laundry sucks.

for the past year i have hated doing laundry. i cannot recall this process bothering me before i moved to portland, so i assumed my newfound distaste was linked to the fact that in order to prevent all of my lighter-colored clothing from turning gray, i had to spend five dollars for two loads of washing and drying in my shady apartment complex's laundry facility. sometimes people would for some unknown, infuriating reason open my washer or dryer mid-cycle and then not restart it, severely inconveniencing me by delaying my finishing time. this, also, was a definite factor in my hatred of doing laundry.

now i live with my parents, where doing laundry is free, and i still despise it, so i now know that my disdain runs deeper than the pacfic tower laundry facilities. i have lived here for over six weeks and have done laundry one and a half times. (the half occured when i first arrived and was a tiny load, which is very much out of my laundry-hoarding character.) my cue for laundry is when i run out of underwear. i very much enjoy buying new underwear, so i have a lot of it. this allows the intervals between washings to be rather extensive. but today was the day i opened my underwear drawer and removed the last pair, so i am now forced to separate my large pile of clothing and fire up the washer and dryer once more.

not all of the attire i throw onto the pile of what becomes laundry is actually dirty. sometimes i pluck an item from its hanger, and then decide it's not what i want to cover my body with that day, so into the hamper it is tossed. or there are those rare times i wear something without spilling on myself like a fucking two-year-old, leaving it in perfectably acceptable condition to be worn again, yet when i disrobe for the evening, i wind up lazily throwing it in the general direction of my hamper.

so then, when the inevitable day comes when i run out of clean underwear, i must sort through the pile, smelling shirts and looking for visible stains in order to determine what is really in need of cleansing. and i think my hatred of laundry in actuality stems from this process.

i know what you're thinking, internet, "why don't you just put clean clothes back into your closet instead of misplacing them into the hamper?" i have thought about this too. i am trying to visualize myself doing this right now, and it just feels so unnatural. like i would lose so much time in my everyday life just sorting and hanging up clothes. sure, it might simplify the process on the day i run ouf clean underwear, but i would experience a small dose of the irritability i feel on laundry day on a daily basis. and i can't have every one of my precious days be affected in this way. i just can't. i am already emotionally fragile enough as it is.

oh, shit.

i have been fully awake for less than an hour and have already made two earth-shattering realizations.


1. the internet is killing my ability to read real books. i used to be able to read an entire book in one sitting. it was not a problem. i even enjoyed it. now i usually think about taking a nap after every three pages and have to coax myself into finishing chapters.

today i read two articles about how reading online affects literacy, and basically, reading online is better than not reading at all, but it doesn't compare to the deep, linear reading of a book and does no favors for the attention span.

overall, this is very depressing news to me. because i love the internet so fucking much. it has been a great source of comfort to me within the last few years, as my life continues to deviate from my expectations. but i also love the ability to read books in a timely manner.

this is such a dilemma. perhaps if i force myself to read books regularly for extended periods of time, i will regain my once natural reading ability, while still being able to waste away countless hours on the internet. yes, i think that will be my plan for now.


2. i am guessing it is highly probably for me to spend a very large portion of my adult life half-drunk, watching csi on dvd with my cat.

i fucking love babies.

i am not one of those crazy girls that has a very definite life plan that includes an age by which she wants to be married and how many children she wants to have of each gender with preselected names. in fact, i don't know if i ever want to be married, but i have decided within the last twenty minutes that i would really like to have a baby.

as a female, the idea of motherhood and carrying life should probably seem like the most natural thing in the world to me. it doesn't. when i imagine something living (or nonliving, for that matter) in my uterus for nine months, i am, simply put, genuinely creeped out. i've seen newborns. they don't even really look human. the idea of pushing one of those out of my body is sort of repulsive, actually. but new mothers always love their children, probably because they schlepped them around for so long that they are a) just thankful to not have it inside of them and b) you can't hate your own newborn baby, people will in turn hate you. and once they get a little older they become considerably more cute, kind of like kittens.

in the distant future, when i have my shit together mentally and fiscally and have found a fly, reliable fellow who matches or exceeds my level of coolness, i am going to proposition this fellow to create one of the top ten (at least!) coolest babies in the world. gwen stefani's spawn, kingston, ranks in at number one right now, just for reference. but my baby is probably going to blow that cute little shit out of the water.

