Let me ask you something

Wouldn't have it have been smarter to just stop after, say, 3? Maybe 2? I mean, call me pragmatic or, at worst, skeptical of the odds, but is this one of those situations where you just keep at it until you get it right?

Evidently the Discovery Health Channel will answer that question:

Imagine a family with six children under 14 living in an 1100 sq. ft. house, with one bathroom. Now imagine that all 6 of those children are autistic.

Also, EPIC FAIL at house selection.

Just Saying: Don't Tase Me, Bro

This morning I decided to check in with NY1 (news ALL MORNING!) just in time to hear Pat Kiernan utter this interesting phrase:

"The NYPD is set to receive a refresher course on taser usage..."

Well, that's probably a good thing, I thought. The less wayward taser activity, the better.

"...as well as dealing with the emotionally disturbed."

Huh. I hope those two things aren't related.

As it turns out, they are.

Let's have a show of hands at who's terribly surprised that New York's finest are out there zapping The Crazy. How about there in the back? Yeah, I didn't think so.

Corporate rock for the idiot's soul

I am sitting on the subway, pretending that I'm not crying because of a Lifehouse song. I just, um, have something caught in my eye. Something called desperate self-loathing.

I am damaged at best
Like you've already figured out
I'm falling apart, I'm barely breathing
With a broken heart that's still beating

No doubt some songwriting think tank was handsomely compensated to conjure that up, and yet it still manages to so perfectly encapsulate how I've felt for the last 6 months, 2 years, decade or so.

I'm hanging on for one more day
Just to see what you throw my way

OK, really, Lifehouse? Low blow. So you're really leaving me no choice but to furtively wipe away tears that at least have the courtesy to slide down the far side of my cheek so as not to be totally obvious. I really abhor public displays of blubbering, and the D train is the last place for emotional spectacles.

Occasionally, as I explained to Tom this afternoon, I have a bolt of clarity over what a wretched creature I can be. It's like all my mistakes and bad judgement and normally manageable regret gets crystallized all at once into a giant monolith of Flawed Character that I can only gaze at in terrified awe, like Kubrick's barely evolved primates. It seems so inescapable and overwhelming. I have dug myself such a hole, and sometimes everything seems lost.

"Why hate yourself?" Tom advised. "What not hate something more deserving - like Dickface."

I don't want to hate Dickface. I don't want to feel anything about him at all. As a matter of fact, I don't want to feel at all period. I'm so tired of this. I hate my own weakness and lack of self-control, and I hate that I'm reduced to something as pathetic as complaining to Tom about my bad mood. There's no way to win, really. Survey says: you're a loser. Number One answer.

I left the Stereophonics show early tonight, even despite the novelty of Adam Zindani of Casino on rhythm guitar and backing vocals. I had issues with the set list, it was hot and crowded, and my back was unhappy with 3 hours of standing. I tried to enjoy myself, but it was not to be. The monolith looms large, and there is no ignoring it at the moment.

I blame you, Lifehouse.

Summer of '62

I haven't watched a episodic TV series in a long time, probably not since college. In a practical sense, there's no way I can commit to be available at a particular time every week to watch something. And much to the horror of most everyone I know, I refuse to get TiVo. It seems pretty pointless since the Discovery Health Channel reruns episodes of Untold Stories of the ER often enough to ensure that I catch every adorable second of Dr. Dorian's screen time (call me, Armand!) Plus given that almost every series goes immediately to DVD upon the completion of each season, I can always Netflix anything that really warrants my attention.

On the other hand, I don't take commitement to a series at all lightly - when I'm a fan, I'm a fan all the way. I keep scrapbooks, I go to conventions, I made a small shrine in my closet and pray to it. And I can hardly bear the disappointment of getting all emotionally invested in a show, only to have it go to complete shit or get cancelled before its prime for lack of viewership. Which seems to happen more and more frequently these days than in the tender, golden years of my youth.

So while I was intially intrigued by the concept when Mad Men premiered last year, I kept my distance. After all, could I really trust that AMC would see this thing through? Plus I had no great love for The Sopranos, and Matthew Weiner's pedigree was the show's biggest selling point at that time. Oh, what a difference a year makes. Your marketing dollars were well-spent, AMC, because I am 110% on board for the 2nd season. Although now I have to be somewhere every Sunday at 10PM. Dammit.

Reasons I have fully embraced Mad Men

• According to the production team, everything involved with the set design is authentic pieces from the early 60s - the costumes, the cars, the furniture are all genuine, as opposed to reproductions meant to look period. Bravo, set designer - many awards may you win, and Chris may you someday hire.

• The behavior of the characters is also firmly rooted in the social mores of the early 60s, including the not-so-PC bits that might have otherwise been glossed over in favor of not offending the masses. There is constant drinking ("Shall we drink before or after the meeting? Why not both?") and smoking, openly rampant sexism and slightly more subtle racism. It's bold, sure, but it's also refreshing to see the time period portrayed for what it actually was - good and bad - as opposed to some watered-down interpretation to make the everyone who was there feel better about themselves.

