Smell of wine and cheap perfume

Cool, but rude

My mental timeline for how long my mother has been running the teen anger management groups for her high school is based on three things: one is that I can’t remember a time when I didn’t refer to them as The Mean Girls based on that crowning achievement in film (Movies I can’t not watch when they’re on TBS: 1. Jurassic Park. 2. Mean Girls. 3. Love Actually. I know, I know), so that means she started the group circa 2004 when the movie released, and two is that some of her Mean Girls alumni are now old enough to be in grad school. I know this because my mom recently mentioned, offhandedly, that she wrote a grad school recommendation for one of the Mean Girls who wants to get a masters and become a counselor. Did you catch that? My mom took a girl who was required by the school to take anger management classes and turned her into a girl who wants to grow up to be my mom. There should be Susan Sarandon narration accompanying my mom’s entire career, like it’s a HBO Documentary or PSA for the National Education Association.

The third way I know that my mom has been running anger management since at least 2004 is because that is the year I moved to New York and the weekend I moved to New York, my mom gave me two baby turtles as a birthday present. Turtles are illegal to buy and sell in our home land of NJ, where we apparently have Serious Opinions as a state about gas pumping and reptile trafficking, so as soon as I saw them I knew my mom had either gone to Pennsylvania to get me animals I had not asked for (unlikely) or somehow lucked into baby turtles (likely) via the kids at her school. Turns out that Anger Management Travis, who was in her Mean Boys group (mom learned very quickly that she couldn’t have the anger management girls and the anger management boys meet as one big group, as it is difficult to discuss and quell one’s anger in the presence of the opposite sex, something I could have told her at least 8 years/ 6 boyfriends ago), was so angry that his mom was not going to let him keep all of the baby turtles that he had secretly hatched from eggs he had pulled out of a river and hidden somewhere in their house without telling her that he brought it up at my mom’s Anger Management For Teen Dudes group that week, and my mom quickly offered to buy two of them off him. I didn’t ask many follow up questions about this, as I was too busy being excited about my new ownership of turtles the size of poker chips, but I really hope that the rest of the kids in this anger management group picked up on this and tried to get my mom to buy their problems off of them, too. “Ms Stickles, my mom is mad that I totaled her Camry. I can get you 3 dented hubcaps and a broken rear-view mirror for $85– deal?” “Ms Stickles, my parents want me to stop dealing drugs, so can you buy all this weed off me?” For the last 7 years, whenever anyone finds out that I’m a turtle owner they immediately ask what the turtles are named and I coolly respond that they are named after Renaissance painters. Nerds/ people with overpriced liberal arts degrees that they’ll never use (….like me) usually say “oh, which ones?” as if they can remember anything from that one Art History class where the darkness of the lecture hall during the slideshows required a Herculean effort to stay awake, and a select few folks have proved to be 3 steps ahead of me and able to immediately jump to “Let me guess– Leonardo, Donatello–” No. Donatello and Raphael. Leonardo was a total sycophant and Michelangelo is basically Ashton Kutcher. Come on. I have standards. I’m not just going to name my pets based on the order of names in the theme song.

Donatello, 2004.

My mom gave me the turtles as I was packing to move into my first apartment, which is the only way I could ever remember how old they were. We are required to measure time in terms of lease agreements here, and lining up your pet ownership on that timeline actually helps a lot if you’re ever in a situation where it’s crucial for you to know how old your turtles are, like if they go into diabetic shock or something and you have to give the EMTs their medical history (…or something).

No one has ever been mean enough to confirm this, but I think being a person who owns turtles is very weird to people who find out about it in a situation where the turtles are not immediately present. I try to not talk about the turtles to anyone who hasn’t been to my apartment and seen them, because I think turtles, like inflatable bouncey castles and certain tattoos, are one of those things that you have to see in order to realize how awesome and not at all indicative of their owner’s weirdness they are. I try to make it so you have to get into my apartment to know that I am the type of person who has intentionally raised more than one reptile while she was in her twenties and living in a gigantic playground filled with, one would imagine, many better things to do over turtle rearing. Once people see the turtles, they pretty quickly come around to how cool they are.

Donatello’s Narcissistic Phase from Cristin on Vimeo.

They have the weirdly hypnotic effect of watching a lava lamp or a jellyfish without the associated dangers of hanging out with hippies or needing one of your friends to pee on you. Girls can go either way in terms of turtle appraisal but, across the board, every dude in my life who has been in my apartment has wound up staring at them for longer than I’m comfortable with. Turtles do something to men in a way that I don’t understand, as being captivated by them doesn’t necessarily lead to the dude liking them. I asked Jordan to come by and feed them while I was on vacation a few years ago, and explained that I would set out all of the food in the right amount by day, and all he had to do was dump it into the tank, and he agreed readily under the condition that “I don’t have to, like, touch them or put my fingers near their fucking weird mouths, do I? No, Jordan. You don’t. One of my former gentlemen callers spent 20 minutes staring at them the way 2 year old boys stare at trains, with an almost psychotic look of joy on his face, the first time he was in my apartment, which should have been my first sign that he wasn’t the one. Not because he loved them, but because it was his first time in the apartment of a girl he was dating and he was watching turtles swim instead of trying to kiss her on the mouth. Months later, I was cleaning the tanks, which involves a lot of kneeling on the floor of my bathroom and moving the turtles from tanks to sinks to bathtubs when I held out one of the turtles, who had recently completed his exercise time in the tub, and asked That Dude to just drop the turtle back in the tank that was 2 feet out of my reach so that I could continue the cleansing process and after a few beats where nothing was done to free up my right turtle-holding hand for other uses, I looked over at the bathroom doorway and he was standing there with his eyes open comically wide, shaking his head slowly. He backed away and I put the turtle in the tank myself. The next time he talked about his time in the Marines I laughed very loudly and didn’t explain what was so funny.

Raphael, January 2006.

As complicated as human-turtle relationships were proving to be, they were nothing compared to the issues these two had with each other. When they were tiny, they shared a series of tanks of increasing size; I didn’t learn until it was too late that turtles are designed to only grow to be as large as their environment can handle, in order to make sure they don’t get too big for the resources available and then starve. Having lived my whole adult life trying to get over the various ways that being 5’8 in the 5th grade crushed my self esteem and cost me a lot of money at movie theaters where they wouldn’t let me buy child-priced tickets even though I was 5 years from the cutoff, I respect that nature has built these kind of safeguards into turtles. I see it as the other side of the coin that also caused the Jurassic Park dinosaurs to change genders even though they were all engineered to be chicks, ultimately causing the untimely death of many young, promising members of the theme park professionals community. My turtles were growing to fit their space, but they were each doing it as though they were the only turtle who had to live in said space, which, as a middle child, is something I also very much support them in. My brothers take up so much metaphorical space in any room they occupy, at least from my viewpoint, that if I had adjusted my rate of growth so as to not cause a family imbalance I would almost certainly have grown up to be stripper.

November 2007.

The boys would be fine for a few months at a time, and then they’d hit a growth spurt and start biting each other’s faces off as much as possible, particularly during feeding time. I would assume that this is because I was negligent and rush out to get them a bigger tank and they would stop fighting, each gain 4 ounces, and go back to ruining each others’ lives, in addition to mine. They had their few but poignant moments of calm repose, where they would do the Yertle the Turtle stacking move to get closer to the heat lamp, or sit quietly, side by side, staring at the lamp like they were consenting to an alien abduction.

Come towards the liiiiiiiight.

My dad & stepmom turtle-sat for me while my mom and I were on our road trip during the summer of ’08, and Vicki was thrilled to have them for about the first 12 minutes they were in her house. “Cris. One time, I came home, and the one was biting the other one’s neck, and the other one was SCREAMING.” When you love animals as much as Vicki does, witnessing something like this is certain to haunt you for years. The victim turtle wasn’t screaming, as they don’t have vocal chords, but I knew exactly what she meant, having seen it a million times; it was always the same (evil) turtle picking on the other (wimpier) turtle, and the wimpy one would open and close his mouth like a goldfish while he tried to get away. (For the record, both of them exhibited that exact behavior whenever I picked one of them up). For all I knew it could just be a reflex, like how you kick when the doctor hits your knee or throw up when you see your bridesmaids’ dress, but it was hard not to think that he was expressing pain. And while the Darwinist in me wanted to tell him to fucking deal with it or get out of the gene pool, I was still responsible for them being trapped in a few gallons of water together instead of out in the wild, driving fast turtle cars and banging loose turtle women, so I decided to split them up when I moved them (and me) into my current Brooklyn apartment, and that they were going to spend the rest of their lives on opposite sides of glass dividers.

June 2010: Cristin watches Shawshank Redemption, Raphael thinks it’s a how-to video

I thought this would be the most liberating time in their tiny, cold-blooded lives, but no one handled it well. Evil Turtle kept being evil, and would thrash uncontrollably in the water instead of languidly doing laps as he used to. Good Turtle stopped eating for 3 months, which infuriated me. “Don’t even tell me that you MISS him,” I would spit at Donatello as he ignored his breakfast while, 8 inches away, Raphael was inhaling half his weight in freeze dried shrimp before moving on to attach his water filter because he Didn’t Like The Way That Punk Was Looking At Him. I came up with a number of ridiculous theories about how maybe I didn’t understand the support that turtles get from one another because I was distracted by their open attempts to kill each other and that Donatello might be suffering in some unquantifiable way on his own, trapped in his own little Battered Wife Syndrome hell. I was pretty sure Raphael was just a dick despite being brought up in a loving home and given every advantage in life, like the Preppy Killer and Paris Hilton, but I was worried about Donatello. I stood over his tank and stared until he managed to eat something every day, bravely overcoming the intense performance anxiety eating disorder issues I was likely giving him.

