An Open Letter To The Male Race

Dear Sir,

Dear Liar,

Dear Peter Pan,

Dear Mama’s Boy,

Dear Popped Collar Frat Boy,

To Whom It May Concern,

I have a bone to pick with everyone who deemed me unimportant enough to warrant a return to my phone call, text message, email, letter, carrier pigeon message or smoke signal.  With everyone who decided that I was unworthy of friendship, dinner companionship, phone callership or beer drinking comradeship because I felt no compulsion to be within a five-foot radius of their penis. With everyone who ever fed me a line of bullshit.  With everyone who brought my feelings into play and then threw them in the trash like a used up copy of Us Weekly.  You’re rude.  Fuck you. 

To the Peter Pan’s, so easily identified by their Ohio State Buckeyes T-shirt, two-day stubble and shot glass of tequila raised in salute to eternal adolescence.   Grow up and learn some manners.  Please realize that not returning a phone call, a text message, an email, a dinner invitation or a request to get together is rude. If I call you, call me back.  It’s very simple.  If you don’t want to see me just say so.  Or lie.  Lying is excusable.  Rudeness is not.  And while you’re at it try a real relationship on for size.  By no means am I encouraging, or even condoning, the social propaganda known fondly as the institution of marriage, but that doesn’t mean that your closet relationship should be with your bottle on Don Julio or that your longest relationship should be fail to weather all four seasons.

To the liar’s and the insensitive ones.  Please realize that when you involve emotions you are fucking with someone’s life.   If I tell you that we can just keep in casual, I mean that.  There is no need to add my soul to your conquest roster.  My ass will do thank you very much.  So don’t tell me you love me, and will be there fore me.  Don’t beg me to let my guard down and don’t wonder, with big, honest, scared eyes, if I will pull the rug out from under you.  If you want to have meaningless sex, at least have the decency to tell me that, and only that.  Don’t promise me the world just to leave me with nothing.

To the rich boys.  Stop with the wine and the jewelry, the exotic vacations and the fancy clothes.  Those who don’t want to be friends first and lovers second (or never) need not apply.  Your black Amex, fancy Porsche and ability to mispronounce the fancy bottle of champagne you are ordering, does not impress me.  It makes me want to vomit.

To God’s gift to all women.  Please realize that just because I show interest, or even kiss you, does not mean that I will fuck you.  Contrary to what you may think of the twenty-something, free spirit, who abhors children, shutters at the thought of marriage, is vehemently independent and is more likely to run away to climb the Andes with an Ecuadorian named Diego than settle in the burbs with a Clevelander named Stan, I have morals.  I even (gasp of horror and disbelief) call myself a Christian and possess a shiny set of good, wholesome as wheat bread, Midwestern, Christian values.  Don’t get me wrong.  I’ve worked very hard at having a one-night.  Just one.  I’ve tried.  And to this day I’ve never successfully had a one-night stand.   I just can’t do it in good conscience.  And the dozens upon dozens of men who have promptly ceased all contact with me as soon as they learned that I wouldn’t sleep with them is staggering.  And depressing.  And extremely lonely.   It not-so-blatantly, or blatantly perhaps, says that I have no worth as a person outside of my ability serve as a life-sized, talking sex toy.

Will you all stop trying to marry me, fuck me, make me your girlfriend, take my clothes off or some combination thereof?  I just want a friend.  So badly I can almost taste it (what does a friend taste like anyway?).  And I’m a really good friend.  I’m kind of crazy, a little eccentric and highly neurotic.  But rock as a wingwoman.  I get guys laid all the time.  Just not by me.  Give it some thought.  Ad while you’re at it go ahead and grow up.  Stop behaving like a two-year old who is either throwing a tantrum, impulsively (or perhaps compulsively) sticking his finger in the light socket, hitting the girl he likes on the playground or playing with his junk just because it’s hanging between his legs. 

Yours sincerely,

K

Author's Note:  I didn't want to publish another letter so quickly but after my conversation with Judy, Elyssa and Angela the other night, I had to.  Cheers ladies!

