Change is Good For Spring (Spare Change or Otherwise)

It's finally Spring, bitches!

This means it's time for new beginnings - also Cadbury Eggs, bunny-shaped Pez, chocolate baby chicks and delicious Marshmallow Peeps (and what is the word for those Kosher jelly rings? They're like tiny raspberry-candy donuts covered in chocolate? Just delightful. How is it I've been Jewish this long and don't know? That's like not knowing foil-covered chocolate coins are Gelt. Blasphemous.) Anyway. Where was I? Oh yes. So Spring is the season of delicious change. And this year, in the spirit of really starting new, I've decided to change some long-held bad behaviors of mine.

But for the sake of thoroughly explaining all this, let's map out my bad behavior like an algebra equation. Which means if Highly Suggestible is "X" and Remarkably Low Impulse Control is "Y," then X+Y=Lifelong Social Retard.

To elaborate further: I am not exactly the queen of containing myself when an idea is put in my head. Like if you were to suggest to me how wonderful a donut might be, I would last maybe a minute before running out to buy half a dozen donuts (chocolate frosted with sprinkles, Bavarian-creme-kruller, devil's food, strawberry frosted, black-and-white marble and Boston Creme - shut your mouth blogland; my philosophy is always have a gameplan in a Dunkin Donuts - otherwise it's baked good anarchy.) Of course, fast-forward five hours and I'm lying on the couch in a state of either pre or post-vomitness - then fastforward nine more hours and I'm consuming donuts like nothing happened - or doodling on a steno pad what is essentially a giant donut with arms and legs exclaiming, "You know you wanna eat the crap out of me!" (Sometimes I pin these to the wall of my cubicle.)

Anyway.

The point is, I am constantly far too tempted by the donut. And by tempted I mean in a way that knocks out logic and will-power and normal reasoning skills - like when I run the air conditioner and vacuum at the same time and it knocks out the whole fucking apartment because god forbid the super should replace copper wiring laid out in the frakking 1970s. (Is it possible the Super in my brain is also a lazy son of a bitch? Now that I think about it, other things never seem to work right either. Damn you, Lazy Building Super In My Brain! Why must you be so inept and at the same time, so imaginary?)

Moving on.

It's probably no great shock that my Algebra Equation of Bad Behavior has long been a source of trouble for me. For instance, when I was a senior in college and my friend Laura, at a house party, suggested to me that our combined lack of idiotic college badassedness might be a thing to regret after graduation, I immediately tossed back about half a gallon of 151 (that's rum with a flame-retardant barrier over the lip - literally one step from sucking gasoline out of a hose) and then I selected from the crowd a drunk boy who I thought might be game to - shall we say - mack on my awesomeness.

"Hey you hey hey you yeah you hey no not you not you yes YOU wanna make out with me?" was what I slurred to pretty much the entire room before I finally grabbed my friend James, yanked him into a corner and climbed him like a spider-monkey; literally, I wrapped one leg around his legs, knocked both of us into a side table, and then, after a half-assed drunken display which involved my mouth and a stuck zipper (it's better I not describe that part in more detail), I excused myself to the porch to vomit into a houseplant.

From that point forward, many post-college-football parties seemed to end this way - with my drinking until wicked-retarded and then striking out (spectacularly) with some guy until I eventually excused myself to go vomit off, over, into, or at something. (Once, after six Goldshlaggers at Club Cairo and a boy-wistful conversation with my roommate Tiff, I drunkenly hit on my friend Brian - who immediately reminded me that he already had a girlfriend - and then I vomited over the railing of the roof deck. Another time, after a shot contest in which I downed more than 10 Red Eyed Sluts because it was suggested by my friend Renee that women should not be afraid to out-shoot [out-shot?] the men they want, I made a pass at Brian - who STILL had a girlfriend - and crawled into Tiff's bathroom, where for the next hour I pushed tissues into her sink, named all of them "Brian" and then vomited into the cat's litter box.)

So to build upon the original equation:

X+Y=Social Retard
WHEN
Social Retard= Substance + Want To Mack On Hot Guy
OR
Value of X is bad idea
Value of Y is well-meaning friend

Of course, now I'm older and wiser (whatever that means) and sure I've stopped going to college football parties, sure instead of complaining about my lack of badassedness I now complain about the pain in my legs and back and how that untalented fetus Miley Cyrus is ruining music for everyone (because she is), and sure I'm "so mature and so over it all," but really, 20 year old retard me has been floating around inside mature 30 year old adult me for awhile now.

So as much as I hate wake-up calls (emotional, metaphorical, iphone alarm, that guy who delivers packages to my desk at 9am and fails to grasp that it's 9am and nobody should be like a Skittles rainbow, dude!) I'm also of the mind that change is good. And eventually, change is absolutely necessary. Like when you reach that point in life where you realize you don't need to think or try so hard. Or when you realize that - hey - my own instincts are pretty good when I just trust myself - and not someone else. And so what if it took me 30 years and several hundred vomits into plants and litter boxes to realize this; the important thing is I can now be like Scrooge McDuck in Mickey's Christmas Carol: "There's still time! I haven't missed it! I can still change!" (Merry Easter and God bless us, everyone!)

