I just want to make sure everyone knows that if you need a mouth trumpet player for an upcoming recording or show, I’m your girl. I’ve been practicing for 15 years now, and once had a neighbor knock on my door and ask me to stop playing my trumpet, so you know it’s good. SHOCKINGLY good. I should make business cards for this sort of thing.
Posted by: Zosia | 01-30-2007 | 07:01 PM
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I moved to Minnesota the day after I turned 19. I’d never been here before, but, influenced by my best friend of many years, originally from the state, I caught a plane and went. My mom came with me, and Abbey met us at the Minneapolis airport. We drove up to Duluth in the worst snowstorm I’d ever seen. I knew Minnesota was famous for its snow, but this! My mom booked a hotel at the Radisson in downtown Duluth, and she stayed with us until the day before school started.
The school had told us we could move in early, so when my mom left, Abbey and I checked out of the hotel and lugged all of our stuff onto a bus and then up the hill to the school. But we’d been misinformed. They took our stuff and put it in a storage room, but the dorm was closed. So we went back into the blizzard, homeless.
I don’t remember what happened after that, though we must’ve found a place to stay. I just remember loitering on the curb in front of Lake Superior Hall in my new red winter coat, a montrosity made for Everest expeditions, bought by my Southern parents who were terrified I’d die in the cold. I had been in Duluth, MN – DULUTH MINNESOTA WTF said my brain – for less than a week. I’d never been away from my family before, not for summer camp, not even to spend the night at a friend’s house. I had friends and I went places, but at night I wanted my bed, my parents, my dogs.
But as we stood outside this foreign school, in the foreign snow, in this hilly, frozen, foreign land, I wasn’t homesick. In a sense, it was the bravest thing I’d ever done, and I felt no effect from it. I wasn’t afraid of everything then, as I am now, but I wasn’t an adventurous person. I liked my adventures in short spurts, but I needed a comfort zone, so this was unusual. But I didn’t take note of it, not then.
I made friends quickly. And while I missed my parents and missed certain things about my hometown and Southern culture, I still wasn’t homesick. Even when my severe anxiety and depression began to slowly grow worse over the next seven years, I still didn’t want to go home. Well, this isn’t true: I’ve always yearned for a home. Army brats don’t seem to lose this symptom. I loved my family and it’s true – wherever they were was home. Technically. But I hadn’t felt that home feeling since I was a kid. But this home – the house in Virginia (since burned down), the neighborhood, my old brown bike, the 7-11 on the corner before the last right turn to school, the creeks down the Twin Cedars hill – I didn’t miss it. I didn’t even think of it. I’d been there and now I was here, and what was the difference, really.
So what’s happened, seven years and seven dorms/apartments/houses/basements later, married and cat-owning, still in school, still freaked out by blizzards, for me to be homesick now? I’ve never in my life wanted to be in Virginia, with my parents, in their new house, with the old dogs, more than I have in this moment. I didn’t go home for Christmas this year – a first, and no doubt a contributer to this feeling – but my parents came here. My dreams consist mostly of seeing my parents, of bedrooms I had as a kid, of old pets and dinners and back porches.
I’m 26 years old, and all I want in the world is to go home again. I can’t, right now, for a few reasons. And even if I did, it’s not going to be the same. At 19, I could’ve had that home – the house hadn’t burned yet and I was young enough where I could drag my stuff home and hole up in my bedroom and sleep all day and eat my mom’s dinner and sit on the porch with skinny legs over the railing, talking on the phone. I could do these things now, but there is something old inside me that sits up at the dinner table and wears mascara to lunch and stands by my mother, cutting up vegetables, chatting about crock pot recipes and the kicker is that the last time I visited I was with my husband.
This is the moment, as its written, where I’ve realized I can’t go home. As a teenager, I thought I was wise, all-knowing. I knew I’d miss something as grown-up, but the idea was vague, unknowable. It was unknowable six months ago. But now. I want to time travel home. Even for five minutes. For thirty seconds. Just walk in the door of that old burned house, throw my stuff on a chair, grab a dog, grab a soda from the fridge, run up to my room, slam the door, flop on my bed and not understand a thing and be better for it.
Posted by: Zosia | 01-28-2007 | 10:01 PM
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A great, and thoroughly accurate, post on what it feels like to have clinical depression.
Posted by: Zosia | 01-22-2007 | 12:01 PM
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Well, we’re still stuck with the Wordpress generic template for a bit.
