Besides, I don’t think about “fired” in a Donald Trump reality show kind of way, I think about it like I’m being packed into a cannon by my fellow circus performers and aimed at an “X” in the middle of an inflatable mattress. This works nicely as a career transition metaphor for all you optimists out there that quickly identified the cannon as Opportunity and the mattress patched with duct tape as The Next Great Thing Waiting For Me Around The Corner. Most days I’m enough of a Pollyanna to see it that way as well, though I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t have dark moments spent wondering why I had to be surrounded by clowns, smelling like gunpowder while I try to careen in the general direction of the inflatable mattress and not into the waiting arms of that 12-fingered carny who wants to take me behind the cotton candy machine and make me his bride.

The best and worst parts of this have both been my parents’ reactions. When it went down, all I could think about was my parents, and how and what I was going to tell them when I got home. I knew this wouldn’t change how they thought about me or anything, but I also knew it was going to make them worry enormously, and as their One Child Who Can Always Be Reached By Phone And Rarely Leaves The Country, I don’t like doing that. All three of them handled it phenomenally, and we were able to transition directly into Accidentally Saying Inappropriate Things Near The Girl Who Just Lost Her Job, which I appreciated. I went home to NJ the weekend after my job-ectomy, and in passing my dad mentioned to my stepmom that he had to go to a meeting for the new job he was starting. “Maybe they want to fire you already!” my stepmom joked gleefully, then everyone froze and looked at me out of the corner of their eyes. My mom took half a personal day from her job to spend with me, and when we got in the car she crowed “Who’s so excited to not be at work right now?!” and then immediately put the car in park and apologized 8 times. If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s Milk It, so all of this has been fantastic. For a month straight, whenever I didn’t want to deal with something, I played the job card. Can you put your dishes in the dishwasher? I’d love to, but I just got fired, and I’m really upset. I think it’s be better if I stayed right here on the couch, eating mac n’ cheese and watching Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman reruns.

When I think about this happening to me, though, I keep coming back to my parents’ initial reactions. Coming from a family where everyone has the same face, same voice, and same mannerisms, I’ve always been a little obsessed with identifying things that I “got” from my various parents, and this was no exception. Watching my parents respond to this was the clearest illustrator of how the three of them had built me from scratch. I was most worried about my mom; my mom is made entirely of little blocks of empathy, and having something bad happen to one of her children is torture. When I get a papercut, I am positive that my mom feels it, and that it hurts four times as much. I called my mom to tell her that morning and I thought she was going to cry– not because she was disappointed in me, but because she knew I was trying not to cry. “I’m coming to get you,” was the first thing she said, because she knew I needed my mom right then, and she knew that part of me wanted to lay in her bed and hide from people until I thought I could deal with it. The first thing my dad said was “Did you sign anything?” which is absolutely the first thing I would have said to anyone in my situation. And when I spent the next three days scouring paperwork and crafting Excel grids and strongly worded emails and telling myself before phone meetings “you have no reason to be scared– it’s not like they can fire you AGAIN,” I knew that had come directly from my dad. Telling my stepmom was particularly hard. With my mom & dad, I always have the fallback excuse that anything I screw up is actually their fault– it’s either nurture or nature, right? so I can blame them for everything– but I like to tell myself that my stepmom got to pick me as a daughter instead of being blindly assigned to try to turn me into an adult the way my mom and dad were, and I also like to tell myself that she made an extremely intelligent decision that has paid off great dividends. (After I got through what we in the Stickles fam like to call Cristin’s Awful Phase, known to the population at large as High School. I was a nightmare. Pretty much every move I make at this point in my life is designed as a silent apology to my family for having to deal with me when I was 13-18 years old). Because of that, all I could think to say to  my stepmom was “I’m sorry,” and she, rightfully, told me to shut up. “You listen to me. You do not fucking apologize for this.” Once I got done trying to remember the last time she had used the eff word, I figured out how right she was, and I decided to stop being a self-loathing little bitch about things and go back to being someone who Does Not Fucking Apologize when it’s not warranted. This is how the three of them made me, and none of that will ever change. Especially not as the result of something like this.

