Before I begin this blog about the things in life that I appreciate, I would like to begin by word-vomiting as usual. Engage.
Tonight I became increasingly irritated in class as people spoke about nothing (no surprise), everyone wasted my time by adding their two cents worth about irrelevant issues/topics, and my heart was pounding so loudly that I could hear it in my ears. I couldn't figure out if this was because I was having a blood sugar drop or because I was really mad. My stomach was growling so loudly that I was scared all of my classmates thought that I stashed a baby lion into my purse. I have decided that I do not connect with most "educators." This is because they are pompous and stupid and find their identity in ideas which only work in theory and not practice. This irritates me. It's like people who are single who complain about it and do nothing to find a spouse, or fat people who talk about losing weight but do nothing to be skinny, or people complaining about not having this or that but not doing anything to get there. I often get irritated with people who do not deal in reality. Anyway, in addition to being unrealistic, people in education throw around the word "educator" a lot. Drives me freaking nuts. Sometimes I really miss my program in Memphis, because I was learning to be a mental health professional instead of an educator. I have no idea what I am doing in my program right now. I feel like I'm learning how to implement school policy instead of diagnose bipolar disorder. I just have to be mindful that this is only a bridge to the long-term goal; this is not permanente, no sirree.
Anyway, with all of my stress-management deficits have come a lot of weird behaviors. Most of my friends will tell you that I am a bit anal retentive. I always lock doors, I always wear a seat belt, I'm always 5 minutes early, I have never done drugs, I check my door knobs over and over, I use a lot of Purelle, bla bla. In essence, I am obsessive compulsive. So I have left my door to my apartment unlocked twice, which is completely unlike me; I left my flat iron on today for 13 hours, which I have never done, and I keep losing my thoughts mid-sentence. I am losing my ever loving mind.
Ok, so now I will progress.
I recognize that I spend a lot of time being negative in my blogs, and I do this because it is my way of venting. It's sort of like letting all of that nasty crap from your cereal bowls and casserole dishes clog up your sink, and then your apartment starts smelling like feet, and you think to yourself, "Why the crap does my apartment smell like mank and a boys' locker room?" and then you see all of the murky water in your sink and you think, "Silly me, I have forgotten to engage in the routine maintenance of turning my garbage disposal on." And then you flip the switch. And then your apartment no longer smells like mank.
I use this illustration as the reason that most of my blogs sound angry. I blog to vent; because if I didn't, my life would smell like mank. So, in general, I wouldn't consider myself a brooding person, but I do like to blog in order to keep up my routine emotional maintenance checks.
Moving onward. I went out to Venice with my college friends the other night, John and Casey. John is now a New York broker and Casey is livin' the dream out here with me in L.A. So John made a comment about how I seem angrier now than I did in college. He also commented on how I used to have pink hair and how I used to never go out and I'd stay in my room studying all the time, which was an absolutely accurate assessment of me while I was at LSU. Then I started thinking about this anger thing. I used to carry all of my own burdens around in the pit of my stomach; which led me to substantial anxiety and physiological problems, so now I feel better about expressing exactly what I'm going through. The problem with this is that this makes a lot of people uncomfortable. The second problem with this is that I don't really care if they become uncomfortable or not. Clearly a J, not a P. Also, over the past several days, people have told me that:
a) I have no feelings.
b) I am a bad girlfriend (a bystander told me this).
c) _____________(insert offensive comment here that leaves me feeling a bit sad with a twist of apathy)
This still has left me with a head full of thoughts swirling around; therefore, I have decided to take a different shift in this entry.
I would like to focus on my life over the past two weeks. My entry will capitalize on random acts of kindness. This gives you, my dear audience/readers, some insight into my more observant and calm side, not the one raging with estrogen, swinging a sword, ready to chop someone's head off.
And here we go.
I was feeling really screwy after Easter. I don't want to emphasize the details here, because it would negate the point of my "random acts of kindness" speech, but I feel like my first demonstration will not be as effective if I don't give some background. After Easter, I felt sad, and empty, and tired, and I couldn't really pinpoint why. I have a tendency to blame things on lack of sleep, or hormones, or some other variable, and it's hard for me to sit down, be introspective, and really understand the whys, because I am sometimes scared that if I do this, I will get sucked back into the terribly low self-esteem black hole that used to dominate me so much. But at some point, I sent my dear friend Rinzee (in Memphis) an email that expressed how I was feeling, and I woke up to a beautiful email from her on Sunday morning. I drank my coffee and cried. It felt good to know that someone knew my heart and my pain and conflict and loved me through it anyway. I am convinced that there are only two or three people like this in a lifetime.
A lot of times, I feel like people will hang in there with me as long as I'm fun or entertaining or being funny, but as soon as I start falling apart, they're outta there like the prodigal son's posse. Rinzee is one of those thick-and-thin friends; and she never offers unsolicited advice. She only offers unconditional love. Not many people are like that. Her email started my week off with me feeling valued and validated.
On Sunday night, Kris drove me South for forever, and I felt like he was taking me into the woods to slit my throat (I say this in jest, right?), but we drove for a long while until we got to this incredible place in Palos Verdes. There was this lookout over the ocean where we stood and watched the sun set. There was a lighthouse in the distance on the left and Malibu was clear and vague on the right. The sky was lit up with oranges and purples and vibrant warmth and we watched it creep down below the ocean. It was incredible. I don't think I've taken the time to really focus on the calm and captivating essence of a sunset in several years; maybe not since the last time I was in Hawaii, which was when I was about 18. It's been so long since I've calmed down and really been in that moment. I'm always pushing so far ahead that I constantly miss the present. At that point in time, I felt peaceful and whole and complete, and for a few minutes, I fully encompassed myself in the "here and now." Fritz Perls, much?
On Tuesday, my boss and I drove up to Santa Barbara for work. She bought my lunch and we sat outside and enjoyed the warmth. She asked me to drive her BMW back to LA, which honestly terrified the crap out of me, but I did it anyway. Then I thought about how trusting it was of her to let me drive her wicked expensive car. Then I thought back on the past few bosses I had, and how they let me drive their cars. I remember leaving during lunch at my teaching job a few years ago and how my principal let me drive her bright red 1970's corvette stingray. I kept thinking about those guys in "Feris Beuller's Day Off," but I didn't take the same liberties. Anyway, even though I was scared to drive her car, I did it, and I thought that it was incredibly kind and trusting of her to let me do so. That same day, after work, I ran a few errands with her, and she bought some coffee. Apparently you get a free cup of Joe at Peet's just like you do at Starbucks, so she gave me the free cup. I thought that was really kind. Then we drove around Rodeo Drive just for kicks. In that same day, my boss gave $20 to a woman who was clearly of low-socioeconomic status, to put it politically correctly (please, like i care about political correctness.). The point is, I saw a lot of things that my boss did which were really kind and thoughtful, and it made me appreciate her.
On Wednesday, a bouquet of fresh cut roses were in my office. My coworker brought the office roses from her back yard and put them on everyone's desks in vases. They brightened up our entire workspace. My first really significant boyfriend used to send me flowers every time we fought. This made me equate flowers with a crappy way to make amends. I guess this is sort of like Pavlov's dogs slobbering when they heard the bell. Someone would give me flowers, and I'd associate them with fighting. Same thing. Unless I got flowers from my dad or if I had surgery or something- that'd be different. So anyway, the flowers thing sort of irritated me until I got these out of the blue, for no reason at all, other than someone was being kind. She grows them in her yard. She didn't go out and spend money or do anything fancy; she was simply thoughtful, and those flowers made my day.
