Dating fail

Just like with flirting, the dating scene is something I know very little about. Typical outings seem like interviews, but with more awkwardness and (hopefully) sexual tension. I normally don’t date total strangers, but when a guy helped with a car-starting situation and asked me out to lunch, I couldn’t say no. Trying to eat noodles while fielding a slew of hard questions turned out to be less pleasant than this sweet pea makes it look:

Ok, so he didn’t ask that last one, but he should have. Even though I suspected he might be a republican, I agreed to a second date (what? he had eye fat). I don’t know what made me do it (lack of a soul, probably), but after seeing side-by-side toilets in the women’s restroom, I told him we needed to take a picture in there. It was just too good to pass up. We did two takes and on the second one, I decided we should pull our pants down. You know, for authenticity. I have no idea what he must’ve been thinking… “By George, this bitch is weird” or “She’s gonna jump my bones!” Whatever it was, he didn’t pull down his red undies.

Authenticity fail. I didn’t intend for that antic to be a test, but it turned out to be one. I feel bad for the guy, he was a pretty good sport but I’m just too strange for his innocent soul. No second beer, no third date.

Ummm… can I listen too?

Just because the bowels of the NYC subway were my extended living room this winter, I chose it as the setting of another social experiment. Everywhere I looked, passengers with earphones were tuned into their own soundtrack and tuned out of the shared space. I thought it’d be interesting to tap into these sound bubbles, so I bought a headphone splitter and started asking strangers if I could plug into their mp3 thingies to share their music. For a shy gal like me, it sometimes took a while to build up the courage, my heart racing till I could muster a tap on the shoulder. I did this about a couple of dozen times… TOTAL SUCCESS since every single person said YES! Here are the most interesting findings:
1. Everyone chose new songs for me. They’d say things like “Hope you like Jay-Z” and “You like Billy Joel?” They all wanted to curate our shared soundtrack, leading me to conclude that humans are inherently good and want to please each other.
2. Most people enjoy their music at ear-bleeding levels.
3. Most of the black people happened to be listening to songs that featured the N-word. One guy actually turned to me and, with an apologetic face, mouthed “sorry.” What? You’re sorry? I’m sorry? I’m confused.
4. Foreign people changed their selections to English after one song max.
5. No one introduced themselves. Not sure what to glean from that.
Overall, it was a pleasant experience that always ended with full-blown or shakily-stifled smiles. My favorite moments were turning to sparkly-eyed, knit-hat stranger and whispering ‘that was nice’ at the end of this song:

Calling all dreamers!

Dennis on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia shared his thoughts on others’ dreams: “I hate listening to people’s dreams. It’s like flipping through a stack of photographs. If I’m not in any of them and nobody is having sex, I just don’t care.” I usually agree with this notion, but sometimes people have great dreams that they can describe vividly. I rarely remember mine, but four months ago I couldn’t get one out of my head, so I called my photographer friend to help reenact it. With loads of toast and old salami, we captured the image that’d surfaced from the depths of my pea brain:

It’s pretty simple and totally bizarre: I’m watching myself eat a sandwich held together by metal bangles, while the bangles on my arms are made of bread. I don’t know what this nonsense means, but it was neat bringing it to reality. New obsession: capturing your REM-rants in the name of fun with cameras and the subconscious. Now, I need someone to bring me one of these from the coast; the bigger and fresher, the better.

Remember your dreams!

Pi-pi-pitter patter

Those middle school choose-your-own-adventure books gave the genre a bad rep. Julio Cortázar’s novel, Rayuela, is pretty amazing if you have the patience for nearly 600 pages of stream of consciousness fiction. Last night, my mind and heart nearly exploded at Sleep No More, an interactive performance of Macbeth set in the historic McKittrick Hotel. My pulse was already heightened at the coat check and my sis and I gripped each other for the first 5 minutes. After a couple of hours of wandering around taxidermy-filled rooms following actors from floor to floor, I stumbled upon an intense strobe-lit dance scene that will likely haunt my dreams forever. When a drop of fake blood splattered onto my hand from the naked goat-headed man, I realized that this was the most phenomenal piece of live entertainment I’ve seen.

Luckily, that damned spot came off easily. If this is the direction theater’s going in, I might need a heart transplant. Bloody brilliant!

The future isn’t now, it’s later

I don’t have an iPhone and while it may be acceptable in Portland, it’s an object of astonishment in Gotham City. When I take out my phone, people exclaim “what is that?” as if I’d just donned a monocle. I’m in the process of deciding whether I should join the technological present (which, as a friend pointed out, I mistakenly refer to as the future).
I had dinner with a blind man last night and he was talking to his iPhone. Talking TO the phone, not VIA the phone! Robot lady didn’t have the answer to his question and when he told her she was dumb, she replied with “I respect you.” Whaaaa!?! I don’t want goddamn r-e-s-p-e-c-t from technology, I want HELP!
Later in the evening, I sat at a bar, flanked by my sister who wields a Blackberry and a wild-eyed boy with his iPhone. I proposed a game: let’s compare your last two phone photos. The first juxtaposition was quite nice: his, an airplane sunrise and my sister’s, a Brooklyn building-rise I captured.

Fun game! We played again with “five photos back” and that was also interesting. I don’t remember who said it, but “last X-rated photo” was the third category. The result went something like this:

We should have just ended the game with that winning hand, but ”No, no, no!” sister & I said. “Your photo isn’t risqué at all, we have a bare ass here!” Big mistake. He said, “Well, the last thing I have is a video of a cum shot on a girl’s ass. She wanted me to film it.” Oh.my.god.the.horror! Game over! I can’t tell if we won or lost, which is a telltale sign of technology overload. The iPhone resistance continues…until the future.

