Touché

Every night, Nick watches poker on the computer. I call these his stories, and think it’s cute to ask questions afterwards like, How was the poker? Did people make bets? Were cards dealt? Did money change hands?

We’ve been in bed for the past hour, each on separate laptops. Just now, he paused his story, lifted his headphones off one ear, leaned over to me and said in a low voice, How’s the internet? Are women blogging? Are they writing about their feelings and the things happening in their lives?

File under Life is Weird

There’s a really great article about Cringe in the latest issue of Grazia, the one with Lily Allen on the cover. There’s a paragraph in it that mentions how I met Nick:

“It’s not just a night for the ladies, either. Sarah met her fiancé, Nicholas, at the last London Cringe. He recited a poem he’d written to a girl called Rosy: [long excerpt of this poem omitted so that Nick will continue sharing a bed with me; buy the book if you want to read it]. Sadly, Rosy spurned his advances and grew up to become a Buddhist nun, but Nicholas and Sarah bonded, have been together a year and are planning to marry next spring.”

Sometimes I think about what ten year old me, or twenty year old me, or even one year ago me would think if I could somehow tell her/us a few sentences about what’s going on in my/our life right now. Those seem like worthy candidates to ensure a good whaaaaa? face.

Launched

You know, it’s been four and a half years now, and it still makes me amazed and excited when Cringe fills a room, especially in another country, where I only know a handful of the crowd. The London Cringes have been some of the very funniest Cringes ever, and this past week didn’t disappoint.

The publicist, Ana Sampson, did a fantastic job, getting Cringe written up in The Times, Grazia, and Look, landing Cosmopolitan’s Book of the Month, interviews with BBC World Service, Radio 5 Live with Richard Bacon, and about a million regional BBC radio stations. I spent the majority of last week in several different but essentially identical small soundproof radio studios, giving basically the same interview all over the country. This was fun, but I was constantly relieved I was the only one who heard all of them, since everyone inevitably asks five of the same ten questions, and by now I can give these answers in my sleep. Nothing about this is disingenuous; it’s all the truth and sincere and heartfelt and everything, but after many hours of this, I started to feel like a dull hack who spewed sound bites, so it was a nice diversion to get to spend the downtime singing along to the music piped through my headphones. There are fewer songs that seem less likely to follow BBC Radio Oxford’s station identification than the Eagles’ “Take It Easy.”

So the official book launch was really fun, and I’m looking forward to hosting Cringe every month while we’re here. I’m also excited now to kind of nerd it up in London, treat it nice like a new girlfriend and do all the things that I stopped doing in New York years ago because I was Tired. This Wednesday, I’m going to go flip off Big Ben because I’m a huge Boosh fan, and on Friday, we’re going to see Edgar Wright present a double feature of Carrie and Don’t Look Now (all thanks to Gray!). Also my friend Becs has promised to be my partner in all sorts of historic nerdery while I’m here, which is great because I haven’t been back to a museum in London since my first visit. Hopefully there aren’t as many mimes here.