Try as I might I can’t stay away from the call of the blank page and I need as many formats as I can get, apparently, so I can:

And there’s just something so un-Wordpress about Tumblr.

In true calamity fashion, I’ve just completed a seven page paper for tomorrow night’s class. Don’t let it seem like I might even be ahead of myself. That shit would wait for tomorrow afternoon if I didn’t have to work. Just pending some printing drama and the absence of every stapler in the world, I’m exactly where I always find myself twenty-four hours before a paper or project of any magnitude is due.

I caught myself thinking it really wouldn’t matter so much if I got a C or a D in my Cultural Anthropology class, so I long as I collected another three units toward the 5482482148239712 remaining.

In two days we end the five month stay in the smallest room of my parents’ house and unload our storage unit into a sparkly new condo. To summarize what it’s been like living with seven others plus two Jack Russells, two cats, a turtle and a Beta fish, I’ll keep it light:

…in all honesty, the Beta totally didn’t deserve that.

-CJ

I declared my weight loss goal to the world three people listening and then I did not make it. Shocked, you are? The move completely uprooted my routine and I shouldn’t have allowed it to happen but I did. The stress and sadness and relief plus good dose of blood, sweat & tears that comes with a move from the city you’ve adjusted to after three years back to your hometown took precedence over the evening workouts and inspired more than a few not-so-healthy but oh-so-quick-and-delicious meals. I checked last night and found that I put back on two pounds, which is most definitely better than putting it all back on which I was pretty sure had happened. My brain does not allow for much hope. Ditto: optimism.

Josh and I picked up some gym passes at the nearby big name workout spot. It’s been about a week and we’ve logged a few sweaty hours. For now, and this may quickly pass, it seems like time flies at the gym. (It is note worthy that my brother pronounces it ‘the guy-m’ and that is how I find myself saying it as I type.) I was pushing for twenty minute workouts and then twenty-two and then twenty-seven, up to thirty when I would work out at home. I don’t know why they went up in those intervals, just roll with it. At the gym, an hour flies by so quickly, I almost don’t want to get off the treadmill because I’m so close to figuring out the puzzle on Wheel of Fortune. (The TV options are pretty dismal at the gym. I stick to podcasts until I see BEFORE & AFTER on the screen. It’s the best category.)

I recently upgraded from a fat little Verizon phone to my very first smart phone, courtesy of Ree, who will always have the latest of the greatest in phone technology. I must say that this thing is beyond smart. It is brilliant. I am so, so in love. (Before I even had a period on that sentence the thing froze in the middle of a text to my sister.) Okay, it’s not perfect but neither am I. And this little first generation Droid accepts me for who I am and doesn’t judge my application choices. What do I need to know about fun and useful apps? I found some snazzy photo ones that I like so far and I’m obsessed with Words With Friends. Which debuted on Facebook and inspired some word-happy dance moves all up in the living room. I got Calamity Mom playing too and posted this message on her wall:

‘Wall’ is a really stupid word for that space. May I suggest: table top.

-CJ

It’s all for the better. To get caught up and to get ahead. We were rocking the hand-me-down chic with pride for a while but it’s high time we bought ourselves some furnishings we love and are proud of. I was mentally and emotionally finished with 2B and wished it a good riddance on the last drive out of the alley. Though on that drive, I did tell Kiddo, “I’m kind of sad.” She offered with a heavy sigh, “I’m sad I don’t have any food.”

Some pretty kickass anecdotes to living at home again are hanging with the fam and enjoying my mom and dad’s cooking. They’re a damn fine bunch of people and I’m pretty thrilled to be related to them. I’ve missed my hometown so much. There’s already been a hefty poker tournament in the backyard, many a lap swam in their pool, a jog around the quarter mile track up the street and a hike at a local park. (I am not above squealing over a cotton-tailed bunny or seven, turns out.) All of my DVDs are packed and my TV requires a variety of boxes and/or cables to work. I don’t have the patience for that so I borrow a lot of their movies and read more than I used to, which is a huge perk in itself. Face down in a good read is when I’m most at peace, mostly because everything and everyone around me seizes to exist. I could get behind this whole no television lifestyle, though I do miss all my Showtime stories.

Last week, I made the final payment on a loan that has been hanging over my head for five or six years. There is so much relief in that statement. It’s gone. Over with. DONE-ZO. This calls for a celebration, yes?

-CJ

Friday was nice, when my boss allowed us all to duck out early. I was super selfish and came home for my workout before I picked up my kid from school. I know, to hell with me. I actually doubled that workout in anticipation of All The Beer. We had some vague plan shapes that frothed over into nothing when Josh went out to finish the dragon tattoo on his arm. I hung out at home with kid, did some shopping, did some cleaning. A young gentleman got in line behind me at the grocery store with a case of beer. I told him to cut in front and he asked if I was sure. “Come on, you’re obviously going somewhere fun and I’m *sweeping gesture over the cart of lunch foods and dinner ingredients* going home.”

