For Those About to ROCK: The Annual Pilgrimage for Pookie's Birthday

I'm not sure if doing the same thing for two years in a row makes it a tradition, but I'm going with it. We've (by "we" I mean shamus and myself) all gone home for Pookie's birthday two years in a row now. So that makes it a tradition. And if we don't do it next year, it will be like, "Oh, we're breaking tradition. We have to go home for Pookie's birthday."

Also, if you would like to see my entire collection of pictures from the trip (including some by shamus and some by Pook and some by Honeydunce), click here.

And yes, there's something somewhat wrong about the idea that we've made Pookie so special that trips across the continent for his birthday are a regular event. I have no answers, per usual.

Firstly, you should know that this was the conversation about coming home for Pook's birthday.

Me
So, my DUI hearing is the same day as your birthday, so I guess I'm coming in for your birthday.

Pookie
Awesome. My sister is getting sober for my birthday.

Me
I'm not. I'm really not.

Day One: This is AWESOME.
So, I arrive Thursday night. I have breakfast with mom. I head to court to hang out with MD. Things are done. Things are not done. Things are sometimes frustrating. MD makes me laugh. I head to Pookie's house, where shamus is napping and listening TO THE MOST GOD AWFUL NOISE FUCK I HAVE EVER HEARD. shamus has apparently realized that a cab from the airport to Joel's cost $70. Ouch. He shows me gay YouTube celebrities. This is what we do.

We go to lunch. Pizza and tiny jugs of sugar, or iced tea if you prefer to call it that. We talk to an old lady about a bakery. We go to Jerry's used records. We have cupcakes. shamus cruises the around in a $300 t-shirt. I make the guy at the cupcake store listen to a five minute speech about how I wish I were bulimic because boys would like me better. Shamus does not like cripples. It's a good afternoon. Our sugar high begins to crash, though, and we want a nap, so we head back to Pookie's Hippie Shack.



And ten minutes after we nap ... the Pookie explosion busts through the door. And the world is happy. Though he needs a nap, too. So we all nap.

And then we head to dinner to meet up with Ferris and Honeydunce. There are two things you should know about dinner:

a. It is the first time that any of us are meeting Honeydunce, and while Pookie may not want to hear this, expectations are frankly low since we didn't like any of the last couple of girlfriends of his we met. Or didn't meet because they were noticeably absent at important events. And while we immediately fell in love with Honeydunce, I, in retrospect, feel badly for that poor girl. Firstly, when you put Pookie, Ferris, shamus and myself in a foursome together for the first time in over twelve months, it tends to escalate into an explosion of inappropriateness. At one point, I'll even admit, I go as far as to ask Honeydunce "On a scale of one to ten, how into my brother are you?" What's awesome about the fact that I just wrote that is that Pookie was in the bathroom when I did that and may just now be heating up in embarrassment that I did that to his girlfriend. The poor girl is literally bombarded. And I have to say, she held up like a pro. Like it didn't even phase her. She's the first one I've ever liked. She also had to put up with point "b", which is equally awesome.

b. We happen to be eating dinner in a Thai restaurant that is DIRECTLY across the street from the apartment building where shamus' uncle overdosed on heroin and died. And shamus happens to be sitting in the direction such that all through dinner what he's looking at is the apartment building where his uncle overdosed on heroin and died. For those of you who hang out with shamus and I, you know how sometimes I'll look at shamus and go, "You know, at least I think that the guy I'm dating now probably isn't going to put a shot gun in his mouth and kill himself," and then we laugh at that situation like it's funny instead of tragic because that's how we deal? Well, pretty much throughout dinner shamus would periodically say, "It's AWESOME that I'm having dinner and staring at the apartment where my uncle overdosed on heroin and died," and then we would all laugh like that situation was funny instead of tragic because what else do you do with that?

Honeydunce was a trooper. I love her.



After dinner we head to the Bloomfield Bridge Tavern where Allies has a show that night. Several awesome things, pretty much in this order, happen at the BBT.

- The Pens game is on. With just minutes to go in the third period, the Rangers come back to tie the game. The ENTIRE bar suddenly goes from moderately noisy to DEAD QUIET. Nobody is talking. There is no noise AT ALL. And then, with just a minute or so left, Crosby scores the go-ahead (and ultimately winning) goal and the place goes CRAZY. I feel entirely home.

