TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

My Virtual Girlfriend passed me an article in some Canadian weekly about the quarter-life crisis, a term you may not have heard before but a feeling you probably get every time you talk to your mom.

You: Great news! I found thirty dollars in a toilet at a bar!
Mom: You’re on birth control, right? God forbid there’s more than one of you in this family.
You: What? It was only pee. I washed it off.

The author basically summed up the last ten months of this blog in a couple of pages. I used to think the “theme” of this blog was I’m gay! And I drink. But this piece light-bulbed that it’s less about climbing cranes and sleeping with your girlfriend and more about how I wish I could take back almost every decision I’ve ever made, like, for instance, putting my Jerry Springer cameo on my resume.

You know how when you were a kid your teachers were like, “Katie H. You are too smart to be sitting under your desk. And take that paper bag off your head. You could be anything you want to be.” When you heard this, you thought, Hmm. She thinks I’m smart even though I just said that the capitol of New York is New Jersey. That’ll get me far in the world. Work? Shmurck. I’ll just coast by convincing people that my gray matter is above medium. Maybe at some point a teacher/parent/parole officer told you that you needed to actually work for success, but by that point, you’d already decided that work is for dummies and poor people.

And remember that test you took in third grade that sent you to the smart person classroom? The one that designated you “gifted”? How wrong is telling a bunch of premies that they are gifted, like your neurons were wrapped in Rudolph paper and dropped down the chimney? This is where is all started. You didn’t have to work very hard in school, so you didn’t. Who wouldn’t prefer to get stoned with other privileged slackers and fall asleep on the model mattresses at Bed, Bath, and Beyond rather than go to AP History or develop work ethic and/or life skills?

Everything in life can be attributed to some mistake your parents made (i.e. You have a drinking problem because your parents wouldn’t let you sip wine at dinner.), so you blame them for not making you prepare for adulthood, which is unfortunate because you actually are an adult, albeit one who uses up all the text messages on the family plan. Yes, it’s definitely their fault. You are in the midst of a quarter life crisis because your parents told you that you are smart. But it turns out you’re not. You belong in a trailer park, pit bulls chained to a stake in the ground, clocking third shift and spanking the kids. Your parents should have beat you instead.

But you’re not in a trailer park. You’re drinking an Americano at a coffee shop, standing at a counter instead of sitting down because you think that counts as exercise. You’re listening to NPR pod-casts on the MacBook your grandparents bought you for graduating from college. You were born lucky, and yet, you are twenty-six years old and experiencing that kind of crisis who should really wait until your forties to have. It’s not the sports car or the mistress or the new career that you want. You don’t actually know what you want, just that you want something.

You do not know what to do with your life. It’s the paradox of choice: there are too many options and too many things to dismiss. You could have been an archeologist but you don’t look good in khaki. You could have been a dentist but latex gloves make your palms sweat. You could have been a child star but the Mickey Mouse Club isn’t interested in little girls in Umbros and a bowl cut who only liked the Hansen Brothers when she thought they were girls.

Facebook makes it worse. You look at the profiles of friends and acquaintances from your past, back when you had potential, and you judge. Marriage? Babies? Jobs? What happened to you? When did you become your mother? When did you become my mother? They are still paying off the wedding that was mostly attended by their parents’ friends, sure to be divorced and alone and broke in ten years, just like the rest of us. At least, you tell yourself that.

But would it be nice to sleep beside someone you actually love, someone who isn’t grateful for the unspoken agreement that you pretend to be asleep when she leaves, someone you sleep with because you actually want to, not because of some idea that picking people up, getting what you want, makes you somehow desirable, worthy of attention, possible to love?

Or maybe you aren’t like this. Maybe you cook dinner with your partner instead of binging on Velvetta and making elaborate plans to shoplift your way to a new life. Maybe you wake up in the morning and get out of bed because you want to, not because you thought of a clever Facebook status. You might be twenty-six years old and exactly where you should be, on the path luck set you on, content with the choices you’ve made, with the job you have, with the person beside you. Or maybe you are like me, twenty-six years old and still looking for the person or the job or the thing that will save you.

I’m emotionally and mentally peach fuzz and cannot make decisions for myself beyond who to hit on, so it’s helpful to have a twin sister willing to advise me on such matters as What To Have For Lunch, Should I Wear My White Vee Or My Blue Vee, and Is It Cool To Lie On My Resume?  I’m generally willing to listen to her, but the resume thing, which she recommends against, just isn’t possible.  As I mentioned in a previous post, my resume is long and thin, like Tyra in 1996, but without a rib cage.  I’ve had 26 jobs since entering the work force ten years ago, which averages to 2.6 a year, and although this may be slightly higher than average, I don’t think it’s wholly unacceptable.

Unfortunately, the 23 jobs don’t account for the long periods of unemployment in between.  In Portland, for instance, I was hired to “manage” a coffee shack.—which actually was a shack, but a Range Rover and surgeon’s salary shack, with maple counters and track lighting and a $10,000 espresso machine.  The first sign that this might not have been the most busty business plan was that I wrecked my bike on the way to the interview and showed up with elbows and knees painted in fresh blood.  And they still hired me.  Also, the company was called Java Sutra and the main selling point was that the coffee was infused with an Andean aphrodisiac called maca, which, according to God-like Wikipedia, “was eaten by Inca imperial warriors before battles. Their legendary strength was allegedly imparted by the preparatory consumption of copious amounts of maca, fueling formidable warriors. After a city was conquered, the women had to be protected from the Inca warriors, as they became ambitiously virile from eating such quantities of maca.”  Good in theory, right?  But do you really want blue balls with your morning hotdish?  We were in business for three months.

Getting laid off didn’t really bother me both because I’d been fired from so many jobs already that it seemed like a backhanded compliment, and unemployment insurance left me time to do whatever I pleased.  What I pleased was ride my bike and do crosswords and invest the dole in liver damage.  At the end of happy hour, I would run home to shower off the smell of booze and smoke, clean my house like an Ecudorian line cook, and pull out job applications or my GRE study guide so it looked like I had a productive day when my girlfriend got home from actually having a productive day.

I eventually found a job scooping gelato for wailing, syrupy seven-year-olds and their attractive but totally un-fantasystic mothers, but this only lasted for a month or so before I some Real Bad Shit happened, which I’m not going to get into cause it’ll take the time I’d like to spend catching up on LiLo and Sam, but I will tell you that as soon as you are punched in the face by a partner, you become a victim, which is sort of like Catholics and their We’ll Forget About The Condoms For A Small Donation rule: convenient.

This isn’t to say that my entire life in Portland was full of booze and memory loss (although most of it was).  I also interned at a gay rights non-profit, where I spent most of my time taking walks along with river with the bear accountant with the rocket ship tattoo and testing my gaydar on the bike messengers who worked in the building.  The one time I went to Friday happy hour with the staff, I got so drunk that I told the outreach coordinator’s husband that he should get a manicure cause his hands were seriously calloused before realizing he was in a wheelchair and his hands were constantly pushing rubber.  Actually, I already knew he was in a wheelchair, but I said it anyway.  And when my girlfriend came to pick me up, I was like, “Babe.  You’re tired.  Just go home. I’ll get a ride in time for dinner. I love you.,” so I could smoke cigarettes without judgment.  I later rode home with my boss, who started crying in the car because she had gotten divorced approximately six minutes before, and I was all, “Hey, let’s party! I’ve got Adderall in my bag!”  The non-profit and I went our separate ways soon after—they to make political strides and me to another four internships, seven jobs, and zero references.

I’m spending the next few days at an “artist retreat” in the mountains (AKA my parents’ house). Even though I like my hometown about as much as I like waking up in a stranger’s bed covered in stale DNA and realizing that I don’t remember a) said stranger’s name, or b) where I left my car, this is a necessary sabbatical now that school is over. Because my six hour work week isn’t quite enough structure and there’s a direct correlation betwixt free time and reputation erosion, I have to retreat to a dry county to preserve my good name every once in a while. Cullowhee, North Carolina is pretty like Shiloh, Vivi, and Knox are pretty, but I have no lust for the place that is the archive of the many small humiliations of my youth. There was the time, for instance, that I was pissing behind my car after a high school football game—something, by the way, I seriously did not belong at—when my sister pulled away from the curb, exposing my expelling lower half for all to see. And by “all,” I mean my English teacher and her family, including the two preteen boys I often babysat until that very night. Also, people used to call me gay.

