Category: Story Time

April 22, 2013

Learning to Swim

Ben and I recorded about an hour of video today, and I’m slowly going through it trying to pull relevant clips. The original intention had been to make a response video to something Hank Green recorded a couple of days ago, but as you can see, we kind of got pretty far off topic. I honestly have no idea if there’s going to bey any way to get a coherent thread in terms of gender and sexuality, but there’s enough for a couple of other videos, if not the one I wanted to make.

The joke, if you don’t get it is that my grandmother thinks of everything in terms of monetary loss. I’ve talked before about how our family motto is probably “I don’t have time for this,” but her personal credo would be “do you know how much that costs?” When I was a little girl, she would try to keep me from hurting myself by saying things like “Don’t run with scissors. Do you know how expensive a trip to the emergency room is?” So her cheapness is sort of a running gag in our family.

I’m still getting used to the camera, and how it works. I know that this is pretty dark. In the future, I’d refrain from recording with a lighted window behind me. I’d also have a higher angle on the camera. I can’t tell if you can see it here, but I had a really hard time figuring out where to put my eyes and my face. Although that’s pretty normal for me, I guess.

March 15, 2013

Dirty Professor: A Dream Journal

It’s been almost 6 years since my undergraduate career ended, so I feel safe sharing this with you guys. It’s more a picture of my own mania than a reflection on the men in question.

1. Oh Captain My Captain

This guy was totally a Robin Williams style mentor for a lot of the dudes in the English department. For the girls he was either an extremely easy A or a misogynist depending largely on the breast size of the woman in question. Class discussion revolved mostly around his adventures as the original Old Spice guy, and incredible astuteness of the students who agreed with his analysis. When I was able to get a word out, his response to my (usually feminist) analysis was generally “Huh” or “Riiight” followed by him frantically looking for a man to say something intelligent to make up for my natural lady craziness.

I had two dreams with him in them, both of which took place in a post-apocalyptic version of our film school building which was at the time a single level maze of low ceiling-ed hallways, edit bays, and theaters. In the dream, tiles hung from the leaky ceiling, mold and stains ran across the remaining walls, and standing water covered the floors to ankle level. At the center, in a rusting iron bath tub only a quarter full of what looked like sewage the Captain sat in tighty-whities and nothing else. His head lolled and he slurred at me like a drunk. With usual dream impotence, I tried to convince him to come with me to safety, but he wouldn’t move and I couldn’t drag him, even though he was not a large man. Instead he told me I was a stupid fat whore, and an idiotic cunt until I cried. In the second dream the same thing happened except that Ben was also there, sitting on the other side of the tub agreeing with him.

2. The Priest

The Priest was on the other end of the spectrum from the Captain. Everybody who was in any way serious about their education loved the Priest. He didn’t take bullshit, but he seemed like a genuinely chill guy. I think every student wanted to be him, or at least be his friend. As fun, funny, smart and interesting as he was, his physical charms were specific ones.

I had multiple dreams with him in them, each one more intense than the other, all on the lead up to finals (of course). In them I sat in a plastic school chair under a spotlight on a black stage. The light was so intense, and the stage so broad that I was barely able to make out the Priest, but nothing else. The walls, the audience, and any other features of the stage were completely in the dark. I had no way to be sure if we were the only people there, or if we were surrounded by millions. I found myself unable to get up from the chair, although nothing seemed to be keeping in it.

From a podium at the edge of the spotlight, Priest asked me more and more personal questions (Describe your first sexual experience. How often do you think about fellatio? Describe a sexual fantasy you’ve never told anyone about. And on and on). Calmly, I would answer each of the questions until I woke up. I can honestly say that I have never been so turned on and freaked out at the same time. For the last quarter of senior year, I had a real problem with looking him in the eyes.

January 29, 2013

The Time I Came Out to My Mom

This was going to be Monday’s post, but since my friend Rhian passed away Sunday, I forwent a Monday post in favor of a goodbye to her, which I published Sunday evening. At first I thought of still publishing it in order to not ruin my M-F streak, but it felt wrong having her tribute up for only a couple of hours before being knocked off the top for the purposes of a damn streak. So in honor of Rhi, Monday, Jan. 28, 2013 will be the first weekday without a post in almost a year of updates.

It’s not what you think. Well, if you know me, it might be.

I’ve already talked about how I was a major tom boy when I was a kid. I’ve always been interested in boys and indifferent to girls. That meant playing in the mud with cars and trucks and ninja turtles, running around with my skateboard and dressing like a boy most of the time. Actually, now I realize I was dressed like a boy. At the time I was trying to TLC

… but with my general fattness and “interesting” fashion sense I probably Missy Ellioted instead.

which isn’t necessarily a bad thing from where I’m sitting now, it just wasn’t the look I was going for.

