These Clothes Worked For Me

The clothes I am talking about are the clothes I packed up into a big trashbag a few days ago in a delusional moment when I actually thought I could get some money for my styly duds at the local Buffalo Exchange.

For those not in the know or too rich to thrift, the BE is a consignment shop where you can actually take your old shit in, and they pay you for it, or give you store credit so you can turn around and buy someone else's old shit and make it your new shit and think you're the shit. Get it?

It's a hipster thrift store.

So since I can barely keep the lights on in this stupid apartment I decide to pack up a bag with clothes that I don't wear but that are PERFECTLY acceptable and trendy articles, and take them down to exchange them in for a full-scale shopping spree.

I was greeted by one of the stores stripe-tighted buffalo exchangers at the BUY counter. She faked a smile as she eyed first me, then my Hefty bag. And even though the store had just opened and I was the first and only customer within a 2 mile radius, she seemed to have a lot of things she wanted to do other than stand there and explain the deal to me. Like maybe staple her eyelids to her forehead.

"Ok here's the deal," she huffed as she hiked up her tights. "We look at what you have, and if you have something we CAN SELL we put a retail price on it and you get 20 percent."

Eye roll or not, this sounded like a fabulous deal.

However, that IF sort of sailed up between us and drifted over to my garbage bag of goodies where it sat atop my awesome old red boots, crossed its legs, and cocked its head at me.

It was a saucy god damned if.

"Sounds excellent! I'll just be over here if you need me," I beamed fashionably as I hid in a rack of slouchy handbags for a good three wilting minutes.

But this wiafish arm-warmer-clad twit of a fashionista was not going to win this little battle of cool. I had seen what I had stashed in the bag.

The twit had not.

But then... unfortunately, she had.

Not two minutes later she tapped my back as I stood pawing through yards and yards of polyester and demin skirts, sifting for my size. From the weight and sarcasm of the tap, I knew things were not looking as good as I had hoped.Turning to face her I saw the satanic IF sat perched atop her left shoulder, chuckling merrily.

"Well, we can't take any of your stuff."

Now if the conversation had simply ended there I would have walked out wounded but with my esteem still hangnig in there. Bruised, but steadfast all the same.
The conversation, however, did not end there. It started going so far south I started hearing bando music in the distance.

Waving good-bye to what was left of my sense of self-worth I listened to her chirp away, "We usually like to buy things that people want. You know. Stylish things. Things that have come out in the past 5 or six months. None of your stuff fits that criteria."

I had officially been hip-slapped by the twit-let.

Standing there, alone, with an arm-full of now expensive-to-me new old outfits that I would have to cough up actual money to pay for, I felt betrayed and abandoned by my clothing. They had lied to me. They had told me, when I bought them....ten years ago....that they would make me pretty and funky and spirited. That they had intrinsic worth. That they would live forever. They did not tell me that they had a shelf life and would inevitably betray me and shame me in the face of a Hollywood fashion maven.

They had told me I was cool.

The liars.

Say Cheese

If someone chose to spy on me and checked my internet history they would most likely report me to the authorities first, and my mother second. I can just hear them now.

"OK ma'am. Can you tell us what you were doing looking up devices to make a cat explode on contact, foot fetishes...and jobs you totally are not qualified for---all within a 7 minute period?"

"What about on Tuesday January 21. Right here the history tells us you ran a search for new bedside tables, cheap David Sedaris tickets, common inhalants, self-cleaning fish tanks and ways to release the Ebola virus upon the United States from your dining room. You wanna tell us what that was all about?"

The internet is one big spy ring, complete with Spyware. Yeah, we've all got it. No big deal. So what.

Spying is becoming so ho-hum, isn't it? It used to be that only international agents with little cameras in their high heel shoes were the only ones with access to any sort of crazy spy gadgetry. We'd send a spy in a conspicuous outfit over to Russia to get some gossip and snap a photo of a top secret document. Russia would send their dude over here to get the document back. We'd ship the same dude back to Russia, but pay him more so now he's a double agent.

The good ole days. When spying was fun.

Funny how that changes when the person snapping photos could be across the street in a tree with a telephoto lens watching you, watch Raymond.

There are now legal stores dedicated to selling devices that help you catch people doing things they're not supposed to be doing. I find it interesting that there are so many people doing enough naughty things that it constitutes an industry. What the hell are people doing? And why am I so god damned boring?

