LIVEBLOG

by Megan Boyle

  small rewards: only way things happen.

  6:01PM: if i have enough time i want to eat a molly to write a draft of my ‘cover letter.’ (the letter basically just has to say: i’m a nice person, i’m responsible, i have had jobs before, there are jobs i would like to have in your area, nursing home jobs, i want to help old people dress themselves and eat because they are as close to death as me and i understand feeling that and wanting help, i am going places) (the letter has seemed hard to write because i feel like i can’t just say those things, i have to like…prove myself…by vaguely…just writing vaguely). just so i can have ‘on molly’ letter and ‘toned down’ letter. seems hilarious: ‘two-years-jobless woman with emotional problems takes molly to help her write vaguely-worded letter recommending herself as an apartment building tenant.’

  molly-eating might be destructive. fed-ex and library close at 9PM. shower has not been taken but don’t worry i have ideas about how to conserve precious shower-time. i responded to another email. seems important, to keep this ‘email streak’ going. fucking taking it out.

  6:14PM: just took out another telemarketer. his name was chris. fucking told chris. he will not soon forget that polite request to take a phone number off a list.

  who gave my number to a website where…these health insurance people call you? did i do that, somehow?

  6:37PM: took that fucking shower out. here was my secret: i never said i had to wash my hair! OH NO! OH NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! that foreboding roach on that conditioner bottle last night—how little did it know about how much it would bode!!!!!!!!

  ‘boding’ seems to be an integral aspect of ‘baby’s day out’

  i am using ‘boding’ loosely…or…um…think it’s just fun to say it…things boding well…my decisions being influenced by ‘boding’…being a bode daddy…

  thought of a good insult: i wouldn’t fuck him with your tampon

  shit just re-read list, i forgot about refilling birth control, CVS will still be open i hope SHIT

  6:47PM: wearing black flats with twinkly gemstone decorations on the toes. check out fucking twinkle toes over here. baby’s day out with the twinkle toes over here. boding all over the place, boding everywhere, in all directions. out of control boding. twinkling it up.

  6:53pm: I’m stalling, shit. Why do I stall like this. Pay attention to your stalling Boyle.

  6:58pm: drove past a dead kennedys looking guy crossing street lighting a cigarette as I was lighting a cigarette. Better believe I head-checked.

  7:00pm: sometimes smoking cigarettes feels physically horrible. pulled into CVS parking lot.

  7:04pm: The pharmacist said my address. I said ‘yup, that’s the one’ like how Alex Trebek said ‘trout: that’s the fish.’ I don’t have any refills left. Shit. Does this count? Shit…doctor is gone at 5pm. Did not account for ‘no refill’ variable. Shit. I don’t know if this counts yet. I think it doesn’t, I didn’t know.

  7:08pm: not going to eat the Molly. Molly eating does not bode well. Driving to library.

  7:10pm: want to watch a YouTube compilation of cars making outrageously unnecessary k-turns.

  7:15PM: took picture of sky while waiting for parking meter kiosk to print receipt. stood on a cement thingy for a better view. man’s voice from behind me said ‘beautiful, isn’t it.’ he was an old man, maybe in a uniform. i said ‘yeah, look at all the colors.’ after i said ‘colors’ he turned his head to look at me.

  8:13PM: at library. eyes got watery as hell typing this: ‘My family has generously offered to continue supporting me, but I want Beach View Apartments to be the place I launch my new independent life—I want Rockaway Park to be my home for years to come.’

  how did i write it. i mean it, but…it looks vulnerable, phrased that way. i feel so fake writing cover letter-type things. that weird subtext of ‘if the person reading this suspects i’m writing to influence their decision, which is my only reason for writing this, i will sound disingenuous.’

  9:14pm: sometimes hearing snippets of an argument between men who don’t seem to know each other.

  Suspenseful ass coin dispensing process on library printer. Discovered 24-hour FedEx hell yeah.

  Sat in car, emotionally assembling printed liveblog manuscript in folder formerly containing lease/apartment application, given to me by Colin.

  Walked to park by American-looking museum buildings. Started walking vaguely in direction of FedEx. Lit a cigarette while looking somewhere in the distance. Thought ‘proud American moment. America.’ Realized I didn’t know where I was walking and had left phone with directions on it in car. Proud American moment. America: I think I live here.

