By Emily
Grade: D-

Every few months, a (giant corporation that I work for) hiring specialist makes a special trip to the Big State Hospital for the Feeble-Minded, Crippled, Creepy and Chronically Incompetent. There, they seek out the hospital’s most challenged patients: non-English speaking hunchbacks with bad attitudes and deep-seated needs for attention are their ideal recruits. Then they put all these people in a bus and drive them back to the (corporation again) building, suit them up in uniforms, and have them start delivering mail.

Lucky is the least annoying of the horrible mailmen. He’s very ancient and weathered, kind of Ansel Adams –looking. His real name is Lucky, like a dog or a Mafioso. He is neither – we think he used to be a Greaser in the ‘50s. He still smokes a lot of cigarettes (possibly Lucky Strikes). He is the best mailman because he hardly ever asks what box to put something in. The only downside of Lucky is that he is sort of starved for social contact, so if you start talking to him about anything other than mail you can expect to spend the next fifteen minutes listening to him spout nonsensical folksy adages (‘People feel bad for me, deliverin’ all this mail, and I tell them that if it weren’t for all this mail I’d be out of a job’) while you nod politely and pray for him to go away.

By way of contrast, the worst mailman is Sex Offender. He has close-set, squinty eyes made owl-like by his round little glasses, and there’s an ingratiating syrupy fakeness/ Hannibal Lecterishness to his tone of voice when he says, “Hello, Miss Gould.” He stands too close when he makes me sign for packages and the smell of his cologne lingers long after he’s made his rounds. Sometimes he makes me sign for things that it’s not my job to sign for BECAUSE HE KNOWS THAT THIS PISSES ME OFF. Whenever I give him the slightest bit of ‘tude in return, he affects an incredibly fake polite tone and pretends not to understand what I’ve just said. I hate him so much, but he’s never done anything wrong enough for me to complain about him, and anyway that would be kind of admitting that he has the power to affect me, which is just playing into his hands. I know that I am coming off as the crazy one in this situation, but believe me, HE IS THE CRAZY ONE.

Somewhere in between is Crippled Mailman. “Ok,” you are thinking, “how can you not feel some amount of sympathy towards someone who perseveres at his difficult task despite his physical handicap? Emily, you are a monster. This is worse than when you hated on pregnant ladies.” Well, I may be a monster for being annoyed by the incompetence of the crippled mailman, but you know what? I kind of think that if someone is physically incapable of doing their job, MAYBE THEY SHOULD HAVE A DIFFERENT JOB. The crippled mailman has a bad back, for which he wears one of those wide leather back-support belts. He is always making me sign for the big heavy packages of people in different departments who sit nowhere near me, which I then deliver to them. Thus in effect he is actually forcing me to do his job for him. If this goes on any longer, maybe our roles will be reversed and he will be the full-time bitter assistant and I will be the full-time Crippled Mailman.

By emily

GRADE: F

Oh, it seems like I’ve been dying to rest my head on something real – too bad ‘realness’ is barely a concept anymore. It’s been replaced by ‘reality,’ which is scary precisely because it pretends to be realness, but isn’t. For example, Ashlee Simpson’s scary fake-realness. Here’s a girl who’s been marketed as the ‘gritty,’ ‘edgy’ ‘punky,’ (and other stripped-of-meaning words) alternative to her prissy, shiny sister Jessica. As everyone over fifteen deduced long ago, Ashlee’s rock realness exists on a purely follicular level – basically, she is Jessica, just with a bad black dye job. But this facile repackaging of the blonde pop ideal was enough to push Ashlee to the top of the charts – and to get her insidiously catchy single loads of insidious airplay. Then, this weekend, she pulled a literal Milli Vanilli, blatanly getting caught lip-synching on Saturday Night Live. She then compounded the heinousness of this embarrassing moment by issuing a bratty ‘apology’ during the traditional SNL all-cast hug-and-laugh closer, in which she blamed her band for starting the wrong song (yeah, blaming your band is so punk rock). Oh, wait, did I mention that she also did a stupid jig? All in all, it was a real catastrofee, as Ashlee’s parents would probably spell it.

There are two scenarios which could play out in the next few days/weeks for Ashlee’s career. One takes place in the land of ‘realness,’ and it goes like this: Ashlee’s integrity-free performance is correctly decried far and wide in the mainstream (read: non-online) media, and her one-hit-wonder days are over. But in ‘reality’—and remember, this is the ‘extreme makeover’ variety of reality we’re talking about here – Ashlee’s sad-face apology will garner sympathy and articles of the ‘I make mistakes – see, I’m so relatable!’ variety in all your fave magazines.

Sigh. Something real . . . I like the way that feels.

