How Do You Mend a Broken Tart? June 29, 2007

Today we fired our first teacher. I freaked out, came home and cooked a quiche (because quiche looks like French for quit?) Dismissal never goes as smoothly as it does on Bravo. If only we could get rid of camp employees by saying “Please pack your door decorations and go.” On Top Camp, Padma Lakshmi would have prefaced this episode’s teacher termination with “You played a fishbowl game of racist and sexist stereotyping and then forbade class discussion?”

Gives a whole new meaning to the quick-fire challenge.

Somewhere between preheating the oven and watching egg stalactites harden on the rack, I realized I make quiche much in the same way I direct Human Resources. I start out a stickler for detail but end up just eyeballing it. It’s a gut culinary feeling that relies heavily on substitution, improvisation, and cheese.

Is a resume like a recipe? Maybe I shouldn’t make a habit of substituting half-a-cup of Shakespeare Summer Stock for an advanced degree. But people who excel on paper so often turn out to be socially anathematic. (No no, not people who carry inhalers. That’s asthmatic.) I stress the human in Human Resources. See, I have a theory that it’s easy to invent facts—alma matters, internships—but tricky to front an entire personality. A guy who doesn’t work well with others will have a hard time masking that in an interview. I’m less concerned with what’s printed on the resume than how it’s articulated. A resume is like a Freshman English paper anyway, right?

Only now…now I’m in the throws of some serious second guessing because this teacher had me fooled. Firm handshake. Sane smile. Questions answered spot-on and with sincerity. Listened attentively, never interrupted or one-upped. Emphasized her history as a team-player. In short, presented a perfect center-cooked quiche. There was no warning. But that’s the trick with arsenic, right?

Tonight while I crumbled feta and kicked myself for forgetting to buy spinach (it was a fucking spinach quiche!) I re-watched clips of the Larry King-Paris Hilton interview. I tried to imagine whether or not, upon meeting Paris for the first time, I would hire her. I tried to eyeball it.

I suspect she’s lying, but then again, I was shocked today to discover that Juicy Juice is actually 100% Juice. If a box with a straw can surprise me, so can Paris Hilton. (I suspect there’s a dirty joke in there.)

That’s my quiche, which soldered itself back together nicely in high heat. Epee Le Peu is coming over later to try it. For a few hours there it looked as if Boss might send me to camp to take over this class, and then it looked as if Epee would have to go—neither scenario sat well with my romantic timeline. So what did I do? Why, hire Epee’s little bother, of course!

Camped Out June 28, 2007

This past weekend I went to camp. I hadn’t been to camp since the summer before sixth grade. I was eleven. I remember Benny Mardones’ “Into the Night” getting a lot of radio play in the Seafarer cabins:

“She’s just sixteen years old
Leave her alone, they say
Separated by fools
Who don’t know what love is yet”

Not exactly the song you want older male Sunfish instructors humming as they teach preteen girls to tie the aft end of the halyard to the upper boom, is it?

I rode to camp with Boss, Ashley, and Epee Le Peu. Epee Le Peu is the man (a former fencer) I am currently seeing and employing. This sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen. Maybe. But just yesterday, Boss threw a NYC condom on my desk as a joke—so I’m thinking that as long as everyone here is blurring the lines of professionalism no one is culpable. If our office ethics were a painting, that painting might look like this:

I picked this muzzy internet art in particular because it bears some resemblance to my hair in high wind:

Boss car was broken into a few weeks back, and, as you can tell from this photo (thank you Epee), has yet to be fixed. Unless you count as “fixed” fashioning a window out of a box. Aside from giving me the plumage of an angry bird, the incoming air made it virtually impossible to sing along to Prince and Journey in anything like real time. While the rest of the car was screaming “With Open Arms!” I was still like “I come to You!”

I’ll write more about camp in Friday’s post. For now, please content yourselves with bookends. Boss left earlier than the rest of us, so on the way home, we stopped in Shartlesville. Shartlesville is known for its sheepskin store and miniature village, which proclaims to be the World’s Greatest (specifying indoor—it might rank low among outdoor miniature villages).

We wouldn’t know. It was closed—miniature hours?— so we hit up DQ instead. I had a banana cream blizzard and won the remaining 1995 oinking pig keychain flashlight from a crane game knock-off.

Ashley acclimated to her new DQ white trash environs:

This photo is a white trash 10. Precariously balanced AC unit? Check. Cigarette in hand? Check. Bad posture? Check. Glimpse of field? Check. Bearclaw stuck to white cinder block wall? Check.

