By the way...

Okay, so a bit of "felt truth" here, for my fellow memoirists-- in truth, growing up I actually loved Mama's Family, particularly the episode where Thelma had a short-lived but oh-so-hilarious stint as the receptionist at a travel agency (when asked if she knew what to do when the phone rang, she replied "No, usually whenever the phone rings I run around with my hands in the air yelling 'what'll I do, what'll I do?'"). But I decided that, of all the early eighties sitcoms I could choose from, it had the funniest name.

Pete suggested that perhaps Mr. Belvedere would have been a better choice, and I have to say I might agree. Also, I just thought of Head of the Class, where Howard Hessman taught a bunch of overacheiving nerds. But I think I may have been the only person ever in the history of mankind to watch that show in its entirety, even through the dreadful Rain Pryor years.

Honk honk!

As I am not normally one to toot my own horn-- in actuality, I spend more time thoroughly discussing every tiny thing I have ever failed horribly at in my entire life, from myspace to Letters of Feeling-- I feel that I have thoroughly earned the right to tell you that I had a column published today in the Columbus Dispatch, a real-live newspaper with many, many readers!

As you can imagine, I have done many a happy dance today.

I know many of you received this news via mass e-mail last evening (sorry about that), but for those I regretfully missed, you can read the story online here. No word yet on whether my dad is upset about being outed as a Safety Man.

Hopefully, this will lead to more to come, and Dave Barry here will be asking for my autograph, just like I did to him when I was in the eighth grade and sporting a big puffy afro and a men's XXL t-shirt (I had big style then, boy).

Big copycat seeks friends

So, partially inspired by Pen's success on myspace (see her exploits here) and Meg's debate about it (here), partially because I heard the word mentioned at least 35 times yesterday as both a proper noun and a verb ("I was myspacing, and I ran across an old ex who now skins puppies and eats their brains"), and partially because I simply cannot be left out of any major trend that will likely make it into a future social studies book (albeit in one of those side bars: "The Aughts-- What Young People Did For Fun!"), I decided to take a second look at my myspace page and spruce it up a little. Mainly because all it was before was a stick figure and a random collection of unsorted friends. And while I enjoyed being portrayed as a stick figure (check out those narrow hips and thighs!), I thought I should at least put up a picture.

But I am not having the myspace success of others. For instance, why does everyone else get a top eight, and I appear to only have a top four? I am very popular! Very! I need others to see this!

Also, there was a scary period last night in which, no matter what I did, I could not get my profile picture to come up. I acted rationally, following all instructions (myspace runs very much like an old Commodore 64 program, don't you think?), finally resorting to voodoo, only learning that the picture had, in fact, been posted hours later, upon receiving a "comment," which is a scary, ominous note that appears in your e-mail.

So anyway, I am now more suitably presented on myspace, and ready to find friends (although Alan, didn't I ask you to be my friend like seven years ago on there, and you never got back to me? Is this because I suck?). So for the love of God, friend me! I am too confused and stupid to find you myself-- I've been trying, but keep getting a weird TECHNICAL ERROR! message that makes me feel scared and ashamed of myself, as if typing in a person's name in the search function is the totally worst way you can possibly go about finding them.

By the way, I'm still sorry about the lack of frequent postings. Hopefully something hilarious will happen soon (I saw those blasphemous pierogies again at the grocery store!). In the meantime, I should share that I found the greatest thing to cut out and modge-podge onto my as-yet-non-existent journal cover, so that project is well underway.

The Dark Underbelly of Journaling

I have had a lot of inquiries as to whether my sudden new need to return to journaling means that I will cease to blog-- it may appear as though I have already ceased to blog, given the infrequency of my postings and their sudden white hot lameness-- but fear not, as this is not the case. The lack of postings is simply because not much of note has occurred to me lately, and I am in a period of oscillating between Totally Unoriginal Thought ("I think Dame Edna just might be a man!") and Entirely Too Original Thought ("Have you ever noticed that when some fireworks go off, they look like big round balls that are racing right at your head?"), neither one of which really lend themselves to blogging.