Which means Spring is totally the season of my spiritual and emotional growth (as I say this, I'm bending paper-clips into animals and murdering them by hurling them over the wall of my cubicle - great start!!) But the truth is, I'm already learning. As in - from every experience and person and situation. (Craziness!) Also, I've learned that I don't need to eat every donut in front of me just because it is the donut in front of me. Furthermore, I deserve better than some thirty-five cent fast food desert. Like some Cadbury Egg with luscuious creme filling and rich milk chocolate- who needs that? I CAN and WILL wait for something better.

(Oh god but I love Cadbury eggs so much....)

Why must everything I want always have to be so crazy unhealthy despite its shiny deliciousness? That just feels like punishment from the Heavens, yo.

Ugh. Change is hard. Wish me luck, blogland.

Boys, Boys, Boys: The Things I Tell My Dog

Nothing like snowmageddon 2.0 locking me inside with my yappy dog for three straight days to encourage a bit of productive (painful?) introspection. And nothing like a bit of hot chocolate and some bad 80s pop (still synthesizer-filled but still oddly satisfying) to accompany the resultant brain-spill/writing exercise on the subject of boys - specifically, my very first boyfriend, Matt.* (Hold on to your hats- this one is filled with tales of epic high-school loserdom.)

Oh, the disasters of youth.

(Beware: re-creation of youth ahead.)

To begin with:

Having always been the smallest and goofiest, uprooted from Long Island to South Florida at the age of thirteen - probably the worst age ever for anyone, even without a transplant to the land where your grandparents literally go to die - I suffered through years of incessant bullying; everything from prank-calls to prank-dates to being chased into public restrooms while being barked at, literally, like a dog - my adolescence, no joke, was John Hughes epic; it was Oprah prime-time special epic.

So eventually, seeing no other way out, I clung to my best friend Jane*, who was adorable and blonde and had lots of admirers and pageant crowns and trophies and sequined dresses, like a Madame Alexander doll with a baton. Which meant that when she joined the marching band I eagerly joined with her - even though I lacked things like experience and musicality and talent... also I occasionally had problems, you know, not injuring myself when I walked. Still. I actually learned to play the clarinet and spin a six-foot flag (and even in my old age can still toss a mean quad - look out, boys!); I also developed a slightly mean-spirited wit and an oversized wardrobe that often made me look like an angry midget basketball player. I read a lot of Edith Wharton and Star Trek novels. I kept Mulder and Scully collector's barbies on a shelf next to Princess Leia from A New Hope. I was always prepared for any occasion with a Mel Brooks reference. (Actually, that's still true.) I was admittedly a little defensive and mean.

I was, in short, a nerd.

Thus it came as a huge shock, my senior year, when the captain of the drumline - that's the bandnerd equivalent of the captain of the football team, for you non bandnerd laymen - inexplicably began showing up wherever I was; before first period, after practice, in the bandroom, after school - there he was like some nerd groupie - this tall guy whom everyone liked, who was so talented and charming you couldn't help but crush on him, even if my go-to move was to ignore him and/or tease the shit out of him like some retarded asshole. Me in my baggy jeans and huge t-shirts and my thick wool socks from Target, my horribly awkward jokes, my obliviousness when it came to guys; I'd see him and immediately say something like, "Why the lopsided new haircut, LaSalle*? Did your blind grandmother shave your head?"

Yeah.

Nevertheless, he'd call and we'd talk about silly things - moving to Europe after high school, hopping on a jet plane and taking off to Amsterdam, where I would take a World War II tour around the city and Matt would smoke weed at bars and get "European drunk" with hot Dutch girls. That he even talked to me about such things, that as a result I knew which bra size he found most fascinating (34-C - oh god, I hope he's not reading this) was seriously the coolest thing ever.

Then one Saturday, at the Auxillary car wash, when the other twirlers and I were busy scrubbing down Ford Expeditions in our inappropriate bikinis, getting tipped by middle-aged rednecks who would watch us and dirtily ask us to please pay special attention to the mud flaps, Matt showed up out of the blue and brought me lunch - a Number Four Combo from Checkers - a "move" I of course missed, thanks to the double-cheeseburger.

After about ten minutes of me silently shoveling fries into my mouth like a fry dispenser, he finally made his big move:

"I like you," he said. "I think you should be my girlfriend."

Around a mouthful of cheeseburger: "I'm sorry, what?"

"Go out with me," said Matt. "You're weird, but it's cool. I like you."

Still waiting for the punch-line of this bizarre joke, I repeated, "I'm sorry, what?"

"Look, I don't think anyone else has asked you out. They haven't, have they?"

