I wrote a review of my toaster oven on Amazon. You should probably read it and definitely buy it, if you are a fire enthusiast or prefer your toast to look like this:
I still have not found a good toaster oven though. It’s been really hard, you guys. Life is, like, so hard. Sniff.
It’s New Year’s again! Again! It happens once a year.
I am still waiting for my lunar horoscope from Doretta, who gets them from some old Chinese lady who is apparently an authority on all things zodiac related. It is unclear how someone becomes an authority on these things, but I’m guessing you have to be an old Chinese lady? Last year, if you recall, I was told I was going to have a good year for money, but bad year for health, which would impede on having a good year for money. Turns out it was a perfectly acceptable year for money, in that I had it and did not lose my job, and it was a bad year for teeth, in that I had them and did not lose them, but they hurt. This is the year of the dragon, which probably means money will continue to exist, but only a little of it will be for me. I will have an acceptable year for health, meaning that someone will sneeze on me. I will spill water, on my pants and on other people’s pants. I will break a keyboard and a mouse (I already broke a keyboard, actually). Something important will happen in space and no one will care. We will depend on foreign oil. Giant pandas will look exceptionally adorable this year and insects will win. My brother will call someone a “douche-and-dick,” as in “dude, that guy is being a total douche-and-dick,” and in that sentence “that guy” is our father. Our mother will continue to assess the quality of my skin, particularly its dangerously low moisture level, and continue to critique the shade of my lipstick, which is “the color that streetwalkers wear.” That’s loosely translated from the Korean.
The year of the dragon is going to be acceptable for hookers with dry skin.
This afternoon my co-worker and I were walking across the street to get lunch. On most days, I’d say eating is a real pain in the ass. Sometimes I wish I had just eaten so I could stop thinking about eating and move on with my goddamn life. You realize we have to eat EVERY DAY, like every four hours? That’s insane. It’s really taxing. You know, I’m kind of busy and I occasionally have shit to do, so eating gets in the way of me sometimes doing things. I realize there are people who don’t get to eat every day, so I should feel grateful, but you know what? I’m an asshole. Eating takes up time and energy and especially in New York, it takes up money. Dude, not even kidding you, I just spent $11 on a sandwich and a salad and no, I did not get a mouth boner from it.
Fact: the second worst question you can ever ask me is, “Where do you want to eat?” (The first is “Can I sleep with your mother?” Obvz.)
So anyway, my co-worker and I are crossing the street. It is raining. And this guy walks up to us and says, “hey” and we are like, “uh, hey.” It is true that people in New York do not like strangers saying “hey.” If we liked that then we would be living in Minneapolis where apparently everyone says “hey” and probably hug and invite each other over for dinner at their nana’s house to watch the Packers play the Knicks or whatever. I don’t follow hockey. Anyway the guy says, “I’m a recruiter for Hollister, would you be interested in being models?”
Now there are a few scenarios here:
1. We say yes. They take photos of us wearing something with seagulls on it and flip flops. Two things, by the way, I do not approve of. We get really famous and quit our jobs to be models for Hollister making whatever it is models make. No idea, but they save a lot of money since they don’t eat (which would solve one of my problems, see above).
2. We say yes. They take photos of us. But it turns out we’re the “before” photos. The “after” photos are two hot models probably from the Ukraine or Belarus with a combined weight equivalent of one, single zucchini. The “before” photos make it to some snarky site where we are berated for being totally average. They make fun of my hair, which I forgot to brush this morning. The good news is that we are not wearing flip flops.
3. We say no.
Guess which one we chose?
But really, I have no idea what this recruiter was up to, because if you saw us, you would not think Hollister. You would think we were more appropriate models for a store that makes clothes for tired, possibly hungover employees. Not sure what the clothes would look like, but they’d definitely be pre-worn.
The second issue of White Zinfandel is out now! The magazine combines food, culture, art, and fancy people doing fancy things and being fancy. I wrote a piece in there about people who take photos of their food. The piece includes VISUAL AIDS, and I don’t mean, like, getting AIDS in your eyeballs. I mean graphic organizers. I’d say the tone of the article would be best described as “enthusiastically enraged.” So, if you are a person who takes photo of their food (and I know some of you do because we’re fwendz on Facebook and I see your feed, don’t you dare hide from me, you coy little bastard), then you will either feel mildly embarrassed or enthusiastically enraged. Just know that I still love you with all my heart, of which there is very little left because my parents have more or less eaten it. As you know, Koreans will eat anything. They will ferment it first though.
New Yorkers: You can get the issue at the New Museum or Project No. 8.
Everyone else: Look here.
