I love that you're into fisting. Also, I'm gay.

So here’s something.  Last weekend I was in New York City which is the best, and I had to take the ol’ bus back to Boston which is the worst.  I was excited though because I was looking forward to 4 hours of uninterrupted WiFi time aboard the Megabus.  I sat on the second level of the bus, which is something you can do since it’s a double-decker which I had never been aboard.  On the way down to New York I had ridden up top in the very front.  It was  amazing because you have this giant window of plate glass in front of you and on either side of you as though you were the driver, only you’re much closer to the front and you’re high up and don’t have to watch the road unless you want to.  It’s also deeply dangerous because you have this giant window of plate glass in front of you and on either side.  SO anyway the ride down was a fun ride because it was the day and everything,  but the ride back up was about Getting Serious Work done. An elderly couple, the kind who seem absolutely mystified and overcome with wonder at anything invented after 1945 had taken the front seats on level two, so I parked myself in a seat a few rows back from them determined to get serious work done.

Not two minutes into the journey however, the best laid plans fell to pieces.  The bus’s promised WiFi cut out.  I didn’t know what to do. It was simply impossible to establish a connection.  I thought about going downstairs (yes,on the bus) and asking the guy driving the thing what the hell the story was but then I got worried. What if the bus driver was like “why are you wasting our time with this shit?” or worse got distracted and drove us off the road and to our deaths? Plus I felt like I didn’t want to be that asshole who creates problems and dramas about something as insignificant as Internet connectivity. I could already envision my fellow passengers exchanging disgusted glances, strangers bonding over their shared disappointment in my presence on their bus.  So instead I sat and attempted to poach internet from the various networks that I passed as the bus made its way from midtown up through the Bronx and into Westchester.

It stands to reason that anytime you put 8 million people together in the same geographic location, a bunch of them are gonna be kinda wacky.  This fact was displayed beautifully in the names of people’s different wireless network.  For every 5 boring ones like “west 56th street” “Amsterdam home” “office wireless” or some other innocuous thing there were some real winnners.  To wit:

Palin 2012 - Is it ironic? Or perhaps a poaching-deterrent device? Probably, in which case: funny! If it’s in earnest though, kudos, because What the Fuck is The Matter With You? And way to have no shame about puttin’ it out there!

Steelers Suck - Interesting that someone’s hate of one team (the Pittsburgh Steelers) outweighed his love for his own team (i don’t know enough about sports rivalries to hazard a guess) to such an extent that the idea of putting, say, “Giants Rule” or some such was just not enough. This wireless customer felt that hate was stronger than love, and for that, is a fascinating figure.

Can’t Touch This - and right you are, because your network was password protected.  Touche.

Noxious Beast – I like it!

Clown College – Perhaps this person is really just a wacky sort of a guy who lives in a wacky house with wacky friends and does a bunch of crazy shit all day.  But more likely he is referencing the episode of The Simpsons in which Homer enrolls in Krusty’s clown college. Classic mirthmaking, that.

Mr. Hoffman’s Internet – This one is so staid and boring that it is rendered hilarious.  I can just see Mr. Hoffman, mustache, glasses, corduroy jacket with leather elbow patches, seated at his desk which has absolutely no clutter whatsoever anywhere NEAR it, and powering up his Dell, dead-fucking serious about secure connections. He’ll then spend a quiet, snowy afternoon furiously masturbating to Dutch clog-dancer porn.

Pussai Palace – Well played.

Inseminator - I can picture the head of this household greeting his buddy’s at Nevada Smith’s with an impish grin and a shake of the head “Yeah, bro, another one, man.  She’s not gonna keep it though, so that’s cool.”

Thinfatninja – A silent sufferer of little-discussed, oft-ignored Assasin Body Dysmorphic Disorder.

Look Ma, No Wires – Super corny. This guy is destined to embarrass the shit out of his preteen daughters.

House of Insanity – Is it one of those moms who’s always like “everything is sooooo crazy around here! We’re just this wacky, happy, messy, joyful, REAL family” or is it actually the wireless network of a mental institution? The mystery is indefatigable.

McFantasy Entertainment - Stripper-coordinator’s office.  Also sells lollypops shaped like dicks.

Stop Stealing Bitch! – I think the idea is that each of us attempting to poach from the Internet as I was, is meant to see this as directly to ourselves. The force of the strong language (Stop! Bitch!) is specially designed to cause a kind of jarring reflection, forcing us to examine what led us to think it was okay to poach internet.  This wireless network is performing a public service-forcing us to examine our reasons for stealing and by extension, recalibrate our moral compasses.  Thank you.

sigh...

