Today begins “National No Name Calling Week.” To prepare, I’ve been doing some Olympic stretching and shadow boxing in front of the bathroom mirror.

Any bets on how long I’ll last?

I haven’t been feeling very nice lately.

Also, last night left me with some new insight: I don’t have friends, I have a cult following. It was probably one of the most flattering (and insane) things anyone has ever said to me, though I’m sure that wasn’t the intention.

 I LOL’d for a long time. I like being amused.

First it was “sewing up her vagina.” Now it’s:

Search Engine Terms

These are terms people used to find your blog.

“hand sign for cunnilingus”

With each entry, I’m quickly becoming more and more of a family blog! See that, mommy?

Remember how I took that baker’s picture the other day? After Kara read my entry about that, she emailed me and said that she used to be friends with a baker at that same Kribel’s and he went crazy and started threatening her and her friends and then she included a MySpace profile and asked, "Is this the guy?" And of course it was. It’s like my body has a GPS for Crazyland. He has a picture of a tree in his MySpace photos and the caption says, "Painted this while in the hospital." I couldn’t help but imagine a very Dream Team-esque scene with hospital gowned schizos enjoying craft hour. I wish my friend Allison would commit herself again so I could visit and paint trees with the patients. Also in Kara’s email, she said she wanted me to pick out some of my paintings for her to buy, and I almost suggested that she see if Crazy Baker’s pretty tree was up for grabs, but I didn’t want to lose a sale. Naturally, there’s that sadistic part of me that really wants to flirt with this situation, but since he did something directly to Kara, I’ll take the Good Friend exit and leave it alone. If it had been Janna though, I wouldn’t care. Good thing Kara told me before I wound up inviting him to game night.

Today, I’m sick of old friends reconnecting with no intention of getting to know who I’ve become. I’m sick of self-serving fucks who schmooze about how it feels like "being home" when they’re with me when they have no idea who I am anymore, or where I am in life, and completely ignore the fact that I’m a mother now and someone else’s girlfriend. I’m sick of pathetic failures who spend all of their time building up a slipshod facade of grandeur and give themselves pompous nicknames on MySpace and wait for all the sleazy goth hoes to fellate their ego. I’m sick of self-aggrandizing assholes who won’t admit that they’re really just not that good, not that talented, but feel it’s necessary to hear themselves making grandiose statements outloud in order to keep deluding the truth, like, "I created a LiveJournal but realized that everything I was writing was just way too good to post there, so I’m saving it for publication." Then they say they care about me, but when we go out for coffee and I stop in the bathroom, they only order their own coffee, leaving me the frustrating task of flagging down the waitress for a cup of my own. Then they say they love me, like the words are laced with magic and I’m going to drop everything and leave my son and leave Henry and run off with someone who can’t keep a job and gets kicked out of school and makes shitty club music but acts like they’re a fucking Goth god who writes manifestos about the "scene" to prove it. Fuck you.

You know what’s severely disheartening? When you pull out of the parking lot after work, only to have your steering wheel lock up and the car completely shut off, leaving you perpendicular to the flow of traffic, and then two of your co-workers go out of their way to drive around you while you’re waving frantically because you’re unable to find the button for the flashers since it’s your boyfriend’s mother’s car that you’re driving and you can barely think straight what with the impending fear of being t-boned and you’re so freaked out that your knee caps are tingling and it’s like your capacity to form logical solutions has rusted and seized up. I was so afraid I was looking at a replay of the Great BreakDown of Summer 2007. Boy, I nearly choked on the strong sense of humanity at that moment. I mean, would it have killed one of them to at least stop and help me get the car off of the road? Or maybe say, "Hey, let me wait with you in case you can’t get your car started"? I’ve worked with these people for over a year now! OK, Joe is a worthless piece of shit to be fair, but et tu Eleanore? Et tu? Say what you will about Tina, but if she was still working the evening shift, she’d have bailed me out without blinking an eye. (Now that I think about it, have I ever seen Tina blink?) After I was able to let the car drift backward into the parking lot and got it to restart, I cried silently on the drive home.

Usually, when scouting the field for some good subjects, I employ the ‘shoot & run’ tactic, an effective choice if you don’t mind angry cries and blurred images.

But today, when I was skulking around Brookline in the spring-like weather, taking my new Diana+ camera out for a test drive, I saw a photographic opportunity that I just couldn’t pass up; to walk away would have plagued me with nightmares of regret. A man was leaning against the brick wall of Kribel’s Bakery, smoking a cigarette. He looked middle age with sandy hair — styled loosely in a rockabilly coif — and tattoos and he sported tube socks that would have made Christina swoon; he looked like he was trying to grasp on to the last few strands of punk mentality that life had alotted him, like maybe he had gotten married and his wife was trying to force him to "grow up" but they compromised on a few accessories.  

