I knew from the beginning that this summer would require a focused effort for it to actually be fun. I got my foot all hacked up (if you don’t sit by your computer constantly refreshing this blog until there’s a new post and you missed my surgery update, you can study up on my current condition here) and will be spending the next 5 weeks on crutches. And then I’ll get the other foot hacked up, and all together I’ll be spending 12 beautiful weeks with one functioning leg. Luckily, 1 week is already down, and time certainly flies when you’re sleeping 18 hours a day.
Anyway, I decided to take my fun into my own hands and make a summer bucket list to ensure that I make it a priority to leave the house a couple times. If The Secret taught me anything it’s that you have to write stuff like this down and put it out into the universe, and dammit, the ‘powers that be’ better conspire to attract to me some time spent drinking on a boat!
So, here’s the list, and I’ll keep you updated as I cross things off:
Go to a concert (I blacked out and bought three tickets to the Summerland Concert in July with Sugar Ray and Gin Blossoms– among other 90′s alt rock/pop bands. I’ve been made fun of enough for this, I don’t need to hear it).
Go to a Red Sox game.
Spend some time by at a lake, on a beach, or any body of water.
Go to the drive-in. I think we’ve all forgotten how clutch the drive-in is. You can talk as loud as you want, don’t have to breathe the same air as strangers, and you can bring your own food. Not that I don’t already do that (I may or may not have brought a 3 course Italian meal to a screening of Eat, Pray, Love).
Party on a boat. Doing anything on a boat is way more fun than doing any of that stuff on land. This is me enjoying life way more than usual ’cause I’m on a boat:
Go somewhere that WASP-y rich people like to spend their summers: Cape Cod, The Hamptons, and Maine all work. I don’t need to stay over, a day trip will suffice.
Make a trip or a road trip or some kind of weekend vacation situation.
Take lots of pictures for memory purposes and making-people-who-see-them-on- facebook-jealous purposes.
Get better at my ukulele playin’.
Spend more time writing outside on my deck.
Find a reason to wear a flower crown. Yes. Lana Del Rey. This is a blog written by someone who is comfortable with how terrible her taste in music is. You need to get comfortable with that too if we’re going to move forward.
This past Friday, I had the pleasure of having my left foot operated on. Basically, I was born with my heel at a slight angle, so they cut it off, and reattached it with screws. Then they cracked some bones on the top of my foot and put a wedge in there so my toes hit the ground correctly when I stand. While I’m healing, I’ll be on crutches for the next 6 weeks, which is kind of a bummer, but being the beacon of positivity that I am (right, you guys? right?) I’m trying to think of all the good things that come from this setback:
My friend Jill noticed that my cast makes my right leg look really skinny, so +1
I received a pretty solid prescription for Vicodin.+1
Evidently, my delicate constitution can’t tolerate narcotic pain killers, and I spent the next 6 hours throwing up said Vicodin. -1
Yay, I’m skinny again! +1
I have to wrap up my leg in a trash bag before I shower. -1
I have a pretty valid excuse to not shower so much. +2
I’m helping the environment. +1
I get to monopolize the living room TV because no one can argue with a sad handicapped person. +1
I’m starting to believe that I know the characters of Breaking Bad personally, and I’m way too emotionally invested in the success of Kim Zolciak’s wedding. -3
The simplest tasks are now so much harder. -1
My parents now expect literally nothing from me +5
So, it could be worse. Maybe now that I’m mostly bedridden (that’s what happens when you’re on crutches, right? You’re on bed rest until the cast comes off?) I’ll have more time to blog. Because that’s what was holding me back before… not having enough time on my hands…
P.S. In lieu of prayers for my speedy recovery, I ask that you leave your well wishes and attention in the comment section below. Your support is greatly appreciated.
John Mayer. (Hasn’t Jennifer Aniston been through enough?!)
People referring to their boyfriends as “the boy.”
Tim Burton and Johnny Depp.
Reality stars wearing bandage dresses. We can’t all look good in bandage dresses!
Skinny Perez Hilton. He somehow set a new benchmark on how upset I am by newly thinned out celebrities. The scale is now from a Skinny Seth Rogen to a Skinny Perez Hilton, with Skinny Al Roker somewhere in the middle. I’m offended by how angular his jaw is.
‘Spirit Animal’ jokes. (But if we’re keeping track, Sally Draper is my spirit animal [but not Kiernan Shipka, who I think is a leetle too proud of herself]).
Stop encouraging her, Jon Hamm.
Anchorman 2. Just when everyone gave me some peace and stopped quoting Anchorman 1, Anchorman 2 is coming out. Young white men, you have already ruined this movie for me.
Alternatively:
This vision of class was on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last night:
I don’t know if you’ve heard, but my mom was kind of a gypsy, cowgirl badass in her day.
I posted this photo of my mom and uncle last year for Mother’s Day, but I figured I should post it again as it’s the only picture I’ve come across that illustrates my point. The woman is wearing a cowgirl hat with feather embellishments like she doesn’t even care. If you need more evidence that the woman who’s uterus I once called home is a badass (sorry, I’m trying to think up another way to call her a badass, but the only phrases I can think of involve the f-word, and she might be cool, but I can tell you I won’t hear the end of it if I decide to start throwing the effs around on her Mother’s Day post. Her coworkers read this) then let me hit you with some more fun facts: She used to own a motorcycle, a 280 Z, and guns.
