ma' family ah' love

sent a letter to the pro BMX-sponsored bro right beneath me: (or rather, according to the pic, above me)

ah, young one, why must you proliferate in breezy shows of articulate proliferance? why not just shine as the motherfuckin' free spirit you be? hehe
yeah hah, just got my groove on to a proliferance of kurt cobain, madonna and busta rymes at my nearest pub.
yahoo.
and now i'm alone. all alone. wishin you were here.
abbi's moving to LA, did i mention? poor sweet, hot dear, is in a world of trouble when it comes to the BF. sad but true. she's gonna grow up alot here.
ben's favorite line is, 'ya' gotta' lotta' guts, pat.' everytime i talk to him and sound slightly insane, that's what he throws at me. it's HILARIOUS.
anywho, drunk off my arse, hope to talk to you soon.


(trust, he was frontin, check this: "whats up, one of exalted nature? its mighty ruler. how do the priceless hours of life's wind blow? ... has the antecedent duration of individual existence proven erstwhile and quondam or newfangled and unprecedented? keep an independent self sufficient outlook a habit and you will ensure preeminent personal remuneration. am i trying your mind a little yet? hard to do to an individual of your intellectual stature. reply with a mind blowing showdown of a response, or im gonna tell everyone i can beat you in a 100 yard dash")

i can't believe it

The Word of the Day for July 20 is:
smarmy \SMAR-mee\ adjective *1 : revealing or marked by a smug, ingratiating, or false earnestness 2 : of low sleazy taste or quality

Smarmy the goldfish is not 2 days fresh in his watery toilet grave, and this, THIS, THIS is the random word-of-the-day delivered to my email inbox?!

Life is cruel.

A Beach Bum's Late Weekend

What an utterly fulfilling last couple days.
Bought a surfboard and wet suit. for cheap, cheap, cheap, backed by the 20-questions of my surf-saavy neighbors being flung at the craigslist unfortunate who found himself suddenly not selling quite so easily to an inexperienced chick.
skateboarded to a surf shop the next morning to get resin for the nose, with a stop-off at an awesome little book-shop coffeehouse where I predict I'll be spending massive amounts of time scribbling away at my novels.
Speaking of, started a new one, which is absolutely the best decision. No reason not to grab and hang on to the daily adventures floating past, which is essentially what my counterculture-bridget-jones type tale is about...
Cleaned my room and found 2 bear claws and a bear tooth that I thought were long-lost. they're from a bear that attacked the native alaskan village on the yukon river that i lived in a few summers back. Took 'em down to the boardwalk, found a rasta to wire and string them up...got a hole drilled in the tooth by an indigenous Peruvian wood carver who didn't speak a lick of english. finally, spanish comes in completely and necessarily handy.
Am now the owner of one bad-ass necklace whose wearing speaks almost as effectively on late-night strolls as a can of mace or a stun gun. or so i think, just like i'm convinced that my shoulders broaden when i square them at scary bums.
and finally, went sunset surfing. enough said.
ps. had a triple-chocolate dessert at a dope-ass restaurant. now it's really all been said.

Trip-Out

i wonder what it would be like to wander with someone i love. someone who's as addicted to tripping on traveling as me.

the spanish singer Astrud Gilberto is crooning 'ba ba ba da' over a banjo.
"felicidade...someone to hold my hand...take me to aruanda...summer samba... only trust your heart...because love is the saddest thing when it goes away..."
I want to be in a land faraway, trekking across rocky streams, eating papayas, dodging horses and cows in dusty streets, taking siestas under a sombrero, speaking sassy spanglish to disapproving shopkeepers, scribbling poetry in a leather journal on the rooftops of Cuban casas, and wrapping up in a woven blanket in a rainbow hostel at the end of the night...

wanderlust is tugging at my chest like a bad case of heartache. Is that why i run? to escape the impossible pursuit of resolution within gain, loss and the apathy in between? to defiantly attempt to leap out of the spiral of inevitable circularity that is this life?

for however briefly, yes.

and because new sounds, sights and tastes are my drug of choice.

oh and because reading the wizardry of gabriel garcia marquez's '100 years of solitude' has been giving me daily spanish-country flashbacks.

Things 2 Live By

"There are 2 things you should adhere to in life.
1)Always tell the truth
2)Never do anything you don't want to do."

