hot lips

My good friend Niedert tagged me to write a post about my husband.

Nicknames: Mr. Woolfie, Turd Ferguson, Brittany (only by his hometown buddies), B Dub.

How long have you been together? About 7 years. We dated on-and-off for six years; we have been married for seven months. What, we had commitment issues.

How long did we date? So long his Dad offered to perform free eye surgery on me if we would finally get married. Surgery--what better incentive??

Who said I love you first? He did.

Who is taller? He is. Which was a pre-requisite. I didn't date extra-short dudes for gene pool purposes.

Who can sing better? He does. He sings every commercial that comes on the T.V. The Daisy sour cream commercial was his #1 hit of the summer.

Who mows the lawn? We have no lawn.

Who drives? We have no car.

Who does the laundry? We have no laundry in the building, so we send it out. I'm starting to realize that city living is simplified--and that on paper it sounds like we live out of an abandoned school bus.

Who cooks? We both like to cook, although he is way more hardcore. I think we own at least 15 items just related to pie-making. That said, we're usually lazy and argue about who is going to make dinner--which often results in a peanut butter sandwich for dinner or another run to Yuki Sushi, where they know our orders by heart.

Who kissed who first? I kissed him. I played hard-to-get so well that he sort of refused to be the first one to make a move. I broke down after about a dozen dates.

Who proposed? He did.

Who has more siblings? He blows me out of the water on this one. He comes from a combined family, one parent on each side passed away while the kids were young, the parents remarried, and they have a combined total of 10. The grand kids come so fast we literally lose count sometimes. We'll get an email about someone and he'll be like, who's this? And I'll be like, I think that's your niece.

What's the best present he's given you? A refurbished 1964 "Debutante" Schwinn Beach Cruiser Bicycle. My roommate Katie had a couple cruisers, and when she moved I missed our bike rides. He surprised me with my own bike on my birthday, with a big red bow on it. Remember when you came down on Christmas morning and found a bike by the tree? Somehow, getting a bike is one of the best wish-fulfillment sensations ever.

What's the best gift you've given him? An industrial-strength shaved-ice machine.

What made you fall for him? His kindness. And his nerdiness. I have long thought that nerds make the best boyfriends. When we first started dating he had just quit a job as an IT manager. He have books on our shelves like "Mergers, Acquisitions, and Restructuring Models." You can bet those aren't mine.

What makes him the yin to your yang? Our mutual love of weird and cool and nerdy stuff. When you are the person who says, "I want to go to the demoliton derby," or, "I know...let's spend our summer vacation with war reenactors," and you find the person who's like, "Yeah, and let's also hit the La Brea tar pits;" hold onto that like a rear-mount choke hold, people. Because that is LOVE.

hippity hoppity

Easter is probably my favorite holiday spirituality-wise (not as commercial as Christmas) and also confectionary-wise. Holidays sometimes are an interesting situation for me in NYC, though, because we're so far away from family.

When I first moved here I had fantasies about having a new persona, shedding my old self and re-creating an all-new me (I think in this particular fantasy I dyed my hair black, in the end I just cut bangs). It turns out being an all-new me is not what it's cracked up to be. Because I didn't know anyone when I moved here, none of my new friends knew anything about my past--I had no context. Creating a personhood proved kind of a chore and I wished that people knew my family, my embarassing moments so we could rehash them, personal jokes like when I say..."What's the time?" They're supposed to say, "Time to get ILL!" But no one knew me or my Beastie Boy references.

This year I got to spend Easter I was especially grateful for Easter brunch with old friends; especially B Dub and this awesome lady. We bonded, many years ago, over marshmallow peeps. Which I have found to be as good a measure of friendship as any.

long life cool white

While in Boston last weekend, I stumbled upon an exhibition of Moyra Davey's photos.

I liked them because

1) The title of the show reminds me of a noodle house, and of a fluorescent light bulb.

2) The subjects tend to be completely mundane. Lots of them were pictures of DUST. Like, closeups of dustbunnies in corners, or a big ol' wad of dust stuck to a dog's paw. That reminded me of learning in freshman biology class that dust is mostly made up of human skin cells and hair, and possibly fallen matter from dead stars. That last part I think I made up or read in a Robert Fulghum book.

In the same class I learned about COHESION, which is the property that makes water molecules stick to each other and form one body, instead of bouncing around like a bunch of tiny water marbles. This is the same property that allows your cornea to adhere to your eyeball--with no stitches or anything--after it's been shaved off for laser surgery. The cornea just clings on there for dear life all by itself until it heals, thanks to cohesion.

3) Her photos are fragmentary, which is something I like in collages and lists and lyric poems. She has a bunch of series or "groupings" that make more sense together than individually. Or, rather, you take in the individual stills and your brain makes a story out of them because that's what brains like to do: order information. For example, one could look at a sampling of magazine covers and come to the conclusion that Britney Spears is crazy, while someone else could look at the same covers and decide that she's crazy and knocked up and strung out on drugs. To each brain its own.

4)Her photos provided an all new art medium for B Dub to assess with the words, "I could've done that." Until now, this dismissal was reserved for painters like Jackson Pollack or Mark Rothko.

a person frying squirrels

I got to hear Philip Gourevitch talk about writing a few weeks ago. His was a useful and endearingly earnest attempt to give good advice to new writers. Here are some of my favorite things he said, many of which apply to new and aspiring artists of all kinds.

PG on beginners:

People will say, Why are you writing about that? You don't even know anything about it. You look at something for the first time, and everyone seems to know more than you do. You think, I must be ignorant...but let me have a look. Your authority is your curiosity.

You have to have a basic confidence you're going to make it work. Use your amateur spirit. [This seemed much better to me than beginner's luck, which sounds dumb and fickle. Amateur spirit, he implied, was a sort of fire-in-the-belly only a first-timer can bring to a project].

PG on his own writing:

I look at stories as containers--I approach it not knowing what's inside, and I have to shape it.

Writing is a great act of distillation and compression. It starts with a vast amount of over-reported material. At some point I go back to this database and confront the material and look at it as a set of characters and start to study the material as a text.

You are writing your world--slicing your way toward a cleaner version of it.

Density and swiftness fascinate me.

I figured out there were 3 things I wanted to do for a living: Imagine, think, and speak. I wanted to get on the road. I wanted to put people into motion across large landscapes.

PG on writing about real people:

You have a pretext for asking people nosey questions. That's one perk. You are looking at people and you don't have to pretend you're not.

A reporter goes to a village and gets a sound bite from Mala Tawala Walla and moves on. What if you threw out all the statistics and spent a month with Mala Tawala Walla? That's where the story is.

Official sources are boring, mostly. I want to talk to somebody I have to protect a little bit when I write about them, because they're that un self-aware.

PG on the kinds of stories he likes:

Too often nonfiction doesn't serve its subject matter. It slams data at you. Nonfiction and fiction have the same test: Be truthful. Good stories are works of imagination and observation. Why should they be divorced?

I'm interested in people who do or think things I wouldn't. What's the belief system of this person that makes him do things nobody else does? What about a person I've never heard of. A person frying squirrels.


I wanted to get up and hug PG when he got to the frying squirrels bit. That's pretty much my raison d'etre and inspiration for writing: The guy who fries squirrels. (Metaphorically speaking. And, sort of literally.) Bless PG and the dude with the deep-fat fryer.


Philip Gourevitch is the author of "We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families," an in-depth account of the Rwanda genocide. He is editor of the Paris Review, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and a contributing editor to the Forward. In the aftermath of the genocide he spent over nine months in Rwanda trying to understand how this extraordinary crime had come to pass, how it was organized, how the Western powers had stood by and watched it happen, and how Rwandans are living with its legacy. His latest book is "A Cold Case."