Brenda and Jason have this plaguing disease that propels them into affection’s arms at least every 7.3 seconds. Some people might think this is adorable, but the other 90% of the planet’s population is more apt to be all, “Yo, get a room you grossballs.” Maybe some pebble-pelting would be involved, too.

This is good for people who like to inhale their partner in public, or those who don’t, or those who like the color mauve on a dark green background.

6×8 comic-wrapped canvas board.

More info here.

The best thing about being child-free was the ability to boast about not seeing all those childish animated movies, like “Shrek” and “Finding Nemo.” It was something that I was proud of, no matter how many adults swore that those movies “aren’t just for kids!

”

But now that Chooch is obsessed with cars (his body shudders with glee every time we drive past Toys R Us, because he knows that’s where cars can be bought), and that he owns every character from the movie, Henry decided the next obvious step would be to, I don’t know, let him watch the movie “Cars”?

He DVRd it the other day and I put it on this morning, hoping it’d captivate him long enough for me to wash the dishes. I didn’t anticipate that it’d instead captivate me. Chooch watched a little bit of it, but mostly spent the time terrorizing the cats and knocking things off the table. I was vaguely aware of what he was doing, enough to make sure he wasn’t lacerating himself or sticking his fingers in sockets, but goddamn, I didn’t want to stop watching.

When there was about fifteen minutes left, I couldn’t take any more of the incessant need to pause to ensure my kid wasn’t slaughtering a cat, so I deemed it nap time. Once I ditched him in his crib, I was able to watch the rest of the movie sans interruption and distraction, and free to let the tears flow.

Fuck, that movie really touched me. And at least now I know all of their names so I don’t have to refer to the toys as “the blue one…no not that blue one, but the dark blue one” and “the brown one with the buck teeth.”

Now I get to go to class (ugh, this semester started back up again way too soon) with bloodshot eyes.

I like to make sure Chooch has a variety of shoes that will make him seem more blendable if lost in the ‘hood.

I sold two paintings last night, so I decided it would be in proper form to reward myself by buying my very own Chiodos hoodies. So I did. Fuck all the haters.

My friend Lisa is home on winter break, so we did the lunch/hang out thing yesterday. She’s one of the few people from high school worth staying in touch with: she’s not a twat, she’s not fake, and I don’t have to worry about her leaking any behind-closed-doors aspects of my life: a rare trait to find in a person these days. (Am I right, Keri? Dumb cunt.)

Lisa moved to Colorado last year for school, and since I haven’t seen her since she last visited in July, I let her decide which restaurant would be the lucky establishment to have us as diners.  She chose Aladdin’s, where she requested a second basket of pita and proceeded to waste it, but nothing was spilled this time, not even a tiny dribble of olive oil. I was proud of her; she must be drinking less.

After sitting through a meal and hearing things like, “You’re still so weird,” and “There’s always something crazy going on in your life” (and by crazy, I think she met dramatic), we crossed the street for some biscotti, which was sold to us by a very brusque and impersonal shop owner. Lisa bought a giant chocolate cookie and was pleased when he slid a warm and fresh one off a tray straight from the oven, but when we got back to my house, she theorized that he was really only choosing the most deformed cookie in the shop — it was pretty malformed and pathetic-looking.

But tasty, I’ll give it that. The shop was supposedly voted one of the top ten bakeries in America, but I found the biscotti to be so-so. (Of course, I didn’t check to see the source of this high accolade, so for all I know, it could have been some fat kid updating a 5-visitors-a-week blog from a dank basement in Idaho, on which completely reverent articles about Twinkie recipes and World of Warcraft are meticulously scribed.)

I gave Chooch a piece of a chocolate biscotti, and he only needed to see my dunking mine in coffee once before he elbowed his way to my lap and ravagingly tried to dunk his own. A caffeinated Chooch is all we need, so Henry took the lid of Chooch’s sippy cup and let him dunk it in chocolate milk.

