Won't get therapy. Will talk to computer.

Hesitant return

2012-01-27T21:04:00.000-08:00

I'm back. Am I back? Let's try writing. I've set up life for it all day...

or for three months

and with a lot of analysis

I mean that I finally have a carpet. It's beautiful, and importantly it is 5 x 8 feet of space on the floor I can sit on, or lie on. I haven't had this in many months. It's been a slog through ennui and avoidance, boredom, moving one thing after another to where it ought to go. Making space for the vacuum, sleeping 'til noon, making space to actually vacuum, getting it all into piles on the periphery.

And just like that my psychoanalyst wants to get down to it then. My Question: What am I supposed to be doing? Her answer: That's the question. Right there.

If you think it's easy, you're crazy.

So my state of being, right now, is something like "half-alright" which is very close to alright, surprisingly close to all alright.

Discoveries are banal but I am psychoanalysis' big proponent now, albeit warily: by which I mean, She makes the sessions count - I lose all focus, don't have an answer to a question, and then she makes that last fifteen minutes work, the genius, - she ends on: "You mean you don't deserve it?" .... me: "I guess that's another way of saying that." Her: "Let's end there."

Thinking about what I want, what would be gratifying, I think perhaps part of my thinking goes: I've tried haven't I? I've done the wanting part. I want to be in a collaborative artistic environment. I want that. I don't have it. So I've done my part. Wanted it. Haven't gotten it. So I WANT my work to be learning to live without it. But instead, oh heaven, that's a dead end, and the prognosis is more like to keep working, keep trying, keep reading, keep having sex once in a blue moon for god sake, keep trying, and actually write sometimes for god's sake won't you? won't you? You won't? You want to obsess about, GODDAM, Facebook? technology? high school? Well why not on paper you fool. Oh because I was trying to just think it in my head and realize it doesn't matter and I tried as hard as I could didn't I? I wanted to come back to that conclusion, didn't I?

I cry before her passive sweater dressed cruel-kindness that says "why do you think that is?" and I say, "Sometimes, ... these 'why' questions - I can't find the answer; there isn't an answer." and she agrees and says, "So let me rephrase that then - is there anything else it makes you think of?" Can you imagine this profession?

2012-01-14T14:16:00.000-08:00

Well, it's been a while. I've been moving and going to psychoanalysis so...

Well, I have to get out the door in 30 minutes, meeting mywonderfulfriendHol... Who would come out to off Broadway on such a cold night but she?

There will be a bloody mary I suspect.

I have a lot of ideas and someone should pay me. :-) XX xxxx

Writing...

2011-11-05T12:19:00.000-07:00

Anyone do it in little fits of structure and structure and properly filling the space in tiny blocks and, again, little fits of, inspiration. And think about the deadlines most when you're a depression case and hating yourself for being behind them and having an ulcer? "Process". Call it that!

2011-10-29T18:13:00.000-07:00

Today I am going to work on STARAMA - a revision is happening and it's really demanding and it has to be done, with discipline.

But it's snowing, and I was smoking a cigarette, and thinking. So I'm blogging until I can get myself out the door to the cafe because that's where I decided I'll do revision work. Oh man.

But just now out back I was thinking about my mother. The link is coffee.

Now I'm really back, I am not going to the cafe. It really snowed! I thought it was a lot of hype but no. So I have been drinking coffee and smoking and listening to Aretha. I ate some raisin toast and drank two pots of coffee, and moved a houseplant inside to save its life. It's dripping melted snow in the kitchen now. Facebook.

I went home for a night a few months ago for dinner at my mom's house with all of us and my mom's baby sister and her husband and two of their four daughters and my grandmother. Grammy was about to leave for Florida, now to be her permanent residence, having been helped by my aunt with a General's precision to empty her house in Philadelphia. Grammy had been staying at my mom's for some matter of weeks and the story goes (per Ben) - three nights before leaving, she freaked out at my mother, upset these two sisters didn't even want to see eachother - around the corner from each other all summer. It is confusing to me too. It's troubling that Grammy doesn't seem to know what it is either. Families can be mad it appears. Anyway, my aunt is hyper intelligent and psychosexually a little - ha! funny. One wonders what runs in one's family when it seems like a mystery to the matriarch too. I know Grammy acts grand and that's just how she describes Nanny as acting too. We've got that quality running through us- we teach it down to the first daughter. Around the women of the family, I think I probably get a bit hyper-analytical - frightened of the family thing... but also thrilled! Who else can you actually tell family stories with where you, ha, tell the truth, drink a glass of wine, cry laughing that you people were allowed out in public - That is what it was like, fairly often, growing up with my mom and her, my, family. I know there are other loud insane families out there but mine was really quite show stealing there for a while. In Boston Markets in Pennsylvania, in Malls in New Jersey, at Earnest Hemingway's historic home in Key West, in a town called Odell... Indiana? Ridiculous scenes.

My favorite story is remembered by Amy and is called "WHERES MY COIN?!" That's the Boston Market one. Ridiculous.

My point is I have a great time as long as there's wine. I do it for the kids I tell you... and myself. If you're going to have an absurdly dysfunctional family that can't even reasonably leave the house much less go on vacation from when you're nine to seventeen, the reward is wine when you're older and your grandmother freaking out and insisting on seeing her progeny. With all the bedbugs this summer, Grammy and I didn't even have martinis and steak, our big plan. I'll do that for Christmas though.

So the point of this is not actually WHERES MY COIN... I told WHERES MY COIN when Ben was outside and I kept it down. I'm not a bitch. My point was going to be something about else... I have been writing this with the loose idea of telling how when I was real little my mother told me drinking coffee like I always wanted to do - would only drink milk with coffee in it- would stunt my growth. And took the opportunity walking in the city past a little person to tell me that's what she meant - if I kept drinking coffee, I'd would be a little person. I told everyone that memory and my aunt, who I haven't seen in six years, since my Grandfather's funeral, turned to her daughters and said "Don't turn against me like that girls." I just laughed. I think that's a funny story about my mom!

I took another break, you missed it. I'm waiting for Indian food. The point was my mother being a weirdo and how when I tell nice stories about her, they're still weird. :-)

I watched Into the Woods last night on Netflix and that is he most psychodynamic musical ever made. The Witch. When she self immolates. You're all liars and thieves like his father like his son will be too oh why bother you'll just do what you do. And the chords are ascending in some diminished seventh or do I know? That is probably the best part of the best show.

Oh sigh. I have not revised my script, still today. I am listening to Into the Woods. I am considering buying a ticket to California for next weekend. Just a hotel in Santa Barbera maybe. It's January weather in October. Can you imagine? Stephen Sondheim. Stephen Sondheim.

2011-10-23T19:02:00.001-07:00

So long story short, Friday, my roommate believes the smalland apparently painful bites she has found on herself are bed bug bites… again. This was the hardship of the summer and thistime around, we simply have to address by removing books, and fabric to a reasonabledegree, to plastic bags, and calling for a treatment – we can’t do what we didthis summer again, either of us. She calls the landlord who hates us, he sayswe can break our lease, so tired is he of bedbug news, and I overhear hermaking her case that this isn’t anybody’s fault. He, it seems, is saying the same thing he alwayssays: “We’ve had that place for twenty-five years and we’ve never…” I yell out,“It has nothing to do with the last twenty five years!” He calls me later inthe day (I am the “good cop”. Honestly Iam very kind and measured with every horrible fool I must deal with after my sixyears in Astoria. It’s the easiesttactic for me. I think I get screwedover sometimes for being “too nice” but I’d get fucked over as much trying tobe “harder” and in a way I’d be fucked twice because I’d be trying to besomething I’m not. I stand my ground- I don't back away from obvious sense, and reiterating it as many times as I must, but I don’t throw out the baby that I’msmall and pretty and these landlords for the most part are old-country enoughthey can’t show me their dirty core motivations, or backtrack as soon as theydo if I just make the right face. I know. I’m no fool. But I appreciate if weall stay on the social niceties page. Without this face, I’d be a whole other person… something of a frighteningidea. ) and an imbecile exterminator comes to really and truly drench our houseand all our things in chemicals - “once and for all” as it were. My roomie gets thehell out to meet her guy, a new guy since the last time we went through this,but, ah not so unfamiliar. I am notfucking anyone right now so when we do these insanely toxic treatments,there’s no go-to place for me. It’s nother responsibility. I feel for her thatshe is the one experiencing these bites. But at any rate I find myself strandedin Astoria. When I brave return to myhouse six hours after the treatment I find the air indoors wholly un-breathe-able,drink a bottle of wine outside and call D-------, to tell him I "actually have a big favor to ask": would he pick me up? Can I sleep at his house? First my stepmom tells me to get ahotel room. I appreciate the advice, butno. “Oneof those websites for hostels or deals” – I mean, there must be a betterway. (you know I love hotels, but to find a deal I'd have to internet search in the toxified house, take a train into manhattan- it was already 8:00pm. A hotel?)

Status updates you can’t post to facebook: A diminished sex drive compared to say, mytwenties, is a blessing and a joy. Latein the summer I went on a “The last straw. That’s it.” okcupid date. A lunatic whose clothes smelled musty, who Imet late at night downtown, he was working the soundboard at “Under St Marks”.A group of Canadians, singers, comedians, had the place for the night. As Ishimmied into the backmost aisle seat in the underground pit, I palmed my cellphone, and held it low under my chair. He texted “Hi.” I listened to thecurly haired stand up comic on “stage” implying incest, screwing up his joke,riffing on his name, his uncle, incest again and texted my “date”, “have youseen ‘Fame?’” He texted back, “No. Why?”I texted nothing. He texted to come overto the booth which I did between acts. I whispered “Which dial is his monitor?I’m obsessed with monitors” He said “You just want to show off your knowledge.”I smiled. Not the wittiest retortalthough true. When the show was done, I smoked out back with the Canadians.Ky, my date, commenced giving me massages (which could not relax me since Ididn’t know yet if I wanted him touching me). I spent the next few hours trying to relax, tensing to his advances,trying to relax enough to enjoy the adventures he sought for us, explainingthat we wouldn’t be sleeping together over 2:00am coffee, then pressed againstonlookers at a Doug E Fresh show(!) and then fleeing as Ky frowned. The cab departs. I realize I am not dating any more.

The realization I am not datinghas yet to give me anything but pleasure in thinking it.

Early in the summer, before I wasn’t dating, D------- tookme to the beach in a rented car. Thetrip was a great success, and at the time, I’d laid myself a gauntlet that amale person would bring me somewhere in a carwith-God-as-my-witness-I’ll-never-go-hungry-again style. After the beach, it was back to D-------’shouse. (We dated a couple years ago but it ended when he yelled at me about hisworkday on the phone. There’s an old blog post about it!) I had my period which, though bloody andmessy, meant I was at least feeling like sex. I blew his enormous penis.

Break. That was afunny break-point. I’m in my made bed now, in my aired out bedroom, wanting toget to my point.

That would be: that day, the idea of his huge cock andblowing it turned me on. I know I blowhis mind when I’m into it. How wouldn’t I? As far as intercourse, well that’s oookay. I come too fast and then have to sort of put up with the huge thing. Sad to say, these are the facts. It’s arelief when the whole affair becomes too bloody. I’ve come and we can clean upand relax now.

So we try this again. What a perfect thing right? He doesn’t drink,he has wheels, he loves to read, he isn’t asking for a girlfriend, he has anenormous appendage, he’s nice to women. I travel out to his place in summer heat – an hour or more on thesubway, what he calls “Prospect Heights” I insist is “Crown Heights”. I’m hungry and upon arrival realize I don’tknow what I’m doing there. I don’t wantto have sex. Now I’m just at his house.We eat a little, he goes and buys me a bottle of wine and opens it with adrill, we eat, go to bed, and I tense to his touch, toss and turn with horribledreams all night. He is angry at me inmy dreams for not having sex. We havelong conversations about what a confusing and unfair person I am. When I wake up and push him away, then touchhim lightly, feeling sorry for these pushes, I try to explain and he lets medig a nonsense grave. “It doesn’t feelnatural. It feels to me… today. It feelsto me…. Now…. That I don’t know, it just isn’tright… just to be so reasonable aboutit – like I can’t do this. I can’t just kind of say ‘You’re here. You’refine. Lets have sex so we both getsome’ Are you angry? Does that makesense to you?”

I think he was kind of angry orat least rejected-feeling. I don’tknow. After I pushed him off again andexplained how I was feeling, and I think told him that I wanted a boyfriend tobe with, not a buddy, that I needed to feel… something, he had a Eureka moment“So none of that is my fault!” Me: That’s right. Yes. It isn’t you at all. We went for brunch and I played some jewelgame on his iphone and it felt like being in a sexless relationship. The kind I’ve nearly never had, always toobusy having sexual connections that arrive at me feeling agonizingly in need orwant, or fucked up relationships, always sexually strong, and then everythingelse smacks us, knocks two crazies out cold. But I feel like an asshole who won’t touch his penis, no matter whatI’ve said. And eventhough he seems totally fine having realized it’s not hisfault.

Anyway, maybe you think this isa lot of writing all just to say “there’s no chemistry” or “you’re just notthat into him”. I feel like there’s aninteresting thing to articulate though.

I called D------- last night andhe was there for me. He took me to adiner, he stopped at a bodega so I could get some Claritin. When we got to hishouse he vacuumed up all the cat hair and downloaded Real Time so we couldwatch it. As we laid in bed after the show was finished, he touched my breast and I didn’t like it. He went out to read on his couch so I could sleep and came back in around 5am and we only lightlycuddled, mostly just slept next to one another. I was relieved. I didn’t want to have sex. If I did, I would have felt like I was forall those reasons listed above.

I love my diminished sex driveof the past few months. It’s serving meenormously well. When’s the last timethis blog went months without me reallyliking someone a.k.a, often a.k.a, having had a lot of sexual chemistry withhim, and then feeling disappointed when he was pleased with that great sex timeand that alone, or some other angst like that. That last straw date and really feeling like it was the last straw wasamazing. I like how I feel. It seems to me, yet, a shame, that if I everwas – and I think I once was, evidence suggests… - I now am not able to getmyself going for someone just because, hey, that’s hot. I especially feel a little sorry if he went out of his way tobe so nice and is asking nothing of me. Just wishes I wanted it. Just feels me right there. I can't fault him. I'm the one who wants to just sleep in our separate spaces. I'm the one who feels that way.

In this long ass, poorly articulatedattempt to articulate, I am saying: ohme oh my- once I’d have sex with someone because they were nice to me. It was not always a disaster wherein thereafter I wasin love- it was sometimes but not always. But now that’s all done.

When I have to explain how it’sall done, all my enthusiasm for your cock, I feel so defensive- as I attempt to explain I think it is as if I’m saying “Oh I have issues. Yes I’m frigid- it’s my issues” and that isreally not it at all. I just don’t want a nice man with an erection who wentout of his way for me to feel rejected so it ends up couched that way.

I am so grateful that it hasn'tturned out like so many told me it would (not so far) – that my thirties would bea time of aching sex drive. That I’d just need dick DICK where ever itmay be found! Maybe it won’t last, butdeprioritizing sex and particularly deprioritizing dating feels so right. I don’t even know if I wish I’d found a great relationship instead, I am liking it somuch. All I can possibly do right now isthink about myself, freak out about myself, worry about myself all thetime. I am open to love- which would besomeone actually seeing and getting these machinations of my mind, and lovingthem. But right now, unlike so manyother times I’ve chronicled, I’m not even longing for it. You see, I’ve given up my friends. I’ve given up and it feels very good.

I couldn’t be a hooker for aplace to sleep and I do sort of feel sad not to have given that fun andacceptance to the nice, good, kindly person who gave me that place to sleep. But I cringe to the penis! And that feelsgood. What a crazy blogpost.

I love you all so much myfriends, you may not even know. I loveyou more more more more more.

-Alexis

I didn't want to work on my shit

2011-10-17T16:06:00.001-07:00

So I ordered a sushi feast.

Going to straight to hell.

Love,
Alexis

All day, all week

2011-10-17T08:52:00.000-07:00

Please read my friend Kelly's blog post about when we went to Zucotti Park last week to see some Occupy Wall Street. Kelly, the straight bomb.

Having been last week, my contribution since has largely been talking to disapprovers while out and about, correcting their perception, media-backed, that the kids, (and Kelly, I too cannot help calling them kids. It's something about idealism. Well I'm probably about to say it...) smell and are dirty and spoiled. I try to appeal to the fact that I and whomever I'm speaking to live in New York so we know from horrible smells, and my olfactory was not in the least offended down there - they should really go see and smell for themselves. I also tend to mention how much I feel for the "kids". As with every generation, the media has consistently indulged a reduction of theirs to "they're apathetic, brainwashed by their computers, and now, if they're doing this spoiled". But kids are supposed to be idealistic! I want to thank them. That's how I feel. Do we want a whole country of people who, what? buckle down, buckle-down-and-you-should-too. How ridiculous. By how ridiculous I mean how unrealistic about humanity.

Today I have my third consultation for psychoanalysis - I guess we'll decide the schedule (at least four times a week!) and payment today. I feel like I've had one realization already.

Let me tell you why I love New York this year, today. NYU's free Health Clinic. Many thoughts, share them in a sec.

Some details on my conversation with that guy Kelly talked about in her post. He is what really worries me. The movement itself should encounter division and problems myriad any minute now as movements must. Their "consensus" thing is bound to, must, mutate, frighten, be frightening, etc. But that is fine - that is natural - that is the discussion- that is the experiment. But the gunman, the Charles Manson, the psycho who ruins everything and discredits by ruining. That's a thing. This guy's delicate psyche gave me a real fright.

Kelly kicked off how he approached - wanting me to agree that the people near us playing some kind of game were "ridiculous". Let me see if I can properly write our dialogue - which I'm usually so good at, but think I'll have difficulty with here because my heart was racing while I spoke to him. It's funny because I'd been emailing with my brother and sister about OWS and Revolution before Kelly and I went down there and I had left off with them that I wanted to write them about the personal and the political. How a "movement" suddenly throws into view for you how much they do meet. Like psychoanalysis, how it may bring a question of "who am I? How did I become me? Why do I have this ideal and not another? What do I want?" I didn't write that email I had percolating. But this conversation brought that thought "The political is personal. The personal is political" banging into my head- like "not only personal, the political can be psychological". It was something about this man's psychology that made me feel in danger.

It's also hard to remember the conversation because the mode was one of cutting me off and then smugness. It wasn't terribly sensible and I was in a decidedly defensive position - so it's hard to remember as a whole.

I suppose he was asking me why it was happening. I think that's it. And that was a hard one to answer cold off the top. As he told me I couldn't answer him I managed to answer something about "the social contract." Honestly, I was not beautifully articulate. I think I said "That's a thing right. There's a social contract."

"Well what's that?"

Me: Okay, let's see, well quite a few things. Let me try an example. Take social security. It comes out of your paycheck your whole life. That's a contract - that you're paying in so when you're older it'll be paid into for you. If I live to be 65, it's worrying to think it won't be there for me.

An older woman, pretty older lady with painted nails and a warm sweater and lots of piled red hair, overheard and politely jumped in. Apparently Social Security was exactly one of the issues that had her there. She explained that she was older- she began to try to explain whatever her situation was with Social Security. But the man just interrupted her over and over to say "Are you finished yet? Are you finished talking? I'm not listening anymore- are you going to answer my question?" This guy was so alarming I tell you. We asked him again to clarify his question. She began speaking again. He started in with "not answering my question" again. She saw someone she knew who she had to talk to for some reason. She seemed to be an occupier and when you see what's going on there, it is pretty obvious that one would actually need to talk to one's friends pretty often to find out - particularly this day - if you might need to move your stuff, what the next step was to continue peaceful occupation etc. It's a hive, you know. So she, all politeness, excused herself to talk to her friend she had seen. I mean, I saw her see this person and realize she needed to talk to her/him. The man said, "She couldn't answer me. That's why she left." And I said "No- I think she saw her friend. Although the way you talk doesn't make people want to stay for more conversation."

This is what I'm talking about regarding psychological problems though. What frightens me about this person is the inability to see motivations other than that people are stupid and have no point, "can't answer my question". I guess all I'm saying is that Kelly and I talked to a real sociopath.

The conversation we continued to have following this was wholly ridiculous so my enthusiasm to transcribe it is fading, was never very strong. I don't have much joy in telling you how dumb this guy's questions which I kept on "not answering" were. He made me agree that 20% of 1,000,000 is 200,000. (vis a vis the social contract.) So, he questioned, if a person is making a million dollars and taxed at 20% and is putting in therefore 200 grand, should someone making 50,000 put in less?

I mean, no one who reads this blog is so stupid they don't know how stupid a question this is. Me: "Well yeah, I'm fine with that. I mean let's talk about 50,000. Can they pay 18%? I mean what's left over afterwards? Capitalism isn't just taxes right? Like, people have to be able to buy stuff? If you tax 18% of 50,000 and leave the rest for the person to live on, can they still buy stuff after paying for wherever they live and eating regular meals, maybe going to the doctor? You definitely want them to be able to buy some stuff."

Oh on and on we went, and on and on he scared me. We talked about how a bad diagnosis could bankrupt you forever if you don't have insurance. Him: That's YOUR problem. Me: Yes, yes it would be. (pause) Oh and yours. It's actually also yours...

Obviously trying to talk about socialism was not productive. ;)

And it was when I said that what was happening seemed revolutionary to me that he was most scoffing and angry. I asked if I could explain what I meant by that. I tried to say something about how what it seemed people were asking was an actual re-examination of global capitalism as a system. He said "You're delusional". I said the conversation had to stop then. Told him that's very disrespectful to me. He agreed and apologized (my heart raced - frightening.) I tried to remind him we had agreed on one thing. He believed the banks should have been allowed to fail. He believes recessions are a natural part of capitalism and capitalism should have been allowed to work to let the banks rebuild.

Anyay, this man is useless as a tool to understand anything about what is happening with Occupy Wall Street and what the most interesting parts of conversation are there. I do keep thinking of him in relation to my revelation that the psyche, my own psyche, is interesting - incorporates trauma, incorporates other psyches battling I can't say what...

He's more to me an exemplar of how we live in ourselves with a past and with problems and with defenses and with reactions and with old wounds and with old joys and we can bury them or we can use them or we can do battle with them or or or.

More on the free clinic soon and how I am working unemployment my friends, working it. And how without me saying something, a person in his second month of medical school might have would up seeing my vagina, and my cervix. HILARIOUS. My whole day at the clinic was a joy and worth telling you about, but my favorite part was telling the third year med student who was about to get her big chance to "swab 360" in my "OS", "Thank you so much. Cool. But Sean can't be in here for that."

XOXO love
A

haha did you see my morning wake up poem?

2011-10-12T07:18:00.000-07:00

haha So I am crazy.

yup my memories are like rats sent to stars.

ugh. Well I sent a message to my college boyfriend, having been recollecting what a traumatized mess I was by the time he got to have me. It wasn't the easiest because it's not like he wasn't sort of, well, difficult - far from a perfect love. And given just how many times I ended it, and it was always me, it makes all the sense in the world that we are not in touch at all. After the first time I broke up with him he said he hoped I died in a car accident, and we still got back together! College!

Not everyone's life is like this I bet.

But I'm finding a bit of a theme.

Or I at least have a few phrases.

One phrase: Living in the past. Interesting phrase isn't it?

