Anne & May

On most days, reggae is blasting out the windows in my neighborhood. Apparently I have a lot of neighbors who really love music and want to share it with the world. But for the past week, all I’ve heard is Michael Jackson—from cars on the street, in the alleyway, from the old lady upstairs who usually listens to Family Christian Radio. Even from ipods turned up too loud in the elevator. It’s kind of exploded. And I get it—it’s a big deal that he died, and his music made up a large part of my childhood. My brothers and I would break out the strobe light [seriously] and blast “Thriller” and dance around the living room like nobody’s business.

But as I’ve recently been subjected to every Michael Jackson song ever made, I started to try to figure out which of his songs I least mind hearing blasted into my apartment at all hours. I think it might be “Smooth Criminal”. But then, I change my mind and decide it’s “Man in the Mirror.” But then there’s “Billie Jean,” and “Bad.” Then again, I have “You Are Not Alone” in my Christian mix, because if you don’t know better, it sounds exactly like a worship song, so maybe that wins.

I don’t know. What’s your favorite?

I had a roommate in college that we called Fashion Kateigh. She was the most fashionable person I’ve ever met and now works in the industry in L.A., but the one thing I’ll always remember about her is that she HATED the word pants. If you felt like messing with her, you could just chant,”Pants, pants, pants,” and she’d run screaming from the room. I guess it was her “utilize” or “moist”–or my absolute least favorite word–”impactful.”

What did she want us to say instead of “pants”? Trousers. So, Fashion Kateigh, this post is about my new trousers.

When I got my first job out of grad school, I was still an “artiste,” and that meant no way, no how, was I going to dress like some kind of working sap–though I most definitely was just that. And so I wore eclectic outfits and declared a ban on khaki pants, erhm, trousers. They just seemed to epitomize the very thing you would not wear while sitting in a smoky French cafe, working on your roman a clef. And even if I was sitting in a cubicle on the 17th floor in a so-so neighborhood of New York City, I wanted to at least PRETEND I was in a smoky cafe in Paris.

Flash forward to the present. My new job is a whole heck of a lot more job than I’ve ever had before. And many of my clothes are too young and/or too wacky for this new role so it was time to go shopping–and more importantly, it was time to get a nice, sensible pair of khakis or chinos. Is there a difference between khakis and chinos? I’m not even sure.

So what did I do? I called my baby sister of course! My baby sister has been in charge of everything her whole life. She probably got the other babies in the hospital to elect her Baby President and she has been dressing like a grown-up for years.

“I have some news about the Vanderbilt butt,” she said.

“Yes?” I sat at attention. When your baby sister is giving you advice about the butt you share, you listen!

“J. Crew. J. Crew pants can handle your butt.”

And so Saturday I shopped a massive online J. Crew sale for hours and picked up loads of sensible staples. Like cardigans! And trousers! And even my first pair of chinos! And you know what? I think I still look like me in them. Sure, I look like the me who’s able to lead a “webinar” (another horrible word), but it’s not like they’d throw me out of that smoky French cafe either.

One pair of chinos isn’t going to kill my street cred, but I draw the line at Hush Puppies!

–May

Our friend returned from a trip to Brazil this week and brought back all kinds of goodies for us. Well, one kind of goody, really, just several different versions.

Let me start over.

Our friend recently returned from a trip to Brazil, where he saw this:

That’s the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janiero. It’s very famous. But instead of being awed by the beauty of the statue or the magnitude of God’s power, our friend looked at this statue and realized he had a goal for his trip: find the tackiest version of this masterpiece he could find, because he knew how much I would love it.

This is how you know you’ve graduated to the level of good friend. It’s not when you get to meet someone’s family or see where they grew up. No way. It’s when they scour a foreign country to bring you the ugliest Jesus kitsch they can find that you know you’re in good.

This was his first attempt. Not bad.

It’s a majestic statue demeaned to the level of miniature fake marble, which is always nice. He bought it.

But then he was walking through a market and saw this:

The brown lacquer is a nice touch, but my favorite part of this version is definitely the metallic heart-shaped Brazilian flag sticker on the pedestal. I’m not totally sure what the message here is: Jesus loves Brazil? Brazil has a Jesus-shaped hole in its heart? They had a bunch of leftover stickers? At any rate, he bought it. So he’s now bringing us two Jesus statues.

But then, he saw this:

I mean. It’s a pink plastic Jesus. It’s a post-modern interpretation. No, it’s modern. No wait, it’s just hot pink and awesome. Well, in any case, this one was so stunning, he had to purchase it as well.

Total Jesus count: 3. It’s like the trinity of tacky Jesus souvenirs.

But wait, it gets better. Then. He spotted this:

That’s right. It’s Christ the Redeemer. On flip flops. It doesn’t get any better than this.

