"You're having a lousy streak. I happen to be having a terrific streak. Soon the world will be back to normal. Tomorrow you will meet a crown head of Europe and marry. I will have a fat attack, eat 300 peanut butter cups, and die."*

   I thought that by the time I turned 30 I would have myself all figured out. I’m pretty sure I’ve brought this up before: I was convinced that 30 was the year when everything got settled.

   So…yeah…that didn’t happen. And that’s okay.

   Here’s something weird, though: a few days back, when I was still in Omaha, my youngest sister, Penelope, said the following: “Lacey’s the smart one; Lizzy’s the most fashionable; and I’m the nicest…?” I actually don’t know how the statement ended because I was immediately offended by not being considered the most fashionable (though I’m definitely not) and incredibly proud of being considered the smartest (also a stretch). Penelope probably said something to the effect of “the most ignored whilst handing out superlatives.” Sorry, P. (And for the record, Penelope: you are the weirdest, quirkiest, kindest and most original...among other traits.)

   Before I left Omaha, Ouisa gave me a pair of GORGEOUS brown leather, high-heeled boots that she said she could never wear because, at five-foot-ten, she feels too tall for three-inch heels. She described it as feeling like a “giraffe on roller skates.”

   And then my Aunt Mel had me over for coffee and we spent a good twenty minutes playing with a feature on a plastic surgeon’s website that allows you to see how you’d look with a few less chins, a bigger rack and Angelina Jolie’s lips. And Aunt Mel, despite being one of the most beautiful, smart and confident women I know, copped to feeling like she spends most of her day thinking about her meals and how much she’s exercised and if she should do 40 squats before bed to make up for the cream in her coffee.

   So, okay, most of this is self-evident: women hate themselves. Yes, yes, everyone knows that. But I really don’t want to spend my life feeling like a fat, ugly cow when, in all actuality, I’ll probably be 87 some day (if I make it that long) and I’ll look back at pictures of myself now, at 30, and think: damn, I was pretty hot!

   So I’ve decided to make a conscious effort to quit hating how I look, despite the fact that I’m not 5’10, I’m not the stylish one, and I consistently appear to be 4-months-pregnant, despite the 9 million crunches I do every week. Life’s too short. And seeing how beautiful the women around me are, who also think they’re heinous trolls, I have an idea that I’m not as hideous as I think I am.

*From Rhoda, my soul sister on The Mary Tyler Moore Show,who always thought she was ugly but was truly beautiful all along...

"When it's 100 degrees in New York, it's 72 in Los Angeles. When it's 30 degrees in New York, in Los Angeles it's still 72. However, there are 6 million interesting people in New York, and only 72 in Los Angeles."*

   It rained** over the weekend and so today it was so clear that I realized that the San Gabriel Mountains were much larger than I thought they were. I’d never really seen them before and it turns out I’d just been looking at the foothills all these years. Ha! Weird, though, because if you can never see them, does it even matter that they’re there? (Whoa, that’s totally existential of me.) But we get so few clear days in Los Angeles that it was a real treat to find out about the mountains. Today it looked like this:

I love those hot air balloons. Love them.

   Minus the hot air balloon. And the regular balloon. And I didn’t draw in the mountains. I guess this is just what today felt like in my head.

  I was feeling pretty awesome this morning even without the mountains (though those made it even nicer) because I’ve FINALLY lost the weight I put on over Christmas and the New Year. That’s right, folks. I gained 6 pounds in two weeks at my parents’ house eating the following: Christmas cookies, my dad's brownies from-scratch (Grandma Begge's recipe), Kraft mac-n-cheese, and copious servings of buttered toast. (Disclaimer: these items were either gifts from schadenfroh*** neighbors or purchased by my mom for my sister Penelope, who can apparently eat whatever the fuck she wants and drink six regular cokes a day and not gain weight. The last time I could get away with that kind of diet, I was 8.) Turns out flour and sugar are bad for you and I had the gut to prove it. But now I’m back to my pre-holiday weight so I can start again with my regular 15-lb weight loss goal. Hooray for baby steps!

