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 like this, basically My summer wishlist is currently exactly one item long.
POOOOOOL.
A POOL. A shape of water more than a foot deep in my backyard where I can drink bitch beer and splash myself repeatedly in the face while screaming, “I LOVE IT. I LOVE WATER IN MY FACE. GIVE ME THE HOSE AGAIN.”
There are basically eight thousand backyard pools in my neighborhood and surrounding city, but you know how many are located at the house in which I live?
NONE. NONE MANY.
 FECAL. FECAL MEANS POOP. Our public pool is called THE PLUNGE and it is an embarrassment. Rec swim is one hour and fifteen minutes in the hottest part of the afternoon and it costs a dollar a day. This seems like a steal until you read the flyer and learn that they won’t refund your money even if, in that precious 75 minute swimming period your broke-ass is trying to enjoy, someone SHITS IN THE POOL. They don’t even seem to discourage pool-shitting. It’s just like, “Hey, people like to drop a lower intestine soft shell crab in the pool every couple days. NO BIG DEAL, MAN. Why would you even ask for your dollar back? THAT’S SIMPLY AN OUT OF THIS WORLD REQUEST.”
If someone shits in a pool I’m swimming in, I am going to ask for my god damn dollar back. Just sayin’.
 the last time I felt joy: drunk in a pool Gratefully, one of my best friends has a pool in his lovely backyard and is often generous and kind and wonderful and invites us over to swim where I usually get in and don’t leave for anywhere from six to twelve hours.
But this year! This year! It is already SUMMER and he hasn’t invited us over yet. WHAT IS THAT ABOUT HOW IS THAT EVEN ALLOWED?!
That motherfucker and I are DONE.
Until he finally invites us over. Obviously.
I’m not asking for the pool at Hearst Castle or an infinity pool that looks over the ocean or one of those rock work and waterfall monstrosities that occur frequently in upper middle class suburban backyards or even a god damn kidney bean, straight out of the box DIY inground classic. I AM NOT EVEN ASKING FOR A DECKED AND STAIRED PERMANENT ABOVE GROUND, OKAY.
No no, I am so wildly desperate for a POOL, a body of stagnant water of questionable cleanliness that I would be ENDLESSLY OKAY with the modern equivalent of the classic doughboy.
 you know this is a tragic replacement for a real pool, don't pretend This thing is an embarrassment to backyard pools. It’s made out of PVC pipe and recycled condoms. LOOK AT THAT LADDER! That thing wouldn’t support a family of squirrels on their path to aquatic suicide.
I’m pretty sure you’re better off digging a hole in your backyard, filling it with water, and swimming in mud.
(I suggested that, by the way, but no one else was into Mudco Polo. Pussies.)
On Sunday, in true desperation, after spending all day playing in a pathetic DIY sprinkler garden made from a decrepit hose with a half-dozen massive cracks in it and a rusted out folding chair, I decided I’d kill for even the most basic of flashback pools:
the soft-sided wonder, the Slip and Slide splash zone of my youth (We were way too poor for Crocodile Mile.), the sit-on-rocks-trapped-under-the-vinyl-and-splash-your-sister. We went through one of these a year as kids, usually, and I have fond memories of trying to hide from bees in those coveted eighteen inches of hose water.
But we’re all strapped for cash right now and my only chance for poolside splendor is probably dumpster-diving the Toys ‘R’ Us and praying I can snag a busted floor model of one of those cheap molded plastic things that people plant gardens in on vacant lots in big cities and duct tape it into some water-bearing marvel of at-home engineering so that i might get my feet slightly damp and playfully splash my dogs who are all mostly terrified of water.
 actual reality. I LOVE POOOOOOOOOOLS. I love the water! It brings me joy. And peace. And zen or whatever other bullshit water is supposed to do. I’m a ~Pisces~, obviously I am supposed to be one with the splashy splashy.
My dad and uncle taught me to swim as a baby by throwing me into a three foot deep spa. Only gentler and with one of them in the water to help me and stuff. And I was always the first kid in at pool parties even though I was fat and pale and should’ve learned all that body shame we’re supposed to have a handle on by the time we’re five or whatever. And I was always the last one out.
 TRUE CHILDHOOD JOY. LOOK AT IT. My dad tells this story that would be really embarrassing if I had shame wherein I got into every lake, river, and stream on a childhood road trip across most of the western states and proceeded to yell at EVERYONE IN PROXIMITY that they should come in and swim with me. Even when it was forty degrees in Green River, Wyoming. (He does this horrible high-pitched voice to imitate me. It’s just awful. “DADDY DADDY COME IN THE WATER IT IS GREEEEEEEAT. Ugh, kill me.)