But like I said, I’m not going to talk about any of that. I’ll talk about it some day, once I’ve entered an era where I can comfortably watch and discuss Up In The Air without breaking out in hives, because one of my favorite things that has already come out of this is a noted high peak in Unintentional Comedy on the Hilarity Graph of my life. Like how in order to retain your unemployment benefits, the state of NY requires you to fill out a job experience form that asks if you have welding skills. That one had me singing the Flashdance soundtrack for days.

I don’t think it’s too far of a stretch to tie this into my Joint Custody Prepares You For Life thesis; children of divorce, myself included, make excellent packers and travelers. I have a minimal standard set of things I bring everywhere with me and I always have it on hand. If you need me in Chicago tonight, I can be out the door in 20 minutes, provided that I have enough podcasts already downloaded. I enjoy The Podcast for that In Between state of attentiveness where I’m not quite alert enough to hold a conversation or follow the plotline of a moderately complex novel, but don’t want to surrender to the blank stare/ head tilt that I get when I listen to music. It’s nice to have someone who just keeps talking to you about vaguely interesting stuff without caring if you listen. Reminds me of college.

I am a huge fan of Slate’s Culture Podcast, which looks at everything from The Dark Knight to Pants on the Ground to French film directors to Jersey Shore with the same critical eye and has never failed to amuse/ inform me. I am particularly in love with Dana Stevens, one of their movie experts, for a variety of reasons including but not limited to the fact that she titled her review of that depressing movie Brothers “Let’s Get Emotional In The Snow,” and that she enjoyed Jennifer’s Body, a movie that recently delighted me to no end. They post a new podcast to iTunes every week and they’re free and you really have only the flimsiest of excuses for not listening, especially if you have any kind of commute to work.

They mentioned something in passing on a show from a few weeks back that I just listened to last week at the airport, and it’s sticking with me. There was a guest television commentator on doing a Decade In Review and when it was pointed out that she didn’t mention Buffy as one of her Best Shows of the 00s, she replied that she had never seen an episode but was saving it, in its entirety, for the future when she needed something to look forward to. This was matched by someone confessing that she had read all of Virginia Woolf but was saving To The Lighthouse for a great bout of depression or another future need.

I kind of can’t believe that this hasn’t already occurred to me. I’ve loved the idea of something being there for you when you truly need it since I became obsessed with King Arthur in college and read several medieval claims that he would return when Britain truly needed him (I am taking his absence to mean not that this myth is untrue but that Britain is doing a-okay thus far), and when Jo Rowling invented the Room of Requirement in Hogwarts for Harry Potter. Recently, I’ve said this about Battlestar Galactica to at least a dozen people unfamiliar with the show: it comes to you when you’re ready for it, and not before.

It’s going to be hard for me to keep anything in The Vault because I’m a Media Completist and want everything of what I like immediately if not sooner. Actually, I guess I’m kind of an Everything Completist, since this also extends to my attitude towards things like soda and sleeping and jelly beans. The average shelf life for a Cherry Craisin, can of Diet Pepsi, unwatched episode of Arrested Development or unread Pretty Little Liars book left unattended in my apartment is roughly 6 hours. I’m pretty sure that all the horror stories told around the campfire at the Reeses Peanut Butter Cup Factory are about my apartment, as no peanut butter cup has ever made it through a night alive there.

So I’m going to combine this idea with another one that I come back to pretty frequently, which is the lingering presence of The Great Gatsby on my Best Books I’ve Never Read List. The gamble of putting something into The Vault for later consumption is the possibility that it might not live up to expectations and you’ll realize your whole life has been a sham (see also: why no one should save sex for marriage). But I’m pretty confident that there’s no way I’ll hate The Great Gatsby, so I’m keeping it on retainer until the universe tells me that I’m ready for it.

Unrelated, But Awesome: Rolling Stone recently quoted my little brother on his epic drinking habits. I love everything about this. It also dovetails nicely (this is something that people actually say at work with a straight face when they’re talking about any kind of ideological overlap. Really.) with my plans to do a series of blog posts wherein I annotate lyrics off the new Titus Andronicus album from the point of view of Patrick’s sister, a vantage point that I am particularly and exclusively designed to deliver. It’s going to be amazing. Trust me.

