best birth control....EVER

*the following is an actual, word for word conversation I had with a friend over the phone*


Me: Hey S., how's it going?

S.: Good, it's going great!

Me: Yeah? How's Alora? Is she getting big?

S.: Oh my God, she's growing up so fast.

Me: Really? Awww, does she remember her crazy Aunt Tracy?

S.: Right now I'm not sure she remembers ME. But sometimes when I tickle her and she giggles, then she looks at me and... uh oh.

Me: What?

S.: Uh, I gotta go.

Me: Why, what happened?

S.: (cheerfully) Alora just pooped so hard it sprayed up the back of her shirt and onto my pants.

Me: OH

S.: Wow, it's on my shirt too.

Me: MY

S.: K, call you later, alright?

Me: GOD.

S.: ::hangs up::



Dear Universe, if and when I decide to ever have kids, could you just send me one in the form of a well-adjusted 19 year old English Lit major so we can talk and have coffee and stuff? And spare me the poop-spraying and sleep deprivation and temper tantrums and teenage dating ordeals?

mmmmkkkay thanks.

pardon our mess...

Things are under construction in my life once again.

About 98% of my belongings are now in boxes, thanks to three intrepid friends of mine who, when I posted on Facebook on Sunday that I was doing some serious procrastination with my packing, invited themselves over one at a time to help me pack. I stood there, overwhelmed and a little freaked out, as they helped me neatly pack books (WHY DO I OWN SO MANY BOOKS?!) and dvd's, trinkets and memories, vases and tea light holders, bowls and spoons, into box after box after box. I have the best friends in the entire world, of that I am certain. I must have been Joan of Arc in a former life to deserve such loyalty.

The apartment Benni and I are moving into should be ready hopefully within a week. We won't be signing the lease until the construction is finished, which freaks me out. Right now I have to be out of my current apartment by September 1st and I don't have a lease signed for the new place yet. I am in mid-air, suspended, between two trapeze bars, with a very long fall and a very shallow safety net if this new apartment doesn't work out.

As Benni pointed out, worst case scenario, the apartment we're in love with doesn't work out, we're out the $1100 security deposit we put down, and we have roughly ten days to find another apartment and do it all over again.

As I pointed out, that's a pretty damn awful worst-case scenario.

I also can't find my current lease agreement, (I couldn't find it even before my life was put into boxes) which probably has it very clearly written that I paid $200 for a cat deposit, and my apartment landlord is now arguing and saying, No, you only paid $100.

Breathe and smile. Breathe and smile.

In the meantime:

Go and read this post about fatherhood. It's amazing, honest, and captures a sentiment that I think a lot of men feel but rarely get a chance to put into such well-written words. Read the post right after it too, if you want, because it's just as good but for completely different reasons.

And a long time ago, The Purple Cow over at Australian in Athens left this for me as a comment. It's kind of changed my life, and I printed it out and read it and re-read it almost daily. Purple Cow, if I didn't thank you before... I'm thanking you now. Thank you, a million times thank you.

I think I'm somewhere between Change #3 and Change #4.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

FIVE SHORT CHANGES ON CHANGE - Author unknown

Chapter 1.
I walk down a street and there's a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. It takes forever to get out. It's my fault.

Chapter 2.
I walk down the same street. I fall in the hole again. It still takes a long time to get out. It's not my fault.

Chapter 3.
I walk down the same street. I fall in the hole again. It's becoming a habit. It is my fault. I get out immediately.

Chapter 4.
I walk down the same street and see the deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it.

Chapter 5.
I walk down a different street.

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.