1. At a party with people my age.  Someone asks, “What the heck is a ‘podcast’?”, with air quotes and an eyeroll.

2. At the laundromat, when I was a quarter short.  The resulting scramble to find one lousy quarter was awkward to the point of pain, and ended with me buying a three dollar bottle of diet coke.  There is something about laundromats that sucks all of the grace out of me.

3. Going to a Christian church with a friend and having someone ask, “It’s a great day to be saved and redeemed by Jesus!  You ARE saved and redeemed, right?”

My grandma’s birthday was last week. I asked if she was had any grand plans for the following year, her 80th. She hadn’t thought of anything, so I suggested we go to Paris and her eyes lit up (this is ostensibly to make her happy on her birthday, but I also realized I could kill two life list items at once: Take my Grandma on vacation and Have a photo of me taken while standing under the Eiffel Tower.)

We are saving up!

I’m currently dreaming of cheese, red wine, maracons and baguettes.

photo by “danske“, from Flickr

Really quick post – I am so excited to announce that today is the first week of me being regularly featured on the Skint each Monday! The Skint is a daily listing of free and cheap things to buy, see, do and eat in New York, and I’m spicing it up with a link to my weekly Hey Brooklyn interviews. Here is the first one!

This connection is excellent for me because they’re a great website – I’ve turned to them often when figuring out weekend plans – and they have a wide readership, so more eyeballs on me! You know I’m such an attention hog.

Today I had a Lunch (as in “ladies who”) with Rob’s mom and then we went shopping after and wound up in one of those skin care and makeup stores, and she was all, “I’m buying you a present!”  We tried on lipsticks and she got a new gloss that I helped her pick out, and then she recommended a face wash that I came home with.

It was fun because, you know, whatever, I can buy my own $20 bottle of shit or whatever, but it was cool to have her buy it for me – very mom-like.

It made me happy.

One of the very best parts of my wedding was the cake. It was ugly (the horrible catering hall manager didn’t allow my tattooed, pierced, punk-rock florist to put flowers on it… but that’s a whole other story) and it was naked. But it was SO GOOD. It was chocolate or vanilla, maybe both, and had both a fudge and cheesecake filling layer in. Never, ever had I had a cake like that before.

Now our 1000th day of being married is coming up at the end of January and I want to celebrate it with a similarly awesome cake. I’m thinking this is an excellent time to cross off a life list item – “Learn to make a really great cake from scratch (with homemade frosting).”

I’ll worry about the ins and outs of it after the new year, but I wanted to put out there that if you happen to have a fabulous recipe for “cheese cake filling” (because it wasn’t cheesecake proper, it was like cheesecake pudding, or cheesecake custard or something that was cheesecake-like in flavor but then so wonderful and creamy and very UN like a cheesecake in texture) pass it on. Extensive googling has turned up nothing.

“You know what phrase I’m surprised got adopted into common ussage? ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold.’ It’s an old Klingon proverb.”

“Huh?”

“Star Trek.”

“Oh. You know what I think is a weird phrase that gets used a lot? ‘It is what it is.’ I mean, of course it is what it is. Everything is. Dumb.”

“Not Transformers. They’re ‘more than meets the eye!’”

All I’ve been dreaming of is a special, swanky dinner at a local place called Al Di La!  It’s not super-super fancy, but it definitely pricier than I’m used to.  Clearly, though, I am not aiming high enough.

This receipt supposedly belongs to Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich.  The whole thing is crazy, but what really kills me is the $12 water.

Also, I’d expect a nicer receipt from such a ritzy place, you know?  Gold-leaf, fancy font, letterpressed… SOMEthing.  Aside from all the zeros, this looks like it could be from a crummy Burritoville.  Nellos, what gives?

via Buzzfeed

Even MSNBC joined me in mocking Ms. Kimberly Daniels.

At a recent party, I heard the story of a guy who had a secret word. When someone eventually said that word in his presence, he had to stop everything and buy a pizza for whoever was around.

Now I have a secret word, too.  No hints.

It’s cute boys from Norway who have guitars and soft voices. They’ve been friends since they were ten. So sweet. Their new album is out, the first since 2004. It is called Declaration of Dependence.