til there was you

Him: I'm so tired.
Me: I'm so hungry.
Him: Tell you what, I'll lie down and you'll eat me, and then both problems are solved.

Here's to four years of walking down the streets of this city, making each other laugh. May there be decades more.

for which we give thanks

Today I am grateful:

For a family full of immigrants around the table, enjoying the all-American splendor.

For words from far-flung friends.

For crisp sunny walks with my pack.

For nano and his ever-widening circle of confidence.

For my mother and father and brother and all the ways they made me, and continue to inform me.

For quality sappy television on this most awesome of holidays.

For sharing Stuart's sense of humor so acutely. Junk mail pinatas! The Britney/Barcardi Float! Spinging!

(For Stuart, obvs.)

For turkey and stuffing and different potatoes and two kinds of dessert and the tryptophantasticness of it all.

For missing the dog show every year because of cooking, and for knowing it will be on the next day.

For a holiday without too much fanfare and just enough food and family to go around.

For you! and YOU! And heck, even you.

state of the union iv

Dear Stuart,

A few weeks shy of our third anniversary, we went to the Catskills, to what I can't help thinking of as "our" cottage, and the best thing about our vacation was all the talking we did. And I mean, we're normally pretty talkative but that week, I feel like we talked about literally everything. We talked about planets and chipmunks and raising teenagers and first loves and writing and ambition and family and dog names and weather patterns and that's just what I remember from our nights outside under the inky black sky, drinking wine and trying to figure out which one was the North Star.

We talked so much out in the garden, and on our drives into and around the mountains. I remember, at one point, we started talking about fate. I said at the time, I don't believe in fate, so I've had a hard time explaining us to myself. If I don't believe in destiny, does that mean it's absolute chance that we met? Can I really give no credit to anything but dumb luck, that I met the perfect man for me out of all the millions of people in the world?

How does dumb luck explain us?

Two nights before we met, I was in Brazil. I had recently, for the millionth time, made a stupid choice about a boy. I sat on my friend's balcony smoking a cigarette and I remember clearly, SO clearly, telling myself something very profound and true. I said, Universe, that is enough. I am done with stupid boys and my stupidity regarding them. Here's the deal, Universe, I'll wait. I remember saying those words to myself. I will wait until you find me a decent man to love and cherish and honor but until then I am done road-testing them. This one, I said, you've got to show me up front that he's right before I even so much as bat an eyelash. And then I went to bed and flew to New York the next day. And met you.

Now, I know it might seem hard to believe, but I already loved you before I batted my eyelashes at you, five days after this conversation with the Universe in Brazil. I loved the way you'd come into New York like a true explorer, taking the subway and a bus to Shiv's apartment from the airport in a city you didn't know. I loved how you'd argued with me about Hemingway twenty minutes after meeting me. I loved how you delighted in ordering Chinese food and I loved how your first day here, you walked from Park Slope to Times Square just to get the lay of the land. And I loved how you bought me a book that day, simply because you thought I'd like it.

So was it dumb luck? Is there a fate, a destiny? Or is the Universe inside of me, a part of me, and it was simply a matter of admitting to myself that I needed to be looking for the right person and not just a right person?

I don't know. I think I believe both, contradictory though it may be. I powerfully believe that we met right when we were ready for this impact and no sooner and no later. I believe we met by chance but knew each other by design. But I also believe that something true and profound happened to me when I addressed the Universe, either within or without myself. And I know, crazily, that I promised to be patient with myself and my desires, and then was engaged less than two weeks later.

So, there's no way to know if it was sheer chance or, as Barrie would say, b'shert. I know that something - perhaps some combination of the two - brought you into my life and me into yours, and damnit if we were going to let some tiny concern like Continents or Time or Sanity get in our way. And I know that we were right to trust ourselves and jump. I hold that truth to be self-evident - contrary to all logic, we were right. I just don't know who to thank for that.

But I know that I fell in love with you, Stuart, and whatever forces I have to thank for that, then my offering of gratitude is this: every day and every conversation and every kiss and every hurdle and every victory and every sweet goodnight. I am not a spiritual woman but I know you are the one man in all the world for me and I am the one woman for you. So if it's fate or luck, I'm equally grateful.

Happy, happy, happy anniversary. I love you.

Kaaterskill creek, September 2007.

help me, rhonda

Today my parents sold Rhonda, my 1997 cherry red Honda Accord coupe. She wasn't my first car - that title is claimed by a teal-green 1995 Saturn which only lasted a couple of years - but she was my first real car. Some memories from the ten years Rhonda and I have been on the road:

- She was actually my mother's car first. We bought her and the Saturn together, the Saturn for me and the Honda for mom. My mom is cool, and she was even cooler in such an ace car.

- I named her Rhonda sometime shortly after I inherited her, in the summer of 1999, with help from Erin. Later, when Erin got a Jetta, she named it Greta.

- While she was my mom's, I was allowed to take her for a spin to Starbuck's once, to hang out with Matt. Leaving the garage, I scraped her right flank along the garage door frame and spent an agonized hour at Starbuck's trying to figure out how to tell my mother.

- She's had the garage ceiling of our townhouse in Houston crash down on her, leaving her trunk forever difficult to open.

- She drove from Texas to New York in the summer of 1999, and from New York back to Texas in the summer of 2000, and then up to Rhode Island in 2001.

- She's been broken into once, in a CVS parking lot in Providence, with the CD player I got for Christmas 1997 stolen out of her in my favorite messenger bag.

- She's gotten in three different bumper fenders - the best one being when I backed up into the neighbors' minivan on Christmas Eve.

- We hydroplaned off the highway together in Texas, July 1999. I was going 80-something in the driving rain with very bald tires (hello, teenagers are dumb!) and we hit a wet patch and spun circles into the 50-foot grass median, screaming all the way. I remember Sheryl Crow was playing as we did about 3 full revolutions before coming to a muddy stop in the middle of the field. I threw up right after opening the car door. I've always been very careful with her tires since then.

- We've gotten through three winters together up at Sarah Lawrence, especially in Tuckahoe where we were constantly digging her and her twin sister - Beth's green Civic - out of the snow on a hill. Never once did she skid on the ice.

- I like to think she's a V6 who's convinced she's a V8. She certainly drives like one.

- When Stuart and I met, I'd been describing Rhonda as my zippy little red Honda. When he saw her, he said, "that's a LITTLE car?"

- We took Rhonda on our honeymoon to Bar Harbour.

- I drove in New York City for the first time in Rhonda. I was nervous about it, but a friend told me to "roll down the windows, turn up the music, and drive by instinct." Very good advice that Rhonda and I have always dutifully followed.

- Once, on my solo drive from NYC to Texas, I stopped in Newnan, Georgia, for the night. All my worldly college possessions were in the car, so, you know, my REM records and my deep journals and some flannel shirts. I got my overnight bag from the passenger side and then went into my motel room. The next morning, I was rummaging around in my purse for the keys as I approached Rhonda and saw them. In the door. To this day it's amazing that someone didn't just help themselves to the big gift-wrapped car in the parking lot.

- In the summer of 2000, I was a mother's helper on Fisher's Island and the family I was working for had two Mercedes. Both girls thought Rhonda was a sports car and asked their mother repeatedly why she didn't have a sports car as cool as Rhonda.

I know it's silly, maybe, to be this attached to a car. But I always felt like Rhonda was really the perfect car for me. She was tough and stylish and fast. She hugged the road like a dream - everyone that drove her was amazed at what a smooth ride she was. When I didn't really have a home in college, because my parents were overseas, Rhonda felt like a little den of permanence, like no matter where I lived, she'd always be parked outside. Which is probably why her back seat was always littered with fifteen books, four sweaters, a Starbucks cup, and five water bottles.

I escaped with her, went on adventures with her, drove countless friends around for countless awesome hours. We drove through towns and cities with all kinds of music talking to all kinds of people but she was always mine.

Since I moved to New York City, she's mostly been in retirement in my parents' garage, but she was always my car when I went home. This summer, she stayed in Brooklyn with us for a few months and even though her air-conditioning was broken, and every time I got in the car it felt like my face was melting off, I was always happy to get behind the wheel, turn the music up, roll down the windows, and give a little pat to the dashboard, and hum a little Help Me, Rhonda at her.

She was my car for nearly ten years and I loved her. Hope her new owners know what a gem she is.

here, kitty kitty kitty

Some facts!

1. Stuart and I are thinking of getting a cat.

2. We are both mildly allergic to cats, with eye-itchy/sneezy type reactions.

3. We are also foolishly optimistic people and you will note that most of our combined foolish optimism (i.e. let's get married! and let's buy an apartment!) has tended to work out pretty well, which means we will doggedly (or cattedly) pursue our foolishly optimistic plans. We suspect that our foolishly optimistic plans have a way of working out simply because we remain foolishly optimistic but the scientists are still working on this theory. No FDA approval yet.

So! Given the above set of facts, wherein we are considering cat ownership but are mildly allergic, we do what every blogger worth his domain fees does. We turn to you, knowledgeable friends and readers. Are you allergic to your own cat? How do you get around it? Does this built-in absurdism contribute positively to your healthy appreciation for the absurdism of Life in general? Because there's something deliciously idiotic about bringing your own allergens into your house. Something about the Dread Pirate Roberts and iocane powder.

Addendum the First: We're not going to rush to North Shore tomorrow and get a cat, as tempting as my "let's just go to recon!" idea was, since we know that one visit with no plans to get a cat will actually entail us coming home with little Snickerdoodle yowling in the backseat. We are aware of this. But we want advice about cats from cat people! We don't want meaniehead negative advice though, you pooh-poohers out there with your pet-hating ways. Pooh-poohing has its place but don't try and convince me I don't want a pet at all, you've never met me. I say hello to pit-bulls.

Addendum the Second: And those that know me really well who want to point out that um, I've always wanted a DOG, well, suffice it to say that you're right. I have always wanted a dog. But I'm willing to cross over to the dark side of catdom. We would raise this cat like a dog, obvs. All the fetching and none of the walking or barking.

domesticity

I am unemployed again! That's enough, let's not talk about it any more. Other things we can talk about:

The apartment! Holy cats, people, I love it so much. I love the walls and the french doors and the kitchen with its granite counters and black appliances. I love the gorgeous Roman shades my mom made for all our windows, I love the shiny white pedestal sink, I even love the four flights of stairs because hey! When I make it to the top, that's an accomplishment! And I'm unemployed here, I need all accomplishments I can lay my hands on.

