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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

When I was in high school, I did not have what one might call a complete emotional tool box for handling difficult situations. I reacted to anything adverse in one of two ways: Hate Someone, or Cry. As you can imagine, I was kind of an emotional nightmare throughout my teen years. There was one particularly bad episode that I can’t place on a timeline except to say that it was back before my dad had completely given up on Trying To Make Me Act Like A Normal Human, because he tried to talk me down from it with a story about light bulbs. He was having a particularly awful day once and didn’t know how he was going to make anything better and didn’t know where to start, so he walked around the house and changed all of the light bulbs and then everything felt more manageable because he had accomplished something. I’m sure at the time I made some comment about how my life was exponentially harder than HIS or ANYONE’S, EVER and that he couldn’t expect to UNDERSTAND MY PAIN, but I think about the light bulb story all the time. Whenever I start to really freak out about something, one of the only ways I can shut off the tiny hyperactive Cristins that live in the panic room in my head is by telling myself to just find one light bulb, metaphorical or physical, to change, and that I’ll take it from there. It always works. Beyond the light bulb trick, the only other thing that calms me down is looking at bookshelves in the Ikea catalog, so in that regard, Evil Mopey Teenage Cristin was right– it is kind of hard to be me.

There was a night a few weeks ago where I showed up at The Boyfriend’s in a bug panic that was approaching Defcon 7. Usually I’m all smiles and hilarity when I get there– last week, I decided I didn’t want to stop at home first, so I just went to The Gap after work and bought alternatives to the outfit I was currently wearing to put on the next day, and was struck by how hard this is. I got to his apartment and was like “This shouldn’t have been difficult. The Gap should have some kind of sleepover widget available that tells you what shirt and underpants to buy for the pants that you currently have on, and they should be able to tailor it to tomorrow’s weather.” Before I was even halfway through my widget idea, he interrupted me and said “I know exactly where you’re going. There should be a store where they have entire outfits by size and you can wear them without ironing.” Which threw me off the widget track for awhile… because isn’t that EVERY store? Seriously, where has he been shopping all this time that has made him think that having acceptable clothes arranged by size is something to aspire to in a retail environment?? I laughed for like 20 minutes.

But not during The Bug Panic– there was no laughter there. I freaked out for a good ten minutes, announced I was going to take a shower, and then freaked out in the shower for another ten minutes. When The Boyfriend came home from buying the wine that I demanded he go out and get so that I could numb myself with alcohol, I was meticulously drying and straightening my hair, almost strand by strand. “Why are you doing your hair at 11 at night when you’re just going to fall asleep on it?” he asked me, because that is what a sane person would ask when confronted with a crazy person doing what I was doing. “I’m changing light bulbs,” I told him. “Huh?” he said, and this became one of the many times where The Boy’s slight hearing impairment totally worked in my favor. I have to repeat myself a lot, and it’s never bothered me because it gives me this automatic do-over that, let’s be frank, I could really use. I don’t ever think before I say something, and every time he says “What was that?” I get a second chance at not being a completely terrible girlfriend and at hiding from him all of the reasons he should be afraid of me. Like the light bulb comment.

“I need to be in control of something,” I told him, making a gesture in his direction with my flat iron that I now realize was probably more menacing than I had intended. “I like to be in control of things, and right now I am in control of nothing, and I have decided to control my hair.”

So that’s where I am right now. Changing light bulbs and/or compulsively flat ironing my hair until I can sleep comfortably in my apartment again.

Unrelated, But Awesome: Hey, remember Mr. Brightside? It’s still awesome even though none of us have thought about it for years. All of the sudden, all I can do on the subway in the morning is listening to this song and the Miley Cyrus “Party In The USA” song where she talks about Jay-Z. But I don’t want Mr. Brightside to suffer by a Miley Cyrus association (or Jay-Z for that matter). It’s awesome all by itself.

Unrelated, But Awesome: If someone were to make a video of what I do at work all day you would promptly want to die after watching it because you’d be so bored of staring at Excel, unless the video crew happened to stop by on the day of the Halloween party or something, which might be vaguely interesting/ horrifying to nonPublishing people, but probably not.

However, videos of what Little Brother Peej does at work are completely awesome, regardless of what day you take for filming.

