Well, I have six weddings to attend this year, which puts me at about 25 total weddings since I graduated college, so I SURE SHOWED THEM WHO CAN MAKE FRIENDS, NOW, DIDN’T I. I don’t think wedding invites are directly correlated to Number of Real Friends– I reserve that metric for People Who Remember Your Birthday, which is why my birthday isn’t listed on my Facebook profile. I’m testing you. Get a day planner and write it down. It’s not difficult– but I’m also sure that if we got Malcom Gladwell on this case he could find some small piece of supporting evidence that the amount of calligraphy on my fridge is related to my friend base. Or so that’s what I tell myself when I’m Groundhog Daying through a Williams-Sonoma registry that, I swear to god, is EXACTLY THE SAME as the last 5 I’ve shopped off of. Why are you all buying the same plates?!?? When (not if) aliens come and take over, they’re going to assume that there’s some weird social caste thing going on whereby you can have plates that are colored or patterned when you’re single but once you get married ONLY COMPLETELY WHITE PLATES GO INTO YOUR MARITAL HOME.

Luckily, I think weddings are great. I am automatically in favor of any event where they play songs off the Big Chill soundtrack and I get to eat shrimp, and that has me covered on 90% of the nuptials that I attend. And beyond the Motown and the seafood, these things usually involve getting to watch two people that I love (or sometimes one person that I love and a stranger, which is cool, too. I was in Baltimore for my college roommate’s wedding a few weeks ago and some random dude in the hotel elevator was all “HI!” to me when I got on and I was basically like “I’m sorry, does it look like I work here or something? Don’t look at me in the face.” and it turned out to be the guy that was marrying my old roommate. I had 6 floors to backpedal and I did so nicely) say that they’re going to be in love forever and that’s pretty great.

THAT SAID.

I am slightly overwhelmed by this all. Financially, Emotionally, Logistically. It’s kind of a lot to deal with in a year. I’ve been doing some social anthropology on this and figured out that most normal people have something close to an unintentional One In/ One Out policy for close friends; they maintain roughly the same number in their inner circle and if they get new ones they move away from the old ones. This sounds pretty sad, but I bet it keeps you from going to 6 weddings in a year. I’ve never been good at anything that vaguely approximates a revolving door (and don’t even get me started on ACTUAL revolving doors, which I have to negotiate every day just to get into my office building and which, even though I have what I consider to be a pretty hard job, are the most difficult obstacles in my path on most days of my adult life) so I’m still hanging on to people from when I was like 6. This weekend I told my mom that I’m going to sit down and make a list of everyone I love that isn’t married, and a couple people that I love who I expect to be divorced shortly, and then I’m going to stick to that list FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE. You can fall off the list if I suffer some grave injustice at your hands (you know who you are, Hands) but you can’t get on to the list. And when I get invited to a wedding I’ll take the list out of my Hope Chest and consult it and if one member of the couple is on it, I go to the wedding, and if not, I buy them some white plates at Williams-Sonoma and spend their wedding day on my couch congratulating myself on being a heartless bitch. This plan isn’t going to work, obviously.

So, I’m coming to all of your weddings. And I actually want to, I swear. I just need to find a way to have this take over slighly less of my personal life. I’m really just looking to take back 7-12% of what this has taken from me. Initially I thought I would just get every person the same gift and that that gift would be a gift certificate to SkyMall. There is something for everyone in SkyMall and I bet most of you would secretly be thrilled to be forced to shop there and finally have an excuse to buy that indoor square yard of grass so you don’t have to take your dog outside to pee anymore. At the end of the day, though, I have enough weird identifiers attached to me and spend enough time meeting friends-of-friends and immediately hearing “Oh, YOU’RE the one with the pirate bathroom/ mr potato head collection/ narcolepsy/ pet turtles/ a sibling pictured on those New York Times ads I keep seeing on the subway” and I don’t need to give people an additional sorting option of “thinks SkyMall is an acceptable retail option,” so I will stick with your racist whitewashed wedding registries for now, or go to my ole’ Spinster Whose Seen Godfather Too Many Times fallback and make people blankets and give them cash. I was recently told that giving money is horribly gauche at a Southern Wedding, advice that has come 8 years and 5 sorority sister weddings too late, but southerners also think it’s okay to smile/ talk to people they DON’T EVEN KNOW, like that doesn’t almost definitely get you murdered according to all the HBO/ Showtime programs that I so enjoy, so whatever. Here’s some money. Spend it in good health, perhaps on couples counseling to explore why you fear eating off of bright colors.

SO. I will handle scheduling and gift selection and being awesome on the dance floor, but I am outsourcing Clothing Selection to you.