Our housewarming party is this weekend and while there's still a lot to do to prepare (hey, table of tools! Why didn't the pixies put you away yet?), I'm looking forward to seeing how this place holds up under our delightful barrage of friends. The Astoria apartment was always such a perfect party place with its spread out rooms but too many people ended up in the kitchen, always, and this kitchen is a little bigger. Does that mean the amount of friends-per-square-inch in the kitchen will stay the same? Probably.

We learned a lot about our stuff, back in Astoria, and packing it all up. One thing I've been inordinately proud of is the organization solutions. I know! You hear that and fall asleep. Trust me, so does Stuart, although he begrudgingly admits I'm right to obsess. Back in Astoria, we'd only implement a solution when the area had been dubbed the "_______ from Hell". But here, oh yes, we've gotten smart! A couple of problem areas have been neatly and realistically organized from the get-go, like the bathroom closet and the too-deep pantry.

[Just so you know, in the interest of full disclosure, there are labels on my pantry drawers and bathroom cubbies. I will tell you why there are labels. Because two weeks ago, I lost my crap over a paper-towel rod i was trying to install underneath our kitchen cabinets. People, have you ever tried to install a paper-towel rod under your cabinets? It will turn your brain to mush and your brain will roll jauntily out your ears like SO MANY MARBLES. So in my incoherent rage, when I nearly threw the drill at the wall, I decided to take a break and accomplish something soothing. Soothing and effective. I made labels. AND PLACED THEM. And do you know what? It worked. Making labels and putting them on things is like my very own Paxil.]

Also enjoying: the park! Holy crap, having a little patch of cool, green grass just a two minute walk away has been a balm on the soul. Sunset Park isn't very big and the western half - the half with the view - is pretty crowded with soccer players and volleyball and other types of ball as well. But the eastern end, near our place, is all leafy old oaks and London planes, and wide expanses of grass for me to do my lying-out-with-blanket-and-book routine. Also in park? Inexpensive weight room and cardio equipment access! So far, I've gone every day this week. Why? To take my mind of being unemployed, that's why!

I think I've bored you people enough with the minutae of my week. It DID occur to me that if I blogged more often, I wouldn't have to tell you all of this in one epic long post. On that note, I leave you with FALAFEL! Which I made for dinner last night. petit Hiboux: all domesticity, all the time.

tonsilliness

It seems we have a resolution in the standoff hereafter referred to as Krissa Vs. Her Engorged, Enraged Tonsils. Since mid-day yesterday I've been distinctly aware that the Physician's Assistant who summarily prodded me at the ER had let the tanning fluid leak into her brain and had basically ignored my swollen glands. I don't mean to deride her and her somewhat demeaning job title but the doctor I saw today was stunned she didn't do any sort of throat swab. Youngsters again, be ye warned! Get a real GP already and never use the ER as a doctor's office. Lesson, verily you are learned.

All day yesterday, I took the ineffective pain killing drugs. All day, I suffered. My pain started to concentrate almost exclusively in the right side of my neck and Stuart, looking down my throat, declared it the tiniest throat opening he'd ever seen. Ladies, we all like being referred to as tiny but a tiny THROAT is not optimal for things like eating. And swallowing. And enjoying life.

Today, thanks to a timely mention of a good doctor and his clinic's willing accomodations by the saintly Jen, I dragged my swollen neck along to the city and deposited myself in the patchouli-scented care of these good people. The waiting room had couches and brochures about zen meditation. Most of the doctors there are also certified in acupuncture. My own shiny new GP is apparently skilled at Mayan Uterine Massage! I don't care. I have fully embraced the touchy feely hippies and their alternative ingrative holistic ways.

[Just don't ask me to embrace holistic gynecology. Seriously, dudes.]

My wonderful adorable and well-dressed doctor took ONE look at my neck and couldn't believe I'd been carrying this grenade around for three days. Even though the basic strep culture came back negative, she was so assured that it's a bacterial infection that she went ahead and dropped a blessed scrip for zithromax in my lap. And then she checked my chakras. JUST KIDDING! But she did ask me all kinds of things about my health history and listened to my tale of woe and movie theatre ickiness. AND she believed me.

I'm going to send her a plate of cookies. Organic, no-cruelty-to-chickens-or-bees cookies. Consider me a full convert to hippiedom. Kumbayas on me, people, all round. My boss will be very glad to hear this, too, as I've missed four (!!) days of work and he's been totally understanding. Also probably because he is sort of a hippie as well. The moral here is that hippies are the way to go.

Yay hippies! Yay antibiotics! Yay kicking the golfball out of my throat for good! Here's hoping.

P.S. All your lemon and ginger and saltwater and lozenge and otter fat (?!) suggestions have been wonderful. I have tried most of them. Not the otter fat though. That's almost as freaky as holistic evaluations of my vah-jay-jay.

throatectomy

I guess I'm going to have to stop bragging about what a cast-iron immune system I have. I'm on day four of an ever-worsening virus, party of four, in my throat.

Yesterday, at 5:30AM, I completely wimped out from my earlier resolve to head to a walk-in clinic at 8AM and wait for a doctor to see me, opting instead to drag Stuart out of bed and to my local - and very fast - ER. Be ye warned, youngsters, this is what happens when your beloved GP skips town and you forget to find yourself a new one. At the ER, the nice lady with the tan probably thought I was insane, complaining this much over a sore throat, but she prescribed motrin (basically, mega-advil) and vicodin (basically, mega-acetometaphin with a dash of hydrocodone). She told me it was viral, and on all accounts made me feel like the biggest wuss alive.

The thing is, normally, I'd agree with her, but I've never had a sore throat like this before. It's like golf ball day on the putting green of my larynx. When the pain killers wear off (not that they do much when they wear ON), I can barely swallow. Everything from my ears down to my clavicle feels swollen and tender. Thinking about how terrible I feel and how never-ending the pain is, I tend to start crying and guys, I cry about a lot of things but I rarely cry about being sick. I have to feel pretty desperately ill to start up the waterworks machine.

Yesterday was this day that felt six days long - waiting to take more medicine, trying to swallow food, trying to rest, trying to swallow. The bright points in my day were when my dad came over (he was here dropping furniture into our storage unit) and for a whole hour, parent-magic took effect and I felt so much better I even laughed a few times, and when Stuart put me to bed and read stories to me. Two little bright spots amid so much persistent irritating pain.

I usually exaggerate a lot, I know. But the pain really is pretty severe here, no need for embellishment. And yet, no fever, no other symptoms, no white bumps in my throat - nothing to indicate anything more serious than "viral pharangytis", which, trust me, translates directly to SORE THROAT, YOU BIG PANSY.

So I just keep drinking water and taking the pain killers and testing my temperature and calling in sick to work, hoping that it's just a virus, and I just need to give my body a chance to get over it, to heal. If it's not better by Friday, I'm performing an outpatient throatectomy.

It's okay! I'm Red Cross trained.

notes from a sickbed

Surely, it should be either tea with lemon, or tea with honey, to soothe the raging swollen throat? Am I entirely in the wrong adding both?

I've got this damned throat inflammation, I might add, by way of Spider-Man. We sat in the second row from the front on Saturday night, directly adjacent a leaky ceiling tile and a puddle of standing water. I know! Legionnaire's! Cholera! The Blacke Humores! Who knows. Wouldn't you know it, I had a sore throat not 20 minutes after leaving. So did Stuart, Beth and Josh, but their sore throats have all receded into regular throats.

I'm a staunch critic of the "get cold, catch a cold" school of oldwivery but it was also incredibly cold and maybe a little damp (thanks to leaky ceilings!) in the theatre. I had the previous week kicked a cold I'd earned alongside my Red Cross certification, that one being more of an achy/stuffy cold varietal.

So maybe there is something to all this take your vitamins nonsense - I'm betting my immune system was much weaker than everyone else's when the recycling damp air threw some nasty little virus at us? Anyone else picturing that scene in Outbreak? Who knows. The science here gets wonky. Alls I know is, 20 minutes out of the movies, I had a scratchy throat, and now my glands feel like golfballs. Such are my lymphatic adventures.

Anyone got an opinion about the tea/lemon vs. tea/honey question? Or their own sore throat remedies? Mine so far has involved a lot of saltwater gargling and vats of tea. And back-to-back episodes of Jeeves and Wooster.

[Good thing there was a lot of this on Saturday before the Cursed Movie Theatre of Damp Illness. Nothing like spring in New York, right?]

the snail race to sunset park

Last night we sat before a dozen or so total strangers and they looked deep into our souls, and then decided as a group that we were welcome to spend our own money in the pursuit of living next to them and sharing their bills.

To you blessed people who have no idea what I'm talking about, we were approved to buy an apartment in a New York co-op. Aside from my genetic predisposition against anything ever done by committee ever (because "committee" is really just a few letters away from "commie"!), this is very, very exciting. Well, mostly it's exciting in that way that watching snails race across Montana would be exciting.

Because, people, buying an apartment in a co-op building, it's SLOW. It's slower than snails. Here's how this whole thing started.

Back over the New Year, Stuart and I house-sat for Beth and Eric and the indomitable Dexter. This accomplished several things - it made me love Method cleaning products, and it convinced Stuart and I that moving to a new neighborhood might be really fun. Also, having a dog is the bomb.

Putting aside the gut-wrenching agony that is leaving a neighborhood that I love so much it's almost a character in my life, we started looking on the web at places to buy. Yes, BUY.

A few weeks later on a rainy Saturday in January (yes, four months ago), Stuart and I very grumpily got off the subway in eastern Sunset Park, near 8th avenue, and started towards our first visit together. We got there and trudged up four flights of stairs in a simple, well-built light brick building, and the realtor opened the door and showed us, basically, this.

[For those of you who crave more, here's my steady but fast video and Stuart's thorough but Blair-Witch video.]

It's a pre-war beauty with parquet floors, french doors connecting the living room and office, a fully renovated separate kitchen, with high ceilings and beautiful walls, it's a block from Sunset Park and 15 minutes from Park Slope, and we fell head over heels in love. So in love that we didn't want to see anything else.

We did. We saw about 17 other apartments that week. The following Saturday, we did another tour of the Sunset Park one (the one we kept referring to as "ours") and we realized we'd been right the first time. We made an offer the next day, and it was accepted. And here we are, four MONTHS later, with all the straggly little pieces finally coming together for a closing. Oh, that blessed closing! When, incsh'allah, we will get keys to this beauty and it will be totally ours.

People, we are moving. The snails are crossing the finish line soon and I am so freaking excited.

Plus also, now we can get a dog. Which, you just KNOW, is the real reason we're moving.

three years

Stuart and I met three years ago today. There was a lot of this going on that weekend, and there was a lot of this, too. It was magical and intoxicating and in many ways, was the best week of my life to date, and in the top ten since.