Long story short, a lot of people thought I was a lesbian. When most kids were being super awkward around the opposite gender, I ended up being awkward around girls and comfortable around boys. The ways that other girls tried to vie for male attention didn’t make a single ounce of sense to me. I’d gone through a phase of wearing too much make-up when I was anorexic, and all it got me was scary dudes on the bus trying harder to fuck me after I told them I was 12 than they tried before. I decided early on that if a boy wanted me, he’d have to take me as I was. Turned out to be a great lifetime resolution, but not such a good high school resolution.

Lets just say that I ended up making out with a lot of gay guys. Upside of that is, I ended up making a lot of gay friends. Which is hog heaven for me. I could hang out with guys and talk about guys at the same time. Revolutionary! Needless to say, most of my parents friends didn’t view this as normative heterosexuality.

Freshman year, my dad’s new girlfriend decided she didn’t like the fact that I had a shaved head. Her solution to this problem was to try repeatedly to get me to get a manicure with her. When I refused (1. manicures are not punk rock and 2. why the hell would I want to spend any more time with my dad’s fuck friend than I absolutely have to?), she decided that was a sure sign I was going to be a dyke and loudly informed my father of his parental failures. A fight ensued between the three of us (apparently telling homophobes that there’s nothing wrong with being gay automatically makes you a big old super gay), and I demanded to be taken home early because his lady was being a hateful cuntbag.

I don’t know if my dad talked to my mom about it or what because sometime after this I would catch her staring at me significantly at random moments during the week. Usually this would be followed by her reaching over, holding my hand, telling me that she loved me and that I could tell her anything. Since this was before her relapse when we were serious BFFs, I just thought she was being weird.

Eventually, her patience ran out and she decided to come out for me. One day at breakfast, she put her fork down, cleared her throat and told me she had something to say. She then told me that it was OK to be gay, that she would always love me and reiterated that I could tell her anything. This is an approximation of the conversation that followed. Many times (say what you will about my family, but we are not the quitting type).

“Mom, I’m not gay.”

“But you can tell me if you are.”

“Thank you, but I’m not even a little bisexual. I don’t even like girls as people”

“Well, if you ever have something you need to tell me, you can”

“Ok, but I’m still not gay.”

“You don’t dress like you’re interested in male attention”

“Do you want me to dress more slutty?”

“I was only saying…”

“Mom, I’m not going to wear uncomfortable clothes just so dudes will objectify me.”

“See, this is why people think you’re a lesbian”

“Mom, a woman is worth more than her ability to command male attention”

“Of course. There’s also female attention. What about [random lesbian friend] doesn’t she think you’re cute?”

“Mom, I’m not gay!”

“God, you don’t have to get upset about it. There’s nothing wrong with being gay, Marina. Don’t be a bigot”

“I’m going to my room.”

I think she was disappointed at not having a more exciting child.

January 17, 2013

The Webster Fetishists

Conrad Bain, the dad from Diff’rent Strokes (who also was one of the founders of the Actor’s Federal Credit Union) has died. In honor of his memory, I will now share with you the Webster Fetishists story from my days as a Blockbuster clerk. I know, Webster is a totally different show, but just go with me on this one.

Blockbuster is an excellent place to work if you’re the type of person that likes people, not as companions, but as research. If you still find yourself absently wondering about the woman who grew into her couch, all these years after her sad demise (as I do), then you will probably take some small joy from the unique outliers of the species that this type of broad-reaching work can bring you in contact with.

One such unit I like to call The Webster Fetishists. My first encounter with TWF happened to be an average visit, something I would come to find completely normal in my day to day work at what was then my new Blockbuster job. A small black man came into the store and wandered around looking for his rental. Other than being a little person and being a black person (in whitey white Orange County) he seemed initially unremarkable. Until he came up to the counter. Since they’re all closed by now, you may not remember that the counter at Blockbuster was basically designed to be offensive to the disabled and the short of stature. At just under 5’5″, I had trouble seeing over it to the customer side, so all I had in my eye line was hair, forehead, and two small hands with movies. In future visits, when I happened to be on the other side of the counter when he was checking out, I realized that this much was only visible on account of him standing on the extreme tips of his toes.

