Awkwardly Social

My new office is conveniently located down the hall from one of my grad school friends and his partner (business, not life, not that there’s anything wrong with life, just they’re hetero…. oh, how they’re hetero) and we lunch on occasion.  The new office building is kind of rad because we get a different lunch truck every day, and I don’t know if this is a nation-wide trend, but in LA, the food truck situation is bananas.  Now, some days this is good, because there will be a fantastic truck with tasty food, and other days we are stuck with the “French fry truck.”  Which is just that.  A truck that serves French fries.  With toppings.  No protein.  While I’m not turning my nose up at French fries per se, I am turning my nose up at the idea of eating only French fries for lunch.

Today was the No Tomatoes truck, which is a dumb name for an Indian food truck, but whatever I love me some Indian food.  So Waller and I got our lunches and went back to his office to lunch with Mike.  Mike unpacked his salad and we all marveled at his salad making prowess.  There was steamed asparagus (double points because asparagus is actually in season right now!) and grilled chicken, (that he grilled!  himself!) tomatoes, and peppers and it was a real “Look at this Fucking Salad” moment.

Waller proceeded to mock me and tell me to take a picture of the “fucking salad” for my blog.  And I proceeded to tell him that no one wanted me to post a picture of a fucking salad on my blog.  Especially since this blog is all about my ‘feelings’ and my period (according to Waller) and I had no way to relate a picture of a fucking salad to either of those things.

Then Mike pulled out his fucking salad dressing and that’s when I could have somehow tied in this dumb blog and my feelings because the fucking salad dressing was some kind of ridiculously named Trader Joe’s brand - Goddess Dressing.  Whatever the fuck that is.  I mean really.  If a salad dressing has 120 calories and 12 grams of fat per serving, I’m not prepared to associate it with a higher being.  It better taste good and be calorie and fat free if I’m higher powering that shit.

Mike ate his fucking salad, and Waller and I ate our delicious Indian wrap thingies (with NO TOMATOES!) and we talked about their dumb idea* that will probably make a jillion youtube dollars for them.  Or if nothing else make them a hundredaire.  And in the end, I wish I had a dumb picture of that fucking salad so I could end this post with it.  But I don’t.

I do imagine that Mike will one day repeat his culinary feat.  And you can bet I will not be so stupid as to pass up taking a picture of it.

*Their idea is not actually dumb, it is just not appealing to me.  And they know this, and yet, they torture me every time I eat lunch with them by telling me their story ideas. And even though I try to be nice, they see through me, and this is why I like them.  Also, one time they made me watch an episode of Archer, which they were sure I was going to love.  And I did not.  And we talk a lot about that these days too.  Mostly, my lunches with them consist of me being a horrible guest in their office.  I cannot believe they invite me back.

I spent all day Saturday shopping and prepping for the first party I’ve had since Christmas and New Year’s Eve 2009.

I told everyone to be there at 7ish.  So when no one had arrived by 7:45, I was an anxiety ball that could not drink booze.  Instead, I practiced singing karaoke.  It was a cross between embarrassing and hilarious to sing karaoke alone in an empty room.

People finally started to arrive and I fed them and made them drink. (I made City Hall Macaroni and Cheese from this cookbook and it was quite possibly the biggest hit of something I’ve made, ever.) And then I forced everyone to do duets with me.  Waller basically made me sing the whole Blink 182 catalog.  Which was hilarious, and hard.  Allie and I sang something that was clearly very funny.

The sangria ran out, so I improvised with a spare bottle of red and some blood orange soda, and hunkered down next to the cheese plate.  YUM.

I had to work the next day (and so did a few of my guests) so we wrapped everything up around midnight, Seth and I cleaned everything up, and poor exhausted Lula passed out in the kitchen.  She didn’t even hear us go to bed.  I got her up and told her to go to bed, but she went back into the kitchen to sleep there. I finally heard her go to her room a few minutes later, but I’ve never seen her that exhausted.

