The Chronicles Of Jessica

I plump when you cook me.

I've decided that there are only about two weeks out of the year where it is pleasant and enjoyable to be outside. The fourteen days are not consecutive, mind you; they are scattered throughout the year and the odds of you having something fun planned outside on one of them are about the same as Brit's odds of staying on the wagon. The other 351 days of the year it's either raining, bitterly cold, or so hot that as Conan O'Brien once aptly said, "It's like walking through a cab driver's breath."

As you can see from this photo of my mirthful youth, I pretty much incinerate upon exposure to the sun. I'm pretty sure that during the era in which this photo was taken, the conventional wisdom on sun protection was to put baby oil on kids and turn 'em loose in the yard. The only thing that accomplished was to keep me moist while I cooked, not unlike a Butterball turkey or a Ballpark frank.

These days I make sure I have on SPF 30 before I step even one toe into the atmosphere. Of course there's usually at least one incident each summer where I forget this cardinal rule and I wind up looking like an amorous babboon's ass, and feeling like one, for it takes at least three weeks for the damn sunburn to fade and for that whole time, everywhere I go people are squawking the inevitable: "You got some sun!!!"

Yes, I got some sun. What an astute observation. Your mastery of the obvious is breathtaking. How'd you like some aloe vera with lidocaine in your eye, you boob?

We are entering the hot phase here in the District and the mister and I are not pleased. It's easily going to get close to one hundred degrees in the shade most days between here and September, and we live in a third floor walkup with very arthritic air conditioning. It cools the 3 square feet closest to the intake vent and that's about it. Which is worst when we're trying to sleep. Neither of us can stand being hot when we're trying to sleep. We just lie there in our own damp whining and cursing ourselves for choosing this apartment.

We really did choose the worst apartment in Washington, apparently. For the second time. But the apartment we had before with the break-ins and the sketchy neighborhood has now taken second place for worst apartment in Washington. At least we had a washer and dryer there, and it was near a Hooters. (What? We like the wings.) But this place is just a catastrophe. The windows are rattling out of the frames, not to mention disintegrating, the circuit breaker blows if I try to use a hairdryer, the sink backs up if you look at it crossly. Next time we go to choose a new place we're going to go with the one we're the least enthused about. It's the only way to counteract our luck and our (apparently) extremely stupid instincts.

Lately I seem to be encountering a lot of people with some kind of odor issue. Like I get on the treadmill; guy gets on next to me with heinous morning breath. And of course since he's exercising and breathing heavily, I'm getting some healthy whiffs. We go to a play, guy next to me with weird musty smell. Last week at the Toad the Wet Sprocket concert, we had finally staked out this awesome spot on the floor where Paul could actually see to his satisfaction, and this guy sidles up to me absolutely reeking of cologne. I kept having to stick my face into my own cleavage so I could breathe. Why do people do that to themselves? Do they expect that they can attract potential sex partners by using massive amounts of strong smelling fumes to disorient them, like chloroform or something? "If I distract them with these vapors they won't notice I have a receding hairline and a black tshirt emblazoned with a wolf howling at the full moon. Genius!"

We've been getting up early in the morning before work to exercise and surprisingly we have managed not to kill one another or any random pedestrians in the process. Neither I nor the Mister are what you could call early risers. We're more the roll-over-at-7-am-decide-to-sleep-for-ten-more-minutes-accidentally-sleep-for-another-two-and-a-half-hours-and-waste-your-whole-day types. But we are in our thirties, and when you are in your thirties you have to exercise a lot or you start to look like Carroll O'Connor. For me it happens very very quickly. After about 5 days with no exercise I have to keep the top button on my pants undone when I'm sitting which invariably makes for an embarrassing moment at work when I realize I forgot to do the button back up when I'm halfway to the copy room. Then I have to try to do my pants up all surreptish, or if there are people around I have to kind of hold my copies awkwardly in front of my abdomen like a twelve year old boy who has the misfortune of being called up to the blackboard while he's having one of those grownup man-time moments. It's frankly less trouble just to exercise.

