Awkwardly Social

I think I’m fighting a cold, or a small depression, or I’m just a big pussy who didn’t get a weekend of solitude last weekend to re-charge the sane battery. When the sane battery doesn’t get recharged the crazy battery goes into over drive and bad things happen.

I haven’t felt like writing anything the past couple of days because it felt like I was walking through my life in slow motion. I hate that. The clock is stuck at 1:32pm and the drive home feels like it takes a decade. It’s the summer time. When I was a kid it was glorious to have an hour long drive to look forward to, that meant an hour in the car reading with no one touching me, no one telling me to clean my room, no TV to taunt me with fuzzy reception and Matlock re-runs. I do something kind of dangerous now when I drive home to recreate that childhood feeling. I read. I only do it in super heavy traffic where we’re not moving and I’m stuck at a stop light for three cycles. I am aware that it’s a bad idea. I don’t care. My commute is sucking the life out of me.

At 3:45am we were awakened by the craziest coyote in all of Los Feliz. It was right in front of our building rabble raising. If you’ve ever heard a real coyote yipping and howling and half-barking you’ll know how disturbing it sounds. Not a single dog in our barky-dog neighborhood took the bait, so I’m guessing they either don’t understand coyote, or are so far above it they cared not to respond. It went on for so long that Louie had to go out and chase the rat bastard away. I swear to Jesus, there is nothing weirder than living in a fully urban area having coyotes baying on your front yard.

Lula says, “I not speak coyote.”

My sister takes me to the nicest places.

I just spent several days in the city formerly known as Duwamps. It rains a lot there. Which makes the children sad.

I haven’t been to Seattle in over a year, and it certainly is a charming city.

Especially when you consider it once was called something as charm free as “Duwamps.”My niece, Fiona, is one of the local attractions. She plays a mean game of tennis on the Wii, soundly kicking my Mii’s ass.

I’m pretty sure I ate more bacon this weekend than I normally eat all year. That is not an indictment of Seattle, it is a selling point. If only I could muster the strength to eat bacon here in Los Angeles, I might be a happier person.My mom made her Chicken Salad that has about 500 grams of fat per serving and her brownies which are made with a half pound of butter. So, needless to say, I am just coming out of the carb coma I fell into while I was staying there.My sister’s cat, Ellis, has taken to raping his housemate Westie. Which is disturbing at best, but also difficult to explain to the children. “Ellis is hugging Westie.” Ellis “hugs” Westie twice daily. I believe this is why Westie has gained several pounds, he’s eating away his pain. He is not pictured here, because Westie finds me abhorent and will not enter a room I am in.

It was a lovely trip, my plane didn’t crash once, and my dog was ridiculously excited that I was not dead or hadn’t abandoned her.

First, before I get to the two cool things referenced in the title, I have to tell you that it is really weird to see people who you actually know on the (kind of) terrible show On the Lot.  So weird.  People you actually talk to on the phone several times a week.  Even more strange when they are made to look bad.  I don’t think I’ll continue watching after tomorrow’s episode.  Maybe it’s too close to home for me.  Maybe I don’t want to see good people thrown under the bus.  Maybe it’s just a boring bad show.

So, the two cool things.

First, there is a blogger named Leah Peah.  (You’ve probably heard of her.)  She is the reason I found Schmutzie, and for that I am forever in her debt.  So when she started up LA Angst and LA Bloggers Live, of course I was flattered to be invited and I enthusiastically signed up.  (I did, I typed in my information with short staccato key strokes to emphasize how excited I was that someone knew I lived in Los Angeles and was shameless enough to want to embarass myself in public in front of real live people.)

Now all I have to do is figure out how to milk the angstiest stuff from my 9th grade diary.  I read through some of it the other day and was surprised how upbeat I was.  I don’t remember my Freshman year being particularly good, but my 9th grade self was marching around beating a happy drum while getting ditched by her friends and discovering how alcohol dulls the pain.  Exclamation points abound.  So, I’ll have to really assess if that’s going to work for LA Angst.  Louie told me I could read my diary aloud to him and he would decide if it was cringy enough.  That’s a big step for the Lou, as he hates being read to.  We’ll see if I decide to actually read aloud for that.  As for LA Bloggers Live, oh hell to the yeah.  Some awesome bloggers are already in the group and I’m excited to meet them and stalk them in person.

If I could figure out how to make the badges appear in my side bar I’d put them there, but I am a lame HTML loser who never got to that chapter in the book, so you’ll just have to click the boring old text links and believe me when I tell you, I am even more awkward and awesomer in person.

