Raunchy Roast

Friday night I nearly herniated something whilst attending my friend AJ's roast from all the laughing. It was a small group there to send him off to Philadelphia in appropriately raunchy gutter style, but you can see the video here (decidedly NSFW). I won't say much about it, because it speaks for itself, but AJ, well, he's one of a kind. And for that we're all thankful.

Quit Your YELLING

Considering I've spent the better part of the last three days feeling like I have an army of ants crawling through my throat, a swarm of baby bees building sandcastles on my eyeballs, and a drippy goo fountain leaking from my proboscis, now is not the time that I want to be yelled at. I can't even hide out in my office, because then people just yell at me over the computer. They yell because they want the work now! now! now! and FORGET that old, semi-reachable deadline, we're bumping it up a few days! They yell because our recent game of phone tag was insufficient proof of their perceived importance within my friend heirarchy. They yell because they misinterpreted an email about soup, of all things. Speaking of soup, can someone deliver me some matzoh ball? It might make me feel better.

If y'all want to yell at me some more, or possibly lob a rotten tomato my way, I'll be down at Duane Reade stocking up on Cold & Flu medicine and a huge bottle of Tylenol PM. 'Cause all this yelling has made my insomnia come back, and last night's fitful attempt at slumber didn't prepare me to deal with all this e-shouting.

Petulantly fed up,

me

The Young Andy Goldsworthy of Carroll Gardens

Some kid built this insane snow fort in the park across the street from my house in Brooklyn. I'm glad they're not all at home gorging on TV. I used to build snow forts a lot when I was a kid, but they never looked quite as cool as this. I wonder if his pops is an architect.

Random Leftover Tidbits of Nothingness

The only time I've ever seen men practically claw each other's eyes out to claim they ARE the father of an illegitimate child (swab my cheek! just SWAB IT ALREADY!) is when said kid very well might come with $800 million in her Golden Diaper. Poor underfed, pawnlike Dannielynne.

I'm not sure I can live in a world where KFed is the more FIT parent.

Here are some New Yorkers who never fail to make me nervous: The crackhead on the train whose house "burned down last week," who's been telling the same saw for two years. Well-dressed buskers. Teenagers. Jim Cramer.

A newspaper delivery person who can't manage to get a paper on my stoop by 6:30, when I'm leaving for the gym, needs to find a new job. If you can't get a jump on a journalist, I'm not sure how well early-morning employ suits you.

Ten Dollar Bottle of Magic

People occasionally come to this site looking for "useful information," such as "Does John Krasinski have a girlfriend?" (latest update: according to a recent interview with Rashida Jones, she is now his EX, so ladies, perhaps he's on the market. BUT NOT FOR YOU!), or whether Nuvaring makes you fat (answer: yes). With that in mind, I am now going to publish my review of a product. That product is John Frieda Luminous Color Glaze.

I am a redhead (a strawberry blonde, if you will), and yes, it's real. Carpet, drapes, blah blah blah. However, ever since I was 14 (fourteen!) and the stress of having to kiss farm boys and wonder if there were Doritos stuck in my braces overwhelmed me, I have had a gray streak. It's not quite as pronounced as Bonnie Raitt's or Elvira's. It kind of blends in with the rest of my hair anyway. And so when I was in my 20s I figured it looked blonde enough that I could get away with it, unless sitting directly under fluorescent lights.

But as my 30s started creeping up on me, I worried that the inch-thick gray streak might interfere with my propensity for cradle robbing. This would be no good for either me nor the young men of New York, so something had to be done.

On the advice of a friend, and with great trepidation, I visited a colorist. Many hairdressers have told me that you simply "can't get my hair color out of a bottle," and I still believe that to be true. But it wasn't all my hair I wanted colored, just a little streak. So I found a sickeningly high-priced color genius and we devised a formula which covers my gray streak, leaves the rest of my hair color alone, and makes my hair nice and shiny.

The problem with high-priced colorists is they don't like to leave your hair (or 99% of it, anyway) the same color. They want to work their "magic." They keep trying to convince me to go Raggedy Ann Red. "You'll look JUST like Julianne Moore!" they squeal, not understanding that I don't *want* to look like her (especially since she's like 10 years older than I am). I want to look like me, just without the gray streak. I had to fire my first high-priced colorist for just such an infraction. Then I found another one who was willing to color my gray streak without futzing with the rest of it. He was also high priced, and a lousy conversationalist to boot, but if I gave him NINETY EFFING DOLLARS he'd do what I asked. Until last time, when he also tried to push me toward the brighter spectrum of fire engine. If I'm paying you NINETY EFFING DOLLARS to apply a product to a small wisp of hair, a product that doesn't even CONTAIN AMMONIA, for fuck's sake, just slap it on there, take the money, shut your yap, and quit trying to make me do something I don't want to do!

