November 18th, 2010

Brian bought me a camera. For those of you who don't know, Brian is one of my best friends in the entire world (and not just because he bought me a Canon Rebel XS). I've known him since he started college, which makes this friendship almost four years old. That's older than any of the clothes or furniture or electronics I have. I believe I mentioned something about commitment issues.

We did "date" on and off for a little bit (refer to all posts labeled with "Mango"), but alas, it was not meant to be. We realized this at about the same time we discussed our life goals: Brian wanted a PhD in engineering and a family in the suburbs who would go to church every Sunday, and I wanted to finally be recognized as a world beer pong champion.

The parting was pretty amicable.

Anyway, we'd been talking about photography for some time, ever since I had to trail a photographer around for half a day at work while he did some publicity shots for us. It was, without a doubt, the most thrilling half a day of work I've had since I started that job. To fully comprehend how sad that is, let me describe what I did for that half day -- I held up his reflector, opened doors when his hands were full, and tried to convince subjects they were photogenic. I didn't even get to touch the camera. And it was still light miles better than whatever I was doing at my desk job.

The thing about Brian is that he gets passionate about things in a split second. A few months back, he worked with a fellow intern who owned a bike shop. Brian then developed an intense and unwavering passion for folding bikes. Not even regular bicycles, but bicycles that you can fold up and carry around with you. It was a very specific passion, and by association throughout the following months I got to hear about every bike forum, bike shop and bike nonprofit (yes, they exist) Brian came across during his research. And he did a lot of research.

So when we started talking about photography -- me meanderingly and distractedly as I think about everything -- he dove right in. We went to camera shops, looked up camera deals, and debated between Canon and Nikon. It was just like the bikes, except this time I wasn't bored and didn't have to exercise. It was still very abstract for me though. I mostly said things like "wouldn't it be cool if I had a camera?" and, "if I had a camera I could take a picture of that weird guy over there." Brian, on the other hand, started talking to me about aperture and shutter speed and a bunch of other things that sounded suspiciously like science.

As much as my fascination with photography was genuine, I secretly thought that it would go the way of my other interests -- karate (I never got past white belt, because my parents didn't have the money to buy me the uniform for the next level -- come to think of it that one wasn't really my fault), painting (my art teacher mentioned at every lesson that I need more patience, until finally I quit -- that'll show him), drinking (you have to go all the way to the fridge, pour the shot, get a chaser, repeat several times, then go get a burrito when you get the alkie-munchies -- it was all too much to deal with). This was especially true because photography is a difficult hobby to be involved with when you don't actually have a camera. Trying to get the perfect shot just isn't as thrilling when you're framing the subject by forming a square with your hands. And it's harder to convince your friends to model for you.

But yesterday Brian remedied all that. I've read every article on beginner photography Google could find for me. I've researched camera bags and accessories until I had to physically put my credit card out of reach. I've looked at examples of good photographs, examples of great photographs, and examples of photographs I suspected had too much help from Photoshop. I learned about the the triangle of exposure -- I'm using aperture and ISO and shutter speed, for God's sakes. And I think I might even know what they mean.

And I'm starting to feel like I have .. an interest in something. And I mean an interest in something besides what I'm having for lunch (fries sound good). So for that, I definitely need to say: thank you, Brian. Also, you are off the hook for the next five Christmases.

Yesterday, when I opened the package -- after I finished shrieking with joy and Brian uncovered his ears -- he looked at me very seriously and said, "This is going to change your life. You should write about it." So I am.

A Pretty Compelling Reason I Shouldn't Have Kids

I have decided to give up on any semblance of chronological...ity? in anything I do. I've come to realize that it's really just too big a commitment for a girl who is reluctant to buy an entire serving of mushrooms because she knows very well that she is unlikely to cook and eat them all before the inevitable rotting sets in. This commitment-phobia extends to even the smallest of tasks.

A month or so ago I was browsing in a store near my apartment that specialized in selling whimsical things at seven times the price anyone in their right mind would consider paying. I came across a little notebook with some clever name which I no longer remember, but the concept of it was simple: a diary in which you write one sentence a day. Each page is marked with month and date, with enough room for about five sentences. The idea was to write five years worth of one-liners in that one notebook, so that on the same day every year you only need to look a space above to see what you were doing exactly 12 months ago.

