Tuesday evening ramble

I just cancelled a free subscription to Lucky. I never wanted it--it was a free gift that came with my flat iron (yes, I went over to the dark side and got a flat iron; it only works a day or two after I've washed my hair, but I digress). Actually, a subscription to Allure came with my flat iron, and I didn't particularly want that, but I didn't mind it. Lucky, I just had no use for, but it was free, so I opted to leave it. Until my third issue, which just came. With Kim Kardashian on the cover. Which takes Lucky from an already net negative (waste of time to even flip through; little-to-no useful content) that I thought might redeem itself, to something that has no chance of ever redeeming itself. I hereby declare that I'll cancel any magazine that graces my doorstep with a non-satirical image of any Kardashian, because such an image indicates that the magazine has nothing useful to add to public discourse.

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It took me over an hour to get home today, which is less time than it took people on the orange and blue lines. I opted not to bike, because I was going to a book launch event. Then, I went to the book launch event. And left, because there was no indication that said event would actually ever start. Take note, event organizers: save the mingling time for after the presentation, so people have the book to talk about. Anyway, this put me back where I would have started my commute, only more than an hour later. I just missed a yellow line train, and then waited while at least four green line trains went by, before another one came. But I can't complain; I can only ask event planners to stop wasting my time.

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What could I tell you about this weekend? The better question is, what should I tell you? I learned that there's a growing contingency for the anti-Gopnik fan club. You know how I've been writing about reading the New Yorker, and a column or so into certain articles, thinking, "this is horribly written" or "that has got to be the most tortured metaphor written outside of a fourth-grade classroom," and then looking up to see that the offending article was almost invariably conjured by Adam Gopnik? I was telling a friend about this over a month ago, and she said she felt the same way about his brother, who's an art critic for the Post. So I was recounting all of this to a couple of people over the weekend, and someone who was-kind of listening muttered, "yeah, I f*ing hate the Gopniks." Just letting you know that I'm not alone.

What else? Oh, you'll never guess what we watched over the weekend. Just kidding! But you won't guess the medium. That's right: we watched a VHS tape. We had to rewind it.

Any guesses on the content of the tape? See if you can figure it out. It started when the most intrepid among us went out to hear a mandolin player, leaving the less intrepid among us to lounge. As we were lounging, I thought it was kind of pathetic that we were just lounging and suggested that we do something. We didn't have a quorum for board games, so we talked about watching a movie from the cabin's collection. We all decided we didn't want to watch anything serious or involved, which reduced our options to a handful of movies we'd all already seen, numerous times. Of these, we settled on Zoolander (surprise!); actually, what's surprising is that we genuinely debated and it took us a while to decide on Zoolander. It was a good choice. You learn something new every time.

Anything else you should know about? Oh, well, y'all know that I'm a consummate fruit fly. In fact, my gay mistress (not to be confused with my gay husband) just wrote that I definitely know my way to a gay man's heart. But I have to come clean with you: we don't see eye-to-eye on everything. This came through over the weekend when we found ourselves in a passionate argument over packages. It went something like this:

A.: Women don't care. We don't care. It's like, the most revolting thing [coming from someone we don't know]. Our gut reaction is, "put that $hit away."

GM: Well, it matters somewhat. It has to matter a little bit.

A.: Not when you don't know someone!

GM: Below a certain length, things become physically impossible.

A.: Perhaps, but what I'm trying to say is that it's not among the first things a woman considers. Remember Weinergate?

GM: The reason he got out of that okay is that he was adequate. Had he been smaller, it would have been really embarrassing.

A.: That had nothing to do with it! At least not for women. They did a study about this, with electrodes and $hit. Women's attraction signs don't light up when they see pictures of male anatomy; they light up when they see pictures of men taking out the recycling.

I guess it's different for gay men; I guess they actually do care.

One reason I think it's interesting is that women often need it pointed out to them that what attracts them to men is different from what attracts men to them. Women don't understand why, say, success isn't more attractive to men. Well, it goes both ways: men don't understand why anatomy isn't more attractive to women. I'm just sayin'.