Owie.

Ouch.

It is 1:30 in the aftrnoon on a gorgeous Sunday in the greater Seattle area. I should be outside soaking up the sun, or barbequeing, or jogging, or driving with my windows down and occasionally yelling "HEY, THAT'S MY BIKE!!!" out the window at small groups of alarmed adolescents cruising their huffies down the sidewalk.

But instead I'm sitting here in a pair of well-loved boxers and a hoodie, with whacked-out hair, eating pizza (vegetarian, extra sauce and pineapple, easy on the cheese), making a feeble attempt to hydrate (Diet Pepsi count?) while flipping through the photo evidence of the debauchery that was last night.

In short, I am hung over. Thanks to one of the best bachelorette parties possibly of all time.

There was nothing particularly spectacular from the outside about this party, really. We had the huge limo, of course, and the gazillion bottles of champagne. And the dresses. And the bride had the obnoxious flashing gag veil with little light-up penises all over it.

But what we had that most bachelorette parties don't was a desire to CRUSH every bar we entered. We wanted to drink everything, talk to everyone, and generally monopolize every venue exclusively for our benefit, other patrons be damned.

Highlights include:

1. The maid of honor taking swigs off a Souza tequila bottle (yes, that is essentially the worst tequila made -- let's be clear on the fact that this maid of honor is not messing around)on the way to the restaraunt and booty dancing her way up and down the limo -- on the freeway.

2. Ordering a round of Scooby Snack shots for the girls, taking them, then deciding they were too "fattening" and asking the bartender to try them with red bull instead of half and half. The result? Pure heaven, an addition to the shot menu, and my first drink named after me: the Lizzie Snack. (Let me just say that these things were a HUGE hit, and are fairly advanced for a "girly" shot. The combination of booze, sugar and caffeine in these puppies result in a very happy buzz -- and could be fatal if overdone.)

3. Taking the limo back from the piano bar to "downtown" Snohomish (think: cow town). No, that's the highlight. A limo in Snohomish. I think it's actually the first time that's ever happened.

4. Hitting three more bars, two of which had live bands and both of which I managed to convince to let the bride to be up on stage to sing a song. I accomplished this using my finely-tuned powers of persuasion (eyelash batting, a well-delivered joke, a little sweet talk and a deftly slipped $20). The songs? Joan Jett's "I Love Rock and Roll" and "Sweet Caroline". The entire patronage of both places ended up joining in by the end of the songs -- I'm surprised we didn't have a roof or two collapse. I should have been a hype-man when I grew up. I'm that good.

5. Being danced with and then gently hit on by a very, very tall man who was in town as best man in a wedding. I, of course, politely declined his advances and made my way back to the table. A few minutes later, in front of the whole table of my girls, one of his buddies came up to me and said something like: "Hey baby, did you know he plays for the L.A. Clippers? He makes a ton of money and he thinks you're beautiful. I mean, he makes a TON of money."

Taken aback, I dismissed him. He continued to push, on and on about this "money", which I gathered was supposed to impress me. I continued to wave him off. Finally, as he was not getting it, I unleashed a torrent of shit on the pathetic little man. Something to the effect of "Listen, you arrogant little prick, I don't know what you're trying to pull here, but I make my own money. I strongly recommend that you go back to wherever hole you came from and work on your little sidekick schtick. If that's the best you can do for your buddy over there, I think he needs to find a new wingman. Oh, and by the way, you're short and you smell like cheese."


It was a memorable night to say the least. Now it's back to the horizontal position for me. Happy weekend!

I don't believe I've met you...

"Jeeeez! Look at all this little personalized Mariners' paraphernalia," I marveled.

Jim and I were at a very swanky party thrown by the president of the Mariners. You know, the terrible baseball team based in Seattle? It was held at SafeCo field (where aforementioned baseball team loses most of its games) for two friends who are getting married this summer. The groom grew up with the President of the Mariners' kid, and therefore el Presidente’s family decided to host an over the top party at the President's suite at the ballpark.

So here we are at this swanky party with unlimited food and booze, where we knew nobody except the bride and groom... and there is customized paraphernalia everywhere, which is clearly impressing me.

Think: Little baseball player cookies with little frosting jerseys with the bride and groom’s name on them, real Mariner’s jerseys with the bride and groom’s name on them, hats, water bottles… just swag up the kazoo.

And I, trying to make friends as I make my way across the suite to the restroom, am exclaiming to strangers in the room, enthusiastically, about how cool all this stuff was.

“Oh look at those cookies…” I cooed. “They’re so cute!” This elicited murmers of agreement from a stranger or two, who I then introduced myself to and made nice with before moving on to the next weird personalized memento.

So picture me doing this while making my way across the room, proudly leaving a bunch of not-strangers-anymore in my enthusiastic wake. I was quite pleased with my impact, and as I sauntered nearly out of the room, I passed one last item: A very oversized leather mitt with a wedding band on its ring finger, in the center of which was a softball-sized baseball with the bride and groom’s name embroidered on it.

“Oh my gosh, would you look at that??” I shrieked in my girlish delight. “It has their names stitched right into the ball!”

To punctuate this exclamation as new strangers turned towards me to respond (and because I have pretty terrible vision and couldn’t see the items well enough), I reached for the ball. I planned to pick it up, turn it over, and look at it up close and personal, as I had with the other items, while making friends.

Except the ball wouldn’t lift.

It was either the world’s heaviest softball-sized baseball, or it was stuck to the mitt.

I tugged at it again with my hand. Nothing. Just as I was about to engage my other hand for a good old fashioned two-handed pull, it hit me.

It. Was. A. Cake. (And for the record, it looked a helluva lot more realistic than this picture of a similar cake. It looked honest to God real.)

A fondant-covered, larger-than-life, baseball mit with baseball in it CAKE.

And I had my grubby little strange hand all over the crowning jewel, huffing and puffing and jerking at it like an I was an over-served middle-aged man and it was a stripper with negligible moral code.

“Oh my gosh, it’s a cake! It’s a cake! I didn’t know it was a cake!”

Yep, that's what I said. I know, I know. Brilliant.

My voice was high pitched. My face was bright red. I clutched my “bad” hand with my “good” hand and glared at it like it was some sort of naughty pet that had temporarily escaped my control. And then I looked around.

Some people off to my left were giggling and nodding knowingly. They had caught me. And they were not impressed. But no matter – I was not going to my left, I was going to my right. To the bathroom. Hell, to FREEDOM. To a place to hide forever and never come out. Because I had touched, aggressively, the cake.

I spun around to my right, just feet from the door, just seconds from the bathroom and sweet escape, and bumped directly into – with my “bad” hand – wait for it...

The president of the Mariners' wife. You know, the HOSTESS of the EFFING SWANKY PARTY at which I knew nobody (now including Jim, who saw the debacle and wisely denied having any idea who I was).

Oh.

FUCK.

Intelligently, I said (still holding up my hand:

“I didn’t know it was a cake! It’s… uh… amazing!!!”

She looked at me – this woman who had certainly come up with the idea for the cake, absolutely ordered it and without a doubt paid ridiculous sums of money for it – with a look of such disdain I can’t even describe it. It was like Cruella DeVille had suddenly appeared before me, and I’d accidentally vomited on her coat holding a sign that said "SAVE THE PUPPIES".

And then she spoke in a slow, disapproving drawl the words that will forever be burned into my mortified memory of this moment while looking me up and down and shaking her head:

“I don’t believe I’ve met you.”

...

I no longer watch the food network's cake show -- the one where cakes are made to look like kittens or buildings or small children or golf equipment.

Why? Because fuck them, that's why. Making food look like something else is just MEAN.

I do. Times seven. Minus hundreds of dollars.

This summer I have seven weddings to attend. That’s right… SEVEN weddings in less than 4 months. This does not count bachelorette parties, bridal showers and other wedding-themed events. This means three things:

1. The countdown to me feeling like an old maid has begun.

To be clear, I do not currently feel like an old maid. I am quite happy not to be married at this particular moment, and am reveling instead in the joys of living in sin.

