Guys. For real. Glee is the best show on earth.

• Todays mail: april issue of Seventeen, AARP membership card. Both with my name on them. 27 is such a confusing age.
• Retiring the dark nail polish is my way of welcoming spring.
• If God actually does bless me every time he’s instructed to do so by men on the street of sunset park, I’ll do just fine.
• I have to watch 7 hours of battlestar galactica today to stay on pace for the finale. CAN SHE DO IT???
• Another day, another coworker freaked out by how much I look like Cillian Murphy.
• HOW HAS NO ONE EVER TOLD ME ABOUT SHRIMP ON A TREADMILL BEFORE? http://tinyurl.com/2468wf
• I have trouble thinking of it as lo mein because I hold it in such high regard.

And so on. You can see why this type of venue is attractive to me. You can also see why I was so bad at improv, where they tried to train me out of my one-liner habit, and failed miserably. I spent most of my classes delivering missives like those listed above and then strolling confidently off the stage, leaving my scene-mates there to flounder.

I can’t get enough of Twitter. “I read on Twitter…” has become my new “There was that Times article…” or “I heard on NPR…” And it just keeps getting better– today BoingBoing pointed out this profile:

Yes! Yes! Someone is twittering as a Mime! And it’s funny, because that’s the LAST person you’d think would have a Twitter profile! And that’s not even the best part! The best part is the comments on the BoingBoing Post  that say things like “Mock him now, but in a few hours when his lifeless corpse is found slumped inside of an invisible box, who will laugh? NO ONE!”

Man. I love Twitter. Should you like to follow me, you can do so here: http://twitter.com/ThtsWhatSheRead

Unrelated, But Awesome:WorkFriend Jen recently brought this AMNY article about how Sunset Park is eventually going to get awesome to my attention, and I love her for it. I love living in Sunset Park, but I think that might largely be to to the fact that I have a really kick-ass apartment all to myself on a train line where I randomly run into my closest friends all the time, including when we’re all headed to the same party/ movie/ night of playing the Battlestar Galactica game. I acknowledge that Sunset Park has a lot of growing to do, but I love it immensely for what it is already. (I will admit, though, that my cheery attitude towards my neighbors might be soured once the weather gets nicer. Before I moved there I was warned that the men on the streets had a lot to say about women passing by, and I was so ready to handle this that when I moved in November and it didn’t happen, I became genuinely insulted. I mean, come on, Sunset Park. There’s a 6 foot tall white chick doing her laundry in her sorority sweatshirt and you have NOTHING to say about it? Then it got warmer and all of the conversations that were apparently being held indoors about women on the street were moved to the front steps. Truth be told, this is still in the “Fun/ Hilarious” zone for me and hasn’t yet crossed over into “Creepy/ Pepper Spray Buying” territory, and I do a lot of waving/ blowing kisses to my new boyfriends. I’m sure this won’t get me in trouble at all).

It helps that Jordan lives exactly two blocks from me- we are geographically closer than we were growing up in Glen Rock, which is only 2 miles across at its widest point. When AM New York pointed out a taco place within site of his apartment, I decided to bring it to his attention.

Cristin: We should go to this Tacos 2004 place. I like that they haven’t updated the name in 5 years.

Jordan: Yeah, except I heard someone got shot there once. But really- what are the chances it happens again? Let’s go!

… and they picked claymation as their medium.

