09.26.07

as i mentioned a few days ago, joe hooked up with the local C team for the nydo's tuesday night league. i was worried that george and i had railroaded him into it - there's more than a little pageant mom in the way we deconstruct him when he plays. oh, he's doing the pre-throw flutter - he should lay off the five and just splash when he goes for the bull. i would have wanted to come along anyway, since we both know all of the guys he plays with and hey, the home matches are at our favorite bar, but i owed him the support regardless. luckily (pathetically?), darts-watching is great fun (if not the great-great fun of playing). there's the amusing transformation of big gruff pub regulars into whispery gossiping ladies - i'm solid enough on game strategy (and whispery gossiping ladies) that i can play along for that part (and the list-making and all-star scorekeeping, most arcane). then there's the unabashedly gleeful way they celebrate - one of joe's teammates, a greek guy who had been grumbling about getting hit by a taxi that afternoon when he was on his bike, squeezed his eyes shut and danced like a leprechaun when joe got a crucial ton in his last round of 501. full-fledged bear hugs all 'round when they won the match in the last game. i don't mind that i look like a groupie for coming along - i'll be asking to play in the spring. it's nice to feel like we're part of the neighborhood (yeah, i watched a lot of cheers at a formative age).

joe was in such a fine mood after the win that he's letting me post his spam poem. it has a great-escape*-liner-notes feel, maybe, but i think it's really about the wonder of darts.

Your friend is here

Czech Olympic Committee annihilates
Free games for all
Our present for your health

Join the Growing Fans of Dry Cleaning Bag
Big size - is success
Make your fat friends envy you

Contemplating Suicide?
Summer is almost here, be ready
We have what you need

Hey Ervin
You have got to read this before Tuesday
Big Day Tuesday

*and what's with damon albarn dissing that album? it's always been one of my favorites.

09.23.07

a post of imelda's turned me on to "you are what you watch" from alessandra stanley in today's times. as imelda put it, "[B]efore I start getting crap for talking about TV all the time, now that the other three networks (or should I say, the good networks) are beginning their seasons in the coming week, read this." it is quite the feel-good read for those of us who love the tube:

A favorite show is a tip-off to personality, taste and sophistication the way music was before it became virtually free and consumed as much by individual song as artist. Dramas have become more complicated; many of the best are serialized and require time and sequential viewing. If anything, television has become closer to literature, inspiring something similar to those fellowships that form over which authors people say they would take to the proverbial desert island. (People who say “Ulysses,” on the ground that it would use up more time than almost any other novel, would also probably bring “The Wire.”)

[...]

Television used to be dismissed by elitists as the idiot box, a sea of mediocrity that drowns thought and intelligent debate. Now people who ignore its pools and eddies of excellence do so at their own peril. They are missing out on the main topic of conversation at their own table.

the paragraphs on battlestar galactica are especially ego-boosting, as it's our current show of choice (i'm going to try to be starbuck for halloween, which will be either fantastic or deeply embarrassing). of course, the ego boost is all about the elitism stanley mentions near the end of the piece:

Before the Internet, iPhones and flash drives, people jousted over who was into the Pixies when they were still a garage band or who could most lengthily argue the merits of Oasis versus Blur. Now, for all but hardcore rock aficionados, one-upmanship is more likely to center around a television series — like metaphysical clues buried in “Lost,” whether the current “Battlestar Galactica” is an affront to the 1978 original (some bloggers sneeringly refer to the current incarnation as Gino, short for “Galactica in name only”* ) or who discovered “Flight of the Conchords” when it was a comedy team performing in concerts, not an HBO series.

good tv isn't really new, nor is the concept of water cooler and/or status shows, but its influence in, say, my office is still pretty incredible. when i was hiring someone for my old job, my cube neighbors less-than-half-jokingly said i should try to find someone who watches lost, the office, and 30 rock. i did, as it happens, and her happy patter with them emphasizes my comparative tv torpitude (i watch only lost, and i usually watch it a day late, which disqualifies me from the first half hour of chat on thursday mornings). pop media fixations are par for the course at a mainstream magazine like ours, of course - our tuesday production meeting began this week with the deputy editor leading the editorial staff in a lengthy facts of life singalong. does this happen at your office? and hey, what do you watch?

*they're right about that, thank goodness.