On Thursday, I was still feeling a little lost. Sometimes I feel like I'm having some sort of alien abduction experience, like I'm lost and confused and have no idea what I am doing in this life. I think a lot of people feel like this. Well, on Thursday night, I got a little package in the mail from Rinzee. She made me a CD. These were some of the best songs I've heard in a long time. I cried again. I just had this epiphany as I was typing. I started thinking about that scene in "Fried Green Tomatoes" at the very end.
YOU REMINDED ME...
ABOUT WHAT THE MOST
IMPORTANT THING IN LIFE IS.
DO YOU KNOW
WHAT I THINK IT IS ?
NO, MA'AM.
FRIENDS...
BEST FRIENDS.
I don't totally agree with this statement, but there's something about feeling valued and loved and unique that drives us to be better people. Getting a CD full of songs that say "You matter to me," makes me want to be a better person. Man, I have the best friends anyone could ever ask for.
In fact, that leads me to Friday. I was walking into work when my dear friend Ryan from Memphis called me out of the blue. I haven't talked to him since my grandfather died. It meant a lot to me that he called for no reason.
Today I got a letter in the mail from my dad. He wrote me a thank you note for Easter. It made me get a little misty-eyed. He is the most faithful person ever when it comes to sending me mail. He also writes ridiculous notes in Haley-code that only he and I would get- or maybe my sisters would pick up on a phrase here and there. Isn't there something hilarious and terrific about inside jokes? I don't care if they are exclusive. I love them.
This concludes my recognition of people being kind. I'd so much rather someone be thoughtful for no reason than for someone to try to woo me to impress me with a bunch of nonsense. I am really blessed (insert cheesy "aaaawwwww" here).
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Donde Esta Persia?
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.
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.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
A toll is a toll, and a roll is a roll; and if you don't pay the toll, we don't eat no rolls!
I have been in a slight funk as of late. It hasn't been anything so substantial that it's interfered with my day-to-day process of living, but I have noticed that I haven't been quite on my A-game. I don't know if that has to do with the summer solstice or werewolves or barometric pressure or what, but I had this revelation two days ago that suddenly, I had started becoming a little bit tainted. Let me explore this idea. I will begin with telling you about my very weird weekend.
First of all, I went to this place in Venice called "The Air Conditioned," which brought me back to going to the Chi when I was a teenager. I couldn't even drive yet. I don't even know how I got there. I think my friend Travis and I used to go together. Anyway, the Chi was this crap hole way out in Lakeland, and it looked like a huge garage. I think it had a tin roof. It was a total dive. Weird bands that nobody had ever heard of used to play there. This was back in the day of the mosh pit. Sigh. Anyway, so I was thinking about the Chi, but this place in Venice would be a dive with a little bit of money put into it. I liked it. I'd get into the specifics but I don't feel like it. The bottom line is that I felt like the most "normal" person in this place as I looked around and saw grown men wearing sky blue faux-fur coats and elton john sunglasses inside- boys wearing girl jeans and girls wearing vintage hippie dresses. It was weird. I liked it.
So next is Saturday. I babysat pretty much all day for this family I sit for in Culver City. Those kids are so funny. I caught myself processing with one of them. I get so dang bombarded with this processing crap in school that I wind up bringing it to all areas of my life. That's probably not such a good thing- but anyway, it worked, and it helped me rationalize with a kid in that pre-operations stage. Go Piaget.
So on Saturday night, I was out with a few folks in Hermosa. Ever wind up being an accomplice to entertaining people that you'd probably never hang out with in real life, but because someone else you know is hanging out with them, you're sort of in the mix? That was my role. I get along with most people, but I actually truly connect with very few. I can get along with people who spray tan and bleach their teeth and wear too much hair gel and work out all day, but when it all comes down to it, I probably have nothing in common with them, and this was the case. So at some point, I decide to stand up on this clock stand thing and announce to the peasants of Hermosa that they shall be charged a toll for entering my pier. I do this with my wing man. We didn't receive any cash money. We also didn't even receive as much as a weird look. This disappointed me. A good but bad thing about L.A. is that people are so weird, nobody notices if you do something unusual.
Sunday was a great day. My friends and I went to church and we ate pizza at this place in Westwood. Then we got some cookies and walked around Westwood and enjoyed being out in the sun. We drove through UCLA. We got lost in Bel Air and drove around. It was relaxing. After that, I went back to Hermosa and saw Jay Leno. He performs every Sunday night and tests his jokes on the audience to see how they fly. If they're good, he uses them on his show. It was interesting for me to see him pull out his rickety old tape recorder (like the one I used to use at Memphis for my counseling sessions--- Oh tape recorder, how I miss utilizing you) and flip through his index cards and hear him mumble, "that one was nothing..." as he got poor responses. It was brilliant. He's a good businessman. I freaking love that guy. Most people don't make me really laugh. I mean that laugh where your gut hurts and you cry because you're laughing so hard. There are only a few people in my life who can elicit that kind of response. He's one of them. I am interested in studying the form of intelligence that works with humor. I've noticed that there are all these kids that were pegged as "bad" - including myself - who were the freaking most hilarious people I've ever met. I'm wondering if these people, who also sometimes got pegged with AD/HD or Dyslexia or Oppositional Defiant Disorder or what have you, might just be a lot smarter than people give them credit for. Sorry for ending a sentence with a preposition.
WAIT!
I forgot why I started this blog. I was talking about being L.A. tainted. Let me get back to my point.
So I was talking to my sister on the phone, and she was telling me that she saw the cast of the "West Wing" in the senate while she was working. So I went on to discuss with her the details of my weekend as well as the following situation:
On Monday night, I get a call from a person whose name I will not disclose, and he asks me to go to a birthday party with him in the Hollywood hills. So, he picks me up and we go to this party. It's way up in these winding Mullholland looking hills, and we finally make our way up this driveway after we get through a gate that you have to be buzzed in to enter. So, we go inside, and the house is all "The Graduate" esque, with real animal rugs and polyurethane furniture and white leather minimalistic couches. And then I see the shrink-wrapped boxes of Reese's Puffs cereal. With the guy's face on them. Then I meet the guy. Then I notice the enormous, 8X10 foot framed portraits of this guy performing in front of billions of screaming girls. And the guy is as tan as Pocahontas and he's got frosted hair. Apparently, home boy used to be an original Backstreet Boy. I AM NOT KIDDING YOU.
So, I attempt to make small talk with all of these pop-star musicians, and I am failing miserably, because I don't have any cool clothes, I talk like a hick, I hate the music that they "lllluuuurv," I can't afford to get wasted because it's a school/work night, and I've been out of the boy band loop since I was 14. Then... The real boy band shows up. These two CHILDREN, who are probably 17 but they think they are 28, walk in wearing the following: bandannas on their heads in addition to ball caps without folded bills (It's an L.A. thing. Stupid.), skinny girl jeans which are fasted UNDER their butts with studded belts, they are wearing eyeliner, scarves, and about 39089380 layers of clothing and accessories. Stupid, stupid, stupid. And they had highlights. The thing is, they were totally nice, and they had good manners. I'm just not that cool. All of a sudden, I felt like I was 55 years old. I was looking around for the "adults" in the room. I wanted to engage in a conversation about white-collar crime or the price of gas or ANYTHING remotely un-boy bandish. These boys are on the Disney Channel and are BFF with Hannah Montana. They also brought in their hoes, who were probably 15 but looked 30. I could see their boobs and their XXS thongs through their sheer dresses. What's the point in even wearing clothes? I mean, really. Somehow, though, at the end of the night, one of the underage hoochies gave me a hug, though the only conversation we had all night was when I said, "The bathroom is through that door and on the left." She also attempted to sing a Sheryl Crowe song with me. This was an incredibly odd evening.
