my flip flops come with instructions

Apparently I am supposed to "keep refrigerated or frozen"

today's "laugh out loud in class" moment

Becky (9:03:47 PM): OMG

Becky (9:03:56 PM): i just emailed john [professor] the table of consanguinity

Me (9:04:57 PM): instead of john [law student]?

Becky (9:05:30 PM): yessss

. . .

Me (9:10:19 PM): maybe i can "accidentally" send a marriage proposal to troy?

Becky (9:10:33 PM): hahahaha

Becky (9:10:38 PM): that would NOT be an accident!

Me (9:11:22 PM): "sorry, meant to send that to your dad"

Becky (9:11:39 PM): LOL

Me (9:12:30 PM): i can be your new mommy, troy!

Becky (9:12:44 PM): hahahahahahahahahahaha

Becky (9:13:03 PM): tell him he can discuss his inheritance with his father, who now has the complete table

"you know any dave?"

I got tricked into buying tickets to Kevin Devine's "Put Your Ghost To Rest" re-release party last night because Brand New posted a bulletin on MySpace saying to "look for Jesse Sunday and Monday" and I knew I couldn't go to the Looney Tunes show today because of Crim Pro. But then I bought tickets and realized that Jesse was playing a show with Brand New at Geneseo last night. I kept hoping that he would be able to defy the laws of space and time and manage to get to Willismsburg sometime to at least be able to play "Cotton Crush" with Kev, but no such luck, as (though I forget sometimes) Jesse Lacey is only human.

Kevin Devine did not disappoint though. Even though I'm an idiot and dragged Becky with me to get there for around 7 when, I soon discovered, Kevin didn't go on until 10. So we walked around Williamsburg aimlessly for nearly an hour, where Becky pointed out how suspicious we probably looked and that a cop might have a reasonable suspicion that criminality was afoot if they saw us that would justify them stopping and frisking us. I've never seen so many Thai and sushi restaurants in such a small area.

Long story longer, I have a total crush on Kevin Devine . . . he is absolutely my favorite person in the world with my initials! Highlights:

• He played "Put Your Ghost To Rest" in its entirety. As I guess could have been expected, seeing that it was the re-release party. But it was excited nonetheless because I don't know that I've ever heard him do "Go Haunt Someone Else" live.
  
• The eleven year old (ok, not really, but kinda really) who played EVERY INSTRUMENT KNOWN TO MAN (ok, not really, but kinda really)
• "Take me to prom!" "I'm a grown ass man, I can't take you to prom! I can DRIVE you to prom!"
• Kareem Abdul Jabar! He made his mom cover her ears. I'm not sure why. But it was cute. Listen for yourself! (It's 30 seconds, watch the clip, don't be lame.)

• His "you know any Dave?" story . . . I fully appreciate anyone who doesn't think that Dave Matthews is God's gift to music. Which may be because I am convinced that Kevin Devine is God's gift to music.
  
• Chuck and Howie/Meredith's husband Chris were in the GDB! Amazing!
• "People Are So Fickle"! LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE that song.
• Super seriously, I looooooooove Kevin Devine. So severely.

I suppose that the the most satisfying thing about the whole night was this IM from Becky today:

Becky (10:20:49 PM): p.s. i googled a picture of jesse lacey today

Becky (10:20:52 PM): and he's so cute!!

I love it.

not feeling outlining = return of the procrastination surveys

Haven't done one of these in a while, and this Long Island one is going around MySpace

BASICS

1) What town are you from?
Port Jefferson Station

2) Live on the island your whole life?
Except for the five years I was in NYC

3) are you going to stay forever?
There's plenty of other places I'd like to live, but the majority of my family is here, so I don't see myself going anywhere unless they do

4) what parking lot did you waste your youth in?
haha, did people actually do that? I don't know anyone who hung out in parking lots

5) name four famous people from the island:
I use the term "famous" loosely to include my love Jesse Lacey, along with Billy Joel, Lindsey Lohan and Mariah Carey

6) ever work at a 7-11 or a supermarket?
Nope

8) anyone in your family ever been in newsday?
Ha, my brother and I both got our names in the "HS graduation" editions, my aunt wrote a letter to the editor, and I'm sure there have been other mentions through the years

9) have you been inducted at the bawdy barn?
Um, it's Boardy Barn. And nooo, I do not do beer.

10) should long island be its own state?
No way, we're more "New York" than the top part of the state! Unless you gave us the five boroughs too, because we pretty much ARE our own state.


