I joined some music communities on my Blackberry and now my phone is incessantly chiming with new text messages. Henry is about as thrilled as someone enduring Chinese Water Torture: Auditory Edition.

"Ha, this person is 16," I laughed. "And petewentzwife94 is only 13." Petewentzwife94 and I exchanged some heavy texts earlier today. Her mom worked with the cousin of one of the cast members from "The Office", but she didn’t know which one. Then Emo Sean kept trying to sex us.

"Well, yeah. What, did you think there would be adults in the Beautifully Emo community?" Henry then shoved me out of the way so he could dress Chooch while I busily read my deluge of very intelligent texts.

I love my Blackberry.

Today’s Bob’s birthday and I post this in his honor; he quotes this at least twice every night at work and I don’t want to laugh because it’s so stupid, but then I always end up laughing. YouTube sellout.

"I finally went to the Cheesecake Factory," Kim said. She’s had a gift card for a long time. Procrastinating gift card user.

Collin asked, did she have anything exotic?

I told them, "When I hear ‘exotic’, I think of dancers."

"Only you would, Erin," said Bob as Collin and Kim continued speaking of exotic cheesecakes.

Later today, I’m taking a class where a hopefully patient instructor will be showing me how to fashion my own pinhole camera. I hope Janna doesn’t embarrass me. She’s coming, too. I’m going to take pinhole pictures of exotic dancers.

Then it’s Henry’s and my big date at the roller derby. I hope we don’t kill each other first. I won free tickets last time, so Henry doesn’t even really have to do anything.

• Oversized overalls from Avalon
• Deep purple pager
• ‘Sophisticated’ dinners at Houlihans; coffee & dessert
• Windowsill revamped with ceramic paint
• Sneaking phone calls to forbidden exes
• Lisa’s jeep overstuffed & oversteeped with joie de vivre
• Puffapalooza ringer tee
• The Substitute
• Kissing a recovering drug addict;
• Laughing because he’s short
• Evan & Aaron
• Caesar salads

Sickly sweet.

The Pink Razr has finally been put to rest. Chooch
had a propensity for gnawing on it like it was a candy bar, leaving teeth marks gouged into the metal. I splurged and upgraded to a Blackberry Curve. I
like it; it has XM Radio on it. Since I’m completely fake and superficial, it’s
my new BFF.

Today I was inspired to:

1. Resurrect "Peace out, Girl Scout!" as an exiting salutation.

2. Possibly submit some of my super gay short stories to an online publication.

3. Write raps again.

4. Incite flame wars on a regular basis because the last one spiked the shit out of my stats. (It wasn’t even a particularly fiery one, either.)

5. Make my own sandwich to take to work.

6. Talk to strangers more often. Preferrably ones that loiter under bridges and in front of abortion clinics.

What are your inspirations for today?

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.