Week 1 of Infinite Challenge

Have yet to crack open that book. That enormous, heavy, heavy book. Just looking at it makes me tired. Maybe the publisher could have split it up into 10 pieces so we can at least carry it around in our pockets. 

I can't put that thing in my purse! 

Maybe I should try to get the audiobook and listen to it during my commute. 

I just checked. Seems like there is no audiobook. I guess the trouble lies in the 100 pages of endnotes. 

My sister told me that she read an article which informs us that we shouldn't tell people what our goals are because simply the act of telling someone fools our brain into thinking that we're already doing it, which doesn't push us to actually accomplish the task. 

Therefore, if you really want to do something, don't tell The Internet. 

I wish I had known about this before. 

Lesson

Me: Don't flick that pineapple at me! Pineapples are so sticky!

Peter: Do you mind if I touch the pineapple to your nose?

Me: If you do, I'll punch you.

Peter: Your punishments never fit the crime.

Me: Let that be a lesson to you. 

At the Movies

Last Tuesday I went to the Mamaroneck Clearview Cinemas box office and requested two tickets to The Hangover. The lady behind the glass window asked me for a photo ID. This took me aback and I asked her why. I noticed that she didn't ask the couple ahead of me on line for their ID. 

"It's a rated-R movie," she said. 

This has happened to me before, being carded at a movie theater. About nine years ago, I couldn't get into the movie Erin Brokavich and the box office lady wanted to shield a teenager from the profanities of hexavalent chromium contamination. 

But that was when I was 27. Now I am 36 years old. I might look young, but I don't think I look like I'm still in high school.

"Wait a minute," I said. "Do you think that I'm UNDERAGED? You think that I might be 16 years old?"

She rolled her eyes and said, "COULD be!" in a very sarcastic tone, like, YEAH girl. Duh. 

I showed her my ID and watched her jaw drop. 

Throwing Down the Infinite Gauntlet

I remember flipping through a copy of David Foster Wallace's book, Infinite Jest, at the Ann Arbor Borders (which is my favorite Borders of all time, not only because it is the original Borders, but because they allowed you to bring your dog--I didn't have a dog at the time, but the fact that they kept dog biscuits behind the information booth desk makes it s'awesome) a few years after graduation. I was living in Ann Arbor (or A-squared or Tree Town as the locals liked to call it) on a lark, working on a novel that took place in a Midwestern town. 

The reviews for the novel were mixed, some people were ecstatic and promoted Wallace as The Voice of Our Generation. Others, not so much. Just looking at the size of the book was daunting. I mean, it's a thousand pages! 

I asked my friend John, reader of books and trusted critic, whether he read it and he said, "Well, no. It's an investment of a huge amount of time and I'm afraid that the book's not going to be that great and then the joke's on me. And I will NOT be made a FOOL of!"

There's a website that was launched a few weeks ago at www.infinitesummer.org. Its call to arms is:

You've been meaning to do it for over a decade. Now join endurance bibliophiles from around the web as we tackle and comment upon David Foster Wallace's masterwork, June 21st to September 22nd.

A thousand pages ÷ 93 days = 75 pages a week. No sweat.

I don't know if I've been meaning to do it for a decade, and I'm not one to usually follow the bandwagon, but it seems like a good time to read the book. 

Plans for the summer:

1. Learn Spanish

2. Read Infinite Jest 

This Is the Way I Should Look

I was talking with my friend Marisol the other day and she told me that a friend of hers was set up with a police officer. So, I guess, you're thinking, a police officer? He must be a pretty fit guy. I mean, he needs to know how to chase bad guys down the street... like we see... on television... which is... oh yeah... fictional..

This police officer was HUGE! 

And her friend was all, "Uhm. I don't date huge."

Apparently, the guy really liked what HE saw. He told her, "You look really great for your age."

"No," she said. "This is the way I should look."

In other words. This is what we should look like at this age. YOU look TERRIBLE. 

Frogger

My sister ran over a frog the other day. She said:

I saw a frog jump in front of the road while I was driving.  I thought that I was totally going to miss it, but then I heard a crunch noise. 

