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.

From: Cristin

Subject: Thursday AM (this will be the best email you get all week)

—————

So, I have bedbugs. It’s the most effing disgusting thing in the world. I am insanely meticulous about cleaning my apartment and extremely picky about who gets to sleep in my bed, but apparently that was all for naught because I’m now the proud owner of a massive vermin colony. The NY State Senate is supposed to be passing legislation declaring this a public health crisis and making it illegal for landlords to ignore tenant complaints due to outbreaks all over the city, but the senators are way too busy jumping party lines and conducting sit-ins and pretending to be deaf when our blind governor demands that they actually do their jobs for the salaries that my taxes pay.

To that end, I’ve spent the last week or so washing every piece of clothing/ bedding that I own and immediately trapping everything in those giant ziplock plastic bags that you could fit a 6 year old into if you were into that kind of thing, which I’m not. I had to send the stuffed bear that I sleep with through the washer and dryer on high before similarly encasing him in plastic in order to avoid losing him in a Velveteen Rabbit-esque toy bonfire. That was particularly hard for me, to have to watch his little stuffed face look at me expectantly from the inside of the baggie slowly depriving him of breath. I’ve been staying at {name redacted}’s, and this has been a superfun and romantic endeavor for our budding relationship, as you can imagine.

My exterminator is making a return trip on Thursday morning, allegedly at 8 am, though I don’t know how much I trust this guy considering he was 7 hours late for our appointment on Sunday, after which he proceeded to do exactly nothing to my apartment to rid it of bugs, bedridden or otherwise. All I need to do Thursday is move my turtle tanks into the hallway to that the boys don’t get exterminated along with the unwanted members of wild america living in my apartment, and then leave as soon as the bug poison starts hitting the fan. I can’t imagine that he would be late since 8 am is the first appointment of the day, but there is a possibility I might not be in by 9 on Thursday and wanted to let you know. If you don’t hear from me it means I burned my apartment down, and I need you to not tell the cops about how I threaten to set things on fire whenever something vaguely frustrates me.

Thank you in advance for your kind understanding in this, my greatest time of need.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unrelated, Not Awesome: Stay Classy, Glen Rock.

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

I’ve been keeping up with Peej via google alert as he’s on this tour, which has gotten more and more hilarious as he zigzags his way back to the east coast– this one from the Chicago Tribune popped up this weekend:

It was comforting to hear Stickles talk, because he spent the better part of the quintet’s impressive opening set screaming as though he were on fire.

That’s my boy. And here he is a few days before that, talking about everyone’s favorite Superbowl Crotch-shotter:  “Most of the guys in the band are not big fans of Springsteen, but I like the way he writes songs that are rousing celebrations in the face of hopelessness,” the singer says. “A lot of Springsteen songs acknowledge that not everything is going to work out fine, but the human spirit can still triumph in the face of failure. That’s a beautiful thing for we humans to understand, and I wouldn’t mind at all if our songs could do the same thing for people.”

Unrelated, But Awesome: I refuse to play Guitar Hero, but I am totally going to crochet this scarf. I just need a screen shot of whatever the Awesomest Part of the Awesomest song is.

Unrelated, Not Awesome: The #1 most emailed story from the Times is about how bankers are freaking out about having to survive on Only Five Hundred Thousand Dollars A Year In New York, thus making the #1 most emailed comment among people who work in publishing Cry Me A Fucking River You Assholes.

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

Patriot Act! I love it!

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

From The NY Times article: In addition to meeting once or twice weekly for brunch or drinks at a bar or restaurant, the group has a blog, billed as “free from the scrutiny of feminists,” that invites women to join “if your monthly Bergdorf’s allowance has been halved and bottle service has all but disappeared from your life.”

Theirs is not the typical 12-step program. Step 1: Slip into a dress and heels. Step 2: Sip a cocktail and wait your turn to talk. Step 3: Pour your heart out. Repeat as needed.

This is going to be a book deal in all of 4 seconds. That doesn’t make it okay, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To that end, I have three alarm clocks. Because my REM cycles are always one big clusterfuck, I go in and out of sleep as many times as possible in the half hour or so before I actually have to make my feet hit the floor and stagger, zombie-style, into the shower. The only way to keep me awake on the first couple of tries is to immediately make my environment as uncomfortable for a sleeper as possible, and in a way that I can’t adjust from a laying-down position. I basically need a Mousetrap-esque contraption to physically kick me out of bed and then fold my bed up to a tiny square so I can’t get back into it. Until someone invents one of those, I’m sticking with the three alarm clocks, all of which are staggered to go off at different times and attached to clocks that have had their times adjusted in different ways so that I can never quite tell what time it is exactly unless I go into the living room and look at the DVR clock. So yes, this means that if you sleep in my apartment on a school night, starting at 6:35 you’ll hear a rotating choir of my cell phone alarm, Z100 from my clock radio, and my iPod from my iPod deck, and you still won’t be able to tell what time it actually is unless you turn on NY1, and I probably still won’t get out of bed for another hour. Sounds fun, right? The line forms to the left, gentlemen. (I’m kidding, Dad. Boys aren’t allowed to stay over in my apartment. Not even if they get snowed in after Bible Study. Besides, the bearskin rug scares them away).

