Hillary Clinton Friday Funday!

So, big news today, guys! Hillary Clinton is FINALLY (but please don't quote her on this) probably, maybe, potentially, quite possibly going to announce or not at all announce her candidacy for president THIS SUNDAY (maybe, who knows, she really hasn't thought about it much.) Isn't that exciting? To be clear, Hillary Clinton is officially running for President unless she's NOT running for president, she just wants to make that very clear. "Honestly," stated Clinton, who appeared to have written YOU'LL TAKE THE PRESIDENCY FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS over and over all up and down her arms, "I really haven't thought about it at all. Maybe I'll run, who knows."

In any case, I have to admit, this news leaves me torn. Because on the one hand, HILLARY. But like, on the other hand, HILLARY. You know? Also, I've begun a secret (not so secret) love affair with Wall Street Public Enemy #1, Elizabeth Warren, who either needs to run for President or birth all my babies, I haven't decided which. Maybe both? How about we just let Senator Warren stew over her options awhile (no pressure Elizabeth but our babies would be beautiful, call me!) and in the meantime, let us all gather together to watch this video (below) of Queen Madge doing a children's instrument cover of her classic 80s hit, Holiday, courtesy of my other secret lover, Jimmy Fallon. Question: do you think Senator Warren would mind a three-way marriage with Jimmy Fallon? I mean clearly at that point I would have to divorce my husband because being married to THREE people just seems ludicrous, but every other part of the arrangement makes total sense. (All I'm saying is think about it, Senator Warren.)

Happy Friday!

20 straight hours of 80s feminism: Working Girl

So working from home is great. (And by "working" I mean dutifully making coffee in the morning, writing several paragraphs of my novel, and then searching the internet for nine hours for the exact right brownie recipe to eat raw out of the bowl because THIS IS IMPORTANT WORK THAT I'M DOING. THIS IS HOW GREAT AMERICAN LITERARY CLASSICS GET WRITTEN.)

Anyway, when your desk is the card table you've set up in front of the TV, it's hard not get caught up in, say, four hours of Jennifer Aniston movies (shut up, you know you can't resist The Object of My Affection) or, say, four hours of Michelle Pfieffer and Melanie Griffith 80's Women Empowerment movies.  Because apparently, 11AM begins the Bitches Always Be Workin' block on HBO.

So anyway, yesterday morning Working Girl came on, and of course when Working Girl comes on you have to watch it because it's Working Girl and who the hell knows why, I don't make the rules. Which is when my husband -- who also works from home, but in a real way, as in he does real things for real people who pay him real money-- came into the room, took one look at Melanie Griffith in her underwear, and said, "What on Earth is this?"

WORD, Joan Cusack.

"Work," I said, as if that were obvious. (To be fair, I was hard at work on my laptop. To be ultra ultra fair, I was typing a Facebook post.)

"Maybe I don't understand your methods." He waved a hand at the TV. "What the hell is this garbage?"

Which is frankly a type of ignorance that borders on blasphemy so I said, "You don't know Working Girl? How do you not know Working Girl?" (And then I gave him a handful of hard candies and a shiny quarter and told him to get the hell off my lawn.)

Classic 80s rom com.

I then launched into an insane explanation of the entire plot of Working Girl for my disinterested husband who was staring at me like I'd grown sixteen eyeballs in the middle of my forehead.

"Melanie Griffith is a secretary from the wrong side of the tracks," I started, "But what she really wants is to be a hot shot business woman like Sigourney Weaver. Sigourney Weaver seems cool but is actually sort of a fucked up bitch and she betrays Melanie Griffith by stealing her big business idea, so Melanie Griffith finally realizes that the only way to get what she wants is to work with Mergers and Acquisitions big wig Harrison Ford, who of course she falls in love with--"

"This is a movie you like?"

Which is where I had to pause.  

Was it a movie I liked? I know it was a movie I USED TO like. As in, way back in the 80s, before the wheel was invented or fire was discovered, back when I thought the Starship Enterprise was a totally real spaceship and the WWE was "totally serious sporting" and work was just this unspecific, nebulous place where adult people went with briefcases to scream office-y shit at one another from their rotary desk phones.