I guess this was an actual frog playing the game Frogger...and he lost. 

I Don't Read Chinese

I know that I have an Asian name. But it's always funny to me when I get junk mail IN CHINESE. Funny that Peter never gets mail in Italian. They're never like, "Oh, he's Italian, so he's not going to know that the McDonald's is now offering a Delicious Coffee Drink unless we send him that coupon in Italiano."

The thing is, I don't know how to read Chinese. Well, except for some of the three hundred words I can still remember from my one year of Mandarin class senior year of college. The Chinese class for non-native speakers my Chinese friends referred to as "The White Man's Chinese Class."

When I visited Taiwan one summer, I had to explain to almost every restaurant waitress that I can speak, but am illiterate, so they would have to read me the menu and they were all, "Huh? Didn't you go to school?"

And I was all, "I'm in college!"

And they were all, "WHAT?" 

I appreciate the coupons, but one of the plus sides of being married to a vegetarian is that you don't really visit fast food chains that often. 

Sometimes I Think Cops Are Not Smart

Today I saw the most heart-wrenching story on TV. A yellow lab was hit by a car on the Major Deegan Expressway and her companion dog, who I found out later was her son, barked at and shepherded the oncoming traffic around her so she wouldn't get hurt. There's a link to it on youtube here.

The footage is so sad, mostly because that yellow lab clearly couldn't get up and the pavement was smeared with her blood. I kept thinking about my own yellow lab and how helpless dogs are now that they depend on people for everything. 

I've heard this story reported on in many news programs today, but it really irks me that no one mentions the policemen who almost botched the whole rescue operation. First of all, they seemed afraid of the barking dog and couldn't get to the injured dog for about 15 minutes. 

They should have tried to grab the healthy dog first so that he wouldn't get hit by another car, but they just stood around staring at him. I mean, how many cops does it take to catch a dog. Form a human chain and close in, for crying out loud! Do I have to be in charge of EVERYTHING?

Then, when the policemen were trying to get the injured dog through the left passenger side of the car, one of the them opened the door on the right side and just walked away. Although injured, there was a small chance that she would have tried to make a run for it--I was so frustrated to see how these guys were bungling this whole thing up.

Then, as they rescue the injured dog, the healthy dog runs off and is running around in traffic. 

These are the people who are supposed to protect us? 

All the news programs were commending these clowns. 

My Broken Pedometer

Now that we weather is nicer, Peter and I have been taking the dogs for walks. I fished out my pedometer from the glass jar it has been sitting in the past few months and we walked down the main street in our town. 

My grandpa used to walk around with the very first pedometers when I was a young girl and it's pretty funny to me now how popular they have become. At the time, I thought my grandpa was a bit anal and nerdy. He used to have this special belt strap that he hooked a pedometer, a box of really hideous-tasting silver mint balls, and a pocket English-Japanese/Japanese-English dictionary. 

The dictionary he only carried with him when I was around because many times during a conversation I would say something like, "Do you want to go to the place-with-a-lot-of-books-that-is-not-a-bookstore-because-you-don't-buy-them-you-borrow-them later?" I mean, my parents never taught me the Taiwanese word for "library." That's when he would reach down on flip open the plastic pouch on his belt and whip out the dictionary for me to flip through and point to the word. 

During the day of the walk, Peter and I were in agreement was that we were going to walk one mile and head on back home. Peter's ride to work is about 4.25 miles away and he wanted to try to see how long it would take him to walk that distance. So, we figured, we would multiply the time it took us to walk two miles and extrapolate. 

So we leashed up the dogs and took off down Main Street. It was so nice to be outside and to not be wearing flannel mom-jeans. I love this time of year, right before the horrible NY face-melting summers. 

Periodically, I kept checking the pedometer. After what seemed to us like a huge distance and we approached the next town over, the pedometer said we had only walked half-a-mile. Peter was all, "I don't THINK so. That thing is BROKEN."

I didn't think that it was broken because I had counted out some steps the pedometer was accurately counting my steps. Also, I wanted to hit that 10,000 paces mark, which Peter and I have NEVER approached during a walk. It's the magic per-day number of paces that scientists say a person should walk for optimal health. So I kept encouraging him to keep on walking farther and farther. 

