What a heathen gives up for Lent.

This is Joe's senior picture. He graduated from an all-boys Jesuit high school in 1993 when I was 11 years old. I'm weak for bow ties, so you can see now why I fell for him. I needed some information about Lent, so I figured I'd go to the source.

I was jawing with my best friend Ro last week and she casually brought up this business of Lent. She said she was giving up pasta, and naturally I responded by saying, "What? For Jesus? Jesus wants you to give up pasta? If I were Jesus, I'd be like eat the pasta. It's just a starch."

And she responded (as she does every year) that Lent is a Catholic tradition, that she's been giving up beloved foods since she was a kid, and like all good Catholics, she must sacrifice something she loves for Lent.

"Is it really a sacrifice?" I asked.

"Yes of course," she said. "I love pasta."

So I mulled it over – this hullabaloo over Lent – as I've mulled it over for years. Raised by an atheist mother and a non-practicing Lutheran father, who has an appetite like a bear, I've never been asked to give up pleasurable food for 40 days.

I could give you my heathen opinion on the matter, but who am I to tell gluttonous Catholics there's a chance this ritual pleases Jesus less and Richard Simmons more? I've got plenty of asinine rituals myself (ie: crossing my fingers and kissing them twice before taking off in an airplane), so who am I to knock Lent when I believe crossing my fingers and kissing them twice keeps airplanes in the sky?

So I hung up the phone with Ro, and told Joe I was giving up sarcasm for Lent.

"Why sarcasm?"

"It's something I've been meaning to do for awhile."

"What about food?"

"Nope. Who gives a shit if I give up a food? Jesus? This whole Lent thing seems bunk. If Jesus were in our kitchen right now, he'd make himself a turkey sammie, and tell me that when he gave up sarcasm he noticed a huge improvement in his gospels."

Now understand: Joe is a writer too. A writer and editor at Tampa's snarktastic Creative Loafing. Telling Joe you give up sarcasm is like telling Mrs. Butterworth you give up pancakes.

As I left the living room and turned the corner into the hallway, I shouted, "I want to return to writing more meaningful things! Things that make people sigh!"

Last night I interviewed Joe about Catholic sacrifices. The transcript is below.

Hey Joe? Can I interview you about Lent?

Sure.

Before you became a heathen, what did you give up?

Chocolate ice cream.

You always gave up chocolate ice cream?

I always gave up chocolate ice cream.

Because you love it madly?

I was obsessed with the fact that I could have it for breakfast one day a year.

What day was that?

Easter. I had a deal with my folks that if I gave up chocolate ice cream for Lent, I could have it for breakfast on Easter.

Did you think you were a better person because of it?

I probably dug the God part of it then.

When did you stop giving up chocolate ice cream for Lent?

By my early teens I was off the religion bandwagon.

Yet you continued to go to an all-boys Catholic school? That’s like being a member of Styx and hating your No. 1 song.

Yes it is. It’s like being a member of Styx and hating Come Sail Away.

Why do people always give up food?

People typically give up things they do or enjoy that are frivolous or pleasurable.

Like sex things?

Yes. Catholics give up food and SEX THINGS. Ya know, God, for Lent I decided to give up anal beads.

What did your parents give up?

My dad gave up ketchup.

KETCHUP?

Do you know what a sacrifice that was for him? He puts ketchup on ketchup. You know, on Fridays during Lent you couldn’t eat meat either.

Yeah, I know. How did you survive without chicken and chocolate ice cream?

We had pizza night and tuna fish sandwich night. My mom used to make a giant plate of tuna fish sandwiches with potato chips. It was always more than we could ever eat. It was like nature’s bounty on the table.

I was always jealous of that part. I used to claim I was Catholic when my parents would force me to eat meat on Fridays.

Do you often interview people in a towel?

Only Jared from Subway.

Is that all m’am? I don’t usually talk to the press.

Yeah, I guess I’m done with you.

If you’d like to know what it’s like to eat a pound of chocolate ice cream for breakfast, I’d be happy to fill you in.

--
PS. Joe's senior quote is from Guns N' Roses' Estranged. W.A.R = William Axl Rose. He felt the lyrics were a perfect senior quote. Melodramatic and angtsy ... because nothing says Fuck You like a bow tie.

I fell for him dressed as Courtney Love

It was a blip of a moment in an overly air-conditioned bedroom.

Joe was wearing a souvenir alien T-shirt from Area 51. I was wearing his heaviest red sweater. We both had our glasses on, which doesn't happen often because Joe hates wearing his glasses. He says they make him dizzy.