09.19.07

for most issues of the ladymag, i review a book or two. this happens in more or less the same way every month: a colleague swings by with a handful of advance copies, and i grab the ones that seem least likely to be chick lit. sometimes she hasn't finalized her lineup and i'll be influencing whether or not we feature the books at all. recently we've been skipping this step, and i agree to read things we already know we'll feature. that's a good thing and a bad thing: i know my piece will be published, but i also know i have to say something positive no matter what (our entertainment coverage amounts to recommendations rather than reviews - the section is so small that we don't really have space to tell people what they should avoid reading). we also don't really have space to say much period (these things are 50 words long at best), so these reviews are basically title/author + major plot point + short string of compliments. you can tell i've had trouble with a book when the compliments are about the cover art. what a hat!

so i've had a lot of practice, is what i'm saying, with blurbs. if i somehow became a celebrated author and up-and-coming writers started asking me to add pleasant sentiments and my name to their dust jackets, i could totally hook them up.

i was poking around online the other day to check on a book i'd reviewed a few months ago. i'd actually enjoyed reading it, so now that it's available to the public, i wanted to see if it was doing well. you can see where this is going, right? the first editorial review on its amazon page (after the publishers weekly paragraph) was by me (attributed to ladymag, of course, but written by me). i then went to the author's website, and same deal: my blurb first, above the washington post, the san francisco chronicle, and a few dozen others. i suspect it's on the book itself, or will be. um, glad i could be of help? i always assumed i'd know i was blurbing if i ever did it, but it can apparently be a totally unconscious thing. are the others written by people like me, in situations like mine? don't trust blurbs, internets! or, trust blurbs, but not mine, unless i've told you i wasn't rewritten and/or forced to be nice. maybe we can have a code word: if a paragraph contains the word peanut, it's a lie.

that one excepted, of course.

09.16.07

101 in 1001: 077 visit a working farm [completed 09.16.07]



nothing says "onset of autumn in new york city" quite like a...county fair. i've had my eye on the queens county farm museum for months now, and i can spend inordinate amounts of time ogling baby animals and/or majestic vegetables, so this was clearly the weekend to make the trip. we figured it would take a while to get from manhattan to a working farm, and we weren't wrong: we spent half an hour on the E train and another forty minutes on a bus that stopped every 500 feet. joe gets the supportive spouse of the day award for coming along, since as far as i can tell, he shares neither of my fascinations. no, that's unfair: he appreciates cute beasts every once in a while. he doesn't tear up when he sees small sheep, though, which is probably normal and healthy. i do wish he'd been willing to stick around for the pig races.

points of interest at the queens county fair:

the petting zoo. i paid an extra $2 to mill around with a bunch of three-year-olds and let animals make out with my hand. i'm not sure that it occurred to the staff that even goats will get full and misanthropic after two days of constant feeding (everyone got a big cup of alfalfa pellets), so most of the little guys were hiding while their greedier parents jostled for treats, but i had to say hello anyway. then i couldn't touch anything for two hours because the bathroom line was huge and i was covered with chunky goat spit.

the livestock tent and craft barn. big advantage of hitting a citified fair rather than a full-fledged state fair: the livestock handlers are hobbyists rather than professional farmers, so their animals are pets, not food. it's possible that someone will eventually eat the stupendous pigs that were snorking around next to the petting zoo, but it seems unlikely. this is what i tell myself, anyway. the craft barn was full of the mean needlepoint ladies i bitched about a few posts ago, but it also had puppies in hats and an unironically awesome bloody needlepoint jesus. the simplicity of the jesus (half cross stitch all the way!) plus the cheekiness of the knitted anatomical heart i spied next to the puppy give me hope that something like my debbie harry piece might pass muster next year. i would like a county fair ribbon, even an honorable mention (which i suspect is what the judges issued to things they didn't want to actually compliment).

the bavarian beer garden. lo, something joe actually asked to visit! it was two in the afternoon, and we were still recovering from last night's darts'n'pints training session (aside: the missus is now an official member of the local darts league. though george is storming an irish castle this week, he and i will be shocking and aweing local pubs with our cheers for joe soon), so we took it easy on the beer. we ja!ja!ja!ed heartily with the polka band to make up for it. there is something about gawky teenage boys leaping around in lederhosen that just makes my heart smile.

'the amazing maize maze.'

101 in 1001: 055 walk through a corn maze [completed 09.16.07]



hot double-item-completing action! this is what hitting queens was all about. it was a beautiful day, it felt like we were in the middle of nowhere, and joe was a good sport about my constant stephen king jokes. totally worth it.