Grace Paley, a New York short story writer, said, “It is the responsibility of writers to listen to gossip and pass it on.  It is the way all storytellers learn about life.”

Amen, sister.  Amen.

We have some friends coming into town this week from Brooklyn.  The only way this couple could be more awesome would be if they lived in Los Angeles.  So obviously while they are here I’m going to drug them and tie them up in the most comfortable room in our apartment and pin their eyes open so they have to watch Heat on repeat, brainwashing them into believing Los Angeles is the most awesome place in the whole world.  (Note to self: must also brainwash them so they don’t remember being tied up in my bedroom…)

The male half of the couple is really quite sure he wants to stay on the East coast.  I think this is because he thinks there are better sneakers and hip hop artists out there.  (He just loves sneakers, I can’t explain it.  And yes, the East coast is sneaker heaven.) The female half of the couple is thinking Los Angeles sounds pretty great especially because it puts her a full continent away from her very tightly knit family, who she loves but has never lived away from.

I don’t really know how to entertain out of town guests is the big problem.  When my family is here I take them to restaurants and museums and Disneyland, but these two people must see the BEST of LA.  They need to leave here thinking they were dumb for not moving here years ago.   So of course, absolutely nothing comes to mind, because for me the BEST of LA is not really a location or a thing, it’s the friends I’ve made out here and the tequila.  Sure, you’ll get better tequila in Mexico, but will it be in a pomegranite margarita?  No.

So I’m excited they are coming.  Worried that I won’t get enough time to properly convince them that LA is the place they want to spend the rest of their youth because I’m leaving for Seattle on Friday morning and Louie is a boy so I can’t trust him to pick up the LA IS AWESOME slack.  Boys don’t know how to do this stuff.  Boys just throw a pillow without a pillowcase on the couch with a lap blanket and call it a bed.  So the next two days are going to be spent getting ready for The Awesomes, I just hope I have enough time.

You know it was a rough girl night when you storm out of book club. Honestly, I don’t know how it happened, it all happened so fast, but once I’m being cursed at and told I’m attacking someone, I’m going to pull a typical 14 year-old girl move and sit and stew and then 5 minutes later when someone else gets up to go to the bathroom dart out of the room tell the hostess a hurried bye and then cry in my car all the way home.

I hate that this is such a girl thing. I hate that I thought on my long drive home from Santa Monica I wondered why women are so hard to be friends with. I think I’m never going back to book club, but I am being reactionary right now and I know that I’ll probably try and let it blow over, particularly because this same woman was involved in a kerfuffle at a book club that I missed. Par for the proverbial Girl Fight Course.

But honestly, at what point do you just admit that it’s not a good match, the book club you’re in, and move the fuck on. Fuck.

Update: After sleeping on it and talking to Louie, I know that it’s not the book club I have a problem with, I love the book club. I don’t like the way things went down last night, but I was definitely partly at fault for engaging the woman. Sometimes you have to know when the battle is not yours and you need to keep your mouth shut. This is me zipping my lips. Sort of.

Note:  I’m not sure where this piece is going, it came out of the writing I’ve been doing for a stupidly personal screenplay.

There was a kid in our home town who was paralyzed from the neck down because he dove off a cliff into a river.  A simple little thing that kids have been doing since there were cliffs next to rivers left him in a large wheelchair that he drove around in by blowing into a tube.  He would occasionally be in Fairways parking lot.  Fairways was an old store front that for a long time was our one an only grocery store.  It also sold clothing, goldfish and guns.  One stop shopping.  The meat department smelled like death, they only had one kind of mustard, the yellow kind, and it was one of the main reasons my mom hated Camp Verde.  Of course, my sister and I loved it.  I would go stare at the goldfish and peruse the Jordache section while she would sit and read Archie comics.  Anyway, it closed down when a bigger better grocery store that only sold groceries moved into town.  If you know Arizona, you know Basha’s.  The Fairways parking lot remained the place everyone would hang out.  Even the paralyzed guy.  The way his hands were curled around white dish towels freaked me out.  The way his presence reminded us all that we took our lives in our hands in various ways every day freaked everyone out.

I still think about that brown vinyl padding on his wheelchair.  I can still see him sitting in the shade of Fairways.  He jumped off a cliff.  He dared to be young and irresponsible.

