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Spitz, Don’t Swallow

For the past couple of days, I have felt the beginning of an uncertain malady in my throat.  My throat is not exactly sore, per se, just consistently dry, despite its rather lugubrious production of mucous.  Beyond that, I cannot seem to get my arse out of bed in the morning for anything (or, well, certainly not for my hungry cat or all-too-easy to quiet cell phone alarm clock).  I would chalk it up to mere allergies (though I rarely have them) coupled with the fact that (1) I’m having a bad reaction to the daylight savings time switch (I’ll vote for whichever President campaigns to eliminate that woefully idiotic institution) and (2) I’m having significant difficult sleeping (I am evidently doing the four-step grief process in reverse — I already hit up “depression,” which was wonderful for getting some shut-eye; now that I’m on “anger,” not so much), except for the fact that I have been exposed to (a) pneumonia; (b) stomach flu; (c) respiratory flu; and (d) the common cold within the past week or so.  My friends are worse than zombies, who might only shuffle slowly toward me in hopes of getting some corpus callosum niblets (to which I say, if you can bit through my hard noggin’, feel free to eat my fleshly bits); my friends appear to be happy hosts to a legion of easily-transportable and fast-moving bacteria and viruses.  I officially proclaim March, “Pick Your Friends on the Basis of Their Immune Systems” Month (which is certainly no sillier than some of March’s other celebratory offerings — March is both Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month and Play the Recorder Month, and host to such celebratory days as If Pets Had Thumbs Day on March 3 and the Birthday of Girl Scouting on March 15).  Indeed, the Ides of March are on March 16, which may be when my friends’ collective maladies might run amok and assassinate me.  Hmm…I wonder when National Paranoia Month is?

In other news, India is pioneering the art of making babies for bucks (aka surrogate motherhood).  Evidently, for approximately $25,000 to $30,000, gay couples (or presumably, non-gay couples, but since this was in the New York Times, a gay couple was the main focus) can contribute a bit ‘o sperm and have one Indian woman donate an egg, while another Indian woman literally acts as a baby-making machine.  I must admit that I was a bit shocked (a) that this was completely legal and (b) that it wasn’t much more expensive than adoption these days (which I’m told can run $15,000 easily).  Of the $25,000 to $30,000, the surrogate mother makes about $7,500, which is 9 or 10 times the average YEARLY income for some women in India.  I guess I find this wrong for the same reason that I find “giving” plasma and other organs in exchange for money is wrong — there are just some things in life that should be free (ahem, such as sexual intercourse, Governor Spitzer!).  On the other hand, this would solve my dilemma — how to have children without necessarily incubating the alien myself for nine, nutrition- and body shape-sucking months nor tussling with government administrators over my right to adopt children given my “lifestyle.”  There is definitely a market for this service; the only question is whether there should be.

On a last note, I would just like to say that I am waiting for the day when at least one political wife will refuse to stand by her man when he makes public speeches regarding his adultery, whether with prostitutes (Governor Spitzer), gay men (Governor McGreevey), or presidential interns (President Clinton).  I long for the day when one of these political women will turn around and bitch-slap the jackass, or better yet, serve him with divorce papers at the press conference.  At least the process server will know where he will be.

The Game of Life

Did you ever wake up one morning and just realize that you were bad at life?  Incomparably, immeasurably bad.  It’s funny, because when I was a kid, I always invariably won at the Game of Life — I managed, with a few rolls of the wheel ‘o life to graduate college, climb the corporate ladder, find a wife and 2.5 kids, and wind up in the mansion before any of my competitors.  Yet, in real life, I find myself amongst the minority of my friends, most of whom are married, have children, own a house, and seem to have obtained a general level of happiness, while I am a single renter who can’t get her shit together enough on most days to clean her cat’s litter box, let alone be responsible for raising a baby or maintaining a healthy relationship.  Somehow, my friends have managed to figure out something I haven’t…how to play the game of life when it doesn’t come with pre-assorted, multi-colored spaces and an instruction manual.

Granted, I’m not exactly at the beginning of the board — I got the college degree and then some, and I’ve climbed the corporate ladder high enough that I don’t save up for months to afford Brooks Brothers non-iron shirts (which, in all honesty, are money savers compared to dry cleaning bills), shiny black cars, and hotel rooms at the Wynn Vegas.  Yet, the Game of Life never told me exactly how not fun being successful can be.  Not having to worry constantly that I may have overdrawn my bank account (a constant game in college, when I can recall making do with peanut butter and Ramen during finals time when the financial aid started getting thin – no wonder I gained the freshman 15 and then some) is a bonus, but my essential position in life is as a small cog in a giant legal wheel, which moves forward slowly, moving money from bank account to bank account ad infinitum.  There’s nothing particular special about what I do — a hundred different lawyers could do it and many of them could probably do it better or quicker or in high heels.  Sure, a few hours of each year, I get to do something that really matters in life — a pro bono case that argues on behalf of the constitution or attempts to save a man’s life.  These are the high points, and they almost make it all worth while.  Except for the fact that every hour I spend on one of these cases is an hour I worry about not billing to a client willing to pay my employer for my work, lest I not make my billable hour requirement two years in a row.  My life has become a series of counting to eight every day…eight units of my waking life that require either (a) a singular focus, which I’ve never had (I’ve always been the kind of gal thinking 10 different things in her head at once) or (b) excellence at time management, which I also don’t have (I would pretty much make the worst personal assistant ever).  This probably explains why I’m at work on a Sunday night at 8:30pm not doing work.  The Game of Life never had a red-colored space for “Yuppie Life Crisis.”

Despite all the above, there was someone in my life, up until recently, who kind of colored all the above a wonderful shade of “content and happy,” but in the end, I’ve never really gotten the hang of getting anyone I ever dated to want to stick around very long.  Certainly not long enough to make it to the 2.5 kids and the mansion.  Maybe they’re playing on a completely different game board with a different end game, or maybe they just don’t like the idea of me hanging on too tightly when they’d like to let go.  Either way, I seem to always end up playing the same 10-15 game steps over and over again and the result never seems to differ.  Perhaps the Game of Life should have a path for “Not Marriage Material and Should Consider a Life of Polyamorous Lesbian Debauchery.”  However, not only do I think that would get Milton Bradley slapped with a lawsuit from the Christian Right, but it’s never been a particularly attractive or viable life path for me.  I’ve always been more enamored of the idea of sleeping with one person the rest of my life than someone new every year.  I guess you could say that I’m an old-fashioned romantic that way.  Too bad I wasn’t born when “Leave it To Beaver” was popular.  My romantic sensibilities are rather useless to me in the day and age of “Tila Tequila” and “The L Word.” 

In the Game of Life, you achieved happiness by being the first little widget to enter the mansion, thereby earning the right to gloat over your fellow life competitors (until they beat you at Sorry or Chutes and Ladders or Candyland or some such).  In real life, I kind of feel like the caboose that got accidentally detached from the back of a train — I don’t have the foggiest fucking clue how to achieve lasting happiness…I just keep on the track hoping that one day I’ll connect to something that sticks.

The Gustatory Contrarian

I feel that I must stand up for all that is holy and good in this world by being one of the evidently few people in this country to say how perfectly AWFUL Chef Michel Richard’s new restaurant, Central Michel Richard, is.  The food, much like the name, is perfectly unimaginative French — buttered into such a state of oblivion that all sense of flavor is lost.  I have been to Central twice.  The first time, I ordered a dish that I believed could only be a win-win proposition for me and the restaurant — they got $29 of my money for lunch and I got a lobster burger.  What could be better than a big pile ‘o lobster between some buns ? 

As I would shortly learn when my food arrived, there were plenty more fetching options in life (including a date with a hippie girl who hadn’t washed in two weeks).  The lobster was relatively tasteless, except for the butter than they obviously slathered the lobster, bun, and pretty much everything else on the plate with.  Chef Richard should have named the item, Butter Burger with a Side of Flavorless Lard.  I didn’t finish my burger and looked longingly at my lunch companion’s salad, which presumably, escaped death by butter.  And let’s not forget to mention the perfectly inattentive staff.  I realize the place is French, but that does not mean that I want a side of attitude and lethargy with my meal, especially a place that caters to politicos and lawyers (people who generally have time-restricted schedules) at lunch.  Evidently, a side of “hurry the fuck up” is a special, non-menu item.

