the rachel papers

an allegory of mascara

2011-11-29T16:53:00.000-08:00

While she worked for Mary Kay, my mom would always tell these outrageous stories of women going ballistic missiles whenever the company announced it was discontinuing a product. She'd receive droves of angry letters, promising massive boycotts and protests. Some contained thinly-veiled suicide threats. How were they expected to go on without Limited Edition Lip Suede in Mocha Freeze? I always just assumed that A) my mom exaggerated the stories for entertainment value; and B) all Mary Kay ladies were estrogen-starved 50-somethings who looked and acted like Kathy Bates' character in Fried Green Tomatoes.

I'll always remember March 2009 for two things: my wedding and the moment I found out Maybelline was going to discontinue Lash Stylist. Lash Stylist was my holy grail mascara for one reason and one reason only: the comb. It looked unassuming but was pure magic in its ability to separate. That comb could nail down every last eyelash. Top, bottom, vertical, diagonal, in fact, it could give birth to eyelash offspring. No Lashes Left Behind. That's how magic. This was no wimpy bristled wand that forced you to keep applying coat after coat until realizing you'd Tammy Fayed your ocular area into a black tarry clumpfest. This got the job done in one fell swoop. In retrospect I suppose placing a sharp-edged object a millimeter from my eyeballs everyday while driving could have resulted in losing one or both of them. Still, nothing could come between me and my Lash Stylist.

Early on in our relationship, I developed costly Bobbi Brown and MAC habits -- brilliant, considering I was pulling $10 an hour as a PR intern -- but never once did I stray from Lash Stylist. I was almost proud of the fact that while I was happy to drop 3.5 hours' worth of salary for a bronzer, I would never in my life have to pay more than $6 for mascara.

When I heard it was being discontinued, I began to buy two and three at a time. March turned into April and one day she was just gone, her usual spot now occupied by Lash Stiletto. Lash Stiletto. Like the Maybelline executives were all sitting around a conference table and someone said, "Let's name this one something prostitute-y... Lash Slut? No, Lash Stiletto. I like it." Then a few months later, a sighting at a Wal-Mart in Kauai. I bought the last two lonely tubes and called them honeymoon souvenirs.

Almost three years later, my biggest question remains why? Why did you discontinue my trailblazing comb crusader? Why not Full 'N Soft or Volum' Express or another one of their ho-hum cousins whose name also promotes illiteracy? Maybelline should put that on their FAQ.

I still feel a glimmer of childlike hope when I walk by the Maybelline section at Target, because what if? What if the mascara people realized it was all a big mistake? I'll keep clinging to that hope. Because as it turns out, I am a Mary Kay lady.

new little project

2011-11-02T21:53:00.000-07:00

I've received a battalion of e-mails over the years from people who thought they were talking to someone else. I saved them all. The result is e-mails from strangers. This is your invitation to join in on the voyeurism.

fumar: an open letter to an indeterminant neighbor

2011-10-03T00:50:00.000-07:00

hi neighbor.

must be that time of day again. did you know that i know each day the minute you get home, even though i don't know what you look like or where you live? creepy, huh? i would call it a sixth sense except that it's not, because the cuckoo clock that alerts me, nightly, of your homecoming is the corruption of my olfactory system.

your smoke isn't, you know, the mary jane -- and i have the authority to say this because of that one concert i went to ~~last month~~ back in the day when my friend explained to me what that smell was -- but your smoke is a smoke so potent it makes my eyes cry and gives me hives and lung disease and strep throat and possible nightmares and an overall feeling so icky that i feel like i just paid a hooker $10 to punch a puppy. every. single. night.

what? i've been around enough varietals of smoked stuff to have built up at least a mild tolerance. hell, who am i kidding? i know how cigarettes taste. personally. i've done the sideways glance around beautiful button-nosed proper people after they've declared their tobacco virginity. as a rule, i am too hungry to wait for a nonsmoking table at restaurants. clean air < food.

but neighbor, just what are you smoking? you live a minimum of 70 feet away. our windows are cracked maybe an inch yet i am choking on water as i type this. have you considered unfiltereds? the patch? the gum? i can't stay here. i can't see. my eyes ... my eyes.

self-critiques of my new orleans photographs assuming i'm 40

2011-05-24T01:33:00.000-07:00

What is going on here? It appears to be a wedding of some sort, but your ratios are all wrong. Also, someone should tell the bride and groom that it isn't raining even a little bit. It's 90 in the shade and you are marinating in your own sweat.

So Maury took your phone and then addressed your dad by your married last name. Hardy har har! This falls under the "funny at the time and even then only to you for two minutes" category. Yet you took exactly 12 photos of the non-event, 11 of them with flash. In a nice restaurant with tuxedo-clad waiters and white table cloths. Take an etiquette class and then get a less-sad looking phone.

Clearly you didn't actually take this photo since you're all... in it and stuff. But Self. Your fleshy arms are all smashed up in such a fashion that they look behemoth even next to the prominent mid-section of Darius the Pat O'Brien's bouncer. This too is the kind of stuff you'll learn in etiquette class.


Here's the problem: While lovely, it's the only (discernible) photo of the bachelorette you took all weekend. Bad, bad bridesmaid.

STOP.

A strange male in denim cutoffs about to ride a mechanical bull + Hewitt and a Taco Bell cup in the background? Really captures the spirit of New Orleans. Hashtag sarcasm.

So you went into creepy mode, all hiding and squatting and otherwise contorting your body to get the perfect candid shot. You will not be able to get away with this much longer without getting arrested for indecent exposure. Also, consider taking a photography class. <3

I'll be honest, I enjoyed this one. Love acts!? Literal LOL.

Look, Claire and Maury walking on a random street, totes captivating!

Claire is uncomfortable because it is not normal to have one's close-up photo taken, even by a friend, while one is eating a popsicle. Once again, you learn this in etiquette school.

Here, you both knocked over a display book thus causing a domino effect landslide of early 20th century literature AND tripped over a cat's litter box. You, 28-year-old self, failed.

It's your artistic effort that counts. I guess.

Remember your "I Aspire to Become a Tory Burch Shoe Photographer" phase? Awkward.


Idée lumineuse!

No, no, no self! We do not take photos of strangers unless they are very famous. I hope you feel sufficiently ashamed.

Redemption Jambalaya.

fredericksburg {a memoir}

2011-04-20T18:01:00.000-07:00

This one time*, my three best soul sistas from high school and I took a highly anticipated trip to the Texas Hill Country.

*: last week

drawn, of course, completely to scale.

As the front seat passenger, I assumed the weighty responsibility of dee-jaying the six hour drive. A 3-1 vote determined that only music from our high school years would be allowed. Highlight: Wide Open Spaces by the Dixie Chicks. I belted out the album in its entirety, remembering the the days of no responsibility when the Dixie Chicks were apolitical and still made music. Lowlight: Little Black Backpack.

We found this homemade gem buried deep within Lindsey's CD case:

made by not just Amy -- made by "Amy!"

Back in the day, Amy had a both a CD burner and access to Napster before anyone else. Luckily, she's always delighted in doing nice things for her friends. Drop a not-very-subtle hint that you liked the new Britney song and the next morning, voila! She'd hand you a personalized CD before 1st period... with a seascape on the cover!

But I digress. We got to Fredericksburg and to our cottage. It looked like this:

We ate dinner at Hondo's on Main Street. It looked like this:

So far as I can tell, queso is more or less non-existent in California. A of all, this state is ass-backwards; B of all, to compensate we wolfed down a bowl per meal. Except once when we plowed through two.

We went to Luckenbach, Texas.

Not too much going on on a Thursday night, but then again:

The population is 3. Or is it?

A bartender named Moon Dawg informed us that this is incorrect and that the population is now 1. We also met a female security guard named Carmen and an over-served 60-something man, presumably a regular, named Joohhhhtttthhhhrrrt.

I highly recommend Fredericksburg Trade Days for a low-key antiquing experience and because of this:

and this:

We also went wine tasting at Becker Vineyards. Henri from France was our sommelier.

When he's not pouring wine, Henri is a cowboy. He really, really liked Amy. "Amy, I am so glad I have met you," he said. His son goes to the University of Oklahoma, which is where Amy went to school. A photo op was born.

We took photos of random things.

We went to Buc's. Karaoke happened.

Then it was time to go home. :(

*Special thanks to Lindsey for letting me share some of her photos (she took the ones that are good) and for the photography lessons while we were in Fredericksburg! She's the bomb dot gov.

nice rack

2011-03-22T17:31:00.000-07:00

Nordstrom Rack is one hot mess of a place. It's crowded, chaotic, and people step on you. The checkout line wraps around the entire length of the store even on weekday afternoons. The fluorescent lighting in the dressing make me want to jump from something tall.

Nordstrom Rack and I have a relationship of extremes. Sometimes I leave high on pheromones and endorphins and whichever other hormones are released during retail triumph. When I'm lucky. More often, I reach the verge of a meltdown (I don't do crowds) and decide that if I don't escape rightthissecond I will faint or die or possibly both. I curse the day Mr. Rack was born because he's responsible for these lines and this lighting scheme and doesn't he realize that for some of us a sticker that says 35, 45, anything-5, percent off triggers bad flashbacks of third grade math?

One day not long ago (OK, last night), all the frustration and agoraphobia and bad feelings that characterized our relationship for so long just vanished and a chorus of angels and bluebirds flew in (somehow) and began to serenade me. Suddenly I remembered why our relationship was worth fighting for.

side A

side B

context clues: they count

2011-03-21T00:52:00.000-07:00

Today, I stop for gas. As I marinate in the pure amount of life being sucked from our unborn children's college funds by way of $4.09/gallon, a large and beefy but smiley man approaches. He asks if I'm in the Navy.

Though the true answer is nothing if not black and white, the hamster wheel residing in my brain begins to spin its please-I-beg-you-to-let-me-overcomplicate-this-question's wheels.

My mouth takes the shape of a donut hole. Mr. Beefy is obviously a spy -- or maybe a psychic. But probably a spy. I say I'm not in the Navy but my husband is, because when dealing with spies it's best to tell the truth.

"Is he an officer?" asks the beefy man.

Me: "Yeah?"

"I noticed the blue decal," he says, gesturing to the Navy registration sticker on my windshield. Blue? Hamster wheel spins faster.

I'd never noticed the blue component of my decal before; in fact, I usually forget that my car sports anything official whatsoever except this one time I tried to meet the ship after infinity months at sea and had to sneak on base due to said sticker's expiration.

I wonder if having a current Navy sticker with blue on it speaks a secret language or means awesome superpower things I don't even know about?

He tells me he's retired Marines. Hamster wheel resumes spinning but in opposite direction. I react as though this is the most fortuitous encounter of my life, blatantly disregarding that 100,000 other military personnel live here. Shoot obligatory how-much-longer-does-he-have-left breeze. Ret. Col. Beefy asks: "Is he out right now?"

"Out? Uhh, no, we drove separately and I needed gas. He's on his way home!"

Fail.

ralphs

2011-03-14T01:11:00.000-07:00

There's this Ralphs in Mission Valley that I visit infrequently. It's not in our neighborhood and the lines are ridiculous, so I only go when I'm in the area and desperate. I can go months between visits, but nearly every time I've shopped there, I've seen the same homeless guy sitting at the same chair at the clearance table. For the past two and a half years.

There he was at his usual table last week, only this time was different because he was eating a microwave dinner. I'd never seen him eating, just staring. I imagined him having to ask a Ralphs employee to microwave it for him, because frozen dinners do not heat themselves, and it made me sad. Sadder than if he'd been eating a sandwich. I wondered if his mom was still alive or if he had children somewhere.

I'd withdrawn cash that afternoon because Girl Scouts were selling cookies outside and Girl Scouts don't take Visa. I wanted to give him a five dollar bill, or another frozen dinner or a couple of boxes of Samoas, but he was just eating in peace, would it be insulting to assume he was after charity? I couldn't decide, so I left.

When you take the strife of this one homeless guy in San Diego times what Japan's going through right now, the world is just too much.

the dog people: a rough portrait

2011-03-07T19:16:00.000-08:00

Soon after I wrote this, I realized that I'm not really *that* dog person, at least not yet. I came to this realization because I discovered a new breed of human. It's a breed I've always known existed but never observed up close until now.

Humans of this breed come in every gender, age and socioeconomic group and, as a whole, falsely convey a demeanor almost Swiss in its neutrality. But do not be fooled. These people are not neutral, and they definitely aren't Swiss. These are the Dog People.

Locations heavily populated by the Dog People include:

Petco
the veterinarian's office waiting room
Nate's Point at Balboa Park¹
any given sidewalk

To qualify as a member of the Dog People, one must A) be a stranger and B) run a surplus of two characteristics: being opinionated and having a compulsion to state the obvious, typically manifesting as a combination of both. Like:

"Wow, look at those paws... she's going to be big... [dramatic pause] -- Really big!"

Prepare your responses to the Large Paws Observation well in advance; you will hear it three times per 20-minute walk. You'll need to tailor your response to each Dog Person depending on the emotion underlying each observation. Start with the four basics: enthusiasm, fascination, pity, disgust.

You can always count on the Dog People to share their overflowing opinions with you no matter how indelicate. In fact, the more indelicate, the better!

Such opinions range from how:

fat
cute
underfed
well-behaved
clearly untrained
old-looking
weird
questionably parented

...your dog is.

Another characteristic invariably displayed by the Dog Person is strength of conviction. For example, the Dog Person may assure you without question that your 12-week-old puppy will grow to 85 pounds and in reality isn't even the type of dog you think she is. That's right, you've been deceived! Luckily, the Dog People have been sent from the Dog Breed Accuracy People to inform you she's definitely a Terrier².

The last part is the most important part. Know what you're getting into at the dog park. The dog park is the pinnacle of existence for the Dog People. Chances are you will feel out of place and judged; chances are both feelings are correct³. The seasoned Dog Person, sensing your newness, will sit back and revel in your relative lack of control because his or her dog is older, comes when called, and probably doesn't chase its tail in circles like a brain-damaged mouse.

Like dog, like owner, I guess.

