Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Maybe,Baby.

I am watching the film Serendipity at three in the morning and it would truly be serendipitous if at the same time my soul mate was also watching this movie. Maybe she is a bartender getting home from work after spending her Monday night serving drinks to banker types at a cheesy bar. Possibly, she is a single mom and woke up to feed her baby before turning on the TV. Or, she could be currently dating a guy that she is already thinking about breaking up with and got out of bed after a night of sex that has become routine, went into the living room, turned on the TV and started watching the movie.

I’d like to think she’s single, probably between 5’ and 5’5'',has brown hair, big brown eyes, and has the kind of unassuming beauty that people don’t notice at first glance. I’d like to think she has the kind of laugh that makes me want to send her funny texts at random moments in the day. Maybe we haven’t met yet. Maybe we have. Maybe we dated and the twisted timing of life broke us up too soon before we both could admit to the other how much we truly cared for each other. Maybe she is watching this movie as the new boyfriend is sleeping next to her. Maybe she is thinking about how I'm just dorky enough to be watching this at 3 a.m. and she has a momentary thought about texting me, but resists and feels an emptiness in the bedroom that she never felt with me.

Maybe she sat next to me in eighth-grade English class, but I was too nervous to talk to her. Maybe I had one date with her when I was 24, and was still too inexperienced in dating to say the right things. Maybe she asked me to skate at the roller rink in 7th grade and I told her I was going to play Donkey Kong to get out of everyone seeing us together,  because I didn't see her beauty through her giant '80s style glasses, and I secretly wanted to skate with the girl who had already developed the major-league yabbos of a 17-year old whose sweaters had gotten hypnotically tighter over the past year;  except she was skating with my best friend, who was an athlete and didn't have braces that conveniently covered the length of an awkward phase.

Maybe I walked right by her in the bar on the New Years Eve that I ended up kissing the woman at midnight who took me back to her place to fool around for a few hours before she would look at the clock after climaxing and casually uttering the blunt words ”I've had enough,"  before kicking me out of her place. Maybe, she is the girl I used to work with who I had the office crush on and then a month later, forgot why. Maybe she is the cool 21-year old intern at my old job that I fooled around with after an office party only to find out a few months later that her college foray into lesbianism with a member of the field hockey team had not been just a "college thing" and that she was happily dating a woman named Jenny (OK, I’m almost positive, she’s not the one.)


Maybe she was that brown-eyed girl that taught me that a night that starts out talking and people watching in a dive bar and ends up with us eating waffles in bed can be more fun than a week in the Bahamas with a girl that forces you to drink daiquiris all day and vodka tonics all night in order to avoid the fact that you can't stand the sound of her voice anymore. Maybe she was the girl I felt many "moments" with during our brief relationship and that within 15 minutes of knowing each other, we both were enamored with each other’s smiles and personalities, and just knew there was a fun connection between us, until suddenly, after a few months of enjoying every minute of each other's quirks, she quickly and coldly disconnected from me.

Maybe it was the first woman I ever went home with in the city who unlocked a passion in me that had been building for years, which helped me figure out that an honest smile can, on occasion, lead to separating a girl at a bar from her friends and sometimes her bra. Our mutual desire had conspired to bring us together for one night of grinding and groping in the back of the taxi and then the top of her covers with the unbridled enthusiasm of people who were both longing for a similar feeling( me looking forward to my Sex in the City years and she saying goodbye to hers.)   I walked out foolishly without staying for the night leaving her disappointed that our night had ended before sunrise.  Then, I forgot which apartment she was in when I got to the street and had the Chandleresque impulsive idea to knock on her door for one more round of rolling around.

Whoever it is, I hope she will realize the connection we currently have or will have after we meet, so I don’t have to go barging into her wedding shouting her name, before running away with her until we catch a city bus and then look at each other and wonder if we made a huge mistake.

Until then, I will continue to watch the occasional late night movie, continue to go on dating sites and continue to wait for that time when I bump into a cute girl with big brown eyes, big green eyes or big blue eyes(really, the key word is eyes, as in plural.) Or, when she bumps into me and our eyes meet. I just hope we’re not both engaged to other people at the time, because that can get messy. But, what’s a little ice cream spilled on your shirt when it comes to finding the person you want to share this messy,crazy thing called life..