But possibly my favorite memory from that week wasn't the first time we talked about books, or how Stuart met me outside my office building and threw his arms around me, or the Wednesday that I skived off work and we stayed in bed all day, or even him proposing out of the blue on Saturday afternoon. It's not the walk through Central Park, or introducing him to Beth and having her smile like she got that I finally got It, or even calling my parents and telling them, you have to come to New York because this guy is the one.

All of those things are beautiful. They're treasures. But my favorite memory was from Monday night. Shiv and Biscuit were coming over for chocolate fondue. We spent twenty minutes in Trade Fair talking and kissing and laughing, and as we stood in line with the chocolate bars and the milk or whatever, Stuart asked, "What are we going to dip into this chocolate?" and we realized that we'd managed to get two people from the register without any strawberries or pound cake or caramels.

It's not the most romantic of moments, but it's certainly the most telling. When you've found something that rare and beautiful, you don't really bother making sure your feet are still on the ground and the right ingredients are in your shopping cart.

I still forget to get the right ingredients or sweep the dust bunnies or mail that form, because I'm too busy being in love, three years later. I'd apologize for it but it needs none. It's perfect.

february 18th, 2007 - photo taken by the stupendously talented jason, as usual.

a case of the vapours

This is going to sound strange, and perhaps I've been reading too much science fiction and fantasy lately, but I think I woke up Victorian.

I've been getting steadily, normally sick for days - pesky cough, lumpy sore throat. Nothing unusual. Still, feeling particularly crappy on Friday, I called in too sick to risk getting the kids sick. I felt stuffy all day but rallied enough to hang out with Stuart when he got home late from work, and eat a couple slices of pizza.

With which I then parted ways, rather irrevocably and violently, at 4 in the morning*.

When I finally got back to sleep after much sipping slowly of water (not even ginger ale in the house!), we slept until 2PM. And I woke up mal du spleen, in the blacke humoures, or with some other vague fainting-couch type illness.

Coughy, headachy, weak as a kitten after triple bypass, achy, tingly, and did I mention, lest you just think this is a cold, my stomach? My stomach felt like someone had poured still-wet concrete into it. Bloated, rumbly and sloshy.

See how all my symptoms end in -y? No good can come of a diagnosis where all the symptoms end in -y. I tried to get some sleep early, around 11, but I'd been quietly sipping too much diet Coke (not around in 1875 London) to really fall into Nod.

Without a real temperature or, not being in any serious pain, and you know, without any REAL SYMPTOMS, I'm left with Pepto for the tummy concrete, Advil for the aches body and head, and Robitussin for the itchy cough. And the Internet for distraction. Four cures that should be able to beat out any Victorian vaguaries and an unexpected case of suddenly turning into some fluttering hand-on-forehead maiden.

But hey, armchair MDs, diagnose away. I'm still sort of hoping it's my spleen.

* it's gross, but critical at this juncture, to note that my body has a bizarre but effective habit of promptly jettisoning any food it disagrees with. The only sense in which this is disturbing is when there's nothing tangibly wrong with the food.

borrowing brooklyn

We arrived in Brooklyn Heights yesterday to spend the holiday weekend hanging out with Dexter until Beth comes back. I love the neighborhood - and having a dog around - too much to go back to Astoria without grumbling a little. Things are proceeding well, although you'd have to check Dexter's Myspace page to see if he's still trying to figure out who these total strangers are and where his family went.

There has been no peebelly that I've noted and the burrowing under the blankets where we were sleeping was far more hilarious than it was intrusive. I took Beth's advice and brought his dog bed downstairs when we came to bed, and at first, Dex settled very politely into it and I thought he was too shy to crawl onto the bed. But about an hour later, I woke up to tiny spindly terrier legs pacing back and forth along my shins, with a clear message of frustration: "WOMAN THAT IS NOT BETH, WHY AM I NOT UNDER THE COVERS."

Rather than rebuff him again and send him into an adolescent spiral of writing in his journal and listening to The Cure, I lifted one corner of the duvet and sure enough, dog dove happily underneath.

Only to be foiled from curling up between my feet when he discovered what a Kicker I am. Something that Stuart grumblingly commiserated with him over, during breakfast.

Dexter, Stuart and I have spend today dilligently pursuing our holiday goals - reading the Winter Fiction issue of the New Yorker (me), playing SSX Tricky (Stuart) and chasing sunshine across three couches (Dex). All is well, I think.

blessed is the season

I hope wherever you are, you're sitting around with your family laughing about Christmasses past and hilarity present. I hope you've gotten wonderful things you need and beautiful things you never knew you wanted but cannot live without. I hope your food was delicious but the company extraordinary. I hope you got funny, silly stocking gifts like an oinking pig whose nostrils light up. I hope your father tells embarassing stories that you don't even really mind sharing.

I hope you put gently and carefully aside the well-developed cynicisms and jaded armour that we use to survive in our daily journey. Because today is a good day to do that. It's a good day to jingle along to jingly Christmas music and hug back the huggy relatives. It's a great day to kiss everyone you love and smile at the guy in the next car. It's a good day to be a little soft, a little vulnerable, and a little open to engaging your world in the conspiracy of love.

Leave the bags of discarded wrapping and everyday heartbreak for tomorrow.

Happy, happy, happy, happy, happy Christmas. Ain't it grand?

margo tenenbaum the third

In between a slew of Christmas parties that both my liver and my feet are recovering from, Stuart and I put up our Christmas tree yesterday, which, because we're huge geeks, has been nicknamed Margo (get it) for three years now. We dragged her home in the sunshine, and set her up with minimal fuss. She's a natural tree, no evenly-trimmed perfection for us, no sirree. Gimme the uneven, imperfect wholesome one every time. Where's the Christmas spirit in a perfect tree? Half the fun is using ornaments to cleverly disguise the flaws! Of course, real trees are a novelty to me - we always had a fake one that traveled the world with us because unless I wanted to decorate a ficus in the tropical heat of sub-Saharan Africa, it was fake or nothing. I'm fine with fake; it's easy as heck and there's no pesky watering. But if you're gonna go real, you might as well go all the way.

She's in a new corner this year - instead of hanging near the window, she's in the front of the living room. It means all that furniture there - the entry table and the lamp - have to find new homes for the season. See also: cluttered office!

It doesn't matter, though, because nothing quite beats the feeling of seeing the lit and sparkling tree first thing in the morning, smelling that balsam fir smell. I like to think I'm not usually one for cliches but Christmas gets me every time. I smile more in public, I watch sappy (/-ier) movies, I get really excited about wrapping paper and getting the corners just so, I plan to bake various spice-smelling things. I'm kicking down the closet door in this age of hipster disenchantment, people. I love Christmas so much, I'm one step away from wearing bell earrings and a Rudolph necklace.

One BIG step, but still. Wheee tinsel!

good friday, i'm miles away

Yesterday I spilled three different liquids on me while driving from Newark Airport to Rhode Island. True story! The first was Coke, inside my beautiful Italian leather purse. That was so incredibly annoying that when I later hit a pothole holding a full bottle of water and it splashed into my face during a phone conversation - no, I wasn't using a hands-free set, spoilypants - I could only laugh, because at least this time I didn't ruin an Italian leather purse, right?

So by the time I was within Rhode Island state lines with a totally dead cell phone (because when you buy a brand-new mobile, Krissa, they don't fully charge it, and it WILL die on you if you talk to three different people for thirty minutes each), I didn't think I could possibly trump the water spurting onto my face, until the cup of tea.

Hold on about the tea. Because it's crucial to note that the reason I talked to three different people for 30 minutes each was because I'd just left Stuart at the airport and I thought I was cool, really, I'd taken him as far as I could and said a cheery goodbye. But I obviously wasn't fine because when I stopped at Vince Lombardi to get some quick dinner, I encountered a snag in my cheer. I couldn't eat. I was hungry, oh yes, hungry enough for Burger King, but lifting food to lips came smack up against the knot of sad in my stomach, which was busily spreading oily tentacles everywhere. So the food sat there on the empty Coke-soaked passenger seat, mocking me. Hence the phone calls, because good people are the only antidote to knots of sad.

Back to that tea. The cup of tea happened because I needed to pee really bad at exit 3B so I pulled over at a Mobil to use a payphone and update my parents on my drive. Which I didn't have to do because the nice guy at the counter, when asked where the payphone was, insisted I use his mobile phone. He must have thought I'd walked in from 1996, who uses payphones, right? So I bought a cup of tea to make a sale for his samaritan gesture.

Then I decided, whilst driving at 70 MPH, that I wanted to throw the teabag itself out the window. Why not? So I rolled down the window and carefully placed the tea bag into the lid of the mug and held it out the window. Then, of course, the tea bag zoomed right back into the car like so many nervous chihuahuas and landed - where? - in my lap.

It was right then with the steaming teabag on my crotch, listening to some droning BBC podcast, where I think I fully absorbed that Stuart was gone for a week. I know it's only a week, but when I hear myself say that it sounds like when alcoholics admit they know they have a drinking problem when you know they're not going to do anything about it and pass them the whisky while you're up. Rationally, I understand that it's just a week. But everything about this distance, from the complex schematics to call each other without spending a fortune to the constantly adding five hours to the time, it jerks me back like a cruel joke to how it was two years ago. You could say I'm a veteran of long goodbyes and even short ones trigger malaise.

But back to the car ride and the tea bag in my lap. Let me tell you worst thing about all this, and no, it wasn't the various liquids in my poor dad's car/on my crotch/in my purse/on my face. It was just that malaise - that sharp stabbing realization that Stuart with his wicked sense of humor wasn't in the passenger seat to laugh at my slapstick. I laughed enough for both of us but it's not the same, is it.

Of course, the argument could be made that with Stuart there, he would have thrown the teabag out HIS window and ended up with hotcrotch. I'm just saying is all.

trying not to hum that soppy john denver song

That's Bow Bear, the veteran of so many overseas flights, going on his first without me. That's because I insisted on packing him in Stuart's suitcase, because I'm a sentimental old bean, did you notice?

So Stuart's going to England for a week, to attend a work thingamabob in Bath and then spend a weekend with his parents which makes me happy.

If you didn't know already, we haven't spent a night apart since he arrived on October 7th, 2004. In fact, Boston's the farthest away he's been, and that was just for a day. Go ahead and mock, but I'm rather dishevelled about the whole thing. I'm going to browse on the internet for Bearded Warmth-Emanating Life-Sized Dummies that could feasibly occupy the space to my left every night, since our bed will seem so fantastically empty without him there to shuffle around and lightly snore and stroke my cheek when my teeth-grinding wakes him up. Will the dummy do that, do you think? I doubt it.

