beccalavelle is an awesome friend and i am lucky to have her

I cannot DEAL with these pills, I mean, I like that I feel a little more emotionally grounded and that I probably won't have PMS anymore but man, the HEADACHES and the NAUSEA

I WILL BE IN YOU JUNE 26th

be in touch

i havent seen my wallet since thursday and it's getting to be a problem

I went on the Nuva ring at the awesome Planned Parenthood doctor's suggestion. She said I might try skipping a period using the ring, just to check that my depressive episodes are actually due to PMS hormone fluctuations. She said it might be less severe than using antidepressants to treat those symptoms, and that it might be worth a try.

if I spent half the time I do worrying about boys working on school, instead, I would have straight As

I think I will leave around the 15th and fly back on the 27th.  I am terribly excited and have been glad to have this to think about instead of wasting time on message boards.  Nonstop from PDX to Berlin is $866!

So far I want to go to:
- the botanical gardens
- Pergamon Museum
- Sachsenhausen
- the zoo

etc. etc. etc.

that i will be going to berlin this summer to spend a week with andrew and i am SO FUCKING EXCITED

I've been trying to clean up everything, I'm working really hard and things are getting better

but I've barely cracked my email box...I have some labels but I'm still at 3060 messages to slough through. what labels or filters do you use with email?

I need a hug so bad but I can't touch anyone

I've made friends with a girl at church. Her name is Jamie. She's 16 and pretty cool. She and her family invited me to Easter dinner at their house in Lake Oswego. I went home with them after church. Little did I know, there was a DETOUR on the way (or, out of the way). When I got in the car, they announced that we were going to a friend's farm in Mollalla, Oregon. The lamb hadn't been slaughtered yet, and this family is notoriously slow, so Jamie's mom wanted to go out there and try to hurry the process along.

It was pretty intense. I wasn't really involved, I just watched and then they showed me how to pull the skin off it, but I didn't help that much because they wanted to get it done as quickly as possible. We threw the carcass into a couple of garbage bags, then drove it to Jamie's house.

They put it in the food processor with some onions and wheat seeds and some other stuff and made this INCREDIBLE paste. Some of it got turned into meat pies. It was amazing to eat meat that was still warm.

Dinner was awesome - there was delicious stuff other than lamb. I got sent home with probably a pound of pasta salad and some amazing rice with cinnamon and olives and raisins and stuff in it. Definitely enough food for a week.

I also ate a ton of cupcakes and truffles, drank a lot of Turkish coffee, and chicken, and pork chops. I feel like I'm about to explode. There were some traditional mixed drinks (anise liquor that smelled amazing), but Jamie's parents didn't want to give me any because it's still 2 weeks until I'm 21. But everyone else got really drunk and they put on Lebanese records and sang and danced a lot.

I had a total blast and I really miss my family, they would have totally fit in. All the boys looked kind of like my brother.

there are three orders of business.

1) the stumptown comics fest. next weekend. you should be there. I will be at the afterparties at Guapo and at Cosmic Monkey on Friday and Saturday.

2) my birthday party, the Saturday after next one. you should be there. I have probably invited you on facebook. if you are not on that site, (cough beccalavelle cough), this is me inviting you. it is at my house.

3) I went to Le Pigeon last night and ate a profiterole filled with foie gras ice cream. it was amazing. I almost came.

First iced coffee of the year at Albina Press! Summer is coming!

I want to sign a yearlong lease with my landlord because my rent is $150 and I want to get that shit LOCKED IN, yo. But, the lease she sent me is kind of funny. In it, she wants repairs costing under $150 to be the tenant's responsibility. I emailed her back saying "hey um this seems weird to me, do you mean that I don't need your permission to get those repairs done and that you'd then reimburse me afterward for them?"

Her response:

"The reason for asking you to take care of small repairs, is that I live far away and it is a hassle for me to do it. I am charging less than the usual rent for houses in that neighborhood of that size, so I think that it is not too much to ask that you all take care of the less expensive problems. Is that something you can agree to?"

My response (not yet sent because I am soliciting feedback):

"I think it's to your advantage to have me take care of minor repairs at the lowest possible rate (and you can trust that I will shop around - I've managed to connect with an electrician, for example, who will do work at $30/hour) and have the repairs performed promptly. Deferred smaller expenses can lead to larger ones down the line. For example, if a tenant chooses not to do maintenance that is the landlord's responsibility (like cleaning the gutters, which could well come in at under $150, and, under this lease, be my responsibility), whose responsibility is it if that becomes a problem down the line?

I am also pretty handy around the house, and have done a bunch of work on it that has saved you money - for example, fixing a leak in the kitchen sink that would have caused mold in the cabinets underneath if it hadn't been promptly repaired. I paid for materials for that out of pocket.

Most tenants simply won't do that kind of work out of pocket - this might be why your house was in such poor condition when we moved into it in 2007. Even if it means that I send you invoices and a slightly reduced rent check some months, I would hope that the security you get from knowing that your house is being kept in good condition and having its issues properly addressed by a financially responsible tenant would be worth the slight loss you might take from ensuring that your house's problems are promptly addressed.

Also, can you imagine me telling future roommates that "hey, you might have to pay $35 out of pocket to get a leak fixed"? No one would want to move into the house! I think you'd have a difficult time convincing anyone who read this lease closely to move in, because of this ambiguity. At the very least, you'd have a difficult time convincing a tenant that was faithfully going to look after your property to move in.

Giving a tenant the flexibility to repair the house promptly without consulting you is great, since you live far away. But I think that if you want to maintain your property in good condition so that it can continue providing you with a source of revenue, that you should probably be willing to pay for its upkeep. If I owned a house, I would prefer that my tenants have problems fixed as they arise than to have tenants that let problems continue until there's $150 worth of work to be done before they call someone to the house to have a look."

that Durufle's Requiem is like, SO totally awesome

if you're in Portland you should come see it, free performance at Latin Mass in a few weeks

is such a freakshow

by Christmas I am going to make a comic. I have the story and know it would work well/be good. please get on my case about it and bug me to finish it

Is the movie worth seeing?