Tag: life as a grown up

One of my favorite love poems:

I wish I were close

To you as the wet skirt of

A salt girl to her body.

I think of you always.

Akahito

12:22 p.m.

I’ve been doing some impromptu modeling around the office, which tends to happen when you work in a building full of trade publications. Anyway, I finally (finally!) have my very own banner ad:

It’s for the WEB2001 Conference, and as you can see, I’m totally a guru. You’ll also find an itty bitty me on the catalog cover:

And you can kind of see my butt on the June edition of Intelligent Enterprise.

11:14 a.m.

Evan says:
“If one were to try, I bet one could discern at what points in the last three years I’ve had a girlfriend based, not on the content of my blog, but simply by analyzing the number nights in a given month I’m making posts between the hours of 1:00 AM and 5:00 AM. I let you figure out the correlation. (2:04 AM)”

In other words, he’s free man, ladies. But for how long? Let the frenetic email flirtations begin!

11:22 a.m.

A small slice of my 4th of July family reunion:

Me: You’ve got a big hunk of something in your teeth.

My sister Raina: (Smiles winningly, and moves her face closer to mine.)

Me: Ugh! Stop it.

Raina: It’s sexy.

Me: (Running my finger seductively over my peeling sun burnt shoulder.) No, this is sexy. Mmmmm.

Raina: I’m going to keep one of these teeth things at home, so I can have one ready when I go out.

My cousin Ryan: You’ve got a collection of dried chives.

Me: I think Madonna had one of those, hers was 14kt. gold, though. She’s into those felt syphilitic moles now.

Ryan: There’s a whole line of possibilities. Like fake boogers.

All: Gahh!

Me: 14kt. gold fake boogers!

Raina: That reminds me! I have a story.

Me: Do we want to hear this?

Raina: It’s not about boogers.

My cousin Ben: If it’s not about boogers, I don’t wanna hear it.

Raina: So I come home from work and there are tampons all over my lawn. I guess the kids found a box of my tampons and they were playing with them. I’m running around totally embarrassed scooping up tampons before the neighbors see.

Me: What the hell was the baby sitter doing?

Raina: She probably just thought they were playing out front. Anyway, Trevor comes outside the next morning and says, “Where are all my pop guns?”

11:10 a.m.

Yesterday at lunch, a friend pointed out that I’d packed my peanut butter and jelly sandwich and fishy crackers in a Sephora bag. Perhaps he thought it was sort of like wearing pigtails and spike heels, or affixing a Big Bird sticker to the bumper of your Porsche. To be fair, red lipstick and Jiffy are a tough combo, but I like to think I can work the look. The look being peanut butter and red lipstick all over my chin.

2:58 p.m.

My cousin Ben makes a discovery about human nature:

“I have a Yahoo! email account and I was poking through my various settings and I ended up on my user profile page. One of the fields that people have the option of setting is Marital Status… Among the many choices was this one: Married but looking.”

2:50 p.m.

We spent hours planning our meals and arranging gear in the packs: camp stove, wool socks, well-stocked first aid kit, water purifier, kitchen sink, and so on. We stopped for lunch near the trailhead after a five-hour drive, and my camping buddy (the Eagle Scout) had a sudden outburst: “OhmyholymotherofjesusCRAP!”

I jerked around to see what had happened; he just pointed to his shoes. Or rather, to his moccasin slippers.

“I left my hiking boots at home.”

3:30 p.m.

Just got back from ladies’ night where we traded mom stories. I told Amy that my mom sends Christmas cards to people she met in the dentist office waiting room. Amy told me that she caught her mom talking to strangers on the bus about her parents’ illnesses. This reminded me of yesterday morning when I was sitting next to a guy on Muni who looked just like Prince William. I was actually turning toward him to tell him so when I realized that if I did, I’d be that woman on the bus telling a perfect stranger that he looked like Prince William. Sobering.

11:44 p.m.

