Que Sera Sera

Whatever gets you to sleep at night:

On the way back from lunch, I was behind a minivan whose license plate said CRPAYDM, and I thought, you’re sure as hell not carpe-ing any diem in a fucking minivan.

A star!

Dude. So evidently my little cousin was on Star Search last night, and she won. For real! My little cousin has endured the criticism of Lil Romeo, Ben Stein and Naomi Judd, and she is totally going to be on again tonight. She sings country music, which doesn’t do much for me, but on her CD, she sings that “I Want To Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart” song, and she can do the cowgirl yodeling part like a pro.

See how far you can go, despite being related to these people?

This is the kind of thing I think about all day:

I wish Mary-Kate and Ashley would grow up to become investigative reporters so their first headline could read IDENTICAL TWINS JOIN CHRONICLE STAFF.

I want to give you children:

Last night I babysat for my old neighbors’ kids, who are without a doubt the most fantastic children in the world. The oldest, a seven-year old, sent me home with a piece of original artwork featuring a wolf monster battling a dinosaur monster, only the thing you need to know about the dinosaur monster is that he has a sort of needle that comes out of his nose with which to pierce the wolf monster, who is bleeding all over the guns on the side of his body. Also, this battle takes place on the sea. Naturally. He also had some interesting ideas about a super-race of mutant alligators that live in volcanoes, and actually thrive on the lava. I would totally vote for this kid for president. His platform would probably involve ninjas and pizza, and who can’t get behind that?

Seriously though, sometimes it really bums me out that kids can’t be your drinking buddies. Not that I’m advocating that anyone get a child drunk: they would just come with you and hang out while you drank, shooting milk out their nose and making you laugh and insuring that you didn’t go home with ugly people.

DON’T say dwarves:

When I was in college, I spent a few summers interning at advertising agencies. As internships go, it was a pretty sweet deal, because it was air conditioned and the people were funny, and even though I had to buy crap like flat-front khakis and Old Navy sundresses with little matching sweaters, sometimes I got cool assignments, like going around to stores and being a secret shopper, armed with petty cash and a Polaroid camera. However, some days were spent filing, filing for hours and hours, alone in the little empty office where someone thought they were doing me a favor by tuning the wimpy little radio to the All Phil Collins station, and it was always Two-fer Tuesday, where they played the Phil Collins song from Tarzan two times in a row all day long until you wanted to stab yourself with the dull end of the three-hole punch.

Anyway: filing. I filed boring things, like spec sheets and change orders and meeting reports, and none of them ever had anything interesting on them, only things like CLIENT SAYS 5/8” OKAY and BLAH BLAH BLAH CERAMIC TILE PHOTO SHOOT BLAH BLAH BLAH. Then one day, I came across the Best Sheet of Paper To Ever Be Filed. It was a change order for an ad for the State Fair, and there were only three lines of text on the page. It read:

NO Ted Nugent
ONLY three Neville Brothers
DON’T say dwarves

I sat there, alone in the tiny empty office, Phil Collins cooing some song about gorilla babies, and laughed and laughed and laughed until I cried. Then I called all of my friends and tried to whisper it into the phone, only it’s hard to shout-whisper, because you MUST read the first word of each line like someone is pissed off. How many times do I have to tell you? Ted Nugent is a no show, quit inventing Neville brothers, and for fuck’s sake, don’t bring up the little people again.

It was the brightest moment of my interning career. Possibly even my life.

I’m just going to come out and say it:

I think I like Ja Rule.

Don’t call it a comeback:

Okay, so, fuck it. Apparently “taking a break” doesn’t help any more with creativity than it does with boyfriends. I want to write, and if it’s not up to par, then I’ll just keep writing. You don’t have to read it; it won’t hurt my feelings. If sharks are jumped, then maybe I’ll take a cue from Roxy and do it in style, while wearing alligators as waterskis.

I bought a domain name and wanted to surprise you all by coming back with a fabulous new website, but then I remembered that I know absolutely nothing about how to actually make a fabulous new website. Who knew? Maybe I’ll get a Mysterious Benefactor or marry some sort of internet whiz kid or something, and they’ll design one for me while I lounge around, eating grapes and reading Olsen twin fan fiction, but in the meantime, this is all I got.

(Dude, I was just being funny, but do you think there really is Olsen twin fan fiction? Maybe I should go back to that break.)

So, in short, I’m back because I missed this, but there are no promises that it won’t be stale or lame. If it is, feel free to let me know. Hecklers are always welcome.

It’s not just the whiskey talking; I really do love you, baby.

