Marina Rose Martinez

I was raised without religion. I understand that my grandmother was raised an atheist, as in “this family does not believe in God” type of organized atheism. She just didn’t take a stand one way or the other with me because she wanted me to have my own opinion, and she opposed my Mexican grandparents when they wanted to baptize me in the catholic church.

There were times when I hated the fact that I wasn’t religious, just because it was one more thing that set me and my crazy family apart from the rest of the Country, and I felt I was already different enough. Now I’m glad that she didn’t force religion onto me. I’ve seen how it messed with my friends and I’m already messed up enough.

I did go to Sunday school with my best friend sometimes and I remember once there was a work sheet handed out that had this scenario: “Emily’s mommy is in the hospital. Emily prayed really hard for her mom to get better and God made her better. In response to God’s kindness, Emily should A. Go have fun with her mom, god brought her back for a reason B. Go straight to church and pray to God to thank him” C and D were obviously wrong. I answered A, probably because the picture of A was Emily smiling in a park or something with her mom and B was Emily all alone in a dark, empty, church. I was told I was wrong, and of course I objected because it was stupid that God would want a little girl to be alone in a church while her sick mom was unable to spend some of her (possibly) last moments with her child. I was incensed and there was some sort of fight, which is when I decided that Christians are morons.

I was probably more effected by it since my own mom was indisposed (read: streets homeless drug addict) and I came to the conclusion that if there was a god that would give her back to me, that meant that he could have done that the whole fucking time she was gone, and that he wouldn’t have ever had to take her away in the first place, and that meant that he was just playing with me like you would play with a cat with a string except that instead if a cat I was a little girl and instead of a string, it was my mom who I hadn’t yet learned to hate and distrust and who I worshiped and who left me with my grandma and a douche bag that hit me so she could continue to live a life unfettered by the responsibilities of parenthood.

Needless to say, I was violently atheist for a few years early in my tweens/teens, only to realize that I hated the christian god so much it was like a religion in its own right, and I calmed down a little bit.

Around this time (12/13) my mom was around and she was really into eastern religion. And by that I mean to say she would appropriate the most attractive parts of foreign spiritualist traditions, claim that they were without the faults of the judeo-christian traditions and use the bullshit tropes of said vague spiritualist amalgamation in order to justify misbehavior and self-righteousness.

It seemed like a good idea, so I did the same until about age 15/16 when I began to notice how any structured belief system could lead to hypocrisy and moronic behavior, not just judeo-christian ones. I came to realize that there were bastards in spiritualism the same as in christianity and moved away from eastern spiritualism, and towards a stark theory of ethics, built on evidence, examination and conclusion.

Later on around 18, after my mom went back to drugs and I moved into Kate’s garage, and found myself struggling with how to treat a woman who was a good mom for at least 7 years of my tweens and teens, until she left AA, and everything fell apart. After years of fighting and resentment, we had finally got a good relationship, and then she started to say little things, that wormed their way into my head because I trusted her completely. She told me she was worried about how I would be able to support myself as an adult. She criticized the things I was most proud of. Because I wasn’t expecting anything, because I had thought that we were fine, that I was fine, she wore my self esteem down to where I was an A student, high achiever etc who thought that I couldn’t do the simplest task by myself since I was such a moron. I felt like I couldn’t make logical conclusions, that I had no ethical basis for valuing myself. I couldn’t conceive of a life where my mother wasn’t cell for cell a part of me.

At that point, I needed something that would be a constant in my life even when I was completely lost. Being in a 12 step program myself, I had a ‘higher power’ but this is when it really came into being more tangible to me than vague. I felt that not only was there a power greater that myself, but it cared for me specifically and wanted me to get out from under the depression and self doubt I found myself in. It had love for me like my own parents never would or could.

This worked until after college graduation when I realized that everything I had worked so hard for and felt so intensely about was for shit and I had an english degree and 40k in college loan debt with no job prospects at all, with little hope of them being in a related field.

