darkly comic

6.25.2008

yup

That about sums it up.

5.30.2008

hiatus

It's weird, three of my long-term commitments are over: thesis, work for classes and, tonight, Intermission. All the day-to-days that kept me rush rush rushing are over. I have time to relax. And relaxation gives me time to think ... how much I'm going to miss the rush, I guess.

On the bright side, I got called back for a final-round interview at my dream job. It's for an artsy non-profit in Los Altos; really small company, so it's a chance to learn a million invaluable skills. I felt a sense of destiny when I read the job listing, and loved the vibe I got from the interview, so if I get offered the job I will a million times say yes. Aubrey McFate.

I know it's nonsense, but I feel like half of the good life mottoes I've heard are from pioneer books. If you don't have half your day's work done by noon, you'll never finish it. Idle hands are the devil's playground. ...don't let crows get into the corn?

The point is, I'm always antsy without a big project. I want a job that's not measured in hours you spend at a desk, but in concrete tasks you accomplish. Just the thought of relaxing over the summer is making me nervous.

5.22.2008

near-death (seriously)

I don't know what century my body thinks it is, but I have a collapsed lung. A COLLAPSED LUNG!

Technically it's called a "spontaneous pneumothorax," ie: a hole in my lung. Pretty fucking cool, right? The doctors decided (after thirteen hours) that I'm not goign to drop dead in any lawsuit-threatening timeframe, so they let me go, but the hole is still there. My lung is, even as we speak, collapsed. I feel like a badass.

(Of course I was not nearly this cavalier at 7:30 this morning when I was jolted out of much-needed sleep by a sharp throbbing pain around my heart, and spent the next forty minutes convinced I was having a heart attack and would die on the way to the hospital. That, I was surprisingly uncavalier about. The weird thing, though, is at the very peak of the pain, when I was convinced that it was my heart and that J would have to awkwardly maneuver my corpse out of his car and call my parents, I wasn't upset. I was knee-jerk scared of dying, but a little part of me was like, "You've had a good run, and at least it's over; you did well enough." This is strangely comforting, but also makes me feel immensely guilty that I'm not doing more with my life, and the part of me that was afraid to die is trying to make me forget that I had the thought at all...)

But still. I'm a badass. COLLAPSED LUNG!

5.19.2008

my dramz

I have drama. Listy time!

1. I seem to have sprained the outer muscles in my right eyelid. This is hugely uncomfortable and makes me want to cry a little, but I cannot, because blinking is sheer torture. Seriously, how does one even sprain one's eyelid?

2. The Gossip Girl finale was awesome until Josh Schwartz capped the episode with a series of dubious romantic pairings. WORST EPILOGUE SINCE CRIME AND PUNISHMENT!

3. Yesterday I saw a commercial for women's razors, the tagline of which was: "So smooth you can skip a day or two." Thanks for giving me permission to take a day off, Schick. Thanks for telling me it's okay to take a little time off of running a series of razorblades across my skin in the pursuit of becoming a socially acceptable female creature. Thanks for letting me know the upper-bound on not doing so is two days before I turn into a monster.

4. Today I bought the brand of razor from the commercial. I am a fucking hypocrite. (While I am still committed to deciding why, where and how often I shave, apparently I have no control over what I do it with. But I'm a sucker for razors with in excess of three blades. Probably penis envy, eh, Schick?)

5. I ever so lightly crunched into another car in the parking lot. As far as I can tell I only scraped some of my paint onto their car, but a Hummer full of fratty types saw me do it and were rubbernecking, but screeched out of the lot before I left a note on the other car. I swear I left a note. I want them to know that I am a decent person. This is a petty desire.

6. J has an ear infection and I feel obscurely to blame, even though he told me it wasn't my fault (after his initial misgivings.)

7. I've been having the murderer-in-the-backseat feeling increasingly often while driving. Today between my place and J's (eight minutes) I had to pull over the car twice to check, and stayed on the phone with V the whole time. Either there is actually a car-fetish murderer out to get me, or else I am losing my mind at the age of 21.

8. I don't know which would be worse.

[Edit: Oh my fucking god. I am not crazy. So tonight after checking my car twice, I got to J's house okay and went in, and was home alone. Then about ten minutes ago I realized I had forgotten my cell phone in my car, so I start walking toward it (it was about a block and a half away from the house) and as I'm across the street from it, I notice a weird guy hanging out about twenty feet away. But I figure I'm just being crazy because, you know, car-murderer psychosis. Then as I step off of the street, two police officers jump out from behind the side of my car (MY CAR!) that I couldn't see and pull out guns and aim them at the guy and start screaming "GET ON THE GROUND, GET ON THE GROUND AND DROP YOUR WEAPON, PUT YOUR HANDS DOWN!" I am fifteen fucking feet away. The guy drops to his knees and I don't know what to do, so I start slowly walking away from my car, but he doesn't have his hands in the air and I'm guessing he has a gun, but then he gets facedown on the ground and I basically run back to the house where I am now terrifying out of my motherfucking mind.]