One theme: Even if I hurt my ex loves only unintentionally, in reaction they've been willing to treat me with the most cruelty they could summon. I've never ended a serious realtionship, one where we were saying "I love you" without the ending or the aftermath involving at best stark insensitivity (Jack - this was the least brutal, and me the least myself in a way - at 23? I don't know - the early 20's elude my analysis. I was more free/ less something, less psychicly heavy then than any other time) and at worst cruelty. My conclusion is kind of that men are weak.

One important true thing, the truest?: Love and anger and pain= the same object, the same thing. Angry? It's another side of Love. Hurting? Another side of Love. In Love? Be SOO Careful. And even if you are, the risk is just so huge. I'm not saying not to go for it, young lovers whoever you are, I know your troubles are few, I know your troubles have the potential to be engulfing, and you should still try, but the odds are really stacked.

Back to living in the past. I wrote a msg to my college boyfriend- just to say I'm thinking of him, understand from his end why we didn't keep in touch, don't expect to be in touch now and am not after that in sending him the msg, am sorry to the degree that I can be that the person I was may have, did in fact, cause him pain, and am glad we had each other when we did. He said this in response:

Hi.

You know, I'm quite sincerely at a total loss for if, or how, to respond to this. But here I am, typing, I suppose.

I accept your words as they were intended and do genuinely appreciate the sentiment. Regardless of whatever else I've thought about you then or now, I don't believe that you ever acted with specifically hurtful intent.

And on my part, I certainly extend the blanket apology that I would to anyone I've crossed paths with for any general encounters with me between the ages 18-22 (I'll be charitable to myself here and leave the range at that).

My memory (in totality) is an absolute horror, and I've spent so long emotionally partitioning off what I did retain of that time that I don't have a lot of positive things left to reflect on. Neither do I doubt that they were there- it's just far from a deep well of pleasant or positive reminiscence for me. But for better or for worse, it has always been there. Take that for whatever you will.

As I said, I have little idea what else to share, but I do hope that doing this is in whatever way helpful for you, and also that it is unrelated to a 12-step program.

Best

So, that's what's making me think of the phrase "living in the past". Funny how it almost seems healthier to have the partitions up, and just be able to wholesale write off 4 years - "blanket apology" to those who knew you then, few memories of the entire time, than to remember it.

It's nice he got back to me. I'm glad he's just trucking and there're no bad feelings and no one wants anyone's car crashing anymore. Don't know why it matters -> maybe I live in the past.

XOXO time to make the donuts, send out a resume to Gawker to be their office assistant (how many of those are they gonna get? 60,000? Reformat this script. I have a pretty amazing life. :-) Later I get my second consultation and maybe we can talk about what it means to live in the past....)

XO
A

2011-10-12T07:01:00.000-07:00

I think
twinkling red stars

I think we send our memories to them
our dreams
a globe of the Earth
with a blue whale half the size of iceland

Our heads touched by people
who touched them
literally
our hairs pressed down
our forheads brushed
our hair pressed down
our creepy parents caught in the act
our dark pursuers

send them
like rats
off to the stars

Let's do some blogging

2011-10-11T13:55:00.000-07:00

A) I watched a movie called Lymelife and now I'm really badly in crazy love with Rory Culkin. Those eyes, those lips.... the acting. oh, oh oh. The character.... tortured teen. I guess it's inappropriate but there's no denying, I dream of Rory Culkin. I want him. I love him.

B) Let's talk about crying. I've had one therapy consultation so far but before I got there I did a little amateur delving into the past, hit a little trauma, and arrived at good old-fashioned sobbing. This happened vis a vis my mother a couple years ago and vis a vis having my heart broken many many years ago, this time. It's pretty complex, wasn't any old heart break, but I won't bother with the story too much here... I guess the pertinent fact is only that both things constitute what I've experienced of traumatic emotional situations. Both times I seem to arrive at the uncontrollable crying from first thinking I can just, stylistically frankly, lay out what the trauma was, and tell the other person what it was and do so coolly, only to realize a few hours later that I'm feeling the same things I was feeling in the past which I had thought I could so cooly describe, effectively *get rid of* by remembering, laying out, sending away.

(This time as I walked home from errands at night, I was suddenly sobbing in the street, oh New York, I turned toward a building and just sobbed and sobbed and a woman - she is named Wanda, asked if I was alright. I pulled myself together. We talked a long time.

Wanda: Are you alright?

Me: Oh, yes. Yes I really am. (heaving breath) I really am.

Wanda: Are you sure?

Me: Yeah, it's just a memory. This isn't - yes, I'm really okay. I know it doesn't look like it.

Wanda: Well, where are you going? Can I walk with you?

Me: (actually composing myself somewhat) Yes. I'm, um, well I'm sorry. Thanks for stopping me.

Wanda: See these tears in my eyes? I know what you're feeling. I'm going through it too.

Me: I'm not even going though it -- this is like old stuff. Is yours, is it a love thing? That's usually it.

Wanda commenced to tell me what she's going through, in the present [which makes her seem like less of a lunatic than me to me] which is horribly difficult. Part of her problem today involves seeing her ex's family at Church a lot so I told her I'm Jewish but maybe we can do some kind of volunteering together some time. I hope we do it. She suggested Thanksgiving, but I won't be around here then so, I don't know, please remind me to call Wanda. )

I came home to continue crying, got a hug from my roommate who is no stranger to needing therapy to deal with the past. And thank God she was around to tell me not to drink, to just drink water, which I did and gradually stopped crying, watched some something or other and went to bed. I didn't cry myself to sleep... and YET. And yet my eyes in the morning when I had some place to be. Puffed so they were barely possible to open. I would like to tell my body that if it's going to be so inclined to gush tears, reduce me to sobs, and keep 'em coming, then it would really be nice if my face could fucking handle that. But why even bother with the things you'd like to tell your body, right? Hello pine nuts? Hello pine nuts aren't poison but HISTAMINES actually might be hello? and etc. for everybody out there, and all that kind of stuff, yeah, right?

Then I go to therapy, or in this case just my consultation, and, of course I wasn't done with this crying jag yet so at the least my therapist must think I do need the therapy... so that's good. I told her how I almost thought in the weeks between writing my bio in order to get the consultation and the consultation that I became worried that she might think I was *too happy* to qualify. Like just thinking about my life so much with the anticipation of therapy was making me feel so great that it would seem like I didn't really need it. I told her this through tears. And then I told her about how I've always sort of had this problem that crying makes me feel like I'm crazy.

I know just how this conversation goes because I've had it every time I've started therapy (not many times, but enough) I'm always a sobbing mess by the time I've gotten myself to their office. I tell them, either "sorry" or "I have sort of a problem where crying like this makes me feel crazy."

and he/she says: What's crazy about crying?

And we could start right there if we wanted to, because I could tell her that when I'd cry growing up, my mother would say I was "emotionally disturbed" and look to psychologists for answers with what was wrong with me (which whenever I saw an actual psychologist was HER, but I'm digressing- not to mention seriously turning my blog into my issues with my mother, barf, but moving on...)

But we don't start there because I don't want to start there yet so I mention, through my tears, mopping up some more snot, that yeah yeah yeah, there are old reasons I feel that way but let's be serious- you don't want to feel out of control. You don't want to be crying. You're not supposed to be crying on the street. And especially about a memory, right? That is what we sometimes, in shorthand, call crazy behavior.

I don't know why I'm blogging this besides that I sort of want to.

Crying has just been a thing that I don't usually do, well -- empathetically for great theater I do, totally controllably, but not usually, not since a long time ago (in high school I was often a sobbing mess), but, now, I don't usually and when I do cry for myself, it feels sudden and I do it uncontrollably, frighteningly, can't stop once it's started, start feeling crazy for doing it. Crying. I wanted to write about crying.

I've stopped crying and am feeling better now for what it's worth. And it may be very worth noting that. You know, for the next time. It makes me feel crazy but I do stop. I can't stop it so should do it without the belaboring the feeling nuts about it. It's sort of a one way trip, a deep dive and then a re-emergence. I should probably eliminate to the degree that I can the part of the dive that's considering myself a total fucking lunatic but it also isn't too important to because I do stop. I guess I'm just saying that I should start to feel some safety about it. The people you encounter don't think you're "crazy" - they just think you're crying. You can't go out dancing or anything but you will live. You're just crying, a lot.

Am I saying anything here?

XOXO

C) When Hurricane Irene was coming I was doing a million things, a last push of compulsive anit bed-bug cleaning, rearranging all the furniture in the house, storm preparations, and finally sitting in bed eating bon bons, drinking Lindemans and watching Funny Face. But I've been saving notes by my bed since then that I jotted down that I wanted to blog about the hurricane. I was going to put them here, but I guess I'll just save them some more because, ha, there's nothing interesting about them not in the immediate. Sort of an interesting blog writing experiment whose answer may disturb us who blog, no?

XOXO

Alexis

Yeah

2011-10-09T18:12:00.000-07:00

God, that's the thing about remembering the worst hurts, going for it in a spirit of "getting somewhere with it" - when it really hits you, how long ago it all is makes you cry more, makes you laugh, makes you cry more. At least with me. On the one hand you think - this is not immediate, so you're fine, phew. Then just the fact that you're not fine, actually, clearly not, makes you feel Crazy. What if someone asks you what's wrong? And you have to say - it's nothing, it's fifteen years ago. It feels like sanity would be to actually be healed. To remember a moment you were abandoned and not fall apart. That's why I'm going to serious therapy now. I have my first consultation tomorrow. I suppose you're not healed ever of certain things, but there might just be an actual getting through it. It would just feel better NOT TO HAVE TO. I am putting a lot of faith in this therapeutic enterprise. I hope it's wonderful and I discover some reserves of strength rather than just puddling out. What will it be? how much puddling do you do before you're somewhere new. I guess you appeal for support and just the presence of the therapist listening until you are at the least tired enough of torturing the wound to move on by default and that's kind of the point. They aren't going anywhere. Unless they die. That's the thing. It's unrealistic to ever expect certain pain to go away. And it's horrible admitting that you're a person who is just always going to have to massage it and try to find some help dealing with it.

This is why I love/hate celebrity sex rehab with Dr. Drew. I grotesquely feel sorry for those poor people who had such sexual trauma so young and are walking around in a haze of pain. Because when they admit it, they basically have to admit it forever. They were damaged and they always will be damaged. Who wants to be damaged? There's sort of not enough reward for it to be "fair".

But Life isn't fair. They're not insane. I'm not insane. I'm just a stupid crazy person who can't tell my brain to stop looking for it to be fair.

I'm going to fall in love with my female therapist about 6 minutes into treatment, I'm predicting.

Jesus Christ

2011-10-09T17:41:00.000-07:00

You think you're so strong and the past behind you but just press it and... I don't know. I'm always surprised.

2011-10-09T02:54:00.000-07:00

5:40am Jolt awake with the idea I'll die and not exist. I think in my dream it became realized that someone proposing sex with me had AIDS. In the dream I successfully avoided sex, but, instead of relief, I woke up with the sharp relief realization that I'm still going to die and death is a thing. It was that thing where your mind says "and you won't be thinking any more. No more of this".

Maybe that sharp relief, as in bas relief, no psychic relief at all, is why the AIDS plays of the 80's are so good. Also being gay and theater.

On that callous note, back to thinking about lovin' arms, not death, and sleeping some more while it's dark.

2011-10-06T10:26:00.000-07:00

Holy God is this hilarious.

Let me just transcribe a bit here.

Classical music.
Geology professor.
He opens his ipad-shaped enough personal thing.
The avatar tells him:
Today's schedule (notably, Take Kathy to the airport by 2:00.)
3 messages: Your graduate research team in Guatemala, just checking in.
Robert Jordan a 2nd semester junior requesting a second extension on his term paper
And your mother reminding you about your father (Geology professor stops the speaking avatar/ secretary) "surprise birthday party"

Then he gets his friend on the horn to do the lecture for him. --- "Contact Jill."
Flemson
"He was challenging Jill's projection on the amount of carbon dioxide being released to the atmosphere. I'd like to recheck his figures"
"Here's the rate"
Guy: "MMMM hmmmm - and what happened?"

OH MY GOD. This is the funniest thing I've ever seen???? Do you remember 1987 now? hahaha oh what happened?First, (it's no longer first, but "first") let me say that I saw this of course because someone put it on facebook this morning - it was not distanced from a general sentiment that wow - the supposed year on the computer is 2011 and the new iphone and siri whatever came out today and Steve Jobs died. Steve Jobs isn't responsible for this particular projection of Apple's future though, because this is from when he wasn't there.Secondly, I don't give a good goddamn. (2001: A Space Odyssey has the most ipad-like looking thing of any pre i-pad existing representations of future technologies I've ever seen. I'm sure I'm objectively right about this) This thing this guy's got is RIDICULOUS. When it makes the joke during the conversation?!?! ("4:15pm") and THE GUY'S ATTITUDE!!!!!!!! I mean the vid is SORT OF predicting google type searching through a wireless technology. Yeah. Oh my god though. It is like an actual secretary ... and the way Herr Professor says "MMMMM hmmmmm. And what happened?"And the classical music.I just want to repeat these things over and over. I believe you are all with me enough that I don't need to explain how hilarious this is. I'm stopping. I have work to do. But wow- I didn't know we were going to be such calm classical music listenting, geology professor consulting fools with actual 2 dimensional helper robots, flirting up "dinner" over "research" while rememebring to take our wives to the airport in our, c'mon, Rolls, now. OH MY GOD THIS THING.

2011-09-29T19:56:00.000-07:00

This one I like because this year 1997/98 was so very tumultuous - the big one of big confrontation by the end. My senior year. I know it's Fall of my senior year from my tshirt and necklace and longer hair and watch and the yellow leaves through the kitchen window. - so I like this because this year was so tumultuous and things so remarkably bad between me and my mom that I don't remember what my relationship was like with the kids so much. But this picture shows me that Steph cracked me up and it seems like she liked to. I remember seeing my therapist after I'd moved out, before I went to college and telling him (he was very very good overall - I miss that guy and would shed some blood to have dinner with him these days [can you tell I'm having fierce life memory time?]but I can somehow never really get a number for him or figure out how to get in touch) I was worried for and wanted to be around for my siblings and he sort of shrugged it off. Fair enough - I got what he meant- I was going to college- was I really going to lose sleep over what was going on with these kids. But I do think I meant it. That's one of the really funny things about looking back at all the craziness and difficulties - I never can without also realizing, you change any of it, you don't get what you've got. Right? Life my friends. Anyway - this picture was a happy find. Steph and I both were like - oh look - we were friends! this is great!

My family bullshit scrapbook

2011-09-27T19:33:00.000-07:00

Here is a picture of Madeline. She's at a dog show wearing a dog sweater and also a dog ponytail-holder. "Probably the best day of my life" -Madeline I thought I'd kick off with this.

This is from the day of my mother's wedding to my step-dad. That's my mom and her parents. This picture is hilarious because of my fake to the fakest smile. It was an extremely small ceremony and I was the only member of the wedding party, as it were. For the majority of the ceremony I covered my ears, which is well documented photographically. I also remember doing this. I was very grossed out by the vows. I remember the point where I covered my ears - they were saying something about "sharing bread". I had an aversion at his point in my life (I am five) to things being "mushy" and shared bread seemed LITERALLY mushy. As I told my sisters and brother when we looked at this, I think this is a case of me being five, and a whole day of ceremony/ celebration that was not about me. I knew not to actively misbehave but,flower girl or not, not about me, not too hot on the whole thing. Good thing I was still out of the loop on the whole moving to New Jersey thing.

Here's me and Grammy in Cape May. I sucked those fingers forever and I really don't know how I'd ever have learned left from right if it weren't for being compelled to suck on my left hand. I can still feel which hand it is. Freud? Freud and whoever has something to say about sides of the brain? Anyway, I am trying to distract my grandmother from the story at hand with this weirdo little doll. I am the same person I was when I was four!

What an independent child! This looks like creative bliss.

Me and grammy on the front porch. I was moved to rescue this photo because, ha, this is a great example of how I dressed as a teenager. I treasured that red velour thing.

This seems very quintessential as well. I will write more on it soon, expand this post. It got later than I meant it to before I could do this tonight. * The expansion. Everything about this photo is everything. Stephanie refers to herself at this and adjacent ages as "obese". She recently called me on what I have apparently *always* said to that which is "you are athletic". Funny. But that tweety bird bathing suit. That tweety bird bathing suit was what we were dealing with when trying to have anything but the worst thing when it came to attire. I mean, my mother only took me to shop at Kids R Us THROUGH 8th grade. Which is what my interesting style - well illustrated in this pic, was borne of. It was a happy revelation that I could make something of shorts and a white t-shirt and children's barrettes. Me and the mid nineties - we got along - I could work with what they were pitching. The pose Steph's doing, with the pursed lips and the hand doing that thing - this is a pose she affected for many pictures. I also don't think it's for nothing that she has put her arm around my mother who is looking off at the baby children. That's it folks. That is it. Amazing some photographs - I know that look of hers so well... nothing like the recognition you can acheive with a photograph. My mom - always sort of looking off disengaged with some thought. She likes to go away to where she goes like this. This is really her, man. this photo is amazing. The kids are so cute. I love how I'm just there in the middle of their mayhem looking at the camera. This is a truth photo my friends. I love it. And I love my teenage fashion if you didn't guess. I really do.Oh my, my youth. I don't feel older! XO

Status updates

2011-09-25T22:14:00.000-07:00

you can't post to facebook:* Staining my pillows with tears. Hey friends! You wouldn't know it, but I find single and 30 and a "writer", I have to defend myself to my family every time I see them like I'm still a kid at home. And of course it is only because they are concerned about me! I am pretty sure I have an ulcer! Yeah, for real! I bet all of you who are married, or even in a good-looking relationship or hold a paying job that you can get behind do not have to do this! I think about this pretty often- how you're probably treated as adults by now, while I cry like crazy like I'm 16 after my family grills me and then grills me about why I don't seem to like the grilling! Maybe I can find somewhere to give me a residency to clean up this blog into sections and try to make it actually visitable by people, and like interactive sort of --- like buildable-upon by subject matter.But probably I can't and I'll be alone forever, unemployable, unmatriculated, and a source of concern to family members until their death or mine. I should soon start analysis and I know the analyst doesn't do much talking but we are going to have to talk about how to stop my family because I know they are trying to be nice and it's well intentioned. Believe me I know that. But it has to stop. I need to be treated like an adult. It kills me more than I realize. I seriously seem to have an ulcer, and I don't even know how upset I am until I am literally crying my eyes out (at least my lenses). It isn't fair. I can't answer for myself every time I see them.

Internet addiction

2011-09-17T11:51:00.000-07:00

Delivery.com asks if I love my order so much I can't contain myself - do I want to share on facebook? I think about it because my order has Lox. Am I Jewish? I am as a matter of fact.

Yes

2011-09-17T09:27:00.000-07:00

The altered-to-deadly-sexy version of Aaron Sorkin hitting on me in the kitchen of his theater in my dream last night complimented me on how well I opened a bottle of wine. Pretty much says it all.* Google is doing its very best to force me to link my gmail and yahoo accounts and I refuse on the basis of not trusting this kind of pressure. What about in an "emergency?" they ask.What if my email accounts weren't linked? Well, I wouldn't be able to get on the blog if I had gmail on. In an emergency, you might not have this blog.

I cut this straight off someone's Ok Cupid Profile

2011-09-08T07:35:00.001-07:00

The most private thing I’m willing to admitThere's not much I won't admit to...I stayed a virgin until marriage (yeah, that was a huge miscalculation) so I'm no all-star in the sack. And I don't work out. So if my tongue and modest penis don't do it for you, fuck someone else.

pinot noir

2011-09-06T20:38:00.001-07:00

for all that you are

wine

2011-09-06T20:37:00.001-07:00

every time

2011-09-06T19:05:00.000-07:00

Time back in Pennington
The car with Stephanie
gearing up
to watch over this trainwreck
as we look forward through some forming tunnel vision
to eventualities
we turn, you should never define,

we exhume what's annoying
how annoying
to gird
to take care somehow anyway

and Ms. Medical Doctor
will be in it with me

and Ben
will do a year at Michigan
hopefully.
He cares about the family.

and I will make a movie in Italy with Madeline.

well

2011-09-06T18:24:00.000-07:00

I wanted to be scanning photographs to here, then I'd long-caption; it's the proto-type for my book idea: "My family bullshit Scrapbook".

But I lost the install cd and the hp website is INCREDIBLY ANNOYING. Where is the actual download? Why won't it let me have it?

Do you know the Jil Scott song "One is the magic number"? What a song.

More soon.

Won't get therapy. Will talk to computer.

2011-08-18T15:12:00.000-07:00

My family is like a song that’s never done singing. That’s what is written on the pad next to my bed right now. I think we’ve had bed bugs for a month here in Queens. I have a problem with my eye twitching if I think a stressful thought, and next up on the menu, in this feast of life, is go talk to the landlord about how it’s letting us out of the lease or legal action. Est-ce que tu have envy? A jalouse?

I’m back from running away to New Jersey after feeling my brain break in half, each hemisphere falling to one side, clunk. I’m sitting out back at 30th Drive now, which looks overgrown and abandoned. (“It looks like a junkyard.” Twitch twitch. That’s not true – it just looks abandoned.) The living room’s full of garbage bags I’ve started spraying quantities of Lysol into. I’ve put two coats of shitty paint on the wood that six weeks ago I hired someone off craiglist to encase my bedroom air conditioner in so that it juts into the bedroom. If I can break the lease, I still won’t be leaving til October 1st, so I might as well make the crooked pine wood sightly.

I asked if you envied me sarcastically, but man were my parents, my Dad and Carol, good to me when I needed them. They were instantly understanding, dispatching me to their home as soon as I cried uncle, and listening as I tried to reason my way back to sanity. My Dad made a London Broil before initiating the how-quickly-can-you-get-work conversation. I’ve said it before, and, let’s say, now, am really going to implement: I should write about my family!

To begin, (you can being anywhere in a song that doesn’t stop, you can begin with a verse from the side of the family that is so functional) I am like my Dad. I went out there on Saturday, after something bad happened. They were in Maine. They have everything, my parents, my Dad and Carol. They have this beautiful home and garden and pool, they have the three of us children and we all love eachother, and Carol’s huge fun famiily comes to visit often and she maintains her house as her very occupation and one of her great pleasures. My Dad works and likes it. He reads things, edits, makes decisions – he was the Chief Medical Officer of a big pharmeceutical company that got bought out and now he travels all over consulting. He understands shit really well but he’s a man so once he thinks he’s understood as much as he wants to, he may ask you a question and then ask you why you’re still talking about something you’ve already told him. When he was done driving back from Maine, getting his stuff out of the car, organizing his mail, and doing a little work, and came to talk to me, it was about 12:30 on Tuesday night. Him “Why are you telling me about this part again? You’ve told me this.” Me: “Well, because of what you asked… wait a sec, you asked… are you annoyed?” beat. “No.”

None of that is exactly how I’m like my Dad although in some ways maybe a little, but I mean, I’m not a Doctor, not a man, not an executive, don’t like some work I do, using my brain, and have my own family I provide a good safe happy life for.