In Defense of a Little Place Called Aspen

“Aspen is a place for people who can’t make it to San Francisco and who have enough money to fail gracefully.” ~Hunter S. Thompson

Give me a Peeber and a porch or give me death.  I think that’s what some famous colonial once said.  Well not really.  But some drunk Ohioan, erroneously citing an old, dead white guy whom he believed to be a famous colonial definitely said that.  That’s PBR by the way – Pabst Blue Ribbon – for those of you who missed the reference.  It might have won a blue ribbon at the 1893 World’s Fair (it’s unclear) and it’s of decent, Midwestern stock.  So it’s got my vote – blue ribbon or not.

I’d gladly get rid of the too-trendy-to-function martini bars for the rest of my life if God would promise me that I could drink cold beer and watch the sun drop over Shadow Mountain forever (Palmer 2009).  And there you go rolling your eyes at me  “Yeah right,” you’re saying, “Look at this poor, little rich girl.  Thinks she’s slummin’ it because she drinks PBR.  She lives in Aspen.  Who’s she kidding?” Or maybe you just think I’m channeling my inner hipster by ironically imbibing with the beer of farmers and steel workers in the town of investment bankers and trophy wives.  But just because I competently play the part of a martini bar whore doesn’t mean I am one. And Aspen allowed me to be me.  Just me.  Jeans and a T-shirt and never a stiletto in sight.

And most people roll their eyes at me and chuckle, “Ohhhhh you live in Aspen.”  Or they pull out dated movie lines circa 1996, “A little place called Asssssssspen.”  And last but not least,  “Where the women flock like the salmon of Capistrano and the beer flows like wine.”  Congratul-fucking-lations, you’ve seen Dumb and Dumber.  And please know that quoting it is the furthest thing from original.  If I had a nickel – well actually a quarter, this is Aspen after all – for every drunk tourist who stumbled down the street quoting Dumb and Dumber at top volume, I’d have a house on Red Mountain.

God bless the tourists for keeping us all in beer and pot.  But unfortunately they show up, go big and go home.  They leave loaded down with fancy and piled high with stories of Aspen as the American Nightmare.  A veritable Sodom and Gomorra – nothing more than a hedonistic playground for Goldman Sachs execs and a fantasyland for their lost and pot-smoking offspring.  My friends in Cleveland, good Midwestern souls that they are, love to inform me that I am delusional in thinking that I live in the real world. And this really pisses me off.  First, it implies that Aspen is populated entirely by rich people swinging from the rafters of their Sotheby’s acquired homes and resting on the laurels of the Italian leather seats of their Gulfstream V.  False.  Second, it implies that people who possess said Gulfstream V, make more than $500,000 a year (lowball) or have more than one home are not, in fact, real people.  False again.

Despite a healthy base of cash money bling-bling in the Land of Milk and Honey, there are normal people.  Now I am not claiming that I live in Hough or Watts or in some backwoods, West Virginia rural ghetto.  I know that we are the lucky ones up here in Aspentown, and that most of us have never worried about feeding our children with food stamps, gun fights in schools or foreclosures in the suburbs.  Nonetheless we work hard to support this life we’ve chosen.  We swig PBR (yes, I’m really hooked on PBR right now.  I’m missing luke-warm PBR’s and softball at the moment.  It’s the withdrawal talking), make thirteen-bucks an hour, wear Carharts, support families and otherwise bust ass to try and “live the dream” as Aspen virgins are so fond of claiming until they realize that the dream is really just life.  And without those people – the bartenders, the maids, the ski patrollers, the APD, the nurses, the firefighters, the waiters, the lifties, the raft guides, the clerks and the baristas – there would be no Aspen.  And those are my friends.  And we drink Peebers.  And watch the sun set.  And play beer league softball.  And get our kids to school.  Just like you there in Des Moines, IA.