So, I am recanting all of this to my sister, and I say, "I'm so freaking tired. I just can't catch up."
And she says,
"Rachel, do you realize that I am walking around with the cast of the 'West Wing,' and you are tired because you were out with boy bands and watching Jay Leno, and it hasn't even crossed our minds that THIS IS NOT NORMAL?! Who talks like this?!"
And it hit me. I got a little bit tainted by L.A. I didn't even think that this was unusual. Someone please stab me in the throat if I lose my accent. I want to be progressive but I never want to be jaded.
Xo.
First of all, I went to this place in Venice called "The Air Conditioned," which brought me back to going to the Chi when I was a teenager. I couldn't even drive yet. I don't even know how I got there. I think my friend Travis and I used to go together. Anyway, the Chi was this crap hole way out in Lakeland, and it looked like a huge garage. I think it had a tin roof. It was a total dive. Weird bands that nobody had ever heard of used to play there. This was back in the day of the mosh pit. Sigh. Anyway, so I was thinking about the Chi, but this place in Venice would be a dive with a little bit of money put into it. I liked it. I'd get into the specifics but I don't feel like it. The bottom line is that I felt like the most "normal" person in this place as I looked around and saw grown men wearing sky blue faux-fur coats and elton john sunglasses inside- boys wearing girl jeans and girls wearing vintage hippie dresses. It was weird. I liked it.
So next is Saturday. I babysat pretty much all day for this family I sit for in Culver City. Those kids are so funny. I caught myself processing with one of them. I get so dang bombarded with this processing crap in school that I wind up bringing it to all areas of my life. That's probably not such a good thing- but anyway, it worked, and it helped me rationalize with a kid in that pre-operations stage. Go Piaget.
So on Saturday night, I was out with a few folks in Hermosa. Ever wind up being an accomplice to entertaining people that you'd probably never hang out with in real life, but because someone else you know is hanging out with them, you're sort of in the mix? That was my role. I get along with most people, but I actually truly connect with very few. I can get along with people who spray tan and bleach their teeth and wear too much hair gel and work out all day, but when it all comes down to it, I probably have nothing in common with them, and this was the case. So at some point, I decide to stand up on this clock stand thing and announce to the peasants of Hermosa that they shall be charged a toll for entering my pier. I do this with my wing man. We didn't receive any cash money. We also didn't even receive as much as a weird look. This disappointed me. A good but bad thing about L.A. is that people are so weird, nobody notices if you do something unusual.
Sunday was a great day. My friends and I went to church and we ate pizza at this place in Westwood. Then we got some cookies and walked around Westwood and enjoyed being out in the sun. We drove through UCLA. We got lost in Bel Air and drove around. It was relaxing. After that, I went back to Hermosa and saw Jay Leno. He performs every Sunday night and tests his jokes on the audience to see how they fly. If they're good, he uses them on his show. It was interesting for me to see him pull out his rickety old tape recorder (like the one I used to use at Memphis for my counseling sessions--- Oh tape recorder, how I miss utilizing you) and flip through his index cards and hear him mumble, "that one was nothing..." as he got poor responses. It was brilliant. He's a good businessman. I freaking love that guy. Most people don't make me really laugh. I mean that laugh where your gut hurts and you cry because you're laughing so hard. There are only a few people in my life who can elicit that kind of response. He's one of them. I am interested in studying the form of intelligence that works with humor. I've noticed that there are all these kids that were pegged as "bad" - including myself - who were the freaking most hilarious people I've ever met. I'm wondering if these people, who also sometimes got pegged with AD/HD or Dyslexia or Oppositional Defiant Disorder or what have you, might just be a lot smarter than people give them credit for. Sorry for ending a sentence with a preposition.
WAIT!
I forgot why I started this blog. I was talking about being L.A. tainted. Let me get back to my point.
So I was talking to my sister on the phone, and she was telling me that she saw the cast of the "West Wing" in the senate while she was working. So I went on to discuss with her the details of my weekend as well as the following situation:
On Monday night, I get a call from a person whose name I will not disclose, and he asks me to go to a birthday party with him in the Hollywood hills. So, he picks me up and we go to this party. It's way up in these winding Mullholland looking hills, and we finally make our way up this driveway after we get through a gate that you have to be buzzed in to enter. So, we go inside, and the house is all "The Graduate" esque, with real animal rugs and polyurethane furniture and white leather minimalistic couches. And then I see the shrink-wrapped boxes of Reese's Puffs cereal. With the guy's face on them. Then I meet the guy. Then I notice the enormous, 8X10 foot framed portraits of this guy performing in front of billions of screaming girls. And the guy is as tan as Pocahontas and he's got frosted hair. Apparently, home boy used to be an original Backstreet Boy. I AM NOT KIDDING YOU.
So, I attempt to make small talk with all of these pop-star musicians, and I am failing miserably, because I don't have any cool clothes, I talk like a hick, I hate the music that they "lllluuuurv," I can't afford to get wasted because it's a school/work night, and I've been out of the boy band loop since I was 14. Then... The real boy band shows up. These two CHILDREN, who are probably 17 but they think they are 28, walk in wearing the following: bandannas on their heads in addition to ball caps without folded bills (It's an L.A. thing. Stupid.), skinny girl jeans which are fasted UNDER their butts with studded belts, they are wearing eyeliner, scarves, and about 39089380 layers of clothing and accessories. Stupid, stupid, stupid. And they had highlights. The thing is, they were totally nice, and they had good manners. I'm just not that cool. All of a sudden, I felt like I was 55 years old. I was looking around for the "adults" in the room. I wanted to engage in a conversation about white-collar crime or the price of gas or ANYTHING remotely un-boy bandish. These boys are on the Disney Channel and are BFF with Hannah Montana. They also brought in their hoes, who were probably 15 but looked 30. I could see their boobs and their XXS thongs through their sheer dresses. What's the point in even wearing clothes? I mean, really. Somehow, though, at the end of the night, one of the underage hoochies gave me a hug, though the only conversation we had all night was when I said, "The bathroom is through that door and on the left." She also attempted to sing a Sheryl Crowe song with me. This was an incredibly odd evening.
So, I am recanting all of this to my sister, and I say, "I'm so freaking tired. I just can't catch up."
And she says,
"Rachel, do you realize that I am walking around with the cast of the 'West Wing,' and you are tired because you were out with boy bands and watching Jay Leno, and it hasn't even crossed our minds that THIS IS NOT NORMAL?! Who talks like this?!"
And it hit me. I got a little bit tainted by L.A. I didn't even think that this was unusual. Someone please stab me in the throat if I lose my accent. I want to be progressive but I never want to be jaded.
