…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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.