Sometimes the perfect job just EMAILS you.

From: Michael Welsh <paypof@aol.com>
Date: Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 3:14 PM
Subject: Re: Personal Assistant Needed‏ ( Contact me on 916-222-4213 )
To: ethibeaux@gmail.com

I'm got your email through the Monster.com employment database. Oh really? I did not realize I HAD a monster.com account. Good to know. I am looking for someone who can handle my personal and business errands during his or her spare time. I’m a her. Please continue. I’m intrigued by your ambiguity. I need your service because I am constantly traveling abroad on business. I own an Art Gallery that specializes in international art.

Oh right. I remember now. Back before I decided to throw in the towel and become an audio engineer, I was actively pursuing an entry-level career in the international art trade. It's so great how you did all this research on me before reaching out. I can see that you really care, and are totally legitimate. 

Your Responsibilities are. Oh hell, you lost me. 

1. Receive my mail and Drop them off at the post office or shipping center. Take your mail, and then send it back to you. The post office feedback loop. Got it. 
2. Pay my bills on my behalf and sit for delivery at home. Can I pay MY bills on your behalf as well? 
3. Pick up my items at your nearby post office at your convenience. Your items? Are we talking about international art, or maybe balloons of heroin? Either way is cool, I just like to know.
4. When you get my mail or package, you would mail all items to where I want them shipped. .All expenses and shipping charges will be covered by me. That’s a relief. I was worried I was going to have to pay for all this international shipping. Because you’re abroad, and I will apparently be living at the post office. Are you sure this isn't just a position FOR the post office?

The contents of the packages are mostly art materials and paintings. In addition, there will be clothing I need for business and personal letters. No heavy packages are ever delivered! What kind of “art” are we dealing with? Do I get to read the personal letters first? Even if you say no, I think I probably will anyway. Are they love letters? Are you running some kind of "Letters to Juilet" ring here? I saw that movie, it wasn't very good. 

I am currently away on business in China. If you decide to accept the position, please read the employment requirements listed below. I was with you until you said China. I have a personal issue with the Chinese. (Author's note: this is a joke. I love the Chinese. Big fan. Seriously.)


A. You are an honest and trustworthy citizen.  I was with you until “honest.” Everything after that just doesn’t sound like me.

B. You will be required to work between 15 and 20hrs a month. A MONTH? That is just so much post office and sitting around. 

C You need to be able to check your EMAIL 3 to 5 times daily. That is too much commitment to having my phone with me at all times. Also, I only have e-mail. I don’t know what EMAIL is. It sounds aggressive. 

THE PAY IS $1000 WEEKLY and you are entitle to a brand new car after 1month if you are hardworking and honest with me, WHICH IS NOT A BAD OFFER.

Okay, in the “list of requirements,” hardworking was not mentioned. I feel this is an unfair addition to you already overwhelming technical qualifications. That being said, I think we should discuss how $1000/weekly breaks down when I am required to do NO MORE than 20 hours of a work a month. Technically, that is 4 hours a week. You are telling me that you need this mail checked SO BADLY that you are willing to pay $250 an hour? What exactly do you mean by “international art?” I can only assume you mean black market internal organs.

I do like cars, though. What do you need from me to get this going?

In closing, I have a couple of questions for you.

First, If I were to mail you money to do my shopping plus an upfront payment for your service, where would you want it mailed to? Preferably my Gringotts vault, because it is the safest, securest place in all the land. 

Second, how would you like for your name appear on the money or check? In all caps, underlined twice, and no less than three crying emoticons bookending it.

Maybe you can provide me with the following details below

Name: E. “Snootypants” Swifty-Lavigne Thibeaux (III)

Address: Third bunk from the left, Slytherin House, The Dungeon

City: Hogwarts

State: Magical Mayhem

Zip: ...pity do dah?

CELL OR PHONE: Cell number 294; Phone numberI’M A WITCH I DON’T HAVE A PHONE.
Occupation: I would like one, yes.

What is your bank Name: Gringotts. Please see my accountant, Griphook, for further instructions. Do not anger the dragon.

Also, Robb Stark is King of the North. I’m pretty sure my bank is in his territory. I’d check with him, too. 

Eviction notices and definitions

There was a very specific practice at the dinner table of my childhood. Every night, my mother would ask about school. Greg, my older brother, would mention some test he did well on, or a question that he answered correctly. Geofrey, my little brother, would complain about eating chicken for dinner two days in a row. I would tell my parents that I did, in fact, go to school. That’s how it was.

After the round robin of daily anecdotes, my father would start talking about something. A general concept, a life skill, some sort of scientific anomaly – it varied from day to day. And in the middle of explaining it, he would slip a higher-level vocabulary word or technical term in to the conversation. Greg would nod along. Geofrey would complain about how he didn’t want gumbo, he just wanted white rice with butter. I would fume silently for a few minutes, pushing my food around the plate, mentally scraping together all the context clues I could accumulate. My first concern, of course, was if I was being mocked; after I could eliminate that, my focus turned to what the hell Patrick Thibeaux was talking about this time.

“Okay, stop. What does ‘anachronism’ mean?” I would cave. Every time.

My father would look to Greg first, who, by this point in the meal, had already finished inhaling his food, as he is the fastest eater on the planet. Greg would mumble something close to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, and my father would then recite the actual definition, complete with the parts of speech and a quick pronunciation guide.

“Why couldn’t you just say that? I knew those words,” I would whine. Every time.

“Knowledge is power,” Greg would reply as he reached across the table to steal the last slice of French bread.

Fifteen seconds later a fight would erupt over dishes versus homework. Thirty seconds later my parents would send us all to our rooms just to shut everyone up.

As adolescents, defining people and words and concepts is a cornerstone of development. Starting out, it’s just objects, or tangible ideas. People are identified as how they relate to you: teacher, mother, crazy person at the bus stop. Learning how to put finite words to specific people or ideas meant that they were understood, and understanding builds confidence in one’s ability to navigate the universe around him/her. The next time I heard the word “anachronism” in conversation, I wouldn’t need to spend 45 seconds trying to decide if that was a word that meant, “Eleanor sucks.” I already knew all of those words by heart anyway. Confidence, and competence: definitions are the gateway to effective communication, and self-esteem.

So naturally it seems remarkably unfair that the older I get, the less I am really able to define in a universal way. Definitions change, words are adapted, shifted ever so slightly to fit a new purpose. What was once micro is now being viewed from a macro perspective, and all that I once had confidence in knowing begins to distort away from the edges of my mental reach. People and concepts I previously put in one compartment of my mind now belong in different compartments, or no compartment at all. It has become painstakingly clear to me that definitions are no longer just for memorizing. Words are loaded, and labels mean so much more than any dinner conversation could convey.

For example, all my life I have been gathering information on what it means to be a grown up. I watched my parents reach the top shelf where the good cereal was kept; I watched my mother attend parent-teacher conferences to discuss Greg’s “gifted” status, or my inability to just shut the hell up. I watched my father make sacrifices and work terribly long hours so my brothers and I could want for nothing and get the best education available. I watched as the ‘he said – she said’ game blew up in my face when I tried to pit my parents against each other. But now that it is almost time for me to leave the 18-24 bracket, the only thing I know about being a grown up is that my parents were awesome at it, and I should still be an undecided college major.

