Wednesday Morning

10:07 AM : English class, unfocused. The Professor just said "aesthetically gay" for the 73rd time this semester.

9:57 AM : Walking to class. Heart racing and not from my briskness. Call my sister Valerie, the Harry Potter freak, to tell her about my basilisk situation. Straight to voicemail.

9:55 AM : Park. Black 5. Decide to bring my book to class though unweildy and likely unnecessary. Disembark. Lock car.

Realize he is in the walls.

Picture my room. Picture the open cabinet. The one on the floor. The one that houses the water heater. The one that leads into the pipes.

9:39 AM : Leave for school. M&M's forbreakfast. Key got stuck so I didn't lock the door. That's not like me. My mind is elsewhere.

9:24 AM : Struggle to pull myself together. Emotionally, physically, and otherwise.

9:21 AM : Oh my god. He's not in his tank. Check the lid. It's loose. He's finally done it. Oh my god. He's loose in my room. Scan wildly. Many times.

9:11 AM : Decide to get up. Remember I have to leave at 9:30, not wake up at 9:30. Unset remaining alarms. Rise gracelessly.

9:10 AM : Reset alarm for 9:17

9:05 AM : Backup alarm sounds. Dismissed.

9:00 AM : Alarm #2 sounds. Dismissed.

8:55 AM : Alarm clock sounds. I tap to ignore.

1:52 AM : I cant' sleep. This is weird. This never happens. My Chopin playlist is on it's second run already.

12:41 AM : Something's wrong. I hear noises. Something sounds like movement and yet the room is still. The sound comes from above and behind me. In the walls. In the ceiling. I am at unease. Try to forget. Restart the playlist. I leave my light on. Turn over. Try not to think. Figure it's probably just the snake.

...

10:33 AM : Still in english class. For many more minutes. 42 of them, in fact. Kenne has her head down; she suffers from migraine headaches. Professor Mufasa is still talking, fervently, without interruption, "I was experimenting with my life you know my dad kicked me out said if I were to live with him I had to live by his rules I said GoodBYE. Who am I? I am nobody. Nobody and something...."

I've become strangely relaxed with my bedchamber of secrets, the only animal I've ever truly loved lost within the walls or plumbing...It is too poetic to not work out...dismally. Why, in Harry Potter, the basilisk hangs out in the walls and pipes for a tick and all that happens to him is he gets his eyes clawed out and stabbed in the throathead.

Thoughts at the Car Wash

I sit down with my Naked juice and my pen. An attendant offers me a Lexus. I accept. He retracts his offer upon discovery that the Lexus is indeed not mine.

The sun is hot but the air is cold. Cloud coverage causes a chill and forebodes rain. I've picked a good day to splurge on the triple foam and exterior shine.

There's a Starburst on this table. Unwrapped, alone, and yellow. If it were pink I'd probably eat it.

I sense the mexican towel twirlers and talking about me. They smile to each other and nod in my direction. I stare at them.

It's cold now. The storm above the mountains has traveled overhead. An old man converses with a guy wearing flip flops. His name is Jerry. I know this because his car is ready. It's a BMW. Maybe I should've worn flip flops.

I picked the green Naked juice today. It has broccoli in it. A woman vacates a yellow Xterra wearing a white tank top. I am cold. She will regret her choice of wardrobe.

The same attendant offers me a new car. I cannot understand him. Recalling my previous fruitless interchange, I decline his offer. The metro police department is across the street, anyway. I wouldn't make it far in a stolen conveyance. Not here.

The Starburst taunts me.

Tank top girl recovers a sweater from her car. I was correct. Flip flop guy has since vanished and I am left in solitude at my table, save for my unedible candy companion.

It is cold. And the clouds are now endless. My car has yet to emerge from the wash. Or maybe it's that one in front. I can't get a good look. The uncertainty leaves me at unease.

Adam's car is ready. Adam drives a Nissan. Adam looks confused. With Adam's departure I've located my car. It was the one in front. This is good news, because it's cold.

Something smells good. It is not the Starburst.

My car is done. They call my name. The many melodic syllables sound misplaced in their mouths. I juggle my notebook, and pen, and green juice. Goodbye, Starburst.

I get in my car and remember to take it out of gear before I let off the clutch. I forgot to last time, and I publicly stalled out. It was embarrassing. I celebrate my brilliance this time, silently. I tip the man, and drive away.

Directly into the rain.

Unhealthy Procrastination

Disclaimer. This is gross, personal, and more graphic than you’d like.

