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

 Donatello, 2004.

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

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

Donatello’s Narcissistic Phase from Cristin on Vimeo.

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

Raphael, January 2006.

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

November 2007.

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

Come towards the liiiiiiiight.

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

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

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

Feeding Frenzy by Cristin on Vimeo

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

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

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

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

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

Raphael, May 2011

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

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

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

Email to Jordan, 3 hours post-goldfish flushing:

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

Scene: Last Wednesday

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

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

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

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

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

I love giving wedding toasts– I love being asked to do it, I love the writing process, and I particularly love afterwards when everyone tells me that I was amazing– but it is completely fucking terrifying. I have historically tried to be blase about the whole thing because I don’t want people to feel bad that they asked me to do it and I really don’t anyone to ever not ask me to give one because they don’t want to give me nightmares, but I was enough of a nutcase leading up to M&K’s toast that the cat is officially out of the bag in terms of where Wedding Toasts rank vis a vis my other greatest fears such as being pushed in front of a subway train and coworkers trying to hug me at the office. Future brides and grooms, I am totally down with speaking at your wedding, just make sure I have 48 hours to write the thing and refill my blushing drugs and we’ll be golden. I’m really good, and I have references.

For example, look how effective I was here at getting everyone, including his wife, to laugh in CJ’s face.

When I got the call to pinch hit on the toast at this wedding, the first sentence out of my mouth was “I know EXACTLY what I’m going to say,” which proves once and for all what a filthy liar I am. I had no clue. I immediately started asking everyone I knew for help, including and especially people who don’t even know Maggie & Kyle. When I asked CollegeFriend Kyle he gave me what he calls his “usual boilerplate,” which went something like this: “How many of you have known {x person} for more than {y amount of} years? Okay, keep your hands up. Now how many of you guys EVER thought that you’d be in {z location} watching {x} get married to someone who {attributes of X’s spouse}?” This wasn’t going to work for me, since I met Maggie and Kyle at the same time and they were already a couple so I didn’t really have a “side” to bat for at this wedding, but the fact that Kyle spit that out within 15 seconds made me kind of wish that I could someday give a toast for complete strangers, like in Wedding Crashers. After the one I did at M&K’s wedding, two people that I didn’t know told me that I seemed “like a professional,” which initially hurt my feelings a little because I thought it implied that I had been too impersonal, but then it got me psyched because I assumed it meant that I could walk into the next wedding I saw and grab the microphone and be good enough at it that no one would call the cops, maybe.

Despite the all-encompassing fear that I was going to ruin this wedding, which, you would think, would be a good reason to start working on it quickly and not stop until the moment it was delivered, there were a few things distracting me last week from my Toast Quest.

1. The Jurassic Park trilogy on DVD

The above-mentioned group of Brooklyn-based nerds that I’m friends with orchestrated an amazing Twitter entrapment on Maggie and Kyle regarding Jurassic Park, which was then turned around on me pretty quickly to my great benefit. Jesse and Marisa wanted to know if M&K already owned the Jurassic Parks on DVD so we faked a discussion about it on Twitter wherein I said I needed to win a bet with someone at work and asked if anyone I knew owned the original and WITHIN SIX MINUTES Maggie & Kyle had confirmed that they already had it. THE INTERNET, amiright?!?? Jesse & Marisa got them Back to the Future instead. During the evil planning stages of this evil plan I told everyone that they could get me Jurassic Park for my wedding, and then later was all “Eff it, I’m just buying them myself from Amazon” and Jesse told me that I should wait 6 weeks until the Blu-Rays came out and then they got them for me for my birthday. THERE ARE NO BLU-RAYS, I TOTALLY FELL FOR IT. Amazing subterfuge.

I know it’s a little ridiculous to own movies that literally play on USA every. single. day except no, it isn’t ridiculous at all, because it allows you to watch them whenever you want and also to do them back-to-back at 3am if you so desire. I don’t think I’ve set aside time to truly appreciate how great these are since high school when Jordan and I took time out of our busy schedule of studying for the SATs and being uncool to watch all 3 in one day, and, listen, they are badass. I haven’t rewatched 3 yet, but I was happily surprised by how much better 2 was than I remembered. I particularly liked that the scientists were trying to prove that dinosaurs were caring parents who raised their young together, and then the ultimate proof that they were looking for came in the form of their near-death when the T Rexes came searching for their tiny infant. And there’s a ton in the first movie that I didn’t remember; I am now particularly obsessed with the scene in the control room where everyone escapes into the ceiling tiles to evade the raptors, and the raptor lifts its head up to sniff them and is blanketed by a projection screen from the computer that rolls the DNA code used to create the dinosaurs over its face. I rewound that one 4 times.

2. I turned 30.

I generally care a lot more about other people’s birthdays than my own, but this seemed like a good one to make a big deal out of. I took a curious, home hospice-type approach to 30 and decided that I wanted to do it in my own home surrounded by people that I loved, and the loved people happily complied. It was a great party, and I know it’ll be one of my happiest memories for as long as my brain stays intact.

When my birthday falls during the work week I always use a vacation day because I don’t think anyone should work on their birthday. I will work hard on non-birthday days, but it just seems cruel to have to do anything on YOUR DAY. So on the Day Of, I stayed home and cooked for the party and, as previously mentioned, watched quite a bit of the Jurassic Park trilogy. Then my family came in and my friends came over and I was so happy that I wanted to cry the whole time but I didn’t because I’m not a little bitch, just so you know. I had this weird obsession with taking a family picture with everyone on my birthday, and we worked around Older Brother Bud’s pacific northwest residency with the magic of the internet and iPads.

