Always the last place you look
June 9th, 2009
When I got an email today that said “Check out your brother on ESPN.com,” I assumed that they meant Bud and that ESPN had gotten ahold of the pictures of him doing the flyover at that UNC football game last year or something. That would have at least sort of made sense. And yet:
Oh yeah. That’s the Peej on ESPN.com, thanks to Paul Shirley, Random House author (as if I needed another reason to love you, Paul!).
Titus Andronicus is widely accepted to be Shakespeare’s bloodiest play, making the band’s name a fitting one. T.A. sounds to me like the band that would be formed if Rob Roy was a 19-year-old skateboard punk from New Jersey who had grown up listening to Brand New and had just been given access to a recording studio, a guitar and Conor Oberst’s voice. And yes, I mean that Rob Roy, the Scottish Robin Hood played by Liam Neeson in the 1995 movie. Listen to my favorite song from the album, called “Fear and Loathing in Mahwah, NJ” and you’ll understand.
Full article here, Paul’s book here.
Vocal Adrenaline
May 20th, 2009
Guys. For real. Glee is the best show on earth.
context-free
May 6th, 2009
Cristin: I’m still mad at you for not letting me order buffalo wings to the bridal suite on the morning of your wedding.
Erin: I’m still mad at myself for that, too.
************************
Cristin: I just cut my tongue licking the lid of my yogurt.
Katie: Wow. How did you live to adulthood?
************************
Cristin: I came in third for the “Loudest” superlative in high school.
Jeremy: Wow.
Cristin: I know, right? I’m not that loud!
Jeremy: No, I can’t believe two people beat you.
Aww, he looks even more like Charles Manson in black and white
May 4th, 2009
New music video from Titus Andronicus! Apparently the peej had to lip synch to this song for a good 7 hours in a row in order to bang this out. I think it’s pretty convincing. I have no idea what the one shot of a baby on the dance floor is– that isn’t our niece, and I don’t know of any other babies in their lives, so I look forward to finding out who subjected their baby to this. Or, knowing peej, it’s probably a metaphor that I don’t understand or something from literature I don’t understand because Peej wrote his thesis on Proust and I wrote mine on sorority rush.
Unrelated, But Awesome: I am beyond obsessed with the site Texts From Last Night. Once I got over being furious that I didn’t think of this myself (full disclosure: this is a lie, I am still furious that I didn’t think of this myself) it quickly became the #1 site visited on my blackberry browser, even over gmail and Twitter. Over the last year or so I’ve gotten into the habit of locking any text message that makes me laugh so that my phone doesn’t delete it automatically, and this is like having a GIANT REPOSITORY of those texts, but from strangers who make terrible life decisions. The inclusion of the area codes just kills me. Bravo, TFLN. Bravo.
(610): Will you still be my friend if I read and enjoyed Twilight?
(570): No
(703): in my opinion joe jonas is kinda pointless. hes just the pretty boy front runner.
(803): I’m at some bar in brklyn… just made out with a guy named Owen.
(803): He is a pre-school teacher… just sang me a song about weather.
(717): Hey, It’s Lauren. i wanted to talk to you tonight. I like you, as you know because kyle told you. I was wondering if you liked me too?
(206): Are you in the third fucking grade? Check yes or no.
Erin’s Wedding, Part II: Toasted
April 21st, 2009
I have a somewhat crippling fear of public speaking. This is unfortunate for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that I Sell Things for a living and my job constantly requires me to convince roomfuls (roomsful?) of people that I know what I’m talking about, which is hard to do when you turn maroon whenever two or more people are looking at you. After several years of public speaking workshops and improv classes and (most importantly) the discovery that they make medication to keep you from blushing, I’m now mostly able to hide the fact that I would rather be buried alive than be handed a microphone in front of a crowd of people.