What I seem to stumble over most is that definitions have multiple meanings now. There is what the word means according to Merriam Webster – the idea that when I use a word in this manner, people will know that I mean this thing. Then, and maybe more tragically, there is what the word means to me when I say it. I feel this way, and I have selected this word because that is how my feelings are best reflected. Take, for instance, when I say the word, “girlfriend.”

To me, this word is a label that means I have chosen to be on his side no matter what, to spend my time and energy invested in his happiness, to say, ‘You, more than any other person, are worth the blinders.’

To the world around me, this label means, “I have decided that I will not let anyone else buy me dinner, unless I’m really hungry.”

And occasionally and unfortunately to him, the word means “someone who is supposed to do everything I like, make my life easier, and have no more friends that are just her own.”

We all have little compartments in our minds where we define people and ideas: this is my brother; she’s like my sister. He’s my ex-boyfriend, or that’s just my coworker. Each term means something very specific, not just about a person’s relationship to me, but more significantly, how I relate to them. So when someone’s definition changes, so do the compartments. When he tells me that he cannot think of a reason he wants to be with me, he is giving notice of moving out. And so I adapt. He leaves the boyfriend box, the box that is a relationship like no other, and I clean up afterwards. Sweep up the floors and plaster over the holes in the walls that got punched through when he flung open the door too hard. I prepare the now emptied room for a new tenant. I change the locks.

Change is uncomfortable, but inevitable. Starting something new, letting go of something old, either situation brings with it an alteration in what was previously defined. It’s a strange territory to live in, the limbo of not knowing what to call someone, of not knowing how to interact with someone, but it is absolutely necessary. The confidence of having all the right words falters; the dizzying notion of opening and soon closing my mouth out of an inability to explain how I feel in common terms is so very frustrating. He is, well, he is who he is. And I am who I am. We are whatever we are. It’s not eloquent and it’s not safe, but it’s the truth.

Adaptation is a skill; being ever resilient, faithfully taking the blows and returning to a new, compromised medium is no small feat. There are people in this world who welcome change; there are people who fight it. Then there are people who ignore it. It doesn’t much matter which person I am, because it doesn’t diminish the fact that nothing stays the same, not ever. Sometimes definitions change in a positive way, and sometimes getting someone to get all their shit out of the compartment they didn’t want to live in anymore is like pulling teeth. It’s not ideal, but it is what it is. Like a very smart person once told me, “you don’t have to embrace it, but you have to accept it.”

At the dinner table now, my mother might ask how our day was. Greg would mumble something about ‘fine’ through mouthfuls of whatever food was on the table. Geofrey would mention a new concept he learned in college, or maybe a paper he did well on. And in a flurry of words, I would describe a conversation or two, something that was amusing, and something that was uncomfortable. Maybe my father would offer a new vocabulary word, or abstract concept.

But always, my brother would finalize the argument.

“Knowledge is power,” Greg would remind us as he grabbed the 7^th and 8^th slice of pizza without asking.

Definitions are knowledge. Knowledge is power. Power is control.

Definitions are just another form of control; to not have definite answers to people and words and concepts is just a lack of control, like a roller coaster. And I think I’ve made it abundantly clear how I feel about those things.  

Mighty Morphin' Wedding Woes.

There have only been a handful of times in my life when I was genuinely convinced I might die. Once right before the train took off on Space Mountain; once when I was eight and a duck tried to eat me; once when I was a 16-year-old girl.

And once when my best friend since the third grade asked me to be a bridesmaid in her wedding.

Now, I need to be clear about one thing: these psychological near-deaths are self-made and extremely self-perpetuated. The bride, my adoptive sister and actual cousin, could not have been saner. Maybe it’s because I don’t understand that shows like “Bridezillas” and “Platinum Weddings” are not the industry standard, but I prepared for the worst. So the reality of our situation dances closely to ironic, retrospectively. If we had been taking bets, those of you who put your money on me for being the most “crazy in a bad way,” could be shopping for that new yacht right now.

For me, vanity has always been, and will always be the cause of my undoing. However, that term spans much further than perfect hair and manicured nail beds. Vanity is the devil on my shoulder who says, “They are all waiting for you to fall flat on your face. Everyone is looking at you to do something stupid, something so very Eleanor.” But rather than addressing the foolishness of that particular idea, I focus on the minutest details of my physical appearance in order to maintain some sort of control. If my shoes match perfectly with the dress, and my nails are painted and not chipped, and my eyebrows arch cleanly at every angle, I will win this wedding. I will prove to the voices in my head and the couple of people who still know my name that I am no longer the Eleanor who messes everything up. I’m Eleanor 2.0.

You see, when I was in Kindergarten, I had to take the bus to school with my big brother. There was a group of kids that waited a couple houses down from ours every morning, and I didn’t particularly get along with any of them, especially not Tyler McAllister. The thing was, Tyler and I had different political beliefs. He was a chauvinist in the making, and I felt that it was ridiculously unfair for me to have to be the pink Power Ranger just because I was a girl. Everyone knows I should have been the black Ranger. EVERYONE.

It was a rainy Tuesday morning when our childish disagreement came to blows, and before I knew it, Tyler had pushed me down into a muddy ditch. My school uniform, because it was Louisiana and my family is Catholic, was ruined. (It was ruined because of the mud. Not because I’m Catholic, just to clarify.) Immediately and without hesitation, I pulled myself up; I thought of the meanest thing a five-year-old could say to a seven-year-old and walked back to the house to change. These are the facts.

The story I have been telling myself for two decades is entirely different.

I have spent the majority of my existence believing I needed help; that my life would not begin until a hand pulled me up from that ditch and then proceeded to punch Tyler McAllister in the face for being such a wang. For years I have let myself sit in that ditch, just waiting for someone to save me from being the sad, pathetic girl who gets pushed around and forced to be the pink Power Ranger. 19 years of telling myself I needed someone to fix me, 19 years of sitting in a ditch, just waiting. It very well could be the help I’ve been hoping for wasn’t a strong hand and a chivalrous act of violence. It was a wake up call in the middle of the night that simply said, “That’s enough, Eleanor. Get up.” 

I told myself that someone had to permit me to be the black Ranger; until someone said it was all right, I was just a fool wearing the wrong suit. But the thing is, I didn’t want to be the black Ranger because I hated pink. The black Ranger was awesome and did awesome stuff. The pink Ranger sucked.   And sure, I can’t put together Ikea furniture very well, and I call my father every time my car makes a new squeaking noise, but I moved 2000 miles across the country on my own, and I was Prom Queen and no matter what I might think happened, I did actually pull myself out of that ditch. Does that sound like something the pink Ranger would do? NO.

It was in those few moments before I walked down the aisle at Meaghan and Phil’s wedding that I realized why I couldn’t seem to stop fidgeting with my bouquet or staring at the scar on my left index finger from a lost battle with a microphone stand: more desperately than I wanted anything, I wanted to be a different person. Over the course of those forty feet, my only thought was that I was no longer going to be that girl who had to be “Heart” when we played Captain Planet. Everyone in that room was going to see a confident, graceful woman who surely never got pushed around, and was never told she was the pink Power Ranger. 