I was about to embark on a solo road trip from Sarasota, Florida. to Bandon Beach, Oregon, which Joe ever so delicately suggested I return from.

Stubborn, fiercely independent, and at times straight-up flighty, I couldn't promise him that. At least not in the beginning.

The first time we met, I was standing by the Pac-Man game at a bar in St. Pete, drinking Miller Lite and making good on a dare by pole dance around a fat oak beam.

When he asked me about myself, I told him how my family had installed a corn-burning furnace in the basement of their Western New York home, and how when it burned, the whole house smelled like Orville Redenbacher's.

The second time we met, I told him I was outta here, that I was moving to Oregon or Idaho or Montana. I told him I was writing a book about a girl who spends her days righting ordinary wrongs, who makes a living on a ranch and sleeps in a hayloft that smells like manure and maple syrup.

"I have to live if I want to write it," I said nonchalantly.

We were at a birthday party in Sarasota, at a bar with a punching bag. I was dressed as Courtney Love - pink baby doll dress, combat boots, mascara smudges, the whole getup. The theme was "high school flashback," and I was never so happy to resurrect the 90s. A 1993 graduate of an all-boys Jesuit high school in Tampa, Joe was wearing a too-tiny suit and tie that made him look like Ben Stiller.

I told him I was reading a memoir by Mary Karr that was written like none other I'd read before. He asked me if my novel would be a memoir and I replied that it was pompous to write a memoir at the age of 25.

"Not that what I'm writing isn't mostly true anway," I conceded.

I was chugging too many Miller Lites, filming the party for my roommate Zac, confessing on camera in a slurred lisp that I was fed-up with doing his dishes.

Joe drove me home that night in his blue Honda Accord. Unlike most of the cars that belonged to people I knew, his was immaculate.

We went back to our friends, Max and Meredith's house - a beach cottage - where we drank some more, played games and ate leftover pasta from the fridge. Joe heated up a bowl of bow tie macaroni with red sauce, and in between rounds of (was it Taboo?) he offered me several spoonfuls, which I found comforting.

As we sat there on the steps leading into Max and Meredith's 10-by-10 living room, our knees touched. Joe was still dressed in his Jesuit uniform. I was still dressed as Courtney Love. Spooning noodles out of his bowl and into my mouth, it was as if I had slopped off his plate for years.

When he walked outside to have a cigarette, I stumbled out of the living room with my roommate and left. It was late and I was tired.

The third time I saw him we were on an actual date. At the urging of my roommate, who had observed our Lady and the Tramp pasta moment, I went ahead and asked Max for Joe's phone number.

"Tell me he's not one of those too-nice, sappy guys," I said.

"No, but he's not an asshole either if that's what you're asking," Max replied.

For four days his number sat untouched. Written on a Post-It note and stuck to a cardboard-box-night stand by my bed, I agonized over making the first move. I was nervous. Feeling sheepish. Feeling like perhaps I drank too much that night, or that I had left coldly without saying goodbye.

When I finally called, he answered on the second ring. He knew right away who I was and why I was calling. He fired off date plans like a semi-automatic pistol, as I joked that simply willing your phone to dial on its own never works.

"Lucky for you, you picked up on the second ring," I said. "I probably would have hung up on the third."

Yes, I had bigger balls in 8th grade, but I was hellbent on moving to Oregon, or Idaho, or Montana. If the way we shared pasta were any indication of things to come, Oregon, Idaho, Montana - all of it - would scarcely measure up.

However, none of these moments were as compelling as the one I mentioned earlier that came two months later, a week before my Jack Kerouac-ian gallivant across the country.

We were lying on his bed - Joe in his souvenir alien T-shirt, me in his heaviest red sweater, and the pug curled up like a Roman snail beside us.

He was questioning my blind love for the Dakotas. I was romanticizing The Badlands. Reaching around my side, he kissed me somewhere near my armpit and said, "If your body were the United States, this would be South Dakota."

Though not in agreement, I let him go on.

Next, he kissed my elbow. Called it Iowa. Then my wrist. Called it Missouri. My spine - Oregon. And on it went. Lazily, languidly, and with no regard for geographic accuracy, he mapped out my road trip with kisses.

When he finally reached my lips, our glasses clanked together like timpani drums.

He didn't say it, but I knew. In that overly air-conditioned bedroom, in that heavy red sweater, in our similarly prescribed eyeglasses, his lips were home.

--

PS. Joe proposed last week. I said yes.