So I’m pretty into this whole Tiger Woods shitshow, as you would guess. As soon as it broke I was all over it trying to find something that I could get all Oh Hell No Did You See What He Went And Diiiiiiid?!? about. It wasn’t too hard. And I came down staunchly on the side of Mrs Woods, and even though domestic violence is about the least funny thing in the world to me, I believe that she physically came after her husband when she found out about it and I kind of want to high-five her for it. Nothing baffles me more than seeing the Mrs Stanfords and Spitzers of the world matching their pearls to their smart business suits that they have never actually done any business in and heading out to a podium to stand by a man that has made a complete ass of himself and a complete mockery of his marriage and his family. If that were me, I would spend the whole night before wide awake, staring at the ceiling of my master bedroom (where I would be sleeping while the pile of crap that I married slept, I don’t know, in a sewage treatment plant somewhere) and planning the exact moment during the next day’s public apology where I would pull the ultimate Kanye, grabbing the microphone to tell the whole nation about all of his sexual shortcomings and how he cried whenever he watched the Lindsay Lohan version of The Parent Trap on ABC Family before declaring “Stickles- OUT” and slamming the mic to the ground.

I don’t think anyone in a relationship is ever justified in physically hurting their partner, so if they prove that she really did try to go par 4 on that Nike-clad dome of his, I might retract my offer of a high five for Ellin, but if she winds up calling me for life advice (which, to be honest, happens to me at least 4 times a week from various celebrities that have heard about the fountain of rational judgement that is Me) I will tell her to stay the course, just like I would tell anyone in her situation: You get your kids and you get the fuck out of there, then you get the money, then you get the book deal, then you get a full hour with Oprah, then you get a new man that worships and glorifies you the way the old one was supposed to. I don’t understand exactly what is so hard about this line of action.

I was on a week long staycation when Tiger decided to issue a public apology, which means that I slept through it and had no idea it had happened because instead of being in front of a computer all day at work I was watching Bones on DVD and eating SweeTart Gummy Sour Bunnies and wondering if it’s actually possible to see God through a candy you bought in Target’s Easter miniseasonal section. When I’m not at work on a work day I have some trouble keeping up with basic human tasks like Connecting With The World Outside My Apartment Before I Finally Put Pants On To Go Pick Up Chinese Food Circa 8pm. Sometimes I think that the universe plans things this way to make sure I don’t have a heart attack. The Balloon Boy drama happened during the one day in October when I wasn’t at my desk; I was at home in NJ with my brothers, conspiring to have the matching sweater photos taken for our parents. Had I been at my computer and able to follow along with that media shitstorm, I am almost positive that my head would have blown clear off my body, which would make the 5th grade version of me happy, as her wish to be the normal height of 5’6 would finally be granted. I just love crap like this way too much. Thank God I was sleeping when Robot Tiger took the podium to talk about the Issues He Is Working Through. I would have caused a one-person riot. At minimum, I would have spent an hour rewinding it (which I have since done) and whipping my head around to my turtle tanks for lack of better company and shouting “Are you HEARING THIS??!?” from the other side of my apartment.

All of my Super Fun Opinions about this scandal have been reeeeallly fun for The Boyfriend to deflect. I feel like there should be some kind of social anthropological term for this (now that I spend all of my vacation time watching Bones which is, for my money, one of the most ridiculous forensics drama on television, I am attributing everything to Anthropology, with a big A). How many other girlfriends in the world used the Tiger Woods scandal as a Teachable Moment? I didn’t even realize I had done this until last week, when one of my coworkers had a baby and I unconsciously used that news to make sure that The Boyfriend wasn’t attached to any ridiculous ideas like, say, not having babies or having babies but giving them dumbass names like Storey or Madigan or whatever the hell people think is okay to do just because they had unprotected sex and it took. “Do you know how much I would kill you for this?” I told him over the Thanksgiving weekend as we ate lo mein and watched surveillance video footage of the Woods estate along with a reenactment of what might have happened when Tiger fled the scene. “I would never stop killing you. I would kill you and then bring you back to life so I could kill you again.”  The Boyfriend, seeing a wiiiiiiide open door that I had hung from its pretty new hinges and then stained to the most perfect shade of wood to match the Crazy House I was building with words, came back at me with something about how maybe we just all need to realize that, anthropologically, one man can never be satisfied by just one woman, and then he laughed into his eggroll for the next 20 minutes while I talked about how much I would kill him for cheating on me. Really, he was masterful in stoking that fire. It was like he found the Chatty Cathy pull string on my back that was only open for operation while Tiger Woods was doing something asshole-y.

