Overheard in Brooklyn: Douchey Couples

Ladies, in my two short weeks of living on my own in Brooklyn I have come to a realization: all of our friends and family people  are shit-talking us to their boyfriends. On multiple occasions while dining or brunching solo, I have overheard some variation of the following convo:

Boyfriend: Your friend/sister/cousin is so ugly.

Apparent Girlfriend: What? No.

Boyfriend: No, Babe. Babe. Babe, no. Her face looks like a toaster mated with a watermelon. Babe.

Girlfriend: But I think she’s so pretty!

Boyfriend: No Babe. Just no.

The incident that established this prototype happened at a table behind me at a Spanish place in Greenpoint. From what I could hear, they were systematically addressing the attractiveness of all females on the GF’s Instagram. What kind of asshole does this, seriously? Who sits down and says, “Hey, how about you tell me how attractive or unattractive everyone I love is, and when we don’t agree you can belittle my opinion?” But only the women. Funny how that works, eh?

 

For the record, I would not have banged this guy.

I imagine he’s an aspiring pop star, currently shopping a single entitled “Babe (Babe, No).”

Arguably worse were the couple I encountered in back room restaurant of a Scandi joint that did tasting menus with beer pairings (review to come, possibly). The guy and the girl were equally wangs. A match made in dick heaven. My butt jostled their water glasses on my way into the booth. They got their revenge by being horribly annoying the rest of the night. They were very concerned with random celebrity body parts; Chris O' Dowd’s penis (“You mean his real penis?”), Scar Jo's boobs (“But were they like, her actual boobs?”).

 

When the girl declared that teaching is the easiest profession to do if you have kids, I nearly threw my glass of Seson in her face. Also, she did physical affection like an alien working hard to pass undetected amongst the humans. She kept leaning forward to jerkily rub the knee of her companion in a circular motion. It reminded me simultaneously of curry combing a horse and a vigorous handjob. Later she did a thing that might actually been an attempted handy-j. She also did this rambunctious patting thing that did not look pleasant.

The artisanal beer that almost ended up in some tramp's face.

 

"She's pretty thin. Not very chesty, though." The guy said, apparently of a family member. You guys, this is how all of your male relatives discuss your body behind your back to their pretentious alien girlfriend.

Furthermore, I would like to say to all couples and people who dine in groups, when you are seated next to a solo gal who looks engrossed in a history of Byzantium/ Vonnegut paperback/slowly decomposing journal, she can hear you. She can see your hand on your man friend’s wang and it is making her uncomfortable.

It’s making everyone uncomfortable. Go back to your room and screw, pervs.

So, I guess the point of all this is to say Thank You to any of my friends or family people who have ever had this conversation:

Boyfriend: Erin is so ugly. She looks like a potato mated with a firetruck.

Utter Goddess: Hey, fuck you, I love Erin, and I couldn’t give a shit if you think she’s attractive.

Star Goddess Extraordinaire: Also? Erin is super pretty. Suck it.

 

Friends and family people: DUMP THIS GUY. The only ass he should be giving this much consideration to is yours. Or maybe porn butts (I’m a realist).

So this one time I tried to write a book...

While I was living in London, I had the insane idea to try and write a book. An encounter had just taken place betwixt myself and a devastatingly attractive person, and yours truly was crafting some very intricate scenarios in my mind for how we would meet , and justifications for why someone so appealing would stoop to date a chubby American geek, such as myself. Then someone told a story about being at a banquet with E.L. James, novelist and main perpetrator of misconceptions about BDSM.

The proverbial light bulb went off above my head.

If James could write bad fanfic where nobody behaves like a real human and make millions of dollars off of it, why couldn't I write good fanfic with relatable characters and make, like, a totally reasonable amount of money?

And so began a period of furious writing; between June and August I churned out 30,000 words. By the end of September, it was longer than my Master's Thesis. As I worked on it, I came to realize that yeah, there was a love-story there, about a girl with issues and a big butt trying to cope with the experience of getting exactly what she wished for, but that wasn't the point of it. The real romance was between a girl (butt and issues still in place) and her city. I thought the point of the story was to write about my hilarious crush, but really it was an excuse to write about London and the scenes and sensations I felt while I was there.

So it seems kind of fitting, after my last blog, to post an excerpt of what I've written. An exploration, of my doomed love affair with London, if you will.
Even if it is just my Mom and my cousin reading this.

Me: Let me love you!

My Cousin: LET ME EAT YOUR FACE!

