I would love to be posting about the wild times we have been having, but things have been terribly unwild lately. I am only documenting how lame October has been in an effort to shame Matthew and I in to pumping up the volume for November.
You would think finally receiving our pre-ordered copy of Dave Eggers, The Wild Things, covered in fake fur would be an omen of wild times to come, but it has quietly sat on our bookshelf molting since it arrived.
October was not a total loss, Matthew did buy a trampoline and a book for $1.75(total) at a garage sale.
Other than getting wild and falling in a fire, even the wildest guy we know has been pretty tame lately.
I will try harder to not let you down November, here is to hoping that I get arrested.
we've been gearing up for a party to celebrate our car's impending 180,000 mile milestone for some time now, and a lot of wild words have been shared on how exactly we should get down. we've known all along that the car deserved to be invited to the party, and we've known that it would wish for nothing less than to be revved up to 8,000 rpm's with the horn blasting la cucaracha while it farted some kid's bmx tires at the exact moment it reached the 180k summit. so we tried to keep these humble criteria in mind while we party planned. but sometimes the best parties are surprises. so imagine ours when we got into the car and noticed that we were only 171 miles away from our long awaited event. we decided to let the party become the journey. we'd come so far and at that point we couldn't stop if we'd wanted to. we'd pollute our way to our goal and we wouldn't go home even a digit short of 180,000. it was a true coming of age story for the camry.
along the way we took some pictures as if they were through the car's eyes. so forgive us if the photos are streaked with tears.
The toyota may not be a luxury sedan but it loves delicious gourmet pizza and quaint patio dining so we obliged and ate at Cibo.
Don't be played for a fool and order bruschetta without pronouncing the hard k in the middle, okay?
our car happened upon a latin celebration, possibly wedding oriented, in the middle of the dark desert farmlands of Laveen or Avondale or some other southwestern valley town. this party was like the vip room within the vip room at club rockin' rodeo back in 1999. it was exclusive. you really would have to love to party to make it to this thing because it was so remote. we probably hadn't driven by a structure with lights on in at least four miles, and then suddenly like a desert oasis that sprang with chilled horchata, it appeared ten feet off the road in-between an irrigation ditch and a metal scrap yard.
It turns out that 171 miles is actually a lot of city driving. who knew? so we got tired and called it quits at 179,905 with plans of an epic part two of the 180k party. Then two days later we saw that the odometer had betrayed us with a measurement of 180,024 miles. we don't know where we were at 180k, but i imagine it was uneventful. and now we'll probably have to sell our car out of disgust. it also turns out that al gore and company are filing a class action law suit against us for our crimes against the ecosystem on that fate-less night last weekend. but here's my question, if global warming is real, why did the temperature in phoenix drop twenty degrees the week after our fantastic fossil fuel burn? by lindsay & matthew
Our niece Macey had a baptism and birthday in Pittsburgh last month. She was nice enough to invite us. Actually, I don't really recall being invited at all. I think we invited ourselves. So, a big thanks to my sister Katie and her husband Levy for letting us come stay in their house and use all of their oscillating fans while we slept in their guest room for a long weekend. It was a lot of fun for us as we hadn't previously had the chance to meet our 9 month old, very smiley neice named Adeline. Also, my sister Kelsey showed up, too, after a year of partying in Hong Kong. It was good to have her back on American soil. The baptism was very sweet, and Macey was successfully cleansed of her sins. All of the kids were fun and they made sure that Lindsay and I were thoroughly entertained. We can't wait to see the Minharo family again.
Levy and I grew up together in the same ward and now we are brother-in-laws. We have the kind of long term bond that allows us to eat shaved ice + custard deserts in touristy areas and still look totally raw.
We spent a lot of time around the Universities of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon, which neighbor each other with campuses that seemed a lot more beautiful than Arizona State's.
The city of Pittsburgh loves the Steelers and dinosaurs. One of the dozens of dino monuments all over the city. Levy is lurking in the background wishing it were a real life jurassic beast so he could lay on its side and feel it breathe, and then inspect its droppings to better diagnose why it is so sick.
The Minharo house and 2/3 of its kids.
Just trying to blend in.
Hold onto your butts. Samuel L. Jackson would be so proud of these real T-Rex bones. Pittsburgh loves dinos so much that they would settle for nothing less than real bones and real marrow at their Museum of Natural History.
On Saturday night we got club-weary after a long night of bumpin' and grindin' so we left the spot and walked across the street to a train/trolley that takes you up the side of Mt. Washington for a scenic look at the three rivers and downtown.
Lindsay kicked a tree root raised sidewalk slab on accident while carrying Adeline in the dark on our way to a psychedelic fireworks show for Community Night. It seemed a little too real for me because we were creeping around this old colonial style neighborhood, while tons of rockets were booming and red-glaring right above us, and then one of my soldiers got wounded and started losing too much blood all over the place. It all felt so George Washington.
Earlier in the year we saw a show on food network with a bleached haired host about great eats in Pittsburgh, Pa. It had a place called Primanti's on it, which it turns out was the first place Katie, Levy and my mom took us after picking us up from the airport. It was so nice we had to go twice. Lindsay loves sandwiches.
Macey loves journaling at the bar with the locals.
From the look of terror on Adeline's face, Macey must have been whispering some crazy threats. Adeline already had a black eye from a bathtub brawl with Atticus, and she wanted no more violence.
We hit the Falls Ravine Trail on the last and most humid day of our trip to work up a Richard Simmons worthy sweat and cleanse our pores of all the Primanti's we ate.
Hi, Keeping in line with the theme of uncommentable blog posts, and while we get around to loading pictures from our trip onto our super-computer and eventually our super-blog, I'd like to take a precious few minutes of my employers time to do some really important blogging. Kelsey showed me this article on Saturday night that she found on the online web. It's weird because immediately prior to reading it i was under the impression that i was a mostly really cool human because of my mind and my thoughts and my feelings, but as my eyes bounced back and forth over the lines of this Pulitzer worthy piece of journalistic artistry I had the same kind of epiphany that I imagine all the gorgeous ones have at least four times a morning as they gaze at themselves in the vanity. The realization that my body is truly my coolest asset.
To summarize, if you want to be cool in these tough economic times, you basically can't afford to be not fat in the stomach. They call this particular species of potbelly, found only on cool youths across the country, the Ralph Kramden, named after the actor.
It says, "Too pronounced to be blamed on the slouchy cut of a T-shirt, too modest in size to be termed a proper beer gut, developed too young to come under the heading of a paunch, the Ralph Kramden is everywhere to be seen lately, or at least (they name a couple of Brooklyn cool guy neighborhoods)... and pretty much any place one is apt to encounter fans of Grizzly Bear (a band that aspiring cool guys listen to)."
Okay, here is where it gets deep. Right at the moment my brain started to process this paragraph I looked down in consternation and saw the silk screening on my shirt stretched tautly around my generous Pepsi gut. Do you even know what that graphic on my t-shirt said? Grizzly Bear. I was wearing a Grizzly Bear shirt. Waves of cool swirled through my hipster belly like dysentery and I've only just now started to recover from the flux. I guess my body has always been just a few inches more ahead of the curve than i realized. As more time passes i can honestly say that it is even harder to wrap my mind around my stomach now than it is was then (the article blames Obama for this phenomenon so i'm still researching the possibility of some direct correlation between this and his proposed health care bill), but its becoming easier with time. In fact, just this morning as i struggled in embarrassing pain just to reach down around my swelling guts to tie my shoes, i realized for the first time in a long time that i felt really truly good. Thanks, matthew b.
