sidewalk monster

i am a crazy fast walker. i have absolutely no idea how to pace myself, so i always end up sprinting around westwood to get to the various places i need to be, often arriving at work really early (which, i guess, isn't so terrible). what is terrible, however, is getting trapped behind slow people, who have no problem pacing themselves. i think i've discussed the wonder that is the slow walker who can take up an entire sidewalk by himself. he is unpredictable and therefore leaves those behind him unable to pass him, as he may, at any time, decide to veer directly into their paths. i encountered a small old woman wearing too-short polyester pants the other day, and she was, by far, the best (or worst) sidewalk monster in the world. she knew exactly where i tried to get around her, every single time, and totally preempted me, literally stepping out to stonewall me. maybe she had mirrors in her giant sunglasses, allowing her to see exactly where i was all the time. i should have been seriously irritated, but it was so amazing that i was actually kind of entertained.

my millions

it's kind of incredible how much my bank account fluctuates. i don't know what i'm going to do when i can't ask my parents for help. hopefully, one day i'll have a real job and will be able to pay my rent at the end of the month without having to panic, grovel for a hundred dollars to tide me over, and then discover that my mom has transferred over way more money than i asked for/ever anticipated. it's a very schizophrenia relationship. they make me feel terrible and irresponsible when i realize i need a little help, and then after making a huge deal about what a burden i am, millions of dollars arrive in my account without my asking for them. my diamond shoes are too tight.

vanity

i was reading an online article about bill murray's recent arrest for driving (a golf cart) drunk around in sweden, and, because i'm incredibly superficial, was saddened by how old he looks:



he used to look like this:



and then, i thought about cary elwes and val kilmer, who look radically different than they did when i was twelve and madly in love with them (for the record, there is no way see "tombstone" at thirteen and not wish hopelessly that doc holliday beats tuberculosis).

exhibit a:



and now:



cary elwes, who went from being westley and robin hood to having to cut off his own feet in "saw," also underwent a terrible change, from this:



to this:



now, i'd be the last person to judge someone based on their appearance, but that doesn't mean i can't be shocked when i realize what's in store for my face in thirty years.

mtv

i just heard the most amazing thing.

and i quote: "it's ignorant to dislike someone because of their personality."

actually, michelle from "engaged and underage," not liking someone because you hate their personality is the least ignorant reason to dislike someone.

maybe i should watch less mtv.

hypochondria

i'm flying out to portland next week with the great-aunts to visit my cousins michael and sara, and to help the aunts babysit their adorable children when they leave to go to a wedding. in order to prep for the wedding, sara wanted to go get a manicure and pedicure, something that she and i aren't really all that familiar with. she invited me to go with her, and we're taking her five-year-old daughter, and it should be fun, right? i can to pretend to be a real girl for an hour. (the closest i usually come to "real girl" is when i buy boxed hair dye at drug stores and get my eyebrows threaded every six months on westwood blvd).

that being said, i'm probably the only person in the world who worries about getting flesh eating bacteria from a pedicure. i have this fear because my mother is a hypochondriac and made us all wear water booties into the ocean until we were fourteen, lest we step on any glass/hypodermic needles in the sand. she has forced me to live in constant terror that i will get some horrific disease as a result of my casual careless at the beach or the mall or the doctor's office. also, i watch too much tyra banks. she often has shows entitled "i sacrificed my health for beauty," which are real news stories criticizing the beauty industry for making young women take crazy risks for perfection, while at the same time hoping we all forget that tyra banks is a supermodel who created a reality show all about how to succeed in that very same industry. (i was just about to call that hypocrisy, and rant about that, and then i realized that i've just admitted to being obsessed with miss banks, which makes me a hypocrite too. so, no, tyra banks isn't misleading, at all. she's perfect. just like me.)

so, long story short, i'm nervous for my pedicure. the last thing i need is for some microbacteria to crawl into the crevices between my skin and toenails and make my legs break out in terrible sores that will result in permanent, humiliating scarring (it happened to some girl on tyra). that would be bad.

