strange musings of a distracted spunk

An old college friend messaged me tonight and said, “DS. You’ve always been good at giving unbiased advice, and you understand relationships better than anyone else I know.”

I laughed, but then I thought about it. And realized that there are three very distinct people who have been using me for relationship advice in the last few days, outside of the usual folk. And this is not the first time I have found myself giving advice to people I don’t consider my closest friends. Did I unwittingly pass a relationship advice dispenser test? How would such a test even work? I’m imagining walking a yellow line with a spoon balanced on my nose; for this sort of test must be completely arbitrary and random. For the record, I would most successfully fail. Nor can I really answer what makes a relationship work, other than to say, “My grandparents knew each other for six weeks before they got married and they’re still together 53 years later.”

For that matter, why do I come across as unbiased? I’m quite biased. I’ve determined that I like contrary, obstinate asses. I’ve determined that I can only sunburn in patches; today gave me a jigsaw puzzle of a sunburn. Which later migrated, so I have a more complete puzzle of a burn.

I am no longer split in halves; at least not physically. I’ve determined that the universe likes to do what it may with me, and I’m just a merry pawn on its game of life. Yet I still wonder, what qualifies me to advise others in the fair matters of the heart? How do you be there for a friend whose mother is dying when he’s sick of hearing “Is there anything I can do? I’m so sorry.” Can a hug or a blown kiss make everything feel better? We’re not the same four year old children anymore, who when mommy kissed the boo-boo on our knee felt better. The band-aid is just that. A band-aid.

We rip them off, thinking less pain now is better but have we even given the wound time to heal? I can’t profess to understand the dynamics of relationships any better than anyone else. I’ve been on a perpetual merry-go-round of my own for a year and a half, and where logic should hold true, it fails in the face of “Well. He makes fun of me when I bang my elbow.” All I can do for myself and anyone else is say, “Be honest. If you’re in love with her and think it’s going to blur the lines of how you treat your friendship, clear the air. If you’re not sure you want to marry her, should you really have moved in with her when you know she’s waiting for a ring? If he hasn’t gotten in touch with you by now, it’s not very likely that he’s going to.” Maybe, it’s just the act of listening, letting someone think the pockets of their brains out that lets them slowly piece their feelings together. Does that qualify me as Oprah then?

I don’t sugarcoat. It’s both a blessing and a curse, and has gotten me in trouble many times. I don’t know what makes a proper relationship work. I can sit in the kitchen and watch my grandfather make his coffee while my grandmother prepares dinner for that evening, but I won’t see the inexplicable magic that lies beneath after 53 years together. I can agree that someone sounds wonderful, but ask, then why are you running away? I ask myself why people value my “unbiased” judgment so much when it seems all I do is make judgments about what I perceive as the truth they don’t see.

Are we ever truly unbiased? Can we come closer to finding the truth out when someone else has to make it clear for us? Or do we shade our own beliefs with those of the people whose opinions we trust the most, losing our own truths along the way?

I can play devil’s advocate. I can listen like nobody’s business. But I can’t give out relationship advice when I myself have been so blind to my own.

I never expected to read an old professor’s book and leave it feeling profoundly depressed.

She writes of her experience as a 38 year old woman, never married, subject to the experience of watching nine of her ex-boyfriends marry the girl right after her. She details various dates with men she so desperately wants to have a spark with, but feels nothing for at all. She interviews other women in her field who are also alone and reveals this uncompromising truth:

Women who are smart end up alone.

In fact, the higher the IQ, the more likely they are to end up alone.

This bodes well for me. So well in fact that it leapt me into second thoughts about whether or not breaking up with Gymnast Drummer Boy was the right decision. I may only be 24, but as I read the book, it occurred to me that my entire family, second cousins included, have been married by the time they were 24. (Though I am a bit disappointed that no one has proven to be gay. I feel like Jewish families such as mine could always use a little bit of spicing up.) It was a sinking sort of revelation, when I realized that for as much as I may have thought and cared about GDB, the vast majority of people I am friends with know nothing, or very little about him. There’s a strange paradox of knowing that I spent almost a year and a half wanting just him, and as far as they were concerned, it was just another year and a half of me being me, doing my nomadic thing, relationships be damned.

