it's all about timing.

so, i decide to return to London for the first time in fourteen years and they shut down Big Ben.

of course.

i remember thinking when i was thirteen (as scaffolding obscured my choice shot of Notre Dame) "Europe is great, but it will be a whole lot better when they're done fixing it"

"I never thought this would happen in Brooklyn. ... Kansas maybe, but not here."

a tornado hit Brooklyn today.

good thing i'm going there tomorrow!

(i know. i haven't written an awful lot recently. i'm an asshole. i'll try to rectify.)

Alright. On a scale of one to ten, what would you consider the likelihood you might be assassinated?

my therapist once asked me if i was concerned that an upswing in my emotional well-being might hinder my creativity (read: writing). i replied, no. what a silly notion. besides, crying bleeds the ink. i would be at my least creative, for whatever i would write would be illegible.

i've been wrong before.

you might say i've been creatively thinking up ways to do as little as possible. i am particularly good at this. if i were a little more creative, i could find a way to procure a sustainable income from doing absolutely nothing. i'm sure it's possible.

in short:

i got a degree.

i found a boy.

and i get to travel this summer (granted, to an area with a particularly high terrorist alert right now and a new ban on smoking)

at least the smoking ban won't hinder my intention to drink Guinness.

i'm not dead.

i promise. i could almost be considered, at this moment in my life, *gasp* happy...

(as she says this, Melaina's usual audience of cynics curses and walks away, muttering "you're dead to me...")

soon...i promise.

for now, read this.

"My parents keep asking 'How was school?' It's like saying 'How was that drive-by shooting?' You dont care how it was, you're lucky to get out alive."

i went back to high school today...to teach.

i opened my iTunes to play an mp3 for the kids. a particularly vocal girl squinted at my artist list on the projector.

girl: "30 Seconds to Mars? i've seen them. Jared Leto is so hot."
boy: "Do we have to go over this again?"

i guess some things never change.

tattoos for example.

my mom: "is it still there?" referring to the tattoo on my [very] lower abdomen.
me: "yes, mom. it's still there."

unrelated: i finished the first Harry Potter. i would check the forecast for Hell if you plan on visiting. you might need a sweater.

the irony of a wrong number.

I was listening to my father complain about his life this afternoon (I am, if nothing else, a loving daughter) when I got another call.

"Hi, can I speak to Mike?"

no, I thought, but if you do speak to Mike, I have a few things you could say to him on my behalf.

His opponent, as proud as the rooster who is left unchallenged upon the midden, crowed away in a last long burst of quotation and deduction.

(my word of the day was "midden" if you are reading this, thinking to yourself, my, where the hell did that headline come from. side parenthetical - i much prefer "midden's" sister synonym, "muckheap" but this is all entirely irrelevant)

i'm really just looking for some fantastic Google hits. and i'm totally not drinking wine right now. my iGoogle homepage (genius lovechild!) makes for fantastic fodder, let me tell you...(okay, i'll spare you).

i don't have anything in particular to say. this troubles me. it is the result of a couple of things: 1) i forgot that truly meaningful diatribe i had intended on writing, 2) it occurred to me recently that i blog a whole lot less when in the frame of mind of "oh, isn't this all so trivial?" and 3) i have midterms.

we'll go with midterms, for the sake of excuse.

a few things to mention this week:

it is entirely possible to get a floor-wide notice citing complaints of "olfactory disturbances." it is also possible that this notice is going on my wall for the purpose of amusement.

my brother made an exceedingly generous donation to the Melaina Guinness Drinking/Scottish Castle Hopping fund. (i was planning on beginning this blog with the phrase "i'm having trouble deciding which castle to stay in this summer" just because i could, but deemed it too...bombastic).

it occurred to me recently that i don't know what the hell i'm really doing with my life. and for that moment i was happy.

the same old prejudice prevails. war matters; love does not.

my lovely Chaya sent me this article by Erica Jong. it is worth reading, thus i urge you to.

