Exercising Can Make You Fat and Other Such Absurdities

Bartok had somewhat of an emotional breakdown yesterday. Being the supportive friend I am, I went into my building’s stairwell for some privacy to talk to her for about twenty minutes. Since I’m incapable of standing still, I walked up and down the stairs repeatedly.

I was winded after three flights, and today I’m sore.

In the evening, I found myself sprawled on the couch waiting for Project Runway to start killing time with my roommate Tatas. She was watching the college ‘Dance Team’ nationals on ESPN 2 or something insane like that, although it actually isn’t as lame as it sounds. These girls are flexible like pretzels, have the precision of ballerinas, the coordination of hip hop dancers and do these impressively choreographed routines all with Vaseline on their teeth while smiling! It was then that I thought:

a. where’s my DVD copy of Bring It On and when can I watch it

b. I haven’t been to the gym in FOREVER!!!!

Stairs make me sore? My after work activity is power napping or eating on my futon in the fetal position? All this while inspiring young women from the University of Kansas are re-telling ancient Shinto mythology through sweat-inducing dance routines wearing spandex!

When did I become a sloth?!?

That question’s only for dramatic effect since I can tell you exactly when I stopped going to the gym. Sometime this past fall, in the waiting room of some doctor’s office, before I owned an iPhone in which to channel all my A.D.D., I started looking at magazines.

Note: I hate magazines. If I want to read girly shit I go online. If I want to read something meaningful I open a book. I guess I never just understood the concept of paying for literature that you’re going to throw away.

Anyway, I came across an article published by the pricks at New York Magazine entitled: “The Scientist and the Stairmaster: Why most of us believe that exercise makes us thinner—and why we're wrong.”

Since doctors tend to run about forty-five minutes behind schedule, I was able to read the entire article. Twice. The Wall Street Journal does a good job summing it up:

The idea that exercise produces weight loss is seldom questioned in workout-mad America, but Gary Taubes says evidence for this belief is, well, thin. Mr. Taubes writes in New York magazine that most studies on the link between swimming laps and losing weight demonstrate little beyond one widely accepted fact: “exercising makes us hungry.” In fact, he says, exercise may even lead to a weight gain, though he doesn’t deny its many health benefits.

Mr. Taubes, who drew controversy in 2002 for

a New York Times Magazine article on high-fat, low-carbohydrate diets, suggests that what really determines how fat or lean a person is has more to do with the body’s own internal programming.

Those of you interested in reading New York Mag’s full article can do so here, but be forewarned, it won’t make forcing yourself to get on the Stairmaster any easier. What I took away from the article (and this is an unprofessional summary) is that:

- When you exercise you burn calories. The more you burn, the more hungry your body makes you so you replenish what you’ve lost. I.E. You eat more

- Some chemist at Harvard thirty years ago invented the idea that overweight people are chubby because of lack of exercise as a way to explain to the rest of the world why Americans are so often obese

- Exercising has a ton of health benefits and is a positive thing, but won’t necessarily make you skinny.

I had to clasp my hands over my own mouth in order to not shout into the waiting room in utter outrage:

“EXCUSE ME?”

If I’m not getting thinner, what’s the point? I lose time and energy on the treadmill only to have a bigger appetite AND have to spend more money on groceries? Is that a joke? Don’t sign me up!

OK, exercising is good for you. So is spinach and not drinking alcohol. Doesn’t mean it something you go out of your way to DO all the time. And the more I contemplated whacky Mr. Taubes theory, the more it made sense to me. I’ve always been thin. As a child, I was frail. And in my adult life, I’ve gone through both hardcore exercising bouts and lazier periods always looking the same. Perhaps more toned while exercising, but barely. I’m just naturally twig-like. And it definitely makes sense that the only truly effective way to lose weight would just be to stop eating. French women are super thin and they don’t even know what a gym is. Sure most of them are starving, crabby bitches, but they further prove my point!

Needless to say, after ingesting that article, my gym participation rate diminished significantly. I also rationalized that I get plenty of doing other activities:

-Walking around the city to save on cab and metro fare (at least 2.5 miles a day)

-Dancing in stilettos (a tricky and intense physical movement)

-Shopping (trying on lots of outfits in a changing room is a work out)

-Chasing free cabs late at night (I often run)

-Bending down to pick up dropped jewelry (my earring backs are always falling off)

-Climbing up and down stairs to use the subway (for the express on 59th street that’s like 6 flights!)

See? My life’s exhausting already!

OK, it’s still no excuse. Why don’t we all watch the dance team from University of Kansas. If anyone can inspire me to get back on the Elliptical, it's them.

It's still me, Bartok!

