The Year of the Tiger
February 22nd, 2010
I have no clue whatsoever how to play golf, despite those many semesters of high school gym where I devoted as much of my energy as possible to playing it without getting sweaty because no one showered after gym in my high school, and then joining a sorority where I would forge a very close friendship with a wonderful girl who would advise me to date guys who played golf or tennis as they are “moneyed sports.” (When I tried to throw this quote back in her face years later, Alanna merely shrugged and said “I don’t remember that but it sounds like something I would say.” Then she married a lawyer who plays golf AND tennis. Touche.). I only care about golf when it gives me something to talk about, like when old rich white guys make racist comments about fried chicken being served at PGA banquets, or when our home town country club hosts a tournament and my brother gets to drive professional athletes around in a golf cart while texting me to say “You would not believe the language these guys use. I’ve never heard cursing like this.” And that’s from the brother who’s a Sailor by trade.
So I’m pretty into this whole Tiger Woods shitshow, as you would guess. As soon as it broke I was all over it trying to find something that I could get all Oh Hell No Did You See What He Went And Diiiiiiid?!? about. It wasn’t too hard. And I came down staunchly on the side of Mrs Woods, and even though domestic violence is about the least funny thing in the world to me, I believe that she physically came after her husband when she found out about it and I kind of want to high-five her for it. Nothing baffles me more than seeing the Mrs Stanfords and Spitzers of the world matching their pearls to their smart business suits that they have never actually done any business in and heading out to a podium to stand by a man that has made a complete ass of himself and a complete mockery of his marriage and his family. If that were me, I would spend the whole night before wide awake, staring at the ceiling of my master bedroom (where I would be sleeping while the pile of crap that I married slept, I don’t know, in a sewage treatment plant somewhere) and planning the exact moment during the next day’s public apology where I would pull the ultimate Kanye, grabbing the microphone to tell the whole nation about all of his sexual shortcomings and how he cried whenever he watched the Lindsay Lohan version of The Parent Trap on ABC Family before declaring “Stickles- OUT” and slamming the mic to the ground.
I don’t think anyone in a relationship is ever justified in physically hurting their partner, so if they prove that she really did try to go par 4 on that Nike-clad dome of his, I might retract my offer of a high five for Ellin, but if she winds up calling me for life advice (which, to be honest, happens to me at least 4 times a week from various celebrities that have heard about the fountain of rational judgement that is Me) I will tell her to stay the course, just like I would tell anyone in her situation: You get your kids and you get the fuck out of there, then you get the money, then you get the book deal, then you get a full hour with Oprah, then you get a new man that worships and glorifies you the way the old one was supposed to. I don’t understand exactly what is so hard about this line of action.
I was on a week long staycation when Tiger decided to issue a public apology, which means that I slept through it and had no idea it had happened because instead of being in front of a computer all day at work I was watching Bones on DVD and eating SweeTart Gummy Sour Bunnies and wondering if it’s actually possible to see God through a candy you bought in Target’s Easter miniseasonal section. When I’m not at work on a work day I have some trouble keeping up with basic human tasks like Connecting With The World Outside My Apartment Before I Finally Put Pants On To Go Pick Up Chinese Food Circa 8pm. Sometimes I think that the universe plans things this way to make sure I don’t have a heart attack. The Balloon Boy drama happened during the one day in October when I wasn’t at my desk; I was at home in NJ with my brothers, conspiring to have the matching sweater photos taken for our parents. Had I been at my computer and able to follow along with that media shitstorm, I am almost positive that my head would have blown clear off my body, which would make the 5th grade version of me happy, as her wish to be the normal height of 5′6 would finally be granted. I just love crap like this way too much. Thank God I was sleeping when Robot Tiger took the podium to talk about the Issues He Is Working Through. I would have caused a one-person riot. At minimum, I would have spent an hour rewinding it (which I have since done) and whipping my head around to my turtle tanks for lack of better company and shouting “Are you HEARING THIS??!?” from the other side of my apartment.
All of my Super Fun Opinions about this scandal have been reeeeallly fun for The Boyfriend to deflect. I feel like there should be some kind of social anthropological term for this (now that I spend all of my vacation time watching Bones which is, for my money, one of the most ridiculous forensics drama on television, I am attributing everything to Anthropology, with a big A). How many other girlfriends in the world used the Tiger Woods scandal as a Teachable Moment? I didn’t even realize I had done this until last week, when one of my coworkers had a baby and I unconsciously used that news to make sure that The Boyfriend wasn’t attached to any ridiculous ideas like, say, not having babies or having babies but giving them dumbass names like Storey or Madigan or whatever the hell people think is okay to do just because they had unprotected sex and it took. “Do you know how much I would kill you for this?” I told him over the Thanksgiving weekend as we ate lo mein and watched surveillance video footage of the Woods estate along with a reenactment of what might have happened when Tiger fled the scene. “I would never stop killing you. I would kill you and then bring you back to life so I could kill you again.” The Boyfriend, seeing a wiiiiiiide open door that I had hung from its pretty new hinges and then stained to the most perfect shade of wood to match the Crazy House I was building with words, came back at me with something about how maybe we just all need to realize that, anthropologically, one man can never be satisfied by just one woman, and then he laughed into his eggroll for the next 20 minutes while I talked about how much I would kill him for cheating on me. Really, he was masterful in stoking that fire. It was like he found the Chatty Cathy pull string on my back that was only open for operation while Tiger Woods was doing something asshole-y.
Regardless, I’m glad that we have these threats on the books, as they, coupled with the lo mein, are clearly the hallmarks of a healthy relationship. And I am reassured by the things I said and the things no one had to say, and that he knew how to answer my underlying “You’re not going to emotionally destroy me for loving you, right?” with an encrypted “you are so beautiful when you’re insane.” Or so I like to tell myself.
Unrelated, But Awesome: I got a package at work today from The Excellent Camilla that contained books she thought I might like to read. I saw the first one, and immediately dropped it like a hot potato because I thought there was some weird Truman Show shit going on and that someone had written a cheeky middle grade novel about my childhood and forgotten to tell me about it.
This, Sports Fans, is The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place Book 1: The Mysterious Howling. I joyfully freaked out over this title because Ashton Place is the name of the first street where I grew up on, and I’ve never seen that word used elsewhere in the world except alongside “Kutcher” which is not something I like to brag about. Also, the cover art shows three children (which, happily, the flap copy explains are FERAL children of Ashton Place- amazing) in the exact gender and birth order arrangement of me and my brothers, the original Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place.
It’s only been a few hours since this discovery, and already a variety of delightful things have happened. Most notably, my father’s response over email, which proclaimed this “GRRRRRRRRREAT!” in the style of one Tony the Tiger. This came on the heels of a response he sent to my Earlier In The Day email regarding a museum exhibit being curated about his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers in which he stated “WE ARE ABSOLUTELY GOING TO SEE THIS EXHIBIT!!!! WOW!!!!” which I think signifies the beginning of my dad’s long awaited (by me, anyway) transition from Stodgy Lawyer Type to Hyperactive Teenage Girl.
The Unsolicited Recommendation: Ricky Gervais was on The Daily Show last night. I’ve never seen Jon Stewart stumble away from his desk while interviewing someone before. I almost choked on my egg whites while watching it this morning.
Cause I’m saving all my love for you, F. Scott Fitzgerald
January 25th, 2010
I look forward to going to the airport the way normal people look forward to leaving the airport. It’s a weird happy place, but it’s MY happy place, and this is a good thing because my job allows me to visit quite a few of them over the course of the year. As long as I’m traveling solo and don’t have to talk to anyone or do the Hey Can You Watch My Bag While I Get US Weekly And Some Mentos, I can be completely at peace at the airport, which is something I rarely even accomplish at home in my apartment. I even like LaGuardia. If it weren’t so inconvenient to get to, I would probably try to hold my birthday party in the Delta terminal.