Ever since my mother’s gotten her fancy car with BUILT IN SPEAKERPHONE she has been ambushing me with spontaneous phone calls to relatives and rando friends and forcing me to talk to them whenever I’m in the car with her, which happens to be all the time. Half the time I have no idea who I’m talking to. “Say hi, this is Jay’s mom, the one with the bakery. You remember him? He went to Stanford. For LAW SCHOOL.” Then I have to remind my mother that like all of her friends’ kids went to Stanford for whatever how can I possibly keep all these highly successful and wealthy Korean sons and daughters straight? You know who I’d remember? The kid who ran away to NYC to pursue a successful career in costume design for drag queens. Yeah I’d totally remember him.
Anyway this is our number one mother-daughter activity: sitting in traffic and getting phonebushed. So I’ll be at the wheel because there’s no way in hell that lady is driving when my life is on the line, I mean seriously she is the world’s shittiest driver, and all of the sudden her bony freakishly long fingers are pushing some buttons and then oh hey there my uncle’s voice is coming through the stereo totally interrupting my groove to Crystal Blue Persuasion. It is SUPER annoying. Because now here I am in traffic talking to my uncle about not being married. “Don’t worry, Annie, next year you’ll have a boyfriend.” OK THANKS I’M NOT WORRIED BUT YOU APPEAR TO BE. So then my mom dials my father and he says, “Take care of you self, Anne.” I thought this was sweet and then he says, “Because you don’t have husband. Who take care of you? You so alone. No one care for you.”
My mom laughs because to her it’s one of those funny-because-it’s-true situations. I laugh because you know what else is there to do? I am in traffic.
It’s been exactly one year from this day last year. Weird, right guys?
So today I eat lunch with my mom and dad because we didn’t have the usual New Year’s get-together-thing with all 100 of my cousins. Note that I avoid using the word “party” in this case because it would be totally misleading since parties have 1) alcohol and 2) fun. So really, it’s considered a “get-together-thing.”
Anyway my dad sits down to the table in his pajamas. It is 3 pm on a Sunday. He is wearing pajamas. Like the whole matching set. Maroon paisley, in case you are wondering. I ask, hey, did you just wake up? And he says no, I went to work this morning and came back. I should note that my mother, father, and I do this thing where we change right when we come home. Like we return from work or whatever, and immediately change into something comfortable. Like house clothes. In my mom’s case it’s sweats and shirts. In my case it is “leisure pants” because skinny jeans look cute but dude they are so fucking skinny I cannot be wearing that shit all the time, I’ll lose feeling in my feet. In my father’s case it is pajamas. So he sits down to eat in his pajamas. He is no stranger to comfort, my father.
As we are eating, he just stares at me, hey, he asks, are you STILL vegetarian?!? And he makes this face. It is what my friend Doretta would call “kidney face”. The face you make when you learn people are stealing kidneys from other people. EVERY SINGLE TIME I eat with my father, he asks me this. I went vegetarian in high school. I’m like dude, roughly half my life has been spent as a vegetarian, so yes, Dad, I am still vegetarian. What is wrong with you?
He says, Anne, vegetarian look not so healthy. Maybe on inside they healthy, but on outside they not healthy. Vegetarian have face that look like this: And he proceeds to make a V shape with his hands. People who eat meat have face that look like this: And he then makes an O shape with his hands. So I say, are you telling me my face looks like a V? And he just sorta stares at me as if to say well duh, you have the American Apparel super deep V of faces. And then I look at my mother, as if to say, hey you care to weigh in on this issue because this guy is either insane or a total asshole. And she says, why do you even talk to your father? I stopped talking to him years ago. Then the woman proceeds to ditch us and go into the living room to watch the rest of the Korean version of the Oscars. And throughout the afternoon I hear her commenting on dresses. Oh that is a tacky color, or ohhh is that Versace? For some reason it is hard for my mom to say “Versace” and it ends up coming out like “vuh-thah-chee”.
So then my father says, Anne, you will never find husband if you vegetarian. Who wants to live with a vegetarian? Then he looks at what we just ate, which is like the most ridiculous amount of food. There’s so much food that the dishes barely fit on the table. And he says to me “you didn’t eat anything.” And I’m like what are you talking about, all I’m doing right now is eating, I’m on my second bowl of rice LIKE A BOSS, and he says, there’s no nutrition. I’m like dude, look at this food. This is Korean food. An entire country is eating this same shit, this tasty, tasty shit. And he’s like no nutrition! He says this to me as if I’m starving. Only in our house can you be eating yourself into some insane kim chee coma and someone implies that you are starving. I think you guys should start a non-profit to save me right now because clearly I’m wasting away.
Right, so happy new year, everyone! I hope none of you starve in 2012.