Chooch made it down to the last bite before turning his face and making a disgusted “no more” sound in his throat, so Henry popped the chocolate milk-saturated piece into his own mouth and I promptly dry-heaved.

“Chooch dipped that in his milk!” I cried.

“Yeah, so?” Henry answered defiantly.

“You just ate his floaters!!”

Lisa laughed and Henry explained to her that I’m essentially a horrible mother and we all laughed and then took pictures and Nicotina bit Lisa and then Lisa peed while I put my make up on for work and we hugged goodbye in my bathroom — an appropriate place to end a day with Lisa.

She goes back to Colorado on Monday and I won’t see her for at least six months. That’s three friends I had to say goodbye to in one week, the kind of trauma that might make a weaker-willed person hang themselves. Just sayin’.

Then I went to work and my boss told me my hair looked like crap.

My friend (or so I thought!) Kara is moving to a far away land this weekend, so she was gracious enough to clear a spot in her agenda for me last Sunday.

I think it was only because Christina was visiting and Kara really only wanted to see her. It’s OK: Maybe I really only wanted to see Kara’s boyfriend, Chris.

The four of us met up at the Library, a cozy little restaurant on the Southside with lots of bare white walls that had me envisioning my TBA art show. The menus were inside old books. Of course the one that I got was the largest — big and bulky with sharp corners that kept jabbing my chest. It was like a fucking atlas or something, I don’t know, and naturally it lacked the actual menu pages so I had to steal the nice compact book Christina was given.

Just when I was about to start eulogizing Kara’s and my friendship, my lunch was served and my mind was completely and wholly arrested by the delightful shark-shaped pieces of tofu circling around a bed of seaweed salad.

I forgot all about Kara.

Always needing to be like me, Christina mimicked my request for an after-lunch coffee. I had to draw the line when she reached for a Splenda packet after spying me sprinkling the sweetner into my cup. I made her use sugar instead. A few minutes later, Chris had a similar reaction when Kara tore open a Splenda packet, and I inwardly beamed; that made me like him even more and I wished that Kara would have shoved the table out of the way and married him right there. Then I realized that he was mocking me. It took me a few minutes, but I’m no dummy.

Christina and Chris bonded over Amsterdam and video games and the similarity of their names and I feared that Chris was about to steal Christina from me, too. For a good thirty minutes, she was determined to move to D.C. so she could work for Chris. I was frantically trying to think of reasons for her not to move while she and Chris discussed things like background checks and drug tests, and Christina admitted that she stores her sister’s urine in a condom before consenting to a drug test, since she’s a flaming pot head. “D.C. has no lesbians!”, I could have shouted. “And no clean urine!”

But then Chris kiboshed Christina’s burgeoning dreams by saying, “There’s just one problem — I have no jobs at my company.” And then Kara told Christina that she just move to Pittsburgh, and that’s when the “Oh yeah!” light bulb exploded in my head and I realized that it wouldn’t have affected me either way if Christina was drafted by Chris and Kara, since she currently lives nearly 5 hours from me anyway; she’d still be just as far.

Apparently, when I was utilizing the facilities, Kara said something about me cutting up and burying any of Christina’s future girlfriends and I really wish I had been present for that convo because it sounds like it was titillating.

Outside of the Library, I pouted for a little bit about how Kara is abandoning me, just like everyone does, and she was like, “Oh my god, shut up. I’ll be back all the time to visit and we’ll probably see each other just as often.” I mean, I guess it’s true that Kara and I didn’t exactly have a weekly knitting circle or anything and that in actuality, I just use her for an extra body when I have parties, to give the illusion that I have more friends.

On the way home, I whined, “I miss Kara already!” and Christina added, “That’s weird that you said that, because I was just thinking about Chris.” I think she wants to be him.

When I came home from work yesterday, I was telling Henry how I taught Kim to say ‘two thousand double quad’ (she won’t say it).

"Is that even right?" he asked. "I mean, couldn’t that actually mean 2044?"

"No!" I cried, blood rising to my face. "Four doubled is eight! Double quad!"