  Do people know when I’m not being serious…

  Walking to FedEx. Just passed a man dragging a heavy garbage bag. Would like to say ‘we did a modest mutual head-check,’ but it was more like ‘which one of us is going to hurt the other one, uh oh’

  9:26pm: walked a little more then saw welcoming lights of 24-hour FedEx.

  9:47pm: wandered around FedEx. Stood at a counter. Another wandering woman stood ‘competitively’ beside me. A man with a ponytail did things to a machine in a vaguely employees-only area. Wandering woman wandered somewhere and I didn’t see her again. A woman with a name tag that said ‘Lulu’ approached me. She said ‘I can help you over here,’ not moving her eyebrows much. I non-laid-back-ly said ‘oh great thanks, thank you.’ Followed her to a shipping counter she stood behind. ‘I could see you walking around over there lookin like that,’ she said. ‘Oh heh, yeah I was doing that,’ I said. Since entering it’d occurred to me that they might not ship 24 hours. I said ‘shit is it too late to ship things?’ Lulu made a face like. Um. Lulu was being this way to me like how I would be to honestly confused customers. Like pleasantly surprised that a person would come in who didn’t think they knew all the answers. I was happy to be that person, the not-knowing-all-the-answers-already person, for Lulu. Placed two envelopes on the counter. Lulu said ‘you don’t need to buy that, we can just do this part for free’ and placed two puffy white FedEx envelopes between us. I said ‘oh. Oh yeah well that would be great, thanks. The other ones, yeah, no good.’ She smiled in her no-eyebrows-moving Lulu way, looking mostly at a computer.

  She told me to fill out forms and left me alone to do that. The moment after I’d finished, she returned. She had pastel blue nail polish similar to my mint green, but her nails looked manicured. I wanted to say something about this, like something you would say, like, ‘springtime: time for nails’ but couldn’t think of a normal-person thing to say like that. Lulu said ‘I’m cold, it’s cold in here, isn’t it?’ I nodded big and said ‘yeah it is, it’s really cold in here. And I bet for you…yeah, your short sleeves, man.’ I didn’t think it was cold. Somehow this did not sound awkward.

  Lulu processed the packages and asked me questions. When I answered it felt like we understood something about the customer-employee dynamic like ‘no one really knows what’s going on, we have to say these words to each other that someone faraway at FedEx invented. We are the people between FedEx and the things we want.’ Like I was thinking ‘I want this to be mailed but I don’t care how and I don’t know what’s going to happen when I leave’ and Lulu was thinking ‘I am at work and things about this place are normal to me; maybe ideally I’d be doing something else, but right now I’m helping this person, I know how to help them and after I do my job I don’t know what’s going to happen.’

  Lulu said ‘I’m gonna close it now’ about my envelope. I said ‘oh great, thanks. Yeah, it would’ve been like ‘oh no, big mistake’ if it was closed and the wrong package.’ Rested my eyes on a box behind the counter with ‘IRONLUNG’ printed on the side in large letters. Lulu said ‘okay you can pay now.’ I grabbed the phone, thinking it was the credit card swiping device. Lulu laughed and said ‘no you give the card to me.’ I laughed a little and handed her my card as I said ‘I thought, you know. It looks like one of those things.’ She handed me a stapled r
eceipt but didn’t let go. I watched the receipt and nodded while she said when the things would arrive in other places, something about a tracking number, going online. Then she let me take the receipt. I smiled, said ‘thank you so much’ as I walked to the door, studiously looking at the receipt without reading it. I stopped and turned to face where lulu now stood, in the middle of the store. I said ‘wait don’t I have to sign?’ She laughed and said ‘no that’s it.’ I smiled like a big idiot and said ‘thanks’ as I exited FedEx, feeling mildly like Judd Nelson at the end of ‘the Breakfast Club,’ raising his hand triumphantly with Molly Ringwald’s earring in his ear as the frame freezes before the credits.

  10:31pm: Baby took this day out. Now all I have to do is the box of books. And like, what, call dad? Easy. Easy peasy. A rapper could be like ‘[something easy] I got that shit: kindergarten.’

  Hungry. Driving to Wawa to get BLT.