Despite my first impressions of the place, I dared to visit again after reading many stellar reviews of Central, thinking that perhaps my lobster burger disaster had been a deviation, rather than the norm.  Perhaps my lobster patty had been accidentally thrown into a vat of melted butter when the sous chef tripped over Ratatouille in the kitchen, but they served it to me anyway because it was the last lobster they had and didn’t want to disappoint me?  (Obviously, I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt.)  This time, I brought my chef-in-training friend with me for a second opinion and I ordered a plain jane burger — something that even a truck stop restaurant couldn’t fuck up.

Evidently, I should have found a truck stop.  Central’s burger, at a whopping $16, was thoroughly underwhelming.  The meat did not taste distinguishable from $2 buck chuck that I could have purchased in a grocery store (again, perhaps the overpowering presence of butter on the plate drowned out all the food’s natural good taste), and once again, the service was snooty and non-existent (and this time, we were one of two seated tables, so it’s not like the server was busy; rather, the server, much like my food, simply sucked).  I will say that my friend’s Fish and Chips were pretty darn good.  The breading on the fish was light and airy, with a nice, delicate crunch.  (So, if you MUST go to Central to see and be seen, I recommend the Fish and Chips.)

Despite the tastiness of her own mean, my friend’s opinion was pretty much the same as mine — if you can’t cook a burger, then you pretty much suck, Central Michel Richard. 

So, if you enjoy the idea of tasting two sticks of butter with your meal and having service that seems to be moving at the pace of a dead minnow underwater, I recommend Central Michel Richard.

I Heart 2005 Argyle Brut Rose

I’m a bit bitter this Valentine’s Day, but for all of you lovebirds who still believe in love and all that jazz, I highly recommend Argyle Winery’s 2005 Brut Rose to celebrate the day.  A pleasingly pink-hued concoction, this sparkling wine is clean, crisp, and has an undercurrent of both straberry and vanilla.  Impress your sweetie by offering the champagne as an apertif with sliced strawberries around the rim, or make it your dessert wine and pair it with a strawberry shortcake, vanilla and caramel-based ice cream, or a light chocolate-strawberry concoction. 

Tasting Note:  As the sparkling wine is pink and bubbly, this Valentine’s Day ruse is likely to only loosen the zippers of the female sex.  As delectable as this champagne is, it’s hard to get guys to admit that they dig pink bubbles, even if you catch them in the middle of lathering themselves up with a pink washcloth in the middle of a Sesame Street bubble bath.  If you’re looking to appeal to the more masculine side of life this V-Day, I’d recommend pairing a glass of Glen Garioche 15-year single malt scotch with a chocolate-caramel dessert.  Yum yum.

The Secret Lives of Shoes

So, those who know me understand that I am not the world’s most tidy person.  My parents often referred to my room as a “dungeon with hidden trap doors underneath all the clothes” until I reached the age of 12, at which point, they realized that no amount of verbal cajoling and  weekly stipend could motivate me to actually clean my room.  Not much has changed in the 18 years since, other than I now pay a pretty penny for the floor upon which my clothes and shoes rest.

At my office, however, I don’t generally throw clothes willy-nilly around (papers, pens, highlighted, and curse words, yes; clothes, no).  I do, however, have a pile of work shoes in the corner, wedged between the end of my desk unit and the air conditioning/heating unit.  As I walk to work, I often opt for comfort over couture, pairing my preppy barrister slacks with athletic shoes until I get to my office, whereupon I slip into a pair from my shoe pile.  The other day, I happened to look at my shoe pile and notice a shoe that I had not previously seen…a black sandal pump that looked like something that I would actually buy, but did not think that I actually had.  I look at it quizzically for a few minutes, because it kind of looked like a heel that I used to have (assuming that the sparklies on my front of old shoe had fallen off, and well, that I hadn’t thrown out those old shoes).  I then pick it up and match it against my foot and figured out that it was at least two sizes too small for my foot.  I searched in vain for the interloping shoe’s soul-mate, but alas, there was just the single, lonely shoe that had somehow wandered into my shoe pile from unknown origins.  I have only one thing to say — “What the fuck?”

Even possibly more disturbing, I explained the appearance of a random Naturalizer shoe in my shoe pile to the fashionable, blond co-worker who sits next door to me, and her response was, “Oh, could it be mine?  I have lots of shoes.”  She did not seem particularly disturbed that a SINGLE, RANDOM AS ALL FUCK shoe ended up residing in my office, only that one of her shoes had perhaps gotten waylaid.  Evidently, if you are willing to pay a few hundred dollars for a pair of shoes, they come with little shoe-residing grasshoppers who have high heel drag races in the middle of the night while you’re sleeping.  C’mon!

The Secret Link Between Female Chest Hair and Vegas

Why is it exactly that I have 362 messages in my Gmail Spam folder, a good third of which promise to enhance my lackluster manhood?  Are small penises really that big of an epidemic, that I need 20 e-mail messages a day reminding me to pump, shoot, massage, and orally imbibe a variety of penis-enlarging concoctions?  And how do I break it to my spam stalkers that their various snake oil creams and pills will have little effect on me, a member of the Va-J-J crowd?  I might get hair on my nipples, but that would be about it.  I have yet to see spam addressing the underserved population of those who relish female chest hair (“Amaze the Girls with Your Bountiful Chest Bush!” perhaps, or “Nipple Hair Really Does Matter!  Get Short and Curlies Everywhere Will Nipple-Gro!”). 

But I digress…the point of this post is Vegas, not my penile-enhancement-friendly spam.  You know the adage, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas…well, I think that’s bunk.  I mean, my money already stayed in Vegas, so I feel that I can share the rest of it here.  This obviously means that I stayed sober enough the entire trip to actually remember the details.  Some of you will view this as proof that I did not truly enjoy Vegas, but I beg to differ.  Although, if the alcohol could selectively erase my memories of Vegas-ostitutes (sprinkled along the strip, or found en masse in the nightclub Tao in the Venetian, a common species in Nevada noted for its lack of bra support and covering, insufficient leg cover, curious orange coloring, and odd four-inch heel shuffle), the Treasure Island Siren show (aka a bunch of lip-synching Vegas-ostitutes using their curiously orange-colored goods to engage in battle with a bunch of skeevy-looking Vegas himbos dressed in pirate drag in a spectacle that seems designed to set the women’s movement back to the days of Christopher Columbus), and the moment when I went all-in at a poker tournament at Caesar’s with a full house and LOST!  (Insert much Yosemite Sam-like cursing here), then I would say, bring on the blackberry mojitos and bloody marys!

Now that we’ve addressed some of the trip’s low points, let’s get to the goods.  First, T. Rex and I stayed at the Wynn, and I have to say that it fucking rocked (indeed, our mode of transportation to the Wynn was decidedly Vegas-like — we had a rather corpulent cab driver attempt to ingratiate himself to us by offering to take us to male strip clubs for free, or even better, to drive a private male dancer named “Jordan” to our hotel room in 20 minutes or less).  Perhaps I’ve been living on the East Coast too long and have suffered the evils of New York hotel rooms (aka a full-sized bed precariously perched between two brick walls with an afterthought of a bathroom for $300+ a night), but the Wynn did not seem like a bad deal at all for the price we paid.  The room was huge, had floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto the strip, and had a separate bathtub and shower, both big enough to fit me plus a sumo wrestler (alas, one of the few things I did not see in Vegas).  Better yet, the Wynn prohibited smoking and strollers in almost all areas of the hotel, which meant that my lungs and my shins were safe!  T. Rex and I hit the Wynn’s buffet on Sunday morning, and engaged in the time-honored sin of gluttony.  We paid roughly $35 a piece, but at morning’s end, she had managed to snarf down four plates of food along with constantly refilled mimosas and ice tea, and I came in second with three plates of food, ½ of a candy apple, and a fair number of mimosas, myself.  Needless to say, we spent most of the rest of Sunday laying flat on the bed in our hotel room, processing our gluttonous repast while watching football-themed movies on TNT.  (And here is one of the many moments in which I knew that I was beyond old — the scene where Ali Larter attempts to seduce James van der Beek in her whipped cream bikini came on while we were watching “Varsity Blues,” and all I could think is, “Eww…she looks so young, go put some clothes on!”  Oh, middle age, here I come!)  Alas, we never did invite “Jordan” over.  Funny that.