I’m so glad I did it, you guys.

I decided for my birthday I’d have people over to the house, but since I’m currently working on a wedding planning show, and I have weddings on the brain, I thought it would be nice to also celebrate my wedding that happened in September without much ado.  And then I realized we never had a housewarming party, so I thought I’d throw that in too.

I’m still trying to draft the awkwardly social e-mail that tells everyone to come to my house to sing karaoke, eat red velvet cake and drink sangria, and don’t judge me for not being able to plan a party.  Because I’m kind of scared no one will show up.  Or is it that I’m scared that they will show up?  I’m not sure yet.

I’ll have had my first round of IUI, so I won’t be drinking my own sangria (sad face) but I will be eating that red velvet cake.  And turning 35.   I guess what I’m saying is, I’ll be feeling fragile.  And not drunk.  And there’s that issue of the toad.  People haven’t really seen the toad.  I mean, I will be wearing clothes that sort of disguise the toad, but the toad is still there.  I love the toad, but will everyone else.

Also, I don’t understand how a karaoke machine works.  I’m guessing there is some sort of magic that makes the song appear on the tv?  Also, I need to learn how to make cake pops before then.  And also, take a class in decorating for a wedding/house warming/birthday party.

I’ll just be over here having a nervous breakdown party.  Care to join me?

I want to say hi to all the readers coming from Kristin, my dear friend, someone who has always inspired me to be more honest and say what I’m really feeling.  I am fortunate to have met someone like her, no matter how hard I tried to sabotage our meeting each other.  I used to be really scared to meet new people.  Now, I’m just older, and don’t really worry as much about what people think of me, also, I take xanax.  It’s amazing what modern pharmaceuticals and a couple of years of black out drinking can do for a person.  So, welcome!   

This weekend I spent Saturday in bed, when I told my friend that he said, “Oh!” as only an openly gay man can, and I shook my head and said, “No, not that way.”  And he said, “Oh….”  And we laughed.  I’m trying to get pregnant, but not like all day long.  Mostly this weekend I was trying to fight the plague that a certain group of story producers leaked into our shared bullpen. (Their show rhymes with rodrect prungay, they are the sickest! I think because they work harder than we do, their show is 3 times longer than ours, and they have 3 times the staff…)  Still no baby, but a full fledged cold has been incubated.  Yay, me?

I just read an excellent post by Cecily about personal blogging and how we oversharers, people who talk about their addictions, their fuck ups, their lady parts, are rare in the current “blog market.”  New bloggers fiercely protect their identity and their brand because they want large corporations to pay them cash money to write about a small segment of their lives.  Cool.  Just, not for me.

I’ve never been a brand.  I’ve never advertised on this page.  The only money I’ve made on this blog is on this post about how much I love my insurance company.  I wrote the post, it showed up in my poor insurance company’s new media guy’s google alert 5 years later, and they offered to pay me to include a link to their page.  That’s about how much effort I’m willing to put into making money on my blog.  I admire writers who are able to turn their blogs into money making ventures, but that’s just not ever what this place was for.  I was inspired by Pamie, and then I found a small group of people who were in the same place in their lives writing about their experiences and I connected with them and laughed and tried to make them laugh.

The best part about writing here is that I’ve been writing about my life for six years.  Not the weird rambling repetitive shit I write in my paper journal about my idiotic obsession with success, how I wish certain people were dead because I hate their guts, and why I am so ever loving sad and nervous all of the time. The stuff I write here, while it might not appear so to the casual reader, is edited, refined and written for a reason other than to complain.  I can sift through my own archives and figure out where I was 5 years ago.  (Oh god, I just did that, wow, it’s been a long 5 years… different boyfriend, different house, different Tamara.)