The idea intrigued me. It was like conducting one of those long term experiments on yourself, or like that guy who took a picture of himself every day for six years and set it to somber music. So of course (because I was unwilling to pay $15 for something I could put together myself in three seconds, although I do owe the inventor some points for using his idea and so he is free to come and take one of my ideas any time -- like that one I have about, when I eventually own a gigantic mansion, setting library book collection bins in every room so as to avoid the troubling problem of losing a wayward book under a couch every time I'm too lazy to go to the bookshelf, a problem that consistently plagued my childhood) I went straight home (well, not straight home, I had some noodles in a nice little restaurant nearby first but that's not really conducive to the narrative) and got out my prettiest notebook and wrote very firmly, on the first page, September 12th. The notebook was a full size one, so I had enough space for eight years worth of one-liners. Imagine -- eight years from now I would be 30 years old, and the possibilities of the routes my life will have taken by then were endless. I COULD BE QUEEN OF THE WORLD. And such a journey should not be left undocumented.

Oh sure, things went well for a week or two. Every day I faithfully wrote down a brief summary of my day. Invariably the results were along the lines of, "Today I burned dinner so I ate three cookies and went to bed," or, "If that girl at work doesn't stop being so annoying I will probably smack her and get fired but it will be worth it." As is the problem with many long-term experiments, my journal seemed to require patience and diligence, with no promise of instant gratification in sight.

It was abandoned within a month.

I occasionally still think about it, of course. In fact, I'm thinking about it now, having just written more on the topic than I've written in the journal to date. But the thought of all those backlogged dates, those empty pages, is too daunting. Going back to it now would be like texting a friend you haven't spoken to in months -- it seems a little more trouble than it's worth, you can't ensure the outcome, and life has been going on just fine so why bother?

I suppose it is possible that eight years from now I will look at my notebook with half the pages used but less than fifty sentences written, and regret it the way I might regret not picking up the phone and moving my thumbs to get in touch someone I may end up missing after all.

But then again, I doubt such things will even cross the mind of the QUEEN OF THE WORLD.

The Queen of the South

Swamped in papers and confusion and just general discontentment with life-- you know the kind that rolls around during finals season? Or the week before Thanksgiving when you realize you might not actually have time to eat any turkey because you'll be so busy writing four essays and trying not to stick a gun in your mouth? Yeah, that kind of feeling. So in lieu of me making lame jokes about pop music or boys or how I set off the fire alarm when I try to make breakfast (true story, it happened this morning -- I do believe that my brain may possibly be missing some sort of homemaker gene?), here's something somebody else wrote that is neither lame nor funny but kind of what life is all about:

"I wonder if you'll make a mistake someday and tell me you love me."
She turned to look at him when she heard his words. He was not upset with her, or in a bad mood. It was not even a reproach. "I love you, cabron."
"Of course you do." He was always making this joke. In his easygoing way, watching her, inciting her to talk, provoking her.
"You'd think it cost you money," he would say. "You're so cool... You've got my ego, or whatever you call it, beat to a pulp." And then Teresa would hold him, kiss his eyes, say I love you, I love you, I love you, over and over. Pinche Gallego piece of shit. And he would laugh as though it didn't matter to him, as though it were nothing but a simple pretext for conversation, a joke, and she were the one that should be reproaching him. Stop, stop. Stop! And in a minute they would stop laughing and stand facing each other, and Teresa would feel powerless at all the things that she couldn't do, while the male eyes would look at her fixedly, resignedly, as if crying a little inside, silently, like some kid running after the older boys that were leaving him behind. A dry, unspoken grief that made her feel so tender, and then she would be almost sure that maybe she did really, actually love this man. And each time this happened, Teresa would repress the impulse to raise her hand and caress Santiago's face in some way hard to know, explain, feel, as if she owed him something and could never repay him.

There are two kinds of men, she thought suddenly: Those who fight and those who don't. Those who take life the way it comes and say, Oh well, what the fuck, and when the spotlights come on put up their hands and say, Take me. And those who don't. Those who sometimes, in the middle of a pitch-dark ocean, make a woman look at them like she was looking at him now.

The Difference Between Getting Tied Up and Being Tied Down.

Remember how I like music that may not be of the highest artistic integrity? Well, I find "Tie Me Down" by the New Boyz to be really really catchy. It's a terrible song, let me just get that out there right away. They're just some teenage kids bragging about what pimps they are and how all women are hos. But it's so freaking listen-to-able and usually I just try to switch all the pronouns in my head so that it's from a girl's point of view (he ain't gon' tie me down!)

But even though I know the song is chauvinistic and stupid, part of me kind of believes that's really how guys think. I know that totally makes me sound like a hater, and there are definitely exceptions to the rule out there (like all my roommates' boyfriends and my guy friends like Stuffin and Laycon and Mango and Jchaq), but come on. Kind of, right?

