My first lesson in originality.

I was awkward in sixth grade. Really awkward. I had braces and that weird half-child, half-teenager body that we curvy women were blessed with at the age of 11. I felt like a monster in sixth grade, too tall, too bulky, too zit-y, too totally, totally uncool. I have an official school picture of myself with dishwater brown shoulder length hair, a beaded necklace that I loved because it was rainbow colors but hated because it was choker, and a white t-shirt with three little lizards where the breast pocket would have been if I had bought it out of an LL Bean catalogue instead of those middle school fundraiser booklets that charges you $35 for a nature-themed t-shirt and promises to reserve an acre of the rainforest in your name. I wanted to be remembered as the adidas-track pants wearing, lizard t-shirt, rainbow choker kid, because that was cooool. Nevermind that choker necklaces make me feel like I need to puke. I suffered for beauty.

But I had friends! I guess. I had 3 friends, one girl and two guys, although I’m pretty sure now they thought I was a total loser back then and could have done without me. I think I was their hanger-on that they tolerated because my girl friend was actually pretty cool and liked doing guy stuff like snowboarding and skateboarding and re-making Blink-182 music videos. This usually entailed someone climbing onto a roof with a snare drum and banging on it for 2 minutes, and then some random artistic shots of beleaguered stuffed animals getting pulled along on a skateboard by a jump rope and neighborhood kids throwing those little spark-poppers on the ground. I don’t know, I was never there. I always watched them later. One time for Christmas we exchanged gifts at Ledo’s Pizza and they all got me cool stuff like a Star Wars Compendium and a walkman, and I got them all….wait for it….matching stuffed lizards. What was I thinking? I don’t know. I do know I labored over those Christmas gifts for weeks. It is SO. HARD. buying Christmas gifts for two 12 year old boys who listened to Snoop Dog and whose favorite card came was Bullshit.

Have you ever heard of Bullshit? You split the deck up with however many people are playing, let’s say 4. On your turn, you put cards face down into the middle pile, and say “3 Jacks,” or whatever it is. But you can lie. You can say “2 eights,” but really put down an Ace and a Seven. If someone around the table thinks you’re lying, they say “Bullshit!” and you have to flip the cards over. If you were lying, you pick up all the cards in the center. If you were telling the truth, the person who called Bullshit on you has to pick them up. Whenever I am playing a game, no matter what it is, I always reach a point where I’m tired of playing and don’t care about winning anymore, so I ruin the game for everyone. It’s my thing. When we were playing Bullshit at Ledo’s Pizza the day of the stuffed lizards, I put down 15 Aces. I just wanted to eat my triple bacon pizza and get the hell out of there so the guy friends could go hang out with the girl friend in peace and I could go home and watch CATS for the 30th time.

Awkward.

I used to say things, too, that were borrowed from other things because that’s easier than thinking for yourself and risking being original and thus being rejected. All those 80’s sitcom clichés, like saying “who died?” in a room of sad-faced people and “you fell out of the ugly tree and hit all the branches on the way down” were how I communicated. Verbally, that is. I found journals a while ago that me and the girl friend used to use to pass notes (no cell phones) and I can’t believe how funny I could be when I could write it down. We were smart note-passers. We had an entire composition book that looked like all our class composition books, so it only looked like we were helping each other study or something. I found it, and was really encouraged by what I read. It made me think maybe I wasn’t totally as awkward as I assume I was. But then again, I’ve always expressed myself better in writing.

Mom says I used to write her and dad letters when I was angry or sad or mad about something and leave them on their pillows. I remember resolving to keep a log of all the terrible things they said to me to have hard, written proof with dates and verbatim quotes for my final angry-letter magnum opus. They were going to find a hole burned through the middle of their bed and at the bottom would be my Letter of Wrongs Done. I think I kept it up for three weeks and only had two entries, like “dad made me feed the cat when he was sitting and the table NOT DOING ANYTHING” and, after digging the log out of a pile of detritus in the middle of my floor, “mom said I was a SLOB!” I gave it up when I realized I would never have much of a case.
But verbally I was like a lava floe of awkward. Searingly embarrassing and impossible to predict the flight path. Which brings me to my first lesson in being original.

One morning I got on the bus and everyone looked dreary. Well, sad. But it was about 6 in the morning, and no middle-schooler looks chipper at 6 in the morning on a Wednesday. Then I got to school, and we all sat in the cafeteria for about 15 minutes until the bell rang and we were released to our homerooms. I saw pockets of kids around the cafeteria looking sad, some were crying. A lot of the kids were people I knew in my classes, in my grade.

At my locker, my friend Heidi’s locker was right next to mine, and she was crying. It was time to get to the bottom of this. And so I pulled from my Arsenal of Awkwardness and said, “who died?”

Our classmate Jessica died. I hadn’t really known her that well. Her appendix had burst the night before and she was dead before the ambulances could get her to the hospital, because we lived in horse country and the nearest hospital was 30 minutes away. And that was the last time I snarkily asked anyone who died.

That was a changing moment for me. I think this was the moment I really became self-aware. I remember praying that Heidi didn’t hear it as a sound byte I borrowed from a sitcom, but a sincere question that I’d heard someone had died and didn’t know who. I remember holding back my tears until I got home and immediately running up to my room to create a set of self-imposed interaction rules, like “now we’re only going to listen to people and say the absolute minimum of words in response,” or “before we say it, let’s decide if it’s a good idea to say.” I was so altered and saddened by my own foot-in-mouth awkwardness that I went home and wrote a set of rules I knew I needed to follow from then on, a manifesto that no one ever saw but myself. I found them when I was cleaning out my room when I was 20 and my parents moved to a suburb. They went something like this, and please keep in mind I didn’t have any internet top 10 lists of Things You Shouldn’t Say to help me, and never discussed it with any of my friends, since they were 12 and busy making music videos:

1. Only say it if you really mean it.
2. Don’t try to make people laugh anymore because it doesn’t work.
3. Wait and listen for the whole thing before you say something.
4. If you don’t know, just say you don’t know.
5. If you like a boy, just don’t talk to him. Just ignore it.
6. Only talk about what you know about from now on.
7. If you didn’t think of it, don’t say it like you did.

And there was more of the same. Basically I was about 25 rules saying “Don’t Say Stupid Shit” that I kept writing over and over and over, like a punishment for being so flippant in the face of a death anyone with an appendix could suffer at any time. Hell. I could die that death. And the angry god I believed in at that time was probably plotting it for me, because I handled it so callously. It can be so very painful when you finally become self-aware. Now, when I go home and dig out my old yearbooks I always end up looking at Jessica’s picture.

My mom gave me a sympathy card after Jessica died that still makes me cry to read it. But I still never know if I’m crying for her or myself.

I'm all, WTF at this post, but here it is. Nonsense.

When I was a teenager my friends A and E went with me to the Renaissance Festival in Maryland, which I feel pretty safe in saying is the best Renaissance Festival in the country. My mom has a friend who actually works at the Renaissance Festival in Texas and the size and sheen of her Faerie Queen wings along with her brood of children dressed like fairies in sunshine-y Facebook pictures once led me to suspect my Renaissance Festival was NOT the best Renaissance Festival in the country. But then I remembered her Renaissance Festival was in Texas, and I felt better. Sorry, Texas. You’re like the rich kid in Catholic school who wears his tie all loose and shirt untucked and has a cocaine addiction. You’re really loud and obnoxious and think everyone wants to be you. Every now and then we kind of do, but really we just wish you’d transfer out of our class.

Anyway, we went to the Renaissance Festival, and one of them forked up the $20 it took for a tarot card reading. In all the years I’ve been going there, about 15, there has been a dude (the same dude), sitting on the balcony outside the Tarot hut, every weekend, every season, every year, ALL DAY, without fail, screaming “foooortUNES, GEEEET your fortUNES, FORTunes read HEEEERE” like he’s selling hot dogs at a baseball game. And he’s one of those uncomfortable hollerers who makes eye contact with you when you walk by. We always joked about doing it but this year, I think it was E, was ready to do it. E and A’s attraction to mysticism began and ended with Jesus, but E had a serious dose of Buffy the Vampire Slayer coursing through the religious centers in his brain that allowed a modicum of benign fascination with things like Wicca, séances, graveyards, and the occult. As a Star Wars nut flirting with atheism who really didn’t care if she pissed off any gods or spirits, we had a pretty fantastic time doing whatever ridiculous thing we decided to do that day. A didn’t care for half of it, but he stuck around for our daily Moulin Rouge! and Whitney Houston sing-alongs. I miss those guys.

Now that I think about it, it might have been A who got the Tarot card reading. All I know for sure is that one of them got it, cajoled the tarot reader into letting all three of us into the reading room, and somebody kept kicking me under the table to get me to stop snickering. And one of them spent $20 to be told, by a shirtless, bearded, 70 year old man, that “they have some hard times ahead, but ultimately they’ll triumph.” Because if you’re a weekend tarot reader making some extra cash at the Renaissance Festival to supplement your day job as a produce stocker at Whole Foods, what else do you say to middle class, white, high school boys?

