So, I wrote down (and photographed) the contents of my bag!
Last week’s New Yorker
Violet sunglasses
A few Equal packets
LG Plum cell phone
Card case for business cards and coupons
Make-up bag (its contents could be a-whole-nother photo)
iPod Classic
Notebook, two pens, Chapstick, and C.G. Bigelow Menthe Lip Shine
Sephora by OPI nail polish in Caffeine Fix
Purple wallet
Inside a royal blue hobo
Happy now?
I’m a needle-phobe.
I was a Ranger at Camp Jewell the summer before I started college and the campus health center came calling. They sent notice in the form of a blank immunization record: I was due for a tetanus booster.
The camp nurse shuttled me off to the local doctor. I accompanied a nine-year-old with her arm in a sling and a fourteen-year-old with a head cold who never lowered the hood on his sweatshirt. I was the stand-in counselor, responsible for the kids’ IDs, paperwork, and behavioral supervision. That I just so happened to require my own medical attention was gravy.
The doctor took the kids first, leaving me to sweat it out in the waiting room, surrounded by trucks with three wheels and a Fisher-Price animal sounds spinner toy that was stuck on the sheep’s baaa. The Colebrook Family Practice collection of communal hand-me-downs. I sorted pieces of mixed-up puzzles into their rightful boxes, pretending it could distract me from the dreadful needle anticipation.
By the time I got my turn in the exam room, I’d gotten myself all worked up. The doctor opened the door and my chin began to tremble. He snapped my college admission health form to his clip board and I flinched. He prepared the syringe and I started to cry . . . and continued to cry as he administered the jab . . . and continued to cry as he applied a bandage and I threaded my sore arm back into the sleeve of my sweatshirt.
The doctor made his notes and signed my form and stepped out of the room. Before the door swung closed behind him, he glanced over his shoulder at me. I had blotted my tears with a shredded tissue and was fanning my face with both hands, hoping to look less pitiful when I faced the campers outside.
“I guess we don’t have to worry about you shooting up,” he said.
It was the first and last thing he said to me.
He was dead on, though. Intravenous drug abusers must be on crack.
Wait, is crack an intravenous drug?
I couldn’t believe what a challenge it was to find a photographic image of a Santa Claus hat with a transparant background to edit on to the heads of family, friends, pets, or celebrities in digital pictures, so I’d like to share the one that I created for just that purpose.
If you liked 2 1/2-months-to-New-Year’s-Resolutions Resolutions (which has been updated again, of late), then you will love Oh.! And not just because it is a proper noun with built-in punctuation. I’m completely crazy about that stuff.
Number 15 could be me.
“I always make this mistake.
When I start a new job I hold off asking questions for just too long.
Just untill it will be really embarrassing to ask the question and it will revile that I have just been guessing untill now [sic].”
It’s not me, though. That’s someone else’s mistake, set free.
When I think about a mistake that I have made from which I’d like to be set free and from which someone else could learn, I’m like, “how much time have you got? I feel like, “where, oh where to begin.” But the point is: mistakes are meant to be made. Oh. liberates the mistake makers by casting them out there on the internet “for all to see and learn.”
The first lesson: everybody screws up.
The second lesson: to err is not to fail.
I appreciate Number 1.
“Here’s my mistake:
I accidentally sent my cv to an ex-boyfriend while sending out work applications.
Just a blank email which my cv attached to it.
. . . to which he driely [sic] replied, “oh, you’ve been up to a lot.”
The ex-boyfriend? Probably didn’t know that he received an email that had been mistakenly sent. I like to imagine him, nostalgic, reflecting for a moment and thinking, “man, maybe I made a mistake when I gave her up.”
Oh. is part experiment in honesty and part community blog. The spelling mistakes in each entry give it a performance art effect, too.
Thanks to Mackin Ink via Design Crush.
You might say my run for daily posts in November ended with an incapacitating muscle cramp. Ouch.
I had about two hours to recover this morning. My ride to the airport didn’t arrive until 11, but I got out of bed at 8 because I so often leave for work while my roommate is eating breakfast and watching Saved by the Bell, and I wanted time to experience that for myself. After Zack Morris got in and out of a bind involving Mr. Belding, a girl, phone impersonations, and detention, I took a hot, hot shower and finished packing for San Antonio.