Late last night my boyfriend and I watched a film.  Maybe you’ve seen it?  Here are some hints:  it was a story about passion, Being Who You Are, triumphing over adversity, getting past the sorrow of your mother’s untimely death, and the inexpugnable need to wear a sports bra as a top.  By now you’ve probably already figured out that the movie in question is Save the Last Dance Step Up 2: The Streets.

The movie takes place in the hardscrabble city of Baltimore, Maryland where, as we know from The Wire they keep gettin’ into funky ass shit, like, every single day.  The protagonist is, as one would expect in a movie about Baltimore hip hop dancers,  a white American Eagle looking chick named Sarah Johnson Andie West, who is totally bringing it in her effort to pursue her dream of being a street dancer. Yes, you read that correctly. Dancing around in a parking lot in an undesirable neighborhood while wearing a baseball cap artfully tilted to the side now officially counts as a career goal.

Not wanting to diverge from  a successful formula, the director avoided any major character development, plot changes or twists and stuck with the well worn, tried-and-true girl-with-a-dead-mom-moves-to-the-hood-and-tries-to-prove-herself formula.   Tyler ( Andie’s Caucasian male counterpart, who looks like he was conceived at a Dave Matthew’s concert in the shadow of Red Rock Stadium and born on the plaid carpet of an Abercrombie dressing room,) encourages Andie to apply to the arts prep school that he himself attends.  BUT, appallingly, the kids soon learn that going to an arts-centric high school doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want!  Not only are they expected to turn up to class, these milquetoasty teens are forbidden from participating in “The Streets”, an illegal (why?), dance competition where Baltimore finds out which of the city’s street dancing crews is the best!  Seriously.  The stuffed shirt principal of the school as well as Andie’s guardian Sarah (played by Kima from The Wire, who apparently, only works on projects set in Baltimore) expressly forbid the young people from engaging in dance-crew battles because of all the violent crime and street harassment that the practice inevitably brings.

But, gee whiz! Andie and Tyler wanna dance SO bad, and they’ve even cobbled together a motley crew of other dancers in the school who, for various reasons obvious to anyone with eyes, are complete social outcasts.  Their little wolfpack includes a nebbishy little Jew in the Shia LeBeouf vein, a nerdy Andre3000 style black kid, and an Asian girl so offensively caricatured as to seem practically retarded.  A nice group!

So of course they dance their asses off (somehow getting away with using a gorgeous studio space in the school during broad daylight hours unbeknownst to absolutely everyone),  practicin’ and practicin’ til their feet bleed and their elbows creak with every pop they lock, all in preparation for “The Streets”.

“So when is “The Streets”, exactly,” you’re probably asking yourself right now.  Well see that’s the thing.  Nobody knows.  Nobody knows when it is until a mysterious text message is sent out the night before.  When it finally happens, everyone is ready, meets at what looks to be an elaborate music venue, complete with elevated DJ booth and flawless sound system, but which, we are made to understand, is simply an abandoned warehouse.   Hmph.

Oh, I forgot to mention this but earlier in the movie Andie, Tyler and the rest of the gang go to some club and try to step to the actual black people reigning hip hop crew, and they really stink up the place and everyone laughs at them because they’re nothing but a crew of outcasts led by two Berkshire’s summer camp counselors and isn’t it just ridiculous?  Suitably humiliated and destroyed they all break up for a little while and it’s really sad.  But then they get the text about “The Streets” and it’s game on, mothafuckaz!

So our raggedy-taggedy crew of erstwhile hip-hoppers( including the poor, backwards Asian girl who seems to struggle creating even the most basic of sentences), shows up to the spot.  The place is packed to the rafters with Baltimore’s most talented, most streetwear-clad, most ethnic young people ya naaahmean??  And of course when our Honky friends appear everyone boos them, and clowns them and can you really blame them?  But then Andie, ever the pragmatic dancer of diplomacy, climbs atop a speaker and shouts at everyone to quiet down.  Mystifyingly, instead of beating her to death with her own throwback Adidas, they not only quiet down but listen to her give a speech about how “The Streets” isn’t about turf wars or where you come from or how cheesy and overprocessed your hair is, it’s about DANCING. Hip Hop Dancing.  Getting out there and showin’ errrr’body whatchu got.  That’s right. Some Whole Foods-fed, Saab-driving white girl who I can just tell smells like fucking Estee Lauder Pleasures, takes the stage at an inner city dance competition to tell your ass What’s What!

