The third way I know that my mom has been running anger management since at least 2004 is because that is the year I moved to New York and the weekend I moved to New York, my mom gave me two baby turtles as a birthday present. Turtles are illegal to buy and sell in our home land of NJ, where we apparently have Serious Opinions as a state about gas pumping and reptile trafficking, so as soon as I saw them I knew my mom had either gone to Pennsylvania to get me animals I had not asked for (unlikely) or somehow lucked into baby turtles (likely) via the kids at her school. Turns out that Anger Management Travis, who was in her Mean Boys group (mom learned very quickly that she couldn’t have the anger management girls and the anger management boys meet as one big group, as it is difficult to discuss and quell one’s anger in the presence of the opposite sex, something I could have told her at least 8 years/ 6 boyfriends ago), was so angry that his mom was not going to let him keep all of the baby turtles that he had secretly hatched from eggs he had pulled out of a river and hidden somewhere in their house without telling her that he brought it up at my mom’s Anger Management For Teen Dudes group that week, and my mom quickly offered to buy two of them off him. I didn’t ask many follow up questions about this, as I was too busy being excited about my new ownership of turtles the size of poker chips, but I really hope that the rest of the kids in this anger management group picked up on this and tried to get my mom to buy their problems off of them, too. “Ms Stickles, my mom is mad that I totaled her Camry. I can get you 3 dented hubcaps and a broken rear-view mirror for $85– deal?” “Ms Stickles, my parents want me to stop dealing drugs, so can you buy all this weed off me?” For the last 7 years, whenever anyone finds out that I’m a turtle owner they immediately ask what the turtles are named and I coolly respond that they are named after Renaissance painters. Nerds/ people with overpriced liberal arts degrees that they’ll never use (….like me) usually say “oh, which ones?” as if they can remember anything from that one Art History class where the darkness of the lecture hall during the slideshows required a Herculean effort to stay awake, and a select few folks have proved to be 3 steps ahead of me and able to immediately jump to “Let me guess– Leonardo, Donatello–” No. Donatello and Raphael. Leonardo was a total sycophant and Michelangelo is basically Ashton Kutcher. Come on. I have standards. I’m not just going to name my pets based on the order of names in the theme song.

 Donatello, 2004.

My mom gave me the turtles as I was packing to move into my first apartment, which is the only way I could ever remember how old they were. We are required to measure time in terms of lease agreements here, and lining up your pet ownership on that timeline actually helps a lot if you’re ever in a situation where it’s crucial for you to know how old your turtles are, like if they go into diabetic shock or something and you have to give the EMTs their medical history (…or something).

No one has ever been mean enough to confirm this, but I think being a person who owns turtles is very weird to people who find out about it in a situation where the turtles are not immediately present. I try to not talk about the turtles to anyone who hasn’t been to my apartment and seen them, because I think turtles, like inflatable bouncey castles and certain tattoos, are one of those things that you have to see in order to realize how awesome and not at all indicative of their owner’s weirdness they are. I try to make it so you have to get into my apartment to know that I am the type of person who has intentionally raised more than one reptile while she was in her twenties and living in a gigantic playground filled with, one would imagine, many better things to do over turtle rearing. Once people see the turtles, they pretty quickly come around to how cool they are.

Donatello’s Narcissistic Phase from Cristin on Vimeo.

They have the weirdly hypnotic effect of watching a lava lamp or a jellyfish without the associated dangers of hanging out with hippies or needing one of your friends to pee on you. Girls can go either way in terms of turtle appraisal but, across the board, every dude in my life who has been in my apartment has wound up staring at them for longer than I’m comfortable with. Turtles do something to men in a way that I don’t understand, as being captivated by them doesn’t necessarily lead to the dude liking them. I asked Jordan to come by and feed them while I was on vacation a few years ago, and explained that I would set out all of the food in the right amount by day, and all he had to do was dump it into the tank, and he agreed readily under the condition that “I don’t have to, like, touch them or put my fingers near their fucking weird mouths, do I? No, Jordan. You don’t. One of my former gentlemen callers spent 20 minutes staring at them the way 2 year old boys stare at trains, with an almost psychotic look of joy on his face, the first time he was in my apartment, which should have been my first sign that he wasn’t the one. Not because he loved them, but because it was his first time in the apartment of a girl he was dating and he was watching turtles swim instead of trying to kiss her on the mouth. Months later, I was cleaning the tanks, which involves a lot of kneeling on the floor of my bathroom and moving the turtles from tanks to sinks to bathtubs when I held out one of the turtles, who had recently completed his exercise time in the tub, and asked That Dude to just drop the turtle back in the tank that was 2 feet out of my reach so that I could continue the cleansing process and after a few beats where nothing was done to free up my right turtle-holding hand for other uses, I looked over at the bathroom doorway and he was standing there with his eyes open comically wide, shaking his head slowly. He backed away and I put the turtle in the tank myself. The next time he talked about his time in the Marines I laughed very loudly and didn’t explain what was so funny.

