Waiting to Get There. Usually on the A/C/E in Chelsea, New York City.

Usually, I don't pay much attention to chauvinists I encounter. Nothing I say or do will change their outlook, it won't be fun, and I'm nothing if not picky about how I choose to waste my time. The most annoying chauvinists are the ones who don't even know they're chauvinists. How occasionally rather smart men can be so fucking dimwitted is beyond me, but this phenomenon is not uncommon in the wild. Let's take my former tax accountant as a case study. He fancies himself an advocate of women. He has volunteered for organizations supporting women in business. You see, he can't think of a better way to spend the afternoon than with some sexy ladies. This is what he informed the female controller and bookkeeper who work for me. He smiled indulgently and brandished his belittlement like he was their king delivering a coveted grace. Had my controller mentioned this incident earlier, I would have fired that flabby ass accountant months ago. As it was, it...

"You threw your pick-ax off the side of the mountain and now you are trying to mine with a bed." - Jackson, 6, gives Uncle Tom some Minecraft insight

The first thing I noticed were Megan's special blue cocktails. The stemware twinkled blue. And everybody wore blue.  The evening was bona fide, especially after Shannon expertly stuck a blue dragon glitter tattoo on my forearm. Although I've never had a book signing thrown for me before, I can state with some confidence that it will probably be all downhill from here. Fyire Blue cocktail at Megan's Three days later, over by the bench presses at the gym, a big dude in a doo-rag asked if he could take a closer look at my dragon tattoo. He studied it carefully and asked a lot of "how to" questions. I felt like I was on some kind of sweaty arts-and-crafts show where the next segment would feature "quarterbacks who crochet" or how to t rompe-l'œil  a hunting blind. Looking all tough guy at the gym with my 3-day-old Dragon Glitter Tattoo I guess I shouldn't have been surprised after what happened Saturday night. We wedged ourselves ...

I will begin with a damning photograph. Here is the inside of my dishwasher when I opened it up expecting to see a sparkling load of clean dishware: Next, I will show you a photograph of the detergent employed in the achievement of the above fiasco. Please glance to the right.  Of course, I immediately snapped into action and wrote a scathing review on Drugstore.com. I accused Arm&Hammer of shilling a substandard chunk of a product that clots like an oxygen-starved deep vein embolism on the door of my dishwasher. I stated with lavish fervor that all my still-not-clean dishes were now coated with a thin film of calcified white foam, reminiscent of nuclear fallout. I wrote something about how the only thing accomplished was turning my dishwasher into a bacteria pleasure palace. Bam. I closed up my computer and threw out the rest of the Crystal Burst. Several weeks later, I received a spam-style email from drugstore.com notifying me that the Crystal Burst was ...

Was it simply the long hairy arm of coincidence? On the exact same day I learned I do not walk properly, I found out I can't brush my teeth right either. Last December, the 14th if you must know, I was sitting in an oversized comfortable chair reading the unabridged Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and underlining majestic clumps of words like " amiably drunk ," " vivid vermeil " and " coltish subteens ." I twisted upon a plush velvet cushion, reached for a glass of pomegranate juice and heard a terrible grinding noise in my hip that hurt like a white-hot bitch.  I hobbled around for months. Whenever anyone asked, I had to admit I had been incapacitated by an incident involving soft upholstery. Every day I would wake up in incredulous denial. Occasionally I tried to go running. That was a medically poor decision. In March, I finally doddered to a doctor and discovered my left hip joint is a pocked and battered warzone. The lounge chair had little to do...

On Friday, December 13 at 8pm, Tom and I saw Daniel Kitson's new one-man show Analog.ue at St Anne's Warehouse in Brooklyn. On Jay Street. Analog.ue is rapid-fire monolog that glorifies moments in time. Kitson cherishes moments in time. He nabs them with tweezers and jams them in preservative jelly. Then he studies them, up close. You can see his breath condensing on the specimen jars and you know he's so into it he doesn't notice. He also doesn't see his fingerprints on the glass. Daniel Kitson.  Very interesting guy. Kitson ruminates fiercely over the idea that no one's life is remembered in a comprehensive YouTube video. You can't buy your own Truman Show. Like mine, all your moments in time are scattered across the memories of everyone you know.  On Saturday, December 14 at 3pm, Nina and I attended the Emoji Art & Design Show at Eyebeam Studios on West 21st Street. Before emoji, emails and texts and Facebook statuses were all rat-tat-...

