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Recruiting some new fans for my show
Cute cards and woe-is-me thoughts
As you may remember, my sister gave my mom a card for her birthday and I felt she’d chosen an unfairly cute card which is totally the kind of thing she does. This is the card:
Well I’m happy to report that I held my own, card-wise, with the following:
In other news, I seem to have fallen into whatever-you-want-to-call-it where unless I’m in motion I’m kind of depressed. This is a particularly undesirable place to be because what it means to me is that I’m not really okay with my thoughts and myself and my current everything. Could I be less specific and less articulate? I could, just you wait. See, I had meetings in LA yesterday and the day before because I’m very important and while to-and-fro-ing I felt like I was accomplishing stuff and doing what I should be doing and here we go and I’m on my way and I’m not stagnating and etc. But today I have less on the agenda so I feel blah, but actually what I feel is that I should be dealing with all the moving stuff I need to deal with, which I really don’t want to deal with. So I guess what I’m saying is it’s less about being in motion than about my not wanting to deal with moving. Also, I have a lot of articulate and thought provoking and philosophical things to say about myriad topics including moving, Marvin, door slamming, adulthood and other stuff so you should probably clear your schedule.
Photos from the LOOK premiere party
I’ve been promising photos from the LOOK premiere party where I broadcast my show live and hosted the live stream and I think tonight is the night because LOOK is premiering on Showtime at midnight.
Here’s a photo of the corner of Cinespace where I did my show. Please admire the lovely loveliness.
And then here’s me in my corner. (more…)
Have I mentioned how much I hate PASSION?
Not genuine passion, but passion as buzzword. It was the topic of my latest McSweeney’s column. You should probably read it!
And then last night while looking at Twitter I discovered that at the Westin, each employee’s nametag includes their passion (it’s a policy that goes back to 2008 apparently). I retweeted the aforementioned tweet and received a direct message from the person who tweeted it, thanking me for the retweet. I felt sort of bad since my retweeting was coming from a place of “look at this bullshit, it’s everything wrong with the world and specifically what I lampooned in my column” as opposed “I think this tweet is awesome and want to share it with my followers.” I didn’t feel TOO bad though as I’m pretty sure the direct message was automatic. (I realize this paragraph makes no sense and sounds like the death cries of an epileptic toucan if you aren’t on twitter.)
Anyway, what exactly is my problem with passion anyway? It’s the disingenuity of the way it’s being used. It’s the flattening of personality. It’s the commodification of enthusiasm. It’s entirely sales driven. The people who won’t shut up about passion don’t give a fuck about your passion, they just want you to have one because it helps the bottom line.
Don’t believe me? Read this about the Westin’s passion tags.
Dismounting my high horse now.
Win an invite to the LOOK premiere party
So as you know, I have five invites to the LOOK premiere party (where I’ll be streaming my show live) to give away and I’ve been going back and forth, up and down, inside and out, to and fro, zig and zag, ass to elbow, soup to nuts, a to z, a to zed (for UK readers), turnips to hedgehogs (just made that one up) trying to figure out how to figure out how to figure out how to… WHOA. I got stuck.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to determine who should get the invites. Here’s what I’ve come up with.
First off: You have to be in the LA area or be able to be in the LA area on the night of Sept 30.
If this is you and you’d like to enter the contest email me your name and pertinent info (email to alisonrosenisyournewbestfriend AT gmail DOT com and put LOOK CONTEST in the subject) and tell me in a couple sentences why YOU should get to go. Then I’ll put the entries in some kind of receptacle and randomly draw five. Or maybe I’ll judge it on the merit of what you write. I haven’t decided yet. I realize that’s shitty for you but that’s just me… an asshole.
SEE YOU IN LA!
Actually, I’ll be seeing you in Brooklyn first because I’m doing my show this Sunday and I believe Barry Schuler will be my guest and we’ll be talking about LOOK and the party and other stuff. How excited are you? Very.
Clip from my appearance on The Joy Behar Show
Lady Gaga's meat dress and other VMA thoughts
I’ll take three yards and use the leftover to make a scrunchie!
I have a lot of thoughts about Lady Gaga’s meat dress, thoughts which I’m going to share with you because you’re sitting over there looking lonely and like you might need a friend, preferably one who has thoughts about dresses made of meat. Actually, I have questions and thoughts. The questions?
Was it really raw meat?
Does it have to be refrigerated?
Does it smell? (What happens around dogs?)
What happens if you get the dress too close to a heat lamp?
Can you wear pork after labor day?
I mean, I should say that I find the dress brilliant. Not “Brillz” and not “brilliant” in the British slang way meaning “cool” but brilliant as in ingenious and clever because it’s the most talked about thing to come out of any otherwise pretty boring VMA show.
Also I find PETA and animal rights activists’ outrage over the dress perplexing because it’s not as if Lady Gaga is suggesting this is a hot look for fall and people all over are going to slaughter animals to wear their muscles. If anything the dress makes you think about the other parts of animals we use (leather, fur, etc.) and suggests those aren’t that different than bloody cuts of meat. Were the dress fashioned out of seitan or tofu or rice pilaf, the onlooker wouldn’t be forced to consider the brutality of fashion. Not that Gaga was intentionally making this particular point. She claimed today she was saying she felt like a piece of meat.
