The Pale Blue Egg

        There’s this meme I love  where a real boy is eating ice cream next to a picture of people also eating ice cream. The joke is that this is what it is like to listen to podcasts.  You feel like you  are a part of the conversation, like you  are hanging out with your  friends. But really, the people you’re listening to all live in Los Angeles and have NO CLUE who you are.         I saw a matinee of Rocketman last week. Just me and a bunch of senior citizens who kept gasping out loud  and talking to Elton, and all  I wanted to do was yell at them, “THE MOVIE CAN’T HEAR YOU!!!!!!!!” But in my kitchen, listening to the Doughboys hypothesize about some bullshit like the differences between two types of cheese, I am the obnoxious senior citizen gasping out loud and screaming at my phone.  I can’t help my friendless self. Sometimes in podcasts, they (the hosts/ my personal best friends) will even be like, ...

        Every couple of months, I decide that Something Else is wrong with me, and then I take all these weird and drastic steps to Fix Myself. For example, my mom told us at Thanksgiving dinner 2 years ago that my dad has a gene mutation called MTHFKR or some shit like that. (The doctor told him it was the motherfucker gene--no joke--and so that is how we all remember the acronym without knowing exactly which letters made it there.) It has something to do with digesting some kind of protein (I think--I refuse to look it up because then I will immediately have all of the symptoms again), and it can cause all kinds of weird stuff, like anxiety, which runs like a racehorse through my family.         In order to fix this problem, my mom used her #1 superpower of 2-day free amazon prime shipping to send me and my sister these weird vitamins. I took them diligently every morning for months without ever really knowing if they were changing anything. Mo...

        This couldn’t have been literally every summer, but this is how I remember literally every summer: wake up, coach the little kids at swim team, swim practice for myself, eat lunch (a Subway footlong if I’m lucky!!!), fall asleep on the couch watching Star Trek while it rains, and go back to the pool for night practice before devouring dinner.         Summer swim team was the tits. I loved it. We even had a lady coach for a while. The two of us shared the same birthday, which was totally cool. She was weird, like in an aloof way, and taught middle school English. I liked her. Until we had this one fun day to celebrate the end of the season, and her son’s best friend kicked me in the nipple while we were fighting in the deep end over a greased up watermelon. And the coach took his side and told me some sexist horseshit like I shouldn’t have been playing rough with boys if I didn’t want to get kicked in the nipple.       ...

        There’s this part in Transparent when the rabbi wants to do this super cool service, and she gets all these seats that you swoosh around and fill with air. I have wanted one ever since the second I first saw that. And then--what do you know--they showed up in the Aldi ad last week.         I didn’t get one right away because I thought I would look like an asshole trying to use it. (Spoiler: I was right).  But once I get something in my head like that--wanting something stupid and unnecessary--I absolutely cannot stop thinking about it until I own it. (Ask me about my stamp collection. It’s not the collectible kind worth actual money, it’s the rubber kind that you dip in ink and just kind of put on things? I have literally a tower of them on my desk, and I have not touched them in WEEKS.)         My choices of color were neon blue, neon green, or dull dead-inside grey.         For $16.99, I br...

        I was in an earthquake yesterday! Did you know Northeast Ohio can even have earthquakes? Because it can, and kinda big ones. MY earthquake was a 4.0. According to one website, there have been nearly 200 here since the USA became a thing.         It was about 10:30, and I was still in bed. I was actually reading a Thich Nhat Hanh book about loving kindness because my shrink told me to look into loving kindness, and I was Getting Into It. I actually bought a ton of Thich Nhat Hanh books before the move to NE OH, but then I stopped reading them, partly bc I was having too many Big Sad Feelings to be able to concentrate on them. But his writing makes me feel so good and it’s all about the present moment and so I felt all zoned into that and then my bed started shaking and I almost had a heart (panic) attack. Am I conveying here the hilarious irony here of finally picking up this book I know will make me feel better and then something terrifyi...

I always forget that you have to sit down and write a whole bunch of bullshit before you even know what you’re going to write about. Or before you have anything you want to post on your--gag me-- blog. I hate having a blog. I love having a blog. It makes me a capital W Writer, even in those months and months when I wrote nothing. Not even bullshit.  It’s hot in this room. The fan’s not reaching me, and even though it’s only like sixty degrees outside (IN FUCKING JUNE!!!), I just got out of the shower and I’m sweating my tits off. I swear to god all I want to do is get up and turn the fan higher but if I do that I might not make it back into this seat and I already feel tremendous guilt over how I wanted to write first thing this AM and now it’s 4pm and here we finally fucking are.  I don’t know how to talk about depression. I’ve had some practice talking about anxiety and just being mentally ill in general. But I don’t even know how to describe th...

       I have been in a movie. I got the part because I knew the writer/ director/ star. He was my Latin professor in college, and I’m realizing now that, while it sounds pretty impressive, “Latin professor” for him was like my “part time job at the grocery store”—just something to pay the bills. In Latin 102, he told us about doing stand-in work for an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. Because I didn’t super understand what “stand-in work” meant, I assumed he was big time famous. The people in my class found him in an Adam Scott movie. He showed up unexpectedly while I was watching Treme once. He was in a syfy movie about a volcano, which I never could find. Every time I saw him on screen, I’d shit my pants over knowing someone who could be described as on screen. He was caught between syfy volcanoes and ancient Roman volcanoes. My friend Cam and I spent a lot of that summer discussing both Vesuvius’s eruption in 79 CE, as described in a letter by one of t...

sick         I don’t want to tell you the funniest part first, but here it is: I was really sick, like projectiling from both ends all night, and I asked Connor to go to the drug store and get some very specific things for me. I’ve been this type of sick before, so I ask for gatorade, pepto bismal, and anti-diarrheal suppositories. He brings me back gatorade, pepto bismal, and preparation-H hemorrhoidal suppositories. This is not at all what I wanted and will not help me in any way. (So now, in my apartment, on my dresser next to all my jewelry, I have a big blue box of pills you stick up your butt when you get hemorrhoids.) The rest of the story is maybe not as funny. It’s the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and I’m trying to go to bed early so that I can get up early for the 45 minute commute I make twice a week to my practicum. I am anxious that the break is ending, can’t seem to get back into my teacher sleep schedule. So I take a klonopin. I know this ...