A personal update, with Shenis.

Okay, so my bachelorette party was this past Friday -- thus my prolonged absence. The impending wedding in combination with a vast amount of work is keeping me from blogging much at the moment, but fortunately, you know what they say about pictures and their worth as related to words.

And so, I hope you'll join me on a whirlwind retrospective of Kat's Coney Island Bachelorette Extravaganza.



The party started out on the beach, right between the Wonder Wheel and the grimy Raritan Bay. Out of approximately 10,000 acres of sand, my two co-MOHs (maids of honor) and I somehow managed to pick the choice spot behind that one kid -- there is one on every beach -- who is really into feeding the seagulls. This one was wearing a pair of waterlogged blue boxer briefs as a bathing suit, and was armed with Cheetos which he threw intermittently into the sand, creating a maelstrom of squawking birds all hell-bent on beachy snacktime. After three horrifying minutes of feeling like we'd accidentally stumbled into a take of "The Birds 2: Terror In The Sand!", we left.

Of additional note: though it was unclear at first how the little boy's blue boxer briefs had become so wet -- he never seemed to go in the ocean -- all was explained when he stood up and, with utter nonchalance, peed all over himself.

Still, we all managed to smile for this picture.



Next up: a ride on the Cyclone.

Fact: the Cyclone's tiny roller-coaster cars are not made to accommodate adult women...

"Wow, I can't move at all," I said, with Maggie wedged in next to me and the "safety" bar firmly locked over our laps. "How are we going to get out of here at the end of the ride?"

...or their jewelry.

"I lost my earring!" she yelled, as we plummeted down the first drop.
"No, it's okay, it's in my crotch!" I yelled back.

There was another drop, followed by a bone-rattling turn around the back curve.
"I lost my other earring!" she yelled.
"That one is probably in my crotch, too!" I yelled.

Mardie turned back toward us and yelled something which, though I can't be sure, sounded an awful lot like "This sucks!"

Several seconds later, and with all my teeth feeling sort of loose after a collision with the safety bar, we tried to make our ungainly exit from the cars only to find ourselves blocked by the three grinning teenage boys working the ride.

"Hey ladies, we'll let all three of you go again for just ten dollars!"
"What?" we said.
"You can go again!" one of them explained, pointing back toward the coaster cars whose red vinyl seats now yawned at us like tiny gaping maws of death.
"No, no thank you. We don't want to go again," said Mardie.
"We hurt ourselves," I said.

Maggie just pointed to her elbow, which was inexplicably bleeding and missing a large amount of skin.
"Okay, okay," said the guy. There was a pause.
Then he said, "You can go again for just nine dollars!"

We may or may not have run screaming down the stairs.

Here we are, displaying our wounds.



With the remaining 4 girls now in tow, we found our way to Keyspan Park, home of the Brooklyn Cyclones.

Things started to get out of hand right away, when Mardie handed me a gift bag containing --


-- a Shenis.

In spite of its un-subtle appearance, it proved to be useful in myriad ways.


Once inside the stadium, I was presented with a "Bachelorette" sash and a steady supply of beer. That's right -- somebody gave these to me. It was totally beyond my control.



In the 6th inning, I went to the ladies' room while wearing my sash and was accosted by two heavyset women with crazy Staten Island accents.

"Hey!" one shouted, "a bachelorette!"
The other strode over and put an arm around my shoulders, and said, "Alright doll, how long ya known the guy?"
"Er..." I said, suddenly unable to remember exactly how long I have known Brad. "A year or two?"
"Well, that's ok," she said, nodding sagely.
"Okay," I said.
"As long as there's communication," she said.
"Yes," I said, "there is definitely communication."
"Well, congratulations!" she said.

On the way back from the bathroom, I ran into Pee Wee the Cyclones mascot. We embraced. Just like with the ladies from the bathroom, I felt that we had a beautiful rapport which nobody else could ever understand.



A second later, one of my co-maids-of-honor appeared and grabbed my hand.
"There's a clown here," she shouted, "And we're getting your face painted!"

