This Afternoon In Drama

Pukes of Hazard

I was listening to Mitch Hedberg's first comedy cd in the car yesterday, so when I was lying in bed at night, I was thinking about how readings are like pancakes. To paraphrase Mitch about the pancakes, the first one's good and then after that you're fucking sick of them.

Maybe the thought above, lingering in my head before I drifted off, was why my body woke me up at 4:50 a.m. to puke. Other possibilities include a.) sympathetic puking (which is sort of like sympathetic lactation), since Brett puked yesterday b.) having eaten some bad food, or c.) my stomach telling me to up the ante at my readings. If Chuck Palahniuk throws fake vomit at his attendees, it's possible my nausea was urging me to get competitive and hurl real stuff.

Anyway, I'm reading in Orange County tonight. Yet again. And yet again at Book Soup, except this one is inside a bona fide shopping plaza, making this my first authorial appearance inside of an official mall. I wish I was competing with the Nordstrom's half-yearly sale, so then I could have a quiet night and just sit and sign some store copies and not feel sick.

Good Food, Good Directions

On my way to Geoff's birthday dinner, a guy made the universal "roll down your window" sign at the light to ask me a question. Birthdays make me happy and helpful, so I did.

He had a confused look on his face. "I'm trying to get back to Las Vegas. Do I take the freeway east or west?" he asked.

I almost thought he was kidding. Because if you literally look to the left (west) from the street we were on, Lincoln, you can pretty much see the ocean. If he went west, he'd drive straight into it.

"Uhhh. East," I said.

I brought him instant relief. "So I get on the freeway going east?"

"Right."

"Thanks so much," he gushed, soothed.

As he made the right at the light to get on the 10 east, I saw that he had a Nevada vanity plate. The guy doesn't know where his home state is in relationship to California's coast. That's depressing. Even more depressing was the plate, which I could announce here, but it's too mean. But, basically, it carried a sentiment along the lines of "No worries," which I think its owner should actually have more of.

Happy birthday, Geoff. I'm glad I have a smart friend.

The Way To Go

Having just finished Mary Roach's book, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, I've been thinking a lot about two things. 1. Why does the softcover version on Amazon look like the cadaver feet are lit in either blacklight or neon, and why didn't I get that cover? It's so cool. And 2. What I want to have done with my body when I'm dead.

This has long been a topic of discussion between me and my dad. One night we discussed becoming diamonds, which is an idea that I like better result-wise than procedure-wise. I think, post-mortem, making myself into a diamond ring could be used for some pretty fun stuff. I'm always grossed out by how women grab other women's hands (and how women jut out their own hands) to ogle over diamond rings as if they're some kind of measure of self worth, so I could find a willing accomplice who would flash the bling at every occasion, and then tell admirers, "Isn't my dead friend beautiful? You can almost see the glint of her teeth inside there." That seems like a good time to me, even though I won't be around to technically partake.

The problem, however, is that while I'm conscious, I just can't get over my negative feelings about cremation. Roach confirms that cremation is really not as clean as people think, since there are certain organs in the human body that take a lot longer to burn than you'd guess. Since I've always had the superstitious belief that my consciousness is enormously powerful (hey, I've mentally caused two car crashes deliberately-- tell you about it another time), I also imagine that there's going to be the need to distill my body as quickly and painlessly as possible. In her book Roach also talks about a somewhat unconfirmed experiment where human cheek cells were separated from their owners, put in a different room, and then monitored while the (living) owner was agitated. The out-of-body cheek cells showed agitation too. I can't risk it.

So it's back to the Swedes. Everything in my life seems to come down to the Swedes. I like their nice furniture. I like their cheap furniture wearhouses. I like the hotdogs and softserve ice cream in said cheap furniture wearhouses. I like H&M's affordable slutty tops. A lot. I like the Swedish version of marriage, which is not really getting married at all, but just hanging out common law style. I like that they have endless summer days, when the sun never goes down, even at night. I like that they have Ingmar Bergman. I like that they have socialism. Basically, me and the Swedes were separated at birth. These are my people.

It only makes sense that they would devise a method of body disposal that so far, strikes me as the best of anything I've encountered. And so far, this procedure is only available in Sweden, and it's hard to say whether America will ever embrace it because for whatever lame reason, we really like our angel gravemarkers and cheesy gravestone quotes. The Swede-technique goes like this-- you are instantly frozen with liquid nitrogen. Instantly, which is fantastic. Then, as you've pretty much suddenly become a human statue, you are then vibrated with ultrasound waves, which shatter you into little tiny pieces. Those tiny pieces are then freeze-dried (I'm way more comforted by the idea of coolness than hotness), and you are then deposited in the earth under a plant, bush, or tree of your choosing. In the most basic sense, you become fertilizer for your own flora in a big park. Young lovebirds can come and carve their initials in your trunk. It's not so bad.