We went to Chicago for our friend Anish's wedding a few weeks ago, and we seriously ate our way across town. We had to. This person wanted to meet for brunch, that person wanted to meet for dinner. You rarely are actually hungry for three restaurant sized meals per day but what does hunger have to do with it? We were on vacation and there was food everywhere we went. We ate stuff that we would never eat at home, like caramel corn. Who eats that? It wasn't like we were at a carnival, we just bought it on the street near Keland's apartment, where we were staying. Caramel corn! If they'd sold funnel cake we probably would have eaten that too. Kind of the Edmund Hillary approach to feeding ourselves. Needless to say I wore skirts almost the whole trip.

We're back now and more or less back into a routine. But all this upkeep really is exhausting. It just never ends. Try on clothes, buy clothes, wash clothes. Color hair, cut hair, shampoo hair, style hair. Cleanse, exfoliate, moisturize, put on makeup. Shave, buff, wax, trim, pluck. Strength training and cardio. Stretching. Flossing, brushing, gargling. Sometimes I really see the appeal of just completely letting myself go. It would be so easy; the inertia would just take over so fast. One week you're a well-groomed woman in decent shape with clean clothes and two separate eyebrows, the next you're a hirsute lump of widening unbathed flesh unable to leave your bed and washing yourself with a rag on a stick.

Well, off to lunch!

Paul sent me this site called GraphJam and I heart it....heartily. Here is a sample. Happy long weekend!

more graph humor and song chart memes

Paul is at his first class of the semester tonight, so I'm taking the opportunity to catch up on some things I've let slide lately. No, not the laundry and the cleaning - important things, like Tivo'ed episodes of Oprah and my blog! You're welcome.

Maybe some of you have been wondering how the lasik surgery turned out. Maybe some of you could care less. Well, the upshot is that they did not blind me accidentally and I have not been reduced to covering Stevie Wonder songs outside the entrance to the metro with a tin cup and a hat full of change. Phew. Actually out of all the medical procedures I've ever had done, I would have to say that this was the most painless, stress-free experience of any of them. It literally took five minutes. They stuck a thing on my eye, they told me to look at a red flashing light, I heard a click, they switched to the other eye, bada bing bada boom, I was done. By the time I woke up from my post-surgery nap I had 20/20 vision. It was amazing!

Of course the more I think about it, the more I chafe at the idea that some people make like $1000 a minute. Ever notice that? I mean doctors, of course, but there are lots of others. For instance I locked my keys in the car once and the guy who came to help me made $90 even though it only took him about 10 seconds to get the car unlocked. Where can I find a $9 per second job? I don't need benefits; I'll just work an extra hour and a half each week and pay for my own dental.

We're on a pretty tight budget for these last two semesters of grad school so I've been doing a lot more cooking to avoid spending money eating out. Not that grocery shopping is any cheaper, these days. At the store last night blueberries were $5.59 a pint. And they weren't magic blueberries. They were just regular. $5.59 a pint. At that price they'd better have a little song and dance number prepared for you when you open the lid. God. I actually think that's what I paid for New Kids On The Block tickets 15 years ago.

I'm also cooking more partly on account of being married; I've begun to feel it's expected of me. Paul comes home at the end of the day and he'll say something like, "What should we do about dinner?" He is an equal opportunity husband, of course, and he would take charge of dinner if I insisted that he do so. But this would result in a higher-than-average weekly consumption of things in nugget form, and things from boxes with titles ending in "ino's" and "oli's" and "ungry man". "What should we do about dinner" means, "I have nothing but the utmost respect for you and for the feminist movement. You are under no obligation to make sure our family is fed. But left to my own devices I will clog our arteries faster than you can say emergency angioplasty." So for the most part I try to take charge. But it's just so much effort for me sometimes. My friend Kate is one of those people who can just come in and look at the cupboard and throw something together, you know? She could make a gourmet meal out of some Stove Top and a jar of blackstrap molasses you bought by mistake because it was on the shelf next to the honey but then you lost the receipt so Safeway wouldn't take it back even though the customer service girl admitted that no one has ever in the history of Safeway bought blackstrap molasses on purpose. But Kate's always been like that. She had a contraband hot plate in our dorm in high school and she used to whip up cappellini pomodoro with shaved parmesan and pignolis during finals week.

People blessed with the innate cooking talent always think it's so easy. "Cooking is fun!! Whee, fennel! Just try things! Let your imagination run wild!" My imagination doesn't do that when it comes to cooking. When my imagination runs wild it conjures up a studly personal chef with the pesky problem of having trouble finding shirts with sleeves wide enough to accommodate his bulging biceps and so is forced to saute in just an apron. (Okay, he can have pants on.) He would also do the dishes but in my imagination I have a dishwasher. And one of those creme brulee torches! I mean, I can take or leave creme brulee but how much fun does that look like?!