¹ Especially at Nate's Point at Balboa Park.
² Apparently Labradoodles look like Terriers?
³ Especially at Nate's Point at Balboa Park.

overbooked

2011-03-02T14:46:00.000-08:00

Almost every time I go up to pay at Barnes and Noble, the cashier initiates a conversation based on the book I'm buying. We're talking in the 90s percentage-wise and I go to Barnes and Noble a lot. Not a big deal for someone buying, oh, Harry Potter and the Nocturnal Kitten or Intermediate Disc Golf, or any book with a semi-generic title. I imagine that these checkout conversations sound like this:

"So you're a Harry Potter fan too, huh? Let me tell you, my son/grandmother/clergy person/parole officer loooooooooves J.K. Rowling!"

"Playing some disc golf, are we? I've always wondered, is disc golf the same thing as frisbee golf?"

But then you have the semi-underground book buying population, the people who, like me, tend to buy books with titles that while not necessarily embarrassing (oh, but some are), are less frequently seen by store employees. Yesterday I bought this book called Southern California's Best Ghost Towns. To test my theory, I flipped it face down before handing it to the saleslady.

She turned it over immediately. "OOooooohhh, this looks GREEEAA-aaat," she said, stretching each word into fourteen syllables. "Where did you fiiiiiii-iiind this!? I've gotta orrrrrr-der it!" She spoke with the wide-eyed zeal of a 13-year-old with backstage passes to Justin Bieber.

Let's assume the checkout chit chat rule isn't restricted to transactions of the garden variety. What's the conversation like when the book is Get Pregnant By Tomorrow?

(Male) Cashier: [sizes up female customer; has mental images] So, got any plans tonight?

Much like the poor soul in the front of the line at Target holding tampons only, there's also the risk of the price check scenario, when the cashier shouts to his manager standing two football fields away to ask whether How to Tell if You Have Multiple Personality Disorder is 20 percent off this week.

Yesterday on my way out, I noticed that the older man in line behind me was buying a copy of The Sociopath Next Door. I wondered if the sociopath in question was him or someone else.

Then I noticed his other purchase.

Amazon, people. Amazon.

an open letter to san diego's climate

2011-02-07T21:16:00.000-08:00

Dear San Diego's Climate,

Seriously?

I know last week shouldn't have come as a surprise. You've always far exceeded expectations in your role as meteorology's most aloof rebel, too cool to care that all the other regional climates in America hate you. While hip and nonconformist, your views -- i.e. reluctance to embrace fundamental weather concepts like precipitation, the occasional sub-65 degree temperature, and the fact that the Earth revolves around the sun and is therefore subject to seasons -- your views need an intervention.

Because last week was embarassing.

San Diego's Climate, remember that one time last week when most of the United States was incapacitated by the most apocalyptic winter storm since Dinosaurs B.C.? No? That's right, you were too busy hanging ten at Windansea to watch the news. Maybe, then, while zipping around in your Prius you heard something on the radio about those hundreds of stranded motorists in Chicago who had to abandon their cars on Lakeshore Drive? What's that? You only ride your bike now? You energy-hoarding granola you.

Last week was not just embarrassing. It was lonely.

San Diego's Climate, there are plenty of scenarios I imagine are lonelier than living in Southern California last week, like P.O.W. camp, the Aboriginal Walkabout, solo flights to Mars, this.

But when your Texas friends are sending you rapid fire photos of the three-foot deep sheet of ice enveloping their driveway and Chicago friends tell you via Skype (while seated in front of a fireplace, what are those?) that they're on their third consecutive day of canceled work and CNN is all "the most catastrophic megastorm the Northern Hemisphere has ever seen!!!!!!!" and meanwhile, MEANWHILE, you're sitting around in flip flops worried that if you leave your dog in the car while you get the mail that she'll overheat, and the only reason you know it's February is because your mom reminds you that your birthday's coming up and you're bubbling over in anticipation of the "cold front" the weather guy says is on its way, because yes ladies and gents, it could get down to 60...

That's isolation.

wish you were here!

(Too) Warmly,

Rachel

i am that dog person

2011-01-31T19:46:00.000-08:00

You'd swear that I've just given birth to my firstborn, because this is how I imagine brand new parents behaving, talking and thinking. But, I assure you we did not have a baby. We had a dog.

And our dog has a name. We were having problems deciding what to call her. We I treated this dilemma like we were in charge of naming a messiah baby or future king of England or someone who will eventually walk on two limbs and speak and read and not eat styrofoam. So indecisive were we that several days after we brought her home, she still had her birth name, Ariel. (Her brothers' and sisters' names? Cinderella, Snow White, Captain Hook, Jasmine, and Aladdin. Cute. No thanks.)

We took her to the vet on day three. As I stood holding her at the front desk, a lady with two guide dogs encroached upon her not unlike the Close Talker from Seinfeld. She fawned over her as though she was the second coming, cooing and oohing and ahhh-ing in a reverberating falsetto. For five minutes. And another five minutes. And then she proceeded to literally make out with my eight-week-old puppy.

Once the bulk of their make out session was over, she asked me what her name was. The receptionist asked the same question a few days earlier as I made the appointment and I crumbled under pressure, sputtering the first name that came to mind, Tess. So I told the admirer that her name was Tess.

"She's not a Tess, she's a Sunny!" the woman said with resolute firmness. She was really on to something.

So Sunny she became.

Sunny's mom is not entirely sure that she is a dog and not a human. She often feels racked with guilt when leaving her, and lets her sit on her lap while she's driving even though this is unsafe and possibly illegal in California. Sunny's mom texts photos to everyone in her phone book each time her brilliant alpha puppy does something awesome, like sleeping, eating, or making it to the Potty Patch. At night when Sunny's asleep in her crate, Sunny's mom makes unnecessary shuffling noises hoping she'll stir and therefore "need to go outside" again. Later, she has dreams about her.

Sunny's mom asks her complex questions like "Why are you so obsessed with that?" and is surprised when Sunny doesn't answer, which is usually.

I heart my Sunny.

naming a puppy is more complicated than i remember and other observations

2011-01-18T19:14:00.000-08:00


does she look like a Caroline to you?

hi! my name is _________!

Some people fit into their names so perfectly that any other name would have certainly produced a different person. One of these people is Amy, BFF since middle school. Amy was supposed to be named Caroline. Her parents decided this long before she was born. But then they met her and realized that she wasn't a Caroline, she was an Amy.

Amy is the Amiest Amy I know. I love the name Caroline, but it doesn't suit Amy.Would "Caroline" have Amy's same robust fits of laughter that make the walls vibrate? Would "Caroline" react to shattering a wine glass by falling out of her chair in such a fit, landing on shards of the broken glass in the process? Most importantly, would "Caroline" not get up right away? No, no, and no. But Amy would. :)

Our 7-week-old Labradoodle needs a name. We refer to her as "Unnamed Dog" for now, but not to her face because she has to stay with her labramom until later this week. We've narrowed the slate down to between two and 14 names depending the time of day. I have placed exorbitant weight on this decision in order to ensure the most complicated and drawn-out process possible.

My philosophy of dog names is similar to my philosophy of human names, which is that people usually become their name. My childhood dog came to us as "Clancy." Clancy is a 78-year-old man who drinks straight up scotch and wears a velvet smoking jacket. What Clancy is not is a five-pound girl puppy. So she became Maggie and we all lived together happily ~~ever after~~ until 2004.

To name a dog Fifi or Toodles or Fluffy is to pave a path to diamond-crusted leashes, dog salons called "Paw-parazzi," and rapidly decreasing street cred. To name a dog Butch or Skid Row or Grizzly is to sentence yourself to 12-14 years of evil glares from parents as they usher their horrified offspring away from you and your spike-collared beast. And to name a dog Fred or Maude is to guarantee a dog who sleeps 22 hours a day and eats ground sausage out of the trash.

Also frowned upon is giving your dog the same name as a relative (living or deceased), a friend, a friend's child, a past pet, an ex, or an acquaintance from your past or present who left an impression on you that's anything less than perfect. You can also rule out names similar to one you might one day consider giving an actual human child. For example, is your dog's name Polly? Sorry, no daughters named Molly.

But all is OK, because I feel an epiphany coming on any minute now. Meanwhile, who cares because do you see this face?

Make up your minds, people.

i see in your palms a long life of douchery

2011-01-09T17:37:00.000-08:00

Bad, bad lines!

I used to think that talking, or appearing to talk, on the phone was a surefire safeguard against foolhardy strangers force-reading your palms. Then yesterday happened.

I was sitting on a bench because I don't do things like "walk and check my bank account balance at the same time without walking into oncoming traffic" very well. A guy who looked like Mark Zuckerberg approached me and said to hang up right now because he needed help. Looking back, my first and biggest mistake was compliance.

Mark Zuckerberg said he was desperate to find a gift for a girl and needed advice. "Gift card," I said. "To where?" asked Mark. "Sephora." Or anywhere, I thought, as long it means you are no longer violating my personal space.

My terse response did not sit well with Mark Zuckerberg.You see, he told me, it's really important. "I'll be honest... it's for my sister," he said, as though this disclosure should come as a total game changer. I said I was sorry but I couldn't help him anymore.

Version where I go back in time: Rachel says goodbye; leaves bench.

Then Mark Zuckerberg said:

"You look like... [hesitates]... I don't want to say someone who doesn't get out much, just like someone who doesn't get out as often as you'd like."

[All brain wave activity stops.]

Mark Zuckerberg, seconds ago standing too close to me, was now sitting too close to me. "Your body language is really negative right now. Look at your legs." I envisioned his idea of appropriate body language. A kickline? Jazz hands? Sitting on his lap? He grabbed my left wrist so that my palm faced upward. "Oooooh... Not good. See that line? That's bad news."

The reality that I, Rachel Leah Pangrac, was getting my palm read on a public bench by Mark Zuckerberg's insult-spewing doppelganger began to settle over me.

Version where I go back in time: I have walked 0.67 miles away from this bench by now.

Mark Zuckerberg then guessed (incorrectly) that judging by the Rubio's cup I was holding, I had already eaten and would I care to accompany him to Haagen Dazs right over there? To which I responded by asking him if he has Asperger's.

"What's Asperger's?"

Then Mark Zuckerberg asked if I had a boyfriend. "I'm married," I said, certain he must have picked up on this during the fortune telling component of our exchange. This did not faze him; on the contrary. Mark Zuckerberg is always up for a challenge. "Just get some ice cream with me."

[Exit Rachel.] "Come on, just for a few minutes?"

[Exit Rachel even more.] "Not even a handshake?"

[Rachel 100 percent exited.]

Whoever nabs this Casanova is one lucky woman.

sequins

2011-01-05T01:05:00.000-08:00

By no means was it a "resolution" of any kind, but I accidentally lost four pounds in four days by not eating Chick-fil-A. If I keep this up I may vaporize by Presidents Day. But why would I want to do that?

Also, I am creepy:

how to take one-half of a road trip

2011-01-02T20:31:00.000-08:00

Wake up at 6:02 A.M. Shower. Forecast the next 13-to-15 hours in head. Note in forecast prominent role played by Allsups, truck stop restrooms and beef jerky. Question logic of decision to shower.

Locate frou-frou Christmas gift yoga pants. Decide to dress for comfort. (Keep frou-frou yoga pants on for the next 48 hours.) Run around in frantic stupor fetching and re-fetching items you forgot to pack last night.

"Leave." Encounter unforeseen dilemma while backing U-Haul truck out of relatively compact driveway. Actually leave nine minutes later. Announce what a long day it's been before reaching end of alley.

Drive all of seven minutes. Stop to purchase two honey butter chicken biscuits from Whataburger. Discuss with driver whether or not Whataburger is better than Chick-Fil-A. Mentally will someone, anyone, to open a Whataburger in San Diego.

Stare out window. Resist temptation to take out Texas Monthly until Abilene. Remind self that you are still three hours from Abilene. Take out Texas Monthly.

Read issue cover-to-cover before Weatherford. Stare out window. Wonder how long it would take to ride a tandem bike from Dallas to San Diego. See on Facebook that childhood friend converted to Buddhism. Google Buddhism on iPhone. Read about Buddhism for the next 45 minutes.

Compulsively change radio stations every five miles. Make mental note to renew Sirius subscription. In anticipation of driving through Abilene, learn everything there is to know about Abilene on Wikimobile. Conclude that "all there is to know" isn't very much. Tell driver that Abilene's population is a bit higher than you thought. Wonder when you were last in Abilene. Realize you were there last March. Stare out window. Miss Abilene.

Drive through Buffalo Gap. Note that there are a lot of pictures of bison in Buffalo Gap. Decide that this should in no way come as a surprise.

Buffalo Gap, TX

Pass road sign that says, "Colorado City: 6." Immediately associate Colorado City with polygamist cult scandal from several years back. Loudly proclaim that there must be a cult compound nearby. Envision exciting real-life "Big Love" detour. Google Colorado City. Discover polygamist cult scandal actually took place in Colorado City, Arizona. Sink into seat in defeatist fashion.

Stop for gas at Skinny's Convenience Store in Colorado City. Decide owner is probably skinny.

Enter first stall in womens restroom of Skinny's. See ladies wallet lying on tin disposal. Inspect wallet using makeshift toilet paper glove. Find credit cards and a driver's license and a Nordstrom gift card and other items people do not typically leave behind in a gas station bathroom on purpose. Internally debate the proper etiquette to follow finding an abandoned wallet in the bathroom of a West Texas gas station. Confirm with cashier that no one is missing a wallet. Tell self you would not want your wallet left at Skinny's. Leave Skinny's with a Red Bull, a wallet that isn't yours, and plenty of ambivalent feelings.

Declare new mission in life to locate and contact rightful owner of wallet. Spend next 45 minutes stalking this person on your iPhone. Find out she's a 4th grade teacher in Plano and the mother of twins, a boy and a girl. Question how humans survived before the internet. Leave message on owner's school voice mail detailing plans to FedEx wallet to address on driver's license. Realize teachers are on vacation for another two weeks. Hang up feeling more creepy than helpful.

Hit Big Spring. Leave Big Spring. Enter chunk of Texas so remote you won't pick up an AM radio signal until El Paso. Count oil wells. Pound Red Bull.

See this:


West Texas

And this:

Even Wester Texas

And this:

And this:


Just kidding.

