Other rockstar iPods for your holiday shopping. [Link via Hamish]

We got our marriage license today.






Actually, it wasn't the easiest thing in the world to do, as there aren't too many places in Los Angeles to fill out this form, and the Beverly Hills one is only open about twelve hours a week total. I appreciate how often they stress that both bride and groom must be in attendence to get one of these things, so you can't send your bride out to get the license as one of her errands, and a woman can't find herself somehow married to a guy with too much time on his hands.



It's very romantic at these service centers. Beautiful Van Nuys stopped making porn long enough for us to stand in line with our photo ID's and birth certificates (which weren't needed), and a form we had downloaded and filled out in advance (that they said we couldn't use even though it was exactly the same as the form they made us fill out at the office). All around us romance was bubbling -- from the young couple filing bankruptcy, to the sketchy man attempting to open his own DBA (the hilarious initialism for "Doing Business As," which is like calling a Ph D "People Hoo Doctor.") Pregnant women and couples covered in babies were waiting in line for the chapel services. A young girl of about five bounced out of one of the rooms and announced, "They're married now!" which was very cute, indeed.



Note the security guard. Also this room had about six thousand individual pieces of paper tacked to the walls, telling us how to get our passports, where to wait in line, what to do with our children, where to park, how to file for an alias, and when exactly the cell phones need to be turned off during this process (before approaching window). We filled out another form and handed it over through window number four. We were given a piece of paper and told to wait in the "holding room."



Yes, he's reading The Fountainhead. Re-reading it, actually. Try not to dwell on what all that means.

I wish we could have taken a picture of this tiny, tiny room, so you could have met the group sitting beside us. A young couple (they later discussed how the oldest one of the four there was twenty), waited with rings in hand for their turn at the chapel. They were all dressed in suits and dresses, fidgiting nervously with the various pieces of paper they had just received from window four. The other two guys goofed around, asking them when they were going to have kids. When they saw the rings, one of the boys raised the roof to celebrate his buddy's good taste.

The couple on my other side were waiting to file some kind of paperwork that would turn over a housing property to someone else. It appeared that nobody in the dwelling could afford the rent or mortgage due to someone's illness.

Yes, I'm that nosy.

Then they called us up. Stee was, of course, outside on a cell phone call during this blessed moment of our impending nuptuals, so I congratulated the young kids and ran out to fetch my "groom," as they continued to call him through this process.

Then we went to another window where we had to sign paperwork. My hands were shaking, which I couldn't have predicted. The guy behind the counter congratulated us and made stee take off his hat while we raised our right hands and swore to the state of California that neither of us had ever been married before. Then they gave us a stack of paperwork for Tara to handle after the wedding, and we were on our way. The whole thing costs almost a hundred dollars, and apparently if you don't sign everything in black ink, the entire wedding is void. I'm not kidding. They said it about five times. If we don't sign everything in black ink -- the witnesses, the minister, etc. -- we have up to a year to redo the entire thing or our marriage will be void. Note to future Britneys -- just sign it in red, bitches. Save yourself some hassle.

And I picked up my dress today, which means this is the biggest wedding day we've had so far. The seamstress was very helpful this time, informing me that I've been putting it on incorrectly all this time, which is why it would gather in a strange place. I promise to impart my wedding dress wisdom once stee's seen the thing, but for now know that the dress is in my care, and the seamstress told me a horror story as a warning, about a bride whose cats shredded her dress because the fabric felt good under their claws.

After seeing what Olive has already done to our beloved new couch, that dress isn't going anywhere near something with fur. I've got it locked in a secret location where it will soon move to a second secret location before arriving at the third location, which is where it will coast down an aisle and become a wife.

Wait. I filled out the wrong form. My dress isn't the bride. DAMMIT!

So, my friend Darren was really, really, really reticent to start a blog because, in his words, "who cares what one white man in New York ate for breakfast?" Or something like that. I'm way too self-obsessed to quote anyone other than myself verbatim. Everyone has a blog, he argues, so why him also? Well, he's right. Everyone else does have a blog. So why not him? Also, he's really, really funny, he's a great writer, he mixes a hell of a rum punch, and his girlfriend and dog are lovely. So read Darren's blog! Every day. I will.