All my snickering and atheism aside, though, I wasn’t the one to get my cards read (although they first offered to pay for ME to get the reading), because I do know certain truths about myself, and knew them even as a 15 year old high on chocolate-dipped cheesecake and curly fries, excited to go to the Rennfest without her parents for once. The first thing I know is that I am terrified for anyone to know my innermost thoughts, desires, hopes, and dreams. The second is that I’m pretty sure that anybody, even a hack tarot reader, will be able to see them in my eyes if he sits in silence with me in a dark room for a few minutes. The third is that NO ONE is allowed to know my future before I do. I was terrified of prophesy before I even knew what it was. All those philosophical/physical postulations about the observed object changing behavior for the sake of being observed and the mere act of knowing the outcome dictates your present actions were scary and real, because I knew I would do that. I don’t need no Tarot card reader telling me I’ll have hard times ahead. A and E’s great fortune was an overarching belief in the Lord, and so all other spirit magic was declared null and void and thus a non-threat. Even at 15 I had a vague appreciation of the One Soul concepts and space-time jumbles my hippie grandmother used to feed me, that Time as we know it is less of a line and more of a cloud and the past, present and future were actually one.

I’ve had prophetic dreams for as long as I can remember dreaming. I’m not talking about an oracle coming to me in my dreams and proclaiming crucial world events as it hovers in a blinding white light. I’m talking about stupid little moments in my life that I can only recall dreaming about when they happen to me. This weekend I went for a walk and there was a point where a man I’d never seen before walked a dog I’d never seen before on a stretch of sidewalk I’d never walked before, and I had dreamed it all before. That one little instant in time like a snapshot (man in khaki pants. Dog with red collar. Pink flower petals in grass. Blue and white sneakers. Taking a walk. Gray shorts.) was something that happened in my brain before and I feel a pulling sensation in my chest like the moment I’m living now is lassoing the moment I dreamed and syncing them up into one. I’ve tried to talk to people about it before and everyone is pretty convinced it’s still just re-constructed moments from previous days sifted together into a dream that happens to match the moment I’m living now. But this time, that explanation doesn’t work. I bought those gray shorts in the morning at Marshalls, having never seen them before, and put them on 2 hours later to take a walk in the afternoon. I’ve never owned a pair of gray shorts in my life until Saturday.

I’m fascinated with books that can assess my character based on the day I was born or what my name is. We have a book at my parents’ house that describes “Jackie” and “Jacqueline” and I’m a perfect meld of each. But why? Is it because I actually am that way, or is it because I read those entries when I was 16 and, having known them, grew into the person I was prophesized to be? Can the power of suggestion really be so great that I can be influenced by 6 paragraphs in a compendium of names? And why, if I am so susceptible to all this otherworldly influence, do I think hypnotism is such a crock of shit?

Despite how eerily accurate I’ve found these predictions to be in my own life, I suspect they are catered to play to social norms that most women will conform to in their life. One entry tells me a Jackie “wants it all – the job, marriage, and children; she’ll have at least three,” which is probably true of almost all Jackies out there. On that same token, I don’t believe that all Jackies “will excel in music and will probably pursue a career in teaching or writing.” Whatever. The more I talk about it, the less equipped I feel to talk about it. Probably won’t have three kids, is all I can say. And, I spell my name with a Y. So that MUST affect SOMEthing in your little runic interpretations, Mr. Prophecy Book.

I like the idea that Time isn’t linear. I think it would explain a lot of things, like how I can dream moments in my life before they happen and how I can meet someone and feel like I have an instant connection with them, like I’ve known them forever. I think it would explain a lot of things, like the soul mate concept. I’m pretty sure quantum physics is going to explain it all. I just have to wait for some smartypants scientist to bring it all down to my level.

I always feel like a monkey banging on a keyboard when I talk about this stuff. I had a prophetic dream and wanted to talk about it, since no one believes me and I can never remember it when I wake up to tell anyone, unlike my dreams about splitting myself into three off-beat personas disguised as professors named Dino (a guy with a blond beard), Bino (a woman who wore scarves and funky glasses) and Gino (a turtleneck wearing guy with black hair). I remember that dream really well. I adopted different personas to steal my students’ credit and buy a bunch of stuff. I was a benevolent crook, though, because I would only steal credit from underage kids, and their credit would just re-set when they turned 18. So one day one of my students was crying in class because her credit had been stolen and I consoled her by saying “don’t worry, you’re only 17. It’ll clear on your 18th birthday.” Then she told me she was 19, not 17, and her credit was ruined forever. I had racked up $516 billion worth of credit card debt on her name. I felt so bad, I confessed to my three personas and everyone felt betrayed. But then they invited me to a dinner party. I asked if I could come as one of my personas, because “I’m so boring when I’m just me.” The dream people let me do it, and then for the rest of the dream I kept at my three professor’s jobs and interacting with everyone, and all the people I met knew I was playing a character and they played along with me because they felt bad for me and knew I was uncomfortable being myself.

The deeper meaning there is hardly deeper. But I take comfort in the thought that it indicates I can at least pretend to be more than just myself, and my imagination can’t fit into a mold laid out by some book on a coffee table, even if my personality can.

Written yesterday.

I recently got a compliment on my blog through a facebook message and the utter shame I felt at abandoning it a few months ago was akin to the shame I feel for not calling back certain friends and family who definitely, definitely need call backs, and so today, on my 25^th birthday, I resolve to:

1. Keep up the damn blog

2. Call my damn friends

So there you go. I don’t know why humanity needs milestones like birthdays and new years to do things they could just as easily begin at 2:41 p.m. on any random day of the week. We just love bookends. Whether they are weighted-bottom brushed bronze Atlas statues we found at Barnes and Noble to keep our collection of Garfield compilations upright or they are arbitrary days thrust upon you in the grand scheme of space-time, we all like a starting place and an ending place.

I’ve been doing some stuff – new job, grown up apartment, zumba classes. Had a tearful goodbye with my beloved scrapyard (who were happy for me that I was advancing myself, imagine that) and began a full time with benefits job in advertising. And no, it’s nothing like Mad Men.

Really, with the routine I have found myself in, I should have plenty of time to keep up with this. Lately, I’ve even had islands of time during my work day in which I’m completely caught up and can take a few minutes breather, but my computer screen faces the door so anybody could stick their head in and see I’m updating a blog. The internet has some image or e-card or something that says “My fondest wish is to have a job where only I can see my computer screen.” Where’s the trust? She asks, as she writes a blog in a word document to throw off the scent at noon on a Friday.

The thing about having a steady job and a nice place to live with a schedule and a routine that is the same every day is that nothing really interesting happens to me anymore. I love it, I’m such a creature of habit, but life sometimes falls into a quiet sameness like rocking back and forth on a calm ocean on a sunny day. Maybe one day it will get on my nerves and I’ll go stir-crazy, but right now it’s sure as hell pretty nice. It’s not so much giving in to domestication as it is enjoying stability. I graduated college with a massive amount of debt into a job I was quickly fired from (twice), into almost a year of unemployment and then a year of a job that destroyed my mind, body, and will to live, to a part-time job handing out cash at a scrapyard that didn’t make nearly enough money but restored my faith in the American workplace, and now to a job with a sustaining salary that I can foreseeably stay at for a long, long time. Jesus Christ, can anybody blame me for actually wanting to go home, make dinner, clean up a little, watch Iron Chef and go to sleep at 10? Mmmmm, spiney lobster challenge.

Personally, I think it boils down to my selfish need to declare myself autonomous, to have things that are mine and didn’t belong to anyone else first, which I’ve never had before. Things have recently become mine:

1. Bed

2. Couch

3. Bookshelf

4. TV

5. Kitchenaid mixer

6. Whisk

7. Nesting rainbow mixing bowls

8. Bamboo spoons

9. Garlic press

10. Seat covers

11. Pillows

12. Shower curtains

13. Tea pitcher

14. Toaster

Of course, all these things are joint-owned and sometimes purchased solely by CS, but come on. We know who really owns the nesting rainbow mixing bowls.

But anyway. That’s how things are going. I’ll be back to regularly scheduled updating now – I feel like I have a few blogs backed up that could get posted. And if not, somebody guilt me out and I’ll start up on the next person’s birthday. Dad’s is in June.

It begins.

I made this blog so I would make myself write again. I started an essay about a year ago that I never finished, and taking my own cue from the My Office Diaries, I guess if I start posting it in unfinished chunks I'll force myself to get it done. Once this story is finished, I'm going to try to make everything that goes up here essay-ish.

