November 29, 2002
As many of you know I love films. I also consider myself fairly well-educated about American movies. Well, last night I saw Goodfellas for the first time.
So brilliant! I confess I've never gotten what the big deal about Ray Liotta was, but now I see. He brought so much humanity to the role of Henry Hill. I loved the way they combined the glamour of being a gangster with the stupid randomness of some of the killings. So many of my other favorite films have borrowed from this one -- Pulp Fiction and Swingers come immediately to mind. The two-and-a-half hours just flew by. Scorsese uses music almost as effectively as Woody Allen does.
I loved the scene where Hill's to-do list for the day was: Cook a great homemade tomato sauce, pick up brother at hospital, pick up cocaine from girlfriend, do weapons drop off with wife, call brother to make sure tomato sauce is being stirred…
Next on my to-do list (I'm embarrassed to admit): See Mean Streets for first time, see Raging Bull for first time.
November 23, 2002
I inadvertently stumbled upon a great way to ferret out information about potential dates just by being polite: I've been asking men about their holiday plans. People offer up so much information in response to this simple question. I'm getting responses like: I'm having dinner with my parents -- it's convenient since I live in their basement or I spend Thanksgiving with my ex-wife and the five children we have together or my partner and I are going to his parents this year.
The beauty part is, you can use the holidays question well into January or until it becomes strange to be asking "What did you do for New Year's Eve?" (I'm thinking February.)
November 21, 2002
In an effort to generate more dates, I answered some personal ads from an alternative paper today. I know the obvious tactic for me would be to just place an ad online, and maybe I will if I get desperate enough, but I just don't wanna go there right now.
Anyway, I browsed through the paper and was amazed at how many men look like Brad Pitt/Ben Affleck, make lots of money, are triathletes, work for charity, attend the theater and have someone managed to remain single. I should have done this personals thing years ago.
November 15, 2002
Went to my old standby, the upscale steakhouse/bar. Had my usual: chardonnay, tiny roast beef sandwiches au jus and jumbo shrimp with cocktail sauce. All that food was $3.
The guy sitting next to me said he works at Amazon.com and confirmed my suspicions that there is not a lot of work for content writers in Seattle. He is a tech and seems to have some job security, however. He told me a story about how he was dressed as a Viking on Halloween: He stopped in to work and ran into some people he knew, including "Jeff" and his family. He said that one of his other coworkers' kids was swinging his Thor hammer and almost beaned one of Jeff's kids.
It got me thinking about guys' raps. I mean, you know this guy is going to be using the hammer story at least until New Year's, and I bet he drops the fact that he's on a first-name basis with Jeff Besos into every conversation he has with an attractive woman.
I don't know what my rap would be if I were a guy. I just tell myself I would look like Johnny Depp, so everything else would be moot.
November 13, 2002
In a shameless ploy to meet cute firemen (are there any other kind?), I brought some canned green beans, peas, peaches and pineapple to one of the local fire depts. for their food drive. They were really specific that you could only bring peaches or pineapple, so fruit cocktail was out of the question.
I managed to get a private tour of the fire station from one of the guys. They have a big kitchen, which was much cleaner than mine. I expressed my surprise and asked if they had a maid. They were having salmon and fettuccini for dinner. Apparently some of the guys are really good cooks. I wasn't able to score a dinner invite, though. He showed me their pool room. The firehouse has been there since the late 1800s and they still play on the original pool table -- the wood was carved and the pockets have gold fringe around them.
My fireman tour-guide and I were talking by the trucks and some of the other guys came around. I told them I have a website and then felt embarrassed when the guys were asking for the url, so I blurted out the name of the client I write for. It was awkward!
I took a blurry picture of one of their smaller trucks and got out as quickly as possible.
November 10, 2002
I didn't have a date last night so I stayed in and watched Trading Spaces. Have you seen this show? It's where neighbors redecorate a room in each other's homes with the help of pushy designers. I hadn't seen it before, and the episodes happened to be in Seattle and Puyallup (Washington).
I never realized until last night what great decorating taste everyone I know has. Let's just say that the rooms in the second segment put the "pew" in pew-AL-lup.
