Little Things

How many books have I read in hopes of learning, once and for all, how to find the zen in my everyday routine? Too many. How many times have I written or said aloud that it's "the little things in life I most enjoy."? Lies! Although, it would be worth my while to appreciate the everyday more, as "everyday" stretches dully before me like a road trip through Kansas. These days I might say, "I'm doing things that my coworkers like to do so that we can talk about it later, at work," or "I tried a new recipe and this one doesn't have yogurt," or "I started drinking a non caffeinated beverage that convincingly mimics the caffeinated beverage it is designed to replace." These conversation starters (enders?) are accurate reflections of the dullness that has spread through my life like a malignancy. My life has been boring for so long, I would think I might be used to it by now. Even when I look back on times that I considered to be exciting, like my freshman year at college, a good percentage of the so-called excitement came from pre-planned "antics" at the dining hall and getting to run errands without my mom. Things aren't actually bad. The trick is to recognize that boring can be good, and recognize it before I take a wrecking ball to all of my hard-won comforts in a misguided effort to pepper my life with "excitement." I know my own patterns well enough to know that after enough time has gone by, I'll look back on this time with bittersweet longing-- this time when I lamented my boredom. I'll think it was a time of simple pleasures--and isn't it the little things in life I most enjoy?

Dinner Tonight: Gateway to Eckhart Tolle Town

There have been times when negativity twisted me until I was doubled over in paroxysms of self hatred. Tonight is not one of those times, for tonight I made a quesadilla with the best bacon money can buy, white cheddar, and thinly sliced apples. I cooked the quesadilla in the glistening grease left by The Best Bacon Money Can Buy, then coated the whole thing in sweet jalapeno sauce with a loving, almost motherly hand. In cooking this meal, I have taken the first steps on a shamanic journey to higher consciousness, and finally have an inkling of the "divinity within" I've heard so much about.

The divinity within is sitting like a rock in my stomach.

Taking Initiative

Maybe soon I will do something with my life. I was just waiting until I got really, really pretty. Now my pimples are starting to get wrinkles; I can see that this day is not going to come.

Interdepartmental Romance

I get migraines. The brain of a migraineur is extremely sensitive to any differences in routine, and even small changes can trigger an attack. For instance, getting up an hour later than usual might trigger a migraine for some. Yesterday at work, an attractive patient asked me out. He wrote "lunch?" on one of his business cards and pushed it over the lip of my desk. I politely declined, and then blushed profusely for half an hour after he left. Usually, the kind of men who try to pick up on me are unwashed, plainly drunk, and trying to get a free ride on Amtrak. I was pretty tickled to garner interest from someone who was both physically attractive and obviously employed-- I am not accustomed. Too tickled I guess, for I got a migraine later that day. This incident points to a grim future. Can I look forward to becoming physically ill when good looking professionals look at me for longer than 30 seconds?

I'm not actually looking to change my current romance situation, but sometimes during the work day I daydream about an interdepartmental romance, like my coworker has. She put in her work order to have a nest of bees removed from the building and 3 years later there's a rock on her finger from the man who showed up to poison them. Daydreaming this way helps pass a time that is mostly spent talking about clearance forms, printing out clearance forms, searching for clearance forms, talking about clearance forms, and boiling the clearance forms into a lumpy, nutritionally void porridge which we then eat.

Key Largo

My Grandma Nina died in the summer of 2005. We all gathered at AJ Nicoletti Funeral Parlor on a white hot August day in the Sacramento Valley, and were milling around hopelessly whilst awaiting an official cue from the funeral director. Though muddled by grief, I was dimly aware of soft music playing. It was mainly indistinct, inoffensively bland piano, but somehow an instrumental version of that Bertie Higgins song "Key Largo" got into the rotation. I caught the attention of my cousin, thinking this was a funny oversight, and we had some laughter over the cheeziness of the lyrics (which I of course knew). What a stupid song-- a song I'd heard years before, sitting in my grandparents' kitchen while they read the paper, drank weak coffee, and listened to AM 1320, KCTC, Your Music and Memories Station. Then I started to cry.

