Things that are happening/have recently happened/will soon happen:

• I’ve moved roughly two blocks to an apartment I hope to enjoy even more than the last one. Pat and Tuck remain permanent installations in my living situation.
• I’ve been at my real, grown-up job for just over a year now. Yay!
• Freelancing? Sure, why not.
• My sinuses are once again cesspools of despair. You know, like happens.
• A certain childhood best friend seems to be getting married. Yay! Vacation!
• I have something like a life direction, at least in the short term.
• The Emmys last night were an excellent show, even if the results were absolutely predictable.

August 29, 2008. After not sleeping at all, roomie Pat and I drove a rental truck packed with all our possessions 350+ miles at excessive speeds. We remarkably made our 3:00 lease signing appointment at our apartment. And then we were too sketched out to leave all our crap in the back of the truck, and unpacked the entire thing, still on no sleep.

That’s how I came to St. Louis. In two weeks, it will officially be a year. A year since I left rural Alabama mediocrity for this city of midwestern splendor (and that’s not sarcasm; this is splendor compared to what I’ve come from). I had no money, no job, no car, and no friends aside from my gay and my dog. Oh, and it was just as the economy was full on plunging into its current downward spiral.

It took a solid month for me to get a job from a craigslist post that I had some concerns may have been luring me to my death. Instead I wound up working at an interactive marketing agency. Because, you know, what else would an English major do?

God, that all seems like it happened ages ago. In the way that life always gives you what you need, things have turned out beautifully. It’s been a crazy fun summer to cap an awesome year. I have a pile of friends who are equal parts amazing and terrible influences on me, as all friends should be. I have more of an idea than I ever have of what I want to do with my life, or maybe just what I want in life. That’s not to say I’ve got it all figured out. I’m told it generally all works out by about 30, so that’s something to look forward to, right?

It hasn’t all been perfect. Life never is. I’ve made some stupid decisions, blown a lot of money, and wasted a lot of time worrying about unchangeable things. I’ve grown into myself quite a lot, though. I think that counts for something.

Thank you, St. Louis, for bringing out the fun in me. Thanks job and friends and Pat and Tuck. Thanks, tiny rusty car. It’s been a kickass year, and I look forward to the next.

Oh, and we’re totally fucking going out to celebrate.

Well, for starters, it was our nation’s birthday. The only suitable way to celebrate, clearly, was to drink probably 2/3 to 3/4 of a bottle of whiskey, a couple beers, and God knows what else because I sure as fuck don’t remember. As a result, I woke up Sunday morning, remarkably in my own bed, with absolutely zero memory of how I got there. And then some blurry memories kind of sifted in as I lie as motionless as possible in my bed for most of the day.

There was a bar I may or may not have ever been inside. There was a car ride I remember absolutely no part of, but I remember being told we were catching a ride with [someone]. There was a cab ride I have only very vague, blurry memories of. I remember yelling, crying, and slurring incomprehensibly. I remember a few faces here and there.

And then I have these pictures. I’ve got to say that the one that most concerns me, and the last one taken according to my phone, is the one that I’m in. WHO TOOK THIS PICTURE? WHY DID YOU TAKE IT? Things I will likely never, ever know.

In all honesty, I’m still pretty freaked out about all of this days later. For one thing, I made a drunken idiot of myself in front of God knows what people, though they were surely all friends of the friend who unfortunately took me out that night. But mostly I’m incredibly uncomfortable with the concept of not remembering hours of my life. Sadly, I can’t say it’s the first time it’s happened, but after a second (I think just second, right?) round, I really, really hope that it’s the last.

Lesson: Never, ever drink faster than the alcohol is affecting you. Bonus Lesson: If your current drink is a glass of nothing but ice and bottom shelf, plastic-jug whiskey, you should not be drinking anymore. You probably should have stopped some time ago. DO NOT GO TO A SECOND LOCATION.

Got any info about something fucked up I did? It will probably make me sad, but I’d like to hear it anyway. It’d be nice to have some idea what I was doing.