This scene is the main character, Dani (who is basically a better, more confident version of me), describing her walk to work after having had a romantic disappointment.

Enjoy (I hope)!
______________________________________________________________________

The next day, I walked 45 minutes to work. This is as per usual because by some perverse quirk of the London transit juggernaut-clusterfuck, there is no tube or bus route that does not actually make this journey longer. One can, if one has the means, get a cab, but if one does not leave at exactly the right moment, exactly 9:30 or exactly 10:15 (by which time I would be super late for work) one will inevitably get sucked into the vortex of traffic that is the Old Street Roundabout. It isn’t an unpleasant walk, delicious smells waft from many dodgy looking food vendors, there is some badass street art, and the view is always improved by stubbly-jawed gentlemen in tight pants with meticulously tousled hair.

You routinely run into interesting, even anachronistic, characters that look like they were simply plucked from some exotic or past setting and dumped into the middle of a modern metropolis. For instance, I once saw a man who looked, for all the world, as if he had just wandered out of some spicy-scented middle-eastern bazaar onto the wet, gray pavement outside of Liverpool Street Station. He wore flowing white and taupe robes and a white cap on his gnarled, tan head. A thin, white tendril of a goatee spiraled off of his chin like a twisted tree branch. In his arms he held a huge bushel of peacock feathers, each one almost as long as he was tall. He didn’t appear to speak any English, but was hawking them aggressively to passerby with a toothless smile that never wavered.

That’s routine in London: the uncommon is so common that it becomes commonplace.

Routines can be depressing and monotonous, but they can also be a comfort. For instance, I find it comforting to walk past my neighborhood Subway twice a day, on my way to work and on my way home. It is a known fact that every Subway in every corner of the world smells exactly the same. It reminds me of home in a way that isn’t personal enough to incite homesickness.

More unpleasant is the smell of the people that one walks by, especially first thing in the morning. London women, especially those dressed in the sort of dressy casual business attire that marks them as working in the city, wear a prodigious amount of scent. When you walk past one of these gals, it hits you in the face like you’ve just walked into a tangible wall of synthetically produced fragrance. I think I could handle it more if the scents were varied, but there are really only five that I smell on a regular basis: there is the one that sort of smells like coconut, and the one that sort of smells like flowers, the one that smells nice but in an old shoe type of way, the one that I’m sure is meant to smell “spicy” but ends up smelling faintly of tacos, and the one that I think must be Chanel because it has a vague bottom note of Nazi operative. Equal parts delightful and disgusting, my morning commute always served as a reminder of where I was: the center of the known world.

On Seeing A New City

I’m about to say something I never thought I would say:

I miss the Tube.

It isn’t that the Subway in NYC isn’t that much different conceptually, being crammed into an underground cigar tube with a bunch of strangers is much the same anywhere (except Paris. THE HORROR). But the signs are less easy to understand, there are fewer maps, and it’s slower and less efficient. Last night the train I was on stopped service for seemingly no reason, and the doors always take forever to close.  Also, everything is newer and therefore less pretty (not you, Greenpoint Ave station, I like your green tiles).

But it isn't New York's fault. See, I’ve figured out what is happening with me emotionally. It’s like I was seeing this guy named London and what we had together was real. We both loved history and ethnic food and cold, misty nights. But we were torn apart, star-crossed lovers, by our families (by this I mean our governments and their visa laws).

And now I’m seeing New York, who is like, the nicest guy. Everyone says he’s great, better than London even. I thought London was The One, but all these new voices say that NYC should be my main squeeze. I can't shake it; I’m still hung up on my last boyfriend, the one with the sexy accent.

Maybe New York is my rebound.

If you’ve only lived in one place your whole life this might be a difficult concept, but when you move to a new city, totally by yourself, it can truly feel like you are dating that city. You go to Yelp or Urbanspoon to figure out where New York is taking you for dinner that night. You ask the girls who have been seeing London for a while what their favourite dates are with their city. You sit alone at bars listening to the voices around you, tasting the neighborhoods, learning the ambient sounds. You get used to hosts/hostesses asking “Just you?” and you say yes, because it would sound insane if you said “Excuse me but Eugene, Oregon and I are on our second date, do you mind?”

So I’m not speaking totally metaphorically (or rationally) when I say I’m still getting over my last city. So far, all of the things I like about NYC are things that remind me of my lost London (woe). It doesn’t help that the area I’m staying is just like Dalston (the area to the north of where I lived in London [coincidentally, to the south of Greenpoint is Williamsburg, which is generally acknowledged to be the Shoreditch of New York]) except everyone is Polish instead of Turkish. 

