A Public List of My Preferred Baby Names

Since I'm rapidly withering on the vine and prospects for me having a kid within at least the next 12 - 18 months look unlikely, I've decided to post my fantasy baby names publicly, since all of my friends always steal them anyway. So go ahead guys. Shatter my dreams. Steal my grandma's name. Go ahead. I'm cool with it. Because I don't think I really want to go nine months without bourbon anyway. I mean, just beer and wine? For nine months? Forget that.

Girls:
Alice
Ruby
Nora(h)
Vivian
Charlotte (maybe)

Boys:
Emmet
(that's it for boys, actually)

There. Take them, they're yours. Who needs kids anyway? All I need is my solid gold car and rocket house and I'll be fine.

Why I am not successful, Part 1: I am a trivial person

It's 11:30. So far today I have made particularly tasty coffee and a stand-up omelet, perused dresses on the internet, and written an email to my sister. I would like to point out that today is a Monday and that I am self-employed. (OK, I sent out one press release. I am not entirely horrible, just mostly horrible.) However, I should also point out that if I worked in an office my productivity output would be about the same. What I'm trying to say here is: I am not a successful person.

For years I have imagined that my essential problem was laziness. But I wrote a book! How could I be lazy? It's also possible that I'm stupid. But I've met people far stupider than myself and they seem to be able to navigate the World of Human Adulthood.

Then today, as I was flipping through some magazines, I realized my problem isn't that I'm lazy: it's that I'm just incredibly un-serious. When presented with the New Yorker and The Atlantic what do I do? I flip to the back to check out the comics caption contest and the funny advice column respectively, then discard the rest of the magazine.

I'm silly. Flaky. Childlike. Nonsensical. A human non-sequitur. Incapable of earning a living because, while I technically have a profession, that profession, whimsically enough, doesn't pay actual money. (Writers are paid in fairy dust, rosewater, and dish-soap bubbles.) I traipse through the forest of my imagination all day long and tend to injure myself if I try to work at anything. Office-work results in papercuts and entanglements in staplers, and it's only thanks to the grace of God that I haven't killed anyone while waitressing. (I think I'd make a fantastic kindergarten teacher but I find flesh-children rather noisy.) I'm an outstanding ghost-tour guide, I will say that. Mainly because it is a profession predicated on being completely bonkers.

What can a person like me do? The Sedaris family has already cornered the market on whimsy, so I can't sell that. The New Yorker caption contest doesn't actually pay any money. Working for the J. Peterman catalogue probably isn't at all in real life as it appeared on Seinfeld. I suppose I'd better buckle down and finish that young adult novel about teen witches and hope that pays off somehow. But first I think I'll write a short essay on "Betty Boop in Snow White." Because that is the least practical thing I could be doing right now. And I am a very silly person.

I look good

I mean I look really good. Hey everybody! Come and see how good I look!

Everything I need to know about life I learned from cutting my own bangs

1. Be bold. If you pussy out you will end up with thin, wispy, shitty, wimpy bangs. They will be limp and greasy and fall in your eyes. What you get will not be what you wanted because you only went halfway.

2. Sometimes you will fuck up and look like an asshole. This is how life goes. Not everything you do is great.

3. But in about two weeks or so you will totally get over it, and soon nobody will really even remember the fortnight you spent looking like a retarded kindergarten teacher. Seriously. You will get over it.

4. And also seriously, not everybody is paying attention to every little thing you do all the time. Most of your most intimate and profound traumas they not only don't care about or want to know about, but they don't even notice.

5. Unless you were stupid enough to capture your awkward phase on camera. Be very careful about who you let photograph you. You do not want to end up tagged in blurry, shitty pictures on Facebook where you always seem to have your mouth open like you're screaming underwater just because someone "likes candid shots."

6. But also sometimes you will cry. This is inevitable when you end up looking not like Ana Karina but the aforementioned kindergarten teacher. It is OK to cry sometimes, even out of self pity. You're only human. And, if you have someone in your life who will sympathize and maybe even take you out to dinner to cheer you up because you are ugly and miserable, cherish that person forever.

7. Along these lines, don't be so hard on yourself if you don't look like Kate Moss when you're finished with the kitchen scissors. You're just a regular person. Don't expect the world.

8. And, don't expect that anything that can be performed in ten minutes or less will transform you completely. That's just greedy.

9. Nothing in nature is perfectly symmetrical. Do not strive for perfection unless you enjoy being unhappy.

10. Sometimes you will get hair in your eyes and it will kind of hurt. Sometimes you will slice open the skin on your brow-bone. You cannot complain about these things. You are the one who took up the scissors in the first place, remember.

11. Also, don't blame the scissors. It's a poor workman who blames his tools.

12. Although, you really do want to try to get your hands on the best equipment possible for the job you're about to do, if you can afford it. It will make things a lot easier. If you can't afford it, that kind of sucks. It sucks to be poor so try to avoid that if you can. This is the real point of lesson #12.

And finally, because who doesn't like a baker's dozen,

13. Maybe you shouldn't wear bangs at all. Sometimes in life you fool yourself into thinking you're more special than you are, have more talent that you really do, can pull off something you can't really pull off. Maybe you are wise enough to know when to give up. If not, I hope you have a special person in your life who can gently take you aside and say, "Dude, stop doing this to yourself." Or maybe you can pull off a heavy, dramatic fringe. If so, good for you. But they need a lot of upkeep. Prepare for constant maintenance.

