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So! Kansas City is BEAUTIFUL. And hot. And humid. And kind of awesome. There’s a lot of good food, even though the gf and I are too lazy to really go anywhere after work. It turns out that working eight hours a day is, like, a lot lot different than going to class once or twice a week and playing video games in your underwear the rest of the time. Work is great, but they get real weird when I play Tetris topless.
Jokes aside, work is AMAZING. I don’t want to talk about my company here because they probably wouldn’t want to associate themselves publicly with someone who calls Jesse Eisenberg a rapscallion and makes as many poop jokes as I do — BUT. I get to WRITE all day in my own happy little booth and be surrounded by people who are kind and talented in a variety of fascinating and jealousy-inducing disciplines and wander around this beautiful and massively confusing building with a bunch of other interns who are turning out to be way more excellent than I imagined. Most of them are leaving on the 12th of August, but I’m here for an entire month after that — the joys of being the last to arrive — and I am ACTUALLY going to miss other human beings when they start to disappear. I’m going to miss coworkers! How is that even a thing?!
Our apartment is lovely and our landlady is great and friendly and sort of like having a mom out here who politely stays out of the way, but gets really excited and or angry on your behalf when necessary. At the end of my second week at work, the back window of my car was smashed in by shit-bag vandals and EVERYONE was scandalized and furious on my behalf. People in the midwest are NICE. REALLY NICE. L.A. nice is a different kind of nice — we’re polite, we want to be friendly, but we don’t really have time for you — here, people CARE and are INTERESTED and want to hear all about your life and stuff. It’s weird and has not yet stopped being weird.
I miss my family and friends desperately. DESPERATELY. Like, wake up when the alarm goes off at six and cry once a week while rolling around on the bed because you just WANT TO GO HOME ALREADY EVERYTHING SUCKS WHERE IS MY MOM SOMEONE MAKE ME A SANDWICH AND HUG ME. But I am so happy with my job that it’s keeping me sane. Crystal is putting up with SO MUCH and being SO EXCELLENT and she doesn’t even complain or cry or tell me how much she hates me for forcing her to come here. Instead she just makes dinner and does the laundry and does weird sex things with me sometimes. She’s the best. And she’s made this entire experience so much more survivable and excellent that it ever could’ve been if I had to come alone.
So yeah, people out here talk funny (it’s ADORABLE) and they apologize a lot, like, for things that are completely out of their control. Like the weather. EVERYONE HAS APOLOGIZED FOR THE HEAT. I feel like the governor of Missouri is going to send me a letter soon, just to check in and apologize.
Today an unmanned rolling cart rolled into me of its own volition while I was standing near it and I apologized to it. THE MIDWEST HAS GOT ME, SEND HELP.
I’ve said, “Oh, the heat’s not that bad, it’s the HUMIDITY” so many times I want to slap myself. Also, “CALIFORNIA DOESN’T HAVE…”, especially re: terrifying insects, food chains, grocery stores, coupons, milk in glass bottles in the regular grocery store, delicious Sonic-esque PERFECT ICE everywhere we go, etc. See also: “CALIFORNIA HAS…”, re: EVERYTHING ELSE EVER.
Here are some pictures of things!
 
Midwestern thunderstorms is NO JOKE, yo. Crystal locked herself in the bathroom while I stuck the camera out the window and tried to catch some lightning while yelling at my parents via Skype. I have NEVER seen lightning like that. INSANE. And amazing. And a little terrifying. The Midwest is the weirdest.
In other news, Michael Cera looks like a turtle.
Christmas is over! And I am bummed.
I am not 100% bummed. I mean, I love Christmas. I’m an atheist that loves Santa and all things Christmas (except Jesus, obviously) and spent most of my adolescence wishing I was Jewish, so I am a big fan of the winter holidays. But Christmas was basically a bust this year.
I ate some food and got some presents and had some good times, but I never felt the wintery-Christmas-sparkle and then BAM it was over. Lame. And it happens EVERY YEAR and yet every year I am surprised. Two thumbs, not so good with learning, etc etc.
Anyway, whatever, here’s some disjointed bullshit:
I am nothing if not really good at doing the same shit everyone else is doing!
