Snacks | Another Wordpress Blog

Starting Tuesday night, Pilot has been slowly coming around back to his normal state. Hungry, barky, bossy. Normally I think of those states as my failure to not be the Dog Whisperer but now that I think he’s a death cheater, everything Pilot wants, he gets.

Today I took him to a park, and when he seemed done i tried to take him to the car. BUT NO. for the next hour he took me all over potrero hill–even though his back legs don’t even lift up all the way when he walks? so other people think I am dragging this super old dog down the sidewalk? Finally I broke out of my “you almost died! you can have anything you want!” mode and into the “okay, jerkatolla, you ARE going to the car and you ARE getting in.” I guess treating him normally is the best way for me to heal my total decimating fear that he’ll die…because seriously, he IS a jerkatolla.

Pilot, my 14-year old english bull terrier, has not been feeling well since Sunday. Mopey, low energy, no appetite. Sunday night he spent the night in his crate in the garage instead of upstairs next to our bed like he always does. Sunday and some of Monday he was trembling and couldn’t seem to stop; that’s gone away. He didn’t drink any water nor pee all day Monday, but Monday night he drank some water and ate a little bit of food that Ivan hand-fed him, and we carried him downstairs to pee *twice*, so that’s a good sign, I think?

I know he’s old. Apparently the oldest bull terrier ever was 16 years old. I thought I was ready for his inevitable death; but I really am not, it turns out. I drove home from work with the knot of anxiety in my stomach churning and getting bigger and bigger; when I walked up to Pilot, laying in the hallway on a big pile of dirty laundry, he wagged his tail and I just started crying. I realized, I am not ready to lose him! He’s such a big part of my life! On the weekends, when Ivan is off racing motorcycles, Pilot is my friend, hanging out with me while I read or make food or watch TV. And he gets me out of the house, when I anthropomorphize that he’s bored and needs a walk, a trip to a park, a ride in the car. There are so many things I do just for him, so that life is how he likes it, foods he likes and cleaning the couch every week because he can’t seem to stay on his blanket and buying a car with a hatchback so that it would be easier for him to get in and out. I do not want him out of my life, it’s going to be a huge hole. A huge hole.

So after crying my eyes out and petting him for an hour or so last night, there were some positive signs–he is standing and walking around, I just fed him some brown rice mixed with yogurt and he ate a good amount–not his normal chow hound amount but probably a baseball-sized amount. The vet said that we just have to monitor how sick he seems, and if he is moving around and standing and walking on his own, those are good signs. He and I have been having a lot of eye contact where I am trying to beam into his little peanut brain how much I love him and how I promise to keep him safe forever.

Sooo…I have a job that puts me in contact with people who are paid to be funny for a living. Some are my coworkers who are comedy writers, some are professional comedians. You know what’s funny to professional funny people? Very little. And never, ever, you.

I don’t think I’m amazingly hilarious, I don’t. But all my life people have told me that I’m funny, I certainly feel funny sometimes, and I’ve cracked up people that I think are funny. The only people who never, ever laugh at any witticism of mine? The professional comedy writers. And it’s not just me that professional comedy writers are too good for.

A friend of mine works as a comedy writer at one of those late night shows. (The following was told to me by a mutual friend, I may be missing some nuances.) As the newest writer, he’s the lowest guy on the totem pole (and comedy is 99% guys). That means that anything he writes gets edited by the more senior people, even if it doesn’t make it better. They don’t laugh at anything he says, either, and he (like I) is very familiar with that sad experience of saying something truly funny and then hearing, awkwardly, only your own laughter.

A component is probably that my style of humor tends to have a self deprecating slant, and professional comedy writers LOVE the super uncomfortable, I am saying something really mean to you, brand of humor. A good example of this genre, and brilliantly acheived, is Zach Galifinakias. Here’s a video example:

I am sure that the comedy business is super competitive, and if being really good at something like comedy is your dream, are you going to give up even a single charitable giggle to some lame chick who works on the website? Or someone beneath you who would love to take your job? I guess not. I guess the laughs are precious and maybe you need to save them. For something more valuable.

Sometimes when I go to a show at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade in LA I think, shit, I should take an improv class! It seems really fun, and there are so many comedies on TV that are killing it this season–30 Rock, Parks & Recreation, Community, Modern Family…and all of those have UCB people either performing or writing for them. How awesome to work with Tina Fey! Maybe I could really get into a career in comedy, into TV shows and movies, instead of directing a website that contains comedy made by other people? But then I think, wow, would I turn into a person who withholds laughter, regarding it as currency that I just can’t afford to spend? And, would I start practicing the Zach G-in between two ferns- kind of humor where I just act like a crazy person who says absurdly mean things to comic effect, and regular “har har” kind of comedy would just seem hopelessly lame to me?

