I was working at a friend’s house Friday afternoon and, with forty minutes left before showtime to change and catch the train downtown, I went home to shed my baggy sweater and maybe comb my hair. Only to discover that I didn’t have my keys. This is a horrifying moment. The brain goes blank before clicking forward at double speed from Locked Out to Homeless Forever. I took everything out of my bag, shook it upside down, checked the bushes, went back to my friend’s house to rootle through the couch cushions – nothing. The show was starting in 30 minutes and I was still sporting a look that would most accurately be termed Hobo on Weight Watchers. I scrambled to the theater, sweater flapping in the wind behind me, held together by a frazzled mess of nerves, a mess that probably wasn’t helped by the shot of vodka I was handed while moving furniture to inspect the floor for errant keys. Naturally, this was the moment I would meet several work people with whom I’d only ever exchanged email. HELLO, I AM A HOT MESS. SO NICE TO MEET YOU. I was tempted to ask for a sheet of paper and a sharpie so I could make myself a sign. “Hi, I locked myself out of my house and that’s why I’m wearing a wrinkled sweater that’s four sizes too big and frankly don’t smell so fresh while you’re all decked out in silk and carefully chosen accessories. Nice night for a bout of idiocy, isn’t it?”

After the performance, an impromptu trip to Alice in Wonderland, and approximately three gin and tonics too many, I stumbled up to Kristin’s apartment and passed out on her couch. I woke up about four hours later – still drunk – and we went to meet Amy, Nicole, Jamie, and Andrea for brunch. By this time, my jeans had reached a state of cleanliness generally reserved for war refugees and people who dodge the law by crouching in dumpsters. After a restorative breakfast sandwich, stories about fried chicken offered by large black women on random bar bathroom floors, and pointedly not thinking about alcohol, I finally got hold of my landlady so she could let me into the hallway. My keys were dangling innocently from the lock where I’d left them 24 hours earlier.

Such adventures tend to teach you things – like who will let you sleep on their couch, who will pet your head and assure you that you won’t die alone with only your cats looking on (“I’m drunk [sniff] and homeless [sniff] and I don’t even have a cat [sniff]. OH MY GOD, I NEED TO GET A CAT. HERE, KITTY, KITTY!”), and who won’t mind when you stumble out of their living room the next morning, insisting that you’ve lost your debit card until you find it 20 minutes later under the pillow where you stashed it for safekeeping. In other words, who doesn’t mind that you’re an adult who occasionally finds herself acting – and dressing – like a 19-year-old frat boy.

Thanks, guys. If I had a couch, you’d be welcome on it any time.

But on Friday, when I looked in the mirror, I recognized myself again. There I was. Unbrushed teeth and all.

Official Assessment: Damn, that’s weird. To look at myself and not recognize my own face. I can’t explain it. Maybe some mini-demon needed exorcising or my disembodied spirit was off floating around in another dimension, somewhere with white sand and rum-based cocktails. Or maybe my skin just really, really needed some help.

Has this ever happened to you? Because it’s a little freaky and made me feel like I was in some B-horror film about ready to be sacrificed to a bunch of black sheet-clad actors whose careers never quite took off.

Anyway, it’s nice to be back. And if your face ever busts out in a chorus line of pubescent agony, buy yourself some apple cider vinegar. It’s pure miracle distilled to its eye-watering essence. A Twitter friend (Twiend?) suggested drinking a spoonful a day and I swear it worked. Nothing else about my routine changed, but my skin cleared right up in about 2 weeks. Maybe apple cider vinegar also exorcises mini-demons.

After turning my head – as you do in the course of life – and feeling like I’d been stabbed by a butcher’s knife, I learned to twist from the waist, something that’s much easier when you’re not strapped in the driver’s seat. I got off the freeway six stops early yesterday just so I wouldn’t have to navigate lane changes with ear-melting curses or prayer.

When one muscle misbehaves, all surrounding areas tense up in sympathy. From the base of my skull to the bottom of my left shoulder blade is a cluster of misfiring neurons and wordless shrieks that roughly translate to “TAKE ME TO YOUR VICODIN.” Since Trader Joe’s doesn’t sell vicodin (I don’t think. Is there some back room that requires a password? Where they sell the drugs and the porn and the darn sipping chocolate they were out of today?), I’m settling for peppermint Oreos, a heating pad, and a staunch refusal to move. These are the moments when all my life choices seem appropriate and I’m terribly thankful I have neither kids nor pets nor any responsibilities more demanding than a thirsty Christmas tree which, by the way, won’t be getting watered until I figure out how to transfer water from the sink to the living room via telekinesis.

