Monthly Archives: July 2014

I can’t stand it

I can’t stand it when you go to the drug store, and you need to buy razor blades or deodorant, and for whatever reason, that particular item that you came to the drug store to buy, it’s locked behind some stupid plastic partition. “Please see an associate,” the display tells you. Great, I need to find an employee to come and help me pick out my toiletries. I don’t want to have to share such an intimate moment with a complete stranger. Sure, I always buy some variation of Old Spice Red Zone, but maybe I want to stand there for a second, read the packaging, explore potential alternatives. Not while some guy is standing right there waiting for me to hurry up. Is deodorant and razor blade theft that much of a problem?

I can’t stand it when I’m cooking something on the stove and, for whatever reason, the skillet starts smoking. And I lower the heat, but it’s not an immediate fix, the whole kitchen is filling up with smoke. Thirty seconds later, I’ve got all the windows open, the ceiling fan doing its thing, but the smoke alarm in the living room starts going off. “Beep! Beep! Beep!” I get it, OK, so I go over with a towel and I’m waving the smoke away, but it only stops for like thirty seconds at a time. I’m trying to juggle my food still cooking, this alarm blaring, and seriously, why is it so smoky in here? Where is all of this smoke coming from, and why isn’t it going away? What’s the point of that overhead vent thing, the big fan on top of the stove? It’s making a lot of noise, it’s definitely the loudest appliance in the house, but it’s not doing anything. I can see the smoke lingering in the air, clearly not getting sucked anywhere near that fan.

I can’t stand it when you get a call on your cell phone from an unknown number. And I just know that it’s going to be some stupid recording. It always is. So I tell myself, just let it go, just don’t answer the phone. I don’t know how these companies make any money. Is anybody actually following through? Do these robo-cold-calls actually succeed in getting people to fork over their money? And what about those no-call lists, how are these numbers getting around it? And why am I answering the phone? I can’t help it. It’s probably a recording, but maybe it’s a legitimate call. I mean, nobody ever calls anymore, but this could be an exception. Maybe it’s an opportunity. Maybe someone’s about to offer me a really cool job. So I answer the phone. I always answer it. And of course it’s a recording.

I can’t stand it when they mess your order up at the drive-thru. I had access to a car a while back, and I decided to use it late one night to get some McDonald’s. I had the type of late night hunger that only a Big Mac meal with the help from a Quarter Pounder sandwich was going to satisfy, and I thought about how I’d attack my meal as I waited behind that line of cars alongside the drive-thru. It wound up being all wrong. By the time I got home, looking at my single Big Mac sandwich, the large sweet tea that I hadn’t ordered, it was too late. I stared at someone else’s receipt and thought, I’m not driving back there. It’s too late. I’m tired. I don’t feel like explaining myself to anybody. I should have known, though, the clues were there. I was munching on fries during my drive home, and I could tell something was wrong. It wasn’t until I noticed that receipt, it said, “no salt.” Why would you want fries with no salt? They’re gross, piping hot sticks of pure vegetable oil. And the cup that they gave me my drink in, I realized it afterward, but it said “sweet tea” on the side. Sweet tea is nasty, it’s glorified sugar water. Come on. I even thought I checked the bag after she gave it to me, but I really must have just gone through the motions of checking it out, moving my head down as if I would have looked in it, moving things around without actually taking a second to think, OK, is this what I ordered? Should I drive home now? I messed up, man, I totally blew it.

I haven’t missed a day yet

I’m up in the Berkshires for my brother’s wedding, and I’m in a little bit of a bind here. It’s about twenty minutes to midnight, and I haven’t posted anything to my blog yet. It’s not a big deal, not really, but I haven’t missed a day in over two years, and I don’t want to break the streak just yet.

Normally when I go away on vacation, I’ll set it up so that the blog will automatically post something that I have ready to go, but I’ve been so busy lately, I forgot to take care of it before I left. And so here I am, I’m on my cell phone, I’m trying to get something down, anything, just to keep my record intact.

It’s a great motivation to write every day, but yeah, I don’t really have anything right now. And does this really count? I could probably force out eight hundred words of filler or so if I really wanted to, stuff about writing and a daily practice and being busy and stuff.

But I’m tired. And this counts, right? Yeah, I’ll let it count. If it’s this or nothing, this is definitely something. It counts.

Can we stop saying Western Queens?

I’ve been seeing it a lot lately, the term “Western Queens.” And I don’t think that this is one of those instances where I just noticed something that’s always been there, and now I’m seeing it everywhere. No, I think this is a trend happening, that we’re in the very early stages of the creation of a buzzword. And I don’t like it.