09.12.07

curse you, berlin, for shrinking my posse! wabes left for germany yesterday, and while i'm thrilled for her and know her year of research will be fantastic (she's too modest to say so, but our girl had fellowship committees competing for her), i couldn't help feeling a bit sorry for myself - and a bit sheepish. i've grown so accustomed to having my girlfriends scattered across the country that i never quite wrapped my brain around how close she was. we met up every few weeks, sure, but now that she's on the other side of the atlantic - i feel like i pissed away so many opportunities. i'm a huge flake, operatically (and genuinely) affectionate in person but virtually unreachable for making plans or catching up from afar. i could make excuses for it - i'm awkward on the phone, i have limited internet access, i'm nesting with the cats and the wife - but at the end of the day, i'm just flaky.

the war on this begins with our trip to chicago next month to see jen and tom: in jen's case, i've been promising a long-distance visit since, well, about 1997. i will also return phone calls, make concrete weekend plans, write beautiful letters, and send a boy to the cratchits' with a turkey! really, internets: i'm going to work on this. and wabes - you're missed.

from lovely ladies to nasty men: pica (the former) comments on the recent release of jack kerouac (the latter)'s on the road (original recipe):

[S]ounds like a marvelously ugly, hateful all-American text. Tasty, like Rocky Mountain oysters dipped in ketchup. I never made it past Kesey and Ferlinghetti as a teenager: I don't think Kerouac or Cassady ever seemed much like kindred spirits; they seemed more antsy than zany. On the road with a bunch of semi-closeted misogynists? Sounds pretty boring to me. I think I'll read popular science books and Camus instead.

kerouac was, well, a marvelously ugly, hateful all-american, which brings me to a question pica asked a few months ago:

Could you read, and love, a literary work by someone whom you personally know to be a crappy human being?

my answer at the time was OH HELL NO! - or it would have been if i could comment on vox blogs (you have to have an account). my answer with old jack kerouac in mind is - apparently yes. i've little (personal or professional) patience for the beats (burroughs in particular - if i had a time machine, i'd head for tangier in the '50s and punch him in the face), but under the influence of my hippie freshman roommate, i read a shitload of their stuff (and wrote several papers on them). kerouac, the chigger, got under my skin: to this day, for me, two of the most resonant passages in modern american lit are his (one from on the road, one from dharma bums). it breaks my heart to know that you'll never read on the road, pica - it's a frequently tiresome book from a frequently tiresome man from a fr - anyway, but its moments of brilliance are more than worth a few hours of holding one's nose.

09.06.07

101 in 1001: 093 attend a lecture at the 92nd street Y [completed 09.05.07]



michael palin and lorne michaels, boom goes the dynamite! i'd forgotten about this list item altogether for a while, and when i first consulted the Y's fall lineup i thought i might have to sit through an evening with don delillo in the name of progress. fortunately his event isn't a lecture. lorne michaels interviewing michael palin wasn't a lecture either, you say? ah, but the event calendar disagreed!

as michael palin has been reading from his new book (diaries 1969-1979: the python years) all over town this week - a friend of ours interviewed him about it a few hours before we saw him, actually - it probably wasn't very clever to pay $26 a pop for the Y event. i wanted to have a look at the facilities, though, and they are in fact lovely - hey, those panels!* when my poetry and joe's government work have made us wealthy, we'll become members and attend so many of these things that their individual prices will be laughable. they'll be free for members, actually, but that's not the point.

financial issues aside, who could regret going uptown for the IT'S man? were it not for his efforts (and for mtv's late-night python marathons back in the day), i'd never have convinced anyone to date me in high school. in college, my mom got first dibs on the guys in her freshman dorm for being the only woman who could play bridge; thirty years later, i was the only girl who knew the lyrics to the lumberjack song. a bit easier, really, and the advantage disappeared at college, but thank you, fellows.

*yes, it's pathetic that i snapped an empty stage. it's tough to sneak a photo when one can't disable one's flash, internets, and i didn't want to be rude (or kicked out).

