Desperately Seeking GerRee

This has never happened to me before.
I am stunned and paralyzed.

I always get to be "GerRee." Always. Does that make me spoiled? Yes. But I earned this. I endured teasing and countless mispronunciations and misspellings of my name all throughout childhood. WITHOUT self-righteous, corrective response from me, mind you. But, by the time we all went wired, and everyone was having to use handles like Jen146 and SteveA7, I came out on top. I never had to compromise, or even throw in my last name for good measure. Nope.

Just "GerRee."

Then came Twitter. I purposely dragged my feet. Ever the early adopter of other social media, I decided to sit the first round out, just to make sure I wasn't taking on a new online habit that soon would evaporate like so many others.

But here I am, coming in on the "late adopter" curve, as everyone tweets. And, what to my wondering eyes does appear?



"Username has already been taken."

I blinked. I typed it in again. Same result, obviously.

I can't move. I can't breathe. Someone. Else. Is GerRee?

The kicker: They first tweeted only two weeks ago. I missed my window by 15 days. The gut punch: They haven't tweeted since.

I have been thwarted by a late-adopter, non-user. Perhaps he or she has been running into me at every turn for the last 15 years.

And they've finally won.

Perhaps I will chose LoserGerRee for my Twitter username. Or DefeatedGerRee. Or FuckYouGerRee. I don't know.

For now, I can't bear to register anything. I am now fully engulfed in the flames of pouting. Burning, burning....

kissy face

So, as usual, we're wrapping up a trip and I'm looking at our photos and thinking, seriously? That's all I've taken? Quel disappointment.

But that's okay. I lived it.

On the night before our friends' wedding, we all went to this great Tiki bar in Portland called the Alibi. There's no website for it (!), but you can google it and get plenty of references to it. Here's a tiki connoisseur's take on the place, complete with a great picture of the sign outside (AWESOME.) It was karaoke night and it was warm and humid inside and we were getting saucy. Our friends Kathleen and Ryan on the eve of their nuptuals, sang, of all pukey-cute things, "Sweet Caroline."

They were adorable. Illegal cute. Having been friends with Kathleen since we were 16, I can honestly say that I've never seen her happier. I think this photo bodes well for their marriage

Anyhoo. While the entire bar is having a blast indulging in such guilty pleasures as "Copa Cabana," and "What a Fool Believes" (thanks, Jefe!), Angela and I could NOT stop obsessing about something I like to call "kissy face."

Now, I don't know if you have a 14-to-22-year-old girl in your family or social circle, but "kissy face" happens when this digital savvy lot take pictures of themselves -- either solo or with a friend wherever they go, on any occasion, day or night, for their MySpace and Facebook pages. They purse their lips. It's sort of like an 80's Cosmo covergirl meets Britney Spears. I don't know why it is the way it is, but this face is EVERYWHERE. My sister (22) does it. All her friends do it. And when she was visiting me in August, she was doing it in pictures with me, but I could not imitate it to save my life.

I mentioned this phenomenon to Angela and she said, "Yes! I've totally noticed my kids do that in their pictures, too!" (She's a junior high school speech teacher.) So, Ang and I decided to try it ourselves.

Over.

And over.

And over again.

(And yes, that's a lei on top of my head.)

We COULD NOT do it.

Is it our age?? We became desperate. We tried psyching ourselves out, giving each other motivation like, "Okay. Don't think about making a kissy face. Just think, 'Oh yeah. I'm 21 and I'm totally sexy.'" We broke out on our own, thinking maybe we could muster the face if we weren't always about to laugh trying to do it next to each other:

Nope...

...aaaaaand... nope:

I mean, you can laugh at how hopelessly Angela's lips seem to be pressing together like they've been melted in a hot sandwich press as seen on TV. But it wasn't just her inability to perform, it was clearly mine, too. In the end, this is the closest I got and it's still just not it:

This is NOT kissy face. This is sweaty 31-year-old face.

Basically, it all boils down to this: We are 30-somethings and we have no business making faces that don't come naturally to us. You can't imitate kissy face. You must be kissy face. And to do that, you need to have been born after 1983. It's that simple.

This is who we are: