This makes me nostalgic for the whole ARIYNBF gang!
Happy Cinco de Mayo!
Archive | dustin
The final day of my tryout, Dustin's lament, smug phone chat, ugly purses
So I’m overdue in posting this link to the last show of my extended tryout as newsgirl on the Adam Carolla show podcast. Perhaps you’ve noticed the way I go back and forth between calling it podcast or show? It’s because I don’t actually know which is the official name and I don’t want to be that asshole who has a whole conversation with someone named Larry and then wraps it up with, “Talk to you soon, Lenny!” Know what I mean? Alice hopes you do.
So once again the show was super duper fun even if I made the mistake of having a kind of extended conversation about what they’re looking for about 4 minutes before the show started which is akin to an athlete doing something that undermines his or her confidence right before a big game. What’s an athlete’s confidence killer? Standing next to a much bigger athlete in the mirror? Improperly carbo loading? Someone weigh in.
“Why did you do that??!?!?!” asked Dustin, putting his head in his hands and then banging his whole head plus hands on the bar in front of us when I met up with him after the show to catch him up on every delightful nuanced thought I’d had in my head for the whole week. “I don’t know! If I had handlers I wouldn’t get into this kind of trouble!” I explained. He missed the unsubtle cue to become my personal assistant for no money.
This is what Dustin and I look like when we’re having a discussion during the holidays
Then the trackball on my blackberry refused to roll left causing me to send out an unfunny tweet before I’d had a chance to revise it. It was a Deleted Tweet nightmare. (For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, Deleted Tweets is a segment I do on my show where we share tweets we thought of sending but thought better of for whatever reason.)
My friend James’s friend Rob, who also has a Blackberry, fixed my trackball though. In the midst of the trackball fixing James smugly turned to Dustin and said, “Wow, this is like an commercial for Apple.” Then I pretended to have an actual conversation on my Blackberry while knowingly looking at Rob and said, “This is a commercial for Blackberry!” Then we all went home and didn’t have sex with anyone. (For what it’s worth I’d prefer an iPhone but I’m still with Verizon which provides absolutely no cell service in my house but gets high marks in Consumer Reports.)
But back to the podshowcast, we talked about all sorts of stuff including shaving, pigeons, my attempt at original reporting, Courtney Love’s twitter defamation suit, getting dickrolled on a submarine (for those who are familiar with my show, Elliot The Pie Guy is my friend who was in the navy), birds falling from the sky and other assorted important stuff. I’m still cracking up about Bryan’s drops during the strap/strop discussion and his comments during the pigeon counting conversation. The guests were Michael Swaim and Dan O’Brien of Cracked.com and they were really funny, just as Greg Fitzsimmons was really funny the day before and TJ Miller was really funny the day before that.
It felt a little sad not going to the studio yesterday. I realized I accidentally left my mechanical pencil and hi-liter there which I’m thinking might be the nerd version of leaving your wallet behind. (The hot girl from the 80s version would be leaving your banana clip and convertible purse cover behind.)
Remember these atrocities? Anyone?
Drinking from the firehose (ARIYNBF post show chat with Dustin)
Dustin has a sweet ride
Dustin has a car and we’re going to dinner. Because of said vehicle, we’re going to attempt going somewhere, in his words, “far-flung.”
Dustin: Ok, so we’re looking for seafood, somewhere out of the way that you can’t get to by subway.
Me: Yes. We’re looking for inconvenient seafood.
Clue, my show, I sneezed, iTunes
Recently I played Clue with my mom and sister and while it’s unflattering to gloat, I won by a longshot. My sister claims she’d also figured it out and was about to guess the same winning trio if only she could get her playing piece into the correct room (which now escapes me. The Attic? The Mud Room? The Bonus Room? The Telescope Room? The Lanai?) however I’m pretty sure she’s lying. What makes me so sure? She’s a total liar and not to be trusted with any board games. The Great Monopoly Heist of 82? The Giant Boggle Debacle of 93? The Humongous Candy Land Rip Off of 2005? All my sister’s handiwork. Once she even stole all the ladders from Chutes & Ladders. Have you ever tried playing just Chutes? It’s a very fast game. But more than my sister and her sticky fingers is the fact that I’m pretty sure I’d be an asset to any small police department or other crime solving agency because the way I solved the murder in Clue the other night was genius and I’m pretty sure I should try my hand at forensics next.
In other news I am still in CA and I just sneezed. Not a tiny little dainty sneeze but a big “Oh no!” kind of sneeze where even though I sneezed a good five seconds ago I think if you were to look at me you would be able to tell I just sneezed. You would also be able to tell that I just woke up. I’m beautiful and I have allergies is what I’m trying to tell you.
Tomorrow’s show should be fun, but then I always say that. Here’s the FB page with info. Not only will my friend Yami (and maybe her baby!) be on the show but Dustin is in these parts and I’m trying to get him to be on the show too because then it’d be like we’ve gone on location. Like if Benson & Stabler were in California. There I go again with the crime solving.