The thing about being home sort of alone on a Friday night is how fucking awesome it’s become. I am thrilled for those wide open weekends with few to no commitments so I be loungey and cleaney and do everything I want according to my watch.

My watch is set like that of most other Pacific time zone dwellers, so I guess I do things according to theirs too but you know.

At one point my mom called and asked what we were doing. I told her Kiddo and I were fresh off a “penis and vagina conversation*,” to which she asked what one had to do with the other. “Um… a lot?”
“Really? Penises and pajamas?”
Choke laughs, snorts and tears followed. I told her what I’d actually said, baffled that she hadn’t put it together on her own, and told Kiddo, “Grammy thought we were talking about penises and pajamas. Haha, go wipe your pajama!”
“No, YOU wipe your pajama, Mom!”

Totally had to be there. Mom got it right when she said, “Yours is the only eight-year-old that would laugh at that.”

*It’s high time she had an educated conversation about those, IMO.

Halfway through a cheap bottle of red and several Chelsea Lately episodes down, Josh came home, showered off the Bactine smell and showed me his new, raw goods. He has had the outline of a “paper cut” style dragon in need of shading on his forearm, which I fawned over and accidentally touched a few dozen times.

Then I touched his bathrobe, over his chest, and he flinched. He opened the robe to reveal a freshly shaved patch of chest with my name BLAZED across in large, fancy letters.

“Oh, you’re not fucking around, huh?”
“Nope.”

This is translated roughly to: “Oh, you’re very serious about us, huh?”
“I am.”

There’s some history here: In October of 2002, eight months after we’d met, he came home to his pregnant, sleeping girlfriend to reveal a small, printed “Jill” on his chest, with a small x dotting the ‘i.’ A few months after Kiddo was born, I took on a scripty little “Josh” on my right hip. Over the years, his little chest piece faded and faded. I asked him to get it touched up but it never happened. Queue epic breakup of 2007, after which I spent thirteen hours (in three sessions) under a needle to get a huge, colorful dragon down my ribcage to my hip, covering his name completely. HA, I scoffed. And then last summer, we got back together. He still had my name, despite having dated others in our down time. If I mentioned touching it up, he gave me that look that says, “Bitch, please. You erased me.”

A (super-cropped) glimpse of the top portion of my cover-up:

Needless to say I did not expect this huge, bold proclamation in place of his tiny, faded one. I’m still shocked when I see him shirtless. It makes me giddy.

Saturday was the day for All The Beer. My neighbor rolled his BBQ downstairs to our common courtyard/front lawnish type area and grilled up some burgers, brats and dogs. We had a number of folding chairs out under an awning filled with friendly faces. Perched next to me was my blue ice chest filled with frosty Coronas, which I sipped on for a solid seven or eight hours, in between dipping chips and smoking cigars. On every rare occasion we get this group together, we say, “Why don’t we do this more often?!” There’s no right answer. It was a really good night that even included some new faces, though I’ve forgotten the names attached to them.

At (my) of the night (11ish) (some others didn’t head home until dawn) came a text message from my friend Oscar, inviting me to a one o’clock Dodger game the next day, which I happily agreed to. Once I was jersey’d and ready that next morning, I found out we were on the FIELD. The tickets retail around $120 each and could have sold for over $200, surely. They were incredible seats, which we toasted to over and over. They were a last minute gift from a rep at our work who I will seek out and hug. I drunk-Tweet’d from said incredible seats.

There are so few things better than perfect weather at your favorite team’s stadium, cold beers and good company. When my plastic cup emptied, I spied a new one in the next cup holder. “A fresh one?!” I asked Oscar. And he said, which will stick forever, “The beer fairy came.”

The girl I’d overheard turned out to be this hilarious, super baked young girl that we laughed with as well as at for about seven innings after we’d shook hands and declared ourselves friends. That’s one of my favorite things anymore; those single serving friends you meet when you let your guard down and stop thinking the world believes you to be a freak.

And today: Kiddo went off to swim with a girlfriend and Josh and I were blessed with a sudden three hour window for an afternoon date. We loaded up on gummy type candies and hit the movie theater for Hangover 2. If you find the first one to be epically hilarious, and you should, this one is worth seeing. It’s not up to the same caliber as the first, though not much is. It is very, very funny though.

Now I’m slow-cooking some chicken and looking forward to some serious ice cream eating in bed with my freshly inked and wonderfully sexy lovah.

