Christa and I are no different from those other famous duos, and thus we are spurred to adventure and submerge ourselves in new battles week after week. Heck, I wouldn’t be writing this post right now if I wasn’t trying to out-post Christa. Since the inception of our dating career I can’t remember a time we weren’t competing in one way or another. Let me list for you some of our earlier battles and who the primary champion was.

She just isn't a good eater

- Eating contest (hot dogs, waffles, primanti’s, etc.) – Dan

- Tennis (I should note that Christa was the No. 1 Seed at our High School) – Dan

- Swinging (Height and endurance, mostly) – Dan

- Settlers of Catan – Wash

- Pumpkin carving – Wash

- Uno (careful, that’s an iTunes link)(via the iPhone, which I HIGHLY recommend) – Christa (user name Buscemi)

- Words with Friends (iPhone) – Christa, who has a degree in English (Have you heard her speak? She’s awfully fluent). She cheats and spells words that I swear are forged in the depths of hell.

Most recently we’ve been contesting one another on the ping-pong table which will end as soon as one of us begins to get much better than the other.

These battles usually end up with one of us grumpy and the other consoling them to no end. “It’s okay, you’ll get better with time. I just got lucky with starting with four ‘Draw Four’ cards.”

I’m thankful that my I can have these small rivalries with Christa because it only serves to resolve our relationship and force each of us to scour the city looking for new venues and competitions to win at. I mean, how can any of these competitions possibly end our relationship? All those other famous duos worked out just fine, right?

I got ponged. And pinged. And it all happened while I was playing ping pong – my new favorite sport. After years of playing tennis and a brief sabbatical from that, I’ve traded in my tennis racquet for a ping pong paddle. It all started on Polish Hill at Gooski’s one fateful night. Dan and I were drinking Straub’s and bopping our heads to the jukebox when we decided to pick up some ping pong paddles and test our skills. It turns out that both of us aren’t so bad, and when Dan and I “aren’t so bad” at something, we usually deem ourselves pros at said something. Thus, we become ping pong pros pretty quickly.

Now our mission is to find more venues in Pittsburgh with ping pong. The Fox & Hound in the North Hills has it, but it’s quite expensive to play and they only have one table. Gooski’s is fun on a quiet Saturday afternoon and the beer is cheap. We’d really love to see what else is out there as far as tables and leagues. Beer should stay in the mix, as well.

So if you have any knowledge of the ping pong community in Pittsburgh, we’d love your input. You can play with us, too, although you’ll probably lose.

1. Undergarments: She bought me some nice no-show ankle socks, my personal fave, and a pair of boxer briefs. I’m not sure what she’s implying here, and it’s not like she ever sees what I wear underneath my clothing (gross!!!!) but it was a really nice gesture. Now when I bark at people to eat my shorts they’ll have something tasty to bite into. I wear only the most gourmet of underwear.

2. Suspenders (black): I don’t get dapper often, but when I do you’ll have to watch out because I’ll look so sharp I’ll be able to cut through any fashion prejudice and let justice prevail. With my new suspenders I’ll right wrongs, suspend pants, suspend time, my ellipses will become twice as suspenseful, and I’ll write only the most suspenseful soap opera dramas.

3. Wallet (leather, tri-fold): Christa thinks I have a boat full of money that is slowly sinking into the sea and that I must ferry the money off the boat to lighten the load and that this wallet is what I’ll use to do that in lieu of a bucket. Little does she know that the boat full of money already sunk to the bottom of the sea because she didn’t give me my Christmas gift when I asked for them.

4. Clocky: I blame this one on myself. I’ve been yearning for Clocky for a year or so and as soon as I let Christa know she jumped on the opportunity to gift this to me. At its core it’s only an alarm clock. A very cute, lovable and charming alarm clock. Its shtick is that when it’s time to wake up, the giant wheels mounted on the side of the beast begin to churn and off to the races we go!

Since I’ve had this clock I’ve had horrible sleep anxiety. I can’t sleep at night knowing that Clocky can wake at any moment and run amok through my room. The ghost in that machine haunts me to no end.

So it was a great Christmas. I’m not sure how anything else can top this but Christa sure did a bang-up job on buying me gifts!

1. A watch
Dan and my mom went shopping for this gift together. That scares me because now I think that they have some sort of secret alliance against me – a watch alliance. Who know what else happened at Ross Park Mall other than watch shopping? Still, it is a wonderful gift that I will wear every day, even though analog clocks still puzzle me.

