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?

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:

I don’t have health insurance. Last September, I made the decision to leave my Human Resources position –”willfully canned” as I like to call it — and sign on as a personal assistant to a well-known poet. And even though I work over 30 hours a week, she can’t offer me benefits (unless you consider my sneaking ginseng and Vitamin D from her kitchen counter health insurance).

New York City is dangerous and I’m poor. That means I’ve had to curtail certain behavior, behavior that seemed worth some degree of risk when the only thing standing between me and an iron lung was a co-pay. Gone are the days of leaning over the tracks to make the train come faster, or walking barefoot through construction sites. I can’t even eat Pan Con Tomate and pretend I’m in Barcelona, because God forbid I get salmonella, and it spreads to my bloodstream, and I have to eHow “Intravenous Drip : Homemade.”

But even though I bike with a helmet, and steer clear of public sandboxes, and don’t pet pigeons, I still need an annual gynecological check-up. I’m one of the millions of women who, because of an abnormal pap, has to routinely submit to a colposcopy. When you schedule one, the admin will call it a “Col-po” for short, because that way it sounds less like a microscope in your vagina and more like an alternative British rock band.

Basically, your gynecologist dabs vinegar on your cervix and then uses the colposcope to shine a light inside to look for abnormal changes, which appear as white areas. I would hazard this procedure isn’t fun for either party, but for ten minutes of fancy flashlight work, I’d rather be the one shining than shelling out $600.

For the price of my one-time visit, I could buy a colposcope. I know, because I looked on eBay. The Colposcope Leisegang, made in West Germany and shipped from South Africa, costs $499 and features “binocular type nice.” I have some Heinz white vinegar in my pantry and a boyfriend with free time. I’m just saying.

In all seriousness, I’m fine, and adamant about annual check-ups. I can get on a high horse about it (there’s a stirrups joke in there somewhere). But I’m not sure why a Col-Po should cost $600, or a cervical biopsy $1200, or why chlamydia and gonorrhea screenings are billed separately at $75 each. Is there really $75 worth of additional labor and scientific equipment involved in analyzing the same culture of bodily fluid, especially when you’ve already shelled out $175 (no insurance, remember) just to see the gynecologist? It’s pricey to have a comprehensive check-up.

A nucleic acid hybridization test sounds complicated and thus justifiably expensive, like it should at least involve protective goggles and vapors, but really it’s just a simple swabbing. Same with an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. I’m studying the bill for my annual right now, and it looks like I paid $83.00 bucks — that’s a slow shift’s wages at the bar — for a Surepath W/Reflex. A what?

My friend Judd stopped by the bar today and we got on the subject of the American Girl store , as we often do, and he told me about the Doll Hospital. The what?

If Josefina’s 19th century Mexican braid were to get caught in the rancho blender and she were to lose her head, you could fill out a form, mail it in, and within three weeks, have a healthy Josefina returned home, in a hospital gown (does she wear it over or under her saddlebag?), with a get-well balloon and a band-aid sticker.

The admittance form is shockingly awesome in its unrealistic portrayal of American health care. For a mere $24, Josefina can get eye replacement. Same price for reattachment of limbs. And for an unheard of $39, she can receive an entire new body.

There in an interesting restriction on head replacement. For such a low low price, Josefina can’t upgrade, say, to Girl of the Year Mia’s skate braid.

I searched and searched, but nowhere could I find OBGYN on the form. Maybe it’s included in torso replacement?

(I’m not sure what’s happening around 1:36.)

Erro again, Interweblings. It’s me, Snunshine, coming to you plush from Iowa City. It’s pretty rough here, as you can see:

The waters are blue. Bright bright awful butt-staining blue.

Why am I in Iowa City, you ask? Why aren’t I somewhere with lots of eggs, so I can sit on them? Well, Girl sent me here to take care of Dan while he was teaching at some bullshit camp thing that didn’t happen because of a little water. He should have taught at this camp:

But then Dan promised me a whole carton of eggs if I’d help with the flood. So, I built this myself:

That used to be how persons walked to the English-Philosophy Building, where they learned about me (remember? I’m a Philosopher-King. With a sweet disaster of a beak.)