I like being a “regular person” who laughed out loud at “White Chicks” and who still sometimes makes a “that’s what she said” quip. But I’m just an office worker… and I guess I always will be? My work and my legacy really won’t add up to very much, and that bums me out. I would love to distinguish myself in a field as a talented person who made a difference. I guess I will just keep pondering it, probably forever, always wondering where the grass is greenest. Oh, and wishing I was a LOT richer.

In my tech jobs, whenever a big project is done, there will be a “post mortem” which means, post death. Someone always says, “but we birthed something (the project), it should be called a post-natal” but it’s still called a post mortem. Probably because most tech workers are boys and the thought of giving birth to something, even a code release, is kind of gross. (Birth is kind of gross, they have a point.)

Anyways. Larry’s memorial was kind of epic, at Lucky 13 and involved me drinking many shots of Larry’s favorite bourbon (which I never drink), someone doing smoky burnouts inside the bar on Larry’s motorcycle, and people throwing m-80s (is that a type of firework?) into the bar. FYI, I don’t think Lucky 13’s smoke detectors are working, don’t wear flammable clothes there. All the smoke and all the bourbon resulted in me walking into the ladies’ room, past the line for the toilets and barfing right in the sink. Yay! And then Megan Boynton drove me home!

My grandmother’s funeral (earlier that day) was much more sedate and Jesus-filled. Also I found out that one of my grandmother’s “passions” was arranging plastic flowers. That funeral reminded me again that religion is very comforting at times like this, when people are missing someone and feeling sad. The idea that there is a being in the sky taking care of the person cheers you up a bit and makes you feel like things worked out as they should have. I wonder if the decline of religion is at all tied to our lengthening life spans? People don’t die as easily as they used to, and you probably go to the bulk of your funerals at the end of your life when all your contemporaries are biting the dust. I don’t know. But I think there is something to that.

I have been in a much better mood! Actually happy. I read that Michael Pollan book, “In Defense of Food” and for the last two weeks I have been cooking a ton and it’s been really satisfying. If I could eat only food I made myself, I’m sure my weight would go down permanently, but that’s hard when all your work mates go out to delicious cheeseburgers and chicken schwarmas and coconut curries every single day at lunch. I am bouncing between 125 and 128. Not a day goes by that I don’t scold myself for being 125 or less every day. Most women have a dialogue like that going on in their heads pretty regularly and even though I know that it would be a fantastic feminist acheivement to not give over any part of my brain to my weight, it just isn’t going to happen in this lifetime. Also I’m vain.

Bolstered by my new good mood, I planned an epic road trip to Portland, Oregan, which I will be embarking on in about an hour! I’m visiting Klutch in Portland for 4 days, then I drive to Eugene to visit Leah at her house, then if Kristen Windbigler happens to be around, Humboldt for a day or so. I might even stop by at Harbin Hot Springs, the crazy nudist hippy colony near Calistoga! The driving is going to be just me in my car and my iPod. I don’t think I’ve gone on a real road trip since James Joaquin and I drove across the country and back in 1994. I am looking forward to the adventure!

I am half posting this because I am testing Funny or Die embeds on wordpress blogs. And also because this is the best song in the WORLD.

My friend Larry Huff died last Sunday night, July 5/6, 2009. His friend Dan told me: “There is not much to tell: about 12:30 am Mon morning, CHP found him off his bike and dead on the road SB 101 @ the chavez on-ramp. no other vehicles stopped. The SFME assigned to him said that he died on initial impact and did not feel a thing. Whether or not he hit a car or was hit by one, we will never know.”

Larry and I first met probably in 1988 or thereabouts, but we didn’t become friends until 1992 or so. (He went to high school with Tony & Craig Brinton, Keith Petersen, and Jill Stauffer, who I became friends with at UCBerkeley in 1987.) Our mutual friend Klutch had become my best friend and I saw a lot of Larry between 1992 and 1995.

I always liked Larry–what was there not to like? He had a quick wit, a perceptive wit, and laughed easily. And even though he was a barfly, unlike some of the people we were friends with who hung out at Lucky 13 and Zeitgeist and couldn’t ever seem to leave, he was always up for something new; he came to croquet games in golden gate park and barbeques and stuff like that.

