Awkwardly Social

I get up every morning and immediately let Lula out the front door so she can leave messages in the grass for the aliens. Seriously, why do dogs make it seem like they are doing “Very Important Work” when they are looking for the right place to pee?  Some mornings it cracks me up, other mornings I want to shake her.

This morning I was distracted by a beautiful sunrise.

Which is probably exactly what the dogs and the aliens were hoping for.

I walked in the front door and immediately noticed our bedroom door was open.

Lula is normally locked in the bedroom.

Lula was not in the house.

Lula was not in the back yard.

Lula was not coming when I called her.

Lula was straight up gone.

I immediately panicked. Mr. F told me to go to the neighbors. Our next door neighbors to the south had seen her, but couldn’t get close enough to catch her. Also, the woman of the couple was straight up irritated that I came over to her house “while she was trying to get them to sleep.” Them being her children. Me being the sobbing mess on her front porch. The male half of the couple was sweet and understanding and turned the porch light back on after the woman turned it off. While I was still standing there. Crying. I mean, I get it, she’s probably not happy about the intrusion, but give me a fucking break.

I walked up the block towards where we walk her every night, calling for her. Not half a block up I heard her collar jingle. I stopped and turned. She came waggling across the street to me. Excited as all get out to see me.

We can only guess that she got out of the bedroom while the gardener was here. That door doesn’t completely latch.  Then she went out her dog door and out the gate that the gardener leaves open while he’s working.  Then when he left, closing the gate behind him, she was effectively locked out. She stayed in a one block radius.

She is now dead asleep next to me, which is way better than her being dead.

It’s going to look a little funky around here while I fight with my a new Wordpress theme.

I’ll need a strong drink and a good lay after all this is over.

UPDATE 1: WTF? Why is that over my face? I hate computers.

UPDATE 2: Seriously, I broke everything. And now I’m just back at the beginning. FUCK ME.

UPDATE 3: So… See that “Awkwardly Social” in the upper right hand corner of the header?  It’s not supposed to be there.  I deselected “Show Text” in the Wordpress Theme’s option, but it’s still there.  Shift + Refreshing is getting me nowhere.  I’m open to suggestions.  Offers of help.  Etc.

Saying yes on Prop 8 won’t protect your marriage. Your marriage is as safe as you want it to be.

This proposition is not about protecting the world from the slippery slope of humans marrying animals. Your crazy dog-lady neighbor will probably still try to marry her dog one day, and I still don’t see how that makes your marriage any less. Your marriage is as safe as you want it to be.

Saying yes on Prop 8 won’t protect girls from learning how to go down on girls and boys from wanting to go down on boys. They will discover that all on their own. Thinking any differently is retarded.

Pay attention. It’s very simple, Proposition 8 is about about stripping the basic civil rights of consenting adult humans to enter into a legal and binding contract called marriage.

And let’s get this straight, once and for all. Marriage is a contract. Nothing more. It’s got nothing to do with your god, or their god, or even my lack of a god. Saying your marriage will mean less if it’s lumped in with gay marriage is like saying my will means less if it’s lumped in with your will. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s a piece of paper. You deserve your piece of paper. I deserve my piece of paper. My neighbor who has sex with men deserves his piece of paper. All of our collective yet separate pieces of paper have nothing to do with each other. Are you understanding this yet?

Let me make it more clear.

You are a moron if you don’t vote No on Prop 8.

Now is the time to donate. Let your support be known.

And go to Looky, Daddy for more photos, because he’s right, everyone should have the right to be awesome.

Saturday

After a meeting with the home owner to go over some issues still pending at our house, we needed to eat Mexican food.  Our house is located in a space/time vacuum so it was 3 hours later that we were able to emerge from the clutches of our living space and venture into Hollywood for an early dinner at Lucy’s El Adobe.  I had a margarita with dinner, my first cocktail since The Great Dry-out Experiment of 2008, and immediately began to try get us back to our house for some adult entertainment.  Thankfully, The Great Dry-out Experiment of 2008 is still going on for Mr. F, so we were able to continue our mission of going to Target to buy important things like garbage cans and bath mats.  While in the shower curtain aisle, agonizing over a waffle curtain vs. a striped curtain, I threw up my hands and said, “I am drunk.  And you are not.  Neither of these curtains make sense to me.  Can you please pick?”  To which Hipster #1 from Central Casting smirked at and sashayed away.  At some point, I contemplated aloud whether or not my legs would fit through the baby leg holes in the shopping cart and was gently led toward an aisle full of sparkling things.  Thankfully after an hour and a half of hellish shopping, my drunk wore off and I was able to correctly determine that Mr. F had done the right thing by discouraging me from trying.

Upon our arrival at home, now stone cold sober, I stared at the dish rack I had purchased 8 months ago for my little 201 apartment and started to get a little emotional.  There are many reasons to get emotional but in that long list of reasons, “Dish rack reminding you of a story your boyfriend told you about a girl he drove up the coast with right before you got together with him,” is not included.  So I sucked it up and let it go.  The dish rack holds no emotional power over me!  I never thought I would admit to someone I was sleeping with that a dish rack was making me cry.

Sunday 

I made up the bed in the guest room and stretched out on it to see what kind of view my house guests would wake up to.  There’s a 100  year old tree out the window and if you lay just right, you can see its branches laddering up its trunk.   We were supposed to go look at dining room tables but me stretched out on a freshly made bed was too much of a distraction for Mr. F, and, well, time got away from us.  I engineered it perfectly, truth be told, looking for dining room tables was not on my list of things I felt I could handle, laying innocently on a freshly made guest bed, however, was.

We finally dragged ourselves away from each other long enough to pretend to look for the perfect dining room table.  The one store I looked up, has closed.  For good.  Feeling all weekendy and happy and in love I steered us across the street for some gelato at Pallazo Gelato.  No on Prop 8 buskers were lined on the streets hooting and hollering and we both agreed that Prop 8 should be no-ed so that people could marry whomever they chose, especially if that included their dog.

Mr. F is a slow walker.  He can out-slow-walk any person in the history of slow-walking people.  I was eating my Moroccan Vanilla Lemon Gelato and trying to keep pace with him when he started laughing.  “How slow, exactly was I just walking?”  And I replied, “I wasn’t going to say anything until you noticed, but you were walking so slowly I thought we might make it to the light sometime next year.”  The light was 10 steps away.  Then I showed him how slowly he was walking.  And the old lady at the other corner harumphed and walked away in a mood, thinking I was imitating her.  It was all I could do not to shout after her, “No, lady!  You don’t understand, it’s my slow ass boyfriend!”

Laying in bed, ignoring everything pending and looming in the house, we had a long, honest conversation about babies and our relationship and how we’re going to do things.  It was the best talk we’ve had in our relationship of amazingly good talks.

As we relished in the afterglow of sex instead of dinner, we stared up at the ceiling and watched a disgusting bug make its way around directly over our bed.  “Is there any way I can get you to just imagine its not there and fall asleep, or am I going to have to kill it,” Mr. F asked.  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I answered and covered my head with the covers hoping the creepy crawler wouldn’t lose its footing and drop on my face into my nose and suffocate me.   “That’s my girl.”

My bosses went to a meeting with an executive who happens to be a friend of mine, and she straight up told them I’m a blogger. I’d been keeping it on the down low for obvious reasons, most of which have to do with the fact that it’s a little embarrassing to have your employer read about your sad face days and your love life.

I was mortified when they came back from that meeting, and stopped at my desk.

“Brooke gave us some dirt on you.”

“What dirt?”

“Oh. Just that you’re A BLOGGER! Girl! What’s the address?”

I refused to give it to them, but that did not stop them. Hi, bosses!

I want to tell you that unless they specifically say it’s OK, I won’t be writing about work here on these pages. Here’s the deal though, they asked me to write about this.

We are doing a show called “Why I Ran” it airs on Monday nights on the Biography channel at 7:30PM PST/10:30PM EST. And I’m asking you to check it out. This is a show with some crazy, some heart wrenching, some incredible stories about the people behind the wheel in high speed chases. It’s pretty fascinating. If you’re into high speed chases (and who isn’t, really?) you should watch.

I’m only adjacently involved in this show but everyone from the editors to the executives all are top notch people who really have delivered some quality television.

Here’s a teaser for you.

And, now you know what I do for a living. Sort of. But not really.

I had a long day on Monday, culminating with the irritating task of dropping off my mailbox key at my old apartment.  I managed to find someone to rent it in record time, meaning my lease was broken legally and I didn’t have to pay double rent.  Unfortunately, I forgot to leave the stupid mailbox key on Sunday night, the night of irritated cleaning.

When I finally got home, I was exhausted and a little irritable.  But as I walked up the path, there on the patio, sat Mr. F in a tiny folding chair with Lula on his lap.  It was the cutest thing I’d ever seen him do.

“We’ve been waiting for you to get home.  Sitting just like this.  Lula tried to lay down, but there wasn’t any room on my lap.”

One of my only worries about moving in with Mr. F was the Lula situation.  It was my idea to get a dog when I was with Louie, and while he was reluctant at first, he loved her just as much as I did.  However, there was never any question that she would come with me in the break-up.  The first time I met Mr. F, I told him I had a dog.   I’m sort of cringing right now wondering how I brought that up in conversation.  Was I like, “Hi, you are sexy and cool.  I would like to tell you about myself.  I have a dog?”  Or did it come up naturally?  There’s no way of knowing.  I do know that he told me he didn’t mind dogs (RED FLAG, that means he HATES them!)  and he said he had never been involved with a woman who didn’t have a dog (REALLY RED FLAG, that means I am NOT UNIQUE!) but he would never get a dog by choice.  At that point I was pretty drunk and I remember telling him I wasn’t really a dog person, I just sort of had a dog (LIE!  I’M A LIAR!) but now that I had her I was totally turning into one of those people (snort, ‘turning into…’).

Cut to three months later and we’re talking about moving in together, and I’m tip-toeing around the subject of where exactly Lula fits into this plan.  Mr. F took the reins immediately and told me we were getting a house, with a fenced yard for Lula.  Swoon.  There was a catch.  No dogs on the furniture.  No dog hair on the floor.  Woah, Nellie, that is impossible.  Lula loves her some snuggle time on the bed.  And the couch.  She cares not how much your fancy upholstery cost.  She wants nothing more than to leave her hair and paw prints on your pillow and your rug.

So it was with great trepidation that I left for work on Monday morning, Mr. F soundly sleeping, Lula nervously following me around.  I told her to lay on her bed and go back to sleep.  She couldn’t bear it and sat in the middle of the living room looking like I was leaving her forever.  I opened my e-mail when I got to work and Mr. F had this to say, “Lula is laying in the patch of sun by the front windows, sleeping.  We need to get her a princess bed for the front room so she can spend her days gazing out the window and watching for you to come home.”

I mean, a princess bed?  Could you just die?  You don’t know Mr. F, but to have him writing about Lula like that, adorable, and so totally out of character.  The tough ones always fall the hardest.

Last night, Mr. F came home with armloads full of groceries and while he brought them all up from the car, I unpacked them in the kitchen.  Spaghetti sauce, bagels, fruit, coffee, baseball.  Wait, what?  Mr. F walked in and I was holding a baseball in my hand trying to figure out where I found this man.  “Oh, that’s for Lula.  She just seemed like she needed a ball.”

The rest of the evening, right up until we went to bed, Lula followed me around as I moved from room to room unpacking and organizing and making plans and falling more in love and all the while she had that ball in her mouth.  And if I wasn’t so sure dogs couldn’t smile, I would have sworn there was a twinkle in her eye and a smile on her little dog lips.

Last night I was laying semi-unconscious on the couch, watching Mr. F rearranging boxes so the cleaning crew could access the floor. Lula was on her brand new gigantic bed beside me. Miles was playing on iTunes. And I started to cry.

I have no idea why.

It wasn’t a sad cry.

It wasn’t a tears of joy cry.

I think it was an emotional exhaustion cry.

I had spent 2 hours getting irrationally angry at myself for being such a slob while I cleaned my old apartment. Spent 40 minutes loading the last bits and pieces of my life in 201 into my tiny Honda Civic. Spent 30 minutes unloading my car while Mr. F was on a wild goose chase for nails to fix Lula’s dog door. Spent 30 minutes aimlessly walking around the new house trying to figure out where, exactly, I was going to find my one clean bra. And then when Mr. F walked in the door, spent 20 minutes trying to fight off eating food. I finally lost that battle.  It turns out that when Mr. F asks me if I want food and I say no, he cooks it anyway and puts it in front of me and there I go, eating.  Good man, that Mr. F.

Mr. F asked me why I thought I was feeling emotional. We have lots of these conversations, getting to the bottom of what’s bothering him, what’s bothering me, so things don’t build and fester and create boils and infections. As we talked through it, I realized that I was just a little wistful about the end of that drunk, slutty, rebellious period I went through. I was so completely ready to be done with it, but I think it’s important to say goodbye to those times in your life properly with a little bit of emotion and maybe a few tears. Then, when it’s all said and done and your next phase has started the baggage has been unpacked and fresh starts are all queued up.

