Little Miss Listless

New blog

2011-03-04T13:56:00.001-08:00

It's been a while. I've started a lot of entries but have yet to finish any of them. I think I'm just in one of those periods where I don't have much to say.

Except about books! I always have something to say about books. Especially when I've had two drinks. So I started a blog where I get drunk and talk about what I'm reading. It all began (like so many great adventures) with my hatred of Jonathan Franzen. Come on over!

http://luterarylish.blogspot.com/

Bridal shop of horrors

2010-11-21T22:44:00.000-08:00

About a year ago, one of my best friends from Indianapolis asked me to be maid of honor in her upcoming wedding. You could've knocked me over with a feather. Part of the issue was her lead-in: she took a deep breath, sighed it out, and then said, "Look, I have to ask you something, and I know how you're going to feel about it, but will you be my maid of honor?" And she was right. I didn't want to be asked -- not because I don't love her, not because I'm not incredibly honored and thrilled, but because seriously, I am the last person any sane individual would choose for such a distinction. Not only am I apathetic and uninformed when it comes to the event preparation aspect of weddings, I also look awkward in formal wear, don't speak well in front of large groups of people and live 2,000 miles away in California. "Jesus, are you sure?" I kept saying even as she kept saying, "I know, I know, I know." But even as we were protesting to each other, we were both bawling like babies. And so the deal was done.

So far, being her maid of honor has been a textbook case of deadbeat bride meets deadbeat bridesmaid: she hasn't asked me to do a thing, and I, dutifully, have responded by doing nothing. This is my second go-round on the bridesmaid beat, and both times have been remarkably low-key, characterized by cool-ass women who put the bridezilla myth to bed with every shrug of their awesome shoulders. Whenever I ask my friend what I can do to help, she just responds, "You can stand next to me during my wedding." Commence feeling jealous NOW.

However, one duty is unavoidable, and that's the bridesmaids' dress. I thought I had it bad with my cousin's wedding a couple of years back. She selected her bridesmaids' dresses at a small boutique in Detroit, which meant that over here in LA I had to go to a bridal warehouse solely for the purpose of being measured. In case you're curious, walking in and announcing that you're just there to get your measurements taken is not the best way to elicit friendliness from salespeople. After enduring that experience, I had to call in my measurements to the Detroit boutique, which occasioned this lovely exchange:

Cat: So I'm a BLAH BLAH in the hips, a BLAH BLAH in the waist and a BLAH BLAH in the bust.
Salesgirl: Wait, read those to me again.
Cat: BLAH BLAH, BLAH BLAH, BLAH BLAH.
Salesgirl: Can you hold, please?

[twenty minutes later]

Manager: Hi, this is the manager. I understand there's a problem with your measurements?
Cat: Oh, is there? They're just BLAH BLAH, BLAH BLAH and BLAH BLAH.
Manager: I see. Do you have measuring tape handy?
Cat: Yeah . . .
Manager: Let's redo them.

[pause while I strip down to my underwear to wrap measuring tape around myself]

Cat: They're still BLAH and BLAH and BLAH.
Manager: That can't be right. According to those, you're a 2 up top and a 10 down below.

So, let's review: according to this woman, my tits are somehow eight sizes smaller than my ass. Now, I'm not saying I'm Heidi Klum, but when I look in the mirror I see a vague hourglass shape, not a big fat triangle. It'd be one thing if she said, "Oh, according to these sizes, you're a 10." I'd be like, "That's not my usual size, but I guess bridalwear runs small." But a 2 on top and a 10 on the bottom? Lady, were you sent to this earth from the planet Golrog 7 with no other mission than to make innocent girls feel like circus freaks?

She went on to try and talk me into ordering a size 10 dress, adding that I would of course have to have the bust taken in because my body is so weird. I informed her that I had never in my life worn a size 10 and that I was sure an 8 would do the job, considering that at most stores I wear a motherfucking 4 and have passed up plenty of nachos in order to do so THANK YOU VERY MUCH, and she acquiesced with the kind of resigned sigh that seemed to say, "Okay, you vain bitch from hell, but don't come crying to me when you can't get this thing over your head." A couple of months later the dress showed up and it fit perfectly, so I'm still not clear on what all the fuss was about, unless it was just God's way of saying, "Not only are you not the one getting married, but you're also fat, you fucking loser!"

I had a much better experience this weekend at the David's Bridal near the Burbank airport (and I challenge you to find a single individual who's ever uttered THOSE particular words before). Some people have an attitude about David's Bridal, but let's be real: whether you acquire your bridesmaid's dress at an elegant boutique where you sip champagne from a glass flute while ten women dressed in black react to your every gesture or pick it up at a discount store where everyone ignores you in favor of bickering about whose turn it is to go on break, you're still NEVER GOING TO WEAR IT AGAIN, so who really cares. At least David's Bridal doesn't measure you before you even put on a dress. They ask what size you normally wear, add a billion to it and hand you a garment that looks about right except for the twelve-digit number printed on the tag. I'm dying to know whether wedding dresses are equally sized down. I mean, here you are, trying to decide what you're going to wear on your big day, wanting to look more beautiful and radiant than you've ever looked in your life, and you've got some woman in a polyester pantsuit telling you you're twelve sizes larger than you were yesterday? Come on.

The brides in the fitting room area of David's Bridal seemed to be having a lovely time, which is nice, but back at the register things were not going so well: a bride-to-be was having shoe color selection issues. While I was waiting for the saleslady to get a manager to void the transaction in which she accidentally charged me for three gold dresses with silver lace overlay instead of one -- a very bizarre mistake, since I am not and have never been a triplet -- the shoe bride asked my opinion. "I don't know," I said. "I think you should just get whatever color you want. No one's going to see them anyway." She frowned and said, "Are you a bridesmaid?"

And THAT, right there, is the problem with acquiring a bridesmaids' dress -- the second-class-citizenship of it all. The bride is the queen of the bridal store -- not because she is the one getting married, but because she is the one who, on top of buying a $500+ dress, is going to sucker a bunch of innocent bridesmaids into buying a $150+ dress from the same store. It's economic incentivism out the yang. I'm not going to be making any costly secondary purchases from David's Bridal, and everyone knows it. I'm not the one getting married; I'm the one holding up the train of the $500+ dress so it won't get dirty -- you know, in case the bride decides to wear it again, for all those formal funerals she goes to in South Korea.

So here's my latest get-rich-quick scheme, and I am pretty sure this one is a winner: I'm going to open a chain of stores JUST FOR BRIDESMAIDS. In my stores, the bridesmaid will be queen. She will be waited on hand and foot, plied with cocktails and brownies, and her dresses will be sized up to the point that she'll think vodka tonics have acquired magical weight reduction properties overnight. "I never realized I was a size negative 22 until I visited Cat's Second-Wave Feminist Bridesmaid Paradise!" will be what my patrons say. My dress-buying watchword will be, "Could someone feasibly reuse this as an outfit for her company Christmas party?" I'll have flat-screen TVs playing helpful instructional videos with titles like "How to let everyone know that you're not doing the whole catch-the-bouquet thing because you're cool, not because you're a sad cat lady" and "Pinpointing the exact moment during the reception when it is permissible to exchange your high heels for flip-flops." I'll have divorce statistics painted all over the walls. And if anyone starts to cry, I'll play a recording of a screaming baby until they perk right up.

I did this instead of getting drunk

2010-11-01T09:39:00.000-07:00

Our apartment is technically a duplex, although I never refer to it that way. I'm pretty sure that out of all the words used to classify domiciles -- studio, apartment, townhouse, bungalow, and so on and so on up the income scale -- "duplex" is the only one that sounds like a skin disease. Also, here in LA I think it's douchey to ever call your residence anything but "apartment," unless it's an actual house, in which case you can call it your house but then are required to add a clause immediately explaining how it is that you came to have a house -- i.e., "We could always go to my house, but it is in Watts," or "I'd invite you guys over to my house, but my mom hates unexpected visitors." Otherwise you're just putting on airs. Whether you realize it or not, you're subtly letting other people know that your place has some expensive characteristic that distinguishes it from theirs, such as stairs. That's no small faux pas to make in a city where some people are living in studio apartments so small they're forced to keep their toilet paper in the kitchen, not that this has happened to me.

So I never call me and Henry's place a duplex, though that's what it is. It's a house that's been divided into two apartments, one upstairs and one downstairs, with two front doors opening onto a shared stoop and two back doors opening onto a lawn that is supposed to be shared, but that our downstairs neighbors are pretending is all theirs because they're parents, so they're allowed to do whatever they want and we have to take it. It's really quite ironic how put-out they are about having two unmarried, late-hours-keeping, noise-making yupsters upstairs, because if we were just like them, they'd have no leverage in their incessant struggle for power. Sometimes I think I'd like to have a baby just to piss them off. I get lost in a revenge fantasy where their excuse for everything shitty and self-involved that they do -- "It's not about us, it's about the kids" -- has been completely invalidated. If I had a baby right now, I'd wake it up in the middle of the night just so I could stand directly over their bedroom holding it while it screamed. Try ringing my doorbell to complain about that, parents! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA SUCK IT.

But I digress. My point is that I now have a front door opening directly onto the street, which I haven't had since I was still living in my parents' house. Also, this happens to be an area of LA where houses actually outnumber apartment buildings, which would make me feel quite grown-up and accomplished if it weren't so generally annoying. Between the bazillion-year-old hyper-religious crank next door who complains to our landlord that we have lights on at night -- the horror! -- and the awful blond mom across the street who screams at her nanny in the front yard and loses at least one of her eighty-nine massive hounds every single night, LA neighborhood life has turned out to have little in common with neighborhood life where I grew up.

But there is -- or was -- one thing to look forward to, and that was Halloween. For the first time in a decade, I was living in a place where I could reasonably expect trick-or-treaters, and I was stoked. I had my big bag of candy all ready, and as the sun went down last night, I waited eagerly for the doorbell to ring. Standing in the kitchen, I could see kids in costume walking by on the sidewalk, giggling and having an awesome time. YET NONE OF THEM RANG.

I went out the front door and observed that the downstairs neighbors had extinguished all of their lights, suggesting that they weren't home. However, from the street this made it look as if no one was home, and isn't that just so typical of them? Because they have better things to do than hand out candy on Halloween, they think nothing of ruining it for me. YES, THEY WERE PROBABLY JUST BEING GOOD ECO-MINDED ANGELENOS AND CONSERVING ENERGY. I don't care. Everything they do sucks.

Having figured out why the doorbell wasn't ringing, I grabbed a book and my sack of candy and sat on the front step for about an hour. During this time, I saw almost as many groups of children go walking by as I did girls in slutty costumes, which is saying a lot. YET NONE OF THEM APPROACHED ME FOR CANDY. Not one. Many even ran across the busy street in front of my house to hit up the blond mom's place, while I just sat there feeling like the last one to get picked in gym class. Eventually I got discouraged, not to mention cold, and went inside. Now I have this giant bag of candy, which two months from now I'll affectionately know as "extra five pounds I cannot seem to burn off no matter how much I work out."

How could blond mom, with her verbal abuse and raging hounds and general suckiness, attract trick-or-treaters while I didn't? It took me a few minutes of observation, but finally I figured it out: theatrics. She'd festooned her gate with fake spiderwebs, put a cut-out pumpkin on the door and hung purple and orange lights. Meanwhile, I was sitting on an ill-lit stoop with a book, looking at best as if I was enjoying the night air and at worst like a probable child molester. Oh, LA, even your simple childhood traditions are competitive. Next year I'm going to have this place so Halloweened out that it looks like the Addams Family mansion. In the meantime, I'm going to go overdose on Sweet Tarts.

Jet lag

2010-10-17T10:32:00.000-07:00

10 p.m. Saturday:

Brain: I know you've been awake for 24 hours at this point, including a 12-hour fight during which you could not be persuaded to take a nap because you are a stubborn bitch from hell, but let's try and stay awake to the end of this three-page article in the New Yorker, okay?
Body: Why should I?
Brain: Because I haven't read anything in English for a week, that's why. Because no matter the circumstances, it feels lame to go to bed at 10 on a Saturday, that's why. Because LOOK AT ALL THESE BIG WORDS, IN ENGLISH, THAT I CAN READ AND UNDERSTAND. JUST LOOK AT THEM. Aren't you proud of me?
Body: I'll tell you what I'm proud of. I'm proud that I carried your lazy ass around on foot for six hours a day for the past week, in spite of the fact that you have not exercised me that much in years and insisted on encasing me in fashionable instead of comfortable shoes because you are neurotic about people thinking you're American. That's what I accomplished this week. Now shut up and pass out sitting up with all the lights on.
Brain: No! Must fight fatigue. Must . . . fight . . . fa . . .

12 a.m. Sunday:

Body: And . . . ACTIVATE!
Brain: WHERE AM I?
Body: I know, but I'm not telling.
Brain: OH MY GOD. I'm in some kind of monument, and I fell asleep in it, and now I'm embarrassed!
Body: Tee hee hee.
Brain: I'm in the catacombs and there are bones next to me! I'm in my friend's apartment and she left in the middle of the night and I can't call her because my phone doesn't work here!
Body: You are tripping your BALLS off!
Brain: I lost my passport! I lost my credit card! I lost my phone! I'll never be able to get home!
Body: Remember last week, when you insisted on feeding me at least four glasses of red wine every night and then only gave me five hours at a time to sleep them off? TASTE MY SWEET REVENGE.

3 a.m. Sunday:

Body: Three, two, one . . .
Brain: WHERE AM I? WHAT TIME IS IT?
Body: It's noon. Clearly.
Brain: Then why is it dark out?
Body: Don't worry about the facts right now.
Brain: OMG I've slept through half the day! I spent all this money to come here and I have just wasted a huge chunk of my extremely limited time! FUCK!
Body: This is the most fun I've had in years.
Brain: Wait a minute. This is my bed. I'm at home, and it's three a.m. I'll just go back to sleep.
Body: Not so fast . . .
Brain: But what about work? I have so much to do on Monday!
Body: THERE it is.

5 a.m. Sunday:

Body: I see that you are finally sleeping peacefully. Little do you know that I've still got one more trick up my sleeve. And . . . go!
Brain: WHERE AM I? WHAT TIME IS IT? Oh, right, we've been through this. I'm at home and it's the middle of the night. Guess I'll go back to sleep.
Body: Wait for it . . .
Brain: HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO HAVE TO PEE THIS BADLY?
Body: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

30% imaginary e-mail exchange with the people downstairs

2010-10-01T09:25:00.000-07:00

Cat and Henry,

You're probably wondering who rang your doorbell in the middle of the night last night, prompting you to sleep with all the lights on in case an armed and dangerous psychopath was hanging out on the front porch. Well, don't worry--it was just me! See, you probably weren't aware of this, and it's a totally understandable mistake, but I'm pretty sure you forgot to lock your cat in a closet last night before going to bed. That's the only explanation I can think of for the horror we endured, because I know you guys wouldn't intentionally try to ruin our lives and those of our children by allowing the cat to walk around at night -- you know we have the auditory capabilities of jungle predators!

I don't want to sound unreasonable or anything, but going forward we'd really appreciate it if you could restrict the cat from roaming the apartment anytime the sun is down. We'd feel a lot better, and our kids would probably have a much greater chance of getting into Harvard one day. You guys have been great neighbors so far, and have done a really terrific job accommodating all of our insane demands, so we know you'll take care of this promptly. Give us a call sometime today to confirm that you've received this directive or next time there will be an armed and dangerous psychopath on your porch--me!

Just kidding. I'm obviously not insane.

Thanks,
Downstairs Dad

Dear Downstairs Dad,

Sorry for the delay responding! I had a hard time reading your e-mail because my eyes keep shutting from exhaustion. I'd take a nap, but your three-year-old has been screaming at the top of her lungs for the past ninety minutes. It's amazing to me that she's still breathing! What a trooper.

Anyway, I'm really sorry about the cat disturbing your sleep last night. I did the math, and since he weighs about ten pounds and your seven-year-old weighs about fifty, you endured approximately one-fifth of the hell we go through when your son runs back and forth from one end of your apartment to the other for no apparent reason. And even one-fifth of that noise is a lot! So in the future, we'd be happy to crate our cat at night as long as you're willing to crate your children during the day. Sound good?

P.S. About a month ago, our landlord told me you're supposed to be sharing the yard with us, which you're obviously not. I wasn't going to say anything, but now I think I'd like to have a party in it. With music. And youths. And marijuana.

Thanks for the free birth control,
Cat

Super freak

2010-09-22T08:38:00.001-07:00

I recently watched the entire first season of Hoarders. I don't have cable, so my television viewing selections are spotty and bizarre -- I will watch things that appear on Netflix Instant Access even if they're terrible or depressing, or, in the case of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, make me want to set fire to myself for being a liberal. Why I don't just get cable if I'm going to spend so much time streaming terrible television on the internet is complex. When I first moved to LA I could barely afford food, so I made the Difficult Grown-Up Decision to skip cable. After my first year in the city I was doing a little better financially, but by then I had discovered how much other stuff I could get done if I didn't have the temptation of zoning out in front of the TV for hours, so I decided to see if I could go without cable just a while longer. And now here I am, five years later, the kind of pain-in-the-ass pseudo-intellectual snot who constantly says things like "Oh, I've never seen The Real Housewives of Dubai, but last night I did read The Age of Innocence for the sixteenth time."

Not having TV is kind of like being a vegan: the only real pleasure you can derive from it is the joy of being a smug, condescending jerk. I think I hate it most when everyone but me discusses Top Chef at a social occasion or when I don't have anything to put on while cooking a complex dinner or painting my toenails. Time-Warner sends me these increasingly desperate mailers all the time offering me discounts and free equipment and bundled rate packages and black market kidneys, but they're missing the point. All it would take would be one flier that read, "You could be watching the Food Network while folding your laundry TOMORROW," and I'd break down sobbing and begging for their forgiveness.

But I was originally talking about Hoarders--really, go back and check!--because after watching the first season of the show, I think I might be one. Sort of. I'm a compulsively neat person, which I blame on my father, who systematically instilled his OCD in me over the years to the point that I literally cannot focus on work if there is a single stray item on my desk. I feel mentally disordered when things are disordered. If I want to spend the evening relaxing, I will spend the afternoon cleaning, because how can I truly relax when there are stains on the white kitchen floor OMG. A couple of weeks ago Henry went out of town, and the first thing I did was clean the whole apartment. That evening a friend came over and asked, "Is your place usually this clean?" "No," I said, then crowed triumphantly, "But it will be for the next four days!" See, cohabitation has taught me that you cannot control everything and that nagging your boyfriend about such egregious sins as leaving a receipt on the counter for more than twelve seconds will not improve your relationship, so now I wait until I have the apartment to myself to get my ya-yas out. So NORMAL, right? SO WELL ADJUSTED.

My neatness has a single caveat: it only extends to what I can see. This is where the hoarding part comes into play. Under the bed, behind the closet doors, inside the kitchen cabinets: these are all places where I am a complete and utter mess, because they are invisible. I will only clean and organize them when they literally cannot fit a single additional item, and even then I'll only be doing it in the service of the real objective, which is keeping things off the visible surfaces in the apartment. I recognize that you are not truly a neat freak if you have to don a pith helmet and a spelunker's light in order to exhume your winter coat. And I had to come face-to-face with my own hoarding the other night, when I returned home from the grocery store to discover that the cabinet where I store my food was packed to the gills. I knew things were getting bad in there, but I couldn't do anything about the six-month-old bags of chips with nothing but pulverized crumbs in the bottom, the half-consumed cans of pistachios and almonds, the six almost-drained bottles of white wine vinegar and all the rest of it because--here comes the crazy Hoarders part--it was all covered in honey.

I really did not set out to have a kitchen cabinet stocked with old food covered in honey. What happened is one of those bear-shaped containers of honey, the ones where the lid never seems to close quite tightly enough, got knocked over on the top shelf, but because I can't see the top shelf, I didn't realize this had happened for some length of time. My first clue came when the honey eventually spilled down onto the middle and bottom shelves, from whence it quickly got all over everything. Anything that touched the honey became contaminated, and if I rearranged things, which I had to do quite often in order to cram one more half-used bag of coconut flakes in there, the contaminated items would touch other items, making them sticky and disgusting as well. This is the point that I, as a closet hoarder, think of as PEAK FAILOVER. Something gross has happened in a space, and because I did not take care of it right away, it has spread to the point of being impossible to deal with in a short period of time. SO I JUST KEEP IGNORING IT.

In finally ridding my kitchen cabinet of honey-coated garbage on Sunday, I came face to face with a side of myself I'd rather not acknowledge. The side that keeps every single piece of mail from the bank in a file for years on end, but cannot be bothered to actually open the envelopes. The side that once dealt with an audible brake malfunction for three months by turning up the radio until she couldn't hear it anymore. The side that apparently cannot remember that she has purchased flour at any point in her lifetime, and thus buys bag after bag after bag of Gold Medal, using one cup of each before shoving them in a cabinet, where they spill onto the existing honey spill to create a super-spill that could survive a nuclear holocaust.

And now, for your viewing pleasure, a photo of Cabinet Zen:

If you look on the top shelf, you can actually see the bottle of honey with the ill-fitting lid that started this whole thing. There's about an inch of honey left in it, so I washed it off and put it back, standing upright this time. Why? If you've made it through this whole entry, I shouldn't even have to answer that question, but I will anyway: BECAUSE I AM JUST THAT CRAZY.

The curse

2010-09-09T09:34:00.000-07:00

One of the amazing things about the birth control pill is how it allows you to predict the arrival of your period down to the nanosecond. One of the shitty things about the birth control pill is also how it allows you to predict the arrival of your period down to the nanosecond. When you know it always shows up between 11 a.m. and noon on Wednesdays--I'm not joking, it's that precise--you can avoid the kinds of routine humiliations alluded to in every tampon commercial since the dawn of time. On the other hand, if it's even an hour late, you get to play a super-fun mental game of Am I Having a Baby? If you're of the male persuasion, you are probably thinking this is stupid. You are probably thinking you would wait for a calm, rational 48 hours before flying into a panic over this sort of thing. To better help you understand the situation, I will now chart for you the awesome interior monologue I experienced yesterday while waiting for my period to show up:

12 PM: I realize it's noon and fly to the bathroom in a panic, fully expecting to have ruined a perfectly decent pair of underpants as a result of losing track of time. But it's all good. I make a mental note to check back in a couple of hours.

2 PM: Still nothing.

4 PM: This is the first occasion for mild alarm. I try to remember the last time my period was five hours late and recall that it was a couple of years ago, immediately following a week-long business trip to Chicago during which I had been taking my pills at all kinds of weird hours because I was constantly in the company of co-workers. I have not been on any such business trips in the past month. I have taken each pill at 6:30 p.m. sharp, when the alarm on my cell phone told me to. SO WHERE IS MY FUCKING PERIOD?

4:45 PM: Now I am locked into a deadly standoff. It could show up at any time, making exercise a dicey proposition; or it could not show up, meaning I have bigger problems. I decide the best approach is to eschew working out in favor of getting worked up, and proceed to mentally compose an angry letter to the manufacturers of my obviously completely useless pills. I try to remember what the effectiveness rate is supposed to be for the pill -- is it 98%? So does that mean that if you have sex 100 times, you'll get pregnant twice? This strikes me as shocking and irresponsible. I will sue everyone who did not explicitly point this out to me, including my gynecologist and my boyfriend.

6 PM: OH HOLY JESUS, I AM HAVING A BABY. I dimly recall browsing the baby shower registry of a pregnant friend and seeing something on there called "nipple guards." I don't want to know what those are! I'm too young and cool for nipple guards! WHY, WHY, WHY WAS I SO STUPID AND CAVALIER WITH MY FUCKING FERTILITY? I should've been using six kinds of birth control at once. Better yet, I never should've had sex in the first place. All the right-wing nutjobs were right. Abstinence is the way to go. Oh, god, I am going to have to buy nipple guards, and breast pumps, and move back to Indiana so I have somewhere to put my illegitimate love child other than the bathtub. WHAT HAVE I DONE?

7:30 PM: I return from the welcome respite of a quick dinner with Jess congratulating myself on staying calm throughout the meal. By now my period will have shown up, and I will see how silly I was being. OH MY FUCKING GOD, YOU HAVE TO BE KIDDING ME. EIGHT AND A HALF HOURS LATE. In birth control time, that's like TWO WEEKS. I briefly debate putting my fears to rest with a quick trip to Rite-Aid for a pregnancy test, but then a mixture of deeply confused logic and misplaced snobbiness takes over: what if the hormones from my birth control somehow screw up the test? And also, why isn't there somewhere that isn't Rite-Aid to buy pregnancy tests--like a nice, clean boutique with wood floors and track-lighting, where sympathetic female employees in their twenties offer you herbal tea and reassure you that it's probably all in your head? I can't face buying a pregnancy test at Rite-Aid. I'd rather die.

8 PM: What I'd really like right now is a nice, soothing glass of wine, but that seems kind of irresponsible. What will I say to my deformed child, irreparably damaged by Fetal Alcohol Syndrome -- "Mommy was so panicked over the possibility of your existence that she had no choice but to drink"? Then I recall the many drinks I consumed over the weekend, back in what I now realize were the last carefree days of my life. Oh GOD, not only am I having a baby, but I am having a messed-up baby. The doctors will all shake their heads in disbelief at my irresponsibility. Other children will make fun of it, and dogs will slink away in fear at the sight of its tragically malformed face.

9 PM: At this point the catastrophizing has reached a peak level where I am conflating all disastrous scenarios into one: I will live in a sad, kind of scary apartment building in my hometown, and when people see me and my freakish alcohol baby scuttling between the front door and the car they will cluck. "What a shame," they'll say, "but then, this is what comes of thinking you can have it all."

10 PM: Having cycled through all the worst-case scenarios, I try to think practically. It's worse.

11 PM: Oh. There it is. Twelve hours late? Really? I mean, better late than never, but come on. At this point I mentally resolve to write down this experience so that I remember it for next time, sparing myself another unpleasant day of panic.

11:01 PM: ALL NIGHTLY ACTIVITIES ARE SUFFUSED WITH JOY. I am not brushing pregnant teeth! I am not washing a pregnant face! I am not applying under-eye cream to pregnant fine lines and wrinkles! All my cute, overpriced clothes will fit indefinitely, and the scale says I have actually lost weight! It will be years and years and YEARS before I have to find out what exactly nipple guards are guarding against! Hallelujah!

Girl power

2010-08-29T10:28:00.000-07:00

Sometimes feminism hurts me. Literally.

It started when Matt decided to move. Four years ago, Matt came from Boston to LA, and he and I moved into a nice two-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a building with a great view of the Hollywood Hills. We had been planning to transfer the various pieces of yard-sale/curb-surfing/friend's-parent-donated furniture I'd accumulated ourselves, but then I broke my big toe, which is more debilitating than you might think, so I decided to plonk down $300 for one of those three-dudes-and-a-truck moving services. All of my things--the massive pull-out couch, the behemoth of an Ikea dresser, etc.--magically arrived in this new apartment with no more effort on our parts than buying the nice moving guys some bottles of water.

Matt wound up staying in that apartment after I left, and the bulk of the furniture stayed with him. Meaning no one had ever maneuvered it around except enormous men who make their living moving things until yesterday, when Matt and I decided it would be a hunky-dory idea to do all of it BY OURSELVES. For variously highly legit reasons, none of the other people Matt would normally enlist for this sort of thing were available, and when he expressed doubts about his ability to handle the workload with no one helping him but me, I flew into a feminist rage. I can do anything a man can do, goddammit! This is 2010, and if someone needs to move a couch the size of Rhode Island, me and my nonexistent biceps are ALL OVER THAT SHIT.

Now, to be fair to myself, if we lived anywhere else in America, where people design apartment buildings in a smart and reasonable way, I might not have had as much trouble as I did. But this isn't America, it's fucking Los Angeles. Would you like to see some clumsily drawn Paint diagrams of what we were dealing with? OF COURSE YOU WOULD:

This is Matt's old apartment building. The circles are there to indicate PROBLEM AREAS, of which, as you can see, there were six. Through these six problem areas we squeezed the pull-out couch, two overstuffed armchairs, a kitchen table and its corresponding chairs, a massive drafting table, a mattress, a box spring, and that fucking bazillion-pound Ikea dresser, as well as plenty of other, smaller miscellany. As we were hoisting the last item onto the truck, I began to relax: it was over! I did it! And then Matt reminded me that we still had to unload all of it at the new place.

YOU HAVE TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME. Three problem areas is better than six, for sure, but at this point my hands were blistered, my shins and upper arms were bruised, and my back was hurting in a way that indicated serious trouble on the horizon if I didn't chase a muscle relaxer with a glass of wine stat. But I powered through. Why? Because Elizabeth Cady Stanton didn't do whatever she did 90 years ago for me to act like a pussy now, that's why! Until, that is, we got to the first item we'd loaded at the old place, and hence the last item we'd need to unload:

"HI, CAT! I'M HOW YOU'RE GOING TO DIE! AND I'M PURPLE!"

At this point I had a breakdown. I told Matt I was not going to be able to do it, that he was going to have to flag down some random man passing by and get him to help. (Sorry, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. I FAILED YOU.) But although approximately ten-thousand people had offered to help us throughout the day only to be met by me responding through gritted teeth, "WE'RE FINE," when I was finally ready to admit defeat, no one was around. So, somehow, we moved the Stonehenge couch all by ourselves, for the second time. GIRL POWER!

This morning I woke up to find myself broken. All my parts are broken. Nothing works. Legs don't work. Arms don't work. Shoulders seriously don't work.

Feminism: it HURTS.

Meaningless string of adjectives here

2010-08-11T14:41:00.001-07:00

Few necessities of modern life confound me more than buying toiletries. I can see why people develop brand loyalty, because how else are you supposed to know what you want? I'm forever spending thirty minutes in the hair care aisle at Rite-Aid, debating between two brands of shampoo, trying to figure out based on the packaging which one is most likely to turn me into Jennifer Aniston. Inevitably I become convinced that the more expensive one will be better, and then I buy it and it sucks, if "sucks" is defined as "does not turn me into a perfect, shiny-haired goddess who eats nothing but quinoa and always looks fabulous, even on airplanes." I recently invested nine dollars in a tiny bottle of shampoo that advertised itself as all-natural AND organic (apparently there is a distinction) and smelled like coconut frosting. In my crazed need to escape fluorescent-lit, dingy-floored, too-many-options hell before I lost another second of my life to deliberations about the relative merits of "pro-vitamins," I decided this choice was summery. Now I smell like cupcakes, and my hair still looks like shit.

The process is less protracted when I buy body wash, but it's still annoying. All I want is an eight-ounce container of something that smells clean and fresh, but all body wash for women is either fruit-scented or has some inane marketing-concept name like "Energy Glow." Thanks a lot, Dove. That's really helpful. Let's make a deal: I will purchase your product when you can answer two questions for me: 1) what the fuck is an "energy glow"? and 2) what does it smell like? At least with the fruit-scented body washes, the ones with names like sorbet flavors ("pomegranate mango!"), I know I will wind up smelling like a half-eaten Ring Pop. I can feel whole in that understanding, instead of befuddled about what I am conveying to the world when I clean my armpits with something called Tahitian Renewal.

At least I'm a woman, so there are some identifiable fruit/herb options out there for me. Things are a thousand times worse for men. Have you ever looked at the toiletries they market to guys? They take the exact same shit they manufacture for women, put it in a differently shaped bottle, slap a picture of a turbine engine on it, and call it something like "Ice Shock" or "Dynamic Wave." The weird thing about these names is that they're as unappealing as they are opaque: I don't know what ice shock is--much less what it smells like--yet I still know I never want to experience it. The same principle has been exalted to its purest form in the razor section, where women can buy a pink Gillette Venus de Milo Windsor Castle Velvet Experience, while men are sold the same thing in gunmetal gray with a name like MACH3 Turbo Speed Boost Jet Propulsion.

I'm aware of all this, clearly, yet there I was in the drug store, trying to buy body wash, finding myself staring at something called Touch of Sparkle Cream Oil ("cream oil"?), which purported to contain, of all things, diamond powder. Right. Okay. My skepticism about this alleged diamond powder rose when I noticed that other items in the "Touch of" line--Touch of Harmony, Touch of Bliss (I am not making any of this up)--cost the exact same amount, yet contained no diamond powder. The longer I stood there fuming over the diamond powder issue, the more I began to resent the implication behind these body washes. So I have to choose between harmony and bliss? And if I choose to sparkle, I'll get neither? How German.

I wound up buying something called "simply Ivory." It's liquefied Ivory soap that costs $2.99 and seems to be marketed on the principle that using the word "simply" and eschewing elaborate packaging--no images of milk pouring into a puddle of honey here, no claims of powdered gemstones or promises of inner poise right around the corner if only I would shower with the right product--would do the trick. And you know what? It did. I bought the shit out of that simply Ivory, and I like it. It's not insulting my intelligence by lying to me, and it smells clean and fresh. I may actually develop brand loyalty toward it. If you can imagine such a thing.

I hope you enjoyed the time you wasted reading this meaningless diatribe as much as I enjoyed the time I wasted writing it. Someday I will develop some profound thoughts. I swear.

Imperfect system

2010-08-03T10:20:00.000-07:00

My Gmail ads seem to have me confused with someone else. Someone who needs a nanny. And a house. And a lifeguard for her raucous pool party, presumably to be held at the house, to the horror of the nanny.

Meanwhile, Facebook has utilized my most recent status updates -- which dealt with drinking four-dollar champagne out of a styrofoam cup and rat extermination -- to find me this little gem:

I fear for the future.

The books of summer, part two

2010-07-29T23:26:00.001-07:00

I am very sorry to admit that I finished The Passage. I wish I hadn't bothered. Please don't waste any of your hard-earned dollars on The Passage; or, if you already have, don't finish it. You know what you should do instead? Go out and buy yourself a nice used paperback copy of Stephen King's The Stand. You'll pay maybe two dollars -- I swear there are more copies of The Stand in print than the Bible -- and you'll be way happier.