I pity the poor fledgling spy who rigs up my apartment with his new camera. He could officially put a camera in every room, from every angle and bore himself to death within 12 minutes. I'm just not that interesting. I walk in. I stand around. I sit sometimes. That's pretty much it.

Cheese.

You Want Fame? Well Fame Costs

And right here's where I started paying.

I am stunned that there wasn't an audition to get in the door of my gym. My gym being Gold's Gym on Cole, in Hollywood. I am actually sort of mad that they didn't audition me because frankly, I am not coordinated enough to belong there and feel kind of nerdy every time I walk through the door of the place. That's not necessarily an emotion you want your gym to inspire or something you voluntarily pay 60 bucks a month for: raw geeky inadequacy. I get enough of that in my own apartment.

After joining and hanging around a few days, I realized I had most likely joined the wrong establishment. That this gym wasn't somewhere I was going to thrive as a human. From the caliber of kick-ball-changing talent I witnesseed in the dance classes and the level of difficulty in those classes, you'd think the entire Gold population was vying for a coveted role in A Chorus Line.

It is a gym like no other, resembling nothing on the planet earth. First of all there are about a hundred dance classes a week and there are no novice gymsters to be found anywhere. It's like a race of really skinny, choreographically superior aliens dropped out of the sky and took over the building--complete with leg warmers, warn Capezios, and camo pants.

The most popular dance class takes place three times a week and is called FIRE. F.I.R.E. is an acronym for Feel, Imagine, Rejoice, Express. I share with you a description from my Gold's Gym dance class schedule:

"This revolutionary dance class will change the way you Feel, Imagine, Rejoice, and Express yourself. FIRE is a cardio based class that moves to the rhythms of Jazz and Latin dance techniques. Irene's motivational skills, energy and passion for dance is contagious. Release stress, gain confidence, and sex appeal in this magnetic class full of drama, sizzle and spice."

I made the mistake of attempting to FIRE once. Before I realized FIRE was a volcanic and scorching land where no freaks or geeks with two left feet are tolerated. I've got to tell you. It was the first time I've been afraid that a gay guy was literally going to kick my ass. One thing you don't want to do is get in a gay dancer's way. Especially if he's pirouetting frantically in the mirror in a headband.

Seeing that I can't dance, I sort of stood in the back toughing it out while rationalizing that I could pretend to dance. Who the hell would notice?

Until I realized there are so many people in FIRE that the routines are done in waves. After Irene teaches the entire class the steps squashed together elbow to elbow, the students fall into groups and perform the routine as the other dancers stand on the sides of the room watching. So even if you hide in the back, you eventually, become the front.

I realized this alarming point as I struggled with all of my being to remember what Irene had told me to do. I told the devil himself that he could take my soul if he would let me walk through this FIRE without making a complete tard of myself.

The Devil wasn't interested.

When my group was up and we were suddenly performing for an audience, I did not want to Feel, Imagine, Rejoice or Express. I wanted to Stop, Drop, Roll and Forget I had ever been born. It was the most stressful, humiliating subsexual moment of my life--full of neither sizzle nor spice.

What ever happened to old fashioned aerobics? I was kinda good at that. I had that grapevine move, DOWN, you know?

Things That Go Bump In The Night

I'm still afraid of monsters.

Back in the day my monster used to crouch at the bottom of the stairs when I was the last to bed, ready to grab my foot as I sprang up the hardwood staircase four steps at a time.

He stood on the bulkhead doors below our kitchen window and gently tap tap tapped the windowpane on lonely nights when I babysat my little sister in our house, in the woods.

These days the monster isn't hiding in my closet. He isn't crouching under my bed ready to snatch an ankle with his slick and hairy hand as I sleep.

My monster now lurks in the corner of my bedroom, inside my computer...waiting to steal my dreams of a better life. On his fetid breath I detect the putrid scent of panic.

He lurches around just inside the window of my monitor, a mere 1/8-inch of glass protecting me from him----my Frankenstein...

My Monster.com.

This beast's main purpose in life is to terrorize me with emails describing soul-crushing jobs that apparently match one of four job profiles that he forced me to create one dark and desperate night when I thought another McPRjob in a series of other McPRjobs might be the golden ticket to happiness and satisfaction.

