I am busier than I have ever been in my life. Well, that’s not strictly true, but it feels that way. I feel ancient. And tired. I haven’t cooked a real top-to-bottom meal in weeks. First my parents were here visiting (so I was working at night, drunk, after doing the tourist round in 12-hour increments), then I had a deadline, then my boss came back to town, then The General and I went land-hunting in the Baja, and now I have another deadline, and the boss is still here, and my fucking writers are dropping like flies so I have to create, out of thin air, several pages of copy for the publication that employs/enslaves me.

And then iTunes goes and adds HBO to the fold, so I’m finally watching season 6, part 2 of The Sopranos. I know! My life is so hard.

Yet, inexplicably, I found an hour and a half today to plant bougainvillea in front of my house and weed the little cactus garden The General created shortly after we moved into our house. I got brutally stabbed so many times, between the bougainvillea thorns and the cacti, that it almost made me forget about the fact that I was covered in sandy dirt sweating like a pig pulling up roots with my bare hands. Almost. (Aside: can you even imagine that?)

So, my question to you, Internet, is this: Do you know how to garden and plant stuff? I sure don’t. Just now I looked up the gardening definition of “pinching,” and I am still unclear on what it is, but I am pretty sure it’s not like regular pinching, or the Spanish curse word “pinche.” Or, for that matter, like pinching a loaf.

SORRY!! *Smiles.*

Wow, I just read my last post (from last night).  Can you tell I was drunk, or what?  There are a few key words missing from that title, for example.  And some serious syntactical errors.

I am turning into a total lush.

Actually, that’s a nice but inaccurate way to put it, since I’m not exactly a social drinker.  I penned that beauty sometime after midnight, while I pounded Mexican beer, by myself, while working.  That’s more like “desperate alcoholic.”  Non-functioning, too, or so I gather from the evidence.  Jesus, I need to stop working drunk.  It’s one thing to post a confusing and mistake-ridden thing on here (sorry, loyal 4 readers), it’s another thing entirely to put together a publication other people read while bleary-eyed and inebriated.  I wish my drug of choice made me smarter instead of stupider.  I have to watch that, I really do.

Well, my wedding dress came back from the Wedding Dress Factory or whatever, and I’ve got a few months before I need to squeeze back into it for any final alterations… so I’m off to finish up some work before The General and I go buy a spinning bike from Costco.

Our original arrangement (our prenup, if you will) involved us promising not to get fat until we’re past our prime retirement years, but we’ve amended that already.  Now we’re just resolving not to get hugely fat until November 9, the day AFTER the wedding.  Funny how fast that downward spiral starts, ay?  In a year I’ll be a fat, married, slobbering alcoholic, whereas right now, I’m just a starting-to-gain-weight, engaged, slobbering alcoholic.  Notice how not different those two states are.  Sigh.

Today my mother and I spent an hour and a half on the telephone in order to order my wedding favors and invites.

Everything in the above sentence would have seemed absurd to me two and a half years ago: “hour and a half,” “wedding favors,” “invites.”  Totally, utterly absurd.  If you told me three years ago that I’d be living in Mexico, making decent money doing something I’d never dreamed of doing, with 2 cats and a fiance, and that I was planning a wedding– a real one, with flowers and stuff– I’d have told you, “HA HA HA HA!”

And yet here I am.  Can we talk about how weird it is?  Can we talk about how that?  I know it’s touchy.  I’m supposed to be bitching about fitting into my dress and yelling at bridesmaids right now.  Well, I ditched the bridesmaid concept– I don’t want to be anybody’s bridesmaid, why should I ask anyone else to be mine?– but I am bitching about fitting into my dress.  Predictably, it’s tight.  What can I say?  Gotta put these curves on display before they melt into human queso fundido.  Gross, right?  Sorry.

But seriously, HUNH?  That’s what I keep saying to myself.  I just nixed the idea of white-on-black invites because we finally settled on brown linens and JESUS CHRISTMAS, YOU CAN’T HAVE BLACK INVITES FOR A WEDDING WITH BROWN LINENS, IT’S A FUCKING FASHION CRIME.  The incredible thing is, somewhere in this snooty fuck-it-all brain of mine, I have stored information such as, “Brown does not go with black,” and “50 bottles of personalized hot sauce should be an appropriate number of favors for a crowd of 70, including couples.”  Who knew?  My early years reading Seventeen were not a total loss.  After all, that’s the magazine that taught me how to pluck my eyebrows without stabbing myself in the eyeballs.  For that I am forever grateful… except for that long stretch in the eighth grade where I had pencil thin asymmetrical eyebrows.  It was around the same time I thought blue eyeliner was a wise idea, so wow.  You can imagine the results.  Pretty ghastly. 

Anyway, I can’t get over the fact that (1) I know any of this girl stuff and (2) how much girl stuff I DON’T know.  Like the fact that you can’t just buy a dress, you have to go back in 5700 times and have old ladies poke you with needles.  That’s one I didn’t know.  I did know that the invites should generally match the color scheme.  (By the way, I won a small victory with the invitations: they will be printed in custom color “Sassy”– kid you not, Naomi Wolf honey, eat your heart out– an obnoxiously neon shade of magenta.  I am rationalizing that on the basis of my florist’s inclusion of something called “hot pink mums.”)  I did not know that veils and dangly little combs with beads in your hair could cost a cool $500 bucks and beyond.  Way, way beyond.  (I nixed those, obviously.)

Also, today, my dermatologist– I know, I am so much more of a suburban WASP than I like to admit– commented on my wedding website.  (One of those shebangs where you design a cute website about your “first date” and “my vendors” and so on.  Interestingly, nowhere is there a Paypal donation button in the standard design, to donate cash to my parents, who are out 25K on this deal.)  I know!!!  My fucking dermatologist went on my wedding website!!  And he signed his comment, “Dr. Derm”!!!!!!  WTF!!!  I can’t believe all these words, in this order, are coming out of my mouth.

The funniest part about it all is that I always imagined (stupidly, privately, with my nose buried in The Second Sex) that if I ever DID throw in the proverbial I Fucking Hate Men towel and get hitched, it would be some kind of creepy, nerve-wracking, “Will he still love me in ten years?  Even if I never, ever wax my pubes?” kind of deal.

Instead, I am utterly, unflappingly committed to The General, in such a way that the wedding thing is funny– because we already feel married, and ACT married, and we’ve been living together for such a long time now that it all seems  a little goofy.  Not to say it won’t be fun to don bridal white and recite vows.  It will; I’m looking forward to it.  I want a piece of paper, and I want people to mistakenly call me Mrs. General.  (I will actually continue to be Cat Lady, methinks, after much deliberation on the subject.)  I also want the privilege of saying, “My husband this,” and “my husband that.”  Inexplicably, even when I refer to The General as my fiance, people continue to refer to him as my “boyfriend,” which reminds me (much to my dismay) of the first few kisses and gropes I endured in darkened schoolyards as a pre- and just-teen.  Yum.  I guess everyone thinks marriage is such a goddamn joke these days that you need to be married for about 75 years and handcuffed together for 25 of those years for anyone to believe you’re actually monogamous.  That’s a crying shame, because I am monogamous, and I like to make it known.  Why?  One, because I love The General like he is already my husband and has been for some time. 

Two, because it settles the prickly issue of whether or not my vagina is a public campground.  It is not. 

I’m getting real slow on these posts over here.  What can I tell you?  I am too busy organizing “breakfast meetings” for which I wake up at a leisurely 9:30, go enjoy a huge Mexican breakfast overlooking the marina, watch someone else pay the bill, and think to myself, “Boy, this sure beats my work schedule in New York.”  In New York, only investment bankers with expense accounts and shitty Armani Exchange suits get to do business over meals, and by business I mean “talk about hookers.”

But it seems I finally figured out the trick to business in Cabo, and it’s this: schedule all “meetings,” interviews, discussions, and so forth at prime restaurant locations, preferably with white water views and full bar service.  Never, no matter what, go into the office.

Specifically, never go to my office, where right now there is a three-foot high man, covered in dust, wearing a wifebeater, and using– I kid you not– a hammer and a screwdriver to knock down a wall right in front of my desk.  The noise is devastating.  So is his height.  However, no one seems too alarmed, so I’m just going with it, you know.  Going with the flow.  Hey, he’s even whistling a little tune now.  How pleasant.

Viva la Mexico, right?

Dude, I am exhausted.  My parents are visiting Cabo for the first time, along with my hermanita.  (The bro has to like, go to college or something, so he couldn’t make it down.  He referred to the family time on a phone message with disdain as a “pow wow.”)

That means I spent all day yesterday frying in the sun on the beach drinking dad-sponsored cheladas and watching my mother bargain with the souveneir-hawkers (and timeshare OPCs) who dot the main beach here.  It was fun.  By which I mean I was drunk.

To my insane boss’ credit, she actually helped me a lot, so I could spend time acting like a tourist instead of sweating over my deadline (which coincided with my parents’ arrival).  Apparently, my father told The General I look “happier and calmer” here than I did in NYC.  The General is perturbed that I cannot truthify that statement without a lot of hemming and hawing about which things make me happier, nearby scenic beaches or a proliferation of interracial couples.  Oh well.  I am a depressive.  We all know that.

I did get a nice “glow,” which The General refers to as “a shrimpy color.”  While I do have kind of a year-round tan here, the fact is I don’t spend a lot of time lounging on the beach.  I am too busy with this psycho job.  I only get in about once weekly pool sessions.  Come to think of it, I am usually drunk when I do that, too.  Maybe I look happier and calmer because I have an alcohol abuse problem.  Either way, I am definitely redder, thanks to a few hours on the beach yesterday.  I am thinking the “glow” will go nicely with my wedding dress come November, but I guess I will have to work on the bikini strap lines.

Right now I just finished all my work for this issue of the publication I slave over here, which means I am ready to hop in the shower– slowly, so as not to aggravate my intense third degree burns– and then painstakingly lotion my damaged skin and drive down to the hotel to pick up the fam.

Truth is, I am happy.  But I’m probably going to mope around for a little while when my family leaves.  Even The General said, “You know, I kind of missed your parents.”

Me too, soldier.

The General just landed a really good job today. Congratulations are in order. And although my job sucks the life out of me with the force of a thousand angry zombies, I think we’re in pretty good shape right now, as a team. I like referring to us as a team. It feels right, especially since we spend so much time high-fiving and saying things to each other like, “Go team! Rrrrrr!” (But just so we’re clear, if there were a team captain, I’d be it. So.)

The man of the hour is out right now getting me delicious Mexican food to celebrate. I know, WTF kind of future wife am I, sitting here in my “comfy pants” lounging on the couch while I send the future hub out to get food for his own celebration??

I’ll tell you what kind of future wife I am: not a very good kind. The worst kind, in fact, the kind that all men fear in their hearts when they hear the word “feminist”: I haven’t shaved my legs, I am wearing stained underwear, I’m PMSing, I’m drinking by myself, I’m surrounded by cats, AND I have a vendetta against the entire universe, especially those universe members with the dangly bits. What can I say? I think The General knew what he was getting into. I think he even likes it… at least a little bit. Either that, or he just really, really wanted a life partner who could be relied on to make an infinite number of To Do lists for him, full of meaningless, inane tasks that he could easily figure out how to do himself, without my help. I am super good at those.

Anyway, heading to my doorstep, in The General’s handsome, capable, talented hands, are some guacamole, fresh tortillas, salsa, and potatoes filled with melted cheese, mushrooms, corn and other stuff that is sure to harden my arteries until they are the approximate texture of cement. Delicious! I am starting to drool a little bit now. Add that to the picture above, and you know what?

You will know that The General is probably the kindest, most forgiving man on the planet. And he’s got skills, too.

As my best friend observed just the other day, “Wow, The General is the only guy you’ve ever dated who is not a loser. And not only is he not a loser, he’s a CATCH. And not only is he a CATCH, he is actually marrying you!! How did you make that happen?”

What a bitch.

I just got choked up with homesickness a few minutes ago.  I actually cried a little bit, but I just put my face really close to my keyboard so it looked like I was deep in thought.  Or gastritis.

And do you know what made me cry?  A picture of a beautiful, fluffy, crusty-on-the-outside, pocked with poppies, dried onion, salt and sesame seed… bagel.

I got homesick LOOKING AT PICTURES OF BAGELS.  There is a lot of amazing food in Cabo– believe it or not, on a remote stretch of beach an hour north of here, I just had the most amazing formaggi course with real Parmigiano-Reggiano and an ancient, almost gooey balsamic–but there is not a bagel in sight. 

Of course I am pretending I did not see those frozen ones that they import from California to my favorite Cabo supermarket.  They import them all the way down here so Californians, in their infinite wisdom–who do not know what bagels are in the first place–can eat them in the morning.  God, they probably put butter on them.  Or jelly.  (Shivers.)  That’s just like something a Californian would do to a frozen bagel.

And thinking about bagels–a food item for which I have an erotic, permanent intestinal hard-on (gross)–made me think about my little shoebox apartment in Brooklyn, where The General and I used to sit by the big windows, a fat cat stretched over our laps, drinking juice and eating bagels thick with cream cheese on weekend mornings.  Ok, afternoons.  I would double-fist my drinks.  I like juice and coffee and a bagel.  I learned that from my dad, who always has OJ and black coffee in the morning.  But I’m a pussy (in the gentle, fussy pussycat sense of the word) and I drink my coffee with milk these days. 

Anyway, we’d eat our bagels, moaning every few minutes to emphasize how happy we were, sitting under the window or on the little Ikea couch, nursing a hangover and planning our weekend.  Sometimes we would go to the park and lie down on this old Urban Outfitters tapestry I’ve moved everywhere I move (except here, I finally trashed it), watching other people with their puppies and their weekend picnics and their soccer and their shirtless frisbee.  Then we’d wipe the dampness from our butts, pack up our books and blanket and drinks (and empty bagel bags), and go back to the apartment to get ready to drink some more. 

Planning a weekend around drinking while faking enthusiasm for “the outdoors” is not geographically specific, although I do spend way, way more time outdoors here, actually enjoying it.  But still.  Those were such good times.

And I love this time of year in New York.  My first spring in NYC, I would walk south along the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge, watching the a.m. tai chi devotees, and hook a left and go walk the Lower East Side.  Even now I still find LES enchanting, hipsters notwithstanding, when the air first turns a little warm and breathy and smells like something’s blooming in the parks, thanks to that first spring I spent walking and exploring.  It’s a shame I won’t be back in NYC until July, when the subways will reek of BO and reheated urine.  That I don’t miss, or find enchanting.  I can just feel my sweaty arm pressed up against a subway pole already. 

Now, I am finally getting affectionate for this place, too.  I am starting to get it, to figure out its rhythms.  It took a while, but now I feel like I really live here.  I feel like I can masterfully guide my family around when they visit in a few weeks.  When I go to the house after work, it feels like my home.  And that part took a long time.  There are still some moments of cognitive dissonance–inevitable, no matter how long you live in a country that’s not yours–but there are plenty of moments of grandeur and newfound coziness to make those moments bearable.  Besides, the jarring moments are good fodder for my Future Bestselling Epic Poem, if I ever get around to it.

But, with all this talk of spring–which here heralds a sunny, dry midday temp of 85 and comfortable pool water–I am more than a little lonely for a bagel smeared with chive cream cheese and a cup of too-sweet coffee scalding my hand.

I don’t normally pray, but here goes.  “Dear benevolent gods of Jewish baking: please send your finest team to Cabo San Lucas.  No one knows how to make a goddamn bagel here.  I’m starving.”

Which is more surreal:

the fact that I spent Saturday night at a party where the average age was about 63 and there was an internationally-renowned OPERA singer covering Andrew Lloyd Weber tunes;

OR

the fact that I knew all the words to the ALW songs, and I said out loud, “This lady has nothing on my homegirl Sarah Brightman”?

___

Truth be told, I did not say “homegirl.”

But the rest is true. (To be fair to the huuuuuuge dip I just took in Cool Points, I really liked Phantom as a kid and my mother gave me the Brightman/Crawford soundtrack.) (Lame-o!)

I decided to “work from home” today, which is like the biggest euphemism for “too hung over to drive” in the vocabulary of the working class.

So I am sitting here in my pajamas, all slumped over on the couch, trying to figure out why Windows Vista is such a fucking bastard (I have the OS in Spanish too, so WOW, NOW I UNDERSTAND WHY I BOUGHT A MAC IN THE FIRST PLACE, but I need the Windows laptop for my JOB, along with early-90s Windows-only software that regularly bugs up the whole network), jes tryin’ to figure out if it’s shower time yet. 

I sort of just looked down at myself to assess the level of dirt, and while I did that, I scratched my little beer belly paunch and stared off into the distance for a while.

And get this, as I’m scratching around, I felt crumbs down there.  (Ok, full disclosure, I had just finished eating a pizza that I really bungled up by burning the crust in the oven.) 

I had actual crumbs of pizza crust inside of my belly button.  Hunks of identifiable crust matter.  Loads of them.

And there was a second– I swear to Christ it was only a SPLIT SECOND– where I thought about eating the crumbs out of my belly button, because the garbage can is all the way across the room.

* * * * stunned silence * * * *

If any family members are reading this, I think we can agree that it’s time for an intervention.  I’ll just be here eating shit that I’ve dropped recently off of my own unwashed body.

Because I got some emails back. Not sure if the two are connected. Maybe the stars are just aligned right for me today. That seems like a good explanation. So does divine intervention.

The more I adapt to my Completely Totally Different Life here in Cabo, the more I have moments like, “Wow, if I hadn’t done this, where would I be?” For example, I have a very bright friend (who is also a spirited drinker) who is applying to Ph.D. programs right now. Ph.D.? I can’t even remember what that stands for.

On one hand, I feel a little wistful, because I always imagined I’d go back to school someday.

On the other hand, the main reason I always imagined going back to school was that I didn’t have a real game plan and, with a little prescription speed, I can knock out essays like Montaigne, bitch. But I doubt I would ever want to teach anyone anything. I hate people. Mostly, higher-higher ed was my fallback plan because I would get an entire summer off to do whatever I wanted, and also I was very much intrigued by the Alcoholic-But-Genius Professorial Type movie character that’s always flitting around in a dirty bathrobe.

But let’s face it, the only part about that type that’s really “me” is the alcoholic part. I have no real discipline, and it’s too hot in Mexico for a bathrobe.

Plus, my “What do you want to be when you grow up” list has changed so many times it’s dizzying. In age order, these have been my “life plans” in the past:

1. Be a prima ballerina (But I couldn’t get past the “log roll” exercise in ballet class)
2. Be a teacher (But once I was no longer a kid myself, this sounded just plain gruesome, especially the salary)
3. Be in a band like Ace of Base (But I couldn’t sing, and I wasn’t Swedish)
4. Be in a punk rock band (I packed a denim purse and my first guitar, a $100 Peavey, but couldn’t save up enough $$ to hike to California, where I believed, for a time, punk rock had its one true birth)
5. Be Scully on the X-Files (self-explanatory dream-detonation)
6. Be a poet (Still working on that; the beauty of poetry’s complete abandonment as an art form by mainstream society is that I can tell people I am one, published or not, and they still think I’m fucking crazy)
7. Be a vet (Except I was really, really bad at science)
8. Be a dominatrix (That’s when it got hard to pay the rent in NYC, and I gave up on it because I didn’t want to have to go to great lengths to groom/eliminate all of my body hair)
9. Be a restauranteur (I haven’t given up on this one yet, I just don’t have the capital right now)

Not a single item on that list includes any of the jobs I have actually had, or the one I now have, which tells you a little something about how goal-oriented I really am. Also, I always lust after things that are impossible for one reason or another, in some kind of perverse masochistic attempt to ruin my own life before it starts.

So I am now trying to be content doing what I’m doing, which is pretty neat, on most days, and enjoying living in Mexico, where the weather is top-notch and I have a real house and a grill. I know I keep harping on that grill, man, but my greatest jealousy in New York was watching bastards with roof or terrace space grilling in springtime. (I did live on the top floor of my Brooklyn apartment building, but the roof was flat and tar-papered.)

Now I have an entire rooftop deck with chairs and a grill and some pretty succulents in big old planters that I have to water sometimes, making me feel very maternal. And I can see the ocean from up there, not the damn East River.

So for now, I am learning a whole new business I never planned to learn about, and I am happy for my smart friend who is going to go back to school. I can ask her about the university gossip once she lands a swanky teaching gig and live vicariously through her. Hopefully by then I will have knocked off a few of my own career goals, including, at the least, joining the FBI and opening a fondue restaurant.

I think we have to permanently can the ballerina thing, though. I really do.