GOOD NEWS FOR PEOPLE WHO LIKE BAD NEWS (OR ANY NEWS)

The inspiration for today’s post comes from the “Live Nude Blog!” mailbag, which we routinely peruse but rarely acknowledge. “Maggie” from Westchester, NY wrote to us with the following comment:

“You should write a novel this year.

That is all.”

If that only that were all, Maggie. Unfortunately, there is a part of the novel-writing equation that you left out, possibly because you were not aware of this particular integer. But such a whole number does exist, and contributes significantly to the formula which we temporal beings call “time.” In short, I have taken to working part-time as a reporter, so some of my written word-related creativity shall be deviated henceforth to that end.

That’s right, folks. The geniuses behind a certain syndicate of local newspapers in Brooklyn and Queens have been letting me work the Greenpoint/Williamsburg beat. During the past week—my first on the “job”—I have gotten to cover the unveiling of a student art exhibit called “Williamsburg Under Construction” at a local high school, and report on a public meeting. The latter took place somewhere called the Swinging 60’s Senior Center.

But the best part of this semi-regular gig (other than how it lets me get all the run-on sentences out of my system) is: I get paid to write.

Sure, it’s a mere double-X note for every article. However, it’s a fresh double-X note, and stories take place in the evening, allowing the flexibility for a day job. This reporting business, by the way, has been a complete blast so far. I’m hoping to spend the next year writing for this syndicate, which would give me fifteen consecutive months of experience (including the three I spent at The Free Press). After that, maybe I’ll be able to wheedle my way into a steadier position at a larger paper.

But for right now, expect to hear all about my fascinating adventurers as a reporter on this blog.

Excelsior!

ARE YOU COOL ENOUGH TO BE LOVED BY CHUCK KLOSTERMAN? PART II:

And now the moment you’ve all been waiting for: The second half—?’s number 11-23—of the quiz reprinted from Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs.

For the first half, click here.

11. You are watching a movie in a crowded theater. Though the plot is mediocre, you find yourself dazzled by the special effects. But with twenty minutes left in the film, you are struck with an undeniable feeling of doom: You are suddenly certain your mother has just died. There is no logical reason for this to be true, but you are certain of it. You are overtaken with the irrational metaphysical sense that—somewhere—your mom has just perished. But this is only an intuitive, amorphous feeling; there is no evidence for this, and your mother has not been ill.

Would you immediately exit the theater, or would you finish watching the movie?

12. You meet a wizard in downtown Chicago. The wizard tells you he can make you more attractive if you pay him money. When you ask how this process works, the wizard points to a random person on the street. You look at this random stranger. The wizard says, “I will now make them a dollar more attractive.” He waves his magic wand. Ostensibly, this person does not change at all; as far as you can tell, nothing is different. But—somehow—this person is suddenly a little more appealing. The tangible difference is invisible to the naked eye, but you can’t deny that this person is vague sexier. This wizard has a weird rule, though—you can only pay him once. You can’t keep giving him money until you’re satisfied. You can only pay him one lump sum up front.

How much cash do you give the wizard?

13. Every person you have ever slept with is invited to a banquet where you are the guest of honor. No one will be in attendance except you, the collection of your former lovers, and the catering service. After the meal, you are asked to give a fifteen-minute speech to the assembly.

What do you talk about?

14. For reasons that cannot be explained, cats can suddenly read at a twelfth-grade level. They can’t talk and they can’t write, but they can read silently and understand the text. Many cats love this new skill, because they now have something to do all day while they lay around the house; however, a few cats become depressed, because reading forces them to realize the limitations of their existence (not to mention the utter frustration of being unable to express themselves).

This being the case, do you think the average cat would enjoy Garfield, or would cats find this cartoon to be an insulting caricature?

15. You have a brain tumor. Though there is no discomfort at the moment, this tumor would unquestionably kill you in six months. However, your life can (and will) be saved by an operation; the only downside is that there will be a brutal incision to your frontal lobe. After the surgery, you will be significantly less intelligent. You will still be a fully functioning adult, but you will be less logical, you will have a terrible memory, and you will have little ability to understand complex concepts or difficult ideas. The surgery is in two weeks.

How do you spend the next fourteen days?

