In the past week I’ve done so many Real Adult things that I’m not entirely sure I recognize myself anymore.

First, I bought skincare products. Like actual super high quality spendy face stuff to replace whatever I was using from the drug store that made it so my skin couldn’t decide if it was oily or dry or normal or iguana.

Second, I bought a bed. As in, I’m no longer sleeping on an air mattress on the floor. I have a box spring and a mattress and a pillowtop thing that goes on top of the mattress and sheets and a duvet and a duvet cover and pillows and and and THIS THE BEST DAY!

If you know me, you know how big of deal this is since I’ve spent the past two years sleeping on an air mattress. (I know right?!?)

It wasn’t like I planned it. It wasn’t like I woke up one day and was all, “You know what would be the best of the best? If I spent the next two years sleeping on the fucking floor.” No. This, like most other eyebrow-raising things in my life, just sort of happened.

I first bought the air mattress in June of 2008, when the woman I was renting a room from called to tell me that in fact, she wasn’t allowed to rent the room to begin with and that if I wasn’t out by the next afternoon, her and her children would be evicted.  I didn’t have anywhere to go, so I went with the only thing I could think of at the time: buying an air mattress and sleeping on the floor of my office.

This was back when I ran a children’s summer day camp, and apparently being homeless and sleeping in one’s office isn’t exactly smiled upon when you’re in charge of young children. So I went from my office to a friend’s house, and then from the friend’s house to my own small apartment, but even as I settled into my new place I knew I wouldn’t be staying long enough to invest in furniture, especially since the place was mostly furnished already.

So I slept on the floor and told everyone who asked that it was “fine!” and “fun!” and “sort of like a continual slumber party!” Which, for the record, was a big fat horse vagina lie. Not fine. Not fun. Not anything like a slumber party. I mean, imagine having all of your sex on an air mattress on the floor.

Exactly.

I left that apartment at the same time I left that job, and I took off from Southern California to my parents’ apartment in Arizona, and then from there to floors and couches all over the country during my three months of girl gone nomad-ing last fall. The tail end of the traveling brought me to San Francisco (air mattress in tow), and 8 months later here I am, splitting a one-bedroom apartment with Jamie, living behind two folding screens in the living room, but finally the owner of an actual bought-it-from-IKEA bed.

Finally. Fuck.

And on one hand, I’m all, “Yay! I win! Life’s too short to sleep on the floor!” but on the other hand I’m like, “Gah! Too many Real Adult things at once! Who am I! Whiplash!”

But then I look out my “bedroom” window and see the ball pit on the patio and remind myself that a) I still have a very long way to go before reaching full blown Real-Adult-ness and 2) Tequila solves everything.

Whoever says money can’t buy happiness needs to order an inflatable swimming pool and 500 multi-colored ball pit balls and then get back to me.

Nothing about this is practical. We have a fucking ball pit on our patio. But you know what? Practicality is overrated. You know what else? I think you should go out and do one ridiculous thing this week that gives you the kind of ecstasy-inducing heart boner that my ball pit gives me.

Dye your hair. Eat dessert for breakfast. Paint your ceiling blue. Take totally risqué photos of yourself for absolutely no reason. Buy ten pairs of hot pink underwear. Just do something, anything, that makes you feel exhilarated.

What the hell is the point of life if we’re not routinely making people question our sanity while we swim around in ball pits?

Big high fives to Jeremy, Norcross, and Lauren for coming over and blowing the pool up. Big high fives to James Bond for covertly filming this video clip and for smacking my ass in the middle of it. Big high fives to Jamie for putting up with me even though I secretly ordered 500 balls to our apartment and then pouted like a child when she wouldn’t agree to sell the couch so we could put the ball pit in its place. Big high fives to The Bloggess and her red dress for inspiring this post. And biggest ever high fives to anyone who chooses wild and irrational happiness over all of the other options.

(Also, yes, I know we need more balls. We’re getting more balls. Never enough balls. That’s what she said! That’s what I said! These jokes are too easy! BALLS!)

