I flew cross country on a plane without personal televisions today. I know. How dreadful. I also was without reading material (procrastinated on packing and woke up 10 minutes before my super shuttle came to pick me up) and using my laptop without power is a cruel joke I choose not to play on myself any longer. You know the minute you stop messing around and doing Important Things like organizing your iPhoto library or reading all of your email from 2 years ago on Mail is right when that thing decides it has 5 minutes left to go.

And so, I was forced to partake in the common entertainment. At least American Airlines doesn’t make you pay for headphones. The movie was Four Christmases which at first I ignored but once I saw a scene involving Kevin from The Office and Cedric Yarbrough from Reno 911!, I decided to stop being an asshole, turn off my podcast and watch the movie.

Of course, I found the headphone jack right as the scene with the funny dudes was ending and ended up watching the schlocky, over acted remainder. It stars Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn as two hateful San Francisco yuppies (let’s say they live in Russian Hill) who have ignored their families for years and who end up having to give up going to Fiji to spend time with them instead. As to where in the Bay Area their families lived, I’m going to say that Vince’s dad probably lived in Sonoma County (the sticks, basically) and Vince’s mom was a total Sausalito/Larkspur monied Marin County lady. I’m going to say the same for Reese’s dad.

In the movie we learn: (1) adult man children can get rid of their Peter Pan syndrome towards avoiding commitment in the span of an hour especially when their tough working class dad teaches them what true love is really about over a beer, (2) only poor, uneducated people with children can feel real emotions, and (3) you should always pretend to never have had a past in front of someone you’re in a serious relationship with. See, Reese Witherspoon’s character used to be fat and made fun of in elementary school and OMG that’s the worst thing EVER. The movie treated this fact as if Reese’s character was hiding serious jail time. And we’re supposed to believe that these people had been dating and going on vacations together for 3 years and they didn’t know any of this?

What really drove me crazy with this movie was how the writers really hate Witherspoon’s character. She suffers much more humiliation than Vaughn’s, who is just guilty of having a weird post divorce family and lying about his white trash name. Reese however, gets puked on, is forced to endure having to steal a peed on pregnancy test from a group of children and doesn’t even get the satisfaction of being pregnant. They allude to the fact that her mom and sisters are hitting on her boyfriend and she comes off as weak and baby crazy.

I went to sleep right as the couple was doing their fake reconciliation dance over cheesy music. It was just too much to bear.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LG0nmabeQN8&hl=en&fs=1]

I’m putting together my SXSW panel finally. I came to the realization that just downloading Keynote and having some notes in my journal were not going to present themselves, so I started typing a few things up. It is still a mess, but there is still time to clean it up. Keynote is so much more beautiful than Power Point there is no comparison.

But it got me thinking about the term “Attention Whore” and how that is the worst thing anyone can be called online, especially for women. It is usually the argument people give when they get upset over something someone said on a blog or online community. I can recite the litany because I’ve heard it so many times now:

“You are still upset people didn’t love you in high school”

“Your father/mom/grandparents neglected you”

Go to any online community and they will all be there. Like admitting you like it when people pay attention to you is the worst thing in the world. I guess we are all supposed to put our heads down and write quietly and wait patiently for the hot guy to ask us out at the Comment Prom.

When I was keeping online journals in high school, I totally did it for the attention: I went to a high school full of idiots and I liked being able to meet people from around the country who were into the same stuff as me and it was always nice to hear your stuff was being read and enjoyed. So, it’s a combination of feeding the ego and feeding the soul via a community.

A complicated answer to a complicated question (why post so much of your life online?). Fancy that, peanut gallery.

Today’s soundtrack is my Pandora station, which means I get to enjoy lots of Junior Boys, which for some reason, I always forget when I am acquiring music. The song “Birthday” is my favorite song today and makes me want to make a music video (which is the same for every song I’ve ever listened to):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUCwmMQ4yWg&hl=en&fs=1]

when the sun shines, we'll shine together

On this week’s The Bachelor (that’s a television show ), Jason, the bachelor, dumped the girl he originally chose, Melissa and picked his second best, Molly (Mollies get everything). In six weeks, he will have moved on to the next girl he eliminated, Jillian (never mind, she has just been cast as the Bacholerette) until he works his way through all the eliminated fame-mongers and the camera crew. His true love is Dolores, the Craft Services lady. She unwraps the Hostess plastic donuts and lays them out just the way he likes it, in a semi-circl, not a straight line. He’ll move into her apartment in the Valley, and become a stay at home dad to her 3 cats and pet lizard. She’ll bring him home leftovers from the craft services table: “Here’s some spinach and artichoke dip in a bread bowl from the set SisterHood Of The Traveling Pants 5. That Alexis Beidel is wasting away! She won’t eat anything but carrots and Orbit gum!” And he’ll smile, feed her a bit of the dip off his finger, before throwing the bread bowl to the floor and ravishing her underneath her vintage All About Eve poster that hangs above her bed while the cats feast on the white and green delicacy below.

