The Day Fabian Was Sick

Fabian (read the post entitled An Ode to Fabian, My Greatest Failure if you don't know who the hell Fabian is) was really sick this week, and the poor fella lacked his usual fabulous energy. It was awesome!

Also, him being so ill was the absolute only reason he was allowed to get away with the remark, "I hate Jennifer Lopez. She is trying to be like a new Beyoncé." Man, that kid is a jive-ass turkey. 

I sat at the foot of his bed, propped his feet up on my lap and quite unfairly made him make a Venn Diagram about the two of us. Enjoy it.

                                       FABIAN                                             EMMA

Two other quotes worth mentioning from Wednesday are"Sophia Grace has a lot of chins," and "Did you watch Eurovision?" "No." "Well, the mowan won." "What's a mowan?" "A man-woman." "They're called transgenders." "Whatever."

I don't care about Eurovision.

Momma Always Said, "No Whiners."

I have a complicated relationship with nature in that I like the theory of it, but I'm not very good at it.

My adult life has mainly been spent in seas of concrete, human pee and far too many people whose only objective is to piss me off by not abiding the unspoken urban laws. Call me a romantic but I love it. 

However, sometimes I just need to see a tree that doesn't have a hippie attached to it by a slack line or nine million dog turds in the tiny square of dirt surrounding it, so I was thrilled to spend my spring break reconnecting with our mother, Earth. 

I eased into it with a day trip to some natural hot springs located in the French Pyrenees. I think you should reread that sentence. We drove for a few hours, got lost, asked for directions in Sprenchlish and finally parked the car at the top of a baby Pyrenee. The journey down wasn't exactly harrowing but we forded a stream, got kind of sweaty, got lost again, whined a bit and interrupted a beautiful woodland couple who directed us towards Heaven. Heaven is a series of warm waterfalls pooling then spilling into the next down a steep hill. We striped to our underwear and couldn't wait to join the other nature lovers in sharing our dirty body fluids in glorified cesspuddles. It was incredible. 

A couple of days later, I threw my pack on my back and whined all the way to the bus station because we were going camping! We hopped off the bus in Tossa de Mar and consulted an iPhone before beginning our hike to the site. I think our hike was a healthy mixture of awe, whining, excitement and getting lost (get it together Apple). We were starving by the time we got there, but we decided to set up camp first. It was then that I learned two things: I'm pretty useless, and I'd forgotten just about everything.

Next, we wandered around in a hypoglycemic daze whining and hunting for food. We whined past two restaurants that looked amazing but were closed until we finally arrived at a place that had mediocre over-priced pizza; it was the best mediocre pizza I've ever had. That night, we nestle into our tents and whispered sweet good nights.

The next morning, we woke whining and feeling like shit. Well, all of us who didn't have an awesome air mattress designed, made by and purchased by wimps (I'm looking at you Riri and FraFra) felt like shit. The rest of us couldn't wait to be wimps, too, and thankfully, the campground supermarket sold them.

We spent the next four dreamlike days at the beach, clamoring through the wilderness after Fra, playing celebrity guess it games, making Fra do everything, drinking tea, watching Fra swim, drinking wine, hating the other campers, telling scary stories, drinking beer, eating the barbecued food made by Fra, talking about how great we are and showering. But I'm pretty sure we spent the majority of our time at the campground supermarket. It was a fantastic supermarket.

The last morning it was raining and cold, and we could no longer pretend that we could totally live there forever as we'd declared several times. The whining was pretty profound as we squished the air out of our mattresses, wrestled our tents into the world's tiniest bags and dreaded airing out all of our wet equipment. We took a taxi in lieu of hiking back to the bus station to catch the earlier one. As we pulled into Barcelona, we all felt very happy to be home even though none of us can claim it as our hometown. Who cares? It's ours now.

These are the exact people I'd choose to spend a zombie apocalypse with.
Fra is not pictured but he, we agreed, is the only reason why we'd survive it.

I'm Way Too Young To Be As Old As I Am

I am now older than Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix ever were, and that just proves to me that being talentless and unsuccessful wins the race.

Last Tuesday, I woke up feeling special because it was my damn birthday. I put on my special pants and my special sweater, ate special pancakes and smeared on my special face.

I was a bit hurt that the strangers on the street weren't wishing me a happy birthday. I felt like I was being very obvious about it.

Though I had to work (thanks for nothing Mom and Dad), I enjoyed my classes more than usual because I was thinking about my birthday outfit the whole time, and the theme of the day was me.