Regardless, I’m glad that we have these threats on the books, as they, coupled with the lo mein, are clearly the hallmarks of a healthy relationship. And I am reassured by the things I said and the things no one had to say, and that he knew how to answer my underlying “You’re not going to emotionally destroy me for loving you, right?” with an encrypted “you are so beautiful when you’re insane.” Or so I like to tell myself.

Unrelated, But Awesome: I got a package at work today from The Excellent Camilla that contained books she thought I might like to read. I saw the first one, and immediately dropped it like a hot potato because I thought there was some weird Truman Show shit going on and that someone had written a cheeky middle grade novel about my childhood and forgotten to tell me about it.

This, Sports Fans, is The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place Book 1: The Mysterious Howling. I joyfully freaked out over this title because Ashton Place is the name of the first street where I grew up on, and I’ve never seen that word used elsewhere in the world except alongside “Kutcher” which is not something I like to brag about. Also, the cover art shows three children (which, happily, the flap copy explains are FERAL children of Ashton Place- amazing) in the exact gender and birth order arrangement of me and my brothers, the original Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place.

It’s only been a few hours since this discovery, and already a variety of delightful things have happened. Most notably, my father’s response over email, which proclaimed this “GRRRRRRRRREAT!” in the style of one Tony the Tiger. This came on the heels of a response he sent to my Earlier In The Day email regarding a museum exhibit being curated about his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers in which he stated “WE ARE ABSOLUTELY GOING TO SEE THIS EXHIBIT!!!! WOW!!!!” which I think signifies the beginning of my dad’s long awaited (by me, anyway) transition from Stodgy Lawyer Type to Hyperactive Teenage Girl.

The Unsolicited Recommendation: Ricky Gervais was on The Daily Show last night. I’ve never seen Jon Stewart stumble away from his desk while interviewing someone before. I almost choked on my egg whites while watching it this morning.

Road to Chicago from Cristin on Vimeo.

I’ve been coughing for about three weeks now. I didn’t go to the doctor initially because I didn’t have any other symptoms and, as I kept saying to the various wide-eyed Swine Flu hysterics at my office, when I wasn’t coughing I felt pretty great. In between bouts of core-shaking hacking, I felt like a million bucks, and that was close enough for jacks as far as I was concerned. I’ve never gone to the doctor for Having A Cold, and I get a fair amount of mileage out of making fun of people who do so, so it kind of never crossed my mind. When I hit the two week mark I checked in with a nurse, but that was mainly because of Marathon Day. Marathon Day is, hands-down, my favorite day of the year in New York (though SantaCon is also very, very high on the list), and this was my first year getting to watch from Brooklyn, as last year during Marathon Day I had only been living in my then-new apartment for about 18 hours and was still having nervous breakdowns about precisely what angle my TV stand should be set at. This was back before The Bedbugs, when things like that seemed Important. Luckily, I have Perspective now.

I watched the marathon with Webmaster Kyle and Maggie and the aforementioned Katie Of The Weak Immune System and The Boyfriend and it turns out that Marathon Day in Brooklyn is EVEN MORE AWESOMER than it was on the Upper East Side. I’m pretty sure that this is because our viewing spot was circa mile 7, when all the runners are still all “Woo, this is so awesome! I am a peak example of what a human being is capable of! I am so pumped to be raising money that will go to administrative tasks remotely associated with Curing Cancer/ Helping Kids Who Can’t Read Good/ Neutering Stray Dogs!” whereas by the time they hit my old apartment circa mile 17 they’re all “Why the eff would anyone, ever, in their right mind want to do this?? This run is named after the first guy who ever did it who DIED AT THE END and I know EXACTLY HOW HE FELT!” Brooklyn Marathon Day was also made awesomer by the above-listed crew, all of whom have the same marathon bystander strategy that I do, which is Constant Clapping, And Specific Cheering By Name For People Who Have Written Their Names On Their Running Shirts. All except The Boyfriend, actually, who mostly stood their quietly with a bemused smile on his face watching me yell ridiculous stuff and rubbing my back when I coughed too hard, which is fairly metaphorical of my relationship with Saint TheBoyfriend Of Eternal Patience. At one point, there was a couple standing behind us who only figured out after a good 10 minutes that we were just reading names off of shirts and screaming for them. “We thought you guys knew EVERYONE running! We were so impressed!” They said, and I don’t think they were making fun of us. My main goal in this exercise was to get the Acknowledgement Wave/ Smile/ Fist Pump from my targeted runner and, I have to tell you, I had a pretty spectacular rate of return. I also tried my hardest to incorporate the skills I learned from Pa Stickles’ 2nd favorite car game after Name The Presidents In Chronological Order, which is Rearrange Colleges Into New Athletic Conferences Based On Their Mascots. I think this really gave me an extra edge as a marathon enthusiast for the people who hadn’t written their names on their shirts but were running in college track jerseys, because I got to spend a lot of time yelling “YEAH TULANE! GO GREEN WAVE” and the like. You know, to show that not only do I care, but I identify with their personal background. I don’t know all of the mascots, obviously, but in a pinch “YEAH DAVIDSON! GO LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION!” will work just as well.

