Former President Accidently Boob Grazes Me

… And it was awesome!

So I got here early yesterday for the specific reason of making sure I got a good spot up front near the stage along the “rope line.” Bill, was of course, running late, so unfortunately they kept us corralled in this little room with hot lights for over an hour. I was wearing some fierce heels, which on the one hand, contributed greatly to my ass looking awesome, but on the other, felt like standing on knives around minute 37.

So anyhoo, after an hour and some change, a delicate shoe removal without having to put my face in anyone’s ass to do it, and a considerable amount of sweat, he arrived. My collegaue B. and I had watched Secret Service agents come and go through the side door and each time it opened we could see the kitchen, there were many employees about, all looking very sharp, a little anxious and excited like we were. B said to me, “I bet he’s in the kitchen getting something out of the fridge and hanging with the cooks.” I nodded in agreement, that seemed like something he would do. Yes, his agents and the event organizers would attempt to hustle him into see the paying folks, but he would stop and shake every employees hand he came across and ask them how they are doing. That’s just the kind of guy he is.

So anyhoo, he did eventually come out and he was awesome. He opens by explaing part of his tardiness on his stop over in the kitchen to chat with the staff. B and I smiled at each other, of course he was. That’s just the kind of guy he is. He probably raided the fridge too, he’s just that kind of guy as well.

We were told he’d speak for 5-10 minutes, he spoke for 25. He was witty and funny, sincere and passionate and I actually shed a tear at one point. “You are the first generation to do this,” he said. “This room is full of diversity. It didn’t used to be like this, but you… your generation recognizes that our differences are important and we should hold on to our culture and at the same time celebrate that our differences is what unites us.” He talked a lot about poverty and the war, he tooted Hill’s horn, but I expected that, he is married to her and I suspect he would know.

It was amazing. At the end of his speech he jumped off the platform (instead of using the stairs) very spry for a man his age and headed toward the wall of people pushing to try and get close to him. The Secret Service agents flanked him on each side, making sure no one was gonna try and throw themselves at him. It took him nearly 10 minutes to get to where my friends and I were, just a little the the left of center (slightly stage right for you theater folks). He was shaking hands and hugging anyone that asked, he took pictures and signed autographs and was just so generous. When he got to me I gushed a little and told him the election in ’92 inspired me to work in politics and he gave me a hug. When he parted he reached out to shake my friend A.’s hand, and his elbow grazed my boob.

It was pretty tight as people were trying to push their way to the front, there were hands on my ass shoulders, hips, back.   The accidental boob graze was hardly the most offensive occurrence in this situation (that honor would go to the dude who’s semi-chub was poking me in the hip as he tried to reach over my head to shake Bill’s). It felt very human. We were touching, and connecting, and he wanted to be touched and connect us.  Some how the madness was comforting, as if even the most powerful man in the world, is just a guy who wants to feel connecting to the people around him.  Kind of makes me think there might be some hope for this humanity thing after all.

So yes,  an ex-president grazed my boob, even though it seems silly and deprecating and strange; it was really pretty damn cool.

Thank you Mr. President for taking the time to connect with some of your admirers. You are a Great man.

If I Needed to Hide a Body, I’d Call you First

This is a direct quote spoken to me today at lunch with a friend.  The two of us were talking about state politics and the likelihood that a seat might open up in this person’s home town.  He’s half considering making a go for it.  It’s tough running for office, you’ve got to have a real thick skin and a total commitment to the fact that you will not sleep much.  I think he’d be great in the position personally.

So anyhoo, we’re chatting about the demographics, voting frequency, and party indexing of the district when he mentions that he wonders if another guy that’s just like him will get in the race dashing his hopes.  We sort of joke about having “whack” any opposition.   We’re totally kidding, of  course, but we still got some weird looks from the people around us.

So the conversation went a little like this.

SE: Killing is the easy part, its hiding the body and getting away with it that’s hard.
Me: I could hide the body, I’m good at things like that.
SE:  You’ve hidden many bodies have you?
Me: No, but for some reason I think I’d be good at it.  I’m that girl you come to in your time of need and I always come through.
SE: That is true, you’re as solid as rock.  If I needed to hide a body, I’d call you first.
Me: Get in line.

A Gay Oasis in a Desert of Rednecks

I grew up in a pretty conservative town, in a pretty conservative state.  It was a military town full of families driving pick up trucks and kids joining NJROTC to impress their soldier dads.  My friends moved every three years, transfer students popped in and out as often as the cafeteria served chilly-dogs.  There is a “city” (I used the term lightly for while it is technically a city it has the population of Hayfield High School) next door to my little town with active Ku Klux Klan.  The people in this town are God-fearing… and feminist-fearing, unwed-mother-fearing, people darker than khaki-fearing, queer-fearing folk. In other words, I grew up surrounded by rednecks.

