Category — AIDS is not funny.

I woke up this morning and lo! there were clouds and it was Good.

The San Francisco sunshine was KILLING me. It is November, people, and I suffered through summer in Oregon with a smile on my face because I had waited 9 long months for some sun and also because I could actually fit into my skirts and things again (post-divorce weight GONE) but now it is November and I want blustery leaves and rain on my face and scarves and tights and boots.

Yesterday, I wore flip flops and a skirt to walk the dog. It felt so wrong and evil. I mean, okay, it felt good but WORNG. I know I spelled that incorrectly but I am making a point about how not right it was.

This past weekend, Dane and I took the Muni light rail together so I would know how to use it without looking like a total potard. It seems easy enough. We also took the bus which was like every other bus experience I’ve ever had in my life – dirty and weird and bumpy. We took the 38 down (up?) Geary to Japantown to see Quantum of Solace at the Sundance Theater where they serve alcohol. I looked around and did not see one single Japan – not one. Ffft. Japantown. LIARS.

Anyway, this was the exchange we had with the bartender/server lady at the theater.

Us: So, the guy downstairs told us we can order food and then not have it delivered until the movie starts, is that right?

“Lady”: I don’t even know what time it is. What time is it?

Us: (searching in my bag for my phone) Um….I’m not sure

“Lady”: So you don’t want to order anything then? (over our shoulders) Can I help whoever’s next?

Us: No, wait! (me seething) We would like a Grey Goose and tonic and a margarita.

“Whore” “Lady”: (Long sigh) OKaaay. That it?

Dane: Actually, would it be too much trouble to order a margarita instead? That sounds delicious.

“Lady”: PAY ATTENTION DANIEL (other bartender) THESE ARE OUR NUMBER ONE TROUBLE CUSTOMERS OF THE DAY.

And then she slapped me across the face.

No, she didn’t, but that’s what it felt like.

So I gave her the death stare, which is surprisingly similar to me looking at the floor and mumbling thank you.

Other than that I would highly recommend the Japantown Sundance Theater as long as your expectations for any actual Japans and customer service are non-existent.

Is gay.

Now, I realize all of San Francisco is gay, but we live right on the corner of Gay and Gayer Streets. Melissa Lion insists we live in Noe Valley and not the Castro but really, we live one block away from Castro St. and one block away from Noe. What this means is we are surrounded by millions of men named Michael and Timothy and Patrick with a small sprinkling of young families with babies in strollers.

I love the gays. The babies, on the other hand, are just meh.

Our first night here, after a terrifying, hellish, 14 hour drive from Portland (let’s just say God was either telling us to get the hell out of Portland or to stay the hell out of San Francisco…I still don’t know which…also I don’t believe in God) we parked the moving truck and immediately went on a hunt for beer.

I don’t know if any of you have ever been to the Castro on a Saturday night but it was a little overwhelming – overwhelming in an ohmygodweliveinarealcitywithamillionpeopleandwecoulddietonight kind of way. And we had ZZ with us because we didn’t want to leave her in an empty new apartment for even a minute. You can imagine how well she took to the street trannies and hustlers touching her. Not well.

Anyway, we survived and although Dane was a little mindblown from the culture shock, he has quickly adjusted to our new gay lifestyle. Embraced it, even. Honestly, I think he’s really enjoying all the attention and has winkled out that he’s probably a bear, but like a smaller one – more BooBoo than Yogi, more  Koala than Grizzly. And if this means we get free pastries at Tartine, so be it.

Yay gays!

Best Friend Sy Parrish™ just sent this to FOTC HQ. It’s a music video (remember those, kids?) by her friend Dave and our friend Sabra is in it! She’s the hot Asian-ish one.

Enjoy.

It’s the maddening tickle in my right nostril that really gets me. And it extends to everything on that side of my face. My eye is all twitchy and my ear is plugged up and there is only so much Zicam I can take before my heart explodes from the crazy zinc-y stimulant.