His primary means of contact with me is the portal to hell also known as my hotmail.com account.

Sender: MONSTER.
Subject: MONSTER AGENT

Body: GREAT NEWS! WE HAVE FOUND NEW JOBS MATCHING YOUR JOB SEARCH AGENT CRITERIA!!!!!!!

Late last night and the night before
tommyknockers tommyknockers
knocking at my door.

I do not fall for his exclamation points.

I know that on the other side of his punctuated pretense lies a job description with a list of requirement bullet points so long and convoluted and improbable that it will make me crumble onto my bed in the fetal position. It will make me want raw cookie dough. And cigarettes. It will make me ornery and unmanageable and catatonic. It will make me call into work the next day because I will no longer be able to breathe.

- Experience in presenting and selling- Experience in managing - Experience in costing and cost engineering- Significant experience with PowerPoint and Excel- Detail-oriented- Strong organizational and project management skills- Solid written and verbal communication skills- Friendly, people-oriented, team player- Able to multi-task- Self-starter, motivated and proactive

I want to go out, don't know if I can, cause I'm afraid of the Tommyknocker man.

I wish he would come out of the computer and hide in my closet again like he used to when I was 5. He was scary then, but he's terrifying now.

And he's gaining on me.

(thank you S King for your Tommyknockers)

A Banner Day

Three days ago I somehow managed to find the time to gather my three netflix movies that have been sitting on my dresser for two months, to walk across my entire 10 ft expanse of livingroom, to then muster up the strength to bend myself in half, and push those three netflix packages 3 inches out of my mailslot for the mailman to pick up.

It has officially taken me 60 days to fit that into my schedule. I'm pretty busy watching my four stations through the snow on my TV and not writing.

Anyway, so when I got home today three NEW movies sat on my livingroom floor. Apparently, the folks at Netflix are not as busy as I am.

Receiving new Netflix is like getting presents from someone I don't know because I never remember what I have asked them to send me. It is always a big surprise when I tear open that little flat red package. Will it be a documentary about John Kerry that will aggravate me because I didn't really mean for them to send that to me and I was just kidding? Will it be a bad foreign film that isn't necessarily good just because it has subtitles? Will it be something a friend recommended and now I'm going to have to end the friendship because the movie sucked so hard?

Today I cracked them all open and tossed them on my couch and was presented with an intruiging triumvirate: Fat Girl, The Barbarian Invasions, and The Butterfly. Which one would be my date for the evening?

Seeing that I have my period, Fat Girl seemed most appropriate so I popped that in without reading the little netflix synposis.

I have got to tell you. Fat Girl was one of the most disturbing movies that I have encountered in my entire life. It is the sort of movie that sucks you in and then knocks you sideways and ends with a "TAKE THAT!" karate chop to the soul. "THAT's what you get for having no life and watching movies all the time. You get THIS. HAPPY NOW? Now maybe you'll leave the house once in a while. There's more where this came from."

After watching that movie I now wish I had a woobie blanket and a few deadbolt locks.

I am not even going to tell you what it is about other than yes, it has a fat girl in it. I don't want to ruin the surprise.

If you have not seen it, it will mess with your world. Don't read about it. Don't google it. Just pop it into your netflix want list, let it arrive, shove it into the DVD player, and watch it.

And don't come crying to me afterwards because I warned you.

So Tell Me About Yourself

Tomorrow I will go bowling with my best friend and two guys that she just met. My best friend keeps referring to this as a date. I don't like to refer to anything as a date because I am not good at dating.

Nor am I all that stellar at flirting. There are some born flirts and I salute them with their witty comments, suggestive innuendo and general with-it-ness.

I do not fall into this category. Most strangers do not like me on first meeting. Or even, say, the 3rd year after meeting me.

I guess it doesn't help that my main obsession when on a date is how to end it. There is nothing as uncomfortable as talking about yourself and trying to give a general idea of who you are to a complete stranger. I always feel like I'm in front of the big wigs at NBC wildly pitching my new fragmented show for the fall season. The pitch always goes horribly awry and I end up thinking, "Well this just sounds really bad. I guess I should have worked that plot kink out. Why did I tell him I've been arrested? That wasn't something I really wanted to divulge until the third season. That one was more of a cliffhanger."

Getting to know someone is hard.