Years ago, when I was in grad school, my creative writing professor made us read this essay from a back issue of the Atlantic called "A Reader's Manifesto." I wasted all of three seconds hyperlinking the article there, so I really think everyone should read it. I've never agreed with a piece of criticism so much in my life. In the opening paragraph the author writes,

Nothing gives me the feeling of having been born several decades too late quite like the modern "literary" best seller. Give me a time-tested masterpiece or what critics patronizingly call a fun read—Sister Carrie or just plain Carrie. Give me anything, in fact, as long as it doesn't have a recent prize jury's seal of approval on the front and a clutch of precious raves on the back.

Oh, B.R. Myers. You my brother from another mother. I mean, doesn't that just nail it on the head? Fuck fucking Justin Cronin. Apparently winning a PEN/Hemingway gives you the liberty to completely and utterly rip off someone else's work while all the critics whistle Dixie and movie producers bang your door down. Because there's been a rash of post-apocalyptic fiction recently, no critic I've read has compared The Passage to The Stand -- there are so many prize-jury-approved novels to compare it to instead! -- so here, for your pleasure, is a handy-dandy breakdown of every story element Cronin bold-facedly stole from that "fun" classic:

A top-secret experimental government contagion that, inevitably, gets unloosed upon an unsuspecting society
A small band of survivors left to fend for themselves in a decimated America
Another small band of survivors with a different set of values that our original small set of survivors encounters, providing a handy-dandy metaphor for our own polemicized world
The settings of Las Vegas and the Colorado mountains, plus, for bonus rip-off points, the journey on foot between them
An atomic bomb left behind by the government that is detonated at a critical moment, deus-ex-machinating the characters we identify with into the sunset
The suggestion that the cycle will inevitably repeat itself because of mankind's inherent weakness

The idea that two books could have so much in common without someone crying plagiarism is insane to me, but that's what old B.R. was warning us about. Books are becoming increasingly dichotomized, to the degree that no one even bothers to compare "literature" with "fun reads." It's like there's this ghetto class of authorship in which all the actual creativity is occurring, and then decades later some namby-pamby Iowa graduate can come along and appropriate ideas from it as his or her own and because he or she is more "literary," it flies. Well, that sucks. I think literary history will back me here. Whose works were more enduring, Shakespeare's or Marlowe's? You know?

So The Passage blew. Moving on:

I'm trying to make a conscious effort to purchase and read more novels by female authors, because let's be real: they're not getting a fair shake. The Elegance of the Hedgehog confirmed this to me before I even cracked it open. I ambled on down to my local independent bookstore, may its doors never close, looking for this particular volume, both because my mom glowingly recommended it and because it's set in Paris, my soul city. After fruitlessly checking the fiction section about seventy times, I inquired about it at the cash register and discovered that it was, in fact, in stock, but was relegated to the "novels in translation" section. I call bullshit: I have purchased two Michel Houellebecq novels, neither of which was as good as Hedgehog, directly out of the fiction section at Skylight. I guess when a man writes it, even if it has to be translated it's not considered "in translation." I'm not trying to get all up on some feminist conspiracy theory here; I'm just stating the facts.

It's been a long time since I both read and enjoyed a book that could be classified as a "novel of ideas," but The Elegance of the Hedgehog broke my streak. I loved it. I loved the story, and I loved the sections when the story wasn't moving at all. Everything about it was terrific. I was so heartbroken at the end that I was visibly morose. I don't know if I was sadder about what transpired in the story or that the story was over. I guess I have less to say about a book when I like it than when I don't, but part of that is because I don't feel bad giving up all of The Passage's secrets. Hedgehog, on the other hand, should be entered into blind and cold, so that everyone can discover all of its many pleasures for themselves.

Continuing on the female novelists tip, I just started:

Being butt buddies with old B.R. as I am, I sometimes steer away from critically acclaimed novels. I just don't tend to like them as much as everyone else. There are exceptions -- here I am thinking specifically of Netherland and A Gate at the Stairs -- but more often than not it's a Special Topics in Calamity Physics situation, where I'm all, "What was everyone THINKING?" I'm not too far into Goon Squad at all, but what I've read is pretty kickass. Most importantly, I am not finding the style problematic in the least. The style is perfect. It's that kind of great modern writing that perfectly identifies a feeling or observation you've almost made yourself a thousand times, but have never quite been able to verbalize; but it does it without calling attention to itself, without screaming "Look at me! I'm a writer! This is a METAPHOR, bitch!" I really wish Jennifer Egan had seen fit to give the book a different title, something a little more hoity-toity and austere, because I feel like she might miss out on some of the readership she deserves with the words "goon" and "squad" both crammed in there. But maybe it'll pay off! I'll be sure to let you know.

Our little leopard

2010-07-12T17:15:00.000-07:00

People tend to be confused by our kitten's name. "Why would you name a girl cat Rocky?" is the principle line of inquiry. The long answer is that we originally named her Punk Rock, which we thought was hilarious, but it turned out not to have much of a ring to it, so we took it down to Rocky. The short answer is WHO THE FUCK CARES. It's not like we acquired a human girl baby and then turned around and named her Stan. Cats don't think about whether their names are gender-appropriate; in fact, at this point I am pretty sure all Rocky thinks about is biting the shit out of me, preferably when I'm sleeping peacefully.

That being said, you can imagine my surprise when I took Rocky in for her first round of vaccinations on Friday and the vet walked in the door, took one look at her and said, "You know that's a male cat, right?" Now, I'm no expert on cat genitalia, but when I look down there I don't see anything I associate with maleness, so I never questioned that Rocky was female. As it turns out, male kittens can be pretty hard to peg, being in the pre-ball-dropping stage and all; what gave away Rocky to the vet was his size, which is apparently quite unusual for a kitten of either gender. At twelve weeks of age he weighs almost six pounds. I have no idea what this means, but apparently it's weird. The vet told me he's likely part Maine Coon--I had to ask how that was spelled because it sounded like a racial slur--which would account for his unusual bulk. When I got home I ran a Google Image search on Maine Coons, and the first picture that popped up was of a woman holding what looks like a fucking cheetah:

Avid readers of this blog may recall that I originally wanted a dog. Not a big dog; I wanted a bulldog, a little tough guy who wouldn't take up too much space but would help me feel safe when I was home alone. I did a lot of thinking about the protective merits of bulldogs versus Maine Coons Saturday night, when I was sitting on the couch wallowing in my miserable head cold when I heard a woman SCREAMING HER LUNGS OUT across the street. I thought everything a seasoned Angeleno would think: 1) It's some drunk idiot walking through the neighborhood with her friends, who are encouraging her to act like an asshole; 2) it's someone having extremely kinky sex; 3) it's an actress who just got cast in a horror movie and is practicing her death scene. But then it just went on and on. It was awful. Finally I got dressed and went out to the street--no small feat while running a fever--only to find a middle-aged man standing in the middle of the road for no apparent reason. Assuming he was also trying to ascertain the source of the screaming, which at this point had continued unabated for ten minutes, I asked him, "Should one of us call the cops?" And he looked right at me and said, "That's a baby." I shook my head: "That is NOT a baby." "Yes it is," he said. "Don't call the police. It's only a baby."

Thoroughly creeped out by this exchange, I bolted back upstairs, locked all the doors, and called 911. I'd never called 911 before, but I can't even describe to you how blood-curdling the screaming was; it sounded like the woman was being beaten to death. Within ten minutes, the operator had called me back to say, "The police are there, but they don't hear the woman screaming." Of course she had stopped screaming about five minutes after I finally decided to call. I apologized for wasting everyone's time, and the operator was really nice about it, and now it's Monday and there's no sign that anyone was murdered on the block over the weekend, so I guess there was some reasonable explanation.

I think I would've felt better in general if I'd had a bulldog sleeping at my feet throughout this ordeal. But if Rocky attains anything remotely approaching Maine Coon girth, he might be able to do the job -- if you saw a housecat that size, wouldn't you think twice? I don't mean about your potential evildoing. I mean about what kind of god would create such a thing. There you'd be, intending to do whatever it is people do to generate twenty minutes of awful female screaming, but you'd be frozen in your tracks staring at our four-foot-long cat. Who, if his current behavior is any indication, would be trying to lick your face while purring at a volume loud enough to vibrate your spine into jelly.

The irony of all of this is that Henry didn't want us to get any pet at all, but he settled for a kitten over a dog because at least that way he'd be spared the trouble of a large, hairy, high-maintenance creature in his personal space. HA. Be careful what you wish for.

Martha wept

2010-07-06T15:40:00.000-07:00

Every year my family spends Christmas in Detroit, after which my grandma comes back to Indianapolis with us for a week. During this time it's pretty customary for us to go shopping, and she'll usually insist on buying me some small thing, a scarf or something, I assume to compensate for the three hours we always wind up spending in this store called Graham's Crackers that peddles mass-produced "folk art" such as cut-out pieces of wood painted to look like holly. But this past year, I discovered that something had changed: I had recently moved in with Henry. I had suspected that this would signify a lot more to Grandma than it did to either of us, and my suspicions were confirmed when instead of buying me a new purse, she attempted to talk me into holiday-themed hand towels at Sur La Table. She caught me looking at them and misinterpreted my expression as "These would be just the ticket for Christmastime hostessing!" when what I was really thinking was "Who has the money for this shit?"

Here's a confession: I don't even have regular hand towels. I know. I think about it sometimes, how anyone who washes their hands in our apartment has to wipe them on the same towel I use to dry my butt after showering, and I vow to myself that the next time I have some extra cash I will buy some hand towels -- not seasonal hand towels, mind you, just all-purpose hand towels -- and then Anthropologie has a sale and I buy my sixteen zillionth white cotton shirt from them instead. These are my priorities. If there's a sector of the brain dedicated to domesticity, a June Cleaver lobe, I'm missing mine.

As the year has stretched on, I've learned that Grandma is not alone in chomping at the bit to supply us with every houseware we could ever possibly need. Cohabiting has opened the floodgates on gifts that say more about other people's expectations for us than our actual needs. Henry's step-mom generously got into the act last month with a serving bowl and serving platter -- both earthenware and quite lovely and extremely likely to be broken in a drunken accident the first time they're used -- as well as this:

All three items were delivered to us out of the blue with the message, "Henry and Cat: happy entertaining!" What is it with all this stuff for "entertaining"? It seems like a relic of a past era -- as if any day now Henry's boss is going to come over for dinner, and if it goes just right, Henry might get that big promotion and be able to buy a new Buick LeSabre. But how can you tell your probable future in-laws (henceforth known as "pfin-laws"), people who don't approve of you sharing a bed with their son under their roof, that the only entertaining that goes on in your mutual abode pivots around strawberry jello shots? How can you break the news to your ninety-year-old grandmother that you live your life as a towel criminal? You just can't.

Then we come to the cheese board itself. It's made of black marble, which makes me think that rather than invite our friends over to enjoy a hearty chunk of Humboldt Fog, we should invite Jay McInerney over to do some lines. Also -- and this cannot have escaped your notice -- it's got that "G" on it. What is it with Southerners and having their initials on everything? What purpose could it possibly serve? Should we be concerned that someone will mistake our black marble cheese board for their own and take it home? Or are we merely displaying our dynastic pride every time someone reaches for the brie? Also: am I now a default "G" in the minds of my pfin-laws? Because as unlikely as I am to make use of a cheese board, Henry is even more so; the last cheese-related dish he prepared in this apartment involved Velveeta and Ro-tel tomatoes.

I know I have sounded utterly neurotic about my and Henry's relationship status lately. That's no coincidence. As I was explaining to him recently, I feel this pressure from all angles to just get it over with and be married already, and the pfin-law gifts, as genuinely generous as they are, add to the considerable barrage of social/cultural influence. Take my Facebook ads. Facebook sees that I am in a relationship but not married, and here is what Facebook wants to sell me:

Thanks for the options, social network! You know me too well. I'll take the donuts.

Allons-y

2010-07-03T17:04:00.000-07:00

I recently changed up my work life a little bit. I used to have two jobs, the Job I Didn't Like and the Job I Did, and trying to balance them was putting me at serious risk for a nervous breakdown. So I called up my boss at the Job I Did Like and asked if there was any way I could do more work for him in exchange for more money, and it turned out he'd been thinking the exact same thing, had essentially just been waiting for me to ask, which is simultaneously totally awesome and incredibly terrible because wait a minute, seriously? It was that easy? How long ago could I have done this? How many e-mails in ALL CAPS screaming at me about YOU LEFT AN EXTRA SPACE BETWEEN TWO OF THE WORDS ON THIS DRAFT THIS IS NOT WHY WE HIRED YOU could I have avoided? How much money could I have saved on the nightly vodka I used to anesthetize myself after 14 straight hours of trying to appease two employers? How much peaceful sleep could I have enjoyed, unperturbed by 11:30 p.m. e-mails from psychotic co-workers wanting to know the status of a three-sentence Facebook update I'd been working on? DANG. If I get an ulcer, it's totally my own fault.

Things are much better now, to say the least. Almost every day I find something fresh to love about my new and improved employment situation, and Wednesday morning of this week it was the sudden realization that I can finally take a vacation. One of the awful things about balancing two jobs was that obligations for one -- a day-long meeting here, a two-day conference there -- meant time off from the other, so whenever I actually wanted to take time off for myself, no one was particularly thrilled. For two years I restricted days off to necessary occasions, i.e. those related to weddings, family or babies, and for three years before that I restricted days off to necessary occasions because I only got ten a year. I have never taken a full week off from work for my own reasons ever.

By Thursday morning I was developing my plan. The floodgates were open -- I officially had the freedom to take time off, and thanks to working two jobs for two years, I had the money to actually go somewhere interesting. There are so many things I've wanted to do for the past couple of years, so many places I've wanted to go -- how would I decide? But in the end the choice was obvious.

You know how as women we're not supposed to buy into all that Sex and the City crap about how spending money is empowering? How that's just a myth society sells us to keep us up to our elbows in unnecessary clothes, cosmetics, and cookware? I rarely feel empowered when I buy something, especially when it's something expensive -- even if I can technically afford it, I always think about how someday my little Honda is going to develop a transmission problem, or I'm going to develop another problem my back and this time it will require surgery, and when that day comes I'll think about all those irrational purchases and start tallying up how much money I could've saved if I hadn't allowed my financial decisions to be guided by my insecurities and I'll want to kill myself.

Well, guess what? I've found the Buyer's Remorse Loophole, and it's TRAVEL. Because really, when is travel ever a waste of money? Especially when it's to France?

Look out, Paris. I'm comin' back.

The books of summer

2010-06-28T09:48:00.001-07:00

It's been a while since I bored y'all to death with what I've been reading, so here are a few books I've cracked open recently.

I know, I know: what is this, 2005? But I never did get around to reading this back when it came out, and probably never would have if the very generous Agnes hadn't loaned me her copy last week. Now, I only just read "Play It As It Lays" for the first time last year, and I remember thinking that Joan Didion could take Bret Easton Ellis to the cleaners with a plagiarism lawsuit, but probably didn't bother because "Play It As It Lays" could beat "Less Than Zero" to death with one hand tied behind its back. So what startled me the most about "The Year of Magical Thinking" was how non-Didion-y it was, as though all her style had been stripped bare by the sheer tragedy of everything and all that was left was the facts. That's not to suggest the book was poorly written, but part of what killed me about it was how plain the prose was, and thus how brutal.

Maybe it's because I don't usually read nonfiction, but there was one thing that hung me up about "The Year of Magical Thinking," and that was how spoiled Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne seemed to be. I know! I'm awful! The guy DIED, and then their daughter DIED, and yet part of my brain could not stop evaluating the book like I would a novel, thinking "These characters would be much more sympathetic if they weren't so rich." On practically every page there was a sentence like "We couldn't bear to spend Christmas in that ramshackle mansion on Franklin Avenue, smoking cigarettes and drinking gin on the sun porch while we read aloud to each other from Dostoevsky, so we decamped to the hotel in Waikiki and sent wires to the producer of John's eighteenth movie while we swam in the crystal-blue water and ate macadamia pancakes and contemplated the meaning of our love." It was a little distracting for me, maybe because their life was EVERYTHING I WANT -- smart and bookish but well lubricated with a steady influx of Hollywood money that they could use to keep apartments in all major American cities without feeling like sellouts.

I also recently read:

I should confess here that I'm not much one for style when it comes to prose. Salman Rushdie makes me fucking bonkers, and I only got through "Lolita" because I really wanted to know what would become of that kid and the old pervert. I like style best when you can't detect it, which made "Winter's Bone" tough at first -- it's one of those novels that critics describe as "muscular," where nouns are used as verbs or two words are shoved together likethis to invent a whole new word and then I'm supposed to marvel at the author's ingenuity when all he did was skip the space key. However, once I got used to "Winter's Bone" I really, really liked it. Concerns about style aside, it's rare to read a contemporary novel set in our modern times that makes you feel like you've just discovered another world, and that's what Woodrell's hardscrabble Ozarks were to me -- a place so unimaginable that I simultaneously couldn't believe it existed and yet knew deep in my heart it was real.

Now I am working on:

I'm halfway through, so I'll reserve my final judgment for when I finish, but right now I am finding this book really disappointing. I'm not giving anything away that you couldn't learn from the jacket copy when I say what I'm about to say, but if you hate knowing anything about a book before you read it and have this one on your list, you might want to skip the rest of this entry.

So . . . for about 250 pages this book exists in the near future and is completely riveting and terrifying, and then suddenly it jumps to a post-apocalyptic world that bears very little similarity to our own and becomes, essentially, a work of fantasy. Right from the start the novel owes a lot to "The Stand," and with all due respect to Stephen King, I think it's much better-written; however, when it made the jump to the fantasy world of the future, I began to suspect that it would not be nearly as well executed. Both books are about an experimental government contagion that accidentally gets out and decimates the world, leaving behind a small band of survivors; I love that shit, so I was certain I would love "The Passage," but where it deviates from the terrific path laid by "The Stand" is it doesn't give us the nuts and bolts of the world as we know it coming to an end and the survivors figuring out what to do with what's left. That stuff is lazily summarized in about fifteen pages, and the book picks back up a hundred years or so later, with a colony of survivors so acclimated to the new reality that they now say "Flyers" instead of "God" but are still using twentieth-century vernacular in their speech. Little inconsistencies like that really really bother me, and the second half of "The Passage" is full of them; I'm no slave to realism, but the book feels insufficiently imagined, and the lack of imagination makes it annoying. Oh, and it shouldn't shock you at all to learn that all the survivors are young and hot, and they all have "honeyed" hair that glistens in the sun as they heroically ride horses and wield crossbows and contemplate getting it on with one another. Is that Hollywood calling?

So: we'll see. It's not the worst thing you could pick up for a summer read, but my enthusiasm for it has steadily deflated since leaving behind reality as I know it.

Speaking of fantasy, the last book I wanted to mention was:

When I was a kid I read the entire "Lord of the Rings" series start to finish every summer, but after a while I quit including "The Hobbit" because it's such a different type of story that it hardly qualifies as a prequel. When the movies came out, I reread the whole series for the first time as an adult, but I never did pick up "The Hobbit" again, which meant I had probably gone close to twenty years between readings of it when I finally revisited it last week. I'm really not into fantasy fiction, like, at all, which is probably why "The Passage" is making me so crazy, but Tolkien's books are an exception. They're just so well done, so absorbing, so fun to read, and when I re-read "The Hobbit," which took maybe five hours total, I couldn't believe I'd snobbily shunted it aside for all these years. What a cute little story! And so smart, which is why I like Tolkien so much. I mean, it's a kid's book, no question about that, but as an adult I really appreciated how he constructed the adventure, and I also enjoyed the humor of it, which is notably lacking from the post-war "Lord of the Rings." So, if you ever loved "The Hobbit" as a child, I highly recommend getting in bed early some night and absorbing yourself in Bilbo's adventures once again. It made me remember how much I loved to read as a little girl, how great it was to bury my nose in a really good story, and that's always worth remembering.

Bad mommy

2010-06-18T10:06:00.000-07:00

"Your first baby!"

Those are the words three separate individuals said to me when I told them Henry and I had acquired a kitten. At this point I'm so accustomed to certain people in my life desperately seeking any signal that we're going to sack up and formalize our relationship that I didn't waste any energy responding. I just said "Okay." "Okay" is how I am starting to feel about all of it. You think it's weird that we've been together almost five years and we're not married? Okay. You think it's weird that I don't care? Okay. You think getting a kitten is in any way comparable to having an actual human baby? Okay. "Show me a human baby that can walk itself over to a box full of gravel and poop in it" is probably how I should've responded, but I'm sick of listening to myself sass people.

That being said, having a young animal around the house has proven to be more like having a child than I ever could've imagined. Call it a micro-baby: although the responsibility is not all that huge, there's still plenty that's parent-y about the situation in which we currently find ourselves. Especially the guilt. I don't know why I should feel guilty about anything short of physically abusing our kitten, considering she was born in an alley and now lives in a two-bedroom apartment full of soft places to sleep where she is fed four times a day and loved constantly in spite of the fact that her idea of a good time is using the flesh of my legs as a scratching post, but I do. Sometimes at night when she meows outside our bedroom door for a half-hour straight, I want to shout, "You think you have problems? There are starving kittens in Africa!"

When I was a really little kid, my dad used to do this thing where he'd hold both my hands and then swing me around in a circle so my feet lifted off the ground. This one time he lost his grip on one hand mid-swing, and next thing you know he and my mom were in the ER with a doctor suspiciously asking how he could've "accidentally" yanked my arm out of the socket. I can't imagine how my dad must've felt, but I think I got a small hint when I stepped on Rocky's back paw the other day and she made the worst noise I have ever heard in my life, then limped away from me as fast as she could while still looking totally heartbreaking. Ten minutes later, she was perfectly fine; I, on the other hand, was a total basket case, practically comatose from guilt. And much as I hate to admit it, the thought that was running through my head was, "How will I ever take care of a REAL baby?" It's probably unlikely that I will ever step on a baby, I know this, but I could drop it or set it on fire or something.

But wait! Aren't I like ten or twenty steps ahead here? That's how I tried to reassure myself. "You're nowhere near having a real human baby, dipshit!" I scolded me. "You're not going to do that for, like, twenty years!" Then I realized those are the very words I used to say to myself as an incompetent thirteen-year-old babysitter. FIFTEEN YEARS AGO.

You know, we spend the easiest years of our lives in school, learning how to add and subtract and what the capital of Uzbekistan is, and then when the hard parts come along we're totally on our own. Sometimes I can't believe I spent a year in grad school translating Amelie Nothomb and consuming large quantities of whiskey when I should've been learning how to send a fax. Why aren't there classes for grown-ups? Here are some ideas for courses I'd sure love to take:

Work E-mail 101
Cleaning the Adult Apartment: Beyond Windex
They're Not Your In-Laws Yet: Coping With Your Boyfriend's Parents' Political Views
What Exactly Is Escrow?
Business Casual for Dummies
Don't Eat Ever: A Guide to Your Changing Metabolism
Hand Towels and You
You Can Do Your Own Taxes But You Can't Hold a Baby Properly: Sound Familiar?

Woman tax

2010-06-07T13:22:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had a series of mundane errands to run, which included a stop at Rite-Aid to pick up a fresh pack of Tri-Sprintec, or whatever the generic fell-off-a-truck birth control Anthem/BC has me on this week is called. In the two-and-a-half years I've been with Anthem they've changed my brand of birth control three times. It's always the same formula, but the packaging looks increasingly dubious, to the point that I wouldn't be shocked if one day the pharmacist just handed me a fistful of mismatched pills and sent me on my way.

Birth control runs me $15 a month with my health insurance. That's not unreasonable, but if you think about the fact that I already pay them $200 a month for basically nothing (including a super-fun $3,000 deductible that I often think about when tempted to run red lights or engage in other high-risk activities, such as breathing LA air) and the fact that the price doesn't go down when they switch me to what is obviously a cheaper generic, it's kind of a rip-off. Personally, I think birth control should be free to all comers; while $15 isn't much for someone with a comfy middle-class job, it's plenty to some people. Whenever I read about these teabagging morons complaining about paying taxes to support "welfare moms," I always wonder why there isn't an accompanying outcry over the cost of birth control. (Or why it's always "welfare moms," as if it's only women with children who receive government support, or as if women with children are the only group that doesn't deserve government support, when if anyone deserves a little help it's them.)

I think the government should be handing out birth control on every street corner. It's just another little cost associated with being a woman, another expense we have to pay because we happen to be the gender with all the uteruses. And it's not just birth control I feel this way about. Lately I have spent a bunch of money on being a woman, and I'm not even referring to the expensive moisturizer that I irrationally feel I need in order to function; I mean tampons, and nice bras, and a $150 Pap smear, and all the other stuff I need to shell out for to keep my lady business operating in a way that doesn't interfere with modern existence.

What do guys have that's equivalent in any way? I asked my Personal Consultant on All Things Male, Henry, this question, and he didn't have an answer. "Jock straps?" I asked hopefully. "Shaving cream?" It turns out both jock straps and shaving cream are relatively optional. In fact, everything is pretty much optional for guys, which really bugs the crap out of me because I am one of those people who won't leave the house without at least putting on some mascara. I know that I've bought into something here: there's no law requiring me to put on mascara before going to the grocery store, and it's not as if the cashier is going to take one look at my foreshortened, undarkened eyelashes and go, "You disgust me, lady. We don't want your damn money here."

But I have grown up as a girl in this country, and just because I have the vocabulary to refute sexism doesn't mean I have the strength to resist it. After the 47 zillionth time you hear a guy who is otherwise a thoughtful, liberal individual say something along the lines of, "I like a woman who takes care of herself -- nothing too crazy, but pays attention to how she looks," the indoctrination just sinks in. I mean, how hard can it possibly be merely to "take care of yourself"? How hard is it to shave your legs and underarms and bikini line, blow-dry and style your hair and apply a full face of makeup every day? To be sure you have your fingernails and toenails neatly manicured and your eyebrows waxed? All the other ladies do it! It can't be that difficult! It reminds me of this joke a friend of mine from high school always used to tell: "Why do girls wear makeup and perfume? Because they're ugly and they smell bad."

The sad truth is that I'm so used to putting in the time for all this crap that I don't even notice it anymore -- I know it will take me an hour start-to-finish to shower, dress, do my hair and get my face on, and I don't care. I especially don't care because my experiences in the ladies' locker room at my gym indicate that I have the process remarkably streamlined. When I used to hit the pool on the way to work in the morning, every day there'd be this girl who was putting on her makeup while I was changing into my suit and was still at it when I came back 40 minutes later. She had a whole trunk of shit, all these different little creams and powders and things, and every one had a corresponding brush or tool. For a solid hour she'd be posted in front of the mirror, working on herself like Michelangelo at the Sistine Chapel. And that was just the makeup portion of her routine.

So I'm not too bitter about the time investment. What I am bitter about is how much all this stuff costs. I don't even wear much makeup, at least compared to my friend the Renaissance face artist -- and for context, by that I mean I have it down to mascara, two shades of eye shadow, eyeliner, concealer, blush and lip gloss. Seven products I use every day, and they only represent the tip of the cosmetic iceberg. Did you know that there's a product out there called eye primer? Did you? It's a primer. For EYELIDS. In fact, if you really give a shit about makeup, there's a separate line of products for just about every pore on your face. Each of which needs to be applied with a very specific instrument that -- you guessed it -- is sold separately. For even more money.

There's a bigger point to be made here, one about how our culture is deeply committed to eroding women's newfound economic authority by suggesting there's no better way to spend our hard-earned money than on beauty products (because we're so UGLY WITHOUT THEM!), but I don't feel like getting into all that. I just want men to start purchasing and wearing concealer. Because guess what, bros? We don't like looking at your zits either.

Rocky

2010-05-20T18:25:00.000-07:00

Henry and I recently got a kitten, which is huge because Henry has been staunchly anti-pet the entire time I've known him. His points are fair: he has allergies, and pets are time-consuming and costly. But I finally wore him down, and I think it's because my points proved to be stronger:

1. OMG KITTEN
2. KITTEN KITTEN KITTEN
3. SCOOCHY FACE
4. KITTEN

Okay, so not stronger. But definitely more annoying. Especially because I was repeating them on an endless loop, drunk (which should come as no surprise) at the apartment of our friends Kayt and Scott, who had taken in a litter of abandoned kittens until they could find them all homes. Whiskey and cuteness are a potent combination: it took about eleven seconds for me to fall in love with one kitten in particular. We learned that this kitten was 80% spoken for; its prospective owners were almost certain their dog would learn to love her, but needed to be sure. So Henry made the kind of decision you can only make when you love someone very much and really want to make that person happy and have also been hitting the whiskey a little hard yourself: he told Kayt that on the off-chance the kitten's new home didn't work out, he and I would consider taking her.

The kitten's new home didn't work out. The dog didn't learn to love her. And so we got Rocky.

Now, I know there's nothing more annoying than pictures of other peoples' pets. I know that. And I know everyone thinks their new kitten is the cutest kitten that ever lived, when in fact a kitten is a kitten is a kitten.

Except that our kitten seriously is the cutest ever.

Welcome home, scoochy face.

Knockers

2010-05-12T11:34:00.000-07:00

I've arrived a little late to the realization that good bras are worth the money. What's that you say? You don't want to read about my bras? It's too personal? Kind of weird? Then WHY ARE YOU STILL READING?

I feel like writing about bras because I have recently discovered the joy of good bras, and I want to spread the word to all the ladies like me -- those who, at 28, still wear that bra they've had since they were sixteen. You know the one. White, no underwire, used to have a decorative little flower between the cups which TOTALLY EVAPORATED years ago under the strain of many successive washes. It doesn't matter that it's too small, because it's so damn old that its elastic is all gone. And still we hold on to it. It's almost as if it has sentimental value; when looking upon it, we can relive such milestones as the first time a boy unhooked our bra, because it was that bra. Yikes.

This is not to suggest that I don't occasionally refresh my bra selection. For the past decade, Target has cornered the market on my boobs. I cruise by the underpants section on my way to get paper towels, snatch the first thing I see labeled "34B" off the rack, and boom, I have a new bra. There's no need to bother with getting fitted, because I've been a 34B my whole life. And there's no need to spend a lot of money, because who gives a shit about bras? They're under my clothes. No one ever sees them except my boyfriend, and we're long past the phase where I tried to maintain the illusion that I always wore nice-looking underwear, though I'm sure he looks back at that first date fondly.

But now I have Ogden -- or, more accurately, the gruesome scar where Ogden used to be -- and Ogden, according to my dermatologist, was more or less a result of ill-fitting brassieres. That's right! On top of everything else I went through at the hands of my dermatologist, I had to sit politely while he explained to me that my bras don't fit. I want you to remember that the next time you think something embarrassing is happening to you. "Hey, at least it's not a seventy-year-old man giving me advice teenage girls regularly get from their moms," you should assure yourself.

So I did something radical and unprecedented: I broke off $200 of my hard-earned money just for underwear. I had this great plan. I was going to walk into the lingerie section of Nordstrom and tell the first saleslady I saw that this was about to be the best damn day of her life. I was ready to spend a truly psychotic $40 a pop to replace all my existing bras. I wanted bras so technologically advanced that they wouldn't feel out of place on the international space station. I had this mental image of the entire second-floor sales staff fawning over me as I capriciously flung undergarments over the door of the fitting room. "More!" I'd cry out. "More!" And they'd scramble to meet my every whim.

Are you laughing yet? If you're a girl, or really anyone who's shopped at Nordstrom anytime in the past two decades, you should be. Because it turns out two hundred bucks won't get you shit in Nordstrom's lingerie department. Two hundred bucks is chump change to Nordstrom. When Nordstrom sees two hundred bucks lying unclaimed in the gutter, Nordstrom spits on it. The first bra I looked at in Nordstrom cost $75, and it didn't even do anything. Didn't push anything up. Didn't enhance anything. Didn't have an eighth of high-grade marijuana concealed in the padding. Nothing.

I wound up at the Gap, which is like the cheap whorehouse I slink on over to when I realize I can't afford Nordstrom's Beverly Hills call girl. I was shocked to discover that Gap Body's prices were exactly in line with what I had expected out of a snooty, upscale department store: $35-$40 apiece. What is going on with bras, I thought to myself, that a retailer like the Gap, with its ever-shrinking quarterly profits and ill-advised devotion to khaki, can get away with charging $40 for them? The bras at Target are twelve dollars. Sure, they fall apart after about six washes, but they're twelve dollars.

It was my last thought before I proceeded to get completely and utterly schooled. First of all, I'm not a damn 34B. I'm a 36B, which is a small but critical distinction, representing the difference between my bra nestling comfortably against my skin and it digging into the flesh of my back until I develop dermatological disorders so gruesome I have to give them funny nicknames to feel better about myself. You wouldn't think this would've been so hard to figure out: I was a 34B at an age when I weighed 115 pounds and thought JNCO skater jeans were the ne plus ultra of style and sophistication; it is not unreasonable to assume that in the ensuing twelve years my bra size might've ticked up a notch. Considering I hadn't been fitted in over a decade, the salesgirl could've told me just about any number-letter combination and I would've believed her. 34D. 38A. 32FFF. Who the fuck knows?

Here's another thing I learned: good bras turn breasts into boobs. Who knew these things attached to my chest could appear so . . . pneumatic? If you know me, you know I'm not packing a whole lot of ammunition in the chest department; I do fine, no complaints, but I have a whole wardrobe that I didn't realize was so revealing until I got these new bras. Before, I owned shirts; now I own display cases for my out-of-control knockers. We're talking cleavage you could spot from outer space. I'm still figuring out how to deal with my new boobs. I'm totally unaccustomed to men looking at my chest, and I don't really care for it, which is pretty unfair considering I can't stop gazing admiringly at my rack either. Mirrors can distract me for several minutes at a time. "Hey, sugar tits," I often say to myself.

Which means -- you guessed it -- I still have yet to throw out that one white bra I've had since I hit puberty. I need it and its complete lack of support for those days that I don't feel like walking around wearing someone else's boobs. I may be a woman now, but that doesn't mean I have to look like one.