The Unsolicited Recommendation: The Droid. For Christmas, The Boyfriend upgraded my cell phone from a fairly awesome one to a Holy God This Is The Best Thing That Has Ever Happened To Me awesome one. I had to switch cell carriers to get it, which I’m okay with because I wasn’t under contract with my old one and didn’t wind up with any fees, and it lead to some hilariously embarrassing Look At The Young Couple Shopping Together moments for the two of us. I was unaware that he couldn’t be in a Verizon store for more than 7 minutes before wandering off to play with the newest blackberry, but I certainly found out quickly enough when he left me and the sales associate with a “I’ll be over there; call me when you need me to pay for something.” I understand that that statement is something akin to “I love you more than anything in the world” to some girls, but it mostly just made me want to sink into the floor and/or sing one of many girl power hip hop songs I have in my karaoke repository about not needing a man to buy me things. I tried to get back at him later when I asked the Verizon girl if I needed to sever ties with my old carrier myself and she responded to my “So, I have to break up with Sprint now?” with a “Nope, I just broke up with them for you,” and I cleverly fired back a “Great, do you think you could break up with him for me while you’re at it?” while jerking a thumb at the nearby boyfriend. “Don’t you want to wait until after he pays for your new phone?” she joked. Touche, Verizon chick. Tou. Che.

That said, the Droid is a total game-changer. I’ve never had an iPhone, but it really seems to be all the awesomeness of one without any of the sucky reception issues that Luke Wilson is always trying to tell us don’t exist on those awful commercials, and without selling (more of) your soul to Apple, as they already have a considerable chunk of mine. Mine is synced with my gmail contacts so I finally have everything in one place and no longer have to live in fear of losing everyone’s mailing addresses when I accidentally delete my Christmas card spreadsheet or lose my day planner, which I’ve actually had nightmares (multiple) about before. Some other thing it does: web browsing, facebook, twitter, quizzes me on the presidents, tells me my daily horoscope, gives me Yelp suggestions, holds all of my music/ beloved podcasts, shows YouTube videos, takes pictures and video, displays eBooks, gives me GPS directions, and has a giant  compass display to tell me which way is north for when I get up out of the subway station and am confused. (The Boyfriend: “I just remember what direction the train is going, and then I can figure out which way is north.” Cristin: “Well, it’s NOT QUITE THAT EASY for those of us who frequently get lost in their office building trying to get to the floor they have worked on for four years.”). I’m already so attached to it that I feel like I’m a few steps closer to needing one of those battery heart plug-ins that Iron Man has in order to survive, but I don’t even care because life with the Droid is so beautiful and magical.

The ALA Awards (including the abovementioned Newbery) were yesterday, which proved to be a Very Fun Day to work at my company, as we did spectacularly well. In particular, there was one book (When You Reach Me which, if you haven’t read, I am jealous of you because you get to read it for the first time, which is pretty much the greatest thing ever. You should buy it, especially since I can’t get you a copy because all the ones we had in the office are being guarded ferociously by their owners, which is totally understandable) that we have all been in love with since we read it forever ago and were all pulling for so much that we were scared to say it out loud because we didn’t want to jinx it.

We were so Almost Positive that it was going to win (as you’ll hear me say in the video, the only way it couldn’t would have been if the librarians had “gone f!cking rogue on me,” as librarians sometimes do) that WorkFriend Jen and I made plans to have a viewing party of the awards webcast with started at SEVEN FORTY FIVE IN THE MORNING on a Monday holiday from work (yesterday). I got up earlier for this kids’ book awards presentation that I didn’t even have to watch for work than I almost ever do for my actual job in kids’ books. And since internet “reaction videos” are all the rage these days, we taped ourselves watching When You Reach Me win. That’s right.

Nerdcast 2010: Watch Jen & Cristin watch When You Reach Me win the Newbery from Cristin on Vimeo.

(Apologies to Maggie– at the beginning of this clip, I look through the ballots for the ALA betting pool and I make the somewhat unfair comment that you are perhaps not the best at predicting awards winners. When I send out the results you will see that, in fact, none of us were good at choosing winners, I just picked you to rag on because you had already commented on how poorly you did. Emily picked the Glenn Beck picture book to win the Caldecott, so you certainly did a lot better than she did).