Anyway, Marathon Day in Park Slope is apparently Bring Your Adorable Baby And Adorable Dog Day. (Webmaster Kyle reminds me that this is Every Day in Park Slope. While I have your attention, Webmaster Kyle, I think I lost the spell check button on my awesome new blog dashboard. Did I? Everyone else– this is why there are spelling mistakes in this post. Either this button wandered off or I just can’t find it). At one point we were right next to a couple with a 6ish month old baby in an awesome pajama snuggly thing with a hood and ears that I would absolutely wear if it came in the appropriate size for someone who is taller than 23 inches, and at one point the dad heard me coughing and turned the baby away from me so that the cough couldn’t reach the baby, as if I wasn’t taking every precaution and coughing into a tissue or my elbow. That, combined with the emails we’ve been getting from HR basically commanding us to stay home if we’re running a fever, made me think I should maybe think about going to a medical professional.

Though how am I supposed to know if I’m running a fever? What self-respecting single 28 year old owns a thermometer? I thought those things were like life insurance or minivans and I didn’t need to think about acquiring one until I had kids.

I’ll skip the long part of the story about how I went to check in with the nurse and she told me I had allergies, and I was a little disappointed because I like to think of allergies as a sign of mental weakness. (They aren’t, obviously. It’s just that I once dated this guy who described himself as being “a little allergic to kiwi,” to which I was all “kiwi? really? No one is allergic to kiwi,” to which he clarified “all melon, really,” which, let’s be frank, didn’t make me feel better about the kiwi situation). I dutifully took Claritin for a few days anyway, thinking that I just needed to build up a Claritin base for it to start working, kind of like how you have to get a base tan before you go on vacation. (NB: I have neither allergies nor the capacity to tan, at all, regardless of base, so please don’t take this as medical advice).

Then one Tuesday (last Tuesday, if you’d like me to be more specific and less Telling Tales Around The Campfire) I woke up and kind of couldn’t breathe. Or I could, but not very deeply, and not without being stabbed by tiny men with knives that were leasing the space under my ribcage. And that felt kind of weird. So I called my doctor and said I’d had a cough for two weeks and was having trouble breathing, expecting them to refer me to WebMD, and they said See You In An Hour, which is one of the nice things, I suppose, about this Flu Panic, if there are any nice things about it.

I learned a lot of things at the doctor’s office that morning. One was that I had spent the last couple of weeks exposing my whole office, all my friends, and my boyfriend to Bronchitis–oops. Sorry guys, that one’s on me. I needed antibiotics, and I needed to go a few blocks over and have Xrays taken to see if I had broken a rib or if I had “only” torn one of the muscles in my ribcage. (Spoiler alert: BOTH). Then I went to the Xray place and learned that if you have one of those truly awful coughing fits in the waiting room at Radiology– the kind where you start gagging because you’re coughing so hard, and you start thanking the 7:30am version of yourself for not putting on mascara because your eyes are tearing all over the place–they will make you wear a surgical mask while you’re waiting for the closeup of your broken rib that you acquired by doing coughing fits similar to the one that you are presently illustrating. You will then bitch to everyone you later come into contact with about how humiliating it is to be forced to wear a mask in the waiting room and how you don’t know how Michael Jackson ever did it because those things get hot and make you claustrophobic like woah until Katie gently points out that a lot of cancer patients hang out in Radiology and they have no immune system so the mask was probably a good call. Then you will fill your $70 worth of drugs at the Duane, send an update email to your bosses/CoRep that includes both your weekly sales totals and the news that you have broken your own rib and also exposed them to the plague, and you will trot back to your home in Brooklyn to become acquainted to your new best friend, Coedine.

