mild misanthrope

Jay Beaman's 35th

Today is Jay Beaman’s 35th birthday, and if you don’t know who the hell I’m talking about, I can only feel sorry for you. To mark the date, I’ll break my near 6-month silent protest against her soft, pillowy bosom and list my four favorite Beamanisms. One is food related, one is a general bon vivant comment, one has to do with music, which sums up Jay pretty well. The last one is an added bonus, a short little email conversation we had a few months ago

One

This is some tasty business.

Two

Not a goddamn thing wrong with that.

Three

Cover songs are for people who don’t really like music.

Four

Me I gotta confess, I kinda like KT Tunstall. Does that make me a bad person?

Jay No. It just makes you gay.

Barry Obama's Congress Luncheon

Menu:

Seafood stew en croute.

Brace of American birds – duck and pheasants on a bed of vegetables: brussel sprouts, cabbage, carrots and spinach – and a wild cherry chutney. Corn muffins baked in a corn husk.

Apple cinnamon sponge cake and sweet cream glace.

Children’s Menu:

Hot dogs, cheeseburgers, macaroni and cheese, french fries, grilled cheese sandwiches, cheese pizza, chocolate chip cookies, apple and orange juices.

Are you fucking kidding me?

Instead of smaller portions of the adult menu, or even slightly toned-down versions of the same food, with less complex flavors, the children were offered, as a commenter on the New York Times article said, “[…] unbalanced party food.”

Children will potentially eat anything - as long as they are taught (by example) from an early age.

The myth of brussel sprout hatred stems from parents too weak to stop their kids from being fat little dictators that make their own dietary choices based on the corn-syrup based junk food advertised on television.

I’ve spent two years as an Au Pair, with a family whose children were obsessed with cherry tomatoes and brussel sprouts, simply because their parents ate that and loved it. Leading by example.

Get these kids some celery, and don’t offer them as sacrificial lambs to unhealthy diets and mass consumption-oriented lifestyles!

Oh, and sorry about the semi-serious post marking a timid return. Gotta ease back into my usual shitty asshole self, right?

Cuntitry

In most senses, women are much better equipped to deal with life in the contemporary world than men, especially in the business world. They are more verbally developed, more sensitive to subtle things, and less prone to cock-waving. They are better at organizing things, getting people to do what they want and delegating tasks.

There is only one simple reason for why they don’t rule the world: women hate other women. It’s a simple and true fact. A woman would fuck her best friend’s husband out of spite because once her friend said something mean about her toes being fat or whatever.

The only thing women hate more than other women is men. You know it’s true, ladies. And guys, no matter how much your girlfriend loves cock, she hates men. This creates an interesting “enemy of my enemy” kind of thing, where two women who hate each other will stick together against men. This is called Cuntitry.

You can see Cuntitry at work all the time. Let’s say some girl is a fan of Barack Obama. Now let’s say she’s talking to two guys defending John McCain, who are aggressively thrashing her about her political views. If a second girl about the same age and about as good looking as the first sees this happening, she could be the craziest, most racist, right-wing christian nutjob, that she would start talking about change and whatnot.

That’s how it works. Women stick together, provided they are about the same age and about as good looking, since attractive young women are known to create anti-cuntitry in fat old skanks.

If women ever control their mutual hatred, embrace Cuntitry at all times and actually take over this shit and rule everything, the world will be a much better place.

Fuck.

Brazil is a wonderful place. Our food is delicious, our music is delightful and the weather is extremely pleasant. Even our people are, for the most part, kind and gentle.

But our police. Oh sweet mother of god, our police is something else. A delicate balance of corruption, stupidity and brutality creates one of the most inefficient and incompetent police forces on the planet.

The most recent public debacle was just yesterday, when a week-long hostage situation resulted in death & disfigurement. Some crazy 22-year-old dude kidnapped his 15-year-old ex-girlfriend and her best friend and held them hostage in a shitty apartment somewhere in a poor São Paulo suburb.

After a week of insanity coordinated by Colonel Eduardo Félix, shoo-in for Fuckin’ Idiot 2008 Award (at some point the friend was released but wanted to return to help her friend, and the police let her – that’s how bad it was) the police decided to invade, and of course fucked it all up. The dude freaked out and splattered his girlfriend’s brains all over the place, and shot her friend in the face. All this after the family’s lawyer and the District Attorney had negotiated with the kidnapper, who agreed to give himself up.

I understand that policemen in Brazil are people too stupid and violent to do anything else, but can we get some training on these motherfuckers? I was watching the news, and the guy kinda stuck his head out the window at least five times, without any of the girls in front of him. Can’t we have some snipers blow his head off or something?

But the worst part is that in Belo Horizonte right now we’re about to vote for mayor, and the choice is between Márcio Lacerda, a piece of shit criminal who’s spending around 20 million dollars to basically buy votes and Leonardo Quintão, a fanatic christian nut, who is a spoiled upper-class piece of shit that pretends to be stupid and illiterate to pander to the masses.

I’ll take a relapsed catholic over a crazy-assed christian any day of the week, but now everybody’s too busy worrying about a random kidnapping to actually think about the next four years of our city.

PS: When I say people are worrying about the kidnapping, I don’t even mean using it as a segue for a discussion on the many problems with the crazy uniformed fucks that patrol our streets and fuck up everything they get their hands on – I mean idiots whining about how brutal mankind is and how the world is a violent place and other meaningless bullshit.

Don’t put your root down, no matter what the Beastie Boys say.

In my experience (three words that should never be uttered by any rational human, but there you have it), the best source for speculation on contemporaneity are conversations with older people who have been unable to adapt to the massive social changes human relations have undergone in the last twenty years.

The only thing better than that is to overhear the aforementioned older people and quietly judge them. When there’s no feedback, absurd theories thrive unchecked. I recently overheard a discussion (between two 60-somethings) about how constantly moving is terrible for children, because it ruins their chances of establishing meaningful human relationships and effectively setting down roots somewhere. They were proud to have settled down as soon as their children were born.

I quietly loathed them, and felt terribly sorry for their children (now adults, most likely), who are probably out there somewhere believing that the city they were born and grew up in is the center of the universe. It got me to thinking, who the fuck needs to have strong roots anywhere?

The concept of roots is thankfully giving way to networks. We are constantly connected to nearly everyone we know, through social networking websites, instant messaging, email. A few decades ago, I might have never heard from the friends I made in Germany again, which would have been an awful shame. Imagine investing a ton of emotional energy into delightful people over the course of a few years, and then suddenly being cut off and getting a Christmas card for a few years and then nothing?

Since the need for firm roots has gone the way of Infoseek, I know that a friend in New York is struggling to find happiness despite problems with her ex, I know which former work colleagues from my thankfully gone advertising days have switched agencies, gotten promotions or abandoned advertising altogether (good for you, guys), I know that a lovely Estonian friend has been living in Australia for some time and that since Iceland went bankrupt, the tiny Brazilian community is breaking apart. I’m connected to all my friends spread around the globe, and am looking forward to moving to New York and being connected to my friends spread around Belo Horizonte.

In this wonderful age of connectivity, the world is a huge playground, and just hanging out at the slide an entire lifetime doesn’t make sense.