Marina Rose Martinez

My new co-worker is moving here from Seattle, so I made her this handy map to aide in her apartment search. I thought I’d share it with you. Click on the map for the bigger version.

I haven’t been very happy with any of my artwork or writing lately. I start things and never finish them, every word or brush stroke after the first is another brick in the wall of it’s shitiness. In terms of writing, I’ve made things in the past that I appreciated, even feel proud of. Artwork for me is never good. My burned out artist grandparents echo in my head with every sketch I start. It’s never good enough, it’s never original enough, or well composed or executed. But I must be a glutton for punishment because I keep on trying to make something, anything that I don’t instantly want to rip in half.

I got in a car accident a couple of weeks ago, totaled my car. Aside from a few bruises and a cool-looking chemical burn from the air bag, I’m fine but I’ve been up and down ever since. I got a new car, and a new car payment. The new car is awesome, but the payment’s a burden I didn’t expect to have. I can afford it, but I’ll have to be a lot more strict about my budget, which I haven’t been for the last few months. My friend told me that feeling depressed like this is normal after an accident. It makes sense–I mean, I lost my car, endangered my life and cost myself a ton of money. But I’m still frustrated. The first week after the accident, I was actually felling better than I had in months. I was so grateful I was okay, so happy that it happened on the freeway on-ramp and not on the freeway it’s self and that I was the car with the most damage because I couldn’t have lived with myself if someone had been hurt. The second week I spent panicky and angry about money, about the inconvenience, worrying about the car payment. No matter how many times I added up my budget, and saw that I was fine, I just couldn’t let go of the nagging idea I was fucked–totally, incontrovertibly fucked. It didn’t help that right when I decided that I would be fine, that I had enough food in the fridge to keep the grocery bill low and make up for the money I spent in the weeks following the accident, my fridge broke and all the food spoiled. It was almost cosmic. Of course, I was still fine, even with all the food spoiled. I just bought more, it’s only money. As uptight as I am about it, you’d think I was about to die.

I spent so many years feeling like I was living on some sort of edge, financially, emotionally, physically. The irony is ridiculous. I worked my ass off to be somewhat sane and stable, and when I find out that my life is actually sane and stable, I don’t know what the fuck is going on.

It’s not just your baby, or even all babies, it’s everything they represent, along with engagement rings, wedding registries, showers, parties, dresses and ‘maids.’

It seems like after college, or the age of 22, which ever one comes first, women only have 2 other things to talk about: marriage and children. And I’m not talking about the whole, ‘we’re friends, I care about your life and progeny’ type discussions. Two women can be complete and total strangers, and within minutes they’ll start talking in serious tones about how his mom thinks that the table settings will clash with her hair clips. It’s like some sort of collective breeder insanity.

And maybe I just feel left out of the whole business, and it’s taking a toll on me spiritually, but I can’t help but experience a sense of pressure. In a vacuum, I just wouldn’t care about marriage and children, and other people would or wouldn’t as they saw fit, and everyone would be happy and healthy in their knowledge of self. Except that my dad calls my boyfriend my “live-in-lover” and asks when he’s going to “make an honest women of me,” my grandmother asks me if I think he loves me, and tells me that boys don’t want to marry fatties like myself, and well-meaning co-workers who meet my awesome boyfriend will say well-meaning things like ‘do I hear wedding bells?’

Granted, those all sound like perfectly harmless little comments (except maybe the fatty one), but when it seems to be coming from every direction, all the fucking time a girl less awesome than myself might begin to think there’s something wrong with her for not wanting to get married, or pining away for rings and dresses and expensive priests who don’t actually know you but will marry you to each other for a nominal fee (go Jesus!)

And every time someone in my office shows up with an engagement ring, or a baby bump it’s a brand new chorus, of “let us see the ring!” “How much did he pay in order to posses you like a horse, while ironically saddling himself with all your future child-support payments!?” and “can I touch your fertile cunt?”