To that end, I have three alarm clocks. Because my REM cycles are always one big clusterfuck, I go in and out of sleep as many times as possible in the half hour or so before I actually have to make my feet hit the floor and stagger, zombie-style, into the shower. The only way to keep me awake on the first couple of tries is to immediately make my environment as uncomfortable for a sleeper as possible, and in a way that I can’t adjust from a laying-down position. I basically need a Mousetrap-esque contraption to physically kick me out of bed and then fold my bed up to a tiny square so I can’t get back into it. Until someone invents one of those, I’m sticking with the three alarm clocks, all of which are staggered to go off at different times and attached to clocks that have had their times adjusted in different ways so that I can never quite tell what time it is exactly unless I go into the living room and look at the DVR clock. So yes, this means that if you sleep in my apartment on a school night, starting at 6:35 you’ll hear a rotating choir of my cell phone alarm, Z100 from my clock radio, and my iPod from my iPod deck, and you still won’t be able to tell what time it actually is unless you turn on NY1, and I probably still won’t get out of bed for another hour. Sounds fun, right? The line forms to the left, gentlemen. (I’m kidding, Dad. Boys aren’t allowed to stay over in my apartment. Not even if they get snowed in after Bible Study. Besides, the bearskin rug scares them away).

The iPod deck is a new addition to this insanity and I only recently figured out how to work it. I thought that I could just leave it in there on Pause and the alarm clock would wake it up at the proper time, but after a few days of that not working I actually read the instructions for the first time (did I learn NOTHING from Jumanji??) and realized that I’m supposed to put the iPod in on repeat and leave it playing all night with the clock power off, and then the clock wakes itself up at the proper time and blasts Kelly Clarkson or whathaveyou at me at 6:42 in the morning. Here is my issue: This sounds unhealthy for my cute little rrrPod (that’s what pirates call their mp3 players. Duh). This iPod deck (which is not an iHome or an iWakeUpLateEveryDay or iSomethingElseAppleMakes, it’s just another appliance I bought based on it’s Cuteness {see also: DVD player I owned for 6 weeks before replacing with a bluray} and I have no idea who made it or what their major malfunction is) is asking me to have the damn thing play all night every night. And yeah, it’s plugged in and all, so it’s not killing the battery, but I have to assume that you only get so many songs in the life of an iPod (this, I think, is an outgrowth from the misconception I had as a little kid that you were literally only born with so many breaths and once you used them all up you died, which lead me to be a freaky slow-breathing 6 year old for awhile), and mine is going on 4 years of service. If it bites it I won’t be terribly sad because I’ll have a reason to buy an iPod touch, but I don’t believe in breaking things just to get new versions. I tried that with PJ when he was a baby and look where that got me.

So: Is this bad for the rrrPod, People Who Know Things? Assuage my guilt! I don’t want to set the poor little guy on a death march. I keep imagining the Trail of Tears littered with Miley Cyrus songs. What a way to go.

Also, this is my Wake Up playlist. Of course it is.

Titus Andronicus/ Titus Andronicus

Ted Leo/ Bleeding Powers

Beyonce/ Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)

Black Kids/ I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You

Mountain Goats/ No Children

Unrelated, But Awesome: Remember two years ago when I became obsessed with The Wizard Of Oz and read all of those Munchkin Memoirs? Yeah, that was fun for all of us, wasn’t it? Well, now I’m obsessed with Walt Disney. I think this is part of my fascination with Medieval Times and colonial williamsburg and other places-within-places, and am sure that, someday, some therapist will tell me that this is a very obvious form of escapism for me, worse even than how I spent 9 hours yesterday watching Battlestar Galactica and did not leave my apartment once. Sorry, Dr King. I’ve read (parts of) this (extremely long) biography of Walt and during a recent departmental lunch found myself explaining to coworkers how I did some research during college into what it would take for me to get a job as a costume character at Disney, given that I had so much experience being inside those giant death traps from working at a kids’ bookstore and dressing up like Clifford and Spot and Lyle Lyle Crocodile (I have pictures. I carry them with me in my day planner. Just ask to see them!). Turns out it would take me being about 5 inches shorter, so I abandoned that dream but kept the Disney obsession. This weekend I read Mouse Tales, which is a seriously thorough look at all of the behind-the-scenes action at Disneyland in California, and it blew my mind. It’s not a puff piece and it’s not slander and it doesn’t seem agendized at all (he says multiple times that Disney had no  part in the book and it wasn’t officially associated with them in any way), it’s just fascinating. He starts with the construction of the park and goes straight through the plans for Disney World decades later and interviewed hundreds of former Cast Members about their experiences working at the park. And you find out that Walt had a series of apartments around Disneyland and would often sleep there, and how the Morse code beeping at the beginning of the Frontierland train ride is spelling out Walt’s opening day dedication address for the park. And Henry Kissinger used to go there when he was National Security Advisor and just, like, wander around to clear his head. At one point he got cold and asked for a jacket so they gave him a Disney security jacket and then guests started coming up and asking him for directions to the restrooms. He was so excited about being able to help and not getting recognized that they let him run a popcorn stand during his later visits. This book is insanely fun. Plus, we just saw a book at preSales that’s about a town based on Celebration, Florida, that creepy/ fascinating planned community where they make sure the sun is always shining and no one is ever unhappy and that manuscript made me re-obsessed with Celebration, so now I think I’m going to dig into this one  next.

When I went to college, I was genuinely freaked out to learn that there were people who not only had never experienced Medieval Times, they had never even heard of it. This was my first lesson in the Great Big World beyond my hometown– the other one, which I just recounted fondly at work the other day in a conversation about cheerful childhood ignorance, was how I really thought that the religious population of the country was mirrored in my hometown, that we were somehow a perfectly representative sampling even though nearly every single person I knew was catholic, with a handful of jewish people thrown in. When I got to college and people would be dressed up on Sunday mornings I’d go “Oh, are you going to mass?” and they’d go “No, I’m going to church,” and I’d be all “Same difference, idiot,” before eventually making the shift from “how weird, you’re not catholic” to “I’m weird, ’cause I’m catholic.” But I never got used to the idea of growing up without Medieval Times. What did those people do for class field trips that are completely unrelated to any of the state approved curriculum? How did they learn that eating with their hands is not only okay, it’s awesome?

I have a weird obsession with reenactments. I didn’t even realize that so many parts of my weirdness fell under this category until jeremy pointed me towards an episode of This American Life that I missed called Simulated Worlds in which they bring a Medieval Lit professor to Medieval Times to see what he has to say about the whole thing. I am in touch with exactly one professor from undergrad, which I think is probably one more than most people, and more than enough for me considering how much awesome Dr. C possesses on his own. He’s one of the reasons I wound up obsessed with Middle English in college (don’t judge) and nearly everything I remember from actual classes came from him. So I almost fell over listening to this because I was picturing Dr. C at Medieval Times instead of wearing a Red Sox sweatshirt and railing against the Yankees as he was when I saw him on his last visit to NYC. The radio piece also describes a phenomenon that I thought was only specific to the trip that Julie, my mom and I took last weekend in which, when in the presence of people so wholeheartedly reenacting something ridiculous, you immediately become incredibly awkward. When the bar wench handed me a Diet Pepsi I half-curtsied, and then whipped my head around to make sure no one had noticed.

The other Simulated Worlds that they touch on, let it be said, are just as good if not better than the Medieval Times piece, and they are the parts of the show that made me realize I could group all of these strange fixations I have under one large, extremely weird umbrella. Before I thought I was just some random chick who happened to love museum dinosaur displays, Medieval Times, and Graceland and who randomly thought that going to school in Colonial Williamsburg would be the coolest thing EVER and who got really, really inappropriately upset when she found out she had missed the recreation of the Battle of Brooklyn this summer in Greenwood Cemetery. And I figured that dragging my mom to all of those frontier museums  this summer was just some latent Oregon Trail fascination that I hadn’t yet killed by downloading the Apple IIGS version for my laptop. No, no. Now I’m pretty sure that the real obsession is fake worlds– anything where anyone is forced to stay in character around people acting anachronistically. And really, how could you not love this:

The knight we were assigned to was the red knight– supposedly the most bloodthirsty of all the knights, though he did totally bite it in the first round of jousting. Of all the times I’ve ever been to Medieval Times, I don’t recall ever having so much trouble following the “plot” as I did during this round. There was a princess and her father in law but the prince was missing, and the green knight was the bad knight. Then people would fight, and it would be awesome. Then there was something about a falcon, which I didn’t totally understand. But then they would fight, and it was awesome. I think Medieval Times is basically like porn– you don’t really have to follow the storyline, because the only reason people watch is for the action. Julie and I spent a lot of time wondering out loud if you could rent Medieval Times out for your wedding reception. The food was pretty fantastic.