And as for the journaling, I'm still debating whether I should even go back to it. Because as Cue pointed out, there is now an actual person in my house who could read it, whereas before I was perfectly comfortable just leaving my journal out in plain view (except when I lived with Dan, and practically buried it in a pile of my own feces to keep him from getting near it). Not that I think Ben would read my journal, and not that I would write anything bad about him in it. But the fact that he could read it if he wanted to...

Also, it turns out that not all of my journals were as genius as the Letter of Feelings journal. The journal that immediately follows it, the I Wish I Were Way More Important Journal, is rather annoying. Apparently, I felt that my life had no impact on anyone else's life whatsoever, by which I mean that they did not weep and tear out their hair every time I exited a room. It does contain this eerily prescient paragraph, however, written directly before a non-fiction workshop that I feared was going to go poorly (eerily prescient, is that a Wendy-ism?):

"I'm getting really antsy and upset all the sudden. Like I know everyone will be disappointed. Oh, brilliant. Why don't I just go get a job in insurance?"

So, the point is: I am still blogging, and I may begin journaling, as soon as I can scrape together enough stuff to modge-podge onto the cover of a composition notebook, which is really the only good journal (mainly because of its ability to hold modge-podge). Also, I am glad that I am past both the Letter of Feelings portion of my life (in which I was a hilarious psycho) and the Why Aren't There More Lifesized Posters of Me Everywhere phase of my life (when I was a pathetic crybaby psycho). Now, I am just a normal person, although still hilarious, and now much better looking. And obviously, still quite modest.

Also, as an unrelated update, Ben and I are about to start our sixth week of non-smoking! Go go gadget cleanlungs!

The Journal Journal

I don't know about the rest of you bloggers, but I've been having some nostalgia for my journal lately. My plain old, pen and paper journal, which I relied so heavily on in college and, to a much greater extent, grad school, where I apparently journalled obsessively about everything from the bed side at hotels ("The bed in this Sleep Inn is freakishly large. Like, uncomfortably so. I don't know why you would need a bed this large, except for having an orgy") to my thoughts on Australia ("I fucking hate Australia").

This nostalgia mainly stems from one journal in particular, which I wrote in the period from March 2003 to August 2003 (when I abruptly stopped and began writing in a different journal; according to the last entry, I stopped because I was drunk and pissed off about something, but I can't figure out what, although there is a semi-legible rant about why it's so awesome to be single, which ends with the phrase "I FUCKING HATE BEING SINGLE"). Mainly, this journal was about the following things:

1. My undying love for a guy (not the guy most of you are thinking of), and the ill-fated Letter With My Feelings that was given to him and received with no response whatsoever.

2. Hundreds of pages analyzing why there was no response to the Letter of Feelings.

3. Further analysis of how one particular incident, in which he caught me talking out loud to myself, probably put the death knell to the whole thing.

4. How my boss was absolutely sure that I had single-handedly robbed the company of our entire stock of Lip Ink. (This came up surprisingly often, and was usually intermingled with the Letter of Feelings, for reasons I can't really understand)

All I know is, this journal was intensely awesome, and while I was apparently depressed and nearly insane the entire time, I was also really, really funny.

So it makes me wonder-- should I really be blogging? Or is journaling where it's at? Don't get me wrong, I love blogging, but it has its drawbacks (mainly, that I can't discuss my actual feelings about certain issues for fear of reprisal, as in Pen's PAM entry). While the journal really would afford me more freedom, it, too, has its drawbacks:

• No one else can read it, lest I die of embarrassment (seriously, if any of you ever find this journal that I'm talking about here-- it has a picture of Richard Nixon decoupaged onto the cover-- after my death, you need to destroy it immediately, lest my ghost come to you and eat your children), and blogging allows me the chance to bask in my need to be paid attention to
• Other than the decoupage cover, it's a little aesthetically hideous, and causes hand cramps
• Most importantly, thanks to Ben, I don't really need to write tortured, long entries about how no one will ever love me. Mostly, the new entries would be "July 2: Ben is sexy. All systems are go." And without No One Will Ever Love Me entries, my journal would be pretty skimpy indeed

But I still miss it. I may go back to it, although it would seem odd to do both a journal and a blog, and I fear that I would find myself scavenging my journal for blog material. So for now, I think I will dedicate myself to Journal Interpretation and Self Reflection. So far, I have learned that I really believed that secretly, all my male friends were in love with me, but too shy and tortured to show it. Which they probably were. Who wouldn't be?

