Auld Lang Syne

It's the same thing every year. Everyone is always sooooo anxious to get the year over with by the time New Year's Eve rolls around, including myself. All of a sudden it's like the year turned to total shit. Rarely do you hear someone say they will miss the current year. This year is particularly huge because we are moving on to an entirely new decade. So I'm going to honor 2009 by listing my 9 favorite things about it:

(In order of occurrence)

1. Scored a major promotion
2. Started a torrid love affair with a villainous reality TV star
3. Made my first appearance on a radio show
4. Went to the horse tracks for the first time
5. Ended torrid love affair with a villainous reality TV star (though still receive entertaining texts)
6. Traveled to New Zealand (!!!)
7. Sat inside a Delorean
8. Relearned how to ice skate
9. Started writing again

While I'm definitely looking forward to more good things to come, the goodbye will be bittersweet. Farewell, decade. I never even knew your name.

The Art of Seduction - Part II

I'm only 150 pages into this book and I already feel like I'm loaded for bear. It's New Year's Eve and I'm fully equipped to trick some bastard into sucking face with me at midnight, FTW.

The Art of Seduction

I've been wanting to read this book for a while, and nobody bought it for me for Christmas...so I just bought it myself. It's called The Art of Seduction, and it's by the same dude that wrote The 48 Laws of Power, which inspired our beloved 50 Cent so much that he actually collaborated with the author to make his own book, The 50th Law. I figured if 50 Cent believed he experienced any sort of success due to this authors' words, then I might have a chance as well. Hell, if I have even a fraction of the success that 50 Cent has had, I'll be drinking champagne with diamonds in it while stretched out by the fire on a bearskin rug in no time.

The inside cover of The Art of Seduction says: "Get what you want by manipulating everyone's greatest weakness: the desire for pleasure. Be Ruthless. Reign Supreme." I'm...totally on board. The book is almost 500 pages, which I didn't expect. If there are 500 pages worth of information on how to seduce someone, then I've been doing it all wrong for years now. I think I've only been operating from 2 pages of info up until now.

Well, time to change. I'm gonna finish this book by New Year's Day and then I'm gonna manipulate the fuck out of every guy that crosses my path. There will be no survivors.

Superfail.

I forgot to suggest Scenario D, in which I receive absolutely zero acknowledgment from The Comedian. I figured that probably wouldn't be a possibility, but that's exactly what happened. I wore my favorite dress and made my cheeks extra rosy. I don't know what I expected. I guess I hoped, at the very least, I would be able to have the chance to take some of the power back, but that opportunity never presented itself. The room was small, too. It required effort to ignore me. What a waste of a pretty dress. I'd say I felt ugly if I didn't already feel so invisible.

I'm not gonna go back to that trivia again.

2 drink maximum

There's another bullshit comedy trivia thing tonight and I'm actually going to attend. The Comedian will be there, of course, and while I think it's probably been long enough for me to be in the same room as him without wanting to rip my heart out of my chest and stomp it on the ground so it stops stinging sogoddamnmuch...you never know. I truly am a glutton for punishment. There are only a few ways this could possibly go:

Scenario A: The way that would work best for me -
Comedian: Hey, sorry I've been such a jerk. Let's start over.
Me: Ok! (smile and take sip of champagne while girlishly batting my eyelashes)

Scenario B: The way it will probably go down -
Comedian: Hey.
Me: ...hey. (blink a lot, bite my lip, and try to look like I'm not even bothered)

Scenario C: Worst-case scenario -
I enter the room and the music stops while the spotlight is rerouted to my face and I'm met with a chorus of crickets and that trumpet sound that's played when someone fails on the Price Is Right.

Only time will tell. But if I know myself at all, I'd say it's probably best to stay away from any sort of alcohol, or I'll certainly make a mess of things. The place demands a 2 drink minimum (which I think is incredibly annoying) so I'll probably just have to stick with two $5 Diet Cokes. Or flask my two alcoholic beverages and give them to a homeless person or something. To be continued...

t4m in LA area

Many moons ago, I was mixed up with this chef that lived up in Portland. I met him through a friend and we sorta hit it off (I guess) and I even went up to see him for one whirlwind weekend. Not surprisingly, things didn't work out between us. But we kept in contact and for a while I had fantasies of us meeting somewhere in the middle and starting some sort of magical Pacific Northwestern life together. He'd cook me dinner and I'd sing him songs and we'd snuggle on the couch and lament over health care and foreign policy while the world outside cried for us and everyone else.

Like all telephone relationships, the novelty began to wear off quickly. I became tired of waiting for this guy that I liked to come see me, I knew he never would, and the words of Mark Knopfler in the song "So Far Away" became less and less romantic. We started picking each other apart each time we talked, and eventually it got to the point where we were just mean to each other over the phone.

One night I must have said something that was the straw on his proverbial camels' back and he hung up on me. A few days later I started receiving phone calls from all over the country. All men. None of them would identify themselves, nor would they tell me how they got my number. One dude eventually said he got my number from Craigslist and he was calling regarding my ad for the motorcycle for sale. I posted no such ad. Strange things were amiss, but I figured there was just a misprint.

When the next guy called, I asked if he was calling about the ad. He said yes, and that he would be in town the following week and wanted to make an appointment with me. When I asked him what it was that he wanted to make an appointment for, he said "Uh. For some company." (What.) Then I asked him to read the ad aloud to me because I had suspected there was a misprint, and the dude says to me "Shit, really? Man, that's fucked up. This ad says you are a transsexual escort in the Los Angeles area, and it says your name is Lindsay."

I swallowed the vomit in the back of my throat and immediately started thinking about who it was that I could have pissed off enough to do something like this. The fucking chef. I called him up and screamed for about 10 minutes straight while he laughed uproariously and I begged him to remove the ad.

Well, he didn't remove the ad, and I continued to receive calls for another week or so. Looking back, it was the best thing he could have done because any feelings I had felt for him before had completely disappeared. It's been years since then, and he's apologized and I guess I don't care enough about him to actually be bothered anymore. Now he's married to some chick that I swear he hated up until the day of their nuptials, but at least he isn't my problem anymore.

I've been receiving an absurd amount of "wrong numbers" lately, and I can't help but think that there's someone out there that I've pissed off. More importantly, what does this new ad say about me?

I'm grouchy.

I've been 30 years old for 48 hours now, and there still have been no great epiphanies. No new wisdom came along with my jump to the next decade. I'm still just as confused as ever. I'm not really sure what I expected to happen, but I definitely anticipated there would be some sort of change. At the very least, I figured the anxiety I'd been feeling for the past year leading up to the actual event would dissipate. Nope. I feel old, and yucky, and nothing any person in their 30s says is going to make me believe that this is better than being younger.