I will love this photo until I am old and senile and believe that computers are out to steal my soul.

3. Lonely Island’s Jack Sparrow song.

This one became a serious problem in terms of toast writing. It got to the point where I was down to 36 hours and was leaving pre-wedding events early, loudly declaring that I had to go home and write my toast, and then I would get home and just watch this video on repeat for 45 minutes and then take a nap. There’s some kind of blog out there that’s a roundup of responses from a team of people walking up to new yorkers who have headphones on and asking them what song is playing at that second, and I live in fear of these people because I am always, always, always listening to Jack Sparrow on repeat these days. I’ve started dropping lines from it into casual conversation in places that they don’t belong and, while that is basically the joke that the whole song is built around, it is only a matter of time before I sing “Davy Jones, Giant Squid!” in the middle of a meeting. Whenever I’m procrastinating on something now I sing “Michael Bolton, we’re really gonna need you to focus up!” over and over until I’m so mad at myself that I just do whatever I’ve been avoiding which, believe it or not, is how I finally got myself to actually write this toast.

I’m a post-college friend of Maggie & Kyle’s, which means that in our 7-ish years of friendship, I’ve only ever known them as a couple. When they said they were engaged, my initial reaction wasn’t ” Ohmygod, Congratulations!” so much as it was “Ohmygod, are you guys seriously not married already? Who knew.” When Maggie said she was keeping her last name, I thought “Well, that’s a smart move since, as far as we’re all concerned, her last name is already AndKyle.” I always automatically think of them together. So I can’t go to any of the usual wedding toast standbys about how you two are so much better together than you are apart, because I don’t have any proof. I never met Single Maggie or Single Kyle- the closest I ever get to those two is when I imagine the Bizzaro World versions of Maggie & Kyle where they didn’t ever find each other and grew up into these totally unrecognizable versions of themselves that do terrible things like illegally downloading pirated children’s books, or saying no to a 2nd glass of wine, or tuning out during an hour-long conversation about the logistics of time travel.
 
When I was thinking about what I wanted to say tonight, the memory that I couldn’t get away from was one of Kyle, from a few New Years Eve’s ago. I always host New Year’s for our friends (you all are totally invited this year– shouldn’t be a problem getting you all into my one bedroom apartment), and I remember standing in my kitchen having a conversation with Kate about how much I love Maggie & Kyle as a couple. It was one of those almost-weepy talks that you can only have after 6 drinks and that you never speak of again afterwards, and Kyle happened to wander in on it because I was standing in front of the fridge, so I was between him and the next beer he was going to drink. And I grabbed hiim and was all “KYLE. I was just SAYING that, usually when I’m friends with a couple it’s so easy to decide who I like MORE. But with you and Maggie it’s just SO HARD to figure out which one of you I like better because you’re both THE BEST.” And Kyle completely deadpanned his response– shocking, I know–and went “You should like Maggie more– she’s much better than I am.” And then he do-si-doed around me to get to the beer and we never talked about it again. (Until now, anyway).
 
And while I haven’t fact-checked this with Maggie, it’s always been completely obvious that, if asked, she would say the exact opposite: that Kyle was the better half, and that everyone should like him more. And this isn’t all that unusual on its own; in most couples I know, someone is always going on about how they’re the lucky one, and that they can’t believe how amazing their partner is, and whenever someone declares that they’re the lesser half, my instinct is to agree with them because, really, they’re usually right. My father will tell anyone who will listen– and many people who won’t listen– that my stepmom is a better wife than he could ever deserve, and every time he says that I say “You’re goddamn right she is. Way to lock that down before she figured it out, Bob.” So I know it’s not rare for someone in a couple to think that they’re getting the better deal, but I do know it’s rare for them to both truly believe that they are the lucky one, and I know it’s even more unusual for them to both be right. And that’s the thing about Maggie and Kyle: they both believe that they’re the lucky one, and they are both completely right. I know that there are more holes in that logic than in all of their theories about time time travel, but I also know that it’s so rare, and so phenomenal, and we are all so fortunate just to be around it.
 
And since I made a vow to myself after that New Years’ to never again stand in the way of anyone getting to their drinks, I’d like you to all raise your glasses with me now to my new favorite married couple. Maggie & Kyle, I would wish you all the best luck in the world, but it’s pretty clear that you’ve already got it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Awkward Family Photos- Outtakes from Cristin on Vimeo.

I’ve been coughing for about three weeks now. I didn’t go to the doctor initially because I didn’t have any other symptoms and, as I kept saying to the various wide-eyed Swine Flu hysterics at my office, when I wasn’t coughing I felt pretty great. In between bouts of core-shaking hacking, I felt like a million bucks, and that was close enough for jacks as far as I was concerned. I’ve never gone to the doctor for Having A Cold, and I get a fair amount of mileage out of making fun of people who do so, so it kind of never crossed my mind. When I hit the two week mark I checked in with a nurse, but that was mainly because of Marathon Day. Marathon Day is, hands-down, my favorite day of the year in New York (though SantaCon is also very, very high on the list), and this was my first year getting to watch from Brooklyn, as last year during Marathon Day I had only been living in my then-new apartment for about 18 hours and was still having nervous breakdowns about precisely what angle my TV stand should be set at. This was back before The Bedbugs, when things like that seemed Important. Luckily, I have Perspective now.