After a lot of protesting (the way I feel about clowns nonwithstanding, face paint makes me break out. And though I'm not exactly a high-maintenance bride, I'll be damned if I'm going to invite a giant zit with only 14 days til the wedding), we settled on a compromise.

"So, what are we doing here?" said the clown.
"Well, we're at a baseball game," said Mardie.
"Okay," said the clown.
"So how about, like, a bat? And two balls?"

The clown stared at us. The clown stared at us. I hope never to write that sentence again as long as I live.

"You get what I'm saying?" said Mardie.
"Yes, I get what you're saying," said the clown.
And then he said, "I'm going to lose my job."


Dear clown: although I am still scared of you, I hope you didn't lose your job.

I suggested that we might want to leave after the seventh inning, since that's when they stop serving beer, but I'm very glad that we didn't. Because suddenly, over the loudspeaker, they announced the night's premier event: The Brooklyn Cyclones Hot Dog Race, featuring Ketchup, Mustard, and Relish.

In a frenzy of excitement I still can't explain, I completely lost my shit and turned to the girl next to me, shrieking, "Oh, thank God! I'M BACKING RELISH!!!"

As it turns out, unforunately, the racing hot dogs look less like hot dogs and more like... well, open wounds.

In this picture: Fresh Wound is outpaced by Gangrenous Wound.

Nine innings, several beers, and approximately 900 calories worth of nachos later (and thanks, NYS Department of Health, for posting that information -- like I didn't hate myself enough already), we took the logical next steps:


We got funnel cake...

We played water-gun carnival games....


And I got lei'd at Beer Island.


And though there were no Chippendale's dancers or penis hats, all told -- between the beer, the best friends, the Shenis, and the random guy who turned as I passed him on the boardwalk and screamed, "Wait! You're the girl of my dreams!" -- I think this was an excellent last hurrah for singledom.


I hope you think so, too.

and nobody was impressed.

Ah, the subway -- that neverending source of blogworthy material during writing's dry spells. (Sorry, guys, but life is getting in the way lately.) Ah, yes, the subway.

It’s never pleasant, but sometimes, one is forced to share space with certain varieties of subway riders who make it even less so. Some key types include the People Who Hog the Seats, the People Who Hump Other People, the People Who Walk Into the Train and then Stop Immediately Inside the Doors Causing a Massive Pileup of Humanity in the Entryway. (On hot days when the air conditioning is broken, you can also add People Who Eat Curry to this list.)

But in the morning, when everyone is cranky and not quite awake and on their way to work, there is nothing worse than ending up on a train with Talking Hipsters Who Fucked Last Night.

I don’t know anyone who lives and works in the city who isn’t vastly irritated by people who talk during the morning commute. There’s an unspoken rule about it. Even couples riding together, or friends who were conversing on the platform before the train arrived , fall almost completely silent once the train doors close – and not just out of consideration for their fellow passengers. Think about it: would you want to broadcast your conversation to a random sampling of 150 captive New Yorkers?

This is why, in general, people who insist on conversing during the morning commute should be forced to ride in separate cars. And it is also why, when those people are a pair of hipsters who fucked last night, and whose conversation incorporates a degree of inanity of which only hipsters who fucked last night are capable, said hipsters should be plucked midconversation from the subway platform, put into a rocket, and shot immediately into space.

This may seem like an extreme measure, until you consider the following conversation, which took place during this morning’s commute between two tight-denim-wearing 20somethings who were talking in the incredibly loud, vacant way that people sometimes do when they have stayed up all night:

Girl: Well, when you think about design in everyday life…
Guy: Yeah, like in a toothbrush or whatever.
Girl: Oh my God, yeah! Like, what if your toothbrush had eyes?

(There is a long pause.)

Guy: Eyes?
Girl: Yeah… eyes that tell lies.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good healthy dose of “what the fuck?” as much as the next guy. I just don’t think I should have to take it before I’ve even had my first cup of coffee.

Drinking, and ranting, while blogging.

I should begin this post by admitting the following: I have had a few glasses of wine.

