Adventures in LizzieLand

things I hate for no good reason

2012-01-25T11:07:00.000-08:00

Things I have an unnatural, visceral, and vitriolic hatred for, that have never done anything to me:

Actresses:
1. Kirsten Dunst
2. Ann Hathaway

Music:
1. Neil Young
2. Modest Mouse

Places:
1. Texas

Why?

2012-01-24T10:26:00.000-08:00

Why do we care about making God happy, when He has made us so sad?

Untitled No. 4,000,007

2011-03-02T19:18:00.001-08:00

I always sit on this side of the C train
Don't think of it until Chambers and
I can't look for you at the station
Staring at the tiled "CHAMBERS"
It's been May to March, God,
almost a year already and yet
every. day. i. look. for. you.
imagining what I'd do
Dreading
Imagining what I'd say
Would I lose my shit?
Attack, black out like the convicts
claim they do
Come to and find a pile of lifeless
flesh in a puddle of blood
Would I pretend not to see you?
Or approach you, ask you pointedly
What, exactly?
I still can't untangle us
I don't know myself in relation to you.
There is no exaggeration in the statement,
"You lied about everything."
And yet
there is another truth
"I still love you."
Incongruous, dichotomy
Nothing makes sense if that is true
And it is.

a week of writing

2010-11-30T08:06:00.001-08:00

my last day at my old job was Tuesday, the one before Thanksgiving. the first day of the new one is next Monday. I'm taking a week off to write.

And here I am, blogging at 11 am on Tuesday, hoping i have enough to say to get me through the week. hoping i have enough to say to keep my hope alive that maybe someday i could do this, really do this, like, do this all the time, not just in the evenings or the mornings or the rare weeks between jobs.

Natalie Goldberg says, "It was important to give myself permission to fail. It is the only way to write. We can't live up to anyone's high standards, including our own...Kindness. It stemmed from kindness. I have always been kind to myself in the area of writing. I know if I'm not kind, if I get too tough, I'll get scared, close up, freeze."

I have never been kind to myself in the area of writing. I have been frozen; I am trying to unthaw. Yesterday, as I wrote, I felt light, free, weightless as a helium balloon climbing high, higher above the brownstones and the leafless trees. Today, I awoke terrified. Yesterday, all I cared about was getting the sludge out of my system. Today, there is pressure to Write. Capital W Write. I am trying to be kind, but kindness does not come easily. I haven't yet learned it.

a little late

2010-11-13T11:16:00.000-08:00

Good news, minions!! I have acquired myself a brand-spanking-new job! But that's another post. Today's post is about dating, and the meaning of the phrase, "a little late."

So, here I am, all super-stoked about this great new job and wanting to celebrate. I've gone on a few dates with a man we will call The Jamaican, or TJ (and no, for those of you who know me, not THAT Jamaican. a different Jamaican.) In any case, this Jamaican is fun and attractive, and while not long-term material, when I text to tell him I got the job, he says, "We have to celebrate!" And so we make plans to meet at 9 for dinner at one of my favorite little holes-in-the-wall Italian places in the East Village.

But it is Friday. And I have had a loooooong week of working late, interviewing, waiting for job offers, getting job offers, telling one of my favorite bosses ever that I'm leaving, and just general stress and sleeplessness. All I really want to do is lay on the couch in my jammies. BUT, I have made plans, and so I go home, shower, do my hair, do my makeup, and put on a dress and tights and heels. About half an hour before we are supposed to meet, he texts: "I may be running a little late but not too late." I have expected this text. (He was late for the first 2 dates.) I have already adjusted my own schedule to arrive a few minutes late. So I respond: "Okay. No worries."

I arrive at the restaurant at 9:08. It's warm and dark and full of music and talking and the sound of silverware on plates. I wait for someone on the waitstaff to make eye contact and then ask if there is a list. He says no, I say I'm waiting for someone, and he directs me to sit. I'm surprised by this, since in New York, they rarely seat you until your entire party has arrived. But, as it is already almost 9:15, I assume TJ will be there soon and take a seat by the window. I order a glass of pinot noir. The bar is in front of me, full of talking, laughing people, including a few men who keep glancing over at me. The restaurant is full of couples and groups of friends. Basketball is playing on a small TV over the bar. My wine arrives and I check my phone. I text him to tell him that the restaurant is around the corner from the cross-streets I gave. Nothing. It is 9:20, then 9:25. I decide that if he hasn't arrived by the time I finish my wine, I'm leaving. The wait staff glances in my direction every time they walk by. I eat a piece of bread, trying to look calm. I know I'm not being stood up, but I begin to be embarrassed. After all, I am sitting alone in a restaurant at 9:30 on a Friday night, clearly waiting for someone. The looks on the men's faces at the bar turn (whether I imagined it or not, I don't know) from mild interest to mild pity. Same with the wait staff. I finish my wine. It is 9:40. I pay the waiter, apologize for taking up his table, and leave. There is definite pity in his voice when he says, "It's okay, miss." I calmly put on my scarf and coat and hold my head high as I leave. I imagine them all putting it together in their heads when TJ finally shows up, comes in, looks around, calls me, looks around again, calls again, and then leaves.

I start walking in the direction of the lower East side. I know some friends are out, so I call them and head in their direction, a little embarrassed but slightly relieved. This man has just made it incredibly easy for me to stop seeing him, which I will do. I get to the bar and relay my story. We sit and drink. I wait. Finally, at 10:03, he calls. I don't answer. Again, at 10:05. A text at 10:08. And then two more calls. All of which I ignore. At 10:35, a text to say he's sorry. I shrug and keep drinking. I am happier here with friends.

We had just decided to leave when who do I see passing the window in front of me to come into the bar than the best friend of the EX. THE ex. "Fuck." They ask what, and I tell them, as 3 other of his friends come into view. I wait for his face. Thank god it doesn't appear. I turned my face away from the door and put my hand up to my temple, hoping they wouldn't see me as they walked in. One of my friends said he thought I'd been spotted. I was shaken, my stomach in knots. We left without incident and went to a tapas place for some food, then to another bar. Finally, I got into a cab home around 2, glad that I'd spent my night the way I had, reaffirming to myself to do what I want to do next time, not what I feel obligated to do. It's so easy to feel like I "should" do something and ignore my gut when it says, "No, you really don't want to do it. Don't." It's a lesson I learn over and over again.

just me and the bamboo

2010-11-05T18:53:00.000-07:00

well, it's just me and the dying bamboo. the most slowly dying bamboo in the history of dying bamboo. honestly, i didn't even know you could kill bamboo. it doesn't even need dirt to grow! just water. WATER. makes me wonder if i kill everything i touch. plants, yes. as evidenced by the sickly yellow bamboo. "I'm sorry," i want to tell it. Okay, do tell it. I feel badly about killing it, and slowly is the worst way to go. But here we are, the only living (ish, i'm not really sure the bamboo counts as living) things in my apartment (unless you count the transient mice, which I don't, but mostly out of sheer denial).

oh, there's a bottle of wine here, too, but it's not alive or anything.

okay, 3 bottles, technically, but i'm only drinking out of one.

right now.

i guess it's been awhile, huh? I hadn't realized I haven't posted since Thanksgiving last year. a LOT has happened since then. I could tell you about all of it, but there is too much. So I will, as the great Inigo Montoya once said, sum up.

I was in love. Seriously in love. Like, really in love. Epically in love.

And then I found out that the man I was in love with was (and I am not exaggerating here) lying about everything. Every. Thing.

This was May.

Since May, I've pretty much been dealing with that. I wouldn't really call it an "adventure" as such, and nobody wants to hear the gory details (likely not even the people who have heard them), but it's been pretty bad.

Which brings me to today, the dominant thought of which was, "If I'm this depressed before winter even starts, how am I going to even make it through until Spring?"

But, you know what? I'll be okay. I always am. And breakups, just like other big life things, are an opportunity to re-examine our lives and to think about what we really want and to change and to grow (blah blah blah). The last time I went through a horrible breakup, I moved to New York, which is quite possibly the best decision I ever made. So, we'll see, right?

But for now, me and the bamboo are going to have a quiet evening in watching "Secretary" and having wine and popcorn for dinner.

A Brooklyn Thanksgiving (Part 2)

2009-12-02T10:24:00.001-08:00

Thanksgiving dawned sunny and bright on the Gowannus canal, and thus, on my small apartment. We had, to my dissapointment, decided not to go to the parade (a childhood dream of mine) so that we could get the turkey in on time. The good news was that I got to sleep in. At 10, I yawned, stretched, and thought about what a great day it was going to be.

The first thing I saw when I wandered out of my bedroom was a raw turkey, spread eagle on the counter, with J's face disturbing close to the opening between it's legs. "Come here," he said. I furrowed my eyebrows and shook my head as a wave of nausea rolled over me. I hadn't even had my coffee yet.

"Look in there. Do you think I got everything?" I timidly cocked my head to the side to get a better view from where I was in the doorway.

"Uh, I don't know. Did you get the gizzards?" He reached in and pulled out something that I supposed could be called a gizzard.

"Is this it?" I shrugged. He threw it away and thrust his hand in again. "I don't feel anything else. Come look. Do you see anything else in there?" I didn't want to look, and I couldn't imagine that a small opening like that could really conceal anything else, but I did anyway. It was gross. And looked empty. And I wasn't about to put my hand in there.

Side note: Much, much later, when our friend Mike was picking the turkey clean, he pulled a plastic bag out of some dark recess of the bird and said, "Hey! Why didn't you guys throw out the innards?" Seriously, I have NO IDEA where they came from. And I hope no one gets cancer from us cooking plastic inside a turkey for several hours.

I pulled up Grandma's E-mail Instructions on Cooking a Turkey From a Woman Who's Done it 80 Bazillion Times and Made it Look Easy, and read verbatim to J while he pulled stuff out of it, rubbed stuff on it, flipped it around, put other stuff in it, and then tried to tie it all up with yarn because I don't have kitchen string. I am a helpful, thoughtful woman. Based on Grandma's calculations, we had 6 and 1/3 hours to burn once the turkey was in. The hot water in the apartment wasn't working for the fourth time that week, so I called the landlord and we sat around in our PJs drinking coffee and hoping the hot water would be fixed in time for showers before people started arriving.

It wasn't. And the good news is I believe I broke a world record for shortest shower in the history of showering. It was under a minute, people.

The rest of the day is a happy, warm (the apartment heated up to a balmy 85 degrees or so, despite opening the windows), glowy rush, with friends coming and going, good conversation, many bottles of wine, a turkey that just couldn't wait to be done (several hours early--though I refuse to blame this on Grandma's calculations and instead now believe that my oven is schizo), and a mad rush to make all of the side dishes before the turkey got cold. Granted, the turkey was a tad bit dry, and the green beans may have cooked a few minutes too long, and the football games--don't even get me started on how terrible the football games were--but nothing beats a big meal surrounded by people you love. And PIE.

And when the last couple of people left at 1:30 in the morning, and some (but by no means all) of the dishes had been washed, and the leftovers were put away in the fridge, J put on the soundtrack to "Charlie Brown's Christmas" and we sat in quiet happiness, ruminating on what we decided, on all counts, may have just been the best Thanksgiving ever.

I can't wait to do it all again next year.

A Brooklyn Thanksgiving (Part 1)

2009-12-02T09:02:00.001-08:00

It felt like the first in many ways, even though I've been around for 27 of these now...27 Macy's Thanksgiving Day parades, 27 turkeys, 27 burnt fingertips from pulling turkey skin off of a too-hot turkey, complete with pie, football, and family. The number of Thanksgivings I've spent without my immediate family is somewhere around 3. Most often, I am in Pittsburgh. But this year was different. This year was the first Thanksgiving J and I spent together. It was also the first year I hosted.

Five trips to the grocery store, one giant turkey roaster purchase, several meltdowns, and one narrowly avoided fight about the correct way to bind a turkey (trust me, it sounds like more fun than it is) later, and we had one of the best Thanksgivings in recent memory.

It all started several weeks before Thanksgiving, after J and I had decided to have a "quiet Thanksgiving at home" with just the 2 of us. This, of course, turned into "the boys don't have anywhere to go" and I said, "oh, I know a few people who don't have plans either" and before you know it -- POOF! -- I'm hosting a Thanksgiving dinner for 6. No problem. 6 is totally manageable. Until the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, when 6 turned into 8, and the day of, when 8 turned into 10.

A quick note on the layout of my apartment: I have a bedroom and a living room. I have no dining room and no dining room table. I have enough seats for 5. My kitchen is on one wall of my living room. I have maybe 2 square feet of counter space, and that's being generous.

We had, by Tuesday, been to the grocery store twice, and I had successfully purchased an enormous turkey roaster that I had no idea where i was going to store after the holiday. I had forgotten about the last minute crush at work the week before any holiday, and had to abandon my plans to clean the apartment and make yet another necessary grocery store run for more forgotten items. Instead, I worked 14 hours, took a car home, and collapsed into bed with the intention of getting to work early on Wednesday to leave by 2 (when the office "closed" but only if you were done with your work) so I could go home and bake pies.

A note about pies: In my family, pies may just be the most integral part of any Thanksgiving celebration. Turkey? In a pinch, we could do without one. Pie? UNTHINKABLE. Also, pie is a bit of an undertaking. You need time, focus, and an empty oven. Therefore, the pies needed to be done on Wednesday, when all of those things, theoretically, would be in ample supply.

J, thankfully, decided not to work on Wednesday. This was the only way we got everything done. I headed off to work an hour early, leaving a "to do" list a mile long in his possession. We were in good spirits. We were in control. We had a plan! Thanksgiving was going to happen after all!

Until I got to work and watched the extra hour I had given myself vanish while trying to turn on my computer. By the time IT had me up and running, I was back where I would have been if I had just come in when I usually do. Luckily, I had budgeted an extra hour into my work time that meant I could leave at 1 if nothing went wrong, and 2 if one hour's worth of things went wrong. I was now on a tight timeline to get done by 2. Nothing else could go wrong.

Meanwhile, J was ticking things off his list with lightening speed. Buy folding chairs: done! Go to the grocery store--again: done! Clean and mop the apartment--done and done!

Needless to say, my day wasn't going nearly so smoothly. The day before Thanksgiving is either incredibly busy or incredibly slow -- apparently, for all of my chatty coworkers, it was incredibly slow. I put in my headphones and put my head down. I was going to finish by 2. Until 11 am, when I got the news that we had done an entire section wrong and it would need to be rewritten. And I wouldn't get it until 5. Fine, the night editor could take care of it. Crisis averted! Until noon, when I remembered it was my day to buy cheese for our department's Wednesday wine and cheese. Fuck. I ran to the Amish Market, grabbed a Brie and and Gruyere, ran back to work, threw it on the community table, and went back to work. 2 o'clock was growing nearer and nearer. The e-mails were coming at lightening speed. People behind me were chatting louder and louder. The work seemed to be going slower and slower. My strength waned. I forgot about food. I just had to get done so I could go home and bake pies.

Finally, at 2:45, I packed up and walked out the door. I headed for Trader Joe's (grocery store run #4), and, laden with two more big bags of groceries, arrived home a little after 4. I promptly broke down and cried. I hated Thanksgiving, I said. I was never going to host again, I said. I haven't eaten since breakfast, I said. J hugged and consoled me, then heated up some soup. I blew my nose, ate my gumbo, and decided to suck it up. I just had to get through making pies.

By 5:30, I was elbows deep in Crisco and flour, and the stress seemed to melt away with every thrust of my pastry cutter. I took a deep breath. Everything was going to be okay.

Except that I didn't have a big enough cutting board to roll out the dough, and then the wax paper that I put down on the coffee table kept sliding around, and flour was getting all over the freshly mopped floor, and the dough wouldn't roll out and I couldn't figure out why.

Cue meltdown number two. J once again hugged and consoled me before softly suggesting that all the dough might need is a little water. Presto, bingo, why didn't I think of that?! And we're back on track once again.

I realize I don't have everything I need for the pumpkin pie, and J puts on his shoes for the 5th (and I'm hoping last) run to the grocery store. We're learning so much for next year! I'm thinking to myself as he shuts the door behind him. 45 minutes later, he walks back in, looking haggard and spent. A run on spices had occurred sometime since he'd been there that morning, and he narrowly avoided a fistfight with a large black woman over the last jar of powdered ginger. Luckily, he is not afraid of anything, not even large black women, and he prevailed. He is, truly, my hero.

Three pies (a very good looking apple and pecan, and a somewhat not-so-appetizing-looking pumpkin) and several cinnamon doo-bops later, I snuggled into that place under his left arm and looked out over the landscape of pies with exhausted happines. We had done it, and with only two meltdowns on my part. We were ready for Thanksgiving. It felt like a giant victory, all around.

When all else fails...

2009-09-12T16:57:00.000-07:00

April?! My last post was in April? Sweet Lord, I had no idea it had been that long.

My apologies, my sweet little crumb muffins. I lost track of time. I was busy soaking in as much sun as I could to delay the winter doldrums that are always just around the corner. I was driving through the night over the east-midwest and spending saturdays lolling around deciding whether or not I would get dressed. I was being in love, and going to work, and writing in Tudor City Park as many lunch hours as possible, and cursing the ever-present rain in June, and fighting mice to the death in the wee hours of the night. Really, there's no excuse. I was somewhere else. But I'm here now.

And I haven't got much to say, really.

I've made the decision, once again, to apply for MFA programs for creative writing this fall. This, of course, has had a seriously devastating effect on my writing, which has screeched to a nasty and frustrating halt. I sent the boy off this afternoon (which was particularly suited to writing--cool, rainy, not much going on) so I could write, and then spent the next 4 hours reading essays on writing, writing about how frustrated i was about writing, writing a paragraph or two on the story i'm working on, hating it, writing some more about my writing frustrations, getting a snack, doing some pushups, checking the scores of all the college football games...all to end up with 10 frustratingly scratched pages in my journal and loads of frustration.

And now, here I am. When all else fails, there is still blogging.

I'm trying to trick myself into finishing the story I'm working on, the story I'd like to submit to MFA programs, the story that now HAS TO BE PERFECT, by telling myself that I'm just writing, no big deal, it doesn't matter, I'm just getting ideas on paper. But inside, I'm wrung tight like a wet dishtowel, I can't let go and just let it flow through me, it's like when you're deep breathing through an injury--it doesn't take the pain away, it just distracts you a little.

Basically, I'm fucked.

printemps (springtime)

2009-04-16T12:07:00.000-07:00

walking through dim stony corridors
the delicious cool warmness of new spring breeze
rolling across my skin
cross-hatching of sun-dappled avenues
the yellow-gray plaid of the city
speckled with a melange of wool-coated
and leather-booted pessimists, dewy browed,
and bare-forearmed optimists, the occassional
peeking set of toes or flash
of bare calf glinting in the sun
the occassional god
or goddess, perfectly suited
for the exact degree, percentage humidity,
miles-per-hour of wind,
and the rest of us wonder
how their contract with the devil reads
shimmering, slinky, silver, glass,
and marble gargoyle-encrusted towers
part perfectly just in this spot
the acoustics transforming
the churning, swirling belly of a cement mixer
into a humming choir.

the great library rises
swathed in bright yellow sun glaze
the steps pillowed with soft warm soaking bodies and
resurrection falls like fairy's dust from the buds
in the opening trees
we take a collective breath, deeper
and happier today than a week ago
amazed, perhaps, by the affect of a few degrees
and storm clouds on our outlook on life.

daffodils dance in evenly spaced clay pots
on the sidewalk, an approximation of spring
as the scarf makes the metamorphosis
from necessity to accessory
from tightly wound cocoon to floating butterfly wings
three carefully chosen hardbacks
tucked under my arm
the steps, the lolling masses wave for me to join them,
i long to lay for a moment,
to flip through these newly acquired treasures
i glance at the time and turn the other direction,
poems rustling as I walk about the nature of spring in New York.

