Exhibit 21.1

I know, I know

I've neglected you during the move but I promise I'll do better soon. In the meantime, I'm focused on acquiring one (non-inflatable) piece of furniture, not dying in a fiery car accident, and reacquainting myself with the benefits of having a freezer. Here's how I'm doing:

Acquiring one (non-inflatable) piece of furniture - Great! Well, Great! as long as pillows count as furniture. If not, then Bad¡

Not dying in a fiery car accident - The secret so far is to put on one CD that I wouldn't mind having playing while dying in a fiery car accident. Somehow this prevents the fiery car accident from happening but I have no doubt if, say, I put on Saigon Kick's The Lizard, you'd all be reading about the gasoline-carrying semi that overturned on me. Today was Fear of Music. I welcome suggestions.

Reacquainting myself with the benefits of having a freezer - Great! Well, Great! as long as this French Vanilla Ice Cream and Hashbrowns sundae I'm eating out of a Tostinos Party Pizza cone counts. If not, then Delicious!

Exhibit 16.24

I imagine this will be a new feature on this blog where I don't know what to say on the weekends and so I just copy and paste other people's emails.

Not really, but I am going to do it just this once. It's cool, I have permission. This conversation entertained me so much that I felt bad keeping it to myself. I often times feel this way. Don't worry, I won't post my emails with you even if I'd like to.

My friend--let's call her Jayden. Let's also not look at what I named the photos--and I had this conversation after I informed her I was going to have a new email address. Naturally, she sent back a slightly embarrassing picture of me from her wedding a couple of years ago.

Jayden
Gmail is all about automatically doing things for you whether you like it or not. On my gchat right now is some girl named Lauren who I ordered some apple cozies from, like, 5 months ago. She somehow ended up there and I can't get rid of her. In fact, right now she is "angry about not being able to go to the pie party due to a certain professor's inability to meet deadlines." Pie party? Hmmmm. While that does sound like the type of party I would like to attend, I can't because I have NO IDEA WHO SHE IS.


Me
I want to go to a pie party, but I never want to see that picture again. I mean, your wedding was great, but for me it will always be the night I got to 2nd Base with Chris Kelley. Is that how you think of it, too?

Jayden
Is this one better? Too bad I can't remove the disembodied hand from your shoulder... although I do wonder now - why are Chris Kelley's fingernails so very shiny?


Me
Nice work. I especially like you pointing out his fingernails as if I wouldn't be able to find the only hand in the picture. You were right to do that.

Jayden
Yes indeed, it usually takes me at least 48 hours to crop a picture and draw on it with MS Paint. I have an entire folder of similar photographs that I used to land my current job. Potential clients really love it when I illustrate their proposals with the difficult to maneuver "circle" tool and my impressive freehand "paint" stylings. I'm pretty sure I have job security for life.

Me
I'd like to see you get in a fight with your boss where he tries to fire you and you say, "Oh, yeah, Bob, well who else is going to do the circles on the Murphy Portfolio? That's what I thought!" Can you immediately go and say this to your boss for me?

Jayden
Well I would but don't you think I should save it for the moment when I actually get fired? The way the architecture industry is going right now, I should only have to wait a few more weeks...But don't worry, I already have a plan for that, should the time come.

Me
Baby?

That's my plan. I don't know how it's going to work just yet, but when the banking industry finally dies and we all go back to buying things with leaves, I'm going to do the following:

Step 1) Baby
Step 2) ?

So it's not a very good plan.

Jayden
Stripper. Duh.

Okay no. I was going to have Octuplets and then fund a leftist group using the money that I made off them.... but some bitch stole my idea. At least the first part.

Me
Doesn't the stripper plan usually end with baby? Or maybe I'm just going to the worst strip clubs.

Jayden
Actually... if people are doing things in strip clubs that end with the production of a baby, doesn't that mean you are actually going to the BEST strip clubs?

Me
Touche. You know a lot more about strip clubs than I imagined.

Jayden
Well a girl has to practice in order to make a living. But I get all my best material from the drag bar down the street.

Me
Oh, so you know my dad.

