The Road to 300

There is only one reason I eat bagels: cream cheese. If you leave me alone with cream cheese, there’s a high probability that you’ll come back to find me eating it like it’s a cup of Yoplait freaking Light. For instance, tonight the cream cheese in our fridge became mine and only mine because B. caught me sticking my finger in it. Little does he know, I’ve been eating it straight out of the tub for the last three days. I would probably dispense with the bagel altogether and just eat the cream cheese if I thought I wouldn’t mind being 300 pounds. Eating the bagel, ironically, is my version of self-control.

Actual question from my lips: “Do you think this would go with tortilla chips?”

Why am I telling you this? I have a story. 

Not too long ago, I did something so disgraceful that I swore I wasn’t going to tell anyone about it. I would take my secret, and my shame, to my grave, and no one would ever have to know. Naturally, I lasted about 8 hours before I shamefacedly told B. my secret, and now I’m telling you. One wintry morning, I was craving an old favorite: cinnamon toast. I did my standard cinnamon toast routine of mixing cinnamon and sugar into (unmelted!) butter and spreading it on my toast. Pretty normal, I think. But, there was left over cinnamon-y, sugary, buttery goodness. You know where this is going. I ate it. I ate a spoonful of butter, cinnamon, and sugar.

And it was so good. 

Nostalgia for the Prime Primate

Not so good:
I’m still unemployed. Apparently I’m not even “qualified” to be a dog handler. So insulting.
Noe’s breath smells like an untreated syphilis infection, and Sebastian somehow pooped all over himself.
No more refills on my birth control prescription and no health insurance. Eugh.
I really want to relive my childhood with a Super Nintendo and Donkey Kong Country and I can’t.
Diploma frames are $160.

Not so bad:
TheCanaryReview loved my post and asked me to be a regular contributor.
Every season of Grey’s Anatomy on Netflix
Hershey’s Cookies ‘n’ Creme Eggs
Shooting B.’s Nerf gun at the cats when they’re misbehaving (or when I want a good laugh).
B. whistling the Super Mario tune while he plays Portal.

F’ing MARVELOUS:
My diploma finally arrived! Three and a third months I waited, very impatiently, for this glorious piece of paper.

It’s even more beautiful in real life.

Wild Thing

I showed Bobby this baby picture and asked
(with shameless sincerity),
“B., do you think I should cut my hair like this again?”

He looked at me, somewhat perplexedly, and said,
“Chief, that is your haircut. It’s just longer now.”

I’ve been wearing the same haircut for 20 years.
Which is hilarious, but also a little bit sad.

What these pictures don’t show you is that I have curly, frizzy hair. Or, as my good friend LKP once called it, “sexy jungle woman hair.” I much prefer her description over the characterizations that the other kids made up. Middle-schoolers are really the biggest assholes ever.

 Anyway, being that it’s poodle sexy jungle woman hair, it’s not easily tamed. Once, in 7th grade, I went over to this popular girl’s house after school. She promptly shoved my head under her shower faucet, moosed me up, and blow dried my “mess” straight. I didn’t shower that night and the next day at school everyone was like, “OMG you don’t look like a wild animal anymore… but you do smell like one!!” I’m just kidding. They totally still thought I looked like a wildebeest.

But that was the night I begged my mom to buy me a hair straightener, and for the next six years, even though straight hair never made me cool, I was hostage to the beauty judgments of bastard preteens, a blow dryer, and flat iron. I couldn’t get out of the house with less than 50 minutes of nearly lighting my hair on fire unless I wanted to look like a jungle woman. Nobody wants that.

This story has a happy end, though. I grew up to love my hair. Once I realized how much easier it is to work with nature rather than against her, I stopped resenting my curls and started appreciating them.

I’ll never give in to that unibrow, though.

Jane Eyre

Since my parents’ promise to me that I would get a great job if I went to college has not come to pass, I have a profusion of leisure. Right now, or rather when I’m not writing (indignant letters to a certain University demanding a refund for my degree enclosed with copies of job rejections), sleeping from midnight to noon, or killing zombies and aliens on the Xbox, I’m reading Jane Eyre.