Church of the MTA

2009-03-12T11:10:00.000-07:00

My morning subway ride began like most others. I sat on the 4 or 5 train, whichever had come first, in my usual car, on one of my usual benches, iPod tuned to the Flaming Lips (after several weeks of Sufjan, while I read Lolita), reading The Loved Ones, by Evelyn Waugh. I noticed this morning my tendency to do this, listen to one artist while I read a book, switching only when I've finished.

As happens about once a week on this particular commute, a man entered the train somewhere downtown, maybe Wall Street, and began speaking. Usually when this happens, it is loud and annoying, and I sit in my seat, staring at the floor, cringing and waiting for it to all be over. Often, it is a man who says that he has sandwiches for the poor and homeless, and that he is accepting donations. Occasionally, it is a homeless person apologizing for the interruption and asking for spare change. Last week, it was a man who yelled loudly and somewhat incoherently, punctuating his words by slamming his fist into the ceiling, yelling that the immigrants needed to stop sending their money home and that the Muslims should go home, and New Yorkers needed to protect "the 'hood." He talked for so long and seemed so disturbed that I finally got up and moved to another car.

This morning, when I heard a man's voice over my earphones, I thought, "Ugh. Here we go again." I was tired from working late and sleeping little last night. I was annoyed. But this guy wasn't yelling. He wasn't asking for anything. His voice was loud enough to hear, but it's tone was one of conviction and sincerity. I could see him from his belly down out of the corner of my eye as I stared at my book. He squeezed a dark knit cap in his pale left hand, which he raised and lowered as he spoke. I was curious. I stopped reading to listen to what he had to say. When I worked up the courage to look at him, I saw that his curly black hair was streaked with gray. He looked like he was of Jewish descent. He stared straight ahead as he spoke, not looking at me when I looked at him.

"Please consider," he said, "The love that God has for you. That he loved you so much that he sent his only son, Jesus, to suffer and die for you, so that you could be cleansed of your sins and have eternal life."

In a clear, even voice, he went through the whole story. God loves you. We are sinners. God sent his son Jesus to die in our place so that we could live eternally. God loves you. Life is hard, but at the end is eternal life if we believe in God, and repent of our sins. And God wants you to do so, because he loves you.

I have certainly heard this message in many ways, in many places, in many voices. I knew the verses he was going to quote before he said them, reciting them along with him in my head. But what I haven't heard in the more than two years that I've lived in this city is someone who is trying to tell people about Jesus do it in such a humble, unobtrusive way. I know that preaching on the subway is hardly unobtrusive, and as someone who hates it when people do this, I have to say that this man struck me, not only because he was obviously not mentally disturbed, not yelling, and not damnating, but because of his message of God's love in such a humble and sincere voice. The weight and burden of his message seemed to cause him almost physical pain.

Much of my criticism of Christians is that they make God look bad. I wanted to hug this man because he did not.

When I got off the train at 42 Street, he had finished his message. I believe he quietly left the car behind me. I prayed that God would bless this man who, counter to the many who alienate people with their, i'm sure, often sincere but misguided attempts at pushing God at the masses, is quietly preaching a message of God's love.

I left Grand Central feeling as though I had been to church.

i love a little (bad) poetry after supper

2009-02-11T10:45:00.000-08:00

I am in love.

When I am in love, I write bad poetry.

See how that works? Love = bad poetry.

Want to hear some? I wonder if it's an inverse relationship? As in, the better the love, the worse the poetry? Maybe just for me.

This doesn't have a title, and I don't think it's finished, as in, I probably won't finish it, but if I were to finish it, it would need finishing. Also, please be gentle. Here goes:

I want to sleep in your belly
Make a nest out of your blood vessels
and use your heart as a pillow
Letting the soft thud-thud, thud-thud
Lull me to sleep.

I'll sprawl over you,
tucking my toes into your intestines
and wrapping my arms around your lungs
Letting the soft whoosh-whoosh rise
and fall be the tide of my dreams.

That's it so far. Maybe it needs another, um, stanza, or something. I dunno.

To keep or not to keep...

2009-01-07T07:40:00.001-08:00

...the resolvements, that is.

So, as I was lying in my bed last night thinking some more about my new year's resolutions, I wondered about whether or not I could/would actually keep them. I'd like to, of course, and I think the problem generally is that resolutions are either

1) too unsavory
2) too vague
3) too un-documentable

to be kept. So, in all of the brilliance that is the moments right before falling asleep, I came up with a plan to document my resolution keeping.

Warning: we are going into serious nerd territory.

So, you remember when you were a kid and you had a list on the fridge of all of your chores or whatever, and then every time you did a chore, your mom put up a gold star and then when you had enough stars you got your allowance? Or something? I don't. What I do remember is trying to implement a system similar to this one at least quarterly from the time I was maybe 8 until I was 12 or 13. The problem was not with me. It was with my mother, who just couldn't be bothered to put up a freaking foil star next to my (albeit meager) accomplishments, or to care at all except whether the bathroom had been cleaned or not. Also, for all of my efforts for a system of (what I believed to be more than fair) compensation for hard work, I maybe got an allowance once. Maybe.

Which brings me to the present day list of New Year's Resolutions. I've condensed them down to the really important, actionable ones:

1. No douchebags
2. No smoking
3. Exercise
4. Write
5. Once a week fun

My goals for exercise and writing are 3 times per week each. Exercise only counts if I'm in proper exercise attire and actually exercising on purpose (so, not walking around the block at lunch), generally at the gym. Writing is defined as FICTION writing, so blogging and journaling, which I will continue to do, do not count towards the three times a week (since I tend to use blogging and journaling as excuses not to write fiction).

Now, what if, every day that I do one of these things, I write the corresponding number in the corner of that day in my datebook? So, say, a day when I exercise and don't smoke and avoid douchebags, is a 1,2,3. And a day when I don't smoke and I write, and I avoid douchebags is a 1,2,4. And so on. And that way, I can have visible proof to myself that I'm doing what i said I wanted to do, while keeping it at the top of my mind by writing it down every day.

So Far!
Monday: 1,2,3
Tuesday: 1,2,4

I really don't know if this is going to do any good, and I haven't gotten to the rewards part of this yet, as monetary rewards don't really motivate me, nor do buying myself presents, so...suggestions welcome!

Happy New Year's Resolutions keeping. What are your resolutions? How are you planning on keeping them? Or do you think resolutions are stupid?

Resolvements

2009-01-05T12:41:00.000-08:00

Ah yes, it's that time of year again, my fluffy marshmallows. Resolution time! During which I "spontaneously" make the exact same list as last year to be studiously followed for somewhere between 1 and 48 hours before unceremoniously forgotten, after, of course, the requisite amounts of consternation and guilt about not really planning to lose weight or quit smoking. I mean, I mean to do those things, but somehow, my resolve just isn't, I don't know, resolved enough. Or something. Or resolutions are stupid and just make people feel like failures.

In that happy, optimistic vein, then, I offer you my Lizzie's New Year's Resolutions 2009 Edition, in which I resolve to do things I know I should do or I really really want to do, but in such broad, vague terms that the actual doing of the things will require many many smaller steps that I'm not going to think about now, and then when those smaller steps come up to be done, I'll probably just ignore them. But resolutions are what we Americans do, and by dammit, I want to at least appear patriotic.

1. No more douchebags

Originally, this one applied to sex only, but I've since broadened it out to other parts of my life, like people I know, and people on the Subway, and world political leaders. See? Broad generalizations, the small steps of which I'm cleverly avoiding. No, but seriously, I'm tired of guy douchebags especially, and the plan is to be a little more careful in the coming year about who I date and etc. Also, the eradications of "friends" who are really just douchebags who know me who I'm not sleeping with. I won't go into specifics here, but let's just say that if you've been a douchebag in the recent past and I stop talking to you, you probably are on the list.

2. No more cigarettes

Sigh. If only they could make them healthy. But alas. This is something I will actually be working toward, in small, measured steps. I've wanted to quit forever for real for a long time, and though my smoking is generally sporadic, I'd like to stop for real. If only it weren't so damn enjoyable! Ah well, we all have to grow up sometime. Or get lung cancer.

3. The requisite resolution to work out more.

You know, because everyone is doing it. Resolving to, anyway. The truth is that exercising helps curb the smoking and is pretty much the only way I cut back and/or quit ever, so they're pretty entertwined. Besides, all the douchebags need to see how hot and sexy I am now that I'm not wasting my time on them. Yes? Yes. It is all about making boys jealous. Always. And other girls. That is where self-esteem comes from.

4. No suicide

Since #1 is going to take a serious toll on my love life, and #2 is going to take a serious toll on my social life, and i know that being in shape isn't everything, I figure a resolution is in order to make sure that my resolutions don't kill me.

5. No homocide

Or anyone else.

6. Do one fun, new thing every week by myself

I figured I'd throw in a semi-pleasureable one because a) no one ever resolves to do anything fun or exciting and b) I need something to do to keep me from smoking and sleeping with douchebags. And no, I don't know what I'll be doing yet this week, though I'm probably going to hit up a museum after work Friday.

Oh, and 7...

7. Write more, write consistently, stop being so goddamn self-loathing about writing, and maybe think about trying to publish something.

Ugh. We'll see about this one.

Pre-traumatic stress disorder

2008-12-22T12:28:00.001-08:00

I have noticed, over the years, that in the weeks preceding my going home for any extended (read: longer than two days) period of time, I lapse into a curious verbal mood--that of complaining about my mother. I don't really mean to, and it's not like I sit around thinking about how much I don't want to go home or how much I dislike her (because I don't really mind going home, and i don't really dislike her), but the idea of going home, especially for Christmas, for an entire week, carries with it a certain amount of stress.

Granted, all families are crazy and stressful. The holidays are nostalgic, frustrating, beautiful, frenzied, happy, sad, terrible--they are your childhood and your teen years and the breaks from college, and now that you're an adult, all of those things piled up and mashed and sifted through your memory and I stand in my grandmother's kitchen surrounded by people who I am completely comfortable with because they know me as well as anyone, even though they may not know the current me, they know my history, they are my history, and so we are familiar, and in that familiarity is comfort and discomfort, a longing for the past and some discomfort with the present. I see the new lines around my mother's eyes; the slightly less coherent sentences of my grandmother; my teenage cousins who suddenly look like adults; my nephew who has grown two feet every time I see him. Every year, I am further away from this, from them. Every year, the small shocks at the things that have changed since I've been home get bigger. And yet...this is home, even though it is no longer home, it's as close as I ever get, and even though I can't talk to my mother without her getting that quiet, strained look, or without her not responding to something I said because she doesn't want to be judgmental, though she doesn't realize that her silence is judgment enough, and so we keep everything superficial and we avoid the hard things, but what i really want to do is scream at her all of the things that i've ever wanted to say.

i suppose this is where the stress comes, beforehand...the knowledge that these silences are coming, the silences in which we do not say all of the things that we would need to in order for us to have a good relationship. i cannot say to her that i feel that she resents me, or that i think she blames her unhappiness on me. i can't say to her that there is nothing that i will ever do, no amount of success that can ever make up for her mistakes, and in any case, that it is not my responsibility to atone for her sins. i don't understand how, as an adult, our childhoods affect us so much still, even when we have tried and tried and tried to either forget them or forgive them, or if nothing else, to let them go. I see that all of those things that I felt and learned as a child affect so much of my life now--that believing i was unwanted informs my relationships (or lack thereof) with men and with friends, that believing that I could somehow do enough to make it worth their while, that if i was only good enough or successful enough, that somehow i could earn their love...that leads me to feel now that there is nothing i can ever do to be good enough. not for me or for anyone.

These are the things I think about while I'm Christmas shopping, while I wrap the scarves and earrings and children's toys i've bought. i think about those silences and what they mean. i think about all of the things that i can't quite understand, as if my mind now cannot understand things beyond what my six-year-old mind could understand back then.

and i know that i will go home, and it will be familiar and comfortable. and those silences that i dread will only come once or twice, and they will pass, as they always do, with nothing being resolved. But maybe there are things we don't want to know. And maybe there are things better left in the past. And in the end, I know it's no different for most people, in similar ways--family knows your beauty and your ugliness, and love you. They believe in you whether or not you do the same. They tell you the truth, if you're lucky, and support your decisions whether they agree or not, though sometimes with more stoic silences than others. And in the end, they are as close as you can get to unconditional love. And if the price of all of that is those goddamn silences, then I guess I'll take them along with all the rest.

The sugar cookie effect

2008-12-17T18:09:00.000-08:00

Tonight, I had cookie dough, wine, and a banana for dinner.

I decided to have a few people over for a Christmas-housewarming party because 1) I have put up a tree that is beautiful and I would like other people to enjoy it, too; 2) I feel myself spiraling into the winter blues and felt a holiday party would be a good way to claw at the edges of my sanity to slow the descent into dark, winter madness; and 3) it gives me an excuse to bake. Also 4) now that it is winter, i do not wish to leave my house and therefore will resort to any means to entice others to come here so that I do not have to leave.

On the street, people are meowing loudly. Through the floor below my feet, a dog barks incessantly. A small dog. A dog I would like to strangle.

There are many, many things to love about my new apartment. I could probably sit here most of the evening listing them for you, but I'll try to keep it to the biggest. First and foremost, there is no giant, loud, crazy person here judging me, speaking ill of me behind my back to her friends, yelling, or taking up space in the fridge. It is glorious to finally be alone after two years of living with people in small spaces. Glorious. Secondly, I now have a real living room that is not also a tiny hallway in which to entertain guests. See number 4 above. I have lived here for a month and comfortably entertained more guests than I ever had in the entire time I was in my last apartment. Thirdly, there are no drunk teenagers yelling outside of my window at 2 in the morning. Or 3. Or 4. No more 2 am trash pickups. No more sirens. The only sound is of the door across the hallway occassionally opening and closing; the rumble of the train carrying across the frozen air; the tires swishing down the avenue; the occassional person meowing loudly on the street. And that damn tiny dog, but that's only sometimes.

Also, I now have room to bake. I've always been more of a baker than a cooker, and I still don't understand how one can understand baking in an intuitive way and freeze up in the face of things like vegetables and meat. But I understand baking, and it understands me. We are one, me and the butter and sugar and flour and eggs. And so, because I'm having a holiday party on Saturday and because my heart is hurting and because it is something that I know I can do well, tonight I made sugar cookies. And I thought about all of the things I feel like I'm terrible at or that I just don't understand--men, writing, relationships--and then I looked at the 7 dozen or so perfectly browned, beautiful cookies I just baked, and I felt relieved that at least I understand something, at least I am good at something, at least, even if I cannot bring joy in ways I would like all the time--why can't I be happy with anything I write?--at least the cookies are good and the people who come to my party will like them, and it brings me joy to bake them. And even though it is such a small thing, making cookies, it calmed me and centered me, and now I'm not feeling so bad about the writing that is frustrating me or the boy that has hurt me, and even if I was, I've got 7 dozen cookies at my disposal to soothe me.

Third time's not a charm at all, actually

2008-12-16T19:14:00.000-08:00

This is my third attempt at a post. Maybe this one will stick. I wrote the first two, and then realized that I'm not ready to write them. Maybe soon.

My friend Ronald died last month. I found out two weeks after the fact, on Facebook. That was my first failed attempt at a post.

I really like a guy with whom things are, sadly, going the same way they seem to always go. That post was a whiny "what's wrong with me?" one step away from terrible teenage angsty poetry journal entry mess that you would probably gag on and then wonder why on earth anyone would post anything remotely so terrible on their blog as an adult. So.

It's winter again. I walked to the library during lunch today while snowflakes I swear to God the size of my head dropped on me like fluffy clouds falling from the sky. The giantest of giant snowflakes. It was as if God was throwing snowballs from heaven.

Third post, about snowballs from heaven. I'd rather hear about dead friends and scared lovers, wouldn't you?

How about this? I will post all three, and you can vote. I won't edit them. I'll just post them. And you, dear readers, can decide. My vote is for none of the above, btw. I think they're all awful. But you people won't leave me alone, so I'm going to just blame this on you.

The fear of the unknown

2008-12-16T18:47:00.000-08:00

I fear loving you more than I fear hating you. The truth is that the latter is much easier, and temporary. If you walk into and then out of my life, I have no lasting obligation to you, I cannot be fully known by you, I am not given over and over and over again the opportunity to disappoint you. This idea of permanence terrifies me--Ronald's death, for instance, or, rather, not so much that he is dead but that he always will be--I want it to be a temporary state, so that he can come visit me for his 30th birthday after all.

I see the used condoms in the trash, and think that a part of you is here, but also I think of the fleeting nature of physical love. Sex is a failure without orgasm--orgasm signals its end. I wonder about love, and how similar it is to sex. In my experience, love is just as fleeting as the moment of orgasm, a moment in time, the flame-burst of a match. Yesterday, you lay where I lay now, our bodies slick with each other's sweat. Tonight, I wonder whether she will win you back--or, rather, if you will decide to return to her. Will you come to me, after all, and say, your different face but the same old words, "I'm sorry, but..." And then all we will have between us is the one night and the three used condoms I'll be putting out with the trash in the morning. I am afraid that this is the conversation that we will have, you, with a pained look on your face, ironically, as the hurter, and me, trying to act unmoved, as the one being hurt.

We are already keeping secrets; you, of her and what happened when you left here yesterday, me, of the date with my own ex tomorrow night--a pillow to help soften the blow I'm already flinching in anticipation of, not knowing if or when it will come.

Why only date one man who will use you up and leave you when you can stay unattached to several?

How does anyone continue to hope for love, when everything suggests that it is unsustainable? When the men you have loved have consistently disappointed you, how do you continue to believe that the next one, or one someday, won't? How do you cross the bridge from every relationship failing, failing, failing, to one that doesn't? At a certain point, don't you begin to believe that they simply will, and then you've damned them--they cannot survive.

Part of me wants to kill this thing now, before we get too deep. And then I look up at the invitation on my dresser to my grandparent's 50th wedding anniversary, and i see in front of me the evidence that somewhere, somehow, my logic is off. Love has to be sustainable, at least in some form, even if I don't understand how. My grandparents have been married almost twice as long as I have been alive. It is not possible that I know more about love. I'd like to think that maybe I know more about heartache, but I don't think that after 50 years, that is possible either.

And now you and I are wrapped together with a thin satin white ribbon, and I'm afraid because, as always, the seeds are planted and beginning to grow, and the ax is never far away, and the longer you let it grow, the harder it is to cut it down. If you did it now, I would hate you and move on, to get my hopes up and be disappointed by someone else and someone else and someone else. But what I'm really afraid of is letting this thing between us grow, to see how big and leafy and beautiful it will get, because always in the back of my mind, I'll know that the ax is arm's length away, that you can never get comfortable, you can never let yourself totally go, you must always keep a part of you to yourself, because if I love you, then when will it happen? After 3 years? Marriage? Children? No. Better to enjoy each other now and not dread the day when the world will come crashing in around us, when we will wonder how we were so blind, when we will realize the terrible people we have become with each other. No, I'll put the condoms out with the trash. You won't have to see me any more.

(written December 8, 2008)

Where does love go?

2008-11-18T13:15:00.000-08:00

I didn't find out until yesterday, even though it had been a week and a half. And on Facebook, of all places. I just happened to leave a comment on Lindsay's page, and she sent me a message: Have you heard about Ronald? And my heart seized up, a tiny panic right in the center of my chest. I don't know how we know these things about the people that we love, but we do. I clicked over to your page, and there was your picture, you smiling just as I remember you--olive skin and white teeth, kind dark eyes touched with mischief. And I began to read the comments, one after another, eulogies to a man who was well-loved, and a note from your sister to say thank you for the thoughts and prayers, and to say good night to you and not good bye, that you were home now. I couldn't imagine what had happened--a car accident maybe? I assumed that something tragic and unanticipated had taken you too soon.