Is it my nature of being open but guarded? (Yes, walking contradiction, acknowledged.) Is it my nature of wanting to wait till something is serious before I really make any necessary introductions? Or is there a part of me that is so hesitant to see something succeed because I believe it will fail anyway, I don’t bother?

For that matter, what is it about girls that when we meet a genuinely sweet, smart, funny, caring individual, we wait for the other shoe to drop or swear if things keep going this way, we’re going to end up hurting them? Why are we so hesitant to believe that we deserve something good? We’ve been conditioned into believing that we don’t want to be alone; whether it’s nature or nurture that put us there, I don’t know. But when I think back to my septuagenarian boss who has never been married, I can’t help but wonder, “Did she miss out?” and then feel ashamed for subscribing to such conventional notions. And at the same time, I know I don’t want to be where she is, no matter how content she may be with her life.

It’s not that I want someone right now. Not at all. I’m simply licking my wounds, waiting for them to heal before I re-emerge back onto the scene as a single girl. I’m not the sort of girl who needs someone. But I am the sort of girl who will want someone. And at the end of the day, after reading the stark reality of how smart women fare in the dating world, I wonder if someday, there will be someone waiting for me at home, or if instead, I’ll be tucking into my bed alone.

Ready for a secret?

Normally, I’m pretty happy with my body image. Normally, I like how my boobs snugly fit a bikini top and how my bermuda shorts ride low on my hips and make me feel sexy. I knew that even if I put on a pair of jeans with a sweatshirt, I would still get looks as I walked down the street, because I am pretty cute. But lately, over the last few weeks, I’ve become victim to self-hatred towards my body.

Perhaps I should start from the beginning. As an overactive, skinny stick who danced five days a week, the biggest complaint I often had was my butt was too bony. It hurt to sit on the ground and other people’s laps. Almost twenty years later, I still have that complaint, but the rest of me has rounded out. I chalk it up to puberty and events in my life that happened when I was seventeen. I didn’t realize how much weight I had gained until post-college, when I was almost thirty pounds heavier than I was when I had entered.

The thing about my body is, I’m not petite and I’m not small boned. I have shoulders; broad ones. They look great in halter tops and spaghetti straps, but they will never look delicate. I’ve got curves, hips that jut out but my stomach tends to be pretty flat; I rock a four-pack pretty easily. I most definitely do not have an ass, but I more than make up for it in the chest region. My legs are muscular; maybe not as muscular as they were when I danced, but my calf muscles are still pretty huge. I’ve been mistaken for a soccer player numerous times.

When everything went down with D last year, I couldn’t figure out how to move out of the zombie phase. One day, a friend suggested I go to the gym with her. I was never a good gym-goer; I felt it was too isolated and too machine oriented. But something clicked that day, and suddenly, I started hitting the gym three, four, five times a week. I would go at the end of my day, after work and class, getting home close to midnight. I felt good about myself, and it showed. The weight I gained in college melted away, and I found myself gravitating towards more feminine clothes, something my high-school and college-self rarely did. But more importantly, I wasn’t mourning the loss of D anymore. I was redirecting my energy to a place where I didn’t have to think, where I could just move and somehow, that blank slate let me move forward.

I struggled a bit when I first moved to California. Living in a strange house where I couldn’t make food or bring home food meant I ate out a lot. And cheaply. When you were only making 800 bucks a month (thanks AmeriCorps!), gourmet meals are not exactly an option. But when I found my apartment, I got back into the rhythm; of cardio, pilates, then weights. I would be at the gym for an hour and a half to two hours, and I felt solid. Comfortable. It helped that a boy loved me, inside and out, even when he was 1800 miles away. For some reason, having someone who thought I was impossibly sexy somehow made me feel even more sexy, which was never a term I would have applied to myself until he came along.