Luckily for me, I've got people. Not people that will take Stuart's place, but wonderful lovely caring thoughtful people that have IMed and emailed and offered to hang out with me every evening and watch movies with me and generally make me smile and laugh and drink wine with me. I love my people like McAdams loves Gosling. Also, I'm fleeing northwards to Rhode Island tonight to dull the blow of the first few days by hanging out with my parents. Parents that are excited to get me all to themselves for two days.

Still. It's going to be a little rough. Keep me away from sappy music this week.

exceeding expectations

New review up at gothamist.com, as per mostly usual: this time it's Dave Eggers and his new "novelized autobiography" (I know.) of a Sudanese Lost Boy and, well, the book is really good. And trust me, it's hard for me to say that.

The story is brilliantly told by Eggers. And it’s done so without gussied nonsense. In face, one forgets it’s Eggers writing for most of the time, so true and unfettered is Valentino’s story. [...] It is the relentless, rapid-fire narrative of traumatized, each event more horrible than the last, each told with the flat unembellished delivery of having lived it. (head here for the full review)

I have to admit, I wasn't altogether looking forward to this weekend. There were some nice things planned - brunch, a great Halloween party - but I knew there was a hell of a lot of chores and admin to take care of before Stuart leaves for England on Friday night (more on that later) and it sort of soured the two days in advance. And since starting teaching, nothing is more valuable to me than beautiful perfect weekends that I can look forward to from Wednesday to Friday and feel the glowing effects of on Monday and Tuesday, you know? It's sustenance, so I was really worried this weekend was going to be the anathema to all that.

But I'm rather proud to say we did pretty well. On Saturday, after driving to brunch in Chinatown because the N trains were too crazy to comtemplate (note: driving in Chinatown was just as bad), we stopped in Roosevelt Island on the way back and who knew? You can actually walk almost right UP to the old smallpox hospital ruins now. There's a fence around the ruins themselves but the whole chunk of land is open during the day, and deserted, with absolutely remarkable views of the city and the East River. It felt like we were at the prow of our very own boat. It was glorious. And me, as they say, without my camera. Drat.

The Halloween party blew my mind. My friends and their friends are so crazy imaginative. My personal favorite, bar none, was Lavina dressed as Bjork at the Oscars - swan and all. But all the Mark Foley jokes and Battlestar Galactica costumes were a close second. I think the Drowned Ophelia went down pretty well but my friends are a geeky, literary bunch so perhaps I just know my audience. A guy on the subway guessed it, though. THAT was cool.

Then yesterday, Stuart and I somehow worked up the energy from where? I don't know, to actually get stuff done. He cleaned the fridge like it's never been cleaned before while I wrote my review, and then we switched out dressers in the bedroom for a bigger one (for me, obvs) and tidied everything. It earned us one huge mug of piping hot apple cider, lemme tell you.

So that was my weekend. Things I don't feel like talking about now: how Stuart is actually going to be gone for ten whole days. Boo!

still noolieweds

Happy second anniversary, baby. It's all still so beautiful.

tender is the touch

A few months ago, Stuart and I were driving back from Rhode Island and listening to Alanis Morissette. Shut up, I'm going somewhere with this. There's this one song - seriously, it really doesn't matter which one - where there's this strange little tink in the middle of an otherwise rough and raucous chorus. Almost like the string on a string instrument was accidentally but forcefully plucked in the recording studio.

"It's like, a balalaika or something."

"It's exactly like that, like someone just wandered through the recording studio, plucking a balalaika."

"You know, Alanis probably had some boyfriend at the time, some guy who played the balalaika."

"Totally - 'please, Alanis, let me play balalaika for you, like this: PLINKY PLINKY PLINKY, come on, Alanis '."

And at the same time, we said:

"And she'd be all, SERGEI..."

I nearly lost control of the car. We must have laughed all the way through New Haven. What are the odds, that in the same crazy imagining about Alanis Morissette and her troublesome Eastern European boyfriend with his goddamned PLINKY-PLINKY, we'd both land on Sergei, at the same time?

A few months ago, Barrie asked me something about marriage, what I thought makes Stuart and me tick. I told her that some couples are good for each other because they complement one another, like the perfect little black dress and the perfect slingback heels. Those couples find harmony in the ways they fill in each other's gaps, even each other out.

Stuart and I, by contrast, are more like the two shoes. I think we're basically the same person on a lot of very fundamental planes. This isn't better, we don't win some couple-similarity trophy, but it's just the best way I can describe how twinned our ideas and emotions and reactions are, after knowing each other for such a comparably little amount of time. The reason that we did what we did, in that crazy way that we did it, was because neither of us really needed the sensible amount of time necessary to discover that you've found your complementary mate. Something essential in me saw exactly its twin in him.

The odds that we'd find each other are pretty much close to the odds that we'd both yell Sergei. When I think about that, my heart gets tight in my chest and I thank a God I don't really believe in for the privelege of being where I am, every night. I don't know how better to thank him for seven hundred nights together and nearly two years of marriage than to say life, in itself, is a marvelous thing - but the colors are brighter with him around.

with half-sincere apologies to anyone who doesn't like the sappy stuff.

G, D7, C, G ...

"What are we going to do today?" is the game we played today from 2:45 to 3:30 PM. After a lazy morning of breakfast and reading and video games, I was restless for something new and exciting that didn't require I leave the house unless it was to get somewhere quickly and air-conditioned, or cost a lot of money. Plus, it had to be fun and entertaining. Those were my parameters - Stuart's parameters were sort of whatever made me happy since I wouldn't stop whining about how bored I was. Some of the suggestions bandied about were:

"Let's go buy stuff at Toys R Us."
"We'd just spend loads of money."

"Let's play guitar."
"No."

"Let's go to Home Depot."
"And build a man with a helmet for a head and oven mitts full of toilet paper for hands and we'll put him on the roof and knock him down by throwing things at him."
"We're out of toilet paper."

"Let's build a robot."
"We'd need a brain. We don't have any."

"Let's go to the Queens Museum."
"Too far."

"Let's go to McCann's and play Trivial Pursuit."
"We don't need to go to McCann's to play a game and drink $80 worth of alcohol."
"Mmm, $80 worth of alcohol ...."

"Let's go rollerblading."
"In September."

"Let's make fake flyers selling nonsensical stuff and plaster them around Astoria."
"And hand them to people!"

Oddly enough, after all that time, what we ended up doing was taking the guitars down and tuning them. I've never tuned my guitar before. It was actually my guitar for three years before I gave it to my brother having learned nothing but a badly-played Silent Night, and my brother learned the entire 1960's worth of songs before moving on to three electric guitars (I'm telling you, some people just have muscial talent and some of us don't). Since he has three electric guitars, he gave me back my roundback acoustic Applause and it's mostly sat there, looking reproachfully at me from the wall.

So then, after tuning them, I learned how to play Hey Jude and I've Just Seen A Face. I've Just Seen a Face has my favorite chord of all time - the E Minor, which I refer to as the Leonard Cohen Chord because it's so morose. And Hey Jude has this sweet little switch between D7 and C that I mastered surprisingly quickly, okay, when you think about it, it's not that hard, but SMALL HANDS HERE. There's even some snippets of a recording of me singing both songs and trying to be quick about those chord changes - not that you'll ever get to listen to it. Well, maybe you, Mom.

My left three first fingers are numb. So that's what I did today. You?

let the world domination begin ...

... NOW.

doors, windows, and closets

This weekend we did something astoundingly, mind-numbingly cool. And I'm not talking about the futebol!. I'm talking about going into the closet.

See, and you Manhattanites who live in shoeboxes should look away right about now, we have an office. In that office, we have a closet. For going on two years, it's been jokingly referred to as the Closet From Hell (staircase of SATAN! bonus points for correctly identifying the reference). It's technically our linen closet, but it's our linen closet in the sense that it EATS LINEN AND DOESN'T SPIT IT OUT. In the past few months, when we really gave up any hope of it ever reverting to a functioning closet, we just started piling stuff on the floor and couch rather than open the door and get eaten by the vacuum cleaner. Yes, it was that bad.

But no more! Thanks to some key help and encouragement (and power tools) from our trusted Rhode Island Based Advice Team (that'd be my parents), we spent Saturday putting the wrongs to right, a crusade against disorganization that I can delightfully announce Mission Accomplished and without any crotch-grabbing outerwear or ironic overtones. What was once a jammed, terrifying mess of stuff has now been pared down to the essentials and filed in wire drawers, small stackable boxes, and wall fixtures. It's like heaven in there. There's even a lightbulb. I CAN FIT INSIDE. I mean, should I want to stand in my own closet and inhale the dryer-sheet-scented perfection of it all.

Did I mention there are LABELS? There are. It's glorious. It's also step #1 of #2 in the reorganization of our entire office to fit two gorgeous desks my mother is building out of our current single desk. Can't be done, you say? You've clearly never met my mother, who's like Martha Stewart but with a better accent and no jail time. Plus, tools.

Our new office, in turn, is a big part of all the Unspoken Interestingness that's going on in my life, starting in early July, when I will be less committed to a desk owned by other people and more committed to a desk owned by myself, doing what I admittedly do best (which isn't knitting, btw). The desk and office reorganization is next week's task and as soon as I sit down at it, with pen and laptop and file folders at my command, I will feel even better about the Big Changes and my ability to face them with organized verve and drive.

So, you see, it's all connected. The closet to the desk to the giant open window that's been left as a present for me when I looked away from a door that had closed. It's all a big metaphor for starting down a new career path and feeling like I don't have to hide under the covers. Mostly because the covers are neatly stored in a well-labeled wire basket so I can't hide under them ANYWAY.

[click on the heavenly baskets to go through to the full before-and-after set, but be warned: I was too zealous on Friday morning to remember to take a picture of the monstrosity intact. Use your imaginations.]

how to stop worrying

The past few weeks haven't been completely consumed with worrying about the MFA denouement, in case you couldn't tell (and I know you couldn't). We also renovated our kitchen, something I've had on my mind for absolutely yonks.

Before:

And after two days and two extra nights of stripping, gripping, screwing (oh you LOVE it!), painting, taping, repainting, untaping, drinking beer, eating pizza, and making silly faces for the camera with face masks on, behold the After:

And the new shelving to solve some space issues:

How's that for time not badly spent, eh? Click here to see the entire set in all its blue and white glory.

the first day

I won't say that two years ago, Stuart walked through the front door and I knew I'd marry him. I'll err on the side of caution and say, I knew it three days later. So today is the anniversary of the day we met, three days before I knew without question that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him.