Plus the older I get the more idiosyncratic I get, and I am sure that is the same for most people which doesn't help anyone.

If I like someone I start wanting to ask questions that will be eventual deal breakers should the meeting miraculously develop into a relationship. I don't want to waste anyone's time.

"Do you snore? If you snore, I'm calling for the check because I need to fall asleep to the gentle hum of my Cool Breeze oscillating fan and that is IT. No snoring. I dated a snorer once and spent three months glaring at him while he slept peacefully ---plotting to snuff him out with my pillow.

Can you hold your breath all night?

Do you even need to sleep in the same bed as me? Because I'm so used to sleeping in my own bed that the presence of another body now keeps me up all night. Can you sleep at your house....forever? Is that possible? Because I need to be alone. We'll be together, but you will be in your own house. How does that sound?

I'm not always going to be in this great of a mood. I can get downright gloomy. Is this going to be a problem?

And on and on and on.

It's hard to get to know someone.

Someone Else's Life

I am currently staring at a new purchase I made yesterday due to a freak cold snap we're experiencing here in Los Angeles.

It is a brown suede coat, with a faux fur collar. I got it at Goodwill.

I bought the coat because it's warm. But I also bought it because it came with two used tickets to the movie Mulholland Drive in the front right pocket. The tickets are dated, October 23, 2001. The last time a coat of this sort was in style.

I like the fact that I know exactly where this coat was on a Tuesday night, five years ago when I was still in my 20s.

It has a history, this coat-- a history which isn't mine. That's the appeal. It sort of smells like it has a past. Not in a bad way, just in a way that reminds me that it lived in this neighborhood long before I moved in.

It has been to a movie I have never even seen in a theatre I've never even been to.

Mulholland Drive: A Love Story in the City of Dreams.

The coat has seen a movie about a street that lies not 2 miles from where I am sitting in the City of Dreams.

Perhaps it comes to me with its own love story.

The Hobbyists

I went to the Masters of American Comics exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art today. Basically it chronicles 15 of the most influential comic strip artists of the past century.

It was a lot to read. Especially since I have only read one comic strip in my life and that was Maus by Art Spiegelman. So I had a lot of catching up to do. And I didn't really have a solid plan going in so I was slightly overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of it--this medium.

Like every niche-interest exhibit, there were the usual oddball suspects. The odd middle-aged guy in a brown Member's Only jacket who follows you around if you're a single female and attempts to chat you up as you're standing there trying to read the 4000 comic strips about The Avengers.

The confrontational trend maven dude who is wearing a shirt that says, "I liked the things you like 4 years ago" that makes you feel like a real asshole for getting out there and trying to nurture a new interest.

The boyfriend or the girlfriend who has absolutely no interest in this sort of thing at all and is here strictly to save the relationship because the counselor said it would be a good idea.

The dungeons and dragons team fresh out of a roll-playing marathon.

It doesn't matter where I go, or what exhibit I see, this same core group is always present. This silent stratum of humanity.

And it is always very serious business. Even if it's a comic strip exhibit. People are scribbling in their notebooks. They're standing there for 38 minutes looking at a sketch of the Vanisher. They're so into it I want to be into it too but I don't know why or how so I end up staring at them, staring at things wanting to crawl into his or her body for three minutes and see the world through those eyes. The eyes that mist at a Jimmy Corrigan original sketch.

It's mesmerizing. And it makes me want to have a cool hobby or start collecting something or knowing something.

Anything at all.

Bounced

Yesterday I found an old fabric softener sheet under my bed. I caught it dancing around the wood floor with its new friends- the dust bunnies, the discarded Bic pen and the emergency earthquake flashlight. I had been looking for a shoe.

On this gauzy strip of fabric softener a single phrase was written in unfamiliar handwriting.

Socks with No pairs?

This set me off into a panic about my life. Why would anyone ask such a loaded question? This question with no answer?

Rosie, the woman who does my laundry because I have no washer or dryer or wherewithal to get myself to a laundromat, always puts fabric sheets between every few layers of folded clothes to keep them smelling fresh. I am assuming this message came from her.

I am really hoping this message came from her.

I wanted to grab my old dried-up Bic from under the bed and scribble back, "I know. I'm so sorry. I don't know what happened. They're gone. I wear these now. These 47 unmatched single socks and my armpit stained t-shirts are all that's left."