On this first visit, he did something I came to regard as his routine. After he placed the movies on the counter, told me to hold on and said something about having to “call him in the car.” He then reached into his pocket and produced an almost comically large, old, motorola phone. Even in that early age of the Nokia Brick (best phone ever, btw), this thing was a dinosaur. It was two inches thick had a retractable antenna, flipable mouth piece independent of the light up rubber key pad, and the whole thing wrapped in a specialized leather casing. It took both of his hands to hold and operate. He carefully punched in a number (no phone book in these old things), waited for a brief greeting and the asked quietly if he could rent the movies he’d brought to the counter. Sometimes he got a brief answer, sometimes he had to describe the plot, usually they were all OKed, although from time to time one was rejected. He’d pay with cash, take his movies, and walk into the parking lot where he climbed into the passenger side of a large, old Jaguar.

The Motorola in question, in case you are too young.

The amazing, hard working, reception-tastic Nokia Brick (before brick was a bad word).

Rarely, another man would come in and use the same account. He was tall, well over 6 feet, pinkey red skin with white hair and a respectable sized older man gut. The two could have been the same age, or the white guy could have easily been as much as 20 years older than the black guy. It was difficult to tell. The white guy was usually wearing a tan wool suit with no tie, and he usually (but not always) took a slim, black, expensive looking cell phone out of of his inside breast pocket and spoke quietly to someone on the other end before checking out his rentals. It took me happening to see him slip confidently into the driver’s seat of the same old Jaguar to go back and realize they were both on the same account.

And just so you don’t think that this relationship is a product of my finals-addled brain, I will tell you about the time they both came in at once. It was raining, it had been raining hard for what seemed like days. It was night, and unusually dark under the clouds. The little guy came in, wandered around and selected his movies. When he got to the counter, he made his call as usual. That particular Blockbuster was never crowded, even on rainy ‘rent a movie and stay in’ type nights, so I had no concern with the time it took to make the call, which in this instance seemed to be quite awhile. There was a lot more discussion than usual, and just as the back and forth became hastey and strained, the call ended and my customer looked expectant, but not at me. Shortly the tall man came through the door looking tired, but not angry and joined the other man at the counter. He picked up the movies, seemed focused on one in particular, an R rated action film that he frowned at. Using the counter and the tall man’s gut for leverage, the smaller strained upwards. He looked up at his companion, said something that I don’t remember, but which was close to pleading, and got a “yes” for his troubles. The older man, having conceded, handed me the movies with one hand draped easily on the little man’s shoulders. They left together smiling.

All told, I worked for Blockbuster 2 years, and in that time I noticed a shift in the Webster couple. More and more the tall man came in, once or twice I got the impression that his companion was sick. I would like to say something significant about their movie selection, that it started to tend toward the fantastical, the type of movies people watch to forget their lives about, but all movies are that way for someone, and honestly I have no memory as to what they rented with the single exception of the R rated action film from the one rainy night when they were both in my store together. As you know, the company crumbled. That small, uninhabited location was one of the first to go. I worked in two other stores after that, but never saw TWF again. I used to joke about what kind of personal ad that relationship got started on, and I honestly thought this post would be something along those lines, but I guess my fingers had other ideas, because it seems like I typed up a sort of love story instead. In the arrogance of youth, I scoffed at the significance of companionship. I thought of myself as an island, and my fellow humans as either competition or congestion. Looking back from not so far away I think that maybe it’s nice to have someone to watch movies with… and to pretend to be a sitcom dad and son while you fuck in the mock-up of a 1980′s living room, 4th wall conveniently missing.

What? Variety is the spice, you guys!

January 4, 2013

Drunk Dad (Not Mine) Tried to Fight Me

Since we left Oregon on Dec. 30 in the morning, arrived in LA Dec. 31 in the morning, and only got a few hours sleep during the day, Ben and I decided on a low key New Year’s. I happened to have some free AMC tickets, so we headed there instead of our usual theater, the Arclight. The first time I ever went to the Arclight I thought it was ludicrous to pay almost $20 for a damn movie. Then I actually moved from the suburbs to the city and I had to stop watching movies because there was no way I’d pay to deal with the bullshit city theaters churn out. Every movie comes with a free Mexican baby running back and forth in front the of the screen, usually screaming. Sometimes there’s a Mexican mom running back and forth after it, not in an attempt to catch it, but more as a form of exercise.

Sidebar: Do you have to pay for baby tickets in movie theaters? I contend that every year under 5 a child is, a parent should have to pay an order of magnitude more for the ticket. So a ticket for a 2 year old would be something like $1700 and no babies would ever come to movies again.

Anyway, I’ll gladly pay $5 more than average so I can watch a film in peace without God damned babies or jerks showing up 20 minutes late or whatever. But I had these free tickets, so I figured we’d use them to go watch Django on New Year’s.

