Bittersweet Symphony: New Hamster Edition

We had a bittersweet trip up to New Hampshire two weeks ago.  My best friend Tim moved up there at the end of fifth grade. At the time, it seemed like the end of the world, because he would be living three hundred miles away and I would only ever see him when he came down to visit his dad in the summer.  But we bucked the odds and stayed friends over the years. We kept in touch through letters and later by email. When we grew old enough to drive, I visited him when I could and he returned the favor.  He was the best man at my wedding.

Now Tim is moving away again, this time to Georgia, which is certainly out of the range of a weekend trip. I’m quite happy that he’s going to get out of the lovely but stifling life in small-town New England, but I am quite sad that we won’t be seeing him nearly as much.

We departed on Thursday night and stayed in a motel with wood panel walls. Wood paneling is the best. Anyone who says different is selling something. (This means you, Jennifer)

Tim would be working until 5 pm that evening, so we took our time and meandered our way across Vermont. We stopped at a roadside attraction to pick up some maple sugar candy for our neighbors. (Don’t get your hopes up if you’re reading this, Nicole. It was too delicious and we eated it all up. Nom nom nom!) We also stopped by the museum in their basement. Jen was interested, I was ambivalent. I was expecting a Mystery Shack type scam,
but hey, we had time to kill and we were in tourist mode, so I was expecting to be fleeced like the punter I am.

However, the museum at  Hogsback Mountain was just tremendous. Great staff, fun and informative. It had a hologram of a T-Rex. What’s not to love?

We continued meandering and eventually found our way to the Mariposa Museum in Peterborough. This was another delight. I found it through a google search for stuff to do in Keene and wasn’t expecting much from it except a reduction in the time I’d have to wait before I saw my friend. Two exhibits really stood out.

The beautifully handcrafted quilts featured in And Still We Rise were created by an international group of artists from the Women of Color Quilters Network and narrate the history of the African American experience, capturing the stories of freedom’s heroes and engaging visitors to reflect on and respond to significant national events over the past 400 years. The exhibition’s resonant theme is the triumph of the human spirit within African American culture.

and

The Biggest Book in the World about Peace: The product of twelve years of work by members of a middle school writers’ club in Groton, MA, this project was born from the simple conviction that young people CAN make a difference in helping to create a more peaceful world.

The quilts were inspiring. The book was grand.  The lady who ran the place was so friendly and informed.  Also, there was a dress made out of books. How cool is that?!

Then it was on to Keene to meet Tim!

We didn’t do a huge amount that first evening. Tim was house sitting, so I stayed with him and Jen and Lily stayed elsewhere. Then we met up and drove out to Funspot, the largest arcade in the world. Lily played Hercules, the oversized pinball game that uses billiard balls.

She played a bunch of redemption games too.  I played Cliffhanger, which is like Dragon’s Lair, but with the Castle of Cagliostro.

Jen played Burger Time. We were hoping for Yie Ar Kung-Fu, but they didn’t have it.

We stopped for Thai food and it was super delicious. Tim and I bought and played Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition. It was on sale for $4.79. We had played it previously, but it was fun to play it again. We enjoyed it more this time because we played the DLC and spent a lot of time punching hopping vampires in the face.

We ate brunch together the next morning and then we drove home. It was a lovely visit. Bittersweet, as I’ve said. I’m glad we had the chance to see Tim before he starts his big adventure.

A trivial pursuit

I’ve always enjoyed trivia. When I mentioned this to a friend some time after high school he said, “Ah, so you’re one of those people who likes to memorize random facts so you can looks smart?” As I got to know him, I realized that the question said a lot more about him than it did about me, and we drifted apart.

But yeah, I do like trivia. It’s fun to share weird facts with your friends. “Hey, did you know that the little blue dude in the flying chair in Akira is in a wheelchair because he had polio?”

When I was younger, I read about the "Internet" and the possibility of connecting to faraway computers, and posting things on BBSs, and just sharing things with people. I didn't know about college radio back then (figure this was early to mid-80s), but that's what I thought it would be, the "Hey, I think this is really neat, and you might not know about it, so I'll share it with you!"

Of course, the real internet is 90% porn and racism, but you can still find that attitude of sincere enthusiasm in some corners. It's part of the reason I value my friendship with my closest friends so much. It's not one-upsmanship disguised as enthusiasm or any of that "I was hating Star Wars before it was cool" bullshit. I don’t want to give the impression that I spend Halloween night in the most sincere pumpkin patch in the world, but I do appreciate honest, earnest enthusiasm as I get older.

Josh and Lily take New Hamster

Lily returns to school on Monday the 25th, so I wanted to do something nice for her before the summer ended. She's incredibly fond of my friend Tim (as am I), so we accepted his standing invitation and drove up to New Hampshire to stay with him for the weekend.

Tim's been my best friend since I was, yikes, Lily's age. Lily was good company on the trip. She had a bunch of library books to read, and she absolutely devours them, but she was afraid of getting carsick, so we talked for a good portion of the trip.

Lily: Do you believe me when I say that mommy looks like she's 20?
Me: Well, I think you're sincere, and that you intend it as a compliment, but I don't think you have a good conception of what people look like when they're 20.
Lily: Yeah. Mommy probably had an afro when she was 20.

She also thanked me for having so many cool friends that liked to hang out with her and she went on to name them, which felt very nice.

