we collided

If you have spare room in your brain or heart or schedule, I suggest you start reading Craigslist missed connections.

Some things I've learned:
ONE. If you're a gay guy looking for love, go to the gym! That seems to be THE hotspot for m4m missed connections. This is a world I know next to nothing about, being not a guy, not gay, and most of all never going to the gym. But hopefully that advice can help someone.

TWO. If men aren't your style but you love tunes AND the legal system, there are some fiiiiine ladies at the Inglewood courthouse!


Lol but seriously,
THREE. I love looking at these missed connection illustrations.



FOUR TO A THOUSAND. The overwhelming feeling I get from missed connections, is that it really should be called Missed Social Cues.

The girl in the above illustration made a point of mentioning she had a boyfriend? Girls: if that is how you flirt it's a bad strategy. Guys: that is not how people flirt. Most posts read something like "You're a cashier at Whole Foods and I know you were into me because you asked if I wanted a bag. You have great legs. I didn't get a chance to get your number." Yeah she sounds SUPER into you.

Am I jaded? If I had to describe myself right now I would say tired, jaded, and hungry for salted caramels. One of those can be fixed by looking at some more missed connections art.

coming from someone who googled "how to apply eyeliner" last week

Not much going on HERE, except reading craft tutorials for how to organize your twenty makeup brushes that you own because you are trying to conceal your identity, you work in the circus, or you share a makeup counter with your sister wives.



If you have any other explanation for why someone would have this many brushes TELL ME because heaven knows I am curious.

Besides counting the face-painting implements over and over again, I've also been passing time by going to pet adoption events and talking about dogs with dog foster parents, chatting with my landlord, and reading so many books that the dogs and my landlord are blown away by my perspicacity. No, perspicacity does not really make sense in that sentence. I guess I have a few more books to read.

concentrate and ask again

At the risk of being vague, I'm going to start out by saying that yesterday I was chosen for something after a requirement was given that the selected person needed to be female.

It reminded me of George Clooney (as things often do), what he said the last time he won People Magazine's Sexiest Man Alive - that he's usually only nominated for "Sexiest Man Alive who has Played both a Doctor and Batman." Only he was joking and I'm not.

You probably remember this from the papers, but I'll refresh your memory. In 7th grade I won the gold medal in Music Olympics, a local music theory competition done in the style of worldwide sports in a last-ditch effort to make kids care about key changes. And I didn't win gold in the "White Kid" division or the "Kids with a Speech Impediment" bracket. I straight up won gold in Music Olympics. And when the other kids were like how did you do that, I was like, let's just say I know a thing or two about chord progressions. And this trophy matches my braces. Check it.

Not that yesterday was on par with Music Olympics. Please. Not that anything ever will be. And not that I'm looking to ever receive that kind of recognition again. I definitely racked up more than a life's worth that day. But from now on, will I only succeed in things when we're looking for a successful girl? Does three quarters of the group need to be ignored in order for me to be even somewhat interesting?

 

I went home. I ate my daily bag of cheap American candy (how I've missed you.) I read all George Clooney interview's from in 1997. And then I remembered : this is why I came to LA. To shoot up the idea that I need special paramaters, and to cover that idea's corpse in raccoon urine, set it on fire, and walk off into the sunset while the embers are burning and "The Final Countdown" is playing.

Or to work in the advertising. I keep getting the two mixed up.

I heard somewhere that the word "mother" is the most beautiful word in every language.

Thent the thrift store last week a really chubby, red-faced kid in a shopping card was flailing around yelling "MAHM. MAHM. MAHM. MAHM. MAHM. MAHM. MAHM. MAHM. MAHM. MAHM. MAHM.  MAHM. MAHM. MAHM. MAHM. MA-

FINE!!!! I promise I will never have children! Is that what you want?! ARE YOU SATISFIED?!?!

When a couple people heard that I had a lot of downtime this summer they were quick with a disturbing suggestion - why don't you have a kid? Then you'll have plenty to do!

