So…I’m always having some sort of issue. The latest occurred a couple of hours ago. 
I wasn’t a girl blessed with either gorgeous thick eyebrows like our girl Brooke…

or long bat-worthy lashes like my girl Penelope (whose brows aren’t bad either):

This is actually totally fine because thanks to a little threading (6 bux around the corner, you can’t beat it) and Browzing by Benefit, I create the illusion of good brows on a daily basis. My eyebrow style has evolved over the years but these days I think they’re looking better than ever. I went through a too thin, tattoo-looking phase which in retrospect was kind of unfortunate (shown here): 

Why didn’t anybody say anything???? But recently I have settled in to a more natural looking groove that I’m happy with (taken at Inauguration hence the crowd reflection in my shades).

About the eyelashes. I wear a couple of coats of mascara and thick black liner on the top lid every day to create a luscious illusion. But for the Inauguration of My Boo (yes I’m a Democrat working in Finance, so what – if you’re a Republican keep reading, don’t be partisan about your entertainment)…I got a set of individual falsies that were FANTASTIC. For precisely six days.

Sidebar – I personally prefer lash extensions but they’re quite expensive. I got them once at this spot in Koreatown for about 200 bux and they lasted a couple of weeks. I wish she had made them more dramatic though so if I do that again I’ll ask the person to be more aggressive. But this post is about glued on individuals which cost about 50. Either way you have to clean your eyes with q tips which adds a good five minutes to your face washing routine. Just fyi in case you’re considering getting some.
Back to the seventh day, which was today. I’m home sick after getting kicked off the trading floor for excessive coughing yesterday morning. My co-workers were quite wise because I had a pretty hot fever (precisely what temp I don’t know, don’t have kids so don’t have a thermometer) which broke late yesterday. I still can’t turn my eyeballs though, it hurts too much. And I still cough when I try to speak too much. Anyhoo…a massive clump fell out of the right side today requiring me to follow through and remove the rest.
This process is easier said than done. After soaking my lashes in makeup remover another 50% came off. Mind you, the left eye was still poppin looking totally fabulous other than the fact that the glue gunks up a bit after that many days. My left eye is my favorite just like my girl Lisa Lopes from TLC, may she rest in peace.

Anyway after about 30 minutes of soaking and cajoling these things to come off about 80% came off easily with no trauma to the underlying lashes and 20% took at least one real lash with them. Maybe I lost about a dozen or two? One spot in particular is looking quite bare. Quel horreur! (I was a French major). They better effin grow back. Just like I wouldn’t be able to stand a hair weave (but I’m not hating, do you if that’s how you roll) I could not take the glued on lashes for long so I’m terrified of becoming dependent on them. They were fabulous while they lasted. But for real…they better grow back. Seriously.

Dating in NYC is an extreme sport no matter how skinny, rich, blond, dumb or ugly you are. It’s just a hard core experience. I choose to see this through rose colored glasses because it means I always have a story to tell. Like I am about to do right now, about my most interesting date in recent memory.
On Halloween I decided to rerun a costume from 2003 and went out and rented a top notch Bunny Suit. It is my strong personal belief that if you’re going to be daring the thing must be top quality or else you just look like trash. I went to this fabulous shop in the fashion district or whatever it’s called where they fitted me twice to get the thing just right. At the end the costume weighed probably 10 pounds between the padding and the boning to cajole all my parts into the correct formation. But it was totally worth it because the final result was pretty authentic. A tip for wearing a daring costume – put on flesh colored dance tights under your fishnets and nothing will jiggle inappropriately.

