I am nacho friend

It's funny how in life, we all have one person who is inherently genius at basically only one thing:

Pissing you the fuck off.

I hope this is true for all of us anyway, because it definitely is for me, and for a long time I took it personally.

I thought to myself: "Self, you have anger issues." or "Self, maybe you are just an intolerant asshole."

But over the years as I've gotten to know my Self better, and in tandem know this one person who is super good at making me crazy better, I've come to finally accept that it's not me.

It's them.

They are the one person in my life who can send me into a blind rage in less than half a sentence.

They can make my face hot and bring back my childhood angry-stutter with one look.

They are, essentially, the most logical reason I would ever have to call one of my homies for bail money.

Do you have this person?

Do you have a Someone in your life, that either knows exactly where your buttons are, and seems to get a sick amount of joy and life-purpose from pushing them? 

Do you have a person you know that is so mind-numbing stupid, but at the same time, so unbearably cocky, that you live for the moments when they are irrefutably proved wrong?

Sure, maybe you have a long history with this person, and part of your impatience with the sound of them converting oxygen to carbon monoxide stems from the years you spent as a helpless victim to their bullshit - maybe you're a little bitter.

But that doesn't change the fact that they're intolerable to you.

I think maybe what it comes down to is that once you dislike a person for whatever reason, whether justifiable or bitter and petty, everything they do annoys you.

The simple fact that they exist in your universe is maddening.

They lose the ability to ever be right or acceptable, in any situation, ever again.

I know I'm probably supposed to take the high road.

I know we're supposed to love all of God's creatures, and whatever.

But at the end of the day, I think it's ok to hate just one person.

Because we can't like everybody, and not everybody can like us.

And also some people are total fucking assholes.

Too Far.

We all know that fights can get ugly.

We cry, we yell, we lose our fucking minds sometimes in the heat of fighting for what we want, fighting to be heard, fighting to get something heavy off of our chests. 

Sometimes it seems as though the more you care about someone, the uglier the fights can be.

Is this because they know you well enough to know exactly what your sore spots are? 

Because they love you so much that they care enough to really fight passionately with you, desperately trying to fix whatever is broken? 

Or is it because the more we know someone, the more we know their faults, their cracks, the things about them that we don't particularly like, and these things, over time, begin to stand out more in our minds than the good things?

With the passing of years, does it become harder to recognize the spectacular and fascinating things about a person, simply because they become common and routine? So much so that their faults, the things about them that we probably see a fraction of the time that we see their positive attributes, begin to stand out so much, that in the heat of an argument, they become nothing more than the sum total of all their mistakes, all their vices, all their short comings? 

We've all said things in arguments that we didn't mean, and probably even more of us have said things in arguments that we did mean, but never should have said, because honesty is rarely a good reason for cruelty.

After the dust settles and everything is out there on the table, is there a point when you've been too honest, or too careless with your words, that there's no going back? 

A point when you've crossed a line in someone's heart, and they just can't look at you the same anymore.

After a recent fight with a loved one, I couldn't help but wonder: how far is too far? 

Maybe it all comes down to who you are, what your triggers are, what soft and vulnerable parts of yourself exist in places that should not be trampled on. Areas of yourself that are so delicate, if they're struck with just the right force, timing, and swiftness, they harden to that person forever.

Maybe it all comes down to whether or not what was said was true. If the person meant it, and really sees you that way.

Maybe relationships disintegrate over words said in a fight, if those words were crushing, and also honest. 

If they accidentally revealed the truth behind something that means the two of you can no longer continue down the same path together in life. Perhaps you could have, for a while, when they were the only ones who knew how they really felt, and you were following along behind them in blind, blissful, ignorance. But now that it's there, sitting between you and this person that you love, there's no going back to that.

All you can do is hope that you can live with what you've learned.

That the light that's been shed on your relationship, and the way the other person feels about it - and you - isn't so blinding, that you have to turn away, and never look back.

Happy Easter.

Well, guys. Here we are again...

Another fucking Easter.

