come, take a walking-trip through happiness.

at first i wanted to remember. now i want to blow it away like a stray eyelash on a cheek, instantly lost to the rest of the world’s debris. people fall out of love every day, said my dad, you can’t always explain it. i needed to explain it. i try to exorcise myself of those two grey years, when i’m sitting in living rooms and bars and tattoo parlors and i wonder, is it going to be like this every single april?

new york city: i should have said, i was never meant to think i was in love with someone, my whole life i have known that it wouldn’t save me. so, i was just letting him use my spine as a leash.

transcendent summer months: i wore a necklace every day, i drank as much vodka as i wanted. it wasn’t all that much. i put my arms around everyone and sang i’ll probably feel a whole lot better when you’re gone in unison with my friends, pretending like he could see the whole thing. look at me, i’m not who i was.

munich: the same story, from another mouth. we promise ourselves we won’t let it happen again. i tip the italian waiters and take self-satisfied sips of my drink, congratulating myself for getting there. but why can’t it be explained? is it going to be like this every time the weather gets warmer, from now on?

yesterday i got my new passport in the mail. i was excited to get a new one because i am vain and my old one was from when i was sixteen and in the picture i look bloated and stoned. i had been dragging my heels on renewing my passport because i figured i wasn’t going to be using it but then of course i impetuously decided to go to new zealand and australia, so i ended up getting my pictures taken at walgreen’s at 8 am on the day of a snowstorm by some woman who evidently had no idea how to take passport photos. and since i am too shy and stupid i didn’t ask for her to re-do it. so in the picture my teeth look gross and yellow and my hood looks like some kind of rumpled purple goiter growing out of my shoulder. but that is not the worst part, apparently they have had a passport redesign so now the pages of the book are covered with drawings of shit like cowboys, totem poles and BALD EAGLES. also at the top of each page there are quotes from former presidents. uh excuse me i did not order the raging patriot version of the passport, whatever happened to the plain blue pages? now i understand why people in other countries hate us, some poor customs official who has to stamp hundreds of american passports every day probably wants to barf every time he opens up to the page with the giant eagle on it.

last night i talked to my cousin and i started making a mental list of all the things i want to do when i’m in new zealand.
-hunt wild pigs. last week paul called and left a message about how he caught a pig and was going to go skin it. i guess wild pigs are kind of a problem down there, they even have helicopters fly around and shoot them from above because these pigs are actually fast. my cousin said there is a guy who takes his pit bulls out and lets them pick up the scent of the pigs and then he follows the dogs and shoots the boar, then slits its throat. i was like uh can you please make me a date with the wild pig hunter dude?
-shoot a gun. i don’t want to shoot any animals but i have never shot a gun and what better place to do it than down on the farm?
-go to the CADBURY FACTORY in dunedin. it has always been a fantasy of mine to go to the cadbury factory in birmingham, but who am i kidding i will never go to effing birmingham. man i can not wait to eat free chocolate samples until i can’t walk out the door.
-eat rabbit and lamb and all kinds of other farm meats.
-milk a cow. another thing i have never done. they have machines that do it but i want to actually squeeze an udder.

i feel like such a city mouse!

tagged by sabrina.

one. i decided if for some reason i ever get married, the first dance will be to big star’s ‘thirteen’. i can’t decide if it is an innocent love song about young kids in love or some sort of pervy declaration or alex chilton’s love for a younger girl, either way, i dig it, man.

two. i have only been listening to country music lately. like, really embarrassing seventies country music that my dad is into. he always hated it, and then he got drafted and sent to texas in the early seventies and began to hate it even more. too bad when he got out of the army he found out he actually wanted to listen to conway twitty and george jones. i used to be embarrassed because i am kind of named after a country song- but it is better than being named after barry manilow’s ‘mandy’, which is usually what people think.

three. i have been watching this video like ten times a day for the past week. chris hillman’s hair is absolutely phenomenal, not to mention the fucking ruffled shirt. i get it now, miss pamela. this is probably a sign that i need to leave the house and meet people and stop being obsessed with dead dudes or dudes who are old or who i will never meet (or a combination of those three).

four. i was a half hour late for work today because i decided to lay down next to my dog and cry because i can’t deal with mortality.

five. if you are my friend and you ask me to do something, i will probably do it. i can’t decided if this is because i am desperately eager to please people or because i just have a giant heart that is filled with love for everyone.

six. if it was socially acceptable, i would never wear shoes. one day i am going to pick up all my friends and family and move them to the tropic of cancer and we can all walk around barefoot all the time.

