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Whilst only Brunslo has confessed to being taken in, the preceding post was but an April Fool’s conceit. I wish someone would offer me a living wage for writing!
Ryan’s joke may have met with far more credulity, but I flatter myself that it was because he based it on an idea of mine. Perhaps I should have let him sketch out my April Fool’s; but then, I doubt any of you would believe that I had seduced Jennifer Connelly away from Paul Bettany and we were starting a lesbian pie commune.
I once said that changes move in packs. This has certainly been true recently, and just when I thought things were calming down, another pack of changes has begun howling in the hills and moving in for the kill.
I had an apartment-warming last week. It was a lovely party, and my new apartment was more together than ever before. Every cranny cleaned and every picture hung, and never have I understood the first party in a new place being called a ‘warming’ more. The next morning, I woke up and crawled from my warm bed into my newly warm home, and checked my e-mail.
What I found was my first fan-letter. It was a very flattering yet intelligent letter about my website and the way my correspondent had stumbled across it (apparently I am the top hit on Google for “austen dickens infectious”—right glad am I she accidentally hit ‘enter’ before typing ‘disease’ and going to sciencedaily somethingerother!)
My ‘fan’, Stasie, is the editor of a new magazine up in Seattle, and on Wednesday she offered me a permanent job. Writing. I repeat for emphasis: Felicity paid to put words together.
I think I actually cried some, between all the laughing and dancing around (probably good I don’t have new neighbors downstairs just now.) It’s the most beautiful thing to happen in my whole life. It chose a pretty silly time, but somehow, I don’t really mind. I’m going to be doing what I want most of all to do, living in a fascinating (if congested and expensive) city, AND seeing my FABULOUS sister all the freakin’ time!
So I’m ripping up all my new roots. Breaking my lease and giving Nike my fond farewells. And as for Ryan, well, he is going on his own adventure. I may think he’s crazy, but I’m doing [side note to wonko: Have I mentioned that if you Aubrey me, I’m going to reinstate quaint old Royal Navy customs, starting with flogging? I have mentioned it? Consider it rementioned.|text|the supportive girlfriend thing].
This place has been my home forever. No matter how long I stayed in the East, this was my home. And it’s not going to be anymore. It’s sad and strange and hard to believe. Every corner holds a memory—playing in the volcano ash in my yard, my first kiss, reading a well-loved book high in a maple tree, sparring and talespinning on the playground, graduating from high school with a smile and a migraine. The stuff of my life is strung out across this valley, and now somehow I must spin it all up, tuck it all in, and move on. My friends, good and cherished friends, I cannot take with me.
But, although twenty-four years is far too short a time to spend among such excellent hobbits, this is the end. I am going. I am leaving. Goodbye.
I’m really not sure I can apologize enough for this drivel. Blame the car ahead of me this morning and its occupant.
Justice Man opens his eyes on another day full of deeds to be done, foul fiends to foil, and bullet-proof spandex. Justice Man loves spandex. He even sleeps…but, where are his spandex jammies? Justice Man rolls onto his tummy, suddenly alert. He scans the tile floor of the kitchen. No supervixens, no probing aliens…in short, no reason why the spandex Justice Jammies should not be in evidence. Wait, why is he in the kitchen? Why is he on the floor?
He leaps to his paws and sniffs the air nervously, and starts as he hears a guttural whine, a sound of animal distress. It’s coming from…from him! From Justice Man! He looks down, and realizes the truth. Reflected in the glossy black tile of the spacious kitchen is the fluffy gray and white form of Justice Pooch. He kneels to the tile with another whine, and sniffs his own reflection.
Now he remembers. This happens every morning. Is it sleep restoring some measure of function to the Justice Mind? Or is this a further torment devised by the Sinister Sparkler, the recidivous reprobate in whose shining modern kitchen he muses, the wizardous wretch that condemned him to this frivolous form!? Is he condemned to live out his life this way, in dog-years, remembering the spandex-swathed splendor of Justice Man each morning, only to retreat into brutish idiocy by noon? No!
Off he races, his claws tapping on the tiles, his silky spray of tail wagging at the thought of action. He sprints across the deep pile rug of the living room and comes to a halt. The bedroom door! Behind this portal his enemy lies in luxurious languor!
Come out, Sparkler! Come out and fight! “Yip! Yip YIP yipyipyip!”
