It’s Memorial Day weekend, so I have a full three days off from work. I have a really bad relationship with holiday weekends. They stress me out because the world has me convinced I should be celebrating my sweatpants off, but I just don’t know how to go about it.

Both yesterday and today I told PJ I thought we should get up early and go to the greenbelt… because umm, duh, the government said to, or something. But both days I talked myself out of it because there might be other people there.. and they might get close to me. Eeep. I’m not sure why on regular weekends I’m totally fine with seizing zero of the day, but on holidays, I get ultra depressed about it.

Instead, we had a cruise control weekend. We did house chores, we hung out with our friends, we went bowling. It was really good, but I was still convinced I should be slow dancing with the Statue of Liberty or shooting firecrackers out of my face or some other similar sort of nonsense. I’m always my own worst enemy when it comes to enjoying life.

Now it’s Sunday and even though there’s a whole day left in this holiday weekend, it feels like it’s winding down. PJ had plans today so I had to find something to do with my afternoon. I ended up remulching a little bit of backyard garden.

I’ve actually spent a lot less time in the backyard so far this year than in the last couple of years… just because I feel lazy, not for any other reason. So this was the first time I’ve really thought, “If I go out there, mosquitoes will definitely be an issue.” I own a full-blown mosquito suit because the mosquitoes in Austin, Texas are seriously not a joke, but I didn’t feel like the season had advanced to the point that I would need it… plus with the rise of Pinterest, I have a few less viscerally uncool methods I want to try out.

Today I tried out the dryer sheet in the pocket method. I got bit three times pretty much within seconds of being out there… so I’ve got to chalk that up to a fail. But I’m an improviser, so I rubbed the dryer sheet on my exposed legs and arms and I didn’t get bit again even though I could see clouds of those bastards all over the place. Final verdict, I think there is something to this theory, but it has to be kicked up several notches to function in Central Texas. Just like everything else.

I read a lot of lists talking about how busy moms can save time. A lot of what’s on those lists certainly applies to everyone… i.e. don’t drop your crap on the counter when you get home, put it where it belongs, etc. etc.

But there are a lot of things that a kidless lady can do to save time that probably won’t apply to a mom. Here are the first few I can think of…

1. If you’re like me and use wine instead of exercise to relax after work, make it a point to drink only two generous glasses, rather than the three your mind will try to convince you are required to make that transition from work to home.
2. Pick your clothes out for the next day’s work as soon as you get home. Don’t wait until you’ve had some wine, because 7 am you is not going to be as adventurous in her fashion combinations as 9 pm you.
3. When you take your contacts out, make sure they are in the cereal bowl shape instead of that other shape.
4. If it’s one of those days when your three-glass emotions won out the night before, don’t lay in bed for half an hour trying to convince yourself that you have the flu. Get up and take a shower, you asshole.
5. Absolutely clean your coffee maker out at night. When I wake up to a dirty coffee maker, my first instinct is to punch it across the room. My second instinct is to stare at it for a while willing it with my powerful mind to clean its own damn self. So many minutes wasted.
6. Give away your pets. (I haven’t done this yet, but I often fantasize about the time savings.)

I know, I’m like the least helpful person on the planet.

This is a follow on to the eyeliner post. Another artifact of my late twenties, if you will. It’s recently become insufficient to just stumble into my car and assume that by the time I get to work my face will have woken up enough on its own to  be presentable. Yeah, I’m finding that I now have to physically coerce my own face into taking part in the day.

And this little practical joke being played on me by the universe is made all the more difficult by my absolute refusal to purchase makeup anywhere other than the grocery store. This is partially because I’m frugal and partially because I’m scared of girls who work at dedicated makeup counters.

So see Exhibit A, like $70 worth of products, 80% of which can eff the eff off because they suck. I’ll point out the ones I actually like some other time, but for now I’d just like to say that someone owes me money. I’m not sure who, but I’m going to start by invoicing Seventeen magazine and seeing how that pans out.

I’ve got a quick piece of advice. Don’t ever google “how to wear eyeliner” unless you want to be super horrified. I’ve tried to wear eyeliner a handful of times in my life and I’ve always ended up looking like a Halloween prostitute. (Probably not that bad, but there was always pretty clearly a problem in the execution.)

The idea to try it again after a good many years recently made its way into my head aboard a slow train a comin’. That slow train would be my late twenties… last stop, vanity. I’m sure the best combatants for no longer feeling like a pretty young thing involve exercise and healthy eating, but we all know I’m a lazy bitch, so I was like, I know, I’ll just finally learn how to apply eyeliner. Problem solved.

Now that I’m older, though, and sooo responsible, I decided I would YouTube that baloney before laying down $8 at the drugstore. And here’s where the horror comes in. Did you know that there is something on your eye called the waterline? It’s the part of your eye on the inside of your eyelashes… the part that touches your legitimate eyeball. And people routinely color it black with wax pencils they buy at HEB. It’s really sick.

But beyond the horror, I’m honestly just not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, I’m kind of relieved that the reason I always looked like a fraggle rock hooker was because I trusted my instinct that the place I was putting eyeliner was the only reasonable place to put it and not because my face just rejects girl stuff. On the other hand, now I want to put eyeliner inside my eye just to see what it looks like. Curiosity and vanity do not good companions make.

I heard a song on the radio today with my name in it.

