Celebrating my heritage...

These are the very important topics I discuss via my corporate instant messanger, in case you were wondering. Always working hard! So we're going out tonight to celebrate many things, not the least of which is Bastille Day! Yes I am going out to celebrate a holiday for a country in which I am a citizen but have a really laughable command of it's language (and based on this last sentence apparenly my command of the Enligsh language is also questionable!). Also Federico is visiting for the weekend, and I cannot wait to spend some quality time with Vintage, and Thea is here too from LA! Here's to friends, France, and my liver's fortitude!

I'll take the physical challenge!

90s Nickelodeon Nostalgia...yes please! (thanks Jezebel)

Don't get me wrong; I'm all for this. I haven't been this excited since I sat next to Marc Summers at Eataly last summer.  But am I the only one who thinks that Roundhouse should have gotten the look on this one?

Someone's ready for the weekend....

And people question why I only eat salad at my office cafeteria, the number of choices are just too overwhelming....

The Birds...

Pigeons Never Forget a Face?!?!?!
Ok this freaks me out, I hate pigeons with a passion. They're dumb, slow and once one pooped on me at the Central Park zoo when I was a kid; I still have an axe to grind with that bird (for those of you that are going to say it's good luck, get back to me when a bird shits on your forehead, you will not feel so lucky), in short pigeons are assholes.

My biggest issue with them is that it seems like 90% of the time they choose to walk rather fly. Crowding together on the sidewalk, clustering in huge groups in the park. I'm gonna go out on a limb (bird pun har) and say, if I had the god given ability to flap my arms and alight into the air I would absolutely never choose to chill out on the sidewalk with the rest of the earthbound. It's almost like they're saying "yeah I could fly if I wanted to, but nah I'll just hang out and do this totally inefficient head bop walk and gross you out if that's alright with you".

But after reading this I am going to be nicer than ever to my fellow city dwellers. I will never threaten to kick them again (please note these were veiled threats I would never actually hurt an animal, I don't need PETA coming after me), I won't call them rats with wings ,and will try to hide the look of total revulsion on my face when they chill out next to me on park benches. Because it seems like I may not be the only one with an axe to grind, that pigeon that I wished death on at age six in the zoo, remembers my punk ass and has been planning his retribution for when he runs into me again. And that is just frightening.

New Look

So you may have noticed that my blog has a slightly new steez going on. This change was spurred by the fact that my lovely ladies Amanda and Alli have been giving me shout outs on their own blogs and I have seen an uptick in traffic directly from their sites. So I felt the very least I could do was make my own blog look slightly less low budget. Now don't panic nothing is really changing. I will still completely lack a consistent vision, subject matter and style. My grammar will still be deplorable (and I will still use parentheses FAR too frequently to provide subtext to my own writing). And if only you could have been a fly on the wall to witness the spectacle of technological ineptitude that was my attempting to "make my blog pretty". Let's just say Google won't be offering me a job any time soon, which blows because I hear their cafeteria is off the chain.

Hot Time Summer In the City

Yo kids, it's finally summer, officially, well two days ago but better late than never right? During this wonderful season my list of things to get accomplished usually consists of things like: wearing jorts as much as physically possible (though lets be serious I wear them year round with two pairs of tights in January); wearing my sunglasses at night, attending as many picnics in the park (which is basically just an excuse to drink wine and eat cheese in a park…score!!), and go to free concerts. However, when questioned recently about my summer plans the only thing I came up with was "Stay Cool" let's hope that wasn't taken figuratively since with plans like that lined up I pretty much have already failed. Either way the list below is what I say I'm going to get done every summer, and rarely get accomplished, but here's hopin'


1. Skydive: I've got it in my head that my completely irrational fear of heights can be conquered by jumping out of a plane. The rationale behind this being that I'm only afraid of tangible heights, tops of buildings, rickety rope bridges, you know things I encounter on a daily basis working in investment banking, thank god I didn't have a calling to build skyscrapers or guide people through the Amazon. Anyway, I've convinced myself that 10,000 feet will be so high that it won't inspire the same toe tingling paralyzing fear, yeah right, I'm gonna need a sedative to even consider letting them pry my bony fingers off the door frame and push me out, and to whoever is forced to do the tandem jump with me, I apologize in advance.