Okay, like this part:

Know we been together for a minute,
But uhhh, its kinda been forever since we been in
The kinda situation not involving other women

I totally chuckled when I heard that for the first time. And I know guys aren't the only ones who can wander in a relationship. I'm totally not the right person to talk to about relationships, by the way, because I am so weird about them. Like for some reason I still believe in True Love and Happily Ever After (blame Disney, that heartless but enchanting corporation) so I end up doing the stupidest things in relationships before I realize that maybe this guy I've been dating for three months isn't the Love of My Life and I should stop believing him when he says he hasn't called because he lost his phone for the third time in two days and that hey, he'd really like to come see me this weekend but unfortunately his car broke down and there are no buses between my house and his and not a single one of his friends will give him a ride and hey, come on, he would ride a horse to come see me if that's what it'd take, baby, but I know he's allergic to horse dander and I wouldn't want him to die, would I?

So it's like years of this type of guy that's turned me into a strange hybrid between hopeless romantic and really angry fork-stealer.

But I digress. My favorite part of the song:

But I'm surprised that you're still standing there
As you know I'm a man and I have no feelings

Okay, okay, I know boys have feelings. But sometimes it seriously feels like they don't. And I just want to stab them in the eye and say "Feel THIS?" but that would probably be frowned upon in a court of law and honestly I wouldn't last a day in prison (too pretty) (just kidding) (not vain).

To sum up I would just like to say if I ever meet a tall boy who likes how fluffy my hair gets after I shower and only buys me flowers in whimsical shapes and enjoys explaining football plays to me then I hope he never reads this because he's going to mistakenly think I may have mild violent tendencies and a worrisome obsession with forks. Not to mention questionable taste in music.

Stop Asking What I'm Going to Do After Graduation, Please.

When I was in England last summer, I spent the first few weeks so homesick it was practically a physical illness. The strange thing was, I loved England. I still think about it all the time, even though it's been over a year since I came back. When I was with my friends out shopping and converting to pounds or eating pastries or strolling through the English greenery I was having an amazing time. I can still picture the funny little flowers that grew outside my dorm, and I can practically count the (four flights of) stairs from my room to the shower in the basement.

But still, I would get so homesick missing my family and friends and the California warmth that I would go three days without sleeping, because I was staying up all night to talk to them.

And the hardest part was that no one really seemed to get it. Everyone else in the program was having an amazing time getting wasted and hooking up with the English TAs or at least clubbing every other night. My family and friends went on with their daily routines and marveled at how lucky I was to be experiencing something so amazing. They sent me postcards and letters and I wrote back telling them about how wonderful my professor's accent was, or how I went to see the cafe where J.K. Rowling began Harry Potter. Even Mango was busy taking classes back at UCLA. He told me how strange it felt for him to be on campus without having me around, but always had to break off our conversation to go to class or dinner or bed. The only person who really seemed to if not empathize then at least sympathize with me was Stuffin. He'd stay up with me when I couldn't fall asleep and tease me about all the good food I couldn't get across the pond. And to just have one person understand made a lot of difference.

The reason I'm thinking of all this is because I don't get homesick at school anymore. I definitely think about home (especially of all the food there, I'm starving) but I don't yearn to go back. In fact, often when I do visit northern California I wish wholeheartedly (and guiltily) that I were back in L.A. The shift is strange but I suppose inevitable; after four years most of my life has been built up here. And I'm lucky in that it's not a lonely life.

Take tonight, for example. I get home around midnight and my apartment is empty. And I realized that I don't mind. I have Mango to walk me home when it's dark and check my empty room for monsters before he leaves; in the mornings I have Jenn to chat with while we eat brunch. At some point tomorrow the Y will stumble in all raspy voiced from having just woken up, and then over the weekend I get to hang out with my Watts kids at a museum before catching up with my roommates at night.

And then I wonder how I'm considering leaving all this behind.

I don't have a post-graduation plan. I do, however, have a backup graduation plan (in case I don't magically get offered the job of my dreams right after receiving my diploma)(hm, I guess that's my post-graduation plan). I figure that to avoid moving back home (for my own sanity -- I'll explain next time) I could always flee the state. I love my parents, it's no reflection on them. It's all me, and I have this strange desire for change and excitement when England has already proved that I should really only be taking such things in small doses. A part of me wants to just move to a brand new city and start all over and maybe end up having the kind of life I was meant to have, but the (small, but) rational part of me is saying: whoa, hold on there, cowgirl.

