Listen, I’m a low maintenance girl. I don’t need a lot of specific shit to be happy, and I only have two rules for the people in my life: no jail, and no hospital. That’s it. Do whatever you want, be whoever you are, just don’t wind up in jail and don’t wind up in the hospital. Unless you’re like giving birth or some shit, then by all means go to the hospital. Or, if you’re anything like some of the girls I went to high school with, just have your baby at home in an inflatable pool and post graphic pictures of your placenta on Facebook.

(Thanks for making that available to me, Mark Zuckerberg. Thanks a lot.)

Other than pushing a human being out of your vagina, though, there will be absolutely no hospital. And definitely no jail. Easy, right? YOU’D THINK. And yet, there I was yesterday, only a few slight degrees of separation away from both jail and the hospital. I also met Hugh Jackman, but that’s an entirely different story.

Wait, let’s back up for a second. Have you ever been to Bay to Breakers? If not, and if you haven’t heard of it, it’s basically an all-out crazy fest that happens in San Francisco every May under the guise of a 12K race. I mean, the 12K race actually does happen, but the serious runners are overshadowed by the thousands of costume-wearing drunk people who wander along the race route in a substance-induced parade. I don’t know how you go from one of the healthiest activities (running) to such a shitshow (THIS) during the same event, but yesterday was the 100th anniversary of said event so apparently people in this madhouse city are all about making it happen.

This was my second year at Bay to Breakers, but it was my first year doing it sober, and as a result my biggest piece of advice to you is that if you ever have the opportunity to soberly attend an event where people are a) completely naked, b) falling down drunk in the streets, c) dressed in full head-to-toe costume, or d) all of the above, take it. You have no idea the things you miss when you’re part of the drunken masses.

I mean, if Amber and I weren’t sober, how would we have managed to keep track of the number of naked old man penises we saw? (15) Also, while we’re on the subject, how is it possible that cops were stopping people to pour out their open beers, yet it was entirely fine for FULL GROWN MEN to wander the streets wearing nothing but a pink sparkly cowboy hat and furry boots? Isn’t it illegal to run around naked in public once you’re over the age of, like, 3? James Bond says it’s legal in San Francisco as long as you’re not obstructing traffic, but I’m not entirely sure his opinion counts since he drunkenly somersaulted over a fence yesterday and cut his effing face open. And also, do I even want to question why my boyfriend knows the rules about what naked adult men are allowed to do in public in the city of San Francisco?

Probably best to just leave that one alone.

Anyway, after he almost broke the “no hospital” rule by destroying his face, and after Amber almost broke the “no jail” rule by getting her car impounded for being parked too close to the parade route, I met Hugh Jackman. He was signing autographs outside a theatre a few blocks from my apartment, and apparently he’s been performing there for the past few weeks. To be honest, I have absolutely no idea what Hugh Jackman does in a solo show involving him and a seventeen piece orchestra, but I’m going to pretend it involves his delicious Australian accent, the Wolverine claws, some soothing classical music, and a lot of gyrating in the general direction of my apartment.

So, to recap: James Bond is missing a part of his nose and a lot of his forehead, it costs $400 to get your car out of the impound if you do it the same day, men can walk naked through the streets of San Francisco as long as they properly adhere to traffic signals, and all of this is probably just a preview of what I’ll witness in Vegas later this week.

Huzzah!

Here’s the thing about plans: they change.

At NYU, I thought I was going to major in Communications and then pursue a graduate degree, get a corporate job, and stay in New York City forever. Instead, I majored in Food Studies, graduated early, never went to grad school, started a blog, spent five years running a children’s summer day camp outside LA, quit, backpacked around the country until I was totally broke, and moved to San Francisco for a guy I don’t even talk to anymore.

Throughout those years, I spent an unbelievable amount of time planning for the future, and then an equally unbelievable amount of time feeling anxious about my plans. Would they work out? Was I doing enough to prepare? Would I be ready? Was I on the right path? Making plans and stressing about plans was basically my full-time job.

Looking back, it makes me laugh that every single long-term plan I made wound up changed or entirely scraped. Even more recently, when I moved to San Francisco, I thought I knew what kind of job I would interview for and what would unfold with the guy I was seeing, but now, a year and a half later, I realize that I never could have planned for what actually happened. I couldn’t have predicted that I’d wind up co-owning a corporation with my best friend and working from home, or that I’d be in the happiest relationship of my life with a guy I didn’t even know existed before I moved here.