Also? I’m pretty sick of this Taylor Swift/Kanye West stuff and I was already sick of it after about a week of hearing about it when it happened. They’re like a couple that is really annoying when it fights and then even more annoying when it makes up.
Also? I think that might be all.
Oh! Yes! If you have questions for Angelina from Jersey Shore tweet them to @bcthomas, my radio pal, because he’s interviewing her this weekend and he wants to collect questions from my viewers or, in the case of this here blog, my readers. So get on that.
Also, I love you.
View from the balcony of my new favorite place
A sad and not very funny at all blog post which is also long
This will be a surprise to no one, but one of my defenses is to make jokes. It’s also one of my hobbies and oftentimes part of my job and something which brings me joy. But it’s definitely a defense, too. Recently Marvin and I were at a support group for people with parakeets and they were talking about portacaths. For those who don’t know, a portacath is a catheter implanted under the skin for people who need to be given IV drugs frequently or whose veins need to be accessed often (as in chemo or apparently hemodialysis, thank you wikipedia) and it saves unnecesary wear and tear on the veins and skin and instead puts it in the chest. See, I just made a joke and it wasn’t even funny. The point is everyone recommends these portacath things even though Marvin was resisting but more on that later. So there’s also something called (or referred to) as a “power port” which is like a portacath but has two areas that needles can be inserted into, or something. There was some discussion in the group about the differences. “What else can you do with a power port?” asked someone. “You can plug a hair dryer into it!” I wanted to yell, time and time again. I’m pretty sure everyone appreciated my biting the inside of my cheek instead. Then later a woman was talking about how she’d had a whole bunch of stuff removed and if she needed surgery again she wasn’t sure what was left to take. “Your money!” I wanted to yell. I’m pretty sure that one would have been met with laughter and applause and quite possibly the entire support group (“for patients, caregives welcome”) would have fallen at my feet and asked if I’m a professional. Then they would have told Marvin how lucky he/she is to have me around since my effervescent outlook surely keeps the dread at bay. I tell myself and Marvin this all the time. But I didn’t say it on the off chance that instead of making me queen of the support group they might turn on me and wonder who let this person who doesn’t even have The Marvins speak.
Anyway, Marvin availed him/herself of the portacath mostly because he/she was being pressured into it and it turns out that it was not the big nothing kind of outpatient procedure we’d been hoping for but instead the doctor was right when he said it would feel like someone punched you in the chest. I mean, it was outpatient and on the scale of procedures at the hospital not a major one, but Marvin was in pain after and was also kind of angry and just not having any of it.
So then the day after, Marvin and I went to a meditation class a the hospital not because Marvin wanted to but because he/she though it would probably be a good idea since the class is to reduce stress and learn to manage anxiety.
Though I don’t regularly meditate I’m fairly open to all that airy hippie shit and read self-help books and have had my head shrunk on numerous occasions and think it’s important and so it wasn’t hard for me to get into the groove. To grok it. To dig it. To vibe with it. To feel it. I’m noticing that apparently the only phrases that are coming to me are ones I’d never use because I’m not an asshole. Or rather I’m not that kind of asshole. Language has turned on me! Anyway, you get my point. Marvin on the other hand is trying to be open to meditation but I’m pretty sure fell asleep and slept through the class. I meanwhile imagined myself in a tiny canoe made out of a peapod, like the kind a mouse would ride in a Disney storybook, and I was bobbing along peacefully in the gentle waters in my peapod boat, listening to myself breathe in and out. The sky was reddish and I’m pretty sure my friends, The Rescuers, were nearby.
But then the woman leading the class told us to imagine we were standing on a beach, either in the sun or in the moonlight, and I chuckled a little to myself because couldn’t she tell I was in a boat? I was really enjoying the boat, too, and I didn’t want to have to come in to shore. Bitch kept talking though and before long I had to drop anchor and stand on the beach, which is not a euphemism in this case.
Then I started thinking about little Marvin and how I’d walked in on Marvin wearing an old, faded oversized pajama top that buttons in a way that doesn’t irritate the portacath, eyes red and rimmed with tears beneath his/her glasses with a bereft look on his/her face that said, “I’m breaking, I don’t know how to do this anymore,” the daily bullshit suddenly stretching out into a path of discomfort so total it obliterated the ability to hold out hope, to cling to small pleasures, to imagine a time the calendar won’t hold a series of frightening and possibly painful appointments, to feel safe in his/her body again.
And suddenly I ached to hug Marvin, to protect Marvin with my own body. And I began crying, thinking about how I wished I could just pick Marvin up on my own back and carry him/her until he/she was strong again. I imagine this is how a parent feels when their child is in pain. And the fusing of me with Marvin was so complete it simply became a situation where I’m in pain because Marvin is in pain. And then I wasn’t really meditating anymore, I was just sobbing.