I’ve been trying to make friends lately, but I don’t know how. I don’t think I’m doing this social media thing right, and I’m not sure how to pick up friends at bars. Or if that even happens. I’ve been posting ads on craigslist, but it always seems like a dead end for some reason. I think it might have to do with the fact that I’m not looking to sleep with anyone, and the virtual world and reality are so far removed from each other in my brain that I forget people on the internet are actually real. And I’ve been practicing being shy for so long that thinking about talking to people makes me want to get in my bed and watch movies for hours instead.

I did make a friend last week though. I was in training for the Census and we bonded over how we would rather be sipping cocktails than waiting for 50 people to get fingerprinted at the alarming rate of 1 every 15 minutes. We went bowling on Sunday. $20 for unlimited pizza and three hours of bowling (OMG bowling is so expensive and that didn’t even include all the booze). It was super fun.

*sidenote: Do you ever just hate someone automatically? Hate at first sight? Not that I really harbor lots of hatred, maybe irritation is a better word, but sometimes the way people talk and move their hands is just so aggravating that it makes me want to pull my teeth out with pliers. Sometimes I’m in a cafe writing with my headphones on but I’m secretly HATING YOU and everything you say and stand for. Get a chin, chicken neck.

Ahem. If you are going to be my new friend, this is what I would do to take you out and show you a good time.

1. Go to Ocean Beach and build a fire in their big Sea Star fire pits.

I’m currently working as the assistant for the artist who made these. Maybe you will be impressed by this. My boo, T, will help us build I gigantic fire and we can cook things over it on sticks and make s’mores and likely there would be a couple bottles of something and we could sit and sip and talk about all the things that are close to our heart and maybe make some music if we were so inclined until the fire died and it got cold and we started wondering how we were going to get home again and omg the train stop is so far away we’ll never make it let’s just sleep on the beach.

That happened to me once, but not exactly. We arrived at this beach park 5 minutes before it closed and got our car locked into the parking lot. We build a big smokey fire from some wet wood we found and stayed up all night shivering and watching the trains go by. We eventually ended up in the car which is where the park guy found us at 6am. It was awesome, like we were stranded on some cold island in the northwest and would sooner or later have to resort to cannibalism, or trapping squirrels, and build shelters out of stuff that washes up on the shore.

2. 50 cent Beer night at Bar on Church

We are broke artists, so we live a romantic trashy existence. On Saturday afternoon, we are going drinking at the place that most closely resembles a frat party at a gay club. We will scoff at the beer pong players, but would secretly play if they were friendly and asked us to. There are available poles and ropes hanging from the ceiling in case you had the hankering for suggestive gyrating, but I must warn you that if you are a girl you will be almost immediately be thought of as a slutty attention whore. The way to avoid this is to wait until you are pretty tipsy and then do it to get people to dance to this song because OMG IT IS SO GOOD!!! Extra points if you are hot and fun and get people to dance. If you are a cute gay guy, go forth with no reservations, but if you run off to have sex somewhere and ditch us, that is lame.

3. Monday Night Movie at Roxie Cinema

I love to watch movies, especially if they’re arty and independent and funny or heartbreaking or pretty and make me feel hip and smart. Enter Roxie Cinema. They always have something offbeat or interesting playing, so it doesn’t even really matter what’s playing. Especially because on Mondays the movies are $5 (cash pls). Before the movie, we can go get pupusas down the street at Panchitas #2 where you can have a feast for 2 for like, $12, I kid you not. This is a fun thing to do esp. when we’re just getting to know each other because there’s a little conversation time mixed with silent movie time that will give us something to talk about if we don’t really know what to say otherwise.

4. An Afternoon on Hippie Hill

On sunny days in the spring, there’s no better place to be than on Hippie Hill. All kinds of people come out. There are tons of hippies and weirdos and freaks to talk to that make great stories. Last time I was there, I watched this guy dressed in all black going crazy on this big empty trash can. He was covered in body armor and training himself to kill people. He came over and said his name was Ash and started throwing knives into the grass. He was awesome, and I feel sorry for any authority figure that runs into him when he’s in a bad mood. His pipe was given to him by an native american who made it out of the horn of an elk he shot with a bow and arrow.

Anyway, I’d pack a picnic with some food to spare, bring a little cash for homemade baked goodness we will inevitably be invited to try, and maybe even something to bang on. There we can spend all afternoon people watching and talking to whoever rolls up. We will share some food, lay in the sun, read, dance at the drum circle, hula hoop and generally chill out until we are so chill we are ready to find a rainbow gathering or go live in a van down by the river with all our new friends.

