| June 15, 2006 | You Can Lead a Whore to Vassar... |
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"You can lead a whore to Vassar, but you can't make her think." -Frederick B. Artz, noted medieval historian  For some inexplicable reason, we went back to Poughkeepsie, New York to celebrate the Vassar Class of 1996 10-year reunion. Thankfully, there was a lot of drinking. You can look at the pictures. It struck me that ten years is somehow both a very long and a very short amount of time. And I'm not the only person who had profound thoughts. In one of the bathroom stalls in Josselyn dorm, one of my classmates scrawled in black Sharpie marker: "I love Vassar, but my girlfriend won't." Ah, the coed college bathrooms of my youth. Being back at Vassar, I realized it was probably the only place where Chris, Mindy, Erik, and I could all pee standing/sitting alongside each other. Ah, co-education is a beautiful thing, despite what one of the women from the (female only) class of 1946 exclaimed loudly at my classmates. Little did she know that by far the most popular party during my time at Vassar was the annual Homo Hop. The other Vassar 10th reunion take-away I will share is that those tiny twin-sized dorm beds with plastic mattresses are completely uncomfortable and I have no idea how we ever slept in them. Nevermind, with more than one person in a bed. Which reminds me... "If all the girls at Vassar were laid end to end... I wouldn't be at all surprised." - Dorothy Parker As I said, you can look at the pictures. Nothing too risque this time. The five-year reunion was a bit more lively. Does this mean we're *gasp* getting old? Have you been ever been to your high school or college reunion? If so what did you think? Labels: chris, college, mindy, pee, photos, reunion, vassar posted by Jess Barron @ 10:45 PM 
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| May 16, 2005 | Jess and The City |
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I'm in New York City for the week to meet with ABC News for work. Bocce and August and I flew in on Saturday and stayed at Mindy and Erik's place on the way Upper West Side near Columbia. (I think it's called Morning Side Heights?) We saw a teeny tiny baby squirrel in the park. We went to Erik's architecture school year-end party and then went to the East Village to meet Lee, Brett, Will, Daniel, and Jeff. On Sunday we packed up Mindy's car, so that she could leave for Carnegie-Mellon, and then we went to Lee's place in the Lower East Side (which is confusingly layed-out and furnished exactly like his old apartment in SOMA), and we drank a jug of red wine. Then we travelled to Park Slope, Brooklyn to Jeff and Daniel and Lance's compound where we sat at the silver table in their backyard garden and grilled steaks and drank Rasberry Lambic and more wine. Bocce humped Odie (Lance and Mark's dog) who is male and part Collie and much larger and was completely indifferent to her advances. This morning, August and Bocce and I took the F train to Coney Island where we saw Astroland and The Wonder Wheel and the Cyclone, and a clam bar. Bocce didn't want to go on any of the rides. August ate two hot dogs from Nathan's with sourkraut and onions, and I had cheese fries with ketchup. Now we're about to head to the Paramount Hotel on 46th Street, which I stayed at in 2001 when I was travelling for Microsoft to meet with Viacom to discuss interactive music television projects we were working on for UltimateTV. They have a pretty interestingly-designed lobby, and they allow small dogs. On Wednesday I'm going with my work peeps -- Dave, Jen, Heather, and Arleen to the Good Morning America show, but we don't know what the topic is yet. Labels: august, bocce, jeff, lee, mindy, nyc, travel, work posted by Jess Barron @ 3:38 PM
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| March 3, 2005 | Mongoose Posing as Ferret |
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Mindy posted her photos from our trip to St. Thomas the day she got back. It took me a little bit longer, but mine are also now available. We saw whales, wild donkeys, and a mongoose (which I incorrectly identified as a ferret!). Labels: mindy, photos, st thomas, travel posted by Jess Barron @ 12:48 PM
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| February 18, 2005 | Disappearing is Easy, It's Coming Back That's Hard |
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I took a long-awaited, much-needed highly-anticipated 6-day vacation last week from my job and from the internets, and I can't get (caught back) up! Yes, the rumors are all true, I have returned from visiting my mother and her boyfriend on St. Thomas in the Caribbean. Mindy flew down from NYC to take a vacation with us, so we got to catch up as well. Mindy was just informed that she has been accepted into Carnegie Mellon's Technology and Public Policy Master's program, so I am wicked proud of her. She also posted her photos of our trip, and mine are -- as usual -- yet to come.
