Do you feel bad about yourself?

Feel the Burn

2009-04-17T13:10:00.000-07:00

With the advent of summer in California are the ever looming reminders to the apparently seasonally unaware residents that beach season is coming. The fact that winters here are generally two week periods of mist and drizzle a few times in the beginning of the year are of no consequences to advertisers, something I note when I see tank top and shorts clad people walking by the Macy's billboard with a girl shedding her heavy parka to reveal layers of sweaters. Her "light" clothing.

Personally I've stopped caring for the summer tan brigade, a heretical action in the general mindset of Southern California residents. There are two things in particular that have shaped me to make this Sophie's Choice.

At one point I was at the beach nearly every day, due to a bizarre and unsaid competition between my friend Connie and I. We never said out loud that we were trying to out-tan each other, it was just implied. So we spent days at a time stretched out at the beach, our long sessions punctuated by the inconvenient and inevitable earth rotations blocking the sun. Once, while we were laying there, I fell asleep on my back with my head resting on my hands. I woke up looking like a cartoon character with white gloves due to my newly acquired tan lines. While Connie sat there laughing at me, I took comfort in the fact that I had earlier given her a friendly pat on the back with a handful of sunscreen, so while I was aware of my new fashion accessory, she was not of the small, but very noticeable, white handprint in the middle of her back. It wasn't until I got home that the extent of the problem was realized. Generally, when someone puts sunscreen on, they put it on any part of the body that's going to be facing the sun. Let's face it, no one is going to put any on any part they don't plan on exposing, unless of course it involves some sort of kinky sex game. Another place people have a tendency to skip is the armpit, including myself. When I got home to shower, I noticed an itchy burn there, and upon investigation realized that I had suffered one of my worst sunburns under my armpit. I slathered the area with aloe vera, but what more could I do? The next few days proved to be a chore. Walking became a hassle as I tried to hold out my arms without being noticed, something which only compounded the attention when my hands kept brushing against people's butts. Putting on deodorant I might as well have just rubbed alcohol all over the burn, but shaving was an entirely different kind of hell. It didn't feel so much as shaving as it felt like running rusty knife blades under my armpit, sobbing in the shower the entire time I forced myself to go through this punishment worthy of Dante. Of course, the more reasonable thing to do would be to go without shaving or deodorant for a t least a few days, just to let the skin heal. However, this incident occurred during my years in high school, where logic and rationale has yet to triumph over emotion. Today if I did that, I would just explain the situation to my friends and no one would hold it against me. In school though, not wearing deodorant or shaving is the exact kind of thing that leads to traumatic high school experiences that movies with Sissy Spacek are made. While I was never popular, I was at least determined to be unpopular, and shaving was the way to do it. After that incident, the tanning was reduced to only weekends, and I haven't since lifted up my arms at the beach.

Certain things that I do on a regular basis tan me anyway, like driving. I consider myself a fairly good driver, but I'm not the best. In fact, my motions may not look erratic, but the pattern of my driving is. I can be overly safe, when waiting to cross a busy street, and sometimes the time between cars passing is enough to make a simple sandwich before I decide to cross the street. Today I was staring at my arm. I've noticed that there's a new mark on my arm. I've been trying to determine whether it's just a particularly stuck fleck of dirt, or if it's a new mole. When I don't feel sonething's right with my body, my mind immediately thinks the worst, and the worst usually ends in death, of which I'm terrified. The thing about driving is that it allows me an unobstructed view of my arms, so I can squirm for lengths of time about my new body marks. I even keep paper in my glove compartment for the documentation of such things, so that I can take my shoebox of new freckles for my doctor to look over and then tell me that I'm being paranoid. I put on sunscreen everytime I leave the house, but I can't obstruct the sun from my car without completely obscuring my vision and turning my car into my own portable sauna. I've written some ideas, but they all seem to have some sort of safetly issue that would keep me off the road. While I was in my car, staring at my arms, I looked up for some reason when I realized that I had driven for nearly twenty minutes with my eyes glued on my arms. I must have seen the road as well, but I didn't remember any of it. All I remember is the small dark spot just above my left elbow. I told my mom about this, and after a "What the hell were you thinking?" and a few "I can't believe you's" she questioned why I had given up on tanning because of this. Clearly, she had no idea the problem that tanning posed for me. Tanning had made me into a reckless driver. She may not understand, but tanning for me has proven dangerous not only to my life, but my social life as well.

