seattlite

The thing I love most about this city is how deliciously random it is. I'm sure all cities are like that, but for some reason this city just does it for me. I spent ten years running away from Washington, trying to find a home, only to realize that it had been here all along. Okay, again with the digression. I think I need to start carrying around a camera to capture some of the things I see that I find strangely compelling.
Like the other day, walking my dog with my requisite steaming latte, somebody walks past with two half-gallon boxes of ice cream and starts telling everybody she passes, "Hey, there's free ice cream at the Rite Aid." And indeed, out in front of the Rite Aid, there were two huge boxes filled with half-gallon boxes of ice cream. People were elbow deep in the boxes looking for their favorite flavor, telling each other to grab a mint chocolate chip if they saw one.
Today, walking over to the park, I was standing at an intersection waiting for the crosswalk's flashing approval and I look across the way and see a young girl and her baby stopped by a newspaper machine. In the middle of the day, without a care in the world, this girl was graffiting the paper machine. She was just so matter-of-fact about it, like it was the most natural thing in the world to leave her mark on the PI box. When she finished, she straightened up, grabbed the stroller and walked off. I have to admit, I was more than a little impressed. It's one thing to do that in the shadow of night, but at noon on a busy intersection...that's hardcore.

climbing the hill

I think it's pretty clear that I'm going through some kind of existensial aging crisis. And as I've said before, a lot of that is because I did everything backwards. While kids my age were going away to college, doing keg-stands, and skipping classes, I was waking up at 4 am to screaming drill sergeants and getting gassed just so we knew what it felt like (not good, in case you needed to know). While kids my age were just graduating from school, trying to find their first job and apartment, I was settling into a suburban middle-class married lifestyle, sorting through fabric swatches and finding missing pieces to my china set. Then when people my age were looking to settle down on a house and a partner, I went back to school, got divorced, and now with one foot nudged firmly in the door of my thirties, I'm trying to figure out how to proceed from here.So now that I've gone off on a huge tangent. Here I am feeling pretty young, doing the things that young kids do, and I get to work and realize that I am working on the old people's weekend. Nobody I work with is under forty. The other weekend has all the young kids. Yet again I am trapped in this weird middle ground between being young and being grown-up and I just don't know what to make of it. But I know this, the soothing sounds of smooth jazz does not a peppy night make.

mile markers

I just realized that I'm celebrating a milestone tomorrow. It's going to be a strange day, probably involving an emotional rollercoaster ride. Tomorrow, I will have been divorced for exactly one year.

party monster

I'm going to stage an intervention for myself. I simply don't know how much longer this rockstar lifestyle can go on. I totally christened my toilet last night with streetside Polish sausage and then passed out on the bathroom floor in my underwear. However, when I left my house, the plan was to go out to a nice dinner. The road to hell really is paved with good intentions...and fruitylicious martinis.

significant other

Some might say I need a boyfriend for silly things like love, compansionship, a sex life, sharing of emotions and blah blah blah. But I really need one because I need somebody to hold my dog while I run into the grocery store and post office. A boyfriend would cut my errand time in half.

hair of the dog

I don't know who has a richer sense of humor, my fate or my irony. I also don't know how I can promise myself to only stay out for an hour, purposely not take a debit or credit card and only about twenty in cash...and still end up getting drunk and stumbling in at some ungodly hour. I would think it out but my brain is throbbing to some conga beat better suited for Carnivale rather than my cranium.

the new digs

I know you're all desperate to see my new crack-alley apartment...so I took a few pictures because it's 2 am and cyberstalking got boring.
Don't laugh at its lilliputian size.
Just remember, it's not how big it is, it's how you use it.

The bedroom-this is where all the magic happens...and by magic I mostly mean the part that happens in your imagination.

The living room-clearly I am in desperate need of some wall art.

The "office"-well, the corner that the desk fit into at any rate.

