eff you, miss california

so the embattled miss california has obviously had enough of all us forward-thinking folks pickin’ on her and she’s decided to go to dc to launch a campaign against same-sex marriage. she of the “well, i think it’s great that americans are able to choose one or the other. we live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage” is launching a campaign.

[which leaves me wondering: "opposite marriage"?? what is that? isn't that, like, divorce? [i am quoting her directly, btw, from her answer at the miss usa pageant, which you can see here.]

i’m kind of irritated w/the today show (one of my fave shows; hi, meredith! hi, matt! hi, anne! love ya!), as they aired an “exclusive” interview w/her this a.m.  i already had a blaring headache and her squeaky little pageant voice just made it worse.

i’m like, look. you’re obviously not that bright. also? it’s also not very “christian” of you to launch a “campaign” against ppl who love each other and want to tie the knot. this is what kills me about “religious” ppl: you say you’re all religious and want to walk in the ways of G-d. the thing is, G-d doesn’t shun! or ostracize. or hate. (at least not the G-d i know. i’m jewish btw.) and neither did jesus. but whatevs.

anyway, i’m just like, shut the eff up. stick to vasiline-ing your teeth and waving and being thin and smiling and trying on gowns and stuff.

ppl like holly and i are obviously trying to undermine the american family. you know, like, our eight years together, where we’ve like…cooked together and gone to museums and drive in our cars and get haircuts and stuff. obviously.

10,000 and counting!

oh and btw? i’ve totally hit the 10,000 mark! (surpassed it, in fact)

this is all thanks to YOU, my loyal readers! happy friday (or “fry-day,” as nicolina and i refer to it; a day for good times and many many fries ) and a sunshine-filled weekend!!! (supposed to gawgeous in bmore/dc) woohooo!

here’s the thing i don’t get

there’s been a lot of bad news around the baltimore area lately. in the span of one week, two entire families (wife/husband/kids) have been killed in murder-suicides, both committed by fathers/husbands. one family had three kids, the other two. one lived in a quiet town outside baltimore, the other was from new york visiting their college daughter (a loyola student; apparently, she walked into the towson hotel room they were staying at and her father had already killed her mom and 11 year-old-sister).

more and more info keeps surfacing on both cases, and as much as it disturbs me, i keep reading. i mean, we all do. it’s human nature. everyone wants to find out why these sick things happened. what could possible lead a person to kill his entire family, kids and all? of course, as the “why” trickles out, so do details about the “how,” but i don’t even want to go there.

considering the state of affairs in this country, it’s not a complete surprise to me that the motives here were based in finance. debt, basically. also bad business practices in the latter case. so here’s the thing i just don’t yet:

you’re miserable. you’re drowning in debt. you want to kill yourself. so WHY TAKE YOUR ENTIRE FAMILY OUT????  why in the hell do you have to take your entire family down with you? most ppl w/families have life insurance policies. and these were middle class families, so they probably would have been taken care of if the father/husband took his own life. as much as it would suck and be awful, life would go on for the remaining family members. but instead, their lives were cut short. some of these were little kids.

the wife of a friend of mine called it narcissism. that these men thought they were so important, so essential, they if they had to go, they all did, b/c they could never go on w/out him. i never thought about it like that. but it could definitely be true.

the whole thing’s got me thinking about deranged, psychotic behavior in general. like, all these school shootings. these depressed, lonely kids hate their lives, hate themselves. so why the heck do you have to kill a dozen ppl and then yourselves??? i will never ever understand this.

this might just be my unfunniest blog entry yet, (you all know i live to make you laugh) but i just can’t stop thinking about all this. i promise next time i’ll be back to my old self. i’m just bummed lately, and haven’t been in the mood to joke around. (also spring headaches.)

if you have thoughts on all this (and i’m sure you), i’d love to hear them, so please chime in…

those housewives

despite my better judgement, i began watching bravo’s “the real housewives of nyc” last year. anyone who knows me knows that i have no airs when it comes to entertainment (or anything else, come to think of it). if it’s fun and i like it, i will watch it. or listen to it. and freely admit it. [case in point: britney. also: t.a.t.u. (fake russian lesbos), "maid in manhattan," "how to lose a guy in 10 days" and etc.]

i am very rarely an appointment tv watcher. meaning: i just watch my shows when they happen to be on. so i’m cleaning the kitchen last night, and it’s on. this is good kitchen-cleaning entertainment so i was thrilled.