In some cruel twist of sleepless fate, I’m an insomniac who’s also allergic to almost all sleeping pills. Ambien and the like make me vomit, and so the only pills I can safely take are those over-the-counter sleep aids which, strangely enough, don’t make me sleep as much as they make me totally fucking crazy. Hallucinations, intense and bizarre dreams, hours of laying awake but not really being awake – and yet I take them, because some sleep > no sleep.

Earlier this week, I woke up in the middle of the night hallucinating off the sleep aid, coming in and out of a dream that involved being stuck in a maze and having no feet, when I realized that my jaw was unbelievably sore. Like two-hour-horse-blowjob sore. In my drugged haze, I thought, “I must be grinding my teeth down to the bone, maybe this is part of the maze” and imagined waking up the next morning bloody and toothless. What actually happened was that I woke up the next morning with so much pressure in my upper jaw that I couldn’t chew. A few hours later, I started complaining about pain in my eyes and pain in my cheeks and Jamie was all, “Um, sinus infection?” and I was like, “Oooh, sinus infection” and went to look it up online.

The glory of WebMD and Wikipedia confirmed that my symptoms did indeed equal sinus infection, although the websites also went on to suggest bone cancer and an abscessed tooth and the beginnings of going blind from infection. Which, you know, made me feel so much better and more optimistic about the overall outcome of my future.

Even better than the symptoms section is the home remedies section. According to the internet, I’m supposed to consume an unbelievable amount of garlic juice (apparently garlic is juiceable?), and I should also try irrigating my nasal passage using a syringe and sodium bicarbonate powder. You know, things everyone just has hanging out around the house.

The best though, is the section in which I do absurd things to my forehead:

“Try applying a paste of cinnamon and water on the forehead, applying a paste of ginger and water/milk on the forehead, or applying a paste of basil leaves, cloves, and dried ginger on the forehead.”

Somebody is making this shit up, I swear. Or the internet is being run by zombies who are trying to make my forehead more delicious before they bite into it and suck my brain out.

In other news, I bought yesterday’s Groupon for acupuncture, which I’ve never done and am terrified of but am committed to trying as a last ditch effort to cure my insomnia. And now my sinus infection. And maybe my soon-to-be sticky forehead and missing zombie brain.

I wonder how many ailments can be cured in one acupuncture treatment.

I wonder if they’ll charge me extra for the zombie thing.

This morning I woke up with the kind of hangover that makes me seriously weigh the pain of getting up to walk to the bathroom against the horror of wetting the bed.

I made it to the bathroom, but let’s start at the beginning.

San Francisco is, without question, the strangest city I’ve ever lived in. Which is surprising, because after 10+ years of living in New York I really did think that I had seen it all. The thing about San Francisco though, is that the crazy is brazenly out in the open. It’s proud of itself. It’s that guy who body checks you in the middle of the street and that guy a few blocks down who tells you that you have a beautiful smile, even though your mouth is closed, followed by a declaration of how he’d like to eat your hair.

This city seems to sanction its crazy, hosting street festival after street festival, continuously giving its residents a reason to be drunk outside in the middle of the day. That’s another thing about San Francisco, it’s a city full of lushes. Jamie and I were talking about this the other day, about how we don’t fit into any of the overt San Francisco cliches (gay, pretentious, hipster, gay pretentious hipster, etc.), but we do fit the quieter mold of likes-to-drink-heavily-for-no-reason-at-all-other-than-the-fact-that-it’s-a-Tuesday-and-wine-is-better-than-no-wine.

So, being that yesterday was a Tuesday, we figured we’d partake. We bought our Two Buck Chuck and did the thing where I sit on the barstool and she stands across the counter from me and we talk until there’s nothing left to say and we drink enough wine to want more wine and then we sprawl out on the couch and watch a randomly selected Friends DVD and discuss how unrealistic it is that women on TV seem to always be wearing a man’s dress shirt after sex as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, when really, I can’t think of a single situation in which I’d get out of bed and be all, “That was lovely, can you hand me the shirt you wore to work today?”

