March 2008

"Time to shine!"

Okay, okay, okay….I know this is over a week late.  I’m sorry.  You can stop with the emails and whatnot threatening my life over the absence of March’s Ten Happy Things.  ;-)  Kidding, kidding, kidding.  Truthfully, it brings me joy that there are so many people enjoying my little monthly affirmations.  I’ve been recently out of town on family business.  More on that later…

Now, without further ado, here are the Ten Happy Things for March…

10.  Baseball has begun.  It sort of began on the 25^th of March in Japan with the Red Sox and the A’s…….but that really didn’t count.  It was kind of cool watching Matsuzaka pitch in his hometown, despite the fact that he pitched like a chode.  Nevertheless, baseball is underway, bringing an almost singular joy to the hell that I call summer….or, in this case, impending summer.  The impending doom of summer brightened by the glory of baseball.  Hopefully the Mets won’t rip my heart out and feed it to me in some manner of casserole by season-end.  Tall order, I know.

9.  Keeping with baseball……..and I know you all are sick of hearing about my television, but I don’t give a sack of goat balls……baseball looks so good on my TV.  It’s ridiculous.  I have the MLB Extra Innings package so I can get my Mets games and my Red Sox games and all the channels come in HD and it’s fucking great.  Not just great.  Fucking great.  The first game I put on brought an odd combination of expressions to my face.  I came home from work and put the game on and a look of joy and annoyance kind of marched across my face in conflict with each other – joy because it looked so unreasonably incredible and annoyance because the Mets were losing four to nothing.  They did come back to win 7 to 4, making the whole experience a complete joygasm.  I love my TV.

8.  Roger Federer just keeps losing.  It’s bloody fantastic!  It started with that loss to Novak Djokovic at the Australian Open and it’s just cascaded from there.  He lost to Andy Roddick at the Sony Ericsson.  He lost to the unseeded Mardy Fish at some other tournament.  And were talking losing in matches that aren’t finals.  He’s losing in quarterfinals and semifinals.  He’s losing in early rounds.  He’s just plain losing.  It’s so nice to be able to fully get into men’s tennis again because I can watch and not just automatically know that Federer’s going to win.  It really makes my day.  What a sick person I am that I get such joy out of one man’s failures.  I don’t even care.

7.  I’ve been undergoing a general rebuilding plan life-wise.  Not saying that anything was particularly broken.  Everything was pretty okay to begin with.  But I’ve kind of embarked on a journey of general improvement as of late and it’s going pretty well.  Just so you know…

6.  While I was out of town, I found an outlet version of my favorite undergarment procuring store.  Normally, my brassieres and skivvies are a tad on the expensive side but I’m an underwear snob so I fork out the cash.  However, I came upon this outlet and found all the stuff I usually spend way too much money on at much discounted prices.  Score!  I bought all new underwear.  I’m talking a whole new wardrobe of unmentionables.  I came home and tossed out nearly every pair of panties I own and replaced two brassieres that were in the first stages of elastic decomposition.  My drawer is filled with neatly folded perfect new skivvies.  They’re bright and shiny.  I have a blue pair on now.  There is nothing better than new skivvies.  Small pleasure, I know.  I’m sure the ladies reading this understand...

5.  To my great displeasure, the Mets are only coming to Chicago once this year and for a measly two games as opposed to the normal three-game series.  They’re making up for the game loss by holding a four-game series against the Cubs at Shea later in the season, which helps me a whole lot of not at all.  Foo.  Foo to the nth degree.  It’s not like I get to see my boys in living, breathing color all that often.  Now the MLB is shorting me a game on top of it?  Bastards.  The silver lining is that I have tickets for both games.  The platinum lining is that Barksdale, one of my most favorite people ever, helped me to procure some tickets five rows from home.  Look for me on TV April 21^st.  I’ll be the nut behind home plate at Wrigley wearing head to toe Mets paraphernalia.  Yeah, that’s me.

4.  My trip home was not a particularly merry one.  Nevertheless, I was blessed with the treat of New York pizza.  Pizzagasm!  I’m salivating just thinking about it.  Besides a more constant flow of contact with my family, pizza is probably the thing about home I miss the most.  I know that’s dumb.  I miss egg creams too, which is probably even dumber.  I don’t care.  Any time I get to have proper pizza, that’s a damn fine day indeed.

3.  I have a foster dog.  A friend needed a temporary home for his ten-year-old beagle so I took him in.  His name is Sammy…..Sammy after Sammy Sosa, but I can’t fault him for that.  It’s not his fault the guy who named him has issues.  The dog has also begun answering to the name Cletus, which he is called because of his utterly absurd conglomeration of teeth.  I cannot begin to explain the pleasure this dog is.  He is the funniest dog ever.  I mean, totally ridiculous.  I’m in almost a constant state of laughing at his shenanigans.  He’s just completely ridiculous.  I really can’t come up with a better word than that.  He runs like a goof, he barks like a goof, he makes all these oddball faces and sounds, he snores loud enough to rupture your eardrums, he attacks my dog by biting his ass.  He’s just ridiculous.  His presence in my house came at a good time.  It’s good to have something to make you laugh when things are sad.

2.  It is now official.  New Kids on the Block are reuniting and going on tour.  They’re all, like, forty and they’re going to get on stage and do those ridiculous dances and sing those awful songs to a crowd full of screaming thirty-somethings who worshipped them back in the day.  I am totally going.  Even if I have to fly out to some other city, I’m totally going.  I may even tease my bangs out four inches in every direction and tight-roll my jeans.

1.  This is a happy thing masquerading as a not so happy thing.  Bear with me.  It gets happy at the end.  As I mentioned earlier, this list is late because I was out of town.  I was in New York honoring my great-grandmother (who is better known as Grammy) who passed away on Wednesday.  She’d had a stroke the week before, hung in there for a few days, and then just kind of faded out Wednesday morning.  Those few days in between her stroke and her passing were marked by a surgical attachment to my cell phone, endless schedulings and reschedulings of airline and rental car reservations, uncountable numbers of phone calls and emails, a most unpleasant airplane ride, and a general sense of unease and disbelief.  Grammy was 98 years old but was healthy despite her age.  Outside of some hearing loss and general forgetfulness, there wasn’t really anything wrong with her…..so while we all knew it would come eventually, the actuality of it came as quite a shock.  She was just so damn old and so damn together in being so damn old that we all kind of thought without thinking that she’d be around forever.  I know how blessed I am for having had her in my life for so long.  I mean, how many 31 year olds have Great-Grandmothers?  I certainly wasn’t cheated or robbed and I can’t possibly say that her death is unfair.  She lived a wondrous, long life…the kind of life that’s like sliding head-first into home plate and being called safe to win the game.  She was a remarkable woman who set the definition for the "ripple in the pond" effect.  She grew up on a Long Island farm with nine brothers and sisters, she worked in airplane assembly during WWII, she was a meat packer by trade, she raised five daughters on her own before it was cool to be a single mom, she was the most fantastic practical joker, and she spawned five daughters, 18 grandchildren, 64 great-grandchildren, and seven great-great-grandchildren before she left us.  Yeah, I know….that’s a ridiculous amount of cousins.  That’s where the happy part comes in.  Most of my family lives in New York.  However, those few of us in Chicago, Maine, Pennsylvania, Florida, Rhode Island, and New Jersey all commingled down on Long Island to honor this woman……and we didn’t do it with tears and grief.  We did it with love and laughter and enjoyment of each other, the way Grammy would have wanted it.  She raised us all in laughter and that’s how we sent her out.  I don’t see most of my cousins very often.  In celebrating Grammy’s life, I got to spend time with my really extended family and it was a treasure of a time.  The terms of the gathering were not so joyous but the experience was and I’m happier for it.