Y’all are pretty much aware that I don’t usually publish posts unless they meet a minimum of 237,013 paragraphs. Accordingly, I save my briefer thoughts for expression via Twitter. Trouble is, thoughts aren’t always short enough to cram into 142 characters, and they’re not always long enough to hash out in painfully protracted swaths of vowels and consonants. Like some kind of binary letterform jungle on your screen. Every time you come here you have to use a virtual machete to hack your way through the textual undergrowth.

I’m really selling you on reading this blog, aren’t I?

I made an exhilarating discovery today, and it’s this: if I list out a quantity of medium-sized thoughts, I get a post nearly as insufferably lengthy as the ones I usually write! As a special bonus, this format allows me to feverishly leap from topic to topic without maintaining any semblance of a contextual thread whatsoever!

There. Now aren’t you glad you stayed?

  • So I was watching Toddlers & Tiaras (I KNOW, I KNOW) and a family was filling out beauty pageant forms in their hotel room and the dad read aloud from the page, “Ambitions in Life.” And the little girl called out, “A doctor!” just as the father commented, “To make some man’s life miserable.” Which kind of just stabbed me in the heart to think of this poor child’s future. And this was after some other dude described his 3-year-old granddaughter thusly: “She’s a pretty girl but just like all women she’s cranky.” Okay. Because it’s not like she is maybe cranky because SHE’S A TODDLER, she’s clearly cranky because she has a vagina.
  • The people that live a couple houses down have allowed their shrubbery to grow to such heights that it is now blocking my view of the mountains from my kitchen window. I can no longer see the horizon, and I need to see the horizon. The horizon is my lifeline to the entire world. My parents bought a house in Virginia that is situated at the bottom of a slight valley and every time I go there I want to claw my face off because EVERY TIME I LOOK OUTSIDE ALL I SEE IS A WALL OF TREES. Which is fine, you know, if you really need to monitor trees [“YEP, THEY ARE STILL THERE.”]. But me, I need to know what’s happening beyond those trees. For example, what kind weather conditions are coming our way? If I glance out the window of my house and it’s difficult to clearly see the mountains, then I know it’s going to be a hazy, ugly day. If the mountains are covered by a blanket of fog, then I know that it will probably be foggy at my house later. If the mountains are on fire, then I know it’s time to maybe turn on the news.1 See? SEEING THINGS IS INDISPENSABLE. Right now, all I can see out my kitchen window is a dang shrubbery and all that shrubbery can ever tell me about what’s going on in my world is that my neighbors are LAZY JERKFACES.
  • Last weekend my friend had to go to a neon-themed birthday party. Since she and I are officially old enough to have been abandoned by popular culture, we just don’t have a readily-available supply of neon in our wardrobes like the Youth of Today apparently does.2 At the same time, we are both fairly broke and we were looking for cheap activities to fill our Saturday hangout time. Ironically, I had believed that I’d gracefully graduate from paycheck-to-paycheck living once I hit a certain age, as perhaps a kind of consolation prize for being too ancient to matter to the rest of the world, but APPARENTLY THAT IS NOT THE CASE. Anyway, I agreed to go with her to Forever Twelve to find some inexpensive highlighter-hued accessories. Except we needed some liquid courage for the journey to steady us against the swarming preteens, so I filled a giant bottle with vodka and we carried it with us to the store. “You look thirsty, have some water,” I’d announce to my friend, snickering as I presented her the bottle. At the end of the day, an entire neon wardrobe was obtained for $12.83 and no preteens were physically harmed, so it was a wildly successful excursion. I am looking forward to enjoying many more variations on this money-saving theme.
  • I try not to be too hard on myself. I try my damnedest to maintain a body-positive mental zone. But sometimes I can’t help but wonder if something is wrong with me. You ever wonder about that? Like maybe whether you have some special affliction from which others don’t seem to suffer? I’m talking specifically about sweating, here. Because, dude. Every time I finish a workout, I look like someone just poured a bucket of water over the top of my head. I am panting, my clothes are soaked through, my hair is dripping. Dripping! Ew, right? My fears are compounded every time I get off the bike after spin class and glance over at some girl whose hair is still dry and has kept all signs of dampness tastefully confined to one small circle on her lower back. Do these people just hold all that sweat in, like a fart? What? What am I missing here? What am I doing wrong?
  • I really, really wish the housing rental listings on Craigslist could be sorted by neighborhood.
  • I could totally have fit that last statement on Twitter, but I try pretty hard not to pollute others’ social media feeds with a constant stream of mundane observations. I reserve that right for my blog.
  • Since I have already mentioned Twitter so dang much in this post, here’s another thought: I wish I had tweeted more during my wedding week. I could have come up with a hash tag and everything. I could have shared more. I could have basked in the sense of community. But no. I was too busy that week trying not to hurl from nervousness and tension. Also, I didn’t have a phone with internet access then. So. There’s that.
  • Lately I’ve found myself regretting the fact that we never got engagement pictures. But I highly suspect it’s not that I regret missing out on photos of us awkwardly posing on vintage furniture in a meadow so much as I regret missing out on the opportunity to have another session with a professional photographer. Our wedding was the first time in my life I’d had professional pictures taken that weren’t inside a JC Penney studio, and boy! What a difference! It was like going from having your hair cut and styled with a switchblade by a methamphetamine dealer in a dark alley all the way to having your hair cut and styled by John Frieda at his flagship salon in New York City. And now I am like, sweet, now I have some photos of myself that I actually like, except whoops, I’m in a wedding dress in all of them. Which is, I know, just about the saddest story you’ve ever read, but wipe your tears and stay with me here. I suddenly realized that, hey! You don’t actually have to have a life-changing event taking place to get good photos taken. So I’ve decided that every few years we should find and hire a photographer whose work we really love and do an informal portrait/family session with that person. I’m really excited about this and want to get started now, but see the third bullet point about being fairly broke. Eh. Maybe next year, then.
  • I still don’t know how to refer to the beau in this space. I am almost ready to just give up and go with his real name, since most of you know it already, but I still really do want to minimize how searchable we are, since there are people out there who don’t know about this blog and I’d like to keep it that way. But “the beau” seems so contrived, kind of like how “the boy” started feeling a few years ago. Yet any other name I try to call him feels wrong. Nick? Who the hell is that? CONCERNS, I HAVE THEM.

Lastly, thanks for your kind words about my last couple of posts. I have indeed rebounded and life staggers on like your drunken uncle at the family reunion.

 

1 Sadly, this has happened before, more than once.

2 EVIDENCE: