The Worst Line

I've read a lot of bad poetry over the last few decades. But I'm now reading Marianne Moore's early poems, and I think the lady has written some of the most fantastic clunckers ever. Ironic or not, this two-word line from her poem "Marriage" just never should have been: "Unhelpful Hymen!" I shit you not. Go find the poem and the godawful thing is there, wrapping in a variety of additional godawfuls.

Got other clunckers that rival Ms. Moore's? Share, people. The world has apparently not had its fill of shitty poetry.

More on Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It

God bless the US Postal Service for delivering Maile's new book a day early. The book arrived around lunchtime and I put down everything to read it through. It's as solidly stunning as her first collection. Few flashy plot points, zero flashy sentences, but a confidence in the telling so acute that the characters' lives stay with you for a long time. Some of the characters' emotions even feel shotgunned through you; the tiny details of their lives are that piercing. And Maile gets the West the way few writers do--the comfort and anxiety of slow open spaces, the barreling toward progress and development and peopled places not inconsistent with the ache for untouched land.

Call in sick tomorrow and read this book, people!

Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It

Maile's new story collection just came out and reviews are good. I have been waiting like a lunatic for this book for the past few years. USPS says my copy will arrive in Tuesday's mail. I have a feeling I'll be up all night Tuesday after work reading it. And I love Curtis Sittenfeld's NYT review because she gets what Maile gets: the careful, quiet detail, the confident attention to our most flawed and ordinary parts. The stories in Maile's first collection were so good that I typed out a pair of them by hand and carried highlighted copies with me everywhere for years. I had "Tome" and later "Ranch Girl" folded in fourths and wedged into my back pocket when I was going crazy as an adjunct. I was teaching both early morning and late night classes and fighting LA traffic four times a day, and when I felt most ungrounded and exhausted, I'd pull out her stories and read my favorite paragraphs over and over until my anxiety thinned out. I'd follow her anywhere.

I'm Never Drinking Again

I have my first post-30 hangover today and it's not pretty. Old family friends from England are in town for the week, and last night we had dinner together at the apartment they're renting in Malibu. The weather was gorgeous and we sat outside looking at the water and drinking so many bottles of champagne that I lost count. Then the port came out after dinner, and we all entered our own kind of ridiculousness. My mother, who rarely drinks more than a half glass of wine, was so drunk that she started vomiting on the twelve-minute drive home through the canyon. My dad pulled over because he didn't want her ruining his car, and I stood with my mother in the weeds at the side of the road after midnight, knowing that the next drunk schmuck to round the corner would hit us both. When we got home, we put mom right on the lawn where she continued to projectile vomit. My own vomiting didn't start until this morning when I woke up feeling so awful that I used The Grandmother's faithful inducing technique multiple times. The knuckles on my right hand are raw enough to prove it. For a while, I even fell asleep next to the toilet but then one of the dogs decided to lie down right between my legs and another brought me his ball to throw. I now plan to spend the rest of the day on the couch, watching Rescue Me episodes in between fits of puking. Quel tragic.

Bagging It

Most days I bring my lunch to the courthouse. I don't have a fancy lunch bag and usually grab a small tote bag left over from some shopping trip. Starbucks and Bloomingdales bags are my favorites because their brands are neutral enough not to offend the liberals or the conservatives at the courthouse. But this morning the leftover bag choices in our garage were more limited. There were a bunch of full-size shopping bags but only a handful of the smaller kind. Two were from some designer baby clothes boutique. Not that I'd be caught dead carrying either while I'm thick into my I'm-turning-30-meltdown. And then there was a small tote from a consignment boutique in the valley. I have no idea where that one came from because we Jews have strict rules about wearing dead people's clothes. It simply isn't done. When people won't eat a cow below its shoulders, they're not likely to wrap themselves in some expired socialite's Ungaro.

In the end, the only small tote I could take to work was a bag from a winery. I've brought my lunch in winery bags before, but not during a week when I intend to remain highly, painstakingly intoxicated. I know better than to draw that kind of attention to myself. I know, for example, that any respectable public binge requires the appropriate attire: preppy gear or a Just Say No t-shirt. And I know better than to flaunt my drinking in the face of multiple judges and armed guards. It's going to be a difficult week.

Busy Moping

Will return sometime.

Slow Up

Today I will embark on a quest to stretch one day's worth of work into a week and a half's. The staff attorney who supervises me at the courthouse figures it will take me that long to write an opinion. The case is a messy reversal, so it is slower than usual going. But I've already written a ten page memo on the thing. All that's left to be done is to shift the tone for a public opinion rather than an internal memo, condense here, expand there, organize, organize, organize. Truthfully, I could draft up a polished piece in a couple of hours.

But why ruin a good thing, right? I'm behind on my newspaper reading and haven't looked at the New Yorker in weeks. I stuffed a Carson McCullers novel and Marianne Moore's collected in my purse. I might even spend half the afternoon shopping online for my birthday presents (my parents seem desperate to get me "something" for the big 20-10 rather than a check and I was going to ask for botox until I decided I'm too fond of scowling at people).

The problem with having to bullshit half of the work day though is that it makes me anxious. I'd rather work hard on something that requires all of my attention. Otherwise I just sit at my desk worrying about being jobless, boyless, bookless, homeless, and 30. It's a pretty picture, right?

Women's Writing

I started the summer on a Cormac McCarthy jag and figured I'd spend the next few months filling in my holes with him and other big boy guns I love: Carver, Mailer, Ford. But then Elizabeth Bishop pissed me off with letter after letter expressing her distaste for "women writers" and now I've instead plunged into Virginia Woolf. Woolf's sentences feel directly threaded to the heart and she carried a certain kind of gushing on prepositional phrases, as if the business of emotion were to be found only in its aggregate. Bishop described external things so she wouldn't have to talk about what was going in inside, and it's not surprising that Bishop felt the need to purge every time some woman like Woolf was mentioned. But shit, dear Elizabeth, what a mistake.

Of course I know that part of my resistance to Bishop's resistance is a shared pathology. I am, by nature, mistrustful of the overtly poetic in poems. I am suspicious of weather and landscape, botany, birds, small children or precious husbands. Nor do I like flowery things in real life. I tossed a jean jacket the other day upon realizing that the stitching around the cuffs was rounded. And more than once, I've slept with a boy just to steal his shirt in the morning.

I recognize that the real power rests upon a middle ground. Think Angelina Jolie in a tux, think the slowest, tenderest sex on a slab of concrete. The unbearable tension of a world locked in its misguided machination while all the while its heart throbs out in the open. Hemingway's bravado paired with the excrutiating loneliness of Carson McCullers. Sexton's blinding pursuit of the personal anchored into McMichael's careful sense of history. Hempel's minimalism spliced with James's wonderfully swinging clauses. Bishop saying her own name.

But talking about a middle ground is not the same as arriving there. And merely letting the heart out is not the same as finding a way for it, carving its path from iron and brick or things that stink, that suffer and decay. How to be present for both? How to listen in the old and the new ways?

Poems for Dummies

Why is it that whenever I try to force a poem all I do is write sentences with missing verbs?

Shut Up And Take Your Prozac

I hated Catcher in the Rye when I read it years ago, and alas, it seems like today's young folk agree. This made me so happy this morning that it almost made up for my having been forcefully divorced from my MTV. Kids today really aren't as misguided as they first appear. Check out their smart and sassy dismissals of dear poor Holden Caulfield.

Techo Rant

I spent the morning on the phone with The Grandmother troubleshooting her wireless connection. I spent the afternoon on the phone with Iomega trying to get a replacement drive for the nonfunctioning replacement drive that Iomega sent last week when my portable hard drive died after only about six months of once weekly use. I've now spent a total of three hours on Iomega's phone and chat support and still do not have a working drive and will never buy anything from Iomega again.