Kevin Spacey, who is totally in Working Girl, trying to fuck Melanie Griffith

But according to Working Girl, the office is a place where women can maybe go to do vague, unspecific things -- just as long as they look nice and have "serious hair" -- or else "a head for business but a bod for sin," as Melanie Griffith's Tess McGill says. According to Working Girl-- a catchy title meant to invoke the image of a street walker-- the only way to get ahead if you are a lady is to fuck your boss, or else agree to be a secretary for ten years and THEN fuck your boss, or else pass out in a cab with an already successful business man whom you will of course at some point fuck. Because of course. Of course. Even Sigourney Weaver, the only woman in a position of actual power in this movie, spends entire scenes literally in her underwear seducing men. And in fact, there is a cocktail party scene in which the only thing Sigourney Weaver does is negotiate sex with a dude just to get him to listen for one goddamn second to the smart, business-y words coming out of her mouth, and Jesus Christ on a Triscuit with ham, how did I never notice this about Working Girl?

And ugh, even the end is a misogynistic pile of bullshit and hairspray! Because if you'll recall, for all of Sigourney Weaver's much coveted business skills,  it turns out that this whole time (this whole entire crazy time!) all she really wanted as the lady villain was to have a baby and get into Harrison Ford's pants. It's really all she ever wanted! (Even though, to be fair, getting into Harrison Ford's pants was everyone's goal in the 80s. Still. You see what I mean.)

"What's that, Jack? Tick tock, tick tock... my biological clock." - actual line from the movie

Sometimes when you work from home you have these epiphanies, guys - about really, really weird fucking things.

Also my husband was still standing there in front of the TV, still waiting for the rest of this deranged plot synopsis, and suddenly all I could say was, "I feel like I learned a lot of really stupid things from this movie."

To which my husband nodded. "So you're gonna turn it off?"

I glanced at the TV.

"Hello, Tess MgGill's office..."

We were at that point in the movie where Melanie Griffith - with her new, "serious hair" haircut, goes to the cocktail party high on Valium to try and strike up a business conversation with business people about business things. The next thing that happens, of course, is she passes out and ends up naked in Harrison Ford's bed, because in 1988, stripping an unconscious stranger down to her underwear and getting into bed with her, and then letting her think you fucked her without her consent, is a funny plot point we are all okay with.

"I dunno," I said, "It's only halfway finished. She hasn't even gone to the Trask wedding yet."

"The Trask wedding? What is the Trask Wedding?"

The Trask Wedding

Guys, I just don't even know. Why are we still talking about Working Girl? Maybe I just really need to lay off the HBO Signature. But the truth is the only other task in front of me at that moment was the note I wrote myself the month before: PLEASE WRITE THIS NOVEL GOOD, OKAY? and instead I chose Working Girl.

Also, like I said, my husband was standing right in front of the TV. So I said, "Look, I don't have time to go over the whole plot with you. I can't explain the appeal of this movie. It's complicated."

Really, it's not.

Working Girl is a terrible movie. 

IS IT? YES. IT IS TERRIBLE! TERRIBLE!

Perhaps this is a problem specific to my generation of feminists. We're progressives but we've aged now, like wine. Or moldy McDonalds hamburgers. We're hypnotized still by the idiocy of Working Girl but at least we're aware of the idiocy of Working Girl. We've got one foot firmly planted in the workplace but the other still up Sigourney Weaver's bony ass. It makes me wonder what the world will look like 20 years from now, when today's little girls are all shattering the layer of glass ceiling in which Working Girl lives with tools they've learned from Spring Breakers and the Kardashians.

Christ, that sounds bleak.

Perhaps the real problem is I need to get up off my couch and stop watching goddamn Working Girl?

(But in the meantime I will go back to my HBO block of retro nonsense because this novel won't write itself and Xbox Live won't let me get into Netflix and anyway we're right at the part where Melanie Griffith asks Joan Cusack to pretend to be her secretary and god help me with this fucking movie, I need to get out of the house.)

Keeping it Real: My Grandfather

So I found myself thinking about my grandfather last night.  Actually, I found myself utterly sidetracked by my grandfather last night, which means the only recourse for me, obviously, is to write it out - sort of like hugging it out or dancing it out, just a bit less agressive.

Anyway. My Poppy was a photographer - a pretty great photographer in fact, who at one point apprenticed at a small studio in Brooklyn in the hopes of opening up his own studio one day.

my grandfather; photographer extraordinaire!

Which was of course when World War II happened, because there's nothing the universe loves more than leveling your expectations; best laid plans and all.

So Poppy went to war instead of photography school and became the official/unofficial photographer of U.S.S. Missouri, snapping photos all over the boat, getting in his jollies whenever and wherever he could. My Dad and I actually found some of his photos in an old paper album; shots of of the deck crew, tools in hand, hats askew, cigarettes hanging languidly from their smirks. They were smiling, likely at some terrible joke my grandfather told because my grandfather was always telling really terrible jokes. Specifically, he liked to tell the same jokes over and over and over - at least often enough that the rest of us really should have known better.

