04.28.06

today's lesson in wedding strategy is that it isn't always a good idea to muffle one's inner bridezilla. i'd been handling our florist with kid gloves because i was afraid she'd back out on us; after waiting a week for a return message and finally resolving to make a polite transatlantic phone call this morning, i got dumped via e-mail anyway. why this couldn't have happened a week or two (or, hell, a month or two) ago - so that i could have had that time to work with the person who inherited (see 04.18.06) her flower shop - is beyond me; what i do know is that it's really, re-ally tempting to be an ugly american when english reticence fucks with my planning. don't mess with the bride, young man. you'll get the horns.

i caught the last fifteen minutes of pretty in pink on cable last night. for those of you who lack total brat pack recall, that's when molly ringwald bounces back from being dumped for prom by whipping up a weird dress and making all of the rich kids look like conformist suckers. when i burst into tears (as i always do) as the soundtrack kicked into OMD's "if you leave," i realized why this wedding stuff is giving me zombie-filled stress dreams* and making me flip my shit over save-the-date cards; while i can shrug off traditions and don't exactly need to feel like a princess, i do need to feel crafty. i'm hoping the stuff i throw together will stand the test of time a little better than molly's dress did, but the temporary "huh? wow!" is what matters. so...which one of you is going to teach me how to pour my own candles?

*the zombies themselves weren't the problem - it was that i was supposed to be revivifying a horde of them while shopping for a rehearsal dinner outfit and my syringes lacked the proper amount of serum, so they kept coming halfway to life and stumbling all over the store and getting in my way. also there was a small dog on fire.

04.25.06

04.18.06

that was way too serious. today is come here, go away (tm tomato nation) day.

come here, charoset and bitter herbs. if you're agnostic, passover apparently makes you need hillel sandwiches like a pregnant lady needs pickles and ice cream: joe and i stuffed ourselves with horseradish, apples, and matzoh pretty much throughout seder on saturday.

go away, saw II. i love dreadful horror sequels - for god's sake, i liked hypercube - and the only good thing about you is the "enjoy your PURPLE NURPLE!" line from the scary movie 4 commercials. when you don't get interesting until you're parodied, you're in trouble.

go away come here, wedding florist. it's professional of you to honor your commitment to our wedding (even though we didn't sign anything) this summer after you sold your flower shop to devote yourself to your new baby. i don't really understand how you're going to get it done without, um, a flower shop, but you're the best and only show in town and i want to trust you. please send us the estimate you promised to have by last week so my head doesn't break.

go away, guess the dictator or sit-com character. i am not and never will be joey from dawson's creek. have you seen katie holmes lately? when i first followed that link, i thought i was looking at kelly osbourne.

come here, magic hat circus boy (and the weird-ass fortune teller on your website). if you did taste like a hefeweizen, i probably wouldn't like you.

go away, guy on tenth avenue who tried chat me up without actually listening to my responses. i tend to distrust people who tell me that i, too, sound like a good uncle.

come here, asparagus risotto. you gobbled up twice the suggested amount of veggie broth and needed doctoring with benecol and vanilla soymilk (because that's how we roll in The Kitchen That Joy Forgot), but you did your best.

04.14.06

a few years ago, a few years after graduation, our college clique got hot and bothered (as twentysomethings do) about working for The Man versus working for The Cause. it was quite dramatic; at the time i was with the SPCA and got terribly upset whenever one of my friends, say, got a nice piece of furniture or joined an entity with punctuation in its name. i remember arguing that we were like babies of different species - we had seemed similar enough in utero, but flippers and claws and such were going to get in the way as we grew up. the discussions were shamefully twee; thank god the whole thing blew over.

the late twentysomething version, i think, is a mutation of town v. gown. i don't want to twee out on it, but this amused the hell out of me when it popped up in my iTunes today:

Come down, come down from your ivory tower
Let love come into your heart
Don't lock yourself in an ivory tower
Don't keep us so far apart

I love you, I love you
Are you too far above me to hear?

Come down, come down from your ivory tower
You'll find true love has its charms
It's cold, so cold, in your ivory tower
And warm, so warm in my arms

I love you, I love you
Are you too far above me to hear?

