Awkwardly Social

One of the pretty party attendees is an actress.  She, like many people in my life, is named Jennie.  Not to be confused with Jennie.

I sort of feel bad for stealing her hilarious story, especially since I don’t really remember it that well because I was on glass number 3 (red plastic cup, actually, but that has no bearing on this story, for some reason my inner-fact-checker had to point that out, carry on)  of Sangria when she was telling the story.

She is an actress, and makes her living doing commercials.  I believe she has been in a herpes commercial and a big name auto supply store commercial recently.  I haven’t seen either because of the glorious Tivo, but I’ve had her act them out for me so I can assure you that she’s awesome in them.  Anyway, she was telling us about a recent audition she had for Always Maxi-pads.  And here’s the kicker.  SHE HAD TO SING A SONG!  Isn’t that awesome?!  She didn’t get the part, but she did remember the song.  It went something like, “I love chocolate, I love pads….”  Ok.  I have no idea what the lyrics actually were, but I’m hoping Geof (her boyfriend) will read this and either write the real lyrics in the comments section or at least e-mail them to me, because I can’t get my rendition out of my head and that doesn’t go over so well when I sing it in line at Starbucks.

la la la! I love chocolate, I love pads, I like greasy food, and some pads!

Maybe this is funny only to me.   I guess that’s all that matters.

I haven’t stayed up ’til 2:30AM in forever.  And I know exactly why, it makes you really, really tired the next day.

The party was a success.  At one point I walked into the kitchen to check on things and saw 7 people in the fridge room.  7 people.  For those of you who have seen my fridge room, you know that it’s very, very tiny.  It was then that I knew we had reached maximum capacity and that people will always congregate around the alcohol.

We ran out of beer.  It’s a good thing there are kind souls who weren’t too drunk to drive and get more.

There were fisticuffs.  Genuine fisticuffs.

The balcony didn’t collapse under the weight of 18 (pot) smokers huddled out there.  Thank god.

People drank responsibly and took cabs home.  This seems so grown up to me.

My friends and Louie’s friends sort of mixed.  Kind of.  I think.  I’m not sure because I was drunk.

Louie’s sundae bar (by his own admission) was a failure.

My cheese and crackers, chips and dip, and sangria were all gone by the end of the night.

I now have to worry about killing a Venus Flytrap AND an orchid.

Louie has very pretty friends.  But then again, so do I.

I’m waiting for people to show up. Of course, my hands are already numb. From the drinking. There’s a rule that if the invite says 8PM people show up at 10PM. It’s an LA thing. Or maybe it’s an all over thing. I’ve only experienced it in LA.

Should my hands be numb from one vodka tonic? Admittedly, I made it, so I could have added more vodka than tonic, but come on. one? Seriously?

Also, I think sitting in my bedroom typing on the computer drunk waiting for people to show up for my party is sad. Especially since typing is made difficult from the hand numbness. At least I feel like the apartment is presentable. There’s that.

I was thinking as I put out the guacamole, finished the sangria (recipe here) and arranged the cheese and crackers, that it would be awesome if I lived in a world where there was always the aforementioned acoutrements sitting freshly on my coffee table.

I’m feelling a little Ms. Haversham.

That could be the Stoli talking.

I’ll update later.

I decided that for the housewarming Sangria would be the easiest and most effective way to get people drunk enough that they no longer noticed the little things I didn’t get to. Like steaming the carpets. And possibly brushing my hair.

Tara said she made a very successful Sangria batch for her BBQ that I was too drunk to attend on the 4th of July:

Tara’s Sangria - serves several

What you need:
2 big pitchers
4 bottles of cheapish Spanish wine (go to Trader Joe’s, they have a large selection, I used some kind of Castillian red. It was around $4.99 a bottle.)
1/2 bottle of Brandy (thankfully, I already had this in my liquor cabinet.)
1 bottle of Trader Joe’s Sparkling Lemonade
1 bottle of Trader Joe’s Sparkling Cranberry
2 or so apples
2 or so oranges
2 or so peaches

Cut up the fruit and evenly distribute it in the pitchers.
Add the brandy and wine (also evenly distributed)
Let it sit in the fridge over night (I started it this morning because I’m a lazy sack)
Before serving add the sparkling lemonade and cranberry and hope for the best!