Vague stirrings from behind the door.
Arise, foul beast! Though you may have changed my form, my heart is a hero’s and I can best you any day! Come out and fight like a man! “Yip YIPIPIPIPROOOO!”
No sound. No response. Justice Man collapses slowly to the berber like a small fuzzy balloon, pricked by the knowledge of his own powerlessness. What is he, anyway? A Mi-Ki? A Malti-Poo? What can he avail against this man? He curls into a ball of misery and shrouds his shame with his draping tail.
The door opens, but he doesn’t stir. “Good morning, Justy,” comes the voice of the Sparkler, and then the murderous madman is upon him, scritching his head, petting him and flopping his silky ears! Despite himself, Justice Man feels…better. The warmth of the insidious incorrigible’s affection spreads over his tiny fluttering heart, and he finds his tail wagging helplessly.
No! he barks, and runs off to cower under the dining room table while the Mast—while the horrible hellion makes his Cream of Wheat. He works up all his fear and hatred, and manages to nip the dastardly devil on one argyled ankle before he is picked up and carried to the dusty grey Mercedes.
“You really must behave yourself, Justy,” says the nefarious nabob, as he drops Justice Man onto the passenger seat and the little hero rebelliously bounds into the back seat.
The car starts, and Justice Man trembles involuntarily at the sound, the tremor - like when the Galactic Cyberworms tried to devour the core of the Earth! - but soon his quailing ceases, and he is himself again. He leaps to the back window and surveys his surroundings, the peaceful streets and buildings that pass him by. They are going to the Sparkler’s business—he is a villain consultant now that he is a villain emeritus. Who knows what massive misdeeds may be managed and manufactured this day? Who knows what burgeoning brigand might be coddled and coached by this consulting cur? Justice Man raises his tail high, as if to block the rear-view and trick the driver into some fatal error. Yes, that’s it! He can crash the car and prevent this pernicious poisonous pirate from perpetually plaguing the planet! He will spring to the back of the driver’s seat and plunge his teeth into the sinful scourge’s hand! He will wrench the steering wheel over with all his tiny weight! He will sacrifice his life by interposing himself between the brake and the floor! His tiny bones will be the end of this malificent marauder!
Justice Man…smells something. He sniffs the air, then the sun-faded plush under his feet. Behind the left headrest, yes…right there. It’s a doggie treat, stale but still enticing. Yes! He pushed it down there as part of an ingenious plan to…he fastens his tiny teeth onto the treat and pulls it loose. Yes, this milk-bone was the keystone of an elaborate…crunch snorfle...Really, being squashed is far less pleasant than the alternative…slurp munch...there’s the injustice of cats, very small cats, to be considered…CRUNCH slobber slobber...and lonely toy poodles like that hot little number next door. Justice Man settles down in the sun with half the milk-bone between his delicately fringed paws. He is happy and aimless, trickling between pleasant reflections. He is soft and cuddly and mindless. He is Justy. At least…until tomorrow morning.
‘Marcus and the Dark’ has been removed in hopes that it may someday be published. I apologize to my loyal online readers, but my less naîve friends in the literary community inform me that online self-publishing like this could interfere with my little stories’ chances.
Things like serials will always be here to waste your time.
I have been long informed, by the man who shines bright lights in my mouth once a year and issues a verdict on my flossing habits, that I grind my teeth. He also informs me that I should think about buying a mouthguard, which both makes me feel approximately 48 years old and strikes me as mondo expensivo. The grinding hasn’t been too much of a problem for me - I’ve got years of work to do before I lose them utterly! - but I do suspect it increases my migraines, neck tension, and TMJ (a thing where my jaw pops out of alignment, and clicks. Did I mention feeling twice my calendar age?). So recently I called up the bright-light man’s office, in the course of deciding about dental insurance options, and asked how much this implement of premature aging would cost. “Usually runs around $425.”
Years of practicing an excellent phone manner allowed me to get off the phone without compromising my cheerful exterior. Four hundred bucks to encase my teeth in bouncy plastic? Surely there had to be some $10 option at my local pharmacy. But nothing availed me, until a friend told me I could accomplish the same task with an inexpensive sports mouthguard. This point of view seconded by an ex-rugby-playing co-worker, I hied me to Gart Sports and found a fittable mouthguard for $1.99. Amusingly, the clerk looked my non-ruggers frame up and down and said confusedly, “Lacrosse?” Ha ha ha! NO. I took the thing home, boiled it and fitted it, and cut off the face-guard strap. I am equipped. And I can even pretend I’m sporty, not entering middle age.
