When I was 14, my best friend Alex and I went with her family on vacation in Mexico. We were there in late December, over Christmas. Early on in the trip, we met this Mexican guy on the beach who told us we should call him if we wanted to go out with him and his friends. So on Christmas Eve, we called him, and we met him and his friends at this nearby hotel. It was me, my best friend, and like 15 teenage Mexican guys we’d never met before. We had such amazing judgment as teenagers.

We’re getting ready to head out on the town, and the guys ask the valet to bring their cars around. A few minutes later, three cars pull up in front of the hotel. They’re these top-of-the-line luxury SUVs. Alex and I are like, “Dude, what the fuck?” The guys speak very little English. We speak some Spanish. We manage to communicate to them, somehow, the concept of “What the fuck?” in Spanish, and it comes out, slowly and with quite a bit of circumlocution, that these are the children of Mexican drug traffickers. Because we are fourteen, we think this is awesome and very funny, and we spend the next five hours partying with the drug trafficking spawn. They buy us dinner. They buy us drinks. They buy us T-shirts and souvenirs. Then they drop us off at our hotel right before our curfew, as we’d requested. And that’s it. That’s all that happened. They are complete and total gentlemen the whole night. Alex and I still look back on that night as proof that God loves us. Like, we definitely should have been sold into slavery, or at the very least raped, that night, but instead we were treated like princesses. We are two lucky people. It’s like this one time that I wanted to mix bleach and ammonia in a closed room, because I’d marked up a tile floor with my boots and I felt that would be the best way to get the mark out, and Alex said it probably wasn’t a good idea because the ammonia might damage the tile. We should have died that night, too.

Anyway.

Here’s the point: the next day was Christmas, and everything was closed. Me and Alex and her family got up and ate waffles for breakfast. Alex and I were hungover as hell from the night before.

That afternoon, we’re all playing Catch Phrase. My word is “waffle.”

I say, “I had one of these this morning!”

Alex’s father is like “A hangover!”

Sigh.

This one time, at Sundance, Laremy and I were supposed to interview some band on camera together. He told me about it that morning, and I was like, “Should I prepare questions?” and he was like, “No, no. Just follow my lead. It’ll be fine.” Ten minutes before the interview, Laremy’s like, “You know, I think it’ll be better if you just do this yourself.” And I’m like “???”

I was unprepared, and the band was nervous and sober and not at all chatty. It was a total disaster. The whole damage report is available, in all its grueling detail, here. The lead singer of the band later apologized to me on her blog.

well, before the show fran, rob and i got double interviewed by sasha and laremy from film.com. sasha and i seemed to be on the same wavelength when it came to the comfort levels we felt through out the whole process. laremy took over the second half and i basically kept my yapper shut except for when the microphone got put in front of my face and i mustered out, “ditto”. i wish i had gotten to talk to sasha after the interview to apologize about how bad i am at talking with the cameras on.

Yeah. It was bad.

After breakfast I am going to clean my house, do laundry, and go shopping. What I actually do is nap for two hours.

Then I get up and go to Target. (See: Target Disaster)

Return home, get the mail, walk the dog, watch Jon & Kate Plus 8 on my DVR for two hours. Am exhausted. Have not cleaned or done laundry. Mail has a lot of bills. And it’s not that I don’t have the money, it’s that paying bills is an overwhelming and confusing process for me. I don’t know why. I just get flustered. I have a terrible credit rating, and it’s not because I can’t afford to pay my bills, and it’s not even that I mind parting with the cash, it’s that I don’t pay my bills because paying bills is just a scary process for me for some reason. So many account numbers. So many checking accounts. So many passwords and so many websites. My brain short-circuits. I can’t navigate it. Instead I put “pay bills” on the to-do list for tomorrow.

Heading up to a BBQ on my building’s roof-top deck (yeah, the one I got invited to yesterday) and then out to a girlfriend’s house for Ladies Game Night. Look at me! I have friends!

• coffee maker
• Swiffer Wet Jet

Things I left Target having bought:

• coffee maker
• Swiffer Wet Jet
• Swiffer Wet Jet refill pads
• Swiffer vacuum
• Swiffer vacuum refill pads
• coffee
• half-and-half
• Sweet & Low
• Sharpies (3-pack)
• Crayola markers (10-pack)
• teeth whitener
• doggie treats
• doggie wee-wee pads
• plush blanket
• manila envelopes
• Scotch tape
• baking pan (for all the cookies I bake all the time … right …)

Total spent: $264.38

RIP, my money.

I have no problem incorporating the most personal aspects of my life into a celebrity gossip blog, but, somehow, in a blog devoted entirely to my life, I’m stumped. I have writer’s block. Weird.

I’m going to start this the simplest way possible. I am going to tell you guys what I did today.

I got up at 10 am. And the only reason I got up that early is that Laremy called to ask me what time we were meeting at the theater to see Garden Party at the Seattle Film Festival, and to confirm, for the third time, that he could bring his wife. Not because Laremy and I are having an illicit affair (he confirms that he could, he supposes, understand how other people could consider me attractive, but I am “not his type”), but because he’s not sure they’ll have a seat for her. It’s an indie flick, not the Sex and the City opening night. And I know both the director and the producer. It’ll be fine.