It turns out there were several colors available, and he chose purple and gold, either as Biblical symbols of royalty or because he thought they looked the most ridiculous, I’m not sure which.

So that brings up to a grand total of 4 souvenirs he brought back for us from his trip to Brazil. Which is either really sweet or really terrifying. Thanks, Michael!

Can we talk beauty secrets a moment? I turned 30 and overnight my face began to change. Everyone has trouble areas (at least I tell myself that) and mine is below my eyes. I get dark puffy bags under my peepers. Also, my skin is STILL oily after all these years so breakouts continue to be a problem–even as new wrinkles set in. If you had told a 13-year-old May that she was still going to be battling breakouts at 31, she would have dissolved into hysterics.

In my early twenties, I washed my face with hand soap, dabbed a little CoverGirl powder on it, and called it a day. Oh those were the happy times! Eventually I discovered Mario Badescu and they drew up an official regimen for me and that carried me to 31. Now, I’m looking to whip out the big guns. What is your secret weapon?

I’ll share mine first. This is Bliss Wrinkle Twinkle–the stupidest named product on the market that really works. It gets rid of the dark circles under your eyes AND it fills in wrinkles. It’s kind of stingy, like lip plumper, and it is the only thing I’ve ever found that actually works on dark circles. Anne, I know you swear by hemorrhoid cream under the eyes but I’ve never gotten it to work.

Your turn!

–May

PS I also have uneven skin tone. Know anything for that?

PPS Does DuWop Lip Venom really work? I have teensy tiny little lips too!

Get out your party hats and noisemakers, because the biggest party of the millennium is about to start: John Calvin is turning 500! I mean, well, he would be turning 500 if he weren’t actually dead. But anyway, lots of folks are gearing up to celebrate on July 10, including me. We’ll play fun games, like Pin the Tail on the Unpredestined, and Jesus Pictionary (Get it? Because he was against religious art? Shut up. That was hilarious.). It will be awesome!

Here in New York, a girl who was badly burned in a voodoo ritual was taken in to foster care after her family ignored her cries for help and sent her to bed. The girl had been forced to stand naked inside a ring of fire with an “accelerant” rubbed into her skin. Which sounds to me like just about the most terrifying thing I can imagine.

Madonna is stirring up angry protests (again? Aren’t we all tired of this?) over the dates for her Sticky and Sweet tour. (Why am I suddenly craving a Cinnabon?). Apparently the singer’s concert in Poland is scheduled for August 15th, which is a public holiday in Poland that celebrates the assumption of Mary into heaven. Which, you know, makes the whole name thing a bit awkward.

I think I might have been the last person earth to get the news that Jon and Kate are making it official and have filed divorce papers. I’m not actually sure how that counts as religion news, but you’re welcome.

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford is the latest politician to admit to an extramarital fling after a recent trip to visit a woman in Argentina. The scandal broke after his staff hilariously explained his unexpected absence by saying he was hiking the Appalachian trail.

I think I’m  going to use that one from now on. “Why were you late to the meeting this morning?” “I was hiking the Appalachian Trail.”  “Why didn’t you start making dinner until 10:30 at night?” “Oh, you know, I was too busy hiking the Appalachian Trail.” I can’t think of a situation where that excuse wouldn’t work. Thanks for the great cover, Sanford!

And of course, we  couldn’t recap this week’s news without saying our goodbyes to to everyone’s favorite wacko.

I’d totally forgotten how cracked out this video is.

We love you, Michael, and we’ll miss you.  No, seriously, we will. You pretty much rocked our world, and our prayers are with your family.

That’s all the news from the pews. Have a great weekend everybody!

As loyal readers know (but no doubt didn’t care very much about anyway and promptly forgot), I had surgery on my foot a while back, and I’m pleased to say I’m all better and back on my… uh, feet. I even went running this Saturday… and, ok, just about every day since.

I don’t know what it is about running that I enjoy, but I really love it. Maybe it’s the endorphins, or the fact that it helps me sleep better, or that when you’re doing it right you feel like you’re about to puke, or the fact that I can justify bagels with cream cheese in the morning if I know I’m going to run later.

Anyway, I’m a lot happier when I exercise. I tend to have a lot of nervous energy, and when I don’t exercise, it just gets pent up and I start to get really uptight and stressed out. I like the weight-loss benefits, but I exercise mainly because it makes me feel better physically and mentally (as in, I don’t end up wanting to punch the old lady who cuts in front of me at the ATM).

As I was running tonight—at twilight, in the park, with the gorgeous trees all around me—I was thinking about how lucky I am to be able to do this at all. To live in a place where I am allowed to run down the street. To grow up in a time where girls were not only allowed, but encouraged, to participate in sports.