i want a tv embrace

One other obsession I’ve maintained while lounging about in my sickbed was the TMZ website and their hours of cheaply shot paparazzi videos of celebrities. The real gold is their nightly television show which airs at around 11:30, the typical hour most office workers are just about to doze off after the Daily Show. The television show is just the web clips aired with some very cheesy voice overs interspersed with scenes from the TMZ news room, with head Harvey Levin, usually seen clutching a tumbler full of coffee with a straw hanging out the top, to protect his delicate mouth from the scalding hot tempature of the beverage. The staff bounce stories off of him, which usually involve saying they saw a celebrity at a store buying something. We’re supposed to believe this is like a real newsroom, but of course, the joke is, if the story has made it to the show, there’s no need to run it by Harvey. Just read your lines and think about all that work you spent getting your MA in J-school has lead you to: working at TMZ.

my life ain't no holiday

TMZ is like landing on soft core porn, making it past the one sex scene and staying up to find out who killed Shannon Tweed’s husband. The tastelessness at which they handle everything is both horrifying and enormously entertaining in a way that makes you want to puke: they juxtapoz a water skiing Chris Brown with photos of his beat up girlfriend Rihanna to Katrina and The Waves’ “Walking On Sunshine.” TMZ just broke a real news story, inexplicably someone fed them a tip that Northern Trust Bank had used unsolicited bail out money to fund a three day party in Los Angeles for its clients, which forced the bank to return the money to the government. Harvey Levin is proud of his staff, but not as proud of the hours of footage of a confused Britney Spears, hounded by dozens of paparazzi, needing their help to drive her car out of the Hollywood Hills. He added a little Bailey’s to his coffee that day and changed the straw to a My Little Pony one in celebration.

it must feel good to stand above me, while i make you so proud of me

Originally posted at Counterforce

In other words, it’s time to start the embarassing parade of 10 year old websites and journal entries from high school. This thing I’ve started talking about, this part of the Internet that we all participated in, but no one has acknowledged thus far, I’m getting such a fantastic response about the topic that even if the panel doesn’t happen, I think we should do something. All of us old school grrl goddesses. Let’s all tell our stories, girls. And cringe while we do it!

But seriously, what should it be? Can we do an archive? Should a book be written? This is the kind of thing people go back to school for, but why keep it in the confines of academia? Also, I don’t want to go back to school. But I do want to talk about this, because I think it’s important.

So, without further adieu, without any editing whatsoever, I present to you, a tiny slice of the Internet, of me, of my life, as it was in 1998. And yes, the lyrics on the side are the Gin Blossoms. In which I talk about my SATs, and OMG how awesome my friends are, and what my predictions would be for their future lives. I was kind of right about one of them.

A few weeks ago, I found myself in a messy studio apartment in the Richmond making out with an almost middle aged white dude. I hadn’t engaged in this kind of thing in quite some time and trust me, this broad needed a fix. We met at a friend’s party at the tail end of it and the pick up was so fast I barely remember it (seriously, don’t ask me, I don’t remember).

In any case, the following morning, I braced myself for the typical sobering post hook-up awkwardness, that same conversation I’ve had so many times before: what are you doing today, that was fun, damn was I drunk, I usually don’t use Craigslist for this kind of thing, etc.

This particular morning after conversation would take the cake. Laying in bed next to me he says: “I wonder if anyone saw me leave with you. That wouldn’t be very good for my reputation, after the whole vegansexual thing.” “Vegansexual?”, I ask. “Yeah”, he says. I just wrote about vegansexuality for my column.” I laughed. He was being 100% serious. (For those of you who aren’t familiar, a “vegansexual” is a vegan who only has sex with other vegans. Me = not vegan. )

He was so serious that a while later, over cups of green tea, brewed for just the right amount of time (naturally, he was too good for coffee) he showed me the article. It has since been posted online, and I was able to get my most favorite passage:

Non-vegetarian bodies,” said one female subject, “(are) literally sustained through carcasses – the murdered flesh of others.” If you really are what you eat, then the body of a meat eater is, as one vegan commentator put it, “kind of a graveyard for animals.” You don’t need to be a certified sexpert to appreciate that some vegans would be turned off by the thought of exchanging bodily secretions (like sweat, spit, scents, and…well, you get the picture) with such walking culinary cemeteries.

I’ve always thought of myself as an adorable beacon of adorableness wrapped in a black hoodie and smelling faintly of dark chocolate, espresso, and sunflowers (or bourbon, but it depends on the time of day) but I guess “walking culinary cementary” works, too. The fact that he went so far as to show me the piece was off-putting. Why did he even invite me back here when the first thing I slurred at him was : “I’m totally NOT vegan, dude!”?