So, after nearly 2 weeks of silence, I have finally gotten word from Miss Model Behavior!!! Since her departure, an unfamiliar silence with echoes of loneliness and an impending sense that I am destined to be an old cat lady, has descended over my life in the absence of our almost constant contact - as only good friends who live in different cities and therefore could never get sick of each other because we only see each other once a month - can tolerate. We do also switch up the mode of communication we exercise no discrimination or favoritism between our three main modes of communication: phone calls, text messages, and emails. On the upside, this technological vacation that has been imposed on my life as a result of her departure has opened up my schedule, and increased my level of productivity, letting loose all sorts of creatitity, ambition, and alternative occupations. In addition to having joined the BBC French Steps program in an effort to ajouter le français to my repetoire of romance languages, one of my favorite past times over the past two weeks has been trying to imagine, as my Italian cohorts would say, che fino ha fatto Miss Model Behavior. My three winning theories - assuming that she was not abducted or beaten to death with tropical fruits by fellow travellers because of her good fortune in chooseing the lone functional pay phone in the Miami airport, and did manage to leave the country - were that she had:

1. Died of too much fun. That perhaps on the yacht of some South American prince, maybe surrounded by the new line of Calvin Klein models, or, perhaps, if she was really lucky, in the company of the boys from my Dieux du Stade calendar (it's hanging next to my desk right now, I tell my boss it's for inspiration). Who knows, maybe she was finally overwhelmed by the amount of fun she was having and spontaneously combusted! I mean, it's feasible...




2. Gotten married and had ran away to some exotic and remote island like Fiji or the Quirimbas Archipelago. I, personally, happen to have an overwhelming and inexplicable interest in both places. Should this be the case, Miss MB would currently be surrounded by servants who are fanning her, attractive young men, and dressed like an empress. This is the saddest possibility for me, since, although still alive and happy, she would clearly have no intention of ever coming home.




3. That she never actually made it to Punta, but was lured away with the trick of some kind of linguistic misunderstanding due to the language barrier, and walked right into her own kidnapping. Who knows, she could be being held hostage somewhere in Buenos Aires as we speak. This theory does not have the sense of tragedy that the other two do, but the idea of her attempting to negotiate her way out of a situation like this using fragments of whatever language most resembled that of her captors and maybe some charades is entertaining. There is also the potential for some romantic rescue and happy ending in this theory too. No pain, no gain.

To my great relief none of my very rational and well developed theories are true! I received an email from Miss MB yesterday evening stating that she was back on the mainland of South America, bouncing around the country of Argentina for her remaining days in the Southern Hemisphere.

As I have been fantasizing about the fun that every other 20-something girl is having, while I, alone, suffer through monotonous days of responsibility and obligation and am forced to brave the misery of non-tropical January weather (BTW, thanks to all the hard work of previous generations and their efforts to pollute our planet, global warming has finally reached a point where the city of Washington, D.C. appears to be on the same thermostat as my apartment - it’s been in the mid 60’s all week). I have created a conception of Punta to be some sort of isla bonita de Sheer-Delight-and-Party. This fantasy of mine has, somewhat, taken over my mind, at least to the extent of replacing my games of virtual chess at work, and Punta has become some kind of mythical land that exists somewhere over the rainbow, requires a treasure map to reach, and is inhabited only by people whose company and compansionship I enjoy, or think I might enjoy based on similar interests (see photo at top of post).

Needless to say, my days are pretty dull.

So, to give you a feel for the island as it exists in reality, and prove that this isn't another one of my delusional attempts to entertain myself, I have included some quotes from Miss MB’s email:

“There has been some rain so we’re hoping weather will get better. When sunny is heaven.”

“The parties are out of this world, I actually have redefined the definition of party after this trip.”

And for sentimental reasons as well as for any of you who can relate to this sentiment,

“I miss writing soooooo much and would kill to be at a computer long enough to do an entry. Punta was incredible!!!!!”

So, there you have it, proof that Miss Model Behavior survived the first part of her escape from reality, seemingly unharmed. In fact, she may be returning, as anyone should from travels in foreign lands and cultures, optimistic (see quote 1); with a broadened or altered perspective on one's own culture or humanity as a whole (quote 2); and both re-enthused and energized about our own occupations and reality (quote 3). All signs point to her trip being a great success!

Just for a little variation and contrast, I’ll write more about my own life later.

Be My Guest

So the idea of a guest is not such a novel one. In fact it’s one of the most dreaded for me, especially at this time of year. To me, guest implies the obligation of hosting; and the idea of hosting implies the responsibility of entertaining, caring for, and generally being concerned about the well being of another person for a period of time that probably exceeds my tolerance (when I’m not getting anything out of it, it’s about 5 minutes). The way I see it, if I wanted children, I would have them. I don’t.

Frequently, guests are the culprits of much discomfort, awkward interactions, and an uncomfortable sense of obligation to perform on behalf of both the host and the guest. On the other hand, there are some guests that are generally welcome in my world. More favorably thought of guests sometimes include guest speakers, guest appearances on my favorite shows, and so following the vein of entertainment, today, I give you, myself, your guest-blogger. I am Bartok.

While Miss Model Behavior is out of the country gallivanting, completely and blissfully cut off from technology and reality, as most sane people know it, here I am, babysitting her blog. No, I do not share MB’s literary aspirations, or background in writing. My friendship with Miss MB began during high school while we were studying abroad in Italy. Our friendship began in the forum of debauchery that only 16 year old girls let loose on a small town in Italy, are capable of. We began with a minimal comprehension of the language being spoken around us and absolutely no comprehension of how a country that had, from our perspective, a grand total of 0 work ethic still “functions” and continues to be a legit global contributor.