It’s not like I don’t care about my friends who are getting married or having babies, even I’m not that much of an ass hole. But I care about that as much as I care about any major life change. I’d care if you went back to college, or moved to a new city, because I care about you. It’s not like I actually care about Cleveland, but if you’re there I’d care a little more. That doesn’t mean I want to move to Cleveland. It doesn’t even mean I’d really want to visit. Do you see what I mean?

Every time some girl at work is wondering around showing everyone her rock, or some new mom who we’re paying to stay away from the office takes a break from maternity leave to haul her sticky, spitty baby into work, creating clumps of mindless cooing women in seemingly every hallway at once, for hours at a time, I feel like a jerk for trying to get away from them. And of course, this is when I not only feel like an outcast for not settling down and shitting out my own cunt turd, but I get told to wait until I’m married and pregnant–not just for the irony–but because this is the inevitable conclusion to every female pursuit.

I am so tired of people assuming that marriage is the ultimate state of any romantic union, and that babies are the ultimate goal of any living woman. And every time another marriage or baby situation comes to a head, it’s like team breeder gets another point up on the massively huge board they’ve erected in front of me just to gloat about how much more valid and meaningful they are than me.

Nice, well meaning people will tell me to let it go, and to be understanding of mainstream jerks who act like everybody should like what they like, if only for the sake of my own mental health. But all of those well meaning people are usually safe in the married with children camp, or they were or are about to be. They still operate in a social safe space. I’m just a fat, unmarried, child-hating cunt.

mikesmith916: @Marinaisgo Your plans for the year? Current list of people that the world needs to send Mars without proper planning?
moopigmoo: @Marinaisgo Blog about female masturbation technique.
mikesmith916: @Marinaisgo @moopigmoo’s idea is much better.

I feel a bulleted list coming on.

• Humping a pillow..
• Humping your palm
• Humping anything, really.
• The Hang Ten: middle 3 fingers inside the vagina with the thumb and pinky serving as both a push off point and a stabilizing force while the heel of the palm stimulates the clitoris through constant pressure.
• The DJ Hero: Using 2 or 3 fingers to stimulate the clitoris in a circular motion, while using the other hand to play with breasts and nipples.
• Rollin’ with the Homies: Using all of the fingers to stroke the entire vulva in a repetitive, up and down motion.
• The Jackhammer: Fingerfucking oneself with 2 or 3 fingers in a steady rhythm. This only works if you are not too fat, and/or you have fairly long arms.
• Bad Girl: Slapping or patting the vulva or clitoral area once or twice in quick succession.
• Girl Fight: Pulling pubic hair.
• The Houdini: Bringing oneself to orgasm by constricting and releasing the pelvic floor muscles and nothing else.
• Terrorist Fist Hump: You know it’s serious when you’re fisting yourself.
• Tainted Love: Reaching behind or around with the secondary hand and playing with one’s asshole.
• Vibrator, applied to the clitoral tissue. Contrary to popular belief, a vibrator should not be used as a dildo, although sometimes the fastest way to get to the clitoral nerve mass is from the inside.
• Dildos, in my experience need to be a few inches longer than your favorite dick length in order make good use of leverage.
• Butt plugs are not just for gays ladies. I have been told, and have come to believe (through careful experimentation) that when constant pressure is applied to the anus, vagina and clitoris, a woman can experience a sustained orgasm several minutes long.
• Combo Platter: Using toys and manual stimulation simultaneously.
• Some girls say that the rhythm of riding a horse has done it for them. I rode horses and never experienced that, but then again, I almost always rode bareback. Maybe it has something to do with the saddle
• Sitting on the washing machine or dryer. Again, I tried in vain to figure out what the thrill was, but for the life of me it never worked.
• Positioning one’s vagina directly under the flow of water as it comes out of bathtub spigot.  Another one I never mastered.
• Hand-held adjustable speed shower head. Yet another masturbation technique that’s lost on me.
• Any combination of these things.