-CJ

After brunch, I dropped my kid sister off with her boyfriend to do mother’s day with the ladies in his family. It was so grown up of her. I don’t think I was in those kind of relationships in high school, where you gave a crap about the other person’s relatives. Relationships at that time were for passionate make-outs and not much else. But as we know, my almost sixteen-year-old sister is light years above me when it comes to maturity.

Over at my parents’ house, champagne was opened and kiwi strawberry juice was added and poker was played. I was the recipient of multiple bright sunflowers from my mom and from my sister-in-law and an orange daisy from my brother’s friend, which kind of melted my heart in a way that almost made me squeeze him with enough fervor to pop his eyes out.

When kid and I got home that night, Josh was scurrying around, room to room, closing doors behind him. I couldn’t figure out what he was up to but I was champagne-tired and ready to whip off my bra and put on my loosest fitting pajamas. Just as my eyes got heavy, I felt his weight on the mattress. Softly, quietly, he gave me and kiss and said all the things that I wanted to hear while presenting me with a silver gift bag and a construction paper card with a pink daisy on the front. Looking at it now on my corkboard at work, I’m thinking he used the cover of Cunt: A Declaration of Independence as a guide. It looks a lot like the book cover/my arm tattoo, and oh my God, I love it so much harder right now.

Okay I asked him and he didn’t use the book. Still. Well done, sir.

As masculine as he is, which, despite his sexy purple shirts, is a lot… Josh can clothes shop for a woman better than anyone else. I would fully trust him to start my wardrobe over from scratch, to dress me for any occasion, to pick anything from undergarments to hair flowers for me. In the gift bag were two tops that I was immediately in love with and a pair of dark denim capris. He bought all the right sizes, nailed my style and kept comfort in mind. Monetary gifts can be few and far between when they’re this good. They can be kept until the end of the night on Mother’s Day when they’re this good.

To all of you raising a little one, helping someone else raise theirs, taking care of kiddos on the side or for work, or step-momming… happy (late) Mother’s day. You are (probably) really wonderful.

-CJ

When said box was empty:

I should really call those posts “Mo In, On & Around Stuff.”

For Cinco de Mayo, I opted out of tacos and beer with the ladies and pulled a double workout. Can you believe that shit? After I rewarded myself with a little red wine, I got a tempting invite via text to hit the gay bar for a drag show. Despite planning to stay in for the night, I hustled into something clean and did a sloppy little number with my hair to go cheer on some queens. It was a damn good show, as always. The beer was flat and gross but you couldn’t beat the company. One of the girls and I hit the punk rock bar on the way home for some free drinks. I’m not sure how we pulled that off. We picked up greasy, salty food for the ride home and I was up for work three hours later.

Today’s my broseph’s secondy-second birthday. He’s going to get all beered out at a dive in hometown. I probably will not be clinking pitchers with him but I’m talking about his day of days on the interwebs, so I did my part.

-CJ

Dearest mostly strangers,

Did I mention that my new job is actually my old job? Follow along, and then I’ll never mention the new job stuff again. I quit the interior design place in the summer of 2008 for the furniture place. I can’t seem to get out of the furnishing and making pretty industry. The transition sucked but it smoothed out into a really cool thing for me. I was glad I endured the scariness of leaving what I knew, what I knew well, and venturing into new territory and being a big dumb dumb around the new terminology and processes. While there, my career mentor from the interior design place, love that she is, offered me three positions to come back to. None of them had the payoff I wanted, job description or monetary, until now. I got really excited about this most recent offer when it came up and was sorely disappointed when the managers of the hiring department declined my asking pay. I had mentally walked out on my current job, which I did not like much anymore. Within a few days, the job scope was revised, the pay was met, and there was an official offer. I lunged for it.

So I’m back to the very place I started, office wise. Sorta. They opened a new building up the street from the “corporate” one I used to work in. I came from the grocery store into the 8-5 world and learned from the bottom up, picking up samples in the showroom and answering phones early on and eventually moving into various departments for order processing, auditing, learning my way around a blueprint, etc. Now I’m back, in a new department, with new people and a whole lot to learn.

It’s going well.

Also? My mom works in a different department here, my dad in another, with my brother alongside him, and my uncle in another. Our last name is all over this place.

/work speak

-CJ

Please feel free to send me some living, breathing greenery to keep me company.

There’s a Thai place nearby. I’m slacking on my quest to try new foods so I think I’ll head there for lunch soon. What’s a picky girl to order from a Thai menu?

The other day when I picked up Kiddo from school, there were some screaming kids on a nearby playground, around her age (or size at least), and one yelled, “I’LL SMACK THE KOREAN OUT OF YOU.” No shit.

