But Call Me Betsy

Okay, look, I'm not saying that I'm going to do any on-line dating. I'm not saying that I have anything against it either. It's a fine way to meet people and when I lived in State College where my dating choices were limited to: *18 year old frat boys *Married men *Poets I decided that salon.com would be preferable. I went out on a few blind dates and every single one of them was interesting and funny, most often in an awful way. Really. I didn't have one date that wasn't note worthy in some form. A few are: *A gay professor. How did I know he was gay? I didn't. But I got a little suspicious when he brought up homosexuality about 5 times on the date and then told me that he believed gayness was something you could overcome if you tried hard enough. Then he asked me if I would like to meet his mother. I am not joking. *Another professor and/or administrator who I met for lunch in the student cafeteria. Before we started eating, he pulled out a little black ca...

Because of the rain, I rediscovered my orange rubber Steven Madden loafers and they are much cuter than they sound. Plus, they make really awesome squeaky noise when you walk. Sometimes, I pull together an outfit that sort of accidentally works but then I usually forget it. I need a Polariod. Small note about cat, promise not to go into any detail: This morning, Ernesto discovered my blush brush. He grabbed it out of the make up bag, jumped down on the floor, and then laid on top of it as if trying to hide the brush. I retrieved it. He did this three more times until I had to hide the thing. I told you he is gay. Molly went with me to pilates last night and did very well. The instructor is this girl who has the slender body of a willow tree and she has long blond hair and a pretty face. She's about 22 or maybe younger. She announced in class yesterday that she's getting married this summer to her fiance, who has been in class before. He is a tall, broad shouldered boy, also blo...

I have been feeling very self-righteous lately because I have managed NOT to blow all of my prize money on something dumb like a gigantic trampoline or a 500 gallon aquarium. And then to my own shock and amazement, I ordered an i-Pod. Why did I do this? Well, in my defense, there were many different factors involved. Jess and Scott had sent me a $40 gift card from Target as a house-warming gift. At first, I was going to be really responsible and buy like $40 worth of sponges or a toaster, but then I just couldn't decide, and plus, Target is really close to my house now if I need to get anything from there post-haste. Second, I've been thinking about how I might walk more if I had a better soundtrack than the sounds of buses and of helicopters flying above my house (as was the case this morning). So, if I have an i-Pod, then maybe I'll walk more or go to the gym more. Look, it's a possibility. Finally, someone recently mentioned that it's not that hard to put songs o...

That is so profound. Had my writing class last night again--the one with all of the very supportive and awesome women that meets in a church and where we get snacks! Last night, we had homemade chocolate chip cookies and ginger snaps at our break. The week before, we were offered poppy seed cake with icing (this is reminding me of the type of entries I used to keep in my Hello Kitty diary when I was ten. They were almost exclusively about the food I ate that day, or the day before, or two weeks previous. Something like: "Dear Diary, Today we had grape Popsicles and Kool-Aid. It was fun!..Dear Diary, Today was a fun day today! We had hot dogs, potato chips, pickles, any kind of pop we wanted and cupcakes. It was fun!" Ad infinitum). The writing exercise for last night was to write (as yourself or as a character) about a time you (or the character) cried or didn't cry. I couldn't get into it. I started with something about a girl whose mom has just gone into remission f...

Here are some ways that the contestants on The Bachelor are able to be on the camera for more than half a second: *Get really wasted on weak lime margarita’s and slur uninteresting obscenities into the Bachelor’s ear. Drawback: You will be kicked off in the same episode. *Throw yourself on the ground and hope to sprang your ankle. Someone did this in episode two. All the other girls were like, That bitch is faking it! She was bragging earlier about how strong her ankles are! *Ask the Bachelor to go with you into the hot tub and then tell him you’re a virgin. Same result as the first one, but you’ll at least be on TV long enough for your old high school boyfriend to see you and wonder how it is you are still pretending to be virgin. *Tell the other girls that you are a real bitch and will stop at nothing. *Sob about something stupid. Cry because you don’t have time to get ready because you were the one who fake-broke your ankle (this is a girl whose name is supposedly “Bevin.” What is t...

