skin, pine, and pitt

so today i am going to talk about facials.
do you ever get facials?
do you think they're an imperative part of your regime and if so, do you think your face will curl up like a sunbaked orange peel if you don't?
i have two theories on facials.
one part of me is like anyone who rubs four different kinds of fancy lotions on their face for a whole hour in a counter-and-counter-clockwise movement will leave the bathroom feeling like WOW my skin is softer than it was an hour ago!
the other part of me believes something totally different, but only when i am given a gift certificate to a spa. suddently i'm like WTF was i thinking? these are totally CRITICAL! especially when i am lying there in the dark and they turn the fluorescent light on your face and run their index finger judgingly over your pores and you think about all the times you got crispy in puerto rico.

anyway, i woke up stupid late for my appointment at great jones spa. it was a gift certificate, as discussed. i need to talk about great jones spa. as you can imagine they are on great jones street, but also, they are great! they are very accomodating because i was 15 minutes late and they didn't glare or throw an organic cleanser in my face! and i didn't even have to make up an excuse. the spa smells like a swimming pool beause maybe there is a swimming pool on the premises unless there is a soy candle on the market called "chlorine." the flip flops were soft, unlike the ones at cornelia, and made my feet look nicer cause they covered up my ugly toes. they only use naturopathica and jurlique products and jurlique makes my favorite lotions in the world, so that was an added bonus. the only bad part was when she put cookie batter on my face - oatmeal raisin to be precise - and that's not cool. she said it was "pumpkin lotion" and she looked at me and i looked at her and we had a moment. people should get their xmas cookies done at home, not on the job. one highlight was when she put this mask on my face and then massaged my hands with a warm lotion and put them into these plastic gloves and covered the gloves with a hot terry glove. at the end, she told me i have combination skin which i gather is very rare, and that i'd be MUCH better off with the entire line of products she used. i was so sure.

it really was a nice experience though, and my skin looks clear like it would look if you washed your face five times in one day and smeared vaseline on it and of course i am convinced i need to go back every two weeks, so i'll be needing a lot of gift certificates. you can just make them out to my name and send them to me in the post. that would be great, thank you.

since i'm on vacation, i did a bunch of other things that are not very thrilling to report, although i will tell you i was probably the most christian jew on the block today because i bought a 3-footish christmas tree and carried it four blocks and when i got to the apartment, my fingers were sticky. i imagine lovers of christ know how to get sap off their hands, and also not to buy net lights because that is borderline reta$@#%ed. why did i buy net lights and why do they sell net lights anyway? on the package, it shows a woman throwing them on a bed of pine. we're in manhattan, who has a bed of balsam? and if you do, please call me immediately so i can come hang out in your huge plot of land. i will bring you my LOVE TRAIN.

finally, at the gym today, there were four or nine people, ranging from a brooding NYU kid in a tragic fluorescent American Apparel ensemble, to an ancient bespectacled man whose t-shirt was tucked into his sweatpants, and amazingly we were all watching the same program (because yes, i stalk people to see what they're watching and then i judge them based on those decisions). it was brad pitt on PBS. what does that say about the power of brad pitt? or the unfortunate reality that is daytime television?

who cares.

good night and good luck.

Candyland

YO! gingerbread making was fun. i made a love train. jess made an airplane, maya made a sex house, and meg made a house with a reflecting pool. i think next year we may do an animal theme.






i learned 11 things during the house-making that i didn't know before:

1- graham crackers are the best substitution for gingerbread and you don't have to bake them.
2- trans fats make phenomenal binders, so use vanilla pillsbury frosting because it sticks to your grahams and your arteries.
3- you may have chest pains the next day.
4- it's better not to eat it while you're making it.
5- you may have an obscenely bad stomach ache.
6- you need a lot of time.
7 - you may get competitive. it can get ugly.
8- you need to listen to really bad christmas music, like "mommy's shoes," on a lite-FM station.
9- you need to get really emotional when a josh groban song comes in, but not mean it.
10- don't mean it.
11- no matter how badly you want to eat it the next day, and all of the candy that you didn't use, try not to or you will repeat numbers 3 and 5.

anyways, sorry for being a weirdo. we had a tremendous time. and jessie is the best host from the west to the east coast. the highlight was when she gave us these gold and silver grillz and we took an obnoxious amount of pictures because we were all into it. maya is sending ones of us tomorrow, so i'll post more then. what's weird is that i honestly thought we looked kind of amazing with them. it could just be me.



it is probably just me.

the second best part of the night was when buzz's sister made an appearance. for those of you who don't know Buzz, he is a large stuffed animal that creepily came onto the scene a few years ago. he doesn't have nipples and he scares me. every year at thanksgiving or xmas, he makes an appearance. well this year, maria found his sister and it was an equally traumatic experience.