Because no one in my hometown understands that my mullet is ironic, I don’t plan on leaving my parents’ property and therefore anticipate plenty of shit-done-getting. I’m going to spend the week browning my opalescent skin and working on my resume, both of which are difficult like the Jew’s harp is difficult. I know this is shocking, but my work history is a little, um, marbled. I’ve had a lot of jobs, but the longest was for just a year and a half—a job, by the way, that I did not get fired from, though I probably should have considering that I took smoke breaks at the bar across the street, g&t in hand. My first job, besides selling hemp necklaces and nickel bags stolen from my friend’s parents, was Taco Bell when I was 16. The shirt was to big for me and the rubber gloves made my palms sweat, so I left on my lunch break and returned to pick up my one and only paycheck the next week. I somehow convinced my parents not to make me apply across the street (Wendy’s) because my athletic training was more important than learning self-sufficiency and work-ethic. The sports thing is actually factually. For most of my teenage years, I was a serious athlete, which seems about as likely as that time five minutes ago when I smoked a bowl with Drew Barrymore, but it actually is true. I wasn’t a ribbon girl or anything, but I was a semi-professional freestyle kayaker, which basically means that I wore a lot of Patagonia and had swimmer’s ear from 12 to 20. My athletic career didn’t work out in the end, maybe because I was surrounded by dudes all the time and I’m not really socialized to enjoy that sort of thing. Months traveling around the country with eight dudes might seem like an opportunity for ass-getting/cloud-surfing to the heterosexual among us, but for me, this was about as fun as taking out your contacts after cutting jalapenos. I also wasn’t much of an athlete.

Anyway, my checkered work history is problematic because, of the 24 jobs and five internships I’ve had in the past nine years, my only references are people I’ve never actually worked with but who have professional-sounding outgoing messages and don’t mind lying for me. My sister’s resume, however, is well-stocked with fancy titles and the only things I have to alter are the letters b, s, and y, and poof! Job offers aplenty.

In addition to resume-stealing, I plan to spend the next few days writing letters to President O in support of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which I think is the best thing that’s ever happened to the fagotry and cannot understand why the gays don’t realize this. It’s not bigotry if it keeps your well-toned ass out of fire fights and combat boots. Believe.

In addition to the aforementioned noble pursuits, I’m going to choose my new name. I just don’t think that Katie is appropriate for either my appearance or personality, and, as hard as I’ve tried to convince people to call me Ajax, I won’t feel complete until I’ve paid the government, gotten the certificate, and seriously offended my parents. The problem is that I can’t actually think of a name that embodies the characteristics I want to project and masks the ones I don’t want you to know about. Considering that I spent the majority of yesterday being referred to alternately as Hotdog and Ding Dong, I’m kind of stuck on one of those. I could really use your help on this. Email suggestions to krherzog@gmail.com or post in the comments if you’re feeling creative and your boss isn’t looking over your shoulder.

Dear Pabst Blue Ribbon,

We’ve been together a long time, you and I. It’s been almost seven years since that first date but I remember it like it was lunch this afternoon—standing in a patch of sunlight in cut-offs and flip-flops, feeling so good, so right, and wondering why we’d never met before.

We’ve had some crazy times. Remember when we spent three hours in the ER last summer after falling off our bike on the way back from a birthday party? And how we gave the ambulance driver our ex’s name and address instead of our own and later called the nurse a cunt before stumbling out of the bright lights and into the heavy night air? And how we got lost on our way home in that vast and empty city they call a medical complex. We tried to hitch-hike back to town but no one would pick us up, maybe because it was three a.m. and there were leaves in our hair and our pants were ripped and we were wearing a neck brace. We cuddled on the sidewalk that night, sleeping soundly until a kindly bus driver picked us up drove us to our front door.

And remember a few months later when was climbed a tree and jumped over a barbed-wire fence and crossed a construction site the size of Ground Zero with a pretty girl to that most romantic of places: an eleven story crane? We climbed that crane, you and me and the pretty girl, ignoring the neurons firing in our brain, whispering, don’t do it, don’t do it, as cops circled the neighborhood below.

