Snacks | Another Wordpress Blog

I used to feel this sense of urgency about writing all my thoughts and ideas down, because they seemed really important and I wanted to make sure that the world understood me, and how I saw everything. Now, whenever I write stuff I think it all seems kind of obvious and not imbued with any special nuances or layers of meaning. Especially when there are so many talented writers who have blogs and twitter accounts–it used to be that the writers you read were limited to newspapers or novels. Now all the smart people have all kinds of outlets to tell you the very same types of important ideas and thoughts that you yourself have! It certainly takes the urgency out of wanting to share it.

My grandma died on Thursday night, the one I was writing about before who has sort of just been waiting to die for the last few years. I think my mom is half sad, half not. And of course I feel like a huge jerk for being on bad terms with her!

BIRTH! Evany Thomas is having a baby pretty soon! So some of her SF friends had a baby shower for her yesterday, which was at Caroleen’s and was really fun. Except, since people know that Evany loves cake, there were three separate really, truly delicious cakes AND two kinds of cupcakes. My fave cupcakes were the chocolate ones that Caroleen made, that had little plastic asian babies on top of them. There was some discussion about why not get African American little plastic babies, and then the rum inside my brain said a little too loudly “wouldn’t that be kind of awesome if the baby turns out to be black and it’s not Marco’s at all!?” No laughing, no agreement there.

Let me describe the three cakes. Jill made a yellow layer cake with chocolate frosting, and it was EXACTLY the perfect vanilla-chocolate party cake. The cake was delicate and soft and left lots of crumbles behind; the chocolate frosting was fudgey yet light. It was fan fucking tastic.

Then, Annie Galvin brought a princess cake that she bought from Schubert’s bakery, which is out in the Inner Richmond. It was DIVINE. I used to buy my princess cakes from Draeger’s but the Schubert’s one was better. What’s that? You don’t know what a princess cake is? Well let me tell you! First of all, know that it is a big mound, a half-dome type shape. Covering the dome is a layer of marzipan, which is almond paste. Underneath that, making up the convex part of the dome, is whipped cream. The base of the dome is yellow sponge cake, then some raspberry jam, then CUSTARD, then more raspberry jam, then more cake. (I just had to go to my kitchen and eat some of the leftover cake. I’m back now.)

Then towards the end of the party, Caroleen suddenly produced a big sheet cake of unusually buttery pound-cake texture (dense), with the lightest vanilla buttercream frosting, and big juicy strawberry slices on it. It was like eating butter with buttercream frosting. SO GOOD. But we all have cake hangovers today (or as Jill calls it, cakeovers).

So I’m feeling okay these days! (And not because of the Deplin that the shrink prescribed me–my depression is not a great enabler for me to be on top of things like getting prescriptions filled and thus I only started taking it yesterday.)

The other day (a week ago I think) I went to the Stanford Shopping Center to go to the Apple store after work. It was about 7pm, and the Stanford Shopping Center is very nicely landscaped; gorgeous roses and foxgloves and pansies and poppies and all kinds of everything. Plantings are arranged in nice color groupings, so you have one planter full of reds and pinks and others are all white and others are lavender and white and blue.

I was walking through the mall (it’s an outdoor mall) and I realized that for the first time in months, I felt happy. I realized I was smiling to myself, smelling the air and enjoying the dusk temperature and light. I am turning the corner!

Then, I found myself looking forward to a camping trip with a bunch of Ivan’s motorcycle friends, whereas before I’d been plotting ways to get out of going. In fact I pushed for us to go up a day early! We took Pilot, and he oddly had a great time. (It’s odd because he’s a total curmudgeon who doesn’t usually welcome a change of routine and scenery). He fell in love with another dog named Max, and was running after him all Sunday morning, which was hilarious to watch because Pilot is 13 and can barely even bend his legs, so he’s all stiff-leggedly pursuing Max kind of like a crazed zombie. And basically he’s been sleeping ever since!

I had a good time camping but, I have this thing where I get socially… SATURATED. Ivan’s friends are totally cool and all, but after about an hour or two I run out of things to say, and then I just get bored and self-concious about being bored, and feel like a jerk because all I want to do is leave. I don’t know what to do about it, and I wish I could turn “on” better when I need to. It’s offputting to other people and I’d like to be more in control of it! Although as Ivan pointed out, a lot of motorcycle people (it was a dirt-biking weekend) are pretty solitary and quirky so they probably didn’t even care.