And see, that’s the thing. We can’t make big elaborate plans for our lives, because it’s all just a product of one thing leading to another thing. The plans I stressed out about making two years ago, and then a year ago, and then even six months ago, none of them are reflective of what’s happening in my current life, which means it’s probably about time that I finally learned the lesson, huh? That plans always change, at least a little, no matter what, and that they often change more than a little and in ways you could absolutely never have predicted. So stop predicting.

There are lots of reasons why our plans change, of course, but the biggest has to do with the people we love. The plans we made on our own often need to be broken down and rebuilt once we’re taking someone else’s plans into consideration. And so, less than a year and a half after arriving in San Francisco, I’m getting ready to pack up and move down to Los Angeles at the end of May. James Bond is starting a PhD program at USC in the fall, so we’ll be settling into Southern California for at least the next four years -  a step I never could have planned for, but am so excited about now that it’s here.

Recently, I heard it said that good chess players always need to think five moves ahead, but that great chess players only need to think one move ahead, because they know it’s the right move. I have no idea what our life will be like in LA, and I don’t have a plan for it, but I know that moving there is the right move, and as for what comes next? My life has shown me that I’ll just have to wait and see.

In an attempt to combat the challenges of working from home, my friend Amber and I have started co-working together once a week, harnessing the power of accountability that comes from having someone else look over at you and yell, “I CAN SEE THAT YOU’RE ON TWITTER. GET OFF TWITTER. DO YOUR ACTUAL WORK.”

We work together on Wednesdays, and in a few short weeks we’ve already established a routine of working furiously for set amounts of time, taking food breaks, and then working furiously again until 5pm, when we watch the new episode of Glee that aired the night before and play our magical Glee drinking game.

The rules of the game are simple:

1. Drink whenever Sue says something that would create a lawsuit in a real workplace
2. Drink whenever Sue makes a comment about Will’s hair
3. Drink whenever Rachel wears Argyle
4. Drink whenever Puck says anything sexual
5. Drink at your desecration whenever something happens that’s drink worthy, such as Blaine & Rachel’s duet of “Don’t You Want Me” in last week’s episode and all the times you want to beat Emma in the face for marrying John Stamos’ character instead of sleeping with Will, because even though John Stamos is hot and Will has gotten kind of sad and pathetic, you’re still rooting for them to bone because come on.

Additionally, the rules of mine and Amber’s game also state that you have to drink whenever the commercials on Hulu are terrifyingly sad. Which, if you’ve been paying attention, is all the time. Seriously though, have you noticed that? There you are, watching a fun comedic show like Glee, when Hulu goes to commercial and it’s like, “Bam! Kids with cancer!” and then next commercial break it’s all, “Here! Look at all these people in Africa who don’t have any water.” And like, I get it, it’s sad and people need real help. But, I don’t know, maybe Hulu could do a better job of picking their audience for these types of ads. I mean, I’m HAPPY. I’m watching fake teenagers get drunk on wine coolers. I’m at my least likely point to stop what I’m doing and donate to Haiti. Save the sad commercials for when I’m watching Private Practice, the most depressing show on television – just don’t show them during Glee. Or Modern Family. Or Mr. Sunshine. Or Outsourced. Or Raising Hope.

Oh hey! I watch too many TV shows on Hulu! But like, it’s Hulu. They’re all just there. SOMEBODY HAS TO WATCH THEM! If Hulu didn’t exist, I’d watch a lot less TV. Because what’s the alternative? We don’t have cable, so the few channels we do get only work like 36% of the time and even then you have to stand in a particular spot of the apartment and do weird things with the remote to stop it from cutting out to that “LOW SIGNAL” screen every 7 seconds, and really, who has that kind of stamina??

But back to Amber. She and I have a running list of items to purchase for our co-working sessions, things like “blue cheese” and “French music” and “fly swatters” (the cheese for our mouths, the music because we’re fancy, and the fly swatters to smack each other with when we wander over to internet distraction land). I’m thinking that we also need additional TV show drinking games (suggestions, anyone?) and more places to go for orgasm-inducing mac & cheese, since last week found us concluding our alcoholic Glee shenanigans with a BART ride over to Oakland to try Homeroom, the new mac & cheese restaurant that’s actually everything you’d think a mac & cheese restaurant could be, AND MORE.

Spoiler alert: I fucking love butter.