"Maybe we should start seeing other people."

Today I woke up and saw the fabric softener sheet on my bedside table which immediately launched me into a sour mood and suddenly I didn't want to talk to anyone ever again and decided then and there that I am going to start doing my own damn laundry because I don't need anyone writing me cryptic notes on Bounce.

Only The Dumb Survive

I got an email from our Human Resources department today. I shall share a bit with you:

"I recently was approached by several employees asking how they can replenish some of their earthquake supplies. Well, now is the time to put in an order and as in the past (insert name of my company) will pay for the shipping "

This got me thinking.

I live alone, and I have one earthquake supply--my dusty flashlight under my bed. I just tested it, and the batteries are dead.

So technically, I have no earthquake supplies.

I used to be pretty prepared though. Two years ago I got freaked out after watching some alarmist news segment, rushed to the 99-cent store and tried to put a survival kit together for myself. The survivalist.

At the 99 cent store I purchased a laundry basket, some dusty cans of cocktail sausages with those cool key opener things that I don't even know how to use, a flashlight, some batteries, a few cans of tuna fish, some bottled water, some fruit juice boxes, a lighter, some candles, a box of these peanut butter dipped in chocolate wafer things, a can of peas, some crackers, and some red gloves.

I spent approximately 10 dollars and I was quite pleased.

When I got home I added some clean underwear, a bra, a change of clothes, and some photos of my family to the basket.

I then put the laundry basket/earthquake kit behind my bed in case the quake hit while I was sleeping---rationalizing that I would then know exactly where the stuff was. I had feng sheuied my room that year and my bed was angled into a corner at the time, so this left a perfect spot to stash my new survival kit. I was quite proud, and fancied myself an adult.

I felt better. Less panicky, and more prepared for life's emergencies.

But eventually the panic wore off and I stopped thinking about life's emergencies.

So one night, I started rummaging around in my survival kit. I was reading a book and I was hungry and I realized that rather than traipsing downstairs to the kitchen-- which was far-- I could easily reach into my kit and eat something out of IT. Who would know? So what?

I opened the peanut butter chocolate wafer things and I chomped one of those down in my bed, while reading. I am not proud of this.

But the thing is, I have no will-power so I continued to do this nightly until the peanut butter/chocolate wafer things were a thing of the past.

A few weeks went by and I needed tuna fish for some pasta dish I was making for a BBQ. I didn't have any tuna fish in the kitchen, so rather than going to the store, which was a mile away, I went upstairs, which was 20 ft away, and grabbed the tuna fish out of the survival kit. Because I was totally going to replace the tuna tomorrow. I just needed this tuna, today.

Not to mention I had forgotten to put a can-opener in the kit so the survival tuna would have been virtually useless and tragic until I bought a second can-opener.

I never replaced that tuna.

As time wore on, I wore that poor little kit out..drinking the fruity juice-boxes and eating the crackers in bed at night and lighting the candles for ambiance. It was fun, and I was having a little nocturnal party every night. Scarfing down the survival food with reckless abandon, I was happy. Life was good.

I actually had packed an outfit I really like to wear, thinking it would make me look and feel good--even if my house fell apart so I eventually took that out of the kit and wore it to work and never put any replacement survival clothing back into the basket.

Then, about a month later, I lost interest and moved onto some other obsession, conveniently forgetting that my home straddles about 13 fault lines.

That poor kit sat behind my bed for a good year before I even looked at it again.

I found it one day while rearranging the furniture in my room. I dragged it out, dusted it off, and took a good, hard look at what I had armed myself with in the face of disaster.

I discovered one red glove.
A bra.
A flashlight.
The cool key cocktail sausages
and a bent picture of my family.

So if the big one struck I would be naked (except for the bra and one red glove), I'd have a flashlight with no batteries, and I'd be eating salty cocktail sausages without any water, while looking at a photo of my family wondering what went so wrong.

I'm going to die.

Performance Anxiety

Employee Evaluations are next week. I can't wait. I'm super excited!!! Aren't you?
I'm especially excited THIS year because I can't seem to find my goal sheet from the last time we were evaluated---and I guess I was supposed to keep that and refer to it every once in a while. I'm gathering this information from an email I got a few days ago from my boss.

