Where the Charles River Meets Long Island Sound

Actual Email I Just Sent, and Commentary

2011-11-11T14:50:00.004-05:00

Actual email I just sent:

You guys, I am failing at being productive today. All I have done is get my TB test read and my hospital ID made for my practicum, baked brownies, and ignored the screams of a person who was trapped in my building's elevator. No joke. Once I excluded the possibility that the ringing I heard was the fire alarm, I thought it was someone's call button from downstairs and that someone was harassing this girl to be let in to the building. Nope. Trapped in the elevator. My quads are going to be so badass from living in a 7th floor walk-up.

Commentary:

1. When I heard the voices of the men who came to free her from the elevator, I felt like a.) an idiot and b.) the most terrible person ever. Just to make it clear that I do, in fact, feel feelings.

2. It's not that I'm a monster. It's just that I always assumed I would be the person trapped inside. Based on past experience, this is not an unfounded assumption.

3. Public health applications of someone being trapped in an elevator: I don't know about you, but I am waaaaay more motivated to take the stairs now.

Reproductive Biology

2011-09-29T23:02:00.008-04:00

I am taking a class on human reproductive biology.

I should mention a few things about the other students. First, given that this class takes place at a medical school that rhymes with Farvard, everyone operates from the premise that the students meet some baseline level of intelligence. Second, it's about 60 percent dudes, 40 percent ladies. Third, they mostly seem pretty normal and nice and decently socialized. I don't say this last thing to be a bitch--I typically assume that people are normal until proven weirdos-- but, rather, because someone asked me the following question:

"How many of the guys are only taking the class because it's the closest they're going to get to knowing what a vagina feels like?"

"No! They all seem really normal and nice!" I protested, reflexively. But then I started looking for the awkward, and I honed in on one guy who kept turning around to share a giggle--yes, a giggle-- with a person sitting behind me, usually when a lecturer used the word clitoris.

So, anyway, here I am, in lecture with some women, some mildly awkward dudes, and the guy apparently unfamiliar with lady parts. In this company I am listening to a lecture about the miracle of sperm.

"It's really miraculous," the guest lecturer, a urologist, says. "Did you ever consider the fact that it's the only cell designed to function outside its body of origin?"

This is really more than feminist me can take. I consider raising my hand. "Is it really miraculous that it takes two million of these amaaaaazing cells for ONE of them to get the job done? I am somehow unimpressed. NEXT."

I decide against raising my hand. I mean, he's a urologist. It's kind of his job to be really excited about sperm.

Blah blah blah aren't sperms the coolest blah blah blah well I guess testes make a lot of janky ones but hey they sure do make a lot of them blah blah bigger stronger faster smarter blah blah scrotum.

Oh yes, now it's the moment we've been waiting for: time to talk about the wonders of the scrotum.

I have a vague idea about what's ahead. I am pretty sure it will involve a lot of awkward silences between prompts to discuss scrotal physiology.

I am so right.

This discomfort, by the way, baffles me. We are in an elective class, a MEDICAL SCHOOL class no less, about reproductive biology. It's not as if all these people were abducted off the street, locked in a room, and told, "Surprise! We're talking about balls!" Good grief, 60 PERCENT OF THE PEOPLE IN THE ROOM HAVE A SCROTUM. Is it that difficult to talk about it in the abstract? The uterus--mine, yours, some anonymous uterus-- is one of my favorite topics of conversation. How is this different?

The urologist is still trying to keep the class interactive. There is a quick refresher on the evolutionary origins of scrotal anatomy. I again refrain from offering an answer, since I'm pretty sure that the expected response to "Why is it so important for the male gonads to be external?" is not "To regulate the temperature of the sperm and also to make them easier to kick." Having somehow elicited an answer about keeping the little swimmers chilly, he moves on: "And how does the scrotum keep the testes cool?"

I consider rattling off three or four mechanisms, just to end the agony. As the tooth-pulling continues, I finally lose patience and call out, to the surprise and discomfort of several of the guys, "It sweats a lot," in a voice that I realize is not unlike Patty Bouvier's. "Just make it stop," I think to myself. "We get it. You have said at least five times that sperm need to be at 34 ˚C. They like it cold. Aaaaaargh."

I give up. I am zoning out a little, trying to decide which of the only-a-little awkward guys might be single and interested in dating my friends. My eyes pass quickly over the guy who is there to hear about vaginas (clearly not friend fix-up material), and then my brain senses a red flag. I focus back on him. Just like one of those games in the back of Highlights when I was little, I play "What's Wrong with this Picture?"

His laptop is not on his desk. It is, aptly, on top of his lap. Has he not seen articles about this? Has he not been listening at all to the last 20 minutes of excruciating explanation about how heat causes male infertility?

The laptop's fan turns on. The urologist looks directly at him but keeps lecturing. I think about raising my hand and asking if we can have an intervention. A fresh surge of annoyance about the whole "miracle of sperm" thing rushes through me, and also I consider the fact that I will sound a.) like a hideous bitch and b.) like I was thinking about this guy's testes. Nope, not me, not today. Sometimes, you have to let people figure out their mistakes on their own.

Kate Is Again Flummoxed By Drug Advertising

2011-01-22T23:28:00.006-05:00

I don't think it's any secret that I am often critical of and sometimes baffled by direct-to-consumer drug advertising. I have railed again DTC advertising before. And then I reveled in the delicious awkwardness of the Yaz ad retraction. And I still don't get what's up with the whole Cialis campaign. How exactly are you supposed to have sex with someone who is in a separate claw-foot bathtub? I'm pretty sure at least one of you will have to leave your tub. And have you ever tried to get out of a claw-foot tub? I lived in an apartment with a claw-foot tub for two years. When you get out of a claw-foot tub, you are not thinking about looking sexy. You are thinking about not falling and cracking your head open on the sink or the tile floor. Although maybe when your tub is in the middle of a grassy knoll overlooking a picturesque valley, the landing is a little softer.

Anyway, the latest drug to make me furrow my brow is Beyaz. Yes, it turns out Yaz has a cousin.

Why does Beyaz baffle me? First of all, Beyaz is only one letter away from "bedaz" which I assume is the noun form of the verb bedazzle. But, more to the point, Beyaz is a birth control pill with folic acid. You know who needs a lot of folic acid? Ladies who are preggers.

Let that one sink in for a second.

I struggle to understand the intent. As far as I can tell, it's "Beyaz is 99% effective at preventing pregnancy! But, um, just in case it's not effective, aren't you super excited that the fetus you didn't want will get all its Vitamin B?" That seems like a pretty weak consolation prize. Especially given the price of brand name birth control. I'd be willing to bet that, from a cost-effectiveness perspective, you're a lot better off popping generic BC and a Centrum (or a generic folic acid supplement, while we're at it).

And can you think of any other drug that does anything like this? It's not as if you go to get a flu shot and they hand you a can of chicken soup on your way out, in case you get the flu anyway. I mean, obviously no preventative pharmaceutical is perfect, and oral birth control is especially prone to user error that compromises the effectiveness. But it seems really strange to make your product's potential failure into a selling point. Or maybe it's scathingly brilliant, and I just don't get it.

Whatever. As long as your boyfriend/husband/guy-you're-kind-of-seeing stays in his own bathtub, you don't really have to worry about it.

Kate Is a Danger to Herself and Cake Mix

2010-12-06T22:22:00.018-05:00

Tonight, I did something of which I am ashamed.

I baked cupcakes.

From a box.

As you will see, I have already paid for this act in emotional pain and suffering. Shockingly, I didn't burn myself. What? Oh, sorry, I've gotten ahead of myself.

I should start at the beginning. Over the weekend, I acquired a box of Funfetti cake mix to make cupcakes for a wedding shower. Hey, at least I make my own buttercream (featuring little sprinkles to make it look like that alleged frosting you buy in a can). I had eggs, and the only other cake ingredients are water and oil. Who doesn't have vegetable oil?

[Awkward silence as Kate stares into her cabinet in disbelief; notes that it is 9:45 p.m. and really, really cold outside; and convinces herself that no one will be able to tell if she cobbles together 1/3 cup of oil from a couple different varieties that were never meant for use in baked goods whose main appeal is the little sprinkles.]

So anyway, the batter was finished. Into the oven go 24 mini cupcakes. Ten minutes later, out come 24 not-so-mini cupcakes. Apparently I struggle with the concept of "fill the muffin cups 2/3 of the way." By this time I was getting a little antsy, so I upgraded to full-size cupcakes for the rest of the batter. But did I mention that I had gone a touch overboard for those first 24 cupcakes? I stretched the remaining sprinkly goop across the 12 cups as best I could, predicting the full-size cupcakes to come out the same size as their tiny brethren, and threw them in the oven.

At this point, I noticed that the first batch seemed a little jiggly and underbaked. Not especially interested in causing a Salmonella outbreak at a public health school, I decided to bake them a bit longer and tossed them into the oven with the other pan.

Did I mention that I have a tiny oven? Oh, and I only have one oven rack. But somehow, it seemed that all three trays fit on the rack. I was legit shocked and delighted.

Or not. Four minutes later, I went to retrieve the mini cupcakes. Remember your earth science class when you learned about tectonics and they showed you the picture of the plates stacking on top of each other like this? Yeah. This was the situation on my tragic, tiny oven rack.

[Brief moment of panic as Kate wonders if all is lost.]

Okay. I grabbed my oven mitts and successfully extricated the subjugated cupcakes from the oven. No big deal--a few slightly smooshed, but certainly nothing that a pound of frosting can't fix (seriously, a pound of frosting; I don't kid around). Now to pull the other tray away from the back of the oven... by which I mean, push it away from me with my unwieldy glove until it falls face down into the bottom of the oven. You know what else is in the bottom of the oven? Why, you're right-- it is the heating element!

Not everyone knows this, but my mom is a really talented baker and cake decorator, and when I was four years old, she baked my nursery school teacher's wedding cake. It was beautiful, but when she baked a practice cake for my class, the batter overflowed, igniting as it sat on the heating element, causing panic-stricken little Katie to beg to evacuate the house. So you can imagine my stream of thought as this debacle unfolded:

Son of a bitch! Shit. Okay. How do you get a 350 degree pan out of a tiny box, all surfaces of which are also 350 degrees? Turn off the oven and shut the door. Is that smoke? Shit shit shit fuck shit. Shut the door! Maybe without air, it will put itself out. If it worked for Mom, it can work for me. Okay, now open the window to let the smoke out; you cannot be that girl who sets off the fire alarm at 10:00 p.m. on a Monday when it is 25 outside. Mommy, can I go play in the sandbox? Where is my fire extinguisher... do I not own a fire extinguisher? Are you fucking KIDDING ME?

Fortunately, there was only a small puff of smoke, because none of the sad remains of this shitstorm was touching the heating element. So clad in pajamas and oven mitts, I removed the oven rack-- which is now named Judas, incidentally-- and began scooping partially baked cupcake batter out of the bottom of my oven with a spatula. It either looks like a baked goods murder scene or like My Little Pony pounded a couple Four Lokos and then lost its cookies. I am super excited to finish cleaning that tomorrow.

By the way, this was not fun. There was nothing fun about the Funfetti. This was Catastrophetti.

Kate Has Possibly Now Seen Everything

2010-10-12T20:07:00.004-04:00

Today, I walked home from school. As I crossed Memorial Drive on my way up Mass Ave., a state trooper stood on the corner, looking up the road (thereby missing my brazen jaywalking). I didn't give it much thought, until I saw four others cruise through the intersection on their motorcycles... which was about the same time I noticed a helicopter circling overhead.

There were many plausible explanations, of course-- a horrific car crash, a dead body washed up in the Charles, a Nobel laureate on the loose at MIT. But I, of course, keyed in on one and only one possibility: my long-awaited motorcade had finally come to Boston!

I continued up the street. Just past MIT, there are train tracks that cross Mass Ave., and a crowd was gathered near the crossing, more state police waiting on their motorcycles on one side and a group of gawkers on the other. People snapped pictures and smiled and held up their small children to catch a glimpse.

As I approached, I had a moment of doubt. After all, the police were still allowing traffic onto the street, which seemed odd. But, no, this has to be it. There's an election coming! Someone on some news station said something about the President coming to Massachusetts to campaign... or something... I think. In any case, you can understand that my rationale, though sketchy, was semi-legit. This was it. This was the Presidential motorcade. Or, even better yet, this was Joe's motorcade!

I followed the crowd's gaze. They were all looking down the train tracks to the west. Hmm. Not sure if I would go with a train trip in such a contentious election season, but whatever. If a White House train ride was rolling through Cambridge, I was all for it. I looked down the track...

...and into the face of an elephant.

No, not a Republican.

A fucking pachyderm.

A whole line of them, in fact. Getting off the circus train.

The. Circus. Train.

THE CIRCUS TRAIN?! SURELY YOU JEST.

I didn't know it was possible to be crestfallen at the exact moment that your mind becomes boggled. But I am here to tell you that it is, indeed, possible.

But the boggling continued. As I walked along, a guy asked me what was happening. I responded, in a dazed tone, that there was a line of elephants emerging from what appeared to be a circus train. He was completely unperturbed and proceeded to tell me--perfectly nonchalantly, by the way-- "Oh yeah, I forgot. Yeah, they have them walk across the Longfellow Bridge."

Of course this was the day I left my camera at home. Of course.

Small Moments of DC Withdrawal

2010-09-21T23:07:00.004-04:00

Every time I hear a siren, I look around for a motorcade. I live next to two hospitals and go to school near a thousand, so this happens a lot.

Kate Has a Laundry Problem

2010-09-14T22:20:00.002-04:00

So, I really, really hate doing laundry and avoid it as long as possible. "As long as possible" is typically about two and a half weeks, but it varies depending on factors including weather, traumas/moments of clumsiness resulting in stains, and how much I go running. (Socks are my limiting reagent. The months that I swam exclusively were some of the happiest of my life, because I could easily go at least three weeks without doing laundry if I really used my closet to its full potential.)

Anyway, part of the problem with hating to do laundry and doing it, at most, two days a month, is that you really want to make those washes count. I don't only hate the effort involved in laundry; I'm cheap, I'm always almost out of quarters, and I have some vague liberal guilt about wasting water. So when I do laundry, I like to do all my laundry (which, by that point, is pretty much all my clothing) in one load of colors and one load of whites. If I'm really feeling lucky (reckless?), I try to fit a couple towels and a set of sheets into the mix.

By the way, at no point did I say I think this is a good idea. It's not laundry best practice, if you will. But aside from one black teeshirt that once came out kind of lint-y, it has not come back to haunt me in any way. Until last Wednesday, at least.

Wednesday morning, I got up early to go for a run. Already, I was sort of unhappy, because it was early, and also because I knew that laundry day was going to be around the corner pretty soon. It was raining lightly, which I had been expecting and which I thought might be nice running weather.

By the time I got downstairs, it was raining a bit more heavily. Okay. Not ideal, but not the end of the world. I had planned ahead and not worn a white shirt, so it's not like there was going to be a wet teeshirt contest moment in the spring break sense of the words.

By the time I got to the river, I could hear rumbling. Trucks? Sure, the road there is pretty busy. I thought I saw a flash, but I easily reasoned that away as a misfiring bulb in the lights on the Harvard practice fields.

By the time I got to the bend in the road... holy shit. Remember how I said some rain wasn't the end of the world? Yeah. At this point, it actually was the end of the world. I was pretty sure this was it. I didn't want to run over the bridge, for fear of being the tallest thing around and, consequently, getting my ass smote, so I tried an underpass and ran a quarter mile on the wrong trail. This was not going as planned. In my pocket, I had keys, a CharlieCard, and my insurance card, which I realized would come in handy when I finally got hit by lightning-- someone could toss me onto a bus headed toward a hospital.

At some point, I made it back to the trail I had intended to follow, where there were things like light posts and guys at least six feet tall, all of which I figured could deflect the wrath of God from me. But then I realized that the people passing were staring at me, and not in a good way. Dude, come on. Yes, I looked like I had fallen in the river, but so did everyone else.

It was then that I glanced down at the front of my shirt.

It was covered in a white, foamy substance.

Does my shirt have rabies? Maybe this really is the end of the world.

Or, maybe, if you really, really overload a washing machine-- I mean, massively overload it, to a point that even you admit isn't a good idea--no matter how hard it tries, it won't be able to remove all the detergent from your clothes. This surprise fabric content can then make its presence known at inopportune times.

I think the lesson is that I need to adjust either my laundry habits or my running habits. It occurs to me, however, that perhaps this shirt is now self-washing, which would reduce my laundry pile by one shirt.

Kate Realizes that She Actually Lives in Boston

2010-08-29T23:16:00.003-04:00

Well, Cambridge, but it seems that I have gotten myself ensconced. I have a CharlieCard. I have taken the bus-- TWO buses, in fact (1 and 66, holla). I have turned on my TV and tuned in to the dulcet tones of Remy and Orsillo calling a Sox game. I have gotten lost running and found my way back home. I have even had guests over for baked goods. It seems I really live here.

And already, in one week, I have seen more celebrities in Boston than I did in DC. I mean, real celebrities. Well, celebrity. The bar from DC was pretty low.

Friday night, I called friends to find out where they were headed for the rest of the evening, and I received vague instructions to go to the South End to The Gallows. Having never been to the South End and lacking a smartphone, I was sort of hoping for a little more guidance than that, but I'm pretty intrepid. So I found myself in South Boston, dropped off at obviously not the right place. Fortunately, a friendly stranger who asked me for directions (which is amusing) pointed me to the right street.

Once on Washington Street, I still had no idea where to go. Unenthusiastic about the idea of standing on a street corner waiting for someone to respond to my texts of "Help?" I spotted a valet standing outside a restaurant down the block and decided that it couldn't hurt to ask him. I set off briskly toward him, mostly oblivious to the presence of a large man chatting with the valet. And by large, I mean really quite large.

As I opened my mouth to ask the valet my question, a guy came running out of the restaurant.

"Mister Shaq! Mister Shaq! Can I have your autograph?!"

What? I briefly looked up.

Shit. It's Shaq.

Does Shaq know where The Gallows is? Probably not. His utility for me is most likely limited.

I refocused and asked the valet about the bar I'm trying to find. Shaq calmly signed something for the dude who came barreling out of the restaurant. I assume; I honestly wasn't paying attention. I was thinking about how, if you walk too far the wrong way down Washington Street, you get shot and pushed off an abandoned building.

The valet went into the restaurant to ask the hostess if she knew where I could find this bar (the existence of which I was beginning to question). The autograph seeker had gone back inside. It was just Shaq and me.

"Hi, how are you?" I asked.

I mean, it would be rude not to say hello.

"I'm good," Shaq rumbled. Seriously, his voice is really low.

The hostess saved the day and told me how to find the bar, which obviously makes her the most important person in this story. But Shaq, it was nice to meet you, and I hope you enjoy Boston.

Kate Loses Her Mind, No One Reaps the Benefits

2010-08-12T23:29:00.002-04:00

Today I lost a set of car keys. Within 30 seconds of driving the car with which they are associated. And, I was pretty confident, within the car itself.

I've heard stories of gynecologists warning menopausal patients that they are likely to lose their car in a parking lot at some point during their perimenopausal stage. Is this some kind of warning shot across the bow? Menopause is to forgetting where you put your car in the parking lot, as PMS is to being unable to locate your keys? And if that's true, someone should alert the makers of Yaz immediately, because they could use a new ad campaign stat, since they had to pull that other one.

The most infuriating part of losing car keys is trying to find them, and I really wanted to give up, but that wasn't even an option-- a.) they belong to Grammy, and b.) I lost them right after I pulled her car into our driveway, trapping my poor little Jetta, whose keys had not gone AWOL, so I had no legitimate way to go hunt down a spare.

I found them eventually. There was about a 25 foot path in which they could have disappeared, and it took me 20 minutes to find them. I started out as a reasonable person, tracing my steps, double-checking every possible location where I could have set them. Then I tore apart the pile of belongings that I had dumped onto the backseat of the car, becoming increasingly frenzied, hearing over and over in my head that obnoxious adage about things being in the last place you look. (I mean, really. I'm pretty sure the first person who ever heard that particular nugget of wisdom never found what he or she was trying to find, because they suddenly felt stabby and refocused their efforts on locating an implement to inflict pain on the speaker.)

But, shockingly, the keys were not in the last place I looked. No. Because I gave up looking. I stopped digging through my bag (where, by the way, there were two other sets of keys). I got into the car, sulked for a moment, and prepared to call my mother and tell her I was an idiot who was sitting in one of three useless cars-- one without keys and two without the tunneling or flight capabilities necessary to move past the first. And then, as I reached for my phone, the keys made themselves known to me, their little blue fob glinting under the passenger seat.

I rejoiced. I started the car and turned on the radio and pointed the car toward the beach.

And then I remembered that in two weeks, I have to be a functional person capable of higher-level thought. Gulp.

Self-Discovery Through Packing

2010-06-24T01:20:00.004-04:00

I think one of my friends once told me that he or she--seriously, I have no idea, and I don't discount the possibility that I hallucinated this conversation-- really likes packing before a move. Something about cataloging all your belongings, taking stock, something like that. Like I said, the details are hazy, and this concept of packing as an enjoyable activity is so foreign to my sensibility that I can't seem to piece it together.

I admit, however, that packing is an excellent opportunity for disturbing revelations.

1. I am even more idiosyncratic than I thought. I saved some of the boxes from my last move, and tonight I filled one of them with a few framed pictures and a variety of extra pillows, sheets, and towels. As I sealed the box, I noticed the label from the last time, two years ago: "Extra blankets, pillows, towels, sheets; pictures."