This post was going to be longer and more heartfelt but I’ve decided that short and lazy is really what the season is all about.

Exhibit A: All the people in front of me who ran that red light.

Exhibit B: The cop who pulled me over who said, “Yeah, lots of people run that red light.”

Exhibit C: Chris, who was a few cars behind me and later noted, “I ran that red light too. Guess the cop was busy with you.”

Exhibit D: MOTHERFUCKER.

That’s not so much an exhibit as it is a heartfelt exclamatory curse.

Never having been to traffic court before, I’m a bundle of quivering anxiety tempered by an enraged, rather self-righteous alter ego I like to call Wanda. Wanda is responsible for Exhibit D, by the way. As Wanda is generally absent, and will hopefully remain absent when I’m standing in front of the Bored If Not Aggravated Person In Charge Of These Things tomorrow morning, I’ve spent the last month asking for measured advice. Advice received ranges from “show cleavage” (which I don’t have) to “sit at the intersection with a video camera and record how many people run that light” (which I’m not going to do) to the cop himself who said, “Plead not guilty and ask for a civil code violation.” (Can’t I just ask for the ticket to be dismissed? Because, um, I don’t want a ticket?) And, most recently, “Your defense is going to be ‘I don’t want a ticket?’ Really? Yeah, I’d hire a lawyer.” (No.)

I plan to show up in court with no cleavage, no video, and no real plan – in other words, how I usually greet a Tuesday morning.  But I have spent most of today engaged in a voodoo ritual designed to get me back out those court room doors with my bank account intact. To the layman’s untrained eye, it probably looks like some woman with unkempt hair muttering “the ticket will be dismissed, the ticket will be dismissed, the ticket will be dismissed” under her breath, but I assure you it’s an impressive display of Caribbean-based voodoo.

I have every confidence that this will work. Yes.

“At least it wasn’t a first date,” she said.

“Oh, but it so often is,” I replied, a bit grimly. These things do seem to happen to me. “It’s a good litmus test,” I continued. “They either find it charming or utterly revolting. It’s good information for everyone to have.” She nodded sagely. She’s watched me eat for the last 16 years.

You can always figure out where I was sitting at a dinner party, because mine is the plate with a crumb circumference of anywhere from four inches to a full foot. I’m a menace with a bread knife. I’m not sure when I escaped the barn in which I was raised, but it was obviously after I learned to handle utensils. A nice complement to my general inability to manage spatial relations. Especially as those relations relate to my limbs.

Years ago, I was going out with a very nice guy who was also a DJ. He liked his music. Actually, he had a rabid and obsessive love for it that drastically improved my own taste while also shunting me from his life forever because I couldn’t keep up with the trivia. The first time I went over to his house, I knocked a glass of water into a box of his records. He didn’t keelhaul me, or even point me toward the nearest bus stop, possibly because he has the forbearance of a saint, but more likely because the sex was so good. (Yes, I said it.) (Sorry.) (Remember what I said about my manners?) (IT’S SUCH A HANDY EXCUSE.)

To sum up: Emily Post should exile me to Siberia or I should enroll immediately in a remedial How Not to Behave Like a Rabid Dingo seminar. Because rabid dingos ALWAYS forget to pour their companion’s wine before their own. And they take the last petit fours without asking. It’s positively unsavory.

In the past, such accidents have inspired a meltdown of distraught toddler-esque proportions – and, yes, it’s just as attractive in a grown woman as you would expect. I was especially prone to dissolving when money was involved.* Several years ago, my brain would have jumped from Must Now Replace Phone to an increasingly hysterical inner diatribe about the car that needs work, and that whole slew of inexplicable parking tickets, and a wedding in San Diego in a month, and…and…. Cue sobbing in the middle of Rainbow, until an aging hippie offers to wave burning sage around my head to cleanse my bad chi.

But when I bent over to pick my poor, bruised phone off the floor this afternoon, I felt entirely calm. My brain did catalogue the mounting expenses, but it did so in a very rational way. It’s soothing, this rationality, like an unfamiliar cool bath after being turned on a spit over a bed of volcanic lava for the past thirty years. Occasionally basted with a blend of hot tar and stinging nettles, while George Bush’s dulcet tones sing me a lullabye. But I barely recognize that person any more AND THANK THE GOD OF IMBALANCED MELODRAMA FOR THAT.