Wonder if survival until Las Cruces, NM, your stopping point for the night, is possible without food. Calculate how many hours since you and driver last ate (save for a few bites of beef jerky six hours ago.) Conclude 12. Drive drive drive. Note that it's getting dark. Very, very dark. Remark to driver how easy it would be to hide yours or anyone's bodies so that they would never be found. Decide preemptively that your New Year's resolution is to make fewer morbid statements.

Drive more. Research Ciudad Juarez drug wars going on a few miles away. Cease research once you realize reading articles about anarchy and mass slayings doesn't lend itself to making non-morbid statements. Reach El Paso. Leave El Paso. Enter New Mexico 14 hours after you left Dallas. Find out you are less than one hour from Las Cruces. Become flooded with renewed determination and hope.

Arrive at Las Cruces hotel 15 hours after you left Dallas. Eat guacamole. Drink margaritas. Sleep better than you have in months. Repeat the next morning.

on the road

2010-12-28T13:45:00.000-08:00

greetings.
i am somewhere near tucson.
or maybe not. maybe tucson was three hours ago.
sand. trailers.
everywhere.
did you know that the seats in u-haul trucks do not recline?
i didn't.
but how could they recline?
hindsight is 20/20.
we left dallas at 7:00 AM yesterday.
"leaving the lone star state!" said a road sign
14 hours later.
progress.
four more hours.
~~i think i'll eat another peanut butter m&m.~~
i just saw a dead coyote.

thanks for saving our world

2010-12-17T00:43:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I found a mystery package that weighed eleventy-thousand pounds and had no return address at our doorstep. Oh cool, I thought, someone has sent us a 12-pack of bowling balls. We started to open it and Mike threw out the obligatory, "I hope it's not a bomb." He says that literally every time one of us receives a package.

Luckily instead of a bomb we discovered a 10-12 year supply of toothbrushes, toothpaste, gum, Post-It notes, coffee, Chef Boyardee Ravioli which I'd forgotten is actually delicious, Bumble Bee tuna salad, shampoo, cough drops, Power Bars, Trivial Pursuit, a paperback called "Virgin Lies" (tagline: The first lie is the hardest one to tell), and best of all, these:

can you play football?

Mike points out that he's actually in the Navy. Gosh Kacela.


Tyjuwuan wins the PC award!

what do you eat?

do you use vehicles to patrol?


i think you have been doing a good job serving our country.


this one is my favorite.

i wrote one too.

bad words

2010-12-14T16:27:00.000-08:00

Other words, however, are not fun to say. They can inspire fear and disgust and other unpleasantries.

bulbous

I'll go out on a limb and say that if you use the word bulbous it will probably trigger both an abrupt ending to your conversation and maybe something even uglier.

in a sentence:
"Sue, you have to see this bulbous blister on my..." (Sue throws up before friend finishes sentence.)

crotchety

There are equally effective synonyms of this word that don't begin with "crotch." Use them.

in a sentence:
"From now on, I'm going to say 'cranky' instead of 'crotchety' thus omitting the imagery connected with 'crotchety.'"

abhor/abhorrent/et al.

Similar to concept above. Nobody can say "whore" without laughing.

in a sentence:
"I abhor that he said whore in front of the children."
hehe.

girdle

When was the last time you or someone you know had to say "girdle" for any reason?

"Her girdle was riding up in such a fashion that it grazed her collarbone."
"Grandmother, may I borrow your polyester girdle?"
"Wow, this girdle hugs my curves in all the right places!"

Been a while, huh?

supposively/disorientated/irregardless

So.

Not.

Words.

***

BONUS SECTION

Bad groups of words:

It is what it is.
I guess it also depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is.

I'm just calling a spade a spade.
And I'm just calling a donut a donut.

It's water under the bridge.
Translated: "I'm still bitter, hostile, and using trite expressions."

Did I leave anything out?

good words

2010-12-14T15:49:00.000-08:00

Some words are just fun to say. Some are so fun to say that I have to repeat them aloud when I come across them even if I'm in a silent waiting room at the doctor's office. Saying delicious words amuses me.

Neanderthal

Neanderthal is fun to say because Neanderthals are hilarious. Without Neanderthals we wouldn't be here and neither would the 1992 Pauly Shore classic Encino Man. I've never warmed up to pronouncing the hard 't' as in turtle but if you choose to say it that way people will assume you are highly intelligent. This is because intelligent people take pride in pronouncing words differently than you do.

in a sentence:
"Ross Gellar hearts Neanderthals because he is a paleontologist."

magnanimous

Magnanimous is fun to say because
it reminds me of powerful things like magma and magna cum laude and the Magna Carta.
it also sounds like magnesium.
which makes your bones stronger.
{i take a supplement.}

in a sentence:
"How magnanimous is your 5-page Christmas letter summarizing your work promotion/kidney stones/family trip to Branson/recent divorce!"

glorious

Instead of saying something is "good" or "acceptable" or even "minimally adequate," why not add a punch to the conversation with "glorious?" Also, women named Gloria are always nice.

in a sentence(s):
"The motivational speaker at this tradeshow is glorious."
"My invasive dental procedure was glorious, thanks for asking."
"Sure is glorious that the tornado only destroyed a dozen homes."

antagonize

To say the word "antagonize" is to experience a flood of serotonin. Why? Because it contains the word "tag." tag = price tags = shopping.

in a sentence:
"I find shark attacks very antagonizing."

I'm proud to impart on you another priceless life lesson.

2010-12-13T01:17:00.000-08:00

Tonight I address you illegally from the "multipurpose room" of my residential building. I say illegally because I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be locked everyday at 9 p.m. but tonight it wasn't. This room takes up approximately a gaggle square feet and houses a ginormous flat-screen T.V., a pool table, a few plush couches and some leather papisan chairs that are way larger than my king-sized bed.

The multipurpose room is, 97 percent of the time, populated by three-to-five fellow concentrating types also taking advantage of the papisan chairs and chillaxed atmosphere. However at any given time this room features one absolute constant and it is this:

Be it dawn, dusk or noon on a Tuesday, a determined posse of pool gamers will emerge with an insane clown pool posse which is almost but not quite as extreme as the Insane Clown Posse, and most importantly: They will play a very raucous game of pool.

Do you know how loud the game of pool is? I didn't. It's not unlike a tornado alarm combined with the sensation of Satan driving a screwdriver through your temple.

Never before had I sat just a few feet behind a pool table in a huge and echoing though previously silent room as the piercing sound of death raped my cerebellum.

Pool sharks, as it turns out, mean serious ess-aitche-eye-tee. It doesn't matter if it's Monday at 8:00 A.M. and you and everyone else are visibly swigging so much caffeine that you needed a harness and a padded wall ~~several hours ago~~ right now, because pool sharks, they are legit.

Pool sharks need to play pool, like in the biological sense. They will play wherever and whenever life allows it. Your surroundings may have been silenter than Helen Keller before Anne Sullivan and then boom! A pool posse emerges. It is mostly impossible to maintain the air of an oblivious person tending to his or her personal laptop matters alongside a pool posse -- the sooner you realize this, the better.

Immediately after the advent of this pool game you should begin to devise an exit strategy. Pulling off the exit is, of course, a larger feat than it sounds. Your exit path will bisect the pool posse's playing area, there is no way around it. Keep in mind that your facial expressions have historically betrayed every annoyed emotion you've thought you were keeping inside.

You see, everyone in the room will know why you are leaving. A more assertive type might simply ask the pool posse to tone it down, but not you. You make your statement with your abrupt exit. That said, the wisest move in this situation is to become invisible.

If becoming invisible is not in the cards today, think about your favorite scenes from Step Brothers. This will ward off the anger threatening to overtake you.You didn't really need to study/return e-mails/finish grad school applications/pay bills today anyway. Once you've left, soak in the the soothing silence or at least the absence of wooden ballsmacking. Ahhhh...

See? Everyone wins.

taylor miffed

2010-12-03T04:22:00.000-08:00

In our society, not worshiping Taylor is a taboo akin to treason, cannibalism and the KKK.

"la la la, you dumped me and i wrote a song about it and the rain is to emphasize that you're a bastard, laaaa!"

"Imma let you finish..."

That's why I commend you, author of this Deadspin article, with a hug and a deep desire to become your friend, both on the facebook and in real life where I will bring you a venti Gingerbread Latte spiked with an extra shot of awesome.

My admiration is fueled by two parts "I thought I would get stoned if I admitted this" to infinity parts these metaphors:

"Can I unsubscribe to Taylor Swift?"

"FACT: Eighty-five percent of all advertisements and magazine covers are now mandated by law to feature Taylor Swift, or at least some portion of her hair crimping."

"Taylor Swift makes training bra music."

"Her [bleep] is one step removed from a Fisher Price Little People CD."

"Every record she sells should come with a complimentary pack of Spree."

"Every adult music critic on Earth fawns over this girl and protects her like she's some kind of forest pixie. (Editor's note: forest pixie! ahahahhahaha.) SHE'S SO MATURE FOR AGE! SHE HANDLED THAT KANYE SITUATION SO WELL! SHE'S SO ARTICULATE! No, seriously. Someone wrote that."

"Swift's thoughtful honesty and surprisingly articulate take on life should be commended.' HOORAY! SHE'S ALMOST 21 AND HAS THE ABILITY TO SPEAK!"

"It's the soundtrack to a trip to Spencer Gifts."

Crimping irons? Training bra music? Spencer Gifts? I love your metaphors so much I want to platonically marry them. Thank you for the permission slip to come out as a Taylor non-enthusiast/vehement-hater-in-your-case; it's the song of a thousand angels.

And it goes like:

O Taylor thy Swift,
Of thou Jonas Brother thy shall lament
Thine is leggy.
[Harp solo]
Though I walk through thine kingdom of a mountain of 'tweens
I shall fear no evil
For thou shall continue with thine manufactured awkwardness
Forever and ever, amen.
Projectile music notes.

social graces in small spaces

2010-11-28T23:50:00.000-08:00

Elevators are the petri dishes of modern civilization. I know they've been around in one form or another since 212 B.C. and I know this because I just looked it up on Wikipedia, but have you ever contemplated just how bizarre are the dynamics of the elevator? Let's operate under the assumption that you haven't.

It's taken most of my 27 years to pick up on the unwritten code of socially acceptable elevator conduct. If you are younger, say 25 or 26 or even 27 with a March birthday, let my past experience speak to you and teach you things. Your social prowess will blow your future elevator co-riders away! Or maybe you just won't look like an inept freak.

Your mantra:

You're standing in the lobby of the hotel/office building/medical complex all raring to go up, up and away, but before you even think about making flesh-to-surface contact with the up button, repeat these words aloud until your mouth begins to foam: "I will not make eye contact."

I will not make eye contact.

The second you make eye contact, you are finished. Game over. Consequent attempts to act aloof, indifferent, or minimally stable are null and void after you look into someone's eyeballs on an elevator, because, and I hate to say this, you've already lost and the situation is irredeemable. Aside from the fact that you might as well have shouted, "I AM CREEPY!" while square dancing with your imaginary friend Silas, you've also seriously marred the next 30-to-50 seconds of your fellow riders' lives. The only possible exception to this rule is if you find yourself in an elevator with someone you know extremely well, for example, a legal guardian, spouse, or sibling, and even those are gray areas. The savvy elevator rider errs on the side of caution and simply does not make eye contact. Ever.

The entrance:

The ideal entry scenario is one in which you enter from a mid-level floor. The rationale behind this is that in theory, many co-riders originated at or near the first floor and have mellowed since gauging the low threat level. Unfortunately, everyone has to start in the lobby sometimes.

If you walk onto an elevator with, say, two or three or fourteen other people, your options are to: A) Hunker into the nearest open corner and say, "Seventeen please." Eighty percent of the time someone will press17 without incident, but in the 20 percent chance no one hears you, skip to B) which is to elbow your way back toward the door and press the button yourself. As long as we're talking stats, there's a 60 percent chance opting for B will provoke a wiseass comment along the lines of "psssshhhh, you could have asked" from someone standing near the doors. Your third and decidedly most pathetic option, C, is to remain silent and hunkered until you are all alone and then start over.

An addendum to your mantra:

I will look straight up at the floor numbers with the fascination of a cat chasing a ball of yarn.

And I will keep one hand on my keys at all times.

When all else fails:

Hopefully life has taught you by now that the only thing in the world you can control is how you behave. And while you, you rock star, earn a big gold star in elevator finesse, it's still inevitable: There will come a point that you'll encounter an assault from the outside, and like a Boy Scout you must come prepared, because when it rains, it pours.

When a fellow rider attempts to make casual conversation -- like, "Wow, you sure are sweaty!" -- take a deep breath, echo their observation because you are in fact sweaty, and then say something about the weather. Strangers with social skills need not send you into a state of panic, because it turns out elevators make only 98 percent of humans turn into Dwight Schrute. Refreshing, isn't it?

Finally -- listen up, this one's a biggie -- if you become trapped in an elevator, I really don't know what to tell you.

thanks.

2010-11-24T02:17:00.000-08:00

This will be the first of my 27 previous Thanksgivings I've spent not in Texas. I was sad tonight but then realized that I'm thankful for:

- My best friends from home. Because you've stuck with me through middle school, freshman locker escapades, shorts detentions, and general mood swings. That we've stayed close is a blessing I didn't deserve.

- My college housemates and friends. Because you embraced a shy stranger from Texas, brought me home with you on holidays, and became bridesmaids, sisters, and extended family. You made me who I am and I wish we lived closer.

- My friends' babies. Eleanor, Nate, Ben, Elijah, Owen, Asher, Brooks, Brooklyn. Because I will drive hundreds of miles to hang out with you and talk about it for days afterward. Thank you for making me look forward to mommyhood!

- Navy spouses and significant others. Because you're the reason I understand what "it takes a village" means now. I could not have survived the past year and a half without your leadership, even when you didn't think you were leading. Your independence and optimism has set the bar high. You are amazing.

- Navy family. Because you not only risk your lives everyday but provide a living example of brotherhood and sisterhood that movies fail to capture. Your loyalty makes this a little bit easier and I am proud to count you as friends. Thanks for watching over Mike.

- Mom, Dad and Parker. Because you didn't disown me when I was 14. Turns out you weren't kidding when you said you were going tape record me. I found it and it was horrifying. Also, thank you for being my family.

- Mike. Because of far too many reasons to list.

- The roof over my head. Because unfortunate circumstances really can sneak up on anyone.