Unrelated, But Awesome: My mom has this Thing (as, I would imagine, nearly all mothers do) about Knowing Where Her Children Are At All Times, Even Though Said Children Are Self-Sustaining Adults. I know this sounds like I’m complaining, but I promise I’m not– I think it’s kind of nice that someone (other than certain members of the state and federal government tasked with monitoring the output from my electronic ankle monitor) is always so concerned with my whereabouts. She is equally concerned with movements on both a macro (“So at what time, exactly, does your plane land in Chicago?”) and micro (“So you’re going to be taking the subway to Target, then?”) level. I’m sure when I was in high school and afraid to drive on the highway for a few years and thus confined to the 25 MPH streets of Glen Rock, that was pretty fantastic for her. The fact that two of her children picked careers that make it virtually impossible to even know what country they’re in has done nothing to quell this tracking impulse– if anything, it’s only gotten stronger, to the point where I think she would consider getting us drunk over Christmas (like that’ll be so hard to accomplish) and then having devices implanted in the backs of our necks that would allow her to watch our every move and, possibly, follow us around using some kind of app on her laptop like she’s playing The Sims, except with no control, even when we do things she doesn’t approve of, like eat cookies for dinner or fail to take other peoples’ feelings into consideration. She doesn’t want to impose or involve herself, she just needs to KNOW where we are. Like I said, it’s pretty cute.

As you can guess, it’s relatively easy to keep track of where I am at all times. I spent roughly 9 hours a day in an office building, and the rest of my time is spent at home on my couch watching old episodes of MTV’s True Life and google stalking people I don’t like. The Boys are much harder to nail down. Mom prints PJ’s tour schedule off of the band’s MySpace page   and posts it next to her wall calendar, and she keeps track of her eldest mainly through, as I understand it, communication with his wife and 2 year old daughter, both of whom are easier to get useful information out of than Bud himself. Heyo! But, seriously.

I called my mom from the Miami airport en route to the cruise we did over labor day (Did I mention I went on a cruise? I totally did, with my fellow yahoos Kate, Katie, Maggie and Kyle. It was ridiculous and awesome even if I did, as Webmaster Kyle likes to say “spend most of it sleeping.” This is a fairly accurate statement– I do not have what you might call “sea legs” and when the boat moved, it made me want to either throw up or go to bed, so in order to avoid doing the first one, I did the second one. A lot. Then I tried the seasickness pills that they were handing out willy-nilly and learned that that stuff gets you high as a kite. It was like the first time I took benadryl during my brief cat allergy and found that it makes me do stuff like lay on the floor and go “My legs feel heavy! Do your legs ever just feel SO HEAVY?” Anyway, cruises are weird, because it’s like being at a days-long bar mitzvah, surrounded by strangers. I think because we are Jaded New Yorkers, we didn’t quite understand the Cruise Mentality. For most of the rest of this boat, they were there to have The Fucking Time Of Their Lives, an attitude we didn’t feel the need to match since we maintain a pretty high level of Fucking Awesomeness at home in Brooklyn. From a cultural anthropological standpoint, cruises are fascinating. There were people wearing ball gowns taking formal posed pictures. Weirdos. Anyway. All I ever want to do on vacation is read and sleep, so this was a pretty good on in my book. It was also proof that I can go anywhere with my friends and they will Create Awesome. So next time, we don’t have to take a cruise and have someone mandate what our fun will be, we can just go to an abandoned cabin somewhere and we’ll probably wind up doing the same exact thing which, in this case, wound up being playing an epic game of Clue and then planning out the different elements of the Brooklyn Clue game that we want to make, or outlining the plot points of a romance novel set among the cruise staff). When I called my mom from Florida she immediately told me “I bought a giant map of the world. I’m going to move you to Florida now.” She has the world map hanging in her office upstairs, and she has pins for each of her children. Whenever one of us goes somewhere, she moves our pin, and then when we go somewhere else, she moves the pin there. (Another one from Webmaster Kyle by way of Mitch Hedberg: “Someone better go to the top two corners first, otherwise the map is going to fall down”).

