Bull(et)s On Parade.

Life (and an annoyingly half-broken blog) really got the best of me for a second there. Today, I’m relaxing with a chilled glass of bulletpoints.

• In 10th grade, there was one night where I managed to simultaneous piss off all of my friends in one fell swoop. They wanted me to go ice skating with them but I declined – there was a UNCF telethon on BET that night, hosted by the one and only Lou Rawls. I watched every single second of that telethon, even through performances by washed up songstresses like Patty Austin. My attention was fixated despite my step dad’s heckling and my mom’s pleas to turn it. “Why do you have to watch the whole thing?” they asked. I even shed some tears here and there. Finally, they left me alone and I was able to call in my pledge of $20 in private. I’ll never forget the day my mom received her billing statement. Ironically, that’s twenty dollars more than she contributed to my college fund.
• There is an attorney at The Law Firm whose last name is similar to one of my favorite soft rockers, Gino Vannelli. His name came up a few weeks ago and then that night, one of his songs came on some yacht rock Spotify playlist I was forcing Henry to listen to at bedtime, which is my favorite  thing to do: force Henry to listen to things and give him lengthy explanations about what each song means to me and every single childhood memory is attached to it. It’s been a while since I heard a G.Vann song and I have to tell you, I wasn’t expecting to burst into tears. But I did. Anything that reminds me of sitting at the counter in my Pappap’s kitchen is going to launch searing daggers of ouchy nostagia into my heart without warning.
  • The next evening after work, Chooch and I got in fight so I fled to my bedroom where I ate dinner alone and put Gino on Spotify to help booster my pity party to the next level. Then I tweeted something along the lines of “Those Gino Vannelli vibes, tho” and some broad retweeted it. I went to her twitter and found that her entire timeline is full of Gino Vannelli tweets, so I guess she makes it her business to troll Twitter and RT every mention of him. There’s always someone.
  • “Living Inside Myself” was one of the main reasons I begged my Pappap to order me the Time Life Body Talk CD compilations when I was a teenager. It was one of those subscriptions where they would send you a new double CD each month and it was glorious. Then my Pappap died and my grandma canceled it so I never got to complete the collection. I’M NOT GRINDING MY TEETH RIGHT NOW OR ANYTHING.

• Chooch’s piano teacher Cheryl has moved to Asheville, WhateverCarolina to take massage therapy classes, so Chooch’s piano is temporarily on hold until June. We were both super sad and I basically acted like she was dying when I picked him up from the lesson and she was like, “NO DON’T START!” because she was trying to keep a celebratory tone but here comes Emo Erin, ready to rain her salty drops of sadness all over the party. She gave Chooch some things to work on in her absence though and surprisingly, he seems to be practicing way more than he ever has. And he’s getting scarily good and figuring out how to play things by ear. Like after he heard “Tip Toe Through the Tulips” on the mid-season finale of The Walking Dead, he had taught himself how to play it that same night and what a treat that was, him flipping back and forth between that song and the Halloween/Michael Myers theme. It was like a soundtrack to a nervous breakdown.
• Two weeks ago (I’m so behind on bullet-points!), Amber2 pointed out that someone in the Firm was giving away a shower seat and gray wig on our Classifieds. “I find this bizarre,” she said, while my fingers were fumbling to reply to the seller before anyone else had a chance to take the gray wig from me. Amber just laughed and said she should have known better than to say that to me. By the next day, I still didn’t have a response from the seller. Nate said, “Maybe she doesn’t want to separate them?” like when people are giving away kittens by the pair or none at all. Finally I was like, “I AM GOING TO EMAIL THIS LADY” and it’s a good thing I did because she never got notification that I responded to her ad via the Classifieds page! So then she called me and asked me if I wanted to know what the wig looked like, and I didn’t really care because a wig is a wig to me, but I was like, “Sure?” so she described it and then said she was going to include the wig shampoo and conditioner and asked me, “How do you normally wash your wigs?” and I was like “…..” but then thankfully she was like, “Blahblahblah?” and I was like, “Yes, just like that. That is exactly how I have been known to wash my wigs.” And then the next day, the wig was waiting for me!
  • Trudy has to age sometime, you know?