I watched the marathon with Webmaster Kyle and Maggie and the aforementioned Katie Of The Weak Immune System and The Boyfriend and it turns out that Marathon Day in Brooklyn is EVEN MORE AWESOMER than it was on the Upper East Side. I’m pretty sure that this is because our viewing spot was circa mile 7, when all the runners are still all “Woo, this is so awesome! I am a peak example of what a human being is capable of! I am so pumped to be raising money that will go to administrative tasks remotely associated with Curing Cancer/ Helping Kids Who Can’t Read Good/ Neutering Stray Dogs!” whereas by the time they hit my old apartment circa mile 17 they’re all “Why the eff would anyone, ever, in their right mind want to do this?? This run is named after the first guy who ever did it who DIED AT THE END and I know EXACTLY HOW HE FELT!” Brooklyn Marathon Day was also made awesomer by the above-listed crew, all of whom have the same marathon bystander strategy that I do, which is Constant Clapping, And Specific Cheering By Name For People Who Have Written Their Names On Their Running Shirts. All except The Boyfriend, actually, who mostly stood their quietly with a bemused smile on his face watching me yell ridiculous stuff and rubbing my back when I coughed too hard, which is fairly metaphorical of my relationship with Saint TheBoyfriend Of Eternal Patience. At one point, there was a couple standing behind us who only figured out after a good 10 minutes that we were just reading names off of shirts and screaming for them. “We thought you guys knew EVERYONE running! We were so impressed!” They said, and I don’t think they were making fun of us. My main goal in this exercise was to get the Acknowledgement Wave/ Smile/ Fist Pump from my targeted runner and, I have to tell you, I had a pretty spectacular rate of return. I also tried my hardest to incorporate the skills I learned from Pa Stickles’ 2nd favorite car game after Name The Presidents In Chronological Order, which is Rearrange Colleges Into New Athletic Conferences Based On Their Mascots. I think this really gave me an extra edge as a marathon enthusiast for the people who hadn’t written their names on their shirts but were running in college track jerseys, because I got to spend a lot of time yelling “YEAH TULANE! GO GREEN WAVE” and the like. You know, to show that not only do I care, but I identify with their personal background. I don’t know all of the mascots, obviously, but in a pinch “YEAH DAVIDSON! GO LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION!” will work just as well.

Anyway, Marathon Day in Park Slope is apparently Bring Your Adorable Baby And Adorable Dog Day. (Webmaster Kyle reminds me that this is Every Day in Park Slope. While I have your attention, Webmaster Kyle, I think I lost the spell check button on my awesome new blog dashboard. Did I? Everyone else– this is why there are spelling mistakes in this post. Either this button wandered off or I just can’t find it). At one point we were right next to a couple with a 6ish month old baby in an awesome pajama snuggly thing with a hood and ears that I would absolutely wear if it came in the appropriate size for someone who is taller than 23 inches, and at one point the dad heard me coughing and turned the baby away from me so that the cough couldn’t reach the baby, as if I wasn’t taking every precaution and coughing into a tissue or my elbow. That, combined with the emails we’ve been getting from HR basically commanding us to stay home if we’re running a fever, made me think I should maybe think about going to a medical professional.

Though how am I supposed to know if I’m running a fever? What self-respecting single 28 year old owns a thermometer? I thought those things were like life insurance or minivans and I didn’t need to think about acquiring one until I had kids.

I’ll skip the long part of the story about how I went to check in with the nurse and she told me I had allergies, and I was a little disappointed because I like to think of allergies as a sign of mental weakness. (They aren’t, obviously. It’s just that I once dated this guy who described himself as being “a little allergic to kiwi,” to which I was all “kiwi? really? No one is allergic to kiwi,” to which he clarified “all melon, really,” which, let’s be frank, didn’t make me feel better about the kiwi situation). I dutifully took Claritin for a few days anyway, thinking that I just needed to build up a Claritin base for it to start working, kind of like how you have to get a base tan before you go on vacation. (NB: I have neither allergies nor the capacity to tan, at all, regardless of base, so please don’t take this as medical advice).

Then one Tuesday (last Tuesday, if you’d like me to be more specific and less Telling Tales Around The Campfire) I woke up and kind of couldn’t breathe. Or I could, but not very deeply, and not without being stabbed by tiny men with knives that were leasing the space under my ribcage. And that felt kind of weird. So I called my doctor and said I’d had a cough for two weeks and was having trouble breathing, expecting them to refer me to WebMD, and they said See You In An Hour, which is one of the nice things, I suppose, about this Flu Panic, if there are any nice things about it.

I learned a lot of things at the doctor’s office that morning. One was that I had spent the last couple of weeks exposing my whole office, all my friends, and my boyfriend to Bronchitis–oops. Sorry guys, that one’s on me. I needed antibiotics, and I needed to go a few blocks over and have Xrays taken to see if I had broken a rib or if I had “only” torn one of the muscles in my ribcage. (Spoiler alert: BOTH). Then I went to the Xray place and learned that if you have one of those truly awful coughing fits in the waiting room at Radiology– the kind where you start gagging because you’re coughing so hard, and you start thanking the 7:30am version of yourself for not putting on mascara because your eyes are tearing all over the place–they will make you wear a surgical mask while you’re waiting for the closeup of your broken rib that you acquired by doing coughing fits similar to the one that you are presently illustrating. You will then bitch to everyone you later come into contact with about how humiliating it is to be forced to wear a mask in the waiting room and how you don’t know how Michael Jackson ever did it because those things get hot and make you claustrophobic like woah until Katie gently points out that a lot of cancer patients hang out in Radiology and they have no immune system so the mask was probably a good call. Then you will fill your $70 worth of drugs at the Duane, send an update email to your bosses/CoRep that includes both your weekly sales totals and the news that you have broken your own rib and also exposed them to the plague, and you will trot back to your home in Brooklyn to become acquainted to your new best friend, Coedine.