Lindsay wrote back that she had few details besides that you died of liver disease on November 6. I didn't even know you were sick. I didn't even know you were dead. And here I was at work, where I couldn't cry, let alone think about it properly. A work buddy called on my office phone to say that his girlfriend of a year had broken up with him. I told him that I just found out a good friend from college had died. We pretended to be less sad than we were, mourning two separate but similar passings. We hung up quickly, maybe finding our own fronts flimsy and transparent, unwilling to seem vulnerable with one another. Later, at a meeting, I sat far from him, where we couldn't make eye contact, but all I could think of what you, and him, and each of our sadnesses.

I tried to put it to the back of my mind until I could go home and think about it, about you. But I avoided thoughts of you all evening, making dinner, watching TV, reading, readying for bed. Your ether permeated my dreams that night, and my first thought when I woke was of you. The alarm woke me at ten to six--I wanted to get up early to think and write about you and us. I hit the snooze until seven and finally woke, looking out my new bedroom's windows to a gray and orange dawn. I sat up--you. Put on my glasses--you. Padded to the kitchen and filled the coffeepot with water from the Brita. And I began to cry, silently, tears running slowly down my face, and I had the gradual and overwhelming feeling that you were standing behind me, watching me as I ground the beans and spooned them into the filter. It was the same feeling as when anyone is standing near you and you feel their presence before you see them. Unable to stand it any longer, and feeling rude for having my back to you, I finally turned, leaning against the counter, tears on my cheeks. I didn't see you, but I didn't need to--you embraced me, and I felt that you wanted me to know that you were okay. The moment passed, I turned on the coffeemaker and got in the shower. I didn't feel you there, or while I was getting ready for work--I hadn't tried to summon you, I hadn't expected you, I wasn't asking God for comfort. I wish I had said, while you were there with me, that I love you. I wish I had asked if you were okay. But I feel like you know and you are. I don't understand how this happened, but I'm not surprised that you found me, that you came to me, or that I knew it was you. I know it sounds unbelievable or like I somehow made myself believe that something happened that didn't, but the closest thing to what happened this morning is having a friend drop by unexpectedly--the only difference is that you didn't bring your body with you. I wish I could have seen you once more, said goodbye, kissed you one last time, heard your voice say that something, anything, was fabulous. But somehow, I also feel as though none of that really matters--that, in a way, we can still give and receive love even though you aren't here in the same way, and that somehow--is it possible?--we are closer now than we were before. And so, a standing invitation. Come whenever you like, you will always be welcome. And if you are not able to come, then good night, sweet friend, until we meet again.

(written November 18, 2008)

The problem with adventures...

2008-11-12T19:09:00.001-08:00

The problem with adventures is that while you're busy having them, you don't have time to write.

Hence the silence of late.

So much is going on right now that a short post feels necessary, yet I have so much to say. Maybe once my life dust settles, again, a little, I can tell you more, but for now, a quick update.

1. My novel in a month has morphed into a novel in however long it takes me to finish. I'm excited about the 22,000 or so words I've written. I love my stories and the characters and the themes I've seemed to fall into--tragedy, love, sadness, loss, the strength of the human spirit, relationships, faith. I'm excited to get back to it, as I've been busy the past two weeks, what with

2. MOVING INTO MY VERY OWN APARTMENT!!!!! Those of you who have been listening to me complain about my current living "situation" can now rest easy that I will no longer have an evil roommate to complain about, as I have found the most adorable, sun-filled, cozy little one bedroom there ever was, all to myself. Thanks to the new job, I am finally able to afford to live on my own, and God or fate or what (or who) have you sent this lovely gift my way. I can't wait to move on Friday and finally have some dedicated space for writing, and a quiet street outside my window, and freedom to come and go as i please without someone looking over my shoulder. The commute is longer, and I'm moving out of Manhattan into Brooklyn, but I'm excited to have more time to read on the train to and from work every day, and I can't wait to explore a part of New York that I'm so unfamiliar with.

3. My new job has been verrry busy lately, and I'm still learning the ropes, but my good friend Okie is just a few desks away, and he makes sure to keep me grounded with a morning reading of Rilke or a fun fact about Thomas Jefferson or to just check on me when he hears me screetching "Oh my God, you want WHAT? WHEN?" into my telephone. I'm also getting over the awkward "new girl" hump and am getting to know my coworkers, who, for the most part, are awesome. Especially the socially awkward editors. I feel right at home.

Did I mention that my new apartment will be within walking distance of at least 4 of my friends?!? How lucky am I?

Remind me to tell you about riding the Coney Island float in the Village Halloween Parade with Leslie and dressing as Bristol Palin for my friend Holly's Halloween party.

All my love and Autumn bliss,
Lizzie

NaNoWriMo 2

2008-09-30T07:02:00.000-07:00

Last year, I wrote a novel in a month. You probably know that already. But in case you missed last year's crazy ridiculousness (on my part), it's all blogged on my "writing blog" which I've since kind of abandoned because everyone knows it and i didn't really want my grandma reading about who I fucked last night. Which was no one, btw, in case she's somehow honed her grandma skills to finding this blog. ANYWHO, all promiscuity aside, I am again going to be joining several friends in the National Novel Writing Month challenge, which is to write 50,000 words in 31 days. MOST people do NaNoWriMo in November, but we all think that's silly because it only has 30 days AND we most of us travel for Thanksgiving and can't write when we're in a turkey coma. Also, we are not most people, are we? No. I think not.

So, as this is the second time I've done this, I gotta admit, I'm going in a little cocky. I know this is not a good thing. I know that I'm going to crash and burn at some point. But I can't help it. I'm all like "Whatever, I did this last year. I can do it again." Ahhh, the mighty (me) are about to fall. I know it, and yet I'm doing nothing about it.

So, basically, me and 5 of my friends are all going to begin our own 50,000 word novel beginning at midnight tonight and ending at midnight on October 31. That boils down to about 1,667 words per day. We have all modified the original "rules" somewhat to fit our own goals, etc, but I'm a purist and a type-A anal retentive, so I'm basically doing it the way it was originally set up to be done. I'm starting with a new story, I'm going to write at least 50,000 words.

So, I may not have much to say here for the next month. If you want to follow my novel-writing progress, I will again be posting on my writing blog, The Naked Writer.

ONWARD!

WHAAAAA!

2008-09-30T06:47:00.000-07:00

I'm reading "Brideshead Revisited" right now, by Evelyn Waugh (which I always pronounce in my head WHAAAAAAAA!, think the noise someone doing karate might make), and anyway, I came across a particularly beautiful sentence that I don't want to lose.

"That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty."

WWWHHHHAAAAAAA!

A Birthday Adventure

2008-09-25T09:32:00.001-07:00

Not mine, mind you. My birthday (and impending doom! erm, my 27th birthday) is precisely 4 months and 13 days away. I think. Counting's not really my thing. ANYWAY, THIS adventure involves many people I love, but 3 especially, because their birthdays were last week, they all live in Pittsburgh, and I got to see each one!

Originally, I was going to catch a ride with some friends who were going to Pgh for the weekend on the cheap. Then I got a new job, and I couldn't take 2 days off work during my second week, so here I was sitting in my cubicle last Thursday, thinking "if only there was a way to go home this weekend...wait a second!" And I tromped over to travelocity to see if there were any last minute deals, which i haven't been successful with the last 10 or so times i've tried it, but lo and behold, my number was finally called, and lickety split, I had a flight AND a rental car for the weekend for around $200. I mentally patted myself on the back, taking all credit for so awesomely manipulating the situation in my favor.

After a jaunt over to the Museum of Modern Art to see a preview of the new Van Gogh exhibit (the exhibit is new, not the paintings, unfortunately. wouldn't THAT be awesome?) with my friend Bob, and probably the best dinner I've had all year (seriously, so so so good. he took me to the restaurant I've been living above for over a year and still hadn't been to), which included several cocktails, I drunkenly packed zero pairs of pants, 5 pairs of underwear, 2 toothbrushes, and an odd assortment of tops. Saturday morning, I awoke bright and early at 5 am to catch the train to JFK for my 8 am flight. I stopped at DD for coffee, and then got on the train around 5:30 am. Now, at 5:30 am, the few people who are riding the train are either a) up very early to go to work or b) up very late and going home from a bar/club/party. This is the kind of interesting mix you don't really get any other time of day. So, I'm sitting on the train, staring blankly at the ads across from me, sipping on my coffee in a half-awake daze when one of the latter kinds of people gets up from his seat down the car a ways from me, walks over to me and sits down next to me. He turns his body towards me and stares at me, waiting for me to look at him and/or say something. I am sleepy. I am annoyed. I have not had my coffee yet. I say, giving him a cursory slightly disgusted glance, "hi." Big mistake. I suppose that was all the encouragement he needed because he immediately told me that i was gorgeous, that he lived in brooklyn (obviously, that's the direction the train was headed) but was born in harlem (actually, he told me this three times) and then started asking me questions.

"I have a boyfriend," I said. Ah, the old standby. Although, I've found it only works about half the time.

"Oh, of course you do, baby, of course you do. You are a beautiful woman. Gorgeous. Did I tell you that I live in Brooklyn now, but I was born in Harlem? Where you from, baby?"

Damn.

So I told him that it was early and I didn't feel like talking and he finally (thank God!) got the hint, said he'd "catch me later" and went back to his seat down the train. I have to admit, I was momentarily flattered that I had gotten hit on at 5:45 in the morning, until I considered that a) he HAD to have been drunk, b) he had struck out at the club and I was his last ditch effort before getting home, and (worst of alll) c) I was the only female on the train. Also, he was ugly.

So, I got to the airport, had a lovely flight, picked up my rental car (a Mazda 6! SO FAST! SO SO FAST!) and surprised my Daddy and my cousin Keegan at the family birthday party, caught "The Dark Knight" again with my mom, grandma, and aunt (better the second time!), and expounded on the parallels between the Bible and Batman to grandma as I drove her home (I was trying to help her like the movie...I don't think it worked). Then on Sunday, we went out to breakfast before Mom and I hit the outlet mall , where i bought some kicky black knee boots from Nine West and a few things for work. Then, on to my final birthday, my friend Katie at her new house, where we hung out all afternoon and evening and watched the baby crawl around and petted the dog and discussed all of the decorating/renovating possibilities for her house (which seems HUGE, but probably only because i live in a bedroom the size of my cubicle). Then I drove the back roads home to sleep for a couple of hours before getting up at 3:15 am to fly back home.

All in all, a fantastic weekend.

And one of the reasons I love and hate New York. Because NOTHING RIDICULOUS HAPPENS when I'm anywhere but here, which was very relaxing and refreshing. Though, it's part of the reason I come back, too.

a brooklyn adventure

2008-09-15T11:36:00.000-07:00

whilst walking to work this morning and letting my mind wander aimlessly across the desert that is the stretch of First Avenue between my apartment and the new job (Side note: I work a BLOCK from the UN and I had no idea until this morning! Security risk? Yes. Worth it for the possibility of meeting wealthy, well-dressed, and [fingers-crossed] dashingly handsome international diplomats? um, yeah, obvs.), and the thought floated across my consciousness like a nimbus cloud that though the blog is called "Adventures in LizzieLand", I don't often recall my actual adventures. I then surmised that could be due to the fact that I've been relatively hermitlike of late and haven't had many adventures, but then...well, nevermind. this has gone on long enough.

So, to give you a real-life ACTUAL adventure of the Lizzie and Sideshow variety, I give you..."Time Warp: Lizzie and Sideshow Enter an Alternate Universe."

It all started when Sideshow asked me if I wanted to hunt photo booths with her to take some candid shots for her NEW! website in development.

And then I found out about the Bullseye Bodegas that were in town "For a limited time only!"

And so the list grew until we had grandiose and very detailed plans for Saturday, including, but not limited to, the following:

1. Go to Bullseye Bodega and drool on things we don't need and so won't buy because our apartments can't possibly fit one more ounce of useless stuff.
2. Find photo booth. Take silly photos. Repeat.

And here's where it got crazy

3. Go to Brooklyn. Look at friend of friend's dad-owned apartment for rent.
4. Stop by Beacon's Closet: shop and drop off old clothes.
5. Use $15 pizza place gift certificate that will never be used otherwise because we never go to Brooklyn.
6. Maybe, if we have time, stop at a kitchy Polish bar I know for 32-ounce $3.50 beers.

Yes, friends, not only were Sideshow and I going to Brooklyn, we were going to WILLIAMSBURG, land of hipsters, ironic mustaches, and unhealthily skinny skinny jeans. And we had 4 good reasons for going there.

Oh, we had such lofty ideals. Oh, were we going to get so much done. Then SS texted at 11 am. "Late night last night, hung over, no photos, look like crap" (my paraphrase), to which I labored over an equally hung over response for the next 10 minutes. "Late night here too, look like crap, no photos okay." At which point, had we been smart, we would have just given up and gone back to sleep.

Our 2 pm meeting turned into 3:30, and we decided to tackle Brooklyn first. The guy whose dad owns the apartment I wanted to see called to say he didn't have the keys, so SS and I headed straight for Beacon's Closet, which turned out to be a hot, crowded, hipster mess. We lasted approximately 2.4 minutes before grabbing her bag of clothes (they told us to be back at 8! There was no way were staying IN BROOKLYN until 8 pm) and high-tailing it out of there. Several headache-inducing outfits later (that is, on the waifs we passed...Williamsburg must be having a severe food shortage, we surmised), we finally found the calm in the hipster storm...the Polish bar with a bartender older than my grandfather and the blessed, beautiful, cold, sparkling 32-ounce beer in a styrofoam cup. We lamented about how we don't want to move to Brooklyn and especially to Williamsburg, discussed our confusion about the skinny-jean phenomenon, and expressed our relief that no hipsters, apparently, could see this bar through their slatted fushia sunglasses.

Until, right after I received my second GIANT beer, 15 of the little buggers came stumbling and yelling through the door of the bar, beelined it to the jukebox, and began playing the MOST TYPICAL BAR SONGS EVER. Which caused an equal and opposite reaction in SS and I: to loudly make fun of them, their dress, their musical choices, and to say that we were having such a lovely time until they showed up. We were just drunk enough to be able to convince ourselves that we were being funny, not rude. Also, that we somehow were not on THEIR turf and so had some kind of right to not be invaded. Ah, retrospect.

So, as "Bohemian Rhapsody" blared in the background and I yelled to SS over the music, "God, wow! I love this song! This is such a great song! I can't believe they're playing THIS song! THey NEVER play this song in bars!" and the hipsters returned our annoyed and disparaging looks, a tall, skinny-jeaned, ironic-mustached, and flannel shirted young man bought two beers and set one in front of each of us.

"Calm down," he said, with a wry smile.

And then we felt like assholes and shut up, or at least quit yelling our obscenities.

We flirted with two brothers who were jerks but not hipsters before leaving the hipsters to the 60-year-old woman who reminded me of my grandmother and had taken over the bar from the ancient man who kind of reminded me of my grandfather. We traipsed to the pizza place, where the guy behind the counter said "Come back and spend some money next time" and the other one told us that his girlfriend was 4'11". The strange out-of-place feelings we had gave way to giggling about everyone and everything that seemed "different" and we got our sausage pizza to go, vowing never to return to this alternate universe where we didn't understand the dress code and the natives bought us beer to disarm us into thinking they were harmless and, could it even be?, nice.

Certain. Death. Maybe.

2008-09-12T12:24:00.001-07:00

A cookie to the first person who can tell me what is wrong with the following sentence:

"Persons not heeding evacuation orders in single family one or two story homes may face certain death."

Also, and this may be morbid, or distasteful, or whatever, but they said this OUT LOUD on NPR this morning, and you would not believe how delighted i was to hear the words "certain death" on the radio. For a brief glimmer of a moment, I was in the Princess Bride. Or some other fairy tale involving a threat of certain death.

CERTAIN DEATH!!

but only maybe.

damn, i think i just gave it away.

also, I'm trying to work out a new budget based on my new salary AND I'm dreaming of the day when I can forever stop talking to, seeing, or listening to my heinous roommate, and I'm trying to remember whether "they" recommend housing costs to be 30% of before tax or after tax income. Do you know?

God, i just reread that last paragraph and i'm a little embarrassed to have you know the heighth, breadth, and depth of my nerdity.

oh well. you probably already know anyway.

wide-eyed, terrified

2008-09-12T09:45:00.000-07:00

This article has had me sitting, slightly terrified, staring at my computer, trying very, very hard to relax all the muscles in my face. and not. move. them. at. all.

i will henceforth be beginning a campaign of non-emotiveness (after the emo-trauma of tonight's half-time routine, more to come on that later), complete with blank wide-eyed stares, speaking without moving my lips, and avoiding any and all interactions in which i might have to feel something, thereby opening myself to the possibility that that emotion may be reflected on my face.

also, sleeping on my back, quitting smoking, never going outside while the sun is shining, and pretty much just ending my life right now, while i'm still young, pretty, and wrinkle-free.

is my insecurity showing?

2008-09-09T19:11:00.000-07:00

a friend and i were talking today about a blog we both read. my friend said something to the effect of, "they think they're masking their pain so well, and maybe they are on the surface, but in their blog, it's in everything they write."

which, on further reflection, caused me to wonder what my blog 'says' that i don't think it says, or that maybe i'm trying (unconsciously?) to mask. Does it scream of insecurity? Or manic-depressiveness? Is it a cry for help, or attention?

It's easy to act cool and put together on the street, in the subway, at work, with acquaintances and sometimes with friends. But here...do I put up that exterior? Do I write exactly what I think and feel? Do I censor myself? don't try to, but i'm not sure it's avoidable.

Because it's easy to think you know yourself, but actually doing it is damn near impossible. i know i'm insecure sometimes; i don't always try to hide it. i let myself be vulnerable here; but there's always a thin coating of self-preservatory humor, or anger, or sarcasm. it is comforting to think of how far we've come. it is another thing entirely to face the demons that remain, especially if we'd rather pretend they no longer possess us. At least you know when you're being haunted by ghosts. How do you know when you're dealing with demons?

this is my brain on drugs

2008-09-09T18:29:00.000-07:00

Hello my darling farphenugens! (yeah, that's how you spell that) (no, i don't know what a farphenugen is) (stop asking fucking questions)

It has been so long since we've communicated via blogoverse (yup, just made it up. like universe, only with blog at the beginning. and yes, i've copyrighted it, so don't even think about it) (yes, even though I just made it up) (shut your mouth! I'm talking!)

hummm, right. So, didja miss me? Because I missed you. Terribly. While i was frolicking amongst the radioactive waste in Lake Michigan and ducking from pretend gangsters in Chicago's south side and hitting on hot artists with families [shameless, i know, but i was on vacation...free pass!] at jazz festivals. oh, also ripping the tails off of boiled crawfish and sucking the sweet spicy creole-seasoned succulent flesh out of them while i stared into their lifeless beady black eyes. and picking their antennae out of my teeth. and THEN, i missed you even more whilst jazz-fingering my toes into the sweet moist north carolina sand while the dictator, king prince nephew Kole directed my sand-castle construction and water carrying duties ("Get more water!" he cried. And so I did.) and then watching my sister be obliterated by waves that were at least 4 feet above her 6 foot high head (awesome. seriously. awesome.) and riding waves via boogie board and learning (the hard way) just which bikini bottoms were conducive to wave riding. and which, unfortunately, were not.

henceforth, i will always recommend a one-piece for wave riding, though i feel that the one-piece interferes with one's ability to catch the eye of passing adult married males with children (the only kind available, apparently, during the first week of September in the OUter Banks).

As you can see, I barely managed without you.

OH, hai! Do you know what time it is?? It's time for me to take some more sinus infection medication! Hold up...one sec...ahhh, very nice. Congestion, begone! Right, and those were the nighttime kind, so i probably should wrap this up before i pass out in a pool of my own slobber and mucus.

and i still don't understand why noone wants to date me. hum.

on the bright side, i'm 3 for 3 on getting my used tissues in the garbage can from across the room.

so, to conclude, i had a lovely time on my vacation, and i really did miss you (even if i pretend to be strong and say that i didn't), and i just started a new job yesterday, and I'm getting a new roommate next week, AND I'm planning on doing the National Novel Writing Month with a few writer friends again in October. So, lots going on! oh, AND i have a sinus infection! (i forgot that part) but hopefully that'll go away soon.