There have many nights as special as those, my friend: averted disaster, near arrest, decisions regretted. Was it a mistake to quit our job from the bathroom of a bar four hours before our shift started? No, no it was not. You’ve been always there for me, waiting patiently at five o’clock, in a way a job can never be. Chilled, that is, and in a can.

I stuck by you while everyone else cut carbs or switched to micro-brews or joined AA. I sat beside you on bar stools and listened, really listened, to you bitch about your inevitable dethroning. What would be the next beer of food-stamping hipsters around the country? Would it be Hamm’s, you worried, or maybe High Life? And when you ruined my chances with the graphic designer from Philly, the one who didn’t think it was a good idea to ride a shopping cart home, I didn’t mention that you haven’t won a blue ribbon since 1893. Friends don’t do that, no matter how annoyed we are that our last girlfriend left us because we make more money from bottle-deposits than from a paycheck.

The two of us have been through it all, can in hand.

We’ve only gotten closer with time. What started casually—on the weekends, maybe the occasional happy hour—has become a marriage of sorts. And, like all marriages, ours is not without its flaws. There was inauguration night, for instance, when you unintentionally tripped me on the way home from the bar. I know it wasn’t your fault—you were just fooling around, being silly—and I forgave you just as soon as I spit out my front tooth. So, yes, you’ve gotten me into a little trouble from time to time, but I know it’s not because you are devious, it’s because you love to have fun. There was Christmas morning, for example, when we woke up in our professor’s bed with her son knocking on the door to see what Santa brought. And there was that time we passed out in the neighbor’s yard and then told her that we were star-gazing and that she really didn’t need to call the cops but we would really appreciate bus fare. And years ago, there was that redheaded guy whose name we can’t remember but who taught us that men, even attractive men, can grow hair on their butts. That was a good lesson, wasn’t it? One that changed our life and sexual orientation forever.

The thing is, Pabst, we are growing apart. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed. You no longer take up space in the fridge. And I can barely afford you anymore. It’s the recession. And my liver.

It’s not that I don’t love you, it’s that I’m afraid of you.

There. I said it. I know you didn’t mean to hurt me when you pushed me into the bushes after the  Michael Jackson dance party and when you woke me up in the middle of the night and made me stick my finger down my own esophagus—but it’s not funny anymore.

And it’s not just me—my friends are concerned. They think we’re spending too much time together. They say they miss the old me. The me who answered text messages that weren’t regarding happy hour. The me who could be trusted with keys, who didn’t need to be walked home, who paid her phone bill, who didn’t hit on their exes, the me who who didn’t call them crying in the middle of the night. In short, they miss the me who didn’t embarrass them. Sure, they’ll also miss that special category of stories called “You Won’t Believe What I Did Last Night,” but they won’t miss hearing those stories over and over. I’m sorry, but they don’t want me to take you to brunch anymore.

I’ve changed as well. I’ve been spending more time in our favorite chair with Netflix and hot tea. I’m been thinking about possibly getting a job someday. I bought running shoes. It’s not that I haven’t been thinking about you, because I have. But I need distance. We need a real break, not just like when we have a fever or when our parents visit.

I will never forget you, PBR. I will think of you every time I look at the boat tattoo on my left arm and the heart-shaped scar on my right shoulder. I will think of you every time I see the women we have loved and left. I will think of you at kickball in the Spring and at the pool in Summer and on Halloween night and Christmas morning and hot days and rainy days and snow days and every afternoon that the sun shines or that the sun doesn’t shine.

I’m not saying it’s forever. I might come crawling back in a month or a year or the next time it seems easier to be with you than to go running. But until then, please, stop calling and stop texting and stop dropping by just because you were in the neighborhood.

Yours always, but not right now.

Dear Twenty Twenty,

I’ve been reading your blog for a few months and I want to know if your stories are true and you’re crazy or if you’re stories aren’t true and you’re a good liar.  If you are crazy, you make it seem fun.

—Linz in Alberta

———-

Funny you should ask, Linz.  I’m a little of both, actually.