To be fair, my coedine came in cough syrup, which is, according to The Boyfriend “the bullshit kind,” and I should have protested until they gave me The Good Shit. But this was good enough for me. It (kind of) made me stop coughing, which meant the Rib Goblins would save their knife attacks for things like Getting Up From A Sitting Position and The Hiccups. I had The Hiccups two days ago and wanted to drown myself in my bathtub just to make them stop. Hiccups don’t go well with a broken rib. At this point, I’m more or less on the mend. I’m typing this from a reclining position on my living room couch with one of those IcyHot Medicated Patches strapped to the front of my ribcage, having taken the muscle-helping thingies that are like Aleve, but more ass-kicking. Some day, maybe even some day soon, this will be a hilarious story, but it won’t be without lingering consequences. Things have happened. I have changed in ways that I want, more than anything, to blame on the coedine, but I know deep down that I can’t use drugs as an excuse for what I’ve known to be a part of me all along.

iCarly. I was a pirate for Halloween this year (you’re all shocked, I can tell) and I enlisted Katie (who is, clearly, the official sponsor of this blog post and a good chunk of my personal life recently– Hi, Katie!) to take my picture in an undisclosed location for this year’s Christmas card. I was Santa for the Christmas card last year, but I was The Pirate for the two years prior, and now I’m going back to my roots. I think this is particularly important now that Older Brother Bud has an adorable 2 year old and is poised to kick my ass in the Stickles Children Christmas Card Competition That Only Cristin Cares About. When I texted Katie to tell her that I was running late because I couldn’t find my eyepatch (to which she responded– ready for this?–”We have a few here if you need one”) and then texted again with my ETA, she commented “Cool, I’ll just continue watching iCarly.” My knowledge of iCarly at that point in time included it being a show on Nickelodeon and that was about it. Since Katie and I had a pretty lengthy walk to The Undisclosed Location, I asked her to fill me in.

K: So, the main girl, Carly, she lives in Seattle.

C: Oh, so it’s like Grey’s Anatomy.

K. No. But she has this ridiculous apartment/ loft thing, and she lives there with her older brother who’s in his twenties, and they don’t ever really mention the parents or how they manage to afford any of this.

C: Oh, so it’s like Party of Five.

K: No. And Carly, her best friend’s name is Sam- Sam is a girl- and they have this webshow that they do every week called iCarly, and you get to see clips from the show and it’s mostly just them being silly or doing fun stuff that 13 year olds do.

C: Oh, so it’s like 30 Rock.

K: Sigh. Okay, it’s kind of like 30 Rock.

I filed this away for a week or so and then when the coedine kicked in, iCarly called to me. Somehow I wound up with about 5 hours of iCarly DVRd, and when you can’t move around very much and are trapped in your apartment and on magic mushroom cough syrup, 5 hours of iCarly starts to look pretty fan-damn-tastic.

Listen to me, now– this show is genuinely good. When they’re doing the webisodes, Carly and Sam have the kind of on-air chemistry that the ladies of The View have been aiming at for almost a decade. These kids are effing good. The main complaint I have is that they’re always yelling. Do 13 year olds today communicate at such a high decible level all the time? Also- how close are we to having, like, One Major Internet Profile per person in this country? I know that some day, Amazon will start recommending me books based on what I watch on YouTube and my gmail background will know to automatically switch to a grid based on how much time I spend in Excel and iTunes will download podcasts for me about how the dinosaurs died based on my google searches, but we’re not that close to that just yet, right? Because between my iCarly obsession and all the online videos I watch of that Staten Island children’s choir singing pop songs, I’m really worried that I’m about to wind up on some Megan’s Law watch list. Moving on.  

Farmville. I’ve been resisting playing Farmville on Facebook because, really, having Amazon Prime is enough of an enormous time suck during the work day. People on Facebook are always telling me to join their virtual sorority house or play Mafia Wars with them and I’ve never been into any of it. I never even played Scrabulous.

And now we pause so I can explain what I’m talking about to my parents, as they are Old People: Web developers come up with applications that can be housed within Facebook, and one of them is a game called Farmville. You’re given a plot of land to farm, and you get to decide what to grow and how to design your farmland, and your Facebook friends that are also playing Farmville can be your “neighbors” and you can help each other out on the farms and gift each other cows and the like. The more you play, the more money you earn, and the bigger/ cooler your farm gets. Each crop has to be harvested within a set amount of time after planting, though, so you have to keep logging back in, otherwise your strawberries or squash or wheat will wither and die and you have to start all over again.

This all just sounded kind of ridiculous to me. Then I read This New York Times article, which might as well have been headlined Yes, Cristin, This Really Is An Insane And Pointless Addiction, and for some reason that made me all Where Do I Sign?? Like somehow, learning that people had taken a seemingly innocent Facebook app and allowed it to more or less ruin their lives was just the green light I was looking for.

Given my obsession with Oregon Trail in college, I don’t know why I was surprised to find that I love Farmville. Within one round of crop harvesting I was having these insane thoughts like “I should probably put something together in Excel so I can figure out when to log back in and check my crops, and what seeds I should plant in order to maximize potential growth, both in terms of plants and the physical size of my land holding.” Yes, really.