Feeding Frenzy by Cristin on Vimeo

They both eventually evened out, but they still did weirdo turtle stuff that I didn’t understand. Turtles hibernate in the wild during the winter, but since it wasn’t cold enough in my apartment to flip that switch, as soon as daylight savings time came in the fall they would just turn into turtle zombies, moving a lot more slowly and eating about a third of what they ate the rest of the year. In spring, two weeks before we set the clocks ahead, they would become hyperactive lunatics. Every time this happened, without fail, I became convinced that they were heeding some weird animal instinct to flee the area and thought they were trying to warn me that an earthquake was coming. Whenever I cleaned the tanks, which became a much bigger ordeal after I split them up (I had to rotate them from the tub to the sink to the tanks in turn so they would never be in the same place at the same time, like that riddle about the goat and the wolf and the bag of grain that you have to get across the river. One time I was lazy and put them both in the tub while I filled the tanks with new water, thinking it was a big enough space that they might not notice each other in time to plot the perfect murder, and was leaving my mom a voicemail when I was disabused of that notion. “Hi, Mom, it’s me, I just- OH JESUS CHRIST LET HIM GO. LET HIM GO! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, YOU MONSTER??” I had to turn the faucet on high and hold them underneath it until Raphael let go of Donatello’s neck. An hour later they were both acting like nothing had happened, but I don’t think my mom recovered as quickly considering I had forgotten to call her back and explain) they acted all pissed off at me once I put them back in the clean tanks. They would spend two straight days moving the aquarium rocks around nonstop, being all “I had JUST gotten them set up PERFECTLY. You have no respect for my vision!” I am very used to the scuttling noise they make while they landscape around, but visitors frequently sit bolt upright on the couch at the sound of it, knowing it’s coming from an animal but thinking that it’s one I have not willingly invited to share my home.

Donatello settled down into something of a lap dog mentality, but Raphael continued to convince me that he was plotting my demise, Pinky and the Brain-style. Emla and I were crocheting and watching bad Discovery Health shows one night (questions?) when she looked over and said “He’s trying to climb out.” I was all, Oh, no, the water level isn’t high enough for him to reach, he’ll be fine. Frustrated, but fine. A week later, I came home from work and went to feed them and couldn’t find Raphael. I raked my hands through the rocks in his tank, then checked Donatello’s tank to make sure that Raph hadn’t tried to pull a Talented Mr Ripley on him, but The Good One was fine. I checked the bathtub to make sure I hadn’t left him there, and considered calling my credit card companies to put a hold on my accounts until I knew for sure he wasn’t booking vacations. I left my mom another superlative voicemail: “So, this is weird, but I got home and one of the turtles ran away. He’s not in his tank, or the other tank, and I ripped apart this half of the apartment and can’tAHHHHHHH! Christ. Okay, I found him. Never mind.”

Man, the guys down at the plant are NEVER going to BELIEVE THIS!

When I came home and couldn’t find Raphael for a second time, I was mostly just annoyed. I shoved the rocks around and very quickly went from annoyed to horrified and hysterical because I had hoped to go as long as possible without having to touch a dead turtle, knowing that all their inherent reptilian creepiness must be magnified once the lights get turned out, and even though I am well versed in the contract that we make with animals we keep as pets, that they are required to make us happy and that we are required to outlive them and deal with the fallout, I had never thought for a second about what to do when one died. In February, I went on a vacation to Miami for College Roommate Allison’s 30th birthday, and spent the weekend with 6 veterinarians. I was the only one there who wasn’t a doctor, and one of the few who had not performed major surgery on a horse, which was mildly humbling. One of the vets also had a pet turtle, and I casually asked her how long they usually live, and then wished I hadn’t when the answer of “at least 40 years” came back. I resigned myself to having these little bastards with me at every stage of my life until one of my kids eventually poured bleach on them or I ran into a CraigsList posting for an elementary school that really, really, really needed a hypoallergenic classroom pet.

A lot of people would later ask how I knew he was dead, and if turtles crawl out of their shells to die, to which I answered that there was no mistaking it and that they had watched too many cartoons as a kid. For the two weeks prior, Raphael had been even more of a nutjob than usual, and was keeping me up at night with all of the banging around he was doing. I told him to Calm The Fuck Down, Weirdo at least 6 times but I’m pretty sure that he saw what was coming and didn’t trust me to take care of the funeral arrangements. When I found him, he had dug a hole in the gravel underneath a rock slab in his tank and then pulled smaller rocks in around him. It was one of the more unsettling things I’ve seen, and I was sorry to have messed up all of his hard work before I realized it was his Sistine Chapel.

Raphael, May 2011

The emotional onslaught came later, after I had freed up the parts of my brain that were extremely freaked out by the fact that there was something dead in my apartment and I was going to have to be the one to get it out of my apartment. I’ve done fine in scenarios like this where the dead thing is the size of a waterbug or smaller and not something I’ve lived with my whole adult life, but as soon as one of them was no longer living I went from seeing them as small and cute to realizing how prohibitively enormous they had become. In people, the tragedy of death is often inversely proportionate to how little the departed is, but in animals I think it works the other way around. It’s easy when a goldfish dies and awful when a dog does. I thought the turtles would fall more on the goldfish side of things, especially the turtle that I had been openly despising for years, but having to get a potato-sized dead thing out of my apartment immobilized me. Once I was capable of rational thought I realized that I lived in Brooklyn, in a rented apartment, and I would not be able to draw from my extensive background in burying hamsters in my parents’ backyard. It’s probably illegal to put dead things in ground you don’t own, right? If it isn’t, shouldn’t it be? What would I say when someone asked why I needed to borrow a shovel, or why I was out in my building’s backyard, digging holes with my eyes all red and puffy? The only thing I could think was GetItOutGetItOutGetItOut which, in addition to making me concerned for how I’ll handle the process of childbirth, wasn’t creating the most fruitful brainstorming environment. I couldn’t believe how much I needed the turtle to be out of my apartment as soon as possible. When I tried to explain this to a coworker she immediately started nodding. “When my dad died, and they tried to talk to my mom about organ donation, she just kept repeating that she needed to get him in the ground.” This served the twin purposes of making me feel like less of a lunatic while giving me what was, clearly, some much-needed perspective on the death of my turtle. I tell you all of this so you’ll understand why I took my dead turtle out of the mausoleum he had built for himself and put him in an entree-sized tupperware container, then wrapped the container in 6 plastic bags and tied them shut as a concession to the people that go through my recycling bin each week, and immediately put him outside in the trash, and pulled the barrels to the curb for pickup the next morning. As soon as I stepped back into my apartment, now (to my knowledge) void of dead things, centuries of Catholic tradition took hold and I began cataloging all the things I had to feel guilty about. I had raised a wild animal in captivity against its nature, I had spent years telling it how much I hated it, I had ignored all of the warning signs that, I’m sure, are commonplace on any advertisement for turtle antidepressants, I had put one of God’s creatures in the trash because I couldn’t take 3 minutes to come up with a better plan, and I had likely orchestrated a complete nightmare for some entrepreneurial recycling scavenger.

To the credit of every person that’s important to me, people understood that this was a big deal to me well before I was able to admit it myself (“Whatever. It’s a fucking turtle. It’s not even the one I actually like.”), and no one told me to suck it up when I became hysterical. I don’t know why I’m still consistently astonished at how good my friends are at not just being good friends, but at being good friends to ME, which I know is sometimes hard to do. Whenever everyone’s at the bar on Friday night and I have to leave at 9:30 to go to bed, everyone immediately choruses “It’s okay! This is so late for you! We’re so excited that you didn’t go to bed 4 hours ago!” which makes me feel a little like I do when my mom praises me for stuff like getting a haircut or going to Target in order to make sure that I know I’m still good at life even though I am not keeping us safe from terrorists or giving regular interviews to Rolling Stone like SOME Stickles children I could mention, but mostly makes me feel extremely lucky and like I might, one day, be able to stop apologizing to people for things that are out of my control because I’ll know for sure that all of the important people have done the math and decided that I’m worth being around despite the whole REM cycle dysfunction thing. I acknowledge the inherent humor in having narcolepsy as a constant reminder of how lucky I am to have the friends that I do, and the turtle dying fell squarely into that category. No one saw me crying, no one was there when I couldn’t bring myself to touch him, and no one watched me pick out a tiny tupperware coffin as his final resting place, but the entire A Team saw a 160 character Twitter post and knew I was a mess. “Cris! I just saw! I’m so sorry. Seriously” was Jordan’s text message, the first in a series of condolences that ending in “…seriously,” as in, seriously, I’m not making fun of you for your dead reptile even though it was always weird that you had not one, but two, and kept 20 gallons worth of turtle housing in your living space. No one said Just Go To Chinatown And Get Another One or Hey Have You Maybe Considered The Impact That A Duplex Turtle Habitat Is Having On Your Romantic Life, both of which would have been fair points. Everyone was sorry and worried and was happy to let me talk about how darkly funny dealing with this was, because dispatching your deeply evil pet turtle off to the afterlife after years of worrying about who he was going to try to kill next could never not be funny, and no one let me pretend that it didn’t matter, because losing something that you were responsible for, whether it’s a pet or a library card or someone’s respect or an umbrella, is always at least a little sad, and being without something that appeared the moment you finally considered yourself an adult and hadn’t been without since is more than a little sad, especially when having morose thoughts about your adulthood to date makes you question whether or not you ever really crossed that threshold in the first place, as you are only thinking about these things on the occasion of being 30 years old and not knowing if you could emotionally deal with moving forward as “just” a one turtle household.