Recently, while at the OSH hardware store, I picked up a packet of seeds solely for the hardcore name of the plant, "Love Lies Bleeding." Never had I heard a better name. Is it too much to ask that after I'm gone, freeze-dried, and planted, someone can come up with a hybrid plant, plant it on top of me, and name it "Andrea Lies Dying?"

A Change Might Not Do You Good

I have a longtime friend who's infamous for starting to look eerily like her boyfriends once she starts dating them. I don't even think it's necessarily a conscious decision-- what appears to be at work is the same phenomenon that befalls owners when they begin to look like their dogs after spending enough time together. Having known her since middle school, I've watched her magically transform into the girl of many love-guises, usually in terms of clothing, hair, and accessories, but the most impressive of them being the time she (Caucasian) actually started to look Hispanic while she was dating a guy from her former church. There's a yearbook photo documenting that amazing transformation, which I still marvel over whenever I go home to Irvine and browse through my nightstand drawer.

I've been guilty of this weird mirroring as well. While dating the illustrious Jonny Jackson in high school, I slipped into oversized flannel shirts and long, stringy hair without even realizing it. My fifth through sixth grade boyfriend, Brian Millat, brought on an influx of Quicksilver and Billabong sweatshirts that could have come from his own closet, and I still don't have the heart to throw out the one out that I wore to my 11th birthday party, where we ice-skated and held hands.

I think Sheryl Crow is one of these girls, except I think she's even more extreme than me or my already extreme friend. I think she's a lifestyle-mirrorer. I'm disturbed by the things I've been reading about her since she hooked up with championship bicyclist, Lance Armstrong. Pre-Lance, Sheryl dated people like Owen Wilson, Eric Clapton, and reportedly Kid Rock-- not guys that you get up at 6 a.m. with and blend the protein shakes for, you know? These guys, judging by her lyrical and musical content, seemed to be more Sheryl's speed. She was into "drinking beer at noon on Tuesday," and stating that "I like a good beer buzz early in the morning." I got the sense that she wasn't inhabiting a first-person character when she sang, "Well, o.k. I still get stoned/ I'm not the kind of girl you'd take home." At one point Sheryl professed that, "I've been swimming in a sea of anarchy/ I've been living on coffee and nicotine." Etc., etc., etc. It is my feeling that these lyrics came from a genuine place.

Now, with Lance, everything I read from Sheryl is about being healthy and active. Lately, I've encountered multiple quotes in magazines about how she and Lance have a contest to see who can "work out more." They literally compare exercise time at the gym. And she sounds enormously proud of it. Too proud, in fact, in the way that when something doesn't come naturally to you and you have to strive for it, you feel the need to make a point of announcing this thing to the world. If you naturally liked to Stairmaster and Ellipticalize, you'd just do it and talking about the activity would be like mentioning breathing. In last week's Us Weekly, Sheryl says, "Both of us are wildly competitive...We fall asleep in three seconds because life has just been so full that day." Everytime she's interviewed lately, and I'm not exaggerating, Sheryl is making some sort of comment about her newfound joy of bicycling or being fit, or giving steroid-like announcements about squeezing the juice out of every waking moment by getting her heart rate up.

This is so not good for a) her former (however tenuous) rocker image and b) her more recent attempts at becoming a modified country music artist. You want your sad, boozy songs to come from sad, boozy people. Country dirges (and even pop Americana) are about being in the bar when the sun's shining outside, about lying in mangy motel beds after you've had nasty, daytime sex with your neighbor's husband. At the very least, I'm willing to say they're about not being a fan of exercising.

Having recently released a twangy version of Cat Steven's, "First Cut Is The Deepest," which I'm guessing was due to leftover Kid Rock fumes, I'm waiting for Sheryl to put out her cover of Olivia Newton John's "Physical." As I'm admittedly one of the laziest people alive and strongly believe in the poetry (the beauty, really) that comes from lethargy, lounging around, and moping, I'm incredibly disappointed in and yucked out by the direction that Sheryl's sprinting toward.

What Big Teeth You Have

When the tampon companies aren't using the fear tactic of convincing girls that the discovery of your period by others is going to embarrass you so much you're going to want to die, they're alternately embracing the fear of dealing with the period internally. As I've stated before, I came from the old school feminine hygiene commercial/ad era of "tampons and contact lenses: you can't feel them!" It seems, however, that the egalitarian spirit of those days has clearly given way to a more cutthroat conception of good vs. bad tampons.