And then I forgot to bow.

The priest was whispering to me calmly, “you need to bow,” and the church was laughing because I made a face that said, “Yep! I messed up!” It was only then that I realized I was the exact same person I have always been. Constantly being told to be the pink Power Ranger, and forever refusing to even entertain the thought. I am still the girl who gets punched in the face for mouthing off about the Queen of England. I am still the girl who tells Tyler McAllister where he should go and what to do when he gets there.  

It was twenty seconds after I accepted this fact that I was brought to joyous tears over another obvious realization: the entire event, the reason I was there, had nothing to do with me. I watched the most stunning bride that will ever live walk down that same aisle with a smile that broke me into a thousand little pieces and simultaneously put me back together, and I thought, “We used to have serious conversations about beanie babies. You and I built a Geocities webpage about cheese and stayed up all night chatting on AOL Instant Messenger constantly. We used to LiveJournal. And now you’re getting married. And I have lived through your life with you and that’s why I’m here. And no one cares what I do, because we all just care about you.”

And I was free from the pressure and I was free from my own vanity, and I remembered what it felt like to think about someone else for a moment. And that was nice.

That was something the black Power Ranger would do.

Funny Person Syndrome

I grew up a “funny person.” This is a clinical condition. One of the fatal attributes of funny person syndrome is an uncontrollable need to have the last word in any exchange. The last word is where the joke lies. The last word sends the conversation off to the next topic in a blaze of hilarity and glory. The last word wins. Funny people can’t feel successful losing a conversation unless they set themselves up for the loss in order to be funny. Funny people have control issues. My name is Eleanor Thibeaux, and I am a funny person.

What is misleading about funny person syndrome is that most of the time, the side-effects are the antithesis of amusing. It’s a compulsive desire to be the ending punctuation in any interactive event. Funny people seek a certain level of supercilious personal validation from having the final say or getting the loudest laugh. This works just fine in social situations and the blogosphere *cough right guys? cough* but not so much in intimate relationships. The last word, like any drug addiction, leads funny people like myself shaking and spinning out of control in between fixes.

I never considered myself a last word addict. I like to make jokes, and often see any conversation as an opportunity to banter and stretch my rhetorical legs. While I do have a flair for the dramatics and an eye for the absurd, I understand that in the real world, where I occasionally vacation, there is a time and place for everything. So two weeks ago when my relationship ended prematurely, I thought only to suffer in silence. I have lived in shame of many dozen overly emotional live journal accounts to know that some personal information is best kept to the messy handwritten notebooks of yore. But in spite of my radio silence to the outside world, the ideas began to gather. First I thought only in sad phrases; then as the hours ticked away, the justified resentment and frustration scratched and clawed my pathetic weepy words into scorned sentences.

Before I knew it, I had a paragraph; then suddenly I had a short answer essay. How exonerating it would be to spin my words around his dizzied head just once more. Surely after everything that happened, I deserved the chance to defend myself! With my inner crazy person at the helm, a scene with blurred edges plays just behind my eyes of venomous words and objects thrown. The crazy person is free from any social obligation to remain calm and civil; she doesn’t buckle under the weight of anxiety or worry about his feelings. When she’s in charge, I say things like, “You can’t break up with me. That’s not how this works. Redo. I break up with you. There!” She’s fun.

Unfortunately, too much exposure to the real world and a substantial amount of years logged as a girl scout has its pitfalls. As the golden rule pulls annoyingly at the sleeve of my conscious, I catch my tongue. Because even if I were to say all the things I want to say, would it really be the right answer?

The last word might just be the singular “goodbye,” and there is a very likely chance was not meant to be mine to speak. The issue at hand is that everyone goes on and on about closure, like it’s this crucial goal we need in order to survive the rest of our life. Books and movies drill it in to our brains; the only way to move on is to recite a heartfelt speech that is both honest and vindicating in the middle of the street, or maybe under an awning at a coffee shop with rain spilling down over the sides creating a curtain of sadness and feelings that would bring even a soulless individual to tears. My speech houses all that was left unsaid. My speech has swear words and more cons than pros. My speech has literary devices to really drive the message home.

Yet, the problem with my speech is glaring. Only one side of it is within my control. Even if I found myself in this movie moment, I can only script one character. That’s the beauty and curse of reality – it’s all improv. You can choose the scene and the characters, but the dialogue is ever-changing. It’s why the phrase, “that’s not what I meant,” is so damn popular. Real life isn’t a movie or a book or a blog. The grace of the real world is in the things we didn’t mean to say, or the things we know we shouldn’t have said. Does he regret showing me a pros and cons list about myself? I can venture to guess he does, and after my blog went up, I can only assume he REALLY does now.

So if I catch him at Starbucks and it’s raining for the first time all winter, and my brain implodes and the lines I have been repeating since the day he told me he couldn’t think of a reason to be with me come cascading out, will I find the personal validation I so vainly seek? Will he see the metaphorical light and realize what a huge mistake he has made? Despite the fact that I am confident our relationship has run its course, will telling him everything I think he should know really make him miss me like I want him to? And if he misses me, will that be the closure I think I need in order to move forward?

In a moment of brutal clarity, I realized the answer is not the one I wanted. Telling him the things that he did that drove me insane won’t make me feel any less sad that the relationship is over. Listing off all the super cool qualities about myself that he so casually left off his stupid list won’t make him really see me the way I think he should. Even if he realizes he misses me the way I want him to, he won’t tell me. The closure isn’t lying in wake of my self-proclaimed protagonist monologue; it is in accepting that the validation I seek externally must first exist internally. If I truly believe I am all those things that should have been in the pros column, then it doesn’t matter if he knows it. More to the point, if he needs me to tell him what is great about me, maybe throwing in the towel was for the best.

If he doesn’t see the significance of my qualities, or the humanity in my flaws, it is because his values are focused elsewhere. Just as he could never make me love rollercoasters or get a cockatoo for a pet, I cannot redirect his vision of what makes for a worthwhile partner. For the first time, I am beginning to understand that the last word isn’t the final moment. There will be other stories with more moments and happier endings. And if I can keep my mouth shut, maybe there will be a story that doesn’t need a punch line at all.

Pros, Cons, and I still hate roller coasters.

Growing up, people tell us to make a list of the qualities we want in a relationship. When you’re a kid, it’s for a best friend. I wrote things like “thinks beanie babies are awesome” and “is hilarious.” It’s a lesson in positive reinforcement, think only of things you want, and then look for those things in other people. I am very good at this; it shows in the quality of my close friends. Individually, they exemplify the very epitome of a “pros only” list, littering my social circle with positive, affable characteristics. When you are eight, the only thing that matters is finding the good things about others around you. There is plenty of time to figure out what is bad about them.

But as we got older, the balance of our list was fulfilled as experience and mistakes taught difficult lessons about the uniqueness of the human race. Friends fight over unforgettable wrongs; girls and boys fall in and out of love, irreparably. Suddenly, my list of positive attributes was stunted parallel to the qualities I had learned I did not appreciate in my close relationships. Suddenly, “thinks beanie babies are awesome” runs correspondingly to “but has a job;” and “is hilarious” is countered quickly with “but is not cruel.”

