I love blogging, but the only thing that sucks about it is that I can’t talk about 80% of what I wish that I could talk about because my life runs a very close parallel to “Fight Club.”

#1 - The first rule of Fight Club is, you do not talk about Fight Club.
#2 - The second rule of Fight Club is, you DO NOT talk about Fight Club.

#1 - The first rule of Rachel’s Life is: you do not talk about Rachel’s Life.
#2 - The second rule of Rachel’s Life is: you DO NOT talk about Rachel’s Life!

I have a lot of good stories. I also like to write in order to revamp and process. I can’t do that a lot of times because of issues regarding confidentiality, so I wind up writing about things that either aren’t that important or aren’t that interesting. Just take my word for it. I have an incredibly rich and bizarre life. I should keep a personal journal of all of the weird crap that I experience. I used to do that. Moving on.

Yesterday was a dynamite day. It was terrific. I started out job shadowing at this place where I really, really want to work. All I will say about it is that the place is a career counseling facility. The thought of helping people, doing research, and administering assessments = pure joy. I never saw myself growing up like this- being excited about a possible career that would make a lot of people want to stab themselves (let’s face it. Very few people think find administering career assessments fulfilling)- but to me, this would be a perfect fit. This is also where I will stop discussing it because I don’t want to breach confidentiality.

Now, let me tell you about class last night. The fire alarm kept going off, so we had to leave class. When the firefighters cleared the building, we returned to class, but the alarm kept sounding. Eventually we just sat in our chairs with this ridiculous, loud alarm making all of our brains rattle around in our heads.

I was irritated, to say the least. We also talked about a bunch of meaningless issues as my prof. read off the power points. Read every single word on every single ppt. Really? Are we in grad school? Then, after my ears wanted to shrivel up and fall off my head and bury themselves under the ground, I decided instead of having a coronary, I would just start writing down everything my prof. said that was driving me effing crazy. Here is my abbreviated list:

“There is tons of cases…”

“There was four of you…”

“There is endless laws…”

“There is people in prison…”

“There is people on lists….”

“There is always many sides to every story.”

“There is a lot of stories in the news.”

“There is situations…”

Now you can see how stressed I become by sitting in a hard plastic desk for 2.5 hours. It isn’t just that the building is always 10 degrees and that I have scoliosis and sitting in that desk makes my spine warp into a slinky, but I am subjecting my very sensitive grammar filter to hearing a “mid-westerner” (Sidenote: everyone who is NOT from California says that they are from the “mid-west.” People accuse me of being from the mid-west. Drives me insane. If you are north of the Mason-Dixon line, you are a Yankee. If you are south of it, you are a Southerner. If you’re from the East coast, you say that, and if you’re from the West Coast, just say you’re from Cali. Everywhere in between can be called the mid-west. Thank you.) completely butcher the English language. Now, I understand that casual conversation may not have all of the proper uses of words that one would use while writing a paper, but saying crap like, “There is a lot of you in this classroom,” is just plain ignorant. My prof. has a DOCTORATE. I’m telling you. There are several people in my program who need to take a remedial, community-college level English course that teaches them the basics of how to speak and write.

Last night my friend came over and cooked a wonderful meal. Something about eating hot foot every once in a while is very comforting. Something about being tired and hungry and eating food that is hot makes me feel complete and safe and tired, and I like that. I slept like a rock. It meant a lot to me, too, that my friend would come over and cook for no reason. Not many people are so generous. God has blessed me with knowing really good people.

Right now it’s drizzling and all I want to do is sleep all day, but I’m not tired- just unmotivated by the weather. Homework time

Clarissa Explains it All

The past few days have been awesome and hilarious and weird. I hung out w/ my friend on Friday and we meandered down to Redondo where we got stuck in this carnival-esque arcade. Everyone looked like a member of hell’s angels. It was odd. I felt like we were the two stand-out hillbillies from Tennessee and we were going to get scalped any second.