When he and I broke up for the first time in December, I lost the motivation to go to the gym. Sneaks of depression would slither in, and all I wanted to do was go home, curl up in my bed, and zone out with a book or a movie. I didn’t want to think. I was afraid to think, because unlike D, GDB would somehow crawl into the furthest recesses of my mind, even when I was running at top speeds on the elliptical. I wasn’t willing to cry in front of other people at the gym. So I hid from it all at home, where no one could see me cry.

I struggled with my body and him for the next few months. He and I were so up and down, he infiltrated my thoughts so often, I thought it best to find as many distractions as I could. I would go to the gym, but it would only be a half-hearted effort. Finally, when I walked away in March, I started to feel good about myself again. I struggled with how my body had grown softer, but I wasn’t afraid of facing my innermost thoughts at the gym anymore. I still felt sexy, even when it wasn’t GDB who left me messages every day, as much as it was Rebound Boy. I was back in a rhythm. I liked myself and my body.

Of course, that’s when the world shifted again. Remember when I got fired? And had to deal with an asshat of a roommate? And GDB came back? And oh yeah. I traveled for a month and a half. Oh right. And broke up with GDB for good. All in the last two months. Yeah. I’m still recovering from that.

So I’ve taken solace on my parents’ couch, in my bed, eating their food, most of which is not what I would keep in my own house. I’ve seen pictures of myself from Thailand compared to pictures of myself from this past weekend, and something feels wrong. My clothes don’t feel right. My body feels strange and bigger than usual. I don’t feel sexy, at all. I don’t even really feel attractive. I’m putting on my more masculine clothes, hiding my body again, because I’m not happy with my body as it is anymore.

I won’t say pounds because I try not to go by pounds as much as I try to go by how my clothes feel, but I do want to get back to where my body was. Where I felt tight and fit, where I wasn’t afraid to wear my more feminine clothes because I felt pretty and light, and mainly, where I felt damn sexy. Part of me wonders if it’s because I’ve finally ended something where I felt like the most insanely attractive thing in the world in GDB’s eyes, and am I not able to see myself in that same light? I honestly can’t answer that today. For the first time in a long time, I am taking a break from relationships (if you haven’t heard Alanis Morrissette’s “Moratorium,” I suggest you download it now), from positive reinforcement from guys I find attractive, and from feeling like I have someone I want to dress up for.

I want to dress up for me. But more importantly, I want to feel like I CAN dress up for me, when I am back to being comfortable in my own skin. I want to shed the weight I’ve gained in the last two and a half weeks of being home. I want to remember what it was like to walk down the street and turn heads. I’m not there yet. But hopefully, even though my routine is at best a joke, at worst, a pretense, I’ll get there again.

What do you do when your vibrator breaks?

A. E-mail the following?

Hello!

This might be a bit of a strange e-mail, but my rabbit habit vibrator broke. Not because of overuse (perhaps from underuse?) but simply, because the battery pack fell off. The shaft no longer works, though the bunny ears twitch quite well, but there is something to be said about trying to use a vibrator when it has wires sticking out and a battery pack hanging off. A vibrator in general is not nearly as appealing as a genuine cock, and sadly, a vibrator with wires (and somewhat reminiscent of a floppy dick) is even less so. And yes, I am quite aware that this is slightly absurd; I should really just go out and find another penis, but I just broke up with the one I really liked best.

Is there any way I can get an exchange for my vibrator? I only bought it in mid-February, and it broke in the beginning of May, but I was unable to do anything about it as I was traveling for the next month and half. Now that I’m back in one place, I’d like to see what can be done about getting my Rabbit Habit fixed. Thank you!

B. Research vibrator repair shops? I feel like the people who work in a vibrator repair shop would be akin to the kind of guy who puts on a used condom. Ick.

C. Suck it up and shell out money for a new one, even though I currently have to hide the old one behind my bed, where I fear my cats may find it and use it like a toy for their amusement. Kitten + twitching bunny ears = hours of entertainment/mortification.