At a certain point in my life, probably around the year 2000, I stopped hanging out at Lucky 13 so much. For one, I just couldn’t drink that much anymore. For two, hanging out at my old haunts made me feel stalled in my life–I wanted new and grown-up things for myself, and after work would rather go to the gym or work late or have dinner at Zuni or shit like that. So I really only saw Larry at the occasional party or event, and we’d always chat but nothing very involved or deep.

Then, Larry discovered Facebook! He friended me on Facebook late last year and we exchanged witticisms and links and videos and all that. I really loved being back in touch with him, because pretty much all our mutual friends had either moved out of San Francisco or, those that were still here, had kids and never had time for casual, directionless hanging out. I savored being on the continuum of the past and the present with him, with all the same reference points, able to compare notes.

I started meeting Larry at Lucky 13 after work once or twice a week. We’d drink and talk shit about people we knew, evaluate how our lives had turned out after 20 years, stuff like that. I told Larry, “I notice that even when you are full-on drunk, you never misspell words.” (We texted and facebook-messaged a lot.) He said, “Oh yeah, I was a spelling bee champ in 6th grade!” It occurred to me (and I said this to him), he and I were a lot alike, but he had much worse breaks than I did, and thus fewer opportunities. I hated my mom in high school, but knew that if I could just make it to college, I’d be free of her. He hated his stepdad, but instead of biding his time till college (not an option) he bailed on them and went to live with the Brintons (he had so many truly glowing things to say about that family, he really felt they saved him). He loved reading and shooting the shit about current events. I guess this shouldn’t seem like especially amazing traits but if you knew Larry, his exterior just said “I am huge and mean and thisclose to killing you so fuck off please.” His exterior just did not match his interior which is one of the things that always delighted me about him. And as we’d have these sort of existential life discussions at Lucky 13, I really did think that he and I were pretty much the same person gone different directions. When I told him that he’d just laugh. I can hear his voice right now saying, “Whatever homes!”

So after a few months of hanging out, he told me that he had a crazy experience in a drunken fury and had decided to reel in the drinking for a while. So out of a desire to not be a huge enabler, I steered clear of Lucky 13 and figured that when a suitably sober event came along I’d let him know. I did invite him to a few dinners and stuff but basically I hadn’t seen him in at least a month before he died. I am so glad that we started up our friendship again, and we had some great, interesting conversations that I just don’t have with most people. I feel so bad for Brenda, his wife who loved him, and all his friends who (unlike me) were with him pretty much every day for the last 20 years. I feel his death so starkly. I really wish I could bring him back.

I used to feel this sense of urgency about writing all my thoughts and ideas down, because they seemed really important and I wanted to make sure that the world understood me, and how I saw everything. Now, whenever I write stuff I think it all seems kind of obvious and not imbued with any special nuances or layers of meaning. Especially when there are so many talented writers who have blogs and twitter accounts–it used to be that the writers you read were limited to newspapers or novels. Now all the smart people have all kinds of outlets to tell you the very same types of important ideas and thoughts that you yourself have! It certainly takes the urgency out of wanting to share it.

My grandma died on Thursday night, the one I was writing about before who has sort of just been waiting to die for the last few years. I think my mom is half sad, half not. And of course I feel like a huge jerk for being on bad terms with her!

BIRTH! Evany Thomas is having a baby pretty soon! So some of her SF friends had a baby shower for her yesterday, which was at Caroleen’s and was really fun. Except, since people know that Evany loves cake, there were three separate really, truly delicious cakes AND two kinds of cupcakes. My fave cupcakes were the chocolate ones that Caroleen made, that had little plastic asian babies on top of them. There was some discussion about why not get African American little plastic babies, and then the rum inside my brain said a little too loudly “wouldn’t that be kind of awesome if the baby turns out to be black and it’s not Marco’s at all!?” No laughing, no agreement there.

Let me describe the three cakes. Jill made a yellow layer cake with chocolate frosting, and it was EXACTLY the perfect vanilla-chocolate party cake. The cake was delicate and soft and left lots of crumbles behind; the chocolate frosting was fudgey yet light. It was fan fucking tastic.

Then, Annie Galvin brought a princess cake that she bought from Schubert’s bakery, which is out in the Inner Richmond. It was DIVINE. I used to buy my princess cakes from Draeger’s but the Schubert’s one was better. What’s that? You don’t know what a princess cake is? Well let me tell you! First of all, know that it is a big mound, a half-dome type shape. Covering the dome is a layer of marzipan, which is almond paste. Underneath that, making up the convex part of the dome, is whipped cream. The base of the dome is yellow sponge cake, then some raspberry jam, then CUSTARD, then more raspberry jam, then more cake. (I just had to go to my kitchen and eat some of the leftover cake. I’m back now.)

