on fear.

like most of you, dear readers, i bought many 3 oz liquids, charged my electronic devices, and headed for the airport this holiday weekend. i had a wednesday night flight into boston, and a saturday evening flight returning home to chicago. like most of you, i went through the lines, security checkpoints, and life preserver demonstrations. but unlike most of you, i was in a blind panic the whole time.

saying i don't like to fly is putting it mildly. i can't set foot in an airport without my throat tightening and my brain projecting the image of the plane ripping apart over the island like the series premier of lost.

i classify it is a combination of obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety disorder, panic attacks, and claustrophobia all rolled into one. as soon as someone finds out i have a "fear of flying" (which they always do with air quotes, which always makes me want to throw them into a propellor blade), one of two things happens:

1. i get a physics lesson. this always starts with an eye roll, a heavy sigh, and a literal pulling up of the sleeves. "penny," they'll say on the exhale, "don't you know that planes want to be in the air? it's the most natural thing in the world. the science proves that this is the safest way to travel." which then leads to my LEAST favorite fun fact in the history of time: "besides, don't you know you're more likely to die in a car accident on the way to the airport than in a plane crash?"

listen assholes, i'm only going to say this once. i'm the lucky survivor of two near-death car accidents, both of which have left me with some pretty nasty physical and mental scars. i understand safety, fear, and the likelihood of travel accidents. but at the end of the day, i walked/limped/was carried away from the wreckage, and i'm sitting here now, virtually no worse for the wear. but people don't walk away from plane crashes. they're mass casualties, violent deaths that result in the very foundation of our society being shaken. but i still prefer this lecture more than...

2. the person i'm speaking with immediately shares with me their worst flight story. "you're afraid of flying? yeah, i know what you mean. this one time, i was on a plane over the rockies, and we hit an air pocket and fell 3,000 feet in a single second." "you don't like to fly? once, i was in the air, and our engine just stopped working!" i don't know if these jerks just like watching me burst into tears, or if they think they're relating to me in some way, but it NEVER helps. it goes in my mental rolodex of horrifying shit that happens on airplanes, and i obsessively think about it in the days and weeks leading up to a flight. unfortunately, there isn't anything a person can say that talks me off the mental ledge i find myself at every boarding call.

getting on the plane is carefully practiced routine, 37 or more steps on the jet-bridge is unlucky, i have to step onto the plane with my right foot, and i have literally yelled at elderly people on southwest until they have given me my preferred seat; the one behind the emergency exit window row, over the wing, on the left side of the plane. yes, i sound crazy. no, i do not believe it helps. but try and mess with my routine and i will saw through your jugular with my bare teeth.

i have to listen to the safety demonstrations. i have to buckle my seat belt as soon as i sit down. i CANNOT ever get up to go to the bathroom (and yes, this applies to international flights). i never ask for anything from the flight attendants, because i want them to be alert and attentive to the captain when he inevitably radios over to them that we're all going down.

takeoff is the hardest part. i play a counting game with myself, partially inspired by that sweet but totally untrue scene in say anything where john cusak is telling that girl who never made another movie that she just has to count until the fasten seat belt sign goes off, and then everything will be fine. i count from the second the engines fire up and we haul ass down the runway until we are well into our cruising altitude, taking note of each and every bump, cloud, noise, and irregularity compared to my memories of other flights.

i wish it wasn't this way. i've tried drugs, talk therapy, immersion therapy, sleep deprivation, yoga, meditating, and avoidance to combat this. none of it has worked. i sat in the boston airport on saturday, unable to breathe, unable to stop crying, CONVINCED that these were my last moments on earth, thinking "why is nobody else around me as upset as i am? am i really going to die like this? how is a flight attendant named brandi with an i going to save my life?!"

i don't want to be coddeled. i don't want anyone to ever have to experience what i feel and the panic i go through at an airport. i don't want to be trivialized for having an irrational fear that impacts my life a lot more than it should. i don't want fake sympathy. i want people to just understand.

but i'd settle for an amtrak gift certificate. and a bottle of wine for the trip.

give thanks.

in 24 hours, ill be hurtling over the northeastern united states in an aluminum death tube with the rest of the traveling masses.

in 48 hours, ill be lying with a full belly in front of a fire in boston with my dog at my feet, my man at my right, and my family all around me.

in 168 hours (one week), i'll be finishing a hopefully awesome work event that i've been lucky enough to run point on since landing my dream job.

so now is when i give thanks. and since i'm an emotionally stunted wasp who can't verbalize thanks to those i truly care about (see: punching the first boy who ever said he loved me in the back of the head. arm spasm?), i'll blog my thanks.  

