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.

American finally freed in Nicaragua.

Thank fucking God. I’ve been personally invested in this case for quite some time now. After I watched some crime show about him, I felt like I had a real mission in life. I was going to start a coalition to vindicate him. I was going to make a website and go on Good Morning America and Tyra and I was going to collaborate with Bono to make the best charity mix CD ever. But by the time the show ended, I had to ask Henry to remind me what that dude’s name was, and by the next day, I had moved on to other missions, like eating raspberry preserves.

But now he’s free! That guy is way too hot to be in prison. Oh, and also he shouldn’t have been in prison because of that whole alibi thing.

A Google search for “sewing-up-her-vagina” brings up my blog in a very respectable number two position. I cheer.

For the past week, I’ve been doing this really obnoxious thing where I brag about how awesome I am. Mostly this has been happening at work. Anytime I know the answer to something, trivial as it might be, I get all sore-winnerish and shout about how my innards are made of awesome.

"Did you just make coffee?"

"Uh, yes. Because I’m full of awesome."

I bet it’s really charming to be on the other side of that.

Tonight, I was telling Christina about how my son has been a little asshole lately. "He keeps grinding his teeth, and when I tell him to stop, he fixes his eyes on mine in a stubborn glare and does it harder," I complained.

"You know what they say," she schooled. "Your kids end up being two times what you are."

"So Chooch is double stuft with awesome?" I asked.

All of my entries are fixed now, for those of you who were trying to go back and read the older stuff.

The html got all jacked up when Henry imported everything to WordPress, but I cleaned it up and all the pictures are back in the Super Gay Stories posts now.

Yesterday, I used my Holga for the first time, but now I can’t find anywhere local to develop the film and it’s driving me crazy. I want my pictures! I took a picture of some bikers outside of a bar and I want it.

Does anyone know where I can get a roll of 120 developed?

I found a place where I can send it out, but they wanted me to buy a minimum of 5 pre-paid mailers. Why do I feel like I’m going to need a side job to support my lame hobbies?

Henry lost some of my entries when he moved my stupid blog over to a different thing and now I really feel like bashing his ugly fucking face in. He won’t apologize either. I have to go back and fix the html on every entry now. Fucking douchepie.

“We can still be friends.”

I should have known then, when he took my hand as we walked down E. Carson Street, that it wasn’t going to end well. I should have known.

Oh wait. I did know.

Today, I toured the WQED studio with my Creative Non-Fiction class. We were incognito as Communications majors. Perhaps if I truly were a Communications major, it would have been more interesting. But, as an “Erin,” it was horrifically boring and counted as the first time since the Great Kidney Infection of 2007 that I had to stand. Kind of a lot. On my feet. Without the aid of Henry’s arm as a crutch. But at least I got to see some Mister Roger’s props. And we got “treat bags” full of guitar picks and stickers from some synth company, which we learned were leftovers from a Battle of the Bands that the studio hosted two weeks ago. I’m so excited that I’m going to score my picks right now.

I be lovin’ my new beret.

I will wear it when I bake next, yes? Crepes and French bread, mon ami? Frog leg casserole, ole? Bravo.

There I was, scouring the kitchen for the perfect receptable to hold the large amount of orange juice and DiSaronno I was about to pour, when Henry disbanded the party.

"Uh, are you sure you should be drinking? You do have a kidney infection."

"Oh shit, you’re probably right." My shoulders caved a little as I replaced the amaretto on the shelf.

"And did you take your antibiotic today?"

"Oh shit…"