Jack Sprat Could Eat No Fat...

...and Megan could eat no lean.

As I was getting dressed this morning, I sat down on the futon to zip up my boots. The futon arm snapped, dumping me on to my cushy behind. I know I screamed, and immediately felt ashamed for being such a girl. But as I sat stunned, it dawned on me that I had just broke Tom's futon meaning:

Not only am I old and out-of-shape, now I am offically FAT and old and out-of-shape.

I am single-handedly crushing large wooden pieces of furniture with my ass. Watch out, or I'll sit on you too.

I Caught You a Delicious Bass...

Tom, Baikie, and I went for Mexican food at Tequira Mexico #1, which has some of the best Mexican food in KC. The restaurant has the lingering smell of cleaning antispetic, but the chicken enchiladas and frozen peach margaritas are orgasmic. Our friend Niall (our very own Irishman), discovered the place. It has what appears to be a giant Gumby wearing a sombrero on the front of the restaurant, although Niall pointed out to me that it is probably a jalopeno wearing a sombrero. I was slightly disappointed, but it makes sense since Pokey was nowhere in sight.

We rented Napoleon Dynomite after that, since we were all trying to recover from our drinking binge on Friday night--a crazy night full of bar hopping, sake, birthday cake shots, and dancing to techno music. I'm not sure what was the best part of Friday night: Baikie's drunken dancing or talking to his friend, Laura. I have never talked to a sober Laure. She's always drunk, but incredibly funny and has an awesome voice, a raspy Demi Moore-like voice. I could listen to her talk forever. Anyway, Napoleon Dynomite rocked. Gosh. It made me think of Dujka, since she's been talking about that movie for a while now. It made me miss her. I've been trying to get a hold of her forever, but that four-hour time difference is a killer. Come to think of it, I've just been really crappy about getting in touch with people. I have a couple dozen phone calls and e-mails that I owe people. So, if I owe you one, sorry. I'm trying to wait until I'm in a good mood, and there's only a small window of opportunity for me on that. :-)

Oh, I guess one exciting thing about turning 25 is that I can finally rent a car without having to spend a stupid fee. You know, since I rent so many cars. And supposedly my car insurance will go down. Just one of the perks to saying good-bye to your youth.

In lieu of turning 25, I'm going to get shit-faced tonight (Hi, Mom!). And how much fun will it be to celebrate 25 on February 25, 2005? Celebrating 25 on 2-25-2005!! Yippee!

So go do a shot of something in honor of me.

Hello Mid-20s

I have been 25 for over 24 hours now, and I don't feel any different. I feel kind of like Molly Ringwald in Sixteen Candles when she's on the phone with her best friend, Randy, at the beginning of the movie and right before she realizes that everyone forgot her birthday:

"Nope, I look exactly the same as I have since summer, utterly forgettable. No, I didn't expect to wake up transformed. I just thought that turning sixteen would be so major that I would wake up with an improved mental state that would show on my face. All it shows is that I don't have any sort of a tan left."

Is it pathetic that I can still relate to Molly Ringwald movies?

Good-Bye Early 20s

Hello, mid-20s. Sadly enough, I no longer have a shot at being a teenage mother; a young tart; referred to as being in my early-twenties; or a gymnast.

Here's how I spent my last day being 24:

• Overslept. Instead of getting up at 5:45 a.m., I rolled out of bed at 6:15, yet still managed to make it to work by 7:30. Some dumbass decided to schedule an 8 a.m. meeting, Monday through Friday, indefinitely. Bastard.
• Spent all day editing text, trying not to fall asleep at my desk.
• Looked at an engineer's vacation pictures from his trip to the Caribbean last week. I saw a picture of him half-naked. Not really a good look for him.
• Intended to leave work by 5:30 pm, but left over an hour later. Drove home singing to "Tainted Love" by Soft Cell and "Faith" by George Michael.
• Stopped at SunFresh and picked up three red potatoes, five slightly green bananas, a gallon of skim milk, and a pint of Eddy's Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream.
• Made an omelette out of eggs, little sausages, and moldy cheese I bought three days ago at Target.
• Watched Lost wearing nothing but my underwear and an Express tank top.
• Ate the entire pint of ice cream.
• Realized I looked like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance, except dressed in all white sans leg warmers. Did the crazy running in place dance where the "Maniac" song plays until I got a cramp in my leg and became lightheaded. I need to save my energy for basketball tomorrow. (Damn it, I have to play basketball on my birthday.)
• Washed all 1200 dishes that had piled up in my sink.
• Said "Yay, Sark!" when Sark appeared on Alias. (Colleen, I was thinking of you!)
• Decided to straighten my hair so that I can be straight-haired Megan tomorrow. Maybe I'll wear a low-cut shirt and a super-tight, super-lowcut shirt tomorrow. Start 25 looking like the hussy that I am.

So...only a few hours of being 24 left. I hate uneven year ages. But I'm thinking I'll go out, get smashed on Friday. What better way to celebrate 25 then celebrating on February 25, 2005? Celebrating 25 on 2-25-2005!! Almost as good as turning 24 on 2-24-2004 last year. Tom, Brett...get your Designated Driver gloves on!

Insomniac

My insomnia runs in cycles. No matter how hard I try, I can't control it. And I find myself doing weird things. One night, I spent an hour reorganizing my pencil holder. An entire hour.

I'm in a cycle right now. Last night, I finally went to bed at 1 a.m. (late for a working girl), and woke up at 5:30 a.m. It was difficult being at work, having to focus on boooorrring text. I kept dozing off at my desk. But things hit an all-time low last Friday when I locked myself in my favorite stall at work, laid down the little sanitizer-wrapper on the toilet, sat down, put my head on my knees, and took a 10-minute nap. I woke up to the sound of someone taking a dump. I hope this cycle ends soon. But I'm a little nervous -- usually, when I get into a bad sleeping pattern like this, it means that someone I love is going to die. I just hope it's stress.

Mail Call

Intern-Boy sent me a Valentine's Day/early birthday card. He sent it to my old address, so it arrived yesterday. It has an ominous "Hope to see you soon" written in it. He's been IMing me pretty much every day, but I've stopped responding. Brett is threatening to send him my blog site.

Ten 'Til Noon

My friend Diane has balls. She said screw it and moved to LA. She quit her job at an ad agency--where she liked her job but it wasn't her dream job--and left her family and friends in Iowa. All on the possibility that an internship with a special-effects makeup artist might pan out.

It did. She just finished her first movie, Ten 'Til Noon, working as a makeup artist. It's an independent film, and I guess they are still looking for a company to buy it. The movie looks like it might be decent; at least, the theory behind it looks interesting. At first I didn't recognize any of the actors, but then I realized the guy who played Cameron in Dead Poet's Society is in this movie!!! (You know, Cameron, the red-haired guy who was the first one to rat out Mr. Keating. You know you hated him too.) I also recognized Jenya Leno, who plays Inspector Sheridan on "Charmed" (I know, this is admitting in a public forum that I watch The WB. Damn it.) AND ... Morgan Freeman's son is in it. (On a side note: Alfonso Freeman looks so much like his dad it's crazy.) Check out the movie's Web site http://www.tentillnoon.com to find out how you can help get this movie to the big screen.

Diane, if you read this and there's any way you can set up a chance for me to make out with Dylan Kussman, I will forever be indebted to you. Seriously.

Which Golden Girl Are You?

Every time I think of Bea Arthur, I think of my old boss from when I was an RA at The University of Iowa. Daniel and his friends had a bizarre fascination with Bea Arthur. One of his friends superimposed Bea Arthur's face onto the body of a male body-builder for a birthday card for Daniel.

