New Thing #312: Baby Love

I'm not pregnant. But I'm hoping some day I will be, and it's a good idea to start getting the nutrients I'll need for that sooner rather than later so today I started taking prenatal vitamins. I started with a sample box my lady doctor gave me, a pink carton with cartoon prints of pregnant ladies with multiracial babies partying in their round (and transparent) bellies. My boss saw it on my desk and asked if I had anything to tell her. For a split second, I did consider messing with her and asking her to shut my door and sit down so we could talk about something. But I didn't, and instead we tried to figure out which waving baby in a transparent baby we each were.
Here's a picture of what I might look like preggers:
Actually, not "might." Will. (babies apparently grow on the hipbone)

New Thing #311: Shhhecrets

Since so many people suggested this one, and since I haven't been feeling great all week, I sent a postcard to postsecret.com. The site is pretty depressing, so it was nice that my "secret" wasn't tawdry, scary, worrisome or cause for my loved ones to put me in a mental institution. I think I like the idea behind the site, but some of the art inspired by the secrets is a little off-putting. It almost seems mean, until you read the responses. But even then I can't tell how sincere the responses are. The site seems to update pretty quickly, so I'll share my favorite before it becomes buried:

New Thing #310: What is Crazy?

It's already too late for those of you on the East Coast, but if anybody on the West Coast happens to read this before 8pm PST and wants to do what I just did, I think there's still time. I took the Jeopardy! online contestant test. This was about six hundred times harder than the Who Wants to be a Millionaire test I took in 2006, after which I just about walked onto the show and won several thousand dollars. Yeah, no, tonight's test was timed per question, which makes the taker start hyperventilating at :06 and struggling to reach into the inner recesses of her brain just to come up with the name "Aaron Burr," which probably isn't the right answer, but leaving a blank is so pathetic that you feel like an ass not writing something. The sadly ironic thing is that the one question I did leave blank was the answer to a question I got right on Millionaire, mostly because I was SO excited to see the question that I of course drew a complete blank and just sat staring at the screen for 15 seconds, nearly soiling myself.
So the good news is that I won't have to take time off work to go to L.A. to tape the show, and won't have to suffer through another round of "well, ya obviously didn't do so well, if you're still working here" and won't feel super defensive when faced with people who smugly bring up my televised loss in conversation (even though they couldn't even pass the test).
So yes- if you, like me, are apparently constantly seeking ways to compound your already crippling anxiety, go for it!

New Thing #309: Get her on the 1s

Every day before I leave the house, I turn to New York 1 to tell me the temperature. And if I turn on the TV when I get home, it's usually still on NY1. My after-work NY viewing has yielded 4th-wall frienships with Pat Kiernan, Roma Torre, George Whipple, Kristen Shaughnessy and Gary Anthony Ramsay. Today I got one step closer to being part of everyone's favorite local news channel when I gave an interview for NY1. Someone there approached Glennis and Marcy about doing a piece on DanceDance PartyParty, and they asked those of us who could to come down and shake our booties during lunch. Despite being in the early throes of a nasty cold, I obliged- then totally overdid it and sweated out nearly all of my remaining energy. But as always, I had a total blast and was happy for the opportunity to profess my love for DDPP to all of New York.

New Thing #308: Rat a to me

One of the most celebrated movies this year was the Disney Pixar wonder Ratatouille, the heartwarming tale of an inept chef and his pet rat. I saw it right after Christmas on my flight home from California, and realized that a plane is perhaps the worst place to see a movie about food. So disappointing were my cheese plate and bag of broken pretzels that I sat doubled up in my seat the entire time, craving saffron risotto and even a steaming bowl of ratatouille, whatever that was. Earlier today, Kevin and I found ourselves at a place that actually served it. So, sight unseen and with only an animated movie as a resource for what i was getting myself into, I ate ratatouille. It is super delicious! We were at a vaguely French restaurant, so I'm guessing it was somewhat authentic. It's basically a brothless vegetable stew, with a yummy tomato base and handfuls of delicious seasoning. But this being New York and all, I am still not convinced that it wasn't made by an actual rat.

New Thing #307: Party Foul!

I opened a beer on a belt buckle.
This resulted in half a beer for someone else, Eliza having to borrow a shirt from hostess Robyn and a guy named Paul generously helping me and Kevin wipe down the walls and floor. I wiped off my face by myself.


