From the Beautiful Mind of Nicole

It’s late. It’s really, really late. I know I should be asleep. I know that. But I’m not. I am what you would call a “night owl” (well, that’s what my grandma calls it anyway. Do people still say “night owl” these days or is it sort of an old-timey kind of phrase? Has it gone the way of “gee golly” and “good heavens”? I don’t know.). If it were up to me, I would get all my crap done at night then sleep during the day. This is especially true in the summer. It’s way too hot here to do anything productive during the day. I mean, your makeup is bound to sweat off, and that’s shortly followed by the frizzing of the perfectly flat-ironed hair, and let’s face it, once the look is gone, there’s really no point in trying to get anything else done. Don’t look at me like that, you know it’s true.

The weird thing is, I’m not really all that productive at night either. I get a little ADD during the insomniac hours. I read a lot of books, and that’s usually because at this time of the night, one can’t hold my interest for more than a couple chapters, so I have to switch to another one. If books don’t keep me occupied, I usually surf the Internets, but there’s not a whole lot of rhyme or reason there (a look at last night’s web activity shows this bizarro trail: Perez Hilton to Amazon to Wikipedia to WebMD to BabelFish Translator to MapQuest. If you can find a straight line from beginning to end in that mess, I’ll give you all the money in my wallet. Which may or may not be $3.17. Minus $.41 for shipping.).

Some nights neither the books nor the web are enough to keep me busy until sheer exhaustion takes over and I finally fall asleep. These are the nights when a lot of thoughts (some deep, most nonsensical) are floating around inside my head. I read once that you’re supposed to write down the thoughts to get them out of your mind, and by doing so you’re ridding yourself of the turmoil they’re causing you, which of course leads to deep inner relaxation and, ultimately, sleep. Honestly, I always thought that doing that exercise was a little fruity and would never work, but I have to be up early tomorrow, and I need to snooze. So here’s my attempt to relax my mind and throw out all the weirdness that’s mucking it up so that I can get to sleep:


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You know those soft-baked sugar cookies with that really intensely sweet frosting and those waxy/fantastic sprinkles? I want one of those right now. One, psssh. Better make it ten eleven a baker's dozen.


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I think I had my first alcohol buzz the other day. I think. Is it hard to tell if you have a buzz on? I don’t know. My cousin Denise always says that a good way to know for sure whether or not you’re on the road to Drunktown is to lift your arms and try to sense if they feel any heavier than they did before you started drinking. The only problem with that is that the weird, tentatively suspended arms have a tendency to give the appearance of drunkenness. Or the appearance of signaling to the waiter for another round. I’m pretty sure you’ll end up getting another Cosmopolitan either way.


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I hate the word "facetious." I feel like people who say "facetious" are trying way too hard to sound smart. Show me someone who genuinely loves the word "facetious" and I will show you an intellectual poseur. An unlikely upside to hating "facetious": If and when I get to be a guest on James Lipton's "Inside the Actor's Studio" and he gives me that quiz at the end and asks what my least favorite word is, I'll have the answer all locked and loaded and ready to go.


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If I see one more commercial for eharmony.com – just one more! – I think I might lose my mind. It’s not that I have anything against eharmony. It’s online dating. Whatever. Some people choose to go that route, and who am I to judge them? They know what they want, and they’re going for it. I respect that, even if it’s not a road I ever see myself taking. You’d think that kindly, tolerant attitude would earn me some kind of karmic relief from the bombardment of ads from Dr. Neil Warren and Co. Yeah, not so much.


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Where are Flemish people from?


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Sometimes I feel like there are needles poking into my eyeballs. It happens for maybe two seconds, during which I blink like a crazy person, and then it’s over. Similarly, I often feel like my two front teeth are being plied out of my mouth. The sensation is, again, momentary, but it’s uncomfortable nonetheless. Does anyone else ever feel that?


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I would give anything in the world to not have to put the sheets on my bed right now. They’ve just been lying there for hours, and I’ve been finding creative ways to lie around them while reading The Scapegoat by Daphne DuMaurier. It's times like this that make me wish I had a maid. Or a butler who would agree to put sheets on my bed even though butlers typically don’t do that kind of thing. Or do women not have butlers? Are they like ladies-in-waiting or something? I can't say that I know for sure.


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Wondering if it should be “laying”/“lay” instead of “lying”/“lie.” Wondering if I’m coherent enough at this hour to figure that out. Wondering if I care about the difference between the two even when I'm completely lucid.


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Who was that chick that got eliminated on Top Chef this week? I swear I’ve never seen her on the show before, and we’re like four weeks in. She must have been pretty flavorless to garner zero screen time until she got ousted. Flavorless, teehee…


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If I had to say definitively right now which prince I liked best, Prince William or Prince Harry, I would without a doubt go with Harry. Because he seems nasty.


