Xmixtape

I was driving back from Spin class last night, too tired to even curse our instructor from hell, and got a cool idea for Christmas 'xmixtape' gift to send to Andrea.  I don't usually send gifts but not because I'm a bad friend (debatable?) but because I am never sure what will make it where and when.  So if you read that right it should say I'm too much of a control freak for real mail.  Then I start questioning whether the person would actually like it as much as I thought they would when I had the idea, and if by the time I make it to the post office I haven't concluded with certainty that their heart would burst from happiness the moment they open it... NO DICE.  And if nothing else, my pen dies halfway and the rest of your name will look like it was mailed by a psycho killer.

If that doesn't paint me in the best light imaginable then I don't know what will!  Let's just add this to the amazing list of things I am the BEST at being horrible at..

• mailing things
• wrapping anything
• having working pens
• parking a van
• folding dress shirts
• leaving my keys behind
• playing pool
• giving directions
• making a list of things I am good at

Just saying

Someone searched for this site this week by typing "wine gun" into Google.  I just wanted to say how much I wish that existed if only so I could say I own one and, in my old age, patrol my property in my housecoat with it at ungodly hours and make signs saying that I will shoot on sight.

Also, until I went crazy from being old, I'd shoot people at Christmas parties.  That would be my 'thing'.

Draft Twelve

*if you haven't read this post, I am posting an unpublished draft from all random points in time every day until I run out*

Title: No title
July 2, 2010

“It’s funny how one summer can change everything. It must be something about the heat and the smell of chlorine, fresh cut grass and honeysuckle, asphalt sizzling after late-day thunderstorms, the steam rising while everything drips around it. Something about long, lazy days and whirring air conditioners and bright plastic flip flops from the drugstore thwacking down the street. Something about fall being so close, another year, another Christmas, another beginning. So much in one summer, stirring up like the storms that crest at the end of each day, blowing out all the heat and dirt to leave everything gasping and cool. Everyone can reach back to one summer and lay a finger to it, finding that exact point when everything changed.” ~Sarah Dessen

Draft Eleven

*if you haven't read this post, I am posting an unpublished draft from all random points in time every day until I run out*




Title: No title.
June 22, 2010




If I could paint a picture for you for a minute, of a warm summer night, maybe when you were young.  The air was heavy and smelled like sweet grass.  It was just after dusk and although it's still a blue sky you can see the moon and you notice maybe some of the street lights coming on.  You're out on the front lawn or riding your bike.. something like that.  Maybe it's even quiet, except for the hum of an outdoor air conditioner, some birds chatting or perhaps that lone car driving past really slow with their club music turned up and you half listen to it trail off the farther it gets.  It's really easy, now that you're an adult, remembering nights like that - weather is great for those kinds of memories.  They can happen over and over again.  Then amongst all the other sounds you hear the distinct sound of someone from the next house jumping off a diving board in the backyard and splashing in their pool.  You can't see it so you think those motherfuckers have a pool back there??  Another jump.  Another big splash.  They do, they totally have a fucking pool.  Why haven't I ever heard them in their pool until now?  What exactly IS back there?

The hedges are really high between you so there's not much you can see but a huge pink rosebush growing over onto your side, which smells really sweet and looks pretty.  You pick a few of them as you lean into the fence of greenery hoping for a little peek.  The idea of how awesome a pool would be on a night like that hadn't even come to mind until you heard the mystery neighbors having fun... completely out of sight.  Pick a few roses and you head inside where it's cool, maybe making your screen door spring shut behind you, and you put them in a tall glass with water on the kitchen table.   They even look nice there.

Some days you're the neighbors with the pool, some days you're just listening to things and other stranger days you are the hedge right between the two.

Draft Ten

*if you haven't read this post, I am posting an unpublished draft from all random points in time every day until I run out*

Title: No title
May, 5 2010

It's been increasingly difficult, the last few years, to ignore certain things in my personal family life.  Don't get me wrong though I do try and ignore them as much as humanly possible because I LIKE being a functioning human being.  This isn't a scene from Gossip Girl though.. I'm not, even at 28, too impossibly cool to wonder at what will happen to my mother if she keeps on the way she is.

I was raised to believe that the word fair just doesn't mean anything.. along with the word sorry.  Nothing is fair and being right means never having to say you're sorry.  Mother's Day is coming up and like I said to Daisy Fuentes and her pilates routine.. I have some stuff I'm working through right now.  My Mom, for example, went missing for 4 days and decided to give me some story that wasn't even true about how she was in simple terms "renovating" a house and living in it, eating there, with a bunch of cockroaches and mice, yet not being paid or have any expectations of being paid any proper way.   She has a place to sleep and eat, for free, but clearly this place had a better offer she didn't want to tell me about.  In the real world we call that a crack house.