I will say that the heart doesn't lie. When we sat down to eat Chinese food, 30 minutes after he arrived at Shiv's apartment, we started talking about books and I got this feeling in my ribcage, possibly my heart. The best way to describe it is this: when a horse has been locked in a stable for a long time but it's a beautiful day and you open the stable door to let him into the paddock, he will immediately sense the wildness of the land outside the paddock. He will sense the summer day, the grass, the running he has to do. And he will pace, back and forth, twitching his tail, trying to get you to notice that he needs to be let out of the paddock; he needs to run. That was my heart, when Stuart and I were talking. I didn't even know what the summer's day was, or that it was there, but there was something fundamental inside me, pacing back and forth, demanding to be let free.

Another way of describing it would be to say that I'd been sliding along in a dark room, along the smooth wall, for years. I'd been sliding around a doorless room, almost wondering if perhaps there was no door, there was only wall. But I didn't stop sliding. The feeling inside me during that first real conversation that I had with Stuart, where our eyes kept lighting up with understanding and camaraderie, was the feeling of having crept around uselessly in a doorless, unlit room only to finally stumble upon a crack in the wall, and to follow that crack around the pitch-black wall with the tips of your fingers barely daring to believe you'll find a doorknob. And the doorknob will be there even if it's never been there before, and that frantic excitement mingled with disbelief mingled with incontrovertible proof, that's how it felt to meet Stuart. Like a door had opened.

So you can see what it was like two years ago. I didn't have these words, I didn't have the assurance that would come with our first kiss, the first time we said the word love, the first time he told me he couldn't and wouldn't be apart from me anymore than he absolutely had to be, that beside me was where he was meant to be even if it meant crossing an ocean. I didn't have those comparably solid emotions, words of substance to react to. All I had on that first day was this kicking, breathing, daring-to-believe-it feeling that the summer day was here, the doorknob was there, and something huge had arrived. Something life-changing had happened.

And I couldn't wait to get started.

the state of not knowing

Consider this your fair warning that this entry discusses my uterus. Put down the computer and back away slowly if this startles you in any way. Most women and you select men can read on.

This morning there came about a method of divining - wait, let me try this again. In every woman's life about once a month there comes a moment - no, that's not right. Let's say that if there are two states, pregnant and not pregnant, and there's no real overlap between the two - ...

... what I'm trying to say is that this morning, I was given incontrovertible proof that I'm not pregnant. Now, this happens every month without fanfare because I'm a responsible modern dame with responsible modern contraception, which we use responsibly to prevent any grandkids for our parents for another couple years, please. But at the beginning of this month, there was a small snafu that involved the pharmacy being closed the exact Sunday and Monday that I needed it open to pick up a prescription, and some secondary contraception that didn't really do very well what it was supposed to do.

Like that responsible modern gal, I called my Ob-Gyn and was told to just make up the missing pills, use secondary measures all month, and oh, he ended the phone call with, "good luck!"

Ladies of the world, take a moment to look in your souls and see the exact precipice he put me on with that falsely cheery "good luck!" and you'll have a general idea of the mild torment I'd been suffering for exactly 22 days. Stuart knew about the phone calls, and the developments as they progressed. I followed the doctor's directions to the letter but it didn't prevent a smattering of conversations that stumbled mid-sentence:

"So, I mean, if we ARE, we'd have to ...."
"We'd be okay, it'd be a change, but we'd ..."
"So, what about school? If we are, do I ...."

And of course, all the jokes we made along the way about how the office was really going to be a nursery, damn you Jen, about how our lives would change upside down, about how we were totally, inconcievably (HA) not ready for this step in our lives but if the foot was lifted for us, by accident, we'd take it and we'd take it in style.

You already know the step has been deferred. If you're smart and you know about a woman's reproductive cycle and the effects of oral contraceptive, you know we weren't really in the hot water to begin with. But you might also know that the heavier the odds are stacked, the more thought-power you give even the slightest chance of .... and there I go, not finishing sentences.

What's remarkable about this is that I'm generally, well, baby-crazy. They're adorable. I love them. I can't wait to be a mother. Except that, well, I can. I very much can. And nothing makes you realize how much you're not ready for something when the heightened possibility of that something is staring you straight in the face. Before you know it, you're not finishing sentences, you're wondering about the reactions of your friends and family, and you're looking in the mirror thinking, can I do this if I have to?

It's scary to know that the answer was yes, and it's a relief to know the question hasn't been asked yet.

wrapped up in bacon

I'm discussing tomorrow night's fondue extravaganza with Shana and Stuart, figuring out who's going to bring what to the table, and Shana mentions a salad that's making her drool - edamame with shiso and lemon vinagrette. I stare at the part of her sentence where she says, "isn't that yummy?" and I decide our friendship can certainly withstand my gentle honesty.

"Let's just celebrate our similarities, shall we?" And Shana laughs, because there is a Venn diagram between our two wildly disparate food tastes and it is clearly marked CHEESE so we'll be okay, Shana, Wallace, and me.

The point is, I'm a picky eater. I see you out there, friends and dinner companions of mine, rolling your eyes into the rear recesses of your brain, falling over and dying from not being surprised. Saying I'm a picky eater is a lot like saying "Vietnam was a mistake" or "the Hulk gets cranky". When I was young, we traveled through Greece every summer but you wouldn't know it for how I refused to eat anything but spaghetti Bolognese and french fries. My first reaction to almost anything you bring near my mouth on a fork is "no!", whether I've tried it or not. Mostly, I haven't.

People who know me well (and have a sadistic streak) like to trump my "no!" by pointing out the part where I haven't ever tried it. I'm forced to admit this is true and concede victory by sampling the contents of their outstretched fork. But this is done begrudgingly, and I'm rarely able to really taste the food for what it is, instead of the pulpy remains of defeat. Yeah, even THAT, whatever dish it is you love that you can't imagine anyone else disliking.

Things I have tried to eat and enjoy to no avail, by no means an exhaustive list:

Every single kind of seafood prepared any sort of way, ever, yes, even that one
Cauliflower
Liver
Caviar
Doritos
Black licorice (really, anything that reeks of aniseed)
moldy cheese
lamb
eggplant
edamame
brown rice
did I mention the seafood thing?

The seafood thing bears mentioning again because it's indicative of a larger problem. When I was 19, my brother took me on a trip to Key West with one of the provisos being that I try every single thing he ordered. I did. I tried all the seafood. Same brother and I ended up at a memorably horrific dinner at Nobu (made horrific by the fact that the woman who'd invited us insisted that the table order the chef's taster menu, meaning I couldn't order my own dish). I tried everything gamely, even when she pointed me out to the waiter and exclaimed in horror, "she doesn't eat seafood! Can you imagine what she's doing here?" to which I barely surpressed the urge to tell her that I wasn't there by my own choice and I knew a political leader in 1940's GERMANY she might get along with, I'll bet he liked sushi.

The point is, I've tried seafood. I'm married to someone who will carefully study every item on the menu until he finds one he's never heard of and promptly order it. Meanwhile, I've actually been to restaurants where there's feasibly only two things on the menu I can eat. So my point is, I'd LOVE to like seafood. It's healthy, trendy, plus sushi packaging is just so CUTE. If only I could bring myself to get past the distinctly fishy texture of fish (yes, even Mahi Mahi, no, it doesn't matter how many times I try all the fish you claim taste "just like steak").

And then there's all that other food I wrinkle my nose at the minute I've tried it. Eggplant? Slimy and tasteless. Edamame? Tastes like packing peanuts. Snowpeas? Just taste GREEN. Liver? Tastes like... well... innards. Do NOT get me started on broccoli. The more astute amongst you will long have seen through that whole "makes me feel like I'm eating little trees" routine to the true aversion behind. I hate broccoli. Most green things, in fact, rarely touch my plate.

Are you starting to get a picture of how incredibly picky I am? And in between berating me in my comments for being so close-minded, could you begin to picture how dissatisfied it makes me? How much I wish I truly loved all the varied, healthy colors of the food rainbow? I'm not one of those people who blame my parents for any and all adult flaws I possess, but I grew up in a very meat-and-potatoes household, very old-school European. Spinach was the extent of our vegetable contributions to the dinner table. And I only recently decided I like spinach. When it's raw. And in salad. And that was a BIG STEP.

I tell myself that I make up for this narrow-mindedness with passion - the foods I love, I adore. I will actually daydream about a new kind of potato I've never tried. I can talk for hours about the kinds of steaks I like, with what sort of marbling, and what I think about seasoning and sauces. I tweak and trim recipes until they're perfect, and by then I've memorized them but every time I smell their distinct smells, I'm incredibly happy. I love food.

I'm just selective. Exclusive. Right? But it's crippling, sometimes, so I've made Stuart my sherpa into the world of crazy foods I don't eat (instead of just catering to my weaknesses). For months, he wanted to make me his celery apple soup. I thought I'd hate it. I loved it, and humbly apologized for ever having doubted him, or celery. We've started making recipes with ingredients I never thought I'd allow on my chopping block - fennel, fish oils, radishes. And every chance we get, I try crazy cheeses, even moldy cheeses, trusting my favourite chefs at places like Otto and Celeste to bring out delicious cheeses even if they smell weird. I don't want to pass on my ... shall we call them peculiarities? ... to my children, making them wrinkle their tiny noses at broccoli just because Mom does. And so, I'll even eat broccoli, and god willing, fish, at our dinner tables of the future.

Perhap the trick is wrapping things in bacon, something I love fiercely with all my heart, something I think is missing in the global quest for peace and harmony. One of my favourite things to do with bacon is to wrap it around soy-sauce-and-brown-sugar-soaked water chesnuts and roast them. They're like crack, and they're the perfect winter-party snack. When I make them, they're gone in about eight seconds flat. So at Christmas, I walked into my cousin's kitchen and there were some gleaming, bacon-wrapped, wait until I get my mouth on you...

"... honey, those are scallops," said Stuart, knowing how sad I'd be that they weren't water chestnuts.

"How bad could it be, right? It's wrapped in bacon," so I popped one in my mouth. The world held its breath, or at leasst, Stuart and my dad did. "Tastes... like... fish." I grinned weakly. I'd tried! A scallop!

And so with meek, mewling steps, I'm trying to get better. I'm holding on to the small, nearly insignificant victories I've made - fish sauce in my Vietnamese takeout, actually eating the sprouts and onions in chicken-fried-rice, the spinach thing and the celery soup thing. I'm hoping for a day when fresh dark green broccoli looks as delicious in the grocery aisle as a flaky red potato or a wheel of parmesan Reggiano. Hey, you never know, right? Crazier things have happened.

Right?

the cheese drawer, OR, scenes from a marriage

We've just finished a late dinner and a couple episodes of Doctor Who when Stuart takes the dishes into the kitchen to start washing up. I flip to channel 11 (o, SaTC at 11PM, how you torture me) to watch a few minutes of the episode where Carrie finds out about Natasha when a plaintative bleat comes from the kitchen.

