Porn Shop Chronicles: WARNING THIS POST IS RATED NC-17

This past summer I worked at a group home. I worked from Friday through Monday. Every Sunday one of the "consumers," that's what the company preferred we called them, went to a store called Taboo to pick out some adult videos. I would give him forty-five minutes and spend a good chunk of that time wandering around the shop looking at the various videos and toys. I would always call my brother and tell him how funny everything was. Here are some of my favorite items:



1) I love mermaids. 2) It is kind of hard to see but the vibrator is irridescent with a shell on top, and the shell is pointy. Why would you stick that inside you? I have never, ever been on the beach, seen a shell and thought, I would love to masturbate with that. 3) The starfish plug is such a nice touch. I can get behind that.



Call me sexually naive, but I found this fascinating. And then I imagined what women would look like if our breasts were attached to our chins instead of our chests, like characters from Star Wars. i.e. every man's dream.

peach soap

P and I were walking down the street in the Pearl District of Portland. We walked by a store called, "Urbane Zen," and in the window there was a bowl of soaps, that were so perfectly round it was hard to believe that they were man made. I remember soap my grandma had that was very similar; it was peach, but it was in the shape of a peach and smelled like a peach. My sister and I were in love with my grandmother's bathroom. She had a hutch over the toilet that had sliding doors. Behind the doors were bottles of nail polish in every possible shade of pink. On top of the hutch were bottles of perfume, the kind with the tube and the ball, that now remind me more of blood pressure machines--then though they were glamour, that you could spray on your neck and behind your ears. On the counter were shallow jars of loose powder and large, poofy applicators made of pink fuzz. The bathroom seemed like a place were movie stars got ready for their close ups. I guess we didn't notice the space full of make-up and nail polish, and creams for your face was shared with the washer and dryer, as well as the glass for my grandpa's teeth and his fixodent. The bathroom wasn't in a hotel with marble entry way--it was in a trailer though, a trailer in the middle of Muddy Valley, off of a gravel road on eighty acres of land my grandpa used for logging. When we smelled that peach soap though, held it to our little noses and felt it soft against the delicate fuzz of skin between our lips and our nose--well, it was exactly how we imagined Hollywood and glamour and beauty.

MONOfuture

It was Science Friday yesterday on Talk of the Nation and this is what I learned:

FLASH FORWARD--Earth--Date: Friday, April 13, 2029

An Astroid enters the Earth's atmosphere but does not make contact. The Earth's orbit throws the asteroid off it's current trajectory and into any number of new orbits.

One possible one:

Seven Years Later: 2036

The astroid that went whipping by us seven years earlier comes back and is on a direct collision course for Earth. The scientist guy said that the odds of this happening, of the trajectory being changed by the Earth's orbit in 2029 to a path that would lead it to make a direct hit in 2036 is 1 in 45,000. The astroid's name is Apophis. The astroid is 300 meters arcoss. If it hit it wouldn't throwing the Earth off it's orbit, the old gal would keep on dancing--but it would cause huge environmental impacts, like wiping out the dinosaurs.

If/When this happens I'll be in my late fifties. What will I be doing? Wearing? Will I have a job? Kids? Will I have traveled a lot? Will I not have mono anymore? I drank three kalhuas and milk last night, maybe not the smartest thing. And I went swimming on Thursday, definitely not the smartest thing. So I am tired. I don't feel that worried about the asteroid hitting us--it's supposedly very unlikely, plus we've already drafted a solution to this problem: see film, Armegeddon.

MONOdreams

I had a dream a few nights ago that my grandma came back from the dead. This isn't the first time that I've had this dream and they are the best dreams. She always just shows up out of nowhere and we all get excited and ask how long she gets to stay. This last time it was just for a night. I think it's great that in these dreams death is like a job that you get a break from very rarely. So she shows up and she talks to all of us individually to tells us what is wrong with our lives, to give us insight. The dead give the best insight. She told me that I needed to settle down, not worry so much, and get married. In the dream we were all at my grandparents' house out in the country. My grandpa either never had the brain tumor, or was fully recovered. In the dream I never get to the part where she has to leave. We are just sitting around until the wee hours of the morning, waiting for her to go, enjoying each other so much. I'm glad that I never have to say goodbye to her in the dreams. I wake up feeling like I really have just seen her, like she really has pressed her palm into my heart and recharged me, as if by seeing her I am a little more alive than I was the day before.