Some notes: Jen has a far more intense job than I do, as I merely sell the books but she has to manage all of their inventory. And I only have one inventory manager- Jen- but she has like 20 sales reps in addition to me that she has to deal with, and each of us thinks we’re more important than everyone else and we like to do things like walk into her office and go “So I didn’t estimate for this title, but I’m going to need 30,000 of them. And they have to ship by Tuesday.” So after we finished watching the awards I went to Barnes & Nobel (it’s around the corner from Jen’s apartment), sent 2 work-related emails, and took a 5 hour nap. Jen didn’t move from that spot on the couch all day because she was managing the crap out of everything. Her job is really hard, and she still gets up at 7 to watch the awards because she loves them, which is pretty amazing.

Also, because awards make so much more work for Jen than they do for me (8 hours of juggling on your day off vs. shopping and napping on your day off. You do the math), she knew about the winners 2 hours before I even got there so she could get started on evvvverything she has to do. And because she’s a great friend and because I had begged her not to tell me ahead of time, she poker faced it, Lady Gaga style, through the announcements so that I could enjoy, Christmas morning-style, finding out that we had won. And it was awesome.

Unrelated, but Awesome: Here is my favorite outtake from when Bud & Peej and I went to Sears to have our pictures taken:

Awkward Family Photos- Outtakes from Cristin on Vimeo.

Gentleman in New Orleans Loses Chunk Of Arm In Possible Zombie Attack. (via Boing Boing. This is not fake news, amazingly)

Not since George Romero’s seminal bloodfest Night of the Living Dead has so much flesh been munched by so many reanimated corpses.

“Other monsters may threaten individual humans, but the living dead threaten the entire human race,” says Max Brooks, author of the 2003 best seller The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection From the Living Dead, of the undead’s popularity. “Zombies are slate wipers.”

~USA Today article that features The Forest Of Hands and Teeth, which is easily my favorite book that RHCB is publishing this year.

And across the pond: The public’s unanticipated desire for the unusual conflation of Regency romance and the undead this morning sent Seth Grahame-Smith’s zombie mash-up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies soaring to the top of Amazon’s UK “movers and shakers” chart, which monitors the books which are experiencing sudden demand from consumers. ~Guardian UK

I am so not above saying I Told You So. Zombies are awesome, guys.

Unrelated, Not Awesome: Stay Classy, Glen Rock.

Unrelated, But Awesome: I started making my Peep diorama last night for the Easter festivities. You have no idea how hard it is for me to NOT post a picture of the work in progress here (you know this particularly well if you’re one of the 8 people I’ve already emailed it to– it’s too awesome to keep to myself). I spent four hours building this thing out of a shoebox yesterday and I haven’t concentrated that hard on anything since the SATs. I’m adding the Actual Peeps tonight and will photo-document shortly. Let me just say this– I am Totally Effing Bringing It in terms of Peep scenery, you guys. You’d better be prepared to Bring It in return. My Peeps have a nicer apartment than I do. Now I can’t WAIT for Sunday.

1- Those top left two cubbies are my autographed books, which I photographed and itemized and logged with my insurance company when I moved even though most are sentimental favorites and not worth much scratch. Highlights include: All 4 Traveling Pants galleys; The View From Saturday; The Book Thief; Kiki Strike; King Dork; and Mysteries of Harris Burdick, my favorite picture book that doubles as Autographed Copy From The Author I Was Most Scared Of During The Signing. I’ll tell that story someday.

2- There’s the GMAT book I haven’t opened for the very good reason of Not Having Signed Up To Take The Test Yet. I’d much rather annotate my bookshelves. We’ll mark this one down as reason number 329 I should reconsider grad school.

3- That’s The Westing Game on the right and Fantastic Mr. Fox on the left. I reread each of these about every year or so and find myself using them as verb in casual conversation more than I should. Like when my parents talk about their wills I can’t resist being all “Are you going to Westing Game it and make the three of us search for your vast fortune?” or when I was discussing where in NYC I would choose to hide from zombies during what I know is an inevitable zombie apocalypse I thought “I would really love to hide in The Container Store as long as I could Fantastic Mr. Fox a tunnel into a nearby bodega to get food.”

4- I collect windup toys.

5- And Mr. Potato Heads.

6- You can’t see it very well, but that little book up front is I Like You, which I enjoy giving to people who don’t hear frequently enough from me how awesome they are. I have a copy of it in my office, as well, which I use as a fun Are You As Cool As I Think You Are test (if someone comes in and goes “Aww, I love that book!” then they are as cool as I think they are).