When I got up the next morning, one of my goldfish was dead. My apartment had recently become a 4-tanker, not because I thought I needed to spend more emotional energy worrying about things that would never love me back because I have the Mets for that, thankyouverymuch, but because I thought these fish tanks were cool looking. I quickly came to the conclusion that I wasn’t a fish person and would likely wind up using the tanks to store my windup toys, so I wouldn’t have cared if the fish had died in a manner that was slightly less Cherry On A Death Sundae way. As annoying as it was, that fish had some amazing comedic timing. I welcomed this as an invitation to make this situation as ridiculous as possible.

Email to Jordan, 3 hours post-goldfish flushing:

I’m pretty much past the point of hysteria, I think. I cleaned the tank out and put all of the stuff away, got the dead turtle out of my apartment. Also and I am telling you this because it s funny, not because it s sad and I want sympathy one of my goldfish was dead this morning, bringing new possible meaning to Bad Turtle s death. Was it a suicide pact? Did Dead Goldfish see me putting Bad Turtle in a Tupperware coffin and just decide Sh!t, if he can t make it in this crazy world, what chance do I have? Did the Good Turtle and the Good Goldfish spend all night whispering to their evil counterparts until they went insane and swallowed their own tongues like Hannibal Lecter and Miggs in Silence of the Lambs? In retrospect, I have also realized that Bad Turtle had seen this coming and was acting accordingly over the last few weeks. I thought he was just being particularly weird and fastidious about the rock arrangement in his tank, but judging from how he was surrounded in death, without getting in the macabre details I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had been preparing his own grave. And I totally missed it, because they do all this other weird crap all the time, but what if the goldfish recognized the signs and spent the last 2 weeks knowing Bad Turtle was going to die?

Scene: Last Wednesday

Cristin, walking in door from work: What the hell is the matter with you? Why are you jamming yourself in under all the rocks? Jesus H Christ, you re so weird. Whatever, sh!thead, knock yourself out.

Now-Dead, Then-Living Goldfish: RAPHAEL! Raphael. Don t do it, man. I know it seems bad out there, but you don t have to go out like this. Listen to me, buddy, it s not worth it. DON T YOU DIE ON ME, YOU CRAZY BASTARD.

And then, last night when I lifted that gross, limp turtle body from the tank (did you think that turtles curled into their shells to die? My mom did. I hadn t considered how they died since I assumed mine, especially this evil one, would outlive me. They don t curl into anything), the goldfish realized that he had failed, and he gave up on life? How do you kill yourself if you re a goldfish? Do you just hold your breath?

In revisiting my first line of this email after typing the rest of it, I concede that I am perhaps NOT past the point of hysteria.

I’ve been living with one turtle for about 10 weeks now, and am concerned that I’m going to give him multiple personality disorder because, even in the present tense, when I talk about the turtle I always say “they.” If I can’t adjust my pronouns, I will eventually just get another Raphael and, even if he displays zero sociopathic tendencies, I will spend his entire life cheerfully convinced that he wants to kill me, and when he dies, and when the next bad thing happens, I’ll be able to handle it like an adult, with all these years of experience in doing so behind me.

Riding the train with my brother

Each May, all of publishing jams itself into the Javits center for BEA, which ostensibly occurs so we can all have meetings/ do business/ promote books. With everyone under one roof it kind of becomes an unintentional research lab for any potential Christopher Guest-style mockumentaries on books that I hope to see released during my lifetime, such is the madness of having so many nerds in one place doing the same thing. This past year it also became (for SOME of us) a video game-type challenge wherein you tried to run into all of the people you’ve worked with at your old jobs that you love without running into anyone who had fired you within the previous 12 months, like avoiding the ghosts in Pacman after the ghosts’ severance payments cleared. I was happy to be there because it did not, as previously feared, fall directly on my 30th birthday (who doesn’t want to enter a new decade at the JavitsCenter?!? No one, that’s who), and because books are fun and I like talking about them. I took the D train to my office before I headed uptown for the show and wound up standing under a New York Times ad with a picture of Jay Z on it that I had been seeing for weeks. The ad had a tiny picture inserted into the corner of a faceless singer fronting a band that was clearly playing music that was very loud and not very Jay Z-like, and I distinctly remember thinking that the Times was really shooting up the middle with this Rap Mogul/ Williamsburg Hipster match up. Way to cover all your bases! Then I looked closely and realized just how truly effective this ad was considering it made me wonder about the target audience before I figured out a somewhat crucial aspect I had overlooked.

…namely, that I had been commuting to work for weeks under a picture of my younger brother without noticing. I wish I had written down the sequence of thoughts I had at the second this came together for me, as I think it would be really interesting to discuss at inevitable future therapy sessions. Is that really him? Does he know about this? Does everyone on this train know that THAT is my baby brother and, if not, wouldn’t I be remiss to not point it out at this exact second? Is this what they mean when they say If You See Something Say Something? Can I take a picture of the subway car without looking like I’m doing terrorist recon? How quickly can I get this to Older Brother Bud? If I just stay on this subway car all day to hang out with this ad, will I get in trouble for missing BEA? If I ever meet Jay-Z, should I lead with this or with the story about how I once named my corporate kickball team 99 Problems But A Pitch Aint One?

I took a Security Threat Orange-volume of pictures, and texted them to Bud as soon as the train went above ground to cross the bridge. “Good thing you don’t work in a factory,” he wrote back. I agree with this for a variety of reasons that I’d never had cause to think about: I imagine that most factories have hairnet policies and when I “retired” from my “career” as a competitive equestrian I swore I’d never touch one of those damn things again, and I bet you don’t get to do a lot of V-lookup in Excel on factory assembly lines, and I would certainly miss that if it suddenly disappeared from my work week. “Why?” I asked Bud anyway. “Because what if you hated your job and you didn’t want to go there and then on the train you looked up and saw a picture of your brother being famous?” Okay, Bud. Good point. If I can cheerfully head to the Javits center under a picture of my brother being a rock star used as an encouragement to subscribe online to the world’s greatest newspaper, then I probably picked the right industry. I’m sure Peej would feel the same way if he saw a Lollapalooza ad with a picture of me sorting sticker books by their release date.

In my mind, this can only lead to the two of them collaborating on a song for my birthday, just like in that Simpson’s episode.

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Over last weekend, I went to the Jersey shore and got a ridiculous front/inner arm sunburn that has my coworkers asking me questions like “Did you get your arms caught in something?” Yes. Both of them. THAT’S why they’re red. Peej and Titus were in Chicago to play Lollapalooza (you may have heard of it?) on the main stage. YouTube was doing a live stream of the festival and trying to find out how to best watch their baby scream to a crowd of overheated Chicagoians drove all of my parents insane until someone figured out that the Titus set wasn’t a part of the live stream (please look forward to my crankypants letter about my disappointment at this oversight and know that you may best correct it by featuring more videos of dogs greeting their military owners after deployment, YouTube) and we were going to have to find out how it went the old fashioned way, through Twitter posts and google alerts. (Spoiler alert: They did a great job). Pa Stickles has officially reached a dangerous level of capability with Twitter, which is to say he is great at monitoring any mention of Titus but that he has somehow come to believe that Twitter was meant to be read aloud in real time to those around you, even if they’re just laying on the couch trying to read a book about the robot apocalypse with plans to look at the Twitter posts later on. “GUESS WHAT? Two more tweets just came in!” He acted like they were valentines getting delivered to his 3rd grade classroom which, I suppose, they kind of are if you are the history teacher father of a punk frontman best known for his concept album about the civil war. “Isn’t this great? This is what it must have been like to get election returns during Lincoln’s time.” Yes. It is exactly like that. “Who did the Foo Fighters used to be again?” was his next question of the festival headliners. Unable (unwilling?) to chart the trajectory from Kurt Cobain’s suicide to festival appearances where the early crowd is incredibly devoted to updating the Internet on their thoughts regarding Peej’s facial hair, I just showed him this YouTube clip of Dave Grohl kicking a fan out of a show for being a jerk, because there are way too many People Who Start Shit At Foo Fighters Shows in this world and not nearly enough Lead Singers Who Will Publicly Shame Them Scarlet Letter-Style, literally and metaphorically.