I envy my friends and neighbors their quiet little backyards. The next place I live has to have some kind of outdoor area. Preferably a little house, with a little yard. Someplace quiet but still in the city. I just can’t do suburbs anymore. I mean I can, but I choose not to.

I’ve done a lot of shit lately, and haven’t written about nearly enough of it. I made a short film. In 48 hours, I helped a fairly remarkable group of people make a mother fucking movie. It was roughly six minutes long, and that doesn’t sound like a big deal at all, but it so was. It was fun and filled my life with immediate purpose. It’s not that I feel purposeless, I just loved the immediacy.

And speaking of beer, which I was a couple paragraphs back, when did that become such a thing in my life? I remember the very first time I tasted beer, sneaking a sip in the middle of the night at my grandma’s house with one of my trouble-making cousins. I was maybe 9? It was terrible. We poured it out and got in trouble for it the next day. I wonder, looking back, if we’d have gotten in less trouble if we’d drunk it. And then again in middle school, I went to a party with kids who were way cooler than me. There were cigarettes and beer, and I had to smoke and drink to be cool. I again took a sip of beer and quietly poured it out when no one was paying attention.  And then somewhere in the last year and a half I decided it was good. I mean, I’ll always love my rum, but there are so many times when a beer just sounds absolutely perfect.

Like when it’s a perfect 70 something degrees out and the not-quite-purple sky is filled with fireflies. Were there ever this many fireflies in Alabama?

Why so nostalgic? So deep and pseudo-philosophical? I don’t fucking know, I just go with this shit when the mood hits me. But I’ve found something here. Maybe it’s something I always had and just needed to be displaced to recognize, but at least part of it is specific to this St. Louis chunk of my life. There’s something to the people I’ve met here and the times I’ve had here and the way I’ve lived here. Here, for a whole 3/4 of a year. Here, since August 27, 2008.

I’m excited about summer, which I never am. I’m excited about the rest of this first year. I’m excited about making the most of whatever the fuck this is. Excited about another beer on the back porch.

Which is unusual. Sand is all clingy and itchy. I have near-translucent skin that doesn’t agree with much sun, and saltwater’s cool and all, but I’m not exactly a swimsuit kind of girl (by which I mean, nothing fills me with a deeper terror than wearing swimsuit-type apparel in public). That said, I’ve just been pining for all those things, and The OC has only aggravated the situation.

I could have been a Cali girl. Not quite 25 years ago (holy shit, am I almost a quarter of a century old? *shudder*), my parents were living in a hovel on the edge of Death Valley. Then they get pregnant, and rather than raise me potentially in an environment more suited to something deep in my essential core, they move to Texas. To add insult to injury, they raise me in Alabama. I’ve spent the beginnings of my adult life sampling big cities.

So here’s a perfectly attainable goal I have: I will go to California in roughly the next year. I don’t want to say exactly a year because of how my vacation days fall and all that, but as close to a year as possible given that consideration. I want to spend a real vacation there, planned to the extent that I get to see all the parts I most want to see. I want a tan for the first time since I was nine. I want to swim in the ocean. Fuck everyone else and my terror of swimwear. I just wanna see what the West Coast has to offer.

I love St. Louis. I still feel like it’s where I belong right now. I like my job and love the dorks I’ve befriended through it. I like my little apartment and our neighborhood. I’m not ready to jump ship by any means, but I like to think of myself as open to possibility. And I feel this compulsion to go out there. It might just be another vacation. It might be the next stop in the city-hopping life I suspect I may live. Needless to say, it’ll be a change of pace.

Until then, I’ll catch some of the highlights with Ryan, Seth, Summer, and Peter Gallagher’s eyebrows. I realize Marissa is there too, but I’m counting the days until she’s dead.

• HPV is a sexually transmitted disease
• Some types of the virus cause genital warts, and in women some types can cause cervical cancer
• Men can carry the cancer-causing form of the virus, and pass it to women, without showing any symptoms themselves

Currently, Gardasil has FDA approval for women up to age 27. When the drug sought approval, debate centered around whether the drug would increase the likelihood that young girls would have sex. I’m very much on the side of that argument being bullshit. Young girls are going to have sex, likely dangerously unprotected sex given the state of sex ed in this country, no matter what. At least with this series of shots, they’re significantly less likely to develop cancer as a result.