But I do narrate everything I do in the task department and I realized Tuesday so does he. As he was trying to be ready to sit down to talk with me about how to get out of this existence I’m in, of endless compulsion and untenable maintenance, he narrated everything he was doing. At the supermarket the next day, we searched for corn that met three conditions, white, straight columns of kernals, and no dapples on the kernals. Everything is out loud. “Maybe if I can find a baby eggplant, then an eggplant. What else do we need? Eggs. They’re over here…” When we got back and I mentioned to them that I’d just discovered that my Dad and I both do this, Carol said she’d never notice my father do it, only me. But I know it is both of us – at least to each other. It was sort of amazing, us walking around the house, “I’m starving// Cottage Cheese// yes” Him “Oh but you’ve got to eat becaue we still have to go shopping, it’ll be two hours… and I have to// you like cottage cheese// good go get that and eat that.” Is this all obvious information to you, reader? I suppose I mean that it is something I am thankful for, to see that my Dad and I in a room together is two people riding some kind of very close frequency of thought. It isn’t genetic, but it is because he is my father. I’m grateful.

Are you gathering that from my father I perceive high expectations but reallly they come from me, really from a fairly natural comparison I’m doing. And how yet, how could I have become like my father in more ways than the way we think, sense of humour, and how we operate a little minutely with the intelligence sometimes and are compatible, given that I didn’t grow up in his house as much as my mother’s?

I mean there’s not a duck I have in a row right now. I have been trying to avoid my mother, her calls. I’m going to backtrack now.

(One day, I’ll try to go back to a long ago changing movement of this song, which would be my birth. What I’ve larned about my family before then is an earlier movement. Some nights I smoke pot and like to think so far back it’s the birth of the universe. Astronomers today think they know how to build a telescope that could let you watch that. So they say.)

Let’s say a year ago, though it may be more, My mother and I took a train together from her house into the city. Taking a train together has always been a very bad thing. Be prepared: I’m the same classic idiot in all conversation with my mother. Soprano Alto idiot – I sing idiot.

My mom: Well I think I am going to sell the house and get a one bedroom in Brooklyn.

Me: I thought you were looking in Philadelphia.

My mom: Oh well we thought or a place maybe in Philadelphia – I’ve just been getting a lot of acting work there. But now I am really thinking of like a one bedroom in Brooklyn.

Me: (laughs a little) Alright. So you sell the house in Pennington. Somehow. Sell all the stuff. (My mom and step-dad, whom I always call “Dad” when speaking to my mom, [but always call Carol, Carol] are what you might call light hoarders. Their pantry has food, but really a more apt word is “matter” in cardboard boxes from, literally, ten and twelve years ago, ordered from telemercials as part of a “diet”.) What happens to Dad? Where’s he gonna go?

My mom: He’s there.

Me: (this is not a very happy laugh I have) Don’t you think you’ve, don’t you think he’s kind of used to living in a house now. Don’t you think you’ll miss the space?

My mom: We’re moving. We don’t need that house anymore, and it isn’t going to get a lot of money. It won’t go that far in Brooklyn.

Me: (God’s own tragic idiot) I mean I get it, my Dad is moving to New York again…

My mom: Where?

Me: The Upper West Side. I haven’t seen it; I’m sure it’s nice. I mean… well, you know, you have to work within what you have and yeah, I bet you’re right, you’d have to sell the house to…

My mom: Your father has that kind of money? Is he selling his house?

Me: I mean that’s why I understand what you’re talking about… I mean that’s what they’re trying to balance. That house in
W--------- is beautiful. You know that. It would be nice if they didn’t have to right away sell it. (If I could program myself like a cyborg, I would weld my mouth shut when I’m with my mother and I’d need a complicated key to release and unseal.)

My mom: Well we don’t have that kind of money at all.

Me: Sorry to hear that. Let’s forget about my Dad. All I’m saying is I know that apartments in New York aren’t cheap. I spend my whole salary and more living here.

My mom: I’m just feeling so sorry for you.//

Me: Don’t be sorry for me// there’s no reason to be s…

My mom: So at Tishman Speyer you’re like, a secretary? Is that right?

Me: Yup that’s right. I mean I try to do applications to writing programs, and to write period. So then I can kind of feel it’s a means to an end.

My mom: You know I have to tell you, we can’t pay for you to go to a writing program.

Me: Well that’s a disappointment since, you know, I’ve heard you say that Grampy left money for his grandchildren’s education. I’d sort of hoped that I could be helped to pay for a graduate program. But if that’s true, then I guess I’ll do what everyone else does, you know, if I even get in.

My mom: If your father has so much money he’s moving to Manhattan… and you say it’s a nice place? A nice place on the Upper West Side? You know. We come from different values. Grampy paid for my graduate education.

Me: Well but , well Grampy was your step-father…

My mom: Alexis! Pop Pop didn’t have money like your father has. (I’m just loving what the people behind us on New Jersey transit get to be entertained with here)

Me: I’m just saying. Forget it, I mean I need to tell you//

My mom: I’m feeling so sad for you. What about his other children? He’s paying for….

Me: Stop feeling sorry for me. I need to tell you my Dad and I really get along and he’s always told me I should never feel like I can’t do something I’m sure I want to and should do, not to say need. I’ll never have to really worry. Most people don’t have that. And. the economy just crashed.

My mom: I know. We’ve lost everything. But now… Andrew?

Me: Mom. Mom – you’re really (sigh) Listen to me. You, uh, ought to know I’m the eldest, so it’s unclear what the younger children are doing, what graduate programs if graduate programs, but Andrew works. He lives in DC, he thinks about his future, and he works and he’s doing great. They paid for college and he paid a quarter of Rochester’s tuition for me, just like you did…

My Mom: I just know how much money he has and when I think of it I think….

Me – blah blah people my age, the economic times we’re in, this is how it’s done, you get loans, go into debt, I’ll probably rethink things a bit now that I know graduate school isn’t a paid for thing. Her – moving herself to tears over my neglect. Me, getting off the train reiterating that I’m not neglected. Her- not listening trying to figure out what train to take to her audition and I tell her. The next morning I write her an email saying she has to know I really love and appreciate my dad. Her reply email: “Good because I was really starting to feel sorry I chose him to be your father.” Me in reply to that “That’s my existence I think you’re talking about. Please relax.”

So, now, are you ready for more? I come to find out that aforementioned Pop Pop, who dies during a time period in which my mother tells me I was dead to her (per my understanding, now, today, there is a new girl in my body) while I was in college, left lots of money to my other three siblings on my mothers side. When Pop Pop died, my mother didn’t tell me. A neighbor called me and told me the news and that I should call my mother. My mother started going to psychics and mediums at this point to try to get messages from Pop Pop. At one point my grandmother, her mother, got her a session with Sylvia Brown as a gift to help with her grieving. I graduated and moved to LA and received some weird litigation about his money advising I waive any right to anything. I did so gladly. For what it’s worth, when I caled her at the neighbors intruction to tell her I’d heard about Pop Pop and was sorry, she told me that Pop Pop really thought I was spoiled, unfortunately. (Obviously these things my mother says to me are similar to things she said to me when I was little thing. If you know, reader, how cute I am, this should break your heart. [Oh how possibly pointless this telling is!])

SO – on a trail in Virginia, taking a hike before a five star meal at The Inn at Little Washington, to celebrate my brothers 25th birthday with my Dad’s family, my step mother asks how my relationship is with my mother and so I tell her this. She is horrified. Oh goodness – here, information: if you didn’t know, all my brothers and sisters are half brothers and sisters on one side or the other. I’m the only child my parents had before divorcing and remarrying.

The problem with this writing is here we come to kind of a point and songs with points… welll… so sue me. Ha ha.

So I tell my step mother on the trail about all this. That I am trying to break away from my mother as much as I can, that I can’t believe after thirty years, our relationship is still defined by how I’m not really her daughter unless we both regret my father.

While we are sitting on course three at a round table with our third or fourth wine pairing that night, Carol beside me to my right, my father to her’s, then Adrienne, Andrew, and Rebecca, his girlfriend, on my left…. we are talking about how when we were little kids we played a game with Dad called Roughhouse. Roughhouse began with roughhousing on the master bed. On this you jump continuously, and get roughhoused a bit, picked up and made dizzy and tossed back on sometimes. Once Andrew was big enough and I was about ten, and eleven, Roughhouse came to have objective and strategy. Continuous jumping on the bed stayed “home.” But the objective was to get out the door. All the being tossed around came with being prevented from the door. But also my father took the knob off the door one day. Also his old socks in the laundry might get shoved up your nose, also, you might be put into the dumped out hamper and dangled over the railing. Carol, of course, fled the scene when rough house began and of course said someone was going to get hurt. And then a rule was proposed that roughhousing wasn’t actually done UNTIL someone was hurt. At some point I know I told Andrew that how this all worked was that my father was “The Volcano” and that we were “warriors”.

As we recalled all this, Carol leaned in to me and said, “I’m so upset about what you told me earlier. When your mother talks about your father, I want you to remember this.” I said “Don’t you think I do?” I mean, I was remembering it all out loud right then.

When Carol was finished with a morning of housework and came to sit with me in the living room of the house in W------ this past Wednesday, she said “Are you talking to your mother? Why don’t you ask her to help you?”

And I had to tell her that as a matter of fact, as much as I’ve been trying not to, she had called the day before, when I was in W------- alone, waiting for them to return from Maine.

And now I’m at the top of page 6 single spaced, just got an email that STARAMA is a finalist for a play devlopment program, and must take the journey for wine.

Once I’m finished this song that never stops singing, I assure you, more than anything I want to tell you how keenly I’ve been thinking of the late nineties and being in high school in a time that is past.

So

2011-05-22T19:35:00.001-07:00

I need: a textbook, characters

Time

2011-05-22T18:20:00.000-07:00

Another reason The Civil War documentary is fascinating is the speed of the leaps in technology bringing us to today.

I am excited because I think I know where I'd like to start writing something new, a little, an inkling, and that is really really exciting. The pilot I sometimes talk about - I apparently have no desire to work on it. ( I still have to. I will.)

My tentative name for my new play is "death wish". That's the idea I think it's centered on and I want to set it in now and in Civil War Days. Ambitious is one of my good traits... we hope. ;-)

No, it is really exciting to have a big idea, barest thoughts of some kind of frame. And something I want to research. It's a relief- I was just starting to worry and be impatient for that.

What do I know about how people lived during the Civil War?

The World

2011-05-21T12:14:00.000-07:00

I am watching the Ken Burns Civil War documentary on Netflix streaming. It makes you think.

This documentary has fascinated me completely any time I've watched it. I'm on Episode 3 now - Emancipation proclamation might arrive by the end of it? I'm not sure how far off it is.

Watching the lead-up to the War, "The Cause", secession, the beginning, Manassas, Shiloh this really grabs me: War is people killing one another. That is what it *is* right?

When it comes to the Civil War, before the first battles are fought, the men write that they are having the time of their lives. When they are learning to sleep in heavy dew while marching 25 miles and rubbing sticks together and whatnot, they feel more alive than ever.

Then they experience "the horrors of war" and they use this phrase "the horrors of war" because they know, as one must, that war is horrible, and this is the phrase used for it.

There are at least 12 reasons that this documentary is fascinating. But what gets me amazed early on is just war itself - we're at war now in a very very different way.

See.. I keep wanting to veer off in a hundred directions of comparison but I won't. What I'm trying to say is we still do this. We still have ideas all around and about war, and excitement by the meaning it could give dying, I think. But when we talk about it, if we talk about it, we let it, "War", become something else. It is people killing each other. It is "the horrors of war". Predictions for the civil war imagined it would be over very quickly. Well why would it be? Some things never change. When two sides fight against each other, killing, 'til one has to surrender and one must be called the victor, why would that ever end quickly and why would it be anything but horrifying bloodshed?

The Civil War also has you, or has me anyway, from the start because slavery was evil. Then you have people living in that world before telephones and so on. These people believed in God. So the stakes are so.... meaningful? I'm not doing so great at writing this.

I suppose I'm saying that the Civil War makes you think about Religion too. Makes you think about life and death and principles. And slavery. I'm not sure "we" could ever be done repairing for slavery if we wanted to and tried to. And the "we" is funny there because I'm an Eastern European Jew, but I'm also a white American... you see how I could go off in many directions here...? But you don't know why you were born you and not a slave, in America and not Bahrain, and so on. We'll never know that. We as in people. And I think also we, as in people, will never quite remember that to go to war is to court your death. That idea is just too exciting.

I could go on all day now about tragedy but I'm going to stop.

Lots of love,
Alexis

Sing it with me!

2011-05-03T11:04:00.000-07:00

I Love Unemployment. (apologies to the Movement, but should be sung to tune of "We Shall Overcome")

They should do an interview segment with me on Fox News in the morning so heads can really get hot. Me: "I think I deserve this."

lol. at my own self. ha.

xo

is

2011-02-28T11:57:00.000-08:00

following crazy dreams... ... Dude. Ah, I can't just write to this like a diary. Mostly it's raining, I'm on facebook too much. Happy, happy indulging in crazy and happy, but yet happier that Spring is going to come. Always slightly concerned... you know. :-) xo

The topic of the moment- porn, performance, gender, feminism

2011-02-02T09:53:00.000-08:00

Lately my little brother is this disaster of inertia and litany of the world's ill. He would sort of like to live on a farm.

And lately I have been watching some great comedy online and reading magazines and papers. On youtube I went from exhaustive Doug Stanhope listening to Doug Stanhope & Alex Jones to Joe Rogan & Alex Jones to Joe Rogan.

Oddly enough, on the phone the other day my friend C said when it came to just getting money and attention for living your life (a concept I've since heard referred to as Nietzschian, but sub "as art" for money and attention - go figure) a reality show was probably the only way. And I replied "Yeah - the idea of ever doing that in any way went out the window for me when I saw Fear Factor." I had certainly forgotten the host of that show's name but it's Joe Rogan. And he's not the owner of Girls Gone Wild Corporation but he "hosted" a video at some point apparently. ("Host" in quotes because what a funny word for that. I can't but hear Joel Grey interject in "Wilkomen" "I... Am... Your... Host.") As did Doug Stanhope who mentions it and mentions it as something stupid he agreed to take the money for. They apparently hosted "The Man Show" together in the nineties. Well all I remember about that is bikini girls on a trampoline. That's all.

Maybe I'm making a short story long (I'm not.) The thing is this: I like Howard Stern. I think Doug Stanhope's fantastic. Joe Rogan is who I'm focused on though. Joe Rogan is a buff asshole. A Boston type. He tells people off like an asshole but he does so when he's technically in the right. As a feminist I really don't have a problem with being an asshole- see, this is actually my point whenever I get to it. One of my favorite blogs turned out to have a post called "That's Your Boyfriend: Joe Rogan": it's a joke because JR taped himself telling off a kid who like clockwork lingers around him when he's naked in the gym locker room and posted it. The idea being that there are hundreds of other ways to intervene in a creepy situation like that that don't involve making it public at all. I'm always willing to be a full disclosure person though and full disclosure- he is hot and he has cool things to say and he's so vain it's sick. That's the kind of thing that gives me a little sexual chemistry rush. So burn me on a pyre.... probably.

Here's what disappoints me:(The World. haha) I give people, male or female, license to be douchebags when they have something to say. I really love to hear intelligent people think uncensored. So Doug Stanhope and Joe Rogan on Alex Jones or Joe Rogan talking about what he experiences on hallucinogens, the epiphanies about consciousness- how dolphins totally have advanced consciousness (I think about this too!!) - that is all great. And all I want, all I want is for anything to come up on a google search of "Joe Rogan Feminism" is within 50 pages to get one thing other than an amateur video of him drunkenly telling off some feminist of renown(? who is she?) who approaches him oddly and has the arrogance only someone who moves in academia can. I mean you can guess what this video is and what are the comments are. "Femisits are morons Joe Rogan Rules he destroyed that bitch" blah blah.

The fact is, Joe Rogan is this cocky jerk who can talk about consciousness and believes as I do that if you were born into another persons circumstances, chemical and otherwise if there is an otherwise, you would be that person. Having heard him say this, I am unwilling to believe that he wouldn't be able off the top of his head to say something kind of interesting... you know, maybe, kind of, about Girls Gone Wild- what I mean is to think a little specifically on having a vagina circumstances. Why not? The discussion isn't there and that's where I'd like to see a change.

In my fantasy there is a woman with a talk show. She is savvy and as funny and interesting as a man. It's ridiculous that I have to qualify that. There are as many of these as each other on both sides. Of course. The woman could be a little arrogant as some (almost all) men who fit this description are or she could be a little more modest, self deprecating. That's a harder line to take. She could be comic and eviscerating but also have a pathos for terrible things and cruel fortune. She could attribute some of that pathos to being a woman. Or she could think otherwise. But she would have a platform to talk about ideas with other iconoclasts and she would bring feminism, bring attitudes about women and their circumstances into the conversation. Can you imagine?

I could write a play of my fantasy and that isn't much of a play. Obviously she has to be strung up or something at the end. That damned requirement of dramatic arc.

I did find a great blog when I was trying to find anybody's thoughts on pop culture and current based feminism. (It's called "Rage against the ManChine)This woman makes great points but she can't stand to watch Bill Maher, for example, given the way he looks right through women sometimes and has stuff to say about masculinity being lost that is so juvenile and offensive. It is profoundly annoying. She's right. Meanwhile, super annoyingly for me, it' a perspective i am willing to listen to sometimes - I'm that hungry for people to be out front with how they treat gender or how they seethe if they seethe, which is no way to go, but I'll even take it. I mean this is part of the inequality that is really rough. I'll listen to men be unfair about women. I want to hear what people really think. And I'm so used to a male perspective that I'll even laugh when a man gets something silly about women right understanding that perspective. I don't see the reverse happening often- or at all really in a public forum - not from heterosexual men.

Take Bill Maher's gripe about "pussification" - one of my favorite things I've heard from Camille Paglia is this great point that car mechanics treat her with an idea in mind somewhere that she's desirable, "feminine" for lack of a better word that makes her life better while her male peers unsex her and that sucks (obvious paraphrase). Right there with her. But she gets to be "divisive" in her community while Maher gets to be a public figure.

The last thing is that all the magazines now are on about porn and it affecting men's libidos. Oh so NOW we can talk about porn affecting us. It isn't "humorless" to obsess when you're a man and your dick is soft for sex!!!!! (p.s. I put "performance"in this post's title because Peggy Orenstien's new book apparently says that that's kind of what younger girls today are going for rather than experiencing sex for pleasure. So that's good that's out there. Thanks Peggy O.)

So now I am just testifying. :-) The porn thing is really interesting and somewhat horrifying. And what I am dreaming of is a forum where aside from asking about Climate Change and The War on Drugs and the hot topics for social onlookers, they're also asked, "So given that you hosted The Man Show, what do you think about that? What do you hear from women? Thoughts?" I know... it's too crazy to imagine.

XOXO
me

The bar

2011-01-14T12:25:00.000-08:00

and Hugo.

I took myself to the bar the other night. I saw my friend Hugo. I'm really struck by him.

To just describe myself... to just do that... well I haven't had a group of friends in a long time. We could identify college as the last time, but even in college I felt that the fact that I did was only because of the set-up of college. When the last semester arrived, we in my group of friends spoke about not being able to call each other up and go to Blockbuster anymore. That did seem like it would be a transition, but I was excited to leave Rochester, not too concerned about the Blockbuster problem because I wanted to drive across the country and be free- I liked my friends but I wasn't in love with them. There was one night I suddenly cried a lot, timed wrong with the night my friends cried a lot. And I was sad driving back to NJ with all my things, especially as I'd had to say goodbye to my roommate, who was one I did love and would miss being so close to. It was nothing a shower didn't pretty much put to bed though- there was a lot of possibility ahead, Los Angeles, where a friend awaited, and sex: I was enthused about sex in LA. (and love, lest you be confused that I was ever any good at that differentiation)

The most important group of friends to me then was still from High School days though, a memory of a group, the friends I met at summer smart camp. This is still that group that I remember such a purity of love for, love that I knew even then I'd always be missing. For me, 14- 17 years old was the time when everything was right for the sensation of discovery, discovery of friendship and love- of delight that I thought people were interesting and wonderful and they thought I was too- which made it so special. It seems to me that in later parts of life, like now, some alcohol facilitates some "hanging out with people" being fun and funny and kind. It is not the same thing by any stretch, but when too isolated, I'll put on some clothes and go to the bar. It's best to bring a book or something because I do not have a best friend in Astoria who is single, available for impromptu bar outings. (sidenote: some people must have this and something about them must be different but I'm not interested enough to figure out what that is. It's obviously elemental and therefore irrelevant.) That this is where I live makes it acceptable however. Because I'd really feel a bit a fool - or it's just too outsize an effort to the casualness of the deisred effect, putting on clothes and makeup and going to sit at a bar alone in Manhattan to see what happens. It has to be Astoria.

The other important element of this discussion is I think that I've been living alone for 5 years, or maybe 6.

So about five years ago, I was in a shittier apartment, but still near the same bar I went to four nights ago. Then as now, I went there from time to time, alone. It's usually months between visits, then and now. But perhaps five years ago, there were probably months where I went more than twice, less than five times. I didn't feel "in" with the regulars and I think I did contemplate that thing from the sidenote above- as in, why can I not joke around with these hip bar people? Why am I not a bar regular up to speed with all these freinds? Not excessively though because even then the answer was who knows; I'm just not.

But anyway Hugo lives in Astoria. Hugo's a regular. Hugo's in some kind of pornographically named punk band he only speaks of to relentlessly denigrate . Hugo stops in a few times a night in between doing stuff with musicians and walking dogs.

Five years ago I was wasted and he walked me home to my shithole.

Four nights ago, I was sitting with my book and when Hugo sees me his look of recognition is *so nice*. He comes over and says hi, says goodbye before he goes, asks if i'll still be there in two hours. I was still there two hours later and he's not drinking these days, just drinking tea. But I sat with him and he seemed, well happy to see me. The point of this writing is that there's such uniqueness to this. The point is my struckness, to let you in on the point if you're confused. Hugo is a funny guy. We were talking about stuff. I asked if he ever wanted kids, knowing the answer, ready to laugh. He said "GOD no - at the most I might like to scotch tape two dogs together and dress them in children's clothes and sneak them into things." ? hahaha.

I said yeah, well, it's really nice to see you too and I like this bar because I don't have a go-to friend in Astoria so I just come here alone and it's always sort of okay, but I'm not a regular, I'm not a regular anywhere. Hugo was like "That's so true! I've never seen you any way but here alone!" He then said it was kind of awesome, that for all he knew I murder people by day. He asked if I don't really have female friends. I told him no not at all, I primarily have female friends, but they don't live here. We made plans to go to Macy's the next day.

I texted in the morning and no one wanted to go to Macy's but he texted back asking if I sing and then sending me this song "gee baby" to listen to and we texted back and forth about it and later I met him, which meant two days in a row, at the bar to drink tea. I only had a credit card: while I looked for it, he looked at me like what's-wrong-with-you and asked if I thought he couldn't buy me a tea. I wasn't trying to offend him of course. I'm sure he can afford to buy me the tea. It appears that actually, the concept of a friend has become so abstract and unreal that I feel, basically, a thousand times more awkward having a cup of tea with a funny friend than being hit on- as is, I think universally, what happens between me and a male at a bar any other given time. I mean not always hit on, but the gist of the possibility of a conversation, underlying it, me and any male, would be either that we're becoming attracted to each other in a way that's going to maybe mean sexual congress, or we're just wasting time with words for lack of any other place to put our attention, not becoming friends. We are not now or becoming friends. Except me and Hugo.