Xo.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
In Memorandum of Serial Dating
I haven't blogged in about two months, and in the past two months, I've probably gone through more insane crap than I've experienced in a five year window at any other given point in my life. Well, that's not true. Anyway, I am about as anal as a person can be without being locked up in the looney bin, and with that being said, I am a big fan of order. I like systematizing things and keeping everything alphabetized, color coded, chronological, size-distributed, etc. So, the deal is, my grandfather died in mid-February, and I wrote about his death and how I was processing my feelings of loss. I was dreading posting my entry because I did not want to revisit that sense of grief, and I was burned out on crying. I hate to cry. I hate that raw, salty feeling and having a sense of heavy emptiness. I'd rather slam the refrigerator door on my skull than cry. Now, let me differentiate. There is a huge difference between pity-party crying and crying because you are broken hearted. It's okay to have a pity-party cry. For instance, if you have a raging case of PMS, and you feel fat and ugly and zitty, and then someone says something to you like,
"Rachel, why does your hair look like Cruella Deville?"
and at any other point in your month, you'd say,
"Shut up, beeyoch, or I'll shank you in the baby-maker,"
but today, your life is so screwy and chemically imbalanced that you feel like you could throw up, a little pity-party cry is kind of therapeutic. Sadly, I don't often have this luxury- normally I just get really mad and want to shove my fist through the wall, but you get my point. Heartbreak crying is the worst crying of all. Those deep, heaving sobs, where you physically feel like the ground can't support your weight, and every time you think of any memory you fall apart again- that's the worst kind of cry.
So anyway, I say all of this to say that I have not been ready to post about losing my PawPaw. It was, by far, the toughest thing I have had to work through since I have lived in Los Angeles, and I have avoided posting what I wrote about his death. Back to being anal: I have not wanted to post anything without first posting about him, but then I decided, I'll go ahead and write out of order anyway. Who cares. My chronology will be all whack, but this is good therapy for me. Rachel, let's first accommodate, than maintain. This is the first step to recovery. Moving on.
I have stopped serial dating, hence the title of my blog. I feel like this is paramount in my life. Reasons regarding ditching serial dating: Numero uno, I don't have the time. I got the job that I wanted, and I am crazy about it. It's a great gig. If only I could write about my encounters with clients. Sigh. There are only a few bad things about having a helping-professions job, and one of them is this ethical standard of keeping peoples' business private. So, though I'm not bound to confidentiality, I still think that it'd be pretty crappy of me to disclose a few scenarios that I have found HILARIOUS, but trust me, no matter what profession you engage in, my job is way, way, way, more bizarre and funny than yours. Trust me.
With that being said, back to being a retired serial dater. Because I work a 40 hour week and take 3 graduate courses, I simply don't have the time to date multiple people and keep all of their stories straight. Now before you go assuming that I am a hoe, let me specify. I am an extremely proactive person. I always have a 5-year window of tentative plans that I intend on accomplishing. My PawPaw Haley is like this, too. He always has a project. I talked to him last week, and he was painting a little fence that he built to hide his generator. Mind you, this is a man in his mid 80's worried about the aesthetics of his front yard. He said,
"I ain't even put the first lick of paint on it yet."
I do not know what this means, but anyway, we had a nice little talk about how we like to always be working towards something. Back to proactivity. I have always thought that online dating was weird, but then I moved out here and got on a site. My reasons for doing this were:
A) I wanted to date around, because I had never just "dated" before. I didn't really date until my senior year of high school, and I had two or three serious (lame sauce) boyfriends through college/early career endeavors (Before I became the seasoned and wise 24 year old that I am today, of course).
B) I wanted to meet people.
C) Uh, online dating stories = HILARIOUS.
D) I had a wing woman who was fully willing to participate in my endeavors to meet crazies and to laugh her head off with me while we discussed how totally awkward our dates were.
E) I figured that online dating was a proactive way to jump start my new serial dating plans.
Anyway, because I have retired, I deleted my profile a while ago, but I decided to copy and paste the content, just to show you my screening process/evil mastermind plans for my online dating candidates. Here we go:
"Your mom will love me.
About Me
Hugs are underrated.
Professional booty dancer.
I refuse to be the big spoon.
I drink coffee black and completely disrespect men who use cream, sugar, & flavor.
I abhor mayonnaise.
Jesus is first.
I eat chunky peanut butter right out of the jar.
I am in love with Halo 3 and Rockband.
I will never drink beer out of the bottle. EVER.
I have not seen my natural hair color since 6th grade and do not care to do so.
I do not wear open toed shoes unless my toenails are painted.
I will be in school for at least 5 more years.
I hate codependency.
Frozen yogurt junky.
Avid reader.
Enjoyer of sushi.
Lover of clever humor.
Please do not contact me unless you have your crap together, are taller than me, have all of your teeth, and are respectful. If you are a serial killer, please do not contact me. If you are a man whore, please do not contact me. If you do not know how to properly use: they’re, their, there, two, too, to, your, & you’re, please do not contact me. Non smokers only. Please be educated. Imperative: open my doors. Chew with your mouth closed. Be old school. Optional perks: glasses, boat shoes, 5 o'clock shadow, nice head of hair, no extra body hair (ew), 6’3” and up, college graduate (at LEAST), have a real job, be nice to your mom, take your vitamins.
First Date
First dates are always weird, so movies are definitely ruled out. Sitting in a dark theater with someone you've never met AND no opportunity for convo exchange? Sounds like the recipe for suicide. I don't want to go to your house on the first date, nor do I want to make out with you. I just want to go someplace chill, get to know each other, and if things go poorly, I will shank you.
Oh yes, and I normally do not go on a first date without my wing woman, Robin. She and I meet up with you and your hot friend (fill in the blank __________) for drinks, then we determine whether or not you are serial rapists, then if things go well, you and I can go on a follow up solo date."
And this ends my online dating profile. If you come off as a hard-ace right off the bat, you eliminate the wimps. Plus, if you get a response e-mail with "Your to cool," then you know he clearly did not understand your spelling rules, and he's elimidated, too.
Anyway, I only went out with two different online guys, and one of them was so bad that I probably should have deleted my profile then and there, but once again, the situation was so awkward and hilarious that I actually went out with one more person. Guy numero uno was about 5 feet tall, had gray hair, and breath so bad that I almost passed out (thank you, wing woman, for being there to double with me). His profile picture looked NOTHING like him, he had no social skills, and the guy he brought with him to double with my wing woman absolutely hated my guts. He tried to verbally assault me every five seconds. The other guy I went out with was actually cool and we're still friends. So that's it for my online dating reminiscing. I am officially hanging up my serial dating shoes. Goodbye, plentoffish.com. Goodbye, multiple L.A. douche bag guys. It was real.
"Rachel, why does your hair look like Cruella Deville?"
and at any other point in your month, you'd say,
"Shut up, beeyoch, or I'll shank you in the baby-maker,"
but today, your life is so screwy and chemically imbalanced that you feel like you could throw up, a little pity-party cry is kind of therapeutic. Sadly, I don't often have this luxury- normally I just get really mad and want to shove my fist through the wall, but you get my point. Heartbreak crying is the worst crying of all. Those deep, heaving sobs, where you physically feel like the ground can't support your weight, and every time you think of any memory you fall apart again- that's the worst kind of cry.
So anyway, I say all of this to say that I have not been ready to post about losing my PawPaw. It was, by far, the toughest thing I have had to work through since I have lived in Los Angeles, and I have avoided posting what I wrote about his death. Back to being anal: I have not wanted to post anything without first posting about him, but then I decided, I'll go ahead and write out of order anyway. Who cares. My chronology will be all whack, but this is good therapy for me. Rachel, let's first accommodate, than maintain. This is the first step to recovery. Moving on.