Grand Theft Auto

2009-03-02T18:03:00.000-08:00

I think it's safe to say that I haven't washed my car for a solid year. Going back and forth between school and home all the time, I never really wanted to waste any of my precious few months at home doing anything that I needed to do. What I'm really hoping for is someone to steal my car. The thing is, if we didn't have all this regulation and registration that keeps my personal vehicular history on file, I's probably be little more than screwed. I do love my car/travelling trash can, but he only thing that really seems to set it apart from other cars of the same make and color is its extreme filth. At this point, the actual color of the car isn't all that relevant, and the grime sticking to the car may actually be structurally integral to the vehicle at this point. However, I do feel kind of bad for my car. So my hope is that thieves will steal my car and in their infinite wisdom take it to a car wash and therefore strip if of its sole unique quality. I'm sure that it would be a smart move, because then you wouldn't be able to tell it apart, especially if it happened to be in a sea of red Escapes. Of course though, since it would be so well documented, my car would soon be returned to me after its wash and condition, making my life just a bit easier. At least a lot easier than going out and getting it washed myself.

It's been too long, chubbs.

2009-02-19T18:36:00.000-08:00

It's been just over a month since my break up, and I'll admit that I've been really shaken by it. No longer though, as I've since taken up that grand ol' sport of boxing.

Now, I've never been attracted to the sport, but there are a couple of what I seem very sound reasons why I've decide that it's my new obsession:

1) The next time I want to see my ex-boyfriend, not only do I want to be satisfied that I'm in better shape than him, but I want to know that if need be I'll be able to beat the crap out of him as well.

2) My sister and I have a pact. We've promised not to let each other get fat. While I wasn't really getting fat, I had gained about five pounds in the course of the relationship. The parameters of the pact are this: if either of us gets to be a size six or over (we're very short, so a size six really is large for our height) then the other will proceed to verbally abuse the other until we feel bad enough about ourselves to drop the pounds.

We haven't had to resort to our promise yet, we've decided to hope that if it comes to that, we can avoid any psychological damage. But no promises there.

T.G.I.F.

2009-01-17T17:18:00.000-08:00

I should have figured that the course of the day wouldn't run very smoothly as soon as I woke up. My alarm woke me up as usual, but instead of my usual routine of spending half an hour to get up and sit with my head in my hands before dragging myself out, I instead spent a few minutes asking myself, "What the hell is this? Why am I getting up? And what is this electric box that keeps beeping at me?"

It wouldn't get better, as while I was walking to work, I rode the escalator, and on the way up, I leaned my head back to yawn. I miscalculated the angle of my head, and I started to lose my balance. I didn't fall, but instead I executed that all too obvious move of waving my arms about in wide circles. I've always wondered why people have this tendency to try to learn to fly once they start to fall. Anyway, as luck would have it my attractive boss caught my mishap and went to ask me later if I was okay.

Of course I was.

As I was leaving at the end of the day, I went to throw my garbage away in one of the trash cans outside of the office, when I noticed too late that I didn't throw it in the trash. Instead I threw it in one of those receptacles that look like trash cans but are actually those hospital bins that your thow coins into and they go to fight children's diseases, or what have you. I looked around and noticed to my relief that no one had seen me. But I didn't want to leave it in there for it to be collected. I could only imagine that the people who collected these coins would refer to me as an asshole, and even though it would be anonymous, I didn't think would be fair without my defense present. So I leaned into it to fish it out. Soon, I felt like there were eyes upon me, and I turned to see several people staring at me, some with their mouths wide open, and another which happened to be my aforementioned boss. I should have explained myself and show them my wrapper to prove it, but instead my first instinct was to turn and run.

Later, I was dumped by my boyfriend. All in all, one of my more interesting Fridays, I believe.