The list of Adorable Things Done By My Mom is long and distinguished, but I think this really takes the cake. This is well on the way to becoming The Default Story I Tell To New Friends When Describing How Cute My Mom Is, just like how I use the story about the time Vicki helped me dye my hair blue and then laughed and took pictures of my dad’s horrified face when I took off my hat and revealed it to him as The Default Story Of Why My Stepmom Is One Of My Best Friends, and just like how I use the story of how my parents put my SAT scores on a balloon as The Default Story Of Why I Sometimes Wake Up In The Middle Of The Night Panicked About My Lack Of Academic Achievement As An Adult. When I told the cruise crew about this Maggie immediately went “Like Mrs. Weasley!” because of the clock that the Weasleys’ mom has that shows where each of them is at any time.

Since I had Intense Middle Child Syndrome before PJ even blessed me with the title of Middle Child, one of my first thoughts was, naturally, how bad this whole map thing was going to make me look. “But my pin is never going to go anywhere!” I wailed. “That’s not true!” mom said. “Your pin was in Chicago when you were in Chicago. And then in Minneapolis when you were there.” This would have made me feel better, except that it easily encompassed the sum total of my travels over the last 2 years in one breath, and both of those trips were for work, and to cities I go to for work all the time. “My pin is going to be so lame! The other pins will make fun of it!” I kept going. “It’s going to rust in its Brooklyn hole!”

Which is not such a bad fate, as far as Map Pin Life goes, I guess.

Oh yeah. That’s the Peej on ESPN.com, thanks to Paul Shirley, Random House author (as if I needed another reason to love you, Paul!).

Titus Andronicus is widely accepted to be Shakespeare’s bloodiest play, making the band’s name a fitting one. T.A. sounds to me like the band that would be formed if Rob Roy was a 19-year-old skateboard punk from New Jersey who had grown up listening to Brand New and had just been given access to a recording studio, a guitar and Conor Oberst’s voice. And yes, I mean that Rob Roy, the Scottish Robin Hood played by Liam Neeson in the 1995 movie. Listen to my favorite song from the album, called “Fear and Loathing in Mahwah, NJ” and you’ll understand.

Full article here, Paul’s book here.

Giving a toast at Erin’s wedding is the only exception to this rule that I’ve encountered– I wanted to do it so badly, and wanted so badly for it to be good. I go to roughly 9 weddings a year and have yet to see a Maid of Honor really effing hit it out of the park, which is why I spent about 3 years writing the damn thing (someone took his sweet time proposing). After all that time (and 45 minutes I spent standing in the shower reciting it over and over on the day of the wedding– I’m surprised I wasn’t still a prune by the time I had to give it) I was able to do it without notes, though I did have a printout of it hidden in my bra, a fact that I only share with you now because my mother has already told anyone who brings up the toast that I was keeping an emergency copy trapped under a delicate little number from Gap Body in case I choked. In retrospect, though, I don’t see how having to reach down my dress would have made the situation of blanking on my speech any better.

We have video of this epic event, but it’s not embeddable (I’m sure my mom would love to show it to you on DVD whenever you’re passing through Glen Rock) so you’ll have to use your imagination as you read it. And Mike, The Best Man (pictured above) did a phenomenal job–I loved his toast, and I think we were a great combo, and I felt bad for him having to stand up there with someone who had approached toast-preparation with the ferocity of an Olympic hopeful Chinese gymnast. After we were both done the groom hugged Mike and said “Thank God you went before her, man,” which I took as a compliment.

There has literally never been a time in my life when I didn’t know Erin—she showed up 6 months before I did, and we owe our moms big Thank Yous for giving us built-in best friends. Hopefully that was more of a happy accident than it was a manifestation of their fear we’d be social rejects who could never befriend anyone outside their gene pool. Danny & Erin & I were basically raised as triplets and spent all of our formative years side by side in awkward family photographs, mixed up in each other’s birthday parties and summer vacations, causing all kinds of adorable chaos. When we left for college it was the first time in my life that I didn’t have Erin—the first time I had to pick up the phone to talk to her instead sitting on the hood of her car in the school parking lot, or walking into her house without knocking. Er and I adopted to the phone pretty quickly, as most teenage girls do, and we held onto the habit after graduation. I called her a week after she started her job at Fort Monmouth and asked what the other people in her program were like, and she paused before answering.

“There’s this boy,” she said. “And he makes me laugh.”

And I thought—okay, big deal, Tina Fey makes ME laugh but I’m not about to go and do anything stupid about it.

But, Erin did do something stupid—she subjected CJ to meeting our family. The first time she brought home this Boy Who Made Her Laugh everything went perfectly fine, and as soon as they left for the evening my family charged right into our time honored tradition of Talking About People Who Were Not In The Room. I don’t think CJ’s car was even out of the driveway before he was offered up for dissection.