Fat is phat

My sister likes to wear pants that fit like this:

Snug and sexy. I’d been wearing her expensive size 27 skinny jeans for a while and one day, the button broke. It made her cry and that’s when I knew that it was time to get my reverse anorexia under control.
These examples illustrate my distorted self image:
1. When shopping, I usually go to the size 4ish section and hold things up thinking, “Yeah, this is my size!” My sister looks at me and says, “Bitch, keep moving down the rack to the size 10!”
2. If I walk toward glass doors and see my reflection, I’m usually pleased. Only when I’m walking with someone who I’d previously thought to be my size do I realize that I’m twice the width. Not trick mirrors, Cristina, they’re not trick mirrors.
3. I often try on size small clothes and have that laughable moment in the dressing room when I can’t pull the shit up past my thighs. I never learn this lesson, keep doing it and doing it.
4. I eat the portions of 1.5 adults because things taste too good.
The symptoms are unmistakable: full-blown reverse anorexia.

I lack the self control and also the control top tights that most reasonable women have. Reverse anorexia is good for the self-esteem, but bad for my sister’s ‘cigarette-fit’ jeans and my arteries. The solution isn’t a diet or an attitude-shift, but rather getting into some ‘cigar-fit’ jeans, sinking into a couch with Christmas leftovers. I have reverse anorexia and accept the fact that I’d rather be the dude on the right than the one on the left:

The most beautiful thing

On the A train home from the airport at 5:30am I didn’t expect to see this most beautiful thing. A sequoia of a man with graying, shoulder-length dreadlocks sat across from me for half an hour. He was either going to or coming from a construction job that covered his clothes in white plaster, but his hands were spotless. After looking around really attentively for a while, he took out half of a grapefruit that’d been carefully peeled to the white pith. With more gusto than I’ve ever seen anyone eat anything, the man went to town on that juicy grapefruit like he was eating pussy.
It reminded me of this album cover, but was infinitely better:

I went out and bought grapefruit the next day. Does that make me gay?

No rocks at the rock show

I give up. No more trying to hide from students in public, it’s futile. I was at a show last night, waiting for the apathetic bartender to make eye contact when I hear, “¡hooolaa, profesora Cristiiina!” Yes, yes, ¿Qué tal? to the student about to wave her hand off her wrist. Damn, they spot me fast! I headed up to a balcony area to watch Mimicking Birds and Typhoon from this nice vantage point:

This is why I can’t have nice things: I set my beer on the wooden ledge, Typhoon’s rockness was so raucous that the beer shimmied its way to the edge and ermmm… dived in all of its 12oz glory into the poor drummer below. I stood there, not touching anything, mortified as the fella rightly looked up with a stink-eye. After he finished the song with his beery-bells, he said, “Why don’t you throw down a towel next time?!” Arghhh, not being able to explain to him that sound waves were to blame, I unraveled my scarf and lowered it down. By now, the whole crowd was watching, judging with their beady eyes. A kind soul brought a towel and
drummer-boy threw the scarf back up to girl-who-shouldn’t-be-taken-out.
A-puh-puh-puh-puh-plause. The show went on, sticky drum and all.

My friends kept offering me sips of their beers, but all I wanted was a huge rock to crawl under. At the end, I passed along my apologies to the nice ladies at the merch table and paid my dues. This album is fantastic, listen to it and understand how it could make a glass of beer want to crowd surf.

Maxx Dude

I loved how in 101 Dalmatians all the owners resembled their pets.
Like soul mates, they were matching pairs.

One morning I awoke with this realization: my pet and I don’t fit the Disney formula. I tried to imagine a human version of my 9 kilo, one-eyed, 26-toed Maxx. The obvious next step was to commission a portrait from Mike Schultz. Here are actual excerpts from email correspondence as I envision the humanoid Maxx:
“a bourgeois middle-aged man… the kind that has longish fingernails and a pinkie ring or something. A glass eye, an eye-patch perhaps… probably flaming gay, dresses in ill-fitting velvet, has some strange low-energy hobby. Like a washed-out yoga instructor, still has the flexibility but lives off of the earnings from an accident so doesn’t have to work anymore. I dunno… he probably does voice dubbing for german movies to make some extra dough. A lot of sedentary computer work and recording his lazy sultry voice over the movies.” The artist’s rendition is a brilliant Dude-esque one featuring a mullet; the other details worked themselves out organically:

Just the right amount of creepy and chill. I suppose I’m glad that there isn’t an owner-pet resemblance here, because this look of desperation for white russians and a body rub is pathetic (as is his girth):

I spent most of my time occupying various administration buildings…smoking a lot of thai stick… breaking into the ROTC… and bowling. Spot on.

IncogNOTo (pun?)

Portland on Friday night: watch an amateur porn film festival in a theater with 300 people. Only one problem: I have hundreds of former/current students. The city is teeming with them: walking around, at concerts, at the coffee shop. Before the fest, friends and I discussed the possibility of a student being there and maybe even IN a film. Gawd! Or what if they see ME in attendance? Oh looooord! To decrease my recognizability, I hid my hair in a bun. The emcee, sex columnist Dan Savage, introduced the films and asked that we check under our seats for a button; one lucky person would go on stage to receive a gift from the neighborhood sex shop. Button! under! my! seat! Jesus Christ Almighty, incognito attempt thwarted! I ran to the stage, curtsied graciously and tried to make it quick but he wouldn’t give me the bag till I promised I’d use the contents for the filming of an entry in next year’s festival. Yes, yes, just hand it to me so I can scurry back to my seat! Fingers crossed that all of my students were at the library practicing the subjunctive.
Yet another reason to leave the house with a burlap sack on my head.

With pity in his heart and talent on his hands, a good friend imagined that the incident would have gone a little something like this:

Time to invest in some of this scratchy but fashionable head-wear.