What's going on with me?
I’ll have the Cream of Some Young Guy
My roommate Mike is moving out! In, like, a week! All because of his crazy demon girlfriend, who is 20 years old and ragingly jealous that he lives with two girls, ie. Jane and I. It sucks. She sucks. She actually found him another place to live, one with the same rent but two guy roommates. I can’t believe he is bowing to such weird manipulation. Especially when you consider that because he’s leaving so soon after moving in, he’s losing his deposit here as well as having to pay like two months’ worth of rent, per his contract.
And now Jane has to find us another roommate, preferably male, because we both agree that three girls in one house is just Too Much Estrogen.
On a good note though, I now have lots of friends. I have this group of girl friends who are super nice and have been inviting me lots of places, including to their weekly potluck dinners that take place at alternating houses and always have a theme. Last week was Asian Food and I made possibly the worst entree that has ever been created. It was called “Chinese Casserole” and I found it on the internet. Which I will never do again.
While making it, it called for like 1 1/2 cups of soy sauce, which seemed like a lot at the time, but of course I put it in anyway. It made the house smell like soy sauce for hours. Mike walked in the door and was all, “What’s that smell? It smells AWESOME.” And I was like, “Um, that’s what thirty pounds of liquid salt being heated up in an oven smells like.”
And then at the dinner itself, I was warning everyone not to eat it BUT THEY DID ANYWAY. (People just have no survival instincts, do they?) I took one bite and almost puked, and you guys, I will eat anything. I am like a goat. I do not have a refined palate at all. Fast food? Yup. TV dinner? Tastes like childhood. Gefilte fish? Yes, I will totally eat that, thank you!
But “Chinese Casserole?” HELL, no.
And the weird thing was, a few people took one bite and then looked around furtively and scraped the rest into a nearby potted plant, but a few others really liked it and went back for seconds, dear god. I shudder to think of what their blood pressure readings were after that meal.
Anyway, tomorrow’s potluck theme is Blanche DuBois/Streetcar Named Desire. I think we are all supposed to wear floaty dresses and say “I declare!” a lot, while fanning ourselves with our hands. I can do that. Also I think I will keep it simple and make black eyed peas or something else that comes canned, and therefore doesn’t require me to use a sketchy internet recipe.
7.20.2005
It’s the “I have raging hormones” hour
Special shout-out/thank-you to revi, who sent me a postcard while travelling through Copenhagen. It is very nice and has KOBEHAVEN written across the front in a bold uppercase 1984-esque font, which lends it that extra European flair, I think. Thanks revi!
I think there is something (extra) hormonal going on with me, because I have developed a crush on, like, everyone I’ve met over the past few weeks. (In case you’re wondering what happened to that boyfriend in DC I used to write about, well, that’s not happening anymore. I don’t have the energy to get into it today but there is a good story there so I’ll tell it soon.) Even weirder, there are a bunch of people who seem to like me too. Sometimes these people even overlap, which never happens to me! Usually there are the guys I like, and the guys who like me, and never the twain shall meet. But lately there’s some very good cross-crushing action going on.
(My roommate Jane and I have this joke going because I can’t stop talking about how much better my skin has been the past few months, and I’m all like “IT’S BECAUSE OF THE PROACTIV. I LOVE THE PROACTIV.” Which sounds like a typical scary drone infomertial person, right? So whenever I’m telling her about something good that happened to me, she says, “It’s because the Proactiv saved your life! Millions and millions served!” So…yeah. All the guy attention is totally because of the Proactiv!)
Do you want to hear about all the boys I am in love with? Here goes:
1. The guy whose studio space is right next to mine at school. The walls don’t go all the way up so we play music for each other and hold conversations across the wall, and sometimes, when we are feeling extra extroverted, we actually leave our respective studios and talk to each other while leaning up against the wall in the corridor!