The problem is, what if those 2 things clash? What if what you want to do is say whatever fits the situation best, if it's the truth or not?
Well #1, I think, if followed, ends up guaranteeing the long-term realization of #2.
I New Year's-resolutioned that quote years ago, and I'm more enthusiastic than ever about sticking to it. (#1 in an 'avoid the drama of falseness that always catches up with you' kind of way, and #2 not in a defeatist, lazy way, but in a 'be true to yourself and don't be a one of the sheep' kind of way.) That said, I feel like marching off backed up by my solid little #1 and #2 and happily telling back-stabbing 'friends' i've wasted silly amounts of time being falsely nice to, that they can go to hell and stay there.

I made that vow 'Years ago' already? Wow. Growing up is so crazy, sexy cool. I mean, scary as shit. I mean, I can't stop it, so I'm just hanging on for a dear life. I hope.
Isn't life supposed to become less complicated, at least in your head, as you gain wisdom and maturity? maybe that was just wishful thinking inundated into me in my youth by hopeful adults lost enough to believe in having it all figured out.
sometimes it seems like I'm just gaining more convulted and jaded observations, thoughts, ideas and most of all questionsto whambamslam into my already overly-analytical skull.
But. As I grow I choose to remain adventurous and courageous and open-minded and most of all, soft-hearted. Never too scarred and scared to love again. Scabs are so ugly and healing is so fresh and beautiful. At least I have control over that miracle.

And thank the gods that my belief in #2 has already led me to choose the un-jam your skull catharsis of a writing career.

..and it's still going...

Dude, I promise to stop after this one. But this is my WORD! right here. right now.

turophile \TOOR-uh-fyle\ noun : a connoisseur of cheese : a cheese fancier

shout-outs to all the peeps that feel me on this one.
abigail?....

On a New Word Kick

borborygmi: rumbling sounds caused by gas movement in the stomach.

thanks MD/PHd study-buddy for that useful palabra.

Words of 2005

The Washington Post's Mensa Invitational once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, orchanging one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are this year's {2005} winners:

Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.
Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.
Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
Glibido: All talk and no action.
Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an asshole.

UCLA Study On Friendship Among Women

Well, something about the flippant, layman's-terms way in which this is written smells fishy to my upturned-nose academic side, but it's so worth reading. I've found myself referencing this challenge to traditional notions of stressed-out humans' behavior on a regular basis in conversation.
PS: as my friend Matthew pointed out, men too are free to indulge in nurturing and gathering instead of hightailing it to the darkest solitary corner, to discount the rather cheezy conclusion.