Work is kind of “meh” as the kids say. I feel pretty certain it will pass, and next week me and Nate are planning a tiny bit of a boondoggle to Los Angeles which will include a viewing of the Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien! And we’re gonna stay at the Roosevelt for two nights and there could be swimming. I do like Los Angeles and I do like the Roosevelt.

So mother’s day came and went, no big drama. Ivan and I drove down to the “in the future all we do is consume” deluxe mall Santana Row and took my mom to Yankee Pier! Her choice!

My triumphs of the day were:

1. acting normal

2. immediately offering up gossipy news about other people to get her in that “talking shit about other people makes me happy” mode

3. ordering wine the minute the waiter came by
4. NOT sneaking to the bar on my way to the bathroom to do a vodka shot (well, I might have done this if the bartender didn’t look so busy. So it’s a triumph but a triumph of circumstance.)

5. acting normal.

Ivan, as ever, was GREAT. He was acting totally normal, chatty, and then the minute my parents peeled off to go their own way he took me to the Left Bank and bought me a cocktail. And drove home AND let me control the radio the entire way home. He is really nice to me at the right times in the right ways. YAY IVAN.

(Also I saw the expensive shrink yesterday and she gave me a prescription for Deplin, which apparently is a type of B vitamin that can cross the “blood-brain barrier” and helps your body make seratonin. I’ll let you know how that goes.)

I hate:

IRONING.

If you know me well then you know that I normally wear things (dresses, shirts, jackets) that are of what they call “jersey”. Knitted fabric that can be washed and dried in machines and that does not need the ironing. SURE it doesn’t look crisp and fantastically professional like Murphy Brown but I just can’t do it.

So I hate the part where I actually iron. But I also hate the part where crisp cotton shirts, previously worn by me, emit a deep smell of… Liz stink! it’s in the weave, it’s in the fibers. I Febrize. I take laundry detergent and I crush it into the armpits, smooooooshing, trying to somehow chase out the Liz Dunn trademarked stink.

So I take the shirt I was ironing, I go Febreze the armpits and toss it in the laundry. Yet another reason to ONLY BUY TSHIRTs right?

Another thing I hate: how can we live in a modern world where there are still things we have to manipulate with hot pieces of metal to make look good?

how can I live in a modern world where my Audi navigation system can’t tell me which route has traffic, where there is an accident, can’t synthesize all the available information on the internet to tell me RIGHT IN MY CAR which way to go?

Okay there is probably a chance that this entry is unreadable perhaps because due to an upcoming vacation with some A-gays at a fancy vineyard with a pool, i have been exercising too much and not eating enough and drinking too many vodkas, I am unable to prooofread. PROOOOOOOOOOOOOOfread ya

It just occurred to me, if I lived in the south, none of these problems would be worth comment–I hate my momma, my daddy’s going senile, who wants a mint julep?

Being disconnected and angry at your relatives is a whole literary genre. I think I should just move to Alabama. And frankly that sounds kind of lovely.

YES I’M DRUNK BUT THAT DON’T MEAN IT AIN’T A GOOD IDEA

Okay so things are not great with my mom. Obviously. We had a few email exchanges, which were not warm or understanding and then devolved into her saying “I should just serve dinner and go to bed since no one seems to want me around.”

It all makes me so low. For the last few weeks I’ve been asking myself, why did I even start this argument! It’s so hard to start a fight when I really want to just forget all our psychotic history, then it’s so hard to continue the fight when I really want to just forget all our psychotic history. But, like I was saying in the other blog post, maybe all these transgressions DO add up to something, maybe they have hurt me such that I need to fight back!
So last week, I realized that we should see each other for Mother’s day, it’s just too…DRAMATIC to not see each other on Mother’s day. So we have a brunch date at San Jose’s incredibly exciting SANTANA ROW for Sunday May 10th!

And in the meantime, I just feel so … I don’t know. Not just uncreative, I feel psychically comotose. I come home from work and turn on the TV and mindlessly watch Law & Order while playing solitaire on my G1. And you guys, I play solitaire basically all the time. It’s not right. It’s like I’d rather be inside two card decks rather than living in this world. Why am I so dead to the world? What is wrong with me?