My degree is in creative non-fiction, which means I write memoirs. I realize I am 24 and don't have that many memories worth writing about, but sometimes I can work with what I have. I heard from my most prolific writing professor that writers are lucky to get published more than twice a year, and shouldn't even hope to get a book published until they're about 50, so here's my plan: write essays and post them online, then take them down when they are finished. Y'all get to read them, and I have a completed essay that becomes future material for my book that I'll publish...25 years from now. So no one will remember my stories even if I become an internet SENSATION, and the internet should be some kind of hard-wired molar implant by then and no one will give a monkey's about my dinky little blog anyway.

I'll be posting this story in chunks, not by creating new posts but by editing the original post so it's easy to read and not broken up into backwards pieces in blog post form. Once it's up and in some kind of finished state, I'll leave it up for about a week and then take it down and turn it into something final. Them's the rules. Let's see if I can stick to them.

Enjoy. As of now, this essay is called People Walking.

****

This road is not pretty anymore. For about 12 hours last week it was absolutely beautiful – snow covered everything, and the trees were coated with a thick layer of hoar frost, which happens when wet fog descends and its water droplets freeze onto trees and mailboxes and signposts like the fuzzy ice that grows on condensed lemonade cans in the back of the freezer. The world was in white and black but seemed to reflect a million colors from the sun, as if the glitter and googly-eyes aisle from Jo-Ann Fabrics had exploded all over I-83. Driving by, you could almost hear the tinkling and jingling of icy, perfect snow crystals as the heat from the sun locked them all together, melding them to every single thing in sight, like glaze in a kiln. Then, on that day, this road was pretty.

Now, it’s like something out of a Great Depression documentary. It’s not white and black but grey and brown with plowed snow and churned up salt. The clouds have blotted out the sun, taking away that lightbulb radiance from the sky and replacing it with some washed out florescent equivalent. Every now and then there is a glimmer of that beauty this road wore so serenely just last week – through the bent and broken trees, bowed and cracked by the weight of 45 inches of snow, a hill lies untouched by plows or sleds, and over there is a car no one shoveled free of it’s terrible prison, perfectly domed and pristine. “Somebody’s unemployed,” I thought, as I looked at that car, almost jealous. I don’t know why, since I just spent the majority of 2009 lying in a festering pool of my own abject unemployment, begging the working world to take me back. It finally did, and now I am one of these hideous, salt-colored cars lined up to merge into the one lane Baltimore City bothered to plow on this four lane interstate. We are waiting in the highway soup line, wondering if we’ll make it through the green light before traffic slams the door shut in our faces.

Whatever. At least I’m not at work. And thank God tomorrow is Saturday. I’ll sleep until noon, not because I want to or because I can, but because I have to. I can’t erase the week otherwise. I have realized, if set my alarm for 30 minutes before I have to get up and if I hit the snooze six times in a row, it’s a little easier to get up on work days. I have also realized if I use that last 5 minutes before 7 a.m. to remind myself that my day is going to be horrible, I can handle it.

This has been the worst week of my working life. Ice dams in the gutters of the condominium complex where I work have forced running, melting water in through the windows, walls, ceilings, and up through the carpets of almost 72 units, causing untold water damage and unholy mildew growth. Now that things have begun to melt a little, glassy icicles seven feet long are hanging over every doorway like claws, and three-inch thick frozen waterfalls have adhered themselves to the siding. The Complex looks and feels like it’s being eaten by an enormous ice monster - one that wraps its victims in a white sheath before liquefying its insides, like a spider. The phone in the site manager’s office is ringing off the hook. People call me every day to let me know their ceiling is falling down and beg me to do something about it. They have packed up their children and moved into hotel rooms, which they expect us to pay for after we’ve fixed their leak damage for free. They are demanding appointments with the contractors we brought in, denying us access to their units when they are not home, and blaming every issue they’ve ever had on the embarrassing rain dance we have the gall to put forth as property management. I am the assistant to an emotionally stunted site manager and a skeleton crew of El Salvadorians trying to steer this ship away from an iceberg it has already hit. It is not going well.

There is a crazy, crazy man who jogs shirtless on the route I take to the Complex regardless of the weather. I know if I’m on time by what part of the road at which we cross paths. If he makes it to Bellona Avenue before I do, I’m going to be late. I always look forward to seeing him, though, because a little dose of genuine crazy puts the vernacular crazy in perspective. This snow might be crazy, but jogging in the snow blows the actual snow out of the crazy waters and back into the kiddie pool of the mundane and average. As far as I’m concerned he might as well be jogging on a golf course with a metal rod on his head in a thunderstorm. On the coldest of days, like today, he’s out there in black skintight jogging shorts, no shirt, with a sweatband holding back his almost-long hair and nothing restraining his chest hair, pounding away at the asphalt, somehow trusting his own perspiration not to freeze his nostrils shut. I realize today he’s jogging, in sneakers, in black snow that comes up to his shins. The white menace has eaten the sidewalks, miles and miles away from where its stomach is digesting my building. And for the first time all week, a thin beam of relief pokes a hole in the black cloud I pull over my head every morning and I think, Dear god. I could have been walking dogs in this nightmare.

****

Stay tuned.

Eyes.

I have this self conscious thing about the way I look at people. Not looking at them dead on, because that's easy enough, but if you are on the side of me and I'm turning my head to look at you, I'm pretty sure I look just like the dramatic hamster. I know my eyes get super wide and my eyebrows go up in the air and it's not out of surprise or panic - it's because of my glasses. If I'm looking sidways at you, you're probably falling into that nether zone of non-glass/wire rim where nothing is focused and there are obstructions all over the place, making it impossible to react appropriately to any incoming facial expression or talking point. I still haven't mastered the side glance with these glasses that I've had since 9th grade. It's like every single time I look to the side, my eyes are suddenly surprised by this cage they find themselves in and can't decide if they're going to look up or down or out or to the side even MORE, which is undoubtedly the most off-putting expression you can throw at someone. I feel like whenever someone is casually trying to get my attention, "Hey, Jacky?" my eyes turn to them and scream "WHAT oh my GOD where ARE WE what's HAPPENING hey, there are glasses here! NEXT CHALLENGE! wait, that's too much, back it down...ahem, yes?"

Then my head tries to adjust by turning even more which gives me this terrible cheek-smash neck gobble along with crazy eyes, and I realize this too slow as its happening so the rest of my body follows my head to try to compensate for crazy eyes and chipmunk cheek, and all of a sudden I'm doing this Frankenstein upper body turn like some Egyptian hieroglyph.

I remember when I first got my glasses. Well, no I don't. I remember the days leading up to getting my glasses. I was in chemistry class and Miss Whatsername who got married and became Mrs. Mudd was writing on the overhead projector. Do they still have overhead projectors and chalkboards? Because I've been hearing some crazy stuff about smartboards and handheld clickers. Anyway, Miss Whatsername was writing on the overhead projector and I couldn't see it, but not because it was fuzzy. Because it was red. For some reason, this sweet little hippie woman who was probably only as old as I am now with hair down to the backs of her knees (until she cut it when we were in 11th grade and caused an uproar with her fan club) - for some reason, this chick would only write in red. I don't get it. Red is such an angry color. Red makes a statement that I don't feel chemistry makes. Chemistry seems like a blue discipline to me. Math is black, because it is like the death of my soul. I am so glad there are math people around so I don't have to math all the time. Man, that would suck.

So she would write in red all the time, and I'd be at the back of the class with my long hair and unusually sweaty underarms, writing in my 3 ring binder with the loose leaf paper in it with a mechanical bic pencil (you know the black ones with the different color shirt clips? I would save the purples clips. I don't know why. I always thought their erasers were better, and god knows you don't want to use a good eraser. You hoard it. It's public school law. And then you find your best eraser again when you're 20 and it's a rock hard piece of leather covered in pulverized lead pencil dust. Life is cruel sometimes.) and I couldn't see anything on the projector. When she would use the blue pen, I'd see it. I could see the black pen. The green pen was pushing it, but that red pen, man. And it was just me, too. Everyone else was A-ok with the red pen. It made me worry for a while I was color blind. But I did some research (the old fashioned way - by going to the school library and getting one of those paper bookmarks you had to shove into the stacks to mark where you got your book from) and I found that color blindness is mostly a male affliction, although women have been known to suffer from it. I don't remember how I ended up going to the eye doctor and getting my first classes but not being able to see red overhead pen had something to do with it.

I'm not color blind. I just have a brain that misbehaves. Once in psychology class, the teacher was testing students to see if they matched up with the norm for memory recollection. Basically, when you are asked to recall a certain type of memory your eyes will look up, down, or sideways depending on where in your brain the memory is stored. So if you are asked to recall a melody your eyes will look toward the part of your brain that remembers music. If you are asked to recall a mathematical formula or do an equation your eyes will look toward the lobe of your brain that handles math. It's all very fascinating stuff, and he tested 10 students. I was one of them. And as he graphed the results there was one little dot on the graph that always plotted in the opposite quadrant to all the other dots. So when everyone's eyes looked right, this person's eyes looked left. When everybody looked down, this person looked up. The teacher asked us to guess who the person was who had the backwards brain, and everybody guessed the dyslexic, didn't-give-a-shit football playing kid in the class that all the girls had a crush on, but no. It was boring old me, and I was a celebrity for 10 minutes.

