The Rielle World

Like all good Americans, I’ve been watching coverage of John Edwards’ infidelity and the Beijing Olympics. The media barrage is beginning to sound the same. The following quote, spoken by Michael Phelps after his surprise gold medal win in the 400-metre individual medley relay, had me doing a double-take: I have to act like it never happened, because I have so many tough races ahead of me.” When did Edwards lose his dulcet drawl? And why is he wearing swim trunks?

I’m from North Carolina, which lends Edwards’ “mistake” and subsequent admission an uncomfortable air of boy next-door. We didn’t attend Law School together at Chapel Hill, or make craft projects out of his father’s textile scraps, but our regional commonality affords me a kind of kinship. He’s eaten at The Ratskeller, kissed under Davie Poplar. I’m no longer certain who he’s kissed, but still.

I love pop culture and I love tabloids. I have a sixth sense about the authenticity of tittle-tattle, and a few weeks ago, before the Edwards’ story broke, I called to alert Dan.

Me: “Hey, John Edwards had an affair with a former video producer for his campaign. She uses a lot of hairspray.”

Dan: “Where did you read this?”

Me: “Um, well, The Huffington Post is about to pick it up. You can tell.”

Dan: “So…where?”

Me: “The National Enquirer.”

Dan, who loves me in spite of my gossipmongering, was dismissive of the report as right-wing conspiracy from an irreputable source. I responded in my most rhetorically convincing way: by making a joke about only one of us living in The Rielle World and hanging up on him.

And now it’s true. John Edwards slept with another woman, kept it hidden from the public, and then proceeded to campaign for the Democratic nomination on a platform based largely on family values. When confronted by reporters at The Beverly Hills Hotel, he hid in the bathroom. I used to time celebrities in the bathroom of The Actor’s Playhouse! Never did I consider this scenario — and Dustin Hoffman was in there for quite some time.

I believe trust is indispensable to the success of any romantic relationship — to any relationship. A “mistake” is forgetting to carry over the 1 in a long division problem, not meeting a poor man’s Jane Fonda in a bar and asking her if she wants to see your “big government.” Is monogamy a measure of how a man will perform politically? Probably not. But come on. We’ve all read Crime and Punishment. An untruth weighs heavily on a conscience, wrecks havoc on judgment. A skeleton in the closet undercuts clarity. Edwards allowed himself to become larger than his party. He jeopardized the Democratic ticket to protect his image. The pity isn’t just that his wife Elizabeth has cancer. The pity is that our country is sick, too, that he fooled us while we’re down. “Elizabeth was in remission,” Edwards qualified. Well, we’re in recession. His ability to lead is suspect not because he had an affair (McCain did, too — several, actually) but because he lied about it to the public when directly confronted.

Edwards appeared rehearsedly contrite, a slick kind of sorry, in his Bob Woodruff interview last Friday night. Even if he’s coming clean 100%, I’m annoyed that he chose to issue his statement on the eve of the Olympics to absorb fallout. And his unwillingness to answer personal questions out of respect to Elizabeth? Woodruff’s pointed “Were you in love with her?”, which Edwards did choose to answer, is about as personal as you can get. He came across glib and inconvenienced. By the end, I was rooting for The National Enquirer, the Sea Biscuit of reporting.

Perhaps Edwards would have been better off leaving out the ego admonishment and instead, issuing a concise, simple, and honest statement borrowed from golden boy Michael Phelps: “I’ll try to bank as much rest as I can tonight — recover and sleep and try to warm down and get out of here as fast as I can.”

How do you feel about Edwards? Do you think he should speak at the convention?

Proof That You Live in Iowa

Turns out it’s in the pie, not the pudding:

(And no, I didn’t take third for apple.)

Ware-y

Dan and I need some help identifying kitchenware.

We pulled this aluminum number out of a box. It might be a steamer. Or a stencil for a gigantic asterisk. Or a postmodern board game called Disconnect Four.

Of greater concern is the plastic pod. I think it’s a birth control dispenser for women who buy in bulk from Sam’s Club.

Anyone?

Fitting Pants

We won’t have wireless in the house til Friday, so if I want to blog, I have to bike downtown. At least I think I’m biking downtown. The streets here are more confusing than in Manhattan. How can you not get lost in a city where Keokuk and Keokuk intersect? I biked down a hill into what looks like a town, so…

The first place I went had a sign with “No Internet” written in multicolored crayola crayon. This was discouraging, but then I remembered the dive bar across the street with the wax paper wrapped cheeseburgers (the top bun is always hot, the bottom cold) and $1.50 drafts. Who says you can’t copy edit and phone O magazine while drinking Bass. Not me.