Last night was a show in the Qarma Building (a warehouse of artists’ lofts) and a show at the Turf Club, and I’m still surprised how I feel like someone’s going to tell me to leave at one of these things. It’s an imposter feeling leftover from high school, I think. I wasn’t an outcast in high school by any means, but I never shook the feeling that I didn’t belong with anyone. Looking back, I put myself on the fringes, too afraid and shy for real friends. There were people who made gestures towards me, and I shunned them, preferring to hide behind my extroverted, flamboyant boyfriend.
I started this website in 1997, as a junior, with the hopes that people would read it and they’d be able to know me in a way I wouldn’t, or couldn’t, allow in person. Reading back over those archives is painful (count how many times I call something “cute,” for instance), and not much of an insight into anything important. In some ways, I let my high school boyfriend mold my personality, so I became someone I wasn’t, but that’s a post for later.
The truth is, I don’t know what people thought of me in high school, and it doesn’t matter now, but it’s affected how I interact in big groups. No matter how talkative or flirty I get in a crowd of people, I can never shake the feeling of, what are you doing? You shouldn’t be here. In my lumpy black sweater and messy hair, with the way I ask too many questions and spill my drink and chew on straws and get starstuck when even minor local celebrities corner me, I know that I don’t think I fit in. But do they? And is it the same thing?
I’m a loner, by choice, for a number of reasons, so I often don’t think about these things. But I wonder if I’m a loner because I don’t want to worry about fitting in or owing something – an obligation or otherwise. And I’ve let myself cross the line, occasionally. Sometimes I find people who don’t bend under my charming drunk badgering. The people who don’t give me their hearts get the most attention, and in some cases, I’ve gone all the way to claim those secrets, and sometimes it was worth it, and sometimes the person was hollowed-out with nothing to find.
But this is rare, that I get caught up. All I can think about is that there’s a chance a conflict will occur – they’ll find something ugly or unbearably strange about me or they’ll disapprove of my stories. So I dabble in people and events, but I don’t rush in. I’ve said over and over and over again how I prefer to be the observer, but – beyond my obsessive fascination with collecting personal details – I think it’s because I’m too afraid to be observed. I take horrible photos because I don’t know how to adjust my face. Why wouldn’t I just give the camera my regular face? In photos that I don’t know are being taken, I’m concentrating hard, nearly angry. Why do I look like this, unpracticed?
This is common, I know. And if I sit on the edges, I can amass personal brain-files on people I speak to without giving a bias. But that feeling remains, awkwardly entering the Turf Club on a Saturday night, stumbling to the Clown Lounge, slouching in a booth, sneaking glances. Thinking I should get kicked out. It goes away when I dive in, but when I dive in, I don’t remember the details. And I need to record everything, just in case.
Posted by: Zosia | 01-20-2007 | 07:01 PM
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I’m upgrading Wordpress, so it’ll look a little weird around here for a few weeks or years. But I’ll still be writing, so keep checking back. Whatever theme is up right now isn’t my final thing – I’m just trying to find a decent placeholder.
Posted by: Zosia | 01-18-2007 | 04:01 PM
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I heard a crash from the kitchen today and immediately looked for the cat. She’d been napping on the couch, but now she was standing at attention with her tail puffed up. On the kitchen floor, I found the cat’s water and food dishes smashed to pieces. I looked up at the mug rack that hung above them, assuming it had finally confirmed my worst fear and fallen. But it was still attached to the wall, and the mugs to it.
There was nothing on the floor except the broken cat dishes. I looked everywhere for what might have fallen, but the counters were bare. There was nothing under the stove or the fridge or behind the trash can. I checked the dining room table, which sits against the wall behind the dishes, but it was a good six inches to the left. There had been no loud noises. No sonic booms. We don’t have rats, especially not superhuman Splinter-like ones.
When I cleaned up the glass and set down temporary dishes for the cat, she wouldn’t eat her dinner. The noise had startled her, but she’s not a cat scared of much – she’ll get wary and sort of test the waters by batting at suspicious objects, but she never backs away. I finally had to bring the new dish into the living room, where she relaxed and ate with abandon.