Nick Jonas: The E! True Hollywood Story

2009-01-11T20:31:00.000-08:00

Today, on my last day of being at home, my mother and I decided to spend some quality time together and watch E! Entertainment Television. At some point a special called "Young Hollywood: A to Zac" came on, and the dog decided that she had enough, and went to pee on the carpet. While she went to clean it up, a segment on the Jonas Brothers came up. When she came back, they were just talking about the condition that afflicted Nick Jonas: Type II diabetes. However, she had missed that part, and all she heard was that Nick had managed to perservere throughout his tragic disease. She's not very familiar with the Jonas Brothers, so she heard that, looked at them performing on the TV, and said very sympathetically, "Ohhh, AIDS....poor thing." I looked at her, then looked back at the TV, and realized how much I'd miss being at home.

Below The Influence

2009-01-08T20:00:00.000-08:00

For the past few weeks, I've been pretty sick, particularly in the mornings. My head feels like it's been used for batting practice by Babe Ruth, and my stomach has been insisting that all food in solid form be banned from its current vicinity. I've also noticed that my usual habit of spending hours roaming the forest of fears in my mind before finally settling to sleep has gone, and I've been falling asleep within five minutes of the light going out.

About a week after telling all this to my doctor (and I'm not ashamed to say that I was happily five pounds lighter), she called me in to let me know what was causing it. You see, I have a tendency to sleep with my head under the covers, and my dog will usually sleep under the covers as well. Recently something about her has made her irrestisable to fleas. I would say it's her big brown soulful eyes, but its become quite a nuisance, so on went the flea medication. It smells wonderfully like baby powder, and it seems that my constant inhalation of it has been the culprit of all my maladies.

We've taken the dog off the flea medication since, and I'm finally getting around to eating a nice hamburger, while my dog is sitting in her bed scratching her ear.

How about a magic trick?

2008-12-26T10:28:00.000-08:00

It was a few days before Christmas and I was about to finish the last of my holiday shopping and buy my dad his gift. It had been a particulalrly grueling day, and I was kicking myself for doing all of it in one day instead of a little bit at a time. So at that point, when people come up to me to ask me for things, I'll just give in. My phone number, some money, my social security number, I would have given it all away just to make it through. As I approached the final store, I was cornered by an amteur magician who said he could tear up my fifty and put it back together again. So he tore it in half, did some flourishing of his hands, and showed me my two halves again. He tried again, and in order for it to work, he had to cut it up again. Then he showed me four pieces of my fifty. Five minutes later my fifty was ironically in about fifty pieces, and he ended up resorting to paying me back in the quarters and half dollars he had saved to pull out of people's ears. I then had to explain all this to the saleslady so she wouldn't look at me like I was the plague while I had to pay her in coins, which was all I had. As I walked out, I could see her looking at me and talking to one of her coworkers as they shook their head at me. It wasn't my fault, but I rushed out of the store with my head hung low, while half a block away I saw the magician enthrall a small crowd by pulling flowers from his sleeve.

The Morning Shift

2008-12-18T22:01:00.000-08:00

I was scheduled to be at work from three in the morning until ten, so with plenty of time to spare I arrived at fifteen minutes until three. I thought that maybe I could warm up a little, grab a snack, and generally prepare myself. I was feeling pretty good about myself when I rang the bell.

A few seconds passed before I rang the bell again. A few seconds isn't such a long time to wait, but I have to say that Converse are not the most appropriate choice for all-weather footwear. I pulled out my phone and began to call every number known to me from inside the office. As my buzzes and phone calls were being greeting by an increasingly intense silence, I decided to circle the building to see if they were using a different entrance due to the hour. On my way back to my original spot, I was spotted by the security guards. At this point, I was completely soaked in a brown hooded jacket wearing jeans and torn sneakers. I began to debate my outfit choices as I ran from the guards who assumed I was a vagrant trying to get in. When I turned the last corner someone from inside finally decided to pick up the phone, and by the time I reached the door I was let in. As I stood there dripping, the man who let me in asked me if I was supposed to be working. My mind immediatley froze and within the span of a second I did a lot of thinking, "Oh my god was I supposed to be where? Could I have slept in early? Should I stay because I already drove all the way out here? Did I just commit a misdemeanor?" All this was done in the millisecond before he said, "Just kidding! Come on in."