So I’ve been trying to sleep with the damnable thing, which almost invariably ends in my being more wakeful than before, as I squidge it around in my mouth, chew on it, breathe awkwardly around it, and finally slough it off into its little bowl. Two nights ago I managed to sleep with the thing on, and shucked it out without thinking the first time I woke up for water. Last night, crawling into bed oh-so-tired, I thought I could probably sleep with its distraction and annoyance, and I was right.
I woke up at around 5 this morning, groggily reached for my water, and halted in mid-reach. Where was the big clunky mouthguard I’d been slurping my water around all night? I blindly patted around me on the bed, on the pillow. Teddy bear. I checked the floor. A pair of socks and an overflow of quilt. I clutched my throat. Did it feel…funny? It obliged. I thought of my sister’s retainer, which disappeared in the night her freshman year and was never seen again. Had I SWALLOWED my mouthguard? Was that even possible? Was it lodged in my lower esophagus even now? Would they have to operate? My drowsy mind raced, and I threw back the covers to surge out of bed and do who knows what—dislodging my mouthguard, tucked into the folds of a coverlet. I guess I managed to extract the thing while completely and totally asleep. I don’t think I’m ever going to manage to wear that thing all night.
Have you ever found yourself standing on the edge of some precipice - the wuthering hatch of a skydiving plane, perhaps - and wondered how on Earth you came to be there? Such were my emotions when wonko pressed ‘Bat-Movie’ on the menu of the ‘Holy Special Edition, Batman!’ version of Batman: The Movie. Perhaps it was Adam West’s voice saying, “Quickly, Robin, to the Batcave! There isn’t a minute to lose!” that made me quail. Perhaps it was my better angels giving me pause. Whatever the happy thought that tried to stay me, I heeded it not. I watched.
I had ‘seen’ Batman: The Movie before; the DVD was on random shuffle, muted, to the accompaniment of some rapper or other, at a poetry professor’s semester-end party. I’m not sure that it made terribly more sense viewed as Nature, or whatever force gave it birth, intended.
Batman: The Movie, as any student of pop-art precursor popcorn cinema will tell you, treats of Bruce Wayne and his youthful ward Dick Grayson, who don totally dorky outfits to foil the United Underworld of “[An Italian guy in bad clown makeup and an avuncular expression|text|The Joker]”, “The Riddler,” “[A portly millionaire as obsessed with gadgets as Batman|text|The Penguin]”, and “[A pretty lady in a tight outfit with a cat and a bag of bad puns|text|Catwoman]”. This may lead to all sorts of confusion, because many of us are familiar with a TOTALLY OTHER Universe in which Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson don kickass costumes to battle competent villains with very similar names. This can be attributed to parallel evolution, if your mind is bendy; or can cause you to weep interminably, if your mind insists the two are somehow related. At any rate, in the movie, the United Underworld is going to take over the world by turning the United Nations (sorry, United World) Security Council into colored dust with a gadget stolen from a whisky tycoon. First they have to kill Batman, preferably with exploding marine animals.
It’s obvious that people aren’t lying when they say Batman KNEW itself to be bad, and was in fact a deliberate masterpiece of camp. It’s obvious because there is no way anyone actually wrote the riddle “What weighs 6 ounces, and is totally lethal?” with the answer, “Obviously, a sparrow in a tree with a machine gun, Batman!” and thought it was obvious. Although it was 1966, so conceivably drugs could make it make sense. But seriously, that’s a good sample of the kind of thing this movie does - it tries to make the totally illogical and irrational ‘obvious’ and elementary, while the totally obvious (The beautiful woman who says ‘Purrrrr-fect’ is PROBABLY Catwoman in surprise, Batman!) is obscured. Perhaps this is meant to be some fundamentally upsetting artistic statement that turns our staid conceptions of logic and reality upside-down - perhaps it is just meant to make us laugh.
And the movie DOES make us laugh, even if we want to cry, even if we protest that it “hurts like burning” (which it does.) However much I love the Caped Crusader, and burn with indignation at the undignified, surprised-eyebrow, press-conference-having antics of his brightly-colored shadow, it’s funny. A submarine with flipper feet is funny. A shark hanging tenaciously onto a man hanging tenaciously onto the Bat-copter’s Bat Ladder is funny. It grieves me, but it is so.