The best food we tried in Vegas was “Alex,”an elegant restaurant in the Wynn that had a delightful, well-traveled sommelier, and scrumptious food.  T. Rex and I parted ways from the birthday girl (my home slice, DC) and her girl gang for the night (alas, they headed out to Toby Keith’s restaurant in Harrah’s…yeah, not so unhappy that I missed that excursion).  Décor-wise, Alex was probably the fanciest restaurant I’ve been to (yes, it’s even more fancily-decorated than “French Laundry;” after all, there were freakin’ silk roses sewn onto the drapes).  The wine list was, however, eminently accessible, with bottles from pretty much everywhere in the world and reasonably-priced ones to boot.  And the food?  Well, it was spot-on.  Not as good as French Laundry, but on par with Le Bernardin in New York (though I prefer Alex’s wine list).  You could choose between a 3-course tasting menu and a 7-course tasting menu; given our buffet gluttony earlier in the day, we opted for the 3-course tasting menu, which was quite divine.  I chose a butternut squash risotto, roasted wild turbot (which is evidently pronounced turb-o, not turb-ot, silly me), and a selection of cheeses, all of which was paired with a delightful syrah from Santa Barbara, California.  T. Rex went with a butter-poached lobster (served with actual black truffles, which p.s. by the way, taste kind of like earthy rubber), venison chop with a pomegranate sauce (if Bambi’s mom tasted this good, I can’t really blame the hunter), and the cheeses as well.  Only possible complaint?  The wait staff kind of looked like they had brooms implanted up their arse on their first day of work.  Lighten up…good food doesn’t have to be so damn serious!

Still, the wait staff at Alex was a dream compared to the waiter at Bouchon, where the whole gang dined on Saturday night.  Being an ardent fan of French Laundry, I convinced the birthday girl to give Thomas Keller’s lower-priced fare a try.  It was, well, disappointing.  Don’t get me wrong…the food is good, it’s just that it’s horribly French, and by “horribly French,” I mean that it’s thoroughly unimaginative and heavily saturated in both butter and cream.  Whereas French Laundry was a delight of the senses, where I could taste every fresh ingredient used in the dishes, Bouchon’s ingredients had drowned in so much butter and cream that the it was hard to taste the ingredients for what they were.  My day boat scallops (a whopping $48) were cooked well, but their taste was blunted by the sauce (even though I opted for what I thought would be a lighter olive oil sauce, the taste was still all sauce and no scallop).  Alas, the oysters we ordered as appetizers did not have any cream, but they were thoroughly uninteresting.  And the waiter…oh my god.  First, he took a good 15-20 minutes to even come to our table.  If I’m paying $48 for scallops, your ass should be at my table to tell me either (a) that you’re super busy and will have to come back or (b) take my drink order within the first 10 minutes.  Second, if we ate everything on our plates, he kept saying, “Oh, I take it you didn’t like it very much?”  He did this five separate times to us throughout the course of the meal.  I desperately wanted to inform him, “Well, to tell you the truth, the food is perfectly average, but I ate light all day to prepare myself for something really good, so I’m damn hungry and this is what’s in front of me, so I ate it,” but he never actually stayed long enough at the table for me to get that whole sentence out.  The wine list was decent, however, and T. Rex and I split a delightful selection of ports for dessert.  All’s well that ends well, but the honest truth about Bouchon (in Vegas, anyway) is that plenty of cheaper restaurants are better.

For example, Mario Batali’s new Enoteca in the Venetian was a definite high point.  A complete contrast from Bouchon, Batali’s Enoteca San Marco is a wine-centric restaurant that offers small plates (pizzas, salads, and pastas) in a delightful setting inside the Venetian that makes you feel as if you’re in a Piazza in Venice.  The wine was excellent, and if you weren’t sure what you wanted, the staff was happy to give you a pour of everything for you to try.  The food was very yummy (T. Rex had a pasta that was little more than pasta and cheese, but which was seasoned so well that it melted in my mouth in a fit of orgasmic pleasure), the service was friendly, and the price was eminently reasonable.  Definitely a must if you’re in Vegas.

One thing I will probably not do on my next trip is to scarf down another Eiffel-tower sized strawberry margarita.  DC thought it would be simply delightful to have our picture taken with each of us drinking out of an Eiffel Tower-sized drink (procured at the Paris Hotel, of course).  The drink is roughly equivalent to 5 or 6 actual drinks.  T. Rex and I decided to split our strawberry margarita, despite the rest of the crew labeling us “pussies” for our share-and-share-alike attitude.  About two hours later, however, when sugar shock had grasped those who consumed the Eiffel tower on their own, we were upgraded to “smart pussies.”  I can live with that…

And I can also die happier having seen Cirque du Soleil’s “Love” at the Mirage (my 11th Cirque show!).  Although I am not what you would call a big Beatles’ fan (indeed, I am more of the “why the hell were the Beatles exactly so important?” camp), the show was masterful.  The set design and costuming were the best I have ever seen at a Cirque show and the music was actually pretty good (though I’m convinced that many, many drugs were involved in creating that music – “I’d like to be under the sea in an octopus’ garden with you?”  C’mon!)

Speaking of lyrics that were created under the influence, we managed to create the first line of a few new songs while on our trip…

BP — “I want a pink one!”  (sure to be heard in a Victoria’s Secret near you soon)

MC — “I have a very flexible mouth, it’s one of my attributes.” (could be either Jim Carrey or Jenna Jamison’s personal anthem)

Snarky — (in reference to an ad on one of the hotels) “Diet Pepsi sponsors Toni Braxton’s twat!” (‘nuff said)

Sketchy Cab Driver — “I have the catalog to the Bunny Ranch…” (a new version of Old McDonald had a farm?)

Okay…so that wasn’t everything that happened in Vegas, but then again…some things that happen in Vegas stay there

Take This Pinta and Shove It

My personal quest of passion and justice to have the national holiday of “Columbus Day” renamed to “Rape & Pillage Celebration Day” has just received further ammunition — a new genetic study indicates that Columbus was not only responsible for introducing the time-honored traditions of raping indigenous infidels and pillaging foreign land to the New World, but can also lay claim to the New World’s introduction to syphilis as well.  I hereby call on the powers-that-be to rename “Columbus Day” to “Rape, Pillage, and Spread a Venereal Disease Day” and to mark such occasion by flying an American flag at half-mast, slightly charred, and hosting a large red rash in the center.  (Of course, there is always the option of jettisoning a holiday in honor of a person whose exploits should have earned him the title of Satan’s butt monkey for all of eternity in favor of a more festive celebration of American discovery and invention.  I’m just saying.)

Motel Hotel Economics

So…let’s talk about how I’m holed up inside a motel in Newark, Delaware that smells faintly of “I used to smell like cigarette smoke back in the 80s when smoking in hotel rooms was the shiznet but I have been sprayed repeatedly with an ozone-like substance in order to eradicate the film of carcinogenic smoke that has layered my walls and carpet” the day after Christmas watching “The World’s Strongest Man” on ESPN, shall we?  It all started off innocently enough — after spending a delightful pre-holiday weekend and Christmas Eve with my mom, I headed up to the all-American town of Middletown, Delaware on Christmas Day to celebrate Santa’s burgeoning stomach, rosy red cheeks, and frostbite-repelling white beard with T. Rex and her family.  Numerous portions of ham, scalloped apples, vegetables, flaky biscuits, baklava, grandma’s cookies, wine, and caramel apples later, I was fit to be Santa’s replacement.  Lacking the proper equipment to strap down my breasts, augment my chiny chin chin with some delightful white hair, or learn how to fly reindeer on short notice, T. Rex and I took our protuberant bellies to the only hotel in all of Christendom (okay, well, all of Middletown) — the Hampton Inn. 

The Hampton Inn was a perfectly delightful place to spend the night — what better way to aid the body in digestion than some free Internet access, Mountain Dew from the vending machine, and a Paranormal State marathon on A&E, which taught me that 3 a.m. is the optimal time to contact evil spirits, since it is the inverse of the time of Jesus’ death (which apparently happened at 3 p.m.).  Evidently, the man not only died from our sins, but he founded the first wireless spirit network.  Yet, despite my crash-course in paranormal communications, I found $120 to be a bit steep for a King-size bed in the middle of sleepy and sparsely populated suburbia.  Methinks that the Hampton Inn Middletown is profiting from being the only game in town as well as the fortuitous location across from the WaWa gas station , which was the only place in all of Middletown open, nay, practically spilling First State residents out of every glass door pore on its edifice, on Christmas Eve.  Seriously, I haven’t seen a place that busy since I watched live footage of a Black Friday stampede at Wal-Mart.