i have many things to say. alas, i have many things i should be writing that are not my blog. for six more weeks at least, school and work will outweigh frivolity.

unrelated: it is my great wish that the people i know, namely the young men i know, could have the opportunity to have a heart-to-heart with my father. he has Gandalf's beard and more perspective than Brunelleschi.

he is somebody worth knowing.

reaffirming stereotypes

Paul Simms' Four Short Crushes.

now. he. kissed. her.

for a brief moment this afternoon, i found myself wanting a baby.

the moment passed.

an open letter to the United States Government

Dear Federal Government:

I cannot breathe. I miss Pseudoephedrine. Phenylephrine does nothing for my sinuses and doesn't have nearly as many letters. Please solve your meth problem another way.

Thank You.

Something's rubbing against my foot.

I went down to Eugene last night to visit my friend Ben.

me: "Let's watch Open Water. I've heard good things about it."
ben: "Sure. I haven't seen that one yet."

79 minutes later..

me: "Is that the end? that can't be the end..."
ben: "Wow. The next time somebody asks me to recommend a movie that will cheer them up, i'm definitely recommending this."

pause.

me: "Wanna go diving?"

in memoriam

where have all the restaurants gone?

it occurred to me today, whilst driving (happily? reflectively?) down Belmont, that i really miss Sweetwater. i do believe the last time i went there was on my 20th birthday, which was a long while ago. i thought about this and realized that, like many things in my life (tv series, boyfriends, perfect shades of lipstick) the things i love evaporate into thin air to remain only in my head a fond memory.

Manna Bakery (Ashland, OR) circa 1980s. best. bakery. ever. they made all my birthday cakes from age 2-16(?) i can't remember what year it closed, but next to Jim Henson's death and the deaths of my first two cats, Sophie and Nikki, it might be the worst heartbreak of my youth. if you ever had a Manna bakery cake, you would understand.

Beasy's Back Room (Ashland, OR) circa 1980s/1990s. best barbecue/southwestern food the NW ever procured. but it was their green olive laden salad that i loved (which i believe you can still get at Beasy's on the Creek today, but it's just not the same)

Bluebird(?) Cafe (Santa Monica, CA) circa 2004. best. cupcakes. ever. I used to work a few blocks away and would go there for lunch nearly every day. when i visited last August, it was a vacant store front (although, i just googled this one and it seems it may have moved to Culver City. it looks like the same place, so if you live in LA, check it out for me)

(a side cupcake note here: Magnolia Bakery in NYC? don't believe the hype)

and they say chivalry is dead...

i opened a door for a guy at Starbucks today and he was so thrilled that he paid for my coffee. ah gender roles in reverse.

a few things:

guest lecturing a class at your own school is a bit surreal. i totally sympathize with all my professors now. i felt like Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Anyone...?

Alec Wilkinson wrote a long article on the origins of Parkour and David Belle in this week's New Yorker. mmm...David Belle.

interestingly, there was a four-page ad for visitoregon.com centered on Ashland's Oregon Shakespeare Festival in the middle of the article. given the fact that i'm studying narrowcasting in my capstone course, i began to wonder if every New Yorker contained this ad or just the ones sent to Oregonians. i received a credit card offer this week that was a Leo (that's the lion, not the DiCaprio) signature card. it freaked me out.

anybody want to launch a computer virus on Acxiom?

books of blood...for kids!

did you know that Clive Barker writes children's novels? i sure didn't.

I'll write you just to let you know that I'm alright

a couple of quotes for the week:

"i'm glad you're back on the hooch!" -- Chaya on my falling off the wagon. and when i fall, i fall hard. story of my life.

"yes, could you magically fill the gaping hole where the Broken Halo should be?" --me to the clerk at Fred Meyer when he asked me if he could help.

"what people can't tell from your blog and your myspace profile is how annoying you are in real life" -- my brother on how fraudulent digital avatars are.

but one Mace telling another they're annoying kind of defeats the purpose. it's what we do.

if you're an exboyfriend and i drunk text you, it was the Drop Top speaking. my apologies.

