Awkwardly Social

The car is fine.  It was only $62 to fix, which, since I had only purchased one thing with my birthday money from my mom, was totally covered without having to dip into the grocery money or my other birthday money from my dad.  Having your parents split is great* because they totally feel guilty and overcompensate even though you are 31 and really have no need for them to give you large gifts (but I am totally appreciative and kind of hope it continues at least until I am 32 or get rich on my own) or to live in the same house other than for holiday convenience.  But since my sister already screwed up the holidays by being the favorite daughter and the daughter with all the damned kids, I am always inconvenienced anyway!  So it’s a win-lose-win-tie-no contest situation.

I have been doing the hippy-dippy journalling in the morning and even though I know no one is going to read it, I have a hard time really letting loose on the page and spilling my guts, because I guess I’m super paranoid and also superstitious.  I worry that I’ll die in a car accident on the way home and then my mom and dad will come to Los Angeles and Louie will hand them a box of all my stuff and they’ll see a vibrator, a journal that details every single way they ruined my life by splitting up* and a student film about an abortion and they’ll wonder at the fact that they birthed this being and my how they’re glad she is cold and dead.

So it’s Tuesday and it’s raining in Los Angeles.  And this weekend my lover is whisking me away to an island.  He suggested we take a helicopter trip to the island instead of using the ferry and I refused because that is just decadent and also completely fucking terrifying.  But I’m super excited.  There is hotel sex in my future!  Hooray!***

*This is the first time I’ve ever spoken about their split in public because I felt like they didn’t want anyone to know.  But now I realize that it’s pretty damned obvious given the fact that they do not spend any time together live several states apart and send me separate gifts at holidays.

**ooo, now I’ve written about it twice in the same entry, and they did not ruin my life by splitting up.  My life was squarely ruined by my very own doing.

***Vibrators and sex all mentioned in an entry that talks about my parents.  I’m a little nervous.

Good news on the car front, but I refuse to say anything else for fear I’ll jinx it.  Superstition is the new black.

Also, I am on the verge of busting through my horrible, crippling writer’s block.  Some call it procrastination, I call it a disease of the mind.  But I refuse to say anything more about that either.  Maybe I should just blog my screenplay, I never seem to be blocked when this window is open.

I have a pound of mozarella left over from the lasagna recipe.  (I accidentally bought two pounds instead of one.  Except it wasn’t an accident.  I thought 32 oz. was a pound.  I’m not stupid, just forgetful.  And in my defense, Louie held it in his hand and said that it was a pound.  No wonder he thinks I look good naked, two pounds=one in his mind.)  Any thoughts on what I should do with it, besides eat it as a side with my lasagna?  Degree of difficulty, plus other ingredients should be easy/low number.  I’m thinking of adding it to my SmartOnes microwave meals, defeating the purpose of eating low-cal TV dinners.

I forgot about all the lame crap you’re supposed to do while you’re doing the Artist’s Way, like take your inner child on a walk and marvel at the damned weeds and shit.  Right now I’m resisting the marvelling of the smears of dog shit on our sidewalk, but give me a week and I’ll be all over it.  It really helps to have Anne Lamott’s book as a back-up.  She’s the kind of teacher I like.  She gets that coloring in a coloring book for an hour a week is a lame exercise, but she totally makes you do it anyway.  Whereas I don’t think the Artist Way lady really understands that spending a day at the playground on the swingset is nothing but creepy.

I was getting ready to crow about what an awesome weekend I made for myself - equal parts getting shit done (oh man, you should see how clean the bathroom is!), taking time for myself (The Artist’s Way is going to be my bitch with the help of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird) and Civilization III (I had to limit myself to three songs on the iTunes and then back to the To-Do list) - and then my dumb car went and busted something so now it’s pouring oil out everywhere.  I think it’s a little embarassed, like it started its period and no one was there to tell it that tampons are way better than pads (my mom was out of town the weekend I got my period and my sister made me go into the Circle K and buy pads because she didn’t think I could handle the Super Plus Extra Big Ass Mom Tampons that my mom had in her cupboard… ah, humiliation).

Anyway, it was a good weekend until I realized my car had sprung a leak.  I fretted a bit.  I grumped a bit.  I drank a bit.  And now I feel like I can handle whatever the diagnosis is, that I will meet this next difficulty with the grace of a much younger woman, with tears and chocolate.  (That might be the liquor talking.)