"In conjunction with our annual review process, please prepare two documents as follows:
A self-appraisal of progress made on your 2005 goals as agreed upon last year. (Please ensure that the current self-appraisal correlates to the agreed-upon goals from last year. For example, if we agreed upon five goals from last year, then I am expecting to see, at a minimum, a self-appraisal on those same five goals.)
A list of updated goals and objectives for 2006.
Please keep both documents concise and measurable.
Please plan on having these documents prepared for discussion the week of March 20th."

First of all, no one told me to keep that thing. I just signed the piece of paper that had my 2005 goals on it, gave a copy to my boss because he asked for a copy, and then I threw it away.
Second of all, I can't believe someone expects me to acheive any goals other than not stabbing myself in the ear with my scissors, or publicly weeping.
So I have until the 20th to find the goals from 2005 that I agreed to and also come up with a whole new set of 2006 goals that I will agree to and then forget about.
Today I ran a search on my computer for anything that vaguely resembles something like a goal sheet and came up with nada. Employee Evaluation? Eval? Employee? Goals? Performance? Reviews? Sheets? Personell?
Fiction?
Nothing. Bupkus.
Which means I am going to be forced to go to my boss and ask for a copy of his copy of my 2005 goals which isn't going to say a heck of a lot about my wanting to acheive them. There's just no way out of this. No matter how I cut it, things are going to look, very, very bad.
I can't wait! I don't know about you, but I am positive I'm going to get a raise.

I Love Oil

So my Civic went on the fritz, which isn't a surprise since it's been around since the Clinton Administration. It crapped out on me on the way home from work on Tuesday which was a real barn-burner of a Hollywood moment.

It was one of those big dramtic car problems that draws a lot of attention and always happens during rush hour. The car smoking at a stoplight making all sorts of terrifying noises. People beeping because the light's changed a million times and I had not moved an inch. Some dude yelling. Me crying in public.

But life is better now, because Paul fixed it.

Paul is my Asian mechanic. He's fabulous and sexy and I am in love with him because he is so damned good looking and to be honest with you, he is kind of a hero and I should list him in my myspace profile as just that. You know what he reminds me of? An Asian Marlboro Man. Paul the Mechanic is designed to be sitting on a horse with a smoke dangling out of his mouth, riding off into the sunset to fix another transmission with a toothpick.

Whenever there is a car issue and things start to look extremely grim I always think, "OK this is it. This is the part where Paul tells me it's going to cost $86,000 dollars to fix some tube that has to be mail ordered from Malaysia."

But it never happens. It's always good news. Like a McDonald's straw got caught in the exhaust pipe or something insane and improbable. Six bucks and I'm out the door waving goodbye to Paul in my rearview, while chomping down a McNugget.

Despite Paul's winning track record, when I dropped my car off today so Paul could look it over, expectations were low.

When I returned to the car shop a few hours later, Paul shared with me a little piece of critical car information that I'm going to pass on to you, because I care.

There is such a thing as too much oil.


Can you believe it? I know. I too, was dumbfounded. Flabbergasted even. Why hadn't my father mentioned this 20 years ago when he burned it into my cerebrum to always make sure I had oil in my car? Couldn't there have been some sort of caveat? A--- "and by the way... don't put too much oil in there because that is equally as bad."

Why the secrecy on this one point?

Paul was not pleased with me. AT ALL. He leaned over the grimy Paul-counter and honed in on me with his twinkly Superhero eyes and chastized me. "You had about a quart of oil too much in there. Is was sloshing around all over the place. Was that your doing? What are you doing just pouring oil in there at random?"

Because I have a massive big-girl crush on Paul and didn't want him to think I was a complete moron from another galaxy where we don't drive cars but hovercrafts-- I lied to him. I looked my hero dead in the eye, I blinked twice, I swallowed....and I fibbed.

"What? Me? Oil? No. That must have been my boyfriend. God, he's so dumb sometimes."
Meanwhile I don't even have a boyfriend and it was me who put too much oil in the car and Paul knows this because he's an omnicient and omnipotent car God who can sniff a girly excuse coming from 5 miles away.

I had indeed put the oil in the car, just four days ago. The day before the car problems started.
See I was at 7-11 buying gummy worms and the in-store oil display caught my eye and it was an impulse buy really. I just bought two quarts of motoroil and I dumped them in without even checking if my car needed it. Just because that seemed like an ok thing to do. A little preventative maintenance.

