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.

Small moments of beauty

Last night, as I was driving to Everett, I was listening to NPR and heard a piece on these ornately carved, sacred Russian bells that have lived at Harvard for 80 years. The 17th century bells were saved from Stalin's wrath by an American industrialist, who sent them to Harvard, where they're played by a roving team of students who refer to themselves as, I kid you not, "clappermeisters." Maybe it was the rain and the way it seems to stir my maudlin pot, but I started crying a little, right there in the car. There was just something so beautiful about jaded teenagers carrying on an age-old tradition of playing large, cumbersome bells. I pictured them, pushing the pedals with socked feet, up in their tower above the tree-lined campus. And then they played the theme from Harry Potter on the bells and I just lost it. It's a wonder I didn't drive off the road.

This happens to me more than I should probably admit. These times when I'm quite literally overwhelmed by beauty; when my heart seems to seize in my chest and blood rushes to my face and my fingers.

It's both a gift and a curse to feel this much, this easily.

"Prada is never funny."

This was the feedback my fellow copywriter gave me. And I'm glad she did since I spent the other night knee-deep in virtual Prada. They're gorgeous bags, they really are, but I'll admit some relief when I switched to Fendi and later, Christian Dior.

With fashion copy, much like fashion itself, less is often more.

This is a hard lesson for those of us who lean toward the hyperbolic and too clever-clever. If you have the ability to spin words, to feel them vibrate off your tongue and onto the page in snappy little couplets, it's hard to reign yourself in. The impulse to show off, to prove that you are the literary equivalent of an Indy 500 driver, is strong indeed.

But few people want to read that shit. I mean, sure, we all love a Douglas Coupland novel, with its nuevo-slang and self-actualized ironic imagery. And I get postively wet for Tom Wolfe's journalistic rantings in his older novels. But by and large, so much of maturing as a writer seems to come from relaxing and pulling back--not hitting your audience over the head with one wordy line after another.

And copywriting is a challenge unto itself. Cramming meaning and clarity into a few lines is an exercize in restraint. Churning through descriptions, assembly-line style, when you're dog tired is another. The later the night gets, the more I want to resort to the weird and amusing. But couture, even couture that has little hand-sewn rainbows and clouds on it (for the low, low cost of $2 grand) is dead serious.

This is all good for me, though. I feel like it's a test. In the same way that others jog or go to boot camp, I am seeing what I'm made of.

Baby Steps

Yesterday, when asked by a friend of a friend what I "do," I paused, and then, for maybe the first time ever answered, "I'm a writer." Not, "I do this but I WANT to be a writer," or "I am hopelessly attempting to be a writer" or any such disclaimer. I said, "I'm a writer"and then went on to describe what I write.

Of course I felt guilty, as if I didn't deserve the word. As if I shouldn't besmirch the same lauded title that could also be attached to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy or, heck, J.K. Rowling. In my head, on loop played the same obsessive thought: Am I a writer? I mean, I get paid to write now, but does that make me a bona fide writer? Does one have to be paid to write something more substantial than articles about remodeling and descriptions of couture handbags to be a writer? Or would even writing books qualify me? Would I ever comfortably classify myself as a writer if I wasn't also living in a flat somewhere, subsisting on coffee and cigarettes, living a half life of endless nights and manic fits of creation? Can a 'writer' be comfortable?

Another night of not sleeping. Tonight, I'll take a pill.