2. I attach sentimental value to objects, including hideous objects. Today, I finally threw out a 9-year-old tee shirt that I kept because it was from our high school production of The Heidi Chronicles. The final straw was when I put it on at the gym and attempted to stick my arm through a hole that I confused with the sleeve. And let's not even start on the neon green, strapless, terrycloth romper that we all bought as a joke for spring break senior year. I am parting with that, too, although in a possible crime against humanity I am going to donate it to a clothing drive.

3. I should not be allowed to buy any more shoes. Or bathing suits, oddly, but they constitute a much smaller problem than the shoes. The shoes have spread across the floor of my closet and slowly up the perimeter in stacks, in the manner of an invasive plant species. There were shoes I forgot existed. It's horrifying.

4. Finding shoes that you forgot existed is sort of distressing, especially when you read about anosognosia the same day. And then you find a bag of sweaters you never took to the dry cleaners. Talk about unknown unknowns.

5. The horror of discovering that you are a deadbeat who abandoned her sweaters and started a new life with her suit dresses and doesn't even send the sweaters a birthday card is easily forgotten when you find a fully functional umbrella that is at least four years old.

Tomorrow, I face the kitchen. I just hope there isn't a family of possums living in my 11x17 pan.

The Harvard Network

2010-06-22T16:58:00.002-04:00

I have mentioned before the guy who sits on the Georgetown side of the M Street bridge. I don't pass him that often anymore, mostly because the things that motivate me to cross the bridge--sangria, cupcakes, Anthro-- are bad for me in excess. But yesterday, I needed to return some things, so off I went.

I should note that it was really hot and disgusting yesterday. I believe some people would say it was 'hot as balls.' I would say it was like living in a sock. Yeah. You feel like you need a shower now, don't you? Exactly. Given the simile options I have presented, I think you can understand my decision to dress for survival instead of cuteness. In my case, that meant gym clothes, and my teeshirt du jour happened to be my Harvard School of Public Health shirt.

Anyway, I dragged my sweaty, increasingly dehydrated self down M Street, considering various places I could stop to shop, by which I mean wander around air conditioned stores feigning interest in the merchandise. I noticed that, despite the heat, our friend was in his usual post, sitting on an overturned milk crate with a newspaper and a book. I stopped to say hello.

And then I noticed his Harvard Business School shirt.

"Heyyyy!" we both said.

He grilled me about my interests in public health for minute or two and then wished me luck, adding, "You have a wonderful personality; you'll do well in public health." (Note that he said nothing about a good personality having anything to do with Harvard-- I bet he really did go to HBS.) I'm going to miss running into him. Do you think it's too cold in Boston for people to sit on the sidewalk at the end of a bridge, just being pleasant?

Kate Begins to Extricate Herself from DC

2010-06-13T22:15:00.005-04:00

Just when it seemed I would never write here again, I am back. I have missed this, and besides, I am quitting my job, soon, so I'm going to have some time to kill.

Yes, it is the end of an era. In 17 days, my DC life will be packed away, and I will drive up I-95, have a little vacation (July and August lazing at the beach-- I feel so French), and then start my new adventure in Boston. I'm preparing already, getting my immunization records so I can prove to my grad school that I will not start a diphtheria epidemic and trying to become a Celtics fan. So far, both of these things are going well, although I am already a Red Sox fan, so I know that the Celtics' lead could blow their lead in the blink of an eye.

It's starting to sink in that I'm leaving. We had a going away party Friday night, since it was probably the last weekend night that we'll both be here, and today I showed the apartment to prospective tenants. It was actually kind of fun, even though no one took me up on my offer of a beer, courtesy of the keg that is still hanging out in our living room. Based on everyone's feedback, either our apartment is enormous and our decorating job is super cute, or every other apartment currently on the market is a catastrophic shit hole, making ours a beacon in the wilderness by comparison.

The best part, aside from the flattery, was meeting the people looking at the apartment. There were a few engaged couples and some girls who coincidentally went to college with my cousin, but my favorites were the girls who were looking for their first post-college apartment. As I showed them around and answered their (many) questions, it struck me that they are Marissa and me circa 2007. They had looked at a million apartments already, trekking around DC in the miserable heat, nervous about missing out on a good place, freaking out about the application ("What does she mean, "previous landlord?" Should I say 'college?' 'My parents?'). Granted, I have not really matured that much as a person in terms of apartment hunting ("Hi, Mom. I think I found my apartment, but you know how I am about snap decisions, so I just need you to talk to me a little and tell me that I'm not being a spendthrift or an idiot"). In fact, I guess the closest comparison I have is the week before the room draw in college, when the underclassmen would come look at our suite and try to figure out if their beer pong table would fit next to the futon. But it was nice to be on the outgoing side of the equation, assuring them that the utilities aren't expensive and that the other tenants don't mind the occasional party.

In any case, this feels like it was a good warm-up for the next big event, my last day of work on Friday. Fortunately, I don't think I have to give tours of my cubicle.

Kate Gets Old, Becomes Reflective

2010-02-02T23:47:00.005-05:00

I turned 25 today. If you want to get technical about it, I turned 25 about an hour ago. It is snowing here, as it was in Connecticut that night. Punxsutawney Phil predicted six more weeks of winter today, just as he did in 1985. Actually, just as he does most years. Honestly, Phil can suck it-- there are much better groundhogs out there. No, not you, Staten Island Chuck, but keep fighting the good fight.

Speaking of Essex Ed, how convenient was that for my parents? If there's a freaking parade for your kid's date of birth, do you really need to throw an elaborate party? When we moved to Annapolis, people didn't believe us when we tried to explain the concept of a Groundhog Day parade. "No really, it's great. Everyone stands on Main Street, and you bang pots and pans to call the groundhog, and then they bring out the giant costumed groundhog and when it's over they place him in the middle of the rotary at the top of the street!" What part of that doesn't sound completely believable?

People make a big deal about turning 25. "Ooooh, quarter-life crisis!" Really? I don't know. It clearly helps that I have a definite idea of my trajectory for the next couple years (grad school/poverty). But I figure I balance that out by maintaining my heading on the crazy cat lady track (minus cats). Nevertheless, I see no particular need for an existential crisis.

Furthermore, I think the whole quarter-life thing is a little presumptuous. I'm a science nerd, and I get excited about advances in medicine, and I work out and try to consume more vegetables than beer (not hard--I've gotten really boring lately). But honestly, I am pretty sure I am not going to live to 100, so the whole quarter-life ship has sailed. [Note: I will retract this statement in 10.5 years when my grammy turns 100.]

But I guess 25 is kind of a legit milestone. As my roommate so astutely and depressingly put it, I am now a member of the 25-40 demographic grouping, which I think means I have to eschew ironically cheering "WOOOOOO, COOOOLLLLLLLLEGE!" in favor of sincerely cheering "Hooray, fiber!"

Even my parents seem to consider it a milestone, rewarding my existence with delicious dinners when Mommy Lew was in town for the weekend, some sweet bling, and a terrifying (read: AWESOME) groundhog puppet which you can see in some of the pictures of the Essex parade (I very narrowly escaped receiving one of those groundhog hats). Which got me trying to think of the most memorable birthday presents I have received. Don't jump all over me-- it's an interesting exercise trying to figure out what has stuck with you over the course of your lifetime. Aside from a few conspicuous consumption-type items I won't describe in detail, I came up with the following:

Age 21: My pearls. I'm from Connecticut-- what do you want from me?

Age 16: Driver's ed with Sal. Memorable not necessarily in a good way ("I've seen some pretty bad things happen when somebody turns away from the skid").

Age 6: Part I: Ice skating lessons at the Naval Academy. Part II: Stitches.

Age 4: I think this is the first birthday I remember, which might color my recollection, but I am pretty sure it is the defending champion in terms of joy. My parents made me a beanbag toss... thing. If you can't figure out what I'm talking about, you should probably step away from your computer and go play with a ball or a stick or something. Anyway, my dad built it, and my mom made the beanbags, and it was Scuffy the Tugboat themed, which is to say amazing. AND on top of that, my Uncle Brian brought this Sesame Street foil balloon, with which I believe I became irrationally obsessed. Anne and I volleyed with it for probably the better part of a week until we had beaten all the helium out of it, at which point my mom flattened it and put it up on our bedroom wall. Seriously, best balloon ever.

And to think that then I got to go to the parade for my birthday.

Kate's Grammy Post-Game Report

2010-02-01T22:55:00.006-05:00

I would like to say three things about the Grammys. Especially since the television coverage was clearly an attempt to turn it into some kind of three-way death match of Gaga v. Beyonce v. Taylor Swift.

1. I am a Gaga believer. I stand by my original assertion that "Just Dance" has some questionable lyrics, and I think her subsequent work proves that she was not giving it her best in terms of the extent of the crazy in that video. But I understand that she had to suck us in with something catchy and ease into the truly bizarre outfits. And now, brilliance. She showed up as a walking homage to cotton candy and/or rhythm gymnastics. From there she went on to channel Marilyn Manson as the Wizard of Oz and got thrown into a machine that spit her out soiled and accompanied by ELTON. The last outfit was possibly the least bizarre, which is saying something. It reminded me of this terrible song I sang at chorus regionals in high school-- there was this part that involved the altos sort of chanting "lightning lightning lightning." Anyway, she is wacky and awesome and really a talented vocalist.

Sidebar: Do you think her head ever hurts from all the head dresses? Do you ever want to take an afternoon off from being a performance artist? You know, hang out in your sweatpants, watch your DVR'ed Real Housewives, not spend an hour hairspraying your hair until it's a helmet?

2. Beyonce has some pipes. I mean, daaaaamn (that was two syllables, in case you were unsure). She is legit talented. Which is why the army of storm troopers that accompanied her to the stage during her performance baffled me. I get that divas like a posse, but that seemed like overkill, especially when you are up against someone who specializes in performance art, i.e. strategic bizarro shenanigans. The following (abridged) conversation occurred between my sister and me during B's performance:

KATE.
Is the Beyonce infantry going to face off against Gaga Laboratories?

ANNE.
I feel like everyone's trying to unleash their inner Gaga.

KATE.
I mean, she's killing it, but the storm troopers are a little suspect.

ANNE.
Maybe they'll do something interesting?

KATE.
Tase an audience member?

3. Taylor Swift. I have been grumbling about her for a while--after she was on SNL, after I watched a whole thirty seconds of the Hope for Haiti telethon (No, I am not heartless. I already gave to Partners in Health and there was not enough George Clooney to sustain my attention). But now, it is abundantly clear that even though she seems like a sweet person who was sincerely excited just to be nominated and gracious in victory, even though I salute her as a tall girl, even though her songs appeal to many, many people, girl cannot sing. At least not in any key that I can listen to without cringing.

Suggestion: Taylor Swift/Kanye collaboration. Seriously. Can you imagine the publicity they would get? It would be INSANE. And more important to me, he could Auto-Tune that shit.

Kate's Open Letter to... Many People

2009-12-19T02:09:00.005-05:00

To my mother, who is probably reading this: At this writing, I am in my apartment, wearing sweatpants, and watching the West Wing episode when it's snowing and the Whiffenpoofs are at the White House and Dulles and National are closed and Josh realizes that he's in love with Donna and the Whiffenpoofs sing O Holy Night. Also, my shoes are drying out-- it looks like the two coats of waterproofing chemicals were a good investment.

To the awesome bellman at the Willard who tried so hard to find us a cab: You are, indeed, awesome. Your heating lamps are awesome, too.

To the cabbie who pulled up to the Willard and then sped away when we explained where we wanted to go: Are. You. Serious. Really, are you serious? To recap, a cabbie pulled up to the Willard and asked where we wanted to go. We said Dupont and Adams Morgan. He responded, "Up? I can't go uphill." Seriously? You drive a Crown Vic. I have seen these cars before. Driving around Connecticut. Frequently uphill, sometimes in snow-- occasionally both at the same time. Imagine.

To all the other cabbies who passed us and did not stop: I do not fully understand your business model, as it seems to involve passing hoards of partygoers wandering through downtown at midnight in the snow. P.S., about half of them were wearing very tall, very unwieldy shoes and inadequate clothing. We really wanted to get in a cab. I would have paid a lot of money to ride in a cab.

To the girls at the Willard who were considering getting a room at the Willard instead of braving the Metro: In what way did that seem like a good idea? Because getting a cab will be so much easier once a foot of snow has fallen? Because your feet will be warmer when your four-inch heels magically turn into snow boots? Furthermore, I particularly liked your logic to explain why it was unreasonable to walk four blocks to McPherson Square: "I'm sorry, but I'm a woman, and it is midnight, and I am not walking to the Metro alone. I do not want to get raped." Honestly, it is snowing. Vigorously. So much so that even cab drivers in their cabs don't want to be outside. All the rapists have taken shelter. It is probably the safest night of the year to wander the streets, unless your concern is wiping out and breaking your leg.

To the guys we passed somewhere around 14th and New York Ave., who decided to grace us with a little Tim McGraw serenade, specifically the miniskirt line from "Bbq Stain": Thank you; I'm glad you liked my dress. I wish I had been as drunk as you were; I probably wouldn't have minded the cold as much. On a related note, my feet were freezing-- why could they still feel pain?

To the people of the fair District of Columbia: I will see you when the snow melts and you all return to normal. Or, you know, what passes for normal here.

Kate Attempts to Grow Things

2009-12-16T16:41:00.006-05:00

Steps to becoming a vigilante gardener:

1. Identify abandoned reality TV house.

2. Look for signs of an herb garden producers probably planted thinking the cast would care about sustainability. Preferably on public property, i.e., the sidewalk. See anything you think you might not kill if you transplanted it to a pot in your kitchen?

3. Double check that you're not going to uproot a perfectly good plant only to slaughter it brutally in captivity.
3a. Hmm, Wikipedia says that rosemary does well in drought conditions. The top of my refrigerator gets very little rain, so this is excellent news.

4. Liberate your target plant from its sidewalk home. Preferably under cover of darkness, even if it is on public property.
4a. You probably shouldn't remove the all the rosemary--that's a little greedy. And, furthermore, you're going to feel like an asshole if you kill all of it in one fell swoop. You have to pace yourself.
4b. You probably didn't plan this exercise very carefully, so chances are you lack an appropriate vehicle in which to transport your rosemary plant to its new home. Fortunately, since you're not a greedy asshole, you can carry it in one hand.

5. Pot your exciting new plant. You might have an enormous bag of potting soil living on your fire escape, an artifact of your last foray into the wonderful world of herb gardens. Seriously-- you might have carried a 20-pound bag of potting soil four blocks from Garden District and up two flights of stairs, because you might struggle with gardening, but you try hard and you appreciate economies of scale.
5a. You might also have some concerns about that potting soil and blame it for the stunted growth and eventual death of your basil plant. Maybe. I'm just saying. If that's the case, maybe you pick up a fistful of dirt from the garden in front of your building.

6. Enjoy your new plant. Remember not to over-water it, in the manner you over-water the Christmas cactus you keep at your desk hoping to reenact Little Shop of Horrors.

Kate Misses New England

2009-09-25T22:49:00.008-04:00

Things that have made me miss New England lately:

1. Fall weather. It has become fall in DC. Well, not this week; this week was July part deux. But the weeks before and after Labor Day were perfection. The air was cool and mercifully dry-- the type of weather people describe as crisp. I don't really like the word crisp. I don't know why; maybe it's because my brain defaults to my cooking definition of crisp: adj., a polite euphemism for burned. But I digress. The beautiful weather--the clear, energizing air and the bright but not-hot sun--caused me pangs of Yale withdrawal, characterized primarily by regret that I was walking to work instead of WLH or the tailgate fields.

2. Friendly people from Connecticut. No, I'm not kidding. Everyone hears all the time about Southern Hospitality and blah blah blah. Whatever. Speaking fewer words per minute than I can type doesn't make you friendly; it makes you inefficient. You want friendly? Try wearing your high school gym shirt from a small town in Connecticut-- which I do a lot, apparently, based on the number of times I've been stopped by people asking about my shirt. Which is three times in four weeks, to be precise.

"Old Saybrook?! Old Saybrook, Connecticut?"
"Yes!"
"We live in Old Lyme!" "I have a house in Groton-Long Point!" "We just moved to Baltimore from Hamden!"

Seriously. Delightful, lovely people. "Are you in school? You went to Yale? Good for you! When was the last time you went home?"

3. The countdown to the postseason. There are few things I miss about New England the way I miss NESN, mostly because I mix my longing for Remy and Orsillo-- hell, even Orsillo and Eck-- with scorn for all those who try to take their place in my life. At least on Fox and ESPN, I can put the game on mute. On TBS, mute isn't enough, thanks to that clown Craig Sager and his nauseating and misguided jacket-tie-pocket square combos. And, more to the point, I don't want to have to mute the inanity of the guy who dresses like my 6th grade French teacher. I want good commentary. I want Don to gravely but sympathetically give it to me straight when Melky freakin Cabrera adopts a new offensive strategy such as lining the ball straight into poor Jon Lester.

However, deficient Red Sox coverage aside, I admit that DC Sox fans are a devoted bunch who sometimes manifest their fandom in enjoyable ways on par with New England. I have encountered many people who give shout-outs to others sporting Red Sox paraphernalia. I usually refrain from indulging this urge, but today on the way home from Safeway, I couldn't help myself.

"I'm sorry-- is your dog wearing a Sox jersey?"
"Well, I mean, we're playing the Yankees tonight."
"Oh, I understand. It's a big weekend."

The Five People You Avoid at the Pool

2009-08-18T22:00:00.006-04:00

For about two months now, I have been swimming in the pool at the Y. I mostly go in the morning before work, and it's funny--by which I mean a little creepy--how you get to know the other regulars. There's the really nice woman who always asks if it's okay if she joins your lane. There's the guy who looks like a guy from college, to the point that I do a double-take-- hey, we're talking about 6:15 on a Tuesday; I'm impressed my hallucinations are limited to false doppelganger sightings. And there's the lady who is always in one of the slow lanes, just chillin and doing the sidestroke, sometimes with a kick board. She's great.

[By the way, if you want to minimize your chances of being in a lane that resembles the aquatic equivalent of the Beltway at rush hour, pick the slow lane. Seriously, this works. A few people use the slow lane because they are honest with themselves, but most people are way too proud to self-select whether they should be there or not. But not you. You are ruled by logic, not some misguided sense of self worth derived from holding your own in the 'medium' lane.]

But not everyone at the pool is great. And I say this not to be a bad person but, rather, as one who understands that my life can serve as a warning to others. Therefore, I give to you The Five People You Should Avoid at the Pool.

1. THE PERSON WITH FLIPPERS
Some people who use flippers are fairly skilled in their use-- you know, they keep their kick mostly under water. As a result, they create a constant wake, which kind of sucks. But not as much as people who don't know how to use flippers. These people create splashing reminiscent of the more violent scenes in "Jaws." Overall, they are not so conducive to your ability to breathe.

2. PEOPLE USING THE BUDDY SYSTEM
Red. Flag. If someone needs a friend, it means he or she is either
a. not that interested in swimming and thus planning to stand awkwardly in the shallow end chatting
b. worried about drowning. And possibly being lost at sea. In the pool.

3. THE TRIATHLETE
I know several triathletes, and they are all delightful people, so don't get me wrong. All I'm saying is that I'd rather not share a lane with someone who is checking their split times and thus refuses to start their next lap until the second hand is on the 60 (you might think they're staring at you, but actually they're staring over your shoulder at the giant clock on the wall). Also, the triathletes sometimes have conferences at the shallow end, which is a little awkward. Yeah, the awesome swimmers are having a meeting. No, you're not invited.

4. THE WIRY OLD GUY
Again, please do not misunderstand. But there are a few wiry old guys who have, over time, developed interesting adaptations of the traditional swimming strokes. They tend to resemble the motions of a drowning interpretive dancer. And the rest of the wiry old guys have old man strength, and nothing ruins my day like getting lapped by a 70-year-old.

5. THE PERSON WEARING A FLOATY BELT
I think this speaks for itself. Especially in combination with flippers.

Kate Stops Being Polite

2009-06-08T12:44:00.002-04:00

This is bad. This is very, very bad.

This is hilarious.

On the bright side, maybe they'll get kidnapped by the Scientologists?

Not Well Played, NYT

2009-03-25T10:51:00.002-04:00

Monday night (probably Tuesday in the print version), the New York Times reported on a federal judge's decision that the FDA acted improperly in setting an 18-and-over age restriction on the over-the-counter availability of Plan B.

Sidebar: Woohoo! Now, science people, don't freak out. I still feel sort of queasy about non-scientist judges making rulings about science. However, this decision was not actually about science; it was about government officials using politics to game the approval process. So I can celebrate the reproductive rights moment without feeling awkward. Besides, if Susan Wood-- who resigned from the FDA because of this issue-- is happy, I'm happy.

So if I'm glowing from women's collective win, why am I pissed at the New York Times? It's because I'm one of those masochists who reads the reader comments. What's worse, I'm that girl who reads the comments and then tries to figure out how the editors chose their "Editors' Selections." Allegedly, the rationale is as follows:

"NYTimes editors aim to highlight the most interesting and thoughtful comments that represent a range of views."

Okay, fine. I even acknowledge upfront that they are inevitably going to pick some comments with which I disagree. No problem. Of course they were going to highlight a comment from someone who thinks Plan B is going to be the end of western civilization. I was ready for that. Hell, that's why I clicked on the comments page in the first place.

However, I have a major problem with tagging as "interesting and thoughtful" a comment that includes factual errors. I'm looking at you, Comment #10:

"For those of us, who respect the sanctity of life and believe a soul is imputed to a human being at conception, this is yet another travesty in a series of tragedies." The poster goes on to condemn "support for Licentious behavior" (bonus point for vocab, deduction for random mid-sentence capitalization), liberal politicians, and people creating baby mama drama (not in those words).