Jayden
He must be the one that takes the stage dressed as Lindsay Lohan.

Me
My dad is the one dressed as Peter Fonda. He really doesn't understand what a drag bar is. I think he just likes the music. And the feather boas.

Jayden [within what seems like 30 seconds, as if she'd had the picture waiting for years in case someone made such a reference]
And.... I'm spent.


So that's the end of my post that consists entirely of an email conversation I had. I know, I know, we all wish Jayden would write every blog post. We also wish I had given her a better pseudonym or at least one that didn't make her sound like an eight-year old beauty pageant contestant. Unfortunately you're stuck with me and what I have to say about Juan Cruz.

I have lots to say about Juan Cruz.

Exhibit 6.5

This is a story I am ready to tell.

Heather and I went to her mother's place in California before Christmas. We went to Disneyland. We went to the LACMA and MOMA and In-N-Out Burger. This is not the story.

Before we left we turned off the heat in the apartment with the vague plan of driving out the mice that we hadn't been otherwise able to displace. Like undergraduates returning home between at the semester break, the mice always show up in this apartment around the beginning of December, each year a little wiser and stranger than the previous year's mice. This year, they'd proven surprisingly resilient and we thought a cold apartment might drive them away.

We also let our landlord know that we were going to be gone in case he wanted to do any apartment repairs while the dogs were away. We did this, drove to the airport, and I forgot about the mice and the apartment and the landlord sometime around when I was spinning on the teacups with my face covered in churro sugar. I may have also forgotten about the very idea of a Nebraska.

So we returned 10 days later to a freezing apartment, quickly left for an après ski-themed holiday party, and didn't think anything was unusual until Heather received an email from our landlord that said something to the effect of:

Hey, I don't mind some ritual sacrifice, but I don't think it's safe to leave a pile of matches on the stove. I threw them away.

This confused us. When we wrote back asking for clarification, he stated very matter-of-factly that when he was in our apartment he found a bed of spent matchsticks on top of our stove and, resting ominously in the middle, a mouse head.

This confused us. This frightened us. We hadn't left any matchsticks or mouse heads around, but, sure enough, sitting in the center of our stove were the remnants of some matchsticks. I felt sick, sure that someone had broken into our house. Then Heather called me at work to say that a pound of coffee was also missing, only increasing our hysteria.

Naturally, we assumed coffee-loving satanists had broken into our house.

I immediately started looking at apartments on craigslist. Heather was afraid to be home alone. At home, I checked the television (which the leisurely coffee loving satanist oddly hadn't stolen), and it was on the Food Network when I was pretty sure an episode of The Simpsons had been the last thing we'd watched. Good god, I thought, these coffee-loving gourmet satanists sat on our couch watching Rachel Ray. If they could have, they probably would have taken Rachel Ray's smiling head and left it on our coffee table. As I turned from rechecking the chain lock on our front door, I could almost see her little chipmunk face waiting for me there to remind me that it was possible to make a yummy meal quickly (and that satanists had sat where I watch The Simpsons).

So we called a locksmith before any other animal or celebrity heads appeared in our apartment. He told us that junkies had probably squatted in our apartment while we were gone. This sounded reasonable. He said it happens all the time. This sounded reasonable.

As we prepared to spend one last night in the apartment before we gave it over to the junkie, mouse-sacrificing satanists, our landlord emailed again and said that--on second thought--he thought it was probably just a nest the mice were making since it was above the pilot light and would have been the warmest spot in an otherwise cold house. What about the coffee? I asked Heather. Maybe I was wrong, Heather said. Yeah, maybe.

Me: So you don't think junkies were squatting in the apartment?
Landlord: Who thinks that?
Me: The locksmith told us it happens all the time.
Landlord: Does it?
Me:
Landlord: I'm sorry I thought you guys were people who would make a shrine to a dead mouse in your kitchen.

That conversation happened. Except for the apology at the end. On the plus side, at least we know if we--or any of our junkie satanists gourmet coffee aficionado friends--had done it, he'd be cool with it as long as it wasn't a fire hazard. That's good to know.