I didn't manage to get along with other kids very well. But to be fair all of the children at Ringing Rocks Elementary School, PA were vicious motherfuckers. A horde of tiny uncivilized people, forming disparate tribes to make war against one another, eyes wet with conjunctivitis and hatred, Mouths red with Kool Aid. Or the blood of the weak. It really depended. If there were curly fries being served in the cafeteria then it was blood. Curly Fries to seven year olds are like what Cacao Beans were to the Aztecs. If there was only one tray of curly fries then you were bound to see some Gangs of New York shit go down.

The play ground was not so much playful as it was reminiscent of the yard at Sing Sing. Turf was drawn and redrawn according to race or class or gender or some subtle social shift in the wind that I could never fucking understand. Cruelties were hurled to faces or behind backs, bigger kids shoved the smaller off the swingsets, rocks were winged at soft, still developing skulls. The one thing keeping us from going fully "Lord of the Flies" was a single listless chaperone who'd blow a whistle and kind of scream at us when he saw bullying.

The hostility was only tuned down to a dull simmer when herded back into the class room. Still 20 to 25 kids agitated against one another in an ever present effort to undermine and assert dominance.

You know, thinking back on grade school it really was like a jail. One time I shivved a boy with a fork because he tried to kiss me. He just didn't understand I ain't nobodies bitch you see? I don't just give my shit out fo' free. You gotta get momma a pack o' smokes or summa them tasty ass curly fries first. Shiiit.

Almost nothing could bring us together in a lasting harmony. Except one thing.

Ripple's dick.

Ripple was the male hamster we kept as a class pet. And for some goddamned reason when we had a spare moment all of us would crowd around the cage and put our differences aside to look at adorable Mr. Ripple, maybe pet him a little bit but always, inevitably, flip this hamster over and look at his junk.

"Look at his boner!" One of the boys would snigger. And that, boys and girls, is where I learned the word "Boner".

"Kids. KIDS. That's enough. It's time for geography." A frantic teacher would hustle us away and put Ripple and his shlong back in the cage. But for that tiny moment we were all united in puerile fascination of rodent willies.

I may be grown now but still sometimes experience a Ripple effect. I was on YouTube a while back looking for cute animal videos because I have a vagina. Ownership of a vagina causes irrational behaviors like the purchasing of hundreds of decorative pillows, weeping and the need to view fluffy bunnies and shit while imbibing merlot.

Anyway, I'd just gotten done watching an anteater in a flannel shirt drink fruit juice out of a champagne flute when on the side bar of related videos the words "ECHIDNA PENIS" stood out from the pile.

"I...Well...Fuck." I thought staring at the thumbnail, trying to make out details. "I guess I'm going know what an echidna's penis looks like." So I clicked on it.

Now when your first reaction to seeing a monotreme's gigantic cock is "Not bad..." then you need to come to grips with the fact that you deserve to be alone forever.

None the less I emailed that magnanimous wanger to friends and family and felt immidiatly vindicated in my belife that sometimes the sharing of disgusting, wretched things is a way to bring people together when I received this reply:

"This is the craziest dick I have ever seen. And I've seen a lot of dicks. That is amazing."

Perhaps this is what could end world conflict. If we all collectively sat down for a little while at a global table and realized that whatever our differences are, whatever has happened in the past we will all agree that an Echidna's dick is the WEIRDEST fucking thing ever and from that point of commonality we would all link hands and swear to stop nuclear proliferation and solve world hunger. A utopia would follow in less than a decade.