A time to gather stones together

I just realized that I've gone almost an entire week with no blogging! This makes me a bad blogger. It also should show you how very boring I am. But just in case you wanted a breakdown of what's been going on recently...

Trips to the dentist: none (hooray!)
Houses burgled: none (double hooray!)
E-mails answered: approx. 50, due to build-up and then responses to responses sent re: buildup
Computers broken: one
Number of hours spent weeping over broken computer: at least three
Computers now fixed, rendering me v. sheepish at my own weakness: one

Dang. I can't even come up with a funny list.

Apparently I have entered into what I would consider "a time to gather stones together," a period mentioned in Ecclesiastes (and, in a much more groovy way, a song by the Byrds) which I consider to be the most boring of all the time periods mentioned. At least "a time to cast away stones" involves throwing, which can be fun.

Can't come up with a funny list, and am making backward Biblical/60's music references. I think I'll stop here now.

Oh, and just so reading this post isn't a giant waste to everyone involved, I'll use it to mention that old seasons of South Park are on sale at Target for the ridiculously low price of $22. See! It was totally worth reading all the way down here for that!

Eat these, or you are dead to me

This one goes out especially to Ashley, who originally introduced me to the Sara Lee Cheesecake Bites back in aught two. We had them at a Christmas party, I believe, and I never stopped believing in them, even after every grocery store from Wilmington to Ohio seemed to have stopped carrying them. How could any supermarket worth its salt believe that cheesecake and graham cracker crust, coated in chocolate, would not be worth its weight in gold? But sure enough, the other day I was at Giant Eagle, having just picked up a vastly inferior (but still quite tasty) tub of Edy's Caramel something something, when I backtracked to buy more Uncrustables (as they still retain their crack-like quality for me) and instead found, lying on its side and covered in cooler-frost, a single package of the infamous and elusive Sara Lee Cheesecake Bites, which I immediately snatched in a Gollum-esque fashion, unceremoniously ditching the Edy's in the totally wrong cooler. Ben and I have eaten two each so far, and I already live in fear of the day when we run out, which should be three days from now, given our rapid Cheesecake Bite consumption.

Listen, I'm not saying that if you don't eat these cheesecake bites you're less than human or anything. I'm just gently suggesting that your avoidance of this particular foodstuff might just make you a Communist of the Kim Jong Il, Everyone Must Have The Same Dorky Haircut vein. Just saying.

The way we were

I don't know if it's because it's thunderstorming right now, or because it's after midnight and I'm still not tired, but I am very melancholy right now. And very homesick for Wilmington. Now don't get me wrong-- I love Ben more than anything in the whole world, and I love Ohio, and all my friends here. But I was laying in bed just now, just about to fall asleep, and this image of Market and South Fifth flashed into my mind, with the fountain and the apartment building. And then-- and this is really lame, but whatever-- it was followed by an image of the inside of Morton Hall, that area where the vending machines are, and we would all hang out before night class started, or during break. And it made me really sad.

Okay, so I never wanted to be one of those people who gets on their blog in the middle of the night and writes sad, maudlin things about the way we were or something. But I really miss you guys. I miss Cedar's, I miss Martha's, I miss the malevolent juggler on the river walk.

And then this sends me down a whole other sad road of missing people from college, and high school, and summer camp, and basically missing every single person I've ever known, except for Mr. Kenik, the gym teacher who made fun of the way I ran. So right now, I am pretty much freaking out with missing.

Point is: I miss you all. Now let us never speak of this embarrassing outburst again. Tomorrow I will return with more snarky commentary on everyday life.

PS: Does that outfit make me look fat? Why didn't anyone tell me? And why are my boobs at my stomach? Oh, the horror.

Serious TV overload

As I'm sure I've mentioned in the past, Ben and I don't watch much TV. But it's not because we're snobby people who very much enjoy birdwatching and poring over the lost translations of "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings." Rather, it's because if we watch more than five minutes of a show, we get severely addicted to it.

