Reading: Yummy trashy set-in-the-future detective series by J.D. Robb (Norah Roberts in drag). I'm not proud, but they have been a great distraction while I am healing.
Listening: Crowded House's new album Intriguer. It didn't grab me when I first heard it but after hearind several of the songs live it has really grown on me.
Watching: Not much, haven't been in much of a TV mood lately. That thing where Piper Perabo is in the CIA is pretty entertaining.
Wearing: the sexiest and most amazing metal spike heels by Via Spiga. I am madly in love with them.
Wanting: to get back in shape enough to be able to do an entire hour plus warm up like I was able to before the surgery. Still have a ways to go.
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Okay, I just poured myself a second cup of tea. An extra infusion of caffeine that I need because I spent most of last night falling in and out of the same nightmare. I woke up gasping trying to claw my way out at least twice. Once I woke up enough (I think) to try and move the cat off my feet but I still fell right back in when I fell back asleep.
This week has been a vivid dream week. I've had strange dreams all week (they tend to come in clusters) and Sunday I had several different nightmares. But last night was by far the worst.
Because last night the nightmare was about my mother. Again.
Dear Uterus,
My trainer asked me to write a letter to you. I repressed all but the slightest eye-roll. I made snarky comments. He pointed out that I have an "adversarial" relationship with my body. I agree. I tend to ignore it when it works and get angry with it when it doesn't perform properly or becomes injured. Yep. I'm a bad owner. I think this was supposed to open up some kind of metaphorical dialogue between us. He seems to think YOU have been abused by years of my heartless application of birth control pills and painkillers. That your cramps have been a plea to be heard. That what is going on now, this fun, month long crampfest (with bonus bloating and hormonal crying fits) you've embarked on, means I really need to listen to you and try to understand what you need. That it is a cry for help.
So I’ve done a lot of ranting and whining about hating living in the city, and I do, for the most part.
BUT
There is one part of living in San Francisco that I really TRULY love and that is that anytime I want I can drive down the hill, find parking (which never takes that long, I have really good parking karma as long as John isn’t with me) and be in the Castro. I LOVE the Castro. I love the shops (unbeknownst to his ignorant coworkers all John’s cool shirts all come from a shop practically on the corner of Market and Castro called, I kid you not, In-jean-ous) and I love the people in them. I love the guy in the clothing store trying to convince me I need to buy John matching underwear to go with the shirt I’m buying him. I love the guy in the Body Shop who despairs of my refusal to wear eye makeup and attacks me with eyeliner ever time I go in. I love buying lube surrounded by walls of dildos of every description. I really don’t want to be, well, Kathy Griffin or one of those other biddies in my age bracket joyfully proclaiming “I love the gays” because: obnoxious but, well, I do.
I don’t think it is going to wear off. This anger and residual revulsion I feel towards my mom? I think it may lessen and fade some with time but I don’t think it is ever truly going to go away. How sad is that?
My mother decided on the evening of June 17th, 2007 that she was angry at me, and was going to stay angry at me for the rest of her life. Angry at me for wanting to leave her hospital room before she had explosive diarrhea. Really.
So, I realized that after blogging so intensely about all my emotional and sartorial preparations for attending my reunion it might seem odd if I, oh, say skipped ahead to the next topic (the election, Halloween, how for some reason October is always the hottest month of the year in San Francisco) and didn’t mention the actual reunion itself.
I am a holy terror right now. That insecure 17 year old brat that usually stays quietly tucked away deep inside my head? She is RUNNING the show right now. For the guys reading this: imagine if your woman suddenly came down with a SCREAMING CASE OF PMS two weeks early. Its pretty much like that.
So, after 20 solid years of looking forward to NOT attending my 20-year high school reunion, it turns out I’m going.
Dammit.
Before I even graduated from high school I was already looking forward to not attending any future reunions. I can remember lying on my bed, Walkman on, Depeche Mode playing, and thinking with great pleasure about never attending another official event with my schoolmates. I was confident that I wouldn’t care one teeny bit more about my graduating class in 1998 than I had when I graduated. And I was right.
So after several days of stalling I finally went back to the salon on Wednesday to let the owner/manager/eyelash mangler know that my eyelashes didn’t turn out quite like I was hoping.
I had decided to just incorporate it into my errands and stop there on the way to Safeway. I didn’t bother calling to make sure he would be there because he is ALWAYS there. I have been there every day of the week, in the mornings, in the afternoons and he has NEVER not been there. He may not be an eyelash perming wizard but his work ethic kicks ass.
Okay, this is really embarrassing, coming as it does so quickly on the heels of my reality TV confessions last week because NOT ONLY is it a story of my embarking upon a rash and poorly conceived adventure, there also never would have been a tale to tell if I hadn’t watched a particular episode of the Tyra show.
(Well to be accurate it was Flavor of Love 3 and Rock of Love 2, but the numbers totally ruin the flow of the title)
THE STORY OF MY SECRET LOVE AFFAIR WITH REALITY TV: PART 1 OF 2
The original plan was just to add this to my bio – a little blurb about how I’ve become totally addicted to something that I was only barely aware of (and disdainful of what little I knew) a few weeks ago. But while trying to word it in my head last night, I realized it was going to be a really LONG blurb and decided that maybe it would make a fun blog topic. And since I haven’t written a fun blog in a while, I decided to go for it, even if it meant exposing the true reality TV skeletons in my closet.
I’m trying to figure out where it all started…
And I’m a bit rusty here… this is he first new post I’ve actually written in a while… usually I like to take mundane things in my life, like, say, riding the bus, and try to turn the story into something funny to read. With the whole my mom getting sick and then dying thing nothing much seemed funny and I couldn’t craft a witty sentence for crap so most of my writing ended up being depressing therapeutic stuff that *I* didn’t even want to read once I was done writing it. I am many things but emo is SO not one of them.