But he kept going on, analyzing it from every angle. "I knew there’d be one motherfucker in the crowd who had to question it…." I muttered in defeat.

"And I’m that motherfucker, yay!" Henry cheered, before leaving for work.

“Henry?! Hi. I was just calling to tell you that Christina and I might be about to get our asses kicked.” 

“Yeah? I’m not coming to get you.”

It all seemed so harmless when the notion came to me on Sunday evening.

“Best idea ever: let’s walk down Brookline Boulevard with my Holga and take pictures of the assholes who live in my town.

”

Henry did not agree that this was the best idea ever, but Christina, always afraid of defying me, went along with it. I grabbed the camera and my cell phone and we embarked into the wild frontier of Brookline.

Walking down the main drag, we came across few pedestrians. Apparently, one of those Steelers games was on, so most of the population had taken refuge inside their homes or local bars, eyes glued to TV screens. I secretly felt proud knowing that I left a house where The Game had not taken over the  television.

An older man slowly passed by, one hand clamped firmly upon  his young daughter’s arm, keeping her upright while she clomped along on roller skates. He tossed us a furtive, sidelong glance and picked up his pace, dragging her along. I suspect he perceived us as being suspicious, just because we were giggling nervously and I was trying unsuccessfully to camouflage my large chunky plastic camera behind my back.

Really Awesome Idea Part 2: “Ooh, let’s go into the bars on this street and take pictures of unsuspecting drunks.”

I could tell that Christina was fighting hard to ward off the angel on her shoulder and after a few moments of consideration, she gave me a feeble and unconvincing answer of, “OK yeah, that sounds like….great….fun.”

The first bar I decided to crash was the Lockerroom, which could very well be an example of Brookline’s seedy underbelly, where an opulence of cocaine and menthol cigarettes can be found amongst gun-toting wife beaters (the men, not the shirts, although they’re probably wearing the shirts). The door to the bar is found at the bottom of dimly lit cement steps, the door itself unmarked and dark metal, giving the impression that what you might find on the other side could quite possibly be the ear-cutting scene from Reservoir Dogs.

I cracked the door enough to glimpse a sliver of the darkened bar, inhaled some of the stale air (possibly tinged with meth fumes), and promptly bolted back up the steps.

We continued to skulk down the sidewalk, looking like we were ready to hold up a mini mart, I’m sure, when we happened upon Gordon’s Lounge.

“Oh, this is it. This is the bar we have to go into,” I said lustily, imagining the awesome photo I could steal of the run down patrons. I lingered before the door, flip-flopping. “Here, you do it,” I commanded as I thrust the Holga into Christina’s chest. She later confessed that entering the bar under the pretense of undercover paparazzi was not on her Good Time Sunday Night agenda, but she did it anyway. Because that’s what friends are for — serving Erin unconditionally.

In her own words:

i went into the bar, (which by the way was no bigger than most people’s living rooms), acting as if i were looking for someone. this made me look like a complete moron since the bar was so small to begin with, and my over-emphasized room scanning was unnecessary. i made a big display of my disappointment in not finding whoever i was “looking for” and headed for the door.  as i opened the door, i gave one last look and placed the holga up by my shoulder… aimed it at all the bar patrons and snapped a quick photo. using my high school basketball skills, i turned 180 degrees and ran as fast as my fat ass would allow. 

While Christina did her thang, I ran away and ducked into an alcove next to a bank, a spout of mad giggles threatening to launch from my mouth, not to mention the urine that was surging through my bladder. I was employing controlled breathing tactics to steady squash my impending wet pantied-laughing fit when Christina burst through the doors of Gordon’s and came barrelling toward me, just as the father and his wheeled daughter passed us by again.

I was so humored by their need to skirt away from us (to the point of nearly walking off the curb) that I was inspired to snap a picture of their retreating bodies. The daughter noticed the flash and quickly spun around to look at us. The father sped up his pace and the two of them disappeared into the shadows of the next block. When I told him about it the next day, my work frienemy Collin said the man probably feared his daughter would be sucked into our lesbian cult, and I wanted to be offended by that but I laughed anyway.