Now, I’m still very new to this– I’m only a Level 6 farmer right now, and some of my Neighbors are Level 25s– but I have some ideas for improving the Farmville universe that I came up with while in various stages of coedine bliss. They are as follows:

1. The All You Need Is Love rule of animal husbandry. The #1 attraction to Farmville for me was ownership of tiny virtual animals. My parents never let me have a pony, and now I can have HUNDREDS if I want, along with cows and sheep and chickens. Because people are so obsessive about their Farm’s organization, one of the options you have for each of your animals is putting them in “stay” mode, so they stay in the same place on your farm and you can line them up and face them in the same direction like they’re praying to Mecca or whathaveyou. I feel like this is somehow cruel, like those invisible electric fences for dogs. Granted, they are two-dimensional and made up of nothing more than programming code, but I still want my cows to be able to roam as they please, so mine are never in “stay” mode. Other than telling them to Stay, the few other options you have with your animals are to rotate, move, sell, or pet them. When you pet them, little hearts appear over the animals and they jump up and down. And that’s pretty awesome, but I’d like something more tangible for my efforts. I think you should either get a prize for having the happiest animals–like those commercials that tell you that the best cheese comes from happy California cows, or like how at the end of Oregon Trail you get more points if your wagon party arrives in good health–or, failing that, petting your animals should make the produce more, and faster. I’ll probably wind up petting fake cows all day long of my own accord, anyway, but a little monetary redemption wouldn’t kill me.

2. Make a List And Check It Twice. One of my favorite things to do when I’m making an Excel grid with multiple worksheets (go back and read the opening of that sentence again… yeah, you heard me. Sexy, right?) is to build a summary page at the beginning that pulls the numbers in from multiple locations. (My mom’s head just exploded reading that. When I first started teaching Mom how to build formulas in Excel, she almost couldn’t learn it because she was too amazed at how smart the program is. She just kept gasping and going “Wow!” and I didn’t even get to summary pages during that session, as I was too afraid that it would make her stroke out). This never fails to thrill me– the fact that Excel knows the locations of numbers that you can even see and can silently and efficiently update the summary page. It’s like Christmas every time I get to do it.

I like knowing where I stand on things. I’ve never bumped anyone off of my Christmas card list for lack of returning the love, but I do have one grid that tracks all of the changes that I’ve made to the mailing list over time and also notes who has and has not sent me Christmas cards back over the last 5 or so years just in case this is the holiday season where I decide to be discriminating. I like knowing. I like it in Oregon trail where you can click on an icon and it tells you how many cattle you have, how many pounds of food, and how far it is to the next landmark. Having one of these pages for Farmville would, in essence, make it far too easy. I’m guessing this is also why they give you percentages instead of timeframes for how long it’ll be before you need to harvest, so you only get “Squash- 52% grown” instead of “Squash- come back in 7 hours” when you hover over your Squash crops. This forces you to come up with your own crop rotating strategy which, as you have probably guessed, I am most likely going to summarize for myself in Excel at some point when it gets to be too much for me to hold in a brain that is already filled with Gossip Girl quotes and the collected works of Roald Dahl.

3. A Little Ruthlessness Never Hurt Anyone, Except the Farmer You’re Stealing From. Look, we’ve all read Fantastic Mr. Fox, and we know how this farming business is supposed to go. Farmville does a lot to foster neighborhood cooperation– you can give your neighbors livestock and fertilize their crops, and they give you back birdbaths and scare the raccoons away from your land when you’re not around to do it yourself. It’s basically communism, but without the fun parts. A lot of time I’ll go into someone else’s farmland and notice that their crops have either withered from inattention, or are ripe and waiting to be harvested. Why can’t I take those myself? You snooze you lose, neighboring farmers. Also, along with this new development of Evil Farming, I think one of the things you can buy at market should be a can of spray paint with which to “decorate” other peoples’ dairy barns. And I think if you catch someone on your land, you should get to use them as a scarecrow for 24 hours.

Farmville is awesome, kids. But, as they used to say on Reading Rainbow (RIP), you don’t have to take my word for it. Let’s see what Texts From Last Night has to say about it:

(513): Girl in front of me has spent the class alternating between playing farmville and the tiffany’s website looking at engagement rings. Every once in a while she holds her hand up to the screen.
(1-513): She doesn’t deserve the breathe the same air that we do.
(513): She just bought a cow and we’ve moved on to looking at wedding dresses.

Taylor Swift. I had  limited knowledge of Taylor Swift before my days on the Coedine. My fondest memory of her is really a fond memory of the night before Cousin Erin’s wedding, when Cousin Matt rocked out to her song Love Story like he was gettin’ paid to do it.

Matt + Taylor Swift 4Eva from Cristin on Vimeo.

I was going to merely link to this video, but then I watched it again and it reminded me of how worth embedding it truly is. And you should enjoy it now, because whenever I put up a video that even remotely involves Aunt Patti (who- let me say, preemptively–is doing NOTHING at ALL embarrassing here and has a hilarious aside about buying us things from the minibar in the hotel) I get an email within 20 minutes of her commanding that I remote it from public viewing because she hates how she’s portrayed. I’m sure she’ll somehow look at this one, where Matt is singing along with a barely-legal poptart and Danny and Janelle are dancing their hearts out while Erin demands that we “BE QUIET- THIS IS MY FAVORITE PART!” during the section of the song where Romeo proposes to Juliet while I scream at people from behind the camera, and she will somehow decide that it is her that comes off the worst here. Fight that urge, Patti. You appear nothing but awesome in this video.

