The Eighth Grade, Part I

Lately I've been walking around feeling like my Inner Eighth Grader is exposed.

We've all got one. I don't know what everyone else's Eighth Grade was like, but I'll tell you, mine was about a miserable as the Eighth Grade could get.

In the Eighth Grade, I was chubby and bespectacled, and not very attractive.

I had bad teeth. I had too many teeth for my mouth, so my teeth were crammed into my face with two canines that never descended to the same level as my other teeth. Giant snaggly sabreteeth. It would take the sacrifice of four healthy molars and two years of orthodontia before it was revealed that I actually have a perfectly acceptable smile.

Later on, I would gladly give up four bone-impacted wisdom teeth in a general-anaesthetic surgical procedure to keep them from re-adjusting that four-figure smile that I know was a financial hardship for my parents.

My dentist to this day complains that I have an extremely small oral cavity which makes it hard for him to reach my back teeth. I leave his office on 57th Street with the muscles of my jaws stretched so far that I am, literally, slack-jawed.

No man that I have ever dated has ever complained about my extremely small oral cavity.

But when I am smiling with every muscle of my face, my upper lip will pull up on the right side as if it remembers the huge canine tooth that it used to snag.

I was also very, very brainy and bookish in the Eighth Grade.

So. A fat, glasses-wearing bluestocking. Can you guess what the Eighth Grade was like for me?

Oh, wait. I was in the band, too. But I didn't play a cool instrument like the flute or the drums. It seemed like all the girls who played the flute were pretty and petite. And the boys who played the drums were delinquents-in-training who were just cooler than all the rest of us band geeks. They smoked and chewed tobacco that they spat into empty milk cartons and sat at the back of the bus. They carried their drumsticks in their back pockets like switchblades and were prone to whipping them out to rattle out paradiddles on desks and cafeteria tables.

I played the clarinet. An instrument that you played sitting rigidly upright with your right foot tapping rhythm on the riser. Quite possibly, with the exception of the oboe or bassoon, the most un-cool instrument that you could play. Even the instrument's case looked uncool -- like a little briefcase that I was toting around school. We clarinet players looked like actuaries on our way to the office as we entered the band room.

So there I was in the Eighth Grade, a fat, glasses-wearing, clarinet-playing bluestocking.

I did have a small coterie of friends -- Tina and Beth and Susan. Tina and Beth were both Flute Players. They were pretty and petite. Tina was the most developed girl in the Eighth Grade and Beth was one of the prettiest girls in school. I couldn't figure out why they wanted to be friends with me.

Susan played the violin and piano and she was serious and studious. She was the first person I knew to buy "Never Mind the Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols." The four of us sat in her bedroom and listened to "God Save the Queen." We were mystified and delighted at the same time.

We used to ride our bicycles to each others houses and camp in Susan's backyard next to the trolley tracks, scaring each other with stories of Green Man, a Pittsburgh legend.

We had our own code that we used to write each other notes.

On Friday nights in the winter, along with every other Eighth Grader at our school, we went to the Corrigan Drive Skating Rink and made aimless circles of the rink, coming in from the cold to eat french fries and drink Cokes.

We all agreed that the cutest boys in the band were Mike P and Ricky P. Mike was a drummer and Ricky played the trombone.

Somewhere along the way, in the Eighth Grade, I acquired a Tormentor.

But He Got The Trains to Run on Time!

None of my friends west of the Hudson River would believe me.

Cintra Wilson says it better than I ever could.

I hope Bill Bratton is out there in LA rubbing his hands gleefully in anticipation of rattling the skeletons in the closet.

Lameness Post-Mortem

Okay, so it was lame. But since I NEVER turn down free booze and food (such as it was - do a sushi station and a make-your-own taco station plus a band of roving waitrons wielding platters of weenie croissants really count as food? Survey says, NO) I dutifully put on my shiny party outfit and cabbed it into the office. Just what a New York City Girl wants to do on a Saturday night.