And I think that’s a totally natural desire, to want to hear your name in a song. If it’s not, then just chalk it up to another small confirmation that I’m as egocentric as they come. My sister has her name in all kinds of songs, but I had mostly given up hope after Ms. Spears arrived in our global conscience and stripped my name of any romanticism or class it had ever hoped to embody. Anyway, I was happy to hear this girl singing my name on the radio today. It guess it’s technically her name and I guess her Alabama outline tattoo is also probably technically better than my Texas outline tattoo… but let’s keep this about me. She spells Brittany like I do, so I guess I might marry her.

I think I actually heard the band, Alabama Shakes, playing across the street when we were sitting at the Brixton during SXSW, but not this song. Anyway, lyrics! Come on Brittany.

Alabama Shakes – Team CoCo

I had to stay home sick from work yesterday with another brutal headache. I’ve pretty much got my headache issues narrowed down to a specific time of month… yes, that time of month. I googled period headache and the Internet asked me, “Did you mean menstrual migraine?” Uh, yeah, sure? I’m hoping to have the issue worked out soon so that I never have to mention it again because it makes me feel like a 1950s advertisement.

Anyway, that’s not what this story is about, it’s just a set up for why I was lounging on the couch on a weekday. It was around 9 am and I had settled into my couch spot to spend my day oscillating between the computer and thinking about ways to end the headache. Stabbing an ice pick into my eye is basically all I can ever come up with. I caught some movement out of the corner of my eye just a few inches from my slumped head. With wicked headaches, you figure it was just a tracer, or some other devil come to take you home. After a second or two, though, I realize it was not a hallucination, it was a small crab.

Wait, a small crab? I’m nowhere near the ocean? Yeah, it was this big bad mother effer.

This was my first Austin scorpion. We had them every once in a while when I was growing up in Boyd, but they were always pretty small and I had a mother available to deal with the situation. There’s no perspective in the picture, but he was a solid two inches long. It was pretty easy to catch him in comparison to the genetically modified cockroaches we have to deal with in this city, minimal screaming and throwing of plastic receptacles, but still not a great experience. And, this is yet another experience where I don’t understand why there isn’t an automated solution yet. I know they make some kind of bug-specific vacuum you can buy… but I want this to have advanced to the point where if I see a bug of nefarious nature, I can shoot a beam out of my eye and evaporate that son of a bitch.

Anyway, you would think that story would end right there, but the plot thickens when PJ says he has to leave for work and he isn’t going to flush our new friend because it’s technically an arachnid and everybody knows it’s bad luck to kill spiders.

So, long story short, he left the scorpion in a plastic tub for me to stare at all day. I obviously wasn’t going to flush it after being told it would bring a plague upon our HOUSES. I ended up giving it a piece of grass midway through the day because it wasn’t moving and seemed very depressed. It hid itself in the grass and I thought it had escaped… so gross.

PJ ended up getting home from work while I was running an errand and he took it to the countryside (city drainage ditch where he promises no children play). I didn’t get to say goodbye.

Well, it’s either do laundry today or drop out of society completely. I honestly think I look okay in a nice pair of granny panties, but PJ assures me that I am mistaken. There are zero parts of laundry that I enjoy. 

Honestly, I’m trying to think of any household chore where there’s that one little part of it that I secretly enjoy. You sometimes hear people talking about, “oh, I love folding clothes,” or, “oh, I love doing dishes.” And I’m like, “excuse me, you love doing what? you seem to have been shipped from the human factory with some sort of defect.” 

I do kind of like pushing the button on the vacuum cleaner that opens the canister to let everything fall into the trashcan, although that comes more from a button pushing place than from a cleaning place. 

Anyway, laundry…. gotta do it. Apparently no one is bothering to automate this junk for me. I feel like if we have advanced to the point where I don’t have to rub my clothing against a board to clean it, I probably shouldn’t have to fold it either.

I got my first professional massage on Friday. I’d been thinking about getting one for awhile. Mainly because about 15 minutes into my work day lately, my shoulders are hunched up beside my earlobes. I’m typing super fast, like, I don’t know, some sort of amphetamine-riddled secretary. It’s kind of nonstop all day.

I can’t really do crazy hours at work. I’m never going to be one of those people talking about my 70-hour work week. To me, even a 50-hour work week sounds like something some asshole made up. So, when things are crazy, I just make up for it by typing super fast and having zero non-work-related thoughts for 7 or 8 hours. That’s a mild exaggeration, but essentially when I look up at 5 pm, I have a herniated neck and a lower back that feels like somebody pink-bellied it all day.

Anyway, review of my first massage that didn’t involve a boyfriend, coercion, and disappointment. 

It did not change my life like I thought it would. It certainly felt good during, but as soon as I stood up, I felt pretty much the same. I told the guy, “ohhh, I feel much taller,” because you would literally have to spit on me to get me to complain about any type of service. But, really, all these people were walking out of their massage rooms all sweaty and swooning. Either they were being ridiculous, or my little Paul Rudd/Will Forte-looking masseuse wasn’t very good. 

Anyway, I guess I might try another massage in a few months if the work pace doesn’t let up. I also convinced myself that if I got a massage, it would reset my body and somehow fix my lack of workout motivation… Failure on all fronts. I did play three rounds of Kinect Adventures yesterday, but I seriously almost puked. Fleehhh…

Roughly four days after my last post, I started working out. This brand new lifestyle went on for four days straight. The workouts ranged from 4 to 7 minutes in length. And now it’s been six days since I worked out. I just thought you should know. I’m basically a modern-day warrior.