- Tater tot casserole. Because you didn't burn tonight.

Happy Thanksgiving.

seasonal haikus

2010-11-19T02:25:00.000-08:00

some bangs would look great
said a stylist with scissors
an imprudent choice

dark at four thirty
well isn't this just lovely?
watch lifetime movies

come fly friendly skies
your naked body x-rayed
you too grams mcgee

fifteen dollar wine
tastes better than two buck chuck
fewer headaches

moxie 'til sunrise
obligations, what are they?
rachel put it down

my lil bro who only 7 YRS old hates you to and don't even know what you did and is always blocking your chair haha!

2010-11-17T02:55:00.001-08:00

You make me touch your hands for stupid reasons.

blog therapy

2010-11-15T22:49:00.000-08:00

Judging by most everything I've read, a blog should focus on a single topic and those that don't are useless in the same way that Rubik's cubes, sea horses, and Betamax tapes are useless. But this is problematic on a few levels. If you have a baby, several babies, a horse, a dog, an Etsy shop, a bleeding heart 501(c)(3) nonprofit, or extremist political views, I definitely see the point of carving out a niche audience. Look at Paula Deen, Rick Steves, and the two women who created Awful Library Books. OK fine, just look at the Awful Library Books chicks.

My issue is, what if your interests span so many different directions that to choose one exclusive focus is akin to telling your second favorite child, if you had any that is, that his or her sibling is secretly more interesting and smarter than he or she, and that you expect Favorite Child to do huge things in life and if one of them attends an Ivy League school you're positive it will not be Second Favorite Child?

Furthermore:

When writing, you find it difficult to block mental images of people you know will read this, like your former middle school teacher and your mom's friends (hi!) and your widowed grandmother's 86-year-old man-friend who is hilarious and makes Viagra jokes, and, as a far more technologically savvy entity than his ladyfriend who refuses to embrace the fleeting concept of the internet (your grandmother), shows her everything you write. What if you say something that's risqué or off-color or otherwise capable of bringing shame to your family? And she's all, "Wow, I'm related to that? FML." What then?

Also:

You are hyper-aware of talking about yourself too much. You enjoy, thoroughly in fact, reading about everyone else's lives, their families, their dogs, their Netflix recommendations, it's fascinating. But your writing is a different story because you don't personally find you all that interesting. I mean sure you could think of lesser candidates to be stranded with in a Chilean mine, that much is fair. However real life offers luxuries like interactive cues: facial expressions, vocal intonation, personal space. How do you know if you're violating someone's virtual space, the kind of violating that in real life would make you take nineteen steps backward because you can feel their breath on your cheek, and gross? SEE. You don't.

Aaaaaand I care too much about what people think. But that sure felt good to write.

oh conan where art thou?

2010-11-08T23:40:00.000-08:00

Conan returned to television tonight. Now's as good a time as any to publicly state that I lost a little will to live last January. The day NBC announced it planned to shuffle/cancel/screw Conan was also coincidentally the same day I first attended a live taping with besties Erin, Lindsey, and Amy. I was so excited about it that I lost my appetite for 72 hours prior. He mentioned this in his monologue and I was all, "BAHAHA that's a hilarious bit but it's so preposterous that I know you're going for a farcical effect, HAHA I GET IT!" After the show was over, we went back to our hotel in hopes that the local news would debunk this absurd notion.

Oops, it wasn't a joke. Nausea and denial set in. Also, the realization that depression triggered by the canceling of a television program is probably a psychiatric disorder in the DSM-IV.

He and Will Ferrell played "Freebird" on his final show and I lost a tad more will to live, because who's to say he wouldn't go J.D. Salinger on us and retreat to a grass hut in New Hampshire? Then he said he would be back in November. Nine months sounded like a daunting stretch of time. We saw him on tour in San Diego. I watched his "Inside the Actors Studio" YouTube clips at least a dozen times because NBC had yanked everything else. Nine months passed somehow.

Welcome effing back.

how much for those empty bacardi bottles from 1973?

2010-11-05T00:06:00.000-07:00

Like most people, you've probably asked yourself at one time or another, "Where can I find personalized Christmas yard paraphernalia with falsely placed apostrophes? (like: "Ho Ho Ho from The Miller's!" "Jingle Bell's from the Smith's!" APOSTROPHE = POSSESSIVE! The Miller's what?!!!) Where can I find bulk quantities of used tupperware? Most importantly, where can I find more dialects of bastardized English than in Deliverance and Sling Blade combined?

How much do you love the word "bastardized"?

The answer is First Monday Trade Days in Canton, Texas. Despite its name, the massive outdoor flea market actually takes place the first weekend of each month. The purpose of the Monday part is to confuse you.

Yeah, those are puppies in a stroller.

Somebody hearts the hotel minibar!

I don't know.

Canton epitomizes all the reasons Texas is projectile awesome. The point of Canton is to hoard as much crap as possible that you are positive you will never use or look at again. Highlights of my recent trip include:

First Monday fixtures "Dressin' Gaudy," "Taylored for Texas," and "Bedazzled Bling"
Vintage collections of the obsolete feminine product now identified primarily as half of a slang term that ends in "bag."
The vendor who sells nothing but rusty old spoons. Hey now. At least he monopolizes his market.
Teams of middle-aged women sporting custom printed t-shirts with monikers like:

Mommas Gone Wild
Canton Beat the Feeling!
Glitzy Grannies

Motorized scooters with horns. Hint: Pedestrians do not have the right of way.
Shirtless vendors in overalls shouting borderline threats at elderly patrons

and the ensuing square mile of awkward silence

This book. Which I bought.:


"What a Young Man Ought to Know," from the chapter entitled "The Selection of a Wife." See esp. bottom half.

While ogling over sexist and at times anatomically explicit literature from 1897 is all kinds of superfun, there are also practical, normal person reasons to visit Canton. It's a goldmine for anyone who has an eye for salvageable furniture. My mom and I found a scrillion-year-old wooden trunk for $60 that will become Mike's and my coffee table after some rehabilitative magic.

I love Canton almost as much as cheese. Mmmm, cheese.

more or less self-explanatory iPhotos

2010-11-03T01:27:00.000-07:00

less popular queries appearing in my google search history toolbar

2010-10-11T00:16:00.000-07:00

"Ferris Bueller" + "Kristy Swanson"
"fetal alcohol syndrome"
"fisticuffs"
"foil lodged in throat"
"four letter words that end in 'X'"
"French Antarctic"
"French Lick, Indiana"
"funky cold medina"
"Fun Time Pizza"
"Gary Sinise" + "army commercial"
"gather round you friends of mine"
"get Texas accent back"
"Glenda the townie" + "Oxford, OH"
"goat milk"
"green skin tone"
"Joyce DeWitt"

underrated

2010-10-01T01:26:00.000-07:00

Spinach

If you think you don't like spinach, there is a 97 percent chance that you are wrong. Spinach is delicious. If the last time you ate spinach was more than 15 years ago or if at any point during your formative years you were threatened with severe punishment unless you finished all of your green vegetable, it is almost certain that pent up resentment is clouding your feelings toward spinach. Your palate has most likely evolved since you were a child. If you are over age 25 you probably watched Double Dare, attended a New Kids on the Block concert, drank Capri-Sun and got maniacally excited at the prospect of playing inside a cardboard box. Would you say your interests have changed
since then? Spinach is underrated.

Abe Vigoda

Abe Vigoda has looked 95 for at least 30 years. There is no plausible scientific explanation for this phenomena and it raises the possibility that he will live forever. Sometimes the news reports that he has died, but they are wrong. Abe Vigoda was in The Godfather and his eyebrows have their own ZIP code. Abe Vigoda is underrated.

Car horns

If you are having a bad day or someone has challenged your authority, your car horn can show the world you are not to be effed with. The boldest car horn statements are best achieved on residential streets or medium density roads with names ending in "Avenue" or "Boulevard." Execution of the car horn need not be provoked by an offensive traffic maneuver; what's important is that you communicate to surrounding cars how in control of your life you are. Try this next time you feel slighted and I think you too will agree that car horns are underrated.

Unicorns

Unicorns are horses that can fly, and besides that what else matters? Unicorns are the only mythological creatures that made it next to the neon puppies and dolphins on Lisa Frank's folders, but don't let the business about fairies and rainbows and sparkly dust fool you. The unicorn is no lightweight and could easily win in a fight against a bear due to its horn and aforementioned ability to fly. Unicorns, therefore, are underrated.

Jem

Jem is a rock star who can switch into a normal person whenever she wants by getting hologrammed. When not touring or lounging in the hot tub on the roof of her limo, Jem runs an orphanage for girls. Jem is underrated.

Not watching football

This weekend when your spouse, friends and loved ones head to a bar at 9:00 A.M. to eat chicken wings and watch grownups collide with each other until the sun goes down, sit at home alone and watch ABC Family. Conformity is overrated and for that reason, not watching football is underrated.

that one time in third grade i got interrogated in a scary dark room: part II

2010-09-29T14:23:00.000-07:00

One day, the school counselor plucked me out of class and took me to her office. Getting sent to the counselor’s office carried some unsavory connotations because back then the only kids I knew who saw the counselor had oppositional defiant disorder or brought pocket knives to school or took their pants off in the middle of the cafeteria. It was like getting sent to the principal but more extreme, because everyone knew that you had not only conduct issues, you also had THOSE kind of issues.

Her office, lit only by a small lamp in the corner, had all the ambience of a dark womb. I sat on the standard therapy couch and she began to ask questions.

How are you feeling today?

Is something making you blue?

Do you ever think about running away?

Are your mom and dad nice to you?

The questions then became more specific. I detected nuances of ABC after school special.

Since her verbal coercion tactics hadn't yet elicited a signed admission that my parents regularly starved me and my brother and kept us locked in a cage at night and in general subjected us to a childhood of torture and neglect, she handed me a piece of paper and drew four circles on it. (I added Maggie.) It looked like this:

"I want you to draw a face on each of your family members."

WTF, lady? This just got Freudian.

I handed her this:

She asked me if my dad was ever mean to me. I said not really. Then there was silent staring. The kind of silent staring that makes the last person to speak feel obligated to say more words, any words, because the conversational ball is still in their court and it is not socially acceptable for two people to be staring at one another in a dark room not saying any words.

"Sometimes he changes the channel when I watch TV."

Let's just say that if one were to create a flow chart out of the next 30 minutes, each box would be followed by a series of arrows and they'd all lead to one giant box labeled "OMG CHILD ABUSE CALL CPS!!!!!!1"

While she talked more about feelings and how everyone has them and they're OK to talk about and this is a safe place and would I like a lollipop, I embellished my family portrait with crayons until it looked approximately like this:

Puppies! Rainbows! Even the sun is smiling! WE ARE SO DAMN HAPPY!

I never figured out what was behind my surprise visit to the counselor's office, but I also forgot about it later that day because I was eight and possessed the attention span of a gnat.

Turns out the answer has stared me in the face all these years and I was too blind to see it until now. It hit me at once via a mid-afternoon highway epiphany.

Miss Cecil told the counselor I was emotionally disturbed.

that one time in third grade i got interrogated in a scary dark room: part I

2010-09-28T19:45:00.000-07:00

You know those trivial events in elementary school that you forgot about right after they happened until one day you're driving 19 years later and a major epiphany punches you in the temple and you're like, "OH! NOW I GET IT!" and then you almost drive off the 163 overpass?

I have enormous respect for teachers, especially because when I worked as a substitute I got a fleeting glimpse of how hard it is. It was still hard even when I knew I didn't have to do it again tomorrow, or again ever if I didn't want to. Teachers are superheroes!

But my third grade teacher Miss Cecil* was mean. So very mean. She was M-E-A-N written in pitchforks oozing with blood and she hated all but two of the students in our class, a boy and a girl. Outside the elite two, the rest of of us were ostensibly inbred leprosy-ridden half-orangutans that left a constant trail of clown drool behind us. She was one of those teachers that made you wonder why the hell she chose to be a teacher in the first place.

I remember scratching my head brainstorming careers I thought she'd enjoy more than teaching, like being an astronaut, a doctor, or a Girl Scout troop leader, i.e. the only other professions that existed in the world. Gauging from her bitter factor alone, you would think she was a 70-year-old spinster with silver hair and lipstick on her teeth. But she was actually 26, 5' feet tall and blonde. Her fiancé was a really nice man who used to bring our class cookies... cookies!

I can't truly convey the ~~soul-crushing, miserable and heartless B~~ unsavory educational experience that was Miss Cecil's classroom, but do allow me to share a few of the more memorable behavioral gems, including her habits of:

Reading everyone's spelling test scores aloud without missing a beat until she'd get to a remedial kid. "Timmy 98, Susie 102, Johnny... hmmm Johnny, are you sure you want me to read it out loud?" Guess what everybody? Johnny failed. This was the perfect opportunity to have him explain dyslexia to the rest of the class.

Calling my parents in for a conference during which she hinted to them their daughter might be functionally illiterate after one time I underperformed on the writing portion of a standardized pretest. We were supposed to describe an elephant, but I had a 103 degree fever and did not care one iota about describing this elephant or its sharp mollusks or cascading trunk. I just wanted to live. Miss Cecil expressed shock a few months later when I won the class spelling bee. "Well, I never thought I'd see the day you'd beat [boy contingent of elite two] in spelling!"

See first item and substitute "spelling test scores" with "personal weight." I wish I was making this up. I think it was Presidential Fitness Test Week and we were about to get judged on our push-up and toe-touching skillz, which I was actually decent at since I am a freak of nature whose arm span makes Inspector Gadget's go-go gadget arm look like a pygmy stump. Anyway, nothing motivates plump kids to get moving and snack on carrot sticks like calling more attention to their size, especially when there's only one plump kid in the class. Hey, that's not obvious. "Sure you want me to read this out loud, Sally?"

Confronting me in the girls bathroom demanding an explanation as to why I hadn't invited a classmate to my birthday party. I stammered through my reasons, which I felt were valid enough... at first: "I only invited two girls from class... My parents said I could only have eight people... I went to a different school in second grade, I still have ummm, friends there... lostinthemail?" Miss Cecil: "You know you were wrong to exclude her." Me: [overcome with guilt. tears].

Stay tuned for the climax of "That One Time In Third Grade I Got Interrogated In a Scary Dark Room."

