Well here I am... As expected

Dear self: I was happy... But now I'm not.

Self-realization epiphany

I should stop bracing myself for a fall that might not even happen.  Just relax.  I'd say this is out of my character, but I'm also beginning to realize my self-portrayal isn't always accurate.  You say something enough, you start to believe it.

Fiction/non-fiction

I think I'm going to squeeze in some fiction stories here as well. You'll know the true ones from the fake ones becuase I'll tell you which ones are which. Plus, these are mostly be adaptations from real life (of course)... just slightly exaggerated.

[Fiction fade in]

Via some coaxing from my mother, I decided to try internet dating. I signed up with a website and spent an afternoon creating my profile, making sure to create an awesome caricature of myself, taking cool things about me and exaggerating them. Being a writer/rambler, my initial profile was maxed to the character limit. So I deleted a couple paragraphs. Don't want to give the idea that I talk too much!

Then I began the search. I narrowed results to single men between 25 and 40, at least 6' tall in the Portland area.

As I scrolled through my future dates, I noticed men on internet dating sites aren't as unattractive as I thought. Being a little self-conscious and fearing rejection, I decided to only click on moderately attractive profiles. Once I found a guy that I was moderately attracted to, I clicked on it and read it. I looked for things like similar interests, sarcasm, sense of humor, etc...

I messaged a guy named Adam. He must have been in some sort of band and kept referencing a band I'd never heard of. I wrote:

"Hey you. I don't know the music you like. Sorry. I guess I could google and fake it but I'm more of an up front kind of gal. Im open to new music... Or anything new for that matter. Unless it involves bodily fluids in my hair.

Shit. I have trouble censoring myself. Since this is text, I should erase that part about bodily fluids because *WEIRD, but I'd rather you get to know the real me instead if the idealized online dating profile version of myself.

Your 'message me if' section is what prompted this message... In all honestly, fucking ditto.

Ok I've spent too much time on a first-time message already.

Do you like me? Circle one: Yes. No. Maybe."

Brilliance, if I do say so myself.

He responded and we did a little online banter, and then switched to text messaging. Then we set a date at a bar that I frequent for Friday night at 8.

My first reaction was that he looked nothing like the blurry photos I'd seen on the internet. He had long-ish curly red hair, pale skin and a serious acne problem that I hadn't seen so horrible since my high school years on a kid we called Pizza Face. Adam was telling me about himself and his job, but I couldn't stop thinking about Pizza Face and trying to remember his actual name. It was some kind of nickname-sounding name, like Smokey or Butch or Skip. What was his name??!?!? Then I started thinking about why people call those with acne "pizza faces". Maybe the potpourri on acne is supposed to represent pepperoni on a pizza. Do they rub pizza on their faces before they go to bed? I'm sure the grease from the pizza would clog pores.

Then I pictured Adam rubbing a greasy, hot pizza on his face every night before he went to bed. How else could adult cystic acne get so bad??

Who knows? Maybe we'd be the perfect couple. I do have a sick fascination with zit popping (which, I know, gross). But could I really introduce this guy to my friends and family?
The shallow-ness in me faked an emergency text message and I apologized and quickly left. I'm sure Adam was a great guy, but I don't like popping zits that much.

I'm back

It's been over 3 years since I've posted here. Every once in a while, I get an email that someone has commented and I just assume it's spam and insta-delete.

I was feeling nostalgic today and decided to read my old journal posts from purerave. Then one of those posts mentioned this blog, and I surfed on over here too.

I miss writing. It seems like when I was writing, I had a much more interesting/chaotic life. Things have simmered down a bit, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing worth writing about now.

This blog was treated more as a personal journal than anything else. I never invited people who knew me from real life to read it. Mostly because I want to keep my private life public. Plus, I talked about them all the time.

Things have changed. The "hostel" house on 64th is no more. There was a big falling out between me and my friends--most of whom have since moved back home to their respective home states (quitters), but I've made new friends. They're just as weird and trashy as the old ones, but they've gotten older and uglier ;)

Anyway, the point is, I'm back. I look forward to documenting my strange thoughts and conversations with y'all again.

Love, Claire

Blocked Blog

The geniuses at my work block certain websites that are "inappropriate" for work.

This blog is now blocked.

Wordle

go to www.wordle.net for your own:



Conclusion: I say "like" and "really" too much. I sound like a really dumb valley girl.

Shit, there I go again.

READ MY FAX!

Hey you guys, remember in Back to the Future II when future Marty gets fired from that Asian dude and he sends him a fax that says "YOU'RE FIRED!!!"? Too funny. Faxing is obsolete... and it's not even 2015 yet.

What brings you to Portland?

I have yet to tell anyone the truth about why I moved here. I embellished a few of the more minor reasons, but the true MAIN reason I moved here was for a guy I "loved", but love is such a stupid word and infatuation can feel stronger, but isn't love. I used to tell everyone who loved that they were naive and "love" is nothing more than the equivalent of eating mass amounts of chocolate in a single sitting. I believe this to be true. But said individual whom I "loved" didn't live in Portland. He lived in Philadelphia. Plot thickens.

