Dietary

Let's talk about what I ate today, because I'm a little on-the-fence about it:

- 8oz. of Red Bull
- Salad with chick peas, grilled chicken, carrots, croutons, parmesan, and Italian dressing
- 12oz. of Red Bull
- 8oz. of French Vanilla coffee (from one of those fake ass machines)
- 8oz. of Red Bull
- 4 Southern Comfort & Cokes
- 4-5 humongous shrimp
- most of a plate of saffron rice
- 1.5-3lbs. of lobster
- 20oz. of Yuengling
- 8oz. of Red Bull

Hmmm.

Liveblogging Leigh Stein

Leigh: guess what I just finished
Hipp: a story?
Leigh: The Great Gatsby
Leigh: for the first time
Leigh: you definitely write like him
Hipp: are you hitting on me?
Leigh: I never said I liked his writing
Hipp: if someone who hated the Beatles told me my songs sound like the Beatles, it would still be a compliment

How To Have Fun #11

Talk and gesticulate like Carl Sagan. All the fucking time.

As The ____ Falls Down

Sarah: I am always shocked when you talk about marriage and weddings.
Me: It's like pooping. It only takes a long time if you're not prepared already.

Confidential to Jonathan, Clifton, New Jersey, East Coast, United States, North America, Western Hemisphere, Earth, Sol, Milky Way, Infinity

I would wake up where this girl is.

How To Have Fun #93

As soon as the subway car slows down, put your hands on both doors and start grunting under invisible strain. Just before the doors open, go from grunting to a full-on Hulk shirt-tearing scream as though you're tearing the doors open yourself.

Quality time with the family

Depending on how you look at it, there's something either very wrong or very right with my family.

Mom: Maybe he was a jailbird that flew the coop!
Poppop: What's he in for, robin a bank?
Mom: I think he's too chicken for that. Probably jaywalking.
Poppop: Then put him in the game. He's pigeon today.
Mom: Let's not start this again, we're sure to egret it.
Poppop: Yes, plus it's almost flew season.
Mom: That's definitely a fowl.
Poppop: I was just winging it.
Mom: Wren it this going to stop?
Mom: Now you're just parroting Patti Flagler.
Poppop: I'm chicken to stop it.
Poppop: Just being cagey about it.
Mom: I'm not swallowing that!
Poppop: Then continue to flounder.
Mom: C'mon, that was a cheep shot!
Poppop: It was on the breakfast special board at Owl's Restaurant.
Mom: That was a HOOT!
Poppop: Most good yokes are a hoot.
Mom: Yeah, I was cracking up.
Poppop: Eggzactly!
Mom: I dyed laughing!

Me: The two of you form a singularity of simplemindedness. Buncha loons.
Me: I mean, totally cuckoo.
Mom: Stop clucking.
Me: Save the hen-pecking for the husband.
Mom: You're going off half cocked.
Me: I didn't see that. What a dodo I am.
Mom: A real birdbrain.
Me: Well, birds of a feather, they say.
Me: You're just mad I left the nest, despite my having developed many of the cardinal virtues.
Me: What's the problem? Not getting the yolk?
Mom: Toucan play at this game.
Me: It's probably easier for me—it is my stork and trade, after all.
Mom: Stork won't fly.
Me: Don't tell me what I pelican or can't say. You've got a lot of gull.
Me: But I know you're just falcon around.
Mom: Good one. Can I use that with Poppop?
Me: I'm trying to figure out a way to turn archaeopteryx into a pun.
Mom: that would be coo.
Me: Success, of course, would be I'd be immediately ostrichsized.
Me: In one fell swoop, of course.
Mom: this makes my cranium ache.
Me: I know, it's sparrowing.
Me: But it's something to crow about, for sure.
Mom: I think it's easier for dudes than for chicks.
Me: Silly goose.
Mom: Sean's in the minors and has a short season.
Me: Do they keep a caged canary on the field to warn them of gas leaks?
Mom: I don't get that one.
Me: Minors
Me: Miners
Me: Sorry, I was being loony
Mom: Don't start
Me: Beats being henpecked, I guess.
Me: But really, having a kid just means that eventually, you'll have an empty nest.
Me: So, to me, people who have kids are out of their falcon minds.