What purpose does Western Queens serve? None. It doesn’t serve any purpose. Whenever you see it used on blogs or in conversation, it’s almost always in reference to Astoria or Long Island City. And that’s it, Western Queens. I guess it should be a little more encompassing, right? What about Sunnyside, Woodside, or Jackson Heights among others? I mean, if you look at a map of Queens, those are all definitely western neighborhoods.

I think what happened is that people who moved to Astoria and Long Island City started going around talking about how much they love Queens, how it’s such a great place to live. And then they probably ran into a friend or a coworker that grew up in Queens, but somewhere else, like Bayside, or Jamaica. And they did the whole, “Don’t you just love Queens?” thing, and after about two or three sentences of awkward conversation, it became painfully obvious that they didn’t know anything about Queens, not really, just Astoria and Long Island City. And so, determined not to make the same mistake again, they latched onto the term Western Queens. “Isn’t Western Queens great?”

I just picked up a copy of BORO magazine, it’s the free circular they give out at all of the cool coffee shops and paninierias around here. And on the cover, it just said, “LIC.” Inside, the editor-in-chief wrote his whole introduction, and he kept saying it, over and over again, Western Queens, it’s such a community, what a sense of place.

At my restaurant in midtown, we just started serving Singlecut Pilsner on tap. They make it right here in Astoria. And when the managers told the wait staff about the brewery and how to describe this particular beer, we were encouraged to read a particular script, to say something along the lines of, “It’s local, it’s from right over the bridge in Western Queens.”

Why does it bother me so much? Because I can just hear it, when you say Western Queens, what you’re really trying to say is, Cool Queens. And you really don’t even care about saying the Queens part, it’s the Cool that you’re really going after. It’s fad terminology, like when East Williamsburg was all anybody could talk about around five or so years ago, before everybody started making fun how ridiculous it was, East Williamsburg, just a clever marketing trick to get people to move to Bushwick, and now it doesn’t matter, go ahead and say Bushwick, that’s trendy as hell too.

But at least Bushwick is an actual neighborhood. Western Queens is just dumb. I’m telling you, just keep your ears open. Maybe you’ve never heard it before, but I guarantee that you will, over the course of the next year or so, one of your friends or coworkers is going to casually slip it into conversation, maybe they’ll invite you out for a drink at one of those cool beer gardens in Western Queens.

You know the New York State government actually tried to make a law a while back that would have prevented real estate agents from just making up trendy neighborhood names for random sections of housing across the city. Why? Because it’s just a cheap way to invent bogus prestige, to drive up rent prices in an already inflated market, yes, but it’s also just really lame.

Western Queens just sounds really stupid, and I’m hearing it a lot lately, and I wish that I wasn’t. But what am I going to do, right? I’m just some random guy complaining about an ever-changing city, and I guess that’s pretty lame too.

I had a pencil sticking out of my leg

One time when I was like ten or eleven, I remember running around the house, a full sprint through the living room, around the kitchen, back again into the TV room. I was just doing laps, a little kid with way too much energy and nowhere to go, no place to really burn off any steam. On this particular day, my theatrics weren’t getting any attention, nobody yelled at me to stop, or calm down, and so after a while it got kind of boring, like a flame deprived of oxygen, without managing to get a reaction out of anybody, I slowly burned myself out.

But not before going out with a bang, my cooped up, ten or eleven year old version of a stuck-inside-the-house grand finale. I climbed up onto the arm of the sofa, jumped into the air, and tucked my legs under my arms, hoping to land like a cannonball onto the couch cushions.

Only, as soon as I hit the furniture, I felt something sharp, stabbing me in the leg. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, really. I’m the oldest of six, and back when we were all younger, a house jam-packed with little kids, there was just stuff everywhere, little pieces of toys, crayons. This time there happened to be a pencil stuck in between the couch cushions. How it got like that, positioned so that the point was sticking straight up, I have no idea.

But that’s how it was, like a spike, my right leg landing directly on top with all my body’s weight to really drive it in. I looked at my leg, I couldn’t even react, not really. It was such a weird sight. The pencil had to have been at least an inch and a half deep inside my shin. You couldn’t see the point, or any of the wood, just the yellow back end protruding from my leg.

My little sister Emily was like four or five years old, and she was the only one close enough to actually see the whole impaling go down. But she was a little kid, and while I appreciated her look of shock, this was a much bigger deal that just that, worthy of a lot more attention, the kind of attention I was constantly craving, my need for spectacle the driving force behind most of my actions, my running around the house, my indoor acrobatics.