And now, to fall into a drug-induced stupor, but not a pseudoephedrine-induced stupor. because the meth people ruined it for all of us.

assholes.

Flexible Structure

2008-08-21T09:23:00.000-07:00

I just realized that that terrible picture was the first thing anyone was going to see when they came to my blog, so instead of taking it down, I'm going to post over it. And besides, the only thing I'm doing at work today is giving blood, even though (as a coworker asked yesterday) I won't be getting an extra day off. At my company, they bribe people to give blood. If you give blood during 2 of the 3 blood drives during the year, you get an extra day off. I was surprised when she asked if I was still going to give blood, even though my last day here is next Wednesday. It's nice motivation, sure, but if you weren't going to give blood in the first place, would it really be enough? Anywho, I am still, indeed, giving blood, because I think it's a good thing to do and if I ever need it, I hope other people will have given it. Karma, you know. And I really don't mind needles.

That and the free orange juice and cookies. Okay, I admit it. That's the real reason I do it. All the guilt-free oreos I can eat.

The point of this post is not, regardless of what you may think, about my personal blood-giving philosophy. It is primarily about getting that terrible picture off the top of my page, and also about talking a little about writing.

So, as you probably know, I like to write. A lot. I went to college for it. I've been doing it for a long time. Someday, I would like to make a career of it. Lately, I've been thinking about taking the GRE and going back to school so that I can teach English to college kids. I figured that would be a good next step out of the corporate world (I'm a medical editor now), and it would give me entire summers off to write. But I'm not sure if I would like teaching, or if it would really give me more time to write. And as I thought about all of the time, energy, and money that i would need to spend to get a master's degree and possibly a PhD, the question I had was "Am I doing this because this is what I want to do or because I'm avoiding writing?"

The fact of the matter is my ultimate goal is to be a writer. I don't know if I can make any money at it. Right now I'm not making money at it; thus, my day job. But is getting a new degree to start a new career going to help or hurt my writing? Certainly, while i'm in school and working full time, i will have little time for writing. BUT, if I love to teach AND I write, then it would be worth it. Also, I'm a huge nerd and I love school. I kind of want to go back just to learn. It's a tough decision, because I genuinely want to go back, but at the same time, I don't know if I will enjoy teaching. Also, what if i don't go to school and instead write and write and write while I continue to work as an editor? It's possible for me to transition directly from editor to writer without making a pit stop at teaching along the way. So, what it comes down to is this: What do I want to spend my energy on? What are my priorities? I already know what my goals are and where I want to go. What I'm trying to do right now is find the best path.

I still haven't decided, though the answer seems like it should be clear enough. What I have decided is that I'm going to make writing a higher priority in my life. I made a list of things that I love, and writing was right there at the top. Running is another priority for me. And I've always loved volunteering, though I haven't done much of it since high school. So here's what I have decided. I have decided to volunteer at the library teaching reading and writing to adults. It's not college, but I think it will give me a good idea about the kind of teacher I could be and how well I would like it. And I have come up with a weekday schedule that I'm going to try to stick to "most" days. By that I mean I will be flexible with myself, but will do it as much as I can. This kind of flexible structure works really well for me. If I'm too rigid, I get frustrated with myself and quit. Without structure, I don't do much of anything. So, here it is:

6 am: wake up, make coffee, shower
6:30-7:30 am: write
7:30-9 am: get ready and go to work
9 am - 5 pm: at work
5-6 pm: commute
6-7 pm: run
7-10 pm: eat dinner, run errands, relax
10 pm: get in bed, read, sleep

The only problem I forsee with this schedule is that I'm not a morning person. The problem with scheduling writing at night instead of the morning, though, is that I just don't do it. So, if I'm going to write consistenly, morning is best. The hardest part of the schedule is going to sleep early. I am a night person. I hit a point in the evening where I am simply just not sleepy. I'm hoping that my body will slowly adjust. I already was getting up around 7 am, so I'm hoping it will be a relatively easy adjustment to 6.

This is something I decided on Monday. I woke up Tuesday and wrote for an hour, skipped yesterday after being out late with friends the night before, and woke up this morning around 6:30, only writing for 45 minutes. I figure 1.75 out of 3 is pretty good. As always, the test is going to be keeping it up until or unless I find a better system.

What happens in Vegas...ends up on my blog

2008-08-06T10:54:00.000-07:00

Today-published worst photo of me ever in existence anywhere ever ever, which will most likely result in a) some future employer finding and firing-slash-not-hiring-me-in-the-first-place, b) my being left at the alter-slash-never-having-another-date-as-long-as-i-live, c) going to a great party and meeting a cute boy who i drive off with in his convertible and then oops! remember that i need cigarettes so ask him to pull off for a sec and then see THAT image staring straight back at me from a cover of some magazine with a caption that reads "Single and Fabulous?" (wait, i think i've heard that one before...), or d) all of the above.

I'mma go with D. I believe this was directly before the Great Stripper Pole Incident of 2008, during which, in my enthusiasm, I whipped around the pole and directly into the brick wall behind it, scratching/bruising my shoulder. I blame the guy who installed the pole. Clearly, he's never seen what goes on with those things.

And after THAT description, D. Definitely D.

Which is fine by me. I clearly have a fallback plan.

Seriously, though, besides that night in Vegas, I had a pretty mature, responsible trip. Here is a short list of

STUFF I DID IN VEGAS!!!

1. I laid by the pool

2. I watched other people have sex on their balcony (to be clear, I was staring because I couldn't figure out what was going on, not because I KNEW and just wanted to watch)

3. I rode the roller coaster at New York New York (no, not the crazy ridiculous scary one on the top of the really tall building. the one that's on the ground in front of a hotel that's supposed to resemble our fair city) (and no, i don't think there is a comma between the New Yorks. I think they did that so people didn't get confused between the HOTEL and the ACTUAL CITY. Because from what I saw in Vegas, I think it was a distinct possibility.)

4. I can haz cheezburger hat

but thankfully i cant haz frankenstine hat

(that wasn't very funny, was it? oh well, moving on!)

5. I won $75 on penny slots...

...while practicing to be my great grandmother.

6. I successfully evaded the giant baby eagles at the Bellagio. (barely.)

7. I waved a bagel around in a hungover stupor

8. And (with no photographic evidence, or at least none i can find to steal)...I danced in the Second Annual J*erleader and WHORE Dance Competition at Rollercon. And all I got was an illegible patch. (and by WHORE, I'm just making a silly inside joke. HAHAHAHAHA, LA is WHORES. MWHAAAHAHAHAHAHA.) Hopefully, photographic evidence to come soon. To hold you over, here are the signs we used in the routine:

which way to mecca?

2008-07-25T11:07:00.000-07:00

I work a block away from the big Macy's, you know, the one they show every year during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. the closest public outdoor space is Harold Square, a concrete triangle of tree-lined metal chairs and tables wedged between Sixth Avenue and Broadway. It is hot. It is loud. It is full of tourists. So today, seeking some actual grass and a little peace and quiet with my sun, I wandered down to Madison Square Park, which is quieter, shadier, breezier, nannies pushing strollers and toddlers drunk-stumbling into the paths of texting business people. I had an entire bench to myself, and so spread out in the shade to read Annie Dillard's "The Maytrees." If you haven't read it, please do. It is a beautifully simple love story set on the beach in Rhode Island and currently has me contemplating giving up the city life. Seriously. I don't know how Annie does it, but her ratio of words to the vividity of the picture she paints is ridiculous, as in, zero words = 100% clarity. She is magic.

I read for an hour and got up in a lovely contemplative, zen-like dream state to walk back to work. I turned up Fifth Avenue, and then turned left on 31st Street, my daily route to work because there is a church on the corner with yellow ribbons tied to its fence, and churches make me feel peaceful. I pass at least 3 of them every day on my way to work. It was about 1:45 pm and I saw in front of me two lines of people on the sidewalk, facing north toward some shops, heads bowed, silent. I thought perhaps it was a small vigil of some sort, as the church was on the corner. As I approached, I saw the small carpets and pages of newsprint, the bare feet and empty shoes, the occassional cell phone on the ground. No one looked at me as I passed between the two lines of men, in various dress, many shades of brown. Almost as I came to the end of the line, someone behind me yelled a command and they all at once shifted. Again came the call, and they knelt on their mats like a reverse wave. I felt strange, briefly, as they bowed as I passed. I wondered why they faced north, instead of east. I wondered why this street, out of many. I wondered why at 1:45. I wondered whether the rest of us couldn't use a moment every day to gather with like-minded people to pray, or reflect, or take our thoughts off ourselves and put them onto a higher being or purpose.

It was the same feeling, walking between the rows of praying men, that i have walking past the sleeping Christian churches. Which is interesting because I was raised to believe that the former is evil and latter is good.

Viva!

2008-07-22T08:46:00.000-07:00

Here are some pictures that I pilfered from fellow j*erleader Natalie's flickr page. Bon appetit!

This is Minnie Pearl Haggard doing "human blockhead." She pounded a nail into her nose! It was awesome!

Bob marrying the j*erleaders

Our first dance. Awww!

Drunk, married, and tattooed

2008-07-21T06:43:00.000-07:00

As I (literally) stumbled to the bathroom this morning around 7:30 am, a couple of unusual things occurred to me. First, that i was still relatively drunk. Second, that I was wearing a wedding ring. And third, that I had a tattoo of two dice with the word "Lucky" in a banner underneath on my left bicep. All three of which surprised me in a "I'm noticing this and not really sure what's going on, but I'm going to roll with it" and a "Huh, I didn't think this actually happened to people" kind of way.

Am I in Vegas, you ask? No. Am I in a bad movie starring Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz? No. Should I be worried that even BEFORE my big Vegas vacation next week, I'm already waking up drunk, married, and tattooed? Possibly.

But, as is generally the case, there is a perfectly logical explanation for all of this, which i vaguely remember in my drunk-to-hungover haze. And that is the second annual GGRD Jeerleader Viva Las Vegas Fundraiser, which was last night at Fontanas, the highlight of which was Minnie Pearl Haggard eating fire. But also complete with Audrey Scorne applying a temporary tattoo to my left bicep in the bathroom before the event, my drinking several vodka cranberrys and two huge Coney Island Lagers, and the second annual Jeerleader-Bob wedding, officiated by the one and only Hellvis. And which ended with me walking home drunk at midnight and having some homeless guy ask to see my tattoo and another guy say in a very menacing voice, "Safe travels." If I hadn't been so drunk, I would have been way more creeped out by that. And then ending the night by eating tortilla chips in bed and reading my journal (? i know, right?) and falling asleep and having a dream in which i was drunk.

I'm going to consider this my dry run for Vegas.

Sorry

2008-07-16T09:41:00.000-07:00

Just now, at work. I walk into the kitchen to find a shortish man facing the microwave, shutting the microwave door.

Man to microwave, in very sexy accent: Oh, sorry.

Me, retrieving my lunch from the fridge: Did you just apologize to the microwave?

Man, laughing, turning red (i assume, under his nutmeg-colored skin): Yes, actually, I did.

'Spection

2008-06-27T11:57:00.000-07:00

Reading:
"V." by Thomas Pynchon (sometimes a little complicated, sometimes a little mumbled, sometimes beautiful, always earthy. my approach: hang on, don't let go)

"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" by Raymond Carver (sweet, slow, and thick like molasses. perfect for on the train or bus or between people-watching at the park)

"Cast the First Stone" by Gwendolyn DeRosa (a tangy, bittersweet, and raw reminder of what it's like to grow up, and the kind of teenager I wish I'd been but never had the balls to be)

"Of Human Bondage" by M. Somerset Maugham (it's Maugham, what can I say? Pithy, perfect, rending, complete with adolescent humiliation, spiritual browbeating, and unrequited love)

Writing:
Short stories that may someday become a semi-autobiographical collection (theme: love, as always)

Novel editing will commence as soon as I work up the nerve

Some bad poetry

And I need to go back to the story i started in January about a child and mother who don't want, yet need, each other.

Doing:
Running, a lot. I logged 24 miles last week, 10 of which was actual running.

Eating, a lot. Due to running a lot, I can't seem to stay full (great side effect of running!)

Practices for Rollercon (a roller derby convention in Vegas at which the Jeerleaders will compete in the second annual Rollercon Cheerleading Competition)

Trying to find people to do all of the amazing free cultural things in NYC with me, and failing mostly

Thinking about:
School. The new idea is to take the GRE this fall and apply for MA/PhD programs in English and become a professor (while the current, or a new, company pays for it)

Road trip. I am in desperate need of some fresh country air and some time with the people who know and love me best. Chicago, Cincinnati, Atlanta, and Pittsburgh are calling me. I think I might rent a car and visit all four places over a couple of weeks in August/September.

Loneliness. I miss companionship. I miss being around people who really "get" me. I love New York, but I haven't really found that here.

Jobs. I may start looking for a new one that will pay me better so that I can accomplish some long-term financial goals a little quicker.

Mermaid Me

2008-06-24T06:20:00.000-07:00

The annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade on Saturday was A-MAZING! If you are unfamiliar with the Mermaid Parade, it is an annual event to celebrate the official beginning of summer, and people sign up to march dressed as mermaids, often in groups with themes. This year, our group was the Rydell High School of Fish (Grease, that is). We had Pink Salmon Ladies, we had Sea Birds, we had Bad Sandy, we had Frenchy, we had Beauty School of Fish Dropouts. And then we Grease Lighteninged and Hand Jived our way down the boardwalk and back up Surf Avenue, cameras everywhere, and people in the crowd singing along with our sound system. My favorite group was the Marie Antoinette Mermaids, complete with guillotine float. Here are a few pictures of our group:

The only decent picture of me was taken by some anonymous type A anal retentive on Flickr who reserves absolutely every single right to his or her photos and I have not been able to steal it. Yet. Though I'm in the process of hiring a detective to track this person down, break into their apartment, and steal their hard drive, just for being difficult. Seriously, what's the point of taking pictures if other people can't use them as MySpace profile pics? I'd even be willing to give this person the photo cred. But whatev, here i am, in all of my mermaid glory.

I put up some more on the MySpace, and everyone else looks great, but I mostly just look like a cross between the wicked witch of the west (at some point, green body paint really did seem like a good idea) and a slightly psycopathic weirdo with a hat made out of curlers.

HOWEVER, there were SO MANY amazing, beautiful, crazy, colorful costumes. Though it is hugely biased in favor of the naked/pastied women at the parade, if you search on flickr for "2008 Coney Island Mermaid Parade" you can get a pretty good idea of what i mean. Fantastic! God, I love this city!

Still, though. So. Fun. After the parade, we spent the next several hours drinking beer on the beach, and then the next several hours after THAT drinking beer while walking around and riding the Wonder Wheel and the Cyclone. BTW, the Cyclone is the oldest, most rickety, most amazingly terrifying-because-you-are-afraid-its-going-to-collapse-under-you roller coaster in the history of the universe. If you are within 1000 miles of Coney Island and you have any love for roller coasters at all, you MUST DO IT.

Do What You Want = Be Happy

2008-06-19T10:37:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's that time again folks. The time when I realize i haven't blogged in weeks and so must catch you all up in one giant crazy nonsensical stream-of-consciousness post that most of you won't read to the end anyway. Don't worry, it doesn't hurt my feelings. But i'm sure you weren't worried, as stopping reading a post halfway through indicates a) annoyance or b) boredom. probably both. but i'm not here for you (sorry, true). i'm here for me. and i do what i want! yay! and so should you!

here we go:

so i'm perusing myspace today, and i see the profile of this guy i used to ahem "see" who was a friend but isn't so much a friend anymore and i wondered, "Why don't we hang out more?" Before realizing that the answer is that we're too busy boinking other people. i like the word boink as a euphemism for sex. it always gives me the mental image of two people's heads accidentally knocking together in a playful accidental way. which, i guess probably could be a deeper metaphor for sex if i thought about it, but i'm not going to. onward!

This week has been CRAZY. It's so bad that i haven't had time to buy groceries (for those of you who don't know, groceries are very important to me. i don't trust restaurants not to feed me poo-slash-weird chemicals-slash AIDS. and also i'm cheap and hate paying for food.). so i've been subsisting on takeout all week, BUT the upside is that I get to wear TWO (count 'em, two!) costumes this week! Tonight, I get to be a pirate at the jeerleader super-fun band night pirate-themed fundraiser, and then on Saturday, I get to dress like a Beauty School Dropout Mermaid for the annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade. Yipee! Except that my beauty school dropout costume kind of looks like a futuristic military uniform of some sort, minus alien-evaporating ray gun. oh well. i'm sure everyone will understand once i'm hand-jiving. So that should be tons of fun, tonight and Saturday.

So, i've come across two articles in the past few days about changing from being a night person to being a morning person and here's what i think about that:
1. Night people get a bad rap as being lazy, but we aren't, we just function great while the morning people are being old-ish and going to bed at 9 pm.
2. But I don't WANT to be a morning person. I LIKE nighttime.
3. Night people should be able to work their corporate jobs on schedules that fit their sleep patterns. In today's global economy, i would think this would be an asset, as the morning people in Beijing could talk to the night people in the US, then we could have 24-hour-a-day office hours, thereby increasing productivity and strengthening the world global corporate machine. erm, wait. no. nevermind. that would never work. forget i said anything.
And D. There is too much emphasis on changing basic fundamental characteristics of who we are. Instead we should embrace ourselves instead of trying to change. Learn to love your nighttime awakeness, or your small boobs, or your giant schnoz, or your gayness (another article I read was about how they might someday try to "cure" homosexuality in the womb by flooding it with hormones so kids don't become queer...so, so disturbing), or your shyness or weirdness or nerdiness or can't talk to people of the opposite sex-ness. I say EMBRACE IT! Own it! I'm a nerd who doesn't have many friends and i can barely dress myself. so what do i do? I read books naked by myself! That's what. And do you know what else? It makes me happy! And if you're happy, it doesn't matter what other people think. unless killing people or something similar makes you happy. then you have a problem.

I've been writing quite a lot (for me, baby steps) lately, and i have an idea for a book that i've been working on and i'm really excited about it. i briefly (read: for 10 minutes) started to read the novel i wrote last October, but I wasn't really into it. So i stopped. I might revisit it later, when i'm done with my new super-fabulous (fingers crossed!) book idea. I would tell you about it, but I don't want to jinx it. I think it's going to be a cross between memoir, fiction, poetry, and short stories. I hope I can pull it off. But if not, it's still good practice, right? RIGHT! Which reminds me of this artist woman I was reading about who was talking about how adult people should be more like kids in the way that they create their art, as in, kids focus on the act of creating as their main goal, whereas adults focus on how their going to make money (or, rather, on the value of the end result), and how all of us adult artists might be more happy (and productive!) if we focused on the CREATING rather than what it may be worth to other people when we're done. i know that very idea has kept me from writing in the past, and the times when i write the most and best i'm writing to WRITE, not writing for other people. Which goes back to what I said about being happy. Do what you want = be happy. Write to write = be happy. Write worrying about what other people think = be unhappy.

Fantastic.

And finally and most importantly, a big shout out to one of the great loves of my life AND my first wife (her second), Ms. Gwendolyn Glover DeRosa, who was born today not so many years ago and who is a talented, gorgeous budding writer. Happy birthday, Gwen! I love you!

That's all i have for today. Kisses, babies!

Stupid in love

2008-05-28T17:37:00.000-07:00

It happened almost a week ago, and I am still really, really angry. So angry I hit a cab for not stopping at a stop sign to let me walk in front of it. So angry, I yelled at a pregnant woman in the park. So angry, in fact, that I feel like I'm revisiting those confusing, messed-up teenage years again, where all of these things just seem to be happening to me, and I don't have any control over them or my reactions to them. I haven't been sleeping. I've been buying (and smoking) cigarettes. I've been eating too much. I'm hurt. And because I'm wounded, I'm lashing out at anyone who gets close enough.

All because of a stupid, careless boy who was so wrapped up in his own feelings that he didn't stop to consider mine.