I know, I know. Its so edgy to get political. And although the public always seems to really appreciate political rants from society's elite, you know, musicians, actors and amateur Mormon-family bloggers, we generally try to avoid those kinds of poisonous topics on this site. They're bad for ratings. Ideally, we'd like to do all of our political quarreling with family, friends, and people in the grocery store in an intimate face-to-face setting. Its usually more heated that way and you leave feeling a little nastier about yourself, but at the same time its totally worth it because if you've done a good job there's a good to great chance that the other person might leave feeling even nastier than you do. And that is what I've been led to believe that the spirit of political debate and activism is all about. But in light of all the recent hoopla surrounding the Obama Healthcare Plan we've found ourselves in a major quandary. The news is getting heavy on images of irate senior citizens (really poor, really disheveled looking senior citizens. The same kind as that crazy old lady who crashed a John McCain rally last year to accuse Obama of being an "A-rab", only to have the microphone immediately yanked away and then Sen. McCain correct her ignorance. The worst kind.) flooding townhall style events so that they can get some screaming done about health care reform to their local political representatives. The thought of rubbing shoulders with so many nearly dead people, and possibly even immigrants, makes us more than a little reluctant to take our own bodies down to one of these events and voice our opinions (even if we don't have opinions) the way we should, the American way. It just feels a little too bourgeois to us now. So we've amended our blog policy and we've taken to the internet to share a good/funny article that Lindsay read that sums up the health care debate pretty well. It's pasted below, and I've included the article link, too. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111736487&ps=cprs
The Health Care Debate Is Making Me Sick
by Brian Unger
August 10, 2009
The health care debate is toxic, revealing a lot about us as a nation. And it feels embarrassing — like the whole world can see our underpants. Or hear us fighting in the kitchen.
First, most of us can't describe accurately the details of the health care reform now under debate. That makes us look stupid or too busy to care.
Second, most of us can't describe accurately the health care or insurance we currently have, so that makes us look kind of stupid, too, or lazy.
Some of us don't care about people who don't have health insurance, so that makes us seem unsympathetic or super lucky.
Most of us don't understand that we're already paying for people who don't have health care — which makes us too busy to care, in denial or merely rich.
Some of us — a lot of us — already receive health care under some form of government plan, but don't believe in health care under some form of government plan. That makes us hypocritical or selfish. In some camps, I hear that makes us patriotic.
A lot of us are a combination of these things: too busy, lazy, a bit stupid perhaps, lucky, unsympathetic, in-denial, really rich, hypocritical, selfish ... and patriotic.
We're having an identity crisis when it comes to caring about the nation's health, which makes me think what we really need is psychotherapy. But, sadly, that's not covered under most health plans, if you have one at all.
To many, health care reform is scary, like someone's building a halfway house for criminals right at their doorstep. It's a N.I.M.B.Y. ("Not In My Backyard") issue evolved into a N.O.M.B.O. ("Not On My Back, Obama") issue.
People never change. But policy can, so our health care reformers must get more creative and visionary.
How about a Cash for Clunkers Program? Not for cars, but for older, beat-up people whose bodies have wear and tear, and can't go long distances when they're filled with gas?
Our government is offering us $4,500 to buy a new car. Can it also offer humans incentives — say, a tax break — to join a gym? To quit smoking? Or to buy produce from local farmers? Reward schools that teach kids how to eat right and exercise? You know, kind of like that class we used to offer kids called "gym."
Let's pay people to stay healthy, instead of only paying for them when they get sick. Then maybe our nation will find its compassion, the one true antidote for its health care identity crisis.
Brian Unger
Brian Unger is a writer, satirist and actor. He helped launch The Daily Show and he is a regular contributor to NPR.
If you demanded that I give you a two word summary of my weekend it would be as follows: Puzzles, Galifiankis. If you were feeling generous and alloted me three words: Puzzles, Galifiankis, Hot( weather hot, not R Kelly hot)
As the 2 and 3 word summaries alluded to but were unable to expound upon due to the character restrictions, Matthew and I started a puzzle this weekend. Things really got cooking once our friends showed up and lent their helping hands and now the puzzle is nearly completed.
We watched this interview with Seth Galifiankis an undocumented number of times and Matthew cried from laughing every single viewing. Fugee's and Funions.
Hey Brad, are you done with school yet? My muscles may atrophy due to the loss of my beloved running partner.
Let's hope Matthew's homo tendencies atrophy as well.
Lindsay loves watching Project Runway, exercising wildly, and reading liberal propaganda.
Matthew loves the Phoenix Suns, day dreams, and hardcore 1990's east coast cocaine rap.
Lindsay does not like zits, lower back tattoos, or unruly chin hair.
Matthew does not like Robert Horry, frowns, or turtleneck shirts.
I will try harder to not let you down November, here is to hoping that I get arrested.