  10:48pm: this guy in Wawa…I can’t even…it was like a Mike judge movie or something, how much he didn’t know what was going on…not even going to try to reproduce…wish I had a stenographer with me…you’d also need to see him though…jesus…

  11:20PM: parked outside apartment, talking to dad on phone. good talk. we were both about to eat sandwiches with pickles on them. dad was like ‘oh you gotta put the pickles on, it’s so nice to take a bite with a pickle.’

  11:21PM: entered apartment. fed cats. got sandwich ready for after packing box of books. wawa has some baller type shit going on with their condiments, you can get condiments on the sandwich AND on the side. just by pressing a button. some real baller type shit.

  11:30PM: packed books from ‘abe’ to ‘german.’ boom. 30 minutes to spare.

  11:34PM: someone paypaled me $100 for seemingly nothing, i think. haven’t opened email yet. jesus christ, person. thank you. this BLT is gonna taste extra good.

  MARCH 28, 2013

  1:04AM: ben brooks sent the $100, with instructions to spend it on drugs. light gchat argument with ex-boyfriend about renting a u-haul friday. he thinks it’d would be ‘wasteful’ because his dad has a pick-up truck. definitely seems like i have more things than my car and a pick-up truck can hold. furniture. shit. agreed to see how it looks when everything is packed, then maybe rent a u-haul. just want to leave it all on the street.

  i have clothes with sizes ranging from two to eight. i’m like a 27 or 28 in pants and girl’s medium or small or kind of ‘whatever’ in shirts. 34B. haha. who wants my bras? bras have always looked ‘embarrassed’ on my body, i feel. like ‘jesus, this is where i have to be? after that ad?’

  2:25AM: laying in bed. ate 1mg xanax. drinking a beer. the people below me are yelling again. the woman seems more mad tonight. they are slamming things and the walls are vibrating sometimes. i haven’t seen this couple, but in the past i have seen the couple who lived there before them. they had one or two small children. they would scream like, insane maniac screaming, like punk band with zero twitter followers and 5000 t-shirts to sell screaming. the children also screamed sometimes but i understood their screaming, they were probably trying to get their parents to hear them, but was hard because there was already so much screaming. it would be like, in the morning, ex-boyfriend and i would wake to the sounds of this couple screaming. one time i stomped hard on the floor, to ‘check up’ on them. the guy yelled ‘the fuck i’m gonna quiet down in my own house’ or something. it was funny.

  imagine people screaming things like ‘LEAVE ME ALONE’ or ‘I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU WANT FROM ME’

  wait, shit. they do that. it’s normal, kind of, to do that. i’ve done that, i think. haha.

  2:33AM: in like 20 years you’re going to start meeting people named ‘huffington.’ then in 300 years you’re going to start meeting people named ‘huffington post’ because people will have forgotten about ‘the huffington post.’ they will have just, over time, noticed other people walking around named ‘huffington’ and…maybe…i don’t know what accounts for the ‘post’ being a part of the name 300 years away. there’s always some margin of error in these things, isn’t there? social gene mutations? the ‘random’ variable? ‘random noise variation’ accounting for…adaptation? used to know college stuff. shit. some people just keep knowing that shit after college. ho, ho, ho. not i.

  recently i tried replacing typing ‘haha’ or ‘hehe’ with ‘HO HO HO.’ also in high school katie and i tried to replace actually-laughing with saying ‘that’s funny.’ seemed impossible.

  4:45AM: since i didn’t account for ‘no more refills’ variable on birth control and i didn’t get it refilled i invented an auxiliary, semi-ass-related, lower-level punishment: uploaded two topless ‘as-is’ photos to flickr. posed a little in the first one, the second is closer to the position i was laying in when i had the idea. this is to punish myself, but also to sort of to show you what i mean about how my breasts look embarrassed in bras. the left one is like. looking down, kind of. always. dejectedly. like ‘basketball practice has been over for like 45 minutes, when is dad going to get here?’

  it feels so nice being in this bedroom and laying with shirley on the bed. i have this candle going. there are a lot of softly-colored green things in here and dim morning lighting. seems like the perfect size, like just enough room to walk to the bed. feels so good. i wish i felt this more regularly. excited to live alone again. i’m putting all my things in storage in maryland and living with my dad until i hear about the apartment in rockaway park. might make liveblog private tomorrow in case the apartment building people want to google me. seems. not worth it, though. if they’re the type. who would not like me because of this.

  i’m just fully typing like, fully conversational-style, like imagining i’m talking to a person when i type, not imagining ‘what should writing look like.’ it feels good. felt like i did that really hard today. i don’t think i’ve done this before, to the extent i’m doing it now. like not worrying about saying ‘like’ or. ending sentences like that. because that’s how i’d say it out loud. okay.