i'm a lucky enough girl that i'm thankful for many people. but those people get their due- especially over the holidays, where we all make a concentrated effort to tell people we love them before exchanging the hideous sweaters they bought us. what else is there to be thankful for, after we cover the bases of family, health, and friends?

mostly? i'm thankful that i live in the age of communication. i've got more anxiety than i know what to do with. some is of my own making (blow drying my hair in the morning leads to pulling out strands, which leads to "WHY IS MY HAIR FALLING OUT- OHMYGOD I'M DYING AND GOING BALD", which leads to three hours spent on webmd researching the correlation between female hair loss and early death), and some is the byproduct of a life led away from family and friends, with significant stressors and responsibilities i can't seem to escape. for the little anxieties, i silently mull them over until they become a much larger deal in my head and i eventually collapse with worry. for the big anxieties, i call my friends, talk it out, drink some wine, and spend some quality time sorting out my thoughts on my couch in my jammies. it's socially acceptable to communicate with others about your thoughts, feelings, and fears. watch an episode of mad men- this culture hasn't been around forever. and thank god for this change. i couldn't get out of bed some mornings without knowing its ok for me to call up my mother and lay out all my fears about work and home. and my life is made instantly better when i get a mid-day text from my man about the dinner he's making for me to come home to (yeah, internet. go ahead and take a collective sigh at that. he's awesome).

unfortunately, this communication index often is the root of some of my major annoyances in life. people who can't contain their own news longer than 30 seconds before broadcasting it to the internet, or people who use communicating as a way to solicit sympathy. guess what, boy i went to elementary school with? facebook news feed isn't a place where you r.i.p. your grandmother. she ain't reading it. and now you've gone and bummed out your interwebz friends to the point that people feel obligated to write these "heartfelt" messages about loss. nobody goes on facebook to talk about loss! that media platform exists to 1. stalk people i don't know well enough to ask my rude & blunt questions to, and 2. validate that everyone i hated from high school got fat. 

but when i'm not hating people who need to talk about their problems during every waking hour of their life (or those that need to create blogs just to bitch about it- lawlzzzz self-loathing), i'm actively looking for other things to be thankful for. 

other than the social acceptance of talking through my worries and spending a significant portion of my 20s on my couch in my jammies...

i'm thankful i've learned the hard way.

i'm thankful for the heat stands on the cta platforms.

i'm thankful for chivalry. 

i'm thankful my corner bodega has a snoop dogg advertisement that makes me laugh every morning. 

i'm thankful for boston accents. 

i'm thankful for dogs with smushed in faces.

i'm thankful for brunch. oh god, fuck the rest of this list and anything i've typed before this. i'm so thankful for brunch.  

i'm honestly trying to come up with something else, but brunch is dominating. and i think that's a good place to leave off before a holiday dedicated to the consumption of food. go baste those turkeys, readers. and make sure to give thanks for your loved ones brunch. or whatever else makes you happy. 

zooey deschanel is ruining my life.

[ed. note to the boys in the bhcc class being forced to read this blog: i'm sorry this is such a chick focused post. you can tell your professor i told you that a good balance to this article would be to look at bikini pictures of women over at the superficial. you're welcome.]

i know that zooey deschanel (also called "the z", because i cannot spell deschanel without intense concentration) isn't really someone who should affect my day to day life. she's real, but only in the tangential way that celebrities and politician's sex lives are real. in general, they're blown way out of proportion. with that said, eliot spitzer, i'm still waiting for you to return my calls.

but this doe-eyed bitch is seriously ruining my life. cracked.com has a phenomenal article that deals with bad relationship advice, which, surprise surprise, overlaps with about 85% of the z's message. you can read it here. one of the greatest points the writer brings up is the following, something that irritates me to no end: "Hollywood is still teaching women that "dumb" is "attractive," they're just hipsterfying it. I don't know when it happened (maybe after Clueless?), but sometime after the '90s, "Quirky Eccentric Weird Chick" became the new Bimbo. She's just as insultingly one-dimensional as the archetypal Ditsy Blonde Bombshell Valley Girl character that was all over the place a decade ago, except now she wears vintage knee-socks and listens to The Smiths, and that's supposed to be better, for some reason." 

while the article also highlights things that ms. deschanel isn't technically guilty of, that manic pixie dream girl has committed one too many crimes for me to stand idly by. and it isn't really the z's fault. she isn't the characters she portrays. but she puts her face on a misrepresentation of women and "cool", and that shit has got to stop. and to make matters worse, she agreed to be in the happening, so if i ever see her in person, i'm going to demand my $9 back, and then punch her in the boob. WHO MAKES A MOVIE ABOUT THE WIND KILLING YOU?!