Raphael, January 2006.

As complicated as human-turtle relationships were proving to be, they were nothing compared to the issues these two had with each other. When they were tiny, they shared a series of tanks of increasing size; I didn’t learn until it was too late that turtles are designed to only grow to be as large as their environment can handle, in order to make sure they don’t get too big for the resources available and then starve. Having lived my whole adult life trying to get over the various ways that being 5’8 in the 5th grade crushed my self esteem and cost me a lot of money at movie theaters where they wouldn’t let me buy child-priced tickets even though I was 5 years from the cutoff, I respect that nature has built these kind of safeguards into turtles. I see it as the other side of the coin that also caused the Jurassic Park dinosaurs to change genders even though they were all engineered to be chicks, ultimately causing the untimely death of many young, promising members of the theme park professionals community. My turtles were growing to fit their space, but they were each doing it as though they were the only turtle who had to live in said space, which, as a middle child, is something I also very much support them in. My brothers take up so much metaphorical space in any room they occupy, at least from my viewpoint, that if I had adjusted my rate of growth so as to not cause a family imbalance I would almost certainly have grown up to be stripper.

November 2007.

 The boys would be fine for a few months at a time, and then they’d hit a growth spurt and start biting each other’s faces off as much as possible, particularly during feeding time. I would assume that this is because I was negligent and rush out to get them a bigger tank and they would stop fighting, each gain 4 ounces, and go back to ruining each others’ lives, in addition to mine. They had their few but poignant moments of calm repose, where they would do the Yertle the Turtle stacking move to get closer to the heat lamp, or sit quietly, side by side, staring at the lamp like they were consenting to an alien abduction.

Come towards the liiiiiiiight.

My dad & stepmom turtle-sat for me while my mom and I were on our road trip during the summer of ’08, and Vicki was thrilled to have them for about the first 12 minutes they were in her house. “Cris. One time, I came home, and the one was biting the other one’s neck, and the other one was SCREAMING.” When you love animals as much as Vicki does, witnessing something like this is certain to haunt you for years. The victim turtle wasn’t screaming, as they don’t have vocal chords, but I knew exactly what she meant, having seen it a million times; it was always the same (evil) turtle picking on the other (wimpier) turtle, and the wimpy one would open and close his mouth like a goldfish while he tried to get away. (For the record, both of them exhibited that exact behavior whenever I picked one of them up). For all I knew it could just be a reflex, like how you kick when the doctor hits your knee or throw up when you see your bridesmaids’ dress, but it was hard not to think that he was expressing pain. And while the Darwinist in me wanted to tell him to fucking deal with it or get out of the gene pool, I was still responsible for them being trapped in a few gallons of water together instead of out in the wild, driving fast turtle cars and banging loose turtle women, so I decided to split them up when I moved them (and me) into my current Brooklyn apartment, and that they were going to spend the rest of their lives on opposite sides of glass dividers.

June 2010: Cristin watches Shawshank Redemption, Raphael thinks it’s a how-to video 

I thought this would be the most liberating time in their tiny, cold-blooded lives, but no one handled it well. Evil Turtle kept being evil, and would thrash uncontrollably in the water instead of languidly doing laps as he used to. Good Turtle stopped eating for 3 months, which infuriated me. “Don’t even tell me that you MISS him,” I would spit at Donatello as he ignored his breakfast while, 8 inches away, Raphael was inhaling half his weight in freeze dried shrimp before moving on to attach his water filter because he Didn’t Like The Way That Punk Was Looking At Him. I came up with a number of ridiculous theories about how maybe I didn’t understand the support that turtles get from one another because I was distracted by their open attempts to kill each other and that Donatello might be suffering in some unquantifiable way on his own, trapped in his own little Battered Wife Syndrome hell. I was pretty sure Raphael was just a dick despite being brought up in a loving home and given every advantage in life, like the Preppy Killer and Paris Hilton, but I was worried about Donatello. I stood over his tank and stared until he managed to eat something every day, bravely overcoming the intense performance anxiety eating disorder issues I was likely giving him.