5. Pho

At this point in hanging out, it is likely that you will have encountered a hangover. Never fear! I would not leave you to somehow vanquish Yesterday’s Cheap Beer Dragon alone. I have found that the best way to fully and quickly cure something like this is through a big bowl of goodness in your mouth. Pho is like a day at the spa. It’s like a sauna, but better because it won’t make you want to throw up when you’re hungover. Delicious broth. Meat or veggies if you want. Noodles. Bean sprouts. Add in some hot sauce and I swear your pain will be gone and you’ll feel so much better.

Maybe after Pho we can go home and make something awesome or think of cool posters to hang all over the neighborhood or work on some sticker tags to slap on newpaper boxes and fire hydrants.

So now that you’re all impressed at how much fun I can be, and are wishing you could be my friend and hang out all the time, comment! I have no idea who reads this thing, but I know someone does because I HAVE VISITORS. Tell me if you’d like to hang out, or what you’d rather do that’s more fun. Or even better, tell me what you’re ideas are for fun things to do and give me some good ideas for fun cheap things to do. Or just say hi! You can also include a link to your blog if you want to be blog buds.

OH YEAH THAT’S RIGHT! HOLLA BACK!

I’m planning an awesome giveaway that will be a secret surprise care package full of such amazing wondrous items it will satisfy the void in your heart and fulfill your life completely. Get on my good side now and maybe you will be the winner!!

Life is definitely more exciting in movies.

There are plots. A developing story. Obstacles that are overcome. Interesting characters. Magical items.

Sometimes my life comes close. There are many times in my life, days where I look at whoever I’m with and say, “Did that really just happen?”

And then there are times in my life when my dreams are far more interesting.

Sometimes there are places I want to be and things I want to do that are just out of my reach. Last October, for my best friend’s birthday, I couldn’t go celebrate with him because he lives in Tokyo and the taxi fare would have been just a little too much. But I was there in spirit. And in my imagination, we went out and had an amazing night.

In Tokyo there is no crime. You can walk around at any time of night and feel completely safe. No one locks their bikes. It’s amazing.

On the night of Justin’s birthday, we woke up and the sun was shining. He lives in this amazing apartment with a sportswear designer roommate, big picture windows, and a tiny back garden with a mini fire pit and a fountain. I sabered open a bottle of champagne and made chocolate chip pancakes and we sat around the garden drinking mimosas and discussing our plan of attack for the day. I promised I would help him spruce up his pad right, so after breakfast we got our goggles and suited up in our white painter jumpsuits before gathering all the paint in the house and starting in.

There’s this great side room in his apartment that opens onto the garden. It’s southfacing, so it gets amazing light all day and we wanted to trap it in and magnify it so got some metallic gold paint and went to work. Before long we got all the ceiling and the walls completely covered in it and it started to look like some crazy egyptian tomb and we had to put on out sunglasses to finish it.

I had made this big drawing of mountains and the sea cascading into this giant pile of brightly colored shapes that were supposed to climb up the walls. We set up the projector and Justin made shadow puppets and danced around to some great funk records while I outlined everything. He started on a ladder at the sky and I started on the floor to paint the ocean and before long we had met on the mountain and climbed up to the crazy shapes. By then it was late and we were exhausted, but we had a ton of stuff to do, so we drank some crazy ass Japanese energy drinks that I swear should have been illegal and I clicked my heels three times and we were on our bikes, flying kites off the back of them through the streets with Justin’s mini ghetto blaster blasting from his basket.

This kind of thing, plus not being Japanese tends to get some attention in Tokyo, and we stopped at lights and struck poses while people on the sidewalk took surreptitious photos on their smartphones.

We went to a friend’s house and she made us some cold noodles and we slurped and slurped while she got ready to go out. This girl is amazing. She has a closet full of wigs and ended up wearing a giant blond beehive with seriously fake lashes and a blue metallic bodysock with platforms built in. She took us to this crazy club that was built to look like a treehouse. You could climb and climb into these little platform rooms and every room had a different drink special. At the top of the fake treehouse was this room that mimicked dawn every 45 minutes and had this infinity pool with, I kid you not, japanese mermaids swimming in it. If you dove in and held your breath, you could go to this totally awesome secret room with one glass wall where you could watch the mermaids swimming, and a deck with a sauna  and a ton of plants that looked out across the city. It was unreal, some weird gateway between jungle and metropolis that totally looked like one of those portals in sci-fi movies to a different universe.