16. Someone builds an optical portal that allows you to see a vision of your own life in the future (It’s essentially a crystal ball that shows a randomly selected image of what your life will be like in twenty years). You can only see into this portal for thirty seconds. When you peer into the crystal, you see yourself in a living room, two decades older than you are today. You are watching a Canadian football game, and you are extremely happy. You are wearing a CFL jersey. Your chair is surrounded by books and magazines that promote the Canadian Football League, and there are CFL pennants covering your walls. You are alone in the room, but you are gleefully muttering about historical moments in Canadian football history. It becomes clear that—for some unknown reason—you have become obsessed with Canadian football. And this future is static and absolute; no matter what you do, this future will happen. The optical portal is never wrong. This destiny cannot be changed.

The next day, you are flipping through television channels and randomly come across a pre-season CFL game between the Toronto Argonauts and the Saskatchewan Roughriders. Knowing your inevitable future, do you now watch it?

17. You are sitting at an empty bar (in a town you’ve never before visited), drinking Bacardi with a soft-spoken acquaintance you barely know. After an hour, a third individual walks into the tavern and sits by himself, and you ask your acquaintance who the new man is. “Be careful of that guy,” you are told. “He is a man with a past.” A few minutes later, a fourth person enters the bar; he also sits alone. You ask your acquaintance who this new individual is. “Be careful of that guy, too,” he says. “He is a man with no past.”

Which of these two people do you trust less?

18. You have won a prize. The prize has two options, and you can choose either (but not both). The first option is a year in Europe with a monthly stipend of $2,000. The second option is ten minutes on the moon.

Which option do you select?

19. Your best friend is taking a nap on the floor of your living room. Suddenly, you are faced with a bizarre existential problem: This friend is going to die unless you kick them (as hard as you can) in the rib cage. If you don’t kick them while they slumber, they will never wake up. However, you can never explain this to your friend; if you later inform them that you did this to save their life, they will also die from that. So you have to kick a sleeping friend in the ribs, and you can't tell them why.

Since you cannot tell your friend the truth, what excuse will you fabricate to explain this (seemingly inexplicable) attack?

20. For whatever the reason, two unauthorized movies are made about your life. The first is an independently released documentary, primarily comprised of interviews with people who know you and bootleg footage from your actual life. Critics are describing the documentary as “brutally honest and relentlessly fair.” Meanwhile, Columbia Tri-Star has produced a big-budget biopic of your life, casting major Hollywood stars as you and all your acquaintances; though the movie is based on actual events, screenwriters have taken some liberties with the facts. Critics are split on the artistic merits of this fictionalized account, but audiences love it.

Which film would you be most interested in seeing?

21. Imagine you could go back to the age of five and relive the rest of your life, knowing everything that you know now. You will reexperience your entire adolescence with both the cognitive ability of an adult and the memories of everything you’ve learned from having lived your life previously.

Would you lose your virginity earlier or later than you did the first time around (and by how many years)?

22. You work in an office. Generally, you are popular with your coworkers. However, you discover that there are currently two rumors circulating in the office gossip mill, and both involve you. The first rumor is that you got drunk at the office holiday party and had sex with one of your married coworkers. This rumor is completely true, but most people don’t believe it. The second rumor is that you have been stealing hundreds of dollars of office supplies (and selling them to cover a gambling debt). This rumor is completely false, but virtually everyone assumes it is factual.

Which of these two rumors is most troubling to you?

23. Consider this possibility:
a. Think about deceased TV star John Ritter.
b. Now, pretend Ritter had never become famous. Pretend he was never affected by the trappings of fame, and try to imagine what his personality would have been like.
c. Now, imagine that this person—the unfamous John Ritter—is a character in a situation comedy.
d. Now, you are also a character in this sitcom, and the unfamous John Ritter character is your sitcom father.
e. However, this sitcom is actually your real life. In other words, you are living inside a sitcom: Everything about your life is a construction, featuring the unfamous John Ritter playing himself (in the role of your TV father). But this is not a sitcom. This is your real life.

How would you feel about this?

HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE YOUR WASH

There was a minor riot at the laundromat the other day. I’m not entirely sure how it started, but I know I wasn’t the cause.