I had to have a quiet chat with the super amazing after-school supervisor gal about Kiddo. I was afraid we were in a bully situation and mine was not the victim. There’s a younger girl in the same after-school program that has told Kiddo once in front of me and once in front of Josh that she hopes Kiddo will be “nicer tomorrow.” Which totally freaked me out to the point that I couldn’t even take my kid’s word that she wasn’t being mean. Super amazing after-school supervisor gal assured me that the other child complaining about everyone and everything and I should definitely not worry about my kid being mean to anyone. Exhale. But when it came to speaking her mind, apparently Kiddo’s got the gold medal. The gal told me how she’s so straight forward that some of the other kids have trouble even trying to react to her.

I’m good with her telling someone deadpan that she doesn’t want to play with them, as long as she’s not shoving them while she does it.

Alright, turning off the mom and turning on the SEX DRUGS AND ROLL ‘N ROLL.

A bunch of my actual family members went out to Vegas two weekends back for my Floridian cousin’s wedding. She and her new spouse decided to forego the fancypants wedding and put that kinda dough toward a reverse vasectomy so they could make BEBES*.

*I KEEP DREAMING I’M HAVING THEM. At least once a week, I’m taking care of a newborn and the memories of almost a decade ago come flooding back.

Upon arrival at the Orleans, Josh and I freshened up and hit the casino with various members of my family. Within an hour, I was pocketing this:

& yelling at various strangers, “I JUST WON FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS.” This was a huge boost for us, being that we had only booked one night with our meager earnings and would be booking the second night once we arrived. We were able to have a good time, guilt free, and leave our bank account untouched.

The wedding was short and sweet, Vegas style. My sister-in-law took one jillionty pictures on her awesome, gigante new camera:

wedding prep

I took some grainy cell shots, as usual:

It was so, so fun. I am reminded that my extended family is so, so cool and I can’t wait until we all get together again.

-CJ

One time I got a very random text from a weird six digit number, saying something about my temporary password. I looked around, confused, deleted it and moved on with whatever I was doing. Drinking rum and playing Dr. Mario is a safe assumption. Cutting the skin around my nails with cuticle cutters is another. I found out a few minutes later that some random pop-up had asked for a phone number and Kiddo typed on in my cell, which I should never have had her memorize, because it’s not once been used for an emergency but only handed out freely to second graders and plugged into random kid-friendly joke websites.

She loves her jokes.

On that note: Why were the teacher’s eyes crossed?
Because she couldn’t control her pupils!

HARHAR

So, yes. Something happened. Something that has stripped my computer’s ability to connect to the internet. The connection is “excellent” and the bill is paid and the little connection indicator is green at the bottom of the screen. But the page will not load. It has been a few days of hell, especially when, for an upcoming Vegas trip, I listed a bunch of crap on Ebay in hopes of making some gambling and spending money. And I could refresh my seller page all damn day in hopes of watching the green numbers climb. As of today, we’re a happy fifty-two bucks richer and in high hopes that someone will buy that coffee maker.

Today I rejoined the work force for a few hours. It was a weird transition, the iced coffee procurement, the freeway traffic, the quiet morning hours or e-mail sorting and the like.

Around 12:30, I submitted a written resignation from my job*. By one p.m. I had not heard a breathe of response. Granted, my boss is on vacation, but I know she’s checking e-mail by phone. And my supervisor was copied but if she has had any reaction, it was probably in the direction of human resources, asking what to do in our boss’ absence. Or something. Either way, by one o’clock I could wait with baited breath no longer and I left to meet with a surgeon’s assistant for a check-up. My wounds are healing nicely, she said, as she removed the tape holding me together. Or, you would think it was holding me together because I was so terrified of it being removed. It was lifting and gathering shirt lent and looking most unsexy but I was so, so scared of pulling it off all four incisions. She yanked it gleefully and sent me home. And I sent me to the library on campus to do the homework I postponed for an entire week. An entire week that I didn’t even have to work but I still avoided my homework. I am without excuse. And I just remembered I have to do my vocabulary work…

*A bigger, better, un-refusable opportunity came my way with very little effort on my part. And I’d had it up to higher than I can reach with the management of my department. If asked, my reasoning would be something like, “Y’ALL SUCK.” With a flip of my hair, I hope to be out on good terms this Friday. But by the way my supervisor and I fight, it could be as soon as tomorrow morning if they feel like being big jerks.

Which would just free up my Wednesday afternoon for a lecture I really wanted to check out.

/geek

Friday night we’re taking the new! hybrid!* down the loooong fifteen freeway stretch from Orange County into Las Vegas. My awesome cousin is getting hitched and I couldn’t be more thrilled for her. Secretly, I’m pretty thrilled for some kid-free, hotel time with my honey too. Guilty pleasures await.

*Josh got a sweet new ride.

-CJ

The ass wiping thing didn’t go over well.

Sorry, Mom.

-CJ