The other thing the movie has going for it is that it’s fast-paced—one of the only ways to be a good bad movie. There’s no time for you to wonder why you’re wasting your life on this drivel, because you’re too busy being whisked along to the next completely incomprehensible clue or totally ridiculous gadget.
It’s painful for one such as myself, a lover of the dark places of the Batman myth, gorged on the dark beauty and angst of the post-Frank Miller Batverse, to take this four-color lunacy. It’s hard to believe that somehow, in the infinite diversity of human endeavor, the chap that got broken across Bane’s knee is the same one who has four kinds of Bat Aquatic Life Repellant and that the urban legend of the DCU, only recently upgraded to ‘GCPD shoots on sight’, can call up the Coast Guard and issue orders. It twists my continuity-lovin’ brain into a horrible garish pretzel. And don’t EVEN get me started on their ‘Joker’.
I did not like this movie. I did not dislike this movie. It planted a seed of horror in my brain that will grow and destroy everything. That seed of horror tastes like lemon candy. Bottom Line: Spoo out of 10. IT MAKES NO SENSE AND MAKES THE BABY BATGIRL CRY but somehow, you just have to look.
No, I’m not talkin’ about some episode of Angel where the Dark Avenger is happy. That happens like twice a season, ain’t worth discussing. What I intend to treat upon is nothing less than the end of an epoch. An epoch of frustrated good intentions and insults to my nutritional intake. Yes, devoted fans and captive audiences may realize, I am discussing my long-stymied desire to share my blood.
Just the other week, I was thinking, “It’s about time for me to undergo another exercise in frustration by spending an hour waiting and doing paperwork only to discover my iron levels are ‘healthy but insufficient’! Yeah!” No, I’m not kidding, I actually thought it was about time for another try. The very next day a stylish drop of blood appeared on the Nike internal website (even blood and charity have to be stylish to make it onto that page) and summoned me to make an appointment to have my blood taken today. Of course, cockeyed optimist that I am, I signed up immediately.
It was with a certain spirit of weary dutifulness that I trudged over to the Tiger Woods Center, past a gigantic photo of said golfer that I can only describe as glamour photography and at which I always stifle a giggle, and introduced myself to the volunteers at the Blood Drive. My appointment was at 10:30. I was early. They were running late, they explained, because they have some new procedures - like asking you the scandalous questions in person and face to face! - and are training a new person, and apparently Nike employees tend to be on time 60% more than the average blood donor, thus throwing off their entire groove.
So I dutifully read scary things about West Nile and long explanations of what they’re allowed to do with my blood, and then settled in with [A truly excellent book about the Little Bighorn and the fate of Plains Indians in America|text|Killing Custer] and waited. Also, I waited. Then, I waited, traded quips with the woman next to me about how long we were waiting, and eyed the post-donation junk food table with ill-disguised longing. Every minute I waited made it that much more certain, by the cruel nature of the universe, that I would be turned away for my weak blood. At 11:50 or so, they called my number.
Before they can test your blood for excessive wimpitude, they have to confirm and update your donor record, which is done, in these whizbang days of techno-magic, on a laptop. I do not believe that the chap with whom I was placed was supposed to be doing this portion of the procedure. While his motions once he at last came to testing my blood were slow and deliberate, they were quite deft. He interacted with the laptop more or less as if he was a member of an isolated tribe in the Amazon and had had only half an hour’s orientation training to our brave new world. He hunted and pecked in the truest sense, where ‘hunt’ implies ‘slowly move through a dense forest quietly and slowly, peering through the leaves to attempt to spy the elusive ‘F’ key.’ He typed everything without spaces, which I had to sweetly remind him to insert. Finally, after his typographical safari had stretched on for ten minutes, the moment of truth arrived.
He uncovered the azure phial of mystic copper sulfate, nursed several domes of glistening blood from the ritual puncture on my finger, and loosed the dark fluid into its watery trial. The dark bead drifted downwards, and caught on the wall of the vessel. I looked anxiously at the acolyte, but he merely gently tapped the side, and the bead happily resumed its descent. Either the 11% daily recommended iron in my multivitamin or the steak dinner to which wonko had treated me had prevailed. I was found worthy.