Immediately to our left was the Green Knight’s section, populated in part by a group of dudes in their 30s who were acting like they were at a Jets game and not, say, watching fake revelry at 4pm on a rainy saturday. Within 5 minutes of us being seated they started The Wave. They were the most cheerfully enthusiastic group of adult men I have ever seen at Medieval Times. About halfway through the tournament the master of ceremonies dude read out the celebration list so that all of the Birthday Kids could cheer, and I was just about to doze off when he read “…and Michael is here celebrating his bachelor party,” and the Green Knight section went nuts, high-fiving each other and cheering. “you could be anywhere today, and yet you’re here, watching men wearing tights play with sticks,” he continued drolly into the microphone, which would have made my day if I hadn’t already been having an effing fantastic time.

The first thing I did after listening to the Simulated Worlds audio (it’s on iTunes, I would never steer you wrong– you need this in your life) was email Sorority Sister Cathy because she’s my favorite History Buff Who Has Fun With It (proof!) and because I needed to talk through these revelations with someone. I’ve never considered myself that into American History beyond trying to win the Name The Presidents In Chronological Order game we play in the car en route to the Stickles Family Christmas Eve every year so I couldn’t figure out why I suddenly wanted to buy books about civil war reenactments off of Amazon. “Turns out that while I like history, I love pageantry,” I told cathy in the email, which I think is true. At one point I was scanning through stations looking for The Weather Channel and wound up watching the Hooters pageant and the next time I knew it was an hour later and I was thinking about becoming an occupational therapist because so many of those bouncy girls were into it.

Far from telling me that I should maybe take it down a notch lest I become one of those terrible people in cocktail party settings who can only talk about how while she was shocked at the first season of the Real World where all of the housemates were younger than her, she was truly shocked to find out that John Wilkes Booth was younger than her when he assassinated the president and even though she has no similar goals it’s still a reminder that she should probably be attempting to accomplish SOMEthing in her life and did you know that there’s a 12 hour bus tour that traces Wilkes’ escape route and they book up a year and a half in advance, Cathy has open encouraged me to Go On With My Bad Self in all of this. So now I am reading a lot of Sarah Vowell and thinking about how natural history museums are put together and wanting to know why this obsession with reenacting history seems exclusive to the country that has the least of it and looking to come up with a time when Cathy and I can join forces at the Mutter Museum to see the pieces of Lincoln’s skull on display there (and also because I am similarly, though unrelatedly, fascinated by conjoined twins. PS in the Mutter Museum gift shop you can get a shot glass with famous conjoined twins Chang and Eng that says “Make Mine A Double”) and I am going to be completely impossible to live with because of it. Good luck, mom.

Here’s what we’re going back to. Also, I love this picture from Joe’s wedding two years ago, because I have no idea what I could be trying to do:

Are we whistling? Am I passing a secret thought through Emily’s ear that she is then passing on herself to someone very short and just off camera? I mean, really. Also am reminded that I should find occasion to wear that necklace more often, though it’s a wee bit too scary for the office or the 8 malls within 2 miles of my mom’s house, and those my most frequented haunts these days.

While I was looking for pictures to bring to my haircutting lady (who is back in my hometown– I just can’t bring myself to cross over. I have no problem changing doctors, but for some reason hairdressers and shoe repair people are like my flesh and blood and leaving them makes me want to cry) I ran into the album from my 25th birthday, where it looks like I also had short hair, but not quite as short as I want it to be. But the pictures are still kind of awesome:

I think I was mostly excited to see this picture because Cousins Danny and Erin and I are getting together tonight for Little Brother Peej’s show in the ‘boken, which promises to be ridiculously fun. His shows are always fun, but Erin and Danny could make picking out life insurance policies fun and I’m going to try to videotape a lot of it. Oh, and, all of our mommies and siblings are also coming to take in some local indie punkness. I wish I still fit into the PJ’s BIG SISTER tshirt they got me when he was born but I’ve sadly outgrown most of my wardrobe from when I was 4.