When I tell people that I was a Food Studies major at NYU, most of them are surprised. They’re all, “Seriously? That’s a real major?” and I’m like, “No, asshole, I’m paying all of this student loan debt as a joke.”

I often get asked why I’m not using my degree by working in the food industry, something that’s followed immediately by the question of whether or not I think my unused degree is a total waste. To which I respond, “I don’t know, how’s your career in Spanish Literature and your side job in Sociology working out?”

Most undergraduate degrees are useless. Well, no, that’s not quite right. What I mean to say is that most undergraduate degrees from a liberal arts school are useless for everything except getting into more school. Because college is like a holding pen, isn’t it? A place where we go to pretend we’re functioning adults. Most of what we learn in college isn’t about the information itself, it’s about how to access and process the information – being responsible enough to show up to class, turn shit in on time, not write papers drunk – that sort of thing.

It’s now been over four years since I graduated from college (how the fuck??) and I can think of only three NYU-learned skills that I still use on a regular basis. The first is how to retroactively pinpoint, with ridiculous accuracy, the drink that should have been my last drink the night before. The second is how to walk down a crowded street at an absurdly fast pace without knocking anyone over. And the third is how to cook.

When people get snarky with me about my Food Studies degree, asking if “Food Studies” is just a fancier way to say “Home Ec 101,” I take great pleasure in reminding them that while I may not be using the specifics of my expensive education in a professional capacity, I at least know how to fucking feed myself without a microwave, which is more than a lot of adults can say.

Which brings me, in a totally unrelated way, to my next point: butter is fantastic. That’s another thing about having a Food Studies degree, people assume that knowing so much about food must mean that I’m always on a diet, or that I’m obsessed with being the skinniest I can be. Once, at a party, I mentioned my field of study and was immediately asked what weight-loss tips I was excited to try.

Hey, here’s a public service announcement: never assume someone wants to be on a diet, no matter their size.

And here’s another one: the things we dislike most about other people are actually the things we dislike most about ourselves.

For example, I have some serious opinions about people who bake homemade bread. I tell myself that they have too much time on their hands, that they must live in the woods, that they have nothing better to do. When really? I’m jealous as fuck. I want to bake my own bread. And so, last night, I did. Because do you know what the difference is between a person who does something and a person who doesn’t? The act of just Doing The Thing. All it took for me to bake a loaf of bread was to just bake the goddamn loaf of bread. Less talking, more doing. Is it the best bread in the world? No, but it’s bread nonetheless. Bread that I made. From scratch. In my effing house.

I’d like to tell you that the reason I finally baked a loaf of bread is because I had some big revelation about how it’s okay to not be good at something right away and that struggling to learn new things builds character. But that’s not why I did it. I did it because I bought the most delicious butter* I’ve ever tasted this past weekend and I just flat out needed more ways to get said butter into my mouth. But, don’t worry, I’m a college educated butter eater, so that makes it all okay.

*If you live in San Francisco, it’s McClelland’s Organic Butter from Bi-Rite Market. If you don’t live in San Francisco, well, that sucks, because this butter is astonishing. I’d offer a giveaway of it if I knew how to mail butter. Wait, are you even *allowed* to mail butter? Apparently, I need a hook up at both the McClelland dairy farm and the US Postal Service. That way, you could all get personalized deliveries of butter, compliments of some batshit crazy girl’s blog. That’s what the internet is for, right??

So, James Bond and I moved in together this weekend!

As a result, I now have twice as much stuff, half as much storage space, and someone who is more or less obligated to deal with me at all times.

In exchange, I’ve replaced James Bond’s non-functioning wireless router with my totally functioning wireless router and have since learned that these devices are basically magic because they automatically carry your old network name over to your new place. Which is to say that James Bond is now stuck with a publicly visible network named “Horse Vagina,” something I think is obsessively hysterical and he thinks is probably the tip of the iceberg of what his life will be like now that I’m here 24/7.

OH WELL, OOPSIE, TOO LATE!!

A few weeks ago, I woke up at 5:40am to the sound of someone from one of the upstairs apartments peeing into the ball pit on my patio. The problem, aside from the obvious fact that there was someone’s disgusting drunk urine in there (no one pees in a ball pit sober), was that I couldn’t do anything about it because I wasn’t sure which of the upstairs neighbors was responsible. I thought about going door-to-door and asking, but really, who would ever admit to that?