It won’t be surprise anyone who knows me in real, tangible, barstool, and dinner date life that I’m a bit rockerless at times.  Actually, it probably won’t surprise anyone who reads this blog, come to think of it.  I’m not run-down-the-street-screaming-that-I’m-Gordon-Brown cray.  And I’m certainly not catatonic-piss-on-myself-depressed cray.  I like to think of myself as a precious blend of the two.  I’m fun crazy!  Mostly.

But let’s get serious for moment, shall we, LIA?

I suspect that most people don’t know they are a cracked until someone (your twin, maybe, or your girlfriend) tells you that you that you are.  At that point, you might say something along the lines of, “Fuck you, you’re crazy.”  But a few months after the friend/family diagnosis, you might wake up in your tub one morning wrapped in a sopping wet towel with a really short, really patchy haircut, which seemed like a good and even necessary idea at midnight last night, but in the light of day you see that a) this is going to be a problem at the salon where you work, and b) you have more in common with B. Spears that you ever thought possible.

Maybe it’s at point that you decide to Get Help.

So you get help.  You see a series of therapists who are like, “Whoa, nice haircut, Britney,” and tell you that you definitely need a hat and probably need drugs.  You get both.  The hat is about as effective as the drugs, but taking that little prescription diamond every morning makes you feel pro-active about Fixing Yourself. 

Feeling pro-active is really, really important when you think that the bathroom at the co-op is a time machine and if only you can get there at the right time you could go back and decide not to steal those red tube socks from your friend’s drawer when you were ten and also decide not lead the entire lunchroom in chanting “Kill LaWhore” in honor of your fifth teacher Mrs. LaTore?  And the Chuck Bass shit? The time you slept with the painter who was house-sitting for the fag upstairs while your girlfriend was visiting her family back in North Carolina, and, by the by, said painter was, of all things, a dude? You hope the time machine hasn’t closed yet.

Another part of being pro-active might be to go to therapy every week.  This has the benefit of making you feel like you’re not wasting your insurance money and you may also get some pretty interesting names for what’s wrong with you (OCD?  Sure!  PTSD?  Why not!? Hyber-Sensitivity Disorder?  Never heard of it, but whatevs!).

But, Linz, therapy also makes people incredibly fucking boring.  You start to think about yourself all the time. You wake up questioning your mental state and appraise it all day long.  Are you in a manic episode? Are you depressed?  Can you even tell the difference?  It’s seriously fucking dull.

At some point, you and your therapist might reach an impasse.  You like talking about yourself for an hour each week and getting something out of your insurance is pretty neat, but you sure as fuck aren’t going to tap on your forehead while repeating “I exist.  I exist.  I exist.”  So maybe you break up with the therapist.

Or maybe your therapist thinks that your antics just aren’t funny anymore.  That you aren’t actually trying to change.  That you’re still doing shit just because it’ll make a good story to tell your pals over eggs Benedict.  Maybe you tell her that she’s being too judgmental about your sex life, that even though the last girl who left her earrings in your house was young, she was very mature for her age. You might also argue that rehab is an absolutely ridiculous idea because you only drink on weekends and birthdays, for fucks sake.

At that point, you may say something that sounds good in your head but with an unintentionally vociferous tone that exacerbates an already unpleasant situation: Bitch, please, you might say. You don’t know me.

And then, your therapist fires you.

When this happens, LIA, you think about what therapy actually is.  It’s humans listening to other humans talk about their problems.  Your therapist may have a box of tissues in her office and your psychiatrist may have the white coat, but they are still human, and when they tell you that disregarding their advice will led to more bad haircuts and possibly even STDs, think about what they say and then go shopping.

I’m not trying to be cavalier about mental health.  I know brain baggage is a Really Big Deal.  My point is that you need to have a healthy degree of skepticism about this shit.  A friend’s therapist once told her that her cutting herself was a good release.  No joke.  See someone, but not blindly.

We all gots shit to deal with.

Q: How do Women Who Sleep With Women (WWSWW) practice safe sex?