Say I move to Seattle or Connecticut or Washington D.C. Okay, what then? I won't know a single person there. I won't have a job. I won't know what neighborhood to live in, where to find decent Chinese food, or which bus line to take. I'll end up huddled up in front of my computer all day, bemoaning the time difference between me and California and wondering what all my friends are up to back home. And I might, god forbid, be lonely.

I'm a pretty independent person (Jesus, how did that happen? I have no idea either), but at times like this it would be really handy to have a boyfriend. I'm still young enough to think that there would be nothing more romantic than moving to a strange city with the love of my life and setting up a little loft somewhere filled with post-its and secondhand furniture and colorful bedsheets. We'd slowly but surely accumulate a circle of quirky but loveable friends. We'd have a bar we go to every Thursday night and a cafe we go to on Sunday mornings.

The thing about this fantasy is that it thrives on youth. What happens in ten years, or twenty years? Will we still be living off caffeine and poetry, or making plans to backpack through Australia? I have no idea what I want that far into the future, but I don't think it's that. I suppose the thing would be to find a boy who could make the transition with you from pseudo-starving artist to respectable suburbanite.

And that's no easy feat. But until then I still have ten months left on the lease to a Westwood apartment and (hopefully) enough savings to keep me afloat and out of Union City for a few months after graduation. And who knows? Maybe even enough to make that move.

Did You Miss Me?

Remember when I used to get mad? Well since I've calmed down and returned to the land of the sane, I've been thinking about that. And since I took two psych classes back in high school, I feel I'm fairly qualified to diagnose myself; I suspect I may have a little, teensy problem: I don't get sad, I get angry.

Here are some examples.

Cause: I'm making soup for dinner and I burn it and it's the last batch of ingredients I have.
Result: I get very mad. Also hungry. But mostly mad. I turn off all the lights and go into my room and vow never to eat again, just to spite food. But then I realize it would be way more of a punishment if I ate everything instead, and then I go to Ralphs and buy those cupcakes that are super on sale because they're about to expire in five minutes. Take that, food.

Cause: I find out I can't go to something fun because of a (less fun) prior commitment.
Result: I get really mad and think about how terrible commitments are and swear never to make another one and then for good measure I kick some defenseless animals to seal the deal. The last part may be a slight exaggeration but the first part is true and also explains my inability to commit. It's not you, it's my anger.

Cause: Some boy breaks my heart.
Result: I'm furious and I want to knee him in the face except that I probably still like him (because otherwise how is he going to break any internal organs of mine?) so instead I think about how satisfying it would be if I mastered his absolute favorite video game and then beat him at it and then while he's crying I secretly steal all his forks and donate them to the forkless and then when the next time he sees me he asks, "Hey, do you have any idea where all my forks went?" I reply, "Hey, just be grateful they're not all IN YOUR FACE," and leave him mystified and rueful that he ever let me get away. See, it's subtle but appropriate.

So I don't know. But now my midterms are over and the mad dash to finish three simultaneous papers on three very different topics has not yet begun, and my mom just sent me a surprise care package today, and a rather handsome knight defended my honor (and that of approximately a hundred other people sitting in his section) (yellow), and there are birthdays and holidays and even Disneyland on the horizon, and as a result I'm feeling almost... mellow.

I know, it's freaking me out too. But just thought I'd let you guys know that I didn't explode in a fit of temper and take out half of Los Angeles; I've just been too busy taking midterms, buying flasks and eating chicken with my bare hands to post. Rest assured though, I'm still working on PLWBIFEMCMEFW and soon you guys will be able to peruse through a post filled with dozens of blurry iPhone pictures showing food, dorks, anachronism and dyslexia. Don't say I didn't warn you.

I Don't Think I'll Ever Have to Kill Myself, Someone Will Probably Do It For Me.

So I've been listening to music a lot lately. It's because it's midterm season, and I'm sitting in front of my computer or a book all day long and it's either play something catchy or go buy a handgun and blow my brains out. No, I'm sorry. I realize I've been using a lot of suicide imagery lately and I agree with you that it's in very bad taste. Rest assured, my head is completely intact. You can refer to that picture on the right there to replace your mental image of a skull cracked open like a watermelon. Jesus, I'm doing it again.

Okay, let's start over.

So I've been listening to music a lot lately. And my top two choices today are "Empire State of Mind" by Jay-Z or "Get U Home" by Shwayze (hey, I never claimed to have a good taste in music. Unless you like these songs too. In that case, high five!).

So anyway, "Empire State of Mind' kind of makes me think about stuff. Well, the other song does too, but it's about exactly what it sounds like it's about (sample lyric: "make love to me up against somebody's car") and as much as I'm sure you guys want all the dirty details of my sex life, I'm not going to be writing about that. At least not until the next time I get wasted and decide it would be a REALLY! GOOD! IDEA! TO! BLOG! I'm an excited drunk.

