Vacationing in a Geographical Analogy

My wife surprised me and arranged a one night vacation in Asbury Park last night-- the perfect complement to my guys trip down to Nags Head-- and we were happy to see that the gentrification of the area is proceeding at an extraordinary rate . . . my mother-in-law lived in the neighboring town of Ocean Grove for many years, so we headed across Wesley Lake and wandered the narrow streets-- every tiny front yard planted with bright flowers, every house a different size and color, the tent city still in the shadow of the Great Auditorium, and we were quite shocked to look back towards Asbury and see a skyline of high-end condominiums and the Biergarten . . . quite a change from the 1990's . . . anyway, here's an analogy and a few food/drink recommendations:

1) Ocean Grove is to Asbury Park as Highland Park is to New Brunswick . . . the small and sleepy town receiving the benefits of the gentrification of the larger grittier city;

2) Barrio Costero has incredible margaritas (but go for happy hour, they're not cheap) and high end Mexican tapas . . . the tuna ceviche is essentially sushi-grade tuna on tiny homemade tortilla chips-- super-tasty-- and the al pastor and fish tacos are ridiculously good;

3) Barrio Costero's sister restaurant, Reyla, has excellent Mediterranean style tapas;

4) The Speakeatery has the ultimate hipster sandwich (and fantastic if you're trying to avoid wheat/bread/gluten) which consists of a slab of General Tso's chicken sandwiched between two sticky rice "buns" and some broccoli and slaw as condiments . . . it's delicious and totally weird;

5) The Chat and Nibble is across Main Street but worth the drive if you like chorizo with your eggs.

I Realize I Have Learned Nothing

Note to self: do not eat a salmon burger before a night soccer game (and you'd think I'd have learned my lesson about heavy meals before athletic events in college, when I went to the Wendy's SuperBar before an intramural football game and stuffed my belly full of tacos and pudding, and then got burned play after play by a tall wide receiver who probably ate a banana or a granola bar or something  like that before the game, and waited until after the game to have a celebratory meal) but though our adult league game was a grueling battle-- I nearly puked-- we lucked out with a Diego Maradona "Hand of God" style goal in the waning minutes for the tie . . . and so we remain undefeated at 5-0-1.

A Review of Some Key Moments in the Film Better Off Dead

One of the joys of having children is forcing them to watch movies from your youth; Saturday night we ate tacos and the entire family enjoyed a screening of Better Off Dead, and while everyone remembers the deranged paperboy who wants his two dollars and the hamburger singing Van Halen's "Everybody Wants Some," this movie has a lot more to it than those scenes and it is much weirder than I remembered . . . here are some moments you might have forgotten:

1. Ricky's mom drinks primer and blows up;

2. the Asian brothers with a PA system mounted in their car;

3. one of the Asian brothers is mute, the other speake like Howard Cosell;

4. Lane tries to commit suicide multiple times;

5. Lane's eight year old brother learns to pick up "trashy women" from a book;

6. Lane's eight year old brother builds a space shuttle from household parts, and it works;

7. Lane transforms from a klutz to a ski-pro in the span of a musical montage;

8. Lane's car transforms from a two hundred dollar heap of junk to a perfectly restored 1967 Camaro SS with a shiny paint job, also in the span of a musical montage;

9. Monique the French exchange student next door is both an an ace mechanic and a professional ski-instructor;

10. Ricky and Lane duel with ski-poles over Monique the French-exchange student;

11. Ricky's mom creates a living slime mold when she botches a recipe, she also cooks a stew that contains a very large living crustacean and has waving cephalopod tentacles;

12. though Monique can actually speak English-- a fact she has hidden from Ricky and his mom-- she substitutes "testicles" for the word "tentacles";

13. Charles de Mar (Curtis Armstrong) wears a top hat the entire movie and-- in an attempt to get high-- snorts both jello and snow;

14. at the end of the movie, Lane and Monique somehow drive the perfectly restored Camaro into Dodger stadium, park it on home plate, and make-out (the stadium is empty and Lane has his saxophone).

