Dearest Volkswagen,

I am a glutton for punishment. We have determined this through my inexplicable allegiance to Sprint and their shitty service, but never NEVER did I expect this kind of behavior from you. I mean, how long have I loved you? It's been just about as long as I can remember. When Dad brought home a tape of Herbie the Love Bug from Erol's video store, I was sold. And then, every summer when my parents shipped me off to Seattle, I got three whole months of playing punch buggy with my sister, and Uncle Jack would drive us around in his cute yellow beetle that smelled vaguely of trash.

In high school, I was convinced that I was from another era, yet misplaced in the 90s, so I vowed to one day own a VW Bus. I sang along to your little Fahrvergnügen theme song, then the cute Da Da Da commercials, and when you said Drivers Wanted, I said, "hey! Here I am!" And then I made the biggest mistake of my life...












Meet the PaddyWagon, or just Paddy for short. Much like every other Volkswagen, I fell in love with Paddy at first sight. I mean, she was just so GREEN and CUTE, and she looked like an igloo on wheels, or an electric shamrock, and every time I saw myself drive by a mirrored window, I would look at Paddy and me and we'd both kind of smile. Just me and my wee beetle bopper.

And you know what Volkswagen? I'm not going to blame Paddy for all the shit I've been through, because she's really just a pawn in your sick, twisted game of doling out adorable cars with faulty parts.

You are One. Sick. Puppy. You know that?

It started almost immediately. I got Paddy in 2002, the summer before my last year of college, and I was beyond stoked. For one thing, she had air conditioning, which is pretty necessary in D.C. in the summer time, but I wouldn't have known that since my previous car (Oh Joanie, you reliable little blueberry....) did not. Over the summer, a mere month after I got the car, my neighbor mentioned that the taillight was out. Weird. So I took it to the dealership and they gave me a new one. Not two days later, a cop pulled me over on my way home from a movie.

"Ma'am, did you know your taillight was out?" Right. So I took it back, but they told me that the taillight was working. Then the next night it wasn't working again, so I took it back, but it was. You can imagine, that this elaborate dance became a little frustrating. Finally, there was a recall. There was something wrong with a piece that connected some wires to the bulb, so sometimes the taillight would work and sometimes it wouldn't.

During fall break that same year, I was tooling around town when Paddy started to convulse. I shrieked and gave her a little pat on the dash, thinking that would calm her down, but instead a big red light in the shape of an engine lit up next to my speedometer. I had to leave Paddy at home because the dealer couldn't check her out for a week, so I took the 16-year-old Honda Accord with the pop-up lights back down to school with me.

After the engine coil was fixed, I was able to swap out Joanie for Paddy around Thanksgiving time. A month later, during WINTER, I rolled down my window to check the mailbox when I noticed a strange noise. Rather than a silent retreat into my car door, my window seemed to fall with a thud and a crunch. I gasped and tried to put the window back up, but there was no window to be seen. Instead, when I pushed the button to put my window up, a noise came from my door that sounded like someone had just dropped a handful of glass shards into a blender. It was sickening. The dealer fixed my window the next weekend. A month later, the other window did the same thing, of course. The dealer fixed that one too.

Then other, small things started to fall apart. The dial that controls the height of the seat kept popping off. The piece that holds the floor mat in place disappeared. The car key began falling apart. In early 2004, I managed to experience a little deja vu when my car began to tremble and the engine light came on again. The dealer hadn't fixed ALL of the coils apparently. A few months later, when I was driving around in a torrential downpour, I noticed that water began to sporadically gush out from the ceiling onto my head. That one turned out to be related to the drains from the sunroof.

After I moved to California a few months ago, the engine light came on again. Another $700 down the drain. And just after I spent $600 to put new tires on my car, another old friend came back to visit: the faulty sunroof. I first noticed this when I got into my car to find condensation on the inside of the windshield accompanied by the unmistakable smell of mildew. I looked up to see that my ceiling was drenched above the back seat on the driver's side. I took it to the shop today and it will cost $800 to fix it.

"It's a stupid design," they told me. "Volkswagen fits a tube into a sleeve along the drain, so water leaks out. If they glued it, this wouldn't happen." So I have to pay someone else to glue it. For $800. I couldn't do it though. All this money that I've put into my adorable, sporty little car started to make me feel ill. Instead, I'm going to pay extra to park my car underground until I can afford to fix it.

