December 4, 2012

Emma Tattenbaum-Fine

Audio books.  I am going to listen to audio books.  For years.  And I’m not gonna get cranky like my Grandma.  She listens to audio books and yet still finds a way to be sad.  Incomprehensible.  I am living for the day when I can retire from the nebulous career I never had and subsume myself in passive reading.  I will be told stories for the last sumptuous 60 years of my life.  And for the last 50 I’ll be in a diaper, statistically speaking…. I mean… age 100 to 150, there’s no way I’m gonna use a toilet.  And I will shit myself and listen to audiobooks and I will pay worship to the god of modern science ‘cause I can finally catch up on my reading, even though I can’t see.

And when people ask me, “Hey, did you read Life of Pi, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Eat Pray Love?”   I will say, “Yes I did!”  And by “read” I will mean that I watched the movies through my cataracts and heard the books on tape with my hearing aids blasting.  ’Cause that is the kind of leisure and luxury that old age will afford me.  I will have enough time to both see the movie AND listen to the audio book and no one will judge me for shitting my pants ‘cause I will be one hundred-forty-seven-and-a-half mother-fucking years old.

Eventually, I’ll look up from my orthopedic bed, with my milky eyes and my erupting clavicles, and I will say, “That was a good book.”  And then l will die.

Bring it, modern medicine.  Let’s do this.

September 28, 2012

Emma Tattenbaum-Fine

The Chinese workers that make your Apple products have started rioting. The factory workers of Taiyuan, China finally looked at the phones they were making, pressed “on”,  got some wifi, and found out the Big Secret… that EVERYONE is having more fun than they are.

It’s been a long held belief by the workers of the Han Hoi Precision Industry’s Taiyuan-based factory, which employs 79,000 Chinese twenty-somethings, that all the people the world over were having an equally miserable time, but it turns out NOT to be so.  It was just them… all along.

The attitude was always—meh—another day, another 12 hours of gluing silicon to another piece of silicon, but horizons are broadening. 

It all began with a dormitory dispute.  One worker said, hey, this sucks: being away from my family, getting paid almost nothing and having zero fun EVER.  And he was so mad that he drunkenly pushed another guy and that guy realized his life sucked, too and that’s how the riots began.  A bunch of young Chinese people realized that the people inside their phones were having more fun than they were AND getting paid more to have it.  Also, guards were beating them as they realized this and that intensified the epiphany. 

The Chinese workers have caught on.  

The party’s over.  Get ready to pay more for your stuff.  And if you don’t like it, glue your own silicon to another piece of silicon, ‘cause it’s no fun and no one wants to do it for you.

So while you’re “rioting” over your iPhone 5, know that you’re in good company.

September 13, 2012

Emma Tattenbaum-Fine

The PIT (the theater where Political Subversities performs its weekly sketch show) is hosting a blood drive on Monday, September 17th from 10am-2:30pm. Like many people, you may be flirting with the idea of donating… especially right now… if this is the first you’ve heard of this. Like many people, you may be scared and creeped out because, though ideologically you’re into it, filling a bag with your creepy crawly lifeblood, may sicken you.

Well, as a veteran donor, I wish to allay your fears and calm you—nay—seduce you— into donating. I’m going to assume, for the purposes of this persuasive blogpost— that you are an improviser/member of the extended PIT community. (If you are not, just substitute some other blood donation center for The PIT and some other thrilling practice for performing comedy.) Assuming this is true, I will further infer that you are a bit of an adrenaline junkie. You relish the thrill of bounding out onstage not knowing what will happen. In keeping with the identity I’ve projected upon you, I will further suggest that you live for the laughter of an audience, the pleasure of bringing joy to strangers and the knowledge that you, personally, have had an impact, in a positive kind of way, on other humans.

So if that’s true… then what else?

You will be a terrific blood donor!

What is more adrenalizing than experiencing the loss of 1 pint of your blood and SURVIVING—nay— THRIVING? You are amazing. You are a hero.

If you like making people laugh… a comparatively piddling good deed… you are gonna LOVE saving a human life with your blood donation. The life of a stranger. You will save it. Ever done THAT with an improv show? You have? Well, now do it with your BLOOD. You are an amazement. You have so much to give.

Now… on Monday, I myself will be in Arizona visiting my grandma. I will therefore be absent from this particular blood drive. However, I want you to know what a high it is to get that sweet lightheaded buzz while saving somebody. It’s… dare I say… even better than performing comedy, which I know you love to do.

Please feel free to leave comments below. I would be pleased as punch to answer any questions you may have about what it’s like to donate. If you wish to vent or mourn about who can and cannot donate, those comments are welcome too.

Let’s talk about donating blood (on Monday, September 17th at The PIT)!

August 16, 2012

Emma Tattenbaum-Fine

I get a lot of flak from friends, and occasionally relatives, for not devoting hours of my life to watching TV.  Because I write and perform comedy, people seem to regard my not watching TV as if I were a runner who shoots herself in the foot.  The prevailing opinion seems to be that, since I’m wildly out of the TV loop, how could I possibly create anything of value. 