CHOOSE ONE

1) 2am taco bell or 2am wendy’s?
Taco Bell! What kind of question is this?

2) yuppy puppy or NSAL?
NSAL hands down . . . my friend got a puppy at the Yuppy Puppy and it was dead within a month. That place is horrible

3) starbucks or dunkin donuts/baskin robins?
Port Jeff actually has a Dunkin Donuts and a Baskin Robbins that are separate from each other

4) mulcahy’s or the nutty irishman?
Never been to either . . . nappertandys

5) parkways or back roads?
back roads, although it's pretty hard to avoid the parkways

6) north shore or south shore?
North shore!!!!!!

7) east end or west end?
middle . . . east end is pretty but too rural, and nassau county is nassau (enough said). Western Suffolk is the way to go.

8) train into the city or drive?
I love the LIRR but will never say no to somebody else driving

9) brand new or taking back sunday?
BRAND NEW!! Oh my God, I'm so glad this was a question! Haha.

10) you have more family in florida or north carolina?
North Carolina . . . haha, I love that this was a question too.

HAVE YOU EVER

1) been to the lighthouse?:
Yes

2) been to the statue of liberty?:
Haha, if you include going to Ellis Island and stopping the ferry to let people off at the statue of liberty. And I didn't do that until I was 21.

3) rocked out to billy joel with your friends in the car?:
Who hasn't?

4) been to two different 7-11s in the same day?:
Absolutely

5) we know you live on an island but, have you even been on a boat?:
yes.

6) driven from brooklyn to the lighthouse?
No

7) driven to the city for no reason?:
nope

8) driven to montauk for no reason?:
nope

9) been to the planetarium?
yep!

10) been to united skates?
Just Amaze N Skates before it closed . . . no clue where united skates was


TOWNS

1) i say riverhead you say?
Outlets and the jail

2) i say centereach you say?
Middle Country Road

3) i say port jeff you say?
Home!!

4) i say stony brook you say?
I hate their hockey team

5) i say huntington you say?
the first GAP I ever went to, with my mom and grandma and sometimes Amanda, every Thursday after school

6) i say babylon you say?
WBAB

6) i say oceanside you say?
Michelle

7) i say hempstead you say?
Hofstra!

8) i say levittown you say?
JESSE LACEY . . . swoon

9) i say wantagh you say?
Jones Beach

10) i say montauk you say?
watching the sunrise


BEST

1) Best diner?
Seaport

2) best food from that diner?
Cheese fries

3) best mall?
Smithhaven was what I grew up with . . . it was always so crappy compared to Roosevelt Field, but they've done some nice stuff with it in the past few years

4) best beach?
Jones Beach

5) best pizza?
Colosseo

6) best mini golf?
all the good mini golf places closed

7) movie theatre?
PJ Cinemas, even though I can't ever go back there for personal reasons

8) public park?
never spent much time in parks

9) best ices?
Ralph's

10) best billy joel song
Just one? Seriously? I love "And So It Goes"

THINGS ONLY PEOPLE FROM LONG ISLAND WILL GET:

1) fire island is gay or totally cool?
I wouldn't say "totally cool", and I never even went there until I was 24, but it's definitely more cool than gay (and as a quick disclaimer, not that "gay" cannot be "cool", I'm just saying the Fire Island = gay stereotype is pretty misguided)

2) are you sick of people asking you about the Amityville horror house?:
I haven't really gotten questions about it since that movie with Melissa "I severely hate you" George came out, so no

3) is the psych center haunted?
Probably not, but if there was a place on LI that would be haunted, that would be it

4) you still hope they’re building that bridge to Connecticut:
nah, that would be boring if the Port Jeff Ferry was obsolete, that's our claim to fame

5) is montauk really “the end”?
oh yeah.

flashback friday: travis's "kodak moment" pick-up line reminded me of my 5th grade crush

"Writing the Autobiography" essay, Spring 2003

To say that I was boy crazy when I was in elementary school is an understatement. I was six years old when I developed my first crush. It wasn’t on a real boy, of course. My love was a celebrity. I’d see him on television and my young heart would skip a beat. I was in love. And who was this man, you ask? Not a New Kid On the Block. Not Uncle Jesse from Full House – of course he was dreamy, but not my true love. No, the man that I was in love with was Mark Summers, from Nickelodeon’s Double Dare. I obviously didn’t have very high standards in first grade, but back then I thought he was beautiful. I have pictures from my seventh birthday party, standing in the bowling alley smiling at the camera with my hair in braided pigtails and proudly sporting a bright pink Double Dare t-shirt.