this weekend i went to a bridal expo. my mom got this postcard in the mail for two free tickets so as a joke i told erin we should go because it was guaranteed to be fucking stupidly amazing. too bad that postcard was a complete scam and once you get on their website to order your ‘free’ tickets they blindside you with the news that the two free tickets come AFTER you pay for an initial pair. they were only $7 so of course people are probably like ah fuck it and just buy them because obviously once you have your heart set on going to a bridal expo it is hard to be convinced otherwise. so we drove out to the damn crown plaza o’hare on sunday morning with our tickets only to find that it was going to cost us $18 to park in their stupid lot. we must have really had some power compelling us to go to the damn bridal convention because i drove around for awhile thinking maybe we could find somewhere to park and instead of just saying forget it and like going to the bookstore or something, we just gave up and paid to park. we must be like true secret anthropologists, on a mission to observe a bunch of fat ugly brides-to-be on a sunday afternoon in a hotel by the airport. i decided if i needed to pretend to be a bride for whatever reason (like, maybe single ladies with no prospects aren’t allowed in?) i would tell them i didn’t have a ring because my fiance is in iraq and he proposed via webcam. sadly i think the story was way more elaborate than that but i won’t get into it. i was also going to write down that my name was ‘lake masters’ because that is the name of a character from the dirty book of the month excerpt they always print in cosmo although it sounded extremely fake. they make you fill out cards before you go in so i put down the address of me and erin’s old apartment so maybe now our heinous ex-landlord will be bombarded with wedding crap. they also give you stickers that say V.I.B. (or V.I.G. if you are a groom). we grabbed free intuition razors and pretty much went straight for the food. they had janky bruschetta but also these magical little biscuits that had a CHUNK OF MEAT inside of them. i only had like three even though i saw some other girl carry her plate away with like 12 of them on it, pigging out at the bridal expo is apparently sanctioned. so then we had mini cupcakes and watched the flirty girl fitness booth workers slide up and down the stripped pole they had installed on a temporary stage. it was so pathetic but also horrifying, the look in erin’s eyes when the david’s bridal representative asked, ‘do you have your dress yet?’ was pure primal fear. we made it out without having to talk to anyone besides the tuxedo people and some guy who was trying to sell us LASER ETCHED PHOTOS.

oh yeah, there was also a fashion show, obviously it was hilariously bad. before it started they kept giving away all these prizes and all the brides were so fat and ugly, my brain started imploding from the cognitive dissonance- i mean fat women who are getting married? my whole worldview rests of the simple truth that if you are fat no one will ever love you, right? i mean that is pretty much the basis of all my neuroses, being told that and actually believing it. and yes, here are all these women who are clearly way dumber and less attractive than me and i haven’t gotten laid in forever. before the fashion show began, the emcee was getting the crowd all fired up and asked, a la ‘who’s ready to rock and roll!’- ‘who’s excited to get MARRIED!’ which pretty much made me lose my shit, then the most boring models came out wearing the grossest bedazzled gowns, there was one model who i dubbed ‘the paris hilton of the bridal expo fashion show’ because you could tell that she was serious about the whole deal and was really pissed off about having to work with a bunch of amateurs. we made it through about ten minutes of this then decided to grab another little cupcake then get the fuck out. my iq had already gone down enough just being there, i became so retarded i couldn’t even find my way out of the parking garage. thankfully there was an antidote to this bridal madness, but i will write my review on that after lunch.

so, because the last few nights i have been laying in bed feeling like someone was trying to remove my stomach with a pocket knife, i have had the pleasure of watching some incredible network television. last night, in order to get my mom to come lay beside me and rub my back, we watched american idol together (though please do not get the idea that my mom is some kind of american idol fan, however if i had been watching, say, curb your enthusiasm, i don’t think she would have wanted to sit there for long). american idol makes me want to go on a murderous rampage. okay, since i work in an office that in most respects is like every other office in the country, i get to listen to the most grievous conversations every day about the most abhorrent television programs. last week my boss forced me to come into his office for ‘a second’ and made me stay for two minutes of this baby faced idol contestant singing the most sappy godawful versionof ‘imagine’ i have ever heard. my boss was like ‘i have never liked john lennon until i heard this kid sing that song!’ why don’t you just take a crap right on lennon’s grave, dude! okay, the kid had a good pleasant voice, but john lennon fucking WROTE that song! anyway, last night was ’80s night’ apparently, for the dudes. i guess if you can call the parade of skinny-jeans wearing, angular haircut-sporting, pouty-lipped, lionel richie-singing coquettes “dudes”. one of them is named CHIKEZIE (i had to look that up, i kept calling him ‘cheeto’ last night, which is not any more ridiculous) and my mom goes ‘he looks just like ICE CUBED.’ oh my god i couldn’t stop laughing about that one extra letter for five minutes. but she is right, i mean he sort of looks like ice cube, if he was gentle and shopped at abercrombie. anyway, my imaginary vote goes for the australia guy. he was clearly one of the least talented, yet, he is australian. on AMERICAN idol! how subversive.

then we watched channel 11 where they were hawking a multidisc set of 60s rock and showing all these old clips and i got all indignant, like LOOK AT SMOKEY ROBINSON! LOOK HOW HIGH HIS PANTS ARE! no way in fuck would smokey have ever won american idol. too bad seconds later my mom and i were both swooning over how cute alex chilton was, to which i say: touche, american idol creators. then i told her that not enough dudes wear turtlenecks anymore (seriously, did you watch that video i posted down below? dave’s turtleneck is so high it is about to suffocate him) and i am pretty sure she looked at me like i just told her i was a lesbian.

i can’t wait until my appetite returns, i am going to eat my fucking body weight in cadbury caramel eggs.