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Just in case trying to be a functional adult with narcolepsy isn’t enough of a challenge for you (read: me), over the last few months there’s been a major shortage of Ritalin and Adderall in New York. Since the only two things that can keep me alert are Taking A Nap Every 4 Hours and/or Ritalin, this has presented what you might call “a problem” for me. Ritalin is a “controlled substance” that you can’t get refills on without a new prescription physically brought to a pharmacy each month, and in order to avoid that scene in No Country For Old Men, they usually don’t keep a ton of it on hand and have to order it, which would take 3-5 days normally. Between getting the written Rx and getting to the pharmacy and them getting it filled from whatever methlab makes it, I usually lose about a week a month to this process wherein I just pound Red Bull at work (Coworker on my 20 ounce: “Wow, I didn’t know they came that big.” 1. That’s what she said. 2. Do you see a “nap time” listed in my Outlook calendar for today? No? Just PreSales? Okay, then, get used to this) and hope things get resolved. Because no one can give out any information on this stuff (like “if they have any” or “if anyone else has any” or “how quickly they can get it” or “how to deal with the fact that I always feel like people think I’m a junkie when they hear these conversations and why wearing a Tshirt that says “Listen, I Need It To Stay Awake, Not To Snort During Finals” to CVS will not solve that problem”) due to the fact that they would immediately get robbed for it, having a distributor shortage has basically ruined my life. It was taking me three weeks to get the damn thing filled, and no one was open to my suggestion that they “Just assume I’m coming back in a few weeks and put some under the counter” and it was just this huge, unfortunate reminder that this is incurable and I’ll have to deal with it for the rest of my life/ until I get offered a job as a mattress tester. At the end of the day, if this is the worst medical problem I have to deal with, I will consider myself enormously fortunate, but it’s hard to hold on to that mindset because I’m not Pollyanna and also because I want to kidnap everyone in the drug industry who caused this and create a Saw movie-type torture gauntlet wherein they have to format Excel grids to print on one page without having slept for 4 days, as that is now what life is like for me for 1-3 weeks out of every month.

I eventually handled this the way I deal with all problems I’ve deemed unsolvable and outsourced it to my mom. I can only assume that she was able to retain so much resourcefulness by not passing along any to her daughter, because she had the damn thing filled within 6 hours. I grew up in a Norman Rockwell painting and we have a local indie pharmacy downtown with a family charge account option so you can walk in, get stuff, not pay anything, and get a bill in the mail at the end of the month, and that was her first and only stop on this amphetamine train. When I was in middle school and my dad started getting scared that I would one day send him out to get tampons he added me to our charge account and, as this Ritalin drama has recently reopened my lines of communication to this store where I bought all my birthday cards in high school, it was recently confirmed that I am still authorized to charge on my dad’s account. This is almost certainly going to turn into that scene from Reality Bites at some point where I stand at the counter and charge other peoples’ purchases then pocket their cash to pay my rent.

You can see how my family would have something of a rapport with the people now supplying me with legal speed. You can also see how them owning a decades-old business in my 2-mile-wide hometown and our family having what I would say, with great confidence, is something of an unusual/ memorable last name among their 16,000-count potential customer base left little doubt in the minds of everyone involved in this transaction that the Narcoleptic Stickles and the Future Of Jersey Rock Stickles are proooobably related. The last time my mom went in to pick up my drugs, the owner of the pharmacy asked her to please tell Peej how excited they were to have been mentioned in one of the songs he wrote for The Monitor and how great they think the band’s success is. Ma Stickles promised to pass the message along, then picked up my Ritalin and headed home.

**********

I don’t know anyone who likes going to shows at Terminal 5 but I figured watching Titus open for Okkervil River there would be fun anyway. When the band went from doing shows as an opener to doing shows as a headliner we were all thrilled for them and sad for us that we would have to start staying through entire concerts and probably not be in bed by 10 like we were used to, so my dad’s main selling point on the OK River show was that even though it was on a school night, the Stickles-specific part of the evening would be resolved at a reasonable hour. I picked a pub somewhere near there as a rendezvous point with my dad and then drank alone and did a crossword puzzle when trying to crash the soundcheck made him late. He arrived with Peej in tow, who had about 20 minutes to chat with us over Guinnesses before he had to head back to get ready for the show. We extracted promises of VIP section wristbands from him, which he happily provided once we got to the venue, allowing Dad and I to chill in the upper balcony without having to touch bodies with any of the common people downstairs (mid-concert text from Marisa: “You guys should pretend you’re Statler and Waldorf!” Cristin: “Too late!”), and hugged him and told him to break a leg but not literally because I get really nervous when he climbs on the speakers while he’s singing. The second he was out the door, the couple at the table next to us apologized for interrupting and then said “He’s in Titus Andronicus, right?” pointing at the door that Peej had just passed through. They told us they were here for the concert and when my dad told them they should have said something while Peej was there, they responded that they would have felt awful interrupting what was clearly a family thing. I didn’t hear all of that, as I was running out of the bar and after Peej to haul him back in to meet these people.

To state the obvious, this has many, many awesome aspects. First off, someone who I am not genetically related to recognized Peej without the benefit of being in a situation where his line of work is tremendously obvious; I am less impressed but just as thrilled when people recognize him at concert venues immediately before or after he stands on the stage in front of all the people who came to see him, so this blew my mind. Secondly, this was proof that Titus’s fan base perhaps extends beyond the demographic boundary lines I had previously assumed.

I would not have bet money on Titus having middle aged fans able to identify Peej on sight who are willing to travel in from their suburban home in central NJ to see the band play. I was pretty positive that everyone meeting those qualifications was also someone I could expect to see on Christmas/ a potential organ donor for me. Our new friends turned out to be huge indie music fans; they immediately mentioned how excited they were to see Titus at Lollapalooza this year, as they were going out to Chicago to visit their son and take in the festival, as they do every year. The gentleman kept referring to it as Lolla, pronounced as in She Was A Showgirl WithYellow Feathers In Her Hair And A Dress Cut Down To There, suggesting intimate familiarity with the 20-years-running concert. He immediately started texting his son, who was reported to be a huge fan as well, and Patrick signed one of those papers that wraps up silverware to the son with an inscription suggesting that he “respect {his} parents!” After Peej left and the couple kept looking at the autograph and taking pictures of it to text to their kids, I was quick to point out that the verb he used wasn’t “obey” or “Listen to when they say you should maybe go to grad school and not live out of a van filled with amps,” not that our parents ever went on record with that request.

They were truly apologetic about me pulling Peej back into the bar, which made sense once we found out that they had grown children who lived far away and as a result wouldn’t want to ever shorten someone else’s clearly limited family time. I was out the door after him within 6 seconds of realizing that they were fans of the music, thinking it might be awhile before I got another chance to introduce strangers to him after taking 6 seconds to vett them as non-serial killers. After they took pictures and he signed things he went back to Terminal 5 to work his own merch table and my dad said, very quietly to me, “that was a really nice thing you did. You did a good thing,” suggesting that he somehow didn’t instantly know, the way that I did, exactly how this was going to play out after the words “Is he in Titus–” worked their way through my synapses. I ran half a block and yelled in front of everyone enjoying their bistro seating outside the bar, but I’ve made a small career after yelling things at the retreating figures of my brothers. Get the phone/ Wake up so I can open my presents/ I hate you/ Where’dyou park my car/ Play Theme from Cheers/ I love you/ Dinner’s ready/ Hurry up we’re late for mass already/ Please be careful in Iraq/ Stay out of my room/ 5 more minutes/ But it’s my turn to pick what we watch. Sisters don’t think it’s weird to yell at their brothers. We learned a long time ago that the louder you start out, the less times you’ll have to repeat yourself, and both the good stuff and the bad stuff are hard to say more than once.

***************

“You should write a letter asking nicely if you can have one,” my mom said about the subway ad. She didn’t specify to whom this nice letter should be addressed. I had been expecting this suggestion from her based on previous situations where she had said I should Write A Letter, which include the time I pointed out my unrecognized potential as Cillian Murphy’s face double and she thought it’d be a good idea for me to write him a letter saying I thought we looked alike, because that definitely wouldn’t creep out a famous person. But in this instance, she wasn’t the only one stumping for the USPS/ Gmail. Whenever I mention the Titus subway ad, I get one or a combination of the following responses: “I think I’ve seen that– is he the one standing like this ::straightens back and cocks elbow::?” “You should email the Times and ask for one.” “You should email the MTA and ask for one.” “You should find out when they change the ads and then be on the subway then to ask for one.” “Just steal one.”

I am very much a Write A Nice Email person and not at all a Just Steal It person, despite my longstanding admiration of Faith’s “Want. Take. Have” slayer code on Buffy as something I could never personify as well as the only good thing Faith ever did on that show. I can’t sneak into movies and I recently went back to a deli near work to pay for a slice of pizza they hadn’t charged me for 3 weeks prior when their registers were down. This, however, seemed like a situation where, if I was ever to become a Just Effing Take It person, the time was now. I figured even if I got busted it would only make the story better and I could probably get on NY1. They longer the ads kept showing up on my daily commute, the closer I had to be getting to them no longer being there, and I didn’t want to live the rest of my life without a copy of the ad because I was raised well by conscientious parents. I promised I’d wait for a time when I was on a relatively empty car and had the help of either a friend or 3 or more drinks consumed within a 2 hour span immediately prior to getting on the subway, and I’d take it and walk. If anyone said anything, I’d explain that he was my brother, and then explain that I wasn’t talking about Jay-Z, though I certainly understand how that assumption could be made, but The Other Guy. This seemed like a pretty awesome plan.