There's something about Sunday night that really makes you want to kill yourself.

i have, however, found a moderate solution to what i like to call the Sunday Night Dread: manage it so that you somehow have Monday off. all the time. it prolongs the inevitable, but i've found that procrastinating the start of my week sure does make my life easier.

except for the fact that i have work due in the morning, i could actually completely ignore the fact that it is Sunday. well that coupled with the sudden epiphany that today was easter. i only realized this in the candy aisle at Fred Meyer an hour ago.

i have now consumed the contents of a large bag of Hershey's Candy Coated Chocolate Eggs in celebration.

happy ressurection! i feel ill.

I am not your friend. I'm not your lover.

(I wrote this last week and forgot to post it. or, I had planned on posting it while on the ground in Vegas, but on account of my having to run the entire length of McCarren Airport, which included a security checkpoint and a tram, I didn't have time. I will also note that I very nearly died on this flight. Which is mostly true, but i'm prone to histrionics)

I am writing from a plane somewhere over the midwest.

On planes, I am weary. I take account of my life. If I had one last call, who would I choose? It would have been a boy, if you’d have asked me sooner. I now know I’d have been wasting my time.

If my plane’s going down, you’d better fucking answer. Voicemail before imminent death is the ultimate heartbreak. Remember this when you ignore my calls.

I’m afraid to breathe on airplanes. Even after a whole box of Airborne.

I take account of my life. But mostly, I take account of what I’ve left undone. And I don’t mean words unsaid or sunsets in Paris. It is the unmade bed, the pile of clothes.

If I should go down on a plane, there’d be dishes in my sink, dirty laundry.

I find sudden relief that any porn I [might]own is on my hard drive and will go down with me. That would be an awful last thing to worry about.

Hi mom.

I am much too small in this world, yet not small enough to be to you just object and thing, dark and smart.

sometimes a place is not what you remembered
a dark mass of lost streets
empty subway platforms
full of stangers
still seaching for
my lost
shaker of salt.

is it wrong to steal a cat?

"when we put together three things...

...it would be a miracle if the object of being attractive to men had not become the polar star of feminine education and formation of character."

if you put together these three things:

Red Bull
the spontaneous appearance of a term paper ghost-writer
ridding Melaina's body of the reservoir of snot it is harbouring

you would get one joyful girl.

at the moment John Stuart Mill is the polar star of headaches.

help.

I mean, come on Francesca. You didn't think that you could just strut around in your little towel and turn Cole's head, did you?

I stopped going to high school midway through my junior year. There were a lot of reasons for this: fucked up serotonin levels, insecurity, stat/trig. My favorite reason, however, is Sunset Beach.

Yes, I stopped going to high school for a daytime soap.

I remembered all this, just now, lying sick (ok, propped up with pillows sick) in bed, glancing at a muted infomercial (juicers! I love juicers!).

Being sick isn’t what it used to be.

Sick days used to entail a cool, discerning parental hand across the forehead and permission to pull the blankets up snug and roll over blissfully. The best sick days were the ones when my mom would come home from work with magazines, crosswords and Betty and Veronica. She brought me my first issue of Seventeen magazine when I was eleven. Milla Jovovich was on the cover. This was before feminist theory ruined glossy fashion publications for me. Back then, it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen (save perhaps Mia Sara in Legend).

I made the mistake of staying home sick the day Sunset Beach premiered. A show I hadn’t missed the first twenty years of! Sweet! Pre-Tivo, I began to weigh my options. Clive Robertson or math? I’m a sucker for British accents. Good thing I feign illness well. Move over Ferris Bueller.

I once rang up Dax Griffin while working retail in Los Angeles. I had the urge to hit the guy for cheating on Meg, but thought better of it. Instead, I silently cursed him for ruining my education.

what day is this?