7- The essay/ memoir cubby. Standing up is EB White’s Here Is New York, which I bought during my 4 month layover in New Jersey this summer and then couldn’t read because it made me miss living in New York too much. I saw someone reading this on the D train the other day and I wanted to check and make sure he was a resident of one of the boroughs because if not, it’s just depressing if you love it here. I’m not a huge fan of memoirs but I love a good essay collection, especially since my Grow Up To Write A Book Like Sloane Crosley’s fantasy surpassed my Practice Your Acceptance Speech For Best Original Screenplay fantasy. I think I could wring an essay collection out of Stories About My Family on this godforsaken website alone, and then we would just have the task of making non-Stickles want to read it. Something to marinate on. On the bottom of that shelf is The Game, the pick-up artist book that Maggie became obsessed with back when we were at Harper, and that we all reference constantly (ex., “Everyone at the ugly sweater party was so friendly, and I talked to all these strangers. But I think that’s because the ugly sweater is unintentional peacocking.” ~Webmaster Kyle). Also in there is the Anna Quindlen book about her dog (Good Dog. Stay.) that made me cry like a baby, and the Ann Patchett book that made me weep like a child. (Those are the same thing, I just didn’t want to totally repeat myself. I wasn’t putting, like, shades of meaning in there or anything).

8- Adult Fiction, fronted by World War Z (how many times do I have to tell you how good this book is before you read it?) and Beowulf. My biggest regret about college is not, as you might guess, that class I failed Freshman year, or the fact that I didn’t drop that class before I failed it, or that guy I made out with Senior year while he was drunk from doing shots of listerine (stay classy, Delta Phi)–it’s that the Old English professor was on sabbatical I didn’t get to take an entire class on Beowulf. We’ve all got our weird things.

9-Nonfiction books about professional baseball, 60% of which are about the Mets. I have read none of these books in their entirety, but I’ve read parts of all of them.

10-Weird Nonfiction. My Walt Disney biography and three books about how weird Disneyworld is, two books on the mistreatment of munchkins during the filming of Wizard of Oz, one on Jim Henson, three books about Lincoln’s assassination, two on how collections in Natural History Museums are built (one of which tells you how many Eskimos had to die for the AMNH in NY), one on how people have died at the Grand Canyon, one on the black plague, and two on Sesame Street.

11- The top is a rotating display so none of the spines get messed up, but This Is New York always stays face-out.

12- One of two YA Fiction shelves with Honey, Baby, Sweetheart and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn face out. I’ve never read A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. The other day I was searching upcoming shows on my DVR because I wanted to find the TLC special on Tree-Man (who, I’m told by Annette, lives in some third world country and has some version of HPV that causes his skin to become bark-like) and it wasn’t available but a movie version of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn was, so I taped it. But still haven’t watched it. I guess I just don’t want it bad enough on this one.

13- My riding chaps. These were my major Christmas gift from my grandpa when I was about 11- by that point, Grandpa Herb had a whole baseball team of grandkids and they were becoming hard to keep track of, so our parents would just buy us something off our list and Herb would bankroll it later. He knew I was a big-time pony girl, but still did a lot of “What the hell are THOSE for??” when I unwrapped them. My chaps have lived in my bedroom at home, in the trunk of my dad’s car, at summer camp in New Hampshire, at college in Virginia, and now in New York. I “retired” from riding after college (though the girls that were on the equestrian team with me at school might say that I really hung it up well before then based on my dedication and performance) but I like having my chaps somewhere where I can see them– if I had to pick one article of clothing to save from a fire, it would be these guys. I like having a reminder that I loved something that was good for me and was good at something that I loved, and I know I’ll get to go back to it at some point.

Unrelated, But Awesome:I have decided to have an Easter Egg Hunt on Sunday in honor of living in a big empty building and in honor of our risen savior. If you live in Brooklyn and are friends with me and I forgot to email you about this, please let me know. I just switched to gmail (I KNOW, right? Way to swing at a pitch 7 years late!) and am a bit confused as to where my email contacts are. Initially, I was all jazzed up about hiding eggs, but now I’m mainly jazzed about Things We Can Do With Peeps. FOR EXAMPLE:

Take Pictures Of Peeps At Historic Landmarks And Upload Them To The NatGeo flickr Pool.

