Monthly Archives: October 2002

By this time tomorrow I will be on a flight to the Czech Republic. I am being sent there to do research by a producer who has commissioned me to write the score for a musical about Terezin, the concentration camp just outside of Prague.

People keep telling me to have a great time.

I will be spending a day in the Jewish ghetto, a day interviewing Holocaust survivors, and two days at a concentration camp. I’m not sure what it will be like, but somehow “a great time” seems unlikely to be an apt description.

In my absence, so that my loyal if small fan base might not feel abandoned, this man and his dog will be guest blogging for me. None of us is quite sure yet how this will work, but we hope you will enjoy it. If you don’t, blame the Nazis. If it weren’t for them I wouldn’t be going to begin with.

I just hope I’ll be allowed to take my knitting needles on the plane.

Because otherwise it’s going to be a hell of a long ride.

My immediate supervisor at my day job has been out of town this past week, so her duties were distributed among the support staff in her absence. A co-worker and I got the job of assigning tasks as they came in (it’s a little more complicated than this but it would be so mind-numbingly dull to describe that reading it would probably cause you to become narcoleptic).

Ordinarily I don’t care about my day job at all. I waltz in late, leave early, do just enough work to appear competent, and spend as much time as possible eating and gossiping with the other support staffers.

The taste of power changed everything.

I became angry when I thought co-workers weren’t working hard enough. I stayed two hours late yesterday to make sure everything got done. Someone called in sick today and I was certain she was lying.

Thank God my supervisor gets back tomorrow, because I am beginning to love this way too much.

I have volunteered to write the songs for a kids’ show being put on by a group that uses theater to teach life skills to kids from Hell’s Kitchen. The kids write plays with songs in them that they then perform along with adult actors and directors. But the songs need music, which is where I come in.

The problem here is that these are street kids and they have written songs that are clearly intended to be R&B ballads and hip hop dance numbers.

I am about as capable of writing a hip hop dance number as I am of laying an egg.

Maybe I can convince them that some nice Viennese waltzes would be more dramatically appropriate.

Yesterday, in a sharp departure from my policy of waiting for him to get in touch with me, I e-mailed W.F. and asked him if he wanted to get together some time.

This turned out to be a mistake.

I got an e-mail back from him today saying he’d love to get together but not on a date, because he didn’t want to be dating anybody right now.

I hate him.

Even if he is a fat sexual compulsive who has any number of good reasons not to want to be dating anybody right now.

Or ever.

Tonight I had an altogether new experience, which I am going to call an undate.

Several weeks ago I got a response to my planet out ad from a guy named N.N. who was about to move to New York. His e-mail and profile were charming, but the picture in his profile was so unattractive that I knew I could never love him. So I e-mailed him and told him that, since posting the ad, I had acquired a boyfriend (neither completely true nor completely false), but that I’d still love to meet him if he was interested in making friends in the city.

So he moved here a couple weeks ago and we arranged to meet tonight. I was surprised to see that he was nowhere near as unattractive as his picture made him seem. I mean, he’s no Peter Bacanovic, but I wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating crackers. (Of course, the way I have been leading my life lately, it’s difficult to imagine somebody I would kick out of bed for eating crackers, but that’s neither here nor there.)

In any case, things were fine for a while, until he asked about my boyfriend. The problem, of course, was that when I first wrote him, I had two reasonable facsimiles of a boyfriend, and now I have none.

So I lied.

I am a terrible liar.

The more I said, the less sense I made and the less believable I was, and so the more I felt I had to say to try to make more sense and be more believable, and so the less—well, you get the picture. In the end I wove such a Byzantine tissue of lies, truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, and pi-truths that I clearly sounded like a creature from another planet.

So it doesn’t matter if I decide he’s attractive enough for me to love, because he thinks I am an ALIEN FROM OUTER SPACE.

How do I get myself into these situations?

I got a reply to my planet out profile from someone with the user name “serious top.” The subject line was “your the one.” I quote his message in full (N.B.: to appreciate his response, you must know that in my profile I refer to both skydiving and chocolate chip cookies):

“our first date will be skydiving, chocolate chip cookies, fucking and a
lot of conversation to find out about each other. However, right not I
can say I love you.”

Right not I can say I love you?

The ambiguity here is almost too much to bear. I might have to respond, if only to find out what this could possibly mean.

In which case maybe we can just do the skydiving, cookies, and fucking and skip the conversation to find out about each other.

Come to think of it, that’s not a bad general rule for dating.

I am turning thirty in less than four months.

All my friends who are over thirty tell me that the thirties are (or were, as the case may be) much better than the twenties.

I am full of hope that this is true. I mean, they could hardly be worse, could they?

Could they?

I know it’s wrong. I know it’s a clear indication of a deep and insidious character flaw. Reason and duty cry out against it.

But I am in love with Peter Bacanovic and I want to bear his children.

Please forgive me if you can.

My friends B.N., D.R., and I are inventing a game.

It’s called Off the List; or, Judging Harshly in Secret.

We’re still working on the specifics, but here are some general principles:

Each player will be dealt a hand of cards that will say things like “Can you believe what he’s wearing?” and “Don’t say anything, but I slept with her boyfriend.” At each turn, a player will select one card from his or her hand to compare with one card from another player’s hand. If the players have matching cards (two “That haircut is a Hallowe’en costume, right?” cards, for example), then they can take points away from a third player without that player’s knowing it. So you have no idea how many points you actually have and how many have been maliciously taken away from you until the end of the game.

There will also be cards that players will be forced to select at various points throughout the game that will say things like “Your second-best friend overhears the nasty story you tell about her to your best friend. Lose 50 points,” and “You manage to swallow the note you wrote about your boss’s personal hygiene just before she enters the room. Get 100 points.”

None of this will distract me, of course, from the other game I’m working on, which is a Golden Girls version of Clue.

I am wildly excited.

I have found a web site through which one can buy titles of nobility.

For less than the price of a cup of coffee a day for a year, I am going to become a viscount.

It’s unclear to me whether this title is hereditary, but since the odds against my having any children are quite high, I’m not going to worry about it.

Once I have my title, I will force all my friends and sexual partners to address me as “My Lord.”

Oh, wait, I already do.