   So I went to my appointment for laser hair removal. (Yeah, I do that. You never know when Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue will need a last minute replacement for Marisa Miller.) So anyway, I had consciously made the appointment with Aren, seeing as how she is the technician I always visit. But it turns out my technician’s name has been Linda this whole time. Wow, I feel like an asshole leaving all those tips for Aren. And...wait for it...Aren is Linda’s SON. And he was the only technician working today. The receptionist, Annabelle, informed me that he’s really good and he’s an R.N. so I shouldn’t worry about showing him my vagina.

   I said, “Have you ever been to him?”

   She said, “Well, he’s my brother, so…”

   “So, no.”

   She said, “No. But people love him! He’s really good! People request him specifically.”

   I think that the “people” specifically requesting him were me. Last week. And notice she said "people" not "women."

   But then Annabelle told me that she has a male gynecologist. Helpful.

   Anyway, long story short (TOO LATE), I sucked it up and had my appointment with Aren. 

   Aren came out and Annabelle said, "Aren, take really good care of Lacey. It's her first time with a male technician and she's really excited!"

   I said, "Well now, that sounds wrong somehow."

   But you know what? Aside from not having much to say while he was working, Aren was truly excellent. I would see him again (just as friends). I think he’s better than his mom, even. And I feel like he probably deals with a fair amount of sexism (not to mention skepticism) in his line of work, what with being a man and all. On the other hand, maybe that’s a weird profession for a man. But on a third hand, I’m sure dudes that are getting hair lasered off their butt cheeks are happy that he’s doing what he's doing. Okay. I’m totally sold on Aren. (Which is apparently pronounced like “Aaron” and not, as I previously thought, an exotic, Armenian name pronounced like “are-en.” Or R.N., which he is!) And at least my tips were staying in the family.

   That’s enough/more than enough for now. Happy Monday!

*Neil Simon. Not to shit on LA, but have you ever noticed that when people who live here talk about it we always say, "Well, you can't beat the weather." That's because if we didn't have the weather, we'd kill ourselves.
**Due to the rain, my power went out for an unknown period of time over the weekend, which explains why the milk I poured all over my oatmeal led to a near-brush with vomiting.

***Schadenfroh, according to my sources (the Interwebs), is the adjective form of schadenfreude. It’s not really used in English, but it was the only word I wanted to describe people who bring plates of cookies to your house during the holiday season and call it "a gift."

"That's it! I've had it with this dump! We got no food, we got no jobs, our pets heads are falling off! What the hell are we doing here, Harry? We gotta get out of this town."*

        I know for sure that I will never murder anyone, because I’m quite confident that if I ever did murder someone, I would have a nonstop panic attack until I was found out. And I hate panicking.

        I wasn’t always this way.

        I have a distinct memory of driving to the Oak View Mall in Omaha with my dad and one of my sisters (I think it was Penelope) at some point during college. 

The Oak View Mall.

        My dad said something to the effect of, “You don’t worry about much, do you Lacey?”

        And then I felt proud. As though it were something my dad admired about me. “Lacey: My One Kid Who Doesn’t Worry.”

        At the time it was true: I didn’t worry too much about anything. For one thing, what’s the point? It’s a waste of energy to worry about the outcomes of events that we aren’t even sure will happen. And even if we did worry, it wouldn’t prevent anything from happening.

        When you’re in college, you sort of feel free from worry because you’re actively working towards a concrete goal: graduate from college. Also, you’re in a sort of in between stage: handling money and paying bills, but not actually earning much of anything. And in my case, spending money that you didn’t have to make yourself.

        Once you graduate, and especially if you graduate with a degree in the “Arts” and even more especially if you graduate with a degree in the “Performing Arts” you start to worry a little bit about what the goal is and how the hell you’re going to pay rent until you achieve it.

