hate list: the short version

I haven't been writing because I haven't actually finished my LA trip post, but fuck it. I'll backpost later.

I am cranky. I got up just after 8 AM to do laundry. I don't do anything that early, but I have exactly one pair of clean undies left. I avoided laundry all weekend because I figured it would be busy and I could do it during the week. And of course, as I enter the laundry room at 8:40 AM, there's a guy loading up both machines. Stupid guy. Who does their laundry at 8:40 AM on a Wednesday? I thought I was safe, but noooooo. And he didn't even speak enough English to understand "Are you using both machines?" and "Do you have more to do after this?" All he could say was, "I think you come back, one hour." Stupid foreigners and their doing laundry at the time my tax-paying red-blooded American self wants to do laundry. I am now a firm believer that all immigrants should be sent to Mexico, whether or not they came from there in the first place.

I also now hate young people. Yesterday in my fiction class (I'm in the next level for summer school) there was a kid, maybe 19, who spoke in a way I am clearly not young or hip enough to understand. First he was talking about "summer camp" and I thought he meant like "Kumbaya" and s'mores, but no, apparently it is a big concert thing. Then he and another kid in the class were discussing some band that's coming to play at the House of Blues, and Mr. Hip was saying "We've been trying to get them to play [insert local indie venue here] instead." So I asked who "we" was, thinking perhaps he was part of some interesting group of project.
"You know, like, family, like, the family and stuff."
"Oh, is your family involved with [local indie venue]?"
He was kind enough to explain to me that "family" is just slang for the group, like his fellow cooler-than-me people - a truly royal We. Then later in a word game he used the word "Deemster." At this point I decided I couldn't get any lamer, so I might as well ask. Apparently, a Deemster is a person who helps dole out DMT. And what is DMT? "A happy bain chemical/drug."
When did I get so fucking old?
Then last night my neighbors were out with tiki torches, cigarettes, loudness, and half a dozen friends until after 1 AM. Yes, I am usually wide awake at 1 AM, but I'd tried to go to bed before midnight with the intention of getting up early to do laundry.
In conclusion, I hate young people.

Must...stay...awake...long...enough...to...put...in...laundry.............

stupidredeyepieceofshitmotherfuckerwanttosleeeeeeeeep

cray day to come

Date with my improv teacher went fine. Very platonic. No worries. The play was very good and moving and such.

My schedule for the rest of the day:
1-2:15 PM: Find out what the girls are wearing for our show, shower, put on lots of make-up, pack self, pack dog, make sister's birthday/graduation card.
2:15-3: Take dog to super swanky kennel where he will be staying for two days, go to theater where show will be.
3-4: Pre-show rehearsal, run-down of who is in what game and introducing each thing, etc. Pray to improv performance gods.
4-5: Improv show. NBF is actually coming now because it turns out his flight tonight is at the same time as mine so I Will actually have an audience member there for me and me alone. HUzzah. Make 'em laugh.
5-6: After-show time with improv people that I may never see again. Some, that is sad. Others, no loss.
6: Go to airport.
8: Fly to LA. Sleep on plane.
10:50 LA time: Arrive in LA. Pick up rental car. Drive to parents' hotel in Passedena.
?: SLEEEEEEEP

trapped, lost, and angry

My car key is missing. The part that attaches to a key ring broke last week. I was on my way to run errands, including making a copy. I'd been so careful. But it's not where I thought I put it and it's not anywhere else that I would have put it which means it probably fell out of my pants or my jacket and I'm ripping my apartment to pieces looking for it and I'm going to kill something. My phone is dead again, too. That was another errand I was going to do: get an actual Verizon charger. I am very not happy about this. I'm supposed to be at E's in two hours and I had all these other things I needed to do today and now I'm cleaning my apartment, which is good, except I'm still not finding the fucking key and I'm getting more and more discouraged as I go. Why oh why don't I have an extra key?

armageddon on my mind

Really bad dreams. Lots of Armageddon stuff. It was somewhat in the future and terrorists were everywhere and blowing up buildings and trains constantly and they were your friends and family so you couldn't trust anyone. Lots of sneaking out of buildings and getting away from areas and false bombs and real bombs and radiation and trying not to touch bodies of water because terrorists had spilled nuclear waste into them and it was so toxic they called it "razor water." Very upsetting.

fat cat

I went shopping yesterday with my mom and got black pants from the Banana Republic outlet that make my butt look really good and a cute dress from BCBGMaxAzria. I need to get back to the gym. Lots of time trying things on in mirrors made me feel fat. Not that I'm actually fat fat, but I've acquired a belly and it needs to go away. My 54-year-old mother has a better body than I do.

onward and upward

Thank you to everyone who sent me birthday wishes via phone, email, text message, Facebook message, and any other method I'm forgetting. It was a very pleasant birthday. Fizzled out a little early, but splendid while I was being social. My cousin, cousin-in-law, NBF and I went to a late lunch at Bittersweet, which was amazingly not crowded for Mother's Day afternoon, ate wonderful things, wandered over to Uncle Fun, drove to the lakefront where we tried to fly kites but there was no wind so we played frisbee catch instead and shmoozed for a long time. Then my cousinses had to go (who the hell has work meetings on Sunday nights?) and I went to NBF's to watch the long awaited last disk in Samurai 7, a strange but surprisingly good Anime series based on Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. Then I came home and futzed on the computer for hours on end and now I have some random music in my head that I'm trying to get down on paper but I don't have a keyboard or perfect pitch and it's hard to plunk it out on the violin, especially when it's a two part harmony thing.

