Happy No Turkey Day!

I'm back! Things I've done in the month that I've been gone:

1) Likely lost all 4 of my readers
2) Made a Thanksgiving dinner
3) Wrote a story for my class

Thanksgiving was awesome. Partly because I managed to burn myself and not the food and partly because it involved my boyfriend and not my family.

When Boyfriend and I first came up with our plan to spend Thanksgiving together I prepared myself to put up a fight. My family has never been very overbearing, but it's small and my grandma's old so I figured my decision to stay in New York for one of the two major holidays I spend any significant time with them would elicit some kind of protest. I was wrong. My dad didn't blink and my grandmother said she was sad she wouldn't get to see me, but that I was growing up and she'd known I wouldn't be coming home forever. I couldn't decide if I should feel liberated or abandoned. Sitting on Boyfriend's futon on Thursday I just felt happy. I love my family, but holidays can be a mess.

My grandmother is 87. It is understandable that she would no longer be up to cooking a giant meal for 6 people three times a year. When I was in high school, however, she announced that she also couldn't handle anyone else cooking either. Since then Thanksgiving has meant going to restaurants with names like The Lamb Tavern and The Rose Tree Inn where all of the other diners are over 50, and all of the food has a weird glossy finish that reflects a disturbing amount of light.

This year was different. This year Thanksgiving meant drinking lots of alcohol in the middle of the day, watching the Food Network, and eating dinner at 11:30 because I'm bad at planning things and for some reason didn't start cooking until 8:00. It was amazing. Now I just have to get through Christmas . . .

Y is Writing Stupid?

I'm taking a workshop at the 92nd St. Y. This is exciting in theory because I like being around other writers and because it will supposedly give me the incentive I need to work on my own things. In practice however, things tend to look much different. This is largely because, while there are a lot of things I like about writing workshops, there are very few things I like about actually writing.

The last class I took at the Y was a 9 week Advanced Fiction course. The teacher was great. She was gorgeous and charming, and I was able to refrain from hating her for these things because she also had a good sense of humor and gave sharp critiques. The people in the class were also great. Sure, one guy was writing a political satire about an incompitent president who's last name was Tree, but even he was friendly. No one was oafish or obnoxious or tried to dominiate the conversations and for the most part everyone could write. It should have been the perfect opportunity for me to get myself in gear and start working on something new for the first time in two years. But of course this didn't happen. I ended up doing what I always do which is spend far too much time writing comments on other people's stories and far too little time working on my own. By the time my submission date came around I freaked out, called in sick to work, and turned in something I'd written five years ago. I was mad at myself and said I would never do that again.

The next time I had a story due I did it again.

So now I'm taking another workshop and I have a story due on Sunday. I know what I want to write about, but am worried that I will once again become paralyzed with fear that the friendly and overconfident hipsters and bored retirees in my class will read my work and declare me untalented. I need to get over this and I'm not sure how. My first thought is to pretend that the thing I'm writing is simply an extended blog entry. Now that I've seen this in writing it sounds like a terrible idea. I don't have any other ones though so I guess it's what I'm going with.

Happy Belated Birthday Post

My birthday was on the 11th and from the level of excitement I experienced leading up to it you would have thought I was turning 10 instead of 24.

I know I'm not quite at that age yet where people start hating their birthdays, but I am at the age where people begin to act like they're too old to get worked up about them. I do not understand this. Birthdays are the one day of the year when your friends and loved ones are expected to buy you things and pay attention to you. I do get why this can sometimes be depressing. Just because people are supposed to shower you with presents and baked goods does not mean they will and any minor slight or moment of forgetfulness gets magnified ten fold because this is your day goddammit.

Okay, so maybe most normal women only feel this way about their wedding. I don't care. You only get a few of those at most and as of right now I haven't decided if I'm even interested in having one. Right now I'm happy to welcome my birthday with the enthusiasm of a fifth grader because I like it when people have to pretend that I'm special and because I truly believe that on the 7th day, in addition to resting, God created cake.

Given my high expectations and my equally high potential for disappointment, this year's birthday was pretty great. That's not to say it was perfect. I definitely got a cold two days before my party and, in a state of panic that I wouldn't be able to taste all of the amazing birthday food my roommate made, took just about every over-the-counter medication available at Duane Read including ones that treated opposite symptoms. Apparently the result of simultaneously taking something that's supposed to decongest you by drying up your nose and something that's supposed to do the same thing by making it run is that you feel not-terrible, but you're kind of woozy and by midnight you completely lose your voice. It was sad and I spent most of the night attempting to play the role of adorable and witty hostess through a series of pathetic little croaks.