I live a very solitary life. This is nothing new. With the exception of, perhaps, Chaya, Professor Klotz, and my therapist, Linda (whom I see bimonthly), I don’t interact with anybody on a regular basis.

I keep in touch with people online. I know most of my local Starbucks employees. I am even familiar with the baristas over at Sip & Kranz (my alternate coffee run. They serve Stumptown Coffee, which is really so much better).

I am social, but it is certainly the exception.

I finished Into the Forest by Jean Hegland last week. It deals with a post-apocalyptic world where technology has failed, oil is gone and the country has gone to hell. The characters weigh what is actually relevant when the modern world collapses – they realize how trivial the days of the week are. It made me think about how I measure time, how I measure my life.

I measure my days in empty coffee cups and empty cans of Red Bull. If the bagels are gone, a week has passed. If the pile of clothes on the floor by my closet is getting out of hand, that means it’s laundry day - a week-and-a-half. If my box of Emergen-C is empty, thirty-six days. If there’s a pile of books on my window sill that need to be shelved, the quarter is almost over. If there’s a packet of graduation info in my mailbox, all those years I thought I wouldn’t get through have, in fact, passed.

The day is only an interruption of my night. Maybe this is why people only seem to call me after 12:30am.

Somebody asked me today if anything exciting had happened in my week and I thought, yes. I ordered something online with the quickest (free) UPS ground delivery I have ever encountered. I arrived home this afternoon with a perfect square little box at my door and I was simply delighted. Even though I was sopping wet with rain.

As my graying, plump college writing professor used to say, it would behoove you to buy an umbrella.

the secret

"throughout history, all the great minds, all the great leaders, all the great achievers, had something in common..." as they flash pictures of Edison, Lincoln, and Einstein across the screen.

they were men. (oh...that wasn't the point you were trying to make? my bad)

(i love you mom, but...) why does the trailer to this thing look like the DaVinci Code?

"On the DVD, Rhonda Byrne, creator, explains that she got inspired to create The Secret after reading the 1910 classic The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace D. Wattles."

umm...

"past secret teachers include Aristotle, W. Clement Stone, Plato, Isaac Newton, Martin Luther King, Carl Jung, Victor Hugo, Henry Ford, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Robert Collier, Winston Churchill, Andrew Carnegie, Joseph Campbell, Alexander Graham Bell, Ludvig Van Beethoven, Charles Fillmore, Wallace D. Wattles, Thomas Troward, and Charles F. Haanel."

mmm hmm.

men.

snail mail

"There's lots more interesting things going on than a postcard arriving 92 years late." really? i find that sort of fascinating. but only because i once received a stack of bank statements at my Brooklyn apartmant last year that were not only addressed to my old Los Angeles address, but were from a bank account i had already closed and were about three years late as well.

WWI was a while ago, i hear.

more interesting, though, was the ad link to coulditbebipolar.com in the middle of the article.

i wonder if ohmyfuckinggoditisbipolar.com is taken.

it's all over now, baby blue.

I know – I haven’t been writing much. There are reasons. They don’t really matter. If you could see my apartment right now, you would see that there is a lot that I’ve been neglecting. There’s some guacamole in my fridge I don’t remember making. I think it’s guacamole; I can’t be sure.

My life could use some upkeep, it’s true.

School, I’ve found, has become something that I do between naps. And by nap I mean coma. I actually schedule my life this way – as actors may ask of their character, what’s my motivation? What gets you up in the morning? For me, it is the knowledge that I can be back in bed by 2:15pm, sleep for an hour-and-a-half catch the streetcar, make it back to campus for my 4:40 and be back in bed by 6:45 if I hit my timing right. I could probably write this all off as being “depressed” or “heartbroken” possibly “lazy.” But I’d probably be lying. I’m sort of always like this. Bouldering? Oh, I’d love to, but it interferes with my sleep schedule.

This could be kind of a problem.

When I say I have insomnia, that isn’t really accurate. I sleep more than most people, just at odd times of the day and in weird increments. I’ve tried to right this. Oh, I’ve tried.