Not sure where I'm going with this. I guess I'll just conclude it with some wisdom:


Life is to short to hoard your good erasers.

Batteries.

I have an alarm clock.

It's one of the little portable ones. I got it for Christmas in 2008 to take to London in 2009. It's red and you can change the color of the display, and it tells you the temperature and the date and the phase of the moon. In my mind, this gives it some electronic complexity, but who knows what that actually means for alarm clock circuit boards. I remember putting AA batteries in it on Christmas day and learning how to set it, and then taking it upstairs with its plug in cord and plugging it in on my nightstand.

That was in 2009. It lived next to my bed until December 2010. Every now and then I'd take it to another room to sleep in another bed, but it always came back to my nightstand to get plugged back in so the batteries wouldn't get wasted. I'm always terrified it'll run out of juice three hours before I'm supposed to get up for work and I'll sleep in and be late.

So I moved in December 2010. My alarm clock was one of the last things to go, so it would waste as little battery life as possible in a bag. I dug around under the bed for the extension cord that powered my clock...and pulled out an unused extension cord. It was plugged in, but nothing was plugged in to it. I thought, there must be another cord under there, so I kept grabbing around the dust bunnies until I pulled out a heavy black plug...and kept pulling until I watched the charge cord for my alarm clock slowly drop from my nightstand and fall behind the bed. My alarm clock was never plugged in.

All this time I've been diligently plugging the charge port into the side of my alarm clock, and the plug itself has been lying in a tangle of dust and tissues under the bed since I first got it.

How is this possible? Is technology so power efficient now that it can live off of two AA batteries indefinitely? Or is it the batteries that have become so advanced they can power an alarm clock for two and a half years that knows the phases of the moon, has two separate alarm functions, and can project the time on the ceiling so you don't have to turn your head to look?

It seems amazing to me. We are capable of so much. Remember all the other stuff that used to be a pain in the ass, just a few years ago? Honestly, I can't. Shit's been awesome for a long time. And I have an immortal alarm clock.

All I'm saying is it's time to make a better Wiimote. It's been long enough, Nintendo.

Cheating.

I don't have a post today. Most days I find myself utterly uninspired by my daily life and thus have absolutely nothing interesting to write about in this blog I created for the sole purpose of getting inspired by my daily life. It's like buying a bunch of gorgeous fruit, arranging it in a bowl on the table, and then watching it rot while I chew a snickers.

Luckily, a few years ago I challenged myself to write for an hour a day on my lunch break. I worked as an intern at a data storage company. Those of you who know me well know all about it. But I was worried that starting work full time was going to murder my desire to write and to be true, I'd heard from my recently-graduated writer friends that it's the first thing to go once you join the workforce. I was worried that would happen to me, so I told myself I would write every goddamn day, even if it was pure gibberish that went nowhere and said nothing. Just write some stuff and worry about it later. I made sure I did it, too, because I picked two friends to whom I would email my diary entry daily, and if I didn't send it by 2:00 p.m. I made them promise to call me and ask for it. (Not to brag, but those two people expanded to five or six once the word got around that I was doing this daily. Oh, yeah. I pull an audience. Any time I refer to "you," or "you guys," I'm talking to my email buddies.)

And so, on these days when I feel lackadaisical and boorish, I will go back into my 70+ diary entries I wrote on my lunch breaks while working as an intern editing computer manuals in the summer of 2007. They will be out of order, and sometimes they'll reference something you won't have context for. But them's the breaks. We all suffer when Jacky is uninspired.

Grab your hats. I hereby present to you, with scarce an edit....The My Office Diaries, #11.

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

If eating an onion bagel after it sat out all night on the counter in a dunkin' donuts bag is wrong then I don’t wanna be right. I ate it plain, too. Somebody asked me if I wanted to put some butter or cream cheese on it and I said no, eating it plain makes me feel like I'm in a Dickens novel. Yes, I am a Dickens character who willingly eats her bagels plain and then surfs the internet for 15 minutes out of every hour.

I've been here for about 3 and a half hours so far today and I got hit with a lethal dosage of Cabin Fever on the first leg of this daily marathon I like to call Mere Existence. It was 9:30 and all of a sudden I decided to practice my bird calls. I was listening to my iPod and editing the Fucking Manual (that's what I call it now; there's the Hardware Manual, the Systems Manual, and the Fucking Manual) and I began whistling to emulate all the bird calls I know. I know what you're thinking; Jacky knows bird calls? What other strange obsessions does she have? Well, I don't know bird calls, and that’s why it's Cabin Fever. I was making up bird calls with the miniscule whistling skill I possess. And then I was making up bird names to go with my bird calls. "tweeeeeel, tweeeeeeel!" is the sound the Blue-Feathered Chicken Loon makes when it's searching for a mate. "Wheet wheeeoo, wheet wheeeeooo" is the sound the Maisy Daisy Flippy Wing makes when it's hungry.

Then I decided to sing out loud to all the foreign songs I had on my iPod. My office mate was running around the office because something exciting happened on a circuit board in the lab (alert the media) and she was barely here so I didn't feel guilty singing softly to myself, "piove sul oceano, piove sul oceano, piove sul ia mia identita! Lampi sul oceano, lampi sul oceano, squarci di luminosita!" That's Italian for "it rained on the ocean, it rained on my identity, it shined on the ocean, it was very bright." I love how translated songs sound like some idiot middle schooler decided to write some deep and emotional poetry. In Italian, it's absolutely beautiful, but in English it makes me laugh. Like, literally, I'm not talking about inward giggles, I sit here all alone on this computer editing the Fucking Manual and I laugh out loud.

Then I listened to Ay Si Volvieras a Mi, which is Spanish: Ay si volvieras a mi, encenderi al sol mil primaveras, si regresaras por mi...so I was singing Spanish. This one doesn’t sound quite so silly when translated: return with me, we'll something something a thousand springs, regress with me..." So I'm singing in tongues and whistling fake bird calls when I have a brilliant plan. I'm going to make everybody here think I'm a fuckin' genius through the clever use of post-its and planted phone calls. Right now there's two post-its on my computer screen frame; one says "E=Mc squared" because you can't be a genius without knowing the Theory of Relativity, and the other post-it has Japanese phrases on it. They say "Get me out of here," You can do it," think happy thoughts," and "You can write about the office later," but all people see is Japanese! They'll take one look and say, "Wow, she understands that! She must be a GENIUS!"

The phone calls part, that's where you all come in. I have been making extensive use of Babel Fish on Alta Vista, and if you ever get a phone call where I just start speaking Spanish or French, just sit there for a minute until I say goodbye and hang up. This means I was standing in a group of people and wanted to impress them with my language skills.

Also, at some point I might notify you via email or prior phone call and give you a question to call and ask me so I can give a genius answer and impress the people around me. Example: I might email you and say "At about 2:00 today I want you to call me and ask, "What is dark energy?" at which point I'll say, "dark energy, like in the Universe? Why do you want to know?" and you'll say "Because it's in this book I'm reading." And then I'll say, "well, dark energy is an anti-gravity force that is pushing the Universe away at an accelerating rate. It is postulated that one day far in the future, billions of years in fact, dark energy will pull on the matter in the Universe so severely it will rip apart the very atoms that make up the Universe. Everything around us will disappear. Of course, whether or not this will happen is contingent on the amount of dark matter and radiant matter in the universe. Scientists currently postulate that .3 percent of the Universe's matter is visible and .7 percent is hidden, which means the Universe wouldn’t rip apart but just go on expanding forever until every cosmic thing lives out it's life and the universe becomes a cold, dark, dead place. Does that answer your question?" And the people around me will be impressed.

Or, I could ask you to call me and ask me something like, "what are the names of all the bones in your hand?" to which I will respond, "the bones in your hand? Why do you need to know?" and you'll say, "because I'm watching Jeopardy." And I'll respond, "well, the bones in your hands are the carpals, metacarpals, and phalanges, to name a few."

Basically the plan is just to make people here think I know absolutely everything, ever. It is kind of thin, I realize that. But I have all summer to perfect it. I need to develop some alternate methods in addition to speaking every language ever and knowing the Theory of Relativity. What makes a genius? I've already been writing with both hands in front of JJ and Purple Polo Man but they do not seem to care, so my one special talent is useless here. I mean, I'll still do it on the off-chance they just haven't noticed yet, but yeah. I'm going to make this whole place think I'm a real live genius by the end of the summer, so help me god.