Come Up With Needlessly Elaborate Scenes In Which The Peeps Shall Play. (I’m rooting for this one. Specifically, I plan to construct the CIC of the Battlestar Galactica when the Final 5 are standing in their Opera House Vision formation. How many of you understood a single word I just said?).

Depict Episodes of NBC Shows.

Explore the science of Peeps.

Have a Peep-Off. (A Peeps eating contest, pervert. Get your mind out of the gutter).

Study the gestational rate of Easter candy.

Make our own Peeps.

Get placement at the Denver Art Museum.

Recreate a Klan meeting with Peeps and almost get kicked out of your Virginia high school. (kids are idiots).  

Do some microwave Peep jousting.

Make S’Meeps.

This week my TV remote control just up and stopped working. I could get some buttons to light up but I couldn’t get it to scroll through the 8 hours of battlestar galactica I had saved (spoiler alert: my TV gets fixed, and I get to watch all of them. Aside from Friday’s episode, I am officially caught up. Eventually I’m going to add up how many hours of the last month I spent watching battlestar galactica just so I can quote it relentlessly in shock and awe, not unlike what I know my reaction will be when I finally add up this year’s Amazon purchases for my tax return. Yikes). For three days I tried to fix it myself, but the extent of my attempts were “unplugging and plugging back in” and “reading a book instead.” On Friday, I finally caved and called Time Warner, knowing that I had had a fairly rough day/ week at the office and figuring that it would be fun to have someone to get upset with.

And then I couldn’t. Because they were awesome. I know. I know. When in your life has customer service ever been awesome? I was floored. So floored that I wrote this ridiculous thank you email via their online form and saved the text so I could look at it later and decided if I was being obsequious. Turns out I wasn’t.

I just spoke with Andre in customer support about a problem I was having with my DVR (I believe the phrasing I used was “my remote control and TV aren’t speaking to each other. Please help”) and he was fantastic. I have about as much technological know-how as a crack addicted ferret and he was still able to explain the problem to me in a way that not only immediately fixed it, but gave me the (perhaps unfounded) confidence that I could take care of it on my own should the problem arise again. I’ve never written a note of gratitude to a customer service rep before (likely because (a) most customer service I encounter is terrible and (b) who has that kind of time on their hands?) but I feel like this experience deserves acknowledgement and applause. With all the horrors of today’s world, having a cable customer service guy who can fix your problems in 40 seconds and make you laugh in the process is pretty fantastic. Please thank Andre for me.

Also turns out that saying Thank You is really fun. No, seriously. I think I had a better time with this than Andre did. And I’m okay with it becoming a somewhat selfish act, what with me enjoying thanking people so much, because it’s way better than if, say, I got this  kind of a rise out of spreading honey on subway seats or something.

And, come on, we’re only halfway through March and Jon Stewart is already telling us that this is the worst year this country has seen since way, way, way before most of us were born. (I get all my news from the Daily Show. And Twitter.) Trying a little tenderness can’t hurt. Find someone to say thank you to– preferably in writing–and then pat yourself on the back for it, preferably on the internet. I promise you’ll like it.

Unrelated, But Awesome:If you haven’t already, you’re going to hear a lot from me soon about the book Lowboy by John Wray. I inhaled this over two days, which is EXTREMELY hard for me to do since I usually only read books meant for moody 14 year old girls with crushes on their best friends, and this is most certainly meant for adults. It’s amazing. And it’s (a) set in NYC {almost entirely in the subway system, which is fascinating} (b) written by a Brooklynite and (c) being publicized by said Brooklynite through readings in the aforementioned subway system. This one’s the real deal, people, I think you should all pick it up. If you don’t believe me:

New York Times Review

NPR All Things Considered (with excerpt)

New York Magazine

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

… only to find that, at once, an equally validating and horrifying experience.

I hope the shininess of that Newbery sticker distracts you from the knowledge that your industry is dying.

Enjoy the one day when it’s cool to be a librarian.

Congratulations on writing a book with a character that endures a tortured childhood that will go on to torture children on state reading lists for years to come.

Let’s face it, there can only be one Bridge to Terabithia.