It’s a known fact that neither the Franklins in someone’s wallet, nor the cost of their phallus on chrome, matters much to me.  However, neither does it give me right, or reason, to claim that they are less worthy of respect just because they possess these toys of capitalistic gluttony.  Rather, I judge people (harshly) on their ability to treat others with the basic respect and decency that all human beings deserve.   And in my experience, the ability to treat someone like the shit on your toilet paper is by no means directly proportional to the size of one’s stock portfolio.  An upturned nose directed at a man with money simply because he has more green than you not only speaks volumes about your lack of class, but also of your ignorance.  Because without these people to spend the money, and buy the Prada and drink the Veuve Cliquot, Aspen as we know it would be long gone.  We’d all be shit out of luck and shit out of work.  Sent packing on the first plane back to Cleveland.

And I’m not ready to see Aspen kick the bucket.  When I found this odd little snow globe, I quit my big-girl job three days later, packed a duffel bag and never looked back.  Now I understand that my falling-down, former meth lab of a ski bum mansion is valued at $2.5 million.  Not just expensive for what it is, but stupid expensive.  And I understand that life in Aspen is costly (Well really only real estate.  Groceries for example, are cheaper in Aspen than in Cleveland.  But that’s an argument for a different day). I also understand that by employing my frontal lobe capacity – made strong through four Ranger Rovers worth of education – I’ll figure out how to make it rain…er…snow.  I’ll keep life small enough to fit into the back of my Subaru.  I’ll crash in a ramshackle ski bum pad with five roommates to cut down on rent.  I’ll give up on the house in the burbs with the manicured lawn (not that I ever had that Steppfordian hallucination, but anyway you get the point).  I’ll get rid of the TV.  I won’t have kids.  And then I’ll maintain my freedom to head of the Kathmandu or Quito at a moment’s notice.  So call me naïve and delusional, most people do, but this is where I want to grow old and die.

If I had another quarter for every time someone bemoaned the crippling boredom and unending uniformity of their paltry existence in cubical hell, I’d have a surfing compound in Fiji too.  They say, “Man I wish I could live your life,” or, “I would totally live your life if only I didn’t have [Insert Half-Assed Excuse Here] holding me back.”  And I think, “Well, maybe you should have thought of that before you attached that ball and chain to your ankle.  Or maybe, the ball and chain isn’t as onerous as you think it is.  Cut it off.  Head on out there into that too vast world and get you one of them lives you’ve always dreamed about.”  Why not?

And that’s why Aspen is magical.  It’s a sociological study in what happens when you put a bunch of death-sport seeking, adrenaline junkies in one mountain town and cut them loose.  My guess is that Aspen is really the psychological study of some vast and secretive government agency, funded entirely by Paepke investment and tasked with studying human behavior in a post-consumer, post-capitalist world.  Put simply, we’re a study in what happens to the most risk-taking people when they are given everything they want.  What happens is one degree from total anarchy – in the best possible sense of the word.  We always ask, “Why not?” instead of, “Why would you do something that crazy?”  We will climb any mountain, ski any run, raft and river, visit any country, drink any whiskey and huck any cliff.  And we will change the world someday because we’re bold enough to think outside the box.  The people inhabiting this little place called Aspen are genuine, certified, grade-A real people.  Sorry to disappoint.  I know it would have made ye-of-outside-the-snow globe feel better about your lives to think that Aspenites weren’t actually real, or were at least a bunch of rich assholes who spent their days counting and recounting their pile of money.

Come out a see for yourself.  Just go ahead and quit your job, pack your bag and never look back.  It’s not as crazy as it sounds.  Would you rather the unknown possibility of a chance or unchanging security of destined certainty?  

Ski Co is always hiring lifties.

A little place called Aspen

Our $2.5 million ski bum palace

The view from said palace

What Happens When You Challenge A Chef

Everyone’s a critic.  Everyone has an opinion.  The problem is most people are sheep.  Their opinion is not their own.  Rather, it is recycled and regurgitated, assured to offend no one.  Unless an opinion offends more than 50% of the population, it probably isn’t worth having. Or at least it isn’t very interesting.  It’s like a Buick.  Offensive to no one, but heinously boring.  Who aspires to own a Buick?  I’d take an uproariously amusing, albeit ill-found, illogical and irrational opinion any day over a banal, beige and boring opinion, no matter how rational and well-conceived it might be.  At least for its entertainment value that is.  But this is not the point.  The point is the sheep out there want to hear what I ate for dinner.  And so I will tell them. 