From the “Yeah, I’ve done that” department. Words of wisdom from Booboolina:

“Note to self:

When picking the jeans that you wore yesterday up
from the floor in preparation for putting them on
today, check to see that the underwear you were
also wearing yesterday are no longer in them…
BEFORE YOU PUT THEM ON.”

1:44 p.m.

I just finished Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. I wanted to hate it, because it’s loosely based on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. I loved Mrs. Dalloway and expected Cunningham to ruin something essential. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised. Some excerpts:

  • “In school she was one of several authoritative, aggressive, not quite beautiful girls so potent in their money and their athletic confidence they simply stood where they stood and insisted that the local notion of desirability be reconfigured to include them.”
  • “Men may congratulate themselves for writing truly and passionately about the movements of nations; they may consider war and the search for God to be great literature’s only subjects; but if men’s standing in the world could be toppled by an ill-advised choice of hat, English literature would be dramatically changed.”
  • (And a pug quote for Swen.) “Viginia’s eyes met those of one of the pugs, which stares over its fawn-colored shoulder at her with an expression of moist, wheezing bafflement.”

8:53 a.m.

Spent Saturday night on the Haight. Mad Dog in the Fog had an “Irish band from outer space,” and Molotov’s was dank, but Nickies featured a relatively sober girl mesmerized by her own reflection. I say sober because she managed to balance on one of the benches that circled the room, and she perched there dancing with the mirror. She would grind seductively and cast furtive, flirtatious glances at…. herself. Huh. Then someone threw up on my friend’s pants and we had to leave.

8:46 p.m.

Watching a kid’s infomercial about a spectacular new mechanical toothbrush, the voiceover exclaims, “BUT THAT’S NOT ALL!” My five year old niece turns to me smiling and says, “They always say, ‘that’s not all.'” Smart kid.

4:01 p.m.

The last week has not been so good. A few days ago, I managed to upset one of my closest friends. Last night, a violently crazy homeless woman charged at me while I was trying to find someplace to eat on Valencia. (She also called me a bitch, which–I think you’ll agree–was really just uncalled for.) In a few hours, I’m off to have several needles inserted in my currently unperforated arms, so some sleepy little diseases can have a party with my immune system. What wonders will the weekend hold? It could be anything, really: severe food poisoning, mugging, drive by, or a friend could visit and demand that I take him to Pier 39.

10:33 a.m.

This is a calendar featuring women with beards. Friends, family members: if you have a birthday in January, you know what you’ll be getting from me.

2:15 p.m.

I’m wearing a new lemon perfume, and a friend told me I “smell like dish soap.” In guy-speak that means, “I want to rip your clothes off with my teeth.”

12:21 p.m.

I booked tickets to Indonesia yesterday because my life is rad. The only problem is, I’m terrified of the vaccinations. I know no one likes needles, but I don’t like them more. One of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever done involved a blood test when I was 14.

In the waiting room I swallowed repeatedly trying to conquer the excessive panic-saliva. When they tried to take me into the room, I grabbed either side of the doorjamb. It took three men to pry me off and hold me down while they drew my blood. My mom was stunned and mortified. “I can’t believe this, you’re practically a grown woman! What are you doing? This is really out of character, I’m so sorry. This is really out of character.” To this day, I have no idea what I was thinking, I guess it hadn’t occurred to me that they’d fight me.

So, yeah. The vaccinations will be a highlight.

10:45 a.m.

It’s time for my very own personalized action figure. For $250 I could have a mini Mighty Girl with a tiny little cape and tiny white go-go boots. That’s some serious first-world livin’.

3:51 p.m.

As I was rummaging for breakfast this morning, the cupcakes on my counter started to look suspiciously muffinlike. I had an internal debate: Muffin? Oatmeal? Muffin? Oatmeal? Then the inevitable self-reprimand: “MAGGIE. Muffins do not have sprinkles.”

9:52 a.m.