It's very cold here in New York this week. I asked Hugo to walk me home. He said yeah but could he get his headphones from his place first because he has this "attention span thing", he "can't stand to be quiet with his thoughts" such as he would be alone on the walk back. I laughed and said "Do you want to talk about that more?"

When we got here, I said he could come up if he liked, but he didn't, wanted to start an early day the next day. it was much the way he seemed totally reluctant to end up at my apartment extendedly when we first met five years ago when he walked my wasted ass home.

This morning he texted to ask if I've seen a certain werewolf movie. I have not and I (not he) suggested watching it sometime. My point is this is the uniquest thing I know. A male friend. I like it so much. And of course, if he continues to be the only non-sleaze in NYC I know who behaves this way, it'll be the most romantic thing I know as well.

It all reminds me of a zine KFR's first girlfriend made and sent me in high school before they broke up and etc. It was an illustrated guidebook of ways to get your crush to be more than a crush. Suggested things to say each got an illustrated page. The page I remember was "Wanna come over and watch Star Wars?"

My point is that at 30, one of the things that pleases me most in this world is being given the respect, for lack of a better word, I was given once by contemporary boys of 15, 16, and 17 years old. The lack of presumption, the absence of an obvious strategy, even strategy hinted at with irony - the irony doesn't change the unoriginality and unspecialness of what it implies.

When I graduated from college, adult hitting on seemed like it was going to be a pretty good time. From my vantage point now, it turns out I really just want to be asked if I wanna watch Star Wars more than anything.

love you,
Alexis

I am sick

2011-01-03T08:02:00.001-08:00

and I have lost my little beanie dog. I don't understand it. I had him yesterday, but when i woke up to throw up last night I couldn't find him anywhere.

Moe on this soon.

I was doing better yesterday so went on a date. The guy was gay - like queer eye gay - with a lisp and wrist-y mannerisms and eye rolls. PERHAPS he prefers women EVEN SO but he's got a tough row to hoe because women do not prefer classic gay guys for boyfriends. It was lame. I had a glass on wine. At 5am, threw it up.

Contrary to how it may seem, I'm alright with life. :-)

XOXO
A

A Christmas Story

2010-12-20T10:19:00.000-08:00

I can blog to procrastinate. Being unemployed is still great. I've calmed down. I need to work and I'm blogging but perhaps I also need to consider my beliefs and my life. What a serious girl. Serious is my crazy.

The holidays are something I have to compartmentalize. It's not because I'm Jewish - it's because I had such a complicated childhood. I mean, I think that is why I'm so analytical. Anyway, most people are really into Christmas it seems. I approve the most when there is a lot of baking going on (and wine). On my step dad's side there are some close families. At Grandma Betsy's we'd stay with all his brothers and sisters and cousins in Springfield, Illinois, Land of Lincoln. We'd sing and bake and some grownups would go to Midnight Mass. Seriously, his tall gorgeous sisters would sit up late Christmas Eve by the tree singing "The Lemon Tree." One year it snowed three feet of perfect packing snow, but I was sick. As a result of Grandma Betsy's compassion for the awful injustice of that, I got to eat cocoa puffs 'round the clock. I remember hearing jokes from my aunt on my Mom's side about my stepdad's Episcopalian family times vs. our Jewish dysfunctional disasters- which is a Woody Allen bit from Annie Hall and pretty on-the-money.

A friend of mine recently assumed that I forego Christmas somehow, or wouldn't know about Christmas or something, because "You're Jewish!" (My response: "You think I'm a Communist?") In reality I had many Christmases with my stepdad's family in Illinois, and encouraged my younger cousin bed-sharers to listen for hoofsteps and all this. Santa was big in my life for a time, even predating my stepdad's entrance on the scene. (As was Jesus - thanks to Ted Turner and a Sunday cartoon called "Superbook.") Anyway, I wasn't being raised religious, so you have to give a Jewish kid Christmas if they're in public school for goodness sake. I imagine it just happens. :-) I had a lot of questions about the big man and Mrs. Claus, but I got funny answers - "A big telescope." "They try to match the paper a family is using." "Well, really, it's more like Dad and I are his elves." (I could read the writing on the wall but liked the imagination belief inspired.) My step dad relied on Santa heavily as a negotiation tool with my younger siblings which is sort of sick and funny. He relied on two things, sarcasm and Santa, for the discipline of his children and it really didn't work at all. They'd hit each other and scream bloody murder about it. He'd yell: "Hey! Santa is WATCHING" and laugh.

He employed this sarcasm with me too. When he married my mother, I was five. He made a lot of jokes about "Okay that's it; Go get me my belt," and stuff (His father said such things in seriousness back in his day in what I picture as Tom's "A Christmas Story" childhood). Tom would NEVER have hit me with a belt but I was five and didn't find his humor at my expense so funny at all. There was one day I was punished in the Cafeteria at PS 158 and made to go stand on a perp line with BAD 6th GRADE BOYS for a shaming before hundreds. His delight at the humor of this and support of the principal and her methods was not very understandable to me. When we moved to New Jersey and I hated it, I was unhappy with him. We did a thing called "Indian Princesses" to improve our relationship.

The main way he drove me crazy was that he devised this punishment where I couldn't talk at the table for half an hour or something. And I would basically cry and that got a lot of headshaking disbelief and delight from him. "Crying!? It's been five minutes!" I don't know why I'm thinking about myself as a child so much. I guess it's unemployment and clearing my mind. :-) This Indian princesses story is funny though if you want to bear with me. (why?)

So we do this Indian Princesses thing. He is Tall Timber and I am Little pine cone. Girls and their dads go around town doing crafts at eachother's houses and wearing feathers. Pretty fucking cute.

And then there is a winter retreat weekend to Camp Mason in Blairstown. It's the statewide Indian Princesses gathering and our tribe are all sharing a cabin. I am seriously pissed at one Tom, my stepdad. Children aren't as hard to analyze as adults. I'd say this retreat must have been timed with my first winter in New Jersey and a seven year old's grasping sadism towards Tom was born of not liking NJ one bit and taking his jokes very personally. I hated New Jersey and it wasn't funny!

So the first afternoon we have to rehearse a fable play that we'll perform at dinner that night for all the other tribes. There is a wart hog on the character list. "That's you." I tell my stepdad. "You will play the wart hog."

I didn't like, really, to be so mean. Deep down I felt the same heat in my person that would come with welling tears. Tom and the other dads were good about my (completely Tom focussed) sneering. The other dads laughed it off with Tom. So it was fine. I continued to be just bitchy enough that we could move on with things.

I think I thought it was a pretty big deal. My attitude. Now I realize a mean seven year old is a lot funnier to an adult than she is powerfully scarring.

So Tom played the warthog and I ignored him in the cabin. The next day was so much fun. We went sledding. I was not angry at Tom that day, but I was obsessed with sledding. I ran off with Aaron who was there with his Dad and his tribe of Indian Princes. He wanted to show me another hill. Tom freaked out when I didn't come back up the hill, so he ran down it, falling, and seriously breaking his arm. Well, I felt terrible. Aaron's dad took Tom to the hospital and I went back to the cabin with the other dads and girls.

I wouldn't have been surprised or felt anything but the guilty and deserving party had they then commenced an inquisition into how I had broken Tom's arm. I imagine I was probably asking Jesus and Santa to forgive me even though neither were real. I was trying to steel myself to confess the kind of terrible person I knew that I was to the assembled cabin of community fathers and girls my age with dignity and without tears, but I think I failed, and cried incoherently, unable to explain what I had done - making him the wart hog and hating him yesterday and now he probably thought I didn't like him, as he was screaming out in pain at the hospital.

I broke Tom's arm.

The other fathers assured me this wasn't true. He would be fine. They distracted me and I had the finest night I've ever. So much hot chocolate and such a grand party we had in the cabin.

Tom came back to the cabin around four or five and told me he was fine and I mumbled a little about how much fun we had while he was gone.

His arm was in a cast and a sling and we were dropped off. I ran up to the door to explain things to my mother. She was absolutely horrified.

A Christmas Story of everbody dealing with everything in the holiday spirit. :-) Sometimes people do right. Life has charms.

2010-12-15T02:07:00.000-08:00

It's 5:00 am.

A cab ride to Queens at 4:30 is... at 4:30am New York is so... manageable. I mean not quite. That's not quite true. It's only how I feel. Every building still has lives beyond accounting in it. Nothing has changed. Only the time of day. Of night. But from lower west to chelsea to drop off Jen over and up 6th and then over to third moves so fast and quiet and there it all is There's old midtown, a cold, arted place, empty squares, loose snow, and we're over on third now and here is the start of the bridge. Cocaine, you have me lucid. Hello New york. I've done nothing wrong.

Everything is good right now, for what it's worth, which I suppose is very little, but drugs are okay once a year, once every seven months. i like to be lucidly able to feel that all is alright right now though. I don't feel it's bad.

I do feel a revolution of some kind must be near. I do wonder why it can't be like the sixties, not that I was there, but i am fascinated. But I don't find mushrooms. I find theater. I find this endless trying... that is theater in New York. And I like it - i don't care. Does that make sense? i don't care that it asks me so little. No free love. No anything. Just we know. That we are trying. to be a thing that can't be nostaligic or fails.

Oh wow - nonsense I write. Yoda I am. :-)

I look real pretty in the mirror. I am my own everything you know. I don't have good steady sex. I have hot baths and lying on my back. I have home at 5 am, look in the mirror, I'm pretty. I really have everything to give. I really am all of it myself. I feel unafraid now. I feel I'll put it in plays. I feel I'll put it in effort. I feel I will try to moisturize and this package i am will survive. Something terrible could happen. Any time. But I'll just keep having fun. Seeking out what New York is being me, living not in manhattan and not in Brooklyn, partying the theater party. Loving who reaches out and asks, lighting design nerd or beautiful Nick B who I will never because he has a lovely girlfriend.

And with a little of the non-sixties drug, that's alright. it's not falling into a heap of love. That's not the spirit of the times. It's staying out as late as we can. It's putting the sloppy drunks in a cab. It's being happy to get out of corporate. Writing. Applying. Lazy and beautiful and able to write. Big eyes and able. Tonight it's all alright. We deserve to know we're alright 21st century disaster children.

X

Wow

2010-12-14T09:37:00.001-08:00

Some real shit goes down upstairs about 1:00am-3:30am some nights. I paced around listening to their argument last night. it was monumentally stupid and upsetting. Now that it's 12:38pm and lots of coffee in my system I feel sorry for the poor girl. " Kept awake, I was pretty mad at her too for letting this fellow know where she lives. They go: "Look at you!" "No, No Look at you!" They hit each other last night. I wasn't sure, but later they were arguing about who hit whom. But from 2:00 on it was the man doing this horrible working himself up sobbing "Don't do this to me! Please please..." I believe it was "don't go" She's on the lease though so WOW SO DYSFUNCTIONAL AND KEEPING ME AWAKE.

I guess I buy earplugs because I'm not comfortable going up with a cup of tea? I don't know this person at all. My neighbor tells me she's divorced and she's Spanish, so when she met her when she was moving in she was with her whole family. That's all I know - and the upsetting "Get off me. Get off me. Don't touch me." content of her terrible fights with her ex-husband? Is this her ex-husband - poor thing? "I've helped you more than your mother ever has!" Man, I want her to get a restraining order. I wish I was going up there with a cup of tea and advice for a restraining order? Does anyone have any suggestions?

I really do feel bad for her. She's got to get rid of him for our sleep.

Pop Culture reporter cont.

2010-12-08T08:27:00.000-08:00

Johnnie Walker Black print ad on subway:

"We only shake hands. We call each other once a month max. I still think you're adopted. And although I'd rather streak across a crowded stadium than tell you this - you're a great little brother."

The idea is that you can give a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black and say this to the giftee in so doing.

A) I would really really appreciate if you would say maximum instead of max, asshole.

B) Let's imagine that this is the dialogue of a character. This character is on "In Treatment" - because he has issues. (Or she. She would be interesting. But let's just keep this literal. The character is a subway print ad. the ad itself is gendered by our preconceptions, but in fact has no gender, is an ad.) "Why," asks Paul "would you prefer to streak than to tell your brother that you think he's been an excellent brother to you?"

"Dude" says the subway print ad.

"Wait- let me just make sure I'm clear about what you're saying," says Paul, "Would you like to streak across the field in front of a stadium of people?"

"NO man!"

"Alright - that's what I presumed. But that would be quite a sensation wouldn't it? I mean how would that feel?"

Subway print ad smirks. Finally,: "It would be embarrassing."

Paul: Ah. What I'm hearing... correct me if I'm wrong but I'm hearing that you'd find it terribly embarrassing to streak across the field but even more embarrassing- am I right?- to tell your brother he's been a great brother. Now... bear with me if you would, you say you and your brother talk at the most once a month, and that you only shake hands. Would you rather express affection with something more like a hug... would you prefer to speak with him more often... do you imagine that you could speak with him about... well, you tell me, what would you like to talk about with him if you could?

Subway print ad: I've gotta go Paul - sorry man. Early tee time. But I've gotta say - sorry man- but people are supposed to want to be like me. I'm an ADVERTISEMENT.

Paul: So what's the point for me then? What am I doing here - we're now aspiring to be unable to express ourselves, embarrassed by affection for even our literal brothers, looking for gifts that say I'd rather go to jail than talk to you but I do sort of like you enough to give you a gift? Boast our distance from our feelings. That's a way people think it's cool to be- is that what you're saying, Advertisment?

Advertisement: Isn't that, like, the definition of cool? Like cooled off- like not warm - warm is goopy, disgusting.

Paul: But look at the world, look at the headlines. Isn't distance from one another the last thing anyone needs? Not to mention it is literally very cold out there...

Advertisemnt: Thus, dude, JOHNNIE WALKER BLACK. Be cool, stay warm.

Paul: My goodness Advertisement -I like that: Be cool, stay warm. Clever and so inoffensive.

Advertisement: You just don't get it.

Paul: Right. Right. Assholes. Life is about becoming a cool asshole. That and money, max.

Advertisement: (sigh) It isn't you Paul.

Paul: I know. i'm going to kill myself tonight.

Advertisement: DUDE YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE MY THERAPIST.

Paul: Hold on a sec.

(Paul unzips his pants and wags his penis in Advertisement's face)

Paul: I like exposing myself. I feel so alone.

Fin.

Pop Culture reporter

2010-12-08T06:50:00.000-08:00

MTV has a show called When I was 17.

It was my intention to joke about how all these people were just 17 yesterday but no--- the episode I just clicked to is actually all old people like myself. People more than 10 years past 17.

Um, Melissa Joan Hart's mom took her to the Limelight. Rapper Flo Rida named himself Flo Rida - and it was perfect because that's a place he likes, Florida, and he flows and was ridin' on all the people - perfect, and Sammi from Days of our lives fell off a horse while exhibiting and got a very small back eye which was gone a week before her audition for Days of Our Lives - perfect.

When I was 17, Advanced chorus had to go sing at some competition near Six Flags Great Adventure. While we waited to perform, Megan and I tried to guess numbers and colors we were thinking of using telepathy. We had enormous success at this and I kept on shrieking at our extra sensory feats of perception. Later, back at school, maybe a week later, Mrs. Corelli told the class, the class called "Advanced Chorus" we would not be asked back as we were too loud and obnoxious. Yet she did not seem to know who was too loud. I don't know if it was true, don't know what the nature of this chorus competition was in the first place, do not think we really weren't asked back. I don't know though, because I was a senior.

When I was 17.

My procrastination

2010-11-29T13:56:00.001-08:00

oh it is so monolithic; it is so epic. I also think it's still, just for the next five hours, within the realm of allowable. I mean to blog now. As if you care, I think I'll kind of ponder quirks of my personality.

And yes, first, what is personality?

Understand, I've been using "okcupid" as my means of procrastination.

Online dating sites tend to feature basically, the Meyers Briggs personality test, but now extended to infinity.

I'm pretty sure I'm like, extroverted, thinking judging feeling or something like that.

but... we've talked about this before. We've talked about everything before. "Which is more romantic: kissing in a tent or kissing in Paris?" Um. Kissing in an airplane when you're scared because of environmental anxiety and anxiety and romance turn out to be a heartbeat alliance. See.. I'm supposed to be at work on my play. :-) but I didn't make it to the coffeeshop. ;-) Dating sites and blog you get!

Enh whatever- I'm just telling you about my life right? Valid. So anyway, I've been real sucked into okcupid and some people are so funny and clever and dark and insane. I forget that I'm looking for love in these internet places and inspect the details of people that are CRAZY.

The crazy people, haha, they implore you: why not? Isn't your mind free? Isn't life LIFE? And my answer is, oh baby, I'll read about you. I don't want to meet you but WRITE. Tell me more Chancellor Foodreallyisn'tthatinterestingtome-Isubsistmostlyonbread. I appreciate that you don't think I should quit smoking.

How weird the internet. I'm not writing to the Chancellor, or Brick_Nipples as he goes by. !

But what I've been doing is turning thirty, home for the holidays, a party hosted by a blog/blogger I'm obsessed with and I was too drunk at (and then so hungover, and now have a cold), thinking about memories a lot, and generationally a bit and therefore I just wanna say, Wow- the internet.

I feel like the answer to how old I am is my step dad worked for Cern and then Fermilab. So when i was five or six I went to Rockefeller University to visit Tom at work and heard the wild "eep" sound and some other sounds and that computers could make noises seemed amazing and like the future. My life was amazing when I was five. Dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum and IBM green-screened machines supposedly telling the scientists data to explain the behavior of sub nuclear particles.

It's a very difference sense of a computer than I have now. I'm not talking about me - I'm talking about the world. I just got a new Macbook Air. It's so light. I can carry it everywhere. I can carry the internet everywhere. It's not a member of our family. But members of our family can show us what they like on it. And there are so many smart people lost in there with you. What I mean is the internet is some big deal stuff. It is science fiction come true, a bit more that the moon landing I think. Brazen statement? I think the way that day to day in America we interect with this system
has a more complex and futuristic meaning than we sent people to the moon? Wait. They're both pretty big deals. Oh god what a genius you have here writing to you. :-D

What if I ever had a point peeps? Hold that thought.

love

Fantastic Time

2010-11-22T12:55:00.001-08:00

Funny that my last post was "musta done something wrong" as I just had a weekend that was a real "must have done some things really right."

Speaking of which, it's really important that I write. Today I'm just feeling good and smiling about the trip. I meant to get it all together today theoretically but I might get my excercise by procrastinating writing hours dancing to the cd I got from the street band. Gym n errands tomorrow.

If you're getting real neurotic in New York, I recommend New Orleans.

love
Alexis

Okay

2010-11-14T13:16:00.000-08:00

I actually did something very wrong in my life and there is a punishing force. As I was finishing that last post a cockroach fell from the ceiling of the kitchen right past my head and he's HUGE and when i stood up going oh my god oh my god it ran away and as I looked for what to kill him with I lost him. AAAAAAAAAAAAA It was huge!!!!!!!!!!! Oh my god oh my god oh my god. :( :( :( !

Using the blog as it was intended

2010-11-14T12:40:00.000-08:00

I'm a bit out of sorts. It feels a bit off limits to be worried and sad right now, to write about it, given the extent to which I was convinced and it seems made efforts to convince who might listen that the only thing between me and Happiness was my stupid job, now having been let go.

But lemme tell you I had a hell of a nice night and day after with than handsome smart guy at the bar. And he literally disappeared. He texted over a week ago that he was going out of cell reception for the weekend but still had me on his mind. Since then it seems his phone has been continually actually off. I'm sorry folks but it's a little trying on my spirit. I mean, is he okay? This is why I guess it's good to have a blog. I can do what I want. I can ponder the options*: * He said he was bipolar a bit. Is this his downswing? Completely Off. This is the most likely I guess.

So I should be Glad we had what we had for a night.

The problem with that is, you know, just take deep breaths. I'm lonely and - what's nice right now, typing - is I don't feel *that* bad. I'm trying to tell you how I feel sad, but there is a persistence of happiness in here, in my head I mean. Like I kind of am glad we had what we had for a night. He made me feel beautiful. The sad creeps in when it comes to me being picky. He made me feel beautiful but it's so rare that I let my guard down. It's like I require such a cool charmer. I worry, my friends. I worry there aren't enough of them and the ones who do it well are wont to vaporize.

Thank goodness it's been perfect fall days. But the more lovely the days the more I wonder what happened to him- my international man. We met because he was getting a drink after picking up the last of his stuff from his apartment across the street from the bar. He's just moved, you see, to an apartment which he's renting for $530 a month on the upper east side. He said he'd been to 40 countries. He is having a bit of a crisis because he's 33 and his identity I take it, was something like rockstar world traveller - now he's thinking it might be time to save some money.

So these gorgeous fall days, I've tried to snatch up a few dates from the internet. But... you feel me? Instant chemistry is such a rush. You can't get it again for a little while. Not when it winds up feeling like loss not too long after.

And I know it's dodging a bullet. I know I know. I am attracted to this. It's a pattern and I apologize to the great god of psychology, esp behavioral psychology about that. There's a kind of charisma a guy with an imbalanced repulsion from commitment can do. I'm weak for it. They can go hard with listening and pleasing, smiling and kissing, touching ways of phrasing gratitude. When they leave, you have no idea where they're going. Even if they said it was the upper east side.

I've made him a they. I'll be back on my feet if I'm even off my feet. But, you know, just to whine my whine, the hurt I'd like caressed, soothed, is that it's a real change of shit- no job, days full of potential. I'd like a boyfriend but after "just hitting it off", dates are kind of taxing. I miss the guy I told my life story to who vanished. I can feel it literally taking a lot of energy, telling a date what my plays are like on the way to the wine bar. He's perfectly nice and touches my hand a lot while we both praise Wine for it's ability to aid relaxation. I'm a little out of sorts though.

X
Alexis

Last Thursday

2010-11-09T23:36:00.000-08:00

I had amazing sex all day. Sex that makes you speak from the heart lying on your back. Kisses. Sweetness. Body having. Body loving.

Now I want to sob from my eyes to my stomach. Unemployment is so much potential. I am overwhelmed. I shouldn't have had coffee late in the day as I did. I'm awake at 2:30 am and I want to sob til I'm exhausted. I feel the fierce pressure to make the most of this and I feel like letting go. Can I let go?

In a week and two days I'll fly to new Orleans to celebrate my 30th birthday in style. Right now it doesn't feel true. What feels true is I can't sleep - some local craft beer doesn't sit well with my stomach and "everything is good" "everything is good" Everything is everything, my stomach is churning and where is my community? I need to find it because I feel a little ill with self.

I will find it. I will do everything. I'm doing my birthday with my dad and carol tomorrow. So some anxiety. Everything and nothing to prove. I want to never go back to corporate. I want to be with my friends. I want to cry til I sleep, not look at the tv. Jeez, I don't want to talk about what I'm going to do now with my parents. I expect everyone can understand that. :-) Now sobbing about nothing - come to me... ?

2010-10-27T17:36:00.000-07:00

I am laid off with severance. Um, delight. I get to live in my house. Astoria is cool guys! (Just kidding but living in your house is amazing.) I worked for it. Blog is testimony to how it killed.

Sexiness is a powerful thing. Haha - so go the thoughts! Have you ever thought about how being sexy makes one kind of an advertisement for her lifestyle. People want to be sexy y'all. I know you come here for the truth. ;-)

Hopefully my writing gets better. :)

Love

Of montreal

2010-10-06T16:04:00.000-07:00

is too good to me. I intend to write out their songs to you - I am as good a transcriber as the internet- and I will also tell what they mean when I hear them - and I'll do some word-based describing of music. Yes.