The kicker, however was really at the end:

Yet I persist in hoping because the heart wants what it wants, and I know, in my heart, that I want to be with someone with whom I can enjoy the ineffably unique bond that only exists in the coupled soul of two deeply bonded vegan lovers.

Except for you know, that unique bond that is shared between two hammered people at a party who talk to each other for 10 minutes and then decide to go home together. I mean, I get it. A drunk ho is a drunk ho whether or not she stuffs her face with goat cheese and fried chicken or Teese and Boca Burgers but if a dude can rise above eating steaks, can’t he rise above the call of easy sex? I guess he can say that while his brain is vegan, his dick was merely vegan-flexible.

(Editor’s note: I thought about linking back to the article in this piece a couple of times, but decided that it wasn’t cool to call him out like that since I rarely use names when referring to dudes on this blog. Those of you who know who I am talking about, will know and those of you who don’t, will just have to find it your own way.)

5 years ago, I broke my foot. I was on an epic bar crawl with a highly inappropriate person which involved going to every shit bar in the Tenderloin and the Lusty Lady and Gold Club. I remember going into the bathroom of a crappy Thai restaurant he had taken me to, looking at myself in the mirror and thinking “You can do this. Man up. Don’t puke. You’re gonna get through this night.”

I didn’t puke, but instead ended up somehow breaking my foot and needing surgery the next day. During my 6 weeks of being house-ridden, I made many Internet friends to pass the time (and watched a LOT of TV). One in particular, would call me late at night and try to get me to come over to his warehouse in the Bayview. He would tell me stories about how him and his friends would get into constant bar fights, which I guess were supposed to turn me on, but instead just made me like him less and less. The final straw came when in one of his bouts of convincing me to go over there, he told me that he could just “fuck me and then never talk to me again” because he was you know, that strong and powerful.

So anyway, around that time I was given the go-ahead to start walking again, and I stopped talking to him. A few years later, the bastard emerges on Yelp, starting fights about vegans and hippies and homeless people. There was one particularly heinous, racist thread he started about the Mission. He was still using the same photos, so I e-mailed him asking if he remembered me and then claimed not to. I let it go.

Yesterday, I got an email from him on OKCupid. He still doesn’t remember me, because this is what he said:

I’m perplexed, because there is nothing in my profile that says I want to fuck random guys with strap-ons. I’ve always thought of that as an activity you do on your wedding night. While the offer was tempting, I had to turn him down. But this being our third run in on the Internets in 5 years, I’m starting to think: maybe he’s the one. Maybe I’m just resisting what is clearly my soul mate. What do you fools thinkr

I haven’t written here in a while. There are a few reasons: I hit a saturation point with media and had to step away from a while. And another reason, my business has been busy and I’ve been spending a lot of my internet time actually working, when not worrying about working. How do you go from total social time wasting slacker to power-driven one woman web shop? You find something you actually give a shit about. Working on websites makes sense because this is how I see the world, most of the time.

And finally, the last point – how to write a blog on relationships and sex when you have almost zero interest in either? As the brilliant Liz in LA states, I’m not into dating because I’m not built for dissapointment. And that’s all I see dating as right now: complete and utter dissapointment. I realize that this attitude sets me up for failure, if you’re not open to it, then it won’t happen. If you immediately expect everyone to let you down, then they probably will. But, how to get out of that cycle?

What am I looking for anyway? I am not a Scary Sadshaw desperately looking for a husband to take me away to some suburb and my hot slut days are most defenitely behind me, at least not in the way that most people treat it, the way most people think that sex is either casual and heartless or has to be completely associated with “being in love”. This is the reason most people can’t do “friends with benefits”, any indication you have any kind of feelings for the person completely fucks it up. And why — why can’t you love someone, have sex with them but not be constricted to the traditional version of a relationship?

And that’s the next thing — I worked very hard after my breakup to build my own life. I started dating my ex when I had only lived here for a year, was barely 22, and my entire social life revolved around my then best friend and her friends, who were all wonderful people, but still: not my people, they were hers. Dating was my only way to meet people outside the circle. And so, Joe became my anchor and my history. When it was over, I needed to build something new and I did. Sure, I spent the first half of 2007 in a drunken stupor, but I have come out of that with some solid friends and some good experiences.

The point is, I’m not the 21 year old girl who is willing to let anyone into my head, my pants or my heart again so easily. It’s no longer about me fitting in with them, but them fitting in with me. I’m much more protective of my life now, because I have so much more to be protective of.

But still: I find myself missing being around you know, dudes. I miss the way they carry over 1,000 keys on their belt loops on their jeans. I miss asexual smelling soap. I miss covertly getting them into shit that is mostly straight girl and gay guy territory like Sex and The City or Project Runway. I miss hoodies under Dickies jackets and getting cigarettes lit for me. I miss concave boy hips and unmanicured nails and having a larger t-shirt collection from which to choose from.

There’s a lot of things to miss. I just need to find someone who is worth letting in.