Easy Exercises to Tighten...Your Vocab

There's something I'm going to change in this country, and you have to help me change it. We're all part of the problem. If you don't know what the problem is yet, then you might have a lot of work to do. I'm not talking about global warming, or recycling, or over dependence on foreign oil. I'm talking about the three skin blisteringly horrendous phrases that need to be eliminated from every American's vocabulary. It needs to happen now. Like, right away, before I start doling out lobotomies. You might not even realize you're guilty of what I'm about to accuse you of. I didn't, until I had a few inadvertent self-interventions. Ready? Your life is about it change. You can sit down if you want.

1) "Basically". We need to stop saying this word, and we need to stop RIGHT NOW. You might not have noticed it's sheer prevalence in every day conversation. Believe me - it's there, and it's a problem. And it breeds like a rodent.

Step one: start listening. You're going to hear it constantly after a few days of tuning your ears, and its going to drive you fucking bananas. I apologize for soiling your innocence, but it's going to make you a better person, I promise.

Step two: Understand that people are throwing this word around with little to no regard for its actual definition. Listen: I don't hate 'basically' because I hate adverbs, like some people. I like adverbs. There aren't enough adjectives in this language to suit me, and when I tack on an adverb, it's like making a whole new adjective. I find that delightful. So I don't hate basically for what it is. I hate that its being so brutally abused. Every second, basically gets strapped in front of some situation that it has fucking nothing to do with, just to soften the blow. Jesus people, leave basically out of it! What did basically ever do to you?? For example, you can't 'basically' be dead, or 'basically' be bankrupt, or 'basically' be in jail. You either are in one of those situations, or you aren't. You can argue with me all you like, but ask actual dead, bankrupt or incarcerated people - there's a whole big line, and once you've crossed over, there's no more 'basically' about it. And if you ever ask a waiter what's in a dish, and he responds with a definition that includes 'basically'...leave the restaurant. Immediately.

Step Three: Begin cringing when you hear yourself use the word. Look, I know change hurts. But admitting you have a problem is the first step towards sounding like you might have a clue what you're talking about. If you start now, you'll be using the word appropriately (and thus, sparingly) by spring.

2) 'At the End of the Day'

Last year, this was voted the most overused phrase by a variety of sources. I heard that story, and was like 'who even says that?' The next day I was just cruising around, chatting, when I realized: OH MY GOD I SAY IT ALL THE TIME. ALL THE TIME!!! I was so grossed out I had to gargle with the non-pleasant-tasting Listerine for five whole minutes.

Since then, I've noticed that this phrase has infected the language like a termite colony. Shit is everywhere, shit cannot be killed, shit compromises the integrity of everything around it. People freaking start sentences with the phrase, just gearing up to say whatever it is they're actually trying to communicate. 'Basically' + 'shitty justification no one cares about because we don't know what you're trying to say, vague-ass' = 'At the end of the day'. Stop the insanity. What does it even mean? That you're ok with being a dickhole for the other 10 hours of the day that you're out interacting with other humans? You mean 'long term'? Are you talking about a goal? Fucking say that then.

3) 'Giving 110%'

Oh, man. This one makes me especially crazy. By telling someone that you plan on giving 110%, it only demonstrates that you are unaware of your own capabilities, and possess unreasonable performance expectations. I see disappointment in your future.

Listen - you can improve 110% from a previous performance. Shit, you can improve your performance 500% if you do five times better than you did last time. But you can't give 110%, because it isn't fucking possible. I'm not trying to be an asshole, I'm just letting you know that to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of percentages, you sound like a tool. Yes, your 100% might be a whole lot better than everyone elses 100%, professional athletes, but it doesn't mean you have an extra 10% to give, because JESUS CHRIST I CAN'T EVEN FINISH EXPLAINING THIS. YOU ONLY GET 100%. That's everything. So knock it off.

Ok, I'm tired now. Changing the world is hard work. Good luck out there.

Yes, This Elevator Makes You Look Fat

I'm convinced there is a special circle of hell reserved for people that use the elevator to travel one floor. I'm not talking about people carrying babies, or in wheelchairs, or those toting oxygen tanks. No. People in those categories - I'm so damn impressed that they're out there at all, I think they're entitled to use whatever means of transportation they find most useful. I swear to God, I saw someone at an Elderly Commission meeting the other day hauling around a portable defibrillator. Jesus! I turned off my cell phone and everything.