Really though, I'm not that bothered by failed hard drives. They fail on me too often to be upset anymore. I'm bothered because my one day off without any family obligations or appointments has been ruined needlessly. I had planned to stay in my pajamas all day, watch movies, sleep, walk the dogs (still in my pajamas but with added flip flops), eat yesterday's leftover chocolate cake, read Mrs. Dalloway (I can't explain that impulse; you usually can't pay me to touch Virginia Woolf), sleep some more...you get the idea. I wanted a day of sloth, pure and simple and without interruption. Instead, I got one of those days that just make you feel anxious and greasy and embarrassingly unproductive. I can smell my own hair, for fuckssake. I'm almost looking forward to going to work tomorrow where at least I can relax while denying nice little writs of mandamus and prohibition.

Double Dare

Yesterday I dared Winter to write a poem without nature or weather. She then dared me to write a poem with nature and weather and with an animal too, undead and undying and uninjured. Preferably a bunny. Here goes nothing:



After The St. Francis Dam


Concrete mostly, fractured spans of
handrails in their new rust,
insistent brown rabbits. Downstream
from the floodwave, now
someone’s house, green lawn, the sun
thick with its own agenda.
More rabbits. Ghosts from here
to the ocean though I know days
aren’t made from holding back and watching
bunnies. To think his hand in hers
means the rest of it, entire weeks
unaware of animals burrowing in weeds or
the sound of stone cracking. Of course
Mulholland blamed himself. All the canyon
a scar, a stain, all heat and bare nerve,
the restlessness that comes with waterless places.

A Draft, For Fuckssake

A quickie only because I'm tired of writing nothing but memos on habeas and prohibition writs. Actually, I think this is exactly the kind of poem I don't like to read, so why the fuck I wrote it this morning is another one of those regrettable and mysterious things that happens when I'm sober and that can only be rectified when I'm not.

[bye bye birdie]

Being Mean

I'm reading Mary Gaitskill's newish collection of shorts. She's mean to her characters in every book she's ever written, and each time I read one, I promise myself never again and later end up with the next anyhow. I don't know why I keep thinking that a new story might be different, that she might find a warmer angle on the broken, lonely characters that parade around her world in various states of misery. There's something humiliating just in reading these stories. You're made to feel bad not only about what the characters do but about what you do everyday. I can't quite rule out the possibility that everyone who really likes Gaitskill's work is a sadist. I think I'm more of a train wreck lookie-loo, unable to look away from the blood and guts and tears of someone else's misfortune. In any case, I think I've got to finish these stories soon or remain unsettled for days.

How To Get Into Trouble With Your New Facebook Username

I wasn't interested in the great Facebook landrush. I didn't want a url with my name for everyone to google. I have my search settings on Facebook pretty tightly guarded to begin with and I like the idea of a somewhat controlled space. But I also liked the idea of renaming my profile address something a little more exciting than a slew of digits. So in homage to the great Kathy Griffin, I tried to rename my profile SuckItJesus. But according to Facebook that username was already unavailable. A quick search, however, produced no Facebook user named SuckItJesus.

A little censorship, perhaps? I started plugging in a few things to get a better sense of what Facebook's up to:

Unavailable:

SuckitJesus
RepublicansSuck
CheneySucks
YourMama
IKilledKennedy
AssFace
FingerLickingGood

Available:
HillaryLicksBalls
ISleptWithYourWife
RepublicansBlow
CheneyBlows
TheJewsMadeMeDoIt
KillYourDarlings
KillObama

It seems that the word suck is a big fat no-no in Facebook land. You can, however, lick or blow there. And you can have balls and Jews and even do a little killing.

But the real temptation of Facebook usernames, in my opinion, is the possibility of grabbing the name of your favorite celeb/artist/hero/crush to either (A) impersonate and then enjoy your own 15 minutes of fame, or (B) sell back to them. People must have rushed to pluck up certain names because as of this morning, most of the big names appear unavailable and even the mid-listers, both dead and alive, are hard to come by. AnneSexton is not available, nor are MargaretCho, ChuckPalahniuk, DanielCraig, LindsayLohan, PedroAlmodovar, MelGibson, and KathyGriffin. You can still get MaryLouiseParker but I have a feeling that whoever her assistant is will soon be out of a job.