I’m sure that I missed some things, I really encourage you guys to add to the list. I think this’ll be fun.

TheJunkenstein: @Marinaisgo Write exactly about your writer’s block, your relationship with writing, what has put you in a dry spot. Go for the feelings

I have 5 drafts sitting in my blog archives right now, all different things I’m trying to put together, or figure out. None of them are happening and I’m kind of stuck. I want to write about the failure of identity politics, and my personal relationship with my birthday, and the concept that transgender issues can easily affect cisgendered people, and a hundred other things, but so far I’ve got shit.

If you’ve ever carted wool, which you probably haven’t, and which I actually only vaguely remember doing myself (it’s been about 17 years), you’ll understand when I say that writing for me is like carting wool. You take the clump of gross, almost sticky, unpleasant raw wool, so fresh from the sheep that some of it still has shit on it (it’s washed, but some things persist), and you mash it onto one carder (which looks like a wire dog brush), then rake it from one carder to another in a methodical repetition that breaks apart the fibers and makes it suitable for spinning. My feelings, experiences and ideas are the raw wool, my draft process is carding, my final draft is spinning and the reader finishes the process by weaving or knitting (or whatever) the final piece for themselves.

So I’m not really having writers block, I’m just in the unpleasant beginning parts of far too many things for me to be happy or comfortable with. With crafts or art it’s easy for me to start, and go wherever I want, but writing seems to have more significance, especially when it goes on this blog that everyone can see. I know that I’m a skilled writer, if not a good one, so I expect a higher quality from it than from any of my other creative outlets, especially when the subject is serious, like the subject matter for all the blogs I have in the works. When it’s something with less perceived impact, like these twitter blogs I’ve been doing, there is a lot more room for error, and it feels informal.

So the issue is that while I can bang out a twitter blog and not think about it, those other blogs stay with me for months sometimes. I’ll be doing dishes, working, or driving home and running the subject matter over and over in my mind, slowly, methodically, separating each fiber, making it more and more suitable to be something else. Because as it is, there is nothing separating the emotions from the experiences, the reason from the passion, and I feel very frustrated at my inability to take these ideas straight from my head and have them make sense.

I want people to read them and like them–and like me–but I have to organize everything first. And the anxiety over being misunderstood, or misrepresenting myself only makes the process more difficult.

I put the call out on twitter for a blog subject and this is what I got:


cherryfizzy: @Marinaisgo about why your pants are awesome?


I don’t really get this once since I tend to avoid pants like the plague. I have a very high waste, and I carry my fat in the front, so wearing constricting fabric all up around my fat stomach has never appealed to me. Not to mention the fact that pants bother my vagina. Also, my lack of ass and hips in relation to my stomach make me look ridiculous every time I wear them.


When I was in highschool and college I wore pants constantly, but they were always far too big for me and I would sag them down around my hips. At the time I was either thin enough or retarded enough to think this was a good look, but once I started trying to be taken seriously as a professional, educated woman, I knew that pants had to go.


Every so often, on a weekend or on an extremely casual day at work, I’ll dig out my old cargo shorts, and try to relive the glory days, but I know it’s over between pants and me. My gross old Cartman gut hangs over my awesome cargo shorts, and no matter how many or various different shirts I wear on top of that, there’s no way I could lie to myself and say that it looks okay. So i put a damn skirt on and I go about my day.


I have to admit that I miss pants terribly at times. I don’t like the vulnerability of skirts, but they’re infinitely more comfortable than pants, so I stick with skirts and dresses most of the time. Although I do have a secret wish that my weight loss will continue at least until I can wear pants again and not look like a fool and feel like a sausage.

I put the call out on twitter for blog suggestions, and I got this response:


@moopigmoo: @Marinaisgo Boobs.
@Marinaisgo: @moopigmoo Can you be more specific?
@moopigmoo: How awesome they are despite their vast variety of shapes, sizes, color, firmness, etc.


