My little brother and I can be kind of competitive and often talk openly about which one of us is winning at the “Game of Life.” I remember very distinctly this night last summer in Maine when one member of our merry party mentioned that since I was married to my soul mate and was working in my field of choice, I was clearly winning. This, naturally, evolved into a rather violent game of ping pong, but since neither of us is really gifted with ping pong playing skills, I don’t think anything was decided right then and there.

But now my brother has really gone and upped the ante by having a story published in the New York Post. Say what you will about the Post, I promise you this: more people read that paper than any paper I’ve ever written for. A lot more.

I could go and get jealous about this - believe me, I’ve tried - but the problem is I can’t be anything but incredibly proud. I just want to show his story off to everyone I know. He worked hard on it (it’s a great story) and pushed for it to be published. And because most editors know a good thing when they see it, it was in the paper this Tuesday.

You can read Vinnie’s story in the Post online here.

Tomorrow I head to Hawaii for a week and needless to say, I probably won’t be writing while I’m gone. But I’ll come back with stories and pictures.

I’m very, very excited about my trip. None of us has ever been to Hawaii before and the past couple of weeks have been an all-out exclamation point fest between me and my friends over email (”HAWAII! I CAN’T WAIT!!!”). It would be one thing if we were just going for a vacation, but not only are we going to this beautiful place to hang out, lie in the sun, take a surfing lesson (oh yes, that’s right, a surfing lesson), snorkel, eat the local fare and take in all the gorgeous views, but we’re going there for the wedding of one of our best friends.

Lisa, the friend in question, always cries at weddings. I mean, this girl cries before the bride has even begun walking down the aisle sometimes, and it’s that personality - her great love of life and for her friends - that makes me think I might do the same during her ceremony (OR the amazing fact that we’re all in Hawaii, for Christ’s sake, might prevent me from crying, I don’t know). Her soon-to-be-husband Eitan is - in addition to being an all-around great guy - the one who helped get J into birds when he spotted an owl in the woods outside our house a few summers ago. This makes me love him and very rarely resent him. But love is the most prevalent emotion.

And I can’t wait to be there when they get married.

I spent some of this weekend and most of this morning preparing for my trip, including going to a department store and buying a suitcase appropriate for such a vacation. It’s been forever since J or I has checked bags, thus we don’t use real suitcases that much, which is good because the one we have is pretty old and doesn’t really zip up. And that’s important when your suitcase is going in the bottom of an airplane for many hours, that it zips up.

Buying a suitcase in an odd experience. I mean, it’s a very large thing and you can’t, like, put it in a shopping bag or anything. So after I picked out a nice blue one I had to wheel it out of the department store, through the mall and out to my car. Besides feeling like kind of a weirdo - a weirdo who brings her suitcase to the mall or something - there were some practical challenges, like getting the suitcase down an escalator. Thankfully a nice guy who was out shopping with his two sons watched me mess with the extendable handle for a few moments and then stepped in, said “I’ve got it,” and carried it down for me like a true expert. He laughed and told me I’d have to perfect my skills before I went on my trip. People like that are one of the reasons I’ll miss North Carolina when we leave.

I met another nice person on my way out, an older woman sitting on a bench outside the mall who looked at me with my new purchase said that I must be going on vacation. I told her I was - to Hawaii - and she got this great, happy look on her face and said, excitedly, “You’ll have such a good time!” I asked her if she’d been before, and she told me she had, to the Big Island, and that it was a wonderful place. I told her a little about my trip. She asked me if I was flying (sure, a slightly strange question, as how else would I get there, but she was a nice older lady, so what did I care?) and I told her I was. This is when she sighed and said, “It’s a long trip” (indeed, my friend Abby and I are flying nonstop from Newark). I said I knew that, but that I was traveling with one of my best friends, and me and my friends always manage to have a good time, no matter what, so I wasn’t worried.