I grew up doing gymnastics and soccer and dance and swimming and basketball, and pretty much anything I wanted, but I remember once asking my mom about why she wasn’t more active, and she told me that in her day, girls weren’t encouraged to do sports. There weren’t opportunities for them like there were for boys, and so she never learned to love physical activity the way I did. Title IX, which made it so schools had to support sports for girls in equal proportion to guys, wasn’t instituted until 1972 (incidentally,1972 was also the first year women graduated from Princeton—it blows my mind to realize how late this is). My mom was in her mid-twenties by then.

It made me realize how much the world has changed, and how those of us who grew up in the later part of the last millennium really benefited from the hard work of the women before us, who fought to allow us to do things like play sports and go to the same schools men go to and have jobs we love. Sometimes I take for granted that I can do anything a guy can do, and I forget how lucky I am and how much I owe to the generations who came before me.

So, uh, thanks. You guys rock.

Wow, I didn’t mean to turn this into feminism week on AnneandMay or anything. I started out just wanting to talk about how excited I am that I can run again. Woo woo!

I hate pronouns. Don’t you? This week at work I was writing up something formal and it looked like this:

Is he/she able to demostrate what his/her objectives are?

Blech! That looks terrible and yet it is correct. I wish we could all agree on some kind of gender-neutral pronoun like shim or s/he–but until that happens, we’re kind of stuck. Some people would argue that I could use he for everything and everyone will infer that I mean women too, but that doesn’t work for me as a woman. This simply doesn’t seem to include me.

Is he able to demonstrate what his objectives are?

And some people like to alternate pronouns but that looks weird to me:

Is he able to demonstrate what her objectives are? (Okay, usually you don’t alternate in the same sentence but still.)

I had never thought about calling God “him” before college, but after the pronoun dilemma was brought up in my religion class, it did get me thinking. Sure, Jesus was a dude. I think we can all agree on that. But God? Not so much in my book or the holy ghost either–well, particularly the holy ghost. You do see renderings of God that make him look like a bearded old white guy (problematic to be sure), but I’ve never seen a rendering of the holy ghost that has it looking like, well, a him.

So what do we do? I find that I avoid using pronouns for God at all costs. That’s honestly the only solution I’ve come up with, which means I’m one of those silly name-checkers.

God loves us. That’s why God sent Jesus to die for us.

What’s that you say? I’m splitting hairs? Well, maybe. I do so love to make life far more complicated than it is. But the problem for me is, calling God a man seems a little like reducing this omnipotent, omniscient entity to…something very human. God can’t be a him in my book. That’s too earthly.

Maybe we need to come up with a pronoun for God too. I’m leaning toward something like “omni” since it means all, which is probably the closest word we’ve got to expressing God succinctly.

–May

I’m going to whine a bit. Just wanted to warn you, because I know there are people with worse problems out there. Bad things are going on in the world, and this really doesn’t qualify as something worth complaining about. Knowing that is not going to stop me from complaining, though.

My computer died on Saturday night. I was watching a movie, and when it was over, the computer just froze. I couldn’t do anything.

(Sidenote: That’s actually Wayne’s computer in the photo. We have the same model, so they look exactly the same, except that his has Jesus spelled out in rhinestones on it and mine doesn’t—naturally.)

Now, my husband is an IT guy. He fixes Macs for a living. He’s really useful to have around. But he wasn’t around. (Which is why I was watching a movie on my computer by myself on Saturday night.* Oh, and also I’m pathetic.) He was in Minneapolis at a conference, but I’ve seen him in action enough to know that the first thing he always tells people is to restart the computer, so I tried that. It seemed like a brilliant idea until my computer wouldn’t turn back on. That’s when I panicked. Never mind that it was 11:30. I called him.

Me: Hey….
Wayne: Hey! Good to hear from you! How are you? I miss you!
Me: I need you to fix my computer. Right now.
Wayne: Oh. [he HATES fixing computers.]
Me: Where are you, anyway? What’s all that noise?
Wayne: I’m out at a bar with a bunch of friends
ME: Oh. Well, that’s nice. So anyway, my computer made a noise like it was mad and me and now it won’t turn on. It was definitely an angry noise. Why does it hate me, and how can I make it love me again?

The poor guy spent almost an hour on the phone with me, talking me through every possible way to get the stupid thing to work again, and finally decided that he couldn’t do anything more for me over the phone. This left me computerless, which was no good because I had planned to spend the whole next day catching up with work.

Sunday morning, I showed up at church and was greeted warmly by my friend and neighbor. He asked how I was doing; I responded by asking if he had a laptop I could borrow (I get a little, uh, focused when I have something on my mind). Incredibly, he didn’t punch me. He offered me the use of his work laptop instead.

