Spreken Ze Shut Your Pie Hole?

So I'm at the gym today, in the zone, focused, sweaty and tired. I'm on the last 15 minutes of 50 minute workout on the elliptical machine when a 6 ft Amazon of a German chick gets on the machine next to mine and proceeds to call every person she knows and converse (shout) in German with them (on speaker phone, of course). I could hear her through my headphones. Suddenly my workout playlist sounded more like the B-side of a Kraftwerk album. Eesh. Not good. About halfway through I wanted to grab her iPhone from her hand and fling it across the gym.

Seriously??? And while we are on the subject, what's with the speakerphone phenomenon? I used to think it was annoying just having to listen to one side of an asinine conversation but, as it turns out, hearing both sides is twice as annoying and doubly stupid (especially if said conversation is in German and just sounds like a bunch of phlegmy yelling).

My point is, just stop. Trust me when I say you aren't interesting enough to broadcast your entire conversation to everyone standing within earshot. Nobody wants to hear it, probably not even the person you are talking to. And as for you, Gretel,
next time put a lederhosen in it.

No Rest for the Insipid

I believe that there are certain women put on this earth whose sole purpose is to remind me of all the things that I will never be. I will never be the girl who finishes a workout routine and looks fresh faced and sweat free. I will never be referred to as "the hot one." I will never wear five hundred dollar shoes with a backless Prada cocktail dress and I most certainly will never shine with that sodium vapor glow that causes men to crane their necks and honk their horns.

Most of the time these women exist outside my world. They live on billboards and between magazine pages. Occasionally they sit next to me at airports or stand behind me in line at the grocery store. During these brief encounters, when I am forced to suffer the discomfort of sharing space with these ethereal creatures, I console myself with the thought that soon they will be back behind glass, delicately pinned to pink velvet where the rest of the world can admire them. Every once in a while though, like this morning, instead of flitting back to their pastel world of lip gloss, shimmer powder and over sized sunglasses, they decide to hover.

So there I was, yoga pants and t-shirt, slightly sweaty and huffing from my morning jaunt, standing in line at Starbucks, eying an old fashioned chocolate donut, and there she was, standing behind me, smelling like peonies and grapefruit and dressed in that chic effortless way that you know really took hours to put together. She had all her pretty girl gear; bronze Makowsky purse, Gucci sunglasses, iPhone with a cotton candy pink silicone cover and the keys to a ridiculously expensive SUV.

After ordering her double shot, non-fat vanilla whatever, she proceeded to sit next to me in the only other open chair. Thank you, Universe. I pulled out my book and ATTEMPTED to read while she prattled on to the poor soul on the other end of the call about her busy week and all the things she had to do and how she had no time for sleep and whatever other OMG-worthy things that had happened to her over the past 72 hours. After 2 and a half minutes of, "and I was all... and she was all..." and "like, are you kidding me, she's my BFF," I had to call it quits before I slit my writsts with a cardboard coffee sleeve.

My point is, maybe I will never be any of those aforementioned things and maybe those kinds of women will always intimidate me on some level, but I will also never be vapid or ridiculous. So...there's that.

If Only Anvils Really Did Fall Out of the Sky

I'd like the world to institute a standardized test covering all the aspects of human interaction and common courtesy. If you take the test and fail, you have to enroll in a class that teaches these things to you. For example: It is NEVER OK to get up at 6:45 on a Saturday morning, put on wooden clogs and start performing numbers from Riverdance, especially when the odds are that your insomniac downstairs neighbor is trying to sleep. Now if after having taken this class you fail the test a second time, you are an idiot and an ACME anvil will deploy from the sky and land on your head repeatedly until it knocks the stupid out of you. Then and only then will you be permitted back into society.

Seriously? 6:45 in the morning? It never occurred to my imbecile whore of an upstairs neighbor that I MIGHT be asleep? We have wooden floors! There is no carpeted cushion of silence between her floor and my ceiling. It's bad enough that she click-clacks around all day and night like a Clydesdale in her hooker heels but now she's taken to folk dancing in them at the ass-crack of dawn. WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE?

The worst part of all this is that there's nothing that CAN be done about it. We aren't getting better. We are spiraling downwards, circling the drain. And I'm only talking about little, insignificant daily annoyances. Don't even get me started on the evil things we do to each other in the name of war, religion and general depravity. That is another rant for another day. Right now I have a strongly worded note to write and post on Clompy's door. I just hope that she can read. I'll keep it simple. There are plenty of monosyllabic words I'm sure I can come up with to express my feelings on the matter.

Nest Not Lest Ye Be Nested.