"so, then i said gre..."

the idea of having to figure out my life scares me. i made the terrible mistake of saying "gre" to my parents yesterday, and my dad proceeded to lecture me (again) about how i'm totally fucking up my entire life if i don't take that test in the next three weeks (i'm not taking the test in the next three weeks). i've been putting it off 1) because i'm lazy and 2) because once i take it, i need to apply to grad school, and i have no idea where i want to go to grad school. i brought up a potential year off yesterday, and was able to successfully steer the conversation to civil maturity, which was surprising, considering the previous talks about my future i've had with my parents. i just have absolutely no idea what i'm planning to do. i know i want to go on with school, but i don't know what i want to pursue, and i can guarantee, barring any mystical revelation, that i won't be any closer to an answer to my life plan in three months, when i'm expected to apply to schools. i know i don't want to do psychology anymore, mostly because i've decided that having a doctorate in psychology (to use as a stepping stone to other things) isn't worth spending more years of my life plodding through material i can't really stand. so, that's out. now, i have to narrow down all my other interests (such as education or journalism), and then find the schools that are best for each one. fun times.

corollary: i decided i'm going to try to become the uber person i once was. i'm going to find a bunch of volunteer opportunities and i need to re-teach myself the four years of spanish from high school, so i can take the placement exam and hopefully get out of having to take a crash course next summer in order to fulfill my language requirement (i've finally realized that my totally amazing score on the spanish IB test is, regrettably, not going to be recognized by the university).

ugh.

double eyelid surgery

i just googled "double eyelid surgery" because i've always been curious as to how it works and what people look like after having such a surgery. i had previously placed double eyelid surgery on my list of "things never to discuss with anyone, despite how interesting and intriguing they are, because everyone will think you're a hatemonger." however, i've decided to come right out and let you all know that i have in fact, on occassion, wondered why people would want to have eye skin surgery - what are the pay offs? what would make someone want to cut their face skin open? i suppose i would ask the same questions of someone who had a nose job, if nose jobs were as clouded in intrigue as this eyelid surgery has been. anyway, i satisfied this curiousity this morning, and it feels nice to know. however, there are still many, many things on my list, things i don't dare ask anyone about, even though they are perfectly acceptable scientific inquiries, because if i did, everyone would be shocked and horrified that i'd put them into words. where am i going to get answers?

i'm really considering going to get my hair straightened via the "yuko system" at a salon in westwood, which is probably a terrible idea, as i have gotten tremendously horrible haircuts in westwood, and this time i would be surrendering much more than just the ends of my hair. however, given the huge convenience of the salon being two seconds from my apartment, and the even huger convenience of maybe never having to use a flat iron all the time, i'm really, really tempted. i could trick myself into thinking that when my hair grows out a little, it'll be easier to manage, but that will only mean that i won't have to use as many bobby pins when i throw the mass into a bun.

i'm so vain.

coooookies

it's far too busy in this phoneroom for me to be comfortable. and by comfortable of course i mean lazy. i have a book here by augusten burroughs (the poor man's david sedaris*), and i really just want to read it. the good news is that i think i've gotten back into the flow of this job, so i don't feel like i'm constantly screwing people, which seemed like a very real possibility on monday.

i emailed my mom begging her for her pumpkin cookie recipe this morning, and i'm hoping she gets back to me before i leave here at 4. i want to go to the market and pick up what i need because the more i think about them, the more i'm fixated. i must eat those cookies very soon.

an asshole just called me. again. that makes number four in the 55 minutes i've been at work this morning. i have encountered approxiately .75 assholes at the chocolate factory in the two months i've been working there. in the six hours i was there yesterday, there were zero assholes. i guess maybe it's the being put on hold and listening to insane musac that makes everyone who calls the ticket office an enraged craze.



*i was by no means knocking mr. burroughs. i mean, i continue to purchase his books each time i discover a new one exists, so i actually really love him. he's just essentially david sedaris, without the fame and the fanfare and the sold-out spoken-word performances on campus that even i, the ticket office worker bee, couldn't get tickets to.

parking brakes

if sam is any indication, the children in my family are severely lacking in the common sense department. this was again proven to me the other night, as i tried to leave zoe's house. i attempted to drive up her steep dirt driveway, and got about halfway up before the wheels began spinning in place. i tried this a few more times before i realized that the parking brake was still on and that i was slowly destroying the inside of my car. nice.