Birthday Outfit:
-puffy-outty skirt in my signature green
-deep v-neck embroidered shirt that makes me look well traveled and cultured but that I got at TJ Maxx in a   St. Joseph, Missouri strip mall
-brown boots with red shoelaces that I need to fix because theya makea me fall dahwn (I'm serious)
-black thigh highs that I immediately tore
- knew that would happen, so I put on my cheap reserves
-dried flower headband that's special because it's from Jenna, and I feel like a king when I wear it

I was told that I had only two responsibilities: clean yourself up and meet Poppie at the Barceloneta metro at a quarter to 10. Poppie is the best person to walk with because she holds you tight and says only funny and/or interesting things.

She's also a deceitful little trickster who lies out of her weasel mouth.

Here's the thing about surprises...I love them. In fact, I never ask questions about anything ever because I want everything to be a surprise all of the time. The downside to never asking questions, however, is that you become very ignorant which is exactly how I felt when I was led into the back room of an unassuming tapas place. I was expecting two or three of my girlfriends, but no...

My friends! All of my beautiful friends were there! And they'd made Emma masks, so they were even more beautiful than usual!

I felt all of the emotions at the same time, and they're lucky I didn't die. The decorations were great, the presents were thoughtful and undeserved, the masks were creepy and amazing and they'd gotten me real good. But those things were the icing. The cake was that for the first time, I was looking straight at my Barcelona experience in the faces of the people I've grown to love after having met them at different times along the journey, and they'd come together for no other reason than me.

The older I get, the more it dawns on me that I may just be the luckiest person in the world.

Untitled Birthday Song
By Adi Mahler

I think it fits you very well
a birthday on the 1st of April

That life is just a little joke
celebrate it well

I won't get over sentimental
I'll just tell you that

They say ginger flame burns hard
but I find in you tranquility

They say that gringo is fake and false
but I find in you sincerity

They say it's hard to find real friends in Barcelona but
I found a real friend in you

I was suppose to write more
but just got addicted to Game of Thrones

So I hope I'll remember all the words and sing them right

It's not embarrassing to say the truth to someone like you
and look around you
it's not only me that...

Then everyone sang!

We found a real friend in you (repeat a bunch of times)

It kind of makes you want to barf and gag but also makes you want to cry, doesn't it?

Feel More Awesome, Okay?

A couple of weeks ago, some friends and I drove to Waikiki, a nude beach surrounded by yellow cliffs nestled in the forest near Tarragona, because why the hell wouldn't we?

We parked the car and every one immediately needed to pee again because we'd only stopped once along the harrowing eighty-minute journey. We schlepped our crap onto our backs and started walking blindly into the woods. About a minute and a half in, we all found our pee spots. I was in my hiking outfit: an ankle length black dress that doesn't allow my legs to take full strides and wedge-heeled boots. After I gathered the hem up and over my incandescent butt, I couldn't really see or remember what I was doing, but my mother's voice echoed in my head, "Stick your bottom way out." I did that and only peed on my shoe a little.

Melissa lit a cigarette, we took a picture and continued our hike.

After asking for directions several times, contemplating how long we could survive in the wilderness on the provisions we'd brought (we guessed we'd just eat everything outright and hope for the best) and more photos, we eventually found the promised land.

I peeled my shoes off, dug my feet whose second toes are longer than the big toes into the finest sand I'd ever felt and reveled for a second. After we'd snapped out of it, we found our spot and peeled nearly everything else off.

We kept our underwear on, and I'll admit that I was a little relieved because I still haven't figured out the right style for my flaming pubic hair that draws way too much attention. I apologized for my razor burn because I wanted my friends to know that I knew as we eeked our way into the frigid water and gathered my courage to dive into a big wave I knew I wouldn't be able to jump over. While submerged, I felt like millions of lil' baby stingrays were fighting over where to play on my skin, and all those strange bumps on my areolas bubbled up. It felt good, really good.

We quickly got out because we're not heroes, and all the wine, cheese and Kelly's hummus were calling. I tried a few different sitting positions before I was satisfied that my winter gut wasn't spilling over too much. I've always felt a little strange eating without clothes on, but our spread was too good to not; my stomach noticeably expanded. After we finished, Sam took a photo of us holding food over our nipples because we're hilarious. I noticed that I'd forgotten to pluck my two determined nipple hairs as I pasted avocado skins to them.

Thankfully, Poppie brought a small bottle of sun lotion SPF negative number because I'd violated the first rule of ginger club and hadn't packed any. It was better than nothing, so I smeared it over my skin reminding myself for the billionth time that we're embarking on yet another summer I will go through without being a bronzed goddess. It smelled like coconut ambrosia!

We took more photos, did sand cartwheels and waded into in the sea once more because we are the luckiest people on the planet. But sadly, even the luckiest people have to put their clothes on and go meet others in town for a traditional Catalan dinner.

Like real assholes, we fell all over ourselves trying to convey the magic of what we'd just experienced to our friends while they had been working. Flipping through the photos, I felt myself getting a little less excited. I had no idea my thighs and stomach looked so doughy. Hold up, when did I get cellulite? What if my boobs were bigger? Maybe that would balance me out?