Feeding Frenzy by Cristin on Vimeo

 They both eventually evened out, but they still did weirdo turtle stuff that I didn’t understand. Turtles hibernate in the wild during the winter, but since it wasn’t cold enough in my apartment to flip that switch, as soon as daylight savings time came in the fall they would just turn into turtle zombies, moving a lot more slowly and eating about a third of what they ate the rest of the year. In spring, two weeks before we set the clocks ahead, they would become hyperactive lunatics. Every time this happened, without fail, I became convinced that they were heeding some weird animal instinct to flee the area and thought they were trying to warn me that an earthquake was coming. Whenever I cleaned the tanks, which became a much bigger ordeal after I split them up (I had to rotate them from the tub to the sink to the tanks in turn so they would never be in the same place at the same time, like that riddle about the goat and the wolf and the bag of grain that you have to get across the river. One time I was lazy and put them both in the tub while I filled the tanks with new water, thinking it was a big enough space that they might not notice each other in time to plot the perfect murder, and was leaving my mom a voicemail when I was disabused of that notion. “Hi, Mom, it’s me, I just- OH JESUS CHRIST LET HIM GO. LET HIM GO! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, YOU MONSTER??” I had to turn the faucet on high and hold them underneath it until Raphael let go of Donatello’s neck. An hour later they were both acting like nothing had happened, but I don’t think my mom recovered as quickly considering I had forgotten to call her back and explain) they acted all pissed off at me once I put them back in the clean tanks. They would spend two straight days moving the aquarium rocks around nonstop, being all “I had JUST gotten them set up PERFECTLY. You have no respect for my vision!” I am very used to the scuttling noise they make while they landscape around, but visitors frequently sit bolt upright on the couch at the sound of it, knowing it’s coming from an animal but thinking that it’s one I have not willingly invited to share my home.

Donatello settled down into something of a lap dog mentality, but Raphael continued to convince me that he was plotting my demise, Pinky and the Brain-style. Emla and I were crocheting and watching bad Discovery Health shows one night (questions?) when she looked over and said “He’s trying to climb out.” I was all, Oh, no, the water level isn’t high enough for him to reach, he’ll be fine. Frustrated, but fine. A week later, I came home from work and went to feed them and couldn’t find Raphael. I raked my hands through the rocks in his tank, then checked Donatello’s tank to make sure that Raph hadn’t tried to pull a Talented Mr Ripley on him, but The Good One was fine. I checked the bathtub to make sure I hadn’t left him there, and considered calling my credit card companies to put a hold on my accounts until I knew for sure he wasn’t booking vacations. I left my mom another superlative voicemail: “So, this is weird, but I got home and one of the turtles ran away. He’s not in his tank, or the other tank, and I ripped apart this half of the apartment and can’tAHHHHHHH! Christ. Okay, I found him. Never mind.”

Man, the guys down at the plant are NEVER going to BELIEVE THIS!

When I came home and couldn’t find Raphael for a second time, I was mostly just annoyed. I shoved the rocks around and very quickly went from annoyed to horrified and hysterical because I had hoped to go as long as possible without having to touch a dead turtle, knowing that all their inherent reptilian creepiness must be magnified once the lights get turned out, and even though I am well versed in the contract that we make with animals we keep as pets, that they are required to make us happy and that we are required to outlive them and deal with the fallout, I had never thought for a second about what to do when one died. In February, I went on a vacation to Miami for College Roommate Allison’s 30th birthday, and spent the weekend with 6 veterinarians. I was the only one there who wasn’t a doctor, and one of the few who had not performed major surgery on a horse, which was mildly humbling. One of the vets also had a pet turtle, and I casually asked her how long they usually live, and then wished I hadn’t when the answer of “at least 40 years” came back. I resigned myself to having these little bastards with me at every stage of my life until one of my kids eventually poured bleach on them or I ran into a CraigsList posting for an elementary school that really, really, really needed a hypoallergenic classroom pet.

A lot of people would later ask how I knew he was dead, and if turtles crawl out of their shells to die, to which I answered that there was no mistaking it and that they had watched too many cartoons as a kid. For the two weeks prior, Raphael had been even more of a nutjob than usual, and was keeping me up at night with all of the banging around he was doing. I told him to Calm The Fuck Down, Weirdo at least 6 times but I’m pretty sure that he saw what was coming and didn’t trust me to take care of the funeral arrangements. When I found him, he had dug a hole in the gravel underneath a rock slab in his tank and then pulled smaller rocks in around him. It was one of the more unsettling things I’ve seen, and I was sorry to have messed up all of his hard work before I realized it was his Sistine Chapel.