Interestingly enough, the FDA has known since back when the drug was approved for girls that it also worked on boys. However, they wanted more testing before they approved the drug for male treatment, or even for the treatment of women over age 27.  Does anyone else see this as some more bullshit? I see this as a big fuck you from the FDA. Boys aren’t going to get cervical cancer, so nevermind the fact that this vaccine could stop them from passing this stupid fucking virus on to countless women who could. We can hold off on that. No big deal. Fuck.

So now, Merck is pushing for the male approval. Now that it’s for boys, nobody gives a shit about whether or not it will make them more likely to have sex. Boys will be boys, you know. Instead, they think it’s too costly, and why should boys be made to get a vaccine for something that doesn’t affect them? Oh wait, it could prevent 250,000 cases of genital warts each year. It could prevent 7,500 cases of cancer in men each year. And I know we don’t care about how things that men do affect women, but let me go ahead and throw out that it would help save the lives of the 3,500 women who die of cervical cancer every year.

All the same, the vote, which could take place as soon as October of this year, seems to hinge on the drug’s cost effectiveness as a preventative treatment. The motherfucking CDC is more concerned about whether it’s worth the $500 for the course of shots than about controlling a disease. CONTROLLING a DISEASE. It’s in your name, you asses! You are the Center for Disease Control! Do your damn job! How about we let this fucking drug get approved first, and worry about working down the price later. Hate!

Clearly this debate isn’t over, and with luck it will turn out the way that it should. Of course, then I’m sure the insurance companies will bitch and moan about how they don’t want to cover it, just like they did with the girls. Whatever the outcome, these arguments are pissing me off. This is some sexist noise.

Also, for the love of God…actually, not for the love of God. For the love of your children, accept that they’re going to have sex. Just like you had sex. Just like your parents had sex. It’s how we’re all here, and I assure you that we weren’t all born of parents who waited until marriage (if they were ever married at all). We live in a time when preaching sexual abstinence is more and more and more a moot and even a dangerous point. Start preaching sexual responsibility. It’ll change the fucking world. Don’t be idiots.

/rant

Today’s lesson is: St. Patrick’s Day is no day to be eating tacos.

I learned this lesson in conjunction with a painful lesson on the geography of St. Louis. I knew, when I left to go to the all-you-can-eat taco bar at lunch, that there was a parade in the STL community of Dogtown (chock full o’ Irish). I did not, however, know where Dogtown is. Now I do, as a direct result of driving (read: creeping at a pace of about one car length/minute) straight through it today, or at least along a rather busy edge of it.

I have decided this is penance for betraying my heritage in pursuit of counter-ethnic foods. That, and I think my ethereally pale Irish skin is a little sad about all the sun it took while I sat in the car. I hope this appeases St. Patty.

Now, go forth and drink green beer. Or Irish car bombs, though I hear those lead to sadness.

I moved to my current city carless, and quickly found that to be a less than ideal situation. Let’s just say that St. Louis is not an especially pedestrian friendly city, and public transit has a long way to come. But I was too broke to really put much time into worrying about it. Then just over a month ago, a coworker/friend walked into work one morning and handed me a piece of paper with a phone number written on it and said “I found you a car.”

Enter Gretchen, the $350 distant foreign relation of dearly departed Gertrude. A slightly paler sky blue, my newly acquired 89 Honda Civic hatchback is probably a third smaller than Gertie. This is likely the cutest little car I’ll ever own, in spite of all the rust and dents and scratches. And as an added bonus, all the rust and dents and scratches equal safety in my neighborhood. I highly doubt anyone will be stealing The Gretch.