What self-respecting grown man gets a poodle, indeed.

There are two things I do when I'm working on something in my head: run or cook. Because I was feeling lazy, I decided to try to make cookies using the persimmons I had that were about to turn. Thirty minutes later I'm looking at some funky, but not too shabby, persimmon chocolate chip cookies. They wouldn't win any awards, but there're at least three food groups in just one bite.

I should probably go for a run now.

This is my favorite picture from my bachelorette party. Allison and Evany discover my disgusting card from Hilary.

The presents are arriving. I cannot tell from their exteriors if they are for the wedding or Christmas, so I'm just assuming everything is a wedding gift and we're putting them aside to open after the wedding.

It's been eighty degrees around here lately, and the weather combined with all the upcoming festivities, it sort of feels like Christmas has been cancelled this year. I'm okay with that; I couldn't possibly afford both events in one week.

I find it very comforting to have these unopened presents in the house. I like the anticipation of presents to come, things to open, letters and cards to read. Christmas is a big deal in my mother's house. Every present must be opened slowly, with pictures taken and batteries inserted if needed. Once my sister and I started giving each other rap CD's, however, Mom got a little more lenient on how much we had to "enjoy" the gift before the next one could be opened. There was nothing more heartbreaking to Mom than the moment Christmas was "over," when the last piece of discarded wrapping paper was shoved into a trash bag. I've inherited that feeling from her. Now I love the waiting for presents, the knowledge that there's more fun ahead, there's still more to do and see. It's not over. I almost didn't get my engagement ring because I begged stee to hold off on another birthday present. I wanted my birthday night to go on until the morning. If he hadn't been too nervous to wait even another minute (and if there wasn't a party waiting for me downstairs), who knows when we would have gotten engaged. This is the house that celebrates a Birthday Week. Our wedding has grown to include most of a weekend. Our honeymoon has crawled into an extra couple of days. We don't want the fun to end.

So the Fed Ex and UPS guys might be sick of me, but every day there's another box I can't open for weeks makes me giddy. I'm already sad that in a few days the wedding will be over. I still want to slow down the next few weeks to make everything last longer -- all the friends and family, the ceremony, the dancing, the hugs and tears. I'm glad it's approaching so quickly, but I don't want it to be over just yet. Every arriving present reminds me that the day is getting closer.

But the presents mean something a little different this year. It's not the usual "Santa's coming!" this time. It's not Christmas Day I'm waiting on, to see what I'll get or how Mom will like her new purse. This time I'm not waiting for just the next morning until the final gift's unwrapped and the turkey's just about ready to carve. This time I'm waiting on my future, and I couldn't be more excited.

pamie.com is thrilled to be a part of Virtual Book Tour once again. This time it's Jennifer Traig's hilarious Devil in the Details : Scenes From an Obsessive Girlhood. She promises me that the copy of the book I received had a binding issue, and wasn't intentionally off-center by one centimeter. The three borderline obsessive-compulsives who tried to fix the book before a recent Writers Guild screening of Closer do not believe her. In fact, our discussion of how her publishing company was genius to make a book about obsessive-compulsive disorder have a small, irritating, disorderly flaw garnered the attention of more than one audience member sitting near us. In fact-in fact, the book held the attention of more than one Guild member much longer than Julia Roberts could. Apparently writers like things to be orderly, and Jennifer's book was calling to us, asking to be fixed, begging to be righted, to be held and taken care of.

Once we fixed the outside of the book (it never really bent back into shape, but at least the spine didn't bleed over onto the front anymore), I was able to read. The inside of the book reminded me of all the strange obsessions I'd had as a child. I'd successfully blocked a few of them out of my memory, but this book brought them all back. I had the ability to turn anything into an unhealthy fixation. I'm talking about more than just my therapy-worthy crush on Johnny Depp, the one that made me videotape every episode of 21 Jump Street, decoupage my walls in one-inch photos of him ripped from TV Guide or create a photo album of his Bop! and Tiger Beat photo spreads. I was already in... high school... when that happened. I'm talking about my secret life when I was younger, the down-low of my single-digit years.