I guess part of the reason I'm so angry (or maybe most of it) is because i feel stupid. I should have seen this coming. But I didn't. I got wrapped up in my feelings, in the idea that i really really liked someone who really really liked me back, and i didn't want it to be anything but magic and so i believed that it was, in a way, magical. Because for all of my cynicism and feigned disinterest and obvious lack of emotion, what i really wanted was something real. and this guy came along and he gave me the illusion that i was looking for. and i let my guard down. and i let myself believe the things he said that i wanted to believe. and i trusted him.

And, here's the most embarrassing part. I even fell in love a little.

Now, I don't know what his side of the story is, but I thought we were on the same page. I thought the sparks were flying for both of us. I thought we were well on our way to happily ever after.

Because sometimes, you just have to believe in it, you know?

And then the rug was pulled out from under me. I was jolted from my dream. The boy said in no uncertain terms that I was wrong, he had only said he wanted to have fun, that there were no sparks, and that this was the end. "But, wait," I thought. "It's barely begun."

And once again, I found myself face down on my bed crying aloud, remembering how these feelings feel when they wash over you: the pain, the disappointment, the feeling of absolute and utter failure, the nagging questions. "What is wrong with me?" "Why doesn't he want me?" "What did i do wrong?" And even if you've done nothing wrong, it is still your fault, somehow, not his.

And once again, you realize that it is not the boy that you are mourning but the ideas you had about the future with that boy.

Maybe the truth is that he did like me a lot, but he got in over his head, he got scared, and then he realized that maybe he didn't want what he had said he wanted all along, and so he said he couldn't see me anymore.

But from my point of view, it seems a lot like this: He treated me like shit. He had absolutely no respect for me or regard for my feelings. He led me on. He lied to me and told me what he thought i wanted to hear so that i would trust him, and then he dropped me.

And honestly, the worst part is not what he did. It's that I fell for it. And it's the oldest fucking trick in the book.

What can you expect from love?

2008-05-20T11:38:00.000-07:00

Please read this. It's an essay from The New York Times about love, and I don't think I could have said what this woman says any better than she does. Especially the part about always wanting men to stay and the transient nature of our modern relationships.

On a related note, the article in the New York magazine this week about men, cheating, monogamy, sex, etc, here.

My married friend Katie asked me the other day if i was sytematically dating every commitment-phobe in New York. I didn't know how to answer her. I mean, isn't everyone a commitment-phobe in this town, myself included? I have just passed the 2-year anniversary of the break-up of my longest, most meaningful relationship, which lasted 3 years. And it is just within the past month or so that I have come to a point where I am willing, nay, wanting, to enter into another committed, monogamous, "possibly going somewhere" relationship. I fully understand the hookup mentality, the friends with benefits, the late-night booty calls. I understand the separation between love and sex, feelings and fulfilling a need, intimacy and orgasm. I understand why we do it. In my case, I did it because I wasn't emotionally ready or available to enter into a relationship. A "friend" of mine is biding time and having fun until he's ready start looking for a wife. Another "friend" is 35, with no real career, who is a self-proclaimed commitment-phobe because he is afraid of becoming the absent father that he had.

When it comes down to the real root of it, we are all broken, and most of us realize that love isn't what we need to be fixed. We've been around the block a few times, we've been hurt, cheated on, lied to. We've had our expectations crushed. We've had our feelings not returned. It is so much easier to find someone to have a good time with, to have sex with, to spend a night with every once in awhile, than to think about a real commitment. Because commitment isn't fun. It's not exciting, or thrilling. It's monogamy, boredom, having to put up with someone else's bad habits. It is long-term. And for many of us who come from broken homes or whose parents had terrible marriages, it is fighting, and anger, and resentment. It is heartbreak and failure. And it is simply not realistic.

I still don't know if I believe that a happy, monogamous marriage is possible. And I'm still not sure that it's something I ever want to gamble on.

The New York mag article mentioned a book called The Ethical Slut. Here's the quote they used, in the context of polyamory, which (if i understand correctly) is having a primary relationship with many sexual partners: "With practice, we can develop an intimacy based on warmth and mutual respect, much freer than desperation, neediness, or the blind insanity of falling in love."

On some level, in order to have noncommittal "encounters," you have to have this kind of shallow intimacy, where you care about and respect the other person, but without the proprietariness, or jealousy, or, consequently, love. It is based on warmth and mutual respect. They are yours when you are with them, and you don't ask about what they do outside of that. What I don't know is if these kind of "relationships" are sustainable long-term. I kind of want the blind insanity of falling in love, don't you? And why can't you have monogamy without desperation or neediness? I think you can. I ordered the book from the library. I'll let you know how it goes (that is, if I can manage to read a book that isn't fiction. I usually get a couple chapters in and abandon ship).

I guess, in the end, we all have to decide what works for us. But is what works and what we want the same thing? I asked my friend Pat the other day whether I date (excuse the cliche) all the wrong guys. His answer surprised me. He said no, I didn't date the "wrong" guys (what does that mean anyway?), but that I was continually hopeful that each of the guys I dated was going to be the right one. It's that hope, I think, that has led me to this place where I'm tired of meaningless hookups, and I'm tired of the shallow "mutual respect and warmth" that stands in as a shoddy pinch-hitter for love. Really, at the end of the day, I'm just plain tired. But what can you do? I still, deep down, want mind-bending, heart-palpitating, I can't help but love you love that, when the dust settles, effortlessly (or effortly, for that matter) morphs into the kind of long-term, in it for the long haul, deep commitment and intimacy and friendship that can be sustained throughout a lifetime. And, honestly, deep down I do believe it's possible. I don't think it's easy to find or to keep or that a whole hell of a lot of people have it, but without that hope, that belief that it is attainable, that i deserve it, that i someday will have it, well, what's the point of continuing to date all of these not right guys if there isn't the possibility that i'm going to find the right one? Hell, maybe I've found him already, and I just don't know it yet.

What do you think?

a little poetry...

2008-05-14T08:58:00.000-07:00

firstly, a quote: “A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful implanted in the human soul.” --Johann Wolfgang Goethe

nextly, a poem about a lemon by Pablo Neruda, who i am in love with.

Out of lemon flowers
loosed
on the moonlight, love's
lashed and insatiable
essences,
sodden with fragrance,
the lemon tree's yellow
emerges,
the lemons
move down
from the tree's planetarium

Delicate merchandise!
the harbors are big with it-
bazaars
for the light and the
barbarous gold.
We open
the halves
of a miracle,
and a clotting of acids
brims
into the starry
divisions:
creation's
original juices,
irreducible, changeless,
alive:
so the freshness lives on
in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.

Cutting the lemon
the knife
leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light; topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades.
So, while the hand
holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world
on a trencher,
the gold of the universe
wells
to your touch:
a cup yellow
with miracles,
a breast and a nipple
perfuming the earth;
a flashing made fruitage,
the diminutive fire of a planet.

People You May Know

2008-05-05T11:24:00.000-07:00

Monday 9:20 AM. I sit at my computer at work. Nothing has come across my desk yet, and so i'm checking my two personal e-mail accounts, myspace, facebook (in that order; every day in that order). I log on to Facebook, read the feed, see what everyone's up to, change a few things in my profile (delete, mostly--i'm feeling reclusive today), and notice, over the insistent throbbing of a growing migraine and under the heading "People You May Know" the profile of Ben Harris. Facebook has no way of knowing, of course, that I was in love with the man for 3 years (and if we're being honest, probably longer). It has no way of knowing that i fully believed that I would marry him and have his children. It has no way of knowing that, finally, 2 years after our breakup, am I just getting to the point of wanting another relationship, and that even now the thought half-terrifies me. I remember that he friended me about a year ago, and I accepted his friend request, but my wounds were still too raw to have him in my life even in this sterile electronic environment, and after a week or two of me sending him "What do you want? Why are you talking to me?" messages, he unfriended me because I was "obviously too stressed out" about the whole thing.

Taking my recent change of heart in the relationship department as a sign, I clicked on the "Add as Friend" button. I clicked "Add a Message," and I wrote, "Let's be friends. I promise not to freak out this time. J." And then I wondered what he would think when he read it. And I realized, due to recently relatively unrelated circumstances, that this may be a promise I can't keep. I looked at the Send button and hit Cancel.

Sometimes I realize that I haven't come as far as I would like to think. And I realize that no matter how long it's been or how much I would like it to be true, Ben will never just be one of the People You May Know.

My-graine

2008-05-05T06:44:00.000-07:00

It is 9:30 am and i have about a half-blown migraine headache. Note that this is after having zero hangover yesterday (after drinking for a full 12 hours Saturday). Note that this is after getting a solid 8 hours of sleep, eating well, and experiencing relatively low levels of overall life stress. Note that i haven't had more than a twinge of a migraine in several years (which i promptly expel from my body by popping a coupld of Excedrin migraine, the drug of the gods). Note that i thought of something relatively profound to blog about only to have it obliterated by said migraine. I'm gonna try this again later.

Years of Therapy

2008-05-02T12:10:00.000-07:00

So, two absolutely ridiculous things i found by accident on the internet today. Both of which border on cruel and unnatural things to do to your children.

First, this, when i googled "coulot" because it was the answer to a crossword clue and i didn't know how to spell it (no, that's not cheating. no it's not. okay, maybe a little)

and then THIS, which came up as a GOOGLE AD in my gmail, titled "You Can Make Tiered Pants." and i thought, "Good God, what are tiered pants?" Those. Those are tiered pants my friend.

Necessary self-involvement?

2008-04-22T07:19:00.000-07:00

Good morning, my sweet corn muffins!

So I was writing a new short story last night (!!!), which i think is not too shabby, and I realized, during the writing (a fictionalized account of actual happenings, as per usual) how completely selfish and self-centered I can be (and am). As I wrote, I was a surprised at one particularly ungracious thing I did last week. A friend of mine did a relatively large favor for me, and I completely forgot to thank him. Because I was too wrapped up in my own world to think about anyone besides myself. I didn't mean to be ungrateful, and I certainly wasn't--on the inside. But it doesn't matter how grateful you are if you don't speak up and say something, does it? Ashamed of myself, I immediately wrote him an e-mail asking him to dinner to thank him for his favor. But it was already too late. I had missed my opportunity to say thank you in person when the moment was right.

I started to think about this. I wondered how I had become so self-involved. The truth is that I care a lot about my friends, and I would do almost anything to help any one of them. But I wonder how often they see that, or if i would recognize an opportunity if it came up? I wondered if this was societal or generational, if it was a problem with everyone I know or just with some of us? I think that, as a generation, people my age are pretty self-involved. We are in our mid-twenties, most of us are single and struggling to find our place in society. We have big concerns: career, finding a partner, trying to make ends meet. There is a certain amount of necessary self-involvement: we are on our own for the first time, and we alone are responsible for our own well-being. No one else is going to take care of us but ourselves, and taking care of ourselves can take quite a bit of time and energy. But somewhere along the way, i think we may have forgotten the benefits of a supportive community. We meet up for drinks or dinner to complain about our busy lives or to blow off steam, but when we're struggling, really struggling with something, we believe that we have to shoulder that on our own. In an age where we are more connected than ever, I have found myself feeling more and more isolated. Facebook, MySpace, and text messaging have replaced the faces and voices and touch of my friends, and I miss their presence. I miss having a shoulder to cry on. And I miss offering mine. We forget to ask for help, or we are afraid to, because we don't want to burden our already stressed out friends. Or we don't think that they will find the space in their hearts to care about our problems. But I feel like I have the space, and that it is vacant most of the time. My own worry-space is constantly full, but the space I have for my friends' worries is collecting dust. Perhaps we would all be able to carry our loads better if we shared them with each other. Perhaps we could take some of our friends' burdens and they could take some of ours, and everyone could find their way a little easier. Perhaps our perpetual loneliness is not only a function of our own selfishness but because no one is asking for our help either. I am the kind of person who tries to do everything on my own, without asking for help. But I am also the kind of person who loves to help others. Except that no one is asking for it, and no one is offering to help me. Which leads me to the next question: How do we ask? And how to do we ask to give if no one is asking us?

What is it with my legs?

2008-04-16T06:59:00.000-07:00

Helloooo my darling little pumpkin seeds! Isn't everything just so wonderful that you could kiss the world???

Finally, finally, finally, the soul-squelching cold and dark and gray of winter has lifted to reveal blue skies, budding trees, the smell of FLOWERS intermixing with sewage, and the return of...ME WALKING TO WORK! Yes, friends, I have logged, and it's only Wednesday, mind you, a total of 10.5 miles this week! Without hardly breaking a sweat! Do you know how many calories that is? Neither do I! Do you know how many annoying hipsters I haven't had to see (or smell)? Neither do I! Welcome, glorious springtime, welcome welcome welcome to my world!

And tomorrow is supposed to be 70 degrees! I might go to work naked to celebrate.

Or not. Though it may help the "Lizzie needs a promotion so she can afford to live on her own" cause.

Anywho, two things about my walk to work today. Firstly, that I FINALLY broke, and wore, ugh, yes, my running shoes, with, ugh, yes, a skirt. And do you know what happened, friends? Nothing, that's what. My feet walked to work in blissfully arch-supported comfort, and i was nary a scornful look received (i don't know if that made any sense, but whatev. it's my blog, i can write what i want.). IN FACT, I was surprised, yet again (please see blog of last week pertaining to "legs"), by the number of men who saw me walking past and immediately dropped their eyes to my legs to STARE until they were out of my sightline (i have no idea what happened after that). This was accompanied in one instance by a "Mmm, mmm. Good morning, beautiful. Beautiful!" Which i didn't mind, in the least. Though I have to wonder WHOSE LIBIDO IS THAT AWAKE BEFORE 9 AM?? Seriously, I totally get morning sex. No problem. But to actually catcall a woman who is walking TO work in RUNNING SHOES...that takes some serious horniness. in my opinion.

Where was I? Yes, the complete befuddlement of men looking at my legs. I'm just going to blame it on the newly arrived springtime weather which arrived with it the showing of women's appendages that haven't been seen since last October. I mean, if men wore skirts, and then they stopped wearing them in October and they just started wearing them again, I would probably be staring that their legs, too.

Bye babies! More to come!

The Boyfriend

2008-04-15T10:39:00.000-07:00

Having a boyfriend is so much easier than dating. It makes problem solving exponentially simpler. For example
Q: What am I going to do this weekend?
A: Hang out with the boyfriend.

Q: Who am I going to have sex with?
A: The boyfriend.

Q: Who is going to take me out to dinner?
A: The boyfriend.

Q: Who is going to tell me that they like me just the way I am even if my fat is rolling over the top of my jeans?
A: The boyfriend.

Q: Who is going to help me haul this huge, heavy piece of furniture that i just happened to find on the street that is so nice that it doesn't even matter that i have zero free sqare feet in my place but i have to have it because it's FREEEEEE?
A: The boyfriend (and if you're lucky, one of his friends, leaving you free to supervise).

Q: Who is going to empty the mouse trap with the dead, mangled mouse in it?
A: They boyfriend.

And on and on like that.

Now, when you happen to find yourself in the extremely liberating position of SINGLENESS, the answers to all of those questions in 98% percent of cases become much less enticing. This, of course, is after that stage where you lie to yourself about all of the great things about being single. For instance

Q: What am I going to do this weekend?
A: Lay around in my sweatpants eating Ben and Jerry's and drinking wine because i was dating someone for so long that i no longer have any friends to hang out with.

Q: Who am I going to have sex with?
A: No one. My vibrator. That guy i used to sleep with along time ago, shit, except i lost his number. In that order.

Q: Who is going to take me out to dinner?
A: No one. Yourself. In that order. Which is really the same thing.

Q: Who is going to tell me that they like me just the way I am even if my fat is rolling over the top of my jeans?
A: Maybe the homeless guy on the corner asking for change. Maybe. But probably only if you give him some change.

Q: Who is going to empty the mouse trap with the dead, mangled mouse in it?
A: Oh, God. Oh god. Maybe the roommate will do it. No, no, she won't, she definitely won't. Oh God, I think I'm going to vomit. I cannot believe there are absolutely no men in my life who will do this for me. Oh god. I don't even want to touch it. Oh God.

And on and on like that.

Some things i thought of today

2008-04-11T17:23:00.000-07:00

First, that everyone dies of heart failure. I went to Easter dinner at a friend's mom's house somewhere in "this looks a lot like Western Pennsylvania" Long Island, and she is a pediatric ICU nurse who takes care of babies who most likely will die, and she said to me, over dinner, that everyone dies of heart failure. which is true because it's the last thing to go before you die, regardless of why it's going (and where...). But it didn't hit me until today, when i was editing some slides at work (yup, the glories of my job. i know, i know, you wish you were me, but you can't be. because i am.) for a drug that cannot be named because it would probably land me in jail (facetious, i don't really care, but these drug companies are super super anal about their drug names, anywhooo), and it's a drug for something called ACUTE heart failure, which is when heart failure gets really bad. (side note: i always thought that it was weird to call a disease "heart failure" as it implies a one-time deal, as in, my heart failed, and now i'm dead, but no, it's a disease people live with all the time until the LAST time their heart fails. and THEN they're dead.) And THEN, I remembered what my friend's mom said at Easter dinner: Everyone dies of heart failure. And then i started thinking about the relationship between heart failure and a broken heart, and whether there was one, because a friend i was talking to recently said that he didn't want to get into a relationship with a girl he was interested in because he was, (and he didn't come out and say it, but i inferred, and i assume correctly) afraid of her breaking his heart, or him hers. To which i wisely responded: "But it doesn't kill you. Everyone's heart has been broken. And it hurts, but it doesn't kill you. So why don't you just go for it?" But then you have the stories about people who love each other so much that when one partner dies, the other follows closely behind, like with Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. And people like to say that Johnny Cash died of a broken heart because he loved June Carter Cash so much that he didn't want to live if she wasn't living too, but really, he didn't die of a broken heart. He died of heart failure.

I'm thinking about writing a story that explores those concepts a little more deeply. Though, it looks like i might have just done that. Humph. Oh, well.

The second thing I thought today was: "All I need is a baby golden retriever (what are those called? those have a special name? What is it? Oh yeah! Puppy!). All I need is a golden retriever puppy, and i could be in a J.Crew catalog. Well, that and skinny legs." Because i was wearing my new navy sailor mini chino skirt with a blue and white striped button down and a brown cardigan and those brown knee-high riding boots. i was very proud of myself for putting together such a typical and WASPy outfit. I felt like i thoroughly fit in with myself. Also, that it has been a LONG time since men last saw knees and lower thighs. A LONG TIME, friends. In the last 26 years combined, my legs have not had that much attention. If Tom Robbins were to write a book about me (and I hope he does, starring a not nearly as gross older perverted man as in his other books for me to have sex with), it would be titled "Fat Knees and All." No joke.

AND THEN, me and Toya went to a meeting way up on the 7th floor where the executives have their kegs and dancing girls while we minions toil and sweat in the windowless abyss that is the 5th floor (more like toil and shiver, actually, but that's just semantics) to hear a very cute and very nervous Maria Von Trapp look alike (pixie hair cut, ugly jacket) tell us about how we can volunteer at a camp for families affected by AIDS and that the company will LET US HAVE A FREE WEEK OF WORK OFF THAT DOESN'T COUNT TOWARD OUR VACATION. And I was like, "Hmm, be at work...be playing with kids. Be at work...be playing with kids." I believe I will be playing with kids. And also because I want to volunteer to help people who are affected by AIDS. And also because the most beautiful boy i have ever seen in my entire life up to this point including celebrities was sitting in that room today, and do you know what happened, friends, when he opened his mouth? An accent happened, that's what. An Australian accent. And do you know what I did when the meeting lady said "Yes, Jason?" I wrote down his first name on my meeting information sheet so that i could somehow stalk him later with only his first name to go on. And do you know what I did the entire rest of the meeting? I drooled all over my meeting information sheet while i took in his perfectly sculpted jawline and the muscles that bulged oh so subtly through his fatigue-colored button-up. And i said something to Toya, most likely too loudly (because i was titillated AND nervous) like "Kill me now. Or is it 'take me now?'" I AM GOING TO THAT CAMP AND I AM GOING TO STALK THAT BOY AND I AM GOING TO FORCE HIM TO LOVE ME AND MARRY ME AND HAVE MY CHILDREN. All because I want to help families affected by AIDS.

because i've been scolded for not writing

2008-04-07T16:13:00.000-07:00

hello my darling macadamia nuts. i apologize for my absence. i've been woefully under-performing on the writing front during the past month or so. i've been in a wound-licking retreat, but hopefully things are all starting to turn around (Bright Eyes, EVERY NOW AND THEN I FALL APAAART...and i need you now, forever...and i need you more than ever, and if you'll only hold me tiiiiight, we'll be holding on forever, we can make it to the end of the line, your love is like a shadow on me all of the time...). sorry. i get carried away. and i make no promises that those are the actual lyrics. i'm one of those people who don't understand what lyrics are saying half the time and just make up my own. i'd love to give you a witty example, but i've been up since 4 am and nothing is making sense, not even my own fingers at this point.

also, i'm realizing that i don't have much to say on a writing-slash-professional level, except that i haven't been, really, and i don't really want to talk about all of my personal problems (and they are feeling pretty overwhelming right about now), so i'm going to sign off, go watch some mind-numbing television, and then read myself to sleep while trying not to think about lovely, glorious, glowing-tipped cigarettes. which i'm off, at the moment, in case anyone asks.

adios and good night.

i apologize for wasting your time.

Who knew balloons could be magic?

2008-03-19T11:13:00.001-07:00

Overheard in the office today:

"Shooting like injecting, or shooting like film?"

What's interesting about this is i know for a fact they were talking about work.

Also, I was having a pretty blah-bordering-on-one-thing-going-wrong-and-me-turning-into-a-head-eating-cyborg day until UNTIL i remembered that i had THREE (not one, not two, but THREE) boxes of fresh Girl Scout cookies in my desk drawer. Three. So I broke out the Do-si-dos and now i am having a fantastic time eating the entire first sleeve of these oh-so-nutty glorious wonders and not thinking about all the running i'll have to do to make up for it later (or not. i have cramps. i can eat whatever i want, dammit.).

Also, last night i went to this crazy psychedelic wonder of an art performance show by the Big Art Group (that's their name. isn't it WONDERFUL?) made up of a lot of short sketches and the first one i saw was a catholic girl who went to catholic summer camp and loved amy grant and i had a flashback to my ENTIRE life until i was 18. Fantastic. They had all of these video screens set up and while the performers were doing their thing on stage, the screens were showing footage of the performers, and those long skinny balloons, and a bunch (i mean a BUNCH) of hairy women's crotches. like, for 15 minutes. just pictures of naked women's hairy crotches. more hairy crotches than i have ever seen in my whole life COMBINED (probably due to previous reference to life until age 18, but whatevs. LOTS and LOTS of hairy crotches) and i had a few beers and then, and THEN, the most amazing thing happened. two men came on stage with those long balloons you make balloon animals out of (the kind they were showing video of earlier), and these two guys were just COVERED in them. they had them on like a big suit, wrapped around their arms and legs and heads, and then coming off of them like plumes or branches, and they were moving real slow-like and it was graceful and colorful and beautiful, and then they danced around each other, still very slow, and getting closer to one another, and then they started leaning in and away from each other faster, faster, faster, until they collided and started fighting and popping balloons, and then they were rolling on the floor, the balloons popping and disappearing until the two of them lay (mostly) naked and breathing heavy on their backs on the floor, all the balloons popped. I can't even imagine how exhilarating it would have been to watch that while on LSD.

Bad News Bears

2008-03-13T07:11:00.000-07:00

Bad news, kids.

I've just had my very first ever rejection from an institution of higher learning. Rejection from men? That I am well versed in, friends. I've been learning how to navigate the subtle underpinnings of potential-romantic-partner rejection since my first crush on one Jonathan Gardner circa 1988 (we were in kindergarten. I was in love.) when I decided to make known my romantic intentions by strategically placing my mat next to his during naptime and kissing him when he wasn't looking. To which he replied by yelling "Ech!" and wiping his mouth furiously. (or something. I don't remember. It was 1988.) I got a good talking to from Mrs. Foster about how "nice girls don't kiss boys." But I've never been a nice girl, have I? And it was totally worth it.

Back to 2008. Educational rejection. Now this is a completely different animal. For once, it has nothing to do with the way my face is shaped, or how much fat i happen to be wearing, or whether or not my clothes are fashionable, things i don't generally put much stock in anyway. No, no, this rejection is based instead on the baring of my innermost soul and desire, my utmost creative effort, WHO I AM AT THE VERY FOUNDATION OF MY BEING, and all of the things that are inside, all of the things i generally rely on for my self-esteem, hooking of romantic partners, general advancement in life, purpose, goals, dreams, etc, etc, etc...well, with one piece of paper, SLC took one giant, hot, steamy shit all over it.

Thankfully, though, I learned a very valuable lesson this week from a little show called One Tree Hill. It was this quote: Blessed are those whose hearts bend, for they will never be broken. My heart is bent, friends, it is. But thankfully, it's not broken. *tear*

yoga and milk

2008-03-11T10:53:00.000-07:00

i lay flat on my back, the ringing of the Tibetan singing bowls resounding between my ears, filling my entire consciousness. i sink into the floor, belly rising and falling with my long, deep breath. Some days, like today, I have no trouble relaxing deeply and quickly into meditation. My practice was more difficult today than usual and pushed me to that fine line where hard work becomes teary frustration. i barely held myself from falling over the line. but the closer i get to the line, the more concentrated my efforts have to be. i believe this determined concentration is what leads to these deep, full meditations. Usually, my meditation goes in one of three directions. The first is distraction, when i can't fully relax into meditation, usually because i don't care for the teacher or there have been too many distractions (real or otherwise) during class. The second is a deep quiet, probably what most people think of when they meditate. There are no conscious thoughts, just the feeling of, well, being, i guess. being the type A thinker/worrier that i am, the only other time i'm not actively thinking about something is when i'm asleep, so it's nice when i can be somewhat conscious to enjoy it. The third kind of meditation i've experienced is when I'm lying there, kind of mulling the "words of wisdom" the teacher has just read (he or she generally reads a quote at the end of class, before the bowls) and suddenly having an epiphany of one sort or another. today, my meditation takes me somewhere else.

Back to my 2-year-old self. I am walking next to my father, holding onto his blue jeans. We are in the barn where we get milk. I can feel the heavy rough fabric of his jeans. i look down and see my own tiny sneakers, my short legs, my slightly rounded belly. I look at my small hand. I see adults, who look huge to me, speaking to each other. I stare at things I've never seen before: hay, cows. We take the empty gallon jugs with us, and they give them back full of milk. While we are waiting for the jugs to be filled, my father lifts me up so that I can see the cows at their eye level. The strongest sense I get is of this absolute innocence. Everything is new. Everything is an experience. It's no wonder that children are so happy and excited all of the time. Everything is something that has never happened before. As I felt the newness and innocence wash over me, happiness did as well. It goes without saying that life was simpler then. When I was two. Obviously it was. I lay there as long as I could on my yoga mat, letting the memory fill me, feeling as much as I could something that adults don't get too much of, especially when they don't have children of their own: wide-eyed innocence, joy in simple things, that feeling of being small and protected, of being lifted into your father's huge arms and of being shown something for the first time.

The Woods With the Fallen Alive Trees*

2008-03-03T20:08:00.000-08:00

There were these woods, when I was a child, that seemed magical. They were the woods behind my best friend Erin’s house—the parish house—the woods where the trees, the kind with a million long, thin branches, had fallen on their sides, offering us canopied boughs of small, richly green leaves. Erin and I would run out of that small house, with the old, stained carpet and the musty smell, our skinny, soft-hairy legs and big feet carrying us with abandon to the place where we were sure no adults had ever been, weren’t sure could even find. We yelled “C’mon!” and “This way!” as the ferns lapped at our ankles and the briars tried to grab us (but we were running too fast), the late afternoon sun landing in dappled spots on the fertile brown earth. And then we would stop, our thin chests heaving, laughing, at the place where the trees were on their sides. They weren’t dead, or didn’t look it, yet, at least. Their leaves were still green, their million fingers still supple. When I think about it now, it all has a soft pink glow, and even though I know that is impossible, it’s how I like to remember it. Erin with her honey hair and freckles and big round brown eyes and me with my wild untamed curls and flashing blue eyes. She was the pastor’s daughter. I was…well, I was just one of the poor kids. Where we went to school, there were the rich kids and the pastors’ kids. I was neither, but the pastors’ kids didn’t mind that I was poor. They were, too.

We had things in common, the pastors’ kids and I. Our clothes never fit right. Our pencils were the yellow kind from the dollar store, you know, the ones with the erasers that just scratch at the paper, leaving a pink smudge. Our moms drove station wagons that were as old as we were. And we never got out of school for a week to go to the Caribbean.

Not that we understood at the time what all of it meant, really. We knew we were less, the rich kids made sure of that. Some of the poor kids tried to befriend the rich kids, to see what they could get. If you were friends with a rich kid, you could go to her big house, drink soda from a glass bottle, play with her American Girl dolls. But you never wanted her to come play at your house. No, you made sure you always went to hers.

I always hated it when the rich kids gloated about the nice things they had, because I knew it wasn’t my fault I was poor any more than it was their fault they were rich. I knew it didn’t make me less or them more, but I could never explain that to them. I got angry instead. And because I had no way to express that anger, I hid myself in books, because books couldn’t tell me that my pants were too short.

Erin and I met on the first day of third grade. She wore a sherbet-colored taffeta dress and a bow in her hair. I don’t remember what I wore: I’ve tried to forget everything I’ve ever worn. Our assigned seats were the two front ones in row three and row four. That was the first time I spent a year in that classroom. The second time would be sixth grade, when Abby Staibel had breasts before everyone else, and would proclaim in the locker room after gym class, “I am a woman now!” Boy, was I glad when her family moved to Utah.

Erin was shy, and I guess I was, too. I hadn’t really had many friends before that; I wouldn’t have many after either. But we became friends in the way that children can, before they are hurt too much and know better. And so, on sunny, warm afternoons after school, her mom would drive us home in one of their secondhand Subarus (they had two) and we would drop our backpacks and run full tilt into the woods, along the skinny footpath, arms in front of our faces to push away cobwebs and branches, until we got to the place with the sleeping trees, the ones that beckoned to us with their countless shimmering leaves. We crawled through the maze of their arms, climbing to the top of their bough-mountains, and lay on our backs, splayed across the branches, staring up at the willowy trees that still stood and the way the sun looked like a disco ball, shimmering above their long, dancing arms. We would talk about whatever it is 12-year-olds talk about, and we would forget that our shoes were too tight and that our sweaters itched. We forgot that we were supposed to feel inferior. Because at that moment, we were the queens of our green-branched castles, warding off dragons and being rescued by knights. We were the wives preparing dinner for late-working husbands (the only kind we knew of) and caring for the babies sleeping by the fire. We were the Indians in our tee pees, shooting arrows at the attacking cowboys. (Or was it the other way around?) We transformed those woods, and I guess you could say that they transformed us, too. Because when we were in the woods, with the fallen alive trees, we alone determined our fate.

*A little bit of fiction for those of you who have asked.

Amy Hempel

2008-03-02T16:20:00.000-08:00

Let me begin by saying this: Amy Hempel is a goddess.

And this: at the risk of sounding trite, or like i'm lying, I have just added her to my list of women that I would go gay for, should the opportunity arise. Here is my list:

1. Maggie Gyllenhal (of course)
2. Angelina Jolie
3. Amy Hempel

From my vantage point in the "Lillian somethingorother Writer's House" (about halfway back a narrow room, behind a doorway, sans doors, that used to lead from what i assume was the drawing room into what i imagine was the parlor), I watched as Ms. Hempel took her place behind a small podium with a microphone. I sat a few chairs away from the speaker, set on one of those old wooden folding chairs. She has thick white hair, but as I watched her read from (the scarcest book i've ever tried to buy) her collection of short stories ("The Collected Stories") I swear, she wasn't a day over 26. She was breathtaking. I witnessed this transformatory magic as her words swelled toward, and then enveloped me. I was in love.

She writes short stories and what she calls "short shorts" that are only a page or two long. I am in awe of her brevity. And how much meaning she packs into every. single. word. Let me find you an excerpt. Here's one, the end of a short story about a friend who dies.

"I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.
In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign to her newborn.
Baby, drink milk.
Baby, play ball.
And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby, come hug, fluent now in the language of grief."

Fuck me. This woman is a genius.

After the reading (which could have gone on for hours, in my book), the guy (an NYU professor with prematurely gray hair and a high voice), asked her some questions before they opened it up to the audience. I always hate that part, cringing with (I assume) the writer every time a precocious 19-year-old asks a stupid question. Yet, i never have the nerve to ask one of my own. I'm strangely timid at readings. I go alone. I sit in the back. I take notes. I buy the book if i have the money. I leave, taking a good long look at the writer's face before I do. I suppose I'm looking for whatever it is that I hope I have, too.

Although I loved her writing, i was a little disappointed with her answers. I don't just go to readings to try to glimpse the writer's soul or hear them read: I go because I want them to teach me something about writing that will help me write. She said a few helpful but relatively clicheed things, that beginning writers should "be obsessed," that successful writing is not about talent but about will and wanting it most, that you should "do the thing that unglues you." But when it came down to discussing her process, she was...a bit flighty. The most interesting thing she said was that most writers write about the "main event" but that her stories often look to the side, at what is happening beside that event. She said that she writes a story already knowing the first and last lines, but that she doesn't think of them: they come to her. She says that she doesn't edit after she writes: it COMES OUT THAT WAY. She said, when asked how she writes that way, "Oh, it's really a lot like magic." MAGIC?? ARE YOU KIDDING ME, MAGIC? I CAN'T DO MAGIC! my insides screamed. "That's it. I'm fucked."

She reminded me a lot of Sarah, whose spiritual/other-worldly sense is probably stronger than her other five combined. I bet Sarah would have understood what Amy was talking about. But I didn't, and I wish I had. I try to not even rely on physical things i can touch; can you imagine relying on magic?

Though, maybe there's something there. The something that you can't always put your finger on about the literature that moves you. I guess you could call that magic. Maybe we all have the magic, and it's just a matter of letting it out. Maybe it was that magic that i was looking for as I left quietly, gazing at her face.

leap day

2008-02-29T11:40:00.000-08:00

also, why can't the extra day this year be during a somewhat reasonable month? July, for example. Who wants an extra day in February?

Yeah, yeah, i know, in the grand scheme of things, an extra day means summer will be "technically" pushed back a day, but it's the psychological aspect i'm talking about here. How depressing is it that we have an extra winter day when winter is depressing enough?

Also, i've never heard all of the folklore about leap day/year until today, which apparently has something to do with all the women running around trying to coerce men into marrying them. good riddance to that bullshit. seriously, who came up with the idea that women are somehow incomplete until marriage?

stopping that before i get started. i'm way too cranky to get started. though i will say that i'm reading a pretty good "social history" non-fiction book right now called "Bachelor Girl" about single woman-hood during the past 150 years. I'm up to about 1910. What i've learned so far is that single women were generally regarded as either spinsters or whores. Luckily, in 2008, you can be both at the same time.

huzzah.

blah

2008-02-29T09:13:00.001-08:00

So, I'm deep in what i've finally come to realize (after several subsequent years of wanting to kill myself come mid-to-late February) as my "winter depression." I feel like crap, i'm frustrated, i'm bored, i'm tired of being inside all the time, i'm tired of having to wear long sleeves that are NEVER long enough because of my freakishly long arms, i feel like everyone hates me, and i'm stressed about school, work, life, friends, and where i'm going to live. i'm also seriously considering deleting my blog, as i feel like i can't write what i want to without making people angry, which makes me feel like i need to censor myself, which completely paralyzes my writing. when, in fact, most of what i write has nothing to do with anyone specifically and has a lot more to do with my own personal psychoses and frustrations over large, general things in my life and personal hangups that have been honed for YEARS. in all likelihood, anything i write has nothing whatsoever to do with you. so please don't take it personally. just because i express frustration that all my friends are married does NOT mean that i dislike you, married friend. just because i write about my frustration with ungrateful men does NOT mean that i am angry at you, sir, or that i think you are ungrateful. also, i am almost always willing to discuss any of my views and listen to yours. if you disagree with me, say something. it's not going to offend me.

i want to go to sleep and not wake up until May.

love and hate

2008-02-21T08:26:00.000-08:00

hiya, babies! how are you? it's been a few days, so i thought i'd write something, even though i'm not sure yet what that's going to be.

let's start with the BF. I know i sometimes get frustrated with him, but at the moment i'm so enamored it's kind of disgusting and i would like to just say that he showed up on my doorstep at a completely reasonable hour last night OUT OF THE BLUE and we snuggled and talked in my bed until the wee hours of the night. and he said something sickening like "I love looking into your eyes," and then i said something sickening, like "I love how we can just lay around and talk." in fact, here's a short list of the things i love about him.

1. he likes my fat (erm, curves)
2. he likes me in spite of (and possibly in part because of) my crazy psychopathic tendencies (like wanting to plan everything, or flipping out over minute infractions)
3. he is a fantastic listener
4. he always knows when something is wrong (sometimes before i do)
5. he is hot, hot, hot, and does that boy know how to dance! mmm.
6. he owns more pairs of shoes than i do.

did you just throw up a little in your mouth? sorry about that. i couldn't help myself.

moving on. I read an article this morning about my alma mater, one Oral Roberts University, which fucked me up more than i care to let on. if you don't know the entire story, it's documented practically daily by the Tulsa World. Because nothing else really happens down there. (HA! I just got a really weird mental image of the "down there" of the United States being in Oklahoma. Oklahoma, the vagina of the US. god, how depressing!) The first article i read was about how the place is on the upswing, because a guy basically said "I'll give you $62 million dollars if you let me make the rules" and ORU was like "yeah, sure. sounds good." which has a couple of alumni i know really excited that the place is now on the right track (these are former "I hate ORUers" who are now giving money to the university). but i'm (more than) a little skeptical. isn't that just trading one monarchy for another? isn't that continuing the tradition of BOWING TO THE DOLLAR instead of God? I'm not convinced. I mean, anything, ANYTHING is better than Richard and Lindsey. A monkey, a chocolate bar, a waitress from Hooters. Marilyn Manson. Anything. (side note: although, i do actually have a lot of respect for MM. i like the guy. he's smart and well-spoken, and i think in many ways he is more "christian" than most self-proclaimed christians.) But I'm not sure that the corruption is gone. i'm not sure that ORU hasn't traded one "evil" for another. the second article i read was about a former accountant who has stepped forward and alleges that ORU was funneling $1 billion annually through the university out to not only Richard and Lindsey but also to the Regents. Though I doubt that it's possible that that much money was coming through ORU, it would explain why the Regents were so reluctant to deal with the allegations brought by the former professors who filed the lawsuit. What? More corruption in the church? I'm shocked.

all of that to say that i'm not convinced that anything has changed. and it will be a long time before i am. at this point, though i feel much less like blowing up the prayer tower or hoping to someday watch a giant tornado level the campus, i am still so scarred by my four years there that i'm not sure that any amount of change could convince me to ever forgive ORU its former evils. and although some former "I hate ORUers" have come to a place where they are now supporting the university financially, i don't know that i will ever even be able to speak well of it. I'm still angry, and it's going to take more than a little restructuring to change that. ORU took my soul. it's not getting my money, too.

ONE is the BEST NUMBER EVER!

2008-02-17T19:36:00.000-08:00

so, i just discovered the joys of Google Reader. More on this later.

