Heatwave 2009

The weather here is unbelievable. It would almost pass for summer in these parts. It's better than summer, though: in summer, sundown brings cold air and fog rushing down through Dolores Park, making the nights feel colder. I'm in my office now with the window wide open. Soon I will bike to the train in a windbreaker and no gloves. Delightful madness, surely a sign of the end times.



2008: good riddance.

2009, a summary thus far:

1. I arrived from the Midwest with a fresh cold and no luggage.

2. I spent a few days at M.'s stepmom's vacation home on the northern California coast, drinking good wine, eating good food, admiring a beautiful view, writing a terribly stilted application essay, and spending literally hours on a sputtering, echoing, many-times-crossed land line with various airline call-center employees in Mumbai who called me "Madam" while explaining to me that no, they could NOT change the address on my luggage to reflect my actual whereabouts. I don't think I can properly explain how bizarre and disorienting it for someone with a phone phobia (hint: me) to be in this situation: hearing 4 conversations going on at the same time, unsure which person I am actually speaking to; trying to filter the conversation through a constant echo; trying to hear what is being said to me through a constant crackling noise and an infernal beeping many times louder than any voice on the line.

3. I got my luggage 7 days later.

4. I resolved to write in a journal every day, as that's the only way I am going to get the writing practice necessary to making my next experience with an application essay borderline acceptable. So far this year I've managed to do so every day but one.

5. I resolved to drink less and spend less money, but alas, I'm already failing there.

6. I applied to another masters program.

7. I inherited another laptop from M. I'm solidly in the 21st century now, with battery power and wireless.

8. My flatmate's boyfriend was arrested driving *her* car with an expired license and a bunch of marijuana plants in the trunk. I took her out for a much-needed drink last night. (See item 5.)

9. Today I learned that one of my 3 true remaining friends is getting married. She met her now-fiance on a dating website. I remember the circumstances under which she joined: she had just suffered a bitter breakup and had learned that her ex (our flatmate at the time) had joined an online dating site. Largely out of spite, she joined one too, and she responded to the first guy who looked compatible. They got along well, and today there was an invitation to their engagement party in my inbox.

10. M. killed his party as a present to himself and to me.

11. I've been majoring in Las Vegas this week: (a) Leaving Las Vegas, (b) Casino, (c) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (some time to read at last!)

25

I've been miserable at posting. But I'm a quarter-century old tomorrow, and I've never failed to wish myself a happy birthday on my blog. So hello, let me re-introduce myself.

This is Penitent speaking. I'm just about 25 years old. I'm a shit blogger. What's worse, I've become only shittier with time, but I probably don't have to tell you that.

For my birthday I would like:

(1) A year's supply of provigil
(2) Another vacation with M. (Death Valley in April was sublime and I don't know when I'll be able to do something like that again.)
(3) To get into grad school, ha-ha.
(4) A new job
(5) Someone to pay off my credit-card debt accumulated over almost a year of M. being in graduate school and the both of us being addicted to food and drink
(6) Less partying like I'm 19 on weeknights, waking up late, sitting through the day in hangover-induced idiocy, because the whole routine has worn out its welcome. (Or will the provigil fix this, too?)

It's ninety-fucking-thousand degrees outside. Tomorrow my age will be a perfect square. I ate lunch at 4:30pm today while watching Netflix on my work computer, after having arrived here at 12:30-- I am a horrendous employee and a worse blogger and an even worse-er writer.

Hap-pee birth-day tooo meeeee....

I was going to link to last year's birthday post but I must have deleted it.

Instead, a San Francisco sunrise.


And Werner Herzog.

Bracing Myself for Going Home

I'm going back home for Thanksgiving. I want to see my family, I guess, but anything over 48 hours in my old house verges on the nightmarish: sleeping in the old four-post bed where I used to have panic attacks and nightmares as an adolescent; breathing in the same musty room-smells; waking up to the blare of Michael Medved on the radio--more than two days of this is enough to convince me I'm crazy or depressed.

M. was supposed to come with me, this time--I've already been twice to visit his mom in Wisconsin, after all, and SD is a hell of a lot closer. But he's throwing party #597660 that Friday and probably would have found an excuse out of it anyway. Ordinarily I'd spend most of my time with my one friend from undergrad who got herself trapped in a hell-on-earth grad program down there, but she's (justifiably) taking the opportunity of vacation time to flee elsewhere.