And the saddest part is that I was blaming poor Paddy. But then I went online, and let me tell you Volkswagen: People online really hate you. I was horrified to see how many people on "myvwlemon.com" had my EXACT experience. There was no variation. Literally, every problem I had, every other person had as well. First the one window, then the other. First one engine coil, then the next. The sunroof, the taillights. Every single person.

This of course begs a question: why, if you know you've screwed up by using parts that don't work, do you continue to use those same parts? And if you know that the windows don't work, why don't you fix BOTH of my windows when I bring my car in? Why do you only fix one, and then wait for the other one to fall into the door with a nauseating thud?

So that's it. I've had it with you. I'm keeping Paddy for now, but as much as I love her, I may have to let her go soon. I guess I was a bit blinded by aesthetics, and the feel of the turbo boost kicking in as I revved the engine and shifted gears. But as soon as I can, I'm going back to the plain jane, old reliable, Japanese engineering. I know I won't be smiling at myself in mirrored windows anymore, but I also won't be sitting in the waiting room of dealerships reading three-month old People magazines.

MFEO

Moving in with someone is interesting if only because no matter how much time you have spent with that person, there are still going to be small secrets to uncover. These things can sometimes be funny and/or cute. For example, some mornings, I walk into the bathroom to find Scooby with shaving cream between his eyebrows. Before living together, I had NO idea he shaved his uni, and although I'm proud of his grooming habits, I feel compelled to give him a hard time when I find him in such a position; he always responds the same way: "I don't know how the shaving cream got up there!?!" and then he pushes me out of the bathroom so that I can't watch him do the deed.

I suspect he would say that he had never known about my spontaneous decorating skills. The other night he left the house and when he returned three hours later, he noticed that I had gone to Ikea to buy frames for the vintage maps I had bought, and I had cut the pictures down to size, placed them in the frames and hung them all in a neat little cluster about the television.

Of course, you will inevitably discover annoying habits as well. I am fairly neat, but I am physically incapable of putting my shoes away. The other day when Scooby came home, he looked around our living room and said, "you've got to be kidding me," because there were literally 4 pairs of shoes strewn around the floor. He has his quirks too though. When I cook dinner, he always insists on doing the dishes, but he will then assert that half the dishes "need to be soaked!" which of course means that after the dishes have soaked overnight, I will end up doing said dishes in the morning.

But every once in a while, we will stumble upon some untapped secret that just confirms how perfect we are for each other. In our case, that secret is our joint childhood obsession with American Gladiators. Every Saturday morning, I would lie on the floor in front of my television set in McLean, Virginia and Scooby would do the same thing in Milwaukee and we would cheer for Nitro (in my case...he was the best!) and Storm (because Scooby thought "she was so hot!) instead of watching cartoons like every normal kid.

In fact, I recently learned that Scooby Snacks was so enthralled with the show, that he set up his very own version of ASSAULT in his basement, which, if you recall, entails Gladiators shooting balls at the contestants, while the players sprint from station to station and try to hit the Gladiators with various projectiles. And my boyfriend re-enacted this with Nerf guns.

And the fact that American Gladiators has been resurrected because of the writer's strike makes it so much easier to live without new episodes of Chuck and The Office. Admittedly, I have a keener sense of cheesiness at my current age than I did at eight, and I do miss the mullets, but it's still so much fun to watch--I mean, the hand bike! The cargo net! Scooby and I alternate between saying, "This is SO bad" and "This is AMAZING!" And I do have some issues with the Gladiator named Wolf who unleashes a testosterone-fueled howl every time the camera cuts to him, but I don't really have time to talk about that right now. You see, Scooby is setting up an Assault simulation, and then I have to take care of the dishes that are soaking in the sink.

Check it!

Movie Review: Juno

Movies and concerts are the perfect places to go alone. The lights are out, no one is supposed to talk anyway, and all attention in the room is directed toward one far-off point. And so I saw Juno. After Scooby Snacks left town, I made plans to hang out with a friend, but when he had to work late, I decided to hop on BART and head into San Francisco for the movie that was getting some of the best reviews I had seen all year.

Speaking of which, I made the mistake of reading an article in Slate before leaving work. Thanks for the damn spoiler alert Ann Hulbert. I've decided that writers who divulge the end of the movie are tantamount to that friend that DEMANDS you watch her favorite movie with her (you know, the movie you've never seen, and she just CANNOT believe you've never seen it! "We're going to Blockbuster NOW!" she tells you) and then she says every line a millisecond before the characters on the screen do. "I can't help myself!" She confesses, and because she's your friend, you love her anyway.

