Dreams Shmeams

I have an issue with these American Idol auditions. These people are truly awful. Like, sometimes, I wonder, who told these people that they are going to make it? I was thinking about this, and you know who I bet said something? Parents.

My sister took violin lessons for a few years, and I think my dad was convinced that she was the next violin prodigy or something, the way he had people listen to her pick that thing. The truth was, the kid was better at picking her nose. She was plain awful. She could probably play two notes, but we had to listen to them. The worst part? My parents really made my sister think she had some talent there.

The catch, though, was that eventually, my parents stopped telling her she was great at the violin, and they stopped having her take lessons when - and here's the big thing - it would have cost money to give her the private lessons. That's a good sign: if money's being shelled out, you're good to go. If you're stopping something because it costs money, you just aren't that good. Years after this whole debacle, if you ask my sister, she'll tell you: she sucked at the violin. If there were some Violin Idol, she wouldn't try out. She's normal. My parents were realistic. At age twelve, she stopped with the show. Everyone thanked them.

Clearly, I'm not into giving people false hope. Or false egos. I don't think it's good for anybody to tell them that they're good at something when they're obviously horrible. People would be saved a lot of humiliation if someone had just shot them, if they were afraid to offend them. And that's just it: in this society, everyone is so afraid of telling anybody the truth. It's all about sidestepping the truth because it's too harsh. Well, I'm tired of it. If you suck, you suck. If you need to be put in your place, someone ought to put you there. Everyone complains about everyone, and yet when it comes down to it, no one's willing to do anything real about it.

We're creating a society of American Idol wannabes, because everyone thinks they have star ability. Everybody has been told how talented they are, even when not a shred of anything resembling talent exists. You're not Whitney Houston simply because you like The Bodyguard and do drugs once in a while. You're not Faith Hill because you're blonde. It doesn't work like that, but for some reason, every person is convinced that if they have a dream, they can make it happen. Here's a cinder block to the head: you can't.

I remember watching Hilary Swank accept her Oscar last year. She said that when she was little and living in a trailer park, she would dream about being an actress. And then she did it: she told everyone who had a dream not to give up. Way to go, Hil. Are you going to be supporting all of the trailer park actresses out there now? Now Wanda who was going to work at Wal Mart thinks that she's destined to be next Hilary Swank, and she'll stop going to work and now she'll move out to Los Angeles and try to make it big while working part time at the local restaurant chain that hires wannabe actresses. Just what the world needs. If I ever meet Ms. Swank, I'm going to have words with her. She really did a disservice to her fellow trailer parkees, who should have been told, "Work at Wal Mart, Wanda. Go out there, work hard every day, it's respectable,pay $7.50 to see my movies, move out of the park, be well." Collect the Oscar, move on.

Just as I go to close this, case in point on American Idol appears. This guy sings horribly, absolutely no ability to carry the tune, and the judges tell him that. On the way out, he tells Ryan Seacrest that the judges are insane, and that he was on pitch. Ten bucks his parents told him every day growing up that he could sing. If Hilary Swank told him he could act, he would have shown up on Al Pacino's door step.

Don't get me wrong - I'm all for having "dreams" and trying to be successful in life, but delusion is an entirely different story. I'm not against dream squashing if it's necessary. My kids aren't going to be dreamers. I'll make sure of it.

Help Me Out

Nobody wants to make life easy for anybody. Take this past Friday. A co-worker and I went to Dunkin Donuts before work, to get some coffee. She has a gift card that we always use. So when we arrive, right before 9 AM, we realize that we are in the midst of the 9 AM Construction Worker Consortium, where every Boston construction crew has sent a delegate to pick up that day's order. (On a side note, I have never seen anything like this - we're talking buckets and buckets of coffees, bagels, donuts, muffins, straws, napkins... it's like an entire operation. Guys had clipboards.) Obviously, there's a line and a wait. So we wait. When we're next, this guy behind the cash register calls us over to his register at the side. We make sure he is pointing to us (he is) and he again tells us to go to his register, so we go. And after we order, we see a sign on his register that says "Cash only - no credit cards." Now, look, we debated for a minute or two, while the guy - Habib - was getting the food, whether we'd have an issue because we were at this register trying to use a gift card. We figured no, because a gift card wasn't a credit card, and didn't require the whole swipe and sign deal. Plus, he had called US over to HIM. We calmed down. When Habib came back, though, we found out how wrong we were. Not only would he not accept the gift card, Habib informed us, but no Dunkin Donuts were taking anything other than cash. That's right. On Friday, January 27th, not a single Dunkin Donuts took any form of payment besides dollars and cents. Looking back, we probably could have probed further and made a decent case about gift cards vs. credit cards (as stated above), but when you have waited through literally about 50 coffees and donuts and you have another 250 worth of construction worker coffees behind you waiting, you pretty much have only one option: pay cash and leave. So we did. Throughout the day, I told a few people about the Dunkin Donuts Disaster, and how the franchise was really experiencing some serious technical difficulties if absolutely none of them worldwide could take credit or gift cards. I stopped telling people this, though, after the fourth consecutive person (out of five people I told) said that they had bought stuff at Dunkin Donuts and used a credit card, and it had been just fine. This led me to my two final conclusions: first, the people I know obviously have money issues (umm, charging stuff at Dunkin Donuts? Unless you were one of the construction guys ordering the store, I think if you don't have the $2.17 for the coffee right then, I'd go without) and, more importantly, Habib is a fraud.

