Sepideh Saremi

I don’t know if this is about disillusion or just hitting a new point on the learning curve, but yesterday I realized that 99% of the people I admire, I don’t actually admire. That is, I admire the things they’ve accomplished, but I’m not necessarily into them as people. It is unfair to them and has always set me up for disappointment, so this realization that I ought to allow people more dimension than their resumes afford should vastly improve my life from this point forward.

There’s a book called Literary Lives, by Edward Sorel, that taps into this perfectly, as it’s basically a tell-all of famous revered figures (Jung, Rand, etc.). I saw it once in New York and reading it made me feel better about things. Now I’m buying it so that the next time I want to elevate someone to demi-god status for their accomplishments, I don’t.

I never thought I would even think those words, but the California DMV has me totally impressed with its very web 2.0 website. You know how most government websites are like Internet versions of Word documents? Not this one!

I just renewed the registration for my car and it took about 1.5 minutes. And there are RSS feeds! And video! Next up probably there will be a YouTube special pitting cranky DMV employees against road ragers. Or MAYBE at the very least, tell-all blogs in which those DMV employees write about all the customers that made them so mean in the first place.

But to be positive again, I’m starting to feel good cosmic vibes (if I believed in them) with parking in this city, too. A few months ago I charmed my way out of a ticket just by being very nice to a meter maid. And the other day I made it in time to refill the meter, with just a single minute to go. Someone’s looking out for me, and I’m going to give credit for everything to the governator. Goodness knows it is his Austrian sense of order and discipline that has kept California from falling into the ocean in the last few years, and his Hollywood sense of fun times that keeps everyone smiling. Vielen Dank, Arnold.

Oh, and apparently Antonio Villaraigosa had a mistress? Erm, where have I been?

Half an hour in, and I am slumped forward in my seat, cradling my head in my hands. Five more minutes and my brain is pulsing against my skull from all the off-key notes.

I was led to believe this would be a dance recital. But there is one six-minute dance number and the rest is Broadway songs that won’t end. Three hours of them. Bad song-acting. Thinning hair. Dubious sexuality. Awkward dresses that do nothing to cover chunky legs encased in flesh-colored nylon. At least in a proper musical you get a plot, however flimsy. This thing is like a high school choir tryout, act after act just belting saccharine songs that have nothing to do with each other but somehow all sound the same. A guy who yells more than he sings gets three numbers. There’s no justice in this world.

But wait, it gets worse. They cap off the night with a “fusion belly dance.” (There were two dance numbers, fine.) Three girls in their bras, bindis firmly affixed twixt their brows, doing poor belly rolls to a Yin Yang Twins song. To the girl with a massive white flower behind each ear… in silhouette, you looked like a gyrating Yoda. And perhaps that made staying through the end worthwhile.

I had a really bad day, one that started in a courtroom and ended in urgent care. Don’t even ask, everything is more or less okay now.

After urgent care, I curled in a ball on the couch in an attempt to relax and made things slightly worse by 1) flipping on the TV and watching the his-and-hers face lifts of Gene Simmons and his wife (nothing like sloppy five-thousands, I always think when I see him), which was so disgusting that I then 2) changed the channel to watch part of American Psycho, a movie in which a 1980s psycho, sex-addicted yuppie played by Christian Bale descends into homicidal mania. I finally had to turn it off when he started chasing a woman down a hallway, wearing only his sneakers while wielding a chain saw. Two images - of a beautiful woman’s head in C. Bale’s character’s freezer, and of the Simmons couple with their heads wrapped in gauze - seem somehow mirrors of each other.

There’s a time capsule at the Griffith Observatory here in LA that I am very interested in. I’ll be dead when they open it. But the idea of what people will think about the age of media (that’s what I’m dubbing the last hundred years and the next hundred, too) is so interesting. We are leaving strange relics. And they’ll never get through all the blogs.

I don’t really get the concept of valet parking at all, because I don’t ever want someone else to drive my car. At the LAX Hilton, where I went to the opening of a film festival last night, they make it next to impossible to find the self-parking lot, so you get suckered into a situation whence you must wait in a line to pay an exorbitant amount of money to get your car back, then wait again in a line for your car to arrive, shivering outside without your coat at the end of the night. Seriously meh. However, their main attendant wears a costume complete with top hat. Delightful.

Another plus: I met Rainn Wilson, aka Dwight Schrute of The Office, last night. Minus? The awesomeness of this was cancelled out by my out of control mouth, because I’m pretty sure he now thinks I’m his idiot-savant stalker. I could not stop talking and I definitely kept telling myself to shut up (in my head) but, sadly, not listening to myself. Truly spastacular, truly pathetic, truly threw me off my game for the rest of the night.

In sooth, I ought never meet in real life the people I truly admire, as it will be much less awkward for all parties involved. I promise to remember this for next time I am at a party and run into someone famous. So, Salman Rushdie, should we ever be in the same room, please consider this my apology for avoiding all eye contact with you. It’s not you, except it is.

“I got the goats off Craigslist.”

This video makes me feel really happy. I’m pretty sure the Cat Stevens playing in the background has a lot to do with that.

This New York Times article on haggling at big-box stores (“At Megastores, Hagglers Find Prices Are Flexible”) made me laugh out loud, and not just because it uses the word dicker, but because my people have been haggling the crap out of everything everywhere for, like, 2500 years. And lots of other people do this, too. So where’s the news, NYT?

