HI I AM STILL ALIVE BUT I WORK ALL THE TIME!

Here is a picture of me with a statue of Borges in Buenos Aires.

Ah, the New Year celebration, an utterly meaningless symbol in the face of the ultimately monotonous universe.

I, for one, am a huge fan of meaningless symbolism.



Ever upward, friends.


ADDENDUM: Surprise.

ADDENDUM 2: For everybody making Mayan comments, cut that business out.

Hullo, friends.

Gosh, it's been a bit. I've been bad. Like I have previously said, my life has been very incredibly busy for quite some time now, but for the past couple of months, it's been even more so.

You see, a few years back, when y'all knew me as another woman in another form, I was working as a full-time freelance writer and editor. And it was glorious. But then the bottom fell out of the market and, well, you know the rest. So I sucked it up, broadened my skill set, used my love of the Internet as a communication medium, and retooled myself as a social media marketing type person.

But, you know, I think there's a sort of person who is naturally good at that, who thrives on it. And I don't think I'm that sort of person.

The company I work for is amazing, my boss is great, lots of things about it were fantastic. But the fact is that I'm just not cut out to make a living at social media. I'm good at it, I guess, but not great. And there are things I'm pretty great at. And I'd rather do those instead.

A bit ago, I was offered an opportunity to return to more writing/editing-centric position, still Internutty, still social, but not client-focused. Super geeky stuff. Really cool.

So I've been working on that transition. This is going to be a huge, incredible big deal for me--a chance to really do what I want to do...research geeky shit and write about it. Like academia, without the rampant douchebaggery. It's...well, let's just say I've been pinching myself for days.

But between working out heavy and hard, making every meal from scratch, meeting farmers in dark alleys to buy food from them, working more or less two jobs, and sleeping, I haven't had a whole lot of time to update this. But life is good. Fuck, life is great. I have amazing, supportive kind people to whom I owe so much.

My mama and daddy trained me to count my blessings.


I need quite a few more fingers for this job.

Love to everyone.

What is up kids?

It's raining here in the A, and I got too much sun this weekend (one last hurrah on the beach) so I'm hecka itchy. I don't sunburn very easily, but apparently I do still require sunscreen if I'm going to lay out for multiple hours. In other news, I am an idiot. I got to swim in the ocean, though, which is definitely high up in the Favorite Things list.

Here is a hipstery picture I took on the beach:



My homegirl Luz has convinced me to join her poledancing studio (!!!) which has been a blast so far, because this is Atlanta and so you get explicitly hip-hop-oriented classes that are booty-focused and so far up my alley that they might as well be choreographed by yours truly. It's a fun accessory to Crossfit, and a good workout in and of itself...my upper body strength means I might be able to do some really interesting things eventually. Anyway, I'm sure there will eventually be pictures and/or video of yrs trooly twerking it out, for your enjoyment.

I would like to recommend an amazing book to you folks now. It's called Ego, and it's an exploration of the evolutionary potential implied in 9/11 and its aftermath. I'm sure that sounds weird as hell, but this book is incredibly inspiring with respect to humanity's future. But, then again, I'm a little hippie-dippie and weird. Still, even if you're not into human potential stuff, it's worth it just for the fascinating chapters that drill down the meaning of tiny incidences spun out from that horrible event. This isn't some weird capitalizing on 9/11 book; it's legitimately meaningful. A+.

Not much else. I hope those of you in the US had an awesome Labor Day weekend. I know I did.

What happens when you go to a party at your gym?

You rope climb in your shitkickers.



Long-time Flux fans may remember these boots from Accident Prone.

(And before any of you critique my rope-climbing, I normally use brake and squat technique. Just not when I'm having my fancy picture taken. Still made it up in about 30 seconds, even doing some weird smush-foot thing. I love the ropes.)

Anyway, life is awesome, work is good, books are nice to read, 22-year-old boys with sick abs are nice to make out with, I drink too much coffee, etc etc.

Massive number of messages to respond to, things to write, adventures to have. Sorry if your message is one I have yet to reply to! Basically, when I unarchived, I got a huge number of messages, and I'm trying to respond to each one, and it's taking FOREVER.