I feel as if I’ve slept through much of my college career. But I’ve never actually dozed off in class – I saw a girl actually do this once. I’ve seen a number of people fall asleep on the subway, actually fall off their seats. A narcoleptic’s life must be fairly miserable. If not fairly amusing to others. I suppose I should be grateful.

My doctor seems convinced that once I’ve found stability in my life, in my schedule, that proper sleep will simply follow. I nodded, but I think she missed the dubious expression on my face. I should probably have mentioned that it’s been an issue since I was a little girl. I used to turn over on each side a certain number of times, rub my feet together twice, re-cross, rub twice more, repeat. Inhale, exhale. Every night. If I wasn’t out within half an hour, I’d creep towards the pitch black hallway and peer down it. Blackness, but for the glowing red light of the stereo down the hall. It took me what seemed like hours to work up the courage to cross the three feet to my parents’ room. I’d hover over my mother’s side of the bed, waiting.

I think I used to scare the crap out of her. It’s a good thing she didn’t take Ambien; she’d have probably whacked me with her pillow till its feathers filled the air.

"I am a drinker with writing problems."

i decided to quit drinking. (with the exception of NyQuil. NyQuil, i have decided, doesn't count) i do have a reason for this decision, but i realized that the only truly socially acceptable reasons for quitting drinking are 1)being an alcoholic, and 2)being pregnant.

in quitting drinking, i am now a pregnant alcoholic.

it's been one of those weeks.

pictures of you

tearing up pictures is harder than you think. literally.

Kodak Xtralife paper is pretty cruel on the brokenhearted.

of waking life

i was on the streetcar this afternoon. a man walked past me in the aisle to take the seat in front of me. he leaned over forward and tapped first the back of the seat and then the bottom with the palm of his hand, as if to make sure it was really there.

i kind of know how he feels.

literature whoring

my father said to me, over Christmas break, "I'll be really glad when you're done with your English degree so you can actually read the books i give you."

my version of multi-tasking:

100 pages of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead
100 pages of Shirley Ann Grau's Keepers of the House
100 pages of George Eliot's Mill on the Floss
50 pages of Morgan Spurlock's Don't Eat This Book

rinse. repeat.

(that's only what this weekend looks like. when i say i can't hang out, i'm probably not even lying)

the plight of an English major. i have the same professor for two of my classes. she looked at me the other day and said, "oh, you poor dear."

i'm going to go watch 40 minutes of television just to compensate.

i'm a golden god.

people keep telling me that i look really well. and i don't know what to say to that. ironic - especially - coming from your doctor.

i don't feel well. in truth, i'm not sure i can even recall a time i did feel well. i feel as if i'm a walking lie, all glowing optimism with a dark, cynical core.

maybe they see something i don't.

unrelated: i went to a tupperware party last night. there's nothing like licking blueberry flavored lube off your hand and fondling pink dildos to brighten your day.

black death in a gel-cap

in my never-ending search for an effective sleep aid, i purchased some herbal remedy at Fred Meyer that is the exact shade of black one should probably never ingest. if i should actually die before tomorrow, well, i suppose you could think of me as having gone out happy, having finally found something that could knock me out in 60 minutes or less.

if i'm checking my myspace messages at 3am however, i'm not leaving my doctor's office on friday without some fucking ambien.

related: every time i shop at the Fred Meyer on Burnside, i have an inordinate amount of young re-stocking men jump to my aid. maybe it's that lost i'm-the-most-inept-grocery-shopper look in my eye. (you mean soy milk and salami don't go together?) perhaps the winded post-yoga look of exhaustion on my face. more likely the yoga pants. either way, i think i could really go for an eighteen-year-old boy. i think that would solve everything. and by everything i mean what to do in between novels.

i got my feet off the ground in my crow position tonight. i had a bad day; this felt like a triumph. a three-second triumph, but i guess that's how guys feel.

