"You may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas."*

   Hey, you crazies.

   Sorry it’s been so long since my last post.

   I live in Texas y'all.

   I am very hot.

   I have an apartment now.

   And go out a lot.

   That was a poem. Did you get it? Didja?

    Can you keep a secret? I can't. That has nothing to do with my next statement: I’m super in love with this town. I’m so hot most days it’s hard to concentrate or remember my name, but when I’m in my car blasting the AC, and I can focus on life, I find every sight I see highly entertaining if not downright inspiring. 

That's the reading inside at 12:30 a.m. Yikes!

   This post isn’t worth much…just a shout-out to the blogosphere to let y’all know I’m alive.

   Top 5 things I like about Austin so far:

1.  Despite driving in what I’m told is heinous traffic, I can’t help feeling Austin is a paradise compared to LA. Nothing takes more than 30 minutes, and it usually takes a lot less.

2.  Every street looks eclectic and original and bizarre. This is not a town of strip malls and Walmarts, praise Jesus!

3.  Some lady very nicely explained from her car in the lane next to mine today that I was in the wrong lane and about to experience a head-on collision. She offered to let me move in front of her. What? Courteous, kind fellow drivers? What planet am I on?

4.  My new apartment has a balcony overlooking a charming creek. Yay, nature! 

How cute is the GE stove from the 70's? And, as Ouisa pointed out,if it works, I'm one step ahead of my last apartment.

5.  Everyone here dresses fashionably: but not LA fashionably. We’re talking personalized, outrageous, adorable, crazy fashion from vintage to full tattoo sleeves to head-to-toe UT gear. In LA everyone dresses to look thin or importantly chic, here people dress to look unique, different, and like they just don't give a shit. And it’s WONDERFUL. I’ve never seen more beautiful people in one place in my entire life (except of course, at family reunions, duh).

   Honorable Mention: to Louise “Moose” Hopp: Gabe’s kitty has been my go-to companion, whether I’m on the front porch or the back picnic table. She sleeps at the end of the bed and only talks when she has something important to say. She searches out the strange rustling under the backyard steps and keeps me from running in the house screaming because I’m afraid of creatures. Thanks Gabe and Dan and Louise for letting me crash here!

Moose working security on the front porch.

I’ll keep you posted.

*That quote is from Davy Crockett.

"You know schizoid behavior is a pretty common thing in children. It's accepted, because all we adults have this unspoken agreement that children are lunatics. When an adult sees things that aren't there, we consider him ready for the rubber room."*

     I probably shouldn’t have started reading The Shining again in the first place. I’ve had bad experiences with it in the past. 

     One time I read it while I was staying in an old hotel (The Mark Hopkins) in San Francisco BY MYSELF and I was too afraid to use the bathroom because it had a shower-curtained tub (I guess they all do) and I was sure that the dead woman from Room 217 was in it. Then I was convinced I heard the shower curtain opening on its own. But nature won out and I had to screw up my courage and go pee or else pee in the bed. And I haven’t peed the bed once since I was eleven-years-old. So I marched right in and pulled the shower curtain open and peed (in the toilet—not in the shower). Then I left the shower curtain pulled open for the remainder of my stay, just in case. 

The Mark Hopkins. Not so scary.

        But I really like The Shining, so I read it every year, despite what a huge weenie I am. And there have been multiple occasions when I convinced myself mid-book that some small ghost child was looking in the window at me or Jack Torrance was trying to open the door and surprise me (in the bad way) in the shower.

        But I’ve never read the book while living alone, and it was really, really dumb of me. For one thing, I live in apartment #213, so I’m merely a few doors down from #217, which seems to be abandoned. Scary. And the elevator is old and creaky, and sometimes I think I hear it when I’m in bed at night (reading The Shining) even though it’s way too far away for me to hear. And I’m convinced I hear footsteps in the apartment above me, even though the building manager told me no one is living there yet. And the plumbing in this old building makes weird clanking and humming noises sometimes, so maybe it’s that old, dead lady trying to heat up her bath.

      Yeah, it was dumb.

      And then my friend Kathryn and I went out the other night for hamburgers and she mentioned how great the movie version of The Shining is.** And I almost choked. I started wondering if maybe I have the shine and somehow she was tuned into my extrasensory frequency. Which would be even worse for me if the dead lady from Room 217 is actually in my shower.

      I want to be proud of myself for how incredibly fertile my imagination is, but at the same time I’m wicked angry with myself for having the ability to imagine someone is chasing me or standing outside my door (despite the fact that I'm nearly 30 years old and I should know better).

     When I was a kid, we lived in a really cute little house with an unfinished basement. Lizzy and I would lay out blankets and pillows on the area rug and watch episodes of Who’s The Boss? and Family Ties down there on Friday nights, and eat pizza and drink Coke. It had exposed piping and light fixtures, but the family computer and dot matrix printer were down there and it smelled good because the washer and dryer were over in one corner.