For instance, why did no one tell me that Hell's Kitchen is like the greatest show ever televised? I've only seen about 35 minutes of it so far, so I kind of actually have no idea what's going on, or what the point even is, but so far I've figured out that:

1. That chef that everyone calls "Chef" in a very important way is really mean and swears a lot, and throws things and often looks like he's going to cry, but in a really ominous way, like every tear he cries is a little piece of your soul.

2. Giacomo was cute, but now he's gone. And I kind of want to name my kid Giacomo, but I don't think non-Italian people are allowed to do that.

3. Tom is a big wussy baby, and I look forward to seeing him summarily humiliated.

I didn't really learn anything about the girls, except that the one with an extraordinarily large head (encephalitis?) is apparently a really good cook, and there's one girl who looks kind of mean and forboding, and I bet she's the one who sabotages the food next week.

Sadly, Hell's Kitchen is on opposite Super Nanny, which is the only other show I've allowed myself to watch more than one time. I realize that Super Nanny is exactly the same every week, but I continue to watch because I like that woman's accent a lot, and I keep waiting for the rerun of the one where the little girl says "Shermie was cwying 'cause I punched him in the eye."

Even more sadly, it turns out I was wrong about the release date of Arrested Development season three (or else they moved it on me, and Jason Bateman didn't even call)-- it's now not until the end of August, when I was absolutely positive that it was supposed to be this past Tuesday. I guess I could go buy season one of The Office to tide me over, as I know it would make Penelope happy, but dang it, it's just not the same!

Crime and Alex

So Friday I'm at work, and everything is going fine, la la la, coming back from break, la la la, oh, my cell phone is ringing how embarrassing, la la la, don't recognize the number, let it go to voice mail, dee dee dum-- it's probably the dentist's office.

But it wasn't the dentist's office. It was my neighbor, calling to tell me that my house had been broken into and the cops were on their way over.

This puts a major cramp on a good Friday afternoon.

Before I go on, let me just tell you that, because my neighbor apparently caught them before they could really do anything other than fuck up my kitchen window, they didn't take anything. Technically, my neighbor saw them passing something blue and cloth out the kitchen window-- one was inside, in the kitchen, and the other was waiting outside the aforementioned fucked up window-- and they ran away with that, but we can't for the life of us figure out what it could have been. Also, other than the robbers (how odd, that I now get to use the word "robbers" in a blog) locking our dog in a bedroom, no harm befell the animals in the house, either.

But here, apparently, is what happened, according to my hero neighbor Alex:

Alex came out of his house to drink a beer after just getting home from going swimming at a friend's, and saw the two guys, passing the blue cloth thing out the window. He didn't figure we'd have the kinds of friends who would necessarily be emptying our house of possessions via the kitchen window, so he called the cops, and then he called me. He then went over to our house and kicked one of the robbers, really hard, in the leg. Which I happen to think is really freaking cool. That one, the one he kicked, took off running through our backyard, and the one in the house ran out and started running in the opposite direction. Alex chased that guy in his car for awhile, but he managed to escape by cutting through some yards.

Then the cops showed up, and, because they didn't know if anyone else was in the house, pulled their guns and ran around inside my house, SWAT-style. Which means my cat has now seen someone holding a gun, which I don't even think I ever have, other than in movies. By the time Ben and I got home, the cops were already gone, but there was a helpful note taped to our door: "Your neighbor saw two guys running out of your house. Call the EPD."

I have to say, it does seem odd that all the time I lived in Wilmington, nothing bad ever happened to me, and now that I live in a nice neighborhood in Ohio, across the street from an elementary school, my house gets broken into and cops run around inside it with guns. But I also have to say how awesome it is to have a neighbor like Alex, and all the other neighbors who came over to make sure we were okay, as well as all the people at work who were so concerned. I do wish, though, that Alex had kicked that guy maybe just a little harder, and maybe a little higher up on the leg, if you get my meaning...

Best! Invoice! Ever!

Dear Customer,


Your advice is duly noted. Now please remit the $16,000 you owe us. Bye.