I also just clicked on my own blog in Google Reader and read the title. which is in your view up there right now. and thought..."hmm, haven't been writing on those lines in a couple of weeks." so, i'm going to try to amend that, as winter makes me an angry suicidal depressive and all i want to do is eat, sleep, and murder people with my eyes. right. and yes, there probably is medication for that. but i'm averse to pills and wouldn't take it anyway, so that is a moot point. thank you for pointing it out, though. you are a good friend.

So, due to winter-ness and angry suicidal depressiveness, i haven't been having too many adventures of late. the whole of the last 48 hours or so of mine have been spent largely within the confines of my own apartment, as the evil twins have LEFT THE CITY for the weekend and won't be returning until tuesday at the earliest and wednesday at the latest. i have been reveling in my complete aloneness by leaving as much of my stuff as possible scattered in completely obvious places ALL OVER the common area, watching TV LOUDLY until late into the night, and walking from my room, to the shower, and back again, completely NUDE. Also, i have rearranged the cupboards to just exactly the way i like them (and the freezer, too), smoked INSIDE, and had an imaginary fight in my head with evil roommate 2 about how she is no longer allowed to sit on my couch or use my dishes since she took all of her free-and-now-in-theaters-so-the-only-way-i-can-see-them-is-to-pay-
$11.50-which-i'm-not-going-to-do movies and hid them somewhere. (she works at a talent agency and they get all of the "reviewer" copies of new releases. ER2 USED to put them beside the TV for all of our enjoyment. then they "mysteriously" disappeared. which i'm trying very hard not to be angry about because that would make me just as immature as her. but seriously. she uses my couch. i want to use her movies.)

Moving on. The one thing i HAVEN'T done so far during this gloriously alone all all alone in my apartment alone with no roommates at all all weekend alone for THREE DAYS alone with no roommates, is laundry. Why? You ask. Let me tell you. (i am the queen of segues. did you see what i just did there? brilliant!)

So, i get off the train coming home from work on Valentine's Day, visions of sugar plums dancing in my head (or vascillating wildly between excited expectation and premature disappointment, whatever), when i get an acrid whiff of smoke and notice that there are 6 fire trucks in front of the building across the street, along with several police cruisers and a few pedestrians. being the (proudly) calloused New Yorker that i now am (see previous post), i was tempted to look at my fingernails while passing by seemingly so nonplussed as to NOT EVEN CARE that there were fire trucks across the street, or possibly to not even notice. Until i realized that firemen were carting the burnt remains of washers and dryers out of my very own laundromat!

now, as you know, i am a fun and carefree kind of girl...as long as the fun and the carefree-ness are properly planned out ahead of time. so imagine my dismay as i realized that I AM GOING TO HAVE TO CHANGE LAUNDROMATS. which means

1. Physically finding a new laundromat
2. Carting my 25 pounds of laundry further than across the street
3. Doing my laundry in completely unfamiliar surroundings with unfamiliar neighborhood people
4. Developing an entirely new "laundry routine" (I won't bore you with the old one. but i had it down to a 90-minute science of efficiency and absolute perfection)
5. READJUSTING BACK to my old routine once this laundromat re-opens, if it ever does, but i don't know if it will because what if that mean Asian lady torched the place for the insurance money and now it will be some kind of terrible sushi place or something?

So, I've basically decided never to do laundry again.

Is it just me, or am I becoming crazier and more anal retentive as I age?

All right then, we've covered how i'm alone in my apartment (please do not come kill me, as i am having a lovely time. if you would like to kill one of my crazy roommates, however, please let me know and i'll help you set it up.), how the laundromat burned to the ground (slight exaggeration. everything is still standing, though the building is empty), AND everything I've accomplished this weekend. Oh! Including my taxes! Which i did for the first time by myself and i am anticipating more than one thousand dollars of a refund, which i think is not enough considering that i am a quiet, well-mannered citizen who barely needs any government services at all and believes that her good behavior should be rewarded with a refund of all the money the government didn't personally spend on her this year. which would be all of it. but i'll take the thousand bucks. of my own money. which i gave you and you've been keeping so you can give it back and make me feel good about this whole "I work hard so the government can squander my dollars and i can only afford to live with two crazy people instead of by myself because i pay taxes" racket.

i'm rambling. i know. i'm beginning to remember the occasional downsides to living alone.

1. squalor
2. talking to inanimate objects/using the internet as your sole social outlet
3. eating (ALL THE TIME. no WONDER i used to be so fat!)
4. noticing every single itty bitty tiny noise and thinking it is a large Serbian man who is breaking in with the express purpose of slitting my throat and raping me.

OH! Right! This is the best part. Well, maybe not for you. but i'm excited about it.

so, i haven't really had a chance to sit down since the beginning of the year and really think about my life. i like to do a kind of "life assessment" around this time every year, you know, because it's a new year and my birthday's in february, and i'm a goal-oriented type-A perfectionist who needs to have something to work toward. or...what? i don't know. but it's not pretty.

ANYWHO, you still there? should i stop now? i should. but i don't want to.

anywho, i've been spending a lot of time during the last few days thinking about my "priorities." This is kind of like new year's resolutions but not. so, one of my priorities is to get my finances in order. i'm usually pretty good with money, but since i moved to new york, i've been pretty lax with my expendable income, and as a result, feel like i'm floundering a little bit. SO, the first thing i decided was to write down where every dollar of my money goes for the next month so i can see where i'm spending money. then i can adjust. but what i found has already started to happen is that i'm thinking about my money and where it's going more, and so i'm being more deliberate about how i'm spending it. For example, when i went to the grocery store today, i was comparison shopping the cans of beans. the first can i picked up was 99 cents, which i usually would have just thrown in the cart. but i looked around and i found that the store brand was on sale for only 50 cents! Half price! So, i got out of the grocery store for around $38 bucks with two big bags of food that i guess generally would have cost me around $50 if i hadn't been paying closer attention.

So, i haven't fully formed my "priorities list" or whatever it is i'm going to call it. basically i'm looking at my whole life versus what things are important to me and what goals i want to attain and then tweaking things to achieve/be happy. i'll update you when i've got it mapped out a little better.

enough for now. byeee!

completely unoriginal valentine's day blog

2008-02-14T09:01:00.000-08:00

is there ANYONE in the western world who actually LIKES valentine's day? Seriously, anyone? I would like to meet them. Because regardless of your personal life, Valentine's Day is bound to be frought with 1) too-high expectations, 2) self-pity, 3) anxiety, and 4) crushedness.

at least when you're single, you know exactly what to expect. when you've got a boyfriend, you WANT to expect, but you don't want to expect too much, because you don't want to be disappointed, but you do know that he cares about you, so that means he's going to do something, right? but then maybe he won't...this is the anxiety. i'm hoping to avoid the self-pity and crushedness this year. gah.

i don't remember ever having a good valentine's day. Oop! Wait. Yes, there was one! I was in 4th grade, which would have made me, um, roughly 10 years old. I was "going with" (what did we used to call it? god, it was so long ago) a cute little black boy named Chris Byers. And on Valentine's Day, he delivered. I got a box of candy and a cheap gold-plated heart necklace that turned my neck green almost immediately. I remember being so embarrassed to tell my mom that i had a boyfriend that i left the chocolate at school in my "cubby." i don't think i ever even ate it. (i've never been a huge fan of chocolate. strangely.) but i'll tell you one thing. that boy liked me. and he let me know it.

i admit, this is probably part of the reason that i dislike valentine's day now (and have since). because if it's so easy that a 10-YEAR-OLD BOY can do it, why don't more men get it right? For Chrissakes, it's not that difficult. And women are so easy to buy for: flowers, chocolate, stuffed animals, jewelry, dinner. Granted, the only thing on that list that really excites me is dinner. and jewelry. but a heartfelt gesture, no matter how off-point, is still a heartfelt gesture. why, then, do so many men balk and simply do nothing? C'mon guys! You know you're supposed to do something. So do something! It doesn't even have to be a big something. it doesn't have to be an expensive something. A card with a handwritten note in it telling us how much you care about us. A carefully picked CD or book. A token of your love and/or affection. I don't need diamonds. I don't even really need dinner (well, I do need dinner, due to my blood sugar issues, but it doesn't have to be fancy). All I want to know is that I am important to you, that you care about me, and that you feel lucky to have me in your life. that's it.

i think it's a pretty small price to pay for guaranteed sex.

the beauty of the unknown

2008-02-13T20:29:00.000-08:00

i feel like i've been scattered into a million swirling snowflakes that are hovering above the city. i feel like nothing is certain, that any part of me could land anywhere. i feel stagnant, hovering above the chaos of the city, unable to settle as i sweep past buildings and trees and the lights in Times Square, and the hunched overcoats. I feel cold and alone. I feel shaken and stirred. I feel like this entire city is my home but i have nowhere to rest. still but on a precipice. calm with a storm on the horizon. the hush before the starting gun.

on your mark. get set. run.

in six months, my life could be entirely different. or entirely the same. and it feels odd to say that i have no idea which it will be. questions are writhing like snakes in a pit, one, then another, then another, sliding on top of the others, into my view.

where will i live when my lease is up?
will i get into grad school?
will my work pay for grad school?
will i try to find a better-paying job?
will i try to find a cheaper apartment further away, or will i be able to afford to live on my own?
who will be my confidantes?
who will be my lover?
will i be able to afford a vacation, and will i be able to find someone to go with me? (yes, i know, not exactly a life question, but important, nonetheless)
will i cut my hair? (haha, NO!)
will i be in love?

i know that some of these things are simply unknowable. which is what drives me crazy.
however, i also know that i will adjust. i will think hard and long about what is most important to me (saving money or living alone?). and i will know what to do. i will be fine. i know it. i always am. but that doesn't stop a part of me from freaking the eff out about the unknown now. before i know it.

which is one of those things i really like about life: the drama of it all. the change. the ambush. you think everything is fine and calm and peaceful and maybe, just maybe you've started to figure everything out, and then KA-BLAM! Batman breaks through the door and starts throwing punches and next thing you know, you're in the middle of an epic comic-book scale punch-throwing, onomonopoiec-word seeing fight with some crazy fat man dressed like a penguin. POW! BLAT! SCHMOOZELE! (i made up that last one.)

BOOM. and you know you're still alive.

yes, actually, i am planning to party like it's my birthday

2008-02-08T10:29:00.000-08:00

BECAUSE IT IS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i was thinking today, because it's my birthday, about birthdays. specifically, about how people react to their birthdays. i think there are two types of birthday people.

1. The denyers
2. The shameless attention whores

Denyers won't admit, even to themselves, that it's their birthday. They tell no one, they lie about it if someone brings it up, and they shut themselves in their apartments/rooms/closets/bathrooms curled in the fetal position and rocking from side to side, waiting for it all to be over.

Shameless attention whores, on the other hand, begin announcing their birthday NO LATER than six months before the event. This usually begins with me, SHOUTING TO EVERYONE on August 8, "HEY! IT'S MY HALF-BIRTHDAY! GET READY! IN SIX MONTHS, IT WILL BE MY REAL BIRTHDAY!" then giving people weekly updates to let them know just how much longer they have before i expect them to shower me with attention, presents, cake (mmmm, a cake shower...can you even imagine????), love, adoration, facebook comments, text messages, phone calls, singing telegrams, clowns, strippers/exotic dancers, vacations to cabo, etc. also, attention whores pretty much base their self esteem for the entire year on how many people show them love on their birthday.

so far, this is the best birthday i've had since i was 21. AND IT'S ONLY 1:35 PM. AND I'M AT WORK.

I've gotten a LOT of love so far today (strangely, though, no vacations to Cabo. but it's still early). my boyfriend called AND texted at midnight last night, my mom called this morning, and several friends have texted, e-mailed, sent e-cards (2 birthday, 1 mammogram!), called, facebook/myspace messaged/commented, or walked over to my desk to give me a birthday song and dance routine (okay, only one of those. so far. but keep 'em coming.)

ANYHOW, all of that to say that it's been a really really really long time since i had a good birthday (really). and i feel so blessed (agh, i hate that word, but it's true) and lucky to have such a supportive, loving family of friends (and family, too, but mostly friends).

and to not be sitting alone in a big, scary house drinking a bottle of wine by myself and watching "Sex and the City" and crying because i have no friends.

man, 23 was rough.

i heart you all.

thank you for indulging my attention-whoreishness.

leggings are not pants

2008-02-08T10:28:00.001-08:00

what more can i really say?

birthday madness

2008-02-07T13:51:00.000-08:00

and now, back to my generally cheery-yet-at-the-same-time-wittily-sarcastic and adorable demeanor.

apologies for the manic-depressive episode yesterday. i think it has something to do with getting 60-seconds a day worth of sunshine, living with the spawn of Satan, and turning, ack, 26 tomorrow.

i'll do my best not to let it happen again. though, if you'll notice, all three of the above contributors to my mental state are for the most part beyond my control.

speaking of, i never understood my mom when she said, "You control your mood."

No, MOM, I don't. I control (or don't) what i say. i do not control how i FEEL. THAT is called repression. which is your problem, not mine.

so. there.

on the bright side, i am about to go hit all of the budget slutty-dress-and-other-party-accessories-for-your-body retailers within a two-block radius to find a party shirt-dress-other revealing accoutrement to wear for my birthday tomorrow. Whoever said you can't shop at Charlotte Russe when you're about to turn 26 was wrong, wrong, wrong! Baby Prostitute store, here i come!

I will let you know how it goes tomorrow. ON MY BIRTHDAY. TOMORROW. BIRTHDAY. TOMORROW. BIRTHDAY.

tomorrow

birthday

yay! let's celebrate impending wrinkles/fatness/sterility! woot!

get divorced. i'll feel better.

2008-02-06T13:49:00.000-08:00

i hate it that you're all* married. because i feel like my relationship problems seem stupid, or tawdry, like you're listening with your hands to your mouths, hiding your wry smiles, thinking, "aw, how adorable!" looking knowingly at your spouse, saying, "remember, honey, when we used to fight about such silly things?"

don't get me wrong. i DO NOT want to be married. i just want ALL of you not to be married either. because when i'm cranky, like today, i don't have a single single girlfriend to call and say "let's go get trashed." or when i'm having relationship problems, like today, i don't have a single girlfriend to call and say "what the fuck is he thinking?" without hearing an adorable anecdote about her mostly perfect "but we still have our bad days" husband.

who is going to come over and help me get ready for my birthday party?

who is going to run over with a tub of ice cream and a good chick flick when i'm depressed?

who is going to wail with me about the lack of decent men in this city?

who is going to get gussied up with me to go to bars where we will unsuccessfully try to pick up men while getting completely drunk?

NO ONE. BECAUSE YOU ARE ALL MARRIED. and you have to check with your husbands first. and you're annoying secure in your relationships. and you have all the fucking answers. i'm sorry. i don't want answers. i want some befuddled commisseration, okay? I want you not to know why men are so frustrating, too.

is that too much to ask?

there, married kyle. there's your fucking question of the day. "is that too much to ask?"

*i may be exaggerating. but i'm upset. and that's how i feel, even if it's not true.

disappointment

2008-02-06T08:26:00.000-08:00

sometimes i wonder if i had met an ex later in life, if we could have been happy together.

sometimes i wonder how my life would be different if my mother had been 25 instead of 16.

sometimes i wonder if i'm doing the right thing, if i'm working hard enough, if i'm where i'm supposed to be.

i wonder who decides that--supposed to and should

or whether these are just expectations that are sure to be unfulfilled?

have you ever noticed that when you shave, you definitely won't get laid...but every damn time you don't, some guy is in your pants faster than you can say "razor"?

is this a matter of expectation, or simply Murphy's law of body hair?

why do men care so much when they disappoint you, yet they don't seem to do much to avoid it?

do you ever think about all of the decisions you could have made differently and try to surmise where you'd be now?

i could have been a college dropout with a child to a man i never loved

i could have been a missionary in Africa to babies orphaned by AIDS

i could have married because i was ready to and not because it was right

i would have been miserable.

birthdays always make me sad

they remind me that i only have so much time and that i don't know what to do with it

don't get me wrong, i'm not complaining

most days i'm happier than i've ever been

it doesn't keep me from wondering, though

if i'm on the right path, or wandering in the correct direction

how do we ever know if we're doing anything right

if anything is right, anyway.

a writing update

2008-02-04T13:17:00.001-08:00

i haven't written much in the last several weeks, most probably because of the frenzy of writing i did leading up to my application to grad school, which was due January 15. unless you count this blog, which is more writing than i've done in a long time, not counting the October novel. or the fact that even though i fancy myself a "writer" i do much much less writing than i would like. or like to admit.

so, imagine my surprise when, last evening, i oddly found myself in front of my computer, web browser closed, with just a blank Word document open. Oh! I thought to myself. I suppose I should write something, then. I began writing, as i always do when i sit down with little purpose or direction, about writing. Then, as i sometimes do, i decided i should try writing something that didn't sound like a diary entry.

so, i wrote a poem. and remembered why i don't write poems. i'm terrible at poetry. but hey, i wrote something, right? i would insert an excerpt here, but it really is terrible, and i'm on my work computer, so i can't.

I'm not sure why I'm avoiding my current story, which is about a mother and daughter who don't want each other but end up needing each other (or some variation on that theme). I think it's because i feel like i started really strong and the more i write on it, the worse it gets.

I also had another idea that i haven't started on yet, about a mortician. That's all you get on that one, for now anyway.

And i have yet to read through or edit the novel i wrote in October. Though I'm tempted to trash it and call it what i suspect it was...an extended exercise in getting the cobwebs out of my system and showing myself that i do, in fact, have the discipline to write 50,000 words in 31 days.

i think my next goal will be writing something worth reading.

which is how i end up not writing anything for extended periods of time.

ugh.

a REAL new yorker now

2008-02-02T11:09:00.000-08:00

hi again! didja miss me? i missed you. really. i did. man, i am farting like crazy today. that's the great thing about being alone. you can fart all you want and it doesn't matter. or pick the gunk out of your toenails. or masturbate. whatever you want! that's why i love being alone. why do you love being alone?

i know i said a couple of posts ago that i was going to start doing a "question of the day." and then the universe stomped on my baby toe and broke it, thus derailing my line of thought for a few days, but i am back, people. i am back! right. so, in case you were wondering, the question up there, in that last paragraph, was NOT the question of the day. that was just a random question. though it may end up being the question of the day if i don't think of anything better by the end of this post. which i have entitled (as you may or may not have noticed) "a REAL new yorker now." (i just farted like 6 times writing that paragraph)

Like most women everywhere all over the planet who are pretty much any adult age do, i base whether or not i am having a great new york life on how directly it correlates to anything i've ever seen in "Sex and the City." And last night, i had a VERY NEW YORK moment. i don't know how many people live here. A lot, okay? Which means that when i lived in West Bumblefuck, I never ever believed it when Carrie or Miranda or Charlotte or Samantha just "happened" to run into someone they used to fuck on the street. I thought to myself, "There are a gajillion people in New York, and they run into that guy? Yeah, right!"

But then, I moved to New York. And what I found out was this: i know less than 1% of the population of this city, easily, probably less than one half of 1%. And yet, every few weeks, i run into someone i know on the street or in a store or in the subway. my theory (which i'm still working on), is something like a ven diagram (and if i knew how to put pictures in my posts, i would draw one for you and put it right here: BLOOP. Where that bloop was. but i don't know how. so you will have to imagine it with me. because i can't see one either. okay, so my theory is that everyone you know is in New York and everyone you know...hmmm, is this really like a ven diagram? nevermind. my point is that everyone you know is probably somewhat like you and runs in the same kind of circles as you and goes to the same kinds of places, so it makes sense if you run into people you know. also, this is a very tiny island. there aren't many places for people to go. i mean, there are. but there aren't. does that make sense?