I tell you this not because I want to paint my town as a horrible place, cause it’s not.  It’s a very historical town and we have beautiful battlegrounds and historical buildings, and lots of wonderful things to enjoy… you just have to step over some rednecks to get there.  While the place I grew up may still vote Republican even though everyone on the planet can see they have fucked shit up royally, it’s my hometown and its still lovely in its imperfections.

Ok, so what I really wanted to tell you about is the awesome place that opened in Yorktown my second year of college.  It’s a salon.  The Michael Hickman Salon, to be precise.  A freaking pampering, have some wine while I color your hair salon.  It plays soft techno over the speakers and is decorated in a very modern, ultra hip, silver and white motif.  It’s so gay!  It’s wonderful!

I  can’t take credit for discovering it.  Although as the biggest fag-hag south of the Potomac River, I wasn’t the first to discover this gem.  No, that honor goes to my mother.  A late-bloomer among us fag-hags.  She called me one day to talk about the absolutely fabulous hair cut she got from the place and to inform me that she made an appointment for me when I would be returning from school later that month.  As she was describing it, I must admit, I didn’t believe her.  A place full of stylist that had studied in LA, enjoyed talking about politics, people who voted democratic and knew that Arbor Mist is in fact not a wine?  In Yorktown?  No surely not.

Well color me wrong because this place is fabulous.  This place is so fabulous, I drive 2.5 hours just for the experience.  See, I could get my hair cut up here, I could get it down by professionals who will do an outstanding job… and pay $300 for it.  Or  I can drive down to Yorktown, have a professional job done, be plied with wine and compliments, and only pay $150.  Um, I’ll take what’s behind door number two please!  My mother is just as bad as I am, I swear she keeps them in business.  My mother is in there 3-4 times a months, getting her hair done, mani-pedis, reflexology, in the summer the spray on tan, electrolysis… you name it, my mother has done it there.  I do my part by showing up every couple months, check in hand, ready for my day of pampering.  Oh it is so wonderful.

I’m going home for Thanksgiving next week… and getting my haircut on Saturday by Scott, my favorite stylist.  I should have some seriously fierce hair when I return, perhaps I’ll post a picture.

I’m Going to Meet Bill Clinton This Weekend

Jealous?

It’s ok, I’d be jealous of me too. I’m going to YDA’s Quarterly Meeting in New Hampshire this weekend, and one of our key note speakers is none other than the ex-president himself.

Needless to say, I am super stoked.

-EB

Career Change: Political Operative to Sous Chef, Doable, Right?

I get like this every once and a while.  I get the feeling that I am totally and completely fucking done with working in politics and start thinking about other career paths I could have taken, or perhaps careers I could still have.  I need the stress reliever to imagine my life completely different.

For your viewing pleasure, I’ve included a list of jobs I’d like to try out.

• Sous Chef in a fancy-pants New York restaurant.  I burn mac and cheese.  I over cook rice, I screwed up Brownies from a Ducan Hines box.  Yet, I’d love to learn how to cook.  How to turn tomatoes into flowers, to cook the perfect lamb chop, to flambe… whatever it is chef’s flambe.
•  Travel Writer.  What could be better than being a travel writer.  “What are you doing this week EB?” “Oh me? I’m flying to Bali to stay in their ultra fabulous, super chic, totally exclusive resort where I will eat like a glutton and get daily massages from a Swedish import names Sven.”  I don’t think anything could be better than that.
• Contributing Editor for an ultra hip women’s mag.  I hate Cosmo, truly and deeply.  I’m waiting for the totally awesome women’s mag that is not as strong as BUST, but not as totally fucked as Cosmo.
• Buyer for Christies.  I know crap about antiquities.  But how rad would it be to travel around looking at beautiful antiques?  I could totally get into that.

I Felt a Murderous Rampage Coming on, So I Decided to Call You

Yesterday was a really great day.  I have managed to tick off a few of the things on my list and I even got a trip to IKEA worked in to my schedule.  I finally have a desk, which I’m oh so excited about.  For nearly 3 years I work from my laptop in bed, or in the living room and at night, I close it and push it under the bed (to make sure I don’t step on it).  But now, I have a pretty little desk and I can work from it, just like a grown-up.

Anyhoo, last night I got a fun call from a friend of mine that I thought I’d share.

Me:  Hey M! What’s up?
M:  Nothing much, just saw No Country for Old Men.
Me:  How was it?
M:  Um, well it left me with the feeling that life is pointless so why not go on a murderous rampage, so I’m gonna say not good.
Me:  Is that why you called me?  Need an alibi or hoping I’d talk you out of it?
M:  Don’t know yet, but it’s definitely one of those.
Me:  Just think about how quickly you’ll become the cellblock bitch.
M:  Hmm, valiant effort, but being a bitch brings protection from getting stabbed with a filed down toothbrush.
Me: You’re right, go for it.  I’ll be a character witness at your trial if you like.
M:  I knew I could count on you.