I just don't get why cooking have to involve all those fresh herbs. Fresh herbs are so obnoxious. They seem to only stay fresh for about 5 minutes after I get them home from the grocery store. Am I expected to have one of those setups with the thing that mists them every so often, is that the only way they can survive? Then you end up using about a tenth of them in whatever recipe you bought them for, so all the rest of them go to waste. It's like killing houseplants, (which I do with alarming regularity), except worse because then the next time something calls for "italian flat leaf parsley" you're thinking, "I had some! It was right here next to this lumpy mess of green crud wrapped in the paper towel! Can I use dried? I can't use dried, huh? Won't be as flavorful? How about I just rip a few leaves of the ficus tree committing suicide in the den and we'll call her even?"

Stupid Rachel Ray.

They're lucky I didn't use duct tape and crazy glue.

Dear Car Owner and (Presumably) Neighbor:

We don’t know one another but I have an enormous favor to ask of you. Would you please, please, PLEASE for the love of God do something about your car alarm. It goes off ALL. THE. TIME. It goes off for no reason whatsosever. It goes off and it goes off and it is so loud, and so annoying, that it makes me want to commit an indecent act. Do you remember a few weeks ago when you came out to your car one morning and it had shaving cream and coffee that had been thrown all over it sometime during the night? That was the lady who lives across the street. Your car alarm went off all night long, and she kept coming out and screaming, and finally sometime around 3 am, she snapped. Yes, it was ugly, but I understood the sentiment. I had already been woken up about 6 times myself by then.

I can’t really tell from up here in my apartment what kind of car you have, but it’s obviously not any kind of expensive luxury vehicle. What makes you so paranoid that someone’s going to try to steal it? There are all kinds of really nice cars parked around; I’ve seen Lexus’s, Mercedes, BMW’s. I don’t mean to be insulting but I really don’t think you have anything to be worried about. I actually think you risk more damage being done to your car by someone being driven around the bend by your alarm than the risk of theft. Also it’s obvious that you can’t hear the alarm from wherever you are anyway – I’ve never seen you rushing out to confront the would-be thief when it goes off.

My advice to you is to upgrade to a comprehensive insurance policy, get that alarm taken out of your car and just hope for the best. The fact that your tires haven’t been slashed is a testament to the goodness of human nature! Trust in that, and get rid of your car alarm. I’m begging you. The neighborhood is begging you. My husband, who averages 5 hours of sleep a night, is begging you.

Sincerely,

Unofficial Representative of Capitol Hill Citizens Against Noise Pollution

Tomorrow I'm going in for my lasik surgery. Paul is driving me there and back, but he does not wish to take advantage of the special viewing room they have for friends and family. Surgeries and lasers - this is not his kind of thing. He doesn't even like the Discovery channel. So if anyone wants to watch the proceedings, speak up now! There's a seat at the table!

This is from my friend Jeff at work. Hopefully my surgery will be unremarkable and in no way hilarious.

I had to wait in line at the post office for 45 minutes today, just to mail our tax returns. Apparently everyone else in America also waits until the absolute last minute to give Uncle Sam his booty. There was one guy handling a line of about twenty people. In Washington, DC. On April 15th. Gah.

Some jobs - it's almost unbelievable there's anyone willing to do them. There's a new baseball stadium that just went up around the corner from us, so the city is being super ultra mega jerks about making sure that no one is parked in the neighborhood that isn't supposed to be. On the one hand I guess I'm supposed to be grateful that they're getting rid of the interlopers so that I (whose car is in full compliance) will still have a place to park. On the other hand, I can't help but feel that people whose job it is to wander around the city and slap big orange stickers on people's cars and have them towed and charge them lots of money and ruin their nice outing to a baseball game - I can't help but feel that those people sort of suck and should get a different job.

In college the university would offer these part-time jobs to students writing parking tickets on campus. You never really knew who had these jobs because this was considered the lowest of the low, writing needlessly expensive tickets to other poor college students. We called them The Turncoats. I only found out years after the fact that my friend Dave Delauter had one of these jobs for a while freshman year; such was his deep personal shame that he was afraid to reveal himself for fear of hideous social retribution. It's probably not even a good idea to put that out on the internet, it could still have repercussions to this day. (Dave - if by some twist of Google fate your wife reads this and leaves you: My bad.)