So one of the early songs on the album is coquet Coquet and it starts off guitar shred, driving guitar rhythm, with drums and hot drums embellishment and then the song.

Coquet Coquette... and so on, and then rising guitar hook

to really hard driving rhythm drum cascades driving rhythm

with these lyrics

With you I can only see my blacklight constellations
and all the shit
I don't think I have a language to say

I don't wanna catch ya w some other guy's face
under your eyelids

something must be wrong
you give me emotional artifacts that can find no purchase

and then they go back into the coquet coquet sing song part
la la "my teenage lust for you is so beautiful"

and then back to the blacklight constellations

and the best part

I don't wanna catch you with some other guy's face under your eyelids.

This guy takes knowing you really personally. I love him.

Then soaring glorious electronica.

The next song is great too.

It is called "Godly Intersex"

italics means i have the lyrics wrong, dunno

It's an eighties dance groove, with a clap clap, sort of Joy Division-like electronic mellow comes in but higher in the range

echoey stuff gabaa gabba gabba go

too high too fast
gonna break our necks
everything about you
screamed of godly intersex
nothing of verbs
ber dash
no human tracks
the new forms were germinating
I saw your aureal wax

we dance for victory (most amazing, like just-pinched "ooh!" - and reverbed) we dance for man's misery (might be "Miles' misery) "wooh!" We dance for miscarriages, we danced in robber fuel

you
everybody's stoned about you
everybody's thrown about you
everybody's stoned about you

yeah-haea

repeat

oooo ooo ooo

repeat

a lot of bowiesish piano and beautifully mad style and lyrics detailing singers personal life and feelings

we get to this lyic "can you excuse me from your archetype"

everybody's stoned about you
everybody's thrown about you
everybody's stoned about you

Reaction Time:

How I love them? ha ha my stereo's moved on to the next amazing song and how it says "a zombie's licking your window/ for black body radiation HMMm" and goes all beautiful starlight song with pure meoldia., and says "par-ti-cle wave duality"

Ah so my analysis so far. Darn. I ran out of wine at the wrong moment! The next two songs are the best (on Earth right now) so I should do those, and then the analysis really. the song "Like a tourist" is literally a wonderful drug.

XO

I think I figured it out...

2010-10-04T19:40:00.000-07:00

What you need to know is my Kindergarten teacher at PS 158, Mrs. Berg, had us listen to Bridge Over Troubled Water every blessed day at snack. And God Bless America in the morning.

Back from the wine store

2010-09-29T17:51:00.000-07:00

So the other thing I did today, I assisted such a very rich man. I can't tell you what he owns but think of something from New York. So I did a very good job printing out all of his email and reporting to him on it. He likes me actually and finds me competent so at the end of the day I find him easy to move on from. One thing I really don't agree with though - as in a thing that is happening and is undeniable but I disagree with it: it's easy to see it's not a good idea for people: is the hyper development of these certain areas of Israel. I think plenty of Jews don't. I've seen orthodox rabbis protesting against it on 5th avenue. Zionism. I don't support one people including my people taking things as much as you can from another people.

I suppose it's extreme religion that makes that conflict. But this very very rich person's huge commitment - it's not commitment to the religion - it's to Jews. For them to live in Israel in areas where people already live. It's all so tied up in some policy. I mean people commit their money to it - you should have seen this fund. I mean I am erasing this from my blog shortly.

So that's what I mean about power. This is why I don't argue that hard against conspiracy theory - because it's just one little nuance away. As far as I can tell somehow you don't *need to* conspire. People with a like agenda don't have to talk about it. They're similar and they want the same things. It's money. It's totally weird but true. As much as I don't think money is everything - I just need lots of it so I can never think about it, they love to think about it, feel powerful and strong, get more. This can make some conspiracies very very understandable. It didn't need to be talked about. My point: it's systemic - when things benefit powerful people they happen. The military industrial complex has lasted a while now, since before us. (and nearly all history has had it.) What a great way to send orders - in secrecy.

So tonight I am Glen Beck. I didn't really mean to go there really. But the Israel thing, damn. It's all money if it's all money. That's all I was saying. Do you think I'll ever move to the woods with their money? Why do they not pay me twice as much?

Love
me

Thoughts

2010-09-29T17:03:00.000-07:00

All the time. I need to work on the pilot I found this week but work! - I mail merged and did so many labels today. Computers are amazing. You can fight with them for their knowledge. As I did and discovered the key to an elusive merge. Work! You know what's funny about work lately. We're understaffed, I'm doing awful things. I so need to be challenged though that it gets the energy going in a new way. I never stop thinking. That's why drinking. Drinking makes thinking more fun.

On that note I have to go buy some wine. I've had tons to blog about but the labels got my hands. Ah, to think you could have gotten to know more about my childhood ! and technology! and how we, as in humanity approach knowledge haha maybe after wine. Tomorrow I have to be early! (Seriously though work, and power and money - I could just a write a book if you wound me up and gave me wine. Now wine store!)

XO

Oh

2010-09-11T12:05:00.000-07:00

and any readers, you can be voters! Can you start an admissions essay: "Man oh man do I certainly care about the Arts." ?

I'll find something better... in fact I have an example excellent essay to read right here on tonight's to do list, but haha.

Good morning

2010-09-11T07:50:00.000-07:00

I'm cheering up. (it's no longer the morning) I woke up with strange sad feelings. It is September 11th but that's not why. It was more self involved and same old and Alexis than that. I woke from dreams of my LSAT tutor I crushed on so hard in the Spring. I knew that here it is Saturday and I am meant to get lots done and be happy now. It wasn't working.

In the dream he came down the shore with me but although we had lovely makeout sessions, he never wanted to do anything fun with the rest of us. I found his personal word documents on his computer. Short paragraph - something about his brother. It was a violation so I felt bad about that. woke up.

A few things I want to do here. I want to retire this blog possibly. I'll have to make a new one. It would be called Allergic to pinenuts. It will probably only be about pine nuts.

If I am retring the blog, I will want to write a post of summation. The reason to retire it is that it is nearly four years old and it's not only a blog, it's a blob. I re-read parts of it often. It was more fun at the beginning I believe - I mean it had a cute voice and funny and I was struggling in a mid twenties way. Now it's updates on strange not-entirely-comfortable feelings. How will I review it before retiring it? I don't know yet.

Check out this uncomfortable feeling:

Last night in New York was something called Fashion's Night Out which I think is STUPID. I had to work it though - i.e. pass out gift bags. It was poorly organized and i was annoyed. Free gift bags in rockefeller plaza? How about hands in my face. I was in no mood. People were disgusting me.

See- this is why the blog has to change? This is a long story and as usual what I want to tell you is EVERYTHING - not just last night - the whole week- the whole everything. I recently read a book with this epigram at the start:

If i could, I'd do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, recordsof speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and excrement.... A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point. -James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

I don't know. The past week i've been feeling great. my applications are going to require a lot but my thought is that if i can just be sure to be home and not go out and keep the house kinda organized, it'll all happen and hooray for holding a job and just keep on keeping on I am blessed - don't fall prey to all the ways to feel bad. To thine own self be true and do your applications essentially.

Work events confuse the fuck out of me though. concerning success and celebrity I always felt this cool way that I was realized beyond that. Even in LA - and then a lot of people were always telling me I was "real." My last night feeling wasn't a new feeling honestly. I've always felt this way when work forces me too. Terrible! About all the shit. And the grey area.

I AM INARTICULATE.

Like one of my cowrokers band played Rock Center for this Fashions night Out event. That's a big deal - right in front of Prometheus. I had so much fun earlier this week hearing these incredibly loud little boys play in a shanty bar in Williamsburg. Other coworkers were saying things like that they were proud of him. And someone said "I'm going to cry. It's great to see people doing what they're supposed to be doing."

In short: I can't enjoy Rockefeller Center. I've always sensed that said kid/coworker thinks I'm weird and stupid. Yes! the indy kid. the adorable weirdo of work. I don't know. See- I can't write? What I mean is that I HATE events and I HATE work relationshps and I AM UNFIT for acquaintanceships. I felt so weird standing alone with a drink listening to his band. So many issues. The lights look nice but I was feeling transcendent and then standing in the fucking rink I felt alone and music felt like nothing to me.

It got better. I got a meal with my one co-worker C and I think he might be a-ok. I'm forever going to be paranoid that my coworkers think badly of me. Seriously its a dynamic i can only compare to 7th grade. Then I think - is it because I'm beautiful and the coolest person in the world and it's jealousy? And I still have no idea! And that seems slightly implausible. More than slightly.

Ultimately, my point is (HAHA can you believe I would even SAY THAT) I am dismayed that I still have sad feelings like exclusion and the back and forth of "ah yes, everyone is admiring me" and "oh God - no one is even thinking about me at all" PLEASE! I am old now!

So I wish I'd written earlier in the week when i was writing in my head these lovely poems about the noise and the faces at rockmusic bar. Instead i am writing on this tired blog lamenting the tired feelings of work is so empty. Boo!

Honestly, so glad for fall - i'm feeling pretty great and so happy with most things and only mildly confused and I'm still in love with that tutor who didn't write back to my email about inception and is 23 or something? haha, no.

Humanity-wise we have no excuse not to be becoming so amazing. Oh- I have to write to Lewis Black today! that's right.

Sorry for this! XOXOXOXOXO
A

Who

2010-09-01T18:15:00.000-07:00

could possibly want to know what's going on with me? Lots of people. I just don't want to tell you how I am. You must figure it out for yourself gentle.

It's time to write. It's time to revise. And get in shape- smoke less and work out and start buying food from the weird health mart. I'm really counting on Fall. You all had best be available for wine. Love.

Life is good

2010-08-10T17:19:00.000-07:00

If they could, all the messages, they'd have you believe that it isn't okay to stop for a second. And this is probably for a good evolutionary reason? Well I don't know. But the bills will build up and family will call! :-)

About two weeks ago I wound up going to check out a hotel for my birthday (which who wants to plan that expensive occasion? But it will be fun... wonder if I should proceed?) with the chatty and somewhat kindly defensive accountant at the cubicle nextdoor during an accounting office week. What an entirely predictable disaster/ moment- and surprising somehow anyway in the moment when I realized his view of life included Damnation for the sinners. And then, much drunker at the first available dive - not evolution.

Woah there evangelical. It shook me up a little. I had nothing to do at work following and availed myself of youtube videos about evolution, atheism and agnosticism, cosmology, and my old favorite Richard Feynman.

I never took Physics. I am unfortunately impaired at operations which move in several, and, especially, opposing directions. And I was never great shakes at arithmetic in the first place. The problem was probably my great tendency to laziness, anything but disciplined thought. :-) Still my step dad is a physicist, chemist, computer scientist genius and when we moved in with him he had Feynman books about how Feynman learned everything fixing radios, and also had to turn his room of radios and other circuits he was working on into my bedroom when we moved in.

God, you start thinking and you just can't stop. :-) That's what I came to (just now, but these last two weeks of thought [and trying to be in the human world too].) I'm in one of those moments where everything feels relevant. Tourists gave me their unlimited day train passes on my way home.

Me: Are you sure?
Dad and Mom with stroller: Yeah...
Just Dad: we're done.

Ha- it was about 98 degrees today...

Ah anyway, everything's a mess. I picked a fight w D, A wants to take me shopping. I want to quit smoking soon. I want to say to Christopher Hitchens that I don't think he spends enough time with mothers with his women-aren't-funny-for- evolutionary-reasons schtick- mothers are the most hilarious people on earth for, I think it's obvious, very good evolutionary reasons- like not losing it because you've got kids -silly thing to overlook. Having an amazing sense of humor is the exact same thing as being funny, silly. Men are idiots so it's kinda something that when I need some discourse coming at me from the Technology Entertainment Design world, I'm relying on them. Someone needs to invite Julie Taymor to that conference.

XOXOXOXOXOX love
Alexis

One

2010-07-22T09:27:00.000-07:00

thing I do, maybe more than I do just about anything else, is watch HBO documentaries. I caught one on HBO family a couple weeks ago that was truly one of the most beautiful and moving things I've been exposed to. It was called "A Century of Living" and was simply interviews with people over a hundred years old who had been alive for the change to the year 1900 from 1899 and were looking at 2000. It was from before 2001, so I think that led to more optimism from them toward the end when the interviewers were asking them how they felt about the future of mankind and so on. If you can find it, watch it - I cried much and I wasn't hormonal. They found really beautiful souls who spoke with great honesty, and the subject was really the heart of the matter of living.

Last night I watched one called "Lucky" about Lottery winners. Do you have enough opportunities to yell 'IDIOT!" at your TV? If not, watch this.

Suffice it to say, if I won the lottery, I would know what to do. Sure sure sure - big change- I'm not in the same milieu anymore sure sure sure. (A couple that escaped Vietnam in a boat are touching and save this documentary... or rather, save you from breaking your television, ironically emulating the idiots who fuck up winning the lottery [or are just so boring it's tragic]. I'm exaggerating. There's also an innocent intelligent homeless man who stays the same but it's so much better how he isn't suffering. And a nice mathematician.)

Herewith, what I would do. With, let's say 22 million.

IMMEDIATELY, I would hire three assistants. These should all be roughly 26 year old females who I never met before interviewing but connect with and severely like.

Each is going to start at $75,000 a year with a review in one calendar year. Benefits hell yes, and 15 vacation days, 3 personal days, 10 sick days. I intend to hire really excellent girls and have their backs forever if indeed their excellence is real and they weren't fudging it early on.

Within the first week of winning, I'm going to find a furnished west village one bedroom to rent, or just move into a well appointed downtown hotel.

I want my 3 assistants to report to work at what was my apartment in Astoria. I will continue to rent this place for a long while. Why in the fucking hell not.

(Oh by the way I quit my job. This will have absolutely no effect at all on my self identity perception. Yay.)

So this is a really great work environment the girls are happy about. There's still a bedroom so the girls can pretty much crash there if they have to or want to at any time. I buy three new apple computers, a better broadband service, and a full service color printer copier scanner fax so the girls are hooked up. Two more desks I suppose as well. I guess I have to give away the couch. :-(

Basically for the first couple months, every day I take the train, or fuck it, maybe a car if I oversleep, to my place in Queens to meet my girls. Their workday starts at 9:30 or 10:00. I meet them out there at 10:30.

from 10:30/11:00 to 12:30/1:00 I work with, hear from:
Assistant A- her job is to do everything related to buying my house in Italy.

1:00 - 3:00
Assistant B- her job is organizing my creative writing and sending it out, networking within the writing and theater communities. She is also doing my MFA applications. This is a very special girl whose performance could mean a big bonus at year's end. Her first couple weeks are going to require some overtime. She's the one who it really matters works out of my old place becasue she and I are going to be going through boxes of writing and talking about writing. She's going to have to get familiar with my work, really know me, be a creative person herself. Assistant B has her work cut out for her.

3:00 - 5:00
Assistant C is basically for everything else- handling my new life as a rich person, dealing with requests for my money basically, and all my general scheduling including with my family. This person should have knowledge of finances - she worked for a hedge fund of something, she understands and keeps track of statements from investments and knows I expect briefings if not daily then close to it.

WINNING THE LOTTERY SHOULD NOT BE A PROBLEM. PEOPLE ARE IDIOTS.

Love
Alexis

Inception - spoiler- and thoughts

2010-07-20T10:36:00.000-07:00

I have scoured the internet and meh- people not talking about what I want to talk about and I will be seeing it again and making a big map aof possible trajectories on all levels like an lsat game but i don't know when.

So here are some things i will be checkin.g I would have remembered this better if I'd done it right after.

* Is it possible that the first scene, the first wash up to the shore, is not a flashforward to the end? I thought it might be cool to think it wasn't. The next thing that happens is in the same asian castle-y place that is in the end/ limbo spot for Saito. So maybe they've all been to limbo before. Just saying. I suppose it can't be though because they get picked up to another dream out of there. I am confused on this point. It seems you go straight all the way back up if you die in limbo? Is that right? I need to know this. (which is sort of the point of the movie. Pretty much the majority of the point. At any rate, the hallway scene is tops. That kid needed a three piece suit more than anything in this world. World of difference!)

* Did people seem to have nodes on their wrists (saito on the train)? Ellen Page in her ear. Were these how they kept their totems on them?

I guess that's it. But no one else gloamed on to these particular things.

I want to erase my last couple postings so no one finds my blog and has feelings hurt. Stupid intimate thoughts blog.

XO
A

BLOG

2010-07-16T05:57:00.000-07:00

Enrique Iglesias is performing out in the Plaza for the Today show this morning. My thoughts went like so:

* "Wow- imagine traveling all over the country going 'AIAIAIAIAIIIIIIII can't go on -just wanna be with you' - wow - that would be awful. Poor Enrique Iglesias."

* "No. Wait. Not Poor Enrique Iglesias - he stays in gorgeous hotels, is paid extravagently, is a 'heartthrob', dates Anna Kournikouva. That song is pretty easy to sing. Opposite. Opposite thing...."

* "Jeez though, hmmm. Wow. We should really make pop stars with songs like that travel around like prisoners, tortured prisoners. It would be so much more apporpriate to be saying "oh poor Enrique Iglesais". These girls screaming much louder than the music would make a lot of sense to me - if they were looking at a beaten broken man singing this for his mere survival. "AAAAAAAAAAA POOR ENRIQUE IGLESIAS! HE HAS TO SING THIS SONG ALL OVER THE COUNTRY BATTERED AND MAIMED AND PENNILESS!! AAAAAAAAAA!!! AAAAAAAA!" Rend your tunics, and all that.

So that's that, and not what I was going to write about.

I was going to write about my sex life.

I am sleeping with the sweetest and nerdiest boy in New York. If you ever meet him, the extent of his nerdiness is going to blow your mind. OMG but I LIKE HIM. It's insanity and it's nice.

Well I don't know where to start. I don't know whether to start with how sweet or how how nerdy. Okay: nerdy: He is very interested in NY geography and the battles fought wherever you are during Revolutionary Days.

And excitedly. I mean he is into stuff really excitedly.

He's kind of jumpy- with his facial expressions and his actual body.

In fact sex-wise for some reason there's like this jerky thing going on too! He told me he is "in five" - I was like "could you give me just some even half notes for a minute?" He sort of couldn't? It didn't matter! In the end the jerkiness wound up getting me off absolutely fine, better than fine!

Oh Jesus. It's too much information. And seriously, the nerd alert is too much information. I could go on all day. My life is really like a movie right now because I'm fairly smitten with a huge nerd.

XOXOX
A

Everyone

2010-07-07T06:24:00.000-07:00

could take a tip from the boy I went home with last night.

Listen to me talk and tell me it's interesting and you like it.

"You look even more beautiful in this light in the morning"

I'll take it. You, sir, are smart yourself. There are rewards to being awesome in this way, and I suspect that they are the kind of rewards you boys want - you really want them so act like this guy!

Sometimes I wonder if I got to have a penis for a day if I would be able to score and everything, things being what they are, and wondering if for all my smarts I'd have any game.

Then I remember: It's easy to be a man. You distinguish yourself when you're not a self defeating asshat.

XOXO

A

The thing about Snow White is

2010-06-29T19:34:00.000-07:00

I remember her so perfectly in my mind's eye. Iconic. Michael Jackson, also iconic. Both of them, fucked up about sex and love. Really though.

One of the first books I remember reading is Snow White. I remember that "vain," when I read it, was one of the most interesting words I'd seen.

Anyway. My apartment is beyond. I need to somehow take a sick day to address the kitchen and the trash. This is your pre law school drunk, signing off in Astoria,

I have got to get

2010-06-25T14:32:00.000-07:00

away from the screen... hard to quit smoking when it forces me to the stoop. It's real life out there, dads and kids, crazy locals on the phone yelling about the higher ups in this company!!!! Oh I wish we could throw them all out our windows and keep it that way for a little while. You can keep your iphones if you gots em and that could be the reorganization for a while - (I can go stay with my brother- he has a really nice apartment and car and is great with the iphone). But computers out the window and televisions too. Take the man to task about that spill in the papers. Je reve, I dream.

woo

2010-06-23T17:28:00.000-07:00

I'm all turned around and happy. Days at the office with nothing to do baffle me. The World Cup is my kinda game... but, having returned from the hippy festival with siblings, it continues to somewhat surprise me that I'm not drinking a beer - hey sportsy real estate guys of the company - they fucking tryna rob us and we still win. I should be wrrrrrriiiiiiiiting....

I am getting high!

Oil spill, hunh? Florida beaches - gone for a while. Is sarcasm a cheap trope? - well..., nicely done. I am going to do my best for the things-fall-apart era of the Empire. I think i can bank on le capiltalisme for a little longer. And plastic bags can be my enemy and you know, I'm going to do my best... excluding taxis... but I'll move to Manhattan maybe. Babbling.

I was reflecting earlier and I'm postponing my reflections. In some ways I am a little old world and I like that - so I think personal thoughts and I want to write but the blog can seem so apart compared to... what was the old thing? writing in private and trying to publish?

So it's hard to segue to how serious I was being in my thoughts. I remember something I've "always wanted to write about" or rather thought of when thinking hard about my life because it feels good. Boys who died. I dunno - I'm not gonna write about it uniquely. No. But in my town there was a boy who died riding his bike a year after I moved to that town. I didn't understand death and reacted to it like it was a story about life. My 3rd grade teacher chastised me for the letter I wrote his mother for the memorial book - I just made up a soap opera feeling basically. I had his mother as my English teacher in 7th grade. She told me at the eighth grade dance that she had waited to meet me. She said he talked about me all the time. I prayed to him for a while after that. We weren't even in the same class. I had spent second grade crying.

So personal.

My idea moved on to this: art and loss and the universal. There's no way to live without experiencing loss and loss is so huge. If you experience it young, it nonetheless comes back later like a tidal wave, as meaning comes to take shape in your strange crooked brain.

I mean that empathy is tha process, in a way. I mean that I saw precious, and my god, I never lost so much, but one day - this is what universalism is - you'll have an inkling, you will. And I thought of how I know that elephants feel it too. Elephants mourn did you know that? They stop and mourn if they pass a space where one of them died.

I thought on from there to the great romance, the death that's come with some of the romantic love I've felt. My vanity, and watching Snow White with A and M a couple moths ago, writing M's Match profile, such a good night of wine and ABC family but lemme tell you a little something about Snow White...

XOXOXO times one thousand
Alexis

Allow me to reintroduce myself

2010-06-02T06:21:00.000-07:00

I like to blog in bullets. once every four months or so. This is the reinvention.

* You know how I sometimes refer to a religion I'll create whose dogma is to love what I love. AIRCONDITIONING.

* I like to date more than one person. That's how I like it. So far. I'm not returning to therapy. I'm just working it til it doesn't work anymore.

* Anyway, i'm way too busy. I possibly haven't studied enough for the LSAT but I have 5 more days or something and I will every day and I can't wait for it to be done with. Also, the way to remain calm and not riddled with anxiety eventhough you hardly even need to particularly "have anxiety" to be anxious about a test of such a very determinant nature: "you need three more points to go to this school - you need four more points to go to that school. Get all the answers right! Get them right! and fast! FAST!" - right, well the way to remain calm is to realize that if you have to go to a lesser law school at least you can choose one somewhere like San Diego or somewhere and get a convertible or something. Staying relaxed this week is key.