I mean ok, Australia probably wouldn't be that wowed but then they're used to Echidna dick. Wouldn't matter. No one wants to play with those kids anyway.
~~~

("BUT LEIA?" I hear you howl to me like hungry babes "HOW CAN YOU TALK ABOUT MONOTREME PEEN AND NOT SHOW US THE GOODS? PLEASE SAVE US FROM TERRIFYING IGNORANCE."
I can do this thing for you. Below you will find a video detailing the horrible machinations of the MonoPeens. Do not look away from this educational film at any moment, for while what you see may disgust you, may cause you to weep openly, in the end it will make you strong.)

My sense of Identity has always been fairly shaky. I find my own impulses and behaviors bizarre. At least once every hour of the day I think: "Why the fuck did I do that? Reaching into the pot of boiling water with my bare hands to pull out a bay leaf? That was crazy. Only crazy people do what I just did."

So not finding the answers in my own introspection I look elsewhere. Namely my relatives, to put the blame on them. I talk to my mom almost every day and we find ourselves not infrequently nostalgic for events from my upbringing or hers. My mother lost a lot of her family too soon. A lucky couple managed to make it long enough to see me born, but none long enough for me to have any real memory of them.

But mom remembers them. And she would tell me their stories, the family history. In our talks the anecdotes come together and a more solid picture of who I am emerges. Why I am the why I am and why I do the things I do. The saga of generations of the women on my mom's side build brick by brick into a sometimes drafty but solid structure.

Although to hear my mother talk you'd figure the foundation was built on one of self inflicted physical trauma...

GREAT-GREAT GRANDMOTHER, ALMA~1964
Alma was a massive woman. A swedish immigrant, she stood about 6 foot and had a size 12 shoe. She wore massive thick glasses now that she was getting into her sixties. Despite her brawny stature she loved feminine things like interior decorating. As a matter of fact Alma's favorite hobby was to go out at night fall in her Baltimore neighborhood when the homes are lighted and she could see through the windows at how people had done up their living rooms.
One night she was engrossed in her walk. Walking slowly enough to get a really good eyeful but quickly enough to not look like someone casing a joint for home invasion. She was passing a house, head turned fully to the picture window and thinking something along the lines of: "I would never have put that tiffany lamp next to that painting..." When she faced it into a "No Parking sign. Hard.
Alma put the entire right side of her body in to the pole of the sign, breaking her giant glasses and bruising herself from hairline to knee.

"She had to walk around like that for weeks explaining to people what had happened." Mom said. "She didn't want people to think granddad hit her so she wound up telling the truth."

GRANDMOTHER, ELEANOR~ 1955
Eleanor and her husband Barney had just bought their first home in Glenn Park, Baltimore and were celebrating and doing a little home repair. Eleanor LOVED whiskey sours and had had about three of them when she noticed that the kitchen ceiling could really use a new coat of paint.

So she fixed her self a fourth, lit a fresh cigarette and got out the oil based white paint and roller and climbed on top of the big gas stove. She rolled on the paint with one hand and drank her whiskey sour with the other, cigg dangling form her lip all the while. A combination of liquor, paint fumes and new home owned euphoria made her giddy.
She finished as much of the corner over the stove as she could reach and slurped her fifth drink. With great satisfaction in her domestic skill she turned on her heel and walked straight off of the stove and hung in the open air for a split second before belly flopping onto the linoleum.

"You mean she COMPLETELY forgot she was on top of the stove?!" I asked my mom after she told me this story.
"Oh, yes." She replied. "Mom told me she was pretty surprised when she saw the ground rising up to meet her."

MOTHER, GWENDOLYN~ 1988
four years after I was born my parents moved us to Pottstown, Pennsylvania, located in a rural area about an hour outside of Philly. We had lived there for maybe six months when the day for bulk trash pick up came around. People would huck furniture, dead refrigerators and other unwanted items onto the street to be taken away by the trash men.
Now there was an enormous, ancient steel trashcan in our garage that Mom wanted to get rid of but she was a bit worried about just putting it out on the curb. What if the trash collectors thought it was just a regular trashcan and left it? Then she hit on an Idea. Crumple it! That way it would really look like garbage!

Now my mother is not a big woman and yet for some reason she is under the impression that she is. It was this misguided self perception that led her to figure that she could somehow crush this 90 gallon steel bin with her own body weight.
So she dragged a chair over next to the can and climbed up. She readied herself for a moment and then leaped in to the air, right into the middle of the trashcan. The can, instead of buckling neatly in the middle, acted as a trampoline and catapulted my mother ACROSS the garage and into the opposite wall. She laid on the floor in a heap for a few minutes then gingerly got up and limped past the defiant trashcan back into the house.
She sat on the sofa with an ice pack and watched cartoons with me as I played with my new happy meal toy until daddy came home.
When she told him what happened he just looked at her for a minute.
"Why...didn't you just tape a sign to it that said, "TRASH, PLEASE TAKE."?"

"Oh, I don't know, Chris." My mother looked resentfully at my father and shifted her ice pack to her shoulder. "Maybe because I'm STUPID?"

DAUGHTER, LEIA~ 1991

We were still in Pottstown. The property we lived on was vast and beautiful, especially in the summer. every thing was in bloom and flowers bobbed in the sultry heat, the grasses and leaves a shade of green that was so vibrant it hurt the eyes. But my favorite part of our yard was the Dogwoods. There were about seven of them dotting the front and back of our house and all of them proud and strong, the branches stretching wide and heave with four petaled white blossoms. All except one.

A few yards away from the front door was a dogwood that was close to death. It had been pruned back several time and most of the bark had rotted away. In the hollowed interior of the trunk a hive of Yellow Jackets had built their nest. The flew in and out of a knothole about half way up. I watched them on their errands for about a week in mid july until one day I decide I was going to fix their little red wagon.

Now I tell people that what came next was born of a scientific curiosity. That both of my parents were scientists and had instilled in me an interest in the natural world and how creatures react to new stimuli.
But more likely an explaination is that I was full of piss and vinager and just wanted to pick on something smaller than myself.

Which is why I picked up a small stick and wedged it into the entrance of the nest and stood back a few feet to see what would happen.

A slow trickle of yellow jackets formed at the blocked entrance, confused as to why the front door was now firmly blocked. Then a swarm accumulated.

Then one of the little fuckers got wise and realized the JUST MAYBE the little flesh beast standing nearby was the culprit and stung me on the back of the calf. I jumped and yelped, at which point the entire cluster of bees turned their multi-faceted eyes to me at once and began pursuit.

Our kitchen looked out over the backyard and my mother was washing dishes when she saw me come sprinting and wailing around the house to go diving into the playhouse they'd build for me and slam the door.

"She's SO excitable." My mother thought and put another dish in the drying rack.

After about twenty minutes of hurling their little exoskeletons against the playhouse door they finally lost interest and I dragged my swollen leg up to the house to cry on my parents. Dad dutifully avenged me by taking a can of raid and wreaking destruction upon the hive.


...I may not have known my Great Great Grandmother or my Grandmother but they come alive when my mother talks about them. The way she spins their histories I feel like maybe I can know them and that the four of us are bound in blood and similarities that disregard time or mortality.

The two of them reach from the grave and out across generational differences with their smooth dry hands and clap me on the shoulder when I fuck something up badly. With their massive palms, their cigarette stained fingers or cracked knuckles the give a reassuring squeeze and say: "It's ok, kid. Sure, you just broke a heel and fell off the curb in broad daylight while a crowd of people watched. But you're gonna be alright. You're gonna be FINE."

"It's happened to all of us."

I started getting email notifications that people were friending my blog sometime on Friday. I was wondering what the hell was going on until someone messaged me and said that Erika Moen, of the comic DAR, Kindred spirit in filthy living, my long time crush object, had twittered about my blog.

Now I do not understand really what a "twitter" is exactly but it has brought unto me the human validation that I constantly crave. Now see, people told me that doodling hearts with "Mrs Leia Christine Moen" in my notebooks was creepy but clearly she felt my deep passion for her all the way out in Portland and decided to repay my affections with a twitterpated shout out.

So I raise my Shmirnoff Ice MANGO (Which doesn't count as drinking before noon because it is the most pussy drink ever.) to you, Cupcake. It warms my cockles, and by "Cockles" I mean "genitals", that you thought of me.

Cheers!

PS: Erika, Did you get that blanket I wove for you out of my own hair? I put a lot of effort into it....

My heterosexual life mate, Pancha and I have a unique ritual. We go out, maybe engage in some feminine activity, Getting out hair did, shoe shopping, whatever, then find the nearest foreign grocery store and peruse the booze. Pancha is a more discerning drinker than I am. She likes to use words like "Infused" and "Undernotes". Where as I use mostly words like "What is the" and "Proof?" to make my choice between bottles.

But we have reached a gentleman's agreement on one thing. If we look at a suspect bottle of liquor and exclaim at the same time: "What the FUCK is THAT?" Well then that's what we'll be drinking tonight. The more obscure the better. "Does that Vietnamese bourbon have a monkey's paw floating in it? It's only $35! Girl, I'll go halfsies with you!"

So after her haircut on Friday we drive over to Chinatowns auxiliary wing over on Clement Street to hunt through the asian markets for new untried types of firewater. We stood in front of the massive row of shelves stocked high and deep with soju, sake, whisky, wine, our eyes flicking back and forth. Surveying the various brands like Ospreys perched in the high branches waiting for a careless fish to wriggle too close to the surface to be snatched up by our unmerciful claws.

Except these ospreys were looking to for something to get crunk to while watching Tropic Thunder.

Pancha picked up a frosted green bottle. "Do we want soju?"
"I like soju but it never really does a lot for me." I took the bottle an put it back in the wrong place. "It's just like really expensive juice." I lean down to look at a row of fruity wines. "I do want to buy something Korean though..."

"Oh my god, what is THIS?" Pancha plucked up some strange brew in a ceramic jar with a branch of red blossoms painted on it. She turned to me. "So here's what we do. We get three. A Korean one, a Chinese one and a Japanese one."

"That idea is not broken." I said and snatched Bohae Black Raspberry Wine off the shelf. Pancha secured a decent sized bottle of filtered sake and a smallish bottle of something Chinese.

"What's that?" I asked.
Pancha glanced at the label. "Fen Chiew. Distilled from Sorghum, barley and pea."
"What's the proof?"
"53%"
"Get it."

Back at my place we decided to start with the Bohae "Bokbunjajoo" as it was called in Korean. I poured it into two glasses with an ice cube in each and brought it to Pancha who was on the futon engrossed in the first 20 minutes of the movie. We took a sip at the same time.
"Oooh." She looked up. "Ohhhh. That's good. It's not just Raspberry though, it taste's like there is a hint of cherry in there..."
"Why, yes. Subtle notes of...Cherry."

We sipped our wine and relaxed, confident that we were masters of drink selection. Ladies of sophistication who could navigate an alien territory of booze and pluck out only the finest gems.

We polished off the Bohae and Pancha got up from the futon. "I want to try that Fen Chiew shit" She came back from the kitchen with two of my little black tea cups, handed one off to me and plopped back down. I was paying attention to the movie so Pancha raised the cup to her lips first and caught a wiff.

"Oh, Jesus."
"What?"
"Smell it. We may have made a mistake."

I raised my own cup and inhaled. It was brutal and corrosive. Like ammonia. It smelled like a substance you could kill yourself with by pouring it into a bucket, sealing yourself into small bathroom and waiting until the fumes lulled you into unconsciousness and then death.

"Agg" I said and blinked away a tear.
"What do you think?" Pancha asked staring at my face with bulging eyes.
"I think I just grew a dick."

She fixed her worried eyes on the contents of her cup and then back to my face. I sighed and looked my little cup full of what I was now thinking of as "The Milk of Sorrows".

"Fuck it. We bought it. We're drinking it."
"Ahhhh..." She hesitantly raised her cup again.
"Ok, Ok. On the count of "three" we drink." I raised my glass in a toast. "KANPAI."
Our cups made a dull clink against eachother. We took a deep breath.
"One...Two...." Pancha was still looking unhappily from her cup to me. Hoping I would abandon this foolish idea.
"THREE!"

We drank.
And then performed a duet of gagging.

"Auuuuunnnuggg. AUUUUGH. Nuuuuuu...."
"Urgghhhhh. Huk, huk, hukkk..."
"Did we...Ukk....Did we buy rubbing alcohol by accident?"
"Hic" Was the only reply from Pancha.
"Oh, god. Oh, Jesus it's burning. It's ruining all of my organs as it goes down. Agggggh."

We leaned forward at the exact same moment and slammed the cups down on the coffee table as far away from us as we could get them. The bottle of Fen Chiew glinting with a crystal clear, distilled malevolence. We sat in silence for a moment.
"Why is it making me drool like this?" I asked.
"Because you are probably about to throw up." Pancha replied and belched.
"OH GOD. I just burped and I can TASTE IT." She moaned incredulously. "AND IT TASTES LIKE GASOLINE."

I grabbed the traitorous bottle by the neck and headed back into the kitchen.

"So what are we doing with this?" I started twisting the cap back off. "Am I putting this down the sink or are we going to save it for when someone looses a bet?"

She leaned through the doorway with the light of new life in her eyes. "No, no, no! Save it! I want to see if we can get Konstantin to drink it!!" She squealed with glee.

Konstantin is our Russian born friend. I have watched him eat a slice of pork fat and chase it with a shot of vodka. Pancha was at a party with him where after the booze ran out he drank straight up Triple Sec. After a Comic convention we went to dinner and he ate an omelet the size of an infant, two belgian waffles and the left overs of about six other attendees, washing it down with four beers. He is something of a legend in our circle for the things we've seen him put in his body.

So of course I want to see if he'll drink this shit. Back into the fridge it went.

It lays in wait there now, like the serpent in the garden. Waiting for the day it is sprung on upon an unsuspecting man we claim to love like a brother.

I have a new post up at our Couscous blog. A review of Joanna Estep's new comic, Happy Birthday, Michael Mitchell.

http://www.couscouscollective.com/

I had skidded back into the room when I heard Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London" come on the CD player.

"Is that Warren?? I FUCKING LOVE WARREN."
Matt looked up. "You know Warren Zevon?"
"I FUCKING LOVE WARREN ZEVON." I repeated and went back to the mirror to finish putting on my raccoon eyes. He came up behind me and grabbed my ass.
"You have no Idea how hot it makes me that you know Warren."

Turns out he was a recent convert to the Church of Zevon. I had been a fan for years but we both had some gaps in our discography. I introduced him to "Mutineer" and he played "Hostage-O" for me.

It was a lesser known track and Matt explained : "I love this song so much because it so perfectly illustrates the absurdity and desperation of love."


It's a little over a week after SeriousGate '09. I was just listening to my Ipod on shuffle and guess what comes on?

"I will stand in line
For the sacrifice
For the shamefaced love
Of the ugly vice
I will pay the price to see how far you'll go
Let me be your prisoner
Let me be your hostage-o"

AUGH.
I flinched and my fingers jerked towards the skip button. But I stopped myself and remembered to breath again after about 10 seconds. That's down from the last time, when I saw a red motorcycle in the street and didn't inhale for about 25.

Then I very deliberately Put my hand back down and listened to it again. Then I listened to it again. Then again. Until the tightness in my shoulders went away. Then I listened to it again. Why? Because I was here first, Motherfucker. Warren and I have been going steady since I was 17.

But Matt was right. It does perfectly illustrate the absurdity and desperation of love.

Everything I learned about being verbally cruel to others I learned from my mother. On meeting certain friends or boyfriends she would smell blood in the water, the timidity of a weaker animal, and lo! the judging would begin. My mother does not swear as casually as I do but then she didn't need to. She had the vocabulary and the tone of voice to stop men twice her size dead in their tracks. This is why I can only aspire to her levels of greatness. I have to use words like "Fuck" and "Shitting" and "Thundercunt" to get my message of loathing across. Mom needs no such corse crutches.