Then one fortunate day I spotted John Frieda's Luminous Color Glaze at Duane Reade. I picked up a bottle of Platinum (blonde) and Radiant Red, mixed them two parts to one, slapped it on my gray streak and VOILA, I may never have to wrangle with an overpriced, pushy color "genius" ever again. OK, I might have to, but probably only twice a year instead of four times. It covers up any stray gray hairs you might have, makes your hair totally shiny, leaves your real color intact, and looks totally natural. I give it five stars of five. Oh, two things: it smells a little funny, and is slipperier than I might have imagined. But besides that, it's great.

Meanwhile, my stylist called my cellphone the other day, wondering why I hadn't been in in awhile and imploring me to call him "if I needed anything." Nya nya, I'm keeping my ninety dollars to myself. (At least for a few more months.) See you later, I'm off to toss my fiery mane and prowl for younger men...

Napkin Fiction

Well, my favorite item of the day from the new Esquire launch is the wonderful (and, I'm betting, extremely sticky in web parlance) "Napkin Fiction" section, with stories from writers like Tom Junod, Jonathan Ames, and Rick Moody -- all on napkins. Brilliant.

My First Esquire Article

My first Esquire article is up, on launch day of the new Esquire.com site (congrats Eric!). You can read it here, along with Chuck's latest musings on Britney Spears's meltdown. My next piece for Esquire is going to be about cavemen. Really.

Seeing as though I couldn't be bothered to keep the "10 Things Tuesday" lists running for more than three seconds, I thought I'd take another stab at an intermittent feature here on Had to Move. Of course, lacking any inclination toward creativity, I'm going to rip it (or at least its format) off from my bitchslap alma mater, The Black Table. When BT closed up shop a couple years ago, so went with it the popular Blacklist feature, wherein contributors would annoint an event, thing, person, or whatsisthingy with a letter grade. I wrote plenty of them. I wrote about selling air, I wrote about clothes, I wrote about advertising, I wrote about the demise of social security. And seeing as though I now write about very little, I'm going to revive the ol' Blacklist right here on my site, although I can't call it that lest I infringe on some kind of copyright law. Sorry Gillin, hope you don't mind. Without further ado, then, I give you today's rating .

Receiving a Dozen Roses

The last time I received a dozen roses, I was 16. The guy who sent them was Douggie Folkens, who was a year or so younger than me and of little interest to me romantically. Nevertheless, I appreciated the gesture.

This week, 15 years later, I received a dozen roses again. They're from an ex of mine with whom I have nevertheless remained close, maybe too much so. He had congenially subbed in as my "fake boyfriend" for months and months, our lack of ire and mutual affection for each other, (despite our breakup), making him the go-to default for nights of TV watching, take-out eating, and all that other crap actual boyfriends are supposed to do.

They were supposed to be sent last week on Valentine's Day, but apparently, the arthritic mule that brought them straight from Colombia took a wrong turn somewhere near Akron and they instead arrived six days late. They're hanging valiantly onto life but looking a tad wilty and parched. Of course, this is a fitting metaphor for the romantic part of our relationship since it was just last night, five days post-V-day, that I told him I thought we needed to close the book on our more or less chaste late-night cuddles.

The buds that are hanging on still smell lovely, and to look at them reminds me that someone cares about me and wants me to be happy. But given their (and apparently, my) lousy timing, and my subsequent feelings of nostalgia and fondness for my 277th romantic relationship to meet its expiry, they make me a twinge sad. Receiving a Dozen Roses -- C.

IM Conversation of the Day

Me: Does there come a point when you stop mailing birthday presents to your mother? i love her, but I just can't think of anything to buy anymore.
Married Male Friend: um, my wife does all of that now. [hides face in shame]
Me: so i have to wait until i marry a lesbian until i can give this up. off to jersey for me.
Me: NOT THAT YOUR WIFE IS A LESBIAN, of course. I just mean, women do that stuff.
Married Male Friend: no, you'll marry a dude and have presents for twice as many people to get.
Me: that settles it. i'll be single forever.

Follow These Rules, Escape Wrath

The Morning News has a funny article on New York etiquette. A snippet:

"For men: shorts are not acceptable, except at lunch, on vacation, in your hotel room, a million miles away from anyone you know."

That's right. Take those nobby, hairy knees back behind a push mower, where they belong.