Now, six years later, I write for a living.  I work in reality tv partly because I know there are smart people out there who will see the ridiculous moments we’re putting in there for their pleasure.  I think I also work in reality because of this page, writing here has helped me see how the reality of a situation can be made funnier.  How the reality of a situation can be improved with a wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

This Robitussin isn’t going to take itself, so I best get on that.  I hope it doesn’t kill the yet to be conceived baby…

1. To the seaweed sample lady at Wholefoods: when I said I love seaweed, but didn’t want to try any right then? And then you pressed and I had to tell you that, no really, I’m not eating seaweed right now and then, you stood there and sort of stared at me, while I looked at prepared salads that was you making things awkward, not me. I just wanted you to know that because it gave me what a friend of mine likes to call “retarded tingles.” Getting those kind of tingles and not giving them, makes me very happy. So, I guess, thanks?2. There’s something so very special about having a life partner who knows you so well that he gets a key made for you with your favorite baseball team logo plastered on it and he calls it your “yankey.”3. I cannot help but look at wedding dress options even though I know that this means I’m part of the hetero- capitalist machine. I refuse to wear a white dress to the courthouse, so I’ve promised myself I will wear something in my closet.4. Inspired by Bitter Sweetly, I wrote down some goals for myself this week. So far I’ve actually been trying to achieve them. Who knew I could so easily manipulate myself?5. I am really glad Prop 8 was overturned, because I really want to be invited to my friend’s gay wedding. It’s going to be so fantastic.

When you check in at the House Ear Clinic, there is a sign that basically says, “Look, we know you’re here because you’re having some ear problems, let us know if you need us to come tap you on the shoulder when we call your name, because you very well might be too deaf to hear the lady call you.”  I felt good that I was at least not so deaf that I couldn’t hear the lady call my name.

First, I had to get a hearing test.  It was hard, y’all.  I am terrible at the Opthamologists office, when they’re like 1 or 2, this or that, and in this one, it’s not a multiple choice.  It’s just, can you hear this?  We don’t tell you when to expect it, do you hear it?  Anything? How about now?  What about this?  Can you repeat this word?  (What word?)  And on and on.

She lead me back to the waiting room and I told Seth I was completely fucked that I had to repeat words and I couldn’t fucking HEAR them.  And there were no 2nd chances!

We got called to the front of the waiting room in a group of 5 people, and I thought, what the hell is this?  Group hearing therapy?  But she separated us off and we waited in a freezing cold room.  Doctors like things to be cold.  I guess it’s better than sitting in a room and sweating.

When Dr. Goddard (the cutest doctor I’ve had in a long time.  Maybe ever.  Like farm boy, central casting, cute doctor cute) came in he told us he works with Dr. Friedman (the doctor I’d been referred to) and that he was going to look in my ear and he did.  And he said, “Oh, there it is, it’s not that bad.”  Which is way better than what my other ENT did, which was go, “WOAH.  THAT’S A BIG ONE!”  He talked to me about my ear and Seth made him blush when he did some tests by touching my face, Seth bellowed out, “Don’t you touch her!”  He giggled.

He told me that because of the location of the hole in my ear drum that surgery is recommended.  The reason is, skin can grow into my ear canal and fuck things up, like cause my face to go paralyzed.  And ever since this girl in high school had Bells Palsy, I’ve been afraid of facial droopy paralysis situations.  Then Seth asked him, “What would you do?”  And he said, “If you were my sister, I’d tell you to have the surgery.”  And I was like, I can be your sister…. I can be whoever you want me to be. (But I only said that in my head.)

Then, he pulled out my hearing test.  And he said, all dramatically, “So, let’s talk about your hearing.”  And I was thinking, oh here it comes, I’m gonna get fitted for hearing aids today.  He looked very serious, and he said, “In your right ear [the good one] you have above average hearing.”  And he showed me the chart, and I was like, “Are you saying, I’m like a superhuman in my right ear?  Like I have an A++ in that ear?”  And he smiled and said, “Yes.  Your hearing is excellent in that ear, and that is why you are perceiving the difference in your left ear, which is also still in the average range, just slightly lower than the right.”  Basically, I’m not only not deaf, I have one bionic ear and one average human ear.  Woo!  (I’ve been bragging about this all day.)