- Honeydunce introduces me to my new favorite drink, which is vanilla vodka and pineapple juice and it tastes like a pineapple upside down cake.

- I eat six pirogies. Here is a note to self: no matter how much you may WANT the pirogies, they're not going to sit well with you after a Thai meal.



- Beautiful Kim shows up with her finance and somebody else we went to high school with. None of us remember the other kid we went to high school with, but perhaps that is because he probably wasn't hot in high school and now he is HOT.


- Andy and Fred show up and are, traditionally, Andy and Fred.



And then Allies play, and they rock. And my favorite thing about an Allies show is that Pookie spends a not insignificant amount of time playing with his back to the audience, all like "I would be rocking whether you were here or not." And Vesley, whom I hear is about to cut off the mane, hasn't cut if off yet and he lets it down for one song. And the band plays my favorite track, which is a track Pookie wrote after we got home from Hawaii for shamus' 30th birthday the other year. And teenage girls swoon and the Gods of rock smile and all is good.




And Ferris takes us home because Pookie wants to do shamus and I a "favor" by staying at Honeydunce's that night so we can have more space.

I should mention, by the way, that there has been no toilet paper at Chez Pookie since we arrived. I used the last tiny square within the first fifteen minutes. That is all.

Day Two: I got your Kayapolitan right here, and an Ass Cupcake
For the record, I have nothing to do with that Ass Cupcake conversation. I am just here to relay the information.

We begin the morning by meeting up with my mother in Cal, PA. By we I mean me, Pook, Honeydunce, shamus and...Doreen Conaway. Yes, my mother's BFF was in full force too. And later in the day Janet Batemen joined us as well, so it was all kinds of generational. I don't have a lot to report because the visit was in general extremely pleasant and relaxed and my mother serves lots of food and I wash my hair over a sink which is CRAZY since she just basically installed a new shower for me and I accidentally mention that I bought cocaine off of somebody that we all know, which, you know, is problematic information on many levels. And we sit outside and it's warm and breezy and smells like fresh grass and then shamus insists on putting his balls near my face and EVERYTHING IS RUINED LIKE ALWAYS.

Though, you know, that move on his part is really only fair since in Hawaii that one time I stuck my bikini clad butt right in his face. We're even now. Here are some pictures of the day.






Joel, shamus and Honeydunce head back to nap. I take a trip to Chez Woo to visit C-Woo and Tyler and Cienna. Those kids are getting ridiculously big. Cienna is so articulate now - she can have a full conversation with you if she feels so inclined. She's also quite good at getting her way. She'll stand in front of you with a book and big eyes. If you don't read it, she'll just open the book and put it on your lap. Eventually you realize that she's headstrong like her mama and she's going to win. And Tyler is just a flirt. Who likes food. And hockey. We know which parent he takes after. And it's so nice to catch up with C-Woo because she's one of the only people I know who will listen to some of the retardo decisions I'm making right now and not just say, "You're a moron." It's almost like she expects them, which is a good and bad thing.



After that but before a non-existent nap that I had planned on, I meet up with shamus and Ferris for more cupcakes. We take our cupcakes and our coffee and go sit on the steps of a church in Squirrel Hill. I first start explaining that part of the reason that I don't move back to Pittsburgh is because of the lack of eligible men to date. I mean, I'm not going to die alone or anything because I've got some cats and some gays, but I might like to find somebody ... someday. This confession immediately turns into a fun game for the boys called "What about him?" "What about him?" sounds a lot like this:

"What about that douchebag in the track pants and sandals?"

"What about the old guy?"

"What about the punk rock teenager? Oh, wait, he's a little old by your standards."

"What about the guy with bad hygiene?"

And on and on. Then, a conversation that I don't even understand begins to happen about eating cupcakes out of asses. I mean, I don't even pretend to acknowledge what was said. That is all.

We make it back to Pookie's. There is no nap time. There is change and roll out time. So I change, and we roll out. To official birthday dinner, which is at this place.

Joining us at dinner are Moon and C-Woo. B-Funk mystically disappeared on us, but that's how he rolls.

I have many favorite parts of dinner. In no particular order:

- Well, one could not overlook the invocation of "ass cupcake" throughout the entire meal. I'm still unclear as to whether "ass cupcake" is a term of endearment or a verb. I'm not sure I want to know.

- Oh yes, Honeydunce steals Ferris' move and the unicorn is brought out in full force. That's really just funny every time. It's like the jackal, but not.



- Political debate 2008, at which point I move seats. In this argument, Moon argues, shamus may or may not argue (I couldn't tell), C-Woo tries to argue and is shut out and really they're all pretty much on the same side in the end, which is the strange part.

- "Oh, I knew your last boyfriend, I was out on the trail with him when you two were breaking up! He was pretty upset." This is by far my FAVORITE moment. It was actual perfection. If I could have reached across and kissed Moon for giving us that moment, I would have.

I'm not sure if this means that we rock, or that we're middle-aged, but we closed that tapas and martini joint DOWN.




And then ... off into the night.

The Last Morning: On a scale of one to five ...
We spend the last morning before shamus and I fly out at the 61c having coffee. We play this game: "On a scale of 1 to 5, how would you rate Pookie's life so far in the category of (insert category) by the age of 31?"

Pookie doesn't like the game and decides that we ALL have to play if we're going to play.

The next category up is "fashion."

Ferris is wearing a Mac OS X t-shirt. His excuse is that he's headed home to do yard work.

Me
I give Ferris a 2.5 for fashion.

Pookie
I'll give him a 3.5. It makes a statement.

shamus
I give him a stupid point dumb.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, pretty much sums us up. Stupid.Point.Dumb.

Till next year, when hopefully my DUI will be resolved and we once again turn Pookie's birthday into a federal holiday.

 

And Then I Cried for the ONLY Time Ever in Public...And it Worked!

The first time I ever left the country, I was twenty-one. I had convinced the powers that be that no self-respecting literature major would ever graduate without doing a study abroad program in the UK. I was mostly broke (though I know in an emergency my parents would have bailed me with extra money, but they were not so "pro" this trip to begin with). By mostly broke I mean clearly I had come up with the money to take the trip, but there was no money to spend on the trip. As soon as I got approved for the study-abroad trip, I booked a plane ticket that arrived two weeks before I started classes and then departed a week after I ended classes, with the departure from Madrid so that I'd have to see Spain no matter what anybody said. And I went on this trip entirely on my own.

And I came back a totally different person.

I've never really written about the amazing, adventurous, incredible stories that came out of that trip anywhere. Part of that is because, even though I am now 33, my mother will read them and the terror that her little girl lived some of this will still strike her heart. In fact, I've actually edited many of the stories out of this journal entry because her stomach would drop out. I was broke and twenty-one on my own in Europe, people. I got into a lot of trouble. And you know that by "trouble" I must mean TROUBLE because I don't think I've ever edited something entirely out of this journal before because I was worried that my mom would have a fit.

But anyway, onward.

Damn Gypsies.
Because Pookie and I have always felt a calling to our homeland, the first place I wanted to go, at 21, alone, in Europe, was Budapest. So I immediately got off the plane and started hopping trains across the continent to Hungary. I found an evening train out of Luxembourg that arrived in Budapest around midnight and decided to take it. While I was in the train station in Luxembourg, I meet another girl who was nearly my age and traveling alone. Her name was Chelsea and I still adore her to this day! She had just finished a stint as a nanny and was just kicking around Europe, so she decided to come to Budapest with me.

We got on the train and immediately met two Canadian men. One was just doing a summer backpacking tour on his own. The other was on his way back to Budapest where's he was studying at a monestary. True story, people. Also a true story: The four of us are sharing a train compartment and I started to make fun of how Canadians are so ... Canadian. I cracked a joke that I wouldn't have been surprised if at least one of the two Canadian guys was carrying a full-sized Canadian flag with him.

And the one...he reached into his back pack, and...

People, this moment is so shocking to me still that I dug a photo out of a photo album that was in a storage unit fifteen minutes from my home just so that I could scan it for you. HE REALLY DID HAVE THAT FLAG.



Ah, memories.

Anyway, the train arrived in Budapest. It was midnight. Nobody had a lot of cash, and nobody wanted to hunt around for a place to stay in a seedy Eastern European city. I wish I could remember those guys' names, but the one kind of looks at Chels and I and is like, "I mean, how do you feel about sleeping in the park tonight?"

Oddly, we felt fine about it. So we all made our way to the island that's in the Danube between Buda and Pest and slept there. That's how I spent my first real night in Europe. Sleeping in a park full of gypsies and thieves in Budapest.

I woke up at the crack of dawn and got it in my head that I wanted to watch the sunrise over the Danube. Welcome to being twenty-one and in Europe for the first time. Oh, hell, who are we kidding? It would take about a hot minute for almost every story I'm telling here to play out exactly the same way again now, in my early/mid thirties. Anyway, I woke up one of the Canadians and said, "Hey, can you watch my pack? I'm going for a walk." Said Canadian took my pack and slid it under his head as a pillow. I took my day pack and headed toward the river.

I'm sure you've figured out where this is going.

Sunrise was stunning. Beautiful. I can still vividly remember it. It was the best first sunrise in Europe that a young woman could ever have had. In fact, here it is:




I got back to "camp" about an hour later.

Dumbass Canadian has rolled over, some gypsy has opened my pack and 3/4 of everything I had with me had been pulled out and stolen.

And please remember that one of the words I used to describe myself on this trip was "broke."

You know what though? Oddly, I never got all that upset about the situation. I was bumming for about ten minutes, and then Chels and I looked at each other and were like, "Well, I guess we'll have to go shopping."

And so that's how I spent my first full day in Europe. Shopping to replace my stuff in strange, Hungarian stores. The good news was that it was Eastern Europe in the mid-nineties so I could replace about $300 worth of stuff for about $70. The bad news was that I spent the rest of the summer dressing like I was from Hungary, by which I mean dressing like a hooker.

My favorite part of shopping in Budapest involved jeans. To this day, the Eastern European women wear their jeans TIGHT. I own one pair of sexy tight jeans, which I wear out when I need to feel pretty. The rest of my jeans are usually about a size too big and drop off of my hips a bit. So, Chelsea and the Canadians and I would go into a store, and they would pull out a pair of jeans in something that I would need to paint on myself, and I would pull an appropriate size off of the rack and put it on. And then the salesgirl would look at me, make a face, shake her head and shove the same jeans in a size two sizes smaller into my hands. She would try to convince me that I wanted jeans that I would have to lay on the floor and pull on instead of comfy jeans. In one store, I bought a pair of jeans in a size six or something. I even checked the size tag at the register. When I got back to the place we were staying, I found that the girl had put a size two into my bag. That girl! She was so committed that I would celebrate my inner Eastern Eurpoean hooker that she kindly switched my jean size out for me.

Budapest was fun. We had a great time there. We almost didn't want to leave and start working our way back across the Continent, but...

Traveling with Chelsea
Traveling with Chels was super fun and we have lots of great memories. I'm going to do them in bullet points though.

- We only spent a day in Venice, but it was our most singular favorite day of the part of the trip that we spent together. We got there at the crack of dawn and left on a midnight train that night and had the most perfect day.

- Except that sometimes with think that this totally random day we spent in Innsbruck was better. That is all. It's a debate.

- Going back to the day in Venice, so we took that midnight train out to Nice, and we paid a little extra so that we could have a train compartment to ourselves. So that we could sleep. And as the train takes off, the ticket checker comes into our compartment, where it's clear by the way we've arranged our backpacks as pillows that we're about to sleep. And he musters up his best English and says, "No, you two don't fall asleep. Bad things will happen to you two if you fall asleep, even with the door locked."

We didn't sleep that night. And at least three times during that night somebody tried to open our door, and we kicked it. Good times.

- In Nice, we stayed in the most beautiful place ever, but Chels almost beat up an old woman because she pushed her out of a bus seat. But here's a picture of Nice!



- The day before I needed to be in London to start classes, I ran entirely out of money but didn't realize it until I got to the ferry station and the Amex office was already closed. Screwed? Not so much because I convinced some kids who were panhandling to get enough money to cross the channel to let me panhandle with them. It's really amazing how many people will just give you money to shut you up.

You Know It's a Good Trip When the Most Boring Thing You Do Is Spend Three Months in London
I mean, I have awesome stories, like about how one night we literally stole invitations and crashed Boy George's birthday party. Or about how a sheep tried to actually attack me in St. Ives. It was a great time. I drank lots of beer out of very lady like half-pint glasses. I saw just about every production that the Royal Shakespeare Company did. I passed out in the tube one night and my friend Shelly woke me up by yelling, "There are Spanish men on this train!" This was 1995, or as you may remember it, "The Year of Whitney Houston's 'I Will Always Love You'" and my neighbor wouldn't stop playing it 17 times an hour. There was a lot of clubbing and even more pubbing. For some reason I really poignantly remember Freud's house. Which is strange because I remember not so much caring if we went there but getting dragged there by my roomies. It was a good summer.

And Then Chelsea Showed Back Up and We Went to Spain...
So, for whatever reason that I can't remember (like she had taken a full year off to travel or something), Chelsea's return to the States was at the same time as mine. So we had decided that we would meet up in Calais and then go to Madrid together for a couple of days. She was flying out, like, on a Wednesday and I was on a Friday. And this, this ladies and gentlemen, is my favorite story of the trip.

So we take a couple of days meandering from Calais to Paris, and the plan is to take a train from Paris to Madrid. While we're hanging out in the Paris train station, we meet this guy from Ohio who is also backpacking around and who decides to come to Madrid with us. We all buy tickets to Madrid. The ticket has a transfer element because you have to de-board in this tiny, tiny town on the French/Spanish border and go through a customs check BEFORE you enter Spain (or at least that's what you had to do in 1995). And everything is fine until we get to said small border town.

I hadn't actually checked my ticket after I bought it.

Of course you see where this is headed. The ticket agent had forgotten to give me my transfer. And though I was holding my credit card receipt that said I had purchased the transfer, nobody was letting me on that train without the actual transfer.

"It's fine," I say to Chelsea and Marc (I can't believe I remember his name). "I'm sure I can just buy a ticket from here to Madrid in this station."

NEGATIVE. I could purchase a ticket for that leg of the trip, but I'd have to go all the way into town, which was actually half an hour away, to do it unless I was paying in cash. Ha ha ha ha. I think we've probably figured out that by this point in the trip I had NO AVAILABLE FUNDS. But if I went down into town to buy a ticket, I wouldn't make it back in time for the train and I'd have to find a way to find Marc and Chelsea once we hit Madrid.

So in truth, it's not like that was such a horrible plan. We knew what train I'd be on. It wouldn't be too hard to meet up. But I was determined.

Let me preface what comes next with the following:
a. You can count the number of times in my life that I have cried in public on one finger, and I'm about to tell you that story

b. The only thing I despise and think is more pathetic than a woman who cries to get what she wants is a woman who cries in public, at all. Every time a woman cries in public, I make another two cents less on the dollar than my male counterparts and every stereotype ever about women being weak is endorsed. When you are a woman and you cry in public, I lose respect for you and so does everybody else. And then they lose respect for me via you. So unless it's the death of a close family member, keep it together in public, women.

That said, I wanted on that train and I'm a smart enough girl to understand the effectiveness of a girl crying.

"Go ahead and get on the train," I said to Chels and Mark, "but whatever you do, don't act like you know me. That train conductor, he needs to think I'm totally alone."

And so Chelsea and Marc wander off.

And, really, honestly, I'm not a crier, nor am I a very talented actress, so I have to take a solid ten minutes to get my act together. And then I walk up to the train conductor with my best "I'm just a lost girl in the world" look on and just start talking as fast as I can about how the ticket agent forgot to give me my ticket and I have no money left and I HAVE to get to Madrid so that I can go home and how I'm all alone and I don't know what to do, and then...

yes, then...

I start crying.

And, as sad as it is to say, it's a done deal the minute I do that. The conductor tells me that he'll let me on the train, but that I'll have to sit up front in the first car near him because when we get to Madrid he's going to walk with me to the Amex office so that I can get cash to pay for my ticket.

And I'm a happy girl, because I'm on the train. And that story would be awesome if it ended there. But it actually gets so much better.

We've been on the train for about an hour, when suddenly there is this BEAUTIFUL MAN WHO SERIOUSLY LOOKS LIKE HE JUST STEPPED OUT OF A RAPHAEL PAINTING OF BLOND ANGELS is standing there looking at me, and as though God were really sending me an angel, he says, "Somebody back there told me that there was a cute American girl crying because she didn't have money for the train. That must be you."