08.29.07

brain dump 008 [another month bites the dust]

learning to love you more (the book) (yes, again), coming to...something near you september 20! neither amazon nor miranda july can tell me whether or not the book will include contributions from me or jen, and that makes me sad; i also can't really figure out if it's going to be in local bookstores. so many mysteries with the twee collaborative art.

someecards, "when you care enough to hit send." i was quite pleased to receive this one from george the other day; i am getting good at bar games (though it's been a while since i've really schooled joe, who was invited to join the team at our local pub). i sent this in return.

why blockbuster is gaining on netflix. count me with the scores of skeptics who commented on this salon piece; i live a few hundred feet from a blockbuster, so it is in fact much faster to return a movie to them than it is to send one back to netflix, but 1) that blockbuster is a joyless place and i don't wish to browse for exchanges there, 2) i object to the way the company censors some films, 3) i think they're still hunting my ass for some accidental late fee i incurred in 2003, which is unsporting, and 4) their website does not please the eye. fellow online movie renters, have you tried the blockbuster? has it met your needs?

cyrano de bergerac, starring jennifer garner and kevin kline. crap - i'm going to have to go see something on broadway. listen, cyrano has been one of my favorite plays since junior high - when, um, i impersonated the title character for a world history project (my nose kept threatening to fall off as i spoke - very awkward). also, the translation/adaptation is by anthony burgess! also also, as my father and i know, a great nose is the banner of a great man, a generous heart, a towering spirit, an expansive soul.

rick roll, noun. "When what you think is a link to something you want to see actually directs you to a video of Rick Astley singing 'Never Gonna Give You Up.' This is common in the WoW [world of warcraft] community: Awww! Rick rolled again, thought this was the new movie trailer." such a kind, gentle alternative to goatse! what really pleases me about rick rolling is the improbability of it cropping up in gaming forums (presumably populated at least in part by The Youth of Today rather than people our age) in the first place: what made them choose rick astley, of all people? there's hope for the future, maybe.

building on this week's theory that some things were better in the good old days, i'm on the verge of announcing that there is no good thrift shopping left in new york. okay, no good thrift shopping left in manhattan south of 90th street or in williamsburg. wabes wrote this morning with a request for (inexpensive) used furniture expertise for a newly local friend, and i nearly drew a blank. the place on 17th that yielded us two leather barrel chairs for $95 in '03 now wants thousands of dollars for miami vice-ish lacquered vanities, and housing works locations all over town have started auctioning their really good stuff online instead of keeping it in the store - so unless one of their very savvy merchandise people falls asleep on the job and the vintage hunters who turn up at the crack of dawn are away in the hamptons for the weekend, there's virtually no chance of finding something awesome and affordable in a random search. that's the heart and soul of thrift shopping, man.

this post is making me feel like andy rooney.

08.27.07

welcome back to kidchamp unplugged! i think our next door neighbor's wireless access, which he's been kind enough to share with us in exchange for picking up his mail, is permanently buggered, so we're reduced to making hay while the occasional open local channel shines. we could pony up for our own service, but i think this is the universe's way of telling me that i shouldn't be playing web games in silence when my husband is sitting two feet away. i have fond memories of the months in san francisco when we didn't even have a television; the cold war housewife who lives in my gall bladder secretly loved listening to the 2000 presidential debates on the radio while washing the dishes by hand. the news stories about al gore's wooden stage presence and haughty reaction shots were totally lost on me.

speaking of my inner housewife, i felt ancient as my assistant watched me unwrap a package from ebay this morning (our department doesn't get a lot of swag in the mail, so all news is big news). i don't really know what could have given her the impression that i'm still a zesty twentysomething - a karen o bong? - but i know discontinued fiesta ware didn't do the trick, nor did my visible annoyance when i found a flea bite on the underside of one of the pieces (simply liking old china isn't that bad; worrying about its quality for collection purposes, on the other hand...). this is, i think, what happens when frustrated nesters can't afford to live in entire houses apartments of their very own and tinker with normal things like fixtures and wallpaper: they fixate where they can, like on where their leftover chili lives. my leftover chili has very classic digs, so's you know.

at the other end of the inner housewife spectrum, the legendary embroidery goddess jenny hart wrote a solid guest column for getcrafty on why most needlework shop owners are stone cold bitches. my words, not hers: actually she talks about going to the national needlearts association (tnna) trade show and how, though a lot of mom 'n pop stores are going under, a lot of the folks in the business want nothing to do with people like her [and me].

I stood up and spoke to the group about the vibrant and active DIY market that's booming elsewhere- to a roomful of blank looks. And, a few who didn't like the suggestion that they were, possibly, just maybe, slipping out of touch with a very important market. I realized they didn't know where the new needleworkers and crafters had gone. But how do you tell them?

[...]