i'm back at the ticket office, barrelling through my first day back in about two months. i'm waiting to go to lunch with josh at 2:30, when i'm going to try to throw as much food into my face as humanly possible in a half hour. apparently, we all got raises (i still have to figure out if that includes employees like me, who disappeared for several weeks), and that will be nice, because i want to save up money for portland and my birthday and for life in general, as i realized today that i need to order another supply of contacts (read: expensive), and should probably do that very soon.

my aunt carole saw me yesterday and said i'd lost weight. yipee! hurray! i'm thin(ner)!

i'm dirty and need to take a shower. gross.

grosstown

i have a pimple. this is not supposed to happen anymore. i ravaged my body for five months to stop this from happening. i'm panicking about how my entire face is being prepped to explode into the doomed craziness i so very recently escaped. i really don't know i dealt with all my skin being covered with this shit, because this is making me nuts.

"no, fuck you."

driving in LA is always an enraging activity, but this morning, something really infuriating happened and i felt i needed to share. some douche in an enormous truck was trying to make a left turn out of a strip mall across four lanes of traffic, and instead of waiting until all the lanes were clear before pulling ahead, he decided to block the lane closest to him. this was, incidentally, the lane next to where i was heading toward him, and as i got closer, i noticed that he was going to pull out right in front of me. i'm getting pretty good with my horn, so i honked, and he didn't look (of course) and proceeded to move in front of me and stop his car, blocking two lanes of traffic as he waited for the cars to clear on the other side. i honked again to thank him for almost killing me and making two lines of cars wait for him to stop being a total jackass, and he finally acknowledged me with a "fuck you" screamed out of his giant window. i will never stop being surprised.

sugar free

i have become such a weeper. it's fantastic. i can remember watching oprah with sam (totally by accident, as we were flipping through channels one day), and being morbidly intrigued by how easy it was to get her going. show oprah a clip of some birds flying around set to enya, and the waterworks begin (or so it seemed when i was eleven). fast forward to twenty minutes ago, when i finished reading "the time traveler's wife,"* and ended up bawling like a five-year-old because the ending was so terribly sad. thank you, hormones.

i've stopped eating sugar again. as of yesterday, i will consume no processed sugar (save for the chocolate almond milk i bought last week, which is flavored with cane juice, and which would be a terrible waste to get rid of). yesterday, at the store, i was practically itching to throw a piece of caramel or chocolate or peach gummy into my mouth, and i'm proud to say that i did not. a chocolate store is the absolute worst place to work after you've sworn off candy. temptation abounds. i had to make chocolate covered marachino cherries, and was required to taste a cherry pre-chocolating to make sure the batch wasn't rancid, and so i chewed it up and spit it out, as swallowing the cherry would mean i'd eaten sugary goodness. it has now been thirty hours since i decided to stop the sugar IV, so we'll see how long this continues. i've learned that after quitting sugar cold turkey, it takes about two weeks to stop wanting to cram every bit of it into your mouth, but after that, it gets much better. i just have to hold out at the chocolate factory for a week and a half. we shall see.



*i would like to apologize for turning this blog into a summer reading list. i'm only working nine and a half hours this week and i need something to do. also, reading is cool.

august!

it's august! i'm sure i've had this revelation before, but when i think back to previous months, to december and new year's eve and all these crazy things i allowed myself to be a part of, i cannot believe i'm come as far as i have, and have the life i have right now. that's not at all meant to imply i was a drug addict or a prostitute or something equally heinous and seemingly insurmountable (and if i was, you'd probably know about it). i just progressed, i think. i credit the accutane with that, because, as vain and terrible as it sounds, getting rid of my terrible skin problems allowed me to take serious inventory of my life and what i was letting happen to me, self-inflicted or not. this year, the beginning of each month has been almost like the start of a new year, and on the first, i can mark yet another month that i've put between me and the enormous fool i used to be. granted, i'm not totally fantastic, i'm not all put together, but i can go out without hiding behind make-up, i can let someone amazing love me, i can finally decide who i want in my life and who i don't. i'm proud of that. it may be difficult to understand, but i'd be willing to bet that many people have had something happen to them that shaped them negatively for a long time - and they'll know how amazing it feels to have it define their lives positively for a change.

also, rent is due today, so i have to come to terms with the fact that the massive bank account i've created will be destroyed when i write the check.