ALL of that to say that last night, the boyfriend (who has informed me that "Bud" is not a proper moniker and would like to be called "something sexier") and I (and my crutches, and the torrential downpour) went to see a friend of mine perform in a monologue slam (which she won last month, btw). after the show (in which she was amazing but didn't win because the douchebag stage guy forgot to put up a chair for her), she, her husband, the boyfriend, me, and her "photographer" and his wife, traipsed off to look for a close bar because i was on crutches and 80% of my body weight is in my legs, making their use relatively uncomfortable. we found a suitably nondescript Irish bar in NYU territory that didn't seem to be full of too many underage college kids. Booths lined the wall opposite the bar. We found an empty booth, and as everyone was taking their coats off, i heard my name, in stereo, from the booth i was standing in front of.

I didn't hear it at first, then thought someone must be yelling at someone else, but eventually realized i must be the closest person with my name to them and looked over.

It was an ex-boyfriend and several of his female friends that we used to hang out with. My friends saw a bigger, better booth and beelined over, and i said i'd be there in a second. I smiled, asked how they were. They asked why i was on crutches. I told them. I looked at the ex. He was smiling, that light in his eyes. He apparently had forgotten that i had treated him like shit. Well, that's probably good, i thought to myself. At least he wasn't a jerk. After a minute, i politely excused myself to my friends. I hobbled to the booth where they sat, thinking how crazy it was that we just wandered into a random bar and happened to run into my ex. and then, i thought, Oh my God, I must be a real New Yorker. I've lived here long enough that I'm running into exes with my new boyfriend! I'm in! I made it! This totally happened in "Sex and the City"!

We get our drinks. We talk. We laugh. The ex-boyfriend awkwardly brings over a beer at some point "to help my foot get better." i thank him. then i notice that he has scootched to the edge of his booth so that he can watch me from across the bar. so i ignore him. then he gets up and goes to the bathroom, staring at me. i ignore him, the boyfriend's hand on my knee. i add in an extra head toss-back laugh so the the ex knows i'm having fun. because the reason i broke up with him was because he was needy and emotional and got way too attached way to quickly, and then tell him to never speak to me again. several times. he was a leech. a sweet, artistic, sensitive leech. that suffocated me.

we have our drinks. we discuss our next steps. we decide to go back to my place so i can take off my rain boots, which are crunching my toe. we walk outside and the boyfriend asks if i can walk to my house. i say no. he says "let us carry you." I say no. they say it again, as though i'm going to let myself be given a piggy back ride as a 25-year-old through the streets of Manhattan. I don't have much pride, friends, but i do have a little. finally, we decide to take the subway one stop to my apartment. as we begin to walk away, i hear my name again. I turn. The ex is smoking outside the bar.

"It was good to see you."

"You too," I say. I smile. I do try to be nice to people sometimes.

"So, I'll talk to you soon? If that's okay? Is that okay?"

I nod, beneficently, like a queen nodding to a peasant. "Sure. Bye."

"Take care of that foot!" He yells after me as I hobble away. I hate feeling pity for people. Maybe that's why i stopped talking to him. I just want to tell them, "I can't give you what you need. Please stop asking me to."

The boyfriend didn't say anything about it. We just walked through the warm moist air, away from my past. We went home. We made love. Everything was as it should be.

little toe, big mistake

2008-02-01T11:29:00.000-08:00

So, I have been cooped up in my 3 square foot apartment since I got home from the emergency room on Sunday. I have gotten out of bed to walk A) to the couch, B) to the bathroom, or C) (and this is the big adventure) downstairs to smoke outside. I was a good girl. I kept my foot elevated, iced, and my toes taped together. When i walked around, I walked on my heel. My boss was nice enough to let me do work from home, so i sat, laptop on lap, leg elevated, and edited. my toe felt pretty good. it only started to ache when i went downstairs, and then quickly felt better when i elevated it again.

So, feeling guilty because my toe was feeling better and because my boss was calling every day to ask how i was feeling and when might i be back at work, and not wanting to go back until monday, I compromised and told him that i would come in for half a day today (Friday), and if i felt good enough, i'd stay through the day.

i took the bus so i wouldn't have to navigate the subway stairs (and the L train full of hipsters). Too many opportunities to have my foot tromped on. At least on the bus, i can tuck my bad foot under the seat. so i stuffed the bad foot into my rain boots (because it was raining and the attractive blue canvas open-toe bootie with velcro straps they gave me wasn't going to cut it) and hobbled to the the bus stop. one transfer and 45 minutes later, i limped into work, already in pain. as i type this, i'm sitting, left leg on my desk next to the keyboard, waiting until lunchtime so i can go home. thank god i'm flexible enough to elevate my leg and type at the same time.

right. so now i'm in worse pain than i've been in all week and worried that i've just gone and undone all the good i did being cooped up in that tiny fucking apartment all week.

side note: the lesser of the two evil roommates is dog sitting this weekend. and the dog is staying with us. which i was okay with until i came home last night to find a disgusting chewed-up slobbery bone on MY COUCH and see that the roommate decided to use my bowls (yes, the human bowls. mine. that i EAT out of.) as the dog's food and water dishes. DISGUSTING. absolutely disgusting.

so, as i always try to do when life pelts me with lemons, i try and make sense of it all by learning something. So, here's what i feel i've learned this week.

1. I am either allergic to having a broken toe or my apartment. Judging by the amount of dust in my apartment, i'm leaning toward that explanation.

2. When you are hurt such that you are house-ridden and unable to go out for the basic necessities (ie, cigarettes, booze, oranges), you find out who really loves you and who doesn't. The people who love you call first to ask what they should bring you, then come over bearing a) the items you need, and b) presents. This is, of course, quite a matter of proximity. Those who are unable to come over show their love by texting constantly throughout the day, having two-hour-long phone conversations at night to help you stave off the boredom, and sending you cab money. (i heart grandma. so much.)

3. You sometimes come to the unfortunate, surprising, and very disheartening realization that someone who should love you and be there for you and be taking care of you and asking you if you need anything and having two-hour-long conversations to stave off the boredom is nowhere to be found.

Sometimes, the people you don't expect to show up do. And the people you think are going to be there for you aren't. That's something I've never understood. How the people who are closest to us are able to let us down so completely.

so here i am, broken toe and all, feeling raw and vulnerable, frustrated by my limited mobility, guilty because friends have so unselfishly offered their help to me, abandoned by someone close to me. maybe i'm making too big a deal out of a lousy broken toe. but if you can't depend on someone when it's something as small as a toe, what's going to happen when something more crippling happens?

maybe i made a bigger mistake than coming to work this morning. maybe my big mistake was depending on people who weren't there for me when i needed them.

on the other hand, i have some fantastic, amazing friends who really came through for me this week. and for them, i am truly grateful. i feel blessed to be so loved. to them i would like to say thank you. I am deeply moved by your selflessness.

baby toe blues

2008-01-28T18:37:00.000-08:00

So, as most of you are now aware, i have been incapacitated by the absolute smallest digit on my body: my baby toe. well, technically, it's not the smallest any more, as it's swollen to goliath proportions, making the new smallest digit the baby toe on my right foot. the worst part is, the story's not even very good. but i'm going to tell you anyway. here goes:

saturday was the infamous Idiotarod Race, an annual January event in New York in which teams sign up to dress up like absolute fools and race with shopping carts. The idea is that they steal the carts, and then decorate them according to a "theme." they then wear as little as possible (especially if they're men, eg, the "chip and dale" team last year who sported only black bikini bottoms, bow ties, and running shoes), and show up at the starting line, without a clue about where the checkpoints or finish line are. they are given this information one step at a time, that is, the location of the first checkpoint at the starting line, the second checkpoint at the first check point, and so on. Don't get your hopes up. I was not in the race, wearing skimpy clothes, or run over by a shopping cart. As a jeerleader for the local roller derby team, i was at checkpoint one, forcing these excited, drunk voyeurs to do dizzy lizzies while they waited to be released from the checkpoint. The whole thing started when my friend, Lady Copafeel, dressed as a cop (as usual) and soliciting bribes for a free pass outta jail (erm, checkpoint), sauntered over carrying two red plastic cups.

"Mystery blue juice or beer?" she asked, a baby doll with a hole drilled through it's belly tucked under her arm. All bribes.

"Hmm," i said, contemplating. "Gimme the mystery juice."

Several "bribes" (swigs out of airplane booze bottles, a beat up can of PBR, and a slightly dirty jellow shot) later, i found myself, Miller Lite in hand, slightly intoxicated.

"Let's go grab a drink before we head home," another jeerleader suggested cheerfully. She had a legit reason, yes, besides drinking, so we headed to the nearest drinking establishment and had another beer.

By the time i got home around 5, i hadn't eaten all day and was relatively liquored up. My roommate was about to start watching "Sweeney Todd" as I walked in and took off my shoes by the door.

"Oh, oh, wait for me!" I yelled as i ran into my room. That's when it happened. i misjudged the space between my bookcase and the wall and SMACK, ran my baby toe full force into the corner of the solid wood bookcase.

"Fuck. fuck. fuck. fuck." i limped back to the living room. Now, i am no stranger to running into furniture. i currently have two rather large bruises on my legs of unknown origin that appeared after i went out for beer, tequila, and air hockey last wednesday night. i assumed i had jammed my toe. after all, i've been informed by a medical professional that i have "benign hypermobility syndrome," which basically means i'm uber-flexible--good if you're my boyfriend, bad if you're my joints and you're attached to my clumsy self. that is, i've been spraining ankles, toes, and fingers for practically as long as i've had them.

now, i would like to say, for the record, that i did not cry. i put ice on my toe. i watched it turn red, then blue, then purple. i grimaced and took a percocet when the pain reached astronomic levels. i was vaguely morbidly interested in the weird way it was bent and in the interesting swelling (more on one side of the toe than the other). When my boyfriend arrived that night, he took one look and said, "It's broken. Let's go."

"Where?" i said.

"The emergency room. Come on."

"No. No, it's fine. it's just, it'll be better tomorrow."

"You can't even walk on it." This was true. i was walking on my heel.

I convinced him that i would go to the doctor on Monday, and we settled in to watch "Elizabeth: The Golden Age." It's a good thing we settled in; that bitch is like three hours long. good, though. very good. Sir Walter Raleigh is hot.

Sunday morning I woke up in pain. This pain wasn't the sharp, stabbing, "i want to cry but i'm a big girl" pain of the night before. this was more of a throbbing, aching, "make it stop or i'm going to cut it off" pain. I was calm as i tried to walk to the bathroom and realized it was not better, but worse. I looked at this purple, swollen mess objectively, noting that my baby toenail was almost completely obstructed by the swollen flesh surrounding it. I got online to see if there were any 24-hour clinics i could go to. Zero. In the largest city in the country. Zero clinics. Fuck. I was at the end of my rope. I did what any independent 25-year-old professional would do. I called my mom.

"Hey, baby doll," she answered cheerfully. I immediately started crying.

"I hurt my toe," i practically wept into the phone.

"Oh, no. What happened?"

I told her, feeling stupid for crying. She gave me the sympathy I was looking for and the direction i needed.

"Honey, go to the emergency room. That's why you have insurance."

"Okay," i sniffled.

Off we went.

I guess i knew all along that it was broken. I just didn't want to admit it. I thought if i ignored it, it would get better on its own. The boyfriend was a good sport, keeping things moving by tracking down doctors, xray guys, whoever, and saying "You gonna take her now?" It was very sweet. It "only" took 4 hours. And the PA on duty confirmed what I already knew: broken. Across the bone between the knuckle and the foot. The bad news is that i'm on crutches. The good news is that i've now got one of those stylish blue booties i see all the cool kids sporting. I took it out for a test run this morning. Hot. Hot. Hot.

I feel kind of like a pussy gimp. it's a toe, for crissakes. that's not to say that i'm not milking it a little. my boss agreed to let me work from home. i promised not to mix the vicodin they gave me with work, too much anyway. a couple of good friends are coming over tomorrow to keep me company. that should be fun. and i've got a couple of days to lay around in sweats. always good.

and hopefully, the pain will run out before the vicodin does.

YAY, we love blogging!

2008-01-24T10:31:00.000-08:00

hi. me again. YES. AGAIN. THREE DAYS IN A ROW*, Okie, who hasn't posted a new blog in as long as i can remember (generally 24 hours, but sometimes as many as 146 hours). Whheeee. Here we go.

I have made a list of things i would like to discuss today. I also think i'm going to add a "Question of the Day" section at the end of each blog, to kind of make this interactive (and ensure blog comments [!], the number of which i receive is directly proportional to my level of self-esteem. today: good [2 comments]. yesterday: better [3 comments]. see how this works? great! go comment!)

1. The movie Atonement. i will do my best not to ruin anything for you except to raise your expectations to completely unfulfillable levels by saying that this movie is brilliant. BRILLIANT. owing to, in no particular order, the directing, the acting, the music (which uses the SOUND OF A TYPEWRITER AS PERCUSSION. brilliant.), the writing, the use of several very deeply felt but rarely talked about emotions (eg, the regret we feel as adults only when we realize the import of an action in childhood), and finally, the ending. Especially the ending. which i will say nothing about until you have seen it and you come to me privately and ask, "Lizzie, what did you think was so brilliant about the ending?" (on a completely unrelated note, my lemonade kind of smells like pot.)

ALSO, the movie Atonement gave me a very profound revelation: Someday i will be dead and i will not be able to write anything else ever again. Ever. And the only thing that will be left of me (besides a mound of rotting flesh, of course) will be what i've written. woah. heavy. nothing like mortality to get your ass in gear.

2. Heath Ledger. after conducting copious amounts of research regarding Heath Ledger, his acting career, his private life, and his general temperament in the days leading up to his death (ie, one article on MSN Entertainment), I have concluded that perhaps my comments of yesterday were a) a bit misguided and b) a tad harsh. i NOW believe that Heath Ledger was just one of those beautiful tortured artist types who took himself too seriously and had trouble sleeping because he was busy thinking about his roles and accidentally overdosed because all he wanted was a little sleep, dammit, and all he could think about was being Batman's Joker. Tragic, really. Accidentally overdosing because you're worried about pretending to be people who don't exist. or silly. i haven't decided yet. anywho, i HAVE decided that the life or death of one beautiful famous person has no bearing on whether or not my own should proceed. so, regardless, i think i deserve to be here, gorgeous and talented or not.

3. So, here's a story about what happened last night.

I left work around 5:30, and, missing my boyfriend, decided i would pick up some of his favorite cookies and take them to him at work. Also, he's always talking about the 19-year-old girls at work, and i like to pop in every once in awhile so they can see how pretty and better than them i am so they will know that my boyfriend is VERY lucky and would NEVER prefer them over me. Right. so, i walk in, and my boyfriend (hmm, we need a code name for him. let's call him...Bud), Bud, is helping a customer. As the customer walks around the counter to look at something on Bud's computer, I hand him the bag of cookies, proud of myself for doing the "spontaneous present" thing, which is something i would LIKE to do more often but rarely remember to do. Bud smiles, and the customer says, "That is a good woman." I beam proudly. Me: 1. Stupid 19-year-olds: 0. The customer leaves, and Bud walks around the counter to kiss me.

"Thank you for the cookies," he says. "But you really should have texted me to tell me you were coming."

"But the whole point," I say, dejected, "was to surprise you."

"Awwww," he tilts his head back. This is what he does when he realizes he has a) said something stupid or b) said something that upsets me.

"But I don't like to be surprised," he says. "What if Sheniqua was sitting on my lap when you walked in? I would like to avoid that." He says it with a twinkle in his eye. This is how he jokes with me, pretending to be serious about something that would anger me if he were serious. I laugh. THAT was exactly the point.

***********************************************************************************

Okay, it's Friday, and i had to leave off writing this blog yesterday because work is ridiculously busy and i don't get on my computer at home much. so, this is as far as i got. i was going to write more, but i didn't. okay? more later, babies!

bye!

*though it appears as though this was posted on Friday, it was actually written on Thursday, making this a mostly valid claim.

baby naming

2008-01-23T10:09:00.001-08:00

If you're reading this, you most likely know me, and if you know me, you know that i like books. I was thinking the other day (yesterday, at work, actually. yes, instead of DOING work) that should i happen to procreate, the chances of which i give myself, at this point in my life, maybe a 37.62% chance of doing*, I might perhaps like to name my children after certain literary-type things. The probability of me procreating 3 separate times is exponentially less likely (twice, 13.31%; thrice, 0.45%); however, i've come up with 3 names i would like to use on my literary spawn, so we're going to go with 3. I've also decided to go from largest literary-related thing to smallest, because everyone knows the baby gets the most attention, so i figured in a handicap for her so that she won't be quite so spoiled. I plan on having a girl, a boy, and a girl, in that order (i'm not even going to attempt the probabilities with this one). The eldest, of course, would be named Paige. The middle child would be Colum (a name shared, incidentally, by a favorite writer of mine, Colum McCann). The youngest would be named Tilde.

~

And should I, God forbid, accidentally procreate a fourth time, it would be a girl and i would fulfill my childhood promise to my 8th grade science teacher by naming her Inertia.

that's pretty.

On a related note, i would like to discuss my amusement with names that constitute a full sentence. Tom Waits, for instance. Or a guy i used to date named Justin Blewitt. i like that one particularly a lot because it's not just a subject and a verb, but also an, um, you know, predicate. Names are so funny. Julie Seals. What does she seal? Who knows?!

Yeah, yeah, i know i'm a nerd. But if i wasn't, i would probably be hanging out with my friends blowing coke instead of blogging. you didn't think about that, didja? DIDJA?

SPEAKING of drugs, I'm sure you know by now that Heath Ledger is dead (good segue, huh?). Without getting too philosophical about it, i would just like to say that IF YOU ARE 28, GORGEOUS, FAMOUS, AND HAVE A 2-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER, YOU HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO REASON IN HELL TO FUCKING KILL YOURSELF. If your life is so bad, i should have been dead years ago. possibly aborted. okay? seriously, grow a pair, perhaps try to consider for 2 seconds that it's not all about you, and realize that pretty much everyone else on the planet is doing WORSE than you.

ugh, what a waste of a pretty face.

Of course, i would be down for starting some kind of "Michelle Williams killed him and made it look like a suicide because..." conspiracy theory.

Okay, that's about all the time i have today. tune in tomorrow for more excitement.**

*All statistics are completely made up. Like all other statistics.
**I make absolutely no promises to actually blog tomorrow or that, in the event i do blog, it will be in any way exciting.

and baby makes four

2008-01-22T08:51:00.000-08:00

Yes, this is the fourth blog I've started. Well, the third, actually, but I'm a member of another, so we'll just go with four. if that's okay with you. actually, i don't care if it's okay with you. it's my blog. i can do what i want.

so, anyway, the first blog was an angsty "i hate my life in pittsburgh, everything sucks, my boyfriend doesn't love me, and i have no friends" whiny, ranty piece of shit that no longer applies to my life. so, i've let that one mist off into the ether of the blogosphere. good riddance. the second started off as a "writing" blog, but the only posts i made to it were updates on how my "novel in a month" project was working out, which, coincidentally, only lasted for a month. i never actually posted anything i've written. because everyone i know has that blog address. and i just don't feel comfortable putting myself out there like that. especially when my mother and grandmother can read it. not that they do. but they could. the third is a group blog, like i said, that sort of counts but that i'm not going to post anything personal or non-writing--related to (how do you do en dashes on this thing?). So here's lucky number 4.

I decided to start this new, improved blog because A) a certain Okie has been *loudly* complaining of late that i "never" post anything to my blog and B) I keep having weird, funny, crazy, existential, terrible, and/or deep-thought--inducing (en dash, again) experiences the likes of which i feel i should somehow document so that when i'm married with kids and live in the suburbs in a few years, i can look back and be marginally solaced by remembering that life used to be worth living. also, we've all seen how the writing-themed blog worked out. right, not so good.

so, here's to me possibly writing something on a blog that has more to do with my life (which continues whether i think about it or not) than my writing (which resembles something more like a petulant child that is prone to running away and attempting suicide).

Enjoy yourself. That is, if I actually blog on this thing.

Oh, and thanks for reading. Your comments are welcomed (unless they're mean. in which case, keep it to yourself unless you want the equivalent of WWIII via blogosphere. seriously, i mean it. i'm a badass.).