Learning to Embarrass Yourself in Public

Man: "You two really know Chicago."
Me: "We spent most of the summer of 2001 practicing approximately 400 times."

One of the skills that Brady and I did not expect to acquire at debate camp in Iowa was the ability - eight years later - to flawlessly and show-stoppingly belt "We Both Reached for the Gun" in a piano bar in Manhattan. Very marketable! (I'm including the James Naughton clip because we both do it so much better than Richard Gere.)

I'm Full of Good Ideas!

David and I went to see Kirsten Gillibrand at the LGBT Community Center yesterday. She was so likeable! We also went to see Sister Spit and I developed an intensely passionate crush on Michelle Tea. If Kirsten Gillibrand joined Sister Spit and they did lesbian-feminist performance art at the US Capitol, I would basically be the happiest person alive. (Sometimes I think this is what Tammy Baldwin is actually doing and it is deeply inspiring.)

Marry Me

Cubbyhole is the best bar ever. Within fifteen minutes of arriving with Abby and Emma, I made friends with a woman who offered to buy me a hamburger, ruffled my hair, said that I don't have any body fat, kissed me goodbye twice, and told me she'd have to give me a job at her university when I finish my PhD. She literally found every part of my personality and made it feel good.

PhD Quote of the Day

"This level of personal involvement is important to the direction that this work has taken - a less involved observer would be unlikely to appreciate the embodied thrill of participating in cooking in a communal cafe for a hundred people, building a sadomasochistic play space out of found objects, or facing a line of riot police dressed in pink and silver gender-ambiguous drag" (Brown 2007: 2686).

This will be a footnote in my methodology section if it kills me.

Hard Knock Life

The highlight of my evening yesterday was when Brady, Emma, and I were getting ready to leave Musical Mondays, and then this came on and Emma got so excited that she almost tipped over the table. Orphanages are so whimsical!



This can be filed with Hogan's Heroes, Oliver!, and Pretty Woman under "People Having Fun Under Objectively Un-Fun Circumstances." Appropriately, it was followed by Newsies, the most upbeat musical ever about striking child laborers. And I have obviously had this stuck in my head all day.

'Til Death

On Friday, I was getting ready to take Lee's poodle, Tabitha, out for a walk and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror across the hall from the elevator. As I stood there in my corduroy jacket, balancing the poodle tucked under my arm with a cup of coffee in the other, it suddenly struck me that this is exactly what I'm going to look like when I'm 30. I actually think that's pretty awesome - shortly thereafter, I had to restrain Tabitha when she tried to attack a woman in a fur coat in a Century 21 advertisement on the side of a bus, and then we went home and played tennis and I had the kind of good (if one-sided) conversation that I typically have with dogs. We have a lot in common, as I learned we are both afraid of jackhammers and sometimes run into walls.

The rest of the weekend was pretty much the same. David was up, and I did all sorts of domestic things like baking pre-fab cookies, replacing the batteries in my carbon monoxide detector, fixing my showerhead, and re-mounting a hook in my bathroom. (The cookies were the best part, although I'm not going to knock the ability to shower without a metal astroid firing off at your naked body when you least expect it.)

David brought a bunch of work, so we didn't really go out, but Emma and I went to Long Island City for a wedding reception for a friend of mine, and we saw Anna Deavere Smith's Let Me Down Easy at the 2econd Stage Theatre. (If you have a chance to see it before it closes in early December, definitely do. It's a great meditation on death and dying and the fragility and resilience of the human body. She's amazing, and she does a pretty convincing Reverend Gomes.)

Balloon Boy Is the Hero of Our Apartment

"You hate children, and I watch the news. I think he did this to help us out at parties."