That said, I did eat enough vegetarian sushi to make me feel nauseous and none of my friends who hadn't met before got into fights with each other. This might not sound like the formula for a memorable celebration, however, when you consider that last year's festivities involved getting water dumped on me at a subway entrance in Chinatown and the guy I was seeing remembering to buy me a card but forgetting how to correctly spell my name, it's obvious why this was a rousing success.

Here's hoping that my next birthday will be just as great!

Happy Friday

What I was supposed to do this weekend: Run a half-marathon. What I am doing this weekend: Watching dvr'd episodes of Kitchen Nightmares, going to a Jenny Lewis show, and, if I'm feeling unexpectedly ambitious, possibly making and eating french toast.

I don't know how this happens. Sometimes out of nowhere I will get this intense and overwhelming surge of energy that convinces me I'm ready to take on the world. Just a month ago in a frenzy of inspiration I signed up to register voters at the gay center, joined a running club, and seriously considered doing another marathon. Now I can barely summon the motivation to leave my office at lunch every day.

I wish I could break this habit; that I could hold on to even a third of the momentum I generate when I go through these phases. Over the past couple years though it just seems to be impossible and instead of being able to accomplish at least one or two of the many goals I've set out for myself I more often backslide into an embarrassing mess of drinking, smoking, and sleeping with strangers. All things that, although I'm feeling somewhat stagnant and frustrated with myself, I'm shockingly not doing now.

I'd like to think that this is a sign of maturity, that even though I'm still too restless and impulsive to remain committed to any one thing for more than a month, I'm at least growing past the stage where the only method I had for coping with indecision involved seeing how long I could subsist on nothing but low-fat muffins and stomping around the west village on my lunch break chain half-inhaling American Spirits and having animated conversations in my head with people I was mad at. I'd like to think that, but I'm not so sure it's the case. I'm turning 24 next week and I still feel like a mess.

If I said this to pretty much anyone I know they would laugh and/or yell at me and tell me you're supposed to be a mess at my age; that it takes decades before you can begin to start figuring anything out. Well this may be true, but it doesn't mean it helps. Just the other day I was complaining to my mom about my tendency to start a bunch of different things, devote my life to them for a few weeks, then promptly drop them along with my motivation to do anything more exhaustive than staring at the wall. She assured me that she has always been like that and that I would be okay. This might have been comforting coming from someone who hadn't spent the greater part of my childhood a manic depressive disaster. As it was it just served to reaffirm what I've always known; that no matter how old I get my family will always be crazy and that I am fucked.

Happy Friday. I'm going to go try to convince myself that drinking beer and eating pizza is in some way a productive alternative to running 13.1 miles on Saturday.

Night of the Living Dead Toenail!!!

I need to buy a pair of steel-toed boots. Not because I have finally decided to head out on my motorcycle and retroactively kick the ass of all the guys (and girls) who have ever wronged me, but because I am apparently not coordinated enough to walk down the street without hurting myself.

Last Friday I was walking to work and smashed my toe on a crack in the sidewalk. It hurt, the nail turned purple, and I'm pretty sure it's going to fall off. I'm pretty sure it's going to fall off because this is the third time I have done something like this in the past year. The first time I wouldn't even look at the nail. I could tell something was very wrong because it didn't stop throbbing for three days and I could barely put my shoes on. Instead of doing something reasonable like attempting to assess the damage and try to figure out if I'd broken something, I decided I didn't want to know and spent the next month applying about thirty coats of bright red nail polish.

Eventually my curiosity got to me and I took the polish off to reveal something that looked like it belonged to a dead person. The entire nail was yellow with white streaks and a few days later it got super loose and wobbly and I had to pull it off. I spent the rest of the summer painting the skin on my toe red so that I could wear sandals without causing anyone to vomit when they saw my foot.

My only saving grace this time is that it's Fall and therefore the only person who will have to deal with my deformity is the guy I'm dating. I would feel embarrassed, but I generally figure having to stifle whatever mild disgust a guy or girl might experience in facing down my various pimples, blisters, and zombie-like appendages is just part of the trade-off if they want to sleep with me.

And I wonder how I stayed single for so long . . .