To be fair, my coedine came in cough syrup, which is, according to The Boyfriend “the bullshit kind,” and I should have protested until they gave me The Good Shit. But this was good enough for me. It (kind of) made me stop coughing, which meant the Rib Goblins would save their knife attacks for things like Getting Up From A Sitting Position and The Hiccups. I had The Hiccups two days ago and wanted to drown myself in my bathtub just to make them stop. Hiccups don’t go well with a broken rib. At this point, I’m more or less on the mend. I’m typing this from a reclining position on my living room couch with one of those IcyHot Medicated Patches strapped to the front of my ribcage, having taken the muscle-helping thingies that are like Aleve, but more ass-kicking. Some day, maybe even some day soon, this will be a hilarious story, but it won’t be without lingering consequences. Things have happened. I have changed in ways that I want, more than anything, to blame on the coedine, but I know deep down that I can’t use drugs as an excuse for what I’ve known to be a part of me all along.

iCarly. I was a pirate for Halloween this year (you’re all shocked, I can tell) and I enlisted Katie (who is, clearly, the official sponsor of this blog post and a good chunk of my personal life recently– Hi, Katie!) to take my picture in an undisclosed location for this year’s Christmas card. I was Santa for the Christmas card last year, but I was The Pirate for the two years prior, and now I’m going back to my roots. I think this is particularly important now that Older Brother Bud has an adorable 2 year old and is poised to kick my ass in the Stickles Children Christmas Card Competition That Only Cristin Cares About. When I texted Katie to tell her that I was running late because I couldn’t find my eyepatch (to which she responded– ready for this?–”We have a few here if you need one”) and then texted again with my ETA, she commented “Cool, I’ll just continue watching iCarly.” My knowledge of iCarly at that point in time included it being a show on Nickelodeon and that was about it. Since Katie and I had a pretty lengthy walk to The Undisclosed Location, I asked her to fill me in.

K: So, the main girl, Carly, she lives in Seattle.

C: Oh, so it’s like Grey’s Anatomy.

K. No. But she has this ridiculous apartment/ loft thing, and she lives there with her older brother who’s in his twenties, and they don’t ever really mention the parents or how they manage to afford any of this.

C: Oh, so it’s like Party of Five.

K: No. And Carly, her best friend’s name is Sam- Sam is a girl- and they have this webshow that they do every week called iCarly, and you get to see clips from the show and it’s mostly just them being silly or doing fun stuff that 13 year olds do.

C: Oh, so it’s like 30 Rock.

K: Sigh. Okay, it’s kind of like 30 Rock.

I filed this away for a week or so and then when the coedine kicked in, iCarly called to me. Somehow I wound up with about 5 hours of iCarly DVRd, and when you can’t move around very much and are trapped in your apartment and on magic mushroom cough syrup, 5 hours of iCarly starts to look pretty fan-damn-tastic.

Listen to me, now– this show is genuinely good. When they’re doing the webisodes, Carly and Sam have the kind of on-air chemistry that the ladies of The View have been aiming at for almost a decade. These kids are effing good. The main complaint I have is that they’re always yelling. Do 13 year olds today communicate at such a high decible level all the time? Also- how close are we to having, like, One Major Internet Profile per person in this country? I know that some day, Amazon will start recommending me books based on what I watch on YouTube and my gmail background will know to automatically switch to a grid based on how much time I spend in Excel and iTunes will download podcasts for me about how the dinosaurs died based on my google searches, but we’re not that close to that just yet, right? Because between my iCarly obsession and all the online videos I watch of that Staten Island children’s choir singing pop songs, I’m really worried that I’m about to wind up on some Megan’s Law watch list. Moving on.  

Farmville. I’ve been resisting playing Farmville on Facebook because, really, having Amazon Prime is enough of an enormous time suck during the work day. People on Facebook are always telling me to join their virtual sorority house or play Mafia Wars with them and I’ve never been into any of it. I never even played Scrabulous.

