Don't look at me

I came to a coffee shop because I need to focus but then two really loud women sat down next to me, but I don’t mind.

They’re sitting within arms reach - so close I could easily touch them - but I didn’t look up when they sat down so I don’t know what they look like, and I do mind that. Not looking up at theses two women is one of my greatest regrets.

“Well she’s having a lot of luck lately.” says the woman closest to me. Close enough for a very loose hug, even, the kind of hug you might give someone at the gym. “What she does now is go to ComicCon and cosplay conventions and gives out stacks of cards that say I saw you looking at me, and that’s not ok, I’m a person.”

“That. Is. So. Great.” her friend exhales slowly.

“Right? It can be hard to say out loud but people need to know, that even though we look this way, the way we look, it’s not ok to look at us."

I have never wanted to look at two people more.

I wonder if I look up at them if they will notice. And if they notice, will they give me a card.

They kept talking, in plain sight but completely unviewable.

“That’s so empowering. And important, because looking is harassment. The occult circle in Seattle had harassment problems years ago and it was terrible. It ripped the witchcraft community apart.

As they pause for a moment of silence for the Seattle witchcraft community I use every muscle in my face to hold my gaze down. I wonder if people will be able to tell later, if my face will be incredibly toned or even sculpted from the self-restraint. I wonder if people will look at me, and I will wish I had cards I could give them that say I’m a person.

I've almost found a new thing to obsess about when one of their friends walks up behind me to meet them. She reaches for a chair at my table and practically screams: “Oh my goodness, look at you two!”

I wish I could, ma'am. That's all I want to do right now.

Later, when they seemed distracted, I looked at them quickly and they look like every other person I've ever seen in my life.

Everything I know about Chicago.

When I was in middle school my family drove through Chicago. 

“I think we’re near the apartment you grew up in,” my parents said. Actually one of them said it, they didn’t talk in unison. But I don’t remember which one specifically so I'm just using "my parents" in a general sense.

“Can we drive by it?” I asked. “Can we see it, just from the car? Just so I can imagine where I come from and what it was like where I lived as a baby?” 

“No.” my parents said.

Still not in unison.

Reasons I shouldn't go running today

Please choose three of the four excuses.
○ It's snowing.
○ My knees feel sort of loose. Is that a thing?
○ Maybe I should stay home and watch tv so I know more about pop culture.
○ My hair looks too good to mess up.

No spoilers please

Things I think about when I’m washing my hands in a coffee shop bathroom and notice a $1,000,000 bill sitting next to the sink:

I bet it’s an ad for something.

Once at a street fair someone scattered ads shaped like $100 bills. They looked so realistic that I put four in my pockets. I'm not sure what I was planning on doing with them, but when I dropped one later a stranger ran through four lanes of busy traffic to return it. I pretended to be as happy as I would be if someone handed me $100 I'd dropped on the ground, instead of as happy as I would be if someone handed me an ad I'd dropped on the ground. I did a great job.

This bill looks way more realistic.

Is that what a million dollar bill really looks like?

If million dollar bills really existed, people wouldn’t carry suitcases full of money. Why would you carry a suitcase full of money when you could fold a million dollar bill into your wallet with your ice cream scoops punch card?

Maybe they carry suitcases full of money because there aren’t many million dollar bills in circulation.

I’m not touching it.

Maybe I should touch it. Just with a paper towel.

Maybe God left it here for me. Because I've been so good lately. It seems like a weird thing to do, but it seems like the sort of thing you’d expect from someone who invented scabs, bananas, sex, and those fish that just look like bummed-out piles of fat.

Or maybe it’s some sort of promotion the coffee shop is running, where if I turn it in to the front desk they’ll give me a year's supply of coffee and all the internet I want. What a strange promotion, and what a strange choice of bill to use. A twenty would have made a lot more sense.

Maybe a million dollar bill is normal. Maybe most people who come to this coffee shop are super rich, obscenely rich. Maybe they had this in their pocket to buy a Mazarati for the ride home. If they did they would have more than a suitcase worth of money left over.

I have been washing my hands for a really long time.

Here are pictures of a few things. A blobfish, a very strange photo of the cast of Ocean's 11 at an air base in Turkey, and the treehouse I would build if I had picked up the money. I'm not looking up if a million dollar bill exists because I want to it to stay a surprise.