She's gotten over most of the hatred of social interaction she had when I was little and every now and then resists the natural gut urge bred into the women of my family to evicerate. Now when confronted with the inoccently stupid for the most part she manages to bite her tounge. For example she related to me the other day an incident at the salon.

The death of Farah Fawcett had just been announced and my mother and her stylist were chatting about how sad it was that she had died too young.

"What did she die of again?" The stylist asked as she delicately shaped my moms chin length bob. "It was cancer, wasn't it?"

"Yeah, anal cancer." Mom said a little sadly.
"Anal cancer?" The stylist said, puzzled.
"Yes... of the anus?"
The stylist didn't stop her work but was still clearly chewing this information over and frowned.
"What part of the body is that?"

And with that remark the blood was in the water. My mother shifted a little in her chair. A thousand quips rolled in the cavern of her mouth, agitating like a hive of african bees. How does a grown woman NOT know what the anus is? How can someone get to be approximatly the same age as my mother and not have been hepped to that kind of info? After all it's not as secret and mysterious as say, the clitoris.

My mother decided that alienating the woman on whom the intergity of her hair depended was not the best move and swallowed her incredulous bile. Instead she just said:

"It's um...It's the butthole."

I gagged on my coffee when she told me this.
"You said "Butthole"?? That was the EXACT term you used?"
"I couldn't THINK of anything else!"
"Oh my god, mom." I was still trying to breath. "I have NEVER in my LIFE heard you say anything like "Butthole"."

Over the phone I could hear the crackle as she sipped her Lipton's tea and said dryly, "Well, Leia, there comes a time in every woman's life where you just do what you gotta do."

My proclivity for making the same mistakes twice is aided and abetted by a susceptibility to flashy advertising. One time I saw an add for Burger King and went on to walk into the closest location and eat not one but two double whoppers with a large fry. It's an experience I still regret living through.

Then there was the time with the Nair.

Nair for those of you unfamiliar is a product that promises to remove unsightly body hair with out the hassle of razor burn. As a pubescent girl I fell for it hook, line and fuzzy leg. Somewhere in my simple head I thought being the smoothest bitch in the gym locker room was going to repair my reputation as an ugly duckling and earn me the admiration of my peers. So I managed to get my hands on some.

"I don't think you want to do that." My mom looked up from her Better Homes & Gardens to say.
I just huffed my way to the bathroom in my oversized bathrobe, clutching my Nair. After all I was 13 goddamned years old, what the hell did SHE know?

Thirty minutes later I was on the sofa whimpering as my mother dabbed at what seemed to be a pretty rad chemical burn that stretched from ankle to thigh on both legs. She laid a cool compress over the worst of the oozing flesh and repeated the mantra of my entire childhood:

"So what did we learn here today?"

Well the answer is not a fucking thing. About a month ago I sat wadded up on my futon watching a Flavor of Love rerun and a Nair ad comes on.

Five hot women dressed like it was the 70's are doing a cute little dance in front of what looks like a vintage neighborhood backdrop. The most irritating song is playing.
"Who wears short shorts? WE wear SHORT SHORTS."
I've reached for the remote but then everything changes! The dull 70's colors are ripped away and the tacky ass clothes along with them! All of a sudden the music is a hip club beat and the women are all in modern hoochie shorts and are now even a million times hotter! So hot that if I had seen them at a bar I would have stood really close to them so that people would at the very least think I was their ugly friend.

It's a ad for the NEW Nair. This one promises it's perfect for sensitive skin! It would never hurt me the way the old Nair did! And it's super easy. Just apply then wait a couple minutes, hop into the shower and wipe away with the cleansing sponge provided!

Now I ALMOST didn't bite. ALMOST. But there was just one thing. I had an underwear party to go to that night.

And if you are going to go to a party where the dress code is nothing but underwear then you wanna bring your A game when it comes to the pubes if you know what I'm sayin'.
So who wears short shorts? Why, *I* wear short shorts! Off to Walgreens I went, hope in my heart and song of silky calves on my lips...

On getting back home I laid out my hot little boy shorts with the matching bra and went whistling to the shower.
I slathered on the cream. Did it smell like a refinery the last time I did this? No no, I thought, don't worry this is the sensitive skin shit. It'll be fine. I applied it to my bikini line. Glancing at the tube the words "DO NOT USE ON SUNBURNED, INFLAMED OR BROKEN SKIN." popped out at me.
I looked down at my knees, which were not only sunburned but also covered in a thick layer of the cream that I now know is not to be used in concert with a sunburn. I thought for a moment. Then shrugged.

"Well, go hard or go home I figure." I waited three more minutes and hopped in the shower with my exfoliating sponge. Cautiously I put the first leg under the spray and began rubbing off the goop in a circular motion just like the instructions said, wincing in anticipation.

Nothing. It felt like nothing. No burning, no blistering, no redness...and best of all when I felt the area I'd cleaned away? Smooth. Smooth like a duck. I'd done it. I'd triumphed. Surely the last time was a fluke!

I was just thinking about how my hotness was going to overwhelm everyone at the party and rinsing the last of the Nair from my left thigh when a tingling began at the back of my knee. As the tingling turned into itching the low keen that had started in my throat turned into a desperate plea.

"Oh, fuck. Fuck me dead...No, no, no, no, no, please god don't let this happen..."

But I think god knows I have had sex before marriage and drink on Sundays because he totally fucking blew me off. The itching was now burning.

Leaping from the shower I scuttled into my bedroom where there was better light to survey the damage by. Inches of leg were a disturbing shiny pink, other places patches of fuzz clung twisted and burned but tenacious. You know the way the trees looked after the Tunguska Event? That is an accurate simile for the ruins of my legs.

Then I looked to my bikini line.
"Oh, Jesus. I have ruined my pussy."

There was no preamble for a blister here. It was just fucking bleeding. On either side of my attempt at a vroom-vroom pubic racing stripe were angry red clouds transforming my sweet kitty into something more like an angry badger. I dabbed at it mournfully and ran my hand down my legs again and debated shaving. That Idea was quickly discarded as being foolhardy in the extreme. Besides it was pretty smooth in most places... I bent down again for a closer look.

Now what had happened in the smooth bits, and I did not know this was possible, my leg hairs seemed to have withdrawn under the uppermost surface of my dermis like the necks of startled clams. They lurked there like sunken ships under the surface of an uncaring, furious sea.

I glanced at the clock. One hour before my ride to the party showed up. For two weeks I had been looking forward to this party.

I glanced back down at the carnage of my lower half. Then back at the clock, then to my little outfit.

"Fuck it, I'm GOING."

My ride called for me right as I was applying mineral foundation to my tender bits. I stood in front of the mirror for a beat before throwing on a pair of jeans and a tank top. "Nah," I thought and slipped on my black pumps. "Nah, It's fine. It doesn't look that bad." So out the door I went.

Two hours later I'm at the party talking to one of the most beautiful boys I have ever seen. Big, clear, blue eyes that squint and crinkle, roman nose, cheek bones you could slice deli meat on. All wiry and lanky. If I had a B-52 I would have him airbrushed posing on the side of it. I think his name was Andrew...

He must be enjoying my company because we've been talking for about twenty minutes. We lean against the wall nursing beers as the rest of the party mills around us.

"So are you having fun?" Andrew asks. "I was kind of nervous. I haven't been to a party like this before."

"Aw, Yeah! This really fun! But dude, I was nervous too. Haha. I used that Nair shit, You know that shit that's supposed to make your body hair, like, POOF VANISH?"

Andrew stares at me hard. I know at this point I'm talking a little to loudly but I just cannot seem to stop vomiting out more awful words.