MONOsick

I didn't post yesterday. Believe is or not I was running around all morning because Paterson was sick so I was completely worn out by three o clock. I left Paterson so convaless at his parent's house and I went to my mom to curl up and die. I revised a story and sent it out into the world. I also ate sushi. I don't like comments like, men are from mars, women are from venus--anything that lumps men into one catagory and men into another, but I have to say after trying to care from Paterson when he was sick, men are pussies when it comes to being sick, and maybe this was just Paterson, but they can be very mean. I was running around trying to make Paterson more comfortable and he was boohooing the whole way telling me I wasn't good at taking care of. I'm sorry, maybe the MONO I have is debilitating me. To his credit (I guess) he apologized later for being mean and when I was so, so sick that I couldn't talk or move he took really good care of me, the best care I've ever had.

When you're lazy and apathetic mono is a really bad thing to get, or it's great because it gives you an excuse, but if you are guilty about being lazy and apathetic mono doesn't abdicate that guilt. i have a lot of guilt for someone who isn't religious at all. I think it's my dad's fault, and my grandpa's (he's dead). My grandpa created the family business and my dad ran it and both are/were very great men who took great care of their family. Plus, both were athletic and my athleticism comes from them. My grandpa used to tell me stories about my dad running stairs at the high school--when everyone else was being lazy. So I have always felt like I had to work out--it wasn't a choice. Dancing in high school did more to drill this into me. My dance teacher could lay on a guilt trip like it was like pitch--sticky and gooey and there was no way of getting it off. I think I've gotten past this, somewhat, maybe.

I've spent the last few days thinking that mono was sort of joke, feeling good, but yesterday and today I am beat. I am giving myself the rest of this week--I start swimming again on Monday-maybe even Saturday if I feel up to it.

MONOlithic

I took the weekend off --not from having mono--but from blogging about it. I needed a change of scenery so I went to the coast. It was nice and I walked around and felt like a relatively normal person. I've been writing a lot today and I'm finding it hard to think of anything for my mono blog. I don't really feel like I have mono anymore, except that I'm tired, sort of. I'm also not sleeping well, that could account for my tiredness. I can't sleep because I've been having destructive thoughts at night. Not about blowing up things or anything, but more about life and how horrible it is. I wish i could be more eloquent about it, but I can't and maybe that is why everything I've written today has been crap. It's a lot of dialogue, two characters get drunk together and have sex and they really don't like each other at all and I don't know what the point of it all is and my main character is getting progressively more annoying. I don't know how to save her face. She is a snarky and sarcastic and she gets drunk with a soldier that has just returned home from Afghanistan and she doesn't like soldiers (she really just doesn't like the war, she doesn't understand soldiers). At first I wanted them to argue and disagree but still really like each other, teaching us, what? I don't know. But it just seems like they hate each other, and Donna, the main character is mean, and I don't know how to handle her.

The soldier claims that it was 150 degrees in Afghanistan. That is ridiculous.

Biggie just came on my headphones and I started dancing, just head bobbing and some shoulder moves. I like that if I were watching me, I would laugh.

MONOdiscovery

Today was an okay mono day. I felt sick enough to stay in bed and that helped my mood. I finished watching the first season of The West Wing and cursed it for ending on such a cliffhanger, but really, what was I expecting. It is sad though when you put in the last disc you have expecting to find out what happens next and it's just the bonus disc. So, without the West Wing I went bravely on with my day. I watched The Lady Eve, a fine film by Preston Sturges. I think I might have seen it before, but I can't remember. I also watched a movie that hasn't come out yet called, Fay Grim. I really enjoyed it. It is the accompaning film to a picture made a decade ago called, Henry Fool. Both are by the director Hal Hartley. Anyway, it is fun to discover good things. I've felt, since I've gotten older, that discovery becomes something rare. Maybe I am just not as open to new things, and maybe I am not looking because I feel like I have been disappointed by so many things, but when I was younger I felt like I found out about things and I gobbled them up. That is how I felt watching Fay Grim, like I had found something and I couldn't wait to gobble up more Hal Hartley films.