(Dedicated She Said, She Said radio listeners are well aware that I have spent many Friday nights on-air cajoling Matt and/or mayor Gavin Newsom to take me out on a Valentine's date.) Well, Wednesday night Matt was escorting a blonde pony-tailed gal who looked a tad too "Marina" for the show's crowd. Matt!? How could you?! I feel so dissed and betrayed! posted by Jess Barron @ 11:09 AM
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| January 11, 2002 | Vassar's Wet Dream |
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"This is Vassar's wet dream!" Mindy squealed, as Ethan Zohn won Survivor. "I mean c'mon, he's a heterosexual male and he's an athelete..." "Yeah, no one's gonna think it's an all girls school anymore... This is almost like when you worked in the school's publicity department and you were making the recruitment videos, and you wouldn't use me as a stand-in because I wasn't black or male or athletic or Asian," I responded, still bitter from missing my big break in Vassar's promotional video due to my white female majority status. "What I want to know," said Adam a.k.a. Atom, "Is do they get one million dollars and then have the 40% taxes taken out or do they give them enough money so that they have a million after taxes?" "I can't believe our classmate won Survivor!" Mindy said. "Yeah, if someone from Vassar was going to win Survivor, I would've expected it to be a catty gay boy like J.P. or a pissed-off Women's Studies major," I said. Mindy immediately called Helen on her cell phone, and I called Allyson who is at CES in Vegas, and probably right now shaking her ass at Rum Jungle. (Oh, I'm not jealous. Noooooo. But what if she's hanging out with Bill?!) Allyson didn't answer, so I didn't even know if she knew yet that Ethan won. Damn. No She Said, She Said tonight. After that we thought about who else to call, and I ended up calling Lee to point out how, once again, Vassar's superiority to his alma mater Occidental College (which incidentally goes by the nickname of "Oxy," Eww!) has been made evident. We considered calling J.P. because he's such a pop culture addict, but I remembered how he keeps telling me that he doesn't watch reality TV because his own life is much more interesting. Perhaps the best part about Ethan winning Survivor is that I won $80 in my office's Survivor pool. It may not be a million dollars, but it's enough to buy me a few cocktails (even at San Francisco prices). After the Survivor excitement Mindy and Adam busted out Dance Dance Revolution and started jumpin' around my living space. And then Mindy and I busted into the duet that she and I are singing Saturday night during my birthday festivities at The Mint. My birthday is coming up very soon. We're celebrating two days early on Saturday night. What song should I karaoke? People keep asking me what I did on New Year's Eve, and it's not such an easy question to answer: "Ummm, well, we built drunken pyramids on my kitchen floor and scared the dog." Seriously, how the hell do I explain what was going on in this photo?. Heather also posted some New Year's pics on her site too. Labels: allyson, jp, lee, mindy, sanfrancisco, sf, vassar posted by Jess Barron @ 7:01 PM
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| November 9, 2001 | California -- It's the Cheese |
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"Happy cows make great cheese, and happy cows live in California." --a cheesy quote from California dairy farmers’ ubiquitous "It's the Cheese" tv ad campaign. "California is the only state that touches both Mexico and Canada." --Mindy, my (actually quite) intelligent friend who received her B.A. from Vassar. Three things: 1. It's November 9, and it's 75 degrees, and I'm wearing sandals. 2. As of next week, I will have lived in my loft for one calendar year. I'm actually planning to stay here one more year. This fact may not sound exciting to you, but this will be the first time since I was 17-years-old (ten years ago) that I've lived in the same dwelling for longer than 12 months. 3. I really do love California. Well, mostly I love Los Angeles and San Francisco (I can say with some certainty that I do not love Bakersfield, Fresno, Sacramento, San Diego, or Davis. But I will admit that there is still something interesting about places like Pasadena, pre-fab Palo Alto, and Sausalito.) Though I do not unconditionally love all the other California cities, there is something I do love about driving the 5 from bottom to top, my eyes lingering along the vast bountiful fields filled with fruit year-round, intersected by elaborate aqueducts, and lined with neat rows of plants and trees. As I reach northern California, I can't help but ogle the gorgeous soft rolling grassy green hills. Unlike the jutting mountain-like hills of New Hampshire or Vermont, northern California's hills seem take special care not to block out the sun. Sometimes I think I'm one of the only people who loves both San Francisco and Los Angeles. I am, quite possibly, the only person foolish enough to admit in