As soon as I walked into the theater, I noticed a stroller and it’s 4ish year old occupant in the section of seats that go at the very front of the theater below the stadium seats on the flat ground. True to form, she was running back and forth in the wide aisle completely unattended. Thankfully, her parents had a containment plan for the film. Unfortunately that plan involved her watching a brightly colored Disney movie on a portable DVD player. And since they were sitting in front, everyone could clearly see Princess Whatsherbucket Fairypants Adventures like screen-in-screen while Jamie Foxx set white people on fire and dudes got eaten by dogs and shit.

Source

At a certain point I either became too consumed by the film, somebody finally bopped them all on their child abusing heads, or they came to their senses and left (least likely scenario), but I stopped noticing the Princess Party after about the second scene.

For whatever reason, we both thought the DVD player incident would be the last major piece of drama, and we bought tickets to Jack Reacher, since it came on directly after Django. We also bought dinner, which made it an pretty expensive night even after accounting for the free tickets.

It started off well enough. Jack Reacher is the kind of ridiculous hot mess that a person expects some talking in, so I was cool with that. What I was not cool with, however, was the family of fuckholes seated in front of us whose star player was an incredibly drunk and sloppy little dad. First of all, every one of the 4 members of the family stood completely up at least 10 times during the film. One time both the son and the mom stood up at the same time so the mom could give the son a kiss. So Jack Reacher kicking some poor bumpkin’s stupid bumpkin ass becomes Oedipal Shadow Masterpiece all of a sudden. The dad kept up a steady stream of inebriated babbling that started to become a sort of soundtrack backup, and honestly wasn’t bothering me until his phone rang AND HE ANSWERED IT AND HE TALKED ON IT! This is the point at which I will kick a man in his tiny, drunken head in front of his woman and their children. However, in deference to Ben, who’s not used to violence, I refrained from braining this little bitchface and instead I shouted “hey, shut the fuck up!”

Drunk Dad threw his arms in the air, waived them like he didn’t care, said something I didn’t understand, laughed like a girl, told everyone in the theater that he was going to go take a piss, walked about 10 feet away, swayed around to my general direction, did the weird little “come at me bro” upper body lunge, almost fell over, caught himself on the seats, ran into the wall and finally actually went to piss.

Meanwhile, someone else saw this exchange and told the theater attendant that there was a fight starting, so he came in and watched drunk dad mumble to himself, but that was mostly the end of the drama until after the movie when I went to the theater attendant, complained about drunk dad and got 4 free movie passes for my trouble.

December 13, 2012

Crying in the Rain on Christmas

Yesterday I teased that I would tell you the epic tale of my personal worst Christmas ever. I believe I suggested that I was crying in the rain, filled with the knowledge that nobody loved me after having ruined Christmas for everyone. That’s not entirely accurate. In actuality, I was filled with rage, crying out of frustration and walking home from Denny’s when it started to rain on me.

I moved out of my Mom’s house in April of 2003, it was rocky, but we were still trying to maintain some semblance of a relationship even though she was totally insane and abusive, which is why I moved out in the first place. From where I am now, I don’t know why I thought that continuing to talk to her would be in any way a good idea for either of us. Although, I write this as someone who is actually sort of talking to again, this time after 5 years of silence. And I know we’re completely off topic, but after all the years of experience I have with her completely losing her shit on me and knowing that she hasn’t changed and wont ever change, I have no idea what this new situation will even be like, or what’s going to come of it. I’m going to say pain.

But anyway, I stupidly thought that it would be OK to hang out with my mom and my grandma Christmas morning at my ex/re/ex step-dad’s house (at this time, he was just my ex/re step-dad, which is why my mom was living with him again). Not being a complete moron, I had arranged to be somewhere else at a fixed time right after I was done hanging out with my fam. Usually, this is a good trick to use on difficult people so that you don’t end up staying longer than you planned, and so that you have an excuse when they try to get you to change your plans without warning. In this case, it only accelerated the inevitable. So at least the shittiest part of my day was over early.

In addition to agreeing to this experiment in hateful family holiday time, I also didn’t have my own transportation for the day, and was relying on my mother to pick me up and take me back to my house. Which is a terrible idea. When dealing with crazies, always have your own transportation, or do not go. Christmas morning, my mother was two hours late picking me up. As soon as I got in the car, she tried to get me to cancel my afternoon plans in order to spend more time with the family and I refused. She didn’t let it go the rest of the morning. Any semblance of holiday togetherness was completely fucked because she was either explaining how it wasn’t her fault she was late (it was grandma’s), wondering aloud what kind of asshole doesn’t even want to spend time with their own family on Christmas (this kind), or trying repeatedly to get me to cancel or postpone my afternoon plans, which I repeatedly refused to do. Surprisingly, I stayed calm the entire time, even when she kept pacing back and forth across the house into her room to scream and cry, then back into the living room to launch another round of ‘it’s not my fault; you’re an asshole; spend time with me!’ I tried pointing out that she was wasting time by having a tantrum, and that Grandma, Step-dad and I were enjoying Christmas while she was in her room alone. That information wasn’t processed very well, and her bitching escalated.