So "Empire State of Mind" is about New York City, if you haven't already guessed/heard the song. Which made me think about New York City. I know, my brain is a mystery. I've been to the east coast before, to Washington D.C. (which I loved.. it was so bustling and bureaucratic, plus I once read a love story about a girl who ran a book store in Boston and was swept off her feet by a dashing lawyer, and I'm like OH MY GOSH I COULD RUN A BOOK STORE! and I realize that Boston is not Washington D.C. but for some reason I feel they are similar; also there are like museums every five steps and hot dog vendors every three and that is like combining two of my great loves), but I've never been to New York. Which I guess is weird, because I've been to San Francisco and Los Angeles of course and Beijing and Shanghai and Taipei and Tokyo and Paris and London and Rome and Venice and if I list any more cities I'm going to sound like some sort of travel braggart, but my point is you'd think I would've gone to the Big Apple by now. Or at least my family would have, since we are so big on traveling.

But we haven't, and I think there are a couple of reasons for that. First of all, it's very expensive. Like have you seen those emails or whatever, where they say what a certain amount of money a night could get you in different parts of the world? You could buy a villa in Thailand with the kind of money it'd take for you to rent out a dirty bathroom in some drug dealer's apartment in New York.

Wow, I'm sorry. I don't know why I have such a negative image of NYC. I have nothing against it, I swear. And I know a lot of people love it. I guess I just feel like it's very cold and dirty and everyone's skinny and wears black, and that is like a cocktail mix of everything that is anti my ideal living environment. Like, I would love living somewhere where it's sunny and clean and everyone's round and colorful. Oh my god I want to be a Teletubby.

Well I don't know how I can possibly recover from that, so I'm just going to end this right now.

Good Luck to Those Who Plan on Reading This in its Entirety.

So I know I've been saying this a lot lately, which at some point might get worrisome, but please don't expect anything I write in this post to make sense. If you have to blame my incoherence on something, try this: I've just sung along to "Breathe" by Taylor Swift like thirty times on repeat (which has driven all my friends out of my immediate vicinity) but it's weird because I'm not really like empathizing with her lyrics or anything. I mean, it's a sad break-up song but I haven't gone through a terrible break-up in... a long time. Which I think might be it. I'm not saying I want some guy to waltz into my life and stomp on my heart until he makes heart-wine, but to be totally honest, I'm kind of bored out of my mind.

And when I get bored terrible things happen. There are really only two outcomes. One is that things continue this way until I throw a huge tantrum and freak everybody the eff out and people start putting me on suicide watch because I'm dressing in all black and muttering ominously about "fate's cruel games" and brandishing the knife a little too enthusiastically when I'm cooking. Okay, that might be kind of an exaggeration. I don't really like wearing black. Nor do I cook, for that matter. Anyway the more probable result is that I do something kinda big and drastic in the hopes that it will change my life, which it usually does not.

Example A would be my tattoos. So yeah, I have these tattoos. They're actually really tiny for the dual reasons that I'm poor and also that I freaked out when the tattoo artist was like "okay I can extend it but then it'll go across your ribs and that will hurt more" and I was like "whoa there buddy, I'm already letting you jackhammer your needle into my skin, let's not get carried away onto the bones" and he was like "you're the one who wanted them bigger" and I was like "that's what she said" and then it was awkward because I had to take my shirt off and lie in this strange position for thirty minutes while he inked me. Also, I bled. I had no idea blood was involved. Luckily that kind of stuff doesn't freak me out. Like, I'm cavalier about it to the point where I'm like "hmm I want to watch a movie this weekend. I should go donate some blood so I can get free movie tickets" and then I attempt to do that and fill out all the paperwork ("are you a male who went to Eastern Europe and had homosexual relations between the years of 1975 and 1985?") and then the doctor pricks my finger and tells me I don't have enough iron to qualify for life-saving because my body is retarded and then I have to pay for my movie ticket so no one wins. Except the movie theater I guess.

Anyway, I have tattoos because I was bored and I was turning 20 and I was like "jesus christ I'm going to be twenty years old and I haven't done anything with my life (this was before I went on my adventurous little trek through Europe)" and I figured I should do something like go to South America and hike through the rainforest but humidity makes my hair all frizzy so instead I took the bus to Venice beach and paid some guy to permanently alter my body. So that's one example.