After the usual round of questions designed to expose my sheltered existence (no, I have not exchanged sex for money or drugs), my staid lifestyle (no, I have never been to Africa) and my conservative aesthetics (no, I have not received a tattoo in the past 12 months), the blood pressure, the pulse-taking, I was ushered to the center of the room and beckoned over to a wizened man with an Eastern European accent, labelled with medical tape as ‘OSCAR’. He seemed disapproving that I did not have a favorite blood-giving arm, and did not exclaim, as had the cupric acolyte, over the beauty of my veins. He merely took my empty tubes and bags and dourly began arranging to suck my blood. He cuffed my upper arm and began gently probing my underelbow. He studied the veins, pressing up and down like a kneading cat, peering through his glasses. Finally, he made a shape like an arrow on my arm in purple and intoned, “Thees ees where we begeen.” Then he looked up and his dourness broke to reveal a truly benevolent smile. “You haff very long vein,” he beamed. I felt inexplicably proud.
It is not merely my overgrown sense of occasion or my desire to dress up a picayune blog post that leads me to speak in liturgical terms. There is something ritual about this, the process by which the stuff of our lives is removed and preserved to bring life to others. And in this case the curious figure of Oscar, his solemnity, the diamond-circled onyx ring on his left hand and the band of sheaves of wheat and crosses on his right, added to the sacramental tone. I sat, flinching away from the organic heat of the plastic tube snaking across my wrist, concentrating on the last days of Sitting Bull on the Sioux Reservation; but all the time, on some level, I was aware of my fingers, rolling and squeezing a foam toy, and the deep sanguine cord spooling into a sack below my chair. It is beautiful, that color, the color of working blood, blood flowing from place to place as it does within us, rather than seeping or spilling or splattering into the world outside. In time, Oscar returned, and frothed my blood into tubes for testing, to track the spread of West Nile Virus, to check for disease, to learn who could take my bottled life. He gravely held up a string of meaningless numbers and letters for me to read as I held my wounded arm above my head, and released me to the junk food and the stickers, the obsequious volunteers pushing lemonade and cookies. I waited a while, waited in vain to feel some ill effect, and pushed off into the cold, richer and poorer, full of the quiet fulfillment of this reverse communion.
How could I have ever forgotten this word, except perhaps a-purpose so I might have the glee of rediscovering it?
Nothing brings a tremor to the nerves of a young adventurer spending her first week in the Mazes of Menace like the distant bombination of a nest of lethal hymenopters.
I love my comic books, and I love my comic book store (shameless plug for my guys), but unemployment is a harsh mistress, so during the thin months I’ve been only an occasional visitor, buying an inch off my shelf and begging the guys to keep stashing my stuff in the back until better times.
Better times having arrived, I scraped together some money, bought out my shelf, and painstakingly compiled all the interim inches with the new bounty. I am overwhelmed. Seldom have I seen such wealth of intoxicating continuity, untouched and unseen, and I am carefully easing into the binge so I enjoy and absorb to my utmost. Last night, I gobbled Batman: War Games, a huuuuuuge crossover event spanning just about every Gotham and Gotham-Jr. title (after all, I buy them all already!), which was just getting juicy (Batman’s existence proved by news footage! Will Tim become Robin again?) when I dropped out of regular consumption. So, while stirring my supper, while brushing my teeth, and while I should have been sleeping, I finished out the tale.
Of course, I had heard the rumors, and had them confirmed in my occasional visits to Comic Book land…they killed off my Spoiler, my dear little Spoiler, my “Dear Diary, maybe vigilantes need to pay attention in Physics class.” Spoiler, the only girl I ever approved of for Tim, the first canon female Robin. It was inevitable, once they made her karmically responsible for the entire War Games fiasco. It was inevitable, when she became Tim’s girlfriend. It was inevitable the moment she put on the R. sniff
May I digress to say that I have never seen such a WEIRD torture sequence in comic books? He’s going to torture Spoiler with a POWER DRILL and when we cut back to your torture already in progress she has…a bloody nose and some scrapes. He’s going to torture her with what looks like a BONE SAW and we cut back to Spoiler with…a bloody nose and some scrapes. Umm. You keep scaring me and reassuring me. I don’t know what’s going on. Are you bastards enough to torture my dear Steph, or are you going to claim you are and then wuss out? Not that I want you to torture Spoiler, but make up your minds, I’m getting dread-whiplash! Never mind the fact that this is the Black Mask, the guy who plucked out a man’s eyeballs and fed them to his wife, in-frame. You’re squandering all my accumulated fear of this guy.