If I were a member of the African American community I think that that scene would be just about all it would take for me to throw my television out the window and never have a fucking thing to do with any white person ever again.  It takes a special kind of egregious ignorance to not only find a way to co-opt an art form developed by the disenfranchised African American community, but to worm your way into it, and then turn around and tell the African American people—the ones who made it up!–that they’re doing it wrong.  Wow.

But what more could we truly hope to expect from a movie who’s poster tagline ends in a preposition?

Of course, no one in the movie takes that particular view and so Andie & Co. say Fuck It, you don’t want us dancing here? Fine. We gonna take it to the streets! The real streets! The ones outside, with gravel and broken glass and cigarette butts and shit! That’s right!
So they do, and they do and they dance  SO super-hard in the pouring rain which actually, works out really well because luckily someone in their dance troupe had the foresight to bring a whole mess of mini-LED lights that they put on their shoes and hold in their hands to better illuminate their awkward thrusting. Fortunately, too, all these people’s cars are parked in a row behind them and everyone cooperates, stupifyingly, by turning their brights on ALL AT ONCE cuz fuck the battery, this is hip hop!   Oh, and in another lucky coincidence someone present has a sound system in his car just loud enough for them to fill the entire parking lot with bass-heavy, oversampled Nazzz-tay beats.

Andie in the center, the poor developmentally disabled Asian girl in question to the left!

And while there is no actual judge, jury or anything resembling a legitimate skill evaluation, it becomes clear from the elated shrieks of the assembled crowd that the white kid crew knocked that shit outta the park!!!

And then Abercrombie-bot Tyler and walking tampon commercial Andie share a wet, rainy kiss under the sobbing, junk-shooting bilious Baltimore moon.

The end.

Anyway, make it out alive we did, but no sooner had we escaped emotional purgatory by boarding the 4:56 Regional to Boston, than a new, fresh hell revealed itself to us. For reasons unfathomable to anyone I have ever met, Amtrak overbooks virtually every single train that they run from the period of Thanksgiving through New Year’s. At Wilmington we boarded the train only to be confronted with other passengers who had been standing since the previous stop, and absolutely no available seats.   One would think that in this day and age of Twitter, iphone’s and all other manner of technology that the people at Amtrak could figure out how many seats they have, and find some sort of system for ONLY SELLING THAT NUMBER OF SEATS, yet somehow, inexplicably, the formula continues to elude them.  However Amtrak and it’s many, many (overpriced!) shortcomings are a tale for another time.

Forced to stand sardinelike, pressed between the foul-smelling train bathroom and a humorless-looking Ukrainian family, I passed the seemingly interminable journey from Wilmington to Philadelphia. After departing Philadelphia we were told that seats would open up “soon.”  Wedged into my crevice I wondered how that would be managed as the train had not yielded up any vacancies at Philadelphia and barring a group-suicide-by-defenestration it was unlikely that any seats would make themselves available while the train hurtled along the tracks.  Somebody up there must like me though, because shortly after my sister was body checked into the side of the train car by a 300 pound man wielding a duffel bag, an Amtrak employee waved us over to the cafe car.

“Sit here” she said gesturing at the ends of two of the benches at a table in the cafe car.

We sat wedged in with the two other people already inhabiting the cafe table. On my side was a young, heavyset girl in a bright pink cat sweater  reading a Glenn Beck book.

Next to my sister was….a terrorist.

Yes. It’s true. I thought that. I was that white lady who looked at a dark skinned man travelling alone and thought: SHOE BOMB!.  My second thought, of course  was “wow, I’m a racist!”.  But my third thought was that he was probably maybe definitely sporting a dynamite stick vest underneath that hoodie.

In my defense I was in the eye of the perfect anxiety-storm. To wit: Only a few hours prior, I drank a latte with an extra shot of espresso which more than once has pushed the needle on my sane-ometer from its regular notch between “slightly nervous” to “panic”. Also, I had just come from my parents house, quite possibly the tensest most anxiety inducing place on the planet these days, where the TV is constantly blaring.  The big news, of course, was about the guy who tried to ignite his own leg on a US bound flight from Amsterdam.  “It is unclear whether or not this gentleman has acted alone, or whether there are more such attacks in the works,” The ruddy, ham-faced reporter had said, looking straight into the camera. “Fuck you,” I  had thought at the time. “Don’t try to intimidate me into watching your “news coverage” with this bullshit fearmongering.

