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.

And this week, someone else did something wrong, and it also pissed him off. You should read what he wrote, and you should read the whole thing, and then you can help me decide if I should be more proud of him because he’s such an amazing writer, or because he’s able to avoid sounding self-deprecating while still allowing that he was part of the making of this problem, or because he didn’t do what I would have done, which would have been complaining softly and then going to sleep angry. I would assume that I’m looking at this through a rose colored We Share The Same DNA So You Can Do No Wrong veil– the same one that once lead my mom to say, at one of my horse shows in high school, “I think it’s so incredible how much control you must have over the horse to get him to stop right in front of the jump!” when she didn’t want to believe that the horse was, in fact, supposed to be well on the other side of the fence, had he been listening to a thing I had tried to communicate to him–but a lot of other people, people who don’t have distinct memories of eating Oreos the morning he was born while waiting for a phone call to determine if he/she would be the obnoxious big sister to a little boy or a little girl, have also read it and figured out how effing smart this kid is. For someone who works in publishing in new york, having the commentators on Gawker talk about the brilliance of your younger brother is basically as good as it gets, though this post from The Village Voice certainly didn’t suck. Well said, PJ.

My little brother is still famous.

That’s an interview with him, and a picture of his back, on the landing page of the The Onion’s AV Club- New York site. Next week, look forward to their Area Woman Is Remarkably Boring In Comparison To Her Siblings article.

Our whole immediate family sans my Stepmom, who is a responsible adult and politely declined a night of hard rockin’ in Hoboken when she had small children to teach the next morning, went to the penultimate stop of Titus Andronicus’ most recent tour, and a great time was had by all.

Maybe we had a little too much fun. I thought Bud was going to be the first person to ever have “hangover” listed as his cause of death the next day when I saw him and he was having trouble walking upright. Perhaps wearing his younger brother’s elementary school graduation tshirt to the concert lead him to wrongfully believe that he could act in the manner of a 21 year old and all would be fun. I appreciated his wardrobe choice, though, as it made it really easy for me to later pick him out in the pictures I took of people moshing. I didn’t know people still moshed. Kids today.

Other than making fun of my parents for wearing earplugs through the whole concert, my favorite part was this into to My Time Outside The Womb. Apologies in advance for how loudly I scream through most of it. Patrick goes “My brother and sister are here…” and I feel the need to yell “YEAH, WE ARE!!!” at the top of my lungs, just in case anyone thought he might be lying.

Titus Andronicus at Maxwells- October 09- Family Intro from Cristin on Vimeo.

Unrelated, But Awesome: I’m finally reading Graceling by Kristin Cashore  well after the vast majority of the book-reading public had determined that it was awesome, and–to the surprise of no one except maybe me–I am obsessed with it. This only comes as a surprise because books about lady warriors in far away lands are usually so not my jam; despite that whole Medieval Literature kick I went on in college, I could never get into books of this bent because I just find myself thinking “Looks like SOMEone read Mists Of Avalon one too many times, ‘MIRite?” even though I’m totally not one to talk since I once voluntarily undertook an assignment to write a tale for one of the travelers mentioned in the Canterbury Tale’s prologue who doesn’t get a chance to rap in Chaucer’s version. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stories of feudal systems, etc etc. Anyway. I am loving this novel. It’s totally making me rethink my Don’t Read Books With Frontmatter That Includes Maps Of Imaginary Lands rule. And if that one goes– what’s next? Will it be time to dismiss my Nothing I Can’t Comfortably Take On The Subway rule?