"Not really." I shrugged, trying to pretend it didn't matter that the furthest I had ever been with any boy was when I'd let the foreign exchange student see up my skirt in the teacher's lounge at the ninth grade dance (he'd told me I was pretty and then he let me eat his chocolate bar). "Well," I babbled, "There was this one guy in this AOL role-playing chat-room that Nik* and I like - The Pub in the Lake? His name's HanSolo25. Well, that's not his NAME name, but you get what I mean. I think he lives in Michigan. He typed a rose at me last time we talked - well, before I got kicked off. Dial-up ruins everything."

Sheepish, I shoveled a few more fries into my mouth.

Matt's left eyebrow shot up. "Whatever," he said. "Just go out with me, okay? Why not? We march together and we talk all the time anyway, and you're cool when you're not saying something completely retarded. Let's go out. Sound good? I'm stealing some of your fries."

And so it went - the first time I got asked out, for real, by a boy who wasn't gay.

I turned my head and mouthed "YES!" to myself. This was all going to be totally great, I thought. Totally, totally great.

I turned back around and nodded my head, yes.

Jubilant, Mike gave me a nuggie - it was a done deal. We were boyfriend/girlfriend! (In the gutter outside of a Checkers - right before he donated a whole $1.00 to our bucket for me to wash his dirty-ass car.)

It was a stunning romantic moment.

Later that week, after convincing myself that having a boyfriend would probably be just like working really hard on the Algebra II homework I never understood either, I got up each morning at 6am, tried on nine different unfortunate skirts from 5-7-9, and posed in front of the bathroom mirror, testing out equally unfortunate turns of phrase. Absurd things like, "Hi, can I reserve this seat next to the Snares? I'm Matt's girlfriend." Or, "Hi, can you scooch a bit? I'm dating the drum captain, thanks." Or, "What's up, single losers? See that hot guy over there? We totally make out. Totally share saliva. Bet you didn't see that one coming - BAM!"

(Oh, seventeen year old me - why can't I go back and slap you?)

Matt, meanwhile, was just confident enough to pass for slightly arrogant, also no less than eighteen feet tall, while I was shy and quiet and just tall enough to legally sit in the front seat without a booster (missing the limit in Florida by about two inches - holler!) Matt was known for being talented on Snare Drum and I was known for having thrown up on the bus on the way to Medieval Times - twice. The world I had come from was one in which I'd once waited by the fountain at the Wellington movie theater for hours, not realizing that I had been asked out as a joke. Matt, meanwhile, had already gone through plenty of girlfriends, and as a single guy, he constantly swam in a sea of stupid and flirt. My world was not Matt's world at all. Nevertheless, I liked him and it didn't matter - after all, Jack and Rose had made it work in Titanic, right? (until the Titanic sunk and Jack froze to death - why wouldn't you get on the damn lifeboat, Rose?? -and then Leonardo DiCaprio didn't even get nominated for a goddamn Oscar... oh shut up all of you, you know you saw this movie 17 times when you were in high school, too.)

Fast-forward a week.

After what ended up being our first real date - not actually a date at all per-say but a group of band dorks hanging out in front of the Winn Dixie on a Friday night - Matt pulled into my driveway, killed the engine and turned to me, his face expectant. For a second, I thought of my grandmother's matzoh ball soup and that moment right before digging in. Being both Jewish and a late bloomer, I'd only ever looked at food with that same expression of primal anticipation. If someone had told me that eventually I'd want to put anything other than food in my mouth, I'd have laughed in their face - unless they meant Leonardo DiCaprio (delicious) or David Duchovny (also delicious); at that point, I'd only ever seen kissing on TV or from a non-creepy distance; I'd only ever hung out with my gays and the other nerds and a few couples who'd once used my study group to make out - ultimately, I was the brainy, clueless Velma to Daphne and Fred's obvious fucking around in the back of the Mystery Machine.

"I wanna take you home and I wanna cook for you," was the first thing Matt said - in a slightly creepy voice. He still had that look in his eye - like he was thinking which condiment might make me taste better.

"What?" I said, hugely nervous. "Okay, yeah. Okay."

(Was he going to kiss me, I wondered? Is that how this worked?)

Matt took off his leather band-jacket - with a flourish that nearly resulted in injury - and added,"I'm Italian. We're very passionate about our food. We're just very passionate in general. About everything. You know?"

"What?" I repeated, and flattened myself against the car door.

(Now? Was it going to happen now??)

"I make some amazing ziti," Matt added, waggling his eyebrows.

"Huh?" I managed, growing increasingly frantic that I had somehow missed the euphemism and thus ran through my mental rolodex of well-known and lesser-known sex words - could a piece of ziti possibly resemble anything dirty? A penis, maybe? A very tiny penis?

No, that couldn't be right.

"You're gonna love real Italian cooking," Matt went on. "It's so good - so much better than Olive Garden. That's poser food. Real Italian makes your mouth water until you're hungry for more. And then I'll give you more. You know?"