I ate a ten-course meal at a trendy, local/organic restaurant in Sun Valley, Idaho (Check Out Sego's Blog).  I sat at the chef’s table in the kitchen.  The meal would have cost me close to $300 (just for me) if I had paid.  The problem emerged because Sarah challenged Chef.  She said, “This girl can eat.  You’ve got your work cut out for you.”  And everyone knows that you should never challenge a chef unless you are prepared for a show so fueled by over-the-top egoism and competitive instinct that it would intimidate even the gluttons of Rome.  And I, the ever-present hard ass who runs with the big dogs, plays with the boys and never, under any circumstances, backs down from a challenge, accepted.  It was sure to be a stalemate – two stubborn, competitive egoists facing off. 

I consumed delicata squash salad with frisee, Idaho goatster and walnut-sage pesto; sorrel soup topped with crab and caviar; a red win poached duck egg on brioche with creamed spinach and spring greens; roasted squash flatbread with Oregon black truffles; handmade garganelli pasta with pine nut pesto and shrimp; pork shoulder with beans and biscuit; grilled local sturgeon with sun-choked capelletti, clams, chili, lemon and parsley; homemade ice cream (Sarah’s first love and absolute specialty) of the mint, toast, apple, grapefruit, vanilla and coffee varieties; carrot cake topped with a candied carrot and no heinously thick butter cream frosting and last but not least a palate cleanser of every sorbet flavor (Sarah’s second love). 

Does that impress you?  It should.  I guess.

After stuffing myself fuller than a fat man at a Vegas buffet, I eventually managed to roll my overstuffed, Michelin man of a body out of the restaurant and into the car.  I have never, in my twenty-four years on this Earth, been so physically ill just from eating.  I was entirely certain that I would need to stop the car to vomit on the 35-second drive from the restaurant to Sarah’s house.  I think the chemicals in my brain released some sort of strange reaction.  I actually felt drunk.  I collapsed on the floor in a stupor of carbohydrate-induced oblivion and felt the twinges of a sugar coma coming on.  I writhed on the floor in visible pain, occasionally releasing small groaning sounds and gurgles from my packed tummy.  I had an overwhelming desire to poke a hole it he side of my stomach and watch its contents drain out.  Sweet relief I imagined.

Good thing they invented hot yoga and spinning class.  Detox must commence immediately.

One more plug for Sego (Don't be lazy.  Check It Out)

She's Just Not That Into You

Between three men I have been in a relationship for almost eight years.  This is most of my adult life.  I suppose this makes me a relatively uninformed and unreliable source of dating world observation.  Furthermore, most of these observations have already been made ten million times, by ten million women, over the past ten million years.  But here are a few new (or at least recycled) words from someone who is new to these phenomena and new to this brave new world called dating.

You have to admire the persistence of the male species in his attempts to sequester female attention.  I can only ascertain that they see it as a grandiose romantic gesture rather than begging, whining or stalking.  Guys listen up.  Despite what the movies tell you, his isn’t romantic.  I digress here for a moment to argue that movies know no gender lines.  Conventional wisdom holds that only women, in their overly emotional states full of budding neuroses and easy tears, succumb to the fairy tale fodder of Hollywood.  The penis is just as susceptible.  The testosterone slinking around the local bar (or library, or grocery store, or cubicle, or classroom, or gym, or pool, or yoga studio, or chairlift, or gas station, or drugstore, or restaurant, or bachelorette party, or class reunion, or grandmother’s 80^th birthday party, or church, or temple, or synagogue, or country club, or mall, or boutique store, or Christmas party, or New Year’s Ever bash, or office party, or Tupperware party, or sex toy party, or gay pride parade, or night club, or beach, or amusement park, or need I continue) has gone all soft and romantic.  They have forgotten how to properly demean and sexually harass women.  Where is a good old-fashioned ass slap when you need it?  Now don’t get me wrong the meat market at the local watering hole is certainly alive and kicking.  All I argue is that men are trying too hard to woo women.  There is a certain point – reached much faster than most males seem to understand – when persistence ceases to be romantic and progress to annoying and then to restraining-order-grade stalking.  Which brings me to my first point of advice.