Inebriated chef: chicken paprikas

2010-05-03T14:05:00.000-07:00

I don't normally blog about my domestic misadventures, mostly because I'm not the world's greatest cook. But I recently made my all-time favorite meal, chicken paprikas, and I thought I would share the recipe because it is one of the most delicious things you'll ever eat. This recipe came to me via my Hungarian grandfather's family, and has survived through the generations not because we're all super-crazy about our ethnic heritage -- I still refuse to eat stuffed cabbage, Eastern European blood be damned -- but because paprikas is just that good.

I've made paprikas a few times before, but this time I took the extra step of investing in some honest-to-God Hungarian hot paprika, which I got for $7, just a little more than you'd pay for the generic stuff at the grocery store. It was definitely worth the trip, and not just because it made me temporarily feel like my Ideal Adult Self, a person who spends her weekends browsing small independent shops instead of posted on the couch watching old Star Trek movies. Ideal Adult Self also uses her very nice camera to take glamorous shots of her cooking experiences; I took a few, but I sampled a lot of wine as I was cooking and forgot to document several steps. Before I sampled the wine in the glass below, however, I did think to take a picture of my hot paprika:

On to the recipe. You start by chopping up a white onion. This onion is ultimately going to be cooked until it's nearly liquified, so it's not essential that you do a particularly good or consistent job with this step; I know I don't. Next, get out your biggest skillet -- I recommend one with a glass lid, so during the simmering portion of the recipe you can monitor what's going on without having to actually do anything -- and brown the chopped onion in four tablespoons of shortening melted at medium heat. I should say that "brown the chopped onion" sounds very nonchalant, like it happens in two minutes, but it actually takes a while. You should probably have some wine while you wait.

Once the onion is nice and brown, you add the spices to the pan, then jack the heat up to the more medium side of hot. The recipe calls for one tablespoon of paprika and two tablespoons of salt, but I would basically reverse this; every time I make paprikas I'm astonished at how salty it turns out, whereas you can go nuts with the paprika and it'll just add to the deliciousness. So maybe mix up one and a half tablespoons of paprika with a skimpy tablespoon of salt and a few twists of black pepper, then pour all that over the onion pieces. Try to go for an even distribution, or you'll wind up with clumps. If you get clumps anyway, adding a little water doesn't hurt anything.

Now it's time for the chicken. If you're anything like me, you're probably a little skittish about meat preparation from that time you gave yourself salmonella poisoning your second month of grad school and spent a week holed up in your apartment having some really novel digestive experiences; however, I promise what I am about to outline works perfectly. With your heat still on the medium side of high, add the chicken in on top of the onions and spices. The recipe I use calls for "four to five pounds of disjointed chicken," and since I have no idea what that's supposed to mean I just get breast fillets. Pop 'em in the skillet and let them sit for five minutes, then flip them over for another five minutes. Definitely let the onions and paprika cling as much as they want, even though it looks kind of gruesome.

When your ten total minutes of browning are up, leave the chicken where it is and add a cup and a half of water. Then cover the skillet, put the heat on low, and set your oven timer for 25 minutes. This is the first round of "simmering," and it's a good time to have more wine.

At the 25-minute mark, flip the chicken over, cover the skillet again, set your timer for another 25 minutes, and then boil some salted water in a stockpot. While you're waiting for it to boil, beat three eggs in a mixing bowl, then add three cups of flour, a tablespoon of salt and a half-cup of water. What you'll get is a really sticky dough. Sometimes you have to add a little water just to get it to mix completely, and sometimes you add too much water and have to throw more flour in. It's all good. (Are you getting a sense of why I'm such a mediocre cook?)

When the water is boiling, pull out the dough in inch, inch-and-a-half diameter clumps and throw them into it. I am certain a more sophisticated chef than myself could find a way to make this step look prettier, but the dough is so sticky that I always wind up with something resembling albino sea urchins.

Let the sea urchins boil for about ten minutes, then drain them in a colander, rinse them with cold water, and put them somewhere close by. At this point, your timer should be pretty close to going off; before it does, put a cup of sour cream in a bowl, and when it does, take out the chicken and put it on a plate or something.

Now to make the sauce. Give your pan drippings a quick stir -- they should be a bright orangey-red and will smell amazing at this point -- and then temper your bowl of sour cream by adding a spoonful of drippings to it and stirring it around a little. This is a key step that a lot of recipes don't mention, but it's important; otherwise the cold sour cream will get a weird flavor when you add it to the hot drippings. Once you've tempered the sour cream, add it to the pan and start whisking everything together until it's a relatively homogeneous color, kind of a creamy light-orange. The sauce will be pretty thin, so at this step you can add a little flour and then turn up the heat a hair. Don't worry too much about it, because it'll get thicker when it starts to cool down.

At this juncture, people who own gravy boats or other serving materials can just pour the sauce into one of those. I don't have any of that shit, so instead I add the dumplings to the pan and then ladle sauce and dumplings combined all over the chicken. I forgot to take pictures of the final product, having consumed plenty of wine at the intervals recommended above, although to be honest, it's not that photogenic of a dish. But the first bite makes up for what it lacks in terms of presentation.

Okay, that's all I got. I promise not to torture you again with my lackadaisical cooking instructions, but given how little one hears about Hungarian food, I figured chicken paprikas was worth sharing. I'll be back when I can think of something new to complain about!

Just swimmingly

2010-04-28T09:09:00.001-07:00

Last night something miraculous happened. I hopped on the scale in the locker room at my gym and watched as, before my very eyes, it displayed a number I haven't seen in a seriously long time. If I told you this number, you might very well go, "Ugh. Really? That much?" like when I recently showed my friend my shiny new driver's license and she wrinkled up her nose and said, "You don't weigh this much." Or, on the opposite side of the coin, you might think I sound like one of those model girls you always see in the dressing rooms of fashionable stores, asking everyone around them if they look fat when they wouldn't look fat wearing an REI tent.

There's really no safe way to talk about one's weight, so for the purposes of this entry, we'll call this wonderful number 12. I can't remember the last time I saw 12; I am pretty sure I bid it a bitter farewell when I fell down the stairs outside my apartment building and did something catastrophic to my foot, preventing me from exercising for months while the bones of my ankle, encased in a really fashionable orthopedic boot, fused back together. At one point I hit 20, an all-time peak, and when I found that I still couldn't go running without my ankle throbbing for the next two days, I joined a gym and started swimming laps. Slowly but surely, I wrestled the number down to 15, and there it sat. For two years. Sometimes it would dip into something that, if I squinted my eyes and sprinkled the scale with fairy dust, sort of looked like 13; but then I'd go and do something stupid, like eat half a grape, and soon I'd be staring at 15 again.

Now, 15 is not an unfair weight to be, and I'm sure there will come a day when I think wistfully of 15, certain I'll never see it again without the aid of a raging cocaine problem. But to remain 15 for almost two years, through endless miles in the pool, through eating salads when what I really wanted was nachos, through mountain hikes and hot yoga classes, through counting my calories and beating myself up over desserts, was kind of frightening. It suggested that everything I was doing was merely 15 maintenance, that if I relaxed my standards even an inch, next thing you know I'd be on CNN getting lifted out of my apartment by a crane.

Well, it's taken two years, but I seem to have finally broken the 15 barrier. I mostly credit swimming for this. In swimming, I have discovered my exercise soul mate. (The search is over . . . it was with me aaaaaaaaaaaall the whiiiiiiiiile.) Unfortunately, not being blessed with my own personal lap pool, I am forced to frequent my gym, which draws a pretty weird crowd: there's the lady who won't let any part of her body come in direct contact with any public item, meaning she sits on paper towels in the locker room, rests her feet on scraps of paper towels, and then, once dressed, leaves these paper towels everywhere, I guess because she can't touch them once they've been contaminated; then there's the woman who seems to go the gym exclusively for the purpose of performing all her personal grooming tasks nude in the locker room. I can't imagine what being naked in public adds to the process of plucking one's eyebrows, but she seems to get something out of it.

And, of course, there's the even weirder crowd the pool attracts. Having now spent a pretty significant percentage of my life waiting for a lap lane, I am perhaps unduly resentful of my fellow swimmers and their habits, but once you've watched a girl with perfect hair and full makeup quietly walk back and forth in the water for 45 minutes, grimacing whenever anyone splashes her and ignoring the queue of would-be swimmers awaiting her spot, you start to get bitchy. I don't know who I hate more: the Perfect Hair Ladies, who come to the pool to do nothing remotely resembling exercise yet somehow manage to make this inactivity last for hours, or the Overequipped Dudes, who show up with kickboards and flippers and hand-fins and stopwatches and water bottles and god knows what else, then make a huge show out of stretching for ten minutes between every lap. Sometimes I want to shout at them, "Does it emasculate you that I swim thirty-three laps without stopping once? BECAUSE IT SHOULD."

That's the first tier of irritating behavior. On the second tier we have: the people who think the pool is for recreational use and jump in right in front of you while you're mid-lap, then try their very damnedest to look as if you came out of nowhere when you have to stop, stand up and wait for them to get out of the way. There's Mr. "We Should All Cycle" (inevitably a man), who is not content to wait for a lane like everyone else and will get in your lane when there are already two people in it, then insist that the three of you cycle even if you tell him you don't want to cycle because you swim at the approximate pace of a drowning person. "I don't swim that fast either," he'll say reassuringly, right before putting on his flippers and breaking the sound barrier. And then we have the class of people who are into water "aerobics," who merely want to stand in the middle of a lane slowly moving their limbs through the water LIKE THAT DOES ANYTHING.

In spite of all these obstacles, however, the LA Fitness pool has enabled me to hit 12, so today I am thanking it and its crazy cast of characters for even existing. Stay tuned for this weekend, when I eradicate that slight loss of poundage via homemade chicken paprikas, which recipe I fully intend to share in hopes of skewing the national BMI curve in my favor.

Career girl

2010-04-24T22:53:00.000-07:00

I'm going to go ahead and do something crazy, which is write about work on my blog. I generally try to refrain from mentioning anything overtly personal here, being unfashionably backwards in my attitudes about internet privacy, but I don't think anyone in America has any idea I have a blog, much less anyone I work with, so I can't really see the harm in it. Or can I? If you're reading this, you may come back in a couple of days to find that paranoia has struck and I've deleted it. You may want to take notes, just in case.

I am a very privileged individual in that I get to work from home, for myself, as what the city of LA considers a "business," although if they saw how much of the day I spend wearing pajamas they might change their minds. In fact, when I got the bill for this year's "business tax," I was tempted to send them a Polaroid of myself in boxers and purple slippers peering at a computer screen in hopes of getting some kind of discount. "See, guys?" I'd write on it with a Sharpie. "Is it really a business if I'm not wearing pants?"

I have two primary clients for my business, and they're pretty easy to distinguish because I like one and not the other. Unfortunately, leaving the one I don't like would mean taking home about as much money as I made when I was a receptionist, because I have all these tax issues and have to pay for private health insurance and blah blah blah. So I'm stuck balancing both, and let me tell you, it's no walk in the park, in spite of the fact that I never have to get dressed; though neither job pays particularly well, both think of me as a full-time employee, which makes something like taking three days off to go to the Caymans -- which should be a snap, considering I am theoretically my own boss -- an undertaking of massive proportions.

The folks at the job I like were really nice about me taking time off. I don't do it very often, and when I do I tend to behave like the type-A personality I am, working twice as hard in advance to get as much done as possible and then, once afield, constantly trying to micromanage everything while friends and/or relatives with normal attitudes about work look on with a mixture of disgust and pity. So naturally, the Job I Like People thought it was cool that I was going to actually take a real vacation, with no internet or smart phone. They wished me a good time, offered to help out with anything I needed while I was gone, and generally behaved as if it was no big deal.

The Job I Don't Like People were not nearly so benevolent. Although they'd been notified way in advance of the pending three days off -- three days, mind you; this was not a two-week bike tour of Tuscany I was taking -- they still behaved as if I'd sprung the trip on them at the last minute. The ensuing panic was way out of proportion to the needs they would be facing while I was gone, as if the entire organization would collapse if I wasn't there to come up with three lines of grammatically correct copy. The real sucker-punch, however, came Friday late in the afternoon, just when I was congratulating myself on being such a responsible employee for working so assiduously to get so much done in advance: my boss sent an e-mail to everyone letting us know that in the future, we were not to ask for time off around "major events." There happened to be two "major events" occurring while I was out, one of which no one had known about at the time I scheduled the trip, the other of which no one had told me I would have anything to do with until the week beforehand. But the e-mail was pretty clearly inspired by me, and there's no way that fact could've escaped anyone who was copied on it.

I guess the reason I'm relating this whole sob story is sometimes I just wonder what's going on with work these days. In my mind, work is something you do so that you have money to live your life, but that attitude doesn't seem to be very favorably received anymore: work is supposed to be your life, and who knows what the money's for. (A private ski chalet for the CEO of Anthem Blue Cross, in my case.) It's especially ironic for me, because I am theoretically my own boss, and yet all that winds up meaning is that I am utterly beholden to not one but two employers, both of whom want the work I do for them to be my whole world. Even at the job I like, my boss told me when he hired me, "I know you like to write creatively, but this is more than just a job for me. It's a vocation. I want to know that it's the same for you." Almost as if it were a condition of my employment. And it's funny, because I am passionate about writing--on the abstract level, I'm passionate about the written word, the communication, the contact; on the pathetic level, I'm even passionate about grammar.

But all that isn't enough to make me passionate about work. I work fifty to sixty hours most weeks, and by the time the next week's crises and deadlines hit I've forgotten just about everything I've done; but an hour before bed with The House of Mirth, or a three-hour hike in the Santa Monica wilderness, or a nice night with Henry and a bottle of wine -- those things I do remember. They're what counts, although they constitute an ever-shrinking percentage of my time. And I hate the fact that I have cried because someone out there thinks that percentage should be even smaller, when I should be laughing at the stupidity of it all.

Tortugas

2010-04-22T19:59:00.001-07:00

And now, in honor of my recent vacation, I give you: pictures of pretty places!

This is the beach in front of where we were staying, with a coral reef creating a nice little cove for swimming and snorkeling.

Everything on the island looks like a screensaver. EVERYTHING.

Oh, no big deal, just the sunset from the porch of the condo we were renting. Whoever owns that condo, I want their job.

I liked the sinister look of these doors.

Sometimes I like to take photos of empty chairs in weird places. This one came from a trip to Nevada in 2008 . . .

And this one came from this trip. I don't know why, but I really like it.

Unbridaled

2010-04-06T13:04:00.000-07:00

I recently had a birthday. Normally I'm all about having some kind of raucous bar-based event to celebrate another year on Planet Earth, but this year I didn't really feel like it. "I'm getting old, SO WHAT," was basically my attitude. I don't generally tend to flip out over this sort of thing, but this birthday happens to be numerically pretty close to 30, and 30 is . . . well . . . 30. You know? It's fraught with associations. Here are just a few that come to mind: the TV show thirtysomething, which was about people with powerful careers and spouses and kids. The fact that my mom had me at thirty. That according to many lady's lifestyle magazines, which are notable for their commitment to factual accuracy, I am approaching my sexual peak, as a lady -- my "dirty thirties," as it were -- and this is worth mentioning because I used to read these articles about my sexual peak and think about how far away it was, and now it's NOT PARTICULARLY FAR AWAY AT ALL.

I've realized that I almost always write blog entries inspired by something that has pissed me off, so before I launch into yet another rant, I want to talk about how I had a really nice birthday, replete with Jon Brion tickets and friends and my very own waffle-maker. My actual birthday fell on a Tuesday, so my plan was to work as usual, then go watch "Lost" with the lovely K-Spiers and crew as usual, and even that plan was thwarted by cupcakes from coworkers and the world's best cheesecake. I wound up feeling pretty cheery about getting older, thinking of it less as "Oh my God 30 is approaching" than "Hey! Another year of this great life I'm having."

That being said . . .

If one more person asks me when Henry and I are going to get married, I'm going to have an aneurysm. I don't know if it's my egregiously old age or if everyone is suddenly intercepting radio waves from some alternate universe where couples have to march down the aisle after a certain length of time OR ELSE, but I have heard this question approximately one million times in the past month, and it's really starting to wear on me. First of all, DO YOU SEE A RING ON MY FINGER OR ANYWHERE IN MY IMMEDIATE VICINITY? NO? THEN CLEARLY WE'RE NOT GETTING MARRIED ANYTIME SOON. Also, more than one person has had the audacity to follow up this inquiry with the question, "Does he want to get married?" Which, if I'm translating correctly -- and I think I am -- actually means, "Because if he did, he would've proposed by now, unless of course there is something horribly wrong with you, like that you have a lizard tail or a secret fondness for PCP."

No one has ever said to me, "Do you guys want to get married?" or the even more preposterous "Do you want to get married?" Why should they? Obviously I want to get married. Obviously it's my number-one priority in life to have someone get down on one knee and propose to me, ideally holding a chip from a lump of compressed carbon mined by a nine-year-old in some country far enough away that I don't have to care about its human rights record. I know that the husband-hunting she-wolf became a cliche for a reason, but is it so hard to believe that there are women out there -- quite a few of them -- who just don't care that much about marriage? Personally, I'd be willing to give the whole thing a miss, except that I have to marry Henry if I ever want to glom off his WGA health insurance. (And I do! "I DO"!) But dropping a month's rent or more on a white dress, speaking vows at an altar in a house of a god I don't believe in, and having the term "wife" applied to me in a non-ironic-hip-hop-reference way? Surely I am not the first woman on the planet to be ambivalent about these things.

On top of all that, the temptation to respond to people in kind is starting to overwhelm me, and one day soon I'm going to wind up blind in both eyes after losing my last remaining shred of self-control and consequently getting a martini hurled in my face. Allow me to demonstrate all the possible scenarios:

Friend Who Is Single: When are you going to get married?
Cat: When are you going to get a boyfriend?

Friend In A Relationship: When are you going to get married?
Cat: I'm never getting married, because it's a patriarchal, heteronormative institution created by oppressive zealots and reinforced by centuries of religious indoctrination. What's your excuse?

Friend Who Is Married: When are you going to get married?
Cat: Why don't you have a baby yet?

Friend Who Is Married And Has A Baby (FWIMAHAB): When are you going to get married?
Cat: When are you going to get a divorce?

So yeah. Probably better not to ask.

Its on it's way

2010-03-23T09:30:00.001-07:00

To wrap up the Saga of Ogden (which sounds like a Norse epic poem), I thought I would share with you all the cheerful little document that Anthem Blue Cross sent me yesterday, presumably so that I could celebrate health care reform all the more heartily:

See that, there? That's my "explanation of benefits" from my first visit to the kindly Dr. R, one of three in which he took out a knife and cut an x in my back. I didn't get any anesthesia -- that "drug non-oral admin" was a steroid shot -- and I was sitting upright in a chair, holding up my shirt so he could reach the area of my back in question. The term "surgery" feels like a bit of an exaggeration. And SEVENTY-EIGHT MOTHERFUCKING NON-COVERED DOLLARS for something I could've done myself with a paring knife and a bottle of vodka (sterilization and anesthesia in one!) seems like a real stretch.

Health care reform has become one of those issues where people either support it or they don't, and nothing is going to change their minds either way, especially not my meaningless blog. I am much better at making jokes than I am at forming cogent arguments, and I'm not even that good at making jokes. But I do make my living writing about health care. I talk every day to people whose very livelihoods are at stake in this battle, and they still know that something has to change. Even my boss, the self-proclaimed Adam Smith capitalist who chuckles at my crazy liberal views, believes in reform. When you're immersed in our current system, you understand how backwards it is, how misaligned the incentives are, how people in other countries laugh patronizingly at what we think of as health care.

I could prove this the boring way, with citations and quotations, or I could prove it the fun way, i.e. at the expense of people who have the bad fortune to be my Facebook friend. Because here's something I have noticed about our highly polarized age: you can often determine which side is the right one by the quality of its proponents' arguments. Take the oft-repeated "No one should go bankrupt because they get sick": that is a nice, simple argument that gets to the heart of the issue, is compassionate and logical, and is hard to dispute. Now check out this little gem:

I am not sure what to say about this, which has the distinction of comin' at you live from your humble narrator's very first boyfriend. So health care is like Disneyland? Is that a Jurassic Park reference? Did I really once make out with someone who doesn't know the difference between "its" and "it's"?

I mean, really.

RIP, Ogden

2010-03-15T12:07:00.000-07:00

Today I returned to Beverly Hills so my dermatologist could render a final verdict on Ogden. First, some awesome news: Ogden was pronounced dead this morning of (mostly) natural causes; surgery will not be required. RIP, Ogden. I can't really say you'll be missed, but at least I'll always have a little lump of scar tissue to remember you by, and whenever anyone at the beach or gym grimaces at the sight of my back, I'll think of you.

The other awesome news is that I no longer have any reason to go to Beverly Hills. I've never been a big fan of the municipality, not personally having much use for a place that thinks it needs granite sidewalks, has strict noise ordinances and has actually spent time and money to pass a law prohibiting people from waiting for parking spaces. Wherever the short-tempered and well-off go, legislating the life out of everything seems to follow. I'm also endlessly amused by the architecture in BH, which seems permanently stuck in the year "Pretty Woman" was shot, so much so that I am often surprised at the lack of voluminous shoulder pads visible on its sidewalks. My dermatologist's office building is a perfect example: a marble promenade open to the street gives way to a brass-and-wood elevator lobby, and inside the hallways are carpeted in jade green and pale pink. It all seems to scream, "Money! Power! Adam Smith and Bret Easton Ellis doing each other on a pile of cocaine!"

I was particularly delighted to find that the late-eighties aesthetic extends even to the Rite-Aid in BH, where the floors are made of imitation marble and neon signs proclaim in cursive, PRESCRIPTIONS! BEVERAGES! To provide some context, at my usual Rite-Aid at the corner of Franklin and Western, both the signs and the floor are made of plastic that doesn't look like it's been washed anytime in the past two decades.

After selecting my purchases -- one Starbucks vanilla frappuccino, if that's how that made-up word is spelled, and these teensy little batteries I needed for my garage door opener that are a lot harder to find than you'd think -- I got in what I thought was the line, only to be corrected a minute or so later by a corporate-looking dude standing about ten feet away from the cash register, half-hidden from view by a shelf of greeting cards. "Excuse me," he said stridently. "This is where the line is supposed to begin." Considering he had obviously just arrived, and I was obviously only getting two things, it wouldn't have been that difficult for him to just let it go, but that's how people are in Beverly Hills: Busy and Important. So I got in "line" behind him, and while the two of us were waiting someone else approached the register, a middle-aged woman sporting a classic BH look: expensive jewelry and some kind of cashmere shawl draped elegantly over her shoulders in spite of the fact that it was eighty degrees out. Her face was super-moisturized, and you could tell she thought she looked twenty years younger, whereas she actually looked like she had applied her morning La Mer with a gardening trowel. When she realized the line had inexplicably formed in the greeting card aisle, she was very put out, and stood behind me grumbling not-so-subtly to herself: "This is RIDICULOUS," "I've NEVER had to wait this long," etc.

Finally, it was Corporate Guy's turn at the register, and it will come as no surprise to you that he was buying about seventy things in what appeared to be the most complicated transaction ever attempted by modern man. La Mer Lady became even more agitated, increasing the volume of her objections until everyone in the store could hear her: "WHAT is GOING ON HERE," "Would it be THAT HARD to OPEN ANOTHER REGISTER," and so on. Meanwhile, the only person who had any real right to be annoyed -- that would be me, the girl who had been standing there the longest, trapped between a blatant line-cutter and a bitch with a slimy face -- continued to wait quietly. You know. Like a human being.

The fun continued at the dermatologist's office, where I shared the waiting room with three more La Mer Ladies, all of whom were engaged in a sprightly conversation about Botox and Restylane when I came skulking in, dressed in all black in case the good doctor planned to cut another massive hole in my back. In spite of the medieval-style treatments I've been subjected to at his hands, I actually like my dermatologist, and I don't fault him for planting himself in a location where he can make a killing injecting rich ladies with muscle-freezing neurotoxins. Still, it was hard to sit there thinking about my nasty skin condition while people much better-off than me chatted cheerfully about getting shot up with something that grows on the insides of dented aluminum cans. Who, really, is the disgusting one?

Sexism in unexpected places

2010-03-11T15:02:00.001-08:00

In April Henry and I get to take an oh-so-glamorous mini-vacation courtesy of my dad. He is a scientist, and he attends a biannual scientific meeting which, for important science reasons, takes place on Grand Cayman Island. The meeting, incidentally, is called the Spring Pain Conference, and its unofficial mascot is a chili pepper, this being the science world's idea of humor.

This morning I booked both of our tickets, charging them to my credit card because I recently discovered that I am getting rewards points, meaning that for every $6,000 I spend I can earn up to $50 in gift cards at participating retailers such as Applebee's. For just $6,000! Imagine! Of course, the more you spend the better the prizes get, so I am currently shooting for $100 at J. Crew, with which I can buy at least 65% of a really ugly pair of socks. Bank of America Visa Rewards, I salute you.

Anyway, the point I am making is that I booked the tickets, out of my selfish desire to one day be crowned Queen of the Mediocre Midwestern Restaurant Chains. I paid for them with my credit card. I was the first passenger listed; Henry was the second. And yet here is the e-mail I got from Continental (sent to my e-mail address) seconds later:

DEAR MR. HENRY. Not Dear Ms. Catherine; DEAR MR. HENRY. How is that even possible? Do they have some kind of e-mail-generating robot that is programmed to address only men? I am completely flummoxed.

That's all I got for today.

Ogden

2010-03-03T22:40:00.000-08:00

As a white lady with scads of privilege, it's not often that I find myself unwittingly part of a news story that impacts the nation, but such has been my experience with Anthem Blue Cross. There are only 800,000 people in all of America who got hit with their unjust rate increases, and I'm one of them. This makes me feel pretty awesome, I'm not going to lie. I feel like there are a lot of unacknowledged injustices attendant upon womanhood, and now, finally, one of them is in the spotlight: THESE SONS OF BITCHES WANT TO CHARGE A PERFECTLY HEALTHY PERSON $300 A MONTH FOR INSURANCE. Shazam! Injustice!

Except I'm not perfectly healthy, thanks to Ogden (my new name for my cyst). In case the timeline here hasn't been entirely clear from my previous writings, Ogden emerged about one week after I called Anthem Blue Cross and had them raise my deductible to THREE THOUSAND MOTHERFUCKING DOLLARS because I cannot afford to give them $300 a month in return for a more reasonable annual cap. Now it looks like Ogden will need to be surgically removed, and I'm on the hook for the entire cost, because I raised my fucking deductible like a fucking idiot. (All this profanity is brought to you by the multiple glasses of wine I had before writing this entry, BTW. Feel free to be amazed at my inebriated typing skills; I know I am.)

So here's what's new with Ogden, for the morbidly curious. I went back to the dermatologist yesterday, and it turns out Ogden is finally ready to be "drained." For those of you not well versed in the lexicon of cysts -- may you always be so fortunate -- "draining" turns out to be code for "bleeding profusely," so basically I got another massive hole cut in my back, followed by more squeezing until I cried like a little bitch. Now Ogden is draining away, so much so that I have already ruined one non-black article of clothing because I made the mistake of wearing it to bed last night. I have never been squeamish about blood, which I credit to being an older sister -- I was the one my little brother always turned to when he had a scrape or other injury, the one who applied the Neosporin and band-aids -- so the bleeding doesn't much trouble me, but it is creating some major wardrobe issues. On the plus side, Ogden is looking much flatter now, a lot less like something out of a horror movie. But he still feels hard and weird like a tumor, which means he may have to be cut off my back entirely in a procedure that I can only pray will come with large quantities of Oxycontin.

So here I am with my $3,000 deductible and a surgical procedure on deck. I want to stress once again that up until Ogden reared his ugly head, I was a perfectly healthy individual on no prescription medications except for birth control -- which, if you think about it, actually saves Anthem Blue Cross money, because as long as I keep horfing down the ol' generic Ortho TriCyclen, they will never have to worry about me having a baby and racking up tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills. I have no pre-existing conditions, I eat my vegetables, I exercise fairly regularly. My dermatologist says I can blame Ogden on wearing a motherfucking bra. I've worn a bra since I got boobs, like a nice modest American girl, and now here I am fourteen years later with a giant bleeding hole in my back. So basically, Ogden, like shit, happens. I did nothing to cause Ogden. Ogden is a painful and disgusting fact of life.

For everyone out there who opposes health care reform, I want to ask one question: Do you think I deserve to lose $2,000 of my hard-earned money because of Ogden? Is that just the way the cookie crumbles, in your universe? I realize, of course, that there are millions of people in America fighting their health insurers over much larger and more long-term issues, such as cancer treatment or rheumatoid arthritis, but Ogden is my personal cross to bear for the time being, and he is turning out to be a pretty expensive specimen. Which is sort of my point: Ogden isn't a life-threatening illness. He's just a fucking sebaceous cyst, a totally common piece-of-crap skin condition that could happen to anyone. And I am going to have to shell out $2,o00 to get him removed, in spite of the fact that I pay $200 a month for so-called "health insurance."

What I have to say on this rainy Wednesday evening, as I sit here in my black tank top feeling Ogden bleeding through the band-aid I applied an hour ago, is that it's not fucking insurance if it doesn't fucking pay for anything. I don't even understand what my $200 a month is going to, and it is my single largest bill aside from rent. I might as well set fire to that money for all the good it's doing me. So for everyone out there who thinks health care reform is dangerous and socialist and how the fuck are we going to pay for it, I want to take a moment to deeply and sincerely wish you an Ogden-free life. May nothing unexpected, however benign, ever happen to you. Because it has happened to me, with such incredible timing that it's almost like a message from a higher power, and I am astounded at the financial consequences. It has taken me years -- YEARS -- to create the meager savings I currently have. That's years of working two jobs, in case you were curious, both of which expect all of my time for about half what I believe I deserve to be paid: years of balancing the demands of being an up-and-coming editrix in a fledgling company with the demands of working as a cog in the machine of a major nonprofit. Years of nasty e-mails, of crying because I couldn't handle the stress anymore, of being lambasted because I let a single typo slip through. And where is a massive chunk of that savings going? Not to a new car. Not to a house. To Ogden.

Anthem BC is blaming my rate increase on the fact that healthy people who could do without insurance dropped their coverage last year, making the risk pool that much more costly. Well, I was healthy, and I didn't drop my insurance. And now here we are, me and Ogden. We can't peacefully coexist; one of us has got to go.

So I'm going to pay that $2,000. And I'm going to be grateful that I have been blessed with enough work to build a savings account in the first place, and that I don't have to go into debt to get rid of my cyst. I'm going to remind myself that people face much more frightening health obstacles every single day, that they fight their insurance companies while knowing their very lives are on the line, and that many of those people aren't single girls with no responsibilities, that many of them have families, spouses and children, who depend on them. I'm going to think about those less fortunate than me, because you know what? I have two jobs, I don't have kids, and Ogden isn't life-threatening. I'm getting off the hook for just $2,000 and some seriously painful squeezing. I'm one of the fortunate ones. I'm lucky.

And that, ladies and gentleman, is what's wrong with health care in America today.

World traveler

2010-02-23T13:43:00.000-08:00

I'm not a big fan of travel by air. I accept it as a necessary evil, because I have made the questionable life choice of being a Los Angeles transplant and because there is no other way to get to Paris, but I don't like it. I used to be pretty phobic about flying -- like, clutching the armrests the entire flight as if that would somehow make anything remotely resembling a difference in the event of an emergency phobic -- but I have mostly gotten over that with time. Now my problems with flying have less to do with the notion that I will perish in a fiery crash and more to do with mundane shit, such as having to take off my shoes to go through security. Because I'm sorry, but isn't that an f-ing metal detector I'm walking through? Does it not, um, detect metal? I am also perplexed by the three-ounce rule. So three ounces of any liquid are totally safe, unless their total volume is more than a quart, in which case they're all dangerous. At the risk of having the FBI show up on my doorstep, couldn't I just fill all my permitted three-ounce containers with gasoline and then ignite it using a match? If I can figure this out, the terrorists can too.

I'm not particularly worried about terrorism when I fly. If the past decade has taught me anything, it's that they'll figure something out no matter what the TSA does, which gives the whole thing an air of inevitability: If I am fated to be on the wrong flight, I just am, and the Department of Homeland Security is wasting its time and resources on treating my tube of mascara like an unexploded bomb. You may be wondering why I can't apply this same line of reasoning to my irrational conviction that my plane's engines will both fail and I will plummet six miles to my death, and there is a perfectly good answer that I will be happy to share with you as soon as I think of it.

Flying these days is even less of a treat than it used to be, as you know if you've boarded a plane anytime since the gas price uptick of 2007-2008. Charging for checked baggage sticks out as one of the most asinine new policies. With the cost of the average plane ticket hovering at black-market internal-organ levels, it's not as if anyone would really notice if the airlines just built the $25 into the original cost, but instead they're incentivizing people to carry all their luggage onto planes that just weren't built for it. I have been a carry-on person from the start, a die-hard who refuses to check her bag come hell or high water, and unlike these johnny-come-latelies, I pack only the essentials into a rucksack, which is easy to squish into almost any space. This gives me the right to carry my bag on the plane. Here's who doesn't have the right: middle-aged businesspeople with roller bags the size of adolescent walruses whose sense of capitalist entitlement makes them think it's okay to take up six seats' allotment of overhead room with their massive, unwieldy suitcases. NOTICE TO BUSINESSPEOPLE: YOUR LUGGAGE IS NOT BETTER THAN EVERYONE ELSE'S BECAUSE IT CONTAINS A SUIT. CHECK YOUR FUCKING BAG.

I traveled by air over the weekend, in case you couldn't tell, and it was my bad fortune to wake up the morning of my flight to the east coast with a cold. Henry had had this particular cold all week, but by day two he had determined that he was no longer contagious -- you know, using his advanced medical degree from the University of Making Shit Up -- and as a result got a little lax about trying not to infect me. We sleep in the same bed, so it's entirely possible I would've come down with the cold regardless, but this sinus headache has a mind of its own, and it says: BLAME HENRY.