When Chris got home, I told him the story and ended it with the phrase, “Kitchen ghost, I guess.” And he looked at me, wide-eyed, “That’s where most ghosts are, isn’t it. Kitchens! Right? Am I right?” As if I knew these things. He’s not a person who believes anything unless it’s screaming in his face, yet here he was, willing to accept any paranormal wisdom I had to share. This is the man who, when I told him that yes, in fact it DID snow in Virginia sometimes and that I knew because I grew up there, replied, “Hmm. I don’t really believe that.”
So I said, “Yes, ghosts live in kitchens. And they viciously bite off the face of the last person to leave the room.” And then I ran, and tripped over the edge of a chair and fell hands first into the floor.
PS: I still have no idea what broke the dishes.
Posted by: Zosia | 01-18-2007 | 12:01 AM
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In case you need to contact Chris for the next month.
P.S.: Comments are off until I upgrade Wordpress because my site keeps getting hacked by dirty phishers. Considering I don’t know how to upgrade Wordpress and my webmaster, Minh, has left me for The Burning Crusade, this might be a while.
Posted by: Zosia | 01-16-2007 | 11:01 PM
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I’ve talked forever about how I vacillate between being a hermit and and a socialite, but I haven’t gone into much detail about the mechanics of that duality. It’s not like it goes, Monday: hermit, Tuesday: drunk and chatty downtown, Wednesday: pajamas all day, no human contact. It goes more like, first half of 2006: socialite, next six months: don’t leave the house.
I leap back into the active world because I slowly go mad cooping myself up. I mean, there’s nothing better to me than my warm apartment, pajama bottoms, books, serial television, a cat on my lap and best of all, no people besides my equally-introverted husband, no cars to drive, no loud jangly places to leave. It gets addictive, that easiness. It’s not always interesting and sometimes worsens my anxiety and general craziness, but it’s comfortable, simple and requires nothing of me.
It’s also difficult for me to get places – I don’t drive, not really. I can drive, and often do, to the grocery store or gas station, but any farther and I don’t do so well. Listen, some people are terrified of bugs or snakes, and I do okay with those, but the whole willingly steering a speeding metal death machine doesn’t sit well with me. And I don’t want to always be like, “Hey, I’d like to go out, youdriveokaydoyoumind?” So I usually don’t. Cut to six months later.
But tonight I went to a show for the first time in what felt like several centuries. I’d been feeling the bug to put on mascara and wash my hair and interact with strangers. While it’s nice to live with someone and know them so well that neither of you have to finish a sentence, it makes for short conversations.
The show was close, so I drove, despite a raging snow storm, and poked my head in the door of the place, unsure how to proceed. It’d been so long that I’d forgotten how to do it. Once upon a time, I did this nightly and I could always pinpoint the awkward, shuffly first-timers in the crowd. I forgot that at these things, everyone looks at you because it’s more about what you’re wearing and what your lipstick looks like than the actual music. But I’d really, really forgotten how that feels, all those eyes defining you. I sat in the back (it was a small, sit-down show, so not a “real” show in the pure sense of the word – an easy transition into extroversion), ordered a whiskey, ran into Rick and then enjoyed the night.
I thought, why do I do this to myself, this not leaving the apartment thing? I like this, the sexuality of it, the human drama, the color, the music, the thriving superficiality. This is not a dig, the superficial claim – there’s something just as comforting as the warm apartment about knowing, and yet not knowing, everyone in the room. If you don’t want anything from anyone – which I rarely do, in these situations – then you can be the reporter, the sponge, and you can pick and choose the details and energies you want to absorb. In the parking lot afterward, a bunch of hipster kids were throwing snowballs and screaming, and I drove home slowly, but re-exposed.
Last time around, I burned out quickly, but only because I forgot to sit in the back. It became a lifestyle. I slept with the hype, stuck my hands in its tight pockets, let it watch me like a stalker through a window. Do I know better now, to keep it level and platonic? It’s only been one night. Maybe that was the only night, a fluke, and I’ll remain a hermit, after all. Too early to tell. I won’t know until I’m dug in it, until the night I come wobbling up the apartment stairs with my hair stuck to my lips and my fingers reeking of tobacco. Not until I walk in, fall asleep in my coat and don’t even write about it, or remember the details three days later. Not yet.
Posted by: Zosia | 01-15-2007 | 05:01 PM
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The only club I actively participated in during high school, besides Drama which was less of a club and more of a cult, was Crimesolvers. I was elected Vice President and I spent one afternoon standing on a curb in an XXL Crimesolvers t-shirt, flinging keychains into students’ cars as they left the parking lot. For my effort, I got to pose with MacGruff for the yearbook photo.