Before too long, she was in my face, shoving me and calling me lots of names, some of them totally true (fat selfish bitch, uncaring cunt, only interested in money and how the situation can help me, etc.) Which used to really bother me, but by that time, I’d done enough work to realize it was all mind games. None of those qualities, however true, were relevant to why I wasn’t interested in spending more time with her on Christmas. In fact the main reason I wasn’t willing to hang out with her was because of the very abusive and shitty behavior she was displaying by calling me names and shoving me around when she didn’t get her way. This is the point that a well prepared person would be about 20 minutes down the freeway, having left at the first sign of trouble. Unfortunately, I was getting spit-shouted at by my ride home. I still managed to remain calm, respond minimally, sometimes only to say “It’s true, I can be quite shitty but I’m working at it. You, however are shoving me and yelling at me and I need for you to stop.” Which, given the stimulus is a response I don’t think I could replicate in a thousand crazy Christmases. I don’t know how I got that cool. I wasn’t even smoking cigarettes at this point in my life.

The breaking point for me came when she angrily picked up my Christmas gift to her, ripped it open, threw it on the floor and shouted “YOU GOT ME USED BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS? YOU FUCKING GAVE ME TRASH!” Which is especially awesome since she had requested her gift be the novels I’d read from my first semester at college, so she could read what I’d read and “feel closer to [me].” So, rather than turn the books back in for whatever small profit I could have made on them, I stuck them all in a large box (English majors read lots of books) and wrapped it for her for Christmas. I’m pretty sure she’s the only person I got anything for, because everybody else in my life was compassionate enough to realize that a person who steals 1 meal a day from the cafeteria isn’t going to have a lot of disposable cash around for Christmas gifts. That’s when I got up and started to head towards the door, determined to walk the 8 miles back to my own house rather than stay in her presence another terrible second.

As I opened the door, she picked my present back up and started shoving me outside, using the box as a sort of battering ram, screaming that she didn’t want my shitty gifts, that I could take my trash and keep it for myself since that’s all I wanted anyway, and more importantly that I wouldn’t be getting the amazing present she got me because trash for awesome is a shitty exchange and she’s not a fool.

Quick aside: this is actually a family theme. Things normal parents do for their children out of love, or even obligation parents in my family do on loan, with interest. Braces, glasses, even regular inoculations are meticulously recorded in the ledger of family accounts. Every toy, every dance class, every cent of monetary expenditure is an investment, not in happiness, not in health, but in high yield guilt and cash rewards. You want to know why my grandmother loves me? It’s because I pay for her every time we go anywhere. And I pay for her because she didn’t let me die in infancy. I owe her. To date, I am the only one of her children who has made any return on investment (in her mind the fact that my mother and uncle would do anything for her is not relevant since they aren’t high earners.) If you ever wonder why I am so obsessed with money and status, know that it could be so much more shitty.

Back to the worst Christmas ever. Using my own gift as a human cow catcher, my mother succeeded in pushing me out the front door, down the front steps, and onto the lawn of my step father’s house. This is a house I had lived in on-and-off since I was 10. This is the only neighborhood in the world where I could conceivably be embarrassed by the thought of my neighbors seeing something terrible like my mother trying to beat me with my own present on the front lawn like a bitch. Standing in the middle of that lawn, feeling all the windows of the houses of children I grew up with staring directly at me, and at her, I finally snapped. One of us threw the box on the floor, I have no idea what happened to it after that. I shoved her, called her crazy, told her not to touch me or I’d kill her, said she was a bitch, that she ruined my life, that she was a terrible mother and that I should never have trusted her to be normal for even a second and I called her a psychopath. She told her to get off her property and I (stupidly) reminded her that she was my ride home.

What followed was the most horrible, dangerous, gut-churning car ride of my life, and I have been driven down the freeway by my screaming mother on more occasions than I can count. I alternated between shouting at her and apologizing to my grandmother for making a scene. Oh I forgot to mention, my grandma got in the car with us for some totally insane reason. I think at first it was to make sure we didn’t kill each other, but she regretted her decision pretty much immediately because she was holding onto my hand so hard my fingers lost feeling in them.

After what felt like the most interminable 8 miles of my life, we arrived at my house. I jumped out of the car almost while it was still moving, shouted at my grandmother that I love her, at my mother that she’s a crazy bitch and immediately broke down crying as soon as the van was out of visual range. I can’t remember if I even went inside the house, but I couldn’t stay still and I decided to walk a mile to Denny’s to buy a pie for Kate’s family (who I lived with) to thank them for not being crazy or violent or mean. On the walk back it started raining. I don’t even think we ate that pie. Also, the pie incident might have been on Thanksgiving. I don’t really remember, but I said there was rain yesterday, so I wanted to give it to you.