It turns out that I spent half an hour in the rain simply because they were eating breakfast in the break room with the music on loud and they simply couldn't hear me.

A good thing came out of this though, because now I know that if I decide to shoplift in the mall or anything I'd probably be able to outrun the security. Earlier I felt that I wouldn't be able to buy everyone Christmas gifts in time. Now though, I'm feeling much better about that.

Taking the trash out

2008-12-16T23:34:00.000-08:00

I have over the years become a true San Diegan. Despite having spent years on the Eastern Seaboard experiencing things like seasons and icy roads, as soon as it drops below 70 degrees, I put on boots, sweaters, and a parka, while I seriously contemplate moving to Valencia in Spain. Today while I planned my sojourn in the Starbucks downtown, a piercing sound crackled like a lightning bolt in my daydream and jolted me back to California. I peeked up from the top of my scarf to see what was going on, and I noticed that some woman was yelling at the poor bastard behind the counter. How dare he, the apparent lone worker at the establishment, serve the twenty other customers in front of him while she had to leave before her free parking expired. I kind of admired her passion, like she was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, railing against the atrocities committed against her, and everyone else in the world who had to wait over a minute for their non-fat lattes. She topped it off perfectly with her close, "FYI, your trash is full." Oh, snap. As she walked out, I thought of all the ways I could use that passion, to finally get back at people who cut me off in the freeway, who spilled their drinks on my shoe and got mad at ME, who just treated me as if whatever little mishap that just occurred was my fault. I gained confidence as I sat on the stool drinking my hot chocolate, until finally someone pushed by me and made me spill. As they turned in my direction, I automatically said to them, "sorry."

The Namesake

2008-12-14T21:48:00.001-08:00

It's been almost a month since my latest oh so clever contribution to the literary world wide web, and I feel I have to explain: my neighbors in the apartment next door are getting a divorce, and since the walls of this particular complex have apparently been salvaged from a military bunker, I've spent the better part of the last few weeks with my ear firmly pressed against the tile wall of the bathroom, which by now has what appears to be an ice glaze on it since I left the window wide open for maximum listening ability. It's only been recently that one's moved out, so the fighting is over and I've gotten down to business. While I was massaging out what I initially assumed was a permanent honeycomb imprint on the right side of my face, I worked on putting a dent in my 400 message inbox and found that several people are interested in where the title comes from. Simply, it's something that I say to my sister all the time. The situation is never the same but the feeling is, and I'll elaborate with an example.

Today my sister and I decided on a trip to Guitar Center, and the traffic was absolutely monstrous. Understandably it's Christmas, and we are just passing a busy mall, but the freeway had been reduced to a stadium parking lot at maximum capacity. As we made our way inch by inch to the nearest exit, we proceeded to vent our frustrations on the only possible causes of traffic, at least in our minds. We decided on tourists from the Southwestern United States and drivers from Mexico, but mainly the former. Mexicans at least have been here often enough to go with the flow of traffic, but more often than not my poor car ends up plodding along the road as I watch both my fuel economy and gas levels fall nearly as far as my spirits, while Johnny Utah is holding up the traffic pointing at the sites and reciting everything he read about the University of San Diego while he was stuck in the airport security line. An hour and ten feet later, after my sister and I have sufficiently rallied our anger towards him, we finally see the cause of the hold-up: several severely mangled and twisted steel carcasses are lying on the side of the road, while emergency crews try to clean up the remains of the cars and clearing the road. We fell into an uncomfortable silence and as we exit off the road I turn to my sister and ask, "do you feel bad about yourself?"

21

2008-11-24T23:16:00.000-08:00

I've decided that as I am steadily approaching the six-month mark past my 22nd birthday, it's about time I come to terms with having been 21.

