I really paint a pretty picture of myself

January 26, 2005 - 1:12 p.m.

<%@LANGUAGE="JAVASCRIPT" CODEPAGE="1252"%> Things that are pissing me off lately despite the fact that I see sweet-lovin' ass in my near future.

1) Gray Hair. I’d let my roots go all to hell lately because I’m trying to keep my hair healthy and preserve my million dollar haircut. The other day I was inspecting my roots and where I thought there had been three gray hairs, there was now a waterfall of silver growing out of my head. This is bullshit. As if having dark roots isn’t traumatic enough, now you got to throw in GRAY roots?? I’ll wholly admit that I deserve fat and wrinkles, lord knows I’ve done a thing or two to earn those, but someone as childish as me really shouldn’t have gray hair.

Tragic thought of the week: I imagine myself in the future. Giving birth out of a gray pussy. That poor goddamn baby. Who’s got the hot poker cuz I need it to burn that image out of my mind.

2) Mid-cycle menstrual bleeding. There are several reasons why I take birth control pills and none of those are for birth control (YET!). One reason is to have a perfectly regimented cycle that you can set your watch to. Everything is in perfect order because the pill makes it so. So how is it medically possible to bleed every day while taking a pill? It’s because of the boy brain. Since I started seeing the Boy my plumbing has run amok, I’ve ruined every single pair of underwear that I own, except for the black ones, which are technically ruined but you can’t tell. They all have to be tossed in the incinerator, and until I can make it to Victoria’s Secret I don’t know what I’m going to do. On the other hand, I can’t wait to start controlling some birth! Yeeeah!

3) Boobs. I was looking at my boobs, like all good perverts do, and I was like: What the hell is that? Are they…ashy? Dry boobs! Ugh. I don’t recall ever seeing dry boobs before. So I grabbed the coconut-lime cream and lubed up the boobs until they glistened in the sunlight. No, that never happened. Pale, translucent boobs do not glisten, and there is no sunlight. Perhaps what I need is some udder balm, since that’s essentially what they are anyway. And they haven’t been milked in forever.

4) Other dry skin. After the boobs I turned around and saw an ashy ass, and of course everything else, arms, legs, Jezuz, ever square millimeter is covered with ash. I’m seriously considering slathering my entire body with Vaseline and wrapping myself in a cotton sheet very night. I read in a girl magazine that for severe dry skin, that it’s a good idea to hop out of the shower and immediately bathe yourself with baby oil. Gross. I hate that shit. I’d feel like a walking fly strip, attracting all the filth and hair floating in the air.

5) Snow. I know, I know, you’ve heard it all before. Yes. I should not live in the Midwest and then complain about the cold. Fine. But there are two unique characteristics about Chicago that make the cold more unbearable than anywhere else I’ve ever been. One-- high humidity, like 80-90% plus low temperatures equals BITTER. The cold feels significantly COLDER on the skin if the air is humid. Is a scientific fact. In my experience, this bitterness does not exist in Northern Wisconsin, Canada, Minnesota, Michigan, or the Northeast. The only cold I’ve felt that was comparable was out on the tundra plains of Nebraska and South Dakota. Holy shit, those people are nuts. It’s like living on Pluto, DEATH is everywhere.

Secondly, surviving a cold winter is 10 times harder living in a big city. The people of Minnesota put up with a lot of cold weather, but they also have their 4wd Jeep vehicles, that can plow over the snow and take them on their daily trips to work, school, and the grocery store. They spend most of their time in a climate controlled environment, minus the time it takes them to scrape snow off their windshield. In the city, only supreme assholes drive SUVs, and then it is typically an Escalade that stays parked in a garage. The rest of us are left stranded, facing the elements with our own two feet. What do you do when there is too much snow to ride a bike, or walk? You stay put. The following is a scene I captured with my phone, of the street, as I was riding my bike home from work last Friday. (“Riding” my bike isn’t completely accurate. It was more like angels carried me home, floating above the snow, because my tires never actually touched asphalt.)

