Addiction Can Be Diagnosed Over the Internet!

This gem landed in the comments section of my post, "Alcohol Makes You Smarter and More Perceptive!":

It is very pathetic conditon to be addicted to alcohol. It spoils our
life and liver. So try to come out of it. Visit us, here we provided useful
informative tips and treatment for alcohol addiction._______________David
Francis

Alcohol abuse affects millions. This site has a lot of useful
information. Alcohol Abuse

That's right, folks, REHAB SPAM. This is just too awesome. Now, I am all about programs to help with substance abuse. I've seen enough friends get their lives back to know that they can work. But the methods here are pretty suspect.

Who is this person trying to help? Me? Nowhere in the post do I imply that I drink heavily. Instead, I mock the men who do. My readers? Do any of you wish to renounce drinking after the esteemed Mr. Francis called you pathetic?

Anyhow, Mr. Francis, thank you. You didn't cure me of my nonexistent alcoholism, however, it's a very pathetic condition to not know what to blog about on a Tuesday. It spoils my life and liver. So, thanks!

The Tyranny of Etiquette

One of the joys of dating me is watching me scrap with random strangers. Sunday was no exception.

Tim and I decided to catch Prince Caspian (my review: I’ll take intense battle scenes with a side of bland, please!). We got to the Columbia theater just as the previews began and settled into our seats.

Once the previews ended, the chatter began. The couple next to me began to discuss the film, in a hilariously non-subtle stage whisper.

“They must really be at Cair Paravel!”
“I bet they find their gifts!”
“It must be the dwarf that got captured earlier!”

I couldn’t tell whether they believed the audience required narration, or whether they suffered from some sort of delusion where they believed they were watching the film in their living room and it was therefore appropriate to talk. At one point, I was looking around for white canes to see if at least one was blind. Or perhaps they thought they were watching a different film from everyone else in the theater, and we needed to know what was happening in their version of Narnia. Or maybe they were just jerks.

After twenty minutes of this nonsense, I’d had enough. So I leaned in and calmly said, “Excuse me, could you please stop the discussion? It’s distracting.”

A bit of back-and-forth, and the husband leans in to me and says, “I’m very sorry, but if you’re expecting complete silence, you may want to move.”

I’m very sorry, genius, but complete silence is exactly what I expected. It’s a movie theater. People pay their hard-earned cash to listen to the film, not to a pair of monotone exurb jackasses who are deluded enough to believe they’re better storytellers than C.S. Lewis. Criminy wickets on toast, people. This isn’t hard.

My response was, “It’s not complete silence I expect, but the ongoing discussion is quite rude.” Then I mentioned ducking out for an usher. The Twitter Twins fell unto an uneasy hush, and I went back to watching the movie. After a few scenes, the woman slipped out of the theater.

When she returned, her husband asked, “So, did you speak to the manager?” The woman stage-whispered back that the manager was unwilling to intervene.

And, here you have it, folks, in a package of self-righteous cheek and modern absurdity: someone actually complained to management to fight for their right to talk during a movie. They were right to be in the wrong, to ruin the experience for those of us who actually know better. This is the dawn of a new era of noxious self-centeredness. I deserved to be kicked out of the theater for wanting to watch the film.

After the movie, Tim and I had a good cackle over that one. We theorized that good manners are a form of tyranny, and the next civil rights crusade is going to be on behalf of rude people. Tim says the next culture war will be on behalf of public urinators, however, I think there will be an insurgency of people who turn without signaling. Or to throw darts in a crowded bar.

Or, perhaps, the Rudeness Crusade is already well underway. Saturday night we saw a man wipe his face with the hem of his shirt…in an upscale steakhouse. Awesome. America rocks.

In the comments section, please tell me what side you'd fight on in the Rudeness Crusade. Or debate whether Tim is going to have to wait outside with the car engine running every time he takes me somewhere.

PS - The photo is of Miss Manners, my personal hero.

Friday's Story: Foot Fetish Jailbait

I’m on the record as saying I don’t like feet. I don’t like people who take their shoes off on planes, wiggling their toes and funking the recirculated air. Cheap rubber flip-flops gross me out. Long toenails give me the willies. Heck, I don’t even like my own feet.


So, of all the quirks and perversions the world has to offer, I understand foot fetishes the least. If you want to yodel while wearing leather and smacking each other with cooked spaghetti, go for it. I can see how that might even be sort of fun (hi, Dad!). But anything to do with feet? No way.

At age 16, I was working part time in a gift shop in Chinn Library. Which is really one of the silliest marketing ideas ever - you don’t sell stuff at a venue where people are accustomed to getting things for free. It's like selling sex toys at the free clinic. (Unless you’re the Smithsonian, but really, if it’s in Woodbridge, it’s not at that level of cultural fabulosity.) I occasionally sold things, but mostly I just sort of sat there. Most of my “customers” were friends who were dropping off library books, plus their parents.

So when an actual customer dropped in, I would just about keel over from gratitude. They never bought anything, but I was happy for the company. One rainy Tuesday, a man in a sharp suit stopped in and began questioning me about my feet.