Aside from just keeping my stalking public up-to-date on my latest car situation, I feel compelled to write about Gretchen for the series of trials she has put me through, and for my triumphs over them all. For starters, Gretchy has a manual transmission. Learning to drive stick is one of those many rights of self-sufficiency that I was denied in my youth because my idiot step-father never thought any of the dozens of stick-shift cars we had lying about at various points were in good enough condition for me to learn to drive in them. Sigh. He also refused to teach me how to change my oil. What a dick.

I owned my car for right about two weeks before I was able to pin someone down and get a quick driving lesson. I learned pretty easily, like I do. Granted, in the pre-learning phase there was a slight incident with a fence, but that’s neither here nor there.

The first problem I found with the car, the day that I bought it, was that the front parking lights never turn off. Ever. Workaround = take the ground cable off the battery every time I park it for an extended period of time (say, overnight, or for a work day). Annoying!

Then there was the first flat tire, which I could never explain. I changed it with only a moderate amount of profanity. In the process I knocked some of the rust off the fender. That’s good, right? I bought a couple cans of clearanced Fix-A-Flat just in case and kept putting off replacing the tire.

During the first week or so of me driving the car, the battery cables were so loose from the guy who had previously owned it taking them off all the time that sometimes when I accidentally slammed the car into gear a little too hard (I said I learned to drive stick, not that I was perfect at it), the positive cable would just bounce off the battery, and the car would die (almost always in the middle of an intersection), and I’d have to get out and fix it. Also annoying! I eventually remembered to take a wrench out with me and bother tightening up the positive cable (but not the negative, because I still had to take that off for the parking lights). Take that, the car.

And then there was the second flat. This time I was with Pat, and a chunk of jagged metal lodged in the tire was the clear cause. Keep in mind that I had still not replaced the tire that went flat inexplicably, but I did have the Fix-A-Flat. So I carefully followed the instructions on the can. I sprayed the crap into the tire. I drove a couple miles to “distribute” the goo, and pulled over at a gas station that conveniently had free air. Where I found that the goo had been nicely distributed out the hole where the hunk of metal was all over the inside of the wheel well. Now, I not only had to change the tire, but I had to do it with goo all over everything. I was not in a great place, emotionally. Having learned from Gertrude, however, that lashing out at a car physically hurts you more than the car, I did refrain from kicking the flat, sticky tire. That was impressive progress for my restraint. I have rage issues.

Anyway, it occurred to me as I finished finished up with the tire change and aired up the tire that had gone flat for no reason once before, while I looked down at my grease and tire goo and blood covered hands (and wondered where the blood had come from), that Gretchen and I were going to come to an understanding if it killed us both. As I had said upon my triumphant arrival at the office after the first flat, this car’s gonna learn not to fuck with me.

And it seems that she has. I think she was testing me. She wanted to see just what she could get away with. I bought two new tires without incident. And today, I even managed to find the fuse for the parking lights, determine that it doesn’t affect anything terribly important, and pull it. No more twice daily battery connecting and disconnecting! And I even snugged down the battery terminals properly. No mysterious bleeding!

Welcome Gretchen to the family, kids. She’s a little bitch, but she fits right in.

Also, be warned: this movie completely blows.

First, a few words about the show. I was an avid Dead Like Me fan from early on. I think I started watching while the first season was still in first run on Showtime, and kept up with it pretty well from there on out. I bought the DVDs some time ago, and had a great time sharing this show that I loved so much with my BFF. I had been concerned at first, since he’s such a TV buff, but once he was all in, I was reassured of my decent taste in things. It’s a beautiful show both about living and about death. The first season is brilliant, and the second season has some great stuff in it even if it’s uneven and doesn’t really flow as a whole. It was a little tragic that this show, which so richly deserved a third season, just kind of fell apart and never made it there. Mandy Patinkin is my hero, however difficult to work with he is rumored to be, and I kind of wish Ellen Muth could find something else to do. Though she may be a little limited. I’ve never seen her in anything else, so I don’t really know.

As sad as I was about the show, Pat pointed out (having just rewatched it all) that nothing too pressing was left all that open in the end, and that it wasn’t a horrible finale. I could argue either way, but I really have to agree in the end.