This morning I woke up and walked into the living room, and it was like Christmas morning. Out of extreme chaos, Mr. F had made our packed to the gills with boxes house a home. And I can’t wait to get home to him tonight and every night.

Two nights ago,  I walked into my apartment to a disaster of Lula proportions.  Dirty paper towels, dog hair, a mysteriously empty bag of Ricola (that had been full when I put it in the trash), and a very excited dog. She was pretty thrilled she had mastered the art of opening a closed trash bag, and couldn’t wait to tell me that her SORE THROAT, it was gone!  Never mind the fact that she didn’t have a sore throat.  I found it hard to get angry at her because she was so clearly on a sugar high, bouncing from the bed to my head to the floor to my shoulders to the ceiling fan and back again.

Normally, as a concerned pet owner, I would have worried and fretted about Lula eating an entire bag of Ricola, but she seemed fine.  That is until 3AM.  When she yakked all over her side of the bed.  And then proceeded to clean it back up.  It’s really disgusting that dogs eat their own vomit, but also, free clean-up!  *gag*

Last night on my run, at the last stretch before I hit Wilshire and head back home, a guy who works in one of the restaurants was standing on the sidewalk having a cigarette.  He called out to me, “You run every day!” And then he started jogging in place, “Is good exercise!”  I got a little sad that I’m finally being recognized by someone on my route.  Then I busted around the bend and flew across 6th Street and some teenagers on skate boards yelled, “Yo, that dog is fast!  That dog is the best!”  And I have to assume they were talking about Lula, because when she stretches out into her longest gait she looks rad.  And I got even sadder because I’m going to miss those skate boarding kids in their skinny jeans and floppy hair.

I have two more nights in 201.  Two more runs in my urban oasis.  I’m going to miss the brick wall and the quiet mornings padding five feet to the bathroom, and five feet back to the kitchen in my underwear while all of Koreatown looks on.  I think Koreatown is going to miss the white lady with the ratty underwear trudging around her small apartment.  But that’s ok, Koreatown, I’ll make sure to visit every once in a while to smell the human feces and see the garbage strewn streets!

It’s all beginning and ending at once.  Mr. F told me a while ago that the Romans didn’t see the future as something that lies in front of you waiting for you to discover it, but as a wave rushing up behind you.  I couldn’t agree more.

Wow, black really is slimming! And boob minimizing! Also, who is that lady? She kind of looks like an east-sider. All she needs is an exciting arm tattoo and some kind of alternative form of transportation and she’s set! Bonus points if she makes her own clothing. Hipster ahoy!

Over the summer I went through a bit of a phase. There was a lot of drinking and a lot of smoking, a lot of exercise and not a lot of eating. I lost about 5 pounds on top of the 7 or so I had already lost from the break-up. One day I went to Catherine’s house for our walk and she told me I was looking awful and sunken and that I needed to eat. I took that as a compliment. Los Angeles can do that to a person.

Then Mr. F came home and we would go out to dinner. I would order a glass of wine or a martini and he would order a Scotch, his meal and an appetizer. Every night he would ask me if I was eating that night and every night I would say I was drinking my dinner. He quickly figured out (smart!) that if he ordered certain things I wouldn’t be able to control myself and I’d have a bite. Or seven. Hello, asparagus drenched in butter! Come to mama, mashed potatoes! So, the 5 pounds I lost from not eating turned into 0. And I was back to only 7 pounds lost.

Then I quit smoking. And kept drinking. And started eating again. Smokers lose their taste buds, but once smokers stop smoking things start smelling and tasting delicious. So, the 7 pounds I lost from the break-up were almost back, and that would have bothered me if I wasn’t getting laid so often. Yay, sex endorphins!

But a couple of weeks ago, I started getting a little sad around the edges. The one tried and true method I have of getting rid of the ’sad around the edges’ feeling is exercise and whole grains and veggies. So now, as a non-smoker, non-drinker, every night exerciser, whole grain and veggie eater, I’m back down 6 pounds.

Lesson? Never quit smoking.

Ha! Just kidding. The lesson is, wear black until it makes you sad enough to get your ass in gear. Bonus, it’s slimming!

OK, fine. The real lesson is (After School Special Alert!) - Not eating is only a temporary fix, it only works while you’re not eating. Also, it makes you dizzy and kind of grumpy and people say you look sallow and bad. The best way to lose weight and keep it off sensibly avoid most meat and dairy (but not to the detriment of getting enough protein, hello, Wild Boar Bacon!), eat whole grains and colorful veggies, and most of all have lots and lots of sex, er… exercise every night.