And in what may either be my road to ruin or stalker-salvation, I grabbed JennySaville. An embarrassing, juvenile move? Yes, of course. But I can live with that. I'm pretty sure Saville doesn't use Facebook but her agent might want to set up a page for her eventually or at least get pissed off at the idea of someone else trashing her name around. At some point then, someone might have to contact me to get that name back. I would never ask for money, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity for a little leverage. You never know when you might need it. Also, if I ever have a book out and go full throttle on my own shameless quest for publicity, I'd get way more hits on a revamped and public Facebook page from people searching for Jenny Saville than some no-name piddling poet.

The Grandmother Report

Apparently, I can be bought for a half dozen Vicodin and an Ipod Touch.

Toilet Paper Wars

The Grandmother and I have begun a toilet paper war. The bathroom attached to the bedroom I use at the beach house is called the yellow bathroom. It's not really yellow though. A few skinny yellow tiles form a border a couple inches above the baseboards. Everything else is white. The Grandmother makes the yellow bathroom yellow with some yellow hand towels and yellow toilet toilet paper.

Now I don't care what color toilet paper wipes my ass but I do care about the quality. I like the cheap stuff. The ultra thick fancy stuff that could double as a bathtowel in India has a tendency to linger. And so because I'm not interested in taking my toilet paper to go, I replaced the Grandmother's thick and fancy yellow roll with a roll of mere two-ply that I found in the back of a cabinet in another bathroom.

The blue bathroom, actually, where, yep, the toilet paper is blue. But I came home from work today to find that the blue roll had disappeared. In its place was another thick and fancy roll that I don't like. But this roll was white. So the Grandmother seems to have quietly acknowledged my dismissal of the yellow roll, refused to tolerate the mismatched blue roll, and has sought to appease me with a neutral white roll. It's not a bad move on her part. My next move, however, will be to replace the current thick and fancy white roll with a mediocre white roll of questionable origin. Who wants to place a bet on how long it will take her to notice the swap?

Writing By Committee

I've got a strange request for you guys. My court gig is working out better than expected so now I'm going to have to actually produce the volume of work I'm capable of (probably two memos or opinions a day) rather than the volume of work I was letting the staff attorneys believe I'm capable of (one memo or opinion every two days). They seem to like what I'm doing and might help me apply for clerkships and things, so I'm going to stop wading in the kiddie pool with the other externs (who somehow have not produced a single piece of writing in a week and a half of work--if I hear one of them splitting more hairs about a bullshit ineffective assistance of counsel claim I might just shove the whole half paragraph of work they've produced right up their ass). Anyway, since I'm going to put in real effort at the court, I'm going to have to stop using half of my day to read the Times and Vanity Fair and to draft my own writing. Which is rather poor timing since I'm thick in the middle of both a poem and a story.

So here's where you come in. You know that saying about how it takes a village? Well, this story I'm working on might take a village too. I have a couple of pages of character work that I almost like, but the character has to do something/go somewhere/have some sort of problem to propel the story. Much in the way that I'm meter-retarded in poems, I'm plot-retarded in fiction. So if you love me just a little bit or are just bored off your ass, please read the few pages and tell me where you think this kid might go. Thanks!


No one ever remembers anything about Rapunzel except her hair, the length of that loneliness. I’d been on my way to the salon when I thought of her braid hanging from a tower, and fifteen minutes later I was swiveling around to persuade my hairdresser to cut it off. All of it off. She pulled my hair into a low ponytail and took it in one straight cut across the back. When she handed it to me, I had a hard time believing it had come from me. It could have been the brown tail of a donkey, detached and spread out on my lap with all its split ends. I walked out of the salon wearing a pixie cut and holding the ponytail away from me to catch and sway with the breeze.

The hair she cut was long enough that I told everyone I had donated it to a foundation that made wigs for kids with cancer. But I never did. My ponytail stayed in my closet for years, poked above the elastic onto a wire hanger and draped neatly between my jackets and long-sleeved shirts. To anyone who asked, I explained that I had wanted to donate my hair because my brother had been diagnosed with leukemia. Which of course he hadn’t but I liked the way people looked at me when they thought my brother was dying—sideways, dripping with sympathy. Some of them wanted instantly to take care of me, to somehow become the hero in my story.