      The only problem was that you couldn’t turn the lights off from upstairs. You had to pull the cord that dangled from the naked light bulb. And while that was perfectly doable at 4 p.m., it was a horrible after the sun went down. Usually our shows would end and we'd race each other up the stairs without turning off the lights and then fight over who had to go back down. When it was my turn, my brain could imagine any kind of horrible thing chasing me up the stairs after I pulled that cord. I could even hear the footfalls behind me.

       But now I’m a grown-ass woman and I still can’t shut out the voices of imagined bogey men hiding in every crevice of my apartment. And now I live utterly alone. And I thought it would be really great to read The Shining again.

     It was just plain dumb.

     The good news is: I’m trying to read as much as I can while the sun’s still up. I don’t have a shower curtain, but rather a shower door, and I leave it open. My imagination is slightly less incredible than it once was. And I’ve read this book about 10 times.

     But if I don’t post again for a few weeks, it’s because the Overlook got me.

The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, CO. The inspiration for the Overlook.

     Or because I just bought Stephen King’s On Writing. Next time I write, it’ll probably be so amazing you’ll poop your pants. 

*The Shining by Stephen King.

**I don't care for Stanley Kubrick's version of The Shining (Kubrick, 1980). He makes the lady in Room 217 hot, he adds in ex-caretaker Grady's daughters as weird twins, there's blood in the hallways and Danny is a wack-a-doo hippie with the voice of a gremlin and the hair of Dorothy Hamill. Plus, Shelley Duvall is Wendy in a heinous bit of bad casting (though to be fair, I hate her in almost everything except as Olive Oyl:the roll she was born to play). Sucky movie, if you ask me and not very scary. Nicholson's good, but he's always good, isn't he?

"And these children that you spit on, as they try to change their worlds, are immune to your consulatations. They're quite aware of what they're going through."*

              Ahoy, Mateys! My blog is under construction, as you may have guessed based on its ever-changing and yet still strange format. I have several brilliant minds on the project, however, so never ye fear. I promised something good would happen to my layout in the New Year, and several of my smartest colleagues are working on it. Don’t think about it, is what I recommend. And I try not to think about it, either.

            Tonight was sort of bittersweet, as Mike (whom you may remember from here and here) came in town for a “business trip” (I guess he’s a real grown-up now) and we sat out on what used to be our balcony when we were mere children right out of undergrad and reminisced a bit about “the past” and “yore” and “ye olden times.”

            You see: I’m leaving my apartment.

            I’ve been in this place for almost eight years and I feel like I’m getting divorced. Down have come all the (not-so-expertly) stained wine crates in which I so artfully ensconced my books and DVDs and random tchotchkes (yep, definitely had to look up the spelling on that one, and Word still isn’t having it…maybe Word is an anti-Semite?) and into the walls have gone little rolls of putty and lots of cursing and slabs of primer. I took all my beloved maps down from the walls. My precious book and play collection is in boxes. My series of bathroom action figures is packed away.  All that remains is….the other 90% of my shit. Clothes, shoes, bags, (blazers), kitchen stuff, tools, towels, board games (of which I have many), furniture, furniture, more furniture, all the light bulbs I hoarded before the government outlawed the old ones in favor of the new long-lasting (mercury-ridden) ones, crafts, artworks, bathroom stuff….oh fudruckers! I’m having a panic attack. I better stop while I’m (somewhat) ahead.

            Change is hard for me. But it usually happens in my life in giant leaps and bounds, rather than in gradual baby steps. If all I had to contend with right now was moving, I think I’d be in excellent shape. But this past month and the two months ahead have packed themselves (okay, I’m partially, perhaps totally, responsible) full of enormous troughs of change.

1.     I’m moving.

2.     I’m considering going back to school for a Master’s degree (in what? Who knows?! Maybe Animal Husbandry. I want to find husbands for all the unwed animals!). This involves re-learning math starting from what I’m going to guess, based on my practice tests, is the 4^th-grade level. (On a positive note, the math I do understand—which is precious little— is quite fun and entertaining.) Lesson: stay in school. Forever, if you can.

3.     I promised quite a few people that I would edit their manuscripts, plays, screenplays, etc…And it’s sad, because I truly enjoy editing. But why would I agree to these things when I can’t even remember the Pythagorean theorem? (Question: how did I get through the last 10-12 years without ever using math aside from leaving tips and figuring out how much something would cost on sale? But, along those same lines, my expertise in fractions and percentages remains undiminished!)

4.     Turning 30. I haven’t quite done it yet, but I’m staring down the barrel. My three best friends, Emily, Gabe and Regan, all turned 30 in the last few months (I doubt my girls would mind me saying so here). They’re all handling it like it’s no big whoop, but they’re also more elegant and together than I am (unsurprisingly—that’s why I want to be friends with them).  I feel like I’m supposed to have done something or that maybe I have only 6 more months to do something or I’m going to drop dead on my 30^th birthday from mis- or disuse. It’s not that 30 is old, it’s that it’s significant, somehow. And I really can’t wrap my head around it. Maybe if I could be 29 for one more year, I could get it together…

5.     Turning 30, when I think about it, seems to be more about figuring out a life plan (which I went into a bit here). To that end, I must say that I’m baffled. I’ve had lots of hopes and dreams, but most of them seem sort of ephemeral at this point in my life, and I don’t know how to redirect my ambitions. Does this even make sense? (Is this destined to be one of those things I write about and then I'll look back on it in 10 years and chuckle knowingly while rolling around naked on piles of money?)