Giving a toast at Erin’s wedding is the only exception to this rule that I’ve encountered– I wanted to do it so badly, and wanted so badly for it to be good. I go to roughly 9 weddings a year and have yet to see a Maid of Honor really effing hit it out of the park, which is why I spent about 3 years writing the damn thing (someone took his sweet time proposing). After all that time (and 45 minutes I spent standing in the shower reciting it over and over on the day of the wedding– I’m surprised I wasn’t still a prune by the time I had to give it) I was able to do it without notes, though I did have a printout of it hidden in my bra, a fact that I only share with you now because my mother has already told anyone who brings up the toast that I was keeping an emergency copy trapped under a delicate little number from Gap Body in case I choked. In retrospect, though, I don’t see how having to reach down my dress would have made the situation of blanking on my speech any better.
We have video of this epic event, but it’s not embeddable (I’m sure my mom would love to show it to you on DVD whenever you’re passing through Glen Rock) so you’ll have to use your imagination as you read it. And Mike, The Best Man (pictured above) did a phenomenal job–I loved his toast, and I think we were a great combo, and I felt bad for him having to stand up there with someone who had approached toast-preparation with the ferocity of an Olympic hopeful Chinese gymnast. After we were both done the groom hugged Mike and said “Thank God you went before her, man,” which I took as a compliment.
There has literally never been a time in my life when I didn’t know Erin—she showed up 6 months before I did, and we owe our moms big Thank Yous for giving us built-in best friends. Hopefully that was more of a happy accident than it was a manifestation of their fear we’d be social rejects who could never befriend anyone outside their gene pool. Danny & Erin & I were basically raised as triplets and spent all of our formative years side by side in awkward family photographs, mixed up in each other’s birthday parties and summer vacations, causing all kinds of adorable chaos. When we left for college it was the first time in my life that I didn’t have Erin—the first time I had to pick up the phone to talk to her instead sitting on the hood of her car in the school parking lot, or walking into her house without knocking. Er and I adopted to the phone pretty quickly, as most teenage girls do, and we held onto the habit after graduation. I called her a week after she started her job at Fort Monmouth and asked what the other people in her program were like, and she paused before answering.
“There’s this boy,” she said. “And he makes me laugh.”
And I thought—okay, big deal, Tina Fey makes ME laugh but I’m not about to go and do anything stupid about it.
But, Erin did do something stupid—she subjected CJ to meeting our family. The first time she brought home this Boy Who Made Her Laugh everything went perfectly fine, and as soon as they left for the evening my family charged right into our time honored tradition of Talking About People Who Were Not In The Room. I don’t think CJ’s car was even out of the driveway before he was offered up for dissection.
The cousins and I were lucky enough to grow up with a wonderful great uncle (a “great” great uncle)—and I know the first rule of making people cry in your wedding toast is invoking the name of a relative who’s both very beloved and very dead, and I promise that’s not why I bring him up now—I don’t know if it was because he had a direct line to The Big Guy to because he was just smarter than the rest of us, but Father Bob always knew what to say. Exactly what to say. And when he saw Erin and CJ together for the first time, he said “I’ve never seen Erin look so beautiful or so happy.” And when I heard that, I just thought—that’s it. That’s it, exactly. And the next time I saw the two of them I thought, I’ve never seen Erin look so beautiful or so happy, and when she told me they were engaged I thought, I’ve never seen Erin look so beautiful or so happy, and tonight, when I saw her walking towards CJ in that white dress, I thought- I’ve never seen her look so beautiful or so happy.
And with anyone else, this might not be that big of a deal, but this is Erin we’re talking about—there wasn’t a whole lot of room for improvement before CJ ahold of her. Since the day she was born, Erin’s always been the most beautiful girl in the room (whenever I’m not around, anyway), and for her to find someone that makes her that much more luminous—well, I think that’s a really great thing, and I think it took a really great man. And even if I didn’t love CJ so much for who he is—for the sense of humor that Erin picked out right away, and for (despite all of his efforts to cover it up) the fact that he truly is a gentleman, and one with an inherent kindness that I think is exceptionally rare—if I didn’t love him for all of that, it would be more than enough for me, and for my family, to just love him for how Erin is since she found him, and how enormously happy he’s made her.