Less kebabs here. Little upset about that.

Luckily, my new BFF Brooklyn has been taking me out for some delicious cocktails.

Baby's First Day In New York

On my first day in New York City, it snowed.

It snowed a lot.

I didn't pack any serious snow gear, for the simple reason that I don't own any, so by the end of the day I was basically an abominable snowlady. No wait, that sounds too majestic, I was an abominable snow drowned rat.

I ventured forth again today only to have my train break the hell down or something, so I power walked to my 7pm show and arrived about 15 minutes late. I am so upset about missing the opening number that I might go back again. Also, there are other reasons. Mainly to stalk Ron Weasley. More on that in a sec.

I feel like the musical "Once" has become a bit of a routine for me. I aw in back in March in London, after seeing on a poster at Green Park tube station that an actor I liked was in it. I damn near fell of the escalator. It's a hilarious, beautiful, and very human show. It's so damn good that I can forgive it for falling so heavily into the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope. My Mom, who has what might be termed better taste in music and movies than I do, made me watch the simple, unspectacular and singularly lovely indie film that the stage play is based on. Being a teenager, I flounced back to my room, probably to stare at pictures of boys with dyed-black hair. But later, I stealthily downloaded all the songs from the film on Kazaa, or LimeWire, or whatever platform we were using to cheat musicians of their hard-earned coke money that year.

The cast was better in London, but Once has officially dethroned Phantom of the Opera as my favorite musical.

The musical really expounds wonderfully on the richness of Irish culture (it's set in Dublin), as well as that of the immigrant experience in Ireland themes which were present, but underused in the film. It also adds new songs, develops snippets of songs from the movies into full-fledged numbers, and adapts the melody of the Oscar-Winning "Falling Slowly" into a score that is at times whimsical and others haunting. The first time I saw it, I was so charmed that I felt suffused with happiness, due in part to the fact that I hadn't experienced any theater in probably years. I felt a lot of hope, and I felt like all of the lyrics applied to my own life. Lots of people feel that way, I'm sure, universality is the magic of a well-written pop song. I cried then, and I cried tonight, but for very different reasons.

After the show, the GPS on my phone wasn't working, so I waited outside the theater to give it a minute to boot up. But the actors on their way home thought I was there for autographs, so I just went with it. The lead actor, however, didn't show. Who the hell do you think you are, Steve Kazee? You're not. You don't do the little butt-dance thing nearly as well as he did (I would find a video of said butt-dance, but frankly I'm scared to Google it).

This cutie plays a Czech drummer with the immortal line "More soul. Less pants."

 He definitely leaned his head against mine, which is the most action I've gotten since I left London.

As I was leaving, a man crossed my line of vision wearing a familiar looking beanie. It was Nathan fucking Lane, and he was wearing the exact same beanie he had worn ten years ago when I saw him leaving "The Producers." God, I hope he splashed out for a new beanie at some point. There was a huge crowd waiting to meet the stars of "It's Only a Play," who include Lane, Stockard Channing, Megan Mullaly, Matthew Broderick, and Rupert Grint. If you know me, then I assume you know the Grint was in the Harry Potter films. RON WEASELY WAS NEXT DOOR TO ME THE WHOLE NIGHT AND I NEVER KNEW! So yeah, I might go back. I might see the play. I might just buy a parka and wait outside the theater every night until I can get myself a sweet, sweet selfie with him.
So, I didn't get to fangirl all over Grint, but Matthew Broderick signed autographs and took pictures with everyone. Such a class act. I really appreciate him mustering a smile for this picture.

Erin and Matthew, ten years after our first encounter



 And then I saw this giant billboard of my boyfriend in Time Square!

I share him with many women, both human and dwarf-kind, one assumes. It's a very modern arrangement.

An Introduction To The Confusing Origin Of The Sexpire. I Mean Vampire.

Vampires tend to go in and out of style, but even when millions of teens and their sexually frustrated moms are not freaking out about the latest “teen has romance with vampire, but somehow does not end up as dinner” story, vampires are an ever present shadow on modern pop-culture, cast by centuries of folklore. The enduring fascination with vampires is perhaps best expressed in Bram Stoker’s classic novel Dracula, which though it incorporated no real folklore, got one thing terrible right: much like the loud general in Dr. Strangelove, we are all about the bodily fluids. Although Dracula is said to be written in the coded style of the Victorians, heavy with uncanniness. However, my reaction to it was HOW IN THE HELL IS THIS CODED? THIS IS OBVIOUSLY ALL ABOUT BANGING! DRACULA AND MINA ARE TOTALLY 69ING RIGHT NOW AREN’T THEY? THEY ARE 69ING ON A BOAT I CAN’T EVEN. So when you read Stoker’s extraordinary novel, just know that all that blood represents…something else.