Years later, we still wonder the very same things. We have, however, come to appreciate many Italian traditions and mannerisms. The Italian male maintains an elevated place in our hearts, and the month of August is, as the Italians ordained, a month of rest with no exceptions. I, personally, am particularly fond of the mandatory evacuation of all cities aspect of this tradition. It implies that all offices must be evacuated as well starting August 1, and the mandatory pilgrimage to a quality seaside location, uniformly known as mare for the entire month! It’s safe to say that our antics have only been shifted from suburban Italian discotecas to sites of mischief like Cipriani’s and the Inferno on this side of the Atlantic.

And, speaking of seaside pilgrimages, it has come to my attention that Miss Model Behavior is making the most of hers. The last time I spoke, she was calling from a payphone, having held true to her word to leave behind her beloved iphone and baby mac laptop, and has ventured into yet another country in which she knows nothing of the language, little about the geographic characteristics, and a minimal amount about its customs. It sounds like a recipe for success!

I had a momentary flashback when I saw the unfamiliar area code come up on my phone screen to countless other phone calls that seasoned our international travels. So many calls that filled the gap between departure and the switching on of the international cell, and served to either calm the pre-departure anxiety, and get ourselves excited for the adventures to come. She repeatedly tried, with gestures that I am sure are generally used only in drunken games of charades, to fend off assaulting non-english speaking travelers who claimed that she was monopolizing the only working payphone. I agreed that it seemed ridiculous that she had found the holy grail of the only working payphone in the entire airport. Not even we are that lucky.

Having developed and perfected the art of persuasion and emotional manipulation in countless relationships, I was finally able to employ those arts for good, and convinced Miss MB that she was embarking not on a safari adventure doomed to end in turmoil and disaster, but that this trip would be one of those life changing positive experiences that would be forever remembered in the history of great vacations. You saw the events list, how could it not be?!

So while my inbox is still flooded with potential party options from Miss Model Behavior, I am reassured that my childhood dreams of European country parties that involve multi-day trips to ostentatious villas where never ending games, entertainment, and debauchery ensue may still exist. It sounds like Never Never Land to me, well, without the pirates or Michael Jackson, and where the lost boys are actually millionaires, attractive, intelligent, have sexy Latin accents, and were born to appreciate, entertain, and spoil girls like us.

Oh, the possibilities!

Kill Me Karaoke Videos

Karaoke rarely sounds good, but it’s usually not this bad.

You guessed it. This time around at Cipriani’s Upstairs’ weekly Sunday night shit-faced singing shebang I had the genius to videotape what was going on. I wanted visual and auditory proof of the ridiculousness because I don’t feel anyone who reads this blog can fully understand what an embarrassment this entire establishment is to the human condition.

For juicy background details on Sunday’s at Cipriani’s Upstairs check out my previous article.

The brief 411: models, modophiles, creepy Italian men, Giuseppe, gold diggers and extremely drunk partiers gather together on Sunday nights in this private club to enjoy spending a few thousand on tables while singing along to karaoke.

DON’T EVEN WALK UP THE NARROW STAIRS TO CIP’S IF YOU’RE GOING TO STUMBLE.

You must attend this party entirely inebriated. Not doing so will result in death, as I’m pretty sure any sober person would hang themselves with a tablecloth from the rafters mere moments after having to endure this adult sing along.

Bartok and I prepared appropriately. We consumed an entire water bottle full of Bacardi and Diet Coke on the walk from my place to West Broadway. Then we jumped around like apes at Diva as the lounge was celebrating its Four Year Anniversary with a Euro dance party starting at 8 P.M. The Diva party was noteworthy, and I’d like to take the time to write about the fabulous Enrique look alike DJ, the relaxed vibe, and the delicious aromatic seafood at another date. For now, just know that Diva served at the perfect vodka heavy pre-gaming event to our eventual arrival at Cipriani’s across the street at 12:30 A.M.

So here you go. It’s dark, my camerawork sucks, the visuals are bad. What’s more noteworthy is the singing – or lack there of. What’s amazing is that when you’re standing on top of a table at this party, you actually feel like a superstar. Looking at these videos, in retrospect, you can barely even decipher what song is playing. Even the karaoke machine sounds like it’s on crack.

Observe my drunken genius in Video 1, as I attempted to create a lighting system for my movie with a candle.

Observe the cocktail waitresses slithering together on the bar in Video 2.

And please, don’t judge me.

Home is Where the Heart Is (Question Mark)?

I actually saw and spent time with the entities that gave birth to me this weekend, something that doesn’t happen too often since accessing them is similar to trying to get a direct call into the Pope. They travel frequently. By frequently I mean like three and a half weeks out of the month. They have a lot of phones. By a lot I mean like six. A completely futile system since they never seem to answer any of them, and when I call I’m never sure if the cell’s going to ring American style or beep and inform me that they’re in Europe or go static and inform me they’re probably in Asia and I should use the Asia mobile number I’ve failed to program into my phone despite the fact that I’ve had it for over seven years. Don’t get me wrong; we all love each other (with the assistance of consistent therapy). Our paths just don’t cross as much as some ‘more normal’ families (in my words) probably do.