And now we pause so I can explain what I’m talking about to my parents, as they are Old People: Web developers come up with applications that can be housed within Facebook, and one of them is a game called Farmville. You’re given a plot of land to farm, and you get to decide what to grow and how to design your farmland, and your Facebook friends that are also playing Farmville can be your “neighbors” and you can help each other out on the farms and gift each other cows and the like. The more you play, the more money you earn, and the bigger/ cooler your farm gets. Each crop has to be harvested within a set amount of time after planting, though, so you have to keep logging back in, otherwise your strawberries or squash or wheat will wither and die and you have to start all over again.

This all just sounded kind of ridiculous to me. Then I read This New York Times article, which might as well have been headlined Yes, Cristin, This Really Is An Insane And Pointless Addiction, and for some reason that made me all Where Do I Sign?? Like somehow, learning that people had taken a seemingly innocent Facebook app and allowed it to more or less ruin their lives was just the green light I was looking for.

Given my obsession with Oregon Trail in college, I don’t know why I was surprised to find that I love Farmville. Within one round of crop harvesting I was having these insane thoughts like “I should probably put something together in Excel so I can figure out when to log back in and check my crops, and what seeds I should plant in order to maximize potential growth, both in terms of plants and the physical size of my land holding.” Yes, really.

Now, I’m still very new to this– I’m only a Level 6 farmer right now, and some of my Neighbors are Level 25s– but I have some ideas for improving the Farmville universe that I came up with while in various stages of coedine bliss. They are as follows:

1. The All You Need Is Love rule of animal husbandry. The #1 attraction to Farmville for me was ownership of tiny virtual animals. My parents never let me have a pony, and now I can have HUNDREDS if I want, along with cows and sheep and chickens. Because people are so obsessive about their Farm’s organization, one of the options you have for each of your animals is putting them in “stay” mode, so they stay in the same place on your farm and you can line them up and face them in the same direction like they’re praying to Mecca or whathaveyou. I feel like this is somehow cruel, like those invisible electric fences for dogs. Granted, they are two-dimensional and made up of nothing more than programming code, but I still want my cows to be able to roam as they please, so mine are never in “stay” mode. Other than telling them to Stay, the few other options you have with your animals are to rotate, move, sell, or pet them. When you pet them, little hearts appear over the animals and they jump up and down. And that’s pretty awesome, but I’d like something more tangible for my efforts. I think you should either get a prize for having the happiest animals–like those commercials that tell you that the best cheese comes from happy California cows, or like how at the end of Oregon Trail you get more points if your wagon party arrives in good health–or, failing that, petting your animals should make the produce more, and faster. I’ll probably wind up petting fake cows all day long of my own accord, anyway, but a little monetary redemption wouldn’t kill me.

2. Make a List And Check It Twice. One of my favorite things to do when I’m making an Excel grid with multiple worksheets (go back and read the opening of that sentence again… yeah, you heard me. Sexy, right?) is to build a summary page at the beginning that pulls the numbers in from multiple locations. (My mom’s head just exploded reading that. When I first started teaching Mom how to build formulas in Excel, she almost couldn’t learn it because she was too amazed at how smart the program is. She just kept gasping and going “Wow!” and I didn’t even get to summary pages during that session, as I was too afraid that it would make her stroke out). This never fails to thrill me– the fact that Excel knows the locations of numbers that you can even see and can silently and efficiently update the summary page. It’s like Christmas every time I get to do it.

I like knowing where I stand on things. I’ve never bumped anyone off of my Christmas card list for lack of returning the love, but I do have one grid that tracks all of the changes that I’ve made to the mailing list over time and also notes who has and has not sent me Christmas cards back over the last 5 or so years just in case this is the holiday season where I decide to be discriminating. I like knowing. I like it in Oregon trail where you can click on an icon and it tells you how many cattle you have, how many pounds of food, and how far it is to the next landmark. Having one of these pages for Farmville would, in essence, make it far too easy. I’m guessing this is also why they give you percentages instead of timeframes for how long it’ll be before you need to harvest, so you only get “Squash- 52% grown” instead of “Squash- come back in 7 hours” when you hover over your Squash crops. This forces you to come up with your own crop rotating strategy which, as you have probably guessed, I am most likely going to summarize for myself in Excel at some point when it gets to be too much for me to hold in a brain that is already filled with Gossip Girl quotes and the collected works of Roald Dahl.

3. A Little Ruthlessness Never Hurt Anyone, Except the Farmer You’re Stealing From. Look, we’ve all read Fantastic Mr. Fox, and we know how this farming business is supposed to go. Farmville does a lot to foster neighborhood cooperation– you can give your neighbors livestock and fertilize their crops, and they give you back birdbaths and scare the raccoons away from your land when you’re not around to do it yourself. It’s basically communism, but without the fun parts. A lot of time I’ll go into someone else’s farmland and notice that their crops have either withered from inattention, or are ripe and waiting to be harvested. Why can’t I take those myself? You snooze you lose, neighboring farmers. Also, along with this new development of Evil Farming, I think one of the things you can buy at market should be a can of spray paint with which to “decorate” other peoples’ dairy barns. And I think if you catch someone on your land, you should get to use them as a scarecrow for 24 hours.

Farmville is awesome, kids. But, as they used to say on Reading Rainbow (RIP), you don’t have to take my word for it. Let’s see what Texts From Last Night has to say about it:

(513): Girl in front of me has spent the class alternating between playing farmville and the tiffany’s website looking at engagement rings. Every once in a while she holds her hand up to the screen.
(1-513): She doesn’t deserve the breathe the same air that we do.
(513): She just bought a cow and we’ve moved on to looking at wedding dresses.

Taylor Swift. I had  limited knowledge of Taylor Swift before my days on the Coedine. My fondest memory of her is really a fond memory of the night before Cousin Erin’s wedding, when Cousin Matt rocked out to her song Love Story like he was gettin’ paid to do it.

Matt + Taylor Swift 4Eva from Cristin on Vimeo.

I was going to merely link to this video, but then I watched it again and it reminded me of how worth embedding it truly is. And you should enjoy it now, because whenever I put up a video that even remotely involves Aunt Patti (who- let me say, preemptively–is doing NOTHING at ALL embarrassing here and has a hilarious aside about buying us things from the minibar in the hotel) I get an email within 20 minutes of her commanding that I remote it from public viewing because she hates how she’s portrayed. I’m sure she’ll somehow look at this one, where Matt is singing along with a barely-legal poptart and Danny and Janelle are dancing their hearts out while Erin demands that we “BE QUIET- THIS IS MY FAVORITE PART!” during the section of the song where Romeo proposes to Juliet while I scream at people from behind the camera, and she will somehow decide that it is her that comes off the worst here. Fight that urge, Patti. You appear nothing but awesome in this video.

Then the whole Kanye West scandal happened, and I decided that I was never listening to another Kanye song if I could help it, the same way I haven’t watched a Tom Cruise movie since he said that people who needed antidepressants were foolish and weak, which was a VERY hard decision for a girl whose first screen name was TopGun527. And THEN I watched Taylor Swift on Saturday Night Live while I was doped up on Coedine, and I decided I was in love with her.

Listen. She’s can’t even drink legally, and she writes her own music and actually plays an instrument and I think in an era where the best way to get famous as a young singer is to have a sex tape leak, I appreciate the fact that someone is recording songs about the first day of high school and having a best friend and generally being adorable and innocent.

Slightly Related, And Awesome: I’ve never read any of the Betsy-Tacy books (gasp! I know! This is like, say, being a literary agent but not reading the Harry Potter books… KATE), and I’ve always thought of it as a gaping whole in my I Know Everything About Kids’ Books facade, though it never bothered me enough to actually amend the problem on my own. And then Camilla sent me these amazing, perfect, adorable repackages that Harper did of the High School And On years of Betsy Ray and they. Are. Phenomenal.

Even when I was at the appropriate age for reading children’s books, I was never into fantasy or sci-fi–at work now, when people talk about books they loved as little kids and how they were taken to other worlds and wrapped up in different lands, that’s never something I really relate to, because when I was younger I always wanted to read about Real Stuff. And even though I’m starting to grow an appreciation/ small infatuation for YA Fantasy (thank you, Kristin Cashore), at least 80% of what I read, YA or adult, is rooted in the contemporary world. But when I was in middle school I was fairly obsessed with the Beverly Cleary books that depicted dating in the 50s (pretty sure I damn near wore out my copy of The Luckiest Girl, which everyone should read RIGHT NOW), which I guess was kind of a baby-step in the direction of fantasy books since it was a time that I couldn’t even begin to pretend that I currently lived in. And I feel the same way about the Betsy books; they’re close enough to my reality to not be off-putting or strange, but unrecognizable enough to be fascinating. And, like with my Taylor Swift thing, sometimes it’s nice to have entertainment that doesn’t have sexting scandals or abusive parents or people coming home from the war disfigured. Sometimes it’s nice to hear about nice things.

