twitterpated

In case I hadn't already mentioned it on this blog...

I am absolutely, head-over-boots, completely and utterly in love with this guy.

Don't throw up on your shoes all at once. I'm not sappy that often so I deserve a Get out of Jail Free card every once in a while.

Who (or what) are you guys in love with right now?

...and the geeks shall inherit the earth.

If you're not a geek and/or nerd like I am, feel free to skip this post. And by "geek and/or nerd" I mean any fan who's interested in any of the following:

DC or Marvel comics and the characters in them (ie Batman, Superman, X-Men, Spider-man, Wonder Woman, The Avengers, Iron Man, The Hulk, etc etc etc)

Vampires, werewolves, zombies, wizards, witches, psychic waitresses, pathetic and utterly useless human females named Bella, etc etc etc

Science fiction and steampunk characters and shows like Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, Dollhouse, Quantum Leap, Caprica, Tron, Sherlock Holmes, etc etc etc.

Role-playing games (known as RPG's) like Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer, etc etc etc


Phew. Okay. So, if you're geeky about any of the above, you should have been at San Diego's Comic Con this year. I spent the last weekend there and it was AWESOME.

Let me tell you a little something about Comic Con and why the real world should be the same way. All those geeky things you love? That you may or may not feel comfortable telling other people that you just met that you love them, for fear that they will look at you like you are a weirdo?

At Comic-Con it is not only safe to assume that everyone loves the same geeky stuff you do, it's also expected, welcomed, and encouraged. And if you're in costume, like I was, people freakin' love you. I had over 50 people stop me and ask to take their picture with me. Lots of girls dressed in hot outfits came over to me to tell me how much they loved my costume and I told them the same thing - there was none of that girl competitiveness that the "real world" has. I even got called a "Hot Babe" by the Comic-Con guys doing press and I've never been called a Hot Babe in my entire life, holy frak. Everyone was so nice and friendly and it was an awesome little community nestled right in the heart of the Gaslamp district of San Diego.

I loved every freaking minute of it. So...if you're a geek, you should go next year. Just think about it, k?

Left to right: J. Jonah Jameson (Spider-Man's boss at The Daily Bugle; Toy Box from the comic Top Ten; Benni as the Joker and me as The Joker's main squeeze, Harley Quinn)

Posing for pics.

Two Harleys. Lots of trouble.

Harley-Palooza! A special meeting for just Harley Quinns and Jokers and Ivy's! RAD!

I ran into my friends Jeff and Ian at Comic-Con and they suffered through taking a picture with me. :)

I hope that dragon is a vegetarian...

Lounging on Odin's throne from the new Thor movie

Yes, that is James Marsters (Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) signing autographs. He is still incredibly hot and one of the nicest working actors in Los Angeles.

"this time baby, I'll be / bulletproof..."

Have you ever felt like you wanted to be bulletproof? Like your sensitivity and the fact that you care only makes you weaker, makes your skin thinner, makes it easier for people to get in and hurt you?

Yeah, me too. It's one of my least favorite qualities about myself, my sensitivity. Because sometimes it doesn't seem very useful.

A couple weeks ago I was going through a really hard time with someone I used to be very close to. I'll spare you the boring details but it came down to the fact that this person, who is smart, funny, kind, and just my kind of geek, doesn't really have much interest in being my friend anymore. And besides the obvious Ego Flail of my inner Fourth Grader, this person is in my immediate group of friends. So it is hard to see this person and make polite chit-chat, knowing full well that this person doesn't have much interest at all in what I have to say or what's going on in my life.

It hurts. Like, a lot.

What hurts even more is that I just can't freakin' get over it. But emotions are cyclical like that: we get angry because we're still angry. We are afraid of being afraid. We can't get over... the fact that we're not over it. Like a tiny drill, the more we freak out over freaking out, the deeper it burrows itself in.