Then towards the end of the party, Caroleen suddenly produced a big sheet cake of unusually buttery pound-cake texture (dense), with the lightest vanilla buttercream frosting, and big juicy strawberry slices on it. It was like eating butter with buttercream frosting. SO GOOD. But we all have cake hangovers today (or as Jill calls it, cakeovers).

So I’m feeling okay these days! (And not because of the Deplin that the shrink prescribed me–my depression is not a great enabler for me to be on top of things like getting prescriptions filled and thus I only started taking it yesterday.)

The other day (a week ago I think) I went to the Stanford Shopping Center to go to the Apple store after work. It was about 7pm, and the Stanford Shopping Center is very nicely landscaped; gorgeous roses and foxgloves and pansies and poppies and all kinds of everything. Plantings are arranged in nice color groupings, so you have one planter full of reds and pinks and others are all white and others are lavender and white and blue.

I was walking through the mall (it’s an outdoor mall) and I realized that for the first time in months, I felt happy. I realized I was smiling to myself, smelling the air and enjoying the dusk temperature and light. I am turning the corner!

Then, I found myself looking forward to a camping trip with a bunch of Ivan’s motorcycle friends, whereas before I’d been plotting ways to get out of going. In fact I pushed for us to go up a day early! We took Pilot, and he oddly had a great time. (It’s odd because he’s a total curmudgeon who doesn’t usually welcome a change of routine and scenery). He fell in love with another dog named Max, and was running after him all Sunday morning, which was hilarious to watch because Pilot is 13 and can barely even bend his legs, so he’s all stiff-leggedly pursuing Max kind of like a crazed zombie. And basically he’s been sleeping ever since!

I had a good time camping but, I have this thing where I get socially… SATURATED. Ivan’s friends are totally cool and all, but after about an hour or two I run out of things to say, and then I just get bored and self-concious about being bored, and feel like a jerk because all I want to do is leave. I don’t know what to do about it, and I wish I could turn “on” better when I need to. It’s offputting to other people and I’d like to be more in control of it! Although as Ivan pointed out, a lot of motorcycle people (it was a dirt-biking weekend) are pretty solitary and quirky so they probably didn’t even care.

Work is kind of “meh” as the kids say. I feel pretty certain it will pass, and next week me and Nate are planning a tiny bit of a boondoggle to Los Angeles which will include a viewing of the Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien! And we’re gonna stay at the Roosevelt for two nights and there could be swimming. I do like Los Angeles and I do like the Roosevelt.

So mother’s day came and went, no big drama. Ivan and I drove down to the “in the future all we do is consume” deluxe mall Santana Row and took my mom to Yankee Pier! Her choice!

My triumphs of the day were:

1. acting normal

2. immediately offering up gossipy news about other people to get her in that “talking shit about other people makes me happy” mode

3. ordering wine the minute the waiter came by
4. NOT sneaking to the bar on my way to the bathroom to do a vodka shot (well, I might have done this if the bartender didn’t look so busy. So it’s a triumph but a triumph of circumstance.)

5. acting normal.

Ivan, as ever, was GREAT. He was acting totally normal, chatty, and then the minute my parents peeled off to go their own way he took me to the Left Bank and bought me a cocktail. And drove home AND let me control the radio the entire way home. He is really nice to me at the right times in the right ways. YAY IVAN.

(Also I saw the expensive shrink yesterday and she gave me a prescription for Deplin, which apparently is a type of B vitamin that can cross the “blood-brain barrier” and helps your body make seratonin. I’ll let you know how that goes.)

I hate:

IRONING.

If you know me well then you know that I normally wear things (dresses, shirts, jackets) that are of what they call “jersey”. Knitted fabric that can be washed and dried in machines and that does not need the ironing. SURE it doesn’t look crisp and fantastically professional like Murphy Brown but I just can’t do it.

So I hate the part where I actually iron. But I also hate the part where crisp cotton shirts, previously worn by me, emit a deep smell of… Liz stink! it’s in the weave, it’s in the fibers. I Febrize. I take laundry detergent and I crush it into the armpits, smooooooshing, trying to somehow chase out the Liz Dunn trademarked stink.

So I take the shirt I was ironing, I go Febreze the armpits and toss it in the laundry. Yet another reason to ONLY BUY TSHIRTs right?