And that’s the thing - these girls and I - we’ve had a lot of good times. These people have been my friends since we were in the throws of adolescence, since the adventure that is high school. I’m aging myself here, but the year we all went off to college was around the time email became a popular, user-friendly tool, and we’ve all been exchanging a group email since then, sometimes many times a day, checking in about everything from boyfriends to health to, well, getting extremely excited about a trip to Hawaii. You could throw us in jail for a night (I mean, let’s hope that doesn’t ever happen, but what I’m saying is you could) and I’m pretty sure we’d have a good time (on a side note, one time my friend Jennifer and I did get locked in a boiler room, no joke, and while it was a little scary waiting for someone to find us and open the door, we had as good a time as two people can who happen to be locked in a boiler room).

So, Hawaii? Yes, from the interminable plane trips to the beaches, I’m thinking this is going to be one great vacation. I’m sad J has to stay here and work, but this just means I’ll have to scout out places we’ll visit when we both go there together some day, since we love to get out and see the world. And also, I have this new suitcase, and we might as well put it to good use.

I like that John Mayer song “Waiting on the World to Change” so much. I like it so much that whenever I hear it I drop whatever I’m doing and just think about life, and I feel really hopeful and good. I’m not kidding you, it might be my favorite song ever right now, and at the same time I’m really into the new Arcade Fire album and am having a renewed love affair with one of my favorite bands of all times, Pavement, and I sort of don’t know how to resolve it all. This is when I’m really glad we live in this modern age with iPods.

J and his labmate Tabb at The Carolina Brewing Company. How about that shirt!

I am on a mission to perfect my quesadilla making technique. I tried a pan after discovering that the oven doesn’t really work that well and the toaster oven…well, the toaster oven really, really doesn’t work.

Because we had nothing better to do…

“Have you ever bought anything from here?”

“Yeah, definitely.”

“Look at this.”

“Yeah?”

“This cotton spandex bodysuit. Check out this bodysuit.”

“Why in the name of God do you know about a women’s bodysuit?”

“I saw an ad for it and then…I mean, there are all these hot women on this site. Look at it! It’s like porn.”

In less than a week I’m going to Hawaii for my friend Lisa’s wedding. I know! I KNOW! How can a person work when there’s a trip to HAWAII in the near future?

What’s more, J can’t come due to the fact that in the next couple months he will wrap up all six years of grad school and become a PhD, and while this is undeniably tragic (both because he will miss out on a Hawaiian vacation and also because God knows what will happen to him while I’m away) it also means that for the first four days of the trip it will be all girls - me and some of my high school friends, some of my best friends ever, traipsing around Oahu, where we’ve rented a house on the North Shore. Just the girls, like in high school, and this is going to make it all the more ridiculous. We leave Tuesday. Friday we fly to Kauai for the weekend, and the wedding takes place Sunday.

It’s ok if you’re angry that I’m going on the best trip of all times. I forgive you.

While it’s been really hard to concentrate lately on anything other than buying sundresses, I also feel this sense of urgency, due to the fact, I think, that I’m going on this awesome trip while my husband will be home working hard on microbiology stuff that I can’t even begin to explain so he can get his doctorate. That’s what he’s been up on in the midst of my, you know, writing a few articles here and there for newspapers, and then writing here on this blog, which, by the way, does not exactly pay at all.

So I’ve started to look for jobs up north, both in Connecticut and in New York, and I’m looking at anything and everything because I don’t think there’s any need to sell myself short and not have a great and fulfilling job doing something totally amazing (see? see my positive thinking in action? that’s how I convince myself to apply for positions I’m totally not qualified for).

The problem is, I mean, after three years working in an outpost office for a rural, weekly paper, where I had a lot of freedom, and then working as a freelance writer for the better part of this past year, I’ve gotten used to things. Like…say…not getting up that early. I don’t sleep in til 10 or anything, come on, but I also don’t get up at 6:30. Sometimes I take the afternoon to work on writing projects of my own, that may or may not pan out someday, and sometimes I go to yoga in the middle of the day. At first I hated these things. I craved structure and, honestly, I still do a lot of the time. But in a lot of ways I dig this life I’ve created, and when looking at jobs I start to think about things I’m not willing to do. And the things I’m going to need. And it’s kind of a long list.

