It's Friday night!

You know you might need to re-evaluate your life when the anonymous person you're playing "Words With Friends" with on your phone asks you what your plans are and all you can answer is "catching up on TV"

The sad part is, that's a lie. You're actually caught up on the TV and you're rewatching the second season of 30 Rock. Also, you've discovered that your new favorite thing is a mixture of medium grade whiskey, crystal light ice tea, and diet off brand lemon-lime soda. Oh, and that the main reader of your blog is your boss.

I came home today after running my awesome errands. And there were three main things that I realized.

1) If you're at the alcohol store that is roughly the size of a Walmart with your dog, and you're talking about wine choices with your dog... You're one of the few people sadder than me.

2) The company I work for... to the public eye, will end due to severe lack of customer service. My mechanic called me today to ask me a favor related to my company, because she couldn't get any service. Then I went into the store and sales associates actively avoided me as I went to ask them for help finding something.

3) One of my basil plants might not make it. As I have taken to talking to my plants, this is very upsetting.

Whatever, I'm still better off than "Chauncy, should we get the Oregon or Washington wine tonight?"

So my boss is the biggest troll that ever trolled

So, he gets upset when I won't let him on my personal twitter, but he apparently reads this blog where I do actually show my crazy.

And my mother was worried about Facebook. If she only fucking knew.

It also occurs to me that her birthday is soon and I will have to call her again soon, and I would rather do something horrible. Like use a gasoline soaked tampon. I feel that that might do something fucked up to me. Or be really fun. Whatever.

So, the sounds of my cell phone telling me I have email is starting to raise my blood pressure significantly. And my computer screen just flashed at me, so I assume that someone just hacked in and is now watching me type this. Vagina.

I don't know, that's just the paranoia speaking to me. I assume that everyone here is watching me all the time. Makes me want to just wear a nothing but a trenchcoat and scream YOU WANT ALL OF ME! YOU GOT IT FUCK FACES! And then watch as they take tear out their eyeballs.

My boss, now known as King Troll for the purposes of the blog, is tempting the gods by trying to turn up the AC. Like we didn't have a massive server failure earlier. Dumbass.

Tomorrow I will do nothing but brush my teeth

Lookit!  Lookit all the things I did on my day off!

• woke up before noon
• ate breakfast (okay, I really just drank coffee and nibbled on a piece of bread, what?)
• went to therapy
• went for a run
• ate lunch
• filed my taxes (three days early this year, aw yeah!)
• went to yoga
• went to the store where I bought actual food
• called my mother
• made arrangements to go to the wedding of a cousin I haven't seen in six years
• cooked actual food and ate dinner

Then I had to call Hattie because only she would understand when I explained everything and concluded by saying, "...and therefore, I have truly earned tonight's Xanax."

We won't talk about how she threw away my toaster and I had to make toast in the oven

Hattie and I were roommates for about a year, once upon a time.  She moved in six months after she was going to, originally, because I used my dining room table for book storage and she stopped talking to me in a fit or rage one night when she and our friend Dave came over to my house and she was unable to, I don't know, set the fucking table or something?  She hadn't even started to move in, we'd just discussed the possibility, and I was already infringing on her ability to properly entertain guests.  Now, we weren't eating at my house because I don't cook.  It was actually after the super fancy dinner and wine tasting Dave had paid for since he was the grownup with an actual job and salary at the time.  And, well, he still is the only one of us with an actual job and salary, but that's beside the point.

The point is, Hattie got in a giant snit about how many books were on my dining room table and picked a fight with me over it and we didn't talk for six months.  I know it seems like a ridiculous fight now, but, well, no, it seemed pretty ridiculous at the time, too.  I maintain that tables are flat and, therefore, the perfect place to put other flat objects, like books.

But what about bookshelves?  Well, yes, I have those, too.  I have giant, seven-foot tall bookshelves lining my, well, let's just call it a dining room.  I also have smaller bookshelves scattered around my house.  And I used to have cupboards full of books.  Kitchen cupboards.

Look, when you don't cook, when you think of the kitchen mostly as the ice room because that's where you go to get the ice for your cocktails, all those shelves are nothing but empty storage space waiting to be used.  And books fit very nicely on kitchen cupboard shelves.  And the cupboards beneath the counter?  Perfect for shoes.

Do not give me that horrified look.  I'm tired of judgey people looking at me all judgey and being judgey about the choices I make in regards to the contents of my kitchen.  I say all a kitchen really needs is an ice maker, a liquor cabinet, and a toaster, and the rest of it is just wasted space, and if I choose to house part of my truly prodigious shoe collection in my kitchen cabinets that is no one's business but my own.