5.16.2008

rebroadcast

Update: I JUST FINISHED MY MOTHERFUCKING THESIS!

And it's incredible. Nothing to ruin my weekends, nothing to stress me out, nothing to make me feel guilty. I kind of feel like I just converted from Judaism.

(I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Once you're born Jewish you can't un-Jew.)

5.15.2008

emergency broadcast

Holy Gore supporter, Batman, temperatures are in the mid-90s today. In the Bay Area. In fucking May. An emergency Kat broadcast declares it too hot to:

wear jeans
drink anything that doesn't involve lime juice
breathe in rooms with more than ten occupants
snuggle
engage in any activity more calorie-burning than Wii Tennis
seriously, this includes sex
eat Italian food
sit in the car with the engine running to hear the end of that juicy call on LoveLine
work on one's motherfucking thesis

However, it is not too hot to:

inflict physical violence on anyone who asks, "Hot enough for ya?"
complain about one's motherfucking thesis

Also, in case it is too hot for you to catch my subtlety, may I just mention:

ARGH MOTHERFUCKING THESIS

Done by midnight, after which point I will resume my life of reading trashy YA novels and heavy drinking. Wearing a skirt though. 'cause damn. Way too hot for jeans.

5.14.2008

begging

Please let the thesis be over. Please. I am so tired.

[Edit: I'm making a deal with myself: if I finish my thesis in the next two hours, then ... I won't have to work on it any more. Because it will be finished. Also, I'll buy myself something I want. Although this is kind of an empty promise because I buy myself presents all the friggin' time.

MAKE IT END.]

5.12.2008

dramz

All week, when eating, I've gotten bored with my food before I've gotten full. I'll wait until two to have my first meal of the day, then halfway through a really quite excellent sandwich, I lose interest. These are not at times when I'm really too full to continue eating (although this has been known to happen, as I eat like bear) -- I'm just losing my motivation mid-meal. Most disheartening.

This has been the big drama of my life.

Well, that and the fact that the sprawling, life-sucking thesis is finally -- finally! -- almost done. Friday I will be freed from its shackles. It's going to be a long week.

4.27.2008

thoughts

Whenever V and I smoke hookah, I always try to make her laugh so she'll use up one of her puffs. This is childish and perhaps inconsiderate (hookah smoke, it burns when you cough it!) but it's one of those things that always happens unintentionally and becomes funny after a few iterations. We always hit a point where I start making a conscious effort not to make her laugh while she inhales, and the fake solemnity breaks us both down into uncontrollable laughter while the coals burn on.

I'm really going to miss her, is what I'm saying.

We threw a little party this weekend -- nothing big, just keeping ourselves in training until the next real event -- and it was a wonderful time. For once we actually bought the perfect amount of food for our guests, and soaked through seven bottles of bubbly for around ten people, plus pitchers of The Spin and mint-cilantro citrus cooler. Life is good.

4.16.2008

lady

It's funny how when you start writing, the story you think you want to get at is almost never the story that you end up needing to tell.

I banged out something for workshop this morning. I thought it was going to be about the moment that grief turns into justifiable anger, but it ended up being about how sometimes the people who lie to you the most are the ones that you need to have blind faith in. In News of the Completely Obvious, this is exactly the thing that I needed to be thinking about in my own life.

In this workshop class, we're reading a rather beastly book on writing, by the director of some CW program or other, and it's filled with these pedantically over-written six-page odes to suspense and brevity and plot v. story and god only know what other drivel. The more I think about it, the more I realize that I've only heard four good pieces of writing advice in my entire life:

1) For stories in the past tense, use the past perfect to indicate a flashback.
2) As a general rule of thumb, don't put significant backstory any later than 75% through the story.
3) Write, then research. Then research research research.
4) The story's the thing in front of you.

The first three are nuts comma bolts, which is the most useful thing to any reasonably intuitive writer. The last one, though, took me a while to understand and is damned reassuring. I guess it's another way of saying Flannery O'Connor's "if you're not surprised, how can the reader be surprised?" Trying to write a story when you know where's it's going to start and where it's going to go is bleak, bleak, bleak. In the workshop slushpiles, I think you can always tell when people have written without any room for surprise. I usually start with one good sentence or a few character quirks and just go from there, and am always amazed by where my mind takes me. It's a wonderful feeling.