"We'll walk until it says one mile and we'll go back home," I said. 

About 2 HOURS later, we were on our way home and Scout just stopped walking and refused to move. She's going to be ten years old in a month and must be getting on in years, because she used to have the crazy boundless energy, and in all these years, she's never once stopped in the middle of a walk. During this whole walk, Peter would point out random landmarks and say, "Now, I KNOW that this (fill-in-the-blank-post office/ dry cleaner/ fire station) is AT LEAST (1, 1.5, 2) miles away from home."

Peter looked at me and said, "If I have to carry this 60-pound dog home, it's going to be all your fault." 

At that point, we could almost see our apartment building, so we urged Scout to keep walking. We are all super-tired and my feet were threatening to go on strike. My shoes hurt my feel terribly, but I didn't feel like I had a right to complain, since I was the one who kept pushing everyone onward. 

When we got home, I Mapquested the route we walked and discovered that we had almost covered 5 miles! 

"Throw that pedometer AWAY," Peter said. 

"Hey, look at the bright side," I said. "We conquered the 10,000 paces! Scientists want us to spend two hours walking a day. Although walking to work is going to set your commute back two hours in the morning."

Acela Express Train Straight to HELL

The other day, Peter was at his mother's house when his sister called--keep in mind, this is the sister he no longer calls because the last time he called her she shrieked at him to NEVER call her house after 8pm or he'll WAKE THE BABY!!!!!

To this day, he has never called her house again, so that baby sure is VERY well-rested. 

When Peter's sister found out that he was there, she asked to speak to him--and during the phone conversation, she could not stop shit from falling out of the asshole she calls her mouth. 

Of course, there's the obligatory, "It's really great that you go visit her (meaning their mother)."

I asked Peter what he said to that, he's a much better person than me, because I would be all, "Coming to visit her more than once a year wouldn't kill you, y'know."

But he's not as confrontational as I am so he replied, "Well, she IS my MOTHER." 

And then, later on in the conversation, his sister casually mentioned that her son had his First Communion last week. For those of you who are not Catholic, the First Communion is one of the rites of passage which is traditionally a HUGE family event and although it is a big relief that his sister didn't make a big deal out of it and make us all go, I did feel terrible for his mother, who was a bit shocked and, I'm sure, very upset not to be invited--it's almost on par with you calling up your mother and telling her that her grandchild had gotten married last week and she wasn't invited. 

After he hung up the phone, Peter's mom started to talk about the First Communion, but he really couldn't take another, "Your sister treats me so terribly after I've given her EVERYTHING" conversation. It wasn't that long ago that his sister purposefully snuck out of the house to get to Christmas Mass so she wouldn't have to take her mother. Remember?

The way she has shown favoritism to her daughter really sickens me, especially after she gave Peter's sister the money his grandmother left him (by the way, Peter's sister pulls in $10K per week, so she really doesn't need the dough) during a time we were really struggling after we bought our first house. 

Peter was the one driving his mother to visit his grandmother every week and towards the end, every day, and his grandmother wanted to give him the only money she had left as a token of her appreciation. Peter's grandmother gave the money to his mother and Peter's mother kept it in her own account for years (and used it to buy really expensive gifts for Peter's sister and her family) before putting it in a trust for Peter's nephew and niece. By the way, his sister didn't even attend this grandmother's funeral even though she was in town that day. Don't even get me started on THAT.

I'm always asking Peter how he can still have the relationship he does with his mother and visit her every week. I mean, I'm sure people have turned their backs on their mothers for much less. He always replies by saying, "I know she's not a good person, but she's still my mother. I don't like her very much, and she makes it very difficult to even deal with her on any level. But I'm the kind of person who sees things through. And she's one of those things."

I've gotten mad at my mom for wanting to go to the mall with my sister instead of me. This is one of the many things Peter teaches me every day. He does try to live his life with integrity. Suffice it to say, he is very different from a lot of other guys. 