Raphael, May 2011

The emotional onslaught came later, after I had freed up the parts of my brain that were extremely freaked out by the fact that there was something dead in my apartment and I was going to have to be the one to get it out of my apartment. I’ve done fine in scenarios like this where the dead thing is the size of a waterbug or smaller and not something I’ve lived with my whole adult life, but as soon as one of them was no longer living I went from seeing them as small and cute to realizing how prohibitively enormous they had become. In people, the tragedy of death is often inversely proportionate to how little the departed is, but in animals I think it works the other way around. It’s easy when a goldfish dies and awful when a dog does. I thought the turtles would fall more on the goldfish side of things, especially the turtle that I had been openly despising for years, but having to get a potato-sized dead thing out of my apartment immobilized me. Once I was capable of rational thought I realized that I lived in Brooklyn, in a rented apartment, and I would not be able to draw from my extensive background in burying hamsters in my parents’ backyard. It’s probably illegal to put dead things in ground you don’t own, right? If it isn’t, shouldn’t it be? What would I say when someone asked why I needed to borrow a shovel, or why I was out in my building’s backyard, digging holes with my eyes all red and puffy? The only thing I could think was GetItOutGetItOutGetItOut which, in addition to making me concerned for how I’ll handle the process of childbirth, wasn’t creating the most fruitful brainstorming environment. I couldn’t believe how much I needed the turtle to be out of my apartment as soon as possible. When I tried to explain this to a coworker she immediately started nodding. “When my dad died, and they tried to talk to my mom about organ donation, she just kept repeating that she needed to get him in the ground.” This served the twin purposes of making me feel like less of a lunatic while giving me what was, clearly, some much-needed perspective on the death of my turtle. I tell you all of this so you’ll understand why I took my dead turtle out of the mausoleum he had built for himself and put him in an entree-sized tupperware container, then wrapped the container in 6 plastic bags and tied them shut as a concession to the people that go through my recycling bin each week, and immediately put him outside in the trash, and pulled the barrels to the curb for pickup the next morning. As soon as I stepped back into my apartment, now (to my knowledge) void of dead things, centuries of Catholic tradition took hold and I began cataloging all the things I had to feel guilty about. I had raised a wild animal in captivity against its nature, I had spent years telling it how much I hated it, I had ignored all of the warning signs that, I’m sure, are commonplace on any advertisement for turtle antidepressants, I had put one of God’s creatures in the trash because I couldn’t take 3 minutes to come up with a better plan, and I had likely orchestrated a complete nightmare for some entrepreneurial recycling scavenger.

To the credit of every person that’s important to me, people understood that this was a big deal to me well before I was able to admit it myself (“Whatever. It’s a fucking turtle. It’s not even the one I actually like.”), and no one told me to suck it up when I became hysterical. I don’t know why I’m still consistently astonished at how good my friends are at not just being good friends, but at being good friends to ME, which I know is sometimes hard to do. Whenever everyone’s at the bar on Friday night and I have to leave at 9:30 to go to bed, everyone immediately choruses “It’s okay! This is so late for you! We’re so excited that you didn’t go to bed 4 hours ago!” which makes me feel a little like I do when my mom praises me for stuff like getting a haircut or going to Target in order to make sure that I know I’m still good at life even though I am not keeping us safe from terrorists or giving regular interviews to Rolling Stone like SOME Stickles children I could mention, but mostly makes me feel extremely lucky and like I might, one day, be able to stop apologizing to people for things that are out of my control because I’ll know for sure that all of the important people have done the math and decided that I’m worth being around despite the whole REM cycle dysfunction thing. I acknowledge the inherent humor in having narcolepsy as a constant reminder of how lucky I am to have the friends that I do, and the turtle dying fell squarely into that category. No one saw me crying, no one was there when I couldn’t bring myself to touch him, and no one watched me pick out a tiny tupperware coffin as his final resting place, but the entire A Team saw a 160 character Twitter post and knew I was a mess. “Cris! I just saw! I’m so sorry. Seriously” was Jordan’s text message, the first in a series of condolences that ending in “…seriously,” as in, seriously, I’m not making fun of you for your dead reptile even though it was always weird that you had not one, but two, and kept 20 gallons worth of turtle housing in your living space. No one said Just Go To Chinatown And Get Another One or Hey Have You Maybe Considered The Impact That A Duplex Turtle Habitat Is Having On Your Romantic Life, both of which would have been fair points. Everyone was sorry and worried and was happy to let me talk about how darkly funny dealing with this was, because dispatching your deeply evil pet turtle off to the afterlife after years of worrying about who he was going to try to kill next could never not be funny, and no one let me pretend that it didn’t matter, because losing something that you were responsible for, whether it’s a pet or a library card or someone’s respect or an umbrella, is always at least a little sad, and being without something that appeared the moment you finally considered yourself an adult and hadn’t been without since is more than a little sad, especially when having morose thoughts about your adulthood to date makes you question whether or not you ever really crossed that threshold in the first place, as you are only thinking about these things on the occasion of being 30 years old and not knowing if you could emotionally deal with moving forward as “just” a one turtle household.

When I got up the next morning, one of my goldfish was dead. My apartment had recently become a 4-tanker, not because I thought I needed to spend more emotional energy worrying about things that would never love me back because I have the Mets for that, thankyouverymuch, but because I thought these fish tanks  were cool looking. I quickly came to the conclusion that I wasn’t a fish person and would likely wind up using the tanks to store my windup toys, so I wouldn’t have cared if the fish had died in a manner that was slightly less Cherry On A Death Sundae way. As annoying as it was, that fish had some amazing comedic timing. I welcomed this as an invitation to make this situation as ridiculous as possible.