Monday, July 20, 2009

Fink’s Rules to making Summer Concerts Rule. Or The Do’s and Don’ts of De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da

10. When going to an indoor concert, never wear flip flops or open-toed shows.

9 When going to an outdoor concert, apply facial sunscreen and bring sunglasses.

8. At an outdoor concert, if you are a man and have a flabbier chest than the girl you are with, do not walk around without a shirt on. It doesn’t matter how pumped you get when you anticipate Dave Mathews coming on stage or how hot it is outside, the rest of the crowd does not need to see your body in sunlight or any light. Conversely, if you spend half your life in a gym and pop steroids as much as you drink red bull, there is no need to be walking around without your shirt on. This also applies to half shirts, too-tight tank tops and mesh tank tops, but that goes without saying (Unless the concert is being held in a gym in Chelsea, then all of the above are acceptable.)

7. Now if you are a woman at an outdoor concert that is nowhere near a beach, do not show up in nothing but a bikini if your body jiggles like a paparazzi shot of Kirstie Alley as she shakes her arm at them like some sort of hairless Sasquatch walking away into the woods.

6. At any concert, if you are a twenty-something Asian dude, do show up with a huge afro, while wearing over-sized gold sunglasses, a vintage Beastie Boys tank top(1) and carrying a 1970’s plastic lunch box. Note: This look can only be pulled off by Asian men in their teens or early twenties.

5. If you are a guy at a Jonas Brothers concert with your girlfriend, (hopefully, that’s the reason you are there) do wear a Ramones or a Rancid shirt. If you are at a Rancid concert, do not wear a Jonas Brothers shirt. Actually, if you are at a Jonas Brothers concert, you probably shouldn’t wear a Jonas Brothers shirt, unless you plan on going to the Dateline NBC house after the show, where you will awkwardly explain to Chris Hansen that the condoms you brought were not for the fifteen year old you met at the concert and you were just being a good Samaritan by driving her home.


4. If you are at a concert and a beautiful girl walks up in the crowd alone and stands beside you while grooving to the music, do give her a slight glance and smile as you rock out yourself, but wait until she brushes up against you and you start talking before going into your patented Axel Rose dance.

3. If you are at a punk concert, do engage in the mosh pit if you have done it before and know when to rush the pit and release some of your pent up frustration on your fellow moshers. Don’t attempt to walk through it quickly after feeling the aggression of the music, if you are not prepared to do some shoving and if you bruise easily. In fact, if you have ever told someone that you bruise easily (me) or have gotten a hickey that lasted a week (me again), than you are probably not a candidate for moshing.

2. Whenever possible, no matter where the venue, always try to avoid spilling beer on the neck of a man who has a tattoo on his deltoid muscle that reads “Only God Can Judge Me.” The results will be dire and unless you have a joint and another beer immediately handy to offer up as a peace offering, you will probably not hear the last few songs of the show after your ears swell up from the violently swift and humiliating blow you will receive. You can be sure that he will not spill his beer while he spills your blood.

1. And last, but certainly not least, if you happen to find yourself at Summer Stage and you are in the section near the stage and Q Tip tells you to wave your arm along to his melodic beats, you wave that arm in the air and you wave it like you just don’t care.
You are lucky to be spending a beautiful summer day (for free) with your fellow New Yorkers sharing the experience of witnessing possibly the greatest performer in the history of hip-hop raising the roof to the sun.


If you follow these simple rules, your summer will surely rock.


1. I'd like to wish Adam Yauch (MCA) all the best and a speedy recovery with the treatable lymphnode illness he has(Jews have a hard time typing the word cancer, much less saying it) and I'm sure that he's got better doctors than Manny Mota and he will live way longer than Abe Vigoda.

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Bad Samaritans. or Blinding me with science- fiction!

While entering my apartment building today I noticed my senior citizen neighbor carrying a few bags and walking slower than usual. I saw a chance to be a Good Samaritan for the first time in a long time and offered to help carry his bags up to the fifth floor. Six minutes later, he arrived on the floor and insisted that I have a glass of water. As he was in another room putting away the bags, I noticed what appeared to be a very old Snapple bottle on a shelf next to other assorted chotchkies. After reading the label I realized that the bottle was about as old as my father and that the beverage company was apparently known as Schnaupple and was originally manufactured in Germany. I felt this urgent curiosity sweep over me that quickly got the best of me. When I unscrewed the cap, and wiped away the dust, this is what I read:




Schnaupple Real Fact #46
A Jew can hold more food in its beak than its belly.