REASONS THE Z IS RUINING MY LIFE

1. her bangs

i don't normally get worked up over appearances (see: every single white female who religiously tracks the stylings of kate middleton, future queen of england and wrecker of your fictitious royal fantasy), but i honestly believe this girl has it out for me. why? because she makes me believe i can have bangs. what's wrong with having bangs? well, i spent a large portion of my childhood looking like this:

a loveable (if only to my parents) human version of a pug. my one saving grace of childhood was that i had, and still possess, red hair. this makes me marginally interesting in terms of visual appearances. but with one hand giveth, the other hand taketh away. so instead of rocking some flowing, sweet locks, my mom (yes you, susan!) gave me a bowl cut until the seventh grade. and bowl cuts aren't complete without bangs. thick, straight, curtain-of-the-forehead bangs. 

i grew them out circa summer of eighth grade. i've lived a bang free lifestyle ever since. but then. of course. the z shows up on everyone's television, and she's got these freaking adorable bangs. her face practically yells at women across america to copy her look. so, like the sheep in this great culture that i am, i do. i go to a stylist and ask for a "sweep side bang." three days later they were totally grown out. do i go back to the overpriced chicago stylist? no. i make the classic mistake of grabbing a pair of scissors and thinking i'm capable of "trimming" them myself. i end up with my current hairstyle, which is a chunk of hair that falls directly into my right eye, cannot be controlled by bobby pins, and refuses to accept hairspray. the z told me i could be cute and fun with this whimsical little style move. and the z lied her goddamn face off.

2. she encourages you (women) to plot spontaneity
the manic pixie dream girl isn't totally zooey deschanel's fault. remember eternal sunshine for the spotless mind? that movie is a long-winded love song to the persona of a woman who shouldn't be let out of her padded cell. and don't get me wrong, i loved that movie. but it's another version of every piece of pop culture the z has slapped her name on in the past five years. z makes it look like women are only lovable when they are so off-the-wall, their suitor is blown away by their originality. except, in plotting this need to be original in every waking moment you spend with said suitor, you lose all legitimacy. yes, it's unexpected and fun when you drag a grumpy but grinning male counterpart along on an adventure that only came into your head at that moment. but living your life like these adventures are what make you valuable as a person is wrong.

the best moments i've had in my life have been unplanned. by me, my significant other, or mother nature. i don't plan on sneaking into skyscrapers late at night just for the chance to see the skyline of chicago from a new angle. but what really makes me interesting isn't that i can weasel my way into off limits places. what makes me interesting (i think/hope) to my partner in crime is that there is a reason for doing my spontaneous thing- an obsession with architecture, a dire need to understand my new home's history. and that is something the z is missing. she does these kooky, crazy things for no reason, other than to be kooky and crazy and relevant. she has no substance.

3. she broke joseph gordon leavitt for the rest of us
i saw 500 days of summer in theaters with a good guy friend of mine. we smuggled in some cocktails, kicked up our feet, and were prepared for a parade of cute. instead, we got two hours of jgl chasing around a scatterbrained reject from the anthropologie catalogue. granted, he had some flaws in that movie. but no heterosexual female with a functioning libido can watch the following video and tell me she couldn't just deal with his flaws for a chance to see him serenade you on your romantic birthday getaway he planned because he is so thoughtful, preferably while naked:

that's a man that you don't walk away from, deschanel. and you made him so sad! yes, it is just a movie. and yes, at the end of it, he falls in love all over again just to validate zooey deschanel being right in that he doesn't deserve her. but there are literally thousands of z's out there carelessly stomping on the hearts of thousands of white men covering rap songs with acoustic guitars. and that is practically criminal.

z, i'm sure you're a nice gal. you have nice clothes, which a stylist carefully selects for you. you say funny things, which other people write for you. but right now, you are ruining the life of every twenty something female who wants to be unique without being ironic, creative without being a cliche, and taken seriously as a woman who is capable of surviving in a modern world as an adult.

should i be a lot less invested in the representation of a person whose sole job is to entertain the masses? absolutly. should she become the model for what is fresh, exciting, and the template for the new wave of woman? over my dead body.

in which i write a dear john letter to an entire city.

dear boston,
we need to talk. we've been trying this long distance thing for awhile now, but i feel like we've come to a crossroads. i hope we can be adults about this.