 But it’s SPACE, you guys. I would take a space flight even if they GUARANTEED that I would die on reentry. I mean, SPACE, guys. SPACE. Sending my name up is a pretty okay facsimile of space-travel-importance. It’s at least as good as going all the way through astronaut training and then not making the final launch team. BASICALLY. Self-aggrandizement is my 2k11 resolution numero uno.
 A bunch of people are using their new Facebook ~photostream~ to express friendly/jovial sentiments. Or that thing where they break their face into pieces. I am not into either of those things.
 Dyed my hair right before Thanksgiving and heard, “You look like a mermaid” three different times. I felt distinctly cartoonish and it took me three days to figure out that I was reminding myself of Sailor Neptune. Yeeeeeeeah! I think I have seen one half of one Sailor Moon episode in my entire life, but whatever, whatever, I DO WHAT I WANT.
 Favorite new picture of my favorite person on the earth. She is getting peed on by a tree.
I have a couple of funny/interesting/whatever things to say that I have scribbled down in a notebook, but I am not feeling the focus to turn them into full-fledged words. Mostly all I am interested in right now is laying in bed and sleeping and not having to do anything except stay in blankets. I am like Scrooge McDuck if instead of swan-diving into a vault of coins, it was just a great big pile of dogs and blankets and he never surfaced for air.
(I would like to point out that this atrocious font is called “Thug” and 1. That’s racist 2. That’s stupid, and 3. I had to mouse-draw the plus and equal signs because they were just dots in the font. Like, wtf, thugs can’t math? Thugs need not plus and equal signs? RACIST, FONT, RACIST.)
I will, however, briefly talk about how “This Time of the Year” by Brooke Benton and “Little Saint Nick” by the Beach Boys are great Christmas songs that INFURIATE me because “Christmas always comes this time of the year” and “Christmas comes this time of year” are the two most idiotic lyrics to ever occur in holiday music. NO SHIT IT ALWAYS HAPPENS AT THIS TIME OF THE YEAR THAT IS WHEN CHRISTMAS HAPPENS. Christmas has been happening for like MANY YEARS NOW and for most of those it has been happening on December 25th. I THINK WE GOT THAT SHIT ON LOCK, SONGWRITERS. Sort it out.
Anyway:
 Merry Belated Whatever-The-Fuck! Merry Past-Tense Ballsmas!
Day 5: Your Definition of Love
UGH. Again. I mean, seriously, meme. Failing me yet again and yet again, here we go.
I think this is probably not a TERRIBLE topic for someone who is into emotions and feelings more than I am, but I’m just not. Emotions are for other people to think about and for me to have and be really good at hiding, THANK YOU.
Anyway. I didn’t believe in romantic love or marriage or any of that stuff until the love thing happened to me. I think this is a normal/common/average thing coming from people who are weird/ugly/fat/geeky/outside the traditional norm because you just kind of get disenchanted about the whole thing. Love is an illusion! A shared hallucination!
I still believe that, I just get to participate now.
I knew that I was in love with my girlfriend because I wanted to be around her A LOT. And, like, let’s be honest: I did not, nor do I now have a lot of friends.
I have talked about being unlikeable before! I’m NOT LYING. And I spent a lot of time with those few people who WOULD put up with me.
But Crystal… I don’t know. We spent a truly astounding amount of time together and yet, when she was gone, I still really, really missed her. It was actually pretty disgusting and I tried not to talk about it to other people because it embarrassed me that I had feelings at all, let alone this weird needy desperate ones.
I think I realized in like, August of 2007 (four months after we met) that I was basically in love with her, whatever the fuck I thought that actually meant. I wanted to tell her one time, while we were walking around my grandma’s backyard, but I pussied out because I still wasn’t sure she was gay. And I thought she was a slut! (No joke! Untruer thoughts have never been had.)
And it was basically like, “Well, I guess I’m in love with this dumb bitch.” And she was my best friend and we didn’t start dating until May of 2008, so I spent a lot of months feeling really tortured and unhappy and TERRIBLE. Because you are not, NOT supposed to fall in love with your straight, slutty best friend. Especially when you don’t even believe in love.
I was all fucked up.