I managed to get a job in my field, but it paid me less than I needed to be able to pay my bills. I felt like a failure. What little savings I had was going down the drain while I worked at a dead end company with no sign of an upturn. I wondered what this could mean, asked myself why I had even bothered to go to college. It wasn’t fun for me like it was for so many of my more privileged classmates. I worked all the time, slept very little and ate shitty food. By the time college was over, there wasn’t much left of me and I badly needed to slow down. I was driving an hour each way when gas prices were over $4 a gallon, then working as a tutor after work and on the weekends. I was totally drained, lost, and convinced that college had been a mistake. Then a man I looked up to, who I felt was an example of the type of high-achieving self made individual I would want to grow into killed himself. That combined with the debt, and the perceived failure of my young life left me feeling completely abandoned by a god I thought had cared for me. I wondered what the purpose was to life if not achievements, money, friends and family. I realized that it had to be something else that I didn’t think I possessed.

Looking back, I was right where I needed to be. I had lived my entire life chasing one hollow, materialistic token after another, thinking each time that ‘this one’ would be the one to fix the massive list of shit that’s wrong with me. If I just proved I was smart enough, I wouldn’t feel so stupid, if I could just prove that I was worthwhile, I wouldn’t feel so worthless. And of course, each thing I did was good for awhile, but the glory faded because the truth is that when a person feels like that, nothing is enough, nothing ever will be enough because the problem isn’t quantifiable. I needed to be enough for me, by myself with shit or without it, sane or insane, educated or ignorant, attractive or repulsive etc. There had to be an inherent value inside of me, and while it was nice to believe in a higher power that believed I had value, I needed to believe I had value directly, completely and without hesitation.

My relationship with my higher power is much more quiet than it was in college, maybe even subdued. Maybe I don’t feel like I need my god as much as I did then, or maybe I feel like it’s not as artificial as it was. Either way, I think that people forget that with or without God, horrible things will happen, nothing is sacred (pun intended). The advantage that I feel I have is that I at least feel like god is a constant for me. When everything is different, when there’s no frame of reference for me, I have a god that is always nearby. My belief in a higher power is a good companion in hard times and good ones, but during the hard times I also have to keep hold of my self worth, and the knowledge that I do have inherent value, independent from anything I will ever do, be, say, or feel.

Yes friends, after seven long years of exile (well, 6 and a half, but who’s counting) behind the Orange Curtain, I am returning to the county of my birth: LA. We will be vacating our lovely, well insulated 900 square foot Anaheim apartment, with balcony, pool, laundry room, air conditioning and garbage disposal for a two-tone Toyota Carola parked behind a 7-11 in Inglewood. It’ll only cost $50 more a month, all utilities paid except for gas!

Okay, it’s not that bad, but it is pretty discouraging. When I moved here in 2003, Orange County was the expensive place to live and LA was the cheap one. Even downtown is way out of our price range, and I remember when bums wouldn’t even go there it was such a shit hole. Now they want $2,200 for a hallway, and consider exposed pipes to be a charming amenity.

Anyway, we’re looking in South part of West LA and the North part of the South Bay. If that makes any sense to you, you’re probably the person this paragraph was written for. If you see anything as far south as Hawthorn and as far North as Culver City, preferably West of La Brea. Let me know.

More as a way to organize my thoughts than a way to broadcast my stupidity across the net, I’m going to list the things I want/need in an apartment below. I’ve already been told that I’m dreaming, if you tell me that and I know where you live, I’ll be coming to your house just to poop on your door!

1. Allows Pets: The reason that this is important is that we have 2 rats, and while we could probably get away with not saying anything and just bringing them into the apartment, we did that at the place we’re in now, and even though it only says “no dogs or cats” on the lease, even though other tenants have pet birds that they hang on their balcony on summer afternoons, and even though they’re safe in their cage, our evil bitch of a plumber called the building owners (not the manager, but the owners) and told them that our apartment was infested with rats. As if our dining room connected directly to the sewers. We didn’t want to get our sweet manager in trouble so we carted the rats to a friends house for the formal apartment owner inspection. Nothing came out of it, but I don’t want the hassle, so apartments that accept at least small pets are our best bet.