The only request from one of the women was that they not paint her fireplace, which of course the designer then wanted to do. He actually did the "I can't work like this" flounce out of the room over it, but the woman's loyal friend would have chained herself to the fireplace rather than let him paint it, I think.
There is no way that the hideous rooms could not have been improved, but the Don't Paint My Fireplace woman hated the changes. You could hear her wrenching sobs off camera as the cheery hostess talked to her husband.
Inspired, I went to Home Depot today with an eye for redoing my office (painting the kitchen table I work at) and meeting men. I met not one, but two: a gay couple buying the same color paint as me -- Sashay Yellow.
November 8, 2002
I realized last night over $10 house merlots and Dungeness crab and corn chowder that I like unavailable men.
So far John Goodman has been my favorite of the guys I've dated and, well, I'm not positive he's married, but he has to be home by 6 p.m. And he hasn't called since our (really early) drinks date last week anyway.
It's like that movie The Tao of Steve, where the overweight slacker was scoring with every chick in town. He attributed his success with women to his philosophy: Be disinterested (women can smell it if you really want them), be excellent (do something great in her presence), be gone (disappear and she will seek you out). This really does work in real life. Or maybe I just have the romantic maturity of a 14 year old.
It's also that these guys who are talking about lots of future things on our second date just seem so needy to me; so relieved to have a met a decent woman (and by that I mean me, if you're confused).
I'm back to square one and not dating anyone right now.
November 7, 2002
Since most of my dates so far have been the same type of guy -- older, stable job, homeowner, I thought I would try to meet someone different -- younger, unstable, lives in a cramped apartment with roommates. Artists are a good bet for this type, so I went to a poetry slam.
The club has a Laundromat attached to it. One of Nirvana's songs has the chorus: "You're in a laundry room" and I tell myself that they were talking about this place.
Have you all been to a poetry slam? Bards get up on stage and read their original works -- some of it is really good -- and then the judges hold up cards with numbers on them, like at the Olympics. I had a Fat Tire Ale and was sitting on a metal chair that for some reason I kept sliding off of.
They interspersed the poetry with a musical duo -- a female singer a guy playing bongos. She was talking about how the women in L.A. have fake breasts. I had kind of forgotten about that. She also did a cover of "Little Wing," which I thought was cool, since Hendrix is from Seattle.
The featured poet (they always have someone quasi-famous from poetry circles) was a funny guy who had a poem about the temperature difference on Mercury: that it's like freezer-burn cold at night and an inferno during the day, but could we meet for coffee during the 20 minutes in the morning or afternoon when the weather is temperate?
Didn't speak to one person there and it seemed like lots of people knew each other, but it was still interesting, if not (laundry) loads of fun.
November 3, 2002
Though Ed asked me to go see My Big Fat Greek Wedding, I instead went to see a different movie, and not with Ed. I am a big, big horror movie fan and see most of what comes out, even if I know it's going to be crap. Here is my review of The Ring:
"And You Thought The Horrifying Thing About Belltown Apartments Was The Rent."
Set in gloomy Seattle, The Ring opens Scream-scary with schoolgirls in short skirts home alone during a thunderstorm. One tells of a new urban legend, that may not be just a legend, about a video that kills those who've seen it within a week. Problem is, her increasingly stricken-looking friend just saw it seven days ago. Guess what happens? Complete with the most obscure images and beautiful unknown actresses this side of a David Lynch film, the main character is the blonde from Lynch's Mulholland Drive, Naomi Watts. She plays the dead teen's aunt. She finds and watches the tape -- a collection of images: a burning tree, a woman in a mirror, a ladder, maggots and the eponymous ring, which appears as a corona of light -- which is reminiscent of Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou. Watts, a reporter for the Seattle Times, spends the next seven days -- the time she now realizes she has left -- trying to find the reason for the film as well as its maker. The movie borrows a bit heavily from Sixth Sense (Watts' son can see dead people), but the storyline and some of the scenes -- a particularly powerful one involves a horse gone mad on a Washington ferry -- are all its own.
If The Exorcist: Director's Cut, with the spider-walk scene (brrr!) is a "10," I would give The Ring an "8." It's no Blair Witch Project, which actually had me sleeping with the light on, but is almost on a par with Candyman, which I thought was very smart.
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