This song came up on the side bar when I was browsing youtube for similarly stupid songs. Now I'm remembering my Grandma and playing back the funeral and the days surrounding it in my head like a movie. I get a certain sense of relief knowing that I can attach my grief forever to this song, and not The Pina Colada Song, which could have just as easily played in the funeral parlor without much notice.

Ficitional Name Available

As I child I didn't understand how it worked. Not only did I think it would be relatively simple to go from my stucco box in Sacramento to a glamorous world of evening gowns, butlers, and limousines, but I believed I was destined for it. Adulthood would somehow ignore my origins completely and transform me into a venomous, wealthy temptress with unrivaled beauty and a collection of jewels. In fourth grade, I thought up a name that would better suit my entrance into the Danielle Steele-ish world of dark sophistication in which I would surely move one day. It was Veronica Ludlow. Sadly, adulthood finds me downwardly mobile and looking exactly the same as I did as a child, but with a hook nose. Plus, the more I think about it, Veronica Ludlow is not so much a name for rich beauty as a weird girl at school. She's really nice but you never want to go over to her house because it smells like fish and all the furniture is covered in dog hair and all she wants to talk about are gnomes.

This name is now up for grabs. It might best be used by a children's author who needs a name for the protagonist in a story she's writing about a girl who helps a horse in distress.

Apartment Hunting Follies for the Unemployable and the Ludicrously Hairy

I'm considering going to Grad School, or at least lying about being a Grad Student so that landlords with the quiet apartments with washing machines will rent to me. I never thought of The Graduate Student as a pillar of respectability the way the Davis landlord does. When my thoughts turn to grad school, as it has been lately, it is out of a pit of desperation that these thoughts arise. I assume that actual grad students were similarly just one breakdown shy of sticking their heads in the oven but applied to a grad school instead-- unstable types-- not someone you want inhabiting your precious, cheap clapboard tinderbox Davis duplex. And yet, the hushed, reverential tone so obvious even in Craigslist ads with the "ideal for grad students and researchers" specification conjurs an image of a monkish figure, working in religious silence by the flickering light of an oil lamp. His face is beautiful and saintly, the ecstasy and the agony of his studies giving him strength of purpose and a strange glow from within like Charleton Heston in a biblical epic.


The rental offerings available to a couple comprised of one undergraduate and one unemployed whatever-I-am are predictably nonexistent. I keep thinking of that fable about the grasshopper who frittered away the summer with enjoyable frolicking while the ants spent every free moment storing food away for the winter. Then the ants get the satisfaction of saying " I told you so" as the grasshopper shivers in the cold of the winter, not a crumb to be found. Whatever. I hate that fable.

Tonight, in response to a craigslist ad for a pretty ideal sounding apartment, I unwittingly called a distant relation who I forgot rented properties in Davis. When she realized to whom she was speaking, she expressed some reluctance to show me the apartment for several reasons, the biggest one being my "heavily bearded" boyfriend might clog up the plumbing. As a concession, she suggested that he might wash his hair in some kind of laundry basin out back. I can't help but think that this conversation could have been avoided, if only I had a masters degree.

2007 Memories: Trysha

Three or four years ago I drew a hideous comic for my friend about an old, ugly prostitute named Trysha. It was very poorly drawn. Today I found some "notes" I'd made for future Trysha adventures and for the sake of the children I'm not going to draw them. Here they are:

Trysha meets a degenerate when she's coming out of Planned Parenthood, where the clinician turned her away as a lost cause. He pretends to be her daughter's ex boyfriend so he can get into her house and use the shower. He steals the VCR when Trysha falls asleep doing an improvised pole dance which she dubs "Night of the Iguana."

What follows is the an actual Trysha comic, which I share in the spirit of keeping the internet as the best forum to showcase bad choices.