This is what I played on iTunes while I tried to pick out four days worth of wardrobe appropriate for Texas in November:
I Feel The Earth Move by Carol King
Extraordinary by Liz Phair
You Shook Me All Night Long by AC/DC
Delicious by Semisonic
Don’t Phunk with My Heart by Black Eyed Peas
By the time I came across 2 1/2-months-to-New-Year’s-Resolutions Resolutions through Design Crush, it was almost half a month down, two to go, nearing the end of October. It remindes me so much of the “It’s okay . . . ” pages in Glamour, my favorite magazine pages of all time, the pages that single handedly lead me to choose that magazine over all the others when I’m in line at the airport or under the helmet dryer at a salon.
Unlike all the placid allowances made by Condé Nast, some of the resolutions pinch me. 13. Remember, love doesn’t find you on its own. Oh. 31. Don’t waste another second. Please? Fine, fine. Since you asked nicely. I’ll try to try.
Just over the cusp and into November, the day after a call was made for our resolutions, new updates ceased. Did the project run out of steam? Funds? Resolve?
This is the resolution I submitted:
Maybe not the metaphor one would expect. Then again, less or lessened volume isn’t always a bad thing, metaphorically speaking. And literally, it’s almost certainly a good idea. Turn the volume down, please. Protect your hearing. Be kind to your ears.
My very first online identity was JKBosco. Bosco was my cat’s name. In this case, J/K didn’t mean “just kidding,” and they didn’t stand for “Jack’s kiss,” which is what every girl in the eighth grade wanted to talk about after seeing Titanic (the first time, the second time, the twelfth time). J and K were my favorite letters of the alphabet.
You know, George Eastman formulated the name of his camera company based on his favorite letter of the alphabet.
Titanic was on TV over the weekend. I’ve learned to turn it off right around the 94-minute mark, which is when this colossal crag creeps out of the darkness and wields its bitter chill at the young lovers, Jack and Rose. It’s hard to believe that I sat through this movie in the theater on four different occasions, and then went home, logged in to an AOL chatroom, and engaged in serious discussion and analysis as JKBosco.
Oh em gee. Remember when I used to do this every day? I don’t. I can’t imagine how that ever could have been possible. Did I have a lot going on? If so, how did I find the time to write about it? Was life too dull to occupy much of my time? If that’s the case, what did I have to write about in all that spare time in which I had to write about it?
It’s not that life has been particularly exciting or particularly dull, of late. It’s just, I kind of feel like I do and think the same things every day.
I loathe getting up in the morning. I put on make-up on my way to work. I want an iPhone. I tell myself I don’t need an iPhone. Consider getting a manicure or splurging on Blue Agava & Cacao from Jo Malone. I do neither. Write one of the e-mails I’ve been meaning to write.
I try to think of a nutritious food for which I have an appetite. I prepare or buy and eat that food and feel unsatisfied. Open another box of chocolate graham crackers. I go for a walk. Jog half of the way home just because I get bored.
Look at the calendar to see when the next Brooklyn Museum Free Saturday Night or 10%-off GapCard Purchases Tuesday or new episode of The Office or Law and Order: SVU will be. Decide whether to wear my hair straight or curly the next day. Make a mental note to charge my iPod/cell phone/camera battery.
I’m used to taking a lot of pleasure from little things, like a special purchase, a special meal, a tough workout. I looked forward to those things, got as much of a thrill from those things as I did from, I don’t know, Lilith Fair or getting my drivers’ license or quitting my first job to start my second (the first three things, in the last decade, that come to mind when I think about “excitement.”)
God, I was so excited when I got my driver’s lisence! But I already blogged about that. So, I’m gonna need a new idea.
This is what’s been playing in the background of the monotony this week:
But, Honestly by Foo Fighters (still)
Let it Rock by Kevin Rudolf feat. Lil’ Wayne
Cruise Control by Mariah Carey
Death Will Never Conquer by Coldplay
Follow You, Follow Me by Phil Collins and Gensis (don’t ask, I have no idea)
There was an episode of the Nickelodeon series The Adventures of Pete and Pete where little Pete, the brother with the wiggling mermaid tattoo on his arm, hears a garage band playing this one song and then can’t get it out of his head. He realizes he’s discovered his favorite song, but he doesn’t know the band’s name or the song’s title. Everybody he tells about his favorite song thinks he’s imagining it or making it up.