I also learned that 'crafting' was a dirty word to them (they are 'needleworkers', while 'crafting' suggests projects with popsicle sticks), and they don't spend a whole lot of time reading BUST, ReadyMade, CRAFT or looking at the interweb for alternative resources outside of the ones they already know. They need serious help. I was going to have to do double DIY duty: educate these retailers on how to attract our market ("Don't fear tattoos and pink hair! New needleworkers might have facial piercings -this is okay!") and appeal to our own community on why we should cross the thresholds of the shops that seem so, you know....squaresville to many of us.

there are several angles here: first is the old refrain about how alternacrafters don't get much respect from more traditional practitioners (it's not just the mean women at the needlepoint stores i visit here in the city - even the posters over at getcrafty, usually a fairly liberal bunch, leap at each other's throats every now and again when the legitimacy of "hip" work is championed or challenged). for practitioners of popular crafts like knitting, feeling the hate just means that you switch to a supplier whose personality jives with yours; for people like the needleworkers, who don't really have a forest of options, this means that 1) you lose out on potentially helpful advice from people who know a lot more about what you're doing than you do (my bummer) and 2) you go out of business once your elderly clientele dies (the vendors' bummer). i loved going to craft stores with my mom when i was little, goggling at the gorgeous materials and chattering about my projects to anyone who'd listen; if i found a place today that generated the same sort of excitement in me, i'd spend money there just to support the atmosphere. i miss it.

08.24.07

i need to stop starting things.

books i'm reading:

a free life (ha jin)
spud (john van de ruit)
haruki murakami and the music of words (jay rubin)
reading comics (douglas wolk)

these are books i'm actively reading, not books on my nightstand windowsill that i pick up once or twice a week; there are about a dozen more of those, jostling for space with the air conditioner and the alarm clock and water-warped back issues of the new yorker. the first two titles will be out of my hair by monday, as i need to review them for the november issue of the magazine, but this is still out of hand. even the cats know it: i tried to bring a copy of the clinton chronicle (our neighborhood paper) home to read the other day, and it sat on the corner of the credenza for 1.5 seconds before chuck leapt up and vomited on the front page.

craft projects in progress:

kathleen hanna needlepoint
stag beetle needlepoint
denim quilt
knitted quilt
supersecret baby gift

this too is silliness. the baby gift in particular should be out of the way by now: i find it terribly embarrassing that my friend is making a person faster than i'm able to make a present for that person. my big craft issue is that i design much more effectively than i execute. though i know just what the stag beetle's head should look like, for instance, i've spent hours and hours filling in the areas around his legs to avoid having to commit to specific stitches up top. on the quilts, i got very excited about what i wanted to do and plunged ahead without bothering to firm up my techniques. i should probably have known how to thread my sewing machine and purl, respectively, before settling in for the long haul. that's more than half the fun of casual craft, though - the occasional bliss of finding that improv along the way resulted in something far cooler than what you'd intended to make.

how predictable is it that a post about overload and unfinished things is itself turning into an unfinished thing? release it, the slacker on my left shoulder says, release it and hope for that improv effect you were talking about.

what are you juggling, internets? how do you decide which of the leisure things get attention?

08.17.07

brain dump 007 [late summer slump]

mexican grilled corn. one of two unhealthy taste fixations joe and i picked up from cafe habana in soho; the other is the michelada (a savory cocktail with beer, lime, salt, and copious hot sauce). the tyler florence recipe linked above is pretty good, even if, say, one is too lazy to buy and grate fresh parmesan and opts instead to use the three-year-old kraft stuff in the back of the fridge. the wednesday farmer's market at my office (?) has been featuring some fantastic (and fantastically cheap) fresh corn, so we'll be fattening ourselves with this for the rest of the summer.

the new pornographers' challengers, streaming for free via myspace (via jacob). i can't say i'm comfortable with buying the album at target for the special price of $9.99; i do hope the corporate promotional partnership means that NP are making some substantial dough, though. how do you guys feel about the indie bands and the corporate partnerships? should i care that, for example, wilco pretty much handed sky blue sky to volkswagen?

turf of gangs and gangsters, a new york times "weekend explorer" piece on the history of hell's kitchen. it focuses more on the "hell's canyon" skyscraper effect than on the northward ooze of chelsea (a store called something like "pocket pooches" opened up the street last month), but there are a few passages that hint at it:

One block east, the Mr. Biggs Bar & Grill at 10th Avenue and West 43rd Street is on the site of a dive bar, the 596 Club, which Mr. Coonan owned in the 1970s. In 1977 he and his crew murdered and dismembered the loan shark Ruby Stein there. The torso was later retrieved from the East River.

