Some Like it Quiet

I am positively mortified to call myself a West Villager right now.

How have I not ever, not once in the three years that I’ve lived down here, never been to Film Forum? It’s blasphemous. I’m ashamed.

Perhaps all I needed, though, was a Hot kick in the butt.

As in Some Like It Hot.

I pass by the Film Forum every day on my way to work. (Yes, I walk. Stop hating, would you!)

They show obscure, independent, avant-garde films at their cinematic best. But oftentimes there are old-time movies playing - so I suppose it should not have come as a shock to see that one of my fave Monroe films was playing. It was a sign - the time had come to break my Film Forum seal.

So last night, my friend Jeffery and I went to see Curtis, Lemmon, and Monroe in the 50th anniversary special of AFI’s #1 Funniest Movie of all time.

I was in heaven. Checking for time and texts on my iPhone and merrily chomping Sour Brite Crawlers aside, I pretended it was 1959 and I was a young girl living the NYC Dream.

I imagined how shocked I would have been to see a suuuuuuuuper scantily clad Marilyn shake her money maker(s). How hard I would have laughed at Jack Lemmon in drag, swinging his souvenir Tango maracas.

I pondered how times haven’t changed in fifty years - that Daphne still wouldn’t be able to marry Osgood in 2009. No matter how hilarious the “You’re a guy. Why should a guy want to marry a guy?” “Security!” banter was.

It was also interesting to watch Marilyn in her scenes, knowing what we know of filming - how she showed up late, didn’t know her lines - and recall what was to be her sad, sad legend.

I used to be a huge Marilyn fan but seeing this movie for the dozenth or so time, I think Lemmon’s character blew any inklings of harbored Monroe favoritism out of the water. No wonder he was nominated for an Oscar!

All in all twas a lovely, rollicking, uproarious hoot of a time.Until a stupid schmuck started singing along with Marilyn in one of the final scenes.

Seriously? I’m sorry, but SERIOUSLY???? Are we in your car? Is this the radio? Are you an understudy at a Marilyn Monroe cabaret show? Are you drunk? Is this real life?

Yes, I’ll admit that sometimes I do hear things that aren’t there. I mishear. So I tried to tune out Marilyn’s fluffy, breathy voice and listen to the chick two seats down.

Nothing. Silly me, I thought.

Then there it was again - the singing. The singing along to a movie. Like we were watching Barney and Friends or some nonsense.

SO DEGRADING! SO OFFENSIVE! SO UNBELIEVABLE!

Never have I ever experienced something so audacious.

But what I was I to do? I turned my passive aggressive, bespectacled face toward the beast. But there was a gal in between us - and she was smiling at her stupid singing friend. Like, rooting her on or something.

I looked over at Jeffery and thank GOD he heard it too - confirmation. I knew I wasn’t crazy! He smirked back and we watched the scene on screen play out, trying to tune out the songbird-wannabe, while Josephine laid a kiss on Sugar.Yay rah rah Joe/sephine!
Boooooooooooooooooo stupid singing lady!

What a way to ruin the end of a perfectly lovely evening at the cinema.

If it had been 1959 I am sure no one would dare be so disrespectful, so discourteous, so brazen.

Seriously, you don’t sing along with Marilyn.

The warning at the beginning of a movie should apparently read “Please silence your cell phones…and voices.” Because, actually, Everyone Likes It QUIET.

You’re Hot Then You’re Cold

Why do buildings never seem to get the temperature right? What is so hard about having a thermostat that pays attention to the OUTDOOR temp and reflects it perfectly with an adequate INDOOR temp.
I don’t get it.

(However, if such an invention does not exist, no stealing my idea! I’ll be contacting a patents lawyer shortly...)
 
Why are we sweating it out in meetings when it’s 65 degrees out? Barbaric, I tell you! Sure, it’s fall - but last week felt like August and the indoor climate did not reflect that.
Just cause the date says it should be crisp out does NOT mean the weather gods are gonna acquiesce. In fact, they’re such little shits that they always do exactly the opposite of what we want. Rain on days we want sunny. Sugar and sunshine on days we want to be overcast. Crippling sunny-day guilt is killer man, ugh!