I don’t think it’s too far of a stretch to tie this into my Joint Custody Prepares You For Life thesis; children of divorce, myself included, make excellent packers and travelers. I have a minimal standard set of things I bring everywhere with me and I always have it on hand. If you need me in Chicago tonight, I can be out the door in 20 minutes, provided that I have enough podcasts already downloaded. I enjoy The Podcast for that In Between state of attentiveness where I’m not quite alert enough to hold a conversation or follow the plotline of a moderately complex novel, but don’t want to surrender to the blank stare/ head tilt that I get when I listen to music. It’s nice to have someone who just keeps talking to you about vaguely interesting stuff without caring if you listen. Reminds me of college.
I am a huge fan of Slate’s Culture Podcast, which looks at everything from The Dark Knight to Pants on the Ground to French film directors to Jersey Shore with the same critical eye and has never failed to amuse/ inform me. I am particularly in love with Dana Stevens, one of their movie experts, for a variety of reasons including but not limited to the fact that she titled her review of that depressing movie Brothers “Let’s Get Emotional In The Snow,” and that she enjoyed Jennifer’s Body, a movie that recently delighted me to no end. They post a new podcast to iTunes every week and they’re free and you really have only the flimsiest of excuses for not listening, especially if you have any kind of commute to work.
They mentioned something in passing on a show from a few weeks back that I just listened to last week at the airport, and it’s sticking with me. There was a guest television commentator on doing a Decade In Review and when it was pointed out that she didn’t mention Buffy as one of her Best Shows of the 00s, she replied that she had never seen an episode but was saving it, in its entirety, for the future when she needed something to look forward to. This was matched by someone confessing that she had read all of Virginia Woolf but was saving To The Lighthouse for a great bout of depression or another future need.
I kind of can’t believe that this hasn’t already occurred to me. I’ve loved the idea of something being there for you when you truly need it since I became obsessed with King Arthur in college and read several medieval claims that he would return when Britain truly needed him (I am taking his absence to mean not that this myth is untrue but that Britain is doing a-okay thus far), and when Jo Rowling invented the Room of Requirement in Hogwarts for Harry Potter. Recently, I’ve said this about Battlestar Galactica to at least a dozen people unfamiliar with the show: it comes to you when you’re ready for it, and not before.
It’s going to be hard for me to keep anything in The Vault because I’m a Media Completist and want everything of what I like immediately if not sooner. Actually, I guess I’m kind of an Everything Completist, since this also extends to my attitude towards things like soda and sleeping and jelly beans. The average shelf life for a Cherry Craisin, can of Diet Pepsi, unwatched episode of Arrested Development or unread Pretty Little Liars book left unattended in my apartment is roughly 6 hours. I’m pretty sure that all the horror stories told around the campfire at the Reeses Peanut Butter Cup Factory are about my apartment, as no peanut butter cup has ever made it through a night alive there.
So I’m going to combine this idea with another one that I come back to pretty frequently, which is the lingering presence of The Great Gatsby on my Best Books I’ve Never Read List. The gamble of putting something into The Vault for later consumption is the possibility that it might not live up to expectations and you’ll realize your whole life has been a sham (see also: why no one should save sex for marriage). But I’m pretty confident that there’s no way I’ll hate The Great Gatsby, so I’m keeping it on retainer until the universe tells me that I’m ready for it.
Unrelated, But Awesome: Rolling Stone recently quoted my little brother on his epic drinking habits. I love everything about this. It also dovetails nicely (this is something that people actually say at work with a straight face when they’re talking about any kind of ideological overlap. Really.) with my plans to do a series of blog posts wherein I annotate lyrics off the new Titus Andronicus album from the point of view of Patrick’s sister, a vantage point that I am particularly and exclusively designed to deliver. It’s going to be amazing. Trust me.
The Unsolicited Recommendation: The Droid. For Christmas, The Boyfriend upgraded my cell phone from a fairly awesome one to a Holy God This Is The Best Thing That Has Ever Happened To Me awesome one. I had to switch cell carriers to get it, which I’m okay with because I wasn’t under contract with my old one and didn’t wind up with any fees, and it lead to some hilariously embarrassing Look At The Young Couple Shopping Together moments for the two of us. I was unaware that he couldn’t be in a Verizon store for more than 7 minutes before wandering off to play with the newest blackberry, but I certainly found out quickly enough when he left me and the sales associate with a “I’ll be over there; call me when you need me to pay for something.” I understand that that statement is something akin to “I love you more than anything in the world” to some girls, but it mostly just made me want to sink into the floor and/or sing one of many girl power hip hop songs I have in my karaoke repository about not needing a man to buy me things. I tried to get back at him later when I asked the Verizon girl if I needed to sever ties with my old carrier myself and she responded to my “So, I have to break up with Sprint now?” with a “Nope, I just broke up with them for you,” and I cleverly fired back a “Great, do you think you could break up with him for me while you’re at it?” while jerking a thumb at the nearby boyfriend. “Don’t you want to wait until after he pays for your new phone?” she joked. Touche, Verizon chick. Tou. Che.
That said, the Droid is a total game-changer. I’ve never had an iPhone, but it really seems to be all the awesomeness of one without any of the sucky reception issues that Luke Wilson is always trying to tell us don’t exist on those awful commercials, and without selling (more of) your soul to Apple, as they already have a considerable chunk of mine. Mine is synced with my gmail contacts so I finally have everything in one place and no longer have to live in fear of losing everyone’s mailing addresses when I accidentally delete my Christmas card spreadsheet or lose my day planner, which I’ve actually had nightmares (multiple) about before. Some other thing it does: web browsing, facebook, twitter, quizzes me on the presidents, tells me my daily horoscope, gives me Yelp suggestions, holds all of my music/ beloved podcasts, shows YouTube videos, takes pictures and video, displays eBooks, gives me GPS directions, and has a giant compass display to tell me which way is north for when I get up out of the subway station and am confused. (The Boyfriend: “I just remember what direction the train is going, and then I can figure out which way is north.” Cristin: “Well, it’s NOT QUITE THAT EASY for those of us who frequently get lost in their office building trying to get to the floor they have worked on for four years.”). I’m already so attached to it that I feel like I’m a few steps closer to needing one of those battery heart plug-ins that Iron Man has in order to survive, but I don’t even care because life with the Droid is so beautiful and magical.
Nerd Oscars
January 19th, 2010
I have a finite number of goals that I need to accomplish in children’s publishing before I can retire and rededicate my life to something like working as a professional assassin or finding a grant that will support me while I break the world record for Most Hours Logged In Excel. One of those goals is working my way into an author’s acknowledgements (done and done, thankyouverymuch!), and another is gathering enough statistical data so that I can build a robot that will predict who wins the Newbery each year within a reasonable margin of error. I am positive that this can be done, but probably not within the next decade or so.
The ALA Awards (including the abovementioned Newbery) were yesterday, which proved to be a Very Fun Day to work at my company, as we did spectacularly well. In particular, there was one book (When You Reach Me which, if you haven’t read, I am jealous of you because you get to read it for the first time, which is pretty much the greatest thing ever. You should buy it, especially since I can’t get you a copy because all the ones we had in the office are being guarded ferociously by their owners, which is totally understandable) that we have all been in love with since we read it forever ago and were all pulling for so much that we were scared to say it out loud because we didn’t want to jinx it.
We were so Almost Positive that it was going to win (as you’ll hear me say in the video, the only way it couldn’t would have been if the librarians had “gone f!cking rogue on me,” as librarians sometimes do) that WorkFriend Jen and I made plans to have a viewing party of the awards webcast with started at SEVEN FORTY FIVE IN THE MORNING on a Monday holiday from work (yesterday). I got up earlier for this kids’ book awards presentation that I didn’t even have to watch for work than I almost ever do for my actual job in kids’ books. And since internet “reaction videos” are all the rage these days, we taped ourselves watching When You Reach Me win. That’s right.
Nerdcast 2010: Watch Jen & Cristin watch When You Reach Me win the Newbery from Cristin on Vimeo.
(Apologies to Maggie– at the beginning of this clip, I look through the ballots for the ALA betting pool and I make the somewhat unfair comment that you are perhaps not the best at predicting awards winners. When I send out the results you will see that, in fact, none of us were good at choosing winners, I just picked you to rag on because you had already commented on how poorly you did. Emily picked the Glenn Beck picture book to win the Caldecott, so you certainly did a lot better than she did).