Bedtime Stories

There’s a stupid tradition of insomnia being regarded as some kind of creative badge of honor. It’s a sign that the sufferer is not only serious about their work, but that they’re so overwhelmed by the force of their own mind-bending brilliance that they can’t possibly take time off for something as base and unconstructive as sleep. I would like to say I can identify with that; that the reason I’m typing this blog entry at 2 in the morning is because I needed to take a break between sketching pages for my graphic novel and outlining my memoir. Sadly that is not the case. The real reason I can’t stop my mind from whirring long enough to drift off is that last night one of my friends decided it would be a good idea to relate, in detail, the plot lines of several of the scariest movies he had ever seen.

Sitting on Friend’s futon and rendered a sedated moron by the knowledge that I would be staying at his apartment that night, I decided this wasn’t the worst idea ever conceived and listened enthralled as he described many scenes involving naïve travelers, psychotic hillbillies, and a variety of sharp and pointy instruments. Well now it is late and I am alone and instead of being enthralled I am apparently twelve years old. I have spent the last two hours watching The Daily Show on my computer and alternately jumping out of my skin every time the cats make a noise and wondering if it’s possible to have an orgasm just from listening to Jon Stewart mercilessly ridicule Sarah Palin.

That said, while I’m going to be exhausted when I have to get up a few hours from now and listening to my heart beating inside my ears isn’t exactly my favorite way to spend my time, being up this late alone isn’t all that terrible. It’s kind of like a slumber party. With myself. And the cats. Okay, now I’m not sure what’s scarier, the idea of a pointy-thing weilding mainiac lurking right outside my window or the fact that I just had that thought. Whatever. It’s far too late for this and now that it’s 3am I’m going to get up and move onto Phase II of my plan to stop freaking out titled: “Is there any problem watching TV while eating chocolate chips straight from the bag can’t solve?”

C.L.I.T. Cat Lady In Training

When Roommate and I adopted our cats back in January we spent a lot of time making nervous jokes about how it marked the beginning of our inevitable descent into crazy Catladydom. We'd spent the past year and a half staying in most Saturday nights to watch the Food Network and complain about not meeting anyone, and by that point we were reluctantly resigned to our fate. It would only be a few short years before we were living in New Jersey surrounded by mewing fuzzballs with names like Queen Elizabeth and Pot Pie who would look on with pity while we sat on the couch and ate tubs of vegan ice cream covered in french fries.

Well, now it's six months later. Roommate has a boyfriend and I have an anorexic looking Siamese who wakes me up in the morning by falling ass first onto my face and who bears a disturbing resemblence to Bat Boy on the cover of Weekly World News when she cries for food.

I'd like to think that I do a pretty good job of keeping my latent CL tendancies in check; formerly ferel Siamese aren't known to be the cuddliest of creatures and even if I wanted to wrap her up in a blanket and force her to watch The Bachelorette with me I'm pretty sure I would end up getting something important scratched out. Then there are those rare occasions that I scare myself and become convinced that no amount of going out or eating baby carrots instead of chips can save me from my fate.

Like the time a couple of weeks ago when I was getting ready to go to a party and, while doing my make up and listening to Pink, asked the cat for confirmation that I looked hot. She stared at me, stretched, and licked herself. I chose to interpret this as "If I were a person I would do you." I then sang louder and decided to go with that outfit.

I am doomed.

Close Encounters of the Depressing Kind

I spend a lot of time having imaginary conversations with people I used to date. Specifically people who broke up with me. More specifically, people I didn't go out with long enough to technically break up with me, but who, in lieu of letting me know they no longer wanted to see me, simply never called me back.

These mental confrontations never go how you might expect. In my head I never run into the person when I'm out at a bar wearing something that smashes my boobs up to my chin and looking so devestatingly hot it will either make them go home and hang themselves in despair or fall down at my feet and beg forgiveness for ignoring me. No, the scenes that run through my head when I'm sitting on the subway or zoning out at work tend to go something like this:

Said person and I bump into each other while I'm wandering around the village on my lunch break or on my way out to dinner or something. It's mildly awkward , but I maintain my composure acting chilly and polite and in no way bitter about the fact that I haven't heard from them in months. We talk for a few minutes, I mention my new job, and then . . . and then that's usually it. We say goodbye and I get the satisfaction of knowing that the whole encounter was probably more uncomfortable for them than it was for me because they're the one who was a spineless asshole and I got to look like a mature adult.

