Hey all–check out my latest piece with blog KeyPA.net, and stay tuned for more BHPS videos…this month! WHOA!

Those crazy kids known only as the Burbank Historical Preservation Society are back with a brand new video!

For the rest of this week I’ll be at COMICON writing for the wonderful online magazine Comic Book Resources! Come say hello if you are also there; I’ll be the one in the t-shirt with comic book characters on it.

I’m currently writing for the man (AKA the PromaxBDA Marketing and Design Awards) full time (AKA every waking minute) but I shall be regaling you all with my wit and whimsy again soon. Hang in there, blogosphere!

No one shows any love to Maryland.

I came to this conclusion driving home one night. I was cruising down the 405 while listening to the radio. If you ever listen to the radio in California, you will quickly realize there are thousands of songs about California, mainly because you will hear every single one of them in the course of your drive. “Hotel California,” “Californication,” “California Love,” “Beverly Hills,” “Santa Cruz,” “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena,” “California Girls,” “City of Angels,” “California”–each one played on endless rotation as if all DJs are under strict orders by the Government, lest everyone forgets what State they’re in.

“If an hour has gone by and no Red Hot Chili Peppers has played, people will think this is Alabama,”  State officials have warned all DJs. “Also for the love of god, DON’T PLAY ‘SWEET HOME ALABAMA!’ ”

Maryland is under no illusions about its place in American hearts. If California is treasured and idealized, Maryland is barely remembered, then mistaken for DC. California has the Pacific Ocean. Maryland has the Chesapeake Bay. California has Haight-Ashbury. Maryland has Annapolis. California has Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Maryland has crab fishing. On the Chesapeake. Which, if you’re hoping for a “Deadliest Catch” scenario, is the equivalent of setting cages in the woods and going back every couple of weeks to see if a monumentally stupid deer has wandered into one. And then probably having to let it go when it doesn’t meet federal size requirements.

California has songs. The only song ever written about Maryland is the song about my hometown: “Don’t Go Back to Rockville.” The chorus is the words “Don’t go back to Rockville” repeated six times before ending with “and waste another year.”

But really, in all honesty people, why can’t we revere our panhandled Eastern state? It has nice things like nicer places, and gritty things like gritty places (I defy you to find a grittier city than Baltimore). It has a lot of Government contractors and suburbs. It holds a very interesting Renaissance fair. If you don’t feel like driving to DC, it’s got a lot of theatres that run weird plays. It has strip malls! To be honest, Maryland is on par with California. So where are the power-ballads about Anne Arundel County?

It boils down to one thing: image. To the average American, California is a pretty paradise full of nice pretty people, and no amount of the truth is going to dissuade them. The Cali Ideal is in our culture, ingrained so deeply we have no idea where our palm-tree dreams even began. The way conservatives long for an America that never was, we long for a California that’s more perfect than perfection; never mind failing schools, a bankrupt economy, or the hellish, hellish summer. California’s name even rolls off the tongue; Maryland just doesn’t have the same pizazz.

But don’t fret, Maryland. Your time is coming. Just as SoCal once acted as a beacon to those looking for work and a new way of life, so too does MoCo beckon with it’s Government contracting jobs and it’s well-regarded schools. CA may get young people with dreams while MD gets middle-aged people with mortages, but those middle-aged people have kids. Kids who will grow up a stones throw away from the majestic view of the Capitol Building, going to free museums and hanging out in expansive backyards, playing street hockey on warm summer evenings until the fireflies come out and they can’t even see their water-bottle puck anymore. These are the kids who will grow into the generation that will finally give Maryland it’s break, recognizing it for what it is: not a sexy city but a playground for memories, old and young, which should be treasured in its own right. Those are the kids who will write the songs for Maryland.

Or will move across the country to L.A. Hey, listen to the song folks, and Rockvillians, I will see you BACK in Rockville starting next week!

Don’t Go Back to Rockville

Hey guys–take a hot second to check out my first article on the fabulous website for the Hollywood beginner, KeyPA.Net!

http://keypa.net/2010/04/five-for-5-the-top-five-things-to-do-under-5-in-los-angeles/

A real post to follow soon!

Today I became incensed at stereotypes, as I often am. This happened while watching an episode of “News Radio” which made a joke about how all women love scented candles. As steroetypes go it was pretty weak, but enough for me to scoff and point out mentally that I’m a woman and I own no such thing.

Until I walked into my apartment and was sucker-punched with realization: I DO own a scented candle!

