I became increasingly annoyed tonight as I sat in my class and listened to the people around me talk. I also became annoyed at my instructor's atrocious accent. I have an accent; this I know, but as saccrine and obnoxious it might be to hear me add additional syllables to words, I find it far more annoying to hear yankees pronounce words like "In-vAAAAAlv," for involve, or to hear someone say something even more stupid like emphasising the "S" at the end of Illinois. Really. Did we make it to graduate school? Further, I am really irritated with people who just yab on and on about NOTHING to project their self-righteousness in order to mask their own insecurities. It drives me effing bonkers. The more I progress in life, the more I recognize that I am indeed a J, and not a P, and most P's drive me up the WALL because they can't stay on task and get their crap done. We'd finish class in about 15 minutes if all of the dewey-eyed, nodding, smiling, superficial grad students would just shut the crap up, stop kissing ass by laughing at my instructor's lame, uninteresting, 20% IQ jokes, and just jot down the main points. I can't handle it. One of these days I am going to just get up and exit stage left. I digress.
I need to touch on my Monday night class pertaining to resiliency and grief and I need to do a brief overview of Easter, but those stories are for another day.
Tonight, I shall focus on Persians.
First of all, I don't know where the crap Persia is, or what it is, just like I have no idea what the crap/where the crap Armenia is (it's a region, right?), but I know for a fact that Persians can party.
I am my friend Fisty's perpeptual wedding date throughout 2009. In fact, I am booked nearly every weekend in May as the wedding date, attending weddings for people whom I do not know.
I can already tell that 2009 is going to be a great year, despite the dramatic pitfalls that it has provided thus far.
And now, I shall cover... THE PERSIAN WEDDING.
First of all, Fisty's friend is a white girl who married a Persian guy, and they did a small private family ceremony on Friday, which left Saturday night as the night for partying it up Persian-style. The reason I add the critical point that the white girl was a white girl is because this left Fisty and myself to be the token whiteys at the Persian party. This turned out to be an ultimate success.
It should be noted that my hair is pretty much a flourescent shade of toxic chemicals and that when I enter the room, my trailer-park 'do glows in the dark, regardless as to whether or not there are any lights on. This gives me great pride. Dolly Parton once said that she saw a beautiful blonde lady walking through her town and asked her mom,
Dolly: Momma, who is that lady?
Mom: She's white trash.
Dolly: Then I wanna be white trash when I grow up.
My story is similar. I have always been the Cinderella of the family from the standpoint that my two sisters have always had gorgeous hair. My older sister has beautiful strawberry blonde locks and hair so thick that Rapunzel would need intense self-esteem workshops if she were to encounter my sis. My little sis has this amazing, cherry-coke colored hair that makes her look soft and ethnic and all American at the same time. Enters Rachel. I've heard it all. Dishwater blonde, mousy, ashy, you name a derogatory hair adjective, I've heard it. I've always had crap hair. In about the 6th grade, I started out with lemon juice, wich progressed to peroxide, which progressed to sun-in, which progressed to partial weaves, which progressed to full weaves, which progressed to my ex boyfriend highlighting my hair for me in college, which progressed to me doing full color myself via Target's sale rack.
So.. the point of this long hair tyrade is that I feel like I draw attention with my cotton-ball head, and I like it, because I like to work a party, much like an over-the-top motivational speaker.
So Fisty and I enter this event, which is in the valley or up in the mountains or wherever the crap it is after you go over the hill on the 405. Already I'm thinking it's weird that we are going to a "reception" at a house, but come to find out, this was no reception at all. Mind you that I grew up in the South, which means that every retirement reception/graduation/wedding even that I've gone to, with the exception of a few white trash folks, have included linen tablecloths and napkins, silver tea sets, fine china, professional catering, coffee stations, and proper floral arrangements(NO carnations unless you're at a funeral, FYI). I was not prepared for this event.
We enter the crazy party, complete with plastic cups and picknick wear and paper plates with little pastel flowers on them. There were nuts and piles of pasta dishes drenched in olive oil and all kinds of weird Persian meats (do they eat cats?). There was a disco-esque lighting situation in the family room of the house and a DJ playing weird Ethnic music. I felt like I was an extra filming a special on the travel channel. There was a little guy who looked like Aladdin playing the bongo drums, and at some point Fisty and I were beating on those things so hard that the next day I had a bruise on my palm. We walked to the backyard where we saw a pool which kept turning different colors. Purple. Green. Blue. Red. Awesome.