A rush of questions filled my head: Was this man whom I had only previously nodded at in passing, a former Nazi? Was he just a twisted man who collected anti-Semitic objects? And then I briefly wondered what 70 year old iced tea tasted like before nervously putting it back on the shelf and shouting out to the man in the other room that I forgot I needed to take my dog for a walk. As I closed the door behind me, images from the movie “Marathon Man” flashed in my head and I imagined myself tied up to a chair in a poorly lit room with my neighbor dressed in all white as some sort of Dr. Mengele, forcing the 70 year old Schnaupple bottle into my mouth and repeatedly asking me ”Is it safe?” as I swallowed the horribly sour concoction.

I sat on my couch and began to calm down and think rationally again. He’s probably just some collector of weird artifacts. I’m sure not all of his chotchkies are racist mementos of a bygone era. I doubt he has any Hitler alarm clocks(Waaaake Up!!!) or Aunt Jemima bottles that show her with a big grin and a watermelon where her teeth are supposed to be. I grabbed my leash and took the dog down for a walk anyway, just to keep up appearances. When I reached the first floor I noticed that a woman who was getting her mail had dropped her wallet. I put my head down and kept on walking out the door. This is New York anyway, who says you have to be neighborly? Besides, look where that got Poland.


Now, you’re asking yourself “Fink, Why did you write a story like this? Is it because you’re Jewish and you think that entitles you to use your religion/ethnicity for cheap laughs? Aren’t you more of an expert on the every day trivial experiences of life? Why don’t you stick to writing about the things you know like teenage virginity, air hockey, and 80's music?” These are all valid points, but the idea for my story originated when I was drinking a Snapple and was looking at the cap and had a “eureka” moment that usually only occurs at 4 am when I’m trying to sleep or during the rare occasion that I smoke pot (every couple of months I come down with a bad bout of glaucoma).

The truth is, I love Snapple, and it was the first iced tea I had ever enjoyed, but if Snapple was a German company in the late 30’s, early 40’s, this would have actually been written on their caps. Except in 1943, most people wouldn’t have laughed at it. That is how fast the institutionalized hatred and Nazi propaganda of Jews being less than human was spread throughout Germany in the late 1930’s. Hell, there was institutionalized racism in parts of this country into the 1960’s. Of course it’s ridiculous, all racism is based on ignorance. It's usually passed down from generation to generation like luggage or genetic birth defects. Hating people because they have a physical characteristic is completely illogical and I doubt in the universe according to Gene Roddenberry there were non-pointy eared Vulcans that had to sit in the back of their Vulcan buses.

Harboring hatred towards people solely based on the fact that their religious beliefs are different than yours is also ridiculous, but we do have the right to think a group of people are idiots for believing every single word that their religion tells them. Like, believing that you might get 200 virgins in Heaven after you die, or that humans came to be on Earth 75 million years ago after Xenu the ruler of a planet in another galaxy, used psychiatrists to get all his people together before freezing them (probably after prescribing Diprivan), capturing their souls and taking the alien souls aboard a 1950’s style airplane to Earth. As crazy as that may seem, walking around with ash on your head, never experiencing the pleasure of a glazed ham, and wearing thick black suits and heavy coats in the summer time while isolating yourselves in a community in Brooklyn is pretty idiotic as well.

So, as long as idiots are not looking to harm other people, there is no reason to have actual hatred for them. Now, when someone has done other people harm they need to be punished by society, but when one person has done so much harm to so many people, well there needs to be a special sort of justice set aside for that person. It is definitely ironic that no one person has caused more suffering to more Jewish people than Bernie Madoff. If Hitler had not left this Earth in such cowardly fashion, he hopefully would have been drawn and quartered and left in the town square for every person to whack at with a stick daily. Something unique and original should be done as a form of punishment for Bernie Madoff, the greedy weasel who stole people’s life savings, even though he was already making milions off their investments.

My recommendations for punishing Madoff, as opposed to letting the taxpayers pay for him to be in prison for 150 years (his corpse will no doubt be left in the cell to set an example) is to make him the star of a Japanese game show. I watched the show “I Survived a Japanese Game Show” the other night and found it equally surreal and somewhat brilliant. The American contestants willingly submit to the will of the Japanese game show for the chance to take a trip to Japan and hope for some sort of poor-man’s “Big Brother” type of fame. The whole point of the Japanese game show is to humiliate its contestants and the host is like a Japanese version of Monty Hall, the host of the 1970’s game show “Let’s Make a Deal”. Only this man and the audience takes incredible glee in humiliating the contestants and threatening to send them back to America if they fail to survive the bizarre tasks like catching fallen milk off a conveyor belt with boxing gloves on while wearing a mouse costume and dark goggles.