Oh, and my blog is back. For real. Please subscribe (if you haven’t already) and forward to friends and coworkers.

An Eye For An Eye, a Tooth For a…? June 19, 2007

I want to assure my readers that I am fully committed to the blogging process and that soon, very soon, I will be back on a regular basis. Sometimes, good things have to go away for awhile in order to return even better. At least that’s what my dad told my mom. Just kidding. But seriously, absence makes the heart grow fonder, yada yada. If sexy hadn’t left, JT wouldn’t have been able to bring it back.

I’ve found an apartment in Dumbo only a few blocks from my office and I’m moving in next week. In the interim, I’m going on a bluegrass booze cruise and driving to Pennsylvania with my boss. It’s a five hour road trip. I’ll need Dramamine for both.

Boss and I haven’t been seeing eye to eye for weeks. He’s a micro-manager. Whenever I hear the word “micro-manager” I picture munchkins. They were creepy and autocratic, always directing by hanging on Dorothy’s sleeve. Try this lollipop! Parade this way! Email that PDF file!

This afternoon, while I was hunkered down attempting to save our summer camp in Ohio (out of a grand total of twelve enrolled students, one made guttural noises until age seven, and two turned out to be scammers from Nigeria), Boss paid a visit to my desk. He tugged at his lower lip like a hooked trout to show me the space where his tooth used to be. Then he produced a presecription pill bottle and shook it in rhythm to 60’s Soul Classics to get my attention. “Guess what? My tooth is in here!” This emphatic show-and-tell left me repulsed and curious. Why would you keep a years-old tooth in the office? And if you were proud of this tooth, wouldn’t you fashion a necklace and wear it to, say, Jimmy Buffet concerts? And what were these pills? Tugboat Todd from nextdoor had an insightful comment: “God, I hope he never gets a vasectomy.”

I want a job I can really sink my adult chops into and here I am teething on a whiskey rag. That rag must be dipped in Powers.

The Relation Ship June 14, 2007

At some point on our cruise—I think it was right after the fifth Bingo announcement— we realized we were the only single people. Royal Caribbean christened the ship Majesty of the Seas but I renamed it Relation. Out of over 2500 passengers, and excluding our waiter Rufino, we met exactly four eligible men. We called them Jersey Shore, Georgia, and Trouble. That might appear to be only three men, but Georgia consisted of a pair of dock building brothers from Savannah. They were somewhat interchangeable.

I don’t have a picture of Jersey Shore, but here are Georgia and Trouble.

This is Georgia #1 giving a good ol’ boy pep talk to Georgia #2, either about pier berthing or dancing—not sure.

We missed the Singles mixer by half an hour (I still don’t believe there was one) and found nothing but Trouble in its place. What appeared to be an event nametag was actually pre-made and part of the shirt.

Now, while I have recently set sail on the S.S. Seeing Each Other (no thought as of yet to a lifeboat; also, the S.S. stands for sickeningly sweet), my girlfriends found being on the fami-leeward side of the ship to be frustrating. As fun as it is to say “Here comes Trouble!,” it’s nowhere near as fun as saying “Here comes that hot guy from Deck 12 who bought me Bicardi and Diet at the Blackjack table!”

Ah, Trouble and Georgia, I’m selling you short. It’s just that you didn’t rock our boat. Which is probably a good thing, because it was less testosterone distraction from each other. If it weren’t for girl time, Cami might not have pointed out that we were on a Celebrity Cruise.

Why, here’s me and Megan with Laura Dern! What a Jurrassic attitude.

We were all surprised to find Ms. Dern dating Kurt Russell. Guess he threw Goldie Hawn Overboard.

And check out this Alien sight: Sigourney Weaver chillaxing with Tim Robbins.

Help! I’m Cast in Landlord of the Rings and Mr. Wizard Can’t Come to My Rescue June 13, 2007

Today I want answers: Why is there a blimp circling The Empire State Building? Is Poison in concert at the Saratoga Arts Center an acceptable camp field trip for young girls? Where the hell am I going to live? Is Mr. Wizard’s death real or (hopefully) just another experiment?