        In the last couple of years I’ve started to panic a bit. Not about anything substantial, just a sort of general panic that sets my heart racing and makes my hands shake. When I take a moment to center myself and try to figure out what’s causing the panic, I can rarely figure out the source.

        I will say that since I moved into my own apartment I feel less anxious, but the idea of panic always seems to be hiding around the corner. I keep waiting to feel anxious and the anxiety of waiting makes me anxious. Yikes.

        What’s worse is that I’ve taken to envisioning problems that don’t even exist. Upon exiting the shower today, I imagined I saw something coming out of the little side drain in my bathroom sink. It turned out to be a portion of my own reflection in the opposite mirror. But still. Then I thought, “What if something actually did come crawling out of there?” What if it were a worm or a snake or some sort of tiny mouse? Or a creature like that one in Ghost Busters II? (Okay, that might actually be kind of funny, after the initial shock wore off.)

Ghost Busters 2. Scary!

        What the hell could I do about that? Scream? Tape it up, like I did with the bees? Run away? I live alone now, and I’m the only one here that can kill the spiders or what-have-you that show up, uninvited, in my apartment.That's the stuff horror films are made of. Shudder.

        Yeah, sometimes being a grown-up really blows.

        I’m thinking more and more that I need a change of scenery or at least a change of focus. A thought that was driven home further by the presence of YET ANOTHER dead bee in my kitchen.

        Sigh.

        In other news, I got a professional haircut today, so my bangs are under control yet again. Hooray!

*Lloyd Christmas, Dumb and Dumber (Peter and Bobby Farrelly, 1994).

"There is nothing that a flower could say that your lips can't prove with a kiss."*

The greatest love of all: that between a woman and her gay best friend.

An Ode to Valentine’s Day           

         Ah, Valentine’s Day. The holiday that celebrates love in all of its forms: between couples, between friends, between a girl and her laptop, etc. All love, all around.

         I used to think VD was venereal disease a holiday designed to make the single person feel awkward. Case in point: this morning when I bought my latte, the barista informed me that it was buy-one-get-one-free in honor of Valentine’s Day. I was forced to explain that I couldn’t possibly drink 8 shots of espresso (I've learned that lesson), nor had I anyone to give my second latte to, and he said, “Oh, that’s too bad.” Thanks a bunch, guy.

         Yet I know it’s hard for those who have sweethearts, as well. You have to buy something special and do it up fancy as though it were Christmas or New Year’s Eve or your honey’s birthday or your anniversary.

         But really, it’s not like any of those things. It used to be a Catholic holiday honoring the one-or-more martyrs named Valentinus and then that crazy Geoffrey Chaucer turned it into a romantic holiday during the times of courtly love in the Middle Ages. Nowadays, if we’re to go based on the cute-but-inconvenient facts that Vatican II (1969) ix-nayed it’s status as a Catholic feast day and no one (not even postal workers) gets the day off from work, I think it’s safe to take the super-cynical stance that it truly is a greeting card holiday.

         That’s not to say that it isn’t a sweet idea. Why not take a day and make the people you love feel special (especially if you’re not planning on doing it year-round)?

         So in honor of Valentine’s Day, I’d like to make a list of the things I love, in no particular order:

1.  Sunny days. Luckily, I get lots of them where I live, and I may be afflicted with SAD** if I ever move. But in the meantime, thank you, Southern California, for being sunny about 98% of the time.

2.  To-do lists. I like making them. I like crossing things off them. I like looking at the old ones. They sometimes make me stress out even more, but usually, they make me feel like I’ve already accomplished something (I've made a list!).

3.  Writing. Oh, it’s such a nice thing to be able to write no matter where I am (except while I’m driving—I rarely write while I’m driving). It’s a gift to be literate, and a gift to have a love that doesn’t cost more than the price of paper and a pen. (Or the price of the really nice laptop my parents bought me for my 28^th birthday.)