He is fucking gorgeous. He was the first painting major I met here, and and oh my god, he is so smart and flirty and has that ability to make you feel really special and attractive. Right away he invited me out to this bar where all the others (all of us! Join our cult! Wooo oooo.) hang out, and I met these three girls who I now hang out with all the time. However, that night I ascertained that he is cute and flirty with EVERY DAMN THING THAT CROSSES HIS PATH, which is a bummer, but he’s still so charming that even knowing that, while we’re talking one-on-one I’m like “Oooh, dreamy,” the whole time. I mean, I mentioned that I was reading Anna Karenina for fun (which is totally true), and everyone else I’ve said that to has been all, “Anna Karana-wha-wha?” But he got all excited and told me that he had recently read The Brothers Karamazov and then he launched into a big spiel about Checkov vs Dostoevsky, and I was basically thinking “I WANT TO BEAR YOUR CHILDREN!” the whole time.
Falling for womanizers is very dangerous, I know. I guess I make dumb choices. But he has an accent and blue eyes and sideburns and I LOVE sideburns and that is all I will say. Moving on.
2. A guy in one of my studio classes who is always there working at the same times I am. We are two of the only people who do the out-of-class paintings in the classroom, as opposed to at home like most people do, so we have lots of time to talk. This past weekend we were both there all day, all three days (Friday through Sunday), so I basically saw him more than I saw my two roommates combined. He is Hawaiian and a really good painter and very quiet in class, which is what first intrigued me, especially because he’s chatty when it’s just the two of us. Of course I told Jane about all this.
This past Sunday morning:
Me: I’m off to the studio! AGAIN.
Jane: Are you going to do actual painting, or are you just going to stalk your Hawaiian lover?
Me: (pause) I’m going to kill two birds with one stone, okay?
Jane: Good luck with that painting.
Me: Shut it.
I get the feeling he likes me too, because when he finished before me on Sunday and started to go, I said, “Oh, you aren’t going to stay around and keep me company?” and he totally put his stuff down and was all, “Yes! I will stay!” and then I was just sort of dumbstruck and silent. And also, dumb.
3. Also there is a guy in my art history class who keeps calling to study together and go see exhibitions and stuff and he’s pretty nice, but he’s about three years younger. Also he makes me a little physically uncomfortable, in that we once rode our bikes to a gallery and then once we were inside I was saying how much I loved the air conditioning, and he goes, “Yeah, you’ve got, like, beads of sweat on your forehead.” Which, okay. If we were good friends that would have been fine, and I would have said something like, “It’s okay, you don’t have to call them beads. It’s a swamp, I know,” but I really don’t know him, and it made me really self-conscious.
(Hello, I am a big sweater! Nice to meet you.)
And there’s no way I could ever date a guy who I got self-conscious feelings from just from something as small as a little sweat. ALSO, he looks a little like my cousin. So, again, moving on.
4. Finally, there is a guy in another studio near me who is quite possibly the strangest person I have ever met, which I told him on like the fourth instance we ever spoke. His studio is a weird explosion/melding of a toy shop and “I love the 80s.” He’s this total packrat who does art with My Little Ponies and puffy stickers and little Care Bear figurines. I mean, the first time we met he showed me a puffolump (popalump? I don’t know. One of those 80s plush toys that has a little pouch in its front that you can roll the rest of its body into) and told me he was using it to make a portrait of Emily Dickenson. And then he told me that he wasn’t really planning to “paint” anymore, at least not in the sense of, like, using actual, you know, paint.
I mean, come on. How could I not be intrigued by this? He is hilarious. Also, the first time we met he couldn’t even look me in the eye and I figured he was really nervous around girls, which is charming. Lately he has warmed up a lot though, and we have long conversations about ART AND BLAH BLAH SOCIETY BLAH, and I want him to be my best friend. I think I will pass him a note asking him to check the box: yes or no?
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So that is the land of my raging Crush Machine life lately. Also, there has been class and painting and studying and stuff. I got a 100 on my art history exam! Hello, I’m a big school nerd.