So anyway, here I am on my six a.m. flight, looking and feeling like walking death, and every time I blow my nose the woman in the next seat glares at me as if I have decided to travel exclusively for the purpose of contaminating her with H1N1. Because it's really super-fun to have a head cold in a pressurized environment! She's the one who is suffering! I find germaphobes silly under the best of circumstances, and for reasons surpassing my understanding, people who are ordinarily rational human beings often turn into psychotic germaphobes when they travel. Everywhere I went this weekend, people reacted to my sneezing as if I had just erupted in festering boils. Which is another problem with flying: after waiting in line to pay $25 to check a bag, then waiting in another line to turn that bag over to the airline, then waiting in a third line for their very own golden opportunity to be treated like a threat to national security for having deodorant, then being herded onto a metal death tube like so many cattle marching toward the slaughter only to be charged six bucks for trail mix, people tend to completely forget their manners. And it's hard to blame them.

I hear things are different in first class, that they actually try to make you feel comfortable and happy there, and if I ever win the lottery I look forward to learning more. For the time being, however, I am forced to stare through the gauzy curtain at the tony hinterland like an orphan in a Dickens novel, thinking thoughts so Marxist I am pretty sure they're a federal offense. And then sneezing. Again.

Pity party

2010-02-15T11:12:00.001-08:00

I don't think it's necessarily important that you like your doctor, but I do think it's important for girls to like their gynecologists. There's no equivalent relationship for guys, no person who you go see once a year exclusively for the purpose of letting him or her reach up in your nether regions and feel around. In college we had a gynecologist in Health Services who really liked to turn the yearly exam into a five-minute guided tour, meticulously alerting me to which internal organ she was squeezing at each moment. I never personally saw the point. If I ever want to know what my uterus feels like from the inside, I'll find out for myself.

Dr. Bradshaw really only had to meet one criteria the first time I saw her a few years ago, and that was expedience. But in addition to having a truly smooth manner when it comes to the least pleasant aspect of my preventative medical care, she also turned out to be pretty funny, which clearly I appreciate. She took a peek at my weird thing and had no idea what it was, but did ask me to e-mail her when I found out, adding, "I wouldn't worry too much. I've seen much scarier things on peoples' vaginas."

She referred me to a dermatologist who happened to have a cancellation this afternoon, so off to the executioner's chair I marched, simultaneously trying to calm myself down and steel myself for the possibility that it might be something serious. Which, of course, it isn't. Because that's the number one rule of bodies, as far as I can tell; nothing ever turns out to be anything serious, except when it does, and you hear the story about it, and you retain every single detail, especially the part where they give the woman three months to live. (I know this is not exactly my best writing ever, by the way, but when I get to what I went through this afternoon you'll understand why I am still not all that coherent.)

The weird thing turned out to be a sebaceous cyst, which you can learn more about if for some reason you feel like vomiting. They're disgusting, common and in no way life-threatening; the very kindly dermatologist explained that I probably aggravated the original cyst by bumping it against something, triggering my body to treat it like an infection and create an inflammation around it. Ho-hum, right? Oh yeah? Would you like to know what they do to inflamed sebaceous cysts? Imagine that you have a big painful lump on your back that has been so tender for ten days that you can't even wear a bra. Then someone comes along and CUTS A GIANT HOLE IN IT. Yes, you read that right: an x-shaped hole, representing two separate incisions that are delivered to you without any helpful anesthetic. Then, as if that weren't bad enough, they STICK A NEEDLE IN IT in order to inject it with steroids. But the real icing on the cake comes when they SQUEEZE IT WITH ALL THEIR MIGHT for five minutes straight while you clutch the exam chair with white knuckles, trying to remember that you were raised not to shout strings of profanity in public. My back no longer resembles the opening scene of Aliens; now it looks more like one big bruise. And I get to do it all again on Thursday!

Apparently in some cases sebaceous cysts have to be removed surgically, so I guess I should count myself doubly lucky: lucky that it didn't turn out to be anything serious, and lucky that it can be treated quickly and easily. But goddamn. I can't remember the last time physical pain brought tears to my eyes. You win, cyst. You win.

There isn't a moral or point to this story, in case you were wondering. I'm just feeling sorry for myself. Boo hoo.

The weird thing

2010-02-11T09:02:00.001-08:00

Lately I have been in another of my Healthy Choices cycles. I go through these a few times a year. It starts with eating better, then transitions into what is inevitably a very brief period of both eating better and working out. Soon enough, though, the cumulative effect of those two makes me so f-ing hungry I could eat my way out of a Fort Knox made of cheesecake, and I become too anesthetized by sugar to go to the gym. Thus the cycle completes itself. The actual sums of weight lost and gained are not very big--I shave off a few pounds, I put 'em back on--but the psychological effects are tremendous. At the moment I am officially in a weight downswing, and you'd think I was Heidi Klum the way I've been carrying on. Sometimes I open the fridge and just gaze at all the fruits and vegetables in there, mentally handing myself an Academy Award for having the courage to buy a tomato.

Naturally, this period of self-congratulation over my own healthiness would be interrupted by the appearance of a weird thing on my back. Actually, "appearance" is the wrong word; I've had this weird thing for years, but for no apparent reason, this week it suddenly decided to get uppity. I'm sure most people have a weird thing like this somewhere on their bodies. Mine is right where my bra strap hits, just a little bump the size of a ball-bearing; I can't remember the first time I noticed it, but I know I was aware of it by college, and every doctor I've had since college has been aware of it too, because I'm always making them check it out to be sure it hasn't randomly decided to turn into cancer. It has a mind of its own, this weird thing; sometimes I'll bust out a bra I don't wear very often, like that strapless one with the rubber piping that makes me look like a comic book supervillain, and it'll get very aggravated with me for ringing the changes on it. That's why I don't often wear lingerie, in case anyone (my boyfriend) was wondering; it's not that I find it scratchy and uncomfortable and expensive and pointless and annoying to hand wash, it's the capricious will of the weird thing. (I swear!)

Anyway, the weird thing suddenly decided on Monday that it was going to make its presence known again, and this time I didn't do anything to provoke it. I wore no unusual undergarments, I didn't touch it, I didn't even look at it, and out of nowhere it's inflamed and red and painful and about five times its usual size. So I'm sure you can imagine what I'm thinking: that I should calmly and rationally make an appointment with a dermatologist, who can take a gander and see if it needs to be removed or deflated or whatever the fuck it is they do to weird things.

WRONG. THAT IS OF COURSE NOT WHAT I AM THINKING. What I am thinking is that I HAVE CANCER. I think it every time I sit down in my chair and feel the weird thing rubbing against the seat back: I HAVE CANCER. I HAVE A TUMOR ON MY BACK THE SIZE OF--WELL, NOT A GOLF BALL, THAT'S A BIG EXAGGERATION, BUT MAYBE A BABY GOLF BALL, LIKE IF GOLF BALLS COULD HAVE BABIES THIS ONE WOULD BE ABOUT NINE YEARS OLD. That's what my brain is doing to me. And that brain went to college.

Luckily, I'm already supposed to see my gynecologist, who I call Dr. Bradshaw because she looks like Sarah Jessica Parker, on Monday. Dr. Bradshaw may not the ideal type of specialist to render a verdict on the weird thing, but she is at least used to me storming into her office convinced that I have cancer, because when I went to see her around this time last year I was having a weird pain on my right side that I thought was an ovarian tumor. You have to give her credit for not laughing in my face as she pointed out the actual location of my ovaries (Ladies: they're in the middle somewhere. YOU ARE WELCOME) and then very politely asked if I was still swimming laps, which form of exercise just might lead to pulling a muscle in one's side. Somehow I doubt the weird thing will back down as easily as my phantom ovarian tumor, which was cured with a few Advil and some conscientious pre-workout stretching. But you never know.

Oh, Anthem.

2010-02-08T21:51:00.000-08:00

Well, well, well.

Obama official "very disturbed" by Anthem Blue Cross rate hikes

Looks like somebody's in trouble. And by somebody I mean the asshole megacorporation that recently had the audacity to demand an extra $80 a month for my private health plan. That's a 44% rate hike, by the way, higher even than the maximum increase mentioned in the above article. I'm glad to see that this issue isn't going unnoticed by the powers that be, but I'd feel a whole lot happier if everyone wasn't talking about health care reform like it's already dead. The idealist in me wants to believe that Kathleen Sebelius will go striding into Anthem HQ like a knight of the round table, spearing stacks of files with her jousting lance and demanding justice. The cynic in me thinks this will wind up costing Anthem a fuckton of money, which they'll just tack on to my bill disguised as "rising medical costs in your area."

Let's take a closer look at the article:

"In a rare step, the Obama administration called on California's largest for-profit insurer to justify its rate hikes, saying the increases were alarming at a time when subscribers face skyrocketing healthcare costs."

So before we get all agitated over government intervention in big business, let's just pause long enough to ask ourselves, why is a step like this "rare" when it comes to insurers? They're not being asked to do anything other than explain themselves. Yet clearly this represents an enormous imposition, because . . .

"A WellPoint spokeswoman said she couldn't immediately respond to questions about the company's reaction to Poizner's request. An Anthem spokeswoman said the company was reviewing Poizner's letter and did not have a reply Monday."

If nothing unusual or illegal is going on, it should be pretty easy to put together a reply, right? Just throw open the doors to Anthem HQ and let everyone see for themselves. If you're not doing anything wrong, why the delay?

"[California Insurance Commissioner] Poizner said in his letter to WellPoint's chief executive and chairman that he would stop Anthem's rate increases if the actuary determines that the insurer spends less than 70% of its premiums on benefits, as required by state law."

Poizner said he would enforce the state law if it turns out the state law is being broken. The state insurance commissioner has to declare this in a letter for Anthem to be aware of it?

Then the hammer comes down:

"Anthem said its costs have been driven up in part because the weak economy has led many people in good health to forgo coverage, leaving those with greater medical needs in its pool of customers."

Translation: "First we jacked our rates up so high that everyone who thought they could afford to drop their health coverage did. Now we have to jack our rates up even higher because they're all gone."

Fuck this. I'm switching to Kaiser. And if you have Anthem/BC, maybe you should too.

Every year on February 2

2010-02-02T10:25:00.000-08:00

I have a longer entry I'm planning to write sometime soon, but until then, just wanted to share an image that greeted me from the LA Times homepage this morning.

This is probably just an unfortunate mistake -- and by unfortunate, I mean awesome -- but I like to think that some highly subversive individual at the LAT planned it this way. If that person happens to be reading . . . marry me?

Complaints of the western world

2010-01-27T18:11:00.000-08:00

Before I moved into this apartment I lived in a small studio in Beachwood Canyon. It was a cute place, as studios go; it had lovely hardwood floors and cool cabinets and funky tile and a nice view, none of which changed the fact that plenty of people in America have bigger closets. Studio living spoils you in a very specific way. You get used to having all your possessions right at your fingertips, everything you own within view. It was during this time that I caught myself saying to Henry one night, "Your apartment is too big. I can never find my Blackberry." And I meant it! I was actually complaining about a living space being of sufficient size to make it possible to briefly misplace a smartphone. Sit down and shut up, orphans of the third world; you have no concept of what real suffering looks like.

I think often of my many complaints of the western world at times like these. I know my friends do, too, because we keep sending each other our usual e-mails complaining about work or traffic or whatever, then following them with the embarrassed caveat, "But at least I have a home and clean drinking water." Haiti has served as a long-overdue reminder to count my blessings, to check myself when I say things like "I just have so much traveling to do this year."

Not surprisingly, many of my complaints relate to technology. Some are more valid than others. For instance, I will take this opportunity to exert whatever influence I have over you and urge you never to buy a Dell computer. I have had so many problems with my two most recent purchases from Dell -- hard drive crashes, screens shorting out, new screens being back-ordered two months and then turning out to be the wrong kind of screen, more hard drive crashes that tech support then blamed on me for using online banking, and so on -- that I actually sat down and wrote them a letter, like a cranky old geezer who gets his kicks from calling the cops on the neighborhood kids for jaywalking. (The letter came back to me marked "Return to Sender," which pretty much sums up Dell's customer service.)

I classify this as a legitimate complaint because it affects my work, whereas the issues I have with other forms of technology, when stated end to end, paint a portrait of a resolutely silly human being: My Wii remote runs out of batteries too quickly. It is impossible to find a cute protective case for my Palm Pre. I keep losing my iPod Nano because it is so tiny. My Dustbuster doesn't hold a charge and my TV has these annoying gray bars bracketing the screen when you're not watching in widescreen mode, which, like, um, hello, who made that design decision? I realize, now, that this is why my parents made me attend church as a child -- so that I would turn into a person with something resembling a moral compass, a person who, for instance, does not get more worked up over AT&T's DSL service than she does world hunger. I quit Catholicism because of idealogical objections, never considering that Catholicism was probably glad to be rid of me.

I recently started volunteering in an effort to assuage some of this first-world guilt. Unfortunately, I started volunteering as a writing tutor for kids, which I enjoy so much I'd probably pay money to do it. Altruism never seems to count if I like it, which, I suppose, means that at least enough Catholicism sunk into my system for me to always feel guilty about everything. Rather than ruminate upon this further, I'm going to go continue my quest to beat Super Mario Brothers Wii, until my boyfriend brings me dinner, that is, at which point we're going to watch DVDs of Big Love on our new flat-screen TV. We got it at Costco, though, so we can be reasonably assured we're going to heaven.

Mrs. Grinch

2010-01-21T08:31:00.000-08:00

Last night I made my downstairs neighbors a batch of chocolate chip cookies. Why? Well, for one thing, they were kind enough to skip town for the evening on Saturday so that Henry and I could throw a party without having to be conscious of our noise level, and that was really solid of them, and I wanted to say thanks. For another, it's good PR: the next time I feel compelled to bang on their door because I can't take the screaming anymore -- I swear sometimes it sounds like their three-year-old is being murdered down there -- I will not be Crotchety Upstairs Neighbor Girl. I will be Nice Upstairs Neighbor Girl, who brings cookies but also has a line that can be crossed.

I had thought about getting them a nice bottle of wine as a thank-you, but in the end I settled on cookies because then the kids could enjoy the thank-you present as well. As I've mentioned before, I really like their kids. Running into them riding bikes out back can brighten an otherwise mediocre day. The last time I saw them, the dad started telling me about how the seven-year-old is devouring books that are way beyond his grade level, and that delighted me, because I was once a seven-year-old who devoured books that were way beyond her grade level. So when I went downstairs to deliver my cookies, I also brought my copy of The Neverending Story to loan to him. Everyone seemed pleased, and I sashayed back upstairs feeling like I deserved some kind of Nobel prize for duplex relations.

A few minutes later my phone rang. It was [Mom]. "Sorry to bother you," she said, "but [Daughter] has a question for you." Then I found myself on the phone with a three-year-old, a situation that always panics me; as much as I like kids, I've never mastered the art of deciphering what they're saying all the time, which means I have a tendency to talk to them like they're mostly deaf. "Hi, [Daughter]!" I yelled. "What's up?"

"Hi, Cat!" she hollered into the phone. At this point we were both talking so loudly we could've just put the phones down and screamed at each other through the floor. "I was wondering if you also have a PRINCESS BOOK!"

Forehead-slap. Of course. I had forgotten the cardinal rule of children: you can't bring only one of them a present. You'd think I'd know better, since I grew up with a younger brother and was capable of having a class-A meltdown if he got something new and I didn't. But, of course, my lending library up here isn't really geared to children; I happen to have The Neverending Story because Henry bought me a really nice copy a couple of years ago as a gift, but otherwise my reading selections tend more toward novels about genocide or biographies of writers who drank themselves to death.

As it turns out, it's a good thing that what [Daughter] was after was a PRINCESS BOOK. Because the only other books from my childhood in this apartment are the "Dealing With Dragons" series, which, if you were so unfortunate as to miss out on them as a kid, are books about a rebellious princess who runs away from home to live with dragons. They're extremely witty and charming, and though they don't come with pictures, they are not about brutal dictatorships or failed marriages, which is about the best I can do.

"So you'll bring the PRINCESS BOOK downstairs?" [Daughter] said excitedly. "You'll bring it right now?"

When I rang the doorbell for the second time in ten minutes, the first thing I heard from within was [Daughter] screaming "COMING!" She really did not want to miss out on that princess book. When I gave it to her she was so happy she clutched it to her chest and rubbed her chin along the top of it. And this is probably just my uterus talking, but that one little moment made up for all the tap-dancing practice in the world.

Why everyone with a functioning brain should support same-sex marriage

2010-01-19T23:16:00.000-08:00

Saturday night I stopped by the 7-Eleven down the street to pick up some last-minute supplies for the party Henry and I were having, a party from which I am only just now recovering enough to put together a coherent sentence. I rarely experience the kind of hangover I had Sunday. Although I am by no means a teetotaler, I usually manage to stay within my limits, and I think part of the reason I overdid it Saturday was the fact that I completely lost track of time. At one point Jess told me she was thinking about heading out, and I said, "Why? It's only midnight," to which she very reasonably rebutted that it was actually three in the morning. Oops.

But shortly before I attempted to pickle my innards with vodka, I found myself outside the 7-Eleven, where a guy who was panhandling asked me if I'm into black dudes. I should've just walked away, but I grew up in the Midwest and am incapable of being rude to strangers, so instead I answered, "I've dated black guys, and my current boyfriend is a bodybuilder with a gun." Ha ha! Just kidding. That's what I should've said, but actually I just said, "I've dated black guys, and my current boyfriend is white." To which my aspiring paramour responded, "But we can still be friends." He went on to explain, "See, it's 2010 now, and B. Obama's in the White House, and we're doing things differently. So you and I can be friends." And then he got out his smartphone so I could give him my number -- making me wonder if he was panhandling to pay off his data usage debts, or what -- which is when I finally mustered the strength to be impolite, wished him a nice evening, and walked off.

But he had a point -- here comes your awkward segue to the real thrust of this entry; get ready! -- in that it is 2010, and we are doing things differently, and while I don't think this necessarily means I am obligated to hang out with people I meet standing in front of a convenience store asking for change, I do think it's just about time for all of us to pull our heads out of our asses and start supporting gay marriage already. That's hardly an original thought or anything, but I have been very closely following the details of the current Prop. 8 trial, and just about every argument being put forth by the hateful morons who call themselves the defense is the most asinine thing I have ever heard. I don't care how you feel about gay people; I care about how you feel about stupid people, or more specifically, allowing stupid people to make laws. Because guess what? Anyone who'll trample all over the Constitution for Prop. 8 will gladly trample all over it again when the next issue comes along. Stay sharp, Cali.

But why leave it at that? Let's "drill down" and get "granular," as my business associates like to say on the conference calls I am forced to be a part of in order to keep myself in Aveda clove shampoo. Let's take a look at some of the defense's arguments and see how well they hold up:

1. "Marriage is between one man and one woman. That's the way it always has been, and that's the way it always should be."

Even if you have no other reason to support gay marriage -- even if you are the world's biggest homophobe, and the thought of two men holding hands makes you want to drive golf tees into your eyeballs -- you should be smart enough to know that this argument is bullshit. Marriage originated to consolidate power between families and to encourage procreation and suitable child-rearing. That's a historical fact. So if you married someone because you love them, you are violating the historical definition of marriage. If the woman in your marriage works outside the home, ditto. If you're childless. If you live far from your family. If you've ever been divorced. How would you feel if someone wanted to invalidate your marriage on those grounds? Yeah. Thought so.

2. "We have the right to amend our Constitution to define marriage."

Really? That's how it works? I feel like there are probably any number of websites that can answer this question without any fancy trial or expensive lawyers needed. Oh, here's one. "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Can you read? Because if you can, this should be pretty clear to you. The only way it could possibly be clearer is if it went on to say "Including gay people, in case it comes up in 40 years."

3. "But what about our CHILDREN OMG WTF 32783RHFJHDS!1."

This one kills me. If there's one surefire way to get a bunch of fence-sitters on board with your cause, however warped it is, it's to invoke OUR CHILDREN. What never fails to amaze me is that this argument conveniently excludes our gay children, and no one seems to notice. I guess part of it is that we don't think of children as having sexualities, although anyone who ever kissed a boy in a closet at a sixth-grade birthday party knows exactly how young you are when your sexuality begins to express itself. You might not be sexual, but you have a sexuality, or at least a sense of one. So let's really ask ourselves, what about OUR CHILDREN? What about all those kids who know they're gay, and suffer silently for years because they're afraid to be themselves? Does nobody want to protect them; are they somehow less worth it than our other children? Is that what's being implied? Because that sucks. And if your gut response has ever been to think to yourself, "But what about OUR CHILDREN," then deep-down you already know which side you should be on. You either care about our kids or you don't. Decide.

4. "There's no relationship like that between a man and a woman. Other relationships are simply different."

Ah, yes, the old "sexual deviance" chestnut. I'm a little shocked these douchebags are even trying to bust this one out. Again: I don't care about your views on homosexuality. You can think it's deviant if you want. You can think it's the express elevator to hell if you want. The same way Rush Limbaugh can think that our president is trying to curry favor with minorities by helping Haiti if he wants, and I can think that the best thing Rush Limbaugh could possibly do is choke on one of his prescription painkillers if I want. This is America, and we're all free to think and run off at the mouth about whatever we want, and if you care at all about that right, if even the most rudimentary aspects of your third-grade history class have lodged themselves somewhere in your brain, then you should support gay marriage. Because the minute we start legislating morality beyond the degree to which an individual's actions negatively impact others, we have opened Pandora's box. When your party's got a grip on the Supreme Court, this might not seem so bad to you, but when they lose it you're going to be sorry.

We have an obligation to stand by the protections in our Constitution whether or not we're thrilled with the outcome; but more than that, we have a selfish motivation to do so. When it protects us all, it protects us all. When its protections are selective, we're all in trouble.

Why I hate the HuffPo

2010-01-12T22:01:00.000-08:00

"Oh, yeah, and some shit happened in Haiti. Don't worry too much about it, everyone knows the DR is the place to vacation."

Pre-existing conditions

2010-01-10T19:27:00.000-08:00

This morning I got a delightful love letter from Anthem Blue Cross announcing that owing to my recent change of address, they're tacking an additional $70 a month onto my health insurance bill. I'm now paying $258 a month to see my gynecologist and my primary care physician once a year each. Which is funny, since I think $258 is around what I'd pay out-of-pocket for a routine appointment with either of them. So I'm effectively paying six times as much as necessary for two doctors' appointments a year. Plus two $40 co-pays. Oh, and let's not forget $15 a month for off-off-brand birth control that looks like it was reconstituted from real Ortho TriCyclen after being cut with dirty speed.

I have a lot of things to say to you, Anthem Blue Cross. The first thing I'd like to say is that you can go fuck yourself. The second is that I really, sincerely hope you are having a marvelous time jacking up my rate for no particular reason. I hope you are drinking Dom Perignon by the case, having sex with expensive, beautiful hookers and snowboarding through piles of high-quality blow, because THE PARTY IS ABOUT TO BE OVER, BITCHES. So please, enjoy these last few months of living like a king off my hard-earned dollars! Have a drink on me!

I think the part of the letter that steamed me the most -- aside from the actual number itself, which is now burned on my brain, $258, TWO-HUNDRED-AND-MOTHERFUCKING-FIFTY-EIGHT -- was blaming the increase on my move. I find it hard to believe that my moving two miles down Franklin Avenue is somehow going to cost Anthem/BC an extra $840 a year. I could understand if there were visible health hazards in this neighborhood: bullets whizzing through the air, a nuclear power plant chugging away in the backyard, a meth dealer living in the basement. But this is Los Feliz. The most frightening thing that happens in this neighborhood is parenthood.

The only reasonable justification for this increase is that Anthem/BC somehow knows about the health hazards not of this neighborhood, but of this particular apartment. Like the very real danger that in the process of stomping angrily on the floor in order to alert the downstairs neighbors that their children's tap-dancing practice sounds like someone is USING MY SPINE TO BEAT A BASS DRUM I will fracture an ankle, necessitating an expensive emergency room visit. Here are a few others that came to mind:

1. I could be bitten by Templeton and become rabid.

Templeton is a rat who lives in the vicinity of this building and occasionally uses the corner of our balcony to get to the fruit on the cactus tree out front. (To be honest, he probably lives under the building somewhere, but I'd rather not think about that, so I imagine that Templeton has a miniature rat-house much like the miniature rat-restaurant in Ratatouille, and that when he's done making a cameo on our balcony he goes home, gets in a miniature rat-bath, and relaxes with a glass of rat-Burgundy.) I've spotted him a few times, but I haven't said anything to our landlord about him. For one thing, he pretty much keeps to himself, and whenever we do happen to be on the balcony at the same time, he seems as shocked and eager to get out of there as I am. For another, I kind of have a thing about rats, because my dad is a scientist and when I was a kid he used to let me feed the lab rats that he and his fellow sciencepersons would later perform hideous acts on in the name of advancing medicine. I have always felt that I owe rats a certain debt, seeing as so many of them have died in the service of paying for my college education. So, against Henry's better judgment, Templeton and his ilk remain unreported to the powers that be.

2. I could develop some sort of rare virus as a result of mildew spore inhalation.

This apartment has a mildew problem in the bathroom. It's been an issue since before I moved in. One of these days I'm going to wrap myself up in a plastic tarp burqa-style so that only my eyes are showing, then douse the entire bathroom in mildew-killer and scrub until my arms fall off, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. It's a pretty big bathroom, and the mildew issue extends to hard-to-reach areas like the ceiling, and I have a life, so yeah. The mildew, like Templeton, has temporary clemency.

3. I could accidentally stab myself with a kitchen knife.

This is a big, old apartment, and like most big, old apartments, it often makes noise entirely of its own volition. I'll be sitting in the office doing something on my computer and hear a sound coming from the living room that could not possibly be anything other than footsteps on the wood floors, prompting me to check for an intruder in spite of the fact that the doors are locked and there's no way anyone could get inside short of kicking one of them in. That's how loud these noises are. I've gotten a lot less jumpy about this, since in ten weeks of living here none of these sounds have turned out to be anything more malevolent than the water-heater turning itself on, but I will admit to having actually prowled around holding a kitchen knife on one particular occasion, when I came home alone late at night to an empty apartment and immediately heard a weird noise coming from somewhere in the darkness. I just knew I wouldn't be able to relax until I'd put my mind at ease, so I timorously opened every closet, flicked on a light in every room, and when I didn't find anything I went out on the balcony, just to be thorough, and it was there that I realized I was holding a butcher knife in an extremely stabby posture in full view of all the traffic going by on the street. I spent the rest of the evening awaiting a knock on the door from the LAPD. "We got a call about a crazy person standing on the balcony of this apartment brandishing a weapon," they'd say, and I'd respond, "How strange! Come on in and take a look if you must, but I'm pretty sure there's no one here but me."

Singlehood manifesto

2010-01-06T16:37:00.000-08:00

Generally speaking, I like kids, especially younger kids. They're cute and perceptive and funny and imaginative. I like hearing what they have to say. I like when you're playing with a young kid and for a few minutes it's like you're a young kid too, like all the horrors of adulthood have magically evaporated and all that's left is the awesomeness of scooters or squirt guns or card tricks. So yeah. Kids have my vote.

Parents, on the other hand: not so much. Particularly here in LA. I know some parents of young children back home, and generally speaking, they're doing their best to raise little people who have fun, eat their vegetables and don't throw too many tantrums, and that's how it should be. Parenthood is treated more as an eventual fact of life there. Here, people tend to think of it as a sacred choice, and if they have made that choice they behave as if a shrine should be erected in their honor.

Don't get me wrong: I respect that parenting is difficult, especially in a big, expensive city. That's why I always defended my downstairs neighbors. When Henry and Scott moved into this apartment, the neighbors were quick to issue a sequence of rules: no shoes in the house (the clomping on the hardwood floors interrupts the children's sleep), no TV above a certain volume (same), no running the dryer after a certain hour (it shakes their floor and blah blah blah), no having a party without notification several weeks in advance. These rules were phrased as requests but reinforced as edicts, with any violation prompting a personal visit during which a polite reprimand was delivered. Throughout all of this, I defended them, probably because I wasn't actually living here. "It can't be easy to be raising two young kids in this city," I would say, or "You guys can't possibly have any concept of how sleep-deprived they must be."

Then, my very first night in this apartment, I was walking around the living room in a pair of espadrille sandals when ding-dong! It was the downstairs neighbors, wanting to gently but firmly remind us that shoes were not allowed in the house. I mention that the shoes were espadrille sandals because the shoes were espadrille sandals. I wasn't clacking around in stiletto heels or trying out my new hiking boots. I was most definitely not wearing tap shoes, a distinction that will come into play later in this entry.

It has taken approximately nine weeks for these parents to completely drain my reservoir of sympathy. The way I see it, the issue can be mapped out pretty simply: they like sleep; we like sleep. They prefer peace and quiet; we prefer peace and quiet. They pay rent; WE ALSO PAY RENT.

This should make us ideal neighbors, shouldn't it? Because you would think that if they had a problem with us throwing unannounced parties, they might drop us a line to let us know when they intend to host a group playdate involving seven children under the age of ten. That if they had a problem with us making noise when the kids are asleep (8 p.m. on), they might try to keep it down when we're asleep (until 8 a.m.). That if they didn't like us wearing shoes in the house because of the noise, they might, I don't know, NOT SIGN THEIR KIDS UP FOR TAP-DANCING LESSONS.

When I contemplate all the different types of dance in the world -- especially those practiced using soft shoes or bare feet -- and, more generally, all the quiet cultural activities to engage in, such as painting or writing a story, I cannot help but feel deliberately provoked by these tap lessons. It's like these parents are saying, "Because we made the decision to have children and you didn't, we effectively own this duplex and can do whatever we want in it. Booyah."

All right, parents of Los Angeles: you want to play it this way? We can play it this way. From now on, I will wear shoes in the house whenever I fucking want. I will not shush those using our back staircase. I will play Mario 2 at top volume on the Wii, and when I lose I will curse loudly and floridly. I will not thoughtfully use my practice mute when I play my cello. I will not keep late-night guests out of the bedrooms. And the strike will continue until you either desist with the tap lessons or move to Burbank.

In short, suck it.

Brandy Alexander

2009-12-31T10:14:00.000-08:00

Henry has this massive family tree hanging in our downstairs hallway.

That's not a very good picture of it, and the branch that actually includes Henry is off to the right where you can't see it, but you get the point. It traces his lineage all the way back to the Douglases of Scotland, who lived in an actual castle and probably, like, played bagpipes and danced on the shield of a clansman. An amateur genealogist in his family researched it and put it together, which must've taken years and years. It's a pretty amazing thing to behold, and I am still occasionally transfixed by all the tiny names, so neatly printed, mapping out all the families that were born out of the original Douglases outlined in the roots.

We don't have anything like this in my family, and my guess is we probably never will. Being a modern gal, I don't spend a lot of time contemplating "my heritage," or whatever you want to call it, but the facts as I vaguely understand them are these: my dad's side arrived in the US as immigrants relatively recently, and my mom's side had a pretty hardscrabble life in rural Texas. I don't know how much it would be possible to research my genealogy given these obstacles.

I got to thinking about this sort of thing because of my grandma, who will be 90 this year. She's my last living grandparent, and the only one who I've had a chance to get to know as an adult rather than as a spoiled kid or recalcitrant teenager. For the longest time it seemed like she would outlive us all. She's still in pretty incredible health for someone her age: she's a little hard of hearing, but certainly not deaf; she has arthritis, but doesn't take anything for it; she moves pretty slowly, but still refuses to let me bring the car around when we're out shopping. "I don't mind walking," she always says.

But for the first time, over Christmas, I started to really notice her age. She repeats herself a lot, tells you the same stories over and over or asks you questions you've already answered a couple of times. And there are more disturbing, less expected, gaps in her memory as well. She's been playing pinochle practically her entire life, and a couple of years ago she was still so sharp at the game that she could anticipate how every trick would play out. But this past holiday things were a little different. She asked me a couple of times whether it would come out right if she dealt the cards in fours. She must've dealt for pinochle thousands of times over the course of her life. It's hard to explain how sad that made me.

It's not shocking that a woman her age is having these issues, of course, but I've never really experienced it personally. Heart attacks and strokes took my other three grandparents at much younger ages, when they were still very hale mentally if not physically. It's kind of clear at this point that, barring some unforeseen event, my grandma's body will outlast her mind, and what's most incredible to me is that she can remember every detail of a trip she and my grandfather took to California in the sixties -- how long they stayed in LA, the fact that they visited the Painted Desert and saw the swallows at San Juan Capistrano -- but not how to deal pinochle. I feel acutely aware of the fact that there isn't much time left for me to hear about her life. The little tidbits she doles out in the course of casual conversation are like artifacts in a museum, so remote are they from the way we do things now, and they really drive home the point that her ninety years have encompassed a millennium's worth of changes for women. After she and my grandfather were married, she spent weeks practically apprenticed to an older Hungarian woman from the neighborhood so she could learn to make his food, paprikas and kiflis and solona. She never wore pants for anything but housework until the forties, when she went to work while my grandfather was fighting in World War II; the women in the office started wearing them after they learned that the men would try to look up their skirts. In those days women could be fired for acts of moral turpitude such as sleeping with a black man. And then my grandfather came home from the war and told her to quit, and she never worked outside the home again.

Here's a picture from when we visited the Hungarian church she and my grandfather were married in. Now a very small Pentecostal congregation has its services there; the surrounding neighborhood is a wasteland of burned-out houses and empty lots. If you look closely, you can see that the windows are boarded up, and there's some graffiti near the bottom. Who knows how much longer it will be there.