Getting My Shit Together: Part I

I’ve hit a wall.  I am clearly not happy with the way my life is progressing right now.  I’m 25, but sometimes I feel like I’m 14.  I’m a spoiled teenager who wants someone else to fix my life for me.  My life does have extenuating factors that contribute to my life-fucked-upness.  For example, I work in politics that takes up pretty much all my time.  For the last three months I’ve worked 7 days a week.  Which basically means I haven’t had a day off since August.  When you work everyday it makes it pretty hard to get your shit together.  Hell its hard to do your laundry even.  Also, I’ve been ill for a long time, one fucking respiratory infection after another.  When you’re sick, working 7 days a week, the last thing you want to do is clean out your car.  I much rather lie on the couch and have my roommate bring me tea.

But, here I am, my first day off in three months.  I still woke up at 6AM, conditioning is a bitch to break.  Instead of taking a shower and heading into work, I decided to formulate a plan for getting my life back on track.  Some things on the list are really big life alternating things, others are really simple and maybe a bit lame.  I decided to share it with you because for some reason putting it out there in the interwebs makes it somehow more real.  Like I’m more accountable for it if there’s a record somewhere.

Anyway, for you viewing pleasure:

How to Be a Grown Up:

• Laundry!  Do laundry every week, including towels and sheets.
• Diet!  Eat healthier, Salads with 18 grams of fat dressing is not eating healthy.  Snackwell cookies are only healthier if you eat the serving size, not the whole box.  Chips will never be healthy, just avoid that aisle in the store.
• Exercise!  Go to the gym.  You like the gym, you like to ride the bike and watch VH1 at 6AM.  Or at least pretend you like it, it needs to be done.

• Finances!  Fix your fucking credit! Mistakes at 21 are still haunting you.  Be a grown up and deal with it.
• Purge!  Go through all you clothes, finally decide you do not need that tank top from 9th grade, you will never be that skinny again.  Goal:  Get down to one dresser, Mariah Carey doesn’t have this many clothes.
• Read!  You have a stack of books you need to read.  Some you bought, some your friends lent you.  They would eventually like them back, so stop spending free time watching TV and read a book.
• Share the Love!  Tell the people you love that you love them.
• Drive!  Clean your fucking car out!  You have shit in there from college, just living in your trunk like a little cave for things you don’t need but can’t part with, its embarrassing.
• Smile!  Take five minutes a day to sit and think about something happy.

Like I said, some are easy some are not so easy, but this is my new plan.  As I think of things to add, I’ll let you know.

Have You Met the Czar of all the Russias?

Last night I had dinner with some of my favorite people; my best friend JB, her boyfriend C, and our friend M.  I have been pretty sick lately (points to post below) and they, being awesome people, drove out of their way to pick me up and take me to a lame chain restaurant near my place so I wouldn’t have to travel far.  About half way through our meal, JB and I started reminiscing about years past and we recalled a camping trip we had all taken together when were in college.

The players in this particular scene are myself, JB, M, our friends S and MH, also along for the ride were mine and S’s  younger siblings JW (my bro) and C  (S’s bro).  I know I just threw a lot of initials at you, I don’t expect you to remember them all, but the main thing to know is that we were all home town friends, now in college and we were out at a remote camp site by a stream… drinking heavily.

I think I was drunk with in twenty minutes of our arrival.  My brother, an Eagle Scout, barely 18 and still hanging on to the idea of not being a complete drunken fuck-up, was good enough to set up all our tents for us, while S mixed our drinks.  By mix I mean added more vodka to the already vodka-ized orange juice.

We got the fire started, although I don’t have a clear memory of this as I was puking by the third tree from my parked car (the specifications are important, this became the puking tree for the weekend), but when I returned, there was the fire, and my friends roasting marshmallows for s’mores.  We were all pretty drunk, even our little brothers.  There something wholly pure about getting your younger sibling trashed for the first time.  It is a sacred practice that we eldest children pass on to our siblings with a sense of great honor.

Anyhoo, as I was saying, we were trashed.  It was a great feeling, we were young, we were free, and we were happy just sitting in each other’s company.  We had been friends for a long time, and it was wonderful to no longer have secrets, to not have barriers.  If you have a friendship that’s so close and comfortable that you can openly fart in their presence and not be mortified, hang on to that relationship for as long as possible, because they are rare indeed.