We got lost in the treehouse, and by then we were a little less than coherent, but somehow I remember finding a tiny little door, like in Alice in Wonderland, that set you out into the street. By then we had somehow collected more people and we stopped at a karaoke bar, but after the treehouse club it seemed kind of lame, so we came home instead and put on an impromtu shadow puppet opera with our new friends and a bunch of random japanese opera records we had found mixed with Sun Ra samples before watching the sunrise in the golden room, which was totally bad ass and actually felt like a womb it was so warm from the light.

It was a totally bad ass birthday, even without a birthday cake. It was okay though, because when we finally woke up there was a giant mountain of strawberry cupcakes being carefully constructed in the kitchen. It was almost too beautiful to eat, but then we ate it and omg it was even better.

Birthdays like this are definitely too awesome to not come true sometime soon. I swear. My life is like a movie.

I love food. Since I was little, food has been one of my favorite activities. I grew up eating brie and pate from infancy. I learned how to mix martinis when I was eight. Every night my family would sit down to dinner. Both my parents are amazing cooks, and I’d watch them make sauces and marinate meat and make pie crusts. In high school, I started baking. I experimented with bread, cakes, cookies, biscuits, crumbles, and anything else I could think of. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because the whole family comes over and cooks together. Food makes community. Cooking is cooperation. It’s a beautiful thing.

When I was a teenager, I used to eat at this amazing, sadly departed restaurant called Bistro E. Europa. Julia owned the restaurant with her husband, Sdravko (I hope I spelled that right). This restaurant was different from any other restaurant. You would show up at 7pm and be there all night, drinking, dancing, laughing, eating, and drinking. At around 4am, you would pour yourself into a taxi and go pass out at home, where you’d wake up the next morning sore all over and with a wicked hangover. But it was all worth it. My sister and I took a cooking lesson with Julia once, learning to make her flatbread and paprikash, delicious staples of her menu. She taught us some key steps to cooking success.

When you are going to start cooking,

1. Open a bottle of wine and pour yourself a glass.

2. Start frying some onions so it smells like something is cooking, for anyone who is waiting for food.

It is with these two tenements of cooking that I started last night to tackle a new challenge: cooking without a kitchen.

This is the sole drawback to our new place. There is no stove, no sink, no cabinet full of dishes, and until last night, no knife. My amazing mother sent us home with some steaks, potatoes, mushrooms and onions, and I was determined to make a feast. So I started out, opening the cheap bottle of chardonnay, bracing myself for the task before me, armed with wine, a microwave, and a george foreman grill. This won’t be hard, I thought. My mom said you can make baked potatoes in the microwave, just stab ‘em a few times with a fork, cover them in butter, and nuke for 15 minutes. Everything else would go on the grill.

I started with the onions, slicing them into rings to be easily manageable on a grill that is sloped downwards, and using a cake tin shoved underneath the front of it to keep the juices from dripping all over the top of the mini-fridge. I sliced the onions, then ran to the bathroom crying to wash out my eyes. Put the onions on the grill. So far so good. Then I stabbed the potatoes and stuck them in the microwave. After trying to figure out how to set the time instead of having the automatic express 5 minutes go on, I gave up and pressed “Add 30 secs” until I got to 15 minutes. After 10 secs, the whole thing shut off.

T: “The surge protector tripped off. It’s pulling too much juice.”

Me: “Can we just plug it into the wall?”

T: “That might blow a fuze. No potatoes.”

What? Steak and potatoes without the potatoes? I would not be thwarted. I took out the potatoes, and cut them in slices. I pulled the onions, mushrooms, and garlic off the grill and stuck them on.

It worked well. After a few minutes the potatoes were crispy on the outside and soft on  the inside. I took them off, slapped some steaks on the grill. They were cooked in just 3 minutes. I put the onions and mushrooms on top to heat them up again, slid them onto the plate with the potatoes, and poured the drippings from the cake pan over all of it.

It was delicious, if I do say so myself. I think I could get the hang of this. One grill, dinner for two. Faced with obstacles, wine is key. Dinner #2? Bring it on.

P.S. If you don’t have a wine opener, don’t use a drill. I just gets cork everywhere.

Cindy Crabb's desk

I don’t remember when I got my first issue of Doris zine. I was in high school, and had started going to punk shows at Gilman St. with my sister’s best friend from high school. There were ripped up couches and graffiti all over the walls and people yelling and dancing and smashing into each other. There were little booklets in the shop and my surrogate older sister gave me a bunch of zines, these magazines that real people like me wrote and glued together and photocopied late at night at Kinko’s. I started reading about all these people who did things differently with their lives. They didn’t grow up and buy a house and have kids in the suburbs. They traveled on cheap greyhound bus tickets, putting their fate in the hands of strangers, doing things you weren’t supposed to do like jumping trains and living in tree houses and reading books and planting gardens instead of working. I learned to dance like those kids in the clubs. I learned to yell my heart out and make out on the sidewalk. I learned to cut my own hair and I learned that I didn’t need anyone to tell me that I was good at something to do it. This is what I liked most about punks: they just did what they wanted and made art and music and culture themselves without waiting for permission or approval from anyone.