But it totally worked. Because the MINUTE I saw that guys face on the train sitting next to my sister, that anchorperson’s voice was the only thing I could hear.  The guy fit the description of absolutely every terrorist-suspects face you’ve ever seen on TV or splashed across the front of The New York Post.  He looked to be in his twenties, of Middle Eastern or African ethnicity, was dressed in a hooded sweatshirt and had no luggage to speak of. He had no book to read, no computer, nothing.  Just a cell phone, his train ticket reciept and a folded piece of paper that he opened and closed repeatedly when he wasn’t looking around the train car with a bored and disgusted expression on his face.

There’s another reason that I was convinced he was a terrorist and that we were all about to die and it has to do with the other people in our car: an adorable talkative little girl at the table behind us.  An attractive African American family on the bench across the aisle from me , an Indian girl with a nose ring and bunch of science textbooks across the aisle from my sister, three drunk guys in hoodies arguing about sports in the rear of a car and a kindly old man with a red scarf and faraway eyes gazing out the window. If you’ve ever watched a movie or television in your entire life I don’t need to tell you that that’s  pretty much the exact demographic recipe of people that need to be in the same place for a terrorist attack to happen.  A casting director couldn’t have culled a more stereotypically appropriate population. All that was missing was the hot/slutty single mom and her precocious glasses-wearing toddler.

My Terrorist kept checking his watch, looking out the window, fidgeting with his cell phone and then checking his watch again.

“Holy shit”, I thought “He’s waiting for the bomb to go off.”

I looked, terrified at my sweet sister, playing Scrabble on her iPhone and pleaded at her with my eyes. She finally looked up and I mouthed “Terrorist” to her, indicating with my head in the direction of the man in question.  She looked at him, and then back at me.  She rolled her eyes.  She continued with her Scrabble game.

“Let’s move seats.” I said.

“Ashley. There are no seats.  Remember? These are the only seats.”

“Well then, let’s go stand back by the bathroom like before.”

“No. We’re not doing that.”

“But… Well I think…”

“No. And besides, if you’re right it doesn’t matter where we go, right?. So sit down”

She had a point, grim though it was.  The train stopped at Metropark and My Terrorist looked out the window, craning his neck.

What? What’s he looking for? I thought. Surely he was awaiting the signal.  All of the sudden, the train lights went dark and the engine turned off. I froze. My sister calmly tapped away at her iPhone as  I sat and waited for the appointed time when lunatic zealots would race through the train stabbing us all with boxcutters and screaming about the jihad.

But of course, nothing of the sort happened and the train regained its electrical faculties and we went chugging off towards scenic industrial New Jersey. But I was not convinced that we were out of danger yet.  Sure enough, not two minutes later, My Terrorist reached into his pocket and pulled out…a boarding pass, for a Continental Airlines flight. Okay, I thought. We’re safe, but those poor people on the airplane!!! My mind raced. I felt like I was in The Pelican Brief! Or one of those other types of movies where people have to run really fast  and commandeer the cars of passing motorists in order to prevent something terrible from happening.  I was going to be one of those people.  I had seen something and now I was going to say something!   But I didn’t.  Because the guy, instead of stabbing my sister in the neck with a penknife, very kindly asked her if she would let him know when they got to Newark Airport because he was worried he’d miss his connecting flight and would she like him to help her put her bag above the seat in that little crate? She didn’t but thanked him and he smiled and she smiled and then we pulled into the station and he got off and wished us both a very Happy New Year.

No attempted bombings were reported.

Check. it. OUT. You will be so glad you did.

Fascinating Aside:This is the first bottle of nail polish that I have purchased since I was like, 16, so I’m perhaps a little overeager.  Its a light enough color that I feel like I won’t fuck it up too bad. Whenever I try to paint my own nails it looks like some blindfolded monkey did it with his feet, but I’m on an extremely extremely tight budget these days.  Historically, I have just ignored my nails if I couldn’t afford to get a manicure, but as I approach my 30th birthday, I am slowly realizing that this is unacceptable.

