…And Then I Ran Out of Jokes.
Remember when I was funny? Remember when I posted with dependable regularity? Want to know what happened? I moved.
I swear, I got away from Charlie the Miracle dog and his douche-bag of a mom, M, and I am literally incapable of producing a blog that doesn’t blow ever since. I blame geography.
…Only that’s not the whole story, I’m afraid. My blogging skills/schedule was largely dependent on the general mood I was in. I’m good when I’m miserable. In fact, my humor reaches impressive levels the less happy I am internally.
So in yet another way the-universe-is-fucked-up, the defenese mechanism I have exploited for years is kind of useless when there’s nothing to defend myself from. When I am unhappy, I deflect the probing questions and sympathetic looks by throwing open the doors to my self-deprecating humor. I suppose I must be thinking, “well, I might be black and rotten on the inside, but at least I can still make people laugh.” Or something like that.
Imagine my surprise then, when I found myself comfortable for the first time in a very long while. And with this comfort came a mental break that took me off guard-duty for myself. I can communicate with people without the need to interject jokes to control the situation. I employ my sarcasm less often now since I don’t need it to distract whoever is unfortunate enough to be near me. I am, I cannot believe I am writing this, not angry.
That’s a lie. I’m less angry. I’m still frustrated with Democrats and my boss and the weather’s bipolar tendencies of late. I’m still disappointed with certain folks and myself for my various shortcomings. But I’m not (at the moment— knock on wood) pissed off at the air for being there. I don’t want to yell at trees and the sky and God. I’m just kind of… going.
Ironically, as I became less awful a person, my blog plummeted. I think it’s more because I’m not passionate about things now… That’s not right either… I’m not passionately aggressive. I’m still in love with politics and my family and my friends and good music and literature. But I’m not forcing myself and my thoughts on the world, and I’m not (currently— knock on wood again!) trying to prove a point that I was never able to articulate well, anyway.
And conssequently, I’ll be taking a break from blogging. I neglected myself lately, and I was miserable… I cried myself to sleep for a long time, and I never looked in the mirror and asked why. Choosing to wallow was sooo much easier and blog-worthy. The need to grieve a number of things took priority over my own emotional well-being and to be frank, I got lazy and in the laziness, incredibly selfish. Lately, I feel like I see a different girl in the mirror, and I kind of like her more than that teenage-esque bitchy-for-no-reason person I always thought I was.
Sooner or later, I’ll return to the world of blogging with what I’m sure will be a wave of observations, but for now, I’ll keep if off the blogosphere. I’m just done trying to be funny.
Everything works out in the end. If it hasn’t worked out yet, then it’s not the end.
Did We Date? Take My Survey!
I’ve been a disgracefully absentee blogger of late. I’m not sure how much better the current situation is- seeing as I’m blogging quite lamely from a Starbucks that I despise (drinking Green Tea— cuz I’m healthy!) and finally getting back into it. It’s quite possible that the only way for me to be any more cliche would be if I were wearing all baggy clothes and a beret. But I don’t own a beret, so the sweater and jeans from high school will have to suffice.
Where have I been, you ask? Jamaica. Clubbing. Meeting my future husband. Rescuing puppies. Except I haven’t (ever) done any of those things, and instead I regret to inform all 3 of my readers that I was at California Republican Convention (seriously), moving (suck it, Charlie the miracle dog), and fuck only knows where else. But shit, I’ve been busy. And now I’m just tired and wondering when I’ll have enough time to wash my hair.
I’m in a Starbucks I hate right now because I have exactly 24 minutes to kill before I go volunteer with the homeless baby that I love more than any pair of my shoes (serious!), and because this is the only place with wi-fi nearby. And of course, because irony has made me its bitch, I’m sitting in the exact god-damned same seat that I’ve had a converstation in that I would love to forget. Fabulous.
From this very bench I was told something along the lines of why I was no longer in the relationship that I so desperately tried to be in… to absolutely no avail. And currently, I’m sort of kind of on the verge of a new relationship, and there hasn’t been a very significant gap between the two events. (Except a girl just walked in with the greatest boots and she’s wearing those tall socks and she has great hair and she’s so cute… ugh. Damn everyone who is better looking than me right now. That includes you, RuPaul).
Anyway, why am I always striving to be in a relationship? It’s practically a full-time job, only it costs me money and I can’t argue my way into it. Trust me, I’ve definitely tried. I’m a relationship type of girl. I get off on routine, commitment, facebook’s “in a relationship” status. If there was an I ❤ monogamy shirt, I’d be sporting it. My friends, the large majority of them, are either married or absolutely single. Both are irritatingly ecstatic. I- on my island of awkward middle-ground, facebook stalking drama- am not. What gives? (update: adorable girl with great boots has an adorable boyfriend with great hair… I’m going to burn this Starbucks down once I’m done with the internet).
