Happy Birthday, Us!

Some people ask if sharing my birthday with Lib takes away from my birthday, but I like it. Most people (girls) think it's really cute when they find out and make high-pitched cooing and cat noises , while others (guys) want to puke. I believe one guy at work even responded with "That's gay."

The big problem with sharing a birthday with your significant other is "what do you do?" I decided to take us both to Cirque du Soleil to see "Ovo," and it was pretty awesome, but I couldn't have prepared for the gift (knock on wood) that we got on Sunday, our actual birthday.

On the way to the city on Saturday, our real estate agent, Nancy, began texting us excitedly about a "cute cute cute house" that was perfect for us. I planned on seeing after the holiday, but Lib texted her that we would be available Sunday morning, and she was more than happy to meet with us. What are the chances that we would find the perfect house on our birthday? Not as slim as putting in an offer and finding out it was accepted within a few hours,but we are going into attorney review on Tuesday, and should have the inspection by the end of next weekend.

It has three bedrooms and one bath. The house is a nice Cape Cod with a finished basement that includes a separate laundry room and a separate workshop. Oodles of storage. Not only is it in great shape, but it was built in 1949 by the man who lived in it and built other homes in the neighborhood. His widow moved out a week ago at the age of 88. She left the place immaculate and left us the original blueprints and every receipt for every appliance. The place has a good feel to it. It feels like a family lived and grew in it for sixty years, and I gotta say it's a bit intimidating to pick up where a family like that left off. I'm getting a bit mushy. On a lighter note the basement is all pine paneled walls--feels a bit like a Pocono cabin in the 70s. Were totally going to have an appropriately themed party when we move in since there is a pine bar built in also.

The lady was thrilled that a young couple was buying her home, but not as excited as Butch, the very nice man who lives next door who came into the house (when he called her to tell her to sell it to us she said she signed the paperwork) yelling "hello?" so he could shake my hand and tell me how excited he was that we were going to be neighbors. He even offered us use of his lawnmower until we could afford one...at the low cost of $500 for the gas.

I can't wait! (knock on wood)-Pine, lots of pine to knock on.

Yet Another Saturday

When you walk into the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, it seems kinda small, but when you consider exactly how many syphilitic skin samples, excised carbuncles or deformed skeletons you can fit into two stories, it starts to seem rather large. The impacted colon that is the size of a ...I can't think of anything but that amorphous, serpentine tentacle that comes in the ship on Abyss and looks the lady in the face--like that but a colon, big and brown, is pretty unsettling if you consider carrying it around in your abdominal cavity. And if you're into looking at different deformed fetuses preserved in jars and getting really sad, then this is your kind of place.

However, if you are overly empathetic or a hypochondriac, DO NOT GO HERE. You will be miserable. If you are squeamish or faint of heart, then stay home--I take that back, you should go here (except hypochondriacs) just to see what kind of terrible, painful and debilitating growths and deformities the human body is capable of. You should go. You should learn. And you should leave the place being thankful that you are happy and healthy...for now.

Just Another Saturday

This is actually a post about last weekend, but it has taken the whole week for me to really process and accept what happened. Lib's sister Rach, who is wonderful, came over for dinner and brought her friend Dina with her, who is also very nice to have around. We had a nice dinner, and I went out to get some drinks afterward.

When I returned, I was surprised to find that I was involuntarily assigned the character of Lila, a game piece in the board game Sweet Valley High. So I played, but it was a little awkward searching Sweet Valley High School high and low for Ken, my supposed boyfriend. When the game got close, I had to fight tooth and nail to keep my boyfriend or steal someone else's, and considering Dina is a lesbian, it was probably one of the most warped games of Sweet Valley High ever played, but Lib won anyway, so I guess Dina and I were off the hook (besides, I think we were both eyeballing the game pieces).

After Dina left, Rach convinced us to watch The Human Centipede on On-Demand. If you weren't aware, The Human Cenipede is an independent horror flick that is about two trashy New York girls who set out across Europe to go to clubs and party, but when their car breaks down in the forest, they make one of many idiotic decisions that leads them to a mad doctor's house. I say "mad" because he used to separate Siamese twins, but decided he wanted to reverse his talents to create. The movies starts with the good doctor weeping in his car over pictures of his experimental abomination consisting of his three rottweilers, who are lovingly referred to on the small headstone in his back yard as "My Sweet Three Hound" just before he shoots a trucker with a tranquilizer who had pulled over to take a dump on the side of the highway. The result of his experiment and the girls' bad decisions is a "creation" that consists of three people sewn mouth to ass to create a three segmented human centipede. The movie went south from there--way south.

Needless to say, I was relieved to wake on Sunday having not dreamt that I was a teen-aged girl searching for her boyfriend in halls of The Black Forest High School, only to end up with my best friend and I sewn face to ass to a Japanese man who doesn't speak any English in a crazy naziesque doctor's remote torture farm, but I fear that some repressed image or scene from the film will one night as I sleep, unexpectedly well up from my subconscious and send me into convulsive fits or at the very least therapy.

