Really, I just wanted a freakin' belt.

Having exhausted every possibility within a 15-mile radius in my search to find a non-black, non-brown belt I could wear with my still-too-big jeans on the weekends, I set out this morning for the freak show also known as THE GREAT MALL.

If you've never been to The Great Mall, let me explain. It's basically a GINORMOUS complex, built in a circle, that houses +/- 100 stores. Many of the stores are outlets (Saks, Neiman Marcus, Old Navy, Gap, Banana Republic), some are generic strip mall stores (Forever 21, Claire's, Shoe Pavillion, PacSun), and some are niche stores that sell items like hospital scrubs, "as seen on TV" items, and glass-encased scorpions that you can hang from a chain around your neck. Should you choose to do so.

And there's a big movie theater.

And of course, because it is such a GINORMOUS complex and just walking through half of it could take even a non-shopper six hours, there are also lots of restaurants, including Fresh Choice (my personal favorite), Dave & Buster's, Anderson Bakery (which you'd think would be my personal favorite) and strip mall standbys like Sbarro and Cinnabon.

(Digression. I hope to never, ever eat a Cinnabon ever again throughout the span of my entire life, because they are so utterly disgusting, but DAMN do they smell good. End of digression.)

One might think, that with all the options, I could easily have found a belt. Not the case. Not one lousy belt that met my criteria.

As I walked from store to store in that GINORMOUS mall, I slowly realized was that we are a society that makes so much crap that we can't even sell it on the regular market, so we have to create special "outlet" markets to attempt to sell the crap that wouldn't sell on the regular market at a discounted price, and then I started thinking about all the people who can't afford food and shelter and it suddenly just seemed SO VERY WRONG to be in The Great Mall.

And so I left, sans belt but feeling self-righteous (and full from my GINORMOUS salad at Fresh Choice).

Driving up 880 toward home, I saw a DSW Shoe store off to the side of the freeway in Fremont. I swerved three lanes and took the exit. Because I am ALL ABOUT the DSW shoes. And although I didn't find any shoes, I did learn that there is a Costco in Fremont, and it is well stocked! And well organized! And the people are nice, much nicer than in San Leandro or Richmond! And the lines were shorter! Although there weren't as many free samples. But anyway, instead of driving 40 miles to find a belt, I ended up driving 40 miles to spend yet another $122 at Costco on bargains I could never have found elsewhere.

And then I realized that consumerism is ingrained in my being just as it is ingrained in all of your beings, and...

And...

Well, frankly I just don't care. I mean, seriously! THREE POUNDS of dried cranberries for under $7? That's like six months' worth of cranberries that I can stir into my oatmeal or yogurt every morning!

God bless America.

Incommunicado.

I am tired.

Each day brings a new challenge. Some are great learning experiences and others are not. Some just suck, actually. True to any new job, I am sure.

I honestly had no idea what I was getting into. I had no real sense of the transition from six months of "cruise control" to being slammed into exactly the opposite. For 10-12 hours a day I use my brain nonstop, usually in conjunction with a lot of other smart people, and then I go home.

On a good day, I make dinner, make lunch for the next day, maybe watch a little TV or read a book, get to bed early, get up early for the gym. That was my routine for four weeks and it was good.

More recently, I've been making dinner, making lunch for the next day, getting back online for a few hours, turning in but waking up at 2am and fretting until the wee hours of the morning. Which results in no gym, no mental break and no time for Her Majesty. At this rate, I will never see my friends, let alone attempt (yet again) the dating ordeal. No job is worth that, unless you don't care about that stuff.

So tonight. I am not working tonight. I am watching the movie that's been sitting next to my TV for three weeks. Her Majesty will curl up with me. It will be good.

If I vow to do some variation of what I'm doing tonight, at least once a week, and increase as I can from there, I think it will all be jussssst fiiiiiiiiine.

Friday five.