I was probably in fourth or fifth grade, just starting to explore new music, when I watched Pete and Pete. And I wish I could remember the songs I recorded from the radio at that age, the ones I intended to play for the clerk at Volt Records, who I sort of perceived to be the oracle of chords and lyrics and could identify the title and artists. Â
Those were the days before Google. Thanks to the internet, so favorite song will ever get lost in a garage.
There is only one song that I’ve never been able to identify with a Boolean search. It’s by a children’s duo that played a concert at an elementary school in town and sold low-budget recordings when I was a small child. It’s about a leprechaun who jumps over a rainbow and I think its melody was inspired by Seven Wonders Fleetwood Mac, so I think of it every time I hear that song.
And now I will identify the songs I’ve been listening to this week:
21 Reasons by Frank Black and the Catholics
It’s You by Annie Stela
Don’t Mess With the Radio by Kelis (“she’s only Nas’ wife!”—sales associate at Jo Malone)
Already Gone by Sugarland
Sun’s Gonna Rise by Citizen Cope
Highly Notable Events in August 2008
I started this blog five years ago today by summarizing the highly notable events of Summer 2003. For two weeks, I coded every entry in Notepad and loaded them page by page to my web space on the school server. Then my HP laptop crashed (surprise.) and I started posting to Blogger. Google had just acquired Blogger, and as an early-ish adopter, I was one of the first ‘citizens’ from outside the Googlesphere to receive a Gmail invitation. I’ll keep boasting about that even though I switched to WordPress in February 2006; and, nobody cares when I was invited to Gmail.
September. It was the time of year when new pens still smelled new and I had all kinds of plans for a school year more productive, accomplished, and fulfilling than the last. Before my notebooks got dogeared and my penmanship got sloppy. Before a leaky highlighter in the bottom of my bag bled through half of Tuesday, and Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday on every single page of my planner.
I used to resent this time of year in this sort of subterranean way, veiled by typical complaints about the end of the summer and by the goody-two-shoes excitement to go Back to School. In my unseen heart, I considered it a mean trick. I wondered if the summer off was worth the consequence. It was a false start—a new year in September? It promised all these new chances and beginnings, but nothing seemed to change.
I remember staying up later than I’d ever stayed up on a school night before my first day of fourth grade. I was organizing my closet. Sorting troll dolls and amateur pottery. I cleaned my room like it had never been cleaned before. I thought if it looked like a Pottery Barn catalog (or like the set of Full House) when I woke up on The First Day of School, it would stay that way all year.
In the days right before the seventh grade, I dropped hints to my mom that I wanted my first real bra because the narrow straps on my First Day of School dress would expose the sports bras I usually wore. I also refused to kneel on the carpet, which is how I usually watched TV or worked on craft projects, because The Dress revealed my knees and I didn’t want them to look chafed.
Every night for three weeks before my senior year in college, I sneaked out of the house and drove into town to walk the length of Main Street and loops around the Middle School for an hour or more, sometimes into the next morning. Ever since, I’m tempted to go for a long walk when I can’t sleep. I’ve tried to think of a safe place to go in the middle of the night. At home, my biggest concerns were distrustful cops and groups of stoned teenagers.  In New York, I have to wait until the gym opens at five if I need to outrun insomnia. I’ve done it before.
Outrunning—that’s what it’s always been. And when I tried to dodge bad habits, quick fix damage, or elude depression, they always caught up with me. They’ve chased me down. I decided to expunge ten years of slobbery on the night before fourth grade? Perfect timing. I had really started to believe that life worked that way; that time was defined either from one day to the next or over the span of three seasons, and never in between. Time dropped paperweights and bookends in the same spots every year until graduation.
Since my days of First Days of School, I’ve been more free to take each day as it comes. To take. Each day, individually. For what it is. As it comes. Not before. Nor after. One at a time. In chronological order. I know it sounds indifferent, like how you live when you’re just getting by. But, honestly? I would rather get through every day without walking all night just to get to it.