And worse than the people I love, are the desperate salespeople over at Time Warner Cable, who relentlessly try to sell me both a landline and cable, neither of which I need, having no phone affixed to my wall and no TV, except my computer.  When I explain that I don’t have a TV, the voice on the other line seems to spin in place, like a robot with one very essential gear that has been removed and replaced with a slinky.

When I’m asked point-blank, “Why don’t you watch TV?”, I typically fail to give a proper answer because I don’t think anyone really cares to listen.  However, with enough people asking, and a lot of really good TV on these days, I’ve now taken the time to think it out.  Here is why I don’t watch TV… really… ever:

 -Sitting still makes me sad

-The people on TV are too attractive and/or accomplished.  It makes me feel inferior.

-The people on TV are too stupid and pathetic.  It makes me feel superior and misunderstood.

-TV stimulates the part of my brain that makes me feel less alive.

-On TV, sometimes the writing is too good.  It makes me feel talentless.

-On TV, sometimes the writing is too bad.  It makes me feel the writer is talentless… ergo I’m a loser for watching.

-I get emotionally invested in every commercial.

-The news makes me cry or feel nothing, both BAD.

-Advertising reminds me that money is the reason people care about one another.

-I slide into darkness.

-Nobody wins.

I also feel, and boy is this gonna sound self-important… that my most original thoughts come from NOT doing things other people are doing.  I actually feel… this sounds terribly self-serious, but only because it is… I actually feel that it is somewhat DANGEROUS for EVERYBODY to be watching TV.  Shouldn’t somebody be maintaining some sort of vigil?  A vigil to my particular and unique inner thoughts that  no one has yet successfully pinned down as a demographic?  When I turn on the TV, I feel assailed by information.  I feel overwhelmed and my personal voice gets squashed and replaced by one big voice that belongs to no real person except the lady trying to sell me detergent, whose values are a conglomerate of hundreds of polled individuals who all once had a divine self, but turned it to mush from watching TV.

Believe me, I’m reading this over and judging myself, too.  What pretentious hogwash!  And yet, I really feel this way and I really don’t watch TV… really… ever.  …Sorry.

May 13, 2012

Emma Tattenbaum-Fine

When Mother’s Day rolls around, we take the time to honor our mothers, but wasn’t someone else there, raising us and teaching us “what do you do with the mad that you feel?”

April 25, 2012

Emma Tattenbaum-Fine

Look, I don’t know if I will have the balls, the willpower, or even the desire to go through with it, but sometimes I fantasize about not having a child.  Not even one.  I imagine the travels I’ll have, the projects I’ll undertake and the children I will mentor without being their mother. 

I ponder my potential as a childless person.  I can’t help but wonder if life might hold secrets for me that I’ll only know if I follow this less-charted path.

I’m seeing these glossy posters everywhere advertising the upcoming movie, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, based on the endlessly trusted and popular book by Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel.  It makes me wonder, who has written What to Expect When You’re Expecting Not to Have Children?  Gloria Steinem?

To whom should I look for inspiration on that topic?  My friend told me about a book called Committed, by Elizabeth Gilbert, that talks about what she calls “the auntie brigade”, which is the idea that a woman can find maternal fulfillment and do a lot of good as an aunt/godmother/nurturer/mentor, in lieu of being a parent.

The world’s in need of teachers and mentors, so maybe I could be useful in that way.  Then again, I can barely haul my ass off the couch to recycle, so I’m not sure I’m inclined to take the “what the world needs” approach.

(Sigh.)

Maybe… I’ll have 2.5 kids and a nice white fence and admit that I’m just like everyone else.  

On an unrelated note, I doubt Gloria Steinem is going to see this movie.

February 17, 2012

Emma Tattenbaum-Fine

Do you really have a gluten allergy?  Really?

Or are you maybe just a little bit fat and sad about it?

I only ask because people with real gluten allergies suffer from non-stop shitting.  Is that… happening to you… when you, like, eat a bagel?

And you kind of just seem like somebody who is trying to control other people with your eating disor— I   mean, gluten allergy.

Do you really NEED to drink gluten-free beer?  Maybe just save everybody the trouble and… leave the bar?

Do you really NEED to eat gluten-free cupcakes?  I mean… they still have a cupcake’s worth of calories.  Just so you know.

Are you actually gluten-intolerant?  Or are you maybe just wishing there was some little way… in which you could be special?

Emma Tattenbaum-Fine
February 1, 2012

Adele is the real deal.  Her album “21”… I mean it’s just a break-up album, and I know I’m the two-billionth humanoid person to like it, but it bears repeating: The album shows some serious depth, emotional maturity, and self-awareness.  

And she’s obviously about to win a suitcase-full of new Grammys. Duh. 

Man.  If I had written an album at 21 after my break-up… it would have been a lot less sophisticated. 

I’m not much of a songstress, but I think my “21” album would have gone something like this. 

I thought I was explicitly clear that I was gonna 

sleep with other people when you studied abroad in 

Prague.  Sorry bout the miscommunication. 

That would be the single… so, like, “Rolling in the Deep”.   

Let’s see, other tunes would go like this, 

I never liked you especially, I was just super-

flattered that you found me attractive—I previously 

hadn’t realized that I was desirable.  Thanks for having sex with me! 

That would be the hook, right there. 

Thanks for having sex with me! 

Adele has won so many things…. 

After my break-up at 21… I just cried.