Five women who have inspired me, in honor of Women's History Month, in no particular order... to call this a top five list would be ridiculous because obviously there's Ella Baker, Barbara Kingsolver, Barbara Lee, Sarah Vowell, Kate Winslet, Alice Paul, Ellen DeGeneres, Jane Austen, Barbara Mikulski, Anne Frank, Ani DiFranco, Julianne Moore... oy vey could I go on for hours, but let me start with these five:

• My grandmother, who raised seven children during the depression (six of them BOYS! one of whom kept getting stuck in quicksand!) while her husband worked all day. In her quiet, subtle way, she taught me that despite any family oddities like, oh, say, one son marrying a woman and the other son marrying that woman's daughter - and all the weirdness that comes with THAT gnarled family tree - the family always eats together at the holidays. And that the best bread is homemade bread, hands down, no questions asked.
  
• Princess Leia, who never gave up and always reminded the boys that they were no better than her. She was the costume of choice for my fourth Halloween, and the subject of my freshman English paper on personal heroes in college.
• A good friend in college, who taught me that this world is truly fucked up, left and right inside and out, and that whatever I could do to make it a better place would be a good thing. She's doing her part and now I am hopefully doing mine.
  
• Roseanne Connor, who was never afraid to speak up for herself, had a great sense of humor, stuck by her family at all costs and proved to be an endless source of inspiration and support despite countless trials and tribulations. At least through season seven.
• My mom, who grew up with six brothers and lived to tell the tale. The older I get, the more I respect and learn from my mom.

If I were a 13 year old girl...

I've been wondering why I got a copy of this magazine, the "original buyers guide for men," in the mail a few days ago. Out of curiousity I leafed through the articles riddled with randomly vulgar curse words, and the ads featuring beer and scantily clad women.

And then I saw this.


Oh, Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Your hyphenated name befuddles me, but I love you still.

If I were a 13 year old girl, that picture would be hanging over my bed alongside Brad Pitt's drenched half-dressed illegal Vanity Fair photo (that I can't even find a link to anymore), every photo of Johnny Depp that ever existed, and this photo of Ed Vedder. Or maybe this photo of Ed Vedder, or this one.

(But probably not this one.)

Aw, hell. Who am I kidding... I'm a 32 year old girl and I have no intention of letting go of this photo anytime soon.

It's hip to be [a few steps ahead of] square.

I'm not hip. I'm usually a few steps behind all the hipsters when it comes to music, movies, art, books, technology... you name it, I'll be there approximately six months behind you. And when I arrive, all the hipsters will shun what I've excitedly discovered, and I'll be behind again.

For example. I stumbed upon Dave Eggers accidentally several years ago. I was going to Belize and needed some beach reading, so a coworker lent me AHWOSG. I read it over two days. I was hooked. I thought I found the next best thing. When I got back home, I learned about McSweeny's, and 826 Valencia, and speaking tours with They Might Be Giants and Sarah Vowell, and, and... And suddenly Dave Eggers isn't hip anymore. But still I buy his books, and enjoy his books for the most part, so who cares.

Such seems to be the case with Jonathan Safran Foer as well. His first novel was fascinating and intricate and complex and confusing and beautiful (although the film adaptation stunk). I'm mostly through his second novel and although it's less so than the first, it's a far better second novel than most can claim. And then I read this, and well... Dang. Late again.

So this Friday a little indie band called The Helio Sequence is playing in the city, and my hipster friend played them for me while I was in Seattle, and I was all set to go, and be one of the first*, but then something came up for Friday early evening and something else came up for Saturday morning, and, and... And I'm just too damn old for all that nonsense.

But YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST.

Their MySpace friends Menomena are also supposed to rock. Doot do, do do do.

________________
* It's not so much about being one of the first, as it is the thrill of seeing an awesome band in a teeny venue before they inevitably hit it big and tickets go from $10 to $35 and suddenly you're sitting on the lawn of the Shoreline breathing in secondhand smoke for 4 hours watching this awesome band on a screen from 500 feet away.

Wading through all the teeny venue crap is another thing I'm just too damn old for. I need it to be POINTED OUT TO ME. Or within walking distance.

Crankypants.

Beautiful panoramic Sunday afternoon 4-hour hike, why do you mock me so?

Not only am I sunburned in such a way that collars, seat belts and turning my head in general really really hurt. That would be annoying enough.

