I’m Not a Cat Lady

Coming Soon To a Neighborhood Near Me

Just as I thought things couldn't get any worse in the Six Flags of Shopping 'n' Nightlife otherwise known as the Meatpacking District, along came this announcement that a colossal new Apple Store is all set to open on the corner of 14th Street and Ninth Avenue, mere blocks from my house.

The megaboom heats up again and my lease is up in February. Help?

For a full analysis of the civilization-ending nightmare this new development portends, see Gridskipper.

photo courtesy of psfk.com

Chelsea Neighborhood Watch Part II

Here's the latest view of that entire block that was ripped down on Eighth Avenue between 16th & 17th Streets.

Hmmm. Must be nice for all those people whose windows face south, they're suddenly enjoying  unfettered sunlight. Just in time for the nice weather, too! They'd better enjoy it while they can, heaven knows what monstrosity is being planned for that huge chuck of space.

It will probably be something like what happened here, a block north on the southwest corner of 18th. In a few months it went from this...

to this...

So what fresh hell is in store for us? Well looky there! See that sign? Who do you think is fixin' to join us in the neighborhood, kids?

And here's me hoping it would be a gourmet cheese shop.

Just Say No

Dear Fashion Victims,

If you're thinking of buying the high-waisted trousers that the fashionistas would have us believe are, like, so hot right now, behold this image before you do.

What is happening here? Jessica Simpson looks like the bottom half of her body has done a 180. That's her bottom coming at us, right below her breasts there. It's enough to give you nightmares.

The lesson here? Sometimes you have just got to let a trend pass you by.

So WHAT?

There’s something that’s been bothering me for a really long time now, and it’s about time I shared.

It’s the way everybody has started using the word so. They’re using it all the time. People of all ages, from coast to coast, north to south, overuse this word, but it is especially prevalent in among the under-thirtysomethings, i.e., Generation MySpace.

Spacers are using the word so instead of um or y’know and sometimes but, and what’s even worse, it always comes out in a really flat note an octave or two lower than the rest of the sentence. It makes everyone sound vaguely Chinese. 

It can be delivered in a long, barnyard sound, with extra syllables thrown in--seeeyyoooowwwwww--or a short, sharp yelp, like an airhorn blast, or Homer Simpson’s “D’oh!”

So gets arbitrarily tacked onto the end of a sentence; used to string sentences together;  sometimes it is the sentence. You’ll hear it bleat from the sticky glossed lips of young women everywhere yabbering vacantly on their cell phones. “Sooooo. Yeah, where are we meeting later?” “I just got out of work, so.” It’s used to fill in a void, to provide  a declarative end to an uptalker’s statement (“I don’t think he’s going to show up? So...”). It can suggest an apology, a challenge, or a studied nonchalance. Whenever someone on the street is coming towards me yakking on their cellphone, I place a silent bet with myself that just as just as they pass by, they’ll say it. And about 9 out of 10 times they do! Are they doing it on purpose? Am I causing it? I’m not so sure anymore. 

I hear it absolutely everywhere. I’m walking down the street and this guy behind me says to his friend, “I like Shake Shack but there’s usually a wait but it’s worth going online to check first, so.” I’m  at the hair salon and I hear a hairdresser instruct his client, “Just shampoo and leave it in, you don’t really have the kind of hair that needs layered conditioning, so.” 

And I just want to scream, “So WHAT???”

It’s driving me a little bit crazy, in case you haven’t noticed. In fact, it’s been tweaking my nerves for well over a year. I’ve always been sensitive to other people’s verbal tics. Like, I once knew a guy who ended all his sentences with “… but still.” As in, “I thought he was going to call me at 3, but still.” And this girl who had a stutter, so used to run up to every sentence with “But though...” Sometimes she’d get stuck: “But though, but though, but though...” God bless ’er, she couldn’t help it. But there was this other girl with a broad, flat California accent who had a way of ending “-ing” words with “-een”. Once she listed all the activities she was looking forward to in an upcoming action-packed vacation: “We’re going hikeen and fisheen and bikeen and golfeen and horse-back rideen and swimmeen and kayakeen…” I had to stop being friends with her, it was so annoying.