For a while, I let them. I accepted endless cups of tea even though it was always too hot outside and the tea made me slightly nauseous. I let the women at the nail salon give me a pedicure though I’d only paid for a manicure. The paperboy even started leaving the newspaper on our actual porch instead of in the flower beds.

As my pixie cut grew out though, the paper started showing up in the begonias again. I went back to my hairdresser and asked for a complete shave. She used the electric razor this time, and the buzzing was a beautiful song playing in my mind for days. With my head shaved clean, I told everyone that I had cancer. And then their heads tilted even farther, their sympathy more acute. One woman I met in the grocery store wanted to hold me. Right there, between the grapes and the blueberries. I let her. Who was I to stand in the way of other people’s happiness?

My parents didn’t mention my lack of hair in the same way they hadn’t mentioned my tattoo or bellybutton piercing years earlier. I guessed they hated my shaved head, but they subscribed to some school of parenting that assumed parental complaints encouraged childhood rebellion well into one’s twenties. I probably wouldn’t have acted any differently had they complained, but I knew enough not to ruin a good thing. I kept my mouth shut and so did they and I went on doing what I wanted.

No one found me out until the end of summer, when a neighbor brought over a dozen carnations and told my parents they’d be glad to help out in any way they could during such a difficult time. Carnations. The most generic flower on the planet. When I’m dying for real, I hope someone has the decency to bring me lilies.

My parents were standing in the hallway to meet me that evening when I came home from my shift at the diner. The carnations were on the floor. My father had his hands on his hips before I’d gotten my key out of the lock. My mother teared up a little. But no one asked me why I’d lied. They seemed content enough with their assumption that I was suicidal. They said I had to get help and that they would pay for it.

I knew I wasn’t suicidal but I watched their heads cock to the side as they waited to see if I’d agree to get help, and they were looking at me so carefully then, their entire worlds focused just on me, that I cried a little too and let them hug me for a long time. I wheezed a bit and told them I wanted to live.

The therapist that they sent me to twice a week couldn’t seem to get past the death part though. He asked me about my plans but just shook his head when I said college. “A quick marriage?” I said instead, hoping to get it right.

“Why don’t you tell me,” he said while crossing his legs, “exactly what kinds of death fantasies you’ve been experiencing.”

I figured that bathtubs and knives were too obvious, and besides, knives made me nervous just thinking about them. So I told him I’d been hoarding Tylenol, that I planned to take enough to put me in liver failure. I’d read that in the paper more than once, and there had been a particularly pathetic piece once about a mother who’d accidentally overdosed her kid when he’d had the flu. I hadn’t believed it was an accident. I mean, who reads “take two” on the back of a bottle and then gives the kid forty-four pills? But I didn’t mention that to the therapist. I just said I’d planned to swallow the Tylenol with a fifth of my parents’ scotch for good measure.

Before my next appointment, the scotch in my parents’ liquor cabinet vanished. In fact, all the liquor in the house went missing, and my mother merely said that she was on a diet and didn’t want to be tempted by empty calories. I pointed to the box of supermarket donuts on the kitchen counter, but she only shrugged and told me my hair was growing back nicely. It was just long enough to spike up with a little gel. My mother said it was “very punk, very now,” and I had to laugh. If there was an award for trying too hard, my mother owned it big time.

But I liked the therapist more or less and kept seeing him. He probably asked no more than three or four questions each session and for most of the hour just listened while I talked and talked. Once I’d satisfied him with my Tylenol plans, he let me tell him the most beautiful stories. I told him of the dog I’d had growing up and the way his coat shined after I’d spent all day brushing him. I told him about the play I’d been in as a freshman when I was better than the lead who actually came up to me after our first show to tell me I’d done a great job. And I told him about the apartment by the beach where I would have been living by then had the whole economy not collapsed and left me with fifteen hours a week at the diner instead of the forty-five I’d been pulling right up until the weekend before I’d meant to sign the lease. I’d asked my parents to cosign—just until I could get more hours or find a second job—but they said things like “a penny saved is a penny earned” and “money doesn’t grow on trees” and banished me back to the pink bedroom upstairs with the twin canopy bed I’ve hated since I was seven.