So I went to the video store to rent Henry Fool and I asked them at the counter if they had it because when you have mono you really don't like looking for things. The clerk was a young guy with glasses and some ballpoint pen markings on his hand. When I asked about Henry Fool he got all excited, "Of course we have it. It's an awesome movie." I told him that I had just watched Fay Grim and that I really like it and I wanted to see Henry Fool. Well, he was jealous. He knew it wasn't out yet and I have to admit that I felt powerful that I had seen this film geek's wet dream before him. I told him it was playing at PIFF and that he could see it there. As I was driving away I imagined myself maybe six or seven years older, extremely lonely, maybe married but not getting enough attention from my husband, or feeling like I missed out on something, and in this future fantasy I bring the screener copy of the movie back to him, right around closing. He would see me as some really hip film critic, an older woman, and I would use him to make myself feel better. We would have an extremely awkward and unsexy affair (film geeks and film critics are NOT sexy) and it probably wouldn't really ruin anyone's life. It wouldn't be like Notes on a Scandal. And as I was driving away, and having this fantasy I thought, I should write more.

MONOmother

The last book that I read that I really loved was called, "Bird by Bird." It is by a writer named Anne Lammott, and I usually don't like all that life of a writer type stuff but she really hit the nail on the head for me. Even though I have friends that write and I have hung out with writers and I talk to them I don't always get that they have the same battles I do--with writing and life in general. And why should they, everyone is different, but Miss Lammott really got me. It was like she was patting me on the back. I remember once in grade school I was upset and I'm pretty sure it was for no reason. I was a terribly sensitive child; I could cry over nothing. I think this was one of those moments when I was crying over nothing and I was in the office because my teacher didn't know what to do with me and the principal came out of her office and she said, "I know what's wrong," and she gave me a hug, and I remember my face being smashed into her belly and her belt, that had gold thread in it, hitting my cheek. This hug was great. Reading "Bird by Bird" was like a getting hug, but at the same time a good kick in the pants. She made me really think about why I write and who I write for, when you treat your writing like it is a gift for someone else it makes it different. Just like when you write and you are worried about who will read it, it changes the writing. I think when you have a blog that no one reads like me, you don't have to worry, but I still do. I think my readership is at about two, and I would certainly never censor anything from you two guys *wink*.

I wrote a story a couple months ago, the last story I completed, and my mom asked if she could read it and I am worried about showing it to her because the character of the mother could very much be taken to be her and I just don't want it to be about that. It is true that I will take autobiographical moments but I always make them better or more, you know, literary. They are jumping off points; they aren't the whole thing and my mom seems to walking a very fine line these days and I don't want to hurt her or piss her off anymore than she is already either. And she is a lot, of both. I guess she'll just have to read it when it's published in The New Yorker.

P and I were talking the other day--we had just exited my mom's and she had gotten angry about something and Paterson said, "You need to learn to just say, 'okay,' and walk away." And sure, maybe I do, but maybe I have too much of my mom in me to do that. Which brings me to the scary part--my dad called a half hour later ot invite us to lunch. I had to decline because I wasn't able to swallow at that point in my disease, but Paterson said, "Why are moms so annoying and dads so great?" And, maybe this doesn't go for everyone, but it goes for me, and then he said, like I needed this, "That's what you're going to be like one day." I think he is right, and that it is unavoidable. I remember being fifteen and really disliking my mom--and feeling so right about it. I felt right about everything when I was fifteen. So, basically, I can't have a daughter becasue she will certainly hate me, some day.

MONOlove

They prescribed me this medicine called, prednisone, which is a steriod and will help with the inflammation of my tonsils. On the bottle there is a warning that says, "this medicince can be it hard to fight infections." You see, when your body is attacked by some infection or virus the tonsils are on the front lines, now this steriod basically shuts off the immune system so my tonsils will stop being fiery and huge, trying to trick the virus or bacteria into thinking my body is an inhospitable place. My grandpa was given a whole lot more of this steriod when they found out he had a brain tumor. I wasn't here to see it but supposedly he did not react well to it. Plus, my dog Lilygirl has to take it when she hurts her back, which often happens because she is a twelve year old bassett hound.

The pill is small, round, and orange, the color of a creamsicle. I don't know why I didn't notice the first two days I was taking it, but it tastes awful. The container carries a warning: Take with food or milk. At first I thought this was to help your stomach but I think it's to help mask the awful taste. Back when I was younger, and much more wild (or attempting to appear wild), I did my fair amount of ecstacy. When we were ready to start our "roll," we would place the tablet, which, yes, usually had some symbol on it like a happy face, or a heart, in the back of our mouths, near out teeth and we would bite down on it, so as to break it up a bit, then we would drink orange juice like we were hungover. The moments from when the ecstacy would hit my taste buds, until the orange juice would come and wash it away were awful. It is not a vitaminy, medicine taste. I hate that as well. It is the wretched taste of something that should not be put in your body. Your body knows it and it is yelling out, your tongue is screaming, "THIS! YOU WANT TO INJEST THIS! YOU HAVE TO BE CRAZY! THIS IS AWFUL!" With the ecstacy, my body had a point, but with the prednisone, I think it isn't taking the good with the bad. This little, orange pill has saved me from so much pain. Yet, if there was a wave of extremely infectious disease I would probably die.


