Money is no object!

September 29, 2007

You know something I’ve always wanted to say?

“Money is no object!”

Who even talks like that?

I’ve never actually spoken this phrase while shopping, but this is basically the reason I make my mom take me shopping to Dollar Tree whenever I visit home. (Dollar stores in New York are disgusting). I love being in a store in which there is not a single thing I cannot afford. Nay, not even a single thing I’d regret purchasing if it didn’t work out.

I kind of want to be looking at something at Dollar Tree and vacillating on the color, at which point I say “I’ll take them all!”

In this fantasy I am dressed like a soap opera character from the 1980s and look more like Ivana Trump.

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Angelina, the clothes blender, and Jefferson: some small things in my life

September 28, 2007

  • I bought a trenchcoat, because Angelina Jolie looks so good in them. The first day I wore it, the repeated rubbing from the strap of my heavy shoulder bag popped off the upper left button. (A girl’s gotta work, and New Yorkers don’t have cars in which to stow the materials of life and toil). On a related note, why must Angelina insist on carrying her now-enormous children, two at a time, for the cameras? And how do her skeletal arms not break under the strain of Pax and Zahara?

  • I have recently taught the vocabulary word “prodigal” to approximately seven SAT students, and have discovered that my “Christian” students (all Asian — this is, after all, New York) are totally unfamiliar with the actual contents of the Bible. Prodigal son? Nothing. Sodom? Never heard of it. (No point even getting into how maybe the moral of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah ought to be “Don’t hand off your daughters to gang rapists!” or even just “Rape is bad!” rather than “Gay people are bad”, even if that were appropriate discussion with a tutor, which it isn’t). I had suspected the informational bankruptcy of church youth groups when an SAT essay topic about sacrifice came up in a class I was teaching, and some students asked if they could write about Jesus. I said certainly, although such an example should contain the same level of detail and rigor as any other argumentative example: references to specific incidents related in the Bible, specific parables, books of the Bible, etc. None of the essays I received back had a level of detail greater than “Jesus was nice and 100% good and he died for us” (even in essays in which the student had shown him or herself capable of better by also writing detail-laden examples about, say, World War II, or The Great Gatsby). When an atheist knows more than you do about your religion … read more! Of course that is my prescription for many ailments, both societal and individual. Please enjoy this article about the Jefferson Bible, the historical life of Jesus, and the suppressed Gospel of Thomas.
  • I am considering getting a tattoo that says “Read More.”
  • I have become less thin in the last six weeks, as Army food really wasn’t bad at all, and downing Gatorade was a requirement just to stay upright. A pencil skirt that used to ride up around my ribcage now stays snugly in place across … what do you call them … hips? Previous readers who have rudely suggested I “eat a sandwich” will be pleased.
  • I’ve been meaning to ask about this for years: how can a cab driver charge you for tolls on top of the $45 “flat rate” for a ride from JFK to Manhattan? Doesn’t that defy the very idea of a flat rate? Have I been taken for a $4 ride (well, a $49 ride including a $4 swindle), repeatedly?
  • I bought a beautiful pressed tin, embossed jewelry box in Bahrain, from a vendor who told me he’d imported it from Kashmir. I paid a nice sum for it and substantially repacked my suitcase to get the thing home. Two days after returning to the States, I was in Chinatown … and guess what they were selling? A friend told me my jewelry box was more special because I had actually brought it back from somewhere. I’m not sure if believing this violates my antipathy for superstition.
  • In eight days, I will cease to be the only “Jennifer Dziura,” by virtue of my brother’s marriage to his fiancee Jennifer. She even shares the middle initial “L.” You know how weird it is to hear my Mom say “Jennifer and Brian” and have her not mean me? Jen 2.0 is totally nice and normal and genial, though, so I can’t even say anything bad about her stealing my name. In fact, once you take a full-time job in a domestic violence shelter, I’m not sure anyone can ever say anything bad about you again.