AHEM. Okay, I’m back. God I babble on this subject. ANYWAYS, they not only Kirk-girlfriended my beloved Spoiler, they killed Orpheus. Now don’t get me wrong, I have no real attachment to Orpheus, and don’t know much about him…except that he was the only friggin’ black hero in Gotham, and one of maybe four black male heroes in the entire DCU. So they killed the girlfriend, and they killed the black guy. Oh wait, it CAN get more stereotypical—the black guy died first!
At any rate, the point of this blogget, back when it had one, before the endless background story and angry digressions, was that Batman: War Games was a friggin’ massacre. They not only killed off two good guys, they killed approximately 17 mob bosses, 20 established henches, and various and sundry other minor villains. Most of those within the first two issues. We’re talkin’ 432 pages of full-color abattoir. And that’s when it occurred to me that there are a few basic types of crossover event. Each event can belong to more than one category, but these are the raison-d’êtres:
So there you have it, my first crack at a unified theory of comic book crossovers. Why do you care? I don’t know. What does it mean? That I’m a big big geek and DC Comics gets all my money.
Last night, after scarfing a dinner of questionable healthiness and beguiling a little time at awfulplasticsurgery.com (why does LaToya Jackson WANT a nose like her brother’s?), I went to play racquetball with garrisod and my boyfriend wonko. Usually garrisod’s more insolent half makes one for the racqueting, but on this occasion she was tussling with her thesis. We convened at Castle Garrikus, and nattered briefly on several topics, including [I tried to find a picture, but I’d really rather not. A guy who took a shotgun to his face and lived.|text|’Arseface’] from the Garth Ennis graphic novel Preacher before moving on to the sports.
I tell you these details to help you understand my state of mind when, some time into our second game of Cutthroat, I turned on my Nike-clad toe to track the ball’s flight and found its flight energetically intersecting with my face, garrisod a faint fuzzy form following through in the background.
For some seconds, I pretty much checked out. I know I didn’t pass out because I didn’t fall over and nothing went dark, but I think I went to my happy place (which involves flying over an azure sea on golden eagle wings), because suddenly I found myself back in my body and my body crouching on the racquetball court covering its face. This was approximately my ‘logical’ train of thought:
Somewhere between Arseface and LaToya I started screaming like a Slayer slaying Gentlemen, thus causing the bystanders to think I was dying or losing an eye. I sincerely apologize to the bystanders and assure them that I’m not USUALLY such a wuss, and it wasn’t the pain so much as suddenly being transported from the joy of the game and the sensation of eagle-flight to certain knowledge of complete facial cratering, impending agony, and the rest of my life in reconstructive surgery that had me screaming. This was, like Mulder’s praying mantis epiphany, a scream of fear and horror. Unlike Mulder, I admit it was a girly scream.
I think I lay on the court for a while repeating the only verbal thought I had, which was that my nose was broken and I would be ugly forever. I’m sure wonko thinks I’m crazy and shallow for this, but if he’d seen Arseface he’d understand why this was important enough to chant unconsciously for minutes at a time. Then wonko convinced me my nose was fine and I should worry about my mouth, which turned out to be the right move. My nose, while tender, still seems to be in one piece and wobble in the correct manner, in direct contradiction to the deep-seated fear which has either its root or its first expression in the night my papa tucked in my 7-year-old self and I drowsily inquired whether my nose was on right; whereas my lip has swollen to beestung proportions Donatella Versace might envy (google image search her. I DARE YOU.)
I felt better immediately upon knowing my nose hadn’t been shattered into a Gaston Leroux description, and I was, in fact, willing to keep playing, much to the confusion of my cohorts, who refused. So, over delectable snacks and an ice-bag, I’ve told garrisod he should drop this whole law-student idea and start whapping movie stars in the lips, but he’s afraid of the lawsuits if he swells up their butts instead… Meanwhile, the score is Lip and Nose, 0; Boyfriend thinking I’m a spaz, 1; and Me, honorary 15, because apparently if you take a ball to the face, you win the game.