Now I am being driven crazy every day by this irritating Tourette’s-like tic that the whole world seems to have adopted. I hear the superfluous so whenever people on reality shows are talking to camera. I hear it on the radio and TV news whenever people are being interviewed. I hear it said by the British—seeewww; the Australians—soooooiiee; the French, the Arabs, the Pakistanis. Everybody has their own unique little phonetic flourish. I’ve even heard it scripted into commercials, movies and TV shows. If you want a classic example, check out this clip from The Office, when David Brent makes an ass of himself with The Dance. See if you can count the sos.

And I love The Office. But still... But though... It’s sooooo annoyeen!!

UPDATE: Now this is a perfect example. I love Emily Gould,  I really enjoy her writing on gawker. As this clip started I thought, God I hope she doesn’t say it. We get three-quarters of the way through, no so. And then, ack! Out it comes. For no reason. It didn’t need to be there.

Can’t everybody stop? Pretty please?

Calm Before the Storm

So tomorrow we're supposed to have The Storm of the Millennium or something and we're all gonna die. Well maybe not, but Mayor Bloomberg has advised us not to leave the house. So here's a celebration of the brave cherry blossoms, which, sadly, have have decided to bloom just in time to be drowned. I hope that by tomorrow night, they haven't turned into mulch.

Crappy-Headed Man-Ho

And speaking of Courtney Love’s butchered stomach… Hello, Don Imus! This ravaged, revolting, freaky little man is all over the news for describing the members of the Rutger women’s college basketball team on his radio show as “nappy-headed hos.” I don’t listen to Don Imus—never have, never will. In fact, I thought he went off the air years ago. But today, everybody’s talking about him because of that comment and the fact that Al Sharpton raised a rallying cry, organizing a protest outside Imus’s MSNBC studio and demanding his resignation. “He has mainstreamed the most vile, sexist, racist words in America,” Sharpton thundered. “I'm going to be on this until something is done.”

What Imus said was vile, no question about it. And what most pundits picked up on was, of course, the remark's flagrant racism. But I couldn’t help but wonder which aspect was worse—the racism or the misogyny? The Rutger team is made up of predominantly black, but not all black, women. He was calling all these women hos, nappy-headed or not. It’s doubly insulting.

But the issue of misogyny was completely eclipsed by the issue of racism as commenters speculated whether Imus should be fired or whether MSNBC and/or parent company NBC should be held accountable. Interesting that Sharpton called him on sexism, too. Nobody else did.

I pondered on this for a while. Misogyny seems simply to have become an acceptable part of the cultural landscape in this golden age of Slut Culture, in which young women clamor to get boob jobs as high-school graduation presents and think that flashing their waxed vadges just like Paris, Britney and Lindsay is all super-cool and empowering. Most young women consider shopping and pole-dancing a legitimate form of exercise. They'll lap-dance a guy at a bar for a drink. Why waste your time, right?

Then, completely by accident, I switched on The Tyra Banks Show this afternoon and, lo, her subject was “Kids Growing Up Too Quickly.” She interviewed a 13-year-old girl whose goal is to dress like a slut “like all the celebrities do”; a young boy who likes playing a video game in which he can slap prostitutes; and an 8-year-old girl whose mother was quite worried because her mature young daughter’s puberty commenced at the age of 5. I thought to myself, Go Tyra!

Except, no. For every question Tyra asked her young guests, she had to bring it all back to—who else? —Tyra. The 8-year-old’s mother mentioned how her daughter already had to wear deodorant. “I had to wear deodorant when I was 9, but I wasn’t going through precocious puberty!” announced Tyra. (Eew! I wish I didn’t know that!) Oh, well, continued the mother, the 8-year-old was already five foot tall. “I was tall when I was 8, but I wasn’t going through precocious puberty!” Tyra persisted. Well, uh, girls stop growing four years after reaching puberty. “I didn’t stop growing until I was about 22!” Tyra goaded. What the fuck was she trying to tell us? That she’s still in puberty? So competitive, that Tyra Banks! If she's the only one speaking out on these issues then, hell, I’ll take Reverend Al any day.  At least he got Don Imus’s ugly ass suspended.