When I met Bob he was jumping off a cliff.  He didn’t know what that meant to me.  He didn’t know that it made him instantly dangerous and at the same time perfectly fragile in my eyes.  I was in love with someone else, but he was going to be mine.  When he was kicked out of the private school he attended he transferred to Camp Verde High School.  I told him that he didn’t have any choice, he could hang out with losers, little boys, or us.  It was something that had to be done.  Ever since the beginning of time boys and girls like us had been smashing into one another making the universe bright with our stars.

It’s no surprise that Bob was to be the  model for all other men that followed.  Dangerous, unavailable, and totally perplexed by me.  I wanted them to jump off a cliff and become paralyzed so they would always be mine.  Life doesn’t work like that.  I don’t paralyze people with my love.  I’ve instead left a trail of broken hearts behind me (all mine) leading up to the present.

I have a tendency to wrap myself up in the past using it as my hair shirt and my woobie.  It’s comfortable and but dear lord it itches.  I guess that’s why Louie is so surprising to me.  He laughs at things I say, things I didn’t even know were funny.  He hugs me when I didn’t know I needed to be hugged.  He thinks I’m crazy but in a way that pulls him closer not pushes him away.  I’m not sure how I got so lucky.

I didn’t know jumping off a cliff could actually be safe.

I leaned over to flush the toilet, and as I straightened back up my phone flopped out of my pocket and into the swirling bowl.  I gasped and watched in horror as my cell phone was sucked down into the depths.  I don’t use that stall anymore.  I’m terrified it’s going to clog and my cell phone will be plunged out by some unsuspecting plumber and I’ll be sent to toilet jail.

I had to call my cell phone company and tell them “I lost my phone.”  For some reason, I couldn’t admit to them that I flushed it down the toilet.  The woman was very concerned that someone would find it and use all my minutes.  I’m thinking, “Lady, if someone finds it and needs to make a phone call, more power to them.  They are stuck in a damned sewer.”

I have a brand new pink razr phone coming to me in 10 to infinity days.  My phone lady was also very concerned that I didn’t expedite the shipping.  I used regular old ‘ground.’  I figure the longer I’m without the stupid thing, the more I’ll appreciate having it when it’s back.  I’m so totally over having a cell phone.  Wow, that was a really intelligent and not at all snotty thing to say.  Hmm, I must be like the coolest hipster in all the land.  Over having a cell phone?  What’s next, not interested in the internet?  Only listening to un-signed bands?  Drinking micro brew?  Um… I don’t know any other hipster things.  I guess that makes me safe from being a hipster.

Answer me this, where do you think my cell phone went?  Is it blocking some pipe right now?  It is seriously all I can think about.

I didn’t know it was possible, but one can flush one’s cell phone down the toilet.

This is hopefully never going to come back to bite me in the ass.

(sorry, bad pun - i’m just…  speechless.  my phone is in the sewer.)

I’m a big fan of Miranda July.  Ever since she spooned me on stage while I tried to here the very softly whispered stage directions with my deaf ear, I’ve been kind of in awe.  It really isn’t that often that I can say I enjoyed being ‘volunteered’ for something.

When she was scanning the audience she looked at me and said, “Or her.”  And I kind of grimaced, but I wanted to be liked by her so I sighed and Catherine said, “Tamara will be awesome.”  I hedged and Miranda said, “It won’t hurt.”  “What do I have to do?” I asked.  She said, “Lay on the bed and let me hug you.  You don’t mind being hugged do you?”

Actually, I do.  Unless I’m drunk, then I love being hugged.  But I did it and it remains a very fuzzy, but fond memory of something that could have gone so much worse.

She’s in town for a signing of her new book, No One Belongs Here More Than You, and I’m not going.  I don’t want to ruin the memory.  I think a lot about her work when I’m struggling to fit in in social situations that don’t lend themselves to me being a weirdo.  I sat next to a woman on Saturday who works for one of my favorite networks and is in charge of two of my favorite shows.  We both had our feet in the boiling hot jacuzzi.  She loved Lula.  And I was comfortable in my skin.  Possibly because I knew there was nothing I could do to make her like me.  She either would or wouldn’t.  And in her liking me or not, I would still be there.  And she would still be there.  And we would still be sticking our feet into the same jacuzzi.

As I stumble through my thirties I’ve come to realize that most of my twenties were spent trying to get people to like me.  I think there is nothing more off putting than someone trying to be likeable.  You either are likeable or you aren’t.  It’s not easy for me to be around new people but I met several on Saturday.  And not once did I worry that I was being an asshole.  It isn’t the prettiest I’ve been, my thirties, but it is becoming the most comfortable.  No one told me it would feel like this.