A Brief History of Beliefs

I believe that music is important, and it can often tell you a lot of what you need to know about a person. I believe it's OK to choose your friends based on the music they like, at least when you're very young and still deciding who you are and what you want. I broke up with someone once over their favorite type of pie, and I've yet to regret that decision.

I believe that if I didn't write, I would suffer, and that is why I do it. I think it would be nice to be published, recognized, earn money for all this agonizing over whether to write 'an' or 'the', but if that never happens I don't think it will make much difference in my decision to write or not. After 25 years I've finally accepted that what I am is a writer.

I believe you should marry someone that you love to kiss, and you love to talk to. In 50 years when age takes it's toll, those two attributes will matter just as much, if not more, than any other quality they possess.

I believe that everyone should get dessert. I don't want to live in a world where dessert is only eaten on special occasions, and chocolate after a meal is not common place.

I believe fun should be had as often as possible, and adventure should always be my main priority. Maybe that's irresponsible or immature, but if it is than I suppose I am irresponsible and immature. What I am not though, is sorry about it.

I believe that you shouldn't judge people by their relatives. Some of us were born into a hot box of crazy, and we had more to overcome than other people, but it doesn't make us bad people. 

I believe you should able to do whatever you want with your hair when you're in high school. Cut it, dye it, shave it off, grow it down to the floor. It will grow back. You will survive. Go ahead and change.

I don't think marriage and love go hand in hand with forever very often. And I don't think that the people who do manage to stay married forever, always stay in love forever. I think being in love comes and goes, but loving a person is what matters, and that's what you work hard to do a good job at every day. I think people leave so easily once the excitement fades, instead of staying and loving that person during the in between times like they promised to, and getting creative or being flexible enough to bend and change and see things differently, so that maybe that in love rush of happiness will come back. I think I live in a generation of people who quit and leave too easily. They have this idea that they should never be asked to change or adjust anything about themselves for a significant other, and that anything less than movie-like passion is unworthy of their time. I believe someone who you can always talk to, and someone who you can always love and wouldn't want to live without is your soul mate, and the one who shows up and makes themselves meant for you by always being there and caring about your happiness as if it were their own, is the one worth sticking it out for, even during the in between times.

I believe that every once and a while you should call out of work with your boyfriend or husband or girlfriend or wife, and spend the day in bed watching movies and taking naps. 

I believe that sleep is not a sign of laziness but an indication that repair is needed. Whether physical, mental or emotional, sleep is the time that your soul uses to fix all that may be wearing down about you. Don't wake a sleeping child unless you have to, and don't see naps as a bad thing even after you're 'too old' to take them.

Work hard.

Tell the truth.

Say what you need to say.

I believe it is a long road to wisdom, but a short one to being ignored. So live your opinions rather than preach them.

Forgive yourself.

Forgive the people who never apologized.

Eat plenty of ice cream, read every book you get your hands on, and kiss like it's the very last time, every single time. Because you never know when it might be.

Christmas Party

 Saturday night was my company's Christmas party at the Montelucia Resort in Paradise Valley. 

Bill came as my date because he's nice.

It was a very nice night.

The Friday Diary: Almost 10 Things That Matter

Happy Friday everybody!

This was a quiet week, full of long, hard worked days as my company prepares to shut down for Christmas break {12 whole days off! Wooh!}

The kids and I put our tree up last weekend, and decorated the house a little, but I still have a ton of shopping to do.

My company Christmas party is tomorrow, and I still have lots of girl prep to do. {yes, girls do start getting ready for a big party days before}

But today it's Friday, and it's jeans day, and tomorrow I'm seeing a movie with my sister and then partying with my co-workers, so all in all I think this week will end on a good note.

In the meantime though, I will leave you with 10 things that matter to me right this second:

1. Have you heard this song? If not, go listen. If you have, go listen again. It's my life.

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2. I don't like my arms. Mainly, I don't like my upper arms/bicep area. They're huge and shapeless which makes them look fat even though they are actually pretty muscular, and I just feel weird when I wear sleeveless shirts and dresses.

I bought a sleeveless dress for the Christmas party.

Why.

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3. I dislike having people's gifts already this long before Christmas. I am absolutely DYING to give everyone their gift, and it's killing me.

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4. Arizona should get colder. I'm being jipped out of truly enjoying my favorite season.

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5. I am legitimately depressed about being single on New Years. Is that lame and cliche? Probably. But I am lame and cliche, so whatever. I don't like not being kissed at midnight.

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6. Pinterested:

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7. Did you see the new Blue Marble pictures of Earth? They are literally breathtaking. Go look.

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8. There is no number 8.

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9. I have worked at my job for a year next Friday. Woah.