Dream, realized

I just had to share with you all that this weekend, I finally realized a long-time dream of mine when I used my Christmas gift certificate to the mall to purchase a vanity license plate for the front of my car featuring a cobra and the name LOLA airbrushed in silver.

The Lizard King:

I saw my very first high school boyfriend at lunch today. We dated when we were barely fifteen and not actually allowed to date, which meant his mother and my mother drove us to two formal dances, our knees touching in the backseat, and sometimes we’d make out behind the wall of our little brothers’ elementary school before it was time to walk them home. He was really cute and not all that quick, and obsessed with Jim Morrison. When I broke up with him, I called the next day to see how he was doing and he said, “I just turned off all my lights and listened to Riders on the Storm on repeat, man.” He always wore a soft leather bomber jacket and smelled like a strong mixture of Eternity cologne and watermelon bubblegum. It was difficult to french kiss him on an empty stomach.

I think he’s married and has a baby now, and his hair was a little thinner, and we didn’t speak, but when I saw him across the restaurant, it all flooded back: the bubblegum and cologne; the cold brick of the school building against my back; that first dance combination of hairspray and velvet and nylon; the chapped lips after kissing in the cold; the fear that my mom was going to catch me in the dark, on the phone past 10.

I suddenly want to go home and find my Best of the Doors tape and turn off all the lights. Man.

These are the Daves I know:

Ever curious about the people I encounter everyday at the front desk? Of course you are. Just for you, then, dear reader, my daily cast of characters:

Steve: Steve brings the mail up to my floor everyday. We always exchange friendly greetings. “Hi Steve!” I say. “Hello, Sarah,” he responds, though not quite as chipper. He smiles, but it’s a distracted smile. I worry that perhaps Steve isn’t content. However, he shaved the handlebars off his mustache and cut his hair, and now he looks much nicer. Plus, he never forgets and leaves the mail in the freight elevator like the last guy.

Dewey: Of all the deliverymen, Dewey is my favorite, mostly because he looks like he walked straight out of a Daniel Clowes book, or maybe a David Lynch movie. He’s sort of cute, in an if-Steve-Buscemi-were-hot kind of way. Plus, he wears a real work shirt with his real name on a patch, but looks like he could be a secret rockabilly guy who would wear the same thing ironically. Dewey and I had a little routine that turned into a rut that we have since wisely abandoned, wherein evidently I asked him one too many times if it was “raining out there,” prompting him to walk in and announce the weather before he even said hello. I am so glad we’re past that now.

Lady who waters the plants: Would it kill her to smile, or even be polite? Apparently so. Also, there was a small scandal wherein she refused to water someone’s tiny personal plant, but still wanted to schedule her watering so she could spend her 30-minute lunch hour in our kick-ass kitchen on the third floor. There were words.

Impeccably-dressed tall man with dashing vaguely European accent who says “Hello Sarah dear” in such a charming way that one can’t help but smile: He also has a gold tooth, but somehow, it’s totally debonair. However, I think he might be up to something sort of shady. I try not to think about that.

Impatient British guy who has some things to learn about Personal Space and Not Touching the Receptionist: I swear to God he uses man-tan.

Building maintenance guy: Think of the most annoying, skeevy, foul-breathed, whiny 50-year old redheaded man you can, and then picture his shirt unbuttoned two buttons too far.

Adorable pregnant courier lady who does not speak one word of English but has the biggest smile: Could I possibly love her any more? No.

FedEx guy: FedEx, are you looking for a new actual employee to star in one of your commercials? Because our FedEx guy is the best person ever in the history of the world. We never really say more than hello and thanks, but you can just tell by looking at his face that he is kind and capable and thinks before he speaks. I would totally leave my baby in care of the FedEx guy, had I a baby to leave.

FedEx girl: She’s okay, I guess.

Guy who picks up the back-up tapes every day at 2:30: He’s the only one my age. Sometimes we talk for a few minutes, if the tapes aren’t ready yet. I can never tell if he secretly enjoys this or if I bore him completely. When it snows, he wears a parka.

Guy who comes in to visit my boss all the time, and he’s nice enough, but the very first time he came in, he asked where the restroom was and I pointed it out, and then he picked up one of our coffee table books and took it with him, totally unashamed, and then put it back on my desk instead of the table 15 minutes later: Dude, for real.

Redefining “newsworthy”:

Reading this was one of the most surreal moments of my life thus far. When combined with this, though, it’s even better.

You know, the odds of my mother discovering this site increase by like one billion every day.