The trip was fine. We ran into two traffic jams, and I-91 is always laid out for construction, with the flashing arrows and orange barrels, but never in the 20 years of driving this route, have I ever seen anyone working on it. It was like a scene from the Langoliers.

We got into town at about 3:00, and Tim was working until 5:00. We stopped at the local Wal-Mart first. Lily, gifted child that she is, had sucked on a shot glass we had lying around the day before, and broke a bunch of blood vessels around her mouth. She was very self conscious, so we looked for some makeup to cover it up. One of the associates helped us, but the end result wasn't satisfactory, so we went to Party City for a mask, which should put an end to any awkward questions.

Nailed it!

After that, we killed some time in the Colony Mill, a 170-year old mill converted into a mall. It did decent business when we lived up in Keene fifteen yeas ago, but it's been absolutely gutted since then, with only about ten stores remaining. The book store (!!) was still busy, and Lily ran into a girl playing Minecraft on a handheld and became best friends with her in moments. Lily talked to her for a good twenty minutes. It's funny, because she's usually so shy. 

We each bought a magazine to read while we waited. Lily got Disney Girls' Life Magazine. It had a surprising amount of content, which helped take some of the sting out of knowing that I just paid five bucks for a Disney Channel press kit.

I bought Amish Survivalist, because, holy shit, it's Amish Survivalist. I could hear Jen's voice faintly in the distance, "This is why we don't have any money..."

These kind of things really interest me, though. I'm always really interested in seeing a culture of which I'm not a part, and this was the double whammy. It's ostensibly Survivalist's guide to looking at Amish Culture, and seeing what can be borrowed for living off the grid, but mostly it's just cheese recipes and horse and buggy tips. I believe my friend Phil, who is himself Amish, contributed a short piece. The ads were pretty great, too, and this one was the best!

http://mountaintopretreatforsale.com/

We hooked up with Tim and got one of his kitties from the vet, and then we went out for pizza. We had this conversation.

Lily: I've only had two cavities!
Tim: I've only ever had one.
Long pause.
Me: So, are you pleased you won that dick measuring contest with my daughter?

The next morning, we set out for Chunky's and saw TMNT. I reviewed the movie and the experience here. After that, we went right next door to Pinball Wizard. There aren't many arcades like this any more. Most arcades are pay X dollars for X time, but Pinball Wizard still uses tokens.  It was outstanding. When i was growing up, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, who serviced video games. When I went to the back room and saw the broken games awaiting repairs, I felt nostalgic in a way that I've never felt before.

I took a bunch of pictures, but I was using a cell phone, and I'm kind of a shitty photographer besides, so you're probably better off looking at the gallery at Pinball Wizard's website. Here are a few that aren't terrible, though.

It's a really great place. I really can't think of any changes they could implement to make it friendlier to guests. Tim and I took turns playing air hockey against Lily. She would score a point and we'd swap out. I used to let her win when she was a little kid, but these days I tend to give her a little challenge, and I won't give her a victory unless she works for it. (Curb stomping a little kid is no fun for anybody involved.) We did let her win this time around, because I didn't want to sour the experience.

Look at her go!

After Pinball Wizard, we hit a local mall because Tim was using a safety pin he had stolen from a dog to keep his pants together, and he needed a replacement. He got his pants and we went to Newbury Comics, because I was under the impression that they were a comics retailer and not a douchier Hot Topic.

After that, we went home. We played Heads Up, watched some Adventure Time, and did a bunch of mad libs.

"When we met up the following week, we sounded much more morose."

"So...we're the Smiths, then?"

It was a wonderful weekend. I always love seeing Tim, and Lily probably loves it even more. When we were driving home, she said what I was thinking. "I wish Mister Tim lived closer, so we could see him more."

M.S.P.

I've thrown three surprise parties for Jen in the time we've been together.

The first was when I was working in a bakery. Maybe 1997? I remember the cake. It was a picture of a Dragon Whelp, which Jen always thought looked really cute. The bakery had a projector so the cake person could blow up an image to trace on the cake. It was pretty nifty.

I suggested we take a walk in a nearby park, where the revelers had already gathered. Everything was going swimmingly until, as we were walking to the pavilion, a late arrival pulled up and said "Hey, where's Jen's party at?" and I was like "You mean her surprise party?"

She got an industrial size can of pudding at the party. We're still working through it today.

The next one was up in New Hampshire in about 2000. This one came off pretty well. We were living in an apartment that had converted from an old motel. A couple friends drove up from Jersey and PA and parked behind the building and all jumped out as you do in this kind of thing. It was fun.

This time around, Lily was my partner. She loves being on on something. She's already astoundingly good at coming up with plausible cover stories and is really good at keeping secrets, and I was forced to reflect that I was teaching her how to do this better.

She decided we needed a code for it, so we referred to it as MSP (Mommy's Surprise Party) or Emma's Pee, if we were feeling silly.

I mostly invited folks through Facebook. Here's the message I sent.

Hi everyone.

I'd like to throw Jen a surprise party on Saturday, August 3rd, and
I'd like you all to attend. I'd like to do it as a pot luck, with
everyone bringing one small dish. That way I don't have to explain to
Jen why I bought 50 bags of chips.

I'm going to get Jen out of the house by telling her that Lily wants
to throw her a surprise party. That gives us an excuse to get Jen out
of the house without making her suspicious.

