Road to Chicago from Cristin on Vimeo.

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

You know how you have that one friend where, if you want to do something slightly weird but mostly awesome, you know that he/ she will be fully on board? I don’t mean the person that you call when you want to do something illegal (that would be Emla, for me) or the person you call when you want to talk about how you just realized that you sing a song to your ice cream whenever you’re putting it away after grocery shopping (that would be Jordan, for me, and the song is “Raspberry Sorbet” to the tune of Prince’s “Raspberry Beret”), but the person you go to when you’re thinking it might be fun to take the old lady bus to Atlantic City and gamble for the day or when you need company for that progressive marionette burlesque show you have tickets to. Or when you want to join thousands of your fellow citizens in dressing up as Santa Claus.

For me, that person is Annette. Annette is one of my New York soulmates, so you can understand how heartbreaking it is for me that she’s moving to Chicago. I’ve come around on the idea because she’s doing it for all the right reasons, and because it gives me an excuse to do SantaCon Chicago in ‘09. Also because she foolishly asked me to be her driving companion for the moving van portion of the adventure. It’s been just over a year since Ma Stickles and I did our epic road trip, so I am thrilled to get back out on the highway. It looks easy enough:

Easy as pie. He are the (tiny, unimportant) conditions that I presented to Annette after she confirmed me as wingman:

1. I want to be able to stop at as many WalMarts, Targets, and truck stops as possible as part of a complicated scavenger hunt that I need help formulating (stay tuned).

2. I will be videotaping our adventures, and then posting the video montage on our internal company blog, since (until tomorrow), Annette and I are both gainfully employed by the same publishing house.

3. I’ve never driven a car, let alone a moving van, in New York City, so she’ll have to handle that part.

4. My driver’s license just expired and I don’t have time to renew it this week, but I’m prepared to cry if I get pulled over.

That sound you hear is Annette ralphing into her garbage can up on the 10th floor and trying to figure out how she can escape Brooklyn without me on Wednesday.

No, really, it will be so fun! Especially the videotaping part! To further awesomeify things, there’s a big crazy conference for children’s librarians in Chicago this weekend that basically all of my friends are going to (because we know how to party) and I get to crash it. AND I just found out that Older Brother Bud will be in Chicago the first night we get there. COULD THIS TRIP GET ANY BETTER??

Annette says that this trip should only take us about 15 hours which, for someone who spent 2 weeks in a Prius with her mom and the most vindictive GPS system known to man last summer, is basically the blink of an eye. I’m worried that if we don’t specifically plan to have fun, we might wind up having only accidental fun instead of intentional fun. And wouldn’t that just be awful. Here’s where you come in.

I need suggestions on what you would like us to do/ accomplish/ find at various roadside rest stops and WalMarts. We’re not going to break any laws, ruin any property, or insult any local residents, but anything else is up for consideration. If you want my picture in front of an anti-abortion billboard, we can work to make that happen. If you’d like Annette and I to purchase and wear matching tshirts of a certain nature, we can do that, as well. If you have a list of scavenger hunt items (shot glass with the American flag on it, glow-in-the-dark condoms, license plate keychain with your grandma’s name on it), I am happy to devote a full day to finding them.

I want you to think very hard about this and come up with something fantastic. Don’t go with the first thing that comes to mind. Click over to Daily Puppy for awhile, pour yourself a glass of wine, and really give it some thought. Leave your ideas in the comments, or email/ text them to me. I’ll try to get the final list up before we leave Wednesday night.

“Hey, I’ve got a great children’s book, too! It’s called F**k It, We’re All Going To Die.”

Latitude also ties into the computer-based version of Google Maps through iGoogle so that, say, a husband on the move could share his location with his wife working at an office PC. (In {Steve Lee’s, product manager for Google Maps for Mobile and Google Latitude} case, his mom in the Midwest likes to check up on him. “She can use this as tool to see where I’m at and use it for peace of mind,” he said.)

Patriot Act! I love it!

Unrelated, But Awesome: Ghostface Killa has a Twitter feed: The Pitchfork Guide to Musicians on Twitter.

