Tidbits

More to keep you busy while I'm training camp this week:

- I've read this post on Doublethink by Helen Rittlemeyer twice through now, and I'm still trying to get my head around it. I typically don't read Jezebel (Fleshbot was always my preferred Gawker Media blog, before it abandoned it's original focus on the intersection between porn and mainstream media and moved to just covering the porn industry itself), but it's on my radar now due mostly to Rittlemeyer's treatment. Put this in the "What Would Twisty Do" category. Thanks to Sczcepanski for passing this along.

- A good reason why I love the Irish and secretly wish I was can be found here, via Rittelmeyer again and her Cigarette Smoking Blog. Being half Italian Catholic and half Russian/Polish Jew certainly provides opportunities for despair and heartbreak, but not like being Irish. Maybe that's why I moved to Dorchester, where my Jewish grandparents grew up after escaping the Holocaust, where my dad was raised, where their temple is now a mosque, and where I'm surrounded by Irish bars. And remember, I don't mean Irish-themed bars, but bars run and populated by Irish people. Your illegal immigrant laborers waiting for work on the corner might be South and Central American, but in my neighborhood they're 20-year-old Irish kids, even if the Brazilians recently surpassed them. Thanks to again to Sczcepanski for turning me on to CSB.

- Janice and I are relentless mix cd makers for each other. We've been dating for almost two years, and I've made her a total of 23 CD's. (She hasn't gotten the 23rd one yet, SHHHHHH!) That's one mix CD per month, if you can do the math, yeah? She's made 18 for me. In the first year and half of our relationship, we literally didn't get into a single fight or disagreement. It was uncanny, eerie, even. It got to the point where I was scared for when the honeymoon might finally end, since with 10 years of marriage under my belt, I knew what we had going on was too good to be true. Eventually we got to that point in our relationship where we were reaching some crossroads: was it time to talk about whether to move in together, how were our careers affecting our relationships, and did we want to start building a life together and not just live off witty, sarcastic teasing, best-friend companionship, and overwhelming attraction to each other. Add to that some experimentation with hormonal birth control (for her, not me!), and you might say we finally entered our first real period of relationship crisis.

You can see it in the CDs we've made for each other over the past few years. The track listings start off so sweet. Six Different Ways by The Cure, Let's Pretend We're Married by Prince, Please Let Me Get What I Want by The Smiths. From Janice there were songs like Too Good To Be True by Spiraling, You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome by Madeleine Peyroux, and When My Boy Walks Down the Street by The Magnetic Fields. But then the track listings get, well, sadder, and more angry. Malfunction by The Cro-Mags from me, Back In Your Head by Tegan and Sara from her. You get the gist. The CD tracks have directly correlated with the state of our relationship, and things got hard for a while.

Fortunately, we made it through our first big test. We dubbed the hormonal IUD Janice had been using "Rosemary's Baby," and finally had it removed. We had to kill the alien inside her, and it was like night and day. We had a lot of serious issues in front of us to work out, but they were much easier to work out when both of us could think straight. When we start having conversations about vasectomies or babies as a better option than the effect hormones were having on her, you know it's serious.

The point of all that is that we make amazing CDs for each other, full of meaning and love; the kind Nick Hornby would appreciate. Janice, with her art degree and full-time job as the art director for the Portland Phoenix - she kind of outdoes me on the cover art. This was on the most recent CD:

I can't compete with that! But I also can't wait for the next 18 installments.