Analgesic.

My temporary job, I have decided, is to watch all the movies that I have here in L.A. with commentary and add to my growing stock of useless movie trivia. It's going really well.

In addition to this, I have also gotten very passionate about developing a schedule of things to do in order to make each day [of unemployment] count, a la Jack Dawson. I bake things. I write things like cover letters and short stories and blog entries (HEY OH). I have completed Veronica Mars in its entirety, which was pretty great and am now moving on to Heroes. I clean things. I sign up for catalogues. I make lists. I make repeated, unsuccessful attempts at turning Los Angeles into a walking city. I purge my hard drive. I attempt to cure things like the inexplicable leg rash that I have been combatting for a few days now (my list of possible causes: an allergy to either North Hollywood air, unemployment, or the fact that my family is currently in Nantucket and I am not) with various "analgesics". I wonder about things like why topical hydrocortisone cream has to be called an analgesic and why I couldn't have just gone to college for something delightfully normal with tons of job security, like medicine or education. I read. I snack. I attempt to get Wii Fit to balance out all the snacking. I correspond via snail mail. I color and on Wednesdays I go to Jamba Juice for a fix.

It's a busy life, I'll tell you. Hopefully one day soon I'll be griping about how exhausted I am and how I'd kill for a day off of my grueling career and blah blah blah.

Sexy.

According to the oh-so-eloquent Sexy vs. Skanky list in the July issue of Cosmopolitan, it is considered "sexy" to post your resume on a job finding website. 

My instant reaction to this addition to the list (it fell just under the equally sexy activity of "looking for baby bumps on stars like Amy Poehler", which I'm not even going to touch right now) was confusion. There is no way that posting your resume on a job finding website is remotely sexy. It's desperate, sure. But sexy? No way. Then I remembered that this is Cosmopolitan we're talking about, a publication that relies on desperate women for survival. It hurts me to imagine the person that reads Cosmopolitan's Sexy vs. Skanky list and thinks, "YES. You know what? YES. Oh my God, David Beckham's sporty pants ARE sexy, whereas Joey Fatone's workout ensemble is pure skank" or "What? It's sexy to post my resume on Monster.com? SIGN ME UP." Especially because, in my experience with job finding websites, you rarely get responses from them. I'm not sure what Cosmo's stance on unemployment is.

All that aside, I would like to point out that in the past month I have ONLY posted my updated resume on online job finding websites. I'm just saying.

Dirty.

Until yesterday, my car had not been cleaned since Liz and Eleanor decided to throw a couple quarters in a self-serve car wash and cleanse its exterior of about 2,000 miles worth of American soil before rolling into Las Vegas. That was in January. Until yesterday, my poor Civic had about five months worth of Los Angeles filth caked on it. 

At the car wash, I learned another new thing about L.A. In Massachusetts, drive through car washes involve robots. Here, there are Mexicans instead. Everything else is the same - car in neutral, little assembly line of water and soap and sponges - except at every station a team of little men attack the car. That was a surprise. Bottom line, they do a phenomenal job and my reason for hesitating to have my car washed for all these months is coming into play: I don't want it to get dirty again. I really hate those stupid car covers that jerks who only love their vehicles tuck them under every night, but I'm sorry to say that I'm starting to see the logistics behind them. 

It is very hot here. I'm starting to get over that Don't Waste A Beautiful Day Guilt that  I acquired over 22 years in New England. It's perfectly fine and necessary to stay inside and watch TV on DVD when the alternative is dying of heatstroke and having your shoes melt to the pavement.

Busy.

Tonight, while baby-sitting - if it can still be considered baby-sitting when the "baby" in question is actually a ten year old with a maturity level and vocabulary that surpasses a fair amount of my peers - we watched The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Home Improvement on Nick at Nite and Olivia was thoroughly impressed when I told her that I watched both of those shows when they were actually new episodes. It's weird that kids today are watching The Fresh Prince of Bel Air like I used to watch The Cosby Show or Gilligan's Island. 

Since I'm still unemployed, I find myself spacing out the things that I need to get done so that every day I have something that needs to be done. Par example, today I accompanied Ray and Natale to the impound lot so that Ray could assess the damage of his car, which got totaled a week ago when an uninsured drunk man slammed into it while it was parked on the street. Yesterday Natale and I walked to the grocery store and made soup videos, and on Sunday I Drain-Oed my drains. Tomorrow I have big plans to deposit some checks and celebrate Day 8 of the Seven Day Soup Regimen (aka, eat brownies and cereal) and at some point, I really need to speak to someone about the fact that my toilet is running. Really. All pranks aside, it's running. Not over, it just sounds like someone with the world's largest, fullest bladder is constantly peeing, which cannot be good for the water situation in these parts.

I. Need. A. Career. Immediately.

Wagon.

Fact.

There is a reason why the biggest part of the original food pyramid is constituted of bread, grains, and cereals. It's because they are the best and most delicious foods and as such, are needed in order to happily survive.

I'm sorry, does that seem irritable? It's to be expected. Allow me to explain. I am currently wrapping up Day 5 in a seven day vegetable soup weight loss experiment and I haven't eaten bread or cereal or cupcakes since Day 1, when I dove off the wagon after 8 hours and went to Carl's Jr. with Alison, my enabler. 

Before I continue my analysis, I would like to clarify that this is not a cry for attention or reassurance. I know I'm not obese. I realize how lucky I am to have a metabolism that, thankfully, runs faster than I do so that I don't have to. I also know what a sad day it will be for me if/when it gives out, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. 