Cousin Erin is getting hitched in April, and she amazingly/ foolishly picked danny and I to be her maids of honor. I have done nothing to help prepare for this wedding other than send erin pictures of acid-wash denim minidresses demanding that she allow me to wear that in her wedding. Danny is working on a rap for the wedding toast. We were probably the biggest mistake Er’s ever made in her life (until she marries CJ, that is. Heyo! I kid, I kid. Welcome to the family!).

Awww, it’s book club! How is it possible that I get nostalgic for pictures from 2006?

One more, just for how anxious we’re apparently making Jordan here:

Until that happens, I’m going to continue to explore all means of distraction during the 80 minutes it takes me to get to my office. Usually I get by on This American Life, but yesterday I managed to listen to the same Rihanna song on repeat for the entire time. I don’t know what happened, it was like I had a stroke or something. I thought about who would most appreciate this and narrowed it down to Cousin Erin (from a possible pool of 1). Via text:

Cristin (7:09 am): New favorite game- how many times can I listen to Rihanna’s Take a Bow while waiting for the train?

Erin (7:13 am): 3 tops

Cristin (7:14 am): I’m already up to 6. I love this. She’s so angry!

And she is (really. Read the lyrics, and watch the video. This will be important later). And I couldn’t get over it (obviously, if I listened to the song close to 20 times before I even punched in at work).

Via Email:

From: Cristin
To: Erin

I listened to this song all the way to work. That’s over an hour of Rihanna singing the. Same. Song. As a result, I have some pretty excellent ideas for the music video-way better than the ones she actually went with, according to my YouTube perusal this morning. I know you can’t watch video at work, but I need you to really familiarize yourself with the lyrics before I can take you, scene by scene, through my vision.

I can’t figure out why I’m so into Women Scorned music (yes, I think this should be an actual genre-just like Thug Love {eg, Put It On Me and all those songs that were bad when we were in college) considering I’ve never actually been one myself. But this song, Irreplaceable, Since U Been Gone… I can’t get enough. It’s a sickness.

PS In continuing with my goal to not blow dry my hair until September, you should know that I have a serious 80s ‘fro right now. I look like (cousin) Traci’s prom picture.

PPS I already know that this (or, the follow up with my music video
plan) will be the best email you receive all day. I’m sorry to tell you that the rest of your Monday is going to be an enormous letdown.

When I got home last night, the Peej was taking advantage of our mom’s giant inventory of cable channels, watching Rattle and Hum on VH1 Classics. I convinced him that it was a good idea to watch the MTV reality show where they search for the next girl to play Elle Woods on Broadway (how this show isn’t called “Give ‘em Elle!” I will never understand) even though I’m confused about why they chose Haylie Duff to be the host. “Why don’t they just get her to play Elle Woods?” Peej asked. Genius. Haylie Duff kept mentioning her own Broadway career, which I was surprisingly unaware of. Wikipedia tells me she was in Hairspray (okay, who wasn’t), but even more fantastically, the entry opens by saying that Haylie is “best known for being the sister of Hilary Duff and her supporting role on 7th Heaven.” Someone put Haylie on suicide watch, doublequick. Anyway.

I launched into my carefully crafted music video idea for peej and, after asking me if I had done a little “wake n bake” that morning prior to getting on the train (I had to ask what that meant, and apparently it involves waking up and immediately getting stoned. Good to know), I told Peej about how I find myself loving all these songs where women tell their cheating men to “get gone,” in the words of Rihanna, even though I’ve never been in their position (if this sentence isn’t tempting fate, I don’t know what is. I can’t wait for my next boyfriend to cheat on me with an NYU undergrad. If you’re reading this, bucko, then trust me– you do not want to go there), and Peej explained “Aristotle would say that you enjoy them because they allow you to experience that set of emotions in a safe environment,” driving the final nail into the coffin of my term as Smartest Stickles Child.