Oh, well, the reason I originally wrote the title for the previous post is that Patti is also giving a reading at the book festival from her memoir or whatever it is that she wrote. And she is reading at exactly the same time I'm reading today or at least around that time. Our reading is from 5-6 and I think I'm last, so I'll probably start at 5:45 which is when she's scheduled.Of course, she's also reading on a huge stage whereas I will be reading in a little closet with four folding chairs. F you, Patti Smith. I hope you remembered to shave your armpits. Still don't have anything to wear. I put a skirt on this morning and nearly fainted at the sight of how pale my legs are. I can't go tightless because the audience will be blinded by my flesh and will not be able to focus on the reading. I have a story due on Tuesday and so have sort of been working on this one about working at an OPO (organ procurement organization) but it's pretty messy still. I nee...

Liz and Luke are coming in tomorrow for this reading I'm doing at the Philadelphia Book Festival . You are more than welcome to come, as I suspect that the group will consist of me, the other two writers and L & L. So, you know, between 5-7 people. I meant to get something new and cute to wear but haven't had time to go shopping, so it looks like it's just going to be a wife-beater with stained pits and flood pants--oh, just talked to Amanda and she said I should write about how some of the female students dress on campus--we were just discussing this at lunch as well, because we saw a parade of fashion victims on the Walk. Possible bad outfits for the reading: 1. A too small super thin t-shirt that clings to every curve on my body and allows the audience to see my belly button through my shirt as well as every wrinkle in my bra and each globual of cellulite. For pants, I will wear a pair of low slung jeans that are three sizes too small so that I can acheive the Muffin...

Heard some guys arguing on the subway yesterday about gun control. One guy said, So, what you’re telling me is that poor people shouldn’t be allowed to purchase guns. The other guy said, Well, yeah. Then the first man said, But most crimes are committed by guns purchased illegally, right? So, what difference would it make if poor people couldn’t buy guns? I hadn’t heard their entire conversation and so didn’t want to jump in and proclaim, Yes! Let’s not allow poor people to buy guns and then let’s allow all the rich people to arm themselves and live in castles and throw their Whole Foods bread crusts into their yards for the poor folk and yell out to them, Let them eat cake! But I didn’t say anything because one thing I’ve learned recently is that I shouldn’t jump to conclusions. For all I know, they are both very liberal men who are extremely intelligent about racial disparities, crime, and poverty. It may be that they were reacting to the shootings at Virginia Tech yesterday. I saw a...

Okay, here’s the thing. I think I’ve said this before, but I truly believe that the way you play Sims gives you a mirror into the way you’d like to manage your life. For instance, I can only play Sims in a way that attempts to make all of the characters as happy as possible. This illustrates a trait in my every day life (and a peek into my psychosis). I am sensitive about how people are thinking and I don’t mean this to sound as though I am a total humanitarian; all this really means is that I’ve learned that it’s very important to pay attention to small gestures and signs from others to determine how I might keep myself safe and out of trouble. I don’t like conflict and so I play the Sims in a way that allows for the least amount of unhappiness. This means that I am somewhat of a control freak. I don’t like things to go awry. I don’t like my Sims to be too distressed; to have to pee or to be hungry or lonely. I must make sure that they are completely fine on very superficial levels (a...

Best intentions--planned on coming to this coffee shop to write fiction for one hour because I signed up to turn in a story in a week or so and I have nothing new. Liz and Luke will be visiting from Brooklyn next weekend for my reading thing so I won't have a lot of time to write then either...Scary (oh, a big cute black dog just walked in with his owner. How can a person not like dogs? They are always so waggy). I have bits and pieces of a story about working at the organ donor place but it's really fragmented and I don't know how to reign it in to a coherent narrative or what it's actually about, plus as I've mentioned before, it's a hard story to write without sounding moralistic. However, instead of writing, I have spent over an hour surfing the Web and reading other people's blogs. (Aside: please kill me if I ever ever sound like this girl in here with her short bangs...She has the Philly Valley girl speak:"You knooowww, like I was like whatever, y...

Will have to write this sans Internet connection because apparently, the person whose connection I am sometimes able to steal is not on-line at the moment. So, I’ll write an entry anyway and save it and try to load it tomorrow. I wanted to write about my class on Tuesday night—this class that might save my life, or at least my writing life because the people taking it are good writers. As I said in the first entry about the class, we have a writing exercise at the beginning and write for about twenty minutes and then the teacher rings a little gong, Ding! And we stop and people volunteer to read their work. This week, the exercise was to write a self-portrait in some way. The woman sitting next to me was carrying a black bag that had some writing on it like, Religion for Reproductive Rights which I thought meant she was a fighter for the unborn. She read her piece first, and I was confused because she was talking about someone at a protest and I didn’t at first know if the protester wa...

