It’s like if the author of The Things They Carried watched a George Romero movie marathon and then wrote a cautionary tale about not repeating mistakes made during World War II with zombies instead of Nazis. ~ World War Z

——

It’s like a supreme court case designed to prove how wrong I’ve been about avoiding all books with maps of imaginary places in the front and/or a glossary of author-invented terms in the back, crossed with the shock therapy session I needed to stop blaming the fantasy genre for all those years I had to sell Paolini books. ~Graceling

——

It’s like reading a great Stephen King book but without the crushing weight of knowing that the author will certainly ruin it in the last 50 pages. ~Sharp Objects

—–

It’s like Long Day’s Journey Into Night but with blackberries. {Special guest contribution by little brother peej}

It’s like Woody Allen made a movie about my family and got James Thurber to consult on the script. ~This Is Where I Leave You

—–

It’s like he was watching a snuff film while reading Agatha Christie and thought that not only should those two be combined into a new literary genre but that he was exactly the man for the job. ~Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

—–

It’s like Heart of Darkness except I actually wanted to read it and was able to understand it.

It’s like Holes or Life of Pi or A Prayer For Owen Meany in that you already love it before you get to the ending and after you finish it you’re eternally jealous of people who haven’t read it yet and still don’t know that they’re about to get their minds blown. ~State of Wonder

—–

It’s like she knew I needed fresh ammunition for my ongoing crusade to elevate great female essayists to a higher level of awareness so that we can someday all agree that it was a lack of suitable competition, and not contributions to the literary canon (real or perceived), that once made Chelsea Handler the leader of this pack. ~Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

—–

It’s like A Separate Peace meets Casey at the Bat meets Tobias Wolff especially if- HYPOTHETICALLY- you still feel bad for lying to your dad at age 12 because you wanted him to think you loved A Separate Peace as much as he does and didn’t understand how that book was supposed to make you feel until you read this one.

It’s like John Green shelved Looking for Alaska for a few years after finishing his thesis on John Updike’s nonfiction works to take a job recruiting college baseball players for the minor leagues. ~The Art of Fielding

—–

It’s like Chuck Palahniuk if he stopped taking writing cues from surgery documentaries on Discovery Health, except without people vomiting at the book signings and won’t give me a reason to immediately dump you the way I certainly will if you casually mention that Fight Club speaks to men in a way that I can’t ever understand. ~Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

—–

It’s like that movie Spellbound plus the Mathlete scene in Mean Girls plus Jeopardy Kids’ Week plus every Newbery winner minus the Newbery winners that no one feels comfortable calling terrible post-sticker plus my favorite middle grade book ever. Or maybe it’s just like my favorite middle grade book ever. ~The View From Saturday

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

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

THAT SAID.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Behold, the slides and the responses:

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

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

Dress Option Slides:

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

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

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

Then my powers of right arm bendage were magically restored.

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

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

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

Erin & Amir’s Wedding

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

Boom! Proof that your vote matters.

Kelly & Gerald’s Wedding

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

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

Katie & Eric’s Wedding

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

Beth & Michael’s Wedding

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

Annette & Dan’s Wedding

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

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

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.