A girlfriend and I (she was dressed as a ballet dancer) went to this party in Tribeca where our fellow revelers seemed to have invested similar energy into their costumes. I think I was the only Bunny though. Apparently people seem to agree that the Bunny-in-a-Bag thing doesn’t convey the same vibe as an authentic costume. But enough about Bunny. The real point to all that background is that going hard like that attracts a lot of attention and it is how I met the gentleman who is the topic of this post.
I met a few cuties that night (which wasn’t necessarily the point, I just wanted to party) but one really followed up. He was a bit aggressive but I stalled him for a few weeks to make sure he was really interested and not just Bunny-struck. He seemed legit and pretty nice over text and a convo or two so we made a date for dinner right after Thanksgiving.
He very thoughtfully chose a restaurant in my neighborhood where I met him on a strangely balmy early winter evening. I was feeling really good about myself so I wore flats (ie I didn’t feel the need to tart up with heels, he’d already seen me as a Bunny anyway) and walked over. That detail became important later. He arrived a few minutes after me wearing a bow tie and looking quite handsome. Let me say, I was glad to see he was good looking (tall, curly black hair, bright blue eyes, juicy pink lips) because I feared he may have been a strobe light honey. I was even impressed by his in-the-know choice of restaurant – a low key storefront neighborhood spot with an unassuming sign and packed full of locals.
Five minutes into our dinner – during which time my date told me how gorgeous I was no less than 25 times – he excused himself to go to the bathroom. The effusive praise was flattering the first 3 times but the latter 22 were just creepy. I shrugged it off thinking maybe it was because he’s from Kansas and/or was also relieved I wasn’t a strobe light honey. In fact because of his being from Kansas let’s call him CornFed.

So when CornFed returned the waiter was ready to take our order. CornFed had a hard time deciding even though he had mentioned he went there all the time with some of his friends. He also seemed to be unaware that they didn’t sell alcohol so as soon as the waiter left he popped up and ran across the street to a bodega to buy us some beer. I was a bit stressed out about ordering because I don’t eat meat and we were at a kebab restaurant, but I ordered the one fish dish on the menu. I’m trying to phase out fish altogether but dating and work interfere with that endeavor. Before I go deeper on that topic let’s just say at this point I was looking forward to the beer. CornFed was gone 10 minutes this time and since I know the area and the bodega he went to, that was about 4 times longer than it should have taken. Time check: 25 minutes into our 1st date ever, CornFed had left me alone for 15 of said minutes.
When the beer came with Mr. CornFed in tow, I had started eating. He started grilling me about work:CornFed: So, you work on Wall Street?Me: Yep!CornFed: How do you like it?Me: I love it, it’s an awesome job. Glad I still have it.CornFed: But tell me, most of the people you deal with are really bad people.Me: No actually, they’re not. They’re really nice.CornFed: No, you can tell me, they’re really terrible.Me: No. They’re not. Pretty cool folks actually.CornFed: But really, they’re really awful, right?Me: Funny enough, I really like my clients and my coworkers too.CornFed: You don’t have to be nice, most of them are bad people.Me: [pause, smile] Nope. Great folks! How’s your food?CornFed: But really, you’re just too nice to say it.Get it?
Then…CornFed: I have to go to the bathroom.At this point I was thinking, poor guy, he has the toots or something. How awful on a first date! But then after about 7 minutes sitting there alone AGAIN, I looked over my shoulder and witnessed him, back to me, intensely conversing with our waiter. Hmmmm. When he walked back to the table after at least 10 minutes total he asked if I was ready to go. Mind you I had a mouth full of food at the moment. And he had only taken one bite before shooting off to the bathroom for the second time.CornFed (still standing): You ready?Me: Huh?CornFed: You finished? We’re all settled up here.Me: What?CornFed: We’ll come back, next week, we can come back.Me: Uh, ok. Where are we going?CornFed: Wherever you wanna go, the next spot, a party, whatever!Me: Um…Waiter: NO! I DON’T WANT YOU TO COME BACK. DON’T COME BACK EVER.Me (lightbulb!): Ok while you settle this up I’m going to take a call outside really quick.CornFed: Ok.And I gathered my things, stepped outside and proceeded to literally sprint like FloJo (may she rest in peace) for the next three blocks, until I got out of eyeshot. I didn’t want him to step outside the restaurant and see me walking away! When I got home I sent him a text, “Thanks for dinner, sorry I had to split” and CornFed proceeded to wear down my battery calling and texting maybe 14 or 15 times. The last one said, and this is a direct quote because I saved it and am looking at it now: “@ a party with gossip girl crew…care 2 join?” But I think he eventually got the point. Thank goodness he doesn’t know my last name or where I live (just the neighborhood). In the future I’ll screen guys for total weirdness and/or general cokehead behavior before they get the phone number. I mean really, why else would you get kicked out of a restaurant unless you got caught doing blow in the bathroom?
Just a hazard of dating in the general pool out there. Y’all be careful! And wear flats in case you have to run away.

According to Wikipedia (because of course I haven’t read the book…YAWN), the Black Swan Theory as articulated by Nassim Nicholas Taleb refers to a large impact, hard-to-predict and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations. Wiki goes on to say that, “the term black swan comes from the commonplace Western cultural assumption that ‘All swans are white’. In that context, a black swan was a metaphor for something that could not exist. The 17th Century discovery of black swans in Australia metamorphosed the term to connote that the perceived impossibility actually came to pass. Taleb notes that John Stuart Mill first used the black swan narrative to discuss falsification.”
Thanks Wiki! Who doesn’t love Wikipedia? And Google. What did we do before Google? And before we had Google on our phones? We were just loud and wrong all the time. But I digress.
This blog is called Black Swan even though it seems narcissistic to refer to oneself in such grand terms because 1) there are very few people like me who do what I do (unfortunately) and 2) when I say “like me” that really doesn’t mean what it seems to mean on the surface, 3) I should capitalize on this feeling of isolation, 4) I went through a long phase lasting at least 20 years that could be called ugly duckling years and 5) blogging is narcissistic and self indulgent anyway so why not just run with the grand name, right?
So…I’m taking a real stab at this after keeping an Inauguration blog that my friends seemed to really enjoy. I also had a little student blog during be skool that had a small following. But all of that was controlled. Now I’m putting myself out there on the entire world wide Internets for people who don’t know me or aren’t connected at all to read.  Oy vey am I nervous.
Anyway the subject of this blog will be my life and my sarcastic observations thereof. I live in Manhattan and enjoy having adventures either personally or vicariously via reality TV. I’ll check in at least once a week but perhaps more often.  Hope you like it!
PS No I don’t know what falsification means either but that’s beyond the scope of this post.

So don’t get mad. I was away for a while but now I’m back. No I was not locked up. It’s just I have new inspiration and new fans (!) so I decided to start checking back in periodically following the hiatus.
Following a holiday season and a visit to the family back home in an East Coasterly city (DC), along with a witty short essay from fellow atheist Ricky Gervais, I got to thinking about morality and religion and a basic psychological concept called intrinsic motivation. As compared to extrinsic motivation.

What got me thinking about this is some church goers be doin some really ill mess. And my more agnostic friends to a person are really quite moral. They don’t litter, they don’t lie cheat and steal, they tip well, and they have a very strong sense of right and wrong and live through that daily. They don’t talk about their failings to live up to any standard, they just live up to it and accept the appropriate consequences and guilt when they don’t. Unapologetically. I like that style.

Note: I am not implying church goers litter more than non church goers. This essay is conceptual.

Anyway, because I’ve taken more than a psych class or three I started to mentally marinate on this concept of intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation with respect to moral behavior in observers/believers and non-observant people. Basically – is the threat of eternal damnation combined with the promise of eternal salvation and immortality actually a disincentive for moral behavior? What if the idea of confession, or the concept of a game winning shot on one’s death bed…or death row, say…this Christian construct of forgiveness for absolutely anything in exchange for deference and devotion, creates a conscienceless unconscious?
Let’s rewind for one sec and review these definitions, courtesy of Wikipedia (to which I donated $5 the other day because if 1% of people who use it do so, it can stay free, you should do it too):

Intrinsic motivation refers to motivation that is driven by an interest or enjoyment in the task itself, and exists within the individual rather than relying on any external pressure.
Extrinsic motivation comes from outside of the individual. Common extrinsic motivations are rewards like money and grades, coercion and threat of punishment.

Social psychological research has indicated that extrinsic rewards can lead to overjustification and a subsequent reduction in intrinsic motivation. In one study demonstrating this effect, children who expected to be (and were) rewarded with a ribbon and a gold star for drawing pictures spent less time playing with the drawing materials in subsequent observations than children who were assigned to an unexpected reward condition and to children who received no extrinsic reward.