Hot Potato

There are studies that show that female teachers with math anxiety pass that anxiety to their female students and I get that-- because right now I'm trying to teach my kids to make tacos and I'm passing my cooking anxiety unto them (we only had to call my wife once).

Perhaps These are the Best Sentences of 2013!

Negligent and lazy readers, here is your chance to catch up on a year's worth of Sentences by Dave ^TM and while these "winners" were chosen rather arbitrarily, I think they will give you a good idea of my best work in 2013, which is no worse than my worst work in any other year . . . and so, without further fanfare, here are some of the sentences of the past year that might be better than some of the other sentences of the past year . . . depending, of course, on your personal taste and predilection for this sort of thing . . . as there is no way I could could actually predict what sentences you personally would prefer . . . so let's just say that these are my favorite sentences of 2013:

Best Absurd Question and Answer;

Best Real Question and Answers;

Best Political Commentary;

Grossest Medical Anecdote;

Kids Say the Darndest Things;

Kids Do the Darndest Things;

Best Sentence About Dressing Like A Holiday;

Most Awkward Moment of Dave;

Dave's Greatest Athletic (and Pathetic) Moment of the Year;

Cheesiest Poem of the Year;

Alex Succumbs to Peer Pressure;

Tacos, Racism, and the Circus;

Best Incident Involving Hot Peppers (To Witness, Not Experience);

Best Attempt at a Motif;

Dave's Dumbest Moment of 2013;

Dave's Greatest Moment of 2013;

A Real Moment That People Claimed Was Fictitious;

and finally,

Something Valuable for Children.

Birthday Weekend Takes the Cake . . . A Rambling Summary of the Busiest Weekend of My Youngish Life

My wonderful wife arranged a surprise one-night getaway for my birthday last weekend (though I discovered the surprise a bit early, because we share an e-mail) and we met some old friends Friday in Greenwich Village, and my friends were nice enough to meet me in a "Dave friendly bar" -- and so Catherine and I made our way from the Hilton near Penn Station to the High Line, and then walked a bit up there . . . which is phenomenal and highly recommended, and then we hit the Chelsea Galleries-- which are directly below the High Line and which are also patently absurd -- and we saw some really bad modern art and some really scary modern art by David Altmejd, who essentially builds sculptures of horror movies, which is cool, but also begets many questions, such as: who buys this stuff? where do they put it?-- and though we found no answers, we did find some delicious pork and pineapple tacos in the Chelsea Market, and then we found Kettle of Fish, the "Dave friendly bar," which means: cheap, wood panelling, dart boards, pinball, dive-like and similar to the Park Pub . . . except this place was also full of beautiful young people, including some super-models hogging one of the dart boards, which was fun to be near at first but then got more and more annoying, but once Whitney and I got on the other board, no one was able to knock us off, a great birthday present, we won in ridiculous and dramatic fashion over opponents that were probably more skilled than us and did this for a good four hours straight, from 8 -12, until things dissolved . . .  and then after more drinking and pizza, we made it back to the hotel at 2 AM, got up the next morning and took the train home for soccer practice, then got ready for my oldest son's birthday -- he was born a day before me -- and went to Medieval Times, and though I could barely keep my eyes open, it was quite fun, sort of like professional wrestling (and our knight won!) combined with bizarre dinner theater (and Whitney reminded me of the best line from The Cable Guy, which is spot on: "there were no utensils IN medieval times, hence there are no utensils AT Medieval Times") and then we hosted a sleepover for a bunch of ten year olds and then on Sunday morning, I had to wake-up my younger son and his buddy from the sleepover at 6 AM so we could get dressed to play three indoor 8 v 8 soccer games, and then after coaching that insanity, we rushed to the basketball play-off game, as I am the assistant coach on that team, and we won and advanced in the play-offs, and then I finally got to take a birthday nap.