Seeing them was all the more poignant because our reunion took place in our home. And because of unusual circumstances, I actually stayed with them, in my old bedroom – an event that hasn’t occurred in ions. I utilize our house. It’s empty three hundred and twenty days a year, in a fantastic location, can hold a great party, and has a lot of bathrooms, something a cramped Manhattaner especially appreciates. I love washing my face in one bathroom, filing my nails in another, showering in the master and putting on make-up in my mom’s. For someone who lives in New York-size apartments, the sense of this extensive hygienic space is oddly orgasmic. The point is that it wasn’t weird being at home. What was weird was being there with them. Sitting in my bedroom, hearing them chat a floor below me, I felt like a high schooler again.

I’ve found family visits such as these seem to follow a distinct pattern. You arrive with a really expensive bottle of Napa wine in hand, enjoy fab hors dourves, stake on the grill, and alcohol and you think, ‘wow, I feel really grounded. These people are great. We’re getting along well. Maybe they see me as an actual adult now instead of the unachieving moron they happened to spawn. I should come back more often. The free gourmet food is abundant. And they really know how to marinate meat!’

Then, much later…just when you’re glowing in your newfound familial happiness and are at ease at your laptop, feet up, finally with your guard down, they say the comment. A comment that references the biggest mistake of your life, a snippet from your dirty past, proof that they haven’t forgotten: You’re still the irresponsible girl who absentmindedly drove her bike into a tree, smashed the car diagonally into the garage, dyed her hair black and looked like a heroin addict – and they’re never going to let your forget it, EVER. They will hold all relevant information against you in a court of emotional blackmail whenever need be.

It’s around that time that you want to S.O.S. in a helicopter and get out fast.

I really can’t complain. This visit was conflict free, and it remains comforting to see them. Some other pluses from the trip:

1. I gave myself my most successful at-home mani pedi EVER utilizing my Barbie doll mother’s insanely extensive beauty tool kit.

2. I rediscovered some lovely/creepy childhood objects in my room such as my senior year prom beer mug, my high school eye glitter, and platform sneakers (who allowed me to wear those!!!)

3. I received a pile of new trendy clothes and super cute fuzzy warm ski pants from my mother. No one can say the woman doesn’t shop for me.

4. I remembered that since the great Model Behavior laptop crash of last year, a lot of old music is missing from my digital collection. I transferred all of my CDs home three years ago when they were taking up space in my Manhattan apartment I needed for shoes, so I got to flip through these albums again and re-install the childhood songs that brought back good memories. This included a lot of Italian pop, especially Nek and Eros, The Calling, All American Rejects, and yes I’ll admit it, one song by BBMak.

In the sprit of remembering memories through music, I leave you perhaps the most ridiculous song in the history of our planet which I re-discovered on a middle school mix CD of mine. Bartok and I used to sing this to cheer one another up in times of teen angst, because you literally can’t be sad and listen to Humpty at the same time. The lyrics (which, by the way, I know by heart) are just too funny.


For those of you with more romantic sensibilities, I leave you with another favorite I rediscovered. Nek’s Sei Solo Tu. I don’t even want to get started on my Nek crush since I feel he merits his own blog entry in which I properly worship his fabulousness complete with pictures, but I will say that while this may not be his best song, I felt like I’d been punched in heart when I heard it again.

Huh. Maybe that means there’s hope for my jaded, game playing, Manhattan heart yet.

Ode to the Animal: Part II

I knew the Linanimal’s solo trip to Amsterdam would be an irrevocable disaster from the get-go. My prediction was confirmed when she phoned me from the Rome airport and cheerfully announced that she had forgotten her passport.

“You what!??!?!” I exclaimed.

“I’m in some sort of security room. I think they’ll let me through though. I have my German identification,” she breathlessly broadcast.

From her tone, it was unclear if she was telling me this for my own personal amusement or because she was hyperventilating and desperately needed someone to talk to. I could never tell with her.

“You can’t travel without a passport. Even if you get through, how will you get back IN?” I pointed out. See. I was a smart fifteen-year-old.

“I just don’t want them to call my parents,” was Linanimal’s non-sequitur answer.

Who were this girl’s parents?

The Linanimal was sounding wackier by the minute. We hung up, and I never got confirmation that she had indeed made her flight and arrived in Amsterdam until several days later. Bartok and I were midway through our vacation in Florence (a vacation which deserves its own separate mini-series – a mini-series I’d write if I thought I could paste together any of those barely-memorable, frighteningly intoxicated nights, nights when the concept of unlimited alcohol was still a novelty…I think you the picture) when Linanimal called us shrieking, crying, barely decipherable, wailing things like:

“My life is superimposed on the ceiling. I’m so scared. The chair’s attacking me. So many colors. The window’s the devil. Waaaaah!”

It took us about forty minutes of Gandhi-like patience to get some straight answers out of her. The synthesized version is that she bought shrooms and thinking that a package full was a single dose, ate them all. Yeah. She’d ingested the equivalent of shrooms for a small house party all by herself. She was alone in her hotel room in Amsterdam, tripping, and freaking the fuck out.

Here’s a question for you all: What do you say to someone in that situation?

