Dateline: Wednesday, 12:07 pm, text from daughter Belle:
Conversation overheard in the bathroom:
“OMG do we have the same pants?”
“Wow, maybe! Lemme feel your ass. Nike yoga pants, shut the f up we do have the same ones!”
*lots of squealing*
“Hi I’m Tiffany, what’s your name?”
I’m surprised Tiffany and her new BFF didn’t whip out their phones and take selfies of their, like, totally awesome like-trousered asses…or whatever such vapid creatures do these days.
Yikes, that makes me sound old.
* * *
Speaking of things that make me feel old:
2014: The Year of Californians Wedding Frequently
Two nieces and one nephew from my side of the family are getting married this year. One in April, two in October, and all three weddings will take place somewhere in SoCal. We’d love for all four of us to be able to go to all three marital hitchings. K doesn’t know if his midterm schedule will allow for a weekend away in April; K and Belle will be in college, facing midterms, for the October weddings, K in his senior year and Belle in her freshman year…blah blah blah. Of course, there are complicated logistical/travel and financial considerations for getting all four of us to one wedding, let alone three. But hey, there are three California weddings. Yikes and Yee haw!
* * *
It seems I have mis-titled the previous section. It should read,
2014: The Year of Californians Wedding Frequently During the Year of the Horse
Gung Hay Fat Choy, or Happy New Year, to my Chinese-American SIL, “Joey,” and to all who celebrate the lunar new year.
Look out world, it’s my year.
My favorite lunar New Year activity, one that might confound my sweet sister-in-law as much as it has embarrassed my offspring, [1] involves roaming the aisles of the Asian supermarket Uwajimaya. If you’re looking for Japanese linens and dishes and sake serving sets or Chinese teapots and greeting cards, or Hello Kitty men’s boxer shorts [2] ; if your recipe calls for lotus root or bitter melon or tatsoi or other hard-to-find Asian vegetables, or Cambodian fermented fish paste or 75 varieties of dried black mushrooms or fermented tofu or spot prawns or uni for your sushi bar or fish you didn’t even know swam in our oceans, you can find it at Uwajimaya.
I make several pilgrimages a year to Uwajimaya, but it’s not the fact that I shop there that causes consternation to my offspring. Rather, it’s the fact that when I push my cart up and down the aisles I am overcome by the irresistible urge to chant my Uwajimaya mantra: I say the store’s name, over and over, mumbling in my pathetic imitation of a fervent samurai, changing the enunciation with each recitation.
U-WA-ji-may-a!
U-wa-ji-MAY-a!
U-wa-JI-may-a!
UUUUU-wa-ji-may-a!
Go ahead. You know you want to.
Warning: the recitation is both calming and addictive. Say it once, say it twice, and one day you may find that the CRAMAWL [3] roaming the aisles is you.
* * *
One Thumb Up (but up in my nostril) for Blue Jasmine
In my yearly quest to see all films that have garnered the “major” Oscar nominations [4] – a quest I have never, ever completed, and will not complete this year, as I loathe the Golden Pumpkin Headed Boy [5] and will not see the much- nominated film in which he stars – I rented Blue Jasmine, which has two nominations for acting (lead and supporting female) and one for Original Screenplay.
Many years ago I was a fan of WA’s films, but his characters’ neurotic New Yorker schmeil shtick, and ever more evident, disturbing and self-serving ethics, began wearing thin long before his real-life incestuous-bordering-on-pedophilia relationship with his longtime partner’s daughter sealed the ICK deal for moiself. I’ve mostly boycotted his films since then (1992) ; [6] thus, MH was surprised to see just what it was I’d popped into the DVD player. I assured MH that Blue Jasmine, like most Woody Allen movies of the past ten years, does not feature Woody Allen acting in it – which is one of the major objections MH has to Woody Allen movies.
Once again, I digress.
May I have the envelope, please? Acting: Cate Blanchett was indeed terrific in the lead role, a formerly wealthy but naive, clueless, pill-and-booze addled, mentally unstable, down on her luck, hard to like, rather pitiable character. The supporting role, that of her sister? Meh. Original screenplay? Hardly original, for Mr. Allen – a familiar tale of lower and upper class stereotypes, most of them with heavy New York accents and/or attitudes, all of them whining. About those accents and attitudes….