Another thing I hate: how can we live in a modern world where there are still things we have to manipulate with hot pieces of metal to make look good?

how can I live in a modern world where my Audi navigation system can’t tell me which route has traffic, where there is an accident, can’t synthesize all the available information on the internet to tell me RIGHT IN MY CAR which way to go?

Okay there is probably a chance that this entry is unreadable perhaps because due to an upcoming vacation with some A-gays at a fancy vineyard with a pool, i have been exercising too much and not eating enough and drinking too many vodkas, I am unable to prooofread. PROOOOOOOOOOOOOOfread ya

It just occurred to me, if I lived in the south, none of these problems would be worth comment–I hate my momma, my daddy’s going senile, who wants a mint julep?

Being disconnected and angry at your relatives is a whole literary genre. I think I should just move to Alabama. And frankly that sounds kind of lovely.

YES I’M DRUNK BUT THAT DON’T MEAN IT AIN’T A GOOD IDEA

Okay so things are not great with my mom. Obviously. We had a few email exchanges, which were not warm or understanding and then devolved into her saying “I should just serve dinner and go to bed since no one seems to want me around.”

It all makes me so low. For the last few weeks I’ve been asking myself, why did I even start this argument! It’s so hard to start a fight when I really want to just forget all our psychotic history, then it’s so hard to continue the fight when I really want to just forget all our psychotic history. But, like I was saying in the other blog post, maybe all these transgressions DO add up to something, maybe they have hurt me such that I need to fight back!
So last week, I realized that we should see each other for Mother’s day, it’s just too…DRAMATIC to not see each other on Mother’s day. So we have a brunch date at San Jose’s incredibly exciting SANTANA ROW for Sunday May 10th!

And in the meantime, I just feel so … I don’t know. Not just uncreative, I feel psychically comotose. I come home from work and turn on the TV and mindlessly watch Law & Order while playing solitaire on my G1. And you guys, I play solitaire basically all the time. It’s not right. It’s like I’d rather be inside two card decks rather than living in this world. Why am I so dead to the world? What is wrong with me?

As a remedy to this ennui, I know I need to do something. I need to get absorbed by something. I have garden plans. I have my unfinished novel. I have THREE separate ideas for screenplays, one of which is about a bachelorette party in Las Vegas, one is about a cougar, and one is about Silicon Valley in these, the sad and unoptimistic times.

And yet I just don’t write. I surf the internet, and yay for Twitter, what with it’s constant updating, I can forget about actual real time, and my real concerns, because @robcorddry is gonna say something funny every twenty minutes or so! YAY INTERNET! (I know, to be properly ironic I should have said internets. My bad)

AND I know I should call my shrink to talk about this all but it seems like these are two-appointment-a-week problems and my shrink is $275 an hour and so twice a week would be $2,200 a month and another depressing aspect of my life is my credit card debt. (Hey if any of you know a talk therapist that you really like and is NOT $275 a session let me know.)

I would love to, at the end of this year, to be out of debt and not playing solitaire every minute of the day that I can. I’d love to have written something, and if not, to at least to have given up the dream that I am a writer. BUT I HAVE A SEMICOLON TATTOO! I can never give up writing. Right?

(I am depressed and this is a depressing blog post so if you aren’t into internet whingeing then you should skip this. Also there are long boring parts explaining some family logistics. Just warning you.)

My mom. She was always legendarily known among my friends as my Mean Mom. There are all kinds of stories that amaze and shock my friends and therapists about the stuff she’s done and said to me, but I’ve worked for so long to NOT tell them that I’m not going to conjure them back up to put down here. It started in high school, and got slightly better in college because I only saw her quarterly, and I only had to deal with her amazingly passive aggressive (sometimes just plain aggressive) barbs and cutdowns during holidays or family birthdays. There are so many movies about dysfunctional families and how Christmases are always so awful because your family is nuts, that I figured I’d gotten past the worst of it and could just join the rest of the human race in struggling to ignore the bad parts about my family and focus on the good parts (mostly my dad). Mom and I had a few frank discussions where she finally admitted she was horrible to me during high school (but only when she was visiting her own father on his deathbed), and I figured that was the most I would get. But that was fine, I just wanted to have a pleasant relationship even if it wasn’t deep or meaningful, it was fine with me that we’d never actually DEAL with our actual emotions about each other, as long as we could get through a dinner without someone yelling or storming out.