Fine. If the NYT editors think it looks magnanimous to give a shout-out to conservative reader, whatever. My problem is one of the following:

a. Comment #10 guy doesn't know how Plan B works.
b. Comment #10 guy doesn't know how conception works (less likely, not out of the question).
c. Both a. and b.
d.-f. Repeat a.-c., but replace "Comment #10 guy" with "NYT staffer moderating comment board."

In case I have confused anyone, here is my problem in a less passive-aggressive format. From the Plan B website: "Plan B® works like a birth control pill to prevent pregnancy mainly by stopping the release of an egg from the ovary." If you read the pamphlet (linked above), you'll see that they allow that it is possible that Plan B also prevents fertilization and implantation. However, in the intended, proven function of the drug (the no egg part), conception is not in the picture. So if you're going to rail against something using only "life begins at conception" and your self-righteous recollections of a bygone time when dirty liberals weren't running the show, please direct your comments elsewhere.

Furthermore, NYT, please step up your game. Misconceptions (ha.) about the function of a pharmaceutical product couched in pro-life rhetoric hardly qualify as "thoughtful."

Kate Experiments with Clothing... Again

2009-03-24T20:57:00.007-04:00

As a loyal viewer of What Not to Wear and a true life victim of my own fashion choices, I am a believer in the power of clothes.

Now, I love the Hartford Whalers. I don't care that they are no longer an NHL team. It's irrelevant. You are probably wondering what this has to do with clothes. Well, I recently decided I needed a Whalers shirt that is not the sweat-stained, paint-splattered, hole-under-the-left-arm "Top 10 Things to Love about the Hartford Whalers" shirt I got when I was 10 years old and now wear to the gym. I still love this shirt and will continue to wear it until it is no longer a shirt (my friend Becca once said, "pants are pants until they fall down"; I think a similar axiom probably applies to upper-body garments). But sometimes you want to show your love without the constant fear of people stopping you on the street to say, "Look into bleach."

So I found myself a new shirt. It is great. It is simple-- heather grey, just the logo on the front. I cut off the collar, as I am wont to do, and now it is perfect. The only problem is that when you work in an office and spend the majority of your weekend hours in your pajamas or your aforementioned sweaty, painty Whalers shirt, you don't have so many opportunities to wear your awesome new shirt. You can't necessarily wear it to go out on Saturday night--it's pretty hipster to wear the tee shirt of your now-defunct NHL team (though massively cooler than wearing the tee shirt of the band you're going to see-- don't be that guy). Which is why it was so convenient that I went to a party in Columbia Heights Saturday night. If you can't dress up as a hipster to go to Columbia Heights, then I don't know when you can. Okay, when you go to H Street, but I digress.

I should also note that this Whalers-centric outfit was a pretty daring (read: dubious) choice. Marissa almost talked me out of it, and were I a more reasonable person she would have succeeded. But as I said, I will only be young enough to make egregious fashion mistakes--like a Whalers shirt with a frilly, borderline-too-short skirt and heels--once, and I have to get them all out of my system now in case I am ever famous enough to get called out for these choices in a public forum. Plus, I know how I react when I see people who identify themselves as Whalers fans, and I sort of wanted to see what would happen.

What happened: people love the Whalers love. More importantly, the Whalers shirt lends itself to a conversation a little more than, say, the plaid skirt and draws comments from specific types of people:

a. Guys from Canada ("Well, you like the Whalers, so I respect you.")
b. Guys from New York/New England ("Are you from Hartford?" "No!" "Oh, okay.")
c. Guys from North Carolina ("[slurred, drunken teasing about the Carolina Hurricanes]")

Lesson: The Whalers shirt is always the right decision. I would never encourage anyone to pretend to be a Whalers fan. I get very upset by disingenuous wearers of Whalers gear-- really, ask the guy who was sporting a vintage-esque Whalers shirt last time I was in Front Page. When someone asks you about your shirt, the answer is never, "Oh, I don't even like them. I'm from L.A."

But if you can hum the Brass Bonanza, you should know that proclaiming your pride in your now-lost NHL team can have positive results. And if you happen to encounter a Captain No-Fun who leans over and says, "You do know the Whalers are no longer a team, right?" you can just smile and say, "They live on in my heart."

This will keep you from saying what you're really thinking (well, also thinking): "If you can't say anything nice, stop looking at my boobs."

Kate Gets Domestic, or The Importance of Power Tools in Decorating

2009-03-20T23:34:00.007-04:00

I decided a few weeks ago to take today and Monday off. I have been avoiding a lot of chores and errands, using excuses like, "But I don't want to spend a quarter of my weekend ironing." Yes. I actually avoid ironing with such skill that the "to be ironed" section of my closet merits designation as a large-scale project/federal disaster area. But when your weekend is twice as long as usual, there is no excuse. That said, I couldn't face my wrinkly shirts on the first day of Kate's Big Productive Weekend, so I opted for domestic project number two:

Do something with the big, awesome map I bought at Eastern Market IN DECEMBER that is still sitting on the floor next to the TV.

Long ago, when I was foraging for Christmas presents, I visited the map man at Eastern Market, who happened to have these sweet city planning maps of D.C., including one with our apartment. Unfortunately, it is big and an odd size, and I have been too lazy/cheap/unmotivated to get it matted and framed. I decided I could get a shelf at Target and stand the map up on the shelf. I know this sounds weird, but I promise it sort of works in person.

With this plan, I commenced avoiding a Target field trip, until I realized that this long weekend would give me the perfect opportunity to go, with the added bonus of missing the masses that descend upon Target on the real weekend. This is how I ended up in our apartment this afternoon with my delightful shelf, puzzling over the instructions for mounting it on a wall.

Brief time-out: bear in mind that I picked "Project Interior Decorating" instead of "Project Actually Have Clothes to Wear to Work Again" mostly because of the equipment involved. DeWalt drill = way cooler than miscellaneous iron. Before I even went to Target, I unpacked my drill and started charging one of the batteries. I was excited.

Then I came home with my overpriced chunk of particle board and was a little sad to see that the instructions called for a screwdriver. Just a regular old screwdriver without any voltage. I consoled myself with the sweet drywall anchors and the fact that with their hanging hardware, it seemed like I had a shot at making the shelf level on the first try. And if you know me, you know that whatever I build/assemble will probably end up level(ish) but that it might take four or five extra holes in a wall and at least that many expletives.

As it turns out, the hanging hardware provided with the shelf was a complete farce.

We will overlook the drywall anchors that were totally useless, because it's possible that I shouldn't have even tried to use them on our walls; whatever. I abandoned those and decided to screw the bracket on which I was to hang the shelf into the wall. DeWalt to the rescue! Pre-drilling was the only way those screws were going to go into the wall; I seriously hope no poor schmuck tried to use a screwdriver and elbow grease.

So the bracket was on the wall, and it was shockingly level, considering that there were only three new holes in the wall and all of them were in use. Now to slide the hardware on the shelf onto the wall bracket, and...

...and why is the shelf still in my hands instead of on the wall? Shit.

Now, I have no misconceptions about my strength as a scholar of physics. But even I have a vague understanding of gravity and force and vectors-- concepts that seem to have eluded the person who designed this misnomer-ed "hanging hardware."

Nor do I presume to be a scholar of the law, but I have some idea of what liability is and of the fact that you probably have some if the shelf you put on the wall over your couch falls off the wall and onto the person sitting on your couch.

However, I can definitely, authoritatively tell you a thing or two about shoddy construction. And I know that in the absence of inherent structural integrity, you can just keep adding shit until all the ancillary pieces you throw into the mix hold your original thing together.

It is with this philosophy in mind that I embarked on a field trip to the hardware store, where I acquired a variety of festive metal brackets in a delightful brass finish. And after much pre-drilling and second-guessing about whether two brackets would be enough (answer: when you're as paranoid as I am, two is not enough-- two on the bottom and two smaller brackets on the top is closer without looking like you're completely psychotic), I am pleased to report that the shelf has been on the wall and the map has been on the shelf for six hours now. It is shockingly level, at least in the plane that mattered to me. And it has yet to fall on anyone's head.

Although if I have to fix the shelf, maybe I can put off ironing a little longer.

"I didn't go to medical school for nothing," or "I'm not a cheerleader for a brandname drug, but I play one on TV."

2009-02-11T08:20:00.004-05:00

I have railed against DTC pharmaceutical advertising for a while, as you probably know if you have ever watched prime time TV with me. But even as I find myself skeezed out by the bathtub people in the Cialis commercials, few of these ads bother me as much as birth control ads do.

Now, don't get me wrong. On principle, I think that if you're going to urge American men to Viva Viagra (okay, those ads bother me as much as birth control ads), someone had better be standing by to assure American women that they won't have to spend the rest of their lives barefoot and pregnant. I just happen to think that someone should be a doctor; call me crazy, I guess. But then again, maybe this is what the women's movement was all about-- equal rights, equal pay, equal airtime?

I digress. Given that I probably can't take down the entire DTC advertising structure all by myself today, I will temporarily allow that pharmaceutical advertising on TV is our reality. This assumption provides me a clever little segue into my actual point-- the degree to which birth control ads are or are not based in reality. First, let's remind ourselves about some terminology we take for granted-- birth control. The name suggests that the purpose is to control births, i.e., keep the user from getting prego. Simple enough. As a directly related effect, it also happens to regulate the menstrual cycle, which one probably expects when one ingests a very specific hormone regimen. But again, that's just related to the main issue-- birth control.

So why isn't this the focus of any advertising for the Pill? Wait a minute, did you see how I switched it up there? I didn't call it birth control; I called it the Pill. Because that's how it's advertised. We're not even supposed to remember that the point is contraception, as this video does a great job highlighting. We're supposed to think of the Pill as the silver bullet to make our skin better and mitigate our PMS surliness and give us the freedom to release balloons from the sunroof of a VW bug while driving in circles and listening to The Veronicas. Why is that, by the way? Is it some leftover relic of the Comstock Law? Is it because we're afraid of offending those morally opposed to contraception? Is it because, secretly, even the producers of birth control want us to be barefoot and pregnant? (Okay, that last one is pretty conspiracy theory-esque, but ask yourself how many major pharmaceutical companies are run by women. Furthermore, don't you sometimes wonder if it would be easier to meet and marry Mr. Right if you weren't a zit-covered, homicidal maniac? Yes, you.)

Anyway, this is all a very roundabout way of saying that when I saw the first ad correcting all the previous Yaz ads (you can read about it here) I was pretty pleased. First of all, that obnoxious woman "who didn't go to medical school for nothing" (as if anyone with an MD calls it "medical school" in conversation) comes right out and says that Yaz is birth control. Second of all, she clarifies the on-label uses and doesn't hype the off-label benefits. I have a lot of ambivalence about off-label uses of drugs in general, but I'm willing to let it slide a little bit with birth control because it's relatively inexpensive (cough, don't use Yaz, use a generic, cough). Still, the whole reason I find off-label use of anything conscionable is because it typically happens with a doctor's recommendation and oversight. Therefore, while I have a big problem with people with high cholesterol marching to their doctors and demanding Vytorin (sorry, I find their ads really visually clever), I have a bigger problem with women with pimples marching to their doctors and demanding hormones. Because we all know that Proactiv is the country's number one skin care solution. Trust us; we're Jessica Simpson and Alyssa Milano.

Finally, the Times article suggests that asking Bayer to pay $20 million to air the corrective ads amounts to a slap on the wrist in the world of DTC advertising. Agreed. But the average person who sees one of those ads probably isn't going to say to herself, "Hmm, I wonder how much that set them back... oh wait, drop in the bucket." Rather, I think she's going to say, "Hmm, it kind of sounds like they kind of lied to me." And if the new Yaz ads can do anything to undermine the credibility of DTC advertising overall, that's worth more than $20 million in my book.

Even Better than the Nurses

2009-01-29T17:49:00.001-05:00

We all know I have some strong feelings on the topic of karaoke, but even I have not taken it to the point of physical violence. Apparently, I have more restraint than some.

Two of Kate's Great Loves Converge

2009-01-29T16:05:00.003-05:00

Health care and karaoke-- in the form of a discussion of good karaoke songs for women with medium to low ranges (read: me)... on a nursing forum.

My favorite suggestion is from the contributor who suggests "getting a little loaded and singing Willie Nelson songs."

Update: Wishlist Bag-- What a Cold, Strange Trip It Has Been

2009-01-16T12:28:00.011-05:00

So, Operations never wrote back to me about the demise of my bag in the plastic clutches of the ice cube maker, but that doesn't mean they did not respond. Today I peeked into the freezer, hoping that this might be the day that my manual dexterity and new biceps/triceps exercise would lead me to victory over my bag's frigid captor. Tragically, however, as I opened the freezer door and dodged the frozen pizza falling toward me, I realized that my bag was no longer a hostage-- it was a kidnapping victim. Yes, I checked behind the boxes of burritos and under that depressing popsicle from the ice cube tray. No sign of a struggle-- no scratches on the ice maker. A sad day indeed.

Or is it?

You see, in researching my initial post about my faithful little bag, I visited the ever-so-cloying Wishlist website, and I decided to have a look around. You can imagine what happened next. I mean, who am I to say no to a half-price Herve Chapelier bag and free shipping? It's an excellent deal on a fairly demure bag that is a good size for the days when I don't need to drag around a tote that is approximately the look and dimension of a spinnaker with handles. And besides, it's not terry cloth or the color of bubblegum. Sounds like a solid investment.

And as I walked back up to my office this morning, carrying the box containing my bag (I presumed), a thought dawned on me:

"I wonder if they gave me a new free Wishlist bag..."

So imagine my glee when there, under my delightfully tasteful and useful canvas tote, was the most godawful, heinous, garbage-bag-meets-gym-bag-hybrid-looking thing I have ever seen-- with Wishlist emblazoned in curly, pink script on each side.

It is seriously one of the trashiest things I have ever encountered in real life. I laughed when I saw it; it's that bad. But it zips closed and the handles are the right length-- i.e., they are short enough that they would never cause me to drag my zucchini on the ground or inadvertently feed it to a major appliance. So I sort of love it.

The universe is right again.

Kate's Friends Also Struggle

2009-01-15T10:33:00.003-05:00

The following conversation happened between 11:20 and 11:25 p.m. Before I begin, I should note that the other party involved in this exchange has demonstrated his culinary talents many times before. That is not to say, however, that he doesn’t struggle every now and again. Not unlike some blog authors who drop pies and feed their grocery bags to ice cube makers (it’s still in there).

The premise: Strand and his friend are making dinner tonight. This is not unusual.

Strand: Um, do you have Cajun seasoning?
Me: Uhh, no… Why what are you trying to make?
Strand: What about onion powder?
Me: Oh, yeah, of course.
Strand: Garlic powder?
Me: Yes. I have onion powder. I have garlic powder. I have curry. I have coriander. I have pretty much any spice you would want. Everything except turmeric. I don’t have turmeric. Do you want me to bring paprika?
Strand: Maybe. Sure. Do you have chili powder?
Me: Everything except turmeric and chili powder.
Strand: Yeah, that’s okay; we’ll get it at Whole Foods. Next question: how do you bake with strawberries?
Me: [pausing to ask silently, “wtf?”] Uh, well, that might depend on what you want to do with them. What does the recipe say?
Strand: [avoiding the question] Like, if I’m using fresh strawberries, do I want them to be ripe?
Me: Oh. Yeah. But check the recipe, because you might need to macerate them a little first.
Strand: [pause] Did you just say a dirty word?
Me: Macerate? Mix them with some sugar and maybe a little hot water? To break them down?
Strand: Ohhhhh. Hmmm, macerate. Okay. [pause] What does rhubarb look like?
Me: [I offered to bake; why did they say no?] Umm… imagine big, magenta celery. Why? [I know why. This is not good.]
Strand: Magenta celery, okay. Would they have it at Whole Foods?
Me: Definitely… in several months.
Strand: Oh. Hmm. Okay.
Me: Are you sure you don’t want me to bring anything?
Strand: Just onion powder and garlic powder.

Freezer Watch-- Update: 10:57 a.m., January 14

2009-01-14T10:57:00.003-05:00

Operations has not responded to my email. At all. Not even, "You've got to be kidding."

My bag is quite cold.

Freezer Watch-- Update: 10:08 a.m.

2009-01-13T10:08:00.002-05:00

After pacing the hall for a few minutes, I was finally able to have the pantry to myself, but I was still unable to execute Operation Extrication. And I still don't understand how that thing works-- I thought I knew which way the cloth was wrapped around the little plastic thingies (I'm very technical), but I was only able to pull about half an inch of fabric out of the jaws of death.

Given that I don't want anyone to walk in there and see me with both my arms completely inside the freezer, defrosting their vegetarian burritos, it's time to ask for help.

TO: Operations
SUBJECT: 9th floor pantry freezer

Hi,

In the pantry on the 9th floor (next to the women's bathroom), someone put a canvas bag of groceries in the freezer, and now part of the bag is wrapped around/inside the ice maker. Is there any chance it would be possible to remove the bag, hopefully intact?

Thanks, and apologies for the bizarre request.

Kate Fails at Transporting Foodstuffs. Again.

2009-01-12T22:44:00.009-05:00

At this point, you might or might not know that I occasionally fall victim to unfortunate situations involving baked goods. Today, I inadvertently expanded my repertoire to include unprepared produce.

Okay, to allay your suspense, this isn't really about the death of a piece of produce. There is no honeydew melon splattered on a sidewalk, no chalk outline of a pineapple. All my Trader Joe's bounty is intact, with the exception of the mango I devoured earlier, which was intact until I deliberately disemboweled it. No, this is about my bag.

I have this bag. It is a stupid little canvas bag from Wishlist in New Haven. In case you are not familiar with Wishlist, you should know that the majority of its shoppers are Uggs-and-Juicy-wearing 15-year-olds. In case you don't know me very well, I will note that I am neither Uggs-wearing nor Juicy-wearing nor 15 years old. That said, every once in a while, in a fit of dubious judgment, I used to buy something at Wishlist, including an overpriced teeshirt for my sister for her birthday. My sister is neither Juicy-wearing nor 15 years old, though she finally caved and joined the Ugg'ed masses. She claims it was in the interest of warmth.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that I should not like this bag. It is from a store that causes me embarrassment when I admit to shopping there. The handles are kind of awkwardly too long, so it drags on the ground if it's not over my shoulder. It has a silver peace sign on one side and 'Wishlist' in curly script in hot pink on the other side. It is an affront to me and everything for which I stand (which is not to say that I don't stand for peace, but you get the idea).

Which is why it makes no sense that I am so attached to this bag. Except that it is the perfect size for two boxes of Kashi, six apricots, and a pound of zucchini. And it was free, which means that I can take it places that I don't want to take my bags that I really love. And it's shockingly durable, having survived a department booze cruise (after which I thought I had lost it; my coworkers can tell you how upset I was-- though mostly because it held my Mount Gay hat) and a downpour that turned it green, thanks to a file folder inside.

Which is why I was a little stunned after work, when I went to pull The Little Beige Bag That Could out of the freezer in the 9th floor pantry, where it was keeping my three bags of cranberries safe (I love cranberries even more than this stupid bag). The thing to know about this freezer is that it is essentially a microcosm of the frozen food section of Trader Joe's, so there isn't much open space.

Given this circumstance, you can understand why I put my cranberries right next to the out-of-commission ice cube maker. And you can probably also understand my surprise when I realized that the ice cube maker had begun to ingest my bag.

Seriously, no one has taken an ice cube out of that freezer in at least two years, I'm guessing. In the little ice cube tray beneath the mechanism is a lone, leftover popsicle from an event about five months ago. I was convinced that ice cube maker was just decorative. Apparently, I was mistaken. I don't know exactly how that thing works, but it had that piece of canvas in its plastic jaw, and it was not letting go.

So you might be wondering what happened to my bag and its contents. I extricated the cranberries and went to work on the bag. But once it occurred to me to close the pantry door to muffle the sound of shattering plastic and pull as hard as I could--ice cube maker be damned--I decided that 5:30 on a Monday was possibly the worst time imaginable to attempt freezer surgery (the other contender being 5:30 on a Friday). So the bag is still in the ice cube maker, and I am going to have an interesting email to write to the operations staff tomorrow morning.

Kate Rails Against Pop Culture

2009-01-01T18:45:00.003-05:00

So yesterday I bought a new song on iTunes. I was looking for something in the category of good music to play at the gym, and there, at the top of the most purchased songs list, was "Just Dance" by Lady GaGa. Now, right there we have some red flags. Lady GaGa? Seriously? Wtf kind of name is that? Furthermore, I suspected that this song was the one that came on the radio about once every fifteen minutes when I was home and that I immediately switched stations to avoid.

But the 30-second sample on iTunes was so catchy-- lots of profound lyrics like "just dance" and "spin that record, babe" and the ever-popular "daa daa doo doo." And I started speculating about the reason for the exhortation to "just dance." I decided that it was something girl power-y. Yeah, sure. I can do triceps dips to that. Click! Song bought. Excellent.

It was at this point that I listened to the first verse.

Holy shit.

Here are the highlights, along with my comments in parentheses.

I've had a little bit too much (well, okay)
...Can't find a drink, oh man (ah, the cruel irony of being too wasted to obtain additional booze)
Where are my keys? I lost my phone (umm... little bit too much?)
I love this record, baby, but I can't see straight anymore (ibid)
What's the name of this club? I can't remember, but it's all right

So, we are maybe a minute into the song and we have a girl who is blackout and can't find her stuff. Call me crazy, but that's bad. Especially when you consider that the solution to this situation is not call it a night and pound some water. Nope. What does our heroine decide to do? Just dance! Because apparently she got trashed on Red Bull and vodka.