This plan excited me, so I took an important stroll around the office. I stood up out of my chair importantly, stretched like I pulled an all-nighter, grabbed my water bottle, walked importantly down the hall, said hello to everyone I saw, cleared my throat importantly, jogged a little bit to look like I was going somewhere important, and filled up my water bottle at the water cooler as I tapped my foot in an important fashion. Then I checked the water level in my bottle to make sure it was just right, poured a little out, and walked briskly and importantly back to my desk where I continued to whistle bird calls and sing in foreign languages.

I brought my own mouse in to work today and it is quite a conversation piece; it's covered in pink and green rubber dots. That's right; I'm the eccentric one in the office. Hippie might have really long hair and Sandals might wear Sandals, but Jacky has a CRAZY MOUSE. Stand back. It's CRAZY.

It's before lunch time and JJ came in. There goes my theory.

And now, suddenly, it's SILENT. There is NO sound. It's been a hubbub here today; there's been a regular brouhaha because my office mate found out what was wrong with the thingy everybody's been working on. So T is off somewhere soddering new thingies onto the thingy, somebody else is on the phone with somebody in another country talking about the thingy, and office mate is probably somewhere throwing herself a dance party on top of a huge pile of thingies and practicing her acceptance speech for the Thingy Fixer of the Year award.

Purple Polo Man stuck his head in a few hours ago and said with incredible gravitas, "I'm leaving now, and I don't know when I'll be back," to which I actually replied, "Ok, bye" but wanted to reply, "Alright, soldier, keep your gun out of the water, take care of your feet, and don’t get shot down over Borneo." And JJ said the same thing an hour ago! He said, "I'm leaving now, and I won't be back till after lunch." Where the hell are these people going!? Is it a secret? Is it a test? Am I supposed to know? When I finally figure it out, will I be inducted into some sort of secret society?

Whatever, man. I'll be here, sitting with one leg tucked up under me and sharing this glorious Friday of my last summer vacation in the best years of my life with the Fucking Manual who really couldn't give a shit less what I'd rather be doing. It just sits there listening to my bird calls and every now and then says in a german accent, "Ah, jaa, ven are yoo going to changen mein outline?"

fud.

I like making dinner. I like making NEW things for dinner. I think all people get into a cooking rut where they have a rotation of food they make all the time and it gets boring, like having Taco Thursday. Wait, forget I said that. Taco Thursday sounds like a great idea. But you know what I mean. You go to the grocery store every week or two and pick up the same crap you picked up before, and make the same stuff you made last week but this week you got some potstickers in a freezer bag or something so you feel excited.

Do you suffer from food boredom? If so, I have one word for you: roasted parsnips.

Don't ask questions.

Just do it.

Making new stuff is always an adventure where you have a bunch of pots and pans with a bunch of food doing a bunch of different stuff and you may or may not destroy it all. I find myself constantly saying, "Is this how this goes? I don't know wtf! MORE HERBS LOL." Like tonight I wanted to roast vegetables because I could live on roasted vegetables. (If little girl Jacky ever travels through time and meets grown up Jacky she'll think she grows up to be a host for a yeerk who is trying to get Visser 1 to give her her own cooking show. If you don't know what I'm talking about, be depressed.) I didn't have that many veggies, only 3 parsnips left from two nights ago, one orange bell pepper and one onion, so I chopped up a green apple and roasted that too. With balsamic vinaigrette. It was awesome.

And I made rice. Screw rice cookers, I did that shit on the stove in a pot like the cavemen did. The one thing I don't like about rice is that you're supposed to put a lid on it and not peek. I hate that. There are some stuff you're supposed to just leave the hell alone and let it do its thing. Whoever came up with the whole glass pot lid thing probably saved some lives. If you have high blood pressure and are NOT ALLOWED to look at your rice for 10 whole MINUTES, maybe you shouldn't make rice. I don't have high blood pressure but I am a control freak, and my pot lids are opaque. You know that Shroedinger's Cat theorem, where the cat is in a box and the chemical may or may have not degraded enough to kill the cat, so that cat might or might not be dead, and you don't know until you look? Zombie cat rice.

I've been thinking a lot about food budgets because I may have to stick to one in the near future. The whole Make Your Own versus Eating Out debate has been weighing heavily. Because you can go grocery shopping with the best of intentions and do so well for about 4 days, and then somebody invariably will say, "I feel like pizza tonight," and even if you didn't feel like pizza before you definitely feel like pizza now, and you just spent $80 on food 4 days ago, but what's another $20 on pizza when you'll have leftovers for tomorrow, and that's really not so much more, right? But you never have leftovers. And if you do, you eat them for breakfast the next morning. So you had the pizza last night and now you're looking at a refrigerator full of 2 day old stir fry and leftover spaghetti sauce which would have been good yesterday but you go the pizza, and they just don't look appetizing at all and you could literally walk to Chipotle, and the gas you'd save by walking certainly makes up for the money you'd be spending on more food you don't need to be buying, but it all evens out in the end and as long as you promise to do better next week there really isn't any harm, I mean your body needs food and there is some food right down the street, and all this grocery stuff will stay good for at least another week so you don't even have to go shopping again for a while. Well, you'll probably have to go get some more pastrami on Friday because you've been eating it for lunch all week and that saved you some money, which really, is just another reason why you should reward yourself tonight with a burrito.

I remember a conversation with my friend P when we were both in college. I had the great pleasure of living with my aunt for 2 whole years of college where I was fed and sheltered and warm and comfortable every single day, but P went to an art college that had bought out a few floors of an apartment complex in downtown DC, dropped the students into poorly kept rooms, and left them to fend for themselves in all regards. I called her around 9 at night, and this is how the conversation went:

P: I've hit bottom, dude.
J: what do you mean?
P: Can you guess what I'm eating right now?
J: Frosting.
P: I wish. There is literally nothing to eat in this kitchen. Nothing. I think there is ketchup in the refrigerator. I am eating rice...out of a pan...uncooked.
J: no.
P: yes.
J: You don't even like rice.
P: I know.
J: It's a texture thing.
P: I know.
J: why is it uncooked?
P: I don't know, dude. I don't know.
J: Cook it!
P: I don't know how! I DON'T LIKE RICE SO I NEVER LEARNED TO COOK IT!
J: look on the bag!
P: The bag is gone! It's in a ziploc!
J: Look on the internet!
P: It's down! THE INTERNET IS DOWN!

And so was mine. We were, through some awful twist of rice-hostile fate, both internetless.

And I realized I, also, did not know how to cook rice.

But really, if you can cook rice, you will always have food. If all you have to your name is a dollar in quarters you harvested from upturned couch cushions, you can go buy some rice and cook it and you will be sustained for another day, or at least long enough to figure out what the hell you're going to do about having nothing but couch money.

POVERTY RICE:

It's a one-to-two ratio. One cup rice, two cups water. Two cups rice, four cups water. A little less than 1:2 ratio makes fluffier rice. So maybe you like a 1:1 and 1/2. Or 1:1 and 3/4.

Put in the water.
Put in the rice.
Bring to a boil.
Turn down to a simmer.
Put a lid on and simmer for 10 minutes.
= rice.

You can make not-so-poverty rice by using chicken or vegetable stock. I like to toast the rice before I boil it because it makes it nuttier. put 2 tablespoons of butter in the pot and melt it up, put in the rice and stir around without any liquid. Keep it moving. When you can smell the warm rice smell, it's toasted. Pour in the liquid, continue as poverty rice.
=rice.

There you are, my friends. Never starve again.

Babies.

So, my afternoon just opened up, which is great because now I have lots of time for important things like blogs and laundry and soup. The lady who was supposed to show me an apartment in Columbia called and bailed to take her sick kid to the doctor. I forgave.

We never bought our bed. We did go to the Sleepy's where Tom was supposed to be, but he had called out for some reason so a manager lady was there instead, and she told us a lie, so she ruined my enthusiasm for being nice to salespeople. We had lain down on some other mattresses that weren't so expensive just to explore a little more, and she said if we wanted to buy one of the Simmons Beautyrest mattresses we needed to do it that day, because Simmons ups their prices at the end of January and the same bed we liked today could be $200 more next week. And that's a lie. I don't know anything about Simmons as a company, and I don't know how I know this is a lie, but it is. CS made a good point - products only go down in price over time because they get old and newer models come out. If anything, the price should go down.

That's all well and good. Either way, she chewed up and spit out all my good vibes I was trying to send, so we didn't buy it. Then a week later a full-fledged American Express card showed up in my name with the Sleepy's logo on it. This wasn't one of those cardboard fakes they usually send, with the name Jane Cardholder. It was real. All I had to do was call and I was good to go. I didn't think credit card companies could still do that - I thought the age of real credit cards in solicitations was over with some kind of regulative legislation years ago. I've gotten probably 50 offers from Chase alone in the past 2 years, and it's always the cardboard card. This Sleepy's card was heavy plastic and had my name and all my info as if I'd already signed up. It was a little scary, and creepy, and saddening. I gave you my info, Tom, and you screwed me. Now your little credit card with the little cartoon man in a nightcap is chopped up into 2o pieces and I'll never go to Sleepy's again. Great business plan, fellas. Didn't have to be this way.