UPDATE: The Rutgers coach Vivian Stringer just held a press conference, redirecting the focus to the damage comments like these do to young women everywhere, regardless of race. Team captain Essence Carson points out that this incient proves that women —regardless of race — have not attained equality yet. Thank you, ladies! The revival of this discussion is long overdue.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Whee! The women are speaking up at last. Two excellent articles, one by Gwen Ifil, a White House correspondent who was the target of a truly revolting slur by Imus nine years ago; and Gwen Knapp, who makes a brilliant point about how women in power — that’s you, Hillary, Condi and Nancy —avoid women’s issues like the plague, lest they jeopardize their standing in the Boys Club. When’s the rally, girls? Count me in!

FrankenLove

For about a week, photos of Courtney Love parading around in a bikini have been showing up on celebrity gossip blogs every day. Each time, she's seen wearing a different bikini and behaving like someone who knows damn well her every move is being captured on film. She knows what she's doing, she wants those  photos out there. I guess she wants everyone to see how much she has slimmed down; what she must not realize is that in the process of losing a few extra pounds, she now has a stomach that seems to be imitating Keith Richards' face.

 
images via Snarky Gossip, Egotastic, TMZ

images via Celebrity Babylon and TMZ

That last photo looks like it might be doctored, but still.

Is poor Courtney so deranged that she doesn't realize we all know what a liposuctioned tummy looks like by now? Honey, wake up: Tara Reid told us all about it.

Phone Rage

For some bizarre reason, in the last month or so I keep receiving daily calls from an online pharmacy advising me that I have a prescription to refill. I don't. I've never used an online pharmacy. And I've told them this, over and over again.

I read somewhere that legally, all it takes to stop telemarketers from calling is to announce calmly and definitively: "Please take my name off your list and don't call me again." I've done that in the past and it has worked perfectly well. But not with this pharmacy. I tried asking nicely, then forcefully, then pleadingly, then angrily; despite being reassured each time that my request was being honored, the calls kept coming.

There's nothing more depressing than when your phone rings several times a day and more often than not, it's a telemarketer. You're hoping it's a friend or someone calling to invite you out or maybe even a great work opportunity you've been waiting for, but no, you check the caller ID and it starts with 1-866 or 1-888. You die a tiny death each time, like when you get a card on Valentine's Day and it's from your mother. (Yep, that's happened to me a lot, I'm sorry to say.) The display might as well just spell out 1-866-NYAHNYAH!

Many people advise that the best way to fuck these callers up is to pick up and then walk away from the phone for a while. Tried that, didn't work. There's also a website where you can go to get on the Do Not Call registry, but have you seen how much detailed information you have to give them? (a) I think there's quite enough information about me out there already, thank you; and (b) Who has time for this?

Anyway, I wanted to get these people on a grassroots level. I wanted to cause them the kind of psychological harm their calls were causing me. So a few days ago, I picked up the phone, held it right up to my mouth and let out  the world's loudest, lung-emptying horror-movie scream.

I terrified the cats and probably the neighbors, but it felt pretty good it a cathartic sort of way. And when I didn't hear from them for a few days, I was convinced it had done the trick. But the calls started again. I screamed some more. I even held the phone up to the speakers to make them listen to Brian Lehrer at full blast. (Pretty crap, I admit, but it's what I had on at the time.) Yet the fuckers keep calling. 

I'm pretty sure I have to give in and go the government-sanctioned route, but before I do, I want to try a little experiment. I'm going out to buy a whistle.

UPDATE 04/04/07: Today my online pharmacy friend got a big old earful of whistle. Take that, pill pusher!