On the Job

Behold! An exchange between me and my boss:

Me [4:12 PM]:
  I am rereading my email to you regarding the Showtime pitch and realizing I sound like an overly professional bitch with NO FEELING, which is totally unintentional.
  As I am not at all professional.
  But this also explains why that Syfy assistant thought I was like 35 and wore pencil skirts.
Boss [4:12 PM]:
  HA

We are really professional you guys. Seriously, though, the day I wear a pencil skirt...

White Girl Problems: Static aka It's Really Fucking Dry Out

Static is really annoying. Like super duper annoying. I hate humidity but sometimes staticity is just so much worse. Is staticty a word? It feels like it is. I mean, it sounds science-y enough, right? Fuck it, for the sake of this rambling inner monologue it's a word.

So like, let me tell you about some of this bullshit with static.

LA is a dry city. I know, I know, we're on the coast and do have some super humid days, especially where I live in Santa Monica. And like, my roommates and I always bitch and moan about how wet it is and how our clothes and towels never seem to dry properly and oh man my room that we jokingly call a boat sometimes really does feel like a boat because it's got this like, moist (ew, ew, ew, I hate that word but I can't think of any other way to describe it) feel all the time. 

Otherwise, for the most part this town is seriously dry.

Right now I am wearing this silk shirt and I'm having some serious cling issues. And my hair is all dry and nasty and stringy and it sort of looks like I maybe got my finger stuck in an electric socket earlier this morning. And don't even get me started on my skin and what this dry climate is doing with that. Let me just tell you this: not cool.  I can tell it's going to be one of those days where I am hyper aware of staticity and cling location (for example I just looked down and my shirt's clinging all weird and I've got an inappropriate amount of boobage happening which is also just not okay for the workplace) and I'm just going to be annoyed all day long. UGH MY LIFE IS SO HARD.


Okay.

False.


My life is not hard, like, AT ALL. But static is just really annoying and it's really fucking dry out and I'm over it and think I could probably use a few days in a miserable humid place like Florida to remind me how much I love dryness. You know?

A Haunting Music Video for "Creep" - Just in Time for Halloween

I can't stop watching this video. It's beautiful, haunting, troubling, creepy, weird and insane. And seemingly appropriate for Halloween.

Creep (Radiohead) - Scala and Kolacny Brothers from Alex Heller on Vimeo.

Crystal Castles + The Cure = Brilliance.

This is obviously going to be scored for a montage scene in something I write...

Huh. This is sort of what I sound like when I am yelling at my boss to leave so he won't be late for meetings.

BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes.

Gourds are weird. This is epic:

IT'S DECORATIVE

GOURD SEASON, MOTHERFUCKERS.

BY COLIN NISSAN

- - - -

I don't know about you, but I can't wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I'm about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it's gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There's a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.

I may even throw some multi-colored leaves into the mix, all haphazard like a crisp October breeze just blew through and fucked that shit up. Then I'm going to get to work on making a beautiful fucking gourd necklace for myself. People are going to be like, "Aren't those gourds straining your neck?" And I'm just going to thread another gourd onto my necklace without breaking their gaze and quietly reply, "It's fall, fuckfaces. You're either ready to reap this freaky-assed harvest or you're not."

Carving orange pumpkins sounds like a pretty fitting way to ring in the season. You know what else does? Performing an all-gourd reenactment of an episode of Diff'rent Strokes—specifically the one when Arnold and Dudley experience a disturbing brush with sexual molestation. Well, this shit just got real, didn't it? Felonies and gourds have one very important commonality: they're both extremely fucking real. Sorry if that's upsetting, but I'm not doing you any favors by shielding you from this anymore.

The next thing I'm going to do is carve one of the longer gourds into a perfect replica of the Mayflower as a shout-out to our Pilgrim forefathers. Then I'm going to do lines of blow off its hull with a hooker. Why? Because it's not summer, it's not winter, and it's not spring. Grab a calendar and pull your fucking heads out of your asses; it's fall, fuckers.