Some notes: Jen has a far more intense job than I do, as I merely sell the books but she has to manage all of their inventory. And I only have one inventory manager- Jen- but she has like 20 sales reps in addition to me that she has to deal with, and each of us thinks we’re more important than everyone else and we like to do things like walk into her office and go “So I didn’t estimate for this title, but I’m going to need 30,000 of them. And they have to ship by Tuesday.” So after we finished watching the awards I went to Barnes & Nobel (it’s around the corner from Jen’s apartment), sent 2 work-related emails, and took a 5 hour nap. Jen didn’t move from that spot on the couch all day because she was managing the crap out of everything. Her job is really hard, and she still gets up at 7 to watch the awards because she loves them, which is pretty amazing.
Also, because awards make so much more work for Jen than they do for me (8 hours of juggling on your day off vs. shopping and napping on your day off. You do the math), she knew about the winners 2 hours before I even got there so she could get started on evvvverything she has to do. And because she’s a great friend and because I had begged her not to tell me ahead of time, she poker faced it, Lady Gaga style, through the announcements so that I could enjoy, Christmas morning-style, finding out that we had won. And it was awesome.
Unrelated, but Awesome: Here is my favorite outtake from when Bud & Peej and I went to Sears to have our pictures taken:
Awkward Family Photos- Outtakes from Cristin on Vimeo.
her life, in a nutshell
January 15th, 2010
I have the distinct honor of bridesmaiding for GRfriend Carolyn this fall. In case that sentence alone doesn’t sell you on how awesome this will be, let me take you back a few months to a text conversation we had:
Carolyn: Do you know the Single Ladies dance? Like, how to do it?
Cristin: I’ve watched that video a million times but have never actually attempted it. I’m sure I could learn it. Why?
Carolyn: Because I want my bridal party to do it at the wedding. Also- I’m engaged!
And that was how I found out (a) Carolyn was marrying her endlessly awesome boyfriend, Mike, who is the kind of guy you dream about your best friend marrying and then keep your fingers crossed that she doesn’t mess it up when she finds him and (b) I would be standing up for Carrie at the wedding. Just to be safe, she reiterated the invitation when we were hella drunk at our high school reunion. Then just to be safe, she asked me again over gchat when she realized that I might not quiiiiite remember everything that happened the night of the reunion. I was in charge of planning for this epic event (when I told my family I had volunteered for the job, Older Brother Bud immediately replied “Wait, I thought you hated high school and everyone in it.” The night of the {wildly successful, fyi} reunion, someone told me that Cousin Danny had said something to the effect of “I’m worried that Cristin might just be trying to get everyone in one place so she can bomb it and take us all out at once.” THANKS, family), and was wound up enough that I’d been having reunion-flavored nightmares for a while. I micromanaged the first 2 hours or so that we were there, and then I micromanaged my utilization of the open bar, so Carolyn was right to worry that I might have only agreed to the whole Matching Dress/ Flower/ Lame Shower Games thing while under the influence.
Carolyn with future bridesmaids, at the reunion.
Carrie just sent out the Hey These Are The Other Bridesmaids email, in which she summarized me better than even I could have, though I was disappointed that she didn’t mention how we met in 7th grade health class and used to sing Gin Blossoms songs in the back of the room while doing the shuffle. I’m not kidding.
Cristin Stickles- Cristin and I have also been BFFs since 7th grade, when we bonded over our enviable ability to use stick figures in any and all art class assignments. Since then, we have collaborated on many creative projects, including but not limited to: stealing Tracey’s car, parodies of Greek tragedies, drinking our weight in girly wheat beers and analysis of Biggest Loser episodes. Cristin is also the supplier of 95% off the books that I have read in the past six years. She lives in Brooklyn with her two turtles.
The above-referenced Greek tragedy parody was written for AP English, and involved a Mystery Science Theater-esque experience wherein the cast of South Park watched a performance of Medea.
Related, Potentially Awesome: My resolution is to blog more. How am I doing so far?
Remember when annette and i drove to chicago back in July? Here’s what that looked like.
December 24th, 2009
Road to Chicago from Cristin on Vimeo.
I broke a rib by coughing too much
November 10th, 2009
Did you have any idea that was, like, a thing you could do? That breaking your own rib using internal force was even humanly possible? I knew ahead of time, but only because I’m friends with Katie, she of The Most Delicate Immune System Ever Invented, who managed to break one of her own ribs from coughing too much sometime last year. This is totally a thing, you guys. Everyone is doing it!
I’ve been coughing for about three weeks now. I didn’t go to the doctor initially because I didn’t have any other symptoms and, as I kept saying to the various wide-eyed Swine Flu hysterics at my office, when I wasn’t coughing I felt pretty great. In between bouts of core-shaking hacking, I felt like a million bucks, and that was close enough for jacks as far as I was concerned. I’ve never gone to the doctor for Having A Cold, and I get a fair amount of mileage out of making fun of people who do so, so it kind of never crossed my mind. When I hit the two week mark I checked in with a nurse, but that was mainly because of Marathon Day. Marathon Day is, hands-down, my favorite day of the year in New York (though SantaCon is also very, very high on the list), and this was my first year getting to watch from Brooklyn, as last year during Marathon Day I had only been living in my then-new apartment for about 18 hours and was still having nervous breakdowns about precisely what angle my TV stand should be set at. This was back before The Bedbugs, when things like that seemed Important. Luckily, I have Perspective now.
I watched the marathon with Webmaster Kyle and Maggie and the aforementioned Katie Of The Weak Immune System and The Boyfriend and it turns out that Marathon Day in Brooklyn is EVEN MORE AWESOMER than it was on the Upper East Side. I’m pretty sure that this is because our viewing spot was circa mile 7, when all the runners are still all “Woo, this is so awesome! I am a peak example of what a human being is capable of! I am so pumped to be raising money that will go to administrative tasks remotely associated with Curing Cancer/ Helping Kids Who Can’t Read Good/ Neutering Stray Dogs!” whereas by the time they hit my old apartment circa mile 17 they’re all “Why the eff would anyone, ever, in their right mind want to do this?? This run is named after the first guy who ever did it who DIED AT THE END and I know EXACTLY HOW HE FELT!” Brooklyn Marathon Day was also made awesomer by the above-listed crew, all of whom have the same marathon bystander strategy that I do, which is Constant Clapping, And Specific Cheering By Name For People Who Have Written Their Names On Their Running Shirts. All except The Boyfriend, actually, who mostly stood their quietly with a bemused smile on his face watching me yell ridiculous stuff and rubbing my back when I coughed too hard, which is fairly metaphorical of my relationship with Saint TheBoyfriend Of Eternal Patience. At one point, there was a couple standing behind us who only figured out after a good 10 minutes that we were just reading names off of shirts and screaming for them. “We thought you guys knew EVERYONE running! We were so impressed!” They said, and I don’t think they were making fun of us. My main goal in this exercise was to get the Acknowledgement Wave/ Smile/ Fist Pump from my targeted runner and, I have to tell you, I had a pretty spectacular rate of return. I also tried my hardest to incorporate the skills I learned from Pa Stickles’ 2nd favorite car game after Name The Presidents In Chronological Order, which is Rearrange Colleges Into New Athletic Conferences Based On Their Mascots. I think this really gave me an extra edge as a marathon enthusiast for the people who hadn’t written their names on their shirts but were running in college track jerseys, because I got to spend a lot of time yelling “YEAH TULANE! GO GREEN WAVE” and the like. You know, to show that not only do I care, but I identify with their personal background. I don’t know all of the mascots, obviously, but in a pinch “YEAH DAVIDSON! GO LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION!” will work just as well.
Anyway, Marathon Day in Park Slope is apparently Bring Your Adorable Baby And Adorable Dog Day. (Webmaster Kyle reminds me that this is Every Day in Park Slope. While I have your attention, Webmaster Kyle, I think I lost the spell check button on my awesome new blog dashboard. Did I? Everyone else– this is why there are spelling mistakes in this post. Either this button wandered off or I just can’t find it). At one point we were right next to a couple with a 6ish month old baby in an awesome pajama snuggly thing with a hood and ears that I would absolutely wear if it came in the appropriate size for someone who is taller than 23 inches, and at one point the dad heard me coughing and turned the baby away from me so that the cough couldn’t reach the baby, as if I wasn’t taking every precaution and coughing into a tissue or my elbow. That, combined with the emails we’ve been getting from HR basically commanding us to stay home if we’re running a fever, made me think I should maybe think about going to a medical professional.