Notice that there are no cars on the road, in the middle of the city on a busy thoroughfare, at 9pm on a Friday night. That’s because cars were spinning in place and sliding around so everyone just went home and stayed there.

When I got home, I was supposed to have a date with the pilot. This was not possible, as you can see. Instead, he walked to my house, dragging a bag full of wine and DVDs. It took him 30-something minutes to walk through that shit and he arrived as a snowman. It was the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. We couldn’t order any food for delivery, so, starving, we ate wine for dinner. Completely wasted and laughing until 6 in the morning. Awesome.

6) “No sugar tonight, in my coffee.” There is no more sugar in my house, and no more cream. I have 3 days left of coffee. There is no food to speak of and I am hungry. I have one roll of toilet paper left. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t get my car out of my garage because there is two feet of snow in the alley and Hondas weigh about 65 lbs and don’t do well in the snow. Alleys don’t get plowed, and I don’t think I could shovel a block-long alley so for now I just wait for the snow to melt. It is snowing as I write this so the odds are not good. For the life of me I cannot figure out how to get to the grocery store. Even if I took the subway, I’d still have to walk a mile carrying groceries, and that just isn’t possible on unshoveled sidewalks. Somebody save me.

7) I like to lie on my bed and hang over the edge and stare at the floor. Sometimes I look under the bed but it’s usually dusty and that makes me grumpy. Usually I just stare and slide further off the bed until I’m inspecting all of the grains in the wood from 6 inches away. This is a favorite pastime, and I get to know the floor and its notches and scratches. I don’t know why I enjoy memorizing wood patterns but now as I write this I realize how crazy it sounds. I’ve done this at all of my apartments, and the ones with severe damage to the wood would send me into a tizzy. Sometime ago I was looking at the floor in my new apartment and saw the biggest, thickest, curliest black hair you can imagine. It is so coarse, and so thick, I can only imagine it having been shed by a wild boar. A wild boar with a Jheri curl. Aside from the fact that my drapes have never matched my carpet, you can bet I’ve never had black pubic hair.

I shrieked and quickly ran for the Kleenex box so I could flush it to its death with all of the other pests that invade my home. It was stuck to the floor. Peering closer, I saw that it was SHELLACKED onto the wood. It was under 4 layers of high-gloss wood urethane, and I scratched and tried to dig it out to no avail. I’ve named it the Mexican Pubic Hair, because it was Mexicans who rehabbed my place and refinished the floors. Maybe it belongs to Fernando, the cute one that comes over to change the battery in my smoke alarm. I flirt with him like a shameless hussy and gush all over him (sing-song voice), “Hi, Fernando!” If his name was José, I wouldn’t look twice at him. But I do look twice at him because that ABBA song always jumps into my head, “Can you hear the drums Fernando…?”

So you can understand why the Mexican Pubic Hair pisses me off. Hanging off the middle of my bed, facing north, is no longer an option, and it’s thrown off my entire ritual and now I just kind of sit there confused until I fall asleep. The MPH has sort of become my own personal version of The Tell-Tale Heart. I lie in bed and I know it’s there, right next to me, I can hear it mocking me. Most nights I manage to forget it’s there, by entering my bed from the opposite side, but some nights I wholly anticipate waking in the morning to an enormous two-ton pubic hair, encircling my bed and I have to climb over it to get to my dresser.

8) There is a beautiful red dog that lives next door that has a serious barking problem. Like he needs a doggy shrink. His Mama lets him out into the yard several times a day and he barks incessantly, monotonously. His name is Chuck and I only know this because his Mama screams at him, “Chuck! Shut up!” He is barking right now, right outside my window. I have to go now, out into the snow, and smother him.

“Chuck! Shut your Bone Hole! Or I’ll shut it for you!”

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The Fast, Days 1-6
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