My classes are chock full of tree-hugging, Anna Karenina-reading, bullshit-spewing English-double-major students that sneeze at my five pages of crap and call my bluff with their own eight-to-ten page masterpieces that the professor only half reads. If each of those students has written 200 or so essays in their college careers, we are talking about a FUCK TON OF PAGES. Pages upon pages of analysis, prose, God-awful poetry and sometimes, if you’re really lucky and in the right class, rants about the degeneration of American politics. I once wrote a rant about the degeneration of American politics. It was about my general dislike of Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin and pretty much every other American vice president in history.

That paper was four pages, thank you very much.

If we took all of these pages and lined them up, read them all, and then let our brains leak out of our ears, we would realize very quickly that there is not one original thought among them. There is nothing more than hundreds of thousands of pages of bull shit wrapped up in ribbon and shiny language. Some people are really good at it, and their ideas almost seem original, thoughtful and intelligent. And then you realize that they are just trying to get an “A” on this paper and have done nothing but parrot back what their professor lectured on. Because these professors, overworked and underpaid, only half read these papers and they like to see their own ideas rehashed on paper. It makes them feel good. Wouldn’t it make you feel good to see your words, printed on a page as evidence of human evolution? You would be the reason this paper was written, and that is fucking awesome.

So my question is this: is there such a thing as originality? Can we avoid cliches in our writing? Can a blog about my life really invent language or words or concepts that have not already been relayed for centuries? Can a picture actually be edgy and revolutionary? Does art ever capture a new emotion, or even an old emotion in a totally different way? Does Flannery O’ Conner’s narrative about obsession with a wooden leg translate into something new and original? Or is the most we can hope for that O’ Conner has given us a non-cliche, above the daily grind of tired phrases such as “eyes so green they sparkled like emeralds?” Does one war photo hit us harder than another?

Does my account of my life reshape the way the world sees twenty-something college students? Or am I just another voice int the crowd, throwing my three-to-five page long bullshit essays into the din in the hopes that it gets read and understood and turned into a cliche?

I should be so lucky. I would be honored to write in cliches, and I would be tickled pink to create new ones. I hope that my rather unoriginal (yet rather interesting) voice is heard, if not as a roar than as a whisper.

Today, she and I napped together. It was amazing, she just came right up to me, sat down on my chest and promptly fell asleep. As did I. About an hour later, I woke up and Maude (our perfect baby angel’s perfect baby angel name) was nowhere to be found. I freaked out in ways that I cannot adequately describe. I searched all over, and when I couldn’t find her, I pictured all sorts of grotesque things that might have happened. Had she gotten caught behind the book shelf? Did she squeeze through a crack in the front door? On the verge of tears, I called Alex, who told me to calm down and look under the bed. She was there. And I was so relieved. I picked her up and sternly said, “Don’t scare Mommy like that ever again!”

And then I realized that I had become that crazy woman.

When Alex came home, he had 3 bags of cat toys and treats. He had the a look of absolute joy on his face as he opened all her new presents. That’s when I realized that he had become that crazy man.

We keep discussing how this was the best decision we’ve ever made. We can’t stop looking at her and cuddling her and being crazy “parents” who worry and dote and are generally unglued.

Be prepared, Internet. We have already taken hundreds of pictures and we’ve had her for just under 24 hours. We have an entire Facebook album dedicated to her. Because we are slightly unglued and she is the cutest kitty baby angel to have ever lived.

Some days the so-called “pain of living” is unbearable, manifesting in cruel albeit mildly ironic ways. Some days my wrists hurt, my lower back aches like an old woman or my feet swell up such that I can’t wear my regular shoes. I’m not sure how much of this is mental and how much of it is sleeping in a bed that I find vaguely uncomfortable for no particular reason and how much if it is my body telling me that it wants in on this depression thing too.

Today, it’s my wrists and fingers. Sitting in class, I did my best to keep my hot coffee cup near where my pinkie meets my palm on my right hand. I clenched my teeth to keep from crying, and I almost couldn’t stop myself when I realized that what the class was talking about was either way too sophisticated for my quasi-analytical mind or I just didn’t really give a shit about the book we were talking about. It was probably a combination of both. It’s not that I’m stupid, I just don’t see why I’m spending my time talking about a book written 150 years ago. Moreover, I don’t know why I now need to write a 6-page paper comparing the 150-year-old book to a 600-year-old book about a completely different topic. Does this seem like a pointless exercise in futility to anyone else? Or is that the hopelessness talking again?

It seems unlikely that anything (especially long-winded drills in critical thinking) will ever spark my interest again. This is where I feel the most hopeless; I feel left behind while everyone around me finds joy and passion in their tasks. I simply do not find anything enjoyable anymore, and it is making me absolutely miserable.

So you can see where that might be a problem for me.