So after that we decided to check out the other side of the river, which turned out to be pretty well fucked. In a totally legal move, we went over the bridge

and down the road

to capture some shocking photos:

Do you see that? No, not my sweet plumage, which is particularly magnificent in the reflected light of destruction, but thanks for noticing. No, the big story: not a single fucking egg! Calling bullshit on this whole flood thing, I started heading home.

Dan was all like, “um, Snun, you’re going the wrong way,” but I follow my beak. My awesomely crooked monstrosity of a beak.

After this Dan was like, “ugh, the lower half of my body is soaked,” which is funny because I was perfectly dry. Dan doesn’t know how to go through underpasses.

So, being a big Mary, Dan gave up on following the bike path here:

I don’t know what “reading signs” is, but doing it seemed to make Dan a coward. So we went back the way we’d come, stopping at the local food Co-Op for my carton of eggs. But what did we find? The Co-Op was wrapped in plastic and hiding behind a pile of sandbags. Calling double-bullshit, I sat down with my pet human, Marty, and started planning a break-in.

Marty can help. He’s a ninja.

Anything else you’d like to see me cover? Just email me here at my, er, I mean Girl’s, blog.

(Also, Sex and The City is bullshit.)

This weekend, while at a wedding in Myrtle Beach, while tubing in the hotel pool’s Lazy River, I thought long and not so hard about Sex and the City. My friend Robert commented on my previous post that he feels the series promotes an unhealthy obsession with materialism and reinforces a cult of acquisition. Maybe. I was never on my high school’s debate team — I chose instead, being shy, to non-combatively construct a replica of The Eiffel Tower out of marshmellows for French Club — so I freeze up a little around ad hominem or ad feminam or ad anything, really. (I wasn’t in Latin Cub, either.)

The only real indisputable is that SATC strikes a chord with a large number of women. The show is everywhere, including LaGuardia Airport, where you can eat at Mex and The City. Trolling Craigslist ETC jobs yesterday, I came across an ad (this is the one “ad” I’m good at recognizing) for a Sex and The City Tour Bus Guide. This posting was sandwiched between “Wanted: Head-Lice Removal Clinician” and “Be a Part-Time Phone Reader to my Father with a Brain Tumor.”

When I was a travel agent on The Upper West Side, I worked across the street from Tom’s Diner and next to The Original Soup Man. Which put me, several times a week, in the direct path of The Seinfeld Tour. Visitors would stand in line, upwards of an hour, in the sweltering summer heat, to pay $8 for a cup of lobster bisque ladled out not by the Soup Nazi himself but a tired Columbia student. And then they had to eat their soup on a BUS. It looked like an open casting call for Epcot’s World Showcase. Once I saw a couple, in what appeared to be matching bunads, feed each other. I couldn’t understand all the Kramer hoopla, yet everyone looked pretty thrilled.

I’m not sure what compels us to follow the food trails of syndicated shows. I got snap-happy on a trolly in front of the Golden Girls’ House, which the Golden Girls never actually filmed in, seeing as to how it was merely a facade used in the credits.

Golden Girls was one of my favorite shows growing up — still is. It featured sassy, sexual, and independent older women redefining retirement. And even though it was markedly different from Sex and the City, and arguably better written, it hit on a winning formula for a female quadriad. You need the carnal one; the caustic one; the simple one; and of course, the wise advisor. But the true formula? Women who become each other’s family.

My gripe with Anthony Lane’s review of the SATC movie centers on his dismissal of the sisterhood that accompanies the flagrant, and yes, slightly sickening, display of purchasing power. What about the scenes where we see the girls give Carrie’s depression its respectful distance, nursing her without coercion, letting her be? The point isn’t that Miranda is a lawyer and unrealistically takes off work to go to Mexico with Carrie; the point is that she makes it happen, that this friendship is so important to her that she allows it to supersede industry.

Which brings me back to the Sex and the City Tour, on which, among other things, you can “shop at The Pleasure Chest where Charlotte bought her ‘Rabbit” and “have a cupcake at the bakery where Miranda stuffed cupcakes into her mouth.”

My friend Michelle calls SATC “girl candy.” Sure, it’s not recommended by the dentist critics, but there’s a childlike rapture — the same rapture that 3 years old have in front of bins of gummy worms. But despite the pink frilly fantasy of weddings and wardrobe, and the far-fetchedness of consistently brilliant comebacks, I am moved by these women. Even if Carrie spends $40,000 on shoes and then can’t afford an apartment, I still identify with her.