It's kind of sad, but I have hardly any friends left in my hometown. My ex-boyfriend C. un-facebook-friended me, which strikes me as childish enough that I'm justified in ignoring him. My old friend Annika is now married to a douche who apparently guilt-trips her for daring to eat dessert, never mind that she's waifishly thin as is. And she's so thoroughly swallowed the idea of being an extension of her husband--ostentatiously, judgmentally--that I rarely enjoy her company anymore. A few others have become so evangelical that I don't think I could spend time with them without resorting to the sort of self-censorship I ordinarily reserve for conservative family members or young children: "Of course I don't share a bed with my boyfriend!" "Gosh, that movie was shi...I mean, bad."

Holiday schedule:

Wednesday: arrive, go to doctor's appointment, lie in bed thinking about human mortality

Thursday: sleep until 2pm, go to grandparents' house for standard turkey dinner, marvel at all the burned stuff, watch fox news, drive home, try unsuccessfully to call boyfriend, stare at ceiling until sleep comes

Friday: sleep until family wakes me, go to see the dead sea scrolls, listen to mom lecture me about religion, come back home, write depressive whiny blog post, try unsuccessfully to call boyfriend, call annika to make dinner plans, learn that annika needs to cook hubby a meal tonight, stuff self with leftover turkey instead, stare at ceiling feeling sorry for self until sleep comes

Saturday: sleep, stuff self with leftover turkey, get close to vomiting it out with flight anxiety, re-pack, fly home at night and slowly recover from brief episode of induced depression

That should cover it.

In the meantime I am watching movies, exciting to do after a long movie-drought. Recently I've seen Repulsion, Shadow of a Doubt, Dial M for Murder, Pan's Labyrinth, My Best Fiend: Klaus Kinski, and Tim Burton's version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Apparently I have a very dark taste in film.

M. is swamped with yet another publication, yet he doesn't really let up with the manic party-planning. He takes meds for depression, but I'm beginning to suspect he's closer to bipolar spectrum or something similar. And he's once again unmedicated. That said, though, we're getting along well for the most part; three years and counting.

An Interlude for Navel-Gazing and Self-Diagnosis

Here I interrupt the scheduled programming (proceeding apace, as it was) to explain my absence.

True, there's been work. Lots of tedious, tedious work.

It's also true that M. has exercised eminent domain on my laptop for the sacred, o'erweening cause of Making Party Flyers On Photoshop.

But mostly, there's been the crazy.

A few weeks ago, for instance, the left side of my torso was going through spells of numbness. I convinced myself I had either a brain tumor or Huntington's Disease, wondered how I'd react when the doctor gave me the news--wondered how I ought to spend the last few months/years of my life. The numbness is mostly gone now; I believe the correct diagnosis is "crazy."

Not enough? My existing pathologies are getting worse. Social anxiety rules my life, more or less. Increasingly these days, I think of the bewildering array of people I might encounter Out There and decide I'm better off staying home. And away from the phone. Away from the email account. Away from the blog, even.

The social anxiety is clear. Upon reading the DSM-IV criteria for Avoidant Personality Disorder, it's pretty clear I have that, too-- I think I satisfy every criterion. That's not new, though; all that's new is my self-diagnosis. But since I'm already self-diagnosing, I think I'm moderately depressed as well. And this is new.

I kind of hate fun these days. Isn't that what depression is? "Let us go to a mind-bogglingly fun event," says M. "Holy God, I'd rather die," says I. "Let us be friends," writes potentially cool burlesque dancer in an email. "Eh," says I, and ignore it. Old friends write me emails and I've ignored every one. I think my job is hugely responsible for my unhappiness, but inertia keeps me from looking for another. I paid hundreds of dollars for an online class but haven't had the motivation to fax in the first homework assigment, even though I've completed it. For at least six months I've been wearing borrowed contact lenses with mildly incorrect prescriptions because it's too much trouble to make myself an appointment. The list goes on and on.

One frustrating trouble with social anxiety is that it's a huge obstacle to seeking treatment for itself. "It's easy to find a good, affordable therapist," my friend Zoe told me. "Just call around, and negotiate for prices." Negotiate for prices? If I could do such a thing, I wouldn't need the treatment to begin with.

I need a therapist, I probably need drugs, and I certainly need a new job. These are requisite for not feeling like crap, I think.

