This is such a beautiful, beautiful post on marriage, friendship and partnership.
Check out this magnificent post over at BitchBuzz! Just look at the magazine cover! Just look at it!
I am honored to call you both my friends.
Here's to you on your special day.
Aloha,
xoxo
Hi folks!
Just wanted to let you know that as of 3am this morning, BitchBuzz is LIIIIIIVE!!!!
While this is just sort of the bare bones of the design and functionality of the site, I'm still very, very proud of it.
On this very day, exactly two years ago, I started this blog.
And, I have to say, aside from marrying Iain and moving over to London, joining VOX and creating CupCate.com was the best decision I have ever made.
Without this blog, and without supportive, fabulous, good looking neighbors and readers like you - I don't know where I'd be.
Thank you so much for all of your support and for continuing to read and comment post after post.
You guys are so awesome, and have no idea how much you all mean to me!
Tonight I shall rub pink frosting all over my body and chug vodka in your honor.
I don't have a best friend.
I think I'm just not meant to have one. The term "best friend" feels so young to me. Not judging those of you who do have a best friend, just for me...I can't really have one. I'm shit at it, to be honest. I've been burned too many times before with people who have been my best friend:
Best friend all through elementary school, Jessica, was a pathological liar and extremely jealous and possessive of me at the same time. I wasn't allowed to have any other friends but her, and in high school things turned really disturbing as when I became friends with another girl named Emily and Emily's best friend Krista.
The four of us started hanging out, and one day Emily's dad all gave us a ride home from a basketball game. Krista and Emily invited Jessica and I over for a karaoke sleep over.
Now, I used to be really weird about spending the night over at people's houses I didn't know that well. I'm just really private. Did I want to sleep on the floor of someone's house I didn't know that well, and have them see me in my glasses? I wasn't sure. So when when we got to my house, I was suppose to run in and ask my mom if I could spend the night.
What I actually did was run in and tell my mom,
"Hey, Emily wants to know if I can sleep over...I don't really want to...Is it OK if I tell them you said no because I have to go to Dad's tomorrow?"
My mom responded by saying,
"Yeah that's fine! Just blame it on me. Tell them I say no."
So, I ran back outside and tell Emily's dad and Krista and Jessica my story of why I couldn't come over. We all agreed to hang out some time next week.
Little did I know that while I was in the house explaining to my mom that I wasn't comfortable spending the night at a new place, Jessica - my best friend - was busy spewing some viscous lie to everyone in the car about my mom being an alcoholic and that she was probably drunk and if I couldn't spend the night - that would be why.
I didn't find all this out until a year later, when Emily and I had become best friends and we found out that Jessica had been spreading vicious rumors about Emily. Emily explained that she didn't tell me about the car incident earlier because she just didn't know if it were true or not, or if Jessica actually lied as much as I claimed.
And that brings us to my best friend Emily.
Emily and I had a lot in common. We were both incredibly emotional, loved singing and karaoke, Christina Aguilera, John Mayer, Britney Spears and The Real World. We would eat McDonalds and then complain about how fat our size 5 asses felt afterwards. Emily taught me how to hate my body and how to flirt. She was an ex-cheerleader and we would spend hours in her bedroom singing and bitching about all the tradgedies of being 15.
We had a couple good summers, and then Emily started hanging around the popular kids. They liked her because her parents had the money to buy her clothes from Abercrombie & Fitch, and she was cool with molding herself into whoever they wanted her to be. I, on the other hand, wasn't.
Slowly but surely I became her unpopular best friend that was in Drama Club and Newspaper and was friends with The Mormons. She got a boyfriend and kept silent while everyone talked shit about me. She never joined in, but she sure as hell never stood up for me.
After high school, she went on to go to our local University, lived in the dorm, and joined a sorority. She broke up with her high school sweetheart after cheating on him with my former crush and Sadie Hawkins date - the son of my mom's best friend. I nursed her through her period of self inflicted heartache, and accepted the fact that she didn't seem all that enthused when I finally got a real boyfriend for the first time.
Over the next two years we maintained a distant sporadic friendship shaped of random dinners at Chiles and Frappuccinos at Starbucks closer to her home than mine. When I met Iain I'd come over to her apartment, over 20 miles away from my house, sit on her balcony and smoke while she pressed me for more details...seemingly living vicariously through me.
We stopped talking after she failed to clear her *busy* schedule of parties and sorority events when I came back home for the first time after moving to London. She sent me an angry email 3 months after my trip back home asking why I deleted her off my Myspace friend list.
I sent her another one back explaining it was because she was a self absorbed bitch who cared, scratch that, has ALWAYS cared more about her social life than being my best friend. How was it that she doesn't make time to see me, ignores me for three months, and then emails me to say, "We're no longer friends on Myspace?"
How about no longer friends in real life??How about I got married and you were so busy planning mixers for Alpha Pi Douche that you didn't even fucking know.
