ta-da!

i know the changes are the insane, but i've been feeling for a while that the old layout was a little too doom and gloom, even for me.  and, as i am a person of extremes, i figured i should go as whimsical-crazy-person as possible.  this may also be the product of my actually getting enough sleep for the past two days. i'm in a great mood!  i'm going to drink tea and read jane eyre and sit practically inside the space heater all day.  so excited.

a few days ago, i got my nose re-pierced, which i suppose is pretty useless to talk about here, considering everyone who reads this a) was there when it happened or b) is party to my facebook page and has probably already seen all the photos i'm about to share.  however, this blog, in addition to being a hilarious part of seven followers' day, is my sad attempt at a journal, so i figure i should include any facial piercings (because they're kinda a big deal).

i first got my nose pierced in september of 2007, as a 21st birthday gift to myself.  the whole event was tainted with craziness (such as: i wound up at a tattoo shop with a coworker i barely knew after carpooling with her to a football game we were working together, and the piercer used the wrong stud, so i ended up with a piercing the size of a gigantic metal bb), so i probably shouldn't have expected greatness.  as it turned out, after weeks of zero healing and one horrible minute in the bathroom mirror, ripping the piercing from my nose, i allowed hole to close up, leaving me with a giant-bb-sized blue tattoo on my face where my skin had eaten off all the nickel coating* from the crappy jewelry.  yay!  i wore makeup over it for approximately forever and when i didn't, it was pretty obvious.  one day, after killing time at a mall while waiting for someone, i stumbled upon "skin gems" at claire's and starting wearing glittery stickers intended for ten-year-olds over my nostril scar.  it was then that i realized i really loved the look of the piercing and wanted to do it again, the right way.

cut to: thursday, when five of us forensic anthropology creeps found ourselves in a tattoo parlor.  i am a notorious baby when it comes to pain, so despite pretending to be a super badass, i was practically peeing my pants at the thought of shoving a needle through my face (and this time, through scar tissue).  here i am contemplating my fate:

and then crying:

and then being extremely pleased that it was over with and my horrible face tattoo was gone forever:

i'm doing everything completely differently than i was advised the first time.  i'm not turning the piercing, not cleaning it with peroxide, not really even acknowledging that it exists, except to spray it a few times a day with a sodium chloride mixture conveniently sold at the shop.  it's not sore, it's not disgusting and it's surgical steel, so hopefully no more nightmarish allergic reaction!**

*/**i've been blessed with a pretty vicious allergy to plated metals (in addition to all the other various skin ailments i've been dealt).  when i was a baby, i used to get little circular raised rashes all down my chest where the snaps on my onesies would lay against my skin.***  i'm allergic to all jewelry in my price range and even get nasty blisters on my ring finger if i wear my circa 1910 white-gold engagement ring for more than 10 hours at a time (as white-gold used to be cut with nickel in order to appear white).  it's never really been a huge inconvenience, except when there was a plated metal stud hanging out in an open wound on my face for two months.  that didn't really end well.

***for those who weren't aware, i truly am one of the most difficult people in the universe.

sucks.

my life is full of things i like to say "make good stories."  these are usually things that are totally disastrous or horrible at the time, but i can brush off eventually as the hilarious hijinks of my youth.  this list includes the time a fly ball hit me in the face at dodger stadium, the two years a homeless man had my cell phone number and would call me every few weeks from different area codes around the country (which is obviously the reason i don't answer calls from unknown numbers) and the october i thought it would be a good idea to drop out of my life and bottle-feed kittens.

i'd had some pretty intense things make the list.  however, this morning something happened that has blown them all out of the water.  this morning, i secured what i hope is number one on the list of "things i could never, ever have anticipated" for a long time to come.  it all started when:

my phone died on saturday night.  i don't know exactly what happened to it, considering it was three months old and i had surprisingly not yet dropped it, lost it or accidentally stepped on it.  it was in pristine condition one second and then had the black screen of death the next.  i had planned on going to a verizon store to get it sorted out yesterday, but then the storm of the century hit southern california and we had torrential rains all day.  so, instead of hitting the stores, i hit the hot cocoa container and dvd cabinet pretty hard.  i figured i could just go get the phone thing worked out today after work, as i use a landfill cell phone while i odor patrol and wouldn't really need my own phone until this afternoon.