So we consulted with the surgeon, Dr. Friedman, and he used a fancy magnifying and projecting ear looking thingy and I got to see it on a TV screen.  The ear is kind of cruddy looking inside there.  It’s gross, and now I can’t even use q-tips.  I was contemplating how one cleans one’s cruddy dirty looking holey ear when Dr. F took a phone call wherein he had reason to name drop his brother.  When he got off the phone, Seth said, “You’re Robby’s brother?  I knew him when he was at Warner’s.”  And Dr. Friedman said, “Yeah, I want his life.”  And I was like, fuck that!  You’re a damned surgeon, he’s just the head of a billion dollar studio.  His parents must be so proud.

So, I’m waiting to hear (pun intended) when I’m going to have this surgery.  And when I’m going to get married.  Because there’s a whole health insurance situation that’s going to need to be squared away.  Who’s got their marrying license?

A while ago a few of my friends ganged up on a single friend of ours, signed her up for all of the dating services, and began to troll the internet for eligible bachelors.  I took my turn skimming through photos of single Jewish men in the Los Angeles area and clicked on a picture of a writer I thought my friend would like.  Once the photo became more than a thumbnail, I shrieked, “He’s MARRIED!”  Everyone turned and looked at me, all rushing around the computer to see the asshole who was trolling for single women while his wife blissfully believed he was in love, and if not, at the very least faithful.

“Or, he was, the last time I saw him!”

“How long ago was that?”

“Um… 5 years ago?”

The questioner laughed and said, “I was happily married five years ago and now I’m waiting for my divorce papers to arrive.”

I trolled through his profile, trying to figure out if he had really divorced the woman or if he was a fraud, a faker, a J-date troller.  Or, if he was doing it for research.  He was, in fact, a writer.  None of the other tidbits made sense though, he used to have pitbulls not Shelties.  He used to live in the farthest reaches of the farthest reaches of the outskirts of Los Angeles, not Sherman Oaks, for godsakes.   Maybe he was divorced.  I told my friend who was manning the J-Date profile to ask him out for our friend.  I wanted to know more.  I wanted to spy on him through my friend.

I was refused.

My friends said if I knew him so well, I should just e-mail him.  “Well,” I responded, “the last time I did that he never returned my e-mail, the asshole, and maybe now I know why!  Maybe because he was going through a horrible divorce and didn’t want me to know.”

I slunk off to my desk and began stalking him on facebook to no avail.  Then, I began stalking his wife.  Her profile wasn’t private.  She listed herself as being MARRIED.

What.  The. Fuck?

I looked at my waiting for divorce papers friend and asked him how long it took him to change his status.  He shrugged.  I got the feeling he’d still have it listed as married if he had a choice.

When Louie broke up with me he almost immediately changed his status on facebook to single, which, since we were facebook linked, sent ice through my veins.  My blood rushed to my face, and I was horrified.  He told the world and I was notified by facebook that my status needed to be fixed.  They couldn’t have me running around saying I was dating someone, when in fact, I WASN’T.

Seth doesn’t use facebook.  I will never have to change my relationship status based on his simple button click.  I hope he never leaves me, but if he does, at least facebook won’t know about it.

I wonder what’s really going on with the formerly loving couple with four pitbulls.  Is he merely trolling the dating sites without his wife’s knowledge for a thrill, is he doing it for a script, is he divorced, does she not want to change her status just yet to avoid questions from distant acquaintances?  It’s all so intriguing to me, and yet, I can’t bring myself to write the e-mail saying, “I saw you on J-Date, does your wife know?”