As I approached, I recognized him as the baker from Kribel’s; I had seen him just a few weeks ago when I stopped in to buy a cake for Kim’s birthday and I remember promptly calling Henry to inform him of my new crush. I knew I needed his picture. But I didn’t hide behind a car or garbage can. I didn’t act like I was trying to "fix" something on the camera as I strolled past, looking skyward and murmuring "Tweedle dee dee." I didn’t pretend like I was taking a picture of the awesome brick wall next to him. I didn’t distract him by baring my breasts.

No, I walked up to him, caught his eye, and asked, "Do you mind if I take a picture of you?" I wanted a real photo of him; not streaks of his blue shirt, or the ground, or the sky, as I tried unsuccesfully to be covert.

His hand froze, cigarette midway to his mouth, and he repeated my request. "Can you take MY picture?" He looked around to see if anyone had heard. I didn’t make up a story about being a photography student. I didn’t pretend to be a tourist. I told the truth.

"I just got this toy camera, and I would really like to take your picture." OK, maybe I slipped in something about a fake portfolio. And that I wanted to fill it with faces of Brookline, a community that’s so dear to my heart. But for the most part, there was no nose-growing. He said yes, and two old men sitting nearby on a bench scurried away into a store, probably afraid they were next on my hit list.

Jesus Christ: enjoying Pixar movies, mending charred bridges, and now asking for permission to photograph someone in lieu of flat out stalking? What’s next — helping old bitches across the street? Don’t worry — I was terrorizing unsuspecting pedestrians with my Holga in another part of Pittsburgh earlier today, so it’s balanced.

If there is one thing I’ve learned  thus far in life, it’s never to burn a bridge unless the other person actually did something unforgivable, something more than hurt my feelings and make me sulk in a corner.

My quick temper and instinct to resort to scathing put-downs with liberal dollops of slander very nearly cost me a good friend a few years ago.

She agreed to get coffee with me this Saturday so let’s hope I don’t fuck it up.

The best thing about being child-free was the ability to boast about not seeing all those childish animated movies, like “Shrek” and “Finding Nemo.” It was something that I was proud of, no matter how many adults swore that those movies “aren’t just for kids!

”

But now that Chooch is obsessed with cars (his body shudders with glee every time we drive past Toys R Us, because he knows that’s where cars can be bought), and that he owns every character from the movie, Henry decided the next obvious step would be to, I don’t know, let him watch the movie “Cars”?

He DVRd it the other day and I put it on this morning, hoping it’d captivate him long enough for me to wash the dishes. I didn’t anticipate that it’d instead captivate me. Chooch watched a little bit of it, but mostly spent the time terrorizing the cats and knocking things off the table. I was vaguely aware of what he was doing, enough to make sure he wasn’t lacerating himself or sticking his fingers in sockets, but goddamn, I didn’t want to stop watching.

When there was about fifteen minutes left, I couldn’t take any more of the incessant need to pause to ensure my kid wasn’t slaughtering a cat, so I deemed it nap time. Once I ditched him in his crib, I was able to watch the rest of the movie sans interruption and distraction, and free to let the tears flow.

Fuck, that movie really touched me. And at least now I know all of their names so I don’t have to refer to the toys as “the blue one…no not that blue one, but the dark blue one” and “the brown one with the buck teeth.”

Now I get to go to class (ugh, this semester started back up again way too soon) with bloodshot eyes.

I sold two paintings last night, so I decided it would be in proper form to reward myself by buying my very own Chiodos hoodies. So I did. Fuck all the haters.

My friend Lisa is home on winter break, so we did the lunch/hang out thing yesterday. She’s one of the few people from high school worth staying in touch with: she’s not a twat, she’s not fake, and I don’t have to worry about her leaking any behind-closed-doors aspects of my life: a rare trait to find in a person these days. (Am I right, Keri? Dumb cunt.)

Lisa moved to Colorado last year for school, and since I haven’t seen her since she last visited in July, I let her decide which restaurant would be the lucky establishment to have us as diners.  She chose Aladdin’s, where she requested a second basket of pita and proceeded to waste it, but nothing was spilled this time, not even a tiny dribble of olive oil. I was proud of her; she must be drinking less.

After sitting through a meal and hearing things like, “You’re still so weird,” and “There’s always something crazy going on in your life” (and by crazy, I think she met dramatic), we crossed the street for some biscotti, which was sold to us by a very brusque and impersonal shop owner. Lisa bought a giant chocolate cookie and was pleased when he slid a warm and fresh one off a tray straight from the oven, but when we got back to my house, she theorized that he was really only choosing the most deformed cookie in the shop — it was pretty malformed and pathetic-looking.

