Virtual Flaneurism

So delightful. God I love/hate cats.

BritBrit, oh prolific siren succubus, lead me into the unknowing weekend!

This image is built into the granite in the floor of my office building's lobby. It does not repeat, nor is there any explanable theme. All I can think is Millenium Falcon? Am I wrong? I have no thoughts to the little aspirin bottles on the lower right, which are equally permanent.

The concept behind this image is great: I do often enjoy same-thing different-opinion jokes (there is a well-known one projecting different religion's answer to "Why did the chicken cross the road?").

However, grammar errors and sloppy work is death to funny. It only takes one. And the use of "compliment" instead of "complement" in the last blurb - in theory what should be the climax of the joke - ruins it.

Anyway, over-reaction over. I will be moving on with my day now.

I deeply want to not credit this, knowing that doing so will earn me a delightfully sassy e-mail, but I'll save us both the time of thinking up assonance-heavy bon mots for said exchange and just tell you that this song is stolen without approval or acknowledgment from JONATHAN, impassioned inamorato of Strunk, White and Stephen Fry, and proud purveyor of a panoply of pocket squares. All this I share lest you go unawares, and insult God himself by accrediting this song's discovery to me. I am but a lowly messenger, mere Mercury bowing before the mighty and majestic pantheon of greater cyber-dieties.

A little slow for me right now, but when I'm mopey it'll come in handy. From Jonathan:

Meet the same-sex parents next door

And here is the moment I hate: the Explaining of the Situation (EOTS). Most of the time, the EOTS is not a big deal at all, but then again, we live in New York City. Not just New York City, but a liberal enclave in Brooklyn called Park Slope, where, depending on the time of day at the local playground, same-sex parents just might outnumber straight ones.

I recognize, though, that not everyone is down with two women or two men raising kids together, so there's the chance this family might quietly pack up their stuff and build their own campsite somewhere else upon the EOTS. Will our impromptu party suddenly become unbearably awkward?

"No, we're not sisters," I say, as I have hundreds of times before (Emily and I do look somewhat similar). "We're partners."

My new friend brightens and says, "Oh, who carried?" Who carried?! After I tell her that it was me who carried, we swap birth stories. Her husband leans over to tell Emily that he gained 25 pounds worth of sympathy weight. "Did you have the same problem?" he asks.

Clearly, the only person there with any judgments or preconceived notions was me. I shouldn't have been surprised. In the five years that Em and I have been married (no, it's not legal), and in the three and a half years since we had the boys, that's pretty much the way it's gone.