Away Message

Real Housewife of Atlanta to Depart for Croatia Friday.
This is the headline on the front page of the tabloid that is my life. I had a plan to perfect myself pre-Mediterranean vacation that included spray tans and a head full of sparkling blonde hair. As I write it I am able to see its inherent flaws. See, the reality is you can take the National Lampoon's outta the girl, but you can't take the girl outta the National Lampoon's. It doesn't matter where on earth I go, I'm always packin' Clark and Ellen.

The Real Housewife mention is in reference to the fact that I now more resemble a Buckhead property-purchasing cougar than a glittering Hollywood ingenue (not that I coulda passed for one prior, but I was hoping for the hair of one). I went in to go totally blonde on Saturday and came out with a head full of food-colored stripes and an anchorwomany haircut that has me looking like a Bravo reality show casting wet dream. Every time I look in the mirror I think of butterscotch pudding and those Archway lemon ice cookies my grandma used to love. In light of my new MILF porn star hair debacle I decided it was probably best to cancel the spray tan. Why add fuel to the fire?

I managed to finish my semester with straight As, of which I'm immensely proud. I sweated through a killer Twentieth Century International Politics final, a research paper and two presentations. In the end, I did the work I wanted to do. I recyled all the reading I did for the semester over the weekend and it filled an entire clear blue recylcling bag. I let it sit on the living room floor for a few hours, thinking that all that paper, what must've amounted to ten pounds' worth, is now inside my head. All those thousands of lines actually translate into something I own. I guess that's intellectual property. You can't foreclose on that shit.

Mercury's been in retrograde. My brother wrote asking if I was experiencing any difficulty with communications as a result. "What're you talking about?" I asked, right before spending five solid days on the phone with representatives in Bangalore trying to figure out where a slew of my frequent flier miles had gone and why I was suddenly locked out of my credit card websites. I keep picturing those kids in Slumdog Millionaire with headsets on. "Yes, Mrs. Cox, I can understand why you would want to know where your frequent flier miles have gone. But before I consult my manual, let me inform you of an exclusive offer for cardmembers."

It's time for me to be in a berth on a big, anonymous sea. I've reached maximum density. I'm gonna take my citrus cookie-colored hair and go get righted. I have got to remind myself there's a world beyond Megan Fox on the cover of Elle magazine sporting a shoulder tattoo that reads:
"WE WILL ALL LAUGH AT GILDED BUTTERFLIES".

A Minor Fall and a Major List

The "Minor Obsessions" list is getting a full-page spread this week. My attention is divided into 16 slender slices of a fat, overloaded pie and I keep alternating between thoughts of long, delicate golden necklaces and former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri.

My semester ends in two weeks. I'm a third of the way through a phone book-sized study of the investigation of the aforementioned Prime Minister's assasination in 2005. It's horrifying, fascinating and frustrating. I've never written fifteen pages of anything more than a hate letter to my best friend in high school. And that was in pink pen, on wide-ruled notebook paper. I think it's safe to say that academic writing is not my, comment dites-vous ?, forte. To me it feels like writing from inside an ice cave behind a door with no knob. Walls, walls, walls. 'Let's see...I want to say that a massive revolution was the result of the assasination, whoops, lemme add a little teeny number up there after that date, whoops, gotta go down to the bottom of the page and cite that source, whoops, let's go back up there and, shit, where was I? Okay, yeah, so...a massive...whoops, that's a bit flowery...let's say large scale...yep, that'll work.' There are a thousand silky, delectable words slipping and sliding around inside my brain trying to ooze their way out on to the page: sybaritic..adulate...ambrosial...MELLIFLUOUS! When this semester ends I'm going to stab a valve into my scalp and let them all drain out, one by one, the sap of stunted prose.

Besides being able to speak again in my usual embellished patois, I intend to read. For the last four months I've felt like I was sleeping with my secretary every time I read a magazine article or a few pages of a novel. I found myself sneaking peeks at US Weekly in the magazine aisle at CVS, craving like carbs even a few meager lines of non-academic text. I bought myself a copy of Celebrity Hairstyles on Saturday and saved it all day, dangling it in front of myself like a chocolate carrot to be nibbled upon completion of five pages of my paper. When I met my self-imposed deadline at 9:00 p.m., I tucked myself into the couch cushions and skimmed through the photos of Blake Lively and Michelle Williams and drifted into and out of consciousness, just as the glossy pages of hair mags are designed to make one do.

When I do allow myself a freebie, I devour the "literary porn" on this website. Now, I'm not in any way hip to the shit. It's a nine year old site. But the editor came to speak to my class last week and rendered a room full of competent, edgy women completely senseless. Ever since then I've been fascinated by the notion of making a living writing about sex. Scratch that. By the notion of people who (read: men) make a living writing about sex. Go there. I guarantee you'll lose an hour immersed in descriptions like "milkweed excretions". Exquisite, elegant writing about things between legs and under arms and behind doors. Bonus: music and literature and fetishes. What else can I say?