6.     I’m pregnant. (Just kidding! You have to have sex to get pregnant! Right?) I only said that because it's listed as one of the most stressful of life's changes.

7.     The Hunger Games. I started reading it because my roommate, Ron, recommended it and then I was useless for three days because all I could do was read The Hunger Games, eat (The Hunger Games makes you feel famished, I kid you not), and go to the bathroom. I’ve missed out on lots of valuable time. I haven’t exercised in days or vacuumed or packed or planned my life. DO NOT READ THIS BOOK. Unless you want to have your mind blown, that is. Seriously.

            It’s super late for me to be writing, but I worked all weekend, and this is the first time I’ve had alone, especially since Mike went to bed because he has a big important, grown-up, business meeting tomorrow. Because that’s what we are, or are supposed to be: grown-ups. And so, I guess I’ll find a new and different and maybe even better apartment (hopefully something anywhere near as nice as Mary Tyler Moore’s). But part of me will always think of this one as mine.

Emily took this picture from my balcony at sunset. Sigh.

            This is where I spent the first part of my “real” life—my post-college twenties. I learned how to pay bills and get to know my amazing neighbors and bitch at the landlord and order in delivery and grow a plant and (occasionally) have it live. It’s really hard, I’m not gonna lie. But I think it’s going to be a good year. Fingers crossed.

*The legendary David Bowie, "Changes."

"Who can turn the world on with her smile? Who can take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile? Well it's you, girl, and you should know it. With each glance and every little movement you show it."*

            I remember being approximately seven-years-old when I first saw Mary Richards hang her large, gold “M” in her new apartment on the first episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (I was watching it on Nick-at-Nite, not, like, on it's original air date, duh: I'm super young!). Her apartment was a fabulous studio with shag carpet, an enclosed kitchen, a tiny balcony and what appeared to be the world’s largest walk-in closest (which also seemed to house her bathroom).

            For many years I've thought about what kind of apartment I would have when I finally managed to afford to live on my own. I knew that there would definitely NOT be shag carpet (duh) and there would definitely be laundry and parking on the premises. And if I managed to finagle a balcony into the deal, so much the better.

            Alas, things have changed since the 70’s.

            I would like to show you the differences here.

            Example one: Mary Richard’s first apartment:

Good friend over to hang out whilst hostess does needlepoint
.

            Now, I make approximately the equivalent of what Mary was pulling down at the News Room as an associate producer at WJM over 40 years ago. Let’s forget for a second inflation and that her job was much more important and high-powered than mine. Not to mention the fact that she quickly became "best friends" with all of the people at the office (Ted, Lou, Murray, Gordy and even Sue Ann).

            Let’s also forget, for a minute, that Mary lived beneath Rhoda Morgenstern, who was perhaps THE BEST NEIGHBOR OF ALL TIME. I mean, how sweet would it be to have the funniest, goofiest and realist gal pal of all time living right upstairs? (And we’ll just as tactfully forget the fact that Phyllis and Lars lived downstairs.)

            But my life isn't like this at all! The more I look at apartments, the more convinced I am that it would be in my best interest to move to Minneapolis. In the 70’s. (My flux capacitor still isn't working...is anyone else's?)

            And there’s an additional problem: I have a large, purple “L” that I’d like to hang in my new apartment (should I ever find the proper abode). But think about it: how do you hang an “L”? There’s nothing for it to hang from, so I guess I’m going to have to bore holes in the wall and have it rest on screws. (Tacky.)

            Examples 2 through 4: here are some photos of the apartments I've found:

You can't even get the photos upright? Really?

         So, alas, my life isn't like Mary Richard's life...at all. Sigh. And that makes me sad. I can't hang my "L," I don't have a wise-cracking sidekick upstairs, hell, I don't even have a balcony/shag carpet/a really important job. In addition, this whack-job of a potential landlord can't even post photos of his (or her) available apartment in an upright fashion (literally and figuratively). 

                  I still love MTM and everything she stands for (powerful, single woman who doesn't need a man to make her feel worthwhile and who doesn't need a bedroom to make her apartment feel like home), but she kind of set the bar a little too high, didn't she? 

                  Fuck you, Mary Tyler Moore. (Aw man, I can't drop the f-bomb on Mary Tyler Moore. It's been tormenting me all day.) Darn you, Mary Tyler Moore (shake fist at sky). That feels much better.

*"Love Is All Around" The Mary Tyler Moore Show theme song by Paul Williams.