10am

Oh Asher Sarlin, how are you so freaking funny?

5pm

Fun with DIY!

Today I was looking to buy a new purse online. But who needs to spend money on a new purse when you can make one with something you have lying around your house!  SWEET!

Look, I’m all for DIY and re-making old clothes into new ones in an effort to reduce the amount of waste that we are creating as a people.  But I think I speak for most of the ladies out there when I say that if I’ve worn a bra for a number of years and I’m trying to decide whether to toss the ratty old thing in the rubbish can or bedazzle the shit out of it in an attempt to transform it into a lovely accent to my summer wardrobe, well, it’s probably going to get thrown out faster than you can click that link.  

2pm

12pm

Hi, my name is Emily, and I'm a creepy stalker. Please hide your children from me.

So, tonight I spent a good amount of time looking at the facebook profiles of people that I haven’t spoken to since high school.  Is this considered stalking?  They did technically “friend” me at one point.  And isn’t the internet pretty much public domain?  Well, I wasn’t particularly “popular” or “cool” back then (what, like I am now?), so needless to say, I’m not in any hurry to reconnect with most of them. But I am, however, in a hurry to study their lives via their blogs and websites for hours on end!  Woo-hoo!

My high school was in an affluent suburb outside of Seattle, Washington.  And do you know what you find out in the middle of nowhere when there’s this strange white-on-white gentrification of rich Microsoft yuppies moving into an area once largely populated by hicks?  Well, you find a lot of things.  Meth labs, llama farms, Ford Excursions…But do you know what else you find a lot of?  Mormons.

So, I went to high school with a bunch of Mormon kids.  One of my high school classmates even converted to Mormonism!  I think she was probably the only 16-year-old in the history of the United States to say, “You know what would be cool?  No, not a VW Cabriolet.  I’d like to be Mormon.”  

So now that I’m a young, spry, single twentysomething who’s desperately trying to figure out whether I want to stay working at my non-profit job for a wage that even we consider low-income or run away to a developing nation for a while and live out of a bindle on a stick, I realize that all the Mormons I knew in high school are MARRIED.  Every fucking one of them.  (As a side note, I think it’s really interesting to see what happens when a generation of kids who follow each other’s lives largely through Facebook start getting married and making babies and suddenly start finding out that someone had a baby because the creepy stalker feed on your homepage tells you that they changed their profile pic to one of them nuzzling their newborn.  It’s like a whole new form of gossip.  You don’t have to hear it from her mom’s neighbor’s hairdresser anymore.  Which is helpful since I’ve lived out of state for the past six years since high school ended.)

 As I’m voyeuristically (so proud of myself I spelled that right on the first try!) looking through the Facebook photos of my high school classmates, the nosiest part of me that yearns for more starts to get antsy.  That’s when I see it.

 http://_________and___________.blogspot.com.   

Oh my god, they have a coupley blog.  

I click the link and I am immediately hooked.  I spent the next hour reading the blog of a high school acquaintance and her family and newborn baby.  Then, I link to another.  And another.  What is this?  Is this, like, a Mormon thing?  All the Mormons I know from high school have blogs chronicling every detail of everything from putting down an offer on their tract-style home in the burbs (I swear it’s the exact same floor plan of the one my parents bought when we first moved to the Northwest) to their ritual Friday-night dates to Outback Steakhouse (where she worked as a hostess before she got preggo) to the growth of a baby bump on an ultra-hot, petite frame which eventually became an adorable-as-fuck trendily-named baby.  Here are some of my favorite highlights from an unabashed night of blog perusal.  

On one blog the wifey decides to dedicate a Valentine’s Blog entry to her hubby.  Sweet, huh?  She writes,

He is so amazing. Everything he does is so cool to me, and all of the knowledge that he has is so humbling. He is not only book smart, but he knows so much about the gospel and about the little things in life, that I cant help but learn something new from him everyday.

Wait a minute.  What’s the difference between being book smart and gospel smart?  Isn’t the gospel a book? Well, if you thought that she’s just looking for a pious man who can recite passages from the gospel on command, think again.  Oh no.  Other things are important. Like hottie factor and style: 

He is so attractive! Not only does he dress nice, but he is always clean shaven and he always smells so good. He has a good fashion sense, and puts me to shame in the shoe department. He is always in the best of moods. First thing in the morning he is sweet and happy and all through the day he is positive and laid back. There is never a time where he is hard to be around.

