The Big Three-Oh!

It's the day we all dread. Our 30th birthday. 21 was glorious relief. Then, with each passing birthday until, say, 26, I felt myself growing a bit more "professional street cred" with my increased age. Now, I look and see 30 on the horizon. While I don't believe the stats that a single woman over 30 has a greater chance of dying in a terrorist attack than she does of marrying, turning 30, for men and women, means that certain things are no longer acceptable, at least by societal standards. A person of 30 is considered an adult to be taken seriously, and thus must conduct his or her behavior in a matter befitting to 30somethings, an age demographic which includes M.Ds of investment banks, doctors, CEOs, mothers, and preists. 20somethings, in contrast, include college students, most celebutantes, and Wayne Rooney.

Below find a list of 30 things that no one under 30 can, or should do:

1. Listen to any of: Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, or any other "artist" who was formerly a mouseketeer. With your age should come a certain degree of musical taste. You also shouldn't be listening to James Blunt, either, but no one, regardless of their age, should be listening to James Blunt.

2. Make mix CDs for your friends. Everyone has an I-Trip for their I-pod and no one plays CDs anymore, even in the car. Just because you're getting old doesn't mean you should be technologically behind the times.

3. Consume the following cocktails: Long Island Iced Tea, Blowjob, Adios Mother Fucker, Jello shots, or anything out of a fishbowl.

4. Consume beer by means of a funnel or "keg stand".

5. Get a free pass when you, say, refer to Benjamin Franklin as a U.S. president, or make similar historical gaffes. With age should come a certain degree of knowledge about the world.

6. Live with your parents. After the age of 30, not even Italians can get away with this. Cut the cord.

7. Buy clothes at Abercrombie & Fitch. Because we all know you're just going in there to ogle all the underaged girls behind the checkout counter, and no one wants to be the pervy 30-year old ogling the hot checkout girls at A&F.

8. Take "Top Gun" seriously. Just as kids should stop believing in Santa Claus at around age 6, at age 30, people should stop believing that this movie epitomizes the heterosexual alpha male, and take the film for what it really is - soft gay porn set to a Kenny Loggins soundtrack.

9. Own framed reproductions of "Dogs Playing Cards", "Boulevard of Broken Dreams", the Singing Largemouth Bass, or any "artwork" commonly found in university dormitories. Unless, of course, it's for the irony.

10. Play video games, unless it's 8-bit Nintendo to "reconnect with your youth".

11. Fail to possess a valid passport. You are 30. Chances are you have a decent-paying job with decent vacation time; or should have one by now. No one should live a third of a century on this earth without having traveled outside their home country. Did you know that a flight to Reykjavik, Iceland from JFK is the same length as a flight to Phoenix, AZ?

12. Fail to vote in presidential elections because you're too lazy to get to the voting booth. Especially in swing states. Nothing's on TV except for election coverage, anyhow, so you can't blame Everyone Loves Raymond.

13. Have a diet that consists of foods mainly seen on kids' menus. I knew a man like this. He was almost 30, only drank Coors Light, and only ate hamburgers, hot dogs, fried chicken, chili, fries, onion rings etc.... We tried to give him a Sam Adams Winter Lager once, didn't work. Don't be this guy. Sure, it's fine to enjoy a mean, juicy Whopper, but balance that out with some ethnic food every once in a while (even American ethnic dishes count, such as crawfish etoufee) so people don't think you're a complete cretin.

14. Attend the Kentucky Derby, but watch from the infield. Do I even need to explain why?

15. Use the N-word as a term of endearment for your friends, unless you happen to be black.

16. Refer to your penis by any "name" you gave it while in your teens or twenties.

17. Obsess over love interests who have not called you. This is especially true for girls. You don't want to turn into a "Sex and the City" character.

18. Buy knockoffs. If you don't have the money to buy the real thing, buy from a less expensive designer. If your friends are among the subset of the population who actually care about designer labels, they can also distinguish between real and fake Prada.