7.13.2005
No, seriously, WHO LET THE DOG OUT?
Wow, I had a really freaking bad day today! It started when I was riding my bike to school and I stopped at the ATM to deposit some money I had gotten for my birthday. I parked my bike and walked up to the machine. The screen said “Insert Card.” I bent my head down for FIVE SECONDS, seriously, to get my bank card out of my wallet, and when I straightened up again, the ATM screen said “Sorry – this machine is now being serviced. Please try again later!”
I MEAN. Does anyone else have luck this bad or is it just me?
I checked my watch to see what time it was, thinking maybe they did their ATM servicing at a standard time every day so I could avoid this in the future, but it was 10:08. So as far as I can see, these things just occur willy-nilly, whenever the bank people (aka God) feel like doing them.
So then, later, I was in class. We are working on a still life of all these glass bottles and a round pitcher with purple sand spilling out of it, and it’s pretty hard. (Glass is notoriously hard to paint.)
As background, we had spent two class periods on this already, so five hours. Plus I had spent about four hours on it last night.
The teacher (the Spanish one! Again! He is turning into excellent story fodder), walking around, told me and two other people that our paintings were geting too dark – the shadows were too dark a grey. Touching my painting and finding it wet, he said, “Ees this all wet paint, right here? Scrape it off. Scrape it off! With your palette knife! And then take thees sandpaper, and sand your canvas. See? Like thees. Sand all the paint off, until it is down to your drawing. Then, start eet over!”
So the three of us started wiping all the wet paint off our canvasses. The professor was heading out to the door to get something, I guess, and I called out, “Um, what is the purpose of the sanding again? I missed that.”
And he said (again, with the swishy Spanish accent and a big grin): “The sanding ees a PUNISHMENT for you. To remind you that you have been a BAD GIRL and a BAD PAINTER.” And then he left the room in a flourish.
Is that not the funniest thing a professor has ever said? He is a nut. But regardless, I am a bad girl who will be spending her entire weekend painting glass bottles and purple sand.
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Do you want to read a funny/retarded thing I wrote while drunk last Saturday night/Sunday morning? It is about our dog, who is crafty and wily and will TAKE OFF RUNNING if she gets outside without a leash on. When I got home that night with my roommates and these two random guys who were friends of theirs, this is what I typed, minutes before passing out (italics added by me just now):
Overheard on Saturday night, 2:49am: “Did you guys let the dog out AGAIN? Son of a BITCH, who did that??”
The dog likes to run. You cannot let her out. She won’t llo both ways as she crosses the street; she’ll just tar across on the search for birds o something. Crazy thing.
Um, yeaaaah. Every day is like a bad drunk entry from Bridget Jones’s Diary around here. Also notice how the spelling got worse as the “story” went on? That’s funny, if I do say so myself.
7.9.2005
The Week of the Chicken
I deem it so because I have had more dealings with raw chicken this week than in my entire life up to this point combined. First off, I have to tell you my chicken salad story. See, back a few weeks ago when I was sponging off my dad and stepmom for an entire month, my stepmom took me under her wing, so to speak (WING, geddit??), and taught me a little bit of cooking. I learned pot roast and green bean casserole and bran muffins and pimento cheese (which, if you have never been in the south and eaten, let me just tell you that IT EES SOOO GOOD).
And chicken salad. A lovely but complicated recipe of chicken salad which involves boiling the chicken in chicken brothy water, and celery and onion and apple and pepper and lots of mayo. It is delish but time consuming. Chop chop chop, you know, these things take time.
Anyway, within my first two weeks of being here, I made a big ole batch. It took me, like, an afternoon. I had one sandwich and then put it in the fridge with a note: “Take some.” I figured your average person would interpret “Take some” as “Take some but leave me some as well, you douche, because it took freaking forever to make, obviously, and you can see how delicious it is.”