“Money doesn’t grow on trees but I might hang myself from one,” I’d shouted at them. When I’d said that then, it hadn’t mattered. My parents didn’t even pay attention to it. But my therapist said it was a precursor and that I’d been sublimating my feelings ever since. I didn’t see how much of anything was sublimated when you announced it out loud at the top of your lungs, but my therapist was a psychologist, not a psychiatrist, and I didn’t want to make him feel more inadequate than he probably did already. The guy couldn’t even prescribe drugs. He had to say shit like subliminal feelings and precursor, and he had to say them fast, or he wouldn’t have any clients. I wasn’t trying to mess with his business, so I nodded my head and made a long sigh like he did, trying to show my understanding. He gave me a couple of rationalization exercises and looked pretty happy with himself when I left at the end of that session.

I trashed the exercises before I went home to my pink bedroom. My mother had done my laundry and left it on my dresser in neat little piles. She’d arranged the piles by type and size and color, separating dark blue jeans from light ones and from the khakis I wore at the diner. I slid open the door to my closet and then gathered up all the piles with both arms before dropping them in a single heap on the closet floor. It looked like some modern art installation, pretentious and somehow orderly chaotic, a tiny mountain of a mostly folded American dream ready for its collapse. I kicked the pile once and watched a pair of white tee shirts jump and then smother a red tank top.

I would have gotten another job and moved out but practically no one was hiring. The few who were hiring had pools of overqualified applicants. Lawyers who had been laid off were willing to clean pools or tutor sixth graders. Former CEOs would scoop ice cream. A mechanical engineer my father knew was pulling janitorial nightshifts at the outlet mall.

I had a high school diploma, one third of one semester of community college, and six years of food service experience. In a repressed labor market food chain, I didn’t exist. And what I made waitressing only fifteen hours a week barely paid for my gas and a latte. The only other job I could find was babysitting. Though I had to drive into the next county because most of the parents in our neighborhood had heard about the whole fake cancer thing, I could regularly book a babysitting job Thursday through Saturday nights. No matter how bad the economy got, parents would still pay to get a night away from their kids.

But even with babysitting jobs, I was years away from having enough money saved up for my own apartment. I closed my closet, leaving the pile of clean laundry for my mother to find the next time she snooped through my room, and walked over to visit the neighbors who’d given my parents the carnations. I had to ring the bell twice before the husband answered, and he stepped out onto the porch while closing the door behind him. His blue sweatshirt was faded and looked thin and soft, and I wanted to touch it where tiny holes had popped up along the seams at his neck. He reached back and scratched the top of his head without saying anything. I could be quiet for a long time, but I said “nice flowers,” like he was still holding the carnations in his hands.

All About Me

I stole this from Useless Dicta. I'm doing it because A) of course I'm a narcissist and B) I'm stuck on both the story and the poem I've been drafting this week and can no longer drink my way to an ending.


MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Where did you take your Facebook profile picture? Off the internet. It's a Cathy Opie from the portrait series she did in the early 90s.

What exactly are you wearing right now? A men's button down, a wifebeater, jeans, no socks or shoes. Do you really want to know about the bra and underwear I'm wearing? I didn't think so.

What is your current problem? Sobriety, a story that's not revealing its center to me, a poem that I've lost interest in. Oh, and did I mention that I'm turning 30 next month and am going to die poor and alone?

What makes you happy most? Dogs and booze, not necessarily in that order.

What song are you listening to at the moment? Lhasa de Sela: El Payande.

Ever sang in front of a large audience? Nope.

Do you still watch kiddy movies or kiddy TV shows? Nope.

Do you speak any languages? Yes, mostly English. Also Spanish. And a little bit of German, French, Italian, and Portuguese.

Has anyone you’ve been really close with passed away? My dog Cody. And I say that seriously.

What’s something that really annoys you? Oh, lawyers, politicians, our current pharmaceutical laws.

Chapter 1:
===============
1. Middle name: P. Can we please ignore the fact that the P kicks off Pamela?