2. A t-shirt
As you all know, 99 Red Balloons (not 99 Luft Balloons) is my favorite song of all time. I used to dance the night away to this little ditty at The Dame in Lexington before they tore it down and rebuilt it into a lesser place to be. It is a lovely marriage of words and music…oh wait, no, that’s Send In The Clowns (aka Clowns Come On In). Anyways, Dan bought me a shirt with exactly 99 red balloons on it! It’s amazing. I will wear it every single day with my watch so that I will always know the time and never stop dancing. Listen to it and think of me: 99 Red Balloons

3. A Record
In case you didn’t hear the news, Dan and I won a Twist dance contest a few weeks back. We didn’t win by actually twisting, but rather by causing a huge scene and sliding under each others legs. The crowd went wild. Our prizes for winning the contest were a lovely picture book of the one and only Audrey Hepburn (who Dan now has a crush on) and the record of the single “The Twist” by the one and only Chubby Checker. We split our winnings, me taking the picture book so Dan wouldn’t get any ideas, and Dan taking the Twist record so that he could practice dancing. Or so I thought. Instead, Dan had this keepsake framed for me so that I can hang it on my wall and any time I want to listen to the record, all I have to do is take the frame down, remove the back hinges, take away the cardboard that is keeping it in place, be careful not to break the glass, and then dance the night away.

All in all, it was a fantastic Christmas. I hope this filled in some gaps for all of you. Also, Dan did propose…that we get drunk! And we did.

The intimate setting at Future Tenant, along with the warm welcome via an audience-participation bit, made me feel comfortable in what could have been a stuffy crowd. The first play opened with two actresses – one held hostage and tied to a chair, the other waving a gun. “Tables turned” seemed to be a theme that was carried out through the night starting right in this opening scene of The Unknown Artist. Needles to say, the tables eventually turned and the hostage become the captor, the captor the hostage. Oh, and the original hostage was an art critic, the original captor an artist. You can fill in the rest.

The obvious crowd favorite of the night was 30 Year Old Dora, in which an aged Dora the Explorer shows up on a blind date along with her pet monkey, Boots. To her date’s surprise, Dora is a promiscuous girl who only wants to eat hot dogs (big ones, wink wink) and drink full glasses of Jose Cuervo. Boots has a few substance abuse problems of his own and he uses a lot of four-letter words. Maybe you have to see it to get it, but by the end of the ten minutes I couldn’t stop laughing and Dan was crying (from laughter).

If you have $10 and an hour to spare tomorrow (November 12) through Saturday (November 14), I suggest you check out this gig. It’s funny, fun, and the Rolling Rock is on the house. For more information, visit http://www.futuretenant.org/.

We can all relate to this

I stole the format for this review from one of my most beloved sites: Something Awful. So without further ado, hope aboard the review express!

Expectations: This being a Coen Bros. film, I expected to find an engaging, progressive, original story that, while very entertaining, would shake me to the core and maybe teach me a life lesson or two. As a by-product, I anticipated being exposed to wonderful dialogues, engrossing characters and  wit so hot that would decimate a wax museum in one fell swoop.

The Reality: Christa and I departed the theater an hour into the film because nothing resembling a story, joke, plot, or an interesting character manifested itself onto that silver screen.

It was as though the peon charged with handling the ever precious reels dropped them into a vat of sea animals that only devour things like “fun” and “entertainment.” Not one to upset the cinema king, the peon grabbed whatever garbage the sea animals didn’t eat and stitched them together to create the film they showed me in that theater.

What makes this a very sour experience for me is that critics were raving about this film. Go to its entry on Rotten Tomatoes! I don’t know what these critics saw that I didn’t, but I know that not a single LOL escaped my lips.

In the first hour of the film, we are introduced to a family that is falling apart and at the epicenter of that vicious hurricane is a man, Larry, who doesn’t seem to care.  He pathetically plods along life’s chosen path, without the will or ambition to talk to connect with his kids, make good with his wife or confront his neighbor who is building a shed on his yard. Instead, Larry climbs up onto the roof and stares at the women next door who sunbathes in the nude. Hey, dude. Why don’t you quit starring at naked women and try to get your life back on track? Clearly, I didn’t understand the motivation of any of these characters.

Some of scenes in the film that one man in our audience laughed out loud to were the following:

1. Larry’s son smoking pot in the boy’s bathroom at school while repeatedly saying “Fuck.”

2. Larry’s wife’s new boyfriend hugs Larry.

3.  Larry looks at a pair of breast.

4. Something extremely Jewish happens.

I’m a patient person, but I didn’t have the will power to sit through the rest of the movie that seemed to be an elaborate cinematic trick.  I’m sure at the end the Coens come onto the screen and tell everyone that they’ve been had and then use very advanced 3-D technology to give the theater a repentant hug.

