Behold, the Holy Grail of Dresses

Perry, dumbstruck

The Trail of Tears began on November 4, 2007, when my friend Jen wore a Laila Azhar dress to her birthday party that drove me insane with jealousy. The dress was perfect in every conceivable way. It was black, strapless, cinched at the waist, and in a normal cotton sheen material and not some hideous cheap silk material like a Zum Zum prom dress or other embarrassing things that woefully misguided women wear to "cocktail" affairs. She got it at Barneys and said she paid like $480 for it, which, although I was employed at the time, seemed like a king's ransom for some reason, so I did what I usually do, which was add it to my online shopping bag every day on the Barneys website but never buy it so that at least other people can't have it. And then one day I tried to add it to my shopping bag again, but someone had apparently bought the last one in my size while I was sleeping.

For a year and a half, I have Googled Laila Azhar about 400 times but it seems that the dress has disappaered. I've run countless eBay searches and considered buying it in a size 8 which was once posted on eBay, but the seller never messaged me back when I asked if he or she thought it could be tailored. I even considered ordering it for "yen" on some shady Japanese website the one time it came up on like page 3 of the Google hits. When I had to buy a dress for a wedding in March, I bought a hammered silk high class escort dress that looked like an anus, because if I couldn't have the Laila Azhar, there was no point in even trying. I often talked about the dress with friends, who advised me to "get a grip" and "move on." But like Scott Peterson on death row who heroically has never given up the search for Lacy's real killer, I never gave up the dream of obtaining this dress.

Last week, feeling flush with cash from a $115 freelance check that arrived in the mail, I randomly went to Bluefly.com, which I never go to because who goes there anymore. They had a new tab called "emerging designers" and I scrolled down to see Laila Azhar was listed among them. I clicked on it and like a phoeniz risen from the ashes, MY BLACK DRESS WAS THERE AND IN MY SIZE. My year and a half of hoping and waiting had paid off and as I ordered it at 2am online, I sat at my computer crying and wondering if there really was a god because first there was Oprah, then my wallet came back to me (FOR THE SECOND TIME) and now there was this dress. I've said it once and and I'll say it again: if you love something, set it free, if it comes back to you it was meant to be. If it doesn't it was never yours to begin with.

The Ides of May

Click to enlarge

Tomorrow is the single most important day of the year. That's right - it's my "25th" birthday, and it is really remarkable how I get more amazing and beautiful with each passing year.
Every year mom asks me what I want and usually I say "nothing" which is obvious a monstrous lie, but this year I took the time out from my exceedingly busy schedule to compile a list of things that I deem acceptable presents that show adequate respect for such a sacred occasion. Click above to see the list.

Hilarious List of Gosselin Freebies

I always suspected celebrities got free plastic surgery

I'm sure many of you are following the amazing marriage meltdown of Kate and Jon Gosselin, who are married and have 8 kids and are on the show Jon & Kate + 8. The show will soon be titled Jon & Kate + 8 - 1 because Us Weekly has loads of pictures and reports about Jon's affair with a 23 year old while Kate was away doing media tours and tending to her insane Flock of Seagulls haircut. There's also rumors that Kate is having an affair with her bodyguard, who looks like Peterman from Seinfeld. In any event, Us Weekly is reporting how fame and fortune have "changed" the pair and how they've become "obsessed" with getting free swag. Us includes a comprehensive list of all the free crap they've gotten:

Utah house rental (estimate: $5,000), ski lift tickets $72 for six days), ski school lessons ($140 per child)
- Upright piano, which they got rid of when they moved into their new $1.1 million home : $5,550-$6,350
- Violin: $100-$300
- Old house re-carperted
-Crayola Factory Tour: $90.00
-Teeth Whitening (for Jon & Kate): $1,310 (average price for 2 adults)
-Hair plugs (Jon): $5,200 (average cost)
-Sesame Street Place tickets: $509.50
-Day with Thomas the Tank Engine: $180.00
-Beach trip to North Carolina, house rental, Jeep tour
-Sight & Sound Christian theatre tickets: $236.00
-SkyBox at Phillies game
-LegoLand tickets: $550.00

Um, do you like how they just casually mention the hairplugs in the middle of this list and then specify "Jon" as opposed to Kate or one of the 5 year old sextuplets, just to clear up any confusion. I basically fell out of my chair.