In another case of nobody wanting to make life easy for anybody, I attended a family dinner last week. My Aunt Bev had bought my grandma, for her birthday, one of those 20-Question Game machines, where the machine guesses what you are thinking of by asking the 20 questions. For the entire day, all we heard about was how amazing this machine was. "It got cat!" my grandmother kept saying. I think she nearly flipped out when she realized that we had gotten it to guess "panda bear." I love my brother telling her, "Umm, it didn't guess mine." My grandmother asks him, "What did it guess?" "Underwear," he says. "What were you thinking of?" she asked. He looked around for a second, sheepish. "Uhh, nothing." Good grief. So anyway, everyone can tell that my grandma is pretty psyched about this, and so far, it's guessed everything. Everyone's impressed. So we take it to dinner with us. And we eat at this Chinese restaurant, and it guesses chopstick. That just put the lady over. She couldn't take it. Finally, my other aunt, my Aunt Diane, pipes up. She hasn't been paying much attention to this game, which already has been annoying my Aunt Bev, who can't deal with my Aunt Diane and always feels like Diane thinks Bev is inferior. So my grandmother tells Diane what the deal is with the game, and Diane's like, "Okay, let me try this. Let me see this thing." My Aunt Bev is practically jumping out of her chair. Her older sister thinks something she got her mother is cool! She can hardly contain herself. So she tells Diane to think of an object, and Diane says, "Okay, I did." Bev says, "No, you have to tell us what it is." After some heming and hawing, Diane says, "Okay okay, I'll tell you." So Bev says, "What is it?" Diane says, "A brandy sifter."

I wish I had a video camera.

First of all, and really, most importantly, Bev's face was priceless. She rolled her eyes and shook her head, like "Oh, right, you have to pick the ONE thing that will prove that my game is a failure, just like me." So priceless. I was so busy concentrating on this reaction that I nearly missed my grandmother's outrage.

"A brandy sifter? That's what you think of! How about a teapot! A toaster. A kitchen appliance. A brandy sifter!" This was made about ten times funnier because my aunt has been drinking like she's in a contest with Diana Ross (pre-rehab).

For the record, I'm still not sure what the hell a brandy sifter is. The game went away after that. But the point remains: nobody makes life easy for anybody. (My brother claims this was the runner up moment, because he had earlier tried to make conversation at the silent table by asking, "So, have you seen 'The Producers?' to which two people yelled out - at the exact same time - 'I loved it.' and 'Horrible, depraved film.')**

(**This was the email I got today: "Elana, there's no such thing as a brandy sifter. It's a brandy sniffer. The glass is designed with a wide top so that you can sniff the brandy." Umm, I am dumb. Ironically, I hate when people mess up words like that. Especially when they're making fun of people while doing that. Ugh. Oh well.)

Speaking of all of this "making life easy" stuff, how about making some sort of rule that when it's inclement weather, pedestrians have the right of way at all times, no matter what? How about some drivers - in their dry, warm cars- being somewhat courteous and allowing people on foot to jump over puddles and snow banks without fearing that they're also going to be run over? How about not jumping the red lights, so people crossing the street don't have to worry about the Mercedes gunning them down while they try to figure out whether the puddle is ankle- or knee-deep? Is that reallly too much to ask? I don't think so.