But Ann, we're not friends, and I'm still kind of mad at you.

But back to the movie. It was the perfect diversion for a night alone. The movie revolves around Juno (Ellen Page), a spitfire of a 16-year-old, who gets pregnant after an awkward romp with the goofy Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera). Stripper-turned-screenwriter Diablo Cody handled the topic of teen pregnancy with just the right balance of gravity and absurdity. Most importantly though, she did a wonderful job of portraying the complexities of people and their relationships.

As Juno decides to give her baby up for adoption to a well-to-do couple, even the new parents, who at first seem like stereotypical yuppies, turn into rich characters with palpable emotions. Incidentally, Jennifer Garner (who plays the yuppie wife) just melted my heart in this movie mere seconds after I had written her off as a stock character. The relationship between Juno and her father (played by J.K. Simmons) was also especially touching as he struggled with the balance of showing his disappointment, yet also demonstrating his love. I always suspected that the man who played Dr. Emil Skoda had skills, but when he sweetly referred to himself as "your old D-A-D," I wanted to reach through the screen and give him a bear hug.

Still, there was something that nagged me about Juno. What was it? I wasn't gushing about the movie the way everyone else was, and it took me a while to figure out why. Of course, in the week in which I saw Atonement AND No Country for Old Men, it would be hard for another movie to compare.

But there were two things that I normally love, but found somewhat bothersome in this movie: Music and Quirkiness.

I love some good quirk as much as the next person, but when it's self-conscious, I find it distracting. For example, Juno has a hamburger phone. "How funny," I thought to myself. "I haven't seen one of those since the '80s." But when Juno later refers to the fact that she is talking on a hamburger phone, what was once a cute little touch, now feels forced somehow.

I felt that the music followed the same path. Not all movies can, or should, carry without a score like No Country for Old Men. But the music should be seamlessly integrated into the film and it should add to the general feel without calling attention to itself; never should the music be used as a crutch. The dialogue and the scenes should evoke the laughter and the tears, not the music (except with that hilarious singing duo in There's Something About Mary).

And I am a fan of Indie rock, but the variety in Juno had such precious lyrics that it started to feel like a cheap trick, a la Garden State. You know what I'm talking about; you saw the movie and wondered, "why am I feeling so emotional as I stare at three people standing on top of a van and yelling?" And then you realized that it was because you were listening to a most powerful beautiful crescendo in one of the best Simon & Garfunkel songs.

So that made me wonder if the lyrics were making up for something. As I heard The Velvet Underground sing "I'm sticking with you," I began to question why I had to hear that sentiment from Lou Reed and not from one of the characters in the movie.

TGI(WT)F

It has been a long week--the type of week in which you begin to wonder if the universe is trying to tell you something. For me that something was: you think it can't get any worse? Well just wait a second. Work was beyond hectic, crazy woman from work made me feel like crap, my insurance called to tell me that I got the license plate number wrong from the car I hit (who happened to be driving the wrong way down a one-way street) and two out of the five mornings, I had no hot water.

And I thought 2008 sounded so promising.

Luckily I made plans to meet up with some friends for dinner at one of my favorite Thai restaurants. I was looking forward to some good conversation all day, and I had a bit of a spring in my step as I walked the couple blocks from my apartment to Cha Am.

I happened to be walking a few paces behind an older woman with a small wheelie cart--the type of cart my roommate used to take grocery shopping. Now, Berkeley is filled with homeless people and generally when I see people with any type of wheeled apparatus, whether it's a suitcase or a shopping cart, I steer clear, because some of these people can get a teeny bit ornery. But this woman seemed normal enough. Well, except for the fact that she was talking to herself.

Maybe she had a bluetooth ear piece in? She must be talking on the phone!

Oh no. She was talking to me. I realized this as she wheeled around, stood right in the middle of the sidewalk and screamed, "I SAID STOP FOLLOWING ME!!!"

I quickly dashed around the woman and then she started following me!

"You look anorexic," she said, which was hilarious to me because I'm a pretty average-sized girl. Yet my potential anorexia seemed to really irk the crazed witch. "Everyone in Berkeley is anorexic now," she shouted after me as I ran up the stairs toward the safety of the restaurant, and as the door shut behind me I could still hear her screaming.

But that's it, I've decided. Weird, annoying things happened this week, but it's not the end of the world. After all, after I ditched the anorexia-hater, I had a great dinner; I received my new pink phone this week; I got a lot done at work and I exercised all but one of the last seven days.