A: I don’t know about you, but when I was in high school, sex ed consisted of forcing students to carry around mechanical babies filled with sand for a weekend. The babies were programmed to cry at inopportune times, like when you inadvertently swallowed ecstasy when looking for Asprin because you (ironically) had cramps during your weekend with the plastic baby and the bottle of Aspirin at your friend’s house wasn’t Aspirin at all, which you probably should have figured by the little Buddha on the pill. And if you were too busy petting your friend’s linens to press the little Shut The Fuck Up button on your mechanical baby’s sand-filled ass, you were granted custody for an additional weekend, which might have been the weekend you were supposed to go camping with your new friends (seniors!) who liked to smoke grass out of apples and let you light their cigarettes. Point being, I barely know how to have safe boy/girl sex, much less that girls gone wild shit.

Thankfully, I happen to be good pals with some older, more experienced WWSWW, and they teach me things.  According to my mentors (friends), some women engage in this thing called “monogamy,” which is a euphemism for Lesbian Bed Death.

However, even monogamous couples sometimes have to deal with STIs. In this case, there are several ways to ensure you’re partner doesn’t throw a lamp at your head or post a libelous Myspace bulletin when she notices that her mons no longer has the healthy pink glow of the disease-free.

If you’re really concerned, here’s what to do: invest in latex gloves. Seriously. While much R&D has been devoted to safe boy/girl conjugal action (copper wire in your innards?  Good idea!), there just aren’t that many options for WWSWW. There are, of course, dental dams, but they look like fruit roll-ups and probably get more action from dentists than from the Sapphic set. Also, they taste like balloons.  Latex gloves, however, are apparently standard operating procedure for responsible fisher-women.  Use lube.

Ironically, WWSWW using sex toys often rubberize them the same way you would a bio-ween. This strikes me as unfortunate. Didn’t we choose to be gay because we think condoms smell funny? Yes, yes we did.

I, however, have devised a new method of safe sex. But before I explain, you should understand something….

After many years of unchecked hedonism leading to forced employment termination; the end of perfectly cute and/or meaningful relationships, romantic and otherwise; the desecration of what could have been an upstanding reputation in various towns and cities; and a constant state of insolvency, I have decided to grow up. That’s right. I’m going to pay my own phone bill. I’m also no longer sleeping with people just because I’m drunk and they’re willing. That said, I do plan on the occasional libated evening, and because there is a causal relationship betwixt booze and sex, I have come up with a method to ensure that even if I get jovial enough to make out with a straight girl in an alley, I will go absolutely no further.

How? By making myself so unappealing beneath my drawers that I’ll be too embarrassed to show my body to anyone, regardless of my BAC. I’m going to dye my pubes tangerine, get a $30 tramp stamp of Celine Dion holding a preemie, and shove garlic in my birth canal before I leave the house. Safe sex? No problem.

Now, I realize this won’t help those of you who actually want to have sex. For that, ask actual experts.

Have a good weekend, people.  Don’t catch anything.

As much affection as I have for Hotdog Minus Buns, I’ve gotten so many emails seeking an explanation* for the title that I think it’s time to grow some chest hair….

Welcome to twentytwentyhindsight.com. Expect more of the same, but maybe with a better color scheme as soon as I can figure out how to do that.

*The explanation: as many times as I’ve tried to get people to call me by my middle name (Ronan) or my dream name (Ajax), the only nickname that sticks is fucking Hotdog. This particular by-product of hog jowls and testes has followed me from the day I was born when my parents asked my brother what he thought they should call my twin and I and he said “Porker and Hotdog.” This latest incarnation has something to do with a wheelie on a road bike. Long story. Anyway, because this blog started out as a detailed documentation of my life on the Master Cleanse, the name made sense, but since it’s deteriorated in nature, the name no longer pertains.

Dear friends and lovers,

I know that I give incredibly astute advice (see below), but I am coming to you today with a very serious question.  Before I ask, know the following:

1.) I am a terrible student.  I slept through my first three classes on the first day of school yesterday.  Why?  Sweet dangerous Firefly. And why was I drinking sweet tea vodka far into the night when I had to get up in the morning and fake being a scholar? Because I am a terrible student.

