Admittedly it's only a few hours since I discovered her, but I'm still wrapped up in this sledgehammer of depression.  I live my life centered around...what?  The internet?  My god.  This is why I usually drink when I'm depressed, but i don't have my car yet and thus can't go buy liquor.  I went and looked at it today in the shop where it's being fixed, and it looked fine. I'm supposed to get it back in a few days, it's been a few days for about a week now, and MAMA WANTS A DRINK.

I'm not sure why I self-reference as mama.  Mama who?  My rat babies are dead.

Drinking vodka like it's water, which should contextualize the otherwise vomit of bitter events of the last few days.  Actually, not all bitter and not all to be defamed.  First up. My car got stolen from outside a friend's house, and I've been crying on my dear girlfriend's shoulder and worried I may never drive LA's fair freeways again.  It really struck home when I couldn't leave the house to get a bottle, as we live all the way up on a hill, and I felt like such a teenage loser, or a mentally disabled adult in depends, unable to get my whiskey fix.

I pull the ring off. It itches.  I pull it on again.  I am in love.

Again and again there have been these moments that make me wish I wrote my blog entries in amicable word documents, only released when they were perfect.  No, this flies out raw from the vodka maw, which is to say, unusable and likely embarassing.

But ANYWAY.  I was turned away from the reading at Beyond Baroque this weekend as neither I nor my cohorts had the $5 necessary for entry.  We had driven miles out to Venice, in Stephen's car, I had parked my car at his house, from whence it was to be robbed.  I was so full of anticipation - Christine Wertheim puts on an amazing show! But alas, there was a cover.  I was overdrawn at the time, my finances are never good and often truly humiliating for a woman of 33.  I'm not exactly a functional adult if you hadn't guessed that yet.  The Disability check comes and it goes to rent, bills, vodka, and  that's about it, maybe a drugstore eyeliner if I'm feeling especially plush.  I did get my food stamp card today.

But anyway.  My feeling at the time was that I had too much dignity to spell out my long sad sob story to the long-haired teens at the register, I couldn't and wouldn't sneak in, and so Katie and Stephen and I made our way out and to a party in Orange County.

This post is brought to you by margaritas, thanks to Myke.  I am trying an experiment in, well, not drunkblogging, but tipsyblogging.  Katie is finishing up her homework, and I am bemoaning the fact that the Washington Blvd Concert blog seems to have been eaten by spam and shut down by the blogger gods.  While this is perhaps a tempest in an innertubes teapot, the concert long-over, it just seems a pity that all of that interesting documentation is erased.

The negative factors currently at play

1. I have a flat tire
2. I really can't put off the food stamp office any longer
3. I have to make an appointment at the free clinic to find out if I have face cancer.  wheee!!!
4. My grandmother told me she didn't approve of gay marriage....I'm engaged to a lady.

The positive factors:

1.  Katie is amazingly beautiful
2. Vanessa Place reviewed the poetic duo in The Constant Critic
3.  Hot glue-gunned myself some new typewriter-key earrings
4. Omar is back from London
5. Disability check arrives tomorrow
6. Don't have to do taxes this year

And the other most up and down factor is that I seem to have put on quite a few extra pounds in the last few months.  I'm considering going back on wellbutrin (as opposed to lexapro, my current anti-depressant), as it made me super-thin.  Curses to these beauty standards and all that, but, really, I can't help remembering little cocaine-addled size zero me, and considering that I'm now a size 12.  I would like a healthy avenue to being somewhere in between there.

Today has certainly been a day.

First up: therapy. all seems well.

Then I went home and found that the air conditioner was broken, and it was 90 degrees in the dear little back house.  The rats were lying there panting out their little ratty lives, and it was a panicky inferno.

Walked to the end of the block...considered buying a bottle.  Walked back and worked in the front house.

Then...I discovered that my external hard drive, with all of my information, since I recently switched computers, was broken.   All my pictures, all my music, the novel drafts, the bits and pieces for the new one...gone.

At this point vodka seemed inevitable, and it was.

Now it's three in the morning and I'm watching the occasional cockroach, the moths and the ants, by golly, there is so much nature here.  Those cockroaches are incredibly fast.  The rats, luckily, survived the heat wave.

I am considering the possibility that my monitor and/or waffle maker brought the cockroaches from my old apartment.  I'm about to spray a circle of Raid around myself and keep typing.

Anyhow, on the good news end of things, Jet Set Desolate is now available on Amazon.  I'm tremendously happy about that.  The new Lamictal seems to be helping with my depression, and has an intense sedating effect that is rather convenient.  I have trouble sleeping.

Now to the endless to do list.

Today we played on the slip and slide. Here is a picture of me and my love.  We went to the beach in formal wear and ran helter skelter through the water.  It was fabulous fun until the Malibu sheriff came by and gave us citations for drinking on the beach.  I'm trying to drink less, we'll see.

It was hardly a criminal moment, though, and I think they felt a bit sheepish..

Either way, the beach in costumes is something else.

Wow. I think someone had a little bit to drink last night. I think that someone would be me. Oh well. I am now very excited by this video-blogging thing. It's way more embarrassing than real blogging. The fact remains, though, that there needs to be content, and all of this silliness is kind of an excuse for real content.

Tonight I was going to go to Cafe Bassam and attempt to be approachable through careful wielding of mid-drift and manuscript, but instead I lost my nerve and am home, with some vanilla smirnoff trying to deal. Shyness is an intense propensity - when one has been steeped in it for so long, it becomes harder and harder to go out. It is just so easy to stay here where I am comfortable and safe and can listen to music and write and curl up in my pedicure chair with a down comforter and generally veg.

I mean, really, I work all day, I wake up at 7:30 and go to a non-profit where they pay me nothing and I research customs regulations and why someone lost a package of "The L Word" dvds they were trying to ship to our field office in Honduras. WTF? You can't track the USPS! I don't know what happened to your goddam dvds, I mean, if I'd had the presence of mind to FedEx them this wouldn't have happened, but I'm told to cut corners and be cheap so we can feed more babies in Ethiopia, so I sent it priority mail and they completely vanished off the face of this earth. I'm sorry. Stop calling me about it, I need to get my eyebrows done. And, no, I don't know if the hotel in Malawi has a view.

Anyway. Sorry, work stories are boring. So I'm stressed out, the same as everyone else in this world that hates their job and feels trapped. I applied to a million grad schools (well, 7, it felt interminable) this winter, and hopefully one of them will rescue me and take me off to a place where I just have to produce vivacious text about my sordid life and live in a garret with a twin bed somewhere...

I need to get out of here...