From: Erin

To: Cristin

I like Take a Bow, but I don’t love it yet. The reason I didn’t immediately love it is because she sings then talks… For example: You’re so ugly when you cry. Please. For some reason I don’t like that.

From: Cristin

To: Erin

I understand your concerns about the song, but I think interjecting spoken words into it actually adds a humanizing element to what she’s trying to convey. She’s using sarcasm as a defense mechanism, but by viewing her boyfriend’s betrayal as something of a play she’s also allowing herself to view it from a third person standpoint which, I’d assume, lessens the blow.

My video concept borrows from what we saw with No Diggity, but with more of a soulful element. It involves a series of alternating scenes, all showing the jilted Rihanna and the lover who cuckholded her. In one set of scenes, much like in the actual video, Rihanna is inside her palatial estate, peering out the window to the sidewalk below, where her former gentleman caller is making a variety of attempts at expressing his regret. He is surrounded by flowers, and is lighting a series of tea lights that spell out either “I Love You” or “I’m Sorry,” depending on what the focus groups prefer. Rihanna, however, is having none of that.

 

The OTHER series of scenes take place in a darkened lounge, where one might enjoy a lusty cabaret act. Rihanna sits alone at a round table for two– she is the only audience member. As she croons her theater/ relationship metaphor, the velvet curtains part and two marionettes– think Sound of Music’s Lonely Goatherd meets Team America World Police– begin to go through the motions of courtship on stage (I also considered using ventriloquist dummies for this portion but wanted the puppets to be on stage alone). As we cut to and from Rihanna’s home withthe dramatic scene going on in her driveway, the puppets coyly meet and fall in love, and the male puppet kneels and proffers a diamond ring as the female puppet covers her mouth in surprise and joy, weeping. Back at her house, Rihanna removes a framed picture of her and a smiling young woman from the wall and smashes it against the floor while her former paramour arranges the candles outside into a heart, leading us to believe that the woman he strayed with was someone close to our heroine. Meanwhile, on stage, the puppets are going through their own breakup– though the male puppet begs and pleads, his exlover won’t listen, and she finally exits, strings taut, stage left, leaving him alone and dejected. The puppet raises his head to make eye contact with Rihanna in the audience, and she rises to her feet and turns away from him as the curtains close in front of him. As she walks, dejectedly but with determination, towards the camera, we notice that she’s wearing the exact same outfit as the female marionette whose love life we just watched crumble before our very eyes.

 

Back home, Rihanna closes her eyes and inhales deeply, then walks towards a small panel in her hallway and flips a switch, turning her lawn sprinklers on. The last thing we see if the heart-shaped arrangement of candles as their flames are doused.

You cannot even imagine how pleased I am with myself for coming up with this.

I’m hoping that all of these oddities are just my natural defense mechanisms keeping me from really loosing it about my intentional, and long-planned, homelessness. I’m also hoping that all of this can someday be put to good use for someone else, so if any of you are about to move, let me know, and I’ll give you my 27 point checklist of Things You Might Not Have Thought Of. For example: Did you refill and then transfer all of your prescriptions? Did you either go paperless or update your address on all of your bank accounts? Did you know that iTunes is smart enough to know when you do this, so the first time that you log into the iTunes store trying to download “Alone” by Heart after hearing it in the CVS below your apartment on the last day before you move out and having been almost moved to tears thinking about how effing awesome this song is when sung by either the originating artists or your college roommate at karaoke, iTunes will make you jump through about 80 different hoops to update your account so that it matches your newly updated bank account and you’ll have to think “How badly do I want this Heart song right now?” Enough to sign into my account online and remember that I had to use my mom’s address instead of my PO box because of some unexplained draconian address regulations that Chase has? (answer: Yes. Of Course). Also, did you think about what might happen when a crane accident makes a building collapse on your street an hour before your movers were due to show up?