So I think I’ll take it easy today and just clean the house, vacuum the furbleweeds, run the stairs in the West Hills, bake some cookies, organize the closets, clean the baseboards, and write my novel. You know, veg out as the kids used to say.

In the meantime I’m here to answer your questions because it’s Friday!

And today’s advice column – in honor of my longstanding obsession with people who have food obsessions- is about nutrition. So go on, ask me your questions and I will answer them because I want you to be the perfectest perfect you that you can perfectly be.

And I may even answer one or two in video format. Huh? RIGHT? Exciting! So c’mon kids, let’s kick those eating disorders into high gear! Let’s talk food!

I can’t hold it in anymore. I don’t want to be a message board for blog hatred but Healthy Food Blogging has really been getting under my skin lately. Or stuck in my craw. Or some such colloquialism. And I don’t mean you Arielle. Not much anyway, because your writing is tremendously funny, but seriously…this shit about blogging every single thing young women with access to laptops put in their mouths? It’s wrong. It’s harmful. It’s OBSESSIVE.

And I am totally guilty of reading these blogs every single goddamn day. That’s right. I am admitting I used to be a regular commenter on Kath Eats but I just can’t participate in a practice which purports to help “people” (women in their early twenties with borderline eating disorders) make healthy choices in their daily eating habits but in reality is taking what is already an obsessive pastime for modern girls to a nuclear level.

I mean, I can totally get behind teaching Americans about nutrition and portion size, etc and sometimes I waffle (get it? WAFFLE) and think, “Well, Kath and Jenna and Whoeverelse really are showing people a realistic way to eat three meals a day with snacks and stay at a healthy weight” and then my brain kicks in and I’m all, “WTF? What is wrong with America? Isn’t this another way to keep women in a tiny little box of conformity and unhappiness? Isn’t there enough pressure on girls to be perfect? Do we really need this? A blog telling us exactly what and how to eat all the time?”

I’d really like to know what your thoughts are on this. Mine are a bit muddled but my gut feeling (get it? GUT?) is that this is the opposite of healthy. It’s orthorexia. Its an obsession with never putting anything in your mouth that isn’t nutrional GOLD. It’s women living a deprived, bare, wasp-y existence in an effort to exert control over every part of their lives. It’s like living inside Real Simple magazine. (But not Domino because I would love to live inside of Domino magazine.)

It freaks me the frak out.

Tell me your feelings internet.

I just spent the last two hours searching the internet for videos of this Lemonheads song and found a LOT of super earnest covers by a LOT of average follicularly challenged white guys (which, to be perfectly honest, were very sweet and I’m sure resulted in them getting laid more than they would have otherwise) but I finally decided this one was my favorite – partly because of the spelling of “lemmonheads” and partly (mostly) because of the peppy uptempo-ness of it. And yes, maybe the accent helped a little. A LITTLE.

Also, I don’t understand why he’s singing from prison. I wonder who he killed? He seems like a nice kid. It’s always the quiet ones, I guess.

I will not giggle about the “lock climbing weekend”. I will NOT.

Remember last week when I told you about the HORRIFIC movie I saw?

Well here is my review, out today in The Merc.

Enjoy. I will be in the bathroom every five minutes, wondering what I did to deserve Cholera. I have a sneaking suspicion it has something to do with the title of this post.

We’ve got a wedding to go to in about 5 weeks and because I am a girl I am already panicking about what to wear.

This weekend it was suddenly about 900 degrees outside and beautiful. Unfortunately, I could not enjoy it very much because I believe it was nature’s way of kicking me in the balls about nutrition and possibly not drinking so many cocktails all the time. The truth is I’m in much better shape than I was last spring when this happened and I was coming down from a three month marathon of divorce karaoke, divorce jaeger shots, and divorce Jack in the Box so I’m not freaking the fuck out the way I was then. HOWEVER, I’m still not quite ready for tank tops and skirts and flip flops the way every girl wants to be all the time. So today begins my re-commitment ceremony to healthy living. And drinking wine at bars instead of delicious boozy margaritas because a glass of wine takes about 14 hours to drink and a chocolate martini takes about negative 5 seconds.

