Light of My Life

This is a picture I took of the lamp I bought from Bed, Bath & Beyond for my room:

Admittedly, I suck at putting things together. Being handy is not one of my strengths. That being said, I have never paid money for a bigger piece of junk than this lamp.

You can see those poles, right? Those poles are supposed to screw into each other with double-sided screws. Well, they don't. They don't screw together at all. I stood there with each pole, twirling them around absent-mindedly for a dozen minutes, before coming to the realization that it just wasn't going anywhere.

Determined to get my money back, I marched out into the hallway, where 5 minutes earlier I had thrown away the box for the lamp in the recycling bin. But alas, in that 5 minutes, the garbage had been collected. So now I'm stuck with this modern art.

I think I'm going to set it on fire and throw it out my window. People do stuff like that in New York, right?

I HEART NY

A whole new city. A whole new world of bullshit I never imagined having to deal with before.

My first day here, I bought a mattress. Imperative to buying a mattress in New York City, the salesman told me, is also buying a mattress cover, to prevent being infested by bedbugs. Interesting. That's something I never thought about in LA.

So I buy the mattress cover for an extra 100+ dollars. Fine. When the delivery guy comes, he tells me I have to wash it first. Fine again. I take it down to the laundry room in my building.

Here's where shit starts getting annoying. When I lived in an apartment building in West Hollywood eight years ago, it cost me 75 cents to do my laundry. Now it costs $2.75. Thanks, Obama. But the machine doesn't even take money. It only accepts a prepaid laundry card that I have to get from a machine on the wall.

Not only do I have to load money onto this card in advance to do my laundry, I also have to pay for the card itself, which costs four dollars. I actually have to pay $4 just to simply earn the right to do my laundry in my apartment building.

And even that alone would only be a giant scam I could go about my day cursing under my breath...except the machine only takes ten dollar bills for the purposes of buying this sacred laundry card.

That's right. It accepts ones, fives and twenties if you want to add money to the card...but only tens to buy the card. I stare at the instructions on the machine, flabbergasted.

Since ten dollar bills are the rarest of all American currency, next to Sacajawea dollar coins, I did not have one on me. So that meant I had to go out into the city, into a grocery store, ask for change for a twenty, get denied because the girl couldn't figure out how to open her register without me making a purchase, wait behind someone else in another line, ask that cashier to break the twenty............................kjsbfsjkdbjkbgjdwo4utiOWUI4T0.........

It all turned into a blurry haze. I understand now why people in New York are so busy. Even the littlest things here take the most maximum effort.

I Know, I Know...

...I haven't kvetched in awhile. I get it. You can stop reminding me. I've been busy moving from LA to New York, via Lafayette, CA. I've been a little crazed. Rest assured that plenty of things are still annoying the piss out of me, and I'm sure that will continue in a whole new New York state of mind when I arrive on the East Coast next week. But for the next few days, go find someone else's misery to delight in.

Bad Rap

If I hear one more rap song about doing shots of Patron, I'm going to freak out. I get that there's some unwritten rule that says rappers can't write songs about anything other than how awesome they are and how much they like to party, but do you guys really all have to drink the exact same booze, too? What, none of you can think of anything that rhymes with Cazadores? Here, let me help you out: florist, Boris, clitoris. That was just off the top of my head.

While we're at it, stop saying "Throw your hands in the air, and wave 'em like you just don't care," too. That was a fun lyric when Snoop first used it...20 years ago. Now it's just a tired cliche that implies you couldn't think of your own rhymes. What does that even mean, anyway? "Wow, look at that guy waving his arms around. He must be totally indifferent to everything."

Now Snoop is rapping on Katy Perry songs. It's a dark age of music.

How Do These People Find Me?

I was on a date the other night, having drinks at a hotel bar, when a couple sat down next to us. The girl was a little tipsy, but was friendly enough. The four of us made some pleasant small talk, and she kept complementing my date on everything: her hair, her clothes, her look, etc.

Then, out of nowhere, the girl says this to her: "You're a lot cuter than he is."

I turned around, incredulous. "What did you just say?" I asked.

"What?" she slurred defensively. "All I said is that she's cuter than you."

I couldn't believe it. What an epically insulting thing to say to a total stranger. I told her as much. "Do have any idea how rude that is?"

"Whaaaat? No it's not. I mean, you guys are cute together. I just mean, you know, she's cuter." I did not find this explanation to be suitable. Fail.

My date understandably backed away from this brewing controversy. "I'm staying out of this," she said, chuckling.

The drunk mess continued to dig herself a hole. "You should take it as a complement," she said.

"I should take that as a complement???" I asked, my voice rising. "I'm sitting here having a drink, you sit down and tell us that she's better-looking than me, and I should be fucking flattered?"

"Yeah, because, like, you're with her, and--"

I pointed to the guy she was with. "You know what? You're a lot stupider than he is." I turned away from her. That was the end of the conversation, other than her trying to stammer some sort of apology to my date. Five minutes later I paid the bill. Ten minutes later I was studying myself from all angles in the mirror. Damn my weakness for caring what strange inebriated imbeciles think of me!!!

And so this is the end of our story...and everyone is dead from AIDS...

I read an article in a magazine the other day titled "Health Scare of the Week: The Insidious Spread of Herpes." It said that one in six people have type-2 herpes simplex virus, but that 90% of those who have it don't even know it, because they don't have any symptoms, and doctors don't usually test for HSV-2.

Wow, I thought. That's pretty scary. I could be carrying around a strain of herpes and not even know it? I got pretty unsettled.

Then I thought back to a meeting I had with a television executive a couple weeks ago. He was telling me about a show his company is doing about shadowy "wag the dog" type forces who manipulate what's in the media in order to influence what the public believes, usually for financial gain. He gave me the example of the Swine Flu virus - the fact that it was basically just the flu, but since it was always in the news, people went into a panic, bought vaccines, etc.

Maybe this is one of those situations. I mean, a virus that has no symptoms, isn't tested for, and you can't even tell if you have it or not? That actually sounds much less scary than regular viruses. You know, the ones that make you sneeze and puke and die and stuff. If somebody said to you "I'm going to punch you in the face, but you won't feel it, won't remember it, and won't show any effects of it having happened," would you really feel all that threatened? That's just called not getting punched in the face.

Nice try, condom mongers.

My Thoughts on One of the More Significant Developments of Our Time, Without Trying to be Funny

This is all very bizarre. Never in my life have I ever witnessed such mass jubilation over the death of a human. Obviously I'm extremely psyched about this development; it's a pretty sweet victory for the good ol' US of A. It's just kind of interesting.

I mean, you must be a pretty bad guy to have throngs of people in the streets of America, crying with joy and singing songs as a result of your demise. Bin Laden was responsible for the murder of thousands of people. And yet he was so up front, so deliberate about it, that I have to think he really believed what he was doing was right. He must actually have thought he was doing the right thing.

Just like Hitler. Or Jared Loughner. Or anybody who's batshit crazy but has a surprisingly productive psychosis and wants to get some shit done.

Well, I'm happy we still have people we can call on to take care of business. This is the kind of thing Batman would have done if he was real.

Adios, asshole.