"You ever have moments where your self-satisfaction runs so deep that you don't know what to do with yourself? I just had one."*

    Okay, so I’ve been AWOL for a while, but I have some really good excuses. For one, I got sick last Thursday. Today is the next Thursday and I’m still sick. I didn’t take enough Zicam and I haven’t gotten enough sleep, so it’s not so much my body’s fault as mine (is it weird that I consider my body a separate entity from my brain/personality?); nonetheless I’m still kind of upset at my body and not myself. But I’m hardly ever upset with myself, because I like myself so much (does saying it a lot make it true?).

    Secondly, I got back from Omaha on Monday to find a stranger living in my apartment. This is a true statement, though the stranger wasn’t a surprise. My friend Dara’s been in Poland studying for the last year or so and her new Polish friend Marta got a Fulbright Scholarship to do research at Cal State LA. She needed a place to stay for a few days until she scored an apartment, but a few days has become a week and god love her, she’s overwhelmed as shit and hasn’t found a way to get to CSULA on mass transit, let alone found an apartment. But…I don’t really play well with others. That’s kind of why I have to live alone. And Marta’s been sitting in my spot in the living room, so I don’t know where to go. And I can’t really write while she’s there, because I can’t settle into the proper headspace. So I’m hiding out at Chad’s apartment while he plays shuffleboard up the street with some friends. And no, Chad isn’t an 87-year-old retiree. 

Chad's fish tank. The best part of my new writing environment.

[It would probably be in my best interest to simply tell Marta she’s in my spot and offer her a new spot, but my cold is making me stupid and tired and so I just keep going to my room and since my room is pretty much wired in my brain as a resting space, every time I go in there I immediately fall asleep. That could also be the cold’s fault.]

    Thirdly, Chad is running for Neighborhood Council and I’m his campaign manager. Just kidding. But he is running. And his upstairs neighbor has a crush on me and keeps trying to give me CDs he finds in the trash or old VHS tapes of “classics” such as the little-known Judy Garland animated flick, “Gay Purree” in which she voices a Parisian cat.

Hmmm....

    Allow me to describe him: long hair, British teeth, pot belly and he's about 45-years-old. Every day he wears the same outfit: long shorts, wife beater (today no shirt, however), backwards baseball cap, white socks pulled up and black sneakers. He works as the apartment manager here and seems to think he and I would have a lot in common. He took Chad and I up to his apartment one time and it looks like Buffalo Bill is living there, except for the poster of Audrey Hepburn he has taped up over his bed. I will tell you more after we start officially dating. I’m not really sure why I get all the sexy men. It’s a blessing. And a curse.

This Buffalo Bill, not the famous American showman. (Silence of the Lambs: Jonathan Demme, 1991.)

    And d. I have some raucous mosquito bites, courtesy of the Midwest, which are making me feel gross in general. Plus I scratched the shit out of ‘em so they look disgusting too. AND, since I’ve turned thirty, I’ve found that it’s much harder to keep up with shaving my legs. I think my leg hair has started growing faster. What’s next? Ear hair? 

I am intentionally not zooming, as then my leg hair would be all up in your face. I also have a couch print going on.

    Anyway, as you can probably tell (since I’ve told you), my life has been a little crazy of late and that is why I haven’t been posting. I wish I’d been spending this time productively, but that, sadly, is not the case.

    Poor me.

*Quote is courtesy of my dear friend, Erin, who left this very phrase in my voice mail. Sometimes the quotes just fall in my lap.