First there were the imaginary friends. I moved a lot, so that explains my need for friends who could never, ever leave me. I'd usually turn my best friend from the last place into my imaginary friend in the next one. But that person wouldn't be my best friend. They were too difficult to conjure for hours at a time. I focused more on people I knew a lot about. Thus, my first imaginary boyfriend was Danny Zuko, and every night he and I would re-enact a few scenes from Grease before I could fall asleep. Then that was so much fun I'd have a few other boyfriends, like Sha-Na-Na's Bowser and Grover. We'd have wonderful adventures within the boundaries of my mattress, and I realized I could have as many friends as I wanted. I pretended to be Annie's (as in "Little Orphan," but the movie, not the strip) little sister, and this was the orphanage we were staying in until Daddy Warbucks sent Punjab to come get us.

By the time I was nine years old, there were almost fifty random celebrities living in my bedroom. They would sleep on the floor, in the closet, on my dresser, and there were more than ten of them sleeping in my bed. Some nights Tony Danza would complain that Cyndi Lauper was using too much of the pillow they shared. Sometimes it meant one of them wanted to leave and not come back (because a young girl's crush can be so fickle). Kevin Bacon only lived with me for a very short time.

Kevin Bacon. Shit, I might have been ten. Eleven. What I'm saying to you is that my imaginary nightlife went on for a very long time. And when I finally let it fade away because I knew I was getting too old for it, I had a hard time falling asleep on my own. I was very used to pretending to kiss Michael Jackson until the next thing I knew it was morning.

My daytime habits weren't any less disconcerting. I would group bathroom tiles. I'd make patterns on the floor and have to repeat them over and over, usually in the shape of a knight's chess move. I'd have to do that until it went "off-screen," and therefore was no longer in my line of vision.

I used to think I was constantly on television. A camera would follow my every move, and sometimes I had to address the camera, usually at recess, to explain how I'd been feeling about my day. Long before The Real World's confessional, I had a set of monkey bars and an imaginary film crew. The Pam Channel played twenty-four hours a day, including any moments I'd had in the bathroom. If my mom had ever opened the door on me, she sometimes would have found me sitting on the toilet, talking to myself, with the shower curtain demurely wrapped around my torso.

There were lines in Jennifer's book that were like that scene in the movie where you find a photo of yourself but there are two of you in the photo because you have a twin you've never met. I don't mean I thought Jennifer was my twin, but her writing gave me the same chills on the back of my neck like someone had just found out a secret about me. In the book, Jennifer talks about the paranoid thoughts that she used to have, and there were so many that I'd also had. The kind of thoughts I never, ever told anybody about because I thought for sure those thoughts meant I was crazy. Loony. Insane in the membrane.

Jennifer put it so perfectly when she said, "I was afraid I'd rape the baby."

I would worry that somehow I was going to kill someone or molest a child, and it would totally be an accident, but I did it, somehow. Here were my fears. Picking up the baby, I'd somehow accidentally molest her. I'd wake up and find I'd accidentally stabbed someone while I was sleepwalking. I'd get behind the wheel of a car, the brakes would go out, and I'd roll over twenty people before I could slam the car into a wall to stop myself from killing everybody. There would be a body in my trunk and somehow I had killed that person and now I have to deal with it. I'd accidentally set someone's house on fire, just by walking too close to a dry brush. I'd somehow knock someone's teeth out from hugging them with too much passion. I would kick a puppy in the face. That fear happens a lot. I'm afraid I'm going to kick a puppy in the face.

I've moved into present tense, because now I'm talking about the fears that haven't gone away, the obsessions that have stuck. I don't count or sort. I'm not a freakisly clean person. I don't have to check the locks three times. But.

I don't have referral logs for a reason. I used to check my stats five, six, seven times a day. I still do it with a few websites, but because they don't update five, six, seven times a day, it ends up being a click-click-click and then I'm on with my day.

I realized recently I cannot fall asleep unless my right hand is touching my face in some way. It usually needs to rest on my forehead, or tucked under my cheek. If my right hand is under the covers, or draped over someone, I eventually end up pulling my hand back to my face. I have no idea. When I was little, I always slept on my back, legs straight, and didn't move in my sleep even an inch. That doesn't happen anymore.