4.  My parents. Yesterday my parents called me many times, mostly because they’d called me the day before and I didn’t notice and so did not call them back and so they thought I was dead. I have the best parents in the world, and not just because they will actually find out if I’m dead before the rats find me. They are really wonderful and supportive and decent people. I love you, Amy and Jonathan Rouse.

5.  My friends. I have some of the most tremendously amazing friends in the world, and I’m not even bragging, though they do make me look awesome and popular.  I am lucky to have the smartest, funniest, most talented friends I could ever hope for. Unless I become really famous and have to replace them with more internationally renowned friends. In which case, I will say: I love you guys! It’s been really fun!***

6.  My sisters. They’ve both been flaky about returning phone calls this week, but that’s okay, Elizabeth and Penelope. I know you both have boyfriends, so it's cool and I still love you.

7.  DVDs of now-defunct television shows. Mary Tyler Moore, The Bob Newhart Show, Arrested Development, Jeeves and Wooster. What’s so great about the DVDs is that you can watch and watch and never stop unless you really want to, or you have to take a shower and go to work, already. (Thank you, Captain Obvious, Lacey, for pointing out that DVDs don't have commercials.)

8. Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens.

9. Bright copper kettles and warm, woolen mittens (I especially like the warm, woolen mittens. Not so much into the chilly, woolen mittens).

10.Brown paper packages tied up with strings.****

11.Checking out what the people in front of me in line at the grocery store are getting. I really hate the grocery store, but I LOVE watching other people buy stuff. It's like a character study.

12.Being able to live in a time and place that allows me to contemplate doing just about anything I want with my life and gives me the potential to make it a reality.

         This is a super cheesy entry coming from me (or anyone, maybe), but I don’t want to come down against a day about love, even if part of me knows that it’s designed to rob us of our dignity and hard-earned dollars. It’s nice to have love in your heart, no matter where or to whom it’s directed.  Flowers and candy never hurt anyone, either. (Unless you someday have a boyfriend like this one guy I dated who showed up all the time with flowers, even though I wasn’t that into it. But I think I wasn’t into it because he wasn’t very nice, aside from the bouquets, so the two are probably unrelated.)

*Lyrics from "Send Me No Flowers" (Frank DeVol), the title song of Send Me No Flowers (Norman Jewison, 1964). This is one of my family's all-time favorite movies. Sooooo gooood. It's also the source of the Rock and Doris photo above.

**Coincidentally SAD (which I meant to connote (denote? Goddamn you, English language!) "Seasonal Affective Disorder" is also my friend Mike's term for Valentine's Day: Singles Awareness Day. Feel free to read about Mike here and also here. He's wacky, but also right on the money sometimes.

***I'm just kidding to all my friends. I love you guys so so much and would never survive a minute without you.

****Okay, I didn't give any credit up there, but I'm sure you know numbers 8-10 on my list were lyrics from The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965; music and lyrics to "A Few of My Favorite Things" by Richard Rogers. Weird. I always thought that was Rogers AND Hammerstein. Hmmm...)

"Before you can read me you've got to learn how to see me. I said, Free your mind and the rest will follow. Be color blind. Don't be so shallow."*

   En Vogue’s epic R&B tune “Free Your Mind” found its way onto my iPhone the other morning and I was so excited. I hadn’t heard the song in years and it’s always brought back memories of my childhood. I was especially excited to hear the opening lyrics: “Prejudice. Wrote a song about it. Like to hear it? Hear it go.”

   When I was 10, my best friend and next-door neighbor, Rachel, choreographed a dance routine to this song. She taught it to me in her dad Mike's pristine garage (I know it was pristine because I often had to help clean it...and pick up twigs from his lawn and sing lullabies to his rose bushes). Once I had the moves down (which probably took a really long time, because I’m bad with moves), we taught it to our two younger sisters—Ouisa and Emily. I remember it involved a lot of cartwheels and the classic move of running our hands from our ankles to our thighs—like we were putting on invisible thigh-high stockings. (I just tried to spell that “stalkings.” Weird. And surely somehow Freudian?)