I don't have cheekbones

Hey guess what it's 5 great things about not wearing makeup for 5 days:

1. You can rub your eyes in comic disbelief and you’re ready to go to a waterpark at a moment’s notice. I wrote that sentence in a way that makes it seem like those two things are related but the only connection is they’re both easier to do without eyeliner.

2. Everyone thinks you’re sick so they don’t make loud noises.

3. You look enough like a child to order from the kids menu, old enough to get senior discounts at movies, enough like a boy to use the men’s bathroom if the line's shorter, and bad enough to be completely invisible. I haven't tested any of these but I have a good feeling about all of them.

4. Beyonce sings about you. There's lots of language in this, the main language is English but there’s also swear words.

5. Now it’s time to think of something to not do next week. I think it’s going to be laundry.

I'm the main character in the most boring movie ever

It's pretty lame but the main reason I wear scarves  is because when I'm wearing a scarf and I see my reflection, I think that I look like a photo my robot kids will see someday that will make them say "oh man my mom used to be cool."

Because one day I'll be really into chess, or whatever moms are into, and I'm sure I'll have gingivitis, and my kids will tease me about how bad I am at teleporting and they'll ask me what it was like to breathe oxygen growing up, but there will be photos to prove that once upon a time I was 26-going-on-35 and this is what a photo of those days would look like.

And then the second reason to wear them is look how messy my hair is here:



Just kidding, you can't tell how messy it is.

for a limited time only

It's that time again!

The flowers are dead, the air smells like worms, and the newspaper someone left out on the sidewalk now looks like a four-foot pile of gray scrambled eggs. That's right: the rain season! Which means some of our seasonal favorites are back:

Bread Confusion
Do you remember putting this piece of bread in a ziplock bag in your backpack this morning? Or was it yesterday morning? Wait, do you own ziplock bags? How did it get this flat?

Sadness Mocha
Stir a packet of sugar-free Swiss Miss into a cup of cold coffee-tasting-water and microwave on the "popcorn" setting.

Twice-burnt toast
Burned your toast? No problem! Scrape off the burnt parts and toast it a little more! Burned it again? Now it's probably super gross and not worth eating and you just ruined a $1.75 slice of gluten-free bread.

Candy you found in your backpack
Halloween lasts all year long!

Mystery Shape Treats
I wrote this one down and had an idea, and now I went to the bathroom and can't remember what that thought was. The stale candy may be messing with my short-term memory.

here are the facts

You asked so here it is: the all-inclusive list of everything I know about kosher dietary rules, and even a few things I don't know.

Anything from a pig is bad news.

Don't eat soup with bugs in it, but you can take the bugs out and then eat it if you want. Same goes for spiders. No rattlesnakes. Fish are fine. Fish with weird skeletons or armor are not fine. Tarantulas are a no-go.

Cheese has cow stomachs in it and marshmallows have horse feet in them and lots of other foods have strange parts of animals in them you didn't know about.

You can't boil a lamb in his mother's blood or milk or something I always thought was literal but it's not, it's a way of saying not to eat meat and dairy at the same time, which sounds gross at first but people do it all the time when they're eating cheeseburgers or cheese chicken or turkey ice cream or turkey yogurt. You can eat salmon yogurt because salmon isn't a meat. You can eat eggs at the same time as meat as long as it isn't pig meat and you don't cook the eggs in butter. You can eat a lemon ice for dessert after eating some non-pig non-bug meat because lemon ice doesn't have dairy, unless you like eating lemon ice with melted butter on it, like people do with popcorn. You could put an egg on top if you didn't have taste buds or shame. Eggs are not a meat or a dairy, they don't fall into the blood and milk description in any way. If you're not hungry for eggs right now you're crazy.

If you have two heads you can possibly eat dairy in one mouth and meat in one mouth, depending on where you are conjoined.

You can eat meat while wearing ice-cream flavored chapstick, but you can't eat actual ice cream for three hours after, or a certain number of hours that depends on what country you live in and whether you're lactose intolerant. I wouldn't recommend eating the actual chapstick, I don't know if it has anything to do with kashrut but it might just make you sick.

Don't eat owls. End of list.

Now you are older than before you read this

Today's the sort of day where after the third person in a row tells you how tired you look, you go to the bathroom and see yourself in the mirror and realize you're not tired, you're just not wearing any makeup.

So the joke's on you, well-meaning friends. This is just how my face always looks.