When Someone Makes Soup, You Eat It

When your wife slaves all day over a batch of home-made chicken soup, then come dinner, you eat the soup (I made the mistake of making a few tacos with the leftover chicken, instead of partaking in the home-made soup, and she was really pissed at me).

Transitions? WTF!

Last week, my wife texted me the following message "U need to pick up the boys from your parents' house on the way home; I took out meat meat for tacos for dinner" and I told her I would pick up the kids and then I chastised her for not using a transition between two very different ideas -- thus creating an abrupt non sequitur of a message -- and I sent this message despite receiving advice NOT to send it from the women in the English office . . . because I thought it was humorous, but my wife thought it was "kind of annoying" and so I suppose that transitions are unnecessary in texts and I won't bring it up again (and of course, my wife used a period, not a semi-colon, in her text but I don't want to ruin the integrity of Sentence of Dave and so I made that slight adjustment . . . I apologize to all parties for being "kind of annoying").

How to Get a Seat at Salt

After many fruitless attempts, my wife and I finally got a seat at Salt during happy hour; Salt is an upscale seafood joint in New Brunswick with a small bar and an excellent (but very short) happy hour: it only runs from 3 PM - 5PM . . . perhaps we were able to get a seat because it was bitterly cold and windy-- we barely made it across the bridge with getting frostbite-- but it was worth it, delicious oysters and tuna and rock shrimp and fish tacos . . . and they make some excellent drinks, as well. 

In The Meantime . . . a Bout of Namenesia

Blogger has been acting weird since Friday, and so I wasn't able to post yesterday or this morning . . . here's what went on:

1) soccer practice was cold, wet, and rainy Friday afternoon and I wore my stupid blue jacket that looks like a rain-jacket but is actually just a windbreaker and I froze my balls off;

2) Saturday I did some rollerblading while listening to 90's instrumental guitar rock (Steve Vai and Joey Satriani) and this was the right music choice;

3) then, in preparation for the Grant Ave block party, Cat and I went to Cypress Brewery to drink a beer and purchase a growler's worth of 17 Mile IPA and the waitress in the little tasting room greeted us warmly and hugged us and I thought it was Rachel, a teacher from my wife's school and then the waitress left to get our beers and my wife informed that she was NOT Rachel, the teacher from her school-- though she admitted that this person looked just like Rachel-- and so we racked our brains, trying to figure out who had just hugged us, and while we were under a serious time constraint, we were able to discuss our namenesia aloud because our waitress had gone next door to check on a large party that was drinking in the brewing area and she literally had to leave the tasting room and walk outside the building and then enter by the large bay door-- so we discussed and used process of elimination and then I took a stab when she returned with our beers and said, "Are you doing girl's soccer again?" and she said, "No that's Rebecca, we always get mistaken for each other" and that's when I remembered who she was-- she had taught both our kids English in middle school-- but she was wearing a baseball hat and a Cypress Brewery tank-top and jeans, so it was tough to identify her-- normally we would see her in back-to-school-night clothes-- but I got it in time, no harm no foul, and my wife was duly impressed;

4) today I went to the gym early and lifted, then played 90 minutes of soccer, but I erased all that fitness at lunch-- my son has had a Taco Bell gift card since Christmas (a grab bag gift) and we finally used it, he ate some large hexagonal shaped item with several meats and a giant tortilla chip inside, and Ian and I had quesadillas and tacos-- this is the first time I've had Taco Bell since college and I'll admit it was edible and it hasn't done anything awful to my stomach . . . yet.

Dave Gets It (Slowly But Surely)

When I first got my Father's Day T-Shirt, I was confused-- Tantalum? Cobalt? What?-- but then I noticed that the abbreviations-- "Ta" and "Co"-- spelled out the word "TaCo," and I love tacos, so that made perfect sense . . . and then the day after Father's Day, I held up my Father's Day T-Shirt and said, "This reminds me of the credits on Breaking Bad," and my wife and kids looked at me like "Duh" and I said, "And I love Breaking Bad . . . this is a great t-shirt!"