So…these studies about education demonstrate an idea that could possibly be extrapolated to why people act morally or not. If your reward is Heaven and your punishment is Hell for acting or not like you have sense, and you can just keep repenting or testifying or confessing every time you “fall” and it’s all good and your reward is back in place…what happens to your intrinsic motivation to behave? Why is this Heaven vs Hell dichotomy even necessary to compel us to act correctly? Why can’t we, in the main, just internalize the Golden Rule? Why can’t we learn to be empathetic enough to realize that any bad act we commit offends another person…usurps their freedom to live unmolested…would suck if it were done to us? Why is that not enough to keep us all in line? We can burn the outliers at the stake.

Recently I was at a club poppin’ bottles. Now don’t get the wrong idea, I’m really not the VIP, bottle poppin’ type. Or maybe I am. I don’t know, whatever. I usually only do it when I am with this one friend who likes to get tables. She liberates me to explore that flashier side of myself. On this evening however it was kind of necessary because the bottle you buy is the rent you pay to sit at the table and once the spot gets all crowded and funky you’re sort of trapped there. I mean, if you surrender your table and go party with the hoi polloi it’s just so depressing. Usually I’m with the hoi polloi because I AM the hoi polloi but like I said I was with my fabulous girlfriend who most definitely IS NOT part of the hoi polloi so I had to whip out the Amex cuz her bottle of Veuve Clicquot was done. And this is a recession so nobody is buying two bottles no matter how fly they are. 
Anyway once the bottle is bought it must be enjoyed so given it was a quite festive occasion to begin with I popped it open (she who pays, pops) and poured out four glasses for the party I was with. Then put the bottle back in the ice thingy and proceeded to participate in further revelry and picture taking and dancing and what not. 

I should probably mention this was a shared VIP area with one big table that accommodated about a dozen folks. Each little group had its own bottle, or so I thought.

Back to MY bottle of Moët Rosé. About 10 minutes later I returned to my bottle to refill our glasses. Do you know that thing was empty? Empty! Some bum drank a good quarter of my bottle. Finished it. Finished my bottle which they did not ask me for and which they did not pay me for, so clearly they didn’t know whose champagne they were drinking, right? I really hate bottle/table freeloaders. I don’t know you, you didn’t chip in, do not drink my champagne! What the hale? 
So anyway I by this time had had a couple of cocktails and was not in the mood because really, in this recessionary environment we must all contribute. This is a team effort people! I thought it was insufferably rude that I should be affronted this way. I picked up the bottle and declared, perhaps too loudly…definitely too loudly, “Who drank my champagne? WHO FINISHED MY BOTTLE OF CHAMPAGNE?” I mean, even the people with whom I had shared would have waited or would have not finished it. So anyway this person whom I have never seen before tells me his wife did it. Mr. Freeloader: I’m sorry, it was my wife, she thought it was cool.Me: In what universe would it be cool for her to finish my bottle without asking me? Do I know y’all?Mr. Freeloader: Naw, we’re so and so’s friends.Me: So? What difference does that make?Mr. Freeloader: Look, I’m sorry, it’s all good. I’ll give you forty bux for it.Me: Alright, that’s cool. [heart rate starting to slow, claws and fangs retracting]Mr. Freeloader: Here you go. [hands me a twenty]Me: I thought you said forty?Mr. Freeloader: Come on, be cool.Me: Here take this ish back, I’m not that pressed. [heart rate back up, nostrils flaring]The sad part about it is, I really just wanted more champagne because I love champagne. And that Moët Rosé is quite tasty. But I really didn’t want to spend another 200 bux to get another taste. My mouth was all ready for that second glass of bubbly. You know how when you are thinking about eating last night’s leftovers for dinner all day at work, and you know there is plenty left so no need to rush home, and you get there and some joker like ate the whole thing being greedy even though you were the one who cooked it and cleaned up after? And says something dumb when you look at the empty Tupperware crestfallen and heartbroken and just devastated. Like, “Aw man, did you want some? I shoulda saved you some huh. My bad. It was good too.” And you just want to stab them in the eye? That’s how I felt.

My friends and other guests in the VIP, trying to diffuse the situation because they sensed my righteous anger, descended upon me with additional cocktails. Somehow another glass of champagne found its way to my hand from a gracious gentleman who had witnessed the event and apparently saw the epic struggle between good and evil pass my brow. He rewarded me for my restraint with a glass of bubbly. Thanks, whoever you are…cuz for real I wanted to pop Mrs. Freeloader upside the head with that empty bottle. She could use an etiquette lesson with her rude a*%.