Some people write these lists down, locked away for decades only to be unearthed when a new, vicious trait rears its unforgivable head. Others, like myself, only keep a mental running tally of the qualities that seem only to offend my own neurotic personality. I don’t tend to mesh well with competitive boys, because I am overly competitive. Girls that lose themselves in romantic relationships have no staying power in my life, as I put as much importance and weight on each of my relationships, no matter the slant. It is only through trial-and-error that these facts become screamingly obvious; it is only after many, many errors do I realize the trial needs to change. Still, the lists remain abstract, describing no one in particular, only the ideology of a perfect human being.

So my problem as of late seems to be stomaching the notion of a physical list with my name in bright lights. Without going in to the over-intrusive details, it seems I have been confronted with a list of pros and cons. Scrawling down the entire page, scratches on both sides of the wall, the pros sang of my greatness, and the cons gnawed at a much less gracious side of me.

This begs the question: when someone in you life has written down a list of things that are good , and a list of things that are not so good about you, what response, if any, is suitable? 

First and foremost, being a girl has its pitfalls. Night after night, I keep myself awake bouncing back and forth between acceptance and anger. There are moments when I think, how could anyone ever think such unfair thoughts about me and still claim to love me? Then there are moments when I remember that every criticism can be constructive if you make it so. 

To be entirely honest, there were bullet points in the list that were echoes of previous claims. My hyper-organized state of mind often leads me down a road of bossiness and overbearing standards of control. The high standard of logic and rationality instilled in me from an early age often distorts in to sharp cynicism and critical judgment. I have been informed by numerous people, some still very much present in my life, that my teasing nature turns soon sour when I get so swept up in the joke, I forget the human being behind it. These are qualities I should work to amend; these are choices I make based on learned behaviors. They are not engrained irrevocably in my DNA.

Still, there were items on the list I felt were better suited for a different column. A column labeled “things that I wish you were.” These are the things that cause the flashes of momentary resentment. A point on my fear of roller coasters, which is directly linked to my irrational fear of heights and uncontrollable speed.  Often when I was younger, my father would try to rationalize with me, explaining that a rollercoaster would not go any faster than 50-60 MPH, and that when I was in the car, he and my mother drove much faster than that. He said, “you aren’t afraid then, right? So you don’t need to be afraid now.” I tried Space Mountain. It was dark, so I could get through it, no tears. I did not have fun.  I tried the Big Thunder Mountain ride. It was daylight and I began sobbing after the first “minor” drop. I absolutely did not have fun.

So I accept what it is that frightens me. I faced the fears when I did not understand them, but at some point, being an adult means you don’t HAVE to do everything that isn’t fun for you. Just because I don’t want to ride the roller coasters doesn’t mean I don’t want to go to theme parks. It means I get to hold your stuff while you ride the roller coasters. It means I get to have the kind of fun that is fun for me, and you get to have the kind of fun that is fun for you. It means you accept that I am the girl who doesn’t like roller coasters, but will always be willing to try a new sandwich shop. Or will never make you feel guilty for taking a nap in the middle of the day if you’re tired. Or will always proof-read anything you email to her as soon as she gets the email. It means that I don’t like to go camping, but I will talk you through your computer problems.

I think the real issue at hand is that upon seeing a pros and cons list all about Eleanor, my eyes merely skimmed the list of pros. The first few were superficial, nothing that had ever mattered to me in this life or the one before. Compliments on hygiene and fashion sense register at a 0 on a scale of what qualifies a person to be worth her salt. They were countered with cons about my interests, almost to say that I had the wrong interests. Almost to say, you’re pretty, but you don’t like anything good.  So maybe the real problem is that I didn’t give the list the balance it worked so hard to maintain. Like a weighted scale, I hit the ground when my eyes saw the column of negatives. No amount of compliments could undo what was done; it was as if I was looking at a graded paper, skipping over all the questions I got right, my eyes only set for the red ink of what I got wrong. Everyday I wake up and tell myself to be better than the day before. If someone could come up with that many cons about me, was I even succeeding at all?

Maybe it’s just me, but if I had to do it again, I don’t think I’d look at the list. Curiosity killed the cat, and if the cat died of getting his heart broken just a little, then by all accounts I should be dead. I know there are things about me that are bad; selfish tendencies and I am a little bit spoiled. But for better or worse, it is all part of who I am at this very moment in time. It has taken me decades to accept that person, for all the pretty, and all the ugly, but I have. Maybe I owe anyone else the same amount of time to accept me for me. But the argument still stands, would decades of time hoping someone will love you for you be considered a foolish waste of time?

At the end of the day, a girl can only accept a list of pros and cons for exactly what it is: a piece of paper cluttered with someone else’s opinion. The columns remain balanced: the bad opinions weigh just as much as the good ones. If you take one seriously, you must take the other just as seriously.

It is possible that this was the universe’s way of getting me to realize that lists can be used for evil - that my compulsive organized vigilance comes at a price. It could even be that if I decided not to hate birds, I would be a better person. At this moment in time, I don’t think it makes any difference. For now I will try every day to be better, fix what I can, accept what I can’t, and always go to bed knowing that every choice I made was because I wanted to make it.

And I think tomorrow, I’m going to paint my nails orange. 

transcribing snapshots

 It is winter where I am and the wind can knock you off those too expensive stiletto heels that you saw Jennifer Aniston wearing and just had to have. It was crazy to buy them, standing flat footed you are already almost five feet eight inches tall, but everyone keeps whispering about how beautiful tall women are, so you pretend you don’t notice the way you tower over everyone like a professional basketball player in Chinatown. The heels make your legs look longer, anyhow.

It’s frightfully cold out, and while everyone is decorating Christmas trees and making plans to be with family, you are stuck inside a poorly insulated studio apartment staring at a wall of post-it notes. The ability to remain so organized is enviable, but after re-reading the same chapter five times in a row, it becomes more difficult to believe that any of what you have written so far could be considered “good.” Yet, you remind yourself that if Stephanie Meyer could churn out the crap that was the Twilight Saga and people praised her, it stands to reason you could do something decent. Then again, Stephanie Meyer has a degree in English, and you work at a bookstore for a wink above minimum wage.

It cannot be easy, one would venture to guess, to watch your close friends fall in love and get married without thinking you could do it better. So it stands to reason that no matter how much you like those friends, somewhere inside, you like yourself more. Maybe that’s why it feels like you are always drawing the short straw. Maybe your straw isn’t really the short one at all; it’s just not as pretty or smart as the straws you really wanted. Maybe you drew a bendy straw and you have to straighten it out and stretch the crinkled part out a bit to feel like a winner. Maybe this game of drawing straws takes effort. Then again, you are the one that decided to be an artist. It could be you cut your own straw before the game even started.

Its winter where I am and you have no idea what you’re doing. There is no plan; you cannot even decipher which angle to play. You are wide-eyed, confused with not a single definite thought in that pretty little head. You drink coffee in the morning, you carry a laptop with you everywhere. You eat dinner at night, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. You drink too much wine sometimes and say things that are very true. You talk about how none of you know what to do next. Yet somehow, when it’s a “we”, and it’s not “you” and it’s not “them,” it feels okay to not have a clue. Being unmarried doesn’t mean being alone. Being single doesn’t have to be lonely.