2. Nicknames: Pooh, Chaparita, Big Ears.

3. Current location: My parents' house. Left coast, god bless.

4. Eye color: Dark brown. Or as Martin says, shit brown.

Chapter 2:
===============
1. Do you live with your parent(s)? Technically, no. But the government thinks I do and that keeps my jury duty in Malibu so don't rat me out.

2. Do you get along with your parent(s)? Yes.

3. Are your parents married/separated/divorced? Married. For too many years.

4. Do you have any Siblings? The Brother.

Chapter 3: Favorites
===============
1. Ice Cream: Baskin Robbins, Gold Medal Ribbon.

2. Season: Summer.

3. Shampoo/conditioner: Whatever's on sale. I'm Jewish.

Chapter 4: Do You..
===============
1. Dance in the shower? Unlikely.

2. Do you write on your hand? Always.

3. Call people back? Less and less.

4. Believe in love? Oh sure. And faith and hope and change and world peace.

6. Any bad habits? You think I'd list them? If I didn't have to go to school or work, my waking hours would begin and end with grain alcohol.


Chapter 5: Have You..
===============
1. Broken a bone: Yes, several.

2. Sprained stuff: Also yes.

3. Had physical therapy: Also yes, and I'm bored with this line of questioning.

4. Gotten stitches: Yes for fuckssake.

5. Taken painkillers: I think we all know the answer to this one.

6. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling: Yes.

7. Been stung by a bee: Yes.

8. Thrown up at the dentist: Yes, and then I got better drugs.

9. Sworn in front of your parents: Really? This is a question?

10. Had detention: No. I am very good at fucking up but even better at hiding it.

Chapter 6: Who/What was the last
===============
1. Movie(s): Defiance. Totally Lame. But I heart Daniel Craig.

2. Person to text you: I don't remember. I don't text. There's other things I'd prefer to do with my thumbs.

3. Person you called: Winter.

4. Person you hugged: My mommy. (Oh shit, this is reading like a Lifetime script and I am not amused.)

5. Person you tackled: Why would I ever do this?

6. Person you talked to on AIM/iChat: Dunno. I've been off chat for the last few months.

7. Thing you touched: Is this a dirty question? If not, I'm thinking a diet coke. If yes, I'm thinking, isn't it obvious?

8. Thing you ate: cold leftover Chinese.

9. Thing you drank: diet Coke.

10. Thing you said: Fuck.

Chapter 7: Future
===============
1. Where do you see yourself in 5 years? I don't want to think about it.

2. Where do you hope to live? LA or Ventura County.

3. Do you want to be famous? Yes, but not for my tits. I'm just in it for the words, you know.

I Want My MTV

I'm too old for MTV. The thought hit me like a couple tons of bricks yesterday. I was watching several episodes of True Life, that confessionalist docudrama where we learn about the real ins and outs of everything from teenage pregnancy to bisexuality to leading a double life. I know it's not good television, but I still can't give up MTV. I grew up with it, staying up late with Tabitha Soren and Kurt Loder and all the other veejays who back then premiered a new Madonna or Prince video with the kind of fanfare reserved for a blockbuster film. The fact that I associate MTV with actual music dates me enough. But I really did myself in yesterday when I yelled back at the TV for some whiny kid who was baring heart and soul to just grow up.

Said yelling happened during an episode about girls with large breasts. They all wanted breast reductions. One wore a 38FF or G and I could see her point. Another had been sexually molested and had real body issues which I could be somewhat sympathetic to. But the thin girl wearing a 34DD who wanted her husband to agree to fork over $15K that they didn't have--I wanted to slap her. My boobs are just about as big as hers and sure, buying dresses is difficult, jogging requires two sports bras (and playing boys water polo requires three bathing suits), and walking braless downstairs in the morning might involve holding your boobs up or a considerable amount of pain. But boobs are fun too—I don't think this is point I need to explain to most of you. Both she and the husband should just enjoy her free tits and move on with their lives. Somewhere a flat-chested woman is crying just to have recognizable aureolas. I had to turn the bitch off and go to Youtube to watch an actual music video. This generation is totally fubar.