* I have some issues around money I’m slowly sorting out and hey, look! HERE’S ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY TO WORK ON THEM. Thanks. I think.

Anyway, the phone still works, but it’s now prone to inserting glass slivers into my index finger when I try to unlock it. Can they fix that? Or do I have to buy a new one? (Please tell me they can fix it. LIE IF YOU HAVE TO.)

Sadly, this would happen just as I learn how effortlessly my phone enhances the comedic slapstick routine that is my life. Observe:

Many pictures from my birthday tea include unabashed hamming. Not here. Yes, that IS how I look when I talk on the phone. Pure and undiluted me, errant bra straps and all. I had no idea I channeled a muppet on laughing gas when conducting a basic phone conversation, but there you have it. I think I laughed for a solid two minutes when I saw that photo. It makes me laugh even now, when a whole and un-shattered phone pressed firmly to my ear is but a distant memory of better, less expensive times.

So if you try to call me and I don’t pick up, it’s not because I don’t love you, or because I’m at work, or racing down the hall and falling down my steps to grab the phone before it stops ringing – it’s because IT WILL CARVE MY CHEEK INTO RIBBONS IF I TRY TO USE IT. I do love you, but I’d rather send you a nice email.

—

Public Service Announcement: If your iPhone has a tragic introduction to a cement floor, don’t take it to Apple. You can get it fixed for much cheaper here. $85 sounds like a right bargain after you’ve spent a few hours chewing over Apple’s quoted $199. We’ll skip my naive horror at Apple’s wretched customer service and jump straight to: HOORAY, BARGAIN! Most of my mistakes are far more expensive.

It was 9:30 on Saturday morning and I was about to go running. I had no money, no phone, hadn’t eaten breakfast, and was in possession of only two-thirds of the keys I needed to access any of these things before I died a wretched, mewling death in the gutter, staring forlornly into the window of my former home.

Before I did that though, I decided to try my landlady. I rang her bell, praying fervently that she hadn’t decided to skip off to Maui for the weekend or otherwise inconvenience me in some selfish quest for enjoyment. No answer. Predictably, my brain started spinning with thoughts of the dinner party later that evening and how on earth I was supposed to provide mac and cheese WHEN I COULDN’T GET INTO MY KITCHEN. I would have to sit on my steps all day before trudging to the party empty-handed, covered in the dried perspiration of a run ten hours previous, wearing some decidedly elastic-challenged yoga pants.

My choices: 1. Wig out 2. Go for my run and assume everything would be fine. I’m proud to say I chose option two. I ran my (admittedly very short) jogging circuit and headed back, confident my landlady would be home again and simply thrilled to answer her door.

She wasn’t. New options: 1. Wig out 2. Wait it out 3. Pound on my neighbors’ doors.

Now, I don’t like to disturb people – this is why I rarely use my phone. Telephones ring! Loudly! How jarring to someone’s serenity! So I was mighty uncomfortable at the thought of ringing the doorbells of people I wouldn’t know if I passed them on the street.

So I went back to my stoop, a stoop I was beginning to think of fondly as my new home, and waited for awhile. As I waited and my landlady remained stubbornly absent, I remembered a conversation at work. For reasons still unknown, a coworker decided to give me an editorial on my character. On his list was “mousy.” I was offended. If I’m sometimes meek at work, I’m often fiesty outside work AND THAT JUST MAKES ME COMPLEX, THANK YOU.

Then I realized I was sitting on my stoop BEING MOUSY. It was a bit of a revelation, I don’t mind telling you. So I popped up and started pounding on all my neighbors’ doors. I remained proud of my chutzpah for precisely two minutes until I realized that no one was answering. So I sat back down on my stoop (hello, stoop! How I missed you!), resigned to wait until someone appeared or I managed to vaporize through my walls.

A minute or two later, the door opened. My entrance is separate and there’s a bush of red flowers between my door and the main door. So I jumped up and threw myself across the divide, yelling “Hi!” just as he turned around to go back inside.

Imagine being woken up by your bell and wandering down the stairs, only to have some unfamiliar, un-showered woman jump out of the bushes at you, hair flying and arms flapping. Yeah. The poor man was terrified. But he let me through to the backyard so I could get back in my house, rinse off the sweat, and start my day.