The plan, in theory, is that Jen will return and enter through the
back door and then Lily and I will yell surprise, and Jen will be all
like "Oh, how cute," and then, as she goes further into the house,
everybody else yells surprise.

Also, something that I'd like to ask everybody to bring is a list of
the ten things you like most about Jen. A small present is fine too,
but no need to go crazy, since I'm thinking potluck. So, a card, a
covered dish and a list of stuff you like about Jen would make a great
present.

We do have a pretty narrow window. I'm going to ask Jen to be out of
the house between two and three. I'll indicate here when it's safe to
arrive. If anyone is arriving from out of town, it might be prudent to
try to get in the area early, and meet with someone local, rather than
just lurking in the area.

If you can't make it, I'd like it if you could still come up with that
list of things you like most about Jen.

I do have a good idea once in awhile and the ten things was pretty inspired. Also, the decoy surprise party was pretty good, because Lily did slip up once and mentioned "That thing we're having on Saturday" in front of Jen, but she thought that Lily was just talking about the decoy party.

I kicked Jen out of the house and she had a little difficulty finding something to do, seeing as that all of her friends were already at our place. She eventually wound up at her dad's house, where she complained about me and my dumb plan getting her out of the house. I hope these complaints were retracted, in light of later events.

We had about 15 people, all told. Our house isn't that big, and we were close to capacity when everyone was hiding waiting for Jen to show up. Considering how many kids were involved and how many moving parts this plan had, it was a minor miracle that everything came together as well as it did.

I made my crock pot buffalo chicken, which has about a million calories  per spoonful, but is super delicious.

Here's the recipe, if you want to make it at home:

2 cups (about 4 nice breasts)chicken boiled, then food processed fine.
16 oz (whole bottle) of buffalo sauce.
1 cup shredded cheddar,
2 8oz cream cheese.
1/2 cup blue cheese dressing.

You can put all in crock pot or mix all together and place in oven 350 degrees for 30 minutes.

Everyone brought something good. Giraffe Karen was there, and she brought the best guacamole I've ever tasted! She called it her giraffe guacamole, because she's as fond of alliteration as she is of giraffes, and she even sculpted it to look like a giraffe.

It was really pretty cool. Our neighbors brought an absolutely gorgeous cheese platter.

We hung the top ten lists around the house. They were all unsigned, and it was kind of fun figuring out who had written what.

This was my list:

1. You're my best friend.
2. You're kind. Someone else said that if he heard that someone didn't like you, he'd want to know why.
3. You not only have the talent to make your eggs, but you have the guts to put them out there for sale.
4. You have eyes like the edges of old mirrors.
5. I love the way you smile when you get enthusiastic about something.
6. You're as great as I think you are. You're kind and smart and a good and loyal friend and a great mommy.
7. "You make me want to be a better man."
8. Lily might play with me more sometimes, but when she wakes up in the middle of the night with a bad dream it's her mommy she calls for.
9. While we're on the subject of Lily, I give her the things she wants, but you give her the things she needs and I hope someday she'll understand that.
10. I remember a letter I sent you in college. I said that you should never change, but evolve and become more of what you are. In the almost 20 years we've been together, you've grown and matured, but you've never lost that essential Jen-ness, and I'm glad I could be along for the journey.

It was an extremely nice party. It came together better than I had any reason to expect it too and I want to thank everyone who attended.

Mütter's Day

I finally got around to visiting the Mütter Museum with my friends Jen and Tim this weekend. All three of us are big fans of John Hodgman and Sarah Vowell, each of whom mention the megacolon in their respective writings. We'd been looking forward to this for a long time.

My friend Frederick is also a fan of the place. He had a poster from the museum in a frame that was clearly many times more expensive than the poster.

En route, we played 20 questions.

The answers were:

• A unicorn
• An elbow
• Lucas Lee
• A cactus
• The TARDIS
• Lindsay Weir

We parked for five dollars, which was pretty cheap, and walked a couple blocks to the museum. It was a bit different from what I was expecting.

1. It was quite a bit smaller than I thought it would be: Just three rooms. Nicely laid out and everything, but that couldn't change how small the place was.
2. Very well lit: I was expecting to be the kind of place the Franklin Institute was before it was renovated, with expansive, dimly lit halls. But the lighting was very good.
3. Body parts: I've got a decent general science education, but I'm not a doctor or a biologist, and my last experience with body parts was dissecting a fetal pig more than a decade ago.The thing that struck me is how much smaller the organs were than I was expecting them to be, the brains in particular. Zombie movies have lied to me! 
4. Accessible: I enjoy science museums, but I do think they cleave much more closely to entertaining than informing. Mütter was no exception, but I thought the exhibits were accessible without being patronizing or simplifying the material to the point of meaninglessness.  
5. No pictures allowed: I had to resort to a stock photo of the megacolon! #Firstworldproblems
   
6. The Megacolon: It wasn't as mega as we were led to believe. We were hoping we could walk through it like the giant heart at the Franklin Institute.
7. Skullduggery: There was a wall with a good 40 or 50 skulls on it, As a lay person, I tend to think of skulls as pretty uniform, but seeing so many in one space, I couldn't help but notice the significant amount of variation visible even at a causal glance. 
8. Skullduggery, part two: They had a forensics of Grimm's Fairy tale theme going on in the upper gallery and I really liked one of the paintings that went with it.

