Twenty Years Ago

Today, I recieved a myspace message from someone who I lived next door to from birth- 4 years of age. It is always very cool to have people from your past contact you so that you both can have a “Where are they now?” moment. In my response to her message, I said that I did, in fact, remember her “even after 20 years.”

And then I stopped cold.

Holy shit.

TWENTY YEARS?!

I am now old enough to remember someone who I knew 20 years ago. Seriously? I have now been alive long enough to talk in 20 year increments? What? When did this happen?

Granted, twenty years ago, I was only 3 years old. But still. This is definitely a turning point in me conceptualizing my own age and adulthood status. And it will only get worse. Next year, when I teach my own class for the very first time, the freshman sitting there will have been born in 1990. 19-freaking-90. Eeek!

Happy Monday

Here are some funny responses to some pressing questions.

Is America Ready for a Woman President?

Should We Be Shaming Obese Children More?

In The Know: Should We Be Shaming Obese Children More?

SWF seeks….Revenge

My earliest notions of revenge came from consumption of popular music culture in 6th grade. I liked TLC’s song “Waterfalls” and was surprised to find out that Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes burnt her fiance’s mansion to the ground. At the time, I thought she was the prettiest of the group and didn’t understand how pretty could get so bat shit crazy. And then, of course, 6th grade was also the year that I discovered Alanis Morissette and Jagged Little Pill. I have known for a long time, at least musically, that revenge was an option.

In the half a lifetime that has passed since I was 11, I have had little desire for revenge on anyone. I have always been enormously deficient in my capacity to anger. I am beginning to think that maybe if I could just get angry a little bit more, I would be far less sad about things. But sports, violence, any type of physicality, really turns me off. I hate watching people punch each other and squirt blood and lose teeth, ugh! Anyway, between my lack of physical strength and my docile temperament, the thought of a physical altercation has never really crossed my mind.

I like to think of myself as a fair and forgiving person. Out of the hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, that have been in my life, only four have crossed the line into “you are voted off the island permanently” territory. And for those people, there are pangs of vengeance. I’m only human, right?

So here it is: my revenge fantasy in all of its strange glory (this is the version for the male).

First of all, even if I hate someone, I would not want them to be injured or die. Do no harm.

Psychological torture, on the other hand, is my poison of choice.

So, it would start like this: He would be standing on the edge of a cliff, gazing at the sunset, totally relaxed and at peace with the world. I would sneak up behind him, and after a running start, I would push – no, SHOVE-him over the cliff. As he is falling forward, he turns his head for a split second to see who pushed him. He sees me standing there with a smug smile on my face, the corners of my mouth upturned into a smirk. He falls and falls and falls, most likely wetting his pants as he prepares to die.

And you thought I said that I wasn’t violent?

Well, at the end of his plummet, he falls into a large safety net of plush pillows and blankets that cushion his fall. And this cushiony goodness that saved his life smells exactly like me (which, as far as smellologists can ascertain, is 1 part Pantene Pro-V, 2 parts Purple Passion moisturizer, a liberal splash of Michael Kors perfume and pheremones that scream pure sex). Between the texture and the smell, it’s like I pushed him down into heaven….

Aha! Now you’re thinking that I’m being too easy on him!

Au contraire! For just as he is adjusting his urine-soaked pants, a 20 foot, upside down Mason jar descends upon him and captures him like the bug he is. He can see out, but he can’t get out. He is trapped and no one is around.

YOU CAN JUST SIT THERE AND THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU DID!

And to help the process along, a one hour loop of my voice plays over and over, listing everything that he ever did wrong…from the beginning. So, there it is. He is stuck in a jar that smells like me and has to listen to me tell him off repeatedly as he sits in his own waste. The minimum sentence is one year; the maximum sentence is until I get over it.