   A week of hard-core rehearsals later, I was very excited to perform the dance for our parents. Rachel had the boom box all plugged in to the side of the Kelleys’ house, and we lined up lawn chairs for our parents to sit on while we danced. The littler Kelley kids sat on the grass in front of us, and Hannah Kelley and Penelope were just babies, so most likely parents held them on their laps. To the outside world, it probably looked gloriously middle-class American and family-oriented.

Boom box with 90's style effects.

   And so we danced. And it was spectacular.

   But when I was in my car on the Hollywood Freeway listening to “Free Your Mind” at 9:15 a.m. on Thursday morning, the whole event suddenly took on a different shade. For one thing, the opening lyrics after the intro I wrote above are:

“I wear tight clothing/

High-heeled shoes/

That doesn’t mean that I’m a prostitute.

I like rap music/

Wear hip-hop clothes/

That doesn’t mean that I’m out selling dope.”

   Um…how the hell did our parents sit through this performance without laughing their asses off or dragging us off to our bedrooms?

   I still love the song, and the message is on point: just because I’m a sexy black woman who dates other races and wears scandalous duds, it doesn’t mean I’m a slut or a traitor to black people: “Be colorblind. Don’t be so shallow.”

   HOWEVER: what were a bunch of little, Catholic, white girls doing with this dance routine, which, in the clear light of 20 years of retrospect, seems ever-so-slightly…I don’t know…inappropriate?

   Our parents must have been frozen in shock and maybe mild-to-moderate nausea. I’m sure they wondered if we knew what the terms “prostitute” and “dope” meant, and I’m guessing they figured we did, since besides the repeated cart-wheeling, we kept acting like we were putting on our thigh-highs for a night of street walking. 

Really patient parents at an outdoor concert circa 1992.

   I’d like to think that they were trying really hard not to laugh at us. I’m sure Mike Kelley was probably smirking. Joan Kelley was probably rolling her eyes. But my parents were pretty straightedge at the time, and I’m sure that The Beatles-Beethoven-and Ravi Shankar-loving pair of them were wondering when and how this decidedly urban music had entered their 10-and-7-year-old daughters' worlds. 

   But they were kind and wise enough to applaud the performance and leave it alone. We were never admonished for play-acting at being hookers, and it seems to me that they played it just right in that moment. To draw attention to the lyrics would have only invited weeks or months of uncomfortable questions from us to which they would have to find clever answers (i.e. lies).

   Many years later, when I was in high school, my favorite pair of jeans went missing. They were wide-legged and made of thin denim and they’d split up the outer thighs (through no fault of my own). I’d proceeded to pin them at intervals with safety pins and I thought they were epically bad ass and I wore them everywhere with my black combat boots and long, cheetah-print coat. And one day during my junior year of high school they mysteriously disappeared. Mom never admitted to it, but I’m pretty sure they went into the garage garbage can sometime in the dead of night. Mom couldn’t take any chances that I’d turn into the dope-selling prostitute my childhood hinted at. Though, to reiterate, the song specifically stated, “That DOESN’T mean that I’m a Prostitute.”

*"Free Your Mind" by the incredible (though not very enduring) all-girl 90's group En Vogue. 

"I'm smarter now than I've ever been in my life."*

   I’ve been really awful about blogging this summer.

   Part of me hopes that everyone is disappointed and sad and checks this page every day for updates and is let down and then their days are ruined because I haven’t posted.

   The bigger part of me knows that you all have been living your lives the way you always do, and haven’t been too bummed about it in the least. Fine. (Screw you.)

   Anywhose-its, I don’t want to bore you with a recreation of my intensely amazing summer (you really couldn’t handle it, anyway), I just want to talk to you about math.

   I know I’ve kvetched about math on at least one occasion, but I want to fully describe to you the utter horror that this math class has wreaked on my life.