Another eyebrow waggle.

And suddenly I absolutely couldn't wrap my brain around this weird version of Matt - with his spaghetti-talk in the creepy voice with the waggly eyebrows. Had I missed something? Had I missed my moment? Was this kiss supposed to happen before or after the Italian sex metaphors?

At this point my brain was working so hard I accidentally smacked the back of my head against the passenger-side window.

"Oh, shit. You okay, J?"

"Um," I said. "Yeah. Yeah, I am. No, I am. No worries. No worries!" Then, in a heart-pounding daze: "My mom makes pretty good meatballs - they're so awesome. Like just round and juicy and... with like, tomatoes. Uh. I should really try them sometime. I mean, no - you should try them sometime. I mean we like latkes and kosher things too. Because we're Jewish. Um. That's not what I meant."

Which of course garnered only one possible response: "You have a concussion, Morris?"

"No," I said, my eardrums ringing. "Sorry. I don't know why I said that. I don't have a concussion."

I shifted into what I thought was a sexier position - still smooshed against the window, but now with my palm upturned by my cheek.

(When was this going to happen? Now?)

(NOW?)

Matt shrugged and moved in ever closer.

(NOW???)

"You like meatballs?" he asked, his hands pressed to the window on either side of my head. "Because let me tell you, I could put them in your mouth..."

And finally, finally grateful to have latched onto one thing I DID understand - a bad dick joke - I managed, "Is that your big line, LaSalle? You're gonna put a meatball in my mouth?"

Which is when he FINALLY moved in to kiss me - my first kiss ever ever EVER- and being both petrified and excited and at the same time somehow picturing my mother's meatballs, I kissed him back with what I had convinced myself was the passion of Kate kissing Jack (shut up people, it was a cool movie back in 1997 and you know exactly how many times you replayed that stupid Celine Dion song.) In reality, so much effort went into this kiss that I accidentally leaned onto the horn - BEEEEEEEEEEEP - scaring the shit out of both of us, and then - in the midst of my panic - biting him in the tongue and throwing him forward into the dashboard, where he hit his head.

Commence nerd freakout:

"Oh, God," I managed. "I'm so sorry! I'm so, so sorry! I was thinking...I don't know what...meatballs?"

(Why I said that out loud I'll never know.)

Matt rubbed at the side of his face, now imprinted with radio buttons, and backed away.

"I'm so, so sorry," I repeated, my embarrassment now a live, nuclear thing. "I'm so sorry. I'm just, I'm so new at this, like I haven't kissed any, I mean at all, no - not at ALL, of course I've kissed guys, um, you don't know him, the guy I kissed I mean, you don't know him, and I...I mean we could still be, um..." I struggled for a word, and after a few blank, panic-filled seconds, I landed somehow on "Juicy?"

And buried my head in my hands.

Another stellar first.

"You are fucking weird," Matt finally declared. "Really weird. I just don't get it. Sometimes you're awesome and sometimes it's a shame. You'd be hot under other circumstances." And off my horrified expression: "Oh, come on. Don't look at me like that. I bought your ticket tonight, didn't I? That shit cost me eight dollars."

BAM! ROMANCE!

Not long after this First Kiss Of Disaster, Matt and I decided to go back to being friends - ah, how short young love can be. On the one hand, I'd crushed on him for so long and he'd actually liked me back - the first boy to ever really like me or want to kiss me - and man I wanted to hang onto that. On the other hand, we were completely inept as a couple, he kept wanting me to be someone less weird and I kept wanting to be myself - also, could have lived without him demanding I pay for his prom ticket and tux. Oh, high school - you crazy bastard.

And thus, I let him go.

It was a bittersweet end to an awkward first experience.

As an adult, I'd like to believe that the awkwardness of my first experiences will be directly proportional to the greatness of what will happen when it all goes right. Or at least, that's what I tell the dog as I stare into the endless avalanche of snow blocking my front door.

And even if cute boys still, to this very day, make me so nervous I occasionally turn back into that overgrown SuperNerd who babbled about tomatoes in a parked car, I suppose I also have to remember that one of these days, I'll meet that guy who digs SuperNerds and is into all of me, and not just pieces.

(Which is gonna happen before I'm eighty, right?)

(Right?)

Sometimes, I wish my dog had a few answers.

(And not just because I want life's answers, but because a dog that could talk would make me so much money.)

* real names omitted to protect the old and not-so-innocent

Threes Company

Two days from now, my sister will be a squatter in my apartment - specifically, she'll be occupying the eight foot space behind the couch, which is actually, by New York City standards, not a bad deal for the money. She's planning to fill this space with an air mattress, which means her room will officially be smaller and more dimly lit than a jail cell. Welcome to Manhattan. Nevertheless, she's excited to move in and I'm excited to have her. Also, it'll be nice to push the couch a little closer to the TV.