Last weekend, right after Karen told a story about a lost fig, I told Anna that Stevie Wonder had been burning up my headphones for two entire weeks. Stevie has an extremely large catalog. I also mentioned that my friend Michael Goodson inspired this motown marathon. To which Anna replied, "Of course he did." Apparently Michael Goodson has been behind a lot of noteworthy pursuits. At grandma's house, I slouch over my computer at the dining room table getting bitch-slapped by the Google Play registration application. I turn on some music. My tinny little computer speakers kick out the middle of a Stevie song. Instantly, my pop, who perches on a chair in the livingroom, says, "Little Stevie Wonder, Fingertips Part 2, 1963, 3 minutes and 13 seconds in length." Pop's well known to rattle off long lists of random facts, but seriously what the fuck? This is the question I pose. Pop says that when he was in college, living in a house he called the Su...

At Swedish Club on Saturday, I mistakenly ordered a shot of whiskey in a pint of Guinness. Obviously, I don't speak Irish Pub. Nonetheless, I felt like Alexander Skarsgård's grandmother . Every day, that feisty bitch rolls her wheelchair to the farmers market and puts down a couple shots of Fernet-Branca with a beer chaser. Not mixed together though, so I'm clearly rougher. I got into a conversation about charts and graphs. No Saturday night is complete without a little chat chat about curves. I wanted to say something about outliers. I do not know how to say outliers in Swedish. I resorted to my old trick, make up a word and hope for the best. I went with "ute" (out) + "liggare" (someone lying). Unfortunately, uteliggare means "homeless person" in Swedish. Everyone became sensationally confused and that was the end of that. I went back to figuring out how to get whisky with nothing else in the glass. Little did I know at the time, but the ...

When I grow up, I would like to be a geriatric scarlet. Iris Apfel will act as my godhead in this pursuit. I waffled briefly— one time I drifted off for a second, dreamt I was Helen Mirren and felt incredibly calm and collected. But as Iris Apfel says, "More is more, calm and collected is a bore." Actually she doesn't say that. As a geriatric scarlet, I intend to pursue the following activities with great vigor: 1) When I arise in the morning, I will part heavy midnight blue velvet draperies. The tassels will be brocade. Obviously. 2) All meals will be eaten on china. I'd like to dine on a pattern featuring small fluffy foxes with keen eyes. Foxes are overlooked when it comes to decorative dishware. I saw a taxidermy raven encased in a thousand sparkling crystal marbles at the Met. There will be one of these about. 3) My friend Stuart told me the other day, "When you're retired, somehow you can spend the whole day going to the post office." Perh...

Imagine a few mildly porny terms. A word or two you'd find on packaging at the Ben-Wah Balls  Sex Emporium. Back in the spicy section. Now picture your grandma. Now picture looking over your grandma's shoulder and seeing these words printed on cards she is holding in her hand.  So that happened. It was all my fault but I'm going to blame it on Tom anyway. I had separated out all the more depraved squealing hog kinds of " Cards Against Humanity " playing cards. Except I didn't include Tom in my plan. He saw a bunch of loose cards lying on the table and put them back, all tidy in the front of the box. And then I dealt Grammy those first cards with no visual inspection.  She  laughed so hard she choked on a piece of potato knish. S tay street, Grammy. Meanwhile my mother, on the other side of game table, somehow managed to get dealt 20 cards and refused to give any of them up. She hoarded "Helplessly giggling at the mention of the Hutus a...