Driving conditions

We've had some extremely windy weather this past month and with all the fallen leaves it's made for some interesting driving conditions.  One night I was driving my mother home and I thought there might as well have been a tornado of 18,000 leaves in the street.  It made me think of this summer I was at the cottage and I was driving my two babies around some extremely dark dirt roads in order for them to fall asleep.  At the time I was pretty tired, and it was a last ditch effort, but when they suddenly fell asleep the thunderstorm that had been coming turned into a lightening storm.  Driving through a lightening storm in the middle of nowhere is actually pretty fucking cool.  What is even more awesome, if I could actually ever really describe it to you, is that both of those times a great song came on the radio.  I like radio because it's just random.. I don't know why but I like not being in control of whatever I'm listening to.  In any event, I enjoyed the shit out of both those drives because it was just something that happened, I can't make happen again, but felt awesome to be there.

Here's to all those great things that just happen to us.

sometimes the best intentions are in need of redemption

Draft Seven and Eight

*if you haven't read this post, I am posting an unpublished draft from all random points in time every day until I run out*

Title: No title
June 13, 2009

I can't believe I gave my grandmother's Holocaust ring to a complete stranger.





Title: No Title
June 15, 2009

After our neighbors had their 80th party of the summer.. we really wanted to spend the Sunday out and about.  Cycling down to Easterbrooks for a foot-long hot dog, fries and ice cream somehow turned into a 20k ride to Dundern Castle around Hamilton and back.  It was so pretty out, and sunny, and all the flowers were out and smelling great... then some cotton or something started "snowing" and blowing around.. it was seriously a wonderful day to be outside.  I'll admit though I had a great ride but my ass gave up the last 30 mins or so.. it has finally recovered a whole 4 days later.  When I got home I noticed I ended up not getting a little sun but literally came back with an actual tan.  Right now I'd be expecting to complain about my horrible burn as I didn't put on any sunscreen but I'll take it!  It's never happened before.

You know what else has never happened before?  Would you like to know what happens to a fish when someone dumps the whole can of food flakes in the water?  First of all the fish thinks it's great, until you actually forgot to clean it and went out for the day and came back when it was half dead.


It was swimming on it's side which said to me I'd be flushing it later. From the only other time I'd seen that happen to a fish at my grandparents, my grandfather announced it was going to die while my grandmother thought it was fine and she could rig some sort of weight/brace to make the fish swim right.  Sounds like something my mother would say.  Even I knew that was a dumb idea and I was maybe 10.. it didn't get into a car accident, it was just dying.  I cleaned the fish tank anyway and thought this might be a lesson to a helpful little boy to be with an adult when you feed fish next time, but goddamn if the fish didn't actually LIVE!  How, I have no idea, but this fish has escaped death at least 3 times by now.

And here's Candy Shop for no reason.

Candy Shop - Dan Finnerty and The Dan Band

Draft Six

*if you haven't read this post, I am posting an unpublished draft from all random points in time every day until I run out*

Title: Oh boy.
June 12, 2009


It's been a long week.  I take on some.. questionable responsibilities some days with the full mindset that t'will suck but I can handle it, which is true even though I don't particularly enjoy handling it.  I get paid for being hassled, essentially, so what the hell am I expecting?  I'm a person who full-on hates repeating myself and I work with small children, who ask you the same thing 60 times.. wanna know how that works?  When you figure it out let me know because I have no idea. 

I have now developed.. where it didn't exist before.. a specific kind of claustrophobia.  I sound all sorts of evil I'm sure but you just have to witness it's craziness to feel the effect when I say that a particular child who likes to snuggle up to me... but doesn't just snuggle.  She writhes around, climbing my body and lunging herself at my head and burrowing around like a ferret.  It's an obsession, really, and otherwise she is a very sweet child whom I like very much and enjoy snuggling with the appropriate amount.  If you need an equivalent it would be of a super nice guy you met at the coffee shop and liked who left a 7 part, 15 minute message on your answering machine before you even got home. Then you agree to see him and instead of saying 'hi' he puts his face in your boobs.  Picture that in baby form.  Yes so I now have a nice little phobia in my later 20s.  Also she is a walking disaster which defies all logic but that is for another day.  Who dives head first into a toilet?

Draft Five

*if you haven't read this post, I am posting an unpublished draft from all random points in time every day until I run out*

No Title
April 14, 2009




I don't like the word rant but.. 

Ok so this may offend some of my friends.  I have no idea why it would offend anyone but, it may!

Ok so one thing that absolutely confuses the hell out of me is Facebook "become a fan".  If you're not on Facebook and you have no idea what I am talking about, it is when someone publicly becomes a fan of something.  In regular life you could just walk up to me and say, perhaps wistfully, "yanno I'm a fan of tv.." and I would say "oh, really, just tv in general not something specific you watch on tv?" but instead of that dialogue I get no response because all you did was press a button and add that you're a fan of something to some web-personality-profile-of-CONFUSING ANN-MARIE.  