Now, what I really want to talk about is Valentine's Day. It is Valentine's Day today. I have always hated Valentine's Day. When I was younger I hated it because it made me feel uncomfortable. Not because I didn't have a boyfriend, oh no, I had plenty of boyfriends. It is hard for me to think of a Valentine's Day when I haven't had a boyfriend. I'm sure in 8th grade I was dating David Toth. I think he brought me a stuffed Tigger from his family's trip to Disneyland. We broke up a few days later. I was never comfortable giving my boyfriends gifts. What if they didn't like them? What if they thought they were stupid, and therefore, I was stupid? So I would usually just call a preemptive strike and break up with them before it got to the level of gift giving. The ultimate story of this is from sixth grade. I was dating a very sweet boy who really liked me a lot. I mean, even now, I know he liked me more than just some silly sixth grade hold hand in the hallways thing, this was like a I might still like you after Christmas Break thing. But the gift thing ruined it. I heard it through the rumor mill that he had got me the cassette tape, "Oooo, on the TLC Tip," for Christmas. I really wanted that tape; it was the perfect present, and I had nothing for him. So what could I do? I had to break up with him. I tried to give the tape back him, to refuse it, but he wouldn't let me. He wanted me to have it. I had no choice. I had to jam to "What About Your Friends?" all Christmas Break on my My First Sony Walkman.

So after many middle school relationships--let me tell you, I went through them faster than maxi pads--in high school I got serious. So my first high school boyfriend I really like and I don't want this Valentine's Day gift giving mess to ruin everything. I forced myself to get over Christmas--everyone gives gifts on Christmas. I could too. But no way would I do Valentine's Day--so I just told him that I didn't like Valentine's Day, not only did I not like, I refused to see him on that day. It coudln't be treated as just a regular day. It had to be treated as an anti-day (which might be what night is, i'm not sure).

Now, I will tell you--I like Valentine's Day. I like that my friend Billy was hoping to get a temp job delivering flowers on this day and was hoping to also see Music and Lyrics. I like that Krista is going to make Jared some steak dinner and tiramsu with beer--and she is going to eat some of the steak because she is a fake vegetarian, which she has every right to be. If I had the fear of roast beef that she has, I would be a fake vegetarian too. I like that Paterson is going to come visit me tonight. I would like that even if it wasn't Valentine's Day, but since it is--it feels special. And, maybe that is what I was so afraid of back when I was eleven, feeling special. It can be a scary sensation--you're different than everyone else; you're special. Paterson will probably get here pretty late (late for me is now 7:30), and he isn't really allowed to kiss me, and any sort of physical intimacy is out of the question, but maybe we can eat a little something and watch "The West Wing," and feel special.

MONO

On Saturday morning I was diagnosed with mono. Now, I know you can't die from mono, even though my boyfriend tried to convince me you can, but I think this will be a good test, can you die from boredom, and a really, extremely painful sore throat? I was going to start this mono blog earlier--but I haven't had the resources to blog from bed, and I wanted it to be very authentic. Plus this is the first day when I am actually feeling better. So, I have probably had mono for well over a week now, but the blog starts here, and goes until it is over-the mono, or my life, having died of boredom.

Now, I have to admit--I have always secretly wanted mono. I like watching entire seasons of television series in one fair swoop, but whenever I do it I always feel guilty. I always thought mono would eradicate that guilt. It does, but you have to feel like shit in the process, and once you are done watching the entire season of twenty four, season 2 (not as good as season 1), there isn't going out with a friend for a drink, or going to for a walk, or even going to a movie to look foward to. It is just more of your ass in bed, watching television, season by season.

I have created some mono goals, because once I really start feeling better and I am just biding time, not moving in hopes my spleen doesn't rupture--I think it will be good to have some direction:

1. finish two stories.

2. read i, tina. i, have always wanted to read this.

3. learn how to make shoes. in hopes of maybe making your own pair of shoes.

4. research pattern making.

5. practice/study better grammar.


This seems good for now, and of course can be completely revised. that's the great thing about goals, they are so changable.
I made some goals last fall, one was to get a "hot bod." it's a good thing mono is like the best diet ever.