"The cheese is OUT. On the COUNTER."

I blink for a minute. I'd cooked dinner and grated some parmesan to go on the dinner and in my hurry to eat a warm meal, I'd left the parmesan block on the counter next to the ziploc bag it came out of. So I laugh.

"Cmon, you left the cheese OUT!"

"Are you serious?" I yell as I turn down the whining Carrie. Surely he's not seriously taking issue with the cheese thing, for reasons I will soon reveal.

"YES."

"So -" I get up from the couch and wander into the kitchen. "I was cooking dinner. We ate dinner. I left the cheese on the counter. Seriously?" He's got just a HINT of a smile but no! He's seriously taking issue! I strap on the relationship equivalent of a bazooka.

"Wait. The cheese, it's on the counter. And you're objecting to this? YOU ... are objecting to this?"

Stuart is now staring down the barrel of my bazooka wondering if his troops really have enough ammo. He's radioing the RAF for backup.

"YES! Look, the fridge is right here, you can just put the cheese back in the fridge!" He opens the fridge to demonstrate his point and my men launch a full-scale attack. Except we're both laughing so hard at this point it's difficult to hold my weapon straight.

"YOU. Stuart, every single time you put any sort of newly-opened cheese packet back in the fridge, you just PUT IT IN THERE. You never wrap it! Or pull a handy ziploc bag -" I swing around to indicate the handiness of the bag cabinet, "- out of the bag cabinet and put the cheese in it! Mozzarella has DIED a slow, hardening death in there! SERIOUSLY, you're still objecting to my hour of cheese-on-the-counter neglect?!"

We starts laughing harder.

"But," he says, valiantly holding the line, "it's so easy to just put it back in the fridge!"

"YES," I yell, "which is exactly how you do it, you just PUT IT IN THE FRIDGE. Do I need to bring up the DEAD CHICKEN IN THE FREEZER episode?!"

Stuart sputters that frostburn on chicken (which he simply PUT in the freezer in its open original container without the all-holy assistance of wrapping HOLY GOD THE WRAPPING) doesn't diminish the value of the chicken either way.

"THE BACTERIA... it...", but I can't talk for laughing now, because it's my turn up against the wall, I genuinely don't know WHAT the bacteria will do, it's a flawed argument, I just don't like FREEZERBURN CHICKEN but I had to go haul the bacteria into it. Nevertheless, I press on. "Raw chicken has bacteria!"

"And they're going to, what? Suddenly come alive in the frying pan only to DIE SECONDS LATER?" He imitates bacteria here, which may be the last recognizable straw of my ability to technically count this as a fight, because I'm sputtering and laughing and pounding his chest: "Oh, hello, I'm awake -AUGH AIE FIRE DEATH," and the bacteria go dead.

The thing is, technically this is a fight. Technically, we have a real communication breakdown about the need to WRAP THINGS BEFORE YOU PUT THEM IN THE FRIDGE, and the need to not bring up pointless arguments about bacteria that you can't back up with science. Technically, that was a fight. But it's really hard to snarkily deccimate someone else's argument when they're imitating bacteria dying in a frying pan, or when you know you don't stand a chance in hell arguing about the cheese on the counter because all I have to do is BRING UP THAT DEAD WITHERED TEN DOLLAR MOZZARELLA, you know the one.

I think it's fair to simply conclude that both factions have winning points. My winning point is the dead mozzarella.

bring out the bubbly

As a Valentine's Day Gift from my sweetie Biscuit, comments are now working! Lordy I've missed y'all! Tell me what you're doing! What you're wearing! How you've been! Have you missed me? What are you doing tonight? Are you bitter and jaded, gooey and sappy, or somewhere in between like me? Can I borrow your dog to play with? Any other questions? Let's chat!

Also:

And yeah, I totally wrote that shit BACKWARDS for you. I love you BACKWARDS, internet. Happy Valentine's Day.

weekend

This will undoubtedly not be as interesting or inspiring of snarky commentary as my last entry was, but I had myself a lovely weekend and sometimes, that's what a blog is for - just writing about your weekend so that maybe one day in a year when you haven't had a good weekend in a while, you can look back and say, "hey, that was a good weekend! I should try that again".

So on Friday night, without any good netflix lying around just yet, Stuart and I had a "thrown together from the fridge" sort of dinner (oven-roasted greek potatoes, leftover sausage and bean casserole, big salad) while we talked. I actually talked most of dinner because baby is catching these days, it seems everyone's pregnant or going through those first few months of motherhood, and it's a fascinating insight that the baby books really don't cover in as much raw detail as an exhausted blogging mother can.

We played videogames and pootled on the internet and I read a lot, in anticipation of the gothamist review that I wrote up today of Julian Barnes' latest book. Saturday was more of the same - waking up deliciously late and talking and laughing in bed for a few hours before breakfast and reading took over. In the late afternoon, I baked blondies for Shana's party and we got dressed and went to her apartment for a few hours of animated chat and margaritas. Today was a late start again, and Stuart cleaned our desperately messy bedroom while I finished reading the book and started writing the review. Then, finally, more very necessary cleaning - I did the bathroom while Stuart vaccuumed and then I mopped the apartment.

It all sounds really boring but it was all done with good cheer, and with no one else's schedule or needs to attend to, so it felt very self-driven and good. Now Stuart went out in the rain to get the week's lunch-making supplies and more salad stuff for dinner. Salad and grilled sandwiches for dinner. Yum.

How was your weekend?

eye, maties!

So, I never got a patch. They don't do them anymore, on account of it slowing the natural healing process of your eye. Which is a real shame, because I was going to draw a skull and crossbones on mine and that would have been a fun time.

I spent most of yesterday relentlessly putting drops in my eyes, annoying little drops that required holding shut my tear duct so that the medicine stayed in my eye. This is all a result of having the most over-dramatic eye in the history of eyes. Of course I couldn't just have a little corneal scratch. No, no. It had to be a corneal ulceration, and then my eye had to go and completely overreact to the thing, causing iritis (inflammation of the iris, which Kate thinks sounds made up), which is what puffed my eye up like it was the Quasimodo of eyes.

After my first appointment, I was pretty down and trodden, and it didn't help that the sweet blissful anesthetic (from the dilation) was wearing off while I spent 15 minutes at 47th and 5th trying to get a goddamned taxi to pay attention to me. So I went home, took a lot of advil and got some rest. The boys came home in time for me to start feeling a lot better but I was still really puffy, see photo.

That night, when I was close to tears from the pain, Stuart promised to come to the morning follow-up appointment. Which helped a lot - I love my new eye specialist (who knew I needed an eye specialist) but it's always nice to have another brain in the room to absorb information, especially when the information is about how your eye is in a little heap of trouble.

My doctor took one look at me that morning and said, "yeah, I wasn't sure it was iritis last night but I dliated you just in case - it's definitely iritis," and prescribed me an anti-inflammatory drop, thank you sweet jesus Rubenstein. So armed to the teeth with four prescriptions and a schedule for dosage more complicated than Leonardo's flying machines, Stuart sweetly deposited me, dilated and disoriented, into a taxi Astoria-bound. After filling the scripts I took to the couch and felt the drugs work their magic.

It's been two days of paying far too much attention to my overly dramatic eye. There's a bunch of other stuff, too, that the doctor armed me with - stuff about my auto-immune system and how it might be malfunctioning just the slightest bit and how I'm a good girl for coming right in with the eye drama but if I could just be still a few minutes longer, there's a host of diseases that want to meet me, please.

I'm not going to let myself worry about auto-immune systems and self/non-self and things that start with the letters HLA until I absolutely have to. Proscrastination is a way of life.

My eye is fine and thanks you for all the attention.

itchy and scratchy

It's a funny world. On Saturday, we had Barrie and Brendan over for dinner. The thing about Barrie (everyone has a thing about themselves, right?) is that she's allergic to, like, everything. I'm not used to planning a dinner around what may or may not kill my guests, so I was extra-vigilant. I ran the entire menu by her, and made sure she could eat everything on the table. We had a risotto with scallions and petite peas. We had a deliciously chunky minestrone, and we had steamed broccoli (not that I ate any - that's my thing, remember). To finish off, we had flourless chocolate cake and a rousing game of Book Lover's Trivial Pursuit.

And then at about 12:30, as the game was winding down, I noticed these bumps in the crooks of my elbows, and scattered across my inner lower arm. They looked like heat bumps, Barrie and Stuart assured me, probably just because it was warm in the apartment and because I had been cooking in a sweater. I put some hydro-cortisone on them and we went to sleep after saying goodbye to Barrie and Brendan. That's when the fun started. Apparently, as a tradeoff for having successfully spared Barrie from anaphylactic shock, it was my turn on the allergy merry-go-round.

At about 2:30, I couldn't stand lying there and NOT itching what felt like my entire body. So rousing Stuart from sleep, we turned on the lights and I commenced to freak out. CHICKEN POX! I yelled. See, I haven't had the chicken pox, which I should really get vaccinated for (yes I know), but Stuart thankfully ruled out chicken pox. After a few minutes where he searched online and I stood in the middle of the room and freaked out quietly, he said, "I think it's hives". He didn't tell me that anaphylactic shock can start with hives. That's because he's a nice husband. He just asked me how my breathing was, and bundled me up to take me to Mount Sinai Queens hospital.

We got there, the same place I dragged myself to back in the wilds of 2003. I proceeded to try not to continue to freak out. Stuart proceeded to check me in. With superhuman speed, the nurses and a doctor checked me out, told me I was having an allergic reaction, gave me the motherload shot of Benadryl, and sent me home.

We got home and I took Zyrtec, because why be one kind of drowsy when you can be three? Stuart watched over my snoring, conked-out self and kept himself awake for two hours so he could make sure the hives were receding, and then fell into bed with me at 6 AM and we slept until 2 in the afternoon.

Since then, every conversation I've had about the hives has centered around what could have caused it. I had the most innocuous, vegetarian meal ever, and besides, the hives were completely limited to my torso in a way that suggests contact, not ingested, allergies. But the clothes I wore that day had all been worn within the week, laundered at the same place I launder everything, and no other item of clothing from that laundered batch has caused hives. I haven't changed my beauty products (creature of habit) in months. No new lotions, no cleaners, I didn't even handle the two batches of flowers that came into our house that day.

The next day, Barrie, berating herself for not having spotted her old nemesis for what it was, ran through a litany of things I might have done or touched or used. She couldn't figure it out. Neither can we.