Gone Underground

Which would you prefer: a wild, turbulent life filled with joy, sorrow, passion and adventure –intoxicating successes and stunning setbacks; or a happy, secure, predictable life surrounded by friends and family without such wide swings of fortune and mood?
~Question 135, The Book of Questions

A few weeks ago, I was feeling great. The start of a new semester. I was busy and happy, having fun with my friends, meeting new people, and I had a half dozen guys calling me. I was buzzing around on a social high and I literally thought to myself, “I can’t believe that this is my life! I am really just on top of it. How fun! Que Suerte!” (Yes, bilingual Laura does pop up in periods of intense happiness).

And now, suddenly, I feel completely morose. I am anti-social, alone, pouty, bitter, and angry at pretty much everyone. I am so dejected and low and I literally think to myself, “I can’t believe that this is my life. I am really at rock bottom. How tragic! Poor me.”

And so it goes. The highs are always so high, the lows are always so low. Whether it be exuberance or misery, I feel it so deeply and it permeates my entire life. But I do it to myself, over and over again. I never can sustain that low-medium level of arousal that is necessary for a balanced life and optimum self-comfort (this is according to the social psychology piece that I presented in class this past week).

My answer to the Book of Questions is that I want the dynamic and passionate life over the predictable and secure life even though when it sucks, it really sucks.

I can’t help but feel childish. Maybe there is some way to become more balanced and comfortable without giving up the good stuff of the passionate life? Doubtful. Maybe time will wear me down and someday, I will be like all of the other women in my family, shackled to the familiar and mundane but feeling quite pleasant about it all nonetheless. I can still hope.

In the meantime, I am not one for clinical depression. I can never stay down for long. So, I may withdraw for awhile to heal and I may experience these intense feelings for awhile, but I always pick myself and feel better. Hopefully, I will not have alienated too many people by then.

One good thing is that if I am feeling bad about something, I use it as motivation to throw myself into work. This is actually great timing, in a way, because I need to work on my Masters. I am starting to get really excited about it. Today, I spent about 6 hours constructing my race variable. That may seem excessive to some of you non-sociology statisticians but it was all in a day’s work. Race is incredibly complicated to code when the survey allows the respondent to answer with more than one race. The long and short of it is that it was great progress and I have some really neat ideas for where I am going to take this project in the coming months.

The other awesome thing that is happening in my life (and I’m not kidding when I say I feel bad for myself) is that I discovered this new cat litter for Whiskers. It is made of magical little litter crystals and the jug says that I don’t have to change it for 60 days!!! Only daily scooping. I love it. I hope Whiskers does, too because the jug also said that I should probably mix it with regular litter until she is acclimated to the new feel, but I ignored that because 60 days!!!

Honey, All You’ve Got Is Time

I declare myself one of the most impatient people in the world.

If something is important to me, I want it done instantly. I like people to make decisions that affect me quickly. I often don’t care what the answer is, I just want things to be resolved.

You may recall that last year, my impatience coupled with my cockeyed scheme to “cultivate fearless passion” made me a fervent passenger on a fast track love train to Nowheresville. And then it promptly exploded, burned to the ground, and left me to nurse my wounds among the smoldering ruins.

There was a point last spring when I was so jaded, so miserable, so defeated that I sat amongst my comrades and said that Love was no longer a concept for me. My idealism and romantic visions had recessed so completely that I believed myself forever changed.

It took awhile, but I’m back. I believe in love and romance and relationships once again. And it feels great because that is who I am. I am the idealist, the romantic, the connector, the emotional one.

But this time around, I am no longer fearless. And not quite as passionate, either. Instead, I am trying to cultivate radical acceptance. Radical acceptance includes patience, something that is a great struggle for me. But also a great virtue. My focus for this year will be to become centered, grounded, patient, and accepting. And I think I am in a great place to start my journey on this more disciplined path after the fallout from my recklessness and the months of reflection in the aftermath.

When I was in New York this summer, I spent a great deal of time thinking about where I went wrong. Sweet, innocent, naive Biscotti thought that she was doing great things: living fully, loving completely, being passionate and following her heart. Alas, that was not any way to live at all! So, here are a few lessons that I learned and have changed me for the better.