After doing this for a few minutes I realized I had to stop before the part of my brain that got stuck doing 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon during college, causing me to fail my criminology midterm senior year, got stuck making children’s publishing someecards and wound up spitting out things like Thank god someone finally wrote a fantasy series about an orphan who’s The Chosen One every time I walk through a B&N teen section.

There was some controversy leading up to the awards this year (or, I should say, “controversy”– they’re still kids’ books. This is the great love of my life, but even I can acknowledge that we are not performing life saving surgery here) when people started questioning the relevance of the award and then other people started questioning the validity of that argument . I tend to side with Team A on this one– granted, I spend all day thinking about disney princess coloring books, so I probably have more of a tendency to Play To The Common Denominator than most do, but I think in recent years the awards committee has kind of turned into Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons (“Last night’s Itchy & Scratchy was, without a doubt, the worst episode ever. Rest assured I was on the internet within minutes registering my disgust throughout the world”) in terms of awarding praise to the obscure. In the 90s, they were like the Yankees– they couldn’t lose. Holes, The Giver, Shiloh, Maniac Magee, Number the Stars– that’s just a ridiculous lineup. That’s El Duque, Tino Martinez, Jeter, Paul O’Neill, and Bernie Williams in nerd-speak. There have been books that I’ve loved in the last decade that have gotten well-deserved attention at ALA midwinter–The Wednesday Wars {one of my favorite books of 2007}, Looking For Alaska, A Northern Light, Al Capone Does My Shirts, Kitten’s First Full Moon, The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins {Best dinosaur picture book EVER, and I would know}– but this year, as the crap has been hitting the fan for everyone in print media, I think we could have used a set of winners that had more commercial appeal. I know saying that kind of makes me the devil and it sound like I want them to give Gossip Girl the Nobel Prize for Literature just so we can move some units, but I think these awards could really lift the industry and you don’t have to go obscure to find something that’s quality. The Hunger Games is an UnEffingBelievable book for young adults and should have been named just for that, but aside from that I’m a little sad that we missed a chance to have an award winner with massive commercial appeal.

That said– some of the choices yesterday were just perfect. I love that Savvy and The Underneath got Honors– they seem like the old-school Newbery picks (Savvy reminded me a little of Each Little Bird That Sings, or The Penderwicks)– and I am so, so excited for Neil Gaiman, who has been doing amazing things for children’s books for decades. Also, his twitter feed yesterday was amazing. He posted (I refuse to say “tweeted”) about his assistant calling him at 5:30 in the morning before he knew what it was about and followed up with “Oh. Never mind.” (When you get The Call it’s always very early in the morning and you’re always sworn to secrecy for a few hours. I remember talking to Kevin Henkes after he won for Kitten’s First Full Moon {that’s right– we were totally bros when I was at OldJob} and him saying he asked the Caldecott committee if he was allowed to call his mom and tell her). After the announcement, he was all “About to drink second cup of tea without Marmalade this morning. Also, I just won the Newbury Medal for THE GRAVEYARD BOOK,” immediately followed by “Newbery, not Newbury. Also FUCK!!!! I won the FUCKING NEWBERY THIS IS SO FUCKING AWESOME. I thank you.” How can you not love this man? I totally forgive you for giving me nightmares with Coraline, Neil.

My major beef this year is with the Caldecotts. We Are The Ship got shafted. It got a handful of minor/ minority awards that don’t add up to a Caldecott and I think that’s crap. I haven’t looked closely at the winning books but I don’t think I’ll love a picture book biography of William Carlos Williams any more than I love The Little Yellow Leaf or Old Bear. Fail!

The other big disappointment I faced down this week was being told that there’s a BBYA panel at the conference where they bring in Real Life Teenagers to break it down and having to deal with the knowledge that I didn’t jump in on this action when I was 16 and working in a bookstore and spewing ridiculous thoughts about children’s books to people who don’t care at all while, unbeknownst to me, there was a forum where they would have given me a microphone and appreciated my Keeping It Real. And now I’m too old to qualify. This is worse than when I realized I was too old to be on The Real World. Especially when Jordan sends me emails like this one, subject line “Cristin Stickles, age 16:”

From a young girl talking about Melissa Marr’s Ink Exchange at kids’ day at ALA:

 Once again Melissa Marr entranced me. This book is just short of addictive. I really loved the reappearance of Seth, who is one of my top fictional boyfriends.

