so unmusical

If you are looking for hobbies I recommend these:

Taking photos of other people's dogs.
Sometimes discreetly and sometimes not discreetly. These photos will be worth millions someday, when dogs are extinct.

Walking around the city early in the morning, eating food out of a bag.
Almond M&Ms, snap peas, dried coconut flakes, the type of food doesn't really matter as long as it can be transported in a bag.

Running in the middle of the night.
It's the perfect temperature and noise level and the sun never gets in your eyes. And after you fall a few dozen times because you can't see the ground, you hardly notice the falling anymore.



Talking to strangers.
I like finding out if they have interesting stories, and also I like their shoes or skateboard or hair or dog and I need to tell them immediately. The bus is the best place on earth.

Planning elaborate fitness regimes in Google Docs and never ever doing them.
Next week I'll run prime-number mile intervals on odd-numbered days and run my weight in roman numerals at the speed of the earth's rotation on even-numbered days. Let's title this one "new idea" and put it in a folder with the others.

Watching tv and practicing my cursive by transcribing every line with a paintbrush.

I think I'm a winter

It's been way too long since I did a fashion post. Here's what I wore today:

Highlighter-colored sweatshirt, Gap
Gap does it again! It's only 11 am and I'm already five compliments deep.

Spilled chocolate milkshake, coffee shop across the street
Chocolate milkshakes are a great mid-morning snack for young professionals who want to replenish their bodies with vital nutrients like sugar while simultaneously testing the effects of gravity on milkshake.

Soap water, 5th floor women's bathroom
When I finally finish my Yelp review of the 5th floor women's bathroom it will lose at least one star for the handsoap's inability to even somewhat fade a chocolate milkshake stain from a neon sweatshirt.

Paper towels, 5th floor women's bathroom
Tired of wet sweatshirt touching your skin? Try stuffing a few handfulls of paper towels under it! Looks like the 5th floor women's bathroom just earned back a star.

Black raincoat, my desk
Not only covers chocolate stains, wet sweatshirts, and paper towel stuffing, but gives you that awesome "Brooke are you going somewhere I didn't even realize it was raining" look.

Stay tuned for tomorrow when I maybe do laundry.

Pictures to break up the text!

At this point I'm just a bookcase away

So the other day I was watching a documentary on prisons, is how I'm going to start all blog posts from now on. They interviewed copious amounts of prison specialists and historians, which seems to be what you do when you make a documentary.

As a child I always assumed that I would most definitely be interviewed for a lot of documentaries when I was older and I never worried about what topic I would be a specialist on. How to make nachos? Pool sanitation? The mass-production of cole slaw? Giving birth on the moon? 



What is a filmmaker going to be researching that makes them say "Oh we most definitely need to interview Brooke or there's no point in even making this movie"? 

That was for Adult Brooke to sort out. It also seemed logical when I was younger that if for some reason I didn't end up as a historian in a documentary, I would be interviewed as a witness to a horrible crime.

I make the best nachos.

imaginary wishlist

Are you guys also trying to save up money for a brainbike - the kind you can ride and instead of burning calories or transporting you from one place to another, it powers your brain? 

Do you guys also think that, even though a brainbike is sort of expensive, and would take up quite a bit of space in your apartment, or at your desk, or really wherever you decide to put it there are so many options, that it would be so useful? 

It seems so nice, when your brain starts to sag and can't go on its own as far, when your brain energy seems used up, to put on you brainbiking outfit and ride for hours and hours until you're hopelessly sweaty and look at the pages of ideas you biked - ideas for work and ideas about love and ideas on how to build a shark toaster gun where the sharks won't get caught in the electric coils and slow their trajectory. That's what I'm saving my money for.

emojis and the other six wonders of the world

Reality tv is one of the seven wonders of my mom’s world, along with hashtags, gchatting, foursquare, mobile browsers, emojis, and one I won't say but it starts with sex and rhymes with texting. These are things she doesn't understand but calls me about every few weeks and says "Today is the day, Brooke. Explain this to me."



And they remain the seven wonders because I guess I never do a good enough job of explaining them, or they’re really nuanced subjects, or it’s hard to get a good grasp on them when they’re not as deeply rooted in your life as hashtags are in mine. It #scares me that one day I will have a child and one day the world will change so much that I will ask that child for an explanation of #conceptsbeyondmyunderstanding. I can't explain reality tv.

But after a few solid marathons of non-reality tv shows, it's hard to tell them all apart. How many quirky attractive characters in their 20s can there be? Why are you all wearing such colorful outfits? Why do all the male love interests have sweating problems? Why does bonding always have to happen near water?

Why does every episode of every scripted show have that joke where someone says "Is it good?" and the other person says "No." and everyone panics until the person continues "...it’s great!" When did humanity decide this was the best joke ever?



Reality tv is refreshing because it doesn’t have any of these things. The plot doesn’t bother me because, there’s no plot. Usually I just decide whose hairstyle I like the best and fast-forward to the parts with that person in them. You can ignore large chunks of dialogue while working on something else and I promise you won't miss anything at all. And they make me feel like America is doomed, which is the hallmark of any good reality tv show.

There is something really invigorating about feeling bad about America that I wish my mom could understand.



Coolest hair ever!

If the world is ever taken over by robots

And luckily someone invents a giant robot killing machine and all we need is a five-word sentence to attract every single robot and bring it to its death, and the world turns to me and says "Brooke, WHAT FIVE-WORD SENTENCE DO ROBOTS LIKE BEST, everyone is counting on you" don't worry, I already know what sentence we could use. 

And with that taken care of the rest of you can just be in charge of bringing snacks that we can eat while we watch all the robots come swarming in.