how do i know my baby is going to be so fucking cool? i will tell you. i am a connoisseur of cute babies, and i can say without being biased, that i was off-the-charts adorable from my birth to approximately six years of age. (it definitely went downhill from there, but i think within the last year or two i've started to make a comeback.) i also happen to look exactly like my mother, who happens to look identical to her mother, which leads me to believe that my genetics will shine through in the making of this baby.

my partner in baby creation and i are going to make great parenting choices and our cool baby will not only be one adorable, well-dressed motherfucker, it will also be a baby that only cries for a damned good reason.

when it learns how to talk, i will record it singing along to top 40 hits and put these videos on youtube for others to partake in the awesomeness of my child. like the "my humps" baby, only even more incredible.

get it, gurl!

i have applied to 10-15 different places, and i only need one job. so you would assume that the odds are in my favor. but you would be sorely mistaken. because these kinds of logistics do not apply to the art of job hunting.

and while my life is still a toilet, at least things are looking up for one of my favorite crazies, second only to amy winehouse, britney spears.

here she is at an autism benefit:



do you see what is going on in that picture? she is standing next to two clean, sane-looking people, and she does not look out of place!

a vast improvement from this:

i'm a slut.

my family had dinner guests this evening. the couple that came over brought their son, who was seven or eight years old and seated next to me. he was not impressed by my mother's schnitzel, and the way he periodically panted made me believe he was definitely going to throw up on his plate. he didn't. but his behavior inspired the mothers to discuss the eating habits of their children, and the following dialogue occurred.

mom: "stephanie is easy. she always ate everything and still does."
dad: "stephanie, mom just said you were easy."
me: "well, you know what that means.."

(AWKWARD MOMENT, ALL AROUND.)

mom: "she's just like her dad."

why don't job applications fill themselves out, huh?

i wish someone i could just have a chance to tell employers how perfect of an employee i am.

my reasoning:

1. i'm poor and recognize that i am too unqualified to work jobs that make lots of money, so no matter how atrocious the job is, i will complete it out of sheer desperation for income.

2. i hate being reprimanded, which is my primary motivation for meeting expectations at work. i will never be late. i will never simply fail to show up for a shift, because i don't like it when people are made at me. also, i'm poor and need all of the hours i am given.

3. i hate being new at jobs so much, i would work at a job i completely detested simply to avoid having to find another one. so, no worries about me jumping ship shortly after time, energy and money have been wasted in order to train me.

oh, the south.

today i went to a columbus catfish game. the catfish play baseball. i kind of thought they sucked. my very limited understanding of baseball may have something to do with this. apparently they have been on a winning streak. the game itself was incredibly boring, but my fellow spectators were not. in fact, they were fascinating and caused me to raise several important questions.

the most pressing one being, "why do parents still give their children bowl cuts?" i just cannot grasp it. there was one child in particular that was totally fucking adorable, but his stupid bowl cut made me hate him. are these the kind of emotions parents want their kids to evoke in others? if i had to guess, i would settle with "no." bowl cuts ruin children.

while the bowl cuts were unsettling, the most disturbing hair belonged to another little boy. this child was sporting big, blonde curly hair that was tapered into a rat tail in the back. the effect could best be described as a coonskin cap (a la davy crockett) made of hair. i could not peal my eyes away from it.

until i looked a few rows down and saw a young man with a string of spitty mucus dangling an estimated six inches from his mouth. then he sucked it back up. it got even worse when some of it stuck to his chin. after some careful examination i realized this person was mentally challenged, at which point i was actually somewhat relieved. but even after i was able to rationalize the spit dangle, the remnants were still on his chin, and no matter how much i attempted to telepathically convince the men he was with to give him a tissue to wipe it off, they only paid attention to the game. eventually, the spitter noticed his face was still dripping and resorted to cleaning himself with his t-shirt. which, given the circumstances, was not such an awful decision.

i could eat my whole damn house.

i had a dream about the olsen twins last night. this is the second time i can remember this happening. i'm sure it's some kind of sign. probably that i am going to be a billionaire.