(Eliza later murdered me.)

New Thing #306: She Move Good, I Guess

I love dance movies. I own Center Stage, Bring it On, Camp and an untold number of musicals. But somehow I've been missing out on that gritty urban dance-off genre. So tonight I saw How She Move, a gritty urban dance-off movie. The plot is standard: smart girl who doesn't fit in goes (back) to urban high school where she must prove her smarts by...stompin' (contrary to one moviegoing companion's prediction, the movie was actually not about a paralyzed girl who mystifies doctors by shaking a leg, nor a young lady changing apartments). Forget the test she has to take to get a scholarship to get back into the private school she had to leave, forget the dead sister, forget the overprotective parents, the real meat of this plot lies in smart girl's ability to dance so hard on top of a car that she blows out the windows with sheer baditude. There's girl-girl rivalry, teenage rebellion, unexpected friendship, betrayal and a little bit of romance. I'm pretty sure that seeing this gritty urban dance-off movie is the same as seeing all gritty urban dance-off movies, but that may or may not prevent me from filling our DVD player with titles like Stomp the Yard, Save the Last Dance and Breakin' II: Electric Boogaloo.

New Thing #305: Callousless

Starting somewhere around third grade, I started to develop this funky callous on my left hand. I'm not left handed and I wasn't playing hard-core rock music at that point, so that's weird, right? What's weirder is that I got it as the result of a nervous habit- I would bunch up the skin on the side of my middle finger by squeezing it with my thumb and forefinger. For at least the rest of elementary school, I would aggravate it whenever I was nervous or upset. I think it lessened after that, but the damage was done and I had this sort of permanent rough spot on my hand. Then just a few months ago I started back in on it. So it had to go. Today I started a treatment to get rid of the callous. I asked my doctor about freezing it off, but since it's so wide and doesn't really have a definite base (like a wart), that won't work. So I'm going the old-school Dr. Scholl's route. If the slow doses of acid don't eat my entire hand off, I'll be back to a baby-smooth, pre-anxiety hand in no time.

New Thing #304: Breaking the Law*

When I started this project, I vowed to never do anything illegal.
Oops.
Today I cut off a tag that said "under penalty of law this tag not to be removed except by the consumer." You might be thinking this is okay, since I apparently own this chair... but.... I DIDN'T BUY IT.


*Not really. Don't arrest me! The penguin made me do it!

New Thing #303: Well done!

This is small but significant, and anybody who lives in a big city will understand why. Today I walked into a deli and said "I'll have the usual." I felt like an idiot for a tiny fraction of a second-what if the short-order cook had absolutely no idea what I was talking about?- but the guy nodded, then turned around and started making me a cheeseburger deluxe with fries. Thanks, hubris! Nowhere else in New York where I've worked or lived have I ever felt comfortable walking into a place and saying that. But somehow I knew that the guys at the deli buffet place would know to make me a medium-well burger with pickles. Stuff like that makes chilly New York days seem a little warmer.

New Thing #302: Famly Feud

Since the beginning of this project, I have intended to spend a day researching a section of history I know nothing about. I had little restrictions. It just had to be a topic that, if brought up in conversation, i previously could not have said much about. On Sunday, I caught part of a documentary on the History channel called "Hillbilly: The Real Story." Hosted by Billy Ray Cyrus, it was an epic journey through the history of Appalachia, complete with stories about snake handlers, mining turf wars and, something that's always intrigued me, the Hatfield-McCoy family feud. It didn't have much on the feud, so today I watched the rest of the documentary and then I researched the Hatfield-McCoy feud.
The documentary made me think the feud began over mining territory; I somehow thought it started because a Capulet from one family married a Montague from the other (which I realize might mean that the feud was already in place). I was sort of right; a Hatfield did want to marry a McCoy, but the families already hated each other (though silently and bitterly).
The Hatfields were affluent Confederates who owned land on one side of the Tug Fork tributary, and the less-moneyed McCoys, a Union family, lived on the other. The marriage between the families was definitely a point of contention, but the tipping point came when a pig belonging to a McCoy wandered over to the Hatfield side and the Hatfields automatically claimed it was theirs and tried to keep it. A court battle ensued, the McCoys lost, and the lawyer was murdered. This was the beginning of 30 years of fighting, bloodshed, kidnapping, shooting, hangings and general brutality and 130 years of an open feud (the killing stopped in 1903, but in 2003 modern descendants signed an official truce). Now I'm super wary of where I leave my recycling and how far my doormat protrudes into the hall, lest my neighbors get a little riled up about it.