Though how am I supposed to know if I’m running a fever? What self-respecting single 28 year old owns a thermometer? I thought those things were like life insurance or minivans and I didn’t need to think about acquiring one until I had kids.
I’ll skip the long part of the story about how I went to check in with the nurse and she told me I had allergies, and I was a little disappointed because I like to think of allergies as a sign of mental weakness. (They aren’t, obviously. It’s just that I once dated this guy who described himself as being “a little allergic to kiwi,” to which I was all “kiwi? really? No one is allergic to kiwi,” to which he clarified “all melon, really,” which, let’s be frank, didn’t make me feel better about the kiwi situation). I dutifully took Claritin for a few days anyway, thinking that I just needed to build up a Claritin base for it to start working, kind of like how you have to get a base tan before you go on vacation. (NB: I have neither allergies nor the capacity to tan, at all, regardless of base, so please don’t take this as medical advice).
Then one Tuesday (last Tuesday, if you’d like me to be more specific and less Telling Tales Around The Campfire) I woke up and kind of couldn’t breathe. Or I could, but not very deeply, and not without being stabbed by tiny men with knives that were leasing the space under my ribcage. And that felt kind of weird. So I called my doctor and said I’d had a cough for two weeks and was having trouble breathing, expecting them to refer me to WebMD, and they said See You In An Hour, which is one of the nice things, I suppose, about this Flu Panic, if there are any nice things about it.
I learned a lot of things at the doctor’s office that morning. One was that I had spent the last couple of weeks exposing my whole office, all my friends, and my boyfriend to Bronchitis–oops. Sorry guys, that one’s on me. I needed antibiotics, and I needed to go a few blocks over and have Xrays taken to see if I had broken a rib or if I had “only” torn one of the muscles in my ribcage. (Spoiler alert: BOTH). Then I went to the Xray place and learned that if you have one of those truly awful coughing fits in the waiting room at Radiology– the kind where you start gagging because you’re coughing so hard, and you start thanking the 7:30am version of yourself for not putting on mascara because your eyes are tearing all over the place–they will make you wear a surgical mask while you’re waiting for the closeup of your broken rib that you acquired by doing coughing fits similar to the one that you are presently illustrating. You will then bitch to everyone you later come into contact with about how humiliating it is to be forced to wear a mask in the waiting room and how you don’t know how Michael Jackson ever did it because those things get hot and make you claustrophobic like woah until Katie gently points out that a lot of cancer patients hang out in Radiology and they have no immune system so the mask was probably a good call. Then you will fill your $70 worth of drugs at the Duane, send an update email to your bosses/CoRep that includes both your weekly sales totals and the news that you have broken your own rib and also exposed them to the plague, and you will trot back to your home in Brooklyn to become acquainted to your new best friend, Coedine.
To be fair, my coedine came in cough syrup, which is, according to The Boyfriend “the bullshit kind,” and I should have protested until they gave me The Good Shit. But this was good enough for me. It (kind of) made me stop coughing, which meant the Rib Goblins would save their knife attacks for things like Getting Up From A Sitting Position and The Hiccups. I had The Hiccups two days ago and wanted to drown myself in my bathtub just to make them stop. Hiccups don’t go well with a broken rib. At this point, I’m more or less on the mend. I’m typing this from a reclining position on my living room couch with one of those IcyHot Medicated Patches strapped to the front of my ribcage, having taken the muscle-helping thingies that are like Aleve, but more ass-kicking. Some day, maybe even some day soon, this will be a hilarious story, but it won’t be without lingering consequences. Things have happened. I have changed in ways that I want, more than anything, to blame on the coedine, but I know deep down that I can’t use drugs as an excuse for what I’ve known to be a part of me all along.
iCarly. I was a pirate for Halloween this year (you’re all shocked, I can tell) and I enlisted Katie (who is, clearly, the official sponsor of this blog post and a good chunk of my personal life recently– Hi, Katie!) to take my picture in an undisclosed location for this year’s Christmas card. I was Santa for the Christmas card last year, but I was The Pirate for the two years prior, and now I’m going back to my roots. I think this is particularly important now that Older Brother Bud has an adorable 2 year old and is poised to kick my ass in the Stickles Children Christmas Card Competition That Only Cristin Cares About. When I texted Katie to tell her that I was running late because I couldn’t find my eyepatch (to which she responded– ready for this?–”We have a few here if you need one”) and then texted again with my ETA, she commented “Cool, I’ll just continue watching iCarly.” My knowledge of iCarly at that point in time included it being a show on Nickelodeon and that was about it. Since Katie and I had a pretty lengthy walk to The Undisclosed Location, I asked her to fill me in.
K: So, the main girl, Carly, she lives in Seattle.
C: Oh, so it’s like Grey’s Anatomy.
K. No. But she has this ridiculous apartment/ loft thing, and she lives there with her older brother who’s in his twenties, and they don’t ever really mention the parents or how they manage to afford any of this.
C: Oh, so it’s like Party of Five.
K: No. And Carly, her best friend’s name is Sam- Sam is a girl- and they have this webshow that they do every week called iCarly, and you get to see clips from the show and it’s mostly just them being silly or doing fun stuff that 13 year olds do.
C: Oh, so it’s like 30 Rock.
K: Sigh. Okay, it’s kind of like 30 Rock.
I filed this away for a week or so and then when the coedine kicked in, iCarly called to me. Somehow I wound up with about 5 hours of iCarly DVRd, and when you can’t move around very much and are trapped in your apartment and on magic mushroom cough syrup, 5 hours of iCarly starts to look pretty fan-damn-tastic.
Listen to me, now– this show is genuinely good. When they’re doing the webisodes, Carly and Sam have the kind of on-air chemistry that the ladies of The View have been aiming at for almost a decade. These kids are effing good. The main complaint I have is that they’re always yelling. Do 13 year olds today communicate at such a high decible level all the time? Also- how close are we to having, like, One Major Internet Profile per person in this country? I know that some day, Amazon will start recommending me books based on what I watch on YouTube and my gmail background will know to automatically switch to a grid based on how much time I spend in Excel and iTunes will download podcasts for me about how the dinosaurs died based on my google searches, but we’re not that close to that just yet, right? Because between my iCarly obsession and all the online videos I watch of that Staten Island children’s choir singing pop songs, I’m really worried that I’m about to wind up on some Megan’s Law watch list. Moving on.
Farmville. I’ve been resisting playing Farmville on Facebook because, really, having Amazon Prime is enough of an enormous time suck during the work day. People on Facebook are always telling me to join their virtual sorority house or play Mafia Wars with them and I’ve never been into any of it. I never even played Scrabulous.
And now we pause so I can explain what I’m talking about to my parents, as they are Old People: Web developers come up with applications that can be housed within Facebook, and one of them is a game called Farmville. You’re given a plot of land to farm, and you get to decide what to grow and how to design your farmland, and your Facebook friends that are also playing Farmville can be your “neighbors” and you can help each other out on the farms and gift each other cows and the like. The more you play, the more money you earn, and the bigger/ cooler your farm gets. Each crop has to be harvested within a set amount of time after planting, though, so you have to keep logging back in, otherwise your strawberries or squash or wheat will wither and die and you have to start all over again.
This all just sounded kind of ridiculous to me. Then I read This New York Times article, which might as well have been headlined Yes, Cristin, This Really Is An Insane And Pointless Addiction, and for some reason that made me all Where Do I Sign?? Like somehow, learning that people had taken a seemingly innocent Facebook app and allowed it to more or less ruin their lives was just the green light I was looking for.
Given my obsession with Oregon Trail in college, I don’t know why I was surprised to find that I love Farmville. Within one round of crop harvesting I was having these insane thoughts like “I should probably put something together in Excel so I can figure out when to log back in and check my crops, and what seeds I should plant in order to maximize potential growth, both in terms of plants and the physical size of my land holding.” Yes, really.
