A brief rundown of things that have occupied my thoughts when I’ve been unable to sleep lately:
I’m becoming increasingly frustrated with Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” for creating an unresolvable circular problematic. On one hand, if you think the song is about you and you’re not actually vain, the song is creating the very behavior that it critiques. But on the other, if the song actually is about you and you willfully ignore it in an effort to consciously quell your vain impulses, it denies you the ability to rectify your latent but unrecognized vanity. Curse you, Carly fucking Simon, curse you.
What is it, exactly, that makes hibachi so completely disgusting? I was more or less forced to go to Benihana for dinner a few days ago, and after yet another miserable experience, I’ve been trying to sort out the real issue. The food itself isn’t particularly objectionable — it’s chicken (or whatever other meat you select) with salt and oil and a metric shit-ton of sesame seeds, which isn’t that exciting but whatever — and despite the irritation of having pieces of zucchini flung at my face (needless to say, I’ve never caught one in my mouth), I don’t mind the show aspect too much. So all that’s left is that indelible greasy feeling that sitting next to what amounts to a table-sized frying pan leaves on you. You feel oily, you smell like sauteed chicken, your clothes smell like sauteed chicken, the woman with collagen lips sitting across from you at the table smells like sauteed chicken, and you walk away from the whole experience with a profound desire to scrub your face with the most noxious chemical possible in the hopes that somehow, some day, you’ll be rid of the lingering essence of hibachi.
When will my mother finally accept that the Roth family in fact does need cell phones? It was bad enough when she and my father decided to share one cell phone, becoming the prototypical elderly Boca couple except that they’re not elderly so what’s the fucking problem?!, but this afternoon, as I sat at my computer trying to figure out how, exactly AT&T was shafting me this month, she became irritated and proclaimed, “You know, we don’t need phones at all. Cancel everything.” I wanted to ask whether I should make it a point to run over the mailbox on my way to the AT&T store to “cancel everything,” to achieve the complete back-to-the-basics-incommunicado-isolationist schtick, but thought better of it.