The next day I went to orientation at school all day long. When I got home, there was about half of it left, and I was like, oookay. I had another sandwich of it. That was the night my female roommate, who I’ll call Jane, and I went out and got wasted. At some point in the night, she was like, “Did Mike (male roommate) and I eat too much of your chicken salad? Because I had a sandwich, but he took a big enormous bowl of it, which I thought was sort of weird.” And I was all, “Oh okay, I wondered about it. That’s funny,” and we had a laugh at Mike and how guy/clueless he was.
The next day was that day that Jane and I were totally hungover and spent all day prone on the couch, drinking water and watching Magnolia. Mike hung out with us too. At one point we both went into the kitchen together. I got more water from the fridge and he took out the tub of the chicken salad and I watched, appalled, as he dumped the rest of it into an enormous bowl and threw the empty tupperware into the sink, without asking if he could finish it. I was like, crying on the inside because of the deliciousness of the chicken salad, and there it went, all gone. When we both walked back into the living room, Jane saw Mike with his big ole bowl and gave me the eyebrow raise of “Are you fucking kidding me?” It was pretty funny.
Anyway, later on he said something like, “That chicken salad was really good,” to me, and I responded “Thanks. I’ll make it again, if you buy the stuff.” I was smiling at him, and I think for a second he thought I was kidding, but I TOTALLY WAS NOT KIDDING, because hello, DAY OF CHOPPING. Then he realized that I was not kidding, and we both burst out laughing.
And ever since that day, Jane and I are constantly bringing up “the chicken salad incident” to him, just, like, at random times, and just to make him feel bad. Because that is the sort of bitchy thing we like to do around here.
So, jump to today. Jane’s younger sister has been staying with us for a week and today is her birthday. I told her I would make her the chicken salad as a present, so I spent lots of time earlier today (as soon as I had recovered from the dirty martinis of last night) making a batch. Finally it was done and I brought the huge bowl of it out to her in the living room where she was watching tv. I wish I would have had a little candle to stick in the middle of it, because that would have been funny.
Mike was still asleep…how, I don’t know, because it was 2:30 and his room is right off the living room and these are NOT QUIET GIRLS WE ARE DEALING WITH. Anyway, we started talking about how we should put the bowl right next to his door and try to wake him up with the smell, or we could push the chicken salad, piece by piece, under his door so that he could have a little snack in bed. Finally we were like, “MIKE DO YOU HEAR US?? WE ARE TALKING ABOUT THE CHICKEN SALAD THING AGAIN.” And the door flew open and he was standing there, all crazy-haired and in his underwear, and he was like, “I PROMISE TO NEVER EAT YOUR ENTIRE BOWL OF CHICKEN SALAD AGAIN, GOOD GOD WOMEN.” And then shut the door and went back to sleep.
I love living here.
The other chicken I am having to deal with right now is for school. I have a homework assignment, due Monday, to paint a still life arrangement of RAW CHICKEN.
I…there are no words. When the professor assigned this, we all just stared at him with our mouths hanging open like idiots. He was very specific, you see. We are to paint two chicken quarters, which is the thigh and drumstick attached, and one wing. Raw. In an arrangement of our choosing. On a light-colored surface (NO PLATE! If there is a plate involved the painting will be failed, apparently!) so that there is low contrast. Due Monday. I…?
???
?
Hunh??
(Also, imagine these instructions being spoken by Hank Azaria’s character in The Birdcage, because my professor is Spanish and sort of, er, swishy. It makes it even better, no?)
So, my last trip to the grocery store took like 45 minutes, because I had to find and price-compare and buy SO MUCH CHICKEN all in one trip. It was odd. I felt like I was catering a family reunion or something.
Here is my still life arrangement that I am attempting to paint:
I bet none of you ever imagined that art school was THIS glamorous, huh? I know, I lead a charmed life.
Furthermore, I AM OLD.
Wednesday was my birthday and now I am 26, which is more than halfway to 50, and also on the “wrong” side of 25. Cannot believe that it was this week, an entire decade ago, that I was failing my drivers’ test.