Dear President Obama,

Here is a list of the first 10 things you should do as president:

1. Fly to the White House in a helicopter.
2. Walk in.
3. Wipe feet.
4. Walk to the Oval Office.
5. Sit down in a chair.
6. Put hand-sanitizer on hands.
7. Enjoy moment.
8. Get up.
9. Get in car.
10. Go to the dog pound.

— Chandler Browne, age 12, Chicago

—

Dear Pres. Obama,

Good job on winning. I heard about Area 51. I wanted to ask you if there are any U.F.O.’s there. I think that you should tell people in public the truth about Area 51. You would just maybe say, “That we will take care of it.” And do it.

— Edwin Jara, age 9, New York

1. That effing debeers commercial with old people holding hands. Old people holding hands just KILLS me. On Valentine’s Day this year, the google image was old people holding hands and I had to stop googling things until the 15th because it was making me cry. Then this commercial shows up and it has senior citizen hand holding AND it’s playing an instrumental of Stand By Me, which was Big Sister Jess’s wedding song. Stick a fork in me, I’m done.

2. Watching PJ’s solo show last night. More specifically, watching his bandmates watch his solo show from the front row and seeing how excited they were for him and how proud.

It didn’t hurt that he covered Bruce Springsteen covering Santa Claus is Coming To Town as a closing song. Peej, if you still need to find a christmas present for me, all I want is a mp3 of that. Or, preferably, an entire album of you covering Christmas songs. Work on that in all your free time, when you’re not busy making every year-end Best Music of 2008 list that I’ve seen so far.

Also: Peej introduced me to Ted Leo last night. Since I am the Coolest Ever, I opened with something to the effect of. “Hi, I love you. And you left me a voicemail that one time– Thank you! I still have it!” Smooth, Cris.

3. Reading the Reasons To Love New York  list this morning.

4. Watching my first Brooklyn snowfall:

I love this so much that I’m going to give up the moment of re-remembering Pure Joy that I just described in order to have the slightly more subdued but more frequent joy of enjoying it every day:

Okay, so, if you don’t live in New York, you don’t get New York 1, which is our local news channel which, frankly, I think kicks a lot of ass. The first week I was in my apartment when I didn’t have internet or cable, the main thing I missed was being able to watch NY1 in the morning. I feel like people in this town usually reject automatically anything targeted specifically at them– I can think of several subway ad campaigns that start out with something like “We get it, New York!” but sounded like they were written from Austin for all of their actual relevance that made me want to walk in front of the train– but I’ve never heard anyone say anything disparaging about NY1. In fact, if it ever went dark or anything, I think people would panic. I say the sentence “Oh, that was on NY1 today” only slightly less than I say “Oh, that was on NPR” or “Oh, there was that article about that in the Times,” and I think those statistics are probably skewed considering “that article in the Times” is my personal code for “I overheard this somewhere but can’t remember where.”

The best part of NY1 is Pat Kiernan. You might also know him as the host of VH1’s World Series of Pop Culture competition as well. Every morning Pat does “In The Papers,” which is a segment where he reads the NY-based newspapers for you on television. It’s amazing. They made fun of this at one point on How I Met Your Mother, but even that was done in such a loving way that I knew the writers must also love In The Papers. He focuses on large national news and NYC based “news” items that you  might only get from your iGoogle page if you have the app for “ridiculous inhabitants of the 212.” I love In The Papers. When I hear him intro it I frequently drop my hair dryer and run out of the bathroom to stare at my TV in rapt fascination while Pat tells me what’s important for that day.

AND NOW: He started a website where he does In The Papers for OTHER CITIES. He’s covering THE ENTIRE COUNTRY, people!! Is there nothing this man can’t do?? He’s like a human RSS feed of AWESOMENESS.

Just as I was thinking “This might become my primary news scource,” I scrolled through today’s headlines and noticed that he included an article from the San Francisco Chronicle about how the dinosaurs died.

Thank you, Pat. I love you!

Dressed up as Santa in Grand Central Terminal with two thousand of my jolliest buddies. Merry Christmas!

ETA:

There is a lot of seriously awesome hair in this video. And Frank McCourt talking about his other favorite indoor sport besides reading. Woah there, cowboy.