That's not the point though - or the demographic I'm targeting. I'm talking about those people who run up to elevator as the doors are closing shrieking "HOLD IT!!!" and then cram themselves in, reach through and around all the other people who waited patiently and push...one floor. One floor? I feel guilty if I ride the elevator for three floors. You're really ok with this decision? You don't want to try again? Did your finger slip? No? Nice elastic waistband, by the way.

Ok, that was a little catty. But I'm not taking it back. National obesity epidemic notwithstanding, there are other reasons I can hate the One Floor Freeloaders. First of all, it wastes energy. It really does! And no, you don't get to make the 'well it was already going to my floor anyway' argument - I have never seen an elevator in my damn life that told button-pushers-flirting-with-laziness how many people were already inside, and what buttons they pushed. Second - you're spreading germs. Really. One more person getting all up in everyone else's space during the height of flu season...I have no data to back this up, but it makes sense to me. And third...in the event the elevator crashes to the floor, your presence will increase the speed at which the rest of us plummet to the basement. That probably doesn't matter either, but you at least could have avoided your own demise by taking the damn stairs.

If you are a One Floor Coaster, and you happen to read this...you probably don't care. I doubt I changed your mind at all. Just know this - in the event of an elevator emergency - say, for example, we get trapped in one, and we're stranded there for several days - the dude with the defibrillator and I are going to divide you up and eat you. What, like anyone will miss you? You're totally friends with that old lady who spends twenty minutes barking her lottery ticket requests at the convenience store clerk while I'm just trying to buy myself a bottle of orange juice. Hot Mess.

True Life: People Be Stealing

So I finally enrolled in my work's direct deposit plan, and it seems like my year-plus of foot dragging reluctance to join the club ended at exactly the right time. Every time I turn on the local news (which, in the interest of full disclosure isn't all that frequently, but often enough so that I don't think this is a coincidence) there's a report about another bank in the area being robbed.

I don't think there's anything that could ruin my lunch break more than being held hostage in a bank robbery. And here I was, running around the city under the assumption that bank robberies as a felony scheme in general had become passe sometime in the 70's, taking my check to the bank every other Friday just because I'm partial to human interaction and dig watching people fidget while they wait in lines. I had been doing all this forever, not even considering that my ass was in danger of being ordered to the floor and then locked in a vault all bound up with duct tape. And then, if I managed to avoid getting shot, and they release me, and the police or whoever take my statement, and it's still only 3:00 - do I have to go back to work? And what happened to my paycheck? Does the bank give me an IOU? Will they give me a note? Because my landlord is totally not going to believe that I was held up in a bank robbery. I'll never have to deal with those issues now though. Nope, direct deposit it is.

I'll miss the bank though. It's weird, I know, but I actually find the place very soothing. Boston has some great banks with seriously iconic architecture, especially downtown, so it's like doing an errand in a living museum. And people crack me up, so I like watching them do weird things with their money, or sing along to the satellite muzak, or make strange requests of the tellers. As an added bonus, no one really goes to the bank anymore for normal stuff, so I'm always in there with some true dyed-in-the-wool oddballs. And they still give out lollipops. Whole baskets of them, just laid out and unattended. I still take a handful like I'm seven, and no one ever says a word. Love the bank. (And I hate ATMs. I just don't trust them. How does it know how much I put in the deposit envelope? What if I typed the numbers in wrong? And -haha irony - I'm always terrified that I'm going to get robbed at an ATM. I feel all exposed.)

And today, as I was waiting to cross State Street to go deposit my check at the bank for the final time, the two guys standing next to me suddenly broke from the curb and darted into traffic - directly in front of a police car. They succeeded in pissing off everyone driving, and failed to use the crosswalk, so I guess they were also technically jaywalking. When they got to the other side of the street, they ran up the sidewalk about 10 yards, then stopped, turned, and gave each other a super-enthusiastic jumping high five. It was the random person moment of the week, and I only saw it...because I was going to the bank. Boo. One more moderately enjoyable activity eliminated from my schedule, thanks to rampant technology and high functioning smack-heads everywhere*. Boo.

*Upon review, I might need to clarify this statement. It is my father's contention that the majority of bank robberies are committed by heroin addicts. I have no idea how true this is, or where the hell his basis for this belief comes from. He's my dad, though, so I believe him. We all have our flaws.

Diversityay!

