the chommo chronicles

.baddy mcbadderton.

Listen, I give up my subway seat to pregnant ladies, injured fellow commuters, and elderly ladies and gents. If I have 50 items in my shopping cart and you’re only buying a quart of milk, I’ll probably let you go in front of me. I forward my various friends-and-family coupons to all and sundry. I give money to the Salvation Army and the mariachi bands that like to play on the R line. I love, respect and fear my mom and dad. I am a loyal-until-death friend. But honestly? Sometimes I worry that I am kind of a bad person.

A Baddy McBadderton, if you will.

.sweet anticipation.

By this time next week,  my husband Kim Jong-Illmatic and I will be in upstate New York, enjoying the long Labor Day weekend in a rented luxury stone house along with six friends and their 3½ children (one adorably smiley toddler, one blue-eyed wonder of an infant, one gorgeous bruiser of newborn and a baby girl still resting in her mama’s belly).  We’re looking forward to long dinners and full wine glasses,* dips in the in-ground pool, treks to local farmers’ markets, visits to local art studios, and other grown-up things – things that perhaps signal that the days of staying out drinking all night until it was time to go hunt for a 24-hour diner that served meatloaf are a thing of the past, things that lead to a big, brightly-lit sign repeatedly pulsating “ADULTHOOD: YOU’VE ARRIVED.” 

While I am of course looking forward to all of this (aging-related ansias asisde), what I’m most anticipating is all the BAKING I’m set to be doing next weekend.

Ooooohhh.

Like Jennifer Love Hewitt back when she was the hotness, I can’t hardly wait. For the past few weeks, I’ve had nothing but visions of all-purpose and pastry flours, creamed sugars and butters, peaked egg whites, melting bittersweet chocolate, toasty nuts,** cream cheese frosting, and concoctions full sweet, sweet love.

.friday fotos.

So, clearly I’m no good with analog photography. And my piggy bank and I are still working hard for that money that’s going to allow us to finally – finally – buy a high quality SLR camera. I do have a trusty three-year old Canon PowerShot, but half the time I leave it at home and the other half I’ve left the memory card in my computer. But I love to take photos – I’m one of those crazy people you see who takes photos of dewy flowers, artisanal cupcakes, copper doorknobs, abandoned shoes in the rain, and male hipsters in ill-advised skinny jeans.    

What’s a girl to do? Luckily for me, last year Kim Jong-Illmatic bought me a sweeeeet camera-equipped Blackberry Curve. And although I've yet to use that camera to catch perverts engaging in acts of self-love on the subway (but oh man am I waiting for that day), I've managed to capture some pretty awesome photos.

Don’t you think?

.adventures in hairland.

As the youngest daughter of traditional Dominican immigrant parents, certain things were expected of me. I was always to obey my parents and never, ever disrespect them. I was to study hard in school and stay away from the tecato* element that hung out in front of our building. I was never to get an ankle bracelet, piercings other than the two in my ears, a belly ring, or a tattoo, as these were all marks of whoredom. I would move out of the house only to get married – “¿Que roommates ni que roommates?,” my mother would mutter – and on the day of my wedding, I would be a virgin, proudly and purely walking down the church aisle to meet my (hopefully Dominican) husband, for whom I would keep house and produce babies. And, like my lady ancestors before me, I would always maintain a mane of lustrous, long straight hair.

Well. I still respect and obey my parents out of a Pavlovian fear of incurring my mother’s wrath. But I went off to live in France without any parental supervision at age 16. I got my nose pierced and am planning on getting a tattoo very soon. My civil marriage ceremony took place on a beach and lasted all of five minutes. I married a Puerto Rican, with whom I share laundry and meal duty.  Six years after our wedding, we remain defiantly child-free.

But where I really fall short on the Ideal Dominican Daughter scale is my hair. Oooohhhhh, my hair. Ave Maria Purisima, my hair. While it is sometimes healthy, it is rarely, if ever, lustrous, long, or straight. Most of the time, it looks like a crazy lions head.

I'm so sorry, Mami.

.a retail intermission.