I've also got the exact same crippling pains in my calves, that I got last year around this time after running uphill for 8 of 14 miles. THAT does not make me happy. I just got on a running kick and now I'm going to have to slack off for a week or possibly several until the muscles heal. And if this is any indication of my ability to do long hikes in the future... Well, get used to subject of post. And lots of it.

On the upside, I learned from last year's mistake - I'm already on the ice and rest plan, whereas last year it took 4 weeks and a 16 mile run to beat me into submission.

And hey, maybe I'll gain that 10 pounds I've been "whining" about.

"Do you have regrets about the way you lived your life? Because I think I do."

I think I've been watching too many Scrubs reruns lately.

Tonight, for whatever reason, I decided to pull out my old floppy disks and read through letters to friends and family that I wrote almost 8 years ago. That poor decision actually feeds some hilarious content for another post, but in the meantime, I just have to say...

For the most part I have learned from my mistakes. I have grown as a person, as a woman and as a professional. But seriously? The biggest mistake* I ever made was being a schizophrenic bitch to the nicest (comma only) boy who treated me with the level of honesty, decency and respect anyone in a relationship should display to their partner.

He was a law student, interning for the summer. I was a temp at his law firm during college. Despite our love for liberalism, red wine and our coworker's band, it was destined for failure due to the age difference (6 years, which, when I was 18, is a great difference), physical distance for most of the year (he was in NYC, I was in eastern bumfuck southern Virginia), and God knows what else. Or so I thought.

I read some old correspondence to friends where I described his cute letters and phone calls during the school year. I vividly recall a message I got from my Beevis-&-Butthead-loving roommate in college, who I made every effort to tolerate at my own expense, where she nonchalantly mentioned when I walked in the dorm door after a study session one night, that he "called, he said to call back if it wasn't too late" and I literally told her to get the hell out so I could call him back.

It lasted about a year, and ended badly due to me being a total crazy psycho who was convinced all he wanted was to get married because he was "of that age" where he was probably ready to start settling down and HOLY SHIT I was too young to think about that so of course the best resolution was to end - nay, rudely sever - all ties immediately.

I saw him a few years after we "broke up" while I was at a show, and he appeared to be with a fiance while I was with my uber-jealous boyfriend at the time. He didn't see me. Thankfully.

From time to time I wonder where I would be had I stayed with the nice guy. I'd probably be in a suburb near DC, raising a couple kids and working a decent liberal job while he fought the good fight with the court system.

And I try to convince myself that things happen for a reason, and that I wouldn't have found San Francisco and all the magic and friends and food that it offers, had I stayed on the East Coast. And I try to convince myself that this was all meant to be, and I'm doing what I need to be doing.

But I'm a child of the "choose your own adventure" era. I constantly wonder what's behind Door #2. I hope his family is doing well, wherever he and his inevitably beautiful and successful wife and children are.

And I curse the Internet for making me search his name these past 10 minutes.

________________
* That's the biggest mistake tonight. Ask me tomorrow, you'd probably get a different answer.

Oh, and also, if I were king of the forest?

I would ban movies with actors who don't bother to pick an accent. I was so distracted trying to figure out what country they were supposed to be from, and what country they were allegedly in, that I missed all the twists and turns of the actual plot. By the end when all was revealed, I found myself wishing I'd just watched Fight Club for the nine millionth time instead.

And the very loud dude at the gym. I would ban him as well.

If I ruled the world.

Entry #1 from this book for bloggers with writer's block: reign supreme.

If I ruled the world, people would care more about politics than Hollywood gossip. Anna Nicole Smith's death would've been back page news in the local paper, overshadowed tenfold by what Ron Dellums is up to in Oakland. Britney's head shaving incident would've been the last skit on SNL, after the sarcastically derogatory plays on the latest debacles of our fine government. No one would know about a celebrity's immediate entry into rehab after doing something [stupid/offensive/annoying] because they'd be too focused on the atrocities going on overseas. (Yeah, I follow Hollywood gossip. My point exactly.)

When I am queen, adults who litter will be immediately sentenced to 16 hours community service, which will entail scraping the scum from the surface of the local public watering hole (wading pants not provided). Parents whose children litter will be forced to put $50 per item of trash toward their children's college education, and the children shall be denied [candy/Dora videos/Wii] for 1 year per item of trash they carelessly toss on the ground.