I asked my friend Andrew about the importance of the First Communion. He is the person I turn to for all things Catholic--and he was HORRIFIED that Peter's mother wasn't invited to the First Communion. 

"Mothers are such a HUGE part of First Communion," he said. "In fact, at my church, the First Communion is always held on Mother's Day, to honor all the mothers and grandmothers. What did Peter's mother do?"

"Well," I said, "She quickly sent her daughter a check as a gift, which I think is totally wrong, because it just reinforces the idea to Peter's sister that she didn't do anything wrong."

"She doesn't deserve a CHECK! She deserves a ticket on the Acela Express Train Straight to HELL!"

That Poor Guy!

Yesterday I went to the movies with my sister and mother. We ended up going to a showing of Valentino, which was really interesting. But before we had made up our minds, I was thinking of taking Judy to go see Wolverine. My mother asked me what that movie was about and I couldn't really come up with a decent explanation so I asked my sister if she could help me out and she said:

It's about this guy. He starts out a normal human and one day a scientist kidnapped him and implanted metal into his hands. 

Hearing this, my mother says, "Oh, that poor guy!"

Phenominal

Peter has a friend on facebook who is always posting these things about her kids, which to someone with no kids, can be the eensy-weensiest bit annoying. I know this is impolite to say, but we really don't care what your four-year-old did at 4pm yesterday, even though it might have been totally great. 

Yeah, we're jerks. 

We barely want to know what YOU did at 4pm yesterday unless it's INTERESTING. 

What's happening with facebook is that people aren't differentiating between interesting and boring anymore. 

So the other day, Peter gets a message on his Blackberry and he shows it to me. This friend has written:

"Just saw Grey Gardens and it was phenominal! What great clothes and such a great life!"

I turned to Peter and said, "Uhm...Great LIFE? Did she SEE THE SAME MOVIE we did? Did she see the part where they were abandoned by everyone in their entire family and living with cat feces under the bed? If that's her idea of a great life, she's more crazy than those old bats!"

Peter said, "The lady spells phenomenal with an "i"--can we really trust her judgement on anything?"

Queer Eye For the Straight First Lady

I was talking to my friend Andrew last night and I was telling him about my horrible Easter Sunday experience and how my brother-in-law is so unhappy that Obama was elected he took it out on us for voting for him. 

So we got to talking about Michelle Obama and what a great job she was doing, especially in getting attention to little-known clothing designers. I love that whenever they talk about Jason Wu they're always bringing up the fact that he's Taiwanese. 

Andrew doesn't think that her outfits are that great. 

"Okay," I said. "I know that she really loves J. Crew, but I think enough is enough. It's okay for her and the daughters to wear something that isn't off-the-rack. I mean, the other day I was watching a show and a woman was talking about how she was going to wear the same dress that Michelle Obama wore for the cover of some magazine. It's a little weird. Women want to dress EXACTLY like her and it's sort of freaky. To combat this weirdness, she should wear things that are one-of-a-kind."

"Personally," Andrew said, "I think she needs a little bit of a Queer Eye for the Straight First Lady."

GOOD Time?!

This past weekend we invited Peter's mom over to our apartment. I made sure that I was home the entire time she was here, because last time we went out to do a little shopping and I came home to find my jewelry box propped open in my underwear drawer. 

I understand that when a mother-in-law comes to visit some snooping may go on, but c'MON! My underwear? You touched my underwear? You KNOW I had to wash everything again.  

Peter said that it was embarrassing on a few levels. 1. because his mother is cuh-razy and 2. the quality of the jewelry in my box. 

Most of that is my fault because I don't really want fancy baubles and I like silly plastic rings with snow globes on them. Although we did chuckle a little at the idea of his mom lifting up my plastic snow globe ring and thinking, "What the HELL?"

This visit went reasonably well except that she kept asking questions every freaking second.

"Where's the flush to your toilet?"

(on the side of the toilet--just like hers)

"What's that noise?"

(the mailman)

"What's THAT noise?"

(the front door)

"What's that noise?"

(the upstairs neighbor)

"What's that noise?"

(me turning on the water faucet)

"What's that noise?"