Let us begin with the review in question.  It is a one-star review of Sleep No More by Amaria M : "I'm hot, sticky sweet, from my head to my feet." - Def Leppard A few weeks ago, Tom and I slipped onto a 1 train uptown. Tom sat down next to a saucy minx with an enormous quilted tote bag nestled in her lap. She twisted like a corkscrew in her plastic orange subway seat, squeezed some savage duck lips, lined up her Android and snapped a selfie. With the flash. Her hair swished left, her ample flesh went right, a re-duckeling of the lips. Another selfie. With the flash. Sexy squirming. Repeat. 17 glamour selfies in the time it took to get to West 72nd. Most of the humans in the subway car who were not blinded by the strobing flash were extremely busy taking Vine videos of our MTA starlet. Mostly, I was just confused. Such activity simply could not be happening without " Pour a Little Sugar on Me " blaring like the voice of god. I think it...

Rumors persist that Cher has Indian heritage. Are they true? If you watch this video, the whole half breed thing strikes you as a little dubious: Cher rocks the outfit, but she's precariously perched on what appears to be a horse that is almost dead. It makes you wonder what kind of Indian would run down to a ponyride, toss aside some ten year old birthday girl and commandeer her mount. Cher's riding style is also suspicious. It is excessively upright. But let's look at the alleged facts: If you reference Wikipedia , you will find that "Cher's father, John Sarkisian, was an  Armenian  truck driver with drug and gambling problems, and her mother,  Jackie Jean Crouch  was an occasional model and bit-part actress with Irish, English, German, and   Cherokee  ancestry." Yahoo Answers reports: " Her mother is of French and Cherokee descent. Her father is of Armenian descent. Cher was born in California and her father left her and her mothe...

Pre-Foosball. Mark on Pier 57 We were on our way back from Pier 57, a pock-marked slab of ancient asphalt and the perfect place for Mark to learn how to ride his spiderman bike. There had been a lot of motivational shrieking. The kid almost pulled off a Triple Donut Dare, but then his chain snapped and that was the end of that. Wheeling Mark's freshly dead bicycle across a park by the west side highway, we spied a lopsided foosball table tucked amidst the shrubs. Of course we stopped for a game. It was me vs. Tom and Mark. I won, final score 5-3. I scored 7 of the goals. I'm a wild kicker and Tom and Mark were missing half their little guys.

Dear Apple, Maybe you think you are making my life easier with these automatic backups and lack of a "Save As" option, but in actuality, you are causing me to go insane. Every presentation I give is a variation of an earlier one. So my workflow is this: open up the deck I presented last week to a prospect with the filename "Deck for Mary Smith," begin to edit it for Sam Jones, save-as the new deck "Deck for Sam Jones." Except with the new Keynote, this workflow is impossible. As the lesser of evils, I selected the workflow option to make an automatic backup of the deck I open up. So as a first step in the new workflow you've forced on me, I have two files: one named "Deck for Mary Smith"  and the other named "Deck for Mary Smith-backup." Except the "Deck for Mary Smith-backup" is actually the deck I presented to Mary Smith, and the "Deck for Mary Smith" is actually the deck I want to present to Sam Jones....

American Rust   This book I just read, " American Rust ," takes place in a small Pennsylvania town named Buell. It's a fictional place where the steel mills shut down and everyone is a meth addict. In other words, it's a postcard from my youth. What I like about this book is that every character gets shafted. Shafted figuratively and even literally, as one character was in prison. I reek with schadenfreude , you see. I rub it all over my head like glitter and boil it in my tea. It's very decadent, untoward and unsatisfactorily fleeting. Almost immediately after indulging in any amount of black-hearted gloating, I feel the beady stare of the Evil Eye . If you are an old Jewish woman on the Upper East side, recognizing good fortune is a sure-fire way to attract demons who will take it away. I frantically ward off them off by pretending to spit three times: ptiu ptiu ptiu. There is magic power in showering spittle upon bystanders. You should know this, Bubbe...