 

 The real life inspiration for Dracula, Vlad the Impaler.

I like to think the Impaler nickname is a double entendre. A warlord in the streets, a freak in the sheets, amirite?

And because of writers like Stoker, and writers who totally suck unlike Stoker, the concept of what a vampire is has gotten totally distorted. Suddenly, anything undead or drinking blood can be called a vampire. As someone who once tried really hard to cultivate the title Erin the Vampire Scholar (geddit?) I will not stand for that shit. A vampire needs to have a) the fangs, b) the undeadness, c) the blood drinking, and d) a creepiness that relates to sex, but not necessarily in a hot way. The first place that this particular vampire developed was in Eastern and Central Europe, in various Slavic communities. The reason that random blood drinkers, like the Indian Goddess Kali are sometimes called vampires has to do with something called daemon contamination, where everybody gets their bad guys all mixed up with each other. For instance, it’s been hypothesized that the vampire’s entanglement with sex comes from daemon contamination with the Slavic mora, a demon that raped people in their sleep (mora-mare-nightmare). But bar none, my favorite vampire misunderstanding is the theory that Jesus Christ was a vampire because he rose from the dead and encouraged his followers to drink blood. That shit is cray.

 

Easy rule to remember: if it's not trying to fuck you or kill you, it's not a vampire.

Your average Slavic vampire was probably not the sort of person that you envision yielding your virginity to under a full moon. First of all, he would arrive for your first date total bloated (a side effect of being totally hella dead), decaying (…from deadness), and possibly stuffed with apotropaic garlic, so passionate kissing is off the menu. His breath might even taste of blood if you aren’t his first meal, I mean date, of the evening.

Sidebar: Apotropaic is a great folklore word, the sort of thing that makes people think you really know what you are doing (you don’t). It basically means preventative or protective, so in this case it denotes all of the weird shit they did to dead bodies before burial to keep them safely unvampired. Like, preemptive heart-staking, decapitation and stuffing the mouth of a dead body with garlic.

Also repels second dates like a charm.

But it is actually unlikely that this is your first date with your undead love, in fact he is probably your recently deceased husband, come to chastise you for getting back into the dating game too soon. The wife of the deceased was most often the first person to be visited by the vampire. It was not unusual in the highly patriarchal societies of Eastern Europe for husbands to demand their marital rights posthumously, which general lead to the wife’s eventual death. More on that in a sec.

Psychoanalysts have theorized that this is a psychological phenomenon to do with survivor’s guilt and the propensity of the survivor to feel responsible for their loved one’s demise. Not because they killed they killed their husband or family member, but because at some point they thought to themselves “Gah Dad, your weird jokes are like, so embarrassing. I wish you would just die!”

There is some (theoretically) scientific explanation for this as well. Much of vampire lore springs from populations having little or no knowledge of how infectious diseases work. So when a town got sick, Patient Zero was branded a vampire. Of course his wife and family would die first, not because he came back to vamp them, but because they had the closest contact and became infected first.

Such is life for the Slavic vampire. Thanks to that pesky “daemon contamination” (getting your bad guys all mixed up), vampires were blamed for everything from bad weather to strange noises in the attic, to, of course, mysteriously pregnant widows.  As you can see, widows were straight up vampire bait. If they weren’t imagining their dead husbands coming back to life, or dying because of their dead husband’s plague, they were using the dead husband to explain away their inconvenient pregnancies. Because hey, it’s not cheating if it’s with your dead husband’s corpse.

Till death do us part? Amateurs.

The cultural of tradition of machismo that made villagers think that it was totally reasonable for a man to maintain sexual control over his wife after his demise is same factor that influenced and formed the Vampire legend itself, with its cycle of biting and staking (I lay this theory out more fully in my 2012 conference paper “Gender and Control: Penetrating the Vampire Legend”). Going back to Ancient Rome even, we can see that sexual penetration represented a statement of power in patriarchal society (one could argue very well that this is still the case). So when things happened that affected a man’s ability to do man stuff like take care of his fields and keep his horny, widowed sister out of trouble, people created a creature whose power and horror lay in one allegorical, penetrative moment: the biting of the vulnerable neck with pointedly pointy fangs. Furthermore, they created a creature that could only be vanquished by stabbing it with a wooden dildo. I mean, come one. That’s what it is. Between the teeth and the stake (virtually the same shape), there are too many phallic symbols involved to discount (FYI “phallic” means “it looks like a wang”).