Then, there's the boyfriend. Dating (and living with) a workaholic statistician has been hard; dating with a workaholic statistician who is also a Ph.D. student may prove even harder. Yet I cannot imagine that either scenario could bring me any closer to madness than the experience of living with that very same workaholic while he's on a six-month rampage of wanton irresponsibility. And what makes it especially pernicious to this melancholic, perenially exhausted social retard has been the dedication with which he pursues his goal of being manically irresponsible. This is not someone who takes partying lightly. Partying is a serious affair, something to monopolize his (and my?) time and money. I daresay I am not built for this, and Depressive Penitent in particular is built for just its opposite. Depressive Penitent wants to sit in a chair with a glass of wine and some Borges stories. She wants to watch hours and hours of Nick Cave videos with big headphones blocking out all the ambient noises. If she must leave her apartment, she'd prefer to make her way to a good friend's place and sip Belgian beer while watching something directed by Kurosawa or Werner Herzog. Hell, she'd be reasonably content studying calculus. But raucous hipster parties populated by tactically bisexual, strategically anorexic fashion girls with enough black or blond hair dye to muddy the whole Pacific? A million times, no! In reality, though, it's been more like: a million times.

I have the pictures to prove it, but uploading them would be too exhausting.

On Friday M. is throwing another party. It should be a big one, but we'll see. This time M. will be a tactical bisexual, and for the night I'll be officially disowned. The bar prefers gay DJs, see. Couples are no fun anyway. He won't be pretending to be bisexual, at any rate: he is bisexual. Or was. Or is. Or was. I don't know, it's so dizzying; if only I got the sense that anything was real. I'm not mad, or I am, or I'm not. Who knows? Not I, certainly.

I do intend to come back and write about my trip east. It was absurd, really, and was responsible either for driving me batshit insane or for helpfully convincing me that I had already gone batshit insane. Either way, interesting!

Don't worry, though, it's all relative. What's insane for me may be a fucking success story for some folk. Besides, I'm drinking lots of German beer as I type and it's making me frightfully dour.

139

This post will be as brainless as possible. And that's a promise.

In other words, it will be one of those lame "list of things about me" posts that conveniently requires little thought, effort, or structure, while still sucking up a big chunk of time that could otherwise be used for, say, work or study.

Let the laziness begin.

1. I have no piercings or tattoos.
2. I am 1/8 Chinese and 3/8 "latina," whatever that means.
3. My mother's maiden name would be Li if her grandmother had not been bullied by her racist parents into rejecting her husband's conspicuous foreign surname. (Her family disowned her anyway.)
4. I loathe the feeling of heaters and of clothes fresh out of the dryer.
5. I still have dozens of chicken pox scars.
6. My dad grew up Mormon.
7. I really have no idea what he thinks of religion, but he seems to tolerate my mom's evangelism. He won't go to church, though.
8. My paternal grandmother sued my dad's younger brother for all he was worth. He was so
infuriated that he cut off all contact from the family, to the point that I don't know the name of my only female cousin on my dad's side, and we haven't seen her brothers since they (and I) were little kids.
9. I have never broken or sprained a bone or joint.
10. I have never really "dated" like normal people and I don't think I would be very good at it.
11. My latent OCD emerges when it comes to food.
12. I use my hands to dismember dishes containing questionable ingredients; I admit I am completely disgusting. In particular, I painstakingly remove fat and gristle from meat. (And onions from everything.)
13. I was an Ayn Rand nut in high school.
14. I'm not at all anymore.
15. I'm squishily a libertarian, though. More or less. I think some of the hardcore ones are loony, though.
16. I think my addiction to political news is an illness.
17. I think price theory is fun.
18. I worry that I'll never do anything about my social anxiety disorder because doing so would probably mean going to a psychiatrist and otherwise talking to people.