(the horribly ugly chiming clock you gave us)

"Can you turn off that clock chime?"

Do you get the pattern? 

Then, in the middle of the night, I went to the bathroom and when I opened the door to leave, I saw a scary figure luring in the darkness and I SCREAMED. It scared the BEJESUS out of me. I no longer have any more bejesi because they have all been scared out of me. 

It was my mother-in-law, standing right outside the bathroom door. Why in the world would anyone wait for the bathroom outside the door? I mean, it's not like she needed to beat Peter to the line at 4am in the morning. Any normal person would have listened and waited until I was done. After all, her hearing has been proven to be quite acute.

Apparently, she couldn't sleep, what with all the NOISE in our noisy apartment full of noise made by noisy people living a noisy life. 

Other than the loss of all the bejesi, I thought that the visit went really well. Peter made this awesome pizza and he made delicious corn pancakes for breakfast and we had pasta with homemade pesto made out of our delicious basil plants. 

The next day, when we dropped her off, I turned to her and asked her, "Did you have a good time?"

She kind of did a guffaw kind of thing and snorted and said, "GOOD time?!?" As in, yeah right!" 

This kind of stunned me, because I thought that we were perfect hosts. And also, even if you didn't have a good time, even if we had spent the whole visit pressing toothpicks into your fingernails, the polite thing to do is to say, "Oh yes! It was wonderful!"

She must have seen the look on my face and she rapidly backtracked and said, "Well, I like spending time with Peter...and with you..."

At least she's learning now that she needs to backtrack when she says something shitty...that's progress!!

Just Who is Ashton Kutcher, Anyway?

So who is Ashton Kutcher, anyway? 

He's this guy who did a TV show and a movie with Amanda Peet and then he married Demi Moore and now he's got a Twitter page that a million people are following. 

So? 

And he looks like he's got very silky skin? 

What do you mean? 

His cheeks look silky. 

I guess, but WHO is he? 

Uhm... I don't know, but he's also a twin. I think he kinda sucked all the good parts in the womb and his twin is all messed up and Ashton Kutcher's perfect. 

Oh.....So he's the Devil, then.

How can you say that? 

That's something that the Devil does. 

Grey Depressing Gardens

This past Saturday I wanted to watch the HBO film "Grey Gardens." Of course, we don't have HBO...but Peter's mother does. So I suggested that we make our weekly visit this time on a Saturday. 

Thinking back on this, I should have warned both Peter and his mother about what this movie was about--which means--it's about CRAZY ladies!!

When the movie first started and my mother-in-law saw that it was starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange, she said, "Ohhh!! This is going to be GOOD!" 

And then...

Yes, the two ladies morph into a sad pile of cat-keeping ice cream-eating recluses. This is very far from the kind of movie that the two of them were prepared for--causing Peter to turn to me in the middle of the movie and say, "Why CATS?"

Interpretation: "Why do crazy people keep cats?"

I really don't know. 

At the end of the movie, Peter and his mom were completely traumatized and Peter was all, "You KNEW what this movie was about and you didn't give us ANY HEADS UP? That's so NOT COOL."

And yet, even though it wasn't cool--it was kinda funny. Actually no. Make that REAL funny. 

Cat Clipping

As I've said before, I'm not really a cat person, so when this little creature came up to us in the parking lot, no one could be more surprised than I am that she's still here. 

I don't know much about cat care, but she's been pretty good. She doesn't scratch on our things (so far) or do anything other than hang out in her bed and run away from me when I approach her. 

Lately she's been pawing at our dogs and her claws are SHARP! She took a swipe at me the other day when I tried to adjust her while she was positioned wrong on the toilet and I came away with a bloody hand. I don't want to the dogs to get hurt so I've been reading up on what to do. 

Peter's last cat had been declawed and he said that it completely changed his personality. I asked a couple of my friends with cats and everyone is pretty mixed on the declawing issue. Some people think it's deplorable, others say that their veterinarians have told them that there's nothing wrong with it. I have one friend who said that she left her cat with her mom one time when she had to go on vacation and she came home to discover that her mother had gone ahead and declawed the cat. 