To me this idea is on par with "Why not become paralyzed from the waist down and take physical therapy to learn to walk again? Why not carry a sofa to the top floor of a 200-story building using only the stairs?" Yes, those are certainly ways to fill time.

What this blog post really is, is a huge THANK YOU to all my friends who have children.

Your kids are adorable. They're way cooler than adults, they have tiny feet, and everything they do is new and exciting. I love hanging out with them, buying clothes for them, and hearing stories about them. Thank you for letting me do all the fun things, while you deal with them when they're screaming the most beautiful word in any language. I don't know how you do it, but I'm glad you do.









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TIME MACHINE POST

I wrote this in February.

Of all the street performers I wish you could see, the best one is the Marseillais Mozart.

In Vienna Mozart street performers are everywhere, and that's fantastic. Mozart was from Vienna. Mozart was NOT from Marseille, but that doesn't bother the Marseillais Mozart. He just dresses up as Mozart, with a sign that says he is not a lunatic, but a father and an artist. He doesn't have music or look like a statue or walk on his hands or do any of the other things I've seen street performers do.

I see him almost every day. One day when I went to Aix-en-Provence he boarded the bus with me, rode to Aix, and stood outside the theatre of the movie I went to. With his sign. Without music. I mentioned before that there was no music but it seemed worth mentioning again. He was the strangest thing.

Until today. When he added cat-juggling to his routine.

Read it again.

I really wish I had brought my camera or a PETA representative, but you're just going to have to take my word for it - it was wild. The picture would be of exactly what you're imagining right now - a man, dressed as Mozart, juggling three cats.

"Isn't that the craziest thing you've ever seen?" a man in a tweed hat asked me.

I told him it was.

But honestly, I think it makes more sense with cats than without.

and turn greeeeen.... NOW!

As a driver, no one looks more stupid than a runner at a crosswalk who jogs in place. What, are they that obsessed with running? Can they not stop moving for thirty seconds?

So I try to act nonchalant at crosswalks, as though standing still is my favorite thing to do. But you can see my fingers twitching and my feet tapping and every half second I glance over to see if the other light has turned yellow. I know I'm freaking you out. I used to be you. An hour ago, before I changed into running shoes.

the only thing he won't eat is lettuce

I miss my dog the most when I'm leaving a room, and instinctively place any food items up on a counter out of reach. Then I remember that unfortunately, no one is going to jump on the table and polish off the stick of butter or tear apart my backpack to get to that package of M&Ms. I can leave snacks in low places without rushing to the vet or cleaning dog vomit off my favorite sweater.

When I remember I stop for a second, and then go ahead and put them up on the counter. Just in case.

If you're reading this McGee - I'm always ready for you to drop by. Also, if you can read, can you also write? The pawprint on my birthday card from the family looked forged.

DISCLAIMER: I am tired and haven't eaten cookies in almost two years

After I read through this I realized it's the most self-centered, dramatic, angry thing I've written since I was fifteen and writing strange poetry and lighting it on fire. I just feel like I should mention that this post was inspired by strangers on allergy forums and my step-brother's ex-girlfriend's sister. Every gluten-intolerant person I know is awesome, and if you're thinking "oh curses, this is about me" don't worry, it isn't. I do have some charred teenage poetry about you though; let me know if you're interested.

Here's a fun experiment for anyone with a self-diagnosed gluten allergy. Take a water and flour paper maché mixture, and put some on your skin. You can do this while making a sweet paper maché piñata if you want. If after a few minutes your skin breaks out in huge burning poison-ivy-esque hives like mine did, you are allergic to wheat. If not . . . well that's weird isn't it.

As good as it feels to have friends who eat the same strange gluten-free foods as I do, and who also can't participate in social rites of passage like birthday cakes and free pizza - it feels kind of sad to have those friends turn around and say that they apparently CAN eat wheat SOMETIMES and it's no big deal. If I licked a sandwich I'd have three days of throwing up and lose ten pounds over the next month. I would be dizzy, gray, and susceptible to every virus in my zip code. Why can't I lick a sandwich, but their allergy disappears on birthdays?