I wonder why mattress buying evolved the same way car buying did. Is there any other industry like these two? Where a salesman actually sits you down and tries to romance you with shit like, "Well, I can't go any lower on this price...but sometimes, only sometimes, I can call my regional manager and she'll be able to authorize it." Sometimes, my ass. She'll always authorize it. It's part of the dance.

I can't think of any other things for which you have to boogie around like this. TVs? Not really. I guess because mattresses are supposed to last a long time and so you don't buy as many? Why isn't couch buying this stressful? Or is it? I haven't tried to buy a couch, so I wouldn't know. But everyone of every age needs a mattress, and that's not true for cars. Even the poorest of us will usually have a mattress. Not true for cars. And there are mattresses EVERYWHERE. Most hotel rooms have two a piece! And hotels, more often than not, have no cars at all! One golf cart, if it's lucky! This makes no sense!

I guess I'm glad we don't have a mattress yet. No place to put it, really, and I guess I'd rather not have a warehouse hold a mattress until we are ready for it. Ugh, I never thought I'd be talking so much about mattresses. This is even more tedious than people who can't shut up about their babies. But if I ever get one of those, I probably won't shut up about it, either. In fact, I know I won't. It will be All Babies, All the Time. And really, I don't think people talking about their babies is tedious. I actually love hearing about babies. Over 5 years I've been watching my friend L's twin boys grow up and it's 100% awesome. I do think irresponsible people talking about how many problems they have because they accidentally had babies is tedious. I'm sorry, I don't care that you can't "get your drink on" this weekend. Please change his diaperNOTONMYRUG, jesus christ. Grow up.

That's why I can't watch those Teen Mom and 16 and Pregnant shows. They're supposed to be this cultural phenomenon that's so controversial - every single one of them regrets it, and young girls really do need to see how difficult it is. But ohmigawd, I cannot listen to another spoiled bitch tell her girlfriends that her mother is getting on her nerves with all the baby stuff. If Teen Mom and 16 and Pregnant had spoiled bitch boot camp after they recovered from delivery, maybe I'd watch it. Those were the BEST Maury shows, weren't they? All that who's-the-father nonsense was just filler between the boot camp shows and the shows where the guest was a drag queen and you had to guess if it was a woman or actually a man. Maury and Ricki Lake did it right. Get the big black guy into the dark fatigues with the pinched-dome military hat and make him scream in their faces until they slinked out of their chair and sulked back to the green room and had to do 50 push ups. And then they had to do one f*cking day of boot camp. One semester, that's what I say. Send these teen moms to one semester of boot camp. It's not like their babies will suffer. Gramma is taking care of the kid for its first year of life either way, so might as well send the teen to a place where she can learn to appreciate all the gold stars and ass-wipings she's gotten for the past 16 years.

We have a few cousins who are having babies right now. My cousin C is having a girl and CS' cousin K is having a boy and their due dates are about 2 months apart, which is so insanely fabulous because at some point in the near future I get to go shopping for baby stuff, and if I see something cute it doesn't matter WHAT gender it's for, I CAN BUY IT. This is full-license, no restrictions, hog heaven baby shopping, people. I'm pretty sure this is what it feels like to win the lottery. And what makes it even better? Neither of the babies are mine. pinch. me.

I mean, someday, sure. But now, while I'm half-employed, homeless and mattressless, I'll stick with the kitty.

MindBodyVagina*

I WILL WRITE THREE BLOGS TODAY. It will not make up for the lack of bloggage for the past two weeks. Three weeks? I suck.

I've actually had a blog commission about something serious. I thought about it all night, because the purpose of this blog is more to entertain and convince myself I can still tell stories. I'm still one of those people who doesn't think the internet is a good forum for serious things, or for regular people to be serious in. If your job is to write articles about serious things and then post them on the internet, that's good. If your job is to use your vast expertise on a serious subject to publish literature and philosophy about that subject, that's good. If your job is to give cash to crack addicts at a scrapyard, maybe you should keep your ineloquent and often incendiary opinions to your nightly one-way conversations with the news anchors on TV.

In lieu of my own opinions I usually post to facebook well written articles I agree with, who explain my stance with clarity and usually have about 9 or 10 relevant, current sources to back up all the wonderful facts and quotes they use to make their point. I don't have time for that. Actually, I do, but forgive me for not wanting to write another research paper without a grade to look forward to, or a commission check. The actual work of writing about serious topics should be left to people who, due to deadlines, audiences, and expectations of quality, are willing to put in the work to make it as intelligent, impartial, and reportive as possible. Absolutely - their bias will show through. It always does. No one is impartial. But with the right amount of effort and time, a serious, important topic can be written about and posted to the internet in a useful, informative, and thoughtful manner.

That said, I would like to take this opportunity to disclaim the following post: I am about to write a blog about abortion.

1. I will not be quoting sources.

2. I will not be getting paid.

3. I have no exact dates, names, or facts of any kind.

4. I am not interested in hearing any opinion that differs from mine, because I am a blogger and I have no obligation to be fair and balanced. I admit it.

Usually, and unfortunately, regular everyday everyweek typical bloggers like myself do not have the pressures that will yield a great, or even good, article. Nope, the only pressures most bloggers have are the 10 minute countdown til their World of Warcraft character respawns and the 4 minutes left on the microwave. We bloggers have absolutely no obligation to say anything good or of value. In fact, we can say whatever we goddamn well please, because this is 'merica and there's laws about freedom of speech. Every human being has an orifice which, constitutionally, is absolutely free of all outside governing except what happens in your own little brain.

How nice.

Everybody's got a mouth, and mouths are so great. It's in my top 5 body parts. And how lucky are we, that everyone in this country can say whatever they want and be protected by the constitution? What a gift. To be able to govern your own thinking. No one is ever, ever going to take that away from us. People have tried, and there can be consequences for saying certain things, and slander is a big to-do, but everybody's mouth is pretty much sacred. And your mouth is so special in that it is half your mind and half your body, and even the body part of your mouth is protected in freedom. It's this whole interlaced universe of freedom, MindBodyMouth. You decide what goes in, you decide what comes out, you decide when to close it and open it, and you can even decide if something that initially went in needs to get ejected.

Sometimes, a foreign body does enter yours through your mouth and you didn't mean for it to get there. It happens all the time. Little viruses hitch rides in uncooked meat and lollipops. Sometimes people ingest an entire bottle of pills. Sometimes your body gets rid of it all on its own. Sometimes you can take a medicine and it is forced out. And sometimes you have to go to the doctor and get a procedure to have it removed.

We are so lucky as a society to have a free orifice. Most societies don't even have that.

Wouldn't it be great if MindBodyMouth was applied to the rest of you? Like, MindBodyHand? Well, we have that. Just don't kill anybody. I guess we also have MindBodyFoot, and MindBodyButt, and MindBodyPenis. Man, wouldn't it be just awful if the government took away MindBodyPenis? MindBodyPenis wasn't around until recently, when 'Merica recently decided that homosexuality isn't a punishable crime. But now it's here! Hooray for MindBodyPenis. You decide where it goes, what goes in, what comes out, what to wear on it, and whether or not you want to get it snipped. Thank god for safe, legal, healthy, available, health-care covered vasectomies. I would put MindBodyPenis up there on the list of Great Ideas of the 20th Century.

MindBodyVagina is definitely on the short list of Great Ideas. You decide where it goes, what goes in, and what comes out, what to wear on it, and whether or not you need to get a procedure done to eject a foreign body. Thank god for safe, legal, healthy, available, health-care covered abortions.

OOPS. Just kidding. There is no MindBodyVagina. Sometimes, you can't control what goes in, like when you get raped. And now a lot of people are trying to revoke it and take back the legal part, so it will be illegal and expensive to to get an abortion when a 13 year old girl is raped by her 30 year old uncle.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-01-31/gop-abortion-bill-redefines-rape/?cid=hp%3Amainpromo8

Because what is forced in and gets left there by a rapist is far more sacred than the orifice itself.

Can we talk about clusters of cells for a minute? All things start off as a cluster of unrecognizable cells. Humans start off as a cluster of unrecognizable cells. Sometimes, a woman's body ejects them all on their own, because they are a foreign body. This is called a miscarriage. In the early stages of pregnancy, a woman's body is trying very hard to eject the foreign body that has taken up residence. There is morning sickness, a little vaginal bleeding, and all different kinds of fun gastrointestinal responses. Because one body does not recognize the other, because it is a cluster of unrecognizable cells. Like cancers, and viruses. During this period, when the cells aren't quite sure what they are yet and the body is trying to eject them, legal, safe abortions can happen, just like a lumpectomy or a biopsy.