This is not a real post because I'm trying to get out of here to make it to pilates so I can lay on a mat and pretend to be using my ab muscles. I haven't been able to write this week b/c work is crazy and also because I can't get an Internet connection at home, which is when I prefer to update. I will try really hard to write more tomorrow. Miss youse guys!

Reminds me of this woman I used to work with at GOL whose name was "Dwendy." I believe her dad was named Dwight and her mom was Wendy and so when they had this new little girl, they decided to combine their names and forever after curse Dwendy--making teachers think she had a speech impediment. It also reminds me of my stepdad telling a story about how some guy in Chicago wanted to name his newborn daughter "Vagina." The doctors refused. There may have even been a court battle. I read somewhere that children who have non-traditional names have a better sense of self identity. I can relate to this as an Amy whose mom named her Aimee--I have met many Amys but have not heard of many Aimees (except for Aimee Mann and Anouk Aimee). I am an individual, just like everyone else. Had a very good time in Brooklyn with Liz and Luke. On Saturday, Liz and I went shopping for four hours, ending up at Beacon's Closet and then we met Luke and had dinner at this hole in the wall...

What gives? Penn people got to leave at 2 p.m. today. Meanwhile, Joe and I are sitting in our respective offices, staring longlingly out the windows and flossing our teeth (well, I'm flossing my teeth. I don't know what Joe is doing. Something with tea?). Tonight, Carrie is taking me to an auction or an auction house or something like that where I will no doubt accidentally buy a Ming vase because of improper auction etiquette. Don't scratch your nose! Tomorrow, I will take the Greyhound bus (not the Chinatown bus. Celia has forbidden me from taking the Chinatown bus with its renegade ways) to Brooklyn to see Liz and Luke and Dave might even be around if we are lucky. I don't mind the bus b/c I can read and it's less stressful than driving, but aren't they supposed to be building an express train from Philadelphia to New York? Hurry up! Last night, Molly and Celia and I went to some bunny hop fundraising pub crawl in Fairmount. We were even given bunny ears whi...

Caught the second half of this show last night and it could easily be a rerun from any of the other previous seasons. They do the same thing every time. They have the same girls. There's always one bitchy girl who is there to spice everything up because, let's face it, models are boring. The bitchy character is always named Jade or Onyx or Pewter. The one from this season is Jael or Joxi. She's loud and tall with short hair and she's not that attractive. I think she even has bad skin--that pockmarked skin you cover over with Cover Girl Extra Acne Hider Filler-Inner. But she's aggressive and mean, so she gets to stay for awhile so that they can have some kind of drama other than split ends. Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton were also on the show briefly at some party where a couple of models got pushed into the pool. NR pitted the models against one another by telling Joxi that one of the blonds (Amber? I think her name really is Amber) said she hated her. That gave Jox...

Okay, so I bravely went to a new writing workshop last night in Centre City, not knowing what to expect, hoping for the best, expecting the worst, etc. The meetings are held in a church which of course made me suspicious, like I might step through the doorway and be grabbed up by a bunch of Southern Baptists and be brainwashed and made to write biblical tales and to watch hour upon hour of the reenactment of the crucifixion until I finally give in and become a born again (which reminds me. I pass a sticker on my way to work every day that reads, "Before you were in the womb, I knew you." Guess who the quote is from? God. God said that. God said that to someone who passed it along to someone else who passed it along to someone who works at a slogan factory and bam! You have the word of God on your window. Still, if the initial statement was passed along like a game of telephone, it's quite possible that he initially said something like, "Before you were in the room, I...

Met up with Kelly and Amanda and a couple of other peeps on Friday night at this bar called Roosevelt's which is popular mostly because you pay $7 to buy a cup and then can order as many beers and well drinks as you can consume until 7 o'clock. The crowd was fairly well mixed. We saw one really cute guy with a pencil behind his ear and as he was leaving, Kelly yelled out to him, Are you an architect? He was not. I accidentally insulted the cute bouncer guy--the one wearing blue high tops, by saying to him, Do people ever tell you that you remind them of that guy from Party of Five ? He walked away. I didn't really mean Party of Five, I meant that guy on ER who was on some other TV show ( Once and Again ). Seriously, this guy looked just like him (by which I mean he looked just like a young gay porn star). I don't know why he would be offended to be compared to anyone on Party of Five , maybe it was the way I said it? I was sincere, however. It's not like I told him...