It's my blog and I still have no control

If you look to the right of your screen, you'll see the blog posts that I have written that have gotten the most attention. I am always tempted to remove this selection from the home page. They irk me, though I simultaneously find their presence amusing. You see, these are not the posts that I think are the best. They are not the funniest, the most informative, the most insightful, or representative of my best writing (the bar is low on that one, I know). In other words, they are not the posts I would have chosen.

I've decided it's a metaphor for life. You make the most out of what you have, try to carefully craft the world around you, but ultimately you get what you get. You can't force people to base their impressions of you on the events you'd prefer - IF ONLY, RIGHT?!? If I had control over that, one of my good friends would stop telling people that the first thing he ever heard me say was, "I want vodka!" After 16 years, that story has slowly shifted from amusing to embarrassing. Especially when he makes sure people understand that I was 15 at the time.

Great. See what I just did there? Now all of you first time readers, all one or two of you, have just had your impressions of me tainted by that stupid story. Even if I told you about the time my friend and I used a week's worth of lunch money to buy food and blankets for the homeless guy sleeping under the local bridge in Montana in the winter*, you'll still remember the vodka thing. Which is exactly the point I'm trying to make. You see, the Internet takes the way we form impressions and exaggerates certain aspects of the process. You can't see me, you don't hear how I emphasize these words. Instead, you get to read them in the way you see fit. I can only lay them out and hope that you appreciate them.

*That's a good story. Expect a detailed account soon.

The way I sound in your head? Yeah, I doubt I actually sound like that. And unless your imagining me gesticulating wildly as I "talk", then you've got that wrong too. I bet I'm a lot more like a cartoon character than you think. Just keep that in mind if you decide to read through those popular posts, maybe that will improve them a bit.

That Time I Lived In A Duplex

Dear Internet,

Sorry for my absence. I was going to wait and write once something definitive had happened but I missed you. Nothing definitive has happened. The only thing that has changed from when I wrote this, is that there is a new fish and he might be dying. Yes, I'm serious.

THE house is stuck in a twisting labyrinth of paperwork and federal regulations. The possible baby is still just possible. And Malcolm died to be replaced by Felix, who is trying to die as I write this. And not because I am a horrible pet owner...apparently he has terminal constipation. Again, not joking.

SO, fuck all that. I don't want to talk about it anymore. Instead, let me share one of the most embarrassing things that ever happened to me. Doesn't that sound like good times? Okay, here we go:

Once upon a time, R and I were dating. A few months into our relationship, R went to Italy for 5 weeks with his roommate, a trip planned before we had gotten together.

While R was in Italy, I moved into a small duplex. Before moving in, I was told all about the other occupant of the duplex, a woman my age who owned a dog. However, as I was busy pining for R's return, I never got around to walking the whole 8 feet over to her front door to meet her. Also, my motto at the time, cultivated from other past experiences, was to do my best to avoid neighbors. At any rate, I hadn't heard her yelling or playing loud music, and the dog wasn't barking non-stop, so I hadn't had a pressing reason to go over.

The weeks slowly crawled by and then the day finally arrived. I drove to the airport to pick up R and his roommate. We stopped by R's house, threw his roommate out of the car, and sped to my new place. Once there we proceeded to make up for lost time. Repeatedly. For the next several days, stopping only to eat and shower...and the shower might not have been the clean kind either.

Several days later, after a vigorous session of reuniting, we lay cuddled together in my bed. And then there was a sneeze. Not a particularly loud sneeze. In fact, a rather lady-like sneeze. The problem was that it had not come from me or R.

We turned to stare at one another in horror. Had we just heard my neighbor sneeze?!? Was it an aberration? It turned out that it was not. The next morning, we sat in my living room listening to EVERY word the neighbor said as she talked on the phone.

Later that same day, I was walking out to my car and the young woman who lived next door came up to introduce herself. It seems that she was also on vacation while R had been out of the country and she had returned the same day he had! Which is why I hadn't heard her before his return, and we had been to, umm, busy once he was back to realize that the walls dividing the duplex were paper thin.

I was so embarrassed by this first impression, and what she most certainly heard, that I never spoke to her again. The end.