19. I think grammar, syntax, spelling--all those boring things about language--are fun.
20. I dated my first boyfriend for five and a half years.
21. Two weeks after I broke up with him, I started dating my current boyfriend.
22. I hate people who block the escalator when I'm trying to walk up.
23. I always walk up the escalator, quickly.
24. I have an excellent sense of direction.
25. I always plan walking, driving, or biking routes on the maps that are always in my head.
26. I once considered myself a patient person, but I don't anymore.
27. I think that the question of whether or not I get along with another person is nearly independent of taste or common interest; I almost see it as a "chemical" thing analogous to sexual attraction.
28. Sometimes I wear sunglasses only to avoid having to figure out whether or not to make eye contact with people I pass on the street. Believe it or not, this causes a lot of stress for me.
29. Talking on the phone is enormously stressful, too. I avoid phone calls to the point of handicap.
30. I rarely wear high heels, but I can walk in them when I need to.
31. I was hostile towards the color pink as a child. Reactionary, even.
32. I was also one of those kids who violently abused Barbie dolls and petulantly refused to accept them as gifts.
33. I was a complete loudmouth until puberty.
34. My shoes (today) are all white and fasten with velcro.
35. I'm enormously happy that my boyfriend is not a romantic.
36. In the first grade I nearly gave my teacher a heart attack when I caught a gopher snake during recess and brought it back to my desk. I became righteously angry when she dared to suggest that I had no way of telling whether it was poisonous or not: of course I did.
37. Relatively speaking, I think I peaked in elementary school.
38. I got sick from bad mayonnaise in the 4th grade and haven't been able to touch the stuff since.
39. My dad built the house I grew up in, with help from my grandfather and one of my mom's brothers.
40. I am not a fan of the marijuana.
41. I think the drug war is a disgrace and that most (if not all) drugs should be legal.
42. Flying scares the shit out of me.
43. I recognize this is irrational, however, and don't let it govern my traveling decisions.
44. I can't sleep without earplugs.
45. I also wear one of those dorky sleep masks.
46. I was creepily obsessed with Pink Floyd in early high school.
47. I think I desperately needed obsessions back then because I had no social life.
48. As a freshman I used to keep a journal in which I wrote "letters" addressed to Roger Waters of Pink Floyd.
49. I used to hide my CDs and tastes in music in the same way that my peers would hide their drugs and birth control.
50. My parents met on a blind date.
51. My mom didn't speak much English at the time.
52. I have eight uncles and one aunt by blood.
53. My mom's youngest brother is gay and my grandmother copes with the fact by pretending it isn't true.
54. My mom didn't tell me my uncle was gay until I was, oh, twenty? Not that I hadn't figured it out a long, long time ago.
55. I stopped believing in Santa Claus in first grade, but I kept pretending I believed in him (and the Easter Bunny) until the sixth grade so as not to spoil my mom's illusions.
56. I would be surprised if any of my elementary school teachers did not remember me, even today.
57. I hate shopping for shoes.
58. I get most of my clothes from a thrift store a block from my apartment.
59. The movie The Santa Clause used to give me nightmares.
60. So did Mrs. Doubtfire.
61. I almost cried when Gene Siskel died of brain cancer. I was in eighth grade at the time.
62. I hate to cry in front of other people and very, very rarely do.
63. The one person I had a "fling" with at the beginning of college ended up leaving school for a while in order to spend time in jail for drunk driving.
64. I like to forget about those embarrassing two months.
65. Everyone in my freshman dorm thought I was a snobby bitch. Apparently it didn't occur to anyone that I was just plain shy.
66. Freshman year was probably my worst.
67. I missed one final exam that year because I had to go to the ER as a result of a problem that I had a roughly 0.001 % chance of developing. Maybe less.
68. Once, I missed a final exam because I was under the impression that it was actually being held the following day, so I slept in that morning on purpose.
69. I grew up bilingual.