Bookworm, part 1 of an indefinite series

2009-12-15T14:06:00.000-08:00

I wish I wrote more in this blog about books, because they are my central preoccupation aside from, you know, my actual occupation. I usually read several at a time, and I am a very avid re-reader. Right now, I am actually reading one book, have two on deck, and am looking to purchase a fourth in the near future:

ACTUALLY READING:

I never used to read biographies, but then a couple years ago this great 700-page biography of Edith Wharton came out, and obviously I ate it alive. I followed it up with one of Emily Post ("Mistress of American manners, daughter of the Gilded Age") and another of Edna St. Vincent Millay. So I guess this is my first biography of a man or of someone whose name didn't start with E. It is pretty fascinating, both in terms of illuminating his relationship with Gordon Lish and if you like to read or write short fiction. I'm currently right around the middle, where Carver and John Cheever are drinking themselves to death (literally, in Cheever's case) as writers-in-residence at Iowa. Highly recommended if not exactly cheerful holiday reading.

ON DECK:

That second one will require no explanation if you have read "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" and "The Girl Who Played with Fire." I got turned on to the Millenium trilogy a few months back when everyone I knew was suddenly reading "Tattoo," and after devouring it and "Fire," I found myself unable to wait for "Nest" to come out stateside in May 2010. So Henry, armed with the knowledge that a UK edition has been available since October, took it upon himself to acquire it for me as a Christmas gift. I've always been a pretty big fan of crime fiction, and if you're not, there's a chance you might not like these books. They're written efficiently with a minimum of style, but the stories are riveting, and it's nice to read genre novels that have female characters because they're interesting, not in order to stuff the book full of smutty sex scenes (I'm looking at you, Dean Koontz). I've also learned a lot about Sweden, the books' country of origin, and to this day when I try to Google anything on my Palm the first search query that pops up is "How many kronen in a dollar?"

Now that I am so far into the Carver biography, I am also itching to get this:

I have most of these collections, but not all, and I don't have any essays. But most importantly, I don't have the original versions of the stories from "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please" or "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." There are the Carver versions and the Lish versions, and I know the Lish versions like the back of my hand; but if there's one thing I've learned from this biography it's that Lish made a whole fuckton of changes, some motivated more by a desire to class up the originals than anything else (he was fiction editor at Esquire in those days, which was evidently a very different type of magazine than it is now). So yeah. I need this book.

Stay tuned, because I have a feeling my holiday travels will eat through most if not all of these, necessitating a whole new lineup for the new year. Hurrah!

I'm gonna make a lot of money and quit this crazy scene

2009-12-09T09:27:00.000-08:00

I'm back. I know it's been a long time. I have lots of excuses, but they all basically boil down to WORK IS EATING ME ALIVE. Should I say that again? WORK IS EATING ME ALIVE, IT IS SHARPENING ITS INCISORS WITH A SPECIAL DENTAL FILE AS WE SPEAK THE BETTER TO GRIND ME INTO SMITHEREENS. This is a good thing, really. There's no such thing as too much work in economically bleak times such as these. And I was actually doing fine with all of the work until the month of December hit. December, for me, is all about distractions: looking up gifts for people on the internet; buying myself gifts, like a new pair of black boots, which I can conveniently rationalize by telling myself I need them for my upcoming ten days in the Midwest; baking things; wrapping things; decorating things; and generally existing in a pre-Christmas state of delight and anxiety more appropriate to a five-year-old who is worried Santa won't come this year because she lied about brushing her teeth that one time and oh my god Santa I promise I will never ever do it again.

I am trying to do lots of new and good things with my life, like volunteering with a certain Very Hip Nonprofit in Echo Park. This may actually mean I have lost my mind. I felt like I had lost my mind last weekend, returning from a week in Chicago late Thursday night only to slog through a twelve-hour workday on Friday, then get up early Saturday morning to attend volunteer training. Why? Why add yet another obligation to a schedule that's already teetering on the brink of being unmanageable? I don't really know. I guess because I am sick of people like me with our money and our privilege griping about the way our country treats those less fortunate while we spill our Cabernet Sauvignon all over our Anthropologie clothes. Ask not what your country can do for you, etc. But that doesn't quite cover it. It's also a reflection of my annual Christmastime Guiltfest, which commences the moment my mom asks me what I want this year, intensifies when I buy my brother a certain present that shall remain nameless on the off-chance he's discovered this blog, and reaches its apex when I buy my boyfriend another certain present that shall remain nameless, but let's just say that all these presents rock, and I am acutely aware of living in a bubble of good fortune and joy wherein anything I could ever want to receive or give is attainable, short of a robot pony that will also clean my bathroom.

My response to stress has very clearly been influenced by women's lifestyle magazines. I would say that between the ages of 13 and 23 I read eighteen tons of women's lifestyle magazines. Did I stop because I realized that the articles are all just recycled editorial whitewash designed to frame advertisements for hair products? No. Did I stop because these magazines have a negative impact on female body image and perpetuate senseless stereotypes about what it means to be female? No. Did I stop because I finally emerged into the real world and realized I was never going to make enough money to buy anything featured between the covers of a $4 glossy? DING DING DING.

Still, the default response to stress instilled in me by all this productive reading remains: BUY SHIT. "Retail therapy," I believe it's called. See what some marketing genius did there? It's like therapy, but instead of getting better, you get a ton of crap you don't need.

So, you see, it isn't my fault that I spent $120 on a single sweater. I wasn't going to buy it. I was just going to try it on. If this sounds illogical to you, you have clearly never been in an Anthropologie dressing room. They've done something to the mirrors in those dressing rooms, I swear to god. You go in as yourself, but when you look in their mirror, you see Kate Moss peering back at you -- not even current coked-out Kate Moss, but cute nineties Kate Moss, the one who looked like the mythical girl next door except hotter. So I picked up this sweater, thinking I'd just see how Kate Moss looked in it.

It should come as no surprise to you that she looked great. But then she started whispering things to me. That's the problem with Dressing Room Kate Moss, she can't keep her fucking mouth shut. "If you owned this sweater," Dressing Room Kate Moss said, "you wouldn't feel like a person who spends all day tearing her hair out in front of a computer wearing pajamas. You would feel like a new media rockstar. Ethereal yet cerebral. Capable of leaping tall blocks of HTML in a single bound." And she didn't stop there. "You work so hard," Dressing Room Kate Moss said. "Don't you deserve to feel good about yourself? Don't you deserve to drop $120 on a sweater?"

So, great. I bought the fucking sweater. Big whoop. It was retail therapy. Don't those two magical words erase all rational arguments about credit card debt, savings accounts, stratospheric Sprint bills? I wore it twice, and both times I got many compliments in spite of the fact that I no longer looked like nineties Kate Moss once I left the magical softly lit Anthropologie dressing room. It was a nice sweater.

A week later I was folding some freshly dried laundry when I came across something odd: a children's sweater, about the right size to fit my downstairs neighbors' two-year-old. I puzzled over this kids' sweater. Why would a child wear a cowlneck sweater? I thought to myself as I tried to fit the neck of it over my ARM and FAILED. And then it dawned on me to check the tag. And there, imprinted upon it bold as can be, were those godawful words: DRY CLEAN ONLY.

For a moment I was so mortified I couldn't move. My first thought was to hide the body, which I did, quickly, shoving it in a dresser drawer behind some pants. My second thought -- and I admit this with no small degree of shame -- was to BLAME HENRY. Why? I don't know, because isn't that what I'm supposed to get out of those whole cohabitation deal, getting to blame my boyfriend for all the dumb shit I do? No? What'd you say? Intimacy and love or something? Get out of here, this is not the blog for you.

Fortunately, the idea that it must have been someone else's fault quickly evaporated, leaving me alone with the knowledge that I might as well have gone to the ATM, taken out six twenties, and started a small fire. Which probably would've made me warmer on the whole than the sweater itself, which was made of loosely knit yarn and didn't have much to offer in the coverage department.

Perhaps you're wondering, at this juncture, what the first two paragraphs of this entry have to do with these DJ-from-Full-House-type antics. I basically just wrote them to let you know that I may be the exact kind of idle twit who purchases expensive things and then ruins them, but at least I am simultaneously trying to do something good for the world. The operative term, of course, being trying.

New home

2009-11-15T22:07:00.000-08:00

I am not quite ready to live in such a big apartment. I've lived in studios twice during my career as a renter, and both times I found myself surprised at how such a tiny space can become so delightfully cozy. When you live in a studio you know every floorboard, every corner, every odd little nook where you can stash something you don't have room for. Of course, you have no choice but to know these things, since a decision as simple as purchasing a new iPod sets off a chain of displaced items so extensive that before you know it you're trying to fit your kitchen table in your bathtub. "It'll be a little muggy, but I could eat here," you're saying to yourself. That is how well you know your apartment.

This apartment is different, not least because Henry had already been living here for two years by the time I moved in. Sometimes I still feel like an occasional overnight guest, wandering through someone else's rooms and puzzling over someone else's things; other times I am stunned by some new vortex of storage I had never paid attention to before, like the built-in drawers next to the bathroom sink or the linen closet in the hallway. Space, space and more space. It's an embarrassment of spaces.

After living for a year and a half in a glorified walk-in closet, I am finding that I don't know how to live in a real place, complete with such trappings of civilization as a front hallway or a one-car garage. There are so many places I could take off my shoes or plug in my phone, so many surfaces upon which to abandon a water glass or my keys. Like most eco-conscious individuals who also happen to be women, I am in the habit of leaving a single light on when I go out at night to frighten away potential intruders, but in this apartment I have to really strategize: a light in the bedroom might scare off those considering entry via the back door, but from the front it still looks like no one's home. And then there's the cleaning. Oh, god, the cleaning. You'd have to be a real idiot not to realize that cleaning a 1300-square-foot apartment will be five times as hard as cleaning a 250-square-foot place; I am that idiot, and I feel totally overwhelmed whenever I contemplate attempting to get this place up to the rigorous standards I maintained when I was living in a shoebox.

I would also like to discuss the rapists. You know how you can check that website to find all of the registered sex offenders in your neighborhood? Perhaps you are thinking that because I am a good liberal, I would never do such a thing, as it constitutes an invasion of privacy and everyone deserves a chance to start over and I don't believe in the death penalty because I think criminals can often be rehabilitated and I should seriously try to walk it like I talk it. To which I can only say: ha. Yes, I am a good liberal, and yes, I do feel torn on the subject of whether there should be a public online database tracking the locations of those who have committed certain crimes. But that doesn't mean I'm not going to look at it. I mean, it's there.

It turns out my new neighborhood is crawling with registered sex offenders, especially below Franklin, where just two blocks south of my current address it is a veritable registered sex offender fiesta, with some registered sex offenders living two or three to an address. I guess it makes sense for registered sex offenders to live together, seeing as no one else would ever want to live with them, but I don't like imagining the conversations Registered Sex Offender A has with Registered Sex Offender B after a long hard day at the office. "Man, that was a long hard day at the office. Ever feel like pouring yourself a strong drink or raping someone after a day like that?" "Totally, man, totally."

I am sure the registered sex offenders have better things to do than attempt to break into second-story apartments, but you know how sometimes when you're home alone you get the heeby-jeebs for no reason? Well, I'm home alone right now, and I have the heeby-jeebs. And thus this long, rambling, complaining-about-nothing entry explains itself.

Econoline blues

2009-11-04T09:26:00.000-08:00

I decided to hire movers out of laziness. I've moved the old-fashioned way plenty of times, getting together a bunch of friends and loading everything into our various cars to haul from the old place to the new place, and here are some observations I'd like to make about this strategy: it always takes longer than you think it will; you always wind up with bruises, scrapes, and a suspicious knot in your back from when you failed to lift from the knees; and it makes all your friends hate you, especially if you happen to have a substantial collection of hardcover books. Also everyone I know drives a tiny fuel-efficient car, so there's no way to efficiently transport the three or so pieces of furniture I own that can't be taken apart with an Ikea-issue hex wrench. And even those that can be taken apart with a hex wrench are never quite the same when you put them back together, have you ever noticed that? You always lose the one little bolt that turns out to be vital to the structural integrity of the item in question, and because the bolt came from Sweden, you can't find one at the hardware store to replace it.

I've hired movers before. This was back in fall 2006, when I had just been thrown out of the Castle Grayskull by the landladies from hell and had broken my left big toe in a related incident, the related incident being my exhausted, stressed-to-the-max hunt for a new place, during which I stubbed the toe in question running up some concrete steps in an apartment building at Fountain and La Brea. Have you ever broken your big toe? I hadn't, and I felt pretty humiliated by the whole thing, let me tell you. I mean, here you have this tiny bone, probably one of the tiniest in the human body, and yet it's essentially impossible to walk without it. You're hobbling around, wincing with pain every other step, and everyone's going, "Oh my god, what happened?" And you're like, "I broke my toe." And then they try valiantly not to laugh in your face while you silently wish for a Vicodin the size of a golf ball.

So. Yes. Even though I was broke as hell and facing down a $10,000 damages charge from BLUE SKY PROPERTIES of LOS ANGELES CALIFORNIA who I personally recommend you DO NOT RENT FROM IF YOU VALUE YOUR SANITY, I decided that as a cripple, I had license to waste money on movers. And let me tell you, it was better than a day at the spa. In they came, with all their hand-trucks and rolling carts and blankets and packing tape, and out went all my stuff, easy as that. They were efficient, careful, friendly. They had a system worked out for my clothes, my blankets, and all the other odds and ends that don't quite work in boxes, and they transferred me from one place to the other in two hours.

I had different movers on Sunday. Not intentionally. I would've used the old movers again in a heartbeat, but I lost their number, and with no way to track them down, I resorted to calling up one of those local companies that leave business cards on your windshield when you're parked on the street. I should've known there was something weird about them when the guy asked me to meet him at the Walgreen's at Sunset and Western to hand over my deposit. But a lot of things are weird in LA. I decided not to overthink it.

The appointed time on Sunday came and went, and no one showed up to move me. After an hour and a half I called the number from the business card and left a message, and a few minutes later someone named Brian called me to let me know that the team of movers I'd hired was not going to be able to make it today. (Would anyone have let me know if I hadn't called? Jury's still out on that one.) "I'm about an hour outside the city, but I tell you what," he said. "I'll pick up a couple of my guys and we'll come move you. How's that?" He said it as if he was doing me a tremendous favor.

Two hours later, Brian and his guys showed up . . . IN A VAN. It was a Ford Econoline much like the one I learned to drive on when I was 15. We used to take it on family vacations to Michigan because it had so much space in the back. I guess Brian and his crew thought I would be able to fit all my worldly possessions into four suitcases and a golf bag.

"Your building doesn't have a parking lot?" Brian asked me in shock when I explained that they'd just have to double-park the van on the street. Apparently mine was the only parking-free building he had ever seen. You know, here in LA. HERE IN LA. He continued to grill me on the building, which was apparently an architectural disaster where moving was concerned, and meanwhile I was just thinking over and over again, That's a van. They are going to try to fit all my shit in a van. A VAN. "Man, this looks like a lot of stairs," Brian would say, and I would think VAN VAN VAN. Or he'd say, "You mean your apartment's all the way in the back? Oh, man," and I would smile and nod pleasantly. VAN VAN VAN.

I let Brian into my apartment -- which, I once figured out using a tape measure, is under three-hundred square feet -- and the first thing he said was, "Wow, this is a lot of stuff." Let's see: bed, desk, papasan chair, kitchen table, dresser. It sounds like a lot of stuff, I guess, until you start thinking about the items not on that list. No couch, for instance. No coffee table. No bookcase. No TV, no entertainment center, no electronics of any sort, really. Of course god only knows what would've happened if I had had a couch, considering they came in a VAN.

It was now 4:30 and getting darker out by the second, and I was eager to get everything over to the new place so I could accomplish some degree of unpacking before diving into the workweek first thing Monday morning. I asked Brian how I could help. He said by moving things. So me and Brian's two guys, who did not seem to be US citizens in the strictest sense of the term -- not that I am hating -- did all the moving while Brian talked on his cell phone, pausing intermittently to tease me about my accent or to call me mannish. For helping. Which he asked me to do. In spite of the fact that I was the one paying them.

Somehow they managed to get almost everything in the van, not without a steady dose of hand-wringing and guilt-tripping from Brian over how much stuff I had. I took the rest over to the new place in my car, along with one of Brian's guys. It was a pretty stilted conversation, considering he knew no English and all my Spanish comes from Pitbull lyrics and reading the ads on the back of buses:

Me: Mexico?
Him: [Spanish Spanish Spanish] Guatemala [Spanish Spanish Spanish].
Me: Ah, Guatemala. Familia Los Angeles?
Him: [Spanish] Familia [Spanish] Guatemala. [Spanish] Familia [Spanish] Los Angeles?
Me: Familia Indiana.
Him: Ah! Indiana.

Over at the new place, it was Henry's turn to play the role of the third mover while Brian and I settled the bill. Unloading everything was a considerably quicker process, and soon we were waving goodbye to Brian, his guys and their van. It wasn't quite the stress-free move I had been hoping for, but you can't have everything in life. I got a live-in boyfriend, my very own office space and a kitchen where I can cook anything my little heart desires. Brian got a nice chunk of money, which I sincerely hope his guys saw the majority of. And the van lived to fight another day.

Only in LA, man.

In which I say Ajax a lot

2009-10-19T17:26:00.000-07:00

There are many incomprehensible mysteries in the world of adulthood, and the act of changing apartments, a seemingly simple task, makes me contemplate just about all of them. Like the age-old Mystery of How One Little Person Can Accumulate So Much Shit, which I faced down over the weekend when I decided to soft-launch the moving process by culling unnecessary items from my apartment. I kind of thought living in a studio might mitigate this process, seeing as there's nowhere to store anything not strictly vital to my day-to-day life. But it turns out even studio apartments can conceal one or two strange vortexes of dust-bunny-coated miscellany. Like a subwoofer. When I was in college my brother bequeathed to me this subwoofer the approximate size and weight of an anvil, and I have lugged that piece of shit from apartment to apartment for six years now thinking one day I might use it again. Except I have never used it, because its entire purpose is to turn innocent and enjoyable music into the type of sinister thudding that makes you feel like your spine is being vibrated into jelly. I keep forgetting I have it, because every time I move into a new place I shove it under my bed, and I only see it again when I am preparing to move out, at which point I think, "Oh yeah! My subwoofer! I might use this at my new place. I'd better take it with me."

Suck it, subwoofer. You shall haunt me no more.

Another eternal mystery is that of the Mugs Full of Useless Change. I used to only have one mug full of useless change, but at some point it started to overflow, so I dispatched another mug to solve the problem, and then it overflowed, and the cycle continued ad infinitum until last weekend, when it dawned on me that I only had one mug left for actual use because all of my others were filled with pennies, nickels and dimes. I finally emptied all of them into a Target bag, which I then took to Albertson's, where I stood in front of the Coinstar machine for at least thirty minutes watching in rapt fascination as it tallied four years' worth of change. I had 1500 pennies. FIFTEEN HUNDRED. Smaller but equally ridiculous quantities of nickels and dimes brought the total cash value of my coin collection to $45. This was actually a little disappointing. I had imagined a ludicrously high number, like one of those TV commercials where an attractive yuppie couple with two picturesque children discover they can get to Bora Bora using nothing but the change that has accumulated between their sofa cushions. Thanks a lot, media.

And then there's the most baffling species of mystery of all: cleaning. How one apartment can get so fucking grungy is way beyond my comprehension. And I'm a one-woman freakshow of obsessive-compulsive tics who cleans all the time. But there's cleaning and then there's cleaning, if you get my drift; there's cleaning of the sort where you Windex your mirrors or mop your kitchen floor, and then there's cleaning of the sort where scrub your baseboards with an old toothbrush or use a special vacuum cleaner attachment to get cobwebs off your ceiling. I'm an old pro at the first kind and a blushing ingenue at the second. Many people solve this same problem by hiring a professional to do their housecleaning, but my feeling is that if I cannot clean a mother-f-ing studio apartment by myself then I deserve to live in my own filth.

However, I would like to get at least a little bit of my deposit back, meaning I need to develop some sort of strategy for getting this place into a condition that would not alarm the Centers for Disease Control. What I'd really like to do is fill the entire apartment with a combination of warm water and Clorox and let it soak for a few hours, at which point all the dirt would lift off effortlessly. Am I right? Except I actually tried this strategy on my bathtub (effective cleaning of bathtubs being another great mystery of the universe, as far as I am concerned) and it didn't work for shit. Nothing works on bathtubs, have you ever noticed that? Somehow professional cleaners and moms can keep bathtubs white and gleaming for eons, probably using some kind of secret formula that can only be discerned using a mishmash of numerology and the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci, but we average persons can scrub until our knuckles are raw and our fingernails are caked with Ajax, and we'll barely make a dent. Yes: Ajax. I also tried that. I left it on the tub for so long the structural integrity of the building was probably threatened, but nothing happened, except now some areas of the tub have blue Ajax stains, and scrubbing them with Ajax doesn't work. So I've actually made things worse, and I have nothing to show for it but some suspicious-looking abrasions on the backs of my hands that are probably so loaded with lethal chemicals that by the time I'm thirty I won't be able to tell my left from my right.

This is the type of thing I am thinking about while other people are out there in the world creating great works of art or unlocking the secrets of nuclear fission. Maybe I need to start volunteering.

Yes I can

2009-10-15T17:04:00.000-07:00

The other night Hadley and I were sitting at a sidewalk cafe in Los Feliz village per our usual Thursday night routine when our friend E. and a girl went strolling by. This is something I like a lot about Los Feliz. A disproportionate number of people I know make their homes there, and it's a very walkable part of town, a rarity in LA, so the odds of encountering someone you know when you're out and about are pretty high. It makes Los Feliz feel more like a neighborhood, in the old-fashioned sense, than anywhere I have ever lived, and I am really looking forward to moving there in a few weeks. I have this image of myself walking over to the bookstore on Vermont on a bored Wednesday evening, perhaps wearing some sort of knit hat, that is quite pleasing. While it will be hard for me to leave behind the paradise that is Beachwood Canyon, I have to give Los Feliz the edge in terms of Things to Do That Make Me Feel Like a RomCom Heroine Living in Some Fictitious Idealized Version of the West Village. (In case you're wondering, this is a factor the Mapping LA project has yet to include in its stats.)

E. and his friend stopped to chat with us, during the course of which discussion it was revealed that he lives right around the corner from what is soon to be my apartment. "Really?" I said. "I am moving here, in, like, three weeks!"

"No kidding," he said. "Why are you moving?"

You should know that later this same evening, we ran into another friend of mine, S., who used to be my neighbor back when I lived in Melrose Place II. He asked where I was living now, and I said I'd be moving to Los Feliz soon and purposefully did not give a reason. As we return to the thread of dialogue I have been recounting, you will quickly understand why:

"I'm moving in with my boyfriend," I told E. and the girl.

FIREWORKS AND ANGELS was essentially the response to this news, from both E. and his friend -- a friend who, it is worth noting, I had just met for the first time. "Oh my god! Congratulations! That's amazing!" And then: "You did it!"

I have to tread lightly here, because I don't want to seem ungrateful for the warm response I always get when I tell people about this. It's really nice that everyone has been so enthusiastic and supportive of the idea.

But it is damn near impossible for anyone to be on the receiving end of this news without responding in a way that implies that I have somehow pulled something off. I understand that these responses are often given thoughtlessly in the moment, but it's sort of like how you tip thoughtlessly until you do a stint as a waitress, and from then on you always tip at least 20%, even if your server spits in your food and calls you a dirty whore. If ever in the future someone announces to me that they are planning to cohabitate, my response will always be a measured, "That's great! Are you excited?" because I have lived through this experience of announcing, endlessly announcing, and I am getting so tired of hearing "you did it" or some variation therein that I don't care anymore about the fact that it is probably uttered without any particular intention. I AM SICK OF IT.

I am willing to bet a thousand dollars that when Henry tells people we're moving in together, they don't say things like "You did it." It's just the first thought that pops into everyone's minds with women, because we're women. You know? We're women, so naturally this is all we've ever wanted in the world, and we've probably plotted and schemed and cajoled to get it, and now we have it, so it's like we've won something. Si se puede! I am just missing that feeling of accomplishment everyone seems to expect from me. This is a natural next step in me and Henry's relationship. I am excited about it, but not because I feel like I've actually done something. In true me form, I have yet to do anything. I don't even have any boxes. Come to think of it, I'm not entirely sure how this move is going to happen two weeks from now. Just that it is.

I think the real accomplishment is living with someone, not moving in with them. The transfer of items is simple enough, as tasks go. But Henry is unwittingly proceeding headfirst into a social experiment of epic proportions. Were it a reality show, it would be called "Can You Live With That Bitch?" So truly, if any congratulations are owed, they are owed to him. For being courageous to the point of insanity. And also for making it this long with yours truly as a girlfriend (four years come November!). And, in general, for being the best ever.

Meditations in an emergency

2009-10-12T20:48:00.000-07:00

I'm at a work conference in Arizona. I go to these a few times a year. My first one was when I was 24, a dizzy, confusing 48-hour trip to San Francisco during which I relished every opportunity to use my corporate card and, the first night, got so drunk that the second day was a hungover blur. I was a year from the magical line of demarcation that seemed to sweep through my life at the age of 25, delineating kid stuff from adulthood.

After a few of these things you get the hang of it. Your back and feet will always hurt. A glass of white wine at the end of the day will always taste like liquid gold. You learn new and exciting things, like that almost every room service meal comes with a tiny bottle of Tabasco sauce, or that the front desk will squirrel away your luggage all day if you have to check out in the morning but aren't leaving until 6 p.m. At the nicer hotels, when you dial the operator the person answers, "Yes, Miss V____, what can I do for you?" At this hotel they also do it in the restaurant, which is supposed to be the last word in gentility but comes off kind of bizarre, like the waitstaff has a secret dossier with your ATM pin code and deepest darkest secrets in it.

You learn to take mental notes on the topography, landmarking the halls of the hotel for future reference (at my first trade show I got lost coming out of my very first session and had to be directed to my room, which was just an elevator ride away). You learn to take everything with you in your laptop bag, because you will never in a thousand years make it back to your room during the day, no matter how fast you sprint. You learn to bring a box of granola bars for when your blood sugar hits a precipitously low level, and you learn that the hotel staff will bring you a glass of ice water or a coffee anytime you ask for it at any point during the day.

What I never get used to is being treated like someone fancy. Someone who, for instance, has $240 a night to drop on a hotel room in the middle of the desert. Here at this hotel everyone bows and scrapes every time I walk by. The room service guy went out of his way to ask me if every little aspect of my stay had been to my liking -- his words, not mine. Earlier, coming inside, I encountered a man wiping the glass doors clean. Not only did he get out of my way -- it would've been easy for me to choose another door and bypass him entirely, leaving him to his business and me to mine -- but he also opened the door for me and held it, bottle of Windex still clutched in his hand. It makes me wonder what kind of person stays in a hotel like this. Or what kind of person is expected to stay here.

This hotel is also "Native-American-inspired" to a degree that borders on the offensive. The whole thing is done up from the outside like an adobe, with red concrete shaped to look like mud clinging to timbers that are actually just more concrete. On the inside, the paintings are of Kokopellis frolicking against brightly colored backgrounds. Actually, only the male Kokopellis frolic; the female Kokopellis carry things, like women should:

If all you can tell from that poor cell phone photograph is that the art is UGLY and in NO WAY Native American, that's all I need you to know.

The "Native American" stuff doesn't end there. The doors are done in Southwestern geometric patterns. The palette is one of sandstone and sticks. Most annoyingly, instead of numbering the conference rooms, which would clearly be too easy, the hotel has named them after Pima words, so I spent all day wandering aimlessly looking for K'AI and ALEKU and who knows what else until I wanted to vomit. Translated, these words mean things like "gila monster" and "blizzard," some helpful signs informed me. I was really soaking up the Native American culture. Especially when I saw two actual Native Americans, the first non-white people all trip. Of course, they were members of the hotel cleaning staff, not patrons, but I'm sure they feel right at home here.

It's not all bad. There's a deck area outside the hotel bar with big cushioned chairs gathered around deep firepits where you can warm yourself against the cool desert air at night. It would be a lovely place to hang out with someone, if I had someone here to hang out with. That's the other thing about business trips: no other form of travel can make you feel so achingly, crushingly lonely.

Female troubles

2009-10-06T09:37:00.000-07:00

ALERT: This entry is going to be all about periods.

You can feel free to throw rotten vegetables at your computer screen when I admit this, but I never used to get cramps. I probably went eight years without ever experiencing the slightest indication that my period was on its way. Which actually kind of sucked. Every other girl I knew had a solid two-day window during which her lady organs were loudly proclaiming, "Period coming! Stockpile your black underwear!" But not me. Once in a while I would fake cramps to get out of something -- here I am thinking specifically of the volleyball segment of my freshman gym class, because the thing about volleyball is that if you haven't learned to spike by a certain age, you are probably never going to, and as a result the whole experience was so humiliating that to this day I won't even play a round of beach volleyball because of the post-traumatic stress. So cramps came in handy there. But until I was 22, my actual experience of cramps was limited to hearing about it from other people. Aside from the usual annoyance and occasional mortifying incident wherein I was out with a group of guys when I realized my period had started and had to make up some insane excuse for getting to an all-night convenience store in the thirty minutes or so I had left before I visibly bled through my pants and as such had no choice but to go home, draw a warm bath and slit my wrists, things were pretty rosy.

Why am I being so graphic in my description of all this as to use the words "bled through my pants"? Because to this day, I don't think guys get exactly how traumatizing any given period has the potential to be. Don't get me wrong: things have improved with time. I no longer feel the need to behave like an MI6 agent when I need tampons, for instance. And once, a couple of years ago, Henry and Matt decided that they had some pressing questions about tampons and were by god finally going to get them answered, which led to a pantomime demonstration of how the cardboard applicator works that I think all of us will remember for quite some time. This definitely counts as progress.

But I have my doubts as to whether any guy I know could handle the sheer organizational challenge of menstruating. Like the time Henry told me that if there were a birth control pill for men, he would happily remove the onus of contraceptive responsibility from my shoulders -- a proposal to which the only honest response is "Bitch, please." Like I'm going to turn over the administration of a pill that has to be taken every day at the same time to a guy. I'm sure there are dozens of psychosocial reasons that birth control remains largely the responsibility of women in our culture, but number one on the list has to be the plain and simple fact that dudes can't handle the pressure.

So it would go with periods, if guys got them. The very trappings of our day-to-day existences would have to be permanently adjusted to accommodate menstruation, because there's just no way any but the most organized of men would remember to bring tampons with him every time he left the house. There would be baskets of tampons hanging from streetlamps. Or pants would be sold with stylized red blotches pre-printed on the crotch, and they'd become all the rage. There would probably be a federal subsidy for Midol. It makes me sick just thinking about it.

Anyway, I seem to dimly recall that I was originally talking about cramps, which I never used to get. Then, at the age of 22, I went off birth control, because I had just been through a traumatic breakup and saw no possible future for myself but one of using aromatherapy candles as a substitute for love and accumulating a collection of cats. At this point everything I thought I knew about menstruation went out the window. After two years of being strictly controlled by artificial hormones, my body went rogue, giving me the adolescence I never had in the form of cramps, headaches, periods that lasted ten days, periods that came early and periods that arrived so late I was practically standing in line at Planned Parenthood by the time they finally meandered down the pike. Oh, and my skin went to shit in a way it never had even when I was a teenager. It was a magical time.

Eventually I was driven back to the pill -- which was probably the Ortho corporation's secret plan all along -- and most of these issues subsided. But I still get cramps once in a blue moon. It's kind of a double-wallop when I do, because I never expect to, and honestly, I'm just not conditioned to the pain. I always think I'm dying of a rare kidney ailment or experiencing the world's least productive stomach troubles. And then at some point -- generally when putting on a bra and realizing my boobs feel like rocks -- it dawns on me that oh yeah, I'm getting my period in a couple of days. That's why it feels like someone is using my uterus as an accordion.

All of which is my long-form way of saying I don't feel very good. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaah.

Apt angst

2009-09-25T10:23:00.000-07:00

As Project Cohabitation approaches blastoff (t-minus six weeks), I am looking forward to the move for many reasons. These include romantic crap that you probably don't want to hear about as well as other, more pragmatic factors:

1. Storage space

I live in a studio apartment where space is at a premium, and have been forced to develop several innovative storage solutions to get by. These include keeping my toilet paper in the kitchen and my shoes in a dresser drawer. Okay, two dresser drawers. I have a lot of shoes because I am a woman, and according to the seminal television program Sex and the City, that's what we women do. We drink cosmos and buy shoes. Shoes shoes shoes.

2. Recycling

I currently live my life as a recycling criminal. My landlord, the man who once suggested I boil some water for a bath when the hot water was out for 30 hours, is too cheap to pay for recycling service, so every Thursday night, under cover of darkness, I sneak my recycling into other peoples' bins. The state of California considers this a punishable offense. Personally, I feel I should be rewarded, preferably with some kind of generous tax break or vodka subsidy.

3. Proximity to children

I like children. Again, because I am a woman, and that's what we do, we buy shoes and like children. Living in an urban area where the demographic skews strongly toward the young and coked-out, I don't get a lot of opportunities to be around children. But Henry's downstairs neighbors are in possession of two live, heartbreakingly adorable kids. After I move in I have every intention of launching a nefarious campaign to become their favorite person ever. I am not afraid to use bribes.

4. Peace and quiet

Living in the back of an old building on Beachwood with nothing but the canyon wall behind me, you would think I would have all the peace and quiet my black little heart could ever desire. To which I can only say: Ha. Murphy's Law being what it is, I had the ill fortune to move in directly across an alley from the luxurious private townhome of the Couple From Hell. It's bad enough that they're both shouters and that their open windows are literally fifteen feet from mine. Not content merely to torture me with the mundane details of their everyday existence (it is not uncommon for me to bolt upright in the middle of a nap, panicked because it sounds as if a burly music industry lawyer is standing at the foot of my bed screaming at me about WHAT HAPPENED TO ALL THE BROWNIES HE BOUGHT), they also insist on entertaining at least one night a week. Their guests tend to be shouters as well. Some of them also play the guitar. Then the Annoyingtons hired contractors to come in and retrofit their townhome with central heat and air, and guess what? Even the contractors were shouters. So here I am Tuesday, minding my own business, listening to some Chopin nocturnes and trying to concentrate on polishing off a 2500-word article on something so boring I won't even bother explaining what it is, when suddenly I am jolted from my journalistic reverie by one of the contractors shouting, "SO THEN I SPENT ALL OF CHRISTMAS DAY IN THE SHITHOUSE THANKS TO THAT SHIT MEXICAN TEQUILA." This was followed by a round of guffawing so violent I thought one of them was going to have a heart attack.