Afterwards, we had some lunch, because seeing dozens of anencephalic fetuses in jars really works up an appetite. Afterwards we visited Fat Jack's Comic Crypt and had some gelato at Capogiro's, which was voted the best ice cream in the world by National Geographic. It was pretty yummy. I'm not sure if I've ever had gelato before. I thought it was vegan, but apparently not. 

Todd Ingram: Gelato isn't vegan?

Vegan Policeman: It's milk and eggs, bitch.

Fat Jack's was really nice. I had read about it in Joe Matt's Peepshow, so I was especially interested in seeing it, though it's not like I need an excuse to check out a comic book store. It's really one of the nicest stores I've ever been in. A great, well-organized selection, friendly and knowledgeable staff that seem to enjoy being there, ten terrible comics for a buck in the bargain bins. 

Great visit all around. Next time we return to Philly, it will be to camp in at the Franklin Institute.

Josh's Trip to New England: Tim-a-palooza!!

I had a truly nice visit up to New England this weekend.

My car recently died. For those of you playing at home, that's like the fourth Ford we've lost between the two of us since I started this blog. We've just had ridiculously bad luck with them. But I'm sure the next one will be different!

However, being without a car actually worked out this time. My wife Jen dropped me off and a different Jen picked me up and we went up to New Hampshire!

I had never been in her jeep before. It looks really cute from the outside, but it's this horrifying garbage barge within, with these jagged spikes of rusting metal poking out where you least expect it.

(Like the door handle!)

Still, she generously did the driving for the entire trip up, and she's offered to pay for my tetanus shot.

We made it up to Keene in about six hours, only hitting traffic and bad weather near the end of the trip. We had dinner at a local Thai place, and I consulted my blog on my phone because I remembered that I had written down the name of the dish I had eaten last time I was there. I had it again and it was still delicious!

We chatted for a while, then Jen vanishes out of the story for a little bit. She went down to Boston to hang out with her friend Tim, whom I don't believe really exists. In fact, since Jen looks exactly like Claire Danes, I think we can call this section of the post "My So Called Tim".

Moving on.

Jen has her own blog, where she's aggressively wrong about the which incarnation of the Doctor is the best. She'll probably post her account of the trip at some point. No pressure, Jen!

Tim and I hung out with his friends and played Zombie Munchkin. My friend Eric has been trying to get me to play Munchkin forever, and I really enjoyed it, and I'll probably give it a chance next time my friends play down this way.

We got home about a little past midnight. I was ready to turn in, but Tim started playing his bootleg Korean copy of Dredd, which I really enjoyed, much to my surprise. My review is up over at this post!

I woke up at nine, three hours before the rest of the house. I watched Goldfinger and then part of Thunderball and a bunch of commercials. Commercials fascinate me anymore, because I so seldom see them because we mostly watch Netflix. I really enjoyed the commercial for the Ear-Vac, which isn't as dangerous as Q-tips.

We went to the Alex Ross exhibit at the Norman Rockwell museum, which you can read about here!

On our way back,  we stopped in Northampton, Mass, home to a million hipsters. Tim took me to a store called "Feces", which he described as "Spencer's Gifts, if Spencer's didn't suck," a description that was accurate, except for the second part. I bought my friend Karen a card for her wedding.

It was just a regular marriage, but I got her this card because she really loves giraffes.

We got back to the house, where Tim played Journey and I played with my phone. Then we watched some Eagleheart, which was hilarious. Then I went to bed, because I was exhausted.

I woke up at 8 because we were supposed to be in Boston to meet Jen and "Tim" there. I was the first to rise, so I killed some time reading Tim's copy of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High".

We got to Boston at about 12:30 and our little group, me and Jen and Tim and Tim's roommate Fok all went around town. We hit Anime Zakka a place close to where Tokyo Kid, formerly Man from Atlantis, had once been. It was neat, but it wasn't as magical as it had been when I had come there in the 90s. They had a whole wall dedicated to Studio Ghibli stuff, including a terrifying plush Catbus.

Jesus Fuck! This is supposed to be a children's movie?!

I bought Lily a little Totoro and a Corpse Bride charm bracelet.

We stopped for some Vietnamese food, which I had never had before. I had the Bún thịt nướng is, shredded beef and spring rolls atop vermicelli. It was good, but I was expecting it to be more distinctive than Chinese food than I found it to be.

Then we went to a couple of book stores, including one with an espresso book binding machine.  I bought the sequel to Bridge of Birds, Eight Skilled Gentlemen. Looking forward to reading it!

And then it was time to go home. Jen and I got going at shortly before seven. We did a few Mad Libs, but it was pretty dark, so it was hard to see and we gave up after three or four.

We made good time, despite missing the final place to fuel and being forced off the road to navigate perilous back roads in heavy fogs in search of a gas station. We passed several that were closed and a number that were on the opposite side of a divided highway before we were able to get to a place to refuel.

But make it back we did. It's great to have have friends and it's great when your friends become friends with each other.

Words with Nerds

I really like this picture and I think it's going to be one of my favorites. That's my wife and my best friend, each playing Words with Friends on their phone. I took a break to snap a picture with mine.

My friend Tim came down to visit this weekend. Tim has been my best friend for a long time. And the usual disclaimers apply here, that Jen is my best friend too, but in another way, and that it's weird for adults to say "best friend". Whatever. But it is nice to see the people with whom you're closest getting along so well.

Here's my piece from the series I wrote when the blog was young. Tim's a good guy, he's interested in the same geeky things (in some cases, he sparked my initial interest in those geeky things) and I don't see him as often as I'd like in person, so I sometimes forget how frightfully smart he is. (Though, like me, it's the kind of smart that's not really useful for anything on its own).

And before I get too far into this post, I want to say how very much I appreciated everything Jen did to make this a weekend where I could really spend a lot of time with Tim. Lily really wanted to see Mister Tim and Jen kept her busy with roller skating and trips to the shore so Tim and I could have some time alone, which we mostly squandered.

Here's a picture of Tim reading with Lily. We have a series of books called "You Read to Me, I'll Read to You", which are designed to be read by two people. One reads the text of one color, the other reads the text that rhymes with it, which is printed in another color. The final paragraph is read by both readers, and usually includes some variation of "You read to me and I'll read to you." It's cute. We have fables, fairy tales and scary tales, the latter of which is of course Lily's favorite.

I have the habit of humming fragments of songs. Usually whatever pops in to my head or something that I hear in my environment. Tim does this too. So I'll start humming something and I few minutes later Tim will hum it. Repeat several dozen times over the course of the day.

We were mostly humming the theme to Gravity Falls and a piece from Nausicca.

For your listening pleasure:

This was the first time I had seen Gravity Falls, but Tim loved it and Lily loved it and I loved it too! (Jen declined comment) I don't know why no one ever thought to cast Kristen Schaal in a cartoon before this, but oh my good, she is perfect as Mable. I enjoy the absurdity of the show, and the Street Fighter episode is one of the all time funniest things I've ever seen. "Winners don't lose!"

On Friday night, we all had Indian food at the local restaurant. The place has to be a front for someplace, because there are never more than ten people, including our party and the staff whenever we eat there, and yet they've been tenaciously clinging to life for several years now.  Lily loves Naan and she made a meal of that and washed it down with the ice water, and we tried not to think too hard that we were feeding our child bread and water.

We stayed up late and played Sleeping Dogs and Trapt. Sleeping Dogs was a Hong Kong version of Grand Theft Auto and will get its own post shortly. Trapt is the successor to the Deception series of games, where you lure people in to your castle and kill them with traps. Trapt was great in concept, but lackluster in execution. I should have listened to the reviews on Wikipedia that call it "tediously unengaging"  and "fairly short and almost unintelligible".

We spent too much money on food and since Tim is occasionally interested in alcohol archeology, we went to the local liquor store. He took a picture of a beer called Delirium Tremens, which is the ultimate in truth in advertising. This picture is a placeholder and I'll replace  it when I get a copy of Tim's photo.

Truth in advertising

Sometimes we do something big when we get together, other times we don't and this was one of those times. I don't regret it, though. Sometimes that's just what the doctor ordered.

A picture of Tim next to a sign with a curiously specific claim about its cheesesteaks

And we will conclude Random Quotes from the weekend:

• While Playing Sleeping Dogs: "I don't like being beaten to death." "Then stop doing it so much."
• Lily came downstairs when she heard us watching cartoons at 4 in the morning. "This is what grownups always do after kids go to sleep!"
• "Is that a camel or a dromedary?" "It's a llama with osteoporosis."
• "Chinchillas will pee on you to defend themselves."
• "At least I'm still beating my wife." (This was in reference to how I was losing most of my Words with Friends games, but I was still ahead of Jen in that particular match.)

and the best for last...

• "Let me put my pants on! I don't want to miss this!"

My Friends are Awesome: Jeremy...and Jeremy

Taking a brief break from the Zelazny blogging to type up the next installment of the my friends are awesome series.

Jeremy was pestering me the other day about when he would get the My Friends are Awesome treatment. I suppose today I'll finally get off my ass and type this up.

The problem is that I know two people named Jeremy, Frederick and the Lord, and I'm not sure who to cover first. This post will be about the Jeremy who used to play in a LARP where he wore an eyepatch. Oops, I mean the one who's unfailingly generous and kind to his pets. Oops, that's both of them again. The one who is always kind to Lily and shares my interest in geeky stuff.

...

Well, shit.

Despite the similarities above, the two Jeremys could not be more different. I suppose I'll cover them in alphabetical order.

Jeremy I: Frederick

I first met Jeremy when he worked at the local mall, and I, as a youth from suburban New Jersey, merely lived there. You know, I can't remember if he was the one chasing another dude and trying to stick something up his butt or if he was the one being chased. I want to say that he was the chaser, but the memory cheats.

All of my friends are pretty great, but Frederick stands out for his courtesy and unfailing generosity. He's always willing to go out of his way for coffee and snacks, and I've never ever seen him let his friends down.

Frederick is more prepared than anyone for the inevitable zombie uprising, and I can't think of anyone whose stout heart and lethal croquet mallet I'd rather have covering my back.

Jeremy II: The Lord

We met in a typing class in the second semester of our Freshman year of high school, where he was this shrimpy little kid, though I think by then he had already earned his black belt in Tae Kwon Do.

He shot up about eight inches during high school (I'm estimating. I mean, it's not like I took out a tape measure and etched pencil marks in the door frame), and if not for the Lord, those high school years, no picnic for a teenage nerd, would have been far more unpleasant.

The Lord is very direct. I always know where I stand with him. The phrase "Occasionally wrong, but never uncertain" springs to mind.

A lot of us dick around with creative projects, but he actually does them. He had the guts to leave everything he knew and pack up to New Orleans.

My Friends are Awesome: Eric

My mom calls him the nice blond boy from my wedding.I knew who he was before we starting hanging out, but we didn't really become friends until I went on a beach trip with Dave and two friends of his. "Wait, Corrina's dating who?" I actually first knew of him as "That guy from the hippie store", because he managed a little kiosk in the mall, with its Bob Marley shirts and rainbow knit caps.

Shortly after we became friends, he had an interview at the Babbage's in the mall. "If I get it, I'll just stick around long enough to show I can hold down a job."

He held it down for more than a decade until moving on to other things. Eric has the skills needed to be a really good manager. He's much less tolerant of bullshit than I am. I'll hem and haw endlessly, but Eric will act decisively when the situation requires it.

He has an incredibly broad range of knowledge and boundless enthusiasm for everything he does. He's a really smart guy, but his mind works in such a profoundly different way than mine that I find him an endless source of fascination. One time, I was at his room in a house he shared with a couple other people, babbling on about Marvin Minsky, in whom I had recently taken an interest, and gushing in particular about his book Society of Mind, which I had been unable to find. Without missing a beat, Eric crossed to his bookshelf and produced a copy of Society of Mind. How awesome is that?!

One of my fondest memories is Eric showing up with a copy of the newly released Tekken 2 at our apartment one day, and playing it all night and sitting out on the rooftop. (This memory reminds me of a line from a Kimya Dawson song ("Maybe I'll play Tekken 2 all alone again hold down select and then laugh at big heads.") He used to show up with the leftover pretzels that Auntie Ann's was going to throw out when they closed up for the night.

He's a gamer, and though our tastes differ somewhat, he's always made an effort to show his friends what they might enjoy about the games that he likes. (And likewise, he's willing to sample games that fall outside his range of experience.) He organized our outing to I-con, which was one of my best weekends ever. He's a dad with cool tattoos for each of his kids. He popularized my "autistic robot" phrase. Other than Greg, he's my only friend who will talk Shakespeare with me. His favorite movie is The Lion in Winter, which is just all kinds of awesome.

The thing I like most about him is that he's always thinking of his friends. Whenever I see Eric, he's always got something cool to show me or tell me. He's just a fun guy to be around.

My Friends are Awesome: Greg

Latest in the ongoing series! I've got a bunch of these half completed My Friends are Awesome entries, and I was trying to decide which one to clean up and post, when Jen started reading something out of a book of poetry. It was by Emily Dickinson, so of course, it fit into the Gilligan's Island meter of all Emily Dickinson poetry.

For instance:

The distance that the dead have gone
Does not at first appear —
Their coming back seems possible
For many an ardent year.

Try it yourself someday!

Nowadays, it seems like everybody knows this little bit of trivia, but I heard it first from Greg. So this post is all about Greg, or as Facebook calls him, "G. Gregory", the "G", standing, of course, for "Gorgeous".

I usually bicker endlessly with Greg during our online (and offline) interactions, but sometimes we join forces to team up on his brother. I remember the time we first met. I was already dating Jen and we were meeting some of Dave's friends at a local carnival. Neither of use was impressed with the other. The only thing we had in common was that we thought that the other was kind of an aloof jerk. (And neither was wrong)

And we became friends because there was a large group of loosely affiliated gamers. We'd get together to play Magic and eventually I had a weekly game session with Greg and another buddy of ours, Timur. These were always fun because each of us knew with utter certainty that we were smarter than our other two guys in the room. Greg's catch phrase is "You're wrong and let me tell you why."

I cherish all of my friends, but there are things that Greg will appreciate that none of my other friends will. He's as big a fan of Dune and Lord of the Rings as I am (even to the extent to introducing me to a Middle Earth MUD that I played for a couple years) . I remember one time we were in Philadelphia for something. We'd been playing 20 questions to kill time. It had started out with animals and transitioned into fictional characters. The game had kind of tapered off until I started a new round with "I'm thinking of an elvish dialect."

Greg "Is it Quenya?"

"No,"

"Well, is it Sindarin?"

Heh, heh. Always nice to have friends to share your geekery. ("Yeah, so how come Eagles didn't just fly the ring into Mordor?")

And Greg is among the geekiest of my friends. He's been building his own computers for longer than I've known him (and doing it now isn't all that unusual, but Greg's been building his own for more than 15 years.) He was the first person to correctly quote Moore's Law to me (most people, to the extent that they know it at all, they just simplify it by saying that computing power doubles every two years) and he's even such a gentleman, he's not going to point out that infinitive I just split.

He also laughed at this joke, when I was commenting someone's misunderstanding of science: "Max Planck is spinning in his grave. Whether it is spin up or spin down is for someone else to determine."

He's said that people have told him that he looks like Chris Elliot, but I really don't see it. He reminds me of Enrico Colantoni who is apparently even playing a character named Greg on his new show! The circle is complete!

Greg is also working towards his PhD in Hitler Studies (Don DeLillo shout out!), which is pretty cool, and will someday let him manage a Barnes & Nobels. (Okay, I was kidding about the Hitler studies. I can never remember his exact specialization, but it's some kind of Arthurian Lit)

Finally, my mom rates him at 996 milli-Tims on her scale of kissability, a very high score indeed. Who am I to argue with that?

My Friends are Awesome: Dave

Dave said at first that he'd prefer if he left him out of the series. It is with great reluctance that I honor his request. This will be my shortest post ever.

And in conclusion,

FIREFLY SUCKS!



(Dave told me that he automatically stops reading my posts as soon as he gets to the (sudden but) inevitable betrayal (Firefly shout out!) Firefly insult, so I thought I'd just trick him into stopping early.)

But I couldn't leave him out of the series! He's too awesome! I always introduce him as the person who introduced me to Jen and he must be getting sick of it but it's a good way to buy him instant goodwill with the person to whom I'm introducing him. When you come down to it, almost every friend I've made since becoming an adult, I know though Dave. Jen, of course, but also Greg and Geoff (and through them, Timur), Eric (who was dating a friend of Dave's) and through Eric, Frederick.

Dave's a pretty awesome dude. He's witty, charming, and a pretty good Street Fighter (Pro tip! Dave can't reliably perform the dragon punch motion if his character is facing the left side of the screen. So if you play against him, try to get him oriented that way.) My mom never kissed him, which puts him in a distinct minority among my friends, but she always calls him the boy with the nice nose, so I bet she would. Pucker up! He may be the biggest Star Wars fan, EVER! He's always willing to come over and help out with something, for the price of dinner or nothing at all.

I remember when we were first becoming friends, and I was still at the stage where I thought that if I pretended to be something that I wasn't, then people would like me more. (Well, that arguably is the case, but it's more hassle than it's worth, and the people you end up with aren't your real friends.) He asked me if I were into smoking and drinking and, thinking that's what this cool guy whose friend I wanted to be was into, I said "Sure!" to which he promptly replied, "Then you're no friend of mine."

I think the best thing about him is that he's a fundamentally decent guy. He's great with kids and Lily thinks "Mister Dave" is awesome. (He was in the local cemetery for her first snowball fight.) Whenever we walk past his house, she always wants him to come along on our walk. I'm happy that he'll be there for her as a role model as she gets older.

Bonus! When I first started dating Jen, I worked the overnight shift at a local store and Dave worked days. We'd often leave each other notes on our time cards. One time I asked him to write something that would make me look good. This is what he provided. (Click for larger image) It still makes me chuckle.

My Friends are Awesome: Karen Z

I have three brothers. I always wanted a sister. I never had one, except briefly, when my father pulled a Brady Bunch and married a woman with two daughters, (all of them with hair of gold, like their mother.) If I did have a sister, I would want her to be Karen.

How awesome is she?! Let's look at the tape. Karen is the one person who emails me every day at my stupid job. She humored me when I suggested asking for reasons why she was awesome, receiving numerous replies.

I met her at my first full time job out of college. We mostly just talked about work stuff, but I struck up a conversation because I saw she was reading David Sedaris.

Karen shares my love of depressing songs. She is of the people who encouraged me to write a blog and she still reads it no matter how geeky it gets.

She reminds me of my favorite paintings, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. I think it's worth observing that I would not have given this painting a second though if I had not recognized something of Karen in it when I first saw it, so I owe it to her that I recognized something of her awesomeness in the painting when I did see it.

I think most importantly, Karen is also a tireless advocate of reproductive freedom, and rather than bitching impotently on a blog no one reads off in a corner of the internet, she actually does something about it.

She's also a loving foster parent to five giraffes.

My Friends are Awesome: Jen

Jen and I were talking about friendship at one point during our first year dating, and Jen said that she considered me her best friend. At the time I thought it was a very sweet sentiment and said so, but I also thought it was such a girly girl thing to say. I mean, sure, I thought she was a friend, but your boyfriend/girlfriend isn't your best friend! Everybody knows that other guys are best friends for guys and girls are best friends for girls! That's just how it is! Are girls going to stay up late playing video games, watching terrible movies, eating candy and drinking soda?

And yet, somewhere along the line, I started not just thinking of her just the woman I loved or a person I liked, but my best friend too.

I always liked Jen before I loved her. I first hung out with her when I was dating a crazy girl. Jen was a friend of Dave's, back home from college and looking to hang out with some of her buddies. So she hung out with me and Dave and crazy girl and later that night we decamped to the Lord's house to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

I remember thinking that she seemed really nice. I suppose I thought she was pretty, but I didn't really notice that except in the abstract sense, because that's something I don't tend to notice when in a relationship with someone else. I've always thought Jen was pretty. I still think she that she has the most beautiful eyes I've ever seen.

We had another close encounter when Dave and I were working at a local Laneco (a chain of combination grocery/general merchandise stores. The entry on wikipedia implies that they were the model for Wal-Mart's super centers).

I was working outside pushing carts around the parking lot. Dave was doing something in the store. I saw someone put a note on his car, so I went inside and mentioned it to him, "A little red-headed girl put a note on your car," so he went out, got the note, looked at it and said, "That's my friend Jen. You should go out with her." I said that I couldn't, because I was already dating somebody. (I was still with crazy girl)

But I eventually broke up with crazy girl and started dating Jen. I'll leave that for another post, since this is "My friends are awesome", not "How I met your mother".

Eric once said that if he ever met someone who said that they didn't like Jen, he'd want to know why.