Then there was that trip to New York last August where she freaked out on me, the full story is here (http://www.lizcoworldwide.com/wordpress/?p=203). She was yelling at me to shut up, don’t say another word, just shut up, in the middle of a restaurant. And then I had to stay on that trip for another 2 days (of course I looked into flights to leave early but they were $800), angry and bummed and freaked out and yet also having to go to plays and dinners with her and be polite and make light conversation (and drinking glass after glass of wine) because I just didn’t want to get into it with her anymore, I just wanted the trip to end. And, when I got back from New York, my mood was really low–like the wind was taken out of my sails. Just a low-level, constant discouraged feeling. And I knew it was because of her, and seeing that fury and hate suddenly directed right at me (my sister and step-niece were at the table when it happened but the yelling was all for me). I felt an old, familiar dread of Joan Dunn the Terrible.

Growing up as a teenager, those outbursts were very common from her. She regularly told me (well, screamed at me) that she hated me, which was fine since I hated her too. She criticised me all the time, or at least it felt like all the time, I’m sure there were times where things were okay. But for example, during my sophmore year of high school, my dad rented me a room at a teacher’s house because my fighting with my mom was so intense (it started the minute I got home from school until I went to bed and I couldn’t get any homework done). I went to a high school 50 miles from my house, so ostensibly I was living at another house to be closer to school, but the reality was that my fighting with my mom was ruining the whole household. It was so isolating, being shipped off to live in this 65-year old woman’s house in Pebble Beach, all my friends were in Santa Cruz and I was just miserable. So it only lasted one semester. I would have run away from home–I fantasized about it constantly–but I knew that if I could just hold out till graduation, I could go away somewhere to college and it would all be paid for. It was what got me up in the morning.

So I was trying to forget the New York incident. I don’t want to live all full of rage and estranged from my family, I really don’t. And then, a few weeks ago I was at my parent’s house and my brother and his wife and my sister and her husband were all there and we were having dinner. And we were having the normal kind of dinner conversation, one person’s story sparks another person’s story and there is a lot of back and forth. And everyone was participating, especially my brother, my father, and me. Suddenly my mom says “Elizabeth, please be quiet, I want to hear what Hunter is saying.” Implying that I am interrupting my brother. OOOOH it made me so MAD! Because he’d been interrupting me (not that I saw it that way) as much as I’d been interrupting him. I told her that, and asked everyone at the table if they felt like I was interrupting my brother or dominating the conversation. They all said no…it took ALL MY WILL to not leave the table. SO INFURIATING! Why does she always single me out? But I poured white wine on the wound, and then one of my favorite cousins arrived at the house the next day, and I proceeded to stick to my normal plan of acting pleasant and letting the insults slide off of me.

That same weekend I went to visit my grandmother Hazel, my mom’s mother, at the nursing home in Santa Cruz. So depressing, because it’s obvious that everyone there is just waiting to die in this place, and all the crayon drawings from the local grammar schools can’t disguise that. Hazel can’t live alone because she does need a doctor/nurse nearby her (she can’t walk) and it’s too expensive to have in-home care. As it is it’s $6,000 a month at this place, and even then she has to have a roommate. Seeing her there always makes me want to kill myself when I hit 65 or 70…Hazel was so into taking vitamins to keep her health up and here she is at 92, she can’t walk, she has dementia, and she lives in this strange place and doesn’t understand why. All that worrying about your health, that’s where it gets you–healthy body, deteriorating mind, bad circumstances. I’d rather die, right? And Hazel was always mean to my mom (which probably has a lot to do with my situation with my mom), but what that means is that Hazel’s life is run by the child that likes her the least. Hazel was married her whole life (got married at 16), raised four kids, and now is going to die alone in a nursing home with the one kid she never liked visiting her once a week. That’s because all the other children moved out of California, and was the only one willing to deal with finding a nursing home and selling the house and all the moving arrangements, none of the other children felt like flying her to their home states to deal with it there, so there you have it. And I didn’t really even know her very well because my mom had a huge fight with her and my grandfather when I was about 14 years old and I didn’t see my grandma until 25 years later at my grandfather’s funeral.

(And I don’t have children and never will so that’s even MORE reason to off yourself before you hit the nursing home. Also who would pay for it all? I guess I can get more worried about that when I’m 55 or 60. Depressing as hell.)

So mom shushed me, back to the story. About a week later I got an email from her, with a passive aggressive apology saying that of course she wanted me to be my “effervescent self” but blah blah blah. Whatever. I wanted to believe that everything was okay between us and we weren’t regressing back to our old dynamic, which was super toxic. But…I couldn’t just push it down like always.  So I wrote back and said, “you know, perhaps you should consider going on an anti-depressant so that instead of saying and doing things you wind up apologizing for later, you’ll be able to stop yourself before it happens. I know you’re under a lot of stress taking care of Dad and Hazel, it might help!”