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.

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.

WOO!

So it was with a mixture of joy and trepidation that I read the following email from my dad, which arrived mid-August.

Good morning, everyone:

Well, about two years ago I made two resolutions re my then distant  60th birthday.  The first was to lose fifteen pounds or so and thus weigh in under {redacted for the sake of my dad’s modesty, if he has any left} on the big day.  I am happy to report that I was able to do that ({exact weight}, to be precise).  The second was to be in good enough shape to run through the 2.5 mile Arboretum Run on the Labor Day following my birthday (within thirty days thereof, and thus  sufficiently in the neighborhood to qualify as a birthday event) with my extended family and other loved ones. (This is especially important to me, as my knees are telling me in no uncertain terms that this is likely to be the last time I pin a number on my shirt and run around town.)

 I write with respect to that second resolution.The annual Glen Rock Labor Day Arboretum Run will be held on Monday, September 1, 2008.  The 2.5 Mile Run starts at 9:25 am, followed by a Junior Mile, for those children 8 and older, and a Fun Run for those 7 and younger.  I am “running” the 2.5 miler.  Everyone – all of you and all members of your families, young and old – is invited to join me.  Vicki and I  will be pleased to cover your application fee, with the single proviso that you must run with me and keep me company throughout the race.  I’ll warn you in advance ( this is particularly important advice for Conor, Molly and Seamus) that I’ll be shuffling along in the 12 minute per mile range, so if you’re accustomed to moving faster than that, you’ll have to adjust. (Younger folk who don’t think they can manage the 2.5 but who want to try the Junior Mile or the Fun Run will be our guests as well.)

After we all recover, it’s back to Ashton Place for burgers and dogs, and, since I’ll be mailing  our mortgage payoff package to Citi during the race ( a mailbox being located en route), we’ll have the classic American  mortgage burning ritual, together with cake for the summer birthday people.

I’ve been looking forward to this for years.  Thanks for being part of it. 

Peace,

Bob/LYF/Grandpa Bob/Uncle Bob

A couple of items of note– when he signs things “Peace” he means it in a Jesus-ey kind of way and not in the way that Usher or other various rappers use it. Also, he’s taken to calling himself Grandpa Bob in written communication even though the only person who calls him that can’t really talk yet, much less scroll through her inbox on her blackberry.

My conditions for participating in this race were that I’d only do it if Peej were there as well, and that if I made everyone matching Tshirts they were required to enthusiastically wear them. This took about 4 trips to Michaels for plain white shirts and iron on letters but it was the best mandate I’ve ever laid down, because it meant that as we approached the starting line the rest of the field got to marvel at the sight of a bunch of people ages 8 through 60 who all look more or less exactly the same even before you put them in matching shirts proclaiming that they were With Bob.

Dad’s shirt, naturally, just said Bob. Unlike the rest of us I didn’t put his name on the back of his shirt, which is the only thing I would change about the project in retrospect since one of Dad’s rules was that no one could beat him so we all spent most of the race looking at his back. For awhile I was considering not doing names but Stations Re: Bob but that would have gotten complicated in a hurry. I didn’t even feel like ironing “daughter” onto my shirt, much less “brother in law,” which is just a lot of letters. I also struggled mightily with the punctuation problem since iron on letter kits don’t come with apostrophes. I was just going to go without them but I wouldn’t have been able to ever look at those shirts again if they had said IM WITH BOB.

I’ve probably never been so proud of anything as I am of those shirts. These are the life skills that being in a sorority gives to you.

Patrick was in charge of taking pictures over the course of the run and I put myself in charge of video. This was a brilliant tactical move– PJ took over 190 pictures during the run, whereas I got half a mile into it and went “Wait, I remember now, I hate running” and circled back to the finish line. I ran the last straightaway of the run with my family and when I turned my number in to the official at the end I confessed to cheating, but he didn’t seem concerned. My name was still listed in the local newspaper. I think everyone should run every race like this. Why even bother doing the middle part?

Dad wasn’t kidding when he said he would be paying the house off in the middle of the race (he mailed the last mortgage check around 1.4 miles in) and then returning to the house he fully owned to light the relevant documentation on fire. Housing Crisis? What Housing Crisis? Everyone else in this country is defaulting on their mortgage whereas we are merely burning ours.