I hover around the pull-up bar. It's the best pull-up bar in the weightroom for people under 6' tall without solid leaping skills. I fit in that demographic and so do many other shorter, less springy folk. We all keep glancing over our shoulder waiting for our chance to move in on the equipment. A guy wearing blue seventies-style nylon shorts rushes in for a turn before I can cut him off. He does a couple of pull ups and then squats down right below the bar, placing his hands underneath his feet. He straightens his legs, hoisting his ass skyward in some sort of advanced leg stretch maneuver. After a few minutes, he performs a hop and more pull-ups. Followed by another round of leg stretching. And some pull-ups. I monitor his activity wondering what the fuck limber hamstrings have to do with pull-ups. I realize that I will need to ask to work in with this guy because this could go on for hours. I also realize that if I do ask to work in with him, I will have no choice but ...

Lots of manly men at a meeting at Personal Capital. Photo credit:  www.personalcapital.com I signed up for an account with Personal Capital (https://www.personalcapital.com). It's a half cool financial app similar to Mint.com, but with more investment tracking. Basically, Personal Capital offers many chart and graph opportunities, which I enjoy. Here's the timeline of this endeavor. Please note how many sentences start with "I." They start with "I" because I perpetrated the action, all by myself, like the Lone Ranger. I sign up for Personal Capital using my name, my home phone number (which coincidentally happens to be Tom's home phone number) and my email address I enter our investment accounts into the Personal Capital app. Most of the accounts I enter are the ones in my name, because they are the ones I know the passwords for. I also enter some joint accounts that are in both my name and Tom's name. I can't remember Tom's pa...

Stockholm in Summer Summer "is the most beautiful week of the year." It is 75° and blue as Odin's eyeballs. The Swedes celebrate good weather. There is frolicking and mushroom picking. There are weekends in small cabins in the forest with no plumbing because as Camilla has been saying for twenty years "it is a very Swedish thing to pee in nature." Be prepared for a swim at any time. While at a wedding, it is usually good form to wait until after the service and to put back a few toasts before dashing across the lawn for a quick dip in a lake. If you are civilized, bring along someone who is willing to stand ashore and hold your jewelry while you are in the water. If you clink on your wineglass during the wedding reception, the bride and groom are supposed to kiss, just like in the US. But if the bride or the groom has left the room and someone clinks on a wine glass, then everybody can kiss the remaining party until the absent party returns. Nothing is ...

I marched up Church Street in TriBeCa bearing a flag. The flag had previously marked the epicenter of our Midsummer land grab in Battery Park. Which we take very seriously. Midsummer in Battery Park, NYC. View from the SSCNY Land Grab My marching endeavor was cut short by Karen, who absconded with the flag. She could no longer take my so-called "willy nilly" approach to flag bearing. She was in the army, where nothing is especially willy nilly. Karen braced the flag in a grip that clearly took some practice.  I tried to copy her example, but hopping around a maypole like a small alcoholic frog for five hours had really taken a toll on my ability to concentrate. Our procession of Tom Revelers arrived at the birthday celebration restaurant. Luckily the maitre d' was willing to check the flag in the coatroom because some people not including me felt it might be awkward to gad about a dining room hoisting a flag. Thus began the First Night of Tom. The Second...

Today we babysat Jack and Ella and may I say we are the best babysitters ever. We only lost the children for a very short period of time. On the way home from lunch at the Ramen joint, the two of them took off across a field and vanished. Not only that, but Jack had Tom's iphone clutched in his sweaty little palms. What a fly in the ointment to lose not only two kids but a phone besides. Of course it didn't take us long to put the pieces together and mastermind an ingenious plan because we are, as aforementioned, the best babysitters ever. I called Jack on the phone. The crumbsnatcher let me go to voicemail. Eventually, I went with the "find my phone" GPS feature and Jack and Ella were located in their livingroom curled up before the dim light of an iPad playing Angry Birds in Space. Jack had not wanted to answer the phone while he was running. We rewarded his safety-first attitude by letting them watch Tracie's rendition of the Aerosmith/RunDMC Walk This Way ...