When I was in high school, I did not have what one might call a complete emotional tool box for handling difficult situations. I reacted to anything adverse in one of two ways: Hate Someone, or Cry. As you can imagine, I was kind of an emotional nightmare throughout my teen years. There was one particularly bad episode that I can’t place on a timeline except to say that it was back before my dad had completely given up on Trying To Make Me Act Like A Normal Human, because he tried to talk me down from it with a story about light bulbs. He was having a particularly awful day once and didn’t know how he was going to make anything better and didn’t know where to start, so he walked around the house and changed all of the light bulbs and then everything felt more manageable because he had accomplished something. I’m sure at the time I made some comment about how my life was exponentially harder than HIS or ANYONE’S, EVER and that he couldn’t expect to UNDERSTAND MY PAIN, but I think about the light bulb story all the time. Whenever I start to really freak out about something, one of the only ways I can shut off the tiny hyperactive Cristins that live in the panic room in my head is by telling myself to just find one light bulb, metaphorical or physical, to change, and that I’ll take it from there. It always works. Beyond the light bulb trick, the only other thing that calms me down is looking at bookshelves in the Ikea catalog, so in that regard, Evil Mopey Teenage Cristin was right– it is kind of hard to be me.

There was a night a few weeks ago where I showed up at The Boyfriend’s in a bug panic that was approaching Defcon 7. Usually I’m all smiles and hilarity when I get there– last week, I decided I didn’t want to stop at home first, so I just went to The Gap after work and bought alternatives to the outfit I was currently wearing to put on the next day, and was struck by how hard this is. I got to his apartment and was like “This shouldn’t have been difficult. The Gap should have some kind of sleepover widget available that tells you what shirt and underpants to buy for the pants that you currently have on, and they should be able to tailor it to tomorrow’s weather.” Before I was even halfway through my widget idea, he interrupted me and said “I know exactly where you’re going. There should be a store where they have entire outfits by size and you can wear them without ironing.” Which threw me off the widget track for awhile… because isn’t that EVERY store? Seriously, where has he been shopping all this time that has made him think that having acceptable clothes arranged by size is something to aspire to in a retail environment?? I laughed for like 20 minutes.

But not during The Bug Panic– there was no laughter there. I freaked out for a good ten minutes, announced I was going to take a shower, and then freaked out in the shower for another ten minutes. When The Boyfriend came home from buying the wine that I demanded he go out and get so that I could numb myself with alcohol, I was meticulously drying and straightening my hair, almost strand by strand. “Why are you doing your hair at 11 at night when you’re just going to fall asleep on it?” he asked me, because that is what a sane person would ask when confronted with a crazy person doing what I was doing. “I’m changing light bulbs,” I told him. “Huh?” he said, and this became one of the many times where The Boy’s slight hearing impairment totally worked in my favor. I have to repeat myself a lot, and it’s never bothered me because it gives me this automatic do-over that, let’s be frank, I could really use. I don’t ever think before I say something, and every time he says “What was that?” I get a second chance at not being a completely terrible girlfriend and at hiding from him all of the reasons he should be afraid of me. Like the light bulb comment.

“I need to be in control of something,” I told him, making a gesture in his direction with my flat iron that I now realize was probably more menacing than I had intended. “I like to be in control of things, and right now I am in control of nothing, and I have decided to control my hair.”

So that’s where I am right now. Changing light bulbs and/or compulsively flat ironing my hair until I can sleep comfortably in my apartment again.

Unrelated, But Awesome: Hey, remember Mr. Brightside? It’s still awesome even though none of us have thought about it for years. All of the sudden, all I can do on the subway in the morning is listening to this song and the Miley Cyrus “Party In The USA” song where she talks about Jay-Z. But I don’t want Mr. Brightside to suffer by a Miley Cyrus association (or Jay-Z for that matter). It’s awesome all by itself.

Unrelated, But Awesome: If someone were to make a video of what I do at work all day you would promptly want to die after watching it because you’d be so bored of staring at Excel, unless the video crew happened to stop by on the day of the Halloween party or something, which might be vaguely interesting/ horrifying to nonPublishing people, but probably not.

However, videos of what Little Brother Peej does at work are completely awesome, regardless of what day you take for filming.