Find out which Golden Girl you most resemble: http://www.lifetimetv.com/shows/golden/index.html

Team: 2-3; Public Humiliation: 5-0

Six weeks ago, one of my engineers called me. I was a little nervous--he is one of my engineers who I never talk to (although there was that one night I went out with him and some other people, and got so incredibly drunk that I couldn't remember where I lived to give him directions to get home. I was so mortified I never really talked to him again). The first question was work related (blah blah blah), the second was personal. He wanted me to play on our team's coed, intramural basketball team. He listed the other engineers on our team...the names alone were enough to make me say yes. They are the pretty-boy engineers who should be models -- beautiful faces, tight bodies, and tall tall tall -- something that you rarely see in the engineering world. And in that brief moment, I thought "This is a great opportunity to get hot and sweaty with cute boys, and "accidentally" touch them inappropriately. I will slap their asses left and right."

After I hung up the phone, the realization of what I had agreed to do sunk in:

1. I had not played basketball in over two years, not since the days when Tom, Garry, and I used to go to The Field House and play intensely crazy basketball.
2. I stopped exercising right before Thanksgiving, after my volleyball team kicked ass in the coed intramural league. I am the size of a small house, with a drooping back porch and a bad paint job.
3. Being tall does not mean you are a good basketball player or athlete. It just means that you are freakishly tall, and people are constantly asking you if you played basketball in high school or college.
4. I don't run.
5. I can't shoot.
6. They all think I'm weird.

The first game was a nightmare. The other girl on our team couldn't make it, so I had to play the entire game. Instead of looking cute and glistening like other girls do, I turned a mottled red and ran like an elephant for an hour. One of the guys threw a pass at me -- directly at my head, that is. It hurt but it was so funny that I started laughing. The guy who threw it stopped the game to see if I was all right, which made things worse. I didn't shoot once. We lost that game. I also bruised my toe so badly that I couldn't wear shoes for a week, had to go to the doctor, and will loose my toenail. But I was hardcore -- I wrapped the toe for our following game and played through the pain.

Since then, we have won 2 of our 5 games. I have only attempted to shoot three times. I missed all three. In high school (and with Tom and Garry) I was used to playing the post position, and I scored points for my team. My team now doesn't have any game plans, so I run around like a moron, just trying to stay out of my teammates' way. I pray that they do not pass me the ball. I like to say that I am their defensive weapon, but I am just fat and slow and old. Tonight, my pants kept falling down so I flashed all my engineers. So now I am fat and slow and old and have a big, fat, white butt that they have seen. I told them tonight that my new strategy was just to pass out on the court: as long as I am on the court and not out of bounds, that would technically meet the requirement of one female on the court at all times.

Essentially, I have joined a basketball team to be with hot engineers, but every week I am showing up to publicly humiliate myself. And it hasn't changed things much, they still don't talk to me on or off the court. When they do, they ask generic questions and I make some dumb remark that only people who know me would find funny. And I talk in my six-year-old voice all the time. I have become a social reject. And, once again, the hot guys are using me just for my body.

The Poster Child for Short-Shorts

Back when erin and i were still living in sin in Iowa City, we would occasionally find ourselves sitting on the couch, doing nothing but staring at the wall. It was during one of these wall staring sessions that erin flipped on the TV and started flipping through the channels. She landed on TBS, where Steve Guttenberg was frolicking in the ittiest, bittiest shorts in the movie Cocoon.

For the next hour, erin and I watched Steve-baby dance around in his short-shorts. And we discovered that we shared a bizarre love for Steve Guttenberg. Despite his being old enough to be our father, we looove Steve Guttenberg. I remember being jealous of Ally Sheedy when she was in Short Circuit. And how could you not love his boyish charm in the Police Academy movies? Or his sensitive character who painted Tom Selleck and Ted Danson into caricatures on their apartment walls in Three Men and a Baby. Ooh, I'm getting chills just thinking about it.

And then suddenly, there was no Steve Guttenberg. He's been banned to the direct-to-video movie world. My love of Steve Guttenberg shall go unfulfilled...

Shopping Made Easy

The KC 10 o'clock news just reported that Mary Kay Letourneau and that twelve-year-old boy she got on (who now is 22) have a wedding gift registry online. Since it was discovered that they were registered, nearly everything has been purchased off it. I'm not sure what's more disturbing -- people buying wedding gifts for a convicted pedophile they don't know, or the 10 o'clock news giving it coverage above the weather and other local news.