19. Date people who are under 21. No, she is not Lindsay Lohan, and no, you are not Colin Farrell. Be glad for that fact, and stick dating those of legal drinking age. For girls, just look to all those schoolteachers arrested for bedding their classmates to serve as a cautionary tale.

20. Watch "Laguna Beach: The Real O.C." I'm only saying this because I'm in my mid-20s and this show already makes me feel old and like my best days were behind me.

21. Dye your hair any color other than that which could pass as a natural human hair color. No one likes an aging hipster.

22. Have a musical ringtone. Hearing "Africa" by Toto every time you get a text message is only acceptable if you're 16. And a girl. And living in Japan. And you won't pull James Bond-quality ass if you have the Bond Theme ringtone. Get over yourself. And engaged ladies who have Wagner's Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin (i.e. "Here Comes the Bride", in flyover-speak) as their ringtone are the most annoying of all.

23. Have a "voice" or "novelty" ringtone. While downloading ringtones for my phone, I noticed there were 4 different kinds of belches and at least 12 different varieties of farts (including one named "G Minor Chord"). On a more hopeful note for humanity, there was no Top Gun Anthem ringtone (not like I was looking).

24. Listen to Dave Matthews. Last time he produced legitimately good stuff, an adulterer was President, 9-11 was the number we called if we suspected our neighbors' teens of throwing a "kegger", and everyone was a dot-com zillionaire. OK...on second thought, maybe we should listen to more Dave Matthews, if only to Take Us Back To A More Innocent Time.

25. Make a big deal about ceasing to like something once it's gone mainstream. If it goes mainstream, that usually means it's good (although it may not necessarily stay that way). If it doesn't go mainstream, then it probably sucked in the first place. And, as I said before, no one likes an aging hipster.

26. Make fun of the physically or mentally disabled. No one, of any age, should do this, except Trey Parker and Matt Stone who, well, make fun of everyone.

27. Own a bong.

28. Act, talk and dress like a rapper, especially if you are Asian.

29. Wear tighty-whities. Sure, your boys need a house, but if it gets too hot up there, you might not have enough swimmers to propagate your genetics (PSA: Someone tell Kevin Federline to wear more tighty-whities).

30. Use your free time at work blogging.

Forbes to Men: "Don't Marry a Career Woman"

On August 22, an article simply titled, "Don't Marry a Career Woman", was published. Yes, this literally was the title of the article. No, this was not some Christian right-wing rag with readership based primarly in East Texas and Western Michigan. This was Forbes. Yep, Forbes.

Michael Noer, the author of the article, spouts unoriginal complaints typical of anti-feminists and disgruntled males everywhere: that women who achieve a level of career success beyond that of their man will soon become unhappy with said man; that "hosts" of "statistics" show that marriage to a "career woman" (which Noer defines as any woman with a university degree who makes $30,000 a year or more) will yield misery and gloom for the unsuspecting male (not to mention a messy house); and that marital bliss necessitates a union with, well, a trophy wife (click here to see if YOU have what it takes to be a trophy wife!). In Noer's words, "marrying these women is asking for trouble".



Below are more gems from this article, and my response:

"Wives working longer hours do not have time to monitor their husband's health and healthy behavior." Unless a man has an inordinately low IQ, or suffers from some form of physical or mental retardation, he is competent enough to monitor his own health. It goes like this. "Shit! I have been coughing up boogers and can't breathe as well. Might have to get some Tylenol PM!" Or, "Crap! I went up a few notches on my belt. Might have to eat more salad and less pork rinds." Does Noer think that men are not competent enough to monitor their own healthy behavior?

