Dear Project Runway,

Please stop editing scenes of the contestants into the show of them saying ""I have NAOOOOO idea WHERE we are goingggggggggg.........." when Tim takes them to their challenge. Every season has been guilty of this.

I KNOW they have an idea of what the challenge is, but of COURSE they can't tell us before they show them getting there. Urgg!!!!!

Black Thursday

If you follow news or the ramblings of gadflys in the blogosphere (Do I ever fucking hate that word), several people used the phrase ""Black Thursday" to refer to Gannett's annoucement this afternoon that they would be laying off about 1,000 employees nation wide at their smaller papers. Read about it here at Gawker. (And, keeping with the theme of the entry, the Gawker post about this only got 740 views and 20 comments, when a posting about some dumb girl who may or may not attend Princeton posting on her Facebook got 24,319 views and 243 comments. I.fucking.hate.EVERYONE.in my generation who has access to a computer.)

(I'll be honest: I was going to call her a "dumb c*nt', but it's not her fault that generation hip values the Facebook updates of complete strangers more than they do keeping abreast of the news by way of honest, objective sources. But I digress.)

This comes on the heels of the Star-Ledger announcing they would sell the paper in October if 200 employees didn't take buyouts, and Hearst also announcing that they were looking to combine the Daily News with another paper, or sell it.

Why this is problematic for me: The Press will be laying off 50 employees.This is the second round of layoffs in nearly six months that Gannett has gone through. I've said a few times that the business is circling the drain, but now I am legitimately concerned that the end of print is coming a lot sooner than we think.

I'm mad.
I'm mad because I am trying to buy my way into an apartment this weekend, and come Monday, I might not have a job anymore.
I'm mad because I spent four years studying a dying industry and didn't bother to minor in anything. Technically, I would consider Radio my minor, but that's not doing too well either. I wish I had tapped into marketing or advertising.
In the event of losing my job, I know I could probably find something else in a timely manner. The next logical step would be to do PR, but the thought of being a PR girl turns my stomach. when I hear the voice of a 20 something fresh outta college girl on the other end of my line, trying to tell me how totally, seriously awesome something that has no relevance to my beat is, and when do I want to speak to the person in charge of it, I literally hiss.

But most of all, I am upset that as as a whole, the career choice of media has failed me as well as several of my friends, who can't even find work in their preferred field, if at all.

I'm dying to go back to school, get my MBA, take culinary courses and open a small restaurant. But I'm afraid of getting saddled with loans.

If anything, I can be a guest judge on Project Runway. They've been using lots of nobodys this season.

To relax my rattled bones, I am going to go watch Colbert Report and Root of all Evil. The nonsensical rantings of middle aged men usually pacifies me pretty well.

Shut up and let me go

Ah, July. It's a magical month, as it's the real beginning of the summer, the 4th, and my birthday.

Like a good American, I spent the 4th getting hammered and jolly in the company of good friends, literally sitting on top of the entire world in the lower east side of New York City.

After an amazing homemade dinner of broiled sirloin and roasted garlic spread on baguettes and three growlers full of decent beer, we sat around the apartment and drunkenly reveled in each other's company to the sounds of Devotchka. Leah and I even caught a bird's eye view of the east village from the roof of the building, while the blueish glow of dusk disappeared for the night, and it was glorious. We ended the evening by watching "Vampiros En Habana!", a Cuban adult animated flick from the 70's that Leah and I uhh-dore, featuring lots of Latin music, naked, ridiculously proportioned women with trembling, naked bosoms, and horribly racist characters. It's really a great, great movie.
Friday was a day where every piece of food I put into my mouth all day seemed like the best I had ever tasted, and the breezes along St. Mark's and Houston Street felt cool and sweet against my skin.


The most important part of the entire weekend, however, may have been the passing of the NFT guide from Leah to me-she got the 2008 version, and gave me her 2006 copy, that has gotten us to one end of the island and back, through a million miles of subway routes, and served as a security blanket for the past two years. I'm very glad to now be able to always have it close.
(I did take it saying, ""So? It's just 2006! It can't be THAT outdated!"

::opens book up directly to section about CBGB's::

"Ohhhhhhh!!! Poo!::

Saturday was spent walking around further uptown and polishing off the rest of the spirits, including popping a bottle of champagne for late afternoon mimosas. I was a bit tipsy on the F while heading back up to Penn Station.

I was sorry we didn't get out to the Brooklyn Bridge to see the waterfall, but we weren't in the mood to rush all over the city; the next time I'm in the city, not for work, I'll get out there.

After a weekend in the city, going back to my closet of an office is a bit easier, which is good because Sunday was horrifically busy, and with a shitty deadline.

My birthday is on Wednesday, which makes me old, and then on Thursday, I'm shipping up to Boston for a long weekend. I can't wait; I haven't been there in years, and it's such a playground. I hope I remember my camera this time, as I forgot to bring it to NYC for the weekend of the 4th (And, the only documentation we have of the whole entire weekend is of me grossing out the boys by tossing back a cup of pickle juice at the NY Burger Company. Pussies.)