Our Brooklyn apartment is where trees comes to die.  I'm serious. We receive almost every catalogue known to (wo)man. Ok, we don't get those Wiccan spirit women catalogues – you know the ones  – but that's okay; I make up for their absence by habitually bringing home copies of the SkyMall catalogue. Anyhoodle, for some reason all the catalogues come to the attention of Kim Jong-Illmatic. Yes, even the Victoria's Secret catalogues.

A few days ago we received the Victoria's Secret Fall Shoes & Accessories 2009 catalogue.

And, oh my goodness.

Without further ado, and with the help of our trusty scanner, I invite you in to witness levels of cobbler fugtitude the likes of which have rarely been seen before.

.new york state of mind.

In the past six years, I’ve had at least four emotional breakdowns which were all directly related to ipod malfunctions. I’m talking about the throwing of the broken ipod across the room, the stomping of feet and the sucking of teeth, the wailing about how my life/week/month was totally ruined and the hows am I expected to function normally? All of which is to say, I love my music. And because I love it so much, have extremely poor impulse control when it comes to acquiring music that strikes my fancy. Whenever/wherever I hear a song I like, I stop what I’m doing and comment, covet, make plans to get my hands on it as soon as I can. Listening to Pandora Radio all day at work doesn’t help; neither does have friends with interesting, wide-ranging tastes in music.  

My friend The Blogsmaid is one such friend. She always has the best soundtrack to whatever may be going on in her or your life at the moment, and gets to be in charge of radio whenever there’s a car trip involved.  Last Thursday, I was over at her apartment, talking – as usual – about our plans to take over the world, when a Billy Joel song suddenly came on. My ears perked.  For some reason, maybe the heat in The Blogsmaid’s un-air conditioned apartment (we’re sisters in sufferance) or the bottle of wine we drank to pre-celebrate our world takeover, I couldn’t get his song – his voice – out of my mind.   So Friday morning found me purchasing The Essential Billy Joel  from the iTunes store, a 35-song compilation of his best work.  

It’s now Monday morning, and I’ve yet to stop listening to it.  

Man, that googly-eyed drunk could sing. And write. How had I not consciously acknowledged this before now? 

.suck it, GQ.

I should have known something was up when my husband broke into a laugh within fifteen seconds of his waking up. Normally, Kim Jong-Illmatic trudges around like a grumpy, decaffeinated bear for at least 45 minutes after he gets out of bed. But not yesterday morning. Noooooooooo. There he was at 7:30AM, cackling a particularly evil, schadenfreude-y, teeth-not-yet brushed chuckle.

“Guess what?” he asked. “Guess which college came in first on GQ’s list of douchiest schools? Guess! Guueeessssess!”

Oh, Sweet Baby J. 

“I dunno,” I answered. “Princeton?”

“Noooooooo,” he mooed. “It was Brown! It was Brown! Ahahahahaha. Ahahahahaha.” I half-expected him to break out into a Rumplestiltskin dance.

You know what?

Suck it, GQ. You’re just jealous.

.don't you just hate it?.

.red and black lumberjack/with a hat to match.

 Last Friday night, Kim Jong-Illmatic and I found ourselves sat South Brooklyn Pizza (…meh) with our friends L and M. Maybe it was all the Manhattans, Kettle One martinis and beers that we’d downed earlier in the evening – Kim Jong Illmatic, M and I were drinking for five that evening, as L is five months pregnant and both she and the baby have been medically advised to abstain from alcohol for a while. Maybe it was the giddy mood borne from actually doing something on a Friday night rather than collapsing on our couch in an exhausted, dull heap. Maybe it’s that we were all children of the 1990s, and the song is part of our adolescent soundtrack. Whatever it was, the minute Biggie Smalls’ Juicy started blasting from the bartender’s ipod, the evening turned into an impromptu karaoke night.

Minutes before we’d been discussing our upcoming long weekend in upstate New York and the mechanics of buying a life insurance policy – boring adult stuff – and the next we were singing* about all the teachers that told us we’d I'd never amount to nothin', about all the people that lived above the buildings that we were hustlin' in front of that called the police on us when we was just tryin' to make some money to feed our daughters. Remember?

.through the eyes of a dictator.