It’s frightfully cold out, and the temperature is dropping. Your worries and concerns will never keep you warm. The next move is to simply keep moving. And maybe spend your money on scarves, not stilettos. 

Rotation Revolution takes on The Economy!

It goes terribly.

For two weeks every year until I graduated college, I was the first one at the mailbox. Why? Birthday mail. Typically my birthday mail started to roll in around my older brother’s birthday, much to his dismay. Fingers crossed for the brightly colored envelopes, filled with the green stuff, crisp ten or twenty dollar bills flattened between a cute “you’re older and we care” birthday card (or between tin foil if you’re my grandfather, who apparently doesn't trust anyone, especially the United States Parcel Service.) And if it wasn’t cash money, it was a check, though to my small "totes-understands-the-true-value-of-money" brain, all a check meant was a longer wait to something useful. Something I could exchange for stuff. Maybe I should have started this out by saying how much I love stuff.

So moving out to California right after my 18^th birthday was scary on many different levels, but mostly I was afraid of losing birthday mail. What if no one gave my relatives my new address and all my birthday mail got lost and someone else ended up with the money I deserved for surviving another year in this world? I kept myself from dying for 365 days; I earned this! The loss of birthday money was depressing. But the metaphorical kick that came when I was already down was the type of mail that began to arrive on a monthly basis. It was the antithesis of birthday money. It was bills.

These things I had never considered, paying for electricity, for television or the Internet. Paying someone to let me live in an apartment every month – it was shocking. I had to get a job, but that was okay, because I had gotten jobs before. I worked for the theater, and I worked at the pet store. I was good with the concept of jobs. What was unsettling was the idea that money I earned from said jobs would have to pay for these things that were boring. I worked eight hours, just so I could have electricity for one month? Gross.  Eight hours of shelving CD’s should be new shoe money, not the ability to microwave stuff. Not to mention that it took three days of 9 hour shifts to even make enough money to pay for the food I was trying to microwave. Growing up went from exciting to a hassle in 4.8 seconds, flat. Bills were my Aston Martin race to bummer-ville.

The craziest thing about money is just when you think you get it, you don’t. I got the hang of half-assed budgeting. Sure, I held my breath at the end of every month, and maybe that last week before pay day and after I paid my rent was a little lean, but hey, if the checks didn’t bounce, I was good. My father tried to teach me spreadsheets, the advantages to online banking, and I tried to get it, but it was like being 10 years old again with birthday money. Except now birthday money was living on this tiny blue card that was accepted practically everywhere. The problem with card money is that you don’t feel your wallet getting thinner until it’s empty. Suddenly, I had fifteen pairs of converse, and top ramen for dinner.

Essentially, I was making all the wrong compromises.

Throughout college, I was still getting financial support from my parents. They wanted me to focus on my education, which was awesome because working full time and going to school full time was leading me down a very dark road lined with mobsters in pin-striped suits with portable gambling briefcases and illegal booze they snuck out of the speakeasies.  And sure, they sing and say things like, “what’s a pretty dame like you doing in this part of town,” but in dark alleys that sounds less charming than one who watched a lot of flapper musicals would expect. No, I was one of the lucky few in this country whose parents could afford to help, and while I am forever grateful for the advantages I have, I think that’s part of my problem. I didn’t grow up knowing what it was like to just NOT have money. It was cash in my mom’s wallet, my parents cards always being accepted. It was my father always picking up the tab and scolding me for trying to look at the dinner bill. Don’t be rude and give me that, he would say. It turns out, not everyone thinks that’s rude. Unless you look at it, say something like “oh shit, that’s expensive. Glad I’m not paying,” and then hand it to them. That is still considered rude, apparently.

Overall, money was just there, and if I needed something, I got it. New school supplies, new clothes. Dresses for dances, lunch money. “Mom I need twenty bucks,” and after a lot of eye rolling, if I could come up with a good enough reason, I got it. I didn’t have diamond shoes or a pony in my backyard, but I didn’t struggle.

But now it’s almost like I live in a constant state of denial. I go out with friends and try to pick up the tab as much as possible. I live outside my means because I don’t understand the borders OF my means. I’ve been out of college for almost three years now and I’m still holding my breath at the end of the month. Sure, I’m making more money, and not asking for help, but I’m definitely not considering my financial state a successful one.

So you take a girl waiting for birthday money in a state of fiscal denial, and then you throw her into a failing economy, and the universe implodes. I took ONE semester of economics in high school. Translation: I do not actually get the economy. A hypothetical successful economy went right over my head, so needless to say how much I don’t understand the one we have right now. People are losing money, banks are poor. There’s a guy in a suit on Fox that’s always really upset with President Obama, and Jon Stewart is hilarious, but in a way that I know is supposed to be sad.

When it comes to the economy, I’m the girl sitting quietly in the corner of the room, head down, eyes averted, trying to not to call attention to how much she has NO CLUE what everyone is talking about. I’m the kid in class that didn’t do her homework and is praying to all the Gods she’s ever heard of that she doesn’t get called out on it.  I finally stepped out from underneath the protective shield of my father’s intellect, and it turns out the sun is really bright out here in the real world and my sunglasses aren’t polarized.

Last week, Wells Fargo sent out an email that everyone with my particular type of account will now be charged $15 a month just to keep his/her account open. Previous to this email, I was paying zero a month because an automatic transfer of $75 was waiving the fee. Apparently that wasn’t applicable anymore. Apparently something in the economy is different this month, and no one is telling me what. The email went on to inform me that if I had a mortgage with the bank, or a constant balance of $7500 in my checking account, the fee would still be waived.

Translation: If you are poor, you shall be punished.

Remember that Aston Martin that could get me from zero to miserable in 4.8 seconds? It turns out, it can also take a girl from zero to “freaking pissed” in approximately the same amount of time. Bills became “the bank” and then “the man” and I was on a tear. No one could run, no one could hide. Eleanor Angry.

“You mean to tell me,” I said, breath held for as long as my temper was tamed, “that I am supposed to pay you $175 a year, just to keep my money there? That’s <insert non-classy, colorful language here.>”

Then I received a notice that a fee had been taken from my saving account for “Excessive Activity.”

So I asked the age-old trouble-inducing question: Why? Why did the bank deem it fair and necessary to take that money from me? I discovered that apparently, there is a federal law that limits the number of times you can take money from your saving account in a month. Regardless of what you put in it, if you have more than six transactions in a month, they charge you $10.00 as an “excessive use fee.” So the government has decided that there is a limit to the number of times I can move my money from my account to my other account. And if I do it too much, they’re going to take $10 from me.

Thirty dollars was removed from my account before anyone said a damned thing to me.

And that’s what gets me about the bank. They can just TAKE money from you. Like, it’s there, and then it’s gone, and they don’t even ask. I work a job that makes me cry because I hate it so much, but I show up because I understand to an extent that I have to because it’s part of being an adult. Sometimes life makes you cry but you keep going and you push through it because those are the rules. I follow the rules. And the bank takes thirty bucks from me.

