quick update

suzanne and i went out last night with a couple friends for dinner and then to play pool. this was nice because it was a last minute thing and usually we back out of that sort of thing, but we went out, and it was cool.
we went to this burger joint called "stand" and had some pretty good veggie burgers, even though they fell apart during consumption, as is the case with most veggie burgers.
but here's some more semi-celebrity gossip. we were waiting for one of our friends outside of one of the new school's building when who do i see walking down the street? josh charles...again. i didn't say anything to him this time because i didn't want to seem needy, but i almost think he recognized me from our previous encounter. i only think this because i wear my plaid fedora all the time, and i've got these metal studs sticking out of the sides because you know...i'm hardcore. he looked at me for a second and i swear i almost thought he was about to talk to me. maybe i'm just projecting, but i don't care.
also, when we got to the pool hall you'll never guess who was there playing pool. the black widow herself, jeanette lee. she's probably like, the hottest woman pool player alive.

see what i'm sayin? i know, this doesn't really count as a celebrity update, but it does for me because i used to be fucking obsessed with pool. this woman is really good at pool...like...really good. she was playing against old men who paid like $1000 to play her, and i actually watched one guy beat her. i don't know that it really counted though because i think she pretty much ran the table before he even got to take a shot, then set the eight ball up against a pocket just as a courtesy so the guy could play a little, but he came back with a vengeance and actually sank it before she did. all i'm sayin is i saw some pretty good pool playas last night and it was fun to be in a billiards hall again...even if i couldn't smoke inside.

merry christmas!

well, its nearly april, but at long last, my christmas present has arrived. it has been cleaned and tuned and beautified and finally, finally its all mine!
so now, i'm rockin' the fountain pen, the cigarette case and the pocket watch. it's even key-wound so it came with these two little keys for winding it and setting the time. i put them on a necklace, so i can't wait until the clasp breaks and i lose the keys (knock wood). i need to wind it every day and make sure that its keeping good time. its sitting on the couch next to me right now and i can hear it tick, tick, ticking away. i love it.
the jeweler that cleaned it and everything for my dad said that he dated it back to 1888-1889. this means that next year it will be approximately 120 years old. it has a letter "P" on the front of it for my last name, and i asked my dad to have it engraved on the inside with "even a stopped clock..." this is a fragment from an orbital song which samples the aforementioned quote in its entirety, which is, "even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day." suzanne introduced me to the quote, and i thought it was an apt one for the inside of a pocket watch.
i am thrilled...all i need to do now is get a chain for it and i think i will be sufficiently old school.

and yet another...

i saw steven van zandt today. i wasn't sure it was him, so i didn't say anything. also, i didn't know his name, but i thought he was the guy that plays sil on the sorpanos, but i couldn't very well go up to him and say, "hey, are you that guy from the sopranos who runs the bing?"
it looked a whole hell of a lot like him, but he was wearing this bandana, so i couldn't be sure it was him. then i came home and looked him up on the sopranos homepage.
here's what he looks like on the sopranos:

and here's what he looks like in real life with a bandana:

i'm pretty sure this is the second time i've seen this guy, but wasn't sure it was him, and can you believe it, i saw him at the coffee shop right across the street from school that i go to pretty much every day that i'm in the city.
maybe i should start a celebrity gossip blog to compete with perez and dlisted.com...or maybe i should start doing some of my philosophy work...its a tough call.

this just happened

i had heard a loud banging sound outside, potentially even gunfire, but by the time i got to the window with the best view there was already a tall, skinny, young man sitting on the ground against the ironclad security system of bushwick, the metal rolling garage door, and he was doing so without a shirt on. soon he arose from his recumbant state and began to, very emphatically, profess his undying love and affection for the young woman who was tragically the focal point and fulcrum of this whole unfortunate scene.
amazingly, almost out of nowhere, pracitcally on cue, the fuzz rolls in and parks strategically in front of the urban stage as the tal, skinny, topless young man continues to profess his undying love, as if to say, "i love you so much that i will stand here, topless, in front of the cops and...hey, shut the fuck up!"
OH YEAH! you heard right, he told the cops to shut the fuck up. at this point it becomes clear that the cops were not just sitting in their car chatting, that they were in fact trying to talk to the crazed young man, but apparently he was not responding. at this point there is a brief interchange of yelling at the cops and softly telling the young lady, "this is how much i love you, and will always love you," until he taunts the cops and says, "yeah, come on! arrest me!"
car doors open simultaneously, the stocky, burly cops come straight out of the car, approach the tall, skinny, young man, who bravely stands his ground, grab him and throw him - literally throw him - against the metal rolling garage door, pin him to it and cuff him. the whole thing took 7.3 seconds, it was amazing.
here comes the best part. this is the part that made me have to blog about this immediately. after the cops have the young man in the car, along with his few posessions that were carelessly strewn about on the sidewalk, all of the people who were standing around watching this whole thing unfold, probably 7 people, including the ex/girlfriend, proceed to meander away from the cops, and all pile into the same, hunter green...ASTRO VAN!
FUCK YEAH! rollin' deep in the 'hood in your motherfuckin' ass-tro van, bitch!
i love this fucking city. brooklyn, stand up! 718!