I have a total chip on my shoulder about my birthday, because since it’s July 6 people are always out of town or hanging with their families, so they forget about it or can’t come to parties. As a kid I always had the tiniest birthday parties and I’d feel like a loser. When you’re seven you don’t really care that all your friends are at their lake houses; you just care that you had to call in your B-list friends to make up some semblance of a celebration.
So I was sort of bummed about celebrating it in this new town where I have basically no friends. It turned out pretty nice though: Mike, Jane, Jane’s sister, and two girls in my department at school who I had only met twice took me out for sushi. They even brought cards. I ate an obscene mountain of sushi.
Then we went to the bar where Jane works and sat on the roof terrace. Another girl from school showed up and she turned out to be awesome too. I had pear cider.
On the bad side, my best friend of NINETEEN YEARS forgot about my birthday entirely and has yet to call. I am thinking about sending her an email entitled “Happy belated birthday!” And then typing inside “Oh wait, it wasn’t your birthday. IT WAS MINE. Wench.” Or something like that.
Is that too passive-aggressive?
7.8.2005
Sites I Visit
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7.2.2005
One year anniversary of my having a pseudonym
Wow, so today is exactly a year since I started this site! A year, that’s a big commitment for me. I think a year is about as long as my longest relationship with an actual human being (other than, like, my parents and friends), so unless I suddenly decide in the next few days to just jump ship and shut the whole thing down, I will officially have committed myself to Supine Fever longer than to Matt or to Oliver or to that other guy (what was his name again?). Strange.
I would have to say that overall I really like blogging, although I hate that word, along with the word blog. It just sounds too much like the noise you make when you’re in the throes of throwing up. There have been periods where I like it less than others. There are periods where I feel I don’t really have many things to say (and therefore type a “today I did blah-blah-blah” post, which I prefer not to do), or should I say many funny things to say, because, as you may have noticed, I like to keep it light around here. There have been times where I sort of let me guard down and talk about Big Sad Issues or feelings or whatever, but overall I feel more comfortable keeping those things to myself and rolling them around in my head, while outwardly I project nonchalance and levity. Which is actually the way I am in my dealings with the real world, so you can rest assured that you’re getting to know the true me, in a weird, paradoxical way.
Do you guys remember what got you into blogging to begin with? I was trying to remember for myself, and I think it began because for the first six months or so at my old job, the one at that start-up in DC, things were very very slow and I basically spent about six of my eight daily working hours just clowning around on the internet. Typically I don’t hear about Cool New Things The Teenagers Are Doing until they’ve been going on for about five years, and this was no exception. I basically had never heard of a blog until last summer. I randomly, somehow, came across Amalah and then Rude Cactus, and basically had two thoughts, in rapid succession:
1) This is awesome.
2) I can totally do this.
(No disrespect meant to either of those sites because they’re two of my favorites (and I’m not just kissing up), because I have this totally weird ego that is a mixture of insecurity and thinking I can do anything anybody else can do. I don’t know I came to be this way, but I can tell you that I distinctly remember walking the rooms of, like, the National Gallery when I was little and seeing the famous Impressionist paintings and thinking I can do this, and furthermore, I want to do this. Why I then derailed my life away from art for the next fifteen years, culminating in going pre-med in college, is a mystery. ANYway.)
And then I somehow came across Blogger and just went right at it. I have heard people diss Blogger as the choice for first setting up a blog, but it worked perfectly for me. Everything is very user-friendly and there’s none of those weird “communities"-type-things that put me off as being exclusionary. I did eventually leave Blogger and get my own domain (obviously), but that was only partially due to the fact that Blogger had been getting increasingly temperamental as far as sometimes not being able log in or to post when you needed to. Mainly I did it because someone told me about all the other options you have as far as the structure of your site goes, and laying out your archives in different ways and stuff. Which I am totally going to get around to doing, um, one of these months.
(Does anyone know how to do that? How to change your archives so that they are in a list of each entry being a link, as opposed to being grouped monthly? Help.)