If you go the SATC Tour website and read the reviews, you’ll figure out pretty quickly that women take the tour with other women. And not just out-of-town women, like the sun-bathers I saw this weekend at Myrtle Beach listening to Top Shelf, drinking Miller Lite, and wearing homemade tee-shirts that said SUN-CAROLINA. Mothers take their daughters; daughters take their mothers; gaggles of girls gorge themselves on cupcakes and giggle through their teeny-tiny Cosmo straws. On the surface, it sounds incredibly dumb. Would I go? HELL yes. Would my best friend, who’s about to start the PHD program in school counseling at Columbia, go with me? You bet. How about my lesbian poet friend who only wears penny loafers? Yep.

I love love love Go Fug Yourself and only wish more critics would ridicule aviary Carrie:

but even my veil feather gets ruffled when Anthony Lane writes, in response to the sequence where Big reveals the closet he built for Carrie, that “the creepiest aspect… was the sound that rose from the audience as he displayed the finished closet: gasps, fluttering moans, and, beside me, two women applauding.” These women weren’t just clapping for a closet; they were clapping for a character who happens to appreciate fashion the way others appreciate art. If all materialism is bad, where does that leave us with high-end designers?

You’d be hard-pressed to find a SATC fan who thinks the show is a gritty, objective, natural portrayal of urban women. But their kinship is real.

Please comment — how do you feel about the show or the movie?

I saw Sex and the City: The Movie. Apparently, so did other American women. The film grossed 55.7 million dollars opening weekend. And check out these statistics, taken from a Fandango survey of more than 10,000 moviegoers in advance of the premiere:

– 67% of respondents plan to attend the movie this weekend with a group of female friends.
– 80% plan to attend a “Sex and the City” get-together before or after the movie.
– 68% plan to drink Cosmopolitans at their get-togethers.
– 51% plan to dress up for the occasion.
– 94% of the respondents are female.
– 45% of the respondents are 25-34.

Although it’s unclear to me what constitutes a “Sex and the City get together” after the movie (if you’re anything like my girlfriends, and you exit the theater only to stand indecisively on the street corner, preferably blocking an entrance and/or bike lane, batting around ideas about what to do next — er, not exactly batting, because that feels too athletic — does that count as a get together?), these figures are not so surprising. I’m 31, and I went with a group of dressed-up women, and we had a Sex and the City loiter, I mean get together, in front of the subway. And we would have smuggled in Cosmos in thermoses if we hadn’t been too hung over from birthday Jager bombs the night before.

Most critics, while acknowledging the movie’s consumer appeal, haven’t reviewed it kindly. OK, I get it; it’s Oscar de la Renta, not Oscar, worthy. But a rather exhaustive read-through of the top-critics has led me to suspect that those panning the movie hardest have never seen the series, or if they have, never liked it to begin with, and now can’t bother to substantiate their attacks. I did the same thing in Sophmore English, when I was supposed to have finished Moby Dick but didn’t, and wrote in the exam blue book that it was too long and focused unnecessarily on one whale.

Anthony Lane, in The New Yorker, sardonically asserts that Carrie and her fashion-forward cohorts are “hormonal hobbits,” and that their “gallops of conspicuous consumption seem oddly joyless, as displacement activities tend to be.” But — and pardon me for not making it past the chapter entitled “Whale Blubber” — men are prone to hormonally driven quests too, and sometimes I find their displacement activities boring. I think it’s perfectly acceptable to knock Sarah Jessica Parker’s stilted, look-at-my-abs! now look at them again while I climb on this chair to reach a high shelf! performance, but when the prevailing invective doesn’t deal with acting or script on any real unbiased level, I find it troublesome. It’s easy to be dismissive, to cite estrogen. No one makes fun of harpoons, but show an audience heels, and watch out!