When Jen and I met with the UU minister to for pre-marriage arrangements, the minister said that while she was advising us to get married, sometimes she'll advise a couple not to. She expressed a little concern about my tendency to put Jen on a pedestal. And I do that. And I understand the danger in that, when someone you've been holding up as an ideal fails, the more you have built that person up, the more devastating the eventual disappointment will be (Here lies a fallen god/ His fall was not a small one/ We did but build his pedestal/ A narrow and a tall one)

But here's the thing. She's too modest to admit it, but I believe that Jen is really as great as I think she is. She's kind and she's smart and she's a good and loyal friend and a great mommy. One time when we she was still out at college, near Pittsburgh, I sent her a letter (snail mail!) that said that she should never change. She should evolve and become more of what she is, but that she should never change from that fundamental Jen-ness.

One time Greg mentioned that I got the better deal out of the marriage. And I think he intended that as an insult, but is there any way I can deny really that? She's better than I deserve, but being with her helps me become a better person. And I don't want to use Jack Nicholson's line from As Good as it gets, but I guess I might as well, because I'm sure you're all thinking it. She makes me want to be a better man.

My Friends are Awesome: Tom

Tom! The very name sets the blood afire! From the dawn of time he came, moving silently down through the centuries, living many secret lives, struggling to reach the time of the gathering, when the few who remain will battle to the last. There can be only one, and that one is Tom!

Tom! He's smarter than Rose and more beautiful than Davros, with the compassion of "Doctor" Greg House and the maverick cred of Mal Reynolds.

Tom! What can I say about Tom that hasn't been written with brightly colored pen in the notebooks of a thousand schoolgirls already, their first names followed by Tom's last name in curlicued practice signatures?

Tom! His father was an elephant, his mother was a crocodile, his grandfather was a gorilla, and his other grandfather was a gorilla who had been trained in Ninjutsu! He stands ten stories tall and has radioactive acid breath. He kills five men every day before putting on his pants, which he does both legs at a time! He bends steel with his pinky toe and extracts wasps from stings in flight!

Tom! It is Tom who ghostwrote the Goosebumps books for R. L. Stein, burning his holy writ in thirty-foot-high letters of fire on top of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains in the land of Sevorbeupstry on the planet Preliumtarn, third out from the sun Zarss in Galactic Sector QQ7 ActiveJ Gamma.

Tom!

To understand the person he has become, you have to understand the boy he was. From birth until age 12, Tom lived in an attic, united with his conjoined twin Hugo, with only fish heads for sustenance and DVDs of Firefly for "entertainment". Eventually they were separated in a radical but compassionate procedure Tom pioneered, with Hugo achieving modest success as an actor under the stage name Matt Smith and Tom marrying a woman who worked with me.

I knew Tom's then-fiancee Jen from the bookstore where we both worked, and of course his legend is whispered in hushed silences in even the most sheltered portions of the globe, but I would not be lucky enough to finally met Tom in person until shortly before the wedding. Instead of wearing a tuxedo, Tom would dress up in a Cyberman outfit but rather than a Mondasian Cyberman, he dressed as of one of John Lumic's parallel universe Cybermen from the modern series, which hadn't even been invented yet!

Tom went underground after that, partially due to his increasingly public feud with Dick Cheney and well as the fact that sentiment was turning against his grassroots organization CAMOS (Committee for the Advancement of Mediocrity in Outer Space Westerns)

Someday, when the world is at its darkest, and hope seems gone, Tom will return to save us from ourselves. Until then, we must strive to live up to his impossible ideal. It is to Tom's credit that his nigh-infinite awesomeness serves not to invoke jealousy, but to inspire us all to live up to the Tom-spirit that lives with all of us.

I leave you with a quote from America's first poet laureate. It is fairly well known in certain circles that Raymond Chandler's stories of Philip Marlowe are thinly disguised accounts of Tom's more mundane adventures. In the The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler writes of Tom.

"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."

And that is our Tom in a nutshell. The best man in his world, and a good enough man for any world.

My Friends are Awesome: Tim

Since I got myself a real blog last month (http://where-there-had-been-darkness.blogspot.com/ is the address if you're reading this on Facebook) complete with tags and everything, I thought I'd do a series of posts with a theme. The theme is "My friends are awesome" and I'll dedicate a post to one particular friend and explain why he or she is so awesome.

I'll start with my buddy Tim. He introduced me to two of the things I blog about regularly, role-playing and Hong Kong action movies. He's also a big video game and anime enthusiast. I would totally cast him as Scott Pilgrim, which looks like such a great movie! Suffice it to say he shares my nerdery

I think the trait that I admire most about Tim is that like Neil Gaiman, Tim is capable of keeping his mouth shut if he can't say something nice, a skill I've never been able to master. I am completely unable to restrain myself when someone says something I don't like. Hey, that Clash of the Titans movie was crap. I think I'll go on a three thousand word tear about it. God forbid that someone mention something vaguely complimentary about Firefly, because it's the only thing I'm going to talk about for the next three weeks.

More than that is that Tim is genuinely decent guy, a trait that counts for more and more with me as I get older. He works at animal shelter and draws all sorts of cool pictures for their promotional stuff. He's an artist too, you see! We share a sense of humor and I think he's a pretty darn funny guy. He's smart and well informed, and he had the guts to teach English for a year in a country as far from his home as you can be and still be on the planet, something I don't think I'd ever be able to do.

Also, my mom says he's a great kisser. But she says that about all my friends.