Yesterday, I asked her how our parents felt about her moving out - they've had at least one of us living with them since the day they were married (we like to reference me as the surprise and not the accident;) and since my mother is a lot like the tortured Harry Burns from When Harry Met Sally and my father is (I swear it's true, all gay jokes aside) more of an optimistic Sally Albright, the two of them alone together should either be like a continuation of the Rob Reiner movie or the climax of the War of The Roses. And I almost shudder to think which of those it'll be.

"There is no winning! Only degrees of losing!"

"I loosened the bolts on the chandelier. I was going to drop it on you."

(I do love that movie, but thank God there are no chandeliers in my parents' house. Which is not the first time I've had that thought.)

"Are they looking forward to it?" I asked my sister. "Being alone with one another?"

"I think they're both looking forward to and dreading it."

"They'll have to occupy themselves without any outside help," I said. "Or maybe they'll finally leave the country."

"Mom would never travel. Too many germs that don't speak English. She'll watch a lot of Seinfeld and make him do her shopping for her and eventually Dad'll hang himself. Hold on, I'm putting you on speaker."

"Forced suicide? Too easy. Mom would never actually kill him," I said. "I don't think. Has she ever?"

"Have I ever what?" asked my Mother, now on speaker.

"She wants to know if you've ever tried to kill me," clarified my father.

"Oh," said my Mother. "When do you mean?"

"What do you mean, when do I mean?" I said.

There was a slight pause, and finally my sister said, "Hold on, Mom's counting."


In mostly unrelated news, this past Friday I went bar-hopping in the East Village (something I haven't done since grad school), which began with the idea of socializing but slowly devolved into a sad attempt to reclaim my lost youth. I'm not old in comparison to, say, the Earth, but I'm old in comparison to that twenty-four year old still power drinking and getting jiggy with it at twelve am. Meanwhile, I'm exhausted by twelve-thirty and by one I'm practically curled under a bar-stool. By two I've begun nursing a migraine of epic proportions, and by three am the migraine culminates in a melodramatic almost-vomit into a trash can on the corner of Broadway, two blocks from my apartment. Additionally, there are contacts in my phone I don't remember entering, entire text conversations I don't remember having, and a cab ride with some hot guy who I vaguely recall making out with, which may or may not explain the ten dollars I used to have that I can no longer account for. God, I hate being too old to be stupid. Remember when alcoholic amnesia was a badge of honor and not absolute Patheticsville?

"Seriously, I just woke up and he was lying under the coffee table with my underwear. I don't know what happened to the Snickers."

"We did it where? And people were just walking in and out the whole time? No, I don't want to see the photo on your cell phone! Well, why the hell would you let me drink that much 151?!"

"What do you mean I vomited over the railing? When the hell was I on the roof?!"

All true stories.

(Okay, so maybe that shit was always foolish. I just hate that my brain has finally aged to the point where foolishness has ceased being awesome.)

Oh, and did I mention I have a twenty-four year old moving in with me in two days? I think I'll just try and convince her that the place to be is Bed Bath & Beyond, and at least then I'll get some new towels out of it. But no more heavy drinking. At least, not in bars. Not for me. Although Halloween is coming up and my sister will be here and I'd hate to limit my options...

Damn, stupidity is tempting. Especially around family.

PINK: Still a Rock Star

Tonight, I saw P!nk (oh, if only I was cool enough to pull off Ja!me) in concert, and learned a valuable lesson about stress relief: sometimes, all you really need is to sing "now it's full of evil clowns, burn it down, burn it down" with an arena full of screaming, drunken imbeciles.

PS: the giant Tinkerbelle in the photo to the right is actually P!nk, singing upside down in a floating hammock.

Dear Britney,
YOU LOSE.
Love, P!nk.

(Photo by Lisa Gwasda.)

Calling all men of the world...

As I'm sure you've guessed by now, the queen of all tragic rodents has not yet been swept up. At least, not by a man. By the magic of Lost on DVD and the Thursday night NBC comedy block, sure. By the evil witchcraft of the Food Network and every cupcake bakery on the Upper West Side? (and yes, I can find them all blind-folded), absolutely. But by a man? No. Or I should say - not yet. So last month, as a solution (or rather, an inept plot device engineered by someone who has seen way more 30 Rock episodes than is normal) I've decided to go out on 30 dates before my 30th Birthday - hopefully not with 30 different guys, although I'm not about to hold my breath. My Relationship Magic 8 Ball still points to Try Again Later - however much I may have believed, at the age of 18, that at 30 I'd at least be living with someone, even if at 18 I also believed that 30 was the age people started sleeping in coffins.

RIP, youth and stupidity.

"I don't even know what you're so friggen worried about, you're still so young," was what my grandmother was quick to remind me at dinner last week - and although I suppose in comparison to her 90 years I seem like a surly little ova, the next words out of her mouth were, "And if I die before I have any great grand-children, so be it. God's will."