I want to tell you a little bit about M, one of my dearest and oldest friends, and in fact the one we nicknamed the “Czar of All the Russias.”  He is a very tall, thin man (looks like you could be a dictator if you catch my drift) who has long dealt with an auto-immune disease that attacks his digestive system.  It is not a pleasant experience and contributes to his thinness and paleness.  It has also lead to several hospital stays and a couple surgeries.  Besides being a person I feel has incredible personal strength to survive and cope with such a condition, he is also the smartest person I know.  I don’t mean it like he got straight A’s, I mean he’s a genius.  He reads everything he can and retains it all.  He probably has a photographic memory (although he’s never said anything to me) and I don’t know anyone who’s thought and developed such complex and articulate philosophical ideas about society, life, and politics.  He inspires me on a pretty regular basis.

So last night while JB, M and I were trying to explain to C how we came about to this long and twisted tale of M’s rise to power as the Czar, I was washed over with this tremendous feeling of nostalgia, and maybe a little peace.  It’s been a rough couple of years. Marriages and friendships have ended that destroyed our little circle of friends and the emotional wreckage of those experiences has left each of a little less alive inside.  But last night we laughed and spoke with such enthusiasm, hands waving in the air as we would suddenly remember another funny tidbit about years past.  There were moments of throwing my head back to laugh, unable to contain myself in such a small space.  I may have even slapped my knee once or twice.  In that moment, there was no devastating divorce, there was no broken friendships, there was no “he said, she said,” it was just us, the us we used to be reliving a perfect moment in our lives.

And it felt so good, to be happy again, even if it was only a memory.

Like Something Crawled in My Throat and Died

Last January I made a healthy decision to quit smoking.  It was January 5, 2007.  The previous day, the new Congress had been sworn in, with a Democratic majority.  You could say I quit in celebration of this event.  I had smoked for about 6 years.  I smoked a  pack a day but during election season it was more like 2 packs a day.  So I got healthier, I used the patch and joined a support group and I haven’t had a cigarette in ten months.

Since I quit smoking, I have been the sickest I have ever been in my life.

I have had 5 serious respiratory infections in the last ten months.  It started with Tracheitis, an infection in my trachea.  It was wicked and it took me a month to recover.  Almost as soon as I started to feel good again, I got bronchitis.  Again, my doctor gave me a round of antibiotics.  A month later, I was fine and able to enjoy some of the end of Spring.  Come May, when I was hit with both Tracheitis and Bronchitis together.  That nasty infection really laid me up.  I missed a week of work.  I lost ten pounds, I felt like I had been hit with a mack truck.  I decided to see a new doctor, this was my third infection and I was a little anxious.  So I went to a new guy, he said it was allergies and recommended I take Claritin everyday.

So I started taking Claritin everyday.  For a long time I felt fine, then about three weeks ago, I started noticing a sore throat when I woke up everyday, I didn’t think much of it, allergies, weather changing, you know, normal fall stuff.  Then one morning I woke up with my glands swollen to the size of tennis balls.  My voice was gone and every time I swallowed, it felt like I was getting stabbed in the throat.  I decided to go see another doctor, maybe someone would take an interest in the fact that a perfectly healthy 25 year-old-woman was repeatedly chronically ill with no basic explanation.

That’s when I met my new doctor.  For the sake of anonymity, we’ll call her Dr. Awesome.  Dr. A really took an interest in way I was having these wicked infections, over and over.  She prescribed me an antibiotic, but also had me get blood tests done, chest x-rays, and allergy tests.  She called me personally a few days after I left her office to make sure I would come in for a follow up.  When I arrived for said follow-up I was feeling much better.  Dr. Awesome poked around a bit and said the infection had cleared but she wanted me to get a CAT-SCAN of my sinuses with in two weeks.

The election was this past Tuesday, as you all know from my previous post.  I had scheduled the CAT-SCAN for today, but on election day I woke up with a feeling of sinus pressure, sore throat, and coughing. Wednesday I went back to my doctor.  I have a sinus infection.

I was so frustrated and tired and overwhelmed that I broke down into tears in her office.  I have been sick for a year and no one seems to know why.  So  I had to cancel the CAT-SCAN.  I’m too sick at the moment.  Instead I’ll be getting it next week.  Dr. Awesome was great.  She let me cry and was very sympathetic and I really feel like she cares that I am so ill.  She thinks I might have some kind of blockage that is causing the drainage and thus the infections.  Not pretty.  The typical solution for this is surgery.  I’m not thrilled, but as I sit here on the sofa, nicknamed the “the death couch” by my roommates, I’m thinking I’m just about ready to do anything in order to feel healthy again.

Polls Are Open in Virginia

Hello Everyone,

If you live in the Old Dominion, head out to the polls today.  We have some seriously competitive  races across the Commonwealth.  Go Vote!

Unless you’re a Republican, than you might want to stay home.  It’s going to be a killing field out there for you guys.