I couldn’t care less about designer labels; I allow my toenails to grow so long that they nick my boyfriend’s shins in bed; and I think I’m a better but broker writer than Carrie Bradshaw, which, well, just makes me mad. In fact, there’s a lot that disqualifies me as a member of Sex and The City’s target audience. I still have trouble remembering if it’s Sex IN or AND the City. But then I reread Anthony Lane’s introductory paragraph, the one in which he couldn’t help but wonder if Carrie “would commit suicide by self-pity (a constant threat), or would a crocodile escape from the Bronx Zoo and wreak a flesh-ripping revenge for all those handbags?” A paragraph positioned next to a cartoon rendering of the four protagonists looking so sinister, so dried up, even Medusa wouldn’t want them for a head:

and I feel cheated, realizing there’s a subtext of sexism in his article, that this is a caricature of female aging. Or “Carrie-cature”, if you will. It isn’t just the fuss over men and Manolos; it’s that the women fussing are now middle-aged. Stephen Whitty, in The Newark Star-Ledger, calls the movie “an absurd joke,” pointing out that “times have painfully changed, and suddenly self-absorption and $18 cocktails don’t seem so cute.” Cute? He faults the Bond movies for product placement but almost as a politically correct aside. Do Whitty’s “changed times” apply less to galavanting men?

If you’re Jack Nicholson, you can be an on-screen bounder. But shame shame if you’re Kim Cattrall — who, by the way, I’d rather look at shirtless. Critics have belittled the movie as narcissistic treatment of what was trite to begin with. That it’s a pathetic excuse for a wedding dress montage, and that, well, these women are pitiful, and maybe what’s worse than pitiful, shallow. “All they do is talk about sex and relationships!” I’ll say what I’ve long said: It’s called Sex and The City, not Current Events in The City, or Careers in The City, and while I’m sure these women hold intelligent and probably punny conversations on other subjects, the show is whittled down to a particular narrative. That narrative predominately focuses on the material that, off-screen, makes its way into Carrie’s column. It just doesn’t seem that complicated. If you edited my phone calls to female friends, and spliced together our monthly brunches, and voiced-over our dinner parties, you would come up with something similar. For example, you’d know that we use the term “plantain dick” to refer to men with small wee-wees, but maybe not that we have heated, throw-your-fork-down-discussions about Rococo architecture. (I hate cherubs.)

Having written all this, and having bawled like a Rococo baby during scenes that didn’t much demand bawling, I thought the movie fell short of the series. But I identify with the sisterly camaraderie and tender witness to… whatever it is that bands us women together, at any age, when one of us goes off in search of our version of the whale or ring. Regardless of whether or not that search involves an ill-placed hibiscus.

Erro Interweblings,

This is Snunshine. Me:

I’m a philosopher-king with a pretty fucked-up beak. Also, sometimes I sit on eggs. I’m a penguin; it’s what I do. I came on this trip with Girl and Dan to see the world, and I’ve noticed a couple of things that would be different if penguins were in charge.

One, this giant egg would be way less pointy:

I tried to sit on it and couldn’t waddle right for hours. That, humans, is what we penguins call “bullshit.”

Second, penguins would have a way better mass-transit system. How am I supposed to carry all my bags with these little fucking flippers? Plus my ticket? I mean, seriously guys. Good thing I brought Dan along to carry them, and Girl to offer him encouragement and emotional support.

Once, Dan was worried that Girl was going to carry stuff, thereby robbing him of his only utility, but Girl soon put his mind at ease. Good girl, Girl.

You got some things right, though, personthings. Like, this public eatery. Just look at me and my friend having a good time!

That’s my friend, by the way. His name is Carlos and, like me, he does freelance music delivery. I like to mail myself between Iowa City and New York, media mail, with burned CD’s. Carlos is old-world about it; he sends himself with LP’s. He also calls it “posting.” I told him posting sounded fun, like sitting on eggs, but what he was doing was mailing shit. I’M posting, right now!

This is how an Australian groom gets ready for his Catalan wedding:

And this is why you shouldn’t even bother doing your hair:

And THIS is why you should have no more than two glasses of cava before the wedding:

Felicitaciones, Mireia y Karl.

Hola! from Espana, or Figueres to be more exact. This afternoon is the wedding of my dear friend Mireia, and at midnight, I turn 31. 

I don’t have much time to post — so my expose on the absence of tampons at JFK aiport will have to wait — but I wanted to let my friends and readers know the essentials. I’ve been traveling for about six days now. Despite the tiny hotel rooms, Dan and I haven’t fought at all, unless you count my getting sulky over his ability to write funnier picture captions. We took some surreal photos at the Dali museum yesterday. We climbed railings, stood on our heads, and fooled French people by placing our stuffed penguin, Sushine, in exhibits.