1. There is nothing you can DO to be loved.

Somewhere along the way, I got it into my head that I had the power to change someone’s heart/mind/decision. I blame it on the media that tells us that if we buy or do or look or say the right things we will get what we want. Through a product or beauty or sexuality or a perfectly crafted love speech, we can be worthy of love and we will be loved by the object of our affection. This is false.

The truth is so simple. So simple that I knew it before, I knew it all along, yet I forgot it. Sometimes we delude ourselves because we want to believe in and justify what we are doing. But here’s the thing: being attractive does not equal love. Being funny does not equal love. Being smart does not equal love. Being attractive, funny, and smart (even in the eyes of the person you want) does not equal love. And trying, forcing, wanting it definitely does not equal love.

Love just is. It is there or it isn’t. Don’t take it so personally. It typically has nothing to do with your virtues and vices, your pros and cons as a partner and person. It has everything to do with the millions of subtle unnameables of the other person’s history and character.

The only action that you can ever do with love is to accept or reject it. There is no conjuring it up where it does not exist, no matter how exceedingly fabulous you are.

2. Radical Acceptance of the Other

My greatest regret (and my ultimate downfall) in my quest for fearless passion was the way that it made me only think of myself and put my emotional needs above all else. I learned that I was not a very appealing love partner because I only cared about myself and the validation of my feelings. I did not often enough think about what the other was going through. My lack of empathy and sympathy was reprehensible and contributed largely to the implosion of many situations.

3. Radical Acceptance of Self

My most recent discovery is that it is ok to want what I want. I do not have to compromise or settle. Instead of trying to enter a relationship where I have to supress my needs or inhibit my personality so that I can be the “cool girlfriend” who never taxes the nerves or creates an iota of stress, I need to find the type of guy who would not get stressed out by me. This will be difficult because it is hard to find guys who operate on my level, who have the emotional and intellectual sophistication to navigate my complexities. I deserve someone who finds self-growth important and who finds joy in intimacy and nurturing. Instead of saying that it doesn’t exist, I am going to start looking for it. He will be phenomenal. It may take awhile, but I’ve got time and after all, I’m getting more patient by the day.

The Skinny

I have been sort of, kind of, not really but a little bit trying to lose weight. I am pretty comfortable with myself, body image wise, and certainly do not want to return to my college state of mind in which I was way too concerned about my body. Over the past year, I have completely moderated myself. I work out about 4 times a week, never more than an hour as compared to my senior year of college when I worked out 6 times a week, for 2-3 hours. Instead of worrying about food all the time and having junk food binges on Friday nights, I eat a fairly balanced diet and don’t even really think about it. So, I am very hesitant to ever get back into any patterns where I tell myself to lose weight or, horror of horrors, actually diet. I hate dieting and I think severely limiting caloric intake wrecks your body. But, at the same time, I am being more conscious of food and exercise now because I would like to get back to my “fighting weight” as I like to call it. This is my optimum weight. My comfortable weight which is the weight that my body always likes to go to, no matter what I do, is pretty much where I am now. Lately, I have been feeling really busy and that has motivated me to also charge ahead and get to fighting weight status by Halloween (I like to set arbitrary deadlines for major holidays).

But here is the thing that bothers me about losing weight:

It seems like if you lose 5 pounds, it slims your body just enough to make the other 5-10 pounds that you need to lose more noticeable and protruding so you end up feeling fatter than when you had the old 5 pounds creating an overall round effect.

I also hate that your body takes fat away from the places that you don’t need it to first. Like clockwork, my 15 pounds goes like this: lose from (1)arms/upper body (2) hips (3) thighs (4) stomach (5) butt. And when I gain it back, it starts at 5 and goes backward. It is terribly difficult to lose bottom weight when you are pear shaped and the fact that you lose upper body first means that even though you are losing weight, your bottom looks even bigger.

Blah, I’m bored by this already. Weight loss crap is such a waste of time. I have been keeping track of the same 10 pounds for the last 10 years. My body always looks more or less the same size whether I’m burning 1000 calories a day or not working out at all. Oh, well. Let’s see if my Halloween fighting weight plan works out anyway.

Gooooooooooglin’ Miss Biscotti

Almost as often as I blog, I fret about who is reading my blog. A handful of people I know in “real life” read this blog and that is great (Hello, friends!). I also assume that some random people read it which thrills me even more (one “random” reader even sent me an email about it and that really made my day!).

But I have recently discovered that a third category exists. The truly random people who click on my blog because it comes up in their google search. How do I know this? Well, I figure if people can stalk me on my blog, I deserve to stalk them a bit, too. So, my handy dandy site meter tells me interesting tidbits about who clicks on my blog (don’t worry, I have no way of telling your real identity). It tells me how many people visit everyday, sometimes location, and in the case of google searching, it will link me to the google search page. For the past couple weeks, I have been tracking these hits and recording what people search for that leads them to my blog.

If my blog is a window to my soul (which it most certainly isn’t, who knows where I come up with half the bullshit on this thing!), then the google search is a window into the window of my soul.

For nearly a year, I have thrown all sorts of thoughts, musings, and ridiculousness out on the world wide interweb and it is fascinating to see which of those tidbits get picked up by random searchers.

So the question is: Are these searches telling of my own strange existence or do they say more about the weird people out there in internetland who put together strange queries? I vote for my own weirdness because somehow, somehow, somehow my posts come up when they put in these things.

Here’s the breakdown:

By far, the most google search hits that I get are for the post in which I reviewed Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder. It’s funny, but I remember writing that in July and thinking that it was a really slapdash effort at summarizing an impressive book. Googlers, if I had known that you would be reading it so frequently, I would not have been so hasty.

Second, I get a lot of things pertaining to the title of my blog: Glitter on the Mattress. As I am sure you are all aware, it comes from the rousing classic song “Love Shack,”— you know, glitter on the mattress/glitter on the highway/glitter on the front porch/glitter on the hallway. And the reason that I chose that as the title of my blog, beside the titillating sound of it, is because one of the most AWESOME dreams that I have ever had in my entire life is when I dreamed out the entire storyline of “Love Shack.” In my dream, it was all there. The shack, located in a large field, hundreds of cars lined up on a dirt path to get there, people naked and loving, dancing and groovin’, glitter flying everywhere. It was the most fun dream I have ever had in my life and possibly one of the coolest things that my mind has ever done for me. It was like my subconscious threw an enormous party just for me. It was so fun that I don’t even care that it never actually happened. So, I have a soft spot for that song and the idea of glitter on a mattress.

Anyway, back to the google searches. Very rarely do I get people looking for the lyrics of Love Shack. Instead, I get hits because of queries such as:

camper mattress
mattress manhattan
back to school glitters
happy first day of school glitter
generation glitter
keep glitter on clothing
Glitter drinks
glitter men

All of these seem to be pretty practical concerns so I have no idea why people click on my blog which is always followed by several random, usually frivolous sentences in the google search results page.

Ok, now for the interesting stuff. The stuff that concerns me and makes me question what kind of blog/life I am running for myself. Here they are, verbatim.

struggling actress not ready for kids
barboy feeling
Mr. Lubie
“I enjoy wearing dresses”
Death Becomes Her
telling the truth about the affair
Attractive why don’t guys ask me out
ending the affair
Mesexual
“Size 6″fat
sassy new haircut
“super attractive” guy
liberal dating

So, I am curious: to my faithful readers, does that list take you down memory lane? Can you see where google might have pointed them in my direction? And, if so, what does this say about me…

Securing that little place in hell for me

I am sitting here in my cozy apartment in my comfy chair. Whiskers is seated on the armrest to my right. And we are both being more than a little catty right now as we enjoy MTV and facebook: two things that I am becoming more and more convinced should be left behind at the age of 18.

