What a country

Some happy news: Nick’s green card arrived on Valentine’s Day. Strangely, it came via the United States Postal Service, and not shot out of a T-shirt cannon or hidden inside a giant cheeseburger a la Double Dare. Green cards aren’t green, although they do have two tiny strips on the back that look like black lines but when you look closer are in fact miniature hologrammish portraits of every U.S. president from Washington to Obama, with Nick’s own larger hologrammish picture looming above them. Nick assumes this is where the Department of Homeland Security has spent all the money we’ve given them over the years, just really wowing us with the design of the green card itself, and if that’s the case, I think we’re both fine with that. It’s cute to picture the immigration agents all crouched over a crafting table, concentrating hard, tongues sticking out of their mouths while they cut and paste and attach their very best scratch-n-sniff stickers, wondering whether we’d prefer grape or root beer.

So we’ve now made it through this entire visa/green card process without ever seeing the movie Green Card with Andie MacDowell and Gerard Depardieu, despite this being the first question nearly everyone asks you when you tell them that’s what you’re up to. “Yeah, no, it’s probably nothing like that, I’m guessing?” is a sloppy conversation I’ve waded through many times since August 26, 2009. Whenever anyone in a movie or television show airily mentions getting married for the green card, and then it happens a scene later, and they have the green card, I want to throw something and explain to everyone THAT IS ACTUALLY NOT AT ALL HOW IT WORKS, which just adds to my fun quotient. It’s like how my brother was in a very serious accident as a teenager where he ran through a plate glass door, and it nearly killed him, and now whenever anyone in my family watches a movie where someone bursts through a giant pane of glass unscathed, and keeps going, we all suck in our breath and then shout OH YEAH RIGHT in disgust. Sorry Hollywood, but you just can’t expect to keep the Brown family on board with such horseshit. We prefer our horseshit to be much more sophisticated, like Falcor the Luck Dragon (me), or the entire plot of Devil’s Advocate (my mother).

A good way to celebrate anything, whether it’s a green card or a good meal waiting at home or just hey you’re alive for another Monday is playing this song over and over. That’s a link to a brass band cover of “Sexual Healing” on Nick’s music Tumblr, Sunday Listening, and also what the inside of my head has sounded like for the past month. One of the many things I love about Nick is that we have very different musical backgrounds. While I grew up in an American ‘90s full of grunge and rap and indie rock, Nick spent the ‘90s in England listening to trip-hop, drum and bass, techno, funk, breakbeat, jazz, and all kinds of other stuff I thought I hated (and some of it I do), but this musical education led him to be into awesome stuff now, and also put songs on mixes for me that I’ve never heard. Dating dudes in Brooklyn before I met Nick was a veritable what’s your favorite Wilco/Yo La Tengo pissing contest wasteland, and it’s so refreshing to live with someone who introduces you to new music in a fun way, not some mind-numbing, “deep cut Bon Iver” way. I never knew I liked jazz, but guess what, I like a lot of it.

I still have to talk about that Mindy Kaling book and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Spoiler: I am not pleased with either of them.