Either I don’t drink pre-mass transit frequently enough or I’ve done a great job of making sure all of my friends understand that subway time is My Time and I don’t like talking to people between platforms, because I never found myself in a situation that met my aforementioned requirements. Every time I saw the ad I subtracted 1 from the undefined value of X that is the chances I had to get my hands on one of these things and I panicked a little, but not enough to do anything about it, which is my typical level of panic for day-to-day life. Then I was coming home from book club at 9:30 on a Tuesday night and there were less than 20 people on the train with me and there was a picture of Peej above the door I’d be exiting through in 3 local stops and I thought, well, if you don’t do this now, you need to shut the hell up about it. And shutting up about stuff is one of the few things I hate more than stealing city property, so that was a big motivator.The edge of the ad was wrinkled and sticking out beyond that plastic shield that had been intimidating me for months, so I hoped it’d be easy to get out without destroying much/ any of the fixture. I waited until mine was the only stop left ahead of me and stood in front of the door, hoping I was silently exuding a casual Oh Me I Just Like Standing On A Mostly Empty Train vibe. I reached up to the wrinkled edge of the ad and started softly tugging on it, then smoothing the edge as though I was a some kind of freelance MTA ad fixer, then tugging harder, then smoothing it out more. Neither the yanking or the tugging was accomplishing my actual or pretend objectives. I realized, with enough time left to pull it off, I would have to wrench the cover out entirely to get at the ad and was not accomplishing that without drawing the attention of the various federal marshals that were almost certainly riding the D train incognito that night. I could do it and run directly out the door I was facing when it opened in 90 seconds. Should have been as easy as falling off a log, but as we already know from my inability to fall off (albeit, very high off the ground) logs across a variety of log-falling opportunities during my Adventure Games class in college, having an easy thing gift wrapped for me is not enough to override the OH NO YOU DONT GIRL FOR REALS failsafe I’ve been equip with since birth, and I couldn’t do it. I stood there smoothing out the wrinkles like the copayment for my OCD therapy depended on it and prayed that the door would open soon, convinced that somehow everyone on the train had figured out that I was trying to Steal Shit but no one had used the psychic ability that had brought them to that conclusion to discover that I was doing it with the purest intentions a middle child has ever known. I took back everything bad I had ever said about The Secret and mentally chanted OpenOpenOpenOpen at the door witha greater intensity than any of the times I’d wished the same thing while staring at that same door while it pulled into the same subway station where I’d disembarked for the last 3 years. The tiles of my station started to flash by and I exhaled, ready to book it before anyone could somehow cut around me and shame me with their eyes and judgey silence. The train stopped and I was still facing tile through the window; the doors were opening on the opposite side of the train, just as they had for every other one of the 12 times a week, every week, that I had come home to this stop. I debated continuing to stand there with my face to wall, Blair Witch-style, just to prove that I wasn’t some dumbass who was just in Sunset Park for the tacos and totally knew where the doors opened thankyouverymuch, but decided to go with the about-face dramatic exit instead, silently giving my fellow commuters permission to add Directionless Moron to the Jay-Z-Obsessed-OCD-Addled dossier they were all clearly building on me.

Minions: Tell me what to wear to all these weddings

I remember basically nothing from Kindergarten other than the family urban legend that grew from my behavior in that class which posited that I was incapable of making friends. Maybe not so much “incapable of” as “unconcerned with.” Cousin Danny was in my Kindergarten class, and since I knew him from when I was something like 4 days old I reportedly didn’t see the point in talking to anyone else in the class. Having been to my high school reunion and knowing what some of those kids grew up to be, I stand by that decision in certain cases. But the school was less impressed and, as I have been told, advised our parents that Danny and I should be split up so we could learn how to successfully interact with different gene pools which, if you know Danny, you know that he is perfectly adept at and which, if you know me, you know that it was a real Herculean task to overcome. I fact-checked this story with my parents recently and my mom was pretty hesitant to back me up on it, as she is with any story that perhaps suggests that any of her children MIGHT POSSIBLY NOT BE the shining examples of human perfection that she believes us to be. “It’s not that you COULDN’T make friends, it’s just that you already had Danny so you didn’t… care… really.” Hey Dad, do you remember how they had to split Danny & I up after Kindergarten because we didn’t have any other friends? “Yeah, that sounds about right.” Mystery solved.

Well, I have six weddings to attend this year, which puts me at about 25 total weddings since I graduated college, so I SURE SHOWED THEM WHO CAN MAKE FRIENDS, NOW, DIDN’T I. I don’t think wedding invites are directly correlated to Number of Real Friends– I reserve that metric for People Who Remember Your Birthday, which is why my birthday isn’t listed on my Facebook profile. I’m testing you. Get a day planner and write it down. It’s not difficult– but I’m also sure that if we got Malcom Gladwell on this case he could find some small piece of supporting evidence that the amount of calligraphy on my fridge is related to my friend base. Or so that’s what I tell myself when I’m Groundhog Daying through a Williams-Sonoma registry that, I swear to god, is EXACTLY THE SAME as the last 5 I’ve shopped off of. Why are you all buying the same plates?!?? When (not if) aliens come and take over, they’re going to assume that there’s some weird social caste thing going on whereby you can have plates that are colored or patterned when you’re single but once you get married ONLY COMPLETELY WHITE PLATES GO INTO YOUR MARITAL HOME.

Luckily, I think weddings are great. I am automatically in favor of any event where they play songs off the Big Chill soundtrack and I get to eat shrimp, and that has me covered on 90% of the nuptials that I attend. And beyond the Motown and the seafood, these things usually involve getting to watch two people that I love (or sometimes one person that I love and a stranger, which is cool, too. I was in Baltimore for my college roommate’s wedding a few weeks ago and some random dude in the hotel elevator was all “HI!” to me when I got on and I was basically like “I’m sorry, does it look like I work here or something? Don’t look at me in the face.” and it turned out to be the guy that was marrying my old roommate. I had 6 floors to backpedal and I did so nicely) say that they’re going to be in love forever and that’s pretty great.

THAT SAID.

I am slightly overwhelmed by this all. Financially, Emotionally, Logistically. It’s kind of a lot to deal with in a year. I’ve been doing some social anthropology on this and figured out that most normal people have something close to an unintentional One In/ One Out policy for close friends; they maintain roughly the same number in their inner circle and if they get new ones they move away from the old ones. This sounds pretty sad, but I bet it keeps you from going to 6 weddings in a year. I’ve never been good at anything that vaguely approximates a revolving door (and don’t even get me started on ACTUAL revolving doors, which I have to negotiate every day just to get into my office building and which, even though I have what I consider to be a pretty hard job, are the most difficult obstacles in my path on most days of my adult life) so I’m still hanging on to people from when I was like 6. This weekend I told my mom that I’m going to sit down and make a list of everyone I love that isn’t married, and a couple people that I love who I expect to be divorced shortly, and then I’m going to stick to that list FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE. You can fall off the list if I suffer some grave injustice at your hands (you know who you are, Hands) but you can’t get on to the list. And when I get invited to a wedding I’ll take the list out of my Hope Chest and consult it and if one member of the couple is on it, I go to the wedding, and if not, I buy them some white plates at Williams-Sonoma and spend their wedding day on my couch congratulating myself on being a heartless bitch. This plan isn’t going to work, obviously.

So, I’m coming to all of your weddings. And I actually want to, I swear. I just need to find a way to have this take over slighly less of my personal life. I’m really just looking to take back 7-12% of what this has taken from me. Initially I thought I would just get every person the same gift and that that gift would be a gift certificate to SkyMall. There is something for everyone in SkyMall and I bet most of you would secretly be thrilled to be forced to shop there and finally have an excuse to buy that indoor square yard of grass so you don’t have to take your dog outside to pee anymore. At the end of the day, though, I have enough weird identifiers attached to me and spend enough time meeting friends-of-friends and immediately hearing “Oh, YOU’RE the one with the pirate bathroom/ mr potato head collection/ narcolepsy/ pet turtles/ a sibling pictured on those New York Times ads I keep seeing on the subway” and I don’t need to give people an additional sorting option of “thinks SkyMall is an acceptable retail option,” so I will stick with your racist whitewashed wedding registries for now, or go to my ole’ Spinster Whose Seen Godfather Too Many Times fallback and make people blankets and give them cash. I was recently told that giving money is horribly gauche at a Southern Wedding, advice that has come 8 years and 5 sorority sister weddings too late, but southerners also think it’s okay to smile/ talk to people they DON’T EVEN KNOW, like that doesn’t almost definitely get you murdered according to all the HBO/ Showtime programs that I so enjoy, so whatever. Here’s some money. Spend it in good health, perhaps on couples counseling to explore why you fear eating off of bright colors.

SO. I will handle scheduling and gift selection and being awesome on the dance floor, but I am outsourcing Clothing Selection to you.