Happy men on deck

I'd like to think Poppy made life at least a little better for everyone even if his job as a sailor had never been to take pictures or make godawful jokes. But then, my grandfather was  the definition of Just Make It Work. And he didn't just make it work - he made it work with a smile and a stupid joke that somehow managed to infect everyone. I mean, here were all these frightened men who had just been thrown together, who would have never even met otherwise, who knew they were all sailing toward certain death, whose lives had just been ripped to pieces and turned upside down and then, at the end of it, were told to just make it work. Just make the best of it, sailors! -- just deal with the shit and the horror and the fear and deal with it fast, all best laid plans set aside-- because now you don't have a choice. And anyway, you also don't even know how long you'll have. And there was my grandfather in the middle of all that, snapping photos of his friends, making silly faces behind the camera and bad jokes about the Japanese.

The Japanese surrender--a photo my grandfather wasn't supposed to take but took anyway.

He wasn't the fastest or the strongest. He wasn't the bravest or the smartest. But he was funny and he was kind and he was always taking those pictures, and sometimes I think that was more valuable. Sure he never made any great navy rank. And sure, it wasn't the life he'd chosen for himself but it was the life he ended up living, and he was always happy to be living it. And I guess that's the lesson I've been obsessing over, the one I've been trying to beat into my own head: Best laid plans don't matter much against the harsh glare of reality, where whatever is meant to happen will happen. But maybe, MAYBE, just maybe.... if you trust in yourself and you trust in the things you love, reality will deliver you where you're supposed to go. Even if you didn't think that was the place you were meant to be at all.

I keep thinking about this one thing, wondering what my grandfather would think of the life I ended up living, and how far that life ended up from the one I had planned.

Years after the war, my grandfather opened up a card store on Long Island. Sure it wasn't the photography studio he always dreamed of but he loved stocking all the toys and the cards and the candy. He loved knowing all the names of everyone in the neighborhood. He loved that they all got their magazines and newspapers from him and that he knew all their favorite lotto numbers by heart. He wasn't the richest man nor was he famous, and he never at any point owned any more than that tiny card store, but he was happy.

Poppy and me. By six  years old I knew how to work both the lotto machine and the register

On my grandmother's birthday every year, Poppy would pull his favorite card from the inventory and give it to her with a shy smile. She would open the fresh white envelope and inevitably I would hear her say, in her agressive Brooklyn accent, "Carl, there's nothing written in this damn card."

"But do you like it?" He'd give her a kiss on the cheek. "You think it's nice?"

"Yes," my grandmother would say. "It's very nice."

"Good," he'd say, "Now put it back on the shelf, I have to sell that."

Same joke every year, same reaction every year, and that's exactly how he wanted it. Poppy loved his life as it was. He loved that we would laugh and then groan and then we'd all go back to what we were doing before. The dog would curl up on the newspapers, my cousins and I would climb up onto the tall stool to work the register. My grandmother would go next door to Pete's and get him an Egg Cream and a burger for lunch, and life would be perfect just that way. It wasn't the hand he was dealt, nor was it the hand he'd asked for; it was the hand he ended up with, although if anyone ever asked him, he'd say he had a full house, had always had a full house, and he'd say it without ever having to look down at his cards.

I hope one day when I grow up (and I assume eventually I will grow up) I am half as strong as my Poppy: The Dude Who Really Was Happy Just To Be Alive. And with conviction one day I'll be able to say-- even if the hand I've been dealt seems bad, even if that hand seems hopeless, even if I don't know where the next cards will come from or how they will fit with the hand I already have, "It's okay, I have a full house."

March Madness is dead! Long live baseball!

In sports news this morning, the great kingdom of Duke defeated the valiant but lesser kingdom of Wisconsin to win control of the Iron Throne, thus ending a month-long spree of terror and uncontrolled madness throughout the seven kingdoms of Westeros, I have no idea what I'm saying, I hate college basketball. But hey, here's a dangerous army of thugs looting and setting cars on fire because their selected group of unpaid teenage slaves did not make enough baskets. White people always be fightin' that good fight.

Moving on to things that actually matter - it's finally Spring! (I think? Or so I'm told? The heat's still on and it snowed last week, also I don't go into an office so I have no use for official records of time, it could still be January of 1998 for all I know or care.) Anyway, Spring means Baseball season (Is it actually Spring? Seriously, is it?) and baseball season means the smell of grass and dirt over homeplate, the sound of the bat knocking one outta the park, the taste of shitty Citi-Field hot dogs (Mmmm, reconstituted hydrogenated pig innards, MMMmmmmm....)The good news is that tickets are on-sale NOW. The bad news is The Mets have already been mathematically eliminated.

