The End is Nigh

Finally! After almost two full weeks of gagging on 12 gargatuan pills a day. It's almost over. I am officially only 12 huge pills away from the end. I have ALMOST completed my Wild Rose Cleanse. And it was really not as hard as I thought. Although I did slip on the weekend, ( damn you Smartpop PopCorn!) and maybe had a little too much from the protein column due to my addiction to coffee ( yeah, go figure! Wild Rose counts coffee in the protein column) I think I did pretty good. I lost some weight. I don't feel as sleepy as usual. My skin is a bit less splotchy. And most importantly, I've learned some very important lessons:

1) My Body is a temple.

2) Eating is not an activity. It should be boring and take a long time to make for it to be really healthy.

3) Peanut butter is not a good alternative to potatoe chips.

4) Chicken caesar salad is not a real salad.

5) Vegetables go rotten if you don't eat them.

6) If something says "No drinking alcohol," they probably also mean no smoking and no taking drugs also.

7) When you have eaten so many carrots that your fingers smell like soap and your computer screen has an orange ting to it, it's time to switch to cucumbers.

8) When all you've talked about for the lat 12 days is what you've eaten and your many and varied bowel movements, it's time for the cleanse to be OVER!

Winds of Change

I've felt it inside of me, rumbling for the last three months or so. I felt it before, too. It's just become a part of life. That rush, that urge, the impulse to fuck everything and everyone. But then it passes. Then my Capricorn-ness comes back. I have become far too practical. But I still make bad decisions. Come on, that's part of what makes me preety. But in my old age, these changes are few and far between. I don't like hassle. I don't like conflict. Well, at least not anymore. But, i also don't like the thought of waking up one morning and going: "Oh shit, I am 30 years old and I haven't done shit." So hassle, heartache, regret and (even more) self-doubt: Here I come!

On the Mixed CD/Tape

The first mixed tape I ever got was from an OLDER guy. You know one of those guys FROM THE NEIGHBOURHOOD. I never liked him or anything, not much anyways. I definitely thought he was INTERESTING. He had one of those hats with the plastic bird poop on it that said DAMN SEAGULLS; and I thought that was the coolest thing ever. I think the only reason he made me the tape was because I had brought my sister’s RAP TRAXX tape to school and was teaching everyone the rhymes of Young MC at recess.

On my walk home from school one day he handed me the homemade tape with a booklet of all the lyrics painstakingly written out by hand; no small feat considering they were all rap songs and had so many words in them. He just stuffed the tape and the booklet in my hand and ran off to soccer practice saying that he made me this. There were definitely no love songs on this tape. I mean he was at least in 8th grade and I was way younger. There was no “You invade my soul,” or “You jump, I jump.” But there was magic in that tape and magic in the next two months as I memorized every lyric and wore the tape down to its shreds. There was magic when he would quiz me on my lyric memorization afterschool and philosophize on the finer points of Boogie Down Productions and Digital Underground. I’m not sure why he picked those particular songs. I’m sure I never will know.

I'm really not into fashion or craze

Just the one who pays and how soon I get a raise

You're probably in a daze, acting out of sympathy

Wrote a couple of rhymes and think that you can get with me

Boogie Down Productions – Poetry.


There's always one bitch in every town

Every time you see her, her panites are down

Always dressed fresh in the ladies' wear

She sports the weave instead of hair

2live Crew – We want some pussy.

Okay maybe his motives were a bit QUESTIONABLE. But still as a young girl unwise in the ways of boys beyond hair pulling and skirt lifting; this mixed tape cemented the relationship between music and experience for me. I can never hear 2Live Crew without thinking of those DAMN SEAGULLS.


Since then my history with the mixed tape and its successor the mixed CD, has been a bit more straight-forward.

You know, the song from that time we…… and the song that was playing the first time we…… this song is about a girl who is way too…… this song is about a guy that is so lucky to be with a girl like you that is so ………. Where the originality comes in, I think, is the inscription and the details. It is all about the details. The CD case. The notes. The computerized graphics. That is the extra effort. Not only are there cuddle points for the Mixed CD itself but any garnish around the CD and extra bits you added or meaning given to explain why certain songs were chosen is like extra chocolate sauce on a super-duper sundae with the works.

The beauty of the mixed CD is its uniqueness. This mixed CD is made for YOU. See it has your name on it! See there are songs that talk about things we talk about! See there are songs by bands we like! You can’t make a bland mixed CD, well you can but you can’t make a bland mixed CD in the sense of a guy giving a girl a mixed CD.

Or so I thought.

Recently I was the surprise recipient of what I believe to be a social anomaly. A mutant in the pool of guy-girl presents. A deviant in the natural progression of music acting as a mirror for relationships. I think I received a mass-produced Mixed CD. I know. I know it sounds like an oxy-moron. But it’s true. A faceless mixed CD with my name and a few cute notes that were probably provided by mad-libs. What kind of person takes something as sacred as the MIXED CD and turns it into some kind of legal Rohypnol?

A cunning person, that’s who. A cunning person who can zone on the girls that watch too much teen television and still want to be popular in high school and feed them exactly what they have been hungry for.

Who doesn’t relate to an Avril Lavigne song? ( Losing Grip)
Who doesn’t always want to be right? ( Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong- Spin Doctors)
Who hasn’t wanted a night to last forever? ( The Brilliant Dance- Dashboard Confessional)
Who doesn’t wish she could erase her past? ( No Lies, Just Love – Bright Eyes)
Who isn’t interested in just getting wasted? ( Nth Degree – Morningwood)
Who doesn’t want to run away and be rich and fabulous? ( Come Away with Me- Fabulous)

None of these songs scream PREETADELIC, you know. Well maybe Losing Grip but that’s a lucky guess. This experience has sullied my lofty perception of the MIXED CD and its significance. Why not just stand on a street corner with a whole box of them and the first girl that recognizes half the songs becomes your girlfriend? GREAT. Soooo romantic.

My Girls Want to Party all the Time.

Okay I may not be good at a lot of things: I can't whistle worth a damn; i can't ask the waitress/waiter to take back my food when she/he has mistaken my order; I can't wear heels for an extended period of time; I can't let someone finish a sentence if I know what they are talking about, etc. etc. But I can do one thing very well. Very, very well. I can party like a mofo. It's true. It's true. Not all teh time, mind you. Not when I am around people I don't know well. Not when I am on my period. Not when I am preoccupied with something or other. But when I'm on. It's on. You dig?

Here's some fun photos from Ella's birthday party last weekend and some random photos of us getting ready for teh Mariah Carey concert the weekend before.





The Mariah concert was so fun! Her voice was fabulous and despite our nosebleed seats, it was so fun. I was sucha dancing machine. In the words of Lionel Ritchie " I was Dancing on the ceiling" Not because I was so limber or anything but because our seats were so close to the actual ceilling. But whatevs. It was fun. I even got a Bootleg Mariah concert tee. That's right. That's right. Bootleg. I know. You don't have to say it: edgy.



The assignment was to WORK the mirror a la Tyra Banks. As you can tell, some of us have practised this before, some of us haven't and some of us are drunk.