Steve Martin’s new novel, An Object of Beauty, is a true delight if you’re into Sex and the City, art world scandal, and coming-of-age stories. As with his first book, Shopgirl, Steve Martin continues to amaze me for his effortless impersonation of a twenty-two-year-old girl. Sometimes I feel like he has employed a ghost writer who fits my exact profile. Maybe he hired a young woman my age to sit next to him in his LA mansion while he writes. Sounds like my dream job.

The new book is all about Lacey Yeager whose first job out of college is in the bowels of Sotheby’s. She moves up in the ranks and becomes a player in the contemporary art market. The novel follows Lacey through the extreme ups and downs of the stock market from 1990 until the recent crash (and the corresponding art world bubbles and bursts).

I think that Steve Martin writes books that can be deeply appreciated by girls just like me. He’s a great writer, but perhaps my vision is skewed by the fact that I relate to his subject matter firsthand. Why do you think that a famous sixty-six year-old comedian and banjo player writes books for and about depressive WASPy young women? Perhaps it’s for dating purposes. But writing a series of well-received novels seems like a lot of trouble to go to to get a young woman into bed. That being said, I’m definitely intrigued.

- Haley Hogan

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A friend of mine went on a date with a former work colleague this week. She was excited to finally explore her crush. The evening was enhanced by some specialty cocktails (the guy is typical Brooklyn and owns a bitters company). It started off well and ended with him insisting that she take one of his shirts to wear to work the next morning.

Unfortunately, he said to her regarding his shirt, “Keep it.” But it was not like “Keep this shirt as a memento of our first night of intimacy together.” It was more “Keep it so that we don’t ever have to see each other again, even if it’s just to return this ugly shirt that I’ve been trying to get rid of anyway.”

Do some men have a special closet filled with ugly shirts they no longer want and are hoping to unload on innocent one-night stands? My friend thinks that he doesn’t want to sleep with her again because she’s sexually intimidating to men in their twenties. I think there is a good word for these ugly-shirt-closet guys and that word is wanker.

- Haley Hogan

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Subway etiquette in New York City is abominable. This week I encountered a girl (with a dreadful spray tan that gave her an orange glow) who had positioned a small box on the subway seat in front of her. I asked her if she could move the box so that I could sit down. She said, “It’s a really heavy box.” I reassured her that it would be fine on the ground, as seats are for people, not boxes. She responded in a bitchy tone, “You can just imagine that I’m sitting there instead of the box!”

Five minutes later an attractive man boarded the subway car and asked if the girl could move her box. She smiled at him and immediately repositioned the box so that he could sit down. I exclaimed to her, “Are you kidding me? Are you some sort of reverse sexist with a super heavy and important box?” The handsome man interjected, “I asked her if I could sit down.” I replied, “So did I. She must have a big crush on you or something, so you should start flirting with her.” The girl was humiliated, and when she finally exited the subway, the man chased after her. I guess he figured that since she was so eager to move her box for him, she would be an easy lay.

- Haley Hogan

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FOMO stands for “Fear Of Missing Out.” I think it’s a thing for your college years and early twenties. It’s when you hear about a party in some kid’s dorm room, or when some Manhattan party promoter texts you that Kanye West will be appearing at X Nightclub and you HAVE to come, and you feel completely obligated to attend. You feel a compulsive need to avoid missing out, because you are convinced that this opportunity/party/concert/blind date will change your life forever.

And then you hit twenty-five, or for some people it’s thirty (and for others, this shift never occurs), and you suffer from FOJI instead of FOMO. That is to say, “Fear Of Joining In.” All Facebook events start to lose their luster, and you simply don’t want to leave your cat home alone. While FOMO is the curse of youth, FOJI is the curse of old. Eventually, the wise ones realize that they should only be afraid of missing out on the really good parties where there is free alcohol of exceptional quality.

- Haley Hogan

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By now this is old news and you are probably tired of hearing about the performance artist who gave birth in a Brooklyn gallery, but I just wanted to make sure you got the memo. Marni Kotak believes that giving birth is “the highest form of art.” She created an art piece out of it, entitled “The Birth of Baby X.”

The  next stage of the performance is “Raising Baby X.” It’s total bullshit under the guise of pretentious pseudo-feminism. Well, I am writing about it, so I suppose as far as performance art goes, it’s getting the word out. “If a baby is born in an art gallery and lots of art people are around to see it, does it count as art?”

- Haley Hogan

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Billionaire Texan Sid Bass is getting a divorce from his second wife, Mercedes, the news has reported. It was a mutual end and they hope to remain friends. Apparently Sid is fed up with the glitz and glamour and wants to live a simple life as a painter. Though he has given millions to the Metropolitan Opera, it turns out that it was his wife’s interest. The opera bores him.

Their marriage was the opposite of their divorce: scandalous and tabloid-worthy. In 1986 Sid was spotted sneaking into a fancy Parisian hotel room to cheat on his former wife (a prim, lady-like type) with Mercedes (an extroverted type who was fond of gossiping and dancing on tables). And so their relationship began.

Maybe second wives aren’t what they appeared to be at first blush after all.

- Haley Hogan

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Last night I attended a very WASPy birthday party. It was held in one of those Upper East Side apartments that you thought only existed in a Slim Aarons portrait. The horse, hound, and African safari were prevalent themes in the decor.

The birthday boy was turning fifty-something, and his mother was responsible for the entire affair. It was her apartment, in fact, and it was an annual tradition. He seemed far too old for his mother to be throwing him a birthday party, but perhaps that was related to the fact that he was a closeted gay man. Between the cigar smoke and the silver serving dish of pink ice cream, it was a deranged inter-generational evening: a vision of restrained WASPy indulgence.

- Haley Hogan

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The hidden identity of a mousy Manhattan lawyer working in the New York Attorney General’s office has made a splash in the news this week. She might be “Alisha Smith” by day, but by night, she’s “Alisha Spark,” dominatrix du jour. That’s right, she unbuttons her pant suit and “performs” at S&M events, satisfying the fetishes of thwarted businessmen, with whips, and chains, and various apparati…

She’s been fired. Obviously. But the reason she was fired was not because of the perverse nature of her extracurricular activity — it was because she was (probably) getting paid (a lot) for it, and the Attorney General’s office never approved this financial excursion. It’s not against the rules to be into S&M, but it’s against the rules to get paid for it. Lesson learned. Maybe if you work in finance both options are permitted.

- Haley Hogan

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There has been an unfortunate mishap at the Hustler Club in Manhattan. A man is suing the club for getting tricked into his $28,000 bar bill. He claims that the busty employees got him so intoxicated that “he was no longer capable of conducting financial transactions.”

At least he’s not alone in his idiocy. One CEO beat him out, with a bill of $241,000 at a similarly slutty establishment. At least that guy got fired.

For $28,000 you’d think there would be more than just alcohol in the equation. At the very least he should have received a nice set of Jagermeister tchotchkes.

- Haley Hogan

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I haven’t written in a while, because I finally got a real job. At a desk and everything. I had deactivated this blog, because many people thought it was jeopardizing my chances of getting hired. But finally one HR person neglected to Google me.

The Manhattan job search has been a huge 9-month-long bummer, so I’m just thrilled to have a job (even though it primarily consists of making coffee and ordering lunch for the rest of the staff that can afford to order lunch).

Instead of mentioning all the dirty details of the company and risking getting fired, I am going to wish you all a happy end of summer. And if you’re unemployed, just remember, once you get hired you’ll miss those endless hours of attending free yoga classes in the middle of the day and playing laser tag with your cat.

- Haley Hogan

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