Anything else? Well things are still kind of shitty in regards to the specific shitty situation which you may or may not know a tiny bit about and which I can only refer to in these oblique ways but completely unrelated and fairly fantastic: my shows are now on itunes!
this duck again… plus passion, rage, self-indulgence and pepperoni
So I thought I was overdue in posting photos, in fact this post was going to begin with, “I’m overdue in posting photos” however I just went and looked and unless I want to upload all the shots I took yesterday which I put on twitpic, which I don’t, I’m really not that overdue. Hence my reliance on Plan B. The Morning After Duckling.
By the way, that’s not my hand holding the duck. It’s not even my duck. How I wish it were!
Also, last night Dustin and I tried to do a livestream from his iPhone. This is what it sounded like: Lasht night Dushtin and I tried do do a liveshtream from his iPhone. We sounded drunk! But we weren’t! It was the audio! I shwear!
Also I have a couple little trips coming up and I couldn’t be more excited. Could I be more excited? I just said I couldn’t. Must I repeat everything?
Must I repeat everything?
Last week Tom Rapp played live on the show and it was amazing. I have all the footage sitting in my iMovie event pane and yet I can’t bring myself to begin editing. My ass is revolting. “Don’t sit on me!” it’s saying. Incidentally that was originally the slogan for the Continental Navy until a very early marketer came along and adjusted his powdered wig, had an affair with scullery maid, got drunk on moonshine and then belched something about synergy and call to action.
In other news, there is no other news. Actually, there may be but I don’t know if I feel like sharing.
Well I will tell you that two things are on my mind. One of them is that maybe I need to make some kind of special website for the show however what’s a good website that would have the video window and also the chat window? I’ve been looking at wordpress and tumblr themes and haven’t found anything that looks perfect or near perfect yet.
Also, I miss writing. This happens to me often. I bounce back and forth between missing performing and missing writing. When I miss writing it’s because a part of me looks at everything I’m doing and thinks, “What the hell are you doing?” and longs to feel like I’m actually adding something meaningful to discourse/culture. When I miss performing it’s because part of me looks at what I’m writing and thinks, “This is about hair.”
Ok that’s not true. I only wrote one story about hair, titled “The Braid Bunch” and it was pretty good if I do say so myself, which I just did.
There’s a lot of talk in this new media world about “passion.” I imagine there’s a lot of talk about it on couples’ retreats as well. But inasmuch as it applies to branding and point of view and labeling and stuff which fundamentally makes me feel icky and yet is so necessary in this world it’s shorthand for “what do you stand for in a couple words.” So I’ve been thinking about what my passion is. By the way, you can’t say your passion is being entertaining. Or being funny. Or being liked. So I’ve been thinking about the inverse: what really pisses me off. Granted that’s not really the inverse of passion but you know. Things which piss me off? Stupidity, rigidity, lack of self-awareness, people who think they can outsmart you, bullshit, lack of ducklings.
Actually, I’m cutting myself off because I was just reminded of a different direction I wanted to go: there is something which has been pissing me off lately. Growing up I was a quiet conscientious overweight nerd. The nicest quiet conscientious overweight nerd you’d want to meet, but you get my drift. And then I was a professional writer for years and years. And now all of a sudden I’m on TV and I’m pretty and people react to me as an attractive person and while part of me accepts it, there’s a part of me that doesn’t connect at all with the person who people are reacting to. Does that make sense? It doesn’t really need to. So for awhile being treated as just a pretty face or as an object, if you will, which you will, was sort of thrilling in this very novel sense. Because the vulnerable part of me was the looks part, not the brains part. I’ve never questioned my intellingence and what I’ve accomplished, those parts of my identity are ironclad and for that reason I also don’t really ram them down people’s throats. I just figure that people will google search my name and see I’ve published thousands of articles or maybe I never thought it through enough to really realize that’s what they would need to do.
So fast forward to now-ish when occasionally I get treated like one of those talking heads on TV whose title is made up to give them a reason to go on TV and who is fundamentally an insubstantial person who happens to look good and instead of it being a novel or amusing thing it just fills me with rage. I can count on the fingers of one hand how many times I’ve been treated as stupid and each time stands out to me because it was so jarring. Like being called the wrong name. And I recognize that writing about it here is really just writing for myself because if anyone is reading this they likely already know who I am and etc. But anyway, I know it’s dumb for me to waste my breath on people who didn’t take the time to google anything and who jump to conclusions and whatnot but it’s also a lesson in the fact that I need to somehow get my credentials a little closer to my amazing hair. In fact, I’m going to stuff them into my hair probably. Both for volume and convenience.
What else was I saying? I don’t know, I think I smelled pepperoni in the course of writing this and was distracted.