My sad, sad little refrigerator, with its second-hand condiments and bread with nothing to put on it.
But at least my little hobbit-sized appliance has some cool magnets.

weighty matters

I don't know exactly how this works in the world of physics, but I'm almost positive that the weights at my new gym are heavier than the weights at my old one. I'm so frikkin' sore from going to the gym for the last three days. I feel like I'm bordering on quadriplegic status here. But the thing is, I didn't lift any more weight than I normally do. I didn't do any more repetitions. I did the same routine I was doing when I left my old gym. I know one measly week off couldn't have taken that big a toll on my endurance.

blue lagoon

Something strange is afoot. My toilet water is blue, it looks like somebody added some tidy-bowl to the tank. I know for a fact that I didn't do it. So does that mean somebody is breaking into my apartment to put cleaning products in my toilet tank? Very strange...

copycat

Just because I'm this close to being in my thirties and single, does that HAVE to mean that my life has to be like an episode of Sex and the City? Last night I found myself being, as Carrie called it, emotionally slutty. I spilled far too many beans, I don't know what came over me... People were asking me personal questions and I didn't play coy or try to change the subject, I actually answered them. I'm wondering if that was the smartest thing to do. A total stranger probably wouldn't want to know your the results of your last pap smear, so why would they want to know intimate, personal things about your life? I think there are games you're supposed to play, and even though everybody says they hate them, they all seem to want to participate in them. This social life thing is going to take some getting used to.Although, it has by far and away increased since the move. It's nice being able to do things on the spur of the moment rather than having to plan days if not weeks in advance. And being able to drive home in fifteen minutes or less...priceless.

let me count the ways

I'm BACK!!! Oh how I missed this place, my little cyber-sanctuary. I almost went to an internet cafe yesterday but I thought I could make it one more day. I just got my internet and I've been spending HOURS going through all of my email. And let me tell you, once I get that bank account information set-up...that guy in Nigeria is going to make me one rich woman! And the deal on Viagra I got, WOW!So, I'm done unpacking. The apartment looks great. The walls however are paper thin, I can hear my upstairs neighbor peeing. And they don't seem to work or sleep, they're always home and always moving around. But I love it here. I love that I can walk everywhere. If I want a coffee, which I do almost every waking minute of the day, there are ten within a one block radius. And it only takes me five minutes to drive to work and I can walk to the gym.Speaking of the gym, do I ever have a story for you. So I signed up for a membership at 24-hr Fitness and you get one free training session. I had an appointment yesterday at 10:00 am. Naturally I was late, particularly since I didn't roll out of bed until 9:40 because I've been sick and had consumed half a bottle of Nyquil the night before. I get to the gym and ask for John, my trainer, and I'm waiting and waiting and this person walks up and I'm thinking, "Oh, that must be John, I think he's a trannie" because John was very manly looking but with some feminine features. A guy who works at the desk asks me if I need anything, so I point to John and say, "Yeah, I think I'm waiting for him." And he goes, "Oh, you have an appointment with Marybeth (or some girl name)." I was MORTIFIED! I mumbled something about just waking up and taking too much medicine, but I could feel my face heating up. How embarrassing, I felt like such the country mouse at that moment.

hiatus

I won't have an internet connection until sometime next week, so I probably won't be updating until next Friday or so.

SHHHH, don't cry...it'll be okay.
No no no no, don't blame yourself.
It's not you, it's me, I swear.
I promise, I'll be back and things will be better.
I'll call, I swear.

moving violations

You know, when I moved from Kentucky...I planned for months. I called around about moving companies, I collected boxes from work and school, I did everything ahead of time. This time, I haven't done anything. It's Wednesday, I move on Saturday, and I haven't done a thing. No truck, no boxes, nothing. But I'm going to get my keys today...and I called to have my cable and internet hooked up. The important things first right.