And maybe I could be in a committed relationship right now. I’m not really good at this stuff, but I’m pretty sure that it’s a possibility with the President (we like him). But when going through the possiblity of having the “so, like, what are we” conversation, it occurred to me that he might actually say “yes.” (I realize that I did not exactly pose a yes/no question, but roll with me. I only have 8 minutes now… it takes time to italicize shit!) And the potential of being in a committed relationship frightened me. No kidding, a sort of, ummm wtf, kind of feeling washed over me.
My last relationships have not exactly been stellar, or even close to “maybe that was a good idea.” So instead of feeling like I’ve learned a lot, I’m feeling a little bit like I’m just working with damaged goods when it comes to the girl my future boyfriend is gonna get. Which makes me sad for him. Which then makes me sad for me, because really, who thinks that way?!
In order to counteract that lack of knowledge increase from the past 3 breakups then, I came up with a brilliant, albeit awful idea. How phenomenal would it be to give a survey to your exes?! You don’t even have to tell me that this is great, because I’m pretty sure (like my ideas about taking on 9,000 volunteer activities, dating people who are awful, and living with Charlie the Miracle Dog) that it is. Naturally, I got started on some questions for my survey-targets.
1. What was your favorite memory of/with me?
2. Your biggest pet peeve about me?
3. What was the most important thing you learned about women/relationships from me?
4. What did your mom say about me? (I might will regret asking this I’m pretty sure of some of them).
5. What were your friends opinions of me/us?
6. If you could describe our relationship in one word, what word would it be?
7. What advice do you have for my future boyfriends? (Also will regret most likely)
8. Do you think we should have broken up sooner/later/still be together?
9. Why?
10. What in God’s name convinced you dating me was a good idea in the first place?!
The best part about this idea is that I am totally sober, completely serious and absolutely curious. If I had the balls (or good relationships with my exes currently) to ask any of them, I would. Also, I’m delerious from lack of sleep, and may rethink the brilliance of this when I reread it in 4 days. But honestly, you know that saying “you can bring a horse to water but you can’t get them drunk”— or whatever it is— it absolutely aplies here. I can go through experience after brutal break up after great first kiss with every guy West of the Mississippi, but until I’m willing to learn from it, I’m just swapping saliva and losing a lot of tears.
Pass it out to your exes before I do, and tell me how it goes. Thanks for being my test-dummy.
I’d Like to Thank the Academy… of Bloggers. Well, only the good ones. Not the weird ones who write about porn and/or the environment.
I got an award. For blogging (from THIS girl). Which means a number of things— primarily though that people actually READ my blog which is sa-weeeet! Also it means that I am not crazy, which is always a little bit of a fear of mine, and it means that I have to do some stuff and keep on sending this bad boy around to keep the good joo-joo going.
As a receiver of the Stylish Blogger Award, I have to do the following:
- Present seven facts about myself.
- Name half dozen bloggers I think deserve the award. Contact those people.
- Create a link back to the person who gave you the honor.
Now for the facts about me…. I bet you’re ready to pass out from anticipation.
- I wanted to be a gynocologist growing up. Then I realized I wasn’t very good at science, and the reason my grades were so good was because I was a superb bull-shitter (still am)… but nobody wants someone who is just pretending to be good at their job when their job is telling you you might, just maybe, it sort of looks like, herpes.
- I’m adopting. I’m having my own little ones as well. Non-negotiable.
- I work in politics, as a legislative staffer…. and it’s a weird job. I make sure my boss (elected official) doesn’t get himself in trouble, I make him sound smart, look good and seem like the second-coming. And sometimes that’s cool… sometimes it’s exhausting… like today.
- Biggest fear: being left behind. Being abandoned. Winding up alone…. also, winding up fat.
- I don’t re-wear socks. I throw them away. I don’t know why.
- I live out of my car, and this seems to work fine for me. Not for people who try to ride in my passenger seat and get a spiked stiletto up the ass.
- Funny trumps all. A funny guy trumps a hot guy. A funny conversation trumps a tough one. A funny day trumps a shitty week. Funny will always win… the way to my heart is definitely through my… hm… this was a poorly thought out phrase. Shit. Anyway, make me laugh and I’ll love you forever.
And now I get to pass the lovely award on! This was hard because I follow some pretty impressive bloggers, who undoubtedly have received many an honor from many a junior blogger. But I’m gonna go ahead and throw em another kudos, because I’m generous like that. Also, because I’m very tired and don’t want to peruse the internet in search of some up and coming bloggers when I already know a bunch of super-studly ones. Like the following:
Alone… with cats
Youkitschme (D’s blog!)