We can eject all other kinds of clusters of cells, but not these kinds. Because religious people think they have souls.

****STAND BY FOR MY OPINION*****

They don't. They don't have souls. They don't have heartbeats. They have potential in the same way a bunch of rogue cells in your brain can become a tumor. Right now, women can decide to allow these cells to grow into a human, and get a heartbeat and a brain, or they can decide to eject the cluster of cells and go about their business. That's their decision. They have MindBodyVagina*, which allows them to make decisions but not without a lot of extra input from every religious wingnut in the world. And by input, I mean clinic bombs, and legislation to redefine rape, and murdered doctors, and huge financial strife.

There will never be a MindBodyPenis*. Nobody is going to shoot a doctor for performing a vasectomy or bomb a hospital for offering the procedure, even though the same potential for life is there and what is a testicle but a massive cluster of cells? But if you need to get rid of the cluster of cells your cousin deposited in your vagina after he fed you a roofie and tied you to the bed, buy some kevlar and cancel your plans. Because you don't have a free orifice.

Bed.

Who's got two thumbs and is terrible at blogging? This guy. I mean, really.

I'm buying a bed today. A big one. An EXPENSIVE one. It's the king size Sleep to Live blue 400 series, and with the boxspring, frame and mattress protector it's probably going to be about $2,500.

We worked it out yesterday and decided if we have it for 10 years that's $250 a year, a little less than $20 a month. I am not used to thinking about beds in this way. Wherever I have gone there has either been a bed already there or a bed purchased for me. The things I think about in terms of broken down cashmoney are cars, pants, foods, and gym memberships. Not beds or furniture. I know I'll be laying in this new bed thinking, "all right, I plan on sleeping for seven hours tonight, which will make good use of the 79cents this night is costing me. Well done, frugal-me." Hooray, adulthood.

We didn't plan on buying something so expensive, but here's what happened: there is this one guy who scraps metal who has some kind of special back door relationship with Costco. I don't know what it is, but every now and then he'll bring us danishes or boxes of cookies from costco that no one bought and were in danger of going stale, and he'll have other things from Costco like ripped sweaters or opened boxes of sharpies...and mattresses. Apparently, if a mattress is returned Costco can't re-sell it. I can appreciate this, because who knows what kinds of health hazards happened on that bed before it was returned? For all we know, someone opened that mattress, killed someone else on it, doused it in cocaine and gave it back saying it was uncomfortable. And then replace it with another mattress from somewhere else. It would be a great way to cover your trail.

"Detective Finder!"
"Yes, Apprentice Gumshoe?"
"This mattress is completely clean of all evidence! It's a mystery...we did find a receipt for a mattress purchased at Costco, but that club is so exclusive. We'll never get in with out a club card."
"You'll learn the ropes one day, Gumshoe....let this be your first lesson. Always join the discount clubs-" *whips Costco card out of wallet and throws it onto bed with two fingers*
*gasp* "you're the whole enchilada, Detective Finder."

So this guy came to the yard after going to Costco, and they had given him two mattresses they couldn't sell again- a king and a queen memory foam. He sold them to two of our employees for $100. ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS for a memory foam mattress. Despite the danger of crime scene contamination I almost bought the queen but had absolutely no way to get it home. Everybody else who works there has a truck and I have a wimpy (but economical) honda civic, so the only way I was getting that mattress home was by bribing somebody or bungee-cording it to the top of my car and praying it was a police holiday. So I didn't buy it. My friend M was the one who bought it, and the scrapper delivered it directly to his house.

I came home and told CS this story who told me I should have bought it anyway and we'd figure out the rest later (cest la vie) but we got all giddy over mattresses and started looking online to find Sears offering a 50% MLKjr sale (which, I'm sure, is exactly how he would like to be remembered). So we went to Sears and found some eh-so-so mattresses for $600 and aroundabouts and decided to price some mattresses at a store like Sleepy's.

It was either a big mistake or the best idea ever. As soon as we walked in the door we were escorted to a lumbar profiling machine by a salesman named Tom which we laid down onto and discovered I need a firmer mattress and CS needs a not so firm mattress, so Tom led us to a Sleep to Live with two separate coil firmness sides and we fell for it. After that one, no other bed was going to live up. It was about $2,400 more than I wanted to pay for a mattress, now knowing that scrappers can pick them up from Costco and sell them for $100, but whatever. Just money, right?

Tom tried to wheel and deal us to close yesterday but we wouldn't. He was sad because he wasn't going to be in that Sleepy's store today when we said we'd come back, so he wouldn't get our sale. It must be hard to be a salesman. I don't care if you enjoy it. I don't think anyone enjoys it, really. I was a telemarketer for about three weeks and I thought I was going to kill myself. I just hate the sales culture in general. Somehow this entire method of interaction has evolved where the buyer is conditioned to be immediately hostile from the beginning and the seller is conditioned to be immediately....I don't know, sales-y from the beginning. Both of you know what's going on and both of you are determined to come out the winner in the end, and you will fight for it with smiles and handshakes. It's like a placid lake with a raging water tornado right underneath that only now and then disturbs the surface. I don't get it. I even wanted to buy a bed yesterday and still I found myself saying things like "watch him, he's shady, he's a salesman." and "how do you know this bed isn't $100 at some other store?" and "see that smile? he thinks he has you." It's terrible. Tom was a nice guy. I'm sure he loves his grandkids and has a hobby like model airplanes or train sets.

At one time a few years ago my dad wound up in a Honda Dealership four times in a six month span, either to buy himself a new car, my mom a new car, help me buy a new car, or buy another car, and every time the ride there was like prepping for a football game where the losing team was murdered for the crime of failure. "Ok, you gotta go there and act like you don't care, got it? Don't be too interested, or they'll swarm down on you. You gotta pretend like you're not gonna buy - don't say you like this one, or you like that one, just nod and agree to test drive it without giving too much away. He's going to try to swindle us, they all do. Their entire job is to get as much money from you as possible, and we can't let them do that. These guys are jerks. Terrible, terrible people. Just watch me and follow my lead, ok?"

And I'm sitting in the passenger's seat thinking, "Is this necessary? The check is signed, here. We're buying a car today. We are leaving this lot with a new vehicle. I feel like this could be a much more positive experience for all involved." Am I naive to think if I walk up to a salesman and say "hello, I am buying a bed today. I want you to know that. I want to trust you not to screw me on a price or I'll just go to Mattress Discounters and buy a bed over there. Can you show me what you have?" am I naive to think that will work? That that is the way we can do things as a sales culture?

Maybe it is. Maybe it's silly to think we can all be nicer to each other. I saved up enough money last year to make possible the things that need to happen this year, like moving and buying furniture. I think we deserve a luxurious bed, and I don't really care what else is out there. I don't care about the reviews I read online where people were dissatisfied with their beds. After sleeping on it for a night (in a bed that is no comparison for the Sleep to Live), I'm pretty resolved I want this bed, and we're going to go to the other Sleepy's store today where Tom will be working and buy it from him there so he'll get our sale after all, because I think human beings have a responsibility to treat each other civilly, even if it's just some guy trying to sell you something.

Gym.

I could be homeless as long as I had a gym membership. I don't mean the carless kind of homeless, just the homeless homeless. You shower there, have something to do during your long hours of not working, can swipe energy bars from the display case, and drink all the fountain water you want. Just have to panhandle $24.99 a month to cover the membership, and you're golden. If I was homeless with a car and a gym membership I'd probably reach my goal weight too (doing nothing but eating weight loss bars, drinking water, and working out) and I'm fairly confident I'd have supermodel good looks if I didn't love food so much, so I could then get a job modeling, buy a house with my millions, and I wouldn't be homeless anymore. Homeless is another word that stops being a word the more times you look at it. If I look at it too long I want to start saying hom-ee-leess, like homilies, which I think is some kind of worship song. Dictionary says: sermon. Which is a word that looks like "salmon," but as if someone was saying "salmon" with with a mouth full of marbles. What a horrifying thought. I hope I never find myself with a mouth full of marbles. I choked on mouthwash the other day and I'm so shellshocked I haven't been able to gargle since.

My dad put me on his gym membership for the few months that we're here, and I forgot how much I love the gym. I really do. It's so clean and everybody is sweaty and everybody else looks just like you. I don't know where this image of gyms filled with perfect sweatless bodies came from - must be the west coast because here on the east coast (in Maryland at least) we all park our crabbin' boats at the pier (all MD establishments have piers), strip off our waders and Gordon's fisherman raincoats, drop our natty at the door and make our doughy asses move on treadmills while we cringe at each other's massive sweat stains on the weight equipment. It's great.