  • I have a splendid device in my house — it’s a Wonder Washer, AS SEEN ON TV ™! It’s basically a giant blender for clothes. It washes delicates. No one ever talks about this, but what do other ladies DO in New York? I drop off my sheets and towels and jeans and socks and a few other things to the laundry-by-the-pound place, where they are returned to me clean and folded, but for years I have been carting my delicates to the laundromat, washing them myself, bringing them back wet (sometimes carrying baskets or bags of wet laundry several blocks) and hanging them up. Which means I have been known to buy new bras rather than wash the old ones. The Wonder Washer doesn’t solve all my problems — it has no drainage system and doesn’t really rinse — but it has cut down on laundry quandaries by at least 50%, which is well worth $40.

  • The mother of one of my Korean students has gotten me hooked on roasted corn iced tea! When I first tried it, at my student’s house, I just assumed it was something herbal. When my student’s mother offered me some teabags to take home, I asked what it was. Corn! Who knew? It’s freaking delicious.

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haha college LOL

September 27, 2007

The SAT is advertising on MySpace! Next to Desperate Housewives!

I have a new idea for a slogan:

If you found out about the SAT from MySpace, it’s too late anyway.

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Mideast tour: Blake and Andrew

September 26, 2007

Apropos to my last post, on the victory of earnestness over irony among our armed forces, here is something I am delighted to have taped.

At Camp L.S.A., Kuwait, two young soldiers stood out in the crowd because they showed up after I’d already begun my set, and because they had bothered to go back to their tents and change into civilian clothes. One even had bleached-out hair — they looked good, but a bit out of place. I teased them a bit from the stage, and when they came through the autograph line, they told us they made music, and asked if, should they go to their tents and retrieve their guitars, we would sign them.

That turned into this:

They performed two songs for us. Andrew, on the left, was charmingly nervous. I later received a MySpace message from Blake — his profile says he’s just 20! I know these young men have important and difficult jobs to do, but seriously: could boys get any cuter?

Blake and Andrew are thinking of moving to Nashville once they get out of the service. They don’t have a band name yet. Perhaps they are taking suggestions?

I have kept in touch and offered to find them a place to play when they come to New York, perhaps in January. I am inviting all my lady friends.

The delighted audience. Comics rarely finish doing a show…
and then get a show done back for them.

Andrew, Blake, and the girls in the USO.
Note the signed guitars.
The USO at Camp LSA was an air-conditioned oasis full of IKEA couches on an otherwise bleak desert base. (Even though it all looks very nice, keep in mind one still has to leave the tent and walk 50 yards through 125-degree heat to get to the latrines). Note the psychedelic decorating scheme — somehow the USO has co-opted the imagery of the Vietnam protest movement to provide today’s troops with the nicest tent in all of Kuwait.

Eventually, Blake and Andrew’s superior officers made us wrap it up — after all, it was nearly 9:30.

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Mideast tour: white people and a total lack of irony

September 26, 2007

On my comedy tour of the Middle East, I was brought to realize many things.

Our military is a lot whiter than I had imagined. In fact, a huge swath of the US Armed Forces is made up of recent (Caucasian) high school graduates from Texas, Indiana, and Ohio.

At one point, I said to one of the other comics, “I thought the military had a lot more black people.”

He replied, “No, you’re thinking of Vietnam.”

(Update: A commenter has provided this link [downloadable PDF] to the relevant data).

Living in Manhattan for awhile will give you a skewed picture of American demographics. If I had to guess, I’d guess Manhattan was roughly fifty or sixty percent white people, but all of them relatively wealthy, while a large percentage of everyone else are recent immigrants.* Every very rare once in awhile, you see a homeless white person, and think: what, possibly, could be the excuse for that?

(*Side note: Manhattan has as high a percentage of recent immigrants as, say, Texas, but nowhere near the anti-immigrant sentiment, because it is so terribly obvious that without hardworking recent immigrants, some of them illegal, we wouldn’t be able to afford to go out to eat, get our nails, laundry, and dry cleaning done, our food delivered, and many other services. You ever try to get your nails done in the suburbs? Try making an appointment and paying $35! A million small things are cheaper in New York thanks to a constant influx of immigration).

On Army and Air Force bases, we often did shows to crowds of 600-700 soldiers, many of whom would line up afterwards for autographs. They hadn’t known who we were before the show (well, there was one guy whose wife loved my work on McSweeney’s — dear god did that make my evening!), but there was literally nothing else to do, and an acute shortage of women.

