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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**********

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some time during Junior year Katiedid and I were watching tv together–I feel like it was Malcom in the Middle, but that could just be because MitM has become my mental default for Crappy Show I Can’t Believe Existed after my brain ran out of space in which to keep track of Joe Millionaire and the like. Whatever show it was, it featured an angry Eskimo who had been wronged by a suburban family and was storming out of the scene. He paused in the doorframe and added “And I only have ONE word for snow,” before slamming the door behind him. Katiedid laughed at this like she was getting paid to do so. When she finally caught her breath she explained about the linguistics urban legend that snow is so important to Eskimos that they have 50 different words to describe all of the different kinds of snow. I think about this all the time. How come there aren’t more words for “love?” Is it because the world couldn’t get by without that amazing episode of The Wonder Years where Winnie Cooper tells Kevin that she likes him but she doesn’t LIKE HIM like him?

I have probably mentioned this at some point, but my little brother is Kind Of A Famous Rock Star. It has been insanely fun for my family to watch his career progress, and I’ve been reminded of that recently as I started a new job and have had to introduce a whole new crop of people to the Ridiculous Stickles Family Back Story. (“So your older brother is a fighter pilot? And the younger one is a rock star? And you… work in children’s publishing. Huh.”) I’ve been at this job a little over 6 weeks (more on this later. Cliffs notes: It’s fantastic, and really hard in a good way. I’m actually trying to be good at it because I want to be good at it, which I something I haven’t been able to say about, uh, anything, since high school. I haven’t been nearly cognizant enough of how limited an overlap the intersection of Wanting To Work Hard and Being Given The Opportunity To Work Hard and even less appreciative of the few instances in my career that have qualified at both. Until now. Stay tuned) and people have been asking follow up questions days after I tell them about Peej that almost always start with “We don’t have to talk about this if you’re sick of it, but…” Listen: I will never be sick of it. I don’t think I’ve ever had any real frustrations with the English language outside of the enduring inability of its speaking population to truly believe that, yes, that IS the real spelling of my name, and now whenever people go “You must be so proud!” I understand how that fictional Eskimo must have felt when someone asked “Is it going to snow tomorrow?” Proud is nothing; proud is how you feel when your Labradoodle finally learns to poo outside, or when you can get through the West Village without using the GPS on your phone. When I think about everything that PJ’s done I feel like someone is over-inflating a balloon inside my ribcage, or like every single molecule in my body is freebasing Red Bull. They haven’t invented words yet for how proud I am of him.

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!