writing that I love Los Angeles a bit more. A few days after moving to SF last fall, I was invited to a loft party in SOMA. While being introduced to a woman around my age, I accidentally mentioned that I had just moved to the city from Los Angeles. Her immediate self-satisfied response was, "Well, at least you're in a better city now!" I tried to explain to her that not everyone is completely brainwashed that the Bay Area is the best place to live, but it wasn't worth getting in a bitch fight and/or shattering her idea of reality. When I lived on the East Coast in Boston in 1996, I always assumed I would move to San Francisco. SF was so cool -- it was the dot.com epicenter -- (and I was already working at Monster.com and completely bought in on "The Revolution," as stupid as that now sounds.) Los Angeles seemed sort of tacky in comparison. When I was trying to get my employers at Wildweb to pay for my transfer to Los Angeles in 1999 (from Boston) my friend and manager, Eliot, a former Angeleno, had warned me, "People in the Bay-Area treat Los Angeles as if it's this big, dumb dog. And Los Angeles maybe kind of just accepts that stereotype, because I don't think LA really cares about the image as much as people might think. But anyone who lives there knows that LA actually has a lot of things, particularly in Los Feliz and Silverlake, that are just as cool, if not cooler than anything they have up there. Plus there are more artists." With Eliot's assistance and a bit of luck, I did end up being transferred from Boston to Los Angeles, and when I arrived there, I found a place that was so strange and filled with people who all had huge dreams and bizarre quirks. I was convinced, and still am, that it had to have been created by someone's imagination like some kind of trippy cartoon. The way the sunlight hits the buildings at 3 in the afternoon, the shadows and colors are so dramatic, you constantly feel like those scenes in a movie where they close-up on the lover beaming down over the beloved's face. (I swear I wasn't much of a romantic until I moved to Los California.) I know, no one's supposed to love Hell-ay, but I did. I fell in love with the city no one was supposed to love, just as easily as I fell in love with the goofy messed-up boy in my life who was daring me to love him. When my friend Jeff and I decided to go west just over two years ago, he was living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which he loved, except for the sweltering summer heat waves that kept everyone inside hovering around an air conditioner. Jeff and I had been friends since we were fifteen. We grew up in a Massachusetts suburb and met in a public school Latin class. Three years after my graduation from Vassar, I was living in Cambridge, MA and hating everything about the uptight Bostonian East Coast attitude. I had already been bitten by the Burning Man bug, and realized that the majority of Black Rock City's inhabitants hailed from the West Coast. "When a lot of people get together in the best places things go glimmering. The thing is to have a lot of people in the center of the world, wherever that happens to be. Then things go glimmering." I beckoned Jeff to move west with me, peppering my speech with lines from "Absolution," one of my favorite F. Scott Fitzgerald short stories. Two of our other friends Paul and Hillary already lived in the City of Quartz. Paul lived in Santa Monica studying architecture at Sci Arc and Hillary lived in Hollywood and worked in acquisitions at Fox. Jeff became convinced. The only decision was whether to find an apartment in cool-kid Los Feliz or out by the sparkly ocean in Santa Monica. Our jobs on the Westside dictated our choice, and I found that I could be happy living anywhere in Los Angeles, even in West LA where we were surrounded by UCLA kids and families with Spanish-style bungalows with immaculate lawns. Maybe I loved Los Angeles most because I hit it at an interesting time in my life. I was really ready to begin everything. I wanted to dance all night to glam rock in Hollywood clubs with strippers and guys in bands. I wanted to dress even more flamboyantly. I wanted to learn to rollerblade while watching the sun set over the ocean and licking the salt from my lips. Maybe I loved Los Angeles because I hit it at an interesting time in its life. I saw the entertainment dot.com bubble from the inside. My P-2-P MP3 start-up company was headquartered in Beverly Hills and majority-owned by mogul Michael Ovitz. The people I met were writers, photographers, painters, musicians, and actors (some whose names you’d recognize, and some who you would not), and they didn’t all hail from New England or go to college in the Northeast. They had their own unique dreams and they weren't doing these things just because their families expected them to. A few weekends ago while walking barefoot on San Francisco's Ocean Beach, Mindy and I were speculating about which, if any, states could successfully succeed from the Union. "California is probably the only one that could do it, right?" I ventured. "Well, California is the only state that touches both Mexico and Canada," Mindy said. "California doesn't touch Canada!" I exclaimed, and both of us immediately started laughing. "I can’t believe I said that," Mindy said, while still giggling. "It's stuff like that that makes people in Washington and Oregon hate Californians." I admitted that I sometimes pictured the map that way too. I suppose that confirms it -- we're officially Californians now. Labels: california, jeff, la, losangeles, mindy, quotes, sanfrancisco, sf, web posted by Jess Barron @ 8:39 PM