New Thing #301: Giant pain in the butt

I know very little about sports, so I wasn't as excited as some of my friends as we watched post Giants' game hype on several tvs in a restaurant we went to after an improv show. But I did have fun suggesting possible headlines for the Post: Bowl Tyne, Super Goal and my lame favorite, One Giant Step. I mused that it would be hilarious to call the Post and suggest one of these. Having worked at newspapers and magazines for more than ten years, I know full well that night deskers don't have time for nor interest in taking suggestions from readers. So I called the Post and suggested a headline. Surprisingly, I got hold of a human being almost immediately. Then I suggested One Giant Step, and, not surprisingly, he hung up on me almost immediately. I think this is because not only do reporters and editors really dislike such input from readers, especially at the 11th hour, but also because I made myself sound like some ridiculous drunk chick. And nobody likes it when ridiculous drunk chicks tell them how to do their jobs.

New Thing #300: Scrabble Rouser

I played Scrabble for Cheaters, a charity event for 826NYC.org, a nonprofit that helps kids become better writers. What an awesome event! Teams of two players play a game of Scrabble, but there's an elaborate catch: you can cheat like mad, depending on how much money you raised. For $25, you can switch one letter for one in the bag. For $100, you can make any one of your letters a blank. For $150 you can add 10 to any one of your tiles. For $250, you can play a word in another language, and for $500, you can make up a word. I teamed up with Michelle D., and we made it through the first round without using one of our "cheats," but lost in the second round, when the other team used two make-up-a-word cheats, one of which cleared one player's board, thus ending the game (otherwise we would have won- I had "quills" with the Q on a triple letter score and was planning on using the $150 cheat. Ah well!). As nice as it would have been to win for charity, the best part about advancing to the next round would have been playing against an incredibly formidable player and her equally intimidating partner.

New Thing #299: Le DVD

You know how certain shows and movies aren't available on DVD in the US because of a bunch of pesky licensing rules and whatnot? Annoying, yes? Maybe. If you have a de-regionalized DVD player, like Kevin's, you can get around that silly obstacle and watch stuff that's only been released overseas. Tonight he and I watched a region 2 DVD. No, it wasn't that different from watching a plain old American, law-abiding region 1 DVD, but since it was a French film (the stunning The Girl on the Bridge) in black and white and with subtitles, it definitely felt more exotic. And now that we know that all the extra requirements of a European DVD are compatible with the DVD player, sky's the limit! Bring it on, Ally McBeal, West Wing and Passport to Pimlico!

New Thing #298: A bunch of elephants & a men's glee club

If you understand the reference in the title of this post, we should be friends! If not, you're probably still okay. Today I took a Rorschach test. I think the Mensa thing fueled me to find out more about my brain; specifically my psyche. The person administering the test wasn't qualified to analyze my answers, but it did make for some hearty laughs. Among some of the things I saw: a clown pushing a van, a tree on fire, socks, and a pie with a bite taken out of it and a sketch of a dog carved into the top. And I happen to think that the one above looks like a headless opera singer wading through a pond at the top of a mountain.
Thanks to Noah at Skull-a-Day for the idea!

New Thing #297: Tape Delay

There's only so much you can do in the way of New Things when you have to stay late at the office and when you work in a building where you can't get back in after five, so there's no leaving for a soda or a bag of chips or a quick zoom around the block on a scooter. But if you're creative and a little bit weird there's oh so much you can do. Tonight during my many hours of waiting for files, I made crazy tape faces. I don't know why I'd never done this before! I guess my youth was taken up by doing so many other weird things that this one, despite gaining fame in Pee Wee's Big Adventure, slipped through my freakish little fingers. Only one person walked in on me, and while he was taken aback by my Joan Riversish appearance, he barely shrugged when I explained why I looked like I'd just had eel pancreas injected into my forehead.