Because I hadn’t. I thought Friday was another beautiful day in the neighborhood, but that was because I woke up in New Jersey that day and only found out what had happened when family members started calling me and spurring this conversation: Cristin: Hello? Family: Oh, thank god. I don’t have any family members in the 5 boroughs, which means that geographic urgency is not really something I have to deal with. They have no idea where anything is. I get phone calls about things that are 20 miles away, but I also get away with not having to reassure anyone about bad things happening within striking distance because no one really know what striking distance is. But they all know I lived on 91st street, and that was enough to freak everyone, myself included, out. Some were more concerned than others– I did a preemptive call to my dad to be all “Hey, still breathing, it’s cool” and he said “Good to hear. Listen, we’re having an issue with the turtles.” My dad and stepmom are babysitting their grand-turtles for the summer, and the mechanical failure of their tank filter is apparently more pressing than their only daughter potentially being buried under a pile of rubble. Which is understandable, to a certain degree, because those little bastards can really stink up a place in a matter of hours if the filter decides to strike for better benefits, but still. Multiple former gentlemen friends of mine checked in to make sure everything was fine, giving me that mushy “aw-they-don’t-want-me-dead!” feeling, but I suppose my dad just assumes that I can curse my way out of any situation and that he doesn’t have to worry about me as a result. Maybe they’ve just gotten used to being on Terror Alert Red with me for the last 4 years that I’ve been in the shit, but let’s put a disaster within 2 blocks of the war hero or the rock star and see if they can’t pick up the phone about that one. (On second thought: No, let’s not do that. For many reasons). In any event, I knew that just being Ball Of Stress Cristin on moving day probably wouldn’t even put me in the top 20% of People Having A Bad Day In My Neighborhood on a regular day, but on Friday it was no contest. It shouldn’t take tragedies to make you feel fortunate, but they certainly do a great job of it anyway.

One of my pet peeves is the phrase “only in new york!” because it’s only ever applied to things that truly suck, like the people on the subway who are screaming at nothing and may or may not be planning on stabbing you, or broker’s fees. Like how people are quick to say that rain on your wedding day or having a bird crap on you is good luck, when really that was just made up because everyone got sick of going “Wow. That totally sucks.” Since I’ve been home, though, I hear myself saying “never in new york” for dozens of unimportant things, things like my mom’s request that I hose down the patio furniture or sneezing 4 times in a row and realizing that I might have allergies that I never knew about since I was never around grass or trees long enough for them to pop up. But all of this Fish Out Of Water Goes Back Into Water That She Swam In For 18 Years business that I’ll be exaggerating for the purpose of internet humor for the next 2 months or so has come with an accompanying sense of calm that I’ve been missing for most of this year, one that’s allowed me to do routine things that have become impossibly hard over the last few months (like sleeping, which I’m no longer class valedictorian at). I’m sure all of this will evaporate tomorrow morning when I haul myself out of bed at 6:15 in order to ride a commuter train with way, way too many parents of friends and friends of parents and have to explain that I didn’t MOVE home, I’m just VISITING, I’m not bankrupt or a drug addict or pregnant or anything else that would make me NEED to be with my parents, this was a CHOICE, thankyouverymuch, and one I’m standing by at least until the first one of them starts quoting my brothers’ accolades as recited by my father on a nightly basis at the (lone) town bar.  If this is what it takes to make me settle back into myself, though–if it has to be a hammock and NJ Transit and being woken up by Peej stumbling home at 3 every night and the realization that I haven’t grown out of having road rage, it’s just been lying dormant, waiting for me to have to find a parking spot in Ridgewood on a Saturday in order to buy Sex & the City movie tickets for my mom and my aunt– then I’ll take it, no questions asked.