My Underminer

There are certain people in my life I wish would just go away., and I'm not entirely sure how they got there in the first place. I've had a handful of stalkers. There's a know-it-all who is forever correcting me and everyone around her, even though I've been traipsing through this confusing earth nearly a decade longer and have lived more expansively (at least by my own admittedly skewed estimation). And now my Underminer has returned.

One of my problems is that I tend to view the past, and people I have known (but perhaps aren't around to bother me any longer), with rose-colored glasses. I forget the ways in which they wronged me, I fail to remember how they grated on my nerves, I only remember our happy happy ha ha times. I guess overall that's a good thing, I mean, who wants to go through life stewing over crap that happened a decade earlier? Why, just the other day when my ex sent a baby present to my sister, I wrote him an email telling him how thoughtful he was and how my family were all such big fans of his, as was I. He wrote back: "Do they know that I blocked your e-mail on and off or about two years and then texted you asking if you wanted to fuck after not speaking to you for 9 months? Thanks for the compliment, but puh-lease, I think your memory is a bit selective right now."

Point taken.

Which is why I forgot just how much the Underminer gets to me. The Underminer has in ways been a wonderful friend. We've travelled together, had many adventures, and she's certainly unique. But she has a way of paying me "compliments" that somehow sting. Example: "Your hair looks so great! So natural! You can hardly even SEE any gray!" I mean, wtf? It's my natural hair. Of course it looks natural. I've had a streak of gray since I was 13, so quit trying to imply that I'm ready for Depends and a Rascal scooter.

I could go on in enumerating the ways in which I've been insulted in the last two days, but in the interest of at some point forgetting, I guess I'll leave it at this.

The Charm of the Geeks

Stephanie Zacharek has a nice column todayin Salon laying out the appeal of one of my favorite shows on television, Beauty and the Geek. I especially like the intro, which I relate to all too well. I remember being in first grade and getting my first paper back that didn't have a big star on it. It had a zero with a dash after it (as in, zero wrong), in red. Heart palpitating wildly, I ran home from school with the paper in hand, wondering what I could have possibly done wrong, how I could have messed up and gotten something wrong, until my mother gently explained that "zero dash" was the same as a big star. I suppose I've always thrived more than some on praise and perfection and head-patting, though once I started calculus, it became immediately evident that I'd have to find my satisfaction elsewhere.

"Kick Me"

Can't find a link for some reason, but Time Out New York's Feb. 15 issue has a hilarious little article about a British artist named Mark McGowan who's coming to New York to do a little (painful sounding) performance art.

"McGowan will spend 72 hours nonstop crawling around New York on his hands and knees while wearing a Dubya mask and a sign on his behand that reads 'KICK MY ASS.' Says McGowan by phone from London: 'I like to think of it as a service -- a therapeutic engagement with the people of America.'

"...He'll be aided by a vital piece of equipment hidden in his clothes -- a pillow for his butt. 'I don't mind people kicking me, I just hope it isn't too severe,' he says. 'But it's all for a good cause: Bush needs his ass kicked.'"

I don't know whether to kick the guy, or kiss him. McGowan, that is. Not Bush.

Phone Slouches Steadily Toward Grave

Somehow I have managed to not lose my little Sprint clamshell phone for, oh, maybe two years or so.

I haven't left it in a cab as I fumbled around looking for crumpled-up ones and tried not to fall into the gutter at 3 a.m. I haven't accidentally lodged in between the couch cushions at the homes of any of my fake boyfriends as I slumped further toward the ground, drool accumulating as we melted our minds on hour after hour of reality TiVo. I haven't accidentally left it, along with my sanity, on the "service" counter at the airport as I juggled 47 bags, a snowboard, a laptop, and a missed connection.

Verily, it's a miracle. But now we have a problem.

I am rapidly approaching the upward limitations of my contact list, 300 in all. That I have managed to accumulate 300 contacts is yet another miracle, considering how many nights I hole up alone at home, eating Lonely Soup. I guess I'm more popular than I thought, or at least I aspire to be. Then again, none of these folks ever call me, so I take it back. And who are "Jimmy Philly" and "Todd Grumples" anyway? Obviously, these are not real people.

I assume that at some point during 2007, I am going to have to buy a new phone. But since it's been so long since I looked at them, I have no idea what I should buy. Anyone have any suggestions?

I guess it's time anyway. This weekend somebody pointed and laughed and said, "When did you buy that thing? 1989?"

One more item for the to-do.