so, i'm phoneless.  and i'm driving up the winding roads to the landfill, roads that freak me out even when it's beautiful outside because they aren't marked with lanes and have tricky speed bumps and are just generally totally menacing.  there was crap (read: giant rocks and a blue recycling bin) in the road from the storm and as i approached a familiar low spot in the road, one that always fills with water, i just knew that the free car wash i got from the rainstorm was going to get totally effed up by a huge puddle.  annnnnnd that's when my crappy rented chevy impala, which weighs about ten gazillion tons and has a frame that practically drags on the ground, got stuck in a thick, lovely layer of mud from an apparent mudslide.  i was there so early this morning that it hadn't yet been cleared and there i was, wheels a foot deep in sucking mud (i know it was a foot deep because i stepped out into it and lost my entire boot.  on a positive note, i'd decided to wear my hunter rain boots, which in retrospect was a really good idea.  thank god for small miracles.)

as i said, i also didn't have a cell phone.  i wandered around the impala helplessly, after having put the car in neutral and trying to push it out (didn't work, obviously).  i waited and waited until a truck came up the road behind me, at which point i played damsel in distress to a guy in a hard hat, who eventually sent a front loader and some dudes with shovels to come save me.  as insane as it was, i was fully aware the entire time of how i was living a five-year-old boy's dream.  the mud around the car was scraped away carefully by a giant construction vehicle and all i could think of (aside from what a dumbass i am) was the classroom full of boys at the preschool last year, who could really think of nothing else but front loaders.  god, they would have been so jealous.  when the scraping finished, they cut my tires a path with a shovel and i was free.

i was an hour late to work, despite being at the landfill on time.  so close, and yet so far.

they live!

i have a thing for succulents.  i tend to attribute this to growing up in the southern california with a father who, being obsessed with history in general and california history specifically, took us to every white-stucco-walled, brown-wooden-beamed, cacti-laden historic mission museum in the state.  the yard in front of the house i grew up in is pretty much an impenetrable fortress of overgrown, alien agaves.  and, for most of my formative years, i lived within a five minute walk of the santa monica mountains.  i live succulents.

so, when it was time to chose a color scheme and flowers for our outdoor, santa monica mountain wedding, i naturally (see what i did there?  naturally?) decided on purples, sages and whites, to reflect the real landscape of this area.  for reference, here are some photos of our wedding favors and my bouquet (and luke's back):

this photo also highlights a spiderweb on this aloe.  apparently it spent too much time outside pre-wedding.  also, this proves how much i didn't care about the details by d-day.  there really is only some much discussion about colors and tablecloths and lighting one can take before it's TOO MUCH ALREADY.

i was in love with this favor idea.  obviously, i was convinced i was the first person in the history of weddings to come up with it.  however, i haven't seen it anywhere else and until i do, i'm claiming all credit.

the bouquet.  it was insane and wonderful and created by a genius florist who took my "um, succulents and white flowers?" and ran into the best possible direction.  

anyway, my point is that i am deep in the throes of a love affair with succulents, with their waxy, smooth surfaces and near-indestructibility.  they are the plants for me.

this brings me to now.  we are about two months from our one year anniversary and i have managed to keep alive all of the leftover wedding favors and two of the giant succulents from my bouquet.  for some reason, this amazes me.  i can't get over the fact that some of the floral stuff from that day still lives - and thrives actually (for the most part).  sadly, though, the favors are still in their dorky little terra cotta pots and are obviously desperate for some more space/better potting soil.  i've been meaning to put them all in a giant terra cotta bowl for approximately all of the months since the wedding and now i've finally purchased all that i need to make this dream a reality.  i'm gonna wait until tomorrow, though, despite having had the time to make the transfer tonight, because buying the supplies was my productive task of today and planting them will be the one productive thing (aside from working before dawn - literally) that i do tomorrow.  see how i think ahead?