The menacing bush, behind which I lurked. Menacingly.

To the guy at work who called me mousy: Thanks, dude! You saved me untold hours of waiting timidly on my front step. You also scared the hell out of my upstairs neighbor.

Part Two of Saturday’s Locked Out Saga

Why, yes. There IS a part two. Consider that foreshadowing.

Clean, fed, and happily relieved of the burden of living the rest of my life in gutter-bound squalor, I sailed valiantly through my day, stocking up on cheese and preparing the comfort food of the gods. After hastily throwing on some Dinner Party Goin’ Clothes, I pulled up in front of their building to unload. I handed out the first armful and hopped out to carry the last of it to the stoop (what IS it with me and stoops?) – and unwittingly closed the car door.

My car doesn’t have automatic locks, and this is San Francisco. Where if your car is unlocked, someone’s bound to crawl in and take a little nap in your back seat. Maybe with a slurpee cup full of moonshine and a cut-rate hooker. So I click down my locks without even thinking about it every time I shut the door.

Did I mention that I was double parked on a busy street and the car was running?

I’d like to take this opportunity to proclaim my belief that it’s every human being’s lot in life to occasionally do something really, really dumb. THIS WAS MY MOMENT.

Doing my patented crazed squirrel impression, I looked frantically up and down the street for a miracle and maybe a really big glass of brandy. Meanwhile, Scott called Triple A. As I realized my only options were putting my foot through the passenger seat window (and forget about the brandy), Scott calmly closed his phone and said, “They’ll be here in 10 minutes.” Oh. Well. How handy. So we stood around chatting until Triple A rescued my ass, and then we all went inside where I poured myself a big glass of wine. The end.

Last week marked two anniversaries: 1) Laura’s daughter Peggy turned a year old, and 2) My first official year of being single ended. The coincidence of the two – and Laura’s visit – eased some of the guilt I’d been carrying around over never sending them a card when Peggy was born. There were a lot of things that didn’t get done that month. Laura couldn’t have cared less, by the way. Apparently new parents use all their available brain cells trying not to inadvertently damage their infant offspring while also staying upright and conscious. “Honey, we have no idea who sent us what,” she told me when I apologized.

Laura celebrated the first year of her daughter’s life, and I spent the anniversary of my breakup, to the day – to the hour, even – hurling bile into my poor, abused commode. Something I never do. Ever. Whether there’s a conclusion to be drawn from that, I don’t know. I just know that coincidences are far less entertaining than hashing out grand conspiracies invented by my gallbladder.

So purging has been a bit of a theme around here. Last night I cleaned house, scrubbing chicken soup remnants out of my sauce pans and whisking away any errant bits of glass before another stray lodges in my foot. (What with the flu, the fatigue, the bloody nose, and the shard of glass still in the foot, I wouldn’t be surprised if I woke up with leprosy tomorrow morning.) I’m even planning to tackle the photos on the hard-drive. Because you know what I still haven’t done? This. I wrote that, what, eleven months ago? And still have yet to pull up all the old vacation photos and random Sundays on the deck and put one copy on a disc to be stored in a box and one copy handed over to the tender ministrations of the U.S. postal service.

I’ve been procrastinating, and no mistake. After being read the riot act by someone who once waited a decade, an entire decade, for an ex to send vacation pictures from a trip to Morocco, I offered up some lame excuse. “He probably doesn’t even want them any more.” I don’t remember if that garnered a response or a withering look, but either way, the message was clear: “That’s just stupid.”

And, of course, it is.

Purging is good. My gallbladder needed the exercise and my apartment certainly needed the wholesale scrubbing, what with the glass shards, the ginger ale empties, and the fine dusting of plague. Maybe I’ll even tackle my closet. Pawing through my old prom dresses and jeans that fit five years and seven pounds ago is surely less painful than splitting up with a partner or feeling the fiery slide of liquid headed the wrong way up your throat.

Apparently.