The iPod deck is a new addition to this insanity and I only recently figured out how to work it. I thought that I could just leave it in there on Pause and the alarm clock would wake it up at the proper time, but after a few days of that not working I actually read the instructions for the first time (did I learn NOTHING from Jumanji??) and realized that I’m supposed to put the iPod in on repeat and leave it playing all night with the clock power off, and then the clock wakes itself up at the proper time and blasts Kelly Clarkson or whathaveyou at me at 6:42 in the morning. Here is my issue: This sounds unhealthy for my cute little rrrPod (that’s what pirates call their mp3 players. Duh). This iPod deck (which is not an iHome or an iWakeUpLateEveryDay or iSomethingElseAppleMakes, it’s just another appliance I bought based on it’s Cuteness {see also: DVD player I owned for 6 weeks before replacing with a bluray} and I have no idea who made it or what their major malfunction is) is asking me to have the damn thing play all night every night. And yeah, it’s plugged in and all, so it’s not killing the battery, but I have to assume that you only get so many songs in the life of an iPod (this, I think, is an outgrowth from the misconception I had as a little kid that you were literally only born with so many breaths and once you used them all up you died, which lead me to be a freaky slow-breathing 6 year old for awhile), and mine is going on 4 years of service. If it bites it I won’t be terribly sad because I’ll have a reason to buy an iPod touch, but I don’t believe in breaking things just to get new versions. I tried that with PJ when he was a baby and look where that got me.

So: Is this bad for the rrrPod, People Who Know Things? Assuage my guilt! I don’t want to set the poor little guy on a death march. I keep imagining the Trail of Tears littered with Miley Cyrus songs. What a way to go.

Also, this is my Wake Up playlist. Of course it is.

Titus Andronicus/ Titus Andronicus

Ted Leo/ Bleeding Powers

Beyonce/ Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)

Black Kids/ I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You

Mountain Goats/ No Children

Unrelated, But Awesome: Remember two years ago when I became obsessed with The Wizard Of Oz and read all of those Munchkin Memoirs? Yeah, that was fun for all of us, wasn’t it? Well, now I’m obsessed with Walt Disney. I think this is part of my fascination with Medieval Times and colonial williamsburg and other places-within-places, and am sure that, someday, some therapist will tell me that this is a very obvious form of escapism for me, worse even than how I spent 9 hours yesterday watching Battlestar Galactica and did not leave my apartment once. Sorry, Dr King. I’ve read (parts of) this (extremely long) biography of Walt and during a recent departmental lunch found myself explaining to coworkers how I did some research during college into what it would take for me to get a job as a costume character at Disney, given that I had so much experience being inside those giant death traps from working at a kids’ bookstore and dressing up like Clifford and Spot and Lyle Lyle Crocodile (I have pictures. I carry them with me in my day planner. Just ask to see them!). Turns out it would take me being about 5 inches shorter, so I abandoned that dream but kept the Disney obsession. This weekend I read Mouse Tales, which is a seriously thorough look at all of the behind-the-scenes action at Disneyland in California, and it blew my mind. It’s not a puff piece and it’s not slander and it doesn’t seem agendized at all (he says multiple times that Disney had no  part in the book and it wasn’t officially associated with them in any way), it’s just fascinating. He starts with the construction of the park and goes straight through the plans for Disney World decades later and interviewed hundreds of former Cast Members about their experiences working at the park. And you find out that Walt had a series of apartments around Disneyland and would often sleep there, and how the Morse code beeping at the beginning of the Frontierland train ride is spelling out Walt’s opening day dedication address for the park. And Henry Kissinger used to go there when he was National Security Advisor and just, like, wander around to clear his head. At one point he got cold and asked for a jacket so they gave him a Disney security jacket and then guests started coming up and asking him for directions to the restrooms. He was so excited about being able to help and not getting recognized that they let him run a popcorn stand during his later visits. This book is insanely fun. Plus, we just saw a book at preSales that’s about a town based on Celebration, Florida, that creepy/ fascinating planned community where they make sure the sun is always shining and no one is ever unhappy and that manuscript made me re-obsessed with Celebration, so now I think I’m going to dig into this one  next.

The Obama Ked.

Okay… really? REALLY?

via I Heart Daily