"And you know," I gestured vaguely at my genitals with the beer bottle. "I really burned myself with it and almost didn't come tonight because who want's to show up to an underwear party looking like they have some sort of horrible new form of Herpes, amiright? Hahaha...AHAHAHA."

Andrew looks slightly off to the side. My face instantly deadpans.

"But I don't have Herpes though. Like I've never had herpes. When I say I don't have it I don't mean that I don't have it like it's just in remission right now, Like, I just DON'T have herpes." I take a take a desperate pull of my beer. "You know I'm very safe with that kind of shit. I mean safe with activities where one could pick up some herpes."

"Ahahaha" He makes a wary sort of eye contact with me again. "Ahaha. That's good. I guess."

We stare at the potted plant between us. The dim light falls on my knee and I can see the rosy halo that falls on a spray of missed leg fuzz. Motherfucker.... What is about the knees that you can never get rid of the fuzzies?

I give up and drain my beer completely.
"Soooo... What did you study in college, Andrew?"

Hey modern age! Do you have a music video to sum up my emotional state in a veiled, poetic way?
Why it seems you do!

It's incredibly inconvenient to date someone you give a shit about. The usual blase apathy with which interpersonal relationships are approached is replaced with something crawling and desperate and so painfully hopeful It feels as if your organs have been wrenched from their proper place. You'll give not going totally crazy a shot but let's face it, You won't succeed. And when your hopes for the true love you wanted are sunk by your own bastard personality and circumstance you'll wind up like me. Shaking and calling your good friend and neighbor at 10:00 PM when you know she's fucking asleep.

"Hello?" Teri mercifully answers the phone.
"Unnnngh...ffft...fttt. He. Dumped. me." I hiccup. Snot and tears and other residue of shame caking my face. And Teri, half awake says:
"Do you want to come over?"
Yes I do. I do very much. I want to run to someone who will listen to me blubber. This is why I drew a hard solid line between the people I loved and the people I fucked so when I made the mistake of blending the two I had somebody to go to.

I walk across the hall and knock on the door. She answers to my wrecked face in her yoga pants and sweatshirt and wraps my heaving body into her own.

"I'm sorry." I choke. "I'm sorry. I just want to binge drink until I don't feel this way."
Teri guides me gently into her studio. "It's fine, babe."

She opens beer after beer for me and I am so grateful as she watches me cry out the details of what I knew was doomed to begin with.

"This...fucking MAN. Makes me feel this way. And I can't deal with it..."
She asks what happened and I relive him looking down at the bar room table we sat at as he spoke, raw, bleeding, fresh because I just came from it less than an hour ago.

"So, I have a problem." He says.
I lean in. "Tell me about your problem." I say.
"So, I really like you..." He says.
He says this and I know I'm totally fucked.
"You really like me, BUT?" I ask. "Are you still hung up on your ex-girlfriend?"
"I wish it was that simple..." He placed his hand out on the little round table we sat at in the the local Nob Hill dive as if he wanted me to take it. I kept both of my own hands in my lap, nails digging into the flesh of my crossed thighs.
"You wish it was that simple, BUT?"
His fingers flinch on the stained wood. "You're really fun and I have a great time with you..."
"BUT??" I snap. My face is hard like the old wood our beers sit on.
"I'm sorry." His eyes roll to my face briefly, guiltily. I hate what I know is coming up but I still look at his jaw line and think about how handsome I find it. "I'm sorry." He says "I'll stop patronizing you. I like you a lot but the next relationship I want to be serious...And I just don't think anything with you will be serious."

I looked at him. Then picked up my jacket and shrugged it on with out making eye contact. To be fair he didn't either. I placed my hand on his curly hair and felt his scalp under my fingers. I pressed down harder than I really meant to.
"Well, hey. Thanks. It was fun for a while." I said and left the bar, down the stairs, in front of all the old lonely drunks. To my credit I didn't start to cry till half a block back to my apartment.

This is how I end up at Teri's late on a workday evening, three deep in Heinekens and sucking on an American Spirit.

"I can't believe this. I haven't been dumped since I was thirteen and here I am being dumped." I rest my head on the cool surface of her coffee table and leak tears.

"Sweetie. it's okay." Teri says and pushes the pack of cigarettes towards me. "It's going to be better tomorrow."
I belch and snivel out my words. "But why did I let this one get to me? I've tried so hard NOT to let these things get to me..." A snot bubble pops on the glass surface and I discreetly wipe it away. After all in movies when people experience heartbreak they don't goddamned snot all over the place. They cry artfully, mascara painting their delicate cheek bones! This is how I imagine my self getting over it. As an actor filming a scene. Talking to Teri is just like doing the promotional tour about my new dramatic performance. I pretend I am on a talk show.

Teri takes a drag and swigs her beer. "Yeah, well, sometimes you find someone worth caring about and it's worth it to go after it." She is most sage as usual. " It's good that you had it for a while. It's better to feel these things than not."

"But I don't want to feel like this. I've felt like this only three times. I hate it. I can't stand it." I started to blubber again the second I pick my head up off the coffee table. "I don't want to feel anything."
"But you have to. The other option is worse." Says Teri.
"How is it worth it? This isn't worth it." I drain half of my beer in one gulp. "Why do guys like this get under our skin?" I squint at her before continuing. "Why am I even asking you that? you're older than me. You've been in my boat."
"Oh yeah" She says. Her hands sweep to illustrate gross acts of sexual whupsie daisy. "I know about when you say, "Sure I'll do you on the roof of the building I work on. Sure, it may end my career but I'll do that. You want a BJ in under the fire engine? Okay!" I know."

I slam my head into the table yet again. Teri threads her hand though my hair and scratches my scalp.
"Gonna be okay, princess. Most people are shit but the worthwhile ones are still out there. You'll find another. You are too awesome not to."
I just gurgle in response and lay on the table for a little longer.

"You want another beer for the road?" She asks.
Of course I want another beer for the road. I need a frosty beverage to sip on when I go back to my apartment to delete all of this cocksucker's info from my contact list on Facebook.

At some point I blackout face down in bed with my Ipod still playing the tragic music playlist I compiled before losing motor functions.

I wake up about 7 AM and call my mother at 8 AM for that unique flavor combination of sympathy and ass reaming only the woman who birthed you can give you.

"Oh, Sweetie..." Mom says when I tell her I got chucked. "I KNEW when you told me his parents were coming into town. I almost told you that you were probably going to get dumped."
"Oh, hey, that's great. How do you know all of this shit before I do?"
"Because of my natural pessimism." She says.
Sure enough I start blubbering again and give her the full details. Or at least as full as I could while crying like a pussy. Of my exit I ask:
"So at least my departure was classy, right? At least I maintained some dignity, right?"
"It was VERY classy sweetie." She says.
"Okay." I fling myself back into bed and crush my glasses and scatter a pile of hair clips. "I'll be fine. I'll cry about this most of today and then move on to the "Make out with strangers" phase of things."
I hear my mom balk on the other line. "No. That is NOT what you should do. You need to stop doing that. There is something to be said for withholding what you have."

Jesus, It's a low moment when your own mother gently suggests that maybe the reason no one loves you is because you dole out your musky treasures a little too frequently.

"I know. I just really liked him." I say repeating what is fast becoming a catchphrase for me.
"Well, I KNOW sweetie." My mother says in a watery voice. "I'm just sorry it didn't go the way you wanted..."
"Are you...are you CRYING? Are you fucking crying right now?"
I'm answered with a sniffle. I roll out of bed and snatch up my keys and credit card.

"No, no, no." I state, my own dribbling tears suddenly gone. "No. You are not going to cry about this. I am getting off the phone. Call me back when you've pulled yourself together so we can get back to what the real issue is here. The real issue being feeling pity for me."
Mom laughs a little between a hiccup. "Okay, call you in a little."