And what’s this law even for? What is the purpose for “Regulation D?” Apparently, this law was put in place as part of an anti-terrorism, anti-money laundering counter measure.

Pardon my language but, are you fucking kidding me?

Isn’t there some way to assess the account in question before just taking money from it? Like, hmmm, this client has under $7500 dollars in her account (way under) and seems to just really like coffee. Maybe she isn’t a sleeper cell. Oh look at that, she’s an audio engineer who also gets direct deposit from a well known book store. If she’s laundering money, she’s really bad at it. Maybe we don’t assume she’s in violation of horrendous federal crime and we LEAVE HER THE HELL ALONE.

But no, they needed that thirty bucks to pay off the mortgage on that fourth summer home in Panama he got stuck with in the divorce.

Dear Wells Fargo slash The Man slash The Government,

Thanks for the consideration. I did, at one point, think to launder millions of dollars to off-shore accounts like I saw in that episode of The Mentalist last Thursday, but after you fined me ten dollars for excessive activity, I decided against it. You just saved America, again. I have been successful thwarted, and will no longer be living the life of crime I had once envisioned.

Sincerely,

Account #xxxxxxxx288

p.s. I know you didn’t get it, but that was sarcasm. I hate you. You owe me $30. And a keychain.

This is not a work of fiction. This is how the little vein in my head popped.

I am standing in an aisle. I am stone-faced serious to the populace and I am standing in the middle of the aisle, just waiting. I am waiting for the moment to pass, so I may continue on in this conversation; but see, I have just been asked who the author of “The Diary of Anne Frank” is, and I am not permitted to laugh. I am being paid a breath above minimum wage to not make a snarky comment, roll my eyes and walk away, so I am standing in an aisle, silent, staring at the rows of books in front of me. Forget alphabetizing or shelving, or putting away magazines. I have not made a single noise of mockery; I am earning my wage.

And this is my life. Day in and day out, I see faces, and they tell me they are looking for a book. And minute after minute, hour after hour, I don’t make fun of their plainly obvious statement, for as we all know, they have entered a bookstore. I don’t gesture around the room and respond, “well look away, we have several.” No, I smile, and I ask which book he or she is looking for. I am asked for the book with the green cover. I am asked for the book by that one guy who wrote that other book about travelling to Africa. I am asked if I have read that book. I am asked why we don’t have every single book they’re looking for in the store. And still, I smile.

Okay. Sometimes, I don’t smile.


People are funny. The way we walk around, genuinely assuming that the planet, and all of her minute, little players, revolves solely around our happiness.  And heaven forbid anyone stand in the way of anyone else’s happiness. This is America. We are a “want” society. Therefore, if Average Joe wants an obscure Christian Inspiration book published last in 1984, then Average Joe had better have it in his hot little hands before his parking validation wears off. And if Average Joe doesn’t want to buy anything other than that book we don’t have, then who are we to say that he isn’t allowed to have free parking? This is America. We pay for parking now? We have to actually purchase things to get the “parking validation with purchase” type deal? Bullshit.

I can’t say the variety of the customers that ebb and flow through the doors of our humble bookstore don’t keep things interesting. The parentless children that think the escalator is some sort of carnival ride that they are permitted to climb all over. Because of these rascals inability to learn from other’s mistakes, I have perfected my teacher voice. “Please do not play on the escalator,” she raises her voice, cocks one eyebrow as the children double back to make sure she’s still watching. ‘That’s right,’ she thinks. ‘You’re still visible. I can still see you.’ And yet, where would I be without them? Surely the presence of unsupervised underlings is nothing but job security. If my job were to be a bookselling Mary Poppins. But it turns out, I don’t know CPR, and I hate kids. And if they run out of the store while Mom and Dad are enjoying coffees and reading 17 different magazines in the Café section, I will not be tried by a jury of my peers. But that’s just another way the world revolves around Average Joe. If he doesn’t want to watch his kids, well, it takes a village, right? I live in the village of Oakland, Joe. That’s like 4 villages over. Find a new babysitter.

But nothing holds a candle to the first-time bookstore visitor. Wide-eyed, awkwardly thumbing through display table items, unsure of what bookstore employees actually look like. But then, she snags one of us, after a few failed attempts with some of the bookstore veterans mulling around. And she asks where the dictionaries are. So I stroll with her, metaphorically handholding, as is our policy, over to the dictionary and reference section, and point them out. And then she looks at me, takes in my appearance and estimated knowledge on the subject of reference guides and asks, “what’s the difference?”

“The difference? With what?”

She picks up a copy of an Oxford dictionary, turning it over and back again, inspecting the outside cover and responds, “between this, and this Webster one?”

I stare at her. And suddenly, it dawns on me, I don’t really know. A dictionary is a dictionary to me. So I ask her to clarify the question. I simply must have missed the point.

“Well, which one has the best words?”

I bite down on my lower lip. Hard. Because now my mind is blank, aside from the fire of a thousand snarky retorts, all of which I am unable to allow escape from my mouth. Which one has better words? It’s a freaking dictionary. It has all the words a regular, average American human is going to need to know to make it in this dog-eat-dog world. But this puppy dog-eyed lady is looking to me, the wise bookseller, to give her life some direction.

“Well, I guess I’d go with Oxford, because it has the word, “muggle” in it.”

Yep. That’s my answer. And the kicker is, she nods along, like I’ve just said something profound. I haven’t. I’ve just made a joke of an answer because there isn’t REALLY an answer to that question.

She stares at the bay of dictionaries, in what I can only assume is thoughtful silence. Running her hands over the volumes, I'm tempted to just silently slip away, despite the fact that her body is still positioned openly towards me, indicating a presumed continuation of our little chat.

"What about this one? Is this one better?" She has now picked up the Collegiate Oxford dictionary. Words are failing me. What about it? Yeah, lady, that's still a dictionary. It's a dictionary with a fancy word in front of it, designed to encourage college students to use it, as to insinuate that it was created specifically for them. Up until now, I didn't understand the purpose of putting the word "collegiate" on there. I do now. It's to confuse people like you. Oxford is trying to be funny. Oxford is trying to break me.

"It's got a better cover."

Time is moving slower now, as I have found myself unwittingly trapped in the reference section with no rescue in sight. It’s like a smoke signal has gone up above my head that says, “dumb conversation happening, steer clear.” So when I think she’s distracted with something else, I start to act upon my emergency exit strategy; Then she calls me over to the thesaurus section.

“What are these?” she plucks out a fifth edition Thesaurus from the top shelf.

“Those are thesauruses,” I respond. Thesauruses? Thesaurusi? Hmm, not sure. I probably should have just made it singular. 'That's a thesaurus.' Oh well. Really don’t think she’ll notice.

“Well, is this better than this?” She is gesturing to the Oxford Dictionary, clutched tightly against her chest.

“Better?" My words are coming out too slowly now. "No. They’re different things.”

“What’s the difference?” Silence. Stone-faced expression. I am not going to laugh. I am not going to cry. I am going to count the books on this shelf until I don't want to punch her. I will be counting for a long time.

“Between a dictionary and a thesaurus? A dictionary has the definition of words, and a thesaurus has synonyms and antonyms,” and let’s rephrase that, “like meaning, and opposite meaning words.”