There's this great ten second essay from the poet James Richardson that says, "The part of myself I like is the part that works, like a good tool. The part of myself I love is the part that loves you."

Isn't that how we all feel? We love the parts of ourselves that are useful, functional. It's easy enough to be patient and loving with ourselves when we remember to floss, pay our bills, wash the dog, and give our partners the appropriate amount of attention.

What is hard is to love the parts of ourselves that are not as useful. The parts of ourselves that are over-sensitive, impatient, insecure, jealous, easily frightened. It is easy to look at these parts of ourselves, the parts that remind us of how young we once were and how young we still are at heart, and call them unusable, broken. It is easy to be embarrassed that we never really break out of being in high school sometimes. It is easy to try to lock these things away or pretend we never, ever feel them. Because they are not useful, and therefore are not to be loved.

Or is it that every single part of us is useful?

Because it is us. The good, the bad, the ugly... all of it is us. And all of it is useful in that it constantly gives us information about ourselves and how we act on this information is a choice, not a pattern we are destined to repeat and certainly not out of our control. The jealousy, the over-sensitivity, the small, insecure parts of ourselves... it is so easy to not love what we claim to have no control over. Someone says something, a button is pushed, and we react.

But to love is to accept, and to accept is to take control back again. When we are acting childish, we do not fix it by having childish reactions to our childishness (everyone got that?) We nurture the childish parts of ourselves by parenting them with unconditional love. And so then these feelings, even though they might be crappy, have a place in our hearts. And so then they become useful.

We are all so useful in our lack of bulletproof armor. Don't ever let the world tell you any different.

what dreams may come

I dream of predators more often than I dream of anything else. Recurring dreams, too; not just once or twice. Consistently, repeatedly, repetitively. My dreams like to remind me that no matter how far I think I've come there's still a small child inside me that is afraid of the monster under the bed.

No matter how many years I've trained myself to use that damn baseball bat.

Wolves show up a lot; so do coyotes. The predators change but the game remains the same: save the innocent. Sacrifice myself if I must, but the innocent ones are the ones whom I must protect at all times.

Freud would be bored with my dreams, they're so obvious. When I was younger and we moved from New Hampshire to Southern California we didn't know that we were supposed to bring our five cats in at night, that coyotes would come down into our backyards and snatch our furry little family members away. We learned the hard way as cat after cat disappeared, and I still dream at night that whole droves of coyotes are making their way down our old backyard slope and there's my cat, my orange cat Motley, who was the first to die, and he's scared and I'm trying to get him into the house as the coyotes are closing in. I can never move fast enough to get him inside, but thankfully, mercifully, sometimes I wake up before the coyotes get to him.

Last night in my dreams we were trying to decorate the house for Christmas, but a huge pack of wolves surrounded our house as a circle and attacked anyone who tried to put up any decorations. I clamped down a wolf's jaws as it struggled while someone hung Christmas lights off the roof and it snapped at me in vain as the red and green lights reflected in its hungry yellow eyes.

You have to admit, it's kinda funny.

He shows up more than anyone else, though. I know this game well; I've had this dream over 20 times. It's a house, sometimes one I've lived in, sometimes not. Friends and family are scattered all over, their bodies still warm in a pool of their own blood. I was unable to protect them. He moves through the house with a gun, always a gun because I do not like guns and no one is bulletproof anyways. There's one last person I have a chance to save, and she is scared and hiding and it is my responsibility to make sure she lives and that she's okay.

I find her, my mother, hiding under a staircase or in the back closet of a room, and I hold her and tell her it's going to be okay, and then he arrives and guns her down in front of me and I have failed. I wake up and life goes on and I try to eat breakfast and shake off the heaviness and I call my mother just to hear her voice and I have holes in my shoes so that I can pay to tell my therapist what I already know, what I will never be ready to hear, that there will always be those wounds inside no matter how much I dress them up as sardonic barbs or clever machines. There is only so much I can heal but my dreams will not change their relentless march through my head.

What dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause.

odds and ends.

Sometimes I don't blog for a while, not because I don't have anything to say, but because I have too much to say. Since I usually write my posts like short little essays with clear beginnings and middles and ends and some "the moral of the story is..." shenanigans, I hesitate to dump prose soup on you guys when my thoughts are a jumble. But then I look up and it's been a week and a half since I last blogged and there's people who literally check in with me if I don't post stuff because somehow they're worried I've gone off the deep end or had a mental breakdown.

Apparently the only week I'm allowed to disappear off the face of the planet is when Discovery Channel has Shark Week, because Shark Week is like, the coolest thing ever so it's okay to be glued to the TV.

My July 4th weekend was lovely. Benni's birthday is July 4th so we made one big birthday weekend out of it, which included a day of adventuring on July 3rd to the Santa Monica Pier and a ride on the big Ferris Wheel that overlooks the sparkling blue Pacific; playing around on Santa Monica's famous Muscle Beach; taking in lunch at a cute little cafe that's getting a lot of press called Huckleberry (if you go, try the marinated peppers and burrata sandwich - I almost died out of happiness); and then I forced Benni to start watching the Harry Potter movies because I saw the trailer for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and I died and went to nerd heaven.

On July 4th we bbq'd and played Lego Rockband in the afternoon (I know, did your brain just explode from Awesome as well? Rockband + Legos?!) and then headed over to the CBS studios, which are opened up to the public for the holiday, to watch a great fireworks show over the LA "River" and eat unnatural amounts of kettle-corn.

On Monday we rested and watched two more Harry Potter films. I am officially an enabler.

Not much else is new. Drama comes and goes, as do challenges and the ups and downs life brings with them. I'll blog about that when I feel like talking about it, I suppose. For now my head is kind of quiet in its busy-ness, if that makes any sense. There doesn't seem to be much to talk about even though there's always a lot going on.

I should also probably officially report that I have decided that I like this Benni guy and so we are moving in together in September. And do you know how to tell when you're moving in with a New Yorker, besides the fact that you're fairly sure the front door will always be locked and your normally very sweet and friendly boyfriend will refuse to make eye contact with any of your new neighbors for fear of building a relationship with them that later bites him in the ass?

This is how:

Benni: "Hey, when we find an apartment, can we look for one that has a backyard?"

Me: "Sure."

Benni: "And if we're really lucky, maybe our backyard will have a guacamole tree!"

Me: "A...guacamole tree? Don't you mean an..."

Benni: "GUACAMOLE COMES FROM TREES!"


Yup. He's a New Yorker all right.

gravity sucks

Just a thought here, guys -

After I decided to turn my life upside down and change the way I was doing everything and how I was conducting my relationships, I floated for a good ten days on a pure, exhilarated air of confidence and joy. Then it ended, as it always does, and I was left shaking the dust off my boots and trying to get back to where I once belonged, upset and confused. Did the fact that I was no longer cruising in fifth gear mean that the changes weren't real? Or that they weren't big enough?

It only occurred to me a few days ago that what I experienced is what I like to refer to as a runner's high. If you're a runner, which I am not, (and never will be unless I'm being chased by zombies, or a Tyrannosaurus Rex, or I have a bucket of chili cheese fries being dangled in front of me), you know what I'm talking about. It's this burst of energy that hits at some point in the middle or two thirds of the way through your run and it propels you forward and gives you additional momentum. What it does NOT do is finish the race for you. And it doesn't make the fact that you're running much easier either.

It took me a while to be okay with the fact that I was no longer soaring above and beyond my problems but was instead back down on earth where there was still a crap-load of work to do. I tend to get inspired easily, and, like most artists and Gemini's, feel the weight of what uninspires me pulling me down just as easily. Maintaining that runner's high is difficult because it requires me to keep running in the first place - whereas whenever I have a success I convince myself that the race is over and now I can go home and sleep.