i'm coming back to you in two short weeks, boston. and every time i'm with you, my heart feels like it will fall out of my chest with the love i have for you. i love your cobblestones. i love your accent. i love your harsh climate. i love your politicians. i love your neighborhoods. i even love your traffic, and your homicidal drivers. but we need to not get wrapped up in those fuzzy reunion feelings when we see each other again, boston. we chose to be apart. and the temptation would be too great if we were to start talking about the past. we'd laugh about the time i was waiting for the T after drinking too much, and when it pulled up and the doors opened, i stuck only my head in, vomited, and pulled my head back out as the train doors closed. we'd laugh so hard remembering how we watched my puke be carried away from the porter stop in a train car full of furious passengers.

you were my first love, boston. i was so young (too young) and impressionable when i moved to your glowing metropolis. i was enchanted by your lack of ethnic diversity, your wasp-y, unsmiling commuters, and your public transit system that closed at 12:45am.

i loved the mornings we would spend together, boston. i'd get up early to avoid the flock of skinny, over-accesorized cambridge students on the red line, and i'd get off at park street before it was overcrowded with tourists and homeless people. i'd walk up to the korean grocer's stand that looked down the gorgeous opening of charles street, and buy my favorite pumpkin cinnamon coffee. then i'd walk through the public gardens as all the wealthy comm ave-ers were taking their bulldogs for their morning walk&pee. i'd watch the cloud of my breath as i exhaled a sigh of total happiness. then i'd get back on the train, head into dorchester, and listen to a right wing nutjob for close to eight hours a day. so, ok, they weren't always perfect days.

but boston, even your nutjobs are endearing. they may play to an audience of toothless truck drivers that begin to spell america with a "u-h", but they themselves are good men. they make you develop your ideals past the college stereotype, and order booze with lunch, and tell you these engaging stories that leave you feeling like you've never laughed that hard in your life. and that's not all, boston. almost every one of your residents i've come to know, love, hate, love to hate, or tolerate (5 points for that little accidental rhyme) has shaped me as a human in some way. and i'm so thankful for that, boston.

so that's why this is so hard for me, boston. you know i love you. but, if you'll let me be honest with you, there's someone else. it's...chicago.

i know i said when i moved here i would never love any place as much as i loved you, boston. and that's still true. you'll always be my city. the place i want to raise my kids (mostly so they can have that obnoxious accent). the place i want to buy a modest but unnecessarily expensive house. the place with the sports teams i will always cheer for. but chicago has just been here for me lately. we've grown a lot closer than i thought we could. and i think we're going to take it to the next level, boston.

chicago isn't better, it's just different. the mix of people in one square mile is more than your entire state. the number of neighborhoods in chicago's city limits is literally triple yours. the train runs all night long. and my job. boston, if you could know the ins and outs of my new job in chicago, and how happy it makes me to wake up to go to work with a purpose, you'd understand, boston. the people i've gotten to know here are life-changing, boston. they're magic. chicago is just what i need right now.

i'm so excited to see you soon, boston. i hope you'll like the person i've become since we've last seen each other. i hope you'll understand i need to be with chicago for a little while to grow and live and make something of myself. i hope you know that a day doesn't go by when i don't think about you, boston; the life i had with you, the people we knew, the seafood we ate.

i'll come home to you one day, boston. but for now, i hope you'll let me be happy with chicago. you know i only want you to be happy too.

yours, always
penny lane

avoiding the liz lemonification of my life: part un

[ed. note: remember on livejournal where you could put your mood/the music you were listening to in the heading? and yeah, let's all take a minute to admit to ourselves that if we were of some affluence and youth in the 2000s, we either had or read a friend's livejournal. i've got your number, former lj-ers. anyway, the mood thing was dumb as sin, but i'm really missing being able to blog brag about my killer soundtrack. so, just so you guys know, i'm listening to billy joel's vienna. and i'm digging it really hard.]

since there are now 22 poor souls being forced to read these posts on the glorious east coast, i thought i'd revisit this beast and try and figure out why i feel the need to blog my thoughts & feelings to the world facebook friends that added me to their google reader.

i've been listening to lot of people lately complain just for the sake of complaining. and i do it too. why is it dark out so early now? why is it so cold? whyyyyy did this waitress bring me a side salad when i clearly said "cover this entire plate in cheese fries"? then to make it worse, i escape back to my apartment after a long day of complaining and listening to others complain, and i watch tv shows where people complain for 37 of a 42 minute program, and shoot each other longing looks for the remaining 5. and yeah, i need to step back from my netflix and actually go to the gym, but that's not the point. the point is that this mentality of whining is everywhere. liz lemon, i love ya like a sister, but your song and dance about not being able to have it all is getting a little old. you have a beautiful apartment in manhattan. you have a hot boss (CALL ME, ALEC BALDWIN). you eat a significant amount of ham, but you've got a cute little figure. your fictitious life is not that bad.