A short list for my landlord

My landlord is super great but emailing him about problems in my apartment always makes me nervous for some reason. So I’m hoping he’ll just find this here and save me the trouble.

1. The wall in the bathroom is falling. Does that make sense? I don't know how else to describe it, but it would be definitely be great if you could come look at it.

2. Also the faucet water sprays sideways instead of down. I know this seems more in the realm of a physicist than a landlord but I thought I’d tell you about it to see if there’s anything you can do.

3. One of the heaters doesn't turn on. This barely made the list because

4. the other heater won't turn off. So that sort of evens things out. Ignore this part of the list please.

5. There’s something horribly wrong with my freezer - I’ll put an entire brand-new container of ice cream in there and it's gone within hours.

6. I still notice the same number of spiders, and that’s great, but lately they seem - less spidery. Like they're not making webs with the same zeal they used to. 

7. This one involves the windows. They used to stay light until at least eight, sometimes even nine, and lately they’re not working at all. Yesterday it was completely dark by six, which seems insane and obviously extremely urgent.

8. I got new dark-wash jeans and they stained the tops of my white tennis shoes blue.

9. Sometimes, at the bus stop or in the elevator or line at the grocery store I’ll say something to a stranger but a bit too quietly, and I think my voice blends into the air around us and they don’t respond. I don’t know if they’re ignoring me or if I need to say it again louder. I think I just need to say it again louder, but I wish I knew for sure.

10. There is a cat in the neighborhood with thumbs. Have you ever seen a cat like that? It’s beautiful, I’m obsessed with it. I don’t have any photos because it’s so blurry (not in real life, just in photos) but here are some other cat thumbs.

Casting list: Portland airport

Girl in a mouse shirt and a black leather jacket.
That's me, but it's not really leather, just black plastic.

Woman at bag check.
The one who says "There are mice on your shirt" using the same tone of voice you'd use to tell someone your name.

Man who calls for backup when you set off the metal detector.
"Attention! We've got a woman in a leather jacket!" is probably some sort of airport code for "Look how cool this girl is!" but it's not really leather, just black plastic.

Woman who wipes your hands with a wet wipe after you set off the metal detector.
You set off the metal detector? No problem. Now that your hands are wet you're good to go.

hair story

So far every day of my entire life has been the part of the movie before the unpopular girl gets the makeover and is suddenly smokin' hot.

great things to do when you're sick

Growing up we were always trying to think of the perfect illness: one that made it absolutely mandatory that you stay in bed, but made you feel well enough to eat foods you like, talk, enjoy television, and maybe play table football or some other very low impact sport. I think one day we agreed on head lice but I'm still not completely convinced.

A while ago I got sick and it wasn't head lice or any other near-perfect sickness, but there was still a ton to do. Here are things you can do when you're sick, organized by great and terrible for your convenience.

Great things to do:

Hot socks magic trick

Right before you go to sleep, put on very hot wet cotton socks, then dry regular-temperature wool socks. You'll wake up with dry feet and no runny nose WHERE DOES THE SNOT GO? I have no idea.

Take the longest shower ever
If it ends it's too short.

Drink tea
I recommend licorice, peppermint, ginger, chamomile, lemon, chai, cinnamon, echinacea, kava, or hazelnut. And I don't even know what a few of those words mean.

Watch Cat Parade

Take a taxi

When I didn't have a way to get home and I was too tired to walk or take the bus I called a taxi and luckily it was a magic taxi, the warmest and darkest and most comfortable in the world, and it smelled like gingerbread, and the taxi driver was like an even prettier friendlier taxi-driving Carey Mulligan. I may have been hallucinating. Which brings me to,

Terrible things to do:

Hallucinate

Rinse your mouth with salt water
It's like tasting death!

Drink red liquid medicine

This isn't so much a blog post as a promise to my mom that I'm going to take better care of myself. 

hats and a love story

My family has one photo of my great-grandmother when she was a baby, and she is wearing the best hat I have ever seen on anyone, especially a baby. Her dad was a hat-maker, so I guess she had her pick of great hats. Being a hat maker was a thing back then, I also guess.

Today I think hats are mainly a way to tell people what sports team you like, but when my great-great-grandfather made hats, it didn't matter what sports team you liked. Hats were for everyone. In fact I've spent a lot of time looking at this photo of my great-grandmother and I still have no idea what sports team she liked. This is all true.