My taste in boys improved with age, however. In second grade, when I caught my first glimpse of the twenty-something who lived around the block from me, I told my friends at school in wonder how he was “even cuter than Mark Summers!” And then came John B. He was in Mrs. Laporte’s class, and my best friend Kim and I would sit at the lunch table closest to him in the cafeteria, giggling about how cute he was. Imagine my ecstasy when a girl in my class played the game MASH for me and it revealed that John and I were going to get married! And a third grader who claimed to be psychic told me that he’d had a vision of me marrying a boy with brown eyes. And John had brown eyes! I was in love. I spent the entire summer after second grade writing him letters weekly. He didn’t reply to even one of them, and my eight-year-old heart was broken. But it all ended up being okay because two years later, he ended up my square dance partner and my boyfriend, for an entire week. I was the envy of the entire fourth grade. But like all great romances of the twentieth century, it did not last. By the next week, John was square dancing with Stephanie, I was square dancing with Kevin, and the love that we’d had for one another was a distant memory.

But nobody could compare to Paul. Paul was the epitome of ten-year-old dreaminess. He had it all. The blond hair, the blue eyes – he was the Zack Morris of the fifth grade, and everyone loved him. The girls all wanted him and the boys all wanted to be him. I know that’s cliché, but there’s no other way to say it because he was just one of those boys. Even my mom’s youngest sister, my twenty-four year old Aunt Ruth, would giggle with me when I’d tell her how cute he was, saying, “If that boy was fifteen years older...” Okay, yeah, my family’s sick, but now do you see how cute Paul must have been? He lived down the street from me, and even my mom thought that I should marry him. She always teased me about having a crush on him, which I denied the entire year to her, but boy did I have it bad. At school, my friends and I came up with a secret name for him so that we could talk about how cute he was without anyone knowing. His name? Cody. Why Cody? Well, because every time we saw him, it was a “Kodak Moment”. Oh how I loved that boy, and it was obviously meant to be because a computerized love compatibility game at the local amusement park, Adventureland, revealed that we were made for each other after I inputted our names and our birthdays. And I had an edge over the other girls who loved him too. Back in first grade, he had fought with another boy over me on the playground during recess. I knew we belonged together. Inspired by the movie My Girl (well, convinced that Paul would die a tragic death by bee stings before we got to fulfill our destiny to be together), I wrote a confession of my love to him while I was at my best friend Kelli’s house. But alas, I never had the guts to give him my letter, and after a summer spent pining away over him, I entered middle school and was introduced to two other elementary schools worth of boys. Eventually, Paul ended up at a private school anyway, and his presence in my life was reduced to memory and the few Kodak moments that had actually been captured in pictures.

Things changed when I got older, of course. No longer did I obsess over game show hosts and classmates. No, college came, and I found a new love: hockey players. My love for hockey players had grown slowly but surely over the course of the previous six years, starting on a small scale (little crushes on my brother’s teammates) and gradually growing to the extremes of borderline stalking Hartford Wolf Pack AHL players. By the time I hit college, however, I had calmed down a bit and set my sites on the slightly more attainable college hockey players, and of course, the way to do this was by managing NYU’s team.

Okay, fine. I guess nothing really had changed. There were still the nicknames. The boy who walked around a bit too freely in the locker room whenever I entered was “Not So Ugly Naked Guy” (sometimes N-Sung for short). And there was “Yellow Hat Boy” and “Abercrombie Boy” – there were just so many of them, and they were all so cute!

By my sophomore year in college, I had expanded my horizons a bit. Oh sure, I was still enthralled by my boys (that year, we acquired a player who I am still convinced is one of the most physically perfect human beings to ever walk the face of this planet – I swear, that boy is single-handedly responsible for global warming, but that is another story), but I had also discovered the (literal) beauty of opposing teams. I’ll never forget that first night in Poughkeepsie that December, gazing at wonder with my fellow manager, Mary, at the Marist players that kept walking by. It became clear within minutes why the team was called the Red Foxes – DAMN were they foxy! Mary and I made no secret of our attraction to the entire Marist team, particularly their star defenseman. NYU ended up playing Marist in the first round of league playoffs that year, and I can only imagine what the Rex Foxes must have thought when they walked by our team to go to their locker room and were met with thirty pairs of watchful eyes, looking them up and down. “Oh, come on, you think those guys are hotter than us?” one Violet asked us in disbelief. Of course I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but you know what they say, if you ask a stupid question… And that was only Marist. The next week, when we were in Indianapolis for Nationals, we had the captain of our team ready to set us up with the hotties from the Central Connecticut State University team, who happened to be dining in the very same T.G.I. Fridays that we were in. A year later, we asked the cute backup goaltender for SUNY – Albany to take a picture with us. With NYU, Marist, Central Connecticut, and Albany all in the same league (and let’s not forget those Siena hotties), it was easy to forget that I was supposed to be watching the game and not the guys.