Like, how I don’t want to work in a boring office. I don’t want anything to do with new and cutting-edge technology, so if the word “software” appears in the description, it’s out. I love children but don’t want to necessarily work with companies that do things to benefit children because I feel like there’s a lot of complaining about the bureaucracy that comes with that. I don’t want to be yelled at. I want to learn new skills, especially because I don’t have that many, but I don’t want to have to learn, like, thousands of new skills. I absolutely will not, no matter how much you pay me, cover any more town board, school board or planning board meetings. I want to have dinner with my husband, preferably before 11 p.m., from time to time, so I’m not interested in working at night. I have a feeling that having a “keen eye for detail” means I should be a good speller, and should know other things, like basic geography, so that’s probably not a good fit. I wouldn’t mind working for a non-profit but not if half my day is going to be spent explaining to people why we don’t have any money, and why we should, and the other half of my day is going to be spent in my office with tan carpet and a 1990 desktop computer we “salvaged” from the dump. I’d like to bring my dog to work but I don’t want to work with or for any other animals. I’d like to work for a company that occasionally sends me on business trips where I get to stay in a nice hotel room. A decent bathroom in the office would be a plus. So would coffee in the morning. I don’t want to sell anything. I want to go to company parties, I’ll even plan them. I’d like coworkers who I can have a drink with after work. I don’t want to work from home, unless I want to work from home on any particular day, and when I do want to do that there should be no questions asked. I want to change the world, but I don’t necessarily want to go into politics or environmentalism or anything, I just want to someone to realize my talent, whatever it is, hire me, and pay me a decent amount. I want to do a great job at it, and I definitely want to be allowed to wear jeans while I’m doing it.

So, I think I’ll probably find something pretty soon. I mean, at least I have some standards.

For those of you who haven’t yet seen “The Sopranos” finale, which aired Sunday, but plan to, you might not want to read on, although honestly I’m not going to really give anything away. I’m not going to provide, like, a plot synopsis or anything because, let’s be honest, I’m not that great at paying attention to detail.

J and I watched the show for the past seven years when we could. Not having HBO, of course, was slightly problematic, but thanks to our friend Sherry, who’d let us come over and watch all we wanted, and thanks to DVD rentals, we got through it and saw pretty much every episode. I’m not going to talk about what a great show it is , how much I loved the characters and the intricate plots because I’m definitely not qualified to be a TV critic, what with the need to, you know, be on top of cutting edge TV that job would entail. I mean, I’ve seen every episode of “The Golden Girls,” but I’ve never watched “Lost,” for instance. I think that says something.

I spent a lot of yesterday talking and emailing with friends about the finale, and if you saw it, you know why. It was pretty shocking. Sudden, jarring - to say the least - but not in any of the typical ways you think of when you think of Italian mobsters. No one’s head was blown to bits in the last five minutes or anyhing.

Anyway, at first I wasn’t sure about the finale. Was that it? Was that the final farewell to these characters we’ve grown to know and love over the years? But after reading many commentaries and talking with people, particularly my parents, my view has changed and I like and respect the ending.

Now that a day has passed, there are new theories and interviews (including this interview with show creator David Chase) but despite all the new information, I still favor this commentary, sent to me by my father yesterday - who, by the way, loved the finale (this may only make sense if you watched the last episosde, OR it might not make sense any way you look it because, let’s face it, this is some of the most exquisite spelling I’ve ever seen and your mind might not be ready for it).