Um, it doesn't work that way.

So if you're going through some hard stuff right now, and honestly, who isn't, and you've just hit a milestone or had a major breakthrough and thought, whew, now the hard work is over, and found yourself slightly crushed when you looked up and noticed that there are still 14 more miles to go...

Well, this post is for you. Because we are all running a hard race and doing the best we can, and the times when we are floating on air because we just did something awesome are definitely worth celebrating. But when you find yourself back on the ground and a little tired and wishing you could be above it all like you used to be...

Just remember that you're doing exactly what you need to do. The only way out is through, and no matter how rad we are (yes, I just used the word rad) we don't get to cruise through life. It takes hard work and guts and showing up and discipline and consistency and patience to get back up from a fall, or come back down from a cloud, and just keep going. You don't need to hang on to those victories and successes because I promise you, there will be more of them.

The only way out is through. And you're exactly where you need to be.

surfacing for air

Hey kids! I'm back! (::cue Beethoven's "Ode to Joy"::)

I hope you've all been well while I've been away... it was a stressful couple weeks but I'm through the worst of it and I'm back to blogging and catching up on everyone else's blogs, HUZZAH.

First and most importantly, a big huge thank you to all of you commenters who trusted me enough to be super honest about the crappy people that are sucking your energy away from you. I am constantly kind of humbled and ever so slightly terrified by how much you guys open up to me and I'm trying my damnedest to be worthy of your trust. I know it's not easy out there with a universe full of clueless people sometimes but I can say, since I pride myself on getting to know just about every one of you, that you are all so strong and kick-ass. It might be hard right now (it still is for me) but I really believe it's gonna get better. So thanks for all your comments that made me laugh, tear up, or really think. You guys are the freakin' coolest.

Second and only slightly less importantly, great white sharks do not attack kayaks very often, for those of you who were worried when you saw that photo in my last post (you can read the full story of that photograph here, no, it's not fake).

And now for the FastPass version of what I was up to while I was away:

1) Celebrated my 200th blog post (I vaguely remember giving my cat my password to blogspot, while face-down on the kitchen floor)

2) Celebrated my birthday - my friends threw a picnic party for me in the park and it was lovely - the highlight was meeting my best friend's two new dogs and Krista's gorgeously adorable little girl, Finn (and seeing Krista for the first time in, oh, five years?)

3) consumed an unnatural amount of red velvet and cream cheese concoctions, including red velvet frozen yogurt, red velvet cupcakes, and a red velvet and cream cheese cheesecake from The Cheesecake Factory

4) Was bitten on the face by a kitten while I was trying to use the toilet (no, I'm not making that up)

5) Hit someone in the back of the head with a blueberry that I accidentally launched off my plate at a party (sadly, also not making that up)

6) Tried to carry the neighbor's cat into my mom's house, not realizing it was, in fact, NOT my mother's cat

7) Have been secretly rooting for the Boston Celtics to win the NBA Championship (shhh, don't tell any of my LA partners in crime!)

8) Received "YOU ARE A DOUCHE" business cards for me to leave on cars clearly parked by idiots from this lovely girl as a surprise birthday present

9) Opened up a book given to me by aforementioned best friend only to be facing the poem that has followed me around for the past several years and pops up when I need it most

10) Cooked this with a few minor tweaks (I took out the bacon and smothered the toast with goat cheese) and didn't burn down the apartment OR poison my boyfriend

11) Received some very cool blog awards from Robin at Your Daily Dose, Heather from The Dream Machine, and Tricia over at Talespinning - thank you ladies, I will pass these along shortly!

12) considered tossing the book I'm reading for my Sci-Fi book club across the room

13) Have been playing this album over and over again as my summer chill-out album, particularly tracks 1, 4, and 9

14) Saw a BMW delivering Pizza Hut pizza (how LA is that??)

15) Bought this and this for myself with some birthday money.



k, off to catch up on your lives! ::hugs!!::