We get off the phone and I go to the market and buy a bottle of wine. No one really looks at me to long for buying firewater at 9 AM. I think because I had the look of some one ready to start a fight for no good reason. This didn't keep the clerk from being annoyingly chipper when buying my shitty merlot.

I got back home and corked that fucker, dove straight back into bed and drank form the most prone position possible. I replayed the occasions my short term lover and I spent together in my head.

Making dinner together...going out to dinner...talking about what we liked to eat for dinner...That time we went to an orgy.

And I remembered waking up after we'd made love and looking at his his sleeping form. The light of the street lamps high lighting his face, his muscled arm thrown up over his head. I laid there and let a string of thoughts roll through my mind.
"You are such a lovely person." I thought then. "I am having so much fun with you. I could see myself being with you. I think I love you. I know I love you. When I see you, when I even think of you I burn like a fire in a coal mine. My love for you burns subtly but it disrupts my geography and opens yawning pits from witch steam and fire erupts. Oh I hope I can make you love me as I love you."

I had finished my litany and laid there looking at they way his eyelashes rested upon his cheek.
Then he farted. Farted with such force I thought someone had discharged a hand gun in the street. I would swear the duvet was blown back.

I took a giant swig of Sutter Home and wiped the new tears off my face.
I may just be able to get over this.

Ok, so this is pretty much the final color version of Jason Thompson's beautiful Bold Riley map. What I need all of you to tell me is this, Does it look to dark? Are the grungy age marks I made on it to distracting/ugly? Also I dropped in a beige layer over the whole thing to dull the white areas. Does that look shitty?

Friends! Cartoonists! Innocent bystanders! Save me from myself!

It's always been of vague concern to me that maybe I love more than I am loved by others. I'm a simple animal. Within five minutes of meeting a person I decide if I like them or not, and within another five I decide that I love them like my own breath and proceed to lavish these individuals with a kind of slavish adoration that has been termed: "Creepy".

Nick had taken me by the elbow at one point."Listen. You're funny and all. But you need to stop acting like a rapist."

I have a hard time curbing my behavior as it is, but coupled with a childhood entirely starved of genuine peer affection and the dawning realization that maybe not all of my character traits are repugnant makes it even harder. Every now and then I would like to gather the people in my life deep into my bosom and say; "I love you all SO much. If I could I would crawl inside of you like Skywalker crawled inside that Tauntaun in Empire Strikes Back, I love you so. "

And Nick would have another quiet word with me while the rest of the party would agree that I should not be allowed around bongs anymore. Even in the capacity of a spectator.



However I'm coming to the conclusion that maybe this one sided devotion extends not only to people, but also to places and things.

Take for example my Laptop. I have cared for it, soothed it, backed up all of it's files, sung it's praises and cradled it everyday and yet now it's decided to reject the idea of home based wireless internet like a bad transplant kidney.

"C'mon, baby." I soothe as I try to load the yahoo front page again. "Remember that time I so tenderly cleaned the dust from between your keys? I sang Jeff Buckly to you as I buffed your screen to a shine. Why will you not tell me what's wrong?"

"Cannot load page. Your computer is not connected to the internet." I am coldly rebuffed.

An even crueler lover has been the coastlines. I worship the oceans with reverence some family members don't even receive. No matter how cold or choppy or rip tidey I will attempt to swim at at any beach I gain access to. The smell triggers in me a euphoric reaction not unsimilliar to putting a labrador in the car for a ride and then rolling down the window on the free way. I fling myself into the sea with no regard for personal safety, gather and dispose of trash, fall asleep in the sand, cut the rings that hold sodas together so baby sea turtles may not become entangled... So much effort on my part and how am I repaid?

Blistered sunburns, jelly fish stings and flesh scored raw by blowing sand. And that one time with the shark in Hawaii but come on it REALLY looked like a fucking dolphin from where I was swimming.

Although I guess the sea isn't entirely at fault. I really should have learned to guard myself from her harsher mood swings. Dammit though I can never seem to remember to put on sunblock. The condom for UV rays.

Once when I was 16 my parents surprised me with trip to Cancun for my birthday. I thought we were just going to Chicago like usual and was too stupid to look at the flight board. It wasn't until we were half way across the Gulf I realized where we were going. At that point my mind ceased to function as an adult. My bathing suit was on before we even hit the ground. Four years of landlocked exile in the nougaty center of the country had made me rabid.

Our hotel was right on the water and I was ready to go fling myself it to the arms of my love. My mother attempted to corral me with SPF 50. But I chittered like a tiny, angry animal and hurtled out the patio door towards the beach, leaving my mother with empty greased hands.

"Just let her go." Said my father pulling a newsweek out his bag. "She'll realize she's made a mistake by tonight.

My mother washed her hands of sunscreen and responsibility and the two ordered margaritas.

Sure enough by the time my enthusiasim had been cooled by the onset of dusk and hunger I was the color of Marinara sauce. Wincing and whimpering. By day two I molted like a cicada, my swedish genetics revealing themselves. It was a fleshy horrifying display.

Of course Both my parents were sunburned too, if to a somewhat lesser extent.
Mom slathered me in sunblock on day three before we went out snorkeling.
"So now do we realize WHY we take the time to do this? Because it turns out badly otherwi-OH. CHRIS!"
My father had walked by and pinched the burned bottom part of her ass that her swim suit hadn't covered.
"If you do that AGAIN I will DIVORCE you."

By the end of the trip I was a husk of a human being but my love was not diminished.

In planning my escape from the midwest I knew I had to get back to the coast where I could continue my masochistic love affair. And continue it did. It's why as I type this I'm shifting in a desperate attempt to find some section of my dermis that does not feel as if gasoline has been poured on it and then set alight. I should know to avoid falling asleep at the beach but the Beers were crisp and tasty and the sand warm. So I fell asleep on Saturday at Baker's beach. Photo's of my friends can be seen posing with my prone, drooling form like tourists in front of the Great Wall or some damn thing. All of them complicit in my sizzling.

So the beach claims yet another pound of flesh from me. Not for the first time and probably not the last either considering how much I love the abuse.
"I love you, Ocean. I love you so much even though you are full of things that only wish me harm. I would drink you if I could I love you so..."
"Listen. It's sweet and all," Says the ocean."But I really wish you would take the hint because this is getting kinda creepy."

Alas, I am smitten though and incapable of controlling my desire to be as close as possible to what I love, even if my affections are not wholly returned.

I can however now spot a jellyfish at twenty yards in the open water. I ain't falling for that shit twice no matter how smitten I may be.

My relationship with vacuum cleaners is fraught and uncomfortable. I hate everything about them. They're loud. They're heavy. No matter what fancy dancy top of the line model you have they behave as if one minor misstep in handling and they will malfunction spewing the bile and detritus you have only recently sucked up all over the living room.

But also they are loud. It's been my cross to bear that I'm easily startled by sudden loud noises like those little designer yip-yip dogs. When I was little the second I saw my mother drag the Dirt Devil out of the hall closet I was out the back door and into the woods. Our CATS handled the sound of the vacuum cleaner better than I did. To this day mom can get me to scrub an acre of tile flooring by hand but the second she asks for help with the vacuuming I go a big nursie. I will only perform this wretched chore when things have reached a Detroit level of filth.

Looking around I see I have reached that pinnacle. There is hair piled in the corners. Great rolling tumbleweeds of my frizzy nonsense. Over in the kitchen I see what looks like a desiccated brussle sprout. Behind the papasan chair there is either a pile of dust and bobby pins or a raccoon. I'm not sure and I'm fucking well not going over to check.