Here’s a picture of me looking pretty boob-tacular as a reward for you if you got through that whole thing. It’s kind of one of the defining moments of my young-adulthood, and I never wrote it down before.

UPDATE: Out of curiosity, I went and dug out my journal from that time to see if I wrote anything in it (there’s nothing on the blog, I already checked). It’s basically accurate to my memory, except I forgot that I was on the phone with a friend as the situation escalated, which is probably one of the reasons I was able to stay so calm for so long. I had moral support. Also, the thing that set me off wasn’t her pushing me onto the lawn, it was her chasing me around, then hitting me after she caught me, and I wasn’t going to go down like that. The best part of this journal entry is the last sentence. After doing a run down of what my part was in the argument (very mature of me, if I do say so myself), I actually wrote “All in all, in the end it was an allright [sic] Christmas.”

The thing I’m “pleased with myself” about is waiting until the last possible second to smack her in her violent, psycho head. Or at least to try, I don’t think I ever connected. She’s really fast.

On the one hand, my childish optimism in the face of what would come to be the worst Christmas of my LIFE is inspiring at a time when I think my biggest problem is that new tires are expensive. On the other hand, wow were my standards low.

Don’t let people like my mother continue to have any excuse for breeding. Please, donate to Planned Parenthood and give the gift of never having to get smacked like a bitch on your front lawn on Christmas to as many grasping souls as you possibly can.

Me: Is that offensive?
Ben: [not looking] Yes.
Me: Come on, read it.
Ben: Maybe. You’re basically implying that you would have been better off as an aborted fetus.
Me: What if I would have been? We don’t know.
Ben: Well, you wouldn’t get to fuck me.
Me: True. OK, it was worth it.

So don’t donate after all?

Actually, do whatever you want.

This post needs to be over. I’m still sick as hell and I’ve been writing this motherfucker for, like, 20 years. I only have myself to blame.

August 31, 2012

Pepper’s Log, Stardate Yesterday

11:00 p.m. Marina shows up and we hang out for a little bit. Then I get to go on a WALK! to her car, which is cool.

11:30 p.m. Hang out in a nursing home parking lot, guard the car.

11:45 p.m. Hang out in a Sheriff’s station parking lot, also guard the car.

12:00 a.m. Attempt to intimidate the Jack in the Box teller into giving me delicious burgers. Does not work. Banished to back seat.

12:15 to 1:00 a.m. Driving. Kinda boring, Marina doesn’t like it when I step on the window thing and make it go down, so now the windows are locked. Sleep

1:15 a.m. WALK! Marina and Ben quietly cheer when I pee, I find this more than a little confusing.

1:30 a.m. Bath. Do not appreciate. Was gifted a squeaky duck as a peace offering. Gladly accept.

1:45 a.m. Cat makes scared cat sounds at me, but when I leave the room she follows, still making scared cat sound. Feel it’s best to ignore her. May not be stable.

2:00 a.m. Time for bed. More than a little excited to be allowed on a bed. Was encouraged to deescalate.

6:30 a.m. Alarm goes off, must ensure that my hosts have heard it. They seem ungrateful.

6:45 a.m. WALK! Nothing more to report, except that the same quiet cheering happens for poos as for pees. Still more than a little confused by it.

8:00 a.m. The worst has happened. I have been left here to die in this house. I’ve scratched some of the paint off the door, nothing more to do for it but have a final nap with squeaky duck before the darkness sets in. They left me a nice soft bed. Presumably it is for me to deposit my corpse into.

2:00 p.m. The best has happened! Marina came home! I was laying in my bed with squeaky duck, breathing my last, and then I was saved! Jumped over the couch as an expression of joy.

2:15 p.m. WALK!

2:15 to 3:45 p.m. Extremely boring car ride. Slept

4:00 p.m. I’m back at home! Do appropriate twisty circly dance.

4:30 p.m. Back in the car.

5:00 p.m. Hey it’s Frana! So excited, attempt to protect her from lady in wheelchair. Hurt lady’s feelings. Hurt feelings likely compounded by Marina telling the lady that “she never does this,” ensuring lady thinks I hate her specifically. Not personal, just unnerved by people with wheels instead of legs. May be a plot to harm Frana, can’t chance it.

6:00 p.m. Back home and Suzie’s here. She lets me lick her on the mouth and calls me Pepperoni. Other stuff happens, but it’s mostly boring.*

7:15 to 8:00 p.m. Car ride. Slept some more.