One of the many things college didn’t prepare me for is dressing myself, as I never lived with less than 3 other chicks and not a single one of them ever said something along the lines of “hey, maybe go easy on the backless shirts.” I’ve more or less solved this in my adult living-alone life by having all of my clothes more or less look the same. Just put the black shirt with the grey pants and roll out, Captain. This wedding influx is dovetailing nicely (work code for “accidentally working out in my favor”) with what I now recognize is a serious obsession with Kate Middleton. As I was pulling out dresses to figure out the wedding rotation I realized that, since Kate Middleton has entered the forefront of my cultural awareness, my dress purchasing has increased by at least 400%. I didn’t even know I was doing it until I laid everything out on my bed and saw an army of shift dresses. I’m not complaining– she has, unknowingly, made progress on my wardrobe in mere months that could, someday, perhaps undo some of the damage done by my mom allowing me to have my 3rd grade school picture taken in sweatpants and a sweatshirt with cartoon penguins on it. And I’m clearly not alone in this; there are plenty of people enabling the addiction. And it’s not like my subconscious chose to emulate Ke$ha or something. I could do a lot worse.

So I’ve got all the raw material and just can’t deal with putting it together on my own. When I pack for weddings, I get that feeling you always get when you open an Ikea bookshelf box and start thinking that you’d rather just pile your books in your fireplace than work on assembly. Without any chicks around to vett this stuff, I’ve been taking awkward cell phone pictures of me in front of my mirrored closet and texting them out just to people who I’m pretty sure won’t think it’s a ransom demand. In response to one of those, WMFriend Katie wrote back “I don’t have enough information,” a sentence which has become an automatic Well I’ll Just Make A PowerPoint trigger because of my job, kinda like the 80-odd sentences that will always get me to put something into Excel (ex., “where are you tracking compared to last year?” and “is there one date that works for everyone to get drinks?”). So I took a series of photos and banged it out one night while I was parked in front of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, telling myself that it wasn’t weird at all because it’s important to keep your brain active while you watch tv and Katie would understand that and not jump to the conclusion that I was losing my ability to interact like a normal human being. No one in this town is capable of that, anyway. After it was done I realized two things: 1. This was a lot of pressure on Katie, not that she couldn’t handle it, and 2. I was going to require way more praise than one person was capable of giving me.

I widened the distribution and not a single person responded with “Christ, just get a cat already” or “please retake pictures with a bag over your head” or “unsubscribe,” because I have cleverly been unintentionally narrowing my trust circle down to only those who understand that some things can only be said in Power Point. My favorite response was from Emla, who suggested that I do these decks for every decision I have to make (“what to have for dinner, what DVDs to watch…”), which is a blog-turned-book-deal waiting to happen for those of you looking for a way to fill your days in ways that don’t require crucial decision making.

Everyone had reasons for each of their choices, from the analytical (“particularly appropriate for a museum wedding”) to the personal (“it’ll look good standing next to the dress I’m wearing to that wedding” and “I would have picked Dress #7 but I want you to save that for my wedding”), and the main thing they agreed on was exactly nothing. This is either a problem where I can’t go wrong or I can’t go right, as no consensus was ever reached for any of the weddings in question, aside from the implied conclusions that A. Two kinds of people in this world: Those who love a recreational power point and those who would never make it on my Approved Future Weddings list. B. Aside from how awful it must be to have to get on the subway to work wearing a suit during the summer, dressing yourself as a chick is significantly more difficult than dressing yourself as a dude, unless you’re a dude who works as a sports mascot or one of those guys in front of Buckingham Palace that isn’t allowed to smile. C. All of my dresses work for all of these weddings. Every wedding guest dress you wear is fine unless it’s white or has puke on it. You can quote me on that. D. Just because there’s no answer to the question doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make a power point about it.

Behold, the slides and the responses:

(These images get bigger if you click on them. I think, anyway). This was the cover slide, which I changed accordingly for each recipient. This one went to Emla, just in case that combination of font colors screws with your deductive reasoning powers.

This is the wedding information summary slide so everyone knew what the mitigating factors were. This was also adjusted slightly for each Dress Advisor, as many of them were appearing on this slide in bride form or would be attending the weddings along with me. Everyone took this pretty seriously; most of the responses I got made it clear that this slide was the SAT reading comprehension question that no one wanted to get wrong.

Dress Option Slides:

Each of the dresses came with a list of advantages and/ or concerns, a picture of me grinning awkwardly in front of my bed, and a picture of me in the dress at prior events where applicable.

I ran out of ways to not look psychotic pretty quickly.

I also evidently came to believe that only my left arm was capable of bending.

Then my powers of right arm bendage were magically restored.

Everyone got this summary slide at the end with instructions to match the dress to the wedding and email the slide back.

This one did double duty as both a response vehicle and a searing visual portrait of how incredibly difficult it is for me to take serious pictures of myself when working on a ridiculous project that doesn’t matter at all. I kind of understand why everyone does that ridiculous off-balanced, cross-legged stance at red carpet events. I don’t think it helps at all, I just think one person did it once with such authority that everyone else decided that it must be a great idea and then it wound up confusing people into thinking that Paris Hilton was a professional… something. Which I guess she is, just not for anything that requires crossing her legs.

The problem with spending an hour out of your day coming up with clever nicknames for your dresses in a world where there are only so many ways to pun on polka dots is that everything sounds equally ridiculous when your friends start using the dress titles to respond as you yourself had instructed. Collating took me awhile and was not helped by the fact that once I open a door in my brain it rarely closes, like that time in college when I spent 6 weeks playing 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon with myself instead of studying, and I kept thinking of better names for the dresses. I eventually had to line them up to see how things shook out.

Erin & Amir’s Wedding

I misspoke earlier; the one thing everyone agreed on was that the first dress above, the one that delighted me by winning this bracket because I had already decided I was going to wear it to this wedding, is probably the best thing I own outside of my fake bearskin rug. If I went strictly by the stats, the way I was supposed to, I would wear that dress to all of the weddings and on 3 of 5 work days each week.

Boom! Proof that your vote matters.

Kelly & Gerald’s Wedding

We had a tie for this one. Everyone’s Favorite Dress came in first again, and many people pointed out how useful it would be to have pockets while holding an 11 month old through a wedding ceremony. But Vanity beats Function in the giant game of Rock Paper Scissors that is attending weddings with people from high school.

To my knowledge, my father did not make a Power Point in order to get dressed for this wedding, so it’s pretty frustrating that he’s standing around having his picture taken while casually emulating Steve McQueen.

Katie & Eric’s Wedding

Posited: Dressing for outdoor weddings makes everyone nervous about footwear. I got a lot of concerned “you have wedges, right?” with the same level of nervousness as usually accompanies inquiries as to whether or not I have sunblock on. Not sinking into the grass is more important than anything else.

Beth & Michael’s Wedding

The Racing Stripes dress runs away with it. Insert NASCAR pun!

Annette & Dan’s Wedding

Spreading the love! Clearly, I should just Beyonce this wedding and make 4 outfit changes during the reception like I’m working through my Daddy issues on My Super Sweet 16.

Dress Advisors: That you for your attention to this matter. Everyone else: Look forward to forthcoming Power Points about what movie I should see this weekend and what haircut I should get.

Maggie and Kyle got married but it is still all about me, fyi.

Maggie & Kyle got married yesterday and it was, as someone aptly noted at the cocktail hour, The Oscars of Our Friendship. For my Brooklyn crew, it doesn’t get any better than this– everyone in suits and dresses, open bar, Motown Philly on the playlist, plenty of opportunities to pretend that you are on a Wes Anderson set. It was easily one of the best weddings I’ve ever been to, which is saying something considering (a) I attend weddings professionally (look forward to the publication of Bring Scissors, my memoir about being a professional wedding guest. And seriously, someone always needs scissors at weddings, so just put a small pair in your purse before you leave) and (b) I was breathing into a paper bag for the first 2.5 hours of it.

I love giving wedding toasts– I love being asked to do it, I love the writing process, and I particularly love afterwards when everyone tells me that I was amazing– but it is completely fucking terrifying. I have historically tried to be blase about the whole thing because I don’t want people to feel bad that they asked me to do it and I really don’t anyone to ever not ask me to give one because they don’t want to give me nightmares, but I was enough of a nutcase leading up to M&K’s toast that the cat is officially out of the bag in terms of where Wedding Toasts rank vis a vis my other greatest fears such as being pushed in front of a subway train and coworkers trying to hug me at the office. Future brides and grooms, I am totally down with speaking at your wedding, just make sure I have 48 hours to write the thing and refill my blushing drugs and we’ll be golden. I’m really good, and I have references.

For example, look how effective I was here at getting everyone, including his wife, to laugh in CJ’s face.