You know how you move into an apartment, and it has its flaws, as all apartments do, but you learn to deal with them, to appreciate the good and ignore the bad, because it's where you live, and there's no point getting worked up every time your neighbors' friend tells a bigoted joke at the top of his lungs and everyone at their cocktail party applauds like he just issued a thoughtful and well-reasoned argument for the economic viability of universal health care? This system collapses entirely when you're within six weeks of getting the fuck out of there. I suddenly hate everything about my twee little canyon aerie. I hate how the door on the medicine cabinet doesn't shut all the way. I hate the crappy sequential wiring between the closet and the bathroom, which requires that I turn on the closet light before the bathroom light will work. I hate the kitchen floor, which, no matter how often I clean it, always looks disgusting. I hate the fact that I get spiders. I hate the tiny fridge, which is not deep enough to accommodate my 14" casserole dish. I hate the stove -- it's vintage, which sounds adorable, but you know what? Vintage is for clothes and accessories, NOT KITCHEN APPLIANCES USED TO PREPARE FOOD.

How have I survived in this shithole for a year and a half? More importantly, in what backwards universe is this glorified walk-in closet worth $1,000 a month in rent?

Get me out of here!

Naptown rida

2009-09-22T10:07:00.000-07:00

Growing up in Indianapolis, a common refrain amongst myself and my friends was, "There's just not anything to do here." Before we had cars, the most exciting thing a Friday night had to offer was the possibility of being dropped off by your parents at Clearwater Crossing, which we all talked about like it was a carnival of sinful pleasures. When, in fact, it was a strip mall.

As you can see vaguely in this photograph, Clearwater distinguished itself from other area strip malls by having a Barnes and Noble, which meant there was somewhere to hang out after 9 p.m. We all started drinking cappuccinos at the age of 14 to validate our time in the Clearwater Barnes and Noble. We'd sit in the cafe area for hours, flipping through magazines and generally making a nuisance of ourselves while slowly but surely consuming a single small latte loaded with so much sugar it barely even counted as coffee. The store employees just loved us.

After we all turned 16, there were other places we could go to purchase a single caffeinated beverage and hang out for seven hours, so we'd rotate between those locations, the most popular of which was a Perkins on the north side that my friend Jared and I went to so often we started referring to it as "the bitch." At the bitch you could get a "bottomless" pot of coffee for a dollar. We regularly paid our tab using small change scrounged from the floorboard of my car. People loved us there too.

Those of you who grew up in big cities may find this lame. As a teenager I was extremely preoccupied with how lame it all was, especially after seeing the movie Go, in which the teenagers wear interesting clothes and go to raves and make out with Timothy Olyphant in the stairwell of a fashionably dilapidated apartment building. Then I went to college and found out that on the lame scale, Indianapolis was actually pretty low. At least we had coffeeshops to lounge around in, strip malls to terrorize. Many of the girls I went to college with grew up in places where there was literally nothing to do at night. Many of them turned to grain alcohol for entertainment.

Over the past few years I've come to a startling discovery, which is that I actually like grown-up Indianapolis. The bars are cool and dive-y, the vodka tonics are cheap, and everywhere you go there's a parking lot. Also, people my age can and do actually buy houses there, houses with features including basements and yards, and then they live in them. Shocking, but true.

It says something about life in LA that the things I used to hate about Naptown (get it? because it's so boring?) suddenly seem like assets instead of liabilities. Yes, my adolescence bore a certain resemblance to the Richard Linklater classic Suburbia, although it was much less interesting. But in retrospect I think that was probably a good thing. Growing up in the burbs forced me to develop a sense of humor in order to pass the time, and it engendered within me a mistrust of the so-called American Dream that has, if nothing else, resulted in a lot of great drunken conversations about what it all means. It also spurred me to seek increasingly bizarre experiences later in life by means of compensation, without which I probably never would've known this girl or gone skinnydipping in the Charles (before you object you should know that it was someone else's idea and that there was beer involved) or any of the other marginally edgy things I've done over the years. Had I been going to raves at a tender age, there probably wouldn't have been any need.

All of which is to say: thanks a lot, Indianapolis strip malls with your smooth poured concrete sidewalks and your patient, patient employees. And your plentiful free parking spaces, which I would totally make out with. Hey, I once swam in the Charles. I have no hygiene-related fears.

Fashion victim

2009-09-07T22:12:00.000-07:00

I do a lot of online shopping. It's because I'm stuck at my computer working all day, and at least once an hour something happens that makes me think to myself, "Why am I putting myself through this? Oh, right. MONEY." Then I go straight to anthropologie.com and spend five minutes soothing myself with a fantasy version of my life in which I wear nothing but flattering blouses, weigh 10-15 pounds less than I do now and spend my days peacefully tending to plants in terra cotta pots.

All of it's a joke, not least the part about the plants. I am a great lover of nature in all its forms, but I kill plants. Not on purpose; it just happens. Bring a plant into my home, and within twelve hours of breathing the same oxygen as I do, it will die a horrible death. True story: once, when I lived in Boston, my friend Tim left town for a week. In his absence, he entrusted me with a bamboo shoot in a small flowerpot. "You don't really have to do anything with it," he said. "Just water it once a day and leave it somewhere sunny." So that's what I did. I put it on a sunny windowsill and I watered it once a day, and when he came to retrieve it at the end of the week, it was dead. I still have no idea why. Spite, maybe.

I used to actually purchase things online, which I am pretty sure is the point, but lately, when it comes time to punch in my credit card numbers, I find myself hesitating. Turns out the trip to retrieve my wallet from my purse is just long enough for pragmatism to kick in, that little voice inside my head that whispers "Do you really need another flowy summer dress that you are rationalizing to yourself by thinking you will wear it to the beach, when in fact you already own two flowy summer dresses for every day you've spent at the beach this summer, none of which you have actually worn because when you do go to the beach, you always just throw on sweatpants?" It has some good points, this voice.

The fantasy version of one's life is a powerful thing. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the complicated relationship I have with the beach. See, here's what actually happens when you live within driving distance of the beach: You wake up hungover on a Saturday morning an hour later than you meant to, and you have seven minutes to get dressed, pack your stuff and mainline Excedrin and ice water before your friend picks you up. You throw a blanket and some books in a bag, then stand in your shower so you don't get sunscreen all over the place as you hastily apply it to your naked body. Then you put on your swimsuit, which gives you fresh occasion to contemplate how much weight you've gained, as well as how greasy your skin looks slathered in Coppertone SPF 15. You are immediately compelled to cover as much of your body's surface area as possible. Because a canvas tent would be hard to get through the car door, you go with a t-shirt and pajama pants, and arrive at the beach an hour or so later looking like a sleepy hobo.

Don't get me wrong: it's great living so close to the beach. But it's not living on the beach, a key distinction that my brain deals with by going into Insane Fantasy Shutdown Mode whenever it sees a flowy white garment.

"Oh, hi there! You surprised me. I was just traipsing along these rocks in a dress made of Kleenex and angel feathers, thinking about how swell it is that I wake up in the morning looking like I've been worked on by a concentration camp of stylists for three days. After a bracing round of mimosas and some Belgian waffles with strawberry butter over at the clubhouse, I'll retire to my private oceanside cabana for a brief beauty rest before splashing joyously in the water all afternoon without smudging my mascara. Then it's back to the manse, where a team of Grecian men will fan me with palm fronds while I eat chocolate ice cream and watch Mad Men on DVD. You could be me, Cat. You could be me."

Here is another area with which I am currently struggling:

"What's that you say, darling? They're out of espresso beans at the corner market? Sigh, quelle tragedie. I will just have to wrap my oversized oatmeal-colored sweater a little tighter around my slim, yet healthy-looking frame on this chilly Paris morn. Perhaps later we could sit at a sidewalk cafe all afternoon reading Gertrude Stein and having a lively discussion about world literature and important issues. In the meantime, let's spread some Nutella on the remainder of last night's baguette, shall we, mon cher?"

I eventually managed to get my compulsive online shopping under control the old-fashioned way: low self-esteem. When I want to buy something, I just remind myself that I will never look as good wearing it as the model does. Works like a charm. I may hate myself, but my savings account loves me so much that little hearts and rainbows pour out of my computer screen everytime I log on to check my balance. One day soon it may even propose.

You can't stop me from writing more stuff about health care reform

2009-09-06T17:22:00.000-07:00

Here are a few arguments against health care reform that I am tired of hearing.

1. "I don't want my tax dollars going toward abortions/euthanasia."

First of all, it's insanely dissonant to argue against legislation that has the potential to save tens of thousands of lives because it will support already legal personal decisions like abortion. The government is supposed to represent shared values, and while our country is clearly split on whether abortion is morally wrong, I'm pretty everyone agrees it's morally wrong for a health plan to drop cancer patients mid-treatment, effectively sentencing them to a horrible death. Secondly, if the sanctity of human life is such a huge issue, then why is no one upset about the $310 billion our government spends annually on defense contracts? Just wondering.

2. "I don't want to pay for someone else's health care."

Okay. Do people not understand how health insurance works? Here's what happens: every month you write a huge check, which becomes part of a large sum of money available to everyone in your risk pool. The longer you remain healthy and spend $200 a month to go to the doctor once or twice a year, the more your money goes to paying for other peoples' health care. According to the information I get from Anthem BC, I am currently spending $2500 a year for about 500 bucks' worth of health care, meaning $2,000 of my money is being spent on someone else's health care every single year. The only difference between this and government-subsidized health care is that government-subsidized health care would be much better regulated. Meaning, for instance, that my money would not go toward such charming uses as awarding health plan employees massive bonuses for finding ways to deny their customers lifesaving care:

Do you like paying for that?

3. "Universal health care is socialist."

Leaving aside, for a moment, the question of what exactly is so evil about socialism, everyone who says this seems to have conveniently overlooked the fact that the health care reform plan is calling for a public option. OPTION. If you like paying through your nostrils so that your insurance provider can turn around and drop you when you actually get sick, great. Go to town. Have a wonderful time with that. I will cross my fingers that you are never so unfortunate as to have an actual problem. Me, I'll go with the government. At least they're theoretically accountable to the public they serve.

4. "The government shouldn't be allowed to touch health care because it is a bloated, incompetent confederacy of dunces. The free market provides the clearest and truest path to efficiency through capitalism and competition."

I am so tired of hearing about the so-called "free market" that the next time someone uses those words in conversation with me I might gouge out my own eyeballs just so I can feel something other than the sharp pain of recognizing that in spite of all our privileges, we remain a country of drooling morons. Let's be clear: what we have in the United States is not a free market. A free market is one that exists without intervention or regulation from the government. If you think that's what we have going on here, then you haven't watched the news since 1874. Managed care never would've gained a foothold without the help of federal grants and loans, meaning it has never been and will never be an example of the free market at work. The government has always had a hand in this country's health care infrastucture, and to claim at this juncture that reform represents inappropriate federal intervention is beyond ludicrous.

Also, just speaking generally, I am sick as fuck of people telling me about "my tax money," as in "I don't want my tax money going to blah blah blah." We are extremely fortunate to have been born in the United States, and we have all -- by "we" I mean my immediate peer group -- benefitted tremendously. We have all been educated for free since we were six, have all gone to college, have all drawn state unemployment when we couldn't find work, have all had our mail delivered six times a week and had clean drinking water pumped into our homes for free and have generally lived like kings compared to 85% of the world's population. And what do we do with our privilege? We grow up, get a little money of our own, and then whip around and act like jerks. Nothing we have would be ours if generations before us hadn't relegated a percentage of their incomes to the public good, and yet, when it's our turn to step up to the plate, suddenly we're stingy. You don't like living in the US, paying taxes to support other US citizens' lives and livelihoods? Then why don't you move somewhere where you won't have to, like Syria? I hear it's lovely this time of year, what with the foliage and the autumnal human rights violations and all.

I pay taxes too. Believe me, I pay taxes. And when I am writing the government two massive checks every quarter, I am wishing my money went toward something useful like helping someone get the chemo treatments they need to survive breast cancer, instead of being funneled down Lockheed Martin's gullet so we can buy Morocco a fleet of F16 fighter jets.

Sorry this entry wasn't funny, but this whole debate really fucking depresses me.

Domesticity

2009-09-02T10:31:00.000-07:00

One of the many bizarre hobbies I've developed in my twenties is laundry. I used to hate doing laundry, hate it with the fire of a thousand suns. In college I would put it off until I had used up all my underwear -- not just the good underwear, but the crappy fallback underwear as well. You know what I'm talking about. The underwear with holes. The underwear with no elastic left in the waistband. The period underwear (sorry, guys, but it's true, and any girl who says it isn't is lying to you). The underwear I had long since outgrown, but kept holding onto so I wouldn't have to admit to myself how fat my ass had gotten. The three pairs of skanky sex underwear that were ludicrously uncomfortable, meaning I'd spend the whole day trying to surreptitiously remove scratchy, stiff lace from my butt crack, only to have it inch right back in there five minutes later. (Hot! Lingerie is SO HOT.)

But times have changed, and now I derive some kind of weird, fifties-throwback satisfaction from doing my laundry. As well as a myriad of other domestic tasks. I like to bake, and there's something really enjoyable about scrubbing my kitchen sink until it shines. The only explanation I can offer for the emergence of these strange habits is the fact that I am not expected to have them. Had I been raised in the forties with no greater expectation of myself than to become a housewife, I would probably hate doing laundry. I'd be sitting around reading Sylvia Plath and smoking long, skinny cigarettes while my husband dressed our children in burlap sacks.

Engaging in modern womanhood has the perverse effect of making me nostalgic for a time I never lived in, namely the one wherein all a gal had to do was graduate high school and possibly spend a couple of years in a secretarial pool before a man would come along and do everything for her for the rest of her life. I'm sick of working sixty hours a week, sick of savings accounts and quarterly tax payments and IRAs and vehicle maintenance and trying to mount my power strips on the wall but they keep coming out because I don't have the right size plastic anchors. I want someone else to handle all that for me while I vacuum the living room wearing a pointy bra.

I'm kidding, of course -- mostly -- but it is true that contemporary womanhood is no walk in the park. The expectation has changed, but has it really changed for the better? We're no longer expected to become good wives and mothers; now we're expected to become good wives and mothers who also have time-consuming careers. And not just any time-consuming careers, but time-consuming careers for which we are paid less than our male colleagues in spite of doing a better job, and then when they screw something up it gets blamed on us for not holding their hands through every step of the process like a kindergarten teacher showing a small child how to tie his shoes. Not that I am speaking from personal experience or anything.

Once, at my old job, I got a mediocre evaluation from my boss. He had started the job three months beforehand, and one of the first things he did was take a long, hard look at his new responsibilities, then pass 75% of them to me. My workload doubled overnight, but I tried to keep my chin up, comforting myself with the notion that come evaluation time, he'd at least suggest to our evil corporate overlords that I get a big fat raise. This, of course, is not what happened. Instead, he gave me average or below-average marks in every sector of my job performance. When I asked him why, he said, "Frankly, Cat, you're doing a great job here, but I'm concerned that you're too ambitious."

TOO AMBITIOUS! Of course! Here I was, so busy doing three-quarters of his job for a third of the pay that I forgot to temper my ambition enough to be deserving of a raise. An obvious rookie error. I probably don't need to say what I am about to say, but here it is anyway: IF A MAN IN THE EXACT SAME POSITION WAS ACTING "TOO AMBITIOUS" HE WOULD BE PROMOTED IN A HEARTBEAT.

But I was talking about laundry -- I think -- and here is the point I would like to make: laundry is a quiet, individualistic, rewarding task. Which I find to be the case with a lot of housework. You don't need to have a conference call with seven different people to make sure you're on-message when you make a cherry tart. You do not have to answer to the edicts of an editor when you mop your kitchen floor. The only approval that is required of your laundry performance is your own. I always give myself great marks for both tank-top folding and delicate fabric air-drying, and one day soon I hope to be promoted to having my own washer and dryer in my apartment. Ah. I feel better just talking about it.

There were times when I was so lonesome I took some comfort there

2009-08-31T17:14:00.000-07:00

Today I read the funniest, most priceless thing ever:

http://jezebel.com/5347269/teenage-wasteland-your-old-diaries-are-awkward-awe+inspiring/gallery/?skyline=true&s=x

I LOVE this. I kept an extremely detailed, gossipy and revealing journal throughout high school; aside from the fact that the writing is totally pathetic, it would've made Edith Wharton proud. It's nice to see that I'm not the only one. Last winter I discovered that those 650-odd pages of blathering had not, in fact, been tossed in the garbage sometime circa 2001, as I had previously believed; rather, they'd been sitting in a huge box in my parents' basement, buried under a ton of stuff. I spirited them back to LA, where I promptly placed them in another box buried under a ton of stuff. Because they're mortifying. MORTIFYING. I couldn't bring myself to get rid of them, but that didn't mean I wanted to look at them.

This afternoon I was inspired to finally dig them out, and I just spent about two hours laughing so hard I thought I was going to have a brain aneurysm. Here's a little taste of my fourteen-year-old wisdom: "Life is an endless cycle where you like the same guys over and over and never do your math homework." Out of the mouths of babes!

I also uncovered the below gem, which I created on the occasion of my junior prom. I scanned it into my computer, then used Photoshop to excise some of the key details, many of which involve people I still know and love deeply. But you get the gist.

Some of that might be pretty hard to read, so here's an annotated guide:

In the upper left-hand corner, you'll see a drawing of my date, next to which I have depicted a ruler indicating that he is "973 ft" tall.
In the upper right, I have made clumsy sketches of my shoes, purse and jewelry. I have misspelled the word "accessories." I have also noted that my jewelry is gold. I think I remember someone warning me at the time that gold was "out," which may be why I elected to clarify the situation. I was such a non-conformist.
See the drawing of me in the dress? Let's be clear: I never looked anywhere near as cute as that drawing. Though I do like that I added, "AAAAAH! Where's my arms?" to the sketch.
All the stars with writing in them are examples of my very non-conformist sense of humor. One of them says "Don't you wish you just stayed in and rented movies? NC PROM 99." Another says, "You WILL have fun. NC PROM 99." SUBVERSIVE!
There is an Ani DiFranco quote somewhere on here. I won't say where or what it is.

Finally, I would like to note that I no longer spell the word "girls" with a z on the end. Though I may be worse off for it.

Full circle

2009-08-24T09:15:00.000-07:00

Remember when you were 13 and The Gap was, like, the shit? It was 1995 (assuming you're the same age as me, and since this is my very own tiny little slice of the internet, I get to make that assumption) and the nineties had finally come into their own, style-wise. Everything was clean and white and Helvetica-y. There was nothing cooler than a basic white t-shirt paired with jeans, and the only acceptable place to get that basic white t-shirt was at The Gap. For $19.99. Assuming your average income resembled mine -- up to $40 a week in babysitting money --you were priced out of The Gap, but that didn't mean you couldn't wistfully stare through its windows like an orphan in a Dickens novel, longing for the overpriced white t-shirt that would solve all your problems and wishing you had cool parents who would just buy you whatever you wanted instead of trying to teach you some retarded lesson about money management.

How I remember those days. While my parents were attempting to enforce good habits and impart meaningful values, other girls' parents were out buying them shit, because they actually loved their daughters. I wasn't loved. Once in middle school my mom told me that I didn't need any makeup because I was so pretty naturally. On multiple occasions throughout my adolescence, she even had the gall to suggest that clothes were not the most important thing in the world and that I would get further in life with my brain than with my fashion sense. AS IF. Can you even imagine? It's hard to believe the neighbors didn't call Child Protective Services.

In spite of all these obstacles, I managed to grow up into a relatively functional adult, and I am generally pretty sensible about money for reasons surpassing my understanding. (Just born lucky, I guess!) However, as the years go by I do tend to spend a little more on things than I used to. Like moisturizer. I buy this expensive moisturizer. It costs $60 for a four-ounce jar, and even though it makes my skin look like it was licked by angels all night long, I feel pretty bad about it, like I should just be buying the $12 kind and donating the difference to the poor. What a load of liberal crap, right? But see, these are the morally bankrupt values I was raised with. I bet if you called up my parents right now and asked them about this, they would probably say that the underprivileged deserve food and shelter more than I deserve to have shining, chemically exfoliated skin. And they call themselves Americans.

For similar reasons, I held off for a long time on buying expensive jeans, the kind some clever marketing individual has labeled "premium denim." I was fine buying my jeans at American Eagle well into my twenties. I didn't need premium denim. Until I did. Because "premium denim" is actually Secret Fashion Code for "jeans that will make your ass look great against all the genetic and metabolic odds," and you can't put a price on that. Well, actually, you can. Nordstrom certainly has. Their current market price for a great ass is $186. And last summer I broke down and paid that price for a pair of adorable, ludicrously comfortable Hudsons that completely restored my fragile self-esteem. I was going straight to hell, but at least I would look awesome when I got there.

Except then my Hudsons fell apart, which is, I suppose, to be expected when you wear a pair of jeans every single day for ten months. The buttons came off the back pockets; holes appeared in the knees; the zipper developed a kink. It was a horrible loss, as you can probably imagine, and if you've ever had a drug addiction you'll know what happened next: I had to get more. More premium denim. All the premium denim in the land.

I went back to Nordstrom in search of another hit, and this time I lucked out, scoring an awesome pair of skinny Marc Jacobs jeans on sale for just $80. After alterations, I had achieved premium denim nirvana for just under $100. But the feeling wasn't the same. The high wasn't as euphoric. It was beginning to dawn on me that maybe a great ass wasn't worth $100. The shameful feelings were creeping back into my mind; I was wondering if I couldn't, in fact, find a cheaper pair of jeans that would make me just as happy, if I wasn't, in fact, indulging in the same kind of senseless Western hedonistic overspending that engendered our country's current economic crisis. And then the buzz wore off entirely. The top button of the jeans came loose after just two months. The cut went out of style. This was, as they say, rock-bottom.

Desperate and fiending for a fix, I went back to the Grove on Sunday, prepared to spend another $200 at Nordstrom if that's what it took to make the bad thoughts go away. But a funny thing happened on the way to massive credit card debt. I passed by The Gap, whose wares last attracted my attention circa 1998, and noticed they were promoting a new line of jeans that cost only $40. I wandered in. I tried on the first pair that caught my eye, and they actually fit. Not only that, but they looked good. I approached the register tentatively. Was I, a self-respecting LA hipster-yuppie hybrid, really about to buy a pair of jeans in generic khaki hell?

Well, you heard it here first. Fuck premium denim: The Gap is officially back. That's $146 for the poor and one great-looking ass for Cat. It took fifteen years, but I have officially come full circle.

Giga what

2009-08-11T09:38:00.001-07:00

I really need a new computer. Which sucks because I just got this computer last June. It is, admittedly, not the world's nicest computer; in keeping with my Midwestern no-frills ethos, I have never upgraded to a Mac like most of my friends and continue to purchase heavily discounted Dell laptops that weigh fifty pounds and can burn holes in human flesh. They all have computers that, in a pinch, could probably run the entire Department of Defense, whereas I have a computer that, in a pinch, might make a good doorstop. Though I'm not entirely confident of its capabilities in that arena either.

I have had so many problems with this computer that my home office now more closely resembles Doc Brown's workshop in the opening scene of Back to the Future. I am jury-rigged to the nth, and if any one cord comes loose from its position it can take me hours to recover. This is doubly annoying because I actually spent extra money on this laptop in hopes that it would last me a while. I got all the gigahertzes and everything. You know, the gigahertzes. Those are what you need to have. Or maybe it's the gigabytes?

Well, it's giga-something, and maybe that's my problem: I don't really understand what I personally need out of a computer to make it last. Except, apparently, that I need to not use it. That's basically what the Dell people told me when my hard drive crashed in April, that I am using the computer too much. They told me that again when it started overheating every forty minutes. They also informed me that just because it's called a "laptop" doesn't mean I should actually hold it on my lap, as this could result in burns. Burns. It's pointless trying to argue with them, because the only English they seem to know comes from the script they use in an attempt to make my tech support call last four days.

Everyone keeps telling me to get a Mac. What they fail to understand is that I am constantly emitting some kind of electromagnetic death ray that interferes with the functionality of technological devices, irrespective of their manufacturers. You've never seen anyone burn through a computer faster than I can. Ditto an iPod or a cell phone. True story: once I catapulted my BlackBerry into a four-hour fritz merely by picking it up. Another time I touched a button on my alarm clock and all the numbers disappeared, never to return. When I lean toward my computer to type, I can actually hear it screaming in a tinny, mechanical voice, No! Not again! I don't know how much more I can take HAGSSKDJFA1111111111111121222111111111111121

It's understandably difficult for me to get enthused about new technology purchases, knowing that I will have just enough time to fall in love with them before they begin to malfunction. Oh, sure, I could buy a new computer. At least I'd get a tax write-off out of it (bling bling). But why bother, when I know the heartbreak that lies ahead? I feel the same way about the Palm Pre. I'd be inflicting unnecessary suffering on a beautiful, innocent little smart phone that just wants to serve. Ugh. I am a monster.

At least the vodka-infused watermelon took the edge off

2009-08-09T20:53:00.001-07:00

We have got to get some new entertainment for women. Lest you think I am making that statement from some ivory tower of cultural superiority where I am holed up with nothing but the writings of Helene Cixous and an old Roseanne DVD, let me assure you that women's media knows no more avid consumer than yours truly. I've read the canon: both Bridget Jones books, The Devil Wears Prada, The Nanny Diaries, even Bergdorf Blondes, which lasted me exactly one LA-to-Dallas flight and was left in the seat pocket for the next bored person to enjoy. In the past year I have seen Confessions of a Shopaholic in the theater, Bride Wars and He's Just Not That Into You via internet bootleg, Made of Honor via Netflix instant access and, most recently, a screener of The Ugly Truth.

Before you undergo a fit of projectile vomiting, let me assure you that The Ugly Truth is not being nominated for any awards, although seeing "For Your Consideration" emblazoned across the bottom of the screen during the vibrating underwear scene is the only thing I can imagine that could've possibly heightened our collective disgust at what we were watching. (For those of you who've never been bestowed with the blessing from on high that is the screener DVD, the scenes that the studio finds most compelling are always marked "For Your Consideration" to remind you that you are witnessing some seriously Academy-Award-deserving shit. In the best of cases this is annoying; in the worst, it's just hilarious.) No, our screener came to us via one of my friends whose boss happens to be the head of a certain movie channel; assuming he would probably not be hosting a gathering of six cynical feminists with a collective weakness for vodka-soaked watermelon and cheese dip over the course of the weekend, she borrowed it for her own use.

It would be hard to overstate the awfulness of this movie. It made Confessions of a Shopaholic look like Citizen Kane. Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy my viewing experience. The beauty of the screener is that it allows you to see, gratis, the same movie people all over your city are paying up to $14 a ticket to watch, but instead of being forced to sit in a respectful silence more appropriate to Schindler's List, you can say and do whatever you want. It being a hot August night in LA, my friends had their living room windows thrust wide open, and from the street it probably sounded like we were watching some kind of extremely disappointing sporting event. Every three seconds we were screaming shit at the screen, punctuating our nonverbal utterances with such exclamations as "This is humiliating" or "I think my soul just died." During one particularly excruciating montage, during which Katherine Heigl advanced her relationship with her generically hunky neighbor via such milestones as receiving a hideous bouquet, one of my friends said, "I'm going to write a movie." Why not? The Ugly Truth certainly makes it look easy.

What kills me about The Ugly Truth is it was written by three women, all of whom deserve to have their vaginas revoked in perpetuity, and produced by Katherine Heigl herself, who by all rights should be rocking back and forth on a grassy knoll at Forest Lawn right now, hysterically mourning the death of her career. But they all made a killing off that piece of shit and are probably sitting on the patios of their stylish Hollywood Hills midcentury homes I write, drinking gin gimlets and congratulating themselves on a job well done.

Generally speaking, my issue with rom-coms is that they give young girls false expectations that reverberate dangerously later in life. I myself have expended plenty of energy on overcoming the notions that such seminal films as Sleepless in Seattle or Father of the Bride implanted in my brain at a tender, impressionable age. But good lord, at least those movies offered wishes worth fulfilling. According to The Ugly Truth, the best a driven career woman with impeccable hair can hope for these days is a dalliance with a misogynistic asshole that doesn't even result in mutually satisfying sex. I never thought I'd say this, but bring back Carrie Bradshaw, yo.

Hot child in the city

2009-08-07T12:36:00.000-07:00

It's a curious facet of life in LA that almost no one has air conditioning. I mean, the nicest comment about this city that anyone can ever seem to muster is "Can't beat that weather!" But in spite of year-round sunshine, most buildings here have never been updated to include central air. I know mine hasn't. It was built in 1915, and although much of its charm derives from how little it has been altered over the years, there is nothing charming about spending July through November so lacquered with sweat that your fingers slip meaninglessly off the keyboard when you try to type. It really interferes with my impression of my apartment as the type of living space you might see featured in a romantic comedy. Oh, sure, it's nice having the original cabinetry in the kitchen, and I love the old, scarred hardwood floors, but I'm pretty sure they've never made a romantic comedy in which the heroine spends her days with a ziploc bag full of ice cubes shoved down the front of her bra.

I love how people who don't live here are always saying things like, "Sure, it's hot, but it's a dry heat." Like that matters to me when I'm operating on two hours of sleep per night (it really cools down between four and six a.m.!). Listen: I'm from Indiana. I spent four summers working outside as a lifeguard on days when the temperature and the humidity matched each other perfectly, resulting in heat indexes well above the hundred-degree mark. I understand the distinction between dry heat and humid heat, and here's the brilliant insight I have to offer on the topic: PEOPLE LIVE INDOORS. It really doesn't matter what kind of heat you're dealing with when you can set your thermostat to keep your apartment at a brisk 67 degrees night and day. So you can take your dry heat and shove it.

I mention all this because we're undergoing something of a heat wave here in LA. It started a few weeks ago, when I left my apartment at 9:30 a.m. to meet the girls for brunch and got a sunburn on the twenty-foot walk to my car. I did what any reasonable person would do when faced with that kind of weather and went to the beach all day, returning only when the sun was well over the yardarm and it was possible to roam the streets without flash-frying my skin to the consistency of an onion ring. And while I would gladly live out the rest of my summer on the patio of a Malibu beachhouse, savoring the cool ocean breezes and taking a dip in the water whenever necessary, first I need someone to buy me one.

Until I find a rich husband, I have to combat the heat the old-fashioned way, namely by drinking 80-plus ounces of water a day and using a powerful box fan to move the hot air around my apartment, ensuring it gets into every nook and cranny. I also have the option of sleeping at Henry's place. He has a really top-of-the-line apartment with lots of modern and exciting features like central air and a dishwasher. It is almost like being back in America.

I know I could go out anytime and buy myself a nice window AC unit. Many people do, and I don't doubt that they go on to live happy, productive lives in spite of being giant pussies. But I don't really feel like coping with the massive electrical bills such appliances generate. Even as I was basking in the cool, crisp air, I would be hearing the clink-clink-clink of pennies draining from my bank account, forming a massive pile of money that could've been better spent on something I really need, like sundresses. I figure if I get enough of them, I can use them as insulation. And at least the stores are air-conditioned.

Oh Lord, here I go

2009-08-06T20:45:00.001-07:00

One of the many marvelous things Facebook has brought to my life is the opportunity to learn the political leanings of every single person I've ever met since the third grade. I am thinking specifically here of these idiotic polls I keep seeing such as "Would you vote for Sarah Palin in 2012?" which many people I know, regardless of political persuasion, feel compelled to respond to, often appending a three-paragraph mini-essay explaining their stance as if anyone cares. I often feel more irritated by this grandstanding coming from the liberals of my acquaintance. With the conservatives I can at least laugh, but with the liberals it's like, oh, really, you think she'd be a bad choice? YOU ARE A GENIUS! CAN I TOUCH YOUR ARM?

I am also surprised to see that many of my Facebook friends consider themselves libertarians. Nothing makes me chuckle bitchily like strident libertarianism. I hate to single people out, but one "libertarian" Facebook acquaintance of mine recently posted the following:

I guess according to this person's definition, "libertarian" means "ignorant douchebag." The entire article is based on a White House page asking constituents to forward along any disinformation they hear about health care reform so Obama's team can formulate a response. Yes, you read that right: A RESPONSE. THE HORROR. God forbid we should live in a society where people talk to each other about issues. Big Brother is indeed watching, and this time he wants to hear your opinion. Quick! To the bomb shelter!

I have a stick -- nay, a firewood-style log -- up my ass about so-called libertarianism because I feel it is often the last resort of people who cannot be bothered to fully educate themselves on the issues, but still want to sound smart. It's not that there aren't plenty of legit libertarians out there, it's just that so many people who call themselves that never seem to have any idea what they're talking about. It's not that I think I deserve some kind of medal for being a registered Democrat. Frankly, these days Dems seem to have all the leadership skill of a three-year-old with a broken train set. But at least they're more consistent than the opposition, who want to protect unborn children but oppose providing in any way for all the underprivileged children we already have; who believe in small goverment unless it doesn't suit their purposes exactly, in which case, would you like a side of patriot fries with your Patriot Act?; who think the institution of marriage should be preserved according to Christian values, but studiously ignore the most Christian value of all: helping the poor; and who will absolutely one-hundred-percent lower your taxes unless they need to declare an unjustified war on an already impoverished and environmentally decimated nation, in which case you should give up the money you would've used to pay down your credit card debt so that Halliburton shareholders can have a warm-and-fuzzy feeling in their tummies this quarter.