Never have I seen a "big scary tampon" like the one pictured on the left, and I don't think I've been on some sort of naive, sheltered tampon island. I feel somewhat safe in asserting that tampon manufacturers, or at least ones operating above the table (I'm just covering my bases. Maybe there's a tampon blackmarket, where the tampons are impressively cheap yet equipped with weapon-like applicators) make sure that the prongs on the applicators are properly closed. Think of the lawsuits.

One of the more alarming things about the big scary tampon, besides the jagged edges, is that it has really bad implications for losing one's virginity. I imagine a teen girl about to have sex for the first time, looking down at her partner's penis, and freaking out because it's about the size of the big, scary tampon. I know there are rare girls who are built with extremely tiny passages, but I'm willing to venture that a good ninety-nine percent of the female population can handle the biggest sized tampon on the market, so why are tampon companies giving the "first timers" named in the ad just another thing to be nervous about? Why not relieve some of the anxiety associated with getting one's first period by not additionally stressing out the customer about the horror of choosing the wrong, malicious product when the time comes? This marketing technique reminds me of presidential candidate smear campaigns that seem to turn upon the person featured admirably in the commercial. In the end, the public often associates the negativity with that candidate who was trying to push it onto his opponent's image.

The "nice friendly tampon" may be waving and smiling at me, but this doesn't provide me with any comfort. It just makes me think that my tampon is a conscious being that has the physical capacity to do "The Robot" inside of me, which is much scarier than anything going on on the left. I spent a long time as a child thinking that my dolls came alive when I left the room and muttered about how cold and uncomfortable they were sitting on my window seat. Do I really need to worry about the same thing coming from my tampon? Due to the mascara'd eyelashes I'm guessing "she's" a girl, a detail which is probably supposed to make me feel like I have some kind of sister support, but I don't like what my "sister" is doing with her string. She's busy making that curlique wag, showing off. Now that's embarrassing when it's going on under your bikini at the pool.

The Continued Saga of the Purple Shirt Pincher

As Brett and I were walking back from the beach this morning, we spotted a man and a woman talking in front of a house fifty feet ahead. She was wearing a purplish shirt, and then, after spotting me, the most pissed scowl I've seen since last week, when she pinched and pricked me with an unknown object.

"Is that the woman who pinched you?" asked Brett.

"I think so." It was hard to give a one hundo percent positive ID just based on physical features, since the woman had jogged quickly by me last time. She'd have to pinch me for me to recognize the familiar force of her weird, gnarled knuckles.

We approached the woman, who was now standing in front of the house's gate. As soon as she had spotted me, her attention had shifted from the curbside man she was talking to and, as if she possessed Seigel radar, straight to my face. Only me. I was reminded of the scene in the Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicle, She's All That, when Rachel Leigh Cook comes down the staircase after being de-dorked and Freddie can't lift his eyes from her. It's like she's the magnet and Freddie has metal pupils. This was exactly how things went down this morning, with Purple Shirt playing the role of Prinze Jr. and me playing the approaching prom date, except Purple Shirt was clearly not smitten with me and I had no desire to dance with her.

We kept getting closer and closer to her, and her hatred for me was becoming more and more palpable. In elementary school I led my share of clique-boycotts against various innocents, who then stared at me unpleasantly whenever I set foot on the field, and, as a teenager, while working at Sam Goody and Tower Records, I rolled my eyes at a good number of customers who couldn't figure out the alphabetization system, which earned me some displeased scowls. But never-- NEVER-- have I been mad-dogged in such a steady, furious, directed manner for this length of time.

It was the moment of reckoning. We now passed Purple Shirt, and true to form, she made some sort of pinching gesture with one of her hands and said something to me in Spanish that I could tell wasn't "happy." I whipped around and gave her my patented, "What's your problem?" look, and she, still seething ultra-angrily after me, gave me a, "I'm thinking about spitting on you" look.

"That's her," I said to Brett, a foot past her doorstep. "What'd she just say to me?" (He speaks Spanish).

"She just told you to go to the devil."

Knowing this changed everything for me. Had the woman called me a slut or hussy or whatever, then I would just assume that her dislike for me was based on some exterior clue, and I was pissing her off by looking a certain way. Maybe she thought girls with dyed red hair were whores and was hoping to clean up her neighborhood, which was fair.