We have a gigantic apartment/duplex/house thingy. We are required (it says so on our lease) to cover 60% of the floors with rugs.  The economic state of affairs in our checkbooks was such that we could not afford to do this immediately, so when our landlords offered to leave their big (and kind of ugly) rug in the dining room, we were like, “SURE AWESOME GREAT!  ONLY $20,000 more to go in order to cover 55% more of the floor!”  So, anyway, there is a borrowed rug in the dining room.  Before we put the dog door in, Lula took great offense to this rug and showed us her disdain for its pastel flowers by adding her own special something to it.  She marked that rug to distraction.  It was so owned by her.  So owned that we rented a steam cleaner, cleaned it and rolled it up because we didn’t want our landlords to hate us for having a pissing dog who pees on their rug and their rug only.

We got the dog door installed and Lula went back to peeing outside where she belonged and last week we unrolled the rug and gave it another dose of Natural Miracle Pee Smell Remover That Costs a Billion Dollars and all was right in the world.  Until she peed on the rug yesterday.  I have a feeling it was a combination of me going back to work and Seth talking loudly about something that freaked her out and she felt the need to let us know things were not right in the world and also she hates that stupid rug.

It was with all of this rug peeing and dog sensitivity in mind that late last night I got up to investigate Lula’s mysterious wanderings about the house.  I didn’t have my contacts in and my glasses were safely on the nightstand and I had no slippers on my feet.  I heard Lula outside beside the house and didn’t want to interupt her if she was peeing because who knew if she would then come in and pee on the rug again.  So I hovered by the back door trying to see what she was doing, when I heard her crunching on something.  I stage whispered her over and she slunk towards me trying to hork down whatever thing she had found in the tiny dirt alley beside the house that I automatically assumed was some kind of neighbor placed chicken bone meant to sabotage my dog.  (I am super paranoid that everyone is out to get me.)   I grabbed her mouth and pulled out a soggy piece of balled up paper that looked kind of like it was covered in dog vomit.  I shooed her into the house, grabbed the flashlight and touched the paper again and realized it was a piece of toilet paper covered in shit.  That I had now touched twice.  I flased the light across the alley and saw that it was strewn with wet toilet paper and smelled like sewage.  Awesome!  My dog was eating raw sewage in the middle of the night and I was grabbing it out of her mouth!  I’ll never eat with these hands again!

I don’t know much about houses with sewer systems because I grew up in a house that had a septic tank, but I had NO IDEA that sewage could just come out of an overflow pipe and into your yard.  I did not know that could happen.  Why is that allowed to happen? Why do they have some kind of sewer scenario that allows raw sewage to flow into the yard, but also why are they letting us use a rug that my dog likes to pee on and that made me paranoid enough to get up in the middle of the night and pull raw sewage out of my dog’s mouth?

Not only do I want to avoid all social contact with my upstairs neighbor for normal social anxiety reasons, but also because I probably touched their poop.  I pulled their poop out of Lula’s mouth.  Lula ate my landlord’s poop.  I might have to move.  And get rid of my dog.

And there were margaritas.

(And I wrote this weeks ago and never published it, I guess my lunchtime margaritas made me hit save instead of publish?  So very unlike Drunk Tamara…)

I guess it shouldn’t bother me that the person who was so Catholic that he refused to have sex with me (unless it was anal) rejected my friend request on Facebook, but right now I’m kind of irritated.  I mean, come on!  We were actually really close friends in high school.  In college (when he was still a virgin), I tried to get him to do it with me and he refused, and then tried to do it up the butt.  Catholics are fucked up.

Then 5 years later, his wife thought I was hitting on him at our ten year reunion…  Which is kind of funny because I barely spoke to him!  No really.  I know those of you who know me in real life are laughing at me right now, and “the lady doth protest too much”ing me, but I’m serious!  She gave me the evil eye when I gave him a hug (because I hadn’t seen him in several years) and I sort of got drunk and forgot he was there for the rest of the night.  It wasn’t until much later that he told me he couldn’t talk to me anymore because his wife, I think the exact words were, “didn’t approve of our friendship,” which, by the way, at that point, was pretty much non-existent.   I lived in Los Angeles.  I would call him on his birthday.  That was the extent of our contact.

