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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.
I have all of my best ideas while driving or in the shower and I start all my best projects around two or three in the morning. Granted, “best” is really up for debate here, since most of those ideas are just poop or dick jokes and the projects are just Google image searched images with transparent Helvetica slapped over them in Photoshop. THEY MAKE ME LAUGH ALRIGHT? I am my most important audience, for now and forever.
So, I was in the shower a couple of weeks ago thinking about Jesse Eisenberg, like I do, and I was like, DAMN, that kid’s like… a RAPSCALLION or some shit. Because he is! Google that face and tell me it doesn’t scream old-timey adjectives at you! If you can, you are LYING.
And so it kind of began with this dumb shit:
SCAMP, guys. Jesse Eisenberg is a SCAMP. He is ruined for me forever in the BEST WAY because I cannot look at him without thinking something Old Timey. RASCAL! RAPSCALLION! He’s like the sort of handsy son of a really wealthy southern oil baron guy who is charming and good looking and also RICH who is at least a little hesitant about groping you against your will, so he doesn’t really seem like a bad guy, just like maybe he had a drink or two too many and got REAL FRIENDLY so you just brush it off and giggle and say shit like, “Oh, dear, I had heard those rumors that you were QUITE the rapscallion and I do believe they’re true!” but really it sounds sort of sexy and delightful. And then he gropes you under your petticoats in a hallway. Something like that. OR WHATEVER.
I think this Old Timey Thing applies to Donald Glover too, but I have a harder time looking at pictures of him because they are like lightning directly to my genitals. SO ATTRACTIVE. I can’t deal with it. I just can’t.
But anyway, that dumb shit rapidly escalates into this dumb shit:
Kittens are a point of no return, right? I mean, really. There is no coming back from slapping text over the top of adorable kittens. There just isn’t. And then it just turns into transcribing your dumb tweets on pictures snagged from NASA and it’s over. It’s just all over.
SO: sometimes when I am having those brilliant thoughts late at night, my brain says, “YO BITCH SUBMIT SOME OF YOUR WRITING YO” and because it’s two in the fucking morning, I am like, “YEAH ALRIIIIIGHT.” And whatever, I’m hitting 50/50 acceptance to rejection at this point (because I don’t write almost ever unless it’s for fun, which means I have nothing to submit, which is a great excuse not to put yourself out there. FOOLPROOF.) so I don’t really care about the process. I come across a place that seems like they might take me, I submit, no big.
SO ANYWAY. I was reading a submission to the lit mag I work on at school and she mentioned another lit mag that I was unfamiliar with (This happens a lot. Generally, if someone mentions one, I haven’t heard of it.) so I checked it out, saw they had a nice selection of flash fiction and threw something their way. I logged it in my little submissions file (anal retentive, what what!) and put it in my calendar (redundancy!) and went about watching BBC comedies (Miranda) and forgot about it.
Guys, I am pretty sure I won the speed award for rejection turnaround tonight. Seriously. One hour and four minutes. ONE HOUR AND FOUR MINUTES. IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. I submitted the story AFTER MIDNIGHT and had a rejection shortly after one. THAT IS SOME EFFICIENT LIT MAGGING.
Holy shit. I didn’t even have time to worry! I didn’t even have time to obsess and then forget about it entirely, which is my usual submission coping mechanism. And let me tell you, this was a much more awesome way to get rejected. I know the longer someone keeps your work, the closer you are to getting in. And that’s great! But instant gratification is always SO SATISFYING and it turns out it actually kind of applies to rejection!
I know part of my cavalier attitude is because I just didn’t care too much, you know? I have extremely low expectations when it comes to anything having to do with my writing (greeting cards and hilarious poop twitters aside) but there was something about that rapid response — like ripping off a band-aid maybe — that I don’t think I will soon forget.
Aaaaaaanyway, it turns out this is all just a long way to say that if you don’t remember Bonsai Kitties, you have not been on the internet long enough.
PS: For the like… two of you who read this BLAHG, would cutting my insanely long and stupid posts be helpful or irritating? I HATE cut posts because I read everything on GReader and am also incredibly lazy, but I am down to do whatevah whatevah because I live to serve, guys. I live to serve.
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 3: Your Parents
 I picked this picture because we all look equally terrible.
My parents are awesome. My parents are so awesome that the greatest guilt I have ever felt in my entire life has basically been that I am not a good enough daughter and that I have not been grateful enough for everything they’ve done for me.
Awkward admissions of offspring-guilt aside, my parents are awesome people.