When I got the call to pinch hit on the toast at this wedding, the first sentence out of my mouth was “I know EXACTLY what I’m going to say,” which proves once and for all what a filthy liar I am. I had no clue. I immediately started asking everyone I knew for help, including and especially people who don’t even know Maggie & Kyle. When I asked CollegeFriend Kyle he gave me what he calls his “usual boilerplate,” which went something like this: “How many of you have known {x person} for more than {y amount of} years? Okay, keep your hands up. Now how many of you guys EVER thought that you’d be in {z location} watching {x} get married to someone who {attributes of X’s spouse}?” This wasn’t going to work for me, since I met Maggie and Kyle at the same time and they were already a couple so I didn’t really have a “side” to bat for at this wedding, but the fact that Kyle spit that out within 15 seconds made me kind of wish that I could someday give a toast for complete strangers, like in Wedding Crashers. After the one I did at M&K’s wedding, two people that I didn’t know told me that I seemed “like a professional,” which initially hurt my feelings a little because I thought it implied that I had been too impersonal, but then it got me psyched because I assumed it meant that I could walk into the next wedding I saw and grab the microphone and be good enough at it that no one would call the cops, maybe.

Despite the all-encompassing fear that I was going to ruin this wedding, which, you would think, would be a good reason to start working on it quickly and not stop until the moment it was delivered, there were a few things distracting me last week from my Toast Quest.

1. The Jurassic Park trilogy on DVD

The above-mentioned group of Brooklyn-based nerds that I’m friends with orchestrated an amazing Twitter entrapment on Maggie and Kyle regarding Jurassic Park, which was then turned around on me pretty quickly to my great benefit. Jesse and Marisa wanted to know if M&K already owned the Jurassic Parks on DVD so we faked a discussion about it on Twitter wherein I said I needed to win a bet with someone at work and asked if anyone I knew owned the original and WITHIN SIX MINUTES Maggie & Kyle had confirmed that they already had it. THE INTERNET, amiright?!?? Jesse & Marisa got them Back to the Future instead. During the evil planning stages of this evil plan I told everyone that they could get me Jurassic Park for my wedding, and then later was all “Eff it, I’m just buying them myself from Amazon” and Jesse told me that I should wait 6 weeks until the Blu-Rays came out and then they got them for me for my birthday. THERE ARE NO BLU-RAYS, I TOTALLY FELL FOR IT. Amazing subterfuge.

I know it’s a little ridiculous to own movies that literally play on USA every. single. day except no, it isn’t ridiculous at all, because it allows you to watch them whenever you want and also to do them back-to-back at 3am if you so desire. I don’t think I’ve set aside time to truly appreciate how great these are since high school when Jordan and I took time out of our busy schedule of studying for the SATs and being uncool to watch all 3 in one day, and, listen, they are badass. I haven’t rewatched 3 yet, but I was happily surprised by how much better 2 was than I remembered. I particularly liked that the scientists were trying to prove that dinosaurs were caring parents who raised their young together, and then the ultimate proof that they were looking for came in the form of their near-death when the T Rexes came searching for their tiny infant. And there’s a ton in the first movie that I didn’t remember; I am now particularly obsessed with the scene in the control room where everyone escapes into the ceiling tiles to evade the raptors, and the raptor lifts its head up to sniff them and is blanketed by a projection screen from the computer that rolls the DNA code used to create the dinosaurs over its face. I rewound that one 4 times.

2. I turned 30.

I generally care a lot more about other people’s birthdays than my own, but this seemed like a good one to make a big deal out of. I took a curious, home hospice-type approach to 30 and decided that I wanted to do it in my own home surrounded by people that I loved, and the loved people happily complied. It was a great party, and I know it’ll be one of my happiest memories for as long as my brain stays intact.

When my birthday falls during the work week I always use a vacation day because I don’t think anyone should work on their birthday. I will work hard on non-birthday days, but it just seems cruel to have to do anything on YOUR DAY. So on the Day Of, I stayed home and cooked for the party and, as previously mentioned, watched quite a bit of the Jurassic Park trilogy. Then my family came in and my friends came over and I was so happy that I wanted to cry the whole time but I didn’t because I’m not a little bitch, just so you know. I had this weird obsession with taking a family picture with everyone on my birthday, and we worked around Older Brother Bud’s pacific northwest residency with the magic of the internet and iPads.

I will love this photo until I am old and senile and believe that computers are out to steal my soul.

3. Lonely Island’s Jack Sparrow song.

This one became a serious problem in terms of toast writing. It got to the point where I was down to 36 hours and was leaving pre-wedding events early, loudly declaring that I had to go home and write my toast, and then I would get home and just watch this video on repeat for 45 minutes and then take a nap. There’s some kind of blog out there that’s a roundup of responses from a team of people walking up to new yorkers who have headphones on and asking them what song is playing at that second, and I live in fear of these people because I am always, always, always listening to Jack Sparrow on repeat these days. I’ve started dropping lines from it into casual conversation in places that they don’t belong and, while that is basically the joke that the whole song is built around, it is only a matter of time before I sing “Davy Jones, Giant Squid!” in the middle of a meeting. Whenever I’m procrastinating on something now I sing “Michael Bolton, we’re really gonna need you to focus up!” over and over until I’m so mad at myself that I just do whatever I’ve been avoiding which, believe it or not, is how I finally got myself to actually write this toast.

I’m a post-college friend of Maggie & Kyle’s, which means that in our 7-ish years of friendship, I’ve only ever known them as a couple. When they said they were engaged, my initial reaction wasn’t ” Ohmygod, Congratulations!” so much as it was “Ohmygod, are you guys seriously not married already? Who knew.” When Maggie said she was keeping her last name, I thought “Well, that’s a smart move since, as far as we’re all concerned, her last name is already AndKyle.” I always automatically think of them together. So I can’t go to any of the usual wedding toast standbys about how you two are so much better together than you are apart, because I don’t have any proof. I never met Single Maggie or Single Kyle- the closest I ever get to those two is when I imagine the Bizzaro World versions of Maggie & Kyle where they didn’t ever find each other and grew up into these totally unrecognizable versions of themselves that do terrible things like illegally downloading pirated children’s books, or saying no to a 2nd glass of wine, or tuning out during an hour-long conversation about the logistics of time travel.

When I was thinking about what I wanted to say tonight, the memory that I couldn’t get away from was one of Kyle, from a few New Years Eve’s ago. I always host New Year’s for our friends (you all are totally invited this year– shouldn’t be a problem getting you all into my one bedroom apartment), and I remember standing in my kitchen having a conversation with Kate about how much I love Maggie & Kyle as a couple. It was one of those almost-weepy talks that you can only have after 6 drinks and that you never speak of again afterwards, and Kyle happened to wander in on it because I was standing in front of the fridge, so I was between him and the next beer he was going to drink. And I grabbed hiim and was all “KYLE. I was just SAYING that, usually when I’m friends with a couple it’s so easy to decide who I like MORE. But with you and Maggie it’s just SO HARD to figure out which one of you I like better because you’re both THE BEST.” And Kyle completely deadpanned his response– shocking, I know–and went “You should like Maggie more– she’s much better than I am.” And then he do-si-doed around me to get to the beer and we never talked about it again. (Until now, anyway).

And while I haven’t fact-checked this with Maggie, it’s always been completely obvious that, if asked, she would say the exact opposite: that Kyle was the better half, and that everyone should like him more. And this isn’t all that unusual on its own; in most couples I know, someone is always going on about how they’re the lucky one, and that they can’t believe how amazing their partner is, and whenever someone declares that they’re the lesser half, my instinct is to agree with them because, really, they’re usually right. My father will tell anyone who will listen– and many people who won’t listen– that my stepmom is a better wife than he could ever deserve, and every time he says that I say “You’re goddamn right she is. Way to lock that down before she figured it out, Bob.” So I know it’s not rare for someone in a couple to think that they’re getting the better deal, but I do know it’s rare for them to both truly believe that they are the lucky one, and I know it’s even more unusual for them to both be right. And that’s the thing about Maggie and Kyle: they both believe that they’re the lucky one, and they are both completely right. I know that there are more holes in that logic than in all of their theories about time time travel, but I also know that it’s so rare, and so phenomenal, and we are all so fortunate just to be around it.

And since I made a vow to myself after that New Years’ to never again stand in the way of anyone getting to their drinks, I’d like you to all raise your glasses with me now to my new favorite married couple. Maggie & Kyle, I would wish you all the best luck in the world, but it’s pretty clear that you’ve already got it.

at an uncharacteristic loss for words

I only took one Linguistics class in college, and we spent most of our session time arguing about the gorilla who used sign language to say “water bird” after seeing a swan on a lake, and whether or not this represented actual language manipulation or just a mere combination of learned nouns. I rooted against the ape having actual language skills not because I found fault in the overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary, but because I didn’t want monkeys sharing my god-given right to invent new words. The fight dragged on for weeks, then we all graduated and took jobs with starting salaries well under $50k. I did, however, live with a Linguistics major for most of college, and gleaned everything I know about how people use words from life with her. Katiedid was one of my “invites” to my senior sorority formal, which meant she was allowed the esteemed privilege of getting wine spilled on her by drunk chicks without having to pay dues for it, and also got to hang out with my dad and I during dinner beforehand, as Pa Stickles was visiting Colonial Williamsburg to watch a college track meet for fun even thought he didn’t know a single person running in it (really). During dinner at the Gamma Phi house, I interrupted my dad in the middle of one of his usual filibusters and he reminded me, for the millionth time, how rude this Interrupting Thing that I do really is. (For the record, I know it’s really bad. I’ve tried a lot of different methods to get myself to stop, and it’s just impossible. It’s not that I don’t want to hear what you have to say, it’s just that I have a lot of questions that must be answered immediately). “You’ve always done this, and it’s time to grow out of it,” he said over the chicken parm that I had cooked for him, in the company of a half dozen of my best friends. “Not only does she interrupt all of the time, she also changes the direction of the conversation every time she does it,” Katiedid added, and my dad’s eyes lit up. He smacked the kitchen table with his palm and went “That’s RIGHT! She DOES do that!” while I took turns rolling my eyes at each of them. “It’s pretty interesting, actually. That’s almost exclusively a male conversational trait. Women don’t normally do it,” Katiedid continued, giving me what is to this day one of my favorite perverse points of pride and also bringing me to the startling realization that she had spent the last 4 years casually taking note of my language patterns, which was enormously flattering and fascinating and horrifying. But this is what we all do in college~ when I was able to condition my freshman year roommate into remembering to take her shower stuff out of the shower stall by hiding her shampoo every time she left it in there (you’re welcome, Kerri) and thusly had myself convinced that I was the best psychology major ever invented. Katiedid watches how people form sentences both for business and for sport, and she had my number from the get-go.