New Thing #296: Time Passages

I had something lined up for today, and after it fell through because I had to work late, I found out that it wasn't as new to me as I thought it was. So I let it go, and decided to turn to my list for a new suggestion. I ended up picking one from memory, and I can't find it on the main suggestion page, which means the commenter left it on another post somewhere, and I can't remember where! Whoever you are, thanks! I wrote a time capsule letter and sent it to a friend. Having been on the receiving end of one of these, and having had to hold onto it for seven years before I could open it, I can tell you that they are tempting but VERY satisfying if you manage to hold out for the indicated time period. I'm giving this one ten years. Friend who's getting it also reads this blog, so I won't give away the contents. I will say that I went into detail about what each of us is up to right NOW and that I do spill at least one juicy secret. I'm pretty confident that I'll still be friends with this person in ten years, so finding me won't be hard for the person. Understanding me might, but only because by then human handwriting will have been replaced by robot code and four-dimensional colors.

New Thing #295: I are smart

Tonight I took the Mensa online test. As is stressed about six thousand times on the site, this particular test is JUST FOR FUN and does NOT in ANY WAY qualify or disqualify me for Mensa. It had a lot of pattern recognition stuff and word games, and sort of reminded me of a cross between an IQ test and and the psych test you'd give to a third grader to make sure they're not crazy. I won't tell you my score, but I was surprised and am interested to find out more. Give it a shot!

New Thing #294: All That Spazz

Oh man. Or I should say, Oh ladies! Ray of sunshine Glennis offered me the chance to do something today that my 10-year-old self (and, ok, every age since then and probably unconsciously before) would have given baby teeth (or grown up, eye, or even wisdom teeth) to do. Glennis and Marcy run this absolute gift to women, called DanceDancePartyParty, every Sunday. It's simple: Dance like you're in a club, but with no men, judgments, booze or high heels (legwarmers optional). They've been doing it for a few years now and it really is amazing. The only thing that would have made it more amazing for me would have been to get to DJ with a playlist made entirely of musical theatre songs.
On Thursday, I had this conversation with Glennis:
Glennis: ooh!

10:40 AM what are some fun Musical theatre songs to dance to?

I want to make an all musicals mix this Sunday

me: THEN I AM SO GOING

10:41 AM Big Spender, All That Jazz, Jellicle Cats

Glennis: woo woo!!

ooooh big spender's great!

me: Rich Man's Frug (From Sweet Charity)

10:44 AM Cell Block Tango, Greased Lightning, Hair, You Can't Stop the Beat, Go Go Go Joseph, Very Soft Shoes, Run Freedom Run, America

Glennis: do you want to make the mix??

me: OKAY

Glennis: yay!!

me: YAY!

(I'm ten all over again)

Glennis: hehe I know me too!

I'll send you an email of the ones I thought of from musicals and you can take what you'd like :)

me: cool!

10:50 AM Glennis: ok sent!

me: Got!

10:51 AM I have 13 of these!

Glennis: AWESOME!!

I made an all musical theatre mix for DDPP. MAN, was it a geek-dream come true! Check out the playlist below, and imagine 12 babes spazzing out to it on a Sunday afternoon:
It's hard to see, but it includes stuff from Xanadu, Guys & Dolls, 42nd Street, Sweet Charity, Pippin, Urinetown, Hair, Hairspray and Funny Girl. Now I have to wait at least a month before I geek out so hard about something again.

New Thing #293: Artsniff

At the Cloisters Museum, a sign in one of what I will lovingly call the Tomb Rooms explains that "while art engages the senses," patrons should not touch it, because their hand oils destroy stuff. Got it. I grew up touring museums, so that' s been drummed into my head since I was about 2. But that part about how "art engages the senses" intrigued me. Kevin recently mentioned that he once smelled a Picasso painting, just because he could. And while I obviously draw the line at tasting art, who's to say I can't engage the senses that won't destroy stuff? So today while we were at the Cloisters with some friends who were scouting the area as a possible wedding location, I smelled art. Art at the Cloisters is more along the lines of religious statues, impressive columns and the aforementioned tombs, so the overall verdict is "musty," with a hint of "stoney" and "old" thrown in. I at one point did catch a guard eying me judgmentally, butwhy? I SAID I drew the line at licking stuff!