My mom is one of the funniest people I have ever known, sometimes intentionally even. Her verbal filter is… minimal, so she says whatever she is thinking and never refrains from asking even the most honest and awkward questions. She has giant, giant boobs that neither me nor my sister inherited. Tragically. Or gratefully. I’m not really sure. She is really sharp, but really unobservant. She is the Occam’s Razor in the family.
She’s also one of the strongest people in my life and she’s survived, literally and figuratively, more than anyone else I have ever known. She also puts up with me and my sister and my dad and we are huge pains in the ass, so it’s really just another testament to her strength.
She likes to talk about her and my dad having sex or about the sluttier days of her youth because she knows that it HORRIFIES her daughters. We cannot drive east on Route 66 without her going, “I’ve had sex in that motel and THAT one and that one and THAT TEEPEE RIGHT THERE” because she is twisted and cruel. And was also kind of a whore. But a classy-ish one, I imagine/hope.
She loves animals and gets REALLY ABNORMALLY UPSET when people are mean to them. She has the BEST LAUGH EVER and if you get her laughing long and hard enough she will probably pee herself.
Fun facts: Mom doesn’t drive, drink, or think as highly of herself as she should. Because she’s awesome. She loves soap operas. And reality TV. And Elvis. And telling stories about getting stoned and/or drunk with her friends when she was in high school. She was the mascot at her middle school. She loved doing sports. SHE MAKES THE BEST BAKED SPAGHETTI ON EARTH. We are incredibly different, but eerily similar.
My dad is also really funny and smart and weird. He likes outlandish theories and tells everyone that he thinks Jesus was a time-traveler. He’s always been really, really good at his job and it’s something I was always really proud of as a kid. We were never rich, but I was always like, “YEAH, WELL, MY DAD’S CUSTOMERS LOVE HIM AND HE WINS AWARDS AND STUFF.” Because I knew how to throw down. My dad and I have always been really close and I look, sound, talk, and make an ass of myself just like he does. A lot of time when someone sets up a joke unintentionally in conversation, he and I both blurt out the same thing at the same time. And it’s usually stupid. And about poop.
My whole life I’ve been hearing, “OH, WELL HE SURE CAN’T DENY YOU, CAN HE?” every time that people see us together. And it’s still as annoying as ever. HE WOULD NEVER DENY ME BECAUSE I AM FUCKING AWESOME OKAY. Even though I grew up thinking the Japanese gardener that took care of our front lawn was my real dad. NO JOKE.
My dad was a slacker and a stoner and his stories about growing up are the BEST. Like how one time he broke his best friend’s face and how he fell on a stick and the NAIL JUTTING OUT OF IT stuck it to his face and how his mom (my sometimes uptight grandmother) got stoned with him one time. HIS STORIES ARE THE BEST. Or how one time he got an F in art and that same grandmother stormed into the class and was like, “HOW CAN YOU FAIL SOMEONE IN ART?! ART IS SUBJECTIVE!” and the teacher showed her what my dad had done in class and she said, “Oh, okay” and left.
My dad tries to be good at the internet and he has an angry political blog! And he’s pretty passionate about the US Constitution, which is a decent thing to be passionate about if you have to get all passionate and shit.
Fun facts: my dad collects guns (for target shooting) and likes the History and Military channels. He is really good at saying the right things. He played baseball in high school and was a boy scout. His high school principal called him Line Drive. He and his sister (my awesome Aunt Sisi) are a year and ten days apart in age. He is a really good cook and loves to fart. We are eerily similar, but incredibly different.
I was conceived on the Fourth of July 1984 shortly after my mom had her trusty IUD removed. They had sex (UGH GROSS — FOR THE ONLY (my sister and I have different dads) TIME EVER — DENIAL DENIAL I LIKE DENIAL) and my dad said, “Well, that made a baby.” My mom said that if she didn’t get pregnant by her thirtieth birthday, she wasn’t going to have another kid (my sister was already eight). She turned thirty on August 14 and I was already 1/9th of the way to being ripped out of her abdomen with medical instruments. TAKE THAT, AGING.
My parents are awesome enough that at different points over the course of my sister’s and my lives they have let one of her friends, one of her boyfriends, two of my friends, and my girlfriend live in their home. They’re letting me mooch off of them in my lost twenties. They have always encouraged me no matter what stupid thing I wanted to do. They bought me booze when I was underage in college. They used to come to my college apartment, buy us groceries, wash all of our dishes, clean our kitchen, and MAKE US MEALS.
These are good people, seriously.
I don’t know how I got so lucky, but if there’s any balance to the universe, I will probably have the worst children ever to be conceived. Like, the antichrist. JUST ANOTHER REASON TO NEVER HAVE ANY.
More narcissism here.
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.
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