“Well which one should I get? I need it for college.”

HOLD THE PHONE. I have spent the past fifteen minutes explaining to you which dictionary is best, the apparently subtle differences between a dictionary and thesaurus, and you’re telling me you need to use this for college? Now, back in my day, you had to graduate high school before you got the thumbs up for college. And I know I can’t tell you all that crap about compounds and solutions and I never quite got the hang of that “two trains are headed towards each other at different speeds” question, but by God, I could tell you the difference between these two ENTIRELY SEPARATE reference materials.

But I am a professional. And I am getting paid to not say all these things. I am earning my money, painfully, self-loathingly, minute by minute. So I take the thesaurus from her hand, I smile reassuringly, and push the Oxford dictionary towards her.

“This is what you need. Trust me.”

And now, before my brain explodes and blood starts to leak out of my ears, I walk away.

This is my life.

And if anything cuts it short, this is how I will die.

Counting dictionaries.

Days in the Tower

Years ago, my hair was blue-black.

Don’t believe me? Look.

Let's move on now.

I’m not quite sure what happened. It was a period in my life that is a befuddled blur upon hindsight, like I'd been dosed with Rohypnol steadily and then hypnotized for 12 months. It was societal anaphylactic shock. Growing up in suburban Spring, Texas, where the most "culture" our town got was the grand opening of the new P. F. Changs in the fancy strip mall, the move from suburbia to the urban sprawl of the California Bay Area was distressing. Keep in mind, this was the same period of time when I felt it was necessary to have both a Facebook AND a MySpace.  It seems there were a lot of things working against the coherent thought process.

So I rebelled against everything and went desperately searching for the exact way to express my frustrations. I dyed my hair black. I pierced my eyebrow and then my lip, and I dressed in grungy black clothes. I plastered my college apartment walls with Anti-Flag, Bad Religion and Green Day posters and allowed my musical preferences to explain what exactly my deal was. And then I did the only other thing I could possibly do to solidify my new identity: I got a job at a record store.

Somewhere deep down inside, each of us has built an image of him or herself based on that first job. Everyone has that job, the one we get for any number of reasons, but it somehow defines who we are in that pivotal time of our lives. Everything revolved around that job. Not just my schedule and the way I dressed, the people I hung out with or the stuff I knew; no, more significantly than any of that, my job at Tower Records gave me the identity I was longing for after being uprooted from everything I believed to have understood. I was air dropped in the middle of a foreign environment, engulfed entirely in the “my work is my self” mindset so loved by these California city folk and so I did the only thing I could think to do: I dyed my hair. I dyed my hair, swallowed my anxiety, learned everything I needed to know about Bay Area rap music, and dived right in. Because when it’s sink or swim, I guess I figured if you look like a piranha, and talked like a piranha, then maybe the other piranha wouldn't pick your scales off one-by-one and then gut you. Maybe you'd just get to swim along with them. Maybe somehow you'd BECOME a piranha, too.

Before we get too far into this, let me be clear: I loved my job. I would still be gainfully employed by Tower, were it not for the failing music industry and short-sighted business strategy of its forefathers. I could wear whatever, I could say whatever, and at the end of the night, I would spent hours just hanging out with my co-workers voluntarily. We harassed each other over the loudspeaker, and I had perfected my countout sheet signature to a T. Everyone knew who’s indecipherable scribbled initials were who’s, and if you messed up, you’d hear about it right away. None of this corporate HR paperwork crap. If you didn’t do your job, Cristian would wake you up at 8 AM the next morning, scolding you in broken English and a smattering of Romanian swear words. That’s just how it was.

So I became the girl at the record store with the black hair and the sullen attitude. I learned how to make annoyed faces while sounding perfectly polite over the phone with customer’s asking for the new song “that they heard on the radio.” I learned how to play the “guess what song I just heard on the radio” game, and I even won a surprising number of times. I figured out a way to openly resent people to their faces without making them mad, and I finally understood just what it feels like when a complete stranger calls you a bitch in the middle of a crowded store. It feels a lot like losing the“have you heard that new song they’re playing on the radio?” game.

Life at Tower brought a lot of firsts. The first time I ever got asked out at work, therefore allowing me to mark “meet a boy at a record store” off from my bucketlist. I don’t remember his name, but he drove a white Acura Integra. And he was really tall. And something about San Diego. He either lived there, or knew a lot about it or something. Whatever. It didn’t last long. Story of my life, anyone? 

Tower Records was my first key holding job. Four or five months after I started, I got promoted to a supervisor position, and they gave me keys to the whole store.

Fun Fact: It takes approximately 2.5 seconds after receiving keys to a business for that kind of power to go right to a 19 year-old’s head.

Finally, I had power. I had authority. I could authorize returns and I could be left alone in the store. I mean, I was on my way to the top; I had keys for crying out loud! But with a moderate amount of power, comes some form of responsibility, and suddenly I was being held accountable for stuff I didn’t care about. My sweet job at the record store where I could talk about music and flirt with my blue-haired coworker, who’s name shall be withheld due to the intense embarrassment I feel for my inexplicable adoration of his punk ass, had turned into a real job.

And let’s not forget that while I was living the "High Fidelity" lifestyle at Tower as a full time shift supervisor, I was also a full time student down the street at Ex’pression College. I would get up at seven in the morning to be at school by nine, and then leave school by noon to work from noon to eight; then I would rush out to get back to school for a lab that lasted until midnight. And I would do this three times a week. In retrospect, I can see where people get off calling me a work-a-holic, but I still have no idea how I survived. Though if anyone is looking for a jumping off point to my addiction to redbull, I’d say that’s a safe bet. Redbull and cigarettes became a meal. It was an exhausting time. It was an unhealthy time. It was a regular Charles Dickens spinoff.

And the whole time I thought I was living the California dream.

And yet, this fairytale I convinced myself I was living has a tragic ending. Tower Records announced it was filing for bankruptcy in November of 2006, and my store was closed by Christmas. I remember the last night, standing in the empty aisles, staring down the rows and rows of vacant CD bays, and it was all so heartbreaking. The chapter of my life that was entirely mine, full of careless mistakes and personal triumphs was being ended before I was ready. It was a family, granted it was one brought together by a crooked manager to had been arrested in the middle of the store some time in April for grand theft totaling over $25,000, but whatever. Details, details. It was with the most sincere sorrow that we all parted ways. No more Ticketmaster calls. No more new release Tuesdays. No more “supervisor meetings” in the art room, which really just turned into a game of “hide from the clerks and do as little work as possible.” You know, I might know another reason the company failed.

So without a record store, it became increasingly difficult to be the record store girl. The piercings came out. It took four years, but my hair is no longer black. My Anti-Flag hoodie that I coveted so much during that time got one too many holes in it and finally hit the trash can. I turned 22 and realized that who I was as a person did not have to be inextricably tied to what I did for a living. I graduated college; I fell in love. I fell out of love and I left California. I finally accepted my deep-seated love for musicals and cheesy pop music, and I figured out that I could listen to both Katy Perry and Rancid without the universe imploding.