As a remedy to this ennui, I know I need to do something. I need to get absorbed by something. I have garden plans. I have my unfinished novel. I have THREE separate ideas for screenplays, one of which is about a bachelorette party in Las Vegas, one is about a cougar, and one is about Silicon Valley in these, the sad and unoptimistic times.

And yet I just don’t write. I surf the internet, and yay for Twitter, what with it’s constant updating, I can forget about actual real time, and my real concerns, because @robcorddry is gonna say something funny every twenty minutes or so! YAY INTERNET! (I know, to be properly ironic I should have said internets. My bad)

AND I know I should call my shrink to talk about this all but it seems like these are two-appointment-a-week problems and my shrink is $275 an hour and so twice a week would be $2,200 a month and another depressing aspect of my life is my credit card debt. (Hey if any of you know a talk therapist that you really like and is NOT $275 a session let me know.)

I would love to, at the end of this year, to be out of debt and not playing solitaire every minute of the day that I can. I’d love to have written something, and if not, to at least to have given up the dream that I am a writer. BUT I HAVE A SEMICOLON TATTOO! I can never give up writing. Right?

(I am depressed and this is a depressing blog post so if you aren’t into internet whingeing then you should skip this. Also there are long boring parts explaining some family logistics. Just warning you.)

My mom. She was always legendarily known among my friends as my Mean Mom. There are all kinds of stories that amaze and shock my friends and therapists about the stuff she’s done and said to me, but I’ve worked for so long to NOT tell them that I’m not going to conjure them back up to put down here. It started in high school, and got slightly better in college because I only saw her quarterly, and I only had to deal with her amazingly passive aggressive (sometimes just plain aggressive) barbs and cutdowns during holidays or family birthdays. There are so many movies about dysfunctional families and how Christmases are always so awful because your family is nuts, that I figured I’d gotten past the worst of it and could just join the rest of the human race in struggling to ignore the bad parts about my family and focus on the good parts (mostly my dad). Mom and I had a few frank discussions where she finally admitted she was horrible to me during high school (but only when she was visiting her own father on his deathbed), and I figured that was the most I would get. But that was fine, I just wanted to have a pleasant relationship even if it wasn’t deep or meaningful, it was fine with me that we’d never actually DEAL with our actual emotions about each other, as long as we could get through a dinner without someone yelling or storming out.

Then there was that trip to New York last August where she freaked out on me, the full story is here (http://www.lizcoworldwide.com/wordpress/?p=203). She was yelling at me to shut up, don’t say another word, just shut up, in the middle of a restaurant. And then I had to stay on that trip for another 2 days (of course I looked into flights to leave early but they were $800), angry and bummed and freaked out and yet also having to go to plays and dinners with her and be polite and make light conversation (and drinking glass after glass of wine) because I just didn’t want to get into it with her anymore, I just wanted the trip to end. And, when I got back from New York, my mood was really low–like the wind was taken out of my sails. Just a low-level, constant discouraged feeling. And I knew it was because of her, and seeing that fury and hate suddenly directed right at me (my sister and step-niece were at the table when it happened but the yelling was all for me). I felt an old, familiar dread of Joan Dunn the Terrible.

Growing up as a teenager, those outbursts were very common from her. She regularly told me (well, screamed at me) that she hated me, which was fine since I hated her too. She criticised me all the time, or at least it felt like all the time, I’m sure there were times where things were okay. But for example, during my sophmore year of high school, my dad rented me a room at a teacher’s house because my fighting with my mom was so intense (it started the minute I got home from school until I went to bed and I couldn’t get any homework done). I went to a high school 50 miles from my house, so ostensibly I was living at another house to be closer to school, but the reality was that my fighting with my mom was ruining the whole household. It was so isolating, being shipped off to live in this 65-year old woman’s house in Pebble Beach, all my friends were in Santa Cruz and I was just miserable. So it only lasted one semester. I would have run away from home–I fantasized about it constantly–but I knew that if I could just hold out till graduation, I could go away somewhere to college and it would all be paid for. It was what got me up in the morning.