Posted by: Zosia | 01-13-2007 | 12:01 AM
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Every birthday I write this long thing about how I can’t believe how old I am. Well, I still can’t believe how old I am, but as a kid, 25 was the oldest I bargained for, and I didn’t picture anything beyond. I
wasn’t being morbid; my imagination just couldn’t reach that far. There’s some famous quote that the existential crisis happens when, despite the solid belief that time will stop, the years come anyway.
Because even though I’m a logical scientist when it comes to human memory and mortality, some part of me must have believed I wouldn’t get old; otherwise, I wouldn’t be so surprised today. It’s enough to push anyone into their own Sartre universe – how can anything have meaning, how can you keep going, why keep going if no matter what you do today results in each year coming like a suckerpunch on a spring? In some ways, 26 is a relief. I spent most of my life feeling too young, like I had all these grown-up ideas and the physicality of a gangly 12-year-old. At this age I can pull off being married and wearing a ring and can sit in the company of all ages, all intellectual archetypes and feel like I belong. If not wisdom, then age.
I’ll admit that this hasn’t been an easy past few years for me. I’ve had to face a depression and anxiety so deep that I thought I was going mad. It’s been a struggle to see it as just my thing – some have alcoholism, some people have kidney disease, some people have an insatiable urge to travel and avoid rooting, some people collect teddy bear snow globes. My thing is mental illness, which is sometimes controlled and sometimes not. I had a doctor tell me that they didn’t understand – I could rationally, with a distance, speak about this madness and the fears that crippled me, but I couldn’t talk myself out of those fears. They don’t go away by being acknowledged, I had to reply, as most things don’t.
But to be truthful, 26 already feels like a better skin. I don’t have the same body or same recklessness, but I do have something better, which is a measure of control. I know enough now to pick my debauchery carefully, to siphon my adventures. It’s not overcaution, though there’s certainly that. I can just be wicked without spinning off an axis, and I think there’s a satisfaction in that. And what do I mean by wicked? I don’t know yet.
As I eased into the new year, I’m easing into being this age. I’m fragile about some things because I’m still not completely convinced that I’m not losing my mind, but at the core I think there’s just what I started with: I never pictured a 26, and so the coming years are a blank space, a vacuum. I don’t think that has to be a bad thing – in most ways, it’s a rejuvenation, as in, I didn’t think I would live this long, and now I have, so what now? It’s terrifying because I have a brain that imagines space and the stars and goes into overdrive, downing me for days. But there’s a creativity happening this time around, along with the existential terror. I’m not ready for it, but it’s coming anyway, and I’ll take it.
The uncomfortable part in the madness is thinking I’m the only who feels like this, but it can’t be true. I think there must be thousands of people who feel punted to a moon, overlooking the planet and their lives with disbelief. The journey, for me, is getting back to the planet. A good goal, I say, for a 26-year-old.
Posted by: Zosia | 01-11-2007 | 04:01 PM
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Our relationship began as an affair, and not a very discreet one. Listen, I need to be honest: I was 21, but I’d had affairs like so much breathing. I didn’t set out to hurt my boyfriends and there was nothing any of them could have done to keep me steady; it was a nasty thrill, that’s all. I didn’t do drugs or ride roller coasters or even take a sharp knife to a piece of meat, but I did have secret romances. It didn’t matter if I had a boyfriend or even if the boyfriend knew, as was the case occasionally; the affairs just had to be secret to somebody.
There was no excuse for any of it; I should’ve been single all those years, but I kept gravitating to these anchors who promised me steadiness and a place to rest. When it came down to the quick of it, I was, and am, someone who wants a rock over a wave, but I couldn’t resist the water. You know what I’m saying here.
This is how I felt about Chris in the beginning, and I’ve told him this. It wasn’t that I was cruel, but I was careless because I didn’t believe anyone cared enough about me to get hurt. It wasn’t a self-esteem issue, either; it was just that I felt like no one could love as much as I did. And since no one could love as much or as long, then how could they possibly get hurt if I betrayed them? Chris was unexpected, though not a shock. We were friends, and sometimes enemies, for two years before anything happened. He wasn’t in my direct group of friends, but he was there in auxiliary, friends with my friends and even dating my roommate at one point.
