Please note the current terror alert level, conveniently posted to the left and updated regularly.

We are currently in Ernie.

I complain sometimes in these pages about things that are stupid, small, incidental and banal. There is no difference, I guess, in the long run, between those small silly worries and the bigger ones, the life-issues ones--in the end, the sum total of all our worries, concerns and fears all equal out as valid. But lately I do feel as though some of the bigger issues have been dogging my friends and myself.

I am getting older. To my dismay there seems to be absolutely no way to stop it.

To my even greater dismay, my parents are geeting older, and horribly, terribly, there is no way to stop this either. As the only child of a very close-knit little family, who cried going away to sleepover parties because I hated being parted from my parents, this is a horrible reality.

Even worse is really thinking about the practicalities of it all. I'm still so dependent on them; I have no family of my own--no husband, no children, and no sight of them cropping up anytime soon--to support me. What will I do when they get old enough to need care?

It's not so far away.

Life trundles along dispassionately and can snap us up or strike us down at any minute. My current stability feels so dubious, so tenuous, so delicate, a water-beetle perched on the surface of a pond with only surface tension keeping it skating along the surface of the water. At any minute I could fall through.

I am a Christmas tree

Me as a tinselated nightmare (intended) at Santacon (I LOVE how the hair turned out!!! I wanted to look as much like a tacky tinsel explosion as possible), with my friend Jet Fuel. He chose the Eastsiiiiide, I appear to have chosen the Westsiiiiide (say it like a homie!).

Despite our divergent geographic affinities, we get along so well. Even tho he'd just fielded a pie in the face from a protesting elf (they were picketing the exporting of elf jobs to Asia).

My eyes look weird cos I had red false eyelashes. Hee hee.

I suck.

not so bad...

So here's the pics from the burlesque show, also.

I don't know if I'll ever do it again, but props to Normal for taking these pictures--I'll forever have proof that I had the guts to do this.

http://www.main-streets.com/images/micheleburlesque/




I like this one 'cos I think I look badass in it. Heh.

I am unwell

I'm sick.

Jaylinn calls me up Monday night to see if I want to come over for dinner and tv...I tell her my symptoms. Coughing, and just feeling generally really really horribly shitty.

"Oooh, that sounds bad. You takin' anything for it?"

"Robitussin."

"Whoo, girl. That's about as close to an over-the-counter opiate as you can get!"

"Well...good."

the Red Tide strikes again

So Santacon was a hit. I had a blast. Here are some pics.




Normal and I gettin' warmed up... and Vanessa (in wheelchair, due to injury), Mattshaw (in fez), and myself walking down Vermont...






...we visit El Ron and cause general mayhem...a little vandalism along the way...and then we pour into the subway...




...more mobbing the subway (there really were that many of us)...emerging Downtown at Union Station and Olvera Street...




...we drink a lot at Olvera Street (even though we'd all been drinking by the time we met up at the House of Pies)...accost some hapless Asian tourists, suddenly awash in a sea of red in the Union Station terminal...





...back on the Gold Line, getting progressively more loaded, we head to Highland Park...some dog likes us...we mob some homie's house (no one still knows who lived there)...





...I was pretty drunk by now so I don't know where this picture was taken...we're really toasted on the subway by now...and then, in Old Town Pasadena, several Santas take one for the team...



...but the best part was giving candy to the kids. :)

And not waking up in a gutter.

I want to be a good woman
and I can't stand
for you to be a bad man
this is why
I am lying
when I say
I don't love you no more
-cat power.


Your face reminds me of a flower
Kind of like you're underwater
Hair's too long and in your eyes
Your lips a perfect suck me size
You act like you are fourteen years old
Everything you say is so
Obnoxious, funny, true and mean
I want to be your blowjob queen
You're probably shy and introspective
That's not part of my objective
Every time I see your face
I think of things unpure unchaste
I'll take you home and make you like it
Everything you ever wanted
Everything you ever thought of is
Everything I'll do to you
-liz phair.

[i edited out the parts that felt too extreme for my tastes...]

;)

fruits, flakes and nuts

I wish Whole Foods sold whole and non-whole foods. This is because often I want non-whole foods. Like sugar-free jelly. I mean, it's equally as bad for you as the full-sugar, organic, sweetened-with-the-honey-from-non-abused-free-range-bees-kind is. You just choose your poison: a fuckload of sugar, or nutra-sweet. This doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. But the nutra-sweet in sugar-free jam is "non-whole."

I imagine walking into Whole Foods, saying, “I’m thrilled with this all-natural smooth organic non-genetically-modified nut butter, but can you show me where this is?” and I pull the jar of sugar-free Smuckers I brought from home out of my purse as a visual aid. “You eat…that?” I imagine the skinny, well-coiffed, lightly-pierced stock guy saying, cringing, leaning back away from me as if I’m about to transform into a puddle of ooze. “Yeah,” I say, glancing down at the jar, and then he snatches it out of my hand like a grenade, dashes it against an adjacent wood-frame stand for yoga mats, breaking off the top, and brandishes the broken-glass end of the sad little jam jar at me wildly. “It’s not WHOLE!!!!” he screeches maniacally, and I scream and run out, all of the employees chasing after me like medieval villagers.

didn't get the memo

So I get a letter in the mail today from the old church I used to attend with my parents. It's a Presbyterian church in the Valley--Northridge, to be precise. Good people. Good, god-fearing, suburban, SUV-driving, soccer-team-carpooling, VentiDoubleLatteWithSugarFreeVanilla-sloshing, private-school-booster-supporting, real-estate-agent-husband-and-wife-team-beaming, heavily-chlorinated-backyard-pool-with-deck-self-poured-by-do-it-yourselfer-husband-suntanning, ...

...people.

I burnt out on church around the age of eleven when my sunday school teacher told me that since I hadn't been baptized, I wasn't as close a part of god's family as the other kids were (my parents had left me unbaptized so I could choose for myself (or perhaps they were lazy and let it slide--as I grow older, more and more I think that may be the case).

Attending Catholic school during junior high and high school finished me off.

The letter surprised me. I've never gotten any correspondence from them. How could they even know my current address? I stopped attending YEARS before I moved out of my parents' home.

Inside, it basically said that if I'd found a new church ("your relocation" it mentioned) I should let them know, as they were about to add me to their "Inactive Members" roster. I thought that was funny, since I'd never really been an active member--I was ten years old, for chrissakes (so to speak).
Then I noticed the handwritten note at the bottom. In elegant, compact cursive its tiny letters read "Could not reach your family to get your new name and address...sorry."
What?
"...Congratulations on your marriage and all good wishes... -M."

The letter was then signed by Ms. Marion Swarthout, Clerk of Session.

Hello? You people know something I don't know?

I mean, you're all talkin' to god and whatever.