Email to Jordan, 3 hours post-goldfish flushing:

I’m pretty much past the point of hysteria, I think. I cleaned the tank out and put all of the stuff away, got the dead turtle out of my apartment. Also—and I am telling you this because it’s funny, not because it’s sad and I want sympathy—one of my goldfish was dead this morning, bringing new possible meaning to Bad Turtle’s death. Was it a suicide pact? Did Dead Goldfish see me putting Bad Turtle in a Tupperware coffin and just decide “Sh!t, if he can’t make it in this crazy world, what chance do I have?” Did the Good Turtle and the Good Goldfish spend all night whispering to their evil counterparts until they went insane and swallowed their own tongues like Hannibal Lecter and Miggs in Silence of the Lambs? In retrospect, I have also realized that Bad Turtle had seen this coming and was acting accordingly over the last few weeks. I thought he was just being particularly weird and fastidious about the rock arrangement in his tank, but judging from how he was surrounded in death, without getting in the macabre details I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had been preparing his own grave. And I totally missed it, because they do all this other weird crap all the time, but what if the goldfish recognized the signs and spent the last 2 weeks knowing Bad Turtle was going to die? 

Scene: Last Wednesday

Cristin, walking in door from work: What the hell is the matter with you? Why are you jamming yourself in under all the rocks? Jesus H Christ, you’re so weird. Whatever, sh!thead, knock yourself out. 

 Now-Dead, Then-Living Goldfish: RAPHAEL! Raphael. Don’t do it, man. I know it seems bad out there, but you don’t have to go out like this. Listen to me, buddy, it’s not worth it. DON’T YOU DIE ON ME, YOU CRAZY BASTARD. 

And then, last night when I lifted that gross, limp turtle body from the tank (did you think that turtles curled into their shells to die? My mom did. I hadn’t considered how they died since I assumed mine, especially this evil one, would outlive me. They don’t curl into anything), the goldfish realized that he had failed, and he gave up on life? How do you kill yourself if you’re a goldfish? Do you just hold your breath? 

In revisiting my first line of this email after typing the rest of it, I concede that I am perhaps NOT past the point of hysteria.

I’ve been living with one turtle for about 10 weeks now, and am concerned that I’m going to give him multiple personality disorder because, even in the present tense, when I talk about the turtle I always say “they.” If I can’t adjust my pronouns, I will eventually just get another Raphael and, even if he displays zero sociopathic tendencies, I will spend his entire life cheerfully convinced that he wants to kill me, and when he dies, and when the next bad thing happens, I’ll be able to handle it like an adult, with all these years of experience in doing so behind me.

…namely, that I had been commuting to work for weeks under a picture of my younger brother without noticing. I wish I had written down the sequence of thoughts I had at the second this came together for me, as I think it would be really interesting to discuss at inevitable future therapy sessions. Is that really him? Does he know about this? Does everyone on this train know that THAT is my baby brother and, if not, wouldn’t I be remiss to not point it out at this exact second? Is this what they mean when they say If You See Something Say Something? Can I take a picture of the subway car without looking like I’m doing terrorist recon? How quickly can I get this to Older Brother Bud? If I just stay on this subway car all day to hang out with this ad, will I get in trouble for missing BEA? If I ever meet Jay-Z, should I lead with this or with the story about how I once named my corporate kickball team 99 Problems But A Pitch Aint One?

I took a Security Threat Orange-volume of pictures, and texted them to Bud as soon as the train went above ground to cross the bridge. “Good thing you don’t work in a factory,” he wrote back. I agree with this for a variety of reasons that I’d never had cause to think about: I imagine that most factories have hairnet policies and when I “retired” from my “career” as a competitive equestrian I swore I’d never touch one of those damn things again, and I bet you don’t get to do a lot of V-lookup in Excel on factory assembly lines, and I would certainly miss that if it suddenly disappeared from my work week. “Why?” I asked Bud anyway. “Because what if you hated your job and you didn’t want to go there and then on the train you looked up and saw a picture of your brother being famous?” Okay, Bud. Good point. If I can cheerfully head to the Javits center under a picture of my brother being a rock star used as an encouragement to subscribe online to the world’s greatest newspaper, then I probably picked the right industry. I’m sure Peej would feel the same way if he saw a Lollapalooza ad with a picture of me sorting sticker books by their release date.

In my mind, this can only lead to the two of them collaborating on a song for my birthday, just like in that Simpson’s episode.