But when Purple Shirt told me to go to the devil, it made me wonder if maybe she was seeing something around me, a supernatural, harbinger shadow. I told Brett that maybe she knew something we didn't. I didn't watch the whole season this year, but I do know that on the WB series Charmed, main character, Piper, had a baby boy, who was destined to wreck the world and (I think) get the Charmed Ones killed, but the sisters weren't aware of this. They probably wouldn't have done anything because they really loved the baby. So bigger powers sent down some effeminate guy, whose name might have been Chris, to alter events and stop Wyatt's eventual turn toward the darker side. Anyway, I considered that Purple Shirt might be kind of like a Chris, seeing an epic danger in me invisible to the average, naked eye. Maybe she could see that one day I would rise up and change the face of the earth forever! Forever! ???

In that case, she is like the Unbreakable Samuel Jackson to my Bruce Willis, or I am the Bruce Willis to her Samuel Jackson if she is instead bad and just pissed that I'm going to eventually crush all evil in the world. Then, I admit, the devil reference wouldn't necessarily make sense, but maybe she was just speaking figuratively, and her devil is actually a field of king-size beds with pervasive contentment and lots and lots of puppies, and that is what she is condemning when she wishes me there.

All I know is forget Dr. Kessler. Now I have a real foe.

That Time Of The Month

This is the reason that I don't use spam filters.

I spent a long time looking at this picture yesterday, trying to suss out the plan behind the Just For Men top and the Distinguished Professor bottom. To me, it looks like Dr. Kessler is secretly a werewolf and had his business picture taken mid-transformation. His downy, chestnut werewolf coating had just started at the crown of his head when the flash went, and if a follow up had been taken two seconds later, we would have been privy to animal brows and steamy red eyes. His moustache knows what's coming. The right side is twitching upward to greet the beast within like a helpless minion rushes to obey the whims of its evil master. Look at the background of the picture. The sky is darkening in an ominous fashion. The clouds are a-swirling. They try to cover the full moon, but a slight shift of the wind, and Kessler's gig is upppp.

And, by the way, A.D. is the nickname the good doctor got in the war-- "After Dark" Kessler. Trust me: you so don't want to mess with him in the P.M. (his middle nickname). Rumor is that he made his fortune not on savvy real estate deals, but by eating previous homeowners and then quietly assuming titleship of the properties. Who's going to stop him? Not you, since you're directing his electronic cry-for-help into automatic deletion.

That leaves me. Kessler: until we dance...

Me Inside The TV

I just got back from my first ever TV interview, and I'm still unsure what this was in reference to, but the first thing Connie Martinson said to me was, "Well, I don't know if you knew this interview was going to be for TV, but if you're fine with that, then I am too." You might be thinking that the "fine" talk was in reference to the taping of the interview, but it was actually directed more, as far as I can tell, at what I was wearing. I think Connie was dissing my threads. But it was a subtle diss, and only taken in conjunction with the fact that I obviously knew I was there for a taping did it become that much more sharp, i.e. there's no way I would pick my hot green halter top and pink heels had I known it would be documented for all time. I think. I'm telling you, it was all very confusing and faint.

But maybe Connie just knew something I didn't about the compatibility of halter tops and clip on mics. The crew watched while I snaked the wire up my cotton shirt, which was kind of a circus trick because I didn't technically have on a bra today. And then the wire was sitting over my boob, and you could see it through the top, so the producer pointed to my breast and was gently like, "Uhhh, can you shift that so we can't see it?" So I plunged into my neckline again and transported the wire over bare boob to my right side, and I was thinking, "This must look sort of weird, me fishing around my naked boob." When I had to retrieve the wire mic from my shirt after the interview, the author who was going to need it next, Noah, was standing there watching, and I realized as I passed on the thing that the transaction was kind of the public access cable book show version of feeling me up. If only it was guaranteed to bring in ratings.

Today must be erotically charged because as I finished this post I just looked out my window, and I think I'm seeing live bird sex.

I Got Poked

Brett and I were walking down a neighborhood street on Friday evening at magic hour. Magic hour is when the sun is at its orange glowiest before setting, if you haven't been to college yet and taken the offered "Intro To Cinema" class (or, at Brown, the "Introduction to Cinematic Coding and Narrativity," because everything has to be longer). We were holding hands. Getting pumped about calimari, which I'm suddenly, intensely, really into. Brett answered a call on his cell phone, and I began scanning the front yards of the surrounding houses for puppies to talk to.