That didn’t go over well, she came back and said that she just didn’t get “enough help” and that I should think about what I was going to do to help out the next time I was there.

FUCK THAT.

The whole time I am there (because I am terrified of setting her off) I’m asking how I can help, chopping vegetables, clearing the table, washing the dishes, taking out the trash. But that is so like her–she thought about what she’d said when I was long gone and then felt bad about it, sent an apology, but when push comes to shove, she really thinks it’s all my fault, it’s because I’m not doing something right. She can’t take responsibility for her flaws, and (as seen in subsequent correspondence about this issue, and in all the frank conversations I’ve ever had with her trying to get her to own up to her shitty behavior) she gets so defensive when her flaws are pointed out, again, it all just turns into an attack on me.

We’ve been emailing for two weeks and it’s been deteriorating. For once I’m not pretending she’s not awful. She does not like that. Half the time she accuses me of being the problem and the other half she does this “well I did the best I could and I’m sorry for all the damage I caused you” which is NOT actual dialog about what is happening.

I don’t like that I’m not able to just repress it like I usually do. The way I get depressed is, I feel like nothing really is good or important. Like, my life really adds up to nothing, I have no real achievements, my relationship with Ivan is hollow and meaningless, I have no friends, etc. Everything is bleak.

Basically I think that my mom does not like me and I think that this has caused me deep emotional pain (based on how very much I do not want to think about it) and I wonder how much of my personality got shaped by this key figure in my life hating me? It had to have SOME effect, right? And that is so scary–I have all kinds of personality traits that are prickly and tough and is that how I’d be if I had a mother that was nice to me and actually really liked me? And if not, what do you even DO with that knowledge? Except be super depressed by it.

I think I might not want to have a relationship with her anymore. I don’t even know how to do that, logistically, if I ever want to see my dad again. Everything sucks but for some reason I am just not in the mood to take her belittling and I think this is probably a turning point in my relationship with my father, like, the kind of turning point where I don’t see anyone again till someone’s funeral.

SUCKS.

(as usual, since comments are turned off on my blog due to spammers, you can email me if you like at liz at lizdunn.com)

Nate Maggio just designed a new homepage for me and JESUS CHRIST is it beautiful! Go look at it!

www.lizdunn.com

Yesterday I weighed 122.5. Today, due to drunken pizza eating last night, it’s 123.5, but the point is, since Dec. 4 I have lost SIXTEEN pounds! (or 15! Whatever!)

So I am calling this project a success. Over and out!

As someone who has always been an enthusiastic and often early adopter of website communities (I was addicted to Friendster in 2002, started my blog in 1997, etc etc), here’s exactly what I picture going on over at the Facebook offices.

(If you don’t know about the controversy, you can read what Facebook says about it in their blog)

So here’s what happens: Facebook is started by guys thinking about how people will use and interact with the site. They are close to the user because they ARE the user, and they build something that a lot of people love. But the guys that built it can’t make money on it, because they have such strong ideas about the way the site should work. So they have to hire douches, because douches don’t care about users, they care about money. Which is totally fine as long as they don’t run the show.

So at Facebook the douches are thinking up ways to “monetize” all the free user-generated content that people have put on the site. Probably the recent spate of “25 things” essays started it–”hey we could publish those things as books or something, if we only had the rights. We need the rights!” And then they argue for it by saying “In this terrible economy, with our valuation plummeting, we HAVE to do this. Or the site will DIE. We HAVE TO!!” and the CEO or whoever is sufficiently scared into saying yes.

And then users find out about it, freak out, and the user-advocates at the company can swing into action with their own scare tactics: “Everyone’s going to stop liking our site and a competitor is going to show up and steal all our users!” And then Mark Zuckerburg writes a blog post talking about community values.

There will always be tension between the “I’m good at thinking up awesome products” guys and the “I’m good at making money by exploiting people’s positive emotions and connections” guys. And I bet that there WILL be a Facebook competitor showing up in the next year or two, to woo us away with less douchiness.

I supported Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. I did so for a few reasons: she is a very tough, very smart, and very hardworking woman. I admire her. I like her. I like the things she says. I think she would be an excellent and fair leader of this country.