But more to the point: After a few glasses of wine, I feel the need to tell anyone who will listen that I hate the fucking Bride Diet.

Not that I'm on one, per se. Unless there is a Bride Diet which incorporates the daily consumption of alcohol and/or grilled cheese sandwiches, in which case I might be on one, but you may rest assured that I had no idea. But. But! The very existence of the Bride Diet -- and the corresponding expectation that anyone who plans to wed within the next 12 months ought to be on one -- is driving me up the fucking wall.

My fury is of my own making: I stupidly watched one of those "Buff Brides" shows on TV the other day. And not one of the fun ones either -- this was one of those Discovery Health specials, complete with cheapo graphics and painfully earnest narration:

"Emily is newly engaged! But of all the many plans she has to make her Big Day a truly Special Occasion, the most important is also the most difficult: Emily needs to lose twenty pounds."

That's right, guys! Twenty pounds: the price of admission to your own wedding. Ha! Yes! No wait -- Emily? Go fuck yourself.

Ok, no, wait again. Listen, Emily the Bride, I know it is not your fault. I know I should be telling the producers to go fuck themselves, and leave you out of it. I know you're just as susceptible as any of us to the urgent, endless pressure to be THIN THIN THIN, particularly when you're about to be the focal point of a semi-major event during which usually-hidden parts of your body may be exposed. But was it absolutely necessary that you air your susceptibility on national television? Couldn't you have just kept your feelings about your extra pounds hidden safely in the Closet of Self-Loathing, like the rest of us? Why'd you have to fuel the fire, Em?

Because there she is: Emily the Bride, sweating out the final three months 'til her wedding, making confessional statements in grainy black-and-white, weeping oh-so-pitifully into the camera, and then, finally, triumphantly displaying the lost poundage that makes her... what?

Qualified to walk down the aisle?

It's enough to poison the mind of even the most well-adjusted woman. Which I, as a person who already tends to drink during the daytime, am most definitely not. And so I am now forced to make my own confession: Under the influence of the evil Buff Brides program, I ran to the grocery store last night and -- in a sort of fugue state -- purchased a whole bunch of Lean Cuisine meals-in-a-box with the goal of shrinking myself to a size zero/98 pounds within the next three weeks.


It's a good thing I have Jean Harlow -- and her hips, which, in spite of being large by today's standards, look an awful lot like mine -- to being me back to reality.

Especially since, having eaten one today, I can safely say that Lean Cuisine is indescribably repulsive.

The devil wears velcro curlers

A true story: One day, during sophomore year of high school, I was in the bathroom putting on lip gloss when a girl named Dezarae Andrassey appeared behind me with two of her friends.

"Hey, bitch," she said.
"What? Me?" I said, looking around.
"I'm gonna kick your ass."
"What?"
"Yeah," she said, and then, as if by way of explanation for the impending ass-kicking, "You and your greasy fucking hair!"

Although I managed to escape untouched, my life was forever changed. Let's face it -- when someone named "Dezarae" thinks they have one up on you, some serious self-examination is in order, and in my case I was forced to confront a very unsettling truth.

Shit, I thought to myself as I fled down the hall, I must have really bad hair!

And I do. Or rather, it is not so much "bad" as it is "worthless". The stuff that sprouts from my head is ultra-fine, thin, limp and listless. It is sort of noncomittally wavy, which means that it neither dries attractively nor holds a curl. And it does, indeed, develop a lovely patina of oil when I fail to wash it for more than 24 hours, which means that I have spent far more of my life looking like Pete Doherty than any reasonable person should.

Add to this the fact that I am incredibly lazy -- I didn't learn to use a blow dryer until after college, and have never had the time or inclination to learn the secrets of making what I've got look good -- and you end up with a girl who not only has worthless hair, but whose only salon experience consists of walking into one every six months and saying, "Uh... can you please give me Charlotte Gainsbourg's haircut?" (Note: This has actually worked out pretty well, thus far -- especially since I stopped cutting all but my bangs shortly after Brad and I started dating, a decision that was based on a) the vague sense that I would probably marry him, and b) the vaguer sense that brides are supposed to have long hair.)