i need to know that it is still possible to spend time with another human who doesn't want to complain about how hard their life is, but rather, wants to talk about something of substance. i had a conversation tonight for the first time in a long time that was about things that make me happy, and it's amazing what talking about things that make us happy does for a mindset. so, i'm going to prevent the liz lemonification of my life by documenting three things that i don't ever want to complain about:

1. where i live (can also be categorized as 'how long my commute is' or 'how much my apartment costs'): unless you live in your parent's basement, you're going to be unhappy about giving a significant amount of your earnings over to a guy named larry who refuses to fix your thermostat and won't let you buy a dog. but that is a fact of life. the same can be said about your property taxes, homeowners. illinois isn't cheap. greater chicagoland is exponentially less so. i spend more that 70% of my paycheck on living expenses, and as much as it hurts to write a rent check with all those zeros on it, i am so happy here. in my independence, in my one bedroom apartment, in my neighborhood, in chicago. i think people mostly complain about where they live/how much being alive costs because its a relatable topic, but goddddd does it suck. you know what else is relatable? bowel movements. lets talk about that!

2. how much work i have: this one kills me. you guys, i went to a science school and majored in art history and public policy. then i dropped out of teach for america. then i went to grad school with zero financial assistance. and to make matters worse, i studied non-profit management. my degree LITERALLY says i'm a master in never making more than $40,000/year. by the grace of some god-like entity, i got a job. and i really, truly, 110% love my job. when my contract is up, i will most likely chain myself to my desk and refuse to leave. so, my only goal here is to not fall into the trap of being one of those people who just can't wait to tell you how busy they are. not that they're busy doing their work, but that they need to shout from the rooftops that nobody in the history of the working world has ever had more on their plate than they do right now.

3. the weather: i don't know who the hell moved to chicago thinking they'd be greeted by the soft tropical breezes of hawaii, but this is the midwest. it is november. being cold isn't news at this point, it's your own damn fault. and sure, weather is a good source of unifying small talk. but those who continue to be surprised when a chilly wind blows really need a reality check. don't tell me how freezing you were on the metra this morning, girl in front of me at starbucks. maybe you should worry a little less about your adorable $600 coat from burberry, and buy one of those sleeping bag coats that zips from ankle to neck. or you know, wear actual pants instead of leggings. whatever.

so that's my goal for this week. honestly, if i make it through 72 hours of not complaining, i'll reward myself with a venting session about all the things i hate. but for now, i'm trying.

this is ground control to major tom

i've been staring at this blogger screen for about 30 minutes now. i created the template. i chose a font. a background of books, because this is me pretending to be literary. i wrote a cheeky "about me."

"no posts." said my homepage. "write a post!" said the bossy upper right hand corner of my task bar. well, fine. i've spent a lot of time reading other people's blogs, and like the malicious bitch that i am, i said to myself "why does this jackass have a blog? they spell thanks with an x! i can do this. i can do this SO MUCH BETTER THAN EVERYONE ELSE."

so here i am, embarking on a blogging experiment. fantasizing that one day amy adams will do a movie about my little blog that started it all. like julie & julia, but less about that cooking bullshit.  more about how redheads are in fact not the social miscreants we're pigeonholed as in middle school.

i want to blog about the funny happenings around me, my crippling addiction to netflix, and my red wine induced thoughts and feelings. i want this blog to not resemble in any fashion the livejournal i had in high school (ohemgee i had so many feelings that were critical to document YOU GUYS). i tried to name this blog "Carrie Bradshaw was a lying bitch," but google kept deleting it. which is probably for the best, because while i'd like to say i breathe the feministo revolution, i'd throw a homeless person onto the L tracks for that wench's closet. tutu included. 

i hope you enjoy reading, but it's cool if you don't. i don't like capitalizing in my blog posts. not because i think i'm ee cummings (snicker), but because i'm sinfully lazy. i wrote this mini paragraph about how not capitalizing blog posts is a bold statement i'm making underlying the difference between the beauty of true journalism versus the bastard child known as the blogosphere. but it's a lie. i'm just lazy. and capitalizing my work emails & professional communication is all i can handle for right now.  

i'd love to hear your thoughts and comments at pennylanesprose(at)gmail.com (this is actually a lie, but bloggers always pretend to care about other people's feelings, so less keep up that facade). i like architecture, bulldogs (english and french), and my morning carbohydrate. i dislike cats, girls who don't close their mouths at the end of words/sentences (MARY LOUISE PARKER I'M LOOKING AT YOU), and the lack of chivalry in the modern world. we'll see how this goes.