Sixty-Two Down & Thirteen More To Go

I've been grading research papers for the last four days. They have to be done and back to my students by tomorrow, so the end is in sight.

But until then, let's meditate on the goodness that is Buffalo hockey:



I love that man.

There Was Much Screaming, Much Stomping

Here's what I remember about last night: It's Game Two. I am standing on a table. Or the bench to the table. I am considering popping the guy next to me because he had, mere seconds before, turned to yell at me and Amy--"CALM DOWN!" he said as we hysterically screamed things like Oh my God, do not score on us! Do not score on us! Do not score on us in the last minute!--but I don't pop him. I know he was thinking those things, too, but he chose not to scream them in the banshee-like levels Amy and I were using.

I am stomping my kitten-heeled feet on the table-bench, and I am screaming, "SUCK IT, RANGERS!" I am pointing to one of the many TVs broadcasting the Sabres game and shrieking my love for all things hockey. At this point of the night, after too many vodkas thick with lime wedges, I am screaming how much I love my future husband, how good he is, how wonderful, how flexible, how beautiful.



I am watching Amy do victory dances to celebrate. I am watching her pump her fist. I am watching the entire bar high-five. I slap the hand of every bearded man--because almost every Buffalo boy is sporting a playoff beard right now--and I slap the hand of every person at my table. Twice.

It was a good night:

Go, Abe, Go.

This was our Friday night:

Happy hour two-for-ones:



Happy hour buffet:



A special appearance of Sporty Amy:



Game Five, which caused me to announce to the whole bar that the man who just made that save, that man right there, he is my love, my future husband, and I love his hair:



Getting Abe dressed for the next round of the playoffs:

Best. Day. Ever.

I'll tell you this: it hasn't been easy lately. I'm starting to come to grips with the fact that I am not going to land any of the fifty full-time teaching gigs I applied for this year. I'm starting to realize that, for better or worse, I am probably going to be in Buffalo for another year. Still, I remain thankful for what I've been given: more time with my family and oldest friends.

But it's been hard. It's been hard to go to the mailbox every single day and see more rejection letters from colleges that stretch from New Hampshire to Oregon. We don't want you, they say. Are you kidding, they say. Better luck next year, they say.

It's been a similarly taxing battle for publication lately. My stories--even the one I love and believe in more than anything--have bounced back to me. Rejections have sprinkled in from all my favorite literary magazines. Not right, they say. We loved almost all of it, they say. Try us again, they say.

My mailbox has been stuffed full of no, no, no, no, no. It's been like this for months. And it was starting to grate on my insides, scrub me raw.

But then this morning I woke up in a beautiful mood. There was some song on the radio--some song I'd never heard before--and it was just the right song to wake up to. I wanted to sing in the shower. I wanted to pull out some of my best dance moves as I was pouring cereal. I wanted to splash through leftover puddles on my walk into school this morning. Everything felt good.

It was just one of those days, filled with these and other beautiful things:

1. I got a standing ovation in my last class of the afternoon.

2. My boy Blake--my favorite American Idol contestant, the boy who, yesterday, inspired me to shriek (in front of my father nonetheless) I want to bite his stomach!--was sent safely back to the couch and Sanjaya was kicked off the show. Later, Katy would call me to declare victory and say, "The world is now right!" and yes, yes, I had to agree. It was. Now I will no longer have to worry about writing her a five paragraph rant on Wednesday mornings that discusses how much I am bothered by Sangina, which is what I took to calling him weeks ago. (When I said Sangina in front of my mother, she turned to me and said, very seriously, "Jess, that's not his name." And I had to say, "I know, mother. I'm combining words here." And there was a pause and a smile as it slowly dawned on her. "Oh," she said. "Ohhhhh. I like it!")

3. The Sabres won Game Four. Let's take a moment to meditate on the beauty of this statement.

4. And here's the crowning moment of it all: all the ugly no-no-no was finally replaced by one yes--a yes that made me drive to the liquor store in search of a bottle of champagne because why shouldn't one celebrate success on a Wednesday night? One of my stories was just picked up by the Berkeley Fiction Review. The edition should be out in a few weeks.

Playoffs: Game One

We won, we won, we won.



And you, tall-skinny-great-haired-man, know how I feel.

Ryan Miller Day

This morning on the way to school my odometer hit 77700. Lucky 7s. Like I'd just won some big jackpot, like my dashboard was going to open up and spill coins into my lap. Then the radio played "Shook Me All Night Long," which is, of course, one of the best songs in the history of songs. I was already in an unparalleled mood, but these things made me feel even better. I felt like maybe karma was watching over me, ebbing, bubbling, getting ready to shower me in a wash of you so deserve this goodness.

I mean, sure I had to go to school and deal with a student who'd plagiarized his paper, and sure I had to listen to a student say, "Wait a second. There was a paper due two weeks ago? Huh?", and sure I had say to my students, "You didn't notice that Margaret Atwood repeated the word egg at least fifty times in a span of three pages? You didn't think that might be important?", and sure I had to watch them blink at me with those big doe-eyes students adopt in moments when they want to come off as sweet and simple and not entirely capable of doing a close reading of the text.

None of this bothered me. None of this bothered me because today was Stalk Ryan Miller Day. And I don't mean stalk in the creepy/scary way--you know, when people get all crazy and yell I want to have your babies, Ryan! or wait outside so they can write down his license plate number or follow him home to play mix tapes of songs they think he'll really love. No. My version of stalking involved spending too much time picking out an outfit and earrings on the off chance he might look at me or in my general direction after I'd staked my claim in the bar where he was taping an interview for a local show that helps us get to know our Sabres in a more intimate way.