Turns out the internet wasn’t working at George’s either, but I did get plenty of attention from the handful of retirees eating hot nuts and nursing whiskey neat. One stooped man told me I looked just like a Parisian girl, tall and thin and beautiful. “I just returned from Paris,” he said. “Only tourists are fat there.” I took the compliment, which felt strangely negated by my biting into a greasy slab of meat.

Now comes the best part of my day. The same man who mistook me for Amelie was struggling with a crossword. He asked me how to spell horrid. “I think it’s two R’s,” he said.

I’m a terrible speller — horrid, in fact — so I wrote it out on a napkin to make sure my instincts were correct. “Yes, two R’s.” I pronounced R’s in my best guttural, washer-woman French, only it came out arse.

He was quiet for a couple of minutes, apparently making progress. Then I saw him massage his forehead with the back of his palm.

“Excuse me, I hope I’m not bothering you, but how do you spell pants?”

“Panacea?”

“Huh? No. Pants. Like, I’m wearing pants. What I have down is P-A-N-C-E.”

“You’re asking me how to spell pants?”

“That you wear.”

Pants is a pretty common word, certainly more common than horrid. There’s no Horrid section in K-Mart. Well, there is, but it’s never labeled that way. And even if you did decide that pants had a C in it, wouldn’t you be tempted to pluralize with an S? To write pances?

“It’s P-A-N-T-S, I think. Yes.”

“Oh thank you! Pants fits just fine.”

Third hot spot was the charm. I found internet at Java Juice. Unfortunately, I also found this couple, who engaged in some heavy petting (tempered with butterfly kisses) on the coffee shop couch with the TV tuned to The Disney Channel:

You can’t tell, but seriously, his hand is down her pance.

Linger

My friend Dan lent my boyfriend Dan a helping hand (and a helping VW bus) with the move. There are too many Dans in my life and it’s confusing. If I knew friend-Dan first, does that earn him the title of Dan #1, or should primary status be reserved for the man who steals the bed covers?

While Dans were loading up the Scooby mobile, I was taking a break, stretched out on the grass and Queens Anne Lace, thinking back to my high school love of The Cranberries and Dolores O’Riordan.

Something about seeing our couch outdoors made me start humming “Dreams.” It was half a life ago I wore cheap Elven jewelry and flannel shirts.

Bad Becca! Good Door!

Dan likes to make lists on his laptop, and I like to change them when he’s not looking. Here’s the list he made last night. (Note: Dan hates olives and beef jerky.)

vent in bathroom fixed?
What do all the light switches do?
Why do bad things happen to good people?
Is there a God?
front screen door hinge?
What’s the story with parking spaces?
paper towel dispenser
floor mat for bathroom
toothbrush holder
shower puff (Dan)
olive flavored beef jerky
deodorant (Becca)

Then I discovered Wordle, a site that generates word clouds from text. Making lists is a lot more fun when you can then Wordle them.

I like how bathroom dominates. I’m also quite fond of the platitude jerky happen. Wordle is a useful tool for poets. You can cut and paste your entire manuscript, and it will give greater prominence to the words used most frequently. What a great way to uncover subconscious themes and/or mess with your boyfriend’s OCD.

I-oh-wha?

I live in Iowa. This isn’t exactly rolling off my tongue, but neither is it stuck in the back of my throat. It’s doing something in-between. Crawling over my cuspids.

Dan and I packed the car so full we couldn’t see out the back window. I rode shot-gun for eighteen hours with a Betta fish between my legs (I bubble wrapped his tank) and a hookah on my shoulder. While I-80 proved to be a stretch of no surprises, shifting in my seat brought something new every time: a boot to the head, a flurry of unsecured postcards. I was more caged than a protester in a democratic free speech zone, and I complained just as much. A 38″ by 50″ framed map of the world didn’t make the trip. Because its sharp corners were precariously positioned directly behind Dan’s head, I left it outside the post office on Myrtle Avenue. The one consolation in giving it up, aside from resting assured that Australia wouldn’t decapitate my boyfriend in a fender bender, was the opportunity to say around a tired hour 8 or so, “I gave up my world for you.”

No no, in all honesty, driving was fun. Much tomfoolery was had. I gambled with scratch and win cards bought from a vending machine, played Big Buck Hunter in a truck stop in Ohio, and phoned the toll-free McDonalds hotline to suggest more tempeh options. Don’t bother with the latter. A recorded female voice prompts you to press 3 if you are calling to “share a new idea you have for McDonalds,” but when I eagerly followed instructions, the same recorded female voice informed me that it is too difficult to sort new ideas from concepts already at play within the company’s internal infrastructure. Now I have no way of proposing a range of feeling meals other than “Happy” or my adorable transfat marauder, the Soybandit.