But ask me about this topic sometime in the not-so-distant future, and I sadly suspect I will have joined ranks with the droves of late-twenties women who are suddenly struck by an insatiable desire to throw a big party and wear a white dress and whatnot. I’d like to say this will never happen because I’m not influenced by things like peer pressure and social expectation, but the fact is I’m not, contrary to popular belief, completely impervious to these pressures. Evidence lies in the fact that I have just planted my first garden (and things are growing!!!), I’m meal-planning and doing my boyfriend’s laundry regularly, and I spend about 4 hours online weekly shopping for either puppies or houses – or both.

Which is so funny, considering that the Liz of a few years ago would have been completely aghast at these newfound preoccupations, preferring instead to picture herself as an unmarried bespectacled 40-something in a flat somewhere in New York with her dogs and cats and fantastic wardrobe and nightlife and single (preferably gay) male friends and an awesomely stimulating and high-powered job.

It could be that the right lovely tall smart sweet cooking cleaning fishing complementing complementary capable man has appeared in my life. (Or maybe it’s just cuz all my friends are doing it.) :)

2. I will be spending a grand total of, well, my entire savings account attending and participating in these wedding festivities.

I actually calculated, and assuming I spend X on each gift and X on each bridal shower and X on each bachelorette party (which, by the way, are RIDICULOUSLY EXPENSIVE these days, even without strippers!) I’ll be looking at a four-month expense of something like what it costs to attend a large state university for a semester when you’re not good at sports OR academics and are not either a veteran or a native American. Which is to say a lot.

3. I will have even more opportunities than usual to embarrass myself.

Yes, there is a story here. And yes, I will tell it. In my next post.

Until then, be good. I’m off to Vegas this Thursday through Sunday, where the weather will be 100 degrees and I will be happy as a well-fed, well-watered, baked clam.

Baked as in tan, not high. Just to be clear.

Talk soon!

Happy Innuendo Day!

Well, folks, it's my favorite time of year again, so to speak. That's right, the day when it's encouraged to say "is that a gun in your pocket, or...", as it were. The day when "that's what she said" reigns, and "not that there's anything wrong with that..." is king -- or at least that's implied.

It's a hard thing to stay on top of, and requires cunning linguistics and repetitious practice before you can fully grasp the thrust of it. (Wink wink, nudge nudge.)

I think you know what I'm talking about...


Happy Innuendo Day, all.

Man-Shave, anyone?

"You know what I think we should get your brother for graduation?"

My mom was driving, I was sitting in the passenger seat, fighting sleep, which was threatening to take me down like a rogue rebel force as we drove the 5 hours from our hometown to Washington State University, where my brother would be graduating the next day.

I shook off the dazed look and attempted to act like I'd processed the question.

"Um....what?"

"An old fashioned lather and shave," she said, all excited-like. "Except I didn't think about that until right this minute and graduation is tomorrow and so there's no way we can do it now."

My adorable mother is trapped in the stone age. She thought that because she'd not arrived more than a day in advance that there was no way she could now, in the car, figure out how/where she could send my brother in his college town for a fresh shave the morning of graduation. It never occurred to her that phones now have web access or that 411 might be a good place to start... instead, she was thinking the most efficient way to do this would have been to arrive in town, ask the locals, and go door to door until she found someone who a) provided the service and b) had a slot open the saturday of graduation for my brother.

She just -- JUST -- learned how to text message, in fact, and though she knows how to do it, she never does for two reasons:

1) she says it's ungodly expensive, and cents (CENTS!) per text, and
2) she can't figure out how to use the "shift" function on her phone, so all her messages are a strange combination of letters and numbers only sometime resembling actual English

Anyway, the problem: I was sleepy and needed a job in the car and my mother needed to find a barber shop.

Well, Liz to the rescue.

"No sweat," I said, pulling my shiny blackberry out of my pocket with a proud flourish. "I can take care of that for you in no time, flat!"

"Suuurrrree," she said, eyeing the phone warily. "We'll see."

I shrugged and started typing. Google wasn't turning up great results, but at least I got a list of phone numbers I could call in the Pullman, WA. area. Proud of my little progress and eager to show my mother that technology was, in fact, the obvious answer to this problem, I held up the phone, showing her the screen (nevermind that we were hurtling down the freeway at 80 miles an hour).