I have stopped serial dating, hence the title of my blog. I feel like this is paramount in my life. Reasons regarding ditching serial dating: Numero uno, I don't have the time. I got the job that I wanted, and I am crazy about it. It's a great gig. If only I could write about my encounters with clients. Sigh. There are only a few bad things about having a helping-professions job, and one of them is this ethical standard of keeping peoples' business private. So, though I'm not bound to confidentiality, I still think that it'd be pretty crappy of me to disclose a few scenarios that I have found HILARIOUS, but trust me, no matter what profession you engage in, my job is way, way, way, more bizarre and funny than yours. Trust me.
With that being said, back to being a retired serial dater. Because I work a 40 hour week and take 3 graduate courses, I simply don't have the time to date multiple people and keep all of their stories straight. Now before you go assuming that I am a hoe, let me specify. I am an extremely proactive person. I always have a 5-year window of tentative plans that I intend on accomplishing. My PawPaw Haley is like this, too. He always has a project. I talked to him last week, and he was painting a little fence that he built to hide his generator. Mind you, this is a man in his mid 80's worried about the aesthetics of his front yard. He said,
"I ain't even put the first lick of paint on it yet."
I do not know what this means, but anyway, we had a nice little talk about how we like to always be working towards something. Back to proactivity. I have always thought that online dating was weird, but then I moved out here and got on a site. My reasons for doing this were:
A) I wanted to date around, because I had never just "dated" before. I didn't really date until my senior year of high school, and I had two or three serious (lame sauce) boyfriends through college/early career endeavors (Before I became the seasoned and wise 24 year old that I am today, of course).
B) I wanted to meet people.
C) Uh, online dating stories = HILARIOUS.
D) I had a wing woman who was fully willing to participate in my endeavors to meet crazies and to laugh her head off with me while we discussed how totally awkward our dates were.
E) I figured that online dating was a proactive way to jump start my new serial dating plans.
Anyway, because I have retired, I deleted my profile a while ago, but I decided to copy and paste the content, just to show you my screening process/evil mastermind plans for my online dating candidates. Here we go:
"Your mom will love me.
About Me
Hugs are underrated.
Professional booty dancer.
I refuse to be the big spoon.
I drink coffee black and completely disrespect men who use cream, sugar, & flavor.
I abhor mayonnaise.
Jesus is first.
I eat chunky peanut butter right out of the jar.
I am in love with Halo 3 and Rockband.
I will never drink beer out of the bottle. EVER.
I have not seen my natural hair color since 6th grade and do not care to do so.
I do not wear open toed shoes unless my toenails are painted.
I will be in school for at least 5 more years.
I hate codependency.
Frozen yogurt junky.
Avid reader.
Enjoyer of sushi.
Lover of clever humor.
Please do not contact me unless you have your crap together, are taller than me, have all of your teeth, and are respectful. If you are a serial killer, please do not contact me. If you are a man whore, please do not contact me. If you do not know how to properly use: they’re, their, there, two, too, to, your, & you’re, please do not contact me. Non smokers only. Please be educated. Imperative: open my doors. Chew with your mouth closed. Be old school. Optional perks: glasses, boat shoes, 5 o'clock shadow, nice head of hair, no extra body hair (ew), 6’3” and up, college graduate (at LEAST), have a real job, be nice to your mom, take your vitamins.
First Date
First dates are always weird, so movies are definitely ruled out. Sitting in a dark theater with someone you've never met AND no opportunity for convo exchange? Sounds like the recipe for suicide. I don't want to go to your house on the first date, nor do I want to make out with you. I just want to go someplace chill, get to know each other, and if things go poorly, I will shank you.
Oh yes, and I normally do not go on a first date without my wing woman, Robin. She and I meet up with you and your hot friend (fill in the blank __________) for drinks, then we determine whether or not you are serial rapists, then if things go well, you and I can go on a follow up solo date."
And this ends my online dating profile. If you come off as a hard-ace right off the bat, you eliminate the wimps. Plus, if you get a response e-mail with "Your to cool," then you know he clearly did not understand your spelling rules, and he's elimidated, too.
Anyway, I only went out with two different online guys, and one of them was so bad that I probably should have deleted my profile then and there, but once again, the situation was so awkward and hilarious that I actually went out with one more person. Guy numero uno was about 5 feet tall, had gray hair, and breath so bad that I almost passed out (thank you, wing woman, for being there to double with me). His profile picture looked NOTHING like him, he had no social skills, and the guy he brought with him to double with my wing woman absolutely hated my guts. He tried to verbally assault me every five seconds. The other guy I went out with was actually cool and we're still friends. So that's it for my online dating reminiscing. I am officially hanging up my serial dating shoes. Goodbye, plentoffish.com. Goodbye, multiple L.A. douche bag guys. It was real.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
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
#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
Monday, February 2, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
"I'm Mad as Hell, and I'm Not Gonna TAKE IT ANYMORE!"
I think I have mono. One of the funniest things my friend said while my sister and I were partying it up for New Year’s was, “How in the world do you two girls NOT have mono?!” I keep taking naps and passing out for no reason. It’s been nice to oversleep versus under sleep for a change, I guess. I’ve been job searching, homework doing, internet carousing, serial dating, and sleeping a rather ridiculous amount. On to new things.
Ah! The great job scam of oh nine. So I send out about 39083493 e-mails a day inquiring about jobs. I fill out online applications that take a million hours to complete. I file through business cards and old records to fill out addresses of former employers only to discover that I don’t meet the undereducated, over experienced qualifications (“you must be a high school drop out and have 14 years of experience organizing paper clips”). And this is how I roll, day after day. I e-mail people until my eyes feel like they have diarrhea and then I blow aliens’ heads off via Halo 3 or perform face melting drum solos via Rock Band to slip back into Funemployment Land.
So I get called in for a closed call for a modeling agency a few Saturdays ago. I meet with “Kurt,” who is about 6’4” and has beautiful eyebrows. I mean, these eyebrows looked like they were painted on by DaVinci. They were perfect. So he looks me over, has me walk for him, asks me if I’m interested in doing music videos, tells me to call him at 3:30 and he’ll let me know if he’s interested. He harped on my “beautiful skin, great legs, great energy.” I am shuffled in and out like I’m a car part on a conveyer belt. I call him at my appointed time; he says, “I definitely want to work with you. Come in at 1:30 on Monday- and parking will be free because of the MLK holiday.”
I came in at 1:15 and was met by a very grouchy parking attendant who spoke approximately zero percent of English. I told him that my parking is supposed to be free. He talked a bunch of mumbo jumbo and I ditched him and got on the elevator. I went to the 6th floor and waited and waited and waited. Finally, this disgusting, Botox-infested alien faced woman came and got me. Her name was Rhonda. Rhonda looked like Priscilla after she got her botched Botox job in Guatemala or wherever the crap she got turned into an alien. Her lips were swollen full of collagen and her face was dramatically stretched over her bones. Her eyebrows were crazy high. She was squinty. Her boobs were about the size of bowling balls. I was afraid.
So she goes through this big, incoherent speech that I DID NOT FOLLOW pertaining to signing with their agency and all of this crap. Her sentences were fragments. She kept using profanity. She kept telling me about being a single mother. I wanted to give her a Lexapro. So eventually she tells me that their company ONLY works with “Omar” in Hollywood and “Omar” charges 895 effing dollars for comp cards. I laughed in her face. Then I told her I changed purses and just happened to not be carrying the 895 in cash that I normally have on me. I asked her to validate my parking pass. She said “I don’t know anything about that.” Her rude ass did not even walk me out. I left and the parking Gestapo asked me for FOURTEEN EFFING DOLLARS. Yes, 14 bucks to park. I almost knocked that little mumbling midget’s teeth down his throat. But I didn’t. I just sent a scathing e-mail to this stupid company and I sent a follow up hate letter with my receipt.