I'm reinventing myself for summer. I think I've got it basically down. It'll be a cross between Rosie the Riveter and Nicole Richie. Sound doable? I'm thinking hippie headbands and red lipstick. Dangly, bangly, spangly necklaces and 1940s "can do" spirit. Stockings and flip flops. Bangs? Perhaps. In any case, I've been making a list of "must get" items and it includes roman sandals, self-tanner, plastic sunglasses, purple shampoo, and a gigantic hat. Don't worry, it'll totally come together.

Just in time to show off the above new look I've earned two delightful ruby red rings around my eyes. Courtesy of some bizarre reaction to the season's first application of gazillion SPF sunscreen I'm wearing alien spheres on my face that look like skin glasses. Bring on the warm weather styles!

This week, one of my professors actually said: "There are no dull stories, only dull writers."

Just let that one sink in a little.

Fluff

Because not every day is a Chrysalis kinda day (despite efforts to the contrary), this blog has temporarily been renamed My Cotton Thoughts Day. I will now pull thin, wavy strands of airy brain candy from my skull and deposit them on this blank e-page where they will live to grow furry with inconsequential blog mold in the internet concsiousness for eternity.

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Okay, so first things fuckin' last. What's the deal with my Facebook page being slammed by friend requests from platinum-haired LA starlets looking to add my name to their growing roll of F-lister friends like Criss Angel? They lure me in, see, and take advantage of the fact that in my old age names and faces are beginning to gel into one giant personality conglomerate making it now nearly impossible to catalog the gory details of everyone I've gotten drunk with in the last twenty years. So these Facebook marketing co-opters know I'll likely see the request, think I might know the person and perhaps peruse their profile to jog the old memory for an image of the two of us wearing sombreros at someone's birthday party in 1995. They hope, of course, that I'll be so impressed by the fact that this person's friend list includes the likes of Justine Bateman that I'll sign my fucking firstborn away to the Facebook promo devil so I can be overwhelmed for life with notices about this girl's every appearance on NCIS. Nice try, Facebook, if that's your real name.

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I spent Good Friday wandering through the Union Square farmer's market. I bought a hand drawn rendering of the Chelsea Hotel silkscreened onto a canvas of hot pink satin. It is now my favorite thing ever. The side of the building sort of fades off the canvas into a fog of black ink. It looks like it was left out overnight on 23rd Street and corrupted by smog--the hotel straining to come through the haze into being. I met a man, "Joe", who had a little table set up near the subway entrance featuring a potted flower, a jar for donations and a professionally-lettered sign that read: "CREATIVE APPROACHES TO WHAT YOU HAVE BEEN THINKING ABOUT". Feeling "in the flow", as my mother would put it, I asked him for a creative approach to the NY/LA conundrum. When I laid out the conflict that's pulling me apart like a Rolfing machine, he told me that I may love New York but I haven't been able to enjoy it. I'm still trying to figure out why that made sense to me at the time. He also suggested I begin thinking about what it means to let go of what I think I know about staying here. He illustrated the suggestion by having me hold a stack of paper in my hand until it became uncomfortable, asking me to note how I had made physical adjustments to accomodate and accept the pain (touche!). Then he asked me to drop it. When I let go, the papers scattered into an abstract arrangement on the ground. As he was picking them up, he said "See what happens? When you let go, it turns into something else." I got it. The conflict had taken a new shape. There was possibility in the burden when I let it go and it spread artfully across the pavement. But I couldn't see that as long as I kept holding on to it, accomodating its weight. As I was leaving I told him about the Chelsea satin. He said I was collecting memorabilia. I cried all the way through a cinnamon toast frozen yogurt.

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I've registered for fall classes. I'm having trouble digesting the passing of time. Only a moment ago I was eating grilled cheese in January, awaiting a student loan refund. I've decided that each semester I'll take something terrifying. In the fall it'll be fiction. The last time I told a story on paper the lines on the page were an inch wide and we were writing about Halloween witches in crayon. Scary, indeed.

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While I still have papers and finals to feast on, all thoughts lead to that, up there. That's Pula, Istria, Croatia, site of my first bona fide summer vacation since going to Indianapolis to visit my grandma in 1992. Now, given that the photo comes from Wikimedia, it could be a beach on the coast of Libya for all we know. But I'd go there too.

The West is the Best? The West is the Best?

Alright, there's simply no point in putting this off any longer. I have to talk about it. There's, gulp, um, gasp (grips chest), see, kind of, maybe, well (falls to knees), there's this chance...that we may have to move to L.A. It's crazy even writing a thing like that. Now it's just out there: L.A. Two little letters to encompass incomprehensibly endless black ribbons of highway, sprawling white houses with red tile rooftops and people I don't know. Two little letters to explain what I'm not sure I can.