1. Take a hint.  Don’t make us resort to being rude.  If she just doesn’t seem that into you please take the hint.  If she checks her watch, Blackberry or iPhone more than once every three minutes during dinner, she’s just not that into you.  If she answers, “Mmm hmm,” to a question that required at least some sort or articulated opinion, she’s just not that into you.  If you’ve received variations of texts, phone calls, emails or BBMs that read, “Rain check on dinner?  Soooo sorry.  My Mom/best friend/ex-boyfriend/grandmother/dog needs my help! Emergency!  Xoxo!”  Guess what?  She’s just not that into you.  And the kicker is - this really happened, I shit you not - if you lie down in/pass out in her bed in an I’ve-been-drinking-in-the-sun-all-day stupor and ask to have sex with her and she politely declines, she’s just not that into you.  If you wrap your arms seductively around her waist (most women view this sloppy drunk move as vaguely pathetic and akin to a two-year old grabbing his mother’s leg) and she less-politely removes them, she’s just not that into you. If you try slobbering on her face in an attempt to relive the earlier make-out session and relight her supposed passion and she much less politely pushes your face away, she’s just not that into you.  If you suggest that the two of you might, “Just fuck.  Have some hot rowdy sex.  Have some fun,” and give the seductive waist grab another try and she pulls away while making that I-just-threw-up-in-my-mouth-and-swallowed-it-back-down face, she’s just not that into you.  If she informs you that she just wants to shower and go to bed and you suggest that it become a group activity and she walks out, she’s just not that into you.  If you ask for a goodnight kiss and she says, “Only when you’re standing outside my front door,” she’s just not that into you.  And then she must resort to being rude.  “Look I am not going to have sex with you.  I have not going to hook up with you at all.  I don’t even really want to be within ten feet of your penis right now.  I don’t want to shower with you and I don’t want you in my bed.”  Point taken, you must now slink out, tail between legs.  This embarrassing situation could have been easily avoided had you taken the fucking hint. 

2.  Pathetically fake compliments don’t work.  The compliments have all been used and abused.  Yes I know my eyelashes are really long.  No they are not fake.  Yes I know I have large lips.  No that doesn’t mean I look like Angelina Jolie.  And no likening me to her when we look so blatantly unalike does not flatter me.  Yes I know that my ass is nice.  So are a lot of other booties.  Yes I know I have a nice smile.  How many other women did you tell that to tonight?  As one of my favorite Silver Screen good girls once spat at one of my favorite Silver Screen bad boys, “Listing my qualities on your fingers is not going to get you anywhere with me.”  (Don’t judge me.  I know it didn’t win an Oscar but my best friend Elyssa and I can quote every line).

3.  Fancy dinners are a waste of money.  If you want to pay for sex I hear some very nice women are working the corner tonight.  They are a lot cheaper and more efficient than a five star dining extravaganza.  Taking me out to a grotesquely expensive dinner that could pay my rent for the month (I’d rather just have the rent check without the small talk) and feed a family of four will not guarantee my naked body in you bed.  It is even less likely to guarantee your naked body in my bed.  The hip quotient of the restaurant will not help your cause.  I am more impressed by seedy, hole-in-the-wall dive bars on Colfax Ave (please see future post for further discussion on dive bars) than the hottest, hippest, newest mastication establishment.  You have a brain. Use it to come up with something more creative. 

Three simple rules.  Please heed them.  Please don’t make me resort to rude behavior.  It’s unflattering and not very post-feminist.  I don’t want to have to stop returning your phone calls.  I don’t want to ignore the 19^th text message you send me at 1:27 AM on a Tuesday.  I don’t want to tell you to “get the fuck out of my bed.”  But you leave me no choice.