2. Parking: A lot of LA neighborhoods have atrocious street parking, which is awful. I’ve dealt with it before and I don’t think I could do it again. I need to be able to find parking within at least 2 blocks of my house, or I’ll be beating out headlights with my bare hands.

3. Space: Right now I am sitting in the largest apartment I have seen on this search or my last one. It costs us just a little over a grand a month and we’re still strapped for space, as every surface is covered in our crap. I’m afraid if we end up having to move into anything smaller, we’ll suffocate on our own overabundance of clothing, furniture and arts & crafts supplies.

4. Dishwasher: The importance of this is sort of dependent on the rent and the down payment. If DP and rent are low, I know I can buy an above the counter dishwasher (perfect for just 2 people) for around 200 bucks.

5. Things I think are a given, and don’t need to be explained (except I know that in LA there are places that don’t have any of these things that still costs way more than I can afford): garbage disposal, deadbolt, at least 1 assigned parking space, laundry room, closets.

Air conditioning as a requirement sort of varies depending on the location. I know that when I lived about a mile from the ocean in Huntington Beach (in a $1200 2 bedroom-so I know it’s not just this apartment that’s affordable down here) we didn’t have air conditioning and we never needed it because the breeze from the beach cooled the entire house.

The only thing I find more than a little ridiculous about this list is that I want all that for under 1100 bucks a month. I pay less for all of that here in Anaheim, but it takes me four hours to get to work and back every day. The commute is melting my brain, and it’s time to go back to LA.

Orange County was a nice place to go to college, far enough away from my family that I never had to visit, close enough that I could drive up whenever I missed friends, culture, good food, museums, non-white people or porno. I really hated OC when I first got here, and now I’m half sad to leave. I haven’t lived anywhere near LA itself since I was 14, if you count Pasadena as being in proximity to the city, and I’m a little apprehensive about living there again. I’m unfamiliar with the neighborhoods, the traffic patterns and streets. It’s all going to be new to me all over again. Although I’ll be glad to cut my commute, I’ll be sad to leave Anaheim, where I was finally starting to feel at home, after years of being out of place in homogenized suburbia elsewhere in Orange County. I even tried to find an area of West LA that was a similar hodgepodge of hookah shops, taquerias, Vietnamese restaurants, mosques and thrift stores, but I haven’t seen anything like it.

I know there’s an apartment and a neighborhood out there for Ben and I, and it might not have everything but it’ll get better. Tomorrow we’re going to Hawthorn, where we found some promising prices, if not so promising neighborhoods.

I’ve just been thinking about the arboreal nature of human development.

Have you ever met a person who was like a seed, and every once in awhile you have the opportunity to see how they’ve grown, and you remember them as a seed? It’s baffling.

Seeds are so amazing, they have all this knowledge, height, time, and energy packed into this tiny little space. They’re like reverse atom bombs, waiting to burst out with life in every direction.

As you can probably tell, I’m feeling sentimental, looking outward at the world, visiting trees I have no business standing under, imagining. And before you get all worked up, I’m not talking about you, or me, or anyone who will ever read this. But at the same time I am talking about all of us. I do this thing where I forget that the angle at which I look at others is so much more obtuse than the angle at which I look at myself. It’s like standing in the driveway of someone else’s house and comparing it to my own house, which I know inside and out.

And I don’t want to live in a nineteenth century Victorian, and I don’t want white carpets or a TV that takes up an entire wall, but it looks so good through someone else’s window that I forget how much I like my house, where everything inside of it is mine, bought and paid for. Is there a way that I can make this house metaphor more painful?

Sometimes I have to check in and make sure that this is where I really want to be, because it seems so tame to me. But I think I spent enough time in a chaotic state of uncertainty, at least for now. All I want is my dinner, my boyfriend and my bed…. and the various other electronics, clothes, pets, knick knacks and media that we’ve managed to amass.

Alright, goodnight.

I went to Night Traffic Court for doing a California roll right turn on a red light, and it was boring so I decided what would make it less boring was to let you all peek into the window of misery and despair that is Night Traffic Court.


