Hot Now

My friend was in town from California. Her boyfriend came, too. It was the first time any of us had seen him in person. He has the eyes of a Siberian Husky. His arm hair is burned deeply into my mind in neat and obedient rows. Arm hair varies. Mine is good, but there's no order to it, and that's fine. I recently found out some men use straightener in their beards. I have vanity, but it's a lazy vanity. I probably won't try to straighten any hair on my body.

I was late to the bar. When I got there, someone told me I'd gotten hot, which is one of those compliments that's also an insult. A man with a blue drink stood behind my California friend and kept his eyes on her ass for a while. Someone said a silver fox was watching me, but I didn't believe it. I'm in denial about strangers finding me attractive. My California friend's boyfriend came back from the restroom and told us he was standing at the urinal and a drunk man came up and sniffed the air and said, "Asparagus, huh?"

There have been a lot of toads lately. I picked one up and it peed all over my hand in a sort of water balloon explosion. I used to have this dream of keeping a garden and making a toad house. A toad house is an overturned flower pot full of damp moss. I did keep a garden once, but I didn't make a toad house. It never occurred to me.

I wrote a book. You can pre-order it at Tiny Hardcore Press. One of my friends asked me what you do when you finish writing a book, and I said, "You start writing another book." I have a new project going, but that's all I can say.

There are people talking in my yard. Hush now. I'm going to make a peanut butter and apple pie.

The Scales of Just Us

The one good thing about allergies is when you're all dried up you get to pick the lizard skin off your nose from where you rubbed it raw with tissues. That's what I've been doing the last couple of days. It's less satisfying than peeling sunburned skin. Sunburned skin is thin and stretchy like dried glue and jock straps. Picking nose skin is like prying the scales off a dead fish.

I have a few friends who are disgusted by fish--not as a food item but by the creature itself. Maybe it's the dead eyes and the weird mouths and the snaky slick bodies. Maybe it's seeing one fish nibble the corpse of another fish. Maybe it's knowing there are fish out there that grossly outsize humans. I don't know. I'm not offended by fish like I'm offended by opossums, and even then, I think I'm just jealous of how opossums can be so shameless about their ugliness.

I was at a restaurant the other day with Josh and a friend. Every server was male and attractive. I developed three distinct crushes. One of these crushes had a gap between his two front teeth and incomprehensible tattoos up and down his arms. I kept drinking all my water so he would have to bring more. When he would reach across the table to fill my glass, I would stare at the almost perfect squareness of his fingernails. Then he started talking and I got over it.

PANK interviewed me about my crushes and my future second husband, Sufjan Stevens.

I want Ariel Hart to create a tumblr called GIF SERIOUS where she posts all the GIFs she's found/created. Ariel Hart is biracial, which means she's part mermaid, part heir to the Blacula family fortune. It's almost true we knew each other in college like it's almost true we know each other now.