Apartment hunting in New York, a masochistic love fest
story of rejection

I have been looking for an apartment in NYC for a little over a month now. I have been rejected TWICE and yesterday I visited an "open house" where the ceilings were about 6'2" high. This open house in Williamsburg was like none other. My friend and I had high hopes, though our egos had been bruised after the last jarring denial we received from a cute place near Columbia. We approached the address and noticed that the door was open. When we entered there were hipsters wandering about confused. No idea who owns the place. Just people blank eyed stares and shaggy haircuts. No one was home. I have never in my whole life experienced this and I have seen plenty of apartments in my day. So, sad eyed, we went to Anytime for $1 happy hour drinks and yes, we consumed a few.

At first I found it funny. Sometimes the best laughs are from emotional, relationship-type failures. That's why college was so fun! I felt like I just got out of a dating situation with someone I really liked, or at least had some hope of a future with. I spent the week waiting for a phone call or an e-mail, something. No response, an obvious rejection. Then in a weak attempt to revive my spirits, I sleep with some loser, who also rejects me. That's how I felt with my $1 vodka tonic warming under my tired fingers. My friend and I shared some drunken laughs anyway, in a desperate but helpful attempt to distract us from the nightmare that is apartment hunting in NYC. For what it's taken out of me, it better be worth it. You hear me, New York???

(Please send me any info on apartments.)
(Pretty please!)
(please)

Why I love Teen Vogue!

I remember when my best friend told me that he subscribed to Teen Vogue. It was about two and a half years ago and I thought he was a total creep. Beside the fact that he was receiving a magazine that targeted females, why would you buy the one for underagers? Was he turning from gay to pervert? These questions haunted me. There must be some reason that a 20-something gay male would be loyal to a teen, fashion magazine.

Well, here's why. This tiny magazine's pages are filled with affordable, adorable and (really and truly) stylish clothes. Every page you look at it's, "I want that," and "I want that," and "holy mother of God, I want that" (you have to sound like a half-retarded pre-teen when you say this). Even though it's geared toward teens, aren't those of us in our twenties (and thirties, don't lie) still acting like teenagers? And don't teens and tweens dress like they're 28 nowadays, thongs included?

This month, the magazine features tons of beautiful Nikes. Like the white, woven high tops that I coveted a few months back from Miami to Chicago to L.A., but was too cheap to buy (mistake). I mean, look at those lusty sneakers!

There are also simple but entertaining articles and clips on tons of really rich, well-dressed girls whose clothes you wish you could afford. I could work for the next 20 years and not make what they get as allowance money. God bless them and Teen Vogue.

A Little Comment on Tyra Banks...

She is so crazy it's frightening. If you want to infuriate yourself or anyone else you know, PLEASE watch her show. She badgers guests, incriminates them, insults them and then inundates them with inane stories about herself. I have never seen worse interviews on television. I mean never. Tyra is vain and undersexed.
Please Tyra, work on your humility.

A note: America's Next Top Model is still one of the most addictive shows ever. Fabulous entertainment.

Birds of America,

the saddest book ever

I read David Sedaris' short story, anthology Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules and I liked the collection, but I couldn't really find an author that I thought I'd like to read much more of until I got to Lorrie Moore's "People Like That Are The Only People Here: Cannonical Babbling in Peed Onk." The story outlines her experience of her son's cancer diagnosis and subsequent recovery. I really wept at the end of this, rather long, short story.

In a perverse desire to feel more pain, I bought Birds of America. This is a collection of the most hopeless, unromantic, morbid tales I have ever read. Though I sadistically enjoyed the beginnings of all the stories, their odd attention to anxiety producing details (like when the main character in "Terrific Mother" is holding a friend's baby and the lawn chair they are sitting on breaks and the baby gets killed in the fall), the endings were dreary beyond belief. Every story I started with the same curious hope that it would make me at least somewhat less suicidal than the last, but by the end I just wanted to throw the book, and my life, away.

Lorrie Moore is a really fabulous writer though.

Happy Ending!

Last night, I stayed up until 2 a.m. watching Happy Endings on a laptop with headphones on in a rolling, desk chair because it was funny and I really hoped it was going to actually have a happy ending. The movie explores a few different life tales and brings almost all of the lives together in the end (sounds trite, but it's not, I promise). The basic idea is that Mamie (Lisa Kudrow) is a slutty teen who screws her step-brother and then secretly gives birth to a baby that she gives up for adoption.

She works at an abortion clinic as a counselor and for some reason has zero interest in her son, until some asshole comes along and tells her that he knows the kid, won't tell her his name until she helps him make a film school movie, blah, blah, blah, and they get into each other while he blackmails her... You get the idea (or maybe not, but rent or Netflix it).
The acting is great. I almost cried when Maggie Gyllenhaal and Tom Arnold were having inappropriate-age sex and he takes her face in his hands and makes her look in his eyes. I didn't even know this guy really acted. I thought he just went on talk shows. I like Maggie Gyllenhaal though she is always a slut on screen. Always playing the slut. And always screwing the older guys.

So the real deal of the movie comes about when the incredibly sexy Bobby Cannavale reveals why he supposedly adds happy endings to the massages he offers middle-class, boring women. He says that they all have a secret and they love their secret because it makes them feel special. Now, the idea that having a secret makes you special, or different, is actually true, otherwise we'd all be the same. However, in the movie, these women are made to seem pathetically common for wanting to still feel special inside. The thing is that in real life, at some point, we all figure out that we're not special. We're all sort of special, but not really that interesting, no matter where we've traveled, what we've learned or how funny we are. I was sort of put off by the fact that the step-brother/gay dad of the secret son, Charley (Steve Coogan), tells his male-similar secret that he got a girl pregnant and had a vasectomy at 21, but the film attitude toward the secret isn't approached in the same way. His feelings aren't belittled. At this point, I started to feel philosophically betrayed by the movie (I'm nuts, I know). Suddenly, I think that men are exempt from this analysis put forth by Bobby, the Latino.

But the reason that this movie is so fabulous is because just when I started to get miffed over the business above, there was another beautiful scene where when Mamie wonders why her son didn't want to meet her, Charley tells her that anyone is better for knowing her. And then I cried. This scene made me realize that us women, secrets and all are special! No matter how lame men may make us out to be, men can also let us know how special we are! Because nothing matters but what they think!!! Men, men, men. I'm just joking, the movie is funny and fuzzy and smart. I want you to see it.

An aside: for some reason, I always pick up the abortion movies. And not just Vera Drake and Palindromes, but others too, I'm too out of it and self-involved to think of any other titles right now. Are "they" just making more movies on the topic, or am I just subconsciously drawn to them? I'm glad they're being made. I don't think that people talk about abortion enough, it's society's secret.

Also: John Ritter's son is in this movie, and he's sort of cute.