My husband is much clearer on all of this. A month ago he flew out to Angel-Town on something of a lark. An opportunity to scale the western face of the acting business popped up unexpectedly (in the way these things seem to do) and he decided to leap on it. We knew the minute he booked his ticket that he'd begun to shift the tectonic plates of our east coast life. The thing is, we've suspected for some time that he needs to be there. Blah, blah, the market here is so limited, there's so much more work out there, he fits in a few little type-y niches that might actually work in his favor on the sunnier side (multi-ethnic!, yay!). But more than all of that, in a way we couldn't quite articulate to each other before he left, we were somehow ignited by the idea of our lives being turned upside down. I didn't tell him at the time but I felt strangely amenable to the notion of an undeniable shift. Translation, if something happened, I might be up for it.

He was gone for two weeks. We didn't talk much about anything concrete while he was away. But I knew the day he drove the Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu for the first time that he might be seeing L.A. as a real possibility. In honor of all the difficult conversations beating down our door I went right out, drank a night's worth of jumbo margaritas and went home sobbing in a cab at 3:00 a.m. The next morning I woke up resolved that he should go there and I should take some time to figure out what the hell I want to do.

I've never felt more sure that now is the time for him. It's partially cosmic, partially timing. Either way, he needs to be able to say he really went for it and I appreciate the value of that. It's more complicated for me. I haven't yet been able to romanticize L.A. to myself. Now, don't get me wrong. I can more than imagine Friday nights at Santa Monica pier and weekends hiking the hills. But my husband's got a hook, an angle, a reason to be there. I don't. Except for him. And while he's a big, important reason, he can't be my only reason or we'll be fucked. We just will.

So for the moment, we've decided he's gonna go. He'll spend the bulk of the summer there trying to rustle something up. We've also made a few other decisions. 1.) Nothing, nothing, NOTHING will ever be New York. We're accepting that and moving forward with the idea that everything we do will be in an effort to get back to our grubby, glittering gray goddess. 2.) The idea of never seeing what else is out there for us is way scarier than facing a world we don't understand.

I'm trying to be open to all the ways this could happen. If nothing else, my view of our current reality has begun to shift. I can't believe how immovable I've become. Thinking for a moment about living in a world where people wear shorts in March and meet each other through panes of car window glass, shop in shiny suburban grocery stores and eat avocados year round has gotten me pondering what is trash and treasure to me here. And that has to be a good thing.

So, onward and...westward? Well, at least I've started going blonde.

Away Message

This post is an homage to my beloved London, which I will visit for the last time as my company's on-staff whipping girl next week.

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My bizarre foray into the world of on-air spokesrepresentation at QVC has come to a close, which means the next time I wander through the gentle, perfect greenness of The Regents Park I will be a mere civilian.

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Sadly this does not mean I am finished for good. I continue to drift along aimlessly at this job, which is by now my own personal version of the embarassing co-dependent relationship I've had countless friends try and explain to me. It's a sandpit I can't seem to extricate myself from--one that has made me bitter and ungrateful for even such a splendid thing as weeks at a time spent in the glory of London's company. Well, if I can't yet figure out how I'm going to make the transition that validates this blog's existence, I'll at least take London back from the oily grip of obligation and make it mine again.

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See, my job has been sold off, along with anything and everything having to do with QVC, to another company. I've trained my replacement (a Midwestern-er Nora Dunn), and I'll actually be doing an official "hand off" to her on air, as if we were Couric and Viera. Naturally, I didn't plan for it to go at all this way. I'd planned a clean break, giving plenty of notice when I started school. But immediately after I began classes the company got a huge sales opportunity and, as the ink was not yet dry on the contract for the buyout, there was nobody else to do it but the ol' workhorse, the ol' lipstick queen, slinger of shellac, wheeler-dealer, buyout-broad...me. Translation, they kinda made me do it. I hemmed and hawed, I even went home and cried. It was one of the worst weeks of my life. Made worse by the fact that I utterly hated myself for agreeing to do it, for having so little backbone, for not liquidating that pathetic little 401k and walking the fuck out the door. But somehow I said yes. It's a complex web involving the fact that the people I work for are extremely maniupulative, I'm easily swayed when I feel obligated to something and, well, dammit I spent nearly three years building a molehill into a blessed mountain and wanted to see it through to the bitter end. Bitter, indeed.

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Even writing out the minutiae of this situation makes me feel slick with that oily residue. I mean, who gives a shit about sales opportunities? The bottom line is I don't want to spend the rest of my life making other people money. Period. So, I'm doing this trip and then...I don't know what. There is nothing left of my job except me answering phones here. Oh, and making coffee. I forgot the making coffee part.