So for Mother’s Day my mom and I went on a surprise field trip which included two of her favorite things (melted cheese and time spent with me) and a little nostalgic, aggressive fun at the firing range! I decided on taking her there because A. I thought it would be a fun activity to remind her of her youth before she ruined her life by having children, and B. I’ve never fired a gun before, so I thought it would be great practice incase of some kind of situation where I find myself in a tussle with an armed intruder, the gun flies out of his (or HER. Women can be can be robbers or murderers too, ya know) hand, I grab it, the tables turned, and I have to make the split second reaction to take her out. It’s the climax in about 8 out of 10 Lifetime movies, which are always based on a true story, so odds are good it could happen to me, and I need to be prepared.
So, I picked my mom up from work and our first stop was Mr. Mac’s where we enjoyed a nutritionally dense meal of carbs, oil, and cheese.
{Mr. Mac’s in Manchester, NH. Buffalo Chicken Mac and Cheese and Bacon, Chicken, Ranch Mac and Cheese}
I blindfolded my mom for the surprise portion of the evening, which lasted until I got to the edge of the parking lot when she asked if she could take it off because it was ruining her make up.
Look, I know my outfit doesn’t match, just leave it alone.
Being at a gun range ended up being a much more stressful experience than I imagined. As soon as I walked into the place I had this feeling that I wouldn’t be able to control the gun and it would just start shooting all over the place and I would just be holding on and riding behind it. Turns out that’s not actually how guns work at all. Shooting at things is actually really fun! And holding a deadly weapon makes you feel like God! Laughing out loud.
I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that my mother shot the target “right between the eyes” (Hit me up if you’d like to hear me say that sentence in my Mom voice). I love you, Mama!
I’ve always heard from other writers that you have to go out and have life experiences so you have something to write about. Well, since the inception of this blog, I’ve been— I don’t want to call myself a hermit per se, but maybe living the life of someone just a touch agoraphobic. I’m definitely not agoraphobic, but there havebeen days when the only thing separating me from Howard Hughes was a pair of yoga pants (and not storing my pee in jars). Hence, why I have been posting a lot about eyebrow pencils and Bravo-lebrities.
Today all that changes! I have life experiences and lessons learned that I can write about in a pithy yet heartfelt manner!
It’s about a guy, so brace yourself, it’s about to get all Taylor Swift-y up in here (I bet you thought I was going to say Carrie Bradshaw… Well, I wasn’t. I don’t always have to make a Carrie reference… But if you want to call me Carrie then do what you need to do. Okay, fine. I’m just like Carrie Bradshaw. Now drop it. Drop it).
So I was dating this guy–we’ll call him Jim. I mean, that could be his name. You assume it’s not because I said ‘we’ll call him,’ but who can say? His name may or may not be Jim. (It’s not Jim). Anyway, we were talking for a week, dating for about 3, so all told the interaction was just under a month. Now, I’ll just preface this by saying that we were not dating for a long time, and I have a heart of stone/am not a crazy person, so I’m not terribly distraught over him, but definitely unhappy with the situation and how it made me question the humanity of all people. Or something.
So you can put someone’s face with the name in your head.
So without getting too into it, Jim came on very strong from the beginning until the end. There was no way I could have misread anything he said unless “I’d like to position this [...] to become a relationship” is a sentence completely made up of auto-antonyms (Facebook, April 16). **Is that how you cite a Facebook message according to MLA style?**
There was no game playing, and I had no reason to question his feelings (I mean, I’m a red headed Jewess with a whimsical blog, what’s there to question?), except for a couple red flags, namely, that he kept bringing up his ex-girlfriend. I mean, he was like, calling her the C-word and stuff, but still. Now, I’m exceptional at 3 things (+ a million more things) which are: Figuring out what celebrity a person looks like, 90′s pop culture trivia, and spotting and interpreting red flags. I saw the flags, yet I ignored them. The stakes weren’t high so I went with the flow.
Things kept chugging along until one day he offered to make me dinner. It was a lovely, romantical night (except for a minor tiff about him bringing up his ex again), but then I didn’t really hear from him for two days. I got a text from him saying that while he was at work the day after dinner, he suddenly felt “overwhelmed” with how fast things were going, and how “his heart wasn’t ready for anything serious,” which made me cringe because I hate when anyone refers to their heart like it’s anything but a vital organ (ie. ‘my heart needs mending,’ ‘my heart is fragile,’ etc.).
Besides the unfortunate phrasing, it was a little upsetting, and I felt pretty duped because I wasn’t driving this bus to ‘Serious’ Town –he was– and it’s kind of bewildering and scary that someone can change their mind about you in one moment.
And he had a hot tub… I think I’ll miss the hot tub the most.