I can run a mile faster than you can make pasta

After my half marathon this weekend I was so hungry I ate grapes without removing the grape-branch they came on, I just ate the entire bunch, grape-branch and all.

I'm telling you the end of the story first because I knew at the beginning of the race that I would finish. I sprained my ankle a few weeks and stopped running, and the most I ever ran was 7 miles but that was in May. So I told everyone I would just try it, and stop if it hurt, but I told myself "I will finish, I will die before I stop running and they will bury me at the finish line" and I meant it but I didn't say it out loud because no one likes hearing things like that. 



At every mile on the race there was a station with a team of people throwing us paper cups of the most delicious water on earth. And at every station there was always someone yelling "We've got GU! GU here!" Always answering questions no one was asking like "Do you have GU? Is there GU here?" and never answering the question "What is GU?"

Every mile we would run right past the the them but after 10 miles I started thinking, well maybe. I mean, they have the GU. When am I ever going to see GU again?

I went on their website just now to find out what I ingested. It's some sort of sport gel that tastes like frosting. The recommended usage is 15 minutes before and 45 minutes after exercise and my first thought was "Who would be running for more than 45 minutes?" Me! I would! I ran three times that. I did such a crazy thing.

I have sat through movies that felt years long, and that was the amount of time I was running. I can make pasta 10 times in the amount of time I was running. I can take the bus to work 7 times. I can recite the Brazilian national anthem 64 times and I don't know the Brazilian national anthem or even speak Portuguese. I can do anything now.

I feel like when people look at me, they can immediately tell that I ran 13 miles the other day because I look so incredibly refreshed and powerful and superhuman. But I tell them anyway, just in case.

here comes an airplane

Apartments in Portland don't have screens because supposedly they don't have bugs but they do. I've killed spiders, millipedes, decided to let spiders live so they could kill the millipedes, and found spiders dying slow and painful deaths after millipedes ate their legs off. 

Come visit?

Anyway none of this prepared me for finding a moth the size of a small bird flying around the apartment, blocking all light as it swooped past the ceiling lamp, landing on curtains and almost pulling them off the wall with its weight, humming as loudly as a quiet plane or fighter jet.

I knew I either needed to get brave enough to fight him, get brave enough to co-habitate with him, or get brave enough to change my name, burn everything I owned, and move to another country. I chose co-habitate.

Just a few days later my heart was only skipping about five beats when I saw him in corners, and I was already choosing what actress would play me in the movie about our friendship that overcame all odds. Tina Fey? Zooey Deschanel? Should I just play myself? The mothbird was not faring so well. He stopped flying and started slithering and jerking around the floor, creaking and wrapping his wings around himself like some sort of tiny elderly Dracula looking for tea.

Seeing him in pain should have brought me immense pleasure, and it did, but it's also a new sort of scary. The best news is that now that he's flightless its only a matter of time before the millipedes get to him and this is all just another horrible, horrible memory.

brought to you by 40 apples

The other day at the grocery store someone had abandoned a table with energy cube samples - tiny silver-wrapped squares of pure organic energy and now I have two handfuls of them.

An energy cube tastes like a Starburst if a Starburst tasted like vitamins and sand instead of like sugary imaginary fruit. And if you can bear to swallow them they give you energy the natural way. Quercetin.

What is quercetin? My ten minutes of research was inconclusive. But one energy cube contains as much quercetin as 40 apples! That's right, to quote the company's website "to get the equivalent you'd have to be willing - and able - to eat 40 apples in a sitting."

During a STUDY where quercetin was administered to four college students, one SUBJECT claimed to have a slightly better day. No report on how the students in the CONTROL GROUP compared but unless they ate nine apple pies for breakfast, they probably didn't get enough quercetin. The words in bold indicate that this is SCIENCE.

I have no idea what Vitamin "Sprinkles" are but expect a review of them soon.

A stranger punched me - the way a friend would punch.

I've been writing every day since I was ten and I don't look at the old parts very often. When I do I find things like this:

“Also I am planning on hosting (is that a word?) a circus.”

- age 10 

“A stranger punched me in the hall today, the way a friend would punch! I need to find them.”
- age 13

“Don’t treat me like a child. I am two months away from possibly having a learner’s permit.”
- age 14

“Three wishes: lots of money, be really pretty, don’t really need a third wish.”
- age 15

“I feel so lonely and angry and no one understands me. I also have a pretty solid tan.”
- age 17

Things I would run 120 miles for

The gym I joined a while ago so people would stop complaining about me running at night (I’m training to outrun murderers) is so amazing I can’t believe I didn’t invent it myself: the exercise machines power the building, finally, and for every 20 hours you work out you get a free grilled cheese sandwich.

Here it is in its own paragraph: for every 20 hours you work out you get a free grilled cheese sandwich.


(They have gluten-free sandwiches)

Even though it should be the most popular place in the world, the gym is usually pretty empty except for me and a blonde girl that is literally always there with a hot pink Spacemaker case filled with exercise secrets. A few people make occasional appearances: a middle-aged woman that tries every day to do a pull-up but has never been successful, a couple doing something that looks like yoga-dance, and that sweaty woman riding the elliptical backwards with no hands.

Obviously for the first few weeks I was a member I tried to maximize my returns and work out enough hours that my grilled cheese would pay for my membership in a world where gym memberships are paid with sandwiches. When I wasn’t running I was leaning against walls, sleeping 14 hours a night, and eating entire bags of cashews I found in a drawer and I hate cashews.

Do you tie your shoes the regular way? There are so many ways to tie them it’s like hiring a shoe tailor, if that metaphor is applicable to you. How much would you pay me for a grilled cheese sandwich? If there were a little sweat on it would it be worth more or less?