"After all, your typical career girl is well-educated, ambitious, informed and engaged. All seemingly good things, right? Sure...at least until you get married. Then, to put it bluntly, the more successful she is the more likely she is to grow dissatisfied with you" I'm sure that some women engage in trading up and that there is some truth to this. However, is Noer so naive to think that men don't engage in trading up as well? Jack marries Jill, his grad school sweetheart. Jack gets promoted to M.D. at a large downtown investment bank, and Jill gets pregnant. Jill's so busy raising newborns that she can't work out as much. Cottage cheese coagulates on her thighs, she doesn't have time to shave her legs as much, and stomach flab begins to set in. Enter Lacey, a masseuse at a Park Avenue spa 10 years Jack's junior, with perky C-cup tits, wavy blond hair, an ass you can bounce a quarter off of, and a bikini region as well manicured as the green on Pebble Beach. Jack knows that without the 7-figure salary, he wouldn't be able to score chicks as attractive as Lacey. So, dissatisfied with his current wife, Jack trades up.

Another one of Noer's warnings to the menfolk: "When your spouse works outside the home, chances increase they'll meet someone they like more than you." DUH. Women have known this for YEARS. Women have consistently turned the other cheek when, after spending the best years of our lives raising our husband's kids, he runs off with his secretary, leaving poor Wifey financially bereft after the divorce and the pre-nup (which she naively signed). See the example of Jack, Jill, and Lacey above. Jack would never have met Lacey if his buddies at the bank didn't recommend that he "de-stress" with some Shiatsu treatments. Next thing you know, Jack's paying for Lacey's steak dinners at Rothmann's with a black Am-Ex card in Jill's name, and ends up taking the corporate car home at 1AM to avoid having to speak to that shrew Jill.

Upon further investigation, it seems like Noer has some issues with women. In another Forbes piece, "The Economics of Prostitution" (published on Valentines' Day, no less), Noer begins with the question, "Wife or whore?", and then, using a study performed by a pair of economists, goes on with crude cost-benefit analysis which can be summed up in the following sentence: "Why should a man get married when he has access to cheap, available, disposable pussy?"

However, I'm not too incensed by Noer's piece. With his use of selective data, pseudo-economics, slippery-slope logic (Cheating leads to divorce! Divorce leads to alcoholism! Alcoholism leads to suicide!), and his portrayal of men as innocent victims of "feminism" (a word Noer uses in quotes in his article, perhaps to express discomfort with - or disdain toward - the term) as opposed to individuals who should be held accountable for their own marital actions, the article reads more like a piece of hyperbole, not meant to be taken seriously, and posted on the Forbes.com website to increase web traffic.

The Summer in a Nutshell

OK, gentle readers, I've been noticably absent from the blogosphere since, well, before Memorial Day. And now, it's almost Labor Day and there's been so much going on this summer that to condense it into one post seems almost obscene. Well, tough. I'll do it anyway.

1) The Hamptons House Experience. We "bought" in Bridgehampton this year, instead of Westhampton, logic being that the guido riffraff that spent all of 2005's summer months doing cannonballs off our roof, chucking plastic lawn furniture into the pool, and fornicating in the hot tub would be priced out. Yes and no. The guido riffraff that lives on Staten Island with their parents and works in landscaping would be priced out, but the guido riffraff that lives in Murray Hill and works at Morgan Stanley would not be. I arrive at the house to find the same God-awful mixture of techno and reggaeton blaring from the speakers that you'd hear at 11th Avenue's worst clubs. The leader of the pack, reclining in a blow-up pool chair with a bottled blonde sporting a "bulls-eye" tattoo on his lap, seems to be playing deejay. I naively ask him to change genres of music to something more daytime-friendly but just as cheerful; maybe The Cure, Dire Straits, Journey, Jimmy Buffett and the like. He snidely grunts, "If you ask anyone here, they'd much prefer house and hip-hop to that shit." And ask I did, which started a "music mutiny" resulting in one of my mix CDs being played, and our deejay hopeful fist-pumping to Track 17 (Top Gun Anthem, no less). But I expected no less from one sporting fake Ray-Ban aviators.

2) World Cup Football. Sorry, I just can't call it "soccer" when it's the World Cup. The game that kids play during recess with their classmates is soccer. The World Cup is football.