In which case, I need recommendations. The Rabbit Habit’s clitoral part works well enough for me, but I’d like a bit more stimulation vaginally. Suggestions?

The thing with moving away for a year is you expect everything to be the same when you get back. You expect the little sister to be the same snot-nosed brat she was for the last twenty years, instead of the more mature and humorous twenty one year old she’s turning into. You expect more arguments and getting stuck in the middle between your bitterly divorced parents, instead of the rational conversations and less badmouthing. You expect your friends to kind of be the same, even though you know they’ve experienced tons of milestones in their own lives.

Moving away for a year also makes you forget how many friends you actually have. I knew I had friends. I knew I had people who were excited to see me. I just didn’t realize twenty five of them were going to come out on Friday night. Had my six usual players been in this part of the country or not a Mets game, they would have been there too. Going from living in Berkeley, where I knew all of nine people that I would regularly see for a once-a-week social life to being in the middle of a bar with people I know everywhere…it’s overwhelming. I forgot how much it hurt to talk that much. My voice was scratchy by the end of the night. Yet it was absolutely wonderful to be with everyone again, because I was reminded of my history with each and every one of them. I forgot how fun it is to just reminisce about silly things with people who have known you for years. I had a little bit of that in Berkeley, when we would create new memories, but this was like slipping into an old sweater and the most comfortable pair of jeans and just being yourself.

I was surprised at how easy it was to hug everyone and fall back into the same patterns. With my life partner, we hadn’t seen each other since November, but we fell right back into almost finishing each other’s sentences. With my Pea in a Pod, though I talk to her every day, having that face-to-face interaction where she knew how I was feeling and having her be there was just really really nice. But perhaps the biggest surprise was when D showed up. I knew he was coming, having invited him, but I wasn’t prepared for the actual interaction. When I gave him a hug (because let’s face it. I’m a hugger now. I have no idea where this came from, as my family is all too happy to share stories of how I would punch them were they to try hugging me, kissing me, or even pick me up when I was younger), he was slightly awkward. But then…he would poke me if he wanted my attention, just like he used to. He ended up being my ambassador of sorts, because outside of Thailand and Avocado, he knew almost everyone there. We slipped right back into our old routine of chatting away and absorbing each other’s attention, and then I would remember there were still twenty four other people there. Needless to say, the whole night was a success.

Then came Saturday. After a lovely brunch, I had a family party to attend, before stopping off at a friend’s birthday party in my old town. I got a phone call. “D is going to be here. Is that okay?” Coming on the heels where I got furtive whispers about, “When did you and D start talking again? I thought you said you would never talk to him again!” it just felt another, “Oh boy.” So I got there. And we chatted. This time, we both tried to redirect our energies towards other people in the room, but quite simply, there was no one there as interesting as us. We caught the whispers and stares and “When did this happen?” We fell back into laughing at one another and just moving around each other to talk. It was like old times, where we wouldn’t plan it, but we’d end up hanging out multiple nights in a row.

And suddenly, it felt all too comfortable. The whispers. The stares. Him poking me and me laughing at him. The ease of our conversation, even when we talked about my now ex-boyfriend and his girlfriend. And suddenly, I felt as though I needed to leave. Because it had only been my first venture out back into socializing the night before, and already I had seen him twice. And I can’t do this again. Are the old feelings there? I don’t know. They were too tied up in comfort and familiarity for me to really ever accurately separate them. So I left, because it was too easy to see this going down the same road. Of the friendship and comfort building up until one day, I decide that he’s the right one for me.

I wondered if I was displacing my feelings for GDB onto D; as though he were the brief interlude during this year and a half we hadn’t seen each other. Is D the Harry to my Sally? I don’t know. I don’t want to find out. I’m glad we were able to spend time in each other’s company, and see that we still have that same ease of comfort, playfulness, and interactions with more awkwardness, but I think…this isn’t a path I want to head down again. What it means, I don’t know. I just know it’d be too easy to make the same mistakes. How is it that everything really can change and yet nothing change at all?