Unless you move in with me, in which case, like Hattie, you'll fill boxes and boxes with shoes and books and dump them in front of my bedroom door with the demand that I store them somewhere that isn't shared space.  She actually said that storing shoes in kitchen was unhygienic, as if there were any actual foodstuffs in my kitchen before she moved in.

Well, I did have a lot of tea.  That kind of counts as food.

Dusty up in here.

So, long story short. I started a new job, therefore, have not updated the blog that me and my co-blogger and maybe three of my friends read. You know, if they're bored. And drunk. And the rest of the internet is broken. And their dogs won't wake up.

Whatever.

I'm having a celebratory glass of wine right now, because I was very much the adult today. I registered my car 2 weeks early and got my hair cut.

Now, that makes me sound like an adult. But if you think about it, really it makes me a child. Because I haven't changed the oil in my car since February of 2010. And really, my dad did that for me. (In my defense he had the car and I was in another state). And I haven't had my hair cut since June of 2009. Yeah, no that's not a typo. So really, I did some shit that I have been avoiding like the plague.

It's not to say that my hair hasn't been cut. I like to cut my own hair when I have a few drinks. It's why I now have bangs.

So, that brings me to the subject of this post. My levels of drunkeness. I think I have them figured out.

Stage One: I get more chatty and everything seems funny to me.
Stage Two: Everything seems funny, but everyone around me is getting depressed because my version of funny is usually depressing to everyone around me.
Stage Three: I start to find other people boring and attempt to do things like cut my own hair or scrub my fridge (This is the tasking stage, but I never finish any project in this stage properly).
Stage Four: People are interesting again, because people can get me tacos. At this point, all I care about is the getting of and eating of tacos.
Stage Five: I don't know much about this stage, because it starts to get fuzzy and really depends on the results of Stage Four. If I have received the tacos, Stage Five will end quickly in sleep. If not, I get pretty belligerent and wacky.

Just 20 more minutes until my water is turned back on.

Childhood Fears

"Wouldn't it be nice to be a kid again?" Hattie asked me a few weeks ago.  We were on the phone, as we often are at night since we're both insomniacs.  "Not, like, gym class or anything, but think about it.  No bills."


"No bills," I said dreamily.


"No job.  No responsibilities.  No worries."


"Seriously," I said.  "What was your biggest worry when you were seven?  We didn't have worries!"


"Exactly!" Hattie cried.  "We were worried about, what?  What Santa Claus was going to bring us that year?  Maybe the boogeyman."


"For me it was the alligator who lived under my bed and wanted to shoot my feet with a laser beam."


Hattie started to laugh.  "The what?"


"There was an alligator who lived under my bed.  He was a very learned alligator.  He'd invented his own laser beam to shoot my feet with.  Only, it wasn't very versatile.  He had to use a different computer program to make it shoot depending on where I was in the room and how many feet I was standing on at the time, and all the programs were on different floppy discs that weren't very well organized because his wife was a bad housekeeper.  I jumped around a lot to thwart him."


Hattie was silent for a long time.  "I don't even know what to say about that.  And what the hell is a floppy disc?"


I sighed.  Hattie's a decade younger than me and very often I have to explain things that existed before the nineties.  "They were five inches wide.  They flopped.  They could hold up to 140 kilobytes."


"Megabytes," she corrected me.


"Nope.  Kilo."


"Really?  Like, seriously?"


"You're trying to avoid the alligator that lived under my bed."


"I'm trying not to think you needed therapy even as a child."

"I'll draw you a picture of the genius alligator so you understand," I told her.  "I was also afraid of the ghost that lived in my clock."


"You were not."


"And volcanoes.  I was terrified that I'd be playing at the park one day and a volcano would erupt and I wouldn't be able to save my book in time."


"Why would you have a book at the park?"


"You've met me, right?"


"Yeah, okay.  Volcanoes?"

"Mount St. Helens erupted when I was a child.  I was emotionally scarred.  Oh, and Russians."


"Russians what?"


"I was afraid of the Russians."


"Why?"


"They were a superpower.  They were going to kill us all."


"People were afraid of the Russians?"


"I hate you," I told her.  That's what I tell her whenever she makes me feel old.  Then I listed off all the other things I worried about as a child.  I worried about a polar bear eating me.  I worried about my dog running away.  I worried about a polar bear eating my dog.  The fact that I lived nowhere near polar bears didn't matter, since my sense of direction and understanding of distance were pretty much nonexistent until I learned how to drive.


