he sees you when you're sleeping

On my flight home last weekend I sat next to a French scientist carrying a textbook titled Comment utilizer votre nouvelle iPad. She wasn’t interested in talking about France or Marseille, which was too bad. She was interested in talking about Grenoble being the birthplace of white coal, which was complicated and involved the evaporation of charcoal. She said she was in Portland for a “science meeting.” I asked her how it went.

“Oh, you know how science meetings are."

(I don’t.)

“Isn’t it unusual," she continued, "how you travel to the other side of the world for a science meeting, but you’re with the same people from Australia that you met while studying whales in Antarctica last summer?”

(Yes, a lot of things about that are unusual.)

After trying to get information about whales out of her for a while, we came back to seeing friends on her trip. I suggested that the world was small, and as a scientist she confirmed it.

“Yes, the world is small. But we are all so spread out.”

This last bit was especially true because she had unfolded her flight blanket out so far it covered one of my knees. I didn’t mind at all, actually I loved it, because the plane was freezing.

save the planet

I'm glowing so much I can see in the dark.

Before you get a facial the person (spa person? spatrician?) sits with a clipboard and asks you loads of questions. Questions like "What skin products do you use?" and "What's your favorite part of the facial?"

"Probably when it's over," I answered, and regretted it immediately because it made me sound like a teenager describing a nosebleed. But I'd rather be the one with the clipboard asking loads of questions. Questions like "By skin products, do you mean products for my skin or products made of skin?"

You're not supposed to ask questions during a facial. Once I asked "What color is my face right now?" and the spatrician just laughed. So I had plenty of time to think about the answers to her clipboard questions, with time left over to think about what umbrellas would look like if wind went up instead of sideways, and what comebacks I would make to hypothetical insults, and what animals mixed together would create the perfect animal. Here are my answers.

I hardly use any products made of skin. I have one jacket that looks like leather, but it's actually black plastic. In fact, it doesn't even look like leather.

My favorite part of a facial is when it's over because there are some things I like best before and after they happen. Also on this list are square dancing, baking, and looking at a photo of a blue whale on the internet. I look forward to these activities, and I talk about them for days afterward. Sometimes I even blog about them. But during them, you have no idea what color your face is. And that's the worst.

The world's cutest animal would be a combination of a loris, panda, meerkat, and otter. It's really complicated and I don't have time to draw it right now, and when I do it will be so cute you may cry. This photo of a blue whale will give you CHILLS. If you send me a photo of you sitting down to prove you are sitting down, I will send it to you.

While we're on the subject of lies I tell

A lot of times people ask if I've had lunch and I say no even though I have, just so I can have lunch with them. The good part is that I don't have to eat dinner later, and the bad part is there is no bad part. It's a perfect system.

I hate salt water

My grandmother firmly believes in not throwing away a Kleenex until it's so soaked in fluid it's unrecognizable.

When I stayed at her house growing up she would fish through the trash for used ones "This one's only been blown in one or two times! Don't be wasteful, Brooke" and stuff them in my pockets, still wet. A lot of times I felt pretty sure they weren't even mine.

She also had a rule that if you cried you had to sit alone in the garage with the lights off. If I ever spend time in prison I will owe the ease with which I adapt completely to the time spent at my grandmother's house as a child.

Sometimes I think about throwing away a completely un-used Kleenex just to balance things out, in like a really well-adjusted way. Regular ones, not the kind with lotion. Throwing away Kleenex with lotion is the kind of thing that gets you put in jail.



This is me and my grandmother. We look alike. She wears a locket with a photo of her at age 5 and me at age 5, because I guess at age 5 we looked even more alike.

Your heart pumps 48 Diet Cokes of blood a minute

Once I asked a friend if he was good at css and he responded with “I don’t know, I’ve never tried it!” This was my attitude I approached my first yoga class last week.

And I told the teacher that I had never done yoga before but it was sort of a lie. I had done it twice - once my sister and I tried going to a yoga class and left a few scary seconds in, and once I saw a yoga position printed on the back of a cereal box and tried it, while eating cereal, which is pretty advanced. I felt like these two brushes with yoga would be my secret weapon. Oh sure I’ve never done yoga before, BAM, dog posse. I mean dog pose. Things were going to go great.

Class started with us all sitting cross-legged on the floor, silently, I can only assume everyone was remembering funny things that happened in middle school or thinking about different food pairings (peanut butter and greek yogurt?)(tried it when I got home, don’t recommend it). I hadn’t even made it to lunch food thoughts before the teacher came over and whispered that sitting cross-legged seemed to be too advanced for me. She suggested a modified pose that I would call “just sitting normally on the ground” and she called “Hero’s Pose.” 

Assuming she made that up on the spot to make me feel better about failing at sitting, I mentally already awarded her an A for Friendliness. And we were only a minute in.

“If you get overwhelmed, just go back to Hero’s Pose.” she recommended.

Then she told us to put our hands together, and then grab our minds and put them in between our palms. I stayed in Hero's Pose and kept my mind wherever it normally stays.

Holding our brains was the first of many bizarre feats of flexibility asked of us. The most common was to move our hearts. “Lift your heart as high as you can.” “Float your heart behind your shoulders.” I just moved my boobs whenever she said this. I don’t know what everyone else did, I thought looking at people might be bad yoga etiquette.

Things I did look at: the window where I could see the restaurant chefs making breakfast. The ceiling lights - one of them had a face in it. Or I may have been having yoga-induced hallucinations.

Toward what I assumed was the end, the teacher congratulated us on “A great warm-up!” and then things kept going, as people often do after warm-ups. And we powered through lots and lots more heart waving and Hero’s Pose and listening to a sound that I thought was a broken fan but halfway through class realized was a relaxation tape.

And then it turns out the last 15 minutes of yoga are a nap, so, being a hero really wasn’t that difficult after all.

Full disclosure I wrote this months ago and have not been back to yoga since. Sun salutations, suckers. Just kidding it really was fun.

What's the word for laughing but also feeling like the worst person?

Three messages from my mom after I got a new phone and changed my voicemail message to just the word "hi."

7:01 PM
Brooke!
Are you still there?
Did I lose you?
Can you hear me?
Brooke.
Ok I'm going to call back.

7:02 PM
Um.
Oh!
Wait.
Are you still there?
Well that is so weird...
I hear nothing, I can't hear you.

7:03 PM
(Laughter)
(Silence)
Shoot. Can you hear me?
Oh...
Hmmm.
Brooke?

Sorry Mom. My voicemail is fixed now.



How many times can I post this photo of my family throwing hand signs at a midwestern Applebees and still have it be hilarious? Seven times? Eight times?

A one-act play about how I make friends

Scene: The clock aisle in a Portland Fred Meyer grocery store. BROOKE is walking around trying to remember what she was going to buy (milk) and wondering why there are clocks in a grocery store, a MAN WITH ALLERGIES is dripping all over the clocks.

MAN WITH ALLERGIES sneezes

BROOKE: Bless you!

MAN WITH ALLERGIES: Is this clock $29.99?

BROOKE (continuing to not resemble a Fred Meyer employee in any way): I think so? Yes!

MAN WITH ALLERGIES: I can't believe these clocks are 30% off.

BROOKE: Pretty insane. Now's the time to buy one!

BROOKE waits for MAN WITH ALLERGIES to laugh

MAN WITH ALLERGIES walks away

BROOKE wonders if maybe she came here because she needed soy sauce. (wrong, still milk.)