(I swear, you have no idea how much wine it takes to get through a dinner at my aunt's house.)

All in all, I'm doing rather poorly thus far - 10 dates, no takers, and five more months to go.

But just to give you an idea of what I'm up against here, let me describe what I've dealt with so far:

- guys who dirty-talk me by asking if I've ever watched cat-porn on TV - as in, two house cats fucking. True story.

- guys who open with, "not that I go around talking about my money, but I'm fine with you getting whatever you want. If you want the deluxe with fries that's fine. I'll pick up the tab - I have a job."

- guys who begin with, "Wow, I was actually kind of thinking you'd be late because of the rain," after I catch him at the bar, flirting with some whore disguised as an innocent, ten minutes before we're about to get our free mini-pizza with beer on. (I paid for that beer, by the way, because he apparently "wore the wrong jeans" - like the ones missing a place to store his balls, apparently - yeah, thanks match.com. But here's a word of advice, ladies: Don't let that guy make out with you after the beer is gone just because you're bored and super-competitive and have a need to show up that girl at the bar because she's taller and blonder. That would just be crazy. And retarded.)

- guys who, when I push back our first date one hour, demand to know "why you are trying to jerk me around by my ball sac." (this gem via text message.)

- guys who don't call, yet send out of the blue, mispelled Facebook make-out pleas, and the next day follow it up with: "I think I messaged you last night? I'm so sorry. My ex-girlfriend texted me out of nowhere and it stressed me out, so I took an Ambien. Thanks for being cool. What are you up to later?"

- guys who get on the wrong train and end up in Babylon. Three hours away.

- guys who come over for dinner and immediately apologize for their appearance by explaining, in these exact words, "My friends and I were drinking. It was Boggle. It got ugly. Sometimes I go a little crazy." He had a huge black eye - like a panda, except not at all cute.

So this is my problem: have all the normal guys been taken? Have I missed my window? Am I sending out digital dating signals which can only be picked up by Douchebag Sattelite? Does true love even exist? Or has some cuter girl already stolen my one true love because she went to the right bar with free pizza - and I went to the wrong bar with free pizza and a guy who keeps his money in the wrong pants? Or is it me? Is that it? Is it the way my ass looks in jeans? Should I buy new jeans? Should I watch more What Not To Wear? SO MANY QUESTIONS, BABY JESUS!

Le sigh.

Why are there never any answers?

Maybe I'll figure it all out during the last five months of 2009 - with 20 more dates to go.

Jewish Holidays and Assorted Insanity

This year, like almost every year previous, I totally forgot about the September high holy holidays - not because I'm boycotting Judaism or anything, but because on my list of daily priorities, religion tends to fall somewhere between "dust top of hallway light fixture" and "sweep out chimney floo." In my mind, Rosh Hashana is merely the all-day feast that gets me out of work early on a Friday in mid-September, and Yom Kippur is its bipolar companion best known for a twelve hour marathon of willing starvation and misery. When I was a kid, that meant no basketball for my Dad and no compulsive cleaning for my Mom and no TV or Nintendo for me, which totally sucked balls. By the end of the day we were all just staring desperately out the window, waiting for sundown, that magic hour when it would all be over, eyeballing the pantry like a group of retarded, stoned people. I still think it's a wonder all Jews aren't bulimics. Thanks for the psychological mindfuck, God.

In any case, when my aunt called last week and reminded me of my dormant heritage and the prospect of free food, I was immediately Jewish again, and after cleaning a bit, I hopped on a train to Long Island.

My aunt and uncle still live in the house my father and uncle were raised in, the same one I lived in for awhile before my parents moved us down to the sweaty groin of the United States, otherwise known as The South; the same house where, at one point, ten of us and four animals lived against code in four bedrooms and a den. So heading out there literally feels like taking a trip back to the cluttered era of Barbie and the Rockers, in which all of us kids shared the same Rocker. The little blue clubhouse my Dad built for us is still in the backyard. The wooden deck where we would sun ourselves in summer is still right outside the sliding glass doors. The kitchen where my grandmother put us all to work decorating her dirty novelty chocolates (for sale at Bingo halls across the tri-state area throughout the late 1980s) is relatively untouched. And living in this house, still, is my aunt - a loud, gossipy Italian Jew, and my uncle, who at one point, while working for a Jewish day school, had lovingly nicknamed the bus he drove, "The Yom Kippur Clipper" (complete with an impression of that sound yarmulkes make when wind whips through them.)

Classy folk, my family.

My aunt had set the table for the next day's "actual" Rosh Hashana dinner, which she claimed is the best way to do these things - a week ahead of time. As she explained to me, it takes days to polish the silver and set out the pumpkin centerpieces and organize the name-cards and fold the napkins into diamond-shaped envelopes and set out the M&Ms in saran wrapped crystal goblets (there are two of these,) and arrange the platters in alphabetical order according to which foods they'll hold - all platters clearly labeled with hand-written post-its. She does this every year, by the way. And every year, my uncle comes in after she's set what we'll call the first draft of her table, and says, "watch this" to anyone who will pay him any attention, and switches all the post-its and name-cards and place settings. Hours later, when my aunt inevitably returns to the dining room to finish some food item, we'll hear her agonized cries over the destroyed piece of art that was the dining room table, followed by, "Jon, you asshole."