I’ve told this story before, so this isn’t new. I’ve told you how he held my hand too long at a show one February, and how something flipped, how he went from maddening, frustrating Chris to Maddening, Frustrating Chris. How it had been a long time since I’d had a crush that might reciprocate, and how my skin was an open socket, just waiting for a handshake like that. In truth, it could’ve been anyone, at first. It was a heat and a moon thing, a right time and a place thing. I wasn’t interested in my boyfriend anymore and he wasn’t interested in me, and I was buzzing, receptive to the smallest suggestion.
Our first kiss, though interesting on paper (by the sea, on some rocks), was not that interesting. It was exciting, but it was cold and I even lost consciousness for a few seconds when I stood up afterward, having lost my appetite that week because of a stomach flu. I don’t remember how we got back that night, or if he dropped me off, but I do remember walking into the bedroom and handing my boyfriend the first betrayal. I said I fell asleep on a couch at school. It came so easy, even though I was glowing from within with wet hair from the water. But I counted on him not to notice the details, which he didn’t. And he counted on me to tell the truth, which I didn’t.
Several nights later, Chris and I were alone in the house, everyone asleep. Chris hadn’t done anything like this before. He had always been honest and sweet, but he had also never been in love. It was no big thing to me. He was hot and electric and I’d spent the entire week in a purple, giddy haze, thinking of him as I walked around campus, dreaming of kissing him in class. But it was still no big thing. Something that would pass like a virus. I might get caught, but probably not. I would not fall in love because I didn’t with these things; it wasn’t the point. That night, alone in the house, we sat on the couch and didn’t kiss, but kept our faces close together, mirroring each others’ breath.
It was better than kissing. I had my hands stuffed in the pockets of his hoodie to keep warm. April in Duluth isn’t like April in most places, especially that April. It was an edgy winter, clinging to each month like a bitter suicide. We almost kissed that night, again, but there were sirens in the distance and we took them as a warning. We were both atheists, and didn’t believe in much. But during the beginning everything was a warning, a myth.
At one point, right before my boyfriend found out, we sat on a hill overlooking the city. I told him directly that this was what it was. This wasn’t going to be love. It wasn’t going to last. I liked him, though much of our kissing came from me shutting him up when he was infuriating me in only the way he could. He was, as it stood, exactly what I’d needed – someone sexy with a challenge, a rock star, someone so efficient in skin and muscle that when his shirt was off you could trace each rib, yank one out if you felt like it. But you couldn’t see his heart, and that was the part I liked so well. I didn’t understand him and loving him would change that. So on that night, when the moon was in eclipse, I said no, and he said OK.
I was desperate that summer. After my boyfriend and our friends discovered the affair, I moved to Minneapolis for two months to clear my head. There were other things going on not related to my relationships, and I thought a change of venue would shake me loose. The venue was unfortunate; I chose to live in the dark basement owned by the woman upstairs, who was gentle and sweet, but devoted to my boyfriend, as he had lived there the summer before.
The boyfriend and I, at that point, were still technically dating, though he was commuting between Duluth and Minneapolis for work. On weekends he was in the city, I would spend platonic nights at his mother’s house, unable to sleep and spending 3 AMs fiddling with her coffee maker while he slept hard in the upstairs bedroom. When my boyfriend wasn’t there, Chris, who was at his parents’ house for the summer an hour away, would drive to my basement and I didn’t sleep then, either, but it was a joyful and willing insomnia.
It was a summer we dared each other to memorize world capitals; to read hundreds of novels; to learn key phrases in every foreign language accessible to us. I’d never had an intellectual affair before. It was still very physical, but a brain connection was developing. I read poetry to him over the phone, shyly. He took me to parks and blushed as he plucked his guitar and played new songs. My landlord didn’t like him staying over, which was understandable had she not also added that it was okay for my boyfriend to be there, but this new guy…who was he? Didn’t he have a home?
Chris was on his way over that evening, so I sat on the curb, waiting. It was a warm night, but not terribly hot and I was brushing a lilac sprig across my face. I was wearing a long skirt and the neighbor’s sprinkler was splashing my toes and up my calves. The block was quiet and the last birds were lingering on a tune. Chris’s bronze boat of a car slowly pushed through the haze, and I stood up, seeing his face through the windshield. He parked and I said, you can’t come over anymore.