We crashed a beach party at Dockweiler with a bunch of Mexican kids on Friday night. They were so nice. They acted like Southern folks. They let us bum around their fire and shoot the bull about nothing. I enjoyed it. We went for a drive around Mulholland and looked at L.A. at night. This is one of my favorite past times. Looking out and seeing all of those lights excites me. I get this glimpse of opportunity. I feel like one of those Oregon Trail people who finally made it to their final destination (after half of their party died of yellow fever and they lost all of their crap because they forded the 3 ft. river, of course). Something about overlooking the city and those lights stretching as far as I can see makes me realize how fortunate I am and how amazing it is to have my whole life ahead of me.

On Saturday, I did homework by my pool and saw about 7 hunky guys hanging out in the hot tub. I wasn’t sure if they were all gay or if they were all just trying to relax. I talked to a few of them and found out that some of them were from Alabama. I am not trying to stereotype here, but 7 hunky guys from Alabama all hanging out in a hot tub meant they were NOT gay. All of a sudden, my apartment complex felt like home. It was nice to engage in some down-home trash talking about Nick Saban.

I called my grandfather as I laid out. I heard my grandmother yell out, “Ask her how her boyfriend is doing!” PawPaw said, “Boyfriend? I didn’t know you had a boyfriend!” I said, “I don’t. I just told Miss Ruth last time I talked to her that I was about to go out with a boy who is my friend.” PawPaw yells back to Miss Ruth, “Ruth! She ain’t gotta boyfriend. She’s just hangin’ out with some boy that she’s havin’ a fling with.” Not exactly what I said, but priceless, nonetheless.

On Saturday night, I went to a comedy show. The last time I went to a comedy show, I was in New York with a few friends and my sisters, and we saw Tracey Morgan’s stand up, and he totally sucked, so my expectations were low. One of the best comedy shows I ever went to was when my buddy from L.A. did a stand up show in Memphis at some white trash ghetto establishment. The line up was great. Anyway, I went to this show with low expectations, but was blown away by the hilarity of the whole ordeal. There were a bunch of ridiculous sketches and a few improve slots (the improv sucked). I don’t want to spend much time on this because I want to get to yesterday.

Ok, yesterday, my friend and I went to church, and it was wooooonddddddderful. What I like about my church is that our pastor talks about real issues, real concerns, real doubt. He makes the messages applicable and talks about struggles. Of course, like I said in my last entry, we’re in Psalms, and a lot of those passages are pretty dark, so I’m not sure that the level of depth at my church is always so paramount, but anyway, I really felt connected yesterday. Post church was a super bowl party (sorry for not capitalizing. The thought of pressing the shift key right now exhausts me). I have never really done the whole super bowl thing. I don’t follow pro sports. I rarely pass up an opportunity to meet new folks, though, so I went to this shindig in Brentwood (where OJ Simpson used to live before he went to the pen).

My friend and I go to this party with folks who are all in their 30’s and 40’s. Everyone has a significant other except for me and my friend. We were the two young chicks. It was nice to be around an older crowd, because nobody was wasted or talking all drunk in my face, and though most of my conversation revolved around issues that had absolutely no substance, it was nice to talk to people who maintained direct eye contact and could form proper sentences. My friend and I are there for about 10 minutes when I finally figure out who this girl is that I keep trying to place. I saw this blonde haired girl who looked like your typical, middle class, American young mom- not necessarily homely, but not one of those chic Manhattan moms, either. Just a regular girl. I kept trying to figure out if I knew her from Memphis. All of a sudden it clicked. Melissa Joan Hart. Anybody remember watching “Clarissa Explains it All?” Or “Sabrina the Teenage Witch?” I was sitting on the couch next to her husband, Mark Wilkerson, who is apparently the lead singer of some band called “Course of Nature,” which I’ve never heard of, but he introduced himself to me, and couldn’t have been nicer. Here was this couple I’ve seen on the cover of magazines at the grocery store check out, and they are feeding their babies with bottles, their little boy is passed out in a stroller, and they look tired. It’s weird. I watched countless episodes of “Clarissa” growing up, and sixteen years later, I’m shooing people out of the way so I can help this mom get to her diaper bag and I’m looking at this girl’s booty crack as she digs through her purse to find baby toys. Weird, weird, weird.

I come home from the party and a few of the hunks are in the pool again. I find out that a few of them go to my church. Southerners are taking over. I have to go mentor now. More later.