celebrity sighting

so far i have run into keanu reeves, jon stewart and now, as of today, just hours ago, i have also seen josh charles!
raise your hand if you know who josh charles is.
this is josh charles

he's done a bunch of stuff, but one of the coolest things he did was this show called "sports night." i used to watch that show late night on comedy central (like, super 3 am late night) with my roomates sophomore year in college and the show was fucking awesome...seriously.
so, what does one do as one walks down 14th street towards a celebrity whose work you actually appreciate to some degree and are sick of walking by without saying anything? you say this:
"i loved sports night."
and the cool thing about that is, that while you're walking away after seamlessly delivering the briefest of accolades you hear this:
"oh thank you, thank you very much."
and that's the end, because you aren't an obnoxious fan, you're just a guy, and so is josh, and even if i interrupted his day, it was no more than i would interrupt and/or annoy any other new yorker.
and in case you couldn't tell, i finally took the 3 1/2 seconds it takes to figure out how to paste pictures into my blog, and will now abuse it until i grow weary.

rob's memory lane

in the vein of bevin's recaptured 90's music memory extravaganza and issues that suzanne and i have been discussing lately, i've found myself rediscovering parts of my youth and teenage years in shameful places.
first i'd like to discuss some dvd purchases. i recently bought the princess bride and hook from duane reade. both of these are excellent films. the princess bride blew me away. i hadn't seen it in so long, and when i was younger i don't think i could really appreciate how great of an actor andre the giant was.
"it's not my fault i'm the biggest and the strongest, i don't even work out."
as a kid the movie made me want to learn how to fence, but the farthest i ever got was hitting my brother over the head with the leftover cardboard tube from wrapping paper. yet another foregone dream, tossed aside for the sake of practicality.
which leads me into my next dvd purchase, hook. it's actually a pretty clever way of revisiting the tired old theme of peter pan, at least it was back in 1991. when is it exactly that we forget how to have fun? when is it that reality becomes so crushing that it completely eliminates our will to laugh and run and scream and fight? call me an ass-puppet if you like (i'm anticipating androo here), but i want to remember what the hell my happy thought was. i remember when i couldn't sleep at night when i was a kid because i was afraid of the dark i would close my eyes and try to think of a safe happy place. i remember a giant theme park, but even then i don't think i imagined any more detail than a big roller coaster and a ferris wheel. i look back on my childhood fantasies and find disappointment, not just for the past, but also for the future because i fear that imagination isn't a muscle you can develop after age 12. i guess the point of hook was specifically that it's not something that just disappears as time passes. it can and should be something i push further and further, as often as possible. at the very least, i remembered a kind of feeling of innocence that i want to try to hold onto.
and then we watched howard the duck. i was really reluctant to watch this movie (thank again to alluc.org) particularly because i remember liking it so much when i was a kid. i don't trust my judgment from back then, and as it turned out, i was right not to. that movie was freaking terrible, excepting of course the gratuitous nude duck scenes (scenes...plural). you actually get to see a nude, female duck in "playduck" magazine, as well as a nude, female duck in a bath tub in the beginning of this movie. funny, but a little bit odd considering this movie was probably marketed to kids. then of course there's the spectacular acting from lea thompson. i feel like she could've given more if she wasn't crouched over for 90% of the movie because her co-star is a midget in a duck suit who probably wasn't even saying the lines that were dubbed in later. there's some implied sexual tension between lea's character, "beverly" and howard, who she continues to call "ducky" throughout the movie, which i thought was really demeaning, but maybe howard is into that stuff.
anyway...can you imagine fucking an oversized duck? well, I can, thanks to those early duck-breast scenes, and let me just tell you, it would probably be pretty weird. i'm not gonna say i wouldn't do it, i'm just saying it would probably be pretty weird.
this post is getting pretty long and weird. i also wanted to talk about this old journal i picked up that forced me to remember a very depressing part of my early college years, and to scoff at the kind of friendship that seemed so strong and yet almost completely desintigrated when the right catalyst was introduced, but i don't think i'm going to really get into that.
where am i? how did I get here?