The night before Rosh Hashana, therefore, is Hands-Off-The-Table night, so instead of eating in we headed out to a nice little Italian restaurant, and afterward, attacked and destroyed my aunt's infamously gobletted M&Ms ("Fine, just eat them all and ruin the ambiance, you assholes.") This period, otherwise known as a Jewish bonding ritual, involves a lot of uneccessary snacking and snarking at one another until someone finally tells someone else to fuck off, and a new dish is taken out and we start all over. I would assume there are more traditionally accepted rituals involved with celebrating Jewish holidays, but damned if any of us can name what they are outside of insults and food.

"Look how much weight you've put on," said my Grandmother to my cousin Sue, who was eating a mouthful of M&Ms. Meanwhile, my aunt was pulling some non-ambiance food out of the pantry (which is alphabetized by taste and genre, by the way) and offering it to us in the hopes of saving her precious display goblets.

"You've got to be fucking kidding me," said Sue.

"You misunderstand," said my Grandmother. "It's not an insult. At all. You were always such a beautiful girl. So tall and slender, with real curves. I'm asking you what happened."

"She's almost 30," reasoned my Uncle, who then went over to the pantry and said, "watch this," and proceeded to rearrange all the boxes and jars until the genres mixed unnaturally.

"Do you see what I put up with?" said my Aunt, "He just wants a rise out of me." And then she sat on her hands (I assume) to keep from immediately putting everything back.

"How is that not insulting?" said Sue. "You just called me a fat ass."

"Now you're putting words in my mouth. I never said the word fat ass. Why would I say something like fat-ass? Such a negative perspective."

"She's a beautiful girl," pointed out my Aunt.

"Yes," agreed my grandmother. "And I love her. She's just bigger now and there's more of her to love. Like a different girl. It's almost startling."

"Fuck you," said Sue, downing the rest of her M&Ms.

"Jo, on the other hand-" And my grandmother wagged an oatmeal cookie at Sue's older sister, Jo, "Looks amazing. Stunning. How much weight have you lost? Ten pounds? Have you been eating at all?"

"Fuck you," repeated Sue. "I work all day. I have to make more time for the gym. I know that." She popped a York Peppermint Pattie into her mouth from a wholesale-sized box my Uncle had pulled from the Sweets, P-Z portion of the pantry.

At that point, we moved on to a bowl of chocolate covered cherries, and as it's impossible to feel anything but joy and good humor while eating delicious maraschino cherries covered in creamy milk chocolate (The Dove commercials are true!) we segued onto pleasanter topics, like past holidays, and how we're all becoming old and feeble and developing weird physical ailments; that, of course, prompted me to (foolishly) mention how strange I thought it was that I'd once sprinted around this very dining room in nothing but socks and a diaper, which immediately prompted the "when is Jamie going to use her ovaries" discussion - an often popular topic at family functions - which then trickled into dessert number four - tea cookies with jam and chocolate chips. Delightful.

"Have you tried J-Date?" said my grandmother.

"How do you even know what that is?" I asked. "You don't even own a computer."

"I watch Dr. Phill," she said, wagging a tea cookie at me. "And according to Dr. Phill, everyone's online now. I'm sure you must know that. You have one of those space phones. So how do you expect to meet anyone if you don't even try? You're not working, you're not dating... Are you just choosing to be alone?"

"Yes," I said, "I'm purposefully endeavoring to have as little contact as humanly possible with the opposite sex."

Fast-forward an argument about the validity of J-date versus Eharmony (neither of which my grandmother had any sort of experience with), and she concluded, "I'm not saying you need to get married right now. I'm just saying, I'm old and will probably die soon."

"At least you're not the fat one," offered Jo.

"Fuck you," said Sue.

And with that, we moved on to Challah and diet soda, and Jo changed the subject, and we proceeded to gossip meanly about all our common relatives who weren't around and were thus easy targets, and after about an hour or so of that (fun times!), I was back on the train to Penn Station - rockin' out to Beyonce and recalling a Rosh Hashana from long ago; one that ended with all of my cousins and I in the foyer of (then my grandmother's house) playing that Halloween game - Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board. We were all deadly serious about it, and had each set two fingers underneath Sue, closed our eyes, and dutifully chanted "light as a feather, stiff as a board," when Jo asked for a sign from the other world and my uncle laughed like Dracula and hit the light-switch, plunging us all into darkness. We screamed, we dropped Sue, and then we proceeded to trample over everything in sight in our terrified, no-holds-barred zeal to get back into the living room. Some of us cried. Some of us told our fathers to take a hike. Dogs were barking, cats flitting all over the place; it was pandemonium; meanwhile, my father and uncle were laughing hysterically. My aunt smacked my uncle in the head and my mother called my father an asshole, and either one or both of them felt bad enough to let us all have a second round of dessert. Thus the evening ended in what I feel is true Jewish spirit- everyone gathered together around six different cakes from Walls Bakery. Again. For the eleventh time. In one night.