2.) I am a highly distracted man. Like right now, for instance, I’m supposed to be doing my homework but instead I’m wikiing vodka and worrying about LiLo and Sam’s apparent break-up and planning my gown for the inauguration. What I’m saying is, I need a job with short bursts of action. Ten hour days? Destined to fail.

3.) I talk a lot. An example—a few months ago, I was at the bar with my pals Shannon and Clare and I got put in silent timeout for seven minutes because I said something mildly offensive to fifty or so percent of the population. It was the worst seven minutes of my life, thus I need a job where I can talk a lot. A job telling lies would be ideal but I don’t think I’m qualified to be a press secretary.

SO, the favor—I’m enrolled in this terrible master’s program in a field I neither understand nor give a fuck about. I could not be less interested in this shit. My current plan—forgo the letters at the end of my name in favor of beauty school. I mean, shit, the stylists I work with are generally happy people and make plenty of money and have enough time to write or paint or play or contemplate Condolezza Rice’s sexuality (totes gay) as much as they want.

And that, friends and lovers, is where you come in….

Should I drop out of grad school for beauty school?

Colorado was so nice that I almost disregarded the proliferation of Uggs walking the streets and stopped noticing when my sister repeatedly used words like “magical,” “heavenly,” and “magnificent” to describe her new landscape.

It was even so nice I can’t even think of anything hateful to say. Wait, that’s not true—Aspen is a rich man’s moonwalk. So much fur, so much wealth, so little regard for anything but Marc by Marc Jacobs handbags (sorry, KFF!). Also, snowboarders wear their pants below their ass cracks, which is ridiculous when you’re walking, much less when you’re shreddin’ the pow, brah. Also, I almost brought the beat down on three pre-ado boys yesterday who thought it was fun to pretend to slip under our car. I had the door open and was ready get all dirty south on those young’uns when Betsy restrained me.  I did like their high tops though.  Oh, and I got lost snowshoeing and had an unfortunate encounter with a vicious yellow lab that left me in tears and with urine running down my leg.  Long story.

Look at that!  I can sip of the haterade even in delicious town!  Regardless, I assigned my sister the task of acquiring a minimum of one dozen gays/gayelles.  If she succeeds, I’m totes giving my Carrboro papers and hitting the Rockies.

• Start a small business (AKA get a prescription for Adderall).
• Not shit myself while reading at the Queer Art/Queer Action Conference (March 26-28 in Asheville.  Keynote Speaker = John Cameron Mitchell = Shortbus = awesome.  Mark your calendars!).  This is only my second public reading (sober) and the last one was pretty disastrous.  I was reading a “non-fiction” piece about coming out that made my folks looks less generous than they actually were.  Their only concern about being there was that someone would point them out, which I assured them would never happen.  But then the man introducing me pointed to the back of the room and said something about having known my parents for 15 years.  Also, when I finished a bunch of people were crying, which was okay because making people cry is kind of a hobby.
• If my small business fails (and I doubt it will.  There’s nothing risky about dispensing prescription medication, especially in this economy.), I’m going into sex work.   Not the kind of sex work where you have to actually touch people (Ick.  Germs.), but the kind on the phone.  What’s it called again?   Ah, phone sex.  A friend recently told me about living with her boyfriend while he was a phone sex operator.  She would wake up in the middle of the night and hear him pouring glasses of water in the toilet so it sounded like he was peeing.  Also, he apparently had to make farting sounds on his arm.
• Not fail out of school.  Figure out what the term “information science” actually means.  Attend all presentations, especially when I’m supposed to be giving them.
• Get involved in a fruitful relationship.  If that fails, cable.
• Limited drunken trips to Time Out to twice a month.   Ok, three times.
• Revive the best fake band you’ve never heard of, Snail Trail.
• Turn 26.  Act like it.  Time to start paying your own phone bill, you lazy fuck.  Also, I’m not going to ask my sister to answer my emails any more.
• I should probably spend less time sitting in smokey bars telling lies and more time working out and hugging orphans, but c’mon.  Let’s be real, people.  This sounds like plenty to me. Let me know if you can think of any vital, life-changing plans you think I should implement next year.  I can always use help with this growing up stuff.  I’m also willing to give you suggestions.  I may not take advice, but I’m good at dispensing it.