Despite the jobless depression of 2K9, a few nice things have happened. Let me tell you what God has done. I haven’t actually purchased NEW clothes in years. I really mean that. I am the thriftiest person I know. I can make something out of nothing, and I enjoy doing it. I have really needed some new jeans for a long time, but I have been holding off on buying jeans because I have had to use money to buy school books and stuff like that. A few weeks ago, I was going to church with my friend, and she said she had a bunch of stuff in her trunk that she needed to take to the Goodwill. I rummaged through it and came out with a “new” dress, a FEW pairs of “new” jeans, and a couple of shirts. It was like Christmas.
God has met my needs in other ways, too. i.e., I am a huge fan of Rock band, but considering my unemployment status, I did not want to go out and buy this game. The main reason that I wanted to buy it was because I like to have something to “do” at a party. I am very big into hosting parties. I like building a sense of community, and L.A. doesn’t offer that environment much. Out of the blue one day, my friend Steve-o came over with Rock band. FOR NO REASON. He just bought it and we jammed out all night.
This is when I recognize that God always, always meets my needs---and he doesn’t just meet my needs. He meets my WANTS. He goes beyond making sure that I am fed and have a roof over my head. He gives me free jeans and Rock band. My bird came back, too! I have a dove on my porch right now sitting on two little eggs. So whenever my little bird came back to live in my potted plant, I was flipping through my book of Psalms, and this is what I came across:
“He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High
will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.
I will say of the LORD, "He is my refuge and my fortress,
my God, in whom I trust."
Surely he will save you from the fowler's snare
and from the deadly pestilence.
He will cover you with his feathers,
and under his wings you will find refuge;
his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.”
Psalm 91:1-4.
Now, the whole 91st Psalm will knock you on your face, it’s so good, but it was so sweet to me that right as my little bird came back, and I have watched her protect her little babies, that God sent me a message about how HE will cover me with his feathers, and I will find refuge in HIM, and HE will be faithful to me. How much more will God protect me than Doris the dove will protect her eggs? The analogy might seem simple, but to me, it was revolutionary.
My church has been going through a Psalms series and I have felt very connected to the messages recently. I have always loved David in the Bible. He’s always been my guy. I like his sense of passion and his desperate love for God. The warrior poet. His faith was unbelievable. Now if we have to get down to the nitty-gritty, Peter might be the guy that I can relate to the most, because he seriously needed anger management and he chopped that soldier’s ear off for Jesus. Haha. Peter was a total hot head with a potty mouth. I love the fact that he was who he was and he didn’t try to be something else. I also like that Jesus so radically changed him that he was in love with the Savior. But what I like most about these guys is that they TOTALLY screwed up, were completely unfaithful to God, and at the end of their stories, you can see God’s faithfulness. This is what I have been learning recently- that God is faithful, even when we aren’t.
Off of my spiritual soap box and onto my personal need for anger management: I started school a few weeks ago and it’s been a big adjustment getting back into the swing of things. During my first week back, I noticed that the crazy cooing pigeon woman was in my class, and she cooed and nodded and laughed inappropriately during the ENTIRE class. I thought that I was going to lose it. This is also the class where my “educated” professor wrote the following on the board:
“Have you ever ran a counseling group before?”
Uh, really? Wrong verb tense, woman, and we don’t end sentences in prepositions. All of my professors this semester also DO NOT understand the concept of subject-verb agreement. I hear them say stuff like this ALL THE TIME:
“There is many of you…”
“There’s options..”
“There is a couple of things to discuss…”
I want to teach a remedial English course for my professors. Now, I may sound like a hypocrite here because I sometimes end sentences in prepositions, I write in fragments, I use contractions, and I don’t always punctuate or capitalize correctly in my blogs, but let’s keep in mind that I am NOT teaching graduate level courses and I am simply keeping a personal “journal” which is informal and a means of venting. Sigh. Wears me out.
I only have about three more scenarios that I’d like to discuss. I realize that this is the longest blog in the history of mankind. First of all, I do NOT understand the crazy people in L.A. who post ads on craigslist for work. This one man called me who really liked me because I sent him a hilarious email. Then when he started with the job description, he went on and on about selling dietary supplements which increase your sex drive, selling disposable phone numbers to dating websites, posting youtube exercise videos for in-home personal training, and writing acting and producing documents. What? WHAT? Everyone in L.A. has AD/HD.
That was weird scenario number one. Now, let me tell you about the most insane person I have EVER met. I will not use his real name because I do not want to hurt his feelings. We’ll call him….Jeff. Jeff and I grew up together in Memphis and he’s always been completely bonkers, but he’s hysterical and a really good guy. He visits L.A. all the time because he’s trying to make it in “the business,” and he is an aspiring director. So the other night, I had gone to class, I was LATE for class because it took me 25 minutes to find a freaking parking spot (I am never late. I was completely humiliated. By the time I got to class, my hair was sweating and my heart was beating so hard that I could see it through my shirt. Serious anxiety.), I had come home, there were zits all over my face, and I was in no shape to be social. I was over it.
So Jeff calls me and says, “I’m in L.A.! I’ll be at your place in 5 minutes.” I told him I didn’t want to see him, but he hung up on me too quickly to absorb the fact that I DID NOT WANT TO SEE ANYONE. So, just as he promised, he showed up about 5 minutes later, and he was lingering around the front door to my apt. complex. I let him in and he came with his trail of AD/HD up to my apartment. He swung open my closet door, pulled out an outfit for me to wear, told me to get ready, and proceeded to talk to my dad on the phone, which was weird, but they knew each other from way back when, so it wasn’t TOO weird. I got ready and we walked downstairs. He opened the door to a bright red mustang. It was very “16 Candles.”
So we pick up some fellow Memphians and eventually make our way to Beverly Hills to some fancy-pants hotel lounge bar. Our waitress was the rudest person I have ever met. Some girl shows up who is a friend of a friend and it is quite clear that she HATES each of us because we all have southern accents and apparently she thinks we all hang out on our front porches in our whitey-tighties drinking moonshine and making out with our cousins. So she proceeds to say,
“American culture is so….different (scowl on her face). In the Chinese culture, we will bend over backwards to make sure that you feel at home. I mean, I walk into an American (scowl) person’s house, and they tell me to make myself at home, but if you come to MY house, in the CHINESE culture, we will stuff you to make sure that you feel welcomed.”
I asked her if she’d ever been to the South. She said she’d been to Texas. Idiot. She has no clue. My mom will stuff you like a Thanksgiving turkey if she’s made her biannual treck to Costco.
So.. “Jeff” says to her….
“I bet if I went to your house, you’d make me go out back and pick up a 2 by 4 and have me nail it up to the wall so I’d have a place to put my glass of water.”
None of us had any idea what that meant, but the look of sheer disgust on this woman’s pompous face made me laugh so hard that I cried a little. And this is why I love this guy, though he completely invades my personal space and DOES NOT CARE if I tell him to leave me alone.