That blissful feeling you're supposed to get, that fawn-like excitement, all of it was lost on me. For most people it seems to take forever to get to 21. A month until and they're pretty sure that they should have turned 28 three years ago. Instead of celebrating with friends in a bar, I huddled in a corner in my room, lamenting the fact that if I'm lucky, a fifth of my life is gone forever. It's how I usually spend my birthday, in my Peter Pan fetal position. Luckily, Comic-Con generally absorbs the anxiety I have concerning these fateful days, and I realize that I'm far more comfortable watching the already small sum in my checking accounts swiftly whittled away over five days than think about my birthday. While the current economy has hampered my fiscal security, it does wonders for my overall anxiety, and I'm sleeping better than I have in months.

Twilight

2008-11-20T23:15:00.000-08:00

I probably would go see the movie Twilight the day it comes out, but I've been tired of this movie for months now. As a diehard Gilmore Girls fan, I watch or Tivo the show every day on ABC Family, and within the last month there has not been one episode that I have seen that didn't show a Twilight trailer about five times.

I feel like Twilight is everywhere this season, and while I have no problem with people being excited, I just saw a news report that focused on the rabid pre-teen army surrounding my local IMAX theater, all gnashing their teeth in excitement and insanity. There on my television screen was a minion talking to the camera about the story: "I think it's like exciting because, like, Bella and Edward get together? And he could, like, eat her cause he's like a vampire? And it's, like, so romantic because they end up married?" All of this she said with a straight face into the news camera.

Because it's, like, epic?

Cute Overload Indeed

2008-11-10T19:13:00.000-08:00

I'll admit it, and readily in fact, I really don't like kids. I don't get a warm and fuzzy feeling inside when I see them to silly kid things. In fact, I think it's stupid. And I hate the fact that I have to stop behind a bus with it's lights flashing, just in case a child stupidly runs across the road. I was never that dumb, and anyway isn't that how they learn?

But the thing is while I hate when kids are kids, I can spend hours watching my dog burrow her way under a blanket. When she accidentally rolls over a sincere "awwwwww" immediately escapes from my lips before I can stop myself. The hours I spend "working" is in reality spent looking at cuteoverload.com. I fail to comprehend how children are any cuter than ferrets, especially the baby ones.

Career Advice

2008-11-06T00:09:00.000-08:00

"He became a writer because he failed at a career as an English teacher." I still remember my dad saying this to me one morning in ninth grade while driving me to school. This statement is, in itself, relatively innocuous. Except for the fact that my dad happened to be talking about William Shakespeare.

The thing about my dad is that he's career military, and groomed his children to pursue careers in medicine and business. My sister and I had no problem in following, and except for a period where we wanted be ninja turtles, it was the general rule of our home. Unfortunately for my dad, I learned how to read, and not long after I decided that I wanted to be a writer. When I expressed my interest, my dad immediately began to lecture.

I fully expected it, and subsequently prepared myself. Somehow my parents have this magical ability to segue into anything during a lecture. During a recent argument with my mom she likened being in the car when I'm driving to being in a car during a hurricane, and five minutes later she had somehow managed to end up on my organizational skills.*

So while my dad started to harp on how I should focus on swimming, I prepared myself for wherever he would swing the sonversation. I remember vaguely how being a professional athlete would be more rewarding, and all of a sudden I heard, "You know, Shakespeare is no success story." Like a newborn fawn just entering the world, I was completely bewildered as he talked about how professional writers were simply failures at another, clearly more respectable job. For the rest of the day I just kind of hazed my way through my classes, particularly in English. To this day I imagined that I looked like a cartoon, with my hair sticking up and an exclamation mark above my head, and my eyes the size of dinner plates.

*I don't have any

Would you like to try a different card?

2008-11-03T23:22:00.000-08:00

It’s a particularly important election, but the question weighing on my mind is whether or not muggers accept Diner’s Club International. Not that I don’t care. I fully intend to vote, but I’m probably just going to hide in my room under a blanket until the results are announced.

My friend was telling me a story about how he was mugged in a dark alley, and while I was listening I couldn’t help but wonder: do muggers still accept Diner’s Club cards?