here's the station:

i think this is too tinytown, so click on it if you're so inclined.  the plants in the orange and yellow ramekins (from crate and barrel, created for baking creme brulees, one of my other favorite things in the world) are the succulents from the bouquet.  so big and green and alive!

loud mouth.

backstory: if you've been paying attention, you already know that my mother's side of the family is bizarrely close.  i love this.  in fact, i may or may not be a tiny bit obsessed with the fact that at family parties, i add extra vodka to my mixed drinks at the behest of my great-aunts.  that is amazing.  another, perhaps less fun fun, consequence of having a close-knit family is that everyone always knows everyone else's business.  growing up, my grandfather knew about all my medical issues and boy problems (mostly because my mom has a giant mouth).

current story: this is why i'm shocked, literally shocked, that no one has mentioned the car accident to me.  i wrecked the car on thursday and friday night, my aunt hosted a shabbat dinner (that was less about shabbat and more about wine and challah, as usual.  my cousin and i "blessed" the candles and the bread by reciting a prayer ending in "neir shel chanukah," which is really only funny because it's the chanukah prayer, guys!  not the blessing over the shabbat candle!*  come on!  god, we're hilarious).  anyway, on friday, i knew my entire family knew about the accident because my mom obviously could not keep it a secret from me that she had not kept it a secret from them.  therefore, imagine my surprise when not a one uttered anything remotely suggesting i'd just been an in accident.  not even my grandfather, who has called me frantic over much lesser crises (such as what brand my birth control was - yes, seriously.  although in his defense, i was using it as an acne medication and having struggled with it himself, at a time when dermatologists locked patients in lead rooms for hours with UV rays bouncing around,** he was concerned with helping cure me).  i still can't believe he didn't say anything over dinner and am especially blown away that when he called me today to talk about getting together for lunch tomorrow (see.  close family.  can't help it.  same dna.  i was born this way) he talked to me for five minutes without mentioning it AT ALL.  it's actually freaking me out.  what are they planning?  probably a huge driving school intervention.  typical.




*for the uninitiated among us, like those who cannot claim that they dropped of out hebrew school after four months at age 12 (like me) or that they occasionally stock their cabinets/fridges with matzo and kedem grape juice as soon as the passover aisles go up in the supermarkets (also like me), many hebrew celebration prayers begin with the same few lines (the appealing to god parts), and only differ in their references to whatever individual celebration/food the prayer is meant to be blessing.  we use the chanukah prayer eight times a year, in rapid succession, and for those of us who only have the supposedly weekly shabbat dinners once a year with our family when we've already had several (very alcoholic) mojitos, its repeated use makes the chanukah prayer much easier to remember.


**my grandpa recalls this time in his life fondly.  in winter in berkeley in the fifties, he had a better tan than anyone he knew.  perhaps the best one of all.  (although, it's maybe more important to note that he didn't get some form of horrible skin cancer from the lead rooms/UV ray double whammy.)

the final stretch

last night, i bailed on something i was really looking forward to because i became a nauseous mess after discovering the dog has fleas.  for some reason, this relatively minor (and totally fixable) issue triggered a full-blown freak out.  i'd been feeling sick with anxiety on and off all the day, but i managed to go meet people for a fabulous breakfast, clean up the house and study for a final before hitting a wall and absolutely losing it.  the fleas were the straw that broke the camel's back, i suppose.  not only because this week has been one insane disaster after another, but also because it is the second doggie health problem we've faced in seven days.  this week, she was diagnosed with spay incontinence, which means her hormone levels are so out of whack that she can't control her abdominal muscles (and was thus peeing everywhere she happened to fall asleep - like all over the couch, for instance).  she'll have to take regulatory pills for the rest of her life.  since late november when we adopted her, she has had ear infections in both ears, mange (requiring weekly injections at the vet's office), this permanent incontinence (which was at first diagnosed as a bladder infection, for which she has already taken weeks of pills) and now fleas.   she also came to us with crippling social anxiety, something we're just now starting to see improve.  so, add the whole slew of dog problems (and how much they impact luke) to my own wonderful medical experience, the accident that totaled my car, and the fact that i haven't been sleeping at all, and you have me worked up into such a state that finding fleas on our dog is the most devastating thing.  could we not have some new issue arise every day?  could i just have a weekend to sleep in and finish my work for this quarter?  what the hell.  i went to sleep at 8:45 pm last night, curled into a ball with mascara smeared across my face.

