adventures in stand up

So I had my little stand-up debut on Monday. Some people came out, most were supportive. It didn't really go how I wanted it to and at first I was really disappointed, but people keep telling me I should try it again. I think next time I do it it would be at an actual comedy venue because I think my grand scheme of how great it would be to NOT do it at a comedy venue was actually not all that successful. Apparently the bartender told my friend that he liked it and it was bizarre. My friend told me that he thought it made people uncomfortable (this was a compliment) and I certainly in my general life make people uncomfortable so it follows that it would carry over to my "stand up".
My friend took a video of it, which I will review once I have some distance from the experience and see what I would like to do differently.
All in all I am glad I did it if only to push myself beyond my boundaries and do something kind of different.
And who knows, you may see me again at your local open mic night. If not, I just have another story.

In unrelated news I need to quit drinking so much -- believe it or not my recent excess is actually a good sign because it means I emerging from my cocoon of hibernation. You like those mixed metaphors?

Aaand in final news I think I am going to hold off on the duathlon until September when I feel more ready.

That's about it on the homefront.

Dating Disaster #7: Some have travelled far and wide, some have given up and died, for the love of a sweet lovin' man

Ok, so several years ago I was doing a lot of craigslist dating and one dude who had written me never sent me his picture, which I figured was fine. I sat outside of a bar looking expectantly at every guy who came up, until my date finally rolled up. Yes, rolled up. On roller skates. Not even roller blades. And he had this scraggly beard (which he nervously picked hair out of for the entire date) and was obviously someone I would not have dated had I seen his picture ahead of time.
When he rolled up and looked at me he said, "You look disappointed."
He was correct.
But this post isn't about this date. This post is about the date that I just got home from. This was an okcupid date, so this guy had seen my picture....but, when he walked up his face looked like I imagine mine must have when I first saw roller skate guy. I feel like there was a moment when he was a) hoping that he had walked into the wrong bar or b) hoped that I hadn't recognized him and he could turn around.
So this dude is 35, which is older than guys I tend to date. Example: He talked about having been to Eugene for a Grateful Dead show...now, he didn't say when that was, but Jerry Garcia died when I was 12...sooo... And in general he is just in a different place in his life than me.
And maybe he realized that right away, maybe it was just a feeling he had. But he ordered sake, which is baaasically the smallest drink you can get at a bar aside from a shot, and he did not nurse that motherfucker.
After about a half hour he said, "So, um, this is kind of like a school night for me...so I had better get going."
Yeah, buddy, better make sure you get home at 9 o clock. Asshole.
Shortest date ever.
I at least stuck around for two drinks with roller skate guy.
So I don't know what happened, maybe he realized we were at different places...maybe I look grossly disfigured compared to my picture. I have no idea.
What I do know is that I can't do this anymore.
Taking a break from dating, indefinitely.

if love is a drug i guess we're all sober

The evening security guard at my work is very friendly. Every day when I leave we chat and he gives me a stick of gum. He knows more about me than is really probably necessary for a security guard to know. A while back he asked me if I had a boyfriend and I said I did not and he said "why?!". Well, Hassan, it's obviously because no one will ever love me. Tomorrow we'll begin a series of 3 minute discussions on my choices in partners.

Today I asked Hassan about his day off, and he in return asked me about mine. I told him I had gone to see a movie. "Alone?", he asked. I said that no I had gone with a friend. He looked so heartbreakingly hopeful for a minute and said "A friend.....? A...boy? friend?" And I said that it was a female friend. Crushed. He was so crushed. "You don't have a boyfriend, right?" And I confirmed that I do not. He gave me this pitying smile and I was like, "what?". He paused for a minute..."I don't like that...you look good! You are young! You should have a boyfriend!"

Thanks, Hassan. No, really.

I have recently had yet another dating disaster, which I don't have enough distance from to blog about (making it sound much more tragic than it was)....and I was thinking that maybe I really just want to spend some time on me. Isn't there a sex and the city or something where they date themselves? I don't know. I don't watch that show.

But then I was like, my friends are already always thinking about setting me up with people ...but you know it's bad when the security guard at your work is tired of you being single....so I guess I will plod on in my ongoing quest to not date an asshole and at least Hassan will be happy.

My regime? The regime from which the radicals are trying to get free?