And while normally I abhor Prince Charming complexes in men, this man was SO LOVELY. And he paid for my ticket and then we collected Chelsea and Marc and traveled the rest of the way in his private compartment with good Spanish wine and bread. Because of course he was American and his parents were wealthy and they had a house in Madrid where they were spending the summer. And that's also where we stayed when we got to Madrid. In his parents extravagant house. And he took all three of us out each night to places with amazing sangria and wonderful desserts and the air was warm and we all laughed a lot and went to the Prado and Reina Sofia and the Palacio Real. And it was perfect. That whole summer had been an adventure and then it ended with this wonderful, amazing adventure that made everything perfect.

So, then, how did I change? Well, it's not exactly like, though I grew up in small town America, I had had the most sheltered upbringing. We traveled excessively. I saw more operas, symphonies, ballets and attended more Shakespeare festivals by thirteen than most people do in an entire life. I saw the West through the back window of a car. But I'd done all of those things with my family and in very structured environments. And I'd done everything that you were expected to do to be a super star in high school and in my first three years of college. And I had a PLAN. I was going to get my PhD. A nice safe ten year plan where I could then spend the rest of my life living in the nice, safe, repetitive world of academia.

And in Europe, on that crazy summer backpack trip with no money and the fun of meeting equally adventurous people who didn't think twice about getting into equally adventurous situations, I realized one thing very clearly:

I did not want to spend my life reading about other people's stories. I wanted to be out collecting my own.

And people who have known me who met me a little later in life, I'm sure, have a hard time imagining that I was every any other way. But I was. I was very content with the idea of a safe life, and I'm SO GLAD that I got my first taste of wandering adventure when I was young enough to realize that that "safe life" isn't the person who I am.

I often wonder, if someday I have a daughter and she is in her early twenties and wants to run off to Europe on her own like I did, would I let her? Or would I make her take friends and sleep in hotels where she had reservations instead of hostels or people's couches or parks or train stations? Would I make sure that she had enough money to bail herself out of any situation she may get in? And I can imagine a parental instinct that would want to do that, because I know EXACTLY how many REALLY BAD spots I got into on that trip (that as I said will not even be mentioned here because I love my mother). The number of times I probably should have been at a minimum violently raped and in a worst case scenario murdered on that trip would need two hands to count, but I have always been very good at talking myself out of bad situations. I don't know what I would do if it were my daughter. I would want her to have her own chance at an adventure that changes who she is, or at least shows her who she is. I think that I would want her to go, because I know that I am only as happy and confident and eclectically open as I am because of that trip.

Then again, as Wooderson said when we were having this discussion tonight, "It wouldn't matter what you did. She'd trick you into it anyway or sneak behind your back."

It's true, and I hope she would, because that would definitely mean that she was my daughter!

 

Big Time, Cell Phones, Snowballling and Mexico

So for a couple of days now, I've been trying to put a real journal entry together about my trip home to Pennsylvania to spend time with my mother, the Woodalls and Ferris for his big birthday (age STILL undisclosed)...and, of course, Pookie, Dana and Jai. And the thing is, I haven't been able to do it. There are dozens of stories that are funny to me, and funny to the people there, but they won't be funny to you. You know, because they're the kind of stories that are funny because all of the people involved know all of the history behind them, or are emotionally intimate enough to understand the laughter. So while the trip was amazing and perfect, it wouldn't be funny to anybody but us. But for those of us who participated, let us just take a moment and remember:

- Larry using a Buffalo Wild Wings as a locational reference point to guide me somewhere
- "I thought taking a walk to the park would be nice."
- "So what if I don't have a cell phone - I WAS THE FIRST ONE TO DINNER."
- BIG TIME
- "Clyde is here, Ferris. Brokeback it up for your birthday, baby."
- Japanese food and the missing server.
- Bar Louie and how somebody thought his move was to let that hobag walk in front of him and steal the table that should have rightfully been ours.
- BIG TIME
- "Did you know that your mother was in Guadalajara?"
- MORE BIG TIME
- "I'm so glad that cell phones were invented so that, while we're all here spending time together, you all can be texting other people who are NOT here."
- "Let's make some MySpace magic tonight."
- "Counting every blade of grass, taking a stand, starting a revolution."
- FANTASTIC cocktails at the Shady Grove
- Making ourselves sick with more food and booze at Gullifty's. I mean, like, SICK.
- Larry wishing Ferris a happy birthday by telling him about his sweaty ass
- My mom's cooking, including her attempt to lame out on stuffed mushrooms by microwaving them, to which we responded, "That's bullshit. Turn the oven on."
- My mom's face when the question "Did you know that your mom is in Guadalajara?" was asked.
- BIG TIME and BIG JIM
- Snowballing. Don't even bother asking.
- Jukeboxes
- "Everything is definitely cool."