And then the part that isn't true, but that I love, is that one day my great-grandmother grew up and fell in love with a man with the biggest skull in the world, a man that looked terrible in hats, a man whose children would have globes instead of heads and would also look terrible in hats and would never have mysterious baby pictures wearing million-dollar hats. It was the opposite of everything her parents wanted for her. And she sat them down and she said "Listen, there are ten things in the world that are less important than love, and one of them is hats."

And she married him, and her dad came to the wedding in a hat so fantastic the other wedding guests wanted to scratch their eyes out so it would be the last thing they ever saw.

And she had seven children, each with a bigger head than the one before. That is why my grandmother's head is so big she uses a punch bowl as a fitting tool when she crochets beanies. That is why my mom's head is so big she can't ride bikes because no helmets will fit. And that is why my head is so big that when I look in the mirror it is hard to see both the left and right edges of it, and that is why I look terrible in hats, and that is why if you want to know what my favorite sports team is, you will have to ask me. It's the Minnesota Twins.

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Pictures to break up the text!

Two plants I don't own but am interested in killing

This is just a warning.

1. LEAF TREE FIG PLANT

That's not it's real name but I don't like its real name so you can click through the photo to find out what it's really called. Look how beautiful it looks in this beautiful sunny expensive apartment and imagine how great it would look in my sometimes-clean not-at-all-expensive apartment! It is native to Western Africa and seems totally easy to take care of.

2. ZZ PLANT

Also not the real name but in this case it is a real, commonly-used abbreviation. And it also happens to be an off-color slang word in French! It would look so good for the few days it was alive and as a bonus it is super poisonous.

3. EVERY PLANT I HAVE EVER SEEN.

Portland safari

When I left work the other day there was a tour bus driving by - for some reason our street is a must-see if you want to spot Portland landmarks like rain, a handful of coffee shops, a grocery store, and

"...here is a place that makes advertisements you know about." a tour guide minutes away from boring herself to sleep said over a loudspeaker.



Growing up my siblings and I shared an obsession with animal facts and a morbid fascination with the zoo. We went as often as possible. Summer was zoo season and if you observed any animal in captivity in the Twin Cities between 1996 and 2006, we were there, and you heard us.

"In the wild a lion this size would cover 65 miles of the Sahara a day, chasing gazelles and wildebeest." we'd tell strangers watching a lion napping next to a bowl of hamburger patties in an enclosure the size of an office cubicle.

"Look at his fur, it would kill his mother to see him like this. Good thing he's never seen his family."

"Rhythmic swimming like that is the first sign of dementia."

"Let's get an ice cream and then look at that depressed giraffe with the curved neck."



The other day in Portland the tour bus passengers looked at me with the same expression: the way you look at a polar bear in the corner of a cement room, slowly chewing on his arm.

"In the wild a writer this size would get up to eight hours of sleep."

"See how she hunches like that? Another ten years and she'll be lucky if she can stand."

"What's that in her hand? Is that just a fistful of bread? I can't watch this anymore."

Dispatches from Aix en Provence

I don't really recognize myself lately.

Because the last couple days have been made up of really lazy activities. Like sitting at a cafe spending fifteen minutes slowing drinking a hot chocolate and fifteen minutes not drinking a room-temperature chocolate. And today I woke up from some sort of trance and I was in a lipstick store which is apparently a thing, trying on a third tube of red lipstick.

"Don't just dot it like that," said a saleswoman who looked like a very pretty clown. She waved the mirror closer at me. "Do big stripes, go all around.

"That's good but do another loop." said the only stranger whose face I would gladly wash.

"I don't even recognize you!" she finally said, I heard it minutes later because her voice had to travel through the deep layers of makeup that separated us, and the sound became more muffled as it crossed each barrier, making what should have been screams of terror sound like delighted praise.

a few of the things we want

Last week my friend Alanna and I went to see a singer-who-will-not-be-named. I was feeling like doing laundry and going to bed early, but we are party animals so we went. I brought an apple to eat while we waited for the concert to start. That sentence is both a fact AND a hint at who the concert was. I'm trying to eat five fruits and vegetables a day lately.

Fast-forward through the normal parts of a concert that involve singing and clapping to the part where someone in the audience yelled something not very nice, and everything immediately went off the rails. The guy doing lighting saw an opportunity and started shining spotlights on people yelling in the audience, and on the singer, who was yelling back. Pretty soon the only people who weren't yelling were me, Alanna, and the sweet older couple sitting next to us.