Come down, come down from your ivory tower
You'll find true love has its charms
It's cold, so cold, in your ivory tower
And warm, so warm in my arms

04.12.06

101 in 1001: 045 earn (and get) a raise at work [completed mid-march '06]
in a literal sense, this item was in the bag unless i got fired before 22 march (pay tweaks happen on anniversaries at The Company). figuratively, it's still exciting; i have in fact been working my ass off, and my evaluation read like one of jan wenner's rolling stone reviews. moreover, joe and the cats and you lovely people are perennial, but i don't count on a lot of other things hanging in there from year to year. congratulations to The Company, then, for sticking it out with me! and congratulations to me for...having the funds to rent an extra movie each month.

celebrities v. giant inflatable rats: the six degrees of That Guy edition.
it was a long, hard winter for both star- and uniongazing; it's much more difficult to spot the famous when their fleshless little bodies are bundled up against the cold, and i think that if the MTA strikers' rallies featured huge rubber animals, frustrated commuters would have used them as bludgeons. things cleared up recently when i was trundling home from work with a huge box full of wedding dress. visibility was poor: i lurched off the curb at one point, nearly flattening myself and kyra sedgwick. woo, now our wedding's only one person away from kevin bacon! i give the encounter 1.5 points. i also ran into That Guy, in this case a character actor with a recurring role as a serial killer on csi: miami. one could argue that he shouldn't be any points because i can't remember his name; i'm calling 0.5 because, bacon-style, he's attached to the fantastically weird david caruso. if you haven't seen david caruso as csi: miami's horatio kane, friends, you are denying yourselves a rare pleasure.

rats: 3.5
star: 7

04.05.06

it's wing, or springer, or something like that. the plaza this morning was a far cry from the drifty blizzard zone of a few months back; our view from the third floor (this is from our stoop) was a sea of blossoms. hours later it was pummeled in a freak snowstorm; snakes on a plane, man. snakes on a plane.

mischa barton quote of the day:

"There's something about not being the quintessential Hollywood person who has to drive to every meeting themselves. You're in your own little area more. Somebody drives me to work - either my mom or an assistant. Or my boyfriend."

(jane, october '04)

03.29.06

and the killer wedding robot lumbers forward: i finally dropped off the first batch of our save the date cards. a clever friend tells me i'm supposed to send one to myself to see if/how they come through; i neglected to do this, so do let me know if you receive one, eh? i haven't trusted the post office with much since they killed my tadpoles in 1998 (grow a frog kits should NOT be available online).

one last addition to the photo set from our trip. if you were leaving our wedding in the super-secret back garden and heading for the pub (which is, in fact, exactly what we will encourage guests to do), you would see this:

03.23.06 [all holes filled]

that's more like it! many thanks to paul, kidchamp's de facto webmaster, for twirling the digital spaghetti that is this site. he even managed to save pensive girl, which means a lot - i was heartbroken when a similar breakdown ate my 'guy who got punched' art a few years ago.

so, then. back to the poop. the dirty dozen [part 2]:

005 101 in 1001: 065 (re)visit 221b baker street [completed 03.16.06]
in the mid '80s, my family was obsessed with jeremy brett as sherlock holmes in the mystery! series;* it was a gimme that we'd visit the sherlock holmes pub at 221b on our trip to london in '95. then (and when i visited again in '99) it was a restaurant / pub / museum for the series - we saw the holmes mannequin from the empty house upstairs, they had one of the corny phosphorescent dogs from the hound of the baskervilles behind the bar, it was awesome. our pilgrimage this time around was disappointing, as the pub was gone and the museum was locked up for the night. good thing "(re)visit" is fairly vague, innit?

006 101 in 1001: 012 write (publish) a mcsweeney's list [completed 03.15.06]
official word rolled in while we were in oxford last week:

At long last we have finalized the lineup for our forthcoming book Mountain Man Dance Moves: The McSweeney's Book of Lists that is scheduled for publication through Vintage in September of this year, and I'm pleased to report that at least one of your lists has been chosen for this volume.

again, yay for vague wording: i was aiming for some action on the website, but this is listastic as well. it's even better, really, as i'll 1) be earning $25 for my efforts, 2) appear in mainstream print for the first (and probably last) time, and 3) get to use the phrase "mountain man dance moves" on my resume if the spirit moves me. as the moat girls would say, how good?!