I got there an hour and a half early, stood in line, was eventually joined by my girls, and we got in, we got a seat, a really decent seat. I was at his back, but anyone who wanted to eat and watch the show had to be at his back. Of course, I was glad I'd done most of my eating prior to his arrival in the restaurant because when people started screaming and when Amy, who moments before said, "I don't think I'm going to get that excited... it's not like he's Justin Timberlake...", let out a squeal that could shatter glass, my stomach flopped over on itself and forgot all about food. There he was--so tall! so skinny! skinnier than I'd imagined!--and I was thinking look at me look at me look at me because I thought maybe if he glanced at me I could give him a real soulful look, a look that told him everything he needed to know about me: that I'm not insane, that I'm not a groupie (well, at least not the type that shows up for this taping wearing a corset, the shortest skirt ever, and spike heels that could easily be used as devices of death and doom), that I'm smart and introspective and not all that unfortunate looking and sometimes funny in a hopeless oh she tries sort of way.

Ryan Miller never looked at me. Of course, how could he? I was sitting behind him, thinking about his hair and his skinny body and the jacket he was wearing. I was sitting behind him and being jealous of all the little kids who got to line up for a Q&A session. I was sitting behind him and listening to Amy say that if she had her way, she'd march right up there, waggle her eyebrows, and ask him How do you like it, Ryan? Huh? How do you like it? (Later, after we'd watched The Black Donnellys and I'd lathered myself into the usual semi-hysterical I love Jonathan Tucker state of mind, Amy went back to the glories of Ryan Miller. I bet it would be good, she said, sagely. I bet he has great legs. And thighs. Big thighs. Think of the thighs. Oh, and I did.)

Really, it was a great way to start the week. I got to sit with my girlfriends and shriek and giggle (especially when a little girl asked Ryan Miller what type of shampoo he used) and eat a pan of garlic bread and think oh wouldn't it be nice, wouldn't it be nice, oh dear God, wouldn't it be nice?

Husbands and Heads

I have a bad habit of introducing complete strangers as my future husbands. Jared Leto, Bradley Whitford, James Franco, Dale Earnhardt Junior, Hugh Grant--they're all my future husbands. My mother says I'm going to be a very busy girl. There are worse things.

Lately, though, I've been leaning solidly toward one future husband that I think is a bit more logical than my others. I think it's only right that I be allowed to meet, charm, fall in love with, and marry Ryan Miller, the Buffalo Sabres' goalie.



This isn't the first time I've talked about him. Previously, I mentioned that Ryan Miller and I should never be allowed to meet, charm each other, fall in love, and get married, and for one simple reason: we have the same head. The two of us have the longest faces in the history of faces.

Not too long ago I was in Barnes and Noble with Pedro. He and I were killing time and thumbing through the bargain books. I picked one up that had to do with makeup and finding your true inner beauty. Before I did that, though, the book suggested I needed to fully understand the implications of my face shape. It listed all the common face shapes. It had an example drawn next to the description and a picture of a celebrity who had that face shape. There were round faces, oval faces, heart-shaped faces, square, and long. And then there was mine: Horse.

"You've got to be kidding me!" I hissed and jabbed Pedro in the ribs with the book's spine. "They actually call it horse face! I mean, that's me, right? We can't make a case that I'm just a long face?"

Pedro looked down at the pictures then back up at my head. He looked a little sad and a little bashful. "No," he said. "You're definitely of the horse face variety. Sorry."

At least I'm not alone. If I'm considered a horse face, at least I know makeup artists would consider Ryan Miller a horse face, too. And it's true that at first I thought we should never join our genes to produce long-faced hockey-playing children--mainly because I was concerned that they would have to face the same scrutiny that Hilary Duff gets for her horse face. In my head I could see bullies squaring off with our children on the playground. They would neigh and stomp their feet. They would yell, Hi-ho, Silver! or Who's ready for the Kentucky Derby?! And that's when our children would beat the shit of those bullies--because, really, they are children of a hockey player, and they aren't going to take any shit. But still, the thought of them being taunted for the long faces that had been passed down after their parents so thoughtlessly combined their genes was too much for me to handle.



When I told Ex-Keith this and instructed him to keep me from falling in love with Ryan Miller because if you put our heads together, length to length, they would combine to create The Longest Face in the Milky Way, Keith agreed. "Yeah," he said. "If you two had kids, they would come out looking like that mask from Scream."

But I've since gotten over those concerns. I've since decided that it's important that the long faces of the world unite, stay strong, band together, and, if at all possible, make out.

Yesterday morning when I woke up, there was a human interest piece about Ryan Miller on the morning news. They showed film of him playing in a band, of him taking photographs, of him brooding and looking out over the ice. It looked like he was testing out lines of poetry in his head. And I wouldn't even care if they were lines about the beauty of the ice, the way it smelled, the way it felt, the way the crowd sounded like a pack of wild animals after the Sabres scored. I would take it. He seems sensitive and dark. He's tall and lanky. He can wear a pair of jeans like nobody's business.



He also has some pretty stunning hockey hair. If you say the phrase Ryan Miller's hair in the presence of Amy or Becky, you will immediately hear sighs escape their mouths in staccato bursts. Ohhhh, Amy will say, When he takes his face mask off and whips his wet hair back... Jesus.



So, our children might inherit our faces, but I think it's safe to say my God would they ever have some good hair. Also, they would be hockey players. Little hockey players. Good deed-doing, sensitive, brooding hockey players, just like their father. Maybe one would retire from his hockey career and become a writer like his mother. That would be enough for me. That would be enough to balance out the heads that certain people would consider horse-like.