Thing of the Week: The Number 10, A Glittery Bad Company Iron-On with a Cannabis Leaf, Lenny the Cat

LJ'S THING OF THE WEEK: The Number 10 

This year, I spent Father's Day with my wife. My wife's name is Jenn, and we were friendship-married on November 23rd, 2011, when we went to see Jay-Z and Kanye West together. Jay officiated, and Ye was our best man. So now I'm married. 
        My wife and I have an extremely functional relationship. Mostly, we like to get stoned and walk around the world: exploring it, having our minds blown, and talking about the Universe (One of the cutest things about my wife is that she's really into Carl Sagan. She calls him "Carl," cuz they're buds). Last Sunday, we did just that, and wandered into a junk shop on Bloor Street run by a semi-annoying woman who guilt-tripped me about smoking and then showed us pictures of her real estate agent boyfriend on house listings she'd printed off the Internet. I kind of didn't believe her- shouldn't you have real pictures of your boyfriend? Not just house listings you printed off the Royal LePage website? 

        I found this box of Flinch cards and immediately felt cosmic energy radiating off of them when I held it in my hands. They're from 1913, and cost me $3. Inside the box are 150 cards, 10 of each number from 1 to 15- I e-researched the game, and it sounds like a pretty bad game. Basically, you put your cards in piles of ascending order and the first person to get rid of all their cards wins. 

        Times were tough in 1913. They didn't have a totally firm grip on "fun" yet.

Jenn and I walked to a pretty skeezy pub on College Street where Brown Sugar was playing. It had a killer patio, which is now our secret patio for Summer 2012. No more standing around waiting for patio space to free up at "cool" bars! We'll be too busy chillin' in a shithole with aging rocker dudes. 

        Jenn ordered garlic bread, and I decided that I was going to organize my Flinch cards into proper numerical groups because when I'm stoned mind-numbing tasks really appeal to me. Once the cards were in order, I took one card of each number and put the rest away.  

        "We're going to play a really cool game," I said, "I'm going to shuffle these cards, and then I'm going to spread them out on the table, and then we each have to pick the card we're most spiritually drawn to. The number on the card we draw is going to be our new spirit number for the entire rest of our lives. It'll always have special significance now, it'll mean something every time we see it, it'll be a good omen when it comes up. Etc." 

        Jenn drew 2, and I drew 10. We decided that Jenn drew 2 because 2 means balance, and I drew 10 because 10 means the ultimate, so that's my new thing: if it's not a 10, I'm not interested. This applies to everything. 

LIZ'S THING OF THE WEEK: Showing My Continued Support of Jessa from Girls by way of This Vintage Iron-On of Her Dad's Band

Here is my entire personal history of the band Bad Company:

1. The summer between high school and college I spent a lot of time sitting on a basement floor and watching boys play music, which included the night that the tallest boy I ever kissed wore a pink blazer with no shirt underneath and they did a grungy cover of "Feel Like Makin' Love" and he didn't have a guitar strap so he just used a rope. 

2. the part in Almost Famous when Cleveland is boring and the Band-Aids are dancing around the hotel room to "Reelin' in the Years" and Bijou Phillips comes out from the balcony and says really dramatically "Simon Kirke from Bad Company is by the pool"

3. A couple months ago on Mad Men/Girls night I was talking trash about all the goofs who posted that "Arrgghhh nepotism on Girls!!" jpg thing on their Facebook page. "Do people think being the daughter of the drummer from Bad Company really opens all the doors in the world for you?" I asked my friend Tim. "Yeah, that and 50 cents'll get ya a cup of coffee!" Tim replied, and we LOL-ed.

4. Six days after that guy was an asshole to me at the bar, I'm still very much supportive of Jessa from Girls; she's my favorite on the show (Hannah = second, Marnie and Shosh are tied for third but really I like them all). A little-known fact is that Jessa wrote the lyric "You shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you" from Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone." I can't remember how I arrived at this iron-on but it was five bucks and I bought it and it's really pretty and glittery, which you can't quite tell from the photo. At some point this weekend I'll iron it on to a white t-shirt and then wear said t-shirt in support of Jessa, the dude with the rope for a guitar strap, and the song "Burnin' Sky," which is my favorite Bad Company song by a million country miles.

JEN'S THING OF THE WEEK: Lenny the Cat 

My cat Lenny had surgery twice last week. It was really rough and scary and sad and just awful. He’s recovering at home now and doing really well. He’s psyched! I’m psyched. He purrs and rolls around with his conehead when you visit him in the bathroom, which is where he lives for the next week. The people who were looking after him at the emergency vet could tell that he would have a British accent if he spoke, which I found really impressive. He was in good hands. Love this little (huge) dude.