Nothing like a good chart

I have always hoped that when I die, someone will present me with a list of every single thing I've ever done, and how many times I've done it. So far, this is all I've managed to keep track of:


Technically, this is day fourteen of no smoking, but I don't add the hash mark until the end of the day (and I forgot. Sue me.). Also, my gum chewing has been sadly curtailed by the seven cavities and one gaping hole where once there was a tooth.

Sophie's Choice

Because nothing says "tasty pierogi" like William Styron's gut-wrenching Holocaust novel.

Update, for those fascinated by my grody teeth:

Okay, it's out. No pain at all, although I'm still really numb. I'm not a big fan of this big hunk of wet grody gauze in my mouth, but otherwise doing quite well. So I'm feeling good, AND I get to watch a Lindsay Lohan movie, and probably eat ice cream while doing so! Sweet!

Alas, poor toothy

So just about an hour from now, I will be parting ways with my one and only wisdom tooth. I have mixed feelings about this-- my wisdom tooth never actually hurt anybody, except for the day that it grew in (because I swear to God, it grew in in one day, specifically, while I was at the Olde Time Tavern on a Monday night with my friend Jared. I clutched my cheek, near the new tooth, and said, "Fuck! What the hell is this?"). But at the same time it's old, worn out, broken and very pointy, sometimes catching on my lip or gum...

Okay, yes, so it routinely hurts people, namely me. But I've just never been good at saying goodbye to things. I once cried for several hours when my parents threw away my old winter boots (something they did with great ceremony, dangling each boot over the garbage can before dropping it in and humming "Taps"). And me and this tooth have had some good times! It was there during most of college, and all of grad school, and for my first kiss with Ben, and through countless cigarettes and cartons of Yan Yan...

Goodbye, bad wisdom tooth. New, non-smoking me sees no need to keep pointy, unreliable you anymore. And plus, Ben says he'll watch any movie I want with me when I get home from the dentist, and I totally checked out "Mean Girls." So while Toothy may be gone, the gift he has given me-- the gift of forcing Ben to watch a Lindsey Lohan movie with me-- will live on.

Smile! You have artificially enhanced teeth!

Having not gone to the dentist for several (by several, I mean the very similar sounding but much more disgusting "seven") years, I am finally reaping what I had sown in my less prudent years (curse you, four-bottle-a-day non-diet soda habit! Curse you, Yan Yan! No, I cannot, I love you too much), starting with a marathon four-cavity-filling session on Tuesday afternoon.

For those of you who do visit your dentist regularly, you are probably unaware of the feverish terror that grips your heart when he (because are there female dentists? I don't know that I've ever seen one. They must be like Yeti. Or better yet, they must actually BE Yeti) fires up that drill, or even before that, when he comes at you with That Needle, that just has Novacaine in it, but might as well be filled with cyanide. But as usual, this trip to the dentist really wasn't that bad, although he did leave far too much filling gunk on the backs of my front teeth, making me constantly feel like they are coated in some sort of cement jacket.

The weirdest thing happened while I was there, though-- after he finished my cavities, the dentist (whose name I don't even know; I go to Aspen Dental, which is sort of like the hair salon of dentists, where they just give you whoever's available) said "Do you mind if I do a little cosmetic dentistry on you?"

This was intriguing; I had a cotton wad shoved under my upper lip to staunch some "unforseen bleeding," and was furiously twisting my copy of "OK!" magazine, and suddenly, he had the urge to just do some cosmetic dentistry.

"Because see? Your canines are real pointy," he went on, tapping on my thoroughly numbed but admittedly very pointy canine teeth. "And I see that your front tooth is broken-- I can smooth that all out for you."

"Ow Uch?" I asked.

"$150 a tooth," he admitted. "But I just feel like doing it."

And so, because the dentist just felt like performing minor surgery, I now have a super awesome smile and totally unpointy canine teeth, which is something that, along with that broken front tooth, had always kind of bothered me (something I never realized until the second he offered to fix them. For free. For no reason). Seriously, I feel like a fashion model now. Except for the rock hard crap on the backs of my front teeth. Which I can really kind of ignore, considering how sassy my new smile is.

