Blog

• Rejecting a guy because he smells like bug spray

• The sidewalk makes a good nail file in a pinch.

• Having radiators in your apartment must be what menopause is like.

• Learning to be single is like remembering how to ride a bike. You know you used to be able to do this, but then you’re flying out of control into somebody’s pants.

• Haters gonna give you anxiety.

• Edgar Allen Poo (Halloween Costume)

• Spider veins are scarier than actual spiders.

They say riding a bike is something you never forget, but those people have never tried to ride one after ten years of driving a motor vehicle and then smashed headfirst into a parked car. After the collision, which was witnessed by more people than I care to remember, I dusted off my torn jeans and decimated pride and walked the bike back home without leaving a note because “I broke your car with my face because I have the motor skills of a drunk baby giraffe” was more than I could bear, and I wasn’t sure if my car insurance covered being a moron. In reality, there wasn’t really any damage to the car, and I sort of toppled over like a toddler on a hoverboard, but in my memory it was much more dramatic. The adage, “It’s like riding a bike” to me means “It’s scary and fast and you stand a good chance of being run over by a bread truck or blimp or small dog. And your route looks like you’re trying to trace a polygraph test.”…

Thursday, April 21. 4:13 am: I generally sleep about as well as a two year old who just saw The Exorcist, and more often than not, I find myself awake late into the night unable to sleep because my mind is consumed with thoughts of “You need to obsess about your credit card debt right now until your mind has the consistency of mashed potatoes and you’ve become fully committed to changing your name and moving to Tokyo where you can disappear and remount yourself as an enthusiastic karaoke star with the singing voice of an aged monk summoning demons” or “You said that weird thing at your work event today and everybody probably thinks you’re on bath salts.” One of my greatest feats of mental acuity is finding asinine things to worry about when I’m supposed to be sleeping and having no one to talk it out with because my boyfriend falls asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow. I’ve seen bullets leave guns slower…

• I asked him to get me a cup of coffee because the cat was sitting in my lap and I didn’t want to disturb her and then immediately got up after he brought it to me.

• I was using the fleece blanket wrong. (“It’s patterned side down, Katie, that’s the softer side.”)

• I try to seduce him by doing dances reminiscent of an electrocuted chicken while he is on the phone or playing video games. (Success rate: 6%.)

• When I work from home and he is gone all day, the apartment looks like a tornado ran through a Walmart by the time he returns.

• I am really bad at making puns but very enthusiastic about persistently doing so. (“The best jokes are the ones you have to explain.”)

• I insist on telling him about things I saw on the internet while remembering few of the details. (“There was this guy, or was it two guys? And he, or they, were in a park, or a field of some kind, maybe a large backyard? I forget, it was funny.”)

I am bad at drugs. Generally, my body’s reaction to medication is about as predictable as Charlie Sheen on bath salts, and I tend to experience side effects that are “atypical” or “uncommon” or “you have better odds of convincing Obama to babysit your cat than getting loopy from this medication, which is why you will be surprised when you burst into uncontrollable laughter on the train because you thought about penguins and then laugh even harder when the lady sitting next to you gets up and moves across the car.” When I got my wisdom teeth out, the anesthesia caused me to call my oral surgeon a “loser” because of his regrettable fashion choice of purple scrubs, which I’m sure he was wearing to impress moody college students who think wearing Chuck Taylors to a club makes them edgy and emphatically profess that emo will never die to anyone who will listen, and when I had complications post-surgery and had to return to his office several times for follow-up appointments, I was overwhelmed with embarrassment because, despite being higher than The Grateful Dead at a sleepover, I not only remembered making fun of him, but I was, at the time, also rather proud of my transcendently clever dig. “I’m a drooling, stoned moron who keeps choking on gauze. But you’re wearing clothes. Gotcha!” I’m sure he was devastated….

• Pouring myself a cup of coffee and then forgetting about it

• Reheating that cup of coffee and then forgetting about it again

• Taking my socks off in my sleep and only losing the cute ones

• Wearing mismatched socks

• Getting cheese on my pants

• Buying plants and then killing said plants

• Forgetting about said dead plants until they turn into powder

• Buying small baskets and having nowhere to put them

• Identifying Shakira songs…

• Some people just aren’t as approachable as others. You understand, you have Resting Bitch Face.

• Yeah, you look young now, but that shit’s going to drop like a bomb at some point.

• Hey, you got your hair cut! They really messed up the side, didn’t they?

• You know, if you’re going to wear lipstick that bright, you could really benefit from some blush. You look like an 80′s prom ghost.

• I remember when you used to dress normal.

• You look like Ashlee Simpson. Pre-nose job, of course.

I have never been stung by a bee, but having “anything can be dangerous if you think about it enough” anxiety and an extreme aversion to needles (I once passed out during a flu shot), I have never gotten an allergy test to determine if flailing my arms in front of my face and running around the yard like my hair is on fire is an appropriate reaction to the presence of a bee. Since the flu shot incident, which was witnessed by the majority of my college dorm and resulted in a university health center mandate that patients must henceforth be seated during medical procedures, I have found it necessary to warn every nurse that comes at me with a syringe that my completely reasonable fear that the needle will snap off in my arm, scrape through my bloodstream and then puncture my heart like a water balloon makes me slightly panicky once they strap on the tourniquet. I once mentioned this to the phlebotomist at my doctor’s office and she politely requested that if I felt the need to pass out, to kindly do so away from her, since I was “a lot bigger and the fall would kill her.” This inspired the urge to lift her over my head and hurl her into the garbage can, but my wet noodle arms and deference to people with sharp objects led me to quietly will myself toward unconsciousness so that I might flatten the impertinent youth in retribution. We both emerged unscathed.

As I have the navigational skills of a stoned toddler driving a blimp, I use GPS everywhere I go to make sure I don’t end up in Canada when I’m just trying to get to Olive Garden before it closes. The accuracy of GPS in my city, however, is about as reliable as Comcast customer service or the drug dealer you met in the alley behind Bubba’s Liquor and Guns. The routes my GPS has given me to my various destinations have been inefficient at best. So you want to go two miles in a city built on a grid system? Go two blocks north, four blocks south, pull a three point turn in the middle of a busy intersection and then light your car on fire. Drive your flaming car backwards through a Wendy’s drive-thru, merge onto the expressway, and then go fuck yourself. You will arrive at your destination in approximately ninety-seven minutes and three dozen curse words. Oh, and that dress makes you look fat…