But even now, so many years later, after moving away and moving back, I still drive by the old Tower Records building in Emeryville and see those red-framed double doors and all of it rushes right back. The feeling of sweeping in through the glass doors, sunglasses on and stone expression. Punching in the code to the back room and the faces that would greet me. And then without fail, Rob would ask, "Oh Eleanor, what's upsetting you today?" 

And I was home. 

So now I have red hair.

Look.

Got it? Okay.

And honestly, I have no idea if these two girls would get along. Blue hair might find Red hair obnoxious for having too much product in her hair and too much Lady GaGa on her iPod. Red hair would absolutely recognize the sheer desperation that blue hair was hiding just behind all that black eye shadow, desperation to fit in while simultaneously standing out. Blue hair wouldn't be caught dead in a dress, and red hair hasn't worn a t-shirt in almost a year. But at least they could see eye to eye on one thing: 

On-sale mornings for Ticketmaster really suck. 

Eleanor V. Physical Fitness, Part [a billion].

I’ve always had issues with exercise. Back when I was a kid, I played too many sports to really worry about it. My borderline obsessive-compulsive addiction to competition heavily outweighed my inclination towards sitting around eating double stuffed Oreos. And by heavily outweighed, I mean, I still did it, I just had to wait until after volleyball camp.

However, and I think I’m entirely entitled to do so, I’m inclined to place blame on the seductive lure of theatrical arts as it pertains to my physical fitness downfall. What 15-year-old kid wouldn’t choose the life of a drama kid over the 4:30 AM wake up call for JV basketball practice? As romantic and enticing as it sounds, the act of choking down a complete, balanced meal at 5 AM under the direction of a sadistic coach 30 minutes prior to being forced to run lines until you vomit said meal back up, it’s really not awesome.  And yet, even with all the perks of a theatrical life, my physical condition dwindled. And yes, “dwindled” is just a nice way of saying, “I got fat.”

And it’s at some point around the age of 17, this girl wakes up to realize, holy smokes. I’m fat, and my depression is a direct result of being fat. If I had only been a little more masochistic, I could have avoided this unpleasantness. But hindsight is 20/20, the grass is greener on the other side, second mouse gets the cheese, whatever. The point was I needed to get back into a shape that was a little less round. And that has been a daily battle ever since.

First I tried the gym. Let’s speak only a moment of the hell that is “the gym.” There are two types of people that go to the gym. There is the ridiculously fit woman, with her Britney Spears “Baby One More Time” abs and non-moving massive chesticles, who is running for probably close to 4 hours on the treadmill with a speed that far out-rolls my 5.5 average speed. And she’s always smiling.  SMILING. She’s happy to be only kind of sweating and running, with her boobies sticking so far out in front of her that somehow, defying any kind of physical explanation, they keep bumping into the Stairmaster in the row in front of her. And I just want to punch her perfectly made up smiling face for beating me to the perfect ab condition, and being so happy in place that makes me so miserable. And then I want to shove hamburgers and snickerdoodles in her face until she cries. So she can know suffering as I have.

Then there’s the horribly sweaty, disgusting large man on the recumbent bike in front of me. I don’t care where I am, what machine I’m on, I could be in the free weight zone and he’d move that stupid bike to right in front of my eye line and make me see him, and smell him and his 1.5 speed with zero resistance fake bike ride. Flashes of high school basketball practice start to resurface. That moment you’re on your eleventh set of lines, and something for just a brief second starts to smell a little bit like eggs and BAM, I’m looking at a trashcan and wanting to die. People have two smells at the gym: vomit-inducing or the popular ‘I just bathed in cologne’ smell, which can also be vomit-inducing. I don’t know about anyone else, but my entire goal is to smell like NOTHING. I go to the gym, I wear the deodorizing kind of deodorant, and that’s it. You know why? Because when I’m at the gym, I don’t really want anyone to see me. I don’t want to be seen or smelled or touched. I want to get my two hours of self-loathing physical abuse out of the way and I want to go home and shower. That’s it. And I think the gym would be a better, happier place if everyone else would adopt this goal. An entire room full of people minding their own business, smelling like nothing, and averting their eyes? That’s the dream.

I’ve tried other means of exercise. Let’s be honest, I’m broke and can’t really afford the gym as it is. So I thought I’d give “running the lake” a shot. I thought, that looks like it’s fulfilling. All those people, jogging in adorable track suits with their iPods and designer running shoes. I have an iPod! I can buy shoes! I can totally do that.

And then I tried.

And about four minutes after I started, I realized one true thing: I am not a “run at the lake” kind of girl.

That shit is HARD. All those people you see running the lake? Forget those people. I don’t know where this energy comes from, and how they are thinking ANYTHING that’s not, “oh God this sucks. How much longer? How has it only been half of a glee song? Why did I think I could do this? I’m a failure at everything, ever. I’m getting a cramp. Gotta walk it off. Can’t stop. Shouldn’t stop. I’m a survivor. No I’m not. Fuck it, I’m gonna walk the next three miles. Then I want a beer.”

Needless to say, that didn’t last.

So I thought about getting a bike. That looks like an appropriate amount of work. But every time I look at bikes for sale, I think, man, everyone that I hate rides a stupid bike. Can I really bring myself to be one of those people? I would be a bike rider. And you know buying a bike for exercise is just a gateway to becoming a full on cyclist. Because you think, man, it’s such a nice day, I think I’ll bike to the post office today. And then it’s the bank. And then it’s the grocery store and you’re buying cargo-carrying accessories for your exercise bike. And suddenly you’ve got one pant leg rolled up on your way to work, yelling at cars who cut into the bike lane too early without looking and suddenly, you’re THAT person.

No, it seems that if I were to purchase a bike for any reason, it would ultimately result in an entire psychiatric break that involved a public denouncement of said bicycle, abandoning it in a gutter and throwing my helmet at some other oncoming cyclist, with a false accusation of his involvement in the deterioration of my dignity. And that just sounds like a mess.

So if the gym is out, and I’m not a runner, and I can’t get a bike for personal integrity reasons, what’s left? I thought about rollerblades, but those really only make sense if you live in the suburbs of Spring, Texas, where roads are actually paved, and there’s a roller-rink right around the corner from the local Jewish Community Center that your best friend has to attend every Saturday, which is weird cause in school they said being Jewish was a religious thing and everyone knows religious stuff is for Sunday, on account of that’s what the Pope said. And I keep seeing ads for “creative exercise” which is like those acrobat and trapeze classes you can take at gymnastic places, but my irreversible fear of heights, falling and dying seem to put a damper on that possibility.

So I’ve got three hundred dollars worth of track suits and overpriced running shoes and no where to go, aside from a ‘no-costume-necessary’ walk on role as Sue Sylvester’s college intern on a rather odd episode of Glee. I could vow to eat better, but the minute disaster strikes it’s me, some yoga pants, a Law & Order marathon and a bag of kettle korn as my only confidant. Counting calories only works if you count ALL the calories, and not the ones that “don’t count,” like morning coffee, or any food that’s free. If I didn’t pay for it fiscally, I shouldn’t have to pay for it calorically either.

So I’ll just take up residence between this rock, and that hard place, and hope that my California lifestyle warrants enough accidental exercise to keep me from getting stuck in between the two.