Basically, I know/knew that I love(d) my girlfriend because I want(ed) to be with her. I liked being with her. Spending a day with her was comfortable and satisfying and good. And even though I was miserable and hurting and wanting because I didn’t have her, because she didn’t love me back, it never once (ONCE!) occurred to me to just… stop hanging out with her.
Also, I like to hold her hand.
I have never in my entire life liked holding hands. I hold hands with my mom sometimes in public because she gets embarrassed and says, “ASHLEY, people will think we’re lesbians!” But otherwise, handholding is not an activity I ever engaged in. But now I want to hold Crystal’s hand all the time. Not kiss, not touch her boobs. Hold hands. In public and not. It’s gross. And I hate myself.
Also, the idea of not being a couple makes me uncomfortable and unhappy. And the idea of her dying makes me miserable in the vomiting all over myself and having a panic attack kind of way.
I think love is whatever the fuck you make of it. The girlfriend and I have figured out a life together that makes us pretty happy and I think the person you manage to do that with is worth hanging on to, generally speaking.
I think loving your family and loving your friends is just as important as loving your partner. I think cultivating relationships with people who will laugh at your jokes and take you to the airport and drive you around for three hours when you’re crying and losing your shit because everything is awful and buy you ice cream in the middle of the night is incredibly hard and important and scary and amazing.
Vulnerability is literally the hardest thing in the entire history of human beings. Being straight up honest about the fact that you have feelings and that you NEED things, the entire idea that you need things from other people? That’s fucked up! And awful.
Which is exactly why I prefer to leave emotions to people who are better at having a lot of them. Like… Mexican soap opera actresses and teenagers.
Day 2: Your First Love
I’ve talked about her before, extensively, but my girlfriend Crystal is my first love. We had a really weird and complicated courtship because we were friends for more than a year before we finally talked about dating and I thought she was straight and she didn’t think I wanted babies/marriage (I didn’t/don’t, but I tricked her good!) and she made me promise that I would at least consider the possibility of children and marriage before she would date me. (She will say that I am lying and that “it wasn’t like that” but she will be lying through her fake front teeth.)
And then we did like lesbians do and moved in together really quickly. Or, rather, she moved in with me and my parents. Granted, we’d already planned to live together as roommates once we got our shit together, but that still hasn’t happened and we have sex, so I don’t think you can really call us “roommates”.
We’ve been together for two years, three months, and three days. We plan to eventually get married — she cares about the marriage license-y part where I have to legally agree to share my life with her, I only care about the awesome party — but I have a really complicated timeline that I deem acceptable for the development of our relationship and I don’t think we should get married for at least another three years. Or at the very least until we’re not living with my parents anymore. Which will probably be like, ten years at this rate.
I love Crystal because she is funny and smart and generous and takes care of me even though I usually fight her about it. I threaten to break up with her about once a week over both trivial and serious shit. Sometimes I’m joking, sometimes I’m just trying to make her cry. Because I’m a dick.
We like a lot of the same things and we get on each others’ nerves a pretty significant amount, which I constantly have to convince her is normal. (She thinks people who are in ~love~ should never fight or bicker, but let’s get real here.) We live in a 13×12 room together, so we’re on top of each other a lot and it’s hard when we want our own space. I was a SUPER SOLITARY person before we started dating/moved in together, so it is still weird for me to have someone around all the time who wants to hang out with me. I DON’T EVEN WANT TO HANG OUT WITH ME.
She’s pretty big on personal hygiene for herself so she usually smells nice and has soft hair, but is kind enough not to care if I don’t change my clothes for three days or if I have B.O. Also, she laughs at all my jokes, which is REALLY IMPORTANT. And she always supports my writing even if I get all pissed at her because she was TOO ENTHUSIASTIC or NOT ENTHUSIASTIC ENOUGH or MAKING TOO MANY SUGGESTIONS or NOT CARING ENOUGH GOD DAMN IT.
She puts up with my fickleness and my insanity and she buys me stuff ALL THE TIME.
My family loves the shit out of her too, which would be a 100% dealbreaker if they didn’t.
Anyway, she’s my first love basically because she has boobs and she lets me touch them. Usually whenever I want. She’s the best.
More narcissism here.
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.
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