ghost stories

When I was in high school, my friend's mother used to tell us scary stories that she heard as a girl growing up in Germany. Maybe it was the accent on top of hearing stories you hadn't ever heard before, but those stories were pants-stainingly scary. They always had a little something, some detail, for your imagination to hold onto so that you couldn't sleep for weeks after hearing one of those stories. One of the tales I remember vividly involved a desciption of the reaper. He didn't wear a hooded shroud like we all imagine. No, this repear wore a long black cloak and a black hat with a large feather. And he would come to you and leave his hat for you as a calling card; you saw the hat and then he took your life. So imagine my surprise when I got into my car yesterday and looked in the rear view mirror and saw a black felt hat with a feather laying in the back window. My heart stopped beating and I know I stopped breathing for a few seconds, staring at that hat and hearing my friend's mother's voice telling her story. Then I remembered that Jen was wearing a hat when I picked her and her girls up at The War Room on Friday night...and things were right in the world once again.

canker sore

Sometime Friday or Saturday, those two days are a total blur at this point, I bit the shit out of the inside of my mouth. It was all raw and ragged. But because we can't help but touch the painful spots, I've been tonguing the sore for days and now it's smooth like the inside of an oyster shell. I guess this is one of the few times that you can keep poking at the pain and it turns into something that actually feels pretty good.
Also, at this after hours party Saturday night/Sunday morning some guy kept video-taping me. No matter what room I was in, every time I looked up I found his camera pointed in my direction. It was a little unnerving because I try very hard to keep my Wonder Woman and Diana Prince lives separated...but now there's some kind of video surveillance evidence of Wonder Woman out there. I should have asked me what he was video-taping for and got a business card or something. I shudder to think where that tape will end up, though I wasn't really doing anything. It was just weird.
I should be signing my lease on Wednesday and hopefully moving on Saturday. It seemed like it took forever and now it's just moving way too fast. I hope I'm ready for this new story arc in my life.

club dread

I'm exhausted. Between the triple shot latte that I drank at seven pm and my brain working at a frantic pace, I didn't get much sleep at all. It's really hard to avoid the elephant in the room when it is sitting (shitting? I haven't decided which yet) on your chest. But then again, I seem to be the only one who can see it, so I guess it's just me making something out of nothing, which is hardly surprising.

freak show

No, not now, not when I'm in the throes of an existential/late-youth crisis! It just can't be happening. WHY ME!?! WHY NOW!?! WHYYYYYYYYY!?!?!

I found my first old-lady chin hair today!

working hard

In the last twenty-four hours, I have been told by two of my good friends that I'm trying too hard. And I probably am trying too hard, or at the very least trying too hard at the wrong things. But here's the problem, where do you draw the line between trying too hard and not trying hard enough? Exactly how small is the "just right" line? Parts of me want to let things/life happen organically, happy people just go with the flow. But other parts of me just don't have that kind of patience and want to make things happen, successful people MAKE things happen. I'm feeling very Goldilocks lately, and I'm still eating from the wrong bowls of porridge.
So, I went and looked at this studio in the Belltown section of Seattle last night. It is a GREAT location and I am completely enamored with Belltown. I really want to live there but it's very spendy, I absolutely could not do it without a roommate. The studio was TINY, my bed would take up the entire "living" space. It was about 350 square feet. Then later, after talking to my sister about buying a condo rather than renting an apartment, she sent me some listings for condos. The only Belltown condos that show up are the studios in that same building I had looked at earlier. And those teeny-tiny, less than 400 square feet studios cost $150,000. Wow, I was blown-away. Talk about inflated housing costs. I should just be happy with my crack-alley apartment.

craigslist

So I'm a loser, I admit it. I pretend like I'm going over to craigslist to look for apartments (even though I have a hold on the other one, I'm still checking out other places), but that's just a pretext for scoping out the Missed Connections. I LOVE reading those. Every once in a while there is one that is just a precious precious gem of hilarity. But sometimes there are a few that I read and think, "Wow, that could actually be from me," because they read like something I wish I had said to somebody. So that made me think about connecting with people. Do the connections we imagine with other people actually exist? Can connections be entirely one-sided? It seems like a connection implies that both people would feel the pull, but judging by the great number of people looking for missed connections, maybe that's not the case. That makes me a little sad.

dreamspace

I don't know why or how, but last night I had a dream that I was making out with Scarlett Johannson. And she was a really sloppy kisser.