Archive | Uncategorized

I’m sitting here waiting for the mover to come and give me an estimate and I should probably be doing something moving related, like throwing out stuff or packing but instead I’m going to sit here writing a blog post about Mad Men because I am very devil may care and also I’m totally over moving. I don’t enjoy it on any level. I think it’s for assholes.

I’d just like to point out that in episode 2 of season 4, Dr. Faye Miller said to Don, when he asked her to dinner (she declined) that he’d be married within a year. So really his engagement wasn’t so out of the blue since it was not only foreshadowed, but predicted.

That is all.

I have a lot of things I need to talk about but I can only talk about some of them and so I’m going to say up front that this blog post is going to be frustrating and self-indulgent and probably melodramatic. It’s also going to be lemon-scented and square-shaped. It will not have wings. (more…)

This will probably come as a giant surprise to you, but I wasn’t the coolest kid growing up. In fact, I was kind of a dork. I hope you didn’t just take a sip of anything and then spit it all over yourself when I dropped that bomb. I’ve been writing some stories about all of this, stories which are true, and I’ve decided to excerpt them. And by excerpt I mean copy-and-paste. Here’s is one. Please love it. Or don’t. I don’t really care because that’s how cool I am now. (Like Ronnie advised Sam in the Jersey Shore house, I’m just doing “me.”) (more…)

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.

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.

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.