Mr. Robbins said macabre stories about the 596 Club still float around Hell’s Kitchen. Old-timers remember jars behind the bar that held the severed fingers of guys who had crossed the Westies. There’s the one about gangsters rolling a severed head down the bar.

“I’ve heard a lot of that kind of stuff,” T. J. English, author of “The Westies,” said in a recent interview. “Normally you’d dismiss it as absurd, but since it was the Westies, who knows? That place was certainly the proverbial bucket of blood.”

Scott Rudnick, owner of Mr. Biggs, said the place had its share of ghosts when he first opened 13 years ago, but the introduction of karaoke nights “spooked the spooks out.”

mud, sweat and tears pottery. i was reminded of this studio's existence when i dragged a bag of old clothes down tenth avenue to the salvation army last weekend. i'd always thought it was a color me mine-style, paint-someone-else's-crap place, but it's an actual studio, and i think i need to take a class there. classes are $400, and i haven't got that, so i'll sock money away for a while and return to the whim when i've got a plausible stash. i have a secret theory that i'll take a bunch of these classes and be able to start making stuff like this,* and while that will never happen, i'll have a hobby to chat with my sister (baby jo, a badass ceramicist) about. that's also good.

pat kiernan's huge apartment. i've never been fond of cribs-style love letters to celebrities' homes, but i am so pleased to learn that pat kiernan, beloved host of the local morning news, has a righteous pad on the upper west side. it's as oddly endearing and canadian as pat himself: two of the family's favorite things are a painting of dancing pigs and a giant mountie.

one in ten benefit auction. beginning this sunday on ebay, a sale of beautiful handmade things to support eireann's mom (who had an aneurysm and a stroke this summer, and whose insurance isn't covering her bills). great cause, gorgeous art and craft - bid, bid!

how have you been passing the time, o internets? i've been up to my eyeballs in work at casa de ladymag for the past few weeks, but the load, she is lightening, and i plan to celebrate that all weekend.

*speaking of diana fayt's (amazing, amazing) ceramics, she's going to have stuff at candystore in the mission soon - you san francisco types should get on that. it's gross that i'm slowly turning into a shopping blogger, but pimping independent design is at least slightly acceptable, right?

08.15.07

joe and i are celebrating the big oh-one next week, and i've been trying to come up with definitive statements on what it's like to have been married for a year. it's surprisingly tough: we dated for seven and a half years (and lived together for most of that) before making it legal, as my grandfather put it, so it's not like we're just learning to play house. a thundering, is-that-you-god? voice in my head said YOUNG WOMAN, YOU'RE GOING TO MARRY THIS GUY AND IN FACT SHOULD PROBABLY PROPOSE TO HIM RIGHT NOW on a november night back in '99, so i can't say that i've been dealing with newfound feelings of solemnity now that new york makes us file our taxes together,* either.

marriage is...handy at blockbuster, where the clerks have finally accepted that joe and i share an account (saying "it's under my boyfriend's name" scandalized them for years; husband is the magic video rental word, even though we still don't have the same last name). it's awkward at work, sometimes, as apparently no one in the history of women's magazines has ever been hitched for a whole year without reproducing (i'm afraid to reveal that we're not trying - saying that aloud would probably crack the walls). it makes me feel old, but lots of things make me feel old these days (my sisters' ages, uncomfortable shoes, the continued existence of the olsen twins); that's not particularly significant.

as a pre-wedding, sorta-shower gift, my aunt caroline gave us a pair of flameless candles. you'd think that removing fire from the candle experience would make it less exciting, but not so, not so: they make excellent reading lights, and i love being able to just leave one on my pillow if i wander out of bed (as i do quite often) to watch the rain, get a glass of water, what have you. what i've really come to love is walking back into the room, to the pool of light in the corner: joe asleep at one pillow, a cat curled like a potato bug on each of the other two. my guys!, i exclaim in my head. my family!** though i didn't know it then, that's why i asked paul to read that wallace stevens poem at our ceremony: how high that highest candle lights the dark. it's like that.

*which, by the way, was such a letdown; being married saved us a grand total of about $100 for fiscal year 2006. a marriage license costs $35 and a ceremony at city hall is $25; all told, i've saved more at barneys warehouse sales.