And then there were the rumors of the movie. And then the movie started happening. Sadly, Rube would not be back. Then there was the rumor that if the movie was good enough to get the show jumpstarted, Rube would be back. Then everyone quit talking about it other than to push back the release date.

I feel they quit talking about it because they hoped it would just go quietly unnoticed and fans wouldn’t be too saddened by the god awful mess that had been made of something lovely. And that brings us to Dead Like Me: Life After Death (I only know there’s a subtitle because IMDB told me so; I assure you I did not buy this and would encourage everyone else in the world not to do so either).

Where to begin? Oh, I know. Degrassi kids? Really? Shenae Grimes makes me want to punch a baby on her best days, and then they had the kid who’s playing an artist who won’t fuck Holly J this season. What the hell? Just, what the hell? Equally apalling, and thus in the same paragraph, who did Ellen Muth’s hair? Because that’s some bullshit. She looked kind of like a diseased lion in the first several scenes.

Fake Daisy Adair is upsetting. Like, physically upsetting. Fake Daisy is what drove me to take a cinnamon schnapps break. As much as I didn’t think Women’s Murder Club was especially terrible, I’d like to go back in time to give it a good kick for keeping real Daisy Adair (Laura Harris) tied up.

On to the premise. Rube is gone, and no one cares. The no one caring seems almost like it’s all cover for their deep, hidden emotion, but then that never goes anywhere. Some new douche comes in and clearly flaunts all of Rube’s carefully laid down laws. Chaos ensues, but again, no one cares. And then they seem to care, but they deal with it by killing the dude. Seriously? Let’s kill a grim reaper and that will solve all our problems? There was half a suggestion that maybe they should go over this guy’s head (which might have lead to something interesting that delved into the mythology of the show), and then that never goes anywhere. Instead, then they hack him up, set him on fire, and make s’mores over the flames. Which I don’t think would even work. A fresh corpse is awfully juicy to just burn that way.

I’m not really doing justice to the deep level of fucked up that this thing was. Oh wait, and then George hangs out with her sister, Reggie, and tells Reggie who she is. Reggie vomits, and then they hang out some more. Then George reaps Reggie’s secret boyfriend (Blue, from Degrassi). Then Reggie tries to kill herself in George’s car, changes her mind, and is quietly acceptant when George says they can’t hang out anymore.

The only parts of this movie that were at least at moments good were Britt Mckillip’s return as Reggie and Jasmine Guy’s reprisal of Roxy. Really, Reggie more than Roxy. Reggie never quite made it to fully developed character in the series. This movie made her seem a little more real, for a minute, but then that never went anywhere. It was nice to see Roxy as her feisty self for about the first three minutes in which she appeared. Then there was a pretty complete betrayal of her character that made me want to hunt down all the people involved and introduce them to the afterlife. You know, only in hopes that they’d get some good research out of it. Not out of anger or anything.

So, on the whole, there were a handful of enjoyable or pseudo poignant or half funny moments in the film. I don’t think that any of it was enough to count as payoff for sitting through the movie. And everyone looked terrible! Terrible! I’ve wanted to do Callum Blue since the first time I saw this show, and I felt nothing but pity for him here. And not even the kind of pity that ends in sex. Though I already mentioned it, I feel I should reiterate that for almost the entirety of the movie, Ellen Muth really looks like shit. Oh, and Christine Willes as Delores Herbig was back, which should be back up there in the “positives” paragraph, but she also looked awful.

It makes me sad that Bryan Fuller, the original creator, had any part in this. It makes me sad for them all. For shame. For shame.

Oh, and they burn down Der Waffle Haus in the first couple minutes. Seriously? Seriously.

In celebration of the holiday, I thought I would pass on a couple of the fun greetings I have received. I’m sure these came from someone else somewhere on the internet, but I could only even take a guess at one of them. Sorry, whoever I’m not crediting. Don’t kill me in my sleep. Though I’m sure it would just be blamed on the hobo that lives below me.

Have a happy, gay Valentine's Day!

Or just a slutty one.