Spotted yesterday on the bus...

...the most fetchingly nerdy couple I have ever laid eyes on.

She had milky white skin liberally adorned with freckles, coke bottle glasses and light brown wavy hair that fell past her butt, held in place by a ridiculously large irridescent butterfly clip. But her outfit was even more amazing: a baggy light pink sweatshirt, intense pleated mom jeans with tapered ankles and a bright purple leather fanny pack worn over both articles, making her look not unlike an overgrown six-year-old from 1989.

He was in a white polo shirt, almost white khaki pants and white tennis shoes, his baby gut straining at the pants, giving him the appearance of an angel gone to seed. His accessories were less angelic, however, as he flashed large yellow gold rings shaped like horseshoes and a tasteless goldtone belt.

They read the paper together, he on one side of the comics, she on the other, and made snarky comments in the sort of distinctively smug nerd voices developed from years of communicating only with one's parents and being reassured that they were "too smart to be popular."

I wanted to sell them as indentured servants to South Park. Trey Parker and Matt Stone could copy them intricate detail for detail and have another hit on their hands.

What to do on the bus when you can't read

My leetle bus riding experiment has gone swimmingly well. It takes longer, but my stress level has dropped considerably. In fact, on Thursday I ended up driving because I felt like ass and it was raining, and the resulting commute wrecked my physically. I was so tense and angry on the way home (at 2 p.m., I might add) that my one consuming thought was, "I wish I was on the bus right now."

The only problem with the bus is that I get violently sick if I read in a moving vehicle. Heck, I tend to get car sick no matter what, but reading really pushes me over the edge. To keep the ralphing at a minimum I have opted to spend my trips staring. Out the window, at my fellow passengers, at the molded texture of the plastic on the seat in front of me--you name it, I've stared at it.

More fun though, are the games I play while staring. My first diversion is a game I like to call "If there was a nuclear holocaust and you had to repopulate the earth with the people on this bus, who would you pair together, and why?" Let's just say my neuvo earth village would be highly interracial.

I also like to play "makeover" where I mentally redress and rehairstyle my fellow passengers. Only one rider has remained unscathed, and he is so painfully fashionable I'm hardly qualified to stand in the glow of his vintage reproduction Raybans. Naturally, he works at Bellevue Square. Boys that hot and gay always work retail or bartend or pursue whatever occupation gives them the best opportunity to shoot lasers from their soul-piercing eyes.

Today I played a new game, courtesy of my pink mini Ipod, which has languished, unused, since I stopped working out at the gym. As we rolled through town I scrolled madly through my playlist to find an appropriate soundtrack for the voyage. Cast in my own little movie I moved in dramatic form with the music--slowly turning in repose over the sweep of Keane, bouncing in the early morning sun to Ereland Oye and even sucumbing to Bright Eyes' 'Arc of Time' as we crested the 5-20 bridge. Bathed in the blinding reflection off the water, barely separated from the seagulls who glided past, I closed my eyes and felt, if only for a minute, like I was flying.

Whipped

When you don't sleep because you simply can't sleep, you become so close to madness-so intimately intertwined with her, that you slip into something like lovers. Madness and you; you and Madness, strolling hand-in-hand down sandy beaches with heavily-lidded eyes, weaving your fingers together to erase where one begins and the other ends. You're a darling couple. You really are.

I'll give you something to cry about.

The only thing worse than feeling sorry for yourself is when you want to punch yourself in the face for feeling sorry for yourself. Nothing ruins a good sulk like the little voice inside your head saying, "but really, you have it pretty good. And there are people in Africa starving. And think about Iraq. And shit, you even have it better than some of your friends, you SELFISH WHINY BITCH."

All that aside, I will temporarily remove myself from the hierarchy of pain to indulge in the most self-indulgent thing I could possibly do: blog about how hard it is to be me today. Try not to throw up in your mouth.

1. It took me one hour and fifteen fucking minutes to get to work today. Otherwise known as going 5.76 miles per hour.

2. I'm the fattest I've been in years. My clothes don't fit right. I feel like a hovercraft. Like the Koolaid man. Like a whale with a glandular problem. I mean, sure, there are literally thousands of people sitting at the DMV right now who are fatter than me. But I live in thin-land and all my friends are pocket-sized people and I walk, on average, three miles a day and how the fuck did I gain seven motherfucking pounds in three months? HOW? And have I mentioned that I'm hungry all the time so me on a diet is just fucking delightful? If you thought I was moody before, take away my food and I'm really, really, really 'pleasant.'

3. I apparently can't sleep like a normal person anymore. I now sleep roughly six hours a night. Fuck you, mind.

4. I'm a mediocre copywriter.

I wish I were a man. No, a raccoon. No, maybe just a jellyfish, adrift, blissfully unaware and boneless; my tentacles waving as I made my way under the heavy covers of the sea.

I'm a damn liar

I didn't take the bus the other day. Despite my best intentions, and a really heart-felt blog post that all three of you who read this were privy to, my fat ass stayed comfortably in my car seat for the past two days.

In my defense, I "needed" to drive yesterday, insomuch as we headed to my mom's after work for some home-style cookin' and a little "So You Think You Can Dance." As a one car household, we "needed" the car to get home from said mama's house.