 SO HAPPY AND DAMP If I cannot reclaim the childhood joy that came with that inflatable pool and basketball hoop, I would gladly settle for the joy of these too cute to even exist cuys having a swim in their own tiny little poooooool. LOOK AT THOSE GUINEA PIGGIES. Let’s hope it’s not cancer water or something. That’d really suck the fun out of back-stroking guineas.
 GOD DAMN LIFE RUINERS Everything I know about high school, I learned from Saved By the Bell.
Countless writers before me have recounted their own experiences with SBTB, writers smarter, funnier, and more poignant than me. But I have something Chuck Klosterman doesn’t: an unironic love of the show and the fact that it pretty much ruined my high school experience.
SBTB debuted as Good Morning Miss Bliss in 1989 when I was a paltry four-years-old. I don’t specifically remember watching it at the time (the only media viewing I remember at the time was A Nightmare on Elm Street. What can I say, my parents were… forward thinking.) and I don’t particularly remember watching new episodes on TNBC Saturday mornings (thought I know for a fact that I did).
What I remember most vividly about SBTB is how deeply it skewed the vision I had of my future high school experience.
I didn’t entertain thoughts of being best friends with Kelly Kapowski (I mean, I was obviously Jesse Spano, but that’s really beside the point.) and I didn’t particularly imagine a world in which I could date Zack Morris or even AC Slater with his truly atrocious Jerry Curl. But, growing up in Southern California, I envisioned my high school future as something not too far from the halls of Bayside High, an experience rife with a hang out like The Max (more likely to be an In N Out in my suburban Los Angeles hometown) and the potential for an oil reserve under our football field.
I knew, logically, even at the time, that these were unlikely and extraordinary scenarios, but I know that I also secretly hoped that we’d have a radio station or an advice line that would lead to wacky hijinks.
My high school didn’t even have lockers, let alone a drivers ed class with in-car (or…cart) training, not even a principle that could have pulled me from a police line-up.
Somewhere in the back of my mind as I set foot on my campus that fateful September day of 1999 when I began my high school education, I expected Mr. Tuttle to run a glee club and for someone to have a caffeine pill-induced freakout.
I’d like to say that these delusions were my own, that I was simply a mindfucked product of too much TV at such a young age, but I wasn’t.
Sitting in my honors world history class, I turned to my close friend and said, “Man, I wish we went to Bayside†and she looked at me and without a moment’s hesitation said, “We don’t even have lockers. Saved by the Bell creates unrealistic expectations.â€
We then proceeded to have a conversation about it that lasted the rest of the day.
I’d like to say we learned something profound about our expectations, about the image that the media creates for the youth culture, about how SBTB is secretly some profoundly counter-culture experience.
But we didn’t. We spent what amounted to about four hours just discussing episodes.
“You remember the one where Lisa sold all of her clothes to pay her dad’s Visa bill?†“Yeah!†“Remember Screech’s robot?†“Steve!†“Remember the time that they did the anti-pot episode?†“Totally. With the Brandon Tartakoff message at the end?†“YES.†“How about the one where they make spaghetti sauce?†“With Punky Brewster!â€
And it always culminates in the great remembarance. “Dude, the caffeine pills!†“I KNOW.†And in unison, “I’m so excited. I’m so excited. I’m so… scared!†complete with melodramatic Elizabeth Berkely sobs.
That’s it. For four hours.
And I have proceeded to have the exact same conversation at least once a year for the last eleven years.
I watched four episodes of SBTB a day, five days a week for the four years I was in college. It was a staple in our dorm room and the on-campus apartment I lived in for the year after that. The two years that I lived at home and commuted depressed me infinitely because I wasn’t home to catch them. Gratefully, my Tivo was. I own all of the seasons on DVD and I watch them.
This is not some fleeting, nostalgic interest like I have in Mr. Belvedere or Salute Your Shorts. This is an all-consuming passion for some of the worst television programming to ever grace our airways.
I love Saved By The Bell. Unironically and unapologetically.
One of my favorite episodes of the show is the one where Mr. Belding’s brother Rod comes to work as a substitute teacher at Bayside. He’s the perfect image of a “cool guy†of the era, long hair and cowboy boots, that kind of obnoxiously perfected image that was really only cool for about twelve seconds in 1993, if it ever was at all.
While working as a substitute teacher at the alma mater that had so failed me as my own Bayside, I introduced myself to the class. “I’m Ms. Russell. You guys can call me Ash.†I grinned and was blindsided by a mostly mortifying realization: I was Rod. I had somehow modeled my entire method of substitute education after a one-off character on an episode of SBTB who ultimately turned out to be the bad guy.