1. I started this blog.
2. I got published. Twice.
3. I kicked a boy out of bed.
4. I tried changing the world.
5. I hugged a cactus in Arizona.
6. I went to Seattle and Vancouver.
7. I stepped in two oceans and one sea.
8. I quit one job and got let go from another.
9. I found joy again in taking a pen to the page.
10. I didn’t have any emergency trips to the hospital!
11. I took a dance class with Taye Diggs, who clapped me on the shoulder.
12. I walked away from the one person who often made me feel the most secure.
13. I met some amazing people, yet I always end up on the opposite coast.
14. I moved cross-country by myself, to a place I had never been.
15. I road tripped from San Diego to San Francisco.
16. I had a bike go all transformers on me.
17. I found a softer, more reserved me.
18. I learned I have awful travel luck.
19. I went to Thailand and Japan.
20. I realized my own strength.
21. I lived the same day twice.
22. I moved. Five times.
23. I fell in love.

Here’s to year 24; may it be as enlightening and exciting as 23.

For the last few months, I’ve been walking a precarious tightrope. The thing about tightropes is you know there’s a chance you’re going to fall and break something. But you do it anyway. I walked it because love was on the other side. But love can only take you so far. You can mean it, you can want it, you can live and breathe it; but sometimes, it’s just not enough.

Today, not enough came through. So I took my first step off that tightrope. The ladder may shake and quiver under me, but with each step, I’ll come closer to solid ground. It was nothing to do with him, and everything to do with me. Or perhaps it had everything to do with him and nothing to do with me. Quite simply, I want more.

I want love, the kind where you breathe each other’s name every time you exhale. The kind where hearing the other person’s laugh sends shivers up your spine, like it did the first time, and like it will each and every last time. The kind where life may come and go, but your hand is still there for the taking, no matter what happens.

I want the kind of love where it’s not about who loves who more, but how can you love me any more than you already do? I want the kind of love where his hurt becomes my hurt and my hurt becomes his. I want his heart to become my heart and my heart to become his. I want to experience every elation, every sadness, every quixotic moment in bliss because it is what life is made of.

I want to know that I’m the first thing he wants when he wakes up, and the last thing he wants when he goes to bed. I want to know that when he looks at me, he doesn’t see if, he sees when. I want to know that when I finally let him in and am ready for the next step, he will already be waiting for me on the last. I want recklessness, impulsiveness, silliness, because I am worth all of it and more. I want him to buy that damn plane ticket. I want him to want the world for me and the milky way too.

I want him to distract me with laughter when my family hurts me. I want him to brush aside his own work when I need to be handled with care. I want him to yell at me and snap me out of my brain, reminding me to live in this life, here, with him. I want to argue with him, passionately, exquisitely, until we’re out of breath and logic is rendered useless. I want sex, hours of sex and love mingled together, tracing lines on each other’s bodies, finding each freckle and errant hair and the scar from when I fell off a seesaw when I was four.

I want love. The good and the bad, the pain and the joy, the explosion that will occur when I find the one who is meant for me, who will love me with as many atoms as I love him. I apologize in advance if we send the universe out of orbit, but my love is too much for only me.

I want love. I’ve had it before. I’ve seen what it can do and how it makes me feel. I can say it now. Love. Love. I’m ready for you.

Settling in is a lot harder than I thought.

It doesn’t help that my body has fine-tuned itself to fall asleep between eleven and twelve, and rise before eight. Further exacerbated by my now religious ritual of driving my sister to the bus. There are three cats waiting to be fed when I wake up, and sometimes, this involves them sitting on my head. Or at least being outrageously flirtatious and allowing me to pick them up for a few seconds longer than they’d normally allow. To be fair, we’re still not sure what the youngest cat thinks she is; her “sqgurks” and “-ehp” sends me into hilarious laughter every time.