KY "Intense"

A reader of this blog recently brought to my attention the sheer lunacy of the KY "Intense" commercials with uptight couples talking about the product and then fast forwarding to apres sex, as they lay "stunned" and speechless in bed by the power of this lubricant. I have never tried KY Intense (GROSS), but it seems to me that KY did itself a disservice by putting Intense on the market. If Intense is the most powerful KY lubricant out there, it makes all their other products obsolete because who's going to waste their time on KY Warming Liquid or 2-1 Tingling lubricant when neither of those sensations guarantee Intensity. It also completely eliminates the need for their other new product, KY Intrigue, because nobody wants to slather Intrigue on their crotches and be forced to solve a murder mystery. Of course there's theoretically argument that you don't want to have "intense" sex every time, sometimes you want to have boring KY Personal Lubricant sex, but that argument contemplates that everyone has a limitless amount of money to buy 90 types of different lubricant for the type of sex that they want to have and also doesn't mind the embarrassment of storing a warehouse of lotions and gelees (HAHAHA) in their sock drawer. I once found two lubricants in an ex-boyfriend's bedside table and it nearly ruined our relationship because what kind of pervert has two lubricants.

This also brings up the KY Yours + Mine issue, which is a set of his and hers lubricants which people are supposed to rub on their personal crotches and then when the crotches meet the completely different chemical makeup of the two lubricants come together and an atomic bomb goes off on your Wamsutta sheets. My initial question regarding this product was if the two products are separately ineffective, but together outrageously unbelievable, why not just cut out the middle man, go to Target and get an empty spray bottle and pour them both in, but it appears that someone at KY realized that people would be stirring up their own concoctions so they came out with KY Intense.

P.S. KY Intrigue says it can be used for an "intimate shower." HAHAHA

R.I.P. Crunch Gyms

More like Credit Crunch - ZING

Today, Crunch Gyms filed for bankruptcy. Well, I could have predicted this. Their motto is "No Judgments" but that's about to change because a bankruptcy court is going to render a judgment against them - ZING. The truth of the matter is the Crunch gyms are a steaming pile of shit. I was briefly and tragically a member of Crunch in 2005 when I first moved to New York, and didn't realize that Crunch was very low on the gym totem pole, ranking somewhere below Equinox, New York Health & Racquet Club, NY Sports Club, but somewhere about Dolphin Fitness, which is truly the worst and most repulsive gym in NYC. The machines at Dolphin are always dripping in other peoples' sweat, there is no A/C and the locker room has no bench to sit on and the entire place is always filthy, which is acceptable for my apartment but is not ok for a gym.

But anyway, back to Crunch. Their "claim to fame" is that they're known for their their see through walls which look out on to the street so that the people inside can run on the treadmill while simulataneously bragging to pedestrians about it. They're also have "world famous fitness classes," which change every month. These classes are all based around gimmicky names or gimmicky fitness equipment with very little actual workout going on. I once went to a "Bosu Bootcamp" class, which involved jumping up and down on that dome shaped rubber pimple apparatus while people doing real work outs stare into the glass-walled class. The workout was lead by a fat instructor which did not inspire much confidence and the workout was a joke.

I would say good riddance, but I wonder if this means that Equinox will get even more crowded, if that is even possible.

Vincent Longo Diaspora from Sephora

Mama's coming

As if discontinuing Sephora eyeliner #209 was not enough, last week I walked into a Sephora in Soho to replace my Vincent Longo Gel Lipstain in Liquid Kiss which I have been wearing for 5 years now. The display was not in the usual place which did not immediately alarm me, since they're always switching things around at Sephora in order to confuse customers. I asked one of the sales associates in insane drag makeup where the Vincent Longo display was now located and she said "we no longer carry that line." I see.

Putting aside the fact that Vincent Longo along with Nars, Clinique, Lorac and Stila were the ORIGINAL brands carried by Sephora and that it is an unimaginable betrayal to just kick out the brands that made them great, was Sephora ever planning on alerting their customers about this? What did they expect, that I would just somehow consult my runes or divine from the atmosphere that Sephora was no longer carrying Vincent Longo and that I should immediately proceed to the nearest store and buy up the remaining stock of Liquid Kiss or did they expect me togo about my business regularly using Liquid Kiss and then when my supply ran out I was just supposed to go to the store only to discover that the linchpin of my makeup routine had been exiled and then replace it with some piece of shit gloss from Cargo or Kat von D and act casual? Any fool knows that if you build an entire makup routine around an enviable berry-kissed lip, you can't just replace one lip product with another and have the entire makeup look ideal. While I have been waiting for Gel Lipstain in Liquid Kiss to arrive from the shady Vincent Longo website, I was actually forced to purchase some "chocolate berry" lip plumper gloss from Clinique as a feeble substitue and a recent decline in my being hit on attests to the inadequacy of this product.

At first I thought it was just bad luck that my Stridex Foaming Face Wash was discontinued,but with the discontinuation of Sephora #209 eyeliner, the closing of the Missha stores (where another key lip gloss originates) and now the diaspora of Vincent Longo from Sephora, it has become perfectly clear that someone is trying to destroy me. I have an idea of who it is and let me just say that this person will be very, very sorry.