Here I am with my brother, back when we were cute, bilingual, and living in a trailer on the homestead.

70. I don't think I'm particularly bilingual anymore.
71. Sometimes I wonder whether I would never have been accepted to my alma mater if not for affirmative action.
72. I don't own a televison or want one.
73. I would like to have a projector in order to watch movies, though.
74. Paper mail stresses me out and I tend to ignore it. Late fees for medical bills, etc. often result.
75. I always carry a water bottle.
76. I enjoy punishing myself with spicy peppers.
77. I hate bell peppers, however.
78. I frequently make enemies by accident.
79. Lately I've begun to seriously doubt the idea of "free will."
80. This doubt is kind of upsetting to me.
81. If I could do it over, I would have studied something far more technical in college.
82. I am a chronic procrastinator.
83. I am chronically a few minutes late to just about everything.
84. Hardly a day goes by that I don't need to run somewhere. Usually in order to catch public transportation.
85. I am tired of most of the music in my itunes library, since I listen to it all day at work.
86. Some of the songs currently on my playlist are:
- "Mutiny in Heaven" (The Birthday Party)
- "Baby's on Fire" (Brian Eno)
- "Is This Thing On?" (!!!)
- "Pepper-Tree" (Cocteau Twins)
- "Diplo Rhythm" (Diplo)
- "I Love a Man in Uniform" (Gang of Four)
- "And I Was a Boy from School" (Hot Chip)
- "Gimme Danger" (Iggy and the Stooges)
- "Computer Love" (Kraftwerk)
- "Someone Great" (LCD Soundsystem)
- "Chelsea Hotel" (Leonard Cohen)
- "The Mystery of Love" (Marianne Faithfull)
- "Lose My Breath" (My Bloody Valentine)
- "The Ballad of Robert Moore and Betty Coltrane" (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds)
- "In Every Dream Home a Heartache" (Roxy Music)
- "I'll Be by Your Side" (Sally Shapiro)
- "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)" (Talking Heads)
87. I love sushi, especially the weird stuff that most people steer clear of.
88. I spend an absurd portion of my income on food. Maybe as much as half.
89. I own a credit card, but I have never used it because I don't trust myself to pay the bills on time.
90. The last time I cut my hair above my shoulders, I was in third grade. I kind of want shorter hair now, but I don't like the idea of visiting a hair salon.
91. I clip my keys to my belt so I don't lose them.
92. I spend more than two hours every day commuting to work and back.
93. The first time my boyfriend heard of me, his friend was describing me to him as "a girl who dresses like a kid in a JC-Penney ad." In the context of making fun of me, presumably. This was five or six years ago, and I don't dress like that anymore.
94. I have a bad hay allergy. Being around hay makes me miserable.
95. I have been writing about myself on the Internet, on and off, since 2000.
96. I was far more public about it in 2000 than I am now. (For example, I attached my full name to my website.)
97. My best friend from elementary school and my best friend from high school are both cancer survivors.
98. I don't talk to my elementary school best friend anymore.
99. The high school best friend is very close with my ex-boyfriend these days, which can make talking to her rather awkward. We exchange emails on occasion, but I haven't seen her for years.
100. Once, when she was angry at me, she convinced my ex-boyfriend that I was bulimic, even though that was not remotely true. An "intervention" ensued. This, in retrospect, is kind of hilarious.
101. I don't think I want kids.
102. I spend far too much time reading kooks' websites. It's really hard to stop. My "favorites" are the unapologetic misogynists and the Biblical hyper-literalists who believe, for example, that no woman should ever work outside the home or attend college. There's actually quite a bit of overlap there, but probably not in ways that either side would readily admit.
103. I'm a big fan of David Lynch.
104. Once during finals I watched the entire second season of Twin Peaks at the library instead
of studying.
105. In ninth grade, when I read A Tale of Two Cities, I developed a bizarre lit-crush on the pathetic character Sydney Carton.
106. The only vacations I ever took as a child were road/camping trips, with the exception of trips to Mexico to see family.
107. I have a vague memory of riding in a plane to Mexico when I was nine months old. I am not sure whether the memory is false. (The second time I rode in a plane, I was sixteen: not easily mistaken.)
108. Many of my memories from childhood and adolescence are still very, very vivid.
109. The most vivid memories are visual/spatial ones, e.g., where in a class I was sitting and who was sitting around me.
110. In high school I always performed well on multiple choice history exams because I could remember the location of the information within the text and then picture what the answer was.
110a. Relatedly, I have difficulty processing auditory information unless I write it down. A corollary: I am notoriously bad at understanding song lyrics, and when I sing along to them, I do so in gibberish.
111. My long-term memory seems to be far better than my short-term memory.
112. I did acid a few days before graduating from college. My experience was 100% positive.
113. Being disoriented is upsetting to me. I tend to avoid elevators because they make me disoriented.
114. In elementary school I was the district-wide long jump champion for two years in a row.
115. I was also widely recognized as the most athletic girl in school.
116. I hate watching sports.
117. My ex-boyfriend is unhealthily obsessed with pro basketball. I don't think he ever realized what a turn-off that was.
118. I wake up less than half an hour before leaving the apartment every morning.
119. I have never blow dried my hair. I don't think I would even know how.
120. I cannot begin to describe how much I despise all things cutesy.
121. Couples baby-talking each other make me want to vomit.
122. Frankly, it bothers me when people baby-talk babies, too.
123. I lost all contact with most people from my past when I stopped signing on to aim.
124. I routinely stalk people on the Internet, however.
125. I think I'm pretty good at it.
126. Perhaps I'd make a decent private detective?
127. I bike dangerously fast through the city sometimes, passing cars left and right. I probably shouldn't, but moving slowly would drive me crazy. At least I wear a helmet.
128. I'm almost always tired.
129. I like drinking Clamato, preferably with lime and habanero salsa.
130. I never needed braces. My teeth grew in remarkably straight all by themselves.
131. I suspect I am genetically programmed to reject religion.
132. I've sunbathed topless in Europe. (I'm not terribly shy about nudity, so long as I'm not alone.)
133. As a passenger, I get carsick if I don't watch the road, and I compulsively check over my shoulder every time the driver changes lanes.
134. I keep my nails short and don't paint them. I don't really wear makeup, either.
135. I think feet are disgusting. I kind of wish no one wore sandals. This is one of many aversions that I share with my boyfriend.
136. Never again do I want to live in my hometown.
137. No one I know in real life knows I have this blog, and I'd like to keep it that way.
138. I liked my old blog better.
139. I think I'm done with this list. Arbitrarily it ends at item #139.