I had a whole post planned about how much I hate this holiday, and about how much I hate doing kid-oriented holidays {which, I'm sorry, if you're not religious this is really a kid oriented holiday in my opinion} by myself, and it was very whiny, and self involved, and ridiculous.

But then I deleted that shit.

Sometimes you have to write down all the shit that's really pissing you off, and totally bitch about how crappy your stupid life is, and how much you're suffering, and how unjust it all is, in order to see it there on digital paper, and be like...no, bitch.

Calm down, and delete that business, because life is good.
You're making money, the kids are healthy and alive and all that, you had some pretty bomb Cajun food this week.
It's all good.
And really, you only hate holidays because you don't like your blood-related family, and you're pissed that by this age you still haven't picked up a new one.

I totally thought someone would've adopted me by now.

We all know I hate Easter, but I'll survive it.

We all know I hate doing kid holidays alone, but I'll survive that too. Also I just found out that Bill is coming over tonight to help me hide eggs and pour drinks, because hiding eggs is a lot more fun for me when I've had exactly two Flirtinis, so I'm actually pretty stoked.

For those of you who love Easter, happy Easter.

I hope it's filled with chocolate and family and Christ wandering around outside his tomb and stuff.

For those of you who don't love Easter, happy Margarita Sunday.

I hope it's filled with Margaritas and people to drink them with and nobody getting arrested.

This isn't Christmas, after all, you guys. 

Save the domestic violence and DUI's for the real holidays.

Thugs Don't Eat Dry Salad.

For a brief little while, I bought into the idea that I was supposed to give a shit about a lot of things.

Most of this bullshit propaganda was forced on me when I worked at Walton for two years, which was a finance company in downtown Scottsdale, teeming with assholes pulling in high six figure incomes, and the girls who wanted to fuck them.

During my time there, I quickly came to the realization that people gave a lot of fucks about a lot of things.

Things I had never, ever even thought to give a fuck about.

Things like the right way to eat a salad.

The idea that there was a right or a wrong way had not even once occurred to me, let alone had I taken enough time to decide if I gave a shit.

And that wasn't all. There were plenty of other things I found out I was supposed to have an opinion on, or interest in.

Things like matching cardigan/blouse sweater sets, whether my purse was a Spring or a Fall style/color/material, the different flavors of forest floor, apricot, some fucking how blue cheese, in a glass of red wine, always described in ways like "subtleties, nuances, hints, whispers, or splashes".

I remember once attending a department dinner at a reasonably upscale restaurant near our office.

My boss was a fucking prick, so he of course kept us there working until 7 pm before taking us to the dinner we'd all been waiting for all day. I'd gotten a sitter for the occasion to pick my kids up from daycare, I had four saltines and half a diet coke for lunch - again because my boss was a fucking prick - and this restaurant was supposed to be AH-MAZE-ING according to all the girls in my office who had opinions on every $50 a plate restaurant in Scottsdale.

Also it was free and my boss was a drunk, so I knew there'd be alcohol.

I was pretty excited, and also hungry as shit.

A little bit about me: I don't handle being hungry very well. There were many times in my life when I was growing up that we were legitimately fucking hungry - like, there hasn't been anything for dinner except rice or microwave popcorn for 3 days now, kind of hungry - and now if my blood sugar gets too low I have flash backs and lose the ability to control the volume of my voice.

When we got to dinner, I realized very quickly my hunger was not going to be sated anytime soon.

See, the hot shit thing to do these days is apparently for 40 fucking people to sit down at a table together, and order a bunch of small plates of shit, and share. 

All around the table people are saying things like "taste" and "nibble" and "experience", and I'm sitting at the end trying not to sweat from panic, because I don't think I have the calories left in my blood to afford it.

I didn't want to taste things.

I didn't want to nibble.

The only fucking thing I wanted to experience was protein and carbs and not passing the fuck out.

But I didn't say anything.

Yes, I had worked nearly 12 goddamn hours and didn't get a lunch.

Yes, I had bent over backwards to arrange a sitter to not only watch my kids, but to pick them up from daycare and put them to bed.