I had grown tired of taking pictures, so I pulled the plug on the shoot and we turned to retreat.

“Wait — we have to walk past Gordon’s? You didn’t tell me that!” Christina looked slightly panicked, so I pacified her by suggesting we cross over to the other side of the street.

As we began our trek home, I peeked across the street and noticed that two people had emerged from Gordon’s. They stood on the sidewalk, looking left and right. I averted my eyes, wary of being spotted, but curiosity got the best of me and and I rubbernecked once more.

Now there was a throng of four patrons. One of them, a tall and bald man, spotted us.

“Hey!” he yelled.

He’s probably not directing that at us, I tried to assure myself. He’s maybe calling a taxi.

“HEY!” he shouted louder this time, causing a shiver to melt down my spine. The throng began moving, mirroring our steps from the other side of the street.

“Oh my god, he’s going to fucking murder us!” I tersely whispered to Christina. The man was still shouting at us. I looked around innocently, hoping that my body language conveyed that I wondered to whom he was shouting, because it certainly couldn’t be at the two sweet, demure women who were merely taking a nice evening stroll. Except that my harried motions all but screamed, “It was us! Over here! We’re the two you want!”

“What the fuck were they doing when you took that picture?” I cried, thinking that we know had photographic evidence of a bar-top virginal sacrifice.

“I don’t know, they were just watching the football game!” That explains it. Christina had a mask of fear on her face. “The worst part is that I look like a boy from across the street. What if they get as far as jumping me before realizing that hey, I have tits!?”

I stole another quick glance at the angry mob, cherishing the parked cars along the street that doubled as shields, and noticed that one of the women had pulled a cell phone from her purse and was dialing.

Holy shit, what if they’re calling the cops?, my inner voice added an extra punch pf paranoia. Or worse — what if they’re calling more drunk Steelers fans?!

“If they catch us, we’ll just deny it,” I blathered, attempting to shove the Holga down the front of my coat. I didn’t look obvious. Not at all. “Or…we can just fall back on the excuse I always use in  times like this: we’re playing a photo scavenger hunt.”

The throng of pissed off photographic subjects gave up after a block and a half, probably not wanting to miss any heart-stopping plays during the game, so we slowed down our pace and tried to relearn how to breathe.

A block later, a skeletal woman with dark eyes and a husky voice stepped out from a stoop and said, “I’m sorry, can I have a light?” As Christina reached in her pocket for her lighter, the woman found her own and excused our services.

“Decoy!” I hissed at Christina, who instinctively spun around to see if we were being followed. Henry refused to come pick us up, and the rest of the walk home was nerve-rattling. Every time a car drove past, I considered diving into a bush.

That picture better be fucking awesome.

Later that night, we drove around, me in the passenger seat with the pig mask stuffed over my head. Now that was a Really GOOD Idea. At every red light, I’d stare into the car next to us. It’s funny how determined people are to not look twice. I scared one guy into turning left, I swear to god.The best was when I had Christina pull into the Denny’s parking lot. She idled next to a window, and I was going to get out, but just staring at the diners from the car ended up being effective enough. One man sat, burger halted in front of his gaping mouth, and stared at me in disbelief.We went to Wal-Mart and terrorized the shoppers in the parking lot for awhile, but it started snowing really hard. “Nothing’s better than bacon in a blizzard,” Christina ruminated, sending me into a five minute crack-up. (At that point, it didn’t take much.)

On the way home, flashing lights loomed ahead of us. “Motherfuck, it’s a roadblock!” I screamed in despair. “They’re on to us!” It ended up just being three cop cars with someone pulled over.

We ended the night without getting beat up or arrested, but we had fun trying.