But my room is significantly messier here than it was in Berkeley. Maybe because I still haven’t found a proper home for everything yet? Here, my past, present, and future all collide. The Care Bear I used to carry with me as a child. The black and white cat my stepfather gave me when I had surgery. The brand new dress I bought for my birthday party on Friday. I struggle, feeling slightly like an unwilling archaeologist, accidentally digging up the artifacts of my time. There are memories stored in every pocket, every corner, every box and bin and yaffa block. Most of which, I had put aside for the time being.

I have to borrow my sister’s earring rack for the time being, which is a bit of a struggle, seeing as I have over eighty pairs of earrings and hers can only fit about forty of mine. It’s strange accidentally glancing at the headless earring mannequin that holds six of my earrings, but seems to wonder where her head went. In a lot of ways, I feel as though I can relate.

The job hunt is not having it. I wonder if I need to dress myself up - professional clothing to yield professional results? More often than not, I sit at my parents’ makeshift dining room table in pajamas, scrubby hair and face, and bemoan the lack of publishing jobs that I’m actually interested in applying. The job industry is one that far forgets the long-term effects of positive reinforcement. Just a single, “We’re interested,” would be lovely; proof that all those cover letters and proofreads are worth my time.

But the thing that hits the hardest is…when I wake up, everyone else is still asleep. It used to be that when I woke up, everyone on the East coast was bustling away, starting on their day, and I would have plenty to keep me distracted. Avocado and I were on the same time zone, Thailand was always up before bed, and I could begin my day-long conversations with my friends. GDB would have invariably dropped a line or twenty. Now, I wake up to several lines from GDB who has this uncanny poor timing of signing on after I fall asleep. I blame the central time zone. I wait for everyone else to slowly wake up, get their coffees, churn their minds, while I’ve been sitting and wondering what to do today for the last two hours.

It’s a strange feeling, feeling so purposeless. I feel as though I should try to make sense of my new room (for it is new; my parents moved into this house a year ago. I’ve never lived here; only visited.) I feel as though I should foster better relations with my three cats. I feel as though I should be writing a book or more stories or just writing in general. And instead, when someone asks me what I’ve done today, I can only answer, “I’m not sure.”

Is this what coming home means?

Edit: Good news! I just found out I am published in You’re Not the Only One, a book that dedicates its profit to the non-profit group, Warchild! Additionally, several other spectacular authors are published, including the ever-lovely Hope. Buy it here!

When we were younger, our mother took us to Disney World in her first act as an independent, single woman. I was twelve and my sister was nine. In a rare display of affection, I offered to give my sister a piggyback ride in the pool. As we sunk lower into the water, her arms clung to my throat, cutting off my air and circulation until I couldn’t breathe. I thrashed around, trying to pry her fingers off my neck, before I was able to finally push her off. Gasping for air, I wondered if that was her way of getting back at me, for the decapitated Barbies whose hair I couldn’t brush properly, for accidentally slamming our grandparents’ door shut on her fingers, for ignoring her whenever possible. She said she didn’t know she was doing it. I’m still not so sure.

I was never a good sister. I’m not sure that I am today. I wanted nothing to do with her, and sometimes I still don’t. I wish I could be stronger, tolerate her more, but my patience wears thin, snapping like straws of spaghetti before they’re cooked. Where I was red, blue, and aged before my time, she was black, shifting colors, and stunted. We’ve wondered if she might be mildly autistic for it took us years to explain what humor was. Her inability to process sarcasm and understand that the world is shaded more in gray than black and white makes it difficult for me to connect with her, being a deeply sarcastic person and never one to focus on stark contrasts. Her inability to keep friendships for long is something we have difficulty understanding, explaining, because the awkward, angry, hurt person she is around my parents and me is not the one she presents to the outside world. So few people realize how difficult it can be to deal with her when she has her happy face on.

When she doesn’t get her way, she takes it out on whomever is nearest; lashing out at me by telling me I think I’m perfect, I know everything, don’t I? Our mother for “refusing” to give her the money our father supplies us with. Our father for not being there, in our house, a stepfather instead in his place whom she hated for much of his appearance in our lives. Much like I would throw gum in my father’s girlfriend’s hair to antagonize her when I was ten, my sister would find ways to incinerate him to the point where he punched a hole in the wall. She has become a source of contention in both my parents’ dissolved marriage, and my mother’s remarriage. I often worry that if my parents were to ever get divorced, she will be the reason.