I’ve always found this whole disparity quite paradoxical. I mean, yes, it does make sense on a fundamental level - warm inside when it’s cold outside, cold inside when it’s warm outside. But still. The extremes are just not fair. This chick agrees:

Why, when we’re all running around in sundresses and cutoffs and skimpy tanks, does it have to be freezing inside? Freezing. I’m talking covered in goosebumps, blue fingernail beds, leg-hair-just-grew-a-centimeter, Barney-purple lips, uncontrollably shivering, cold.

Yet in the dead of winter - when the temperature is in the teens - you walk into a building and immediately wish you hadn’t donned so many layers. You start sweating like a whore in church.
I know, I get it. We, as humans, have the ability to manipulate indoor climates so it’s “comfortable” - not too hot, not too cold, but just right.

However, if the goal is just right, then why can’t anyone anywhere ever seem to GET it right?? Especially office buildings and department stores. And subways and restaurants and doctor’s offices (omg) and APARTMENTS (bigger omg).

The upside of renting in NYC is that you don’t pay for heat. However, good ole Newton got it right with all his actions and reactions babble. You see, not dealing out the dough is nice - but the flip-side is that you can’t control the heat. Once it’s on, it’s on.

And of course being on the fourth floor only adds to the sweatbox that is my apartment come late fall. I have been known to sleep with the AC on in January (OK that’s a lie - I pretty much use the AC 9 months out of 12).

Or I leave my window and door open, trying to create some sort of cross-ventilation. But usually it’s to no avail cause once that frigid air touches my skin I don’t care about bringing my body temp back to homeostasis. Being hot seems a hell of a lot better than hypothermic.

Public places, though, have no excuse to be so boiling. Why can’t offices and eateries, hospitals and schools, stores and apartment buildings just turn down the heat (orAC) a notch? Why make us all sweat it out? Pit stains and melty makeup are not attractive. In fact, they’re fairly foul.

I suppose it’s that age-old rule: We always want what we can’t have, summer in winter, winter in summer (not that I ever WANT to have to wear sweaters in the first place...ugh). But for reals, some attention should be paid to the thermostat.

Let’s make these man-made climates more hospitable for everyone. Don’t crank up the AC, don’t crank up the heat, and you won’t have cranky people on your hands!

And, best of all!, you’ll be saving energy in the meantime. Wow, I am one green inventor yo. Drinks on me! (In thirty or so years.)

Sicky = SUCKY

“I will H1N1 all OVER you!”

This was my comeback at a concert-goer last weekend. He was making fun of my ‘stache, yo! What else was a girl to do?

In reality, I should not have been outside. I should have been cozied up in my apartment reading or catching up on hours of DVR.

I’ll admit, it wasn’t the nicest threat on my behalf. But I was coughing and blowing my nose incessantly and I was just trying to have a good time and he was making fun of my funny faux mustache!

Fingers crossed I don’t Secret the Swine to myself for talking shit about it.

For now, at least, Swine free begins with me. I just have a no-good, very-bad cold. This past week has been one box of tissues after another.

Being sick sucks. Like whoa.

When you’re little, having a cold is fun. You get to stay home from school. Suck on Luden's cherry flavored cough drops (which definitely make you feel grownup and worldly and taste oddly like candy).

Your parents fawn over you, wait on you hand and foot. Whatever you feel like eating instantly materializes under Mom’s deft hands. You controlled of the remote!

Those were the days. Being sick ruled when you were a kid. But now...now being sick just plain sucks.

Missing school and missing work are eons apart. (Though I would like to acknowledge how our crazy culture is so brainwashed, that even if we are sick we still go to work. Like robots, we’re programmed: “Can. Not. Miss. Work. Can. Not. Can. NOT.”)

There’s no Mom in sight to make you chicken noodle soup (this is probably the most devastating part of being an adult - cause yeah, Trissi’s chicken noodle soup rocks.)

Every time you cough in public, people give you the death-stare. Blowing your nose suddenly becomes the most dreaded thing in the world (mine is currently rubbed raw, flaky, and perma-chapped).

You can barely sleep - what with the constant need to blow/cough, blow/cough. And when you do fall asleep, there’s the unfortunate guarantee that you will awake to piles of drool and a mouth lined in cotton balls.

Even TV is annoying! There’s no Duck Tales to watch with glee, only copious amounts of Top Chef, Project Runway, The Office, Grey’s Anatomy, Greek - I’m going to stop there before I really start embarrassing myself - to catch up on.