In general, I am not particularly offended by glamorizations of drinking. I mean, last night was New Year's Eve; obviously I spent part of the night sitting around drinking champagne. But promoting--nay, celebrating-- the practice of getting wasted to the point of being unable to function is not okay for several reasons. There are the obvious health implications. And there are the nearly-as-obvious safety implications of young women getting out-of-control trashed. Nor can we ignore the extent to which drunk people think they're very talented dancers and the toll that belief takes on all of us. Moral of the story: we are reminded, once again, that pop stars are probably not the models for our behavior.

And, yes, I continue to listen to that song at the gym. It's just so frickin catchy. I am appropriately ashamed.

Kate is Betty Freakin Crocker

2008-12-13T11:34:00.002-05:00

If ever you are trying to flour a baking pan and it doesn't seem to be working out, ask yourself this question:

"Am I using flour? Or am I maybe using confectioner sugar?"

Once you conclude that you are, in fact, using sugar to flour the pan, ask yourself if you're qualified to be using knives and appliances. This is why I don't usually try to bake early in the morning.

Kate Misses Yale; Cooking Ensues

2008-12-07T22:23:00.002-05:00

Recently, I've found myself experiencing the pangs of Yale withdrawal. They started in the early fall when I realized that our neighborhood reminds me of Orange Street. (Yes, it's true, I was nostalgic for the grad school ghetto. I definitely felt a little twinge of sadness when I looked up 19th Street and saw the Hilton looming instead of East Rock.) They intensified when the leaves started to change and the air turned crisp.

But tonight, I reached a new low. And it hit me in the most surprising of places: the produce aisle of Soviet Safeway. It was there, standing in front of the vegetables waiting to be inspired, that I realized I would basically kill a man for a taste of the organic Indian-spiced cauliflower they used to have in the Davenport dining hall.

"Kate," you say, "you miss dining hall food? Have you discussed this with someone? Perhaps a mental health professional?"

I know, and I promise I haven't lost my mind. But seriously, that cauliflower was amazing. So I turned away from the anemic green beans and the squash that looked like it had fallen off the struggle bus. I grabbed some cauliflower and--after a detour for some curry-- headed home to reincarnate that delicious, delicious dish.

Mine turned out a little different from the Dport version, mostly because I used vastly less oil than is included in the original. But it was pretty good, so here is a vague guide. Really, these directions are probably not at all helpful, since I didn't measure anything except the oil, but you'll get the idea.

Curry Cauliflower, as inspired by Yale University Dining Services. (Really, stop laughing.)

1 head of cauliflower
1/2 tsp extra virgin olive oil (or really whatever oil you want, I suppose)
curry powder to taste
garlic powder to taste
onion powder to taste
salt to taste

Cut the cauliflower florets (technically, they're not actually florets, but whatever) off the head into large-bite-sized pieces. In a large skillet, heat the oil. Sprinkle curry, garlic, and onion powders into the oil; they will sizzle and brown. Immediately add the floret pieces and cook over medium-high heat for about 7 minutes, stirring often and adding additional curry, onion, garlic, and salt. (Do what looks good to you; I went with a light, even dusting of onion and garlic, a heavier coat of curry, and a pinch of salt.) After about 7 minutes--at which point the cauliflower should be a little bit browned but still pretty firm on the inside--transfer the cauliflower to a vegetable steamer. Steam for 8 to 10 minutes or until the cauliflower is as soft as you like it.

Serving suggestions: if, after finishing your cauliflower, you can get Billy to come sing his song or Joanne to compliment you on your hair...well, now I'm all nostalgic again.

Adventures in Christmas Spirit

2008-12-07T00:16:00.003-05:00

There's nothing quite like the D.C. Metro, especially when its riders are dressed unusually. Tonight, Marissa and I were on our way home from a Christmas party, and--as luck would have it-- so were three Santas, two of whom followed us onto the train.

Given that my last Santa encounter involved bumming some Jack Daniels off Bad Santa at a Halloween party, I was pretty confident that Santas leaving Adams Morgan at 11:45 on a Saturday night would prove entertaining.

They nodded at us solemnly. "Merry Christmas."

"So, I have to ask," said Marissa. "Do you rent the Santa suit, or is this something you own?"

"Oh, you definitely need to own," said the more Santa-shaped of the two.

"Yeah," I said. "It seems like a good investment."

"Well, maybe, " said cute Santa, as he pulled a chunk of white faux fur from the trim on the jacket. "I don't really know how much is going to be left next year."

"Hmm, you appear to be molting." I know, I'm astute.

"Well," he replied, "the word 'molting' suggests that it might grow back."

At this point, it was time for Marissa and me to disembark--which was good, since the other Santa was starting to explain that a lot of the, um, fur loss was from the crotch region of his costume--but we nevertheless found it hilarious that we had encountered a.) multiple Santas and b.) a Santa who would challenge me on my diction. Merry Christmas indeed.

Today in Mixed Metaphors

2008-09-08T21:52:00.004-04:00

Yes, it has been a big day in figurative language. And yes, I am a nerd for enjoying this stuff.

First, Hillary Clinton said that electing Republicans to fix the damage of the last eight years of government is like electing "the iceberg to save the Titanic." I thought that was pretty funny, especially since Titanic was on Friday night and I happened to watch the 45 minutes when the iceberg shows the Titanic who's boss.

But then, on came Rachel Maddow, my new favorite political commentator (exclusive of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert). I watched most of her show tonight, and I am a huge fan. That said, one of her rhetorical flourishes struggled a little bit. That would be the one about "deference has a place in journalism as much as vertigo has a place in trapeze." Ummm... really? Granted, now the only substitutes I can conjure are terrible and based in diagnoses (as much as dyslexia has a place in a spelling bee? as much as anorexia has a place in a competitive eating event?), but I'm just me, whereas she has a staff.

That said, I am willing to forgive this analogous stumble in light of a few things. Saying that church and state are like peanut butter and chocolate, except that they are two good things that don't go together? I like it. But the icing on the cake (since frosting is also a good thing, perhaps in this case comparable to judicial review, in that frosting goes better with chocolate than with church) was definitely the title of the I-hope-recurring segment with Pat Buchanan. And yes, I-hope-recurring pretty much solely for the purpose of repeating the title...

"It's Pat!"

YES. Rachel Maddow, if you can get a Saturday Night Live reference into every show, you'll be able to phase out that pop culture minute. And given that this is election season (really?), it shouldn't be long before you work in "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and--gosh darn it-- people like me!"

Overheard at Eastern Market

2008-09-01T21:20:00.002-04:00

Or rather, addressed directly to me at Eastern Market:

"Were you in the Olympics?"

HA. I love it. I don't even care if the guy who said it was making fun of me for wearing gym shorts and a sweaty--and screaming orange-- tank top. Best, most hilarious comment ever.

The Complete Summer of Kate (Abridged)

2008-08-21T00:17:00.003-04:00

Well, it seems that once again time has slipped away from me, and I have found myself-- the prodigal blogger-- back at the keyboard repentant for my negligence. And so, to fill in the blanks a bit and give a sense of what was going on every time I thought about posting and concluded I didn't have enough to say, I submit the following:

The List of Stuff That Occurred (or Will Occur) This Summer (Post Early July) That Kate Thinks Was/Is/Will Be Cool

*I bought amazing new furniture at Eastern Market. It is this mirror-shelf-drawer thing that is hanging on the wall between my closets. It is old-looking, and I had to glue one of the drawer pulls back on, and it isn't really white. And I kind of wanted to die on the Metro on the way home with it (loud, crowded car full of tourists plus malfunction of the train in front of us equals unhappy Kate), but then some girl in Metro Center asked me about my mirror thingy and complimented me on finding such an awesome piece.

*I got a new computer! Hooray MacBook!

*I helped design the cake for my Grammy's 88th birthday party. It was themed after one of the staple foods of my childhood, mocha chip ice cream from Shady Glen. Chocolate chip cake with mocha frosting. Amazing. The only way it would have been better would have been with a large scoop of mocha chip on top.

* I went sailing with my dad for the first time in a long time. It was the first time he had taken the boat-- which is named Anyway-- out all summer. I sometimes forget that Old Saybrook is really pretty, and seeing it from the water is a good reminder.

*I bought peaches from Eastern Market and blackberries from the Dupont Circle farmer's market. The peaches I devoured (another one will meet its end tomorrow); the blackberries I made into blackberry crisp.

*I went kayaking at the beach. The only minor problem was that I pulled up at the wrong spot in the creek when I returned, which meant shlogging through the marsh a touch to get the kayak out of the water. There is marsh grass permanently embedded in one of my Rainbows, which I rather enjoy.

*I'm going kayaking again tomorrow at Thompson Boat Center with my department!

*I went on an expedition to Old Town Alexandria and went to this awesome boutique, Treat, where I found an amazing dress.

*I witnessed two arrests... neither of which was of me. Gotta look on the bright side.

*I arm wrestled a roller derby girl at a literary magazine issue release party. I lost, but not in a completely embarrassing way (I held my own for a while... or at least I didn't drop immediately). I also learned that foot positioning, leverage, and mental preparation are integral to successful arm wrestling.

*There is a great little band that plays at the south entrance of the Dupont Metro at least one night a week, so I hear them on my walk home. I think this is great.

*Some random guy on the street said 'bonjour' to me, and when I responded in kind he tried to start a conversation in French. Unfortunately, I was in a hurry, so he didn't really get past 'ça va?'

*I started church shopping. Some people seem unfamiliar with this concept-- I try various Episcopal churches until I find one I really like. In the course of shopping, I ran into someone from my church at home!

*My grammy, upon hearing that my ridiculous, bright orange toenails were the result of a pedicure, called me a "rich bitch." It was accompanied by a [non-lewd] hand gesture. It was one of the funniest things I have ever seen and heard.

*I got another pedicure, this time sponsored by my department (woohoo for team outings!) and my toenails are now lime green. They are sweet. Somewhere, my mother is shaking her head and asking herself what compels me to do these things.

*I went to karaoke and performed "Hit Me With Your Best Shot." This is not especially unusual for me. I was, however, stone cold sober at the time. That is somewhat unusual, given the general tone of most of my karaoke outings.

*My mom got me a mango pitter as a housewarming gift. It works like an apple corer, but the center blades are shaped like a mango pit. It works alarmingly well.

*I am going to a wedding this weekend. This is my first non-family wedding ever. I don't even know the people, which means I will be a great wingman (my purpose at this event) because I will throw my "date" at any girl who walks by with the reckless abandon of someone who knows no one.

*We shotgunned on the fire escape. Not once, but twice in one day. It is possible that one or both of those instances was a mistake, but we had to christen the new place. Besides, it would have been a little out of our way to go shotgun in the Dean's courtyard.

*I got the coolest bag ever. It is giant and made of recycled sails.

*I joined a book club. And I finished the book in time and made mango salsa (see mango pitter), thereby ensuring that I would not be that awkward, quiet kid in section. This book club is great.

*I have continued my habit of showing my love by baking. The problem with this habit is that I typically plan these displays of affection somewhat haphazardly. As a result, I am now an expert at walking (and riding the bus) around DC wearing a sundress and oven mitts as I try not to burn myself on the 350˚F baking dishes I routinely tote around the city.

*Wine game in our apartment. Another one of those "good idea? or great idea?" situations in which the real answer might be "bad idea."

*I resolved to post more consistently!

Home Invasion

2008-07-09T22:23:00.002-04:00

You know that you really live in a place when you have to do all those things that people do in their homes. Last night, this involved laundry. Tonight, this involved fighting off an intruder. Yes, that's right. Tonight, I single-handedly-- well with the assistance of a cup and some newspaper-- trapped and banished the largest bug I have ever seen in real life.

It all started typically enough. Windows open, sitting in a big comfy chair, wasting time on the internet instead of unpacking my shoes... yes, there are enough of them that they constitute a category of items to unpack. Suddenly, drawn by the lure of the compact fluorescent lightbulbs in the ceiling fan, in charged the culprit. Imagine if baby turtles could fly. That would approximate this thing. You can understand my horror.

But I was fascinated as I watched it hone in on its beacon-- the bright, white light of the fan-- only to be smacked off course repeatedly by the rotating blades. Finally, disoriented to the point of doing the flying equivalent of a drunk stagger, it made its way toward my chair. I jumped up and proceeded to engage in an intensive bug-hunt, as it had fallen out of my view. I located it climbing up the very chair from which I had leaped, and in a fit of resourcefulness and humanity, I trapped it under a cup to let it outside. Yes, I probably gave that thing a heart attack, thereby negating the benevolence of my release plan. And yes, I decided on this course of action mostly because of my concern I couldn't kill it on the first try and my hesitance to squash bug goo into our pretty chairs. But overall, I think I took the high road.

Also, I am never opening that window again, since the bug is deranged and spent the next 10 minutes trying to break through the glass to get back to the light. At least not without a screen that is rated for UFO-sided insects.

Street Soccer

2008-06-28T00:17:00.002-04:00

This morning I finally stopped for a minute to talk to the guy who hangs out at the Georgetown end of the M Street bridge. He was reading the Post Express, and when I asked him if there was any good news, he told me about the street soccer tournament in D.C. this weekend. As he put it, "It's interesting, because it gives homeless people an opportunity to represent themselves athletically."

As it turns out, it is even more interesting than that. The tournament this weekend (which is at 11th and H Streets NW, if you're around and interested) is the qualifying tournament for the U.S. team in the Homeless World Cup. Teams from around the world are traveling to Melbourne in December to play for the world title. The stories on the website are really compelling, and it seems like a cool cause, so I would encourage you to read about it.

Miss You Love

2008-06-22T00:57:00.004-04:00

No, this post is not about my pining after anyone. Pine? Me? Oh please. But this post is about my missing various stuff. And what is any blog without the odd Daniel Johns shoutout?

Anyway, we're moving soon. Half of the contents of the apartment are already in storage (big ups to Rockville), which makes the living room look a little awkward-- four dining chairs with no dining room table, one lonely armchair in front of the coffee table and TV, an unopened jug of Carlo Rossi atop an empty bookshelf. Like I said, awkward.

The impending move has made me think about some of the things I'm going to miss about this place. I have also made note of a number of things I won't miss, but hey, no need to be too negative.

Miss: Looking out the window at the Lincoln Memorial. And the Jefferson Memorial. And the Washington Monument, the Capitol, the Smithsonian, Memorial Bridge, the Potomac, the Kennedy Center, and Roosevelt Island. Also, on the rare occasion that the Nats score a home run, the fireworks at the new ballpark. Fortunately, the Nats suck, so I won't really miss that many fireworks.

Miss: Our semi-functional elevator system. It's always an exciting adventure-- wondering how long it will take to get to the lobby, wondering if the elevator will stop at the lobby, wondering if the doors will open when it stops at whatever floor it damn well pleases. It might seem off that I will miss this death trap, but I bet I will as I drag my laundry down three flights of stairs. Fortunately, I don't do laundry very often.

Won't miss: Our water "quality." I'd rather not elaborate.

Won't miss: The Rosslyn Metro station. I hate that frickin escalator. Not that the Dupont escalator is that much shorter, but still. I'm also not a fan of the various chunks of concrete that are missing and the general inability of the ceiling tiles to keep water from cascading down onto the platform. When you're that far underground, you like to think that the infrastructure around you isn't literally crumbling.

Miss: The ladies who work at the front desk, especially Rhonda who always says hi to me and Janea who gave me free Nats tickets one time.

Miss: The hilarious people who live in our building. Notable personalities include the old guy who wears his Royals hat constantly whom I tried to convince to go vote in the primaries and the lady in the elevator the other day who looked at my legs, cautioned me to wear sunscreen, and told me about having carcinomas removed from her nose.

Won't miss: The creepy people in our building. There are sort of a lot of them. Many can be found smoking outside the entrance at all hours of the day and night.

Miss: Walking home across the Key Bridge, especially when it's high tide. (Yes, the Potomac is tidal as far up as D.C .; you can tell because at high tide it's pretty and at low tide there are visible tires and other detritus.) And especially on weekend nights in the summer, when people are out and you just see the running lights on all the boats.

Miss: Walking/running past my favorite view of D.C. I am telling you here and now that there is no better view of Washington than the one you get standing in the Iwo Jima Memorial park in Rosslyn, on the part of the path just to the left of the Netherlands Carrillon. If you ever want to see this, I will happily take you on a field trip.

Won't miss: The weird smell that has recently developed near the CVS on Lynn Street. Seriously. It started as a decaying garbage smell. Then we enjoyed a brief (day-long) scent of overtaxed septic system. For the past two days, it has smelled of something I can only define as drying seaweed mixed with mussels that were used for crab bait and were subsequently left to bake in the sun. And people wonder why I refuse to eat mussels...

Won't miss: State- (Commonwealth?)-run package stores. I have never even been in one, but they just freak me out in theory.

Miss: Subterranean Safeway. Most of the time their produce is not bad, which means that all of the time it is better than the one zucchini and three oranges in Soviet Safeway. Also, checkout guys are awesome, especially the one who always asks "How are you, beautiful?" and the one with the Snidely Whiplash mustache who told me they charge extra to fill reusable Trader Joe's bags.

Won't miss: Various emergency vehicles and big rigs on VA-110. They are actually louder than most of the planes landing at National, which I generally don't notice anymore.

Miss: The homeless guy I pass on the way to work. He hangs out at the Georgetown end of the M Street bridge over Rock Creek Parkway. Well, I think he's homeless, because he usually has a cup for donations, but maybe he's just trying to pick up a little extra cash on the side. I have never stopped to talk to him, because I am always tearing down the street trying to be less late, but I feel bad about this. If no one else is talking to him we exchange pleasantries-- he usually goes with, "Good morning, dear." Most of the time, though, I get no love because he's chatting up someone. Seriously, I have heard him talking politics (which is honestly not that surprising for a homeless guy in D.C.), but more often he is reading his original poetry. I have overheard bits and pieces, and what I've heard is good.

Won't miss: Our dysfunctional refrigerator. It is more accurately described as a freezer-- anything uncovered placed higher than the bottom shelf is liable to be covered in ice within an hour of entering said fridge.

All that said, I'm sure life in the new 'hood will be sure of its own quirks, both good and... entertaining. Sure, entertaining, that's it.

Kate Salutes Awesomeness

2008-06-17T23:52:00.002-04:00

I just wanted to give a quick shout-out. I have been known to watch some TV in my time, and I have definitely watched some really bad TV--The X-Effect much?

But tonight, lacking anything more interesting, I watched a couple minutes of Denise Richards: It's Complicated. I was prepared to be really embarrassed about it, because to be honest I don't really care whether her assistant or her assistant's assistant is lying about something asinine. However, in what was probably a one-time-only event, Denise decided to build something. A playhouse for her daughters, in fact. Again, I was skeptical, especially when she started saying, "What are all these thiiings? You brought it without instructions?"

I mean, in her defense, I too have been charged with building "just four walls and a ceiling," and that process became the most grueling two months of my life, so I sympathize. I mean, full-scale Weimar Berlin apartment versus pink playhouse; to be honest, the playhouse sounds pretty easy after that. Nevertheless, I had my concerns about watching some blonde flailing around trying to understand the purpose of washers and nuts.

Fears allayed. Once she realized she needed a drill, Denise went on a fieldtrip to her friendly neighborhood hardware store and bought herself a DeWalt cordless drill-- with the help of the female clerk, I might add. After that it was smooth sailing, and if I were little again, I would think it was a pretty awesome playhouse. As it stands, I think it's pretty awesome that a mom built her daughters' playhouse on national TV.

And maybe next time we can step up for some real lumber and a saw too.

The Actual End of the Hunt

2008-06-17T00:10:00.002-04:00

So we officially have an apartment. Well, actually we have two apartments. Three if you count the one where I'm sitting presently. But this one goes away soon, and before then one of us is going to have to break the bad news to Charlemagne... which leaves us with one delightful abode in Dupont!

The process for finding this was teamwork at its finest. Thanks to my neurosis, Marissa's Blackberry, the Metro's failure to function, and our cab driver's failure to--well, to function, really--we found our apartment while trapped in traffic on Friday morning. It's a good thing, because we had to do something to distract me from my plan to hijack the cab.

In any case, the moral of the story is that everything works out for the best. Well, okay, two bathrooms would make this apartment 'the best,' but as is it's still pretty great. But fortune favors the doggedly persistent. And those willing to walk up three floors.

Signs You Have Been Apartment Hunting Too Long

2008-06-13T13:03:00.002-04:00

So I have not shared as much of our apartment hunting adventure as I had originally intended, mostly because it has been so miserable that I couldn't bring myself to write about it in any kind of funny, non-Eeyore-meets-mental-patient kind of way. It's a good thing the quest is over, because apparently it has begun to take its psychological toll. The following is a real interaction that occurred this morning when Marissa and I went to submit applications for what is likely to become our new home (since I will actually need some kind of prescription anti-anxiety medication if we search any longer):

Marissa: Now, are we under any obligation once we submit this application?
Charmain, our leasing agent friend: No, nothing happens until you actually sign the lease and accept the keys.
Marissa: Okay, so we're not legally bound to take the apartment.
[Charmain looks at us suspiciously.]
Marissa: I mean, if anything happens--
Kate: --like if one of us gets hit by a truck.

Whaaaaaa? Where did that come from? A truck? That's the reason we wouldn't take the apartment? I mean, excepting a case in which we found a better apartment which won't happen because we're done looking and which we clearly couldn't tell Charmain... but a truck? Really?

I need a beer.

You Know It's Summer in DC When...

2008-06-11T22:57:00.002-04:00

...it's hot enough at 7:30 p.m. to make you decide not to walk home.
...the Metro is delayed.
...you are trapped on the Metro with interns. This is almost enough to make you decide to walk home anyway.