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| October 13, 1997 | The Scatman in Greece's Modern Ruins |
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The first time I heard "Skee-Bop-Bop-Ba-Da-Ba" by the Scatman, I was lying practically naked in a shabby hotel room in Athens. It was 3:30 AM local time. Our bodies weren't acclimated yet. Mindy and I had been sleeping with our clothes off because Greece was sweltering. It was late July and the temperature had topped 100 degrees. Our tenth-floor room featured a small window that wouldn't open (whether it was forced shut from accumulated grime or well-positioned glue, we didn't know), a large dead cockroach (we named him Hephestus and he became our mascot), and a small TV which received five channels (two in English). The ancient fan (there wasn't an air conditioner) was positioned on a short table in a corner of the room. Its blades blew stagnant air across our low pallets. We had arrived in Athens at 5 PM, and after lugging our overstuffed packs through the airport and surviving the treacherous cab ride to our hotel, decided sleep was more important than dinner. Just a nap, we told ourselves, and then we'll venture out to explore the nightlife. It was still too hot to move. We peeled off the clothes we had been wearing since Boston, and collapsed in our bras and underwear on the beds. "I wish I could take my skin off and just lie around in my bones," Mindy had grumbled. I didn't answer. I thought of the cracked buildings and crumbling facades I had seen out the grimy glass of the cab window. Everything looked dirty; it was as if the entire city had been thoroughly coated with a dull beige layer of paint. Or maybe it was sprinkled with the dust of disintegrating skeletons. You may notice that I have morbid tendencies. When we had explained to the cab driver that we had come to Athens for a vacation, he advised in broken English that if we were visiting Greece for a summer holiday we would not want to stay in the city. As per our premeditated plan, we neglected to add that we only intended to stay in Athens two nights before moving on to Turkey. The additional information would have taken too much energy to communicate and would have angered him unnecessarily. I sprawled uncomfortably across my lumpy bed and worried. Would I be able to manage carrying my backpack? Would we be able to get information from anyone (neither of us spoke a word of Greek)? And how would we ever get to Turkey? I wondered whether the trip would be successful. Somehow, my anxieties subsided as I shifted on the lumpy the mattress beneath the gaudy gilded mirror (a price tag in Greek drachma was still stuck on the frame). And then we slept for hours. Mindy woke up first and turned on the TV. The meager options for late-night viewing kept the dial positioned on channel 18, MTV Europe. While most of the videos played by the trendy British VJs were well-known American artists such as Nine Inch Nails or Nirvana, an occasional wild-card was thrown into the mix, reminding us that we were far away from home. When The Scatman came on with his cheesy video, we knew we needed to get out of our stifling tomb. We dressed and headed downstairs. The hotel bar was closing down, from what we could tell. No one could (or would) speak English, so we ventured onto the street without any direction. After walking for a few blocks we found out that the large divided street housed nothing but Italian car dealerships with well-lit glass showrooms that only emphasized the nighttime desolation. One of us wondered aloud how it was that the ancient Greeks had managed to build and maintain aquaducts while the modern Greeks hadn't managed to build and staff 24-hour convenience stores. There were very few cars on the road and sometimes the drivers slowed down to look at us. We attracted attention as "foreigners" without doing anything silly or wearing anything tacky in that way American tourists inevitably do. We realized slowly that we were the only women out walking the street. After receiving catcalls from two men on a motorcycle, we gave up and returned to our hotelroom. Back in the room we broke into our supply of "emergency food" and nibbled Nutri Grain breakfast bars followed by swallows of warm bottled water. Then, in an attempt to entertain ourselves we made togas out of our dingy bed sheets and paraded around the room. posted by Jess Barron @ 8:20 PM
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