We stayed at a smelly Econo Lodge, where the bedspread looked like the winning dress on last night’s Project Runway:

and we listened to a ton of NPR. (“Obama played the race card” really does start to sound like “Obama played with racecars.”)

And now I’m in Iowa, proud new owner of a droopy basil plant and a red FTD vase I found on someone’s lawn.

Today, my red vase led me to blogging. I’m back to posting every day.

Twelve Pipers Drumming

Well. It turns out Christmas does come early. Dan is here — I miscalculated — which is great for me, but kind of anti-climatic for the blog. Considering I was going to meet him and his family at the airport dressed like this:

I also wore a mane the last time I saw my cousin.

I expect Dan and I will have a very emotional reunion.

Hearts drumming. Friends piping. Happy two-posts-in-one!

Top Dog

My roommate Morgan got a puppy. I’ve been amusing myself all week by pretending to be a Sears pet portrait photographer when I should be editing a poetry lecture.

Here she is flying (and loving it!) Her name is Guadalupe. I call her Lupe, after the maid on Arrested Development, hoping she’ll clean instead of pee in corners.

I thought this picture was just about the cutest thing imaginable:

She’s so adorable you want to put her on top of a Christmas tree (which she would love!) and coo “Who’s a widdle star? Who’s a widdle star?” But after I sent it to Dan, I was surprised at not receiving BF Awwwws (preferably with lots of emoticons) alongside some cheesy comment about him wanting to get his paws on ME. Instead, he emailed photos of another white fluff ball. It turns out Dan’s friend Chris just got a doppelganger dog, which happened to be over at his apartment.

Dan was totally trying to one-up me with a puppy named Monday. One-pup me, if you will.

OK, that’s pretty cute, I agree, but I countered with a winsome face lick:

A pose Dan then unceremoniously copied in a lame comeback attempt (though I admit the locket ID tag does add an Orphan Annie element):

But I was like, Whatever dude. MY puppy can look head-on, unflinchingly, into the camera:

And then Dan was like Smack down! Here Monday and I are, reenacting Ekaterina Alexandrovna Shcherbatskaya’s heartless rejection of Kostya in Anna Karenina:

Which doesn’t even look convincing. That puppy has no training, unlike Lupe, who can do Hamlet:

It wasn’t necessary to explain to Dan “how” exactly this was doing Hamlet. He tried one last time with a full-body shot of Monday, who was worn out from competing:

As you can clearly see from the diminished level of cuddle, I needn’t acknowledge that with a response.

We’re doing butterflies next. What’ya got, Dan?

Pinkberry

I’ve had the Pinkberry Lady Tigra Remix in my head all afternoon.

That’s because I’m applying to be a blogger for a travel website that promotes New York City attractions and I have to submit a sample post. I didn’t want to pick something too cliche, like The Empire State Building. Nor did I want to go the morose route of writing about Grant’s tomb (although you can’t beat An Attraction to Take For Granted! as a title). So I chose Pinkberry.

The song is super catchy, even if it is a bit difficult to sing along to without falling behind during the PIN-KBE-RRY refrain. (0:31) My Junior Year of High School, when I played Aunt Eller, I couldn’t spell Oklahoma, either. O-K-L-O-M-H-A!

Pinkberry is only available in New York City and California. That, coupled with long lines, helps qualify it as an Attraction. There are currently 13 locations in Manhattan. Mayan legend has it that 13 crystal skulls will one day unite and save humanity from a horrible catastrophe. Now I’m fairly certain these “skulls” are Pinkberry stores (Mayan is so easily mistranslated) where the delicious dispensed goodness is crystalline cold and quite possibly our only means of averting nuclear war.

Pinkberry, as a verb, means to wait. First you pinkberry on the curb next to stinky Soho trash, and then you pinkberry indoors on a faux-pebble floor, slowly filing past adorable but unnecessary kitchen kitsch by Italian designer Alessi: an egg-cup in the shape of a blue alien, for example. But all this pinkberrying has an air of urban hipness. It’s like the L train, only pastel, and with $500 Philippe Starck Victoria Ghost chairs.

Sure, I think the name Pinkberry sounds like an alternate ending for Citizen Cane , but I love the tart, natural taste of its three fro-yo flavors (Green Tea, Coffee, and Original) and the huge selection of fresh fruit toppings. Also, with 13 locations, you’re guaranteed not to be in this line: