The Chronicles Of Jessica

I've given up waiting for Paul to have time to finish the honeymoon blogs with me. His new semester started last week and he's pretty swamped, so I told him I was going to proceed on the project without him. He seemed, frankly, pretty okay with it.

Where were we? Well, we did finally make it onto the boat, sorry if anyone has been gripped in suspension for the last 3 weeks. The morning we embarked we saw Psycho and Mrs. P waiting to get on, too. We made pleasant small talk and then beat a hasty retreat but oddly, we didn't run into them again the whole rest of the week. The cruise line had "sent" a taxi to the hotel to pick us up and bring us to the pier. I'm not exactly sure this transaction was on the up and up, because they called to let us know they were "sending" a taxi, which to me implied "paying for." After all they stranded us and left without us and forced us to stay at the Fort Lauderdale Airport Ramada, a fate no one should have to face. But when the driver dropped us off at the boat, he told us it was thirty dollars. It only occurred to us much, much later that he might have been doing the ol' double dip. But even if we thought that I don't know how we could have called him on it. We're not so much the type to call people on stuff. We're more the type to discuss things later at home and think up clever comeback lines from a safe distance.

So we were finally on the boat! We met our steward, Mario, a charming Italian who kissed me on the back of my hand (LOVE THAT). He had decorated the door of our stateroom with balloons that said "Just Married". He was very sweet, and he felt very sorry for us, which we felt we were due. In fact, we were a little miffed that every single employee we met didn't have a ready apology for leaving without us. They really should have been a little more placatory in general; I think we would have been mollified with a fully choreographed musical production entitled, "We'll Make It Up To You".

I'm sure you're all wondering about the sectarian deck chair violence. Well, blows were never actually exchanged. There's a wealth of knowledge and procedure among regular cruise-takers. People seem to have the way that they do things, and since we came three days late to the party, it took us a little while to catch on. The deck chairs were an example. Everywhere you look there are these signs posted about how you can't reserve deck chairs. You can't save your seat; if you get up and leave, you've left. So it was particularly crowded one afternoon, and Paul and I happened upon two chairs that were in the shade (an important consideration given that we both burst into flames upon exposure to the sun.) But there was a towel and a bottle of Banana Boat on one of the chairs. So we kind of waited around for a while (a half an hour to be exact) and when no one came back, we went for them. Of course it was at this exact moment that Melanoma McDouchebag and his buddy Topol Von Reeky show up. And instead of just saying, Oh, you know what, these are actually ours - which would have been fine - he says really aggressively, "Do you mind?"

I have never understood this expression. Mind? No, I don't mind at all. I don't even know what you're talking about, actually. And this is the kind of thing that, upon reflection, you can't help but wonder what you could have done differently. Suppose I had said, "Nope, don't mind a bit!" and plopped myself down in the chair. Or suppose I had started speaking in Spanish or French and smiling broadly and kissed him on both cheeks (before plopping myself down in the chair.) I could have just started whooping and slapping myself in the face and singing Beach Boys songs. What's he going to do? Hit me? I suppose he might have hit Paul, being that Paul is the man and everything, and we didn't exactly have time to get our strategy worked out because the guy was trying to be all intimidating and secondhand smoky and everything. I mean, we knew he was in the wrong: It said so right on the sign. But he won and he got the chairs, and why? Because we're nice. Too nice, obviously. But I don't really want to become a different person over something like this, so I don't know what else there really is to do. Other than hope he gets hemorrhoids. Which I do.

The rest of the trip was fairly uneventful. I lost a karaoke contest to a musical theatre major who sang "Wind Beneath My Wings" and was a little bitter about that. We did a walking tour of St. Thomas with a very strange woman who kept shifting accents. It was really weird, it was like taking a walking tour with Joe Piscopo on meth or something. And the walking tour didn't really go that many places, it was more like a "get within a certain distance of historic stuff and point at it" tour. Paul took some photos of wayward chickens, we got back on the boat. Most of the time we spent reading and doing crossword puzzles and playing Scrabble. The irony was not lost on us that those are the things we do all the time at home for free. But this way we got to do them on a big boat with a gorgeous view of the Caribbean! Not too shabs.

Anyway, the really important part of the adventure had already happened.

And it was blissfully happy.

I've been noticing an odd trend in the television censorship of movies. They'll edit a movie for adult content to show it on Comedy Central or TBS, and they'll overdub little substitutes for cursing; "spit", "fudge", etc. But then sometimes they thing they substitute ends up being more provocative than their edit! Take this scene from "The Breakfast Club".

Hot Bad Boy Judd Nelson is trying to get a rise out of Athletic Boy Toy Emilio Estevez, over Demure Teen Queen Molly Ringwald: "Come on Sporto, level with me. Do you slip her the hot beef injection? "

Ew! No question, Ew. But the cable edit I saw the other day made it even
ewwwier! Observe:

"Come on Sporto, level with me. Do you slip her the hot beef inFECTION?"

