Ask Gynomite!
In her former life, Emily “Gynomite” Gordon was a couples and family therapist licensed in 2 1/2 states. In this life, she’s a freelance fighter of your emotional woes. Write her at askgynomite@gmail.com- all emails stay confidential. You can also check her out on her weekly advice column over at Lemondrop. Today, Gynomite takes on when the sex is good but everything else is bad.
I’ve been dating this guy for about 8 months, and honestly, it’s a pretty lame relationship. At first we got along totally great, but we quickly went from being flirty and having fun to either ignoring or snapping at each other. I have stuck around because I love him, and also because for the first time ever, I have a great sex life. Every time we fight we end up having sex, and it’s always passionate and mindblowing and amazing. That’s worth sticking around for, right?
Wow, good question. Here’s what I will say: while it’s tough to have a good relationship without a good sex life (thanks Mom!), it is totally possible to have a horrible relationship with a good sex life. And this is what you have. The question is, what does it mean?
Look Around You
Last night, in order to celebrate the release of the Region 1 compatible version of the BBC show Look Around You, the creators of the show, Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz, did a live show at the UCB. It was hosted by Patton Oswalt and it was so hilarious. If you don’t know Look Around You, it’s a faux educational show for children that is just nutty and British and awesome. Here, watch the episode about Maths.
If you don’t know the guys who created it, you might recognize Peter Serafinowicz as Simon Pegg’s mean roommate-turned-zombie in Shaun of the Dead, or you might recognize him as the voice of Darth Maul. He also has a hilarious Twitter account.
Since the audience contained half of the staff of Chud and half of Tim and Eric (the Tim half) as well as Chris Hardwick, I’ll leave the reviews to those guys, but rest assured it was an awesome night. I was lucky enough to know someone with both a region-free DVD player and copies of the BBC version, so I’m just excited that the rest of America can bask in the hilarious glow. Go out and buy Look Around You now!
Diary
Fifteen years ago, I was 16, and Sunny Day Real Estate’s “Diary” was my favorite album. Many nights were spent driving around our tiny rural town blasting that tape over and over again. I was in love with how vital and dramatic they sounded, and how vital and dramatic I felt. I wore ridiculous clothes and Doc Marten boots, and after making a tragic turn into brown and pink striped hair, I dyed my hair jet black. It looked horrible on my way-too-pale skin (people kept asking me if I was feeling better), and my horrified mother eventually agreed to pay for me to have the color removed from my hair. I spent 8 hours in a Winston Salem salon and emerged with hair that was literally not a color- kinda grey, kinda brown, all horribly damaged.
I’m 31 now, and after about eight months of having black hair again (though I would contend it looked much better this time around), I went to a salon here in LA to have it removed again, on my own dime. As I sat there, watching the bleach being slathered on and wondering how I would look in a few hours, I heard the opening strains of Seven, the first track on “Diary”. The salon played the entire album, and my stylist kept asking me why I was smiling so hard.
I was smiling at how vital and dramatic it all felt.
Obligatory Inception post
I found this pretty awesome infographic for the movie Inception at Cinemablend, so I thought I’d share after the jump so as not to spoil it for the Inception virgins out there. There’s soooo much talk about how it’s genius and you have to love it, followed by so much scorn heaped on those who don’t like it, and then backlash for the folk who heap the scorn, so I’ll just say this: I absolutely fucking loved it. It works as a heist movie, as a bizarro “what is reality?” movie, as a tragic love story, and if none of that works for you, just sit back and experience the action scenes, which are crammed so artfully into all of your ear holes and eye holes that you can’t help but gasp.
Subthought: Every man should dress like Joseph Gordon Levitt did in that movie. Forever.
Now jump if you’ve seen it!
Oh do go on, Matthew Wilder.
If you don’t know who Matthew Wilder is, that’s fine. He’s the moron who is directing the film Inferno, which is about porn star Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat. (I like how the Wikipedia page snidely points out that the movie has no financing or studio.) Of course, Lindsay Lohan is playing Linda Lovelace, and the film is based on a book Lovelace wrote about how much abuse and terror and misery she experienced while being a porn star. Lovelace wrote the book as a cautionary tale, and now speaks out about the dangers of the porn industry. Raise your hands, who thinks Lohan will handle such sensitive material with grace, humility, and depth?
Me neither.
Anyway, with today being Lohan’s jail day, Wilder was interviewed by RadarOnline about how it affects his movie, and lucky us, he gave us some salacious details!
There will be full frontal nudity, but it will not be cinematic nudity – it will be more violent nudity. For example, linked images of the Vietnam war – that kind of context. It’s not a porn movie, it’s an artistic movie about a porn star. We will not see Lindsay performing oral sex, but there could be some clever play with black boxes or other cinematic tricks that the viewer may see.
Hurry up and get out Lilo, so you can start making this miracle of a film!
Def Leppard post!
Remember Phil Collen, guitarist for Def Leppard? Well, he just got married! Jump to see maybe one of the most oddly off-putting wedding photos I’ve ever seen in my life!
Discoveries of a Has-Been
Another installment in Gynomite’s newest series, Discoveries of a Has-Been, chronicling the adventures of a once cool grown woman trying to figure out what the kids are listening to these days. This is my favorite song right now. I listen to it constantly. Yeasayer with O.N.E.
An air conditioner is an air conditioner.
My first time living away from the South was when I moved from North Carolina to Chicago in the early 2000s. Desperately trying to navigate the city to see potential apartments on a deadline, it barely registered that every place I saw was completely air conditioning-less. Central air is a given in NC apartments, no matter how crappy they are, on account of the wet sticky stifling heat that blankets the state most of the summer. I just figured that it didn’t get very hot in Chicago. (Ha ha) Stupidly, the apartment I ended up taking was blisteringly hot when I went to inspect it, but I brushed that off, some part of my brain going “Well it’s because the AC isn’t on.” After all my lipstick melted in my new apartment, I bought several industrial fans that kept the hot air circulating, at least, and a lesson was learned.
Chicago doesn’t believe in air conditioning, it seems. They’re so angry about how cold it is all winter that they just embrace the hell out of warmth. I had two more apartments in Chicago, then two in New York, and none of them had air conditioning. I bought and lugged dusty gross window units for years. I made do, and found that making do was possible. Our apartment here in LA has central air, and I have appreciated it so far, although I could see myself being fine without it. I try to stand it as long as I can with the balcony door open, letting the warm breezes waft through our living room.
The point of all this? LA Times has a great piece about the invention of air conditioning and what it’s done to our country, like creating a huge movement to Western and Southern America, and also making us all wusses. Go read it, it’s full of gems like this:
Suburbia’s original appeal came wrapped in visions of green earth, clear skies and backyard bliss. But to fulfill the dreams of home buyers on modest incomes, developers cut back on costly structural features such as movable window sashes, screens, awnings and eaves, high ceilings, thermal mass, cross-ventilated designs and attic fans. They bulldozed shade trees and began building instead for mechanical climate control. Families responded by spending more time indoors.
Go read it here, it’s fascinating!
*a reference to a very famous interaction my sister and I had when I was 2 and she was 5. I asked her to explain to me what an air conditioner was, and her response was “An air conditioner…… is an air conditioner.” This made perfect sense to me.
Which Mad Men star is in the August issue of Playboy?
Hot hot gossip folks! Which sexy lady from Mad Men is remaking these two classic Playboy covers?
Jump to find out! Is it January Jones, Christina Hendricks, maybe Elisabeth Moss?!!?
I want one!
Seen at The Daily What today, this porcupine named Stinkers thinks he’s a puppy!