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I haven't seen a street in London in the last three years. Not really. And lemme tell ya, I've been everywhere, man, I've been everywhere. But I have missed out on the delicate details: the shimmering green blades of grass in Hyde Park, the perfect edges of a box of Bond No. 9, the musty elegance of the Courtald collection, lacy spines of Parliament, coriander and chutney, Times at rush hour, clotted cream and brown sauce, all of it so rich with tradition and so hard to hold on to tightly because I was there on someone else's time.

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I've decided to make a trip this summer that is just for me. When I arrive I will not immediately unpack my straightening iron and line up all of my high heeled boots. I will not make a taxi reservation to take me to the studio. I will not sit on the edge of my bed and practice my "sell" to my reflection in the darkened tv screen. I will not call the office, check email, or look at any numbers. I will instead pack a bag with nothing in it. I will buy a scotch egg from Paul Rothe and Sons on Marlyebone Lane and eat it as I walk to The Barrow Boy and Banker pub at the end of the London Bridge, where I will spend an entire day drinking Chiswick Brown and watching everything thing I've missed.

I Will Have This Hair

Just as Germany wanted France in the first world war (I'm learning this!), I want this multi-dimensional, layered flaxen confection to be mine. I'm about to take a mid-term on the international levels of analysis for world conflict and instead of studying Paul Kennedy's "power perspective" I can't stop running my fingers over the mouse, urging it toward the Google icon to search for photos of Kate.

I've reached the part in the school year where I a.) think I am an ass-sucking dumb dumb who can't internalize concepts or structure a decent essay, b.) think all my professors think I am an ass-sucking dumb dumb who can't internalize concepts or structure a decent essay, and c.) fear that my academic pursuits will not be transformative but rather fruitless and (I can't think of a good word to go here. See? It's true!).

Since it's only noon and I'm sitting in an office in Midtown, I can't have a glass of wine. Even in this laissez-faire, ethics-free work environment a liquid lunch would be considered untoward. So, in times like these there is no better salve for the uncertain soul than perusing glossy photos of "newly curvy" models with my dream haircolor. I'm feeling like a decent grade might be elusive so instead I'll aspire to follicular light-headedness. I'll strive to be blonde.

I actually wrote an essay for class on this very subject last week: hair as a canvas, a place to make discoveries and declarations. It came back last night with the following comment: the piece was fun but the material uninspired. Well, shit. Back to Kate.

Uninspired, perhaps. Escapist, absolutely.

The endless reinvention continues.

What Recession?

R.I.P.

Money Tree (June 2008-February 2009)

This is actually our second-generation money tree. The first one officially killed itself when we moved into our new apartment. Who could blame it? What with the major rent increase, it just couldn't self-motivate to promote prosperity any longer.

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I bought this money tree immediately after because I'm totally superstitious and believe in shit like money trees. This one was lush and full, reaching and striving out if its little pot toward greatness. And then in January, as I was fretting my way through the Christmas holiday, preparing for school, obsessing over adult acne and downsizing, a little brown border slowly began to develop around its leaves. At first I came home to one, then two rigid crusty leaf remnants on the floor under the TV cabinet. I ignored it. I continued to play a relentless stream of morning NPR with its elevated recession talk and analysis. I poured more and more coffee. I applied more and more Retin-A. And then my face began to dry up too, peeling away, layer after layer, revealing a rippling map of arid wrinkles on either side of my brow. I eyed the money tree. Dry. Me. Dry. NPR. Dry.

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With each passing day the money tree surrendered another leaf or two. I found one on top of my American Poetry Anthology and yet another in a little crystal bowl of seashells. And each morning I'd wake up and gaze in the mirror to see myself peering out from under an onion skin, recessing too. The money tree must've shed its last leaf the same morning I woke up to NPR as my alarm, declaring, "Good morning. Nissan lays off 20,000, posting a loss of $8billion." The radiator steamed and clanged, sucking moisture out of the air. As I rose in the dark and stumbled into the living room, I saw the tree's skeletal, spiny trunk and branches laid bare on top of my bookshelf. I felt a short wave of despair rise and wash over me. 'This is it', I thought. The vapors of the recession had finally made their way up through our vents and floorboards that morning. It was really true. We had another suicidal money tree.

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I let it sit on top of the bookshelf for nearly a week, partly as a reminder of how dry we really were, partly because I hoped it could be revived. Finally, I stuffed the entire tree in its pot into the kitchen trashcan where it was kept company by Ramen wrappers and other evidence of the drought. In its place I now have a little rose plant featuring two delicate miniature red blooms. Its tag declares it a "love rose" plant. I've been nearly drowning it in water.

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I can deal with two suicidal money trees. But a love plant with a death wish would finish me off.