I'm Bleeding All Over The Place

I got my period today. Accompanied by cramps and general unpleasantness. Fun! I never used to get cramps. When I was younger my period came and went, and while annoying, it was never painful. Until an old woman (A WITCH! A WITCH! BURN HER!) cursed me.

Around November of 2001 I was sitting outside the Brooklyn Museum waiting for a friend, wearing an unattractive long blue coat, when an old woman with a shopping cart approached me. "Do you get cramps when you menstruate?" She asked me in her scratchy old lady witch voice.

"Excuse me?"

"Do you get cramps when you menstruaaaaaate?" She repeated.

"No, never! I'm, um....very lucky?" I replied. I was relatively disturbed that a stranger was asking me about my period.

"Well you will! Sitting on cold things! That's where the trouble starts!"

"I...What? But I'm sitting on my coat! I'm okay!"

"That's where the trouble starts!" She said, pointing at me menacingly. And then she shuffled away.

And then I started getting cramps.

Bitch.

ANYWAY - to top everything else off I got a nosebleed when I got home. After I had used up the last of our toilet paper I realized I had something else that would stop the blood flow:

Today sucks. ♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Add to Technorati Faves

Dude, seriously, back off...

As we all know I am quite capable of over sharing and embarrassing myself, but some people are just bizarre. This evening, in a deli near my house, I was looking at the beer selection trying to figure out what I wanted to get when a man carrying far too much in his hands almost bumped into me. The aisle was huge so there was no reason for this until I realized, oh balls, he wanted to chat. Fine. Bring it on weird dude.

"You like that beer, huh? Getting some?"
"Yeah, just figuring out what I'm in the mood for, you know."
"Drinking alone tonight?"
"Oh, no, I'm picking them up for me and MY BOYFRIEND to have with dinner."
And this is when he started making things up. He told me how him and his "girlfriend" like to drink beer all the time. You could very clearly see the train of thought on his face. "She has a boyfriend? Fine! I will make her jealous with tales of my girlfriend! Weeee...." So apparently his "girlfriend" likes drinking Bacardi mixed with "What's it called? Hendy? Hinny? Starts with an H." "Hennessy?" I ventured. "Yeah! That! We got TWISTED on that the other night. I was so drunk, I don't even know how I got home!" THEN he told me that actually, him and his "girlfriend" don't really drink that much, because he's prone to seizures. (WHAT?) Then he asked if I was engaged and when I told him I was not went into this long speech about how his girlfriend wanted him to propose last June, but he didn't because she has an ex husband. And she's carrying the ex husbands child. But somehow, this unborn child calls HIM "Daddy" and he's afraid of child services coming after him. He also told me that him and this pregnant (with miraculously speaking fetus) woman and he have been together for three years.

If you're going to start telling me stories, at least have them make some sort of sense. Crazy pants.

People are so weird. ♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Add to Technorati Faves

Vote Vote Vote Vote...Voted!

My right to vote was taken away during the last election.

I knew I was going to be in Portland for election day, so I applied for an absentee ballot in late September and was assured I wouldn't have any problems. A week before the election, when my ballot had still not arrived, I called the New York State Board of Elections and was once again assured that my ballot would turn up in time for the election. Finally, the day before the election I called again and told them that, no, I had still not received my ballot and what the hell was going on here?

They basically told me that I was shit out of luck.

After the election had passed and New York had (thankfully) gone blue, I found out that just about everyone else I knew who had applied for an absentee ballot that year had never received it.

That's just screwed up.

So I just voted in my first presidential election and it felt good. And tomorrow I go to CALIFORNIA!

I lent Seth my little rolling suitcase that I've used for all my trips this year thinking I had another one and forgetting that Dusty had taken it. So now I'm heading out with a GIGANTIC suitcase which will end badly because I am the mother of all over packers. Especially when I'm nervous and don't know what to wear for any given occasion. Enough outfits for a month? Probably. Too many pairs of shoes? Check. (I once brought ten pairs of shoes, including heels, to a seven day trip to my grandmother's house. My grandmother lives in a cobble-stoned and very steep village in France. There is no way in hell I would be wearing heels there. Ever.)

On top of all that I'm going to get my period this week (and you were wondering why this post was tagged "TMI" HAH!) which means, because I am reaaaaaaaally paranoid, I will also be bringing just about every pair of underwear I own. Because I am out of my damn mind.

And now we wait for the results to come in.

It can't go to McCain, can it? Could anyone possibly vote for a man who would pick a running mate this stupid?



They just couldn't.

UPDATE: as of 9:30pm it's 174 to 69, and Obama only needs 270 to win.

HELL TO THE YES, PEOPLE! ♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Add to Technorati Faves

Happy Friday! Er...Saturday. Whatever

I am afraid of a lot of things. I'm afraid of bugs, rats, roaches, vermin in general, dying alone, being an orphan, growing up, the dark, frostbite, falling...the list goes on and on. I am also afraid of exceptionally old people. Not normal old people, but people who seem like they've always been old. Does that make sense?

At the beginning of this semester, in my first class, an exceptionally old person strolled in (with the help of her walker). I would have been perfectly okay with this had she not sat in my line of sight. And by "line of sight" I mean in the seat DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF ME. Not okay.

The scariest part about the exceptionally old lady is that her makeup is always exactly the same. Like it's tattooed on or something. Her eyebrows are painted on, her lips are painted on, she doesn't even look like a person. Which is freaky. She seems very nice, but there's something about her where she looks a little like a corpse already. Just having her in the class freaks me out, for two main reasons:
1) I'm terrified that she's just going to stop showing up to class one day. Because she's dead.
2) I'm afraid that NO ONE is going to mention the fact that the freakishly old lady in our class has suddenly stopped showing up because no one wants to bring up death.