• Spotify told me that these were my top genres of 2015 and I’m like, duh:  
• I went to dinner last week with my Original Work Mom, Carol and it was wonderful! I haven’t seen her in a pretty long time, which is sad because we shared an office at the meat place for 4 years. She and I walked out of that place together and while it was such a shitty, traumatic day for us both, I feel like it’s something that will always keep us bonded together. Of course, we did a lot of reminiscing—some good, mostly bad—about that horrible company and it left me feeling some type of way, for sure.
  • Instead of being doom and gloom about it and crediting it for the stutter it left me with and the near-crippling fear of getting another job, which sent Henry and me into a financial pit that we have only recently begun to claw our way out from, I like to think about the good things that came from it:
    • Getting to work with Carol for four years was wonderful. She is my friend/Chooch’s godfather Brian’s mom, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that from 200-2004, she was more of a mom and support system to me than my actual mom. She was also one of the first people who I confided in about Henry, and she was definitely on board with me dating him.
    • Which leads me to: meeting Henry, obviously. Whoever would have thought that 14 years later…you know. Life is fucking weird and awesome.
      • Even though I’m mad at Henry right now because he has been ignoring my texts all day because apparently I’m not important like Faygo.
• Prettttty sure I’m food-phobic. All this holiday bullshit has me panicking about overeating, or you know, just eating in general. I skipped the Law Firm’s holiday party because I was petrified of being around all the cookies. And luckily, I wasn’t around for our department’s holiday party because I was in Cleveland, so that alleviated some forever-fat anxiety. I probably should talk to someone* about this instead of having secret heart palpitations.
  • *Like a therapist on Twitter or Instagram, maybe.
• Today, Todd was trying to guess what kind of music I liked in high school and his first guess was NO DOUBT which was actually so offensive to me that it made my stomach hurt. Then I made him listen to Chiodos and he said he was super nervous at first because he was bracing himself for a lot of screaming, but that it ended up not being too bad.
• I made Henry leave on some Carpenters special that WQED was airing during one of their telethon things, mostly as a joke because I never gave a shit about the Carpenters one way or another, but then I was suddenly really into this stupid special because they make me feel uncomfortable. Uncomfortable in the sense that I’m having an out-of-body, time-traveling experience* where I’m standing in my grandparents’ backyard in the 60s, wearing a purple sundress, and it’s springtime and I can’t see my face. So then I started torturing myself by listening to them all last week and I had no idea that they sang “When I Fall In Love” because I always thought it was originally by Celine Dion (thanks to the “Sleepless In Seattle” cassette in my Pappap’s Cadillac) so then on Sunday night, when Henry was trying to go to sleep, I played basically every version that Spotify has, even the Doris Day one, and when I got bored with that, I asked him what he wanted to listen to and he mumbled into his pillow, “Anything but Doris Day.” That story seemed a lot more exciting before I started typing.
  • See also: Marty Balin’s “Hearts.”
• I hope that little things like this never stop making me squeal like a teenager:
• In relation to the above bullet, I have been extremely regressing lately, and this entails fluctuating precariously between extreme giddiness and a morose listlessness that finds me doing nothing more but laying around, with my arm splayed across my forehead, listening to emocore.
• Seeing Craig Owens on Wednesday totally reignited my love for Chiodos. I haven’t been able to stop smiling!
  • Except for when I’m being emocore. Which happens at the drop of a hat.
• I bought this Skinny Dip phone case last summer, months before I finally upgraded my phone. Priorities. Even Glenn said it’s “cute.” I’m not sure if he meant it or not.
• It occurred to me recently that I’m the same age that Henry was when we started dating: he was 36 and I was 22. He seemed SO OLD to me back then, but I don’t feel like I’m old now that I’m the same age.

Ew, on that gross note, I’m going to go and, I dunno, listen to more emocore probably. Sorry, co-workers.