Oh, Judaism.

The older I get, the more I believe that religion actually has very little to do with what's important about your heritage.

Too Many Dead Celebrities, Too Little Time

Seriously, Universe. What is going on? First Natasha Richardson with that freak head injury and then Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson on the same day, and now Patrick Swayze? Are you there, God? It's me, Jaime. Please stop killing our celebrities before they can do Dancing With the Stars.

Before I continue, I should clarify that I don't normally sob into my popcorn when celebrities die, although I'm not completely hollowed out inside either (despite what my mother insists whenever we discuss my lack of husband and babies) and clearly, I realize the death of any human being is a terribly sad thing for the family and friends of that human being. I'm just saying, if I don't know you personally, it's kind of impossible for me to have an opinion one way or the other, and I'm definitely not going to your candlelight vigil. (Sidenote: I was once witness to a candlelight vigil for an actress who was still alive. No joke. Idina Menzel fell through the stage the day before her last performance of Wicked, a show I worked many moons ago, and bruised her ribs. The paramedics took her to Roosevelt hospital and gave her painkillers. Hours later, bawling fans were standing outside the theater in their freshly painted, neon green, puffy-paint OUR THOUGHTS ARE WITH YOU and DEFY SADNESS t-shirts, with their green roses and green witch-hats and green candles, and playing, from a lone boom box underneath the poster with Idina's photo and the Tony award stamp on it, an acoustic single from her album, unfortunately [or hilariously] titled, "It Only Hurts When I Breathe." Creepy? Ridiculous? Hysterical? I don't know. She was three blocks away, high on morphine and lying in bed with man-candy Taye Diggs, watching Access Hollywood. You make the call.)

That said, there's something so inherently strange to me about the passing of Patrick Swayze, even though we all unfortunately saw it coming for a long time. This is the guy who pulled Baby out of the corner and taught her how to get her groove on, 1989-version-of-1964 style. This is the guy who made sexual clay pots with Demi Moore. He was such an inherent part of my childhood love affair with the genius Cheese Whiz of late 80s/early 90s cinema that his death is like that of an old elementary school friend who kicked it before I could Facebook him. Vividly, I can still remember watching Dirty Dancing for the first time, my cousin Joelle and I spending at least fifteen minutes beforehand trying to get the blasted tape-deck door of the VCR to STAY THE HELL shut. (I feel like half of my TV-watching time in the 80s was spent yelling at that bastard VCR as it randomly opened and shut like some demon-bitch Jack in the Box.) Dirty Dancing was worth it. Dirty Dancing was just one of those movies. It made you want to put on an ugly, salmon-colored salsa skirt and hop into Doc Brown's Delorean and travel back in time to the fictional 60s so that you could go to Kellerman's vacation resort and do lifts in the ocean at sunset with Patrick Swayze. Because that mofo? was DREAMY. Right? I can still remember dancing like an uncoordinated white girl (some habits you never outgrow) in an attempt to reproduce Swayze's moves to The Time of My Life, except my dance partner was Joelle, who - although slightly more coordinated than me, in that way Autistic kids are slightly more coordinated than Down Syndrome kids - still hit her head on my grandmother's night-table during the chorus and bridge (which may or may not have been my fault as I may or may not have promised to catch her.) I can still remember the sounds of my grandmother clamoring around in the kitchen, making dinner. ("Carl, get the hell out of my way, and don't you dare change the channel, $25,000 Pyramid is on. Go find the girls - are they watching the fucking TV again? This floor isn't going to clean itself.")

Ah, memories.

That Patrick Swayze, such an intrinsic part of my childhood universe, could be gone forever, is so sobering - as if a chunk of the 80s was just killed and trampled by the high-stepping Marching Band of Time. (Shut up! It's a perfectly good band nerd metaphor.) This also means both guys from the SNL Chippendales Stripper sketch are now gone, which of course means I've been asking the universe those serious questions. Things like "What the hell?" and "Why the fuck?" The answer, sadly, is we're growing old, my fellow Gen-Xers, and we're apparently dragging a ton of random B-Celebrities down with us.

So in conclusion, God, I want to know when this madness is going to end. Don't you understand we need these people for our reality shows? THEY'RE STILL FILLED WITH PURPOSE! THEY STILL HAVE THINGS TO DO! HAVEN'T YOU EVER WATCHED I'M A CELEBRITY, GET ME OUT OF HERE?

Sigh.

Think on it awhile, God. That's all I ask.