The reason I don’t know how it started was because I had to run home and grab more of K.’s laundry. You see, we hadn’t taken care of our dirty clothes in nearly a month, and during the interim, none of our soiled sweaters, jeans, or underwear managed to acquire sentience and walk themselves into the shower. We were kind of hoping this would happen.

So the morning of my trip to the laundromat, K. and I bundled our laundry into three large sacks. Since she had to be at work, and the responsibility of lugging our cleaned clothes home would inevitably fall on me, we only hauled two of them. In an ideal world, our clothes would have been equally divided. Unfortunately, not only is our planet imperfect, but given how much of a rush we were in, most of K’s clothes got left behind in the other sack. Realizing that most of the things we brought were mine, I returned home, wherein I scooped up as many of my girlfriend’s clothes as could possibly fit in my arms and mouth.

Now of course, by the time I had discovered the aforementioned laundry snafu, K. had hopped the train to Manhattan. Luckily, I had befriended a middle-aged woman named Rosa, who claimed to have come from Mexico. Rosa’s English wasn’t great, but my Spanish was equally broken. Ultimately, I used the universal language of wild gesticulation to convince her to watch my stuff while I hurried home.

To my surprise, when I got back to the laundromat, Rosa was not watching my things, although they were exactly where I had left them. Instead, she and some other elderly women, along with others of varying age, appeared to be gathered together in a corner of the facility. Naturally, I made my way over. As I did this, I gradually discerned another party in their midst, with whom they were arguing.

This “other” appeared to be a short, middle-aged woman, clearly of Asian descent. She could have been Vietnamese, or Thai, for all I could tell. Even if her English skills were decent, her words were effectively drowned out by the people confronting her. The small mob vociferously complained that the dryers were not doing their job.

Rosa appeared to be the most vocal complainer. “Money, money, money, money!” she said, albeit with a Spanish accent. “I put more money in, but the clothes no dry!” At one point, she held up a fistful of rolled-up jean leg, as if challenging the laundromat employee to feel how damp it was. Meanwhile, an old Jewish lady, who seemed unable to walk without the aid of a cane, approached the situation less dramatically, but much more subversively. She would turn to the other customers, who wandered over to see what all the hubbub was about, and explained such factoids to them as, “They used to give you ten minutes for every quarter you put in. Now they only give you eight minutes, and the clothes take much longer to dry.”

Funny thing about that old Jewish lady. At one point, after the short Thai or Vietnamese employee told her to refer any complaints to the manager, who would be in later that week, the yenta uttered something that more politically correct souls might consider racist. To quote her verbatim, she said,

“Those Chinese people, boy are they smart (She delivered that last line in a slightly sarcastic tone). It used to cost you a dollar to get forty minutes with these dryers. Now it’s a little more, but they make a fortune because of all the machines they have. You’ve really got to hand it to those Chinese people.”

I don’t know if that lady would have made that comment, had she known I was standing right behind her. But the others in that little conclave, including Rosa, saw me. Her eyes got real wide, and she said, “Pero… eso es un chino (But… he is Chinese),” or words to that effect.

The old yenta, following Rosa’s eyes, wheeled around, then saw me. She started to explain that what she had said wasn’t meant to be offensive. I remember thinking, Yeah, I don’t see how equating greed and questionable business practices with a particular ethnic group could possibly be taken as a racist comment. I mean, I’ve frequented my fair share of laundromats, many of which weren’t owned by Chinese, or even Asian, people. And I’ve been ripped off worse than I was here. Hell, the worst rip off I ever experienced was at Beth Israel hospital, where the goddamn machine ate my dollar and wouldn’t give me my soda, and everyone acted like it wasn’t their responsibility. And we ALL know who Beth Israel hospital is affiliated with...!

But what I ended up doing was smirking at her, then saying, “Oh, I’m not offended. I also think I’m smart.” Rosa and the other women started laughing. The old yenta skulked away, not saying much else. It’s funny, but after that comment, the mood in the place seemed to lighten. People still muttered their disappointment with the quality of the dryers, but no more confrontations with the staff took place. The frustrated would simply pack up their still-damp clothes, wave a cordial good-bye to friends, and exit.

