From Mrs. Kennedy at What’s the Fuss?:

“Almost every mother I know with a nearly-one-year-old child has her thong in a twist about planning a birthday party for a child who absolutely could not give a shit what day it is. I know how sexist this is, but it finally took a man — one who works in the building trades, no less (i.e., a manly man) — to straighten the whole first birthday concept out for us.

It boils down to this:

(1) Get cake

(2) Place cake in front of baby

(3) Take pictures of baby flinging cake around room

Optional: Funny hats

Not optional: Margaritas for mom. And dad, I guess, since he’s paying.”

From Eurotrash, excerpts from “Other targets of my random hate:”

• “Hoboken sorority sisters who assume the entire bastard subway carriage is like, rilly rilly interested in their gym routine every morning and consquently turn on their internal megaphones just so we don’t miss a single ear-splitting nasally-mangled word on the way into work.
• Men on the PATH train who imagine their sexual organs are so large they have to spread their legs wide enough to mash me into the next side of tomorrow and take up three seats…
• People who want to talk to me on aeroplanes.
• Men with long hair who play the guitar at parties and the girls who sit at their feet, nodding, smiling inanely, hoping for a fuck…
• Families of five from Idaho in matching shorts and windcheaters who get off the subway train and then fan out, blocking the entire platform while they work out which fucking country they’re in and which way is it to Disneyland.”

From Defective Yeti:

What Up, Boss

While at work I frequent a website where users post interesting pictures and audio clips they have found. Today a guy who works at an ad agency posted an mp3 along with this comment: “I found this audio at the start of one of the our spare tapes. No explanation, no reason it should be there. Seems to be a kid’s tv program host teaching kids slang. It’s overmodulated and pretty strange.” I was rockin’ out to Kosheen at the moment, but was sufficiently intrigued to stop my CD and click the link. A little box popped up to tell me that the mp3 was downloading at would autolaunch in winamp after a minute or so.

A few moments later my boss strolled into my office. I swiveled around in my chair to face him, turning my back to my computer. “Hey Matthew,” he said sitting down,”How are you doing for time? Would you be interested in working on a new project?”

A loud voice from behind me suddenly bellowed “Awwwwwwwwww yeah! Fo shizzle!”

Bus Pass

Chatting with a female friend.

Me: I dunno what it is, but I’ve seen a lot of attempted pick-ups on the bus recently.

L: Yeah?

Me: It’s like open season or something. Has anyone ever tried to pick you up on the bus?

L: Sure. It happens from time to time.

Me: Really? What do they say?

L: Oh, you know. They don’t use “lines” or anything, they just say something to start a conversation and go from there. Like, I had my headphones on at the bus stop a few weeks ago, and this guy came up and said “So, what are you listening to?” And I said the news, because I was listening to NPR. And he said “Oh, that’s too bad. You should be listening to …” and then he went on to list his favorite bands and ask me what my favorite bands were and stuff.

Me: And that works?

L: It probably works on some girls. But not on me, because I’m not in the market and I know what they’re up to. I mean, when someone comes out of nowhere and starts talking to me like that, I know they are either trying to pick me up or sell me God.

Me: [Laughs] Actually, that’s my backup plan when I try and pick-up girls. If it’s not going well I start pretending like I was only interested in converting them.

L: Crafty.

Me: I say “You’re listening to the news? Well, have you heard the Good News?”

L: Then, you know, they’re not rejecting you, they’re rejecting God.

Me: Which gives me the added comfort of knowing they are going to Hell.

L: It’s win-win.

Jason on proxemics:

“I stand alone in the elevator, right in the middle, equidistant from the four walls. Before the doors close, a woman enters. Unconsciously, I move over to make room for her. We stand side by side with equal amounts of space between the two of us and between each of us and the walls of the elevator. On the 12th floor, a man gets on and the woman and I slide slightly to the side and to the back, maximizing the space that each of us occupies in the elevator. At the 14th floor, another man gets on. The man in front steps to the back center and the woman and I move slightly toward the front, forming a diamond shape that again maximizes each person’s distance from the elevator walls and the people next to them.