Dear Google Searchers,

This website has nothing to do with Tiffany VanDemark. Yes, I have a picture of her here. But only because all of YOU were looking for her picture, and I was curious. I don't even know which one of these three women she is, but I assume she's the blonde one, who looks sort of like the secretary of the English department at my old university, only if she had become a man and decided to wear a metallic blue bikini to work.

Please don't be angry that you will find no information about Tiffany VanDemark here. As much as I love Ric Flair, my love for him does not extend to his very mannish new wife (why are there medallions on their underwear? Do I even want to know?).

So while it's fun for me to see you all visiting-- from San Paolo! Lithuania! Et cetera! I am afraid that your search for VanDemark-related periphery has come to a dead end.

Much love,
Kim

Is it my new non-smoking nose, or...

... does fresh-brewed coffee sometimes smell like hot dogs?

Also, I have discovered that my basement smells much worse than I had originally believed. Otherwise, the return of my sense of smell has been really awesome!

Quitting smoking by the numbers:

Days non-smoking: 4 (not counting today)

Cigarettes not smoked: 43

Pieces of gum chewed: 18

Relatives visited to stave off smoking freakouts: 4 (6, if you count their spouses)

Freakouts had anyway, despite relative intervention: 2 (plus a minor one last night after Ben fell asleep, because I accidentally banged my nose into his forehead trying to kiss him good night and it really hurt)

Minutes spent sobbing: 100 (or so)

So, the not smoking isn't going as well as I had hoped, but I am still NOT SMOKING, which is the main goal. The main side effect of not smoking, for me at least, appears to be sleeplessness (which aids in ease of freakouts) and depression, to the point where sometimes I literally get sad that I can't smoke, as if never smoking again were on par with never seeing my cat again, which it totally is not, considering my cat is good and fun and cute, and smoking makes me talk like Bea Arthur.

Ben is doing much better than me, and even that contributes to my freakouts. While I am threatening entire nations with my wrath unless I get a cigarette right now (Namibia, you bastards, I don't care if Brangelshiloh are there, I am COMING for you unless someone hands me a Parliament light!), Ben is calmly playing video games or watching movies or planning outings to prevent me from actually enacting my fiendish plans. And I had fully expected that I would just wake up and NOT SMOKE, and it would be easy and would be a garden-fresh winner. That's what happened the last two times, but I think in the back of my mind, both times I knew I wasn't REALLY going to quit smoking.

But oh, well. I am still a non-smoker, and, to bring the freakout level back down to low, I went shopping and bought a ton of new clothes, which are cute and fit me (until I quit the patch and my metabolism plummets and I gain a million pounds and meld to my couch). But until them, I am cute, I smell good, and, as Daisy pointed out, I will not have weird mouth wrinkles when I get older. All good things, and yet, I will still fistfight you for a cigarette right now. Luckily, there's no way I can ever win, so my non-smoking streak should remain intact.

I quit.

Or am in the process of quitting, anyway.

I know this comes as a surprise to some of you-- we didn't warn most people, and those people we did tell were given a different quit date. But based on some outside factors-- namely, the fact that I can't smoke after the extraction of that freaky wisdom tooth-- we pushed our quit date up to yesterday, meaning we have officially been smoke-free for thirty-eight hours.

So far, so good-- there was a brief period of intense hatred toward all humanity around three p.m. yesterday, when I would have gladly slain every koala in the forest for a cigarette. But luckily for me, and for the koala population at large, it passed, leaving me cranky but relatively sedate.

Ben's been handling it well, too-- much better than he thought he would. He started smoking a long time before I did, so it's even harder for him, but we figured we should do it sooner rather than later. We haven't even come to blows yet, either, which I suspect is rare when a couple quits smoking at the same time. But this could be because we spent most of the evening apart yesterday, with him playing a computer game and me using the computer to come up with anagrams for all my friends' names (inspired by my friends over at Turkey Hat Sweet). The best one I came up with: Alamo Tits. Also, Ben's name is an anagram for MBA Ninja Joe, which would be a sweet addition to the GI Joe line, in my opinion.

We're really hoping this works, so we can be smoke-free and happy (although I will never forget how romantic it was the day we found out we both smoked the same brand). Ex-smokers out there, any advice?