The more I think about it, the more I realize that there are entire professions that I can't imagine people being willing to enter into. Proctologist. (That's too easy, I know.) Bikini waxer - worse yet, back waxer. (Shudder.) Reality television show producer. Prison conjugal visit supervisor. Republican political strategist. IRS agent. I wonder how these people get through the day. How hard up must they be for money that they are willing to suffer the slings and arrows of these odious careers?

Personally, I like to feel that I'm making a contribution to society, that what I do lifts people up, that....

Shit. I forgot for a second that I'm an actor. We tend to be employed so infrequently, that's a real occupational hazard.

Yet I suppose the inherent lesson is that no matter how demoralizing the artists' struggle, we can rest comfortably in the knowledge that at the end of the day, there's only the very slightest chance that we'd be called upon to put a finger or fist into another person's nether regions, or betray the planet or our fellow man. Or find ourselves being chased furiously down the street by an angry tourist screaming, "That's my car!!! I was just about to move it, you bastards!!!!"

And that's no small comfort, my friends.

I haven't had a diet coke in 2 days, 6 hours and 3 minutes. I'm getting that aspartame monkey off my back, people! So far it's been pretty easy but this could just be the honeymoon phase.

I'm sure this seems like a very drastic step for me to be taking, but I've been doing some research about the chemicals contained in Diet Coke and it's not encouraging. Check this out:

Aspartame/Nutrasweet (aspartylphenylalanine-methyl-ester) breaks down to its poison constituents at 86 degrees (Aspartic Acid 40%, Phenylalanine 50%, and Methanol 10%). Aspartame/Nutrasweet's breakdown products attack the bodies tissues and create Formaldehyde which builds up in the tissues forever.

Your stomach is 98.6 degrees! WTF? Formaldehyde? That. Cannot. Be good. There's just no way it's advantageous to be ingesting this stuff. Except that I love it. I love the crack of the can when you open it, I love its fizzy brown just-one-calorie deliciousness. But I'm going to be strong. I want to have a baby someday and when I do I'd prefer that it incubate in a non-formaldehy-drated uterus. I'm trying to stick to this, so I'm accepting suggestions of other stuff to drink. Here are a few choices I've ruled out thus far:

Yoo Hoo. The taste is okay, I guess, but the name is really too stupid to make any kind of serious commitment to this beverage.

Southern Comfort.This had its chance in college and let me down miserably. VERY miserably.

Grapefruit Juice. Makes my face turn inside out.

Tea. Meh. What am I, English? I mean I know I was BORN in England but I just can't get into tea. What are you supposed to do with the bag afterward? That's what I've always wondered. Saucers have kind of gone by the wayside in these troubled modern times. Are you supposed to fold it up in a napkin, put it on the table, stick it in your purse - what!? And I never know when to have it, anyway. I know there's a proscribed English 'tea-time' but I could never figure out how to account for the time difference.

Iced Tea. Doesn't taste like anything. Makes me have to pee.

Water. Get serious.

In a recent budget meeting the Fidalgos decided to think seriously about giving up cable television, which would mean I would officially have no vices left. Except red meat. And cheese. And wine and beer.

Sigh. It's a slippery place, the wagon. Why else would it be so easy to fall off?

(Oh - and magazines. But they don't hurt anything! Except the environment. Forget this entire post.)

I'll tell you what's a-happening.

The thing is, not much. Although a whole lot of stuff seems to be happening to other people. Check this out:

Friends Having Babies:

Anne and Johnny
Margie and Jim
Abby and Ed

Friends Getting Married:
Anish and Michelle
Aaron and Emily
Justin and Allyson
Jake and Virginia

Friends Moving to Phoenix
David Loar and Kristen Barner

Friends Who Had A Tree Fall On Their Car During Recent Tornado:
Julie Smith

Friends Getting Out of Prison
Eric Schoen (Take it one day at a time, buddy. One day at a time.)