She responded by telling me that I was demeaning the "life she had worked so hard for" (more like "the life my parents have paid so much money for") and that I don't "know her anymore". Oh. And "goodbye".
Haven't heard a peep from her since.
The most recent "best friend" I had was named Roseanne. We had high school class together and bonded through a common interest of not doing any work for the class...ever. She welcomed me into her group of misfit emo kids and they seemed to like me alright - despite me completely lying about liking bands they did and obviously having not nearly enough knowledge of 1980's British Punk.
Roseanne weighed about 242lbs, which she quickly lost through using laxatives, binging and purging, and a burning desire to be thinner than her popular, punk princess best friend. She transformed herself into a warped version of her best friend, and even went as far as to make-out with said friend's long time ex-boyfriend behind her back. She, in every way, had turned into a skinny bitch.
I always kept Roseanne at bay because she was clearly in need of some intense therapy, and had a malicious, controlling streak that unless you were aware of what she was doing, you would become her puppet on a string. We drifted apart after high school (mainly due to me avoiding her and her awkward boyfriend), but she got in contact with me in early 2005 when she suddenly inherited a lot of money. She got extensive plastic surgery, decided to go to school in England and thought that now would be a good time to rekindle our friendship. (Wonder why.)
For some reason, I didn't see through this and thought she had *changed* a lot since high school. She seemed to be more mature. She seemed to be less controlling. So, when she moved to England in September 2005, we kept in contact and became really good friends through our daily email conversations.
I booked a ticket to see her in the upcoming January in September 2005, before I had ever even started talking to Iain.
Basically, during my visit to her in January, we made a 3 day trip to London so I could see the capital..and meet Iain. Despite having her boyfriend with her, she turned into a jealous, controlling, malicious bitch. She ruined my last night with Iain, and we spent the whole night, and early morning, arguing and screaming at each other. I was called a cunt, she tried to convince me that Iain was a liar and "not the right guy for me" and that "all the therapy in the world wouldn't be able to help me if I stayed with him".
Obviously, I spent the rest of my vacation with Iain in London, and then had to drive all the way to her flat up north to retrieve the luggage I had left behind. Upon opening it I found that she took back all the things she had given me for Christmas, and had slipped in a Chlamydia test kit into my belongings. You know, because I'm a whore. Get it?
Needless to say I haven't talked to her since. (Despite her "I'm sorry, but you still used me to get to Iain and are wrong about everything that happened" email that she also had published on her then public Myspace blog.)
She was the last person I called a "best friend".
Since then, I have met some incredibly fabulous women.
I think that I have some soul-sisters dotted across the globe. In San Francisco, in Davis, in Egypt and in some strange corners of the earth that I've yet to visit.
I have a good feeling about these women and I feel like I will know them a very long time; see them marry, see some of them have children, see them find their way in the world and make their dreams come alive.
But the label "best friend" is just dead to me.
Best Friend used to mean constant phone conversations, shopping, driving around with the windows down singing Britney Spears, back stabbing, being ditched and being lied to.
Now, I'm quite happy to email my friends. Talk to them on MSN when we're both at work. Get coffee whenever we're on the same continent and have champagne pajama parties. Plan websites together and how we'll take over the world.
On an everyday basis, in real life, I am friendless. When my laptop is off, there is no friend to meet with for lunch. There isn't a girlfriend that I can call and be like, "Hey, dude. Coffee?" without there being an incredibly expensive plane ticket involved.
I've met some really cool girls in London...
But we all know that we're not friends like that. There are a couple that I think we could be. I think that we could be friends for a while. But I just wouldn't be comfortable sharing all the ins and outs of my life and skeletons in my closet with them.
Maybe that's my fault for not opening up more, or maybe it's just me growing up, and realizing that friendships are not going to look how they did when I was 14.
While I love that I have friends around the world...I still wish that I could have them all in one spot so we could go out for coffee every once and a while.
That would be superb.
The fantastic ladies over at The Frisky asked me to give them a list of nominations for their annual Hotness Awards, and just posted them up on their site!
I tried my hardest to not just list country music bands and lame answers like "I don't watch TV", and I'd like to think I nominated some pretty cool stuff. (Who would argue that the Rain vs Stephen Colbert Dance-Off wasn't the hottest scandal of the year?)
Why hello there!
If you've been on Twitter the last few weeks you'll have noticed about 1,000 "COME VISIT WE'RE STREAMING LIVE! LIVE I TELL YOU!!!" tweets from various people.
At first I was annoyed. WHY would I want to see you live? I barely know you! This is all moving too fast! Next thing you know you'll be wanting to leave a freakin' toothbrush over here and have your own drawer!
But now I totally get it. It's freakin' fun. I'll be trying to do one every night, so, come by and visit! I'll be posting on BitchBuzz's Twitter whenever we'll be going live on Qik.