Now, I’m still very new to this– I’m only a Level 6 farmer right now, and some of my Neighbors are Level 25s– but I have some ideas for improving the Farmville universe that I came up with while in various stages of coedine bliss. They are as follows:
1. The All You Need Is Love rule of animal husbandry. The #1 attraction to Farmville for me was ownership of tiny virtual animals. My parents never let me have a pony, and now I can have HUNDREDS if I want, along with cows and sheep and chickens. Because people are so obsessive about their Farm’s organization, one of the options you have for each of your animals is putting them in “stay” mode, so they stay in the same place on your farm and you can line them up and face them in the same direction like they’re praying to Mecca or whathaveyou. I feel like this is somehow cruel, like those invisible electric fences for dogs. Granted, they are two-dimensional and made up of nothing more than programming code, but I still want my cows to be able to roam as they please, so mine are never in “stay” mode. Other than telling them to Stay, the few other options you have with your animals are to rotate, move, sell, or pet them. When you pet them, little hearts appear over the animals and they jump up and down. And that’s pretty awesome, but I’d like something more tangible for my efforts. I think you should either get a prize for having the happiest animals–like those commercials that tell you that the best cheese comes from happy California cows, or like how at the end of Oregon Trail you get more points if your wagon party arrives in good health–or, failing that, petting your animals should make the produce more, and faster. I’ll probably wind up petting fake cows all day long of my own accord, anyway, but a little monetary redemption wouldn’t kill me.
2. Make a List And Check It Twice. One of my favorite things to do when I’m making an Excel grid with multiple worksheets (go back and read the opening of that sentence again… yeah, you heard me. Sexy, right?) is to build a summary page at the beginning that pulls the numbers in from multiple locations. (My mom’s head just exploded reading that. When I first started teaching Mom how to build formulas in Excel, she almost couldn’t learn it because she was too amazed at how smart the program is. She just kept gasping and going “Wow!” and I didn’t even get to summary pages during that session, as I was too afraid that it would make her stroke out). This never fails to thrill me– the fact that Excel knows the locations of numbers that you can even see and can silently and efficiently update the summary page. It’s like Christmas every time I get to do it.
I like knowing where I stand on things. I’ve never bumped anyone off of my Christmas card list for lack of returning the love, but I do have one grid that tracks all of the changes that I’ve made to the mailing list over time and also notes who has and has not sent me Christmas cards back over the last 5 or so years just in case this is the holiday season where I decide to be discriminating. I like knowing. I like it in Oregon trail where you can click on an icon and it tells you how many cattle you have, how many pounds of food, and how far it is to the next landmark. Having one of these pages for Farmville would, in essence, make it far too easy. I’m guessing this is also why they give you percentages instead of timeframes for how long it’ll be before you need to harvest, so you only get “Squash- 52% grown” instead of “Squash- come back in 7 hours” when you hover over your Squash crops. This forces you to come up with your own crop rotating strategy which, as you have probably guessed, I am most likely going to summarize for myself in Excel at some point when it gets to be too much for me to hold in a brain that is already filled with Gossip Girl quotes and the collected works of Roald Dahl.
3. A Little Ruthlessness Never Hurt Anyone, Except the Farmer You’re Stealing From. Look, we’ve all read Fantastic Mr. Fox, and we know how this farming business is supposed to go. Farmville does a lot to foster neighborhood cooperation– you can give your neighbors livestock and fertilize their crops, and they give you back birdbaths and scare the raccoons away from your land when you’re not around to do it yourself. It’s basically communism, but without the fun parts. A lot of time I’ll go into someone else’s farmland and notice that their crops have either withered from inattention, or are ripe and waiting to be harvested. Why can’t I take those myself? You snooze you lose, neighboring farmers. Also, along with this new development of Evil Farming, I think one of the things you can buy at market should be a can of spray paint with which to “decorate” other peoples’ dairy barns. And I think if you catch someone on your land, you should get to use them as a scarecrow for 24 hours.
Farmville is awesome, kids. But, as they used to say on Reading Rainbow (RIP), you don’t have to take my word for it. Let’s see what Texts From Last Night has to say about it:
(513): Girl in front of me has spent the class alternating between playing farmville and the tiffany’s website looking at engagement rings. Every once in a while she holds her hand up to the screen.
(1-513): She doesn’t deserve the breathe the same air that we do.
(513): She just bought a cow and we’ve moved on to looking at wedding dresses.
Taylor Swift. I had limited knowledge of Taylor Swift before my days on the Coedine. My fondest memory of her is really a fond memory of the night before Cousin Erin’s wedding, when Cousin Matt rocked out to her song Love Story like he was gettin’ paid to do it.
Matt + Taylor Swift 4Eva from Cristin on Vimeo.
I was going to merely link to this video, but then I watched it again and it reminded me of how worth embedding it truly is. And you should enjoy it now, because whenever I put up a video that even remotely involves Aunt Patti (who- let me say, preemptively–is doing NOTHING at ALL embarrassing here and has a hilarious aside about buying us things from the minibar in the hotel) I get an email within 20 minutes of her commanding that I remote it from public viewing because she hates how she’s portrayed. I’m sure she’ll somehow look at this one, where Matt is singing along with a barely-legal poptart and Danny and Janelle are dancing their hearts out while Erin demands that we “BE QUIET- THIS IS MY FAVORITE PART!” during the section of the song where Romeo proposes to Juliet while I scream at people from behind the camera, and she will somehow decide that it is her that comes off the worst here. Fight that urge, Patti. You appear nothing but awesome in this video.
Then the whole Kanye West scandal happened, and I decided that I was never listening to another Kanye song if I could help it, the same way I haven’t watched a Tom Cruise movie since he said that people who needed antidepressants were foolish and weak, which was a VERY hard decision for a girl whose first screen name was TopGun527. And THEN I watched Taylor Swift on Saturday Night Live while I was doped up on Coedine, and I decided I was in love with her.
Listen. She’s can’t even drink legally, and she writes her own music and actually plays an instrument and I think in an era where the best way to get famous as a young singer is to have a sex tape leak, I appreciate the fact that someone is recording songs about the first day of high school and having a best friend and generally being adorable and innocent.
Slightly Related, And Awesome: I’ve never read any of the Betsy-Tacy books (gasp! I know! This is like, say, being a literary agent but not reading the Harry Potter books… KATE), and I’ve always thought of it as a gaping whole in my I Know Everything About Kids’ Books facade, though it never bothered me enough to actually amend the problem on my own. And then Camilla sent me these amazing, perfect, adorable repackages that Harper did of the High School And On years of Betsy Ray and they. Are. Phenomenal.
Even when I was at the appropriate age for reading children’s books, I was never into fantasy or sci-fi–at work now, when people talk about books they loved as little kids and how they were taken to other worlds and wrapped up in different lands, that’s never something I really relate to, because when I was younger I always wanted to read about Real Stuff. And even though I’m starting to grow an appreciation/ small infatuation for YA Fantasy (thank you, Kristin Cashore), at least 80% of what I read, YA or adult, is rooted in the contemporary world. But when I was in middle school I was fairly obsessed with the Beverly Cleary books that depicted dating in the 50s (pretty sure I damn near wore out my copy of The Luckiest Girl, which everyone should read RIGHT NOW), which I guess was kind of a baby-step in the direction of fantasy books since it was a time that I couldn’t even begin to pretend that I currently lived in. And I feel the same way about the Betsy books; they’re close enough to my reality to not be off-putting or strange, but unrecognizable enough to be fascinating. And, like with my Taylor Swift thing, sometimes it’s nice to have entertainment that doesn’t have sexting scandals or abusive parents or people coming home from the war disfigured. Sometimes it’s nice to hear about nice things.
that’s my boy
November 2nd, 2009
My older brother leaves me a lot of excellent voicemails between the hours of 2 and 6am. The younger one almost never does; the only time that comes to mind was when he talked Ted Leo into calling me and singing “Me & Mia” into my cell voicemail, an amazing gift that I didn’t discover for days, because I hate checking voicemail. I normally just call back whoever shows up on my Missed Calls log. This frustrates my parents to no end, as they hate having to repeat whatever 3 minutes worth of information they already recorded, but it nicely handles the problem of how I hate listening to 3 minute long voicemails. Last winter, I called Brendan back after seeing I had missed a call from him at 2am. “I think I was calling to tell you about how PJ picked a fight on the train, and it was amazing.” The voicemail Bud had left was even more glowing, but the description of the fight that he was able to transmit while sober was more descriptive. Bud & PJ had been coming home from the city on the train when some douchey guy started harassing a girl in their car, and then started trying to rip the NJTransit signs down off the walls. Before Bud could process it, all 140 pounds of Peej had stood up and said “Listen, it’s bad enough that you were giving her a hard time, but I don’t think you need to be stealing shit to hang up in your mom’s basement.” Then there was some kind of face-off and a lot of yelling, and the douchey guy eventually slunk away. “Do you think he did it because you were there, and you’re a trained killer, and he knew you would have his back?” I asked Bud, trying to figure out why Peej would invite any kind of trouble. “No,” he said, “I think he did it because that guy did something wrong, and it pissed him off.”