I read an article in this month’s Oprah Magazine about a woman who is committing the next 60 days to the Bikram Yoga Challenge. She basically goes to yoga everyday, and not just any yoga. No, that would be sane. This woman is going to HOT yoga. The studio is heated to 105 degrees or higher for optimal toxin flushing and facilitating flexibility. You basically drip sweat, and it is nasty.

I read this article, which chronicles this woman’s first 30 days of her challenge, and I made the wild, ridiculous decision to take the challenge as well. So today was Day 1, and it pretty much sucked. I’m not going to lie to you, it was hard, it smelled really bad and I came home looking like I took a swim, which is beyond gross.

I have always been a skeptic of the bullshit that surrounds yoga and meditation. “It’s so therapeutic” or “it’s so calming” or (my favorite) “Yes, you can loose weight with some sissy stretching” have always seemed like drink-the-koolaid behavior. However, as I was going through the poses something incredible happened. My constant inner voice was silent. Begrudgingly silent, like she had been hit upside the head and was stunned into an inarticulate pile of mush. And that was nice.

During the rest periods, you are supposed to lie in what is known as the “corpse pose” – on your back, silent, unmoving, just gazing up at the ceiling. What is noticed is that I felt very much alive (and beat up – maybe there’s something to this sissy stretching nonsense) in those moments. My heart was pounding, my breath was calm and the inner bitch was absent. Lying there, all I focused on was leaving the bitch out of this moment, and I did my best to take her criticisms floating around in my head and leave them in that hot, smelly room. It worked, if only for that moment, and suddenly the last 90 minutes of “toxin-flushing” was not in vain, but rather – dare I say it – therapeutic. But don’t tell my inner bitch I just said that because she thinks yoga is dumb.

I mostly aspire to the badass part of that profession.

The problem is that I don’t think I have the chops to make it in such a competitve industry, and the first thing a life coach will tell you is that you have to believe in yourself. So really, I have fucked myself before I have even started.

It’s not that I am trying to sabotage myself per se, it’s more that I just have a negative self image of myself. And by negative I mean like horrible, bad, Hitler-negative. I mean, it a combination of not knowing what I want out of life and not seeing a therapist. I also stopped taking my meds, a decision that has been both fantastic and wonderful and horrible and insane. I’m not sure if I’m feeling better, but I don’t feel numb anymore either. I hated not feeling – I couldn’t feel when people physically touched me, and I couldn’t feel when I was sad or happy or alone. This is better in some ways, but unbearable in others.

I want to write here, in this imagined space – I love writing and I love people reading my thoughts, but I feel so horribly inadequate at the same time. I feel like my thoughts aren’t worth the time of day for the people who know me best – so why would anyone (strangers no less) want to read about them? Why do my thoughts and observations deserve an audience?

So for now, I’m not going to answer that question. I’m not going to feel bad if I don’t want to write here one day, because this is for me and no one else at this point. If that is different in the future, than my desire to write here will also change. Right now I’m going to let this be a space where I work through what I am thinking about – even if what I’m thinking about isn’t funny or witty or lovely or politically correct. I don’t have to write poetry and high prose to be a writer. And even though my self-image is shit, that doesn’t mean my writing is. My writing is what it is, independent of what other people (including myself) think about it. Regardless of my audience size or quality I am going to write. I am going to write about what I’m thinking about, without the strain of trying to impress or measure up.

I spend all of my time and energy trying to get people to like me, and I try to meet to a standard set so high that I crash and burn every time I reach for that perfection that I demand of myself. Maybe, just fucking maybe, I don’t need to set the bar so high for this one little area. I don’t need to impress anyone because no one is listening right now anyway. I can still try (and fail) to be perfect in other areas of my life, but I don’t need to be perfect here. At least for now, I can free myself from the constraints of perfection in my written life and let myself cry metaphorically, and save my anguish for my failed attempts at physical and spiritual perfection in my “real” life.

I can let my apartment stay messy, I can hate my hair for not staying perfectly poufed and teased, I can loathe my waist for not being 28 inches around and I can black out my mirrors in mourning when I don’t learn a new skill on they first try, but I’m going to let my writing suck. I’m going to be okay with the fact that I don’t write on my blog every day, like I wanted. Just this once, I’m not going to beat myself up for my utter lack of perfection in this one area. Just this once.

Hard.

On the plus side, I think I saw a crack whore today while I was at the drugstore getting more post-it notes.

This is a statement not predicated on the time of year or specific date. Rather, I say that Christmas is upon us because my favorite radio station has started playing nothing but Christmas music. Thank goodness, I was starting to worry that Christmas would never officially come due to a critical shortage of Christmas music airtime on oldies radio stations. Whew. I’m so glad that is not going to happen.