Unrelated, But Awesome: My mom has this Thing (as, I would imagine, nearly all mothers do) about Knowing Where Her Children Are At All Times, Even Though Said Children Are Self-Sustaining Adults. I know this sounds like I’m complaining, but I promise I’m not– I think it’s kind of nice that someone (other than certain members of the state and federal government tasked with monitoring the output from my electronic ankle monitor) is always so concerned with my whereabouts. She is equally concerned with movements on both a macro (“So at what time, exactly, does your plane land in Chicago?”) and micro (“So you’re going to be taking the subway to Target, then?”) level. I’m sure when I was in high school and afraid to drive on the highway for a few years and thus confined to the 25 MPH streets of Glen Rock, that was pretty fantastic for her. The fact that two of her children picked careers that make it virtually impossible to even know what country they’re in has done nothing to quell this tracking impulse– if anything, it’s only gotten stronger, to the point where I think she would consider getting us drunk over Christmas (like that’ll be so hard to accomplish) and then having devices implanted in the backs of our necks that would allow her to watch our every move and, possibly, follow us around using some kind of app on her laptop like she’s playing The Sims, except with no control, even when we do things she doesn’t approve of, like eat cookies for dinner or fail to take other peoples’ feelings into consideration. She doesn’t want to impose or involve herself, she just needs to KNOW where we are. Like I said, it’s pretty cute.

As you can guess, it’s relatively easy to keep track of where I am at all times. I spent roughly 9 hours a day in an office building, and the rest of my time is spent at home on my couch watching old episodes of MTV’s True Life and google stalking people I don’t like. The Boys are much harder to nail down. Mom prints PJ’s tour schedule off of the band’s MySpace page   and posts it next to her wall calendar, and she keeps track of her eldest mainly through, as I understand it, communication with his wife and 2 year old daughter, both of whom are easier to get useful information out of than Bud himself. Heyo! But, seriously.

I called my mom from the Miami airport en route to the cruise we did over labor day (Did I mention I went on a cruise? I totally did, with my fellow yahoos Kate, Katie, Maggie and Kyle. It was ridiculous and awesome even if I did, as Webmaster Kyle likes to say “spend most of it sleeping.” This is a fairly accurate statement– I do not have what you might call “sea legs” and when the boat moved, it made me want to either throw up or go to bed, so in order to avoid doing the first one, I did the second one. A lot. Then I tried the seasickness pills that they were handing out willy-nilly and learned that that stuff gets you high as a kite. It was like the first time I took benadryl during my brief cat allergy and found that it makes me do stuff like lay on the floor and go “My legs feel heavy! Do your legs ever just feel SO HEAVY?” Anyway, cruises are weird, because it’s like being at a days-long bar mitzvah, surrounded by strangers. I think because we are Jaded New Yorkers, we didn’t quite understand the Cruise Mentality. For most of the rest of this boat, they were there to have The Fucking Time Of Their Lives, an attitude we didn’t feel the need to match since we maintain a pretty high level of Fucking Awesomeness at home in Brooklyn. From a cultural anthropological standpoint, cruises are fascinating. There were people wearing ball gowns taking formal posed pictures. Weirdos. Anyway. All I ever want to do on vacation is read and sleep, so this was a pretty good on in my book. It was also proof that I can go anywhere with my friends and they will Create Awesome. So next time, we don’t have to take a cruise and have someone mandate what our fun will be, we can just go to an abandoned cabin somewhere and we’ll probably wind up doing the same exact thing which, in this case, wound up being playing an epic game of Clue and then planning out the different elements of the Brooklyn Clue game that we want to make, or outlining the plot points of a romance novel set among the cruise staff). When I called my mom from Florida she immediately told me “I bought a giant map of the world. I’m going to move you to Florida now.” She has the world map hanging in her office upstairs, and she has pins for each of her children. Whenever one of us goes somewhere, she moves our pin, and then when we go somewhere else, she moves the pin there. (Another one from Webmaster Kyle by way of Mitch Hedberg: “Someone better go to the top two corners first, otherwise the map is going to fall down”).