It doesn't surprise me that the Republicans are accusing the president of being a socialist because he backs universal health care. What does surprise me is that "libertarians" feel the same way. Their supposedly beloved free market has had its way with American health care, and the result is one of the most inefficient systems in the world. We're the richest country on the planet, yet we rank 37th in terms of our health care, and we have the worst infant mortality rate of any developed nation. If these libertarians are so independent in their views, so much more educated on the issues than everyone else, why can't they read the writing on the wall? THE FREE MARKET FAILED US.

But maybe I myself am being too strident. After all, who really cares about the value of human life these days? What difference does it make if a few thousand poor people in this country live or die? What really matters is whether I will be taxed an additional 2%, thus being forced to engage in such cost-saving measures as not having that third glass of champagne or shopping off the sale rack. That is clearly the real issue.

Dogitis

2009-08-05T09:51:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I think about how weird it is that, biologically speaking, my body has been ready for me to have a baby since I was 13. While I was spending hours on the phone deconstructing the facial expressions my first real crush had given me in bio class, my body was going baby baby baby. While I was experiencing my first French kiss (in a swimming pool, holla!) my body was going baby baby baby. While I was trying to hide how grossed out I was by my more sexually precocious friends' early experiments in handjobs, my body was going baby baby baby. My body was way ahead of its time. It was the Leonardo DaVinci of reproduction.

As a civilization, we're always getting further and further from our biological destinies. For my parents' generation, it was considered standard to get married right out of college, and many of my friends' moms had their first child at 23 or 24. Still a full decade from when their bodies started going baby baby baby, but nothing like what's going on today, a mere generation later. I don't know anyone who expects to have a baby before 30. I see myself getting going on that business in my mid-thirties, meaning my body will have been futilely clamoring baby baby baby for TWENTY YEARS while I have been engaging in such irrelevant pursuits as having a career and shit. You can imagine how frustrated my body must be. I mean, here it is, working its ass off to produce a viable egg right on schedule every month, and meanwhile I'm force-feeding it birth control, sending it a clear message every day at 4:30 on the dot: FUCK OFF. But all that hormonally driven maternal instinct has to vent itself somewhere. And this is my theory as to why I want a dog.

I know, I know. I sound like one of those idiots who use biology as a rationale for all confusing human behavior. You know, "Men cheat because they have a biological need to spread their seed," etc. But leaving that aside for the moment -- also leaving aside how gross the word seed is -- let's talk facts. I want a dog. Henry doesn't. I want something to love and feed and take care of and cuddle with. Henry does not want something he will have to love and feed and take care of and cuddle with. When you break it down logically, his stance doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense, considering he already has to love and feed and take care of and cuddle with me, and I am nowhere near as worshipful in return as a dog would be. For instance, a dog would never give him a hard time because his bathroom contains mildew advanced enough to form its own government. Have you heard of a revolutionary product called Tilex? is the kind of sentiment you would never hear a dog uttering.

For a long time I thought I was immune to dogitis. Other people would talk about getting a dog like it would magically solve all of their problems, and I would smile and nod supportively, but inside I would be thinking, THIS PERSON IS A WACKO. Because dogs are animals. They do not feel anything remotely resembling human love. And I know that.

Except then Jess got a dog, and I swear to God, that dog and I have a relationship. She often spends the day with me when Jess is working, because Jess has a real job involving long hours in an office, while I have a fake job involving mid-afternoon naps. At first having the dog around was just an amusing diversion, an excuse for getting up from my desk a few times a day to take a quick walk around the neighborhood. Then something insidious happened. I started attributing all kinds of emotional and logical responses to the dog. I realized I was falling in love with a creature who can spend hours entertaining herself by chewing on an old hiking sock. If that isn't biology, there must be PCP in my drinking water.

Ghost ride the Prius

2009-08-01T11:40:00.000-07:00

When I decided to move to LA a few years back, I confused a lot of people in my life. Not because I'd made the decision capriciously after two glasses of wine, which I had, or because 3,000 miles was a long way to travel, which it was, or because I'd be a long long way from home, which I am. No, they were confused because I had overlooked San Francisco. "It just seems like it would make more sense for you," was the sentiment many people shared. I heard all about the smog in LA, the crime, the traffic, the collective anti-intellectualism. "Why would you want to move there?" everyone said. "What about San Francisco?" They always said the words San Francisco as if upon uttering the city's name the clouds would part, a single beam of sunshine would strike my face and a chorus of angels would sing, "Cat! Move to San Francisco!"

But move to LA I did. For one thing, I'm just too stubborn to let go of an idea once I've persuaded myself it will work. For another, everyone said similar things about Boston, and I hated Boston. Why would I want to move from one enclave of well-educated, pretentious yuppies to another? To shop in the overpriced bookstores? To pay the ludicrous rent? To learn about all the different varieties of North Face zip-up? (So many!)

I've lived here for four years and people are still asking me what I like so much about LA. I've given up on trying to formulate a worthy answer, so here's my new answer: I just love smog! Traffic is amazing. I'm so glad all my friends are breast-implanted bimbos with bleached blond hair who want to be actresses or models. I am learning to express myself without the use of multisyllabic words and haven't read a book since the summer of 2005. That's right: I moved to LA and my entire personality changed overnight. That's why I like it here. Mystery solved!

Okay, clearly I'm a little defensive about my adoptive city. I just don't get what the big whoop is about San Francisco. I've been a few times, and have appreciated the lovely scenery and the public transportation and the bohemian history. And I think it's very clever how all the non-Asian minorities have been segregated across the water in Oakland, where they can't interfere with white twentysomethings' right to smoke pot and drive up rent prices, but can produce plenty of music about the Bay Area for the white people to annex as their own. We have not mastered this art here in LA. I have to see non-Asian minorities all the time, and it really wrecks my buzz.

I think people are afraid to criticize San Francisco for fear of sounding like Sarah-Palin-supporting red state fascists. People have no such fear when it comes to LA, though all their critical words do tend to be code for something else -- you know, "dirty," "crowded," "dangerous." I get it. Most of us live where we do because we choose to, and we don't want to be accused of choosing wrong. So it helps to have a scapegoat location. When I was growing up in Indiana, this location, abritrarily, was Kentucky. To express contempt for a place, such as the northside suburb of Noblesville, you would do this incredibly clever thing where you'd add "tucky" to the end of its name. Then you'd say stuff like, "Where's she from? Nobletucky?" and hoot at the hilariousness of your own insult. At the time I figured everyone in the country was mocking Kentucky, even the Kentuckians, but when I moved to Virginia for college I learned otherwise. In Virginia, it was West Virginia you held in contempt. "What has twenty hands, seventeen eyes and three teeth?" people would ask. "A West Virginia DMV line!" From these examples we can see that strident regionalism is almost always ill-advised.

LA is unique, however, in that the buck stops here. Angelenos don't have a place they universally hate; instead, they hate LA just like everyone else. "This town," you will regularly hear people here saying. So I would like to propose that we adopt San Francisco as our official scapegoat city. We won't be able to hate on its traffic or its smog or its rent prices, I know, but at least we will never see a typed and laminated sign affixed to a shelf in an upmarket convenience store explaining for the benefit of all the customers who have complained in the past 90 days that no two bottles of kombucha are the same and that no refunds will be offered if one finds one's kombucha purchase to be unsatisfactory. THAT, my friends, THAT is why San Francisco sucks.

The hunt commences

2009-07-24T08:53:00.000-07:00

I don't have any hard evidence to support this, but it seems to me like rents in LA ought to be coming down any old time now. Everywhere I go these days, I see For Rent signs. Almost every building on my street has one. I can only assume the economic downturn has forced some people out of their pricy apartments and into the suburbs, or even back to their hometowns; it's hard enough making rent here when you have a job, but when you're out of work, it's damn near impossible. You're probably thinking the same thing I am: SCORE! I mean, uh, what a pity. You're probably thinking what a pity, which I would be too, except that I am moving in a few months, and my attitude toward LA real estate is TAKE NO PRISONERS. There is no room for compassion in this game. It is like the movie Wall Street, but with larger sums of money.

I've now apartment-hunted in this city twice, and both times the pickins were frighteningly slim. The landlords always had the upper hand: a two-bedroom two-bath with a view could garner fifteen applicants in four days, and the only way to make yourself stand out from the crowd was to have exceptional credit and to wear something slutty. I am therefore very, very excited about the prospect of apartment-hunting in a market where the tables are turned. I can hang up my revealing dress and rock out with my checkbook out. Shazam.

Tragically, though, no economic climate, no matter how unfortunate, can change the basic parameters of the LA apartment hunt. Here's how you find a place that's right for you. First you decide how much you're willing to pay; then you make a list of everything you want, a list that looks something like this:

Two bedrooms

Two-car parking

Storage

Washer and dryer

Hardwood floors

Outdoor space

Upper level

Cool landlord

In order to meet your intended budget, you will have to cross at least three items off this list, plus add at least one Mystery Feature, defined as something you really don't like but are willing to live with. Mystery Features are generally left over from the eighties, a distinctly disappointing era in terms of American design, and include but are not limited to:

Mirrored walls

Vertical blinds

Light fixtures festooned with plastic "crystals"

Popcorn ceilings

Pink or jade tile

Beige carpet, randomly, in at least one bedroom

Landlords love Mystery Features. They love them. They're always advertising them using this perky language, like "Fiesta-colored tile in bathrooms AND kitchen!" or "Plush wall-to-wall carpeting extending across almost 60% of the living room!" This is what happens when you are repeatedly exposed to paint fumes.

Of course there is another option. It's called Looking Light Years Outside Your Price Range. In order to engage in this strategy, you have to have become sufficiently demented by the apartment-hunting process that you think it may be possible to negotiate. Then you see a whole new echelon of apartments, apartments so luxurious you would be happy to live out your days in their bathtubs, and promptly fall in love with each and every one, to the point that you are more than willing to throw in your future firstborn child as a supplement to your deposit. Tragically, here in the United States we feel obligated to protect unborn children -- actual children can starve to death for all we care -- so you're back to square one. (Oh, was that a little angry liberalism sneaking in there? Whoopsie!)

And this, essentially, is the problem I am noticing in perusing Craigslist for apartments that might work for me and Henry.

WARNING: FRANK AND OPEN DISCUSSION OF RENT PRICES AHEAD. NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART

Here in the under-$2,000 range we have tons of almost-okay apartments with tragic flaws like no outdoor space or no parking. And then over here in the $2,500+ range we have apartments I would actually marry. But nothing in between. It's almost enough to make you want to move back to America.

The force is strong in this one

2009-07-20T08:53:00.000-07:00

I'm what you'd call a neat person. Not neat as in nifty -- though I am also pretty nifty -- but neat as in organized to a point some (HENRY) would characterize as compulsive. I guess he's right. Neatness, for me, has evolved from being a preference to being a necessity. I have trouble concentrating when my apartment is a mess, and so I have developed certain routines for making the bed or doing the dishes or organizing the surfaces, routines that I DO NOT WISH TO HAVE QUESTIONED OR DISTURBED. So sure, if that's your definition of compulsive, then yeah, whatever, I guess I might be a little compulsive.

I wasn't always this way. I used to be a real slob. I can remember one semester of college in particular when I never got around to unpacking my massive duffel after returning from three weeks off for the holidays, and it remained centered on the floor of my dorm room for months, the pile of discarded clothes around it growing and growing until tendrils of dirty laundry were actually clawing at my sheets while I slept, begging to be put out of their misery. So then I would do my laundry, but instead of putting it away, which could've taken up to twenty minutes, I would dump the clean clothes on top of the suitcase, where they would get so wrinkled it was like I hadn't washed them at all. And this only skims the surface of my messiness. My motto was "don't clean until your room has attracted ants, and maybe not even then."

Fortunately I had the same roommate all throughout college, one who shared my cleaning philosophy (or lack thereof), so everything was fine until I went abroad junior year. You can imagine her shock when I returned from France with a set of new, incredibly annoying habits. These included pronouncing a verdict on every single glass of wine I was offered ("The Boone's Farm Snow Creek Berry contains top notes of apple and citrus, with a strident undercurrent of high fructose corn syrup") and keeping my half of our room as carefully preserved as a museum exhibit. God forbid the sleeve of her jacket, tossed carelessly on our floor per our pre-abroad routine, should creep over the invisible line of demarcation. I would promptly kick it toward her desk, then spend another ten minutes prowling around with a damp cloth and a bottle of 409 just to calm myself down.

It all started months before, when my host mother in Paris, Mme Prevost, alerted me to the fact that I wasn't keeping my room clean enough for her taste. Though she and I eventually got to be great friends, my first few weeks in her house were tense: I could barely spit out a coherent French sentence, and meanwhile I was committing serious faux pas left and right. I used up the extremely limited supply of hot water several times in a row. I left my bedroom light on when I went out, a major no-no in a country where electric bills constitute a major percentage of monthly living expenses. Owing to some really impressive vocabulary mix-ups, I accidentally told her I liked condoms on my toast and that I was on medication for a mental illness. So when she politely asked if there was any way I could keep my room a little neater, I lunged to meet the challenge.

Now, you'd think I would've been thrilled to return to the United States, land of excess, where showers can last just as long as you please, lights can be left on indefinitely and messiness can reign unchecked by disapproving Gallic frowns. And I'd be lying if I said I didn't eventually lapse back into all my old slovenly American habits. All except for one. Today, as a recovered Francophile, I can drink a glass of wine without commenting on the bouquet, and I can pronounce French words without an exaggerated, pretentious accent. But I will never again be a slob.

Because here's the thing: much like schizophrenia or Tay-Sachs disease, I had been, without knowing it, carrying my OCD inside me my entire life. It is a genetic trait as inescapable as male-pattern baldness, and my family has it in spades. I have an aunt who alphabetizes the food in her freezer by main ingredient. I have a cousin who, when we were children, had separate containers for each category of Barbie garment -- shoes, dresses, pants and so on. Most notably, I have a father so fixated on cleanliness that the presence of an errant Coke can is enough to throw off his entire day. He'll start by rinsing out the can and putting it in the recycling bin, but while he's in the garage he'll notice that some motor oil has leaked out of its container and onto the particleboard shelves, and on his way to get a rag to clean that up he'll realize that the boxes in the basement are seriously disorganized, and next thing you know it's five hours later and he's sequestered in the upstairs bathroom cleaning the Venetian blinds with a chamois.

There's nothing creepier than the first time you detect yourself turning into your parents. My dad's OCD, once the scourge of my adolescence, is now completely understandable to me. I mean, the man worked hard all day long, and all he wanted was to come home to a clean house, a sanctuary where shoes were not kicked off willy-nilly in front of the door where anyone could trip over them, where used glasses were not left on the side table to form water rings but rather placed in the sink, where beds were made and dirty clothes were in the hamper and his own daughter was not painting her desk with nail polish while talking on the phone, does she have no respect for the fact that furniture costs money?

And this, essentially, is my legacy. It's too bad I want to have a career and shit, because I would make a killer housewife.

Currently applying for my AARP discount card

2009-07-17T09:10:00.000-07:00

There are two primary indicators that I am turning into an irrelevent, calcified old lady. One is that I have officially reached the age where there is separate fashion for me and for the kids. See, for years after college I continued to shop at my favorite stores from high school; every so often, like when dress-shopping for a formal occasion, I would go somewhere a little more high-end, but for the most part I saw no need. Why buy a $50 top at Anthropologie when you can get one for $15 at Forever 21?

But then time continued to pass, as it does, and something perverse began to happen at the stores I loved so much as a seventeen-year-old. They've done something sinister to the sizes, for one thing. A small no longer fits me, and I suspect a nationwide fashion conspiracy is to blame. Also: have you seen what the kids are wearing these days? Evidently neon is back, which is weird because I don't recall ever missing it when it was gone. It seems to me that the kids are wearing styles deliberately designed to exclude people my age, such as skintight jeans and Keds with splashy early-nineties prints. I am on the downward slope to thirty. I cannot be walking around in sneakers selected primarily for their ironic value.

Of course, there is an echelon of stores where these trends never seem to penetrate, where the style evolves slowly and deliberately so as not to cause back pain or other injury, and it is at these stores where I am now forced to shop. They are insulated from the whims of the fast fashion scene by a thin but impenetrable layer of money, money I am happy to dole out hand over fist because the dresses are flattering and the sizes are all the way they're supposed to be. And so, slowly but surely, my look changes from "just woke up at noon after spending all night at the bars and eating Fred's chili cheese fries at four in the morning" to "just off to the farmer's market to shop for summer-fresh vegetables," and this is sign one that I am getting old.

Sign two is that I am no longer able to keep up with the latest technology-related trends. No, that's not even accurate: I am unwilling to keep up with the latest technology-related trends. Here I am thinking specifically of Twitter, which I just don't get. I don't flatter myself into thinking that my life is so interesting on a minute-by-minute basis that other people would like to hear about it. In fact, here's what my Twitter feed for yesterday would've looked like:

8:30 a.m. I am working.

9:45 a.m. I am on a conference call.

11:00 a.m. Kashi Go-Lean waffles!

1:00 p.m. I am working.

2:00 p.m. It is hot in my apartment.

3:00 p.m. Just returned from heroic trip to retrieve my mail. I got an REI catalogue.

4:45 p.m. I am almost done working.

6:30 p.m. Chicken salad sandwich!

9:30 p.m. Leaving the building for the first time all day.

I know, I know, the point of Twitter is not to literally say what you are doing, but rather to amuse those on your friends list (I believe in Twitterese these are known as "followers," which sounds suspiciously Maoist, doesn't it?). Still, here's what I see when I look at most peoples' tweets:

9:45 a.m. I am funny. See?

11:00 a.m. Seriously, aren't I the funniest?

1:00 p.m. Also, I am cooler than you.

2:00 p.m. Just saw [insert famous person's name here] at [location] looking [adjective]. I go places where famous people go!

3:00 p.m. Gosh, I'm cool. Also popular. DID YOU HEAR THAT, PERSON WHO REJECTED ME IN THE TENTH GRADE?

4:45 p.m. Obligatory liberal remark.

6:30 p.m. I love California. [link to blurry iPhone picture of sun setting over ocean]

9:30 p.m. Off to [name of cool bar]. Am I going to have sex tonight? I'd like you to think that I am.

Of course, I'm not Twitter's intended demographic. Twitter's intended demographic is the kids, you know, the ones with the neon Keds who can express themselves in 140 characters or less with the help of hybrid numerowords like "2moro." To them I might as well be driving my Buick LeSabre over to the early-bird special at the K&W Cafeteria; such is my degree of irrelevence. Oh well. Hope they're serving Jello!

Bingo wings

2009-07-15T09:07:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been trying to lose weight. It all started with OK Magazine. See, we recently went camping up north, and Matt bought this OK Magazine for the car trip that included a two-page spread on how women should disguise their body flaws by purchasing $726372676332 worth of clothing from OK Magazine advertisers. Immediately upon seeing this, I went into College-Educated Feminist Mode, a very aggressive behavioral pattern that enables me to mock sexist articles at speeds approaching 500 expletives per minute while secretly absorbing all the information contained therein because deep-down -- and this is a very dark secret I am revealing here -- deep-down, I BELIEVE EVERY WORD.

I was born lucky in the sense that I have an okay body. I say "born lucky" because lord knows I don't do much in the way of maintenance. I've never been the type of girl who turns heads, especially not here in LA, but I'm fine. Most of OK Magazine's figure flaws -- big hips, flat chest, broad shoulders, thunder thighs -- don't apply to me, at least not yet. But then my eyes settled on an unfamiliar phrase: "bingo wings." And even as my mouth was running at eighty miles per hour on autopilot, ranting about how our oppressive patriarchal culture makes women feel like criminals for their god-given body types and undermines our economic authority by suggesting that we can do nothing better with our hard-earned money than investing in thousands of dollars' worth of ugly dresses, my mind was going BINGO WINGS BINGO WINGS BINGO WINGS. OK defines bingo wings as the fat that accumulates on the underside of your upper arms when you don't spend five hours a day working out with Madonna's personal yogi. Though I had never given much thought to the fat on my arms before, in that moment I realized, with no small degree of horror, that I HAVE BINGO WINGS.

BINGO WINGS: the hidden menace! All this time I've merely been worried about my ass, my calves, my thighs and my waistline, and meanwhile my upper arms were expanding to the size of greater Manhattan, completely unchecked. You can imagine my sense of betrayal. Why did no one warn me about bingo wings? Now it's summer, and there's no way to hide them short of purchasing a whole new wardrobe according to OK's edicts. Obviously I have to lose some weight.

Luckily, I live in LA, where losing weight is the city's primary economic driver. Everyone's trying to shed a few pounds, and every single business caters to the needs of the calorically challenged in one way or another. Just down the street from me, you can spend $18 on lunch at Real Raw Live, and when you're still starving a half-hour later you can gorge yourself on on fried items at Birds. And because weight loss is a cultural assumption here, complete strangers will always be there to cheer you on. True story: once Hadley and I went to Birds for a cocktail. We wanted to sit outside, but you can't have a table on the patio before 10 unless you're eating dinner, so we decided to split an order of onion rings and a piece of chocolate cake, figuring two courses should be enough to count as a meal. Three girls our age were decamped at the table next to us, and when our snacks were delivered by the waiter, they felt compelled to comment. "Can we just say that you guys rock?" said the blonde, who was wearing a dress that wouldn't fit around one of my thighs. "Onion rings and chocolate cake? You are, like, our heroes." Then the brunette chimed in, "We've been trying to guess what you're celebrating. Did one of you get engaged?"

Don't ever let anyone tell you that people in LA aren't smart. It takes real brainpower to find a way to simultaneously food-shame and life-shame two people at once while making it all sound like a compliment. So food- and life-shamed were we that we felt compelled to invent things we could be celebrating. So I told them that Hadley had had a short story published, and Hadley told them that I had quit my spirit-crushing job: both true, but both events that had taken place months beforehand and had already been celebrated quite extensively. It was easier than divulging the devastating truth that we had chosen to consume 500-plus calories apiece for no particular reason. Not to mention dealing with the mess after their heads exploded.

So I've been eating healthy all week now, lots of veggies and hummus, stone fruits and yogurt, salads and more salads, and the thing is, it really does feel good. I always forget that about dieting, that it reminds you of how much better your body functions when you feed it wholesome things. I've entered the evangelical phase of trying to lose some weight, when you can't even remember what appealed to you about sodium and sugar and all you want to eat is grilled vegetables and lean protein.

But like most evangelical phases, this one is not destined to last. Eating crap is, in some ways, very akin to an addiction. When you don't indulge at all, you don't miss it; but all it takes is one taste of a creamy, light, delicious cheesecake with a perfect buttery crust and suddenly you're back at square one. You ask yourself questions like, "Would it really be so bad if I ate chips for lunch?" even as you're scraping the bottom of the Lay's bag with your fingernails looking for any remaining molecules of fried potato. I'm great at short-term bursts of self-discipline: cleaning my apartment, meeting a deadline, remaining polite when people are obviously cutting in line at the Arclight. Much harder is the process of transforming something from a whim to a habit.

I know what you're thinking: that I would be a much happier person if I just didn't care. It's not as if my bingo wings had any impact on my life before I was aware of their existence, after all; can't I just forget they're there and focus on my inner beauty? The answer is NO, HIPPIE, I CAN'T. I've been reading women's lifestyle magazines since I was eleven. There's no undoing sixteen years of indoctrination, but there is undoing of bingo wings.

Destination cohabitation

2009-07-09T23:01:00.000-07:00

Henry and I recently decided to move in together this fall. By then we'll have been together four years, and while it's hard to imagine waiting much longer before taking this step -- it's not, after all, as if any special qualifications are required; no government-developed test is administered, no agency regulates real-estate-related decisions -- it's equally hard for me to imagine sharing my life with a guy in that way. I had a guy roommate for about a year and a half, and what I learned from that experience is that the cliched, fifties-sitcom nagging female figure, with all her incessant demands and petty fixations, is very misunderstood. She didn't start life as someone who cares more about the cleanliness of her living room than the possibility of nuclear escalation in North Korea. It's just, who puts their dirty socks on the table? What is that?

This observation segues neatly into my primary fear regarding cohabitation, which is that the minute the first box of my stuff slides across the doorway of our mutual abode, I will somehow, unwillingly and without my knowledge, morph into June Cleaver. I won't have the perfect hair or the trim waistline, but I will be That Woman, the one who's always wiping away at invisible smudges and worrying over dinner while her man reads the paper and contemplates world issues. Henry and I are not like this, and yet we are. You could say that I just happen to be a neat freak who enjoys cooking and was born with a natural ability to plan the hell out of things; you could say that Henry just happens to be something of an absentminded professor type, so absorbed in creative pursuits that he is impervious to such unimportant concerns as the state of his bathroom sink or the name of his friend's ex-girlfriend. All this is true, yet the facts somehow imply a lie, namely that I am a silly, shallow lady with nothing better to think about than making a homemade, eco-friendly drain flush from a combination of baking soda, table salt and vinegar. Wait a minute.

I was trained to be a second-wave feminist. In high school and college I proudly proclaimed my antipathy toward marriage and family, two building blocks of an oppressive, patriarchal culture I felt obligated to live in protest against. I saw myself taking up residence in foreign countries, having many lovers, wearing elegant party dresses, creating great acts of journalism and eating whatever I wanted without gaining weight. Now I'm old -- well, I'm a good ways past those halcyon days of fantasy and idealism, at least -- and I've realized a few truths about myself. Like that I'm kind of a homebody. And that I hate uncomfortable shoes. And that nothing makes me happier than seeing Henry's face first thing in the morning, smiling back at me.

Surely there's a way to live together without losing my mind. But even our preliminary discussions on the topic have uncovered some fundamental disparities between the way we think. For one thing, he thinks that just because he lives in a huge, beautiful Spanish-style apartment with hardwood floors, vaulted ceilings, a washer-dryer, a garage and the world's nicest landlord, that I should move in to his place. Whereas I think we should take our chances on an unstable rental market that's horrifying at best and try to find somewhere new. He thinks that because we both work from home, we need separate office spaces, whereas I think that because we both work from home, we need cheaper rent and a constant supply of moderate-quality vodka. He thinks that we will each have to learn to compromise in order to be happy, whereas I think he needs to learn that it's just not acceptable to leave dust bunnies loitering in the corners of the dining room. What is this, Mogadishu?

Most girls dream of moving in with their boyfriends. On at least three occasions, other women have actually congratulated me on achieving this next step, as though it were a life accomplishment on par with getting a big promotion or learning how to change my own oil. Part of me resents the implication that I have pulled something off by moving in with my boyfriend of so many years -- everyone seems to think I tricked Henry into it or won the privilege in a poker game. ("Full house? Dammit! Here's the keys.") I'd prefer to be congratulated a year from now, when with any luck we'll have weathered the apartment-hunting, possession-combining, finance-merging aspects of the deal and are experiencing domestic bliss the likes of which the world has never seen. Either that, or he'll be sitting at the dining room table writing while I spray the back of his head repeatedly with a bottle of Windex.

So this is growing up

2009-07-06T22:57:00.001-07:00

I recently went to Detroit to be a bridesmaid in my cousin's wedding. I invited Henry to come with me, both because he'd never met most of my Michigan-based extended family and because I have already been to approximately six-thousand weddings as his date and he owes me, dammit.

At first I was excited about the prospect of having a boyfriend meet the family. It's a very 27-year-old thing to do, like wearing more modest clothing and spending upwards of $50 on moisturizer. I'm not going to lie, I turned 27 a few months ago and I am still pretty confused by it. When people ask me my age I have to pause before responding. In my head I'm thinking, "2009-1982=27," and then I nod and say, "Right, 27," but the truth is I feel like I'm 24, live in a 22-year-old's apartment and get carded buying beer like I'm 20. Can you blame me for not being able to keep my own age straight?

Anyway, approximately five seconds after extending the invitation it dawned on me that bringing Henry back to meet the clan might not be the best idea. They're wonderful, but they live in a part of the country where 27 is an appropriate marrying age, as evidenced by my cousin, who was born ten days after me but got engaged when we were 25. Most of my friends in the Midwest are currently in relationship zones ranging from cohabitation to considering second child, whereas most of my friends here in LA are currently in relationship zones ranging from drunken hookup to brunch the morning after a drunken hookup.

As I get older, the contrast between what's considered appropriate for twentysomethings here as opposed to back home has become sharper and sharper. I've vascillated between several theories as to why this might be and have ultimately concluded that it all comes down to real estate. You get married when you can afford a nice place to live; in the Midwest, this happens in your midtwenties, whereas in big coastal cities it happens much later, if it happens at all. This is not easy to understand when you live in a part of the country where foreclosed homes can be purchased with the change that's accumulated between your sofa cushions. And so I was worried that my relatives, without intending to, would place an unanticipated new level of pressure on my relationship by asking Henry when he and I plan to get married. (Cue theme from "Halloween.")

These concerns turned out to be unwarranted, however, because it turns out my family has simply assumed he and I are getting married in the near future. No questions required. I suppose this is fair, considering we've been together more than three years, have visited each other's families at the holidays and are making plans to move in together sometime this fall. But all that evidence notwithstanding, there is no piece of jewelry weighing down my left hand; in fact, I just had to visit Google to confirm that that's where engagement rings go. Such is my level of apathy regarding marriage. It's not that I don't want to get married one day; it's just that I always saw myself getting married at a much older age, like 29 or 30. You know, in six years, because I'm 24. Oh . . . wait.

This is not the only area of my life in which I have seemingly no awareness of how old I actually am. While preparing for the wedding with the other bridesmaids, standing in front of a mirror applying makeup, I was shocked when another girl asked if anybody had any eye primer. Apparently it goes on your eyelid before the eyeshadow to make it last longer. This was never mentioned anywhere in the cosmetics aisle at Rite-Aid. Yes, I have yet to graduate from buying my makeup at the drug store, just as I have yet to buy a second set of sheets, or actually purchase furniture from a store other than Ikea, or wean myself off of flip-flops as my primary shoe selection for all occasions except the most formal.

The only time I ever really consider my age is when I read one of those scare articles about how women have to have children by 35 or they'll be born with horrible deformities and brain defects. It's unfair, really. Men can go on wearing flip-flops and washing their dishes with Pine-Sol until they're eighty, but women have to magically turn on a dime and become grownups before a certain date, or else. I don't really know how to wrap my brain around this except to remind myself that 35 is eight years away, and eight years ago I was a sophomore in college who wore pajamas to class, listened exclusively to Ani DiFranco and took her life cues from the poetry of Allen Ginsberg. I now almost always put on jeans before leaving the house. Clearly a lot can change in eight years.

2009-03-11T09:57:00.000-07:00

It's no secret to anyone who's ever read a women's magazine that they're basically all about fear-mongering. For me, the golden age of women's magazines was the four summers (1998-2001) that I spent working as a lifeguard. There's a lot of downtime when you work as a lifeguard, and magazines like Cosmopolitan are the ideal way to pass that downtime -- they don't require much concentration, they feel pool-appropriate, and no one ever wants to hang onto one after they've finished reading it, so there's generally a big stack of them sitting around, waiting for perusal.

Reading women's magazines as a teenager gives you the impression that you're just a few short years away from landing a high-paying media job that requires you to spend 14 hours a week having brunch, living in a stylish Manhattan loft and thinking nothing of dropping $700 on a really great Chanel handbag. It's a little different when you get your first low-paying job and your first crappy apartment and find yourself wondering who their target audience is supposed to be. Surely anyone who makes enough money to buy $700 handbags is too busy working to read women's magazines.

At any rate, I vividly remember reading an article back then that reported, in all seriousness, a new women's health problem that wasn't getting nearly enough attention from the medical community: peeing too much. According to this fine piece of journalism, peeing too much is a problem affecting anywhere between twenty and forty percent of the female population. Peeing too much is characterized by peeing too much, and the best way to solve the problem is to pee less. It was difficult to understand why the CDC wasn't standing up and taking notice, but it has been at least eight years and so far I have heard nothing further about peeing too much, so maybe the article made a difference. The pen: still mightier than the sword!

So yesterday I went back to Dr. Bradshaw's office, exactly 366 days after my last visit as per Anthem Blue Cross' mandate, and while I was waiting I picked up a recent issue of Cosmopolitan. It's a smart business move for gynecologists to leave women's magazines lying around their waiting rooms because they're great at alerting you to problems with your ladyparts you never knew you had. This issue (you may have read it; Amanda Bynes was on the cover looking like a smug squirrel) had a fantastic piece about how if you ever want to have a baby, you should start worrying about it now. Immediately. Yesterday. It dropped some major truth-bombs. Mentioned: fertility is impacted by body weight, so if you think might want a baby ten years from now you should get on a diet today. Not mentioned: how much money would be ideal to save up or how to buy a house when you can barely pay your rent as it is. In Cosmo's world, your baby will live with you in your Manhattan loft, and you will carry it around in your Chanel handbag.

Another thing the article failed to touch on was that guy, what's his name. Oh, right, dad. The one whose sperm will be taking advantage of the fertility you have nurtured via dieting and limiting yourself to one alcoholic beverage a week. Fortunately, the answers can be found on Cosmo's website in the slideshow "How to Be a Good Girlfriend." This article contains too many insights to delineate here, so I thought I'd just touch on a few of my favorites.

Hanging with the Guys.

"Do This," the article instructs. "Watch the game with his friends. Spending an afternoon on the couch with his pals says you're easygoing and cool...and he'll appreciate your making an effort to get to know his boys."

Sounds easy enough. But wait!

"Not That: Cheer really loudly, chug beers, or tell off-color jokes. Let's put it this way: It's really hard for him to be sexually attracted to someone who reminds him of his buddies."

So, to conclude: watch the game, but keep your mouth shut and for god's sake, don't drink. You're a fucking lady.

Leaving Stuff at His Place

"Do This: "Forget" your necklace. Leave behind a pretty, delicate piece of jewelry (such as a little gold necklace) and he'll think of you in similar terms every time he sees it."

But before you go overboard . . .

"Not That: Leave a toothbrush in his bathroom. An unsolicited toothbrush or other toiletry will give him the impression you're moving too fast — and may freak him out."

Because nothing says "I'm pretty and delicate" like poor dental hygiene.