Yet, I must admit that the Hampton Inn is to the Bellagio as the Sleep Inn in whose ozone-scented room I am currently residing in typing this lengthy blog entry is to the El Cortez Hotel and Casino — one left turn down the road to Sketchville.  Sketchville was not my intended destination for tonight.  No, indeed, after spending a day lounging, relaxing, and doing abso-fucking-lutely nothing, me and 9 pounds of holiday ham were set to travel back down I-95 to D.C. tonight.  Yet, the second that I hit the highway, I was awash in a rainstorm and 30-mph traffic.  It seems that everyone and their brother, sister, niece, and nephew was heading back from the New York area in separate cars, descending upon the beltway in a wash of steel, headlights, and rubbernecking.  I forsaw a 2 1/2 hour drive turning into a 5 to 6 hour nightmare of road rage and high blood pressure, and turned tail back to Delaware in search of cheap lodgings.  And so here I sit in the $69 Sleep Inn.  It ain’t all bad.  The vending machine has diet Dr. Pepper, and the floor and bedspread have the good decency to have enough color and pattern that if I toss my ham and cookies when I wake up to head back to D.C. at 4 or 5 in the morning, it’ll blend in.  Still, it’s not exactly the best establishment for a romantic, post-holiday tryst.  Unless I’m picking up one of the Lube Express proprieters; in that case, it’s just right.

The Wine Ho “Comes Out”

I’ve been told that admitting you have a problem is the first step on the road to recovery.  I’m more than happy to admit that I have a dastardly addiction problem (well, two, actually), but I have no desire to recover from either addiction.  You see, I’m a ho.  Not the kind that trades her bodily wares on the corner of 12th and M NW at Sunday morning at 4 a.m. (Though I was once mistaken for a prostitute at 5 a.m. as I sat on the stoop of the stairs outside my front door waiting for T.Rex to get off work, despite me being dressed in athletic shorts and a baggy puma t-shirt; this leads me to believe that tomboy fantasies are being underserved by the active prostitution population), but a (1) wine and (2) bath and body products ho. 

Now, the bath and body products ho-dom has been a lifestyle pattern since college.  Many a person has been forced to restrain me as I pass by lotions and potions stores in the mall, lest I buy my tenth bottle of body wash or lotion.  (Let’s see…a current review of my body washes alone reveals Oil of Olay, Korres Fig, Body Shop Olive, H2O Natural Spring Body Polish, The Thymes Ginger Milk, some Honey and Fig concoction I brought back from New Zealand, and Molton Brown’s Wild Indigo — and that’s not even counting what I might have squirreled away in shame underneath my bathroom sink.  My repository of body lotions is a subject for another day.) 

The wine ho thing is a new phenomena, however, spurned into existence by (a) a sudden doubling of my old government hack salary and (b) recent wine trips to New Zealand and Sonoma, wherein I discovered that Greeks were onto something with wine-infused Bacchanalia.  I started 2007 being a big believer in the $5-9 specials at Trader Joe’s, with the occasional splurge into $15-20 wineland, and I finish it with a wine fridge stocked with 53 bottles of wine, champagne, and port ranging in price from a mere $9.99 all the way to $100.  How in holly green hell did this happen?  What started out a novel interest in having wines shipped back to myself from New Zealand and California has turned into full-fledged maniacal passion, complete with a Wine Spectator membership, a notebook of tasting notes, and strange Saturday phone calls with the wine expert of an Oregon wine shop about the virtues of Oregon versus New Zealand pinot and California versus Washington State Cabernet. 

 So, since I have decided to jump off the bridge ‘o crazy into a flowing river of wine, I have decided that the best way to get company in Crazy Town is by sharing my love of fermented grapes and oak barrels.  (I could certainly also share my love of all things smelly and lotion-y, but something tells me that y’all would prefer to hear about food and wine over, say, the foam ratio of different body washes I’ve tried or how how soft and supple different lotions make my skin.)

So, we begin this foray with Thursday night’s dinner.  I whipped up a grilled sirloin with caramelized shallots and blue cheese, grilled asparagus, and sourdough bread topped with fig jam and more blue cheese and paired that with a 2005 Mayo Family Russian River Zinfindel($30/bottle) that T.Rex and I bought in Healdsburg, California (the Mayo Family has a delightful tasting room outpost in Healdsburg, which is about 30 minutes north of Sonoma, where they pair their wines with delightful niblets like peanut butter and jam and left-over Chinese food — a delightful sensory experience not to be missed).  The Zinfindel was good, but unremarkable on its own; paired with the blue cheese and steak, however, it was the picture perfect definition of “orgasm in my mouth.”  Just a touch of spice and blackberry jam to accentuate the boldness of the blue cheese and the texture of the steak.  Damn, if I ate like that every night, I’d be a very happy, 300-pound woman.  Yum yum.

If you’re the type who only spends $30 on a bottle of wine either (a) at a restaurant when that’s the cheapest bottle you can find or (b) when you’re trying to get into someone’s pants, then I recommend pairing your steak with a 2004 Naouoaia Red from the Naoussa region of Greece, which can be obtained for a bargain $9.99 at Whole Foods (just look for the label that’s entirely in the Greek alphabet!)  Not as fruity or jammy as a good Zinfindel, but it has hints of nuts and spice and is eminently drinkable with a a good cut of cow (I paired it with some free-range, grass-fed New York strip) or on its own.  I went back and bought two more bottles of the Naouoaia after trying it a month or so ago (one more for me and one for a Christmas gift).  53 bottles and counting…y’all need to get your arses out to DC to help me drink this damn wine!

The Holiday Hook Up

There are two things more perfect for each other than peanut butter and chocolate — the holiday season and the Internet.  Not only do I have J. Crew stalking my e-mail inbox on a daily basis, promising me free shipping and discounted outerwear if I will only give them free access to my credit card (which, admittedly, I do on a somewhat regular basis, curse you J. Crew and your preppy lures!), but I have Amazon.com sending me personalized discount offers, such as today’s 30% discount on the movie Personal Best (for those of you who didn’t try to watch every lesbian ever made when you came out in college, that would be an early 1980s movie with Mariel Hemingway about a lesbian relationship between two Olympic track athletes).  Evidently, something about my purchasing habits at Amazon screams lesbian.  Funnily, I had also thought that my purchasing history screamed “good taste,” but evidently I’m going to have to work on that if I want Amazon.com to offer me a discount on a friggin’ decent lesbian flick next year.  At this point, it’s looking like next year’s Amazon coupon might be a fantastic deal on Vampire Lesbian Kickboxers.

One of Those Days

Have you ever had one of those days?  Those days where you can’t manage to get your ass out of bed until an hour after your alarm goes off; where everything in your closet seems like it fit better one-year and ten pounds ago; where you yell at your cat because he has the audacity to require a little attention after you’ve been gone a whole evening?  Alas, half-coherent morning ramblings at a feline about the fact that no one is around to pick up my clothes, do my laundry, or play plushie toy games with me is probably not the best outlet for my frustration.  I think me and the kitty both need a Wii.

If only a day on Earth lasted about as long as a day on Mercury (that would be about 176 Earth days), I might be able to accomplish everything that I needed done in any given day.  And I’d have time for that thermonuclear tan, too.  Now that winter has firmly set in here on the Eastern seaboard, my chances of fighting the luminous whiteness of my Eastern European heritage are slim to none.  I suppose there is always that “self-apply” tan lotion, but ever since that stuff turned an ex of mine’s belly button into a burnt sienna wonder, I stay firmly away from such products.  Having a tan is sexy; looking like a six-foot Oompa Loompa is not.

Alas, not even the 15 pounds of gourmet Kookaburra red licorice sitting here in my office are enough to brighten my day.  Yes, 15 pounds.  This is what happens when (a) a deep and unyielding love for red licorice; (b) a passion for sale pricing; (c) a lack of time to shop in person; and (d) an exorbitant paycheck combine.  BOOM — you order 15 pounds of licorice in bulk pricing because you’re tired of paying Au Bon Pain $1.99 per ounce for the sweet manna when you could pay that per pound if only you would purchase 15 pounds at once and who cares that it’s an obscene amount of money to spend on licorice when you know that you’ll eat it eventually, unlike the pile ‘o carrots that are sitting in your refrigerator and wilting, while yet simultaneously growing fur.  I don’t know why, but I just had an image in my head of a Wii boxing game where a licorice niblet takes on a furry carrot (my bet is on the niblet); Nintendo could call it “Food Fight.”  On the other hand, perhaps I shouldn’t quit my day job just yet…

Mea Culpa

The holidays seem like a perfect time to beg everyone’s forgiveness for vanishing from the face of the blogosphere for a while.  And because it’s the charitable “It’s-so-much-easier-to-forgive-me-than-to-stomach-giving-money-to-those-annoying-people-ringing-bells-especially-when-you-have-a-burning-desire-to-steal-one-of-those-bells-and-run-up-and-down-the-aisles-of-Macy’s-screaming-at-the-top-of-your-lungs-that-the-mumus-are-on-sale-for-a-reason” thing to do, I feel confident that y’all (and more importantly Santa) will look favorably on my mea culpa.

