Awkwardly Social

The rain started this morning as a bit of a drizzle, pleasantly plinking away at our trashcans.  Then it became a downpour, pounding so hard that our DirecTV went out.  Our DirecTV never goes out.

We went to peek out the front window and my car was underwater up to halfway up the hubcaps.  Two minutes later the water had reached the door.  Seth went out to try and move it.

He had to crawl in through the trunk.  He said the bottom was completely filled.  Like a fish tank.  And of course it wouldn’t start.

He scraped the leaves out of the sewer grate (while he was knee deep in water) and now the street has returned to near normal.

Who knows if my car ever will.

I don’t have a lot that I can talk about right now.  Partly because once you start working in TV, you get really paranoid.  It’s basically a law that you stop trusting people once you start having your name appear on the small screen.  I would venture to guess it’s the same for people whose names appear on the big screen, but I haven’t had my name up there so I can only give anecdotal evidence to that fact.  Trust no one is pretty much everyone’s motto here in LA.  It’s a little sad, but whatever.  I don’t trust you people, so what do I care?

Last week I had a pitch at real live network (the network that I think is responsible for creating the format…) for a reality show that I produced with Seth and a partner.  It went pretty swimmingly, but now we wait and refine our pitch and hope that other networks will also want to see our little docu-soap.

I also had my 4th IUI.  It was kind of bizarre to be sitting in the waiting room with the show I’m currently working on playing on the television.  No joke, that happened.

Then I managed to pick a big fight with Seth about his son being in town soon.  I guess my stress about the situation is a very sharing kind of stress in that I want everyone to know how stressed I am, and hope that they’ll be just as stressed as I am.  It didn’t get unusually ugly, but it did involve tears.  Me once again claiming I’m the outsider and I don’t want to be on the inside.  Wah…  Girl who cried wolf usual bullshit.  For those of you who are in the process of falling in love with people who have children from a previous relationship, I feel for you.  Especially if they are young.  I am lucky in that they aren’t young, so they don’t have to live with us.  THANK GOD.

I’ve been working so late I haven’t been watching many baseball games.  Last year at around this time I was getting home around 7, so I could turn on a West Coast game and let it calm my anxiety.   This year at around 7pm every night I’m struggling to get a cut finished so I can get out the door by 9.  New year, new show, new anxieties.

So on Friday, I looked at the schedule and realized the Yankees were in town, and since I love the Yankees, I made it my mission to get tickets for Saturday or Sunday.  Since Sabathia was pitching yesterday, that was the game I really wanted to see, and a few hours later, tickets were purchased and plans were made.  After I working on Saturday, we hit the road to Angels Stadium.

I am a firm believer that once you sit field level, you never really want to go back.

We got there early enough to see the Yankees in batting practice.

And to have a random celebrity sighting.  Why was Snoop there?  No clue but it makes me really love living in LA.  You just never know when a rapper will just show up on the field.

I liked the stadium, and the rally monkey is kind of hilarious if a little annoying.  I would definitely go back to another game.  The Yankees are back in September….

I’m not sure where March went.  It seems like it wasn’t around for long.  I have been up to what seems like a lot in my head, but when I sit down to put it to paper, would just sound like a lot of back and forth to doctors’ offices.  Good news on the ear front, for those of you who have been anxiously waiting to hear (ha! a pun!) if my ear is healing or if I blew it (there’s another one!) by forgetting my doctor’s one order.  Let your breath out, because the ear is healing nicely.  On the inside anyway.  On the outside there is a scab issue and a vaseline issue that I don’t want to talk about.

Other than that, I have been doing some consuming - I’m consuming food and media and internet.

Downton Abbey - Watch it if you please.  If you loved the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice and you were a fan of Gosford Park, I have a feeling this will be up your alley.  If you only liked one of those two things, it will probably still be up your alley.  Just watch it.  It’s on Netflix streaming.