In my kingdom, the following will be banned: Sub woofers. SUVs. Tom Cruise. Pointy-haired bosses. Linkin Park. Commercials, mainly just those featuring Tom Shane, but if I can ban the whole lot of them, super. Reality TV shows. Golf. $600 shoes. "Don't ask, don't tell." Bill O'Reilly. People who would rather film [whales attacking fishing boats/tsunamis/police beating citizens with billy clubs] than call or run for help. Twinkies. Office romances. Ticketbastard. That nasty "butter" at movie theaters. Las Vegas. Bridge tolls that don't go toward filling potholes. And last, but certainly not least - people who don't spellcheck their public lists of things that should be banned.

The post no woman wants to read.

After running Inspiration Point in the blazing sun and heat yesterday afternoon in record time, I returned home to enjoy the rest of the glorious sunny day by... Hemming lots of pants. WOOHOO!

See, here's the thing. I don't know if it's all the running, or all the running at increased speeds with no detriment to knees or other physicalities, or the fact that I haven't really been depressed about work since January, or the fact that I've been trying to save money by cooking more often, or a combination of all that. But since the beginning of the year I seem to have lost another somewhere-between-8-to-10-pounds. After losing big about 12 months ago, I held steady last year and did lots of shopping, but now none of my clothes fit. Belts don't help. And I hate shopping unless it's for shoes. So for a while I've just been layering and feeling like a slob. And in a rare turn of events, I decided yesterday to hem all the pants that fit 12 months ago but now hang below my ankles.

I contemplated gaining 10 pounds just to save myself from having to shop or get clothes altered, but I seem to be addicted to (obsessed with?) this running thing, so gaining weight while still eating healthy (I don't like chocolate, and with my family history of heart issues I don't want to dive into the french fries and gordo burritos either) is more of a challenge.

See - told you no woman would want to read this. I know, waaaaah, woe is me, right? Seriously though? It's annoying.

In other news... I want my hour back, dammit. This Daylight Savings crap is for the birds. And the squirrels. And the people walking their dogs, and the farmers, and the cats who get an extra hour of sunbeams to snooze in. But I want my hour back.

Friday five semi-double take.

I had iTunes on random last night and I heard a song that took me back, so to speak, and so tonight I was going to post five songs on mix tapes from cute male friends in high school that I misinterpreted as meaning "I'm interested in you" but really they were just saying "hey you should hear this, it's a great song," in no particular order... but I could only remember three songs, and I probably threw away or burned or otherwise destroyed the tapes over the years so there's no way to know what the others were but dammit there were many... but here are the three I could remember:

• Somebody - Depeche Mode
• Found - The Beloved
• Lovesong - The Cure

(One step closer to this... but several vodka shots short.)

For the actual Friday Five - five activities, scents or tastes that remind me of childhood, in no particular order:

• Swinging my feet - I do this at the gym when I'm on the arm press thingie, because I have to put the seat up high so that my arms are pushing at the right angle... and as a result, my feet don't touch the ground, so in between sets I kick my feet out one at a time (and if I'm in a really good mood, I whistle along with whatever's blaring in my ears from my iPod, which just makes it even more childlike) - try it, it's fun
  
• Swinging in general - there's nothing like flying up high in the air and swooping back down, only to go up even higher the next time and dare yourself to jump... when I was in college I visited my cousin and we were walking around his neighborhood talking about all this depressing shit (mostly about how I was depressed, I imagine) and we ran across this little park with swings... we swang and swang and swang and I remember expressing to him that I hadn't been that carefree in a long time... so now I try to swing whenever the opportunity presents itself
• Going barefoot - I hated shoes as a kid, I hate shoes to this day... I wear them because I have to, and whenever possible I wear flip flops or sandals, but as soon as I get home the shoes are OFF... and if I step onto a grassy knoll or a forest valley, my shoes are off almost immediately
  