Get yo freak onnnnnnn.......

 

Now I know what you may be saying. Sometimes a gun is just a gun, and vampire fangs are just vampire fangs. And I say to you DID YOU LEARN NOTHING FROM STOKER? One of the most enduring and fascinating things about vampires is that they are never meaningless in our cultural imagination. Not even in Twilight, which had all sorts of fucked up implications. If you’re interested in reading about it, I highly recommend the analysis of blogger Cleolinda.

 

An important element of the vampire confusion is that this creature of the night doesn't only exist in Folklore and Literature, but as a character in History. There were several "vampire panics" in the 17th and 18th centuries. Obviously (well, probably) there were no actual vampires involved, but people were motivated by very real fear. We can put names to the maybe-undead and the villagers who persecuted their bodies, months and years after they were interred. To those villagers, lacking modern medical knowledge, every coffin contained Shrodinger's vampire. That's enough to put anyone on edge. Furthermore, my BFF Stoker did not help matters by dragging poor Vlad Tepes (Dracula) into it. Vlad, the pointy faced guy with the righteous goatee pictured above, was indeed a huge douche known for impaling people and being way too chill about his wives suicides, but literally the only thing Stoker utilized of Vlad's was his nickname which means "son of the Dragon" or "little dragon," depending on the translator.

So, I hope this has illuminated our fanged friends for you somewhat. What with questionable History channel programming and backseat folklorists posting misleading or unresearched information on tumblr, vampires are a singular site of confusion between history, folklore, and pop culture.

The Best Thing to Happen This Weekend

This is a segment in which the authoress will attempt to identify the absolute best moment from her weekend.

I'm not going to name names in this blog, because the best thing that happened this weekend might be a bit embarrassing to some involved parties. I wouldn't be embarrassed. I would tell this story at cocktail parties until the day I died (perhaps of too many cocktails).

 

I highly recommend the French 75 at the R&J Lounge and Supper Club.

 

This past Saturday, I narrowly avoided peeing myself on the floor of a casino. I actually find casinos kind of terrifying in concept, mostly because of a surreal experience I had years ago. I was driving home from a concert with friends. It was the dark of the early morning, in the middle of nowhere. And yours truly had to pee like a racehorse. So we stopped at the first place that materialized out of the night: an oasis of sickly flashing lights, ringed with semis and proclaiming in neon that they had restrooms. But to get to the ordinary, fluorescent lit truck stop part, I had to walk through a small casino, carpeted in yellow like a fading bruise and with more flashing lights, it was populated with a surprising number of dead-eyed, slack-jawed patrons pawing away at slot machines, oblivious to all else. The stench of bud light hung in the air. It had an otherworldly feel to it, like maybe all the people there were held captive by a fading Eastern deity ala American Gods who fed off of their hopes and their despair.

 

I have never peed so fast in my life.

 

This casino wasn't that bad, but frankly, we are all college educated women and we could not figure out how the damn slot machines worked. And the stocky bartender made a mean Sex on the Beach.

 

So the best part of the evening happened after we had all had some cocktails, but really it was a totally understandable mistake. See, several members of my family and I all had variations on the same lip product: lipstick that came in the form of a fat, vibrant pencil. So one member of our party reaches into the makeup pocket of her purse and pulls out a pencils, then draws thick lines of color onto her lips. Only that color was pitch black--she had grabbed a kohl pencil, meant for lining the eyes.

 

She didn't realize what she had done until she tried to rub her lips together to distribute the product, she turned to me with a bewildered look in her eyes. Not even grasping what had happened, I laughed until my eyes watered and all I could see of her mouth was a black "=" She looked down at the tar-colored pencil in her hand and back to me in horror, the truth dawning on her suddenly goth-y face.

 

The aftermath, cropped to protect the guilty. I mean, innocent.

 

"I thought this was may lip gloss!" She exclaimed, as I tried to wipe it off of her with a cocktail napkin. I couldn't breathe. I really thought that peeing myself was, like, a valid option in the situation.

 

Luckily, this family member is incredibly good-humored, and laughed along with me, making my efforts to clean her up really ineffective since we were both bouncing with giggles.

 

And that was the Best Thing That Happened This Weekend. Have a great week, everybody!