Anyway. My reasons for accepting the Leahy Clinic "Diet" Challenge are threefold

1. I am currently unemployed, therefore I welcome anything that brings some sort of structure into my life.

2. I am currently unemployed, therefore by only eating vegetable soup and the rotating schedule of random fruits and vegetables per day, I save money by not buying impulse snacks or going out to eat.

3. Overall curiosity. I'm horrible at commitment and I only love the bottom layer of the food pyramid. Plus, metabolism or no, who wouldn't want to lose a few pounds? This is pretty much the only way, given my disdain for running and aforementioned lack of funds with which to take up ballet again, the only form of exercise that I have ever enjoyed.

So since it's Day 5, I've passed the point of no return. I can't let myself quit now, two days away from completion with only one wagon tumble. But really, diets like this are ridiculous, mainly because what do you think I will do on Day 8? Obviously I will eat macaroni and cheese and peanut butter and brownies and Frosted Mini Wheats with unreasonable fervor because I've been dreaming about those things for the past five days. And where will that get me? Right back to square one. Fulfilling my need for the brownies that I only want right now will probably undo and then some whatever I manage to accomplish during this week of vegetables and soup and fruit and bananas.

I just find stuff like this amusing. When you think you're doing something great for yourself, it really just causes a huge backfire that would never have happened if you hadn't done the great thing in the first place. I'm not sure if this rule applies to everyone or just people like me, stereotypical heads of the pecking order who have no one older than them to learn from or compare their lives to, aside from their parents. Yeah. I used to compare what I had accomplished at a given age to what my mother accomplished by that same age, until it occurred to me that she got married on her 22nd birthday while I got dumped on mine. That's when I realized it was probably time to reevaluate. (Truth be told, at this particular juncture I'd rather be dumped than married, but that's beside the point. It's all about the irony.)

At the very least, it's good to know that the universe isn't 

ignoring me. I will continue to be irritable until I can start my days with cereal instead of noodle-less minestrone soup.

Saved.

In case anyone was wondering, the second coming has already happened. "Christ" is an employee at the Vineland Avenue Ralph's in North Hollywood. 

Apparently they didn't want to make a big deal of it this time around.

Pennies.

I have discovered my future place of residence on Beacon Hill.

I will return from L.A. when I have $650,000 with which to purchase my one bedroom apartment with two fireplaces on Garden Street.

Annnnnd GO.

Intervene.

After watching Intervention for the first time and witnessing the struggles of Caylee, a 21 year old meth/heroin addict AND  her mother, Christy, a bulimic, chronic over-exerciser, I have made the executive decision to eliminate my own crippling habit: fingernail/cuticle gnawing.

I'm not going to do it anymore because I realized that it probably makes me look like a fidgety meth addict and in a place where people don't know me that well, I can't risk that kind of misconception. 

I should also point out that I am totally serious. Just as I always am when I discuss the effects of crystal meth and meth labs in general. This is important to note since last year, while strolling down Newbury Street, Liz and I got admonished for our apparent lack of reverence on the subject of exploding meth labs by an angst-ridden stranger who was eavesdropping on our conversation, which had to do with finding hypothetical reasons to bring down Boston Realty Works following our apartment fire, and meth labs on Grey's Anatomy. He informed us, rather unnecessarily, that there was nothing funny about meth labs and that his own apartment in Atlanta suffered damage from a drug related explosion. All of this happened on the street, completely at random. Bottom line: Yes, sir. Meth labs are no joke.

We brushed it off as him being angry with his own ignorance for choosing to live in Atlanta, of all places. What did he expect?

Move.

Growing up, my grandparents lived six hours away in Ocean View, New Jersey. Six hours. In a pre cross country road trip world, six hours might as well be four years. My parents tried to throw the travel time into perspective for us by converting the hours into increments of time we could wrap our minds around. Ocean City, New Jersey is six hours away from Massachusetts which is equal to two The Sound of Musics, four The Little Mermaids, six Star Trek: The Next Generations, and twelve Reading Rainbows away. Pretty far.

Since Grandma and Grandpa lived a whopping twelve Reading Rainbows away, we didn't get to see them as often as I wished we could have, so our time there was always really special and, as is typical of treasured time, went by in a flash. It didn't seem fair that six hours could drag on for so long when six days went by in what seemed like one Opening Credits Sequence of Star Trek. Obviously, leaving my grandparents' house in New Jersey was always a real bummer, but I remember my mother reminding us that we had to leave in order to be able to come back.

So I'm 22 now and I'm finally realizing what she meant by that. For years I brushed it off: If we just stayed at Grandma's or Disney World or wherever it was that was so hard to say good-bye to, we'd be happy forever. Sure, we'd be happy, but soon it wouldn't be special anymore. It'd be regular. It'd be toast. Time would eventually slow back down to normal, the hours would become hours again and someplace else would become the coveted escape from the familiar.

Right now I feel like I could stay in Massachusetts forever. It's great here. So great in fact, that I could almost forget why I can't stay. It's easy here. It's stable. It's familiarly filled with memories of my most favorite years and moments and people but at the same time, I know that I can't be a grown up in a place where I've always, until now, been a kid. Being home makes me want to hold onto a part of my life that cannot exist anymore, and for every hour that I sit here wishing I didn't have that damn apartment to go back to in L.A., a city that I have come to associate with sunshine and bitterness and opportunity and stress, there's a second when I remember that I have to go back there for awhile so I can look forward to coming home. That second is all it takes. 

I will always only love Boston. Only, only, only and I will be back for good someday. I've got to hand it to L.A. though- it was moving there that made me realize how truly special the East Coast really is and how wonderful it is to come back to. I don't know how long it will take, or how many Titanics I am from my triumphant return to Beacon Hill, but when it happens, I know I'll appreciate it.