1.  I am taking statistics online through Omaha’s Metro Community College. Therefore, I am essentially my own teacher. And my teacher is really bad at math.

2.  There are, if I were a responsible, adult-type person, approximately 2-3 hours of homework per day. But who the hell wants to have so much fun? So I wait until day 3 or 4 and do 5-6 hours at a stretch. I’m like an Olympic athlete at math. Except for not really, because I don't try.

3.  Since the course is of course online, I am at a distinct disadvantage because of my cave woman-level knowledge of the Interwebs.

4.  My sister Penelope, who is ten years younger than I am, is taking the same class. Which sort of puts me in the mood to say, “WHAT THE FUCK HAVE I BEEN DOING WITH MY LIFE?”

5.  I’m a girl. We’re not supposed to have to learn the maths (duh), because we’re supposed to get married after high school. But I’m not married, so I have to learn statistics. Thanks a lot, God.

6.  Math books are written by mathematicians, therefore they are extremely good at telling you things that make no sense and they are really terrible at WRITING ANYTHING OF VALUE. I.e. “blah-blah-blah, use this formula, blah-blah-blah, don’t worry about it, "snoochie-roochie," don't think so hard, "blah, blah, blah," answer.” There is no, for instance, description of how these mathematical terms work in the grander scheme of things, just pictures of Asian women with glasses leaning over a list of really long columns of numbers. Yeah, thanks. I already knew Japanese ladies could do math. Showing me a picture of it does not constitute an education or a text book, you dumb fucks.

7.  Really long columns of numbers: fuck you, statistics! Now that we know what we’re doing, do you think you could maybe just hand me the standard deviation for this problem so this quiz doesn’t take me 5 hours to complete?

Here's a collage of my summer artwork.

8.  I know I’m starting grad school in mere weeks, but what does it all mean for me? As soon as I take a math test I’m over it. I don’t hate math, I just don’t ever want to do it again. Because it's stupid and awful. (J/K...it's just time-consuming, requires concentration, and doesn't happen to get my motor running. I'm not trying to be an engineer, bitches!)

   So…the summer has been full of long columns of hideous numbers that mean nothing to me in any real context. In many ways, that is the short story of my life.

   I have, on a positive note, learned a lot about gambling odds. Hopefully this will prove useful the next time I'm on an Indian reservation. 

*This quote is from Season Two of Mad Men. It's odd I haven't quoted Mad Men before. The show makes no sense, has no point, and is yet one of the most addictive pieces of shenanigans I've ever seen. And consider this: not a single character does math. Fuck yeah, advertising!

"Oh but the kisses are a long way off yet. Well, we just started a'courtin, and next month we start the walkin' out, and the month after that there'll be the threshin' parties, and the month after that--" "Nope."*

    My parents raised my sisters and me rather strictly. We had to go to Mass each weekend (despite having already gone at school during the week: lame). We had to do chores and be in bed on time. We couldn’t do anything fun until homework was finished. And we were not allowed to watch TV during the week. On weekends, we were allowed television on Friday nights and on Saturdays and Sundays after noon.(If I ever have kids they'll be allowed to watch TV all the time. Otherwise I'll probably have to entertain them myself.)

    But my parents were decidedly nervous about the things on television, so they took additional precautions. Anything on prime time was probably rife with sexual content and curse words (things like “blast it!” and “gosh darn it!” and “tarnation!”), so they pushed us to watch the things on Nick at Nite and American Movie Classics. It is probably telling that the first song I learned in childhood was the theme song from Cheers, but that I never got to see an episode of Cheers after the age of three. (Mom also let me watch Moonlighting until I had some sort of grasp of the English language.)

    As a result, Ouisie and I (and eventually Penelope, when she came along) wound up loving shows like Get Smart, Gilligan’s Island, Bewitched and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. We didn’t realize these shows were thirty years old; we just knew they were cutting-edge and hip.

Don Adams and Barbara Feldon as 86 and 99 in Get Smart.