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10. Can I just be "that guy" for a second and point out the obvious, which is that this year went by like at light speed? I mean New Years last year feels like a few months ago....Italy feels like last week....Valentines day just happened...and now it's Christmas, and time to say goodbye to the year and the people we all were during it. Time to say goodbye to the things that happened, the places we went and the way we were. Take what you want to hold on to and leave the rest if you can, because it's over. Take a deep breath and look forward. Make some plans for another new year, and hopefully do it better this time.

It's all just going by so fast.

Happy Friday.

I Wish I Could Be Who I Was

There is a quote that I used to love, that said "I wish I could be who I was when I wished I could be who I am now".

 I liked it because it always seemed fitting to me, and it was the longest way possible to say "I wish we could just go back. Back to how things were. I wish I knew what I had then." 

Like when you're a kid and you want so badly to be an adult, until you are one. You get your first job, and finally your first paycheck, and you realize for the first time that paying taxes on your hard earned money sucks. You get your first apartment, and your first electric bill, and you realize for the first time that paying bills and rent sucks. Sure you can also have all the sex and Tequila and parties you want, but after a while you realize how expensive Tequila is, how unforgiving neighbors are of loud music at 2 a.m., and how unreliable birth control and condoms can be when you're testing the odds several times a day.

You want to go back.

You want to be a kid.

You want to lay down on your twin size bed with a teddy bear and smell your mom's cooking again.

The world is a cruel and unforgiving place, and you don't want to play here anymore.

Or, when you've been an adult long enough to get over the parts that are miserable and monotonous, and you've finally found a little joy in it, and then you fall in love. Maybe with someone you've been friends with for a while, maybe with someone you just met, maybe with the most unexpected person who you met in the elevator in your office building. Regardless, for the first time, this is real love. Adult love. Not super fun, carefree high school or college love when the biggest things you have to worry about are whether to take that person with you to every house party you go to, and who's couch you're going to make out on tonight. 

No, this is grown up love, and you're all in. 

But one day, something happens, or nothing happens, but everything changes and the next thing you know the love of your life is breaking up with you over a five dollar Gyro in a strip mall on their lunch break. 

Suddenly there are no more Thursday's watching Grey's Anatomy together, no more Saturdays drinking and goofing off in their kitchen, no more long Sunday drives to middle of nowhere towns or lunches at hole in the wall restaurants where the waiters learn your name and memorize your order. No more kisses, no more pet names, no more text messages that say "Good morning! Have the best day ever!" Just a lot of crying, moping, and personal hygiene negligence.

Once again, you want to go back.

You want to have never met.

You want to be meeting again for the first time so you can try it all over and maybe do it differently, or at least be able to relive those sweet moments a second time.

You want to go back to a point when being just friends seemed possible, so you could at least still have this person in your life, and not have to lose your lover and your best friend all in one go.

You've made mistakes, you took some things for granted, and there doesn't seem to be any kind of redemption.

You wish you could be who you were when you wished you could be who you are now.

I Should Be Doing Something

Today it is Wednesday, December 5th. 20 more days until Christmas, two and a half more weeks before my office closes for a 10 day Christmas break, two days before my company's fancy party, halfway through my holiday shopping and knee deep into my third bag of Doritos.

I should be doing something.

At the very least there are several things I shouldn't be doing, like eating 3 bags of Doritos two days before my company Christmas party to which I {mistakenly} decided to wear a dress that shows my figure. At the last minute it was between that dress and a sequenced moo moo. Now that it's here and I've actually practiced squeezing my fat into it, I feel like I made the wrong choice.

When in doubt, always choose Moo Moo.

I should be doing something about the two furry caterpillars that are making their way across the bridge of my nose to be friends in the middle of my forehead, a.k.a. my long suffering and over neglected eye brows.

I should be cleaning and putting stuff away and arranging the living room in some kind of Christmas friendly fashion. Finishing my decorating, perhaps, and busting out the holiday dishes.

I should be grocery shopping, meal planning, doing laundry and checking my budget.

I should be pulling one of the five million post it notes I've got stuck to my bathroom mirror with phrases, sentences or even just words scribbled down on them in red pen, and working on the book I'm supposedly writing.

I am doing none of this, now or in the foreseeable future.

Instead I am sitting at my computer in pajamas and bed hair, watching Doctor Who far past my bedtime, while the dishes in my kitchen sink grow Penicillin.

I don't feel all that bad about it, because it's Wednesday and sometimes I would rather not care about things.

Sometimes, I would rather have Doritos and Doctor Who.

Things I Don't Know How To Do, Pt. One

I don't know how to make rice. 

There. I said it.

I mean, I get the basic concept of it I guess, but I fail at it almost every time.

This is a running joke with my friends, none of which actually know how to cook, but all of which can still cook rice. 

I am the friend who cooks well.

I am the friend who always has a good recipe for something.