tomorrow i have to go to my new institution of higher learning to register for classes and shit. i am a fairly self-assured person, but i really can't think of anything that makes me feel more insecure than college. not because i don't think that i can handle it (because i'm obviously a genius, so that's never really been a problem), but i feel like there is so much pressure to choose a path for my future, and i'm just not ready for it... okay, society?

there are people who say to me, in an effort to provide support, "oh, it doesn't really matter what you major in. most employers will just appreciate the fact that you have a degree." this is not comforting in the least. because i want to have an education i can put to use, and i want my major and future career to have a correlation. i do not want to spend thousands of dollars earning a degree as an english lit major to become the manager of a home depot. i am looking for something with a little more meaning.

i wish that all i wanted in my life was to get married and pop out babies. it's not necessarily that these aspirations are any less admirable than seemingly more glorious goals. it's just that if my ambition was to lead a so-called simple life of marriage and children, at least i would know what i wanted and when i had achieved it.

a miraculous day.

today, my mother told me that my hair looked good. at first i thought she was being cruel as usual because my mother finds something to criticize about my appearance every single day, and my hair is a common target. Other frequent complaints are directed at my choice of attire and make-up (or lack thereof).

the greatest part of her compliment was that my hair looked exactly like it has every day for the last, oh, i don't know.. two months.

my family recently got two dogs, buckwild and woody. (my family is pure class, by the way.) i have never really had a dog before, and i can honestly say that i still love my ferocious cat, dewey, a thousand times more. the cuter, smaller of our dogs, woody, refuses to cuddle with anyone for more than three minutes unless you take advantage of him while he's sleeping. this always seems a little inappropriate, like date rape. sometimes when he's laying down, i like to lay next to him to stroke his velvety fur, and he will get up and walk ten feet away from me, only to lie down again. depending on how resilient i am feeling, i choose to follow him despite his blatant rejection of my love. i figure that i will eventually wear him down. he can't run forever.

i think i would prefer dogs if they purred. when i pet my cat, and he wants to say, "you are petting me, and i love you for it," he makes the most delightful purring sound. but when i'm petting of my dogs, even the one who lets me, i have no way of knowing if they are really appreciating my caresses.

better late than never.

i really wish that i had written about my journey across the country as it was happening, because i really feel that it was an experience i should have documented. i have a really shitty memory (thanks, chronic marijuana usage) so now many of the hilarious details have already left me. but i will attempt to recall as much as possible. or maybe i will just make things up because nobody will read this and after enough time i probably won't be able to distinguish the embelishments from the facts.

we left my grandparents' in cameron park, ca way too early in the morning. our first destination was salt lake city, which turned out to be something like a 12 hour drive. We had already been driving for several hours and were somewhere in nevada when my father purchased an up-to-date atlas. he found our location on a map and then started flipping many pages to look at a map of our destination. at the sight of all of this page flipping i grew extremely anxious and said, "oh god. can we really be that far away?" my father saw this as an opportunity to ridicule me since the maps of the states were in alphabetical order and the number of page flips did not correlate to distance in miles, just distance in the alphabet.

we finally got to salt lake city. we were staying in a hotel in the outskirts. we were hungry. we tried to find a restaurant. we settled on chili's, which turned out to be THE hippest place for mormons to be at six o'clock on a monday night. at one point i looked over at the table next to us to see a man clipping his fingernails. i am pretty sure that's some kind of health code violation. one of the hostesses looked exactly like this girl i went to high school with, which made me extremely uncomfortable. it was not her, but it was still weird. upon concluding our meal at chili's we decided to explore the mormon mecca and went to temple square.

most of the mormons i have met are very nice. this can likely be attributed to brain washing. so, we walk into temple square and are greeted by a young chinese woman who asks if we want to take a tour that starts in three minutes. my father and i agreed. the other tour guide was another young woman, and she was from hawaii. we stood around making small talk, telling each other where we from etc. then the chinese girl turned to my father and inquired about our relationship, asking, "you guys are... friends?" i do not know if child brides are common in the mormon church. i quickly responded with a disturbed, "no. he's my dad." which only made everyone feel more awkward.