AIRCONDITIONING IS SO AMAZING. It's like this every year - the first night of aircon and the first morning - and then it lasts, it is the only bliss I know that lasts and lasts, what is this happy HEAVEN? Where had it gone? Don't dare ask why it allows me its grace each summer.

If you thought I'd talk about my vacation last week and seeing KFR for the first time in 11 years, the joke is on you.

XOXOXOXOXOXO
Love
Alexis

dream analysis

2010-04-11T10:15:00.000-07:00

Erotic is not always sex. I think it means the insanity of the way things feel in dreams. Have you ever had one where something else insane is happening to someone else and you're helping her? And feeling deeply, but not anxiety, more like sympathy - and you feel great? The other character has the anxiety. That was my dream this morning and it was so intense... I've had this crazy feeling about it all morning. I really want to tell you.

My boss (you know - I guess she's my boss - you know how that is.) had just realized that she was pregnant. I guess she must have known - she was eight months- but it had just hit her ESP. because the father was possibly the executive she initially assisted. The office looked crazy of course and the soaked sky was being wrung out of rain. I stroked her feathered sweater collar and told her it was going to be okay and that I was sorry for what she was dealing with. Her sister will be arriving for her to tell her - you know - it's clear that that is going to be something of a sob scene. My boss is really worried. I tell her it'll be fine and I send her to the opposite side of the office from the boardroom. Someone arrives and she's clearly the sister. So I run up to her to direct her to where her daughter is. But the woman says no she's her mother. I say "Really?" and she says yes and it's true. They meet up with one another - it is dramatic. Afterwards my boss seemed much much relieved. She's very teary but feeling much better. She also tells me that yes that was her mother but she does laughingly concede that it is very strange how she looks not a day over 30 and that she was wearing a wig - that is the one thing she has to do.

Kungfuramone says I should make my dreams one sentence but how could I do that?

I think it's funny because I know that people in dreams can stand in for other people who make you feel the things you project on that character. All the synapses twisted- I love it- but anyway the part that's "erotic' by my new definition is where the feelings you have in life do sort of overlap and you get that middle of the venn. That part sticks with you. That's the part where you wake up and your mind's a little blown. As for wishes fulfilled? Really? That's also a mind blow- because I didn't know my wishes could be so creative.... wigs?

XOXOXOX

also, Working Girl. Ha! Watched after that dream of all dreams! -HBO! Yup- I love the eighties - an abundance of movies that succeed wonderfully when they get it SO RIGHT - (she's cleaning up the Park Avenue house in a hurry in her underwear with the vacuum because that has been plotted and we need to see that!) and SO WRONG - she calls from her window office and the entire secretarial pool is jumping and cheering as we pan out to "Let the River Run".... Let me be frank. I loved it.

love,
Alexis

Oh my God

2010-04-02T08:57:00.000-07:00

A Spring Day off!

I have to make a list and get it out of the way - this is for me-

- Bills
- + Census
-mail
-dry cleaning
- call realtor to ask landlord to come tomorrow to look at ceilings collapsing from insane pipe leaks that (luck on my side coming up...) I have never been home for - they happen when the steam heat's pumping and it's raining outside. (Tomorrow: try to explain this to Angelo. Jesus)
- walk to PC Richards about a vacuum!
- wait for vacuum
- try to get out of date
- party tonight

more long term-

-weekend writing generating party days - I have a really specific idea about this that it's annoying I haven't already implemented which- At least for myself I want the writing prompt to be stolen plots from shows who send plot summary in their reviews. oooooh blog secrets.

It is such a beautiful day! Spring is my god/ goddess. Autumn is my totem. Winter is my wraith.

XOXO

Old

2010-03-27T19:42:00.000-07:00

There is a party I should go to. But I am feeling very content at home - it's not really that messy, I've been tidying. Just need a new vacuum. Old one broke.

Old and I live in Queens.

I make quite the life of it! - but today I took a prac test at 24th st. (55 minutes away) from 11 - 4, I am feeling content, and also like waking up with a fresh start on my day tomorrow, which includes a 3 o'clock meeting on 24th st. So here we are at 10:45 and even though I should really go to the party, I know- it would definitely be fun, I do feel just a little sick - and the house in question is on 34th st.. I am an adult, I want to stay home, and wine will have to be my friend. Also I got my copy of The Executioner's Song back from Adam. I am so old and so lame. So old and so lame. repeat. ha ha. fetishes. fetishes are the next frontier. ways to stay at home and keep it interesting. Oh God - do I have a fever?

XO

Alexis

When it comes to the LSAT...

2010-03-27T16:30:00.000-07:00

... sometimes I am a little in love with bad reasoning in the arguments. I believe I know it isn't quite right, but bad reasoning... ah, it can be so charming that you (I) entertain it. I should think of the LSAT as an extremely coy obnoxious man. When it comes down to two choices especially. I need to practice that thing. :-) Haha lol.

When I was in third grade I had

2010-03-16T19:14:00.001-07:00

a nanny named Jill who lived with us. She was the second Jill. The first Jill was when we lived in the house in New York, just my mother and I. I liked her I think but I don't think I had her (I had her?) very long. But the strongest memory I have of her is a time I stepped on her toe and she had an "ingrown nail!" and she cried and screamed at me, so I guess first Jill may have been a little mental no wait - i also remember watching snow fall in big flakes for the first time with her. She had pretty art in her room. She bolted in the night leaving a note about hating to leave, but she had to, but she loved me, just like Maria did in The Sound of Music. Second Jill, a lifetime later (everyone remarries! moves to New Jersey! has babies!) was the best nanny a girl in third grade in New Jersey with a sort of blobbish-age baby sister could have. We were in love. Jill made any of the lie-bragging about my mom I had ever done come true times a million. Jill made me scavenger hunts for when I came home with clues to the next thing all over the house - ingenious clues, sometimes picture clues, - the library was often a trap. While I did the hunts she made a snack of something in an ingenious shape. She sent notes in lunch. Once she made red sweatpants for me with ribbons and buttons and a decorative pink & white patch. She put them in my room and she told me not to confuse them with play red sweatpants which I immediately did and ripped a huge hole in them that day, that instant , just about. When she went back to Wisconsin for the holidays she left a note in the box under her bed for me not to spy on her things -she knew me too well. She was magical like Mary Poppins - from Wisconsin - who went to such a cool youth group church that we rode for miles to to pick her up from. She would tell us about the coed Jesus trivia games they played wearing bathing suits(?) in a Jello filled swimming pool. Cool.

It is true, I think, that she only ate buttered popcorn. I was told that and I think it bore out. And it's true I'm sure that she had an emotional side I didn't see. She left though - and I think my mom fired her. She was gone and my mother talked to me about how she was mentally ill, anorexic, and kleptomaniac. I just thought of her suddenly talking to Jessica on the phone. She was telling me about her mom these days and I don't know - it took me back - even though I hadn't met Jessica when Jill was my nanny. What a sad story. My mother didn't know how to be kind to that girl. I talked to the school counselor about it. He had a special room where you could look down on the people in gym class from two stories above through a tiny hidden door - those happy kickballplaying suckers didn't know the secret perspectives revealed to those as weird as me. I repeated to him what I'd been told - she only ate popcorn, she stole my mother's pin that she got at her promotion party at her firm - and people only steal things like that when they have a fixation with the person it belongs to - it was personal. I remember telling my friend Meredith about it. I loved telling her the dramatic things about my life - they impressed and excited her. It's strange thinking about Jill. It just occured to me too that I could look her up. Facebook being what it is. My mother told me that she went to an institution and that's what I told Meredith dramatically in the hallway - we had been getting pretty good at leaving class at the same time. I missed her badly - after her came Angie, a sweet mormon girl, I was purposely mean to- through with nannies and all this best friends let's hang out and talk. She left soon enough, homesick - back to Utah (I did warm up to her. Asked her now and then about the Bible.) But my attitude was that Jill was the best, what was there to gain from Angie... I just wouldn't commit ;) Then someone came and calIed a suicide hotline the third night of living in our house, Jolie (accent on the "Jo"). Then came the era of Indra from Trinidad Tobego, who just stopped showing up one day, and then Emma from Belize and Stephanie got some discipline at last (and someone told poor sixth grade me that it wasn't weird if my mother made me cry - she had that effect.) Emma was mos def fired. it was right after my step-dad had some kind of heat stroke and was lying on the couch and she said "Well she's finally done it- she's finally killed him." Emma was a blog of her own. I wonder what really happened with Jill. Maybe she wasn't fired. Maybe I'll try to suss this out from my drunk mother the next time I have the chance.

We all know

2010-03-14T18:54:00.000-07:00

what "freaked out" means. Memphis just freaked me out. Why was i just in Memphis for twenty four hours? A guy named Steve I met three weeks ago so drunk and delighted after a night at Mike and Wendy's in Westchester with Kelly in a bar by Grand Central Station flew me down. He lives, at the moment, in Arkansas. He is drunk and sweet and a little passive in that rich, so sweet, and it's all been too easy way. (But of course somehow no one has it really easy - because women are never easy... [people are never easy - love is impossible] but I digress... )

Would anyone have wagered that Memphis would turn out to suit me? (it doesn't - It is a freakout!) Hicks are scary! Or anyway - they are a freak out. Don't you agree?

I find that Southerners have a common weirdness about Jews. Listen, hicks scare me, but tolerant one that I am, when I think about it tolerantly, I didn't understand that Jewish is your ethnicity, religious or not, and it's about bloodlines that are traceable and that is what a tribe is until, I don't know, my junior year, when I joked with Megan and my Dad that the big new Polish boy in Math class would surely ask me to prom and it would be great how we're both Polish and my Dad was like "What's your problem? You're not Polish." It was much like the time I explained to him that the Fourth of July is The Statue of Liberty's birthday long after I should not have thought that. Blame NJ. I do. - and that is just how I blame memphis for how those crazy chilling accent nutty scary people are!

more soon.

It turns out

2010-03-01T08:52:00.000-08:00

God Help the Girl is the main guy from Belle and Sebastian and the female singer is a newcomer. Anyway, it's so good. This song "Musician, Please take Heed" is a real sing to the hairbrush song... "I thought I might just write a letter / anything to stay away/ from books and lessons today/ Besides it's part of my induction/ into the literate world/ I am a literate girl!"

The internet couldn't understand the following lyrics from the bridge but I got em all!:

I'll kick this mood off with a change of scene
I bought a leotard and go to the gym!
I couldn't get away with wearing it last summer
but I've lost a lot weight
I think it's down to leaving meat
out of my diet
as a rule
I won't buy it
'cause it's cruel

So hilarious and wonderful. Sounds like ABBA if ABBA were more wonderful by a power of ten and the songwriters knew counterpoint.

I have taken off work today to listen to an album too much.

Oh and then:

And if the nighttime threatens me with pain
I will give in to lust
I will do what I must!

Sick day for mental illness. I wish they were all sick days for mental illness. I learn about the puzzles for the LSAT from 7pm-9pm tonight.

XOXOXO
A

The song

2010-02-28T11:00:00.000-08:00

is Act of Apostle by God Help the Girl. It's Won't get therapy. Will talk to computer set to beautiful beautiful song. Honestly. She is my heroine.

Okay okay

2010-02-28T05:42:00.000-08:00

It is the morning and I feel much better but I'm well over due to tell you all the shit of lately. I had the perfect sex dream to feel better so thank me, me.

I'll come back to the horrible date and insert it here. It's over a week ago now. who bloody cares.

Remember I slept with a guy from my work, not just once, and then he avoided me and could even avoid my most bald pleas to just tell me what was going on? (He isn't the person whose blackberry thumbs were incensing me the other day incidentally. The world of my work is part, certainly, of this pie chart of Saturday night tears and properly prescribed sexdreams. Did you know I am starting a religion? A cult - yeah- no one's gonna be forced into it or anything - just really right-on tenets and objects of worship. .. more on this later...) and I realized on my own that he must be seeing someone else seriously. And his whole personality was right wing arrogance, but it made me laugh while I smoked joints and told him I had more to tell him about the world than vice versa and he agreed with that and tested if I could really not subtract like I said I couldn't and, well, of course I could subtract. He gave me very even numbers though.

Anyway I had my ways and where it was left was that he better not fuck with me - like at all - and for a year and a half we have been not speaking- not one word. Friday was his last day! Hooray! I guess he left for a competing organization and everyone hates him? I know a little about this I think - I mean I can piece the rumors together a bit but it's not important. Anyway, all that really mattered was he's gone. How lovely for me not to have that stomach drop anymore.

After he left the building though I went ahead and googled his name and his fiance's together. He's been engaged since last Spring-ish. You know that story about Pandora and the box I assume. I was curious. Their wedding page. My God. It's just exactly. I've had a really shitty week. And reading this wedding page it was like God. He said something I can't remember about how-to-live sometime about 15 months ago hanging out at my place. And I said "Wow - It's so simple!" and he just smiled and nodded. He proposed to her fifteen months to the day after they met and started dating. So, isn't that lovely. I can subtract that well too. But here's the rub: If you are really simple and keep the peripheral world out while golfing instead of considering, then you can have exactly what you want. That's what kills, a little.

They have side by side lists of things about themselves. T chart. And at the bottom beneath the T chart, some little facts about their life as a couple. Here's some stuff from his side (from memory). "First conversation with Kirsten's brother: 'Why the fuck did you buy Archstone at a 3.4% cap?' 'What are your intentions with my sister?'" Does the world we live in not hit you in the heart like a brick sometimes. I see me and Ayn Rand in a room and I'm crying on the floor, inarticulate, and she's saying "You know that I'm right." and I am just like "cry... but art... but struggle" and she rolls her eyes and says "What's so great about struggle?" and I say "Don't ask me - why are you asking me? I had a REALLY BAD WEEK." Oh yeah, in this brief t-chart he also says he does not like fiction. Just so you know. Just so you know - no fiction. It's a thing to brag about you see. It isn't accidental. He holds this stuff in real contempt. It is a way of life. And it works.

They like to make bets, says the wedding page. For example, he bet Kirsten that she couldn't score under a hundred on a really tough golf course. She did and thereby won a scuba trip from him. They like to bet Scuba trips, Ski trips, or Gorilla trips. Once a week they discuss either a winery or a current event. I am not making this up.

I don't know. It's a fairly complicated feeling I have about all this - and that in itself is kind of the heart of it - me and my complicated feelings. They don't help anything - they are just who I am. I live negotiating always with being who I am and that I can do things without a partner that are true to that and get me to places I want to be. Yet, I would feel more like I was laughing at the wedding page and less like it was laughing at me if I had a love right now, who was loving who I am. This simple girl - what does she do for a living? She "sells people things they don't need!" Same reaction I had to him I have to her: "It's so simple!"

I'm going to have to go to fucking law school if I want to go on a gorilla trip. I'm jealous. I want to go on one now. And, maybe this bothers you, I don't even know if it bothers me: I probably would have been alright with this incredibly-selfish-person betting me things I could definitely do like some paternalistic figure cum lover if he had been on board. I mean we did not even really go out. But I was somewhat alright with Mens Health being his Bible and whatnot. I thought it was a game he needed to play to live his life. No one could really think that. No one smart could ever think the best thing to do is to never consider any fiction and treat Mens Health like the Bible. So in my fantasy, which might have some reality in there, he knew that it wasn't just a silly choice of mine, loving well crafted fiction, searching for meaning. I say "might have a little reality in it" because this person did feel compelled to seduce me before proposing to the girl who fits so perfectly. They like playing soduku, gin, or backgammon and discussing a winery or a current event once a week and she likes reading the wall street journal while she blowdries her hair in the morning. Kirsten presumably never gets drunk and chainsmokes as a pasttime. Well I pity her that. As much if not more than he thinks of mens health as a Bible, I believe drinking and dancing beats the shit out of backgammon. Even if sometimes my way of living finds me so lonely I can barely take it. Contrast can really be a bitch though. Believe it readers, believe it.

Well boo hoo. That alone wouldn't explain my abject misery last night. i shall bullet some other last week things that'll help you understand that I can't even qualify it as self-indulgent. There was no way to feel but sad. Now I need to get my hair blown out though. I love you.

More soon.

Alexis

light cry

2010-02-27T18:06:00.000-08:00

Boy do I feel lonely. Thought maybe I'd tell you about today. I mean I really feel awful though. Or just so silent and empty. More that than awful.

I am not going to tell you stories for now. I'm going to be a little dramatic. Dramatic and yet plainly true. I want and I need at the moment. I need the phone to ring and for it to be someone coming over with I don't care what and open arms and I'll lie in them and just feel like they're here and I'm here and feel fine.

It isn't going to happen though. Cried a little admitting that and feel a little better already actually. I don't know. I need that good feeling to come around soon. It will.

I promise to blog to you about what's been going through my mind - I can't access my blog at work but that's no reason not to write myself an email for posting later while I'm at work on Monday. At work is a good place for this stuff. I'm pretty commited to sitting in silence right now it seems. Anyway this is quite the experience, the human experience, in which you can't just ask people to come hold you - it must be your turn. Ouch I have a headache. I already took two advil. I guess I'm already starting to feel a little better.

love
Alexis

I've been out of it

2010-02-22T06:30:00.000-08:00

A real space cadet.

Today, Monday, I was apparently supposed to show up at work at 7:30am to do front desk, and it was "on the calendar" last Friday - Friday I was unassigned and came to work, found a desk, and cried a little in the morning and read articles and watched Kathy Griffin on youtube in the afternoon.

I mean the point is I got here at 9:00am today because although I may have ... technically... like eyes may have seen... seen this on the calendar, I was in a mind to chop off my hair methodically with a jackknife, eyes locked on the mirror a la Legends of the Fall last Friday. I predict that there will not be any consequences to this slip up here though. Except that asking for a raise will have to wait a couple months. Which I thought it would anyway. And I won't get it anyway. But be honest, even if I waited two years, she, my boss - who I'd describe because she's somewhat just-so and in that way very likable to me, but I don't wanna start with describing bosses on my internet blog, but who perhaps should have sent me an email if I had to come in at 7:30am on a Monday, will still bring this up. When our old boss got laid off and they threw her, her new assistant, in out of the blue, she took it to heart, she really did. But she's a good girl and I like her. I consider her smart. Knowing who pays you is smart - always has been- but it's so non-negotiable nowadays...

Anyhow - a koan for you - what is more awful than someone standing in front of a closed elevator wearing a tie, head bowed, typetypetyping on his blackberry oblivious to how awful he is? Nothing. Nothing is worse than that. Let me break it down for you. There's nothing wrong with a man in a shirt and tie waiting for an elevator, whether he be distracted, thoughful, lost in thought, aware, smiling, frowning, looking up, looking down - none of this appraoches awful; all of this is fine. That same man staring at his own fucking thumbs held juste, juste a peine above his own sad belly button a tap tappin', a tappity tappin' thumbs - completely consumed by those big thumbs, that little screen. Awful. Just... Awful.

I went on this really terrible painfully undermining date on Thursday. It made me cry Friday. And by Saturday the emotion had morphed into one that was oddly affirming. (not for nothing - this was with a little help from my friends. Friends called Kelly and GREY GOOSE - you know I am going to tell you everyting in a minute and am just working up to it - bit by little bit - the butler just brought me coffee and I'm supposed to never tell anyone ever that he did so. Oh cry oh weep life is sad and good.) Yesterday I took a pretest LSAT. Gee I feel like I could cry this morning again. What weird gyroscope of feeling am I in? Suppose it's called late February early March and is always like this.

Well let me say this before I tell you about the date because I guess that's the assignment. I still love Mad Men. I mean a lot. I can't believe how broad it is in terms of story. It's is the kind of thing I'd write --

I have to come back to this later. :) XOXO

If I were a stripper...

2010-02-10T19:55:00.000-08:00

I'd strip to MGMT's weekend wars. other than that, not an mgmt fan. But that's pretty high praise.

All's Well

2010-02-10T17:50:00.001-08:00

We had a blizzard. I have a million things to do tomorrow to get ready for Miami Friday afternoon to Monday morning baby! XO

Well

2010-02-09T18:28:00.001-08:00

romantically it can really be just ironically awfully bad. Remember I wrote a post a year ago about how wonderfully smart I was to not be caught up anything with a person name Josh who told me he rated his (now ex) girlfriend a 6.5. I messed around with his friend and he hoaxed me that the friend liked me when I asked about him (the friend.) Josh seems like a pathological liar/ sociopath anyhow. I still feel asinine because I got a little fantasy world on it. The fantasy was simply a museum visit and more sex with said friend. But anyway, all you need to know is that over the past week I was fucked with in my head and it's not fair and tonight I am feeling sorry for myself. I could use a good cry, but, as 62% of me knows it's silly and nothing to bother being upset about, the good cry is close but so far.

Everything is fine- just me being me - getting a little tripped up, understandably sad to be just fucked around with when I'd thought I was making a new if maladjusted friend in terrible Josh. I mean anyone would have a sad night realizing they were being fucked with, not awesome to death in everyone's eyes like they were being led to believe.

Poor me!

XO
boo hoo

love
Alexis

I am

2010-01-29T15:57:00.000-08:00

midway through this book, Netherland, that is made for me - the narrator is an intelligent but lost financial businessman in New York, and the book is being called the first great September eleventh addressing novel of this our post 9-11 era, and Obama read it and recommends. So, how interesting is it to read this passage knowing Obama read it and loved it? :

(This is after the narrator's wife tells him she won't come back with their son to New York from London by employing an intense political argument, and calls him Conservative, )

"... I should have seen Rachel's telephonic outburst coming, not least because the imminent invasion of Iraq had stimulated an impressive and impassioned opinion in practically everybody I knew. For those under the age of forty-five it seemed that world events had finally contrived a meaningful test of their capacity for conscientious political thought. Many of my acquaintances, I realized, had passed the last decade or two in a state of intellectual and psychic yearning for such a moment-- or if they hadn't, were able to quickly assemble an expert arguer's arsenal of thrusts and statistics and ripostes and gambits and examples and salient facts and rhetorical maneuvers. I, however, was almost completely caught out. I could take a guess at the oil production capacity of an American-occupied Iraq and in fact was pressed at work about this issue daily, and stupidly. ("What are you saying, two and a half million barrels or three million? Which one is it?") But I found myself unable to contribute to conversations about the value of international law or the feasibility of producing a dirty bomb or the constitutional rights of imprisoned enemies or the efficacy of duct tape as a window sealant or the merits of vaccinating the American masses against smallpox or the complexity of weaponizing deadly bacteria or the menace of the neo-conservative cabal in the Bush administration, or indeed any of the debates, each apparently vital, that raged everywhere-- raged because the debaters speedily grew heated and angy and contemptuous."

For my part blogsters, I've been thinking about intimacy. I've written about this before, but intimacy is wonderful. In my life as it is, it takes its best form as talking after sex - I did this last Friday and my was it fun. I am personally unfamiliar with intimacy's seeming apex, Marriage. The heart of it, I find, is the numbers - being listened to and listening. Concerned with the concerns of another and having your concerns being concerned with by them. Funny that I get the best intimacy in funny bust up sextimes. I keep trying to dump my therapist and he won't let me. He has no sense of humour (compared to me). I think it's hilarious.

I'm feeling really happy. I guess something must be wrong. :)

I have made the comments registered people only. When the comments were these crazy japanese ... or were they chinese? things, I was frightened that they were a terrorist cell communicating by code. I saved them in a word document, I was so concerned about that. That's my deepest confession. But I don't think I'm paranoid - it was just very strange and then there was that person who said he was going to bring my writings to his class? It was strange. I'm not crazy.