My problem however is that I had thrown out the vacuum cleaner my parents had purchased for me when I moved into my new place. I hated that thing. I named it after an old boyfriend because it generated more mess than it professed to clean up and it was difficult to shift.

"What do you mean you put it on the street?" Mom asked over the phone. She had that tone in her voice that suggested I had done something I really, really should not have done.
I floundered desperately. "Well... It was heavy! I mean really heavy and It hurt my back and it kept spewing dust! Remember how it would spew dust?"
"Yes, and do you remember how when the last time I was out to visit and I figured out WHY it was doing that and FIXED the problem?"
"Uh..."
"And then I showed YOU how to fix it so you could continue to use it?"
"Uh..."
I could practically hear her pinching the bridge of her nose.
"Look, we just won't tell your father you threw out a Perfectly good vacuum cleaner and figure out how to get you something lighter."

I saw my chance to backpeddle.
"No! It's Okay! My building has a vacuum I can use! It's fine! I don't need another!" I said.
"Fine. Just...don't TELL me this kind of stuff, okay?"

Now what I said was true. There was a vacuum for tenant use but it's gone now. It's been gone for a week leading me to believe it's been stolen. I have two suspects. One is the surly New Yorker with the bowl cut on the first floor, but I don't have anything to back that up. I just hate him. More likely is the 80 year old woman down the hall who loves to vacuum the same way I love merlot. Either way that bitch is gone and my home grown tumbleweeds keep on a rollin'.

To add insult to injury it seems that everyone is has the god damned time of their lives vacuuming their homes in my building and the one that joins on to mine. Hardly an hour goes by that I don't hear the violent, menacing roar of a heavy vac churning up the lightwell. So I have to LISTEN to that wretched noise and tolerate the bunching of every muscle in my terribly anxiety prone body while simultaneously being reminded that there is less filling in my duvet than there is dust on my floor. For a month since I hucked my Vacuum this has been going on. A non stop chorus of vacuums, every make and model under the sun raising their gutteral voices in hearty refrain:

VVVVVRRRRRRMMMMMMSUCK IT, WEATHINGTONMMMMMMRRRRMMM AND YOU HAVE A DATE TONIGHTMMMMMRRRRRRRWAIT TILL HE SEES YOUR FLOORS HE WILL LEAVE IN DISCUST RRRRRRRRMMSUCK ITMMMMVVVRRRRRRR.

There is nothing for it but to scoop up wads of fluffy scurf with my bare hands like a quaint rice paddy worker. And to chase out that, turns out, very real raccoon that's chewing on my router cable.

Thank god I didn't put my broom out on the street too.

The naps were getting longer and that's normally a bad sign. I poked my head out of the duvet at 6:00 PM. Yesterday I was too tired to stay at a party and too tired to get home from the party. The day before that I just sat down for a minute at 11:00 and came to at 2:00 AM, laying with one leg propped on the sofa and face down in the berber carpet.

Getting that close to the rugs makes me realize how badly I need to vacuum. A fact that makes me yawn just to keep from crying.

Like most soft headed women I decided this new onset of depression could be cured with Ice Cream. But I wouldn't see money until Friday so into the change jar I dove. About $4.50 I came up with, surely enough for a handful of tasty, fatty endorphins. I didn't even lock the apartment door I was in such a rush.

At the liquor store half a block up I debated my options. Apparently they may Twix bars in ice cream form now. That was intriguing. But then there was my old favorite the Snickers ice cream bar... I look to my left. Jesus is that mini Hagen Das? Dolce de Leche? Are you shitting me? I bundle all of this in my arms and take it up to Victor, the sweet, soft spoken latin man who seems to never be off shift. But not before I grab a bottle of apple juice because I just HAD to have it.

"$5.08." Said Victor quietly. His gold grills glinting in counterpoint to his personality.
"Uh.. ok. I'm going to put that Twix back, ok? Hold on." I skittered back to the ice cream cooler as a portly man dressed in black came in to the shop. Back up to the counter I went a skittering again. I counted out change like I had the right amount.
"Ok, one, two, three, four, five, six seven, eight, nine, ten... Ok that makes three dollars..."
Behind me the fat man in black started up. "Are you short? I've got some change in my pocket." But Victor, My short, Mexican, my knight in armor with his shining gold teeth just said without a hint of sarcasm: "I really needed change. I'm glad you came by."

I laughed nervously. "Well I'm glad me and my poverty could help out.Ok, there's a dollar in quarters..."

The jerk off behind me got in touch with his funny bone. He addressed Victor.
"Hey, I'm going to pay in pennies. Is that ok?"
I turned with the smile my mother taught me. The easy going one that means mentally we are doing grievous violence to a person. A beating with a tire iron is a family favorite.
"Haha, yeah...I'm not doin' so good today, huh?"
"I'm just kidding!" says the man in black.
"Oh, I know!" I say, chipper as always. But in my head the gory thought: "I WILL EAT YOU LIKE THE CUBAN PORK SANDWICH YOU ARE JUST LET ME FIGURE THIS OUT."

In the end Victor lets me go twenty cents short. My hero.

I'm at the elevator door and can't even wait for it to show up before I start opening my Snickers Ice Cream Bar. The chocolate is cracked. Fault lines run down the length of it, caramel oozes and a solitary peanut surfaces like a whale breaching through the shattered coco carapace.

My entire world opens beneath my feet. The litany begins.

"My god." I think staring at my damaged goods. "I can't even buy a Snickers Ice Cream without fucking it up. I mean I'm going to eat it, but I was going to eat it at the computer and read blogs... but it's going to get melty and the caramel is going to drip on the keyboard. I'm going to ruin the D through H keys and I won't able to fix it.I'll have to go to the Apple store and they are always so good looking and judgmental and they won't fix it because they don't fix damage done to a machine by it's junk food fatty owner. I'll have to call dad and admit that I fucked up because I love Snickers Ice Cream Bars! Oh he'll be sweet about it and solve the problem but maybe he's wondering why his twenty four year old daughter can't keep it together long enough to notice the caramel dripping out of the wrapper or complete a BA in illustration. Really, it's shit like this that makes you unworthy of love..."

Depression is like this. A creeping beast in the undergrowth that strikes at the most absurd of moments. Any legitimate reason you may have for being upset is waylaid by the small and insubstantial. You'll spill coffee grounds while making the morning joe and sink to the floor in despair, contemplating Plath like whether or not to put your head in the oven and end it all.
Or it forces you to sleep for hours at a time at random to think only when opening your eyes: "SHIT. I woke up again. I thought for sure that time my organs had shut down."

But it's those small victories that get you through. For example, even though my Snickers Ice Cream Bar was a hot mess I managed not to curl up in front of the elevator door and take a nap. No! I successfully waited until it reached the lobby before stepping in while drooling all over my ice cream. I had bogarted the entire thing by the time I reached the third floor, the caramel sucked from my fingers. I even made it to my bathroom with some time to spare so I could fill the sink with cold water and plunge my head in when the tears started! Magnificent! I may still be unemployed but damn it, I pulled my head out of the porcelain looking fresh as an english rose!

It's the small victories that get you through.

"I sucked dick once" Said Jim. Everyone sat up on their barstools and paid attention. Brittany poured another beer.
"You sucked dick?"
"You sucked dick?"Nikki followed up immediately.

Ah, Here I was again. In the comfortable and familiar world of fellatio. Even though I had heard this Irish three way story about five times already. It was like the gate way drug of dick sucking stories and I had moved on. Now a dick sucking has to take place in Juarez and involve dwarf transsexuals before I can get a buzz.

But what was going to make my night, the icing on the dick sucking cake was that Danny had just come back into the bar with a giant, turgid burrito and didn't know what we were talking about.

I leaned over.
"You are going to love that burrito. It's going to be your best ever."
"What?" He asked and took an enormous bite pretty much at the exact point that Jim was reaching the money shot of his experimental homosexuality. With grand sweeping gestures he described it, the conductor of an orchestra comprised entirely of genitals.

Danny paused in eating.
"Wait, so you had another dude suck your dick?"
"No, no. I was the one doing the sucking."

Jim continued and Danny looked forlornly into his burrito. At the sour cream spilling from one side.