and finally, this has nothing to do with the weekend, but check out this sky that we enjoyed from our office on friday. it looks like someone took a giant eraser to the clouds. strange and beautiful.


ps - screw inside out junior mints. my new obsession is mint eminems. i'm beside myself over them.

little boxes

i'm going to jessie's tonight for our annual holiday domestic sleepover and this time we are making gingerbread houses.
i am in charge of the dec-a-cake. someone told me red dec-a-cake is elves blood, do you think that's true? that would suck. do you think their blood is the same type as ours? because that would be great if you ever needed a transfusion you could just show up at the hospital with a case of dec-a-cake. it's not really funny but deep down you kind of think it is.

there is nothing better than girlfriends because you can put on elastic waisted pants, get frosting in your hair, and they will still like you alright. that's how you know a true friend from a falsie. like yesterday at work, i put a large narrow cardboard box on my hand and when peter walked by, i held it out and he high-oned me and acted like it was totally normal that i had a box hand.

"hey narnia."

"hey. if my hand really looked like this, would you still be my friend?"

"yes."

"really?"

"it's cool. i wish you always had a box hand."

he didn't say that last part but i know he was thinking it. or maybe he did.

it's hard to say.

tick

do you like watches? no, i mean, do you REALLY like watches? i like watches so much that i don't even wear one because i can't afford the one i really want and i probably won't ever be able to, so i may never wear one. but i will always admire them. from afar. which one do i want? about five of them. which one do you want? they are beautiful and complicated. look at this one here. spectacular. i am starting to sound like david byrne in the film "true stories," so i will stop. i just got back from an A. Lange & Sohne luncheon at le bernadin, and while we didn't get a watch, we ate, in one sitting, olive bread, foie gras, sea bass, and a creamy mushroomy brothy saucy kind of pasta. i actually didn't eat the foie gras because i don't like foie gras and the manager came over in the middle of the meal and looked really horrified by me and sort of turned towards me with a scowl and then looked away and then cleared the plate and looked up at the sky. it was awkward. on the way out, they gave us a box of chocolates because we definitely needed more food. but i would kill for one of their watches. did i already say that?

feelin fine

here is a picture of the cookies. do you like them? our family hanukkah party was sunday and it was super fantastic. and big. there are so many little munchkins running around these days, banging on pianos, walking on those cans attached to ropes (remember those? only now they're not cans, they're foam cushions, cause everything is safer unless it's got lead in it or it's from china, so mostly everything is not safer). we did a grooming closet cleanout the other week, so i brought up lots of lotions and creams and gels, etc. and everyone got really into it. my mother put the terra cotta menorah that julie and i made when we were little on top of the fireplace and we ate latkes and brisket and roast chicken and i could go on for an hour about the food but i won't.

yesterday, i was buying my breakfast at work and the woman at the register asked me how i'm doing.
"a bit under the weather," i answered.
as i was pouring my soy milk, i thought about this expression some more.
"under the weather."
it doesn't make much sense, does it? we're all technically below the weather, unless we're flying Jet Blue to Vegas through an ominous pile of cumulonimbus. who knows. maybe they mean, like, it's sleeting and you're below it? also, who even says "under the weather" anyway?? it's kind of rude. the woman at the checkout doesn't need to hear about my problems, she's got her own. just say you're fine and BRING IT IN!

but anyway. since i can't let it go, and since these are the things i think about throughout the day, i googled it and here is what i found:

UNDER THE WEATHER:
Colloquial expression for sick or ill as, for example, to be under the weather with the flu. The phrase "under the weather" came from British sailing ships. When a sailor became ill he was confined below deck out of the weather, so it was said that he was under the weather.

see you on deck very soon!

THE DOLLAR IS WEAK AND THEIR BAGS ARE HEAVY

the europeans have descended on fifth avenue, a swarm of fedoras, fur, and cigarettes, their wet j.m. weston footprints branded onto the avenue like cigar stubs in a dunhill ashtray. jovial, whiskered men in long double-breasted polo coats pause outside bergdorf goodman while their frosted, coyote-trimmed wives walk up to the windows and sigh, overwhelmed by the possibilities, reminding me of what it must have felt like to be an american in paris in 1984. when the stuff was cheap; when you could actually afford it. it's been so long since i've visited, and it will be so long until i go again.

but let's not dwell.

i mean jesus christo, i aint' starvin'. i just ate two cupcakes at an office birthday party. sometimes duncan hines is better than the real thing. sometimes.