"Well tell your boyfriend to stop putting oil in the car," he said with a smirk, which pained me deeply."I gave you an oil change so it now has the right amout of oil in it. I also dried out the engine and checked your transmission for you. Took it for a spin. The car is still looking good. You should be ok for now. Stop messing around with it Tara."

"That'll be 30 bucks."

I'm going to ask him to marry me.

Get The Smell Out Of Here

I went fake house hunting today. I like to do that on Sundays sometimes-go browse the neighborhood for mansions I could never in a million years afford.

The real estate people never really give me the time of day when I show up, but that's ok. I know I don't look like a million dollar home buyer and have permanent renter written all over me. The great thing about not looking like I'm going to buy the house is that agents tend to forget I'm even IN the house. I can stay for hours if I want, absorbing someone else's life.

Going to open houses gives you permission to snoop through a complete stranger's things and make up stories about them which you'd be arrested for on any other occasion.

Most people do a good job sprucing up and removing anything personal before their home is shown. I have a feeling they get some sort of sheet that tells them what to do.

1. remove the photos of you in your scuba gear while on vacation in Bali.
2. make all surfaces clutter-free
3. put the toaster away.
4. take anything that will make you look odd, out of the home.

Things like that.

The real estate person usually lights candles in every room to make the house stop smelling like the people who currently live there, and start smelling like cinnamon. I guess because if you go into a house and it smells like someone else's house, you really can't see yourself living there or paying two million dollars for it. Maybe something psychological happens in your brain that you're not really aware of and don't really think about, but affects you all the same. Hm...This house is really great and all, but it smells an awful lot like the Robertsons.

The candle trick never really works that great because you can smell people through the wax.

Most of the time I can pretty much tell if I'd be friends with the people who currently own the home that I'm snooping through, right off the bat. Today I could tell I would like the couple because even though they did a good job removing most of the personal stuff from view, they missed a few things.

For instance, in the master bedroom, there was all of this gorgeous imported-from- somewhere-expensive furniture and the bed was neatly made with 5 million thread-count sheets and everything was just so. It reminded me of a really expensive hotel.

Except one of the wife's knee highs was sticking out of the dresser which was apparently the place she keeps her knee highs and socks and stuff. I judged her to be about my mother's age because the knee high looked like something my mother might wear. Flesh colored. Just a two-inch stretch of knee-high sticking out letting me know that the inside of the drawer was probably really messy. This made me happy. I could just see it that morning. Sandra running around stuffing pencils and underwear and Electric bills in any drawer she could. Phil scraping dog fur off the sofa.

There were also a few shirt's hanging out of the guy's dresser. It's amazing how a few little pieces of fabric creeping out of things gives you a vivid picture of the people who stuffed them in there---people trying to look neat who are probably pretty normal and not all that fastidious.

It sort of made me want to move in.

The Body As Art

There is a girl at my gym that is covered in tattoo. And not the sort of "covered in tattoos" that you normally see and that would probably disgust your mother, with all of the colors and anchors and lions and crosses and confusing items with hidden meanings that would take you years to decipher.

This girl is literally, from head to toe, covered in the most beautiful markings that I have ever seen on a human being's body. I say tattoo and not tattoos plural because it looks as if she just appeared to us this way, with this new type of skin. It is a thing that stands by itself and on its own and should not be spliced up into segments or stories or eras.

It simply is.

Winding up her legs, zigzagging down her arms, sprawling across her back and creeping around her chest is the most elaborate and compelling black ink mark that I have ever witnessed on a human being. She stuns me each time I see her and I have to refrain from staring…simply because it is so striking.

She runs on the treadmill for hours at a time and each time I see her there effortlessly loping away, the gym melts away and the Serengeti plains rise out of the mist and I hear the gentle rustle of Accacia trees in the distance.

She is cheetah-like, both in movement and adornment.

I wonder what it was like to be the bearer of all that pain.

I have a tattoo: a single mark on my lower spine which is the exact right place for it because I was spineless when I got it. Had I really embraced the meaning of the tattoo that I had stitched into my lumbar region, I would have had the tattoo artist place it on my forehead so that I would be forced to confront it daily.

My tattoo means 'to live without fear.'

I find it oddly appropriate that it is in the one place on my body where I cannot see it.

Even if I try.