Awkwarrrrrrrrrrrrrrd...

So there's a facebook movie coming out. Lame.

Anyway, today, while I was facebook stalking people after my officemate left, and I no longer felt obligated to work, I deduced (deducted?) that one of my friends/acquaintances/people-from-high-school-I-don't-really-care-about-but-give-full-access-to-my-profile-so-they-can-be-jealous-of-how-awesome-my-life-is got divorced. Why else would one un-hyphenate one's name and remove all traces of a spouse from a profile? It's tragic, really. How terrible that I find these things out when I have no emotional attachment to this person. Certainly she didn't want to have to share that part of her life with even those people whom it doesn't concern. I mean really, if I suddenly went back to my maiden name, everyone on facebook and myspace would for sure notice the addition of seven consonants and the removal of all vowels from my last name. And then there would be speculative whispers and pity and guessing and no one would ever feel bold enough to ask or offer condolences, because in reality you shouldn't have known I was married to begin with. You didn't go to the wedding, you didn't even get an announcement, you probably didn't offer congratulations because let's be honest, you probably didn't really care. But it's okay! You don't have to maintain a moderate level of interest in everyone you've ever met. So after that awkward discovery, I have decided to cleanse my friends list.

Other awkward things I have learned about people I shouldn't be friends with:

• You got fake boobs sometime after high school
• You quit your job to be a musician/artist/writer and you're bad at it (I hope no one says that about me)
• You have ugly kids
• You have illegitimate kids with other people I know
• You're gay (seriously, were you the only person who didn't know?)
• You just got out of rehab
• You're a Juggalo/Juggalette
• You're conservative

STOP JUDGING ME, PANDORA!

I needed a little gospel country bluegrass hill people music in my life today, so I typed "Come to Jesus" by Mindy Smith as a song seed into Pandora. Eventually, through an unwitting series of thumbs both up and down, through Allison Kraus and The Wailin' Jennies, Pandora decided to play "Ready or Not" by the Fugees. What the hell. That is the opposite of gospel bluegrass hill people music.

On a lighter note, serious yoga students apparently don't think it's funny when you acknowledge the constant struggle to hold your farts in during class. ADMIT IT! With all the garbanzo beans and vegan cheeeeeeze you're eating, you're bound to inflate a little.

Nnnnnnnnnnnamaste!

I love yoga. No, you don't understand. I loooooooove it. Doing yoga is like giving yourself a full body massage. Whenever I come out of a class, I feel relaxed, loose and fluid. And when you are doing the same parallel routine in a room full of people, it creates a peaceful, communal energy that just can't be achieved when you do it by yourself.

The problem is, it's so damn EXPENSIVE. The cheapest unlimited 3-month pass I can find is $200 (fortunately at a studio down the street...holla!), and I've seen as high as $300. You can drop in at most places for around $10-15 a class, and most studios have a pay-what-you-can class once a week, but those tend to be too crowded for the individual attention that I demand. And I feel justified slightly in paying so much for it because I could potentially hurt myself if I don't have the proper supervision, I appreciate the group dynamic, and the scheduled classes keep me committed.

However, I still don't quite get the cost. Most yoga studios are in gutted out buildings and they look like the insides of Chipotles. To my knowledge, there's not much equipment maintenance, unless the studio provides mats, blocks, straps, and balls (for which they charge rental fees). Further, the AC just doesn't seem to work well in most of the studios I've visited (and no, I didn't accidentally go to a bikram class), so it doesn't seem like there's much overhead. I would think that if the prices were lowered, more students, young moms, and frugalistas like myself would participate. Has yoga reached the point of negative returns? No really, I would like someone to explain it to me. I'm not asking this rhetorically, because I really just don't understand the economics of fitness.

I love lists

Apparently this blog has started to revolve around the things that are wrong with me. In conjunction with all my vocal cord problems, one major issue is that I'm a really bad throat-clearer. I'm plegmy like, always. It's thwarting any progress I've been making in speech therapy because I'm always inflamed, so my doc ordered food allergy testing. They injected like, 40 little pockets of crud under my skin to see if they caused a reaction. You know it's never a good sign when your nurse looks at your bubbly itchy arm and exclaims, "whoa, how are you eating anything?!"