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My cousin Stacie told me today that she and her friends Joe and Bart once wrote a pilot script for a TV comedy about eight people working in a mall. I really don’t know what to do with that information. My only real thought is that I need to work on finding a copy of that sucker ASAP. Perhaps get it performed by a local theater troupe. Or tweak it so that it could be done as a one-woman show with me as the star. I better get on that.


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Pete Yorn has a new song, "Shampoo” (go on, click the link and snag it. You know you want to.). He posted it on his message board as his “new favorite song to break up to” or something like that. That’s all fine and good, but I want to know who the backup vocalist is, because it’s a lady, and I’m inclined to think that Pete is probably dating whomever that lady is. And this makes me upset because shouldn’t Pete be saving himself for me? I’m saving myself for him. Or, you know, Dave Lieberman. Whoever I meet first.


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I got gas today. When you pay at the little island kiosk, it tells you that if you use your ATM card, a transaction fee of $.45 is added onto your total. By an amazing stroke of luck, I bought exactly $39.55 worth of gas, which means my overall total was $40 on the nose. How often does that happen? Almost never! Ah, little victories.


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Huh. I don’t feel any more tired now than I was before. I don’t feel any more relaxed either, especially since now I’m really worried that I chose the wrong prince and that somehow that decision will come back to haunt me one day. Blurgh. I feel a massive Excedrin PM shot coming in five...four...three...two...

Because You Have To: Weddings

A few Saturdays ago, my cousin Rob married his longtime fiancée, Jackie. This was a totally happy occasion, as Rob is a great person and Jackie his equal in every way. I don’t know if anyone ever wishes for in-laws, but I really don’t see how you could hope to get anyone sweeter than Rob or Jackie for your own. Still, as it is with most weddings, no matter how much you love the bride and groom, there’s always a slight sense of dread when it comes to actually attending the event. And that is precisely what I was feeling when the day was finally upon us.

I had several concerns about attending this wedding, first and foremost being, of course, that I had absolutely nothing to wear. I don’t go to weddings that often, and I have little or no need for dressy clothes in my day-to-day life. Because of this, not only did I have no formal wear in my closet, I also had no idea how to do formal wear properly. By doing a little snooping before hand (ie, asking everyone I knew who was invited to the wedding what they were going to wear) I figured that I could get away with some kind of sassy business attire, maybe even pants. Armed with my new info, I hit the mall with my favorite shopping partner, my grandma, Vivian, and came away with a really cute, appropriate outfit – and my very first pair of stilettos, which I have to say I really, really love. Sure, I couldn’t feel my second and third toes on my left foot for a week or two after the wedding, but the shoes looked hot and – I’ll admit it – were a nice change from my usual Converse and slip-on Vans. After the successful, virtually painless purchase of the ensemble, I was feeling more optimistic about the wedding day.

Optimism is a funny thing though. As any lady will tell you, once you have a cute outfit locked, you can convince yourself to do most things based solely on the confidence boost you get from knowing you look good. I’m fairly sure that I was riding that train right up until the day of the event, when the pessimism set back in and the list of horrible things that could go down starting compiling itself in my head. For example, as I am certain it is at most weddings, Rob and Jackie’s was sure to have a modicum of familial weirdness, which I was most definitely not looking forward to encountering. Another thing: I don’t dance (or rather, I haven’t figured out how to dance in public without looking like some crazy Elaine impersonator), and at a traditional wedding, it’s hard to avoid dancing. Then there’s the added pressure of the bouquet toss. As is well documented, I am single, and being the age that I am, that apparently makes me a prime bouquet toss participant. And how about the fact that you inevitably get greeted by someone you know you should know but then proceed to blank on their name when it comes time to return the salutation? Those things, and a whole host of other equally heinous situations could go down at a wedding at any given time, and, well, I was pretty much at a DefCon 10 level of anxiety when it came time to go to the wedding.

As it turned out, I didn’t really have to worry about any of those things. The family stuff thankfully – mercifully - took a back seat to the happiness of the day. I didn’t have to dance, mainly because whenever anyone asked me, I pointed out that the floor looked very slick and that my shoes were very new (this actually made me love the shoes even more). I managed to escape the bouquet toss simply by lying low behind a tall centerpiece when the DJ called all the single gals to the floor (though my Aunt Virginia almost blew my cover by maniacally pointing from me to the dance floor, at which point I slunk out of my chair and made a beeline to the open bar…it’s funny how Cosmopolitans can deaden the meddling of batty aunts, isn’t it?). And as far as blanking on names goes, I found that if you mumble, you can pretty much get away with calling anyone “Janet” without them ever noticing (though methinks the open bar helped with that one too). All in all, it was a nice event, and I think I enjoyed myself (though that could just be the relief that it’s over talking…).