The Bald and the Beautiful

I have a theory. This usually precedes cockamamie ideas from your friends or drunk people that make no sense. But I have a theory--a real theory. Today, I noticed a coworker, not a close coworker, but someone I see and don't know his name, and he has the dumbest hair cut. In the late nineties, it may have been cool, but I'm not sure it belongs in the 21st century, especially since we are on the second decade already. My question is: why would someone keep a stupid haircut for so long?

This is where my theory comes into play. I have noticed this trend in others, mostly men, who cling to a certain era of fashion, whether it be in clothing or hairstyle, and this is my theory: These people must have gotten laid more at this time in their lives than any other when this style was in fashion and not much prior; as a result, they are afraid to let go of the style of the times, or zeitstyle, because either consciously or unconsciously, they attribute their animal magnetism to the "look." What is even more tragic about the condition is, I believe, that even after they stop getting action, the afflicted are too afraid to abandon la moda for anything, even in the face of complete abstinence, believing that something must be just around the corner. Why else would people still wear stone-washed jeans, or even more rare, the netted t shirt?

Case in point: Seven or eight years ago, my friend's cover band played in a bar full of forty-somethings. My other friend and I went to see the show, and there was this guy who looked exactly like Steven Segal--exactly. Not only was it his features, but also his hair(the slick, pulled back, tiny ponytail) and his dress(the small-collared black shirt buttoned all the way to the top). Even this guy's mannerisms, the squint and the raspy soft but firm voice were just like Segal, but it wasn't Segal. Ten to twenty years ago, this guy probably cleaned house with the ladies, but in 2002, he looked a bit foolish. But to play the devil's advocate, I must ask: should he have abandoned the look for the sake of not looking like a washed-up, B-list movie star (who would later have his own reality show) or should he get out of the shower, towel off on a bamboo mat, light some candles next to his plastic buddha, button his satin shirt and head into cougar central in the hopes that some fine lady has been carrying around a fetish for the star of Hard to Kill for the past twenty years? I think you know the answer to that; otherwise, we would not have the pleasure of seeing the Steve Perry and Kenny Rogers look alikes on the streets of our fair cities from time to time.

Not that I am completely free of this same fate; I realized that if being completely bald ever becomes taboo or pass'e, I might be mistaken for one of these guys, but in my defense it's not that I'm clinging to a ravenously sexy period of my life( because I don't think I've ever had one)but because I don't really have a choice, unless the male-pattern-baldness horseshoe becomes a turn-on. Could I become some anachronistic egg head that passersby will point to and laugh? Will I be the like the guy who thinks he's Burt Reynolds or Dee Snyder? Will my perfectly shaped head come to haunt me because I can never carpet it in thick lustrous waves of shiny, healthy hair?

Just as I started to get a bit panicky, something occurred to me, as if God heard my cry de profundis and decided to send the spirit of comfort and reassurance to let me know that everything is all right--that everything would always be fine, and that I would never be that guy unless I failed to update my wardrobe or facial hair: Bald is the new black. It's classic, simple, and if done tastefully, will never go out of style. It changed Michael Chiklis from the fat eighties comb-over commish to the bald, unrelenting (though morally corrupt) badass, Vick Mackey. I'm perfectly fine! I'm going to be OK!

"F" FarmVille.

That's right, screw FarmVille! Success in farming is not about how many friends you have on the Internet, it is about hard work, which according to Michael Bluth is "the sweet sting of sweat in your eyes."

Finally, Lib and I got to start working on our own little ten-by-ten plot at the community garden yesterday. Sure, I can't expand to the "great big ol' plantation" like in Farmville, but I can actually eat what grows in this farm. I don't need to fertilize my neighbors, and I don't lose myself staring mindnumbingly at the screen while a thirty-second loop of maddening country twang created by an intern in NYC (which was actually charming for the first three loops) plays over and over and over and over until my brain actually turns off waiting for the last percent of my pattypan squashes to finish "growing" so I can harvest. Thoreau would be rolling over in his grave, and he may actually leave his grave to stab me in the face with a loon if he knew that that is what I had resorted to. So I have decided to focus my efforts on the earth, the real soil that brings real life to nutritive vegetation.

It was a hard five hours under the baking sun, clearing grass and weeds with and breaking up our plot with a maddock. We worked some lime and corn gluten into the soil, put up a tiny fence, and got everything ready for planting. Even Lib took a few swings with the maddock to get things moving along.

So you can probably bet on seeing some garden blogs thrown in here and there, and I will try to limit it to the most exciting moments, but I'm not really sure what qualifies when it comes to gardening. Maybe I will eat one of the habaneros I plan on growing, or maybe I will attempt to make the world's largest salad...or maybe I will just keep posting busty pictures of Lib sweating under the sun every so often...or maybe she won't like that, so here is one. Enjoy.