So he started crawling through the window, one of those deep wells intended for fire escapes. He’d crawl through two or three times a week, brushing away birds and squirrels, bringing me lilacs. We would set the alarm for 4 AM, and he would sneak back up, quietly escaping before dawn. His shoes were ruined by the end of the summer, and the carpet surrounding the window had a permanent dirt stain by the time I left. Sometimes I would be asleep when he would slip in. I’d leave the window unlocked, and suddenly he would be there, smelling of rain and stickiness and purple flowers. His hair was long and crazy that summer, as if he had been too distracted to cut it. His arms were wiry, but muscled, his body still holding onto his former life as a high school track star.
He was 21 years old, and in love with a girl who refused to love him back, which was okay. While I rushed through centuries, he took each minute as-is, expecting nothing, savoring what was given. But when did this active betrayal, the coldness with which I approached my love life, this careless affair, almost stupid and corny in its execution, become something worth marrying, something for which I’d detonate my own embassy…
What he didn’t know was something happened that last time I heard him crawling through the well, gently shaking off his shoes, padding across the floor quietly, slipping in beside me, sharp hip bones and wet arms. See, I always told him that I knew I loved him much later. I tell him this story of how I was drinking rum and we were sitting on the floor of his Duluth apartment, many months from that summer. I tell him that we were listening to a certain song and that I knew then, that I loved him and that this was more than just an affair.
But the truth is I knew that last, humid July evening, when he brought me lilacs and I pretended to be asleep. His heart was no longer a mystery; I’d learned many weeks before that he was brightly transparent, someone who had lied once in his life, for love, which is sometimes excusable, especially in those of a noble nature, stone-brave warriors who fear nothing and bring flowers. That night I let him believe I was asleep. He didn’t know me well enough yet to realize that I woke up at small sounds, all sounds. We weren’t at the point yet, five years down the road, where I would be stomping out of the bedroom to sleep on the couch because he was making weird swallowing sounds. We weren’t at the point where we finished sentences, and ordered food for other each other without asking, or absent-mindedly leaned into each other at grocery stores, chattering about lettuce without listening.
That summer he thought I was dead asleep, so he curled next to me, lightly as to not disturb. Every hair on my body stood at attention when his chest came in contact with my back. I wanted to turn over and take him, as we did and as we do. But through the haze and the wavy air, I let him hold me instead, in stillness in the way he always had, with sweetness and respect. In my head something loosened and sighed and I told him, OK. Do you hear me? The sirens have stopped, but OK.
Posted by: Zosia | 01-10-2007 | 12:01 AM
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The things that make me feel like it’ll be okay are pretty universal: a good poem, a great love, a soul-shattering meal, an amazing live show and, most of all, musicals. Any musical. Even a bad musical, with awful singers. A politically incorrect junior high Thanksgiving medly featuring six-year-olds in feather hats. Whatever. Before anything else, I was a theatre junkie, and when I’m at the blue points, I think I need to remind myself of all of this. In other words, that’s why I’m seeing Dreamgirls for the third time in four days. In case you were wondering.
Posted by: Zosia | 01-08-2007 | 03:01 PM
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I’m still in bed when the UPS guy rings the doorbell at 11 AM, so I quickly throw on some jeans and the first top I can find, which is my big puffy purple winter jacket.
GUY: Hi, sign here…whoa, you must’ve just woken up! A winter jacket and bare feet, I see.
ME, apparently embarrassed that I slept late: Um, I work the night shift. (ATTN: NOT TRUE, unless working the night shift means “watching The Wire.”)
GUY, feeling chatty: Oh, what do you do?
ME:…accounting.
GUY: Late-night accounting? At a hotel?
ME: Yes. No. Yes.
GUY, not letting it go: Which hotel? Downtown?
ME: No, a hotel somewhere else. You wouldn’t know it.
GUY: I bet I would! I’ve lived in Minnesota for 37 years! Try me!
ME: Um…um…Raja. Raja, MN. (NOTE: Raja is the name of my cat.)
GUY: Raja…up north?
ME: More east.
GUY: By La Crosse?
ME, practically crying at this point: Yes! I have the oven on, I need to go.
GUY: You had the oven on while you were sleeping?
ME: (whimper)
He finally left when I pretended to hear the phone ring. And even then he was like, “I don’t hear anything!” Maybe he was FBI. I should’ve just admitted that I stayed up until 5 AM watching serial TV and looking at my pores in the bathroom mirror.