Yes, I had traded the only couple hours I had with my children between work and their bedtime, for a stupid dinner with people I hated.

Still though, I didn't want to be the asshole who was all "Fuck you guys, I want my own food."

I didn't want to be the girl at the table who didn't know you're not supposed to pour your salad dressing on your salad, but instead dip the tines of your fork in the dressing before each bite, and that's all the dressing you get.

I didn't want people to think I was a fraud.

I sat there at that stupid table, with those stupid people, and ate maybe a combined total of 50 calories between my bites of food and two glasses of wine.

By the time I left I had to get a ride home because two glasses of wine held more alcohol than my body held calories at that point, and I was shit faced.

I remember going through the drive thru at Jack in the Box on my way home, and then sitting on my kids beds and watching them sleep while I ate, because I saw them for 40 minutes all day.

If there's one thing I learned from my time working in the corporate world, it's this:

Every single fucking person you meet has an agenda, and shit that they care about.

It doesn't mean you have to give any fucks about those things, just because they're caught up in them.

Don't try to force yourself to give a shit about the color scheme of your cardigans, or whether your shoes match your ear lobes or whatever the fuck else, if that shit don't come naturally for you.

Don't eat a dry as shit salad like your Jackie fucking O, just because the other girls at the table are self obsessed and insecure.

And don't ever, not fucking ever, give up the opportunity for free, expensive food just to please a bunch of assholes who don't notice you anyway, after you've already given up a night with the people you love, and too many hours of your life.

I will never be the kind of girl who prioritizes perfect hair over a few extra minutes of sleep.

I will never care enough about the calories in my dressing to eat a dry salad. I already ordered a fucking SALAD instead of a burrito, so let's not push this.

I will never be the kind of person who has the trendiest, most expensive or popular clothes, and everything is always matching and put together.

I'm the kind of girl who has been wearing the same The Who t-shirt since her 18th birthday, and doesn't get people who don't wear Chuck Taylors.

I'm the kind of girl you can always kick it with, no matter who you are, or what you suck at, as long as you're fly as hell and aren't too much of an asshole. I'm the one girl in the room that anybody can sit with.

That's important to me.

You be you.

Care about what you care about, and don't let fucking nobody tell you what's important.

The Good Parts

I've never been particularly great at being happy.

I'm the girl with abandonment issues. I'm the girl who is always waiting for it to all fall apart.

One thing I've tried hard to get better at though, is recognizing when something good just happened, and letting myself play it over and over in my head, as many times as I want.

See, when you come from shit, when you experience trauma on a regular basis, you learn to play that shit over and over in your head. 

It's easier to believe than the good things.

It's easier to recognize. 

It's unfortunately, a hell of a lot more reliable in your experience.

So I never knew how to notice a good moment when it was happening, but lately I've been trying to lock that shit down.

When you order soup at Wildflower and they put it in a bread bowl without charging you the extra $1.99, so you don't have to dig a little soup moat into the roll they give you.

When you live in Arizona and it's a perfect 75 and breezy, during a month that's usually 98 and hell.

When your favorite rap song comes on the radio while someone who has yet to experience your dope rap skills is in the car with you, and you nail that shit and obviously impress the shit out of them.

When you ask the person you love what they're thinking, and they pull you in a little closer and say that they love you. That they love you a lot. That they'll love you forever and ever.

And then some.

That's the shit I've been trying to teach myself to savor.

To replay.

To memorize.

And it's so goddamn sweet, I wish I could bottle it.

I wish I could record it and play it in the car.

I wish I could box it up, and live inside it whenever I want to.

It's nice, to know all the words to a good moment, and let yourself rely on there being more of them.

The Little Things

When I was younger my friends and I were always making lists of qualities and attributes that our dream man would possess. 

We included things like "romantic, funny, honest, smart", sometimes even getting as detailed as "brown hair, green eyes, 6'3 - oh and drives a convertible.

Convertibles were the shit in the 90's.

As I've gotten older though, I've learned that those things almost never matter as much as you think they will.

It's the little things that make you fall in love.