anyway, this one lady (i forget her name but she has red hair) brings one of the other ladies [the "hot" one; no, not that one (the suspciously square-jawed chef) the other one (the one who likes to jog in traffic; wtf, i know, right?!)] to a private appt. with some sort of…purse maker. french lady? anyway, they’re sitting on the designer’s couch with a bunch of bags in front of them. like, on a coffee table. and they just look like…bags. call me “gay” (woman “gay” not man “gay”; two totally diff things and you know it and it’s ok to think it b/c i think it, too) but they really don’t look all that special. one is purple. another is red. one or two look like a snakeskin material.

so it’s the is the red-hair lady’s “birthday present”  (ok, i figured out who she is) to herself or from her husband or something. she’s like, hmmm, i think i like that one. yes, def. that one.

from my vantage pt, it looks like a knockoff of something i could find in tj maxx. [or, as my beloved late grandma would call it: "jt maxi" (oh grandma, you were so funny)] it’s red. and then the camera does a close-up of the pricetag: $16,000.

SIXTEEN. THOUSAND. DOLLARS. for a BAG!!! a BAG!!!

holly and i were watching together at this pt (yes, i was taking a break from said kitchen-cleaning) and were like, what? it was like a joke. a few more thousand dollars, and that’s the (low-end) starting salary of a recent undergrad. that’s more than some *cars*. that’s insane. and the craziest thing is that she barely thought anything of it. i can’t begin to wrap my mind around that sort of wealth. $16k could help us out a lot. that could alleviate a lot of worries for a lot of ppl. but for her it’s just a bag.

then her husband surprised her with a new, huge, black benz suv, and she whines that it doesn’t connect to her iphone or something so he says, ok, this one will be mine. i’ll get you another. (silence)

then there was a blowout fight about a tennis match. and like, jewelry shopping and some interior designing.

i know the entertainment value in these sorts of shows is the ridiculousness of it all. the great majority of ppl in this country don’t live the way these ladies and their families do. and so we all watch, mouths agape, as they “live the good life” and buy $16,000 bags and fight over tennis and freakout about charity events and shoes and boobs and decorators and whatnot. and mostly, it’s just entertainment for me. anything annoying i can usually forget in about 10 minutes (or less; yes, i have the attn span and sometimes the memory of a hamster, just ask holly and she’ll tell you). but that $16k bag thing last night really got to me. like it’s burrowed its way into my brain.

even in a good economy it’s hard to make ends meet, let alone treat yourself to something nice. (hell, holly and i have been together eight years and we have yet to even take a real vacation together. we didn’t even go on a honeymoon.) i guess i’m just trying to say…just…wow. i mean, look, if you have the money, i guess…you know? who am i to say? but that sh*t just blows my mind. and yet, i will continue to watch. and be disgusted and shocked. and watch again. total trainwreck that is reality tv. if you watch the show, i’d love to know what you think about all this. even if you don’t watch it. you know i love hearin from my peeps (no, not the marshmallow easter peeps! you. it means you )

in other news: passover cannot pass over soon enough. i made matzah pizza tonight! help!

i have been a negligent blogger lately

and i feel just terrible about it. there’s so much i want to tell all of you. and yet: i have no time. or have a headache (the transition to springtime is esp. hard for whatever reason, prob. the friggin barometric pressure). or am working on my book proposal (and trying to find an agent), which is proving to be a much bigger endeavor than i realized. (also there is Other Stuff that you won’t find out about until the book is published)

also: passover is kicking my a** this year!!! it’s not so much that i want bread, it’s just that it’s…inconvenient. logistically. trust me, it’s not that i don’t appreciate the exodus from egypt and all, i just want to buy lunch (or just pop something in the microwave) b/c i suck at bringing it/making it. i mean, how much tuna/egg salad and matzah can one really eat? i’m even beginning to tire of the chocolate-covered raspberry jelly rings. last week i twittered that i actually wanted to marry one. (that or a choc-covered passover marshmallow. or both.) now that’s saying something.

and…one last thing: major blog shoutout at yonat ‘n jason for hosting the BSE (best. seder. ever!) thursday night. HOLLA! srsly. you guys rule. and the fact that your son not only dressed up as pharaoh but did such a good job singing all the awesome passover kids songs (awww i am smiling just thinking about it) made for a casual evening. serendipitously, i sat directly in front of the delicious brisket. also od’ed on yonat’s insanely good homemade choc-chip mandel bread (how do i describe mandel bread? hmm…oh i know. kosher-for-passover biscotti.)  this made for a happy jessica. thanks again, guys! mmmmmwah!