I doubt I'm going to shock anyone by saying this, but say it I will: Boston is one of the most segregated cities I've ever encountered. For a state so blue, this has always bothered me. If the states were individual socks, you wouldn't ever be able to figure who to roll Massachusetts up with. Eventually you'd just have to take our navy asses and ball us up with a really faded black dress sock, wear us with long pants when all your other socks were dirty, and hope no one noticed. And yet, here Boston is, all racially compartmentalized by neighborhood, often right down to the block. It's incredibly disheartening. (I'm not a sociologist, or an urban historian, so I don't feel comfortable tackling the socio-economic racial politics. Suffice to say - it's something that bothers me, and it bothers me daily.)

So imagine my delight when I discovered Boston Bowl over the weekend. Apparently everyone already knew about Boston Bowl, but for those of you who, like me, thought they were stranded in a metro-area choking with preppy-polo Ralph Laurenoclads for all your bowling and bar sports related needs, fear not. Boston Bowl has bowling, obviously - candlepin and regular - and an arcade, and pool tables, tons of weird food options, and plenty plenty plenty of beer. $6 for an aluminum bottle of Bud Light isn't going to win the award for best deal in town, but they let you run around with them unrestricted, and the draught beers are cheaper - even the Harpoon - if you and the people you're with aren't insanely impatient about waiting in line.

Anyway, I was many different kinds of pleased by this place, mostly because there's just this incredible dearth of comparable places in the city where you can go and see a representative from nearly every race, age and income tax bracket hanging out and having a good time. (Sidebar: I almost included Somerville's Good Time Emporium, in this category, but the bloom has kind of gone off that rose. Personally, I love me some Good Time, and I've never been anywhere else where I can play old-school arcade games - Original Ninja Turtles! The four-player one! - carnival shooting games, skee-ball, go-karts, laser tag, batting cages and never be more than twenty feet from one of about five full service bars...but if I had kids, I would not take them there after nightfall. And I'm fairly certain that if you lingered for long enough, you could catch some form of hepatitis in the bathroom.) Walking around the city in the days following my Boston Bowl initiation, I tried to figure out how they had achieved this feat. The answer is really quite simple: they succeed by shamelessly appealing to the gigantic dork inside everyone.

Not to sound like like that Amanda Bynes movie that came out last summer, but there is plenty of dorkiness inherent in every human. And no activity puts this on display better than bowling. Think about it - before you even set up your screen and pick teams, you have to surrender your kicks and don rental footwear. Now everyone is wearing the same shoes. Equal - fantastically evenly nerdy - footing. The only way to differentiate yourself here is to bring your own bowling shoes...dropping yourself immediately into the basement of bleatingly uncool footwear. Before you know it, everyone has their pants rolled up all weird, and is making up stupid nicknames for people on their team, and eating weird food that one normally doesn't encounter outside of a 4th graders birthday party...bottom line - you just can't be cool when you're bowling. It's one of those very rare great human equalizers. And maybe we don't have them in Boston (notice how I'm carefully side-stepping those loaded socio-economic issues again...not saying they don't exist - but this is just a blog entry about the socially soothing effects of the American bowling alley, after all) because we're all just too busy on our Massachusetts trip to let our guards down for more than five seconds at a time. This whole bloated superiority complex we all tend to take on from time to time (oh, honestly, stop with the denial, if you live here, you suffer from it too) is just really...tiring. When we let it go, we stop being so mean to each other and can actually hang out. Or maybe I'm totally off base. Maybe everyone in the city just digs bowling so much that they're all willing to put up with each others shit if they're at least separated by lanes and tables. Who knows. I told you - I'm not a sociologist. All I know is Boston Bowl is doing something everyone is appreciating the shit out of.

Plus, they give you free socks with every shoe rental. Free socks! Another great human equalizer. The powers that be at Boston Bowl should be nominated to some kind of state executive committee. Everyone could hang out, eat french fries, and wear free clean socks. Then it wouldn't matter that you can't roll up Massachusetts and bundle it with another state. We'd all have our own fresh pair, with the word 'bowl' right above the little flag logo. Great success.

Things We Learn About Alcohol With Age

1. 18 year olds can afford to be creative. Really. When I was 18, I would drink anything. Of course, scarcity was a major motivating factor there. But my favorite drink, for an entire summer, was Amaretto and orange juice. Amaretto and orange juice! Jesus fuck! If I drank that now I would immediately throw up, and then cry. But 18 year olds have livers like big juicy pomegranates, and 26 year olds have livers that resemble the human brain.

2. Whiskey is A Solitary Libation. Please respect that.

3. That 'beer before liquor, never sicker; liquor before beer, never fear' rhyme can be disproved in a variety of ways, none of which are especially pretty.

4. Champagne has its own set of rules. Rules that should be obeyed unless you totally don't care about publically engaging in bouts of insane giggling, impromptu speeches, or over enthusiastic dance moves.