I used to think my creative limitations when it came to these little fantasies was a little sad. Where's the part where I kick them in the crotch with my leopard print stilletto? Or at the very least sneak in a casual mention of my supersexy new boy/girlfriend who feeds me peeled grapes and rubs my feet in between giving me 50 orgasms a day? Then last week I actually did run into someone I used to date. Well, kind of. I was walking to the subway on the way home from dinner in the East Village when I saw a girl I'd gone out with for a month and who, when things started to look like they were going somewhere, suddenly fell off the planet, only to reappear two weeks later to let me know she "wasn't in a place to be dating anyone."

She was with a group of friends and didn't see me. I made an uncertain attempt to make eye contact, but she was talking to someone and didn't notice. And that was it. After four months and several hours spent rehearsing what I would say if I saw her again, those 20 seconds were all I got. Not that I'm disappointed. Seeing her again hurt, but it would have been worse if we'd actually talked. She would have been polite and I would have been sad and reminded of how it feels to be rejected by someone I thought I could really like. Because that's how these things go in real life.

People Are Overrated

Yesterday my roommate told me she didn't think I should have a job where I worked with other people. This was in response to me coming home last night and immediately sitting on her bed to whine about my new job. The job I have had for all of one week and that I had been searching for for over a year. The one that I flipped out about when I finally got it because it would presumably demand more of me than my previous positon which largely involved putting romance novels into boxes and shipping them to Latvia. Well now I've started and I'm freaking out because it's something new and I don't know where things are or what I'm doing or how I'm going to adjust to working in a one room office with four other people when I'd gotten depressingly used to being a drone in a honeycomb of cubicles in a giant corporate building. So basically I'm going to be frustrated no matter where I am and what I'm doing which has led me to believe that there is only one option: freelance.

I used to think that I would go crazy if I had to spend the day alone. Without the distraction of other people around I always assumed I would devolve into a depressive recluse who sat on the floor attempting to braid the cats' tails together and writing poetry with my menstrual blood or something. After two full years of going off to work every morning and pretending to be a grown up though I'm not so convinced that hanging out by myself in my apartment could really be any worse for my mental health than spending 8 hours a day in a cubicle.

So now my new mission in life is to find a way to make this happen. I don't really know how to go about this and I know that it won't happen overnight, so for the time being my plan is going to involve updating my blog more frequently than oh, once every two months in the hopes that someone important and influential will stumble across it, decide I am the brilliant new voice of my generation and offer to "freelance" me a giant advance for a book or series of articles full of my general observations and musings. Because that's how it works right? I might be feeling a little restless right now, but starting with this post I am clearly on my way towards years of happily isolated success.

Workman's Comp.

I think my job is causing me to develop a mild form of autism. In my ongoing effort to kill as much time as possible during the day I’ve started doing things like writing words in bubble letters and spending several minutes filing them in. These include such things as my name, the names of people I know, and telling phrases like “I hate my job,” “It’s only Tuesday,” and “I am so bored.”

I have also started covering pads of paper with drawings of things like people I’ve slept with and fruit. This first habit is clearly a sign of my declining mental health; how many stable people over five do you know who can spend a half hour solidly absorbed in coloring within the lines? The second one would be less disturbing if I wasn’t such a terrible doodler. The people I sketch always end up looking like the victims of the same kind of hideously deforming birth defects and I’m kind of worried that one of my co-workers will catch a glimpse of what I’m doing and decide I’m a serial killer.

Contramazing

Evidence that I am the coolest person alive: Because all of my weekend plans at that point involved going out with strangers at vegan restaurants on the lower east side, I decided to take my friend Dan up on his invitation to go to a gender role free contra dance party at the LGBT Center in Chelsea. Um, yeah. If you understood the last part of that sentence you’re already way ahead of where I was when I agreed that this would be the best way ever to spend my Friday night.

For the uninitiated, contra is a close cousin to square dancing ,that originated in New England. Two rows of people stand facing each other and there’s a caller at the front of the room shouting out calls to do si do and swing your partner round and round. It is also amazing.

I was skeptical at first, as I am with any kind of organized group activity, but by the end of the night I can honestly say it was the most fun I’d had in months. Of course I was terrible at it, but everyone was really friendly and there is something about touching sweaty strangers in a completely platonic and consensual non-creepy context that made me feel like I was in middle school and forget I was in New York in the best possible way. There’s also something really heartwarming about watching two middle aged men in skirts doing the waltz 1000 times more gracefully than you’ll ever be able to. They have it on the second Saturday of every month and I'm pretty sure I'm going to go back.

Never Eat Soup When You're Drunk and Other Hazards of Online Dating

Okay, so the first one is more accurately a hazard of me being a moron, getting overly excited when I came home from a date at 1am to find that my roommate had left a pot of some vegetable noodle thing on the stove, and not letting it cool off at all before slurping it down. Whatever. My tongue still hurts and I’m blaming the internet.