The aforementioned Europe trip was another. I was in my second year in college and I was like "oh god I'm so bored with my life" so I signed up to go study abroad but I had to apply like a few months before the program began and in the interim I got bored again and that is why I ended up planning myself a three week trip through some of Europe's must-see cities.

And the time before that I cut off all my hair so that it was the shortest it'd been in at least ten years.

And then I did a few things in between those things that are not really suitable to be made common knowledge but the point is all these temporary distractions are all good and well and sometimes even permanent but they don't actually change my life. Which is why I'm bored again, and trying to think of ways to distract myself. My default when I'm not feeling creative is usually just cutting my hair even shorter, but for some reason I've been getting a lot of compliments on my hair lately. This is puzzling to me because whenever I look in the mirror my immediate reaction is something like "oh my god why does my head look like a beach ball?" but who am I to argue with the public's opinion? Okay, so it's like three people but you know what, I am considerate of everyone's feelings. So instead of cutting it I'm thinking of dyeing it purple.

Or going to Vegas. That would be really awesome because I just watched The Hangover and now I really want to go back. This is weird, because I don't want to experience any of the things the guys in the movie did, but I really just enjoy visiting a city where "wasted" is an acceptable condition to be in while strolling through public. Actually, it might still be frowned upon (I remember stumbling with my friend through a shopping area of a hotel and passing by these little kids on vacation with their family and loudly whispering "we are setting a terrible example. KIDS DON'T BE LIKE US") but as far as I know I wasn't arrested so it's still better than most other cities.

Okay so it's one in the morning and I just wrote like thirty paragraphs about how freaking bored I am of my life so if anyone should be put on suicide watch it's probably you, since you got all the way down here. So I will do you a favor and end this by saying: black is not a good color on you.

If You Plan On Ever Going Anywhere, Just Don't Even Bother Befriending Me.

And now, for the next in my series of Things I Hate About Adulthood I present:

this exclusively adult idea of Impermanence and Mobility.

I hate it. When you were a kid your parents (if they were good ones, I guess, or if they at least read some child psychology books) tried to give you stability. Like, that's pretty basic. You went to bed at nine, you woke up at seven, you had to go sit in the corner if you were being too rowdy unless you were too rowdy while your dad was sleeping, then you had to go kneel in the backyard (this is where emotional issues and childhood knee scars come from). You saw your friends every day during the school year, you played with your neighbors over summer vacation and then you went back to school and caught up with your buddies like nothing had ever happened.

Adults cannot do this, apparently. Now, I know I'm being kind of hypocritical because whenever things get tough around here I threaten to move to Hawaii and pick up surfing and get an intense tan and marry a boy with killer abs who lives for making me fresh pineapple juice every morning. But I haven't done it yet. And it's not like I'm sitting in my room looking at one-way plane tickets online.

But apparently some people are. People I know. People who, if they left, would not only be leaving California, they would also be leaving me with severe abandonment issues. But do they consider that? Nooo.

"But," I point out. "if you leave, who am I going to hang out with on Tuesdays? We always hang out together on Tuesdays."
"Well," they inevitably reply, "first of all, that's not true. Second of all, I hate you and can't stand being in the same state as you. Even a state as big as California."
"Screw you," I say, "I hope the Atlantic Ocean swallows up Florida or wherever you're planning on going."

Alright, so that conversation is not completely accurate. More likely than not they give me some stupid response like "My girlfriend lives in Chicago and I want to be closer to her/I got offered a job in Minneapolis and it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity/I'm in love with New York and would be a thousand times happier there/My ailing mother's last wish is for me to move to our family estate in Savannah/I'm fulfilling my lifelong dream of being a shark hunter in North Carolina" or something like that.

And they're totally missing the big picture. Which is that if they leave, I'm going to have to make new friends, and I hate doing that almost as much as I hate dating. First of all, it's going to be impossible because I'll be dealing with all the insecurity issues I've acquired as a result of being abandoned in the first place, and who wants to befriend a weirdo who won't let her new friends out of her sight, even if it is to go to the bathroom?

So, to my friends who are moving away, think about it this way: you're not only leaving me a big issue-y mess and forcing me into social situations outside my comfort zone, but your actions are probably also going to get me arrested for being a stalker.

Is that what you want? Yeah, that's what I thought. Now go to the backyard and think about what you've (almost) done.

You Were Warned.

So let me just say right now that if you value yourself at all you will not continue reading this. Because it's going to be long and rambling and, above all, angry. Because I am pissed. You can tell when my sentences get all fragmented that something else is going to get fragmented, and it'll probably be a bowl or someone's skull, if that someone were foolhardy enough to mess with me right now.

Yesterday I was taking a break from killing zombies and looking through my blog when Mango's roommate Maaron glanced over.