Sometimes I wash my hair twice because I can't remember if I'd already done it, and then it's just easier to rewash my hair than risk going without the shampoo.

And while I know I won't rape your baby (on purpose), that doesn't mean I'm not constantly terrified I'm going to drop her on her head.

I wonder why so many of my obsessions focus around the bathroom and the bedroom. I don't remember doing weird things to my schoolbooks. No, that's not true. I had to have a book owned by fewer than three people or I knew the class would be a bad class. I needed to keep my Trapper Keeper a certain way or it was all going to be wrong. I kept a secret notebook (a la Anastasia Krupnik) wherein I wrote a list of people I hated and people I loved, and I would update it constantly, even in the middle of a test.

Dammit! Now that the memories have started, they won't stop. How did I make it to a functioning adult? Why couldn't I have the cleaning obsession? At least then my house would be spotless. What good is this constant desire to check CNN.com to see if the world blew up five minutes ago while I was updating this entry?

Jennifer's book should probably come with a warning. "You will be reminded of your freak status, regardless of whether or not you've convinced yourself you've moved on past that weird time in your life when you had to read all of the ingredients in the shampoo before you could wash your hair." That way, when you read it, it's like you're sharing some good, silly times about your past, in that look-back-and-laugh way, instead of what happens instead, when you think to yourself, "Holy shit. I really should go apologize to some people. I'll start with my parents."


Devil in the Details : Scenes From an Obsessive Girlhood, by Jennifer Traig will either make you feel way superior to those of us who can't seem to complete one task without doing five, or will make you worry that you forgot to turn off the iron. A week ago. At a hotel in Boston. That has surely burned down by now and it's all your fault.


Continue on the Virtual Book Tour.

See more on Jennifer Traig.

(If you'd like more information on the Virtual Book Tour, contact Kevin Smokler.)

I asked Jennifer to participate in one of our writer's group exercises -- uninterrupted writing. We usually do five minutes, but I thought fifteen would be more interesting to see what Jenny's brain would make her do for us. Dance, monkey girl, dance!





Pamie has given me an assignment. I am to write whatever comes into my head for fifteen whole minutes, stream-of-consciousness-style, on the subject of obsessions. It's an exercise designed to reveal hidden truths. I am afraid that it will do just that, revealing that I'm very, very shallow, and extremely dull to boot. The last time I had to do this was in a writing workshop two years ago. I didn't realize two important things: 1. we were actually supposed to take this seriously; and 2. we'd be exchanging them with a writing partner for critique. Which resulted in my writing partner giving serious literary consideration to my grocery list. She was kind enough to suggest there might be symbolism in "PAPER TOWELS. DO NOT FORGET!!!!!!"

But Pamie knows what she's doing, so I am going to trust the process and try this again. And if it turns out I'm not up to the task I'll just post pictures of my hair from high school.

Which brings us to the subject at hand. I have been obsessed, just obsessed, with hair recently. This is partly because of Pamie's fabulous wedding hair posts, and partly because I'm working on the hair chapter of my next book, a sort-of follow-up to Devil in the Details I've been referring to as "Wait, Wait -- There's a Whole Bunch More Things Wrong with Me." I've been writing about a truly disastrous haircut I got in junior high. My mother talked me into it. I believe she suggested it would make me look like Andie MacDowell. I ended up looking like Dee Snider. I like to think I've come a long way since then, but just last year, when I was on the bus, a snarky cabal of junior high girls seated behind me got me again. They were shrieking and flailing their arms, so I turned around to see if they needed help. "Oh, that's just your HAIR," one of them said. "We thought there was a wild animal on your head and we were fixing to kill it."

I guess we never really leave junior high behind.

Let's see, two minutes left. Hair hair hair. Hmm. What else is there to say about hair? Oh, screw it:




Continue on the Virtual Book Tour.

See more on Jennifer Traig.

Buy Devil in the Details : Scenes From an Obsessive Girlhood

(If you'd like more information on the Virtual Book Tour, contact Kevin Smokler.)