Somewhere between the DVD watching and the obsessive wine drinking, we also managed to severely burn a batch of popcorn and then “fix” said popcorn by melting all the butter in the fridge over it so that we could eat it anyway. Which is to say that this morning was rough and that it’s pretty much going to be touch and go for the rest of the day. Especially since I’m about to leave to get a Brazilian wax, something that falls near “vigorous aerobic activity” and “talking to my mother” on a list of the worst possible things to do while suffering from this kind of hangover.

Yes, this is your cue to think kind and gentle thoughts for my soon-to-be-pained vagina. Unless you’re this guy and you get your giggles from taking a bottle filled with your semen to the grocery store and spraying it on unsuspecting women, in which case I’d appreciate if you never ever ever thought about my vagina ever at all.

The internet is a dirty dirty rabbit hole.

One minute you’re living real life, walking home from the grocery store, passing by that telescope and binocular store that’s somehow still in business in a shopping center in the middle of San Francisco even though you’ve never seen a single person come out with a pamphlet, yet alone an actual telescope, and then the next minute you’re home and you’re on your couch eating all of the groceries you bought (or more accurately, drinking all of the wine you bought because sometimes a 25 year old woman just needs to drink her feelings) and you see an email pop up that’s all, “So and so has done such and such annoying thing on Facebook” and you click over, because you’re alone and you’re bored, and you look at the wall post, which leads you to that person’s profile, which leads you to a different person’s profile, where you see that hey, this person’s boyfriend is mutually friends with a friend you know through your blog and huh, isn’t the world such a small and funny place?

And you’re curious, of course, so you click around some more. You click and go on a virtual tour of everything that’s been happening to everyone you’ve ever known since whenever it was that you last knew them and you can’t stop, click after click, until you look up and realize that you’ve spent an inordinate amount of time learning that your ex is finished with law school and that a girl from college lost her job and that your former neighbor is living in another country and that the guy whose arms you cried in on the morning of 9/11 is married, and you think, “When did we all start hurling ourselves down such drastically different paths?”

You click more, stalk more, judge more, falling down the dirty dirty rabbit hole, staring at pictures of Miss California and “liking” the page of another high school classmate who’s now running for City Council in that very same city.

You close the computer, wondering how long it’ll be before this same guy shows up in your news feed announcing that he’s running for President of the United States, followed by a frenzy of comments from that group of girls who, if they’re anything like their slutty high school selves, will not so jokingly ask when they can audition for the role of his Monica Lewinsky.

When I found out that Jamie hadn’t seen the first two seasons of Grey’s Anatomy I was all, “Um, THE FUCK?? Those are the best seasons!” and she was like, “Uhhhh” and I was all, “Sit down right now, we’re watching them.”

And so we did. Four, five, six episodes in a row. We even stopped going out for a while, making our friends (HI DREA) come over and sit on the couch and watch it with us because we were too invested in the process to waste time with things like “outdoors” and “public” and “three dimensional people.”

But do you know what happens when a few women spend hours upon hours watching wildly dramatic television? They get just a little bit too into it, and one of them starts yelling at the characters on the screen and is all, “Don’t worry Meredith! No! Stop crying! You and Derek eventually do get married! On a post-it note. Also, you get pregnant with his baby. But also, you have a miscarriage before you can tell him you’re pregnant. And also, he gets shot and we’re pretty sure it turns out fine but we’re not entirely sure because season 7 hasn’t started yet.”

And then another person on the couch yells, “Don’t worry George, you marry Callie. And then you drunkenly cheat on her with Izzie. And then it doesn’t work out with Izzie because the sex is awful. Also, your dad dies. Also, you die.”

And then another person on the couch chimes in with, “Seriously, relax Izzie. This thing you’re going through? It isn’t nearly as big of a deal as when you get fucking brain cancer and start seeing visions of your dead ex-fiance.”