**I’ve been completely neglecting my blog lately. Which makes me sad. And because now we know people other than my mom are reading this, I assume those people are sad, too. (key word: assuming). I have plenty to write. PLENTY. Like hickeys.***
I Propose Returning to the “Do You Like Me”/”Check Box” System.
If I were to list my hobbies they would be: drinking wine, reading lots of books at one time, good music, blogging, politics, and organizing my closet in times of stress. But you know what I really love doing? crushing. I forgot how much I missed those school-girl-meets-hot-older-guy and then shamelessly draws hearts around his name times. The harmless “what-ifs” that kind of go drifting through your head when you’re trying to write a press release at work. That’s a good time, friends.
Did the lack of anger in that first paragraph throw you way off? Me too. Just re-read it. Both shocked and proud of myself.
He’s a lawyer. I know. Awesome. And he’s kind and funny and so smart that I proof-read my text messages like 4 times before sending… which is actually pretty pathetic. And bla bla bla we should get married and then he can run for President and I will be First Lady except I won’t be annoying because I don’t care if your kid is fat, so long as they don’t eat my kid. (On a related note, that would be even MORE fitting becuase if I’m FLOTUS then I don’t ever have to learn to cook because they have got to have like a shit ton of cooks at the White House, right?)
Someone needs to look into that for me, thank you.
Like I said though, harmless. I have yet to doodle my name + his name = LUV4EVA on my post-its though so at least I’m behaving myself and keeping all most my crazy behind closed doors. The only (major) downside would be the fact that he has admitted at least three times that he doesn’t date girls in politics. Sadly, I am both a girl and a girl in politics. So maybe he missed one of those two facts? What he obviously misses about me is that I am practically designed for candidate-wifehood. He wants to run for office. I like politics and the high-schoolesque games that accompany them. I am also small and like to dress up and can chat up old people whenever the time calls. Sometimes I can even keep myself from cursing for a whole 5 minutes straight! Psht. Future POTUS doesn’t know what he’s missing. (ooooh… Good name for him. President).
Clearly, I am in uncharted waters. Normally I can just bully boys into dating me until I realize how much I dislike them, or let them abandon me. This time though… I am afraid I have met someone to0 clever to be bullied. Which is both intriguing and unnerving.
But if we have learned nothing about me, it is that I tend to take this things to the absolute limit. So if he ends up liking me back (awwwww) then I will one day be FLOTUS, and none of you can EVER mention this blog. If he doesn’t, we will commence angry-girl blogging promptly and wage wars on all lawyers and law school students and anything even sort of affiliated with the law.
Good plan.
The King’s Speech and My Lame Resolution… Not as Important As Epic Wartime Speeches.
*This was an awful post, written a few days ago and then forgotten about… But I need to put something on this blog that doesn’t reek of 2010 crappiness, so whatever. I promise to make up for this blogtastrophe with better posts for the entire year. I hope*
2011 has been a raging success so far. In the 48 hours since it began, I believe I spent 30 of them drunk. The other 18 were spent sleeping. I think. It’s hard to do math very well when your head feels like mine does right now.
People love to talk about resolutions… and I dread that I’ll have that conversation about 80 times in the next week with people too lazy to come up with something legitimate to talk about. It doesn’t bode well for those conversations that I actually don’t have a resolution. I resolve to do nothing except try not to die, which I’ve done every other year (some years with more enthusiasm than others) so I don’t mention it to people. My roommate has taken me on as a cause and keeps hurling resolutions at me that I didn’t ask for, I’m nervous I’ve become the girl who needs to be saved from herself. More on that later because that’s deeper than my current brain capacity can handle. But probably not- I’ll more than likely forget.
Obviously I’d like plenty of things to happen in 2011 and I hope a shit-ton of things DON’T happen in 2011. I would enjoy being named Princess of the United States (finally), and I would like to lose 8 pounds while eating cheesecake and drinking beer. I hope I don’t get AIDS or get fat or evicted. In essence I’m much too lazy to resolve to do anything, or resolve to STOP doing anything else. Like I said- Big Things in 2011!
I did, however manage to already accomplish something. I went to the movies…. which, I agree, sounds worthless and like an everyday thing that anyone can do. But! I went to the movies alone. Let that sink in for a second. On Sunday, I mustered the guts, energy and actual desire to walk my stocky little butt up to the theater all by my lonesome and sit through almost two hours of awesomeness BY MY SELF. Which makes me officially ready to be a cat-lady. Or officially independent… depending on how highly I’d like to think of myself, I switch between the two.
It was actually quite enjoyable. I brought extra socks so I could keep my feet warm (which I normally just suffer through so I don’t look like a fucktard wearing two pairs of socks and flip flops), and nobody bothered me with inane commentary while I sat along the back (I’m not so ready to flaunt my loser-y aloneness just yet). But on a serious note: it was a step toward shirking the general idea that people are always judging me, and furthermore, shirking whatever judgements they formed about the short girl wandering around without a companion and questionable foot-wear. Because it’s true what people say: you’re really not as important as you think, and you’d be surprised to know how little people think of you.
