Life Trends in Early September

Doughnuts
This place, Dough, is right by us. I've broken my doughnut fast for their creative flavors and enticing colors. So sue me.




Hurricane/Earthquake Awareness
The two things I didn't think I had to be paranoid about living in NYC are now back on the list. (The list: Terrorism, subway bomb, being stuck on the subway under water, giant meteor striking earth, Helicopters in general, murderous co-worker rampage, gay bashing gang in a van, plunging to death in an elevator, nuclear attack, sun explosion). The good news is we now have two flashlights and about 20 bottles of water.




Glasses
There's something ironic about being too blind to be able to participate in a cool glasses trend. Thick frames = hip. Thick lenses = hip grandma.


Selling Yourself
I'm pretty sure this is an essential skill to being a creative person in New York. I tend to over explain and muddle my thoughts, argue both sides of an opinion, apologize a few times for no apparent reason, and end up exhaustedly holding my head in my hands and/or softshoeing out of the room to distract from my disastrous presentation skills. I've learned that part of it is talking louder, part of it is making an affirmative sounding statement no matter what the content of the statement is, and part of it is "ovary-ing up" as Dan Savage would say. What will make me the NY huckster I need to be to succeed?




Funny Women in Primetime Banking off of the Success of Bridesmaids
This seems promising. According to NYMag, there are a handful of shows slated for Fall that feature one (or more!) smart/sassy/funny women. One is set in Williamsburg, which should be interesting (but probably terrible). Another is created by Lena Dunham, of Tiny Furniture fame. It's called Girls and it's on HBO. I have a suspicion it's going to be sort of amazing, and make me want to pull out my "script" I've been "writing". Now I just need to figure out a way to hack a subscription
to HBO.




Gay Stuff All the Time
I recently launched a gay parenting website with a group of friends, and it's taking up pretty much all of my time. I'm pretty sure I've secretly transferred all my self-worth, past purposelessness frustration, and approaching 30 ennui into this project. You know what they say: The path to success is paved with ulcers!



Fantasy Fiction
I've been reading Game of Thrones (NOT watching the show...yet). As a result, I've found it amusing to incorporate the fictional world into our everyday lives by calling the cats "direwolves," talking about my broadsword when I'm slicing bread, and pointing out how the backyard dining area at Flatbush Farm looks like a castle. I used to read Brian Jacques' series Redwall all the time when I was little, which features similar plotlines and medievil harvest feast descriptions to those of Game of Thrones, except with woodland forest animals as all the main characters, so I'm pretty sure I just need to accept that I may be a fantasy fiction nerd at heart.

Spunkmeyer: Sex Sells

This girl enjoying her muffin recently caught my eye at our local grocery store:

Top 10 Worst Dreams

1. Dreaming about the work you do during the day. There's nothing worse than completing a full day of stressful data inputing, only to dream about stressful data inputing.

2. eating some kind of poop

3. Realizing that you are cooler and better looking in your dreams than you are in real life. I know it's - like - a phrase and everything, but waking up and remembering you have pimples all over your chin and that you aren't actually hanging out with Bikini Kill and never will be makes the morning a real drag.

4. claws as hands, hands as claws. How frustrating!

5. Fatworld--oh, wait...

6. When you keep trying to hide from someone, like under a blanket or something, but the blanket ends up not being there or shrinking at an amazing speed. You may or may not be naked.

7. Big, huge teeth (no, this has nothing to do with vaginas.)

8. Small, tiny teeth sharpened to points and soft to the touch.

9. When everyone in your dream is someone you met once like 5 years ago. It makes me feel like my real friends aren't top of mind. Or that they're doing a bad job of staying in my dreams consistently. Get in there friends!

10. The almost-can't-tell-it's-a-dream, dream. You know when you dream about the same exact things you do during the day, but with only slight differences, like your nails are weirdly shaped, or your name is Kristen instead of Kendra, and instead of eating pasta for dinner you eat a burger.

For the record, I was really bothered by the film Inception because the "dreams" all these people were having were not marked with any of the weirdness of actual dreams. They should have had Tim Burton or David Lynch do it, and there should have been giant blueberry-headed dogs, morphing electronics, and cackling witches baking apple pies that periodically walked through the frames. Instead there was - like - a man walking fast, or something that would tip Juno off that she was in a dream. How weeeeeiiiird. Oh yeah, and crumbling buildings. woooooooowwwwwwwyaaaaaaaawwwwwwn.

There's No Crazy like NYC Crazy

We ventured into Manhattan to see the movie Catfish last night. From the time we exited the theater to the time we arrived home in Brooklyn, the crowds in Union Square, the L train and the G train provided the experience of an acid trip without taking any drugs (unless the heady mix of urine and rat poison in the guts of the subway has psychedelic effects). I suppose this is why I and everyone else I know is drawn to and repelled by the city. Selection of sights beginning around 10 p.m.:

10:05, Outside of Theater: Man is distributing postcards promoting indie movie outside of theater. Pops up in front of my face saying "You like CATFISH - you watch THIS!" We decline and move on, swept along with crowd. Short, wild-eyed girl appears out of nowhere to verify his claim, cackles "It's BETTER, It's BETTER - I've seen it!"

10:06 Directly behind us, seemingly college-age girl talking loudly about G-CHAT, mentions it eerily over and over, begins to sound like incantation.