A word about SYTYCD--it just might be therapeutic. My mom, a clinically depressed emotion-whore is back on the Zoloft sauce, so one could argue that the dolls are lifting her spirits. Me? I think it's the dancing. I made her watch SYTYCD last week for the first time, much to her grumbling as it didn't involve torture, insect copulation, sensationalized news or any of the other depressing-ass topics she seems to gravitate toward on television.

And did she like it? You bet your sweet Mary she did! As so eloquently stated above, the woman feeds off emotion. She'll rile people up just to parasitically feed off their feelings. And what, I ask you, is more feeling than dance? Throw in the fact that it's a reality show and thus is obligated to highlight the dramatic inner monologues of the participants and you have a recipe for OCD household fun.

It's not just fun for her, either. Watching this sort of show with my mother is pretty entertaining for me. Just imagine witnessing someone with the unmasked, unwalled responses of a child, the intelligence of a highly-educated adult and the attention span of an ADHD teenager and you have the general idea. I've always said that I never fully understood my mom until I started taking hallucinogenic drugs. Once I did, I could imagine seeing the world the way she did and I've been slightly more patient with her ever since.

In any case, these Wednesday night gatherings are becoming something I really look forward to. We eat dinner, go for a walk, then watch the dancing while Hombrelibre semi-drunkenly heckles us from the other couch.

My mom said that last week, after the show, was the best she had slept in a long time. This week we pulled away from her house watching her pop-and-lock on the front porch, her arms waving, her grin positively lighting up the night.

Save me a seat on the shortbus. I'm comin' aboard.

They've finally broken me. I am broken. Not heart-broken, not house-broken (that's a whole 'nother story), but traffic broken. I am only so patient and my patience has worn through the proverbial toe in my sock of life.

Bad analogies aside, I really am resigned to do something, or rather attempt something I've been avoiding for some time: namely, ride the bus to work. It wasn't the cost of gas that broke me, although it's utterly outrageous. It wasn't my devout environmentalism at play. It wasn't even the time involved. Quite simply, it's the fact that I am too "delicate" for my commute. I get carsick so easily that more of my drive is spent concentrating on not puking out the window than actually focusing on steering my car. The stop-and-go, go-and-stop jerking combined with the ever-present Seattle drizzle makes me literally sick. And the copious amount of dead raccoons along the side of 5-20 doesn't help.

I've avoided the bus thus far because, let's face it, I'm lazy and I hate being bound to other people's schedules, even if those "people" are Metro transit. Cars are the ultimate symbol of independence, at least as far as I'm concerned. I didn't learn to drive until I was almost 21 and I spent much of my youth either on the bus or being ferried around by my patient friends. I hate relying on others. I hate being a burden on others. And I hate asking for favors. So I essentially spent my teen years embroiled in constant guilt and discomfort whenever I had to go anywhere. Call me crazy, but the bus carries some negative connotations as a result.

But tomorrow morning I will set out to trek the .4 miles to my bus stop at 7:39 a.m. and arrive at 8:48 a.m. in Bellevue, a full 48 minutes past when I should technically arrive and at least 18 minutes past when I used to arrive. Long and annoying? Yes. But after spending nearly an hour this morning in my car, struggling with nausea and feeling rage seeth up into every crevice of my body, I am willing to try.

Travel Whore

We're going to Europe. Eastern Europe. Or really, more accurately, Central Europe since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Prague, Krakow, Budapest, Vienna. It's almost all I can think about. I'm like a masturbatory teenager but instead of sex I have a one track mind for Prague.

My mom instilled the travel bug in me early. Sure, all our furniture was picked up off the street or from other people, sure we didn't have a properly working toaster or a tv for much of my childhood and sure our bathroom sink didn't work and we had to brush our teeth in the bathtub but damnit, we traveled.

When I was little, travel meant camping up and down the Oregon Coast, living out of our tiny honda, aka "Little Blue Horse," and making our way to Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. When I got older we ventured further south to California, and then, when we were finally above the poverty level, we made two epic voyages, paid for by many years of savings and birthday money. First we went to Hawaii when I was in 7th grade and then to England when I was 16.

For people at our income level, this sort of travel is almost unheard of. But my mom made it happen. When we went to London we only had the money to eat twice a day--the breakfast that was included at the B&B and then one meal out, typically consisting of a sandwich. My sister and I complained bitterly, as we were walking roughly 10 miles a day on too few calories, but I have to give my mom some serious props for getting us there to begin with.

I went again to England and Scotland when I was 17, funded primarily by my first job at the University Village QFC and weird fundraising efforts like playing an extra in a movie that was never officially released.

And then there were the two trips to Tijuana, Mexico to build houses for homeless families taken my sophomore and senior year of high school, funded by a conglomeration of my parents, my extended family, myself and the church. While not vacations, per se, they certainly expanded my vision of the world.

All that before I was 18. And I just kept going after that. I've been ridiculously blessed and lucky. I pushed Hombrelibre on this trip. I really did. We can't really afford it and we're stretching our vacation time to the max. And we just bought a house, so it's doubly stupid.

But you only get one life. And I don't want to spend mine without adventure. And I have a second job for a reason: to blow it all looking at castles.