I’d like to tell you that with less than three weeks left in my college career, as I stand on the brink of the real world, that I’ve matured. I’d like to tell you that I look back on all of the MASH games, and the nicknames, and the crushes and I’m embarrassed to think of how stupid and silly it all really is. But the truth is, I’m not. I look back on my boy crazy past and a smile is instantly brought to my face. It’s just part of who I am.

As for the future? Well, nothing is certain. But I can pretty much guarantee that I will be marrying Dan and living with him, our four kids, and our pet goat in an apartment in Pennsylvania, right next door to our best friends Mary and [______ *name omitted so Mary doesn't kill me!*], their two kids, and their pet turtle. And whenever I start to question my fate, I remember back to that day in second grade when the clairvoyant third grader prophesized my marrying a boy with brown eyes. I smile, reminding myself that MASH would never lie, and I go back to coming up with names for my kids.

Person of the Month: March 2008

PERSON OF THE MONTH
MARCH 2008



BRITON S.
(who apparently does not approve of his winning)

One of the tragedies of my failure to properly maintain my website after April 2006 is that I ended up neglecting to name P.O.M.s for nearly two years and that people like Briton are just winning for the first time now. Because there is no doubt that Briton would have *owned* this award over the past couple of years. Briton's been one of the best, if not the best, friends I've had at law school and hands down one of the most awesome people in my life ever. But I guess since this is a Person of the Month award I'll try to limit my praise to the month of March. March involved: the PJF Auction (where we were very rudely outbid for a dinner with Silber by the kid sitting on the other side of Briton - how rude!), continuing the search for the perfect cheese fries (Ruby Tuesday's - not bad; Social's - better), Barrister's, THE CUTTING EDGE! 1, 2 and 3 (my favorite part about that is that he got mad at Becky and me for talking through CE3 and missing parts of it), and then Blades of Glory (March 2008 will forever be "figure skating movie month" to me), St. Patrick's Day (where I discovered Briton's AMAZING ability to take group self portrait pictures - seriously amazing), our adventures in Waldbaums searching for 50% off Easter candy and tiny plastic swords and doing Peeps wars in his microwave (which was documented in photos, but alas, the blog entry never happened), fun times in NYC . . . I think my favorite Briton moment of the entire month was driving home from the city over Spring Break and me, Briton and Becky were in the backseat, and "We Will Rock You" was playing on the radio and when it went into "We Are the Champions", Briton suddenly got excited and said "I just had a dream that it was going to go into this song!" I don't know why it was so funny but it just made me laugh again now remembering it. Also, when I found out that Mary would be leaving me (sniffle) a few months earlier than expected, Briton was a life saver by agreeing to move in to take her place . . . and to have a Full House complete series marathon with me. Let's be honest, it just doesn't get much better than that. Sooo . . . sorry this was late, but it couldn't go to someone more deserving. Briton's so money and he doesn't even know it.

best tv moment of the week

Totally awesome early 90s flashback.

melissa complained that i don't update this enough

Although I wasn't quite as disappointed by this as Rachel was, I would agree that it's probably one of the cruelest April Fool's jokes ever. Well, aside from that time Anna and I wrote Kellee and Carla that letter from Housing saying that they were going to get kicked out of housing and that Kellee couldn't walk at graduation for drinking on the SAFE floor. Anyway. Fortunately, I had already read Rachel's entry saying how elaborate and expensive and MEAN this joke was, so I knew it was a joke - sadness anyway. I definitely had a crush on Link in elementary school. (As opposed to Rachel, who has a crush on Link now.)

Anyone crazy enough to want to be in NYC by 7am on Friday for the NKOTB appearance on The Today Show? I'm serious, let's go!

And finally, Dr. Pepper will give everyone in America a free soda if Axl Roses releases new Guns N' Roses Album, Chinese Democracy, in 2008. Love it.