usually, i have an impervious hard candy coating that allows me to handle things rationally and quickly.  i'm all about solutions.  i tend not to wallow or be crazy or completely spin out.  occasionally, though, the world will get to me.  so, congratulations, universe.  well-played.

i'm gonna try to use today to complete the last two theory papers i need to write and then all i have to think about tomorrow is finishing up studying for a multiple choice exam.  i could be done with finals by tuesday!  perhaps the feeling of accomplishment will help level out this week from hell.

i don't think you're ready for this jelly

yesterday afternoon, on my way to class after a horrible day, i completely flattened the front my car into a giant jeep grand cherokee on the freeway.  i have never before been the cause of an accident and this one was a doozy.  pieces of my poor little scion box were littered over the freeway, so much so that people behind us had to swerve around them.  i don't think i was going super fast, because it was stop and go traffic and despite my high hopes for getting to class on time, one cannot go 65 mph on the 101 at 4:45 pm.  that being said, traffic was breaking up and i was distracted and when the guy in front of me had to slam on his brakes, i was screwed.  the worst part about this huge mess is that i'd already had an epically disastrous day and had actually been thinking/crying/obsessing about it when i lost focus for a second and caused the accident.

right before the accident, i had to go to cvs to pick up a prescription, where the pharmacy tech actually heckled me for picking up medication for something she thought was "so gross."  i was publicly shamed by a medical professional, which of course made me insane.  and then i got in my car.  probably not a good idea.  but, before i left the store and just after my upsetting encounter with the pharmacy counter biatch, i discovered that, lucky me!, it's almost easter and there was a toooooon of delicious easter candy out on display.  i bought a gigantic bag of jelly beans and ripped it open in the parking lot, calming my nerves with sugar.

the most upsetting part of the car accident?  that giant, open bag of jelly beans, the stuff of my life, whiplashed around until all the beans were scattered around the floor of the passenger side.  it really was a terribly sad microcosm of what was happening in my life.

jelly beans all over the floor.  so depressing.

blistering heat

continuing in this week's tradition of posting upsetting, vomitous photos, i present, the blister of doom:

wait.  i think we need a different perspective:

the thing is so bulbous, it hangs.  i can't even believe it.  it's not particularly large per se (especially now that i've just googled "giant blister."  the internet puts the surface area of this bad boy to shame.).  however, it stands a good centimeter and a half above the surface of my skin, which is fascinating to me. the best part is that i walked around with this all day before noticing it at like 4 pm.  obviously, i knew i had a blister (one cannot possibly miss something this massive), but i had no idea it would be this impressive.

i have to walk the rounds again tomorrow, and therefore, the question is: to lance or not to lance?

odor patrol

this is my first full week of odor patroling and it is wednesday and i am exhausted.  oh, not from getting up at 4:50 am every morning.  that's actually been good.  i feel like i've done so much today and it's only 12:30 in the afternoon, so the early morning call time ain't the problem.  it's the walking.  i essentially walk up and down hills for four hours every morning and for this sack of laziness, that's a pretty tall order.  despite the fact that i was on track teams for seven years sprinting my little heart out, i am by nature incredibly lazy.  i became a hurdler simply because hurdle practice followed general conditioning on mondays and was conveniently at the same time as the intense sprint workouts.  i was able to sprint and hurdle at meets and i also dodged the deadly bullet of endless repeats on mondays on our shitty, gravelly track.  yes, i am that devious.  (for the record, though, i was actually decent at hurdles and really enjoyed them.  i just came to them in a sneaky way.)