Okay, so maybe I just blogged my way into a resolution: stop overestimating myself and keep my toes warm, and let everyone else be damned. Easily the most ridiculous resolutions I’ve ever heard, let alone written for myself.
PS: go see the King’s Speech. Promise.
Retrospect was never my forte.
The holidays always seem to ambush me… Some sort of unexpected gust of wind that takes me from the mundane life I have come to shape for myself. And as quickly as they come- they vacate, leaving me with the debris of wrapping paper, the sweet memories of family and good food and joking banter with my sweet but absolutely irritating younger brother. This year proved to be no exception. I sat on Christmas eve wondering where the eff Christmas spirit was hiding, why I had yet to embrace it when all of a sudden it was Christmas day and then, before I had time to register it, it was the day after Christmas. The holiday hangover.
My version of "festive"
My best friend’s dad is sick. From needing a transplant to life support to up and staring down hospice care…. it’s a frightening thing to deal with. This is D’s dad… the fellow blogger, fellow cynic, fellow over-analytic woman who is my soul mate who mentions me in her blog which may or may not qualify me as famous (www.youkitschme.wordpress.com). During one of the visits I made to his hospial bed, Baba Gut (a nickname he ordained himself with… which is, in all honesty, quite fitting), imparted words of wisdom on us. Words that made me cry, words that hit home, words that had impeccable timing, and words that I’ll let D explain if she ever decides to do that… because they aren’t mine to say.
But this was the first holiday season that was coupled with reality of growing up. Looking around the table on Christmas night, I realized that the people gathered around my heart each year will change. I will gather new souls to mine, while mourning the loss of others, and each year the numbers will more likely than not dwindle. Life is, like someone said in Esquire recently (don’t judge my less-than-profound reference, ass), a generally sad thing- with bright spots that are moments of happiness. So this year taught me another lesson I never asked for. (Isn’t that always the way? Lessons, flying like knives from the back, never the front where we can prepare and ready ourselves… becuase we would duck them and the wisdom that they painfully force upon us). What was the lesson?
Years ending in even numbers will always be worse than years ending in odd numbers.
I don’t care if I sound crazy- I say/write this with a very solemn face and brown eyes that remain unblinking. Crazy works for me, and I have long since shed that accompanying shame. Screw you.
That’s mostly a joke. Key word being mostly. But 2010 wasn’t my year… I’ve explained this as both an excuse, a scapegoat and a target repeatedly on this very screen. Normally, I obligingly write a yearly wrap-up sort of thing… As if my life is a non-profit that owes an explanation for how it spent its time to a board of old, mostly white directors. Only it’s not. And if there were a board of directors in my life, it would be the few people I’ve decided I’d give a flying fuck about… which don’t want to read any more of my whining. The lesson being, then, that I can’t keep perpetuating the same shit that I say makes me miserable. People hurt you. Life has moments that make you curse at innocent plants and then at yourself for being such a loon that you could possibly mutter evil words at inanimate objects. At the worst moment, you’ll stub your toe and traffic will suck. You should have known better and if you didn’t- now you do. In sum: growing up sucks.
Which is why I am letting 2010 pass without a fight. I’ve sort of gone into hiding, reading the books I’ve long stared at but always said I never had the time for and actually going to the movies (while smuggling diet coke in my purse because fountain soda is fucking gross). During the remaining days of this year- I won’t put up a fight, I won’t argue my case and I won’t continue the bleating drone of how I was a victim of the economy, my family, life, and people I should have known better about. The only thing I was sincerely a victim of was myself. And maybe credit card people. They’re like vultures. All roads of blame trace back to me, and I finally have come to terms with this.
So. I won’t be writing about how much I hated 2010. Doesn’t mean I didn’t. But once upon a time, I had a conversation with an aunt who used to journal- used to jot down her memories and repeated the words of others and her own into notebooks stashed away in some anonymous box. When she was sick with cancer, I sat with her a few mornings and while sitting, wrote feverishly my own memories. I asked why she stopped writing. Her response burns me, years later: I like to think I stopped recording life and starting living my own.
Like Baba Gut, Aunt Betsy found wisdom in dark hours. I am still trying to find the balance between recording and living but swing violently from one end to the other in the mean time. And although I don’t know if I do a good job of putting the wisdom thrown at me to good use, I file it away. And like the other ones, those lessons will come to reveal themselves when I am a student deserving of learning whatever they have to teach.
Good Riddance, 2010. Kiss my ass. (okay. I’m a slow learner).
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