But all this exposition is simply to say this: I've never been very savvy about hair, and that goes double for bridal hair. And when it became clear that I would have to do something with it, the best I could do was to find a picture of what I wanted, tote it into the salon, and hand it to the stylist.



That, of course, is not my hair. It is only what I wanted my hair to look like, approximately speaking, but it is pretty, and I really thought I had things well in hand when I went in for my consultation.

That good feeling lasted approximately five minutes.

At 10:00, the woman who would become the Stylist Of Unreasonable Bitchiness (or, as my mom suggests, The SOUB) took the picture and gave it a distasteful look.

"This woman has a lot of hair," she said.
"Um... I have long hair!" I said, holding up a piece of it to prove I wasn't lying.

She looked at me.
I dropped the piece of hair.

"We'll see what we can do," she said, which I now realize was code for, I will make you sorry you even HAVE hair.

At 10:05, the SOUB started to wash my hair.
"Do you have to use conditioner when you wash your hair?" she asked.
"Yes," I said, "It turns into a horrible tangle otherwise."
"Huh," she said.

At 10:15, after the SOUB had pulled out several chunks of my impossibly snarled hair while trying to comb it, I looked up at her and said, "Just out of curiosity, did you use any conditioner or detangler or anything?"
"No," she said, and then pulled out another chunk.

At 10:30, she brought over a set of curlers. I looked at them and felt a little hint of panic.
"Hey, I'm sure you know this," I said, "but Velcro curlers are a problem for me -- they always get stuck in my hair."
"Those are brush curlers," said the SOUB, and rolled her eyes. "You'll be fine."

At 11:15, after forty-five minutes under the dryer, the SOUB brought me back over to her chair and started taking the curlers out. There was a painful yank, then some muttering.

"Marion! Hey, Marion!" she yelled.
Another stylist wandered over.
"What?"
"Get a look at this -- the curler is, like, double-gripped into her hair!"
More painful yanking.
"Wow," said Marion.
The SOUB, who was now sporting sweat-darkened patches beneath her arms, muttered, "I've never seen anything like this."

At 11:30, after a curler-removing operation that required four women and the loss of approximately 80% of my hair, I began to relax. Now, I just had to wait for her to make my head beautiful.

I would like to take this moment to remind everyone of the look we were going for:


So twenty minutes later, when the SOUB handed me a mirror and said, "Take a look," I was slightly taken aback to hold it up and see not the beautiful whirly curly mass above, but something disturbingly similar to... well... this.



"Um," I said.
"You don't like it?" said the SOUB, turning red.
"Well, I mean, it's...uh... got nice volume," I offered, trying to salvage the situation and thinking to myself, Oh my God, what if she comes after me with the scissors?
"What do you want me to do?" she said.
"Er..." I said, and then pointed at the picture. "Could you just make it look, you know, more like that?"

At 12:15, after a long operation which involved a nylon sock being pinned to the back of my head, she handed me the mirror again.

She had given me a french twist.

"That's... pretty," I said.
"It's a little more formal," she said.
"Yeah, it's just... um..."
"What?"
I pointed desperately at the picture again. "I really wanted it to be more loose and twisty, like this?"

At 12:45, she handed me the mirror again. This time, I discovered a fat, low bun with odd protruding lumps and bumps at the nape of my neck.

The SOUB was watching me.

"What's wrong with this one?" she said, sighing loudly.

I looked at the picture again, and then back at my reflection in the mirror, and suddenly realized -- with absolute panicked horror -- that I was very close to crying. In the hair salon. What the fuck was wrong with me? No, wait, what the fuck was wrong with her?! All I wanted was a beautiful twisty mass of lovely hair, a few inches above the nape of my neck, something textured and romantic and tousled so that my head would match my wedding dress! I had been very clear about this! I had the hair. Not only that, I had a picture, damnit!!! What was the fucking problem?

"See this?" I said, desperately trying to keep my voice from cracking. "I really like this. I like how blousy and twisty and tousled it is. I want my hair to look as close to this as possible."