Now that we have that out of the way, I must say that I had a fabulous Turkey Day.  It was a small, diverse affair.  Four people, one lesbian, one gay man, an Asian woman, and a white girl with a penchant for getting her knitting needles on.  If one more person had shown up, we could have had a modern day Village People band audition.  It was a Turkey Day of firsts — my first experience at carving the turkey (of course the lesbian gets to carve — thanks to Z.R. for letting me go to town with an electronic carver!); my first bit of green bean casserole (and I swear it will not be my last); and the first time I have ever broken into song while playing Trivial Pursuit (and received backup support, no less — everybody loves me some “Island in the Stream”).  But the best part of Turkey Day was definitely the friendly banter (both before and after consumption of the spiced apple butter rum):

Me:  “You’re supposed to stick the herbs up it’s ass before you cook it.”
M.C.:  “That’s not it’s ass, that’s it’s neck.”
Me:  “No, it’s most definitely it’s ass, though sometimes they stick its neck up it’s ass.  You’re sodomizing the poor thing with herbs.”
M.C.: “Well, if you were empty inside, you’d want to be sodomized with fresh herbs, too.”

M.C.:  “I’m going to take a lover.”
Me and Z.R.:  “Awesome.”
M.C.:  “Who should I pick?”
Me:  “Someone who’s good in bed.  Life is too short for a poor lover.”
M.C.:  “I want someone to take me out to dinner and buy me presents.”
Me:  “Lovers don’t take you out to dinner and they don’t give you presents, except for maybe lingerie or jewelry.”
M.C.:  “Oh, okay, forget it then.”

Other highlights of Thanksgiving Day weekend included the Tegan and Sara concert, which pretty much rocked my pinky toes.  Definitely one of the top five concerts I have been to, save for the relative age of the audience (late teens/early 20s).  I literally had a girl behind me (she looked to be a freshman in college) say, “I wish this concert would start so my life could begin.”  I may have been a lot of things at the young age of 18, but an obsessed idgit was not one of them.  If you love iTunes as much as I do, check out Tegan and Sara’s “Call It Off” and “My Number” for an introduction.  I also highly recommend checking out Amy Winehouse’s “F**k me Pumps.”  The funniest song that I’ve heard in a while.  It makes you almost forgive Winehouse for that horrid beehive on top of her skullcap…almost. 

Well, I have a bit of catching up to do, including discussing my lovely trip to Sonoma with T. Rex, complete with a fabulous dinner at The French Laundry.  But, alas, I am off to bill more hours before taking the evening off with some dirty-talking puppets on Avenue Q.  Dirty talking puppets are absolutely the best kind.  I would have enjoyed the Muppets ever so much more if Kermit told Miss Piggy, “Damnit piggy, get in that house and make me a chicken pot pie!  Know your role!” or perhaps a little star-crossed Swedish Chef-Beaker love story?  Meep meep bork bork bork!

Naked Surfing in Ocean City

So, it has been quite the little while since I’ve updated this thing.  Alas…billable hours, dating, and car buying happens.  That’s right…after almost three years of pounding pavement, I decided to be an All-American Guppie (that’s Gay Yuppie to those of you not in the know) and buy a BMW (2003 BMW 330xi for those of you interested in such matters) the weekend before last.  Now, I’d like to say that I thoroughly thought through (say that 3 times fast) all of the angles when making this purchase, but really, what happened was that during my journey into purchasing a dependable and reasonable vehicle (1990s Toyota 4-Runner or the like), I happened to test drive a manual transmission BMW.  Alas, the 4-Runner, sporty though it may be, is no match for the zoom-zoom exhilaration of a BMW cornering around a curve at 35mph in 3rd gear on a test drive.  I was hooked.  After that, it was just a matter of finding everything I wanted in one car (black, manual transmission, 4-door, low mileage, decent price), and convincing myself that spending more then $3,500 on a car was justifiable (ahh…Spanky Truck…how I miss thee and your sun-dappled grey paint coat).  I must say that the new car (as yet to be named, but I’ll take suggestions) is a sexy motherfucker.  It looked particularly hot this past weekend with surfboards strapped to the top of it for its inaugural road trip adventure – transporting T. Rex and I to Ocean City and Assateague Island, Maryland for some surfing, (and when I say surfing, I actually mean “sitting on a surfboard watching tiny little waves that are the ocean’s sinister form of premature ejaculation pass by without much fanfare”), sun, and fun.  Assateague Island, despite its lack of wave action, was pretty darn nifty – not only were we able to grab ourselves a semi-secluded stretch of beach, but we got a bit closer to wildlife, thanks to the Island’s indigenous wild pony population.  Word of advice, though – if you ever go to Assateague, watch out for the wild pony poop…it is pretty much everywhere. 

The BMW made it there and back in fine form, though it’s a bit more sandy from the experience (I feel it’s pain – surfing without a wetsuit somehow manages to get sand in bits and places that one didn’t even know existed.)  As for me, I’m a little more tan, and a little wiser – I’ve learned that I need to buy a bikini that’s not so prone to “wardrobe malfunctions” when I eat it and flop off the surfboard.  Just one of life’s many lessons…

Gay Dogs and Good Vibrations

Every day in D.C. is simply another opportunity to take in the vast array of wildlife that inhabits this city.  For example, on my way home yesterday, I passed a woman who was carrying a ratty shopping bag in one hand, a business briefcase in the other, and muttering to herself that she went to church the other day and discovered that her dog was gay.  (No sure where doggie-on-doggie love fits into the modern ministry, but…)  Then, further up on the street, I was assaulated with a fairly loud rendition of a bootylicious (i.e. the lyrics were sexual) R&B song that sounded like it was song by an 18-year-old girl.  I looked around for the source of this scourge and found it sitting in a Volkswagon convertible.  It was a late-30s to early 40s very white, balding man.  Dude, get your freak on in enclosed spaces and stick to the Beach Boys on your convertible days, mmkay?

Women Deserve Better Than Pro-Lifers

As I was reading this article on abortion foes’ new tact in the “war on abortion,” I was interested to read the slogan for Feminists for Life, the anti-abortion group supported by Justice Roberts’ wife – “Women Deserve Better Than Abortion.”  Well, absolutely, Feminists for Life!  Women deserve unfettered access to contraception and birth control, sex education, and RU-486, right?  Because we can all agree that abortion is one of those things that you never want to have to do, and having access to contraception, sex education, and RU-486 will help to eradicate the need for abortion, right?  And after all, it is the modern woman’s ability to control when birth happens (to a certain extent, anyway…) that has allowed women, en masse, to move from the legal equivalent of a piece of livestock (“chattal,” anyone?) to persons that are able to break the constraints of biology long enough to get educated, get a job, and make the informed choice as to whether the pitter-patter of little feet is a good idea for them (because, let’s be honest, not everyone should be a parent, and the earth would probably be a wee bit better off if we stopped sprouting like rabbits).  Strangely, though, there was nothing, zilch, nil on the Feminists for Life website about contraception, sex education, or RU-486.  Hell, Margaret Sanger, the mother of birth control, didn’t even make their “feminist history” entry.  Tsk tsk.  While I personally don’t label myself a feminist (because, honestly, folks, equality should just be the fucking standard and I shouldn’t have to label myself to say that I stand for equality), I certainly wouldn’t consider those who would deny women the education and resources necessary to make an informed decision about whether to be a mother “feminists.”  Aburdists would be a better characterization.