*All names extremely changed for obvious reasons.

that time i accidentally conducted a physics lab in my elevator

2010-09-22T14:41:00.000-07:00

I waited until the last possible minute of my senior year in high school to take physics, and I didn't retain ~~a whole lot of~~ any knowledge except: A) that the immaculate conception MUST have really happened because I somehow ended up with an 89.5 and therefore an exemption from the final through prayer alone and B) the definitions of velocity and momentum.

Actually I'm not sure I remember the definitions verbatim. E = mc² may or may not be relevant to one or both, but who cares? What I do know is that Mr. Velocity and his lady friend Mizz Momentum both played a significant role this morning when my keys fell through the elevator crack and into the hereafter.

I first noticed that the crack in our building's elevator is really effing wide soon after we moved in. If most cracks leading to elevator shafts look like this:

_______

Ours looks like this:

It's so gaping that I trip/stumble/faceplant over it on average twice a week. The most memorable such occasions are, of course, when fellow residents whose feet, groceries or small dogs I've accidentally stepped on during the tripping process, bear witness to the folly and then ride with me for ten more floors, because what fun is eating tile if nobody sees it?

So I'm standing in the elevator this morning headed down to 5P when I realize I left something important. Back home I go. I kneeled down to zip my bag after thinking, "Hmm, I better zip my bag, wouldn't want anything to fall out!" (Foreshadowing?) When the door opened, I was still messing with the zipper. I took a giant leap forward à la Neil Armstrong in a doomed attempt to keep it open.

I was still mid-stride as my keys, my precious keys, the keys to my home, my car, the mailbox, the magic clicker that opens the gate, the other magic clicker that grants access to the pool, my gym, the threadbare Miami University keychain that's held my life together since I was 20, my Spicy Pickle swipey, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD MY SPICY PICKLE SWIPEY, plummeted out of my jeans pocket and slipped through the cracks into wherever it is that elevator shafts stop.

Which guess what, is somewhere really far away because I'm pretty sure six minutes elapsed between the keys' initial descent and the faint, echoing crash I heard somewhere way, way below. I'm all stunned for a second, talking to myself out loud asking, "Did that just happen?" Once I determined that that had, in fact, happened, I set out in search of Chuck the maintenance guy. The idealist in me said, "Don't fret, pet! It can't be that hard to break into an elevator shaft! I'm sure Chuck will save the day!"

The idealist in me was wrong.

Chuck said that to gain access to the elevator shaft, the elevator company itself would have to come out from Manitoba or something and shut off the whole city's power and plumbing and we would have to ration food for months and nuclear war would break out between PB and OB and then Glee would get canceled! A watered down version of this, anyway. He told me that a couple of other unlucky souls lost their keys the same way over the past month or so, and they're still waiting to hear from the elevator people. In other words, don't hold your breath.

So onward I must go. Although I mourn the loss of my keys and especially my beloved Miami keychain, I'm amazed at the show of support from friends, some of whom have apparently lived in fear of what would happen if they dropped their keys into an elevator shaft. Some text messaged responses:

Mom: "That's been my greatest fear in life."

LMack: "AHAHAHAHA, only you would do that."

Anonymous: "I hold my breath and clutch my keys to my chest every time I step into an elevator."

Wes: "I always wondered if that ever happened to anyone."

Well Wes, it does happen, and there's life on the other side... I'm just not sure how I'm going to get back into my apartment.

rodeos, outhouses, five star hotels, and beatnik bookstores

2010-09-12T23:28:00.000-07:00

We couldn't leave our little slice of trailer heaven without stopping next door at the branding competition.

We took "the fast way" out of the mountains per the advice of our new mustache-y cowboy friends. This speedy escape included a separate 9,600 ft. highway pass with zero guardrails, i.e. I held my breath for two-and-a-half hours while debating whether it would be scarier to drive off a 9,600 ft. elevation traveling uphill... or downhill? Jury's still out.

We stopped in Bodie, and by "stopped," I mean off-roaded up four miles of tire-piercing rocks. It was pretty much the coolest thing I've ever seen. Heard of it?

Bodie (rhymes with "body") was a bustling mining camp that once had 10,000 residents at the height of the gold rush. It's been abandoned for eons but now it's a California State Park, which means its hundreds of buildings aren't allowed to fall over because the state says so dang it! The interiors of the buildings are all untouched. We saw a brothel, a church, a jail, a mortuary, tons of outhouses, gambling halls, a full gymnasium with swingy acrobat rings, and dozens of normal people homes. We loved Bodie!

We drove back to San Francisco that afternoon and got lucky with a last minute rate at the Ritz which included a surprise upgrade... club level! And then for the next two days our view looked like this:

City Lights Books, owned by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the last living Beat poet.

The lesson to extract from our weekend is that if at first you don't plan well and spend the night breathing in possible aesbestos at a skeevy mountain dive, dust yourself off, go to Bodie, drive back to where you came from and have faith that the Ritz offers military discounts. It worked for us.

Won't you be my neighbor? Labor Day, Part II

2010-09-10T20:35:00.000-07:00

Truth be told I was surprised when MP was all "YEAH!!!" about staying here considering it was sketchy and we hadn't yet trekked through the dark, starving cat-populated alley to check it out/make sure there were no varmints/roaches/dead hookers in our home for the evening. Also, you could easily hide a dead person there for a long time but hey! It's called faith. And hunger. And it hurt. Wanted burger. Beer. I asked Innkeeper Jean if this place had a physical address, should we misplace the hand-drawn mapkin. This did not sit well with her. Touchy subject, I suppose?

After inhaling dinner we decided hey, why quit now? There was a honky tonk down the road crawling with real cowboys in ten gallon hats and Wranglers and boots and epic handlebar mustaches I wanted to touch and ask questions about. Like, how long did it take to grow? Do you have "bad 'stache days?" How often do people come up to you and ask "who wants a mustache ride?" If someone cut it off in the middle of the night while you slept because they were mad at you, would you be devastated? So in we went. They were in town for a cattle branding competition. We made a couple of new cowboy friends and were all "Now THIS is America! Could this trip get any better!? WE LOVE BRIDGEPORT, CALIFORNIA!!!!!!!"

Then we went "home." Tee-hee.

Turns out our home for the night was not only situated between two trailers, yes ladies and gents, but was itself a close relative of a double wide from circa the Eisenhower administration. Care for a walking tour?

Curb appeal!

First we have the furnished living room. This plush couch is an example of the Native American-meets-"Full House" design motif. Bonus: You can push me a couple of feet to the left as a barricade against the front door, in case the deadbolt has been forcibly removed. And it has.

Tons of natural light! The sagging, sans-ring curtain is a cutting edge trend in window treatments.


A personal VHS library for your convenience. The thick layer of dust coating the collection is is all you need to rest assured that A) these tapes are in barely-used condition, and B) No one has stayed here for a long, long time. The TV doesn't work, but go ahead, take home "Boys on the Side." ;-) We won't tell. Whoopi Goldberg's finest hour. Onto the kitchen. Upon testing the non-functional stove, the corpse of a spider may fly into your face... Don't worry, this is normal.

The autumnal cabinet appliques are from Pottery Barn's new line, "Grandma's Fall Harvest." Really takes you back, huh?

As we enter the master bedroom, keep in mind that this rare painting is in no way an attempt to hide a large gaping hole in the wall behind it.


You may choose to sleep fully clothed on a palette of towels, like these guests did -- and that's OK.**

Tons of storage! Free mop.

Stunning views.

**At the time these photos were taken, the bathroom was not camera-ready. This day marked the first time these particular guests dry-heaved at the sight of a bathroom sink.

But wait, it's not over. Third and final installment forthcoming.

Labor Day: Part 1

2010-09-08T21:51:00.000-07:00

Last-minute road trips are basically my reason for living, so when Southwest DING-ed in Friday morning with SAN - SFO sub-Greyhound fares, my Labor Day weekend equation was clear: MP off until Wednesday + I work in pajamas = God himself affirming His will that we SHALL fly to San Francisco tomorrow morning and drive an economy-sized rent car eastward through the Sierra Nevada! MP liked this.

The only glitch in ~~our~~ my plan is that Yosemite took a long, long time to drive through -- all of it beautiful, of course, but, well, LOOOOOOOOOOONG, especially since we entered the park at 5ish in the afternoon. Long drives are awesome except when I'm hungry. And I was. So very, very hungry. MP was hungry too of course (insert fact that he's gone through POW training where he ate only leaves and bugs whilst getting punched in the eye sockets for lots of consecutive days and OMG I'm starving just typing this, my husband is titanium steel). We were all, please Lord, give us rest.

And this wasn't so much a function of fear of starving to death as we didn't want to drive two more hours to Carson City to eat and sleep. Because, hunger > safe overnight accommodations.

We gave up in Bridgeport, CA pop. 817, starving and tired. Most of the hotels said "No Vacancy" in obnoxious neon lights, but there was this one place! Clearly "vintage," but who cares!? WHAT IF WE COULD STAY HERE AND THEREFORE EAT A HAMBURGER SOON!!? We walked into the smell of 1885 and a sign on the door that said "Knock Here." The rest was straight from the movies. Have you ever seen "Funny Farm?"

Jean, the innkeeper, walked out to the lobby to greet us barefoot in a nightgown. We asked if she had vacancy and she said while the actual hotel was booked that night, she did have a "house" she rented out... "back that way," she said, pointing toward the pitch black alley-within-an-alley behind the hotel, and she'd even give us a special rate. Hallelujah. She took a special liking to Mike and touched him whenever possible.

Jean's selling points:

"It's got a TV!"
"And a bed!"
(My self-observation of next door restaurant, somehow still open. People eating burgers. Salivation.)
"Now, it's nothin' fancy, ya hear?"

We'll take it.

***

To be continued, but first, a preview:

"I'm gonna draw you a map now... Pay attention or you'll get yerself lost!"

"It's between the white trailer..."

"and the yellah trailer."

Part 2 is unspeakably glorious, the yin to Saturday night's yang. Until then....

Rachwill

that dog looks very uncomfortable.

2010-08-25T01:20:00.000-07:00

If ever, and I mean ever, you find yourself moping about on a rainy day feeling sorry for yourself because you never really fit in as a child, please slap yourself in the face and take a moment to meditate over the two "superheroes" I dressed as on "Hero Day" in first and second grades respectively:

1st grade:

Juliette Gordon Low, founder, Girl Scouts of America. Deaf.

Samoas are delicious.

2nd grade:

Helen Keller, Miracle Worker/BFF to Anne Sullivan. Also: Deaf.

I don't remember why I chose her but that dog looks very uncomfortable.

howdy y'all

2010-08-17T22:58:00.000-07:00

Outside their state I think Texans are a little frightened and very tender in their feelings, and these qualities cause boasting, arrogance, and noisy complacency -- the outlets of shy children. At home Texans are none of these things.

-- John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley, i.e. why I was fated to be an English major.

Sometimes, I write stuff because after stewing over something random I become convinced that my thoughts are SO DEEP and might even benefit someone else a smidgen, omg please let that be the case!? Other times, I write stuff because something funny happened that day, or because I had an epiphany about California drivers or how depressing the film Easy Rider is even though I'm kind of jealous they got to do that, or about Larry King's imminent mortality or how badly I want a dog. Still other times, I write stuff because I find myself in my childhood bedroom and it's 102 degrees at 11:00 P.M. and realize I haven't bloggety-blogged in almost a month, like I have this super important life that includes children/professional direction/pressing obligations apart from posing as an adult?

Overlapping with the above scenarios is that sometimes when I'm in Texas, like now, I wish I could freeze time. Even though I haven't spent more than a few days in the August heat since 2005 and had forgotten how grueling it is, and even though I choke when trying to inhale oxygen outside until nighttime, and despite that my parents' deceptive air conditioning unit displays 67 degrees, which guess what Honeywell, is a total farce since you and I both know you won't dip below 80 until well into October... Even still, I don't care. I wish I could freeze time right now.

I went to college in Ohio and have since lived in four different cities. During one spring break phone conversation with Amy shortly before graduation, I remember saying, "Guess what: I'm not Coppell anymore!"

Umm?

I choose implicitly to NOT revisit what exactly "I'm not Coppell anymore!" was supposed to mean in my co-ed spring breaking, hot-dang-i'm-evolved mind, but wow. Someone had gotten too big for her Texas britches. Oh, but she was wrong. She had no idea she'd live in D.C., then Chicago for three years, Dallas again and then San Diego and the only accent she'd pick up along the way was a Midwestern one and she'd love it. Or that she'd get married and make a life with Mike in California, a great one, but that Texas would be home for them forever and she wouldn't recognize herself or the love of her life if it were any other way.

run forrest

2010-07-21T01:11:00.000-07:00

I ran two miles today on the treadmill which would be a non-event except that I used to be an insane runner in college. I mean I was insane, but I didn't realize it until I moved to Chicago and eventually stopped running altogether. And by insane I mean I ran 50+ miles per week just because I could. Because like Forrest Gump, who said the reason he ran across the country was "because I could," I too realized that my motivation to run was "because I could." Which, BTW, is a terrible reason to run, my knees still crack every time I climb a stair.

But these were the hilly back roads of Ohio and nearly Indiana, actually one time I really did run to Indiana, and it's just blissful. The dogs hang out in the same spot in their big farm backyards and each day they bark at you like they've never seen you before even though they see you at roughly the same time everyday, and this assurance is always comforting even though they seem quite disturbed that your strange body is in their field of vision traversing their cornfields.

Anyway, to this day I wish I could have packed up Chestnut Rd./Brookville Rd./OH State Rt. 732, because my route had lots of names, in my suitcase after graduation. Except maybe not, because I was insane. Also, in retrospect, I'm not sure running umpteen miles each day alone into the cornfields of rural America was, I dunno, safe? But here's what's even worse: I talked about running ALLTHETIME, to my friends who didn't run, or if they did, ran a normal amount, i.e. not for two hours each day. Seriously all the time. "OMG here's what I do when I come across roadkill/my iPod runs out/I have a test to study for but instead I'm going to run because I'm JUST THAT HARDCORE and omg the fact that I run for a long time is SO relevant to your life and all our conversations, no all of them." I bore myself just imagining the conversations I subjected my friends to. Sorry y'all.