I also am very much a feminist and I have a feminist agenda. That includes turning the patriarchy of American into a matriarchy. Bush and Reagan had such hard-ons for war they could barely disguise it. The minute they could, they loved sending their missles all over the world to bomb the shit out of innocent people instead of trying diplomacy, talking, or even minding their own goddamn business.

I truly believe that men and women are different–I think their brains are different. I think men have certain strengths and personality traits and women have others. Men really care about running things. They want to compete, and win, and that is why they tend to be leaders of armies and countries, because it matters more to them than anything else. Women care about about fixing problems, fairness, and the individual people that make up the masses. That is why I really want a woman to run this country–because the dream of America is that we care about everyone, we prize individuals and everyone is entitled to the same treatment and benefits in this country. And I feel like the country is NOT like that now.

So, I was sad when Hillary didn’t win the Democratic nomination. And as her supporter I had developed a position on Obama: he was too new, too inexperienced.  But during the presidential race, and then Barack’s victory, I started to really, honestly like him–I like that he’s not a Washington insider, which Hillary of course is. I like that he did actual service work with poor people in Chicago–I don’t think the Clintons ever really worked *with* the poor although I do think they did work on behalf of the poor. I like how he seems to have real, longstanding friends, and that he appointed a bunch of them to his cabinet–people that won’t be yes men, people that can tell him their real opinions and be in touch with real people on his behalf (because as President, Barack himself can’t be “real people” anymore).

I actually think Barack Obama is going to make everything okay. Not just better, okay.

I think he will get back the respect of the world towards the United States. I think he will enable and encourage policies and programs that actually help people, not benefit fucking Halliburton or big campaign contributers. I think he’ll conduct himself in an honorable way and that he’ll inspire other people to behave honorably as well. I think he has values that transcend politics and I think he might make elected officials across the country, including Congress and the Senate, remember why they were elected–to help people, not to trade favors or get re-elected or do well in polls.

And my beloved Hillary, well, she has a pretty awesome job now. And in some ways she’ll be able to improve people’s lives all over the world instead of just in the United States. At her confirmation hearing for Secretary of State, she said, “Of particular concern to me is the plight of women and girls, who comprise the majority of the world’s unhealthy, unschooled, unfed, and unpaid. If half of the world’s population remains vulnerable to economic, political, legal, and social marginalization, our hope of advancing democracy and prosperity will remain in serious jeopardy. We still have a long way to go, and the United States must remain an unambiguous and unequivocal voice in support of women’s rights in every country, every region, on every continent.”

Another nice chunk of what she said about improving the lives of women all over the world.

So maybe I got everything? A Washington outsider who is bringing actual, tangible hope to regular people all over this country as well as all over the world. And a women’s rights champion who has actual power to change things. And I’m feeling pure excitement and optimism. I hope you are too.

Will Ferrell is doing a broadway show called “You’re welcome, America” in his George W. Bush character. It is bound to be hilarious and I AM GOING! Funny or Die got a few tickets for each performance and I pounced. So on Jan 22 I fly to NYC and on Jan 25 I sit back and laugh at the funnyman.

I am hoping that this trip will erase the trauma of my terrible, terrible trip to NYC back in August with my mom and sister and step niece. That trip seriously damaged my relationship to my mother. The warm feelings are gone, it might not be irreversible though.

Project Heifer is actually back on track! I am 127 pounds. Three to go, and then we have a Project Heifer “Mission Accomplished” banner that we’ll drape behind me when I do the press conference. However my progress is not due to any ability to restrict myself, it’s due to me chopping my last perkies up into four sections (from each pill) and popping one when I start feeling hungry. Soon, I will run out of this crutch and then lord knows what’s going to happen. If I could just stop myself from going to restaurants and bars I think I would be okay, I just really like a well-crafted cocktail, you know? And maybe a little ceviche or wild mushroom compote to along with, is that really so hard to understand?

So, I went into the hospital at 138.5 pounds. Since then, exactly one month ago, the lowest I’ve gotten is 128. And I’ll get to 128 and be happy and think, “I’m almost there! Project Heifer is almost done and I can call it a successful mission!” and then something like 500 rum and cokes happen, and boom. I’m 131. This is so crazy making.

I forgot the worst thing about dieting which is, you have to eat in very specific, non-usual ways for any weight to come off, for days and days at a time. But to go up like 2 or 3 pounds, all you have to do is have ONE normal meal–like dinner with dessert and wine. And boom! You fast forward to where you were four days ago. I.e., fat.

I got some extra perkies from the doctor, that should help Project Heifer along. Man narcotics are so awesome for losing weight!