Truthfully, I was expecting today to be at least a little difficult, or for it to feel strange—as excited as I’ve been for this wedding, I just always assumed that it would be hard to watch your other half pick another half. And I kept bracing myself for these weird emotions, and the best surprise of today has been that they never showed up. And it hasn’t been difficult, or weird, or hard at all—it’s been amazing. And if I’ve been overwhelmed by anything, it’s been how lucky I am to have this reminder of how easy it really is to believe in love, which is something I think of every time I see you two, every day, and especially today. And I want to thank you for sharing that with me, with Danny, with our families, and with everyone here.
And since this is the longest I’ve gone all day without having a drink, I’ll wrap it up here before the withdrawl kicks in—please raise your glasses with me to Erin and CJ, and a lifetime of happiness together.
Erin has successfully been married off
April 20th, 2009
Cousin Erin’s wedding was on Friday. It was amazing. The weather was amazing. Erin was amazing. It is amazing that I am still exhausted from the effort. I plan to write many extensive and amazing posts about it, but until then:
This is officially my favorite picture of myself, ever. Story of my life, right there.
Peep Show
April 13th, 2009
Easter was yesterday. I didn’t go to mass, but I think the Risen Jesus would still be happy with how I celebrated. In short form:
I did a full-building egg hunt for my friends. Here I have helpfully drawn (pun!) your attention to Egg-Searcher Jesse and the object that has been giving him the slip for the 3 minutes leading up to when this picture was snapped. We had a fantastic time egg-hunting and I am lucky to have friends to not only didn’t roll their eyes and talk about me behind my back when I suggested this (to my knowledge, anyway) but who instantly took to the idea. We had more fun egg hunting than most children of the appropriate age do. I had money on Maggie to take it home, but Jeremy destroyed the competition with a 9 egg haul (per person average was 6). I was proud of everyone for sharing their candy afterwards.
Then we retired to the part of the building I’m actually entitled to occupy and made things out of shoeboxes. Because I am an enormous loser with no life, I’d been working on this one for the past week. It’s a Peeping Tom. I slay myself. Those are teeny tiny books on the bunny peep’s nightstand– Watership Down and Rabbit at Rest. Works on so many levels. I could not be more pleased with myself about this. The only thing that gives me pause is realizing that I put the most energy and focus that I’ve experienced in a great long time into something fully ridiculous that will get me nowhere in life, but for now it’s making me desperately happy, so I’m cool with it.
Unrelated, But Awesome: If you have Sirius radio, Titus Andronicus is guest-hosting the morning show on XMU this week. Glad to see Patrick drawing from all the college radio DJ experience.
Unrelated, Also Awesome: Cousin Erin gets married on Friday. I’m working Monday & Tuesday of this week and then headed to the jerze to complete my Maid of Honor duties, including but not limited to falling on the cake and doing a roll call of Erin’s exboyfriends instead of a proper wedding toast. Mazel tov!
Just in time for Easter- everyone’s coming back from the dead
April 9th, 2009
They made fun of me when I became obsessed with zombies, didn’t they. “What happened to pirates?” they asked. “How many weird obsessions can one seemingly otherwise-normal urban 20something have?” They laughed when I bought both versions of Dawn of the Dead on DVD and watched them back to back, and they rolled their eyes when I asked them where in the five boroughs would you choose to barricade yourself for the zombie apocalypse, given that you’re not allowed to choose a personal residence. WHO IS LAUGHING NOW, I ASK. Zombies are awesome and everyone is about to know it.
Gentleman in New Orleans Loses Chunk Of Arm In Possible Zombie Attack. (via Boing Boing. This is not fake news, amazingly)
~USA Today article that features The Forest Of Hands and Teeth, which is easily my favorite book that RHCB is publishing this year.
I am so not above saying I Told You So. Zombies are awesome, guys.
Unrelated, Not Awesome: Stay Classy, Glen Rock.