A few hours later, as I labored under the weight of too much clean laundry, I found myself wondering: Was it possible that everyone else had been thinking the same thing as that yenta? Could she have been giving voice to what they themselves wanted to say? If so, did I answer for their targets, either through my words, my smirk, or just my presence? Could it have been possible that, in having had the chance to see the all-too-familiar site of racial tension transpire before their very eyes, albeit from a distance, like watching a television show or movie, and without any hurt feelings or lasting repercussions, they had all managed to achieve some sort of emotional catharsis? In my own way, did I manage to save the day that morning?

Admittedly, such a thought gives me the warm fuzzies all over. Now if only I could get these clothes dry.

FEELING DOWN IN THE ‘SHRUMPS’

Nothing says “Chinese New Year” like a dinner out. It doesn’t even have to be Chinese food; I once capped off a quarter-chicken value meal at Pollo Tropical with a fortune cookie, and considered my actions sacri-licious, though not necessarily sacrilegious. But this time, K., her pals S., J., and E., and myself decided to dine in Chinatown, specifically a cozy little restaurant near Elizabeth Street. They served wonderful entrees such as salt-baked shrimp. Their all day dim sum menu, however, pushes them to the top of my personal recommendation list.

If I had to recommend any particular item off that aforementioned dim sum menu, it would be the piping hot soup dumplings, or the finger-lickin' good pan-fried dumplings. Both the pan-fried and the steamed varied in the texture of their thin, external wrappers (Not to mention the fact that the piping hot soup dumplings contained, you guessed it, piping hot soup). The real star of either, however, was the juicy, meaty, slightly spiced interiors, which practically exploded with flavor.

The price of dinner was also very reasonable, considering how much food we ended up ordering (We actually declined the traditional staple of steamed white rice, and left some fish and tofu casserole behind in its hot clay pot). I would recommend the place to anyone, and will heartily recommend it, as soon as I can remember its name. Until then, I will relate the following dim sum menu-related anecdote:

As K. and I perused the single sheet laden with small photographs of every item, and equally tiny captions located beneath each corresponding picture, we soon became aware that the restaurant served something called “shrump dumplings.” This caused initial confusion, since the flip side of the menu listed another item called “shrimp dumplings.” Were they different items? They looked exactly the same, though that isn’t saying much. The main visual characteristic of all dumplings is the outer wrapper, which renders shrimp, shrump, beef, or chicken more or less alike, especially when projected on a one inch-by-one inch photograph.

It didn’t take us much more perusing to figure out that the restaurant printed the same menu on both sides of the sheet. They just happened to list them in different sequences. We found this initially disorienting, but mostly harmless. But even after we pared down our selections to a mere half-dozen, and put the single album page away in deference to the entrée list proper, a thought continued to gnaw at me: It was impossible to tell one dumpling from another by the pictures presented to us. Also, the images were sorted differently on both sides of the menu page. And yet, here we were, smug in our assumptions (or at least, I was smug in mine) that “shrimp dumplings” and “shrump dumplings” were altogether different things.

But how could we be sure of this? Each side of the dim sum menu featured fifteen photos, arranged in three rows by five rows. For all we know, the aggregate number of dim sum items was sixteen, so whoever made up the menus used shrimp on only one side, and shrump on the other. Hey, anything is possible. You know what else is possible? That shrump is the most mouth-watering shellfish in the world, exponentially more delicious than shrimp. And for all we know, that restaurant we went to for Chinese New Year is the only eatery in New York City that serves shrump, but no one knows, because everyone assumes that “shrump” is a typo.

Now I know what you’re going to say: “Phil, if you care so damn much, you can always go back to that restaurant and order shrump.” But for all we know, after K., S., J., E. and I gave our non-shrump order to the waitress, who brought it over to the kitchen, the following exchange went on in the backroom:

Kitchen Worker: Looks like we have to throw out the last box of shrump. It’s past the expiration date.*

Chef (Exploding with rage): Why doesn’t anyone ever order the shrump? That’s it! No more shrump! We are never ordering shrump again!*

(*Translated from Mandarin)

So there you have it. Quite possibly, the shrump boat has sailed, and the only way that I or anyone I know will ever get to savor the succulent flavor of fresh shrump is to order it someplace like Cambodia or New Orleans, where it’s served with optional botulism scare. Perhaps that isn’t fair, but that’s life. During tough times like this, I am reminded of advice my mother once gave me for similar situations: “Accept the things you cannot change, and always order an extra shui may.”