You know your team sucks ass when...

...they're up 8-0 in the top of the 4th and you're not sure if they'll win.

-L

Skating Lessons

You came to meet me at the beer garden, overrun by trendy Manhattanites “slumming it” in quaint outerborough New York and they wouldn’t let you in because of your skateboard. I stood outside the door with you and we took turns throwing puzzled looks at the bouncer, plotting ways to throw it over the fence without knocking a hipster unconscious. We settled on the deli down the street where you bought a pack of Marlboro Menthol Lights and let the Pakistani man behind the counter keep the change in exchange for holding onto your skateboard, and I made fun of you for smoking menthols and I made fun of you for your newfound vegetarianism and you laughed and rolled your eyes at me—not bothering to dignify my sadistic sense of humor with a response.

20-minute waits for pitchers of Spaten poured by German baristas and we were restless and we weren’t drunk enough, but M breaks some weed onto a dollar bill and you roll it for me because I don’t realize how buzzed I am until I have to do something so precise. The crowded tables around us stick their noses into the air and there’s a chorus of what’s-that-smells.

When D and M explode into an impromptu beer fight, everyone’s covered in beer and asked to leave, but we don’t even try to argue because we’re drunk and high now and another drink is the last thing we need. But we giggle like teenagers to the bar across the street and get one anyway and end up sitting on the bumper of someone’s obnoxious birdshit-covered Ford Explorer, watching C being drunker than I can ever remember seeing him.

The Pakistani grocery store clerk laughs when we stumble drunkenly back into the store, a huge shift from our earlier composed selves and as we leave, I make my mind up that I want to learn how to skateboard, now. I perch my high-heeled feet on top of the wobbly skateboard and cling hard to your forearms as you guide me down the sidewalk. The wheels rattle along the bumpy sidewalk sending vibrations up my legs while I try to focus my bleary vision, but I keep hiccupping into giggles and jumping off. I try one more time and we start our awkward dance down the street, but I lean too far to one side and the board slides out from under me and in an instant I’m airborne, squeaking and trying to regain my balance, but you grab my arms tight and I bury my nose into your chest. We stand there laughing like that for a while.

When I find a copy of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay on your desk, I think that maybe we have more in common that I first thought—that maybe you are someone I could fall for after all. But I know that I never will. I know that you never will either. And I wonder why that is.

-L

It's that time again...

Time for another installment of "Choose L's Fate," brought to you by CEO's of the World in conjunction with Blogger and Monster.com. If you want random people to call you about jobs that have nothing to do with your prior experience, trust Monster. Getting your hopes up and crushing them, one phone call at a time, since 1999.

After a year at my current magazine, my boss told me that we're folding. I saw it coming, and I was planning to start looking for new work anyway, but it came a lot sooner than I thought it would. In two weeks, I will once again be unemployed. So, I'm leaving it up to the 12 and a half people who still read this site to choose my fate from one of the below options. Feel free to suggest your own.

1) Apply for another magazine editorial position. Hear no responses. Cry. Develop a dependency to pain medication, antidepressants and fried food. Drown in own vomit à la Jimi Hendrix.

2) Go back to school. Preferably abroad. Immerse self in copious amounts of debt.

3) Sell out. Become a corporate whore. Hate self.

4) Join Peace Corps. Spend two years in Africa. Contract Malaria.

5) Convince British friend to marry me for a visa. Move to Europe. Engage in illicit affair with oil tycoon from Mediterranean country. Sail a lot (because that's what rich people seem to do). Leave him for poor artist from Bar'theh'lona. Live on street.

6) Get a one-year visa to Australia. Downside: I'm only allowed to work at one job for four months at a time. Major backtrack on career goals.

7) The ever popular option: Strip.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

-L

Hi, my name is L, and I am a Mets fan.

This is why I am bitter, angry, often depressed and a self-loathing masochist.

I also have a crush on David Wright, which probably means I have an STD.

-L

Where is my mind?

I don't know where it's gone. I used to have that itch to write all the time. I'd freeze mid-sentence to hunt down a scrap of paper just to jot. Lie in bed buzzing and finally throw the covers off in a huff to write down ideas. Sit in front of my computer for hours chain-smoking cigarettes in my little off-campus studio apartment. Leave Trainspotting on repeat in the background as a reminder of how far removed from "completely fucked" I still was. It was comforting. It felt like my mind was this neverending geyser of thought, ideas, word pairings that would continue to spew ridiculous-isms to the point that I'd never fully rest. I'd forever be an insomniac slurping cup after cup of black coffee. A full bladder sending my legs into spasms and leaving me wriggling in my seat because I refused to break my chain of thought or I was lazy or both.

But it's gone on vacation somewhere. I lost it in Europe. It might be huddled in the EuroStar tunnel between London and Paris. It might have fallen in love with a one-night stand in Barcelona and left me to pursue a man who was lost before it even learned his name. Or it's begging for change on Grafton Street in Dublin, belting out Irish folk songs at the top of it's lungs.

Maybe I dropped it in a toilet in Rome.

Now everything seems repetitive and somehow wrong. I keep recycling what it one gave me into different versions of itself and I'm so bored.

I'm afraid to look for it. That thing that lived inside me and made my brain want to move all the fucking time. What if I look and it's permanently gone? If I accept that it's just taken a break, I'll never have to face the possibility that it's dead. If I convince myself it'll be back, there's no chance of my finding it's decaying carcass somewhere in the recesses of my completely and utterly fucked head. Maybe my constant depression has ceased to nurture it and finally smothered it into a grey semblance of something it once was.

When there's nothing left to burn you have to set yourself on fire.

Which is what I'm doing now. Hence the two sloppy, ill-formed posts today.

I'm ripping my hair out and setting myself on fire in the hopes that the stink of burning flesh is enough to guide my sanity back home.

-L

Transatlanticism

He describes her as “the girl he loves” and it makes me chuckle into my hair. It's such a trite way to describe a woman. Cheesy song lyrics. Corny, like referring to sex as “making love” and all that bullshit. It doesn't define anything. For all I know, he's never even met her, but it makes everyone bat their eyelashes and sigh collective breaths of understanding. It only makes sense to the people who are in love. All intensity and heaving chests, air escaping their lungs like bursting balloons.

The ones like me paint their nails black and purse their lips in perpetual disbelief, understanding the lie before it even leaves his parted lips. Before there’s even a chance to tell the truth.

But it’s simpler that way. Stretching an arm to take a photo of yourself while stumbling through another drunken night over West London’s cobblestoned side streets. Sipping a strange fruity concoction from a late bar that you would never order yourself, but it’s okay because it was bought for you. And, in retrospect, it tastes delicious.

Another week is wasted whether it’s on one side of the Atlantic or another and you’re not quite jaded enough to accept it’s the same everywhere you go. So you hold out the hope that you can change it by crossing a different ocean or mountain range or reaching out for that unavailable thing—you haven’t named it yet—that keeps slipping in and out like a wave licking sand.

You dig your toes in deep but no matter what, the tide ebbs. But that moment of contact will carry you through another week here, a month there, however long it takes to settle on a good name.

-L