You see what I did there?

You just wanted a cool story about an incredible experience that I made infinitely less cool and incredible for you because of my body issues, but I feel like that's what a lot of people, especially women, do to themselves daily. We don't wear what we want to wear, eat what we want to eat, have sex like we want to have sex or go to the damn beach sometimes because we're preoccupied with the 2% that we don't consider perfect instead of the 98% that's banging. We're robbing ourselves of so much feeling awesome time.

And while I remember every negative thought I had about myself that day, I also remember not having a single criticism of my friends' gorgeous bodies even though I knew that they, sadly, were dealing with their own hangups. They're idiots, though. I thought they looked beautiful, confident and sexy.

And you know who else did?

The naked guy who was masturbating behind us the whole time.

I don't remember eating a bowl of fabulous before this hike, but I clearly did.

What Can I Say? I Like the Ladies.

I have way more guy friends than girlfriends because girls are so jealous and bitchy. 

If you've said this recently, I want you to know that that's a "you problem" and not an issue with an entire sex or gender, and I hope that your "you problem" resolves itself quickly. 

Most women are awesome and some women suck, but unlike men, I don't have to constantly remind myself that I do like women.

Here's why: 

They're always on my back caring about how I feel and if I'm happy, they won't stop nagging me about how great and worthy I am and they won't shut up for two seconds so that I can forget that they have valid thoughts and feelings they want to share with me because to them I am the most important person in the world at that moment. Fucking bitches. 

Throughout my life, I've been extremely lucky with the ladies, and I think it's simply because I listen to them, support them and think they're funny. 

My first girlfriend was my mom followed four years later by my sister. If you don't know them, imagine the most talented, hilarious and intelligent person you know, tell that person you chose him/her because that will really make her day then completely forget about that person and go meet my mom and sister. To say I'm lucky to have them as my life partners is a gross understatement while saying that it's their kampf to be stuck with me is pretty accurate. They're my best friends. 

Andrea let me get away with far too much showboating when we were little, and I partially blame her for my inflated ego. She effortlessly brought out an imagination in me that I would love to have back. We conquered a lot of imaginary worlds together, and she always played the blind Mary to my overzealous Laura Ingalls Wilder because she trusted me to lead her through the sunflowers and up the ladder into her tree house. Jesus, Andrea, I hope you let yourself peek every once in a while. 

Then there was Annie. She was an exotic (from Connecticut!) bright light in a town that I was starting to feel angsty about. Very few times in my life have I felt a level of terror comparable to the time we kicked a soccer ball through a window from the inside of the house, or looked at the aftermath of our butterscotch pudding fight in her kitchen or squeezed ourselves under beds and into cupboards trying to hide from Nazis. I watched Gandhi and Empire Records with her rolling up our skirts and selling Jagged Little Pill to imaginary customers on the floor of her bedroom. I think she, more than any childhood friend, helped form the adult me. 

You know the last scene in American Beauty when Lester Burnham reflects on his life the second before he dies? I think my second will end with..."and Margaret." 

I started a new paragraph because I wanted the drama. That won't actually happen, but we both really like the film. Margaret isn't my friend, and she isn't my sister. She's my Alaskan appendage. Together with our college room/soulmates, Christine and Ana, we talked about our studies, men, and far more important things than men. We helped each other decide who, what and where we wanted to be. We're still talking about it, and although she doesn't just give me the goddamn answers, there is no other voice in the world I want to hear scream, "Emma! What are we doing with our lives!?" 

I now find myself in another country deeply entwined in a group of women politically incorrectly called The Gypsies. They're irreverent, intelligent, brave, creative and my life source. Each day I come home to two women who are responsible for making it a home and who really want what's best for me, as I do them. And although I teach Rosemary's Baby after Children of the Corn on Wednesdays, I always look forward to the day because the women I meet for coffee make me laugh and inspire me.

Have I seen most if not all these women succumb to jealously? And are they capable of laying down a thick layer of bitch?  

Mos Def 

But they don't do it because they're women. They do it because they're humans, and I don't want to be friends with people who aren't humans because that would mean I was just an actual crazy person. 

I could never describe them as jealous and bitchy because that's not who they are. They're individuals who aren't just navigating the stormy seas of life; they're trying to conquer them like bad ass pirates, and the coolest pirates are covered in scars, right? Maybe their moments of weakness are just one pirate reaching out to another pirate saying, "Hey, buddy. I need your help getting over this wave." 

I lost the point in that really awesome pirate metaphor, but what I'm trying to say is that I wouldn't be nearly as confident and independent as I am without the help of these women and so many others. I need them when I'm sad, weak and tired; I need them when I'm happy, excited and proud, and I want them to come to me for the same reasons. They can wiggle their way into cracks that men just can't seem to fill...even the gay ones.  

Well, Hell Froze Over

I was a transvestite in junior high school. If the high tops weren't high enough, the track suit bottoms weren't butch enough and the crew necks weren't unflattering enough, I wasn't going to wear them.

And now I have to live with those photos for the rest of my life.

I guess it was part of my personal feminist movement. Hating bras wasn't something I grew into just as my dirty pillows (reclaim) never grew into them because shunning traditional gender roles came to me pretty naturally, and my parents (bless you) also gave very few shits about them.

In second grade (OJ Simpson trial), I spent an entire recess on an actual stump in the playground in my vest and silk shirt proselytizing to the masses (Matthew Barger) about how society forces women into a kind of prostitution selling even their lives for a lifestyle only attainable through a man. Five years later, Mr. Pieper had to carry me to the principal's office for jumping on a kid's back and punching him in the head repeatedly for being a "sexist pig." I miss that obnoxious nightmare of a child; she really had her shit together.

But I've grown out of my cute, warped sense of what a feminist actually is and have turned it into something I don't respect: female chauvinism. The other night, I watching the best series ever created in the history of television, and one of the characters was wearing a sign around her neck that said, "FEMALES ONLY." Fist pump. I immediately started designing a line of them in my head in various colors to go with my outfits because sometimes I dress like a girl now...

what an asshole.

I then thought about all the great (and straight) men in my life who've been model buddies recently in no order whatsoever.

1. The Viking who is the only man not blood related to me that I will allow to feel like he needs to protect me...cause he's a damn Viking.

2. The Belgian giant who prepared a Christmas duck, listened intently to my lady juice (wine and weird period hormones) induced blubbering then validated all my feelings from a place of human decency. Keep that pituitary gland in check big guy.

3. The bodacious Spaniard babe who could have gotten away with nothing more than a vaya con dios after a first class one night stand but instead decided to cultivate a friendship with me based on mutual respect. Am I on Candid Camera? Also, maybe go with the guy above to look at your gland, too.

4. The lovable Guido who told me (a bajillion times), "Emma, I fuck wit you heavy. I fuck wit you heavy." And I was like, "I feel you. I feel you G Frizz Ease." But I really didn't feel him at all, so he explained that it means he enjoys hanging out with me, respects my ideas and opinions and values me as a person...I don't get it either.

5. The Israeli who fucks wit me heavy but would never put it that way. Shalom tío.

6. & 7. The Brit and Venezuelan that reminded me that I could be a real dick sometimes, too, like when I use men for sex or flake out when it's really important to them that I show up. Ohhhhhhhhhh. So, you're telling me that people without penises can do that, too? Yep, that one's on me guys.

8. Danon (that's his actual name). Words. Can't.

Despite what it seems, this was not to brag about how many hoes I have in different area codes because none of them is my hoe. They're my actual friends.

I really like it when the boys are on my team, and I'm on theirs. But that means that I have to stop bashing my teammates only because of their junk because it's just as unfair as when they do it to me. And our team is called Human Team because some people aren't men or women in the traditional sense which fascinates me but not enough to really care what's up because they're just people and I see people almost every day, but my friend Shane (he's a man) told me not to digress into tangents because it's distracting.

This is what happens when you have a tumor on your pituitary gland. I'm pretty sure he died a virgin :(. 

A Very Merry Christmas Break Up Story

The day you realize that you can relate to Miley Cyrus* desperately riding a swinging ball without a layer of underwear to protect your privates is the same day that you need to stop it right now.

Instead, I'm going to give Adele a call and ask if I can live with her. OMGeejus how fun would that be!? Her baby and guy could go be someplace else, and Dels and I would eat chocolate peanut butter balls next to the wine fountain in black muumuus, knee socks and Crocs.

When we're tired of that (if ever), we'll lock ourselves in a stable in the English countryside. She'll smoke fags, and I'll pretend to smoke fags until my album is complete. It's called 27. 

These are the songs:

1. Rolling in Dog Poop
2. I'm 35 Ana Haf (The World's Oldest Child)
3. Your Selfies Are Extremely Stupid
4. Captain A-hole Moby Dick
5. Set Fire to Everything I Can't Sell
6. No, You Can't Have Your Stuffs (I'm Selling Your Stuffs)
7. Don't Add 'S' to Stuff Because It's Already Plural I Told You That
8. Where Are My Shits to Give!? I Can't Find My Shits to Give!
9. You're Not Really a Model (Snap)
10. Namaste
11. Someone Like You Is Bad

After I get rich and build my house next to Adele's with a telescope room, Roman bath and spiral slide, I'm going to donate a huge amount of money to organizations that empower girls and women (and therefore insecure men) by activating the part of us that doesn't put up with bullshit.

But do people still wear these? 

*I've acknowledged her in this blog three times now, and that really bothers me...but I'm not going to stop.