I made a delicious lasagna from the Ina Garten book and we have leftovers.  Nothing makes you feel like you’re being frugal quite like eating leftovers.

I hope the rest of the week is better.

I recently made fun of my mom for not having any (real) favorite vegetable recipes for our family cookbook, so here’s one for her next edition.

Roasted Winter Vegetables (serves 8 ) - From Barefoot Contessa Family Style Cookbook by Ina Garten (a gift from my sister that I adore)

I am pretty lazy when it comes to chopping and peeling and this recipe requires a lot of it, so it’s a good measure of how tasty it is once it’s done that I put up with it. Just be prepared to be very familiar with your cutting board, vegetable peeler and knife by the end of it.

Ingredients
1 pound carrots, peeled
1 pound parsnips, peeled (Parsnips, for those of you who don’t know, are delicious, if you have never seen them they can be a little off putting as they kind of look like albino carrots, don’t let that stop you from trying them)
1 large sweet potato, peeled
1 small butternut squash (about 2 pounds), peeled and seeded (Oh man, peeling this fucker can be a total pain, get a good sharp vegetable peeler and be prepared to do some trimming with your knife when you’re done.)
3 tablespoons good olive oil (She doesn’t really say what constitutes good olive oil, so I just use what I have, the slutty, non-virgin kind.)
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon freashly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley (This is for garnish, after cooking, so if you aren’t a big parsley fan, feel free to omit it. I usually do because parsley irritates me.)

Instructions
1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

2. Cut the carrots, parsnips, sweet potato and butternut squash in 1 to 1 1/4-inch cubes. (Try to make them as close in size as possible, without getting too anal. They’ll cook more evenly and then you won’t taste one, think everything’s done and take them out too early.) All the vegetables will shrink while baking, so don’t cut them too small.

3. Place all the cut vegetables in a single layer on two sheet pans. Drizzle them with olive oil, salt and pepper. Toss well. (I actually put them in a big mixing bowl and toss them with the oil, salt and pepper that way, because I found tossing them on the sheet pans was kind of a messy pain in the ass. Do what you will with this information.) Bake for 25 to 35 minutes, until all the vegetables are tender, turning once with a metal spatula.

4. Sprinkle with parsley (eh, or don’t), season to taste (I find they need a bit more salt) and serve hot.

Garten recommends using the leftovers for her Roasted Vegetable Soup, but I find they taste delicious on a salad with a little stinky blue cheese and balsamic vinegar.

Enjoy!

I bought a beautiful butternut squash the other day, determined to reintroduced some form of vegetable into my diet.  (ASIDE: I think squashes are vegetables, if they aren’t please don’t correct me.  I’m not taking criticism well right now, and that has something to do with the creature that is currently making a home on my neck.  One time in film school I had something similar on my neck and it grew so large that I had to name it and wear turtle necks for 3 days.  It was terrifying, cyst-like and I named it Suchin Pock, after the old MTV news girl, Suchin Pak.  Now, Carson Daley has taken residence.)  Anyway, the vegetable experiment seems to have backfired.  Because A. I have a sore throat, and B. I feel like shit (partly because of Carson Daley, partly because of having to wear my glasses which always makes me feel ugly and mean) and C. I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up (I blame vegetables for everything!).

On the other hand, the squash was delicious.  I put some leftovers on a mixed greens salad with some Danish Blue cheese and Balsamic Vinagrette and I about died from happiness.  Blue cheese is quite possibly the most disgusting thing I will ever put willingly inside my body, the stinkier the better.

While I continue to tap away at an entry about how much I hated Babel and why, which is starting to sound a little screechy and histrionic-y, I’d like to tell you how much I love 30 Rock.  I know.  It’s not supposed to be good.  And sometimes (namely when Tina Fey tries to deliver a punch line) it really isn’t.  But then Alec Baldwin or Tracey Morgan take the screen and you just can’t help yourself, you find yourself laughing.  Then the ebullient and adorable page, Kenneth, does a speech about why he loves television, and you realize this show totally gets it and is making fun of Studio 60 in a big, gigantic, enormous and hilarious way, and you want to have sex with your TV or in front of your TV or on top of your TV.  It’s just that good.