God, can you imagine if we could do this to ourselves? If I could go back in time and be all, “Don’t worry 17 year old Nicole, you get into NYU. But then you’re in debt for like, ever. Also, that relationship you’re in? It doesn’t work out. Neither does the next one. Or the next one. Also, you drink too much vodka and make a series of unbelievably bad decisions. And then you have to leave in the middle of class one day to take a pregnancy test. And then you almost have a heart attack from drinking 13 cans of sugar free Red Bull in a 22 hour period. Also, despite your bizarre employment history wherein you spend five years as Director of a children’s summer day camp, four years as a nanny, three months on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, two years at Williams Sonoma, and one year as manager and part owner of a create-your-own-cookie shop, you wind up managing business operations for Shatterboxx Media and writing a totally irreverent and inappropriate blog that gives people way too much information about your vagina.”

Which is to say, life is unpredictable. Stop freaking out. Things are either going to turn out the way you planned, or they’re not. And sometimes the “not” is the best thing that could ever happen.

We were making cocktails a few weeks ago and I was trying to recreate the glory of the ginger vodka plus Sierra Mist drink that should unquestionably be illegal, but we didn’t have any Sierra Mist so I rode the elevator down to the basement with a handful of quarters and a mission to empty the vending machine of all of its Sierra Mist-ey goodness.

Except the vending machine didn’t have Sierra Mist either. Or Sprite. Or ginger ale. Or anything that’s clear and carbonated and mixes well with ginger vodka. So I looked at the selections, settled on Sunkist, put my quarters in, pushed the button, heard the thud of the can coming down, and grabbed it. Then I looked at it and realized that it wasn’t Sunkist, it was orange Fanta. And like, what? Who does that? Who puts the totally wrong beverage in a vending machine and doesn’t warn people??

Frustrated, I decided to pick a second choice. I put my quarters in, selected unsweetened Nestea, pushed the button, heard the thud, grabbed the can, and guess what? No unsweetened Nestea. You know what I got instead? Fucking diet lemon flavored Brisk tea. Not unsweetened. Not plain tea. Not even the same BRAND. And like, I stood there for a few minutes and looked at the vending machine and wondered why this type of thing *always* happens to me.

Also, why is it so absurdly impossible to get a real person on the phone when you call a customer service number?

Also, how the fuck am I going to Vegas again on Sunday and what do I do with the fact that it’s going to be 108 degrees??

Also, please remind me to tell you the story about my Vajacial (facial-esque procedure for the vagina) when I get back. And the story about the yogurt tampon. You definitely want to hear the story about the yogurt tampon. In fact, you should probably just prepare yourself for an entire post full of my new found vaginal wisdom.

Yes, I have a very wise vagina.

It’s not that I didn’t know where Alaska was. Okay okay, fine. FINE. I didn’t know where Alaska was.

I blame the placemat. Do you remember those placemats? The ones that had a map of the United States on one side and a blank map on the other side and the point was to study the first side and then flip it over, take a washable marker, and test yourself on which state was which? I grew up with a collection of these placemats – one of the US, one of the world, one of the planets, the world’s flags, the multiplication tables – my mom was all about mealtime education.

The map of the United States though, that one was my favorite. It just made the most sense. I mean, how is a seven-year-old brain supposed to wrap itself around there being countries named Uzbekistan and cities named Srednekolymsk? I found it much easier and more comforting to be all, “Florida! This one’s Florida!” and leave it at that.

I’ve recently learned, however, that the problem with my beloved US map placemat is that it fucking lied to me. It fucking lied by putting Alaska and Hawaii in the bottom left corner and making them both look like islands. They were just floating there, you know? Sectioned off by this white box that screamed “THESE STATES ARE NOT CONNECTED TO THE OTHER STATES AND ARE IN FACT ISLANDS OF THEIR OWN.”

Which is how I nonchalantly came to believe that Alaska was an island and that it was floating off to the left of the United States.

