My Writerly Blog

Observation: Relationships tend to take a turn for the worse once I blurt out the ever-disastrous phrase “I love you.” Hypothesis: Men do not like to hear “I love you.” Ever. Unless they’ve said it first. Prediction: If I let him say it first, then the relationship will not end immediately following my own declaration. “What is it?” “What? Nothing.” “Come on. What was that little moan for?” “Nothing. It’s just…” I snuggle deeper under the covers, sliding my palm over his slightly pudgy, yet still sexy chest. “It’s just, I love you so much.” Whoops. Silence. Not even a “thank you,” or “that’s nice, could you pass the rice?” I really do not think this is such an awful declaration to make. There are a million other things that I could have said that would be more panic-worthy. For instance: “Could you take the garbage out?” “I am an alien. You are going to have my alien-child.” “I have syphilis.” In comparison, the L-word really isn’t that bad. Or so I thought. After all, ab

It isn’t that I don’t like people. I love people. I really do. I love little girls who chase after soccer balls and pat horses’ velvety noses. I love old men who fart without repercussion and then wink at their grandchildren. I love coworkers who understand when I’m having a crankypants day, and I love friends who will give me a hug even when I haven’t showered in three days and I’m slobbering and drooling with heart-broken sobs. The problem with me is dosage. I am a people diabetic, fully capable of going into shock from an overdose of bodies in my immediate vicinity. Drop me in the middle of a crowded mall at Christmastime and watch me spiral into a coma of claustrophobia and paranoia. My heart begins to thud, oxygen becomes scarce, my vision blurs, my ears thump, and my body temperature shoves the mercury sky-high. Within seconds, I am gasping like a beached fish and a flood of uncontrollable tears are streaking their way down my face. I know I must look like a recent esca

Time is a relative concept. The hours spent at work are triple the length of the hours spent drinking with your buddies, watching a good movie, and having mind-melting sex. Sleep, the activity with the most potential for pleasure and pain, takes place in the blink of an eye. My brain in its infinite wisdom forces me to move “forward” in time every day. Every time I drive to work, work, drive home, cook dinner, and go to bed, my brain buds out in new dendtritic tendrils, forming new memories, maintaining its repetitive pathways. That’s how time moves, that’s why time moves. Because we remember. The past is nothing but old neural pathways, shooting off electrons in the old familiar ways. I wonder, sometimes, if we – “we”, meaning humanity in general – will ever figure out how to move ourselves through the sucking, slurping quicksand of time. It’s all out there already, so the theory goes. Why can’t we just move around in it, jump to a certain place and time, like diving into a sw

I lost my virginity to my cousin when I was fifteen years old. We were the same age, but she was infinitely more experienced than I, and — well, to tell you the truth, fifteen is a very horny year. It’s not so incestuous as it sounds; Chrissy is my uncle’s stepdaughter, so we don’t share more than the normal amount of random genes. She’s been my best friend since I was four years old, so it was inevitable that we would do it. After all, that crap about guys being friends with girls and not wanting to get in their pants, that’s just pure propaganda. Generated by us guys, of course, in an attempt to strip off all of our female friends’ underpants. I tongue the memory idly in my brain now as I drive down the flat, two-lane highway between circular fields of cotton and maize seven years later, cotton drifting lazily across my windshield. I could make this drive home from the university in Austin with my eyes closed; all I have to do is aim in the direction that smells the dustiest, bl

I am a social magnet. (Not magnate, as in an “oil magnate” or “shipping magnate,” but as in the kind you stick on your refrigerator.) Now, I’m not saying I’m the life of the party, or that everyone loves me and wants to hang around me. I only wish I could say that – in that sense of the phrase “social magnet,” I am permanently stuck in the off position, it seems. No, I am a particular breed of social magnet. I am the central attractor for every single rude, loud, wrapper-crackling, inappropriately laughing, line-repeating jackass who has the poor judgment to attend movie screenings with regular members of the public. It never ever fails. No matter what film I see, no matter what time of day, in pricey theatres and seedy sticky floored artifacts of the 20th century, I wind up sitting next to Chatty Cathy, Cell-phone Charlie, or Drunken Dan. This past weekend I encountered an entirely new breed of the audience member who needs to be voted out of the theatre: the Orgasming Octogenar