    What is even stranger is that my parents would rent Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies for Ouisie and me when we were barely out of diapers, and we LOVED them. We’d practice for hours trying to get the dance moves down, and it never seemed to matter that the films were entirely in black-and-white and featured hit tunes from the 1930’s.

    Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about those squeaky-clean films of the ‘30’s, ‘40’s and ‘50’s. I’ve been thinking about how, for instance, in Easter Parade, when Fred Astaire says to Judy Garland, “Why didn’t you tell me I was in love with you?” she hugs him really hard instead of kissing him. Or how at the end of the same movie, when he puts an engagement ring on her finger, she just smiles at him.**

Fred and Judy get engaged in Easter Parade (Charles Walters, 1949).

    I used to think that romance could be (and most likely was) utterly bereft of sex, and that people in “olden times” didn’t ever do it until they were married. They didn’t and couldn’t! Some examples:

1.     In High Society (the 1956 remake of The Philadelphia Story), Mike (Frank Sinatra) sings a song to Tracy (Grace Kelly) while they’re both intoxicated. The song is called, “Mind If I Make Love to You?” If “make love” meant “have sex” in 1956, then how could they write a song about it in a major motion picture? Imagine a song that went, “Mind If I Have Sex With You?” I don’t think the studios would’ve gone for it, especially with all the censorship at the time. By the way, “Mind if I have sex with you?” is not a romantic thing to say to someone. It kind of sounds like the second party isn’t really going to be involved.

Frank Sinatra asks Grace Kelly is she minds if he makes love to her (High Society, Charles Walters--again!--1956).

2.     Let’s fast-forward to 1959, when Cary Grant says to Eva Marie Saint in North-by-Northwest, “The moment I meet an attractive woman I have to start pretending I have no desire to make love to her.” Now the idea of sex is sort of out there, but is it really? Because what follows is one of movie history’s longest make-out sessions (beaten in length only by that between Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot) but no one actually goes to bed with anyone. Or do they?

Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint do everything but in North-by-Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959).

    My parents were quite clever: they showed us movies where people talked a lot, kissed occasionally and NEVER HAD SEX. At our sleepovers at the Meisingers’ house, we were only allowed to watch the final dance number from Dirty Dancing, and not the movie itself (a quite innocent movie, if you ask me, because I’ve seen the whole thing now).  But having re-watched these films as an adult, I’m realizing that people did, in fact, fornicate prior to marriage prior to 1967.

    Do you remember Scarlett and Rhett doing “it” in Gone With the Wind? Of course not. But do you remember him carrying her up the stairs, kicking and screaming? Yes. Yes, you do. And you knew what was going to happen. You never saw a thing, but you were a little turned on, weren’t you?

    Same goes for The Quiet Man. Once Sean (John Wayne) throws his wife Mary Kate (Maureen O’Hara) in the bedroom (after valiantly proving to her entire village that he doesn’t want her for her money), you know things are going to get sexual. But you don’t see a goddamn thing. And my parents were in love with that film and we watched it countless times (you know how the Irish feel about Ireland).

    So see, sex had to be implied once upon a time. And for some reason, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve found that implied sex is much more enjoyable to watch than the blatantly “realistic” sex that’s becoming increasingly available on HBO and Showtime. Sometimes I think the actors aren’t even “simulating” sex but actually having it. I’m sorry, is that acting? I think that’s just pornography. (Which is funny, because I used to stay up past my bedtime in junior high to watch "USA Up All Night" because I was convinced something dirty was going to be shown at some point.)

    And if the numerous golden age movie star biographies I’ve read have proven anything, it’s that people did, indeed, have a lot of sex outside of marriage in “olden times.” But the movies had to have a code, and so they tried to give you just enough to be exciting without ruining your day with close-ups of actors’ genitalia. Let's face it: genitalia ain't so attractive.

    I’m truly grateful for my love of classic films. Because I don’t want to look at movie stars’ naughty bits any more. 