I thought about exaggerating the whole thing, tearfully telling them that the ball pit belongs to my young daughter and that she’s disabled and that the ball pit is her favorite toy and that she was out there playing when it happened and that she was open-mouth laughing from the sheer delight of having a ball pit and that someone peed in her fucking mouth and that we had to rush her to the hospital because she ingested urine that was 90% vodka – but those shenanigans seemed like a) too much effort and b) something even I’m not dramatic enough to pull off.

Frustrated, I decided to report it to the building manager, but I stopped myself after realizing that a ball pit would definitely fall under one of the eleventy thousand categories of prohibited patio items that make me wonder why they even built patios for this building in the first place (WHY GIVE ME A PATIO IF I CAN’T USE IT??) and that admitting to having such a “hazardous” item would probably get me in more trouble than the mysterious urinators who poisoned my fake disabled daughter. Not worth it.

Also, my building manager people are never actually in their building manager office during normal building managing hours, a fact I learned a week after the ball pit incident when I went to ask questions about the guy two doors down from me whose apartment had been broken into, in the middle of the day, and who was now missing all of his valuable shit.

I mean, whaaaaat??

So, to recap, I’m paying exorbitant amounts of rent money to live alone in an apartment building where thieves break into your living room via your patio and yet the building doesn’t allow you to have anything on the patio to create an obstacle course for the thieves because it’s against the goddamn safety code and then even if you do decide to put things on your patio anyway, people fucking pee all over it.

Alright Antoine Dodson, you’re up.

On my flight to Denver last week, I accidentally spilled half of my Caesar salad on the woman sitting in the middle seat. She was in her 80s, traveling home with her husband, and turbulence got the best of my salad and the worst of her velour jumpsuit.

Can you believe they still make velour jumpsuits?

She was nice about it though. I gave her some of my homemade dark chocolate and sea salt truffles as an apology, and we both spent the rest of the flight pretending that she didn’t smell like garlic and that I wasn’t horrifyingly embarrassed.

Over the past few months, I’ve been traveling so much that I’m constantly in a state of transition – packing and unpacking, repacking and unpacking again – bouncing between San Francisco, Chicago, Phoenix, Miami, and Denver, with upcoming trips to NYC, Seattle, Phoenix and maybe Denver again before the end of the year.

It’s not that I haven’t been enjoying it. It’s not that I haven’t been having an incredible time. It’s just that perpetually being the girl gone nomad is exhausting, and truly, I’m starting to realize that it’s not as fulfilling as I always think it’s going to be. The apartment that I’m living in now, in San Francisco, is the 19th apartment/house I’ve lived in over the past 25 years. That’s just too many places. Too many moves. Too many renditions of, “If I give this away, I won’t have to pack it.”

Virtually everything I own can fit into my Honda Civic. All I’d have to do is ditch my bed and I could leave town, for good, tomorrow. That constant one-foot-out-the-door-ness used to be enormously comforting for me, but now it just feels pathetic. What’s wrong with me that I can’t just pick a place and live there?

With Jamie moving out of our apartment at the end of November and leaving for Europe in January, I’ve been thinking a lot about my next move. Am I done being a city slut? Which city do I love enough to actually commit to? I’ve even been taking quizzes online to determine the list of cities that the internet thinks are the best fit for me. I’ve received results for Denver and Austin, Paris and San Francisco, Honolulu and New York City, which makes me think that the quizzes are completely arbitrary and not at all related to my answers, but it’s fun to play along anyway and imagine my life in each new place.

One quiz picked where I should live based on my favorite foods. It wanted to know if I preferred pizza to steak, if I had any interest in trying ostrich meatballs, and if access to anzac biscuits was important in my decision making process. What kinds of questions are those? Or, more accurately, why would I ever want to live in a place where it’s pizza or steak. It’s always pizza and steak. Also, no, I don’t want ostrich meatballs. Ever. And what the fuck is anzac?

Do you know what I do want? I want an apartment with a view. I want rental prices that aren’t high enough to force the decision between food and shelter. I want nightlife that isn’t douchey and pretentious, weather that let’s me go outside most of the year, public transportation that actually transports the public in an effective way, and a diverse culture of people who aren’t locked into one mindset. I want my perfect city to just materialize. I want someone else to decide for me. I want to finally learn that I am who I am and that living in a different city isn’t going to make me a different person.

This would be a whole lot easier if my decision was solely based on ostrich meatballs and anzac biscuits. Clearly it’s time to Google “anzac biscuits.”