So I was trying to forget the New York incident. I don’t want to live all full of rage and estranged from my family, I really don’t. And then, a few weeks ago I was at my parent’s house and my brother and his wife and my sister and her husband were all there and we were having dinner. And we were having the normal kind of dinner conversation, one person’s story sparks another person’s story and there is a lot of back and forth. And everyone was participating, especially my brother, my father, and me. Suddenly my mom says “Elizabeth, please be quiet, I want to hear what Hunter is saying.” Implying that I am interrupting my brother. OOOOH it made me so MAD! Because he’d been interrupting me (not that I saw it that way) as much as I’d been interrupting him. I told her that, and asked everyone at the table if they felt like I was interrupting my brother or dominating the conversation. They all said no…it took ALL MY WILL to not leave the table. SO INFURIATING! Why does she always single me out? But I poured white wine on the wound, and then one of my favorite cousins arrived at the house the next day, and I proceeded to stick to my normal plan of acting pleasant and letting the insults slide off of me.

That same weekend I went to visit my grandmother Hazel, my mom’s mother, at the nursing home in Santa Cruz. So depressing, because it’s obvious that everyone there is just waiting to die in this place, and all the crayon drawings from the local grammar schools can’t disguise that. Hazel can’t live alone because she does need a doctor/nurse nearby her (she can’t walk) and it’s too expensive to have in-home care. As it is it’s $6,000 a month at this place, and even then she has to have a roommate. Seeing her there always makes me want to kill myself when I hit 65 or 70…Hazel was so into taking vitamins to keep her health up and here she is at 92, she can’t walk, she has dementia, and she lives in this strange place and doesn’t understand why. All that worrying about your health, that’s where it gets you–healthy body, deteriorating mind, bad circumstances. I’d rather die, right? And Hazel was always mean to my mom (which probably has a lot to do with my situation with my mom), but what that means is that Hazel’s life is run by the child that likes her the least. Hazel was married her whole life (got married at 16), raised four kids, and now is going to die alone in a nursing home with the one kid she never liked visiting her once a week. That’s because all the other children moved out of California, and was the only one willing to deal with finding a nursing home and selling the house and all the moving arrangements, none of the other children felt like flying her to their home states to deal with it there, so there you have it. And I didn’t really even know her very well because my mom had a huge fight with her and my grandfather when I was about 14 years old and I didn’t see my grandma until 25 years later at my grandfather’s funeral.

(And I don’t have children and never will so that’s even MORE reason to off yourself before you hit the nursing home. Also who would pay for it all? I guess I can get more worried about that when I’m 55 or 60. Depressing as hell.)

So mom shushed me, back to the story. About a week later I got an email from her, with a passive aggressive apology saying that of course she wanted me to be my “effervescent self” but blah blah blah. Whatever. I wanted to believe that everything was okay between us and we weren’t regressing back to our old dynamic, which was super toxic. But…I couldn’t just push it down like always.  So I wrote back and said, “you know, perhaps you should consider going on an anti-depressant so that instead of saying and doing things you wind up apologizing for later, you’ll be able to stop yourself before it happens. I know you’re under a lot of stress taking care of Dad and Hazel, it might help!”

That didn’t go over well, she came back and said that she just didn’t get “enough help” and that I should think about what I was going to do to help out the next time I was there.

FUCK THAT.

The whole time I am there (because I am terrified of setting her off) I’m asking how I can help, chopping vegetables, clearing the table, washing the dishes, taking out the trash. But that is so like her–she thought about what she’d said when I was long gone and then felt bad about it, sent an apology, but when push comes to shove, she really thinks it’s all my fault, it’s because I’m not doing something right. She can’t take responsibility for her flaws, and (as seen in subsequent correspondence about this issue, and in all the frank conversations I’ve ever had with her trying to get her to own up to her shitty behavior) she gets so defensive when her flaws are pointed out, again, it all just turns into an attack on me.

We’ve been emailing for two weeks and it’s been deteriorating. For once I’m not pretending she’s not awful. She does not like that. Half the time she accuses me of being the problem and the other half she does this “well I did the best I could and I’m sorry for all the damage I caused you” which is NOT actual dialog about what is happening.

I don’t like that I’m not able to just repress it like I usually do. The way I get depressed is, I feel like nothing really is good or important. Like, my life really adds up to nothing, I have no real achievements, my relationship with Ivan is hollow and meaningless, I have no friends, etc. Everything is bleak.