*The Quiet Man (John Ford, 1952). Probably one of the sexiest movies of all time. No sex shown.

**I've read in numerous "classic" era movie stars' biographies that Fred Astaire preferred not to kiss his costars out of respect for his wife. That's sweet, but kind of silly at the same time. 

"I cook with wine. Sometimes I even add it to the food."*

   No man will ever want to marry me.

   There are, perhaps, many reasons for this, but the most important is my general ineptitude at all things house-keeping or craft related.

   Take for instance “The Curious Case of the Holes in All the T-Shirts.” I have a plethora of cotton t-shirts. Nearly every one has a mysterious hole in the same exact spot: lower, middle front.

   They all look something like this:

   What’s this about? How does it happen? Are my jeans attacking my shirts? Is it my seatbelt? Do I have a sharp bellybutton? I don’t understand, but it’s been going on for a good 4 years now, so I can’t blame it on any specific item of clothing. I’m truly stumped. And I’m really fucking annoyed.

   I was feeling crafty the other night and decided to re-hem one of my favorite t-shirts in order to cover up the telltale holes on the front. It’s a sweet t-shirt that my Aunt Kris brought back from Korea after she and her family spent two years on the Army base in Seoul. It’s not exactly replaceable, if you get my drift. And it’s super cool because it has dolphins and Korean letters on it that probably spell out something really neat. (I actually think it was a t-shirt from the school my cousins attended there and it was supposed to be for Penelope, but I stole it before I moved to LA. Sorry, P. But once you’ve seen how I “fixed” it, you won’t want it back.)

   Here are a couple of photos of the finished product.

   Good lord, it looks like the dolphins themselves hemmed this shirt. And they were blind dolphins. On strong doses of PCP.

   I have plans to get this problem resolved. This shirt is too special to look this bad. But I’m ashamed. Ashamed that I mention sewing so much and act like I know how to do it. I don’t. And I should never be allowed to touch a real garment again for the rest of my life. I’ll just keep trying out stitches on pieces of cardstock like I did before. Sigh out loud.

   Segue to today when I attempted to make gluten-free peanut butter cookies. The recipe is very simple: take some peanut butter and add sugar, an egg, some vanilla and baking soda and bake it.

   But I am much too clever to follow a recipe. I decided to make mine with chocolate almond butter and since it was already really sweet, I decided to leave out the sugar. Here is what I ended up with:

I thought it might be good anyway, once I let it cool. 

But here's what happened when I tried to cut it. Cookie scale soup, anyone?

   Never make up baking recipes as you go. Or “eyeball” your measurements. Okay, maybe it’s fine if you’re good at culinary stuff and know what you’re doing, but don’t start getting a big ego just because you once made a yellow cake out of box. This doesn’t mean you’re a baker. It just means you can read. I went back and did it right the second time and they turned out pretty good. (I think. I mean they look like cookies. And what's that famous saying, "Get it right the second time"?) Lesson learned. (Dang, I’m just learning lessons all over the place this year!)

Totally passable. Fingers crossed.

   I am comforted by the fact that men still sometimes marry women who can’t do anything useful in the home. Thank goodness it’s 2013 and not 1953. But what can I possibly bring to the table besides my incredible body and delightful personality? It seems unfair to enter into a marriage with only the abilities to sleep for twelve hours at a time and recite lines from movies. On the other hand, no one is actively trying to marry me right now, so I guess I shouldn’t worry about it. And I suppose I can always keep hoping for a rich dude with lots of servants that know how to cook and sew. And I’m not entirely sure I want to get married anytime soon anyway, so I can probably relax about the whole thing. Phew. Yet another crisis diverted. Like my buddy Rebecca always says, "Life is a game of Whack-a-Mole." True, so true.

   I will, however, say a few prayers for my friends. They’re the ones that are going to have to try to eat these cookies tomorrow.

*A quote from W.C. Fields. I swear to god, I made those cookies sober. Maybe I shouldn't brag about it, though.