Here's a list of things that my body only kind of hates:

• Chicken
• Eggs
• Pork
• Apples
• Oranges
• White grapes
• Peanuts
• Rice
• Rye
• Chocolate
• Coffee
• Tea
• Green Beans
• Broccoli
• Carrot
• Tomatoes
• White Potatoes
• Black Pepper
• Cayenne Pepper
• Garlic
• Onions
• Mushrooms

Here are the things that coat my throat in a suffocating layer of mucous:

• Turkey
• Coconut
• Almonds
• Barley
• Malt
• Milk
• Soybeans
• Corn
• Lettuce
• Cinnamon
• Safflower

And the thing that made my arm bubble up like a Canadian tar pit: Wheat. I am, fortunately, not allergic to beef, bananas, blueberries, lemons, oats, and yeast. Yay. The nurse refused to do the environmental allergy testing because she didn't want to send me into anaphylactic shock, seeing as how I'm allergic to, well, nature. But here's my question: how does someone like me even enter the world? It seems maladaptive that a human like myself would be born into a world like this, when I am seemingly intolerant to most things in the environment (except for mold. I'm strangely not allergic to mold. I'm apparently designed to live amongst amoebas). Nonetheless, I've been living this long on a diet of coffee, toast, macaroni, and red wine, so clearly it's not a life or death situation. Anyway, when I got home I celebrated by having a red velvet cupcake with cream cheese icing. Yummers.

Yup, I got these too...

I have bunions now too. The fun just never stops.

If a dog screams in the forest...

Okay, so before you judge me for using shock collars on my dog, let me just explain that we have exhausted every other option. Shock collars are a second to last ditch effort (last ditch being large amounts of quaaludes and martinis), and only meant for obstinate little brats like Maybe. Also, a little refresher in case you didn't know, our dog Maybe has been attacking our other dog Buster for the last seven months. Let me also justify my actions further by saying that Buster is not the only dog Maybe has attacked, so we felt it was necessary to deal with her aggression problems in general.

Anyway, so we got these collars. Only $260 on ebay, a steal, I know. Two come in the pack, and they have a remote with two buttons, one programmed for each collar. When our militant trainer, Scott, came over to show us how to use them, we first had to determine the "threshhold" for each dog, or the level at which the dog reacts to the shock. The collars go from level 1 to 127, so it's a pretty wide range. Maybe's ear twitched a little at 26, so Scott decided that was the minimum she would need to correct her behavior. Buster, on the other hand, spun his head around and then rolled over on his back at 18, so either he's a drama queen or a big sissy, although the two are not mutually exclusive.


We gave the dogs the opportunity to roam around the living room a little bit with the collars on, something they have not done since January. Scott had control of the remote so we could watch how he handled the inevitable brawl. Sure enough, Maybe attacked Buster after about five minutes, and after that, my memory is kind of a blur. It happens so quickly, it's like a Viet Cong guerilla attack. The only problem now is that Buster is actually bigger than Maybe by about 10 pounds, so he had her pinned in a matter of seconds. There was gnashing of teeth and clumps of fur flying all over the place, and this whole time, one wouldn't have even noticed that Scott was lighting Maybe up like a Christmas tree. Ultimately, he had to turn the collar up to level 75 before she even started slowing down so he could break them up, and I'll tell you what, I have never heard a noise like that come out of a dog. It was like this hiss-gurgle-scream, and she was reeeeeeeeeaaally pissed. However, I can't deny the fact that after she was struck by lightning, she didn't so much as bat an eyelash at Buster for the rest of the night. So thanks be to God that Benjamin Franklin harnessed the power of electricity so that I could live out my yuppie dream of having tiny dogs that like to snuggle.

Gut Rot

Ugh. I'm going to blame my current state of blah-ness on the vegan carnival fare I enjoyed last night at a music festival, but I have a feeling that it has more to do with beer and some shot called the "Lindsay Lohan" (a Red-Headed Slut with a little Coke...I can't make this stuff up).

Regardless, yesterday evening we were surrounded by our community at the Northside Fourth of July festival, and we were fortunate enough to have several of our own very close friends with us. My friend Madeline kept saying, "I'm just gushing with joy right now." I'm not very good at acknowledging those moments in which I don't think my heart could swell any larger, but she said it so authentically it was hard not to agree. So despite beer farts and dry mouth, I feel like I'm a pretty blessed person today.