And, story numero tres: last night, I met a girl at Starbucks for a cup of joe. This was some girl from my church whom I did not know, so it felt like I was on an online date as we texted stuff like, “I am wearing a green jacket and have long brown hair,” bla bla. So we meet up, talk about the church and volunteer opportunities, etc, and then after about an hour, she leaves. I realize that I have no coffee in my house but I have a Starbucks gift card and so I thought I’d buy a pound of their coffee. So I’m talking to the little barista about which coffee to buy, and he tells me that if I trust him and buy such-and-such coffee, he’ll give me his employee discount. Probably roofied coffee, but whatever. So the other girl says to me, “do you want your free cup of coffee?” Apparently, I get a free cup if I buy a pound. I had already had a cup of coffee. So, this little guy walks into Starbucks, and I say to him,
“Sir, what kind of coffee are you going to buy tonight?”
He turns around and looks behind him.
“I’m talking to you.”
He looks at me like he’s afraid.
I said, “look, I get a free cup of coffee with this pound that I’m buying, but I’ve already had a cup of coffee tonight, so I’d like to give you my free cup. Tell that lady what you want.”
He almost dropped dead. After a few minutes of confusion, he says,
“And I was told that all people in L.A. are rude! I guess that isn’t true at all!”
And I said to him,
“Oh, honey. I’m not from L.A. I’m from the South.”
Then all of a sudden I realized how bi-cultural I’m feeling these days. I don’t feel connected to Memphis at all, but a few weeks ago when we were talking about MLK and we watched a little video that had the Lorraine motel on it, I all of a sudden felt proud to be from that awful place. Then when I was in Memphis for Christmas, I kept wanting to come back to L.A. I can’t imagine how tough it must be to come from another country to America or whatever. I am having an identity crisis just being a Southerner and trying to assimilate in L.A. So weird.
Oh! I lied. I have one more story. So last Friday, I was babysitting, and right after I had put the kids to bed (and this was after I got the whole “Kindergarten Cop” speech from the 5-year old about how “boys have a penis and girls have a vagina,” yes- I was mortified and thought that kids shouldn’t be so clinical… Californians are weird), there was a huge BOOM! Out of nowhere. I thought that it was a driveby. Why? Because I am from Memphis.
So the kids jump out of bed and they are terrified and the big golden retriever runs into the room and we’re all sitting on the bed trying to figure out what just happened. Then the phone rings and I talk to a relative of the family and she said we’d just had an earthquake. Well, how about that? What the crap do you do if you’re in an earthquake? My immediate thought is to get into the closet, because that’s what we do during tornadoes, but then I remember that you don’t want crap falling on you from the shelves in the closet, so you get under a desk, right? I have no idea. So the kids freak out and I have to do some relaxation therapy on them to wind them back down and get them in bed again. Sigh. I need to google how to survive an earthquake. In closing, I leave you with the following youtube clip to keep you from going postal during the recession. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao3FuGEGcU8
Ah! The great job scam of oh nine. So I send out about 39083493 e-mails a day inquiring about jobs. I fill out online applications that take a million hours to complete. I file through business cards and old records to fill out addresses of former employers only to discover that I don’t meet the undereducated, over experienced qualifications (“you must be a high school drop out and have 14 years of experience organizing paper clips”). And this is how I roll, day after day. I e-mail people until my eyes feel like they have diarrhea and then I blow aliens’ heads off via Halo 3 or perform face melting drum solos via Rock Band to slip back into Funemployment Land.
So I get called in for a closed call for a modeling agency a few Saturdays ago. I meet with “Kurt,” who is about 6’4” and has beautiful eyebrows. I mean, these eyebrows looked like they were painted on by DaVinci. They were perfect. So he looks me over, has me walk for him, asks me if I’m interested in doing music videos, tells me to call him at 3:30 and he’ll let me know if he’s interested. He harped on my “beautiful skin, great legs, great energy.” I am shuffled in and out like I’m a car part on a conveyer belt. I call him at my appointed time; he says, “I definitely want to work with you. Come in at 1:30 on Monday- and parking will be free because of the MLK holiday.”
I came in at 1:15 and was met by a very grouchy parking attendant who spoke approximately zero percent of English. I told him that my parking is supposed to be free. He talked a bunch of mumbo jumbo and I ditched him and got on the elevator. I went to the 6th floor and waited and waited and waited. Finally, this disgusting, Botox-infested alien faced woman came and got me. Her name was Rhonda. Rhonda looked like Priscilla after she got her botched Botox job in Guatemala or wherever the crap she got turned into an alien. Her lips were swollen full of collagen and her face was dramatically stretched over her bones. Her eyebrows were crazy high. She was squinty. Her boobs were about the size of bowling balls. I was afraid.
So she goes through this big, incoherent speech that I DID NOT FOLLOW pertaining to signing with their agency and all of this crap. Her sentences were fragments. She kept using profanity. She kept telling me about being a single mother. I wanted to give her a Lexapro. So eventually she tells me that their company ONLY works with “Omar” in Hollywood and “Omar” charges 895 effing dollars for comp cards. I laughed in her face. Then I told her I changed purses and just happened to not be carrying the 895 in cash that I normally have on me. I asked her to validate my parking pass. She said “I don’t know anything about that.” Her rude ass did not even walk me out. I left and the parking Gestapo asked me for FOURTEEN EFFING DOLLARS. Yes, 14 bucks to park. I almost knocked that little mumbling midget’s teeth down his throat. But I didn’t. I just sent a scathing e-mail to this stupid company and I sent a follow up hate letter with my receipt.
Despite the jobless depression of 2K9, a few nice things have happened. Let me tell you what God has done. I haven’t actually purchased NEW clothes in years. I really mean that. I am the thriftiest person I know. I can make something out of nothing, and I enjoy doing it. I have really needed some new jeans for a long time, but I have been holding off on buying jeans because I have had to use money to buy school books and stuff like that. A few weeks ago, I was going to church with my friend, and she said she had a bunch of stuff in her trunk that she needed to take to the Goodwill. I rummaged through it and came out with a “new” dress, a FEW pairs of “new” jeans, and a couple of shirts. It was like Christmas.
God has met my needs in other ways, too. i.e., I am a huge fan of Rock band, but considering my unemployment status, I did not want to go out and buy this game. The main reason that I wanted to buy it was because I like to have something to “do” at a party. I am very big into hosting parties. I like building a sense of community, and L.A. doesn’t offer that environment much. Out of the blue one day, my friend Steve-o came over with Rock band. FOR NO REASON. He just bought it and we jammed out all night.
This is when I recognize that God always, always meets my needs---and he doesn’t just meet my needs. He meets my WANTS. He goes beyond making sure that I am fed and have a roof over my head. He gives me free jeans and Rock band. My bird came back, too! I have a dove on my porch right now sitting on two little eggs. So whenever my little bird came back to live in my potted plant, I was flipping through my book of Psalms, and this is what I came across:
“He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High
will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.
I will say of the LORD, "He is my refuge and my fortress,
my God, in whom I trust."
Surely he will save you from the fowler's snare
and from the deadly pestilence.
He will cover you with his feathers,
and under his wings you will find refuge;
his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.”
Psalm 91:1-4.
Now, the whole 91st Psalm will knock you on your face, it’s so good, but it was so sweet to me that right as my little bird came back, and I have watched her protect her little babies, that God sent me a message about how HE will cover me with his feathers, and I will find refuge in HIM, and HE will be faithful to me. How much more will God protect me than Doris the dove will protect her eggs? The analogy might seem simple, but to me, it was revolutionary.