Tom shales tv critic for the wash post, says the sopranos disappeared while Don’t stop believing was on the chutebos. We see ton,t face for the last time as the words don’t stopare sung on the jukebox.
The ambiguius ending mirrowed the ambiguity of all our lives. No easy endings, no stupid clotures.
Synbolismand irony througt the last eisode. Note the kitty. And. Paule’s reaction-did paulire give up tony.
The fbi agent, moraly. Maybe. But he gave up phil lotardo knowing he would be killed. And he likely got the info from the women agent he had just slep with. Noteher anger at him as she leaves the room.
Jr has an analyst just as tony.
And tony’s father was killed with his family around.
The parallel patterns of life. Overlapping.
And the mysteriousstrangers in the diner. Who were they. Were they not tony’s enemies from previous years.
One heads for the bathroom. Is a gun hidden there just as in the famous scene from the godfather.
The complexities are staggering and demand closeattentions and more viewings.

Sometimes - I’ll admit this - when I turn on the television and there’s a rerun of that irresistibly, annoyingly cute sitcom “Full House” on, I watch it. This wasn’t always the case. As a younger person, I couldn’t stand the Tanner family because, of course, they were the antithesis of cool. Now that I’m older, and know that I won’t become uncool through osmosis or anything, sometimes I watch it, particularly if there’s a show on from the years when DJ and Stephanie were older and going through older-kid stuff, like having a first date, or making out with a boy and getting caught by Bob Saget (and while we’re on the subject, please check out this site), who’d get really pissed (and, inevitably, while he was losing his cool, and the teenage daughter was yelling that she just wants “to be treated like a grown up,” Joey would stumble on to the set and provide some comic relief in the form of a Bullwinkle impression). The show would always end with good old Dad coming to his senses and heading up to the girls’ bedroom to have a heart-to-heart and that soft music would play, and I’d think, “You know what? That’s nice.”

So yeah, sometimes I flip through the channels, and it’s on, and ok, yes, I watch the entire show.

Sometimes though, like yesterday, “Full House” is on and it’s one of those episodes - there are, like, thousands of them, I think - where one of the guys, usually Jesse, is all revved up about the band The Beach Boys for some reason (occasionally because the band is, inexplicably, coming over to the house for an impromptu concert) and the guys, all of them - Bob Saget (who plays Danny Tanner by the way, but it’s hard to think of him as anyone other than Bob Saget, you know?), Joey and Jesse are singing a Beach Boys tune, and they’re harmonizing for Christ’s sake, while the girls look on in disbelief, and if it’s one of those episodes, I’m telling you, it’s a wonder I don’t throw the TV off a bridge. I cannot change the channel fast enough.

J and I, in a somewhat uncharacteristic attempt to be modern and spend a little money on something nice, decided just two days ago to buy exactly what we’ve really, really wanted for a while:

I’m not one to get excited about cars or anything, so the fact that I became completely pumped about buying a Toyota Prius several months ago was a pretty big deal. I mean, when I bought my Honda Civic back in 2002, yeah, I was excited that I had a new little car to drive around, but mostly I was excited about the fact that my new car had a CD player. That was pretty much the extent of it.

With this new car - which, I should clarify, will really, mostly be J’s car once we move to New Haven (I traded in my Civic and will buy something else once we’re up there and need two cars again) - it’s different. I’m excited that it’s a hybrid, of course - that we’ll be filling up less at the gas station for both personal, and global reasons. I think this is the way car technology is going, and I’m glad we’re part of the new wave.

But also…look at it! That’s a cute car!

We spent many hours at the car dealer the other night, talking it over before we decided we might as well bite the bullet and take the car home. Once we’d signed on all the appropriate dotted lines, gone over multiple contracts and numbers and books, it was late - almost 11 p.m. - and the place was pretty much closed. Nevertheless, being the car salesmen that they are, the few remaining employees had me ring this huge bell, signifying that a car had been sold. A loud, happy noise, for all parties involved.

So for the next few months we’ll be operating with one car only, which I think will be alright. We’ve been doing that for a while now, anyway. We just have to plan, and share be patient with one another, and those are all important things to work on anyway, you know? So we might as well work on them while having fun in our totally awesome new car. Because everybody knows it’s easier to become a better person when you buy new, cute things for yourself. Obviously.