We were approached by two older men who had to have been in my dad's age bracket. At some point in the evening Fisty and I were wearing their $200 Burberry ties. I mention this because Fred, the owner of the house and my 55+ man-friend of the evening, kept saying to me in his thick accent,
"Do not spill anything on my tie! It's a $200 Burberry tie!"
Um, okay. I know an expensive tie when I see one. I can also sniff out a fake Louis Vouitton bag about 20 miles away. I know this because I own the fakes. In addition, I was a big fashion guru in college, until I found out that most people in the fashion industry are stupid, and I left fashion for a career that was backed by substance and meaning. So anyway, it irritated me every time this dirty old codger was in my face about his stupid tie, because I'm not an idiot. I was not going to wipe my greasy olive oil fingers on his Burberry tie. Sigh. Here we go.
Throughout the night, we mixed and mingled with all kinds of interesting Persian people. Persian men smell like expensive cologne and cigarettes and they have an excessive amount of chest hair that seeps through their $400 dress shirts. This is what I know. Persian women are exotic and have gorgeous hair. This is what I learned.
At some point I told Fred that I knew that his tie was expensive and I was not an idiot and that if he didn't shut the crap up, I was going to throw it into the pool (in so many words). This is when he introduced me to the VP of American Apparel and said that if Fisty and I wanted to buy underwear, he would get us an 80% discount. It was somewhere around this point that she and I escaped from these sleezes and went to the back of the house, which was an added-on apartment called "Room 112."
We enter this lime-green painted mother-in-law suite and I felt like I was stuck in "Animal House." There was a big hookah thing on the floor, dirty dishes everywhere, piles of dirty clothes all over the place...I couldn't help but be thrilled that I am a girl. I take my trash out at least bi-weekly, buy vanilla scented air freshener, and do laundry once per week. I am anal about cleanliness.
This is when we met the next generation of Persian men, who greeted us with,
"Dude, are those our dad's ties?"
Fisty and I tried to just blend in with the crowd, but it was impossible, because, as previously mentioned, we were the token white folk. This reminded me of last summer when I went to Club Atlas downtown with my African-American girlfriends, and I was definitely the only white girl there. I stood out like a sore thumb. Somehow this wasn't so bad to me, because it takes a lot to make me feel uncomfortable, but at the same time, I was hoping I wasn't irritating people for being the odd ball. I like these kinds of situations because they make me more cognizant of how it feels to not be like everyone else, which helps me develop a stronger sense of empathy and understanding. Look at me, I'm such a processor. Back to the Persian Party of OH NINE.
Fred came flying in like a bat out of hell, holding a big chunk of meet, and said to me,
"Theez eez for you. Rack of lamb."
I put it in a pita and took a bite. It tasted like a brain. Lamb = game. Sick.
Fisty's sleezey man-fan's response when she asked if he was married:
"If my wife is not here, I am single."
GROSS GROSS GROSS. THEN- at some point, Fred invites us to his house this summer, and says,
"We shall bar-b-que. Only bikinis allowed at my pool."
At this point, we went inside, danced for a long time, jumped around like the Persian folk, which was a BLAST, and eventually, we got scared and escaped to the garage. We sat in the garage, which looked like the storage unit from "Silence of the Lambs," because there was a couch in there, all kinds of boxes, furniture, and creepy storage crap, and it wasn't used for an actual garage. We sat in that dark garage and tried to weigh our options. We could stay and continue to be moderately harassed or we could leave and not have the option of dancing. Tough choice when you love to party.
Sometime during the evening, I was offered "very, very good deal" on a Plasma TV from Best Buy, "very, very good deal" on a boob job via a plastic surgeon from Beverly Hills, and everyone kept trying to get me to drink vodka and eat their weird meat. Ug. Vodka. No thanks. I kept thinking of Aladdin.
SUGAR DATES! SUGAR DATES AND BEANS! SUGAR DATES AND PISTAAAACIOS!
I make this sound like the worst night of my life, but despite the sleezes, we had a blast. We danced like crazy and met lots of interesting people. Toward the end of the night, though, we were just straight-up scared, so we stole some wedding cake and ran out to the car. We ate the cake in the car and then threw the plates out in the grass.
This concludes my Persian party. I can't wait for the next wedding.
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