Then, next thing I know, he’s back with his ex-girlfriend (which apparently was separate and unrelated to him pumping the brakes with me two weeks before). Just to give you a frame of reference, they have broken up 5 times in 3 years, so clearly theirs is a healthy and loving union. At first, I didn’t get why he would want her (with whom he has major trouble making it work) over me (who is awesome). But, I thought about it, and it actually makes the situation a lot easier to digest, and it made me realize a couple things.
For one, never ignore your gut instinct. If you do, something like this could happen to you or you could end up murdered by a Craigslist Killer, bloated and decomposing in a lake (I saw it on Oprah). To be honest, I don’t know if I would have done anything differently, but it did prove that I shouldn’t second guess myself because I’m right about everything, always.
Another thing I realized is that I shouldn’t take this personally because I don’t think it was about me at all. I’m the center of my own universe, so at first it was like, why did this happen to me, and I didn’t do anything to deserve this. But really, this was about the two of them, and I’m just a footnote in their Sid and Nancy love story. People come into your life for a time, wreck shop, and then go about their business. It’s not about you, it’s about them dealing with whatever mess they have going on in their own life. Everyone is the center of their own universe and serving their own interests. People are disappointing. It sounds cynical, but either way, people are going to let you down sometimes, and it’s important to know it’s usually not about you. And I guess it’s important to realize that so next time when you’re doing you (and you should always do you), you remember who might be affected in the process and then be a little more careful.
So there you have it. Please excuse me while I have a Bridget Jones, ‘I’m Every Woman’ montage.
I know I’m 23 (and a half) so that’s only about 4 years removed from actually being one, but I feel like I’ve always been a 45 year-old divorcee at heart, anyway. Teenagers are the worst. They’re just these little zitty mental patients with no sense of consequence or personal safety.
But God bless them.
They are so resourceful when it comes to getting drunk. Apparently, drinking hand sanitizer —one more time— hand sanitizer is the new way to circumvent the 21+ rule for intoxication.
Again, bless their hearts. They are so, so stupid. Can they really not find anyone willing to buy them beer? Do their parents not have a liquor cabinet to steal from? Or is it just an opportunity thing, like, “eh, found some sanitizer in my mom’s purse, might as well drink it.” I mean, where do they come up with this stuff? I don’t remember being 14, cleaning my earrings with witch hazel and thinking it might be a good idea to take a straw to it. Then again, I did musical theatre when I was a teenager, so maybe I missed out on the crazy public school youth experiences like smoking bath salts and getting pregnant.
I think it’s obvious that we’ve allowed some of America’s children to slip through the cracks. And guess what those kids find in those cracks? Actual crack. If these tiny forgotten souls manage to escape the drugs, they might just end up stripping or in porn. Where I’m sure there’s a lot of crack. It’s a vicious cycle, beginning and leading to crack.
To give you a better example of the kinds of kids that end up in porn or on drugs or at the very least, have no chance of escaping a future of psychotherapy and a string of loveless marriages, I put together a small list.
Children with No Chance of Being Functioning Members of Society:
1. Sophia Grace and Rosie
I think we’ve all been a little irresponsible in our care and keeping of these two little British girls. It’s one thing to give them a viral video, I’ll even grant you one Ellen Show appearance, but I think we’ve gotten greedy. How do you think it’s going to go when these girls are 25 and they realize they peaked at 8? In their formative years they’ve been taught that by performing a rather mediocre version of a Nikki Minaj song they’re entitled to be on TV. I mean Ellen gave them a billboard in LA last week. A BILLBOARD! Why try to cure cancer or become a lady president if a tone-deaf rendition of an age-inappropriate song gets you to the Grammy’s?
2. The 5 Year-Old Daughter of This Woman
I mean, I could probably just stop right here. Anyone who uses that much bronzer does not have the presence of mind to take care of any kind of living organism, let alone a daughter who can grow up to become a serial killer. Anyway, this lady brought her toddler to go tanning and was arrested for it. First, it’s my own personal opinion that unless your kid has some sort of monster uni-brow or other deformity, you shouldn’t allow or encourage them to alter their appearance until they’re a teenager. I mean, they can play with make up, sure, but encouraging your kid to tan (or even spray tan) puts into their head at a very young age that they’re not good enough the way they are, which is just like, priming them for a future as a Hustler centerfold. AND, just the fact that this mother has such little common sense as to let a 5 year-old tan, you know she’s probably letting her sex-offender nephew babysit or something (#toomuchnotenoughjustright? Sowee)
3. Bear Silverstone
So if you haven’t seen this video, it’s Alicia Silverstone (for terrorists who don’t know, that’s Cher from Clueless) and she’s feeding her son, Bear (first problem) from her mouth like a BIRD. Okay, I’m all about letting you do you, but this isn’t even safe! Even if it was sanitary, what are the chances that this kid is going to have a successful relationship with any woman besides his mother?
So a big ‘good luck’ to these little cherubs, and I’d like for them to remember something: One day when someone asks you to be in a ‘documentary about drug addiction’ and they ask you to meet them at a hotel for your final interview… RUN!
Yes. Lana Del Rey. This is a blog written by someone who is comfortable with how terrible her taste in music is. You need to get comfortable with that too if we’re going to move forward.