Now, for the highlights. With that ballstomp (for video footage click here), Wayne Rooney catapulted well into the ranks of Future Husbands of Plain Jane Jones (don't worry, it's a rather long list). Bad sportsmanship makes for good television, and there's nothing more entertaining than some surly Englishman pounding some Portuguese pretty-boy in a rather tender spot. Other than that, it was very entertianing watching the tourists from flyover America get baffled as to why the English fans were singing "My Country 'Tis Of Thee". The end was arguably the worst part and the best part, depending on whether you could find unintentional humor in Guido Nation (most of whom have probably never been to Italy) and their display of Guidocentric pride after the conclusion of the final. I felt like Margaret Mead amongst the pygmies witnessing this display, which rivaled only the Puerto Rican Pride day parade in, well, you just have to be there to understand.

3) Those Snakes, That Plane. So it didn't do as well as we all expected or hoped, but that's the nature of cult movies. Its fan base is comprised of urban twentysomethings and thirtysomethings, some hipsters, some film geeks, some just curious as to witness Samuel L's next step into BadAssNess. Not since "Rocky Horror Picture Show" has moviegoing been as much as who is in the audience as what is on the screen. Hearing the entire cinema theater join Sam in saying "that line" was worth the price of admission itself. However, I doubt the experience would be the same in the flyover states. Sure, in college towns - the Madisons and the Ann Arbors and the Austins - would SOAP fever be at as high of a pitch, but in places like Grand Rapids, MI or Beaumont, TX, don't expect Mommy to drop her knitting needles to fork out $10 a pop to take her daughter to see a movie where snakes bite off passengers' private parts and a black man says "Fuck" a lot.

3) Not Another 9/11 Movie: I don't care if the only movie critic I trust, Napalm Jones, gave "World Trade Center" 4 "stars" (his ranking system doesn't use stars, but he gave it the equivalent). Nicholas Cage is a weepy nebish who makes James Blunt look like John Wayne, and I just can't see this movie (I do think "Great New Wonderful" would be good, though).

4) People Who Need To Die. OK, not seriously die, so no one should take this as an actual call to assassinate these people. But, for the sake of hyperbole:

-Jessica Simpson. Get over yourself. Your billboard in Times Square makes you look like some fake tanned sorority whore who just rolled out of someone else's bed with a legendary hangover obtained from a night of drinking too many Midori Sours. Since your MTV show got cancelled, and since your Oompa Loompa complexion robs you of any sex-symbol status (outside of, probably, the Bible Belt) you no longer provide us with unintentional comedy, hence your purpose on this earth has come to an end.

-Paris Hilton. It's called hubris, bitch, and you're reeking of it. You were entertaining when you dabbled into reality television, but when you start recording self-congratulatory "music" that, according to you, is, like, so good, it makes you cry, that should be God's call to raise his right hand and smite you.

-James Blunt. How someone could graduate from the most elite and rigorous military academy on the face of this earth (sorry, Westpoint) and turn out to be such a fruit basket is beyond me, even though it probably shouldn't be. The British government should apologize for turning such a scourge loose on the rest of the unknowing world's populace. He's apparently on a world tour, where he will sing all of his four singles, over and over again, until the world implodes as a result of the sheer sucktitude of his music. Reminds me of that South Park Brown Noise episode, except without the pooping.

I need to die, it's true

-Men Who Can't Get Over Their Ex Girlfriends. OK, this gets personal. I meet a guy. He's the first person I got really excited about since I moved here. Cute, entrepreneurial, 29, a bit short but his bright blue eyes made up for it. We met at a happy hour, then we corresponded for 2 weeks while he was on holiday in France. We had two great dates when he randomly emails me saying, "I need some time off from dating girls. I still have feelings for my ex-girlfriend who doesn't want to be with me. It's still breaking my heart." Cry me a river, Timberlake. Write some fruity love songs about it. Take some Zoloft. But don't try to sleep with me - not once, but twice - to get some tail inbetween weep sessions.

And that's it.