On the other, more positive hand, the more people that don't eat gluten, the more companies will make gluten-free food. In the last three years you helped bring favorites like cereal and cookies back into my life, and that's pretty cool.



So on second thought, maybe don't do the flour test. Stay away from flour. You're deathly allergic after all. Unless there's a pizza party.

My mom is an award-winning racquetball player. I'm not, but it's growing on me.

Racquetball was the fifth sport where I got myself hit in the face, and the first one that encouraged wearing protective eyewear, which made it an instant favorite. Things only got better when my mom's Recreational Racquetball League trophies impressed hipster boys I was dating.

When my mom was a child, her family was the first family in her town to get the video game Pong, which is what I assume led to her playing tennis in high school. In college she switched to racquetball, which was either the result of the cold climate which meant racket sports needed to be played indoors, or because she wondered what tennis would feel like on drugs. Fast forward to today and I'm playing a sport that has as much interest in physics as I do.

The logistics of the game are these: Hit the ball away from you, and then body slam into a cement wall to avoid being knocked out by the rebound. When the ball unexpectedly bounces right toward you, sprint over and body slam into the opposite wall. While this is going on, your mom is laughing at you without breaking a sweat.

Occasionally the racket I use to protect my face will miraculously deflect the ball in a way the earns me a point, and the echoing of the room and the blood in my ears make my moms exclamation of "We need to get you to Vegas!" sound more like "Wow, nice hit Brooke!"

I think the pure absurdity of racquetball is best summed up by its spelling of the word "racquet." I'd racq my brain for other words spelled with a cq next to each other, but I need to go lie down.



In this picture I'm the girl who's two heads shorter than everyone else and is wearing black plastic glasses. Believe it or not, I was not the star of the team.

glad I could cheer you up

I keep forgetting that even though I'm hard at work, the rest of LA is on summer vacation. This morning on my bike ride to the agency I saw a man riding with his daughter on the handlebars. The little girl smiled at and looked beyond thrilled to see me. "What a sweet little girl" I thought. "What a wonderful day." Then I realized she was probably laughing because I was wearing a helmet. Boo.

and he had a son, his name was Fred Astaire, and boy could he dance!

Today while I was waiting for my laundry at the laundromat, a seemingly well-composed homeless woman cornered me, and managed to talk to me for ten minutes about her experiences in Florida and the dancing abilities of her favorite celebrities before I could really get away.


Before she showed up the morning had already been reminding me of France, because after I started the laundry machine it turned out the door hadn't been shut properly or was broken, and water starting shooting out. The only people around were two sweet Mexican women, and when "Excuse me - sorry to bother you but do either of you know if these machines have a stop button?" was met with blank stares I said "Stop!" and pointed to the spectacle that was my washing machine. They didn't know what to do either, but we all ran around yelling "STOP!" and banging on the machine, and surprisingly that worked.

Since the only language barrier in France was articulating really complex emotions and cultural things, the inability to talk communicate with anyone in the laundromat seemed even more French than France did. It was the France that could have been.

Anyway, once this homeless woman started chatting me up, I was happy at first, because it reminded me of the thousands of people in Marseille that would randomly come up to me and just want to talk for hours. No matter where you were, you could always count on having a five-minute conversation with a stranger. But there were two depressing differences.

1. This woman clearly had a drug problem.

2. She never stopped for breath. People in Marseille are chatty, but they aren't talking about themselves. They want to know how you're doing. "What's your name? What are you studying? You have beautiful hair, you look Italian. Have you been to Italy? You should go. Where have you been? Tell me all about it!"

Nice try Los Angeles. But Marseille's crazy people have so much more heart than yours do.

After I had finally shaken her, I got excited because I know the Spanish word for "crazy" and I thought I could show it off to my new laundromat friends. But I couldn't find them. Mama Mia! My Spanish has a long way to go.

that's a dog browsing a department store, completely unsupervised

If you move often the thing you miss the most is the way it feels to live somewhere for a year. After a year you don't have bruises from running into doorways and furniture in your apartment (I'm really clumsy) and you could almost do everything with your eyes closed because your hand has memorized the exact height of your shelf and the snooze button on your alarm clock and how the fridge opens.