10:10 Older woman w/dual-pedaled scooter talking animatedly to homeless girl and her dog. Scene seems oddly comforting, like observing a mailman exchanging pleasantries with your neighbor in a small town.

10:11 Fire truck everywhere. No apparent reason.

10:15 While waiting for G train, extremely skinny gay man/boy in jean jumper and flowered blouse with dyed white blond hair clasps hands with his bff, an extremely high girl with oily hair and pinwheel eyes in patterned scarf. They simataneously hump each other and the air, stomp in imaginary circle, and sing hot chip song at top of their lungs, collapsing into each other in giggles after every verse.

10:15 Several yards down from jean jumper and friend, large group of black teens are step dancing, possibly in competitive circle.

10:20 Man on G train threatening to sprinkle bedbugs on train patrons. Makes his way through multiple cars spreading the news and laughing.

10:25 Vacant-eyed white man seen exiting train with giant orangeish-red stain on most of his white t-shirt. Stain appears to be from pasta, or possibly blood. Man doesn't seem to notice.

10:30 Home!

Cupcake Wars

I thought the reality shows that really had been pushing the limits of ridiculousness were all on VH1 - shows like Tool Academy (self-obsessed muscleheads in bandanas whose girlfriends try and force them unsuccessfully into monogamy and misery) , I Love New York (loud yelling from a metareality star)and Celebrity Rehab make me realize all bets are off when it comes to show ideas.

However, after catching a few snippets of The Food Network's Cupcake Wars last night, I realized that VH1's dramatic trash reels were at least soap-operatic in their material, in some tiny way referencing the human dramas we've all experienced - love, loss, and social pressure.

In contrast, Cupcake Wars seems like the inevitable result of inbreeding among competition reality shows - the category of cable shows of which Top Chef is top dog and Project Runway, Design Star, Hell's Kitchen, The Apprentice, Shear Genius and the like crank out something judgeable (usually food, but including art, hair, businesses, clothes). What makes Cupcake Wars so bad is not just that it's a stretch of the formula from the start (how many different ways can you judge cupcakes?), it's the contrast between the light, simple pleasure of making/eating a cupcake and the stress and drama of the competition. Everything they say or do on the show ends up reading like a comedy.

For example, when one contestant, an older, foppish pastry chef from Beverly Hills named Farish starts in on the final cupcake round, in which the contestants have to build a giant cupcake display (a challenge that basically reveals that the producers ran out of ideas for baking cupcakes), he exclaims:

"At this point, I don't know how many more fondant purses I can make!"

Farish's display includes four giant spinning cupcakes gazing at their own reflections, "inspired by a 1930s hollywood dressing room". If self-absorbed starlet cupcakes can't make you laugh, I don't know what will.

The judging panel drama, a staple of any reality competition show, is even more laughable. The contestants, fully absorbed in the competition and putting their "reputations" on the line, spew standards lines while tearing up: "I want to win this for my family, it's my dream", etc etc. But I can't help feeling the whole show is like adding "in bed" to your chinese fortune cookie fortunes. Add "cupcakes" (or anything related to cupcakes) to end of any dramatic sentence uttered and you collapse into giggles.

How serious are YOU about cupcakes??

When contestants are elminated, the judges say:

"You are a casualty of this cupcake war". Groooooaaaan. How about "You've been frosted." Or "Take your cupcakes out of the oven, you're going home."

The older judge - some sort of French pastry expert, barely cracks a smile the whole show and says things like "the frosting is like mortar" while grimacing. With his exaggerated French accent, I almost believe that the cupcake he's judging is a serious matter. Oh wait, no, I don't. I think they casted him from a Grey Poupon commercial from the 90s.

The show seems to struggle to find ways to portray making cupcakes with more skill than it actually requires. For example, when another contestant craftily makes paper cups for her cupcakes, it automatically becomes her creative selling point:

"She came up with these ingenious cups that no one has done here before!"

Yawn.

With project runway or top Chef, I'm genuinely impressed with the contestants skill. I know I couldn't sew a couture dress or cook a gourmet meal from scratch. I'm pretty sure I could come up with a creative way to make cupcake holders.

In short, I think it's all downhill from here.

Internet Grasp Fail

Last week, David Pogue of the NY Times thoughtfully wrote a kind of "basics of social media" column for those who, um, still kind of don't get it (a.k.a older people who've just been faking knowing what the hell everyone else was talking about).

It was kind of interesting, if only to realize the knowledge gap that exists among seemingly smart, astute seniors who held out from accepting digital tools and trends too long, scoffing at the wide, rolling social media waves as a passing flood and only now realizing that no, actually, the world is now built on water like the towns in late 90s Costner-bomb Waterworld and fuck, I better learn to swim (deep breath - still with me?) Luckily, Pogue serves as a version of the Waterworld key to the new world - only instead of a tattooed map on the back of a little girl, his dictionary will save those who've managed to survive this far by drinking their own urine and such. Until we realize just how dire the situation is, as evidenced by this comment by a grateful "swimmer":

"I found this as a first class in a Twitter Communication course. What I had expected and would like as a second class are some of the terms that tweeters use. For example, many people use the acronym "LOL", and the first definitions that I think of are "Lots of Love" or "Lots of Luck". However, when I looked it up on a twitter dictionary what came up was "Laughing out Loud" or something that is funny. I need more help in understanding the language that I receive when someone tweets me."

Prognosis: dire.

Mow It! Do It! Cut It! Trim It!

I feel most sorry for the cat in this commercial: