- a learn spanish the easy way cd
- about 8 AAA maps
- a windup flashlight
- juniper scented body spray
- my beat-up old Nokia
- a Glamour from ‘05
- $3 worth of change
- the clicker to my garage at work
- riding gloves
- a can of deepwoods off (i know it seems odd to keep in the car, but you never know)
- some melted makeup products
- and an old wallet with pictures of my ex in it (thanks for finding that, I was wondering where my wellesley student id went to)

Whatever, just had to vent. I’m crossing my fingers that my car will be forever remembered as the plastic piece of crap with absolutely nothing good in it. I guess I can look on the bright side and say that now I’ve cleaned all the useless sh!t out of my car, and the floors have been vacumed.

So you might be asking yourself what goes into the Sam Cleanse. Well I’ll tell you:

The first usually involves the correction of overindulgence on my part. Nope, I don’t mean I’m an alcoholic (highly functioning or not) needing a drink every night. I just need to remember that although I have a big personality I’m actually a wee person, and should never try to match drinks with friends. Not such an issue when I was in undergrad… the joy of having so many asian friends is that they can’t drink that much or they’ll get the asian flush, and for the most part I was into my fancy mixed drink or wine phase then anyway. Grad school was a different story and I still blame Tim and Scott for several incidents involving boot-and-rally on my part, since I am notorious for mixing beverages. Lately, for those that know me I’ve switched to hard liquor so as to not continue on the path of the feared beer gut my mom scolded me for at xmas time. Well, needless to say I’ve discovered that just a few vodka gimlets will do just fine, and I really should try to avoid any more than 2… if you really must know I’ll tell you the story, but I’ll be damned if I’m putting it in writing. This doesn’t mean I’m cutting out the fun that is involved with an occasional glass of happy juice, but I need to lower my tolerance again… cause cheap drunks are more fun right?

This leads me to my second cleanse… acting like a dude all the time. When I say this I don’t mean you’ll catch me walking around spitting, scratching my junk and catcalling women that pass by. What I’m saying is that my mind often times thinks like a 12-year old boys… always inappropriate. I knew I’d gone too far when I actually made my raunchy guy friends blush from something I said… once again it was funny, but not at all appropriate for print. I’m not saying that I will be able to change this about my personality, but I will just monitor the verbal diarrhea that seems to spew from my mouth and just think it rather than giving it voice. But if you ever look at me and see me smirk after someone has said something fairly leading you can rest assured I’ve just thought something that would make my grandmother blush.

My third cleanse is related to the second. All this time around guys… and a vast majority of my girlfriends (Heidi, Maura, etc…) has led me to have a mouth like a GD sailor. There is nothing more unattractive than a woman dropping the f-bomb all the time. I think I started doing it a while ago to announce my independence and feel like a grownup. It hasn’t gotten any better being in a male dominated profession, and so now it’s time for me to clean my own mouth out with soap.

The last isn’t so much a cleanse as a simplification. I’ve gotta be a little bit more ego-centric. I know it sounds a little ridiculous, especially considering I’m an only child and therefore already pretty selfish, but it should be all about me. I’m gonna get back to doing stuff that’s just for me, like going to coffee shops, taking walks/runs, maybe even throw in an adult education class (spanish, oil painting… pole dancing).

Well, we’ll see how it goes. It usually takes a few weeks/months to bring out the full awesomeness that is me… so let me know how it goes when you see me the next time.

And I know this next bit will come as a shocker, but not every girl wants/ is ready for a “relationship”. More often than not I piss off guys because I’m the one who’s not ready to commit. I’m way too busy to be tied down to you… I could maybe squeeze you in a couple nights between work, travel and my overbooked social calendar. I hate to say it boys, but roles are starting to shift. Women are no longer needing men to fill these empty voids in their lives… granted it would be nice to have a companion, and the physical stuff is always important, but I’m the TFP (Total Fuckin Package) on my own… without you… and if you can’t handle that you’re clearly not man enough for me.

* The above blog is really meant for guys I’ve known, guys I’ve yet to meet, and friends that should know this. If you feel like it pertains to you in an individual way I didn’t really mean it that way, but maybe you should take a step back cause it looks like you’ve got a guilty conscience.

My rant is now over… writing is very cathartic for me and I just had to get it out… now we’ll see how long I keep it up there before I start to wonder if I sound too crazy.

Nowhere was this more strikingly apparent than at the mall… that’s right I said the mall. The ultimate venue for people watching. If any of you have been to a mall anywhere in the south, and I’m going to make a broad statement and say this counts from Atlanta all the way to Dallas, you’ll notice a particular phenomenon. That would of course be the fact that the mall is not just a place to exchange currency for goods, but rather a fashion extravaganza. I don’t mean a fashion show for the stores of course, but for the people walking around the mall. At Atlanta’s see-and-be-seen malls, either Lenox or Phipps, you can sit for hours and watch a parade of blondes in tight jeans, with their fake tans, sprayed on inches of makeup, and 4 inch stilettos… because when I’m throwing down some major cash shopping, and hauling around bags full of goodies I want nothing more than to look hot doing it while my feet scream out in pain and bleed through my Jimmy Chu’s. Then of course there are the rappers/ballers/wannabe thugs that walk around the mall not actually shopping, but scoping all the women in the jeans they’ve poured themselves into. This species of mall goer is personified by baggy jeans, tim.s, oversized t-shirts with a sweatshirt emblazoned by a designer label, ball caps with the hologram stickers still on and the brim straight from the package, and of course some obscene chain/watch/bracelet/earrings/all of the above with as many diamonds as one can squeeze into a dollar sign as humanly possible. Now let us compare the Southern mall persona with that of the northerner. It would appear that the primary concern of those that shop in the north would be to maintain a body temperature above hypothermia when they are scurrying from the parking lot to the mall. As a southerner you might ask yourself how that walk consisting of only a few hundred feet could possibly determine one’s entire wardrobe… clearly you’ve never had your freshly showered hair freeze while walking into the mall. So the uniform of the northern girl at the mall includes Uggs, tight jeans  and a hoodie… I’m not even kidding when I say 1 out of 2 girls had on Uggs. Maybe it’s just me, but looking like a yeti with enormous furry feet isn’t my scene. You don’t really find the blonde highlights or the fake tans, well, because frankly nobody would believe you, its been winter here for like half a year already, the most time you’ve spent getting naturally kissed by the sun was while you were outside blowing snow off your driveway for the eighth time that week. We also don’t really bother with the bling up here considering you are either old money, or no money. We have no rappers, you’ll never hear anyone bust a rhyme with “my beantown bitches and hos”, and the ballers don’t live on the north shore. For the exceptionally lazy shopper there is also the option of just coming to the mall in your pajamas, oh if only I had a camera to take pictures of the number of people I saw in flannel pants, and their bedroom slippers.

When I arrived it was a wintery wonderland with about a foot of snow covering everything in site. It’s actually best when it’s snowing because that means it’s right around 30 degrees, it’s when it’s not snowing that you have to start worrying. Sure, snow is beautiful when it’s freshly fallen, but just give it a few hours to turn dirty and grey. My hometown has all of these old narrow streets, so when you are shoveling your driveway there is no place to go but up with the snow, so after a few good snowfalls the snow along the roads is about hip deep. Well I’ve been running every other day, and since anyone that knows me knows I don’t EVER run, this is shocking. I’ve quickly discovered why people don’t really run in the winter… cause it’s freakin treacherous that’s why. First of all half the sidewalks aren’t actually shoveled, so it’s like you’ve reached a dead end in a maze and you have to turn around and run back. So I started running in the middle of the street… clearly a dangerous move, especially once the snow started to halfway melt forming patches of black ice. All I can say is that it must have been comical driving up on me half run/walking, getting startled because there’s a car about to run me over, and then slipping on black ice and nearly eating it on some dirty snow.

My blood has definitely thinned out over the past few years and I’m walking around my parents house bundled up in sweatshirts and flannel pants… hm, maybe I should head to the mall, I’m dressed already.

• Clearly I decided to stay in ATL rather than take any of the job offers back in Beantown… have no fear peeps, I’ll make it back up north soon enough, and until then you can very well get your asses down here to party in the Dirty Dirty
• I’m back to competing with my Morgans… this time it’s Suki’s baby Ty that we’ve raised from a baby (in fact I got to hold the bag when he was still just a frozen sperm… grosse). They finally let me show as a lady… I know, I’m as shocked as you (there are some picks of me in my suit, and yes I’m supposed to look a little like a man, I mean more than normal that is). It’s tricky though cause I have to keep flying up to New England every few weeks, showing up, riding, drinking heavily, showing with a hangover, repeat, fly back to ATL and head straight to work…
• I’m working on some sweet shit at work from the BeltLine to a giant resort town in ..:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Egypt (but I can’t tell you about it cause I’d have to kill you)… I’m kind of a big deal
• I’ve encountered a series of ‘interesting’ men, and when I say interesting I mean that I seem to meet guys that are a caricature of what a real person is like. It’s been everything from a guy that seriously lives in a bus that runs on corn oil, to a guy we fondly refer to as Eurodouche (the man sported the same pair of corduroys every day during the summer, wacky Belgian), and the most recent was this one guy I finally gave into and went out with purely based on his persistence… I should have realized it would be a mistake when we met at an ugly sweater party and I was dressed in a tree skirt (and no I don’t mean a skirt that had xmas trees, I mean I wore the thing that goes around the base to your xmas tree… I actually heard someone voice their shock that I would own such an ugly xmas poncho… are you kidding me, is there such a thing as an awesome xmas poncho?), anyway my ‘casually dressed’ date showed up in a silver blazer, a button down shirt with white collar and cuffs, plus cufflinks (no man under the age of 40, or a CEO should own cufflinks), a Rolex, and the biggest blinged out ring I’ve seen on a man or a woman (at least 50 little diamonds)… this all culminated with the fact that he forced me to get in his car to drive 10 spaces to my car just so I would be impressed with his shiny brand new Lexus (sorry buddy, your money doesn’t impress me). I’m pretty sure that I have now discovered… and inadvertently gone a date with almost every species of douche bag, this latest being the New Money Douche, First Class Douche or the Douche Upgrade (I’ll let you all choose the nickname). Anyway, have no fear, I have the feeling that I have met my douchebag quota for a lifetime, and it’s all nice guys from here.
• The last big thing is that I just bought a house. It’s a 3 bed, 2 bath on the edge of a transitional neighborhood (nice way of saying there is a man that sleeps on my porch) and an established single family neighborhood. It’s a foreclosure and little by little there are things about it that lead me to believe it was all kinds of shady… but even if I just sit on it I think I can make money based on the neighborhood. The shadiness starts with the fact that when the guy came to do the inspection and he went in the crawlspace he said that there is an entire room down there with drywall and all… of course I think we all jumped to the most logical conclusion about its use… underage Malaysian prostitutes. The other thing that seemed fishy at first glance were all the phone lines running to the back of the house, but then when you see the switchboard in the back bedroom you realize “of course, it’s a phone sex operation”. Needless to say since the house is already set up for these types of ’small businesses’ I should just continue on with the endeavor, unfortunately I don’t know any Malaysian girls, but I think I could talk dirty for a little mortgage money.

So I really do need to go to bed now, but one of my new years resolutions is to keep up better with my blogging.