Basically I think that my mom does not like me and I think that this has caused me deep emotional pain (based on how very much I do not want to think about it) and I wonder how much of my personality got shaped by this key figure in my life hating me? It had to have SOME effect, right? And that is so scary–I have all kinds of personality traits that are prickly and tough and is that how I’d be if I had a mother that was nice to me and actually really liked me? And if not, what do you even DO with that knowledge? Except be super depressed by it.

I think I might not want to have a relationship with her anymore. I don’t even know how to do that, logistically, if I ever want to see my dad again. Everything sucks but for some reason I am just not in the mood to take her belittling and I think this is probably a turning point in my relationship with my father, like, the kind of turning point where I don’t see anyone again till someone’s funeral.

SUCKS.

(as usual, since comments are turned off on my blog due to spammers, you can email me if you like at liz at lizdunn.com)

Nate Maggio just designed a new homepage for me and JESUS CHRIST is it beautiful! Go look at it!

www.lizdunn.com

Yesterday I weighed 122.5. Today, due to drunken pizza eating last night, it’s 123.5, but the point is, since Dec. 4 I have lost SIXTEEN pounds! (or 15! Whatever!)

So I am calling this project a success. Over and out!

As someone who has always been an enthusiastic and often early adopter of website communities (I was addicted to Friendster in 2002, started my blog in 1997, etc etc), here’s exactly what I picture going on over at the Facebook offices.

(If you don’t know about the controversy, you can read what Facebook says about it in their blog)

So here’s what happens: Facebook is started by guys thinking about how people will use and interact with the site. They are close to the user because they ARE the user, and they build something that a lot of people love. But the guys that built it can’t make money on it, because they have such strong ideas about the way the site should work. So they have to hire douches, because douches don’t care about users, they care about money. Which is totally fine as long as they don’t run the show.

So at Facebook the douches are thinking up ways to “monetize” all the free user-generated content that people have put on the site. Probably the recent spate of “25 things” essays started it–”hey we could publish those things as books or something, if we only had the rights. We need the rights!” And then they argue for it by saying “In this terrible economy, with our valuation plummeting, we HAVE to do this. Or the site will DIE. We HAVE TO!!” and the CEO or whoever is sufficiently scared into saying yes.

And then users find out about it, freak out, and the user-advocates at the company can swing into action with their own scare tactics: “Everyone’s going to stop liking our site and a competitor is going to show up and steal all our users!” And then Mark Zuckerburg writes a blog post talking about community values.

There will always be tension between the “I’m good at thinking up awesome products” guys and the “I’m good at making money by exploiting people’s positive emotions and connections” guys. And I bet that there WILL be a Facebook competitor showing up in the next year or two, to woo us away with less douchiness.

I supported Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. I did so for a few reasons: she is a very tough, very smart, and very hardworking woman. I admire her. I like her. I like the things she says. I think she would be an excellent and fair leader of this country.

I also am very much a feminist and I have a feminist agenda. That includes turning the patriarchy of American into a matriarchy. Bush and Reagan had such hard-ons for war they could barely disguise it. The minute they could, they loved sending their missles all over the world to bomb the shit out of innocent people instead of trying diplomacy, talking, or even minding their own goddamn business.

I truly believe that men and women are different–I think their brains are different. I think men have certain strengths and personality traits and women have others. Men really care about running things. They want to compete, and win, and that is why they tend to be leaders of armies and countries, because it matters more to them than anything else. Women care about about fixing problems, fairness, and the individual people that make up the masses. That is why I really want a woman to run this country–because the dream of America is that we care about everyone, we prize individuals and everyone is entitled to the same treatment and benefits in this country. And I feel like the country is NOT like that now.

So, I was sad when Hillary didn’t win the Democratic nomination. And as her supporter I had developed a position on Obama: he was too new, too inexperienced.  But during the presidential race, and then Barack’s victory, I started to really, honestly like him–I like that he’s not a Washington insider, which Hillary of course is. I like that he did actual service work with poor people in Chicago–I don’t think the Clintons ever really worked *with* the poor although I do think they did work on behalf of the poor. I like how he seems to have real, longstanding friends, and that he appointed a bunch of them to his cabinet–people that won’t be yes men, people that can tell him their real opinions and be in touch with real people on his behalf (because as President, Barack himself can’t be “real people” anymore).