Poppop: But mostly, they are gullible.
Me: Well, it was work chicken into.
Poppop: Only if you're pigeon for the Mets.
Me: I used to be a finch-hitter, you know.
Me: I would hit fly balls. Then the fans would tar and feather me.
Poppop: How many at bats did you have?
Me: A lot, but everything I hit was fowl.
Poppop: I remember that. It was against the Cardinals I believe. Paul Byrd was pitching.
Me: I mean, all things being eagle, that was pretty hard to swallow.

Keeping up with the Cardassians

I'm not going to pretend I know what the hell is going on in pop culture. I assume, to some degree, that if I don't know who someone is or why they're famous, it's my fault. Upon doing research on someone I don't know, I tend to find out why they're famous, and it usually makes sense. I even understand the girls from The Hills. Sort of.

But I don't know why the Kardashian family is famous. I've looked it up before, but the evidence must have been so underwhelming that it just didn't stick with me because I had to look it up again today. As far as I can tell, the reason they're famous is because they're on TV, which isn't really enough reason for anyone to be famous. I suppose it might also be because Kim Kardashian has enormous breasts and was in a sex tape with someone else that no one knows, but again, there are amateur sex tapes all over the internet, and no matter how hard I stare at them, I still don't know who any of those people are. And believe me, I've tried to find them.

There's an argument to be made that they're famous because the former head of the family was a defense attorney for O.J. Simpson also those thousands of years ago, but I'm pretty sure that any lawyer that wasn't on the prosecution in that trial was working for the defense. And even that doesn't pan out, both because the mother is divorced from him now and I sure as hell haven't seen Robert Shapiro's family on fucking TV. (It's entirely possible they have been on TV in the last three years, when I didn't have a television.) Is it because everyone has K's in their first names? Isn't that a dangerous trick, though? If you have three kids, all with K at the beginning of their names, are you trying to create some sort of boringly Nazi-ish acrostic?

I have to say that in the years before I moved to New York and went without television for the most part, I didn't watch much TV. By which I mean I didn't do much channel surfing. The whole reality craze has passed into primacy without my paying any attention to it, save for the first season of Survivor and watching The Real World 's London and second New York seasons. I think I even watched the first two seasons of Road Rules, although I can't imagine why. There's nothing real about these shows. There's nothing artful about their artifice, either, and I'm boggled why anyone puts up with it. I understand that, necessarily, to be a reality TV star on a successful show, you have to be so batshit insane, self-involved, or emotionally unstable that you make for interesting TV.

But that's not reality.

Reality is boring as fuck. It's not rich, entitled sixteen year olds planning a party that would make the Vatican look like it was decorated by Chuck E. Cheese. It's not celebutantes who don't have to work for a living by virtue of the fact that they're rich and wear little-to-no clothing, and it's definitely not giving those same people a TV show that will ensure that they never have to do an honest day's work in their life.

If someone made a reality show about my life, which, as far as I've been able to tell, occurs in real-time with little or no editing except by the fanciful cuts of my own memory, it would be about 40% sleeping, 40% sitting in a Tribeca office and writing about New York while barely moving anything but my fingers, 5% drinking at bars or at home, 5% writing/playing music, 3% writing in general, 3% eating, 3% reading, and 1% reading on the fucking subway. Most of that is interesting enough that I enjoy my life and don't fall asleep while living it, but it's certainly not filmable. So I don't begrudge Mtv for not knocking down my door to start producing season one of Old Man Hipp, the cerebral F train travelogue of a man coping with his diminishing youth and advancing waistline. But I've seen these other fucking reality shows, and living my life sure as shit beats watching theirs, so I don't understand why anyone would.

Now, if this were a scripted show about the real life trials and tribulations of a Cardassian family in the twenty-fourth fucking century, I'd put that shit on my DVR with the option to "Save until I delete."

And I never would.