One of the most recent stories I've written was, in its first draft, a laughably bad letter from a drug dealer to a priest, describing the death of one of his client's children (I was pretty elbow-deep in Dostoevsky). As I thought about the character, I tried to figure out where he developed his attitude toward children, and came up with an old relationship with a girl who'd eventually had an abortion. Of course -- of course! -- that old relationship was the whole story, minus the abortion that had been its inspiration in the first place. My first draft got scrapped altogether in favor of expanding a relationship that had only been the subtext of half a clause buried in a middle paragraph in the original.

That's not very interesting to anyone but me, I guess, but isn't it nice to think that the story is everywhere?

4.14.2008

afterword

In case you were wondering, the dinner party turned out to be cool and not lame. Whew. Also, it's amazing how much more time-intensive an intimate dinner party for eight is than a cocktail party for forty. I still haven't fully recovered. Amazingly, though, we managed to hand wash twenty-four glasses and sixteen plates -- twice! -- without breaking a single one. Though this may not sound amazing to the casual observer, let me put it this way: even though we drink low-end champagne (sparkling wine, sparkling wine), it's an expensive habit because every time we crack a bottle I have to buy two new champagne flutes. I'm frankly astounded about the limited crockery carnage.

Also: just discovered the joy of Champagne Cocktails. (Are cocktail names capitalized?) I love champagne. I love sugar. I love bitters. Who knew the combination would be so wonderful?!

Also also: I'm reading about binary opposition in folktales, and this dude is arguing that binary opposition is a common feature of all oral folk genres and not just narratives, and to prove this he offers a series of Jewish curses based on binaries. My favorite: "May you suffer lockjaw and seasickness at the same time." Genius!

4.06.2008

wonders

Will wonders never cease? I bought the face vibrator and my skin is positively glowing. I guess there's something about a body that just likes vibration.

V and I are throwing a murder mystery dinner party tonight. In case you were wondering why our lovely weather in NorCal suddenly took a turn for the drizzly, I'll go ahead and extend my apologies now. The universe always knows when we intend on entertaining on the patio.

We spent about a week designing place cards, centerpieces, napkin rings, etc, etc, for the party. I spent so much time on wedding websites that I think J was starting to get nervous. God do I pray this is cool and not lame. It's always such a fine line.

3.28.2008

brief flash

I'm at the airport, waiting for a ridiculously late flight and eavesdropping on a phone call. This cute little Latina girl, wearing tight white cropped pants, is on the phone with a female friend. First the boring preliminaries -- she thought she missed the flight, she left her phone charger in the room...

Then she tells her friend she's pregnant. She doesn't seem to believe in abortion; she's going to raise the baby on her own; apparently her boyfriend is going to Iraq in two weeks. I can't tell whether she told him or not.

Ha, and here I was reading Gregory Corso and feeling sorry for myself about some silly failure of my youth. Perspective.

[Edit: Oh, now, not five minutes later, she's laughing and joking about something else. Jesus. I stumble across an old, emotionally charged song on iTunes and I'm all trembling lips and watery sighs for an entire weekend. She's eating a corned beef sandwich and quoting South Park. ...perspective? I guess?]

3.27.2008

another sign

Keeping you up on Apocalypse Watch: Neutrogena is now selling vibrators.

Okay, so they claim it's a vibrating facial cleanser, but examine the facts:

Fact the first: Curvy ergonomic shape. Easy to hold, perhaps for extended periods of time, and pleasing to the eye.

Fact the second: Fun feminine colors make it fashionable and discreet.

Fact the third: Water resistant so you can keep it in your shower.

Fact the fourth: Thumb-controlled power button.

Fact the fifth: ...I mean, come on, people, look at the damn thing.

Check out these two pictures. One is the Neutrogena Wave and the other is the Laya, top-selling vibrator at Good Vibrations in San Francisco (although honestly I haven't heard any good reviews of it.)

Come now. If these products aren't twins, they're at least cousins. The handle on that facial cleanser is clearly designed for clitoral stimulation.

Not that I'm opposed to this. On the contrary, I think the next generation should come with a variable-speed dial and a few attachments, save girls a stumble or two on that long, awkward trek through puberty. But let's be honest with each other, Neutrogena. Trying to trick people into buying your sex toys? Tacky, tacky.

my life is a million times better than it is true