If abortion foes can agree that a woman should be well-informed of the mental and physical risks of having an abortion, then why shouldn’t a woman be well-informed about how she can save herself from finding herself in what we can all agree is a shitty and unfair predicament?  Yet, abortion foes tend to be the biggest detractors from expanding sex education and unfettered access to birth control.  Why?  Why does the “sanctity of life” have to go hand-in-hand with women staying home, barefoot and pregnant, without any real choice about the matter?  It doesn’t.  It shouldn’t.  And abortion foes who oppose expanded sex education and access to birth control (President Bush is a good example) are partly to blame for why women have abortions in the first place – because they weren’t given the tools and resources to choose a life on their own terms.

A Friend to Look Down On

It should be noted that President Bush fully stands by and supports the much-maligned Attorney General, Alberto “What me, Worry?” Gonzales.  If I had a 34% approval rating, I’d stand next to the shortest man in the room, too.

Harvard Does Not Heart Alberto

Looks like Alberto Gonzales is going to have to bring Secret Service detail to his law school reunion…I mean, you know what happens after lawyers take out a full page advertisement in the Washington Post, don’t you?  That’s right…they’ll force him to run around Harvard Square with only a copy of the Constitution to keep him decent. 

Follow the Yellow Brick Road

Let’s see, first Attorney General Gonzales blamed the U.S. Attorney firings on his Cheif of Staff, Kyle D. Sampson.  Clever, considering Mr. Sampson has already quit.  As that failed to quell the cries from Congress, Gonzales is now blaming former Department of Justice Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty for the decisions to remove the U.S. Attorneys.  I can only describe this as the “Don’t Let the Door Smack Your Ass On the Way Out” defense.  Mr. Gonzales is a one-man “Wizard of Oz” clusterfu*k - he manages to combine the brain-lacking skills of the Scarecrow with the courage-lacking abilities of the Lion, yet somehow manages to whine the entire time like Dorothy.  Does the fact that the leading law enforcement official in the entire country wholly lack the ability to take responsibility for anything bother anyone but me?  Anyone?

I Think I Preferred The Last Monica in Town

I very rarely use the “c” word.  It can lead to yelling and bruising, or possibly a fist thrown high in the air from a passing feminist cheering on linguistic reclamation of all words referring to the hoo-ha.  Either way, it just leads to trouble.  But today, I just cannot resist my urge to call Monica Goodling a cunt.  A sanctimonious, partisan, fourth-tier law school attending, lacking in the actual work experience of the common house fly, ethically-devoid, doesn’t have any damn respect for the law, cunt.  It is people like her who erode the foundations of justice and government like a fucking virus that necrotizes flesh.  I’d call her flesh-eating bacteria, but I happen to have a very cute one of those in my office, and I wouldn’t want to offend its delicate sensibilities.

The Vast Silence

You know that silence that has been emanating from my blog since I returned home from New Zealand?  Well, if you’re like Elmer Fudd, and you’re reawy reawy quiet, you can actually hear the ka-ching, ka-ching sounds of a little cash register counting up billable time in the background.  So, I dearly apologize for my absence from the Internet, but I honestly had no idea how hard it was to count up to 8 hours every day, or well, to count up to 8 hours of productive time every day.  To quote 1994 Teen Talk Barbie, “Math is Hard.”

Granted, I can’t complain about the pay or the perks of my new employment . . . my entry-level swag bag included an umbrella that not even the Big Bad Wolf could blow down and a fleece blankie with my firm’s name emblazoned on one corner.  For company or cuddling?  I still can’t decide. I’m also getting to do the kind of work that once upon a time as a government lackey, I wished for.  Yeah, you know that adage about being careful what you wish for, lest it find you and then throw up many binders filled with reams of paper with binder clips and yellow highlighter all over you?  (Certainly, Aesop addressed this scenario?)  Turns out it’s true.  But, other than the mountain of piling papers, the firm is great, the people are great, and I finally have a freakin’ window, so now I can actually multi-task and process some Vitamin D while studying Table 6 of the Blue Book (Oh, Table 6, how I heart thee…let me count the ways…).  So, though y’all might have to survive on fewer and shorter posts, a whole new world of snarkiness is just waiting for me to exploit it.

New Ways to Taunt Our Youth

P.E.  classes around the country are turning the craze once reserved for only ultimate Frisbee hippie parties – Dance Dance Revolution (“DDR”) – into a well-attended gym event for American’s youth.  DDR’s proponents praise this “revolution” as a way to move physical education from the “competitive” atmosphere of team sports to encouraging “lifetime fitness.”  Horsefeather, I say!  Getting picked last in gym class is simply a rite of passage that every pre-adolescent must face the horror of in order to grow into a well-adjusted human being.  (Wedgies and playground taunts are just an added character-building bonus.)  Besides, I personally cannot think of anything more terrifying than getting my white girl groove on in front of my would-be tormentors. 

The Christmas Present Every Child Must Have

In a rather momentous decision, the Mexico City legislature legalized abortion yesterday, which prompted ”thousands of protesters” to hoist coffins and waive “plastic fetuses.”  They make plastic fetuses???  Do they make them in different colors and sizes?  How about the endometrium and umbilical cord expansion pack?  For pity’s sake, people.

The Off-Roading, Lesbian Snuffleupagus

My last day in Queenstown ended up being quite the little adventure.  I kicked off the day with a little deep tissue massage, a pleasure that I have indulged in before – an experience that had me believing that sex could be forgone forever, so long as I could get me a massage every couple of weeks (and ever so much cheaper than courting a woman).  Alas, just like sex, the relative pleasure seems to depend on whom you let touch you.  My Queenstown massage artist was an aromatherapy freak who insisted that I pick out a scent dependant on my relative mood and then made me sniff it for five minutes.  After she was done with that, she got to work massaging my body with the aromatherapy oil that I had selected, an experience that was slick and alternated between somewhat relaxing and outright painful.  She neglected to actually massage my chest (the massage therapists over here are a little freaky about nudity and touching the bum or the chest), gave a half-hearted rub to my feet and hands, and actually made me feel more in pain afterward than I had before (though she did say I had very strong shoulders, but still!).  And to top it all off, I came out of there slippery and smelling like a walking incense candle oil – an interesting combo with my big, puffy jacket and raincoat.  I must have looked and smelled like a big red, hippie, snuffleupagus.

After that lovely experience, I ended up going off-roading in my rented Toyota Corolla.  Now, I didn’t intend to go off-roading…I intended to drive through Glenorchy and Paradise on my way to Lake Sylvan (the lake in Isengard in the LOTR trilogy) in order to get some more scenic photos.  I even plotted out my course on my New Zealand driving atlas, which showed that there was indeed a road all the way to Lake Sylvan, though the road was colored white, instead of yellow, but at the time, that meant nothing to me.  Evidently, white means putatively paved with a few four-wheel vehicle tracks, criss-crossed by streams, and cut through a forest (and I’m not talking about where they cut down a section of forest to make a road, I’m talking about making a skinny-ass, one car can only possibly fit though it’s a two way road, which winds through the forest trees haphazardly road).  I made it across about 40 minutes of gravel, forest, six streams, and the odd cow sitting in the middle of the road before I ran into an actual fucking RIVER crossing the road.  It was at this point that I gave up on my quest for Lake Sylvan.  I did get some great snapshots on the way to and fro, though.  The drive, though it was bumpy, vibrating, and fraught with my constant wondering about the rental car inspection when I turn it back in was just like driving through a gorgeous oil painting. 

After getting back from the fringes of Middle Earth, I decided to grab a couple of beers and some grub at the Lone Star restaurant – a local, Texas-themed pub and grub place.  It was here that I managed to charm my way into the middle of a lesbian Internet date between a rural Brit and a city-fied Kiwi.  I just started chatting up the ladies at the bar in an attempt to understand the game of cricket (the world championships were on the TV), and soon enough, the conversation evolved into politics and the joys of Mexican beer.  After a bit, the ladies invited me to sit down to dinner with them, and I soon discovered that I was in the midst of “family.”  In America, lesbians usually stay the hell away from Texas, but in New Zealand, evidently, the Texan bar is where it’s at.  They were very nice and gracious and ended up buying me wine and dessert, so all in all, it was a great way to cap off my vacation (and I didn’t even have to put out – bonus).