Tere’s Mexican Grill - Go there, if you live in LA and want a burrito that will fill you with much goodness.  Best burrito I’ve had in a long time.  I used to eat a lot of burritos, and then that made me sort of hefty, and I gave them up.  But now, I am eating what I want and suffering the cellulite and tight pants in exchange for the delicious joy of meats and cheeses wrapped in tortillas.  I think you should too.

Understand Rap - click it.  If you’re perplexed by the popular lyrical stylings of today.

Now, you go!  What should I consume?  I’m dying for a new (to me) TV show to feel passionately about, and nothing is doing it for me.  Maybe I should just go read a book.

We went to Berkeley last weekend for a little wedding getaway.  I spent two years thinking I went to a wedding on the Berkeley campus, so I was very confused when we drove by the campus and didn’t recognize it.  Which is when I remembered the wedding was at Stanford.  I get all of my California schools mixed up.

I do not do well with air travel.  I get to the airport too early.  I scrutinize the pilots and flight crew too harshly.  I pack too much.  I wear the wrong outfit.  I am a total mess. When I discovered xanax, my world changed.  Then a nice commenter told me xanax is not good for ladies trying to get pregnant, so I talked to my doctor and she told me it was fine if I was in the first two weeks of my cycle.  I bet you can guess which part of my cycle I was on when we went to Berkeley.  Not the first two weeks.  I think Seth contemplated divorce, and/or a seat assignment change.  After a complete post flight air train clusterfuck of meltdown proportions, wherein I wondered if Seth was trying to drive us off the Bay Bridge because he’d had enough of my whining, we arrived at our hotel.

We stayed at the Claremont, which is a Northern California dead ringer for the hotel in The Shining.  I wouldn’t say we went to bed mad, but uh, sometimes my moods are not easy to get over.  For the person on the receiving end of them.  My whole entire family is nodding their heads and saying a little prayer for Seth.

The next morning things were looking up as we ate an enormous breakfast at Rick and Ann’s, browsed books at a little bookshop, and walked around the town all amped up for the Colorado v. Cal game.  College towns are magical to me.  I think in my next life I’d like a little house, a tenured position at a small liberal arts college and many sordid trysts with students half my age.

I had the best deep tissue massage I’ve ever had at the spa.  But the spa itself… It was of another time.  Kind of janky and weirdly decorated, no dry sauna, a scary looking jacuzzi and some kind of waterfall shower that freaked me out.   But that massage made up for it.  If you are in Berkeley and want to drop a little dough and you don’t mind a weird doctor’s office type waiting room, see Michael at the Claremont.

We had dinner that night at Chez Panisse - Alice Waters is a genius.  We eat out a lot in Los Angeles, and Campanile is probably our favorite restaurant, but man, sorry Mark Peel, Ms. Waters has you beat.  I’ll be dreaming about that meal for a long time.

The next morning we had plans to get up early and play tennis.  The courts looked so pretty, and we actually woke up in time for our reservation, but we canceled our court because we decided to drive up the coast and see Stinson Beach and some Redwoods.

The drive to the beach was very Highway 1.  Windy roads, steep drop offs, beautiful views and hundreds of tourists.  We got to the beach and I spent a good thirty minutes in the bathroom, um, doing stuff a person usually likes to do in their own bathroom.  It wouldn’t be a vacation if I didn’t get sick!  After a scan of the beach we thought would be deserted,  we decided to head to less touristy pastures.  The redwoods.  Which is when we got caught behind a tour bus.  And we realized the vision of deserted redwoods and lonely beaches was something we would only see in our fantasies (maybe ones that included tenured professors and half my age students!) and we headed back to San Francisco.

A trip over the Golden Gate Bridge brought us back into the city and we motored up steep streets with pretty Victorian row houses, ate French fries and chicken pot pie at an old hotel bar, shivered at the fog rolling in and headed back to the airport.