By the time you make it to 25 - or more conservatively 30 - there are very few women in the world who can say that they've never met a man who was the perfect guy on paper: loyal, honest, handsome, stable, everything you're supposed to want, that they just never were able to fall in love with.

A man that is perfect in so many ways it's infuriating, but for whatever reason, they never become more than a relationship that almost happened, but didn't.

  Instead we fall in love with people who on paper probably look all wrong for us. People who don't look very much like that ideal man we'd built in our heads with bullet point requirements and the perfect inseam length. All because of a bunch of little, unexpected things.

The way that you haven't had to tell them how you like your coffee since the very first time they ever asked.

The way they reach for your hand when they're driving.

The nickname they gave you on your third date that feels more like your name now than your legal one.

The little things that they do for you that seem to anyone else as completely inconsequential, but ultimately show you how much they truly understand you at your core.

The love of my life was 17 years older than me, and took 3 years to tell me he loved me.
We had an almost insurmountable number of obstacles, but he was the first guy who ever held my hand in the car. He had a dead-pan sense of humor, and even when I was super pissed, he could make me laugh. When we slept he wrapped his entire body around mine like a ladle, and even though he thought he was a terrible dancer, he danced with me. In clubs, in the living room, at concerts.
I loved that.

And that's how love happens.
Unexpectedly, out of nowhere, and with someone you might never have imagined for yourself.

You don't always fall for the cookie cutter definition of perfect.

More often than not, you love the one who drives you fucking crazy, someone a little broken, someone unexpected. Maybe you bicker with them more often than you planned, or you don't love that they're a bartender with a law degree they don't use and no plans to ever change that, but you love how they tickle your back and kiss your neck, and that weird little patch of hair on their lower back, right above their ass.

Bottom line is: they have a way of catching your heart in their hands like a frantic bird, and calming it.

And in a world full of potentially "better" options, you feel like they're the only perfect option for you.

On Sex and Being Naked

When I was growing up, I always seemed to be surrounded by people who assigned this huge, heavy, weight and meaning to sex. 

Whether it was for religious reasons or personal upbringing, there was an idea going around that taking off your clothes, allowing someone to see your physical self completely, and putting your two naked bodies together was the highest form of intimacy two people could share, and it was not to be taken lightly.

For a while, I went along with this in a half assed sort of way. 

While I did go ahead and take the plunge into sexual experience at the tender age of 15, I remained convinced that it was this huge deal. I prided myself on only having slept with one person for the two years that that number remained the same, and I would tell anyone who would listen that sex was not something to be taken lightly.

Cheating, in my opinion at the time, was unforgiveable.

Sex was this big, grand, monumnetous and important thing! It was special! It was a gift you give somebody! It was the highest form of intimacy for fucks sake! For someone to offer that to another person outside of their two person union {in other words cheat}, they must not care for their partner at all! They must be callous and horrible and completely out of love with their person - not to mention now probably in love with this hussy they cheated with! - because I also believed that since cheating didn't happen in the presence of love, sex didn't happen without it.

I had somehow almost entirely forgotten - or chosen to overlook - the indesputable fact that sex happens all the time without love, respect, or even really liking each other. It was something any asshole with working genitalia had the basic ability to do. Something we were all, regardless of nearly anything else that was true about us, able to do.

Something that we all had a natural and instinctive drive and desire to do, since long before we began experiencing any romantic feelings for people.

Still, even though I knew this, I insisted it was the biggest thing two people could share.

To take off their clothes, part their legs {if they're female}, and wrap around each other, moving together usually in the dark, where no one can see them and they don't really even have to see each other.

What I've learned as I've gotten older though, is that that's the easy part.

The stripping and the panting and the blind feeling.

People do it all the time.

But opening up your soul to someone?

Letting them in, past the well lit paths and things that are easy to share, all the way into the darker and more fragile parts of ourselves; sharing our hopes and dreams and fears and secrets....letting them not just inside your body, but into your spirit - into your heart?

That's being naked.

And it's not something that everyone is capable of doing.

It's not even remotely as easy as having sex.