Disaster on Ice

A few months ago, I went to my first Bruins game and bought my first Bruins t-shirt. I went back and forth on who to get, because I'm not a huge Bruins fan, or a hockey fan, and so I didn't know who would be good to get on my t-shirt. I was deciding between Samsonov and Thornton. I went with Thornton (even though I was leaning towards Samsonov, though I'm not sure why) because he was the team captain and because his brother goes to BU as a grad student, and I'd met his brother and thought he was very nice so I bet that Thornton was also nice. I paid twenty bucks for that shirt, and I was assured it was a good purchase because Joe was a.) a good guy and b.) a good bet because he was the captain of the team.

I wore the shirt the following Saturday for about six hours.

About a week later, the Bruins traded Joe Thornton to the San Jose Sharks for three young (possibly?) unknown guys.

I don't even want to talk about the disappointment I suddenly felt, even though I'd probably watched Joe Thornton's career as a Bruin for about two hours and twenty minutes, including the one game I had attended a few weeks earlier. But still, I felt cheated. I'd just bought the shirt, how could he be gone already? I lamented my fate until I got a ticket to the next time Joe was in town - that was tonight - and I got all excited to wear my Bruins shirt again (yeah, writing this, I'm not sure why I was so excited to wear a stupid shirt. I think it was just on principle.)

I told everyone I was going to wear my Joe Thornton shirt on January 10th, because that was when he'd return to Boston. Today, while I wore it, people constantly were asking me if I was going to the game and if I was excited to see Thornton. The thing is, I WAS excited, even though it doesn't make much sense.

My excitement lasted approximately four minutes once the game started, because at about that time, Joe Thornton got ejected from the game for a major penalty - boarding. Here's something pathetic: I know so little about hockey that it took me way more than the five minute penalty they gave him (well, in theory) to figure out that he'd actually been ejected. I kept waiting for him to skate back on the ice, when I started to think, "Hey, dumbo, he might have been ejected." I think I was the only person in the entire arena not to realize it. Plus, I had no idea what boarding was. I had to ask about four people before I got the concept. And if you saw the people I was asking to try to explain this to me, you'd realize why I felt pretty bad about my comprehension skills when I couldn't grasp something that was so obvious to all of these... people.

This brings me into another discussion about Bruins fans. Well, take that back. Hockey fans. I'm not telling anyone I'm into hockey. The truth is, I'm not that into it, and plus, the female hockey fans are... scary. Forget their clothing (shudder) and their mullets (laugh slash shudder). The stuff that flew out of the women's mouths, I can't even put in print without shuddering. I'm telling you, I've never heard anything like it. It's like I was afraid I'd get cooties sitting next to some of the women and some men there. (One particularly attractive gentleman wore the t-shirt, "Drink until she looks better." From counting the number of beers he brought back to his section, it looks like the lucky lovely lady was a trainwreck.)

They did make me think of an idea: if you think someone's disgusting, you should take them to a hockey game. Chances are, if they can sit through it without getting one of those "I think I just puked in my mouth" faces, you're dealing with a pretty disgusting person. I think I almost lost my dinner... oh, about twenty times? The worst was when some guy told this San Jose fan to "sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up" and the woman (I think she was one) yelled back that he should eat... umm, something. I'm going to go barf, excuse me.

So anyway, the whole night was a bust. It was fun to go to a game, if you could call it that - the Bruins lost, 6-2, with that second goal coming in the final minute of the whole debacle. It was just a horrible mess. The only reason I went to the game in the first place was to see Joe Thornton play, and that was only for the first four minutes! I spent the rest of the game all upset over the irony of the entire situation and trying to pretend I knew what was happening. The Bruins never got anything good going; the one time it looked like the might have a play, something happened and the teams went to time out and then the Sharks got possession of the puck during a face-off. I don't even think you can write a sentence like that about hockey. I can't tell if my annoyance with the whole thing is because it was truly awful or if I just couldn't understand a single thing.

Also, the Sharks fans make this horrible arm motion that looks like a shark's jaws during the most random moments ever. Like, I'd think they'd do this thing when, oh, say, the Sharks got a goal, right? Nope. Just at total random moments, the hands start going. Something's off in San Jose. Plus - and almost up there with no Thornton - they didn't even have one fight the whole night. The one fun thing in hockey, and the officials (or are they referees in hockey? I don't even know) broke up the only potential fight before anyone even threw down their sticks. Total disappointment. Still, it's even scarier to watch hockey fans react when they think a fight even might happen. If you want a harrowing picture of what American society looks like, go to a hockey game or jury duty. I'm telling you.

I'm sending Joe Thornton a bill for my ticket.