Leah posted a way more detailed post of our weekend gallivanting on her blog, AND, there's pictures of KITTIES on it. She will also be eventually uploading the video of me doing pickle juice shots and delighting in the dollar I TOTALLY EARNED from doing so.

What the fuck are you talking about?

Nothing kills the refreshed feeling of coming out of the bathroom to find a missed call from work.

"My boring ass life" by Kevin Smith has reaffirmed itself as one of my favorite books, because it gives me hope for the future. I drift off to sleep with dreams of when I someday write a script or a book or shoot a crappy movie that legions of socially inept schmucks base their entire existence on, those same people will dish out their hard earned money for a copy of my diary detailing little more than what I fed my kids for breakfast, which episode of The Simpsons I fell asleep to, and how often I fuck my spouse. Ah fame-I can't wait to get a big house in LA and fill it with excessive, foreign made shit.

I spent the last hour of my shift today driving up and down Route 36 in Hazlet during rush hour, looking for a graffiti tag that the paper needed a picture of for the next day's paper. It was hot. Everything is hot.

I can't believe it is June 10, soon to be June 11, already. That's the problem with working full time-the seasons aren't really defined anymore. Summer just becomes a lot of excessively hot days spent in a stuff office, that eventually give way to freezing cold.

My birfday is in less than a month. I took the week off from work and am planning a vacation. It won't come soon enough. I want to go to the whole other side of the country and hide in a cave far far away from everything for a little while, but going to New England will have to do.

Pata Pata Pata Pon

I hate Yahoo. Seriously.

I had to create a Yahoo account to join a league's group, and from the beginning, its given me nothing but trouble.

First, it never let me open attachments. Ever. It would say I had an attachment, but didn't display the little paper clip we've all come to recognize and love. Since the league didn't work out for me, I went to leave the group and it wouldn't let me. Not even that, it just doesn't offer a little tab that says "Leave This Group''. Nothing. It took me 1o minutes and multiple page loads to eventually find that option. Even when I entered it into the help search bar, it brought me to a page telling how how to sign up for a username, when I was ALREADY LOGGED IN WITH MY CURRENT ONE DAMMIT.

Yahoo and Aol are so outdated and work horrifically and I don't know why anyone still uses them. Google is totally the "machine", but it always works and never gives me trouble, and for that, I am a believer. My blood boils at the sight of the Yahoo home page.

In other news, I am patiently waiting for my stimulus check to arrive. My shortsighted generation has been buzzing about what to do with the shot of cash. I originally thought of spending it on another tattooing project, but now I'm thinking of looking for a new computer, since my laptop is about seven years old and showing its' age. I just don't want to have to spend it on lame, real world needs, like a car payment or a rent check. Money like that is begging to be spent on irresponsible things.

Credit must go to Andy for hooking me on lolcats and loldogs, even though I publicly announce my hatred for both cats and lolspeak on a daily basis. Lolspeak is yet another example of both the dumbing down of our culture, and the unoriginality of the general public's sense of humor. But dammit, it doesn't stop me from looking at pictures of little grammatically incorrect dogs almost every day. EL. OH. EL.

P.S.-I don't have the proper platform for it, but this website lets you play demos of "Patapon" on it, a weird PSP game where you command a little army of eyeball guys by following a drum rhythm with your controller buttons. It's really neat. I read an article about this game in what I think was the Times, and I've been curious about it since. It's a good time killer, if needed.

All your base are belong to us

Happy Anniversary.

I got a chance to see "Baby Mama", a comedy about a hee-lariously mismatched duo of women brought together by a surrogacy agency.

It was entertaining enough. Tina Fey plays the hard working Philadelphia career woman VP of a Whole Food-ish supermarket chain, Kate Holbrook, who at 37 has baby fever. Amy Poehler is trashy Amy Ostrowski, a surrogate with a mouth breather husband, who drinks a lot of Dr. Pepper and yells every other sentence. After a meeting at Kate's impossibly chic Philly apartment, where Angie and her husband act like fishes out of water, the duo decide to work together to bring a baby into the world. HILARITY ENSUES.

But seriously, it was exactly what I expected it to be. Fey didn't write the movie, but if she had, it would have been so much funnier, I'm sure. Romany Malco was once again sadly but hilariously typecast as the street smart, smooth talking brother with a heart of gold, much like his character in 40 Year Old Virgin, Jay. The chemistry between Fey and Poehler is rock solid and totally believable, which helped the film immensely, especially in parts where the connection between Greg Kinnear's love interest character and Fey isn't really believable. I also laughed at the spoofs on the new agey, natural childbirth movement that is becoming big in this country. But the ending wraps up a bit too neatly and happily ever after for a film starring two women who are so adept at offbeat and black humor.

Bottom line: I'll probably watch it again when it comes out on DVD, but it wasn't one of my favorites. A halfway decent watch, but very much like a not so funny 90 minute episode of 30 Rock.

By the way, when searching Google images for "Baby Mama" to find a picture of the movie poster to put with this (because IMDB doesn't allow pictures to be saved from the site), a million pictures of super-trashy looking women and ugly children come up. Niiiiiiiice.