"Well, you keep changing your mind," she snapped.
I gaped at her. "What? I have not--"
"Alright, FINE," she said. "Blousy and tousled, huh? FINE. "

At 1:15, my mother arrived to pick me up and found me sitting miserably in a chair while the SOUB glared at me over the head of her next customer. My hair had been twisted into a sort of bouffant, with a series of knots on one side and the other side swept across in a mass of unstyled, greasy, product-laden nastiness. I looked like what might result if Elizabeth Bennett mated with Amy Winehouse.

"I like the righthand side," my mother said, tentatively.
"Kat said she likes this," said the SOUB, with eyes narrowed.

It was true -- I had said that. After two and a half hours in the SOUB's torture chair, you would have said it too.

"I see," said my mom.
"Mom," I whispered. "Mom, I need to get out of here."
"She changed her mind FIVE TIMES," the SOUB said.
"Hey, wait a minute!" I said.
"Oh, whatever," said the SOUB, "you're the bride, obviously."

"Okay, we'll call you," said my mom, grinning with maniacal politeness and dragging me out of the salon before I could claw the SOUB's eyes out.


"I AM NEVER GOING BACK THERE!"
We were sitting in the car outside of the salon. I was hyperventilating. My mom pointed to the cafe next door.
"Do you want a bagel?"
"I WANT TO GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!"
"But do you want a bagel first?"
"GODDAMNIT MOM SHE IS IN THERE WATCHING US WOULD YOU PLEASE JUST FUCKING DRIVE!"
"Are you sure you don't want a bagel?"
"FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!" I said.
"Oh, alright," she said mildly, and pulled away.

By the time we'd gotten home, I had calmed down enough that I was no longer screaming the f-word, but instead using it conversationally to describe the variety of abysmal hairstyles I had suffered through at the hands of the SOUB.

"But," I said, after catching my mom up on the entire ordeal, "what the fuck am I going to do now?"
"Hmm," she said. And then, "Let me try something."


Alternate title for this post: Reason # 4,491 Why My Mother Is The Bomb.
She did this in ten minutes.

More incessant bitching

It’s no secret at this point that I’m not a big fan of office life. The corporate casual dress, the cubicles, the forced participation in inane conversations lest you be labeled anti-social… it all adds up to an unhappy disgruntlement that makes me regard any workplace but my own apartment through the puce-colored lens of general malaise.

But the real hell of the office, to paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre, is other people. And so, in the sweet little consulting firm where I currently work 3 days a week, I thought I could pretty much count on not having to interact with any of the usual spate of awful personalities who make toiling away in a larger office so damned dreadful. I mean, in a group of 5 people, you know right away if you’ve got an employee who doesn’t play well with others. The Happy Monday, the MicroManager, the Standoffish Intern – these guys aren’t supposed to exist in smaller offices, for the simple reason that they have nowhere to hide.

Unfortunately, “supposed to” is the operative phrase here, because I’ve just found out that one my coworkers – fully 20% of the assembled staff – is an Angry Contrarian.

You probably know one of these -- they’ll be the pereson who reacts to any question or request with a scoff and a glare, and whose conversations are often riddled with little barbs suggesting that you are fucking up their life by being lazy and incompetent.

Email sent this afternoon…
To: Angry Contrarian Coworker
Fr: Kat
Subject: Info needed

hi ACC,
I’m working on a proposal for Client X and need the following files to upload;
- 501c3 letter
- audited financial statement
- operating budget
- supporting organizations
Can you please pass these along?


Five minutes later…

Angry Contrarian Coworker: Kat, you need all these files?
Kat: Yes, they need to be uploaded.
ACC: (suspicious tone) You don’t already have them?
Kat: No.
ACC: (suspicious tone plus narrowed eyes) Are you sure?
Kat: I’m sure.
ACC: I thought you already had some of them.
Kat: (finally becoming frustrated) No, I don’t. If I did, I wouldn’t be asking for them. See how that works?
ACC: --silence accompanied by icy glare--

This is typical of an exchange with an Angry Contrarian – a completely mundane request for necessary information, followed by five minutes of utterly unnecessary arguing to convince the AC that this is actually something I need, and not some sort of workplace-specific red herring which I have oh-so-creatively invented for no reason but to waste his time.

