About GAS

"The journey is the destination." -Dan Eldon

If this website had a theme song, it would either be 32 flavors or Smack My Bitch Up. The DiFranco track, obviously, because that’s what my life and this site is about: wearing different hats, being everyone at once because that’s what I think it takes nowadays. And Prodigy, because, well, I like to smack up bitches in my free time.

Both my everyday and bitch-smacking name is Chelsi, and the odd spelling of it comes from my mom, her best friend Juli, and the one and only Jane Fonda. I’m a Single Mutt Female in my twenties who fancies herself both a writer and an artist, mostly because I am both of those things and only partially because that’s what this little slip of paper from this one college says I’m allowed to call myself.

I’ve been blogging my brains out for some time now (since 2001) and have come to find that it’s a practice that’s more than necessary if I want to remain anything close to stable, both mentally and emotionally. (I know that statement sounds a little crazy, and I apologize for that, but you must know that I am inherently a writer and that’s just the kind of crazy shit we writers say.)

After several different hosts and domain names I finally purchased girlsarestrange.com in late 2005, but didn’t start posting regularly until 2007 because of an office job that temporarily turned my brain into soup. Fortunately I left the cubicle world in favor of a poorer but brighter life, and now I get to write without overhearing mind-numbing conversations about casserole dishes and grandchildren.

Life often bangs on my door to remind me of things such as: I have two completely useless degrees, every day I’m closer to death, I radiate some sort of magnetic field that attracts lovers of the asshole-ish variety, that reality is in fact, very real indeed, and that its sense of humor is deadpan and sarcastic.

Basically, every day is a scramble to figure out who I am, what I want to do with myself, who I want to be, etc. I just want some kind of stability. It’s the normal quarter-life-crisis kind of freak-out, and this site chronicles it all: the path of a semi-neurotic and entirely strange young woman from a springboard to what will hopefully be a place that I am happy being.

Everyone at GAS headquarters agrees that we don’t really have anything catchy to offer you, like a fantasmic graphic or constant theme that you can count on being in the majority of the entries like cooking or parenting or how I deal with my obsession with X. And we definitely don’t have any homemade t-shirts or stickers. The only thing you’ll find here is the truth, and the truth is simply that life is never simple, and I’m inviting you into the strange complexities of mine. So please, do what you will with the words that I write here; whatever I can do to inspire you is fine with me because ultimately, that’s what I’m here for. Because I know a zillion other people are going through the same sorts of things and I genuinely believe that at least one of those zillion really needs to hear what I have to say.

Love, always love,

Chelsi