My point if I have one is that ever since I stopped my compulsive nuttybuckets running, I've been scared of running at all, which aligns perfectly with my other avoidance issues. But back in the day I ran half marathons and trained up until one week before a full one (stupid stress fracture) and by gosh, I might still be legit? But wait, dear my life: maybe this time I could be not insane?

our town

2010-07-15T01:37:00.000-07:00

Read this article first.

One of my first ever real memories is the day Coppell got a grocery store. It was a big deal because before Minyard's opened, we had to drive to Carrollton, a town away. It was 1986, population nothing, and I was pushing four years old. We were a farming community with two elementary schools, one middle school/high school hybrid, and a lot of cows.

Today, Coppell is larger and louder, but as much as the population and amount of traffic lights have exploded, it still feels a lot like 1986 to me. The last few times I've gone home after an extended period away, the same thing comes to mind: "The more things change, the more they stay the same." The six-mile route I used to run is still just as green, the bleachers on the little league fields are still just as packed, and the neighbors are still vehemently aware of the unchaperoned party your 17-year-old had while you were out of town. My college friends who've visited call it idyllic and things like "Pleasantville" and "Mayberry." Was it perfect? Absolutely not. Life there was pretty typical of upper-middle class suburbia: protected and sheltered but as susceptible to growing pains as the next town. Our teachers were involved, our parents held accountable and so, by extension, were we. And that, I suspect, kept me out of heaps of trouble. My hometown, like an old friend, is a familiar place, safe on so many levels.

And that's why the news of the apparent murder-suicide of Coppell's mayor Jayne Peters and her teenage daughter Corinne is so shattering. I can count on about three fingers the number of violent crimes that have occurred in Coppell since I've been alive. Few, if any, have involved children, certainly none in this brutal manner. I knew Jayne Peters in high school through Coppell Youth Leadership. She was our facilitator, and herself a Miami grad. I've tried to picture my friends and I at her daughter Corinne's age, right after graduation, and how we would have dealt with something like this. Like most fresh-out-of-high-schoolers, we were consumed with things like where we were meeting that night, and what outfit we'd wear to the first day of sorority recruitment. And maybe that's a testament to how sheltered we were, but I think that's kind of the point for people who make their lives and raise their families in a place like Coppell. It's a good sheltered.

And my hope here is not to defend anything about this woman or what she did, but to acknowledge the morale tonight in a town that 24 years ago didn't have a grocery store, and 24 hours ago would never have believed that today would ever happen. Because Coppell just grew up in the saddest of ways.

read this if you like crazy

2010-07-02T19:05:00.000-07:00

Ever seen the video of that chick who shrieks so loud it shatters a mirror? If not, imagine the noise you might make if a one-eyed sloth grabbed you in a dark alley and shoved an axe in your face.

This is the sound I woke up to last night, and by "this" I mean the most guttural, sternum-rattling scream I've ever heard not on a movie. I went out to our third floor balcony ready to dodge bullets because heck, clearly some woman in major distress needed rescue from a heroic samaritan like myself, RIGHT!?? What I saw in our circle drive was a guy in a hoodie sitting on the curb and a girl who definitely watches Jersey Shore standing over him acting all satanic. So I hollered down at "Snooki," let's call her, to ask if she was OK, obviously a redundant question because who screams like that to communicate that things are hunky dory?

This is a transcript of what followed:

Rachel: Are you OK?
Snooki: CALL THE COPS!
Rachel: Do you live here?
Snooki: I used to.
Guy in Hoodie: Give me back my keys.
Snooki (stumbling): @&*$&**@$##$$@^^@*!!!
Snooki, (trips over curb; stays down): Callllthahcoppphhsss!!!!!!!

Oh yes, Snooki is wasteface. So I'm debating whether to call 911 at this point, because it would go something like, "Um hi, this wasted girl who looks like Snooki is screaming at a boy in a hoodie who wants his keys back and I'm not sure why I'm calling you but she used to live here!" and then, PHEW, the police zoom up in a blaze of glory, because did they hear the scream too?

Snooki, seconds ago a 187 on a 1-100 drunk scale, suddenly regained the ability to stand up and walk and speak normally again, PTL, IT'S A MIRACLE! Guy in Hoodie gets handcuffed and they're both questioned for 15 or so minutes. Well, he's questioned while Snooki pouts on the curb a few yards away. Finally, an officer has her sign something and she drives off (yeeee, bad idea) in a Mercedes. Guy in Hoodie, presumably her ex-boyfriend, gets de-cuffed and what follows is, no joke, what he tells the cops:

He came home.
She was sitting on his couch. In the dark.
Rip-roaring drunk.
They broke up three months ago and he hadn't seen her since.
He didn't know she had keys to his apartment.
Until tonight.

mario what?

2010-06-30T01:04:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer time: I know down to my soul's deepest core that one major tenet in life is that nobody should begin a sentence with: "So I had the craaaaaaziest dream last night..." Because guess what, no one, including and maybe especially, your mom cares at all and guess who's the sole lonely human interested in analyzing your dreams? That's right, you.

So please forgive me in advance for asking if anyone else has had the dream where you are given the brand new version of Mario Kart. But wait, you've never played Mario Kart in real life, in fact you haven't played a video game since Santa brought you the original Super Mario Bros. when you were like five. And here you are playing this ultra shiny new Mario Kart game that you knew nothing about until rightthissecond yet you find yourself overcome with disappointment because you expected so much more?

Hey! It's OK

2010-06-29T19:32:00.000-07:00

So a few weeks ago we went to one of my favoritest most kindredest friend ever Laura's wedding in Westport, Ontario, Canada but first we had to fly from San Diego to Rochester, NY (fun fact: Rochester = close to Westport, Ontario, Canada) and by that I mean we flew the most miles any human has ever flown in the history of ever while staying within the contiguous United States. WOW, you're saying, THAT'S FAR!

All told with layovers and sucky Delta baggage-losingness, both trips exceeded, oh, 13 hours? In Rachel time this equals 1,273,91992 hours because I can't sit still for longer than five minutes unless I'm thoroughly engrossed in a book or magazine or crossword puzzle or game on my iPhone that I will hide underneath my jacket while the flight attendants make the announcement to turn off all electronics right now OR ELSE. I'm like a 4-year-old at church who's somersaulting all over the pews during the sermon and everyone is all, "Shut your kid up!" until ~~Mike~~ the kid's parents finally cough up a coloring book or some Cheerios or a pot and a wooden spoon. Anyway, the point is that the second leg of this particular flight required that I wipe out the supply of every newsstand at the Detroit airport because, oops I read my whole book in < 3 hours, thanks a lot speedreading class I took in middle school.

So there I am holding my huge plastic bag of magazines, well my former bag because its bottom fell out due to the National Forest worth of glossy dead trees it had been carrying. You know what two magazines make me kind of ashamed to be a female? Glamour and Cosmo, especially this one "column," term applied loosely, in Glamour that makes me feel the same way I do during the rose ceremony on "The Bachelor," i.e. like I've just forgotten everything I learned in ~~college~~ preschool plus basic motor skills. It's called "Hey, It's OK!:" and its purpose is to assure all the middle class, presumably white females ages 18-34 that their wackiest, MOST OUTRAGEOUS secret behaviors are in fact quite normal. Here are some examples of what, hey, it's OK! to do (emphasis and emoticons mine):

to wear that dress to TWO weddings!!!!!!!!!! We won't tell!!!!!
to begin thinking about lunch at 9:35 A.M. We won't tell!!
to buy it without trying it on!!!!!!!!
to shove it in your closet and call your place clean!!!!! Secret's safe with us! ;-) ;-)
to eat Bon Bons in sweatpants on your couch all weekend when that jerk stops calling for no reason. You go, girl!!!!! P.S. We won't tell!!

Now I don't know about you, but I find little-to-zero shock value in any of these scenarios. I've personally done everything on this list, well if you replace "eat Bon Bons" with "kill a case of Charles Shaw while you watch 'Dawson's Creek: The Complete Series' from start to finish and therefore don't leave your apartment from Friday until Monday." Hey, it was a long time ago. Call me crazy but it never occurred to me that I should feel guilty. Since my guilt threshold is clearly much less sensitive than Glamour's when it comes to things like household chores, fitting room habits, and meal planning timelines, allow me to throw out a few suggestions from the personal archives?

Hey! It's OK:

that in order to enter your walk-in closet you must first step inside a large moving box still half-full of clothes despite having moved in a hair shy of two months ago.
to have indicated for months on your calendar that 6:30 P.M. one week from today is the one-year anniversary of when you got the Most Godawful Mullet from Hell that You're Still Recovering from Emotionally, Physically and Spiritually (MGMHYSREPS), and whose trauma outweighed the combined aftermath of both the 1992 Coppell Cuttery perm that earned you the nickname "Chelsea" as in Clinton for a solid year and the time in second grade you sought revenge against your parents by butchering your own bangs to the length and texture of ragged toothbrush bristles. Boo-ya, mom and dad!!!!!
that you plan to light a candle in memoriam at 6:30 P.M. one week from today while singing "Bridge Over Troubled Water."
to spend two hours reading WebMD articles on gluten allergies because today you decided that you definitely have one.
that you know the names of > 5 employees who work at the Chick fil-A on Sports Arena and you also kind of know who works when.
that one time you initiated an abrasive political e-mail war with one of your best friends when after the 2004 presidential election she forwards a lighthearted e-mail about average IQ levels in the red states and OMG you're from a red state, and your parents are raging Republicans and how dare she question their intellect! so you immediately reply all, "all" being your shared closest seven friends at school, in fact you even add a few because the more the merrier, and your performance as a humorless, hypersensitive a$$hat is witnessed by all, but wait, what you don't know is that five seconds after you press "send" you shall crumble into a pathetic pile of remorse that shall include the guilt-sob which BTW is the opposite of subtle and oh yeah, you're at King Library and it's 10:00 P.M. on the Sunday before finals.

But hey... it's OK.

natural disasters

2010-06-26T02:06:00.000-07:00

I have earthquake paranoia. It's not that I'm scared of them exactly, I just always think they're happening. Is that a ripple I spy in my water glass? TAKE COVER! We didn't have these growing up in Texas. We had tornadoes, lots of them, and they petrified me. When we were little my parents would wake my brother and I in the middle of the night during horrific storms, sirens blaring, and bring us downstairs in case, you know, our house happened to get leveled to dust. Tornadoes are big and black and loud and pick you up off the ground and shred cars to bits, and who wasn't emotionally scarred by "The Wizard of Oz?" With earthquakes it's more of an intense fascination. I mean, the earth's crust is moving and we can feel it and hear it. Read that a few more times... pretty deep, huh? Also, I just felt an earthquake.

Fair Fare

2010-06-22T19:15:00.000-07:00

a year

2010-05-14T17:29:00.000-07:00

It's funny, the stuff that grabs you by the wrists as if to shout, "I'm talking to you!" My writing teacher Carmen said something in class a few months ago that I doubt she even remembers, but it sure settled over my psyche that night. She was talking about her mother's death and how afterward she couldn't bring herself to write, quite a conundrum for someone who writes for a living. She felt paralyzed for months. And then she realized that she couldn't write anything until she wrote about her mother.

Mike was involved in a helicopter accident a year ago May 19th. The official Navy term is "mishap," which to me is like calling a landfill a little bit dirty. I have attempted to write about it several times. The process would go something like this: Open laptop. Click "New Document." Stare at blank document. Write single sentence. Delete sentence (repeat 2-37 times). Become aware of unpleasant feelings. Close laptop. Open wine bottle. Pleasant, this is not. It makes me sick to my stomach. But it's necessary.

What I remember about that Wednesday morning is that my life turned into a garbled TV searching for its signal, an incoherent mess that would flash a split second of a clear picture. I was visiting my parents in Dallas; Mike was out on a workup in preparation for his upcoming deployment. They were just off the San Diego coast and we'd been married almost seven weeks. My mom told me to come downstairs with an uncharacteristic urgency in her voice. She said there had been an accident.

I said of course Mike's squadron wasn't involved; there were more than 5,000 sailors on his ship, what were the chances? I sputtered this aloud more as a statement than question, but she said, yes, his squadron. I still remember the headline on CNN: "Three dead, two missing after Navy helicopter crash off San Diego." Some time later -- maybe seconds, maybe minutes -- the names of Mike's carrier and squadron flashed across the ticker. The aircraft had crashed into the water around 11:30 P.M. In a cruel anomaly, we had spoken on the phone a few hours before they went down. It was the first and only time we'd ever talked while he was on a helicopter. I couldn't understand a lot because of the rotor blades but I had heard him say "takeoff" before we hung up. Navy helicopters fly two at a time. He was either on the downed helicopter or flying alongside them, knowledge I'd wish away for the next four hours.

My mom was on the phone with Mike's dad all morning. Mom announced they had decided that the scant details from the media and the fact that we'd talked when we did were "good signs." I responded by throwing up twice.

I breathed the last full breath I'd take that morning and then shut down. Not physically yet, though I'd do that too in a few minutes. Know how I would've predicted I'd be? Hysterical, inconsolable, would need to be around people, but I went silent. I prayed to God to let me slip into a coma until this was over. Kathie Lee and Hoda blared in the background and I wanted to take a bat to the TV. Perky is such an unwelcome companion when faced with the 50/50 odds that your husband might be dead. My mom said we should go on a walk, so we did. It lasted half a block. Calls and text messages poured in from our friends and families, but it was too hard to take them. Their desperate tones made this too real for me and my M.O. of avoidance. I answered only one call that morning.

I had lived at Amy's apartment in La Mesa a few months earlier when she'd gone to Massachusetts to be with her family while her husband, also a Navy pilot, was deployed. I'm sure she expected a blubbering mess and not catatonic silence, but it was OK because she did all the talking. She assured me that no news was probably good news, that the ship's email and phone systems always shut down in this type of situation, and that's probably why I hadn't heard from him. Our ten minute conversation was the eye in a storm I feared had just begun.

As morning stretched into afternoon, one thing replayed over and over. I can't do this. A "can't" more laden with conviction than anything I'd ever believed. A "can't" that drowned in helplessness and sucked the air from my lungs. I guess I'd figured hypothetically that some divine wave of strength or faux-optimism would wash over me and I'd keep my hard-ass exterior. I didn't. No hypothetical can prepare anyone for this.