• Peanut butter ice cream - there was this ice cream place in the local mall where I grew up that had THE. BEST. PEANUT BUTTER ICE CREAM. EVER... it was the first peanut butter ice cream I'd ever had, and the only kind I ever wanted after I tried it - basically just vanilla ice cream with big globs and swirls of peanut butter in it, not like that Ben & Jerry's stuff where it's a blur of vanilla and peanut butter flavoring - this was hard core straight up PEANUT BUTTER in the ice cream... when I get a craving I grab a pint of french vanilla, let it melt for a half hour or so, add in globs of peanut butter, stir it, re-freeze it and then eat it later - but I have yet to recreate that ice cream experience and the store, natch, is now gone
  
• Swimming pools - I can't even begin to count how many hours I spent at the neighborhood pool as a child... almost all our family photo albums have pages and pages of us at the pool as kids, and I still remember when I took swim lessons from the hot lifeguard Andy, and he was trying to teach me to tread water and I ended up butterflying from one side of the pool to the other, and he was all "that was GREAT! only next time, try staying in the same spot" and I felt so dumb... anyway, any time I smell chlorine, I am five years old stubbing my toe as I eat my frozen Reese's Peanut Butter Cup in the hot, humid July sun (Snickers bars are also excellent frozen, by the way)
  

(OK! One step closer to something out of this book, but several shots of courage short.)

Mindless crap, here I come.

Thanks to David Attenborough, I now know that some version of the weird little cover girl actually exists in nature.

Thanks to GOD, I am finally finished with all my documentaries for a little while. Animals, insects and brothels are interesting and I've learned a lot, and Sir David is really entertaining (especially when he sat there as the meerkat stood on his shoulder, or when he got up in the sloth's face and mocked it), and those kids took really good photos... but along with that comes the grim brutal reality of life and survival of the fittest.

And speaking of grim brutal survival of the fittest... Next up: Saw 2. Suh-weet!

Attention Franchise Tax Board.

Hi, Franchise Tax Board. I have a small request. If you insist on making me write a check that will cost more for your staff to cash than the actual amount on the check, could you please at least give me a self-stick label like the US government does? Or make sure the damn glue on your envelopes work?

Thanks!

Signed,
REALLY hate that my taxes are supporting your stupid war
Oakland CA

The porn is deleted.

Maybe all those induhvidual quotes are actually the early stages of brilliance?

I double-dog-dare you to use "putting the umption before the ass" in your manager's next performance evaluation. Me, I'll be saying "verbally bi" whenever appropriate from now on...

"Somebody call the police! There's a pants thief on the loose!"

On the way home from a three-year-old's birthday party today, it occurred to me that I am the same age my mom was when she had my older brother.

Now, I know that I'm more mature than I was five, even two, years ago. But everything else aside (the main thing being it would have to be an immaculate conception, followed closely by "I can barely remember to feed Her Majesty"), I definitely don't feel like I could entertain the thought of raising another human being right now.

And to some degree, I guess that's the point. No one ever feels ready. I mean, really - what adult who felt grown up enough to raise a child could actually have fun as much fun as my friends did just by throwing their kid a Spongebob Squarepants birthday party?

Technology IQ dropping to zero.

Since quitting my high-tech job, I've noticed an interesting decrease in my ability to complete tasks that involve technology.

Earlier this week I was trying to redeem an iTunes gift card, and it wasn't accepting the number. I emailed the friend who gave it to me, and he called the store, and they said to scratch off the area in the back and enter that number. I had been trying to enter the viewable number they use to scan the card, not the actual gift card number.

Mind you, I have redeemed at least 5 other iTunes gift cards in my life. This concept is not new to me. (To partially redeem myself, unlike the others, this one was glued into a fancy-schmancy card holder and the scratch off part was not visible until you unglued it.)

Yesterday I tried to use the self-scan at the grocery store. It took me about 5 minutes to figure it out. Five minutes isn't a long time, unless you're frustrated, you feel like an idiot and the people in line behind you start tapping their feet and sighing louder and louder as the minutes pass.

I have done this many times at Home Depot and have never had problems.

If my ability to use the remote control fails me next, I am in BIIIIIIIG trouble.

I think I'm gonna like it here.

The week started with my very first email - subject: "and now for more bad news." I thanked my office mate profusely for that one.

It got better as the days passed, though, and this afternoon I signed my first official documents.

And then I completely freaked out about signing official documents and actually being responsible and accountable for stuff.

But overall, it was a good week.