The last few days have been a whirlwind. Last night, The Best Friend™ and I got all dressed up (and I got made up) and partied our asses off at a Halloween party downtown. There was much drinking, there was much fun, and there was even Game Three of the World Series playing on the big screen so I could watch my Sox win last night, much to the dismay of 99.999% of the people in the place. Photographic evidence, as always, is available here.
Nine hours from now, The Best Friend™ and I will be sitting inside Coors Field as my Red Sox will (hopefully — please, please, please whatever baseball deities exist) sweep the Rockies and I will (again hopefully — please, please, please whatever baseball deities exist) actually be present for a Red Sox World Series victory. To actually be in the house for a Red Sox World Series game is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity I couldn’t pass up, and to be actually be there when they full-on win the World Series would be a once-in-10,000-lifetimes opportunity, so despite the fact that I’m fully in enemy territory and paid way too damn much for these tickets, I am hoping beyond hope my boys can pull it off tonight.
With the Red Sox up two games to none in the World Series, yours truly is a pretty happy dude. However, it’s pretty obvious that I’m in enemy territory right now. They announced the final score of Game 1 during my flight out to Denver, and I was the only one who cheered… which got me some dirty looks. And when I was exiting the plane, the pilot saw my Sox hat and said, “Out of everything I didn’t want to see on my plane tonight, a Red Sox hat is definitely not one of them.” Wow.
I was watching the local Fox affiliate’s pre-game show yesterday, and it was pretty obvious they were reaching. First, they showed a clip one of the guys from Boston’s biggest sports radio station, WEEI, and began talking over him, saying things like “oh, what does he know?” Then they did a whole segment about Fenway Park and how, despite the fact that it’s got a ton of heritage, it’s crammed into the downtown area where there’s not a lot of parking, and Coors Field is newer and bigger with better parking and technological advances like an electronic scoreboard. Come on — is that really all you’ve got? Denver has a better ballpark? Yeah, because that’s really going to help you win games.
And yes, I got dirty looks at the bar last night too, since I was again the only person in the place wearing Sox gear. However, I fully expect Red Sox Nation to descend upon the Mile-High City within the next 48 hours, so I won’t be alone. Go Sox!
HOLY EFFING CRAP! For the second time in four years, my beloved Red Sox have come from behind to win! And what a game Game 7 of the ALCS was. I’m sure my neighbors are pissed at me for all the screaming I was doing at the TV.
Here’s the thing… I had actually planned to be in Denver this upcoming weekend anyway to see The Best Friend™. And now… my beloved Sox will be in town to play in the World Friggin’ Series. So now I have to do everything within my power to get Game Four tickets. Does anyone have a hookup? Red Sox Nation must represent!
Tessie, “Nuf Ced” McGreevey shouted
We’re not here to mess around
Boston, you know we love you madly
Hear the crowd roar to your sound
Don’t blame us if we ever doubt you
You know we couldn’t live without you
Red Sox, you are the only only only...
--Dropkick Murphys, “Tessie”
It was a double-feature at lunch a couple of days ago: Sitting outside at the restaurant, we spotted James Remar as he walked by. (Some of you may recall him as the badass in 48 Hrs., others may remember him as Richard on Sex and the City.) Then after lunch, we walked down the street back to the car, and sitting in one of the cafes was William Baldwin.
And just overheard: “My ex-girlfriend just bought a condo, but it’s not ready for another couple of weeks, so I let her move in with me. Then I couldn’t handle the stress of it, so I just started taking Wellbutrin, and that lowers my alcohol tolerance.” Only in L.A....
My upstairs neighbor was kind enough to wake me at 6am, so I had the chance to see Sunrise Earth on Discovery HD Theater, where they pick a location somewhere on the planet and then just show nature scenes from it for an hour; this morning’s episode was from somewhere in Idaho. I never thought I’d be so mesmerized watching nature… I usually can’t even be bothered to watch nature when it’s right in front of me, so I’m amazed that I could enjoy it so much on TV.
HDTV: It’s better than real life!
Spotted yesterday: The dude who plays Ben, the creepy head of “The Others” on Lost, as I was walking to lunch at the mini-mall next door to my work building. He was talking to someone and passed right by me. Normally, when I see someone who I recognize from TV or movies, I do a double-take — first glance tells me they look familiar and can I place them? Second glance usually gives me a rough idea of who it is, since sometimes it’s a little hard for me to recognize actors out of their element. But this dude… instantly recognized him. He looks exactly the same in real life as he does on TV.
Spotted this morning: The bedroom wall, when I walked into it. I only got a handful of hours of sleep on Sunday night, so after the Red Sox suffered the ignominy of defeat again yesterday, I crashed hard at midnight and woke up 8 1/2 hours later when my alarm went off… and then promptly fell out of bed. Then, still groggy, I got up off the floor and walked into the wall. Gee, I’m coordinated.