One of the many things college didn’t prepare me for is dressing myself, as I never lived with less than 3 other chicks and not a single one of them ever said something along the lines of “hey, maybe go easy on the backless shirts.” I’ve more or less solved this in my adult living-alone life by having all of my clothes more or less look the same. Just put the black shirt with the grey pants and roll out, Captain. This wedding influx is dovetailing nicely (work code for “accidentally working out in my favor”) with what I now recognize is a serious obsession with Kate Middleton. As I was pulling out dresses to figure out the wedding rotation I realized that, since Kate Middleton has entered the forefront of my cultural awareness, my dress purchasing has increased by at least 400%. I didn’t even know I was doing it until I laid everything out on my bed and saw an army of shift dresses. I’m not complaining– she has, unknowingly, made progress on my wardrobe in mere months that could, someday, perhaps undo some of the damage done by my mom allowing me to have my 3rd grade school picture taken in sweatpants and a sweatshirt with cartoon penguins on it. And I’m clearly not alone in this; there are plenty of people enabling the addiction. And it’s not like my subconscious chose to emulate Ke$ha or something. I could do a lot worse.

So I’ve got all the raw material and just can’t deal with putting it together on my own. When I pack for weddings, I get that feeling you always get when you open an Ikea bookshelf box and start thinking that you’d rather just pile your books in your fireplace than work on assembly. Without any chicks around to vett this stuff, I’ve been taking awkward cell phone pictures of me in front of my mirrored closet and texting them out just to people who I’m pretty sure won’t think it’s a ransom demand. In response to one of those, WMFriend Katie wrote back “I don’t have enough information,” a sentence which has become an automatic Well I’ll Just Make A PowerPoint trigger because of my job, kinda like the 80-odd sentences that will always get me to put something into Excel (ex., “where are you tracking compared to last year?” and “is there one date that works for everyone to get drinks?”). So I took a series of photos and banged it out one night while I was parked in front of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, telling myself that it wasn’t weird at all because it’s important to keep your brain active while you watch tv and Katie would understand that and not jump to the conclusion that I was losing my ability to interact like a normal human being. No one in this town is capable of that, anyway. After it was done I realized two things: 1. This was a lot of pressure on Katie, not that she couldn’t handle it, and 2. I was going to require way more praise than one person was capable of giving me.

I widened the distribution and not a single person responded with “Christ, just get a cat already” or “please retake pictures with a bag over your head” or “unsubscribe,” because I have cleverly been unintentionally narrowing my trust circle down to only those who understand that some things can only be said in Power Point. My favorite response was from Emla, who suggested that I do these decks for every decision I have to make (“what to have for dinner, what DVDs to watch…”), which is a blog-turned-book-deal waiting to happen for those of you looking for a way to fill your days in ways that don’t require crucial decision making.

Everyone had reasons for each of their choices, from the analytical (“particularly appropriate for a museum wedding”) to the personal (“it’ll look good standing next to the dress I’m wearing to that wedding” and “I would have picked Dress #7 but I want you to save that for my wedding”), and the main thing they agreed on was exactly nothing. This is either a problem where I can’t go wrong or I can’t go right, as no consensus was ever reached for any of the weddings in question, aside from the implied conclusions that A. Two kinds of people in this world: Those who love a recreational power point and those who would never make it on my Approved Future Weddings list. B. Aside from how awful it must be to have to get on the subway to work wearing a suit during the summer, dressing yourself as a chick is significantly more difficult than dressing yourself as a dude, unless you’re a dude who works as a sports mascot or one of those guys in front of Buckingham Palace that isn’t allowed to smile. C. All of my dresses work for all of these weddings. Every wedding guest dress you wear is fine unless it’s white or has puke on it. You can quote me on that. D. Just because there’s no answer to the question doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make a power point about it.

Behold, the slides and the responses:

(These images get bigger if you click on them. I think, anyway). This was the cover slide, which I changed accordingly for each recipient. This one went to Emla, just in case that combination of font colors screws with your deductive reasoning powers.

This is the wedding information summary slide so everyone knew what the mitigating factors were. This was also adjusted slightly for each Dress Advisor, as many of them were appearing on this slide in bride form or would be attending the weddings along with me. Everyone took this pretty seriously; most of the responses I got made it clear that this slide was the SAT reading comprehension question that no one wanted to get wrong.

Dress Option Slides:

Each of the dresses came with a list of advantages and/ or concerns, a picture of me grinning awkwardly in front of my bed, and a picture of me in the dress at prior events where applicable.

I ran out of ways to not look psychotic pretty quickly.

I also evidently came to believe that only my left arm was capable of bending.

Then my powers of right arm bendage were magically restored.

Everyone got this summary slide at the end with instructions to match the dress to the wedding and email the slide back.

This one did double duty as both a response vehicle and a searing visual portrait of how incredibly difficult it is for me to take serious pictures of myself when working on a ridiculous project that doesn’t matter at all. I kind of understand why everyone does that ridiculous off-balanced, cross-legged stance at red carpet events. I don’t think it helps at all, I just think one person did it once with such authority that everyone else decided that it must be a great idea and then it wound up confusing people into thinking that Paris Hilton was a professional… something. Which I guess she is, just not for anything that requires crossing her legs.