Within the next few seconds I was grabbed from behind, and I was grabbed in that way I used to get grabbed when I was playing on the grass in elementary school and some squealier-than-me friend was being chased by a bee or a boy or whatever, and then grabbed onto my arm to take cover behind my body. The grab was that urgent. I didn't really have time to think about the present grab beyond the shock, but I do remember having a brief flash of, "Oh, someone's using me as a shield."

And before I could turn around, bitch who had grabbed me PINCHED me as hard as she could (using knuckles, I think) and I felt some sort of prick, and then she was running. My other arm went to my assaulted arm and I instantly stopped walking and stared, gaping, at the thirty/fortyish woman in a purple t-shirt jogging away now. Brett, who had been caught up in TCBing (that's "taking care of business" for you trust fund readers), hadn't noticed anything, but saw me stop.

"That bitch pinched me!" I yelled.

"What?" he asked, and lowered the phone to his chest.

I was still agog at the Purple Shirted Woman, who gets caps now and who had stopped jogging a block ahead. Now she looked over her shoulder from a safe distance and mad-dogged me.

"That bitch pinched me! And I think she poked me with something!" I just couldn't get over it. Something in my head was telling me to sprint after her and go pinch her back, but I was so completely stunned that she pinched me in the first place that I couldn't get through the process of processing yet.

"She pinched you?" Brett asked, finding the chorus contagious.

We took off my hoodie and looked at the back of my arm, where there was a tiny prick mark. "That bitch poked me!" I really couldn't get over it. Trust me, if you ever get poked by some random Purple Shirt Woman, you won't either.

Brett wanted to run after her, but I was still, still in, "That bitch pinched me!" mode. I couldn't get out of it. I couldn't let him out of it.

The Purple Shirt Woman turned the corner and disappeared. We still gaped after her.

"That bitch pinched me," I repeated slowly for the tenth time, the wonder never ceasing.

Geoff's dad says that if there's no irritation around my pin prick, I'm probably fine. Also that a bunch of girls were running around New York doing the same thing a few years back with plain needles. My mom is leaving multiple messages on my answering machine about going and getting a Tetanus shot. And two days later, I'm still sitting here, awed, that that bitch!!! pinched and pricked me.

P.S. Happy 18th, Kate.

Avert Your Eyes And Ears

I found two things especially distracting during last night's broadcast of the MTV Movie Awards. Neither of these was Lindsay Lohan's breasts.

The first was the "little person" that MTV hired, dressed up in prosthetics like some kind of reptile/gnome boy, and then put in a cage underneath the podium. For the first hour of the show, the actor just stood in the cage, his fingers clutching onto the bars. Whenever an award was presented, he raised the popcorn trophy above his head and it was retrieved without so much as a glance down in his direction, like the container had emerged magical and immaculate from the bowels of the Culver City stage. Finally, at the 10 p.m. mark, the actor finally exited the cage and pretended to clock out, eliciting amused head shakes from the celeb-studded audience, like, "Ohhhhh, those little people and their funny antics!" People had that "little people" glimmer in their eye. I know how to immediately identify it. I see posts on Craig's List all the time for "Midgets for a big show! We'll be dressing you up! Call number below by 4 P.M.," and now I know that at least one of them was probably attributable to the MTV casting department. But, stature aside, having a living, breathing man in a cage underneath presenters and speech givers really messed with intended visual cues in a big way. Maybe not next year, MTV.

And then, secondly, there was Paris Hilton's on-again off-again baby voice. It was particularly bad on the re-airing of The Simple Life debut episode Wednesday night, where, when Paris was comfortable in Beverly Hills, she talked like a pee-pee doll, and then, when her truck in the boonies started misbehaving, revealed that her true tone was about four octaves deeper. Last night on The Movie Awards Paris was the female pre-show host, and when she remembered her composure she'd gather spit in the back of the throat and gurgle out a "That's hot!" or "You look hot!", but when the pandemonium of the event and the unexpectedness of being tossed unknowns, like Jake Gyllenhaal's reference to Evil Dead took over her concentration, Paris totally butched up.

My college roommate had the same telltail behavior. When we had guys in our room she started talking like Thumbelina, curling up upon herself like a fuzzy leaf fallen to the ground. She'd sit on the carpet and reach under the bed, saying soft things like, "Do you want to see my stone collection?" to the boy getting goosebumps on the back of his neck, a question which I've amplified for you because from my side of the room, it was mostly unintelligible. It was always an offer of showing various nature-type things. There was a certain kind of guy who got very, very sucked into this.

Then the guy would inevitably leave to go to his drum circle practice session, and my roommate would raise her voice, reinstate enunciation, and be like, "So do you want to get some pizza tonight, Andrea?" And I'd think, "That's so not hot."