The McSweeney’s note was especially unusual, as the entire remainder of our tour was free of irony and of any appreciation of irony. As well, perhaps, it should have been, as earnestness may be a necessary means of bolstering oneself for peril.

At Camp Buehring, Kuwait — a training base where soldiers are stationed for a short time just prior to deployment in Iraq — we did a show for an audience that was both armed, and shipping off to Iraq an hour after the show. One officer, observing the mood of the crowd, explained that much of the audience wasn’t laughing out loud because “Twenty or thirty of these guys are going to get blown up just on the way there.” In the autograph line after the show, one soldier took his signed photograph of Laura Rosenberg and showed us where it would be taped to the butt of his rifle, to keep him company in combat. Is it 1944? I thought, and then Well, goddamn.

Towards the end of the tour, we did a show on the USS Enterprise, and the ship’s media officer did taped interviews of us for the ship’s local TV channel (when they don’t have something like a rerun of last night’s comedy show to play, it’s just a blue screen with motivational messages scrolling by). Despite all the (wry, offbeat) quotes that could’ve been extracted from those interviews, when the ship’s newsletter came out the next morning, it was peppered with made-up (unfunny) quotes purportedly from the comics, things like, “Performing for the troops who are defending our country makes me proud to be an American,” and, “Entertaining the hardworking men and women of the USS Enterprise is the greatest experience of my life.”

We did not say those things. But we forgive the “media specialist” responsible.

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Mideast tour: Comedy at Camp Arafjan

September 26, 2007

This recording starts mid-joke, but it’s pretty decent for a digital camera in an outdoor setting. This was actually from the first day of the tour, 8/23, in Kuwait.

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"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

September 25, 2007


No. That would be “Omnipotent” lipcolor. Or, more precisely, lipcolor that makes its wearer omnipotent.

Diction, folks, diction.

This ad says “My lipcolor is never in error; therefore, I am omnipotent.” That, itself, is a fallacy, thus proving that a quality possessed by a lipcolor does not necessarily transfer itself to the wearer.

The proof is not “in the mirror,” L’Oreal. The proof is really only in, well … the proof.

Sophists.

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we can stop being snide Americans now

September 25, 2007

$1 US = $1 Canadian.

Yeah, I’m sure I’m not the only comedian who has jokes to go back and revise.

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World Beard and Mustache Championships

September 25, 2007

The World Beard and Mustache Championships have announced their winners.


Funny — among all the categories for English, Hungarian, Imperial, and Chinese, why no “Hasidic”?


This is Matisyahu, the Hasidic reggae star.

Just saying.

Related post: porn with mustaches: my practical joke from 2004

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Mideast tour: I finally put some flat objects in my scanner

September 24, 2007

Now settled in after my Mideast tour, I’ve finally found time to scan some souvenirs.


I bought this greeting card in Kuwait. It came from a whole line of greeting cards featuring cute cartoon burqa-clad women and dishdasha-clad men doing things like barbecuing, riding on a magic carpet, and in one case, being visited by space aliens.

In Djibouti, I found myself saving everything that said “Djibouti” on it. Iced coffee is not well-known outside America, but the hotel staff at the Djibouti Kempinski was quite enthusiastic about making me one (for what looks on the receipt like $700!) The beverage I received was laden with heavy cream and had been strained over ice, but was served sans ice, making its temperature only infinitesimally lower than that of the hotel at large. Like a cool bath. In a glass.


I purchased a bowl decorated with elephants at this shop in Djibouti. The proprietors were really adamant about giving me their business card, which had been faintly xeroxed and badly cut, but basically got the message out about HAPPY SHOP. And now it’s on my blog! So next time you’re in, say, Somalia, go ahead and take a detour to Djibouti. The bowls are great.


There is a coin shortage on US military bases. Instead of actual metal currency, you receive these cardboard “pogs” as change. Annoying! I’m stuck with seventy-five cents’ worth. I’m going to mail them to my mom so she can see if they’ll take them at the Navy Exchange back home. I’ve always wanted to buy my mom a pack of gum.


These are my alcohol ration cards from the Army bases in Qatar and Djibouti. There’s a three-drink a day limit, although that seems to be something of a formality for performers, perhaps especially female performers. I think I could have obtained really as much alcohol as I personally desired to consume.

Just add meat and milk cards for that old-time World War II feeling.

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