And all I could do was chortle with adolescent glee and offer him more salsa...

I wind my self up for things. I was laying in bed taking one of my rum induced naps And woke up. It was stifling because I'd set the electric blanket to H. Which is about the same temperature you would roast a chop at. I was paralyzed with one of my anxiety attacks that springs up for no reason. The thing is I just could not decide what would be less painless, turning the blanket to low or opening a window. the Window is on one side the blanket clicker on the other.

WHAT TO DO?? If I go one way maybe I will roll over on my glasses and break them! I can't afford to replace that shit! or put my foot down on something sharp! God, Weathington if you only cleaned your room things like this wouldn't happen. You always fuck these things up, christ the 11th grade career councilor was right about you...

It would have to be the opening the window. That looked like the safest bet.

I cautiously unrolled from my ball of terror and stepped out of bed reaching gingerly for the blind cord...

...and somehow got tangled up in the sheets and fell forward, yanking the blinds up which made a sound like the rending of flesh and smashing my forehead into the windowpane. Somehow in the daze I got tangled up in the cord and nearly hung myself like a 4 week old kitten.

My anxiety is perfectly justified. I never want to be told differently.

My mother's side is Swedish which is occasionally a source of cultural pride for things like:



But more often for abortions like:



Which is why I'm surprised these guys have not shown up on a VH1 reality show beforehand. The swedish triplets and members of a rock band named "Snake of Eden" are contestants of "Daisy of Love", the Rock of Love with Brett Michael's spin-off.


Just...Just... part of me is saying "YES! YES THAT IS SO FUCKING WEIRD! YES!" and the other part of me has nothing to say because shes hung herself with a belt.
The three of them want to date her all together BTW.

But really though. I'm hooked on these stupid "For The Love" of shows and the human scurf it showcases season after season. It's the visual equivalent of mainlining the most dubious of street drugs.

I'm pretty attached to Daisy with her fake boobs and squeaky voice. She never fails to entertain and the dudes that have been selected to fill out her coterie are such fantastic trainwrecks I can barely find the words in my extensive vocabulary to express the excitement I feel. VH1 has realized that no one actually care about who WINS the bullshit dating game, we just want to see shameful acts of inebriation and hear the barely literate sound bites.

God, I wish I was a better person. Here's the trailer:


(ETA: OH WAIT. Daisy kicks the Swedes out about ten minutes in. It was to weird even for her.)

I think it was over this weekend that the Swine Flu thing really blew up. The basketball game was over and Valerie switched to CNN. The anchor's spoke of the death toll in Mexico with that mix of seriousness and barely concealed glee that's the hall mark of 21st century journalism. Death tolls were recited, the CDC was quoted, fear was mongered. Then they got to the part any one cares about which is how it's going to affect the US.

"People in midwest are freaking out right now. I guarantee it's going on right now." I said to the other people on the couch. "You should have seen them during the anthrax scare. they love to panic almost as much as they love Applebee's."

"I don't care about this." Said Valerie. "I just want to see Bea Arthur's obituary."

Sure enough every hour since getting back from Tahoe Yahoo news has been running head lines like "YOU COULD BE AT RISK" and "PANDEMIC ALERT RISES" or "HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF." That last one is my favorite because it's full of Durhay advice like washing your hands, not sneezing on people and taking vitamin C. Really? Really? Is that how you prevent a flu? You assholes. My mother told me that when I was six.

So now the back peddling starts. Folks have gotten all worried and hyped up and now need to be told that this isn't AIDS. It's a bad flu. So many have died in Mexico because it's a country that has a fucked up infrastructure and bad (worse than the US at least) health care.

But for real though. If this cold I have kills me I want a giant granite pig for a tombstone.

That's it. I've done it. Between the Stumptown Comics Fest, this weekend in Tahoe and my usual disregard for my well-being my throat is BLOWN. Two weeks now? And how do I react?

In Portland:
" I WILL TALK VERY LOUDLY AND DRINK ALL OF THIS MERLOT NO NO. IT'S FINE, IT'LL DULL THE COUGHING AND OH JESUS, ARE THOSE WINSTONS? I HAVEN'T SEEN THOSE SINCE I WORKED A RENAISSANCE FESTIVAL. LEMME GET ONE OF 'EM FOR THE NOSTALGIA OF IT."

In Tahoe:
"LALALA DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY CIGARETTES LEFT? YOU THERE, STRAPPING AUSTRALIAN! POUR SCOTCH DOWN MY GULLET! I DESIRE TO VOMIT FROM THIS HOT TUB!"

Which was fantastic by the way. I thought initially when I went out to the porch to see Nick shoveling snow over the shameful scene everyone had elected me by committee to be scapegoat because I tend black out, but nope that was me! In my defense though that antipodean fucker egged me on.

All in all it was fantastic. I forced the biggest crowd yet to eat my cooking and was only taken aside twice to be spoken to about voiceing every sexually inappropriate thing that popped into my head. To other people's girlfriends...
I'm sure later I'll replay every mortifying thing I've done or said the past two weeks and despise myself, write a poem about it, despise myself for writing a poem and delete it but honestly I am so hopped on Codine there is room for nothing but the white fluffy clouds pouring through the third eye in my chakras.

Ok. I'm super high. See the thing about codine cough syrup is it doesn't ACTUALLY cure your bitched up throat, it just makes it so you are too blitzed to care. Which is fantastic because that is basically my ENTIRE and ONLY method of coping with the upsetting. The conversation at the urgent care clinic was pretty much this:

Me: "So it feels like there are a handful of pissed japanese hornets lodged in my tonsils and it makes me painfully aware of how often in the day you swallow your own saliva. It's very often. I just never noticed before, but I notice now and I desperately want it to stop. Look in there. Are there actually bees?"

Doctor: "No, there are no bees. There is some swelling but it doesn't look like strep. I'm going to give you some Codine Syrup."

Me: "So what does that do?"

Doctor: "It's going to make you unable to operate vehicles and most door knobs."

Me: "Wonderfull! Bring me this magic juice then!"

And lo, he did. Along with the admonishment to take it easy, which I ignored almost instantly by meeting Ali and the rest at a bar for "Planning the Trip" but all I heard was "PBR is three dollars."

Anyway now I'm right back where I fucking started with the whole Wince and Swallow maneuver I've perfected. And it's now time to stop dicking around and finish drawing the pages of book one I've been putting off. It'll be of great interest to me if I can focus on what I'm doing. The syrup, while tasty, is not going to make my pencils any tighter.

All right...I'm going to need to lay down...besides I think I hear yellow coming.

"One of the cruelest tragedies of the sex industry is that it attracts girls like me who already have skewed ideas about sex and self-worth and then completely reinforces all our secret fears. The men you meet, the whole lifestyle, whispers to you that you were right all along, that all that really matters is being desired.

I still struggle every day to change my thinking. It makes me almost sick to my stomach to meet new people whether in a personal or professional capacity, because I worry they will not think I am pretty. Most of my friends are men with whom I have had former dalliances because I just do not feel comfortable around people who I don’t know with certainty find me sexually attractive. In my head, my worth is completely tied up in my appearance and sex. As a result of being abused at a young age, my thinking is fucked. There is something wrong with my brain. No matter how logically I know that who I am is more important than how sexy I look, I have internalized the lesson that it is my sexuality that makes me lovable.

Of course, this is a trap that will keep me perpetually insecure because not everyone is always going to be attracted to me. When you feel that perfectly normal fact as a deep blow to your self-esteem, it’s impossible to ever really feel confident. Except of course, when you are having your attractiveness reinforced and trading on what you feel is your most valuable asset while working as, what else, a callgirl. Being a talented writer, a caring person, a ballsy kick-ass woman with an amazing circle of innovative and unique friends…none of that makes me feel as good about myself as the drunk guy who wants to fuck me, something so common and cliché it means practically nothing."

~http://collegecallgirl.blogspot.com/