I credit Bartok for being thoroughly more helpful than I. She’s the one who got Linanimal to spit out story of what happened and suggested she throw up, much better advice than mine which was to “take deep breaths and close your eyes.” She didn’t want to close her eyes because doing so resulted in entering “a scary place.” I mean, what do you say to someone who’s in another country and thinks furniture is attacking them?

And here’s the second million-dollar question: How do you ever get this person off the phone?

It’s pretty difficult. Hence why Bartok and I traded off phone duty in front of Italian MTV for the majority of the afternoon. I wish I could remember more specifics, but I think in the end she puked. She called again several days later announcing that Amsterdam was fab and she’d seen the Van Gough museum. She’d also figured out that her parents would inevitably find out about her trip through her credit card and phone bills.

Duh.

You’d think as semi-professional delinquents we’d all have thought of that earlier.

Now I know you’re all currently musing that maybe Linanimal’s whole trip was a ruse. A prank. A way for her to entertain us while she spent winter vacation happily eating and laughing her ass off on her apartment floor. I considered the possibility. I mean, the entire trip was crazy and broke every school rule, not to mention international transit laws. But the truth remains that Linanimal returned to Italy with photo proof of her trip and several bras worth of narcotics that she never could’ve acquired in Italia. That’s right. She smuggled drugs from Amsterdam to Italy in her BRA. She then did shrooms (in the correct dosage) with many of our classmates, and everyone had a positive experience. I often regret not taking part as shrooms are a drug I’ve always wanted to try, and don’t think I have the nerve for as an adult.

For our purposes, the story of Linanimal culminates at the end of the school year party. She came shroomed out and naked, wearing only the German flag somehow stylized into a dress with safety pins. I think some teachers made her change.

After that, Linanimal ended up back in the States, then at St. Andrews in Scotland, then back in the States again, always with her devoted boyfriend from her hometown who she’d met right after we finished high school. In short, they’ve been engaged forever, not without some minor bumps, but those are other stories for another day, stories which I wouldn’t feel comfortable telling without Linanimal’s permission. And next month, Linanimal and her beloved are participating in a handfasting ceremony, which according to Linanimal is like a religious wedding ceremony but without the legal aspects because she needs to retain her parent’s current insurance in order to attain some sort of medication (see, she hasn’t changed that much). Yet at the end of the day, I think Linanimal is the only person I’ve met in this world that I can conclusively say has found true love. Someone who loves her with all her quirks. So wedding? Handfasting ceremony? I don’t think it makes a difference.

And you know what? I’m happy for her.

Ode to the Animal

Women cumulate many groups of female friends over a lifetime: childhood friends, sports friends, high school friends, international friends, college friends, work friends, partying friends, writer friends – the list goes on and on. The mystery remains who in this colorful array of female acquaintances will be the first to get married? Move to a suburb? Have a baby? The answer to these questions is rarely who you’d expect.

On a notoriously long phone call with Bartok this past weekend; we noted that the winner of the marriage race is going to be someone we’d have defined as kids as an unlikely candidate. This is the story of Linanimal, an eccentric female friend of ours who attended high school with us in Italy.

Why the name Linanimal? While this works as a codename, this is in fact what we often called her years ago. Her proper nickname began with an “L,” and we called her “the animal.” These two concepts were abbreviated and the ‘Linanimal’ was born. Linanimal was a high school female version of your stereotypical class clown. Her goal seemed to be the identifiable ‘outrageous one’ in every situation. She strived to make people laugh, and especially to make her close female friends laugh, a task she succeeded in, whether it was signing her credit card receipts at the local restaurant with the signature “S & M is good for me,” sexually eating muffins, or doing obscene things with bananas in museums on school field trips.

I fear not all of this humor was planned on her part. The animal was on tons of whacko medication that none of us had even heard of. She did have a stash of Adderall that circulated the school during exam time, but most of the pills she sucked down weren’t even stuff an adventurous high school druggie would want to sample. I never knew if she was crazy because she failed to take her meds regularly, or if it was actually the meds that made her hyperactively irresponsible.

I guess I’ll never know.

Linanimal was somewhat of an international as she had previously lived in Germany and spoke the language well. In English, she was often difficult to understand as she was eating 90% of the time and usually had her mouth completely full. Despite this fact, she remained remarkably thin. We found her simultaneously disgusting, entertaining, and somehow lovable – like a pet bulldog. Her sense of adventure was unparalleled; she explored new places with an ungraceful vigor and pushed the envelope until we all squealed with discomfort. Ultimately, we adored her for how far she went each and every day to make us cry with laughter.

While Linanimal was attractive (at least when her mouth wasn’t catapulting forth crumbs), she seemed basically A-sexual. She took no romantic interest in Italian men or our male classmates, although she would often excitedly hump furniture for our amusement. When Linanimal dressed up and swiped on eyeliner she was undeniably hot. Her wardrobe was sassy for a fifteen-year-old’s and we shared clothes. Bartok in fact, still to this day has one of her black halter-tops that never found its way back to Linanimal’s closet. Yet even decked out in a black evening dress, the animal surrendered to her inner comedian, whether by flashing her leopard skin bra or throwing her high heels into a nearby Italian military camp.