If a friend of yours ever takes their first flying trapeze class and says, “Wow, that was really easy and I’m not at all sore,” you should punch that lying bitch of a friend in the throat and start immediately posting Craigslist ads looking for new friends.

In related news, Life List item #122 is complete and I didn’t die in the process. In fact, it was Venti-sized amounts of fun. TERRIFYING, but belligerent fun. Giant cause for celebration, no?

Special thanks to my friend Morgan for taking the class with me, to Circus Center San Francisco for offering classes such as Flying Trapeze and Mongolian Contortion (what?), and to the three kickass instructors who didn’t let me accidentally hang myself, or anyone else, all morning.

I’m not sure what the moral of this story is, but I’m almost positive that it has something to do with the fact that I’m probably as narcissistic as Tommy Hilfiger and therefore I need to get my own headshots taken.

It all started on Facebook. Jamie comes into the kitchen last night and she’s all, “Third Eye Blind is doing a random middle of the day concert in Union Square tomorrow!!” I look at her and I’m like, “I love Third Eye Blind!” and she’s all, “Same!” and I’m like, “Wait, Third Eye Blind is still together?” and she’s all, “Um, YES” and I’m like, “Huh” and she’s all, “And they’re giving away ten pairs of tickets on Facebook!” and I’m like, “Cool?”

And then she actually won.

We took the bus over there this afternoon, no idea what we were getting into, and then all of the sudden we learned that it’s not just a Third Eye Blind concert, it’s a collaborative event with Macy’s that’s being co-hosted by Tommy Hilfiger. Oh, and by the by, we were VIPs and would we like to come over here and wait in this line to meet the band? YES WE’D LIKE TO MEET THE BAND.

God, in another life I would have been a phenomenal groupie slut.

Waiting in line, we kept looking at each other and marveling at the overwhelming randomness of the day. “Remember when you won tickets to a Third Eye Blind concert on Facebook and now we’re waiting in a line on the third floor of Macy’s to meet them? What is our life?”

A little while later, the band came out to meet us and autograph CDs. You know who else came out? Tommy Hilfiger. And do you know what he did? He sat there, next to the band, and signed glossy 8 x 10 headshots. OF HIMSELF. Now listen, I get why certain people have headshots taken. If you’re an actor or a model or anything in this general category, it makes total sense. But Tommy Hilfiger? What the actual fuck is anyone going to do with an autographed headshot of Tommy Hilfiger?

Going through the line, Jamie and I were hysterical. Finally, we got up to the table where the five of them were sitting and we’re getting our CD signed and Jamie’s shaking hands with Stephan Jenkins and I’m telling him that this is the most random day of my life and he looks up at me and goes, “Everyday should be totally random” and I’m all, NEW LIFE MOTTO. Also, did you know that even while awkwardly wearing sunglasses inside, Stephan Jenkins is hot? Like, hot. Do you know who else was hot? The models standing around in Tommy Hilfiger clothes during the entire event that were silently all, “Look how pretty and all-American we are. Oh this football? We’re just going to toss it around in front of the cameras for a bit. Take a look at our blazers, we’re very sophisticated. We could be Yale students. Very rich Yale students named Brandon something something the third with little black books and not-so-quiet coke habits.”

Those kinds of models.

Apparently, the entire concert was to introduce some kind of partnership between Tommy (what’s up first name basis!) and Third Eye Blind. Some poverty initiative. I think? With models? Fuck, I’m a terrible listener when there are hot models and musicians around.

The concert was great though, except now Jamie and I each have an autographed copy of Ursa Major and an autographed photo of Tommy Hilfiger and really, we don’t need these things. Does anyone need these things? I don’t know, but I’m giving them away. Please tell me that someone out there wants to receive these two items in the mail. Or that two someones want to receive these two items in the mail, since Jamie and I are both giving our autographed shit away. I also have a few kaleidoscopes* laying around if you want those too. Well, the kaleidoscopes aren’t technically mine, but they’ve been laying around James Bond’s apartment for long enough that I’ve decided he doesn’t want them. Don’t worry, I checked the fine print of the blogosphere and it states that if you’re dating a blogger and you leave items unattended in your apartment for too long, they’ll be packed up with a Tommy Hilfiger headshot and given away on the internet. True story.

*Holy shit, I spelled kaleidoscopes right on the first try. I win at life.

[Prize winner update: Arielle! And Lynsey!]

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.