Have you ever been in an Italian deli with salamis hanging from their ceiling? Well then you're going to fucking love my house. Just look where you're walking or you'll get KO'd by the gauntlet of misshapen, zucchini-descendant bastards swinging from above. And when you do, you're going to hear a very loud, very stereotypical Italian laugh coming from me. Consider yourself warned.

For now, all I plan to do is to throw on a flannel shirt, some tattered overalls, and a floppy fucking hat and stand in the middle of a cornfield for a few days. The first crow that tries to land on me is going to get his avian ass bitch-slapped all the way back to summer.

Welcome to autumn, fuckheads!

Thank you McSweeny's.

MATT DAMON

Okay I can't not see Matt Damon and not say MATT DAMON a la Team America. But then I watched this adorable YouTube video of him urging people to vote on the Working Families party line, and I love him so much more than I thought I already did. Especially when his voice kind of cracks holding the Yankees hat. Blech. I feel your pain MATT DAMON.

In more adorable Matt Damon news, his wife had another baby girl over the weekend. I am convinced the reason he and Ben Affleck have such perfectly darling families filled with beautiful little girls is all thanks to their New England upbringing.

Halloween on 'Community'

I'm not going to say anything. Okay I am: I am going to say that you should watch this preview for the Halloween episode of Community and then ask yourself "what is wrong with me that I am not watching this show, and how can I rectify this potentially fatal error?"

I know. WATCH COMMUNITY.

This R2D2 Swimsuit is EPIC

Have you ever been watching Star Wars and thought to yourself, "R2 would look great as a one-piece swimsuit!"? No? Me neither. But in case you have:

bleep bloop bloop bleep

You can buy it here. Oh and if I see any chicks wearing this as a Halloween costume I will punch them in the face.

it's raining, it's pouring, the old man is snoring...

It's another dreary day in LA, but I am perfectly okay with the gray weather - it feels like we're getting a fall! So I'm back to wearing my Barbour coat and my cowboy boots and looking like I'm going on hunting trips in the English countryside. Which, frankly, sounds just lovely.

 Anyone know the rest of that nursery rhyme? You know "it's raining, it's pouring, the old man is snoring" and then something about bumping his head? Yes?

Chiquitita: Most Underrated ABBA song?

Okay. So this song is either called "Chiquita" or "Chiquitita." Those crazy Swedes definitely pronounce the former version but I've seen it listed as the latter in places.  Regardless, I think this song is especially underrated in the ABBA catalog. I am unclear as to what they're singing about and the video is real weird.  However - this jam is epic, wouldn't you agree?

Sometimes I relate to Veruca Salt, don't you?

I totally relate to Veruca Salt sometimes.

I want the works

I want the whole works

Presents and prizes and sweets and surprises

Of all shapes and sizes and now

whole song below:

I want a ball

I want a party

Pink macaroons and a million balloons and performing baboons

And give it to me now

I want the world

I want the whole world

I want to lock it all up in my pocket

It's my bar of chocolate

Give it to me now

I want a today

I want tomorrow

I want to wear 'em like braids in my hair and I don't want to share 'em

I want a party with room-fulls of laughter

Ten thousand tons of ice cream

And if I don't get the things I am after

I'm going to scream

I want the works

I want the whole works

Presents and prizes and sweets and surprises

Of all shapes and sizes and now

Thanks to my friend Sarah for sending me the lyrics and reminding me of this gem.

Halloween!

Okay you guys. Based on what you know of me - whether or not you are one of my best childhood friends and know everything about me... or you just have an opinion formed completely on your perception of the posts in this here blog - what the hell should I be for Halloween?

I refuse to do any of that "Slutty Nurse" bullshit. That's just an excuse to dress like a slut. If you want to dress like a slut, dress like a slut, and then tell people you are a slut. Profound, right? Needlepoint that shit.

80s Ski Suit

Anyhoo - I've been toying with ideas ranging from - a little kid, an old lady who lives in Florida and spends too much time on the beach, Rocky, a zombie, a Lobsterman, an 80s skiier (please note I end up dressing like an 80s athlete just about every year so I'm probably going to end up in a once piece ski suit at one point regardless of what I choose), a lobster, Punky Brewster, or.... yeah that's where I run out of ideas.  All I know is I want to be comfortable. I mean, unlike most girls, I view Halloween as the one time of the year I get to wear sweatpants out to a bar.