To me, they still seem a figment of the past, where Ozzy and Harriet, after a disastrous Christmas dinner (oh, what a blast!) take their two sons to the local Mom and Pop for a quiet dinner, because, “Sons, it’s not the food that’s important, it’s that we’re all together.” And while Harriet cuts Ozzy’s steak to fork it gently into mouth, he tenderly hands the cute-as-a-button waitress his Diner’s Club card. Ironically, my imagination places the card at a diner.

I do believe that the cards now have the MasterCard stamp on them, but if I were a mugger I might shank someone if that was the only card they produced. In my mind, the local news would come on, and after talking about the voting lines and Facebook profiles, they’d turn to the local news. “Sadly enough, not everyone can be as lucky as these young first time voters…” as they segued into the unfortunate homicide of the 110 year old man found in an alley behind the Mission Valley Denny’s.

In this tough economy, I find it hard to believe that anyone born after 1976 would take a diner's club card to steal. I myself might see it was one of those Barbie toy cards, those cards that teach girls from a young age that debt is super cool and fabulous. And a lesson I learned quite well, if I may boast.

Personally, I think that it is one card that it's about time to get rid of. As you can see, it only leads to confrontations with supercentenarians, which no one wants to hear about. So let's save our old people: stop getting Diner's Club cards.

Little Person, Big World

2008-10-29T15:26:00.000-07:00

Riding in the car with my sister and mom to Chino, I noticed a blue sign on a silver Mercedes that read "LITTLE PEOPLE ON BOARD." I was immediately excited at the prospect, because I rarely see midgets, particularly driving! I'm always curious. I mean, do they have some sort of lever and pulley system to work the pedals? Can they handle a manual shift? Do they have special seats? I always see this sign on my cars that says no one under 4'10 or under 90 pounds should be in the front. My mind worked faster than it ever had trying to figure all this out. At last, I was finally getting the answer to my question, and I could taste it as I peered over the door to see the answer to this mystery of life.

There, in the backseat, sat what appeared to be a twelve year old little blond girl, being driven by her very full-grown father. All of a sudden my curiosity turned to anger. I don't see the right that this little girl has to earn that sign. She looks way past five feet, certainly not little. At 22 years old, I am an inch under that height. If there's going to be any kind of accident, shouldn't she be the one to get hit? She's in a Mercedes so she's already got the safety advantage. Plus, she looks as if she's on her way to soccer practice, and the muscle mass I've got is equivalent to that muscle mass on our Chihuahua. There is no reason why I would choose to save her over me, besides that fact that I love me, and I would hate for me to die.

Stewing away in the backseat, I look around at our car, full of other very short people, and within seconds I'm completely convinced that the sign is on the wrong car.

My first time...

2008-10-26T01:01:00.000-07:00

When I sat to write my first blog entry, I decided against writing about just that. But, in the course of events, I changed my mind, and I credit my laptop for aiding me in making that decision.

About an hour before I go to sleep, the laptop inevitably gets to that point before I do, and everything I try - shutting it and reopening it, plugging it in, holding down the power button - doesn't seem to work. After about half an hour of alternately pleading with, yelling at, and reasoning with it, it still just sits there like a tupperware dish full of spokes and nails and whatever they make laptops out of. I don't know what goes in a computer, but if soemone was building one and put a bike chain in there, I wouldn't think anything of it. I would feel enlightened at that point. Then I could tell other people about where the bike chain goes in the laptop, and subsequently mistranslate their looks of bewilderment as admiration of my ever expanding genius.

The laptop, sans bike chain (maybe), sits idling on my desk. The next half hour is spent staring at the power light. It seems as if the light lets out an intermittent soft glow here, but it's late at night, and I'm thinking that my eyes are just telling me that it's glowing to let me know that there is some sign of life in my computer. Either way, I end up writing my first blog not on my computer, but on the back of my grocery list which is the only piece of scrap paper I have nearby.

It's at that point that the Apple ad comes on TV to mock me in its colorful splendor, and I'm just staring at my my computer waiting for it to die.