Now, for the uninitiated, or those who didn't have the pleasure of reading the NY Times last Sunday, yes Virginia, Saturday night IS the most "over" night of the week for New Yorkers. We are not going out on Saturday nights any more. We've ceded that night to the bridge & tunnel crowd. We stay in so the Todt Hill Express bus can drop the Red Bull and vodka crowd at the edge of the meatpacking district to slobber all over each other and hope in vain to catch a glimpse of a b-list celeb or maybe see Lindsay Lohan publicly humiliate herself once again.

Once you read about a "trend" in the Times, you can pretty much guarantee that it's either completely over or on the tipping point of over-ness. There's nothing quite like the Paper of Record to breathlessly relate the "latest thing" which we who actually live here have been quietly doing for at least five years. Or maybe they do it on purpose... you know, keep the thing on the down low until we have exhausted all its coolness, then put it in the Sunday Styles section so people from New Jersey can feel hip. Face it, once people from Staten Island and New Jersey are doing it, it's got the stink of "over" and we quietly move on to other pleasures that we diligently keep secret from the rubes. Why do you think we all moved to Brooklyn? We're actively TRYING to keep away from you people.

So anyway, back to the "party." As far as office parties go, I guess it was okay - inoffensive and bland, culturally stultified and blah blah blah. People got very, very, very drunk. But if people are getting very, very, very drunk and NOT misbehaving, what the hell kind of fun is that? What happened to "drunk and doing stupid things"? There are lots of tales of massive hangovers that have carried into this morning (my own included) yet not one whiff of bad gossip.

I liked the piano player. When I tried to bolt at 9:30 she begged me to stay because I was the only "cool person" there (her words, not mine) and we would go out after the gig. So, against my better judgement, I stayed... and stayed... Many glasses of bad red wine later, Missy PlunkPlunk of Pianoville decided to just go back to Brooklyn, meaning I had stayed past pumpkin time and gotten drunk for NOTHING. Not to mention that I observed that she is very chummy with the Retoucher formerly known as Hot, who has of late been demoted back to buck private and put back in the category, "Doesn't really exist for me any more here at the office."

Trust me, it's better that way. I've made my observations, and the coins have dropped from my eyes -- and kids, your Janey got played. But good. She fell right into the "sensitive guy" thing that she is usually immune to (how many times have I told you I'm not interested in those guys who are in touch with their feminine side and that I much prefer a guy to be in touch with his masculine side, thank you very much?). Her spidey sense was completely OFF and look what happened.

The player got played. I hate when that happens.

But again I say, it's better this way. Especially since --

Ahem. Ahem.

As I was saying, especially since I have been having some truly amazing sex with this other guy. (Not Baby Boy.) Since August.

You've heard me complain about many, many things, but have you heard me bitching about not getting laid? I don't think so.

But it does make me want to offer a little bit of advice. From a hussy to all the wives and girlfriends out there. Girlies, if you want to punish your man by withholding sex, keep this thought in mind: If you won't fuck your husband, and he is tired of trying to get you to fuck him, at a certain point, he will stop trying. And he will find someone who will fuck him. Some days I feel like I should have a tattoo on my forehead. It will say, "EXHIBIT A."

Well, a co-worker and I ended up on the LES at EmKay's bar, which was doing ROARING business, I must say, and he plied us with many more glasses of good red wine.

Let's just say, Sunday wasn't pretty. I woke up and confronted evidence that I had eaten HOT POCKETS. Not one, ladies and gentlemen, but TWO Hot Pockets. A quick check of the cell phone revealed that I somehow managed to avoid the deadly drinking and dialing, but oh, my head! And I had an brunch party to go to. Lord.

I made it to that, and the crowd was much, much more my style -- artists and fags and one very sweet dog, and not a pair of pleated pants to be seen in the whole place.

Ended the weekend with a much needed nap interspersed with old videos (the annual exhumation of "White Christmas," "Holiday Inn") followed by a "Law & Order" marathon. Is there a better way to spend a Sunday evening?

Okay, I Trust the Lawyer

Archer, I will never, ever, question you again!

November and the Treadmill

Ok. I never do this, but this has got to be the cutest damn cat ever seen on YouTube.