So, what should I be? Any and all suggestions are welcome.

The Descent into LA

A girl I know because she used to work at a company I used to work at, but I worked there before she did and we never overlapped, only happened to meet through a friend (she calls him "Mark" and he truly is that incredible), wrote this beautiful piece in This Recording - "In Which There's Nothing Like Looking at a Picture of a Haircut." It's epic, grandiose, cryptic, abstract, beautiful, and brutally honest - this is a piece that captures the descent into the maelstrom that is Los Angeles better than anything else I've read of late.

Some brutal truths:

After a while you find yourself folded into the city, lulled into a kind of daze. You stop reading books and talk about box office grosses instead. There's no need for philosophy in a place where the weather is this nice. Still, voices from the outside reach you every once in a while, make it hard for you to sleep. The people you went to college with are editorial assistants, non-profit coordinators, teachers, medical students.

And at the root of my every existential-crisis is this:

Because though you have spent the past three years working actively against it, the only thing you ever wanted to do is write. Now you leave work every day with the truth heavy in your soul: no one deserves that kind of life. For every story about the acceptance that came after 100 rejections, there are millions about people who wrote for eighty years and died humiliated, poor, hungry and alone. You should have gone into banking, you should have been pre-med, you should have joined a cult.

Perhaps it is not too late to join a cult.

Dudes, Emoticons, and Sex on the Kitchen Counter

As you can imagine, the life of a young professional working gal in her mid-20s is as fabulous and fashionable and superficial and everything Friends/Sex and the City/The Hills told us it would be. Am I right, ladies? ;)

See that "winkface" there? Do you understand what I was trying to convey using that cringe-inducing combo of a semi-colon and a parenthesis? (By the way, if I have to spell it out for you, just don't bother reading past this point). This brings me to a very pressing topic that I'd like to delve into in detail, and then open up to the floor (floor = comments section): Emoticons. Specifically, the use of emoticons by dudes.

I happen to be of a certain school of mind, along with the majority of my close girl friends, that it is seriously lame (and a potential dealbreaker) for a dude to use an emoticon in any form of written communication.  However, at the outset of any budding relationship (whether it's a post-hook-up text or date-planning email) 9 times out of 10 the dude is going to use one (or is it just LA guys? Because this definitely seems to be a phenomenon I've experienced with more frequency the past three years I've lived here).  

Okay fine, at the initial stage of any relationship, this is (and I say this begrudgingly of someone in the anti-emoticon camp) perfectly fine. I mean - the dude probably doesn't even realize he's doing it - I imagine him just switching into that mode of his brain where he's like "I'm talking to a girl, must write things in a way so that the girl will know my intentions, and thus, if I use a winkface emoticon, she will know that I am being both cute and sexually suggestive. And this can eventually lead to sex. Sex. Maybe on the kitchen counter." I mean, I don't think the dude is actually thinking all that, but I would surmise that when a guy is about to communicate with a chick, he transitions into a manner of addressing her that would be different from how he would his male friends or platonic female friends. I mean - he has to. Duh. Thus, the use of the emoticon.

I would almost argue this is necessary. In this day and age, when texting seems to be the most prominent form of communication in the casual relationship (at least at the start) how else can a guy get his point across? He wants to let the girl know he's into it, without being so blatant as "I am into it" or "Let's bone" or "I wanna do you on my kitchen counter" - because, let's face it - guys are apprehensive of rejection too (side note, dudes - sometimes being explicit works in your favor. So if you're waffling over whether or not to tell the chick you are interested in that you'd like to do her on your kitchen counter, she might be more receptive than you think). It's my theory that the emoticon serves as a sort of emotional insurance - he can put himself out there, suggest something with a degree of ambiguity, and hope that the girl picks up what he's putting down, without the risk of anyone's expectations blowing out of proportion.  It's also a way for the dude to gauge her interest - he throws out the emoticon which could potentially influence her response, and if she interprets it the way he intends it, then eventually they might just go to Poundtown on his kitchen counter.