What really frosted my butt about the film was that it was ostensibly set in San Francisco (present day scenes, with flashbacks set in New York). If it weren’t for a couple of outdoor shots of SF’s iconic hilly streets and the Golden Gate Bridge, you’d think you were watching a typical Woody Allen set-in-New-York movie. I could not suspend disbelief and pretend, not even for a minute, that Blue Jasmine’s characters lived…well, anywhere on the West Coast, but especially in The City. How could Allen think anyone who had ever spent more than ten minutes in San Francisco would buy that his characters were from, or lived in, San Francisco? From physical appearance to wardrobe to dialog, the cast embodied Allen’s hackneyed, New York/Brooklyn staple characters. Did Allen lose a bet, or was he trying to disprove the notion that he can only film in New York? And why would anyone want to film in San Francisco, one of the most scenic and distinctive cities on the planet, without incorporating or depicting the sights and sounds and social and cultural diversity and distinctiveness that is The City By The Bay?
* * *
Friday’s Fun Food Fact
Frozen cauliflower, as it thaws on a plate by the sink, will slowly but inexorably fill your house with the odor of what your house would smell like it if twenty-five Marines, whose rations for the past six months had consisted of nothing but cauliflower and beer, decided to celebrate going on military leave by having a flatula-thon in your kitchen.
Don’t say you haven’t been warned.
* * *
I read the news today, oh boy.
All New York Times newspaper days are equal, but some days are more equal than others. And for moiself, some days are easier to ready than others, in that there are the once-a-week sections of the paper I highly anticipate and usually enjoy in their entirety (the Science section on Tuesdays and the Dining section on Wednesdays), or the ones I forthwith relegated to the bottom of the pile (Sports Mondays). Thursday is an “easy” read day, in that there are two sections in the Thursday NY Times that require little of my attention before they are relegated to the recycling bin. These sections are Home and ThursdayStyles.
The Home section is an ratcheted up version of your typical newspaper home & garden section, and features stories about People Who Are Much More Adventurous (and richer) Than You, Doing Cool Things You Can Only Dream About. This week’s Home section features an archetypal story about some folks who decide to build a home on a remote Scottish island.
The Lure of the Hebrides,: Drawn by the beaches and ethereal light,
a family builds an offbeat [7] island home.
Such stories can be entertaining, in that drive-by accident-gawking kind of way, and so I usually give the Home section a look-see. ThursdayStyles is almost always a five-second-at-most, flip-through-giggle-then-toss-it exercise for moiself, and the seconds fly by as I wonder aloud how anything involving style and fashion can be considered print-worthy. I know, I know, it’s a bug bucks portion of certain economies and thus can have a financial excuse for being deemed” news.” New York City may be the fashion hub of the world, but fashion hub of the world is one step up from motorized ear hair clipper hub of the world, in terms of its relevance to my world.
But, don’t ya know it, this week’s flip-through of ThursdayStyles had a gotcha! for me. My curiosity was momentarily piqued, and I had to at least skim whatever story could follow a headline like this.
Below the Bikini Line, a Growing Trend.
“Women are increasingly going with the natural look
when it comes to their nether regions.“
Peter Pan, Wendy? Looks like we’re not in Neverland anymore.
Welcome to Nether-land, with miniature headshots of four Celebri-ons [8] who “…have all expressed a preference for a fuller look in their most private areas.”
Silly me, for thinking the phrases “expressed a preference” and “private areas” would be mutually exclusive.
Yo, Famous Ladies whose names rhyme with Mady Tata, Grinneth Malcrow and Shameron Peeass: are y’all so feminist consciousness-retarded that you think your nether regions needs to be “groomed,” or needs a “look” other than what is naturally there? I know it’s been said that no publicity is bad publicity, but are y’all really so whorisly PR-desperate that you think the world welcomes knowing how you groom your lady bits?
No, please – don’t answer that.
On second thought, enquiring minds – or at least those belonging to Tiffany and her new bathroom yoga pants buddy – want to know.
* * *
No fashion for you, Gilda.
I base most of my fashion taste on what doesn’t itch. (Gilda Radner)
May you be fashionably late, may you feel free to scratch where it itches, and let the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
[1] Well, Belle has sometimes seem embarrassed, but K…I suspect he is amused, perhaps even proud. I’ll make an aisle-mutterer of him yet.
[2] And who isn’t, these days?
[3] Crazy-ass middle-aged white lady.
[4] Screenplay, acting, directing, best picture.
[5] Stage name Leonardo DiCaprio.
[6] Worthy of a post, but not today, are the ruminations re separating the artistic worth of a work from the moral achievements or shortcomings of the artist.
[7] Offbeat = $$$$.
[8] The mutant offspring of celebrities and morons…would that be a creature of redundancy?