And this week, someone else did something wrong, and it also pissed him off. You should read what he wrote, and you should read the whole thing, and then you can help me decide if I should be more proud of him because he’s such an amazing writer, or because he’s able to avoid sounding self-deprecating while still allowing that he was part of the making of this problem, or because he didn’t do what I would have done, which would have been complaining softly and then going to sleep angry. I would assume that I’m looking at this through a rose colored We Share The Same DNA So You Can Do No Wrong veil– the same one that once lead my mom to say, at one of my horse shows in high school, “I think it’s so incredible how much control you must have over the horse to get him to stop right in front of the jump!” when she didn’t want to believe that the horse was, in fact, supposed to be well on the other side of the fence, had he been listening to a thing I had tried to communicate to him–but a lot of other people, people who don’t have distinct memories of eating Oreos the morning he was born while waiting for a phone call to determine if he/she would be the obnoxious big sister to a little boy or a little girl, have also read it and figured out how effing smart this kid is. For someone who works in publishing in new york, having the commentators on Gawker talk about the brilliance of your younger brother is basically as good as it gets, though this post from The Village Voice certainly didn’t suck. Well said, PJ.
footloose and bug free
October 19th, 2009
I can’t even explain to you how beautiful my life is post-Successful Visit By Exterminators Who Are Qualified For Their Jobs. Everything looks different to me now. Coming home to that apartment and not getting inhaled by evil bugs was like that scene in The Giver where the kid sees the color red for the first time. Everything is changing in new, exciting ways. I would imagine that the most exciting part for my friends is that I now have to find something to talk about other than bugs, which is going to be difficult, but I think I can do it. FOR EXAMPLE:
My little brother is still famous.
That’s an interview with him, and a picture of his back, on the landing page of the The Onion’s AV Club- New York site. Next week, look forward to their Area Woman Is Remarkably Boring In Comparison To Her Siblings article.
Our whole immediate family sans my Stepmom, who is a responsible adult and politely declined a night of hard rockin’ in Hoboken when she had small children to teach the next morning, went to the penultimate stop of Titus Andronicus’ most recent tour, and a great time was had by all.
Maybe we had a little too much fun. I thought Bud was going to be the first person to ever have “hangover” listed as his cause of death the next day when I saw him and he was having trouble walking upright. Perhaps wearing his younger brother’s elementary school graduation tshirt to the concert lead him to wrongfully believe that he could act in the manner of a 21 year old and all would be fun. I appreciated his wardrobe choice, though, as it made it really easy for me to later pick him out in the pictures I took of people moshing. I didn’t know people still moshed. Kids today.
Other than making fun of my parents for wearing earplugs through the whole concert, my favorite part was this into to My Time Outside The Womb. Apologies in advance for how loudly I scream through most of it. Patrick goes “My brother and sister are here…” and I feel the need to yell “YEAH, WE ARE!!!” at the top of my lungs, just in case anyone thought he might be lying.
Titus Andronicus at Maxwells- October 09- Family Intro from Cristin on Vimeo.
Unrelated, But Awesome: I’m finally reading Graceling by Kristin Cashore well after the vast majority of the book-reading public had determined that it was awesome, and–to the surprise of no one except maybe me–I am obsessed with it. This only comes as a surprise because books about lady warriors in far away lands are usually so not my jam; despite that whole Medieval Literature kick I went on in college, I could never get into books of this bent because I just find myself thinking “Looks like SOMEone read Mists Of Avalon one too many times, ‘MIRite?” even though I’m totally not one to talk since I once voluntarily undertook an assignment to write a tale for one of the travelers mentioned in the Canterbury Tale’s prologue who doesn’t get a chance to rap in Chaucer’s version. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stories of feudal systems, etc etc. Anyway. I am loving this novel. It’s totally making me rethink my Don’t Read Books With Frontmatter That Includes Maps Of Imaginary Lands rule. And if that one goes– what’s next? Will it be time to dismiss my Nothing I Can’t Comfortably Take On The Subway rule?
Thanks for ruining my metaphor, compact fluorescent lighting technology
October 5th, 2009
Good news, someone is maybe/ probably coming tomorrow to rid my apartment of everything that’s been living there that isn’t me or my turtles. It’s been a long and interesting tango with the bedbugs and I will not be sorry to see them go. Particularly since, as bedbugs are drawn out of hiding by your body heat and the smell of your breath, after the poison is laid down, I then HAVE to sleep in my bed to act as the bait to get them to come out and roll around in the poison as they chew me to death. Seriously. There is no other way to get them to die. I can’t just bug bomb the place and then continue to stay at The Boyfriend’s– you need a human form in the bed to get them to come out. If this particular form of torture doesn’t appear in the next Saw movie, I’ll be really disappointed. I’m not looking forward to it. To put it mildly.
When I was in high school, I did not have what one might call a complete emotional tool box for handling difficult situations. I reacted to anything adverse in one of two ways: Hate Someone, or Cry. As you can imagine, I was kind of an emotional nightmare throughout my teen years. There was one particularly bad episode that I can’t place on a timeline except to say that it was back before my dad had completely given up on Trying To Make Me Act Like A Normal Human, because he tried to talk me down from it with a story about light bulbs. He was having a particularly awful day once and didn’t know how he was going to make anything better and didn’t know where to start, so he walked around the house and changed all of the light bulbs and then everything felt more manageable because he had accomplished something. I’m sure at the time I made some comment about how my life was exponentially harder than HIS or ANYONE’S, EVER and that he couldn’t expect to UNDERSTAND MY PAIN, but I think about the light bulb story all the time. Whenever I start to really freak out about something, one of the only ways I can shut off the tiny hyperactive Cristins that live in the panic room in my head is by telling myself to just find one light bulb, metaphorical or physical, to change, and that I’ll take it from there. It always works. Beyond the light bulb trick, the only other thing that calms me down is looking at bookshelves in the Ikea catalog, so in that regard, Evil Mopey Teenage Cristin was right– it is kind of hard to be me.
There was a night a few weeks ago where I showed up at The Boyfriend’s in a bug panic that was approaching Defcon 7. Usually I’m all smiles and hilarity when I get there– last week, I decided I didn’t want to stop at home first, so I just went to The Gap after work and bought alternatives to the outfit I was currently wearing to put on the next day, and was struck by how hard this is. I got to his apartment and was like “This shouldn’t have been difficult. The Gap should have some kind of sleepover widget available that tells you what shirt and underpants to buy for the pants that you currently have on, and they should be able to tailor it to tomorrow’s weather.” Before I was even halfway through my widget idea, he interrupted me and said “I know exactly where you’re going. There should be a store where they have entire outfits by size and you can wear them without ironing.” Which threw me off the widget track for awhile… because isn’t that EVERY store? Seriously, where has he been shopping all this time that has made him think that having acceptable clothes arranged by size is something to aspire to in a retail environment?? I laughed for like 20 minutes.