Capital sculpture from Saint Michele de Cuxa, 1190.
Smells like chicken.

New Thing #292: Approved!

I'll go into this more later, when I can retrieve the art I neglected to move off my hard drive at work, but I took a cue from New York Magazine and I made an approval matrix. For those not familiar with NYM, the matrix is divided into four individual quadrants: highbrow, lowbrow, despicable, brilliant. So then the two four lateral quadrants are highbrow despicable, lowbrow despicable, highbrow brilliant, lowbrow brilliant. NYM's approval matrix features local and national news or culture events. Mine is filled with nothing but personal references and inside jokes and maybe three other people on the planet will each understand a different 55 percent of it. It sort of became a nerdy, one-time diary entry. At least I know I approve!

New Thing #291: Scoot Scoot Scootsie

The autumn after I graduated from college, Razor Scooters seemed (according to my University's newspaper that I still got in the mail, courtesy of having been the editor) to be taking over college campuses. I'm not sure why I assumed they'd be huge in New York as well, but once I knew I would be moving here, I could picture nothing but sidewalks full of scooting New Yorkers, and vowed to get one the second I landed. Well, I landed... and there was nary a scooter in sight, at least not on a regular basis. So I smartly refrained from getting one, and didn't really know any of the cool, quirky people who had gotten one for exercise. But after cool, quirky coworker Sharon found out I'd never scootered, she generously offered hers and I scootered. Nobody really pays attention to the unusual anymore, so I could have been walking, or walking with a cat on my head, and I would have gotten the same impassive reactions. I did enjoy seeing the city at a slightly faster pace, and that's saying a lot because I am quick in a general sort of way.

New Thing #290: Cab-levision

I rarely take cabs anymore, now that I live far enough uptown that I can't convince myself that my apartment is "centrally located." But since I was at work for twelve hours tonight and not in the mood to deal with the subway, I took one home. My, how things have changed in the last 10 months! Cabs have TVs now! Somebody had the bright idea to rip off the JetBlue telly-on-the-back-of-the-seat idea and put it in a cab. So I watched TV in a cab! I was less interested in the NBC bits with Roker and Leno (sorry, Roker; not so sorry, Leno) and the ads than in the map, also ripped off from JetBlue. Instead of watching a little plane tick its way across the country, I watched little blue dots hop across midtown and up the West Side Highway, while Leno said something funny about stuff.

New Thing #289: There for me

In high school and college, I had a lovely relationship with the show Friends. While not riotously funny, it was aesthetically pleasing and it took place in my future home of New York (although even I knew that I shouldn't expect their unrealistic village sprawl lifestyle). The one thing I did think might be realistic to emulate was drinking coffee out of those unreasonably huge mugs they had. I never really put much effort in trying to find one like them, so I had to settle for getting Rachel's haircut (kidding). But for Christmas, my sister gave me this humongous mug with NYT quotes, articles and puzzles on it. So I drank coffee out of an unreasonably huge mug. I only say 'unresonable' because it is such to most people. But I love my cup-a-day, even if it's a head-size cup a day (it's still just one, right?). This baby holds almost three times as much coffee as my regular teacuppish mug, and I felt like kind of a jerk for taking so much from the pots at work. I won't make such consumption a habit, but we do have a ship this week, so that's my excuse for now!

New Thing #288: Turning Point

Today I took one tiny step for a New Yorker, and unfortunately, one tiny step for New York. Nearly the entire time I've lived here, I've had a huge aversion to other people's loud, leaky headphones. Not only are they annoying to entire trainfuls of people, they're going to cause their owners to go deaf in five years. The latter probably isn't a concern to most other people, but I happen to think often about people other than myself. So it was out of consideration for a trainful of people, myself and a hearing aid-bound doughy 20-something in a Looney Tunes t-shirt when I got someone to turn down their music on the subway. I waited until a gap between songs, and when the next one came on, I jumped enough to get his attention, then smiled and mouthed, "that's really loud." He grimaced, then reached for the iPod and TURNED IT DOWN. Yes, my method was a tad bit passive-aggressive, but you really do have to be careful on the subway. Just because he's a young doughy guy in a Looney Tunes shirt doesn't mean he's not also psychotic. I've seen people I'm friends with flip out over less.

