Schadenfreude, sort of

Last night, I was relaxing on the couch in my lovely new living room, enjoying a glass or three of not-too-cheap cab and a plate of homemade shiitake-gorgonzola risotto, when I heard a familiar voice emanating from the television. Curious, I immediately directed my attention to the screen, and gasped, taken aback, very narrowly avoiding spitting out a mouthful of the fruits of my domestic divadom onto a throw pillow. It was indeed who I thought it was.

Yes, friends, my college crew teammate/occasional party buddy/frenemy extraordinaire Jenn is now a contestant on Beauty and the Geek.

If you've ever had the pleasure of meeting her, you know that the jokes here write themselves. If you haven't, suffice it to say that I have never met anyone in my life more suited to appearing on a reality show where dumb pretty girls compete in an attempt to prove their intelligence. As my friend Miriam once noted, "if Jenn were to compete in an academic decathlon against some rocks...the rocks would probably win."

Now she has giant fake boobs, and is employed as a "cigar model," whatever that means. However, she's still built like a total man, which at least restores my faith that there is some sense of order in this crazy universe.

(Okay, I probably ought not make fun of her for her masculine build. Let's just say that there's a reason I avoid gyms like the plague. I come from a family of linebackers. You do the math. But still...you know how sometimes pictures come out early in the baseball season of the rookies being hazed, and you'll see a muscle-bound dude with an overstuffed bra and a bad blonde wig in a dress at the airport? That's pretty much what she looks like. Okay, fine, and what I would look like if I got a boob job and started frequenting weight rooms.)

Anyway, after a momentary pang of jealousy over the fact that she's on TV and I'm not (which passed quickly when I remembered that I would rather eat glass than be on a show like that), I became inordinately pleased over the fact that I get to bask in her boundless stupidity for a full hour each week. I know this makes me sound like a bitch, but she talked an enormous amount of shit about me behind my back over the years. I can't help but feel a little vindicated.

Otherwise, I had quite a lovely long weekend, excluding a nasty tumble on an escalator which left me with a fetching assortment of parallel black-and-blue lines across my left kneecap and a subtle limp. I spent some time in New Hampshire, where I enjoyed the fall foliage, picked a peck of apples, and took single bites out of enough apples to fill another peck, because everyone knows that the first bite is the best. So cheers to Christopher Columbus and his fortuitous discovery of San Salvador. Lucky for us, he had a flag.