Some people can’t help but push things to the limit. Lance Armstrong did it when he won his bicycle race thing and sold all those bracelets. Michael Phelps pushed it to the limit when he won all those gold medals AND he was stoned. And as I recall the Wildcat Basketball team had a whole musical number about doing just that in that one High School Disney movie.

And then we have people like Steve-O, who take things dangerously close. Physically painfully (and unnecessarily) so.

My attempts to do this in the inspiring athlete way have since landed me in the Jackass category.

When it comes to physical injury, putting it off in no way classifies one as a bad ass.

But I do it anyway.

I pushed right on through and ignored shattered and dislocated ribs, fractured feet and ankles, torn menisci, kidney failure, car wrecks, cuts that needed stitches, and most recently, and perhaps most revoltingly, toenails that reached a whole new level.

Close friends (the few and the proud – only the closest had the dishonor and privilege of seeing these things) relentlessly made fun of me for how disgusting they were, begged me to seek help.

The problems started a little over a year ago when I started working retail – a short-lived career path. They made me wear footwear; a garment I’d not been required to wear in any lifeguarding capacity. So I donned my little flats, or my little boots, or whatever, and I hated them more deeply than just as unsightly. They were murder on my feet, and before long the nails had a thick yellow quality. They’d been stepped on, abused, and before long I had blood pooling beneath them.

I care not.

One day which I do not remember one of the big nails just fell off, and I was left a 9-toenailed freak. My solution to this problem was to just paint the skin, no one will notice I reasoned. A new, deformed toenail had begun growth in it's stead; from death comes life.

I’d been growing this thick, repulsive nub of a toenail for almost a full year; caked-on nail polish was my self-prescribed solution to the problem of it’s apparently mangled 23^rd chromosome. Granted it was disgusting, but at least I was beginning to move back up the ranks to 10-toenailed person.

And then, tragedy struck.

I could feel the magic would not last. Out of nowhere in particular (no event I can pinpoint) it started bleeding. Not a happy toenail. I could feel it commencing to separate from it’s fleshy counterpart. The pain became so intense that I could not even sleep that night. Around the chilly, dew-kissed hour of four in the goddamn morning I decided it was time: action had to be taken. I’d had a full, relatively painless year to take action; but I thought it’d be fun to wait til right now. When it came to this.

A few, calm hours of pain-killer induced sleep welcomed horror upon their end. Doctor time.

One look at that thing and he informed me, without hesitation, of the imperative amputation or removal or whatever.

It was like a scene from Hostel.

I’m sitting on the little table with my feet straight out in front of me and he puts on his latex gloves. He takes what strikes me as an obscenely large needle and starts stabbing it in my toe with reckless abandon. Striking nerves and inducing more pain than he was relieving.

He vanishes for a moment and returns with his tray of utensils, torture instruments, pain implementers. Sharp, shiny metal scissors, gauze, tape, miniature steel ice picks, a surgical, curved wedge.

Before my very eyes he takes his ice pick and starts shoving it vigorously underneath the top of my nail. That doesn’t quite do the trick. He takes his menacing curved talon and starts DIGGING MY NAIL OUT FROM THE CUTICLE.

It’s separating, and bleeding, and clinging to it’s bed by thick, white tendrils that look a lot like I imagine tendons do, which he severs vehemently with his shears. Blood spurts from the openings and drips down the naked toe. What once housed a symmetrical, feminine (ha), painted nail was now a war zone. An open sore, bleeding and distorted, remnants of nail, flesh, and otherwise served as but memories of the casualties. What remains? A bloody, naked, nail-less, sad sad little stump.

Let this be a lesson to you. Don’t procrastinate.

The Donkey Encounter

Who doesn’t love a good family outing?

I sure didn’t. Family time during my adolescence usually involved a lot of educational speeches, intense physical exertion or even labor, and more than likely ended with someone in tears.

One time on a family vacation my father decided a good way to pass the 4 hour car ride was to put me on trial for not putting chlorine in the pool when I said I would or something to that effect. My mother was the judge, my dad the prosecution, I represented myself as the defendant, and my sisters served as the (incredibly biased – sibling rivalry can be an ugly thing) jury of my peers. The trial ended with me convulsing in sobs of self-pity, trapped in the confines of a moving vehicle with the very people who openly attacked me. (My dad later cheered me up by letting me pick a dead and dismembered pigeon out of the car grill with a stick.)

Or the time on yet another long car ride my ever-playful father invented a game where each person was to act like another family member; which quickly snowballed into a game called “capitalize on everyone’s deepest character flaws and exploit them mercilessly.”

Those were the best times of my life.

These, my fondest memories.

It was an occasion like this – seemingly fun but unbearable at the time – that this drama unfolds.

We were no strangers to Red Rock. My dad is a bit of a celebrity in the climbing world and often times the family would rise bright and early to embark on a hike of his choosing. We would attempt to start the trek with optimism; my little sister Emily charging ahead while bragging about how fast she was, how easy the hike was. My mother strode along, soaking up the nature, pointing out wildlife – “Ooh girls, Larry, look! Is that a roadrunner?!” “No, that’s a tumbleweed.”

Fast forward 3 miles.

Emily’s now riding atop my fathers shoulders, blaming her fatigue on the terrain and not her high-heeled sparkly sketchers. Valerie and I are trudging bitterly, complaining to each other in hushed tones, sometimes singing marching songs to keep us going. Mom is in the back, clutching my dad’s hand screeching “Larry! Larry!” as she struggled to conquer the rocky decline with her sub-par depth perception.

A beautiful family portrait.

By the time we reach the car we’re all in silence. Nothing left to say to each other, driving down the winding one-way road, my sisters and I yearning for the comfort of home. The sooner the better.

This is not a good time for traffic to come to a halt, so of course it does. A long line of cars and nowhere to go.

Please don’t suggest playing courtroom, please don’t suggest playing courtroom I silently pled.

We round a curve at a pace that causes me to notice a desert tortoise passing us. The perpetrator of the hold up is in my sights. A donkey in the road, and an unending line of Asian tourists stopping to take photos of the desert native. A novelty to them, an atrocity to me. We approach the ass, inch by inch, one car at a time, until we’re almost home free.

The donkey is clearly enjoying his celebrity status. He’s not moving from the middle of the road, he’s within arms reach even.

Did this stop us? It did not. My dad accelerates toward the beckoning horizon, showing little concern about the large animal obstructing our path to it.

Crash. Bang. The donkeys head hits right on the passenger side of the windshield.

Screams from my mother. Wails from my little sister. Explosive laughter from me in the backseat. Many, many Asian middle fingers seeing us off. My father, wordless, smirking. One half second totally justifying the hike which had so drained me.

Sometimes, you have to go through hell to have a little excitement.

The Worst Day of My Life

I remember it vividly. I was probably three or four years old and I was at swim lessons.

I took the classes with the love of my life; Matt Something. I liked his little golden bowl cut and his 5 year old masculinity.

Swim lessons, however, I hated with a passion. I was the youngest, and the slowest, and the most afraid. I didn’t like the water, I didn’t like the way the water felt in my ears, I didn’t like competing because I didn’t like losing, which I managed to do every time without fail. The only thing I was good at was being the last one to retrieve a starburst from the depths.

The worst part was I was in the same class as my sister, and she was fearless. She dove beneath the surface with reckless abandon, awkward and gangly limbs flailing, beating all the boys to the other side.

I hated her, too. She made me look slow in front of Matt.

My only salvation was the popsicle we were sometimes gifted at the end of class, which I savored on the deck, recovering from the trauma I just endured. A consolation popsicle.

So this one day Valerie is effortlessly experiencing a particularly excellent class, whilst I struggle to maintain respiratory obligations at the very least. I’m left behind in every game, every race, every dive through the stupid yellow hula hoop. I come up empty handed in the starburst event, despite everyone else’s abundant spoils.

I am not happy.

The class mercifully ended and I was standing on the deck wrapped up in my towel.

I decide I’m going to tell Matt I like him. That will make me feel better after this demoralizing lesson. I’ll just tell him I like him and he’ll tell me he loves me too and he wants to marry me. That’ll work.

I scope him out sitting on the grass with a few of the other, less attractive little boys.

“Matt, I like you," I managed to choke out. Very poetic.

“Oh. I like Valerie”

I don’t know if the sound I heard was my heart shattering or my blood pressure reaching a hundred million. I turned as diplomatically as I could and ran somewhere to pop a squat and cry.

The adults must’ve sensed my agony because I was then told I would be receiving a popsicle.

There is a god.

Wrong again.

When presented with said popsicle I was horrified to realize the one with which I had been bestowed was grape flavored.

Nasty, purple, reject grape. The slow sister of popsicles. In my depression over this discovery I hung my head in sorrow and despair. It was at this point that I noticed a stinging sensation on my knee. I opened my eyeball to see HALF OF AN ANT STICKING OUT OF MY KNEE.

It was only half of an ant because the other half was INSIDE MY KNEE SUCKING OUT MY BLOOD.