"This is why I NEVER leave anything with my mother anymore," she said. "I come back and it's broken!"

I've been clipping her claws and I think it makes them less like tiny knives and more like tiny not-as-sharp pencil points. But it's still scary to think that she'll go at the dogs with those pencil points. I might try the plastic claw tips and do more research on declawing. 

No More Cupcakes

For Easter Sunday, I decided to make very delicious carrot cake cupcakes with cream cheese frosting topped with a colored chocolate egg. They were so cute! 

Of course, when dessert time rolled around, only Paul, Peter's nephew, had one. He's the only one who ever eats anything I bring, which is why I like him the best. After I mentioned the cupcakes for the third time, Peter's brother's wife said, "I'll take them home."

When you read between the lines, she's saying, "I'd rather eat these dried-out pastries I bought at the store than your freshly-baked cupcakes made lovingly with organic ingredients. But if you insist, I will bring them home with me and throw them out later." 

Peter has beseeched me time and again to not make anything to bring to the dinner table. But I always do, because it makes me happy to make something. The thing is, he always gets really upset when people completely ignore what I bring and then go on and on over some yucky desserts they bought at some no-name bakery. This time, on the way home, he asked me to please not to bring anything over there anymore. 

Although, I don't know when we'll see them again. The good news was that Peter's sister called a few hours before dinner started to let his mom know that she wasn't coming. Apparently, her husband's gout flared up. I didn't even know he had gout. Every time she makes these health excuses for her family it just gets worse and worse. When she didn't make it to my bridal shower she said that everyone had the flu and they were throwing up all over the house. But we all knew that she was fine since we found out later (Peter's mom blabbed) that they went to PA to visit her stepdaughter at her college.  

Unfortunately for us, that meant that Peter's brother and his wife focused all their attention on us and why we are so misguided to vote for Barack Obama, who will drive the economy to the ground and bankrupt the entire nation, leaving our grandchildren to a life of dirt-eating and begging on the streets of Calcutta--therefore, we should watch Bill O' Reilly's show to get the REAL facts. 

It's okay if you don't want to eat my cupcakes, but if you want me to take you remotely seriously, you really can't bring up Bill. 

Is That What You're Wearing?

Today I asked Peter what he was wearing to Easter dinner tomorrow. 

He answered with a smirk and a roll of the eyes. 

"So you're wearing a look of annoyance?" I said. "You know what? I think I might put on that EXACT SAME OUTFIT tomorrow."

Movie Star Legs

Peter and I went to see the play, "God of Carnage." I got the tickets because I LOVE Hope Davis and think that she is awesome (Jeff Daniels, Marcia Gay Harden & James Gandolfini are also in it).

We were pretty stressed out by the time we got there because, although we left the house 1.5 hours earlier (it usually takes us half that time to get downtown), we were still cutting it close. Plus, we got into the biggest fight in the car. And then we had the most ridiculous parking experience ever created (which I will be posting about tomorrow).

So, by the time I got to the theater, I was pretty huffy and puffy. I showed my ticket to the usher and although my seat was only about 5 seats in from the middle, this bouncer-type usher person insisted that I get to my seat from the left side, across about 10 people who were already seated. 

I started to argue with him, pointing out that it would be much easier to get past the four skinny people seated at the other side of the aisle instead of the ten rather corpulent people on the left side. 

During this time, I kept pointing at the aisle and the bouncer/usher was all, "NO WAY. GO TO THE OTHER SIDE. DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT GETTING IN THE LOGICAL WAY."

The skinny people kept looking at me like, "Why is that lady pointing at us and arguing with the usher?"

And the corpulent people? They were SO unhappy to have to move any more than they had to and I had to wade through their force field of unhappiness. They were harrumphing and grumpling left and right. 

Then, when Peter got to the theater, they made him do the same thing and I told him about the stupid bouncer/usher person I had a fight with. 

"That's Kevin Spacey sitting right there," Peter said. "That's probably why they didn't want you to go that way."

Apparently, one of the skinny people was a movie star. 

What makes those movie star legs so fancy that they can't move aside to let people get to their seats?