Unrelated, But Awesome: I started making my Peep diorama last night for the Easter festivities. You have no idea how hard it is for me to NOT post a picture of the work in progress here (you know this particularly well if you’re one of the 8 people I’ve already emailed it to– it’s too awesome to keep to myself). I spent four hours building this thing out of a shoebox yesterday and I haven’t concentrated that hard on anything since the SATs. I’m adding the Actual Peeps tonight and will photo-document shortly. Let me just say this– I am Totally Effing Bringing It in terms of Peep scenery, you guys. You’d better be prepared to Bring It in return. My Peeps have a nicer apartment than I do. Now I can’t WAIT for Sunday.
Shelf Awareness
April 8th, 2009
So, long story, but I might apply to go to business school part time. I know, right? What a perfect place for someone whose ideal day would be sleeping for 16 hours and reading Sarah Dessen novels/ watching A Double Shot At Love in between naps. This might be the dumbest idea I had since I got my tongue pierced 6 weeks into my college career (it lasted two days) but I haven’t been able to shake it. One of the applications I’ve half-read and not started has an essay option that just says something like “How would you explain/ describe yourself to your future classmates?” and doesn’t require you to answer in essay form– You could send them an apple pie you baked or a rap video you filmed in your apartment (both of which I’m sure would have a dramatic impact on your application). I find this pretty hilarious because they’re basically asking for creativity from a bunch of people who are asking them for training in Working For The Man. Of course, this is the only part of applying to business school I’ve put actual thought into, and I think that was only because I knew right away what the best way to get a stranger to understand me would be– I would show them this picture, with footnotes. When I first set this bad boy up, I used this as my facebook profile picture for awhile, and within moments WorkCohort Amanda told me that she had the same ones in her home office, and had similarly merchandised them as she is also part of my Trained By Indie Booksellers tribe. People in publishing read bookshelves like tea leaves. I could look at pictures of other peoples’ bookshelves all day, and I think you should all similarly annotate your bookshelves for me when you have the time to do so to your liking.
1- Those top left two cubbies are my autographed books, which I photographed and itemized and logged with my insurance company when I moved even though most are sentimental favorites and not worth much scratch. Highlights include: All 4 Traveling Pants galleys; The View From Saturday; The Book Thief; Kiki Strike; King Dork; and Mysteries of Harris Burdick, my favorite picture book that doubles as Autographed Copy From The Author I Was Most Scared Of During The Signing. I’ll tell that story someday.
2- There’s the GMAT book I haven’t opened for the very good reason of Not Having Signed Up To Take The Test Yet. I’d much rather annotate my bookshelves. We’ll mark this one down as reason number 329 I should reconsider grad school.
3- That’s The Westing Game on the right and Fantastic Mr. Fox on the left. I reread each of these about every year or so and find myself using them as verb in casual conversation more than I should. Like when my parents talk about their wills I can’t resist being all “Are you going to Westing Game it and make the three of us search for your vast fortune?” or when I was discussing where in NYC I would choose to hide from zombies during what I know is an inevitable zombie apocalypse I thought “I would really love to hide in The Container Store as long as I could Fantastic Mr. Fox a tunnel into a nearby bodega to get food.”
4- I collect windup toys.
5- And Mr. Potato Heads.
6- You can’t see it very well, but that little book up front is I Like You, which I enjoy giving to people who don’t hear frequently enough from me how awesome they are. I have a copy of it in my office, as well, which I use as a fun Are You As Cool As I Think You Are test (if someone comes in and goes “Aww, I love that book!” then they are as cool as I think they are).