The only definite was that even if Mike was on the safe aircraft, five of his squadron mates, dear friends, mentors, people we loved and drank beers with and considered family, were gone. Five families and hundreds of friends would have to go on without them. Never again would I define "relief" the same way. No winners would emerge.

I shut down my computer, turned off the news and prayed desperate prayers to God in which I bargained, begged, and pleaded for his safety. I asked God if he'd considered rewinding time back to before the crash, because he can do anything, right? Seriously. I prayed for time travel.

My phone rang again at about noon and it was Mike's dad. I knew this was it. We'd been married for so little time that he hadn't changed over the next of kin contact from his dad yet. I stared at the phone wishing I could move to a third-world jungle for the rest of my life, because at that moment, I wanted permanent ignorance more than the truth. Answering meant no turning back, no more dodging the reality that lay ahead. Pressing that stupid green button felt like jumping out of a plane without a parachute.

Mike was OK. He had just emailed us both, but since I'd quarantined myself from outside communication, I hadn't seen it. I called my family and our closest friends and managed to squeak out the news. Then I just sat. And gasped for air. For as long as I could. When my arms and wrists regained strength, I signed into email and there it was. Proof. He said he was OK and would call as soon as he could and to please not worry. And then he said, "I'm sorry we couldn't talk on the phone longer last night." He'd just seen five close friends crash into the Pacific and he was the one comforting me.

My experience is, obviously, nothing compared to the altered realities that Allison's, Eric's, Grant's, Aaron's and Sean's families woke up to that morning. We miss them and think of their families everyday. I can't believe it's been a year.

a quick vegas outline

2010-05-04T21:50:00.000-07:00

I went to Vegas:

for my friend Katie's bachelorette party.

for the first time.

and because our wedding season kicked off the same weekend, my trip lasted only 19 hours.

The two most important lessons I took away from my trip were:

that 19 hours in Vegas is sufficient enough to inflict enduring emotional scars.

that any quasi-reasonable person should expect a pool-oriented place named "Bare" to include:

topless people
topless people who should never, ever go topless
sequins before noon
bald $100-dollar-bill spewing septuagenarians convinced that "Tawni" is giving him a lap dance because he's so interesting, and like, wise.

At "Bare," I:

lost the ability to control the volume and pitch of my voice; in essence forgot how to whisper.

attempted this facial expression: "Huh? There are topless people sitting arm's length away? Pardon me, I didn't notice. I'm SO down with clothing optional. In no way shape or form am I uncomfortable right now."

actually made this one: "Oh the bloody horror bursting through my corrupted soul!"

~~subtly removed~~ violently ripped off my sunglasses so I could stare at the Tin Man pool dancer. (Postscript: The Tin "Man" was a she.)

sang. "Just because I'm presumin' that I could be kinda human, if I only had heart."

And I asked myself questions like:

Would Tawni's mom be surprised right now?

Old Man River's wifey, who definitely exists according to his left ring finger, does she too go on gender-exclusive vacations with her friends where they cavort on rooftop pools, perhaps with Chippendales and Bunco in the background?

Is this what [name of close friend or relative who goes to Vegas three times a year] does here? Cool/Sick/Faint.

And the whole time, I prayed for:

removal of the knowledge that Mike and my dad have ever been to Vegas.

church

the return of childlike innocence

three more days in Vegas

let's play dress-up

2010-03-02T19:30:00.000-08:00

If I could bottle the feeling I get when I walk into Anthropologie, I would sell it on the black market and I would bank. My well-documented love affair is storied and at times torrid. It's much more than a retail thing. The closest things to a worship experience I've had outside of church have happened between the walls of the House of Anthropologie. My dopamine level skyrockets just walking through the doors.

Spring is my favorite time of year, especially after this El Niño-ravaged winter. But I love it most because of the clothes. Anthropologie kicks off its primo wooing season every year around mid-February with window displays of whimsical floral dresses and gauzy popsicle-hued tops. And I salivate. I popped in yesterday while "running errands," and it was one such visit that almost moved me to tears. I left sans purchasing anything (self-pat on my back) but there were moments of zen all the same.

These are a few gems I'm still dreaming about. Budget, schmudget I say. It may still be 40 degrees in Dallas, but look at these frocks and tell me spring hasn't sprung. I can't wait!

Anchors Aweigh

2010-01-16T21:07:00.000-08:00

Well, I bit the bullet and decided to get a Navy-themed tattoo. What do you think?

I know it's a bit much considering it's my first tattoo and a little, well, huge, but I wanted to do something special for Mike before he gets back, and this one just had that certain je ne sais quoi.

JUST KIDDING!!!!!! Last weekend, Amy, Erin, Lindsey and I were throwing out all our hypothetical tattoo scenarios, e.g. "Eleanor's Mommy," "Mikey P's Gurrrrl," "Nate'NBen4L," etc. Then I stumbled across this photo online. Um, doesn't the top of your foot have like 70 trillion nerve endings? Ouchsies! I suspect this was sort of painful. Also, I apologize to any relatives/husbands who's heads may have temporarily exploded as a result of this 30-second hoax.

Fake tattoos aside, we did have some nautical (and otherwise) fun in a Beverly Hills dressing room last weekend:

Speaking of nautical things, guess what? I will soon be taking a slightly last-minute trip to a very distant, very non-western destination. If all goes as projected, the mister will magically appear in this same distant, non-western locale and we will have a nice quick mini-vacation. Because of East Coast layovers and the comparatively small size of the Atlantic Ocean, eight hours is the longest consecutive amount of time I've ever spent on one plane. This flight, however, is 15 hours. Would you like a pillow? Some hot towels? A horse tranquilizer?

Just to reiterate: I didn't get a tattoo. Me + tattoos = still strangers.

Bye kids!

it's the simple things.

2009-12-14T20:46:00.000-08:00

Nail polish really excites me these days. My mom told me that in high school she used to paint her nails every night to match the outfit she planned to wear the next day. While I'm not that dedicated, I have been on a major kick lately. Tonight I painted my digits with Essie's Mint Candy Apple from their 2009 holiday collection.

This color had me intrigued for a while. (It doesn't take much.) It looks delicious, like after-dinner mints. If nail polishes could speak, this one would have said, "Look at me, I am so sweet and so 'now.' Let's be friends."

Tonight, looking at my nails makes me happy.

Open Letters to My Co-Passengers on Flights 127 and 157 As Well As a Few People at the Denver Airport

2009-11-23T00:11:00.000-08:00

Dear Frontier Airlines,

This is my first time flying with you. The bold green slogan printed at the top of your jets exterior promises that you're "a whole different animal." Just wondering though, which animals are you trying to distance yourself from? Maybe a turtle? If so, I can see the rationale. No wise airline would use a slogan like "a more or less slow-paced animal" or "about the same kind of animal as your 5-year-old son's class pet." No, times are tough, and you've got to stand out. Speaking of standing out, may I make a suggestion? It would be edgy and unique to give me back my $20 checked luggage fee. Maybe in the process you could also have a little chat with the FAA about the 3 oz. liquids rule. Do you know how many bottles of conditioner I've had to throw out in the security line? It's always the expensive stuff too. One time, I cried.

Animalistically,
Rachel

***

Dear Lady Sitting Next to Me on the First Leg,

Judging by your facial expression, I feel like you're bothered by my beverage selection. I'll admit that tomato juice is an unusual choice. But hear me out. It doesn't get the credit it deserves. Most people only ever think of tomato juice when they're mixing it with vodka. Don't misunderstand me, I love a bloody mary. You can mix orange juice with vodka too, but you don't see the world abandoning it in its natural form. Give tomato juice a chance. I drink it every time I fly; I'm pretty sure the plane would crash the first time I didn't.

You Say Tomato,
Rachel

***

Dear Guy Who Ordered Jack and Coke,

Until today, when flight attendants would announce that beer, wine, and cocktails were available for purchase at 6:00 a.m., it always made me laugh a little inside. But you, sir, proved that boozing before breakfast can be done, and you showed us how to do it. And that enthusiasm! "Gimme a jack and coke, sweetheart." Kudos to you and your nonconformist attitude. Who cares what these people think? Most of them are passed out anyway, and soon you will be too, albeit for a different reason. Quick question though: If jack and coke is breakfast, what's for dinner?

Abstaining a Few More Hours,
Rachel

***

Dear Patrons of Denver International Airport's Terminal A,

Allow me to respectfully suggest that when on the moving walkway, you consider in fact walking.

Trapped,
Rachel

***

Dear Large Crowd at Panda Express,

Beef and broccoli, breakfast of champions!

Love in MSG,
Rachel

***

Dear Three Frontier Employees Who Asked I Wanted to Open a Frontier Credit Card,

No thanks, no thanks, and no thanks. We're in a recession, remember? You guys make the zealots who sell sea salts at the kiosk at Fashion Valley look passive.

Non-aggressively,
Rachel

***

Dear Two Older Guys Sitting Across from me at Terminal A,

Are either of your names Larry? You both look like Larrys. I may never know your names, but I do know that the waiting area was completely empty yet you sat yourselves right here. Maybe it was fate. Our faces are ten inches apart, and I just felt my chair faintly vibrate when you, Larry on the left, laughed. Don't get me wrong, I'm not mad. I mean, this is Denver, you may be concerned about hypothermia should the heat go out or something. I know that accent, Alabama? Happy Thanksgiving.

Catching Your Vibes,
Rachel

***

Dear Little Girl in Tears About to Board the Plane Alone,

Don't worry! Airplanes are fun. Once you're settled in, you'll be happy as a clam! Your mom and little brother look like they'll really miss you while you're gone. I like your pigtails, I used to wear those elastic bands with the little balls too. Nooo, don't cry. Is it your mom's full sleeve of tattoos that's scaring you? Look, this nice Frontier employee will take you to your seat. He looks like Mr. Rogers. Well, it's last call for UMs; my guess is that UM stands for unaccompanied minors. Keep walking, you're doing great. Oh no, don't turn around! Probably best you keep walking. OK, you're crying again. This is excruciating. Are we being punk'd?

Also Unaccompanied,
Rachel

***

Dear Teenage Girl Next to Me on the Denver to San Diego Flight Reading a Library Copy of Twilight:

I bet you're reading that for like the 37th time, right? Can I tell you a secret? I've never read these books or seen the movies. Any of them. I know, my cool factor just dropped below Larry King's. Please try not to notice, but I'm going to read over your shoulder so I can feel a little more connected to the rest of the world, if only for a few seconds.

"I should be tan, sporty, blonde, a cheerleader perhaps. All the things that go with living in the valley of the sun."

Yeah, vampires totally hate valleys. And suns.

Still Resisting,
Rachel

***

Dear All Addressees:

It's been a joy flying with you, studying the backs of your heads, and eavesdropping on your conversations. You make flying fun. Happy holidays!

Still a Southwest Girl,
Rachel

Dear Diary

2009-11-12T18:18:00.000-08:00

Nothing says "introspective" like my first diary. Bound in glossy cardboard and covered in trains, I found it while cleaning out my closet the other day and had no choice but to revisit the tumultuous era that was 1990. This makes it sound like I wrote in it consistently, but I didn't. My entries are quite infrequent.

My diary had a lock, which was a major source of pride at the time. Owning anything with a lock before you've ditched training wheels made you legit. You think you can read my diary? Well, per this lock right here, think AGAIN.

I learned about these top secret keepers of inner thoughts from my way older and way cooler cousin Leah. I remember sitting in her bedroom with The Cure blasting while she scribbled with the furious angst only a 16-year-old who listens to The Cure can. I asked what she was doing and she said she was writing about her boyfriend. She had lots of boyfriends.

I was already intrigued with the concept when I saw the Punky Brewster episode about the diary. Need a reference point? Let me know, I own the entire series on DVD. Punky was my idol and if she had one of these, then I had to have one too. Christmas came around and my dreams were answered. In my stocking, alongside a Wilson Phillips' cassette tape (yes, "a" Wilson Phillips tape -- they made two) there she sat, that shiny white thing.

The first entry appears on Feb. 3, 1990 -- grammar, spelling and punctuation untouched:

Dear Diary,

Today's My Birthday
You're Pal,
Rachel!

I was obviously entrenched in serious scandal from Feb. 19th until the 24th. Each page in this diary had the printed date at the top, but all five of these are ripped out.

April 1, 1990:

Dear Diary Today is April Fools day I think that's all I have to say right now.
xxoo you're pal Rachel!

You'll notice we hadn't had the your vs. you're lesson yet.

The rest of that week included accounts of a church fish fry and a couple of playground shenanigans. Compelling stuff.

May 9th was super exciting:

Dear Diary -

Today I spent the night at Jill's house. We tried to stay up all night but we (note: I inexplicably skip one line here) couldn't. I brought jelly beans and we ate em and played in her backyard. It was fun. Well I gotta go
Love, (smiley face)
Rachel L. Williams

What this entry does not tell you is that we did make it all the way to 4:00 A.M. when Jill sat up on our sleeping bag fort, said in defeat, "it didn't work," rolled back over and re-passed out.

May 31st = pure elation:

Dear Diary,

I'm so exsided, today school's out! I'll probly do over 100 things during summer!!! I will have a lot, doble! to say tomarrow! XXOO
You're Nurvis Pal
Rachel

June 1st's blankness indicates that I didn't have anything, let alone "doble," to say. Also, why was I "Nurvis?"

It was another couple of months before I paused to make an inaugural address to the 2nd grade:

Dear Diary,

Well school starts tomarrow. My teacher is Miss Chantilis. Second grade is going to be cool! My lunch box has Punky Bruster on it! Love, Goodnight, Rachel Williams!

Life was so complicated.

motivators, part 2

2009-10-28T18:48:00.000-07:00

Part 2 of 2

Mom and dad had good ideas, but clearly home remedies wouldn't get me out of this mess. (I can't stop with the metaphors.) My mom told me to find two wooden planks and wedge them between the offending tires and the mud. The good thing about Durango, Texas is that there are plenty of wooden planks lying around. The bad thing about Durango, Texas is that I was there alone... facing an enormous field of wheat, or rice, or barley or something, from here to Kingdom Come. I mustered up every fourth grade science lesson about levers and pulleys I could, it took 15 seconds to realize I would not be wedging jack-anything between my poor tires and the earth.