The cousins and I were lucky enough to grow up with a wonderful great uncle (a “great” great uncle)—and I know the first rule of making people cry in your wedding toast is invoking the name of a relative who’s both very beloved and very dead, and I promise that’s not why I bring him up now—I don’t know if it was because he had a direct line to The Big Guy to because he was just smarter than the rest of us, but Father Bob always knew what to say. Exactly what to say. And when he saw Erin and CJ together for the first time, he said “I’ve never seen Erin look so beautiful or so happy.” And when I heard that, I just thought—that’s it. That’s it, exactly. And the next time I saw the two of them I thought, I’ve never seen Erin look so beautiful or so happy, and when she told me they were engaged I thought, I’ve never seen Erin look so beautiful or so happy, and tonight, when I saw her walking towards CJ in that white dress, I thought- I’ve never seen her look so beautiful or so happy.

And with anyone else, this might not be that big of a deal, but this is Erin we’re talking about—there wasn’t a whole lot of room for improvement before CJ ahold of her. Since the day she was born, Erin’s always been the most beautiful girl in the room (whenever I’m not around, anyway), and for her to find someone that makes her that much more luminous—well, I think that’s a really great thing, and I think it took a really great man. And even if I didn’t love CJ so much for who he is—for the sense of humor that Erin picked out right away, and for (despite all of his efforts to cover it up) the fact that he truly is a gentleman, and one with an inherent kindness that I think is exceptionally rare—if I didn’t love him for all of that, it would be more than enough for me, and for my family, to just love him for how Erin is since she found him, and how enormously happy he’s made her.

Truthfully, I was expecting today to be at least a little difficult, or for it to feel strange—as excited as I’ve been for this wedding, I just always assumed that it would be hard to watch your other half pick another half. And I kept bracing myself for these weird emotions, and the best surprise of today has been that they never showed up. And it hasn’t been difficult, or weird, or hard at all—it’s been amazing. And if I’ve been overwhelmed by anything, it’s been how lucky I am to have this reminder of how easy it really is to believe in love, which is something I think of every time I see you two, every day, and especially today. And I want to thank you for sharing that with me, with Danny, with our families, and with everyone here.

And since this is the longest I’ve gone all day without having a drink, I’ll wrap it up here before the withdrawl kicks in—please raise your glasses with me to Erin and CJ, and a lifetime of happiness together.

This is officially my favorite picture of myself, ever. Story of my life, right there.

I did a full-building egg hunt for my friends. Here I have helpfully drawn (pun!) your attention to Egg-Searcher Jesse and the object that has been giving him the slip for the 3 minutes leading up to when this picture was snapped. We had a fantastic time egg-hunting and I am lucky to have friends to not only didn’t roll their eyes and talk about me behind my back when I suggested this (to my knowledge, anyway) but who instantly took to the idea. We had more fun egg hunting than most children of the appropriate age do. I had money on Maggie to take it home, but Jeremy destroyed the competition with a 9 egg haul (per person average was 6). I was proud of everyone for sharing their candy afterwards.

Then we retired to the part of the building I’m actually entitled to occupy and made things out of shoeboxes. Because I am an enormous loser with no life, I’d been working on this one for the past week. It’s a Peeping Tom. I slay myself. Those are teeny tiny books on the bunny peep’s nightstand– Watership Down and Rabbit at Rest. Works on so many levels. I could not be more pleased with myself about this. The only thing that gives me pause is realizing that I put the most energy and focus that I’ve experienced in a great long time into something fully ridiculous that will get me nowhere in life, but for now it’s making me desperately happy, so I’m cool with it.

Unrelated, But Awesome: If you have Sirius radio, Titus Andronicus is guest-hosting the morning show on XMU this week. Glad to see Patrick drawing from all the college radio DJ experience.

Unrelated, Also Awesome: Cousin Erin gets married on Friday. I’m working Monday & Tuesday of this week and then headed to the jerze to complete my Maid of Honor duties, including but not limited to falling on the cake and doing a roll call of Erin’s exboyfriends instead of a proper wedding toast. Mazel tov!

Yo. Our little bro plays South By Southwest today. We are each therefore cooler than we were yesterday. Psyched. Google stalker ready.