But not during The Bug Panic– there was no laughter there. I freaked out for a good ten minutes, announced I was going to take a shower, and then freaked out in the shower for another ten minutes. When The Boyfriend came home from buying the wine that I demanded he go out and get so that I could numb myself with alcohol, I was meticulously drying and straightening my hair, almost strand by strand. “Why are you doing your hair at 11 at night when you’re just going to fall asleep on it?” he asked me, because that is what a sane person would ask when confronted with a crazy person doing what I was doing. “I’m changing light bulbs,” I told him. “Huh?” he said, and this became one of the many times where The Boy’s slight hearing impairment totally worked in my favor. I have to repeat myself a lot, and it’s never bothered me because it gives me this automatic do-over that, let’s be frank, I could really use. I don’t ever think before I say something, and every time he says “What was that?” I get a second chance at not being a completely terrible girlfriend and at hiding from him all of the reasons he should be afraid of me. Like the light bulb comment.
“I need to be in control of something,” I told him, making a gesture in his direction with my flat iron that I now realize was probably more menacing than I had intended. “I like to be in control of things, and right now I am in control of nothing, and I have decided to control my hair.”
So that’s where I am right now. Changing light bulbs and/or compulsively flat ironing my hair until I can sleep comfortably in my apartment again.
Unrelated, But Awesome: Hey, remember Mr. Brightside? It’s still awesome even though none of us have thought about it for years. All of the sudden, all I can do on the subway in the morning is listening to this song and the Miley Cyrus “Party In The USA” song where she talks about Jay-Z. But I don’t want Mr. Brightside to suffer by a Miley Cyrus association (or Jay-Z for that matter). It’s awesome all by itself.
Unrelated, But Awesome: If someone were to make a video of what I do at work all day you would promptly want to die after watching it because you’d be so bored of staring at Excel, unless the video crew happened to stop by on the day of the Halloween party or something, which might be vaguely interesting/ horrifying to nonPublishing people, but probably not.
However, videos of what Little Brother Peej does at work are completely awesome, regardless of what day you take for filming.
Unrelated, But Awesome: My mom has this Thing (as, I would imagine, nearly all mothers do) about Knowing Where Her Children Are At All Times, Even Though Said Children Are Self-Sustaining Adults. I know this sounds like I’m complaining, but I promise I’m not– I think it’s kind of nice that someone (other than certain members of the state and federal government tasked with monitoring the output from my electronic ankle monitor) is always so concerned with my whereabouts. She is equally concerned with movements on both a macro (“So at what time, exactly, does your plane land in Chicago?”) and micro (“So you’re going to be taking the subway to Target, then?”) level. I’m sure when I was in high school and afraid to drive on the highway for a few years and thus confined to the 25 MPH streets of Glen Rock, that was pretty fantastic for her. The fact that two of her children picked careers that make it virtually impossible to even know what country they’re in has done nothing to quell this tracking impulse– if anything, it’s only gotten stronger, to the point where I think she would consider getting us drunk over Christmas (like that’ll be so hard to accomplish) and then having devices implanted in the backs of our necks that would allow her to watch our every move and, possibly, follow us around using some kind of app on her laptop like she’s playing The Sims, except with no control, even when we do things she doesn’t approve of, like eat cookies for dinner or fail to take other peoples’ feelings into consideration. She doesn’t want to impose or involve herself, she just needs to KNOW where we are. Like I said, it’s pretty cute.
As you can guess, it’s relatively easy to keep track of where I am at all times. I spent roughly 9 hours a day in an office building, and the rest of my time is spent at home on my couch watching old episodes of MTV’s True Life and google stalking people I don’t like. The Boys are much harder to nail down. Mom prints PJ’s tour schedule off of the band’s MySpace page and posts it next to her wall calendar, and she keeps track of her eldest mainly through, as I understand it, communication with his wife and 2 year old daughter, both of whom are easier to get useful information out of than Bud himself. Heyo! But, seriously.
I called my mom from the Miami airport en route to the cruise we did over labor day (Did I mention I went on a cruise? I totally did, with my fellow yahoos Kate, Katie, Maggie and Kyle. It was ridiculous and awesome even if I did, as Webmaster Kyle likes to say “spend most of it sleeping.” This is a fairly accurate statement– I do not have what you might call “sea legs” and when the boat moved, it made me want to either throw up or go to bed, so in order to avoid doing the first one, I did the second one. A lot. Then I tried the seasickness pills that they were handing out willy-nilly and learned that that stuff gets you high as a kite. It was like the first time I took benadryl during my brief cat allergy and found that it makes me do stuff like lay on the floor and go “My legs feel heavy! Do your legs ever just feel SO HEAVY?” Anyway, cruises are weird, because it’s like being at a days-long bar mitzvah, surrounded by strangers. I think because we are Jaded New Yorkers, we didn’t quite understand the Cruise Mentality. For most of the rest of this boat, they were there to have The Fucking Time Of Their Lives, an attitude we didn’t feel the need to match since we maintain a pretty high level of Fucking Awesomeness at home in Brooklyn. From a cultural anthropological standpoint, cruises are fascinating. There were people wearing ball gowns taking formal posed pictures. Weirdos. Anyway. All I ever want to do on vacation is read and sleep, so this was a pretty good on in my book. It was also proof that I can go anywhere with my friends and they will Create Awesome. So next time, we don’t have to take a cruise and have someone mandate what our fun will be, we can just go to an abandoned cabin somewhere and we’ll probably wind up doing the same exact thing which, in this case, wound up being playing an epic game of Clue and then planning out the different elements of the Brooklyn Clue game that we want to make, or outlining the plot points of a romance novel set among the cruise staff). When I called my mom from Florida she immediately told me “I bought a giant map of the world. I’m going to move you to Florida now.” She has the world map hanging in her office upstairs, and she has pins for each of her children. Whenever one of us goes somewhere, she moves our pin, and then when we go somewhere else, she moves the pin there. (Another one from Webmaster Kyle by way of Mitch Hedberg: “Someone better go to the top two corners first, otherwise the map is going to fall down”).
The list of Adorable Things Done By My Mom is long and distinguished, but I think this really takes the cake. This is well on the way to becoming The Default Story I Tell To New Friends When Describing How Cute My Mom Is, just like how I use the story about the time Vicki helped me dye my hair blue and then laughed and took pictures of my dad’s horrified face when I took off my hat and revealed it to him as The Default Story Of Why My Stepmom Is One Of My Best Friends, and just like how I use the story of how my parents put my SAT scores on a balloon as The Default Story Of Why I Sometimes Wake Up In The Middle Of The Night Panicked About My Lack Of Academic Achievement As An Adult. When I told the cruise crew about this Maggie immediately went “Like Mrs. Weasley!” because of the clock that the Weasleys’ mom has that shows where each of them is at any time.
Since I had Intense Middle Child Syndrome before PJ even blessed me with the title of Middle Child, one of my first thoughts was, naturally, how bad this whole map thing was going to make me look. “But my pin is never going to go anywhere!” I wailed. “That’s not true!” mom said. “Your pin was in Chicago when you were in Chicago. And then in Minneapolis when you were there.” This would have made me feel better, except that it easily encompassed the sum total of my travels over the last 2 years in one breath, and both of those trips were for work, and to cities I go to for work all the time. “My pin is going to be so lame! The other pins will make fun of it!” I kept going. “It’s going to rust in its Brooklyn hole!”
Which is not such a bad fate, as far as Map Pin Life goes, I guess.
Good night, sleep tight…
August 17th, 2009
I have a friend who cites the transit strike as a main turning point in her relationship with her now-husband. I bet a lot of new yorkers have similar stories. She was living in Manhattan and he was living in Brooklyn and as the transit strike was looming a few days before Christmas in whatever-that-year-was (‘05?), he packed up everything he’d need to go home for the holiday that year and everything he needed to go to and from the office that week and parked himself in her apartment and they waited out the transit strike with all of his crap all over the place and then a few years later they got married. I love this story because it gets an “only in new york!” tag while still being perfectly romantic and sweet. Usually when people punctuate something with Only In New York it’s because the worst thing in the world has happened, and we need to acknowledge that the city we live in is ridiculous and abusive to its denizens and that we know that we are fools for loving it. Like if you fall into one of those sidewalk grates that restaurant people are always leaving open for deliveries. Or like this morning on the Q train, for instance, where I saw a woman tweezing her eyebrows. Which isn’t that gross until you start thinking about it, and then it’s effing disgusting. The top 2 things on my List Of Items That Are Fine Where They Belong And Effing Disgusting Anywhere Else are (1) Bandaids and (2) Hair of any variety. That woman’s eyebrows are somewhere on the floor of that Q train, and that is disgusting and wrong and it made me want to shoot her in the style of that guy who shot the kids trying to mug him on the subway back in the 80s or whatever and became a vigilante hero and wound up in The Tipping Point which is the only reason I know about him. Only in New York!