the phones, they keep calling me

i'm gonna make this short and sweet.
as the need for funds grows larger and larger, i decide that working is probably not such a bad idea. an e-mail circulated through the school that was offering a position calling alumni and asking them for money. i apply, i get the job, and now i'm back on the phones, like i never left them.
i go into an alter-ego when the phone is up against my ear, especially when i have to pretend to care about someone that i've never talked to before. but sometimes they catch you off guard and you start to actually care.
i don't know if this is legal or not, but i'm gonna tell you a story.
i tried calling one alum who graduated a long time ago. his wife answered the phone and i asked for him. she said it was funny because i was like the 14th call she'd gotten that day asking for her husband. she assumed i wouldn't get the humor of the situation and then proceeded to tell me that it was funny because he was now spending his few remaining weeks in a nursing home. all of a sudden it dawned on me that it was funny because this gentleman perhaps doesn't usually get so many calls, and it's only when he moves into a nursing home to die that people want to ask him for money. that was a little depressing.
the fund-raiser in me thought it would perhaps be a good time to suggest making a donation in his name (as she had already stated how fond he was of his time at our school), but then a flash of humanity came over me and i made what i considered to be a moral decision - to not ask her for money. granted, i'm not going on any humanitarian aid trips and devoting my life to saving others, but given my circumstances, i think i acted appropriately. i would say more at this point, but this happened a few days ago, and suzanne demanded my attention when i wanted to blog about it while it was still raw. any complaints about the brevity of this emotional story should be directed to her.
another alum told me that the only parallel to going to grad school that exist in nature is when "lemmings go to the north sea." what an asshole.
life, death, work, education, love and lemmings...not a bad week.

dinner party...with clarification

dinner and drinking...
while drinking and dinner seem pretty self explanatory, the rest of the night took a sudden turn as we imbibed more booze and devoured some bourguignon.

naked dish-washing...
when two friends make a bet about the status of maryland and it's position on the mason-dixon line and the terms of the bet are that the loser has to do the dishes naked, you end up with one angry, naked texan.

arm wrestling for the battle of the sexes...
i don't even know how this started, but it turned into a battle royale (with cheese) as each party-goer lined up at the coffee table and tried to take it "over the top" (raise your hand if you understand that obscure sylvester stallone reference).

more drinking...
you really burn off some alcohol arm-wrestling, so we needed to drink more.

oil pastels on blank canvas...
as the rest of the wine began to do its work, some people were getting ready to head home. as i walked them out the door to catch their cab i suggested to suzanne that she pull out the blank canvas and some oil pastels so the remaining guests could enjoy a little art-time. by the time i came back (literally the time it takes to smoke a cigarette and breath some refreshing, soberingly cold air) the following was happening.

bleeding on canvas...
call it creative license, call it devotion to art, call it blind intoxication, whatever it was, the end result was a slash through the middle of the canvas (which transferred onto the coffee table, but battle scars make it more valuable anyway), and drops of blood scattered sparingly in aesthetically pleasing places.

tulip/rose eating chased with OE...
somewhere along the way we ran out of wine and had to run to our local, 24 hour bodega to get some mexican beer and a couple of Old English forties. as we continue to drink, we're standing at the kitchen counter when suddenly our friend bends over as if to smell the tulips someone had brought, but much to my surprise he put one in his mouth and bit it off. i'm not one to shy away from a challenge, so i followed suit and ate a tulip myself. we chased with OE and celebrated the intensity of a shared moment. i didn't want to stop there though, so i ripped off a rosebud and ate that whole too (roses don't taste as good as tulips). the rose didn't go down as smooth so i definitely needed another big swig of OE (wouldn't this make a great commercial for OE?). Now things are starting to slow down a little bit, people are heading home and the party is wrapping up.

two forgotten bags...
once everyone is gone, we realize that there are two bags on our bed that are not ours. we considered this a sign of a successful party...if people forget personal belongings because they're so trashed, we did our job.

excessive, annoying clean-up...
once the place was finally empty, it became glaringly obvious how much we drank over the course of the night. there were beer bottles, wine bottles, plastic cups, forties, a bloody piece of art, tulip stems, rose stems and more of the like. i did as much as i could to clean up, but knew i had to get to bed soon, because the following morning i started a job, and it was not going to be a fun day based on how drunk i was feeling.

what more can i say? aside from how much i appreciate suzanne's dedication to being an amazing hostess and how much i appreciate our friends for always somehow managing to take it one stop further, i don't think there is much else i can say.