I also got lazy yesterday and neglected to shave before work, so I went to the office scruffy. However, none of my co-workers believed I was working on only 1 days’ worth of growth. It’s 2 days now, and I look positively mountain mannish. The question becomes, do I remain lazy and let it grow out for a couple of days to see what happens, or do I start hacking it off again? If I let it grow, I anticipate itching, and I also anticipate a painful shave when I eventually do take it off.
And now, I’m livid.
Earlier this week, raving lunatic Ann Coulter appeared on CNBC’s The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch to promote her new book, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans. On this show, she blatantly showed her anti-Semitic tendencies (which was ironic, considering Deutsch is Jewish) by declaring that everyone should become Christian, that Christians see themselves as “perfected Jews” and that Christians want to perfect the Jews by making them Christian. She said this on national TV. Don’t believe me? Watch it here. Still don’t believe me? Read the transcript here on Fox News’ site, an outlet usually sympathetic to Coulter and her insane rantings.
I am incensed that the American media would permit this woman to continually traipse around the country, spewing her hatred, intolerance and closed-minded stupidity on its airwaves, and I’m more incensed that there has not been an outcry from any groups demanding that Coulter be censured, forced to apologize for anything she’s said or banned from giving interviews or being given a forum to deliver her message of prejudice to the public. When Don Imus uttered three words, there was such an uprising from the African-American community that the entire country knew what had occurred, and Imus was banished from the airwaves after almost 40 years. Yet Coulter constantly utters such hateful insults, but there is never a response, and nothing seems to stick to her. We’re talking about a woman who called Bill Clinton a “latent homosexual” and said he was a “very good rapist,” referred to Arabs as “camel jockeys,” called John Edwards a “faggot” and Al Gore a “total fag,” said that the 9/11 widows were “harpies” who were exploiting their husbands’ death, referred to Islam as “a car-burning cult,” said that feminists were “weak and pathetic” and recently claimed that “if we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat [sic] president.”
How much more of her hate-filled haranguing should we allow? It’s not like Coulter hasn’t established a clear pattern of being a racist, homophobic, sexist and intolerant. If Don Imus should be forced to publicly apologize and be fired after saying only three words, how can we continue to permit Coulter to say such things without any kind of consequence? For once, we need to speak out and say that this kind of thing cannot be tolerated, and she should be made to retract her statements and offer an apology — if not to the Jewish community, then to the gay, Islamic and feminist communities, at the very least. This country was founded on the principles of freedom from persecution, and we shouldn’t have to deal with it coming out of our TVs and radios.
Thoughts on a Wednesday:
- Thoroughly enjoying the new NBC-TV show Chuck. But for the life of me, I can’t figure out how a guy whose name is Zachary Levi and who is sporting the curly Jewfro… isn’t Jewish.
- Also thoroughly enjoying the new NBC-TV show Journeyman. And I love the fact that they tell you initially what year he’s travelled to by playing music — every time, I’ve been able to guess the correct year before he finds out on the show… well, because I’m a full-on music geek, that’s how.
- Was today Bad Driver Day and no one bothered to tell me? I saw an almost-accident on my way into work this morning — guy wasn’t paying attention and had to slam on his brakes, rubber squealing and all, in order to avoid rear-ending the stopped car in front of him — and then I almost got into an accident myself when some idiot decided he wanted to be in my lane without signalling and without checking to see if maybe, you know, someone was already there, like me perhaps.
- Speaking of the roads, I’m becoming increasingly frustrated with the audacity of bike riders in this city. Yeah, I know we’re all supposed to “share the road,” and I’m all about sharing — I always give bicyclists a wide berth when I pass them. But I take issue when these morons are pedaling down the road and are riding in the middle of the lane. It’s superhard for me to go around them when there’s maybe 2-3 feet between the bike and oncoming traffic, and they’re not sharing when they’re going 15 mph and letting traffic pile up behind them because they won’t let anyone around them.
- I know it’s a good day at work when I get at least 4 e-mails from my co-workers telling me things like “you’re demented” and “there’s definitely something wrong with you.”
- Living in Los Angeles has its perks every now and then. I think driving around for a half-hour last night in Hollywood looking for a parking spot might’ve been offset by my strong suspicions that the guy on the elliptical trainer next to mine tonight at the gym was the dude who plays Alejandro on Heroes.
I had such high hopes for Grey’s Anatomy. I remember watching the pilot episode and thinking that it was a really great reflection of what I’d imagined went on in a busy city hospital. And then it went and turned into a big, mushy soap opera with everyone sleeping with everyone else and people falling in and out of love with each other every week. It was kind of the same path that ER took, and it’s why I stopped watching that many seasons ago.