Terrified, I brushed my knee with my hand in attempt to dislodge my attacker. Instead, I succeeded only in breaking the ant in half, leaving the other half inside my knee where I’m sure it still remains.

I sat on the floor somewhere and cried while my sister flirted with my one true love. I vowed I would never forget this day as it was the worst day of my young life. And the worst day it remained.

i should hire someone to think of titles.

Everyones favorite week of the year is here, and while all the cool kids are off getting drunk on the beach, I'm kickin it in Virginia with my sister Val and her husband Jake.

I try not to make anything on here too personal because I'm not kim kardashian and nobody cares about my life. Even though I've probably accomplished more than she has. My sisters idiot dog who can't even urinate outside has accomplished more than she has.

I digress. The point is that being somewhere new, and being forced to partake in things Val enjoys (I shouldn't say forced; whatever makes Valerie happy truly makes me happy, just totally NOT my style) provides for a wide variety of new things to observe. Observation leads to thinking, thinking leads to writing, and writing leads to this.

So, with my hosts in bed and nothing to do at night, extensive writing will ensue.

VIRGINIA DAY 1

Flight at 6 am. The last time I was up this early was probably in high school. The airport is packed, I'm half asleep, I dont know where the B gates are because I've never flown east.

I get to the front of security.

"Ma'am step up to the right please"

I step up.

"The other right" (which was actually left.)

"ookay."

good start.

Now I get to put all my stuff in the little taupe colored boxes. I decide against taking my 349075028 bracelets off but I do take off my belt. Apparently I thought THAT was gonna be the thing that would set off the alarms. Like I said; half asleep.

I'm standing waiting for the fat little ray of sunshine on the other side of the metal detector to motion me through, but I am interrupted by the guy on the other side of the conveyer belt.

"You gotta get your stuff through the scanner" he says to me.

Ok, for those who are unfamiliar with airports, the boxes in which you put your carry-on items to be scanned are to be placed on a long conveyer belt, halfway made up of a series of little rolling cylinders, halfway made up of an automatic belt like in grocery stores. My box was like, .01 nanometers away from the electronic part.

He seriously could not have nudged it for me? Luckily he had enough energy to alert me of the situation. It's 5 in the morning. Thanks, douchebag.

My stuff went through and they concluded that I was indeed NOT a terrorist, but as I put my shoes back on I noticed a man with whom lady luck was not so generous. I watched in empathetic, disgusted amusement as the pretentious tsa agent felt up a guy who looked like he was on his way to Disneyland with his family.

America: 0

Terrorists: 1

I could go on and on about the airport but let's skip to the part where I land in Virginia.

Val and Jake picked me up...blah blah blah...boring sister stuff that you'd care a lot more about if our names were Kim and Khloe..........and THEN

she made me watch The Bachelor.

ok. WTF. IS UP. WITH THIS SHOW.

Is it real? seriously. is it?

All of these women compete for a guys "love" over the course of 6 weeks, and then BREAK DOWN AND CRY WHEN THEY GET REJECTED?

uhhh. k. where do I even begin.

The bachelor hooks up with all of these different girls, "gets to know them" (hahahaha) and then chooses one to whom he proposes marriage. And right before said proposal, he sees another girl who has met his family and is all dolled up, tells her he has real feelings for her and can't deny the spark, but he's in love with someone else. ?!?

And then she cries, because girls are stupid.

Then he confesses his undying "love" for the chosen one, and she is glowing with excitement and adoration, after STARING INTO THE FACES OF THE OTHER GIRLS ON THE SHOW DAY AFTER DAY AFTER DAY KNOWING THAT HES BEEN DOING THE SAME THING WITH THEM.

And then she accepts, because girls are STUPID.

I can sum that show up in one word: it starts with 'p' and rhymes with synthethic - just like all of those people's personalities.

turds with friends

Now trending among smartphone users: a game that has been around forever but not popularized among the younger generations until it was modified to a version on which the mentally insufficient could easily cheat.

For the most part, people write the same way that they talk. I definitely do, I usually sound like I'm speaking in verse; be it Shakespeare or a rap song. This is how I know for a fact that people are googling the letters they have and picking a word.

I don't want to play with any of you back-handed low-life scum. As soon as you put in a word that I have never heard you say, I know you're cheating, and I've already won.

Besides, words with friends is really only popular in the first place because people can play it while they're sitting on the toilet. Sit your ass down at the table and play scrabble like a man.

NOW WHO WANTS TO PLAY ME??? thug.nasty.