Strange New York City Conversation of the Day, No. 237

Friend: So you think I should just sublet my apartment to this lady, or what?
Me: Yeah, she seems like a great candidate. But you should definitely try to clean that blood off your wall first.
Friend: I tried. It won't come off. I even scraped it. Nothing.
Me: Can you just, um, paint over it?
Friend: That's disgusting. White paint? Really?
Me: Well, you could cheat and try toothpaste.
Friend: But I use Aquafresh.
Me: Oh my gosh. Go buy some Colgate, or I can't help you here.

Valentine's Day. Hooray.

Has anyone ever given or received a good Valentine's Day present? Ever? One that made you feel loved, appreciated, and not like an unwilling participant in a mass-hoodwinking by the Tschochke Marketing Association of Greater Taiwan? I bet they set up little security cameras in the aisles of drugstores across the nation, and have a good laugh as balding, frenzied men in pleated khakis paw over four-inch stuffed gorillas grasping boxes of artificially sweetened chocolates, hoping beyond hope that the bestowal of said item it won't be too much of a letdown.

Looking at all the mass-produced, chintzy crap being passed off as viable tokens of romance makes me want to cry. I can't imagine receiving a box of Russell Stover and a browning fistful of baby's breath from someone who earnestly meant to convey his affections. But it makes me even sadder to think that people in my demographic might actually make these purchases ironically. It seems an insult, somehow, to the genuine feelings of the unfashionable masses who really do buy them for their significant others with love in their unoriginal, if sentimental and sweet, old hearts.

When I think back to past Valentine's Days, it's hard to remember a gift -- even among the better ones -- that doesn't make me sort of depressed in retrospect. For instance, one time a (well meaning, and really very sweet) boyfriend gave me some nice lingerie. But my excitement was nearly entirely extinguished once I found out that he had his best female friend, who OWNED the lingerie store, pick it out. His only request regarding the style was that it be "see through." Ugh. Then there was the year that I received, on my doorstep, a homemade, hand-painted jigsaw proclaiming verses of eternal love inside the completed puzzle. Unfortunately, the Puzzle of Passion was from someone with whom I had broken up months earlier. Receiving it only made me cry, feel intensely guilty, and remind me of my utter failure in that relationship. And then there was the year that my Soul Mate kicked me out of his apartment in the middle of the night after Valentine's dinner so he could do some heavy thinking about how, in two months' time, he would leave me for a man. GOOD TIMES.

Don't get me wrong. I've never GIVEN a decent Valentine's present, either, and that's a trend that probably isn't going to change. But I'm not going to let that little fact damper MY hopes.

This year, what I'm hoping for is that someone will put together a picnic basket full of oysters and champagne, take me hiking to a beautiful overlook at sunset, and serenade me while playing the lute. Ideally, he'd hire small babies, outfit them with working wings, and train them in archery so they could fly around and shoot Arrows of Passion our way during dinner. After dinner, my suitor would produce from his pocket a lump of coal, and say to me, "I am but a man, but through the strength of our love, I will turn this coal into something beautiful." After pressing the coal into my palm, he will wrap both of his hands around mine and "through the strength of our love," turn the coal into a perfect 2-carat diamond, which soon enough will be mounted on a band on my finger.

I really don't think it's all that much to ask, and it will save him from the scrum in the candy aisle.

Happy Valentine's Day!

A Simple Answer to Your Complex Question

In the past couple of months, a good number of my male friends have asked this question of me: "Hadtomove, how is it that you can POSSIBLY still be single?"

They go on to list my (myriad, naturally) positive attributes and bemoan the fools out there who are standing on the dock, smoking cigarettes and missing my comely ship as she sails on by them down the Gowanus Canal.

So I've been pondering the correct answer to the question, at the very real risk of treading on loathsome Eric Schaeffer's territory.

I suppose the answers could be all complex. Issues of bad timing, bad judgment, and bad behavior can thwart relationships for even the most eligible. Maybe I have daddy issues, or maybe I'm too picky, or maybe I'm too busy tending to this blossoming writing "career" I've carved out for myself (ha!). Or, it could just be that I'd rather sit at home with one of my pretend boyfriends (who are legion), chastely eating take-out and musing over the latest issue of "Beauty and the Geek" than perch on a barstool somewhere all tarted up and waiting for a humorless I-banker to ask for my number. Maybe I spend too much time at the gym.

The answer could probably be any combination of the above, or none of them at all. So I've decided to go the simple route when someone asks me "How can you still be single?" I just throw more questions back at them:

"Do you know any good-looking, intelligent, genuinely decent men, preferably with a taste for adventure and relatively few issues with whom I might have a workable amount of chemistry?" I ask.

Yes! They invariably say.

"Are they single?"

Never.

And there's your answer. So quit asking. Now back to my regularly scheduled take-out and Tivo.