Draft Four

*if you haven't read this post, I am posting an unpublished draft from all random points in time every day until I run out*

No Title

April 9, 2009


Sometimes life makes you think about serious questions like:  Are Bob the Builder and Wendy "together"?  Will they ever be?  Why doesn't garbage/recycling take area rugs?  How did I manage a really successful 1st interview while my insides were fermented?  What exact time would you give to late-afternoon?  Doesn't Andy Samberg being on "yo-gabba-gabba" doing an alligator dance make you feel bizarro?

Draft Three

*if you haven't read this post, I am posting an unpublished draft from all random points in time every day until I run out*








March 26, 2009
No Title


I cut my thumb today and learned a valuable lesson: a little blood on your clothes is the only thing keeping a regular person from looking like an addict/the guy on COPS that sits on the stairs outside 'tellin stories' about his old lady.  I either have some sort of blood clotting problem or the human thumb holds 8 glasses of blood in it.  

The worst part is, the cut is literally the size of a poppyseed.  I can't even think of anything as small as it is besides that!  Well, I can, but I am not sure how many people know what Baby Pastina looks like.

Draft Two

*if you haven't read yesterday's post, I am posting an unpublished draft from all random points in time every day until I run out*



August 8, 2008
Title: 8.8.08 

Tonight we're off to celebrate my friend Brooke's "anniversary of her 25th birthday" .. aka the terrible 26 at Zu Bar. 

Shoppers Drugmart sells gino face rash cream right?


Terrible 26, I'm calling it, is the year you difinitively know you will one day turn 30. I'm going to go ahead and coin 27 right now as "what the fuck, 27" - an agressive attempt to punch time in the face. See now I'm 26 I don't like wasting time, I will name everything right now and get it out of the way. Who are you? You look like a Phil, see you later Phil!

Draft One

I saw the other day I was about to hit 700 Blogger posts.. then after noticing how many of them were drafts I deleted the majority of either empty or incomplete crap.  Ever want to know how often I get distracted or have my thoughts trail off?  Apparently about SIXTY TIMES.  60 posts deleted.

The ones I didn't delete for some reason I've decided it might be fun to publish one every day.  Here's a sneak peak at the titles.  We'll go from oldest to newest.

September 5, 2008
No Title


The search of the week - which I might just refer from this point on as "the google awards" was hard to choose. My candidates were:

04 Jul, Fri, 16:27:13 Google: christina ricci puking in street 

04 Jul, Fri, 20:03:25 Google Images: ray romano nude 


I'm going with the latter since I could maybe see why someone would be interested in knowing why somebody puked in the street. That would probably be a really good story. But images of Ray Romano nude? There is no logical reason anyone should want to see that.

Always be the teacher of your own life

When I was 16 I went to live with family in Italy for 33 days.  It really affected my life in the way that I had never seen things before, felt things before, met special people, and at the end of my time there one of my cousins that I grew very fond of wrote me a letter for me to read on the plane ride home.  I also wrote her a letter, and gave her a gift.  It was a very letter writing and gift giving summer, 1996.  In her letter though she thoughtfully translated each line for me, and one of those lines I would never have to save the letter to remember.. she impressed upon me a life lesson loosely translated as:

Always be the teacher of your own life.

 In some ways, now that I am older, I am acutely aware that she reminded me both physically and in my heart of my own mother.  Or at least my mother in my mind as she should be.  I took what she said very seriously, the tours of historical architecture included, and am forever grateful she spent so much of her free time hanging out with me.. tanning, or eating lunch, or trying to connect in simple conversations.  I adored her willingness to bring an embarrassingly huge dictionary to the outdoor pool just to talk about a dream I had.  I always hope I will see her again as well as my other family there.  It was really such a spoiled feeling, an ocean away with my camera and Weezer CDs, in a beautiful country with everyone being wonderful to you all the time.  Then I actually was gifted diamond earrings just to top it all off and pry actual tears out of me!

It is now nearly half my lifetime ago but I do think about that one line from my letter sometimes.  Be the teacher of your own life.  I am trying my best, and encourage anyone else to do so.

Internet

Well it's been a nice long +week or so since I've had internet at home and when you just move into a big house full of boxes needing to be unpacked it's basically exactly what I needed.  Did you know real life happens everyday even when you know nothing about it??  I totally missed that Kim Kardashian got a divorce!  It was like I was living on the Little House on the Prairie.  And my dishwasher isn't hooked up yet so my washing everything by hand has raised the instances of cutting my own fingers up about 500%

I guess if I've been missing you, Internet, you've also been missing me.  Let's never fight again.  We both want the same things.