the tour commenced. i'm not sure why i was not expecting this, but the tour was littered with information that clearly was meant to convert non-mormons into mormons. the two tour guides talked a little more about themselves, explaining that they were on a mission and would return to their homes when it was over, hopefully to find righteous men to get married to and start families with. i swear i am not making this up. and she definitely used the term "rightous men." while she said this she also gave a hopeful look to the ceiling, as if she was asking god to help her with this quest. i wonder how many times a day this happens. i cringed.

the next notable moment of the tour occured when we were able to visit a 12-foot jesus statue in room painted to look like the universe. they asked us to please be reverent as they played a narration about jesus. i wasn't really listening. but i did turn to my dad and ask, "is this creepy?" because sometimes i don't know if i just get uncomfortable in religious settings because i am on my way to hell or if they are genuinely unsettling. he also found it creepy. i concluded this section of the tour by taking a picture with jesus. i might frame it and hang it above my bed.

the rest of the tour was pretty boring. we went to the first ever mormon church, where the tour guides sang us a song and forced us to fill out notecards reviewing the tour. i didn't want to offend so i just said it was interesting and the girls were nice. it asked for my name and contact information which i was extremely reluctant to give. we then went back to our hotel and slept.

the following day's destination was colorado springs. to get there we had to drive through wyoming. nobody lives there. nobody. it also features the exact same landscape all along the interstate. at one point i got really excited because i thought i saw a bison, but my father informed me it was just a cow. such a bummer.

we had dinner at my dad's friends' house. they have had two children since the last time i saw them. their son kissed me twice, unexpectedly and uninvited. it would have been rather inappropriate had he not been six.

at our hotel room, my father and i discussed politics. we don't really agree on anything in that spectrum. i admitted my socialist leanings, and he looked at me with disappointment while telling me to hold on to my german citizenship. maybe i will.

the next stop on our great journey was fort riley, kansas. we were going to stay with some guy my dad met at his sergeant major's training and had served with in Iraq, but his family had some kind of function to attend, so we went over to some other family's house for a few hours. i am lucky my dad is so popular. we arrived at the other family's house before they were there. and as we were sitting on their front porch, hoping that we were, in fact, even sitting on the correct porch, i realized that i really had to poop. i also realized that it was rather windy. i asked my father if this part of kansas experienced tornadoes, and he told me he didn't know. i then commented that my car could use some rain to wash away all of the dead insect remnants that covered its front. i would later regret these comments.

my dad's friends finally arrived. i quickly entered their bathroom to move my bowels. while i was doing so i noticed that there were several different locks on the door. i found this strange. some more people arrived at the house and as we were all sitting around, we heard what seemed to be a siren. it did not sound promising. the tv was turned on to reveal that the area was under a tornado watch. i asked what this meant, exactly, and was told it just meant to be aware and if the siren went off again, we should probably go sit in the bunker, which was also the bathroom, which is why there were so many peculiar locks on the door. the siren sounded again, and i proceeded to piss my pants. not really. but i was shaking a lot. but that could have been because it was really cold in their house. i was definitely frightened. so, we all got in the bunker.

i think there was a total of eight humans, one golden retriever and a guinea pig. it was snug. we stayed there for about an hour or so, and then it passed. i am still amazed that on the one day of my life i happened to spend in kansas, the weather decided to cause a tornado to hit about a mile away from where i was staying. i was elated to leave kansas the next morning.

our drive to fort campell, kentucky was rather uneventful, as was our stay there. a major highlight was listening to the nelly/lynyrd skynyrd mash-up of "country grammar" the entire time we were in the vicinity of st. louis. this was obviously inspired by the fact that nelly utters the line "i'm from the lou and i'm proud." it was also awesome because the version of the song samples "sweet home alabama," our final destination. i find it very strange that my father enjoys nelly because any rap i ever want to listen to is not acceptable. but i will take what i can get.

then the next and final day of our travels was supposed to include a stop in Nashville, but after we got off the freeway and realized that the country music hall of fame would cost fifteen dollars per person to attend, we decided to just go home. this decison was also largely affected by the fact that my dad becomes easily outraged when driving in city traffic, and i do not enjoy all of the yelling. so we drove home to alabama instead, which was really just as well.