I wanted the show to succeed. I wanted it to show me what the hospital was like, with the heroic measures and the ordinary daily craziness of the pressures of holding people’s lives in your hands minute by minute. Most of all, I wanted it to show me what it was like for my dad when he would go into work for these insane 12-hour shifts, where I never really got any information out of him about his day other than the fact that it was busy. All I heard about were some minor things here and there and some basic stats, like the crazy day when there was a chemical leak near the hospital and Dad came home and told me he literally had about a minute each to decide how to save his patients — or if they could be saved at all. Later on, now that he’s retired and we’re both adults, the stories come slowly leaking out, like the young Russian kid who spent a Thanksgiving with us because he came into the hospital and had nowhere else to go, or the meth addict who threw him into a wall, or the six-month AIDS scare from a patient who was fighting him and bled all over him that I never knew about, or the kid who coded in the parking lot....
I knew he was a good doctor. I just never really had a real idea of the kind of things he dealt with seriously on a daily basis, and the pilot episode of Grey’s gave me a small glimmer of an idea, and the more I saw of that serious world of medicine, the more proud I was of him. And now I almost feel like I’ve lost some of it because the show has gone so far off that track.
And yet, I was still up this morning at 7:30am watching it on TiVo. And I was up at 7:30am on a Sunday morning watching TV after having barely gotten 5 hours of sleep because my idiot inconsiderate neighbor upstairs once again was blasting her TV and it woke me up through my ceiling.
As the old radio joke goes, when a station flips to all-Christmas music, you know Halloween can’t be too far off.
Personally, I think stations have been pulling the trigger on that just a bit too early… It’s not that I’m anti-Christmas because I’m Jewish, because I love going to New York during Christmastime and seeing the giant tree in Rockefeller Plaza and the storybook windows at Saks, and I’m a huge fan of Christmas lights. It’s that too much of a good thing — okay, too much of anything — is still, well, too much. I can’t tolerate eight straight weeks of Christmas music. I can’t tolerate eight straight weeks of Christmas anything! It just gets tiresome. Does anyone else remember when the Christmas season started on the day after Thanksgiving?
That said, I was amused today when the first Christmas CD of the 2007 season arrived on my desk this morning… Barry Manilow’s In the Swing of Christmas. Not only was the first Christmas CD of the year done by a Jew, but two of the three guys in his band for this album are also Jewish. Oh, the delicious, delicious irony.
Anyone want a Barry Manilow Christmas CD?
Back in Los Angeles after a whirlwind week of East Coast mania and the culmination of several months’ work for my company. Oddly enough, I feel kind of emotionally numb at the moment… like I took everything I had over the past several weeks and built it up and poured it into this past week — so now I don’t have much of anything left, and I’m home now and trying to fit back into this life that feels a little empty.
Either way, it was a great experience. I caught up with some old industry friends, made a lot of new ones, got some nice compliments from people who work in my industry… and, hey, did I mention that I saw Van effing Halen on opening night of their reunion tour? It’s almost like a full circle: VH was my first-ever concert when I was a kid, so it was great to see them again, especially now that I can definitely appreciate them more. Then again, we’re all taking bets if they’ll actually hold it together for the entire tour — I might’ve waited to see them once they came to Los Angeles, but who knows if they’ll make it here?
A few more 10-hour nights of sleep and a little more clearing-out of the TiVo, and I think I’ll be a little closer to normal. In the meantime, here’s the requisite pictures of Manhattan from the air as I was taking off from LaGuardia last Tuesday. It was just so perfect, I couldn’t help but grab my camera and start taking pictures like a madman.
Three words: Van effing Halen. No, wait… five words: Van effing Halen, opening night.
The high stress levels over the past months, the panic attacks at 4am, the sleepless nights, the frenetic schedule and the unbearable workload… Tonight made it all worthwhile. I was there, in the audience, as David Lee Roth and the Van Halen brothers kicked off their first tour together in 20 years. And man, do they still have it. They can still effing rock.
One more day of the Convention, and then I come home. Then my actual life resumes without the craziness and pressure of this Convention. I feel like this one week has been the most important of my career, like I was handed the keys in my recent promotion and over these few days, my bosses are seeing whether or not I can drive the car. So I’m rather looking forward to getting home and watching the 20 hours of stuff waiting for me on my TiVo. I guess it also means that all the stuff I’ve been putting off until “later,” I finally have to get around to doing.