Posted by: Zosia | 01-05-2007 | 03:01 PM
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Cats on backs for the win. Chris goes to Vegas tomorrow with his dad and uncles for our honeymoon. JK, it’s not our honeymoon. But every time Chris mentions he’s going to Vegas, that’s the comment. He got a bunch of shit for it at the reception, even though the trip was planned before we decided to get married. “YOU’RE GOING TO VEGAS WITHOUT YOUR WIFE THREE WEEKS AFTER THE WEDDING?” What do you reply? “Yes, because I hate her and hope she rots in hell.” Or whatever. Either way, Vegas is my idea of a nightmare with the jangliness and the neon and the way people seem like they’re floating and dead. Unless it’s Oceans 11 up in there, I’m not interested in having my senses split open and pissed on.
In other news, my favorite internet writer is posting again. Looks like he made a resolution, too.
Posted by: Zosia | 01-04-2007 | 11:01 PM
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I drove into a brick wall yesterday. That was pretty cool. Fortunately, I was going about 5 miles an hour, and pulling into my parking lot, so I didn’t get stranded anywhere. I was talking to my mom on my cellphone and the worst thing about the ordeal was that I yelled, “SHIT, GODDAMNIT” really loudly in my mom’s ear. Not that she’s against cursing and I am nearly 26 years old, but I still have memories of cursing in high school and getting pulverized by the Mom Glare.
I didn’t curse much until my 20s, though I did call some girl a “dictator bitch” in the 5th grade. (I remember exactly what happened, too. I’d started a club called The Four Flowers* or some shit, and when I got to school one day, there was a note on my desk saying that I was OUT of The Four Flowers. Ousted! From my very own club! The gall.) I got sent to the counselor, who asked me what did I mean by dictator. The only dictator I knew at the time was Hitler, and you can imagine the note sent home to my parents about that one.
In other news, I just cleaned the kitchen wearing no pants, and I’m obviously trying to update this thing every day, but who wants to hear about cleaning the kitchen? Even if it involves partial nudity? Still I persevere.
*I wasn’t very girly, well, ever, so I can’t imagine this was the real name. I know I started a club in Girl Scouts called something like The Devil Girls, and that seems more fitting to my younger self. I was the girl, you know, who was convinced for years that the devil spoke to her (straight-jacket alert), only discovering in my early teens it wasn’t the devil and boring old OCD instead. That caused a few embarrassing moments for my parents at dinner parties. “Can you pass me the butter?” “Maybe, let me ask Satan.”
Posted by: Zosia | 01-03-2007 | 08:01 PM
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I swear to God if this horrible pain in my jaw and teeth means I have to get my wisdom teeth out, I’m running into traffic and hoping the front end of a car takes care of it for me. Anesthesia (or the idea of it, since I’ve never been under it) terrifies me, so I’d do the tooth extraction like complete badass with only novocaine, but that sort of terrifies me, too. Let’s just hope I stabbed myself with a chip or something. That doesn’t bode well, either, however, because Chris stabbed himself in the upper mouth with a chip once, creating a goopy cyst which doctors biopsed by sticking a huge, HUGE needle down the back of his throat. I would like to begin and end 2007 with an intact mouth.
More pleasant thoughts today include: “stay in, little wisdom teeth, stay in!” and grocery shopping. I’m really excited to make things in my vegetable steamer (a regift from some friends) and/or my crock pot, and I’ve given up making fun of myself for that. Somehow it only seems okay to love a vegetable steamer if you have other debaucherous elements in your life, which I do not.
Every year, I seem to switch between wishing for something interesting to happen, and then for all the interestingness to calm the hell down, and this year is in the latter. Last year was plenty interesting, with the house fires and marriages and, well, a lot of other things appopriate for Livejournal, but not for here. So pajamas and crock pots and wisdom teeth it is, for now. I write more, anyway, when I’m not in trouble.
Posted by: Zosia | 01-02-2007 | 01:01 PM
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New Year’s was dressing in black, deciding to drink Bourbon and play board games at 11 PM, and then yelling, “Could you please shut up for the love of God,” at 7 AM to Chris and Rick in the living room who were on the dregs of the Bourbon and having “philosophical” discussions. Then it was cold Spaghetti-Os at 8 AM – still awake! – while watching some old guy plow the parking lot. I changed out of my pajamas once for a coffee run, and then my priest got to 41 in Warcraft. An OK beginning.
Today, I really like flash fiction by Dawn Raffel.
Posted by: Zosia | 01-01-2007 | 11:01 PM
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