Today, a mansion for you. I've decided I need to begin thinking bigger. No more cozy little bum shacks. Mansions! Big, big mansions! That's how rich people think, right? I have all this money--I will buy myself a house that will be hard to heat, easy to get lost in and so big that my crazy family from [insert state here] will feel all the more compelled to come beg to live with me and borrow money for methamphetamines! Ahem. Yeah, I heard Donald Trump quoted saying that, I swear.

Granted, this behemoth isn't quite the house I have in mind. Too drafty. Looks like it's in a floodplain too. Basement is probably full of killer mold, and the attic? Huh, no sir, imagine the spiderwebs. This is purely an illustration--concept, if you will. And seriously if you are either agorophobic, a serial killer or the elephant man/woman, this out of the way location offers unparalleled privacy.

@ @ @

Sins of Beauty.
I want to know if y'all can help me determine which jobs out there in the world are NOT likely to give one a repetitive stress injury. Cuz I sure as hell picked the wrong field for that. I love writing, but I am starting to loathe the computer screen and the keyboard, dance as my fingers do upon it.

But then, massage therapy was worse (yup, that was a former career), all the admin jobs I ever had were no better, plus I usually had some tyrant smashing my self-esteem into pancakes. Being an Esthetician was worse than massage because not only was I constantly bending forward in that neck-vertebrae pinching fashion to gaze into the magnifying light and attack the clogged pores of well-off women, I was being asked to improve upon women's beauty. Do you understand what that means? It means there is NO margin for mistake. If you're being asked to pluck eyebrows and wax bikini lines, to remove blackheads and tint eyelashes, trust me--you CANNOT screw up. Oh, you can, and you will, actually, but you will pay. You will pay by becoming the object of the unhappy woman's entire life of rage at those who made her feel less than beautiful. There will be screaming; there will be threats to the management; there will be finger waving and pocket-book snatching up and haughty cries of "I'm never coming back here." There will be baleful stares and no tips and great epiphanies in which your own physical beauty starts to look alright again.

My three biggest Esthetician mistakes?
-Giving an uptight twenty-something on her way to a party eyebrows that were more Charlie Chaplin than the Madonna she sought. Oh the walls shook!
-Failing to prep a woman's bikini area before waxing and being UNABLE to remove said wax (had to send her home with instructions to bathe and oil...oh my god, I felt bad. I didn't charge her).
-Mistakenly believing a histrionic woman who said she wanted a hydroxy-acid peel. Hahahahahha! Not thirty seconds in she was writhing and screaming; I had to all but pour the bowl of cold water on her face. She said she'd had them before too.

Being in the beauty business (and yes, I did go to Beauty School--most hellish six months of my life) was brutal, and so completely not for me. At the time I thought it was a means to an end to be a writer, as I had with massage therapy. And while the spa that I worked at was good to me, ultimately I realized that I just didn't care enough about people's outsides. They were inconsequential to me, but absolutely everything to my clients, and well, when that woman with the botched eyebrow job ran off muttering curses, and I slept well the night that poor woman probably slept with a wax paper bikini on so as not to stick to her sheets, I realized that I did care about eyebrows or coochie-trim, and I was in the wrong industry.

J