I get up and blog about celebrities for an hour, still half asleep. This will not be my best work. There are rumors that Angelina Jolie had her twins, and I’m hesitant to believe this. It turns out not to be true. I have a sixth sense for the goings-on of Angelina’s uterus. Like, Hayley Joel Osment sees dead people, and I see Angelina Jolie’s vaginal canal. We all have our gifts in this life.

Decide to go back to sleep for an hour or so. Wake up three hours later. I suck so hard. Feel gross about this.

I think I’ll go into the office for a little bit. On Friday afternoons, everyone sits in the boss’s office and bullshits for an hour or two about anything and everything. It’s fun. I don’t even bother bringing in my laptop, I just bring in my dog. He’s a conversation piece.

I have another reason to go into the office — I need to submit the insurance papers for Charlie, my dog who died a couple months ago, and I want to make copies of the documents before I send them off into the deep abyss of insurance-land. Submitting these insurance documents is a process I’ve been working on for about a month. Not that the entire thing would take more than half an hour, but it takes me like four days to work up the courage to do five minutes of it. It was gut-wrenching when the hospital where he died submitted the final report of his death. They’d reported every half an hour on his condition for the two days he was in the hospital before he went into cardiac arrest and died. It’s horrible to read. I stood there next to the office fax machine the minute it came in, reading every sentence of it, trying not to shake and cry. I was expecting a simple one-page fax stating his cause of death (parvo). Instead I get a five-page document detailing the demise of my one-time BFF. It caught me off-guard, and it sucked.

Anyway, I make the copies, then head down to the cafeteria to see if there are any pre-made sandwiches I can buy. I’m hungry. The only kind of sandwich available is ham. Gross. The other choices are pepperoni pizza and an Odwalla bar. I know I should get the Odwalla bar. I get the pizza. And since I’m getting the pizza, I may as well get a chocolate chip cookie, too. I consume them both in the space of five minutes. Ew. I will never find a hot husband if I continue to be gross like this.

Hang out with the staff in boss’s office for an hour. I tell them about my plans to adopt a baby from Russia. The only other girl there is very excited for me. The boys are awkward about it.

Head home to drop off my dog. There’s a rooftop deck on my building, covered in grass and woodchips, where people bring their dogs. I ride in the elevator up with a guy with a golden retriever. We walk onto the roof together, where four other people have their dogs. They chat amongst themselves, and nobody says anything to me. The guy with the golden is hosting a party up here tomorrow. Invites everyone but me. Decide I must suck so very obviously.

Guy with the golden leaves. Other people stare at me when I don’t go with him. “You’re not his girlfriend?” they ask. I am flattered that anyone could think I could be anyone’s girlfriend. “No,” I say. “I’ve never met him.” They laugh, and then they introduce themselves and chat with me. Maybe I don’t suck. Why am I so quick to jump to the conclusion that everyone hates me instantly?

I drop off Leo in the apartment, then take the elevator down to the garage. Guy with the golden is in the elevator again, this time sans dog. He smiles at me. As we walk out to the garage, he turns to me and says, “So, are you coming tomorrow?” I look at him blankly. “To my party? On the roof?” Ah! I smile and say I’ll try to make it. Am secretly thrilled that he wasn’t intentionally excluding me. Why do I just assume everyone hates me?

Drive to theater to meet Laremy and wife for the movie. Chat with the producer outside for a minute, then head in to watch the film. Actually, that’s not true. First, I stop at the concession stand to buy a medium popcorn, soda and Junior Mints. I mean, I already had the pizza, so the day is pretty much shot, diet-wise. May as well live it up. Back to diet tomorrow.

Movie is basically a character inventory of the city of Los Angeles. Makes me miss LA. Makes me not miss LA. I can’t decide, but anyone who says Los Angeles is a city without character hasn’t really lived there. Los Angeles is a living, breathing thing, and it smokes weed and it sunbathes and it sleeps with your boyfriend and it has to go now because it’s meeting a producer at the Ivy in fifteen minutes. The soundtrack to this film is amazing. Decide what I really need to do is be a singer-songwriter. I tend to decide this about once weekly.

I eat all the Junior Mints and most of the popcorn, all by myself.

Movie ends, and I head home, alone. I’m supposed to meet some girlfriends out bowling, but I’m exhausted and also I don’t want to go. I don’t feel like telling them I’m bailing, so I don’t. Will deal with the fall-out later.

But I’m kind of at a crossroads. I love writing about celebrities, but it’s not really what I want to do in the long run. And it would be awesome to, ya know, write a book, but I get bored of writing about one single thing after about 500 words. That is why blogging works so well for me.

Basically, I think writing is healthy for me. I think writing about my life is healthy for me. And I kept diaries obsessively as a child, but that’s lost its charm somehow. So I’m going to write about my life online. And you people will either read it or you won’t, and that’s okay either way.

Enjoy.