Louie and I have decided that Tina Fey can’t write jokes for herself.  She’s really good at the material for Baldwin, Morgan and Kenneth the Page, but when it comes to her, she just doesn’t get it.  Or as we suspect, she’s a head writer at heart and doesn’t want to give all the good stuff to herself.  Or she’s just not sure what is funny about herself?  I don’t know.  But whatever it is, it’s kind of annoying.  The show would be so much better if she had better material.

Also, I’ve been seething in a jealous rage since yesterday when I found out about something that I’m not going to mention here because it’s dumb and will only make me look like a screechy, talentless, jealous hack.  I will say, I’m totally going to have to cure AIDs with my next movie in order to top what has happened in my world.

I was perusing my Joy of Cooking cookbook for a recipe for tonight and came across this entry.

About Brains
We do not recommend eating the brains of cows, sheep, or pigs, nor any part of the spinal column, because of bovie spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) know as Mad Cow Disease.

I bet the old versions had the all the good brains recipes.  What is one to do if faced with an unexpected wealth of monkey, baby or ostrich brains?  I bet Martha Stewart will know.

Yesterday was rough.  I somehow managed to gain three pounds, ten wrinkles (on each side of my face) and a big negative attitude in the span of 24 hours.  The 3 pounds will probably disappear today after my run, and while the wrinkles are here to stay, the negative attitude isn’t.  All  in all it wasn’t a bad birthday.  Much of it was spent on the couch at my friends’ house watching screeners and eating cupcakes.

Since I like to extend my birthday to the following day so as to not feel the actual weight of the occasion while I’m celebrating, we’re going to a fancy brunch at a kind of scary location - The Scientology Celebrity Center.  Allie is a little worried she’ll be brainwashed, but I figure the more successful friends I have in Hollywood, the better.  If she has to take one for the team, so be it.  Also, since she’s so easily convinced about things, there’s no way we won’t be able to trick her back out of the religion once we’ve gotten what we need out of it.  (I’m terrified to hit the publish button right now.  They have scary lawyers.)

Anyway, yesterday was bad.  Today is good, three pounds and all.

Last night I went to my book club and started to feel really bad about myself. All of the women in the group seem to have everything together. They drive nice cars, they have fancy jobs, they have regular doctors, they don’t worry about whether or not their next paycheck is going to pay for rent or their student loan and if they’ll have enough left over for food. They ask me questions about what I do, and when I answer I feel like a little kid. Like I might be joking. I feel like they don’t understand it’s not just what I do it’s who I am. I drove home in my beat up little car with my $22.00 in my checking account and my pain in my kidneys and my crappy health insurance that I pay for entirely on my own and thought how 31 had to be joking. Especially since even though today is Saturday, I had to work. On my birthday. And I’m 31.

I guess I thought I would have given it up by now. I thought I would be in a job at a desk with clients. I thought I would have a nice car and jeans that cost more than my grocery budget. I thought I would eat out whenever I wanted. I thought I would be soulless and hopeless and that would make me happy. I never thought I would be happy about writing things down for free that made people say, thank you or that was nice. I never thought that would be enough. I wonder if it will continue to be enough. I wonder if 31 is serious. I wonder if I have a kidney stone.

I’m not sure this is how it’s supposed to be, but this is how it is, so I guess that’s all I can say.

I was casting around in my notebook today trying to come up with something clever to say about how horrible I feel, and coming up bone stinking dry. As it turns out, nothing I wrote on those notebook pages is worth repeating here. Except maybe the stuff I wrote about a certain woman who is a parent of a certain boy I live with but I really can’t commit any of it to the internet because I can really see that coming and biting me in the ass. Suffice is to say, I had a bad day, or rather a series of them. Most of the badness came from the chemicals in my body that regulate my moods (or don’t regulate them and leave me snapping at my boyfriend when he’s just trying to be cute and give me a kiss when I come home), the rest of the badness has to do with the fact that I’m faced with reminder after reminder that I seem to be wasting my stupid little life on stupid little things instead of writing something meaningful and smart whether or not it will make me rich and famous.

So, onwards and upwards. Sarah wrote in the comments below that I was totally right about my Ugly Betty prediction several months ago, and I’ve been dying to talk about it, especially after last weeks episode. The bandaged woman is totally Daniel Meade’s dead brother. I’m good. Really, really good.