I’ve been thinking a lot about people who really make an impression on me and people who don’t, and I wonder what kind of impression I make on other people when I meet them and they meet me.
I started thinking about this after I completely offended a girl whom I couldn’t remember. A couple of weeks ago, I met a very plain-faced girl at a dive bar. I remember her face had absolutely no features. She had brown hair, I remember that. But her face was totally blank, like a ghost from Pacman, and there was nothing about her face or body or personality that stood out to me at all.
That same night, I met another girl who had the most dynamic and hilarious personality of anyone I’ve met since I moved back to this crummy town, and I remembered her name.
Last night I attended a shower where I pretty much knew nobody and I didn’t really care to meet anyone because most people were married, so if I met any of the men, the women would think I was hitting on their husbands, and if I met any of the women, they would not want to be friends because they were already in some big wives’ club where they all went to the same church and they all grew up together and they weren’t accepting applications from newcomers who (God forbid) left Memphis, came back to Memphis (Oh, there must be hope!), and who aren’t married (God forbid again). So. I just sort of stood around and mingled here and there and tried to keep abreast of the LSU football scores.
Then this brown haired girl enters the room and my boyfriend says something to her, but I don’t know what it is, because I’m on the other side of the room out of ear shot. She waves to me, and I wave back. Now, my boyfriend could probably be the mayor of this town because he knows EVERYONE and I don’t know anyone anymore so I constantly feel unpopular, like the fat kid who never gets picked for the schoolyard games, and he constantly is very nice about saying, “And this is my girlfriend, Rachel,” and people wave to me and pretend to care, even though they don’t, but at least they’re nice, I guess.
So the brown haired girl comes up to me and extends her hand, and I say,
“It’s nice to meet you. I’m Rachel.”
And then a miracle happened.
The no-faced girl all of a sudden had a face.
It was full of expression.
I still had no idea who the crap she was, but in retrospect, I was proud of her human face, because beforehand, like I said, it looked like a Pac Man ghost.
“We’ve actually MET,” she said to me, all pissed off-like.
I said,
“Oh. I’m sorry. I’m a drunk. I forget things a lot.”
And then I walked off.
So I’ve been thinking about this stupid girl who had no personality and no face and plain hair and I’ve recognized that maybe it’s the really uptight and plain people that make the people who are funny and smart and brilliant a lot brighter. And now I would like to pay tribute to my dear friend in L.A. who took the cake on hilarity yesterday.
Let me preface by saying that my dear friend is incredibly smart and has this sort of vintage romanticism about him, and he constantly talks about becoming a Southern gentleman and he talks about “the War.” Now. We assume this is World War II, but he isn’t even 30 yet and he’s never been in the military so we know that he is not a WWII veteran. I also sometimes think he means the Civil War, because he'd like to live on a plantation one day. Anyway, he talks about “the War,” and sometimes I ask him about it.
So yesterday I was g-chatting with my dear friend, and I told him to try to survive the war, or something to that affect, when we were closing our conversation, and his response was….
..
(drum roll)
…
“The war is tough out here. Thank God for porn and Skype.”
BAAAAAAAAHAHAHHAHAHAHA!
This is why I miss my L.A. friends. There was a wittiness about two of them that is so incredibly rare, and I can’t believe that I found two of them in one city. That never happens.
What else, what else. My parents are out of town, so our pets have become increasingly codependent. We have these two cats, Mikey and Peaches, but I call Peaches “Blanket,” in honor of Michael Jackson’s youngest son. It seems like any time I do ANYTHING (pour cereal, load the dishwasher, do laundry), Mikey and Blanket are sitting right at my feet, staring at me, like my little fan club. My peanut gallery.
I’ll be sad when my parents come home tomorrow and all of this feline attention is disbursed accordingly.
I’m trying to exercise a little more, since I have nothing else to do other than compulsively worry about things that are out of my control. I’m saying this like I actually exercise. I don’t. But at least I don’t binge and purge. That really sucks. Then you smell like puke all the time and your teeth start looking like candy corn. So the past few days I have been walking or riding my beach cruiser down “The Path,” as the Haleys like to call it.
“The Path” is this long bike path that is the best kept secret in my neighborhood, where you can walk behind the neighborhood and forget that you live in American suburbia, because on the right side of the path is a canopy of green trees, and on the left side is a field that is filled with bails of hay and swaying wheat, or something that looks like wheat.
So today I was riding my beach cruiser down The Path, and I was thinking about how sad I was that I wasn’t riding my bike down in Venice somewhere and I was cruising down a dumb country path, but I was hopeful that once I got to the lake where The Path ends, I could sit on the bench in front of the fountain and read my book.
But guess what.
I got to the lake and a rat bastard family was sitting on my pre-claimed bench and they were fishing. And they looked so cute and vintage Americana, like a Norman Rockwell painting, that I decided not to cuss them out or throw rocks at them, but to just make my way home and read my book by the pool.
So, my aforementioned friend also suggested that I beauty up my blog a bit, hence the new layout, etc. My friend said that I should add some pictures, etc.
So my plan was to describe to you this really homey and plain wooden barn that is by The Path. The barn is big and brown and there are horses all around it nibbling at the wheat.
Then I was going to put a picture of a barn and horses here for you to see.
But guess what.
I googled “barn and horses,”
And this is what I found.
Really?
REALLY?!
This man is clearly NOT a horse, nor a barn.
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