After the phone call where he told me he couldn’t talk to me anymore, he called me from a hotel room in Denver, because he didn’t want his wife to know.

Oh shit, I just told my office that he denied my friend request, so now everyone here is friending him.

hee!

When we were looking for a place to live, we looked at a lot of places, we went through a couple realtors, and we were probably a huge pain in the ass.  (snort, probably…)  The final weeks of our search brought us to the Hancock park area in the duplex region.  The prettiest place had the awkward appeal of having the owners living right above us.  I was not keen on having the social anxiety of a landlord above me at all times, judging me.  So, even though we loved the actual place, and the price, we kept looking.  The next duplex we saw was smaller and not as awesome and not conveniently located to Campanile (my favorite restaurant in Los Angeles next to the Polo Lounge, but I’m not about to move to Beverly Hills), and I started to realize the owner operated duplex was going to be the best place we would see.  So we called our realtor and she told us that the owners were in the final stages of negotiations with another family.

Let me pause just a second to tell you how not to raise your children.  Don’t tell them that the only acceptable grade is an A.  Don’t tell them that a B might as well be a failing grade.  You will have children that grow up crazy.  Like me.  Who believe they must always win, no matter what the game is.  Even if the game is beating a perfectly nice family out of a fine duplex wherein the owners live upstairs.

So, I flipped out while Seth was calmly talking to our (completely batshit crazy, but totally driven) realtor.  I’m not exactly proud of this, but working in an industry that doesn’t exactly frown on flip outs (in fact it tends to reward them…) I might have yelled some things.  Loudly.  Like, “What the fuck is she doing?  This is fucking ridiculous! She royally FUCKED us!”  It was very “Tamara of 2002.”  Anywhoo…  Like I said, not proud, but I was now in some kind of insane competition mode with someone I had never met and saw my future laid out in weekends of aimless apartment hunting all over Los Angeles and I just couldn’t take it.  Our realtor hung up and I started to cry.  Seth told me that our realtor said we should just go over there and talk to the owners.  I was in no mood to sweet talk, but Seth, being smart and realty savvy, said we were going.

So we went.  And we had a delightful conversation with our soon to be landlords.  They basically told us they wanted us and that the place was ours if our realtor didn’t fuck up the next three steps.  Which at this point, in my mind, was questionable.  But she did it!  And we moved in!  And I still cannot believe how much closet space we have, how our garage isn’t falling down, and that Seth is still dragging around motorcycle parts for his vintage Ducati that he never rides.

The day we moved in, our lovely landlady came down and told us that their 20-ish year old son had just moved home and that we shouldn’t be surprised if we saw him lurking around the back yard being weird.  She didn’t say that last part, but when she introduced him to me, and I formed my initial impression of him, it was that he was a weird lurker.  I guess because he has bad posture?  Or because he was wearing gym shorts?

Anyway, cut to last week, I was walking out our back door when I heard a shril girlish squeal and a series of thumps and giggles that could only be described as “Girl Descending a Staircase on Her Ass.”  And a pack of Marlboro reds came tumbling into our part of the yard.  I picked up the cigarettes and as I called out, “Dude, are you ok?”  I heard him asking the same thing, “Are you ok?”  And I looked up and saw a 19-ish year old girl on her ass half way down the stairs, looking freshly fucked and very embarassed.  She giggled and pulled her skirt down as she stood up.  I handed the cigarettes to our landlord’s son and said, “Everyone survive that?”  The son said “yeah”, and lumbered down the stairs as I scurried to my car to avoid any other discussion of what I had just seen.

The upstairs is identical to to the downstairs, so I know those bedrooms are really close together, and I cannot imagine being a 20 year old dude bringing a girlfriend home to fuck while my parents watched TV next door.  But I do love how awkward this all is.  It makes me so uncomfortable, which makes me so happy, because, I am nothing if not inspired by awkwardly social situations.