(1) I do not watch MTV as a rule, but I made an exception because I wanted to see Britney. More accurately, I wanted to see Britney fail. Which she did. What a mess! Someone who makes 3/4 of a million dollars every MONTH should not go on national tv with greasy hair and a bad weave. Plus, she was pretty listless for a comeback performance. And I do not feel bad for her at all; she is clearly an idiot.

P.S. Rihanna is beautiful.

(2) Facebook.

What can I say?

There are people who I am not friends with and never was friends with but I went to high school/college/whatever with them and they have since friended me. So, for the most part, these aren’t people I consider myself having any type of relationship with. I just know them. Therefore, I don’t feel quite so bad when I judge them.

Our generation is the first to grow up with the internet as a social networking device and I kind of feel like we should outgrow some of this stuff at some point. It seems bizarre to me to see people who used to be on my teenybopper ICQ friend list now use facebook to show off their weddings and/or spawn. And to be honest, I think it is ridiculous. Facebook used to be for single, young college kids. I include myself in this statement: If you die tomorrow and someone besides your parents is legally entitled to your remains or you would leave orphans, you are an adult and should not be on facebook anymore.

Yes, indeedy, the facebook feed is singlehandedly securing my spot in hell.

As in:

1) Engaged to married. Wow, congratulations, was it worth saving your virginity all those years? Nope, didn’t think so. Or, you are way too young for this – does facebook have a “divorced” relationship status for your future use? Or, wowza, that was fast. Preggers much? And finally, if you use terms such as “so in love with my prince in shining armor” to describe your engagement, you are way too delusional and immature to get married.

2) Using facebook albums to show off your children. This is particularly egregious when you entitle your album “my cute kidzzzz!!” or “my beautiful children” and thus opening you up to the fact that someone (ahem, maybe me) will look at these pictures and vomit a little in her mouth because your child is actually quite disgusting looking.

I told you. I’m going to hell.

It should be fun because Sarah Silverman will definitely be there with me.

Sociology Blahs

Second week of second year, and I am feeling the sociology blahs.

1) I have spent the past week doing actual math problems for my statistics class. This takes me back to when I was 12-16, or studying for the GREs, and hated my life. Math makes me hate my life. I feel like I have served my time to the gods of math already and I have chosen a different course for my life, one that does not involve equations, calculations, and feelings of deep-seated inadequacy.

I cried tonight when I got to Part 4, Exercise 4. Real tears. Over Math. Just like high school. And I remember when my Trig teacher let me come in before homeroom to secretly retake a test that I bombed and would have sufficiently failed me for the marking period. She was very nice and and I apologized for being so terrible and she said, “Laura, the cream always rises to the top.” I think that was her way of saying that I was smart and would overcome. I took it to mean that I should find another kettle, full of verbal coffee, that would let me rise with a little more ease. And Trig was the end of the mathematical road for me.

2) The more that I learn about sociology, the more that I appreciate psychology. The more that I think about other people, the more that I just care about myself. The more that I hear liberal, politically correct bullshit that is supposed to paralyze us with guilt so that we can speak for no one else’s experience except our own sterilized, deferential and apologetic, the more that I think that we should all just go to therapy, write autobiographies and call it a day.

3) Plus, I think I am a bad person because I give into traditional beauty norms. I think I’ll write a paper about it this semester. After all, sociology is really identity work anyway, right? *tongue-in- cheek*

4). And to top it all off, they waited until the second year to tell us that any work we will do that might be anything near to meaningful, authentic, non-conformist or challenging must wait until after tenure. There is something incredibly outrageous about the stifling of the freshest, most idealistic minds in academia. Put us in a box and hope that by the time we have breathing room, we will have forgotten that we ever even cared.

Chuckles Bites the Dust

I was talking to some friends today about inappropriate displays of emotion – like if you were to laugh at a funeral. This made me think of the Mary Tyler Moore show. “Chuckles Bites the Dust” is probably one of the best comedic episodes ever to be on television. Someone said that I should see if it is on youtube…and what do you know?! It is. And it is still hilarious!

What could be better after a stressful day than some comic relief? It cracks me up, at least!!