And the suggestion was seconded by mikesmith916, so here you are, a blog about boobs.


First of all, I want to say that boobs are great because of their staggering variety, not just despite it. I once had a friend tell me that, for as many different shapes of drinking vessels there are, there is a boob out there of that shape. Just like people, breasts are so different from each other and so perfect, and beautiful. In fact, genitalia of all kinds can be used as an analogy for the human condition.


There’s really no wrong way to be a private part. The taboo nature of genitals have allowed them to develop relatively unscrutinized by the mono-culture, resulting in no major standard for what’s considered ‘pretty.’ And while I’m sure that’s going to change, it hasn’t got there yet, and while we’re all engaging in the international debate on what makes an implicitly attractive boob, we can at least bask in this sliver of time where any boobs are good boobs.

I’ve been a fan of the various multimedia ventures of Keith McNally for awhile now. His taste and ear for popular music is only less enviable than his encyclopedic knowledge of it. If you go over to keithcourage.com, you’ll see and hear some good fun stuff, ranging from shitty comics to well composed and edited videos.

So when McNalley announced his latest venture, “XO, an Internet Show by Keith McNally in the Style of This American Life,” I was interested to hear what he had to offer. I was a fan of “This American Life” for years, and I remember wishing there was something else like it in the world. But that was before I started to get more and more annoyed with the continued fake-ness of celestial radio, the perfect cuts and the slightly pompous, over-important sound that most radio has, including “This American Life.”

By the time “XO” came on the scene, I had been bored with “This American Life” for awhile. I was over their traditional 3 act composition, I was over their smart indie music, I was over their articulate, sensitive and quirky staffers, I was even over the well produced and eerily ironic TV show.

But “XO” has ignited my love for things ‘in the style of This American Life,’ despite my dispassionate objection to the actual show for so long now. So far, 7 episodes in, McNally delivers everything I liked about “This American Life,” and everything I like about podacsting in general, while leaving a lot of the apathetic, over-edited bullshit I left radio for in the first place.

Since music for me can sometimes make or break a show, let me say up front that the music selection is the kind of considerately chosen, perfectly variegated pastiche of sound and meaning that I’ve come to expect from McNally’s work thus far. But unlike his earlier show “I Have a Ham Radio,” where the music was clearly the main event “XO, an Internet Show by Keith McNally in the Style of This American Life,” places the emphasis on the story, using the music as a compliment to the narrative.

The meat of the show is the real life audio, mostly recorded by Keith in different everyday situations. The magic of McNally is that he has the genius or the arrogance that it takes not only to put the mirror of unfiltered observation against his own life, but that he has the testicular fortitude to reproduce it for all of us, and leave the dirt in, with full knowledge of his actions. There’s a part in one of the shows where Keith contemplates editing out some earlier section where he felt he was being petty, and unreasonable. But in the final edit, the petty audio remains, and so does this on air rumination on the future editing process.

So many things in life advertise themselves as genuine, and yet they rarely are. XO makes no such claim, in fact, with a subtitle like ‘in the Style of This American Life,’ a potential listener almost expects an imitation, absolving the subject from any obligation to reality. But what I love about XO is that it is so honest, and so brazen, without sacrificing quality. This is not to say that there isn’t windy audio, or fuzzy audio. The show is recorded during the course of a man’s actual day-to-day living. What I mean by quality is simply that: the impeccable transitions between music and talking, the fact that the music so often matches the tempo, the tone of the language as if they were made for each other.

If you like “This American Life,” you might like “XO.” That would depend largely on what it is about the show you like, and what you’re looking for when you’re looking for a show. In “XO 006 Alcohol Rant,” Keith says “I’d rather continue to alienate the people who aren’t on my wave-length in order to feed the people that are.” I think that’s as good a philosophy as any. I look forward to more of this fledgling show, and I recommend anyone who likes to be early to the pop-culture party to watch Keith McNally and his future endeavors. I think there’s a lot more people out there who are on that wave-length than he might yet know.