I guess I just never really looked at a map of the US after childhood, not carefully at least, and it wasn’t until Jamie and I bought one of those huge wall maps a few months ago that I realized my entire life has been a dirty web of geographic lies.

We were going over the map, listing out the places we most wanted to visit, and I’m all, “Woah, look at Alaska” and she’s like, “What about it?” and I’m all, “Since when the fuck is it connected to Canada??” and she’s like, “Shut up, no it’s not” and I’m all, “No seriously, look! Alaska is part of Canada!” and then we stood there for a few minutes, looking at each other, looking back at the map, looking back at each other, trying to figure out what it meant to live in a world where a) Alaska is not an island, b) Alaska is connected to Canada, and c) neither of us knew about it.

And I get it, okay? I get that you’re second guessing our status as grown women because the two people we told in person looked at us like we had horses growing out of our torsos. It’s just. I don’t understand how no one ever told me about this. And the real question here, the real question is what else don’t I know?! Is Michigan really in Saudi Arabia? Is Saudi Arabia next to Australia? Also, does Denmark seriously own Greenland?

Which is to say, happy 4th of July everyone. Jamie and I are belligerently idiotic.

One of my favorite scenarios is when I’m having a conversation with someone and a ridiculous thing comes up and the other person is all, “You couldn’t pay me to do that,” because that’s my cue to call their over-exaggerating bluff and begin the cash-in-a-duffel-bag game.

I’m all, “Oh really? What if someone seriously gave you a duffle bag full of cash, on the spot, tax free, to do said thing right now? You’d so do it.” And the other person hesitates and is like, “Well…” and I’m all, “I fucking told you.”

And so the game begins.

After we finish the first round and this person has named their price, I start listing one absurd activity after another to see what else this person would do in exchange for a duffel bag full of cash. Although actually, money in really large quantities is often too abstract so I usually choose to play the game with a dream-come-true prize instead of a cash prize. Like, I really want to go to the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia. I want to go there more than I want to go to any other place that exists amongst all the places ever. Yes, I’ve researched all the places ever. Yes, the world’s largest salt flats > whatever place you’re going to suggest. At least for me. Because it’s my one place. So, when playing the cash/dream-in a-duffel-bag game, I find that it’s much more exciting to offer people the chance to achieve their dream because if you play for cash-in-a-bag, people say boring shit like, “I could invest it!” which makes the whole thing remarkably less fun for me, and isn’t the entirely selfish point of this game to make myself laugh?

A few weeks ago, I made Jamie play with me. We quickly got deep into it and the prize was a trip for two to Antarctica, which is the place we most want to go together. “Okay,” I said. “In exchange for our trip to Antarctica, you have to go down on Oprah” and Jamie doesn’t miss a beat before being all, “Done” and I’m like, “But what if it’s on live TV? And you have to be naked?” and she’s all, “Um…” and I’m like, “And she has to be naked” and Jamie’s all, “….” and I’m like, “And! And! She has to finish by squirting all over your face!” which is when Jamie went all unintelligible noises on me that I think translated loosely to “What the fuck is wrong with you?!” and I’m like, “But it’s for Antarctica!” and Jamie’s all, “Are you disgusted with yourself yet? Ew, you’re not. You’re like, self-satisfied” and I couldn’t even respond after that because I was laughing so hard that I almost puked and I couldn’t even manage to say what I wanted to say, which was that I’m obviously a far better friend because I’d *totally* let Oprah squirt on my face for her.

Also, a few hours after the game ended Jamie sent me this photo via text message of what she thought Oprah’s squirting face would look like, which I think eliminates all questions as to whether or not Jamie and I are made for each other.

**

Update: I completely forgot to ask what your dream prize is and what the ridiculous things are that you’d do to win it. Clearly I suck at playing my own game. But you know what I don’t suck at? Taking one for the team and blowing Oprah so we can all go on a blogosphere field trip to Antarctica to smuggle home some adorable fucking penguins.