b-bye bread

so tonight starts the jewish holiday of passover. it’s quite an involved story, (the book of exodus could break it down for you. or you could click on that handy lil link in the first sentence of this post. tad bit briefer!), but basically:

the jews were enslaved for hundreds of years in egypt, what, like 3/4,000 years ago?  i’m not exactly sure, but a very long time ago, as in, the era of pyramids (since the enslaved jews actually built some of them). so there was moses (“let my people go!”), and then G-d stepped in and there were plagues (locusts, darkness, boils, you know, just your average week in the life of the ancients) and then grand finale: the angel of death/killing of the first born (son). the jews put lambs blood on their doors to signify they were jewish, and so the angel passed over (hence “passover”) their homes and their sons were spared. that was pretty much the last straw for the egyptians, and they were like, “get out.”

so the jews left in a huge hurry. such a hurry that their bread didn’t have time to rise. hence matzah (the flat cracker-like stuff that’s sold around this time of year). then the pharoah (egyptian ruler) was like, no, wait, i changed my mind. so the jews are pursued in the desert until they hit the red sea. just as they’re about to be captured, it splits and they get to the other side, and splash, the red sea crashes on the egyptian soldiers. then there’s 40 years in the desert and there you go.

it feels kinda wacky to write it all out here on a blog entry in 2009. i mean, plagues? angel of death? lamb’s blood? an ocean splitting? but this is in the Torah (the old testament), and whether or not you’re into the details, the bottom line is, us jews were in dire straights and G-d stepped in and saved us. so we commemorate G-d’s kindness and the freedom we enjoy today every year at passover by not eating leavened bread (instead we eat the aforementioned matzah; it represents the hardships of our enslaved ancenstors) and a host of other things for a week. we also have two sedars, which retell the exodus from israel. the first one’s tonight and the second is tomorrow night (always the first and second nights of the holiday). 

i’ve always loved passover. ppl think i’m crazy for it, since there are so many food restrictions. but first of all, i enjoy anything associated with food. also, to me, passover ["pesach" (PAY-saCH) in hebrew, and that last "CH" you say like you're clearing your throat. that's right! you got it ] means spring. there’s fresh fruits, things are blooming, the sun’s out. also? cream cheese. passover means whipped cream cheese (easier to spread on very breakable matzah). also chocolate. and chocolate-covered matzah (sounds weird but really, sooo good).

i usually forget it after the second sedar is over, but passover also means freedom. that’s the real meaning of it. the jewish ppl have had their fair of drama. usually some leader or group of ppl is trying to kill us off or at least force us to stop practicing or convert. but here we are. still here. still goin’ strong. there may be less of us, but we’re here and determined to be around for the long haul. that’s really what this holiday is about. the freedom to live as jews, and that G-d’s never abandoned us, not even in our darkest hour. there are still jews around the world that can’t practice their faith freely, and passover’s a time to reflect on that and pray that one day our world will evolve so all jews, all ppl, can be free.

so, yes. b-bye bread! b-bye pizza. and also many other things (like beans and peanut butter and rice and corn chips and corn syrup, which is in a surprising number of things) that i won’t go into. something i forgot to mention? for all you wine lovers out there? yeah you’re totally supposed to drink four full cups of wine during each sedar. i stick to grapejuice, but yeah. four cups. of wine. haha. tttys, everyone!

eight years ago today

 i woke up in takoma park, close to floor, as i didn’t have a box spring those days (silly considering how many roaches umm “hung out” in my apt). it was just another wednesday for another new-ish college grad at her very first job. i was a community reporter with pink-streaked hair and a bad attitude.  i talked big but i was lonely. i could have never guessed, not in a million years, that later that same day i’d meet the love of my life.  

i remember it was unseasonably warm the night we met: april 3, 2001. it was “ladies night” at a now-defunct dc bar called chaos at Q & 17th streets NW. it was by chance that i wound up there. a girl i randomly hung out with those days and i went to go see sandra bernhard at my alma matar (university of md, college park), where i graduated not even a year earlier. a couple of other girls (other entirely random girls i don’t think i’ve seen since; one was a stripper the other was a corrections officer, go figure) invited us to go out. i was like “eh, ok,” so they picked us up afterwards from my place and off we went.