I love you.

Alexis

So freaked out by my comments

2010-01-17T18:19:00.000-08:00

move to wordpress? how?

Hi blog

2010-01-15T20:07:00.000-08:00

I feel like writing. Jeez... one would hope! - I asked my friend with the painting biz to hit it and she did and sitting around in the living room is really nice. Plus full-spectrum lights - did you know about these?

Talked to my sis who needs her MCAT study guides sent to her friend and, more importantly, needs to move out of the house. My mother is no kind of person to live with. My mom used to have a bedroom completely mauve and ostentatiously. Mauve venturing to pepto. The carpet: wall-to-wall of course - bright pink-mauve... The bedding: patterned like one of the wallpapers - one of - there were four different, all reflections on mauve, and purple with a dash of light blue flowers vines, dots, and wavy lines. The ceiling was light pink mauve, the blinds of the skylight, remote controlled, the same mauve but deeper. Mauve curtains like one of the wallpapers, pinker variety, on the bay window across from the bed with those same mauve blinds, mauve patterned chaise lounge under the window. Tonight while I looked at my tasteful multicolored living room, I called my sister, to remind her to get the fuck out. She thanked me for the reminder and has been on craigslist - so that's good news.

But she's full of memories - she doesn't need me to tell her anything - except that hearing from eqachother is obviously relieving ;). Sisters are great. Poor Maddie. She's doing her college applications and, word is, also going nuts / impossible to talk to. In possesion of my step-dad's credit card for her applications, she is running up a tab at Abercrombie and Fitch. Don't ask me how, she makes those clothes look cool. Anyway she is having her senior year complete with the screaming, and refusing school. I remember it well. (I went though - oldest - it's different.)

So my mother is an actress now - did I tell you? It is like she's joined the circus sort of... apparently she's got herself a pied-a-terre somewhere - maybe downtown? and just stays in the city to take her classes, do her shit. Oh God you guys, the best part - for her main class she's been assigned the mother in "night, mother". fucking perfect. Mother drives daughter to suicide. It's actually hilarious. Carrie Fisher quote: "If my life weren't funny, it would just be true, and that is unacceptable." But anyway... OF COURSE my mother is getting some kind of Meisner technique where she stands with props in rooms of our house repeating single unconscionable lines that would drive you to suicide repeated constantly - like something about "eat[ing] the last snowball sugar." I'd love to meet her teacher.

And then Steph tells me that our mom cut the dog's bangs and was saying "I am the greatest. I am just the greatest - look at what I did to his eyebrows? I am so great." (She did this exactly to me once by the way, plucked my eyebrows and congratulated herself on being so wonderful. That's the kind of thing that only happens once, wouldn't you say?) and then she asked my step-father "How do I feed him?" I said this is what really got me - the helplessness. I don't like it in my conscience. I told Steph "She is really remarkably self-involved" and Steph said "Yeah, I told her - I don't even mind selfish people. They know there's other people and they say 'yes but I'm selfish.' She doesn't know there's other people."

It's so fitting that the Smiths have come on my itunes. William, william it was really nothing... lol

i don't dream about anyone except myself

Morrissey!

Well - I have to think about walking to the supermarket. No uniting theme tonight. Paint job, my crazy mother. XOXO

2010-01-04T15:06:00.000-08:00

All the news that's fit to print:

Good thing: I had sex last night. Omgosh it was great. It was with Ryan. (This post is so far in the style of the guy that writes the "I'm a guy" column in Glamour magazine, but I'm not a writer anymore - everyone knows that ;) so it's no big.) Yeah, gosh it was just great. He was also very very pleased. GOOD SEX. WHERE IS MY BLUE RIBBON TODAY?

When Ryan called Christmas Day I said "Well I guess you could come to New Years Eve at my house and be my weekend boyfriend." I thought this was a pretty benign offer since Ryan lives in Montreal (when he's not driving all over the place - picking up craigslist riders, camping wherever he finds himself) When he called a couple days before and said, yep, as long as I agreed he was getting in his van in Montreal and heading down on New Years Eve itself, I felt somewhat apprehensive about him coming. I kept saying "Well I hate for you to drive so far" but he was glad to.

My apprehension in all this, which was outweighed but existed, is that Ryan and I are different in this way that feels very essential, elemental... However, with reminders to myself to chillax, it was possible to recognize that he knows that and thinks that's fine so I should know that and think it's fine too.

Ryan loves Burning Man. Ryan loves cuddling. There is a sticker on his van door that says "wanna cuddle?" and it's funny because yes, this must be a big phrase in his life. There are also all these stuffed animals on the dash. He said at Burning Man last year he didn't take many drugs because he was working at that Burn. 'Working" here means preparing and giving away 3,000 plates of poutine - for free! Whenever he describes Burning Man, I wind up saying, really just from my brain straight to my mouth, "Why would you want to do that? Why do people do it?" The answer per Ryan is "expression' and "community" - one year he built a huge tower for people to climb up and sit on. Last year he made and gave away all this poutine. So that was an expression of "generosity." (the quote marks are for his having said this when I asked what the expression was.) He laughs at how he's invited me repeatedly to the Burn, but I've never shown any interest. I explain and he understands that I get two weeks of vacation from this job thing I have and by God I'm staying in a hotel when I take 'em. He's stalked my facebook and he gets it he says - the vacations look nice.

Let's get off the topic of the weekend boyfriend who comes to visit, which I think is intriguing but feel like leaving and coming back to. (It is like I am endeavoring to be a lecturer today and the topic of my lecture is life, being me, good things and bad things. I hope you have a pen and if you don't please see if you can borrow from the person next to you and be prepared next time.)

Bad thing: Winter. The cold. Oh Jesus. As you can see I spent the period of preChristmas to New Years basically freezing and either alone in my house or (for three days) at work at a desk where the phone never rang. 'Twas existential - lemme tell ya. Then was New Years Eve. This was a somewhat impromptu very little party where we drank absurd amounts of champagne, didn't really watch 2001 A Space Odyssey, mostly played tunes and were all (remaining) mututally black out drunk from about 12:30am to 3:00 am. The tragedy was that MyfriendH was able to come with the intention of not overdoing it at all, as she had work at the hospital at 8am, but couldn't even lightly partake until around midnight-ish as planned, because she got sick, maybe from her dinner at a restaurant with her husband, whom she told to stay in spite of her sickness and have fun and who did and rocked our jams as is his party wont. But I must admit I was inordinately sad about that. However, there's supposed to be this rager coming up at my place in a couple weeks and if all the stars align we'll be able to party together then. I hope it makes her feel good not bad that I miss her. :)

None of that is the point really but it all adds up to the point which is that it's too cold, I drank so much, I saw my dad's family, I'm ashamed how addicted I am to cigarettes, it's too damn cold.

Right - so New Years Day Holly and Micah stayed all day to watch 2001 which blew my mind as it always does. Micah left and Holly stayed to watch Kathy Griffin episodes and Kathy Griffin is my new Gore Vidal. We think the same things about everything just about. We both know you're not supposed to say 'retarded" but think it's such a great word the world is just going to have to deal with us doing the wrong thing on that count. Ryan had a lot of fun watching Kathy. He doesn't know anything about pop culture. Not his thing. When he drove me to NJ the next day, we stopped for a beer before he dropped me off at my Dad's and we got into the foreign-ness of our lives to eachother. (ultimately they're not so foreign actually) I told him that he has the soul of a true hippy and he had to admit it was true. (I wonder to myself if I have the soul of a true neurotic but if I think that it is probably the cold and the sleep schedule and who knows what thinking that because what I have is, as always, this blasted grounded-ness and then my own dose of expressiveness - I just exist and I don't need anybody except I do but I can tell, luckily, that it's all going to be fine.) Ryan also doesn't seem to have any bone terror going from watching 2001 which I do because I'm not sure the days between Christmas and new Years watching tv and checking facebook this year were all that different in existential affect than the ride to Jupiter with HAL. (whatever.) Into my house and the family gathered around the counter with the digital photo album of the trip they just returned from to Patagonia. Ella and David are over and taking in the slide show too. Ella: "And what are YOU doing Lex?" Me: "Oh-- looks like going to Mexico for my 30th and then going to Law School." Ella: "I was a single woman until I went to Mexico - be careful- that's where I met David!"

Then last night I came back from New Jersey, sex, and you're up to speed except that I haven't told you about waking up in the same old freezing cold this morning (ryan made coffee and walked me to the train. I thought about how winter is a reality that I wisely don't think about til it's here because what would be the point but it is funny how I forgot it would be so cold that I wouldn't even be able to get myself to go out for presents!) and it seems I'll just never get into detail about family. One day we can talk about how different the two of them are. At that point I guess I'll be writing a novel on my blog.

At any rate the combined effect of being cold all the time, being really awfully alone for a long stretch, getting blotto with a small group of greats, recovering and confronting the infinite and my own personal most bone chilling terror-from-sound-and-image (2001), seeing my family and having no presents for them eventhough they had presents for me with the lame excuse that I meant to but it was too cold (true) coming back, ah, sex, and then not really enough sleep and a cold cold walk to to the train to come back to work is one of confusion and fullness that can't be qualiied as happy or sad. I have the taste of not enough sleep but eye-opening coffee in my mouth and its presence in my stomach. My eyes are a little tired but I'm up. The environment is forbidding. I'm looking forward to reliving last night's climaxes when I get home tonight. I think the part of the vacation where people came back to town and I convinced some of them to come be my friend at my house was a really good move that kept me from just fucking giving up in a pile of my own dirt and bedding watching cable and never thinking another thought again. Nonetheless the forbidding outdoors is sure to make a patina of this way-of-life linger in my consciousness through the season. But overall, reviewing this now, I think we can call me happy today. GOOD WORK.

love
Alexis

My heart is sorta heavy

2010-01-03T18:35:00.000-08:00

I'll try to tell you about it tomorrow but for now happier to attribute it to the ceaseless frigid cold and Sunday night's enduring ethos.

I haven't, recently, been able to blog at work but if i can't tomorrow i'll send it to myself in email and throw it up later.

Have you ever wondered if happiness feels exactly like sadness. Or if that is only on Sundays. Or only the holidays. Anyway more soon and it's poosible that I'm really really HAPPY and there's just a little confusion somehow. Anyway more soon.

XOXO
A

So did you guys catch it... like, 4 days ago,

2009-12-30T22:02:00.000-08:00

when I got so drunk listening to free internet music I just started throwing up Empire State of Mind lyrics on here?

Well I'm about that drunk now -but party here tomorrow - so have a lot of coffee and cleaning to do as early as possible.

love

Lily Allen

2009-12-27T18:37:00.000-08:00

Fuckloads of diamonds.

:)

Porn Star Nails

2009-12-27T17:40:00.000-08:00

Believe it or not I have a million things to do ("believe it or not" given that I just had the whole of xmas break to myself -- the weather was horrendous. :) )

Porn Star nails refers to spending this afternoon throwing down at the nail place. I'm talking spa pedicure, french manicure, eyebrows & lip wax, 50 minute massage. I said thick white line. Porn star nails. People, at this point, I am from Queens.

I need to go to Borders. I think the only location is by Penn station but I should research that before using tomorrows lunch - I'll buy one LSAT book and.... and... something good.

So much work to be done on the house.

When bored at work doing 12th floor reception I should look at STARama: the airplane flattens your drama.

At any rate there is a geneeral gameplan of chardonnay. XO

XOXO

X
A

Woof

2009-12-26T10:51:00.001-08:00

The weather is horrendous. I had big designs on today and the weather is just too yuck for any of it. I should take a look at my airplane play.

I'm alone for Christmas. What a drag. This happens a lot. It's a little more irking than regular alone time of which I am the grand princess just because I don't know anyone else who is doing it. I'm pretty good. I saw Nine yesterday but it turned out to be so perfect tailor-made to what I find beautiful that it made me cry a little. I love it. I'd missed a call from Ryan - he has a real thing for me but I don't really get him at all - he is always on travels all over the world. He sends me really long facebook messages about what I'm up to that I usually forget to respond to. Anyway yesterday I said he could call. As I was leaving the movie theater I listened to the msg he left and it was like "I guess you're at the movies but you shouldn't be. You should be with your family on Christmas!" Thanks Ryan! I still wound up talking to him eventaully and, you know, explained that I have to go to work Monday and both my families are traveling so.

Drake is having a Unitarian Youth Group reunion tonight in Princeton. I called him - I told him what Ryan said - I said I guess some people's families actually wouldn't go away if one of them couldn't come but... and he cut me off to say most people's families. I don't know if that's true, but it was like there was a feel sorry for yourself fatwa on my head. I still really didn't. I watched Ali g Dvds. Something I'll probably recommence in a minute or two.

Enh. Well I wish you were around and would come pick me up. I'm okay but it's so disgusting outside. I realy don't want to go to Princeton but was also tempted by Drake's enthusiasm to go see Nine with me tomorrow and I could cry and he'd cry with empathy for me he offered. I don't know if I have a big Princeton trip in me in this weather and in a longer blog would tell you how I don't want to wrestle with his romantic idea of me either.

Bored! XOXOXOX
A

2009-12-21T06:37:00.000-08:00

There are so many pricks out there :) ! I had a true blast this weekend - the kind I was worried one just never really has again after age 23. Oh but pricks - no shortage of pricks! I'm glad I have a blog so this abundance of pricks can be "for your consideration" not only for mine. :)

Sometimes it flits through my mind that maybe I've got something to atone for and this is why the sheer number of prickly little pricks I meet and chat with. (score one point for Judaism) But it's probably more empirical than that. (score one point for logic) More likely there are just so many pricks!!!

At the party, while I was at the craft table making an ornament that said "Which do you love more? ... your Dad? or bunk beds?" a prick faced kid arrived and stood next to me and looked at it. He didn't introduce himself so I just sorta nodded. He sorta arrived, stood, and judged. I was glad when he walked away. Bad vibes.

Later, in the smoking room, I wind up next to him while everyone is passing joints. Dialogue!!!!

Him: Oh I feel like I'm just towering over you. Sorry - it feels very dominant.
Me: It's all right.

He has some other conversation with someone else - the thrust of which is something about something he's done or is doing being "incomplete" or "unfinished"

Me: So, Dominant and Incomplete, those// don't really go..
Him: //are big words, I know.

I smoke my joint a little. The DJ was the best for years (FINALLY)- he strikes up "Cupid, draw back your bow" and I start singing. (I sing this song out loud in cubicles several times a week because the website I wind up on to collect my internet dates is called "fastcupid") I'm singing along. I have a nice voice which everyone knows. It's just a nice voice. And viva la midrange.

Prickhead: (acting very excited and interested) Do you know who sings this?
Me: Sam Cooke!
Prickhead: Let's keep it that way.
Me: Hunmn- I see. (pause) You know just a minute ago when you said that thing about big words I wondered if you might be implying that I don't understand big words, but then I thought to myself 'Stop it- you're paranoid,' but now I see I was right: you're a very undercutting person.

Then Baby Love came on and this other guy who had heard this whole exchange and I got out of there to go break it down.

That guy(not entirely a prick): But all you do is treat me bad
Me: woah oh oh oh

These pricks are everywhere. Speaking of that internet service, I checked my filtered messages the other day and Wait I should reproduce this message for you verbatim. Hold on while I log in:(CUpid Please hear my cryyyyyy and let your arrow flyye Straight to muh lovuhs heart for me, for meeeee)

It's from nicksthatname. It says:

There's something very special about you. I noticed your picture immediately, I mean other than the hair which looks like your gardener cut it or your outfit which looks like something you stole from the 90's.

You seem like a cool, interesting woman.

I'm not sure about you though, but I would like to ask you some questions so email me back.

Bill

I'm glad only my friends read my blog because I don't think they'll disbelieve the claim I stake on what little naivete I still have. Like I really don't understand all these pricks with their desire to bring a little more cruelty, a little more undercutting, a little less happiness into the world. I know their insecurity figures into it, but don't you find that knowing that still doesn't give you any sympathy for it? Hey losers I feel insecure ALL THE FUCKING TIME - HASN'T ANYONE HEARD OF CHARM. ?

Today's blog is Charm vs. mean not smart or funny undercutting comments.

I guess if my dress looks like I "stole it from the 90's" that that means it looks like I got it in the nineties, Bill. A human can't steal from a decade. That's not witty. It's like a garbled Keenan and Kel joke - you should go back to Nick Jr. Anyway I got that dress from Neimans Last Call in Austin and the body you can't handle is straight from God, time of birth 1980 time of pubescence circa 1995/1996.

Aside from wanting to stay kind, and maintaining at least that much innocence and I do appeal to you Hebrew God to let me keep that please, I have so little naivete it prevents me from getting laid. All this maturity and understanding. But it's better than the alternative. I did the alternative when I was younger and that was its own thing. I talked to some cool chicks at the party about this actually. What a weird moment it is when you think to yourself 'I DID have fun in my early twenties." Nothing too deep about this thought - the weirdness is merely in the past tense.

But that past tense is eminently important. That's what I'm driving at. How I love love my perfect Megastar - who invited me to the party and is too wonderful all around- At the end of the night she surprised me: She was upset that the hottest guy at the party (who was under 25 for sure and just back from serious world travels) left with the strange misplaced extra ditzy blonde girl who was instantly and obviously infatuated with him. This girl was extra dumb. Talking to her was an excercise in getting really REALLY confused. I felt happy for her when someone gave her a little white and she became able, it seemed, to talk to her paramour without making duck wings and saying "gobble gobble", a problem she had been having earlier when he started talking to her, she had earlier confessed to me. But Megastar was actually upset to see him choose someone so vapid. Hunh. We all have our little pitfalls/wishes-for-an-unreality and I call on Megalotronic all the time to tell her about mine. But it seems my friend with whom I share so very much doesn't know young hot guys are going to go home with the stupid girl who is definitely going to put out. I mean that is the world we live in and specifically the city we live in.

Harsh! Well, meanwhile I feel like Dorothy Parker at parties. Sometimes I dampen the mood I think unfortunately, becoming sort of an arched brow observer, but no one wants to see a 29 year old woman throw herself at a guy. Or rather I don't want to see myself throw myself at a guy. The thing is that that throwing yourself shit worked when I was young. As it did for slow blonde at this party. My average for scoring if I acted like that was probably 78% in LA in '03. I really am too old to try it now though so I have to watch other people do it.

This is all fine. At the horrific office party that I go to every year becasue the sky is blue, I made that cute office boy buy me a stiff drink while everyone else coupled off for better or horrible hangover tragic mistake worse. This blog began with me scared and horrified that I could no longer ho like I once could. And here we are in the time of peace with that. :)

XandO's for days and days and days,
X
A

oh

2009-12-14T19:59:00.000-08:00

I guess my blog has some kind of strange security breach to illiterate to English advertising for having your credit card stolen. God knows how - simplicity is key foreigns! hahahaha you need someone who speaks English? Might I volunteer for your crime team? I'm ready to lead your crime team. :)

I was going to talk about how great the nutcracker is and how when i was little, so young, on one of my weekends at my dad's while he lived in this great little east side apartment with my step mom i thought i had a stomachache so i made a deal of it and learned everything about life when i was told we couldn't go anymore because it had started and was almost over and that's not how it works.

Xo

Tomorrow is a no to one cigarette day

2009-12-14T17:55:00.000-08:00

I need to go work and then see my family for a show after work. Hello, I am Bridget Jones. A pretty good movie. She turns the soup blue.

I need to get up over an hour earlier than I usually do is the thing. I am seriously blogging to remind myself to bring black jeans t shirt cardigan belt. I am procrastinating finding those things now and trying to remind myself two beers in to actually wake up earlier, to find them, and to shower.

Maybe I should end this blog tomorrow! Je pense que je regrette avant je publie.

Mes regards plus chaud,

Alexis

Merry Christmas - I want to blog

2009-12-09T10:21:00.000-08:00

Hold on little craft in the ocean. Nurture your obsessions and pick up your clothes - the winter is upon you - breathe and breathe and breathe - Your craft is so imperfect so ride each one as one perfect crashing wave at a time. Stay a pace ahead and they're mere hillocks for you to buoy on. A mere length ahead little sailboat, twisted sail.

Hi. Hello. It's rainy and I'm crazy. I am back from a quick smoke in spite of my smokers cough. While smoking I thought, maybe I'll see if I can go in for therapy tomorrow. Isn't that what it's for? For not bothering anyone who doesn't deserve it with the cartography of the paths of anxiety on which you beat the encroaching dry thorned shrubs- flail at them really.

I thought of how he sometimes talks of his group that does group therapy - he'll mention experiences people have talked about in his group. I'll never join a group ever, I thought. Here you go: a very un-humble conviction of mine: Never will I ever join a group for therapy. Oh yes- I've no humility in my sharp sharp judgement here - such a thing is Grotesque. Never. Never. Never never ever ever ever ever.*

I've been thinking about psychology a lot. My latest obsession is Celebrity Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew. I've driven myself half mad trying to decide what I think of Dr. Drew. If you are lucky, I'll tell you about it.

I have to change desks now.

XOXO
Alexis

* For Grief or Illness I would actually, but for general malaise? I stand by grotesque.

some inventory

2009-11-30T17:26:00.001-08:00

sorry no quizzes or fun stuff for a long time!

I'm toasted and a little tipsy, a-bleedin, yes. Always relevant, no? In this case it is, cuz it's also maximum tree lighting time at Rock Center, holiday time. I'm happy so feeling a lot of love even for the weirder relationships in my life and certainly and most purely for my family.

Today I did 830 gift bags with my friend who was laid off a little less than a year ago. I love the gift bags actually - as much as I think it is important to bitch like it's being sent to prison - this is a very important aspect of the ritual. I like year markers and I love mindless team work. I like to sing all day and i don't care if my coworkers complain it's really annoying behind my back. When I'm happy, nothing can stop me and people just have to suffer my love, fuck them. !

Last night Kelly and I went for champagne pretending we were going for champagne and shopping. We talked family. You know my life. I like to come home after a day of gift bags and fire up what needs to be fired as well as the chardonnay and think about my family. :) For this reason, I've been thinking I should blog about them, but as soon as I get to it, i dunno... my family is awfully complicated. I guess I wouldn't know where to start. I wonder what Sam Sheapard's family is like. My guess is considerably smaller.

The person I think it would be neat to write about is my step dad. There's some betrayal to writing about your step dad though - not a deep betrayal, but some. I think it stops me. I should write a family play. Blogging about my family would be more fun first though. And soon I'm just going to start getting good at LSATS so I may skip the family play. So anyhow, i guess to be continued while i empty the chardonnay and listen to jams on my ibook speakers cus the good ones are buzzing at a break your head frequency. hateful soundwaves what the fuck are you alien voices from other planets?

haha that sounds crazy. Get me high more often. Before I'm a lawyer. haha!

love
Alexis

Well that was boring

2009-11-25T07:45:00.001-08:00

What I really wanted to tell you about work and Mad Men I didn't and maybe I will one day but I find this whole waiting to write thing does not really work. :)

Anyway Thanksgiving. Yays.

love
Alexis

Whew Hello

2009-11-24T16:53:00.000-08:00

I feel like telling you the story of my life blog, but someone made me do data entry today- so I am doing it now even though i wound up writing all day in my head while entering contacts. Well, it's been a long time since a little evening blog.

I wanna talk work, Mad Men, happiness, thanksgiving, the "family play". We'll just see what I get to.