The animal’s Italian host family had an apartment right in the center of the city, which placed Linanimal at the center of most social activities. If you wanted to stay out all night, go clubbing, get drunk, or generally misbehave, sleeping over at the Linanimal’s infamously messy lair was a must. On any given Saturday night, half our high school would be technically “sleeping over” at her place. The good news is none of our parents ever communicated with each other and therefore remained oblivious to the fact that “sleeping over at Linanimal’s” was code for indulging in every illegal activity known to teenagers. The bad news was that if you weren’t tight friends with the animal, you ran the risk of getting locked out of her apartment and wandering the city streets till dawn. The basic rule remained that Linanimal’s apartment keys were always left outside the front of her house in a large plant. Whenever Linanimal would leave a bar to go home, there’d be a general chorus from everyone at our school:

“Remember to leave the keys in the plant! Leave the keys in the plant!”

As Linanimal wasn’t stable and appeared drunk at all times, we’d chant this to her continuously as parents would give instructions to a small child. We always knew that on a whim, if feeling evil, she might take the precious apartment keys inside with her, rendering the rest of us homeless for the weekend. Stumbling up the steps of Linaminal’s apartment at five in the morning I remember all of us secretly praying, “please let the keys be in the plant, please let the keys be in the plant.” Seventy percent of the time they were, thirty percent of the time you ended up sleeping in the drained fountain in the nearby piazza Rialto and taking the five thirty am bus back home.

Looking back, I commend Linanimal for being in the business of outrageous fun. Some of my fondest high school memories involve her at the focal point. She was one of the few students with a laptop that played DVDs, which meant every school field trip (of which there were a lot) the ‘cool kids’ got to chill with her on the back of the bus watching films beyond our years like Pulp Fiction, the notoriously scary K.I.D.S, and Boogie Nights. If in class, she’d sit in the front of the room with her computer and we’d watch the movies on silent with subtitles.

Linanimal referred to our school principal as “MoFo” (the abbreviation of ‘mother fucker’) often to his face and had a flair for making Italians as uncomfortable as humanly possible by utilizing her weird faces, broken Italian, and unusual eating habits. She once screamed at the top of her lungs at a pricey restaurant when served fish with the head still intact. And her general outrageousness extended beyond school grounds. She had the nasty habit of purposely dripping candle wax from her apartment window onto cars parked in the street below, often ruining the vehicle’s paint job. Linanimal also got a kick out of cleaning her room by throwing garbage out her bedroom window. These things caught the attention of the Italian police but she eventually got out of jail time by paying some sort of fine, a fine of which she ultimately only paid half. Note: Everything in Italy is negotiable.

When winter break arrived, the school broke down into various groups of friends that decided to vacation together. Bartok and I set off for Florence and Linanimal was determined to assert her independence by traveling somewhere by herself. We weren’t allowed to leave Italy without hefty paperwork from our actual parents. But our headmaster MoFo’s pesky rules were not going to stop Linanimal from going to the one place that people like her should never be allowed to go.

Yep, you guessed it.

Amsterdam.

To Be Continued…

Survivor: Hamptons Style

My posting schedule this week has been a little cracked out. Don’t worry. I’m chalk full of excuses, the most pertinent and truthful of which is that this weekend I suffered several near death experiences, all in the same 10-hour period. Stressful? Yes. The chords in the back of my neck have only now (four days later) begun to relax into their normal position, and that’s only because in an act of desperation I used one of my roommate’s sun salutations yoga stress-reliever DVDs. Note: old men in instructional yoga videos are creepier than your average pedophile. What I gained in flexibility I lost in peace of mind.

So how was my life endangered repeatedly? Well. This past Labor Day Sunday night could perhaps be defined as the night to be in the Hamptons. There was P Diddy’s silly all-white extravaganza, there were six zillion ‘fashion week parties’ (whatever that means), there was the end of the summer fiesta at that club that starts with a ‘T’ that I can never remember, and then there was Rocco’s Sunflower children’s charity event and finale blowout at Pink South Hampton hosted by Buddha Bar. Now we all know I hate the Hamptons and that I haven’t ventured there since Memorial Day. But when I got a last minute invite for a ride to Long Island on Sunday morning, I succumbed to the idea. I decided I’d begin and end my summer in the Hamptons on the two hot holiday weekends that open and close the summer. What can I say? I like symmetry.

The adventure that ensued is still too raw for me to talk about fully. I haven’t really progressed to that funny ‘ha ha’ looking back in joyful retrospect stage of a situation that was at the time, dreadful. I’ll kick off by saying that I was in a car with seven people. Uh-huh. You do the math. We also had six cases of Veuve Clicqout in our car’s trunk, so everyone’s luggage was on their lap or at your feet. The fact that there was NO space was remedied by the fact that our happy jeep-bus of seven was drinking insanely expensive sake out of Starbucks paper cups. Our hosts also had some champagne on ice. There was also the distinct odor that several joints had been enjoyed in the vehicle before Bartok and I had even been picked up. And how many bottles of sake had already been consumed before our arrival remained a mystery.