a girl in a yellow sweater (who turned out to be holly’s longtime close friend) had another girl tap me on the shoulder b/c she must’ve thought i was cute (i must say that i was wearing an exceptionally 80s outfit that night, so hell if i know why she even wanted to talk to me!). it was all very high school, but very cute. anyway, she wound up introducing me to all of her friends. one was this quiet girl (well i thought she was quiet then…) named holly. we were being wallflowers, holly and i, as i recall. the bar was hot and, as per usual, i was breaking a sweat (i break a sweat sometimes just thinking about breaking a sweat). i went to stand in front of a fan and she was there. we started talking and i invited her outside to talk some more where it was cooler.

 i remember touching the black shirt she was wearing.

 ”your shirt’s so soft,” i said.

 i also remember thinking how cool it was that i was talking to someone with a good head on her shoulders at a bar.  i got her and her friends’ email addresses. and again, hell if i know how i remembered her email (come to think of it, probably b/c it had to do with her darling brown eyes) b/c it wasn’t even close to her name. anyway, i don’t think her friend expected us to start chit-chattin it up outside the way we did, and her group wound up leaving and i was like, “um, aren’t those your friends?” she was like, “oh! yeah! email me!” and with a squeeze of her hand (tho she doesn’t remember squeezing it, but she was drinking and i wasn’t and i say she did) she was off.

anyway, i emailed her almost a week later from my reporting gig:

From: “Jessica”
To: “Holly”
Subject: chaos craziness etc.
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001

holly…

hey so it’s been almost a week since the chaos at chaos so i figured i’d drop you a line…i was in my new jersey homeland this past weekend for passover. i really love new jersey. it is, after all, the *garden state* — that’s what the license plates say

geez i hope you got home ok wednesday night…your friends looked like they were heading off without you. what was that all about??

anyway, it’s deadline day here at the newspaper, tuesday afternoons, the papers come out wednesdays, but i’ve finished all my stories. now i’m going food shopping.

are you gonna be in dc anytime soon??? we should meet up.

let me know how you’re doing…

take care.
jessica.

every year i log in to my old hotmail account (i only keep it around to save our old emails and there are a lot of em; yes, i’m sentimental….) to count back the days to figure out exactly when we met. anyway, a week later i get an email back. we email and talk on the phone for a month until we meet for our first date (also on 17th st. NW, same street as our wedding reception site and just down the street from where we had our wedding ceremony). that first date is a whole ‘nother story. but that first date led to a second which led to another and…the rest, as they say, is history. but i just want to say to you, holly, my hunny, my sweatheart…i love you so much. i thank G-d every day that eight years ago, for whatever reason i decided to go out with those random girls and bump into you. you are the light of my life, and meeting you was the best thing to ever ever happen to me…

to all of you out there still searching for that special someone, take heart. i thought it could never happen to (little badass) me: meet someone, fall in love, build a life with another person, get married. i’m not saying you’ll meet that person at a bar (for the record: we’re telling our future children we “met thru a mutual friend” (hey, she’s a mutual friend now!) until they’re older, not that meeting someone at a bar is a bad thing, ijs) but you never, ever know. it’s been an interesting eight years, hasn’t it, honey? ever since i met holly, every day has been…an adventure. looking back, my life was in all blues and grays before i met you.  i love you, sweetheart. here’s to april 3! here’s to eight more years and eight years after that. here’s to forever. mmwah… <3

served

saturday morning we were awoken by an obnoxious succession of doorbell rings followed by heavy pounding on our door. when i say ”morning” i mean before 7 a.m., like 6:50 a.m.  and by “obnoxious” i mean effing awful and rude. i want to note that holly and i were in an exceedingly pleasant deep sleep until this point.

we were like, “what THE?!!”

as holly put on her slippers and ran downstairs, i lifted our shade and peered down, expecting to see a ups or fedex truck and wanting to yell down something about being a mothereffin persistent deliveryman. instead i saw a burly dude with glasses and a ballcap staring up at me. he had a red car with its blinkers on parked in the middle of the street behind him. i got a bad feeling and suddenly wanted to open the window and throw my pointiest shoes at his dumbass face looking up at me.

a few moments later, i hear our door beep open (our alarm system; we’ve got the place wired up like fort knox) and a man’s deep voice says, “are you holly [lastname].” i started running downstairs, my hair poofed out (didn’t straighten it yet), pajama pants blowin in the wind, “holly! noooooooooooo!!!!”

we were getting served.

all those unpaid dc parking tickets holly got when she used to stay over at my apartment in adams-morgan had finally come back to haunt us. he was going to arrest her. this was it. did i mention my cousin was visiting *for the very first time* from philly and was sleeping in the guest room??? i was like, great. great introduction to our calm home life.