annnnnyway, so the walking is killing me.  i will get used to it, i'm sure, but as of right now, even my shoulders are sore and i can assure you i haven't been doing my rounds carrying extra weights.

silver lining to the misery of my feet, legs and back?  i picked up a paycheck today (aka i should shut my mouth about being sore).  i haven't had a check cut in my name for what seems like decades and there are things that must be handled, so things are on the up and up.  yipee!

the greater and more terrible unveiling.

apparently, i lied in the last post about my skin evolution.  i've been thinking about it a lot lately and just yesterday, after scouring computers, found this:

the non-existent chest shot exists!  this was actually taken in that same hotel room by that same miserable 19-year-old.  god, what a nightmare.  but, in the interest of full disclosure, here it is.  again, i feel the need to justify how bad it was, because for some reason, i feel like this photo doesn't convey it.  maybe that's just a hold over from having to be such an apologist for my feelings.  i know how damaging this was for me, but i also know some people have it much worse.  however, on a scale of "normal person" to "bad news," i still believe this falls into the "bad news" category.  (interestingly, though, i have a bathing suit tan, meaning that dying of humidity on a road trip through the south in august trumps feeling like a disgusting mutant.  who knew?)

i know for certain now that no pictures of my back survived, as i would have had to ask someone else to take them and that sure as hell wasn't going to happen.  i'm disappointed now, though, at the other end of the journey, because i would love to have a series of comparison photos from the start of the medication to the end of it.  accutane, despite its bad rap, saved my life in a lot of ways and i wish i had a better record of just how it did it.

but, for the sake of some comparison, this is me now:

i'm covered in little white scars and my skin here reacts a little differently than the unblemished stuff, but for the most part, it could have been much worse and i've been normalized since early 2007.  (is it coincidence that i met luke just after finishing my last dose of the giant orange twice-a-day?  or is it possible that i finally had the confidence that no one would be embarrassed about being with me or take advantage of my obviously less-than-prime self-esteem?  that's so sick and sad and horrible.)

the difference between these two photos is perhaps way i sometimes get chastised for wearing shirts that are "too low-cut."  that's the point, guys!  i spent five years in t-shirts.  let wear my v-necks and tank tops without shame.

always be prepared

as much as this goes against my feminist leanings, i think there's always something about a girl's mother that she associates with being a woman/adult.  for most kids, it's probably dressing up in their mom's jewelry, clomping around in her high heels and spreading her lipstick all over their faces.  they prance around, everyone loves it and ta-da, you've got a lady in the making.  however, my mother wasn't into jewels or makeup or five-inch heels.  she was a painter, a cake maker, a writer, a brilliant student.  instead of carefully putting on eyeliner, she was constantly analyzing, assessing and was preparing.  therefore, our house was almost always stocked with goodies, as my mom has this really awesome ability to think ahead.  i could decide on a whim that i wanted to make cookies or cakes or a complicated dinner and she would always, without fail, produce everything i needed.  it was the same with medicines (which i'm sure had a little bit to do with all the hypochondria spinning around our house).  i could have any symptom in the book and she would have on hand in the house the exact remedy i needed.  i loved that about her.  in my eyes, my mom was so on top of things, she was a superhuman.  i associated being grown up, being a woman, with always thinking two steps ahead.  plus, there was also the very reassuring feeling that we always had whatever we needed, and that we could count on our parents to provide it for us.  and now, that i'm a grown-up and trying to sort out my own household, my mother is who i aspire to be.  this is why, for the past several months, since we moved into this house, i've had a box full of medical supplies (every over the counter drug possible, band-aids, ankle wraps, face masks, etc.) sitting in the hallway near the bathroom, as there is absolutely no room for all of it in the bathroom.

luke thinks this is insane.  he's wanted me to throw it all away for months.  he doesn't think there will ever come a time we'll need meat tenderizer for mosquito bites or special anti-fungal creams.  and, if we did, he figures we'd just go to the store to get them.  unfortunately for him, what he doesn't realize is that going to the store is akin to failure.  in order to be the master of your supplies, you must have already have them all, so that when someone asks for something obscure and you produce it for them instantly, they think you are magical (which is all i really want anyway).