"There! See? A whole bunch of places we can call!"

I clicked the first link, calling a barbershop with a very masculine name. Surely, I thought, these folks would be the place a guy would go to get a...

a...

shit, what are they called?

As the phone was ringing, my mind was racing.

A straight shave?
A lather shave?
An old-fashioned shave?

My mind was blank. Though I could picture the service in my mind: man sitting in barber's chair, a hot towel on his face, then lather on his beard, then a straight-razor shave, I couldn't figure out what in the world that experience was technically called.

And then a man answered.

"Phil's Barber shop, this is Phil, how can I help you?"
"Oh! Hi!" I was far too enthusiastic in an attempt to buy me some time and hide how flustered I was.
"Hi," Phil said patiently. "What can I do for you?"
"Umm," I stammered, "I...I..." spit it out already! what were they called again? "I was wondering if you did those... uh... fluffy--er, I mean, soapy... uh... MANSHAVES!?"

There was a pause, then the sound like ol' Phil pulled the phone away from his ear and covered up the reciever, and then a snort.

"ManShaves?" Phil was sweetly trying to contain a laugh.

"Yeah... uh, you know..." It was over. I realized I'd just said "man shave" and completely lost it, bursting out in hysterical laughter.

"Fluffy?!!" he gasped.
"MANSHAVES??" I screeched.

Phil did the same. For two minutes at least -- a long and intimate time to be laughing on the phone with a dude you don't at all know -- Phil and I snorted, howled and tried to contain the waves of hysterical laughter that kept rolling back and forth between us.

When I finally composed myself and he courteously did the same, I of course apologized.

"Sorry, I didn't know what they were called," I said. "I cannot believe I just said 'man-shave'. How embarassing."

"No, it's cool," said Phil. "It's just that we're an equal-opportunity shaver. We prefer to call them 'PersonShaves'."

"Oh, of course," I said. "My mistake!"

Cue laughter again.

God bless goofy strangers.

And what the eff is wrong with me?

Y? Because we like you!

Well, step 1 seems to have worked. After a car detailing and some reorganizing, I seem to be free of Mickey, the gum-chewing mouse. This is a relief, as is the fact that it does not appear I will need to go buying mouse traps and digging little mousey graves anytime soon. Hurrah!

The thing is that I think that in dealing with this situation, I may have developed yet another neurosis: I think I'm now either obsessed with or terrified of rodents.

The other day while at the mall, I stood on a skybridge talking on the phone to my mother when I saw a mouse scurry across the street below, from the parking garage (where I had just come from) to the mall building (where I was going).

Not only did I completely blank out on what we were talking about, I just sort of froze there momentarily, considering whether I really needed to go into the mall, and whether it was completely insane to think maybe that mouse came from my car, and whether there was any potential that mouse was going to make it into the mall (and therefore whether, again, I really needed to go in).

I think I recovered well, but to be honest, I'm not sure. I think my mom just kept talking the whole time I was panicking.

Then, last night, I dreamt that my house was infested with rats. But not just any rats, the kind that are really smart and evade you at every turn while still periodically popping their ugly little faces out of strange places in your home and scaring the bejeezus out of you. Yeah, not a sweet dream at all.

Like I need something else to be fixated on! On the upside, this could very well result in some entertaining stories for you sadistic minds out there who are entertained by my every misadventure. So stay tuned for that.

This is my 250th post, and there is a mouse living in my car.

Let me repeat: THERE IS A MOUSE. LIVING. IN MY CAR. Is that both horrifying and disgusting? Yep, that’s what I was afraid of.

There is a mouse living in my car. And this dirty, disgusting little imposing mouse has a squeaky clean mouth (sorry for the pun).

I know both these things because this morning, when Jim and I were commuting to work, I reached into a little coin tray where I keep change and gum in my car for a stick of delicious Orbitz gum, and when I pulled out a stick, it had teeny tiny little bites taken out of it.

A goddamn MOUSE broke into my goddamn CAR and ate my goddamn ORBITZ. For the record, this did not give me a good clean feeling no matter what, as advertised.