I think I'm suffering from some sort of weird psychological condition that is preventing me from furnishing my new apartment with anything more than a bed, computer desk and television stand. I desperately need bookshelves to house the multitude of books that I insisted on carting across three states and yet every time I go to make the purchase, I just can't. Either I don't like the size, the depth of the shelf space or the color or the finish, or any number of other ridiculous things that really have no actual bearing on the functionality of the unit whatsoever. It's the same when trying to pick out a nightstand or a chair or even mixing bowls. All I can think is, do I really want to accumulate all this stuff again? Part of the allure of moving here was getting rid of pretty much everything I owned and starting over. I have never been a minimalist. I enjoy buying things as much as the next American, but suddenly the thought of anchoring myself to a place with all the burdens of things that don't fit neatly inside 10 or 12 boxes scares the consumerism right out of me.

It sounds ridiculous, I know. I just can't seem to allow myself to connect to this place. I keep thinking about how easy it would be to just get up and leave if I don't acquire anything and then I wonder what the hell I'm doing worrying about leaving when I haven't even been here a full year. So why does the fact that I have so little feel so comforting? I've always been quick to get rid of things because I'm not very sentimental and I HATE clutter, but this is something else. Maybe I have Obsessive Compulsive Spartanism. Maybe I just need a good interior decorator.

There's No Place Like . . .?

I have recently discovered that location, location, location, may not necessarily play that big a role in a person's happiness. Maybe it's just the hard-wired capitalist in me (though believe me when I say I straddle the line between Capitalism and Socialism, well hover over it actually, more than anything else) but I beleive it's money that truly changes a half empty glass into a half full one.

If I'd had money there, I probably wouldn't have left. If I had money here, I'd probably feel like the move was justified. Money lets you live in nice places and see amazing things and do everything wonderful that you've been dreaming of doing for as long as you can remember. Without it, you're still the same hot, sweaty girl in the middle of the desert pining for the day that you will be surrounded by beauty and color and all those marvellous bits of life that you've missed out on.

And oh yeah, there's other stuff too, that you don't count on when you upheave your whole life and strike out for the unknown. Shit follows you.

I packed up everything that meant anything (6 boxes of books, 4 boxes of clothes, 2 boxes of kitchenware, 3 boxes of cds and dvds and 3 boxes of random miscellaneous crap)and ventured (narrowly survived a two day road trip with my brother at the wheel)across three states to get here, only to find that even though I made sure NOT to pack them (in fact I'm pretty sure I left them sitting beside the dumpster next to my computer desk), fear, anxiety and general self-loathing picked up my scent and followed me here. I think they may have actually been waiting here before I even arrived. I'm fairly certain I saw them hanging around the giant T-Rex at the Burger King in Palm Springs.

As it turns out, moving is just geography. It seems like a fresh start, but really it's just all the same ghosts haunting you and the same hurts still stinging, even if there is a brand new, lovely waterfont view to look upon and a cool breeze blowing.

Broken

When you are in a relationship with someone, even if the nature of that relationship is undefined, complicated, nebulous, or any other of dozen things, you expect a certain level of respect, especially if you are sleeping with said person. You expect when he makes a promise, he will live up to that promise, that you mean more to him than the fear he so desperately clings to, which keeps pulling him under the riptide, suffocating him and eventually you. It's funny how quickly hate surfaces.

People will never tell you the truth and they will never keep their promises because it's too hard. It's too messy to meet emotions head on and deal with them. No, better to deaden yourself inside, make yourself numb. But you don't know that going in. You think that the things that are said are real, that they mean something, that your presence is appreciated, important, and that dirtiest of dirty words, wanted. It isn't until you've wasted so much of yourself that you discover you never mattered and you never will. It's one thing to be thrown away once, but when it happens time after time, relationship after relationship, what's left? How do you come back from all those little deaths? How many more tiny fractures can you take before you shatter?

I say build your walls and build them high. There are only a handful of people in the world worth knowing anyway.

Thirty-Effing-Five

The contents of my fridge are as follows: a gallon of water, a pitcher of iced-tead, ketchup, soy sauce, leftover pasta, an orange, three strawberry yogurts and bottle of Italian dressing. The contents of my wallet: four maxed out credit cards, driver's license, sixty-two cents in nickles and pennies and a movie stub from Hot Tub Time Machine (don't judge it was free).

And so it is. Apparantly my life is where dreams come to die. A friend recently (twenty minutes ago)told me that whenever he talks to me, bad things happen. Happy Birthday to me. Because another candle on this cake is exactly what I need to mark yet another uneventful year.

I'm lookin for a hallelujah!