like tomato soup,

the obp membership drive gives me enormous comfort.

listening to this american life is one of my favorite things to do on sunday morning. opb is my only source of news, which i admittedly do not get much of. opb is what i leave on for my two cats every day when i leave the house for work.

but my #1 favorite thing to listen to on npr is the membership drive. i do not know why, but somehow listening to the opb people ask for money and say cheesy things about how public broadcasting is so meaningful to our community and blah de blah, it soothes me. i can listen to it for hours.

i've never donated to opb, or "become a member" as they call it. but i have come close many many times. the fact that i can hardly pay my rent without a little bit of assistance from mom and pop stops me. my need for booze, cigarettes, and yarn stops me. my selfishness and my reluctance to talk to strangers on the phone plays a part. but i have a feeling that this time, this opb membership drive, is gonna be the one in which i finally contribute.

but i am not as excited about donating money as i am about listening to them beg for it.

and i suspect that that makes me a sick bastard.

the least pathetic people ever

ok, so we've established that i am pretty pathetic. but i've just discovered a list of people who are possibly the least pathetic people ever. the john and catherine t. macarthur foundation (they give lots of money to npr, so i love them) has a fellowship program where they give $500,000 to unsuspecting creative geniuses.

you can't apply to be a fellow. you have to be nominated by an Anonymous Nominator. and you don't find out until one day, out of the blue, you get a call from the president of the foundation saying that they're giving you $500,000. and you can do whatever you want with it. seriously. no strings attached. and the people who are chosen are, of course, so amazing that they write plays and invent robotic fish and change the world. whatever big dreams of installation art i may have first thing in the morning, by the end of the day, i can surely see myself order $500,000 worth of yarn at the best online yarn store ever and then smooshing it into baskets and drawers and jars and only someday knitting with it.

the rockstar fellows have included: the late (and maybe the latent lesbian) susan sontag, robert penn warren, and coworker-ben's favorite film-maker, errol morris. also twyla tharp, who's name sounds familiar but i do not know who she is.

someday, i will be more like one of 2004's macarthur scholars, amy smith, who is "an inventor cobbling sophisticated devices from accessible materials to save lives and reduce labor in remote areas of the world with little access to technology and even fewer resources to obtain it." oh amy smith. ordinary name, phenominal life.

normal person v. most pathetic person ever

how many months does it take a normal person to get over a break up?

i have been broken up with my ex-girlfriend (we'll call her exy) for 4 months now. 4 months almost exactly. and i was the one who broke up with her. 4 months ago. so i'm expecting that normal people, 4 months after voluntarily ending a relationship, can do things like sleep through the night and sit through an entire day at work without crying.

not i. my melodramatic breakup woes seem to only be getting worse. and now, 4 months later, all of a sudden, i can't sleep. insomnia is a pretty normal response to stress for normal people, i hear, but i can sleep like it's my super power. like, that period of time when you're in bed but before you've drifted off, when most people are thinking or daydreaming or tossing and turning, i'm already asleep. i don't have that period of time. i am out like a light, like a log, every night. and now, 4 months after breaking up with exy, aka. ruining my life, i can't get to sleep.

not only can't i sleep, but i also dream of exy and all of the other women she is with. now dreaming about an ex is normal, i know, and the other women thing is generic worst-case-scenario-torture-yourself-fantasy type shit. but not in this case. exy started date another woman (we'll call her cunty, okay?) over a month ago. according to mutual friends, who cringe at the sight of me for fear of the inevitable "so is exy happy with cunty? who is this cunty bitch? are they in love? could you please stab me with this sharp object?" exy questions, exy and cunty are quite the blissful couple.

so if the trend follows, in another few months i will stop eating and maybe stop bathing.

joolie

This is me, not getting laid.

anonymous schmonimous.

i started a blog a few months ago to chronicle my pathetic life, but i was all caught up in not wanting anybody to know who i am (not that anybody ever read it) that i stopped writing. but fuck that shit. my name is julie. and i like to spell it with two o's. joolie. just to please the teenage girl within. it's funner with two o's.

to introduce you all to me, i am writing in a blog because i am too cheap and masochistic at this point in my life to get therapy. and therapy is something that everyone who listens to my problems agrees that i need. but bear with me. i am not clinically insane, nor am i even moderately depressed. i'm just a regular twenty four year old girl with a broken heart, two cats (I KNOW), and a cubicle job. my work friends (who i will refer to by name, because if i don't get to be anonymous, then they don't get to be anonymous either), susie and ben, suggested that i create a blog to countdown the time until i ever get laid again- which we all anticipate will be far off. i was not immediately inspired by the idea, but it has come up again as not only intriguing, but urgent, upon receipt of the following email from my ex-girlfriend:

hey there,
i just wanted to write and see you you are
holding up.
have you contacted any therapists??
i might ride your ass on that one for a while.
anyway, i hope you are doing well
and if there's anything that I can do,
please let me know.

if that is not proof that i am the #1 Most Pathetic Person in the World, then what is?

with much melodrama to come,
joolie