Yes, it's that time again. Tuesday night, I had my first drive-by sloot-ing of the summer. As we sat in Farragut West, I overheard the following:

"You don't have an ID?"
"No... well, if I wear a lowcut shirt they'll let me in."

Happy summer everyone.

I Love D.C.

2008-06-02T00:23:00.002-04:00

I had a very D.C. weekend, and it made me remember how much I love living here. Friday after work, I went on a Trader Joe's mission and--after wandering the wine section for about 15 minutes--cobbled together a Trader Joe's picnic. Like any good ex-girl scout, I was prepared--in this case with a corkscrew--as was my co-picnicker. Joined by another friend, we headed over to the jazz concert in the sculpture garden.

It was awesome. The jazz was good, the grass was springy, the weather was perfect, and the park police turned a blind eye to the dubious beverages being enjoyed by literally everyone there. And when I say 'everyone'-- there were so many people. It was almost a little challenging to find a spot to set up camp. But mostly it was really cool that so many people--mostly young people-- turn out on a Friday after work to sit in a park and listen to jazz.

Saturday-- well, Saturday was less integral to the whole 'amazing D.C. weekend' scheme. That said, seeing the Sex and the City movie in the vaguely bombed out-looking theatre in Union Station was pretty classic. Once we realized that everyone else around was talking to the characters on the screen-- "Oh no he di'int!"--we joined in the Greek chorus, balancing out the "Awwwww!"s with our "Ugh, you have got to be kidding me"s. I mean, hurling cynical comments at the screen during a romantic comedy? That's pretty D.C. And then I went home and counted the Ick-ness of the movie with four episodes of West Wing.

Today was my first trip to Eastern Market in waaaay too long. Ever the multitasker, I decided to pair my deep and abiding love of the market with my grudging persistence in apartment hunting and go to an open house on Capitol Hill. I decided that I hadn't been outside enough recently and set out to walk to the apartment and Eastern Market. Not only was it a very promising apartment, but it was a lovely day at the market as well. I bought two birthday presents. I got mango sorbet. I made friends with Caitlin who makes awesome book purses and who--after calling me crazy and telling me I should take the Metro home-- bestowed upon me some of her sunscreen. I resisted the urge to buy completely extraneous kitchenware from the Polish pottery guy, though next time I will not be so strong.

On my way home-- no, I did not listen to Caitlin; I wanted to take pictures of D.C. from my favorite vantage point, the base of the Netherlands Carillon, so I decided to walk-- I took a mini-detour to avoid the ostensibly crazy guy who started talking to me on Independence Avenue and wandered upon this awesome exhibit at the Botanic Garden. In addition to the awesome globes, they also have two wind turbines, which as I science nerd I found to be really cool. Definitely go check it out if you have a chance, even if you're not a nerd.

All in all, a very good weekend indeed. Now if only I could bring myself to do my ironing, I would be a completely productive citizen. Maybe next weekend.

Spotted on the Key Bridge

2008-06-01T23:54:00.004-04:00

The cherry blossoms all finished falling about two months ago, but I am still clinging to spring. My mission to walk to work as much as possible is still in full swing... sorry, I just got distracted by all the inadvertent rhyming. I apologize, but I think I'm just going to leave it since it happened organically.

Anyway, I still walk to work. It is the best decision I consistently make between Monday and Friday. There is nothing like meandering over the Key Bridge and looking out at the crew shells and the Kennedy Center in the morning sun. To be fair, my trip to work is nothing like that-- it's more like careening along at a power-walking pace and trying to avoid death by bicyclist. But the part about the crew shells and the Kennedy Center is true. It makes me want to skip out on work and go rent a kayak.

As it turns out, maybe some people indulge a similar seafaring urge. Most mornings on the bridge I pass these two guys walking into Rosslyn from Georgetown. I have started calling them Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum in my mind, extra emphasis on the Tweed part. Seriously, if it were ever slightly chilly, I am sure they would both be wearing tweed jackets. Given that it's pretty mild, they stick with the pastel Polo-khakis-boat shoes look. I have never seen them wearing matching shirts, but I am waiting for the day. My favorite part though is that--in addition to the Sperry's--one of them has croakies on his sunglasses at all times.

Now, I am paranoid about lots of things including somehow losing my grip on something and watching it plummet into the Potomac. As a result, no mugger will ever be able to steal my bag on that bridge, because I clutch it with a death grip at all times. But despite my own neurosis, I find it really hard to believe that this guy's sunglasses are really at risk. Does he think it's going to get so windy that he is going to need the croakies to keep the glasses on his head? Or around his neck, as it were?

No. He is really just that fratastic. And he probably wants us all to wonder if he is in fact going out for a sail after work-- which is legit, because if he were, I would totally support the croakies. But until that day, I will continue to believe that Tweedle Dum (you knew he would have to be 'Dum, right?) is the post college analog to that kid in middle school whose parents made him wear his retainer case on a lanyard so he wouldn't lose it.

Adventures in Real Estate: Prologue

2008-05-20T00:18:00.002-04:00

My lovely roommate and I have been apartment hunting. This never goes especially well for us, but it usually involves a good story or two. At the very least, we meet some interesting characters. Over the next few weeks, I plan to recount some of our stories thus far-- we've made friends-- and what are sure to be ridiculous tales as we approach the end of our lease on June 30.

For now though, a retelling of some of last summer's travails in apartment hunting. It's good to understand exactly how simultaneously high and low our standards are-- seriously, you have to be pretty bizarre to impress us at this point.

Looking forward to sharing the post-game report for the 2008 season,
Kate

June 24, 2007

A few weeks ago I did something funny to my right foot. When the pain refused to go away for good, I went to a podiatrist, feeling like a huge wuss who was whining about a little throb, but it turned out I had actually hurt myself. I have a stress fracture (right foot, third metatarsal, for all our premed friends). Fortunately I caught it before I ran on it enough to make an actual break, but unfortunately I'm not allowed to run for a month.

What do you do when you can't run? I drive 7 hours and then walk 5 miles a day for two days (yeah, my foot is not so happy with me right now). After my 8:00 doctor appointment Wednesday, I got in my car, picked up Marissa, and we trekked down to D.C. to apartment hunt. Immediately upon arrival, we met up with Strand and went to a Nats-Tigers game (go Tigers), and the next morning we embarked on what we termed "guerrilla real estate"-- wandering around Dupont, Logan Circle, Foggy Bottom, Mass Ave., and Rosslyn (VA) calling anyone advertising vacancies. Picture me dragging my clubfoot, because I was wearing one Rainbow flipflop and my velcro surgical sandal. I looked like a preppy cripple-- people offered me their seats on the Metro, I looked that gimpy.

We also got in touch with a realtor, and embarked upon what I called "Will Rogers Follies". The realtor's name was Will Rogers-- seriously, I can't make this stuff up. Will Rogers showed us two properties. About five blocks away from the first one, Marissa and I broke into a rendition of "In the Ghetto". But then Will Rogers drove us to apartment number 2. The address was 2907 18th Street. I thought to myself, "Wait a minute... that's the bar strip in Adams Morgan. This can't end well." Will Rogers wandered up and down the wrong street for a while ("Can either of you see the lockbox?" he said, at the door of what turned out to be 2907 Ontario Road), but then he found 18th. Sure enough, we were two doors down from Brass Monkey, Spaghetti Garden, Nolan's, and the infamous Dan's Cafe, which I frequently describe as the greatest, most terrifying, broke-down dive bar ever (we think the bartenders are homeless, no lie). Marissa and I realized we could not possibly live here and remain gainfully employed, explaining to our parents, "No, you don't understand. We had never been there sober before. I have been the loud, drunk girl on that street, and if I lived there I would come outside at 3 a.m. and kill me."

After taking our leave of Will Rogers, we looked at a few more apartments before we faced the choice between taking a nap in our hotel and buying a bucket of beers at Front Page. In a totally uncharacteristic move, we chose to crash-- I blame my third metatarsal. We rallied to go to dinner and drinking with my uncle and then met Strand for another beer in the hotel bar. Again, I blame my cloven hoof for our inability to drag ourselves to Georgetown for $2 Coronas. Not varsity behavior, but I think a real sports injury might qualify me for the drinking DL if the bar is over a mile away.

Long story short, Marissa and I got pretty frustrated, especially after seeing a beautiful building that turned out to be on the edge of a seedy neighborhood and experiencing kind of a general lack of 2 bedroom apartments for less than $300000000 and our firstborns. We have not given up hope, but we have also not yet signed a lease. Of course we will keep you updated. We deeply believe that the right apartment will come along and we will know it when we see it. It had better, because we are planning a sweet housewarming party, and we need a place to have it.

These Flipflops Are Made for Walkin...

2008-04-21T00:23:00.002-04:00

Last week I did an experiment. I decided to walk to and from work for an entire week to see how it affected me. And the result is this: best decision ever. Granted, I picked a particularly balmy week, but it was great. I arrived at work happy, rather than surly about that family that couldn't get out of my way when I needed to exit the train. I didn't have to confront my persistent fear of careening down the escalator to my demise. In the afternoon, I was a little irked by slow-walkers on M Street, but it was no worse than my disdain for people standing on the left-hand side of the escalator at Foggy Bottom. (Seriously, escalumps take note: I am boring holes in the back of your immobile head with my eyes.) And I would rather walk over the Key Bridge than up the Rosslyn escalator any day.

Plus, I saved almost $20 in fares-- and I didn't even blow it by stopping to shop on my way home. Awesome, right?

The one problem I failed to anticipate, however, was re-entry. Friday evening I went to a friend's party and I took the train for the first time in five days-- I didn't really have a choice if I wanted to arrive before midnight. I did not think it would require an adjustment, but wow. I was a little shaky as I tore--carefully-- down the moving stairs of doom. Granted I was carrying a Pyrex dish of clam dip and repeated reliving the great pie catastrophe of 2007 in my mind (remember, I always thought I would wipe out on the Metro, not 10 feet outside of my building). But still, I was not as sure of my step as usual. And your first ride in a week is not really the time to have a brake-happy driver. By the time I got to Metro Center, I needed some Tums and a glass of flat ginger ale.

Nevertheless, despite the bumpy (literally) re-adjustment, I am pretty excited to begin yet another Metro-free work week. But let's see how I do as the weather makes its transition from balmy to disgusting, with the occasional crappy day thrown in to test my mettle.

Kate Gets Annoyed by Direct to Consumer Drug Advertising

2008-04-11T00:15:00.003-04:00

In case you haven’t watched primetime network news recently, there are three things for sale in America: cars (to burn the fossil fuel Americans are not supposed to use), investments (to build the nest eggs Americans are presently without), and drugs (you thought I was going to throw in another parenthetical here, didn’t you? I am a sly one).

There are few things I love as much as direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug advertising. And by love, I mean ‘respond to with some form of dyspepsia.’ But I bet if I could just make it through the ads, they would sell me something to cure that gurgly feeling I get from seeing an older couple dance in their kitchen after Mr. Whoever pops a Cialis. Eww.

But what makes me even gurglier deep in the depths of my stomach (I think my spleen may be involved too—something about rage) is that fact that, somewhere, there is some man who now wants to go see his doctor and ask if there is a little blue pill that is right for him. And it’s not just that I’m grossed out by erectile dysfunction drugs. It’s that I can hum the Vytorin song in my head. I know that Lyrica might relieve my fibromyalgia symptoms.

As I have mentioned before, our whole medical system is based on an imbalance of information. We go to doctors because we don’t know how to fix ourselves and they do. But that is changing—kind of. Between WebMD and the Merck Manual online, we can diagnose ourselves… right? Okay, maybe we play into our own hypochondria and exaggerate our symptoms. But really, we don’t even really need doctors, do we? Heck, I can navigate a drop-down menu as well as some guy who went to med school—and my wireless costs a lot less than those four years of his life he’ll never get back.

So we have diagnosed ourselves. The next step is obviously to analyze the armamentarium and decide if Lipitor is right for us. (Incidentally, if you are making this particular decision, you are one of about 12 people left in your time zone who are not already on Lipitor. Public health experts actually joke about putting it in the water.) So now the drug companies tell us—the self-diagnosing, prescription-demanding public—what to ask for when we see our doctor. And since our doctors are running late and our appointments are short, they don’t always have the time—or make the time—to do a comparison of brands or recommend (gasp!) generics. Instead they write the prescriptions for the name brand drugs of our choosing.

You want numbers? Here are numbers. Percent of patients who have seen a DTC ad: 86. Percent of patients of asked their doctor about a drug they saw in an ad: 35. The kicker: of patients who went to the doctor specifically to ask about a drug, percent of patients who walked out with their prescription of choice: 75. And we wonder why the drug companies are spending more on marketing than on research and development.

So here are my problems with DTC advertising.

First, it plays on people’s fears and hypochondria to get them to buy a product. I just find that kind of wrong. Furthermore, they play on people’s fears while downplaying the risks and side-effects of these substances. Except for that one psoriasis drug. I can’t remember the name, but I saw an ad for it yesterday, and death was very clearly stated as a potential side effect. I thought that was pretty ballsy. Although if I remember death but not the name, I guess it wasn’t a very good ad.

Second, we live in a world in which “first do no harm” can sometimes mean prescribing a drug if it won’t hurt the patient and it will make him or her go away. As a result, DTC advertising is potentially causing overuse, driving our growing national health expenditure (NHE) higher and higher. Moreover, it takes less time to write a script than to develop an exercise plan with a patient, and the availability of drugs can compromise our message about the importance of preventative measures and health preservation.

Finally, DTC advertising is not about pharmaceuticals. It is about branding. And as long as we keep buying in to the shiny packaging and the funny ads, it’s going to be difficult to reduce our exploding NHE through the use of generic drugs.

*Kate does not endorse any of the drugs named in this post. She just happens to concede that their brainwashing tactics are impressive.

Oops

2008-04-11T00:14:00.001-04:00

It seems I missed a whole month. Working on it. I promise.

Quarterlife: Worst Show Ever

2008-02-26T22:57:00.004-05:00

So, on our first night back after our sojourn through the desert of cablelessness, my roommate and I watched the beginning of the new series Quarterlife. I continued watching it, because I cannot look away from a trainwreck. The characters are self-absorbed, emo, hipster, alcoholic, and sex-obsessed. Basically, throw in a Starbucks cup and you will have a picture of the stereotype of young Americans.

Two things made this show especially terrible. The first is the casting of Scott M. Foster. I would like to qualify this statement by saying that I am kind of in love with him. But if his presence on this series means the ABCFamily's Greek is canceled, then I cannot abide his judgment in roles. (NB: According to his bio, Greek is still in production, but I am worried.)

The other problem-- which I only witnessed because I was foolish enough to watch until the end-- was BAD KARAOKE. Clearly, the writers of this series have not read my guide to karaoke. The venue was bad, the song was too slow, the girl who was singing--badly-- was crying and having some kind of epiphany onstage. All bad artistic choices. Throw in a guy trying to sing Tracy Chapman with a beer in his hand, and you would have the perfect storm of karaoke doom.

Anyway, I am glad my cable is back, but it was sad to realize that nothing good was on tonight. Gossip Girl, come back to me! You know I love you.

Brief Diatribe Against Comcast

2008-02-26T11:28:00.002-05:00

Hello! I have missed you. I've been meaning to post for some time now, but I have been cut off from the outside world. What is this, you ask? This, my friends, is the work of Comcast. I posted last on February 12. On February 13, I came home from work and found myself without cable, internet, or phone service. Yes, my roommate and I have a home phone; deal with it.

Today is February 26. I think they are coming to fix it tonight.

Seriously? Seriously. This is after two failed attempts to wait for repair people-- one of which involved some kind of traffic accident; the other I believe to have involved the Bermuda Triangle, since the guy who was "5 to 10 minutes" away from our apartment vanished.

Anyway, I've been fuming. And drinking a lot of chai at Murky Coffee in Clarendon, which I have discovered is delightfully walkable from my apartment-- good news when 60 percent of the Metro lines are delayed and I need to go somewhere with wireless to work. And listening to a lot of old school Third Eye Blind, also the influence of Murky.

Before I go (I am at work, after all), a brief highlight from this weekend. Walking almost all the way home from Adams Morgan (really, I walked to Dupont, where the wait was so long I continued on to Foggy Bottom), I overheard the following conversation:

Guy: What's your name again?
Girl: What's your name?
Guy: Ummm... do you want to come over and... um, hang out?
Girl: Umm, yeah... we could, um... have a drink.
Guy: Yeah... or, uh... listen to music.

Oh, innuendo. How I love you.

You Can Take the Girl Out of Connecticut...

2008-02-12T23:30:00.004-05:00

...but you can't take the healthy fear of death by catastrophic ice-induced fall out of the girl.

Yes, it's true. Just because I'm from the North doesn't mean I go frolicking about in the ice--as I reminded myself tonight.

Having promised caramel brownies to my office for tomorrow, I set out for a trek to Subterranean Safeway after my gym session for the evening. Bear in mind that the reason I had to go tonight was because it was way too inhospitable outside for me to go yesterday. It was cold. Not precipitating, not glacial. Too cold.

So tonight, once I no longer had a choice in the matter, I made my way up the hill that is Wilson Boulevard to Safeway. There was only one really treacherous part-- one semi-icy intersection. Not bad. When I found out that my Safeway does not sell the caramels I needed for my brownies, I came up with Plan B-- go to CVS on my way home. It closes at 10. I left Safeway at 9:20. Fine, right?

Wrong. Not fine.

(To cut the suspense, I will tell you here that I made it to CVS in time to buy a ridiculous quantity of Werther's caramels. I wanted a stiff drink by the time I got there, but I made it.)

Anyway, back to my death march. Actually, no. March suggests that I stepped with some kind of deliberate motion. Which I did until I really got going down hill and the sidewalk really got frozen.

You know that feeling in the pit of your stomach when you take a step and that foot is suddenly not bearing any weight or making contact with the ground? I hate that feeling.

Which is why I decided to walk on the very edge of the road. I waited until the light had changed to stop the flow of traffic and prayed the tiny strip of shoulder that became my trail to safety was not also frozen. Because wiping out alone on the sidewalk is bad. But wiping out in the company of an SUV on the road is worse.

I made it to the next block relatively unscathed. Sweet. Right? Wrong. Bridge. By which I mean sheet of ice.

Remember, I had a backpack and another bag full of groceries. There was not a lot of potential for me to regain my balance if I lost it, which seemed increasingly likely the longer I stood on the one unfrozen square foot of sidewalk on this block. And remember too, I am still going downhill.

At this point, I decided that I had several options:

a.) Cry. Specifically, stand in one place and cry until my tears melted some of the ice in my path. I had already considered this once.
b.) Save myself the inevitable fall by sitting down and sliding on my butt to the end of the ice, which was probably 50 yards away. I'm not kidding; I had already considered this once as well.
c.) Hail a cab to take me half a block to CVS. Hubris prevented this. Also the disturbing lack of cabs. But then again, that meant there were fewer vehicles to run me over when I wiped out and tumbled ass over bandbox into the road.
d.) Sally forth.

And sally I did. Or, more accurately, I skated in my running shoes down the sidewalk, with the aid of the guard rail of the overpass and several newspaper boxes. Seriously, I have never been so grateful for The Onion or those stupid real estate guides. Were it not for that strategically placed bank of newspaper dispensers, I would have been on my butt sobbing in the path of a Ford Explorer.

Lesson: Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today. Because tomorrow there will be freezing rain, and you will have to walk--downhill-- through it to get home.

Kate's Guide to Karaoke

2008-02-06T22:17:00.002-05:00

Saturday was my birthday. It was also Groundhog Day, but somehow I am a huge failure and have yet to find out whether or not he saw his shadow. Not that it matters, since it was 71 here today-- wtf, mate? Really, whether Phil said so or not, spring has sprung, even it's taking a kind-of hiatus this weekend.

But back to birthday. It was a great night. Why? Because it included a trip to Café Japone in Dupont for some sweet, sweet karaoke. Having gone on several karaoke excursions in the recent past, I hereby offer some musings on the rules of the road-- as I see them-- for a successful night of karaoke.

Location
1. Bigger is not better. For example, Café Japone is a pretty small restaurant, which means there are fewer [presumably drunk] people to mock or attack you. It's also set up like a restuarant, so not everyone is watching the performer. Places that are bigger or more presentational can get a little terrifying, especially under hostile conditions.

2. Don't go to Peyote in Adams Morgan ever. It's in Adams Morgan so everyone is a belligerent, wasted 20-year-old (I am McSurly?). Also, the DJ makes you tip if you ever want to hear your song and one of his microphones--the one he hands to you, conveniently-- doesn't work. No lie. It was the best "Hey Jealousy" I've ever done, and only I heard the first half of it because I was singing into a dead mike.

Attitude
1. Get to a mental and emotional place in which you can enjoy making a spectacle of yourself or watching others make spectacles of themselves. If this preparatory process requires alcohol, so be it. Performers be warned-- this does not give you license to be in the bathroom when your song comes up on the queue.

2. Strike a balance between respectful and judgy. Once, a guy yelled at my extremely talented, classically trained friend that he was bad. Like, to my friend's face, while my friend was singing. That was cruel and inappropriate. On the other hand, some terrible girls once stole the mike from us when they forfeited their song by being too drunk to realize it was their turn. We sat calmly at our table and commented to each other about how awful they were. And how vaguely anorexic. The suggestion, "Eat a powerbar" might or might not have been uttered at some point. But the moral of the story is that we let those pathetic diva-wannabes finish their destruction of a perfectly good song. Even though it was "Sweet Caroline" and it hurt us.

2a. If you are better than someone, you are allowed to judge.

2b. If it is your birthday, you have free range to judge everyone else, including other people with the same birthday.