Throughout my adolescence I had pretty decent skin with not a lot of problems...maybe a breakout around the lady time, but not too much else.
Then, on the day of graduation when we had the all-night party that they always have I started to feel a huge cystic pimple on my chin. That single cystic pimple marked the beginning of the end of my manageable skin and that summer I developed the first of many bouts with acne and went on acne medication for the first time.
The skin issues come and go depending on hormones, weather, stress, diet, etc. Currently, I am in the middle of a bad spell with the skin. Not the worst it's ever been, but enough to make me feel pretty gross.
To make it worse I was sick last week - that, combined with the stress of the new job and lame living situation, has caused me to break out in herp of the mouth.
Once, when I was 8 and my sister was 6 we went to Papa's Pizza (the place to see and be seen on a Friday night for elementary schoolers in Eugene, Oregon in 1990). We ran into a kid from my sister's class, Andy. He is actually like some physics genius now, but unfortunately I don't remember his last name. This is because, on that Friday night in 1990 when we ran into him in the play room at Papa's, he had apparently finished his pizza dinner and neglected to thoroughly wipe his mouth. He had pizza sauce smeared at the corner of his mouth. My sister and I ran around and called him Andy Pizza Face....and not just for that night. Oh no. Recently my sister sent me a link to something about some crazy science thing he had done at Harvard. "Oh look!" We exclaimed. "Andy Pizza Face is up for a nobel prize!"
My herp of the mouth makes me look like Andy Pizza Face. But without the credentials.
So in my neverending quest to find a solution for my skin, I am now trying the Oil Cleansing Method.
Check out the link if you wanna, but this is basically it: Wash your face with oil.
People swear by it. People who say they have never had any luck with anything else claim this solved everything.
Here's the downside, apparently your skin goes through a "purging process" as it gets rid of all this shit that has built up, so it gets worse before it gets better. I'm not really looking forward to this. And there is no way of knowing really if it's purging and will get better, or if you have just fated yourself to Edward James Olmos territory.
So, today was day 1. I made my little mixture. Steamed my face. Washed it off. Followed up with some Tea tree oil on the existing problems.
My favorite part is that you are supposed to think relaxing and positive thoughts about your skin getting clear. The Secret + OCM!.
I also really like that it's natural because every once in awhile I get all hippie and decide I need to put less toxins in my body.
My second favorite part is that you are supposed to massage it in until you feel little granules, which are sebum plugs coming to the surface. It's so nasty, I love it.
Anyway, I am willing to give it a month and we'll see. One thing I read said several months, but fuck that, I would rather go to the dermatologist and have them look at me disapprovingly while admonishing me for being a skin picker.
In the meantime, I will take solace in the fact that at least for the next month, every day, I will get to be conscious of sebum plugs. Assuming I don't get bored of the whole thing, which is kind of a process and likely to become tiresome.

school's (not) out forever

I subscribe to a lot of blogs and podcasts. To the point where it is actually becoming overwhelming. I subscribe to science blogs, social work blogs, psych blogs, New York Times most emailed articles, friends' blogs and Jezebel. I also recently added a job search thing to my google reader which adds about 30 new posts a day. This adds up to hundreds of new blog posts a day and I don't even know what to do about it anymore. I used to subscribe to Google news but found that I was skipping through a lot of them just because of the enormity of information. Unfortunately, my deletion of culturally relevant blogs may be a contributing factor to my ignorance about anything current or significant. And it kills me to delete my blogs or podcasts. I used to listen to Slate's weekly podcast about the weekly political issues. I liked it because it was a good way for me to get updated on current events and also listen to some commentary. It was short, succinct and perfect for a commute. But there was also a lot of banter among the three hosts and it got really tiresome. They would get off track, make fun of each other and generally irritate me. I went through a weeks long process of debating whether or not I would unsubscribe from the podcast. Literally weeks where I would sit, waiting for the subway, listening to inanity about whether one of the hosts was too negative or whatever and I would have a long debate with myself about the value of wasting 45 minutes a week on the podcast. I ended up deleting it and I felt a pang of guilt as I did. It's really hard for me.

Jezebel is by far my favorite blog, but often times it reminds me too much of high school. It brings out all of my insecurities. I desperately want to be a part of this group that I think is so {funny, smart, cool, above-it-all, etc.} but I don't think that I am {insert adjective} enough to fit in. So I sit on the sidelines, laugh along at the jokes and tell myself that it's just because I have a life that I am not available to immediately comment on every post. That wasn't true in high school and it isn't true now.
Jezebel had a post today about that german sex book that has everyone all riled up and one of the editors posted a translation of part of it. It was about this girl who has hemorrhoids and how she doesn't get them removed because the only reason someone would get them removed is for aesthetics. The protagonist also writes about having anal sex while having hemorrhoids, which she describes as cauliflower. This prompted a google search for hemorrhoids, since I don't know anything about them AND because I love things that are disgusting. I love to do a youtube search on cysts, morgellons, the tree man and tumors. I can't help it. It's so gross and I love it.
It also got me thinking about the poor cauliflower, which I think is particularly delicious with a little sauce made of mustard and mayonnaise and with cheese broiled on top. But the cauliflower gets compared to everything disgusting that a human can get. Warts? Cauliflowered. 'Roids? Cauliflowered. You've got your cauliflower ear and a yeast infection looks like cauliflower.
So I thought, maybe I will write a comment about the poor cauliflower and disease comparisons and also my mystification regarding why anyone would have anal sex when they have hemorrhoids because it seems quite painful aside from the visual disturbance for the batter.
Turns out, Jezebel has all these rules for posting comments and you have to get approved ahead of time. The way to get approved is by writing a comment that they deem worthy of Jezebel and then they post it and you can post forever.
Which brings us back to my insecurities. I couldn't do it. I couldn't bring myself up for the scrutiny of the clique. It's just like that time in English class when I wrote a story about mean kids, because I happened to sit in this corner where all of the asshole guys sat and they would just talk shit about people all through class. (I'm sure they're all really successful now, btw). My teacher asked me to read it and I wouldn't do it and he gave me this fixed look and said "Caitlin, I think it's really important that you read this". So then everyone is looking at me and the last thing I want is for these guys who were sitting in my corner to know what I had written. And I might have cried a little.
So maybe my observation that it would probably hurt to have up-the-bum sex when you have a mass of veins protruding from your ass probably wouldn't subject me to later criticism from little boys driving big trucks bought with their daddy's timber money, but it doesn't matter. I am actually back in high school, writing journal entries about my inability to fit in, laughing too hard at the wrong jokes and having crushes on all of the boys who are now gay.
Ugh.
I am going to go to my room, eat a bag of chocolate, hide it under my bed and self-injure.