One of the things I hate about my video camera is hearing the sound of my own voice, which makes me want to claw out both my eardrums and vocal chords to keep myself and anyone else from having to listen to it. I think I sound frighteningly close to Daria Morgendorffer. The only time I don’t is just as Dad is about to start lighting things on fire in our backyard and I get nervous about not having an exit strategy (like, say, water or a fire extinguisher), and that is the only reason I’m posting this video– so I have proof that I don’t always sound like a 14 year old who is trying too hard to be ironic. I would suggest you keep the sound pretty low for this one, as it is a “tradition” in my family to sing off-key to the birthday song, which has nothing to do with the fact that not a one of us can “carry a tune.” I had no idea that my uncles were so skilled in lighting pieces of paper on fire, but as soon as the mortgage catches you hear two of them going “turn it upside down! Don’t let the flame go out, it’s bad luck!”

Dad sets the house on fire from Cristin on Vimeo.

Anyway.

Patrick, let it be said, destroyed this race. He ran the whole thing and afterwards looked like he could have done it again 4 times without breaking a sweat. He also did it in velcro sneakers from WalMart and kept me distracted from how much running sucks by shouting things like “Looks like we’re getting a dispatch from The Ministry Of Funny Running!” before skipping for an entire block, and he doesn’t exactly have a lifestyle conducive to athletic exertion. He was amazing.

Photo gallery here.Good place to go if you want to see me misspell things in the captions and make self-deprecating comments about how I quit the race after two blocks, or if you want to see pictures where I look like an 8 foot tall albino grasshopper. Seriously. My understanding about adolescence was that you outgrew it around age 18, but these say otherwise.

I did a little movie for my dad that is mostly a slideshow interspersed with the video clips where I don’t sound quite as annoying as usual (still pretty bad, though. I’ll never again make fun of how those Olympic gymnasts sound when cheering each other on). I’ve given about fifty billion caveats to everyone who’s watched it so far: I still haven’t learned how to use any transitions other than “wipe right” in Windows Movie Maker and you start getting vertigo from it after awhile; I am pretty sure a fairly advanced 3rd grader could have done a better job on this; I really thought that the music would cover up the audio on some of the more annoying clips but it didn’t, so you just have to deal with me yelling “Good Stretching, Guys!” to everyone before the race starts. (Though let it be said that the stretching clips are probably my favorite part of the whole thing– you can’t really hear what PJ says, but he’s telling me “You have to hold it for 15 seconds. Otherwise it doesn’t count” (that’s what she said) and then when you see Uncle Michael and Uncle Tom they’re both kind of flapping their arms around before Michael resorts to just practicing his golf swing, which must be genetic because my dad used to do it ALL THE DAMN TIME. He would come to visit me in high school when I was working at the bookstore and just stand in front of the counter and fake golf for a few minutes while I was all “DaaaaAAAD, STOOOooop.” After the stretching it goes to Uncle Ricky ordering us to either win the race or don’t come home, but before you hear him saying that you hear my Aunt Kathy go “Ever see that movie There Will Be Blood?” and I have no idea what she was talking about but it seems like the perfect reference for that exact moment in time when I was thinking about faking an aneurysm to get out of running). But I should stop narrating and just let this glorious piece of art do all of the talking because at the end of the day I will probably never in my life make something better than this and I’m upset that I didn’t save it for Christmas, because according to my stepmom it made my dad cry when he saw it for the first time and after last Christmas  when he cried looking at pictures of The Baby when the real baby was, herself, just two feet away I’ve been vowing to find a way to ellicit a similar response from him. Now turn the sound back up.

Take us home, Bruce:

See Bob Run from Cristin on Vimeo.

Trust me on this one– and happy earth day!

via Aunt K!

Matzoh Ballers

99 Problems But A Pitch Ain’t One

Green Eggs and Slam

Sure Plays a Mean Kickball

Kix: Kid Tested, Your Mother Approved

Ballbusters

Balls to the Wall

Kick It

How The Grinch Stole First Base

She’s a Kick… House

Life’s a Pitch

You can understand why I’m having such a difficult time casting my vote, and not just because WorkFriend Jen and I submitted over half the list. She is the genius who came up with “She’s a kick… house” which I cannot. stop. laughing at. I’ve wanted the 99 Problems name for over a year, but anything with a “your mom” joke in it is automatically funny. What to do?!??