I have the constitution of a Bavarian mule. I honestly can’t remember the last time I had the flu. Or threw up, for that matter. I’ve been a major participant in tossing back two pitchers of margaritas plus a carafe of wine and still managed to hike 14 miles the next morning. I’ve walked in at 8 p.m. and tried to catch up with drunkards who’d been tossing back the bubbly since noon, and not so much as a heave. I’m kind of like Superwoman – if her thighs were bigger and her super-power was the ability to ignore a hangover. So the rate at which my stomach emptied itself – and then emptied it again – and again – and again – and hey, look! again – was perplexing. After the fourth bout, I decided to call the advice nurse, so she could tell me what I could buy at Walgreens that would keep me from wanting to die. The possibility of actual illness hadn’t even occurred to me at this point. I thought it was alcohol. After waking up to find the lights still blazing, shards of glass all over the floor (still not certain how that happened), a pounding headache, and a missing left shoe – wouldn’t you assume the same? After a few questions:

“Can you walk?”

Pause.

“Well?”

“Um, I don’t know. Still sitting here.”

- and -

“Can you keep anything down?”

Pause.

[Sounds of retching.]

Pause.

“No. But I can throw myself face-first into the toilet.”

…she told me to go to the ER. Convinced I was dying of Stupid Girl Drinks Three Vodka Cranberries On An Empty Stomach syndrome, I went. Otherwise, I’d probably have blown it off, like I do most doctor’s orders. See: hearty constitution. See also: unattractive stubbornness. (Though, do you mess with that kind of thing? When a health care professional tells you to go to the ER “sooner rather than later” and “find someone to drive you,” I don’t know that you do. Especially if you’re not really doing anything with your day besides rolling around in bed like a rotisserie chicken and moaning. Wasn’t interrupting my busy schedule of curing diabetes or anything.)

I found a cab (I thought about taking the bus, but that seemed like frugal overkill) (plus, what if I didn’t get a window seat and threw up in someone’s grocery bag?) (that’s just bad manners), and shuffled around three buildings before finding the emergency room. The gift shop is easier to find than the ER, I kid you not. Poor floor plan aside, kudos to San Francisco Kaiser and my health insurance because the waiting room was clean and had a window and in less than five minutes they were asking more questions:

“Any allergies?”

“Besides vodka?”

She took my temperature and blood pressure, related her own story of bile-hurling wretchedness thanks to St. Patrick’s Day and a poorly timed flight, and sent me packing. To my regular doctor – in yet another building – who said, “You have the flu and bad timing with liquor and who the hell sent you to the ER?”

Well, then. Seems my usual instinct to ignore medical advice is pretty on target. But she did give me precisely the instructions I was hoping for when I called the nurse in the first place: Drink anything you can keep down, eat mashed potatoes, stay home from work tomorrow.

And now we know precisely which doctor’s orders I’m happy to comply with: The ones telling me to eat buttery starches and play hooky.

Also: I feel ill.

Last night, after we plowed through carbonara and all the wine that was supposed to go into the pasta, Jemima thrust the remainders of the Thin Mints at Kristin and I with a exclamation that sounded suspiciously like: “YOU ARE NOT LEAVING THAT SHIT HERE, BITCHES!” We promptly did as instructed, but not before trying to pawn the half-eaten sleeves of cookies off on each other, and by “pawn” I mean “toss the package back and forth like a hot potato hoping the other will cave first”. I finally prevailed by stuffing half my stash in Kristin’s purse. It was that, or hurling it through the window. Which I might have done, but 1) the window was closed, and 2) I figured I’d already exceeded my Rude Guest allotment for the evening by sneaking into the kitchen to pick the last tidbits of prosciutto from the sides of the pot.

When it comes to sugar, I’m a Pavlovian dog. My response to buttercream frosting is preordained and the fate of that buttercream isn’t pretty. Obviously, I don’t want to be at the mercy of my own poor impulse control, so preventative measures are in place. Measures aided by the blatant lack of extra cookies or spare cakes in the kitchen at work today.

In other news, the oral arguments for Prop 8 are happening within feet – literal feet - of where I’m sitting and I’m missing it. Missing history – and discussions about the validity of my friends’ marriage - because my work ethic is too well-developed (cough) to sneak out. My experience has thusfar been limited to listening to the blaring sirens and creeping around the side of the building this morning to avoid the TV cameras and throngs of protesters.

It occurs to me that the aspersions I cast on Girl Scout cookies are quite similar to what’s being said right now about gay marriage. People who proffer such opinions probably aren’t reading this, so I’ll just put it out into the ether to disperse at will: If you’ll be more tolerant of your fellow human beings, I’ll be more gracious toward the much-maligned Girl Scout cookies. Deal?