My mom wasn’t in the house. She was there just a second ago, but now I couldn’t find her. I needed her to see this. I ran outside of the house and down the driveway, but no luck. After a minute or so, I looked down at my leg. For the first time, I was starting to freak out a little, the gravity of the situation sunk in somewhat, that I had a pencil in my leg. I reached down and yanked it out.

And it just slid right out, easily. It bled, but not that badly. In fact, looking at the wound from the outside, you couldn’t really tell that a whole pencil had been lodged inside just a second earlier. I deflated a little, like maybe I should have kept it in there a while longer.

When I went back inside, my mom was back in the kitchen. “Mom, where were you! I just stabbed myself with a pencil. It was in really deep! Mom, look, it’s bleeding! Mom! Mom!” And she looked at it, but like I said, the after shot didn’t really do any justice to how severe this thing looked when it was still sticking out of my leg.

“Yeah?” she asked, “Well, it doesn’t look too bad. I think you’ll be OK.” But she didn’t get it. Nobody got it. Nobody except for my little sister Emily, but she was way too little to have any sort of a significant testimony. I had wasted it, a golden opportunity to make use of what looked like a potentially serious injury, without any real danger or lasting damage.

Because, for real, why didn’t it bleed? I swear I’m not exaggerating, that thing was in deep. Shouldn’t it have hit something? Wouldn’t you have expected a lot more pain?

My only consolation is that, after all these years, my sister Emily still claims to remember exactly how the situation played out, my dramatic leap onto the couch, the heart-stopping realization that there was a pencil stuck deep inside of my leg. And so it’s nice to have some sort of confirmation that I hadn’t just made it all up. I think so. I hope so. I mean, she was really little. Part of me wonders if I hadn’t coerced the memory onto her by sheer force of will. I just wish that everybody could have seen it. I wish that everybody could have been paying attention to me.

Haha that’s so funny

Whenever I settle in to write something down, I’m usually aiming for funny. But how do you turn on funny? I have no idea. Spoiler alert: this probably isn’t going to be funny at all. I know from experience that, if you really, really try to be funny, if you truly want it, it’s never going to happen. Even worse, it’s going to show. Your lame attempt to make people laugh is going to come off as: look at me everybody, I’m trying really hard to be funny.

And so it’s like I said, I have no idea how to turn on the funny. I’m not even sure that I’ve ever written anything funny. That sounded terrible. It sounded like a poor invitation for me to get anybody reading this to think to themselves, no, come on Rob, you’re funny, don’t be like that.

But what I mean to say is, I can never tell if what I think is funny will at all translate to funny for a general audience. I’ll have ideas that pop into my head all the time, some of them very funny. I’ll be at work, or at the grocery store, and I’ll start laughing. I’ll take out my iPhone and open up the notepad app, thinking, this is great, this is going to be so funny when I go home and write it out.

And then I’ll sit down at my computer and I’ll look at my notes and nothing makes sense anymore. I mean, I can read what I wrote down, and yeah, I kind of have the memory of what I was going for when it came to me earlier. But where is the funny? It’s not funny anymore. I don’t know what happened, or where it went. That’s unfortunate, but at least it’s straightforward. I had a funny idea that didn’t translate into funny writing and so there’s nothing I can do really.

But sometimes it’s not as obvious. Every once in a while I’ll write something that’s looking pretty funny. I’ll get all giggly as I type the words onto the keyboard. By the time I’m done, maybe my sides hurt, maybe it’s actually cost me something trying to maintain my composure long enough to sit still and make coherent sentences out of whatever’s going on inside my head.

That has to be funny, I’ll think, that was so funny just writing it, there’s no way it’s not going to be funny. And I’ll calm down and I’ll let it sit for a second and, when I come back, something’s happened. It’s the same piece of writing, but the funny is nowhere to be found. It’s as if it never existed in the first place. I panic, I reread it back to myself a couple more times, come on, there had to have been something. I mean, I was laughing, that was a real feeling. If there’s nothing on the screen that’s funny, what was I laughing at before? What was so funny?

And I’ll try to force the funny. Maybe I’ll just go ahead with it, and then I’ll get disappointed when I can tell that nobody else thinks it’s funny. Because I don’t know. I have no idea how any of this stuff is ever going to go over.

And then in some cruel cosmic twist, every once in a while I’ll get serious and try to write something substantial. I’m making a point, I feel like I’m actually using my words to convey some sort of a larger message. And I’ll read it and reread it and eventually I’ll post it on this blog.

And someone will be like, “Haha, Rob, that’s funny.”