I was afraid that the zombies from Michael Jackson's Thriller video were going to get me.  I worried about forgetting my lunch money.  I worried about starving to death if I forgot my lunch money.  I worried about falling off the monkey bars.  I worried that my dad would get hit by a car.  I worried that my dog would get hit by a car.  I was terrified of clowns which, okay, I still am, because clowns are evil and I was a smart little girl.


I listed off all my childhood fears and anxieties, and Hattie laughed her ass off because she is also evil.  "Mostly, though, I was afraid of the man in the hat who lived in my basement."


"You had a man living in your basement?" she asked.


"He wasn't a real man.  He just looked like a man.  Sort of.  He was all black.  More of a shadow than a person, but really, really dark, not like a normal shadow.  He had a long coat and a fedora and he would watch me when I was playing.  I always wanted to run up the stairs when he showed up, but I was too afraid so I just kept playing, like if I pretended I didn't know he was there he wouldn't get me."


Hattie was silent.  I sighed and waited for her to start laughing.  "Dude," she said.  "That's real."


"I was a neurotic child, okay?  I know this, I--"


"No, seriously.  That guy with the hat, he's a shadow person.  Like, thousands of people have seen him."


"Fuck you," I said.


"Google it," she said.


I googled it.  I was not happy with the results.  I prefer to believe that I was just neurotic and that there wasn't really a malevolent shadow being watching me all those times.


I am not going to draw a picture of the man in the hat who lived in my basement, because he was scary as hell then, and I strongly dislike the idea that he might have been real.  Instead, you get a portrait of me and Hattie, just to end things on a lighter note.

This might seem like it's just a really shitty drawing, but it's not.  We actually look exactly like this, only I'm even taller.  And I'm eating nachos right now.

Tour De France, Yeah, I'm Down With That

>Just a forewarning, I swear, a lot in this post. And damn Floyd Landis to an eternal hellfire for being a dickhole.

So, Sena and I are Tour freaks. This is mostly my fault. And it is mostly the fault of Lance Armstrong. What started in 2001 or so as a "Hey, he survived cancer and he's American! Let's watch this bitch," has become a fairly all consuming obsession...

Really, it was the 2004 Tour that got me seriously into it. Thomas Voeckler and his little woob face. And then. And then. FLOYD LANDIS YOU SKEEZY WHORE FACED COCKSLAP.

...Sorry for the capslock and language, but seriously. Fuck him hard. Lance Armstrong is probably the most tested man in the history of any sport. And seriously, seriously. He had less than a 40% chance of surviving cancer... not only did he survive, and win the Tour 7 times? He naturally fathered two children (OK, one is still in the womb, whatever). HE SHOULDN'T HAVE SPERM. Clearly, he is superhuman. OK. Deal with it, Floyd, you skeezy bastard. And it's not just Lance he's attacking. It's everyone. What is that? Come on, you got caught. You and Vino and all the other cheaters can have a nice party in hell.

I mean, if you ever prove to me without a shadow of a doubt that Lance cheated? I'll probably lose all faith in humanity. And he's not even my favorite cyclist... but he is one of my favorite human beings ever. And Landis accusing Hincapie and Zabriskie too? Sorry, Floyd, they're national champs, and you're made of fail. Sucks to be you.

I think that some background should be give on this. I loved Floyd. When he was one of Lance's lieutenants, I thought to myself "He could win this, he should be on another team, going for himself". And then he won! And then he was accused and he wrote a book. A book that I bought, and I sung his praises. And then he turned out to be an epic bag of douche. Like when Vino couldn't have won, couldn't do it, was out and then came back and won a stage. Won it epically. Fuck you, Vino. Cheater.

Anyway, watched the stage today, the first stage in the Alps, and my little heart wants to say, “no, you're wrong announcers, Lance isn't out of this” just because they said that Cavendish was broken and they talked smack about him and said he couldn't come back and then Cavendish went “hey, fuck you, two stage wins” and I made the most epic win arms ever. Tyler Farrar... broken wrist and cracked elbow went “hey, second place, bitches.” This is why I love the Tour.

I don't know who's going to take it this year. Andy Schleck, perhaps? (Side note, if you're on Twitter, you should follow @schleckfrank and @andy_schleck). Contador? He's won all three before, in his own right. Shady-ness of last year aside (What was he doing on the same team as Armstrong, anyway?), he can win it in his own right. Cadel Evans has gotten stronger each year... I think I'm throwing my support to Andy Schleck, and a little to the slightly longer shot of Levi Lepheimer.

Mostly this year, can we have a dope free race? Please? That would be amazing.