Also, as many of you will recall, I was robbed two years ago in Barcelona, on a little street named “Robador” (which translates like it sounds — and no, it does not sound like “Moroccan man tried to steal my wallet and I-Pod but fortunately I got away.”) Well, on Friday night, walking back along Avenue Paral-lel after drinks with the ladies, a swarthy man wrenched my arm in yet another attempt to take my handbag. Life is full of second chances. I’ve experienced many: getting to make-out with Shep, my high school’s quarterback who wrote me off as the weird girl with a Phantom of the Opera calendar in her locker, five years later; or getting back on the Tilt-a-Twirl and this time, not throwing up bratworst and onions. So Friday, in what could have been a mojito-motivated bad decision, I fought back. I clenched my purse. We circled each other. Then, having watched too many Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes, I kicked him in the face. What my leg-lift lacked in force it made up for in startle. The robber was shocked. He produced a pocket knife. Again, we circled. I remember watching Planet Earth a couple weeks ago and commenting on a team of divers who filmed footage of an especially darty and aggressive shark without cages. “Planet Stupid,” I told Dan. But now I was leading with adrenaline and a kind of sick second-chance pride; I kicked the man in the face again. At no point did it occur to me to punch. I felt like the most intimating gesture I was capable of was a display of flexibility. I was, after all, the top of my class at the Sit-and-Reach.

The fight happened very fast. At some point my purse spilled, and a dark and beefy undercover Catalan cop saw us and chased the robber into a side-street. I was very, very lucky, and I admit I should have walked away when he pulled a knife — but it was such a small knife, and I needed to reclaim my bad-assedness.

Here I am with half the Catalan police force:

Dear Becca,

Why haven’t you posted in two months? True, you had the flu, and a rather tenacious stomach virus brought on by rellenos from a Mexican restaurant with an Irish-sounding name (O’Pepe’s?), but really, if you could find the time to visit Colonel Sanders’ grave AND take your virtual band The Dinky Inchers all the way to the Desert Rock Tour Festival in Guitar Hero, you could have written something.

My God, the material! Remember when wooden baby blocks and beef were recalled the same week? You parodied nothing. Complete inaction. You let your parents’ “Best Neighborhood Landscaping” Award go unblogged, instead opting to watch Deep Space Nine episodes, out of order, with your boyfriend. (At the time you didn’t know they were out of order. To your credit you did re-name the show Deep Sleep Nine.) Instead of actually taking the initiative to write Cracker Barrel Headquarters requesting that you be made their Poet Laureate on the basis of your a) MFA b) skill at their peg game c) ability to come up with unconventional rhymes for Fancy Fixin’s, what did you do? You pretended to work for a made-up underdog firm (James C. Biscuit) at the annual New York Trial Lawyer’s Benefit. Which is all fine and dandy, if you had actually blogged about it.

Frankly, I’m angry and disappointed. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you can get off the hook so easily, with some funny comment, maybe about how you’re learning Catalan and the word for lamb (”Xai”) is pronounced like the expletive you caught yourself saying last week at Pinkberry in a line full of small children but Shi-– it was still too late. And don’t try the quick fix of a picture, say from the current J Crew catalog:

(Although it is worth adding, from experience, that it never ends well when girls sit like this at weddings, so you can only hope that her cello has been photo-shopped out.)

And it most definitely isn’t enough for you to produce Dead Sea Scroll-like fragments of a half-assed April entry entitled “Things Aren’t What They Juiced To Be”:

I bought an Odwalla AntioxiDance because I wanted to figure out exactly which dance Cherry, Orange, and Passionfruit together is — the samba? The robot? Now days, you have to blend strange fruit. And you have to have a reassuring juice mascot, something slim and fushia, like a cartoon heron, who wears a lime-green bowler and plays Easy-Listening on his sax:

I was shocked, and betrayed, to discover that my Odwalla was doing a dance of only 16% juice and 28% organic. How do you even compute those percentages?

So John McGrew who has a show Friday night May 23 10PM at Rockwood Music Hall, you were most definitely within your rights to post this:

as a blog comment.

My dear Becca, let’s only hope that your upcoming two-week sojourn with Dan in Spain, during which time you’ll be transforming Trybecca into a daily travelogue complete with photos of you next to naked statues, and which will feature the sprinklings of clever phrases like “going tapas,” will restore readership to more than the chance dirty google.

Sincerely,
Becca