I love you mom, Pookie, Ferris, Dana, Candy, Larry, Jai. Thank you for such a wonderful set of perfect moments. You can see all of the pictures here, but here are my favorites for reference.


Don't you wish you could rock to ANY music? Even the servers singing at Yokoso?


Dinner. Good Times.


Much like The Jackal, where there is bottled beer, The Unicorn will appear.


My favorite photo with C-Woo.


Sibling self portrait.

 

Five Perfect Moments

I'm doing this exercise in therapy where I make a timeline of all of the individual moments in my life that I remember as being perfect. Seriously? I have A LOT. A lot more than a girl deserves. Some of them, we'll cover periodically here as they come to me.

Remember the Spin Doctors?
One summer, Pookie and I went to see the Spin Doctors. Part of me thinks that we may have had J-Flo with us, but I'm not sure. And I'm not even sure why we went to see the Spin Doctors, because they had all of two songs. Hell, I think that they still have all of two songs. But it was summer in Western Pennsylvania, and we all know that summer nights in any part of the midwest are more beautiful than summer nights anywhere else and there's possibly nothing better than dancing to live music on grass with stars above you in the then-Starlake-now-CocaCola amphitheater during those nights. Anyway, I'm pretty sure we went to the Spin Doctors' show with very little expectation. And it ended up being this perfect night. You know how sometimes you're at a show, and the band actually just connects with the audience, and everybody is feeling it? And you dance with strangers and sing at the top of your lungs and then people fall asleep in the car on the way home with the windows down? It was that kind of night. And months later, Pookie was watching MTV in Pittsburgh and I was watching MTV in Indiana and we both saw the same news report with the Spin Doctors. And the Spin Doctors said that their favorite show on the tour was in Pittsburgh. And Pookie and I were both like, "Yeah."

Speaking of Driving in the Midwest
Which is one of my favorite things to do, driving in the Midwest. These long roads lay out in front of you and you can just move, cover ground. This one time, Catwoman and DivaMae and I were taking a road trip where Catwoman and I were going to drop DivaMae in Indiana to visit his brother and then the two of us were headed to Louisville. It was summer. And we decided to drive all night. As the sun was coming up the next morning, Catwoman and DivaMae were both dead asleep in the car. And I was having a "moment." It was summer. We had driven all night talking about relationships and dreams. Two of my best friends were asleep in the car and the sun was orange and coming up over the cornfields and all was right with God. And just as I'm having this moment, DivaMae wakes up, reaches over to the cd player and turns FREAKIN' LORDS OF ACID ON AT FULL VOLUME, waking up Catwoman and destroying all the peacefulness in the sunrise. And yet, somehow that moment was perfect.

Speaking of DivaMae
One night, DivaMae and I decided that every time we heard the song "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails, we were going to strip our clothes off. And so we did.

Speaking of Being Naked
Wait. I don't even have one for this, and it was the only logical place that I could take that last one. Let's restart.

This one time, at band camp...
Band camp being one of my favorite times of the year every year in high school. And I was a freshman and TimR was a senior and a REBEL and he drove this blue drug van and everybody who was cool would have lunch in the drug van and sneak liquor after band camp moved to the football field during the second week. And I got invited to hang out with the cool kids in the van and then the next day TimR drove me home on his motorcycle and my mom FLIPPED OUT. That was a good summer.

Speaking of TimR....
There was a marina that his mother owned in Five Town that was named after him, and one day J-Flo and ChuckA and some of our other friends took J-Flo's boat out onto the Mon with more liquor than any group of 18-year-olds should ever have. And there was Zima. And ChuckA and I both drank so much Zima that by the time we docked at TimR's marina we were sick and embarrassing to be around AND we never drank Zima again in our lives. But I remember that that was one of the last days that we were able to all spend together as a group before people all started leaving, and it was sunny and fun and I still remember it.

See how I cycled from J-Flo back to J-Flo? We'll jump to another time era later.