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American Pie 2 was released the first weekend in August 2001, slightly less than halfway through what turned out to be a 40-month single edit version of “’til death do us part” and precisely midway through our two years in Astoria, Queens, New York. Things were already beginning to strain by this point. Money had been tight beginning from the move out and even with both of us working (her full-time, me part-time until I completed my MA in Cinema Studies at New York University), there was never enough to be spent without always worrying that too much was being spent.

There was an increasing frequency in arguments about staying vs. moving back home vs. moving back home early vs. her moving back ahead of me to be near her family who she loved terribly and who drove her - and frequently me - up the wall. It wasn’t wall-to-wall misery, though. Not at any point. The best memory I have is of the first of our two winters 2000-2001, when the heater in the basement of our apartment building broke down and we were without hot water for two weeks through Christmas and New Year’s holidays. I remember boiling water on the stove and filling up the bathtub for her, probably about a dozen passes with a standard size teakettle. And at some point during one of those evenings, I was reading her one of Ebert’s columns, a remembrance of Cannes Festivals past, and I began laughing uncontrollably, tears streaming down my face, because I hadn’t read this dispatch yet myself and didn’t know what to expect. Laughter is contagious and pretty soon we were both howling.

The worst memory is of a Friday where I picked her up at work and when we got home, she just let loose with her anger and frustration and sadness and feelings of helplessness over how much she hated her soul-crushing job and being on the other side of the country from her family. It was a meltdown the likes of which I had never seen from her. She just wanted to crawl in bed and stay there. So we did. The kicker is that we had plans to go out that night.

We were going to go to a silly hipster club in lower Manhattan near where Claire Danes lived at the time to watch her guest DJ. I had even picked up a ridiculously awesome outfit on the cheap at a consignment store the previous weekend. I can’t claim a deficiency of selfishness. I had built up that night in advance as a chance for us – me - to do something atypical and being denied it wounded me a lot more than I was ever willing to admit. We saw American Pie 2 at the United Artists Kaufman Astoria Stadium 14, three subway stops from our apartment, most likely with one of the last “free passes” that I had received in the mail from a former manager of mine back in Portland. I had never viewed it a second time before this week, although I recall enjoying it, overstuffed and slightly cruder than the first though it was. More on my 2012 impressions a little later.

American Wedding came out less than 12 hours after I had left my wife, telling her I wasn’t sure of my feelings for her anymore because I had become emotionally involved with a co-worker. I lied by omission, leaving out the part about how I had already slept with this woman. The timing was particularly… egregious because we had closed on a house two weeks prior. A house I would end up sleeping in only 15 nights, and making payments on for two years.

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