An alternative to fight or flight by Gale Berkowit
A landmark UCLA study suggests friendships between women are special. They shape who we are and who we are yet to be. They soothe our tumultuous inner world, fill the emotional gaps in our marriage, and help us remember who we really are. By the way, they may do even more. Scientists now suspect that hanging out with our friends can actually counteract the kind of stomach-quivering stress most of us experience>on a daily basis. A landmark UCLA study suggests that women respond to stress with a cascade of brain chemicals that cause us to make and maintain friendships with other women. It's a stunning find that has turned five decades of stress research---most of it on men---upside down. Until this study was published, scientists generally believed that when people experience stress, they trigger a hormonal cascade that revs the body to either stand and fight or flee as fast as possible, explains Laura Cousin Klein, Ph.D., now an Assistant Professor of>Biobehavioral Health at Penn State University and one of the study's authors. It's an ancient survival mechanism left over from the time we were chased across the planet by saber-toothed tigers. Now the researchers suspect that women have a larger behavioral repertoire than just fight or flight. In fact, says Dr. Klein, it seems that when the hormone oxytocin is release as part of the stress responses in a woman, it buffers the fight or flight response and encourages her to tend children and gather with other women instead. When she actually engages in this tending or befriending, studies suggest that more oxytocin is released, which further counters stress and produces a calming effect. This calming response does not occur in men, says Dr.Klein, because testosterone---which men produce in high levels when they're under stress---seems to reduce the effects ofoxytocin. Estrogen, she adds, seems to enhance it. The discovery that women respond to stress differently than men was made in a classic "aha" moment shared by two women scientists who were talking one day in a lab at UCLA. There was this joke that when the women who worked in the lab were stressed, they came in, cleaned the lab, had coffee, and bonded, says Dr. Klein. When the men were stressed, they holed up somewhere on their own. I commented one day to fellow researcher Shelley Taylor that nearly 90% of the stress research is on males. I showed her the data from my lab, and the two of us knew instantly that we were onto something. The women cleared their schedules and started meeting with one scientist after another from various research specialties. Very quickly, Drs. Klein and Taylor discovered that by not including women in stress research, scientists had made a huge mistake: The fact that women respond to stress differently than men has significant implications for our health. It may take some time for new studies to reveal all the ways that oxytocin encourages us to care for children and hang out with other women, but the "tend and befriend" notion developed b! y Drs. Klein and Taylor may explain why women consistently outlive men. Study after study has found that social ties reduce our risk of disease by lowering blood pressure, heart rate, and cholesterol. There's no doubt, says Dr. Klein, that friends are helping us live longer. In one study, for example, researchers found that people who had no friends increased their risk of death over a 6-month period. In another study, those who had the most friends over a 9-year period cut their risk of death by more than 60%. Friends are also helping us live better. The famed Nurses' Health Study fromHarvard Medical School found that the more friends women had, the less likely they were to develop physical impairments as they aged, and the more likely they were to be leading a joyful life. In fact, the results were so significant, the researchers concluded, that not having close friends or confidants was as detrimental to your health as smoking or carrying extra weight. And that's not all. When the researchers looked at how well the women functioned after the death of their spouse, they found that even in the face of this biggest stressor of all, those women who had a close friend and confidante were more likely to survive the experience without any new physical impairments or permanent loss of vitality. Those without friends were not always so fortunate. Yet if friends counter the stress that seems to swallow up so much of our life these days, if they keep us healthy and even add years to our life, why is it so hard to find time to be with them? That's a question that also troubles researcher Ruthellen Josselson, Ph.D., co-author of Best Friends: The Pleasures and Perils of Girls' and Women's Friendships (Three Rivers Press, 1998). The following paragraph is, in my opinion, very, very true and something all women should be aware of and NOT put our female friends on the back burners. Every time we get overly busy with work and family, the first thing we do is let go of friendships with other women, explains Dr. Josselson. We push them right to the back burner. That's really a mistake because women are such a source of strength to each other. We nurture one another. And we need to have unpressured space in which we can do the special kind of talk that women do when they're with other women. It's a very healing experience.

"yeah, i wanna kill her"

...when bitches fuck with me, it's like, OVER,"

says the click-clacking conversation that just walked past my house. I know how those random drunk neighbors feel, though. Control issues and nsecurity have a way of misdirecting natural healing processes into petty drama, especially when you're female. did I say that? oops, my bad, feminism.
I'm in a half-way here, half-way there kind of confusion with old friends and new.
there was an invisible but weighty divide between my black-clad indie best friends and my sun-bleached homies tonite. I just tried to focus on the sound of the waves and ride the divide, but ineffectually enough that the snooty Hollywood versus laid-back Venice memory is now bothering me.
there are no cool-o-meter cops patroling the ranks of 'fashion sense' 'who-you-know' and 'what-you-do,' people. there really is no mechanism out there to give you college-esque GPAs on social success. the thumbs-up is gonna have to come from within.
hipster or beach bum? what's my thing? and why should there be a genre?
How about 'just living?'
***
"hell, no."
"look, calm down."
i will not calm down, motherfucka. that shit is fucked UP."
this time the walk-by conversation was two dudes.
I guess it goes both ways!
ah, humans, us lovable hateful, silly, silly things.

cinnamon toast

I've burned two pieces in a row, due to the mad frenzy in which I am dashing around my home, completing perfunctory tasks at some early a.m. hour.
just chill, Heidi. sit down by the toaster oven, and take a deep, cinnamony breath of leisure.
I've got too much shit going on, and I can't stop. And I don't have a battery insert, the way I seriously suspect that annoying energizer bunny does.
ok, my toast is done. right, this time.
and I'm back, slice in hand.
some dude in his huge, solitary mansion just tried to charm his way into my pants all night, under the, it turns out, false cover of 'friends hanging out.' and I was like, uh uh, pops.
I hate when guys with money think they can have whatever they want. It makes me more convinced than ever that I don't want to end up with someone that has more dough than me, that's for sure.
ok, I'm gonna go continue reading 'one hundred years of solitude' and fall asleep now.