honest, this is not a joke. this was a real post from a real woman. i know with the bad grammar that its a little hard to follow. i think the only thing that is a lie is that her and her husband don’t do drugs, cause otherwise, there’s a gas leak at their house. wow. i mean wow.

Let me explain: It is the year 1991.  My dad is currently stationed at US European Command Headquarters, or “Patch Barracks” in Germany.  I’m in 7^th grade.  I am NOT cool.  My mom buys my clothes from the Base Exchange.  All the cool kids got to go back to the States for the summers and they dressed like Kriss Kross.  Their lives are exactly like the Utopian existence portrayed in the music video for the hit single of the day, “Iesha” by Another Bad Creation.  There’s one English speaking TV channel, the Armed Forces Network.  On very rare occasions, the cosmos would align itself just right and we would get AFN at my house.  Sometimes, they would broadcast music videos. I would watch them and dream of a better future, one in which I would buy my clothes from Nautica and Esprit.

Liz, a vicious and popular beauty who rode my bus, would let me listen to her walkman and peruse her bag of tapes, but only after the essential ritual of abuse had concluded.  She said I looked like a Christian mom.  I would gaze at the cover of Coolin’ at the Playground Ya Know! and silently beg the Lord of Darkness to buy me a Starter Jacket.

Naturally, I do not own this album, but I found a photo of it on this amazing website.  I also found this:

Imagine this: It’s 1976 and you’re dating a man named Rick. He has a mustache and owns at least one reindeer sweater. High off of reading The Easter Parade and The Great Santini, he’s all pumped up to write the next great American novel but, to make ends meet, he’s currently working for Hallmark. He’s been really cagey about his latest project, only revealing that this will be the first time Hermann Zapf‘s Crown font is used in a publication.

The fact is, things could be better between the two of you; he forgot your birthday… then your anniversary. Then there was that time he bit your head off on the car ride home for making fun of him during a game of Monopoly at a friend’s house.

Now, imagine it’s Valentine’s Day and you’re not expecting much – but Rick surprises you. It turns out that book he was working on – it’s all about you! And your relationship! Your eyes well up with tears of joy. Then, as you skim through, they become tears of something else. You discover that the book is full of lines like this: “Please don’t get mad at me if I forget your birthday or some special day we share.”

And this: “Please don’t expect me to always be good and kind and loving. There are times when I will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand.”

And there’s even a photo depicting couples board game night paired with this text: “Please don’t… make me look foolish in front of other people.”

I spotted this amazing treasure at Spoonbill and Sugartown and, of course, I had to buy it right away. Aside from the prose, the photographs are priceless – but even more priceless are the hand written annotations and underlined passages in my copy, beseeching the reader to re-read certain lines. It’s out of print (as you might have imagined) but, as your faithful friend, I’ve digitally preserved this amazing book; every magical page can be viewed after the jump.

Sigh. I loved Hugh Grant with all of my being from the moment I saw Four Weddings and a Funeral. If my love could withstand multiple viewings of  a movie staring the wretched Andie MacDowell, it had to be true.  Who could resist the foppish hair and self-deprecating wit,  posh accent and the  ability to play the same character over and over.

I like to think a paparazzi flashed this photo, catching us in an affair as we leave a cozy Notting Hill restaurant but really I stalked him at Late Night with Conan O’Brien when I was in high school.

Fabio and I met, rather romantically, at Media Play, under the soft glare of florescent lights, surrounded by a surging crowd of women waiting to get their Pirate, Viking, and Rogue novels sign. The man is a saint by the way, and while sipping from what looks like both a red and white glass of wine, stayed for hours until every last fan had the chance to meet him.

Want to fall further in love with the man that was once hit in the face with a bird AND hosted the unfairly forgotten gem, Mr. Romance? Please listen to his expert advice on love here (scroll to the bottom of the page) from the PHENOMINAL album Fabio After Dark.

I don’t have any photos of myself with any Famous Notables, but if I did, I would want it to be with the awesomest lady ever, Isabella Rossellini.

This illustration by Stephen Gammell from the book Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark frightened the living piss out of me when I was in third grade. I liked the book a lot until I turned the page to find that thing [not] staring at me… the book and I were not friends for many years afterward.