Sunburnt & single
Been listening to Modest Mouse’s “Gravity rides everything” and Mana’s “No voy a ser tu esclavo” on repeat like a shamelessly lame eighth grade girl. Had an anxiety dream about gender roles in video production last night. I fought off comments from male crew members that I should be a makeup artist, or an actress, or something less technical. “No!” I yelled. “I wanna shoot! I’m gonna shoot video!” Right, I don’t have any hangups about this topic or anything…
Last night we ate dinner at this place called the Liberty Bar. Part of its appeal is that it’s an old house that’s leaning sideways, literally about to fall over. The food was amazing, and the waiter was funny. Afterwards we drove around downtown San Antonio and J. showed me the church where she’s to be married in a few months. She’s 25 with a good job and a great guy and a smart plan, a very pretty engagement ring and alot of other mid-20s friends in Texas who are engaged. Made me think about how urban, northeastern life is so different, at least in terms of advocating individualism, more personal agendas, less traditionally domestic expectations for life. It’s neither good nor bad, it’s just different — way different — from Texas, where the highways are wide and the air conditioning is always on and people much younger than me are buying houses and having children. Whoa! I feel an urge to run away to Europe coming on…

This is N.’s stolen phone photo of me looking sad while watching a cute webcam music video that I edited last year of me and G. The vacant stare is actually the outer manifestation of my insides combusting into a million pieces. This is how death will be: a climactic sadness, an implosion. And then I’ll laugh about it when it’s all over.










We took an extended sabbatical at the pub last night. Many many hours. Lots of ginger ale and cranberry seltzers. The purpose of the field trip was, at least for me, to break in my new birthday darts. Everybody smeared everybody else, S. and I with our long overdue double bull’s eyes. What fun.
Reminiscent of my grandfather’s greatest dream for my athletic future, I spent the first hour of our driving range adventure slamming the hell out of an entire large bucket of balls. By the time I got through with them, my arm was about to fall off, I’d acquired four new callouses, and J. wasn’t even halfway through his bucket.
He bought a third, gave me some pointers, and I finally started developing and using technique. By the end of our session, J. was driving all his balls way down against the net at the end of the green, and I was getting 150 yards at best, but that’s not too bad. I like golfing with J. because he’s the one person you can invite to any sporting event ever created and he’ll hop in the car with a Powerade and a Sox cap screaming “Let’s go for it!” The best part about tonight was when I noticed that we were the dirty hippies of the driving range, although we are neither dirty nor hippies. We just wore baggy ripped khakis and giggled our way through hundreds of golf balls while everyone else strode around with fancy clubs and tucked-in polo shirts and pristine girlfriends to whom they called out tips on improving one’s swing, one’s aim, one’s image. Thank you, God, that we are who we are.
To top it all off, my landlord stopped by and graciously offered to hang up my 100-lb punching bag which has been sitting dormant for months. Now it hangs gleefully on the back porch, waiting for me to slam the guts out of it. Boxing rocks.