Although for Madoff, I do believe we ought to step it up a notch and have him do things each week like sit in a dunk tank filled with jelly fish while dressed in nothing but a diaper and holding a rattle as the Japanese game show host calls up people from the crowd to try to knock him off his platform. The Japanese Monty Hall would probably tell him with a smile to stop acting like such a baby, or else he will have to breast feed from a wild boar. At that point his wife will be sent on stage dressed in a pig costume. I’m sure this would get the best ratings of any show on TV, but there will always be some people, who simply would not approve of this form of televised reality justice and would turn the channel back to CSI Miami, where they will shut their brain off for an hour in order to watch David Caruso give fake criminals their weekly comeuppance?

Midway through writing this essay, I turned my TV to the Twilight Zone marathon and happened to catch the last episode that was shown in the marathon, entitled “I am the Night. Color Me Black.” It was a brilliant tale of a white man in the early
1960’s about to be executed for shooting and killing another white man who was a racist cross-burner and due to the majority of the town’s blind hatred for the man in prison waiting to be hung, the sky stayed dark the morning of the execution and got darker after he was put to death. That was not only thought provoking but ironic considering that I was already in the process of putting down my thoughts on hatred. Is it possible that at 5:30 am, I’m stuck in my own personal “Daybreak Zone”? Luckily, the sun is beginning to shine through my window. I can’t believe I’m still up. Maybe I should switch to an herbal tea.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Trip her. She's drunk, and it's not Christmas.


I read in the news today that Joyce DeWitt got arrested for DUI last night. In my sit-com soaked brain, I immediately imagined after getting pulled over that she said to the officer: “Officer, I know what this looks like, but you see this is just a misunderstanding. I grabbed my roommate’s glasses instead of mine off the counter when I left the house, which is why my vision is blurry and I swerved off the road and hit those stop signs.” To which the officer replies, “Sure. Look lady I’m guessing at the bar the beers were yours, and yours and yours. I’m going to take you to the station, and until someone posts bail for you, you will be staying in a not-so-lovely space, that just happens to need your face. Oh, and there will be no Jack Daniels to keep you company, too.”

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Embracing Your Inner Dork. or Tina. Hey, How You Doin'.


I just realized why women like 30 Rock so much, and why guys like Tina Fey, as well. Liz Lemon basically gets to do every awkward thing that women fear they will do in front of a guy,(and what guys do do in front of women) like having the door fly open while she's sitting on the toilet on a first date. But, she's a neurotic hot mess of a woman who is constantly making quick decisions as a producer of a TV show filled with crazy people while she is incapable of making the right choices in her train wreck of a personal life. Liz is the woman whose social life is always in upheaval, kind of like what Holly Hunter personified when she was the spunky perfectionist news producer in “Broadcast News." If overachieving, incredibly successful female characters with type-A personalities didn't have a relatable dorky side, they would appear to be as compulsively crazy as Reese Witherspoon's perfect portrayal of the fanatically driven high school student in the film Election.

This is why she was smart enough to make her character a hyper-reality version of herself. She is probably a little quirky, and assuredly a very funny woman who was the head writer at SNL. Tina managed the break-neck pace creating live comedy at the real 30 Rock but I'm pretty sure she can talk to men without accidentally cupping their balls in an elevator, or something quirky to that effect. Lucille Ball portrayed a wildly popular goofy character that was funny and got herself into many sticky situations but the audience laughed at her and said "That's our Lucy", as opposed to watching Liz Lemon and going "Oh My God, that's so me." Tina Fey has become a one-woman "Seinfeld."

But, the so-called point of my story is that if you are going to be a walking with a coffee cup down the street-while checking your blackberry-and fitting in gym workouts in between meetings- before taking flights back and forth for a day to give presentations-type of woman; then it helps if you don't also try to come off as being perfect to men and the people in your life. People like that are just naturally presumed to be uptight,   Type A-holes(see Meryl Streep's magazine editor in the Devil Wears Prada.) Luckily, most people are not A-holes,and we all have a hidden dork side to us that makes us unique. Putting up facades only works for buildings(Wow, that sounds like something Tony Robbins would say. I guess I'm extra dorky when writing about being dorky).

I think one of the big differences between men and women is men pretty much want to forget about their day at work(men expect the people they work with to be idiots and are not surprised by it) and women can't leave behind the fact that their counterpart would show up to an important meeting dressed like she's trying to pick up a sailor on shore leave. If my grandmother died and I got fired that day and I had a first date, I would smile and act like nothing happened, because I know how important a good first impression is to women. I had a woman break a first date with me recently and then the makeup date a week later and give me a rain check both times because it was actually raining and she didn't want her curly hair to frizz up.