Nineteen:

Today my sweet baby brother turns nineteen. This kind of freaks me out, because nineteen is an age I remember very clearly, and, a few things aside, it really wasn’t all that different from now. Okay, I don’t live in a dorm and I can buy my own alcohol and I gave up on the whole mod headband thing, but other than that, on the inside, I still feel a lot like I did when I was nineteen.

It’s a little strange for me, for my brother and I to have some common ground other than the fact that we share the same parents and a love for Mystery Science Theater 3000. He is the one person on the planet that I am more related to than anyone else, and we couldn’t be more opposite. We don’t even look alike. At all. No one in my immediate family really does, but he definitely looks the least like anyone else. When he was little, I attempted several times to discuss in hushed tones with my mother the possibility of the hospital having switched babies on us, but she wasn’t interested in my theories.

Not that I would have let anyone take him back. I like watching how he turns out. And besides, who else is going to walk into my room at midnight on Christmas and say, “let’s do shots and watch Willow”?

Thanks:

Today I received the best thank you note ever. It begins, “Dear Sarah, thank you so much for the fart machine!” and ends with “See you at the office!” It’s from an eleven year old.

Completely unrelated to yesterday’s posts:

You can’t find happiness with a man who doesn’t recognize the importance of Say Anything.

Some advice, from me to you:

If you’re on the phone with someone late at night and they’re reading you Raymond Carver short stories and you accidentally fall asleep, and then wake up 45 minutes later and they are still on the phone, just quietly playing video games, and you ask, Why didn’t you just hang up? and they say, Because I figured you’d wake back up sooner or later, I’m going to go ahead and say that this person is probably a keeper.

Disrespecting the sisterhood:

The only thing worse than a high maintenance girl who thinks she’s low maintenance is a high maintenance girl who think it’s cute that she’s high maintenance.

Trust me:

Things that will not make your party any better:

Things that will make your party better:

Rainy Day Women:

I’m a rainy day girl. I get excited when I hear rain on the roof, and I don’t understand why you can’t call in rainy to just lie around and take baths and read all day. There are pictures in my baby album of my dad taking me out on the front porch in a rainstorm, and I’m laughing so hard you can almost hear it. I’m a cold weather girl, too. I love scarves and coats, and it always pisses me off when the perky weathergirl just assumes that we all live for 65 degree sunny days, all year round. If it’s December, then I want it to be cold, yo. And as much as I love the summer, too many spent in the stifling Oklahoma humidity make me wish they ended right after July 4, giving way to an extended fall. I usually can’t wait for this time of year, because January and February are like the Tuesday nights of the year, where it’s quiet and cozy but secret cool things happen unexpectedly. When cool things happen on a Tuesday night, they’re so much better than on a Saturday.

That said, I’ve been going crazy for a good old April thunderstorm lately—the thunderstorm, and the hour before it. I don’t really long for sun on my skin or warm breezes or anything; I just want to sit on my back porch balcony while the sky turns pink and smell that air right before it pours, when it feels fresh but still a little crisp, and you can’t be barefoot after the sun goes down. I’d prefer to have a tall boy in an old cowboy-style shirt fetching two beers and joining me on the porch swing to watch, but right now, I’d settle for just the thunderstorm.

Hey, want to see what I think I look like?

I’m involved in a hot point/counterpoint over at The Plug. The best debates are always those where neither party does any research before they begin their argument, and then no one actually bothers to fact-check until a few days later.

For those of you needing an extra incentive to click, there’s a self-portrait of yours truly accompanying the article. Fun fact: I totally drew it on the back of one of my old business cards!

Supah New Year:

Last night I went to a fantastic party with lots of old friends and loud Hank Williams playing, and there was a even a snake, and I touched the snake, and briefly wrapped it around me Britney-style, and I’m not going to lie and tell you that didn’t make me feel and look like a total badass.

I kissed everyone in the room at midnight and only one person tried to get all open-mouth on me. That person happens to work at NASA, and so I batted my false eyelashes and now I have a NASA jumpsuit headed my way. He also offered a space monkey, but warned that they have a tendency to get violent and try to rip off people’s testicles, so I declined. I also declined the open-mouth kiss, for the record.

I wore a crown and boots and lots of red lipstick, but I had to abandon my ghetto-fabulous dreams of drinking my champagne through a twirly straw and just slam it back like a heathen. It seemed to do the trick, though.

Unfortunately, no one would let me give them a black eye, even when David got drunk enough to start punching people in the balls for money, so I’ve learned my first valuable lesson of 2003: don’t ask, just swing.

I woke up this morning with MARY-KATE written on my knuckles in Sharpie and no idea where my car was, so I think it’s pretty safe to say that this year is going to be the best yet.

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