It was definitely the most uncomfortable I've been at a concert, and once at a concert in college the man next to me kept grabbing my butt because he thought it was his girlfriend's.

I wanted to leave and get started on my laundry and not have to deal with the spotlights and the fighting but we were worried someone would see us leaving and scream at us.

Finally the singer announced that she was too upset to sing anymore. It seemed like a weak excuse, the other day I did a conference call for two hours even though I had to go to the bathroom the entire time, which seems like a bigger deal than being upset. I guess that is one way I know I am not famous. That and the only people who recognize me consistently are a cashier at Whole Foods and the bus driver who saw me jaywalk once.

"So ___ all of you, this show is ___ing over I never wanted to do it anyway!" said the singer.

"Oh dear, now that's really a shame." said the sweet older lady next to me.

"You again." said the bus driver who saw me jaywalk once. I really need to start taking a different bus.

almost too healthy.

"We're so excited you're here today," my nurse said, while she strapped that horrible thing to your arm that tests how tightly they can squeeze you before your arm falls off, and also checks your blood pressure.

"Doctor Anderson told me you were coming in, and I asked what we were doing and he said we'd need some bloodwork and I said 'Oh no. This is going to be a disaster.'"

Can we take a minute, or thirty minutes because that's how long it takes to check blood pressure, to talk about how much I hate the word bloodwork? You're a nurse, not a construction crew. What are we working on? All you're doing is taking blood out of my body. Is showering dirtwork? Is nausea barfwork? Is a traffic accident safetywork? This metaphor has gone too far but you get the idea.

"This is going to be a complete disaster." she repeated. "I told everyone in the office and we've all been talking about it all day."

The fact that a nurse I only vaguely remembered was so familiar with my phobias was only mildly unsettling and it didn't make me feel any sicker than I already felt (which was definitely barfwork level). We walked around a corner and saw two more nurses who I promise I had never seen in my life.

"Brooke!" said one complete stranger.

"Our favorite fainter!" said another complete stranger.

They held up three different kinds of juice. For some reason I chose the one that stained the easiest.

Aside from their (friendly?) threats to punch me in the face if I moved and "laugh immediately and literally talk about it for months" if I passed out again, the nurses at my doctor's office are ok. I got bloodwork done and it was not the worst thing. And they gave me the dinosaur tape and they gave me a new piece when I accidentally ripped it off in a moment of panic.

And they were really nice when I spilled red juice all over the carpet.

I don't know why they have carpet in a hospital. If I start coming any more often I'm sure they'll be switching to linoleum soon.



Anyway the good news is I'm the healthiest!

fool me once

When I walked across Spain for a week I met a lot of people who had never heard of Portland, which at first I thought was fair. Not everyone needs to know about Portland. "Is it near New York City?" they always asked.

It's literally as far away from New York City as you can possibly get in the continental US.

"I really want to go to New York City." said everyone on earth.

Then three South African girls invited me to walk with them for the rest of my trip. Five days of walking with me means I slowly provide more and more facts about the city I live in, and the facts get stranger and stranger, less and less possible, until you realize the city must be imaginary, and I am most likely a compulsive liar, and I am probably going to murder you and your friends in the Spanish countryside.



Here are true but made-up-sounding things I will tell you about "Portland" as we walk:

Forests remind me of Portland! Cats remind me of Portland! So does sun. So do clouds, and mountains. My favorite thing in Portland is probably the ocean.

In Portland people don't eat meat, or anything from animals.

In Portland people ONLY eat meat, it's a diet inspired by cavemen.

In Portland I lived in a high-rise building full of professional basketball players. There are no street performers, only people selling a homelessness newspaper for a dollar. There are chickens everywhere. I get free shoes, yogurt costs a fortune. There's a giant birds' nest with bad air circulation. If you want breakfast you have to wait in lines three hours long. Most food is served in trucks. There are hazelnuts everywhere.



The more I told them true stories that sounded like poorly-crafted lies the more I realized how unbelievably great Portland is - we have the ocean and chickens and cereal-flavored ice cream and everyone needs to know about it. Because you can go to Spain or South Africa or outer space and there probably aren't very many cities as good. I will go, and I will look for them, and I will let you know.

In Portland my friend Boaz hosts a talk show attached to a bicycle and if you believe that then you are the most gullible person on earth, and you should sign this petition for it to be on the television show Portlandia.



And then visit Portland! After you go to New York City.