Alright…I’m off to return my car and pray they don’t look underneath the damn thing.  I should be back in the States tonight, when I gain back the day I lost on my way out.  I’m excited to see what exactly that does to my biological clock

300 Random Thoughts

It’s definitely the random moments over here that have been the most delightful – getting into a lengthy discussion with my Canyon Swing operator about weather Hillary Clinton would be taken seriously as a president by Muslim countries (we also chatted a bit about the parliamentary system here in New Zealand – charming fellow – I can see why he’s so successful in convincing people to jump off a cliff day in and day out), sharing a bottle of champagne with a throughly insane Australian woman who snores like a 300-pound linebacker with a head cold, watching an American female college student break down into hysterical crying while on top of a semi-precarious part of Franz Josef Glacier and feeling better about my relative weanie-hood, the image in my mind of the plane falling away from me as I leapt out of it, talking about whether Shakira or Kylie Minogue was hotter with a couple of Australians (my vote is for Shakira!), seeing a delightful tree branch on a beach and dropping down onto my belly to take artsy pictures of it that will never turn out well, the feeling of peace and accomplishment from actually getting myself upright on a surfboard (even the subsequent quart of salt water down the lungs couldn’t erase my smile), sharing the view of the Emerald Lakes on top of the Tongariro Crossing with an American doctor I had just met the night before, driving up and down the New Zealand highways and having the urge to stop the car every 10 minutes because the landscape is just so beautiful.  It’s been great fun.

What is not great fun, however, is the movie “300.”  My god that movie was bad.  I caught it here last night, as it was one of only three movies playing, and was the only one playing at the time that I was at the theater.  If you like watching oiled-up men with six-pack abs in their loin cloths, than this movie is for you.  If you actually want a decent plot, acting, or say, a love scene that doesn’t inspire fits of laughing in the audience, try a Hillary Duff movie.  That’s right, I’d rather watch a preternaturally annoying teen queen six times a day rather than watch “300″ again.  Ack.

Hedonism Down Under

Well, I do believe that I am over my fear of heights.  After leaping backwards off a 100+ meter platform over a canyon, living to tell the tale, and more to the point, loving the adrenaline pumping through my veins, and then asking to be suspended over a canyon river along with a care bear dolled up to look like the “Gimp” from “Pulp Fiction” and dropped forward, eyeballs first towards the river in the canyon below, I do believe that I have befriended gravity in all its forms.  There’s some “quotable” fridge magnet somewhere that says to do something each day that scares you, and on my trip, I’ve been pretty decent about heading that bit of advice.

I decided to finish off my evening with a lovely trip to Wine Tastes, a local Queenstown establishment that lets you take a wine glass and go crazy over a wide assortment of pretty much every type of wine grown in New Zealand – an interesting, and sometimes motley assortment of pinot noirs that taste like earth and mushrooms, chardonnays that taste of cream and blackberry, sauvignon blancs that taste of berries with bite, and rieslings that are dynamite with cheese.  I talked for nearly two hours with a chap named Duncan from the UK about the joys of wine and organic farming (which means sustainable, all-natural farming that respects the animal that you are chowing down on).  Between reading “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser and “An Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan, I am beginning to feel more strongly about finding sustainable, eco-friendly farms from which to buy my meat, eggs, and cheese.  Not to mention that the cheeses that I’ve had in New Zealand, which are the product of cows that are grass-fed and non-antibiotic, unlike our American industrial farming, are simply out of this world.  Simply because we are omnivores who thrive on the proteins from meat doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t offer our food the best life possible – a life consistent with a cow’s or chicken’s natural tendencies and desires.  Meat deserves to be happy, too.  If I were some alien’s protein requirement for the day, then I hope it would let me out and about during the day

But that is neither here nor there…I admit that I was hoodwinked (or should I say besotted enough by alcohol?) to buy quite a few more wines to add to my growing collection of New Zealand’s finest wines.  Indeed, I have learned a great deal about wine since I’ve been over here – the subtleties in the grapes, the values of cellaring a bottle for a few years, the nose of a wine, the finish, the difference between a bottle of $2 buck chuck (or $3.99 chuck if you happen to live in DC) and a $50 single-vinyeard production.  The people over here are more friendly, informative, and willing to sit down with you for an hour or two than their American counterparts.  Beyond that, New Zealand wine is interesting, innovative, and bursting with flavors that a lot of American wines simply don’t have (probably in an effort to please the general population).  New Zealand has helped to convert me to further heights of unabashed hedonism, it seems.

I am truly looking forward to coming back to the States in a couple of days.  Although I have had a fabulous time in New Zealand, I miss my friends, the comfort of my luxuriously firm bed, the pleasures of my TiVo.  I’m looking forward to starting my new job and planning my next vacation.  Thank you to everyone who has e-mailed me and kept me company on my vacation.  You rock (and are kind enough to put up with me when I decide to go on pre-menstrual flights of fancy).  My friends are every bit my family and I look forward to spending time with you all (tasting New Zealand wines!) in the upcoming year.

High Highs, Low Lows

And by high highs, I mean about 12,000 feet high   That’s right, to celebrate Easter yesterday, I decided to break my skydiving virginity out near the Franz Josef Glacier.  It struck me that if I was ever going to do it, flying over two glaciers, a few snow-capped mountains, and the Tasman Sea made a pretty darn nifty backdrop.  So, we go up in a turbo-prop plane that fits four people (plus one pilot) on the floor (without seats) squished up next to each other.  Thankfully, though the plane looked like it might have been constructed from toy plane parts, it didn’t shake upon liftoff.  My spirits were lifted. 

The scenery was beautiful, and I was enjoying it immensely, until my jump instructor told me it was time to open the door and take the quick way down.  It must be said that swinging my legs out of a moving plane at 12,000 feet was the scariest thing I have probably ever done willingly.  The good news is that I was only dangling there for a few seconds before my jump instructor (who was, thankfully, very solidly attached to me) thrust us out into the void and we began dropping through the sky at 200 kph (120 mph, or the rate of a 20-story building every 5 seconds).  The interesting thing about perspective is that I seemed to be floating, rather than falling, and it was fucking awesome!  I could twirl around and see all the scenery, the top of the glacier, the sea spreading out before me, and a thousand tiny dots below me (which I would discover upon getting lower were sheep – how appropriate).  Even before the instructor popped the parachute, time seemed suspended (though the wind shear on my face did not…I’m hoping I got a bit of a mini-face lift on the way down).  Once the parachute deployed, my instructor decided to do some fast twirls and this was the only part of the skydive that I didn’t enjoy.  It was like being in a zero-gravity machine, which tends to make snarky a bit green in the face.  But other than that, rock on and bring on some more altitude…I’m ready to do it again!

Another high of my trip so far was my night before the skydive – I went out to dinner and drinks with two Aussie boys, met up with a Frenchman at the bar, and played pool all night long.  The Frenchman (Pierre Claude – how appropriate is that?) and I proved that French-American relations can be greatly improved with the addition of sticks and balls, as we racked up a 10-win streak on the pool table.  How often is it in life that you find yourself playing Kiwi pool with a Frenchman near a glacier?  Life is funny sometimes.

Alas, my trip has now also had a pretty low low, as the girl I’ve been seeing decided that Easter was a lovely day to break off seeing with me via e-mail while I’m in a foreign country (and to be home in only three days’ time).  Though that sentence is rife with inappropriateness that I could expand on ad nauseum, I’m just going to say that it’s pretty darn low to hurt someone when they are stuck in a dorm room in a hostel, and so don’t have the ability to curl up into a ball in a comfy space and have a good cry about it.  Not only did I not have any of my own pillows nor some “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” to take my mind off it all, but I was surrounded by chatty Germans.  So fucking uncool.

But the show must go on, so I’m set to do a canyon swing in about an hour-and-a-half; tomorrow, I have an hour massage scheduled; and sometime in-between, I’m going to visit this local wine club, which pretty much let’s you go gonzo trying at many wines as you like (the Queenstown region is known for its pinot noirs) on the cheap.  Hopefully, that all will serve to end my trip on a high high, rather than a low low.

Ice, Ice Baby

Greetings from Franz Josef Village – population around 480 or so.  This little section of the world was founded exclusively to support the tourism surrounding the Franz Josef Glacier – a lovely little chock-o-block of ice that I had the pleasure of hiking on for about eight hours today (and it was a pleasure, though my right third toe insists adamantly that the bleeding and bruising wasn’t worth it – I say that’s what my right third toe gets for being fucking longer than my right big toe – it needs to learn it’s place).  Having never hiked a giant ice cub before, I was unprepared for it’s texture – it had very few flat faces, but was instead full of porous “potholes” and sheer cliffs.  Luckily, our handy guide brought a very heavy pickaxe from which he made appropriate footholds for when we ascending up ice cliffs, jumped over ice pools, and leapt over ice crevices (this seemed rather daunting at first, but I discovered that if you don’t look down, it’s so much better – ignorance is bliss).  And you better believe that I got my picture taken with that pickaxe! 