Anyway, here are ten things on my mind right now:

1. I now can officially squat my body weight (130 lbs.) Holla! Heavy squats=bigger, more awesomer butt (I didn't intend to type "awesomer" but that is too funny to correct). Also, for some reason nobody believes I weight 130 because I look small, but that's what happens when you put on muscle like a 17-year-old boy on steroids.
2. I was in LA for a long weekend and had an awesome time and ate bone marrow with friends from THE INTERNET. Also, since I don't drink beer any more, nobody likes me anymore (not actually true). I also played Beatles Rock Band, hiked, put my feet in the ocean, drove my friend's Volvo around, met Tucker Max, and proved that milkshakes are totally paleo. I miss LA so much! Fuck you, perfect weather city with fun stuff!
3. I am reading, like, four books at once: advance reader's copy of my friend's book Ego, The Vegetarian Myth (for my book club), 1491, and a Spanish-language book of Hellenic porn that my boytoy brought me back from Greece. Multitasking is hard.
4. There's a recently-unearthed mammoth at the La Brea Tar Pits museum that has my same autoimmune disease! His name is Zed! I wonder what mechanisms cause arthritic conditions in mammoths. Zed probably was not hitting the gluten.
5. My mom calls me honey badger because I eat massive amounts of nearly-raw meat rapidly. Imagine a 51-year-old woman with a Southern accent saying "honey badger don't give a shit." It is exactly as amazing as you are imagining.
6. Check your Vitamin D levels, kids. Especially if you don't eat eggs or organ meat or spend much time in the sun without sunscreen. Most people are deficient. I am at 55 ng/mL and feel like a goddamn rockstar. Supplement or get some sunshine. Glorious. (Vitamin D has a sort of cultish following, but it is really important.)
7. There is something exciting afoot that will reinforce #1.
8. I miss my dog. Lost in a breakup. Her name is Pippi, she is a brindle pit bull/whippet mix, and the smartest, sweetest, most well-behaved little girl in the world. I am unabashedly a Dog Person. Sometimes I think about breaking into my ex's house and stealing her back, and then running away to Mexico. I'd have to change her name, though, because everybody would think her name was "Pipi" which means...you guessed it...peepee.
9. I hate when people pretend like all hunter-gatherer groups are the same, and have some sort of identical idyllic leisure culture OR exist in a state of violence and semi-starvation. People are different. Does that seem random? This weekend I had somebody try to argue that HG societies are all non-sexist and super-egalitarian. I am fairly anti-civilization/agriculture/the state/etc. but, uh, that's not true.
10. Two weeks ago, my friend Luz had a birthday party and took this picture of me that is kind of amazing:



Never stop dancing.

Some of you will appreciate that the new running joke among multiple groups of friends is that my life is an elaborate falsehood crafted around the pivotal supposition that I am lying about having read Finnegans Wake.

No, I don't know how that works, either.

Anyway, I had a luscious grassfed beef heart for dinner last night from my local CSA, which I shared with a friend whom I've known since age 10 or so...meaning that he knew me when I was an awkward, unattractive nerdy kid with severe social dysfunction. And there we were, sharing the circulatory organ of a cow oh so many years later, still awkward nerds with social issues. That's been one of the most pleasant things about moving back to my hometown, for all its flaws: the ability to renew all those old friendships and to relive old times.

A lot of what we did was gossip...who's married, who's had an insane number of kids, who's failing miserably, who is triumphant. I wonder what they say about me when I'm not around...the punk rock poet laureate and nerd seductress who had so much potential to squander, who traveled wide only to come back home, who's done everything and nothing all at once. Who finds herself ten years later living in a studio apartment in intown with a chest freezer full of organ meat, a decent bit of savings, a good job, and big ol' plans.

Big ol' plans, like always. Not really existing in the "someday" because everything is immediate. The pursuit of eudaemonia. Excellence and glory.

That's what it's about, really. Ever fucking upward.

So says the awkward, attractive nerdy kid with mild social dysfunction, who has read Finnegans Wake, damn it.