Somewhere along this path I found Doris zine at the anarchist bookstore by my school. I’d read it on the bus, and it was like I had a new secret best friend. Cindy, who started writing Doris in the early 90s spoke about her adventures. Traveling, running away, reading and trying to teach herself how to do things. She built boats that sank and danced in the rain and bailed water from her flooded tents. She taught me about things I never thought or knew about before, like herbal abortion, learning about your body, questioning society, living outside of meritocracy, anarchism, learning on your own, and doing things for for the sake of doing them instead of waiting or working for praise. Her writing reaches directly from her heart to mine, as she works through all the things good and bad and heartbreaking that happen when you live. She is my greatest role model. I want to be like her, making things with my own two hands, trying to learn even when I think it’s impossible, have courage against any fear to create and make things grow and learn about truth and community and being yourself and healing yourself and understanding other people. Cindy sees the world I see and her writings are a window into this universe I’m always trying to find.

By now, I’ve been reading this zine for 10 years and she has managed still to write in a way that’s so close to my heart I sometimes mistake her for myself.

“I used to worry about – what does it mean to be a real writer? Was I one? Was it good or did it suck? What if I didn’t spend enough time writing? Was I a fake? What if I was stuck? What was the point? I thought there had to be an answer, a key. I read books about writing and books about creating a writer’s life … and I couldn’t figure out, was I real. Was I a real writer or just a fake. Eventually I figured out that the whole question was bullshit. The question “was I a real writer” was part of the competative system I wanted to destroy, where everyone is suppose to strive to do something brand new that’s never been done, to make a mark on history, to be better than everyone else. I didn’t want that shit, so why was I looking to those models for legitimacy. I had to ask questions like – why did I write. and then hold myself accountable to my own reasons and standards.” excerpt from Doris #27 “Writing”

Her words have had such unknowable impact on my growing brain. I probably wouldn’t be who I am today if I hadn’t found her zine. You should read it to, it may change you’re life. Get Doris zines and Anthology here. Buy some for your friends too. And she makes cute skirts you can buy too. And read her blog. She is amazing and has tons of awesome stuff she does.

There are times when you want to do stuff, or put stuff in your body, that seems like it would be fun, but isn’t. Like every time I think it would be really fun to drink a lot. Hangovers can range from a mild headache to waking up still drunk and puking your guts out all day long while you silently pray for a merciful God to just end it now already. Or drugs. However good they may make you feel, you will feel that much worse tomorrow. Or sugar. I ate a block of fudge the other day that made me bounce off the walls for ten minutes before giving me a giant headache and putting me to sleep immediately afterwards. A friend called the other day and said her boyfriend smoked a lot of trees and she couldn’t help but smoke with him, even though she knew it was too much and it made her feel yucky.

Why is it so tempting to do things that make you feel shitty? Of course it’s that high it gives you, the sweet sugary happy feeling, the indulgence, the out of body experience, the lack on inhibitions, the wet t-shirt contest. Doing crap that’s bad for you is fun!!!

But I also think it’s fun because it’s BAD. Being constantly bombarded with messages of eating right and being healthy and skinny and beautiful totally makes me want to drink and eat cake and pizza, in that order. People telling me I have to be rich and successful, or at least productive all the time totally makes me want to do nothing and watch movies all day long.

But this is all reactionary! I feel like if I just tried to figure out what made my body feel really good normally, I could find that whole “moderation” area where I have a balance between the good and the bad. If I did yoga a few times a week and took long walks, and ate things that didn’t give me the shits or migraines or make me puke every few hours, I would totally feel tons better!

I had a friend who once swore she got high eating raw vegetables. Why don’t I try it? I once ate a super spicy jalapeno burger when I was hung over and though it burned out my face, it totally got rid of my hangover!

I guess what I’m trying to say is this. Don’t listen to other people! Listen to your body! It will tell you what you need to feel really good but you have to listen really carefully because if you’re too wasted you can’t hear it. Also, drink lots of water and when opening that big bottle of vodka seems like omg the best idea ever, don’t. Drink water. Put your clothes back on. You’ll feel better in the morning.