2c. If on your birthday, some guys who are really awful get up and try to sing your song, you are within your rights to tell them to stop and then reclaim the mike by force if they persist. Seriously, I don't think they had ever even heard "Wild Night" before.

Song selection
This is obviously the most important choice you will make. More important than Sapporo or Sapporo Light. More important than sake bomb or don't sake bomb. This is huge and it will make or break you. With that in mind, a little guidance for the misguided:

1. Pick a song you know. Please. It's funny to watch people who can't sing but love a song and go balls-out. It's painful to watch people trying desperately to keep up with the words or blatantly guess at the melody. Helpful example: unless you are a complete and utter badass, never pick
"End of the World as We Know It," by R.E.M.
"One Week," by Bare Naked Ladies
Anything by Busta Rhymes

2. It doesn't matter how good a song is; if it isn't at least kind of up-tempo, it won't work. There are obvious exceptions to this rule ("Total Eclipse of the Heart," much?), but by and large it is an effective weeding tool. I am not giving examples. Figure it out.

3. Don't pick songs that are more than five minutes long. Really, it's just rude.

4. Don't pick songs with melancholy lyrics unless they are vastly outweighed by a kickass tempo and over half the people in the bar knowing the chorus. Mostly, this rule is dedicated to the guys Saturday night who tried to sing "Talking About a Revolution," by Tracy Chapman. Great song. I really like that song. But it was a bad decision. I'm sorry, but if it's 11:30 on a Saturday night and I am being peer pressured into another sake bomb-- I've lost count; don't ask--and you have been hogging the mike all night, i really do not want you to sing at me about people standing in the welfare lines. And singing badly, I might add. It was kind of funny, and every girl at my table was singing to try to drown you out, but mostly we were all silently asking wtf.

5. I know you're young and drunk and you only really know the words to about four good songs, but try to save the standards for later in the night. No one is ready for "Don't Stop Believin" at 9:30. Not even you. We use that to close down bars.

And with that, a brief sampling of successful karaoke tunes. I recommend the 80's, the 90's, boy bands, and the so-bad-they're-good:

Don't Stop Believin, Journey (please wait until the end of the night, at least after 11.)
Sweet Caroline, Neil Diamond (so good, so good, so good)
Livin on a Prayer, Bon Jovi (again, patience please)
Hit Me With Your Best Shot, Pat Benatar (BIG winner)
Hey Jealousy, Gin Blossoms (brilliant)
Follow You Down, Gin Blossoms (you will be pleasantly surprised how many people know the chorus; obviously they should know it because it's amazing, but you'll still be surprised.)
Candy, Mandy Moore (awful, and therefore perfect)
That's the Way It Is, Celine Dion (the Vegas show might be closed, but the music lives on; a very popular selection at the gay bar)
Red Neck Woman, Gretchen Wilson (a well-timed country song can be very effective, by which I mean hilarious)

All Roads Lead to [a Pseudo-]Toad's

2008-02-02T18:06:00.000-05:00

I love U Street. I love concerts at the mainstage at the Black Cat. I love that the doorman at Cafe St. Ex calls me Shorty because I am as tall as he is. But just when you think you've found a place where people vaguely resembling grown-ups (i.e., people I aspire to be) go to drink, you find yourself in the midst of another Toad's.

I have been cataloging the existence of pseudo-Toad's long before I ventured to the legendary Spoad's one fateful week in May 2007. As a member of that most-reviled breed of human-- the D.C. summer intern-- I spent many a night reveling in the sketch that befell my favorite Red Sox bar every Saturday at 11:00. Who knew that once all the guys in jerseys cleared out, all the guys in striped shirts would move in for the kill? But alas, part of the charm was lost when I returned only to realize that D.C. interns had been replaced by Georgetown students and that I was now the sketchy older chick. No way that is okay.

So I moved on. P.S., baseball season, please begin again so I can go back to Rhino. I miss it. One night, Laura and I wandered into The Front Page. We were after a cheap bourbon and ginger, but soon we heard the thumping of a bass line and the words "in da club." Could it be? Our Thursday 5:30 source of buckets of beer loosening its Vineyard Vines tie and getting low? Apparently.

But sadly, we were not quite pastel-clad enough. And I love a pastel, so that is saying something. Don't these people realize that the sketchy dance party is the raison d'être of Forever 21? They are putting an entire industry-- the cheap, hoochie "clothes" industry, I know, but still-- out of business.

So when Marie suggested the Bliss dance party at the backstage at the Black Cat last weekend, I was full of guarded optimism. Okay, that's a lie. I was pretty sure it wouldn't be very good. Or it would be fine, but not like Toad Sweet Toad.

It was amazing. There was a stage. Nay, there were multiple stages. Obviously, we picked the highest and most prominent and charged up to our pedestal of dancing glory. And the DJ was playing songs directly from his iTunes. How great is that? There were girls with Coach bags wearing $11.99 tops rife with oversized sequins. They played "Call on Me." It was perfect.

And-- clinching backstage's place as the premier pseudo-Toad's-- vaguely skeezy guys befriended us, securing our place as not the sketchiest people there. A good night indeed.

The Zamboni's Fall from Grace

2008-01-24T23:12:00.000-05:00

This week, I felt a stir deep inside me that has long been dormant. But as I laced my skates at the rink in the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden and penguin-walked toward the ice, I remembered one of my most persistent, if sometimes obscured, desires:

I think it would be sweet to drive a zamboni. Seriously. How awesome is the zamboni? And how cool would it be to drive it? Maybe not as a career, but clearly it's one of those things to check off of a To Do list.

But my faith in the zamboni was shaken this week, when I Googled this seemingly fine machine-- the granddaddy of all ice resurfacers-- and found the website www.zamboni.com. It is unassuming enough, touting the legacy of Frank Zamboni and his eponymous invention, and there is a kids section of the website with zamboni games.

I am easily entertained, so I clicked on what appeared to be the coolest game. It turned out to be a picture of a zamboni sliding back and forth across some ice. Not so interactive, nor, dare I say, gamelike. But whatever. So I decided to try the checkers game.

What a sham!! The game actually prevented me from making legal moves! I cannot explain how irrationally upset this made me. The zamboni is a pure, noble machine, smoothing the way for all who wish to traipse across the ice. Or who get paid to barrel across the ice and pin an Eastern European ex-pat against the boards and knock out his teeth, as I saw at the Caps game tonight (not the teeth, just the potential for teeth). And yet, at the Verizon Center the zamboni is now one more lumbering advertisement for Bud Light-- like a blimp, but lower and slower--and on zamboni.com it sucks the innocent joy from a simple game of checkers against an automated "partner." So sad.

On a more exciting note, the Caps game tonight was awesome. It had been a long, dark time in my life since my hockey spectator days ended with the demise of the Hartford Whalers (damn you, Carolina Hurricanes... damn you...), so I was glad to return to the rink. Well, a rink.

Kate and Electronics-- A Winning Combination

2008-01-21T21:48:00.000-05:00

As you might recall, my hairdryer tried to kill me in November. I have since deemed it the winning appliance in the 2007 edition of Kate Versus Technology. It narrowly edged out the microwave in our apartment, which steadfastly refuses to let me cook anything on less than 100% power, and every printer on the sixth floor of my office, which steadfastly refuse to function correctly in general. But as much as I curse the useless "power level" button and enraging bond paper debacles, they never tried to inflict bodily harm. Most of all, they were never on fire.
Which is why I am a little nervous that we already have a contender in the running for Kate Versus Technology 2008. No, it's not Hairfryer's successor. So far, the little red ConAir that could is on my side.

I have long had digital camera issues. One was stolen from Sigma Chi. Another gradually gave up on life, vanquishing its preview screen to comatose blackness-- only to suddenly revive itself at Viva's one night! Seriously, I have no idea what happened; I think it might be possessed. And another had a bitter falling out with its dock-port-thingy, leaving me to feed it non-rechargeable batteries. But never before has the battery charger turned on me.

So last night, as I set about charging batteries to prepare for ice skating photo ops and perhaps a moment with the Stephen Colbert portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, I plugged the charger into the wall. Upside down, but whatever; I do it now and again. I folded a sweatshirt, looked toward the charger-- and saw something smoke-like wafting out of the charger.

A brief moment of panic ensued, obviously, as I pulled the adapter off of the wall, held it in my hands (it wasn't hot), and hoped it wouldn't burst into flames or explode all over me. Against my better judgment I held it closer to my nose to try to detect smoke. I didn't. Nope, it smelled like ammonia, not smoke.

Where should I put it? In the bathroom? Fewer flammable things... but potential electrical fire plus water equals bad decision. Seriously, a fire I can't extinguish with water? That is terrifying. But anyway. On the balcony? Nothing really flammable out there... maybe I should just throw it off the balcony? Eh, probably a less good decision.

In the end it was fine. I brought it to a different outlet, plugged it tentatively into the wall, and waited for the building to implode or for toxic fumes to overtake me. But for reigniting (ha) my fear of electrical fires and briefly emitting some weird ammonia-esque chemical, I nominate you, battery charger. I'll be watching.

Missed Opportunities

2008-01-18T00:03:00.000-05:00

There is this restaurant near our apartment. Tom Sarris' Orleans House. Marissa and I have made a running joke of this place. There is always a line outside at 4:00. The parking lot is packed by 5:45. There are stained glass windows and a generalized attempt at architecture that evokes the feeling of "My daddy, the Colonel." It is bizarre and we are fascinated by it.

We decided at some point that we must eat there. We also guessed that this experience would be even better were we slightly drunk. This suspicion was confirmed on New Year's Eve. I had never before seen a person under the age of 50 walk into or out of the Orleans House. But as I made my way to the Metro, a pack of 12 or so 20-somethings entered the restaurant. Well-- 10 of them entered; the other 2 had to wait outside until they consumed the contents of their red solo cups.

But apparently our dreams of drunkenly grazing the apparently renown salad bar will never come true. The Orleans House closed on Tuesday, taking with it the caravan of Lincolns and Oldsmobiles I dodged each night as I crossed the lot on my way home. Just goes to show that even absurd opportunities only last so long before the government forecloses on some property and you find yourself on the corner of North Lynn and Wilson with an empty solo cup in your hand and nowhere to go.

Kate Spews Bile

2008-01-12T02:55:00.000-05:00

I remember a conversation, shortly before I began this blog, between my friend Marie and me. I told her I was worried I wouldn't have enough things about which to write, and she--wisely-- replied, "Oh, just wait until something really enrages you. Then you'll have something to write."

Well, friends, the time is now. I am enraged. And a little drunk. But mostly enraged. Before I begin, I would like to give a shout-out to the director of my department at work, without whom I would not have seen an article about rollergirls (I am seriously considering joining a league) and thus without whom we would not have had a discussion about aggressive women at work today.

NB: I sincerely apologize for any obscenities I spew in the course of this rant, but I promise they are long overdue.

Background: I had a great night. I went to firmwide happy hour. I went to a jazz concert with friends. I went to a bar I like with those friends and more. I had conversations with at least three guys at said bar (Cafe St. Ex., btw), one of whom happened to be beautiful and a law student who had played lacrosse at Princeton. Seriously, I was not complaining, until cute P'ton lax guy started talking to two girls who seemed neither cute nor smart. But overall, it was still a good night, right?

By this time it was about 2 a.m., and I wanted to head home, so I went to the Metro, where another guy struck up a conversation. Again, lovely. And then I switched Metro lines at L'Enfant Plaza.

Can I just note, briefly, that I really don't like L'Enfant Plaza? Seriously, once I rode in a green line car with "BLOODS" graffiti-ed on the Metro map, I knew I should start transferring at Gallery Place, even if it meant an extra transfer at Metro Center. Oh well.

So I'm on the platform, and there is some really loud guy, and his friends. Maybe they are "friends." Unclear. But he is going on and on about something or another for the 8 minutes I must wait with him for my train.

"Oh, she's so fat. [words, words, words] ...she's ugly. [words, words, words] ...ugh, she's such a bitch."

At some point, a train arrives, and we all embark on our journey to NoVa. He continues talking about how fat and unattractive and terrible most people in his life are-- especially these girls, apparently.

I am fuming. I am sitting directly in front of this terrible, obnoxious kid, and I kind of want to turn and slap him and yell at him, but I have to time it right. I have always dreamed about this type of thing, but today Meghan told me she could see me being a rollergirl, and the aggression is out in full force.

The train begins pulling into the Rosslyn station.

KATE: [turns halfway around to almost face the little douchebag]: Since it seems everyone you know is ugly, fat, or bitchy, I just want you to know that you're intolerable and a douchebag."

DOUCHEBAG: [as KATE stands and waits for the doors of the train to open]: Yeah? Well, why don't you go home alone and watch some Life... uhh"
KATE: [done with him] Oh, wah, wah, wah. [Exits train]

That little shit will probably never read this, and-- if he does-- he will have no grounds to sue me (it sounded like he was in law school) because I do not name him. But I offer the following complaints:

1. He clearly assumed I was going home alone because I was not with a guy. There are moments I wish I was a lesbian, if for no other reason then to call somebody out for theoretically discriminating against me.

2.If you're going to use television to attempt to insult me, learn your frickin channels. It's called Lifetime, not "Life, uh..."

3. How dare you assume that because I am alone on the Metro means I am going home to an empty apartment. I was out with work friends; screw you, douchebag. Moreover, maybe I have a long-distance boyfriend. Or one who has a cold. Or whatever.

4. HOW DARE YOU PRESUME I WON'T BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF YOU? As noted above: seriously, I could strangle this kid. Moreover, I could knee him in the balls so hard that he would not be able to drag himself onto the last train bound for Vienna or Franconia-Springfield. I mean it. I generally avoid confrontation, so if I have the balls to say something to someone on the Metro, I have the balls to stand behind it. And also, I was at least a foot taller than he.

5. HOW DARE YOU INSINUATE THAT I AM NOT A COMPLETE PERSON BECAUSE YOU THINK I DON'T HAVE A BOYFRIEND? I realize that I'm not in the kitchen baking you cookies and that scares you, but get real.

The worst part is, of course, the mots d'escalier part. It's French for "stair words," meaning the things you should have said before you left that you think of on your way down the stairs. I had a couple, most notably accusing him of being a huge sexist.

But anyway. Tell me what you think about gender roles. Or just plan to join me on the Metro for an afternoon, trying to find this kid and scream at him until he can't remember what happened.

When I Grow Up, I Want to Be Ina Garten

2008-01-07T23:16:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago at work we talked about the answer to the question, "What's your dream job?" I, of course, said that I wanted to fix American health care, probably by being an important advisor to a similarly important person.

"Seriously?" one of my pod-mates asked me. "What do you actually think would be fun?"

"I mean, once I do that, I want to be a Food Network chef."

This sounded a little more reasonable to everyone, especially once we considered how I could go from a cooking show to cookbooks to a travel or entertaining show. Really, the possibilities are endless. But is it really possible to go from policy to cooking shows?

Yes. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Ina Garten. She went from writing nuclear energy policy for Ford and Carter to owning a specialty food store in the Hamptons, writing a cookbook, and starring on one of my favorite shows, Barefoot Contessa.

How did she get her start on her second career? Throwing parties in Washington. Granted, she and her husband had a rather swanky place in the Dupont/Kalorama area, but my roommate and I have a fabulous view only about five minutes from the Metro.

And this past weekend we threw a pretty successful Twelfth Night party. One of the signatures of the night was the big pot of wassail, which involved two six-packs of Newcastle, half a dozen apples, more sugar than I care to recall, and my creative interpretation of two different wassail recipes-- which I finally combined in about 20 minutes with my hair still slightly damp and my outfit covered by a Lucy Ricardo-esque, ladybug-print apron. Not to mention the Twelfth Night cake. Seriously, if we could keep 20-some-odd 20-somethings happy on a Saturday night without the benefit of a keg or organized drinking games, then I think I am on my way to fabulous dinner parties.

Lest we forget, I am still basically a college student playing house and dress-up-- though apparently my pretending to be a grown-up is more convincing than I thought. Once the wassail was mixed and the Twelfth Night cake was cut, I got down to one of my pieces of business for the night:

"Hey Strand, come on. Are we shotgunning or not?"

As my friend and I stepped out to the balcony and began carving strategically placed holes in our cans of beer, a party guest turned to my roommate:

"She is the last person I would have expected to go shotgun a beer. She baked, she made wassail, and she's wearing pearls. She's like Martha Stewart."

*****

NB: Beginning this week (meaning yesterday), I am a contributor for an exciting, new blog called Last Stop in the District. I will be writing a weekly column-- published on Mondays--on health, science, and policy, though not always at the same time. Just a heads-up. It's not that I've become completely fluffy, but my writing will be a little compartmentalized from here on out, as the topical stuff moves to LSITD. The hilarity will continue to ensue, and when I get particularly enraged about something health-y, I will let you know in whatever forum I find most appropriate to vent my rage. But please support the new site, and make sure you check out all the other awesome contributors as well!

Happy New Year

2008-01-03T00:17:00.000-05:00

In the category of science you can use, I give you Science Times on the effects of alcohol. Having just summoned the power of alcohol leggings on Monday night, it's always fun to learn about another way in which alcohol messed with the nervous system. Not that I wanted to trek from Petworth to Wonderland Ballroom without the benefit of my booze coat. It was New Year's Eve, after all.

By the way, Wonderland-- despite its packed bar, crush of revelers on the dance floor, and creepy guys on the stage dancing with us-- was a supremely hilarious place to ring in the new year. In my neverending pursuit of dive bar perfection, I hold a special place in my heart for any bar that salutes the ball drop with a Champagne of Beers toast. Not only that, it was so crowded outside that we couldn't shove through to the gate. Clearly, the only solution was to climb through the bushes and across the neighbors' lawn.

Me and Mean Maxine

2007-12-23T23:29:00.000-05:00

Written Saturday, December 22, at 10:55 a.m.

As I write, I am sitting smooshed on the train home. I am sitting adjacent to the most unpleasant woman ever. Really. An oversold train is no place to start in with moral indignation, which is exactly what she did when I attempted to move her paired pink luggage to make room for my one little bag.

I want to give this woman a name. I think she could be a Maxine. She is certainly sassy enough, although not in the good way. Mean Maxine.

“No! Don’t move my bag! What did you do? Why aren’t they together anymore? It’s going to fall! Put my bags back together! That will be easier when I get off! Why won’t this fit anymore? Did you put something there? People can’t just shove other people’s things!”

As usual, being the amateur sociologist that I am, I have a few observations:

1. I should mention that the guy behind me attempted to help me put my bag on the luggage rack. While this endeared him to me pretty much forever, it wasn’t really that necessary because I am badass enough to mangle other people’s packing arrangements on my own. My lady friend Maxine, however, did not seem to realize that I was the architect and primary executor of the evil scheme to heave her belongings into disarray. She therefore directed her anger at the guy trying to help. Because, you know, I’m just a girl.

I bet some poor conductor had to put her bags up there for her. I bet she stood there and told him he was doing it wrong.

2. Maxine was never a student of physics. Or, if she was, she was not a particularly successful student of physics. Concepts Maxine fails to grasp include the following:
a. Inertia. Maxine’s bag was not moving—I mean, at least not once I stopped sullying its pink perfection. It was not going to fall. Unless I decided to make it fall, of course, which at this point I was liable to do.
b. Center of gravity. Barring the possibility that Maxine had lined the bottom three inches of her bag with lead, there was no way that the small amount of suitcase looming ominously over my head—you wouldn’t think anything so pink could be ominous, but Maxine made it so—could contain enough weight to send it careening down. But apparently this impending crash was a source of concern for Maxine.

3. Once I hid my crying enough to dare give Maxine a dirty look—yes, she made me cry, not because she hurt my feelings but because she enraged me so—I noticed her ensemble. It was pretty festive. The obvious festive pieces were the bright red sparkly sweater and the big ring with pink and red rhinestones, but as looked more closely as the embodiment of cruelty, I noticed her earrings. They were wreaths. I thought they were just woven gold circles, but upon further inspection, I saw the little red bows that topped each one.

For someone who is so festive, Maxine does not have very much Christmas spirit.

**Note: I have moved to a seat across the aisle. It is much less smooshed and far enough from Maxine that I don’t fear she will claw me to death for touching her suitcase. This seat also gives me a new vantage point from which to view the ensemble, and I can now see the pin on her red “I’m a lady who wears a hat” hat. The pin is a woman’s head. The woman is wearing a red hat. Who knew old-lady accessories could be so meta?

4. Maxine is the most important person in the universe. This is abundantly clear already, I know, but it got even better once she took her seat, aired her last few uppity grievances to no one in particular, and resumed her crossword puzzle. Out loud. She’s one of those people who exhales, “Aaaand six down…” It’s intolerable. But of course Maxine does this because she’s very important and interesting, and we should all know that she is deeply invested in finding the correct answer to six down. I worked on something to say about it—and it was going to be sassy, let me tell you—but I was too convinced that she would send me into a fit of furious tears again.

***

Update: I'm home now, and I have slept more than 4 hours, and I have decided that-- while I do not understand why Maxine felt compelled to freak out at me for shifting her luggage-- she is probably not an evil person. She even offered me her pen when I had to sign my ticket, indicating not only the presence of a soul but also the conclusion of her crossword puzzle commentary. It does not explain why she had to work all the bitchy out of her system at 10:45 in the morning, but that's okay.

Lessons from Joe's Basement

2007-12-17T22:29:00.000-05:00

Well. It's been an interesting couple of weeks. At some point in the past week or two I realized that it's finals time for those still fortunate enough to be blessed with blue books, and as noted previously I started thinking about college. I was in the middle of getting all nostalgic when I stopped for a moment and remembered that I haven't really cut the cord. Part of this is my own doing-- I live with a college friend, I see other college friends at least once a week and talk to them all day to Gchat (bless you, Gchat). Hell, there is a giant YALE banner hanging on a wall in our apartment. The only physical thing that even vaguely suggests that something is different is my degree, which also happens to be hanging on a wall in our apartment, but that's really just a piece of paper.