so, this brings us to today, when my grandpa delivered to us the extra medicine cabinet he made for us.  yes, an extra one.  don't you people know you need one for things you use all the time and one for just-in-case supplies?  he installed it in the bathroom and it's beautious and i can't wait for tomorrow when i can start stuffing all my drug store purchases into it.

while the grandparents were here, we met up with one of the great-aunts and we all went to a deli, where we were surrounded by little old ladies playing pan at their tables, some of whom recognized my grandparents (and one of whom was the mother of my second cousin's ex-husband).  apparently, the valley's older jewish scene is quite a small world.  i absolutely love my grandparents and the aunts and the lunch was hilarious, adorable and probably incredibly annoying for our waitress, which is pretty much how we roll.

each and every time i see them, i realize how very, very lucky i am to have grandparents who not only love me but also craft me magnificent cabinets and shoot me knowing looks when we're confronted by crazy people in restaurants.  the snark is genetic and there is nothing better in the world than being a sarcastic diva with your grandfather.

the great and terrible unveiling.

last night, in my anthropology theory class, i was out of control insane.  it probably had something to do with the fact that i was operating on zero sleep and the room was about ten bajillion degrees and we spent about ten hours trying to understand how to play a trivia game, but it was also because i am insane.  that's me.  i tell crazy, snarky jokes and laugh hysterically and am just generally capable of acting like drunk when i'm perfectly sober.  as many people have heard (because i am a loud story-repeater), when i was two and a half my parents were so concerned about my energy levels they had me evaluated.  as in, taken to a child psychologist/behavioral therapist/guru for examination.  i recently found a copy of this evaluation in my long-lost baby book and all the doctor's observations are pretty much still 1000% accurate.  he used many fancy medical terms to describe me, all of which boiled down to: high energy, super friendly, easy wound up, sensitive, crazed.  that's who i was when my brother sam and i forced our grandparents to watch us perform selections from "the phantom of the opera" over and over again in their front room, and when i chased my friends around with the corpses of my freshly dead pet fish (which i did all the time, traumatizing melissa for the rest of her life and perhaps illuminating why i shouldn't have fish as pets), and when i dated the boy next door in ninth grade.  i plastered my room with "i love me" stickers (plastered it, guys), created dance routines for school talent shows and was a sprinter.  when i was 15, all that changed. whereas before i would do anything to claw my way into the spotlight, as a teenager i did everything within my power to avoid attention from anyone.  i became the girl who didn't dance at gatherings, refused to sing karaoke or been seen in a bathing suit.  i stopped voicing opinions, stopped going to the beach, started genuinely hating who i was.  i suppose maybe that happens to a lot of people in their awkward youth.  however, for me, my perhaps requisite teenage self-hate was compounded by this:

this is me.  august 2006.  in a south carolina hotel bathroom after i'd just privately washed all the caked concealer off my face and had a major breakdown about how horrible i felt i looked and how equally horrible being in the muggy south in the dead of summer was making me feel about the situation.  you can't seen in this shot, but my chest and back are also tragic (no pictures of those parts of my body from this time of my life exist, which really isn't too surprising.  i pretty much pretended the parts themselves didn't exist and therefore never thought to photograph them.).  i was a month shy of 20 and going on my fifth year of uncontrollable acne.  i'd done countless rounds of useless antibiotics, slathered my face in acids, spent sunny days desperately trying to sunburn, hoping the uv radiation would kill the pimples.  i'd stopped all treatment and washed my face with only water.  i'd changed my eating habits and stopped touching my face.  i saw several dermatologists and started the same treatment programs over and over again.  salicylic acid, antibiotics, salicylic acid.  by the time i was actually effectively prescribed accutane, i'd attempted to get it from two other doctors who couldn't figure out the paperwork necessary to obtain the medication.  (accutane, being one intense chemical cocktail, is probably more difficult to catch than a unicorn is.  the prescription came with a three-ring binder full of warnings and rules.  seriously.)  