The list of Adorable Things Done By My Mom is long and distinguished, but I think this really takes the cake. This is well on the way to becoming The Default Story I Tell To New Friends When Describing How Cute My Mom Is, just like how I use the story about the time Vicki helped me dye my hair blue and then laughed and took pictures of my dad’s horrified face when I took off my hat and revealed it to him as The Default Story Of Why My Stepmom Is One Of My Best Friends, and just like how I use the story of how my parents put my SAT scores on a balloon as The Default Story Of Why I Sometimes Wake Up In The Middle Of The Night Panicked About My Lack Of Academic Achievement As An Adult. When I told the cruise crew about this Maggie immediately went “Like Mrs. Weasley!” because of the clock that the Weasleys’ mom has that shows where each of them is at any time.

Since I had Intense Middle Child Syndrome before PJ even blessed me with the title of Middle Child, one of my first thoughts was, naturally, how bad this whole map thing was going to make me look. “But my pin is never going to go anywhere!” I wailed. “That’s not true!” mom said. “Your pin was in Chicago when you were in Chicago. And then in Minneapolis when you were there.” This would have made me feel better, except that it easily encompassed the sum total of my travels over the last 2 years in one breath, and both of those trips were for work, and to cities I go to for work all the time. “My pin is going to be so lame! The other pins will make fun of it!” I kept going. “It’s going to rust in its Brooklyn hole!”

Which is not such a bad fate, as far as Map Pin Life goes, I guess.

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.

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.

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:

All that endless positive energy is a bit peculiar for a band with such routinely depressing lyrics — Stickles looks bizarrely happy when he croons, “You met the world naked and screaming/And that’s how you leave it.” But if the band truly believes such thoughts, you couldn’t detect it from their set, which was bouncy and hedonistic and utterly devoid of angst. ~Austin 360

By the time Patrick Stickles arrived on stage at Club Deville last night, the Titus Andronicus frontman sounded like he had played far more than five shows over the past four days. His voice was hoarse, he acted a few notches below cranky, and he appeared to have aged five years since I saw Titus open for Los Campesinos! in February. ~AV Club.

Titus Andronicus was a very loud band. The music and words were so loud that my ears hurt, but people told me that’s a good thing. There were three guys with guitars, and though the guitars were different in appearance, they seemed to be making similar sounds. There was one man with a beard who was yelling lyrics directly into a microphone. I couldn’t make out everything he was saying but one thing was “sleep in the dirt” and later, he said the word “clock” twice. This man got very sweaty as the songs progressed, but no one asked him if he needed water. ~New Yorker cartoon lounge

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.

I’ve been keeping up with Peej via google alert as he’s on this tour, which has gotten more and more hilarious as he zigzags his way back to the east coast– this one from the Chicago Tribune popped up this weekend:

It was comforting to hear Stickles talk, because he spent the better part of the quintet’s impressive opening set screaming as though he were on fire.

That’s my boy. And here he is a few days before that, talking about everyone’s favorite Superbowl Crotch-shotter:  “Most of the guys in the band are not big fans of Springsteen, but I like the way he writes songs that are rousing celebrations in the face of hopelessness,” the singer says. “A lot of Springsteen songs acknowledge that not everything is going to work out fine, but the human spirit can still triumph in the face of failure. That’s a beautiful thing for we humans to understand, and I wouldn’t mind at all if our songs could do the same thing for people.”

Unrelated, But Awesome: I refuse to play Guitar Hero, but I am totally going to crochet this scarf. I just need a screen shot of whatever the Awesomest Part of the Awesomest song is.

Unrelated, Not Awesome: The #1 most emailed story from the Times is about how bankers are freaking out about having to survive on Only Five Hundred Thousand Dollars A Year In New York, thus making the #1 most emailed comment among people who work in publishing Cry Me A Fucking River You Assholes.