To be honest, I was starting to feel a little guilty about all this stuff. Here I am, purporting to be a grown-up, when really I do all the stuff I did for four years. It's just that now I put on grown-up clothes and go to an office Monday through Friday. I still do my laundry from 11 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. on Tuesdays. I still go to the gym to avoid other necessary tasks-- before it was reading; now it's grocery shopping. I have not ironed since I started my job. Seriously. Before I just avoided the wrinkly shirts. Now I wear them under sweaters. I actually think I ironed more in college.

I also selected the perfect job for my M.O. of being in college for the foreseeable future. We're all the same age, the majority of us still think we can drink as hard as we did in college, and many of us routinely try. This is how our department outing turned into The Night of 28 Bottles of Wine and inspired haiku (yes, just as in college I am still a huge nerd and enthusiastically participate in haiku contests) such as the following, composed as I groggily waited for the Metro the next morning:

Department outing!
So much wine in Joe's Basement...
I don't feel so good.

I mean, when you and your boss start singing the Mory's song [notorious Old Yale drinking song] in a restaurant that is not Mory's [notorious Old Yale drinking establishment], and his boss challenges two other people to a wine chugging contest... it's hard not to think that you're still in a basement on York Street passing around 4-liter jugs of Carlo.

On the other hand, I try. I realize how much I am a work in progress, and I really aspire to become one of those productive, upstanding citizens you're supposed to aspire to be. I go to museums, I bake too much for anyone's good, I go to concerts, I read again. The reading has been a really big deal-- I missed reading for pleasure all through college and I've always harbored anxiety that I'm not especially well-read. So I decided that this is an area for development, and isn't a desire self-improvement a sign of maturity? Or something?

My book selection has been a little haphazard, and my plan to alternate recent work with classics was thrown off course when I lost my copy of Love in the Time of Cholera-- which I inevitably accidentally found tonight. It was on my bookshelf. You might think that this is the stupidest thing you've ever heard, but consider for a moment-- why would I put it on the shelf when I was in the middle of reading it? See, I don't know either.

So Marquez is on siesta until I finish one of New York Times's 100 Notable Books of 2007-- Throw Like a Girl: Stories, by Jean Thompson. The characters are all smart women and girls, several with a wicked steak-- I wonder why it appealed to me. Hmm. Unfortunately their common bond is their links to loser men and boys, so maybe not the best message to send to myself. But I remain optimistic for a Bridget Jones moment--not necessarily the kind of moment when the sassy and deserving heroine ends up with Mark Darcy, but at least the kind of moment when she choses vodka and Chaka Khan.

Language Barrier

2007-12-13T00:40:00.000-05:00

I can't believe it has been a week since the last time I wrote. It has been an interesting week. Son of Pie was a huge success, but more about that in the next few days-- honest, I have a whole post planned in my mind, but the execution was just a little too much for me tonight. Blame it on real-people tasks, which happened to include the gym AND Subterranean Safeway AND laundry. It was a big night; usually it's all I can do to shower after the gym. The irony is that this amazing hypothetical post is all about how I'm pretty much still a college student who plays dress-up and goes to an office during the day.

Anyway, as I said, that is a post for another day. And, as per me, I had a bizarre encounter tonight so it's not that I'm struggling for material.

I went straight from the gym to Subterranean Safeway. It was around 9:00 p.m. I was wearing a sweatshirt, gym shorts, and a layer of grossness from the gym-- and I wasn't cold, which is just messed up. I'll admit, after nearly wiping out on ice multiple times last week, I am kind of enjoying the temperate weather, but then I remember that we're halfway through Advent and I freak out a little.

That was a digression, but the following is an important sidebar. I mentioned a sweatshirt. It is one of my many, many articles of Davenport clothing. The back of this particular sweatshirt proclaims-- in a salute to our diminutive mascot-- "gnome is where the heart is." Cute, right? I love it. Bear this slogan in mind.

I ran up the hill to my supermarket of choice, grabbed a cart, and pillaged the produce section. But I'm me, and apparently the job description for being Kate includes "must attract the crazies in the supermarket." A slim, relatively short, older man approached me as I picked apples, and said with a slight accent, "What does the 'g' stand for?"

Whaaaat? Where did this guy come from? Seriously, he kind of sneaked up on me. I looked at him with a look of pure, unadulterated confusion.

"Is it for genome?" he continued, "like human genome? G-nome?"

Oh no. Am I supposed to do the English as a second language explanation of 'gnome'?

"Uh, no... it's for--" I point to the small gnome who is emblazoned, pointy hat and all, on the front of the sweatshirt. He still seemed intrigued. I think to myself, "There is no good way to say this that allows me to finish my shopping before the store closes at 10."

"--little people. It's like little people."

I think he was pretty disappointed that it wasn't a human genome joke.

Revenge of the Pie

2007-12-07T01:18:00.000-05:00

It's about 1:30 a.m. and I am still awake, waiting for my amazing apple pie to come out of the oven. People in my office have been on a collective baking binge recently, and I am joining in with this particular confection to avenge a previous foray into the world of baked goods.

Sometime in October, when we all thought the fall weather might finally descend upon D.C., several of us planned a fall festival for our department, complete with scarves, pie, Schnapps hot chocolate, and pumpkin beer. I love to bake, so I offered to make what I consider to be the greatest apple pie in the history of... well, of pies. My mom has been making it for years, and we are pretty sure that it could kill a man-- really, the amount of butter in the topping shall remain nameless to protect the LDL-impaired. But what it lacks in fat-freedom it makes up for in apply goodness-- eight apples of goodness, to be precise.

Needless to say, I was very excited about this pie. I baked it the night before; the apartment smelled amazing. I left for work early, hoping that I would be able to get a seat on the Metro-- because, seriously, what could be worse than dropping my pie on the Metro?

I walked carefully down the hall, down the elevator, out the front door of the building. At which point I realized it was raining. Grr. But no big deal, right?

I stood in front of the building, under the awning, balancing the best pie ever on one palm and digging through my bag for my umbrella with my free hand. I located the umbrella and began to open it.

"Hmm," I thought, "maybe I should set down the--"

It was one of those moments when you float out of your body and time slows down.

"AAAUGHUUUH!" I didn't really scream so much as this strangled yelping sound escaped from me. I like to think my choked cry was drowned out by the slurp of pie flopping onto the sidewalk-- concurrent with a single crunch of glass, of course. Because I had just a little too much hubris to get the pre-made pie crust in the little aluminum pie plate. Nah, who needs that?

Apparently, a spaz like me.

I debated my options-- run away and get on the train, run to Safeway and bake a new pie (I would probably only be about two hours late to work-- I really thought about this), clean up the mess (damn nagging conscience), sit down in my mess and cry (a strong contender, but not the winner). And of course, some attractive guy walked out and saw me staring transfixed by the pile of apples, brown sugar, and glass on the sidewalk-- really, it was the topping on the pie, as it were.

That was the end of the pie. I didn't even get to taste it-- again, a bad option that received a lot of consideration, but finally my taste for apples and cinnamon was bested by my distaste for Pyrex shards and emergency room visits. The fall festival was still a smashing (ha) success, complete with a moment of silence for my fallen pie.

There was a silver lining, though. I got home from work that day with an urge to write about my fruit-filled failure and though, "Hmm, if I had a blog, I could write about this." So it's only appropriate that as Long Island Sound approaches its 1-month birthday celebration this Saturday I avenge the pie that contributed to its inception.

Let's just hope that Son of Pie's life is a little longer and ends in dismemberment rather than a fatal fall.

Trivia Night Triumph, Thanks to Lance Armstrong

2007-12-03T23:31:00.000-05:00

After a fun but lackluster first trivia night out of The Have a few weeks ago, tonight marked my return to Fado. This time forty percent of the old all-star team was present, and Laura and I were determined to win big. We recruited a solid group, convened with our answer booklet and our shiny blue but woefully dull pencil...

...and the pillaging began. Seriously, I have never gotten owned by a game of trivia the way we got owned tonight. And there wasn't even a music round! Do you know who Mariska Hartigay's mother is? Because we sure didn't. We didn't completely fail-- again, we ended up in the middle of the pack-- but it was not our finest hour and, in fact, it made us want to find trivia that's slightly less grueling.

But there was a silver lining to the evening-- in addition to returning to my trivia and Newcastle ways with one of my favorite old trivia friends and several new ones. A big part of the joy of trivia is amusing yourself and those around you. This aspect of the game can be manifest in absurd answers when you have no chance of guessing correctly. It can also be realized in the selection of a team name. To acknowledge the importance of hilarity, the organizers of this trivia night give an award for the best team name each week. And guess who won tonight!!!

Yes, it's true. We considered ragging on Mike Huckabee, taking a swipe at Larry Craig, formulating a joke about Iran's lack of a nuclear weapons program, and saying anything true about Kevin Federline and letting it speak for itself. But finally we chose a name that encompassed a variety of topics from sports to television and movie stardom to... well, to just dumb-dom. At the suggestion of Laura and with refinement from Andrea and me, we synthesized the best team name of the week:

Lance Armstrong trades in his Schwinn to ride an Olsen twin.

Kate Discovers the Power of Plaid

2007-12-01T04:10:00.000-05:00

Long ago and far away, during my time with Mother Yale, one of my favorite events of the year was Sigma Nu's "Champagne and Schoolgirls" party-- by which I clearly mean I went once and stayed for 10 minutes, none of my clothing was short or plaid or tied under my boobs, and we called them Sketchy Nu for a reason. I mean, really.

As it turns out, those uncomfortable minutes in a house on High Street were, in fact, teachable moments. Because, as I determined tonight through an informal experiment, the guys love the plaid.

PROBLEM: Will my outfit attract guys--in particular guys I might deem date-able? And by "date-able" I basically mean "not complete social miscreants." Bonus points if they're literate.

HYPOTHESIS: The combination of a short skirt and boots is attractive; guys will respond accordingly.

MATERIALS:
girl (me)
skirt-- very cute (like, OMG, it's so totally cute), plaid miniskirt from Gap-- short but not raising-extra-money-by-working-nights short
boots-- black
test subjects-- males
alcohol-- everywhere, including the bloodstreams of girl (me) and males.

PROCEDURE:
1. Go to Adams Morgan. Do not pass Metro Center. Do not collect a good night's sleep after watching The Departed again. Go directly to Adams Morgan.
2. Do a lap up and down 18th Street. Yes, I missed the bar on the first try-- either because the sign is poorly lighted or because I was walking briskly to plow through the crowd of test subjects outside of Tom Tom (see OBSERVATIONS AND DISCUSSION).
a. Note reactions of test subjects encountered.
3. Enter bar; begin drinking; observe.
4. Leave bar; move to new bar via 18th Street; observe.
5. Repeat Steps 3-4 as many times as necessary to accumulate statistically significant number of observations.
6. Depart Adams Morgan; ride Metro to home.

OBSERVATIONS AND DISCUSSION:
Guys love a girl in a plaid skirt and boots to a degree I did not anticipate. Seriously. The following list details actual comments made to/about me during the course of the night--in Adams Morgan and on the Metro:

~ "Hey, girl! You from Scotland?" [Seriously. Five distinct times. I kid you not.]

~ [As I send a text message to locate my friend] "You texting me, baby?"

~"Hey schoolgirl!" [I lost count.]

~ "Nice skirt." [This was from the bouncer at Nolan's.]

~ [I am clomping furiously down the Woodley Park Metro escalator to make a train. Two guys are standing-- one in my path-- drinking from bottles of Bud.]
GUY IN MY WAY: That is one serious walk you got going there.
ME: Yeah, well, you know. Good job with those bottles.
GUYS: Thanks. Good job with that skirt.

~[GUY and GIRL are exiting red line train at Metro Center, as am I.]
GIRL: So wait, which way do we go?
GUY: I don't know. I'm just following the schoolgirl. [Yes, I'm sure he was referring to me.]

~ [Cute, non-sketchy guy (who is apparently going to visit his girlfriend in McPherson-- boo) and I are discussing our apartment complex-- he lives two building over; go figure. Additional, seemingly non-sketchy, attractive firefighter guy joins conversation, has been considering a condo in our complex, asks us pros and cons.]
FIREFIGHTER GUY: Yeah, well, it must be nice. There sure aren't girls walking around in skirts like that where I live now.

And finally, FIREFIGHTER GUY for the win:
"Can I tell you something? I mean, I'm going to tell you either way. Anyway, that combination of a plaid skirt and boots just does something to guys. I mean, I can't speak for anybody but myself... but I'm willing to say it's the same for a LOT of guys."

CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION:
Guys-- even guys who seem nice enough and are not at all aggressive or threatening-- are pretty skeezy about this whole plaid skirt thing.

I mean, seriously. "Baby One More Time" was a great song and all (yes, I just said that, and I even kind of mean it-- sorry), but this is not just about Britney back when she was young and spry. This is about some kind of fetishization of the schoolgirl image, and there is plenty that is disturbing about that. I mean, besides that fact that women pay upwards of $50 each October for a $5 plaid skirt and a flimsy white button-down they buy in a bag at VIP because they think it's a cute Halloween costume.

What does it even mean-- the "schoolgirl"? Is it just someone young? Is it someone innocent for a guy to corrupt or debauch? Is it even more nuanced and sinister than that-- she is someone naïve and vulnerable, of whom guys want to take advantage?

That's one thing. The other thing is that I was completely taken aback by the number of guys who cat-called me. If you're going to be like Firefighter Guy and tell me to my face that you think my skirt and boots are hot, fine. Not gonna lie, it was a little awkward, but it was really flattering, and it took some cojones to say that to me-- on the Metro no less, which is notoriously awkward (although everyone trying to catch the last train to Virginia on a Friday or Saturday is pretty friendly). But anonymous cat-calls from people in cabs and lascivious looks from people you pass on the sidewalk are at the very least annoyances, and at their worst these incidences can make women feel threatened and cheap. And tonight I blew by those people with a look of "Oh please," but a person with less of a head on her shoulders or a little more time on her hands might have kneed one of those guys in the aforementioned cojones and gotten herself into some trouble.

(All that said, I totally want to run a control experiment with an equally short skirt that isn't plaid. I mean, it's for science.)

That's it. I am a feminist but not an angry one. I am also a realist-- I want to be judged for my mind, but I know we all judge based on appearances too. And I that's fine-- I am quite secure in the knowledge that I am smart, but every now and again it's nice to have some guy suggest that my mind isn't all that interests him. I don't go to the gym only for my health; I go so my legs look good sticking out of my short skirts and tall boots. What I don't want are guys yelling at me from cabs, insinuating that I-- or any other badass young lady with ridiculous quads and a miniskirt-- am the answer to their prayers for a sexually frustrated parochial school student.

Arts and Sciences

2007-11-29T00:17:00.000-05:00

Unfortunately, my plans to write last night went awry, thanks to the tell-tale laundry basket mocking me from the darkness of my closet. But now that I have clean clothes, I am back on track and atoning for my neglect.

It was a great day in Science Times yesterday. In addition to the reproduction and vocal quality article-- which was interesting until the last paragraph, when it became kind of hilarious--there was an article on the biological basis of the arts.

The very watered down summary is that some scientists hypothesize that we engage in the arts because they allow is to replicate the maternal-infant bonding activities of... well, replication. I have made faces at enough babies in enough contexts-- family picnics, the Benetton at M and Wisconsin, church-- to know how this works (yes, even though I am not a baby mama). We make exaggerated facial expressions-- I am a master of the big, goofy smile-- and wait for babies to smile back. And we understand that children learn to speak by listening and mimicking. None of this is earth-shattering.

I have some proto-thoughts about this article, but it's hard to figure out exactly how it relates to the whole range of artistic endeavors. It really highlights the distinction between artistry and creativity, which I think is kind of the humanities version of "a square is a rectangle but a rectangle is not a square"--you can reproduce a melody written by Bach (which I have been known to do, on occasion, in addition to "The Rainbow Connection," my first-ever violin solo). And you're generating something and it's art, but are you really creating? Apparently, you're just indulging an innate urge to replicate patterns you already kind of knew because your mom sang to you.

Really? I like to think that, at some point, we as a species get off the evolutionary couch and make some new stuff. I have friends who construct collages and compose music, and by this hypothesis they are just doing what they are wired to do, but I happen to think that they are really creative.

I Love Science Times

2007-11-27T11:36:00.000-05:00

I am a huge nerd, and I own that. And if there's one thing I love, it's an interesting science/anthropology article that also takes a swipe at machismo. Seriously, I love a good parting shot.

Back to work; a fuller post tonight.

Welcome Back to DC

2007-11-25T18:39:00.000-05:00

This morning, realizing that I had more or less half a loaf of bread, half a jar of peanut butter, a jar of salsa, and 6 baby carrots in the kitchen, I took a rousing trip to Subterranean Safeway, finally ate breakfast at noon, and set about the real business of the day: a run and a field trip to Eastern Market.

About a month ago, I started running every weekend--one good, long run. On the inaugural voyage, I accidentally ran into D.C., by way of the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge. Since that little miscalculation, I have discovered the way to Memorial Bridge, past the Iwo Jima Memorial, the Netherlands Carillon, and Arlington Cemetery. My favorite moment every time is finishing a little climb up to the road that crosses the river: to the right is the beautiful entrance to Arlington, and to the left is the Lincoln Memorial. It's pretty stunning. Once I cross Memorial Bridge I mix it up, visiting a different monument or building each week.

But this morning I decided I would combine my two loves--weekend runs and fieldtrips to Eastern Market--with a run to Eastern Market. I mean, really, taking the Metro to go shopping is overrated. And, as MapMyRun told me, it's only a hair over five miles from chez moi.

Arriving at the market around 3:00, vaguely crusty from the salt left by evaporated sweat (overshare, sorry), I got to work wandering. I had two missions: Christmas presents and dining chairs.

Eastern Market did not disappoint. In record furniture buying time (it took us a loooooooong time to furnish our apartment), about 10 minutes, I found and committed to four beautiful chairs that happen to match our table perfectly. (Yes, we bought a table and no chairs. We were all about baby steps.) And having just finished eating dinner at a real dining table sitting in a real chair for the first time ever in the apartment, I can tell you these chairs were an amazing purchase. Also an amazing purchase: the services of Joe, the guy who delivered them. Not only did he help me carry the chairs up to the apartment, but he also told me all about his recent trip to his home in central France. Seriously, what a cool guy. It's that kind of thing that keeps me so excited to visit the Market week after week.

I also found Christmas presents, whose identities are being protected in case their recipients should stumble across this URL.

But the best thing at Eastern Market today-- better than my chairs, better than awesome Joe, better than all the people looking at me like I was crazy to be wearing shorts-- was... the Christmas tree section!! It should have dawned on me much sooner that there would be Christmas trees in the farmer's market, but I didn't occur to me until I saw a miniature Christmas tree farm spilling from the back of a truck. Every size imaginable, including Charlie Brown size. I walked around the trees just to smell them, and now I really want one. Even if it's just a runt. Of course I will have to decorate it with ornaments from Eastern Market.

The Kate Lew. Post-Game Report

2007-11-22T19:42:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time, I always gave one of my friends a hard time about analyzing everything we did. Seriously, this habit reached its lowest low when we were sitting in a restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina:

COMMENTATOR: No, seriously, guys, this was great. We saw the waterfront, and we just walked around the gallery district of Charleston, and now we've had a very authentic, Southern lunch-- [very authentic, Southern women turn around and stare at COMMENTATOR]-- and now we're going to a museum. This is such a rich, cultural day, guys.

I should also note that my friend has a rather booming voice that allowed pretty much everyone in the very authentic, Southern restaurant to hear him. I, of course, thanked him for the Post-Game Report and threw it back to the studio.

And now, in that great tradition, I bring you bits and pieces of The Kate Lew. Post-Game Report. I am somewhat vindicated in this endeavor because my report comes in the wake of an actual game-- The Game, at that. So, without ado, le report, in a quirky wins-losses format:

[note: The Report will soon be illustrated; it would be now, had I not failed to pack my camera cords. Check back!]

FRIDAY NIGHT:

W: Best welcome ever, in the form of a scream and a flying attack-hug from one of my favorite people at Yale. I think her family was a little surprised that the first thing she did upon entering her common room was nearly break the girl sitting on the couch, but it pretty much made my day.

W: Dinner at Thai restaurant with rockstar. There is nothing quite like pan-Asian cuisine to strengthen the bonds between a future star and her current groupie. I am already pulling for the band to play the Black Cat and 9:30 Club. Afterparty will be anywhere we can sing sweet, sweet karaoke.

W: Do you know any jokes that start, “So, these 15 people walk into a sushi bar”? After Miya’s, I’m working on some.

L: Five dollars and a little of my soul. Friday night at Toad’s, also known as one of the worst nights at Toad’s ever. Clearly what happens when you take a good thing and let in Harvard students. And I really can’t believe they charged us, although maybe they were just trying to make up all that lost revenue from when they were closed during Senior Week.

SATURDAY:

W: There's something about taking a tranquil stroll to the Yale Bowl, meandering past taxis--and I believe the bus carrying the Yale football team--stuck in traffic, and arriving at your U-Haul of choice to the tune of cheers and a "mimosa" of orange juice-tinted Andre that warms my soul. And people making pancakes. Especially at 9:30 a.m. I know a lot of people like football, but I maintain that the great American sporting pastimes are baseball and tailgating.

L: North Face fleece glove. Drowning victim—lost in the sea of human bodies that was the attempt to enter the student section of the Yale Bowl. Shockingly, the only thing I took into the Bowl that I did not bring out—though my arm was almost on that list.

