A Novel Quest

It’s Friday. Why are you reading this. Kindly make your way to the nearest pub, grill, and/or brothel and Instagram your drinks for the sake of man kind.

Monique has to stay in and study tonight, but later she is going to polish off a bottle of wine and watch most if not all of the rest of Season 2 of Parks and Recreation. In case you haven’t been following her rants for the past 2 months, she is studying for the GMAT, the standardized test she must complete in order to apply for business school. The test is May 29th. This is her life until then so thanks for reading about it.

Below is VLOG #3! The none-too-anticipated vlog of her experience wine tasting a couple of weekends ago, and a silly, silly hungover tirade about not wanting to do laundry OR study. If you happened to miss her second vlog, in which she was drawn like a French girl and dressed like a madman, you can watch it here.

What was ‘My So-Called Life’ about, anyway? Why was she calling it ‘so-called’? Whatever. Monique is having a moment and often that means she needs to get some stuff out. Here’s the stuff. No bubble wrap, no postage, no turkey, just stuff.

There are so many people smarter than her it’s distracting. And beautiful. Today she laughed for 10 straight minutes at gif’s of babies making sour faces and read a really great blog post by this guy from twitter who she accidentally bumped into at a bar and she had a real, true realization. Things are rarely real and almost never true so this made her pause and take a moment to type a few things down and that is this.

Comedy helps her cope with everything.

She felt the ache of it gnawing at her knee caps in the middle of the night and she realized once and for all ON THIS VERY NIGHT that she has relied on all things comedic, witty, and smart to get her through every single god damn every little thing. That’s not a typo, she meant it to sound like that. She likes sounding weird. Anyweird, the point of this blog post is that there are a lot of fucking frames and pillows that say how healing laughter is, but Monique doesn’t care about all of that. She only knows that any time she is feeling ancient, frizzy, or miscalculated she turns to comedy and feels better. Any time boys make her want to burn something she makes toast and is actually okay with it tasting like crap because hey, it’s better than the hiccups.

What she’s trying to say here is thank you, comedy. Two significantly majorly annoying and emotionally draining things have happened to her in the past year, and comedy threw out its rope when she was drowning and SHE CAUGHT THAT SHIT so comedy, you deserve a pat on the back or a free drink or three. She can’t begin to tell you how many times she’s turned emotionally distorting situations into humor. She was once in a yoga session in a horribly deformed pose sweating through her eyeballs and the yoga instructor said, “Think of a really horrible situation that you’ve experienced recently. It’s humorous, isn’t it?”

She was all, ‘No that shit sucked’ but then started laughing and even fell out of her position because of it, while continuing to laugh. Not to say that this yoga deformation/instructor prodding was what changed her life but there was something humorous about finding the humor in everything. That last line even made her think “There’s something hubris about finding the humor in everything” which is like pride right? So like, kind of conceited there for a second. But the point is, every any time she’s feeling down (also, purposefully not grammatical) she looks to comedy and it shakes her out of her rattle and roll. If that makes sense. Even if it doesn’t, you understood it and maybe it made you smile.

Okay, post too long and attention span is the rarest thing in the universe currently so she’s done but just wants to reiterate the graci to comedy because it’s gotten her though some shit and she has seen some things…

Monique had an entire blog post outlined in her head. An entire one. In fact, she had an entire night planned out. She was going to come home, clean her room, make a nice dinner for herself, and study. After studying, she was going to blog about her weekend, and finally finish editing her latest video blog. This was her night, and a productive one at that.

This post is the result of a night of productivity that only partially happened because she let a single boy beat her down. If you are in the market for letting a boy beat you down, outlined below are a few steps in which to let this happen.

Step One: Agree to see him whenever he wants to see you. Today the boy said to her, “Come over.” So Monique, having dated this boy for quite some time, agreed, despite whatever plans she’d previously had.

Step Two: Sacrifice the things you must do, because he wants to see you. She liked this boy, and she would sacrifice some blog/study time to watch a little TV and fall asleep with him. Both her and the boy were very tired, and neither of them had anything in mind for the evening other than settling down, tubing, and sleeping. And by tubing she simply means, watching the tube.

Step Three: Always look forward to seeing said boy. Always. Monique gets home from work, cleans, makes herself a nice, healthy dinner, does two loads of laundry, and takes a shower. Most of the things she wanted to get done, got done. Stepping out of the shower, it is 7:45pm. Her plan was to study for an hour and a half or so, and make her way over to see the boy. Here, Monique would like to stress that she is looking forward to it.

Step Four: Prepare to meet said boy without contacting him first. Dress in your best “comfy but attractive” clothes. This includes wearing a bra. After changing, she contemplates completing tonight’s self-prep by doing her hair and maybe putting on a little make up. She decides against it. Good thing too.

Settling down at her desk, she text messages the boy to let him know she will put in at least an hour and a half of study time before leaving to visit him. The boy was aware that she had some cleaning and studying to do ahead of time, and he was also aware that there was no set time in which they would meet. In fact, Monique told the boy “I’ll text you later”, to which he agreed.

Twenty minutes after her text to him, the boy responds, and she is frittering around in the bathroom. She hears the text during this frittering. For some reason, she has a sinking feeling. Keep in mind that she has not read the text yet. She is still frittering. Once finished, she reads the text.

[Insert text from boy along the lines of "I'm too tired" here.]

Are you let down? Great! You’ve successfully let one boy beat you down. (It sure beat her down! Now she can’t really focus on anything but heart-wrenching disappointment!) Continue on this path for the rest of your life, and you’re sure to find heartbreak and affliction at every turn. Best of luck!

At some point in the not so distant past Monique decided she was going to try her hand at video blogging. She carried around her trusty video camera and Canon with her all weekend and filmed everything that moved, in addition to snapshots of wind, people, places, things, and nouns in general.

While still very much an apprentice in the realm of video editing and speaking directly into the camera, this is her first attempt and she’s tired but somewhat proud of it.

Let’s be honest, Monique doesn’t know quite how to organize things into neat piles of ten. What this means is she doesn’t know how to organize the things she has to do into something resembling a to-do list. Also, she just spent 2.5 hours taking a practice GMAT test and she failed miserably and quit before the third hour could set in.

What does this mean for you? It means she’s going to find solace in comedy, like she always does, on Twitter. Twitter is like being blindfolded in a virtual hot tub with a bunch of cool people you don’t know. You’re not sure what they look like, but they’re always just sort of chewing the fat and sharing cool stuff with you.

So tonight Monique is dedicating this blog post to her all-time favorite tweets in a bucolic attempt to forget her past failures and join the circus. She follows comedians, friends, bloggers, comedians, writers, social media hotheads, comedians, web designers, musicians and Peter Shankman. She tried narrowing it down to less than 20 tweets but she has trouble letting go. If any of these tweets resonate with you, don’t wait. Follow them and join the virtual hot tub today.

Disclaimer: Monique understands she is probably the only one that finds 100% of these tweets funny/amazing/tasty as cherry cough syrup.

Drew Koshgarian

1. Drew Koshgarian: @MostlyPregnant This blonde cricket thinks it can walk over to me.

2. Joe Veix: @joeveix Your love is like a roller coaster, there’s a long line and everyone is throwing up.

3.  Laura Aime: @angelmeat Last night I dreamt that I was trying to find a cute dress to wear for the end of the world.

4. Robin McCauley: @RobinMcCauley Ask your doctor if dying is right for you.

5. Sean: @SeanBlazed Too many people should be in awesome warrior tribes and aren’t.

6. Kelly Oxford: @kellyoxfordWant to know the worst thing about yourself? Hang out with a kid for an hour, then ask them.

Braden Graeber

7. Braden Graeber @hipstermermaid I wish awkward accidental eye contact burnt more calories.

8. Jacqueline Carbajal: @jackiecarbajal Thank you channel 4 news for showing film footage of old people being blown away by the wind

9. Alec Sulkin: @thesulk Girl on Bachelor: “I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather be or anyone else I’d rather be with.” How about NYC and Clooney.

10. Peter Shankman: @petershankman Don’t compare yourself to others. Compare yourself to you, yesterday.

11. Dane Cook: @danecook Asked a girl why she didn’t use her blinker while driving. She said blinkers are to “remind me to turn” & “I didn’t forget.”

12. Andy Richter: @Andy_Richter I’m a pretty tolerant guy, but if you try to give me one of those tissues with lotion in them I’ll kill your family.

Dane Cook

13. Brian Clark: @copyblogger The less seriously I take myself, the more I achieve.

14. MJ: @sucittaM I think I wasted my 15 minutes of fame trying to save money on car insurance.

15. Disneywords: @disneywords If I really lost him, the best friend I’ve ever known, how sad I’m gonna feel, looking through the woods alone. –Pooh

16. Andy Martindale: @AndyMartindale Adolf Hitler trending? Has he died?

17. TextsFromLastNight: @TFLN I legit just said “vaginal access denied” then told him his password hint was “tequila shots.”

18. Amber Tozer: @AmberTozer If you’re trying to eat a cantaloupe but you don’t have one, get your shit together.

19. Fran Gillespie: @FranGillespie Kony just got cast in the new Eddie Murphy movie to guarantee no one will find him.

20. Tim Siedell: @badbanana I honestly thought I’d have more Cub Scout badges by now.

It’s gotten to the point where she now experiences bit of anxiety over posting a blog because she fears she will have nothing to say. Little does she know, that tomorrow her reticence will no longer be a handicap.

How little does she know this? You could measure it with your finger. She wants you to believe she can predict the future, that her oven smokes when she turns it on for no apparent reason other than to look cool, no matter how long she’s been thawing a slab of salmon. So she starves and casually sips decaf green tea and her lips boil down to one notable fact: it’s hot, and that’s life. Life is hot and full of unfactorable polynomials. The functions are undefined.

This is what happens when you sit age-old math formulas at the same table as an English major and serve them tea–the problems aren’t solved but stuffed into a closet full of sentences with the door shut tight so everything fits. Strike a prose! And on she sits, like a 90 degree angle in the driver’s seat, mumbling about sitting upright for God’s sake man or you won’t go anywhere in this world.

And when she’s done with slopes for the night the only thing she hopes is that this all makes sense in formula Dream: bed + head = oh, now I get it. Then the light bulb over her head is actually morning, and zero is the only thing that makes sense.

Flailing on the edge of the ‘Shit Girls Say‘ bandwagon, holding on for dear life, Monique can’t seem to focus on anything but this Saturday, when she and 3 others will venture around Los Angeles, video camera and lip gloss in tow, in hopes of portraying an accurate picture of ‘Shit Single Girls Say in L.A.’.

She pauses here to put on her headphones so she can concentrate. Feeling but looking nothing like this little cousin guy. –>

This Saturday she will be co-starring in her first scripted YouTube video. Here’s what’s going through her head: ‘sure I can act in my room in front of my mirror but in front of a camera?’ and ‘can we really finish the entire thing in a day?’ and ‘I wonder if it will go viral’ and ‘is this trend even viral-able anymore?’

Her gut tells her it doesn’t matter. She’s only in it to have fun and make people laugh. A more serious side says, “But yeah you’re dedicating an entire Saturday to this. A Saturday you could spend studying for the GMAT and possibly fitting in a 4-mile run. Something good better come out of this shit.”

She ignores both gut and serious side in favor of a large sip of water and a long back crack. Also, she opened up her novel last night. She read it in its entirety. 12 pages. Twelve whole ones. She wrote a small paragraph, tweeted it, and got so distracted she made herself sleepy.

Does that number of lines even make the paragraph minimum? By the time she’d removed her contacts and the rubble from between her teeth she could barely get through more than a page of the book she was supposed to review weeks ago before drifting off to a rather shortish-long sleep that should have been dreamless but was not.

A note on dreams before she showers and pretends to read again before she sleeps: they’re real. Here’s why.

When Monique first picked up the idea to write this novel and popped it into her mouth like a mint from a welcome dish, she’d had a dream about her dog. This was either early to mid 2011. She dreamed her dog had choked on a green tennis ball, dying before her eyes, choking and spasmodic. Without a clue as to how to rescue the dog, she pushed on the bulging tennis ball lodged in the dog’s throat, and the dog was alright. The moment of the choke however, was a long and grueling one, and those brief air-clogged dog seconds were like hours in her dream-fog.

Just a mere week and a half ago, Monique’s dog had a seizure right before her very eyes, violently shaking and convulsing in much the way the dog choked in the dream. It was the first time one of her dreams attempted to predict anything but her true life insanity, which she was already vaguely aware of. Why did she remember this petrifying dream? Because she opened her novel. That very dream is described on the very first bloody page of it. It gave her goosebumps. Maybe that was why she couldn’t get past a paragraph the night before.

If her current dreams are any indicator of the future, she should probably tell you that last night she dreamed Oprah passed away in a red dress. Everyone lowered her body in a body of water slowly, some strange burial service she’d requested before her death. You can imagine the world’s shock when she rose from the water seconds after she was submerged, alive.

We all felt pretty bad about it.

Laundry night.

As she walks down her apartment hallway, rumpled sheets in hand, a man at the end of the hall yells, “Hey neighbor!”

She stops, turns, smiles, and waves back with her face. Her arms are holding rumpled sheets, remember? She keeps walking.

Then, “Uh oh.”

Monique turns again. “What?”

“Somebody’s got a boyfriend,” he sings.

“Who?”

“You. I noticed a little sass in your step.”

Monique smiles again, blushes a little. “That’s not the reason for my sassy step.” She keeps walking. Sassily.

“I’m happy for you!” he yells one final time as she rounds the bend at the end of the hall and approaches the laundry room, out of sight.

Her first thought: since when does sassy step mean sappy schlepp? Maybe she’d lost three pounds. Maybe she’d just gotten a stunning new hair-do. Maybe she’d gone four days without a single nail chipping. The possibilities are endless. Our main character is, I might add, no feminist, but she certainly felt slighted by this man, this male neighbor of hers who had assumed she was happily sashaying down the hall for no other reason than because she was now ‘taken’. As if no other solitary thing could have caused this no-nonsense hip strut. As if her very happiness  depended solely on the affections from a single man.

Please.

She’s merely happy because her Klout score went up 2 points on Twitter. And these dark chocolate peanut butter cups from Trader Joes are absolutely fabulous.

acidcow.com

She doesn’t pause to drink, only walks in and straight for her computer. There were at least 15 thugs loitering around the front steps of her apartment entrance when she got home, and if that one entrance were the only way in she probably would have slept in her car.

There’s a termite on her bathroom floor. She kills it quietly and changes her toilet paper roll. Then she goes for the computer, without pausing to drink. Where has she come from? A walk, five long miles in the cold for a little fitness. There’s a half-marathon in June she’s shelled out $140 for, so come hell or high shin splint, she’ll be there and she’ll be ready.

She pauses to drink here.

Monique is in a very good mood. The work out has somehow caffeinated her spirits and the energy broiling inside her rib cage just might lift her off her seat. She wants to use that energy to study for the GMAT because she is clear in mind and body and ready to take on rational numbers and irrational thoughts about lifting off her seat and also failing the GMAT. She furiously digs her teeth into her thumb knuckle, scratches a non-existent itch on her wrist and gets lost for a full minute in all the unread books on her bookshelf.

Today she discovered the magnificent tweets of Jen Statsky and almost had a stroke upon waking this morning to the realization that it was still not Friday. On the bright side, she also woke with a radiant stream of words at the tip of her tongue, all of which, if strung together properly, formed quite the poetic verse. And the poetry stayed with her throughout the day, right on the bridge of her nose. In fact, the first email she opened read, “Good morning, I am out of pens,” and it was from a complete stranger. Monique found this oddly poetic and stored it for later. Now.

“I need a manicure,” she says aloud. Anything to keep her from staying on topic. The topic of which is, well, your guess is as good as mine. And then she saved this blog post and attended to her poetry, once again, shirking the novel in search of a less task-oriented task.

Walk away from this post knowing that this is the first line that popped into her head this morning: Never, ever, ever, ever give up doesn’t apply to every, every, everything.

She woke this morning to peaceful ringing, and the vague notion that her right leg was longer than her left. How would she fit everything in a day? If she could multiply herself, she would be a millionaire, but ethically, it wouldn’t be right. Or so she’s been told.

What is her priority? Ascension. If she’s not moving upward and out, she turns stale, accumulates dust, which is actually something featured early on in her novel. What novel? The one she hasn’t touched in months because she’s been tenderly nursing an addiction to blogging and slam poetry, Twitter and her Toshiba tablet. Is it lack of interest? It couldn’t be. Her characters are waiting. She thinks about them always, and even nabs snippets of conversation from large crowds to add to her dialogue. But the distractions persist like a dry itch, and each night she must reaffirm her mission, her quest to write a novel. Be something great.

Define great. In your mother’s eyes, you already are. In your eyes? Just good. By definition, great means large in number; numerous. To Monique, great is a woman in a white  dress, telling you you’re great. This is how Monique’s blog sub-header came into existence, after all. It all started on a cool, smoky night in Vegas at some posh club.

She was sitting down on the sidelines because her feet were experiencing a pain threshold only Jesus himself could identify with. Like many women aged all-of-them, she felt it was her civic duty to sacrifice agony for elegance, and so it came to pass that she was seated all alone, with only a half watered down cranberry-vodka as her consort. And so she sat, and every once in a while, her toes nodded in agreement.

A lady in white approached. “I absolutely love your hair!”

Now Monique cut her hair the very next day (see right), but that’s besides the point.

“Thanks!” Monique replied. “I’m cutting it tomorrow!” The exclamations are used for effect. It’s to give the reader the feeling of being at a club where the music’s so loud, you can’t even feel.

The lady in white did not make a face. Her carefully tweezed eyebrows raised with delight instead. She smiled and said, “It’s going to look gorgeous!”

This lady is definitely drunk. But Monique keeps going on about the hair, because she’s all alone with her toes and there’s no one to talk to. She expounds upon topics such as: the length of time it took to grow such a curly stream of brunette, as well as her fundamental reasons for doing away with it (see left).

It was at this pivotal moment when she realized that the lady in white had heard nothing of her drawn out hair spiel. She stood there (admirably), nodding, pretending to listen to this poor, afflicted damsel who at this point was going on at a terrific speed about this split end or that when suddenly, the lady in white leaned down slowly, put her lips to Monique’s ears and said softly, “You’re gonna be great.”

There was something in the way this lady in white said this one single line. It was as though the music stopped, and all the people disappeared. The entire universe took a breather so this stranger could whisper this single thing into Monique’s ear…

And it was the way she made me feel.

Great. Let’s get started.

Why do you blog in third person?