In case we somehow wind up living together one day, there are a few things you should know about me. Number one is that I bake excellent brownies. Number two is that I’ll likely make your bed whenever you’re not home, whether you want me to or not. And number three is that there isn’t a circumstance in the history of circumstances under which I’ll be the one to deal with a bug/rodent. In fact, I’ll move out before I deal with a bug/rodent. And from the time of bug/rodent discovery until I move out, I’ll stand on the barstool and curse both you and the bug/rodent, which I’m thinking is one of those qualifications that will make me an incredible mother, no?

My future four-year-old child: Help! Mommy! There’s a spider in my room!
Me: Well. That sucks.
My hysterically crying child: But I’m so scared!
Me: Well of course you are, the spider is probably going to crawl into your mouth and lay eggs while you’re sleeping.

(Do spiders even lay eggs? They can’t possibly have live births, right? But if they did, they’d have to have vaginas. Maybe spiders have vaginas? Oh my god, I wonder what a spider vagina looks like. Actually, wait. Wait! I’ve finally found something so horrifying that even I won’t Google it.)

Anyway, if we ever live together, you are the one on critter patrol. You. Not me. Not ever me.

This particular scenario (the “which one of us deals with critters” dilemma) hadn’t occurred in the six months of mine and Jamie’s cohabitation. Until last week. Until last week when a wasp arrived in our apartment.

I was the one who first noticed this wasp, and of course I immediately assumed my permanent role in these situations: shrieking and hiding next to the couch. But, Jamie was shrieking too. After we shrieked together for a little bit, I calmly told her that if she’d like to return to our wasp-free existence, she’d better fucking do something. She indicated that I had better fucking help. I agreed, on the condition that “helping” meant “throwing things at the wasp from afar in hopes of stunning it into submission.”

And so it began.

I started with two small Jaegermeister basketballs we were given at our local bar. But I have terrible aim, and I missed, and the wasp stayed put. I then threw a Sky Mall catalog at it. But I missed again, and the wasp stayed put. I then decided to throw my two deflated sex dolls at it, one after the other, and even though my aim was bullseye-like this time around, the wasp stayed put.

We stopped to evaluate. We discussed strategy. We debated how one battles such a freak fearless ninja wasp. We settled on the decision that our only real option here was to continue throwing random items at it. Next went a Trader Joe’s bag. Followed by a rubbery plastic penis (the one that came with the male blowup doll), and even though I was positive I had hit the wasp in its tiny fearless freak face with this penis, it didn’t move. At all. Nothing. Just the stationary buzzing of vehement threats to our lives. Which is when Jamie stepped in, took one shot at the wasp with her purple shoe, knocked it down onto the windowsill, walked over, and beat it to death with the matching shoe. Like Rocky – if Rocky would have done less pointless running of the stairs and more pummeling of unwanted insects on my behalf.

Jamie – 1, Freak Fearless Ninja Wasp – 0, Rocky- 0, Nicole- N/A

Which brings me to my next point, that my roommate > all other roommates and that if faced with a wasp invasion, you’ll probably die because you don’t live with her. And that would make me sad, sure, but not so sad that I’m willing to give up Jamie so she can come save you. I will compromise though. I’ll compromise by giving away one Wasp Fighter Care Package, containing the following weaponry:

- 1 female blowup doll
- 1 patch for said female blowup doll in case you pop a hole in her
- 1 set of instructions for how to open the hygienic seal on said female blowup doll’s vagina and anus, which is now only relevant to her anus since I impatiently cut her vagina open with a knife
- 1 male blowup doll
- 1 penis that fits said male blowup doll
- 2 small Jaegermeister basketballs
- 1 Sky Mall catalog
- anything else that Jamie and I decide is relevant between today and next Wednesday

Now, please raise your little commenting hand if you’d like to be the winner of this package.

[Update: I couldn’t resist. I Google image searched spider vagina. On one hand, I’m afraid to report that a few of the photos may have blinded me. One the other hand, I’m happy to report that one of the photos is of a spider performing cunnilingus on a human woman. Fair tradesies, I'd say.]

[Update 2: Sara wins!]