9:00 to 10:00 Trip to Petco, Target, and In and Out. Make it well known that I do not trust the largeness and whiteness of this Target. Whine until Ben parks the car facing away from it, but maintain that I will stare out the one window that I can see it from as long as we’re in the parking lot. This foul beast shall not best me!

10:30 p.m. WALK!

11:00 p.m. Back at Marina and Ben’s, do wiggly jumpy dance and immediately nap on the office floor. It was a hard day for all of us.

*If you’re wondering if this is me telling you, in the guise of a blog written by the dog that I saw and talked with my estranged mother for the first time in 5 years, the answer is yes. Because I am a grown up and I can handle real life… just as long as that life can be narrated by a rat terrier. I promise a more mature attempt to address this on Monday, but it’s late and we’re all worn out.

August 29, 2012

Doesn’t Ben Find You Disgusting?

One time, I was having coffee with my beloved grandma, and she ask “Doesn’t Ben find you disgusting, with all that fat on you?” One of the things I love about my grandmother is how honest she is, even when it’s really inconvenient. My favorite example of this is when she asked loudly “DOES THAT MAN KNOW HIS SHIRT LOOKS LIKE A DRESS?” while pointing to an obvious gang member in an over-sized sports jersey. I personally had a great time with that one because his shirt totally did look like a dress, and probably the only person that could have said something like that to his face and not get beaten to a pulp is my frail looking grandma. Being with her is like hanging out with a drunk drag queen, except all the time. And nice restaurants still let us in.

Anyway, terrible rudeness aside, asking if my boyfriend, who is as fat as I am, finds me disgusting is kind of hilarious (what if the answer was yes?!) but also kind of ridiculously indicative of the thought process I was raised with. Grandma is anorexic, so to expect her to have a holistic, body love attitude towards fat – a substance that positively horrifies her – would be ludicrous. But the fact that, having made the assumption that everyone else feels the same way about fattness that she does, she expresses more concern for my boyfriend than me (her own flesh and blood!) at having to deal with a fat sex partner is silly in the extreme. I can’t really tell if she’s asking me this because I’m a girl, or because I’m in her family. There is sort of a general assumption amongst us that anybody who wants to be with any of us is marrying down, and that we should be so lucky. So it’s not entirely unrealistic to think that she would ask me this question no matter what my gender, or what the gender of my partner was. Although I don’t discount the internalized misogyny inherent in the assumption that a woman has a responsibility to be physically attractive to her partner that a man does not have.

At the time of this coffee date, I had only recently stopped talking to my mother, but it hadn’t been so very recently that anybody still believed I was just fucking around. As a result, everybody was more than a little gun shy with me (who knows who she’ll cut off next!) So I knew that this would make the proper impact on someone as elderly and as tetchy as my grandma. I said very loudly “No, my boyfriend does not find my fat disgusting. I was fat when he met me and I have remained fat since then. I am a fat person, and if you don’t like having a fat granddaughter, you don’t have to. I will leave you here in this coffee shop and we will never speak again.”

After a couple of moments of everybody in the coffee shop out and out staring at the both of us, she leaned back and shrugged. “I was just asking.”

And it’s not like this little piece of drama came out of the complete blue. My entire life, she’d been hounding me for being too fat, and around that time, it had kicked it into high gear. Drastic action had to be taken if we were ever going to talk about anything other than my fat. And it totally worked. Oh, she still bitches about every other person with even an inch of extra meat on them, but she doesn’t bitch at me and that’s all I care about.

Feel free to use this tactic with anybody that has shitty things to say. The way I see it, I’m a complete package. If there’s something you don’t like about me, you better love it or leave it, because I’m the only person who decides what changes I make, and I am done taking suggestions.

August 28, 2012

The Time a Tow Truck Driver Gave Me the Cure for the Common Cold

So when I was in college, I worked about 30 to 50 hours a week at 2 jobs and usually had a side hustle selling things. In general, they were things I had lovingly handmade, but I also sold my plasma to a local lab to make Hepatitis B vaccine. As you might imagine, I ran myself ragged, and was generally at least slightly infirm.

One of the multiple times my car broke down, my tow truck driver was a little Eastern European man. Seeing me in my pathetically snotty state, he told me “Get garlic bulb, roast in oven very short time with olive oil and salt. Eat whole thing. Go to bed. You be fine in the morning.” Best advice a tow truck driver’s ever given me. 2nd best was when the alternator was going out in my old truck, the driver told me to tap it with a stick when it wouldn’t behave. Worked like a charm.