  5:12AM: want to wander around to see if any 24-hour places have ice cream to sell to me right now. not tired at all. xanax made headache go away.

  the brother of the guy who looked like joaquin phoenix, who also looked like joaquin phoenix, who i had even more formal/less casual sex with a few years later, told me this story:

  an ex-girlfriend turned to him in bed and said ‘there’s something weird on my ass, can you come look at it?’ he looked and saw nothing. she said ‘no, closer?’ he moved closer and saw nothing. she asked him to spread her asscheeks. when he did, she farted. it made a ‘pffffff’ noise. he thought she was really funny and loved that she did this—they’d make the noise at each other sometimes, as a joke. he said ‘but after that, there was no mystery left.’ he told me this story to stress wanting to keep ‘mystery’ in our relationship. think i don’t want ‘mystery,’ ever. feel like this liveblog has removed all possible ‘mystery’ about me. that’s not true. every moment can be mysterious, in its own way. er. i don’t know what i’m talking about. ice cream.

  5:46AM: ate another 1mg xanax. it is garbage night. taking that shit out. put on black coat from last fall and felt something.

  imagine the restaurant that would sell a ‘palzone.’ it’s like a calzone big enough for two people. two pals. you have to eat it in a special area of the restaurant with a big neon flickering sign that says ‘the pal zone.’

  WHAT I THINK SEX WITH CERTAIN GAME SHOW HOSTS WOULD BE LIKE:

  • out of all the game show hosts, i think alex trebek would be the kindest, most generous, but also ‘nastiest’ lover. he would make jokey comments like ‘i’m gonna show you where the daily double is.’ oh man. but there would be moments where you’d just look at each other’s eyes. you’d see how hard it is to really know him. like, really, really know him. the way you want to. the man who says ‘trout: that’s the fish.’ and you’d have no idea what he was thinking sometimes. he is mostly thinking about your pleasure, i thi
nk. then he gets aggressive sometimes. it’s just. it’d be really good.

  • pat sajak just does missionary i think. he has like. constant other concerns. he’s really easily distracted. he’s thinking about ebay a lot.

  • drew carey…is it public knowledge that drew carey is into some kind of really hardcore s&m? wasn’t there some thing about that? i picture him as more of a ‘strictly doggie-style’ guy, who like, enforces it to annoying degrees.

  • howie mandel is…so freaky…he just imitates porn, he says the things the guys holding the cameras say in porn. the camera guys who aren’t even doing the porn. when they’re like ‘oh yeah, look at that.’ he does stuff like that. he like, puts baby oil on everything. he’ll be like ‘are you gonna come for howie?’ and she’ll be making those really embarrassing noises because she thinks it’s making him happy.

  • steve harvey has studied the female orgasm. he has a sex swing but he’s never used it. his wife just like…really likes having sex with him, she bought it.

  • it’s hard for me to think about ryan seacrest having sex, they way it’s hard for me to imagine sea mammals having sex (not just because his name has ‘sea’ in it, i don’t think). like…how would he even…arrange things…with the way he is…his manner…i mean, i guess it would honestly be like ‘on the porn-y side of normal.’ the weird thing is thinking about his motives for sex. like, they are purely species-furthering in a weird aryan way that is not quite human. like, he ejaculates and thinks ‘YESSSSSSS. MY SEEEEEEEDDDDD.’

  7:55AM: just returned home from major unprecedented carb spree. bought an everything bagel with cream cheese from ‘the last drop’ (cafe i liked when i went to UARTs in 2003). then drove by the place i lived when i went to school there. i only went for a semester. i lived on the fourth floor. wanted to taste something sweet. i drove by whole foods but it was closed. then another health food store was closed. driving home, i passed kaplan’s and parked. i approached the counter, made an an invisible square with my hands, and said ‘is that thing a raspberry thing?’ a woman said ‘why, yes.’ i said ‘i’ll take it.’ the entire exchange seemed like it was under one minute. heard ‘have a happy holiday’ behind me as i opened the door to exit. legs and body are achy. i could eat like ten more carb units right now, i feel. so sleepy. not going to set alarm.