Remember kids: your bangs will break you down. Especially if you are really shallow, like me.

Today's Forecast

Oh, hi. I didn't notice you there. I was busy running my hands through my thick mane. I know, it's impressive isn't it? These two lovely ladies seem to think so. I call them Blonde and Brunette. Maybe they have real names, I don't know. Yeah, they're acting like they don't see me, but they do. They love me. Know why? Gorgeous: that's why.

How to upstage the bride

Sometimes you can upstage the bride by looking better than her, or almost better (viz. Pippa Middleton). And sometimes you can wear something so horribly hideous and distracting that you will blind all the other guests to anything but your strangely monochrome, raccoon-eyed, caduceus-hatted self. Either way, you'll get the attention you so badly crave.

In the funniest coverage of this hat I've found so far, Helen Popkin calls it the Cthulhu hat, saying Bea's choice to wear a "chapeau representing a 'monster of vaguely anthropoid outline' ... really paid off."

P.S. For the record, I loved Princess Eugenie's whole outfit. Sincerely. This is actually what I wear to the Casual Slacks office most days.

Something funny on the internet

I actually found something on Gawker that made me laugh out loud (it's been a rather slow day at the office). Re: Jennifer Aniston's new WV apartment:

"...[w]e should focus on that lonely widow's walk of a terrace. Look at all that terrace space! Perfect for standing and looking out forlornly at the busy city, so full of happy people... On occasion, the neighborhood kids down in the street will suddenly stop playing, feeling a strange chill and melancholy in their bones, and they will look up and swear they can see sad Jen up there in her aerie of isolation. But their mothers will come and shoo them away, feeling themselves as if a cold cloud has passed over their hearts."

Tee hee! Oh I love laughing at her pain! Extra points to author Richard Lawson for "widow's walk" and "aerie."

Cross post, whiskey-related

If you're an avid reader of Spinster Aunt, this will be old news to you. But if you're not*, here's some new news:

According to my good friends at the Canadian Press, women are just discovering this awesome new thing called bourbon.

"I think there's this sense of relief that finally we were at a point where we can be taken seriously as women who enjoy bourbon and the lifestyle that accompanies it," said Mary Quinn Ramer, a founding board member from Lexington.

And man, what a lifestyle it is. It's pretty much all success all the time.

Here's another fun fact: "Bill Samuels Sr., concocted the Maker's Mark recipe in the 1950s, but it was his mother, Margie, who coined the brand's name and came up with the idea of adorning the bottles with dripping red wax."

I'm thinking Mama Margie's "idea" came about kinda like this: "Oh fuck me, I spilt the goddam wax again!"

* If you're not reading Spinster Aunt, WTF?

Very Important Businesswoman: Being a Famous Writer

I always find it funny when people express surprise at disciplined writers. I'll come across a sentence like this in an article somewhere: "I got my first lesson in writerly discipline that cold winter of 1975 when Tom Wolfe was staying at Pup-Pup's Vermont hunting lodge with us. He'd rise every morning at 9 am and write for a full five hours before buggering off with Mum for most of the afternoon, which they mostly spent quilting, I was told." It's utterly amazing to some that writers actually have to sit down to get their stuff on the page, and that they actually do it not only some days, not even most days, but almost EVERY day! This amazement is rarely expressed in relation to the other arts where, in my experience anyway, it is never supposed that Van Gogh just got up one morning and puked out some paintings, that Bach just sat down and farted out some symphonies. Hey, art! Wow! You never hear people say, "Gosh, that Rock Hudson was amazingly disciplined -- he went to set every single day!" I'm not sure why We Famous Writers get so many kudos just for doing our jobs. This would be like congratulating a regular person for, oh I don't know, paying their rent every single month. "Bob was amazing. Not once did he lie around in bed on a weekday morning drinking whiskey and beating his children instead of going to work. No, he showed up during all regularly scheduled hours. He didn't even piss away his paycheck at the track! No sir, he paid his bills with it -- he even bought food with it. Food he shared with his hungry children. The man was a.... I don't want to say genius, because what is that, anyway? But boy, he sure taught me a thing or two about discipline!"

What shall I be today?

Looking for jobs is fun. I like to imagine all the interesting careers I could have, like so many schizophrenic, overqualified Barbies. What shall I be today? Perhaps a Kidney and Liver Transplant Specialist? Or maybe a Head Lice Removal Specialist? So many choices!

How to be a VIB Part III: Learn Cutting Edge Technology

If you can master complex systems like Facebook and Twitter, this $115k/year government job might be right for you! Remember though, social media is a grave responsibility, and you probably can't handle it unless you have the emotional maturity of someone at least 22 years old.

How to be a Very Important Businesswoman

Innovative millennial job-hunting tactics here for those interested in becoming a "general scientist" (I prefer the term scientician myself) or game designer ("Employee will responsible for making up a fun game"). The fact that I'm way too old to be considered part of this group but still find this article amusing is funny in a sad way, like Liza Minnelli. On a related note, the odious Christopher Buckley offers something to be enraged about in this month's Atlantic when he writes about an hilarious episode in his life in which he moved back home: "I don't have the statistics for this, but it's quite possible, in this economy, that even some recent college grads are."

New blog ideas

Why, I say, limit myself to just Casual Slacks? Why not start a blog called.... "Elegant Lounge Wear!?" Or "Vast Oeuvre!" Or "Suspiciously Milky Tea?" I'm telling you people, I have a LOT of ideas right now!