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

Over last weekend, I went to the Jersey shore and got a ridiculous front/inner arm sunburn that has my coworkers asking me questions like “Did you get your arms caught in something?” Yes. Both of them. THAT’S why they’re red. Peej and Titus were in Chicago to play Lollapalooza (you may have heard of it?) on the main stage. YouTube was doing a live stream of the festival and trying to find out how to best watch their baby scream to a crowd of overheated Chicagoians drove all of my parents insane until someone figured out that the Titus set wasn’t a part of the live stream (please look forward to my crankypants letter about my disappointment at this oversight and know that you may best correct it by featuring more videos of dogs greeting their military owners after deployment, YouTube) and we were going to have to find out how it went the old fashioned way, through Twitter posts and google alerts. (Spoiler alert: They did a great job). Pa Stickles has officially reached a dangerous level of capability with Twitter, which is to say he is great at monitoring any mention of Titus but that he has somehow come to believe that Twitter was meant to be read aloud in real time to those around you, even if they’re just laying on the couch trying to read a book about the robot apocalypse with plans to look at the Twitter posts later on. “GUESS WHAT? Two more tweets just came in!” He acted like they were valentines getting delivered to his 3rd grade classroom which, I suppose, they kind of are if you are the history teacher father of a punk frontman best known for his concept album about the civil war. “Isn’t this great? This is what it must have been like to get election returns during Lincoln’s time.” Yes. It is exactly like that. “Who did the Foo Fighters used to be again?” was his next question of the festival headliners. Unable (unwilling?) to chart the trajectory from Kurt Cobain’s suicide to festival appearances where the early crowd is incredibly devoted to updating the Internet on their thoughts regarding Peej’s facial hair, I just showed him this YouTube clip of Dave Grohl kicking a fan out of a show for being a jerk, because there are way too many People Who Start Shit At Foo Fighters Shows in this world and not nearly enough Lead Singers Who Will Publicly Shame Them Scarlet Letter-Style, literally and metaphorically.

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

Just in case trying to be a functional adult with narcolepsy isn’t enough of a challenge for you (read: me), over the last few months there’s been a major shortage of Ritalin and Adderall in New York. Since the only two things that can keep me alert are Taking A Nap Every 4 Hours and/or Ritalin, this has presented what you might call “a problem” for me. Ritalin is a “controlled substance” that you can’t get refills on without a new prescription physically brought to a pharmacy each month, and in order to avoid that scene in No Country For Old Men, they usually don’t keep a ton of it on hand and have to order it, which would take 3-5 days normally. Between getting the written Rx and getting to the pharmacy and them getting it filled from whatever methlab makes it, I usually lose about a week a month to this process wherein I just pound Red Bull at work (Coworker on my 20 ounce: “Wow, I didn’t know they came that big.” 1. That’s what she said. 2. Do you see a “nap time” listed in my Outlook calendar for today? No? Just PreSales? Okay, then, get used to this) and hope things get resolved. Because no one can give out any information on this stuff (like “if they have any” or “if anyone else has any” or “how quickly they can get it” or “how to deal with the fact that I always feel like people think I’m a junkie when they hear these conversations and why wearing a Tshirt that says “Listen, I Need It To Stay Awake, Not To Snort During Finals” to CVS will not solve that problem”) due to the fact that they would immediately get robbed for it, having a distributor shortage has basically ruined my life. It was taking me three weeks to get the damn thing filled, and no one was open to my suggestion that they “Just assume I’m coming back in a few weeks and put some under the counter” and it was just this huge, unfortunate reminder that this is incurable and I’ll have to deal with it for the rest of my life/ until I get offered a job as a mattress tester. At the end of the day, if this is the worst medical problem I have to deal with, I will consider myself enormously fortunate, but it’s hard to hold on to that mindset because I’m not Pollyanna and also because I want to kidnap everyone in the drug industry who caused this and create a Saw movie-type torture gauntlet wherein they have to format Excel grids to print on one page without having slept for 4 days, as that is now what life is like for me for 1-3 weeks out of every month.

I eventually handled this the way I deal with all problems I’ve deemed unsolvable and outsourced it to my mom. I can only assume that she was able to retain so much resourcefulness by not passing along any to her daughter, because she had the damn thing  filled within 6 hours. I grew up in a Norman Rockwell painting and we have a local indie pharmacy downtown with a family charge account option so you can walk in, get stuff, not pay anything, and get a bill in the mail at the end of the month, and that was her first and only stop on this amphetamine train. When I was in middle school and my dad started getting scared that I would one day send him out to get tampons he added me to our charge account and, as this Ritalin drama has recently reopened my lines of communication to this store where I bought all my birthday cards in high school, it was recently confirmed that I am still authorized to charge on my dad’s account. This is almost certainly going to turn into that scene from Reality Bites at some point where I stand at the counter and charge other peoples’ purchases then pocket their cash to pay my rent.

You can see how my family would have something of a rapport with the people now supplying me with legal speed. You can also see how them owning a decades-old business in my 2-mile-wide hometown and our family having what I would say, with great confidence, is something of an unusual/ memorable last name among their 16,000-count potential customer base left little doubt in the minds of everyone involved in this transaction that the Narcoleptic Stickles and the Future Of Jersey Rock Stickles are proooobably related. The last time my mom went in to pick up my drugs, the owner of the pharmacy asked her to please tell Peej how excited they were to have been mentioned in one of the songs he wrote for The Monitor and how great they think the band’s success is. Ma Stickles promised to pass the message along, then picked up my Ritalin and headed home.

