MY PHONE SEES THINGS

Seth has started in with his texting me pictures of weather. It's been about a year, and I forgot how infuriating it is. Picture below is Bed Stuy this morning for juxtaposition. I bought a bag of salt (snow melting kind, for those jerks who can only identify with the first picture. Not table salt) for the stairs last week and left it by the front door for ease of use. This morning my downstairs neighbor dumped the entire bag on the first step. It was like 2 inches deep with salt and the rest of the stairs were untouched by it. To be fair, that first step totally didn't have any snow on it afterwards.

We went to Central Park to do some iconic ice skating. I'm not good at it, and the last time I went was over a decade ago. I'll get a good stride going for maybe 50 yards, and then all of a sudden I'll totally forget how to skate and I'll end up half-hunched over with my arms sticking out taking cautious baby steps, and I pretty much look exactly like someone who has to go look for toilet paper after they've already pooped. It made the front of my shins sore. I don't even know if there's a muscle there. Neither Virginia nor I fell though. Afterwards we grabbed dinner in a place that had a life sized Michael Jackson mosaic in the bathroom. 

Christmas was a success! Useful presents and frivolous presents were had by all, and Virginia and I each bought each other cookies, so there's a ton of cookies in the house right now. Virginia also drew me an awesome note because my Darth Vader toaster apparently didn't ship on time. I'm pretty psyched about it because it burns Darth Vader images onto the bread, but also because we currently only have a toaster oven, which I previously ranted about in a post that I'm too lazy to go and find. After, we went into the city and went to look at Macy's holiday windows. They change them every year, and this year's theme is apparently, "Santa's drug fueled trip throughout the cosmos".  

Virginia and I were listening to the Pogues to kickstart Christmas into Irish overdrive, and afterwards Youtube recommended this video. Maybe I'm super late in the game and everyone else in the world has seen it, but it's new to me. Not positive I understand the need for two full drum kits though. Only thing I can think of is the dude in the back has the chops, but the dude in the front has the hair. If I had to choose between them, I'm not sure I could pick either.  

There's a local chain of ice cream places in Rhode Island called Newport Creamery, and their signature shake is the Awful Awful. It's got quite a slogan! I couldn't resist it, but Virginia was hankering for a Coffee Cabinet. Apparently that's what they call milk shakes in Rhode Island... Cabinets. I couldn't and can't get over what a weird thing that is to call a milk shake. There's already something called a cabinet. And milk shakes already have a name. I read up about it online, and one theory is you have to use a blender to make them, and you keep blenders in a cabinet. If that were the case, omelets, cereal, cakes... virtually everything in the kitchen other than things prepared only with silverware would be called cabinets. Things made with silverware would be called drawers. 

Virginia and I went up to Rhode Island to visit her family, and man did they have some big houses! I'm not sure if a "Sike" is needed here, but obviously, sike. We did visit her family, but these are the super mansions in Newport that belonged to the Vanderbilts and other fancy fuckers who apparently had more money than I do. We walked along the cliffs looking at them, and they had signs everywhere warning you that you'd fall off, flailing, if you strayed from the paved path (which typing this seems like some sort of allegory for conformity). On many of the signs, people had drawn dicks (or possibly "a poop" as Virginia noted) poking from between the falling man's legs. Even amongst the presence of America's wealth and class, you can't keep people from putting a dick on something given the opportunity. People love to draw dicks. My friend Marc is a painter, and he noted in job site port-o-potties that there are way more dicks graffitied on them than lady parts (presumably by the majority male workforce). There's just something about dicks that demand to be drawn. 

We went out to Dyker Heights to check out the kookoo insane Christmas lights that all of the Italians put up. They go nuts. My former boss (an Italian American herself), described this type of audacious display as “Guinea Gaud”, which I’m only comfortable typing in conjunction with saying she said it. It’s an entire neighborhood and there are companies that they hire to drape their ridiculous houses with lights covering every surface. It’s one of the only neighborhoods in Brooklyn with single family detached homes, so I guess they feel its their responsibility to provide joy to all their surrounding peasants. Unfortunately some of these pictures are blurry, as I don’t think the iPhone 4S is equipped to capture the twinkling of a billion tiny lights assaulting its lens from every direction. The house with all of the inflatable things (including a non-denominational Hulk flexing in the front yard) was blaring Dueling Banjos for some reason. Not only is it not a Christmas song, but I’m pretty sure its closest association is ass rape to the majority of people at this point. I think Yukon Cornelius is my favorite holiday character (as seen in the Rudolph display). If I owned a pick axe, I could be him for Halloween with zero notice. 

Virginia and I went to the Holiday Fair at the Morbid Anatomy Museum. I wasn't sure what to expect, but tiny rat devil priests, and beetle/dentist dioramas weren't really it. It was super cool though. And pricey! The price tags made my eyes bulge out not unlike that stuffed bobcat that was for sale. I included the "oculus horn" wax sculpture because I can't think of a worse place to have a horn grow out of you than the center of your eye. The pair of human feet were actually really tempting. Not sure what I'd do with them, but can you ever see something like that for sale and not consider purchasing it? 

Afterwards we went and ate pie and then I ate another piece of pie.