That's why it helps to show up to first dates with the occasional bloody nose or to spill a drink on your own white t-shirt and laugh about it on a date. We, and I'm speaking for all men (not just NYC dorky, cute Jewish guys with warm smiles, endearing eyes and a surprisingly muscular body for a seemingly skinny guy, who exude a laid back, go-with-the-flow attitude, and enjoy making women laugh as much as orgasm) find that totally cute and adorable and will be smitten every time. Plus it helps, if you can fling off your glasses and pony tail and reveal an even hotter version of yourself when we're not expecting it.

My Face My Book or SereNitee NhowW.

I was on Facebook today sending emails and making comments to Facebook friends(guy I haven’t seen since the sixth grade, and girl I met at a party three years ago but haven’t seen since) and I had to fill out these word puzzle security checks. It’s bad enough that I have to do that when signing into Yahoo occasionally, but I’ve noticed that I am being asked to do this every other time I comment on someone else’s comment(there’s way too much commenting going on) in order to send someone an email on Facebook after already being signed in. What is Facebook the airport check-in of social networking now? I have to spell out MiscterMytczlePlick in order to send my dangerous clip of cats falling off a treadmill.

What is actually the point of these so-called security password oral puzzles? All it’s proving is that I can read jumbled English. I’ve already put in my password, so it’s either me or some lucky cyber thief who gets to read annoying forward emails from my mom on my Yahoo account. All these time consuming word puzzles do is frustrate the person whose account it is. A cyberthief would have to be the laziest thief in the world to give up after seeing the letters NanCey DrouGh and not being able to re-type them. All this does is frustrate the actual user who can’t believe they have to retype a new group of letters(written even smaller) because they didn’t press the Caps button while typing.

I think I know who came up with this security system. Osama Bin Laden. It makes perfect sense. He’s hiding out in his duplex cave somewhere in the hills of Afghanstan, watching re-runs of M*A*S*H on his TV, bored out of his mind waiting for the cable guy to come and upgrade him to Digital cable; so Bin Laden figures what better and cheaper way to fuck with Americans than to slowly drive them crazy and make them pissed at the institutions they hold so dear. And so, our precious online security checks were designed by the one man who poses the greatest threat to our collective security. oSammHnA ViN LaddeMn.

It’s Amazing, It’s Stupendous, But it’s No Bullshit. Or is it?

Gerry Blank, 14, was on his way to school when he saw a "ball of light" heading straight towards him from the sky. A red hot, pea-sized piece of rock then hit his hand before bouncing off and causing a foot wide crater in the ground.The teenager survived the strike, the chances of which are just one in a million - but with a nasty three-inch long scar on his hand. He said: "At first I just saw a large ball of light, and then I suddenly felt a pain in my hand.

Gerry’s mother did not believe the boy’s story at first and demanded to see the crater herself. “That boy spends every waking moment in his room doing God knows what. The one time he takes the garbage out without me asking him to, now that’s a one in a millon chance” , said Mrs. Judy Blank. After neighbors arrived on the scene, Gerry noticed the burn marks on his right hand and raised his left fist to the sky before shouting “Why God? Why Me?”

Gerry then ran into his home and locked himself in his room for the next twenty-four hours. Gerry’s mother called the local police in order to remove him from the room. Sgt. Frank O’Leary was the first officer on the scene. “I knock on the door asking the kid to let me in and I don’t get a response, so I tell him to open the door or else he won’t get his name in the papers for witnessing the meteor. See, I took a psychology course at the juco before joining the academy. But, the kid shouts at me to jam my baton all the way in an area that I know it won’t fit, so I bust down the door. Well, how do I put this, the kid is having his way with a pillow and seems to have cut a conveniently placed hole in the Miss November fold out, which he has placed on top of the pillow. Now the door has slammed down in front of him, but the kid is still going at it like a jackhammer. I gotta give it to him. That’s dedication. He also had his right hand covered in Bugs Bunny band-aids,” recalled Sgt. Frank. O’Leary.

After being pulled kicking and screaming by two police officers from his room, while wearing nothing but one sock and clutching the torn upper torso of Miss November, Gerry then proceeded to erupt into a profanity laced tirade before bursting into tears. “My one in a million boy. Looks like you just became the one millionth customer in your own amusement park,” shouted Mrs. Judy Blank. After a few weeks Gerry’s scar had healed completely and he bought a telescope for his room, to further pursue his newfound interest in Astronomy. “Hey, my mom took away my computer and my magazines, so I needed something to do”, said Gerry Blank. “Luckily, there’s plenty of heavenly bodies for me to discover.”