L: I don’t actually want to address the score of The Game, beyond noting it on my loss list. As I told Text Message Guy, I went home for a tailgate. As much as I would have appreciated a win, I really just needed an excuse to go stand around a U-Haul with my friends—and if that excuse is a football game, then so be it.

Sidebar: Yes—Text Message Guy is still texting me. The future rockstar thinks it would be funny to maintain correspondence to see how long he will go before he finally asks my name. I think this plan is potentially interesting—and potentially hilarious.

L: Just about all the fluid in my body. Seriously. I don’t think I’ve been that dehydrated since…well, probably since the last Game. There’s nothing quite like mimosas for breakfast to set the tone for a day of healthy hydration.

W: Davenport Oktoberfest stein. Accidentally burgled from the Cottage in the process of dragging people to Toad’s. “Here, you can put it in my bag; I’ll take it back to the Cottage tomorrow morning.” Oops.

W: Further proof that all roads lead to Toad’s. Despite the malaise resulting from approximately 24 hours of drinking, the 7:30 a.m. wake-up thanks to the Harvard morons staying in the next room (it’s not that they go to Harvard—it’s that they’re morons), and the vague recollection of a crowded, awful Toad’s the night before, we cowboyed up and sallied forth to our York Street beacon once again. And it was great. Fortified by several dollar draughts, a SoCo and lime or two, and—I’m pretty sure—a Jagerbomb, I remembered how I ended up on that dance floor so many times before. Because when Toad’s is bad, it’s a mess. But when it’s good, it’s so good-- so good! so good! so good!

W: Did I mention that I was at Toad's because I was not in a theatre striking the set of a mainstage musical? Because it was the first time in history that I went out after The Game, instead of resigning myself to a night of set demolition until dawn. In order to convey my joy, I took a little trip over to the theatre that was the scene of so many of my debacles in the past and said hi to some of my favorite theatre people. Needless to say, I was happy to see them and really happy not to be them.

OVERALL:

W: Seeing so many good friends. In terms of the Dport crew-- I mean, there really aren’t sufficient words to explain what happens when there are 30 of us in a room. We started a party in Cottage—which six of the guys used to call home—without the help or permission of the guys who live there now. Well, their keg helped. And in addition to having an '07 Myrtle reunion, I saw 7 years of Dporters, which was cool beyond words.

The One When Kate Broke Everything in her Path

2007-11-15T00:00:00.000-05:00

As promised, a Kate theatre disaster story. This post is excerpted directly from an email I sent to my parents the day after the events in question. Enjoy.

*****

Hi! Here is another update… this one is a doozy. brace yourselves; i promise i'm fine. honest.

I handed my French paper in about 2 hours ago; I changed my topic to something much less outlandish (which was the word I used to describe it; you were on the right track with the out- prefix). I think it was good, especially considering the day i had yesterday.

So, Kate, what happened yesterday? Well, you might or might not recall
(I only mentioned it once I think) that in addition to the Dramat mainstage [note: this is Mother Courage, alluded to in the last post], I am doing two other shows this semester. Ine of them opens on Thursday; it's The Mineola Twins by Paula Vogel. My friend asked me to help with it, and it's in a tiny little theatre in the basement of Trumbull (it's call Nick Chapel; it's a converted squash court= très ghetto). The deal with Nick Chapel is that you're not allowed to build an actual set; you can only hang thing from the walls or balcony and use furniture. So I figured it would be easy. Thursday afternoon I went to Home Depot and got the lumber we needed for the hanging pieces, and then I went to the props warehouse to find furniture, and Sunday we started putting stuff in the space.

All the furniture we found was delivered yesterday around 5:30. I had been at the University Theatre (UT) helping with Mother Courage (which was bordering on debacle, still) and ran over to Trumbull. So the designer and my friend and I unloaded all the stuff and started carrying it down the stairs to Nick. This is in the basement, remember, and we needed to go down 2 full flights to get to the floor level of the theatre (remember-- old squash court, so think stadium seating once converted into a theatre). And it's a twisty staircase (so, 7 or so stairs, 90 degree turn, 7 more stairs, etc). Now consider that one set piece is a bar (as in, place where one has a drink) that is about 2.5'x5.5'x4' tall. Equals unwieldy. Now remember that Trumbull is old and sucky and needs a renovation.

So, we get some stuff down one level, and then we decide to move the bar. We get in down the first 7 stairs with great difficulty. The other two people are below/in front of it, and I am above/behind it. So we stop at the first little landing where the stairs turn, and we start trying to move it (in an extra-unwieldy orientation, now it's very tall and skinny) around the corner and down the next 7 stairs. And we get it wedged against the ceiling and un-wedge it and re-wedge it and do it again, and it looks like we are about to make some progress. One of the people notes, "Ooh, be careful of the sprinkler," and we observe the exposed sprinkler head jutting out of the wall.

Not five seconds later, the bar moves down a stair. Taking the sprinkler head off the wall. Releasing a deluge of oily, gross, sprinkler water. Great. Really, awesome.

We all scream like little girls for about a second, before we yell obscenities for a few seconds, before we try to figure out what to do. I duck my head around a corner so I am not getting disgusting water on my face, but my pants and shirt (nothing nice-- build crew clothes) are SOAKED and repulsive. Also, I am terrified of letting go of this thing because I don't know if it will crash down the stairs onto the other people. So I am standing there, looking at the Trumbull dining hall as about 30 different people come by, point, gawk, say "OH MY GOD!", laugh, do some combination of these things, and then run. Bear in mind, water still pouring down the stairs. A random dining hall worker comes out to watch the shitstorm, laughs, says "Oh man! That's gonna be a MESS to clean up!" and goes outside. 10 Davenport freshmen look at me with sympathy and pain and bolt. The fire alarm starts going off (because of us). It's a party. Really.

Finally, I decide that the other people aren't stupid enough to stay standing there forever, so I take my hands off the bar (it doesn't move) and leave the building. I see dining hall worker smoking a cigarette, he asks me what happened. I explain; he replies, "HAHA! So you're responsible for cleaning it up! HA!"

I see one of the people emerge from another entryway, followed by some freshmen who went down to see how flooded it was. Answer: pretty damn flooded. Another person exits with a huge bag of costumes she saved. I go back in (down these other stairs, not the ones in which the bar is wedged) and retrieve my bag and my jacket). By the time I come back up, the director is there, sitting on the steps. We are all absolutely aghast/hysterical/in shock. Did I mention damp?

I look at the collected theatre people. I hear sirens from the approaching fire trucks.

In a very small voice, I say, "You guys… I… I can't stay to clean this up tonight… I have to write a paper… and go back to the UT… and… um…" To which someone replied, "Y'know, at this point, all bets are off, so why don't you go home and shower and then go help Mother Courage."

So I left. On the way I saw these two guys who do some theatre. They asked how I was doing.

KATE: I'm a little squishy. I've been better.
JOHN: [with one of his feet in an air cast with a big bandage]: Um… I mean, I just lost between 30 and 40 percent of my toe.
KATE: I mean… I just flooded three levels of the Trumbull basement.
DAN and JOHN: [look at each other, then at KATE]: Wow.
KATE: Yeah. You hear that fire alarm?
DAN and JOHN: Yeah...?
KATE: Yup, that was me.

Possibly the most amazing part of the story is that I emailed the other people last night to see how everything had gone after I left, and they said that after they all left and came back the building manager had gotten the flood cleaned up, the lighting panels that hadn't been working pre-flood were more or less operable, and that the show is still opening Thursday (barring another FEMA-worthy disaster).

Love, Kate

The theatre, the theatre, what's happened to the theatre?

2007-11-14T22:22:00.000-05:00

I have been meaning to write for a while about going to see Tamburlaine and how doing theatre has made me bad at watching theatre. It's true. Granted, part of the problem was that I didn't really care about the plot of Tamburlaine, but I was also completely distracted by the production of it. For one thing, the theatre itself is beautiful, and they used the back wall as part of the set-- which I love, so sometimes I sort of stared at it for a while.

And then there were the costumes. They were ridiculous. They were lavish, and there seemed to be hundreds of them. I can't explain them; I was in total awe.

There were also times that I just looked up into the fly space to see the lights. Or tried to figure out how they built the set pieces. Or worried that one was going to collapse. The point is that I spent a lot of time not watching the play, because I was watching all the other parts that you're just supposed to experience. And I love it--glimpsing the movement in the wings, seeing the traps open and close, watching the actors set the brakes on the rolling pieces.

I also get major theatre deja vu. The set piece that I thought was going to collapse? It was the cart from Mother Courage. I'm not kidding. All I could think of was the day the cart went missing and then turned up completely disassembled.

And then there was this scene in which Tamburlaine and his men are preparing to stage their attack on some feckless civilization, and they represented tents with banners that were unfurled along the back wall. Except that one of them caught on something, and stayed wonky for the rest of the scene-- it was the American flag from Assassins.

If you have no idea what those two paragraphs mean, it's okay; they are a select few who have been involved the shitstorm that so frequently was the Yale Dramat. But it definitely tinted the lens through which I see theatre.

In the entry I'm going to post approximately 10 minutes from now, I offer a window into what exactly I mean by 'shitstorm.' It's not the Dramat, but it is one of the finest moments of my Yale theatre career.

Last Call for Know-It-Alls

2007-11-12T23:27:00.000-05:00

Tonight, the Service Line Planning team went on a field trip to Trivia Night at Fado. The trivia was actually pretty tough tonight-- BrainStormer is a fickle mistress-- but we ended up holding our own. In the bathroom just prior to the announcement of the final scores, I heard someone say there was a four-way tie for last place, and I almost demanded that we leave early before we were forced to accept the prize for notable suckitude. As it turned out, though, we ended up right near the middle of the pack-- not my finest trivia hour, but not a catastrophic failure. And I blame part of the lackluster performance on the "assholes who don't seem to care that they paid $300 to see Brice Springsteen tonight," as our oh-so-eloquent Quiz Mistress put it.

As happy as I was to go, and as much as I still love BrainStormer, it was much stranger than I thought it would be. I spent six months trekking to Anna Liffey's every Tuesday night, stalking bar patrons until they gave up their chairs, drinking Newcastle from a coffee glass (that was only about two months-- a story of for another day), and arguing with my friends and the bartender about the answers-- only to wander home in a pack, up Grove Street and through Cross Campus, sometimes to Ivy Noodle, most times to the Cottage to watch Sports Night. It was a huge part of senior year. We planned our Tuesday nights-- and, to he honest, our Wednesday mornings-- to account for our weekly pilgrimage to Whitney Ave.

So it's safe to say that I put Trivia Night at Liffey's, with a team of Dporters and Bobby Shaw, on a pedestal. I knew this. But tonight it hit me exactly how much I compare new experiences to old ones. To be perfectly honest, I judge. A lot. The Quiz Mistress-- though quite funny; the feminist side of me was pretty happy that a funny, snarky woman was running the show-- just wasn't as surly as the Quiz Master back home. Seriously-- she offered to repeat the questions at the end of the round. Everyone knows that you get the questions twice and only twice, and if you don't hear them, tough shit. The matching round was really hard, and it would have been nice to have a little help from our favorite bartender. We needed a sports expert at least three times, and in one case a Yankees fan would have been especially clutch-- and I know that guy, and he would have been at Liffey's.

And who thought it was a good idea to make the team size unlimited? This isn't 'Nam; this is trivia. There are rules.

That said, the D.C. trivia faithful lived up to my team-name expectations. Granted, they had it easy with the writers' strike this week, but some of them really went above and beyond. Though I hereby swear to revive some of the greatest hits from Liffey's, including but not limited to "In the Soviet Union, trivia plays you."

But I also need to dedicate some energy to thinking of new names. I'm not a college senior with no class on Wednesdays anymore. And even though I can appreciate that time and miss it a little-- and I plan to do so for a while-- I can't judge my new life and my new experiences against some gold standard I construct from the past.

That said, I have some serious trepidation about Harvard-Yale-- my whole "Yale football crashing and burning in the second half" prediction aside. I have been building this weekend up in my mind for... probably about a year. This is supposed to be the greatest weekend since graduation, our homecoming. And I have hyped it in my mind to a point at which I'm not sure it can meet my expectations. I live in Washington now; I should know about managing expectations.

But unlike the trivia thing-- which I expected to be great, because what could be more perfect and universal than pub quiz?-- I actually think I'm a little reasonable about The Game. I have a very clear label-- I'm an alumna now. I don't have to help load the U-Haul at 7:00 a.m.; I just have to show up around 9:00 and start drinking. And even though I hope a lot of it will be the same, I know that something will be different. Like, for example, I'm going to look at 25 percent of the people and say "Who the Hell are you? When did they start admitting 12-year-olds? Oh, you're a freshman."

I got my ruby-red, peep-toe pumps back from the shoe-repair place, but I'm pretty sure I can't click them and go back to last year. Sounds like I better go shopping for something a little more sensible. Or just different.

Kate Learns That Her Actions Sometimes Have Consequences

2007-11-11T23:17:00.000-05:00

When we last saw our heroine, she was tracking down guys in the street and speculating on the potential ramifications of her decisions. Ever self-effacing, she concluded that he would probably never call and the story would end there.

As it turns out, I was half-right. He didn't call. But as I stood in the gift shop of the National Gallery on Saturday (yes, I went back), I felt my phone buzzing in my bag. One new text message. From a 202 number I've never seen before.

Really? I imagined the words. Just an introduction? Maybe an invitation for drinks?

HEY SEXY. ITS [name]. WHAT UP?

Oh man. It's becoming clear why he didn't want to talk to me in Front Page. It could have something to do with a pathological inability to form a sentence.

To his credit, at least he didn't say SUP. But there was no way I could possibly respond to that. At least not yet. Not until after a couple of Sapporo and my finest rendition of "Livin on a Prayer" to date.

The rest of the hot guy story is unremarkable-- not only did he fail to string together a coherent thought, he also failed to find a group of us at Buffalo Billiards once we finished living out our dreams of karaoke superstardom. Clearly a winner.

The karaoke, though, was the stuff of legend, with one M.K. McCarthy and me soloing on a variety of classics including "Heatwave," "Follow You Down" (the dramatic irony of which I only realized today), and "It's Five O'Clock Somewhere." We were also asked to guest-star in a stirring performance of "I Will Survive." Unfortunately the song queue grew a little too long, so Meg, Marie, and I will have to wait for another day to pay tribute to Kelly Clarkson with our "Since U Been Gone."

Until then, stay classy, Cafe Japone.

Sparks

2007-11-09T23:15:00.000-05:00

As it turns out, the timing of the introduction of my blog was rather auspicious. Exciting things happened to me even before I left my apartment this morning!

Really. My hairdryer tried to kill me.

It doesn't get much more exciting than nearly igniting yourself at 8:07 a.m., and that's how my day began. A fun time for all, especially considering my deep and abiding fear of all things flame-related. With a snap, crackle, pop, spark, and shriek, I awoke from my morning fog with a new appreciation for my life. Once I confirmed that I was not on fire, I closed Benedict Hairdryer in the bathroom where there were minimal flammable objects-- I decided to pretend my roommate's hairspray didn't exist--and went about my merry way. As I write, I am sitting in my unscorched apartment, so all's well that ends well, I suppose.

Work was good. I revealed Long Island Sound to its first audience member--we're obviously very productive all the time. But the next big story of the day occurred once I left the office and wandered over to Dupont. I actually wandered, stopping at my favorite Friday evening activity, the free wine tasting at The Wine Specialist, where I tasted five lovely wines, sampled one enjoyable scotch, and nearly spat out another scotch-- as I told the woman next to me, I got my fill of "smoky" for the day courtesy of my hairdryer.

But I digress-- I do so often; you should know this up front. I finally made my way to Dupont to meet the roomie. Considering the beers at happy hour (thank you, employers!), the wine tasting, and the two scotches I tried, I was probably up 4 drinks to 0 by the time I met her and feeling pretty good. And so we meandered into one of our favorite--by which I mean default-- Dupont bars, Front Page.

Now, we all know that everyone in D.C. is young and single. Well, maybe not. But everyone is checking out everyone, either for themselves or for their single friends. Front Page is a perfect example, and as luck would have it a really attractive guy was talking to his two friends when we walked into the bar. I mean, really, really attractive. Made even more attractive by the fact that we caught each other's glance. Maybe. Can you really tell? Was he looking over my shoulder? Who knows? It's not like he came over to talk to me.

Until he and his friends were ready to leave. He walked toward me, extended his hand...

...and bent down to pick up his umbrella from the ground next to my foot.

Really? Really? Aargh.

Still bent over, he stopped and looked up at me.

REALLY ATTRACTIVE GUY: [speaking from Kate hip-height] Sorry! Just needed to get my umbrella!
[KATE's face falls.]
KATE: Oh! No worries. [smiles, attempting to hide her diappointment]
REALLY ATTRACTIVE GUY: [awkward, hurrying to straighten up] Um, I wasn't trying to grab your leg or anything.

[REALLY ATTRACTIVE GUY and KATE exchange a look. HE exits. KATE, jarred, looks at ROOMMATE]

ROOMMATE: Why did he leave? He had about 20 opportunities to come talk to you. He was starring at you the entire time. I saw him ask his friends about you.

[KATE chugs the rest of her beer, bends down, digs through bag with new resolve.]

KATE: Do you have a pen? I can't find a pen.
ROOMMATE: Yeah, why?
KATE: I'm conducting a social experiment. I have to catch him before he gets too far and I look like a desperate stalker.
ROOMMATE: What?

[KATE, sober enough to know what she's doing but drunk enough not to care, scribbles her phone number on the back of a theatre ticket, the first piece of paper she found. She caps the pen and hands it back to ROOMMATE.]

KATE: I'll be right back.

Yep. I left the bar, followed him a block and a half down the street, tapped him on the shoulder, and gave him the theatre ticket, saying only, "In case you decide you wanted to grab my leg."

My roommate and I had a good laugh about it when I marched back into the bar, triumphant. It's not as though it was a significant gesture. I didn't even write my name on the ticket--all Really Attractive Guy knows about me is my area code and my seat number for Tamburlaine. But even if it doesn't result in a meaningful relationship, at least my little chase makes for a good story, and half the time that's all I'm after. Of course it would be a better story if he called-- it would be hilarious, and it would add the element of surprise-- but maybe that's when I talk to the guy in the bar instead of being the crazy girl who follows him down the street. I'll get there.

Sunday in the Gallery with Edward

2007-11-08T23:50:00.000-05:00

Sunday afternoon, I ventured over the river and through the Mall to the Edward Hopper exhibit at the National Gallery of Art. I decided to go alone, because it was easier, and because I've realized that I am an antisocial gallery goer-- a revelation came at the expense of a guy who once suggested we go to the Portrait Gallery together.

The whole Portrait Gallery experience, which I have since termed a pseudo-date, was deeply awkward. Am I walking too quickly? Too slowly? Does it matter if I want to look at the Louisa May Alcott bust for five minutes? Do I care if it matters? I don't care, because I am awkward. I embrace it. But ill-advised pseudo-dates in galleries go south in a hurry when people start talking about art. In the case of Portrait Gallery Guy, his comment on a painting of Sandra Day O'Connor confirmed it: he was blandish.

But on Sunday, alone in a room full of people, I witnessed a crash-and-burn that far surpassed PGG's uninspired remark. As I wandered around the last room, I fell into line next to Fratty. Fratty was wearing the uniform, of course-- khakis, button-down, sweater, crew cut. He was clearly there with the woman to his left, and he was clearly trying to exercise his wit and insight. As they shifted their attention away from "Nighthawks," he turned to her.

FRATTY: [excited] I don't know. I just feel like all the people in his paintings are talking about... I don't know, something cool, you know?
WOMAN: Really? I feel like they're not talking. At all.
[beat. FRATTY looks like he has been slapped in the face.]

It hurt. Even through the schadenfreude, I felt bad for him, just a little. I mean, he tried. But didn't he read the notes on the exhibit? Come on now.

Debacle-watching aside, the exhibit was amazing. I struggled with the paintings from summers in New England. The isolated houses and Coast Guard stations seemed out of step with the shoreline in my mind-- a shoreline not of houses, but of children running out of houses toward the beach to play in innertubes or to the creek to catch crabs. I was struck by the winter-ness of the scenes. No matter how many times I reminded myself that they depicted summer, I found myself transported to the beach in February, when there are no cars at the cottages and the marsh grass is brown and the sun is bright but not warm. It made me excited to go home for the first time in three-and-a-half months.

I have more to say, but it is late, and the alarm clock will sound too soon. Before I go, though, a few notes about upcoming posts I have begun to formulate in my mind:

*On seeing Tamburlaine: How my love of theatre has made me a terrible theatre goer. No really, I'm a ruined audience member.
*The Game 2007: I am optimistic that I can keep this from becoming a catalog of mishaps and bad decisions, but it wouldn't really be me if that stuff were completely absent.
*Remembrance of Times Past: I have done a lot of ridiculous things, some of which are suitable for publication. Those stories will appear here.

Nighty night.

Hi...

2007-11-08T23:03:00.000-05:00

So this is a little awkward... surprise. I swore for a long time that I would never be a blogger. But I have recently had a change of heart, fueled in large part by inspiration from other nascent bloggers and my stock of anthropomorphisms yearning to breathe free.

And what better time than now? Still settling in to a new life, still adjusting to the nine-to-five... or rather the 8:30 to 5:30, still trying to find chairs for the dining table. Seriously, if anyone reads this and feels compelled to make his or her presence known through an offer of attractive, reasonably priced chairs, then this blog will be a success.

So, without further ado, I declare my intent to string together a few cogent, clever, or entertaining thoughts every now and again-- perhaps more frequently than that-- if for no other reason, then to prove that I can.