Apparently, I'm allergic to Trivial Pursuit.

nouveau

2005 went out gracefully, in the end. After a slightly grumpy evening, certain I'd doomed 2006 to boredom by choosing to stay home and nurse my cold instead of heading down to Brooklyn for festivity, I finally got up the energy to make the last 30 minutes of 2005 worthy of the wonderful year they were seeing out. We lit a lot of candles and turned all the lights out and listened to good music and drank a beautiful bottle of beaujolais. We didn't watch the clock, we just chatted and listened and were quiet and then surely enough, there was 2006. The fireworks over Central Park were just visible from our living room windows so we watched them as my family called and wished good times for the upcoming year. My stuffy cold and aching sore throat graciously took a few minutes' break to make that hour just as lovely as it sounds.

Considering I thought I'd ruined New Year's Eve and spoiled 2006, it was okay, I think.

Today we woke up at noon and I roused myself off the couch at 1:30 to make french toast for Stuart and I. Now I'm enjoying our Christmas tree's last few hours with us - Margo Tennenbaum II, you have served us so well! I've also hauled my erstwhile knitting bag out of the cupboard, because it seems like the right thing to do on a sick holiday along drinking tea and staring at tulips and candles and listening to the Viennese Philharmonic on PBS.

It's cheesy. But I love it. Hope you're doing what you love, too.

pillow fight

Out my bedroom window, it looks like someone grabbed an infinite amount of down pillows and started ripping them open and dumping them out over Queens. Twenty minutes ago, it was pathetic little dandruff flakes that weren't sticking to a thing and now suddenly it's eddies upon eddies of down feathers hurtling to the ground. It feels like a present.

We ventured out for breakfast this morning and I barely made it back, I'm so about to be incredibly sick with the Destructo-Cold of December 05 that all of my friends have been passing around like a drug. I had to just almost weepingly call off our long-standing New Year's Eve plans at Jeb and Neela's and I feel really crappy about it but feeling crappy in general won over any chin-up-old-chap attitude I was feebly trying to sport. I'm sick and I get sick about once a year. Apparently my karmic levels weren't so good, I had to go get sick on New Year's Eve. Blockbuster and takeout for me.

But I've got a beautiful bowlful of white tulips on our coffee table, to ring in 2006 with freshness, and white flaky snow outside to give my tired stuffy face something to look at. Goodbye, 2005. You were cool, let's stay in touch.

i make toys but i've got aspirations

We gave:
an audio CD of Time Traveler's Wife and a handmade cotton scarf for the english mum
an audio CD of Personal History and a crystal lightcatcher for the stateside mum
two books by Daschiel Hamlett and Raymond Chandler to the stateside dad
Dylan's latest Bootleg series and some stemless wineglasses for the english dad
a Switching to the Mac guide and a prosperity frog (and some candy) to the stateside brother
a cute mug and some dessert plates to the (newly homeowning) english sister

For Stuart, I gave:
an awesome handmade wool tweed newsboy cap
a tee shirt with a sewer cover on it that he's still trying to ascertain why he got it (it's funny!)
a japanese designed screwdriver set from MoMA design store
penguin boxers

This year, I got:
three Eddie Izzard DVDs from Stuart (YEAH!)
handmade soap from Stuart
a beautiful kelly green cotton cotton scarf from Stuart
my favourite Van Cleef & Appel perfume from my mother
an 160GB external hard drive from my parents
a kelly green cashmere sweater from my parents
more books than you could shake a stick at from my brother (James Frey, Zadie Smith, John Le Carre and Jane Austen)
the Essential Johhny Cash from my brother
Raymond Chandler, Daschiell Hamlett and Joan Didion from my english mum and dad
a beautiful art deco inspired silver necklace and earrings from my english mum and dad
a Lexar Jump Drive from my english mum and dad
new Sony headphones from my english mum and dad

We (the married state) got:
a new stainless steel soap pump from my parents
a new spice rack from my parents
550-thread count sheets from my parents
a new onion chopper from my parents
a book of penguins from Jen

I write this list almost every year because I like remembering what I was able to think up for my family as much as I love getting all their thoughtful surprises. But what I really got this year was another precious few hours with my family, laughing and surprising each other and delighting in the awesomely gift-oriented thing that is christmas. Gifts!

have yourself a merry little something

We got to Rhode Island last night at 11PM and stayed up until 2am talking, which is what my family does - we sit around and talk. Sometimes when we come home for the weekend, my mom worries that we're not having enough fun, getting out there and exploring. I've explained to her, though, that one of my favourite things to do is sit around with my family and talk.

Stuart got a haircut from my mom a few minutes ago, while I made sandwiches for mom and I. I wrapped presents for my brother who hasn't seen the awesome job I did yet, but he will and he will be awed.

My dad has been teasing me all day about having been a terrible daughter this year, so of course he doesn't think that at all, as I continued to be faux-shocked at his accusation. I'm pretty sure I was a terrific daughter this year.

My parents got a pre-lit tree and it's got more lights than jesus - that doesn't work, as a metaphor, but you know what I'm saying. The area under the tree is overflowing with presents, I mean, we're five people! It's madness. Awesome, awesome madness.

And tonight after ham and potatoes and applesauce, we'll have present-opening because in this family, impatience runs in our veins like blood and no one can bother waiting until Christmas morning.

Merry christmas to you and yours, y'all.

funny in the genes

My parents are pretty funny people. The thing that my mother does that always cracks me up is she'll make some assertion (and a lot of the time, her assertions are spot on) that she's not entirely sure is going to stand up in court, but when I jokingly point out some huge fatal flaw in the logic, she'll get really cute and flippant and go, "oh, I don't know, WHATEVER," and it's so adorable that I'm giggling about it for days.

My dad also does things that crack me up. Like he'll call me up and leave a message that says, "BALLS, said the queen. If I had them, I'd be KING." And then just hang up, because obviously I know to call him back. He also does this with, "I'm your hippy dippy weather man, with your hippy dippy weather, MAAAAN." Usually these voicemails are followed by a beat where I can hear him grinning, and then he goes, "CALL ME!" and hangs up.

A few months ago, I was having a small but painful spat with a very good friend of mine, over how we're both changing and that's hard, and my parents happened to call in the middle of the day after the spat where all I could do was cry about it. After about an hour of talking and soothing from my mother, my dad gets on the phone (having obviously understood what the conversation was about) and goes, "you haven't changed for ME. You're exactly the same. You were a pain in the ass then, you're a pain in the ass now, and I love you to death. Want me to come to New York and hang out with you and be your pal?" Aside from being hilarious, it also made me cry again from total sweetness.

So it's pretty nice to join another set of parents that are equally hilarious. When we had that little meltdown about thinking we'd lost our AP document when we were leaving the Isle of Wight, and I came into my in-laws' kitchen only to see Katina, grinning but obviously exhausted, start to crack up and say, "Merry CHRISTMAS!" It was pretty much the laughing balm we all needed.

And today, well, we had more immigration issues involving cards and renewals and setbacks and fees and none of it is really worth hearing about because it basically sucks but we'll fix it. So when I got some random text from a random UK mobile phone that said (verbatim):

HAHAH WHAT A GREAT BOOK OPPORTUNITY! I LIVE WITH AN ALIEN! STUART! HAHAHAHA LOVE DD XX"

I was really confused. We'd just realized this immigration snag, we hadn't blogged about it, and I didn't know the number. But I had a sneaky feeling it was family. So I texted back, "HAHAH, I'm sorry to say I don't know who this is!"

And two minutes later, got a reply text:

TINKIES BETTER HALF, YOU DOUGHNUT!

And I realized it was my father-in-law, Keith, who is another incredibly funny man who can immediately see the ridiculous side of everything, and reached out all the way across the ocean to make me laugh.

These two sets of parents haven't met yet, but I'm realizing more and more every day that they're going to freaking LOVE each other.

taking stock

I am thankful for:

Stuart. Pretty much everything about Stuart.
My mother, and her great cooking, great fashion advice, how she always calls me "pumpkin" and hugs me for no reason other than love, and the way she still dances around the kitchen to Carly Simon and Neil Diamond.
My dad with his excel spreadsheet advice, good spy novels, baking tips, banking tips, and how I'm just getting to know him for the wonderful man that he is.
My brother and his big bear hugs, constant older-brothering, the way he gets along with absolutely everyone, and his ridiculously huge music collection.
Our extended family that lives an hour away and has finally provided me with the joyous, boisterous family holiday I've always wanted.
Our home here in Rhode Island, with all the furniture I grew up with, and a place for my family to finally stay for more than a few years.
My friends in New York, with their quick emails, quick wit, quick helping hands, big hearts, and great taste.
My job, because it's still there even when I complain about it.
My writing, because it's good to know I'm good at one thing.
My silly little fantasies about the future, like a dog named Caspian and a summer house in Maine, because you never know, they might come true.
That it snowed this morning, waking me up with pure snowy joy and giving me a reason to bound into everyone's rooms and throw open the curtains singing Winter Wonderland.
Turkey, wine, potatoes, pie, stuffing, madeleines, sweet potatoes, corn bread, and Biscuit's delicious cranberry sauce.

For all this and more, I give thanks today.

snapshot

I stepped into the living room a few minutes ago and laughed a little at this scene, because it's pretty much the entirety of my Sunday. I haven't left my turtle pyjamas, eating clementines and finishing my book and following review. Breakfast was french bread and Gouda cheese with coffee. Dinner is Stuart's superb apple celery soup and olive-oil-and-garlic brushed croutons. My brother and Ozzie spent the first half of the day with us, lazying about and listening to me complain about Dowd. And even though it was glorious outside from the window next to Stuart's armchair (which he graciously lets me curl up in to read, well, all the time), I didn't want to be anywhere else but next to a book, a coke, and a pile of growing clementine peels. Viva winter!

company calls

Visitors are sort of part and parcel when you're a New Yorker. Look, you live in the greatest city in the world, with some of the most expensive hotels. When you're out of town visiting friends and family, the words, "Oh, you live in New York?" are always followed by, "I've been meaning to go there to visit!" You, New Yorker, have an expected response of "oh, stay with me/us, I'll/we'll show you around!" It's pretty much part of your DMV exam.

And for me, it's not the city tourism part that gets me frazzled or stressed. I can reel off about twenty cool things to do in the city, for every taste, and pull up websites and hand out brochures, all in about thirty five seconds (oh, and talking faster - that's on the DMV exam too). It's the house that's got me straight tripping, uh, boo.