My Ear, Part IV

Click to enlarge my unbelievable test results

So, following my course of antibiotics and prednisone, neither of which did anything except stop me from drinking for 4 days, I decided to return to Dr. Lim and tell her that my ears were still ringing. I went through the entire process again of booking a "follow up" appointment (aka, no extra charge), waiting in the waiting room with the blaring Good Morning America, and having Lim look in my ears, spritz crap in my nose, tell me that it was still clogged at which point I reminded her of that it had been clogged since my 2001 nosejob and there was no reason to think that in the week since I'd seen her last it would magically clear up and that a Ven diagram suggested that if my ears had only been ringing for a few weeks but my nosejob was eight wonderful years ago, the two circles did not overlap and the nosejob was not the cause of the ringing. She ignored me, filled out some forms and told me she was sending me for hearing tests. Mind you, she didn't ask whether I was having trouble hearing, and the appointment was at 8am so I was too tired to tell her that my hearing was fine, andshe wrote a referral form and gave me the names of 5 HEARING AID places to call for my tests, one of which was that horrible NY Eye & Ear Infirmary hellhole.

I go home, call one of the places to ask how much their hearing tests cost because I'm paying out of pocket due to my lack of insurance, and because it's a hearing aid place, the volume on their end of the phone is all the way up so they scream in my ear that it's $300 and I say, "no thanks, I'd rather go deaf but at least have some money," and then I proceed to complain to several people via Gchat about how absolutely ridiculous is that I was sent to get my hearing checked and that they're attempting to charge me $300 to ring some tones in my ear and tell me that my hearing is fine. Several people, including L.G. and my parents, insinuated that maybe there IS something wrong with my hearing and that maybe I'm just being defensive about it, which is patently false, but anyway the only way I could conclusively prove these people wrong and rub it in their faces was if I got my hearing checked. So I called back Audio Help Associates and told them to count me in for the $300.

This morning, I arrive for my 9am hearing test appointment and check in at the receptionist desk. Since this is a place for the hearing impaired, the receptionist SCREAMS at me "PLEASE HAVE A SEAT" and then SCREAMS again for me to fill out some forms which contain questions including rating things on a 0-5 scale, including "interest in improving your hearing aid device" and "comfort conversing with friends and loved ones." One of the "audiologists" (bizarre, made up profession) comes out and the receptionist whispers to him that I don't have insurance, believing me to be deaf, and the audiologist gives me the stink eye and whispers back to her "she's not my client" to which I reply "Hello, I'm Marin and I don't have insurance, here are my forms" which completely stuns both the receptionist and the audiologist because obviously they are accostomed to whispering shit about people directly in front of their faces.

As I'm waiting with two elderly men, my 28 year old "audiologist" comes out and takes me to a weird padded small chamber with bizarro 80s machinery involving dot matrix printouts. She sticks things in my ear that supposedly take "pressure measurements" and it becomes abundantly clear that the latest advances in audiology may also include blood letting, phrenology and application of virgin tears. She then puts the tone plugs in my ear and goes to a room facing me with a window and puts on a 1-800-Dentist headset and tells me through the head microphone that she will be playing tones and I should say "Yes" when I hear them. I obviously hear all the tones, even the sneaky ones and the longer silences that I know she was trying to trick me with, and after we're done with this exercise in lunacy she asks me to repeat words after she says them. So I'm sitting there in a chamber wearing earplugs, looking at this girl in a headset who is probably two people apart from me on Facebook, repeating words like "use" "toe" "cat" "stove" back to her and about to die of laughter and shame. Finally, she looks up at me and says into her headset microphone, "why are you here?" because I'm obviously kicking this hearing test's ass and I say, "I know, it is absolutely ridiculous," and I tell her that my ears have been ringing and that Dr. Lim sent me here to have my hearing checked but obviously my hearing is fine. She rolls her eyes and says "your hearing is average" and I said, "wait, do you mean like getting a C or like average as is my hearing is normal" and she said "your hearing is normal." Approximately seven minutes have elapsed into my test at this point, and she then takes me to back to the receptionist and permits them to charge me $305, in what comes out to $38 a minute. I then ask for a copy of my test results and the receptionist says "We can send it to you, our copier is broke" and I inform her that I just paid $305 for this test and I am a blogger and if she could kindly scan it and print it that would be ideal, so she scans and prints a copy.

As you can see, I received "Av" on my clinical interpretations (which I initially thought said "A+" but Aliza informed me that I was only fooling myself), in addition to "Excellent WRS." I also received two "Good"s and many "10"s and "100"s throughout this report, so at this time I would like to accuse L.G. and my parents of having worse hearing than me and also say in your face to them.