anyway, do you like salmon?
CLICK HERE

it's cold and there are robots

so i stayed in tonight because the pavement is shivering and i think i just heard a pigeon cry, so i made some of this hot chocolate which - and i HATE to sound pushy - but you really need to be drinking it if you're not, because it will make you feel warm and light even though it's filled with fat. so i curled up with the latest issue of Oprah [insert joke here]* and there was a story about deja vu and how it is not really that you are in some kind of twilight zone or lived in a past life, but in fact, you likely have done something similar before. are you surprised? do you believe in past lives? i don't, but even if i did, i wouldn't say so, because then we would see each other at parties or in barnes and noble next sunday pretending to buy fiction even though we are buying self help, and you would go, "oh yeah, see that girl with heels that are too high? she believes she was important in a past life." i'll just say that i want to believe in them so that i can pretend that i was really somebody, you know? wouldn't it be great to find out that you were super important?

i have another thing to say. i was on an appointment at around 3:00 today, and i was talking to a PR woman about how there are all of these cashmere airplane sets that you can buy now, like a kit that comes with a face mask, slippers, and a throw and it's super luxe but we both decided that that is a retarded thing to buy yourself unless you're christina aguilera or you have three first names or one of your names has a symbol in it, so i told her to tell my boss that i'd like it, and she said No.

so then at 4:00, i received a gift and do you know what was inside? a monogrammed kit! exactly what we had discussed, minus the slippers. isn't that ridiculous? if i received this gift three months from now, it would feel like deja vu, but since the events happened one hour apart, it was just really fucking cool and my name isn't even P!NK.

and finally, did you see this thing in the news about the robot that can play the violin? he's five feet tall, white and, according to CNN, "plays a pretty solid pomp & circumstance." so basically every child in my building.



*isn't it obnoxious when people write that?

Non Stop

heyfolks. do you ever have a day where you didn't plan on a particularly good outfit but once you got to work, people seemed to really like it, whereas on other days, you think that what you're wearing is a smash hit but it's not so sensational with anyone except yourself?

here is a conversation that took place in my fashion closet this morning between me, two interns, and our fashion assistant mike.

Intern A: "nina, your outfit today is NON STOP."

Me: "what?"

Intern A: "NON STOP."

Me: "that actually doesn't make any sense."

Intern B: "he's trying to make Non Stop happen."

Intern C: "but we don't really understand."

Me: "oh. but i'm queen of not making sense."

Mike: "yeah, she makes things up all the time that no one gets. like TIDAN."

Me: "exactly."

Intern A: "oh cool. basically it just means that it's so good that it's non stop."

Me: "like one long flight."

Intern A: "no."

Silence

i love my interns. i do. they're young and eager and bubbly and easily-excitable. and while i don't miss being an intern, i miss being their age, when you could say things like "i'm gonna go to europe. kick it. maybe take an art course. do some light reading. visit my aunt. eat a baguette." now it's all so heavy. literally. have you felt the weight of my handbag? my cab fares were $400 last month. that's like eight pounds in receipts. roughly the weight of a newborn child. did you hear me? the receipts in my bag ARE THE SIZE OF A BABY BOY NAMED ABRAHAM.

last weekend, i read this article in the NYT about a lounge opening in west chelsea called "1 OAK." have you heard about it? yeah? i'm sure you eventually did, after you wrestled your significant other or cat for it because it's jumping off THAT much. it's basically NYC's "dream team" (gagging) of nightclub owners uniting (choking) on one project and pretending that it is any different because they operate on "velvet egalitarianism" (i can't breathe) at the door, where "people will have to earn their way past the ropes" (call 911) "with an appealing personal style or disposition." (i died). i can only assume this means if, oh i don't know, heidi klum arrives, and she's in front of me and i feel that she's not turning it out, i can and WILL suggest that they don't let her in because she's not NON STOP and i am because my intern said so. sure. anyway, the point of this is not about the club which, may i add, DOES need to TIDAN, it's about the fact that while i was reading the article, i realized - holy shit - i'm old. the lounges they cited, like Life and Moomba, were hot almost 10 years ago, but it feels like last year, and if i mentioned them, my interns would think i'm referencing a dance step. now i'd rather stay at home, watch hitchcock, and bake. no, seriously. NO. SERIOUSLY. the last two weekends i made these and then i baked and decorated, YES, DECORATED christmas cookies. i'm a jew, but i appreciate christ, and i even made a menorah and used yellow M&M's for the flames.

happy hanukkah, l'chaim, shalom, mazeltov. amen.

oh, one last thing. i forgot to mention - if you're at a loss for what to get me for the festival (of lights), i wouldn't mind grace kelly's Rear Window wardrobe. and please don't feel badly if it's terribly expensive, it's for a good cause: my Non Stopedness and Appealing Personal Style so that i can get into a lounge that i don't want to go to.