It is on the table in front of the door. It smells like cotton when it burns. And, most importantly, I DON’T REMEMBER BUYING IT.

I sat dazed, cotton wafting. If I lived with roommates I would assume it was theirs, or at the very least that they were pulling a fairly subtle practical joke. I tried to think where I could have gotten it–as a present? A drunken purchase? I have no idea what store even sells cotton candles–SEARS? Did I get drunk and go to SEARS?

Uneasy, I began to worry. Did someone break in solely to place a conventionally female item on my table? Ridiculous, I snorted, entering my bathroom. That’s like someone putting–

My scream had the neighbors pounding on my door. “Hey!” they yelled through the wall, “What is it?”

“BATH SALTS!” I screamed.

The pounding stopped. “Uh…what?”

I stumbled, unable to look away. There they were, on the counter, next to bottles of bubble-gum “flavored” lotion and enough mascara to supply a Sorority. I ripped open my shower–jars of body butter. I tore through my medicine cabinet–purple glitter nail polish. I ran to my bookcase–two copies of “Eat, Pray, Love.”

“Why would I need two?” I cried, sinking to my knees. “WHY WOULD I NEED TWO!?”

Get a grip, I thought, slapping my face. Dear god, I was wearing the glitter polish–NO! I couldn’t think of that right now! I felt like a Philip K. Dick protagonist, except instead of learning I used to be a Martian secret agent, I was discovering that I had taken the “Are you Compatible With Your Man?” quiz in Cosmo.

“What’s happening?” I whispered as I lay in the fetal position. I hated frilly things. I never bought them, and avoided places that had them. Yet here I was, proving every TV show, movie, and shitty comedian right.

Had I really bought these things, unknowingly? Had the very shows and ads and movies and books and magazines and billboards and assumptions I decried influenced me? Were these things beat into my subconscious to the point where even I, staunchly anti-feminine Josie, think of apricot face scrub the same way I think of band-aids or toothpaste?

“No.” I sat up. I knew what it was. Without a shadow of a doubt, I could name the force that did this to me. I looked around, eye twitching.

“GREMLINS.”

So that’s why I have mousetraps all over my place. It’s just a waiting game now. Sooner or later they’ll emerge–to add high heels to my shoe hang, or perhaps to replace my backpack with a clutch that says “I love to shop!” in rhinestones.

But when they do, I’ll be ready.  Oh yes…I’ll be ready.

If you follow this blog, you’ll know I’m a procrastinator. Mainly because if you follow this blog, you’ll see there are long stretches of time I don’t actually blog (though this last month was for legitimate reasons, I swear!).

The fact that I am a procrastinator is well known to me–I come from a long line of them. From my father, to my father’s father, to probably his father too, I’m assuming (we never looked up anyone past Grandpa). Growing up, my family never left on time, we left on Dad Time–which is like comparing regular years to dog years. In order to leave for a trip at 10 AM, we’d plan to leave at 6 AM, which meant we’d hit the road at 12:30. Complex mathematical formulas went into adjusting for Dad Time, resulting in a house that looked like an MIT classroom: whiteboards filled with numbers and figures doting every room.

There were various tricks we tried to break ourselves of our wait-to-the-last-minute habit. My father famously set every clock ahead by twenty minutes. In theory, he’d forget what he did, think he was late, and actually leave early. In reality my father ALWAYS remembered he set the clocks forward, and would ignore them. This  resulted in him being twenty minutes late.

This also bothered the hell out of my mother, who operated on Mom Time, the same time operated on by hummingbirds and especially speedy NASCAR pit crews.

“How is it 1:30 already!?” she’d cry, throwing bags into the car with Superhuman speed. Then she’d wait for twenty minutes, as my brother and I watched TV with Dad. Needless to say, we were not on Mom Time.

In the mind of us procrastinators, we do not think of it as “procrastination.” We think of it as “creative priorities.” Sure I could do homework, I’d tell those on Mom Time, but homework stresses me out. Therefore, my priority is to play Warcraft for a minimum of three hours, so I can relax enough to do work. My brother and I had our own equations that inevitably equaled trying to write an essay at one in the morning.

Take away toys from a procrastinator plays and we’ll just find new ones. Take away those, and we’ll fiddle with our hair, decide we need an haircut, and are at the Super Cuts before you have time to blink. Its not that we’re bad at getting things done–we’re bad at getting NECESSARY things done. The yard of a procrastinator is always neat; our lockers are always spotless; we always have a an impressive To-Do list with everything crossed off but the one most important item at top.