I can’t help but wonder that the Coens are pulling an Andy Kaufman and actively trying to upset their fan base. Unfortunately, this results in people so desperate to understand the meaning of this film that they’ll declare it a masterpiece without knowing why. Of course, I’m probably just a big ol’ dummy who doesn’t understand the beauty of film making and thus, I’ll die alone in a very small apartment that smells of my own urine because my brain isn’t capable of grasping such concepts as “hygiene” and “toasters.”

You may have heard through a tweet, a text message, an email, or even through the New York Times, but in case you’ve been hiding under a rock (drum roll, please) Dan got new pants!

When I worked at J. Crew, they told us that most men shop for clothes only once a year. Men buy all that they need in one trip and avoid the mall for the following 364 days.  I learned that Dan is “most men” when he asked me to go shopping with him on his typical male once-a-year shopping trip. Like any dutiful girlfriend, I had to say yes.

I’ve worked in retail before, but never really understood the male shopper.  29W 30L, 33W 34L – all of these numbers confuse me too much to pay attention.  Also, I am drawn to sparkly things, and there aren’t a lot of sparkly things in the men’s section unless you go to American Apparel, in which case you may as shop at Halloween Express.  For me, this shopping trip with a real-life man (Dan) was quite the learning experience.

What I learned was that man shopping is easy. We walked into The Gap, picked up a pair of 29W 30L Standard Fit Vintage Wash denim jeans (side note: Dan lost those 70 pounds he gained after college), a few shirts, a thermal, and went to the fitting room. In 20 minutes, Dan had found his wardrobe for the year. I was in awe. I’m still in awe.

Needless to say, Dan looks outstanding in his new wardrobe.  Below is a very true-to-life example of what Dan and I might look like if we stood next to each other wearing our favorite pairs of jeans. Aren’t we cute?

We had a few goals in mind. Let me list them in no particular order for you.

1. Find the biggest pumpkin while avoiding the Pumpkin Snakes/Spiders

2. Navigate our way through a corn maze without having to take the Donner Party route.

3. Feed animals.

4. Quench lust for cider.

We knew it would be a packed house as it was the annual Fall Festival, but strike while the iron is hot. Am I right or am I right?

There are supposed to be toys in here

First thing we saw was a small hub area that had a variety of attractions. There was a fudge booth, funnel cake booth, “The Hay Tunnel,” pumpkin painting, mini-golf variant involving a pumpkin OR apple, and the corn stalk maze. Except for “The Hay Tunnel” it’s the typical fanfare you would expect from a farm. Let’s just talk about this tunnel of hay for a moment.  It’s a small barn, or shed, that is over flowing with hay. There could be a thousand needles in there and you’d be none the wiser. What the geniuses at Soergel’s did was drill a small tunnel through the hay and then charged kids a dollar to walk a tiny hay-cave loop. I’m not sure why anyone would do that when, not even 50ft away, is a corn maze to explore.

Christa and I opted to not waste our money and spend our hard earned dollar on a promising corn stalk maze. The maze wasn’t as Shining-esque as we had hoped and was less of a maze as it was a linear winding path with corn stalks sticking out of the walls waiting to poke your eyeballs out. We did have a chipmunk guide and Christa was kind of scared. Despite our best efforts, we still wasted our money.

Next, we hunted down a pumpkin to gut and carve to celebrate the dominance of mankind over agriculture. Pumpkin is an incredible beast to hunt and I would suggest it if you’re an adrenaline junky or preparing to hunt man. We were eventually successful, but at what cost…

A successful hunt!

Getting cider wasn’t exciting so forgive me for not describing it in excruciating detail.

The final task we had to complete was to feed some animals. To do this we had to walk through the main festival hub where a bunch of people were scarfing down hot dogs and Christa was getting kind of grossed out, which meant we didn’t have much time left.

We arrived at the petting zoo,I dropped my quarter into the machine and then went to town.  I have to wonder if these animals are fed apart from when people like me come to feed them pellets because these beasts were eager and willing to do anything for some pellets. Almost anything, anyways. Here is my montage for you!

Yea. My whole arm taste like that, don't worry.

I'd wear that

Kids, NOOOOO!

"Get your goats in a row"

Then we left. I’m still reeling from getting my hand covered in animal saliva. I mean, my fist was straight up in a cow’s mouth at one point.  All in all, Soergel’s is a semi-gross place that deserves to be visited once a year for an hour or two max. Thanks for being a pal, Fall.