If you have arthritis and need pain killers, you can refill your prescription by email.
If you need heart medication or anti depressants you can do the same.
But by god, if you just want to fuck for fun and not get pregnant - you must be punished!! No matter how long you've been on the pill or on the same prescription, the only way you can get a refill is by going down to the family clinic and waiting...and waiting...and waiting...and waiting...
It's not as bad as going to a Planned Parenthood where you could end up being there for 4 hours- but you still have to wait a long time. But worst than the waiting, you have to put up with the other people who go to these clinics.
The trashy teenagers who need to travel in packs to get their pills. The nasty couples who are all over each other who want you to know just how badly they need that bag of free condoms, and the teenage mothers who, yet again, need to bring a posse with them to wait. It's just depressing.
I actually had a woman in there last time yelling at the staff that they didn't give her enough free condoms in her bag,
"Hello!! Can you fill this bag up! I tell ya! You people really skimp on these and never give me enough. It's your fault I have 8 kids!!!!"
I swear to god.
So today, I go. I wait. I wait. I get called into a room.
I step on an ancient looking scale, fully clothed and with my shoes on.
I go sit in a room where the lady pulls up a screen on a computer and says, "So last time you were on this....OK, six more months...OK."
She takes my blood pressure and says that it's good. And then she looks at me and says,
"Your weight is over the top. You should try to lose the weight any way you can."
And then I couldn't speak. I quietly took my prescription and zombied my way out of the clinic.
MY WEIGHT IS OVER THE TOP!?!?!!
Had I been living in a world where when I thought I was a bit heavier and a bit curivier than I had ever been before when I was actually dangerously over weight and unhealthy?!
Are the UK size 12 jeans I wear actually plus sized jeans and I just didn't notice?
Perhaps it was somebody else going to the gym at least twice a week since April.
Maybe it's some other girl that's been eating fucking vegetable soup and god damn Special K snack bars every day for the past two weeks.
Maybe that girl doing push-ups each morning and sit-ups before she goes to bed is just a figment of my unhealthy, lard-filled, fatty McFat-fat imagination.
WHERE DO I EVEN BEGIN?!?!?!
How unbelievably, retardedly irresponsible of her!
Do you want to know how much information she had on me?
My weight. What birth control medication I've been on. My blood pressure.
THAT IS ALL.
She didn't have my chart, she didn't know how tall I was, my BMI, what my diet was like, if I exercise at all, ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING.
She didn't know if I had an eating disorder or not!What if I was bulimic and she just flippantly said that my weight was "over the top" and that I should "lose it anyway I can".
How about binging and purging, does that sound like a good idea to you, you fucking idiot!!!!????
I'm sorry, but from what I've learned about body image and health, WEIGHT doesn't not equal HEALTH.
You DO NOT tell a young woman that she has a weight problem without knowing ANYTHING about her! Especialy if you're a fucking NURSE.
So, FUCK YOU nurse lady.
I don't have a god damn weight problem. I'm curvy. I weigh more that other girls my height because I have a different body type than they do. (OK and I like to eat pizza.)
I've been trying really hard to eat better lately. I've been trying to lose weight before I go back to California in September. I exercise. I take vitamins every single day. I drink a lot of water. And I don't drink as much as I used to, and I've really cut back on junk food.
I am healthy. So, if being curvy and healthy makes me fat, than you can kiss my fat ass, lady.
Why, hello there all you fabulous people.
Not much going on here other than Iain and I locking ourselves in our home office to work on launching BitchBuzz. We've left the room only to sleep, go and grab a take-away curry, and to try and take a few photos that we're going to base the new BitchBuzz logo on.
While I was all dolled up, we went ahead and a few for my VOX avatar, as I've had the same one for almost two years now.
Once I stopped laughing and having nightmarish flashbacks from The Observer Woman photo shoot, we finally managed to get a good amount of usable shots, so hopefully our new logo will be up and ready to go very soon.
I won't show you any that we're going to base the logo on just yet, but here are some of me being an asshole, grabbing my own boobs, and trying make "the sexy face".
Yes, the dress I'm wearing is my wedding dress, which is cool for various reasons. The first being that this means I can actually GET INTO IT, which is always an exicting moment.
Secondly, I'm getting multiple uses out of it. I've worn this puppy 3 times now, which makes me sort of proud that I managed to buy a wedding dress that I liked so much I actually want to wear it again.
Anyhoo...
Thank you all so much for your support. You're the best Internet friends a gal could ever ask for.
Links from my Friends and Family
On Partnership & Gratitude ...
Last night was the sixth anniversary of the evening Jon a...
Welcome to Crush Beat, BitchBuzz's awesome new mag where ...
My dear, beloved, kick-ass friends were married today. I ...
Having it large - Times Online
Ah, those size-zero ladies, with their sternums and clav...
My Damn Channel: Laura Ingr...
Laura Ingraham routinely losing her shit on her old show ...