Is i fair to censure us, though? It’s not our fault the world is filled with interesting things, and we are much more willing to watch a thunderstorm or play with a dog than, say, pay our electricity bills. History is full of famous procrastinators, like Charles Darwin, or some other people.

I say it’s time for us procrastinator’s to defend who we are! Will we chop wood in the backyard for five hours in July? Yes! Will we be doing that to avoid putting together a presentation for work? Absolutely! But, eventually, WE WILL GET IT DONE. It may be rushed, and we may not sleep for 24 hours, but it’ll be there, on your desk, on time, with us passed out on your couch.

And that’s the glory of being a procrastinator–the thrill of a job well done combined with the knowledge that next time, you can wait a leisurley SIX hours before your paper is due at midnight, as didn’t you just prove you could whip it together in four? And that’s WHO. WE. ARE.

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A rousing first entry back to blogging! Now excuse me, I’m going to leave this written on my iMac, vacuum the rug, finish a belated birthday present, take a nap that goes for a little too long, then wake up tomorrow and finally hit the POST button. Procrastinator’s unite!

The title of this post doesn’t reflect the fact I haven’t updated in a month. It reflects the fact that the Hadron Collider didn’t tear the world asunder. Good job, everyone!

I’ll get back to a regular posting schedule soon, but for now sit back and enjoy my last post, which now seems dated, and that thrills me.

~The Cozy Jamble

It’s about this time of year that I re-discover I hate cooking.

You would think this is a fact about myself I wouldn’t forget, but the holiday season always lures me into a false sense of culinary confidence.

“Chestnuts roasting on an open fires? Simple!” I shout and rush to the store, only to come to my senses hours later as I nuke macadamia nuts in a microwave. You would think a girl who subsides on Swiss Miss and Red Vines would have come to understand she couldn’t cook a long time ago, but my powers of delusion are great. I love the idea of entertaining and I love the idea of bringing friends and family ’round a table laden with seasonal goodies…just heaven help the neighbors as I attempt to make my ideas reality.

“Your smoke alarm is going off again!” the building manager shouts from his apartment, which I can hear as I have all the windows open to get rid of the smoke. “Thanks!” I shout back, wondering if it’s now a bad thing that when they hear an alarm go off in my apartment their first thought is “She’s baking again.”

I have always been extraordinarily bad at cooking and perversely good at setting off fire alarms. I gained notoriety in college as the girl who set off all the alarms in her building by boiling water. I can now disable most household fire alarms in 30 seconds or less. If I was to ever die in a real fire, when my life flashed before my eyes it would be a tableau of all my various roommates and I trying to fan smoke out a window.

I don’t even have to be the one cooking in order to get something to burn. Just being in a room and contributing even the slightest amount will do. On a recent trip to Boston I added a crumble of brown sugar to an apple crisp. Five minutes later the fire department showed up.

“I barely even turned on the oven!” my friend exclaimed.

I think my problem with cooking is that it doesn’t fall into the two extremes of my attention span. You need someone to intensely focus on a project for hours on end, cutting out all distractions and entering a near trance, you call me. If you need someone to hit a button and then completely ignore something for hours, call me too. But cooking falls in this stressful middle ground, where you can’t put something in the oven and walk away, but you’ll bore yourself to tears trying to intensely focus on a process that largely happens in an oven. Boring and stressful, cooking is a magical activity that makes me feel as adept as a two-year-old chewing on soap because it looks like candy.

And don’t’ get me STARTED on measuring.

“How much flour did you add to this cookie dough?” my boyfriend asks.

“Uh…” I respond, trying to remember if I used a measuring cup or a Subway Monopoly Cup. “Why?”

“Because it’s both too much and not enough.”

Thus if you see me in a grocery store, loading a cart with turkey and babbling about being home for the holidays, stop me. Soothe my raging brow, stop my feverish foodie dreams, and rip the ingredients out of my hands before steering me to the microwaveable dinner aisle. For, at the end of the day, the greatest gift I can give to you is not cooking and accidentally giving you salmonella poisoning.

And the greatest gift you can give me is hot coco and a bucket of Red Vines.

Please enjoy the pilot episode of: General Dentistry

Will Dr. Danny’s General Dentistry practice survive dental love triangles, financial ruin, and sabotage?

Now also found in the Fun Stuff section of this website!