My church has been going through a Psalms series and I have felt very connected to the messages recently. I have always loved David in the Bible. He’s always been my guy. I like his sense of passion and his desperate love for God. The warrior poet. His faith was unbelievable. Now if we have to get down to the nitty-gritty, Peter might be the guy that I can relate to the most, because he seriously needed anger management and he chopped that soldier’s ear off for Jesus. Haha. Peter was a total hot head with a potty mouth. I love the fact that he was who he was and he didn’t try to be something else. I also like that Jesus so radically changed him that he was in love with the Savior. But what I like most about these guys is that they TOTALLY screwed up, were completely unfaithful to God, and at the end of their stories, you can see God’s faithfulness. This is what I have been learning recently- that God is faithful, even when we aren’t.
Off of my spiritual soap box and onto my personal need for anger management: I started school a few weeks ago and it’s been a big adjustment getting back into the swing of things. During my first week back, I noticed that the crazy cooing pigeon woman was in my class, and she cooed and nodded and laughed inappropriately during the ENTIRE class. I thought that I was going to lose it. This is also the class where my “educated” professor wrote the following on the board:
“Have you ever ran a counseling group before?”
Uh, really? Wrong verb tense, woman, and we don’t end sentences in prepositions. All of my professors this semester also DO NOT understand the concept of subject-verb agreement. I hear them say stuff like this ALL THE TIME:
“There is many of you…”
“There’s options..”
“There is a couple of things to discuss…”
I want to teach a remedial English course for my professors. Now, I may sound like a hypocrite here because I sometimes end sentences in prepositions, I write in fragments, I use contractions, and I don’t always punctuate or capitalize correctly in my blogs, but let’s keep in mind that I am NOT teaching graduate level courses and I am simply keeping a personal “journal” which is informal and a means of venting. Sigh. Wears me out.
I only have about three more scenarios that I’d like to discuss. I realize that this is the longest blog in the history of mankind. First of all, I do NOT understand the crazy people in L.A. who post ads on craigslist for work. This one man called me who really liked me because I sent him a hilarious email. Then when he started with the job description, he went on and on about selling dietary supplements which increase your sex drive, selling disposable phone numbers to dating websites, posting youtube exercise videos for in-home personal training, and writing acting and producing documents. What? WHAT? Everyone in L.A. has AD/HD.
That was weird scenario number one. Now, let me tell you about the most insane person I have EVER met. I will not use his real name because I do not want to hurt his feelings. We’ll call him….Jeff. Jeff and I grew up together in Memphis and he’s always been completely bonkers, but he’s hysterical and a really good guy. He visits L.A. all the time because he’s trying to make it in “the business,” and he is an aspiring director. So the other night, I had gone to class, I was LATE for class because it took me 25 minutes to find a freaking parking spot (I am never late. I was completely humiliated. By the time I got to class, my hair was sweating and my heart was beating so hard that I could see it through my shirt. Serious anxiety.), I had come home, there were zits all over my face, and I was in no shape to be social. I was over it.
So Jeff calls me and says, “I’m in L.A.! I’ll be at your place in 5 minutes.” I told him I didn’t want to see him, but he hung up on me too quickly to absorb the fact that I DID NOT WANT TO SEE ANYONE. So, just as he promised, he showed up about 5 minutes later, and he was lingering around the front door to my apt. complex. I let him in and he came with his trail of AD/HD up to my apartment. He swung open my closet door, pulled out an outfit for me to wear, told me to get ready, and proceeded to talk to my dad on the phone, which was weird, but they knew each other from way back when, so it wasn’t TOO weird. I got ready and we walked downstairs. He opened the door to a bright red mustang. It was very “16 Candles.”
So we pick up some fellow Memphians and eventually make our way to Beverly Hills to some fancy-pants hotel lounge bar. Our waitress was the rudest person I have ever met. Some girl shows up who is a friend of a friend and it is quite clear that she HATES each of us because we all have southern accents and apparently she thinks we all hang out on our front porches in our whitey-tighties drinking moonshine and making out with our cousins. So she proceeds to say,
“American culture is so….different (scowl on her face). In the Chinese culture, we will bend over backwards to make sure that you feel at home. I mean, I walk into an American (scowl) person’s house, and they tell me to make myself at home, but if you come to MY house, in the CHINESE culture, we will stuff you to make sure that you feel welcomed.”
I asked her if she’d ever been to the South. She said she’d been to Texas. Idiot. She has no clue. My mom will stuff you like a Thanksgiving turkey if she’s made her biannual treck to Costco.
So.. “Jeff” says to her….
“I bet if I went to your house, you’d make me go out back and pick up a 2 by 4 and have me nail it up to the wall so I’d have a place to put my glass of water.”
None of us had any idea what that meant, but the look of sheer disgust on this woman’s pompous face made me laugh so hard that I cried a little. And this is why I love this guy, though he completely invades my personal space and DOES NOT CARE if I tell him to leave me alone.
And, story numero tres: last night, I met a girl at Starbucks for a cup of joe. This was some girl from my church whom I did not know, so it felt like I was on an online date as we texted stuff like, “I am wearing a green jacket and have long brown hair,” bla bla. So we meet up, talk about the church and volunteer opportunities, etc, and then after about an hour, she leaves. I realize that I have no coffee in my house but I have a Starbucks gift card and so I thought I’d buy a pound of their coffee. So I’m talking to the little barista about which coffee to buy, and he tells me that if I trust him and buy such-and-such coffee, he’ll give me his employee discount. Probably roofied coffee, but whatever. So the other girl says to me, “do you want your free cup of coffee?” Apparently, I get a free cup if I buy a pound. I had already had a cup of coffee. So, this little guy walks into Starbucks, and I say to him,
“Sir, what kind of coffee are you going to buy tonight?”
He turns around and looks behind him.
“I’m talking to you.”
He looks at me like he’s afraid.
I said, “look, I get a free cup of coffee with this pound that I’m buying, but I’ve already had a cup of coffee tonight, so I’d like to give you my free cup. Tell that lady what you want.”
He almost dropped dead. After a few minutes of confusion, he says,
“And I was told that all people in L.A. are rude! I guess that isn’t true at all!”
And I said to him,
“Oh, honey. I’m not from L.A. I’m from the South.”
Then all of a sudden I realized how bi-cultural I’m feeling these days. I don’t feel connected to Memphis at all, but a few weeks ago when we were talking about MLK and we watched a little video that had the Lorraine motel on it, I all of a sudden felt proud to be from that awful place. Then when I was in Memphis for Christmas, I kept wanting to come back to L.A. I can’t imagine how tough it must be to come from another country to America or whatever. I am having an identity crisis just being a Southerner and trying to assimilate in L.A. So weird.
Oh! I lied. I have one more story. So last Friday, I was babysitting, and right after I had put the kids to bed (and this was after I got the whole “Kindergarten Cop” speech from the 5-year old about how “boys have a penis and girls have a vagina,” yes- I was mortified and thought that kids shouldn’t be so clinical… Californians are weird), there was a huge BOOM! Out of nowhere. I thought that it was a driveby. Why? Because I am from Memphis.
So the kids jump out of bed and they are terrified and the big golden retriever runs into the room and we’re all sitting on the bed trying to figure out what just happened. Then the phone rings and I talk to a relative of the family and she said we’d just had an earthquake. Well, how about that? What the crap do you do if you’re in an earthquake? My immediate thought is to get into the closet, because that’s what we do during tornadoes, but then I remember that you don’t want crap falling on you from the shelves in the closet, so you get under a desk, right? I have no idea. So the kids freak out and I have to do some relaxation therapy on them to wind them back down and get them in bed again. Sigh. I need to google how to survive an earthquake. In closing, I leave you with the following youtube clip to keep you from going postal during the recession. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao3FuGEGcU8
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