Saved by the Bell is not a show to me; it is an inexplicable cultural phenomenon of such importance that it has integrated itself into my personality and my professional life.
I am not what I eat; I am what I watch.
I know that I am not alone in my slavish devotion to a show that’s seventeen years off the air. SBTB is a language of my age, an utter cultural staple. I have never once met someone in my age bracket that hadn’t seen at least one episode and more often than not they are almost as intimately familiar with the show as I am. If you are looking for a uniting force for Generation Y, there is no pop cultural icon quite like Zack Morris and his brethren. I cannot imagine building a long-term friendship with someone who is not at least relatively familiar with the canon of what probably amounts to the single most important television show of my life.
In the end, that is, of course, what it amounts to: a TV show and a really shitty one at that. It’s not the great American novel or Citizen Cane; hell, it’s not even well-done Saturday morning programming, but it is the kind of media that leaves a mark, the kind that will likely (and probably sadly) outlast the great masterpieces of the ages because it’s left that mark on the hearts of a generation of pop-culture addicts who are never going to let it go.
Zack Morris will live on and I’m so excited.
I took this picture of my girlfriend Crystal in August of 2007, just four months after we first met. We were at a barbecue for my family celebrating all the August birthdays (my mom, my dad, and my aunt) and Crystal had come along. My family took to her immediately. We were just friends then, but I knew at this moment, this fraction of a second when I snapped the picture, that I was in love with her.
Now if you want to vomit, you’re not alone. I kind of want to puke all over myself too, but I’m trying to do this post all honest-like and that means there are going to be some ~emotions~ floating around loose on the air. Throw on a swine flu mask and you should make it through just fine.
Crystal is smart and funny and talented and generous and patient and kind and crazy and sweet and clever and loving and beautiful. My friends love her, my family love her, and she loves them back.
She likes my writing and my cooking and my jokes. She ALWAYS LAUGHS AT MY JOKES, which is like the number one thing I look for in a new friend.
She is terrified of everything: bugs, heights, the dark sometimes. It’s REALLY CUTE.
She loves so many of the same things I do and when I want to go out and do stuff she doesn’t, she sucks it up and does it anyway. BECAUSE SHE LOVES ME.
She was my friend first. We were friends for a year and a half before we ever tried dating. Granted, my friends and family were already calling her my girlfriend based on the sheer amount of time we spent together, but whatever. And maybe we did it once or twice. BUT WE DID NOT DATE. We were not emotionally entangled like a couple. And then we were.
And at first it was crazy and everything felt like this:
But eventually we got it figured out and tomorrow will be our second anniversary. (Someday I will tell the story of that faithful “getting together” conversation and how, just as we were starting to have celebratory sex, she got a bloody nose ALL OVER MY CHEST. But today is no day for that.)
I don’t know entirely how we’ve made it this far.
But I love her more every single day. And without her I’d have trouble functioning. My novel wouldn’t be getting written, I wouldn’t be surviving school, hell, I wouldn’t have ever even applied for the MFA program.
I love you, bub. Thank you so much for two amazing years.
Right now, I am curled up in the mental fetal position at my desk eating my feelings in the form of a large-ish bowl of Life cereal. NO JOKE. I am stressed as hell because I have a novel workshop tomorrow and I am giving myself SERIOUS ANXIETIES over nothing. This ain’t my first rodeo, so I don’t know what I am freaking out about, but WHATEVER, I am running with it and when Life hands you lemons, you should take that shit back to the store and buy the cinnamon kind instead.
Part of my freaking out is just the general anxiety of knowing that some people I trust/respect are reading my (very, very raw) work and are going to tell me what I did wrong (and right, but that falls on deaf ears pretty much) for TWO HOURS in the very near future. The workshop system is fucked up on a lot of levels, but writers are nothing if not gluttons for punishment, so we just. keep. doing. it. I expect this insanity twice/three times a quarter and I deal with it pretty well.
The second part of the anxiety is really frustration. I’m not writing my book linearly. I don’t mean that narratively (shit starts at point A and ends at point B), I mean actual craft-wise. I’ve never written a novel before (three NaNoWriMo attempts be damned.) and I’m not the kind of writer that can force readable writing out when the spark’s not there, so I am jumping around in the timeline, fully aware of what is missing and mostly how it’ll shape where the story is going.
If my brain says, “Yo, write this scene that happens in the last third of the book,” I’m going to write the fucking scene that happens in the last third of the book. I’m not going to be all, “Nah, man, that has to wait, there are still a hundred pages between here and there!” because by the time I get from here to there I will have lost everything good about what I wanted to write.