New Thing #287: Habla dinero?

I took a risk with this one; few New Things have the potential to leave me broke, cause me to overdraw my bank account or somehow donate every cent I have to the Monkey Literacy Project, but luckily none of that happened when I selected the Spanish language option on the ATM. I've been tempted to do this forever; as a smug Spanish I student, then later as a beleaguered Spanish II student then finally as a manic-depressive Spanish III student, I entertained but then rejected the notion of trying it. I couldn't really afford to lose the $200 in babysitting money that constituted my sad little account, and I really wasn't all that confident in my Spanish at the time. I'm still not, but now at least I have more money, more confidence and more ego, all of which came in handy in assuming that Washington Mutual's ATM people had the sense to make all the options correspond to the same buttons, no matter what the language. And apparently they did; a cross-check of my mini-statement in English revealed that I had not withdrawn more than I meant to, and that those illiterate monkeys won't be getting a dime from me. At least not this month.

New Thing #286: Cangular

I dislike my cell phone. It doesn't hold calls, it doesn't have enough storage, and it's not very pretty. But I would never just ditch it in favor of a new one without testing other options first. That includes obsolete, old-fashioned models. Today I used a can-and-string phone. Kevin and I had a short but important conversation while he was standing in the kitchen and I in the living room. I think we talked mostly about whether we could hear each other and how bad the cans smelled. I never did this as a kid , mostly because I wasn't Dennis the Menace, but also because the next-door neighbor I had until I was 11 didn't like me, and any next-door neighbors I had from that point on were either in houses too far away, or in apartments to scary to try this out. I'm not ready to ditch my Samsung for these, but it's nice to know I have a backup.

New Thing #285: How Rude!

I don't really judge anyone or anything anymore. It's hypocritical and a waste of time, and in New York you see so many different things that if one were to judge everything one saw, one wouldn't get anything done, ever. I barely even react to things anymore, and that's if I even notice them. One thing I CANNOT let go is when people spit in public. It's gross and rude and nobody should do it.... Or should they? In a gesture inspired by "don't knock it till you tried it," I spit in public. I spit onto the subway tracks, and you know what? It felt gross and rude and nobody should do it. There is no difference between some big dude and some little lady spitting onto the tracks, or the sidewalk, or your puppy. I will continue to not feel bad when I throw a dirty look at those who do this.

New Thing #284: Sweet Sounds

Kevin and I had tickets to the New York Philharmonic tonight, to see works by Mendelssohn, Mozart and Elgar. I was particularly excited about the Mendelssohn, and ended up really liking the 14-movement Elgar piece. But the uniqueness of this particular concert came about before it even started. I saw a musical tribute to a member of the horn section, who recently passed away, as a prelude to a regular concert. His name was Jerome Ashby, and he'd been the Associate Principal Horn. In his honor, the horn section played The Evening Prayer from Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretl, a piece I sang in junior high. I'd never been moved to tears at the Philharmonic before; I've definitely felt moved, but for different, more standard reasons having to do with music and passion. But this was the first time I'd ever looked down at the stage to see members of the orchestra crying. Several violinists had smartly stashed kleenex in their music stands, and the timpani player was shaking slightly. I also heard a chorus of sniffles from the audience, proving that you don't need to know someone to be touched by their life's work.

New Thing #283: Banana Boot

Ah wikihow, you and your never-ending inspiration! There's something about seeing that little window in my iGoogle page that piques my curiosity and makes me want to try everything they feature. But since I'm not daring enough to try to "cook breakfast on a car engine," ambitious enough to "make a secret door out of a bookshelf" or teenage enough to "convince parents to let you stay out late," I used a banana to polish my shoes. This idea is that the leather absorbs the potassium, giving your shoe a healthy, longer-lasting shine. Load of bunk or not, I enjoy ramping up any mundane task by using fruit, and I do so love the smell of banana. I am a little nervous that my feet and I may attract a herd of monkeys on my way to the subway in the morning, but such is the price I pay for glamor.

New Thing #282: New Year's Rocket Day

Happy New Year!
Here's the amazing video Kevin made of when he and I launched matchstick rockets made with a tin-foil top and paper-clip launcher. The non-appollos were apparently supposed to have flown further, but we did have great fun with our several attempts.