• Jon Hamm is my ideal male specimen made flesh - he is big and dark and often depicted making the sex. And I can see this on a regular weekly basis? Excellent.

• Much like The X-Files, my previous long-standing TV obsession, it's the sort of show that rewards you for hanging in there from the beginning (or, in my case, watching the entire 1st season on my iPod before picking up the 2nd) since the backstory is revealed in layers. I remember getting seriously irritated with Alias when, in an attempt to attract a bigger audience, the writers decided to close the 1st season by burning down the entire original premise of the show and starting over. I call bullshit on you, J.J. Abrams. Chris Carter was having none of that - if you started watching The X-Files in the middle of the 4th season, then you sir were just fucked and that's how it was. Man, I miss the good old days when we all had 60-minute attention spans.

• It makes me yearn for a time when I could get away with wearing fabulous tailored dresses and roundtoe heels on a regular basis. Something about the strict social code of dressing up is very appealing. One does tire of one's fashionably distressed jeans being suitable for almost every occasion, after all.

• I did mention Jon Hamm is sexing a lot of laydeez, yeah?

Don't need no education

James and I were having fancy cheese at Otto on Sunday night when I realized that I'd forgotten a lot of things that happened in college. For one thing, I'd somehow forgotten that James had also been an RA until we started trading ridiculous on-duty stories. Even though both of us have been certified Grown-Up People for some time now (haha - no, really, we have jobs and debt and stuff), it's a little bizarre we manage to find bottomless nostalgia in talking about When We Were In School. You know, back in the day. It feels like another life. A life where I wore messenger bags exclusively and had an unfortunate taste for Smirnoff Ice.

At some point in the last few years, I stopped being on academic time. (I also gave up Smirnoff Ice, but somehow that seems less sad.) For most of my life, this would be the time of year when I would actually start to pine for school. Even for a long time after I graduated, I would still find myself conditioned to think of late summer as time to get ready for...something. Then I realized that after Labor Day I still had to go to the same job, sit at the same desk and order the same chopped liver sandwich for Steve. Oh, and make my student loan payment on the 8th of the month. Fantastic.

I was really good at school. And I mean that in the way that some people are really good at video games - all I cared about was getting the High Score on my transcript, getting to the next level, killing the big boss with my super-combo move. OK, maybe not the last part. But when I think about it now, I wasn't terribly concerned with, you know, learning anything. I'm sure I absorbed a few things here and there - I will spell you under the table, for example, thanks to reading about the exploits of Flavia and company in 11th grade Latin. It was like The Hills of ancient Rome, only with more conjugating of the verbs. ANYWAY. Much like how mastering Gears of War doesn't have much residual benefit to your everyday life, my gift for deftly navigating the hurdles of secondary education didn't actually make me a more knowledgeable person now that my value as a human is more than my cumulative GPA.

By the time I got to college, manipulation of the academic system was almost second nature. I knew exactly the bare minimum of effort I needed to put in and still satisfy my need to overachieve. I seemed to have an eerie ability to churn out term papers in the 11th hour - I would almost go into some sort of trance (no, seriously) and spew words and hope that I was making a rational point somewhere in there. It was a game of chicken to see what I could get away with, how much I could coast on my innate intelligence.

I remember being handed back an essay I had written for my 20th Century American Literature class - an essay I had finished approximately 2 hours before it was due on two books I had not actually read, only skimmed for quotes. Oh, and it was about 3 pages shy of the minimum required length. I got an A. That was the moment at which I realized that I was effectively minoring in Complete Bullshit. As a matter of fact, if bullshit had been a real choice of major (it probably was at Gallatin), it would have prepared me much more effectively for my chosen line of work.

After I got home from dinner with James, I had a text exchange with the tour manager for one of my bands.

"It's good to be off the road," he said. "But I'm not exactly looking forward to going back to school."

Compared to spending weeks in a van with a bunch of hungover, unshowered dudes?

College - it really is much better in retrospect.

Surprise! You've won a raging anxiety disorder!

The basic premise of "Scare Tactics" is a little absurb, at least from the viewer's perspective. Is it really that entertaining to watch people be freaked out by completely fake and often beyond stupid scenarios? I guess there's some smug satisfaction in thinking that YOU wouldn't completely lose your shit if confronted by a "failed genetic experiment" - i.e. a midget in a rat costume.

However leave it to Japan to pervert the entire concept by taking it way above and beyond limits of reasonable restraint. Now there probably isn't anyone among us who probably wouldn't react the same way as this poor woman if two guys ON FIRE came running toward you after carjacking someone and firing weapons in your general direction.



She doesn't seem terribly relieved when she finds out that the whole thing was staged as an exploitation of her emotional response to lack of PERSONAL SAFETY. All in good fun, right? She even gets a t-shirt...and probably agoraphobia for the rest of her life.

Just Saying: Choking hazard

On the site where I sometimes shop for bras (because I need a special kind of assistance from the UK), they sell this, which both frightens and perplexes me:












Seriously?

I ask much of my bras, yes, but light bondage isn't usually part of the deal.