"What is that?" he asked.
"Uhm, my blog."
"I know that," he said, "but what's the point? Do people even read it?"

Now, if he had been a zombie asking that sort of impertinent question, I would have blown his head off with a trench gun. But since he has a soul (as far as I know) and his flesh isn't decaying off his body, I just gave him a dirty look.

"Uh, yes."
"Please," he continued, blithely unaware of the imminent danger he was in, "how many? Like five people?"
"EXCUSE ME," I replied, "MORE LIKE EIGHT."

But that's not the point (it's not why I'm mad now either). The point is that I don't know why I was all defending the readership of my blog. I mean clearly I think it's cool when people read what I write, but mostly I'm writing because I have this slightly neurotic fear that I'll forget everything if I don't write it down. Like I only have snapshots of memory from elementary school and that freaks me the eff out because come on, I'm 21 and I can't remember the third grade? Yeah. Thus my little self-prescribed mission to preserve my youth on blogspot. I hope this website has good technicians or whatever because if it ever crashes and wipes everything out there goes my entire past, and I don't think they'd want that on their hands. I'm like an android.

Jesus, where was I?

Anyway, what this post really is about is love. More specifically, about how love sucks and/or doesn't exist. Okay, I told you not to read this. If you're going to start crying you should really just leave now. I'm pretty sure it's all downhill from here.

When I was little I had this totally concrete idea about my perfect guy. In middle school I had it down to the color of his eyes (green; grey was also acceptable), his family background (he was an orphan or estranged from his parents), and of course, his personality. He was this total tough guy, kind of a thug actually. He would be sarcastic and a little mean and very in control. I think I read too many gang novels where, you know, that one nice girl could turn a gangster into a doting boyfriend and upstanding citizen. Anyway, now that I'm older I realize that my 'perfect guy' in middle school would, in real life, have with several warehouses full of baggage and probably be borderline abusive.

So that went out the window and I was kind of left to drift. I dated guys I would never have imagined myself with, mostly guys I couldn't see a future with. And I didn't really mind at all. I mean, if I had met that one guy with whom I could (god forbid) see children or wedding bells (hopefully not in that order), I probably would have driven the relationship straight into the ground using only the sheer force of my temper. It's kind of my specialty.

As it is, though, no prince has ridden up waving an obscenely large emerald ring and promising to cook for me for the rest of our lives (never using onions, eggplant or raw tomatoes, of course), bring me wet cloths when I'm sick or tell me my singing is cute and not horrendous.

So thanks to his taking his sweet time, I'm left to fend for myself out in the dating world. And it sucks. First of all, I'm not a real big dater. I kind of hate it, actually. Dates bore me, and plus they're kind of awkward because you know it's a date, and it's so hard to get to know someone when you're alternately wondering if you are making a good impression and when you can go home and put on your sweats. It's much better when you like someone, and you know they like you, and then you do something silly together like make root beer floats and have an Arrested Development marathon. In your sweats.

Okay, so I'm a loser, but I'm a comfortable loser. So that's one reason I'm mad. Because I have the sneaking suspicion that I'm a grown-up now, and I'm eventually going to have to go on grown-up dates, and I hate that.

And you know what else I hate? And I'm not saying this applies to me personally right now or anything but GOD I HATE IT IT MAKES ME SO MAD. Sorry, it just came out. I hate it when you can't be with someone who you want to be with.

Like, if I were Rachel McAdams in The Notebook and my parents dragged me out of town and I didn't hear from Ryan Gosling for seven years I would have razed the town of Savannah or New York or wherever she was (actually, it was New York for college and then Savannah, where she was getting ready to be married. Have I mentioned it's my favorite movie?) Or if I were Nicole Kidman and I had to pretend I didn't love Ewan McGregor anymore because I had tuberculosis or "consumption" or whatever, I would've torn the windmill right off of the Moulin Rouge.

But sometimes it's not an obstacle as easily overcome as protective parents or a fatal illness. Sometimes it's more than that, or less than that, or (in what I'd imagine to be the worst cases) the other person. And there's nothing you can do about that. Because no matter how many major metropolitan cities you threaten to destroy, you can't make that person like you, or at least not enough to take you out for ice cream or watch Titanic with you on rainy nights, I'm pretty sure. To be honest, you'll probably just scare him/her off further with your displays of violence. You should really get your anger problems checked out. But enough about you. Back to me.