I have bedbugs. Again-slash-still. My place is being re-exterminated this week, and if that doesn’t work I’m going to resort to some more Out Of The Box type ideas. Number one on my list is setting everything I own on fire and having my insurance company replace it, bug-free. I’m still working on numbers 2 through 15 on the list, but I think they’ll be just as logical and easy to execute. Until I get a real plan together, I’m going with what you can casually call my Meek Whiney Sorority Girl Plan, which involves showing up at your boyfriend’s apartment half-crying because you’re sick of having to deal with this and just want to sleep in your own bed for the first time in a month without worrying that you’ll wake up looking chewed to pieces and also because you spent all day rewatching Veronica Mars season one and it made you a little emotional, okay?!??
The boy has been handling these meltdowns so well I’m starting to suspect that he has some sort of Truman Show-esque crew feeding him answers out of the extensive dossier they’ve compiled from going through my trash and following me on Twitter. During the first week of Infestation Realization ‘09 (after many, many weeks of me assuming I had some weird allergy or was being followed by a cloud of invisible mosquitoes that were genetically engineered to only survive on my blood), when just being in or near my apartment opened up the door to the wonderful world of Oh My God How Am I Ever Going To Get All Of This Dry Cleaned And I Can Never Have Guests Over Again This Is Awful, the boy was all “Here. I made you keys. Just stay at my apartment,” which, naturally, lead me to flip my shit, because I am female and we know that there is no exchanging of keys without deeply rooted emotional significance and didn’t he want to talk this to death before deciding it was cool because that’s really where I’m most comfortable, thanks. I’m sure I have my hundred grand liberal arts degree in literature to blame for this; even though I’m not One Of Those Girls (you know Those Girls, the ones who update their Facebook status 8 times a day to let us all know what stage of the wedding planning game they’re at), I still look for hidden significance in everything. Like a friend giving her fiance running shoes as a gift before he ran off on her (true story- don’t worry, she bounced back and is awesomer than ever so SUCK IT, running shoe guy), or that the last gift I got from the Former Future Mr Cristin Stickles was a baseball glove, right before I realized that he wasn’t the catch I was looking for. The Boy doesn’t think about any of this– out of everyone I’ve ever known, he might be the only one whose thought process appears to be a straight line. “She can’t sleep at home, she sometimes sleeps here anyway {ed. note: Sorry, Dad}, I should give her keys to my apartment.” Point A, Point B, Point C. This fascinates me, as my thought process has never been a straight line. You know how if you play with a Slinky long enough, it winds up this jumbled rats nest of wire and it’s impossible to bend it back to its original shape? That’s what MY thought process looks like. On a good day.
A more observant person would have seen this coming. You meet a guy on the subway, you almost walk out on him when he says during your 3rd date that he roots for both the Mets and the Yankees because he’s “a new yorker, first and foremost,” you find it cute when the car service guys stop asking you for your home address because they’ve picked you up at 7 in the morning at his apartment so many weekdays. How many NYC-appropriate Bring Them Together Or Force Them Apart third act complications are there? Clearly, either I was about to get bedbugs, or his laundry guy was going to mix his clothes up with some chick’s and cause me to freak out when Lady Things started to appear in the pile of boxers on his couch. Or one of us would find some amazing rent stabilized one bedroom and we’d have to deal with living more than 3 subway stops away from each other, or there’d be another blackout and after I fainted from heat exhaustion trying to walk home he would have to come to the hospital to get me since my parents live off-island. I accept that one of these things was probably destined to happen. That does not mean that I’m okay with The Universe deciding to fill my bedroom with the most diligent and persistent vermin in existence. What kind of rotten karmic bastard gives the narcoleptic girl bedbugs?? On top of my never-ending quest to convince my REM cycles that No, we really don’t need to sleep for 12 hours a day, did I really need the added bonus twist of But if you do want to sleep for 12 hours or even just 2, make sure you don’t do it in your own bed because you will wake up covered in welts and looking like a leper?
What a fun, sexy time for a couple that just met one another 5 months ago. The only thing that’s getting me through this is daily repetition of the mantra Jesse delivered when I had my original freak out the day of the bed bug diagnosis: “Compare and contrast with accidental pregnancy.” And he’s right– that would be a lot worse. As would an STD, though I’m starting to get a feel for what that would be like through all of these bug discussions I’m having. “Pretty much everyone in new york has bedbugs,” I hear myself saying. “The bites don’t show up on everyone, so you could have them and not even know.” I thought I was unintentionally quoting NY1 but soon realized that I was unintentionally quoting those of my friends that have HPV. “Basically, if you’ve slept with someone that’s slept with someone, then you have it,” they say, and I nod sympathetically while thinking “And yet you have it. And I don’t.” Joke’s on me, though. Stop snickering at your friends with HPV, folks, otherwise the Instant Karma police will instantly wait a few years until you have the most amazing apartment before they sprinkle bedbugs across the ridiculously high thread count sheets you found on Overstock.com for 70% off.
During one of the weekends where The Boy and I were frantically washing our respective bedclothes in an attempt to kill any hatchlings (EW), it came to my attention that he only owns one set of sheets. This didn’t surprise me all that much, since my time as a transplant in his apartment only confirmed his Straight Dude-ness to the max. One day I got dressed for work in one of the 80 shirtdresses that I own and announced “this one’s my favorite, because it has pockets!” while I demonstrated putting my hands into and removing my hands from my dress pockets. “Do most skirts not have pockets?” he asked absentmindedly. I paused. “What am I wearing right now?” That got his attention. “A striped skirt?” No, darling. “Do you know the difference between a dress and a skirt?” “How am I supposed to know that?!” Eventually it came out that he thought a dress was Fancy and a skirt was Less Fancy. I still can’t get over how adorable this is. It was almost as cute as the time I told him I had to get my flat iron from my apartment and he went “is that the clampy thing?” and made a hand motion that you generally associate with preschool teachers acting out “alligator” or “acute angle.” Slightly less adorable than this was all the times we had to leave the bar early to get to the laundry place before it closed, as they were holding his sheets hostage. (Actually, this only happened once. And I didn’t leave the bar, he did. Whatever, they’re HIS sheets and it was MY beer). So when I decided I should get him a Sorry My Vermin Infestation Problem Has Kind Of Ruined Your Life present, it was pretty obvious what I should go with. It wasn’t until I sat down to write the card that would go with his new sheets (also from Overstock– seriously, you people should check it out. When I went through that phase where I had to change my pillowcases every few days, Overstock totally enabled that habit like woah. That was back when I thought sleeping on the same pillowcases for 4 straight days was the most disgusting thing you could do– before I realized I was sleeping on a colony of bloodsucking nits that were leaving little bloodstains on the Titus Andronicus tshirt that I sleep in when I rolled over in my slumber and crushed them while they were mid-suck. This is how awful bedbugs are, kids) that I realized how sad this was. When you select sheets as the first gift to give in your new relationship, that card should pretty much write itself. It should say something like “Can’t wait to break these in!” or “Sorry I got JellO all over the other ones!” It should NOT have to say something along the lines of “I am so sorry that I accused you of giving me bedbugs. I’m also really sorry that every time you came to my apartment or I came to yours over the last 3 or so weeks, we were risking spreading the most disgusting apartment infestation possible to the home where you have lived in quiet bug-free joy for the last 6 years. Thank you for calming me down when I called you, hyperventilating, at your extremely busy and stressful job. Twice. Also, adults over the age of 30 should own more than one set of sheets. Seriously, that’s just ridiculous. I don’t know HOW you’ve made it this far in life. Thank god, for your sake, that you found me.” Not that I actually wrote that. I didn’t actually write anything– I handed him the sheets wrapped in a plastic grocery bag and said “here.” And he said “thank you!” and “What do you want to do for dinner?” and I said “get Chinese food,” so we did, and it made it seem like everything was a little bit more okay than it had been.
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