Okay, for those of you who have seen my house when I haven’t had a DAY to desperately clean first, this has to be really funny. To John it borders on hilarious since I have so much beauty product detritus strewn across my counter he’s actually afraid to go in my bathroom. Because sometimes stuff falls on the floor and I forget to pick it up. So there’s a small tripping and falling hazard. And okay, I have long hair and it sheds when I’m fighting with it in front of the mirror. BUT I am not performing SURGERY in my bathroom. The way my hair has been acting, with the growing out my bangs and all, I don’t even let myself keep nail scissors in there because god KNOWS what might happen. And, in the spirit of full disclosure, there is half a bagel and an almost empty tea cup left over from this morning sitting next to the computer as I type this. But again, I’m not performing SURGERY here. Writing a snarky blog entry doesn’t require a sterile environment. It requires a Dr. Pepper. Over ice. Which I have. Anyway, the issue here is that apparently, by San Francisco standards, I am way too much of a clean freak. Also, I have no visible tattoos. Hell, I have no tattoos of any kind. On top of that my hair IS currently dyed a color found in nature. In Marin these were all positive job-candidate attributes. Here, not so much.
For a smart woman I can be pretty dumb sometimes. All of you out there fake-clutching at your hearts going “Laurel DUMB!? Never! Blasphemy!” can shut it. Let’s say that I can be, uh, forgetful. Or that maybe I’m not good with putting stuff in context. Whatever. Shut up. ANYWAY, I KNOW that I live in San Francisco. I know that the city is about seven miles across and I know that the REASON it is only that long is that if you drive any further than seven miles you end up in the ocean or stuck in traffic on a bridge. I know that. And I know that therefore I am... uh, let me consult yahoo maps for a second… hold on… I am 3.9 miles from the ocean*. I knew that in some vague sort of way beforehand. But somehow that technical knowledge stored in the back of my brain doesn’t translate into, “I am four miles from the BEACH!"
Okay, so I rode the bus. And it wasn’t that bad. Enough time has passed that I think I can safely say no one coughed Avian-flu onto me and, since no one actually coughed on me at all, I’m probably safe from T.B. as well. And I ate lunch without washing my hands first (although I wasn’t happy about it) and still seem to be free of any bacterial problems. I mean if I had a tapeworm I’d have seen some serious weight loss by now, right? So I survived unscathed. I haven’t been too ill to tell the rest of my bus tale, just too busy. I’m sorry if any of you were worried I had contracted brain fever and was no longer coherent enough to log onto the internet. My bad.
Tomorrow I am taking the bus somewhere. I haven’t figured out where yet. But I know the bus that stops literally right across from my house goes to a main stationy-thing (I should probably find out what that is called) and that from there you can get on MANY different buses that go many different places. So that’s what John and I are going to do. Get on the bus, get off the bus, get on another bus and then get off and walk to, well, maybe someplace that sells boots. And yes I know I need to know the number of the bus and of other buses and where they go and when they pick up and after I post this I plan to get online and figure all that out along with what, exactly, a transfer is, how it works, how long it is good for and why it looks like some people get on and off the bus without ever paying. I have many things to learn.
Most of the 37 years I’ve been on this planet I’ve really enjoyed being an only child. I tend to be quiet and bookish and don’t really like noise or games or, well, other children. I’ve never been sure if this was a chicken or the egg thing but it worked out. I was always the kid sneaking off to read. My parents, after they adopted me, fully intended to GET me a brother but they were told that, having GOTTEN one child, they now would go to the end of the list. Which was seven YEARS long. And back then they were already OLD for parents – my mom turned 31 a few weeks after they got me and my dad was closing in on 40. Another seven years would have made them REALLY old parents. They also had enough foresight to realize that a brother seven years younger than I was really wouldn’t do me any good. He wouldn’t be a play-mate, he’d be someone I’d have to baby-sit. So they decided to stick with the just the one which was, as I said, fine by me
Okay, so I always have a short list of celebrities that I fantasize about. And the list is always pretty short because I’m picky and if I don’t think I’d actually LIKE the person I can’t get hot and bothered over them. Silly but true. I don’t have to think they’d want to have sex with ME but I have to think that after being in a room with them for an hour I’d still want to have sex with them. I’ve met just enough famous people to know that just celebrity or just power by itself isn’t going to do the trick.
So a few days ago this showed up in my e-mail box from Captain Karl. Karl being, of course, the Captain and lead singer of WARP 11 the Star Trek Tribute band (the song playing during the opening minutes of the William Shatner roast on Comedy Central? “Everything I do, I do with William Shatner”. They were paid $17,000 for the use of that song. Or so I heard.) and friend of John who is having both a birthday and gig/CD release party tomorrow and they’re letting John sit in for a few songs. This makes John very happy.
As I drive around this great crowded state of ours I am constantly reminded that different cities and areas totally have their own driving quirks.
I'm gonna be rich! Well, not now, because I was stupid enough to post this on the internet instead of rushing of to PATENT the idea but I have hit upon a winner: voicemail for the dead!
I'm betting most of you work in some kind of an office or store or place with other people and that rarely do you get bitten or peed on. I would hope not anyway. So in my work as a Veterinary Assistant I occasionally have things happen that make me go, "I bet this never happens to my friends when THEY are at work." And then usually after I finish thinking that I have to go home and take a shower. Here are some of them:
Cool, there are no customers inside… I won't have to wait.
She HAS to be at least 8 months pregnant, is it safe for her to be down there working on my toes breathing in all those chemicals? That can't be good.
I can see right down her maternity shirt. Closing eyes.
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