I actually think Barack Obama is going to make everything okay. Not just better, okay.

I think he will get back the respect of the world towards the United States. I think he will enable and encourage policies and programs that actually help people, not benefit fucking Halliburton or big campaign contributers. I think he’ll conduct himself in an honorable way and that he’ll inspire other people to behave honorably as well. I think he has values that transcend politics and I think he might make elected officials across the country, including Congress and the Senate, remember why they were elected–to help people, not to trade favors or get re-elected or do well in polls.

And my beloved Hillary, well, she has a pretty awesome job now. And in some ways she’ll be able to improve people’s lives all over the world instead of just in the United States. At her confirmation hearing for Secretary of State, she said, “Of particular concern to me is the plight of women and girls, who comprise the majority of the world’s unhealthy, unschooled, unfed, and unpaid. If half of the world’s population remains vulnerable to economic, political, legal, and social marginalization, our hope of advancing democracy and prosperity will remain in serious jeopardy. We still have a long way to go, and the United States must remain an unambiguous and unequivocal voice in support of women’s rights in every country, every region, on every continent.”

Another nice chunk of what she said about improving the lives of women all over the world.

So maybe I got everything? A Washington outsider who is bringing actual, tangible hope to regular people all over this country as well as all over the world. And a women’s rights champion who has actual power to change things. And I’m feeling pure excitement and optimism. I hope you are too.

Will Ferrell is doing a broadway show called “You’re welcome, America” in his George W. Bush character. It is bound to be hilarious and I AM GOING! Funny or Die got a few tickets for each performance and I pounced. So on Jan 22 I fly to NYC and on Jan 25 I sit back and laugh at the funnyman.

I am hoping that this trip will erase the trauma of my terrible, terrible trip to NYC back in August with my mom and sister and step niece. That trip seriously damaged my relationship to my mother. The warm feelings are gone, it might not be irreversible though.

Project Heifer is actually back on track! I am 127 pounds. Three to go, and then we have a Project Heifer “Mission Accomplished” banner that we’ll drape behind me when I do the press conference. However my progress is not due to any ability to restrict myself, it’s due to me chopping my last perkies up into four sections (from each pill) and popping one when I start feeling hungry. Soon, I will run out of this crutch and then lord knows what’s going to happen. If I could just stop myself from going to restaurants and bars I think I would be okay, I just really like a well-crafted cocktail, you know? And maybe a little ceviche or wild mushroom compote to along with, is that really so hard to understand?

So, I went into the hospital at 138.5 pounds. Since then, exactly one month ago, the lowest I’ve gotten is 128. And I’ll get to 128 and be happy and think, “I’m almost there! Project Heifer is almost done and I can call it a successful mission!” and then something like 500 rum and cokes happen, and boom. I’m 131. This is so crazy making.

I forgot the worst thing about dieting which is, you have to eat in very specific, non-usual ways for any weight to come off, for days and days at a time. But to go up like 2 or 3 pounds, all you have to do is have ONE normal meal–like dinner with dessert and wine. And boom! You fast forward to where you were four days ago. I.e., fat.

I got some extra perkies from the doctor, that should help Project Heifer along. Man narcotics are so awesome for losing weight!

My last blog post included a little part about being wistful for the time to do nothing. I didn’t expound on it too much because I’m sort of worried my blog has been too sad and depressy lately. But then my friend Jill wrote a post on the same feeling, and captured a lot of what I would have said if I hadn’t been trying to spare all you readers from my deep thoughts. Read it!
Thing I just IM-ed to Evany Thomas which made me laugh and laugh:

being pregnant means you barely have to blog anymore! just keep those ultrasounds coming!
you could do a perez hilton thing where you put cocaine marks near the fetus’ nose, for hilarity

After a full month at home, all the little things I do to pass the time or unwind from work…well, I’ve done them all to the extent that I am finally truly bored of them. My favorite little flash game on the web, the solitaire and Texas Hold ‘Em on my Sidekick, the Sunday New York Times, reruns of House and CSI.