The fridge at my new apartment opens on the opposite side you'd think it would, and every time I try and open it I spend a quarter of a second thinking "What the heck is wrong with this thing. How am I supposed to get the milk out of it? This isn't right, this isn't my fridge, this isn't my home."

Right now my home is Marseille. The things I miss most about Marseille lately is the width of the sidewalk and the amount of sunlight and the whiteness of the buildings and redness of the rooftops. It took me a year to memorize how far from the curb to walk and how much to squint, and the peach-tint of every day, iced with a layer of Marseille-blue sky. I miss knowing the exact price of my staple foods at the grocery store. I miss the shade of orange my curtains were. I miss knowing where to hold my breath because it smelled bad. Three steps past the antique book store smells like dead rats. Twelve steps past the macaron shop smells like urine. These are constants. These things never change. Unless you move to the other side of the world.



Maybe in a few months Los Angeles will be home, but right now it isn't, and even though I love my family, neither is Minnesota. Right now I'm a confused girl wandering lost around a grocery store full of strangely-priced food, wondering if she's going to be homesick for the rest of her life.

Check out this car!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/mpd/permalink/m19JENA24NZZKQ/ref=ent_fb_link

Something horrible happened this morning and I woke up 24 instead of 8, and don't own a single remote control car.

The most exhilarating part of my mornings and afternoons is The Overpass.

It's halfway between my apartment and my office - an empty, dark, tunnel decked out with bright yellow signs that read "DANGER! BEES!" and beneath that PELIGRO! ABEJAS!

I don't know about you, but to me there's nothing like an upside-down exclamation point to make you ask WHAT BEES? What are you freaking talking about? Is this thing just packed with bees? Why so many signs? Are you breeding them with a chemical that makes them super angry? Does the tunnel smell like honey?

And there's nothing like a honey-scented, psychotic-bee-packed tunnel to get me biking sixty miles an hour. I fly through that thing like a bee that smells dinner. No, faster. Just a hair faster.

I've got a cobalt-blue beach cruiser and a bright future in sales

This was going to be a post about my super-hipster practically-useless one-speed beach cruiser a got for biking to work.

But instead it's going to be a rant about why no one wears a freaking helmet anymore. Have you forgotten everything you learned in bike safety class in second grade? Or did no one else have to take that class?

There are few things worse than leaving the apartment with clean clothes, a freshly-packed lunch, and a neat-o super-duper safe AND stylish helmet, only to pass thirty people who are biking around with hair blowing in the breeze. I don't know who these thick-skulled and soon-to-be-skull-less losers think they are, but they're sharing the road with giant pieces of steel that are going 50 mph, and the closest thing to protection I've seen anyone wearing are Dodgers baseball caps. Twins hats, of course, protect the wearer from any sort of bodily harm that may arise. I'm not aware that Dodgers caps have the same effect.

End of rant. Wear your helmet, you'll double the number of people in the world that are currently doing it.

Does anyone know more about Salvador Dali than that melting clock painting? I've liked him ever since I saw a picture of him walking his pet anteater in a metro station.

No, I'm not going to post a picture. You know how to google it, don't be lazy. Geez Louise, the things I put up with.

Anyway, I found these sweet Salvadore Dali quotes today. I've now doubled my list of personal heros, which used to just consist of Yoko Ono. It was a tough decision, but any clock-painting, ant eater-walking, insane-quote spouting artist is a hero of mine.

"The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant."

"I don't do drugs, I am drugs." Unfortunately I would have like this more last year, when I wouldn't have been reminiscent of Charlie Sheen.

"There are days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction."

Now go look at pictures of anteaters. Did you know they looked that crazy? Doesn't their head look like a fifth arm? Alright fine, I'll post a picture.



What on earth?!