I am the friend you want to know when your family goes to the Bahamas for Thanksgiving and you're looking at a bleak future of hoping the Jack in the Box drive through is open after 4 p.m. that day.

But I can't cook rice.

What the hell is wrong with me? It's irritating because this is the one food that every stoned college kid knows how to make. And they even have like versions of it. Different ways to prepare it so as not to become bored with their 98 cent dinner, three weeks into not being able to afford anything else.

I am getting better at it, and I do believe in the old saying of 'if you can't do, teach.'

So today kids, I am going to teach you how to make rice.

Step one: measure out way less rice than you think you need. Estimating about two cups for three people? Yeah, half that. Rice expands like those little foam pills we used to put in bowls of water as kids, to watch them turn into dinosaurs and kittens and other useless pieces of foam that vaguely resembles animals. 

You will always have too much rice.

Step two: add twice as much water as you added rice. This seems simple, right? 1 cup rice = 2 cups water. 2 cups rice = 4 cups water. Yeah. It's simple until the night you've had four Appletini's and are standing at the sink talk/screaming to your best friend on the phone about how you ran into your asshole ex-boyfriend whilst measuring rice and water and suddenly you realize you've lost count. Did you just add one cup too much, or do you still have one cup to go? DAMN IT. Throw it all out and start over. 

After another Appletini of course.

Step three: find the lid that actually goes to the sauce pan you're using. This is bullshit. With pasta, if you can't find the right lid you can just throw a cookie sheet haphazardly over the top and the shit will still cook. Not so with rice, the smug, persnickety bastard. That shit needs to be practically air tight. Dig through the cabinets, get pissed when everything falls out, jumps out, breaks, becomes a jumbled mess or smashed your toes. Wonder why you decided to cook rice in the first place.

Step four: ponder the AUDACITY of rice to even require so much as TWO steps, let alone FOUR. Place the pot on the stove indignantly. Turn the burner up to whatever temperature it needs to be at to boil shit. My stove is possessed  so that number would be about 4. I've heard other stoves actually need to be on like 8, but whatever. Can't have everything.

Step five: remember that cooking rice is like baking. It's a science, not an art. You have to be exact with your measurements, your timing, your heat. Everything. Don't fuck this up by going to sit down and watch Duck Dynasty with another Appletini. Stand at the stove and watch the rice. You are now the rice's bitch, and don't ever forget that. Once it starts to boil, panic completely and try to decide how long you should let it boil for. The answer is not too long, but exactly long enough. If that shit boils over, you've lost moisture for the rice to absorb, resulting in hard rice. If you have to lift the lid to make the foam go down, you've lost heat. You're basically fucked.

Step six: at exactly the right moment, switch off the burner, but leave the pot there. It will keep simmering for a bit, and then being the greedy motherfucker that rice is, it will start to absorb the water and freakishly expand into way more rice than you're ever going to need. Leave the lid on. 

Under no circumstances should you follow your natural cooking instincts. It looks done? Well it's not. You feel like it's been enough time? Nope. Better let it sit there for another five million hours while you're children starve and you run out of Vodka.

Step seven: after you've spent you're entire life waiting on this shit, it will finally be done. Life the lid and taste a tiny bit from the BOTTOM of the pan. If it's soft and edible, the rest should be too. If it's hard and crunchy and tastes like shame and failure, give up, order Chinese food and ask for a rice cooker for Christmas.

I hope we all learned something here today.

And that is that rice is an asshole, and Appletini's are good.

The end. 

Chapter One

It's cold outside. Rain falling in slow thick rivulets down the window like oily water, so we're smoking inside. I shouldn't be here, but nobody knows that except me, and him. Rose has us all gathered at the rickety dining room table she inherited from her parents when she moved out on her own, all of us sitting together like the last supper, before a table of nothing but cigarettes and booze. Smoke hangs over us like a thought cloud from those old comic books. Thick and gray because none of us are thinking anything good.

Rose is at the head of the table. Fitting. Her hair is cut and dyed again, a new shape, a new color, still a mess. Sometimes I wonder how she never runs out of hair to fuck with.

It's getting hot in here. Or maybe it's just running out of clean air and I can't breathe. I want to go outside and shiver for a while. Wake up and maybe drive myself home while I still can. Dooney follows me out though and I know why but pretend I don't. Rose is inside holding court and I can hear her voice over the sound of traffic swishing through the puddles. Short whispers that almost sound like waves. I wonder where they're all going at this hour.

Dooney brushes the back of my hand, and I know I'm not supposed to be here, but nobody else knows that and I can't be where I should be so I stay. I hate being drunk. I always think it's going to be fun, but by the end of the night I feel dry and sticky and heavy with poison and just want to sleep, but I hate sleeping alone.

I won't see these people again.