We’ve been back five days and it wasn’t until yesterday on my drive from the valley back into Hollywood when I looked over the sprawling city cloaked in smog, concrete overpasses and iconic buildings surrounded by the bad architecture of the 80s that I was reminded why I love Los Angeles so much.  It’s a real big mix-up of good and bad, right and wrong, pretty and ugly.   Kind of like me.

And as I screamed an obscenity at an idiot cunt in Audi who cut me off at my exit, I thought to myself, “It’s good to be home.”

Summer has finally arrived in Los Angeles.  This morning as I walked out into the muggy, rain speckled morning, and felt the weight of the air, I flashed to summers spent in the mid-west, playing cards in the basement with my sister and cousin, riding bikes to the corner store to buy pop-rocks and blasting through a huge stack of novels.  I had a special childhood in many ways, a charmed life, I have so many good things to remember and summertime brings it all flooding back.

I felt very sad about not getting pregnant in June.  I was so sure I would.  I boo-hooed about it for a day then I read an article about a study conducted that said women without children are far happier than those with.  Even worse, women with children are the least happy when they are physically with their children.  I’m sure there are about a 100 other studies going on right now to figure out why that is true or if it is untrue, and I can guarantee it has something to do with this new theory I’m forming about the bill of goods sold to women of my generation and (I expect) the generations following.  The bill of goods that says you can have it all, you can be whatever you want, you can find the man of your dreams, you can live the picture perfect life and not only that, if you don’t - if you aren’t all of these things - a mother, a college educated career driven woman, and a wildcat in the sack with your loving devoted husband - you aren’t trying hard enough, and you’re a failure.  Hard to believe women would be unhappy when we’re expected to do all of these things and the men of our generation are promised that we will be all of these things - and they don’t have to do one damned thing different except not open the door for us.  It’s a theory I’m still fleshing out, but when I start to really think about it, I start to really get pissed off.

Mostly though, the past few weeks have been spent trying to respect myself.  I learned something about this in therapy.  I spend a large part of my day finding fault with myself.  The part about therapy that really started to get me down, was that I was expected to wallow in the failures of my upbringing.  Wallow in the ways in which I could blame everyone around me for why I am the way I am.  Why I don’t like being who I am a lot of the time.  I want to be perfect.  I want to be thin, funny, smart, talented, productive, positive and loved.  I’m working on the productive and positive parts.  I can admit I’m smart, I can admit I’m talented, I have been praised for my comedic timing, I believe I’m loved and even though I want to be thin, I can at least recognize that my body dysmorphic disorder is often in overdrive and I’m learning to love my shape.   But I want it all.  I want to be able to do the triathlon - but the fact that I have to skip the swim upsets me.  I won’t be perfect.  I’ll be pussing out for part of it.  I am working on forgiving myself for this.  I’m working on forgiving myself for not taking care of my body while I’ve been nursing my depression and my stress.  But moreover - I’m trying to accept the fact that I’ll likely never look like an athlete/model/actress.  It helps that I get to laugh every day with my friend who sits directly across from me at the work, and my Seth who sleeps next to me.  I’ve started running again, after my injury time off.  My ear was bothering me so much that I didn’t want to get out of bed, much less work my ass off trying to keep up with Seth.  But now I can and it feels so good.  Blazing down beautiful streets at dusk with the dude and the dog I love.

I am a lucky girl.

Every night we sit on our front stoop with Lula between us, watching the Hasidic Jews walk by, drinking a tall glass of ice water and basking in these special days we have here together.   In 25 years I’ll look back and have these to add to my long list of nostalgia.  And I’m so very glad.

We were waiting for our dangerous garage door of death to make its rickety rise open, when a bug landed on my arm.  I yelped and almost smashed it, but looked down and saw a heavily spotted ladybug.

“Make a wish!”

I did and I’ll let you know if it comes true.

I’ve had a weird weekend.  Fits and starts, naps and late nights, books and movies, tv and radio.  It was a gorgeous day today and now that the Yankee game is over, I can relax or start worrying about not sleeping tonight.   Maybe I’ll do both.