It reminds me of cell division in an embryo or the arrangement of atoms in a molecule…”

He says, “Several stories have been lost in the media frenzy over President Bush’s noble and controversial stand against the sexual enslavement of children…”

How to figure out when it’s your dream. From O Magazine‘s interview with Salma Hayek:Salma Hayek: …This is one thing I learned: How do you recognize what is your true dream and what is the dream that you are dreaming for other people to love you?

Oprah: How?

SH: The difference is very easy to understand. If you enjoy the process, it’s your dream.

O: Correct.

SH: If you are enduring the process, just desparate for the result, it’s somebody else’s dream.

I want to read Common Shock by Kaethe Weingarten. O‘s book reviewer describes the premise like this: “In a society rampant with binary thinking–good versus evil, us versus them–how do we move toward understanding and forgiveness of those who are different? How do we hold onto hope and let go of fear?”

I’ve been watching too much T.V. Painter Robert Henri says, “You can do anything you want to do. What is rare is this actual wanting to do a certain thing: wanting it so much that you are practically blind to all other things, that nothing else will satisfy you.”

North Koreans are living in an Orwell novel. From this week’s New Yorker, “Alone in the Dark” by Philip Gourevitch:”Pyongyang is North Korea’s model city, full of model schools and model hospitals and model people: residence is reserved for the Party’s chosen, the political and military elite, the commissars and cadres and their most faithful followers, and the population is regularly cleansed of those deemed ideologically lax, as well as the old, the sick, the disfigured, and the lame, who are banished to the provinces and replaced by a fresh crop of loyalists.”

I’ve been sick for a week. This gave me a chance to finish Dave Eggers’s latest book. I also watched several episodes of “Newlyweds” the new MTV reality series. If you have some spare time, allow me to recommend the book. My favorite parts:

“Passing a middle-aged couple in matching jackets:

–You two need to change.

–What? Why? the middle aged couple said, to my head, in my head.

–Because you are wearing the same jacket.

–We bought them while on vacation in Newport.

–You must be hidden from view.

–The jackets are nice.

–They are not nice. You must change to save us all.”

“–You, on the motorcycle.

–Yes.

–It’s only a matter of time.

–I know.”

“I would know that in any city, at an hour like this, there are people sleeping. That most people are sleeping. But that in any city, in any cluster of people, there are a few people who are awake at this hour, who are both awake and dancing, and it’s here that we need to be.”

From Life of Pi by Yann Martel:

“I would have won the Governor General’s Academic Medal… were it not for a beef-eating pink boy with a neck like a tree trunk and a temperament of unbearable good cheer.

I still smart a little at the slight. When you’ve suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.”

An all-too-familiar excerpt from Here Comes the Guide Companion magazine Spring 2003:

“Don’t forget: That man in the corner is your fiance. While you may have intended to plan the entire wedding yourself, consider including him in the process. Because he loves you, he’ll tag along with you to the florist, caterer, photographer and wedding planner. And because he loves you, he’ll forgive you for saying stream-of-consciousness things like, “Oh honey don’t you just love this it’s so adorable how does it look on me oooh I just have to have it!” Even though he probably won’t share your boundless enthusiasm for picking out party favors or linens, he’ll do what he can–chauffer you around and say “uh-huh” a lot, despite the fact that he really doesn’t understand much of what’s going on.”

Dear anonymous author,

Bite me.

Sincerely,

Maggie Berry

My favorite part of a Vogue article by Katrina Heron, former editor-in-chief of Wired magazine. She quit her hectic job to be a better mom and find a more varied life:

“The joys of a carefree life eluded me. I’d sit down with a book and not be able to read it. I was distracted, all peripheral vision. I felt I should be accomplishing something.

Thank God for kids, who really do teach us to delight in slow pleasures. We would dawdle over breakfast, talking about how much we liked raisins.”