(Because apparently, there is a shortage of pumpkin this year, so many were thinking about canceling the Holidays. Apparently, there was a series of Unfortunate Events and Floods that resulted in a low pumpkin harvest, which means LESS CANNED PUMPKIN. Let’s all remember that PRE-MASHED CANNED PUMPKIN is a key ingredient in pumpkin pie. It was on the Sacramento news and everything. HOW CAN SACRAMENTO HAVE CHRISTMAS WITHOUT PUMPKIN PIE?)

(Answer: It can’t.)

(There seemed to be plenty of pumpkins when I was paying $10 for one to carve up for Halloween. I’m just sayin’)

Whenever I hear Christmas music on the radio, I always flash to that scene in Sleepless in Seattle where Meg Ryan is in the car singing along to “Jingle Bells.” I hold that scene as the standard of what singing along to holiday music should be like: ridiculous and alone in a 1990 Honda. Meg is horribly off-tune and off-beat and I try to emulate her exact tone whenever possible… “Horses… horses… HORSES!” I suggest running out and watching that movie immediately.

When I worked at a home for developmentally disabled adults, we listed to Christmas music year round. Sadly, I did not get tired of it, and at times it was better than endless John Denver CDs. And it was WORLDS better than Sharon, Lois and Bram-style kid’s music.

I look forward to this time of year from about January 3rd of each year, and the closer Thanksgiving gets the more excited I become. I will admit that I am a sentimental person, and this time of year was designed for saps like myself. And I buy into it – why not? Life is just a little bit happier around this time, and the music a little worse. I’ll take it.

We made appointments with the Genius Bar for 5:00 and 5:15, and figured we could leave at 4:30 and get there in plenty of time. We are obviously stupid, because 30 or 45 minutes to get from DAVIS TO SACRAMENTO is obviously not enough time. This is not LA, it should not take more minutes than miles to get somewhere. Sacramento Arden Mall is about 23 miles away. It should take about 23 minutes to get to the mall. That’s called logic, unless you’re in LA. Then logic states something 23 miles away will take you 23000 minutes to get there, or about 16 days.

We were obviously late, so we had to go on the standby list. Have you ever been on the standby list for the Apple Store Genius Bar? I’m still on the Standby list. I could actually go 23 miles in LA before I would get helped on the Standby list.

About 40 minutes into our stay at the Apple Store, one of Alex’s bros suggests we go to Hooters for dinner. Which is obviously more classy than trashy, which is right up my alley, so I was totally happy.

Maybe it’s because in LA even the waitresses at regular restaurants look like young Cindy Crawfords except blonde, but I was not really impressed with the girls at this particular Hooters. I mean, they were cute, and they had big boobs, but they were just meh. Is that mean? Is that like calling a stripper flat-chested? Like calling a Hollywood starlet old? Like telling your old sorority sisters that you resent that you spent so much money trying to be their friend?

After all of that fun, Alex and I got home and, like the old farty couple that we are, we sat on our couch and watched The Office DVDs and lit our fireplace-scented candle and ate the last of our jelly beans. Because we don’t have a fireplace and we were really low on desserts. And when we ran out of soda we decided to go to bed. Because staying up is just no fun without Diet Dr. Pepper. LITTLE LIFE LESSONS, PEOPLE.

Anyway, nudity. I was watching Jimmy Falon and they were talking about the Italian Saturday Night Live. Apparently, in Italy, if the skit isn’t funny they just cut to a crazy-hot naked woman dancing. That is an excellent idea, because at least there is something going on.

(If you can’t tell, I’m also not a huge fan of Saturday Night Live. I’m sorry, it’s dumb. It used to be funny, sort of. Now SNL is actually the absence of funny.)

Why is nudity not allowed on television? Do we really have sticks so far up our butts that boobs make us uncomfortable? Is it the word? I mean, “boob” is pretty awkward. Or, if we look at shows like Gossip Girl, boobs are not allowed but skirts short enough to show Blair’s hooha are. Awesome guys.

Do you like my use of “hooha” as a substitute for “vagina?” My freshman year of college one of my roommates called her vagina her “koorah.” She was from Sacramento and we LA girls thought that was the cutest thing ever. So we made our 6-person suite into a sorority: Kappa Delta Koorah. We considered applying for a school charter, but we got drunk instead.

Not me, because I have gained 20 pounds in the last 2 years.

For the last 4 weeks, I have been dieting and going to the gym and I lost 10 pounds. I mean, that was mostly intentional, but I didn’t mean to lose 10 pounds so quickly. I am quite proud of myself for losing the weight of course, but I am mostly proud of my new huge new bicycle muscles and the fact I am no longer passed by old Asian women.

Though a few sorority girls on pink cruisers sail by me, I don’t let that get me down.

Small victory. I’ll take it. And the 10-pound loss. Pretty soon I’ll have to buy new pants! And then I will gloat all over the Internet about by new small pants.

I may even post pictures of my butt. Wouldn’t that be a treat?