I’ll let you know how drunk people get. Right now I’m a little nervous I didn’t put enough fruit in there, but I’m trying to remain calm.

I don’t know if you’ve heard* but there’s a conference for Ladies Who Blog going on this weekend.  It’s like Nerd Prom** but for women.  Who Blog.  I guess.  Whatever.  I’m not going.  Which is fine.  I’ll read all about it, and feel like I was there anyway, because that’s all people are going to be blogging about for the next few weeks.  It’s all they’ve been blogging about for the last month leading up to it.

This is starting to sound bitter, which is not my intention.  I’m only talking about it because while I was thinking about what exactly I would do there besides sit in my hotel room and wonder when the next cocktail hour was happening (I abhor panels because there’s always some asshole asking stupid questions that makes you want to punch them in the back of their plastic chair), and I realized, I’ve actually logged a shitload of time at conventions far trickier than this one.  Conventions with no alcohol, a curfew and shared hotel rooms, which brings me to a super nerdy confession that I’m sure you’ll all laugh at me for.  All 7 of you who don’t already know that I was and always will be a Super Big Nerd.

When I was in high school, my sister was involved in a service organization called Key Club, which is the high school branch of Kiwanis International.  (I’m sure if you pressed a specific part of my brain I could tell you who formed it and when it went national, etc.)  She was pretty serious about it.  Through some strange turn of events, I think starting because of her attendance at an International Convention held in Annaheim, she got roped into being a Lt. Governor and from there her popularity soared and she eventually became the Governor of the Southwest District.  I don’t really know the scope of how big a deal this is anymore, but I do remember that everyone at the International Convention in Chicago knew who she was. Every last one of the 20,000 business attired high school attendees knew my sister because she was helping the candidate for the Presidency run his campaign. They started to know who I was too, because I followed my sister around like the loner I was.  (I’m surprise she never punched me in the back of my plastic chair.)  My second year I was elected as a Lt. Governor.  (District 11 and 19, dude, don’t ask me what I’m forgetting right now in order to have that stored up in my brain.)  I think my platform was, “I’m the only one running.” I had to write a Newsletter.  I went to Conventions and Retreats and Leadership Conferences in glamorous locals like Alburquerque and Pennsylvania.  I was IMPORTANT.  I can’t imagine the unfortunate hotel guests who were subjected to thousands of dorky high school students, who are chanting and wearing badges with pins*** on them and basically trying to get made out with or at least groped, descending on a city and going to meetings and holding elections and it all sounds so lame that I can’t even believe my sister dragged me into it.  I LOVED it.  My freshman and sophomore years of high school were tough.  I was not so popular.  (Not until the drinking and misbehaving really got ramped up did I make a name for myself.)  And Key Club gave me something to do.  I look back in awe at my sister.  She was a lightening rod.  She was so pretty and smart and everyone liked her.  EVEN BOYS!  ESPECIALLY BOYS!  One year she went to prom in three different states. (As it turns out at least one of them was gay, but you know how it is, high school is confusing.)

I just had a flash of the ‘clip art’ file that I had to use and literally, I cut (with scissors) and pasted (with glue or invisible tape) pictures of people doing things like holding a bouquet of flowers or digging a hole onto my craftily designed newsletter, which I would print out on a dot matrix printer and then Zerox on my dad’s GINORMOUS copy machine.  Dear lord.  Those kids probably have blogs for their districts now.  Lucky.

