I'm taking Gerard to his first lobster boil.

“Now, you should know that this isn't the type of 'lobster boil' they have in Cape Cod.”

“I've never been to one of those either.”

“Good – those are dumb. All kinds of corn and potatoes rolling around, getting in your way. Those fancy pants think they are too good for a plain old lobster on a plate.”

My lobster is simple, approached the way my family has approached everything since the grands-peperes and grands-memeres crashed over the American border in a wave of French-Canadian immigration a century ago. My family has un-recipes: Corn – boil water, toss it in. Potatoes – bake. Boiled dinner – heat broth, add whatever you find in your fridge, wait.

Newspaper reports from the early 20th century widely assume that Franco-Americans are  simpletons. Our highly literal interpretation of what we still call “a lobster boil,” adds some muscle to that idea: We take a lobster, and we boil it.

The boiled lobster is my summers, my birthdays, my family parties. It's so entrenched in my family's life processes that when we moved from Maine to South Carolina, there really was no question of where to have my first birthday south of the Mason-Dixon line -- it was Red Lobster or bust. 

Six-year-old me had no idea the gasps of horror that this decision would elicit from foodies hearing this story years later.

A Very Special Winter PSA

thelaurenbell crawls from her deep, dank hibernation space to tell you this: please, dear people, cut those stitches that hold the tails of your coats together. Your coat tails are not an extra sleeve, or a wee little headhole for small-headed people who enjoy wearing their coats upside down. They are not a special breathing apparatus hole for when you do that thing where one person sits on another’s shoulders wearing a long coat and they pretend to be one, unusually tall, unusually lumpy person.

No, no, no.

They are tails. They are meant to waggle free in the breeze, like the flowing tail of a fine stallion. They cannot be restrained! To restrain your tail is to restrain your SOUL.

Also, it makes you look dumb.

New Yorkers like to think that they look extra-super-wicked-cool at all times. New York, I tell you this once, and I tell you now: you cannot look extra-super-wicked-cool when your bottoms are unnaturally constrained by stitched-together jacket hems. You look like The Penguin, and he is not even plain old unhyphenated cool.

This nonsense has so distressed me lately, I've started entertaining elaborate fantasies of carrying around tiny (non-threatening!) scissors and just...snipsnip - solving everyone's little rear-binding issues. I would be like a superhero - a modern-day Batman solving this most modern, most pressing of problems, de-Peguinizing people withe the tiniest flick of my leather-gloved wrist. People would greet me with "hurrahs" and tears of joy. This is what goes on in my mind.

But NO! Let us not go there. You must not let the figments of thelaurenbell's overactive imagination come to life and run ramshackle over your fabled streets. New York, you are better than this. You should not NEED a vigilante of tail freedoms. You should be able to handle this yourself. Do not make me be that person with the nail scissors, stalking people's bottoms on the subway (see exhibit a - and please note that I painstakingly wrote those true-to-life sound effects backwards for your benefit, dear readers).

This concludes your very special winter PSA.

Thankful this story is not about me

A friend of mine is in the middle of training for his job. It's one of those training dealies where they make you go to a particular branch of the business - always in some godforsaken place where you would never actually go if you weren't being paid to do so - and they put you in a hotel - the only one for miles in said godforsaken place - until you truly learn what it is that you are supposed to be doing for them. Because they have cut you off from everything that could possibly be important to you - your real home, your family, friends and civilization - learning the job only takes about 6 or 7 weeks. So it's a good deal for them.

For my friend, it's slightly less of a good deal. Sure, he's getting some serious training to make him good at his job, and I'm sure his Hampton Inn Junior Executive Suite is very nice, only...he has to share it. He's a 29 year0old man, training for a management-level job, and he has a roommate. In a single.

Fortunately, my friend is a pretty happy dude, so this situation didn't really bother him much, until the day he was chatting with said roommate and his new boss, and they started discussing hobbies. The boss says,"You know, I like reading." Oh, that's nice. What do you like to read, mr. boss man? "You know, just stuff about serial killers."

[ROOMMATE]: "Wow - ME TOO!"

BOSS: "Oh yeah? Remember that time that John Wayne Gacy did such-and-such?"

ROOMMATE: "Classic."

...

And thus is my friend Chris doomed to sleeping with one eye open for the rest of his training period.

Rooming with someone is a lot like dating - if you are a normal human being, you know to hide certain things from the other person until they become more comfortable around you. Your complete knowledge of famed and lesser-known serial killers throughout history is one of those things.

Now, in the interest of Christopher's personal safety we are on a mission to find him something equally as creepy. The hope is that he can drive away the Dahmer-phile before something truly horrific happens.

So far, we've suggested that he start rabidly tearing through the Twilight series - not so much for the horror factor but because I would never trust a 29-year-old gentleman who reads softcore porn that magically hones in on some secret pleasure center in the tiny brains of adolescent girls.

Our other idea was to set him up with an "Adventures of Teletubbies" or some other 12-pager that only the very young or very simple would enjoy. We figure if just sits in a darkened corner, reading it over and over , and occasionally giggling to himself, "Not again, Tinky-winky!" he'll either scare the creepy roommate into submission or earn himself a lifelong weird-o friend.

Choices

Today is Haircut Day for thelaurenbell, and, in a manner befitting the always-prepared-to-the-point-of-boyscoutyness person that I am, I started looking for some ideas this morning.

After Googling "short hair cuts" (to fit the boyscout theme...?) I was directed to a site with pictures and whatnot. The best thing about this site is that it offered not one, but TWO pages of short haircut ideas: "short haircuts" and "cute short haircuts."

What a relief -- I was really in the market for a cut that hit somewhere in the middle on a scale of plain-to-hideous. Now I don't even have to LOOK at the cute versions, which would only confuse my poor little brain under its thatch of anti-cute hair.