New Years with Ron Weems

It's the holidays and like any other day of the year, I'm reminded of my mother. I fully believe grief morphs into something else: it becomes part of the air you breathe and expel, part of your insides. You grow it out in your hair and nails. Whenever you lose anyone, there is a direct and bumpy line from that loss to the loss before to the first. It's still a shock to the system and hurts like hell because you're feeling three or more heartbreaks at once. I'm not making this up. Someone much smarter than me with a medical degree told me this fun fact.

My mom died on January 1, 1991. As I was fourteen at the time, it shocks me that the number of years I had my mother and the number of years without her are now the same. My dad usually disappears on New Years Eve and resurfaces on January 2. He also disappears in early May, on his wedding anniversary. We celebrate my mom's birthday, just two days before mine, together.

This year my dad and I are having a Netflix night together on New Years. We're also going over my budget and he's going to see just how little money I have. A homeless person has more cash than I do because they don't pay rent and don't have credit cards. As I'm in the red, I often want to curse at the homeless: "Fuck you, dude. Whatever cash I give you is yours to keep, you bastard."

My dad knows I have no money as I haven't bought new clothes in years. I desperately need a haircut. I'm on at least three different medications, multiple vitamins, I wear contacts and I'm a girl (which requires an expense report, quite frankly). So I'm not really sure what this meeting will bring. He's being surprisingly kind and says "I've never gone ova budgeting wid you, Kad." He is an accountant after all.

I suppose there's a first time for everything.

Merry fucking Christmas

I celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve with my dad, Ron. He gave me a plunger. And a trashcan. The assfucker is that he gave me the same trashcan last year for Christmas and didn't remember doing so. One is reminded of that lovely deskset scene from Dead Poets Society.

It is a nice plunger, as far as plungers go. The long part is a clear plastic with an ergonomic design. The plunger part is a bright blue. "It's fun, Kad!"

Yeah, but it's still a fucking plunger, Dad.

It would seem I'm doomed to spend the holidays alone with my dad as long as I stay single. We got in a fight Christmas Eve about my wedding and his money. Mind you, I'm not engaged. I'm not even in a committed relationship. What the fuck?

I watched Rebel Without a Cause for the first time yesterday. God, I love DVDs. One of the special features was James Dean's screentest. It was so weird to hear the director say "Dennis Hopper, meet Jimmy Dean." So fucking cool.

Still getting effed

Yep, the young Italian continues to flake on me. I forgot that "I miss you, I want to see you" actually means: "Let's hang out cuz clearly you'll be cool with me forgetting to call you even though that's the sole reason you broke up with me, right?"

And another douchebag in my life owes me an apology. You know who you are, douchey mcdouchealot.

This job rocks.

I'm proud to say: I took my first interoffice dump yesterday. I put it in an envelope and sent it to a woman named Helena. Seriously, dumping in public can be scary.

My new boss "punk'd" me on my first day here. Told the receptionist to tell me: "Sorry, he's had a change of heart. He'll call you later." I was at the elevator, thinking of the offer letter I'd just signed and almost in tears when my boss poked his head out, laughing. I screamed at him: "Are you fucking with me? Are you fucking with me?" Realize reader, this was my first day. I shook my fist at the receptionist: "You suck! I don't even know you and you suck!"

Other than that, I love it here. We've had krispy kremes, cookies and pumpkin cake two days in a row. I have tomorrow and friday off. I get to sit in on writers meetings. Oh dear, got somethin' cooking for Helena. (btw, she's Wolf Blitzer's sister and Tim's old boss). She sounds like a man and could use a few camisoles. Yikes.

Gabe and Pfizer

I am going to blatantly blog about my job of four years, a temping gig at Pfizer and my friend of four years (boyfriend for two, exboyfriend for two), Gabe. Please don't be alarmed. There's no vitriol to fear here. Perhaps toward several co-workers, but not Gabe. I could tell you about the cast of characters here but most of you saw or read my play, "Every Dog" so you know about the sort of office shenanigans I've witnessed. You know about Big Stinky, who referred to his boner often and picked his ears. You know about the Japanese chef who called me Kathreen. The office manager who found Gabe so cute he had to hire him, with or without my recommendation. The crazy lawyer who told me to make another lawyer happy as his wife and kids were stressing him out. The surly old man with the amazing laugh who grunted at me.

As many of you know, your feelings toward your ex potentially run the gamut. I don't think anyone in the history of humanity has spent 5 days a week, almost every week, for two years with their ex as Gabe and I have. And so it is on my last day here, leaving this crapass job, that my thoughts return to Gabe. We've, much to Gabe's dismay, smooched a little on the job, gotten lunch/dinner/coffee together, run errands with each other, watched the aftermath of a bombscare, done the crossword, read the paper, compared notes about auditions/sketches/plays/relationships, surfed online dating sites, ridiculed our co-workers, dealt with each other's hangovers . . .in turn, seen each other at our best and worst, on a daily basis, for about three years. We've also fought here. We've taken turns ignoring each other. We've passed each other in the hallway blatantly looking anywhere but at each other. There were times when I could hear his laugh a few rooms away and it broke my heart. Did you know Gabe hates abbreviations? FYI is a favorite. He's scared of old people. The thought of a crotchety old woman with a walker shaking her fist and yelling every abbreviation known to man while struggling to chase Gabe down the street makes me laugh a lot. Or maybe she should be in one of those motorized wheelchairs, attempting to run him down: "IMDB! ETA! ETD! FYI! SUNNY D! RSVP! P.A.! WMD! TREX!"