It’s part of my goal to read half a hundred books this year, and even though I read it (purportedly) in high school, I’m inclined to read it again because of my teenage tendency to read SparkNotes rather than entire novels. Yes, I am indeed proof that you can graduate with a degree from the fourth best English program in the entire world without having read even half of the books assigned in high school, but I digress.

Anyway, I’ve read about a third of Jane Eyre, and I have a few observations I’d like to share:

1. This book makes me want to drink. Heavily. Mrs. Reed, John Reed, Mr. Brocklehurst. Jesus, these are not people whose presence I want to endure without a stiff martini.
2. There’s not enough sex. I’m youthful and progressive and, damn it, I want to read the dirty bits. I’m hoping I’ll be a little more satisfied when Jane and Rochester get together. That happens, right?
3. For someone so acclaimed for being a protofeminist, Charlotte Brontë sure spends a lot of time talking about clothes.
4. The way Brontë writes makes me think I’d be good friends with her in real life. I get the sense that she practices great restraint in writing, and was probably wont to say highly indecorous and hilarious things in conversation, which I totally appreciate in another person.
5. Surprisingly, I like Jane Eyre! I was not expecting this, as British Lit. usually causes me to fake gag while making the “vomit” sign in ASL and curse aloud, but hey, personal growth… or something.

This list offered a lot more insight about me than the book, but isn’t that kind of the point of a personal blog?

Everything You Didn’t Want to Read About My Cats’ Poop

This morning when I woke up, Bobby heard me stirring (by which I mean groaning, “B? Beeeee?”), so he came over to the bed and we’re sitting there being all couple-y, rubbing noses and such. This lasts approximately 30 seconds, until I look down and spot something brown on our white duvet cover that totally ruins the mood.

“B, what is that? What is that?!”
“Um… poop?”
“SHIT. It’s shit. Take it off! Take it off! Take it off now!”

CAT SHIT.

I mean, damn, as if tracking litter from their filthy little paws into our bed isn’t enough, now they are bringing their actual poop? WTF. It’s got to be Sebastian with all his dingleberries that he won’t let me remove. Cleaning dingleberries is one of the many things you don’t think about when you’re picking which little ball of fur to adopt. Let this be a lesson in cat adoption: think about the poop, because dealing with it is 85% of cat ownership.

Don’t be fooled by his sweet face because his other end is covered in crap.

But poop in the bed isn’t even the worst thing they do. The worst is when Noe, who thinks she doesn’t need to cover her shit, just backs her ass up over the lower part of the litter box, drops her crap, and then bolts. What kind of etiquette is that? The whole room starts to smell like shit, and if you have a cat (or a baby or a gross roommate), then you know what that smell is like. It’s rancid. And it lingers. And if you’re not home to catch it immediately, your whole room will reek like poo for days, long after the turd is buried.

Which, by the way, you’ll have to do yourself, because your precious little princess isn’t going to help with that.

I’m shaming Noe with this picture of when I had to shave her because she wouldn’t let me brush her.

Well, hello.

Like countless other writers, I am quite diffident about sharing my writing. Whether the genre is expository, academic, creative, or even informal, there is hardly anything I can think of that’s more personal than putting words to a page. In fact, I think I’d rather be a nude model for an art class than attend a creative writing workshop when my piece is up for critique.

While I’ve attempted to blog a dozen times before, each blog invariably met its demise within a month or two. That’s the shelf life of my personal literary aplomb. Inevitably, I peruse every published post ad nauseam, until my resolve and confidence crumble, and then I delete the entire site. The odds are certainly against the survival of this one.

But the thing about writing is that I can’t not write. And, despite the nausea, writing is something that I want to share. I’m often criticized for being aloof – and it’s a fair judgment – so writing is the olive branch I wish to extend to people put off by my distant demeanor.

Don't plagiarize!

This post felt naked without a picture, so I picked the most writerly picture from my computer. The NYU application really annoyed me.

Also, I can’t figure out how the hell to change the color of the blog title from black. I’ve been all up in the CSS to no avail. If you’re knowledgeable of such things, leave me a comment, would you?