4a. The only things you should mix with champagne are orange juice, cranberry juice, grape juice...ok, 'juice', Chambord, Creme de Kassis...

4b. Ok, mix it with whatever you want, just don't use Sangria. Especially 'sangria' concocted by your friends out of all the fruity shit they found in their fridge.

5. Never Mix the Grape and the Grain. How did I not learn this until I was 26? My father dispensed this crucial nugget on New Years Day, while I cried into my gingerale wondering how on Earth two (ok, two rather generous) glasses of red wine and 2 large helpings of Jack and Coke were making me curse the gods. Also, I should have remembered Rule 2.

6. If you're of legal drinking age, you shouldn't be drinking anything served out of a plastic garbage can or a bathtub. Especially if it's purple. I'm not saying 'don't do it', I'm just saying 'don't tell everyone in the office about it', because they'll judge you.

7. Rum Makes You Steal.

7a. Wait, that's just me? Whatever. There's one drink that makes you more likely to steal than others. If you're at a party, and they're serving that drink, do the decent thing and advise the host to protect their lawn ornaments accordingly.

8. Just because you can make anything into a drinking game, doesn't necessarily mean you should. Necessarily.

9. Some people sweat out booze the next day, some people do not. You need to know which group you belong to if you ever plan on drinking on a weeknight post-college.

10. If you don't have at least 3 different hangover remedies by the time you're in your mid-twenties, your mentors have failed you. And not to be harsh, but you need better friends.

Feel It

In the year 2007, a movie came out called 'American Gangster'. It was good. It wasn't great, but it was good. Although, I could probably sit in the dark and watch Denzel Washington eat soup for three hours, and emerge from the theatre proclaiming the experience worth the price of admission. Ridley Scott is pretty sweet too, (although if I were him I might have retired after Blade Runner. What else is left?). And Russell Crowe... his mere on-screen presence didn't cause me to hatch a vengeance plot involving the kidnapping of his dog, so that was a pleasant departure the usual. (No, I have no reason to hate him like I do. I just think he's a sucky actor, and honestly, it makes me feel left out that everyone digs him, and I totally do not. I think that if I had a cool accent and just acted really pissed off at everything on screen with me, people would tell me I was a good actor, too. It's not fair. You can't intimidate people into thinking you have talent. Well, maybe Russell Crowe can, sometimes, but it hasn't worked on me. Ok, Crowe? I'm not buying it. You stink.)

Anyway, the theatre in which I watched the movie in had lovely seasonal Harpoon on tap, so that quieted much of the animosity between Russell and myself, and made the Scott-direction that much more awesome. But the movie's appeal can't be explained by the Winter Warmer alone. (How could it be? They only let you buy one at a time, and I would have had to tromp all the way through the theatre, and then up some stairs, and then find my way back to my seat, holding an uncapped beverage no less.) There was some other element that made the American Gangster experience worth every nickel. Oh yes. The bananas soundtrack.

The ability to make a decent, original, surprising soundtrack to any event is a difficult task. Doing so for a movie must be (I imagine) that much more complex, what with all the copyrights out there just ripe for the infringing. Plus, movie soundtracks have to complement actual plot and character development, rather than, say, 'Joey's Going Away Party' or 'Chet's Engagement Soiree' or some other event that you will attend with 20 drunk friends who share your taste in music. A well executed movie soundtrack is a beautiful thing. And one you want to listen in your own home, on your own time? Spectacular.

Needless to say, I have found the American Gangster soundtrack pretty damn gorgeous. Along with supporting the actions of the characters in the movie, it's also ideal for washing dishes, or putting on makeup, or walking the dog, or picking out what to wear, or dancing around your kitchen to see if what you have chosen to wear will survive the evening. (I happened to be listening to it on New Year's Eve. I had many diverse tasks to complete.) It is incredible.

If you don't want to take a gamble on the entire cd (or you aren't one of the 19 people left in America who still buys cds) do yourself a serious favor and just get (by which I mean download, because I don't think you can even purchase a single anymore. Remember singles? Did itunes kill the single? So depressing.) Anthony Hamilton's 'Do You Feel Me' which is my favorite song of 2007, and most of the rest of the 2000's. If you don't sit down on the floor or cry or clap or something the first time you hear it...well, then you're probably just a whole lot more chemically balanced than I am, but that isn't really the point. You'll like it, I promise.

The soundtrack - and Mr. Hamilton's contribution in particular - made me like a Russell Crowe movie. There are transformative powers here.