Shannon > Recent Status Updates

I especially like eavesdropping on women my age. Besides being titillating, it also helps me gauge where I'm at in comparison. Am I normal? Am I doing the correct trendy exercises? Am I reading the right books? Is gluten still lame? It was through eavesdropping that I learned that you could buy fresh peanut butter at Whole Foods from a machine that grinds it in front of you.

Jewish guys - Hey, look. I know you talk to your mom twice a day on the phone, and I talk to my mom only once a day. That doesn't mean your mom beats my mom. Also, I know your mom is an amazing cook. I feel like you think my mom cooked us Hamburger Helper growing up.

If my mother is crying, I will start to cry. I think it mostly has to do with the fact that my mom never cries. My mom and I went to go see The Help, and during the movie I noticed her start tearing up. It was such a rare sight, I started to as well. Soon we were both weeping so hard it was as though we'd been black maids in Jim Crow-era Mississippi and the movie had hit too close to home. People were weirded out.

Depressing zeitgeisty magazine articles convince more open-minded liberal arts graduates that the nuclear family doesn't exist without some hideous twist, like the dad is allowed to go to an S&M dungeon once a week or something. It means that fewer and fewer people are believing it's cool to want what I want, which is to be married and have kids and love each other in a monogamous, long-lasting relationship.

Non-traumatic things that have made me cry:
Valet guys who are my dad's age. I can't even deal with this. When I see a man who is around my father's age running down the street to get a car, it breaks my heart.

Averting my eyes in order to not see all of the Shadow Heir updates is proving to be difficult ...

Get a little jealous now and again, even if you're not strictly a jealous guy.
Too much, and it's frightening, but a possessive hand on her back at a party when your girlfriend looks super hot is awesome.

Bring wine or chocolate to everything.
People love when guys do that. Not just because of the gift, but because it is endearing to imagine you standing in line at Trader Joe's before the party.

Kiehl's for your skin, Bumble and Bumble for your hair.
Maybe a comb. That is all you need. And when girls look in your medicine cabinet (which they will obviously do within the first five minutes of coming to your place), you'll look all classily self-restrained because you'll have only two beauty products. You're basically a cowboy.

Here's my incredibly presumptuous guide to being an awesome guy, inside and out.

Have one great cologne that's not from the drugstore.
Just one. Wear very little of it, all the time. I cannot tell you how sexy it is to be enveloped in a hug by a man whose smell you remember.

CHLOE (shyly): Can I just say you're my hero?
Don't you dare, Chloe. Don't you dare make it impossible to hate you. Quit looking at me, all earnest, with those Bambi eyes. Also, I'm your "hero"? What am I, ten thousand years old? I quickly said something weird like "Bless you, child," excused myself, and walked briskly away.

My teens and early twenties were largely without significant sexual incident. Okay, even the not-so-careful reader will notice this. If you've merely glanced at the back cover of this book while you're in line at the bookstore, you'd probably come to that conclusion. This is what happens when you have friends who are more likely to tell ghost stories in a living room with flashlights than recount tales of raunchy sex

In my mind, the sexiest thing in the world is the feeling that you're wanted. The simple overture of wanting me can satisfy my ego for a good long time. The sexual situation that could come with it? Well, that's just less appealing to me. I just think, like, who is this guy? Don't you need to know some more about a guy than an evening's worth of conversation at a bar to make sex appealing?

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with listing my favorite things. I kept an index card with all my favorite foods folded into my wallet, just in case anyone asked me what they were. Then when people walked away, I imagined they'd say: "Whoa, Mindy Kaling is so cool and self-actualized. McDonald's pancakes are her favorite food, and she was able to tell me right away."

I do not need to hear people tearing into Lisa Lampanelli for liking to have sex only with black men. I'm sad that this is her famous running gag. I'm sad that I now know this. I'm sad that a legitimate rung on the ladder of making it in comedy is writing hateful stuff about total strangers. I don't know. I also did not want to see photos of Osama Bin Laden's dead body. I think the two things are related.

Van Helsing
Why was this movie so bad? It had all the ingredients of a great movie. The subject material (handsome European professor annihilates vampires) is the stuff dreams are made of. Hugh was in prime Jackman when he played smoldering Van Helsing. The lovely Kate Beckinsale was there, too, as pale beautiful lady friend or whatever. Why wasn't this a killer movie and a classic?

I love watching The Real Housewives of any city, so I have an appreciation for lunatic divas. So it is a little disappointing that there aren't any on our show. We don't have any sensational meltdowns if, say, Catering accidentally puts chickpeas in a star's salad. Actually, wait, maybe I'm that person. I will throw a salad across the room if there are chickpeas in it, I swear to God.

The woman who works in an art gallery. This is one of the rare clichés that actually has a male counterpart. Whenever you meet a handsome, charming, successful man in a romantic comedy, the heroine's friend always says the same thing. "He's really successful—he's an ...
(say it with me)
... architect!"
There are like nine people in the entire world who are architects, and one of them is my dad.

I am more than willing to suspend my disbelief during a romantic comedy for good set decoration alone. But sometimes even my suspended disbelief isn't enough. I am speaking of the gorgeous and skinny heroine who is also a disgusting pig when it comes to food. If you look closely, you can see this woman's ribs. You wonder what the characters would do if they were confronted by an actual average American woman.

I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world. Then I just lap it up. There is no difference between Ripley from Alien and any Katherine Heigl character. They're all participating in the same level of made-up awesomeness, and I enjoy every second of it.

Brenda and I have always done "bits," even before we knew they were called "bit." For whatever reason, around this time our favorite recurring bit was when Bren played Matt Damon and I was Ben Affleck. We played the "guys" very naturalistically, but they had a slightly jock-like, dude posture, and slightly lower voices. Again, have I emphasized how well we fit into our lesbian neighborhood?

Bennifer was so big it was as though two people had never been in love before, and they had discovered it. I think it's also easy to forget that Bennifer created the trend of the blended celebrity couple name. Without Bennifer we wouldn't have Brangelina or Tomkat, or even the less used Jabrobra (James Brolin and Barbra Streisand). That is the gift that Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez gave us.

I made these:

My mother is so proud.

I had to be careful not to cry when reading this on the plane. I have no idea why "toys coming to life" stories always make me so emotional. I used to actually have a velveteen rabbit too, and this is such a nice little story.

"I am the nursery magic Fairy," she said. "I take care of all the playthings that the children have loved. When they are old and worn out and the children don't need them any more, then I come and take them away with me and turn them into Real.
"Wasn't I Real before?" asked the little Rabbit.
"You were Real to the Boy," the Fairy said, "because he loved you. Now you shall be Real to every one."

Weeks passed, and the little Rabbit grew very old and shabby, but the Boy loved him just as much. He loved him so hard that he loved all his whiskers off, and the pink lining to his ears turned grey, and his brown spots faded. He even began to lose his shape, and he scarcely looked like a rabbit any more, except to the Boy. To him he was always beautiful, and that was all that the little Rabbit cared about.

And so time went on, and the little Rabbit was very happy-so happy that he never noticed how his beautiful velveteen fur was getting shabbier and shabbier, and his tail becoming unsewn, and all the pink rubbed off his nose where the Boy had kissed him.

Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.

I don't think this book is for me.