 After a day crawling up and down a glacier, as well as crawling through ice holes, and all in all, attempting to stay on my feet, I’m plum knackered (see how I pick up the Kiwi-speak?).  I’m headed out for dinner in about an hour with some Australian blokes that I met on my hike today.  A lovely pair, though when we had the option to go through a particularly treacherous piece of the glacier, they wimped out.  Me, who can’t even play Pictionary without spraining her ankle and ending up in the hosptial (on my birthday, no less), was all for ice climbing, but the Australian boys (who are right now in the spa in, I have to say it, though it pains me, SPEEDOS!) were, “no, that’s too high.”  Pussies.

As tomorrow is Easter, and I am spending it all by my onesies with no one to make me a proper ham repast (nor anyone to paint Easter eggs with), I decided to do something completely insane, so I’m jumping out of an airplane for breakfast (weather permitting).  That’s right…I decided that my first skydive should be over these lovely glaciers – what better environment to propel yourself out of a Cessna airplane at 12,000 feet?  (Note to my future employer - this is what happens when you offer a poor government lackey a job that doubles her salary – she starts doing pricey stuff that may impede her from actually showing up to her first day of work on account of death   Happy Easter to me!  Think the Easter Bunny can find me at 12,000 feet?  Maybe I should bring a carrot.  After the skydive, I’ll be driving the long drive (6 hours or so) to Queenstown, which is where I’ll finish up my vacation.  It’ll be nice to actually spend four nights in the same place.  The only thing I have planned there is a canyon swing (a free fall for 60 or so meters, that turns into a swing over Shotover Canyon, which I think will be cake after the skydive), but we’ll see what else I can dream up.  It will most definitely not involve hiking.  I don’t think the Tongariro Crossing and the Glacier can be topped for unadulterated beauty.  And my toes have few places left for more blisters!  Until my next insane event…

When in Doubt, Drink Wine

What is one to do when one’s self has two bum knees and three supersized blisters on their feet?  Toss their hiking shoes in the trash and get their arse over to Blenheim, New Zealand, the home of Sauvignon Blanc, to go on a full day of wine tasting.  The lovely thing about New Zealand hospitality is that almost all of the tastings were free (only two of the 10 or so vineyards I went to charged a fee, and it was nominal at best, as opposed to those money-grubbing hooligans in Sonoma), which led me to a large lunch and a lot of wasting good wine (by pouring it into a vat) in the name of staying sober!  Although I was not converted to the joys of sauvignon blanc (it was very acidic to my palate), I did learn an awful lot about white wine.  For starters, I actually learned that I liked it, so long as it wasn’t American white wine which tends to have all the complexity of a baked leather shoe.  I ran into delightful chardonnays that tasted of cream and oak, dry rieslings that did not taste like saccharine, but instead like crisp fruit, hitting the tip of the tongue, and a few single vineyard productions of mixed grapes (sauvignon blanc mixed with pinot graps, etc.) that were simply out of this world.  The only thing I did not find were fabulous reds – the States definitely does Pinot Noir better.  By the end of my sensory overload, I wound up with a case of wine, only two of which were actually red (one pinot that was decent and a delightful merlot that tasted of berries and chocolate and smoke).  New Zealand has converted me into a white white drinker!

Naturally, having purchased a case of wine left me with a little conundrum – given current US restrictions on carry-on liquids, what the hell am I to do with 12 bottles of wine?  Even on my most decadent days, I can’t finish more than 3 glasses by myself, let alone polish off 12 bottles in my last seven days of vacation!  Luckily, I found an exporter in Blenheim, who was more than happy, in exchange for a rather steep fee, to send my case ‘o wine to my address in America.  Indeed, I dropped by his “work” address this morning, which turned out to be his house, whereupon he then asked for a ride to his warehouse (because that’s just the kind of thing that happens in New Zealand – it was an odd morning, already – I had a book that I left behind on the Queen Charlotte Track delivered to me via boat at 8:30 a.m., so driving my exporter to his job was par for the course).  My delectable selections should get to me in about a month.  Can anyone say wine and cheese par-tay?

The rest of my day was spent driving, snapping photos of the lovely landscape, and more driving.  The South Island is a helluva lot longer than the North Island, and I had a long way to go between the Marlborough Sounds and Franz Josef Glacier (Indeed, after a full day of driving, I’m still not there – I’m in Greymouth, which is about 3 hours away from the glaciers).  Oh well, the country was beautiful, and I capped off my day of driving watching the sun set over the Tasman Sea.  All that was missing was someone to cuddle with.  My camera just doesn’t do it for me…it gets all grabby and insistent at the slightest provocation.

Odd Kiwi sightings on the road today:

• A Mercedes Benz with a trailer hitch (and what exactly does a Kiwi yuppie have to haul?)
• A road that went down to one lane (two directions still, but one lane) around a mountain curve, with only a curved mirror to guide the driver around the mountain and potential oncoming traffic (proof that crack is available down here)
• A number of “penguin crossing” signs (no penguins were actually sighted)
• A road sign that depicted falling rocks right next to a fence that had many large, rock-sized dents and holes in it (not making me feel better here, guys!)
• A herd of cows less than 50 meters from a beach (Bessie’s Americn cousins are so jealous)

I was originally supposed to go on a tour and tasting of the local Monteith brewery here in Greymouth, but it seems that tomorrow is Good Friday (something that traveling heathens such as myself wouldn’t remember), and thus they are closed.  So long as the beer is “good,” why not drink it on Good Friday?  Sheesh.  So, instead, I’ll probably stop by the crafts town of Hokitika, where almost all of the jade in New Zealand is designed and made.  I may then wander down to Fox Glacier for sunset before heading back up to Franz Josef Glacier and resting up for my all day adventure hike on Saturday (sssh…don’t tell my knees).

The Knees Have It

Evidently, doing 13 hours of hiking within the space of three days was a bit much for my knees to handle (thanks for teaching me to be a catcher, mom and dad), as the last hour of my trek along the Queen Charlotte Track yesterday become the “Queen Charlotte Limp-A-Thon.”  (Donations to the cause will be accepted upon my return to the States.)  I could only manage to descend down hills while shuffling sideways, in fact, which must have been an odd sight for those I was sharing the shrubbery with, but they were all nice enough not to say anything.  It was at this point that I began rethinking the whole last leg of my journey, which was supposed to involve three days of hiking in Fiordland National Park (or, more to the point, my sneaking suspicion that my knee was secretly telling me that if I did anymore hiking, it would defect, leaving me to a plastic knee replacement and the ability to only hike small molehills in the future).  Luckily, doing a complete switcheroo in New Zealand is quite easy – I put my whole itinerary back a day and am now doing wine tasting today, something active in Westport or Greymouth tomorrow (it was supposed to be surfing, but it seems that the Wesport surfing gurus will be out of town tomorrow), glacier hiking on Saturday, and then four days in Queenstown (which will no doubt include me jumping off a canyon and something else completely bonkers and off-the-wall that I would never do while within the borders of the U.S.A.).  The good news is that after 10 hours of sleep, my knees now only feel like they were hit with a soft mallet rather than a pick axe, so I’m thinking this says good things about my ability to actually bend them tomorrow.

Just this morning, I had a rousing discussion about the similarities between  American and Canadian politics (I had forgotten that they actually have a monarchy, though a quite neutered one), which reminded me of the lovely discussion I had in Taupo with a member of New Zealand’s national underwater hockey team.  Yes, underwater hockey.  I had no idea that such a sport existed, nor that the United States actually possesses an underwater hockey team (well, I guess if we play ping pong, then we can push a little stick underwater, too.)  The things you learn the people you meet while cavorting about!

I have also learned that despite my less-then-stellar hiking and running abilities, I rock the kayak.  Indeed, I’m thinking it was a shame that my parents insisted in living in mostly land-locked states as I was growing up, as I evidently missed my calling to be one of those water-based Olympians that’s only shown on ESPN 8 (the Ocho) at 2 in the afternoon.  But alas, not much kayaking potential in Arizona, so I’ll have to think of another way to get on television.  Perhaps de-pantsing a Supreme Court Justice?  I’m thinking Scalia is an optimal target given that belly of his…unless he wears his pants like highwaters…then it’ll be more a struggle.  Stay tuned to CSPAN!