Better luck next year?

(I believe that is actually painted above the entrance to Citi Field.)

Anyway. Here's something to get all us all jump-started today because it's exhausting being a Mets fan; we'll need to save all our strength for screaming obscenities at the field and setting shit on fire in effigy. It's gonna be a great season, I can feel it already! So please enjoy today's morning eye-candy -- an actual filmed Subway Party, courtesy of AMK Productions. FYI: my commutes were always like this, except replace the dance party with inarticulate screaming and replace the strobe lights with a homeless person jerking off into a coffee cup. Springtime in NY!

The fly is dead. Funeral set for Monday morning.

Finally, after approximately one hundred billion months of relentless Febreezing and accidentally smacking the dog across the face with a rolled up Oriental Trading catalog, I can say with at least 93% certainty that Michael Myers the fly is dead.

(But is Michael Myers ever really dead?)

Yes, he is dead.

(But is he?)

A mock-funeral, in which my husband and I will mock the fly as he is laid to rest in our garbage can, is set for Monday.

(Yes, but where is the fly's body?)

I just have to locate the body and remove it.

(Michael Myers cannot be killed. Michael Myers is unkillable.)

Look, I killed him, I swear to you I killed him. He is dead, I killed him. Just ask my husband, who was there. (Asleep, but there.) I knocked over everything on my night-table and accidentally punched my husband in the nipple (so I can confirm he was at least partially awake) and then I swear I saw the fly plummet to his death. I saw him fall and not get back up. The fly is dead, THE FLY IS DEAD! I DID IT! I KILLED HIM!

(But did you?)

Yes? I think so? I AM DEFINITELY ALMOST POSITIVE.

(Michael Myers The Fly lives! He lives!)

Okay, so he's probably alive.

DAMN IT.

MORE GUNS!

Not to get too political here (except I'm about to get SUPER political here) but what the hell is wrong with us, collectively, as human American people, that this shit still goes on and nobody seems to care? Oh, another school shooting? Such a shame, guess it must be a Tuesday, oh well, let's get onion rings!

 Totally normal day!

Did you know that in 2014 alone, there were 88 separate school shootings? 88! If you counted Senile Pop Crooner Tony Bennett's age in tree rings, those tree rings would equal the number of school shootings in this country per year, and Tony Bennett was born in the goddamn 1920s!

Look, people. I just want to clarify that we're all totally cool with this. We're all super okay with the sheer volume of deaths in this country due to firearms. Yes? Because the second amendment and guns and tyranny and bibles. Right?  This is where we're at now?

Here's my question: why are we unable to create and enact better gun laws? Why are we so paralyzed by inaction that we can't  even talk about it? How is it that every time we even TRY, the conversation mutates into an ugly game of telephone where the message becomes OBAMA'S TAKING THE GUNS! ALL THE GUNS! WE MUST PROTECT THE GUNS! CONSTITUTION! CIVIL RIGHTS! SECOND AMENDMENT! BENGHAZI! (The second amendment, by the way, only guarantees your right to defend yourself as part of a well-regulated militia, but whatever. Who cares about facts? )

Look, let me make an analogy: you're allowed to own a car. Right? And you're allowed to drive that car wherever you'd like. Right? You want to go to California? Boom. You drive that spunky little Prius right on down to California, girl. You drive like the wind. Say hi to Ryan Gosling for me (and then punch him in the face for The Notebook). Just keep in mind that you are not allowed to just do whatever the hell you want with that Prius. You cannot drive it without a license. You cannot drive it without having been properly trained. You cannot drive drunk. You cannot drive it unregistered. You cannot drive on the opposite side of the road or on the sidewalk or into a fucking Arbys just because you feel like it and freedom! the constitution! civil rights! That is simply not how "civil rights" work. You have the "right" to own and operate a dangerous weapon, you do not have the right to just do whatever the fuck you want with that dangerous weapon. We understand this about cars, but cannot grasp this about guns? Why?

Perhaps because here in America, we worship the gods of unchecked capitalism, which involves  something called profitability, which essentially comes from the marketing of fear: fear of scaaaaaaaary people (AKA black people), fear of being murdered, fear of not fitting in, fear of not being sexy enough, fear of not having enough money, fear of not having enough things, fear of not having the right clothes or enough hair, fear of not being smart enough or fast enough, fear, fear, fear, fear, all the time fear. America runs on fear! It's like Dunkin Donuts, but with 80% more murders.