Tomorrow, I go to the premium outlet mall with my mom to try to return the skirt that doesn't look great on me.

and I smell like one, too

Happy birthday to meeeeeeeeeeeee. I am 25 now. I am oh so exceptionally old. I saw Oedipus Complex with my family, which was good but not great (I thought the male leads were fairly weak and the integration of the Freud stuff could have been much better, but the chorus was awesome) and then we went for dessert at some random place in Lincoln Park because we found a parking spot nearby. I ate a chocolate moose tart thing that was completely delicious and now I am a complete fartyfartfart-head. My brother was cranky the whole time because he wanted to be out with his friends and my dad was in his super type-A personality mode and a little tipsy from dinner (which is usually more entertaining because he drinks so infrequently). Gotta love family. They gave me presents, including my amazing new toothbrush that I picked out myself last week, a cute shirt from Benetton, and a completely fabulous Kate Spade bag*.

In flattering-but-awkward news, my improv teacher invited me to go see a play with him on Friday. I'm pretty sure in a date way. He's a great guy and perfect on paper, but I am a terrible horrible shallow human being and find him completely unattractive. Not just an absence of attraction that perhaps could change with a date or two, but an actual vague repulsion. Which is funny and sad, because I tend to be attracted to plenty of more portly and homely menfolk, and frequently fall for teachers. He just looks like an old man to me--a scruffy old man with a beer belly and a tired face. Otherwise, he should be perfect. He's brilliant (graduated Harvard Law when he was like 20) and interesting and funny and knows music and culture and understood my dorky econ references and isn't scared of me. But he might as well be a woman for the quantity of attraction I feel. I suck. I will die alone and it will be my own fucking fault. Do not pity me, dear reader, for I have designed my own fate.

After sleeping for most of the last three days, I am not tired. Maybe I will play Wheel of Fortune on my phone until I fall asleep or it is time to get up and have birthday festivities. And did I mention I am farty?


*Sunny, if you are reading this, the bag makes me think of you. In a good way.

Slept about 19 of the last 21 hours, and I really just got up to eat something and drink water and walk the dog. Stupid annoying low-level but persistant migraine. I have a busy day tomorrow, so if a bazillion hours of sleep and tons of naproxen don't kill this thing, it's back to coffee for me. Grumbles.

If I only had a chemise

I want to be the kind of girl who sleeps in a chemise*. I would have $300 curtains that I'd change every season and artful throw pillows everywhere. And when I got a migraine, I would lie among my throw pillows in my chemise, staring at my curtains with a cold compress to my head and sigh beautifully while my understanding and attentive boyfriend (or perhaps fiance, since this scenario needs more words co-opted from the French) tip-toed around me and brought me iced tea and walked my dog and stroked my hair. Maybe as I slept he would whisper things to me in French and Italian--only two of the 14 languages he spoke, having been raised the lonely only child of a diplomat.

But no, I'm in my mess of an apartment, greasy and unshowered, popping pills, having a whining contest with my dog, picking at the zit on my shoulder blade, daydreaming, and reading McSweeney's features to keep myself happy between painful brain stabs.



*Perhaps this $170 Josie Natori number from Saks, or perhaps something more sweet and innocent from Anthropolgie...it is my birthday this Sunday

OUCH.

Stupid head. Today is supposed to be my last class (except for tutoring tomorrow) and my class is going out drinking. I want to be there, but it is very clear I cannot. I need a neurologist. Take care of this stupid crap.

Thing I wrote for my fiction class:

Migraine Monster

His tentacles are long and muscular, covered in suction cups and briars. They wrap around my cortex, through my cerebellum, and down to my medulla oblongata. He entwines himself in my gray matter, weaving in and out of my parietal, occipital, and temporal lobes, lying quiet, dormant, waiting. He can sleep through days, weeks, and the occasional fortunate month or two, as I tiptoe around him, terrified to disturb his slumber. I know what can wake him: changing weather, stress, flashing lights, soy products, red wine, too much alcohol. But some days I can sneak past him with fistfuls of edamame, other days a fluorescent light bulb is enough to incur his wrath.
He first begins to stir, quiet and playful, turning up the volume on all of my senses. I hear ants cough and smell a burp burped three days ago and a butter-yellow shirt can blind me. The world starts to smell like static electricity and the very idea of food makes me sick. The creature is now awake, alert. He squeezes a tentacle around my retina and flashes his tail in my peripheral vision, causing me to see things that aren’t there: a flash in the corner, a halo around the window. All images flatten to two dimensions and spatial relations skew. He hums in my ear like a bad fluorescent light bulb.
He slithers another tentacle down my throat, poking at the back of my mouth like a bulimic’s finger. The gagging queasiness begins, but unlike nausea originating in my stomach, vomiting does nothing to alleviate the pressure. The monster laughs his low, sharp laugh as I run to the bathroom.
If I catch his stirring early enough, he is much more content to simply slink back into dormancy. I search frantically for pills, digging through vials of failed past treatments. Some made him laugh, some made him angry. He demands a louder and louder “FEED ME” and, with a sharp tentacled squeeze, jabs briars into my cortex and frontal lobe. I try not to scream and find the blue pills, swallowing three of four instead of the intended one or two. If I am lucky, the monster accepts the offering, gobbles them up, and settles back to sleep, appeased.
For now.
Some days, blue pills aren’t enough. “FEED ME” he squeezes and stabs, even after the blue pills. He sees the fear in my eyes and jabs again. “I said FEED ME.” I run back to the cabinets for the vials with a 17 letter name. I used to have to draw them up into syringes and inject them at a 45 degree angle into the flesh of my stomach every eight hours. I would scream, “Monster! Do you see? I am willing to do anything if you will simply shut up and go back to sleep! Do you see, Monster? Anything.” Now the vials have the same 17 letter name but a new formula and I screw spray tops onto them and stick them in my nose, aiming for the blood vessels. “If you tasted it, you wasted it,” the nurse explained, and the $50 vials are good for only two doses each if I do it right the first time. And still, the monster is not always appeased. His “FEED ME” becomes a “FUCK YOU” as he squeezes tighter and tighter. He throbs and stabs and presses in every direction. He screeches and tantrums. Every ray of light, every peep of a noise make him scream louder and thrash harder. I cry and beg and crawl into bed, useless and writhing.
Please, please, please let me drill a hole in my skull. Just a little one, on the top right side of my head. Like bullet through an airplane window, the change in cabin pressure will suck the monster out. There will be screams like a boiling kettle, slurping popping sounds as his tentacles dislodge, and with a spatter and a splutter and flop to the floor, out he will come. And as he lies dying on the ground in a puddle of his and my blood and ooze, I will grab the nearest blunt object and beat the shit out of his deflating body. I will scream at him, “Do you like that? Do you? Now you see what it’s like, you piece of shit. Now you begin to know what you put me through. Oh, I hope it hurts, I hope it hurts twenty-five years wroth of bad. I hope you feel every bit of pain and loss of the things you’ve taken from me and kept from me. Fuck you, monster. FUCK. YOU.”

love me or leave me

Newest addiction/procrastination tool: filling out online dating profiles. eHarmony, Match, Chemistry, The Onion. It's a wonderful exercise in self-obsession, answering question after question about me. I still have a tendency to include the most negative information possible about myself to scare off the faint of heart. I parade my flaws with the hope that a Boy will see them and find them charming. It all goes to my fear of abandonment stuff, I think--I'd rather never get to know a Boy than have him leave me after discovering some chunk of my personality he doesn't like. It's all mostly irrelevant, anyway, because I refuse to pay for any of the online services, so the only one that lets me respond to interested Boys is The Onion's personals, and the odds of me actually agreeing to meet any of these people in reality are slim to none. I'm the internet equivalent of a girl who goes to a singles bar, shows everyone her cellulite, and then refuses to give out her number to anyone who is still interested. I am awesome.

My nose is itchy and so is my brain. There is no good food in my apartment but I refuse to move my car because gas is too expensive and my tank is almost empty. I think I forgot to take my pills today. I'm feeling withdrawl-ish, and I've been forgetting shit all day. Tomorrow I'm having Girls Day with my mom. How cute. You look like a monkey.

Why is my dog being whiny and clingy? I am trying to write my big phone sex thing for tomorrow. I need to write and concentrate and write some more. I wrote an outline last night, which I never do, and a big block this afternoon, but I want to turn in a way-too-long version with absolutely everything in it that I can then chop down into something smaller and punchier. Just need to keep spitting out chunks of it until it is done. Chunk chunk chunk.

I had a rough few days last week. A close friend was being a jerk-face and it hurt something fierce. This is why I'm so guarded about people I let into my friend-world and (corny but true) into my heart. I am EXTREMELY sensitive once I care about a person and I've had enough hurtful people in my life already, thankyouverymuch. Add to that this wonderful time of the month and you have one sad, lonely, weepy Annabell. Not good, and not very productive. I need to be productive. Need to write.

Back to writing.