This New Year’s Eve was very significant for me because it marked the first time that I got to spend it with my bestie,  Christina. Usually I end up calling her the next day, crying about how lame my night was. This time, we woke up the next morning and proceeded to laugh about how obnoxious we are. It was nice. We may not have had a party banquet, a free-flowing fountain of Patron, or pulsating club beats, but what we did have was all the makings for an evening of wildin’ out: a pig mask; a Thomas the Tank Engine flash light; a stock of Disaronno, Woodchuck and (cheap) champagne at our gluttonous fingertips; and an arsenal of bitter jabs at Tila Tequila.

Henry started off the festivities by going upstairs to take a nap, since he was running on a low tank of energy. By 10:30, I was a little annoyed and really wanted him to come downstairs because “things were about to get real krunk.” I believe those were my exact words. I turned the bedroom light on, and he promptly pulled the blanket over his face.

At this point, I did what any other rational human would: I invited the pig mask to hump my face and then proceeded to stand in the front yard, alternating between pairing a warrior-like fist thrust with a blood-curdling “Happy Oinkin’ New Year!” at passing cars and hurling stones and rolled-up newspapers at the bedroom window.

Suddenly the light went out and I found myself very troubled.

At 11:59, I frantically pulled my hair back into a taut bun and stuffed the damn pig mask over my face again. Precisely at midnight, I flew out the front door, duly forgot that sound reverberates underneat the mask, and started shrieking “It’s two thousand fucking double quad ya’ll! Oink oink!” I insisted on saying “double quad” all night and there was a point where Christina was like, “Would you stop saying that?” and Henry echoed, “Yeah, please. That’s stupid.”

Christina dressed me up in her thuggish cash-love hat and we pretended like I was a Jersey Yo-Girl, right down to the streaks of orange across my face. She dropped Blue into my hands for the final touch, because how else do Jersey gangstas pop caps in asses, right?

 What’s that glaring red rectangle emblazoned across my ample bosom, you ask? Why that’s my Chiodos hoodie. See, all I wanted for Christmas was a Chiodos hoodie.

I’m always pretty specific with these things, yet no one listens. Just in case Christina and Henry might think I forgot what assholes they are for not making sure my torso was buffeted by an over-priced example of my fan-girl love for a band, I fashioned my own Chiodos hoodie with a little bit of ingenuity, Henry’s Everfresh hoodie and a piece of red cardstock. On Sunday, I used a blue sweatshirt and white paper, crudely ripped into a small box just large enough for me to scrawl ‘Chiodos’ with my Sharpie, but it wasn’t as eye-popping as the black one. Both days, I sported my makeshift hoodies with pride. Even though on Sunday my hoodie didn’t even have a hood.

Henry and Christina didn’t seem to feel very bad, though.

My favorite part was later on when Christina and I were on the porch having a smoke break. The mask had been long abandoned by this point (my breath causes condensation to drip down the insides of it and it’s really gross; really fucking gross) but my vocal chords were still begging to be used. (Seriously, you think I like being so mouthy all the time? I can’t control it.) I can only imagine how much my neighbors appreciate me. So there I was,  still very hyper and buzzed, running all around the yard, when I spied a car coming down the street. As a person who has always yearned to be part of a hit and run, I charged toward the street and started screaming and essentially shaking my body like a schizophrenic with a bit of a skin-crawling affliction.

The car effectively slowed down. Then the car stopped and I noticed it was a fucking taxi. Still a 12-year-old at heart, I laughed hysterically into my hands like I had just cold-called a crush and hung up, and rushed back into the house and left Christina to handle it. She stood out there, waving the cab on, and yelling, “No. No! No one needs a ride. NO! JUST GO! LEAVE!” Then I laughed in Henry’s shoulder about it for a few minutes while he desperately tried to shrug me off.

This New Year’s Eve was much better than the one back in 2003, when I completely flipped my shit at my mom’s house over a stupid game of Trivial Pursuit, lunged over the coffee table at Henry and called him a motherfucker, left all of my friends there while I drove home drunk, and then broke my phone into pieces when Henry called from my mom’s to lovingly tell his bi-polar girlfriend that all of her friends were pissed off at her for having another episode.

I hope all of you guys got to spend New Year’s Eve with your besties, too!