it's difficult for even me to see the extent of the damage in here, because the picture's so tiny in this blog form, but what still absolutely kills me is the look on my face.  that devastation is what i felt every time i saw my reflection as a teenager and that's why i stopped being a bubbly pixie from the land of absurdity.  i was miserable.

the few people who i allowed to see me without makeup (which essentially did nothing but make me feel like i had some small control over what i looked like) tended to tell me i was lucky that the acne wasn't cystic or that i was vain for letting my skin issues take over my life or that it wasn't "that bad" or that i should get over myself or something equally as hurtful or insensitive.  (it was "that bad" for me, assholes.)  as i was figuring out how to deal with something that effected me so negatively, i was also constantly apologizing to other people because they thought i was being ridiculous.  thus, the way i know i am unequivocally over that part of my life is that now, i don't give two shits what anyone else thinks.  if an opinion is negative or insensitive or uninformed, i simply do not take it in.  i've lost friends, made bad choices, dated terrible people, missed out on countless opportunities and wasted enormous amounts of time feeling bad about myself and now, finally, i'm feeling very nearly over it.  i'm learning to sing to the radio when luke's in the car, dance around the house, be silly with the dog, wear bathing suits, and to basically fulfill the maniacal destiny laid out for me by my evaluator long ago.  i'm feeling ok with being the focus again because i deserve it.  i'm funny, i'm smart, i'm interesting.  i'm done with thinking i'm not worth it.

i've debated posting this photo/tony robbins lecture for literally about two years, because now, at this point in my life, i have a very different relationship with it than i used to and i feel like the transition from that girl to this one is one of the more hugely important chapters of my life.  the only reason i never put it up is that the picture existed only in digital form (obviously it didn't make it into any college albums) in a hidden folder on my parents' computer and it was never really a priority to get it back.  now, though, it seems appropriate to, because this year, i am feeling more like myself than i have in a long time.  also, as ludicrous as this sounds, i was seated next to a woman on the flight home from chicago who on her fourth glass of wine told me i was incredibly, profoundly mature for a twenty-four-year-old and asked me to share my secret. here it is.  this is my secret.  this is what made me the stunning person who blogs before you today (i have always preferred "stunning" to "mature").  i hated myself deeply for six years and had to slowly creep my way back to normalcy, and while i can't pretend that getting rid of the acne didn't massively kick-start the process, there was definitely enough of an emotional shitstorm left over after accutane to make me feel accomplished for having surmounted it.

...it just took four years.  

a job for the jobless.

very soon, as in tomorrow morning, i will be starting a new job as a member of the "odor patrol" and my resume will get that much more interesting (as if a cv claiming cemetery excavator, preschool teacher, fossil preparer, editorial assistant and nanny could get any more variety).  a friend of mine got me a job testing air quality near a landfill, which is actually super exciting, as the hours are wonderful, the pay is nice and i'll finally be working again (perhaps the best perk of all).  anyway, i have to get to work at 5:45 am, which means i was really looking forward to sleeping in this morning and squeezing out the very last drops of mid-week laziness that have made up my life for the past seven weeks.  sadly, the dog became obsessed with hassling the cats and the dream of lounging in bed all day became the reality of a morning of moderating various stand offs between the animals: the cats who could not care less and the puppy who is desperate for some playmates.  it's sad, really.

thus, no sleeping in.  this turned out to be beneficial, though, as i have already finishing all the reading i missed/refused to do during the jaunt to chicago and have written the paper summary of them that's due tomorrow.  now, i have a full day of vacuuming, straightening up, tv watching, onesie making and general coziness ahead of me.  while vacuuming isn't exactly a mind-blowing way to spend a free day, it promises freedom from being covered head to toe in dog fur all the time, so that's pretty good news.

also, i just unpacked my chicago suitcase.  just now.  i actually think this is something of a record because i hate unpacking so much i usually continue to live out of the suitcase until everything's been cleared out simply by virtue of making it to the laundry room.