**********

I don’t know anyone who likes going to shows at Terminal 5 but I figured watching Titus open for Okkervil River there would be fun anyway. When the band went from doing shows as an opener to doing shows as a headliner we were all thrilled for them and sad for us that we would have to start staying through entire concerts and probably not be in bed by 10 like we were used to, so my dad’s main selling point on the OK River show was that even though it was on a school night, the Stickles-specific part of the evening would be resolved at a reasonable hour. I picked a pub somewhere near there as a rendezvous point with my dad and then drank alone and did a crossword puzzle when trying to crash the soundcheck made him late. He arrived with Peej in tow, who had about 20 minutes to chat with us over Guinnesses before he had to head back to get ready for the show. We extracted promises of VIP section wristbands from him, which he happily provided once we got to the venue, allowing Dad and I to chill in the upper balcony without having to touch bodies with any of the common people downstairs (mid-concert text from Marisa: “You guys should pretend you’re Statler and Waldorf!” Cristin: “Too late!”), and hugged him and told him to break a leg but not literally because I get really nervous when he climbs on the speakers while he’s singing. The second he was out the door, the couple at the table next to us apologized for interrupting and then said “He’s in Titus Andronicus, right?” pointing at the door that Peej had just passed through. They told us they were here for the concert and when my dad told them they should have said something while Peej was there, they responded that they would have felt awful interrupting what was clearly a family thing. I didn’t hear all of that, as I was running out of the bar and after Peej to haul him back in to meet these people.

To state the obvious, this has many, many awesome aspects. First off, someone who I am not genetically related to recognized Peej without the benefit of being in a situation where his line of work is tremendously obvious; I am less impressed but just as thrilled when people recognize him at concert venues immediately before or after he stands on the stage in front of all the people who came to see him, so this blew my mind. Secondly, this was proof that Titus’s fan base perhaps extends beyond the demographic boundary lines I had previously assumed.

I would not have bet money on Titus having middle aged fans able to identify Peej on sight who are willing to travel in from their suburban home in central NJ to see the band play. I was pretty positive that everyone meeting those qualifications was also someone I could expect to see on Christmas/ a potential organ donor for me. Our new friends turned out to be huge indie music fans; they immediately mentioned how excited they were to see Titus at Lollapalooza this year, as they were going out to Chicago to visit their son and take in the festival, as they do every year. The gentleman kept referring to it as Lolla, pronounced as in She Was A Showgirl WithYellow Feathers In Her Hair And A Dress Cut Down To There, suggesting intimate familiarity with the 20-years-running concert. He immediately started texting his son, who was reported to be a huge fan as well, and Patrick signed one of those papers that wraps up silverware to the son with an inscription suggesting that he “respect {his} parents!” After Peej left and the couple kept looking at the autograph and taking pictures of it to text to their kids, I was quick to point out that the verb he used wasn’t “obey” or “Listen to when they say you should maybe go to grad school and not live out of a van filled with amps,” not that our parents ever went on record with that request.

They were truly apologetic about me pulling Peej back into the bar, which made sense once we found out that they had grown children who lived far away and as a result wouldn’t want to ever shorten someone else’s clearly limited family time. I was out the door after him within 6 seconds of realizing that they were fans of the music, thinking it might be awhile before I got another chance to introduce strangers to him after taking 6 seconds to vett them as non-serial killers. After they took pictures and he signed things he went back to Terminal 5 to work his own merch table and my dad said, very quietly to me, “that was a really nice thing you did. You did a good thing,” suggesting that he somehow didn’t instantly know, the way that I did, exactly how this was going to play out after the words “Is he in Titus–” worked their way through my synapses. I ran half a block and yelled in front of everyone enjoying their bistro seating outside the bar, but I’ve made a small career after yelling things at the retreating figures of my brothers. Get the phone/ Wake up so I can open my presents/ I hate you/ Where’dyou park my car/ Play Theme from Cheers/ I love you/ Dinner’s ready/ Hurry up we’re late for mass already/ Please be careful in Iraq/ Stay out of my room/ 5 more minutes/ But it’s my turn to pick what we watch. Sisters don’t think it’s weird to yell at their brothers. We learned a long time ago that the louder you start out, the less times you’ll have to repeat yourself, and both the good stuff and the bad stuff are hard to say more than once.

