dear friends, family, fans, fellow folks,
hello! i’m grateful you’re here!
thank you for being here, wherever here is for you!
and now, for some jokes and funs regarding various here-type places!
A) new jersey:
"have you been to this particular building full of stores before?"
"nah, but if you've seen one, you've seen the mall."
new jersey, land of malls, is where i was born AND where i am RIGHT NOW.
i don’t know if you’ve been keeping up with the travelogue that is my life of late, but rini (my gf) and i had to move out of our brooklyn apartment in may, and our travels have since taken us to exotic locales like arlington VA, pittsburgh PA, minneapolis MN, and right now MY MOTHER’S HOME IN NJ.
now, back to the mall of it. new jersey may not have the BIGGEST mall, but upon a brief googling to confirm my suspicions, “North Jersey has the MOST shopping malls in one area IN THE WORLD with seven major shopping malls in a 25 sq. mile radius.” (capitalization MINE.)
AND if you imagine that while people aren’t looking (toy story-style!), all those malls combine into one voltron-like massive mega-mall (voltron-style!), then perhaps we could say that NJ is home to the Mall Of Malls! which is an acronym for MOM (me-style!), whose NJ home you may remember i am in RIGHT NOW.
B) england:
in England, the company Lyft is called Elyvator.
tonight, rini and i fly to england (home of the original jersey)!
essentially, we get Lyfted into the air and then get set down in the UK tomorrow!
so we’ve got a few hours between now and then to learn the language.
C) scotland:
“can i get you to put a wee squiggle there?”
— a scottish checkout clerk asking for my signature in a way that made me uncertain whether that was an adorable quirk of this one person or if the whole nation calls them that, and either way is delightful
our summer travels culminate in scotland for the edinburgh fringe festival! rini and i were there for the fest in 2018 and we loved it, in part because of delightful scots like the clerk above. also, this story happened 5 years ago and i JUST realized that i could have called this situation a “checkout quirk.” CLERK AND QUIRK SOUND SO SIMILAR! I’M GOING TO REMAKE KEVIN SMITH’S MOVIE BUT MAKE IT MORE ECCENTRIC AND CALL IT “QUIRKS”!
and that’s all the travel silliness from me! how about YOU? some questions:
1) how are you? where are you? where are you from?
2) where have you loved to travel?
3) have you been to the UK? what do you love about it?
4) how do you feel about malls? do you have a favorite?
5) how are you NOW? where are you NOW? where are you from NOW?
and if YOU are in the UK in the next month or so, why not attend a show?
— July 21: Tramlines Festival in Sheffield, UK!
— July 22: BlueDot Festival in Macclesfield, UK!
— July 23: Truck Festival in Oxfordshire, UK!
— July 24: Oxford Comedy Festival in Oxford, UK!
— July 25: Dabbers Social Bingo in Hackney, UK!
— July 26: Honk in Henley, UK!
— July 29-30: Y-Not Festival in Derbyshire, UK!
— August 2-28: ImPerfect at the Edinburgh Fringe Fest in Scotland!
1) I'm fantastic, thank you. In and from upstate NY.
2) For our tenth anniversary, we flew to LA and then drove to Vegas. It was a really fun trip.
3) Not yet. I work at a community college and they are planning a trip to Ireland and Scotland next spring so I've been saving my pennies for that.
4) I'm indifferent about malls. I do love abandoned malls though.
5) Right now, I'm great (even though I'm at work). The sun is shining and it's a beautiful day.