By emily

Grade: B-

We don’t usually do restaurant reviews at the UR because, except on the rare occasions when our parents or sugar daddies treat us to fancy meals, we don’t dine at the kind of restaurants that there’s anything to say about. I mean, I could do an in-depth review of the Whole Foods Salad Bar, but it would probably turn out just as dry and boring as their pasta salad. But this week I somehow managed to pay my own way at a restaurant of the someone-asks-if-you’d-like-fresh-ground-pepper variety. Here’s the poop:

Hipster date spot DuMont can be a little bit intimidating. When you first step past the velvet-curtained doorway, you’re greeted by a long banquet table full of first-class Williamsburglars, all gleefully chowing down on giant burgers and steaks and platefuls of thick, golden fries speckled with parsley. It’s as if you’ve died and gone to a very self-consciously cool Valhalla. However, if you’re lucky, a waitress will lead you to a secluded table for two that’s crammed into a niche in the hallway on the way to the back bar. Here, you can focus on the food (and on your dining partner, of course) instead of on the hairstyles of the people on either side of you. The food is standard-issue steak-frites stuff, but it’s well executed and only a little bit pretentious (example: the waitress who recited the specials spoke in the third person and called the acorn-squash risotto ‘autumnlike’). I ordered the lobster bisque, which was yummy if a bit too much like drinking a bowl of half and half. Normandy had a nice crisp green salad that seemed to have been assembled from real lettuces and not mass-produced bagged mesclun mix, which always tastes a little bit mossy to me. Then we split a plate of salmon, which had a crunchy, buttery exterior and a slightly translucent middle. It was situated on a bed of crisp fingerling potato slices, rich sautéed mushrooms, and chewy, bitter kale. Really we should both have gotten the burgers, which looked and smelled fantastic, but we were trying to be healthy or something. We also had glasses of the cheapest variety of red wine they had, which cost $7 and was not particularly exciting. Neither is this review, I realize, but I figured I might as well give it a shot. At least I did not mention cats. Wait . . . shit.

By Emily

Grade: A, probably

August in New York City. Prime time to get reservations at fancy restaurants, baby, cause everyone who’s anyone (including B) has fled this town. Me? Oh, I’m holding down the fort. It’s the first vacationless summer of my life.

Via office small talk I have heard a lot about how great other people’s vacations were. This has only exacerbated my desire to vacation, potentially forever. The real question here is, if the country (beach, mountain) is so great, why don’t we just go live there all the time? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself with alarming frequency lately. Usually late at night, in a tone that’s more like “why, WHY???”

Okay, here is why: For one thing, the city is where you go to Make It Big. Also, you never have to worry about drunk driving, or, for that matter, driving. There is unsurpassed access to comestibles of every description, whether your tastes run to fast food or organic soy yogurt. Some of the architecture is very grandiose and pretty. The skyline is nice, especially on a clear day. Also, the faded advertisements painted on the sides of old buildings never cease to thrill me for some reason.

But then there are the downsides of the city. The chief one is the other people who live there, many of whom are loud, obnoxious, ugly, smelly and depressing. Others are quiet, beautiful, impeccably dressed, and depressing. Other downsides include: commuting, pollution, expensiveness, implicit danger lurking around every corner, and unavoidably running into people you don't like/once loved.

So we escape to the country, get our hands dirty, perhaps begin some sort of organic farming venture. Maybe we take up Reiki or glass-bead blowing. And even though no one can see it, we will be living a perfectly happy life. If we are living a perfectly happy life in the forest, does it still count? Or would we find ourselves missing the crowded avenues, the dungeony bars, the everyday D-list celebrity sightings, the little perks that enable us to convince ourselves that we still want to be here, want to be a part of it? Sigh. New York City vs. Perpetual Vacation Elsewhere: the lifestyle choice to end all lifestyle choices.

By Emily
GRADE: C-

I am sorry to have to give pregnant ladies such a low grade, but there it is. It’s not really anything they do that upsets me (other than the occasional eye-contact guilt trip for not giving up my hard-won subway seat), it’s just that, frankly, they creep me out. I mean, they are walking around while slowly growing a little being inside their bodies. There are two ways of looking at this: way one is, awww, the precious miracle of life, how beautiful and mysterious. Way two is like in the Alien movies. Aieeee!

The ickiest part of procreation is that it has become a fad. All the weekly gossip magazines are currently focusing way too much of their coverage on baby joy, which comes in three flavors: 1. speculative (“Is Britney/Whitney Houston/some Reality star you’ve never heard of/ Jennifer Aniston Pregnant?”) 2. illustrative (“Liv Tyler’s Bump Takes Fashion Week By Storm!”) and 3.recuperative (“Debra Messing Finally Loses The Baby Weight”) I know I speak for everyone when I say that I doooooooon’t caaaaaaaaare. I mean, I care if someone is ruining their life by getting pregnant (like, if Paris Hilton was pregnant, that would be sort of awesome, but I think that she probably just lays eggs owing to the fact that she is a praying mantis). Or if it’s Cathy Zeta-Jones and she’s pregnant, smoking, topless, on a yacht. But if it’s just some random celebrity’s distended tummy on display, count me out. Looking at these magazines is now more than ever a big fat reminder that human civilization has not really progressed since fertility-idol-worshipping days.

Even creepier than pregnant ladies, however, are the ladies who are totally obsessed with trying to get pregnant. I feel sympathy for these ladies because I am not oblivious to the fact that I might eventually be one of them. But even if I am, chances are that I will not have a blog about it.

I don’t even want to think about what this review has done to my reproductive karma. On the bright side, maybe it will save me some $ on condoms?