Then the whole Kanye West scandal happened, and I decided that I was never listening to another Kanye song if I could help it, the same way I haven’t watched a Tom Cruise movie since he said that people who needed antidepressants were foolish and weak, which was a VERY hard decision for a girl whose first screen name was TopGun527. And THEN I watched Taylor Swift on Saturday Night Live while I was doped up on Coedine, and I decided I was in love with her.

Listen. She’s can’t even drink legally, and she writes her own music and actually plays an instrument and I think in an era where the best way to get famous as a young singer is to have a sex tape leak, I appreciate the fact that someone is recording songs about the first day of high school and having a best friend and generally being adorable and innocent.

Slightly Related, And Awesome: I’ve never read any of the Betsy-Tacy books (gasp! I know! This is like, say, being a literary agent but not reading the Harry Potter books… KATE), and I’ve always thought of it as a gaping whole in my I Know Everything About Kids’ Books facade, though it never bothered me enough to actually amend the problem on my own. And then Camilla sent me these amazing, perfect, adorable repackages that Harper did of the High School And On years of Betsy Ray and they. Are. Phenomenal.

Even when I was at the appropriate age for reading children’s books, I was never into fantasy or sci-fi–at work now, when people talk about books they loved as little kids and how they were taken to other worlds and wrapped up in different lands, that’s never something I really relate to, because when I was younger I always wanted to read about Real Stuff. And even though I’m starting to grow an appreciation/ small infatuation for YA Fantasy (thank you, Kristin Cashore), at least 80% of what I read, YA or adult, is rooted in the contemporary world. But when I was in middle school I was fairly obsessed with the Beverly Cleary books that depicted dating in the 50s (pretty sure I damn near wore out my copy of The Luckiest Girl, which everyone should read RIGHT NOW), which I guess was kind of a baby-step in the direction of fantasy books since it was a time that I couldn’t even begin to pretend that I currently lived in. And I feel the same way about the Betsy books; they’re close enough to my reality to not be off-putting or strange, but unrecognizable enough to be fascinating. And, like with my Taylor Swift thing, sometimes it’s nice to have entertainment that doesn’t have sexting scandals or abusive parents or people coming home from the war disfigured. Sometimes it’s nice to hear about nice things.

My little brother is still famous.

That’s an interview with him, and a picture of his back, on the landing page of the The Onion’s AV Club- New York site. Next week, look forward to their Area Woman Is Remarkably Boring In Comparison To Her Siblings article.

Our whole immediate family sans my Stepmom, who is a responsible adult and politely declined a night of hard rockin’ in Hoboken when she had small children to teach the next morning, went to the penultimate stop of Titus Andronicus’ most recent tour, and a great time was had by all.

Maybe we had a little too much fun. I thought Bud was going to be the first person to ever have “hangover” listed as his cause of death the next day when I saw him and he was having trouble walking upright. Perhaps wearing his younger brother’s elementary school graduation tshirt to the concert lead him to wrongfully believe that he could act in the manner of a 21 year old and all would be fun. I appreciated his wardrobe choice, though, as it made it really easy for me to later pick him out in the pictures I took of people moshing. I didn’t know people still moshed. Kids today.

Other than making fun of my parents for wearing earplugs through the whole concert, my favorite part was this into to My Time Outside The Womb. Apologies in advance for how loudly I scream through most of it. Patrick goes “My brother and sister are here…” and I feel the need to yell “YEAH, WE ARE!!!” at the top of my lungs, just in case anyone thought he might be lying.

Titus Andronicus at Maxwells- October 09- Family Intro from Cristin on Vimeo.

Unrelated, But Awesome: I’m finally reading Graceling by Kristin Cashore  well after the vast majority of the book-reading public had determined that it was awesome, and–to the surprise of no one except maybe me–I am obsessed with it. This only comes as a surprise because books about lady warriors in far away lands are usually so not my jam; despite that whole Medieval Literature kick I went on in college, I could never get into books of this bent because I just find myself thinking “Looks like SOMEone read Mists Of Avalon one too many times, ‘MIRite?” even though I’m totally not one to talk since I once voluntarily undertook an assignment to write a tale for one of the travelers mentioned in the Canterbury Tale’s prologue who doesn’t get a chance to rap in Chaucer’s version. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stories of feudal systems, etc etc. Anyway. I am loving this novel. It’s totally making me rethink my Don’t Read Books With Frontmatter That Includes Maps Of Imaginary Lands rule. And if that one goes– what’s next? Will it be time to dismiss my Nothing I Can’t Comfortably Take On The Subway rule?

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.

I have bedbugs. Again-slash-still. My place is being re-exterminated this week, and if that doesn’t work I’m going to resort to some more Out Of The Box type ideas. Number one on my list is setting everything I own on fire and having my insurance company replace it, bug-free. I’m still working on numbers 2 through 15 on the list, but I think they’ll be just as logical and easy to execute. Until I get a real plan together, I’m going with what you can casually call my Meek Whiney Sorority Girl Plan, which involves showing up at your boyfriend’s apartment half-crying because you’re sick of having to deal with this and just want to sleep in your own bed for the first time in a month without worrying that you’ll wake up looking chewed to pieces and also because you spent all day rewatching Veronica Mars season one and it made you a little emotional, okay?!??