Plus, how could I possibly stay sad when I have Jemaine around to cheer me up?

Crawling back for more

I'm in an abusive relationship....with my cell phone company. I came to this realization today as I was unwrapping a large cardboard box that I found outside of my front door.

Like a typical loser boyfriend, I have spent hours waiting for Sprint to help me, but instead I've gotten yelled at, stood up and they've made me feel like crap. And then when I finally decided it was time to cut my losses, they were all, "no baby, we can work this out. How about a present?"

And it worked. I'm SO WEAK!

It all started when I was home for Christmas and my cell phone (which I unaffectionately nicknamed Darth Vader, because it's all black and it's a little bastard) wouldn't charge. So I went to the Sprint store, which coincidentally is next to Tysons Corner mall and a Circuit City two days before Christmas. After I searched for parking for 35 minutes, I waited for a Sprint technician to help me.

Two hours later I was slowly driving back out of a parking garage filled with last-minute shoppers with a new Darth. Unfortunately I lost all of the numbers from my old phone, because the only way they can transfer data is by using the charge plug, which happened to be the broken piece of my phone. It only cost me $35 for the replacement, but since I had to go the day after a red eye, the lost vacation time slightly irked me. But that's not enough to dump over, is it?

But it quickly became clear that there was something wrong with my new phone. It wouldn't hold any charge and sometimes, halfway through a conversation, I would hear faint static on my end, but the person on the other end of the line wouldn't be able to hear me at all.

Maybe it was just bad reception? I made a million excuses, but after it happened again and again, I realized that my Darth was a lemon. So the day I was flying back to California, I went back to the Tysons Sprint Store. They actually had the gall to try to charge me an additional $35 to replace the phone "because you didn't buy insurance." But after I gave them a little sass, they changed their tune.

So they told me it was just the battery. "Bad batteries can cause static," the technician assured me, which sort of sounded reasonable at the time.

But after getting back to California, I had to go back to the Sprint store in Oakland of all places. I ran home from work on a Thursday night and drove in the rain to the store (which closes at 8) only to be told that the technicians only work from 11 until 4 everyday. The other nearby Sprint stores were only open 9-5 Monday through Friday so I had no option but to leave my phone at the Sprint store overnight so that the technician could look at it at 11 when he got in.

The host at the Sprint store just told me to wait for a salesperson who could take my phone and get my information. But after I waited 45 minutes, the sales rep told me he couldn't take my phone overnight. His excuse was: "we've lost too many. People get mad."

So I switched to Verizon. Then I called Sprint to cancel. To make a very long Friday night on the phone short, I ended up in a screaming match with a CRAZY woman who should not work in customer service, and then when I called back to complain about her attitude, this very nice man convinced me to stay with Sprint. He even sent me a brand new phone in the mail. And it's pink!

But I'm worried that every time my new pink gadget rings, I'm going to be reminded that I'm a pathetic weakling. I will at least find solace in that fact that my contract with Sprint ends in August. I guess I could switch to Verizon then. Right?

Om

After the worst kind of day at work, which ended with a rainy night, the only thing I wanted to do was walk home and crawl into bed without changing, never to emerge again.

BUT, against my will I dragged myself to the gym with all the other new years resolutioners to take a yoga class. And I was glad I did as soon as the instructor, an older woman with a soothing voice and long silver hair, said "your perfect pose is just as much as you can do at any given moment." Has there ever been a more easygoing attitude?

Of course, it doesn't really translate well in other realms. I wouldn't tell a Starbucks barista, "just do what you can. If you can only make one latte every 15 minutes, don't beat yourself up over it." But at that moment, it was exactly what I needed to hear, and it was ALMOST enough to take my mind off of annoyances at work.

But the calming yoga instructor wasn't responsible for ultimately getting me to put things in perspective. That honor was actually bestowed upon the elderly, if flatulent, woman behind me sporting bright orange hair and a Christmas tree turtleneck. What can I say? Sometimes the perfect antidote to a long day is a little laugh.

Flying high?

Reading the New York Times online this week when I should have really been working, I stumbled upon a most hilarious blog posting. It reminded me of the hell I have endured since moving to California. I've become an expert at making a weekend trip to D.C. while avoiding jetlag and any of the many diseases that lurk within the dreaded airplane. Yet I can never avoid being entirely uncomfortable for the duration of my flight.