007 snaps of the sherlock holmes trip, as well as several artful portraits of joe and my mom drinking, are up in an oxford / london photo set. it isn't quite as large as it might have been, as i had to save memory stick space for umpteen photos of the wedding ceremony and reception sites, but hey. how could photos of mom drinking be less than satisfying?

008 when we retrieved the cats from the vet's place on saturday, he mentioned that he'd done "two extractions" during chuck's dental work. fine, i thought, i'd actually expected it to be much worse - chuck's breath had been like an open grave for a month or two. we get the cat home, he yawns and smells of roses, and we see...one fang, because "two extractions" actually means "i pulled out three of your cat's fangs." poor chuck has one big tooth left, on the bottom, and looks like a (very very cute) gargoyle. that's normally the sort of thing you'd mention to a client when discharging their pet, right? i'm sure the teeth needed to go, but we...need a new vet.

*mystery!'s excellent opening sequence began my love affair with edward gorey; when my sister agreed to do the illo for our save the date cards, i asked her to take her cues from him. we like our weddings spooky.

03.20.06 [fire in the hole]

o, how i love the vicissitudes of domain registration. kidchamp a splode a few days ago; though i've forked over a big pile of cash to resuscitate it, it'll be a while before i comb through the shrapnel and find the server info i need to get back online. if this post is readable, of course, it's also superfluous; be that as it may, i miss/ed you, internets.

03.14.06 [uk]

a wedding scout operates with lightning speed and ruthless efficiency. we are seasoned wedding scouts: though it's but midmorning on the third day of our oxford planning mission, we've been through five pubs, two harvey's lunches, and three plates of ahmed's chips and cheese. we've also confirmed that the local stanford staffers don't remember (o happy day!) what we did to the house seven years ago, that oxford florists (like students on study-abroad programs) are lousy penpals and difficult to motivate, and that one should never, ever link to a cheap b&b from one's wedding website before checking to see if said b&b was, for example, nearly named The Worst Hotel in the UK. marriage nonsense aside, it's been wonderful to be back; oxford is just as we remembered it, though the students seem impossibly young. are the british simply baby-faced? this is what i tell myself.

03.08.06

friends, the wedding monster has eaten my soul and rendered me unable to update the 'champ. in lieu of detailed stories about my cats and lunches, please accept ziggy lives (the david bowie comic book).

02.23.06

the dirty dozen [part 1, since i'm too lazy to come up with twelve bullet points in a day]:

001 we've (i've) been on a movie binge for the upcoming academy awards. this hasn't involved actually watching nominated films (with the exception of the constant gardener - very pretty, but i'd be surprised if rachel weisz won for it), but i like to think we're offering broad support to the industry as a whole. we saw one of the greatest films of all time (r. kelly's trapped in the closet, which we both own and watched for the first time with my mother) and one of the worst remakes in recent history (the fog). the latter was such an inversion of all that is right and good that it actually caused a new york post reviewer to say something awesome: "How many out there have nightmares about leprous sailor-skeletons reaching up to grab you through the drain while you do the dishes?"

002 still slumming with wedding books; those listed at right are the tip of a dirty, dirty iceberg. repellent sentence of the day, on diamonds: "For your fiancee's sake, the larger the better, and she probably only likes talking in whole numbers...one carat, two carats, three carats, four." mine is not a whole number, per my request, thanks much. which is not to say that we don't refer to it, in our best sean connery voices, as The Rock.

003 yeah, there's a ring; we bought it (and ordered a wedding band for joe) before the blizzard started the weekend before last. the first flakes were falling as we left the store in soho, just in time to commemorate the freakishness of my liking a diamond.

004 ace young is the next american idol. his voice isn't the best this year, and he doesn't make my own personal liver quiver, but he's species hot - one of those seamlessly, freakishly attractive people who look like they were bioengineered to destroy the earth via mating. freakish is the operative word: even the television without pity crowd is responding to the way he shuddered through george michael's "father figure" last night. i'll keep watching for a few weeks just to see which pop songs are considered most conducive to the end of the world.