The boy has been handling these meltdowns so well I’m starting to suspect that he has some sort of Truman Show-esque crew feeding him answers out of the extensive dossier they’ve compiled from going through my trash and following me on Twitter. During the first week of Infestation Realization ’09 (after many, many weeks of me assuming I had some weird allergy or was being followed by a cloud of invisible mosquitoes that were genetically engineered to only survive on my blood), when just being in or near my apartment opened up the door to the wonderful world of Oh My God How Am I Ever Going To Get All Of This Dry Cleaned And I Can Never Have Guests Over Again This Is Awful, the boy was all “Here. I made you keys. Just stay at my apartment,” which, naturally, lead me to flip my shit, because I am female and we know that there is no exchanging of keys without deeply rooted emotional significance and didn’t he want to talk this to death before deciding it was cool because that’s really where I’m most comfortable, thanks. I’m sure I have my hundred grand liberal arts degree in literature to blame for this; even though I’m not One Of Those Girls (you know Those Girls, the ones who update their Facebook status 8 times a day to let us all know what stage of the wedding planning game they’re at), I still look for hidden significance in everything. Like a friend giving her fiance running shoes as a gift before he ran off on her (true story- don’t worry, she bounced back and is awesomer than ever so SUCK IT, running shoe guy), or that the last gift I got from the Former Future Mr Cristin Stickles was a baseball glove, right before I realized that he wasn’t the catch I was looking for. The Boy doesn’t think about any of this– out of everyone I’ve ever known, he might be the only one whose thought process appears to be a straight line. “She can’t sleep at home, she sometimes sleeps here anyway {ed. note: Sorry, Dad}, I should give her keys to my apartment.” Point A, Point B, Point C. This fascinates me, as my thought process has never been a straight line. You know how if you play with a Slinky long enough, it winds up this jumbled rats nest of wire and it’s impossible to bend it back to its original shape? That’s what MY thought process looks like. On a good day.

A more observant person would have seen this coming. You meet a guy on the subway, you almost walk out on him when he says during your 3rd date that he roots for both the Mets and the Yankees because he’s “a new yorker, first and foremost,” you find it cute when the car service guys stop asking you for your home address because they’ve picked you up at 7 in the morning at his apartment so many weekdays. How many NYC-appropriate Bring Them Together Or Force Them Apart third act complications are there? Clearly, either I was about to get bedbugs, or his laundry guy was going to mix his clothes up with some chick’s and cause me to freak out when Lady Things started to appear in the pile of boxers on his couch. Or one of us would find some amazing rent stabilized one bedroom and we’d have to deal with living more than 3 subway stops away from each other, or there’d be another blackout and after I fainted from heat exhaustion trying to walk home he would have to come to the hospital to get me since my parents live off-island. I accept that one of these things was probably destined to happen. That does not mean that I’m okay with The Universe deciding to fill my bedroom with the most diligent and persistent vermin in existence. What kind of rotten karmic bastard gives the narcoleptic girl bedbugs?? On top of my never-ending quest to convince my REM cycles that No, we really don’t need to sleep for 12 hours a day, did I really need the added bonus twist of But if you do want to sleep for 12 hours or even just 2, make sure you don’t do it in your own bed because you will wake up covered in welts and looking like a leper?

What a fun, sexy time for a couple that just met one another 5 months ago. The only thing that’s getting me through this is daily repetition of the mantra Jesse delivered when I had my original freak out the day of the bed bug diagnosis: “Compare and contrast with accidental pregnancy.” And he’s right– that would be a lot worse. As would an STD, though I’m starting to get a feel for what that would be like through all of these bug discussions I’m having. “Pretty much everyone in new york has bedbugs,” I hear myself saying. “The bites don’t show up on everyone, so you could have them and not even know.” I thought I was unintentionally quoting NY1 but soon realized that I was unintentionally quoting those of my friends that have HPV. “Basically, if you’ve slept with someone that’s slept with someone, then you have it,” they say, and I nod sympathetically while thinking “And yet you have it. And I don’t.” Joke’s on me, though. Stop snickering at your friends with HPV, folks, otherwise the Instant Karma police will instantly wait a few years until you have the most amazing apartment before they sprinkle bedbugs across the ridiculously high thread count sheets you found on Overstock.com for 70% off.