Not to be ethnocentric or anything, but rich, poor, old, young… Iranians like to talk down a price. Some of us take it a little too far but for the most part it is something sorta ingrained - only an idiot or a desperate person or someone with something to prove pays full price. It’s funny to me that this article is also now a top story on Techmeme, as when I saw the headline I thought it was maybe a joke, or perhaps I was actually browsing The Onion by accident and that was one of their less-funny titles. I mean, even in NYC, where everything is overpriced to the extreme, people haggle. Duh. They sorta have to.

I am really into the idea that prices are pretty much random anyway, so there is nothing wrong with making the randomness mutually agreeable for both parties. I still remember my first big haggling victory, at age 16, talking down a skirt with a broken zipper to the bargain price of $5, in a boutique where the average price of shiz was $200+. That was a bargain for me, because it was a nice skirt and my mom was then a tailor, and it was a bargain for the proprietress because no one who shops in an expensive boutique will buy something defective. So rather than getting $0 for an item, she at least scored a fiver. My mom took out the zipper and sewed up the back, and it was totally wearable.

Next up from the Times? Probably an article about how a lot of people buy stuff on sale. That is so something that is not news at all and would show up in their slightly clueless style section, which I love/hate and read obsessively anyway. FYI NYT, I once scored a $900 skirt for $15 - at Searle, no less. Put that in your paper and esmoke it (Przhn accent).

Oh hai. I’m in ur guvrmintz, sleepin wid ur hookrz. I know I’m a year-plus late on the LOLcat train, but lately I cannot help turning everything into an LOLcat caption in my head. Makes the news more fun.

Back on topic: The only pol whose infidelity ever made me sad was Bill Clinton. He was so paternal, maybe because I was a child throughout his terms. The rest? They are ticking time bombs of sluttiness, probably because they’re not allowed to act like real humans. Even Eliot Spitzer. Maybe especially Eliot Spitzer, Toter of Morality.

The only person to feel sorry for in this sitch is his wife. And maybe the hooker. Let’s face it: This is not a handsome man, not even for five grand. And now she’s out a job.

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The other escándalo del día is that of BusinessWeek writer Sarah Lacy’s SXSW interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Here is the largely uneventful video, which features a lot of hair-twirling by Lacy, awkward scanning of the room by Zberg, and actual heckling by rude-ass nerds. I love nerds, but come on. Simmah down, as my good friend Peter From Boston would say (and my good friend Danielle from New Jersey). The hullabaloo over this on Twitter was really unwarranted.

If you’re too busy to watch the hour-long lamefest (you are, trust me), here is a brief synopsis. Apparently, the geekerati did not like Lacy’s questions, or her interview style of trying to warm up the interviewee a little bit. So they started yelling at her. My impression is that interviewing Mark Zuckerberg requires a certain alchemic touch. And no one has yet turned that little soccer-slide-wearing impresario-firecracker of a $15 billion jackpot golden boy into actual interview gold.

Also, there’s been a bit of criticism that Lacy flirted with Zuckerberg. This comment really got on my nerves. Seriously, WTF? There was no flirting. If having boobs qualifies as flirting, then she is guilty, as is every other female journalist that has ever lived. Other than that, meh. The hair-twirling seemed like a nervous tick. I apologize for adding more to this ridiculous coverage, but rest assured that you are the only person who reads my blog.

God, Facebook. I just want it to die already.

I’ve been thinking about killing my account and then pathetically talking myself out of it, saying to myself that I don’t want to lose my 400 contacts on there.

I have this ambitious project, of transferring all my old Rolodexed business cards to my Gmail address book. A former boss of mine once had me do this for his Outlook address book and it sort of made me want to claw my eyes out. So, surprise, my own old biz cards have been sitting in an old J.Crew shopping bag in my closet for six months. I should take this as a sign to chuck them, and reduce Facebook time to work-related research only (I work in social media, after all).

I’m pretty sure that if not having all the Rolodex details of the Banana Republic PR rep I talked to once (two years ago, when I was fact-checking the details of some earrings used in the fuzzy background of a dinner party shoot) hasn’t made a difference in my life, neither will losing the Facebook status updates of the guy I sat behind in chemistry class during my sophomore year in high school.

A network is only interesting and useful if the relationships are dynamic. Dynamic information and dynamic relationships are not the same thing. I’m going to start applying this in my offline life too.

But don’t worry, Internet. You always lead me to new ways to waste my time. I will resign myself to watching this faux soap opera (soap faux-pera!), Horrible People, which is maybe the best thing I’ve ever seen. After Jake and Amir, of course. I love Jake and Amir so freaking much.

P.S. I realize some of the sentences in this post are run-ons with questionable, comma, usage. I’m sorry. I’m ESL.

Today was my first day at my new Santa Monica office space. I cannot write a lot about this space, so suffice to say that it is awesome, and filled to the brim with fascinating people. Of course, another perk for me is that I get to work in Santa Monica. It’s not cool to say this, but I want to live here, too.

Santa Monica gets a lot of crap for being super-yuppified, because it is. For example, today, Wednesday, I got to the office around 11 am, and droves of grown people were wandering the streets in flip-flops, yoga mats rolled under their arms. That is not acceptable anywhere else but in Santa Monica. And that is precisely why I love Santa Monica. No one who lives here has a job.

Also: I love Santa Monica because it doesn’t have real nightlife. You would think it would, since apparently no one has a job and yoga’s not til 10. But it just doesn’t have any nightlife. The Third Street Promenade is sort of a joke destination for tourists and high school kids (it used to be cool, though, and I promise I have many tales of its coolness stored up from childhood). And Main Street is packed to the hilt with boring bars and not-very-amazing restaurants. So if I lived in Santa Monica, I wouldn’t feel bad about not “taking advantage of the neighborhood,” which is how I felt any night I stayed home when I lived in Williamsburg last year.