Anyway, that night, after we dropped my car off at the mechanic, I had Ben swing by the grocery and pick up some garlic. I did exactly what the mechanic said (except I ruined the first bulb because, I totally can’t cook) and it worked! Over the years, I’ve modified the recipe, but the principal’s still the same: 1. Introduce as large and as raw a quantity of garlic into your system that you can possible stand. 2. Prepare to feel better. Now days I usually just crush raw garlic into some butter and put it over pasta, or toast. Pasta if Ben is cooking, toast if I am. I have to say the toast medium is not for the faint of tongue. It can get really burney, especially if you follow the maxim of more is better.

This works best if you do it in the first day or so of being sick, right when your throat starts to get scratchy and your energy levels drop, but it will still perk you up if you’re already well into a cold. In my experience, over the counter cold medicines only help abate symptoms so a person can work or sleep through the worst of it. This garlic thing actually makes me feel better every time. So, while I did call this a cure in the title, it only gets rid of the cold if I get to it in time, but it does more than any other remedy I’ve ever heard of to help me feel better, no matter when I do it.

This blog goes out to all the tow truck drivers. You guys always see people on their worst day, and yet, you stay helpful, sometimes even cheerful. Thank you for all the time I have sat in your trucks and cried while you patiently drove me to the mechanic like I wasn’t having a conniption.

July 18, 2012

Poetry I Wrote in High School

It’s almost midnight, Ben and I are leaving for vacation on Thursday morning, so I’ve been running around insisting that we do all the cleaning and organizing that we’ve been avoiding since he started working on this project he’s been on since March.

On the one hand it’s pretty ridiculous, I’m worried our cat sitter will come in the apartment and realize we’re exactly what we are: filthy people. On the other hand, there’s a level of general cleanliness that no person should be subjected to anything less than, and I think that’s about 3 hours of work away from where we currently are.

As an example of our situation, I literally just reached down into a small pile of clutter next to my computer and pulled out a poetry journal covering the years 2001 to 2005. It wasn’t what I was looking for, but it’ll have to do because I need content and this is about it as far as anything original goes.

Me: Oh these are terrible.
Ben: What are they?
Me: Poems from ~~freshman~~ sophomore year of high school.
Ben: Oh God, why would you read that?
Me: I need content!

Ben said that if I was going to write down our conversations, I should include this IM gem from earlier in the day. For background, I’m talking about how my sour mood this morning might be traced to the fact that I’ve been tending to this tomato plant for months now, it’s the first vegetable I’ve ever successfully grown as an adult. It finally had a ripe tomato that I picked and ate today, and the first tomato of the ever tasted pithy and it made me extremely depressed.

Marina: Or the fact that the 1st tomato tasted like ass
Well, even assey a home grown tomato tastes better than a store tomato

Ben: that is sad.
i am discovering that i didn’t do as good a job brushing my teeth last night as i would have liked

Marina: Infinite saddness

All of these are just so painfully terrible I think it would be considered assault to reprint any one of them in their entirety, so here are a couple of choice lines from my favorites.

Wonder what it’s like after
When you’re not my friend and I won’t see you
And you won’t like mee [sic]

I could have been a teenage Gotya

Take your stupid vicodin
Be a hypocrite
Scream at me and take my Pez
And make me feel like shit

I have noooo idea who that might be about. I just like the idea of 15 year old me getting in a fight with my drug addict mother over Pez (of all things!) and stomping off to go write in my poetry journal. That’ll show her!

Stories are riches when you think like I do

Take note kids. I just pulled a 7 year old journal out of a pile of trash and I’m using it as content for a blog only 40 people read. This is what that kind of thinking gets you. This is the kind of future you’ll be having when you devalue actual riches.

I’m gonna own nice cars someday
But you’ll never see in em

Behold the glory of my 2009 Honda Fit Sport! Technically, I don’t actually own this car. I still owe $5,000. Because adulthood hooray.

I will come out on top
I will live through
The tears you’ve drawn

To kick you in the head
Someday and laugh

I’m noticing a theme: Success as hate-motivated revenge. Hatecess.

Sex with you could be great
If you weren’t so ugly
And passive

Yeah, that’s what it says. I don’t even know.

Someday all the cute boys will be younger than us

I’m a fucking psychic.

Seriously, Tyler Posey how were you born in 1991? Also, how to you look so uncannily like my friend Paul from high school? These things make it difficult for me to properly lust after you. So work on that.

I’m only halfway through the book, but it’s almost 1 am, and tomorrow is the day I have to take care of all the last minute shit I haven’t done yet (like everything.) So I need my beauty sleep, such as it is. I hope you enjoyed my hot teenage mess. What do you say, do you want to see the 2nd half? I’ll probably do it anyway, but it’s nice to know I have your consent.