Do I get bunions?
How about blisters?
Do I like to put foodstuffs on my feet? Chocolate sauce? Jelly?
Do I like footrubs?

The great thing is that I had no idea what this man was getting at. Instead, I patiently responded to his every question. After a few minutes, he got bored and went away.

That evening, I mentioned the mysterious customer to my mom, who reacted with uncharacteristic calm. Her usual reactions ranged from paranoia to hysteria, including the time she claimed Clearasil was carcinogenic. However, she took the romantic attentions of a fetishist upon her naïve jailbait daughter as simply a part of life.

“Wow, you’re easy,” Mom said, with classic Aussie understatement.

Apparently, even fetishists dig a challenge.

PS – lest you think I’ve become any wiser in the intervening 15 years, I still fall for:

1. 'Gullible’ isn’t in the dictionary.

2. Hey, look! Somebody wrote "gullible" across the ceiling!

PPS - Happy Divorceaversary to me! Finalized June 6, 2006 - 666, in other words, lest you needed any proof that divorcees are doomed to damnation.

Restaurant Review: Sonoma

Now that I’m gainfully employed, I’m getting to experience all the restaurants I’d been dying to try during my year of temping (when the typical meal out involved a Dollar Menu).

The DC dining scene has four distinct categories: Comfort Food, Dinner with Girlfriends, Date Night, and Wow the Yokels. Sometimes, like last night, I goof and miscategorize.

Tim and I chose Sonoma for a special occasion, with the idea it was a Date Night sort of place. It’s really more Wow the Yokels. As in, the sort of restaurant you take out-of-town visitors to show off how hip DC can be (either to blow away your country cousin, or take New Yorkers if you’re insecure about DC’s legendary/overblown lack of cool). Wow the Yokels restaurants are cool, trendy, specialize in obscure cheeses, and are usually very loud.

Sonoma is loud enough to Wow the Yokels. Like, deafeningly so. Clatter, clamor, rattles and chatter. It’s like dining inside a cement mixer. A cement mixer inside a nightclub. And that nightclub is inside a Victorian-era insane asylum with lots of screaming people. Tim and I could not converse for most of our meal, as I lost my voice a few weeks ago and have yet to recover. (Most days, I sound like either a phone-sex worker or a middle-aged chain smoker.) So we were reduced to eavesdropping on the two rowdy women next to us. Aside: Sweetie, he’s not going to propose until you move out. Cow/milk/free, sometimes Mom is right.

No surprise that the wine list is the big draw – two pages of wines available by the 3 oz pour, the glass, or the bottle. I love the idea of a 3 oz pour - it's like a tapa for boozehounds. The categories are very helpful to those of us who generally just order the second-cheapest red and call it a day: medium finish reds, light and crisp whites, etc. I ordered a 3 oz pour for the cheese course, and a full glass for following courses (the wine tab was about $15 each).

We started with a two-cheese course ($10) – I chose a blue cheese, Tim chose a sheep’s milk cheese. I liked mine better, as I love the sort of cheeses that curl your nose hairs, smack your mama, and teach you what’s what. The red wine jelly was a clever touch. I also loved the little bowl of olives, as I pretty much got them to myself (there are definite perks to dating a non-olive person).

Next up was a starter of chilled scallops over greens ($12ish?). Fabulous. Incredible. Well-balanced, not overpowering, and just about perfect. I could eat that every day for the rest of my natural existence, then be Sonoma’s scallop-loving poltergeist ho in the afterlife.

For our main courses, Tim had the pollock over asparagus ($23), with a side of roast potatoes ($5ish) and I had the hanger steak with twice-baked cheddar potato and seasonal greens ($26). The steak was the first disappointment of the evening: a bit tough even by hanger steak standards. I wish I’d disobeyed the chef’s recommendation and ordered it medium-rare, instead of medium. There was a lovely grilled crispiness to the outside, but, overall, it was a miss. Tim’s pollock was well-prepared and tasty, but nothing spectacular.

At this point, we’d downed enough food to sate a Uruguayan soccer team, so we skipped dessert.

As for the service, it’s definitely attentive. At one point, we had three waiters. There were no order mixups, and servers seemed very tuned in to timing issues – courses arrived at reasonable intervals, and our glasses didn’t go empty. However, I think the tone was a bit casual. Lots of "you guys" and popping of heads into our conversation. If you’re dropping over $100 for dinner for two, then I expect Sir and Madam and not a Jalapeno Poppers/Pieces of Flair service vibe.

I think Sonoma is definitely worth the trip, and it’s a good value for the quality of the food. But I’d go with a group of girlfriends, perhaps for a milestone birthday, rather than as a romantic dinner for two. It’s just too loud for mushiness. Or I'd take some out-of-towners who love wine. And I’d stick to cheese and charcuterie plates, starters, and small courses, and share them amongst the group.

Scorecard:
Food: 8
Ambience: 6 (a lovely room, but 3 points off for excessive noise)
Service: 7
Wine List: 10
Categories: Wow the Yokels, Dinner with Girlfriends

PS - I added some e-friends and members of the commentariat to my blogroll. One day, my blogroll will be bigger than Arjewtino's formidable list. One day.