Last night, when I was sitting inside the bleach-filled bathtub desperately scrubbing at the grouting in the tub, I stopped for a minute. This is my brother and his friend Ozzie that are visiting this weekend. Putting aside for a minute that brother is the most obsessively neat person I know second only to my mother, it's not like the guy is fooled by my, uh, cluttery tendencies. He's known me since I was what, born? I do this with every guest we have. I go pretty much full-tilt bananas with the cleaning until exactly the moment the doorbell rings. And for what? We're never even IN the apartment when there are guests, we're too busy seeing the city.

I dragged Stuart out of the house at 11:45 PM last night, after the cleaning had passed my neurotic sleep-deprived standards, so we could go to the grocery store and get things like soap for the dishes, paper towel, extra toilet paper, coffee, bread, eggs, bacon ... you know, the things you fill your fridge with so that it looks like you actually LIVE there, instead of just collapse on the couch and dial for chinese three times a week. "What, that? Oh, is that what an oven looks like?" It's this struggle to make life here in New York seem like other places, when really, it's not.

And so I figured it out, why I always go so berserk with guests. It's because of all the things we've got it better in New York City, housing isn't always one of them. Sure, I can dump my guests on the plane, exhausted and euphoric, lighting that cigarette and going, "thanks, New York City, I'll call ya, baby". Chances are, where they're going back to isn't as exciting, exhilirating, breathtakingly chock-full of everything as New York City is. But their house? It's probably bigger. With better organization. And a newer oven. And less dust. And they probably pay half the price for twice the space.

I've worked like a dog, and Stuart has joined me, to make our apartment a beautiful, cozy place. And it's not small, cramped, or dirty by city standards. But sometimes, I look at it from Elsewhere's eyes, and it must look like a tenement! So out comes the toothbrush to scrub the grouting that's always a little dingy, and the swiffer to valiantly (and uselessly) try to sweep up every last dustbunny, and god, what am I going to DO ABOUT OUR KITCHEN CABINETS?

It's a losing battle. Invariably, Luiz and Ozzie will arrive, be charmed by our sweet flat and comfy beds and nice coffee maker, and that's all they'll notice in between waking up and dashing off to enjoy the city, and collapsing into bed at the end of packed, busy days.

I just hope our ancient radiators don't crap out, and that the sink doesn't back up, and oh, I hope the dust-bunnies don't start reading Marx and forming labor unions. And I hope they see that for all the money, stress, pollution, crime, and taxes we deal with to live in this crazy place, our life is just as fulfilled and - you know - CLEAN as everywhere else's. And, oh, I guess I hope everyone has fun. Duh. It's New York City. How could they not, right?

Let me just get this ONE last corner with the swiffer, just - right - argh.

update

Well, the results are less that perfect, guys. Our interview went okay, we answered all the banal questions about each other and showered her with documents. Except the one she wanted - apparently, we are meant to have a US-approved vaccination report, and Stuart's UK one (that was showed to the doctor for his UK-side medical) isn't good enough.

So we need to make a call, see a USCIS-approved doctor, fork over a wad of cash for him basically to transcribe Stuart's UK vaccination report, and then Fed-Ex it back to our friendly case officer. She said we were basically fine except for that, once she got that in the file she'd approve us and mail the green card.

What that means is very little, really. Stuart can still work, since we'll have resolved this well before February when his current Employment doc runs out. We're otherwise fine on our application, according to today's caseworker, and the address she gave us isn't some scary monolith processing center but her own desk in the very building we were in, which gives me hope.

And call it some sick twisted Stockholm Syndrome, but I got to see our papers flashing past in her thick case file, all the things we'd ever sent over, our handwriting on every page as it flipped past, and I got a little sentimental.

And also, glad that all our disparate applications, supplications, reparations, negotiations ... all of them ... made it into the same brown folder. Minus one, of course. So, one pesky little vaccinaition report, coming right up.

Fries with that?

red letter day

It's god damn thirty in the morning, which is to say, when I usually wake up. I don't usually wake up this anxious to get the day over, but today's our USCIS Initial Interview where, if everything goes well, we'll get stamped and approved for Stuart's Permanent Residence (Conditional Upon Marriage) and we won't have to futz with the USCIS for another couple of years.

See all the unnecessary capital letters in the middle of sentences? That's the USCIS experience for you. I've been on message boards with posts that have titles like "My FOP isn't working with the GRV and I need two extra 563 and a ORP/RGT! Help!" I'm not even kidding. Actually, the real terms are AOS, EAD, 765 and 485, AP and 130, and people, I DIDN'T LOOK AT THE DOCUMENT PILE, I've got that shit memorized.

Prowling the message boards to find out what to expect is sort of like listening to rumors about the French Resistance during World War Two. They WILL look at pictures? They don't? It'll last 20 minutes? It'll last six hours with a follow-up? Affidavit of Support? How many times have I submitted that, wait, you want another one? The song-and-dance segment of today's interview will directly follow the scotch tasting?

At this point, I WOULDN'T be surprised if the presiding officer breaks out into a rudimentary welcome routine involving two penguins, a flying car, and a stack of pancakes. I won't be surprised by anything. I know what to expect except for what they tell you you'll never know to expect. Yeah, see?

Last night Stuart and I sat around quizzing each other on the facts of our lives, just for fun because we certainly KNOW everything about each other including the full range of each other's school names, first kisses, parents' middle names, maiden names and birthdays. It got a little silly, like when I said, "what surgery have I had?"

And Stuart answered, "well, an appendectomy during the blackout, and the... eh... they anally probed you for cysts when you were little."

"... That's COMMONLY REFERRED TO AS A COLONOSCOPY, AND IT WAS FOR POLYPS."
"Whatever."

We also know each other's family secrets, each other's deepest fears and resentments, what turns the other on and how to make the other laugh in the middle of anything, including church, a wedding or a funeral, or a USCIS interview. Only the surface information in our lives will be laid bare for these people today - our lease, our marriage certificate, our photo albums. But if it gets tense in there, I might just do the wiggly hand thing. And that's for the LAUGHING, not the turning-on.

Or I'll refer to my colonoscopy as an anal probing, and see if I can keep a straight face.

Those USCIS guys have NO IDEA what goofballs are about to whirl into their lives. Maybe they'll stamp us just to get us out of there.

iii

Dear Stuart,

Last night, we arrived home from our trip to Florida, chattering and flipping through the mail as we came up the stairs to our apartment. We put our bags down in the bedroom and went around the house, switching on lights and turning on computers and yelling down the hall what we wanted for dinner from our chinese takeaway.

There was some kind of happiness in that apartment, I tried in vain to pin it to a wall and study it. It was some resounding contentment with how very much our home it was, how perfectly normal it was to walk around in it with you and talk about chinese takeaway and what's been happening on the internet in our absence.

We do lots of romantic things, you and I. We take long walks and make each other dinners and meet each other for drinks after hard days at work and read from magazines while the other showers. But something about coming home from traveling last night seemed like the most romantic thing we've ever done, only in its total normalcy.

A year ago, we stood in front of a judge and swore under the state of New York and the laws of this nation to love, honor, and protect each other. Privately, we also swore to fight each other's battles with grace and cheerfulness, to be each other's first resource for love and understanding, to be compassionate and fair and to always make the other smile, even if we're fighting. We agreed on a lot of things that day - that we'd have children together, foster each other's dreams, grow old together. We also agreed to never fight to win, only argue to understand. We agreed to consider each other's needs and desires above all others, we agreed to share the chores of a life together - everything from deciding on graduate school to washing up after dinner.

We were married at City Hall a year ago and we made all those promises. But the very best promise that went unspoken was the one where we'd simply be around each other, every day, forever. It wasn't something we took for granted back then, only ten days in each other's arms after six months of trial-by-fire separation at the very beginning of our relationship. It was a tough path we carved from meeting each other in Shiv's living room to walking into the judge's chambers together. It was also a path we carved joyfully, with confidence, and above all, with love. We were married knowing we'd never be apart from each other again.

And perhaps that's what was so beautiful about last night - how very normal it was. Because every day since a year and ten days ago, no matter if we were in Florida, or at work, or at the doctor's, or visiting friends, we've come home to each other. And of all the promises both lofty and mundane that we've made to each other, that we continue to honor every day, this is the one I love the most.

Thank you for marrying me, but more importantly, thank you for just being with me.

Love,
Krissa

A month of firsts

October is always a great month because it's the month where Stuart arrived in New York, we got married, we went on our honeymoon, and it's also the month of Stuart's birthday.

A year ago, in the evening, he came through the gates at JFK and almost not believing it was finally here, I launched myself into his arms. I haven't left since then.

We took a taxi home, staring at each other in delight and also being the usual couple we'd become, talking about the flight and the city and our plans. It was so exquisitely new and yet so familiar, to open the front door with him standing next to me, as if I knew how I'd be doing it for the following 365 days to now, and all the days ahead of us.

A wedding anniversary is a special thing, and Stuart and I will celebrate it thusly. But this day, perhaps, was even more impactful, even more of a memory to be revisited and cherished. Last October sixth at night, I got into my bed alone for the last time. Last October eighth in the morning, I woke up to a lifetime of mornings with Stuart around.

This photo was taken at Astoria Park, underneath the Triboro with a view of the city. It's a spot we've come to love dearly, many bagels eaten and books read and runs relaxed from and kites flown there since last year. But on October eighth, last year, we ventured out of the house together for the first time to see the sunset together at Astoria Park, and then with my brand-new camera phone, I took this incredibly crappy photograph of us kissing.

The only thing you can see is our eyelashes and the outline where our lips met. But I've kept it in my phone since then, and though I've cleared the picture file many times since then, I've always marked that one to save.

And now, I'm sharing it with you, on the anniversary of the best day of my life.

serendipity

At six thirty on the outbound platform at Queensboro Plaza, there were a lot of really pissy people. We'd all gotten here somehow, determined to make it across the river, past the snarl of stalled trains in various tunnels. We'd been turned back at Times Square, put on the E or the V, jumped on a crowded 4/5 from 59th/Lex to get onto the 7 at Grand Central, hell, maybe some of us had walked across the bridge.

We'd gotten to Queensboro any way we knew how, and now they were telling about 250 people that there were to be no outbound N/W trains snaking up to the last six stops on the line. They were telling us that everyone going to those last six stops had to just take a bus, or walk. And it looked like rain. It really looked like rain.

I'd left the office at 5:15 and here I was at 6:30, only halfway home. I had been reading a crappy magazine at very close range on the very shaky train and I was getting the beginnings of that sort of headache that isn't going away any time soon. I was hungry and cranky and so was everyone around me. And when the announcer told us all, effectively, to sod off and make our own damn way home, I couldn't figure out what to do. Walk? I was in heels and tired. Catch a bus or taxi? Me and two hundred odd of my fellow travelers. Sit down on that there seat right here on the platform, pull out the phone and see if I could warn St