WINTER WHITE

I'm so grateful for the breaking news on Yahoo's homepage that it is now okay to wear white after Labor Day. Now chefs will won't hide their faces when they show up in their standard white uniforms on that first Tuesday in September. Nor will angels cower behind flashy harps to camouflage their fashion faux-pas.

If you're still self-conscious you can always wear these "Winter White" items, most of which are a total steal:


Teeth
Stained doilies
Polar bears
Vanilla bean ice cream
Carol Channing's hair

I think this song is really beautiful.

SWAMI RIVER

I went to a Hindu temple on Tuesday, and I'm going back this week. The Swami was this little man swathed in melon-colored robes talking about joy and pain and how if you touch a pan and say "the pan burned me" it's not really the pan that burns you, it's the fire. There's a part of us called Sakshi, which is like a witness, and is always neutral (like the pan)...So say I quit smoking and I am going crazy and can't sleep and only want to cry and eat mango spears, that's my body coloring my Sakshi. So I am not in pain. My body is. And that's what's keeping me in alignment right now so I'm sticking to it.

Sometimes a performer is trying to enter at neutral but it's possible that she had a boot on her car earlier that day and had to pay a huge fine and now what you're seeing at a comedy show is more of a meltdown, but who are you to know, with your neutral Sakshi. But if she has a microphone she can try to gather the synapses as they fire and use them to heat some comedy brownies.

Sorry if I'm butchering these religious concepts. I'm still trying to grasp them. Oh, and also, after I left the Hindu temple I side-swiped a big metal pole and now I have a giant black scratch on the side of my car. A karmic scar. That sounds like a poem, "On the side of my car/A karmic scar..."

On the side of my car,
a Karmic scar. Now poised
by Griffith Park I arc
my back to eject
the nicotine gum set
deep in my psyche.

Oncoming antonyms
flash hazzards in my throat,
engraving my lungs
with one final honk,
one more thing
that can't get around me.

So here's a fun game. Watch this video where I'm going crazy under a gold comedy mask and see if you can pick out the times I....

1. Can't formulate a sentence
2. Offend the Japanese culture
3. Pick my nose
4. Apologize to the guy who booked me for saying the F-word which was the one word we agreed I would not say.
5. Ask a man if he's pregnant.
6. Say I don't like music.
7. Tell a woman her name reminds me of arms like chicken wings.

(And that's not me smiling. It's the gold theater mask infusing my Sakshi. Not pictured: Tragedy mask. But it was there)

ELECTRIC MAYHEM

This is Lizzy reporting live from Peet's Coffee in Larchmont. We just had a very "Hollywood" power outage. Some girl with bleach blonde extensions sitting next to me was like, "What The F*$%? I have an iChat meeting at 12:30. What The F$*#?" To my right a guy with an eagle studded on the back of his flannel (a very "I got a development deal" look) was on the phone with his agent, "Well now I CAN'T read the script because the power went out in here. No. I was running on Reserve Battery Power."

Ten minutes later the power came back and the blonde had moved to a table with a moustached man a in an ironic t-shirt, was playing with her earring and complaining, "...because things were so slow this year for pilot season..." and he said, "I know. My desk was empty."

And the eagle-studded flannel actor seems content now that he's downloaded his script. He's squinting at his screen, with some sort of whipped cream drink to his right, his lips barely moving but his eyes making emotional shifts as if he's on camera. He's cracking his knuckles, imagining himself at the audition.

Outside there are some hot guys eating salads. I want a salad.

IT'S HAPPENING AS WE BLOG

Mercury really is in retrograde. Do you care? Do I?

Growing up I was exposed to rudimentary astrology and also some pretty unusual coping methods....for instance, once I was stressed out and my Mom said, "Picture yourself sitting in a glass cube. But whatever you do, DON'T LET IT FILL WITH WATER." I still like to swim and everything. I just have an aversion to Houdini.

According to an "Astrologer to the Stars!" I met at my old day job, I'm a Leo with a Leo rising and a Libra moon. She knew what signs her dogs were too. These tiny white dogs in her office full of giant neon furniture.

Broke-o-vich

From now on I’m only doing things as if I’m Erin Brockovich. Or Julia Roberts as Erin Brockovich. I am going to hand-deliver all important documents. I am going to take my comedy door-to-door. I'm going to perform for desk clerks at every county water board. And when someone says they won’t sign a contract, I am going to warm their heart by carrying a baby. Does anybody have a baby?