Anyway, the reason I thought of all of this is because if I went to conventions when I was a kid and was sort of a person in charge, I can’t go back to being a participant.  I’m really bad at big group functions where-in I don’t have a specific
role to fill.  Give me a bridesmaid’s dress and I’m golden.  Send me
out to ‘mingle’ with strangers and I stand around looking mean and
bored.**** .  I was a Convention rock star (if you could see some of the photos I have from the convention, you’ll know that I’m being ironic.)  I owned them, you know.  I was an elected officer.  I got into meetings other people couldn’t get into.  A long time after I dropped out of Key Club, I was at a bar in Tempe and a guy came up to me and asked me if my name was Tamara.  I was surprised that someone knew me in Tempe and knew the proper pronunciation of my first and last name.  He said he knew me from Key Club.  I had no idea who he was.  Had never seen him before.  He was a stalker.  Ok, he wasn’t a stalker, he just was some random guy who remembered me from one of the local conventions.  He remembered the panel I ran.  I did that.  I ran panels.

So, for some reason this all came to mind when I was reading about Blogher.  I hope if you went, you had an awesome time.  Nerd.

*You’d have to be kind of blind if you haven’t.
**This is a full on Nerd Bait.  For those of you who don’t know, Nerd Prom is Comic-Con.
***One of the things I brought home from Arizona was a baggie full of pins from the conventions.  Shut. up.
****I am mean and usually bored, but I don’t like to look that way.

I don’t think it will come to a surprise that I’m Super Grumpy.  This has something to do with the cycle of the moon, the fact that the heat - IS NOT GETTING UNHOT! and the unusual noises I’m being subjected to all day and all night and everywhere I go.

First, a really pathetic bird who I believe might be in love with our air conditioner (no, not the cool air emitting from the AC, the actual unit) has moved into the cypress tree located right outside the window which is right by my side of the bed.  Here is a visual representation of the sound this shit bag makes:  Scritch.  scriiitch.  Scritch.  Scritch.  scriiitch.  Which is sort of the sound the AC makes, but the AC is a machine so it makes it in a rhythmic fashion, making it easy to ignore.  The STUPID BIRD has NO RHYTHM.  MAKING IT IMPOSSIBLE TO IGNORE.  And making me contemplate going outside and shaking the cypress tree until it decides to go fall in love with someone else’s stupid AC.

Second, my car.  Oh my car.  I just got over my love for the Rental Truck From the Gods and now I’m forced to endure the indignity that is my car.  I spend a lot of time driving around Beverly Hills.  My car is the eye-sore that makes people point and guffaw.  Partly this is my fault.  I haven’t washed my car in over a year.  LA is a dirty city.  My car is sort of like Pig Pen, there are squiggly lines following it all around.  But the other part is AGAIN air conditioning related.  It seems there is a belt loose or coming detached or just purely trying to fuck with me because everytime I have to stop at a particularly crowded intersection (crowded with people who when not toting their $3000 dogs around, drive really expensive cars) it makes this noise.  screh.  screh.  SCREEEEE screh.  And then I want to die.  Because my choices are, A.  Turn the AC off quickly and melt in the time it takes me to get through the intersection or B. Just let it screh and SCREEE until I’ve scared the entire population of Beverly Hills into buying me a new car.  I think you know what option I choose.

Finally, I tried really hard to come up with a third noisy thing that had to do with air conditioning and the scr sounds but I have nothing, leaving me with what feels like an incomplete post.  Three things mean there is a pattern.  Two is just a coincidence.  Or is it?  (I tried to think of a way to make that last sentence seem mysterious, but… I’m too fecking hot.)

um.  that’s it.  I will say one more thing.  I was told by someone that he knew I had a blog but that he hadn’t read it yet.  I told him he probably wouldn’t like it and he said, “What’s it say, ‘Today I woke up and I saw a bird.  In a tree.’?”  And now I’ve gone and done exactly what he was making fun of me for.   Great.

One of the things I retrieved from the storage shed was a plastic bag full of photos.  I vaguely remember shoving them into the bag and then into a box and forgetting about them.  At the time I thought they were more Great Aunt Nancy Photos.

Yesterday, I spent some time going through the photos and letters that were in the bag and it seems a mystery has developed.  Or, I’d like to believe a mystery has developed because I live a sad, sad life.  A sad, sad life that lacks mystery.