During one of the weekends where The Boy and I were frantically washing our respective bedclothes in an attempt to kill any hatchlings (EW), it came to my attention that he only owns one set of sheets. This didn’t surprise me all that much, since my time as a transplant in his apartment only confirmed his Straight Dude-ness to the max. One day I got dressed for work in one of the 80 shirtdresses that I own and announced “this one’s my favorite, because it has pockets!” while I demonstrated putting my hands into and removing my hands from my dress pockets. “Do most skirts not have pockets?” he asked absentmindedly. I paused. “What am I wearing right now?” That got his attention. “A striped skirt?” No, darling. “Do you know the difference between a dress and a skirt?” “How am I supposed to know that?!” Eventually it came out that he thought a dress was Fancy and a skirt was Less Fancy. I still can’t get over how adorable this is. It was almost as cute as the time I told him I had to get my flat iron from my apartment and he went “is that the clampy thing?” and made a hand motion that you generally associate with preschool teachers acting out “alligator” or “acute angle.” Slightly less adorable than this was all the times we had to leave the bar early to get to the laundry place before it closed, as they were holding his sheets hostage. (Actually, this only happened once. And I didn’t leave the bar, he did. Whatever, they’re HIS sheets and it was MY beer). So when I decided I should get him a Sorry My Vermin Infestation Problem Has Kind Of Ruined Your Life present, it was pretty obvious what I should go with. It wasn’t until I sat down to write the card that would go with his new sheets (also from Overstock– seriously, you people should check it out. When I went through that phase where I had to change my pillowcases every few days, Overstock totally enabled that habit like woah. That was back when I thought sleeping on the same pillowcases for 4 straight days was the most disgusting thing you could do– before I realized I was sleeping on a colony of bloodsucking nits that were leaving little bloodstains on the Titus Andronicus tshirt that I sleep in when I rolled over in my slumber and crushed them while they were mid-suck. This is how awful bedbugs are, kids) that I realized how sad this was. When you select sheets as the first gift to give in your new relationship, that card should pretty much write itself. It should say something like “Can’t wait to break these in!” or “Sorry I got JellO all over the other ones!” It should NOT have to say something along the lines of “I am so sorry that I accused you of giving me bedbugs. I’m also really sorry that every time you came to my apartment or I came to yours over the last 3 or so weeks, we were risking spreading the most disgusting apartment infestation possible to the home where you have lived in quiet bug-free joy for the last 6 years. Thank you for calming me down when I called you, hyperventilating, at your extremely busy and stressful job. Twice. Also, adults over the age of 30 should own more than one set of sheets. Seriously, that’s just ridiculous. I don’t know HOW you’ve made it this far in life. Thank god, for your sake, that you found me.” Not that I actually wrote that. I didn’t actually write anything– I handed him the sheets wrapped in a plastic grocery bag and said “here.” And he said “thank you!” and “What do you want to do for dinner?” and I said “get Chinese food,” so we did, and it made it seem like everything was a little bit more okay than it had been.

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.

You know how you have that one friend where, if you want to do something slightly weird but mostly awesome, you know that he/ she will be fully on board? I don’t mean the person that you call when you want to do something illegal (that would be Emla, for me) or the person you call when you want to talk about how you just realized that you sing a song to your ice cream whenever you’re putting it away after grocery shopping (that would be Jordan, for me, and the song is “Raspberry Sorbet” to the tune of Prince’s “Raspberry Beret”), but the person you go to when you’re thinking it might be fun to take the old lady bus to Atlantic City and gamble for the day or when you need company for that progressive marionette burlesque show you have tickets to. Or when you want to join thousands of your fellow citizens in dressing up as Santa Claus.

For me, that person is Annette. Annette is one of my New York soulmates, so you can understand how heartbreaking it is for me that she’s moving to Chicago. I’ve come around on the idea because she’s doing it for all the right reasons, and because it gives me an excuse to do SantaCon Chicago in ’09. Also because she foolishly asked me to be her driving companion for the moving van portion of the adventure. It’s been just over a year since Ma Stickles and I did our epic road trip, so I am thrilled to get back out on the highway. It looks easy enough:

Easy as pie. He are the (tiny, unimportant) conditions that I presented to Annette after she confirmed me as wingman:

1. I want to be able to stop at as many WalMarts, Targets, and truck stops as possible as part of a complicated scavenger hunt that I need help formulating (stay tuned).

2. I will be videotaping our adventures, and then posting the video montage on our internal company blog, since (until tomorrow), Annette and I are both gainfully employed by the same publishing house.

3. I’ve never driven a car, let alone a moving van, in New York City, so she’ll have to handle that part.

4. My driver’s license just expired and I don’t have time to renew it this week, but I’m prepared to cry if I get pulled over.

That sound you hear is Annette ralphing into her garbage can up on the 10th floor and trying to figure out how she can escape Brooklyn without me on Wednesday.

No, really, it will be so fun! Especially the videotaping part! To further awesomeify things, there’s a big crazy conference for children’s librarians in Chicago this weekend that basically all of my friends are going to (because we know how to party) and I get to crash it. AND I just found out that Older Brother Bud will be in Chicago the first night we get there. COULD THIS TRIP GET ANY BETTER??

Annette says that this trip should only take us about 15 hours which, for someone who spent 2 weeks in a Prius with her mom and the most vindictive GPS system known to man last summer, is basically the blink of an eye. I’m worried that if we don’t specifically plan to have fun, we might wind up having only accidental fun instead of intentional fun. And wouldn’t that just be awful. Here’s where you come in.

I need suggestions on what you would like us to do/ accomplish/ find at various roadside rest stops and WalMarts. We’re not going to break any laws, ruin any property, or insult any local residents, but anything else is up for consideration. If you want my picture in front of an anti-abortion billboard, we can work to make that happen. If you’d like Annette and I to purchase and wear matching tshirts of a certain nature, we can do that, as well. If you have a list of scavenger hunt items (shot glass with the American flag on it, glow-in-the-dark condoms, license plate keychain with your grandma’s name on it), I am happy to devote a full day to finding them.

I want you to think very hard about this and come up with something fantastic. Don’t go with the first thing that comes to mind. Click over to Daily Puppy for awhile, pour yourself a glass of wine, and really give it some thought. Leave your ideas in the comments, or email/ text them to me. I’ll try to get the final list up before we leave Wednesday night.

Erin: I’m still mad at myself for that, too.

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Cristin: I just cut my tongue licking the lid of my yogurt.

Katie: Wow. How did you live to adulthood?

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Cristin: I came in third for the “Loudest” superlative in high school.

Jeremy: Wow.

Cristin: I know, right? I’m not that loud!

Jeremy: No, I can’t believe two people beat you.