“Oh…my…god…” I held one of the evidential sticks out to Jim, while not at all maintaining the 10 and 2 position with my hands on the wheel and only partially paying attention to the road.

“Looks like you have a mouse,” he said with utter disgust. “Eeew.” (Yes, Jim said “eew”. Priceless.)

“I do not have a mouse! There just IS a mouse! How did he even get IN here?”

I was immediately indignant. Nevermind that I have gone though periods where I could have been mistaken for living in my car, having someone bear witness to the fact that there was/is/had been a mouse living in there was a thousand times worse. Because mice are, well, icky. And I have it on good authority that mice only like really disgusting, dirty places. So that meant, in my head, that “my” mouse said something not at all flattering about me and my ability to maintain a car.

Just after I processed that thought, shaking my head and muttering, the next terrible one hit me:

“Oh shit! Do you think he’s still in here?!”

(As you can imagine, I was paying even less attention to my free right turn and the 5 key rules for safely operating a vehicle while processing this thought than I was before, because I was at that moment increasingly certain that there was a mouse – no, MANY mice, maybe hundreds – scurrying around under my seat, next to my feet, across my headrest, along the backseat. I was utterly convinced that they were everywhere.)

I couldn’t get us parked and out of the car fast enough. I scrambled to the elevator, imagining a torrent of rodents racing frantically behind me, worked to ditch the heebie jeebies and formulated my Rodent War battle plan:

1. Get car detailed, by a professional. Do not opt for the cheapie where they just vaccum your carpet, bite the bullet and request the full-on shampoo treatment, complete with bonus search for dead, dying or (eeew eeew eeew) alive rodents.

2. Lay a food booby-trap shortly after detail mission is complete.

2.a. At first sign of teethmarks, purchase 6 mousetraps – the kind that catch and squish the mice. (NOTE: Do not poison, as you have heard too many stories about people poisoning car-mice and then suffering through dead-mouse scent for weeks when they’re unable to find the body).

2.b. Have a nice strong drink. Consider setting up a hidden night-vision motion-detection camera with which to catch the mice in the act and determine their mode of entry.

2.c. Have another drink and reconsider motion-camera tactic, as it sounds like a lot of work.

3. Rely on the traps to catch and squish the mice.

3.a. Throw bodies away as needed, screeching "eeeeeEEEEEEWWWWWWWW!" the whole way to the garbage can.

4. Repeat as necessary until they wave the white flag or someone gives me a better idea.

5. Go shopping.

I do anticipate some problems. For one, I apparently live in the rodent capital of the universe. Mice have been a problem for some of my neighbors and even the previous renters of the house I currently live in (which, for the record, is VERY CLEAN AT ALL TIMES) and is so far free of mouse-sightings.

Secondly, mice breed like rabbits. Or cockroaches. Or something. I think they can have like a hundred babies in 10 minutes flat. Which means I may have to dip into the 401K to afford all the mousetraps this war may require.

Third, the irony: I have a cat, but she has no claws and lives indoors and poops in a little sandbox and owns a pink bedazzled shirt with the word "bitch" on it.

Finally, I don’t like killing things.

This is perhaps my biggest weakness as a person. It’s so GIRLY it’s unforgivable. I don’t even kill spiders – I make my cat do that (you don’t need claws to kill spiders). Hell, I go fishing and am happy to snag the fish and reel them up, but you will never get me to be the person with the bat who whacks that poor fish on the head to kill it. Nope, I’d rather put it in the cooler and know it’s slowly, painfully dying than just end it myself. I used to pluck and clean like 50 chickens every spring with my family growing up and I loved looking at all the guts, but I could NEVER handle that axe. So IF I get to step 2 and have to buy the horrible old fashioned mousetraps and I actually catch a mouse and find it in the trap the next day, squished and dead or worse—squished and not yet dead, I’m in trouble. Because there is NO WAY I’ll be able to a) open the door to the car in order to b) pick up and dispose of that trap.

Which may mean I’ll have to just give up and turn the car over to the mice and start jogging to work.

Wish me luck. And please, if you have any advice, I’m all ears. But not Mickey ears, because he’s the Enemy.