I had a sort of epiphany about work. It wasn't a particularly happy epiphany but when are they particularly happy? - They're not meant to be happy as much as rewarding - which can bring happiness. Another weird thing is you might have to reach them twice I've found out - in that case, particularly if they are painful. :)

Anyway the rewarding epiphany. They're mostly pretty boring. They bore me more than they anger me. Nice feeling this epiphany because I stopped feeling angry without having to experience a feeling of it culminating- I just let it dissipate . Anyway, I don't wish I were marrying a preppy asap. Jeez I let that idea go too far. It's being part of their thing - the executive men I'm speaking of now - and some assistants who seem crazy - imagining that's the thing. Oh blah I could care less about making you read about this. Anyway - ack - I wanna get out of this epiphany and into the next part. Anyway, the whole thing is false, for me, because I like for love to be a little more about me than supporting a bigshot - I mean at least a Real Estate bigshot. These people are not sane, in my version of the sanity/ insanity paradigm. I've been really open minded (worse than that - I've built them up so that I would find my life more interesting) and now I'm allowed that much judgement. Mad Men is really good it turns out! :) Everyone should watch it the way I did: The first episode and then the entire third season sick on Saturday. Mmmm it was so good. I'm sorry but HBO is the new storytelling.

I know more about politics than a person needs to. Reading the internet all day is stupid - life is, after all, existential. One thing that's very funny to me is that there are "Mad Men" blogs where a person writes what happened in the episode and explains what it meant and has loads of people telling him they adore them! Jeez Louise - dummies! (I mean it's FINE -i don't harbor the person any ill will - it's just funny and boring. :) -still in the epiphany here: "mostly people are boring". ) Most of the internet is dumb and then there's following politics - climate change, scientists manipulating data, civil rights, famine, end the war? and constantly with the approval ratings. More dummies - but in politics everyone thinks they're an expert. I mean this includes me - it reminds me of why parents are difficult for teachers - because everyone went to school and everyone knows how they think it ought to be. Politics is even more broad and selfish. And a politician is really just an archetype for you to project. You know. That's why it's nice that it's not always a white man. Beyond that - it's just more internet I tell you.

So anyway I just talked to Amy and now I'm going to get cash so i have it for the laundry tomorrow. I've been in a getting my shit together moment which is fun - especially since it's going to culminate in painting the living room. if you an't tell, I'm in a very good mood. :)

So la la. More soon I hope but everything is getting very hectic in a wonderful almost Thanksgiving home renovation way. xo
A

2009-11-23T11:16:00.000-08:00

Ultimately though it's okay that people are pompous though right. I mean the right approach is to seek tranquility. I feel immature when angry.

i am DYING to paint my living room and nervous the landlord will say no. I am going to call him soon. Scared.

love
Alexis

Let the record show...

2009-11-23T09:25:00.001-08:00

I ALWAYS loved Katie Couric.

http://gawker.com/5410874/katie-courics-forbidden-dance-of-gin/gallery/?skyline=true&s=i

First,

2009-11-17T13:01:00.000-08:00

don't ever buy this "Mash" bottled juice stuff. I got it this morning having skimmed the label and thinking it said, "it's 100% juice..." What it says is, "it's not 100%juice" and it's gross.

I don't know what the point is of it all. I really don't. I am turning 29 tomorrow though. And pretty soon I'm going to go to law school. I have to because of a very simple thing called money. I want to have it. I want a house in New England. I can deal with the possibility of never falling in love again. But I can't deal with never being in a certain bracket, the homeowner bracket. So there it is. Enh - I should also be able to kick some litigous ass. I need to be kicking more ass, and making money - not this year but, well, probably next year - go to Mexico for the 30th bday and then to Law School before the 31st. Maybe I could be an environmental lawyer. That would be sort of awesome. Maybe I could lend my future to-be-gotten contract understanding abilities to would-be producers and sorta keep my hand in the theater production game. I don't know, I've been thinking these kind of serious thoughts about the future. Probably because so many people are getting married or pregnant and I can't even afford a puppy, and also am developing a corner of myself that doesn't believe I'll ever have another boyfriend, not to say husband. And because I really admire the women around my workplace who are runnin' thangs while I take phonecalls and dress like Mad Men (which I was doing since before that shit was on TV - which is awesomely prescient of me but doesn't help me at the automat- not one bit). I'll be accepting "But Alexis you MUSTN'T go to Law School - you are TOO UNIQUE and should just maintain and WRITE" comments/ caveats - but I'm more serious than usual as 30 looms and I seriously want to be able to support a Dog and have a house preferably made at least in part of stone. I think it could be deeply satisyfing a) to study and use different colored highlighters - so in depth will be the level of studying b) to do the persuasive thing c)to earn money, did I mention that?

So there's that. It's related, or at least how serious I feel about it is related, to a phonecall with my dad last night. I guess I'll dialogue it. "Mad Men"-wise it would be hot as hell if I could light up a smoke here at work while I dialogue out my conversation with my dad last night on my blog. Hating so hard on smoking is sadly not even the worst of the aughts.

My dad calls.

Me: HI!
Dad: Hi - how are you?
Me: Good! I'm Good!
Dad: That's one thing that's great about you - you are always so upbeat.
Me: Well, I try!
Dad: So, tomorrow is my last day at Schering.
Me: Wow. Unbelievable. That is some serious end of an era stuff.

um, etc.

Dad: So I won't have to go into work for a while and I found two boxes of your papers from Middle School and High School in the basement so I can bring them out to you one day.
Me: Hm. Alright.
Dad: You know what else I found - cleaning out my desk from work... notes I took from a phonecall from that casting agent about you being in The Secret Garden when you were 12. It says they'd provide a tutor - but you need to have at least one guardian and I wrote "Grammom?"

etc. Jokes.

Dad: Oh well... probably you would have ended up like Drew Barrymore on drugs and a mess.
Me: Oh probably not. Probably I just would have loved the living shit out of it and then for college gone to Carnegie Mellon's Conservatory or I dunno Yale and gotten an agent and it'd be great.
Dad: Yea! You'd be Natalie Portman.
Me: Exactly. But talented. Anyhow, this is silly. Yeah, right now all I really want is a dog.
Dad: Well I guess I can be glad you're not telling me you're not getting younger so you want to have a baby.
Me: Yeah not to worry - not even close. I'll tell you that in about 10 years.
Dad: What about your mother? Is she still bothering you to have a baby?
Me: No I think that was mostly drunkenness... well, or... well I don't really know what it was. Honestly it was more her asking why I was keeping her from her grandchild - you know the imaginary grandchild - which - I don't think you like to hear this, but when I do think of having a baby, I'm pretty sure I really don't want her anywhere near it and I'll try to keep it as far away from her as I can...
Dad: Oh I don't think I'll fight you too hard on that.
Me: Okay good yeah. Hey so these boxes of stuff - I'm just thinking- you don't really have to bring them out here - I mean it's great if you come out here- there's all sorts of stuff we can do, but it's not like I have so much storage space...
Dad: Well if I don't bring it out it's gonna get thrown away.
Me: Jeez fine. Bring them out then - I don't want you to throw them away. Like my "All About Me" book. I was just thinking of that because of Where the Wild things Are. Do you remember the stories you took dictation from me of? They were incredible- They were so Jungian - I can't believe they're lost forever.
Dad: Yeah! you were so Creative!
Me: No Really! I remember one of them I looked in the mirror but I was a bird and... then there was this journey on a train but all the while I kept having these feelings, as a girl, as a bird... - it's terrible that they're gone.
Dad: What about schools? Are you applying to schools again this year?
Me: I mean I should try. Get together a couple applications over Christmas break. But I haven't written anything new. I am in a mood to revise, but I don't know if I'll get to it. Plus I was reading this Wendy Wasserstein play over the weekend and thinking, "Why not try to produce this?" I mean I don't know how to acquire the rights but I guess I could find out.
Dad: Yeah I guess that's why there are producers - not everyone can write.
Me: Well I can write but it's just I think there's a lot of writing that's already there that is better than mine. I mean mine is mine but Wendy Wasserstein - it's kind of great- it all applies to now as well as when it was written and there're all these female characters.. I could cast myself... I don't know.
Dad: No I like this - very ambitious...
Me: And law school - I think about law school
Dad: Well I REALLY like that! But don't wait too long...
Me: What does THAT mean?

But I didn't want to give my dad a hard time so I laid off and didn't demand an answer. Thinking about it more today I also think I shouldn't wait tooo long (I just don't want to hear it from my Dad) because it's expensive and you want to do it young enough that you're paying it off at a time when it's still okay that you're paying it off.

Uh, Booooring - sorry about this y'all. XOXOXOX
A

2009-11-16T10:14:00.000-08:00

Chrissy, I really appreciate you saying what you do about me being such a genius.

I have this fond, I mean bittersweet which can be extremely sweet, while bitter or anyway, tear-salty, memory of meeting MyfriendH and her husband, who was then her fiance, long before they were my neighbors, in Princeton a long ago Thanksgiving just when everything hit the fan with the somewhat psychotic only-man-I-ever-lived-with. Moving out and quickly was suddenly very much on the immediate agenda.

I was crying, but it was manageable and I wasn't about to not meet them just because he'd just published this awful Friendster blog about me. Sounds so nerdy and was still so painful. It was really bad. And I'm sitting there with MyfriendH and her G, and saying, "I would just like to find someone smarter than me" (per grammar discussion "I" is actually correct Chrissy :) :) ) and they were both concurrently like "Well, that's gonna be hard."

Smarter -that's relative and of course, he doesn't have to be smarter, just very aware that I'm smart - right? That's smart enough. But also, truly, I do demand exceptional. I've met and gone out with some even exceptional people and still I really require someone be quite quite amazing - he's gonna have to be gracious and interesting to hear from for ages, and I'll also need the initial get together to involve thrill.

It's a waiting game and sometimes I get lonely and it sucks. But it is what it is and it is exactly what it is and there it is, yeah?

I had the BEST TIME last night. MyfriendsH,M,J,A - her boyfriend R, and me had dinner and reminisced about funny old times when we were kids, high school et al. Champagne, wine, and the laughter of recalled teen times. I had to wipe my eyes laughing over dinner and wine. This might be the best of life. I haven't felt so warm and good in a while. Hooray for Birthday week.

Even before this I had the loveliest night with another friend H and the ever good Kelly the prior week.

Seems it's the ladies that keep my heart warm enough to enjoy life and to smile. I also am happy that the men some of them have found to be with are enjoyable and good too. So glad for the people I love in my life... is my point. XO

A

At the Accounting Office

2009-11-11T06:26:00.000-08:00

Chilling chilling.

I think my mosquito problem is related to Climate Change. What is the fucking deal? -it's mid November. Other people in my building must be having the problem too. (maybe it's partially my own fault - leaving trace amounts of standing water in my sink - I am unfit.) I see that the mosquitos linger in our building wide front door vestibule. They're like vampires that need to be asked in. Kind of. Actually they're the opposite and will fly in as soon as you open the door with your groceries even if you scream at them.

You should really see how I deal with this. Following waking and itching, I move to whichever room I'm not in, slamming the door quickly behind me - if it's into the bedroom that I've moved, I form a seal made of recently discarded clothing over the gap at the door bottom. Last night I had a few beers and forgot to do this when I went to bed. So after I awoke with bites, I moved into the living room - did not form a seal - do not know if I have 2 skeeters or only one. I think it's just the one and eventually he came into the living room from the bedroom under the unsealed door. Anyway what I do is wrap myself completely in a blanket so I cannot be bitten. I also wrap my ears so the buzzes won't necessarily wake me. This is the funny part that you should see. I got one bite on my browline like this last night, but I put hydrocortisone on it immediately (I sleep with it at my mummified side).

Frustrations with men in my life : legion. Still haven't met a great one for me. Oh no! - and the winter on the way! Trying to think how best to long story short here...

That night I lost my contact lens I started to feel angry at Adam. Adam and I have been friends a long time. I'm not a doctor, but I'd say he has chronic depression. -not that some really tough things haven't been happening for the past few years to him. Including the death of his father which of course is beyond hard. I knew him prior to that though and his reaction and the extent of his grief and inward turning is inkeeping - Adam would feel guilty if he felt good even now - that's how his grief works. An Eeyore Adam. But he's a great guy. He brings me music and gives me massages. On his schedule obviously. Recently he's gotten kinda sentimental when he comes by to hang out - talking about teaching me to play guitar and spending the first day of Thanksgiving break with me and asking, weirdly, if he can write to me during work days (me: About what? Adam: About anything.) stuff like this. I didn't want to get excited. I didn't get excited. - this is like four years of not getting excited about Adam I'm into here. But I thought these were nice developments in our friendship plus sometimes sex or whatever it is. He's the same person I once had to call and talk my head off at because we boned and he didn't call. And you know way way way back then I told him: Listen, I'm not trying to get you to feel anyhing you don't feel or be my boyfriend even - you're a piece of work, I get it - but it would really be nice particularly on Sundays to maybe hang out in your new house around the corner and read the paper. I really wish you'd ask me to do that. That has never happened.

So anyway, that night I lost my contact lens, I called him and was like "you know - are we even doing these guitar lessons? Are we really seeing 'Hair' the Wednesday before Thanksgiving? - OF COURSE you haven't done anything about it. OF COURSE you're going home this weekend. I have no faith in any of this honestly." He textd through the night checking I was fine. I guess I'm glad of that, but Adam just does a ton of falling short. It's kind of his whole bag. It's a shame. He's a wonderful guy, person. It's very cyclical where his belief that he is like this is part of what makes him like this. I guess I have a problem of my own feeling disappointed about someone who I endeavored to be aware even on a subconscious level would and will disappoint. Fucking subconscious though! When you're on your period and lose your contact, it's all "Feel my wrath - you tell me NOTHING."

Then, here is last night: This part is kind of interesting and I hope it doesn't make Kelly feel conflicted b/c it's vis a vis her friend who she was really awesome to set me up with. He's fun/ he's one of her favorite people. He's not right for me really. I'm pretty sure she won't mind that or feel anything different about me about that. But anyway, so, I like him but I'm not falling in love. BUT, um, anatomically, uh.... well really exciting. So I pretty much objectify him badly in my mind. Bad person, me.

ANYHOW. So he and I haven't talked much for a week or so. Everytime we gchat he has to go or miraculously I have had work to do at work (well not so miraculous - the holidays are upon us and, you know the drill, OMG THE MFing TREE!@!!) So anyhow - right long story short- he, like Adam, who is who I actually am angry at, eventhough I'm supposed to never expect anything ever from Adam, wasn't being particularly amenable to discussing when we were actually getting together next. I asked him what was up on Monday (basically - I wanted to go over and give him lots of oral sex. You heard it here first - I adore his penis. [SO BAD - can you imagine what I would think of someone writing that they weren't so infatuated with me, but did adore my vagina on the internet? Actually, the life I've had, I think I could handle it. So there.]) So anyhow - I'm not totally sure how understood this is, but I'm getting the feeling it's kind of understood. So anyway yesterday I'm telling him, "Look Thursday's out but did you say Wednesday? And do you want to do this other thing first on Wednesday and blah" and he's gotta call me later he says. So he calls last night on his way to meet this guy for dinner and honestly screams in my ear for ten or twelve minutes about his frustrations at his work. I had to hold the phone away. I made little comments not knowing what else to do. "Well you sound angry" etc. Anyway he went on and on and when he was winding down I tried to sort of sneak in "You're kind of yelling in my ear" which is not actually a sneakable statement. No questions about me or my day though. I said "Well I guess I'll let you get to your dinner and your friend." At this point he said he didn't mean to just dump on me. I think I just said "yeah" because that is exactly what he did - what was I to say? I chose "yeah." Then he said, "so do you want to try to arrange to hang out tomorrow" all heavy inuendo voice on the "hang out" which would have been fine with me -- that was exactly what I wanted to have go on with him - if he hadn't called me on his way to meet someone and just vented his whole life like it was fascinating at 130 decibels with no intention of ever asking me how I was. Boo to that. Sorry that's just so rude. If you're calling someone on your way elsewhere and the first thing you're going to make clear is that you're on your way somewhere to meet someone and don't have time to ask about the other person, you've really got to contain your twelve minute shouting monologue. That's called courtesy. I said I didn't think so about the hanging out today. I said I had to clean my house. I am no longer capable of pretending I am not pissed when I am - if I ever was - which I probably never was.

XOXOXOX I LOVE YOU
Alexis

Is my emotional life boring yet?

2009-11-06T12:36:00.000-08:00

Anyway I wonder what it's like to be a man. They must feel similar emotions sometimes but they don't feel them all miserable on their period once every few months. Yesterday I felt all bad in the first place, my house is a mess, I'm out of toilet paper, and then I lost my BRAND NEW amazing left contact lens down the drain and had to just go "I am going to be hysterical about this for five minutes and then I'll internalize that I'll just order another one tomorrow and calm down, but I get to go down a whole path of misery for five minutes... but - don't break the plates!" :)

Anyway, I took a sick day. I still haven't addressed the trash but I'm about to take a shower. What an amazing Sopranos the one where Tony and Tony have to take Chris to the hospital to get the doctor to tell Chris that Adriana was sitting up during the car accident is.

love

2009-11-04T08:08:00.000-08:00

Something delightful

Names to call a girl named Madeline, Maddie

* Mart the Fart
* or just Mart
* so now and then Martina Hingis
* also Mardy
* or Moldy

hahaha. Brothers and sisters are the best.

eh

2009-11-03T06:25:00.000-08:00

I hate the ones where I protest over and over "This is not pathetic!" Maybe it's a style problem. Maybe I should only mention fantasies and dreams in the context of plays about plane crashes.

XO

More later

2009-11-02T12:11:00.000-08:00

Where the Wild Things Are is Excellent. David Brooks wrote the best review I've read so far. It's pschoanalytic in its approach to character he says. Then he put in his own little zeitgesit statement about a change happening in our collective approach to character. Neat. Anyway, wonderful movie.

WTWTA is probably somewhat responsible for a degree of vividness and fullness of feeling to my dreams last night/ this morning. I traveled a distance in a lush part of Africa and climbed a ladder and met my team. I watched a lot of TV yesterday and that's why there was a "team" I think.

Oh right before I went to bed I watched Celebrity Sex Rehab which aside from the fact that Dr. Drew wears a stethoscope is really pretty good.

Jesus what am I talking about. I was gonna do such a good blog today but I ran it in my head and now I don't wanna write it.

So I woke up and decided to sleep another 20 minutes and decided to put my chosen work crush in a dream since I was in a good dream moment.

Scene from last week (reality):
Analysts crowded around another analyst's desk in front of mine. Analysts discussing sunglasses with sides. These are called wayfarers. Cute boy didn't know this and I can never remember what wayfarers are either since to me they sound like either sneakers or shorts. I don't talk at work though - not to the analysts, not unless we are getting coffee at the same time. I am listening to this conversation but acting like I'm not. So then Cute says "like the sunglasses they give you at the dentist" For some reason everyone looks at me for a reaction. I say "Do you mean the eye doctor?" (even though I know he means just what he said) Much more lauughter than that deserved.

And so - I loved the dream I got to have about him when I told my contented self to dream this morning. (upcoming = dream) We went to a burger place. Oh the burgers smelled so delicious. Without a doubt they were in n out burgers but we were in NYC. Dreams! We were laughing and laughing and buying our burgers. No one was watching and I very nearly stole myself a second burger at the checkout becasue therewere all these hot delicious ones just wanting to be grabbed. But I didn't - just stole extra fries. Then we were in a car - he was driving I think - or I was - either way we were eating the burgers and the fries and they were delicious - maybe we were bringing someone else some burgers too. Then he told me he really liked me and kissed my neck. It was AWESOME.

I have dreams like this and they're really nice. Maybe if I wait long enough something this exciting will actually happen (but I doubt it. Also I don't mean iwth him. I just mean with anyone) Please don't get the wrong idea that I'm upset about boys or love or stuff right now. I'm not. I feel pateint and fine about it. I have support, boys who I like and who think I'm bee-ooo-te-ful - I'm good. I'm not inspired but it's fine. And my last blog post wasn't about becoming lesbian or actually hating men: it was a women are superior thing which I always think. Just to clarify. What I'm going at is that feeling I remember from adolescence and dreams where I actually feel flooded with that special joyful anxiety. Some days I think I could never feel this ever again - which I can be happy to have ever felt it at all. Most days I figure I may feel it again before I'm 46. At any rate, I understand it to be an unknown and it does not wrench my heart regualrly or anything like that.

But sometimes good enough movies can make me dream it. Plus daylight savings time, plus the heater on yet not overheating the room.

God I love it. Too bad there are no occasions where me and that office cute boy are sent to go get burgers for everyone in an old blue Corrolla. Becasue I am sure you readers all know DUH If we were it would go down just like the dream. I would sit in the passenger seat all silently repeating "tell me you like me and kiss my neck tell me you like me and kiss my neck" and then it would happen just like the dream.

Again, this is in no way a patheticness posting. Need you to know that. How I feel about this is happy. Happily, I am not very deluded lately.

You may ask this though: "Alexis, you're funny: can I ask you this? You know Alexis, you seem so excited, moved, and spiritually most nourished by the arts - most of all drama, the depth of human character, and music, so what attracts you- what arouses your secret sad-happy dark and soft and heart heat love-warmth about these bland corporate boys?"

(MyfriendH told me something great about looking for our Dads once recently and I really liked that answer and it gave me some solace in wondering why I liked someone I shouldn't have. She's good. this is an aside)

I was thinking this very question to myself as I went for lunch today though. Look out becasue I don't have a concise answer.

Part of it though I think is a practicality that I insert into my fantasy life, or a realism, however you want to say it. Even in my fantasy likfe i am fantasizing about someone whose job would actually support us so that we could really have a wintry house which is like a haven in the snow - a key fantasy of mine all my life.

I don't want him to be around all the time. I want him to be handsome, love to love me, go to work, earn money, respect me to fucking death.

What is love to me? Nothing intense and twilight-like - not even in my fantasies. When I fatasize about my be-suited husband I just fantasize him saying my name to other people when I'm not around and saying something about me. To me that is love. "Alexis doesn't like those sorts of movies." These are the words I put in my crushes' mouths in my fantasies. Isn't that funny.

The way I see it - there's an alternate route to my wintry joy which is law school. Then I'd be able to earn enough to buy my own house. I will consider this at 31 but no sooner. I like being single in New York now, but I do want to live in New England in my own house and i would like a child.. sometime, later not now. I don't see any harm in fantasizing about just being taken there and encouraged to write, mother, get analysis, learn to play instruments and the odd language - and don't forget, be mentiononed to others... "Alexis is learning Italian. We're taking the baby there in Spring." "Alexis wrote the saddest song about her postpartum depression. Anyway she doesn't like those kinds of movies."

I hope you understand I don't feel pathetic about any of this! It is just confessional and hopefully you kinda know what I mean!

xoxoxoxox
love
A

My Opinions on Everything Continued

2009-10-30T08:42:00.000-07:00

Obviously had to continue right? I have opinions on things besides Rosie O'Donnell and one other thing. I mean c'mon...

Related to Rosie O'Donnell though. All opinions have to be related to Rosie O'Donnell. Never love a man. Only love a woman. I'm upset about Gore Vidal. I loved him a lot and then this is what he said of the girl in the Roman Polanski case: "Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she's been taken advantage of?"

The safest thing is just to only love smart women and be radical like that.

love
Alexis