Nothing Says "Happy Valentine's Day" Like a Stalker

So. Let's do a recap of my intern-stalker boy from this summer:

• Intern-Boy shows up at my place of employment in June. He has a blond pageboy, kind of like one of those Hanson boys. Mmm-bop. He just finished his sophomore year at Mizzou, is studying computer science, and is deemed socially awkward by my coworkers. He is not old enough to drink.
• Intern-Boy is introduced to me. Suddenly, he is everywhere I turn. He walks by my desk in the morning to say "good morning". I head to the printer to pick up my work, and he jumps out from behind the cubicle walls. He sees me walking in the aisle and waves vigorously at me, despite the fact that I am about 10-inches from his face. He asks me to lunch almost every day. He gives me his work phone number, cell phone number, and dorm room phone number. (I don't think a guy has ever given me his dorm room number, not even when I was in college.) He asks me to the same movie three times, even though I repeatedly say no, that I plan on seeing it with my boyfriend. He grabs my ID badge, which hangs from my belt and is about two inches from my crouch. He waits for at least ten minutes next to the elevator, waiting for me to leave at night. I see him following me home from work in his parents' '93 Dodge Caravan. My brother and my coworkers think it's funny. I am creeped out.
• The summer ends, and he goes back to school. I breath a sigh of relief. Phew. My stalker has returned to college world.
• No, it's not over. In a brief moment between him being innocently friendly and him following me home after work, I mentioned my AIM screen name. He starts IMing me.
• Winter break. He is at his parents' house in St. Louis. He IMs me every other night. I answer maybe one in 12 IMs. He asks me to see the movie "A Very Long Engagement" with Audrey Tautou several times (because I mentioned I wanted to see it). He offers to drive the 4.5 hours to KC to spend the night on my couch. And makes other weird comments. He hooks up his Webcam so that he can show me his new haircut. His AIM messenger icon is a picture of his own eye.
• January 15th, he's back at school. And IMs me at 3 a.m., confessing his undying love to me. It's a loooong IM. Luckily, I am asleep. Freaky dinky. Lots of talk. Did I mention that he's only 20? I stop responding to his IMs and hope that he doesn't know where I have moved to.
• This past Saturday, Intern-Boy IMs me while Tommy is on my computer. I tell Tom to tell Intern-Boy that I'm not available, but Tom is.
• Valentine's Day. My AIM away message is set to Grover's "Here/There" speech. Intern-Boy sees my message and says that he wishes someone would say that about him. Hint hint. "Happy Valentine's Day, Megan. "

I want to tell this kid that he is as freaky as hell, that stalking is only okay if you are super-hot or if I am doing the stalker. I am afraid that, if I tell him off, he might do something drastic to himself. Or I'll find a rabbit boiling in my apartment. But is it wrong to be slightly flattered at the same time you want to get a restraining order?

Jumping on the Band Wagon

Surprise, surprise. I have jumped on the band wagon. (Wait, is that one word or two?) My life, open for ridicule.

Here are a couple things that happened to me in the past couple of days:

1. Car accident on Southwest Trafficway. (I wasn't driving.) We were rear-ended by a massive Ford truck going maybe 40 mph. He said he was on his way "to a meeting with a priest at that Catholic church over there." Um, no Catholic church in sight.

2. The Westport Hallmark is going out of business. This is sad news for someone who sends cards to people for things like getting a new tattoo or passing gas. However, I was able to get $30 worth of cards for about 15 bucks. I rock!

3. Some kid at Subway called me "sir". (I was wearing a skirt, boots, and talking in my six-year-old girl voice). I reassured him that it was okay, that I had been called a lot worse. He was so embarrassed he gave me eight Subway stamps, enough for a free sub the next time I go in. I almost told him he could call me sir anytime if he kept supplying me with free stamps, but he looked about 12. I have sworn off 12-year-old boys, for now.