In the book "Heartburn" by Nora Ephron, she writes about her marriage to the philanderous Woodward (or Bernstein, I get them mixed up) and she mentions how she could never figure out how to work it so that when you're married things keep happening to you. I kind of know what she means. When I was single a LOT of stuff used to happen on me - of course, most of it wasn't very good, and it usually involved getting stuck with the check; still, I had anecdote fodder for days! Now my anecdotes involve stuff like not having a sink in our bathroom for a month because of a leaky pipe and having to brush my teeth in the tub. Fascinating! Tell us more! Or showing up to the gym for a six a.m. workout and finding that whoever was supposed to open the gym must have overslept.

(That was a nasty hang, let me tell you. There's no angrier group of people than folks who've hauled their cookies out of bed in the dark to try and accomplish something as horrible as exerciseonly to find that they can't get into the place where the exercise occurs. Vicious, vicious crowd. I took the opportunity to go back home to make Paul a 'Jess McMuffin' and watch a Seinfeld rerun before work, which, while not cardiovascular, had its own rewards.)

I've had a few auditions and a couple of callbacks, lest you think I am just withering on the vine. Also I helped edit Paul's thesis proposal, "George W. Bush - Secret Genius or Total Incompetent Failure and Poopyhead?" I'm caught up on every episode of Biggest Loser (go, Kelly, go!) Annnnnd - I finally found the perfect pair of underwear! It doesn't ride up, it doesn't wedgie, it covers everything it's supposed to! I bought eight pairs in different colors. I think it's going to improve my outlook considerably. Send congratulatory emails care of this website.

Ciao for now...

Paul has been kicking my sorry butt as far as blogging is concerned. He left Hillary and rediscovered the internet. And his guitar. He has a bunch of new songs he's put up and his creative juices are flowing. Not to be outdone, I have decided to make more of a concerted effort to write stuff, even if no stuff is really happening worth writing about. Hey, it's never stopped me before! (See previous blog entries.)

Truly, this always seems to be the time of year where I just sit and wonder what the hell to do with myself. I've had a few auditions and none of them has turned into anything yet. I have a (wee) standup show on the 20th that I just found out about, but that's hardly what you could call stunning career momentum. I'm 75% of the way through "Jane Eyre", so that's good. I always meant to read it and never have, but now that I'm almost through with it my momentum has slowed. I think it's pretty clear that Jane is not going to have a happy ending here. Mr. Rochester is definitely a fixer-upper, as love interests go. Sure, he's tall dark and handsome and owns his own manor and all, but that's about the extent of his viable boyfriend characteristics.

Of course, there's always the election and the current events. Around my house that's what passes for entertainment. Info-tainment. I'm so inundated with the talking heads that I actually had a dream the other night that we took George Stephanopoulous to a birthday party with us. Also I've noticed a mole on Wolf Blitzer that could be pre-cancerous, so I emailed him to give him a heads up on that. Can't be too careful when it comes to melanoma.

Anyway, you'd think Paul would be reveling in all this indecision and horse race stuff, but he seems to have reached the place that I sometimes reach when I make homemade macaroni and cheese: He doesn't really want any more but he can't stop himself. Last night of course, we watched the vultures devouring Eliot Spitzer and while we felt relatively sorry for him, we couldn't help also noting that he's also pretty....what was the political term Paul used? Oh yes - Stupid. Powerful women in politics don't seem to get caught up in these sorts of scandals. Either they aren't as obsessed with sex or they know enough not to write personal checks to male prostitutes. I wonder what you write in the memo of a check to a prostitute? "Re: Nooky."

Of course Ann Coulter and stupid hags like that are taking this occasion to skewer the wife in this situation and of course, to bring it back to Hillary whenever they can. Then I heard a woman on Bill Maher talking about how she could never vote for Hillary because she was stupid enough to stay will Bill after he got caught cheating. How are the women supposed to win in these situations? If she leaves she's un-Christian, weak, and reactionary. If she stays, she's an idiot and an insult to women everywhere. Eliot Spitzer's wife has the exact same dilemma. What business is it of ours if these women stay or go? Maybe they want to protect their children, or maybe they're too shocked to do anything for a while except mainline Haagen Dazs and watch Top Chef and wonder what went wrong with their marriage. That's what I would do. Anyway - feminism is supposed to be about supporting women's choices, so women need to stop condemning one another for the choices they make, especially when we don't have all the facts.

Support, people! That's where it's at. For example, I'm thinking of getting Lasik surgery and I have a consultation next week to see how much it's going to cost. Charles says if i do and then I go up in an airplane, my eyes will explode. Not supportive.