I’m not sure if that’s an accurate application of the transitive property– while PJ was playing a massive music festival, I was spending my days gluing covers onto coloring books and my evenings bitching about the Battlestar Galactica finale (I am, in a word, Displeased. I think they totally punted, particularly on the Starbuck storyline, particularly when they didn’t wrap up the whole Cylons Stole My Ovary subplot from season 2 that’s been driving me insane since I saw it. I’d also like to go on record against any plans you might have to watch four seasons of a SciFi original series in the span of two months. Part of me wishes I had live blogged/ Twittered this experience, but I’m mostly glad I didn’t because that seems like a great way to lose all of my friends), so I don’t think I can claim any additional coolness runoff since we share a last name/ DNA/ knowledge of all of the good Easter basket hiding spots in the house (Bob and Vicki appear to be horrified that their children have grown up to be adults and have elected to cling to our youth via odd means, including but not limited to the insistence that we continue to hunt for our Easter baskets. Luckily for us, this is no way means that they’ve become more creative in the selection of hiding spots, as said baskets are always either in the dryer or fireplace. {I’m making fun of them here because it’s so, so easy to do, but in reality, if I ever go home on Easter and my Easter basket isn’t hidden or–even worse– does not exist, I will probably set the house on fire in protest}).

If Titus Andronicus goes back next year, I really want to go to SXSW. Apparently there’s some panel-thingies (yes, that is the technical term) on publishing and digital media, so I can pass it off as a tax write-off. But mostly I just want to be around for when pictures like this get taken:

Why yes, that IS my baby brother in a Bruce Springsteen concert tshirt from the year he was 6 years old clawing at his mountain man beard while being interviewed for the news alongside the Mayor of Austin! If he were the kind of person to do Christmas cards (or even the kind of person to acknowledge Christmas in terms of any kind of preparation sooner than the day before Christmas Eve), I would demand that he use this picture. As you can imagine, this sent Older Brother Bud and I into a googling fury that you cannot imagine. I know there has to be some kind of online clip from whatever local news station this was, and I am determined to find it. All I’ve been able to come up with so far is a confirmation that this was at the Mayor’s SXSW kickoff reception at City Hall, and that in 2006 that Mayor physically removed a rowdy party goer from a SXSW event and was later charged with assault, so he’s obviously a Badass.

More Titus Andonicus at SXSW:

All that endless positive energy is a bit peculiar for a band with such routinely depressing lyrics — Stickles looks bizarrely happy when he croons, “You met the world naked and screaming/And that’s how you leave it.” But if the band truly believes such thoughts, you couldn’t detect it from their set, which was bouncy and hedonistic and utterly devoid of angst. ~Austin 360

By the time Patrick Stickles arrived on stage at Club Deville last night, the Titus Andronicus frontman sounded like he had played far more than five shows over the past four days. His voice was hoarse, he acted a few notches below cranky, and he appeared to have aged five years since I saw Titus open for Los Campesinos! in February. ~AV Club.

Titus Andronicus was a very loud band. The music and words were so loud that my ears hurt, but people told me that’s a good thing. There were three guys with guitars, and though the guitars were different in appearance, they seemed to be making similar sounds. There was one man with a beard who was yelling lyrics directly into a microphone. I couldn’t make out everything he was saying but one thing was “sleep in the dirt” and later, he said the word “clock” twice. This man got very sweaty as the songs progressed, but no one asked him if he needed water. ~New Yorker cartoon lounge

Unrelated, Not Awesome:

What’s not respecting Cristin’s bedtime? from Cristin on Vimeo.

Remember when I took the video of the thing eating inside my kitchen wall? Over the next 3 weeks or so I wound up with something like 7 clips that I will, someday, amass into the most boring and poorly-shot video montage of Whatever’s Eating My Home. My landlord is allegedly On The Job of getting this thing out of there, but it doesn’t appear that any steps have been taken to limit inhabitants of my building to people/ animals that have signed leases alone. I took this video after The Thing woke me up at 1 on a school night, and figured it was blog worthy since so few of you will ever be granted that upshot view of my bedroom ceiling. (Heyo!) (Sorry, Dad, it was too good of a set-up to leave alone). My next plan is to have Jordan come over and film us hunting it down in the attic with flashlights while doing his impression of the host of Man Vs. Wild. I see no way in which this could backfire on me.

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.