Puppies, wisdom teeth, Dustin, socks, hoarding, babies
I’m the kind of person who can feel attachment to just about anything, as evidenced by the way I name my plants and can’t bring myself to buy a fish because I know it would crush me to find Fred or Skippy (the name of my fish) belly up and to feel I had failed him. The irony, and now I’m not sure if that’s the correct usage of irony or the casual incorrect usage which eventually will become the correct usage since words are losing their distinct meanings and pretty soon we’ll all walk around “bemused” with “notorious” iPads that “literally” say “MLGHRF” on them and what was I saying? Oh yeah, the odd or unexpected thing here is that I can’t bring myself to buy a fish and yet I dream of having a puppy. You might be thinking, “Don’t you mean a dog? You know that puppies don’t stay puppies forever, right?” however I really just mean a puppy. I definitely don’t have time to deal with anything that’s losing cuteness and gaining size by the day. In fact, I fully intend to make any puppy I purchase sign a contract stating that either party may terminate the arrangement at any time.
I was thinking about attachment though because vronsfan2005 got his wisdom teeth out and tweeted about it and I got mine out some years ago and I was remembering that a few days before the procedure I was sitting in my chair at Time Out New York thinking, “These teeth will never be in this office again.”
I can also recall having trouble throwing away a sock many years ago, and Dustin (who is not my boyfriend! I realize that my blithe references to him may scare off potential suitors and I’m in no position to scare off any potential suitors since my biological clock is ticking hard and I really want to get married and have babies immediately, in fact that’s what I tell guys I go on dates with when I explain that Dustin is not my boyfriend). Where was I? I really need to quit going on these long parenthetical tangents and then thinking I can get myself back on track. I’m a writer, so if anyone can I can, and yet it’s as if I’m driving a car and while trying to get back home I lose interest in retracing my steps and instead decide to just pull over and build a new different home. So my point was that Dustin is not my boyfriend, we’re just friends, but once he busted me about my socks.
Anyway, I think maybe I’m a proto-hoarder. I have hoarding tendencies. Of course, I think probably everyone does which is why that show is so popular.
Oh and RSVP to my Ustream show on Wednesday, won’t you? It may or may not feature Jim Norton. It will definitely feature me talking about this whole online dating thing.
last night's Alison Rosen Is Your New Best Friend recap plus online dating Qs, horror stories, where to see me
Last night’s show was really fun. First we talked to writer A.J. Jacobs, who was delightful, and then comedian Brendan McLaughlin came over to talk comedy and teach us how to professionally taste beer. He was a hoot, and I mean that in the sincerest way. At some point I also spoke Spanish and we did the wavey pencil dance and it was the greatest wavey pencil dance ever (Dustin took a solo) and we also talked about dating and my plans to do some online dating and document it on the show because I don’t go anywhere without my viewing audience.
Which brings me to a question: Have you had luck with online dating sites and which do you recommend?
And at the end of the show I invited you all to share your dating horror stories (either put them in the comments or email them to alisonrosenisyournewbestfriend AT gmail DOT com) and I will read some of them on the next show and name a winner. I’m not sure yet what the winner will win.
Oh and also, also, also, I need a logo so I can get some stickers made up. Anyone have any ideas for a logo that would look good on a bumper sticker? Maybe it should just be the name of the show. The thing that flummoxes me is that most sites where you order stickers have a button where you upload artwork. So that’s what I need. You know? Okay then.
Oh and also I had super fancy new title cards and we did a segment called “Just me or everyone?” where it was determined that many things I do are just me. It felt less reassuring than I’d hoped.
And one more potentially obnoxious thing. If anyone would like to make highlights on the videos for some of the moments I mentioned above, I will link to them.
Oh and see me tonight at 8pm ET on Diana Falzone‘s Paltalk show. Apparently I’ll be spelling my name with two LLs for the occasion.
And Friday morning at 11am ET I’ll be on CNET’s The 404 podcast. YAY!
Photos: The future of TV
Last week Dustin showed up to the show dressed as “the future of TV” which is silly because everyone knows that’s what I am. I, meanwhile, was wearing glasses because it’s the only way a hot dish like me can be taken seriously.
Here’s where we had words. Not really but I kind of like this photo because it looks like the kind of photo you’d find in the program of a really crappy musical.
On tonight's Alison Rosen Is Your New Best Friend
Please tune in tonight and I’m saying that both to people who make it a regular weekly event to watch and to anyone new who may have stumbled in here by accident and now is caught in a web of Alisonness. Also, as some of you may or may not know, I did an impromptu FANZ ONLY (and by that I mean fans and anyone who happened to see it or hear about it on Twitter) show on Monday night and it was fun. And why do I feel the need to put Z instead of S? It’s ZILLY!
Anyway, tonght we have comedian Myq Kaplan, Dustin, Activity Pit founder Kim Flynn and a cooking demo. RSVP!
And here’s a photo of the puppies Kim’s dog just had!
Apparently you’ll be needing a magnifying glass to see the photo.
And for anyone who listened to Dustin and me discuss his oatmeal fixation on last week’s show, here’s the blog post I mentioned from when we both worked at the same magazine. Unfortunately the photo is no longer there but it was a photo of a box of pop-tarts sitting next to a box of oatmeal.