On one red eye, I was sitting by the window, and because the two people next to me were both sound asleep and I had to pee, I didn't get a wink of sleep. Another trip I spilled half of a grande latte on my crotch at the beginning of my 5.5 hour flight. And most painful yet, there was the time that I was grabbing my bag from the overhead bin at the end of my flight, and a tampon managed to wriggle free from an unzipped compartment and MIRACULOUSLY (or embarrassingly) land in the hand of the man who had been sitting next to me.

I just looked at him, snatched the OB out of his hand and said, "WOW! Thanks."

This past flight went off without a hitch (with the exception of my takeoff anxiety which is inescapable), yet I couldn't help but find things that annoyed me.

1. Why do people gather by the ticket taker even though their zone hasn't been called? Do they not realize that the seats are assigned? If they're worried about overhead bin space, then they can have mine. Ever since the tampon incident, I just shove everything under the seat in front of me.

2. The Jane Austen Book Club was the chosen movie.

3. Ugly Betty was shown after Jane Austen. This would have normally been a good thing except that every 5 seconds a line of static would shoot across the screen, which would also cancel out whatever dialogue had been uttered at that moment.

4. There was something wrong with my audio and every other second there would be a faint, yet obnoxious BEEP! This in conjunction with the static issue made Ugly Betty pretty much unwatchable.

5. After I had settled into my seat, a man with a state trooper-style mustache came to my row, said "21 E," and then proceeded to sit in the aisle seat. This seemed odd to me, since generally the aisle is D, but whatever--this man was clearly delusional so I didn't want to sit next to him anyway. It seemed like the plane was finished boarding and Officer Crazy was in the clear, when a young woman came onto the plane, stopped at our row and said, "I'm 21D."

And he looked at her and earnestly asked, "would you prefer the middle?"

Oh no he DID NOT! I had to contain my laughter. She shot him a fake smile and just said, "Um. No." You could tell she was really thinking, "bitch please!"

But I made it back to Berkeley safely, and that's all that matters, right? I guess after you've been stuck in the Denver airport for 4 days due to inclement weather, being teased by an episode of Ugly Betty doesn't seem so bad.

Movie Review: No Country for Old Men

The only things I knew about No Country for Old Men going into it were:
• The Coen Brothers directed it
• Javier Bardem plays a terrifying killer with a bowl cut
• The movie is chock-full of violence

Those last two bullet points were enough to make me want to skip this movie. I bitched and moaned when my boyfriend planned our Saturday night, but he assured me that we could play our usual game of me covering my eyes and him telling me when the gore had subsided.

I am happy to announce though that the violence, while unrelenting, should not be a deterrent for seeing the movie, even for the pansies like me. There aren’t any David Cronenberg style close-ups of dismembered bodies; in fact the whole thing made me less queasy than one 60-minute episode of CSI. And if you wimp out because of the violence, you’ll miss one of the best movies of the year.

It pains me to admit that, because now Scooby gets to pull the old “told you so” on me, so clearly I really mean it.

The plot is fairly straightforward: Josh Brolin’s character stumbles upon a drug deal gone wrong in the middle of a Texas desert. He steals a briefcase full of hundred-dollar bills and consequently incurs the wrath of hitman Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem.

Then again, it would be hard to say that Chigurh shows any anger exactly. He’s more of an even-keeled kind of killer, who, at most, shows minor annoyance. Nevertheless, he has a job to do, which is kill the thief and retrieve the cash. If there are bystanders in his way—say, a random person driving down a highway—he will do what he has to. Coincidentally, what he has to is almost always murder said character. He appears to be more machine than human, and the audience begins to wonder if he’s simply the personification of violence, rather than truly a man.

Meanwhile, Tommy Lee Jones plays the sheriff who takes his time piecing together the crime and then half-heartedly ambles after both the thief and the killer. Jones plays one of the old men to which the title refers, and it’s painful (yet almost comical) to watch him sort of give up before he’s even begun. The audience watches as his thought process moves in the right direction and then, from either fear or ignorance, any clue he was about to uncover vanishes.

What’s so refreshing about No Country is that it isn’t dumbed down for the sake of the audience. It operates on a higher plane than most movies because it works both as a straightforward story and as a metaphor for an unfortunate truth: violence existed before we were around and it will certainly outlive us all.

The Coen brothers also take a real risk with the score: there is none. The movie unfolds with the same sounds we would hear if we were living through the whole ordeal. They don’t use the trick of eerie music to sufficiently terrify the audience. And it turns out they don’t have to. If I ever see a bowl cut again, I may very well run screaming in the opposite direction.











Eek!