What do you think, you out there?

a) it’s embarassing to admit that one needs so desperately to work on these two areas that they need to go to a specially tailored class for professional instruction, and

b) I hate the word “butt”.  I think it’s the stupidest, dumbest sounding word ever and I never ever use it.  I worry about having kids because I know I can’t teach a child to talk about his (or her) ass all the time, but I can’t bring myself to propogat the use of that idiot word to a new generation.  I could tell them to say “booty”, I guess, but I’m a white lady.

Anyway, so fine. On Tuesday’s I go to what will heretofore be referred to as G&B.

So Jackie is really awesome at G&B. She’s this super cute high-energy brunette who wears leotards and a high ponytail when she teaches us, and always has some dancey-style playlist set up to keep us pumped the whole way through.  We use one of those STEP aerobics things from the eighties and when you’re hopping around and looking at the leotard and the aqua blue and neon pink colors of the STEP, you can almost convince yourself that you’re in a fun workout video instead of concentrating on how sweaty and miserable you are.  The next day you feel sore, but in a good way, and can tell that Jackie really knew what she was doing.  Awesome.

So about a week ago, before class began Jackie told us that due to some scheduling conflicts, she would no longer be teaching Tuesday evening G&B! I know! I was like “what the fuck?” in my mind but no one said anything cause what do you say? “Why?” she’s not our foster mother, she’s a gym class teacher.  So we all put on a brave face and nodded when she said that some guy, name of Forreste (!) would be taking over the class. She mentioned that

I showed up on Tuesday with not a little bit of trepidation. What was this Forreste guy going to be like ?  For some reason I pictured this.

In terms of physique, race and sexual orientation I was not disappointed but in every other respect, oh yes I was.

Jackie’s class usually begins with some warm up exercises where we jump around on that STEP thing to some Lady Gaga-type shit to get the blood pumping and “warm up the core”.  Forreste’s class was dead silent. No music.  No STEP.  Just a mat on the floor.  He instructed us to lay on our backs and proceeded to awkwardly lead us through a series of abdominal crunches so poorly described that we had to start over about six times until we got it right.  I could tell that my fellow G&B-mates were as dismayed as I was. As exhausting and high-impact as Jackie’s class was, it made you feel alive and that you were actually working out.  Forreste’s class  was probably a fairly accurate approximation of physical education at a juvenile detention center would be like.

The other thing about Jackie’s class is that we stand up virtually the entire time.  There’s a little bit of mat work but only at the end. This was a part of my decision making when I elected to wear the workout pants with the teensy tiny little hole in the crotch.  Unfortunately for me, Forreste dearly cherishes exercises in which you spread your legs wide open and move your pelvis around.  Did I mention I had also eschewed underwear? I had. Compounding my discomfort with the Draconian, music-less exercise regimen I was engaged in was the palpable terror that at any moment I might inadvertently flash a gay man my goods. To avoid this during Forreste’s many trips around the room, I would convulse my body awkwardly so that my legs were closed whenever he approached my mat.  Unfortunately for me, Forreste was a bit of a taskmaster, and he insisted in correcting my form, coming far closer than he knew to being Newman in Basic Instinct.

Forreste, I presume was unused to teaching men and women who don’t have the core strength of a Green Beret, as he grew exasperated with our feeble attempts to balance on one foot while holding our opposite leg behind us at perfect 90 degree angle.

The class wore grimly on.

“No, like this,” he would  sigh in exasperation, demonstrating uselessly once again.  “If you’re doing it right you should be feeling it all through here” he added, grasping his own ass firmly in both hands to better illustrate his point. The only place I was feeling anything was in my neck which I moved up an down to simulate the movement I would be doing with my torso, were I in anyway capable. Apart from a sub-part instructional technique, Forreste seemed unaware that he was not, in fact,  the MC of a dance competition.  “Are we feeling it our legs, ladies?” he would cry, hand on hip, oblivious to the two men in the room.  We nodded grimly, abs clenched, trying to maintain our position.  “I saaaaaaiid “Are we Feeling it in our legs, ladiieess”  he sang out sassily, doing his best to generate a loud cheer of affirmation. He was rewarded with slightly more audible groans and seven pairs of dagger-eyes.   It was with a collective shifty eyed -half smile that we bid Forreste adieu.

As we filed into the locker room my fellow classmates and I exhcanged wry smiles; the kind of rueful acknowledgement of one another’s suffering that I imagine hostages share.

“So I’m gonna see y’all next week, right?” Forreste called after us down the hall.  We all pretended not to hear.