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

“You should write a letter asking nicely if you can have one,” my mom said about the subway ad. She didn’t specify to whom this nice letter should be addressed. I had been expecting this suggestion from her based on previous situations where she had said I should Write A Letter, which include the time I pointed out my unrecognized potential as Cillian Murphy’s face double and she thought it’d be a good idea for me to write him a letter saying I thought we looked alike, because that definitely wouldn’t creep out a famous person. But in this instance, she wasn’t the only one stumping for the USPS/ Gmail. Whenever I mention the Titus subway ad, I get one or a combination of the following responses: “I think I’ve seen that– is he the one standing like this ::straightens back and cocks elbow::?” “You should email the Times and ask for one.” “You should email the MTA and ask for one.” “You should find out when they change the ads and then be on the subway then to ask for one.” “Just steal one.”

I am very much a Write A Nice Email person and not at all a Just Steal It person, despite my longstanding admiration of Faith’s “Want. Take. Have” slayer code on Buffy as something I could never personify as well as the only good thing Faith ever did on that show. I can’t sneak into movies and I recently went back to a deli near work to pay for a slice of pizza they hadn’t charged me for 3 weeks prior when their registers were down. This, however, seemed like a situation where, if I was ever to become a Just Effing Take It person, the time was now. I figured even if I got busted it would only make the story better and I could probably get on NY1. They longer the ads kept showing up on my daily commute, the closer I had to be getting to them no longer being there, and I didn’t want to live the rest of my life without a copy of the ad because I was raised well by conscientious parents. I promised I’d wait for a time when I was on a relatively empty car and had the help of either a friend or 3 or more drinks consumed within a 2 hour span immediately prior to getting on the subway, and I’d take it and walk. If anyone said anything, I’d explain that he was my brother, and then explain that I wasn’t talking about Jay-Z, though I certainly understand how that assumption could be made, but The Other Guy. This seemed like a pretty awesome plan.

Either I don’t drink pre-mass transit frequently enough or I’ve done a great job of making sure all of my friends understand that subway time is My Time and I don’t like talking to people between platforms, because I never found myself in a situation that met my aforementioned requirements. Every time I saw the ad I subtracted 1 from the undefined value of X that is the chances I had to get my hands on one of these things and I panicked a little, but not enough to do anything about it, which is my typical level of panic for day-to-day life. Then I was coming home from book club at 9:30 on a Tuesday night and there were less than 20 people on the train with me and there was a picture of Peej above the door I’d be exiting through in 3 local stops and I thought, well, if you don’t do this now, you need to shut the hell up about it. And shutting up about stuff is one of the few things I hate more than stealing city property, so that was a big motivator.The edge of the ad was wrinkled and sticking out beyond that plastic shield that had been intimidating me for months, so I hoped it’d be easy to get out without destroying much/ any of the fixture. I waited until mine was the only stop left ahead of me and stood in front of the door, hoping I was silently exuding a casual Oh Me I Just Like Standing On A Mostly Empty Train vibe. I reached up to the wrinkled edge of the ad and started softly tugging on it, then smoothing the edge as though I was a some kind of freelance MTA ad fixer, then tugging harder, then smoothing it out more. Neither the yanking or the tugging was accomplishing my actual or pretend objectives. I realized, with enough time left to pull it off, I would have to wrench the cover out entirely to get at the ad and was not accomplishing that without drawing the attention of the various federal marshals that were almost certainly riding the D train incognito that night. I could do it and run directly out the door I was facing when it opened in 90 seconds. Should have been as easy as falling off a log, but as we already know from my inability to fall off (albeit, very high off the ground) logs across a variety of log-falling opportunities during my Adventure Games class in college, having an easy thing gift wrapped for me is not enough to override the OH NO YOU DONT GIRL FOR REALS failsafe I’ve been equip with since birth, and I couldn’t do it. I stood there smoothing out the wrinkles like the copayment for my OCD therapy depended on it and prayed that the door would open soon, convinced that somehow everyone on the train had figured out that I was trying to Steal Shit but no one had used the psychic ability that had brought them to that conclusion to discover that I was doing it with the purest intentions a middle child has ever known. I took back everything bad I had ever said about The Secret and mentally chanted OpenOpenOpenOpen at the door witha greater intensity than any of the times I’d wished the same thing while staring at that same door while it pulled into the same subway station where I’d disembarked for the last 3 years. The tiles of my station started to flash by and I exhaled, ready to book it before anyone could somehow cut around me and shame me with their eyes and judgey silence. The train stopped and I was still facing tile through the window; the doors were opening on the opposite side of the train, just as they had for every other one of the 12 times a week, every week, that I had come home to this stop. I debated continuing to stand there with my face to wall, Blair Witch-style, just to prove that I wasn’t some dumbass who was just in Sunset Park for the tacos and totally knew where the doors opened thankyouverymuch, but decided to go with the about-face dramatic exit instead, silently giving my fellow commuters permission to add Directionless Moron to the Jay-Z-Obsessed-OCD-Addled dossier they were all clearly building on me.

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!