Now, Jay and I once had a mini-discussion about how we named our sites, and I will tell you that I truthfully do not have ANY cool background story to how I came up with Supine Fever. When I came across Blogger and saw that one of the first steps to setting up your site is to think up a name and url, I immediately set to work just thinking up cool words that would sound cool together. Supine is one of the first words that popped into my head, and I liked it both for the nice feeling you get as it rolls off your tongue, and for the image it conjures up (to me at least): lounging around on a hammock, just takin’ it easy. (If I let the imagery continue to build up in my head, it takes me to Bermuda or Aruba or something, where I am lounging on a hammock with some smokin’ hot Don Juan-type-man, but I need to keep on writing this entry so I am WORKING VERY HARD to pull myself back from that nice little place.)
And then I thought of Fever and I had Supine Fever the end now back to Aruba!
Hmm. Maybe not.
But yeah, I was basically like, oh Supine Fever, yeah, that sounds cool. Print it up! And that one day or so of brainstorming cool word combinations is the extent of the big backstory of how I came up with this name. Kind of anticlimatic, I know.
Now, other people have expressed amazement to me that nobody in my real life knows about this site. As far as I know, that is still true to this day. (If someone I know is there, come out already! I won’t be upset, for real!) I have never ever used my real name anywhere here, so I don’t really see how anyone Googling me could find it. I think a few times people HAVE accidentally used my name in the comments, but since those are Haloscan they’re like entirely different web pages so I think that’s still okay. In the early days, I think I was a little bitchy about some of my friends, not too terribly, but you know, just venting a little about things hat annoyed me, so that’s why I never told them about it then. And now that I have a different style when I write, and don’t do so much whining about specific people (except for my mom, but she really truly is crazy), I guess I could direct them to it, but it’s been so long that it would be sort of weird, you know? Like, what if your closest friend came to you and was all, I’ve had an Internet alter-ego for AN ENTIRE YEAR NOW, just fyi? That would be weird.
So I am still not ready to “out” myself as far as names go, but I will cave in a little bit and post one measly tiny photo of myself, or of the top half of my face at least. Here:
This is one that one of coworkers accidentally took on my last day of work, in that she was fiddling with my camera and couldn’t find the shutter button, so I came toward her to show her and she found it and snapped the picture as I was, like, four inches away from the camera. So that’s part of my head which is all I am ready to show right now, because baby steps! At least now you can rest assured that I have two eyes and a nose. I like my eyebrows in this photo, but I don’t like how assy my hair looks. What can I say, it was my last day and I had a hangover because of that
goodbye party that involved tequila shots.
But as I was saying, yeah, blogging. It’s fun. It’s all good. I will be around for a while yet. I’ve really enjoyed finding all of you, my Internet Reciprocal Link Friends. I like reading about your lives and emailing you and telling you about my life. (You like me, you really like me!) So to wrap up my One-Year Blogiversary smorgasbord of site factoids, here is a little map of the year:
First post, back when I did short posts every day. Also the first post in which I revealed my lack-of-sex-life, which, GOD, is embarassing.
First post in which I bitched about my job. It’s boring. Don’t click this.
First post in which I become infatuated with a boy who does not know that I exist. Sigh. My life is basically a Molly Ringwald movie, and not the one where she kisses that hot guy on her birthday.
In which I got nominated for an award.
Okay, I am bored with this already. Also I am STARVING! I made pot roast for my roommates last night and we sat around drinking Woodchuck cider. I am going to have some more pot roast I think. I hope everyone has a great 4th of July weekend, and thanks again for sticking by me and coming around and reading and stuff.
Oh, and one more thing! I just checked my site stats, and as long as nothing weird happens as far as everyone abandoning their computers simultaneously, today I will get my 10,000th hit! I know lots of you passed that mark ages ago, but I’m excited, what can I say. (Plus it’s awesome timing.) Take care, everyone.