Here's the back story: Chris and I knew each other for a long time in Kansas City. We partied together, but were never more than friends. In fact, the thought of being more than friends had never even crossed my mind. I didn't feel "that way" about him. I thought of him as a friend, and nothing more, but I knew he felt "that way" about me. I always knew.

He went away. He moved back to the east coast and eventually found his way to Philadelphia where he lived for years. We still kept in contact, every one in a while a phone call was made just to catch up on things. I like to keep tabs on my friends after they've gone.

I began having dreams about him. "Distance makes the heart grow fonder"? True. I felt very strongly that I messed something up. I couldn't believe I let him go away.

I called him late one night, after a few too many, and confessed. He told me he felt "the same way" about me. For months, we continued a phone, long-distance "I love you" relationship. Fucked up, huh?

The dilemma: Chris lives in Philly, I live in Kansas City. What to do? Chris and I fantasized about moving to the west coast. He wanted to expand his musical career and I wanted to get away. I was feeling trapped in Kansas City. "I feel 40" I said in a journal entry. I decided to move away--closer to him. In order to do that, I needed to sell my home. So I moved in with my parents in Michigan while the house sat on the market for 167 days. No buyers. I couldn't stand living in Detroit, not finding work, and STILL being away from Chris. This was getting pointless. Didn't I move away to be with him? So why am I stuck here? I cashed out my 401k and ran away--again.

I went, where else? Philly! I wasn't nervous about seeing Chris again for the first time in ages until I finally entered the city. I had a blast there. I loved the oldness and I loved New York. But Chris and I didn't pursue and loving, deep relationship like I thought we would. I mean, how do you do that when you haven't seen the person in years? We sorta "dated" but really never romantically did anything. Ever. I was quite disappointed that I had changed my life so much and for next to nothing. We continued together, as friends, and took all summer finally getting to Portland.

"Love" shouldn't have been the reason. But it was.

I felt betrayed. I felt like he had used me to get here--an elaborate plan to expand his music career. Like I was a wagon or something. "Sure! I'll give you a ride!" We were roommates, until I moved out, and I learned that he was... not the person I thought. What will years of being apart do to a person? Think what it did to him. Think what it did to me.

Chris and I barely talk now.

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In the last few weeks, I've been wondering what I'm still doing here. People ask, "What brings you to Portland?" I can't tell them the truth. It just sounds so pathetic. Wait... it is so pathetic. So I tell people I just needed a change, which was true, and that I couldn't get work in Detroit, which was true, and that I felt trapped in Kansas City, which was true, but all these things were not the main reason for moving and changing my life.

What brings me to Portland? Nothing. I've been here for 6 months already, and I still feel like an outsider. I've been trying to stick it out. Find some cool friends and have a good time. I have found cool people and friends, but it's tough when I think about the hundreds of friends I have/had in KC. Tough to think that I can never go back there, for fear of being perceived as having my tail between my legs. Before I left KC, I had a going-away party and Will said, "You're not moving." I proved him wrong, but for what?

Either way, I'm pathetic. Pathetically sad and still lost. Lost in an ocean of apartments and drowning. When I get close to the surface to break for air, something grabs my leg and drags me back down to the bottom.

I continue to drown.

Hideousness

There's this Avon lady who comes by my work all the time to peddle crappy makeup and hideous accessories. She comes by the front desk (where I work) and gives us 6-7 Avon catalogues and we act like we're really excited to see them. Then as soon as she's gone, we trash them.... except today. Today I'm pretty bored, so I decided to flip through the catalogue a little bit, just to kill time. And that's when I saw the most hideous shoes I'd ever seen in my life:



I mean, platform moccasins?! Is that what they're trying to convince people to buy?! Those are just plain nasty.

But that got me thinking... you know, there are probably more hideous shoes out there. So I google imaged "hideous shoes" and I found them. The most hideous and COMPLICATED shoes on earth:

Tangents and Wikipedia

I often bring up the term “conversational tangents.” Picture this: A friend and I are having a conversation over a spliff or whatever, we’re on the porch, because we’re porch monkeys (I decided this term isn’t racist, we call ourselves porch monkeys because we hang out on the porch a lot). We’ll be on the topic of high school, remembering stories and how much cocaine I sold to people and guaranteed good grades until graduation. Then we’ll start talking about school buses and about the time that my friend Jade threw Stephen Carter’s left shoe out the window on the highway. Then we’ll start talking about the color of the school buses and who decided to make school buses such an unattractive color. Then we’ll start talking about other hideous colors like baby poop green. Then we’ll start talking about the fact that when babies are first born, their poop doesn’t stink until the first week is over and then it smells like the worst smell you’ve ever smelled. And so on and so on. First we were talking about high school and now we’re talking about fowl-smelling baby shit. I call these occurrences “conversational tangents.” That’s all conversations are: a series of tangents.

I get lost in Wikipedia. I simply love it. I’m on a wiki page, and then some of the words are clickable links to their Wikipedia page. It’s fantastic! I’ll be reading about Hawaii, then I click on “highest mountains”, then I click on “Mount Everest”, then I click on “Great Trigonometric Survey”, then I click on “India”, then I discover that the population of India is 1,147,995,904!! And then I learned something. I love surfing Wikipedia. I could do it for hours… and do.

So, in many ways, conversational tangents are a lot like Wikipedia.

End of post.