As of late, I've taken to rubbing my boobs on Gabe's office door just to piss him off, which brings me great joy. And he, of course, has his own ways of annoying me, which make him happy as well.

So, this post is for Gabe. May you get the eff out of here ASAP, jackass.

In love with lethargy

As the start day of my new job rapidly approaches, I find myself taking inventory: my closet, for example. Do I have any pants that aren't low riders? Do I have any skirts that don't have a leopard print? Any turtleneck sweaters that don't have armpit holes? Cute t-shirts that actually come past my belly button? A belt without metal studs? A decent winter coat? (no to all).

More importantly, I find myself thinking of my brain. My wits. I haven't really had to use either in a workplace in over four years. My new boss is going to say "Kath, coordinate the schedule in triplicate and fax it over to Emeril" and I'll have one hand picking my nose and the other pulling up my pants to hide my new Superman thong while jerking it to the Everyday Italian.

Speaking of Italians, thought I might somehow hear from the little boy I just broke up with. Alas. Must find other New Years tail. Such is life.

From Tim:
K: Hey Tim, what do you do for New Years every year?
T: Wake up next to somebody I don't know.

I'm a tard.

It occurs to me that I need to stop my public nose/lip picking habit as I start a new job on Monday. Rats.
As I waited for about an hour to see my doctor today in the hopes of kicking a serious viral infection in my throat, perhaps the hiv I picked up from the Italian comic or the cancer I developed after chainsmoking for a solid weekend with my friend Carol, I noticed the slightly misshapen black circles on the stark walls about six inches above the rather ugly waiting room chairs. I looked around. Every sickass person in the room was leaning their head on the wall behind them. I thought of all the ill people that must have sat in those hideous chairs at one point or another. Hospital rooms really are ugly. You'd think, in a place so potentially tragic, somebody would make waiting rooms soothing. To this day, I have a clear visual of the "bad news" room in the ICU in Mt. Vernon Hospital, VA where my dad told me my mom had died. It was atrocious. Some sort of woods motif with ugly birds. I felt like I was on some sort of morbid safari. So weird when the mundane and the surreal meet.

All of Yesterday's Cookies

Cookies do indeed get stale. So does realizing you're picking from the same pool of douchebags every time you attempt to date someone.

Damn it, I kinda liked the young Italian. But for the fifth or sixth time, he gave me the "I'll call you at [insert time] and we'll meet up" and then no call. Mind you, he was the one, shortly before Tgiving who said he wanted to be my boyfriend and call me his girlfriend and how much he liked me, how he hadn't been so excited to be with someone in so long and blah blah blah. In addition to his seeming flakiness, he also gets drunk every night with his fellow comics or his roommates, and rolls into work at 2pm. And for the past month, I've been doing that, too. And I'm not 23 anymore, folks and those kind of shenanigans manifest themselves all over my 28-year-old face. He also seemed scared to be alone with me. It was never like: let's go out and do something. It was like: I'm drinking with my roommates, come over. I'm drinking at the club: come hang out with me and a bunch of standup comics. Then, most likely, sex I wouldn't remember followed by a massive hangover and needing to take a beer dump on the way back into the city from Queens, still drunk.

I don't get it. Men act like they're so into you and then do everything to prove that they're not. I give up.

Christmas Comes Early

Lewis Black is livid that Christmas starts the day after Halloween. Because my siblings both have in-laws that need their holiday cheer, my family is celebrating Christmas this Sunday, December 12. I just met my future brother-in-law and I now I have to add him to my fucking list? What the hell is that?

"He likes coffee," my sister says. "Get him a travel mug."

And yet I'm the only member of the family travelling for these fucking holidays. Why not get me a fucking travel mug, eh?

And yes, I'm still coughing up brown shit from my chainsmoking, bingedrinking, Italiansexing weekend. Thank you to all who contributed. You bitches know who you are.

I got nothin.'

I've had a hangover since Friday. My boss just told me to live early because I look ill. I should've called in drunk. More soon. Happy fucking monday.

PB. Porn for women.

I have wicked insomnia and have been on Ambien for about three months. I'm not supposed to mix Ambien with alcohol and it works out quite nicely: I use my drunkenness to get me to sleep in lieu of Ambien. I hear you're not supposed to read in bed but I do. Lately I've been looking at Pottery Barn books. Not catalogs. Books. One's called "Living Rooms." One's called "Bedrooms." They help me ease into the Ambien daze that will ultimately knock me out for about five or six hours. There's something innately soothing about home decor. I dare say I think home decor books and periodicals may be the female equivalent of pre-sleep porn. Which isn't to say I don't have porn. I do. But my porn cravings come at bizarre times. For example, last night I was happily enjoying Marlon Brando in "On the Waterfront" when I suddenly wanted to stir the soup to "Masseuse" starring Jenna Jameson. I am disappointed that she only has sex with her husband these days. He couldn't be queerer. Kickin body with a butter face and a femmy voice. Like so many . . . (Tim, fill in the blank here. I got nothing.)