Great. But here's the deal. Dudes using emoticons? LAME. And while it's permissible during the first stage or so of text messaging (so like, the first one to two texts sent), if it's a pattern that continues, I know that for me, and most of my friends, we're going to be a lot less interested in a guy who's using emoticons. Emoticons = dealbreaker.

However, I speak only from personal experience, and from talking with my select sample of friends - so I could be way off base here. In fact, I'm curious - what do the rest of you think?  Are we cold ice queens for feeling so staunchly opposed to emoticons?  Are dudes even aware of the fact that they're using emoticons? Is it merely an issue of personal interest and it shouldn't be examined as a representation of the general male psyche, at least when it comes to dating and relationships?  And is the fact that I find emoticon usage so repellent a tell-tale sign I'm going to die single and alone? 

Before I write myself off a ledge - please, please, please weigh-in in the comments below. I'm super curious to hear how everyone else feels about emoticons.

Banksy does 'The Simpsons'

Here's last night's epic - and statement-making - opening intro from The Simpsons, directed by reknowned graffiti artist Banksy.  Check it out:

Some thought-provoking stuff, right?

Kristen Bell + Christian Bale = Kristianne Bialle

This is the stupidest but also most amazing thing ever and I want to watch it over and over and over again because I laugh really fucking hard every time.

Source: Mikey

HAHAHAHAHAHA.

Hi. My Name is Annie, and I'm totally, completely, overextended.

I'm one of those people that likes to do everything. I have trouble saying no. I also have a tendency to just do as much as I possibly can until I'm on the brink of a nervous meltdown/existential crisis/both. Last night my dad called and I couldn't talk because I was pulling into a meeting at 7:30pm. I haven't talked to my dad on the phone - beyond a two minute "I'll call you back" since Labor Day weekend. THAT IS A MONTH AGO.

Earlier today I sent my dad and step-mom an email asking their opinion on whether or not I should pick up another class. My dad's worldly advice was:

I'd take five more classes and while you're at it, how about writing a couple more blogs.  Hey, you can write mine!  Also, you could probably squeeze in being a production assistant at another company and I'd like to hire you to do some research for us...and...

Perhaps you're just a bit over committed?

love,

Dad

Point taken - and that's some good fatherly advice.

Moral of the story: sometimes saying NO is the right thing to do...

This & That

+I've started a little guest-blogging stint for Zap2it.com - check out my piece "Stamos on Stamos" (more entries forthcoming) for a little taste. Mayhaps my dream for the "Stamos vs. Stamos Reality Show" is closer to becoming a reality. The irony in all this - at least, it's ironic to me - is that I never was really a diehard fan of John Stamos. It's just my nickname. And I happen to share the name with someone quite famous, which has led to a lot of funny posturing and comparisons (from my end, obv).  Thanks to Twitter for confusing everyone...

+In the world of TV and TV-watching, I'm already feeling pretty burnt out. Last night I was going through my DVR and caught at least 6 shows I'm already sufficiently behind in. Thing is, I am totally okay with that. That's the thing about people who work in television - they don't actually have time to watch TV. As long as I watch all the pilots and sort of just stay looped in, I am totally okay with not devoting the hours upon hours required for watching everything. Especially when I'd rather spend my free time Monday night working on my writing.

+Speaking of writing, it's so fun being in a class again - granted, it makes me really long for college days, but it's pretty great walking around the UCLA campus and going to classes.  Even better is this writing class is going to force me to start and make a dent in a new project entirely - I'm looking forward to that.

+I'm still convinced we're having an earthquake every five minutes. Okay, not that often but I swear to God I feel earthquakes all the time.

+I kind of want to learn how to play golf. It was the one country club sport I never learned, mostly because I spent most of my time at the club in the pool or being forced to tennis lessons. I feel like now I might really enjoy golf. I'm going to look into that.

+Why is it that the month following Labor Day is always so packed and stressful? It's as though this is the real start to the year - the real time for resolutions and plans.  Not sure I'm sticking to any of my goals. I think I need to find a better balance for my weekends where I am a little more productive and a little less not-sober. Ha. Or I need to figure out how to survive on less sleep. I once heard that Bill Clinton trained himself to get only 5 hours of sleep a night and it made a world of difference. How can I do that?