I woke up yesterday wishing I was married, thinking, "Wow, it would be nice to hold someone right now. But would they be grossed out that I just sneezed into my Strawberry Shortcake beach towel? Wait, I wouldn't have done that in front of another person."

Because here's thing: Living alone, I feel like a wolf. Just an animal. I can do as a please, leave whatever wherever,
say anything aloud without judgement.

Like once I was dating this guy and I was at his place checking my email, saw something I didn't like and said, "Dammit!" He asked, "What's wrong?" And I thought, 'If I were alone right now, I would never have given my reaction a second thought. It's just that now there's an observer...'

By they way, I washed the towel. There's some girl in apartment fifteen who never smiles and she was taking her clothes out of the dryer, folding them very slowly. I said, "Hey, can I squeeze in and throw my stuff in the wash?" She paused, and with this all-knowing motherly glance, she goes, "I'll be done in a couple minutes," like she needed to be alone in the laundry room to fold her socks?! Ughhhhh. I wanted to go back and ask, "Is your life so bad that you need to control the laundry room?" I also have this new neighbor who has a ton of tattoos up his legs and a forest green sheet covering his window. Forest green reminds me of every guy's bedroom in high school and a sweatshirt that around the same time I wanted from Eddie Bauer. When you're young and you tell people you like a color, you start getting everything in that color.

It happens with cartoon characters, too. I have a friend who said she liked Mickey Mouse and now she has a Mickey Mouse teapot, Mickey Mouse towels, a Mickey Mouse toothbrush. All she needs to complete the theme is for Mickey Mouse to come over and shit on her bathmat. There's a time in your life when people think you're going to start making money, or get married, and that you'll get to replace all the old stuff you have. But sometimes that takes awhile and you're stuck with the same things you like when you were eighteen. You still have the holey plastic crates and the paper cranes and the lava lamp. And the Strawberry Shortcake towel.

Here's one of my favorite parts in Erin Brockovich: When Erin brings her boyfriend to tell the very sick woman that she's getting five million dollars. Her boyfriend says, "I still don't understand why you want me to come with you." And Erin says, "I want you to see what you helped me do."

I want to be able to say that to someone. My equivalent: Dragging someone out to a show in the valley and saying, "I want you to see what you helped me do." Then afterward would they ask me to sign an I.O.U.?

I do need money, by the way. I keep avoiding the topic of rent with my landlady by bringing up Swine Flu.

O Life!

Scatterbrain

I fantasize that I was in the room when traffic rules were established. The conference room always looks like an Edward Hopper painting and I’m making a point in a conservative scarlet suit.

“You’re telling me people who want to make left turns are going to WAIT in the MIDDLE OF AN INTERSECTION for the light to turn YELLOW and then just turn without knowing whether the oncoming traffic is going to STOP?!”

They tap their pens and a stubby man pipes up, "Well, Lizzy? Can you think of a better solution?"

And then my moment: “I say we prohibit all left turns.”

A deep silence swells and one man with slick black hair rises from his chair.

He scratches out a Goodwill Hunting-esque equation on a dry erase board that proves mathematically how only taking right turns will slow the flow of traffic by seventy-five percent and also waste x-amount of fuel.

"Choose your battles," I scribble in the margin of my legal pad where I've also doodled flowers and a certain kind of spiral I learned to draw from watching a show called The Secret City.



There he is. Commander Mark. After I learned how to draw spirals I only wanted to draw things where I could apply my technique; beanstocks, telephone cords, and cartoonish drawings of "crazy" people with spirals flying out of their brains.

Neither Commander Mark nor dry erase boards existed back in the 20s around the time traffic lights were invented. I tend to abandon chronological order, and not just in my fantasies. I need to look at a timeline in order to process a sequence of events. Once my friend Jodi and I made timelines of our lives but they made us sick to our stomachs so we burned them outside The Hungarian Pastry Shop.

I also struggle when I'm learning the rules for board games. The other night I was at a party where a woman was explaining how to play Scattergories. I even took notes on my little pad of paper with my tiny pencil, the kind you have to press down on really hard.

I wrote:

3 category cards
12 blank lines
4 lists
2 lists of 12 categories

What the hell. So now I have to solve a puzzle before I can play a game?
Then I looked down and saw the 20-sided die and felt Oh Dear's slip through my body.

"So how does all this connect?" I asked.

And pretty soon everyone forgot about Scattergories and started eating macaroni.