This is not an official Rolling Stone article.

i rarely watch reality television. correction: when i do watch reality television, i rarely admit to it. however, MTV has come up with yet another brilliant concept for sucking away my life, in thirty-minute increments that should be devoted to Victorian literature or work. this time, the culprit's name is I'm From Rolling Stone. having put myself through three soul-crushing, non-bank-account-filling internships myself (some i thoroughly enjoyed; others, i care not to mention), i thought, hey, i'm curious how they're going to make coffee fetching, photocopying and the ever entertaining transcription of interviews into something as scintillating and dramatic as The Real World. i mean, there's nothing more exciting than watching somebody write. trust me - there's a reason i'm a recluse.

it's all in the casting.

one of the interns interviewed Brooklyn band We Are Scientists; it was so awkward and uncomfortable to watch, i actually had to fast forward though the scene.

Tad Friend gave a succinct review of the show in this week's New Yorker.

“Or sometimes the seed splits into a genetic mutation, and you get a two-headed calf, or twins.”

Paul Rudnick's First Love.

iCingular

ah, the iPhone.

that's funny...i use my iPod to ignore the world around me, not stay connected to it.

i fucking hope it doesn't come in pink.

"Forgiveness is like throwing a party for someone who was born two hundred years ago. You do it for your own sake and not much for anyone else."

i'm having trouble forgiving somebody. this is something i normally save for my therapist, but my next scheduled crisis management is not for another week-and-a-half. my back-up plan for situations like these is to 1) call my father ("i should be talking to my therapist, but you know, you'll do") and 2) google it.

there's no greater therapy than the internet. it's cured me almost entirely of my need for social interaction. and my fear of porn stores.

some of my personal favorite google hits for forgiveness:

this quote from Page Six. "LINDSAY Lohan has learned the art of forgiveness from her new stripper friends - despite her having once called them whores and worse"

the reading room subject list at forgivenessweb.com, which includes such hot topics as addictions/12 steps, how to forgive, the Holocaust, quotations, sermons, murder, poems and of course, the unforgivable.

it's Steve's fault.

as a professional writer, i am frustrated daily with the overuse of idioms and cliche descriptive phrases (i actually have a list of these i alternate. i believe i am not allowed to use the phrase "[they] rose to fame". which is fine by me)

i was reading this MSNBC article on Steve Jobs (which is, admittedly sort of boring) and a couple of blatantly irritating phrases jumped out at me:

"[Steve Jobs'] storybook resuscitation of Apple Computer Inc"
"his rock star status"
"the Apple view of the world"
"one of [the world's] greatest innovators"

storybook resuscitation? this writer is obviously a mac person.

“I could really get behind a relationship with a woman who had only six months to live.”

My father handed me a copy of Pam Houston’s Waltzing the Cat last week and instructed me to read the first story. For once, I complied. The above quote brought a noise out of my mouth that could only be described as a guffaw.

It made me laugh because it’s true. It made me laugh because it so accurately captures the men of my generation. It made me laugh heartily, and then, uncomfortably.

Somehow, I managed to spend New Year’s Eve at a party almost entirely comprised of married people. Somebody asked me what my resolution was; I stated quite earnestly that I was giving up men, to which they replied, “can you do that?”

It’s easier than coffee.

This is usually the time of year where people reflect on the last year of their life. Frankly, I’m tired of reflecting. I’m much more interested in moving forward for once. I’m an old pro at self-reflection. Moving forward is something I’ve struggled to learn.

My final thoughts on 2006 are this:

For whatever reason, it was the popular year to go. Something about that year-end retrospective really pulled people towards the grave this week. Like the release of holiday movies, if you’re not in before the new year, you won’t make Oscar contention. End of December? Total shoe-in for that top retrospective spot.

I’d like to thank the Academy for noticing my timely departure…

"Cell phone video image shows Hussein on gallows."

this is perhaps my favorite CNN caption ever.

god bless camera phones.