 Okay, I’m going to feel really bad about saying this, but I think your husband might be a gay. 

 I’m just saying.  

Then, there’s my favorite post of all!  The one where thet go over to some relative’s house (he’s a real estate agent and is going to help them with their. house-buying! Sweet!) and oh yeah, the newlyweds get to kick it with their pet Niko.  A Serval.  A wild cat.  A freaking wild cat in their home.  A freaking straight-off-the-Savannah wild animal.  

 ”

Oh yeah, you know.  Just come over and kick it with me and my fucking exotic cat!  How crazy is this?  So then deviate a little bit from my busy Blogstalking schedule to look up Servals, and I find out that it’s actually legal to own them, you just need an exotic animals permit.  Anyway, it seems weird as hell to me.  But I couldn’t get hung up on this issue for too long; I had more ultra-cheezy blog entries to read.  

 Basically the main themes of the blogs were love, family, quality time, love, babies, religion, and pets.  Oh yes, pets.  Pets are huge.  If you don’t have three pets (extra points for exotic ones) you can just kiss your blog readership goodbye.   

And so I was giggling to myself and thinking about how scary it would be right now to be all wifed up and babied out….and then I read this, which basically solidified my desires to live up my twenties and take as much time as I need to see this world before I settle down.  

 On a list of “six random facts about myself,” hidden way at the bottom is this secret little desire that desperately wants to be realized…

6. i really wanted to live in new york. when craig was applying to a bunch of different dental schools, I was rooting for Columbia. and then, when he got accepted there (and we hadn’t heard from UW yet) i was living on cloud nine. picturing myself taking the subway everywhere, shopping everyday, and becoming a true new yorker. then, craig got accepted to UW, and there was no question that we would go there instead. i love seattle, being next to family, and saving tons of money…… but i still dream about living the “real life” in manhattan. someday, i will get over it. someday. 

 Pretty much heartbreaking and inspiring at the same time.  

9pm

This isn't Terminal, please leave me alone.

So tell me, what is it with stranger people always trying to talk to other stranger people in airports?  I don’t really get it.  Today I was in the Oakland Airport and I’m sitting on a bench and—well, okay, it wasn’t really a bench.  Something in my brain wants me to explain that I was sort of doing a leaning-sitting move on more of a windowsill than a bench.  So maybe it looked like I was trying to be talked to by my body language, which was not-quite-sitting, not-quite-standing.  But it was almost boarding time, which is the only reason why I was sit-standing there anyway.  But anyway, this kid—who’s got to be like eighteen years old—with sort of an awkward, lanky appearance which is spilling over into his persona starts chatting me up.  His opening line is,

 ”So…are you headed back to LA, for school, or something?”  

It didn’t seem very well-planned, if you ask me.  

My response is, 

“No, I just…live in LA.”  

 And his response is, “Oh, I’m sorry.”  

And then he goes off on this long fucking rant about how he is from the bay, and he goes to LA because that’s where he can “play this thing” (as he taps the large box he’s lugging around; I guess I’m supposed to assume it’s an instrument and also maybe guess which instrument it is?).  He’s doing a very good job of playing off the whole “I hate LA, but it’s a means to an end” thing.  I know this spiel.  Everyone at my college did it, too.  

So then somehow this kid gets me to ask him if he actually lives in LA or what, because he’s being so ambiguous that I’m not really sure what he’s trying to say with it.  He clarifies that he goes to “med school” there—which he says under his breath so maybe “med school” is his way of saying “I’m eighteen and an undergrad, but I’m pre-med.”  Maybe he was actually older.  Sometimes people think I’m younger than I am, too.  Then he introduced himself to me.  We shook hands.  I was trying to display my disinterest in anything other than finishing my book and I think he caught on.  He did ask if I had flown Southwest before, which seemed like a silly question.  Is there really a person living on the west coast today who hasn’t at one point purchased a $79 ticket on Southwest for some impromptu weekend getaway?  Yes, Andrew, I’m a frequent flier here at Greyhound of the Airways, thank you for asking.  

Editor’s note:  It’s been suggested that this post may have come off a little more cynical than planned.  For the record, if you try to talk to me in an airport, I probably won’t secretly despise you and blog about it later.  Maybe I was just in a less-than-great mood on that particular day.  

10pm