Maybe you shouldn’t drink any alcohol at all, you say?

Well, to that I say, keep your morals off my goddamn lawn, you hooligan! I do so love my delicious wine and it loves me back and who are you to put boundaries on a love that is hurting no one except my waistline and why are you judging me and subsequently marginalizing functional alcoholics everywhere? It’s hurtful and, dare I say it, IGNORANT.

So I’m going to dial back my portion sizes AGAIN and mostly just lay off the boozy drinks and up the exercising a little but mostly I am going to try not to obsess about it too much. If I was 22 I would be able to lose 9 pounds in a week just by forgetting to eat but now that I’m an adult I never forget to eat. EVER. I do however, still forget to pay bills because I have no ability to prioritize. Like, two months ago right now I should be doing our taxes. Instead I am writing a blog post about dieting and alcohol and that is because I would rather talk about dieting and alcohol than discuss the merits of a five party system (although that sounds alcohol-y, right?) or Sudanese politics. And this should explain to you why I will never, ever be a respected journalist at The New Republic. I will just forever be known as that one blogger who thinks AIDS is funny.

Do as I say, not as I do.

I am just sitting here in a full on panic attack waiting for my interview to happen. It’s times like this when I yearn for a Time Machine. I’d climb into the Time Machine (which would, fingers crossed, look exactly like an english phone booth) and plug in 4:30 PST and a whir and a click later I’d be bathed in relief and flopsweat, ready to take a klonopin bubble bath and go out to dinner.

But that is not going to happen, is it? And I am going to have to talk to the Famous Person on the phone and ask them questions and not stutter or pass out and I ASKED TO DO THIS because it’s exciting and good for my career and it’s supposed to be fun, right?

And none of this would be so bad if I had been able to watch The Hills last night. Do you know why I was not able to watch The Hills? Because someone, who’s name rhymes with Dane Flesselball, somehow DELETED it from the DVR. And where I come from, that is grounds for divorce.

I will update you all at or near 4:30 and let you know if I managed to make it through the next two hours without having an AIDS attack.

UPDATE! I DID NOT DIE. It was fine. I will link to my interview next Thursday when it comes out and we can all laugh about how stupid I can sometimes be.

People are still mad at me for comparing my cold to cancer (Well, not cancer – we can rest assured people still think cancer is funny or at least inconsequential) and AIDS. I have now been invited via another blog post to travel to Africa and volunteer with some kind of AIDS prevention and treatment center and then blog about how funny or not funny it is. This, I suppose, will Teach Me A Lesson about Taking Things Seriously.

God.

I DO NOT THINK WATCHING A LOVED ONE OR ANY LIVING THING DIE OF A HORRIBLE DISEASE IS FUNNY. I think using humor to ease a bad situation is, however, funny and HEALING. It’s called gallows humor. Look it up.

And anyway, how did we get to this point? Comments taken out of context and reposted elsewhere, I guess – which by the way is just poor journalism – and reactionary blogging by everyone. I made a twitter comment about my flu, someone reacted to it badly, I reacted to their reaction, my readers reacted to that, and so forth. And that is how you start a war. It’s stupid.

Do these people really think that WE think a child wearing a silly hat who has tourettes and is dying of AIDS is funny? It’s not funny, although typing it did just make me giggle a little. And you know why? Because it’s inappropriate, like laughing in church (actually, laughing in church is the only appropriate thing to do, in my opinion).

I really did not want to talk about this anymore, but then I got called out again and I was all “It is ON” and my fingers were all “Let’s type this shit OUT” and also, no, I do not want the world thinking I’m some kind of hate monger who is evil and wants people to die of diseases so that I can make fun of them. Way to blow it all out of proportion, Portland.

Sometimes, I do not like the internet. I hops it gets the cancer.