In what universe is hot beef INFECTION better than hot beef injection? The one is just a crude nickname for the male member, the other is..... Actually I don't even want to speculate, come to think of it. Best you don't either, probably.

Anyway. That's weird.

Paul joined the gym I've been going to and we've been working out together. I think I keep overdoing it though. I'm in charge of the workout routines because if left to his own devices Paul will just wander aimlessly about the facility, maybe wind up doing 2 mph on a zero-incline treadmill watching "Deep Space Nine" on his video ipod.

I kid. We heart fitness.

Start rehearsing at Woolly in a couple weeks, that will be good. Looking forward to getting back to work.

This has been a really strange week. I saw this Barbie-turned-political statement in a parking lot and it disturbed me greatly. Is it a statement about Big Tobacco or did some 'Catch a Predator' reject put it there? Art or warning sign? You decide.

A few nights ago there was a helicopter circling around above, about a block or so from our apartment, for like half an hour. I have no idea what it was doing there, nor could we determine how we'd even go about finding out. Are you allowed to call the police and ask about stuff like that? It was really weird and made us really paranoid. Paul kept trying to flush the cocaine down the toilet, except instead of cocaine it was Coffeemate. Now our bathroom smells like Hazelnut shame.

Then the other day I bought over a hundred dollars worth of groceries and after everything was bagged and I was supposed to pay, I realized I'd left my wallet next to the computer after ordering something, I can't remember what. The air purifier, I guess. We bought an air purifier because I'm convinced our apartment is choking us with dust and we're going to both get asthma and have to live in an iron lung. Maybe they'd at least be adjoining, that would be kind of cute. But if the air purifier works it won't have to come to that. In 3 weeks I'm supposed to check the filter and then I can see how much grunge we saved ourselves breathing, which I will be gloriously disgusted by. It's in the same feeling neighborhood as when I do Biore Strips and see what came out of my nose pores. The more gunk there is the more perversely thrilled I am, I feel an archaeolgical zeal akin to Howard Carter.

I'd also forgotten my cell phone.

Luckily the nice manager of the Giant let me use the phone to call our apartment, which was a long shot. Paul doesn't answer the phone too much, he's wary of telemarketers. But he picked up and then the nice manager of the Giant let me get the credit card number from Paul and he charged me for the groceries that way. Not my finest moment; in fact I was pretty embarrassed. But after I thought about it I figured that it was a lot less hassle to have to do that than to have to put back everything if I had no way to pay for it. Plus, I'll bet lots worse stuff has happened in there. You know a kid has thrown up in there, kids throw up lots of places. Or I bet some crazed vegan has thrown fake blood on someone buying bulk sausage, or something like that. Compared to that I'm a minor nuisance.

On the upside, I narrowly escaped getting a parking ticket yesterday, and I have to say, it felt so awesome to get away with something. I don't seem to get away with much, historically. Certainly not in my diet; all I have to do is look flirtatiously at a bucket of chicken and five pounds will appear on my ass like some sick David Blaine experiment.

Paul and I are going to TWO concerts this weekend. This is more concerts than I've been to in the last 2 years. V. excited.

I went down to McDonalds to get a hazelnut iced coffee for a harried coworker, and I may never recover from the experience. A downtown McDonalds at noon is just chaos; it must be like the old Russian breadlines used to be. There were just these teeming hordes of unwashed masses scrambling around in there trying to get their cholest-on, and all this screeching in different languages. My blood pressure went up just thinking about working there.

Seriously, that is a bad, bad job to have. I have nothing but sympathy for people who can't get a better job doing something else, but you have to figure almost ANY job would be better. The only thing I can think that would be worse is maybe cleaning toilets like at the Port Authority. Even picking up garbage would be a better job; they have a union and health benefits! No free food, I don't imagine, but you could probably take home any of the more attractive refuse that caught your eye. That's how most actors furnish their apartments, if I'm not mistaken.

Actually in our neighborhood no matter what you put on the street, someone will take it before the trash collectors come around. I can't imagine who would have a use for any of this stuff. When our microwave went gently into that good night, we stuck it out by the garbage cans to be hauled off but within an hour some passerby had just taken it. The thing was totally fried, there was no way it would ever work again. Surely the fact that it was sitting forlornly out on the sidewalk would alert you to that? Plus it weighed about forty pounds, so I don't really see that you could carry it too far unless you were one of those Ironman fellows, or maybe James Keegan. Is someone hauling this thing all the way home, only to plug it in and are they then actually surprised that no micros or waves are forthcoming? I wonder.

Our concerts last weekend were ever so much fun. First up was Thomas Dolby, which some hardcore trivia whizzes (and ASC 2006 Season vets) might recognize as the artist who did "She Blinded Me With Science" sometime in the 80's. That was actually never one of my favorites, although I loved the acoustic cover of it in the preshow for Tempest. Now he does all kinds of...well - I'm not sure what the best way to describe it is. He has a computer and a bunch of equipment and he kind of builds these beats and songs on stage. It's kind of like Max Headroom meets Moby. Paul, naturally, was beside himself with excitement, and it was pretty cool. We had great seats, too, and it was a small venue so we could see everything really well. Sunday was the total opposite experience; it was the Genesis reunion tour at the Verizon center. We were definitely on the low end of the age range there; most of the songs they played had been written before we were even born. We could only afford seats up top, and by up top I mean as far up as the seats went. "Nosebleed section" would be a generous description; they actually had a couple of oxygen tents set up in the aisle. But that was a great show, too. Sitting that far up isn't as much of a detriment as it used to be because everything gets projected onto video screens now, so you don't feel like you're watching specks wriggle around on stage. But the one thing we did miss out on was getting captured by the audience cam and projected onto the jumbo-tron. I absolutely love that, and I don't know what it is about it, but it's so hilarious when they do that. I've seen it at Sea World, too, except there they put funny captions and thought bubbles on people. But the cam will kind of pan around and land on a group of people, they're kind of swaying and doing the white man's overbite - and then they realize they're on the jumbo-tron and they wave and jump up and down and are so excited. A few people showed their boobs, which is one of those things that there is a certain window of time for, and let us just say that for me, that window is closed. It's also been painted over like in those old apartment buildings where they send in the super with a triple gallon bucket of industrial high gloss to just hose the whole place down after the previous tenants left.

What?

Anyway, good times. We have no proof of these excursions, because flash photography is not allowed (yeah, like Phil Collins is going to be disturbed by the glare of a Canon Powershot from my seat in Siberia) but also because the tshirts were $40. We don't have that many policies yet, being a new married couple, but we now have one against the forty dollar tshirt. And the seven dollar beer, and the 5 dollar pretzel. And showing your boobs on the jumbotron.

Edit: Paul says he might be flexible on that last one.

Paul and I are going up to New Jersey this weekend so I can meet his grandparents and spend some more time with my new family members. I decided it would be nice to bring them a framed photo of us from the wedding, since they weren't able to be there, so I took a photo over to a local lab and had them do three 5 x 7's. They turned out terribly; we both look totally blurry and I have these red blotches all over my neck. And it cost me $9! I don't know why the guy didn't tell me that the resolution of the file wasn't good enough to support a 5 x 7 enlargement, but he didn't, and this is one of those situations where I'm not really sure I'm in a position to demand a refund. It's not exactly his fault, but it's not exactly cool, either.

It's got me thinking about other times that money has just been completely and utterly wasted, which is a depressing line of thought if you have no sense of humor about yourself (fortunately, mine is quite healthy.) Following, my top five.

1. Sculptured Nails. I got these when I was just out of college. I have always had bad nails and I thought it would be so much fun to be able to have these long polished nails with which I could gesture grandly. I guess I had them about a year, and you have to get them "filled in" every week or so which costs about $20, so I probably sunk several hundred dollars into that enterprise. Which would be okay if I didn't look back on pictures of myself and decide that I looked like Cruella Deville with these fake talons tacked onto the tips of my fingers.

2. Home Leg Waxing Kit, seen on infomercial. The wax didn't take the hair off my legs; I was lucky I had any skin left in the end, as a matter of fact.

3. AOL. AOL drives me up the wall, it's so Internet for Dummies. You can almost always get the same or better service for less, and they suck you in like a cult and won't let you out again no matter what you do. I kept calling to try and get it cancelled and they kept saying, "Well why don't we just give you another month free, see if you change your mind." That's like offering me a month of free celery: I don't want it, I'm not going to use it and eventually it will turn against you because I'll tell everyone I know that you're a stupid celery-pusher who can't take no for an answer and will never leave me alone.

4. Cello and cello lessons. I took the cello up for the second time in Chicago after about a 12 year hiatus. I used to play in the school orchestra in middle school and I wasn't very good then, either. I quit because at the end of the year we had our big concert and the girls were required to wear a skirt. When I questioned the wisdom of wearing a skirt while playing the cello, this know-it-all dude who played viola told me in front of the whole class, "Wear thick underwear!" In retrospect it's not a bad line but hey, I was 13. I'm sure I thought the advancing maturity of my years would improve my abilities. It didn't. And it was a pain in the ass to take on the subway.

5. Beeper. I got this beeper when I had my first agent, because they had to be able to get in touch with me at all times. (Pfft.) I couldn't afford a cell phone at the time, but as I look back on it now, smoke signals would have been a more effective method of communicating. You could leave a voicemail on the service but only up to 30 seconds and there was no way to save the message so if you missed any information you were just out of luck. Plus you had to make a call to retrieve the message or to call back anyone who beeped you, so I was always running around trying to get change and find a payphone. Thus making it a waste of time AND money! Brilliant.