The bottom-line is this: an unafraid America is an unprofitable America. And unafraid Americans buying fewer guns is totally unprofitable for the gun industry, which in turn is unprofitable for politicians and the NRA-- who by the way are all 100% in the pockets of wealthy gun manufacturers who don't give a shit whether you live or die-- which in turn makes you, my dear gun owning, gun-rights-toting friend, a patsy for the uber-rich and a stupid fucking idiot for fueling a dangerous narrative that kills over 1000 people every year.

To be clear: the government is never (not ever) going to take away the paranoid stash of guns from your Ebola safe room, Billybob J. Moron-- but it's super profitable for the gun industry to let you THINK the government is taking away your guns.  Because if you think people are taking away your guns you'll buy more guns. Just like if you think your child's school might morph into a warzone, you'll BUY MORE GUNS!

MORE GUNS!!!!!!

Yes, it's far, far better to live this this way, don't you think? Mired in an ignorant culture of meritless ethnocentrism, evangelism and fear. And guns. Lots of guns. Lots and lots of guns. Because as we all know, the only thing that solves fear is more guns, and the only thing that solves more guns is more guns, and the only thing that solves more and more and more guns is bigger and bigger and bigger guns with more and more ammo, and the only thing that solves bigger guns with more ammo is assault weapons with more ammo, and the only thing that solves assault weapons with more ammo is more guns and more ammo and MORE GUNS and maybe some TANKS and MORE GUNS and also several copies of the old testament, because clearly what Jesus wanted was lenient open carry laws and untrained teachers in classrooms with guns.

Wake up, people. Wake. The fuck. Up.

There is a fly in my house.

A mutant fly has been living in my house for the past month. He is unkillable. Both my husband and I have tried to kill him multiple times. MULTIPLE. Have, in fact, spent hours, perhaps a days worth of hours cumulatively over the course of a month, trying to kill this one damn fly. But the damn fly won't die. We can't kill the damn fly.

Flies are only supposed to live for several days, right? It's been well over a month. Perhaps even two.  The carcasses of his fallen brethren lie inside my window sill and in various ceiling fixtures and I'm worried that maybe, just maybe, this fly is the Michael Myers of flies and one morning I'm going to wake up and find my husband lying on the floor in a pool of blood, the fly slowly buzzing at me in plodding, measured paces, steak knife in wing. Or maybe this is the Emeric Belasco/Hell House of flies, turning my own home and insecurities and idiocies against me. All I know is Mutant Fly cannot be underestimated. It is only a fool who underestimates Mutant Fly.

My husband asked me to give him the febreeze. We'd made some omelettes for breakfast and the fly buzzed about us closely, brazenly. He landed on my omelette, as always, and I swung at him wildly and missed. Then the fly yelled what can only be described as an obscene series of expletives and flew off.

My husband wielded the can of Febreeze, and I snorted.

"And what do you think that's going to do?"

"We'll spray him to death like the others."

(Truth: we've Household Fragranced many, many a fly to death in our day. As a strategy, we've found it effective. Instead of Raid, which is super-toxic, you just Febreeze the fly into a fragrance induced fugue state, and then let it smell itself to death. As I type this I realize that might perhaps be violently enraging the other flies.)

(Which makes this war?)

My husband waited patiently with his weapon, a can of Apple cinnamon scented aerosol, for Mutant Fly to land on one of the walls. And, once it did, he proceeded to spray the shit out of --well, mostly the wall, not the fly-- and then the TV, and the couch, and the desk, and the dog; he shoved folding tables out of the way, kicked aside wires; he chased Mutant Fly from one end of the room to the other, me yelling out hysterical directions as he steered the nozzle, the two of us operating a tight tactical fly killing unit, creating what I'll just say was an unhealthy breathing situation, a sort of an Apple Cinnamon aerosol prison... and yet, AND YET--

"Where'd he go?"

"Fuck." I sighed. "He's gone. It's over."

"He has to die eventually."

"Does he?" I laid a hand against the wall, touching the space where the fly had once been. "Does he?"

"The room does smell awful."

"Yes," I said, eyes narrowed. "Yes, it does."

And that is how the fly lived. He lives still. And my apartment smells like the anus of a scented candle.

But hear me now: I will get Mutant Fly. I will find him and I will kill him. Not that this makes me Captain Ahab and the fly my giant whale because that would be ridiculous, but I will destroy this entire apartment and everyone in it if that's what I have to do to kill this fly.

Relaxation Sunday!