This gym is really big and clean and open. It's very, very new, has a pool, and fantastic locker rooms. Really classy, like deep mahogany wood locker doors and lovely tile backsplashes. No scales, though. Which is weird. Yesterday was my first time going and I looked everywhere for the scale, and on my way up to the front desk to ask where it was I passed the trainer desk and a regular old K-mart style bathroom scale on the floor. I puzzled at it and kept walking, but it turns out this is the only scale in the joint, in this wonderful new gym, a scale someone picked up at the store on a toilet paper run and brought to work, in the middle of the main floor.

Um, no.

There was a spin class going on when I got there this morning - people never look so miserable as the people taking a spin class. Some people swear by them, but whenever I see a spin class it's just a sea of misery. That said, there's something mesmerizing about them, and I want to try one. I think it's the spinning silver thingies. They are hypnotizing. They look like the future, when everybody is bioengineered to be the perfect weight and build and no one has to work out ever again. Ahh, the future. Fingers crossed it happens next Wednesday.

I want to be a yoga instructor. Mom and I went to yoga yesterday for the first time (we've gone before, but it was run by this enormously fat man in his attic so I don't count it) and the yoga instructor was toned and thin but not, like, overwhelming to us who are not toned and thin. I can see how she got that way, because after 15 seconds of kneeling on the ground in a dog pose with my left arm straight out and my right leg straight back I felt like my body was screaming at me. According to the yoga instructor, at that point I should have listened to my body, respected what it was saying and changed position, but come on. 15 seconds? My body will have to deal with it. I'm tired of it being a brat.

I really liked the yoga stretches. They felt really nice. I don't think I could do the hardcore yoga with the crazy poses or the hot yoga (EFF THAT, seriously) but the stretchy yoga, I'm in. Although I couldn't be an instructor because I don't have yoga toes. Every yoga instructor I've seen has had yoga toes, so it must be a thing. Yoga toes are thick and reedy, and the big toe is the longest. The tendons stand out a little and you can see the veins, but yoga toes and yoga feet are thick and heavy like they were carved out of wood, and no, they are not something you acquire by doing yoga. My feet will always be flat like pancakes and really smooth, and my big toe will never be longer than the toe next to it, which hangs out of peep-toe shoes and thus I hate peep-toe shoes. My other toes are kind of smallish and bent-y, like they don't know what they're supposed to be doing. "Yeah, we're here, but why?" Yoga toes are like frog toes, and each toe is straight and has a flat part that makes steady contact with the ground like a suction pad. Next time you're in yoga, check it out. The people who are really good have yoga toes.

So I could never be a yoga instructor. But I could be homeless, because I have a gym membership. And a car. And you can have any kind of toes to be homeless.

Nose.

I'm up at 7:11 on a Sunday because I'm congested. My nose if full of crap and my lungs are sick. I probably have something diagnoseable like bronchitis or a sinus infection but I'm going to ride this one out and see how it goes.

I don't understand noses. I mean, I understand them in that they are our smell receptors and they are very important. I understand them in that they have their defaults because we evolved from four legged creatures, now we're on two legs and our sinus system is still built for four legs and that's why it dams up and stuff. Our sinuses are supposed to be hanging down with our nostrils to the ground so all this garbage drips out as we go along hunting for gazelle and mongooses, or whatever our ancestors liked to eat. Whatever they ate, it was the sick ones because they were the slowest, so maybe some of our sinus sickness comes from that too. We have evolved into cold-catching creatures because our ancestors habitually caught snotty zebras.

I mean I don't understand noses in that when I blow mine, it should clear out. It doesn't. I see pictures of human skulls and right there are big sinus cavities, empty nothings with a straight shot out the nostrils. It's those suckers who are filling up with crap, so when I blow my nose, shouldn't all that mess rocket out like no big thing? It would fill up again and again because my nose glands would be activated to clear out whatever is irritating it, but the logic seems to be violated by my complete inability to blow out of my nose what is blocking my breathing. I understand that when I lay down, the stuff settles back to block my passages so my breathing is interrupted. I understand that when I stand up, it settles down into the bottom part of my sinus cavity and my passages are usually cleared. But WHAT IS BLOCKING IT FROM COMING OUT. Are there parts to noses that I'm not aware of? Are there cartilages in the sinus cavities like little hedge mazes that the goop needs to weedle through before it can escape? Is it some high-society garden party in my sinuses with minotaurs and droll mimes around every corner?

This explanation would explain the success of the neti pot. pour water in that pushes through the maze and exits through the front. I've only ever seen a neti pot in pop culture, but I guess that's not surprising. A lot of things I've only ever seen in pop culture, like lamborghinis and machine guns. The neti pot I saw on the Office when Dwight Schrute shoved the teapot Jim gave to Pam up his nose, and on Six Feet Under when Ruth found George's neti pot in the cupboard in the kitchen and it sparked a big fight. Oh, Ruth. You have such terrible taste in men. Hiram, Nikolai, George, Arthur (as played by Dwight Schrute).

It's not so bad being up early. I feel like my day is longer and I can do more. I used to hate getting up early on the weekends but now it's fun. And I hate snow, and I love roasting vegetables, and I'm totally responsible with my money. Must be old.

Roasting vegetables, man. I've never been so excited to make some potatoes and carrots. I've never, ever been excited about carrots. I don't even like carrots. But I've never had them roasted, so it'll be a whole new thing. I'm thinking about a little brown sugar. We have to do something with them, because I bought a whole bag and dad bought a whole bag. There was a lack of grocery communication. This also happened with a bottle of balsamic vinaigrette salad dressing. We also have a lot of tomato paste. I do not know what one does with so much tomato paste besides stirring a tablespoon into a huge pot of soup or some pasta sauce here and there. There is no tomato paste casserole and I do not think there is a great demand for one to be invented.

I think I'm turning a corner in my cooking ability where I don't need a printed recipe in front of me all the time. This is great, because now I can save trees while I cook. Less paper! I made butternut squash soup the other day and it was awesome. The recipe just called for butternut squash, chicken stock, salt and pepper, but I added allllll this other stuff and it was fab. I didn't have amounts, like teaspoons and stuff, and I hadn't seen it on the food network so much, so I was on my own and I succeeded! I can pretty much make anything now as long as it doesn't call for celery or fennel. I hate both of those things. They ruin everything. I also avoid meat now. I'll make it for people who eat it but I don't eat it. Mom and I are trying to go all organic, and she said to me yesterday, "I guess we're just going to have to go to Whole Foods from now on," which is a little like telling me we're going to celebrate my birthday once a week. Whole Foods...and Trader Joe's...all the time? Damn, I'll wake up at 7:11 every Sunday if you tell me I'll get to go to Whole Foods.

New Year.

Someone once told me that the thing you do when the new year hits is the thing you will do that entire year. Therefore I am glad I was sleeping instead of puking out my guts, which is what I was doing for 4 hours before the new year. Was it a migraine? Was it food poisoning? Was it the thing that everybody is getting? I don't know. But I felt wonky driving home, laid down for half an hour, and then life was just awful. An eternity of awful. I always forget just how outrageously terrible throwing up is. Every second is a thousand years of pain and nausea. And it ALWAYS RUINS MY PLANS. I'd rather be sick on Christmas.

At least my first conscious action in the new year was to self assess - "phone is ringing...am I sick? What hurts?....nothing. Ok, sit up a little....nothing. I think I'm good. Walk around. We're ok. It's over." I looked at the time and it was 12:05. So if my friend of years past was correct in any way, and the thing you do as the new year hits is the thing you do all year, I'll be realizing over and over again that I'm ok. I can live with that, even if I didn't get to drink champagne with my friends.

Once the worst was over and I was hanging out with CS waiting for my parents to get home from their friends' house (party animals), he said "you look really pretty, though!" which is very sweet to say to someone who just very violently eliminated every bit of sustenance from her innards. Is it brash to say I actually did look kind of pretty? Is that weird? My skin gets all pale when I'm sick and my eyes get really bright and glassy, and sweat forced out of my pores by the strength of my dry heaves humidifies the air around my head and my hair curls right up like some freckled kid on a beach in the summer. The end effect is the kind of thing I would spend hours trying to achieve with curlers and makeup, if I ever took the time to do my hair or makeup. I've been wondering whether this is a silver lining to being sick and I have decided it is not. I'd rather be well and hideous than sick and attractive. Looking pretty as a byproduct of extreme illness is kind of like losing everything you own in a fire and collecting the insurance money.

Watching sports today with mom, dad, and CS (who is now officially a computer scientist and already has a job offer - happy graduation, CS!), I have realized that commercials really love to use Vampire Weekend's music, and Vampire Weekend has no qualms about selling out to commercials. It has made me not really enjoy Vampire Weekend anymore. I feel like I knew about Vampire Weekend before lots of other people did, but I don't like to say things like that because it sounds snobby. But really, Oxford Comma and Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa and A-punk were on my shuffle playlists years ago. Now I don't want to listen to them because all I see are Subarus and GPSs.

More later, maybe. Gonna go call all the people who need calling. Happy New Year!