Wayne finally came home, bringing hip computer with him, and played around (maybe he wasn’t playing; I really have no idea what kind of voodoo he uses to get computers to right themselves) with my computer and said he had to bring it in on Monday. I almost cried.

Anyway, the upshot is that my hard drive crashed, wiping out everything since my last back-up. Fortunately, my nerdy husband backs up my computer for me regularly, so it’s not that bad. The photos are mostly there, and the music, and Wayne installed a new hard drive for me today, so I’m up and running again. (May, as much as I would love to get a new computer out of this, a hard drive is less than a hundred bucks, while a new computer is way more, and even though the tiny thin Macs are really pretty, I can’t justify that.)

So everything is fine, but it was still somehow traumatic. I lost the file I had been working on, but I’ll figure it out. It was just that to suddenly be cut off from the world like that was strangely frightening, and losing my ability to be productive freaked me out more than it should have. It’s a strange world.

Done whining. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

*Let’s have a fun little guessing game in the comments! First person to correctly guess what pathetic movie I was watching by myself on a Saturday night gets an I LOVE JESUS AND CUTE BOYS BUTTON button. If no one guesses right, then my life is more pathetic than I thought.

Were you praying that I pass my driver’s license test? Well, you MUST have been because I did! On the first try! And I only missed two. Look, I have proof of three key components of this story. 1) That I have been procrastinating on this for years. 2) That I studied this little book until it nearly fell apart. 3) That I only missed two!

Recently my friend Holly blogged about how she pretends Obama is telling her to do her wedding errands. She absolutely must line her invitation envelopes by hand with vintage maps! The president told her to! Well, I’m here to say that all mundane civic tasks in California take on a lovely note of humor, thanks to our governor. How could I NOT study for my exam with Arnold Schwarzenegger telling me to do it?! (This is the first page of the book. Really.)

I have now officially said, Hasta la vista, baby, to my New York license and my California one is on its way! I didn’t even have to change where I vote, which is awfully thoughtful of California because I love voting in Florida’s elections. Almost every time there’s a monorail on the ballot–and I have to be one of the few votes in favor of it. C’mon, Floridians! A monorail! The whole state would be like Disney World!

But that’s not the only thing I’ve said, Hasta la vista, baby, to. I’ve taken a new job within my company and it is sort of kicking my butt at the moment–but in the nicest way possible. It’s like Coach Taylor yelling at me from the sidelines, saying, “C’mon! Pick it up out there! Don’t you want to go to state?!” For instance, last week I had to do a live TV interview and speak intelligently for five straight minutes. Oy to the vey! I’m here to say I survived, but only because I have a new mantra.

I’ve been chanting Philippians 4:13 again and again and again. I was joking with Anne about how New Age-y I’m getting out here in California and she said chanting bible verses probably doesn’t count. I guess she’s probably right. But it does remind me vaguely of the rosary, which we don’t have in the Anglican church but I think we need to bring back. For whatever reason, chanting and meditation really work for me lately–so much better than kneeling on the floor. Maybe I just need to repeat stuff again and again and again to get it through my thick skull.

Or maybe I’m just becoming a Californian. Arnold would be pleased.

–May

Need a nudge in the right direction to abstain from work on the sabbath? Koogle to the rescue! This kosher search engine (whose name is a cross between Google and kugel, a Jewish noodle pudding) shuts down completely on the sabbath and filters out objectionable content. And here I thought being kosher was mostly about avoiding pepperoni pizza and cheeseburgers.

And since I simply can’t stop–it’s not my fault! His name is Father Cutie–everyone’s favorite ex-Catholic priest married his girlfriend this week. Congratulations, you crazy kids! No more making out on the beach, okay? No one needs to see that.

I’m sorry. This has to be (forgive me) the cutest Catholic scandal in ages.

Random fact of the day: Most Jehovah’s Witnesses do not believe in blood tranfusions. This is really neither here nor there. I just found it kind of interesting.

Ever felt like a guardian angel was watching over you? Well, you’re not alone. According to a recent study by Baylor University–my proud alma mater–55% of people say that they’ve been saved by a guardian angel. The funny thing is, I have never felt like I was spared from death by an angel, and I’m pretty terrible driver. Have you?

And finally, let’s close the week out on a more serious note. This week a man in New York saw Jesus in a coffee stain in the bottom of a Mason Jar drinking mug. Why anyone would drink coffee out of a Mason Jar is just one of the many mysteries surrounding this story–another is what the stain looked like exactly. Crack investigative reporter that I am, I Googled (then I Koogled) it and came up with nothing. However I did find this set of coffee stain Jesus coasters from Cafe Press. Guess what Anne is getting for Christmas?

That’s all the news from the pews. Go with God.

–May