I hate the things in my life that make me blush when I think about them.

We had a party in my writing class today. I made red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting (yum). They were supposed to be heart-shaped, but my attempts at molding the foil liners did not work as planned, so I drew hearts on the top with gel icing instead.

Well. I thought it was gel icing.

Aimee (the professor) was eating one and smiling and suddenly I realized her mouth was completely blue. And then someone said, "Aimee! Your mouth is blue!" and everyone started laughing and she dashed out of the classroom to check her teeth in the bathroom mirror.

I then realized that it might not have been gel icing on top of the cupcakes -- that it might have been, actually almost certainly was, gel food coloring. Enough gel food coloring to tint fifty batches of icing.

She came back and said it was not as bad as she had expected, but her mouth was as blue as if I had given her trick gum. So was her index finger.

No one ate any more cupcakes after that.

I just want to say that Kevin, Rob and Jamieson are the most fun people in the world to get drunk and dance with.

(If you ever go to Club Bang, you can see for yourself.)

I am off to Palm Springs for three days on a business trip.

(That sentence looks weird to me too.)

I am reading Please Don't Kill the Freshman, the high school memoir by Zoe Trope. I really like it. I am suddenly remembering the exact horror of sitting in class, staring at the clock and feeling like you are completely wasting your time.

In honor of that, here is a look back in time at something I wrote for my zine when I was in high school.

16

16 is waiting for something better that you know is out there but you can't quite reach.

I suddenly feel a little sad about the last line of this entry. Spending three days playing teambuilding exercises and discussing financials was not exactly what I had in mind when I was 16.

Palm Springs was: steak frites, Kir Royale, trying to escape the boring table, Pacifico in the hot tub, too many cigarettes, going over financials while eating bacon, stealing teeny tiny bottles of Tabasco, lots and lots of coffee, the most expensive manicure ever, beautiful windy skies, dry lips, champagne, white terry robes, teaching my co-workers how to crochet, laughing, sleeping hard on soft pillows, feeling glad I don't work with a bunch of suits, sipping warm bourbon from a flask in the backseat while racing home on the 10.

I drove out on Wednesday with three guys I work with, in a huge old Ford LTD. The driver is a man with a plan. He has a trucker stove, which is like a little crock pot that can be plugged into the cigarette lighter. You can cook different things in it depending on the length of your trip. He has made brisket before, but since our trip was going to be relatively short, he decided to do a meatloaf. He'd also dreamed of doing some engine block cooking so we decided on potatoes and butternut squash, wrapped in foil and strapped to the engine with wire.

The meatloaf smelled amazing after an hour of driving, but we had to move the potatoes and squash to a hotter part of the engine because they weren't cooking at all. After forty-five more minutes, on the outskirts of Palm Springs, we decided to pull over and eat. The tires rolled onto the soft sand of the shoulder and we got out of the car, taking our paper plates and meatloaf with us. We pulled sodas from the cooler and sadly undercooked potatoes from under the hood. The squash was fine, especially sprinkled with brown sugar, pinched straight from the box with our meaty-sticky hands. The meatloaf was perfect -- tender and oniony and full of pure meat flavor. We gobbled up hunks of it, paper plates resting on the massive trunk of the car, and then picked at the scraps left at the bottom.

We cleaned up, stuffing our trash in the trunk, and poured little nips of Jim Beam into our half-full soda cans. Two of the guys lit up cigars as we started up the car and, as we pulled onto the road in our huge car under the pink, setting-sun sky, I sipped my whiskey + soda and felt so perfectly happy.

So after Palm Springs I was struck down with a cold that has left me snotty and drippy. But even at the low point of the illness, last Saturday, I was still able to attend the sleepover.

That's right, we had a sleepover.

Because we miss that particular cozy feeling of falling asleep in the same room with a bunch of friends, giggling in the dark, drunk with new secrets (or whiskey), the housemates and I organized a sleepover. There was an opening ceremony that featured everyone dressed in their finery -- argyle sweaters, smoking jackets, blazers with leather patches on the elbows -- and smoking huge cigars. Then we cleared the living room floor, covered it with mattresses and blankets and lounged in our pajamas. Taboo was played. Monster Squad was watched -- and partially slept through. Cranium was conquered. (I am the Word Worm master.) Around five am, the morning light barely creeping up the edges of the sky, I blew my nose one last time and lay down on the floor. But Rob promptly launched into the entire script of Merman: The Movie, which was hatching from his brain, fully grown, right at that very moment. "Stop!" I finally yelled toward the middle of Act II, after Merman's father has sent him to the surface to fall in love with a human girl. And then it was quiet.

We slept.

Dear C,

Today I spotted you flirting with the girl at the cafe, the one with the cute face and clothes much cooler than yours. But C, dear C, don't you realize that she has a boyfriend and that she knows you are flirting with her?

You wear your sad heart on your sleeve, with a neon arrow pointing at it that says "LONELY HEART," flashing. You think it hurts less than hiding it. Maybe you're right. But I think it is a decoy heart, hollow, with your own hidden somewhere else entirely.

I think if I bit into it, my mouth would fill with honey. It would be soft and chewy as taffy. If only you'd turn off the neon sign -- you're advertising for tourists when what you really want is a girl to call it home.

Yesterday I was walking behind a man
who was carrying a large box with one hand
and struggling to put on his sunglasses
with the other.
After an unsuccessful minute or so,
I heard him mutter intensely,
"Fuck you motherfuckers!
Get on my fucking face!"