Our designated driver was not drunk, per se. I think he was just a really bad driver in general and one of those people incapable of multitasking: i.e. every time he’d speak on his cell phone, send a text, or smoke a cigarette (which was about 90% of the voyage) we’d often drift into the opposite traffic lane, come close to rear ending someone, or miss turns. The car had a satellite navigation system, a function the driver thought was purely decorative, as we got lost several times. My favorite moments on this hellish journey had to be:

1. After pulling over for a pit stop, when everyone was piling back into the jeep, our driver took off with two of us still in the parking lot and one girl’s body half-in / half-out of the moving vehicle. She’s lucky to be alive.
2. When I saw the ‘Montauk to Hamptons’ exit sign over five times, each from a different direction.
3. When our driver pulled into a jail / concentration facility to ask a cop for directions. The moment we pulled into this sketchy parking lot, complete with a guard, a high fence, barbed-wire, and a big yellow sign that read “Correctional Facility” to turn around, I knew our driver was officially insane and that it might be time to start text messaging people my will.

With everyone acting as a backseat driver and me shrieking out directions and survival techniques like an opera singer on steroids, we ultimately arrived at SAG Harbor with a newfound appreciated for life. I then made it my personal project to get me and the people I cared about as far away as possible from the aforementioned driver. Me and my girl’s had a conference. Our driver and our host (by association) were clearly out of their minds. And our host is someone I know quite well. I don’t know if it was the glare of the full moon or his eighth glass of sake after two joints, but I no longer saw him as an entity to be trusted. And if this was the drive up, did we really want to stick around to see what kind of Hampton’s accommodation these whack-jobs had to offer? From that moment on, the night metamorphosized into a game of survivor. And I think girls alone in the Hamptons is a much more frightening prospect than girls alone on a deserted island.

I proposed we find a way to get to Rocco’s party at Pink in Southampton because at least at Pink we’d know half the club. The majority of our friends were there, so I game-planned that at Pink we could recount our story of woe to sympathetic ears and locate a friendly soul who’d take us in for the night. This meant scouting prospective transportation from SAG Harbor to Southampton in a nearby bar, since our hosts were preoccupied drinking the Veuve we brought with us out of paper bags on the street. Every time a police car passed us, I feared for my life.

Luckily, after much research and over an hour of conducting interviews of eligible bachelors with licenses and cars, we found gentlemen responsible enough to lend us a ride to Pink, where they were going anyway. Our now officially drunk driver from before a little too carelessly tossed me his car keys so we were all able to retrieve our luggage out of the large, crack-den on wheels that had transported us to the Hell which is the Hamptons.

I like having millions of cabs surrounding me like Christmas lights. I like the 24-hour subway system. I like being able to walk everywhere. You mix with the wrong crowd in the Hamptons and you are STUCK in all caps. There’s no escape, except for the one you create yourself. And me and my girls epitomized that Destiny’s Child song ‘Survivor’ last Sunday night as we bailed out of SAG Habor looking for safer territory.

We left our overnight stuff in an anonymous friend’s trunk and made it into Pink by two thirty am. Naturally, the place was a shit-show. Rocco stripped and danced and fell off the bar. And for three blissful hours, as sad as it may sound, I felt safe and at home in the company of my fellow douchey partygoers. And when Pink becomes a sanctuary you know you’re in a freaky, emergency-like situation.






My bliss was naturally cut short because at five thirty am I had to deal with where we all were going to crash. I won’t go into details, but let’s just say my stress level rose another thirty percent. We ended up all four of us in a bed trying to get some shut-eye at six in the morning. Sleeping was an impossible task since house music was playing in the adjacent living room at mega-watts and the majority of our companions were engaged in those never ending, coked-out, seven am in the morning discussions about the meaning of life that are more painful than nails on a chalk board to listen to if you aren’t also high. Needless to say, our crazy driver and negligent host had failed to provide us with any kind of dinner, so at this point we were more starving than your average child in Somalia. One of the owners of the house kindly offered us all that was in his fridge: some wheat bread. So we nibbled on that and drank water and realized we surviving off bread and water – literally. We were prisoners in a Hamptons jail.

The minute I saw the sun had fully risen, I knew it was safe to venture out of the shed/refugee camp where we’d spent the night. I gathered my girls and high-tailed it out of there, stepping over unconscious bodies on my way to the door.

We walked around a random, cute, Hamptons street before seeing our equivalent of a rescue helicopter – a Hamptons Jitney put-putting by at eight in the morning. We all waved our hands in desperation, and even though we were no where near a Jitney stop, the driver pulled over and let us in. I think he just took a look at our smeared make-up, haggard faces, luggage, and weary walk and knew this was a legitimate emergency. And once we were on the Jitney, I finally felt safe. Traumatized, but safe. And just like in any rescue aid vehicle, support started flowing in. The Jitney hostess gave us water (be blessed), muffins (nourishment!), and a New York Post (where we cautiously read reviews of the parties we attended from the night before).

I wanted to kiss the Manhattan sidewalk when I exited the bus onto 3rd avenue. I wanted God Bless America to start playing and to crescendo at the moment I’d dive into my own warm bed, huddled under my covers in the fetal position like a genocide survivor. And the Hamptons – well, until I’m married with a mansion in Montauk – I’m never going there again.