And, it’s harder to lose myself hanging out with friends–everyone has a significant other, or babies, or lives far away. (To me both the East Bay and the Sunset are far, far away.) The days of hooking up for brunch and then wandering around thrift stores in the mission for 5 hours are gone, forever. Even if we all lived right next to each other I think the days of just doing nothing, together, are gone.

The other night Evany was over and we were killing time before she had to pick someone up at the airport (I live kind of near, and almost always on the way to, the SF airport). At one point we were lying in my bed watching TV with a space heater blowing hot air on our feet and giggling about nothing. THAT’S WHAT I MISS! There is a hole in my heart for that kind of perfect together nothingness.

Many people say, quite kindly, that I am a talented writer and I should finish my book. And you know what? If I am done distracting myself with flash games, and if my socializing has ebbed away to a thin stream, then why the fuck not? I keep avoiding it because obviously the whole story has changed–the book is about the dot-com boom of the late 90s–but maybe it’s set in now times and there are flashbacks?  Maybe the book takes place over the course of ten years? Who knows. But I think this might be truly the only thing I have going these days, and I’m going to jump back in, even though writing TORTURES ME. Fuck it’s hard.

Talked to a friend today a lot about relationships. There are so many aspects of being alive and in a relationship and happy and they don’t all happen to the same people at the same time. What is going to happen in MY life? No idea. And at the same time, probably exactly what is happening now. I don’t know. I’m pensive.

I call Percocets “perkies.” And usually within about 15 minutes of me getting out of bed, it’s perkie time! The morning is when it hurts the most. However I am weaning myself off the perkies, partially because I want them to last and partially because I really don’t need them that much anymore. I am healing quite nicely! So, sometimes I don’t take a perkie till around 3pm. And around 5pm, I turn to…wine! The perkie extender. Just one glass of wine (wine does not taste that good to me right now so it takes me over an hour to finish a glass of wine) extends the magical properties of the perkie for like 2 more hours! I am proud of my efficiency here.

Project Heifer is coming along; I was down to 130 on Saturday morning, but then Shane Ginsberg came over with a 3-piece fried chicken dinner (sides: mac and cheese and red beans and rice) just for me and I ate most of it. Plus martinis! We were watching the Steve McQueen version of the Thomas Crowne Affair and watching movies from the sixties always puts one in the mood for a classic cocktail. Anyhoo, the day after Shane came over my weight was up to 131.5! I’ve only just today gotten it back to 130 again. Boo! I am behind schedule!

When I start work again I’ve got to start bringing my own lunch at least 3 days a week. You never know how many calories something has unless you make it yourself. There is a reason restaurant food tastes so good–it has a bunch of sneaky fat in it. I really do want to get down to 125 at the very least!
I’ve started working a tiny bit; checking email and responding to it. Things are mellow at the office and that is nice.

Okay boring dispach over!

The good news is, I’m starting to feel a lot better! I’m going up and down stairs, the burning pain is fading.

The bad news: I’m going to start getting bored. Please entertain me!

The doctor called yesterday, to see how I was doing. I told her that one side of the incision really hurt, way more than the other side, super burning hurting. And she says, “Oh, well the tumor had attached itself to some of your organs, so I had to cut it away.” And in my head, visions of her scalpel just scrape, scrape, scraping away.

(I just spent ten minutes trying to figure out which organs are near the uterus, and it looks like it’s mainly the colon down there. THIS is a super detailed diagram which is a little too gross to embed in my blog. Check it out!)

Tomorrow is the day I think I’m going to try going down stairs. Although to Ivan that probably means that I can do laundry again (my current excuse being that I can’t get to the machines). Ha, so I brought home this little bell that we had at work, the kind that sits on the counter and you ring it for service? The idea was that if I needed something, I would ring the bell and Ivan would come running. Ooooooh, he did NOT like that. He looked at it and said, “you better only ring that for emergencies and blowjobs.” It has not been rung.

I’m all tea drinky now! I like the chai, I like the genmaicha (brown rice and green tea). I love coffee but I don’t actually need to drink it and everyone always goes on and on about how tea is so great for you, so I’m doing that now.

Oh and shit, I forgot that I have to complete an online traffic school course in the next four days. Does someone want to come over and do it for me? Smiley? I’ll give you chocolate!