So it’s finally happened. After several months of fighting off my roommate’s urgings that I follow her into the dark scary world of virtual ass hunting, I finally admitted I don’t actually have any pride left and signed up for an online dating site. Somewhere I think the little me that was convinced that by 23 I would be writing for VOGUE and struggling to choose between marriage proposals from Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonathan Brandeis just shot herself in the face.

I decided to do this for two reasons:
1) I have no clue how to meet women and while it would be nice to think that every few months I will get the opportunity to run into an old acquaintance from high school, get drunk, and make out with them in a bathroom stall, I just don’t think this is a strategy I can rely on.
2) I figured it would give me something to write about.

Even at the time I knew this second reason was pretty much bullshit. One of the advantages of saying you’re a writer is the ability to claim that any range of potentially embarrassing decisions were made in the name of research. I’m not desperate, I’m an anthropologist! It doesn’t matter. So far the only revelation that has come of this is that I was probably right to hold out in the first place. I went on two dates last week and they were both fine. The girls I went out with were friendly, read books, and I wasn’t attracted to either of them. As neither of them openly questioned my intelligence or tried to make me pay for everything, however, both dates were infinitely better than ones I’ve been on with guys I met in real life.

At the end of each night though I couldn’t help thinking that the whole thing just feels like too much of a project. I have enough trouble making time to hang out with my real friends on a regular basis. Do I really want to reserve two nights a week to getting trashed with strangers? (And yes, I understand that these things don’t necessarily have to involve alcohol, but you try getting through a blind date sober.) While it’s nice to have a safety net and a guaranteed way to meet people, it just seems so forced. The whole fun of dating and meeting someone new is the excitement that comes from that initial electricity and confusion. Even if the person completely sucks, which they will, and everything falls to shit, which it will, you still had those first few moments of possibility when it seemed like it could work. With this all you get is the knowledge that you're both awkwardly assessing each other and that after three beers and two hours will probably find the other person lacking.

I’m giving this experiment until the end of the month when my subscription runs out. This is partially because I don’t like treating my love life like a position I’m holding auditions for and partially because if I keep it up much longer I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to add “overweight alcoholic” to my description of myself in which case I’ll probably be off the market anyway.

Hair!

Because I apparently live in a world where romantic comedy clichés about sad single women actually apply, after getting dumped by the person I don’t think I was even technically dating, I decided to go to a salon on the Lower East Side a few weeks ago and lob off all of my hair. I have never had short hair before. Up until a few days before it was well below my shoulders. There were giant tumbleweeds of it rolling through my apartment and tangled wet nests clogging up my shower drain. Now the longest parts come down around my ears and to the nape of my neck. When it starts to grow out and if I don’t take care of it, it will look like a mullet.

I’m not sure why I did this. I had just spent three hours at a student salon on Thursday getting the most time consuming two inch trim of my life. Actually, this is a lie. Half the time I go there it ends up taking an eternity because the person cutting my hair either feels too lazy to work on two people in one night, decides to give me a spontaneous makeover that leaves me looking like someone just beat me up/barfed glitter all over my face, or is so insecure they feel the need to call their instructor over ever five minutes to make sure they didn’t somehow fuck up snipping off my spit ends. I keep going back though because it’s so ridiculously cheap and for some reason I seem to think $20 is a reasonable rate for my entire Thursday night. My hair looked fine ie, the same way it has for the past four or so years, and I wasn’t too concerned about it until I got home and my roommate decided this would be the perfect opportunity to do a photo shoot for an online dating site. Apparently those extra frayed inches they cut off pushed me over the edge from clearly straight to “kinda dikey.”

After she’d finished taking a couple dozen pictures in which my attempts to appear sultry/friendly mostly resulted in me looking high/confused I began to realize I sort of liked the way I looked without a gigantic mass of ratty curls hanging partway down my back. The theory being that maybe if I stop trying to look like a delicate flower I will stop getting trampled on so often. Two minutes later I was making an appointment at this place that only does short haircuts for women and two days after that I was sitting in a tiny studio salon on the lower east side telling a weirdly awkward hairdresser who reminded me of the serial killer from Silence of the Lambs to do whatever he wanted. He did a good job. I’m still getting used to it. It’s also possible this little “gaykeover” won’t be as transformative as I’d hoped it would be. Whatever. Maybe I just need to buy some beaters and a hoodie.