I still don’t know the power of gasoline vapors or why ice is sticky. I should. I logged a lot of Mr. Wizard hours afterschool, stretched out on the carpet with Kool-Aid, mentally taking stock of my mother’s kitchen pantry and my father’s tool shed. Because Mr. Wizard made combustion and motion out of things. He was the opposite of Smokey Bear. He encouraged fire. I took the SuperMarket Sweep approach to Science: grab what you can in a few minutes, figure its worth later. What might vanilla extract and WD40 do? How about baking soda, shoe polish, and sea monkeys? To this day I am still surprised that rubbing alcohol and marshmellow fluff just sort of sit there.

I would be disingenuous if I claimed not to be writing a fantasy series about a princess from a fishing village and a talking raven during Mr. Joyner’s 7th grade Science class (later it morphed into a musical that featured such highblown lyrics as “When the sun will set in the gates to the west/when the raven flies by with the stone and the crest), but I would also be selling my Scully side short if I didn’t claim some semblance of interest in the periodic table. It was “periodic” for me, aptly enough, because my interest in it fluctuated. I liked looking at my cheek cells under a microscope, but soon found making a lemon battery out of a nail and some plastic coated wiring to be lame (I also left my lemon battery at school over Christmas Break and it rotted).

What kid doesn’t grow up to remember his/her Science and Art projects in crystalline detail? The smoking volcano, the paper mache Alaska? I dressed up as Eva Peron in 8th grade. My best friend Katie was Juan. Of course she was. She was always the dictator in our realtionship. Trust me, that presentation has to count as some sort of experiment. How did I presume to know an Argentine accent at 13?

Mr Wizard, I will miss you. Josh will, too. In the tradition of Gandalf and other skilled enchanters, your most lasting trick was patience and kindness. Your Science had a kind of moral imperative to it. Maybe that’s why I was so desperate to get my tin can telephone to work.

Oh Mr. Wizard, how will we ever suck eggs into bottles without you? And how will I exact revenge on my landlady using only borax, glue, and food coloring?

Good Will(iamsburg) Hunting June 12, 2007

So far, since turning 30, I’ve lost my readership AND my apartment. Hey, at least I’m in my sexual prime.

A few of you have emailed to ask if I survived the ship or if I went all Natalie Holloway. Well, I am safely back in New York despite my utter unconcern for the Royal Caribbean Muster safety drill:

I chose not to blog from the cruise because of exhorbitant wireless costs. Also, I was drinking rum punch. I do have tons of material and will get to it in due time, but right now, I’m focused on apartment hunting.

When we docked in Key West last Thursday, I learned that my landlady decided not to renew my lease. Is it because I harbored sharp-clawed kittens over the summer? Or is it because the last guy I dated passed out drunk on my front stoop, on two separate occasions, leaving whiskey stained mouth marks?

If one has to make such difficult housing discoveries, one should most definitely be ordering one’s third mid-afternoon margarita at Sloppy Joe’s while listening to an affectionate (if somewhat cabaret) cover of The Eagle’s “Take it Easy”:

You can clearly see the freak-out on my face, right? It helps when you’ve had a becalming housing heart to heart with this guy:

His shirt says “Double True,” which of course is from the SNL Chronic of Narnia skit. Everything about moving in New York City is double: double the rent, double the trouble, double the pressure. I’m not new to this process. You see a place in the morning and you’re unpacking before sunset. When I moved here five years ago from North Carolina, I had just run my first and last half-marathon. I couldn’t feel the lower half of my body, or rather I could feel it too well, so if a walk-up didn’t have a Gatorade station I couldn’t really check it out. I had 2 days to see and sign. When you’re under such time constraints, you miss things. Important things. Like: does this apartment not have a fridge? Or: does my landlord’s schizophrenic 40 year old son live downstairs and repair bicycles at midnight and invite himself in unannounced to show-off his Stevie Wonder record collection? Yes to both.

In Park Slope, I took a three bedroom with a Fireman. I answered his ad on Craigslist. He had a Three’s Company fetish and would only live with two girls. As creepy as this was, since he admittedly cast me as Joyce DeWitt, the smart one, I managed to smirk it off and lock my door. My friends referred to him exclusively as “Fireman.” He fell asleep every night to Heart Live and suctioned his nose with a complicated allergy apparatus. Nice guy, but it was time to move on when he hooked up with one of my friends and the only way she could convince him to leave was by setting the oven timer. Maybe he thought it was a fire alarm?

The last two years with Woody in Williamsburg have been the best. Hats off, kid. I’m glad you found love and a garden.

Any reader leads greatly appreciated. I forget my keys alot but I can make you laugh.