The problem with spending an hour out of your day coming up with clever nicknames for your dresses in a world where there are only so many ways to pun on polka dots is that everything sounds equally ridiculous when your friends start using the dress titles to respond as you yourself had instructed. Collating took me awhile and was not helped by the fact that once I open a door in my brain it rarely closes, like that time in college when I spent 6 weeks playing 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon with myself instead of studying, and I kept thinking of better names for the dresses. I eventually had to line them up to see how things shook out.

Erin & Amir’s Wedding

I misspoke earlier; the one thing everyone agreed on was that the first dress above, the one that delighted me by winning this bracket because I had already decided I was going to wear it to this wedding, is probably the best thing I own outside of my fake bearskin rug. If I went strictly by the stats, the way I was supposed to, I would wear that dress to all of the weddings and on 3 of 5 work days each week.

Boom! Proof that your vote matters.

Kelly & Gerald’s Wedding

We had a tie for this one. Everyone’s Favorite Dress came in first again, and many people pointed out how useful it would be to have pockets while holding an 11 month old through a wedding ceremony. But Vanity beats Function in the giant game of Rock Paper Scissors that is attending weddings with people from high school.

To my knowledge, my father did not make a Power Point in order to get dressed for this wedding, so it’s pretty frustrating that he’s standing around having his picture taken while casually emulating Steve McQueen.

Katie & Eric’s Wedding

Posited: Dressing for outdoor weddings makes everyone nervous about footwear. I got a lot of concerned “you have wedges, right?” with the same level of nervousness as usually accompanies inquiries as to whether or not I have sunblock on. Not sinking into the grass is more important than anything else.

Beth & Michael’s Wedding

The Racing Stripes dress runs away with it. Insert NASCAR pun!

Annette & Dan’s Wedding

Spreading the love! Clearly, I should just Beyonce this wedding and make 4 outfit changes during the reception like I’m working through my Daddy issues on My Super Sweet 16.

Dress Advisors: That you for your attention to this matter. Everyone else: Look forward to forthcoming Power Points about what movie I should see this weekend and what haircut I should get.

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.

Carolyn: Do you know the Single Ladies dance? Like, how to do it?

Cristin: I’ve watched that video a million times but have never actually attempted it. I’m sure I could learn it. Why?

Carolyn: Because I want my bridal party to do it at the wedding. Also- I’m engaged!

And that was how I found out (a) Carolyn was marrying her endlessly awesome boyfriend, Mike, who is the kind of guy you dream about your best friend marrying and then keep your fingers crossed that she doesn’t mess it up when she finds him and (b) I would be standing up for Carrie at the wedding. Just to be safe, she reiterated the invitation when we were hella drunk at our high school reunion. Then just to be safe, she asked me again over gchat when she realized that I might not quiiiiite remember everything that happened the night of the reunion. I was in charge of planning for this epic event (when I told my family I had volunteered for the job, Older Brother Bud immediately replied “Wait, I thought you hated high school and everyone in it.” The night of the {wildly successful, fyi} reunion, someone told me that Cousin Danny had said something to the effect of “I’m worried that Cristin might just be trying to get everyone in one place so she can bomb it and take us all out at once.” THANKS, family), and was wound up enough that I’d been having reunion-flavored nightmares for a while. I micromanaged the first 2 hours or so that we were there, and then I micromanaged my utilization of the open bar, so Carolyn was right to worry that I might have only agreed to the whole Matching Dress/ Flower/ Lame Shower Games thing while under the influence.

Carolyn with future bridesmaids, at the reunion.

Carrie just sent out the Hey These Are The Other Bridesmaids email, in which she summarized me better than even I could have, though I was disappointed that she didn’t mention how we met in 7th grade health class and used to sing Gin Blossoms songs in the back of the room while doing the shuffle. I’m not kidding.

Cristin Stickles- Cristin and I have also been BFFs since 7th grade, when we bonded over our enviable ability to use stick figures in any and all art class assignments. Since then, we have collaborated on many creative projects, including but not limited to: stealing Tracey’s car, parodies of Greek tragedies, drinking our weight in girly wheat beers and analysis of Biggest Loser episodes. Cristin is also the supplier of 95% off the books that I have read in the past six years. She lives in Brooklyn with her two turtles.

The above-referenced Greek tragedy parody was written for AP English, and involved a Mystery Science Theater-esque experience wherein the cast of South Park watched a performance of Medea.

Related, Potentially Awesome: My resolution is to blog more. How am I doing so far?

Road to Chicago 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.

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.

And Emily is on YouTube, talking about her books!

It’s fun having Important Friends with Things To Say about their work. It doesn’t feel like all that long ago when we were all Professional Photocopiers in cubicles.