So yeah, I'm angry today. It's one of those days where it doesn't really feel like things work out for good people, or that no matter how compassionate, sympathetic, helpful, optimistic and well-dressed you try to be, life is going to kick you in the face with a muddy boot and then leave your doors open on its way out so that a fly gets in and you can't open the windows to let it escape because it's pouring outside (that's how the boot got muddy) but you're not fast enough to kill it, probably because you are still recovering from that attack on your face, which, by the way, is probably going to leave a scar that will have kids calling you "Harry Potter" for the rest of your life. Yeah, one of those days.

For Teenie.

I'm taking an honors class right now on "Stress and Coping." I just had the class for the first time today, so I've only learned two things so far:

1. The class is in the exact same classroom as an honors class I had last quarter that I dropped after a week because there were only like twelve people in the class, sitting in a circle around the teacher, and I had already fallen asleep three times in the first hour. I figured it would be all downhill from there. I'm crossing my fingers that this quarter will be better.

2. Compared to what I learned about every single other student in the class during those awkward self-intro speeches, I am really behind on life. Like there was a girl who was interning for the Conan O'Brien show (this coming on the heels of her internship with the Make-A-Wish Foundation), and a guy who spent part of his summer in Haiti volunteering in hospitals. Over half the class had taken either the MCAT, the LSAT or the GRE. A typical 'what I did over summer' speech would go like this: "I spent this summer putting in over 40 hours a week at my internship with a sports agent representing dozens of professional athletes. In my spare time, I studied for the LSAT and did some volunteer legal work on the side. I took the test last week and now I'm working on a few dozen applications for law schools across the country." And then there was me: "This summer I worked until I saved up enough money to go to Hawaii. And then I did and it was awesome."

After that whole thing, the professor went through some of the logistics of the class. It was all very basic, but one question she asked stuck with me. It might just be because it's the topic of a quarter-long assignment and I like to do my worrying in advance, but this is the question: "how do you deal with stress?"

It sounds simple, right? No. Sucker. At least not for me. I thought it was obvious at first. "Oh," I thought to myself, "well, that's easy. When I'm stressed I snack a lot. Ugh weight gain. Maybe I should start going to the gym. But I have no time and I hate being sweaty and moving around. Maybe I should just stop buying snacks." But then I realized that this isn't always necessarily true. Sometimes when I'm stressed I stop eating. Like there would be stretches of time where I'd be too busy to cook or grocery shop and I'd subsist on whatever non-perishables I have left in the back of the pantry. Unfortunately, if you're thinking "oh at least that helps her weight balance back out" this does not seem to be true. Apparently my body is in a kind of lose-lose situation -- or should I say gain-gain?-- where if I don't eat it goes on survival mode and manages to wrangle 300 calories out of a single stalk of celery. And then when I do eat it rejoices by safely tucking all these incoming calories in little pockets of fat known as my appendages.

So my point is I was trying to figure out how I personally cope with stress. And I was drawing a blank until just now, when I was having a conversation with Teenie about how confusing and annoying feelings are, and basically just bitching about life in general to the point where she had to calm me down by quoting Red Hot Chili Peppers and telling me that I'm pretty. I'm not saying I'm superficial, but just fyi: telling me I'm pretty often has a calming effect on me. It's like what a tranquilizer dart does to a charging bear. Song lyrics are optional.

Anyway, we started talking about this ongoing fantasy I have where I uproot my life and move to somewhere exotic and romantic and then do something charmingly destitute like be a waitress in a small cafe by the ocean. And then I realized: this is my coping mechanism. Like when I'm in my beautiful apartment in Westwood, which at the moment might not seem so beautiful because there is nothing in the refrigerator and I have a pile of unfinished assignments and hundreds of pages to read and nothing more exciting than Shakespeare on my horizon, I think "well you know what? in a year I'll have graduated and I can do whatever I want and if what I want to do is buy a one way ticket to France and spend my life savings on a small apartment over a bookshop and work in a bakery selling cupcakes, then what's stopping me?" Or sometimes it's Bath, an apartment over a shoe store, working at the spa; Hong Kong, in a high-rise penthouse, something with banking and investments where I get to wear killer heels and flattering suits. My fantasies about the future aren't always so far-fetched, however. Once in a while I'll be feeling tame and domestic, and it'll be something more along the lines of a Victorian house in San Francisco, where I sell antiques; a cottage in Maine where I lead tour groups through historic landmarks; an apartment overlooking the cityscape in Seattle where I, of course, work in a coffee shop.

That's the thing about being an English major, I think. On one hand, I have little to no prospects. On the other, I could be anywhere, doing anything.

And if nothing else, that makes me appreciate my sunny little apartment with its french doors, soft carpets and familiar, friendly residents for the short time that I have it.