Fuck that.
So, my classmates and professors get whatever it is I’ve written with outline and explanation of what is missing. I have worked HARD to make it as clear and understandable as humanly possible and I am nutso-insane SICK AND TIRED of having to apologize for it.
It’s not even the people around me! My readers are all REALLY SUPPORTIVE. It’s like I am being COSMICALLY SHAMED into changing the writing method that works for me and that’s total bullshit. I shouldn’t have to apologize for writing what comes easily, naturally. I should be able to write whatever-the-fuck I want to write without feeling like I am breaking some bullshit rules no one bothered to tell me in the first place.
I understand it changes the reads and critiques I’m going to get, but that’s my problem to deal with and one that I am fully willing to accept. I have no problem with, “Hey, I don’t know where this is, so I can’t be of much help plot-wise,” because I will be like, “HEY COOL, I APPRECIATE THE HEADS UP.”
I cannot legitimately be the only writer in the HISTORY OF WRITING PROGRAMS to write non-linearly while shaping the first draft of the novel. And I am real, real tired of having to kowtow and apologize like I’ve done something wrong.
Embracin’ my methods straight-up from HERE ON OUT. TAKE THAT, COSMOS.
The final part of the anxiety isn’t nervousness, it’s fucking-ready-for-this-shit-to-be-done-ness.
My MFA program is great and I am grateful everyday that I get to work with the people I do and that it’s turning out as well as it is and that I don’t, yet, have to work a real job and try to fake my way through real life responsibility.
But I am LEGIT ready for summer. I am in my EIGHTH month with this novel, not counting the three to four months I spent hardcore percolating the story way back in 2008 and I am SICK of this motherfucker.
I love the story still, probably even more than I did when I first came up with the idea, and my writing gets better every single time I sit down to burn through pages, but I am sick of talking about it, thinking about it, critiquing it, breathing it, living it. And I’m not even DONE.
The writing process BLOWS. It’s like African elephant gestation, an abominable pregnancy that is NEVER GOING TO END.
I know it’ll be worth it, that all the agonizing and stressing and misery and anxiety and suffering will be something I can be proud of, but eff that right now. I just want to get drunk and hang out in my BFF’s pool and crack wise about some serious bullshit and get up to some shenanigans.
So, PEACE OUT, SPRING 2010. I am ready for your scantily-clad sister Summer and all the debauchery and freedom she’s got jammed in her jorts pockets. BRING IT ON.
so, i have a lot of kind of random allergies. i developed an allergy to strawberries as an adult (but i eat them anyway) and i can’t use 90% of face products. and my body reacts to allergies with HIVES. big, lymph-leaking hives all over my FACE, mostly, then usually my neck and chest. it’s gross and itchy and awful, so aside from strawberries (which has actually lessened in recent years), i try to avoid them at all costs. it’s miserable.
well, one of the things i am MOST ALLERGIC TO is weevils. which shouldn’t be a big deal, except every house has weevils! they like dry foods and flour and stuff, so sometimes they are just in a house and if they don’t get into the food, they just hang out looking for crumbs and shit and they’re tiny and mostly not bothersome. EXCEPT WHEN YOU ARE ALLERGIC TO THEM.
so when i see them, it is my first instinct as a bug-hater to squish them, only I AM ALLERGIC, so i have to run and wash my hands two or three times and hope that i didn’t touch any of my clothes.
so the other day, i guess i killed one and forgot about it and then touched my face. and i was sitting at my desk at four am and i was like, “fuck my face really itches.” and i was like, “ugh, i bet it’s dry skin. my skin is FREAKING OUT this week.” so i just resolve to not touch it and ignore it. but i am sitting there and it is getting itchier and i am like, “UGH FUCK I WILL JUST GO WASH UP” and i walk into the bathroom and look in the mirror and see this hot mess.
YEAH THAT’S RIGHT.
so gross. i look like my skin is going to fall off. FUCK HIVES IN THE ASS, MAN. so miserable. and they were all wet and slimy from lymph-juice and just. ugh. my life, non-stop misery.
it was nice to be able to show my parents though and be like, WHAT WHAT YOU SAID IT WAS PSYCHOSOMATIC MOTHERFUCKERS LOOK AT THIS BOOYAH.
(also, i know that looks like one side of my face flipped to look like two, but i assure you it is not. i just have a FREAKISHLY symmetrical face. seriously. the mirror effect on the isight gives me the heebies because my face LOOKS EXACTLY THE SAME. my gf says that’s why i often get approached/reached out to by random children and babies. she says they dig symmetry.)
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