Be Careful What You Wish For

Cajun Boy in the City recently and perceptively created an accurate analogy in which the NYC clubbing establishment Pink Elephant is Heath Ledger and I, Model Behavior am Jake Gylennhal whining, "I wish I knew how to quit you." This astute remark not only rang as true to my house-music damaged ears, but also reminded me to give Brokeback Mountain a second watch on DVD.

The truth is I’d like to quit Pink. I’d run into a lot less people I’d rather not see, my alcohol calorie intake would drop significantly, and I’d no longer have Bob Sinclair in my head 99% of my working hours. But as in dealing with any addiction, walking away cold turkey is rarely the best strategy. That’s why I’ve often wished a new Manhattan club, far from meatpacking or the 27th street strip, would open, providing me with a fresh, more private, and perhaps even less douchey location to waste my inebriated nights.

Finally, my wish has come true.

Sort of…

This Friday my friend Safari did the impossible – she took me to a club I’d never seen or even heard of that wasn’t a remake of another failed establishment. She described it as:

‘A new hotspot. Small. Intimate. Top crowd. Think Bungalow. Meet there 1 am.”

Naturally, I was hooked and Bartok and I began preparing outfits. Perhaps the best perk of writing this blog is that a great deal of social misconduct can be justified as “research.” So off we went and at around one thirty am climbed the rickety, filthy stairs which led us to this supposedly secret, new lair of treachery – the club upon which I’m bestowing the code name ‘The Inferno.’ Why? Because the activities taking place inside this undisclosed joint too closely mirror Dante’s description of the third circle of Hell.

When my eyes first swept across the club it appeared empty. The music sounded, as I’d describe, ‘lame.’ I’m not a big fan of large empty spaces when I’m going out. Breathing room is appreciated, but especially after one thirty I feel any place worth its salt should theoretically be rockin full of people. So I’ll describe my first emotional state upon entering the Inferno as ‘disappointment.’

The bar was void of human activity. The entire crowd consisted of six or seven tables in an elevated privet. Bartok, Safari, and I ascended the small stairs to mesh with our fellow party seekers. We said hello to our host, and around this time I was overcome by my second strong, reactive emotion of the evening, this one similar to a kick in the stomach – ‘horror.’ I was surrounded by dozens of baby models, some swaying back and forth in a seated, drug induced stupor, others performing lap dances, some grooving to their own queer beat, some spastically twitching as if being continually electrocuted by barbed wire. For those of you lucky enough to be ignorant of this phenomenon, I’ll explain that baby models are dangerously attractive girls, usually foreign, and always under the age of twenty-one (often under the age of eighteen) who hang out at places like Cipriani’s Upstairs and now the Inferno because of these institution’s extremely lax carding procedures. I wanted to open my mouth to scream but before I could manage our host (kindly?) stuck a joint in my mouth which I had to immediately focus on spitting out since I don’t smoke.

I was momentarily ‘wowed’ by the fact that this place was so chill and so clearly unconcerned with keeping their license that they were letting people smoke joints in public, until I noticed a man in a striped shirt doling out cocaine on his house key to the six baby models the surrounded him. Now I literally double taked. I mean, in the Old Fashion privet in Milan I once, repeat once, saw crazy Arabs do lines off their club table in public, only to be scolded by their bodyguards moments later. Even in Hollywood, Milan, everyone had the common decency to go inside the handicapped bathroom to get snow-blown. Here, keys of cocaine were being innocently passed around as if they were maraschino cherries. Had I taken a wrong turn up the creaky stairs and ended up in some sort of time warp ala Studio 54?

Me and my girlfriends shared a look of mutual shock before shrugging and pouring ourselves drinks. My first instinct was to have a Peroni and then high tail it out of there to attend some less novel location, like the city’s standard Friday night at Room Service. I mean, the DJ was playing 50 Cent, the place was empty except for the privet, the palm trees were faker looking than Bungalow’s, and the poor bathroom attendant was dressed in a joker costume (complete with multi-pronged hat). This just wasn’t my scene.

Three glasses of an anonymous brand vodka brand later, Safari, Bartok and I had somehow magically meshed into the crowd. The fact that the club was 80% women, 40% of which hadn’t celebrated their sweet sixteen, no longer seemed as bothersome as it has upon our arrival. Since there was no crowd surrounding the DJ booth, I gave him some musical instructions to which he was extremely receptive. The musical situation improved. At around two thirty, I again considered heading over to Room Service, the same moment in which our Room Service Friday night crowd strolled into the Inferno themselves. Wow. Maybe this place really was going to be something good.

I went to the bar and got the Inferno low-down from one of the Pakistani owners. It had been open about a month, but only for private parties and events related to fashion week. Jay-Z had been there on Tuesday, blah blah blah. You get the picture. They’d recently been letting ‘civilians’ in on a very limited basis – only people they could trust (probably a smart policy since the amount of illegal activity going on in there required two hands to count). The owner insisted he didn’t want anyone to know about the place. I admitted to him that in preparation of my arrival, I had googled the club’s real name and come up with nothing. And google’s a hard monster to hide from. So I promised the owner I’d write about my experiences at the club with the utmost discretion for the time being. Let’s not fool ourselves. In six weeks, this place will be the new '