Her willingness to play the victim both angers and upsets me. So we got into a fight yesterday, one that left her screaming at me and me parking the car in our driveway and walking out. I told her we’re too different to ever be friends, that if I weren’t related to her, I would have nothing to do with her because I don’t associate with people who don’t take responsibility for themselves.

I’m not one to mince words. Rounded edges has never been my forte, and yet, it’s what my parents have used to get her through her childhood. I’d rather the sharp edges, so it cuts at once, and you know not to make the same mistake again. I never can tolerate how quick they are to hold her hand through everything, to reassure her that the world is not out to get her every time something doesn’t go her way. Empathy and sympathy are not emotions she understands for anyone else, yet she demands and clamors for it when the slightest thing goes wrong. It has often led to me slamming a door in her face and sobbing behind it when my world is crumbling and she wants to go to the mall.

I can’t pretend to be a good sister. I know I’m not.

This time, she didn’t cry. The red-faced anger was still there; the one that leads to tears and shouts, locked doors, “I hate you!” declarations throated from a voice that can’t quite absorb the world around her. She said, “We’re different. You’re always running away, moving onto something else. I need time to get used to things, to learn how to do things, because I’m slower. That doesn’t mean you’re better than me.”

I told her I never thought I was. Just that I wish she would stop saying, “I can’t” and start trying to say, “I can.”

How is it that she and I were made from the same cloth? Can you agree to disagree? Maybe she has changed in the last year, grown wiser to the ways of maturity. But my scars run deep. I can’t so easily accept she’s different when she’s still so unwilling to accept the damage she dispenses, wielding a baseball bat of irrationality when it strikes her fancy. I can’t be the punching bag she directs her anger at because she’s not getting what she wants at that immediate moment. I can’t be the wall between my parents, waiting to break the minute I get loose.

I’ve been home less than a week. Is it too soon to take flight?

-Why does Macy’s Wedding Registry keep sending me e-mails? Do they think I might be a customer soon? They have wild aspirations.

-My parents’ smallest cat makes noises like a robot. I’ve never heard anything like this, and I end up cracking up every time I hear a “Sqgruk.”

-It’s kind of nice having a shower that works. My apartment in Berkeley was excellent at being temperamental in temperature and pressure. This is why I often took baths.

-I’ve been shaving for at least twelve years. So explain to me why a chunk of my right leg is now missing?

-Kyle XY is quite a spectacular show, and they need to come out with the season 2 DVD ASAP. (We started watching this in the islands in Thailand. This is geek chic; who needs to go out and socialize when you can watch a boy without a belly button!) Also, why is Lisa still on Top Chef? And why did my family forget to DVR the last two weeks of So You Think You Can Dance? At least I get my dance fix tonight! *cheers*

-Twould be lovely if I could stay awake past 10. Last night I passed out at 9:45 pm. This does not bode well for my alertness at a bachelorette party on Saturday night.

-I’ve lost an inhaler, an earring rack, and 50 yen. Each one of these are in a different country. Awesome.

-When I invited D to come to a party next week, he said, “Are you sure it’s okay if I come? Won’t your friends want me to die?”

-GDB makes me laugh. He can stay for a bit.

-Family barbecues with mine and Thailand’s family are super fun, especially because he and I finish each other’s sentences and would tell stories and giggle hilariously. Also, I am craving a hot dog like no one’s business.

-One of my easiest snacks is a ketchup sandwich in a hot dog bun. My mom used to have to have my camp counselors take them away from me if I made that, but I’m such a picky eater sometimes that instead of picking at my food, it was easier to make a ketchup sandwich! I don’t know why it hasn’t caught on more.

-I think my hair is redder in California than it is in New York or New Jersey.

-I’m actually kind of digging not doing anything this week.