You should all go buy it. Even those of you who bought it the first time. In case you think I’m biased towards the record, here are what some people who don’t have the same last name as PJ have to say about it of late, plus some old favorites of mine:

The Airing of Grievances also recalls Springsteen, the Replacements, Ted Leo, younger peers such as the Gaslight Anthem, and, for their overmodulated rave-ups, Neutral Milk Hotel. The allusions, musical and lyrical, are fun, but they’re only footnotes to Titus Andronicus’ galloping, smart and passionate anthems. ~The Philadelphia Inquirer

Titus Andronicus walks its emo/punk tightrope with a droll sense of humor and abundant literary flair — the band’s name comes from a Shakespeare play, the title of its album from an episode of “Seinfeld,” and the lyrics touch on everything from Camus to gonzo journalist Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. ~ NJ Star-Ledger

As for their frontman, he has a tendency to gabble and garble his words, like a mad drunk who can barely form an intelligible sentence but does so fast, and as a consequence almost dares the listener to assume he’s a true urchin-poet… he appears throughout Titus Andronicus’ debut album The Airing of Grievances to be using one of those devices that Julian Casablancas employs to make him sound permanently like a renegade cop shouting at bank robbers during a siege. ~ The Guardian. (Called a “mad drunk” by an Englishman? How many of us can say that? Congrats, Peej!)

The music makes it easy to dismiss the true depth of Titus Andronicus. Stickles is the poet laureate of counterculture, smothering each song with insightful prose. He justifies his anger on the lead track by reasoning, “People will tell you that if you don’t love your neighbor then you don’t love God / but no god of mine would put light in such unrighteous eyes.” ~A College student at the University of Madison- Wisconsin who is getting a care package of cookies from me.

“Things have meaning when we assign meaning to them,” Stickles says. “You know what I’m saying? Existential revolt.” ~ Paste Magazine

Getting in touch with Stickles for an interview is an experience in and of itself: With no cell phone, reaching him directly is a maze of delayed emails, publicist contacts and, at the last minute, a call to Graetzer’s phone for a cellular handoff at the given moment  (Ed Note: TRY BEING HIS SISTER)… Truth be told, The Airing of Grievances has been a long time coming. Like Stickles noted, indie rock sprang from the wreckage of the American punk underground, and, underneath all the superficial differences, the two styles still share similarities. ~Aversion (Kidding aside, this is a great interview, and Peej says a lot of awesome and wildly intelligent stuff about music that make me feel guilty for having downloaded the new Kelly Clarkson song this morning)

I never want to go to New Jersey, or even pass through it. If my ears tell me right, everyone from there is so pinned down by middling working class minutiae that they have to pick up guitars and write songs about it. The unquestionable highlight of New Jersey’s natives Titus Andronicus’s eponymous album cut is the finale where they’ve become so overwhelmed by frustration that they can’t think of more lyrics and keep repeating “Your life is over,” ensuring once and for all that no one will ever mistake New Jersey for the sunshine state. ~Someone from Illinois

And the sizzling, storage-locker production makes it all sound like a cage match. Which it is — between a band and a damaged world. ~Rolling Stone

Tour Dates and pictures of Peej rocking out in a sweater.

Related, And Awesome: I’ve probably mentioned before the relationship Older Brother Bud has with YouTube– it’s his favorite thing, ever. I frequently get texts from him that say “I finished YouTube,” which usually mean he’s stranded somewhere for work and is hanging out with his laptop watching every video ever made, ever. He recently found this one, of a man and his infant daughter dancing around to PJ’s music. I am 99.9% sure that we don’t know/ are not related to this baby.

Also, here’s some slow motion ping pong set to Titus Andronicus. As you do.

And I love this one, a whole ton:

Fake movie trailers get me every time!

Unrelated, But Awesome: Subway Map of Publishing Trends in 2008. Probably not what you’re picturing, but spend a few minutes looking at it anyway. Interesting visual.

I get roughly 85 email daily newsletters about publishing (nerds rule!), and today one of them (Shelf Awareness– heyo, book puns!) had this picture from the author’s on sale date signing, and it makes me terribly happy. I reserve Terribly Happy for anything that has people lining up for children’s books, but the fact that these people are doing it for a book that isn’t about vampires makes my heart grow three sizes (no offense, Stephanie).

Yay!

Unrelated, But Awesome: How have none of you brought to my attention that The Onion does a wrap up of the year’s worst band names? I’m in a fight with all of you who kept this from me! Also, along the righthand side, if you sort the recent music reviews by grade, PJ is right up near the top. Ahead of David Byrne. And Coldplay. And Neil Young. Just sayin’.