It gets better. AT&T had apparently taken a few minutes to realize just how remote my location was, but by golly, they were on to me now. Our conversation dropped and "No Service" popped up. Peace out, Triple-A option.

The next few minutes were like the eye of a hurricane. I became very calm and quiet and thought about all the people in history who had gotten stuck in the mud before cell phones. Probably lots, right? And they made it out eventually, no? I tried to recall if I had ever seen something like this on Forensic Files. Bad idea, every other episode starts out like this, except they usually have ex-husbands. My calm begins to dissipate. I seriously contemplate trekking to a farmhouse I see way off in the distance. I am not sure what to do.

Then, in my rear view mirror, I see a red Jeep Wrangler pull off the road and aim toward me in a blaze of glory. It is the tallest, widest and loudest vehicle I have ever seen. Keep in mind I am a good 50 feet from the road, so there's no way this was an accidental drive-by. In the passenger seat and at least as tall as the driver is an Irish Setter or some similarly large dog breed, which negated the possibility of anything bad happening. Everyone knows dog owners don't kill people. But you know what? I was just glad to see another human.

Red Jeep Guy drives up to my window and asks if I'm stuck. Well, yeah, kind of. Red Jeep Guy appears 17 or 18, but I'm a poor judge of age. Confidently, he says he'll get me out. Riding behind him on a three-wheeler is his girlfriend or sister, making the likelihood of murder almost zero. Something tells me they have plenty of experience with mud.

Red Jeep Guy can't hide his amusement at my predicament. He digs out an odd pulley instrument and attaches it to my car's hitch. While profusely thanking him, I pause to ask if I need to get out of the car. Hey, I do what I can. His reaction assures me in no uncertain terms that he's a mud aficionado. I decide it is best I stop talking. Sister Girlfriend on the ATV is directing him as though he was parallel parking. He helps me on wheel direction, and shoot. He pulls my car out of the mud.

Amidst the excessive thank-yous, my cell phone apparently sprung back into range and my parents called. I said not to worry, that I was being rescued, to which they shouted every variation of "GET HIS LICENSE PLATE! GET IT NOW!" Remember, solo drives = their daughter's a goner. Flustered, all I managed to get out was "What's your name?" His name is Brett. Brett from Durango, Texas, pop. 54. And then he was gone. I still have no idea how he saw or heard me.

Brett, you're an angel. Thank you, and thank your dog and your sister-girlfriend. You are so not Forensic Files.

tags: improbable scenarios, uncharted territory, motivators for continuing ed automotive classes

2009-10-26T22:04:00.000-07:00

Part 1

Sometimes I wonder if it would behoove me to be a tad less forthcoming about the freak shows I encounter everyday. The reason is that even as the protagonist of these circus acts, I have a hard time believing them myself. Translation: A lot of my sentences begin with, "You will never believe what just happened!" followed by ten excitable re-tellings of the same story. I speak so fast I forget to breathe. Thank you, inventor of typing!

This weekend I was in Austin for my friend Shannon's beautiful wedding at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. Sunday morning was sunny, lazy and Hill Country-perfect. So perfect in fact that I decided to take the scenic route. After a chicken fried steak stop at Threadgill's, I hit the road. Ahh, Texas. The first two hours were pleasant but unremarkable.

The events of the next two hours were both unpleasant and way too remarkable.

I was about ten minutes northeast, or southeast, heck maybe northsouth(?) of Temple, on FM 935, a back road you have never heard of. Temple, for Texas geography shunners, is maybe one-third of the way from Austin to Dallas. Most of the Earth's population, including plants, would say, "But Raaaaa-chel, Austin to Dallas is a straight shot on I-35!" These lifeforms are correct. But I really like driving through small towns, and today I had the time.

The last thing I remember seeing on my TomTom is "You are in Durango, TX." Well, hello Durango! I did not notice a sign informing me of this passage, but oh well. Since failing to plan is planning to fail, I pulled into a vacant... "lot" isn't the right word... a vacant patch of dead-looking grass, to check the map quickly. Then I put the car back into drive. There's really no segue into this: I revved the gas pedal, and the wheels moved... a lot... loudly... but my car wasn't moving.

Has your life ever turned into a slow motion replay where the sound gets really low-pitched and slurred? That's what mine did. Thoughts (and utterances) included: "WTF!? How can this be mud!? It looked like a patch of grass! It IS a patch of grass! So this mud is invisible!? How is my car stuck in invisible mud!? WTF? *@#*&$*$##!"

For the next ten minutes, I revved and tried to reverse. I revved and tried to drive forward. My engine made sounds I didn't know a Civic was capable of making. Have I mentioned I was in the middle of nowhere? Unsure of the official protocol when one's car is submerged in mud, I called my mom. To my parents, road trips, really any type of prolonged time spent alone = my impending murder. They were thrilled to receive my call.

(I am posting this as part 1 of 2 because this is getting way too long and I physically cannot type any longer. Part 2 is coming very soon and, spoiler alert coming, I do not die.)

best laid plans

2009-10-21T18:55:00.000-07:00

Where to start? I'm pretty sure I wrote more in one preschool-era Weekly Reader than I have in the last six months. Although I doubt my hiatus from blogging -- I refuse to use the word "blogosphere," except of course when citing words I will not use -- was the catalyst for any suicide attempts, (if I'm wrong, my apologies) there were hundreds of times since April that I thought, oh boy, another incident/silent monologue/diatribe I should write about on my blog!

Just so we're clear, a little truth nugget: I have blogging anxiety. It's rare I'll get half a sentence down before I start ripping apart the four-or-so words in front of me. This acerbic alter ego (we'll call her Hate-chel) spews things like "Is that the best modifier you can come up with? Wow, lots of prepositional phrases there. Something very bad will happen if you don't diagram this sentence."

As it turns out, this type of anxiety is common enough to make other people write books about it. I read a good one called "The Courage to Write" by Ralph Keyes. It was comforting to learn that authors are afraid of writing sometimes, and that Hate-chel can even work in my favor if I let her. Then, after I breathed a big sigh of relief, guess what? I continued to not write.

Here's a non-comprehensive list of events that merited, but failed to produce, a blog post:

1) Not contracting swine flu.
2) Finding my favorite mascara at a Wal-Mart in Hawaii many months after it was discontinued and buying all four remaining tubes... expiration, schmexpiration!
3) Eating at Chick-Fil-A six days in a row which is technically the maximum consecutive number of days anyone can eat there due to that keepin'-the-Sabbath-holy business.
4) Chipping my tooth on a tortilla chip and realizing the halloween costume possibilities.
5) Mike deploying for ~~six~~ eight months.
6) Driving from San Diego to Dallas. It was fun!
7) Reading everyone else's entertaining, informative blogs and wondering why I was still making excuses.

A truckload of stuff has happened in the last six months and my hope is to revisit it here in the coming days. Not every blog post (are you listening, Hate-chel?) needs to read like a doctoral dissertation. That kind of defeats the purpose of blogging, doesn't it? Now I just need to show up again tomorrow.

Mahalo.

One Year Later

2009-04-17T01:53:00.000-07:00

April 22 will mark one year since Meredith Rankin left this life for her eternal one. I feel sheepish trying to blog about this, like I'm grasping in vain for the right words. I don't know how one would begin to encapsulate Meredith's spirit. But I think that's OK, because she wasn't about talk. In my stubborn naivete, I guess I'd just assumed that when it came to things like faith, gratitude and humility, I had a decent grip -- imperfect but not awful. I'm so thankful she showed me how much further I still have to climb.

I wrestle with the nuts and bolts, the hows and whys of everything imaginable and some things I doubt anyone's ever bothered to imagine. Why do people do evil things? How does Earth not get wiped out by a meteor? Why do I have gray hairs already? Naturally, this curiosity extends to matters of faith too. But Meredith helped me put down the microscope. She personified the hows and the whys of faith and in the midst of the greatest struggle of her life, she accepted what was.

Meredith, or Muffy as she announced at age 2 she would be called from then on, was beautiful, hilarious, intelligent, and had approximately 2 billion friends. I knew her at Miami but mainly after college through my friends Lindsay and Jen. At age 23, almost three years ago now, she was diagnosed with colon cancer -- advanced, metastasized, incurable, Stage IV colon cancer. But it would never define or embitter her, because she didn't allow it. What she did allow was for her heart to be transformed by the true, unpretty, sometimes wrenching meaning of faith. And she let us all witness it. She and her family started an online journal after she was diagnosed, and if you read it, you'll understand why she affected so many. I printed all 56 pages and made a book out of it.

Thank you Meredith, for exploding the lid off of my immature concept of Christianity, of suffering, of contentedness and gratitude. Thank you for loving God and teaching me that to "give thanks in all circumstances" really means all of them, especially the most unpleasant ones. Thank you for showing me that the joy which arises from selflessness is the only kind that matters.

So, is God enough? From Muff herself:

Yes. Because like I said before, He is the only thing I can ever count on anymore. I can't count on my own body to work for me, my own decisions to get me though, my own parents to protect me, my own husband to provide for me, or my own doctors to heal me ... because they can't. They just can't, and I think the sooner people figure that out the happier they'll be. I gave up a long time ago trying to do it all myself, because you'll kill yourself trying. God is it ... He is enough for everything.

Comfort Food

2009-03-22T23:33:00.000-07:00

On Friday, I spent six or seven hours en route from San Diego thanks to two solid stops in Phoenix and El Paso. I read a whole fat book cover-to-cover and knocked out 50 pages of another. Late discovery -- books are what to read when flying. Flights a millisecond over two hours long usually make me nuttybuckets, but not this time.

We will have two kinds of macaroni and cheese at our wedding. Now you know where to find me.

For some reason, I never got around to seeing "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" until about last night. Whoa, way dirtier than I ever imagined, and that was 1982. Did the whole above-40 population just have one huge collective stroke after it came out?

Jeff Spicoli = the best character basically ever. Mr. "Mystic River" playing a stoned surfer just makes me all kinds of happy. "Aloha, Mr. Hand."

I want the macaroni and crab cakes and smoked salmon-y stuff now, please. This menu printout I'm looking at is torture. Or Torte-ture. :)

Welcome to Anthropologie. Can I Help You Steal Anything?

2009-03-17T14:40:00.000-07:00

So, I like clothes. I enjoy the process leading up to the purchase more than the transaction itself, and I'm picky. Usually, by the time I step up to pay, I've already inspected, tried on, and turned down enough fabric to cover Delaware. Shopping is my me-time. I keep phone conversations brief and sparse, because this is serious stuff people. (Note to large families/entourages at Fashion Valley: I'm begging you and your 10-person brood. Please. Walk. Faster. I'm trapped.)

Society tells betrothed females that there's about 87 showers/parties/rehearsals/showers/miscellaneous occasions/showers that necessitate the New Dress. ("Society" consists of the editorial people at D Weddings magazine and my mom.) Last Saturday, I set off on what I'd hoped would be my last Operation Find Miscellaneous Wedding Event Dress mission. She would be named Miss Rehearsal. I won't lie, this wasn't the first, or fifth, time I had searched for Miss Rehearsal, but I'm down to the proverbial wire here. My first stop, as usual, was Anthropologie.

O, my beloved Anthro. You've inspired me so much over the years. I remember the first time we met at the Santa Monica Promenade. It was the summer after freshman year in college and I was stuck in L.A. with Lindsey and Amy. We were trying to fly to Hawaii on free standby tickets over July 4th weekend. (P.S. Who does that?) We never made it aboard, but it mattered not. I had found you. Lindsey bought a $400 comforter from you, I a dainty headband. You made me want to be a better pseudo-hippie.

I walked in with a bounce in my step and and a heartful of hope. My bounce was siphoned by the salesgirl, who zoned in on me with the determined swoop of a vulture on a dead rabbit. Initial thoughts: "OMG, she looks like Lauren Conrad," followed by, "why is she violating my personal space?" Then I noticed the teeny Anthro logo on one of my bags. She asked me if I had a return. I considered going into detail about how I was just matching some shoes and this was the only bag I could find with handles, they really should make more bags with handles, and OMG that shirt is so cute, but instead I just smiled cordially and said "No thanks." She hesitated for an few seconds and said "Umm. ... Oh." I could tell she was annoyed, but what could I do or say short of emptying the contents of the bags out on the floor? I kept shopping, wondering if I hadn't seen the last of L.C.'s twin. That's when I saw her summon backup.

I know stores lose millions of dollars a year to shoplifting. I'm on your team, shoplifters suck. I understand if you need to take the bags behind the register, check receipts, or do anything to quell your suspicion that you're in the midst of a thief who intends to stuff three bags with merchandise in plain view while you call Crimestoppers. But please stop staring at me.

These salesgirls seemed to have trained under the "stalk-and-stare-and-analyze-over-headphones-you-forgot-were-on-speaker" school of thought. Maybe they used Dale Carnegie's lesser known "How to Lose Customers and Influence People (to Boycott Your Store)." I felt so uncomfortable that I began to move around a lot, as one does when faced with swarms of gnats that won't go away, or a wasp that follows you on your bike for three blocks. I felt dirty.

In accessories, I turned around to find six beady eyes congregated a couple of yards behind me. I could smell their shampoo. Each wore a contemplative expression suggesting they were plotting their next move, which I assume involved a taser. And then, the injustice in my soul gave overflowed and turned into actual words from my mouth. You know the threshold between simmering frustration and disgust? Yeah I skipped it. I'm not sure exactly what I said except "Are you kidding!?" and stormed the h out as they stood there in utter girl-shock.

I'm curious as to Anthropologie's shoplifter profiling criteria. Yoga pants? A fleece jacket? THIEF! My only relevant experience came at age 5 when I took a Brach's peppermint from Minyard's without depositing a nickel. Overcome with guilt, I tearfully confessed to my mom and then to the manager the next day. He told me he forgave me and added that Jesus probably would too, if I was good for the rest of the year. I think he confused Jesus with Santa Claus.

I probably won't stop shopping at Anthropologie. I will, however, write an artificially rational complaint letter to their corporate using primarily "I" statements, like "I felt dirty when your snobby salesgirls whispered audibly that I was trying to steal things." Next time, I guarantee I'll dress more uppity but carry the same bags, and see if my perceived credit limit doesn't ebb their suspicions.