But tasty, I’ll give it that. The shop was supposedly voted one of the top ten bakeries in America, but I found the biscotti to be so-so. (Of course, I didn’t check to see the source of this high accolade, so for all I know, it could have been some fat kid updating a 5-visitors-a-week blog from a dank basement in Idaho, on which completely reverent articles about Twinkie recipes and World of Warcraft are meticulously scribed.)

I gave Chooch a piece of a chocolate biscotti, and he only needed to see my dunking mine in coffee once before he elbowed his way to my lap and ravagingly tried to dunk his own. A caffeinated Chooch is all we need, so Henry took the lid of Chooch’s sippy cup and let him dunk it in chocolate milk.

Chooch made it down to the last bite before turning his face and making a disgusted “no more” sound in his throat, so Henry popped the chocolate milk-saturated piece into his own mouth and I promptly dry-heaved.

“Chooch dipped that in his milk!” I cried.

“Yeah, so?” Henry answered defiantly.

“You just ate his floaters!!”

Lisa laughed and Henry explained to her that I’m essentially a horrible mother and we all laughed and then took pictures and Nicotina bit Lisa and then Lisa peed while I put my make up on for work and we hugged goodbye in my bathroom — an appropriate place to end a day with Lisa.

She goes back to Colorado on Monday and I won’t see her for at least six months. That’s three friends I had to say goodbye to in one week, the kind of trauma that might make a weaker-willed person hang themselves. Just sayin’.

Then I went to work and my boss told me my hair looked like crap.

My friend (or so I thought!) Kara is moving to a far away land this weekend, so she was gracious enough to clear a spot in her agenda for me last Sunday.

I think it was only because Christina was visiting and Kara really only wanted to see her. It’s OK: Maybe I really only wanted to see Kara’s boyfriend, Chris.

The four of us met up at the Library, a cozy little restaurant on the Southside with lots of bare white walls that had me envisioning my TBA art show. The menus were inside old books. Of course the one that I got was the largest — big and bulky with sharp corners that kept jabbing my chest. It was like a fucking atlas or something, I don’t know, and naturally it lacked the actual menu pages so I had to steal the nice compact book Christina was given.

Just when I was about to start eulogizing Kara’s and my friendship, my lunch was served and my mind was completely and wholly arrested by the delightful shark-shaped pieces of tofu circling around a bed of seaweed salad.

I forgot all about Kara.

Always needing to be like me, Christina mimicked my request for an after-lunch coffee. I had to draw the line when she reached for a Splenda packet after spying me sprinkling the sweetner into my cup. I made her use sugar instead. A few minutes later, Chris had a similar reaction when Kara tore open a Splenda packet, and I inwardly beamed; that made me like him even more and I wished that Kara would have shoved the table out of the way and married him right there. Then I realized that he was mocking me. It took me a few minutes, but I’m no dummy.

Christina and Chris bonded over Amsterdam and video games and the similarity of their names and I feared that Chris was about to steal Christina from me, too. For a good thirty minutes, she was determined to move to D.C. so she could work for Chris. I was frantically trying to think of reasons for her not to move while she and Chris discussed things like background checks and drug tests, and Christina admitted that she stores her sister’s urine in a condom before consenting to a drug test, since she’s a flaming pot head. “D.C. has no lesbians!”, I could have shouted. “And no clean urine!”

But then Chris kiboshed Christina’s burgeoning dreams by saying, “There’s just one problem — I have no jobs at my company.” And then Kara told Christina that she could just move to Pittsburgh, and that’s when the “Oh yeah!” light bulb exploded in my head and I realized that it wouldn’t have affected me either way if Christina was drafted by Chris and Kara, since she currently lives nearly 5 hours from me anyway; she’d still be just as far.

Apparently, when I was utilizing the facilities, Kara said something about me cutting up and burying any of Christina’s future girlfriends and I really wish I had been present for that convo because it sounds like it was titillating.

Outside of the Library, I pouted for a little bit about how Kara is abandoning me, just like everyone does, and she was like, “Oh my god, shut up. I’ll be back all the time to visit and we’ll probably see each other just as often.” I mean, I guess it’s true that Kara and I didn’t exactly have a weekly knitting circle or anything and that in actuality, I just use her for an extra body when I have parties, to give the illusion that I have more friends.

On the way home, I whined, “I miss Kara already!” and Christina added, “That’s weird that you said that, because I was just thinking about Chris.” I think she wants to be him.

As of this moment, my new last name is Jelly. I will answer to nothing else but Erin Jelly. Not Erin Jam, neither Erin Preserves nor Marmalade, but Erin Jelly.

let’s just stop
drop everything
forget each other’s names and
just walk away.

it could be like we never knew each other at all.

Here in Pittsburgh, Santa doesn’t smile, preferring instead to emulate the mouthal shape of the child on his lap.

Merry Christmas, yo.