Sending Him Texts

"Do This: Type "Last night was amazing. Repeat 2night?" Keeping your message short and provocative will ensure he stays totally intrigued."

But don't, you know, actually bother to spell out any words! Because you know what that means . . .

"Not That: Send a message that's more than two sentences. To him, texting is for quick communication. Sending him a novel is analogous to a droning phone call."

Man love woman who no communicate good.

Finally, a helpful illustration of what NOT to be:

She's the only person in this picture who's happy. And that's the problem!

Ladies: you're welcome.

2009-02-13T11:08:00.000-08:00

I recently got a letter from Anthem Blue Cross announcing that they're raising the price tag on my health insurance to nearly $200 a month. As if this weren't annoying enough, I'm insured through a special hip branch of Blue Cross aimed at twentysomethings, so the letter came stamped with a sassy little logo that read, "Now you got it. Don't lose it." THANKS FOR THE TIP, BLUE CROSS. Not only have you jammed your sticky little fingers even further into my wallet, you've also pissed me off with improper grammar.

Ironically, I received this letter two days before my annual appointment with my gynecologist, who, as I believe I've mentioned in the past, looks disconcertingly like Sarah Jessica Parker. Last year I saw Dr. Bradshaw in March, but this year I needed to see her in February because my birth control runs out in a week and a half, and I can't get more without a Pap smear. So I dragged my ass all the way down to Cedars in traffic -- there is no longer any time in LA when it is not rush hour -- only to find out from the receptionist that my shitty, overpriced insurance will not cover a Pap smear until it has been exactly 366 days since my last one. Unfortunately, the 12-month supply of birth control allotted per Pap smear only lasts 336 days, because there are 28 pills to a pack. So . . . what the fuck am I supposed to do now?

It is difficult for me to imagine that I am the first person to ever encounter this discrepancy. Even more difficult to imagine is the problem that led to the one-Pap-smear-per-year policy. Are there millions of women out there who just love having a cold speculum shoved up their ying-yang so a stranger wearing a latex glove can reach in and poke their ovaries? Are they abusing the system, showing up every three weeks for yet another whirl in the stirrups? Believe me, I wouldn't protest if Blue Cross changed their policy to one Pap smear every three decades, as long as they would still give me my damn birth control.

Then I read that, like many private insurers around the country, Blue Cross is currently under fire for charging healthy young women something like 30% more than they charge healthy young men. Their rationale is that healthy young women could theoretically get pregnant any old time, generating thousands and thousands of dollars in medical bills. I always love when I read stuff like that -- like how occasionally I'll be flipping through a women's magazine and see something about how all women of childbearing age should be taking folic acid constantly, should be cooking their food in folic acid and using it to wash their dishes and bathing in it every night, just in case they get pregnant. You get the feeling that everything you learned in health class was just a nice story and that no sex of any kind is necessary in order to have a baby, that you can get knocked up just from standing downwind from a large group of men.

I don't take folic acid because I don't plan to have a baby anytime in the near future. Of course, this plan could be disrupted by the fact that I am RUNNING OUT OF FUCKING BIRTH CONTROL. So, to review: my insurance rates have gone up, probably in part because my health insurer is getting sued for charging me too much money. They're charging me too much money because I might get pregnant. I am trying not to get pregnant by taking birth control, but they won't give me more birth control because I haven't had a Pap smear. And I haven't had a Pap smear because they won't pay for it.

Right.

Disaster preparedness

2009-01-27T08:53:00.000-08:00

Last week in LA we had a series of little earthquakes, none of which I actually felt. I don't know what's wrong with me that I can't feel these earthquakes. Everyone else can; I know this because usually my first indication that there's been an earthquake is when I get on Facebook and the status update of every single one of my LA friends mentions it in some way. (Hey, you people in the rest of the country are always getting attention for your blizzards and ice storms and hurricanes, and we want a piece of the spotlight too.)

I guess part of the issue is that I live in an old building that shakes whenever someone slams a door. Which, when I contemplate the ever-looming specter of the Big One, doesn't instill me with much confidence. Normally when I fantasize about the Big One I imagine myself in various heroic scenarios -- not because I am strong and macho, but because I always assume that whatever happens, I will be fine. Other people may be trapped under beams or ensconced by raging apartment fires, but because I am myself, I will be unscathed except for a few strategically placed, glamorous-looking scrapes and bruises.

The only time I imagine myself as the damsel in distress is when I imagine the Big One striking while I'm in my apartment. This building was built in 1915. It predates earthquake construction codes. I know there's some law that requires landlords to retrofit old apartment buildings with the proper reinforcements, but my landlord, Mel, has owned this building since the seventies, and he's not very conventional when it comes to his duties as a property manager. Sometimes this manifests itself to one's advantage: he let me take my apartment "as-is," i.e. without a wholly unnecessary paint job but with a thorough, professional cleaning, for $100 less than he was originally going to charge. He recently froze my rent for 2009, saving me another $40 a month. (When I asked him why, he said it's because I'm a "good sport.") On the other hand, this is the man who once suggested I boil some water for a bath when the hot water was out all day. He also let an actual documented con man with no ID and no credit history move into the building using an assumed name; ordinarily I would say live and let live, but this guy has a record of sexual assault, I know this because you can GOOGLE HIM AND FIND OUT, so, you know, I'm a little skeptical about how much Mel actually cares about his tenants.

The only solution, aside from moving back to Indiana, is to make an earthquake kit. You're supposed to have one anyway, but I don't know anyone who actually does; it's the kind of thing you think about immediately following a small earthquake, then never follow up on. This summer we had a fairly major earthquake, as measured by the fact that I actually felt it, and for a few days afterward there were a lot of articles about how the Big One is coming and we should all be ready, and during those few days I thought a lot about going to Target and buying some earthquake supplies. But I never actually did it, because I was busy drinking.

The problem with the earthquake kit is that once you actually start looking into it, it turns out to be a very expensive, high-volume proposition. Initially I thought I just needed a first-aid kit and a few bottles of water. Easy enough, right? Then when my ancient building collapses on top of me in the middle of the night, I may have two broken legs and no way to pull myself out of the rubble for hours, but I will be sufficiently hydrated, you can bet your ass on that.

The thing is, it's hard to imagine the kind of devastation the Big One could create because it hasn't happened yet. So you turn to the experts. You do a little Googling. And suddenly your shopping list is much, much longer. You need some sturdy shoes -- do you want to be barefoot when the Big One hits? Some non-perishable food items, and a backpack to carry them in -- do you want to starve? A flashlight. A fire extinguisher. Copies of all your important personal documents. Small bills. Liquor and cigarettes -- okay, the experts don't actually mention that, but don't you think you might want to drink and smoke after your whole city has been leveled?

It's the disaster-preparedness paradox: if something truly devastating does happen, the people who will be most equipped to deal with it are the people who, in the ordinary course of things, behave like Armageddon-awaiting separatist freaks. So for now I think I will just start sleeping in a t-shirt -- do you want to be naked when the Big One hits? -- and build from there. Baby steps.

2009-01-22T09:18:00.000-08:00

I always used to wonder how I would know when I'd turned into an adult. Inevitably I will reach an age where I refer to my peers as men and women, not guys and girls; where I am aware of what concepts like "escrow" really mean (something to do with houses, right?); where I have long, in-depth conversations with people my own age about fiber. This has yet to happen.

What has happened is I have noticed a change in my spending patterns. When I first left college and was living on my own, my principle expenses were rent, alcohol and orchids. I wanted to think of myself as the kind of person who "kept" orchids, so I kept buying orchids at Trader Joe's, and then I kept killing them after about a week, so then I would buy more orchids, and before long orchids were a big part of my monthly cash outlay. One sign of growing up was the day I realized there was no point buying all these damn orchids, and that if I really wanted to keep an orchid I should buy a fake one. Something similar happened with high heels. For about two years, I valiantly tried to buy and wear lots of high-heeled shoes, but I only ever mastered the "buy" part; as for the wearing, I mean, have you seen those things? They're torture devices masquerading as fashion, and anyone who tells you differently has been brainwashed. Now I have two dresser drawers filled with exquisite heels, and each pair gets worn about once a year. But at least I have stopped kidding myself.

It's a real bummer, getting old and letting go of all those youthful fantasies that were so helpful before I knew better. Nothing used to cheer me up like buying some new makeup; somewhere in my heart of hearts, I was deeply convinced that the right color of eyeshadow would solve all my problems. Hope sprung eternal in the cosmetics aisle at Rite-Aid. Then one day I realized that all the truly foundational things that had happened to me since starting out on my own -- interviewing for my first real job, for instance, or meeting the guy I was going to fall in love with -- had happened without any attention on my part to eye makeup. I began to wonder if eye makeup was the problem, not the solution. It was sobering.

In the past few months I have made several large purchases, and all of them are just as dull as bricks. I don't remember anyone on Sex and the City getting behind on their Visa payments because of a plane ticket. Chanel handbag, okay. Plane ticket, SNORE. Let's see. I bought myself some stylish new renter's insurance. $400 for an uninsured eye exam and reading glasses, because I am slowly going blind. Around $750 to the government -- I am paying my 2008 taxes quarterly in advance. My cello developed a crack in the front piece; that shit ain't cheap to repair, and the irony is that it never would've happened if I wasn't such a cheapskate about turning on the heat. But I can't afford to turn on the heat, because I've got this glasses bill to pay off.

Shopping used to cheer me immeasurably; I may be bookish, but I am still a gal of my generation, and by god I deserve the perfect bookish outfit to wear on all my bookish-in-the-big-city adventures. But even this pastime has lost its pleasure. Clean out your closet enough times and you'll realize how much money you waste on things you'll never wear. I have grown up, and in growing up have realized that when you get right down to it, I wear basically the same thing every day. I hate when I occasionally ring the changes and everyone asks me why I'm " so dressed up," as if I'm wearing a prom dress instead of boots. But I suppose this is what I have coming to me for being old.

It's not that I have developed some kind of mistrust of materialism, though that would be well-timed given the economic climate. It's just that something else is always coming up -- something that, more often than not, seems like a terrifying harbinger of middle-age. Earlier this month I went out and bought a desk chair. It's black and ugly and doesn't go with any of the twee painted furniture in my apartment, and it cost more than my bed. But it made my back pain go away. This is my new priority: back pain. There's no turning around now.

Midwestern transplant

2009-01-01T11:32:00.000-08:00

There are some rituals that come with going home for the holidays. The long flight east combined with the three-hour time change generally guarantees a late-night arrival. When I come home to a house where everyone's sleeping, I like to unpack my Christmas presents and wrap them late at night so that my family wakes up in the morning to a few more gifts under the tree. There's always one evening where my brother's friends and my friends miraculously combine; he and I aren't that far apart in age now that everyone is old enough to drink, although there was a time (I remember it fondly) when I was so much taller and bigger than him that I could pin him down and beat the shit out of him. One ritual used to be the stalking of/obsessing over love interests from high school, which has evolved into the more pleasant (but also more boring) hanging out amicably with love interests from high school. There's playing cards with my family (we celebrate the birth of baby Jesus by drinking and gambling), which always results in me going home with ten dollars' worth of laundry quarters regardless of how much I actually won or lost.

Less Rockwell-esque, but equally perennial, is what I think of as the Annual Defense of LA. When I lived in Boston, everyone fell all over themselves to congratulate me on my wonderful and fitting choice of city. Friends and family alike seemed to feel that I was where I belonged, I guess because I have brown hair and like to read. Even people who had never actually visited Boston were proud that I was living in Boston. They had the facts on Boston and they were voting yes.

I currently pay $1050 a month to rent a studio apartment. When I lived in Boston four years ago, I paid $1050 a month to rent a studio apartment. My current apartment is on an incredibly picturesque street in a safe part of the city; my apartment in Boston was in a student ghetto. Everything works in my current apartment; my Boston apartment had a broken oven, a mouse problem, radiators that oscillated between scorching Saharan heat or no heat at all, and a vine growing through the bathroom wall. I had a clawfoot tub but couldn't take a bath because the landlords had ripped out the drain plug to save on water costs. At night, drunk people would try to open my door; I would lie in bed in the dark listening to them thumping and giggling through the halls until the sounds of homeless people fighting in the alley below lulled me to sleep.

No one ever said to me, "Isn't Boston an incredibly expensive city to live in?" Yet everyone asks me that about LA. When I tell them what I pay in rent, they feign heart attacks. When I lived in Boston, no one asked me about how long it took me to get to and from school everyday; apparently a 45-minute commute in an air-conditioned car is ghastly, while a 45-minute walk in the freezing rain builds character. No one ever said things to me like "I just wouldn't be able to stand the people there," as though there's something in the water that makes everyone in a certain region utterly uniform, so that there are no stupid or mean New Englanders, and no smart or interesting Californians.

People just think things about LA. That's okay. People think things about most big cities, whether they've been to them or not. What's unique about LA is that people love to hate it. I've lived here three and a half years, through five jobs and three apartments, through heartache and commutes and unfair evictions and abusive bosses and $12 cocktails in West Hollywood. Obviously I am choosing to stay, and it's not for the Thai food. It's because I'm happy. And all this hatred of LA, all these questions about traffic and smog and earthquakes and wildfires and breast implants and oh my God, for that much rent you could singlehandedly make the mortgage payments on a four-bedroom house in the suburbs, it's all insulting. Because it implies that I am making a huge mistake. That my happiness is stupid. When, of course, the truth is that you can be happy just about anywhere. And living thirty minutes from the beach definitely helps.

Emotional

2008-12-05T10:01:00.000-08:00

I've written about Christmas fatigue before, right around this time last year. I thought maybe I wouldn't feel the same way this time around, that I had somehow excised it from my system, but I guess it's the kind of thing that doesn't go away, because if it did go away it wouldn't be heartfelt. Part of the problem is my ridiculous, romanticized notion of what Christmas should be, which Henry got a taste of when trying to help me figure out what to get my brother:

H: Why don't you just get him clothes again?
C: I don't know. It's getting boring. I want to get him something cool and exciting.
H: What about something cool for his iPod?
C: Yeah, but what if he already has it? I want something he'll actually use, too.
H: What kind of video game system does he have?
C: I don't know!
H: Call and ask him.
C: But then it's not a surprise.

So, to summarize: presents need to be something unexpected, but cool, that the person will actually use. The sacrificing of any one of these three elements dampens my enthusiasm for gift-giving by at least 30%. Of course, the reverse isn't true; if I ask for a French-press coffeemaker I am still thrilled to get a French-press coffeemaker, and will sleep with that French-press coffeemaker in the crook of my arm like it's a teddy bear, such is my enthusiasm for it. But then, it's always harder to buy for guys than for girls, especially class-A college dudes like my brother, which I believe is what led my mother to once buy him a bong for his birthday, then give it to me to give to him from her, as if this would somehow take the edge off her de facto endorsement of illegal drug use. And what was her reasoning? "I just want to give him something he'll actually use."

(BTW, if anyone out there has a brother who's a senior in college, I decided on a make-your-own-beer kit. Gift that keeps on giving.)

Anyway, work brought me to Chicago earlier this week, where the temperature was in the teens at night and it snowed two of the four days I was there. One night as I was walking to a bar in that fast-forward bullet manner common to those who haven't brought a solid enough coat for the climate, a homeless guy asked me for some change, and I lied and said I didn't have any cash. I want to stress here that I am not a cruel person, but the truth is that because I was traveling for work I had about $300 in cash, much of it in large bills, and common sense dictates that you don't leaf through a wad of money like that on a dark city street while a homeless man is looking over your shoulder. Especially because I wasn't sure I had anything smaller than a $20, and that's not something you want to say to anyone, really, much less someone panhandling for change on a streetcorner.

"It's just that it's really cold, as you can see, and for 75 cents I can get myself a cup of coffee at McDonald's and they'll let me sit in there for an hour," the guy said. And then I did pause, just long enough to notice that there really weren't many homeless people around, nor had I seen many during the course of my trip. In LA we have homeless people everywhere, literally everywhere; they are passed out on people's lawns when they wake up in the morning or standing three-deep outside the 7-11 asking for cigarettes. And honestly, I sometimes have trouble feeling sympathy for them. For no reason other than that there are just too many, so many that if you stopped to think about the plight of each and every one you might become overwhelmed to the point of depression.

But this guy got to me, I guess because Chicago is not LA. No one has ever frozen to death from spending a night outside in LA. Not wanting to admit I had lied, I invented some ludicrous story about needing to go to the ATM, then into the bar to make change, both of which I did in mime form, returning with a $5 dredged from the depths of my wallet. And then the guy said I had a good heart, which I couldn't bring myself to tell him was about as far as possible from the truth.

So anyway, here's how Judaism has changed my Christmas values. When I was in grad school I got to take a class from Elie Wiesel. The class itself was basically a Midrash thing, and except for me and my friend John, it was entirely composed of rabbinical students. So the material at hand could sometimes get a little dull.

What never got dull was listening to Elie Wiesel talk. He's a soft-spoken guy with a really thick accent, and in the pauses between his sentences you could've heard a pin drop, so respectful and hushed was the atmosphere in the classroom. When you sneezed he would say "I bless you," and speaking as a devout agnostic, I can tell you that I got chills the first time he said it to me. Whenever people ask what it was like to take a class from him all I can say is that he is the closest thing to a spiritual figure I have ever met. He is deeply thoughtful, ego-less and kind.

The best was when he'd let himself get off the scholarly topic at hand. Like the day of the 2004 election. I had his lecture that morning, and he talked about politics -- in the abstract -- for most of it. He instructed us to vote from our hearts for the candidate who would do the most good for the most people. And another time he told us that he alwas gives money to people on the street. "You never know," he said.

I know I'm a little late to the party on this, but the things that give me pleasure at this time of year are gradually shifting. Of course I still love the rampant materialism, the opportunity to wear scarves and the convenient rationale for stuffing my face with whatever I want all day long, but I also want to do things for "those less fortunate," as we middle-class folk love to say, because lord knows the number of the less fortunate is mounting rapidly, and I can't believe my good luck at even having a job, much less all the other incredible things in my life.

/politics

2008-10-02T11:07:00.000-07:00

Pulling into my cello teacher's driveway yesterday, I nearly died of shock when I noticed, crammed into the bushes next to the mailbox and keening sheepishly to the right, a McCain/Palin '08 sign. I'm sure these are proliferating all over the country, but here is why I was so surprised to see one there:

1. This is Los Angeles.
2. My cello teacher is 28.
3. He's also a professional musician.
4. This is Los Angeles.
5. It was a McCain/Palin sign, not merely a McCain sign, suggesting that it was the selection of Sarah Palin as running mate that pushed him over the edge.
6. My cello teacher is 28.

I've really reached a point where I am deeply confused by anyone who's planning to vote Republican in this election. I know that's hardly an original thought, but I grew up in Indiana and went to college at an all-girl's school in the South. I have had to deal with the presence of Republicans my whole life, and I think I've been pretty accepting so far, especially when you consider my dyed-in-the-wool liberal upbringing. From the time I was very young I understood that I should consider the facts before choosing which political party to associate myself with, and the facts were that Republicans only cared about money and were racists and bigots, while Democrats loved and helped everyone. But then I got older, and at college I was introduced to the concept of "fiscal Republicans," which I understood to mean traditional Republicans who believed in small government and states' rights, not legislating according to religious values or disenfranchising the poor.

Until this year, whenever I met a soi-disant "fiscal Republican" I smiled acceptingly. I think deep-down I even suspected that these fiscal Republicans were smarter than me, especially given that I wasn't sure what the word "fiscal" meant until circa 2001. I took their fiscal Republican status to mean they cared about the same social issues I did but were much more intelligent when it came to money. I wondered if one day I wouldn't become more intelligent when it came to money and turn out to be a fiscal Republican myself.

But then this most recent election year rolled around, calling for a fresh re-examination of my political beliefs, and what is different about this election year for me is that I am not a freshman in college (2000) or a drunk grad student (2004). I am a working professional with an actual savings account and an IRA. What's more, I work for myself. My taxes don't come out of my paycheck in anonymous, inauspicious little chunks. No, no: I owe a huge lump sum of money at the end of every -- ahem -- fiscal year. This requires me to be very conscientious of where every penny of my money goes. I have spreadsheets. I pay quarterly against my anticipated earnings. I am fiscal as hell, a fiscal rockstar, a fiscal machine. I am racking up the benjamins, and then I am handing a quarter of those benjamins over to a government I hate.

But I'm not voting McCain. And if you say you're voting McCain for fiscal reasons, you no longer have my respect. Because what you're really supporting isn't small government or states' rights or any of those nebulous 10th grade history class concepts. What you're supporting is a political party that is currently controlled by the religious right, a party that doesn't believe in gay marriage or abortion. So if you have any gay friends, or any female friends, you are saying that money is more important to you than their rights. No, that's not even true. We're currently being taxed more than ever to pay for a war less than half of the country supports. So I guess what you're really doing is saying the promise of the possibility of getting to keep a small extra percentage of your income, however tenuous, is still worth more to you than the freedom of the people around you.

That's a pretty shoddy facsimile of democracy coming from the party that's so adamant about spreading democracy around the globe.

Of course neither party is perfect, far from it. Politics is all about lying and manipulation, and how to fix that is a question for someone much smarter than I am. But one of the founding principles of this country is that we do not legislate based on anything other than reason. The truths that we hold to be self-evident are that all men are created equal and that they all deserve the same inalienable rights. How anyone can whistle Dixie while casting their vote for a party that openly opposes equal rights for all is beyond me. How they can excuse their doing so for financial reasons is even more unfathomable. Shit, I'd rather meet a balls-out Republican. At least they know what they believe in and are willing to stand up and declare it to the world. All this namby-pamby fence-sitting in order to look like a hero to everyone is not only revolting, it's cowardly beyond all comprehension.

The introduction of Sarah Palin into the mix just confuses me further. So you're already supporting McCain for whatever reasons. Then he nominates a running mate with all the executive experience of a senior class president, passing over an infinite line of more qualified candidates, in order to scoop up the Hillary vote. He won't let her talk to the press because she thinks the Bush Doctrine is a landscaping principle, and suddenly he's extremely concerned about sexism, which you don't have to be a Democrat to acknowledge is an about-face of truly epic proportions. Meanwhile, she's running around calling herself a maverick and a reformer while blatantly lying about her vote on the Bridge to Nowhere and trying to interfere with an investigation into an alleged unfair firing. She's supporting abstinence-only sex education with a pregnant teenaged daughter. She's calling the media sexist while saying she wouldn't let her daughter have an abortion even if she'd been raped.

And still people support them. In the face of all this hypocrisy, lying and backpedaling, somehow people are still able to rationalize voting for them. Even my cello teacher! What is the world coming to?

The burn

2008-09-24T20:45:00.000-07:00

It was a long summer, work-wise. I have several new gray hairs, a new computer, a new set of glasses for a new vision problem and a newfound feeling of ennui. I guess that's what happens when you finally crawl off the hamster wheel. One minute you're working so much that you don't have time to shop for groceries; the next you're making macaroni and cheese from scratch in order to pass the time until you can pad downstairs in your pajamas to check the mail.

To fill the hours, I've started working out more, and I'm really beginning to see some results.

Just kidding! Well, about the second sentence, anyway. I am working out more, in the sense that I am working out every day, something I've never attempted to do in the past. I like to think of myself as an active, fit person -- who doesn't? -- but I've always found it easier to not eat than to work out on a regular basis. Why spend up to an hour a day doing something when you can attain similar results by doing nothing at all? But there comes a time in each girl's life when she wants to make healthier choices, and that time is now.

Again, I am kidding. I don't really want to make healthier choices. I'm just doing it, the same way I just pay my taxes or just clean my toilet. I think deep-down the part of me that grew up Catholic is convinced I will go to hell if I don't treat my body like it's my temple. It's funny how you can go along for years thinking Cheetos with a Cherry Coke is a fine snack to consume nightly at one a.m. and then wake up one morning convinced you can actually feel your arteries hardening inside your body and know that your days of Cheeto consumption are over.

For a while this summer I was dragging myself to the gym three times a week, more or less, which until recently was about as good as it got. I would wake up early and swim a mile before going into the Sony lot, where I would then become so hungry in the three hours before lunchtime that I would rush out and undo all my good work with a chicken salad sandwich from the Wolfgang Puck cafe.

Now I am working out every day, alternating between running and hiking and swimming, and I am having the same problem all over again. The working out part itself is fine. Better than fine, really -- for some reason it's easier for me to work out every day than every other day, probably because I'm not giving my muscles a chance to start hurting before I abuse them anew. However, I fail to see how I am ever going to lose any weight when I am eating like Michael Phelps. I try not to bring unhealthy things into my kitchen, which from everything I have read is the secret to always feeling satisfied and energetic. To which I can only say: ha. I will make a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast and be hungry thirty minutes later. My lunch, an oversized spinach salad with oranges and almonds, might as well be a handful of breath mints for how full it makes me feel. I know that if I ate Cheetos and Cherry Cokes my glycemic index would look like a California seismograph, but honestly, I think I'd be happier.

On the plus side, my guns are so out of control that they can only be referred to as guns. I'm feminine as shit.

2008-06-03T09:55:00.000-07:00

The building I live in now used to be a hotel. It's all studios, and everyone living here seems to be cut from roughly the same Hollywood twentysomething cloth -- except my neighbor. My apartment's in the back, and the building was designed longways, so he's the only person I share a wall with. He's very old. What a guy that old is doing living in a studio apartment, I'm not sure. I think he's been here a pretty long time and must have some amazing rent control. He once left me a mean note about making too much noise at 8:30 in the evening.

For over a week now there's been a strange smell, like rotting garbage, every time I passed his apartment on my way to mine. Last night it vaguely occurred to me to wonder if he had died in there, like one of those horrible stories you occasionally read on CNN.com, and then I chided myself for being melodramatic and morbid. Well, finally the cleaning guy told the landlord about the smell this morning. Turns out my morbid thought was right. He was dead. The coroner thinks he died more than two weeks ago.

If I imagine my building as a cross-section with the walls open to the world, like a dollhouse, I almost feel like throwing up. Here I've been, engaging in such activities as taking baths! trying on dresses! cutting my own hair! getting drunk with my friends! And the whole time this poor man's body was just a few feet from me, sitting perfectly still while the sun rose and set and the street-cleaning trucks whizzed by and it rained and got warm again and rained and got warm again.

The worst of it is thinking about the fact that he was dead and no one knew. No one he cared about called or stopped by. Don't get me wrong, my only association with the guy was the note he left me. He never said hi in the halls and was always perfectly quiet. We weren't friends and I didn't know anything about him. But he lived next to me. He was over there while I was over here. And he died, and nobody knew.

I feel really depressed and I'm not sure why.

Apocalypse forestalled

2008-05-21T10:31:00.000-07:00

When I got my current car in the summer of '05, I made myself a promise: I would drive it until the wheels fell off, and possibly even after if I could reattach them with duct tape. In keeping with this notion, I swore that I would always stay up-to-date on my oil changes and routine maintenance, no matter how much it cost. Because I am an adult, goddammit. Hear me whimper.

So about five months ago I got an oil change, at which time the mechanic mysteriously pointed out to me that my brake fluid was low. He didn't say what I was supposed to do about this, if anything, just informed me, using the same tone a physician might employ while saying "The results came back abnormal." Now, Old Cat would've hopped into her car and promptly forgotten all about it, but New Cat did the responsible thing and called her dad for an explanation.

Dad was unduly delighted at being consulted on any aspect of my adult life and promptly launched into a thirty-minute explanation of how brakes work. I should note here that my dad is theoretically a scientist, but he also teaches classes, and though he claims to enjoy being in the lab more than anything else, anyone who knows him can see that his real calling is lecturing. Endlessly. Give my dad a topic and four hours later he'll still be breaking down Subpoint B-3 and you'll be dehydrated and exhausted, wishing for sunlight.

So he's explaining how brakes work and at no point am I hearing the word "fluid." There's a lot of talks of "pads" and "shoulders" and "shoes" and other things that don't sound related to brakes in the least, but no mention of fluid. Finally I break in to ask, "So basically I just need to buy the fluid and put it in?"

"No, no, no," Dad says, frustrated. "Haven't you been listening? You need to go to the dealership and get your brakes checked."

"Oh, oh," I say, bluffing. "I see. Okay. I'll make an appointment."

For weeks afterward, whenever I called home, my dad would get on the line and ask if I'd been to the dealership to have my brakes checked. The truth is, I wasn't going because I still didn't fully understand what the problem was, and I would've felt like an idiot making an appointment because my dad, who's 2,000 miles away in Indiana, said to. Also, I have a general fear of mechanics that dates back to high school, when something went wrong with my secondhand Saturn approximately every four days, and I'd take it to the mechanic and they'd spout unintelligible gibberish at me for twenty minutes and then ask for $700.

Then my car started making a noise which every guy I know informed me had something to do with my brakes, and still I put off going to the dealership. "It's not making it all the time," I'd say, or "If I turn up the radio I can't even hear it." I waited and waited and waited until finally I had a minor financial windfall in the form of some long overdue paychecks showing up, and then, at long last and with heavy heart, I took my car in this morning.

As I sat in the waiting room, I scolded myself angrily. The whole point of my resolution was supposed to be not winding up in a situation wherein my brakes had been making a scary noise for close to two months and were potentially destroyed. The whole point was proactive maintenance. And now the guy with the weird mustache was going to emerge from the service department shaking his head. He was going to say to me, "We're sorry, miss. We did everything we could, but your brakes were fucked up beyond all repair and we had to gut your entire engine and now you'll be driving a Geo Metro. That will be one million dollars."

While I waited, a salesman came and sat near me. "How's your morning going?" I asked him.

"Good, good," he said. "Gas is up but vodka's still cheap."

"That's . . . true," I said.

"Can't drink gas," he told me.

"No," I said. "You can't."

Eventually the verdict on my brakes came through: the front pads were worn out and had to be replaced. "That's it?" I said to the service department guy. "Just the front pads?"

"Yep," he said. "And you made it to 30,000 on them, which is great. Most people don't get past 20,000."

The moral of the story: sometimes it's okay to procrastinate. I'm going to take a nap.

There were times when I was so lonesome I took some comfort there

2008-05-15T10:20:00.000-07:00

Tonight I went somewhere I've never been before: Newport Beach. In case you were living under a rock in 2004, this is the opulent SoCal community that provided the setting for groundbreaking documentary series "The OC." I went for a work-related event, and by "work-related event" I mean "thing I was paid to go to and look smart for three hours." Also, I got a free dinner out of it.

It probably sounds ridiculous, that I've lived in LA all this time and have never been to Newport Beach, and I thought it was ridiculous too until it took me two and a half hours to get there this evening. Part of the problem, admittedly, is that I left the house at 4:15. If I had to make a list of LA survival tips, number one on that list would be NEVER LEAVE THE HOUSE AT 4:15. But there's no motivator like an easy paycheck, so I decided to fly in the face of convention and get on the 5-south in rush hour traffic. In doing so I unconsciously subscribed to what I like to think of as my sense of wholesome Midwestern optimism, known out here by the more economical term "stupidity." I decided that if I really, really didn't want there to be traffic, if traffic would be really inconvenient for me, then by God the red seas would part and the 5-south would be the clearest it's been in seven years.

Ha.

If I left my parent's house in Indianapolis and got on the right combination of highways, I could make it to Cincinnatti--which, in case you're not up on your Midwestern geography, is in a completely different state--in less time than it took me to travel 50 miles to Newport Beach this afternoon.

But I did eventually get there, and I didn't totally lose my mind, thanks in large part to Henry, who kept me company via telephone for the most frustrating segment of the trip. (Hi, Henry. You make my world a better place in a million different ways every single day.) The event was being held at The Island Hotel, which is in the same complex of identical buildings as something called Fashion Island. I never actually saw Fashion Island, but I've heard it alluded to more than once on--you guessed it--"The OC," and had always assumed it was a made-up location because it sounds so ridiculous. Well, it's not made-up. Fashion Island is a real place. A whole Island of Fashion. Imagine.

The event itself was what it was. (Specifically, it was a hob-nobby style dinner followed by an hour-long lecture on MRI: past, present, and future. Scintillated? No? Whyever not?) I was in full-on professional mode rocking some business formal attire, which never fails to make me feel like a little girl dressed up in her mom's clothing. Afterward, I teetered out into the surprisingly muggy night to retrieve my car and politely waited while three preppy-looking white guys in what looked like tennis polos swarmed around the valet stand. Suddenly one of them turned to me with his crystal-blue eyes and said, "Can I take your ticket?"

Please don't think me racist because I initially assumed this was some kind of joke. It's just been a really long time since I encountered a white valet, much less one who looked like he'd just stepped off the tennis court for a bracing round of highballs. I guess this is what goes in Newport Beach, and I'm not going to pretend I wasn't a little pleased that this Aryan demi-god was fetching my janky Honda Civic while I stood on the marble sidewalk with the real adults. Call it white guilt, because that's pretty much what it is, but one thing I hate about LA is the fact that some underprivileged minority who works ten times harder than I do for a third of the pay is always having to bring me a water or park my car. I know that's just life, but it still makes me sad.

Then something even more shocking happened: a doc from the event I'd just been attending noticed my nametag still clipped to my dress and asked, "Are you a patient with mental impairment?" (This being the medical profession's idea of a rollicking one-liner.) Then he shook his head as if to say, no, seriously, folks, smiled, and asked me in a perfectly pleasant tone, "So you're a referring neurologist?"

This never happens to me. Never. No one ever mistakes me for anyone of any importance, possibly because of my inability to walk in heels. I regularly get carded buying beer at the QuikMart, which really slows down the visibly stoned sixteen-year-olds in line behind me who will proceed to purchase enough alcohol to kill a horse without being asked for ID, then go out into the parking lot and shoot heroin under the Fat Tire sign while the Rent-A-Cop is distracted making sure I'm not about to break into any cars.

Before I could explain that no, I did not begin my twelve years of intensely competitive medical training at the age of fourteen, the tennis boy pulled up in my car. Soon I was leaving Newport Beach, where preps are valets and idiot writers are neurologists, in my rearview mirror. Not without a strong sense of regret.