2. Read Infinite Jest (or Atlas Shrugged) or any book north of 1000 pages, somehow I think this will make me feel more accomplished, enlightened, superior, who knows, haven't gotten it done thus far and no inferiority complex has resulted so we'll just leave it…moving on

3. Organize a fishing trip, this is one I bandy about every year and then when Panda mentioned how fun she thought it would be I figured well heck if someone else thinks this could be fun why not try to plan it. Well this one has gotten off to a bit of a rough start I made a valiant effort to guage interest in such an event by sending an email (if you didn't get the look on that one and want to come just holler at me) , and was pleasantly surprised to find that a whole bunch of you want to go out and catch some stripers, guantlets were thrown, and pictures exchanged of previous fishing endevours, but it turns out we're all so goddamn popular (well in reality we're all just invited to so many weddings) that what was meant to be an early July trip is beginnging to look like it will take place in late August, but either way, fingers crossed I'll get that one off the list. I just sincerely hope this time I manage to make it back from City Island without being pulled off the train in Hunts Point (SCURRY) for drinking 40s on the subway, you can drink on the LIRR and Metro North, what makes the subway so different???

So that's basically it, I've come to grips with the fact that I will probably only cross one of those three off my list by the end of the summer, and it'll probably be getting pulled off a subway for drinking 40s, but whatever, I do what I can.

Zportz....

You know having reintroduced this whole "fitness" thing into my life lately I am beginning to really miss the sports I participated in as a kid/teen, horseback riding and rowing. Unfortch I do recall that neither of these activities were low cost even back in the day when I was doing them courtesy of Poppa Breen (thanks dad!!!), so currently it appears I have champagne taste with a beer..wait no make that sparkling water budget..this is a post about fitness after all and while occasionally I work out hungover/potentially still intoxicated from the night before, drinking and fitness are not usually a good mix. Either way I started to look around to see if there were any low cost options to get my fix for either sport, first up rowing, we live on a island surrounded by water how hard could it be to find a place to row? Well you'll be happy to know there is an option that's fairly low cost, for those of you who are particularly motivated morning people (not me) you can participate in an adult masters rowing class which makes use of the Columbia boat house and gets you out on the Hudson at the ungodly hour of 5:45 am, thank you no I'll pass. I justified said laziness by saying taking the subway up to Columbia at that time of morning couldn't possibly be safe, right?!?!? That and my germaphobia took over and envisioned my slightly out of practice self getting out on the extremely polluted Hudson and "catching a crab" (yes I know what you're thinking wow how germaphobic is she I know the Hudson is polluted but is is really possible to catch an STD just by rowing on it??) no that extremely pleasant term is what rowers use to describe dipping their oar a bit too deep which results in the oar coming back into your midsection quite forcefully which can actually knock you out of the boat, and based on my track record this would definitely happen, and I'm pretty sure I would catch something much worse swimming around in that water. Undeterred by my own laziness and germaphobia which nixed my first option I moved on, horseback riding, something that could certainly be done at a more normal time, however, horses not so common on the island of Manhattan unless I hi-jack one of the carriage horses in the park or a police horse, neither of which seems like a reasonable plan. And taking the train out to Long Island or New Jersey on a weekend to ride while it sounds nice I already mentioned my penchant for going out in past blogs, and as mentioned above, hungover/still drunk exercising is not a good plan especially when said activity involves a 1300 lb animal that's potentially jumping over things, so back to square one, looks like I'll have to stick with the extremely pedestrian running and yoga that I'm already doing, le sigh, need to find me a sugar daddy with a summer house and a pony.

P.S. I'm sorry for the generic picture above, mostly I couldn't resist because it reminded me of something you would find on a trapper keeper folder and I'm feeling all nostalgic. But thankfully most of my athletic pursuits took place before my parents adopted the use of digital cameras, so all of the pictures and hours of video of my riding lessons and shows are snugly packed away in my parents house and on VHS. Maybe one day I will recover a tape or two and buy a VCR (what are they like $5 now?) and we can have a double feature of my horse show days and Chrissy's appearance on TRL in a cowgirl costume, at least the horse theme will be consistent!