You know there is a problem when television watching isn’t enjoyable. Seriously, it felt like a sick-day chore!

Shame on me for thinking myself invincible. For believing that, while everyone around me was getting sick, I would be miraculously bypassed.

But come on. I pop Vitamin C daily. I am a perpetual hand-washer/green tea-drinker. I go to bed at a reasonable hour. I disinfect my desk at work.

Hell, my mother gives me a bottle of Purrell every time she sees me. (And boxes of tissues which is kinda funny and ironic and foreshadow-y.) I’m talking ridiculous amounts. I have collections of them.
Alas, I guess I just have to suck it up (or blow it out, whichever). Cause à la Heidi: In this germ-ridden world, one week you’re sick, and the next week, you’re not.

The Stress of Being a Laundress

All I can say is that my future husband better be ready to do some laundry. I’m talking 50/50. And when my future kiddies are old enough, they’ll be doing their own. Fo sho.

I give my mother serious, serious props for being such a laundry hound. She is on top of that shit like no one else I’ve ever met. The second I walk through the door, she’s pulling out my dirty clothes, popping them in the washing machine.

(Which begs the question - how old do we have to be before our mom’s stop doing our laundry? I know I am ridiculously lucky - Trissi is the exception, not the rule. But really? Hell no will I be hand-laundering my 26 year old’s fine washables. Hell no.)

Regardless, 95% of the time I am, unfortunately, responsible for washing my own things. After all, I am a “grownup”. Wamp wamp.

There are fewer things in life more aggravating than doing laundry. Especially when communal machines involved. (People - be punctual when switching your loads or picking them up. Never know what someone might do to your newly “clean” clothes.)

I have been über lucky in NYC - both apartments I’ve occupied have had laundry on-site (believe it or not, that’s fairly rare). And even though I don’t have to lug my dirty clothes and linens a few blocks to the laundromat, hauling them up and down four flights of stairs blows.

Why can’t clothes, like diapers, be disposable? I suppose that would be quite wasteful. But do we not waste water with our incessant washing?

Dirty garments are so unbelievably inconvenient. You have to stow them somewhere. And when you live in a rabbit hutch, that somewhere is tricky to pick (after much contemplation, I hung a laundry bag on my bathroom door).

Then there’s the detergent, the fabric softener, the bleach, the dryer sheets, the stain sticks. It’s all positively shelf-consuming!

Ugh, and the quarters - the quarters. Who knew those little 25-cent George Washington’s would ever be considered gems - GEMS! Perfectly round chunks of glistening gold. Seriously, gold. No quarters, no clean clothes!

Laundry is one hell of a time-consuming commitment. And, in my case, one that is also anxiety-inducing (surprise, surprise). If I make up my mind to do a few loads, it’s a race against the clock.

I dash around my apartment like a madwoman, grabbing towels and stray socks and dirty-clean jeans. Inevitably I end up forgetting a dishtowel or a dress I wanted to wash. So annoying.

Then I run down the stairs, my twenty pound Santa sack of soiled things pulling me onward to the laundry room.
Ideally I do two or three loads at a time. Which means I occupy half to ¾ of the machines. Does this make me feel guilty? Of course not. Sure, there was that one instance where a magnanimous monsieur offered up two washers to me, saying it was only “Fair” - what a nice dummy. (He was foreign.) Would I do that? Absolutely not.

There are just so many horrendific things when it comes to the laundry routine. The separating of clothes into darks and lights (or, in some really awful circumstances, the lack thereof), towels and sheets, cold wash, warm wash, hot wash, permanent press, gentle cycle.

And those are just the old school machines I’m talking about - these new age spaceship washers and dryers are nuts. FAR too many options for anyone’s own good.
Then there’s the weeding out of clothes that can be machine-dried from those that need to be hung on a rack. And let me tell you, my drying rack don’t fit too well in my hutch. Sometimes if I have company, that shit’s gotta go in the bathtub (and no, not so it’s more aesthetically pleasing - because otherwise there wouldn’t be room to move).

Omg and the folding! Unfortunately an atrociously crippling case of obsessive compulsive disorder consumes me when it comes to folding.

Must. Be. Perfect. Or. Else.

The only pro of doing laundry is that first night between those clean, crisp, scrumptious smelling sheets.
I’ll leave you with a parting piece of advisory etiquette: Empty that lint tray. Or else.