It’s been a weekend. After going to services Friday night for Yom Kippur, I was up packing and then couldn’t sleep for the big trip. I finally dozed off at 1:30am Friday night… then the alarm went off two hours later at 3:30am Saturday morning (I judge days by when I sleep) to head to LAX to fly to New York. So not only was I running on no sleep, but I flew while fasting for Yom Kippur. Suffice it to say that by the time I got the JFK and rented the car for the drive up to Connecticut, I had a splitting headache. I went East initially for my mom’s best friend’s son’s wedding up there, and it was a really nice ceremony and reception in a beautiful area of Connecticut. Sadly — and I wish I knew why — I got a huge case of homesickness while I was there. It’s been three years since I’ve seen the town that I grew up in, and even then, I was only there for literally an afternoon. Being back in Connecticut, and especially being within an hour of my hometown and not being able to go, made me a little upset.
Either way, last night, I drove back into New York. It was great to see the city again, and strangely enough, this time around… well, being here makes me think that maybe, if the circumstances called for it, I might be able to live here again. I know I’ve said for a long time that it’s too frenetic and too busy and too loud, but I actually think I might be able to work it if I needed to. I’ve been doing the culinary tour, eating at all the restaurants and places I used to love to go but haven’t been to in years.
My hotel is 41 floors above TImes Square, but the coolest part of it was realizing that they do Good Morning America live from downstairs on 44th Street & 7th Avenue, across the street from my hotel. And in other cool stuff, I was walking back from Rockefeller Plaza last night and saw a bunch of movie trailers parked along 49th Street with people gathered outside them — then Kristin Davis walked by and into her trailer! Continued down the street… and a minute later, Cynthia Nixon walked right by me, dressed in a bathrobe. Yup, they were filming the Sex & the City movie. Today, I went back to pick something up in Rockefeller Plaza, and I actually saw them filming! Sarah Jessica Parker is short.
Tomorrow, I wake up at 5am to fly out to Charlotte, where I’ll spend the rest of the week at my company’s big annual convention, running my ass off and not getting any sleep. At least at the end of this week, a huge stress will be lifted — basically, my bosses handed me the keys with my recent promotion, and now I have to prove that I can drive the car. No wonder I’ve been out of my mind for the past three weeks.
So with my company’s big-ass annual Convention happening next week, suffice it to say that my stress level has been through the roof and my workload is probably about as high. When people ask whether they’ll see me at the Convention, my response has pretty much been “Look for the overtired, overcaffeinated blur… that’ll be me.” Thankfully, The Girlfriend™ has been stellar during this meltdown leading up to next week, being extremely patient and understanding and helpful and even going as far as to buy me a Futurama action figure.
I also have been watching a bunch of pilots — TiVo has some available for free download, so I’ve already seen Chuck, The Bionic Woman, Journeyman and The Big Bang Theory. Honestly, I felt like I’d already seen The Bionic Woman because of all the promos I’ve seen in the movies, so it’ll be interesting to see an episode where I don’t already know what’s going to happen. I did enjoy Journeyman and I’m looking forward to it, and I’ll give Chuck a little more of a shot because it seems decently funny, but I was sorely disappointed in The Big Bang Theory — I don’t expect that one to last. At this very moment, I’m about 20 minutes into that new HBO show, Tell Me You Love Me, and I’m seriously thinking about turning it off and cancelling my Season Pass… it’s really just not holding my attention at all. And is it me, or is NBC completely geeking out with the shows they’re offering this season?
So, I’m starting to think about buying a condo.
It was only natural, I suppose. I’ve lived in Los Angeles for almost 6 years now [shudder] and my position at my company seems pretty secure, what with having survived a buyout (and being 1 of maybe 20 out of 80 who did) and actually gotten promoted twice in the process. I rather like what I’m doing, and I can see myself doing it for a fair amount of time, if they’ll let me. So I figured it was probably time to stop flushing money away by paying rent every month and maybe starting to invest in something that’s actually mine, plus it’ll (hopefully) appreciate over the years. Not only that, but everyone keeps saying that the housing bubble has finally popped, so within a few months, I should be able to get a decent place at a halfway decent-for-Los Angeles price.
The question is where. I’d like to get a place in an area that has “stuff"… you know, a supermarket within a decent distance, some restaurants, maybe some bars, maybe even a movie theatre or some other cool area. I’d also like to be in an area where I wouldn’t be afraid that my condo or my car would get broken into or that I wouldn’t get mugged and/or beaten on the street at night, as well as some place that’s not way the eff out and makes my commute an hour each way. However, I’d also like to be in an up-and-coming area so the condo has a chance to seriously appreciate over a few years, rather than an area like Santa Monica or Brentwood, where there’s really not too far upwards that it could go.
So, my Los Angeles-based readers… any suggestions on where to start?