4:30 PM - At traffic court
4:35 PM - Girl in front of me at the traffic court line is staring at everything like it’s covered in shit. It’s traffic court, it sucks, get over it
4:50 PM - Country dough face in cheap shoes, jean skirt and water polo shirt listens to ipod, stares out into space
4:52 PM - I got all claustrophobic and tried to leave through the emergency exit. It buzzed at me.
5:10 PM - Cell phones are not allowed to be in the traffic courtroom so I am writing this in my moleskin to be transcribed later.
5:10-5:25 - Q&A with the bailiff. Don’t try to explain. Plead guilty, not guilty or a third thing I forgot. Baliff is not a good teacher. He doesn’t repeat the question and he does not answer loud enough. Most of this is lost on me
5:27 PM - I can’t tell if the Spanish section is better off because they get to ask questions of the translator, or worse off because they don’t get to ask questions of the bailiff.
5:28 PM - Court clerks, bailiffs and translator chat and socialize, waiting for the judge to come in.
5:28 PM - Nobody else is listening to their ipod, not even country dough face. I decided to turn mine off. Never know what’ll offend a judge, especially a night traffic court judge.
5:28 PM - I have a feeling this will not be over at 6PM. Do you think I could be held in contempt of court for sleeping?
5:29 PM - Court is now in session
5:29 PM - The judge looks like a nice old guy. Says that he’ll probably slash fines, unless you asked for your fine to be slashed, then you’ll probably get whatever you already got. Tells us that there are two kinds of people that don’t get on well in his courtroom and they are unreformed multi-offenders and people who ask for their fines to be slashed. He also hates it when people don’t get up as soon as he calls their name. Like I said, a nice old guy.
5:29 PM - I am convinced the clock has stopped.
5:30 PM - In consideration of the judge’s advanced age, I have taken my lip ring out.
5:30 PM - Wherein we learn that the judge prefers to be called sir, and will take offense if he is not. This is no time for hippie egalitarianism.
5:32 PM - Judge orders a 16 year old ticketed for underage smoking to write him a 5 page essay on the dangers of cigarettes in the hopes that he’ll “knock that silliness off.” Also references the activity of ‘camping with your father’ in his lecture to the boy. Not to be judgmental, but I have a feeling that mini-hulk here has never been camping with his father, if he even knows who that is.
5:34 PM - Judge gets sassy with the first douche to ask for a slashed fine. “This is not a Burger King, sir.” Go judge, it’s your birfday…
5:40 PM - I notice that the judge is dismissing every single photo enforcement ticket that comes across his desk. This continues the rest of the night. Go judge.
5:41 PM - Man ticketed for “driving on the wrong side of the road and without a license.” The entire courtroom laughed.
5:44 PM - A lot of the Spanish speakers don’t have licenses.
5:53 PM - Every time he slashes a fine, he says “It was supposed to be X, it’s going to be Y. That’s a bargain”
6:00 PM - I’m up
6:15 PM - I got my ticket cut in half! two-seventy something looks so much prettier than the four-seventy something I was going to be paying.
6:30 PM - Couple in matching khakis clings to each other like they’ve just been thrown into the thunder dome. It’s just night traffic court bitches!
7:00 PM - Waiting around to get my payment plan instated. Boredy bored bored
7:30 PM - Final Outcome: the fine, including processing fees comes out to $313, to be paid in $50 monthly installments over the next 6 months. I’m on my own recognizance to send the money in, I will not get a bill.
7:33 PM - On my way out, I trip on a line separator thingy and the younger bailiff tells me to “watch where you walk.” It’s been a long stressful day, and I’m tired and and it hurts my soul a little bit to chuckle at such a douchey statement as if it was funny, but $200 off a ticket is there to help me forget about my dignity.
10:00 PM - At home, I write out all the checks I’ll be paying, put them in the specially formatted envelopes that the court gave me and clip them to their corresponding page on the calender so I won’t forget to send them on time. I even stamp them. I am the king of this shit right now.