Aunt Nancy, as you can see in the burgeoning photo set over on Flickr liked to take photos of dressed up animals.  She also has some shots of North Dakota farmers, etc.  As far as I know, if she ever travelled abroad, the place she would have gone would be Norway.  But I don’t remember ever seeing anything from there in her collection.  She didn’t ever travel to Asia, of that I am almost absolutely certain.  So you can imagine my surprise when I started going through these newly found photos and saw photos from India, the Philippines, Italy, and New Zealand.  Most of the photos appear to be taken by someone named A. Araiza (at least that is the stamp on the back) and there are several envelopes in the bag from A. Araiza to CM Seymour.  Mr. C.M. Seymour.  Of West Hartford, Connecticut.  Charles Seymour.  There was one more envelope addressed to Nancy Christensen, (Great Aunt Nancy) written in 1925, and it included a 4 page (double sided) letter from Mr. Seymour.  So, to me it seems like, fine, she had a pen pal in Mr. Seymour.  But why then did he give her letters that A. Araiza had written to him.  Why is one kind of foreboding?

“After some months that I didn not receive your exchange I sent a card inquiring about your health and at not obtaining a reply my conclusions were very pesimistic and mourned you, indeed, thinking that one friend more had passed away.”

Is this boring to you?  Or interesting?  To me it’s fascinating.  Why did she have letters of his?  Why did he write to her?  Were they in love?  How did she even meet him?

Anyway, I have no idea where this mystery is going, I guess I thought if I put it out there on the internet, someone would find me and say, those are my great grandfather’s photos!  Or something.

I’ll be uploading some of the photos to my Flickr page in the coming weeks.  Somebody must know something, right?

How does one wrap up a trip that was too short, too long in coming and maybe a little bit sad?  I’d like to say that I’ll return to Camp Verde on some non-high school reunion based trip, but I can’t really see any reason why.

When I saw Squaw Peak, busting up the horizon, sitting like an old friend waiting for me to recognize her, I wanted to wave.  I wanted to drive up one of the many dirt roads we used to tear up with coolers of beer, Mad Dog 2020, Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill and dangerous intentions.  I wanted to go to the creek and stumble around the banks looking for minnows and crawdads and tiny frogs.  I wanted to stop by the Circle K, watch for my crush to drive by and will him to notice my car was there.  I wanted to eat at Denny’s at 2am, knowing my parents were asleep and had no idea I wasn’t safe in my bed.

Instead I just emptied out my storage shed.  Ate an enchirito from Taco Bell, and drove back over the hill, thinking about how many times I prayed my car would make it just one last time without overheating on the pass.  I guess I said goodbye a long time ago to my one true home.  And going back there this weekend was kind of like seeing an old flame who has a new girlfriend, maybe a different haircut, wrinkles around their eyes, and you can kind of see why you once liked them, you kind of remember how they made you laugh but you’ve moved on, and so have they.  They don’t remember much about you besides how you sassed Principal Bean and got a week’s worth of suspension for drinking on school property.  You only remember that one time he accidentally threw up a little in your mouth when you were making out.  It’s awkward and you’d rather you just had the old picture of him in your head, the one where he defiantly smoked a cigarette while he was filling gas and you sat in the car barefoot with cutoff shorts drinking straight from a bottle of Bacardi.

Time alarm was set for:  2am
Time I departed: 3:35am
Time at which I noticed the temp was 105 degrees: 7:12am
Time it took for me to forget a woman I knew pretty much all my life:  10 years
Time I spent being embarassed about the above: TBD
Times the temp broke 120 degrees: 4
Time I spent in the car today: 14 hours.
Time I spent wishing I was still living in AZ: 5 seconds.

Number of trucks parked on the lawn at my old house: 2
Number of ATVs parked on the lawn at my old house: 2
Number of vehicles total parked on the lawn and in the driveway and garage at my old house: 8
Number of times I drove by my old house to count vehicles: 3

Highest temp achieved: 121 degrees.

I’m back.  I’m alive.  I have a whole bunch of crap I don’t need.