In addition to freelancing this weekend (I will be so happy when people stop dying and/or the Obvious Big Awards Show deadline for death is reached), Seth and I continued our quixotic search for a new place to live.

The requirements are, we thought, not that big a deal, especially since I just recently decided that I don’t care if I live in Silverlake anymore.  I’m not completely sick of it, but I’m pretty close.  A friend of a friend suggested we look downtown, and this friend of a friend got on the phone with me and talked me into it.  She was very persuasive.  I’m glad she wasn’t trying to sell me Amway, I totally would sold my soul.

So I did some Craigslist hunting, got drunk at a downtown diner, and we went open house-ing.

The first place we saw was Penthouse 10.  I immediately fell in love.   It was three stories, open floor plan, had a private rooftop deck that was two stories, it was way below what we are spending now, and it was quite possibly the closest thing I’ve seen in real life to where I imagined fancy rich people who lived in cities would live.  It was that good.  We also looked at Penthouse 8.  Identical to Penthouse 10, except it was 80 square feet smaller and $285 cheaper.  I don’t understand downtown.  I mean, they’re basically giving these places away.

We were discouraged by the lack of parking in the building, so we went down the street to another open house and I almost threw up we were up so high.  I took a picture of the roof of my dream house from the roof of the vomit tower.

Then I slowly backed away from the edge and wiped the sweat off my palms.

We spent two hours in Penthouse 8 and Penthouse 10.  I was sold.  We were approved.  Then we went home and started talking about living downtown and how walking Lula alone at night might be sketchy and how we loved the space but it might not actually be big enough to contain all the shit we’ve both accumulated in our lives.  It was sad.   I might have cried.

Then this morning I told Seth I didn’t care, I wanted to live there and if they would agree to let us move in on the 15th for half month’s rent that month, I wanted to do it.  So, we put in our offer.  And we were shot down.

So, here I am, thinking about that rooftop deck and all the parties I won’t have there.  Whatever.  *sniff*

At least we had sex in there, so we know what that’s like.

I have some things to tell you, but I also have a Sangria recipe to track down. Priorities, people!

In the meantime, let me tell you, it’s creepy seeing a mushroom cloud on your horizon.  I’m worried about the ponies firemen, the dogs people who lost their homes, and the morons people who refused to evacuate.  But I’m also worried about normal shit like my sister and my niece are coming into town and will the hurricane currently swooping up Baja make it uncomfortable at Disneyland.

I’m only human.

Now, off to find that recipe.  I’ve got some fruit stewing to do.

On Sunday, I pulled a muscle in my neck trying to be cute while getting out of bed.  That’s the full story.  I feel pretty lame about it.  It still kind of hurts.

There was a weird mail situation wherein someone stole our mail, then returned it to us all opened and crumpled.  I guess they felt bad after seeing my credit card balances.  And my bank statement.  I know I would.  But for a minute I thought it was some kind of blog stalker sending a weird message to me.  That message being, “I know where you live and your mail sucks!  Keep it, asshole!”  Then I realized I was being paranoid.  Also, the biggest expert on threat assessment (I’m too scared of him to even name drop him here) told us that we were being weird and paranoid.  So, there’s that.

The rat is gone.  The exterminator set some traps and sprayed some rat repellent and since then, we’ve been rat free.  Which leads me to believe that the rat saw the writing on the wall and split.  I like to believe this war is over, but rats… man, until you’ve seen one in your own kitchen, you can’t really know how you’re going to react.  Lula on the other hand, is a bonafide rat dog.  Too bad she couldn’t close the deal.

And speaking of Lula, did I tell you she bit an opossum’s butt?  Sort of?  It was more of a love nudge with teeth.  I know general wisdom on possums is that they are ugly, but I’m here to tell you they can look so cute.  Especially when dangling their little asses over our deck and Lula is trying to disembowel them (albeit badly).

Sorry about his paw there.  It’s really disturbing.  Don’t look too close.  I don’t want to alarm you, but it might have human fingers.

How many of you wish you lived in my house now?