My last post gave me certain qualms. Primarily because I know that my dad (obviously) reads this site, as do others in my family, and certain of my parents’ friends—the cool ones, of course (hey guys!).
Now, we all know that I’m an adult (regardless of whether I cashed that check from M&D last week for $3,000), and adults do the things that adults do. It wouldn’t be out of line for a single 33-year-old to, say, take a guy home with her and spend an evening on her couch with him listening to the Beatles’ White Album, or perhaps to go home with a different guy (on a different night, okay?) to peruse his Pet Rock collection. No one would be shocked.
Well, let’s take that one particular a-hole and multiply him by oh, let’s say, 3 million. Nearly three million single men in New York between the ages of 35 and 54. (Not that I’d date the upwards range on that, but whatever, it’s an average, and you can estimate the twentysomethings for yourself.)
photo credit: corypina
Every once in a while some jackass comes along who really deserves a firing. I nominate Officer Justin Barrett, 36, who seems to be trapped in a racist, misogynistic time warp.
If you haven’t yet heard, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested last week at his home by Cambridge police after he tried to force open his locked front door. (He had just returned from China and reportedly had trouble opening the front door with his key. YUD does that all the time, and she’s not even jet-lagged.) Gates was booked for disorderly conduct after “exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior,” according to a police report.
Perhaps even more shocking than the initial arrest, which, giving the benefit of every doubt seems to have been baseless, ridiculous, and at the very least extreme, is Barrett’s follow-up: a mass e-mail in which he referred to Gates as “banana-eating” and a “bumbling jungle monkey.”
A lot of people love that book, including a former boss of mine who has a special place in the hearts of my family for the day in which he came into the office with a large bag of baby carrots, announced that he (a pompous, pudgy Brit who was always going on about his Extraordinary Ability visa) was “instituting a diet,” and then scoffed down the entire bag in about three minutes flat.
This is old, but certainly still applicable, perhaps more now than ever. In these trying times Hollywood is facing the same struggles as you and me: surviving on Ramen and dishwater, borrowing money from their parents, taking books back to the Strand, reaching out to certain ex-boyfriends who might happen to owe them $900.
Derek Ivie, the legend behind TGMTU, shows YUD Fashion Director Lindsey Hunter Lopez the upside of dressing down (in a down market) at a midtown lunch near his former place of employment. While the suits strut the street in hot, wooly cocoons, Derek breezes around NYC looking casual cool.
LHL: Derek, what is the key to your unemployment wardrobe?
DI: Comfortable underwear. I spend most of my day rolling around in bed thinking about what I am going to do with my life. I don’t want anything too tight, otherwise things will get hurt in the rolling process. Cotton boxer briefs from the GAP really seem to fit the bill for me.
photo credit: cazpoo
I’ve been dreading my Dreamweaver class all week, for a number of reasons. One is that the teacher, who went so crazy fast last week that people had to keep stopping her to ask for help (during which another student would lose his or her place, and the confusion would continue domino-style) also had the gall to tell me that I looked like someone “who likes pink.”
I mean, I do like pink, but somehow that didn’t seem like a compliment. Especially as she was dressed in beige and black with a very severe haircut that I have a feeling she might “live and die by.” (I, you can imagine, do not feel the same way about my own mane.)
In addition, there was homework in that class, and the class itself was 4 hours long, and, in fact, was more appropriate to someone who wanted to design her own website or websites for a current or future employer using Dreamweaver than someone like YUD, who merely wants to figure out how to make text wrap around certain pictures and get a little better, maybe, at HTML or something that may help her get another writerly job, if and when she chooses to do so.
A friend of mine recently brought this to my attention, and I think it may be the perfect solution for what to do when all the magazine jobs are gone:
Want a job you can really relish? Do you have an appetite for adventure, a friendly personality, and boundless enthusiasm? Do you want to become a goodwill ambassador for Oscar Mayer, helping to organize promotions and even pitch TV, radio, and print media? If the answer is “Yes”, you could qualify to be an official Oscar Mayer Hotdogger. Read on for all the juicy details.
Would she smell as sweet? I suppose that would depend on when she’d bathed, and how much Wild Turkey she’d consumed the night before.
But it’s an interesting question. There are a lot of words out there for the jobless, and the way we got there. Unemployed, fired, laid-off, “between work,” even freelance and semi-employed. All have a different cast; a different set of expectations and perhaps stigmas. And how freakingly meta is it when your job becomes “Being Your Unemployed Daughter”? Dude.
On Friday, C. asked me if this was my new favorite word. Apparently, at least on that day, I was saying it as much as she said “L.B.,” which is most definitely her favorite, if not word, pairing of initials.
Yes, C., it is. Followed closely by “passel,” “crankinsence,” and “gruner veltliner.” And after that, “lobster roll.”
photo credit: kumquatdesign
