Awkwardly Social

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?”

It’s so easy to look at a tv show and give notes.  People make livings doing that.  They get to sit there and say what could be done better.  And then we, the people doing the behind the scenes part, have to make it better.  It can be really hard to do that, because sometimes you’re not sure if what they want is actually making it better.  But also it can be really great to have someone who’s not completely entrenched with the material just sit back from their safe distance and say, “Don’t need.  Lose this scene.”  “Story not tracking until Act 3.” or, “Not enough sexy, let’s add some fun into act 2.”

I was thinking about how I would hate to sit through a notes session on my own life.  How there would be complete sections that someone would say, “Lose, doesn’t move story ahead.”  Or, “Why is this scene here?  Repetitive.”  Or, “This is your A story?  Why is it being introduced at the end of Act 2?”

If I look at my life like a 4 Act, 22 minute 30 second episode of reality TV, I would have a lot of story notes myself.   My story is tracking right, it’s just not tracking quickly enough.  I am trying to get pregnant right as I’m also trying to get my career into full swing.  That gives great potential for conflict, but I actually have to live this life, not watch it on TV.  I spend a lot of time looking at story outlines on neatly typed 3×5 cards on huge corkboards, and I’m starting to realize I might have fucked up my act breaks.  That I’m pushing too much story into Act 3.  That Act 4 is always the shortest act and that Act 3 needs to bring the tension to a head then have some fun with it.  That the way I’ve designed my story it’s all leading up to this great Act 2 act break, and if everything goes as planned in the field, Act 3 will have great drama and conflict with a really awesome Act 4 resolution.  The thing is, I have no idea how to get there to that act break.  I cannot control when I get pregnant, or get a job.  Not to mention once I get to Act 3, I have no idea how to balance work, family, creative life, social life and still have time to ride bikes with Seth on a Sunday afternoon.

I don’t regret my act 1, and even though my act 2 took a story detour for a while, I’m really loving this second half of it.  I just don’t know how it’s going to work.  I don’t see a lot of people in my business, at my pay level, being able to do the things I’m going to want to do.  Which means, I’m going to have to sacrifice something, and I hope I manage to figure out what to sacrifice before it’s too late, because from what I’m seeing, the way it’s designed is that people with kids don’t have both parents working 10-12 hour work days.  And I sure as hell am not giving up my 10 hour work day.  I actually like what I do.  I like being there.   And, yes, everyone seems to think that will change once I have a baby, that I’ll want to be home more, but what if it doesn’t?  What if I still like 10 hour work days?  Will my children be ADHD monsters who date hitters (or worse, actors…) because mom liked work better than them, and dad is dead because mom married someone 21 years older than her? Or fuck, what if I can’t even have kids?

These are things I guess I should have thought about while I was dorking around in Film School.  It’s so embarrassing now to think about how much time I dorked around there.  Or god, how much time I was obsessed with getting shit faced drunk in crap bars in crap parts of Los Angeles with crap boys.  But these are the things I can’t change.  This is the story line that’s being shot.  I’m just going to have to make it work in the cutting room.  I hope there won’t be too many notes, and I hope they mostly say, “More sexy,” or, “Up the fun here.”  Those are my favorite ones to get.  And they’re ones I know how to address.

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.

Seth said to me, “I think you’ll have terrible morning sickness.  No reason, I just think you will.”  Then he said morning sickness was caused by the baby pressing on your stomach.  I crinkled my brow and told him I was pretty sure it was because of hormones, not because of stomach pressing.  So we googled it.  I was right.  Then I said, “I think women have to pee more because of the baby pressing on your bladder,” and he said, “Oh, yeah, that’s what I was thinking of.”

Then we googled the Pink Hotel in Bermuda because a friend of his recommended it.  We decided La Vita e Bella in Tulum was much more our speed, even if it doesn’t have room service.  If I get pregnant in Mexico, I promised I would consider naming the baby Tulumla.  There is no harm in promising you’ll consider something.

I googled progesterone, trying to find out if men had it too.  I still don’t have the answer to that.

I googled a hotel in Cabo and after looking at the pictures for two seconds realized we shot there, then I had to google the name of our show with the name of the hotel to make sure I was right.

I’m off to google places to run in our neighborhood.  It’s about time I got out of bed.

I’m on hiatus at the moment.  I like saying that.  “I’m on hiatus!”  It adds a positive twist to my current unemployment situation.  And since my 2nd episode aired last Sunday, and we’re waiting to hear if we get a second season, it is actually true.  We TV people are so fancy with our hiatuses (hiati?) and our 2nd seasons and our episodes on TV.  In fact, today I actually had a “lunch meeting” with a real producer and pitched ideas to him and he acted like I wasn’t a total moron.  It felt like a real thing even if it was Seth’s best friend and I am just the girlfriend who was there to act like a reality tv expert.  Maybe one day, I’ll get paid again to have story meetings.  (Hire me! I promise I’m very fun and talented and you won’t ever be bored in a room with me.  I can hula hoop!)

I’m trying to get some other writing done, but of course, I have an interim gig lined up already and my first week off has slipped away, and by this time next week I’ll be swamped.  These are good things.  Yay!  But I’m not getting any closer to finishing that great American screenplay/documentary/novel/short story that I was supposed to be working on. C’est la vie!

Nothing much else has happened other than that time on Cinco de Mayo when I was supposed to meet some friends at a bar, saw that it was crowded, couldn’t find parking, went to a different bar, found parking and then started to accuse Seth of having rotten kids, started crying when Seth assumed that I meant he was a rotten dad, and fell asleep worried I was not only going to have to find a job but also a new place to live because he was going to leave me and Lula would probably prefer to stay with him now that she’s picked a favorite and the favorite is him.

Needless to say, I don’t think Seth is a rotten dad, I do think his kids are sometimes rotten (I also admit that being a kid myself, I am sometimes rotten and I don’t blame my parents… much…), and he didn’t make me move out, and we are still very much in love, but I haven’t heard from my friends I was supposed to meet so I guess they hate me.  Phew and boo!

My other concern of the moment is that I am interviewing for jobs, something I haven’t had to do in a while, and I worry about my google results and how people will find this page if they’re really looking and what they’ll think when they do.  I’ve tried to make it less findable, and for the most part it is.  There are some dead ends that if cross-referenced a savvy person could navigate through.  But I’m fine with that.  I’ve made my bed.  And here I am, as we speak, in my pajamas, laying in it.

I ate ice cream for dinner.   Someone get me a wheel chair, I’m getting too fat for these pants.

Oh god, this is not ending well.   I need to put this baby to bed.