**i always want to take a picture of this, but it'd never work; everyone would wake up and howl.

08.06.07

hey, the wall street journal's giving the times's "modern love" column a run for its money! in this weekend's edition, "'til tech do us part" -

Marriage counselors say they're increasingly hearing couples vent about electronic clashes. More than that, they say, the inherent solitude of Web surfing -- keeping tastes in music, movies and literature locked on their own computers instead of visible on the bookshelf -- sometimes adds to intimacy problems. "People have grown up in a more isolated world, so that coming together to share domestic life is a bit more difficult," says Danille Drake, a marriage counselor in suburban Washington.

Of course, sharing can create its own problems in the event a couple breaks up. Peggy and Michael Andrzejczyk, a recently divorced Detroit-area couple, are feeling the digital fallout. Peggy, 50, and Michael, 49, are still using their joint email address, although it's meant they've had to see each other's online dating alerts. They split amicably, Ms. Andrzejczyk says, but it was still strange when he remarked on her potential dates: "That's a little uncomfortable, when your soon-to-be ex-husband says, 'Hey, there's nice guys on there. I like Number Three.' "

For Derek Powazek, 34, there are limits to what he'll share with his wife, Heather. The San Francisco couple has separate blogs; his focuses on digital media, hers on photography. Mr. Powazek says he sometimes sees her quoting his best jokes on her blog, and he tells her not to steal his material (she credits him after the fact). As for sharing one blog, the idea "never came up," he says. "It would be like saying, 'Let's share our underwear.' "

interestingly (or not), there's little or no friction between joe and me on any of those fronts. it could be that we're old enough that we didn't really come of age in said "isolated world" - hell, we didn't even bother to get cell phones until after college (which is part of why i'm so amused when parents bitch on the local news about how vital their grade schoolers' phones are. i say gps-enabled anklets are much less disruptive in class, and child molesters can't use them to text your kid).

we also aren't very proprietary about some of the most 'personal' gadgets in the piece. the ipod i got for christmas a few years ago, for example, promptly became community property, so worrying about one person's itunes infecting the other's device (a big issue for one of the couples profiled) is totally moot. where else would the music go? also, is it so hard to blip past a rogue track or, damn, just make your own playlist? i admit that sharing would be more difficult if either of us cared to use the ipod to work out or walk around town, but we hook it up to the stereo when we have people over (and take turns deejaying), and joe uses it on planes, and that's about it. on things we do use frequently and don't use in the same way, like the netflix subscription (joe will not watch my leprechaun or dekalog picks, understandably, and i have to be in a special mood for hitchcock or a western), i think common couple courtesy sorts everything out: he's got access to the queue just like i do, and i make sure he wants to watch whatever's up if i'm about to get something new and he'll be around to see it (i save the lauren-only picks for when he's out of town, say, or at the gym). there aren't, admittedly, many joe-only things on the list, but i seem to care more about it than he does. i can't imagine acting like the guy in the wsj piece who wakes up extra-early so that he can knock his wife's movies out online at the last possible minute; are we sure their problem is technological?

the one thing i won't share: an e-mail address. i don't mean that i need to have a supersecret way to communicate - joe has all of my passwords, and my cell phone doesn't even have one - i mean that joeandlauren4eva@gmail.com would be really scary.

Partly because online activities can feel so solitary, some couples look for ways to achieve togetherness in their digital lives. Sherry and John Cheung created a joint "johnandsherry" email address. Ms. Cheung, 28, says the shared address makes her feel more like she's part of an official couple.

"It's a 'We're the Cheungs' type of thing," says the telecommunications manager in San Ramon, Calif. She says she's more likely to use it when she's writing her married friends (many of whom also share addresses) because they understand she's operating as part of a unit now.

But Ms. Cheung's friend Hui-Lin Grecian balks at writing to "johnandsherry." Ms. Grecian says she worries Mr. Cheung might forget to pass along a message if he checks the email first or might feel left out if she fails to include a greeting for him, as well. "A little more thought has to go into it," Ms. Grecian says.

GROSS. we have an official couple thing, too: i call it an apartment.

as for the blog, sadly, it is like underwear-sharing: joe is perfectly welcome to use it, if the spirit moves him, but he ain't interested. and i don't take it personally.

how about you? david and meg, paul and pica, kolz and wabes - what's it like to co-blog, or to have co-blogged? folks in general, do you play well with others?