Getting Personal

Seeing as we’ve got one Groomzilla and two overworked corporate drones on the LasagnaFarm staff of late, I agree that our time would be better spent on personal blogging. (Bless you Liz, and godspeed. Tell Wolff I’ll pay up soon – I bet him you’d never take the job.) Maybe, if the gods decide to again anoint us with the sacred oils of media-savvy and up-to-the-moment editorial wherewithal, we may again start interviewing Young Manhattanites or some such. So please, come back to us from time to time, even if just to send e-mails requesting yearbook pictures of Chloë Sevigny in her JV cheerleading ensemble. If you make us beg, we will not like it, but we get on our knees and, well, you know.

Here’s a quick window into the twilight world I now inhabit. I’m hot off my first Willy Lowman trip into the bleak heart of southeastern Pennsylvania. Sylvania this place sure is not, I don’t care what the Penn family might have thought in previous centuries. (Hopefully they aren’t alive to see how many chain restaurants and oil-change-and-lube garages the state has packed onto a half-mile stretch of what was once the Penn’s back 40.) Moreover, I have not seen so much horizontal office space since Battlestar Galactica went off the air. It’s as if some huge kid had snatched up New York’s skyscrapers like Legos and strewn them all, sideways down, over an Iowa cornfield. There must be a billion square feet of cubicle farms in Bucks/Montgmery county, and another billion of Quiznos oven space.

Although I love my new company dearly for employing me – seeing as I am unqualified for just about anything other than driving strangers to the airport – and will, for the moment, overlook their not letting me use instant messaging on the company network, I was still a bit piqued by the accommodations.

Despite my prior six-and-a-half minutes as an Internet thousandaire and VIP player on the guest lists of some of the most expensive parties since Hugh Hefner chose naked women over antique buses for his magazine, my feet are firmly planted these days. In other words, I was not expecting the Roger Smith hotel. After all, I was visiting a land where certified network engineers and machine-parts sales reps share six-packs in motel whirlpools, not where Ryan Adams and Parker Posey swap spit over downtown billiards tables. Still, I wasn’t expecting the Waldorf Estonia, either. My room at the Days Inn reminded me of sleepovers in a childhood friend’s basement. It stank like mildew, the AC didn’t work right, and all I did was watch HBO for seven hours at a clip and eat takeout pizza until my gums bled. The only thing missing was my friend’s mom sitting on the kitchen floor chain-smoking and rocking in place while yelling at us to “knock off the noise.”

The food? Why a continental breakfast, of course. It’s been a while since I’ve been in Europe. Could someone tell me if they prefer their doughnuts stale and milk in such a fragile organic state that it explodes into curdles when it hits the liquid surface of a cup of hot coffee? If that’s what I can expect from the continent, I’ll take my breakfast on a raft in the North Atlantic, thanks just the same.

Tune in next time for my treatise on the Amtrak Socialist Republic.

The Farm is no longer playing the media game. Recently Elizabeth Spiers, formerly of Gawker, got a job at New York Magazine. We wish her the best of luck. In fact, we love her the best of luck. We love, love, love Elizabeth Spiers. It's true. (God I wish Sterling actually introduced me to her that one time at Bleecker Bar but I was nervous because the NYTimes quoted her and I had a bad haircut recently and someone told me she was pretty and I always blow it with cute girls even though I'm not on the market.) Very much love the woman. Why? Because she used to link to us fairly frequently when she ran Gawker. Since she left, some other has taken over Gawker and we are verboten, apparently, on the New Gawker (aka, Bad Gawker). Clearly we're too small time for New York Magazine, so we understand that she doesn't link to us anymore from her new blog.

Therefore, since there is no more Elizabeth Spiers, there is no more LasagnaFarm. We tried original content and had fun, but with Liz (can I call her Liz?) gone, it's over for us. Our traffic dropped to ... me. That's right, 1. When Gawker linked to us it would go as high as 100 -- or something; I never figured out our traffic thingy on the hoster.

So, like most sucky blogs out there, we will now be a personal blog that only two of our friends (the ones we aren't getting drunk with every night; aka the ones who moved to some shitty Baltimore locale and bought a house and who we now envy and at the same time hate) will ever read.

Here it goes, this personal blog thing:

I'm getting married! And boy is it expensive to get married in NYC! Let me tell you, it's like getting raped and not getting a reach-around. Jesus, these people think I'm made of money when I walk in, then they shoot me down with their $5000 space-rental fee and $140/head charge. And then I tell them I don't want their shitty band recommendation and I'd rather have an ice cream cake from Carvel because it's an inside family joke (and wedding cakes usually taste like my ass after I just hiked the Sahara with a diaper on) and they look at me cross-eyed and might as well be spitting down my throat. Fuck NYC. I'm moving to Baltimore.