And that just plays into my fears of dying alone, etc etc.
This lady never speaks in class, she nods and smiles, and seems perfectly coherent, but still somehow, absent. Or already dead. She might be a zombie! I wouldn't be able to tell because of all the makeup!

Does that make me terrible? I should probably just make an effort to talk to this woman , as we sit very close to each other twice a week, but I'm afraid to. There's another aspect of it where I'm afraid to talk to her and make a connection if she's going to kick the bucket in the next five minutes.

And the worst part is that I can't tell if that makes me a terrible person or simply a cautious one.

On a completely unrelated note - please read David Sedaris's piece about undecided voters in the upcoming election:

I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

You can read the rest on the New Yorker website, or in this week's New Yorker Magazine.

Also? I have a pimple INSIDE MY NOSE. It hurts like hell.

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Things that are really not cool that have happened in the past week

-Amelia passing away. Not even passing away. Being killed. She was killed while riding her bike and it was shitty and scary and holy hell it could happen to any of us.

-Seeing a dead body for the first time. I have never, before last night, been at an open coffin anything. Amelia had one. And I was under the impression (because that's how it's shown in movies) that the bodies were fully IN the coffin and not propped up a bit so you can see them from anywhere in the room. I wrote about Amelia in this post. She was killed while riding her bicycle a week ago and it made me think about a lot of things. Those things include but are not limited to:
a) losing touch with friends and how shitty it is. This horrible tragedy brought a shit-ton of us together and I really wish it was under better circumstances.
b) how I never ever ever want to go to an open coffin anything ever again (girl was 24. Girl looked about 80 propped up for all of us to see. It didn't even look like her, besides the hair and clothing...it was awful)
c) How much people change.
d) How some people don't change at all.

- There was a mugging on my mother's block tonight. And the muggie happened to be a neighbor of mine whom I happened to have known for about ten years. Dude was mugged in front of our house and my mother had to call 9-1-1. I just ran into him and his parents coming home from the hospital. It is almost 5am. This is the neighborhood I grew up in and shit like this does not happen here. WTF?

-The X-Tina moved to Paris today. Which is actually very awesome, for her, but on top of everything else this week is kind of like, "really? Seriously? Just kick me in the shins!"

-----------------------------------

Mostly it has been a very strange/sad/insane week and I am tired, and sad, and freaked out.

And I guess that's it. ♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Add to Technorati Faves

Hitler lives in my pants

In two days I will be in a bikini. Because of this me and my chest cold went to get a bikini wax today. Like you do.

My waxer was not fluent in English, so when she asked how much...um...stuff I wanted to keep, I showed her with my hands. "You know, about this much," while I traced a decent, but not porny triangle. So she went to work and I, as always, stared at the ceiling and tried to think happy thoughts.
Rip..."PONIES!"
Rip..."UNICORNS!"
Rip..."DEAR GOD...KOALAS!!!!!"
Like that. After what felt like far too long, my foreign waxer asked if she had left too much. "Is this okay?" I raised my head a little off the bed to inspect my newly shorn bits. Or rather, my extremely shorn bits. There was a large discrepancy between what I had asked for and what I had left. Basically, for lack of a better mental image, my girl is now sporting a Hitler 'stache.

Awesome!

In that not so awesome kind of way.

Now what? My fear is that next time I go in they will try and replicate this girl's work. Is there a way to work around this? Do I just wait a little longer before getting the next one? Dye the patch I want to keep a different color? ♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Add to Technorati Faves

Stupid Effing Chest Cold

Remember the flu of death? I completely convinced myself that that would be the extent of my sickness for the year because oh my GOD it was terrible. But guess what? I was wrong. Wrong wrong wrong.

I woke up yesterday morning coughing up gobs of green shit, but not in a scary way. In a "Oh, well, the weather's changing, let's get it up" kind of way. This morning (at 5am or something equally terrible) I rolled over in my sleep and woke myself up with a horrendous coughing fit, complete with bigger, brighter chunks of slime. FUN. Then, I went back to sleep and woke up at about eight with a headache and more coughing. Fun.

So I'm home. And I wish I wasn't because as far as I can tell the first nice weather of the year is happening today. And I'm missing it. And I'm sad about it. ♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Add to Technorati Faves

Snot the color of Mountain Dew

On Saturday night Seth and I went to Studio B in Brooklyn to go dancing with some of his friends who were in town. When Seth and I first got there it was almost completely empty, which was fine with us because it gave us plenty of room to dance. I hate going out to a place that is so cramped I can barely move, let alone get my freak on. (Yes, I did just say "get my freak on." Shut up.)

Anywaaaaaaay...

As the night went on more people showed up, including Techno Viking. Well, someone who danced and looked almost exactly like Techno Viking at least. Don't know who Techno Viking is? Prepare to be amazed:



That, my friends, is Techno Viking.

At Studio B Seth accidentally bumped into Techno Viking 2.0 and he GRABBED SETH BY THE ARMS AND MOVED HIM. So. Effing. Scary. We also watched him work his way through the crowd sort of picking up and moving anyone in his way. The animal!

Aaand...that's about it.

About the title of this post, I woke up this morning and blew my nose and it was a horrible shade of neon green. Just like Mountain Dew!

Yum! ♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Add to Technorati Faves

TMI

Um...so, I have foot odor. In a really serious way. My feet, they smell like ass.

But, for the last two nights, for some odd reason -

MY FEET SMELL LIKE POPCORN.

I'm sorry, what? ♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Add to Technorati Faves