Women Are Stupid. We Get It. Whatever.

OK, straight men of America, we get it. Sarah Jessica Parker isn’t pretty. She’s horse-faced, goat-faced, hatchet-faced, skinny-legged, flat-chested, pointy-elbowed, and all-out hideous. She screeches too much, she can’t act, she dresses like a high-dollar psychedelic freakshow, and you wouldn’t have sex with her if she wore a paper bag on her head and paid you to do it. Oh, and Matthew Broderick is totally gay.

Also, guys, we do understand that Sex and the City was the stupidest show ever. Unmarried women over 30 are pathetic ugly old maids, no matter how many fancy shoes they buy. Women's expectations went haywire, as they tried to mimic the lifestyle of cruising the clubs at 40 and buying stuff they couldn’t afford. The show is shorthand for all that’s “wrong” with the women of America.

The movie was dumb, but you sure as hell didn’t go, because you have no desire to commit cinematic castration. It’s dumb that women dressed up and went in groups. And the box-office take is a sign of the Apocalypse.

Really, dude, we get it. And nobody cares what you think. It has nothing to do with you (which may be what ticks you off so much). SATC is fun and silly and girly. And that’s why women like it. We don’t consider it a new code of feminism or a roadmap for life. If anything, we think it’s anti-feminist and too man-centric. The women of America aren’t taking things half as seriously as you are. And before you use Sex and the City as a rationale to demean women, let me point out that women are not behind the success of fantasy baseball, watching poker tournaments on TV, or the odiously unfunny Dane Cook.

So can we all please just get on with our lives?

PS – I didn’t see the movie last weekend, I totally would have if I hadn’t had visitors from out of town. I just can’t get over the idea that it’s OK to tear apart the physical appearance of a fellow human being. What did SJP ever do to deserve a whole website comparing her to various horses? I also think straight guys take that show WAY more seriously than the girls and the gays ever did. Lighten up, people.

The Demographic Wormhole

Human nature is a fabulous thing. If you want proof, take a look at some divorce statistics.


My perspective is pretty skewed when it comes to marriage. My parents are divorced. I divorced at age 29, the average age of female "first divorce" in America. Of the three people I ate dinner with Saturday, two are separated, the third is my boyfriend. (Who I am sure was quite impressed by the stat-citing, timeline expertise and legal wrangling of the Divorceketeers at the table.) Many of my high school and college friends are divorced or separated. I am the center of a bizarre demographic wormhole that sucks marriages and finances orthodontia for lawyer's daughters everywhere.



Pair the wormhole with the fact I'm a former pollster. I while away the hours researching divorce statistics on the Internet. The one that gets cited the most, with the least evidence? Half of all marriages fail. Hrm, not quite.



Forty percent of all first marriages end in divorce. Of those, half end in the first five years - so if you can make it five years, the gods of statistics will most likely let death do you part.

Second marriages have a failure rate of about 60 percent. Third marriages fail 70% of the time, and once you move into Liz Taylor territory, your chances of a successful marriage approach lottery winner/struck by lightning levels.

So, back to human nature: not only do we NOT learn from our mistakes, the harder we try, the more we screw up. And on that cheery note, commenters, toss in your favorite statistic. Or bemoan no-fault divorce, the greatest invention of the 20th century. No-fault is the sliced bread of the New America.

Artomatic: Come for the Art, Stay for the Fire-Freaking

I saw a woman set her boob on fire!

And how was your weekend?

Now that I’ve got your attention, Artomatic runs through June 15. It's art, music, film, bars...basically an all-inclusive DC freakshow. Check it out.

I went Saturday evening with Tim and two visiting college buddies (after visiting the Temperance Memorial and the Sonny Bono Park, I'm all about the oddball tours). A few impressions:

1. The Bush administration has been hell on the arts. I saw some seriously bad political paintings, depicting all sorts of Revelations-centric images of Bush and Cheney. Or sometimes Cheney was skipping along a river of blood, or Bush’s head had been superimposed on a missile.

2. And Bush has been particularly bad for music. One of the singers we checked out had rejiggered every Dylan song, ever, to protest the Bush Administration. He even used the Marine's anthem as a protest song at one point. I couldn’t tell if this guy was for real, or if it was some sort of performance art parody. The singer’s long-winded announcement that he opposed the commercialization of music and was therefore not available on iTunes did little to settle the debate.

3. The Peeps dioramas had more artistic merit than about 80% of the artists who were selling their work.

4. I love being carded!

5. The fire dancers were the best part, for the worst reasons. There is something unsettling (but horribly funny) about watching clumsy amateurs frolic with open flames. Aside from the boob fire, we saw one dancer fall on his butt (twice!), two dancers attempt to fire-freak, and one woman trip over her fiery baton. It felt sort of like a middle school dance recital, except that the dancers were all those kids who set bugs on fire with magnifying glasses.

So, uh, Artomatic. Check it out.