Some time during Junior year Katiedid and I were watching tv together–I feel like it was Malcom in the Middle, but that could just be because MitM has become my mental default for Crappy Show I Can’t Believe Existed after my brain ran out of space in which to keep track of Joe Millionaire and the like. Whatever show it was, it featured an angry Eskimo who had been wronged by a suburban family and was storming out of the scene. He paused in the doorframe and added “And I only have ONE word for snow,” before slamming the door behind him. Katiedid laughed at this like she was getting paid to do so. When she finally caught her breath she explained about the linguistics urban legend that snow is so important to Eskimos that they have 50 different words to describe all of the different kinds of snow. I think about this all the time. How come there aren’t more words for “love?” Is it because the world couldn’t get by without that amazing episode of The Wonder Years where Winnie Cooper tells Kevin that she likes him but she doesn’t LIKE HIM like him?

I have probably mentioned this at some point, but my little brother is Kind Of A Famous Rock Star. It has been insanely fun for my family to watch his career progress, and I’ve been reminded of that recently as I started a new job and have had to introduce a whole new crop of people to the Ridiculous Stickles Family Back Story. (“So your older brother is a fighter pilot? And the younger one is a rock star? And you… work in children’s publishing. Huh.”) I’ve been at this job a little over 6 weeks (more on this later. Cliffs notes: It’s fantastic, and really hard in a good way. I’m actually trying to be good at it because I want to be good at it, which I something I haven’t been able to say about, uh, anything, since high school. I haven’t been nearly cognizant enough of how limited an overlap the intersection of Wanting To Work Hard and Being Given The Opportunity To Work Hard and even less appreciative of the few instances in my career that have qualified at both. Until now. Stay tuned) and people have been asking follow up questions days after I tell them about Peej that almost always start with “We don’t have to talk about this if you’re sick of it, but…” Listen: I will never be sick of it. I don’t think I’ve ever had any real frustrations with the English language outside of the enduring inability of its speaking population to truly believe that, yes, that IS the real spelling of my name, and now whenever people go “You must be so proud!” I understand how that fictional Eskimo must have felt when someone asked “Is it going to snow tomorrow?” Proud is nothing; proud is how you feel when your Labradoodle finally learns to poo outside, or when you can get through the West Village without using the GPS on your phone. When I think about everything that PJ’s done I feel like someone is over-inflating a balloon inside my ribcage, or like every single molecule in my body is freebasing Red Bull. They haven’t invented words yet for how proud I am of him.

all the time in the world

Kids, I’ve got some free time on my hands. I won’t go into the details for a variety of reasons largely related to the legal document I signed granting me all this free time and my hunch that it’s somehow contingent on me not getting all Internet Jerry Maguire about it, and also my struggle to find a linguistic consensus for how to describe what an interesting May I had. Whenever I use the word “fired,” my mom clutches her stomach like someone kicked her. While I’m pleased with the dramatic effect, I haven’t intentionally caused my mom pain since that time I forced her to listen to Christmas songs for an entire July day during our cross country road trip, and that’s not a place either of us wants to go back to. I never liked “laid off” because I think “laid” should only be applied to situations where the object of the sentence is having sex, though I guess it technically applies to people in my situation because they’re generally getting screwed. Semantics, huh? Plus I like saying “fired,” even though it’s not the best textbook definition for what went down. Having been described for most of my post-adolescent years as a “pistol” or “sparkplug” or “fire cracker,” I feel oddly comfortable with terms placing me in the Associated With A Minor Explosion category. (Somewhere in New Jersey, my father is reading this mere feet away from the bedroom door that I broke during middle school with Furious And Repeated Slammings, and he is nodding in agreement).

Besides, I don’t think about “fired” in a Donald Trump reality show kind of way, I think about it like I’m being packed into a cannon by my fellow circus performers and aimed at an “X” in the middle of an inflatable mattress. This works nicely as a career transition metaphor for all you optimists out there that quickly identified the cannon as Opportunity and the mattress patched with duct tape as The Next Great Thing Waiting For Me Around The Corner. Most days I’m enough of a Pollyanna to see it that way as well, though I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t have dark moments spent wondering why I had to be surrounded by clowns, smelling like gunpowder while I try to careen in the general direction of the inflatable mattress and not into the waiting arms of that 12-fingered carny who wants to take me behind the cotton candy machine and make me his bride.

The best and worst parts of this have both been my parents’ reactions. When it went down, all I could think about was my parents, and how and what I was going to tell them when I got home. I knew this wouldn’t change how they thought about me or anything, but I also knew it was going to make them worry enormously, and as their One Child Who Can Always Be Reached By Phone And Rarely Leaves The Country, I don’t like doing that. All three of them handled it phenomenally, and we were able to transition directly into Accidentally Saying Inappropriate Things Near The Girl Who Just Lost Her Job, which I appreciated. I went home to NJ the weekend after my job-ectomy, and in passing my dad mentioned to my stepmom that he had to go to a meeting for the new job he was starting. “Maybe they want to fire you already!” my stepmom joked gleefully, then everyone froze and looked at me out of the corner of their eyes. My mom took half a personal day from her job to spend with me, and when we got in the car she crowed “Who’s so excited to not be at work right now?!” and then immediately put the car in park and apologized 8 times. If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s Milk It, so all of this has been fantastic. For a month straight, whenever I didn’t want to deal with something, I played the job card. Can you put your dishes in the dishwasher? I’d love to, but I just got fired, and I’m really upset. I think it’s be better if I stayed right here on the couch, eating mac n’ cheese and watching Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman reruns.

When I think about this happening to me, though, I keep coming back to my parents’ initial reactions. Coming from a family where everyone has the same face, same voice, and same mannerisms, I’ve always been a little obsessed with identifying things that I “got” from my various parents, and this was no exception. Watching my parents respond to this was the clearest illustrator of how the three of them had built me from scratch. I was most worried about my mom; my mom is made entirely of little blocks of empathy, and having something bad happen to one of her children is torture. When I get a papercut, I am positive that my mom feels it, and that it hurts four times as much. I called my mom to tell her that morning and I thought she was going to cry– not because she was disappointed in me, but because she knew I was trying not to cry. “I’m coming to get you,” was the first thing she said, because she knew I needed my mom right then, and she knew that part of me wanted to lay in her bed and hide from people until I thought I could deal with it. The first thing my dad said was “Did you sign anything?” which is absolutely the first thing I would have said to anyone in my situation. And when I spent the next three days scouring paperwork and crafting Excel grids and strongly worded emails and telling myself before phone meetings “you have no reason to be scared– it’s not like they can fire you AGAIN,” I knew that had come directly from my dad. Telling my stepmom was particularly hard. With my mom & dad, I always have the fallback excuse that anything I screw up is actually their fault– it’s either nurture or nature, right? so I can blame them for everything– but I like to tell myself that my stepmom got to pick me as a daughter instead of being blindly assigned to try to turn me into an adult the way my mom and dad were, and I also like to tell myself that she made an extremely intelligent decision that has paid off great dividends. (After I got through what we in the Stickles fam like to call Cristin’s Awful Phase, known to the population at large as High School. I was a nightmare. Pretty much every move I make at this point in my life is designed as a silent apology to my family for having to deal with me when I was 13-18 years old). Because of that, all I could think to say to my stepmom was “I’m sorry,” and she, rightfully, told me to shut up. “You listen to me. You do not fucking apologize for this.” Once I got done trying to remember the last time she had used the eff word, I figured out how right she was, and I decided to stop being a self-loathing little bitch about things and go back to being someone who Does Not Fucking Apologize when it’s not warranted. This is how the three of them made me, and none of that will ever change. Especially not as the result of something like this.

But like I said, I’m not going to talk about any of that. I’ll talk about it some day, once I’ve entered an era where I can comfortably watch and discuss Up In The Air without breaking out in hives, because one of my favorite things that has already come out of this is a noted high peak in Unintentional Comedy on the Hilarity Graph of my life. Like how in order to retain your unemployment benefits, the state of NY requires you to fill out a job experience form that asks if you have welding skills. That one had me singing the Flashdance soundtrack for days.

The Year of the Tiger

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

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

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

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?