Honestly, I don’t even know where to begin, so I’ll just start by explaining that this past weekend I headed to Philadelphia with my parents, where we met up with my brother and nearly everybody on my mom’s side of the family for this big party dubbed “The Celebration of Life.” We celebrated birthdays and wedding anniversaries and just being alive, hence the name. Very sadly J wasn’t able to come with us as he is nearing the end of this great journey called grad school, and wanted to stay home and get some work done.

Instead, though - instead, he was attacked by an owl and had to spend five hours in an emergency room where he, by the way, had to lower his pants so he could receive a rabies shot in each butt cheek, among other things that went on.

See, that’s the thing. I knew this birding phenomenon would end up causing some kind of crazy injury someday. It wasn’t enough that J wanted to explore abandoned wooded areas at dawn, or make handcrafted wooden birdhouses on the living room rug - he had to get so close that finally, almost inevitably, one of these so-called fascinating creatures swooped down and grabbed at his head with its sharp talons.

When J called me Friday night and said, “The craziest thing just happened to me,” I immediately got kind of nervous because, it seems, something crazy happens to him every time I leave town, but when he told me that “an owl just flew into” his head, well, I mean, I hadn’t quite imagined something like that.

He had been walking down this trail somewhat near our house - he’d seen a barred owl on this particular trail the night before and because, you know, he loves them, he decided to go looking for it again. And Friday night, there it was, sitting in the trees above him. So he told me it stared at him, and he stared at it, and it hooted, as owls are apt to do and then, as he was walking away he felt something hit him - hard - in the back of his head, so he yelled, and then ran for it and when he stopped a little way down the trail he put his hand up to his head and he was bleeding.

Ok. If this had happened to me I probably would have died right there - if not from natural causes like a massive heart attack I would have found the nearest ravine (few and far between in Chapel Hill, unfortunately) and thrown myself in upon the rocks, because when you are in the woods - night or day - let me tell you, you are in the scariest place imaginable and I don’t want to hear it from those of you who didn’t think “The Blair Witch Project” was scary. That movie was scary as they come and you totally know it.

Anyway, my point is that if I’d been in the woods and some unidentified creature had hit me in the back of my head and I was bleeding I would have died, or at least run for cover and I definitely would have tried to find the nearest policeman, or anybody who had a gun for that matter, but J simply told me that he “knew it was the owl” and went on his way. Owls had, in fact, attacked people - runners in particular - on that very trail before. Later that night, some friends of ours suggested to him that he better get the cut checked out because owls are wild creatures, after all, and he might get an infection. That’s why he called a nurse at UNC the next day who recommended he come into the ER, and that’s where J spent roughly five hours of his Saturday, a Saturday he meant to spend working, waiting to see a doctor who told him that he was going to have to have rabies shots, because he couldn’t definitively say that what hit him in the head was, indeed, the owl, since he never saw it coming. There was a minor chance that what hit him could have been a bat, for instance. And bats, they carry rabies, and when you get rabies, you die, so he’d better have those shots just in case.

Shots in his arms and quads and the afore-mentioned buttocks and - it hurts me to even type this - in the cuts on his head.

After J had been released from the ER and I’d talked to him and ensured he was alright, I told the story to a few of my aunts and cousins and it turns out owl attack stories spread like wildfire because I cannot tell you how many people came up to me during the Celebration of Life and said something along the lines of, “So…I heard your husband was attacked by an owl.” And then I had to explain to them that, yeah, he did, but that’s not why he’s not here, just so you know - and then they’d ask me something like, “Well, how did that happen?” and the easiest answer for me to give was the simplest - and really, the most truthful - I just told them, “My husband, he loves to look at birds,” and then I’d explain that this particular bird, I suppose - if attacking somebody’s head with its talons is a clear enough sign - didn’t much feel like being looked at.