I started out wondering what could possibly motivate someone to act this way –it seems like it must be a combination of unbridled self-importance (believing that you know better than your coworkers about pretty much everything) and paralyzing suspicion of the human race in general (they’re out to ruin my productivity! all of them!). Just think what a misanthropic little weenie you'd have to be! ...But at this point, I’d just settle for getting through the rest of the workday without any further snark.

Anthropological musings about the nature of Angry Contrarians, as well as survival tips, should be left in the comments as a public service.

Things that a doctor should never say, dermatological edition.

I spent last weekend at my parents' house for wedding-related activities. (Five weeks, kids, for those of you who are counting.) Which means that you may brace yourselves for a recap of our visit to the cake lady, a tribute to the secret shameful pleasure of buying shoes at Walmart, and a blow-by-blow account of the Bridal Hair Consultation which left me nearly bald and shouting the F-word in my mom's car.

That is, later this week.

Because today, we're talking about dermatology.

When I was about 9, I got a mole. It wasn't a big hairy mole, but rather a wee little thing, dark brown and raised maybe 1/8 of an inch off my neck. It never really bothered me -- from afar it just looked like a beauty mark, and only those who spent any time within a few inches of me ever knew that I could put my finger on it and wiggle it around independently of my epidermis. Which is actually sort of fun if there's nothing else to do and you've run out of beer.

But more to the point, the mole and I had been together a long time, and my personal moral code states that you don't just go severing (ha!) a relationship with something that's been stuck on your body for more than 15 years, unless it does something to piss you off, which the mole never did.

But then, after a truly unpleasant incident involving the dog, a tennis ball, and an extremely ill-advised use of my neck as a leash-draping apparatus, the mole suffered a little... mishap. Suddenly, it was no longer the mole that I knew and loved, but rather, a mottled little flappy thing that looked less like a beauty mark and more like a failed attempt at growing a second head. And since I am getting married in a month, and since I had a doctor right there, on Saturday during lunch I turned to my father and said, "Could you take this mole off?"

"Sure," he said.

The next morning, as we sat at the breakfast table, Dad whipped something out of his pocket and placed it, with a grand flourish, in the center of the table. I looked at it. It was a scalpel.

"Is that for my mole?" I said.
"Yep," he said.

The scalpel lay between us, glinting in a sinister way. I tried to avoid looking at it, but my eye kept being drawn inextricably back to the blade. There was nothing for it: I was not going to eat breakfast with a surgical instrument lying on the table.


"Dad."
"What?"
"Let's just get this over with," I said, pulling my hair off of my neck.

Dad shrugged. "Okay," he said.

I would like to remind everyone, before getting into this next part, that this was a relatively insignificant mole. If not for its problematic location, I could have cut it off myself with a pair of scissors in one fell swoop. And although having my father slice it off at the kitchen table was a bit unorthodox, I wasn't expecting it to be particularly excruciating -- just one or two swipes of the scalpel, a little blood, and then breakfast.

At first, there was a little poke. Then another. And another. And--
"Ouch," I said.
"Sorry," said Dad. Another poke.
"Ouch," I said again.
"Sorry," said Dad, "it's just--"
"What?"
"Nothing, I just--"
"OW! Dad, what are you doing?"
"Josh!" My mom had stopped what she was doing to observe the carnage. "What's going on over there?"
"Er..."
Poke.
"Ow! Is it over yet?"
"Hang on," Dad muttered.
"OWW!!!"

I turned to look at my dad, who at long last had freed the mole -- which was less than the size of a seed bead -- and dropped it onto a piece of the morning newspaper.

"What the hell was that?" I whined, feeling the bandage on my neck.
"Sorry," said Dad. "I, er, wasn't as deft as I expected."

"I am so blogging about this," I said.

My mom said, "Make sure you get that line about 'not being as deft as he thought he was' right."