7- The essay/ memoir cubby. Standing up is EB White’s Here Is New York, which I bought during my 4 month layover in New Jersey this summer and then couldn’t read because it made me miss living in New York too much. I saw someone reading this on the D train the other day and I wanted to check and make sure he was a resident of one of the boroughs because if not, it’s just depressing if you love it here. I’m not a huge fan of memoirs but I love a good essay collection, especially since my Grow Up To Write A Book Like Sloane Crosley’s fantasy surpassed my Practice Your Acceptance Speech For Best Original Screenplay fantasy. I think I could wring an essay collection out of Stories About My Family on this godforsaken website alone, and then we would just have the task of making non-Stickles want to read it. Something to marinate on. On the bottom of that shelf is The Game, the pick-up artist book that Maggie became obsessed with back when we were at Harper, and that we all reference constantly (ex., “Everyone at the ugly sweater party was so friendly, and I talked to all these strangers. But I think that’s because the ugly sweater is unintentional peacocking.” ~Webmaster Kyle). Also in there is the Anna Quindlen book about her dog (Good Dog. Stay.) that made me cry like a baby, and the Ann Patchett book that made me weep like a child. (Those are the same thing, I just didn’t want to totally repeat myself. I wasn’t putting, like, shades of meaning in there or anything).
8- Adult Fiction, fronted by World War Z (how many times do I have to tell you how good this book is before you read it?) and Beowulf. My biggest regret about college is not, as you might guess, that class I failed Freshman year, or the fact that I didn’t drop that class before I failed it, or that guy I made out with Senior year while he was drunk from doing shots of listerine (stay classy, Delta Phi)–it’s that the Old English professor was on sabbatical I didn’t get to take an entire class on Beowulf. We’ve all got our weird things.
9-Nonfiction books about professional baseball, 60% of which are about the Mets. I have read none of these books in their entirety, but I’ve read parts of all of them.
10-Weird Nonfiction. My Walt Disney biography and three books about how weird Disneyworld is, two books on the mistreatment of munchkins during the filming of Wizard of Oz, one on Jim Henson, three books about Lincoln’s assassination, two on how collections in Natural History Museums are built (one of which tells you how many Eskimos had to die for the AMNH in NY), one on how people have died at the Grand Canyon, one on the black plague, and two on Sesame Street.
11- The top is a rotating display so none of the spines get messed up, but This Is New York always stays face-out.
12- One of two YA Fiction shelves with Honey, Baby, Sweetheart and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn face out. I’ve never read A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. The other day I was searching upcoming shows on my DVR because I wanted to find the TLC special on Tree-Man (who, I’m told by Annette, lives in some third world country and has some version of HPV that causes his skin to become bark-like) and it wasn’t available but a movie version of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn was, so I taped it. But still haven’t watched it. I guess I just don’t want it bad enough on this one.
13- My riding chaps. These were my major Christmas gift from my grandpa when I was about 11- by that point, Grandpa Herb had a whole baseball team of grandkids and they were becoming hard to keep track of, so our parents would just buy us something off our list and Herb would bankroll it later. He knew I was a big-time pony girl, but still did a lot of “What the hell are THOSE for??” when I unwrapped them. My chaps have lived in my bedroom at home, in the trunk of my dad’s car, at summer camp in New Hampshire, at college in Virginia, and now in New York. I “retired” from riding after college (though the girls that were on the equestrian team with me at school might say that I really hung it up well before then based on my dedication and performance) but I like having my chaps somewhere where I can see them– if I had to pick one article of clothing to save from a fire, it would be these guys. I like having a reminder that I loved something that was good for me and was good at something that I loved, and I know I’ll get to go back to it at some point.
Unrelated, But Awesome:I have decided to have an Easter Egg Hunt on Sunday in honor of living in a big empty building and in honor of our risen savior. If you live in Brooklyn and are friends with me and I forgot to email you about this, please let me know. I just switched to gmail (I KNOW, right? Way to swing at a pitch 7 years late!) and am a bit confused as to where my email contacts are. Initially, I was all jazzed up about hiding eggs, but now I’m mainly jazzed about Things We Can Do With Peeps. FOR EXAMPLE:
Take Pictures Of Peeps At Historic Landmarks And Upload Them To The NatGeo flickr Pool.
Come Up With Needlessly Elaborate Scenes In Which The Peeps Shall Play. (I’m rooting for this one. Specifically, I plan to construct the CIC of the Battlestar Galactica when the Final 5 are standing in their Opera House Vision formation. How many of you understood a single word I just said?).