“please sign here.”

as i arrived downstairs, i saw her take hold of a clipboard and a pen that this a-hole pushed thru the practically shut door.

“holly, noooooooooooo! DON’T SIGN THAT!”

she told me to simmer down, and shut the door in the guy’s face. the idiot knocked and she cracked open the door.

“hey, it’s raining out here!” he said, (total pansyass).

“i don’t know you,” holly said. “you’re going to have to wait out there while i read this.”

then she shut the door in his face. good girl.

my hands and feet were ice cold. what the hell was all this??!! we flipped thru the papers and finally found what we were looking for. an electrician, this effing awful electrician we fired back when we were renovating our once-crackhouse, was sueing us. we had a courtdate.

i breathed a huge sigh of relief. so she wasn’t getting arrested. my baby wasn’t going to jail. we’re only being sued. thank G-d.

(silence)

hey, i know what you’re thinking right now. but let me tell you: when enough crappy stuff has happens to you, you really and truly start looking at the bright side.

so yeah. a little background here. we bought a boarded up rowhouse about three years ago. it was pretty much a drughouse. so we demo’ed the whole thing, down to the original bricks and joists. holly designed the inside and hired all the subcontractors to rebuild it from the inside out. the electrician we hired was pretty terrible. he didn’t show up to do the work most of the time. when he did, he did it wrong. he also put us a month behind schedule (we were living in an apt. while searching for the house and then during the renovation). so holly fired his ass and found a new electrician. we wound up paying even more money b/c of this jerk to pay the new electrician to fix the idiot’s work. about a year or so later, the original electrician said we owed him x amount of money and sent a bunch of generic collections agency lawyers after us. we hired our own lawyer and got them to drop it. that lawyer told us he seriously doubted they’d come back after us. maybe he’s grasping at straws b/c the economy’s so bad and he doesn’t have a lot of work right now? all i know is that he’s not getting a red cent from us and he can kiss our collective ass.

let me tell you something, and i offer a disclaimer in case you or someone you know or are close to or someone in your family is in any kind of construction business, b/c there’s exceptions to every rule: contractors are pretty much the scum of the earth. this is my opinion only, and i’m sure i sound like a major effing jerk to say that, esp on the internets. but i offer the following from experience: they will take you for all you have. they will rip you off and never look back. they will spill insanely sweet iced tea all over your subfloors (and not even bother to pick up the overturned bottles) until roaches are crawling everywhere. they will piss on your basement floor (yes, this happened to us). and electricians are the worst of  em all.

it’s kind of like: i thought this was all over. all this headache over our renovation. but obviously it’s not.

so we signed the damned papers and handed them back to the guy. (look, i know it’s just his job but he was a total jerk and too bad you got stuck standing out in the rain! what do you expect? us to invite you in and make you a mothereffin pot’a coffee?!! get a grip, dude! grow a set and stand out in the rain for a minute. it’s only drizzling you big baby!) somehow my cousin fell back to sleep after all that commotion. we did, too, tho i hate to do that b/c sleeping too late can set off migraines for me. (i turned out to be ok)

she padded downstairs a couple hours later and was like, “what was all that?”

“we’ve been served,” i said. i couldn’t help but laugh. our ridiculous lives. like i always say: never a dull moment.

holly and i have a way of putting these sorts of things in the back of our minds, b/c really, what can you do? if we focused on all this, we’d wind up in a padded room (hopefully they would put us in the same one? not funny but it is).

so we did what all normal ppl would do in this situation: we made coffee and then went out for omlettes.

i meant to write about all this earlier in the week, but i just didn’t have the mental energy to do it. also i’m working on my book proposal, which is a serious endeavor, i’ve come to see. anyway, now you know what’s up. i know, i know. you all really want to stay over at our place to experience all this excitement. but there’s a waitlist, you see, b/c we only have one guestroom (!). haha. jk jk.

the upside to all this is that now i can say to holly: YOU GOT SERVED!!! i don’t think that one is ever going to get old. i’ve said it about 20 times since saturday and it’s still pretty damn funny.