How can I find this girl? I need to know where he ranks against Phineas from Separate Peace and Holden from Catcher in the Rye, who were the running nos. 1 and 2 in our “Fictional Characters We’d Bang” game at college.

You should all go buy it. Even those of you who bought it the first time. In case you think I’m biased towards the record, here are what some people who don’t have the same last name as PJ have to say about it of late, plus some old favorites of mine:

The Airing of Grievances also recalls Springsteen, the Replacements, Ted Leo, younger peers such as the Gaslight Anthem, and, for their overmodulated rave-ups, Neutral Milk Hotel. The allusions, musical and lyrical, are fun, but they’re only footnotes to Titus Andronicus’ galloping, smart and passionate anthems. ~The Philadelphia Inquirer

Titus Andronicus walks its emo/punk tightrope with a droll sense of humor and abundant literary flair — the band’s name comes from a Shakespeare play, the title of its album from an episode of “Seinfeld,” and the lyrics touch on everything from Camus to gonzo journalist Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. ~ NJ Star-Ledger

As for their frontman, he has a tendency to gabble and garble his words, like a mad drunk who can barely form an intelligible sentence but does so fast, and as a consequence almost dares the listener to assume he’s a true urchin-poet… he appears throughout Titus Andronicus’ debut album The Airing of Grievances to be using one of those devices that Julian Casablancas employs to make him sound permanently like a renegade cop shouting at bank robbers during a siege. ~ The Guardian. (Called a “mad drunk” by an Englishman? How many of us can say that? Congrats, Peej!)

The music makes it easy to dismiss the true depth of Titus Andronicus. Stickles is the poet laureate of counterculture, smothering each song with insightful prose. He justifies his anger on the lead track by reasoning, “People will tell you that if you don’t love your neighbor then you don’t love God / but no god of mine would put light in such unrighteous eyes.” ~A College student at the University of Madison- Wisconsin who is getting a care package of cookies from me.

“Things have meaning when we assign meaning to them,” Stickles says. “You know what I’m saying? Existential revolt.” ~ Paste Magazine

Getting in touch with Stickles for an interview is an experience in and of itself: With no cell phone, reaching him directly is a maze of delayed emails, publicist contacts and, at the last minute, a call to Graetzer’s phone for a cellular handoff at the given moment  (Ed Note: TRY BEING HIS SISTER)… Truth be told, The Airing of Grievances has been a long time coming. Like Stickles noted, indie rock sprang from the wreckage of the American punk underground, and, underneath all the superficial differences, the two styles still share similarities. ~Aversion (Kidding aside, this is a great interview, and Peej says a lot of awesome and wildly intelligent stuff about music that make me feel guilty for having downloaded the new Kelly Clarkson song this morning)

I never want to go to New Jersey, or even pass through it. If my ears tell me right, everyone from there is so pinned down by middling working class minutiae that they have to pick up guitars and write songs about it. The unquestionable highlight of New Jersey’s natives Titus Andronicus’s eponymous album cut is the finale where they’ve become so overwhelmed by frustration that they can’t think of more lyrics and keep repeating “Your life is over,” ensuring once and for all that no one will ever mistake New Jersey for the sunshine state. ~Someone from Illinois

And the sizzling, storage-locker production makes it all sound like a cage match. Which it is — between a band and a damaged world. ~Rolling Stone

Tour Dates and pictures of Peej rocking out in a sweater.

Related, And Awesome: I’ve probably mentioned before the relationship Older Brother Bud has with YouTube– it’s his favorite thing, ever. I frequently get texts from him that say “I finished YouTube,” which usually mean he’s stranded somewhere for work and is hanging out with his laptop watching every video ever made, ever. He recently found this one, of a man and his infant daughter dancing around to PJ’s music. I am 99.9% sure that we don’t know/ are not related to this baby.

Also, here’s some slow motion ping pong set to Titus Andronicus. As you do.

And I love this one, a whole ton:

Fake movie trailers get me every time!

Unrelated, But Awesome: Subway Map of Publishing Trends in 2008. Probably not what you’re picturing, but spend a few minutes looking at it anyway. Interesting visual.

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.