Have a Peep-Off. (A Peeps eating contest, pervert. Get your mind out of the gutter).
Study the gestational rate of Easter candy.
Get placement at the Denver Art Museum.
Recreate a Klan meeting with Peeps and almost get kicked out of your Virginia high school. (kids are idiots).
Do some microwave Peep jousting.
South by Southwest
March 23rd, 2009
Little Brother Peej and his band of lunatics played South By Southwest this weekend. I know this because my Google News Alerts went insane in the space of 3 days, and because I got this text message from Older Brother Bud:
Yo. Our little bro plays South By Southwest today. We are each therefore cooler than we were yesterday. Psyched. Google stalker ready.
I’m not sure if that’s an accurate application of the transitive property– while PJ was playing a massive music festival, I was spending my days gluing covers onto coloring books and my evenings bitching about the Battlestar Galactica finale (I am, in a word, Displeased. I think they totally punted, particularly on the Starbuck storyline, particularly when they didn’t wrap up the whole Cylons Stole My Ovary subplot from season 2 that’s been driving me insane since I saw it. I’d also like to go on record against any plans you might have to watch four seasons of a SciFi original series in the span of two months. Part of me wishes I had live blogged/ Twittered this experience, but I’m mostly glad I didn’t because that seems like a great way to lose all of my friends), so I don’t think I can claim any additional coolness runoff since we share a last name/ DNA/ knowledge of all of the good Easter basket hiding spots in the house (Bob and Vicki appear to be horrified that their children have grown up to be adults and have elected to cling to our youth via odd means, including but not limited to the insistence that we continue to hunt for our Easter baskets. Luckily for us, this is no way means that they’ve become more creative in the selection of hiding spots, as said baskets are always either in the dryer or fireplace. {I’m making fun of them here because it’s so, so easy to do, but in reality, if I ever go home on Easter and my Easter basket isn’t hidden or–even worse– does not exist, I will probably set the house on fire in protest}).
If Titus Andronicus goes back next year, I really want to go to SXSW. Apparently there’s some panel-thingies (yes, that is the technical term) on publishing and digital media, so I can pass it off as a tax write-off. But mostly I just want to be around for when pictures like this get taken:
Why yes, that IS my baby brother in a Bruce Springsteen concert tshirt from the year he was 6 years old clawing at his mountain man beard while being interviewed for the news alongside the Mayor of Austin! If he were the kind of person to do Christmas cards (or even the kind of person to acknowledge Christmas in terms of any kind of preparation sooner than the day before Christmas Eve), I would demand that he use this picture. As you can imagine, this sent Older Brother Bud and I into a googling fury that you cannot imagine. I know there has to be some kind of online clip from whatever local news station this was, and I am determined to find it. All I’ve been able to come up with so far is a confirmation that this was at the Mayor’s SXSW kickoff reception at City Hall, and that in 2006 that Mayor physically removed a rowdy party goer from a SXSW event and was later charged with assault, so he’s obviously a Badass.
More Titus Andonicus at SXSW:
Unrelated, Not Awesome:
What’s not respecting Cristin’s bedtime? from Cristin on Vimeo.
Remember when I took the video of the thing eating inside my kitchen wall? Over the next 3 weeks or so I wound up with something like 7 clips that I will, someday, amass into the most boring and poorly-shot video montage of Whatever’s Eating My Home. My landlord is allegedly On The Job of getting this thing out of there, but it doesn’t appear that any steps have been taken to limit inhabitants of my building to people/ animals that have signed leases alone. I took this video after The Thing woke me up at 1 on a school night, and figured it was blog worthy since so few of you will ever be granted that upshot view of my bedroom ceiling. (Heyo!) (Sorry, Dad, it was too good of a set-up to leave alone). My next plan is to have Jordan come over and film us hunting it down in the attic with flashlights while doing his impression of the host of Man Vs. Wild. I see no way in which this could backfire on me.
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