take a memo

Until when

2006-05-16T17:24:20Z

The white box is staring at me and I realize that I really don't miss doing this as much as I thought I would.

If I were still writing here, I'd write about that castle, Aragonese, off Ischia, where I'd like to live, with the unfinished church and the wild house-cats and the grape vines and the nuns' death toilets and the gelato cafe at the top.

I'd write about the witch doctor on Olive Street, the bruja, who cured my dog by helping to dislodge The Demon Ass Rope.

I'd write about my new love for baseball and how I understand ERA and GB now and how I'm still looking forward to a Dodgers game.

I'd write about my brother graduating Medical School and how I flew all the way to Tampa just for one day to see him walk.

But I'm not writing here anymore... because the moment for courage arrived a few months ago. I just neglected to talk about it here.

I needed a new direction to take. I needed to stop doing what was safe and easy. I needed to consider the fact that just because I wasn't private about my life for so long doesn't mean I have to continue to be an open book. I needed to consider that some people in my life ARE private.

It all came down to, "Why am I doing this?"

The answer is because it was therapy and I liked the attention. But when you don't need the attention anymore, it becomes exhausting.

There are a finite amount of books I have time to read before I die. And places I'll visit. And words I'll say or write.

So I considered starting a new website.

"What do you want your site to accomplish?" my closest confidante asked me back in February.

I tried to answer that question:

"I want it to be a think-tank for people like me who are searching for purpose. I want it to be a literary piazza of musings and essays from people who have managed to find glimpses in their everyday life of what we're supposed to be doing while we're here.

"I want it to be the answer for everyone leading lives of quiet desperation. I want it to be Paris in the 20's. I want it to be Concord, Massachusetts. No, even better, I want it to be Walden Pond.

"And then I want there to be a huge corner of the site dedicated to body image and how beauty has somehow come to mean just the way we look. I want to talk about the roles we have as women: an old-fashioned domestitician, a sex goddess, and a breadwinner. As importantly, I want to know what men think and how they see their roles.

"Oh, and I want another huge corner of essays about being alone or being part of a couple. I want people to write about never having children or resenting their children or trying desperately to conceive children. I want people to write about their travel experiences, whether it was a trip to Italy or a trip to a local swap meet.

"And philanthropy! I want essays about how important it is to find a cause, whatever cause speaks to you, and support it.

"And there'll be book reviews and movie reviews and website recommendations.

"In everything posted, by me and by others, I want to clearly see purpose.

"I want this website, my website, to be a home page for the thinking and feeling person."

But. There's always a but.

But the rub is that I can't figure out a way to do that and not expose raw bits of myself, or ignore pieces of my day, or censor out things that must be private.

Maybe I'll figure out how to do it. Maybe I won't. Until I figure it out though, know that I'm still writing. I'm ridiculously happy. I'm egregiously busy.

So this isn't The End.

Or goodbye, because no one likes goodbye.

It's until we meet again.

Stay tuned.

Learning to Sink

2006-01-17T05:27:24Z

Let's get you dressed, the man says to me, taking gear out of milkcrates.

First comes the wetsuit. I wear a faded gray, Mens Large, and struggle to pull it up my legs, still wet from the swimming test. I swam a couple of laps and then treaded water for fifteen minutes. I assume I passed because now he's getting me dressed.

I put blue fins on my feet and work my snorkle into the rubber loops attached to a face mask while the man continues to toss things out of the crates.

You need a weight belt. How much do you weigh?

What? Um... I don't know.

The man is already loading two pound metal squares into the pockets of something that looks like a fanny pack that I will strap around my waist. It's sixteen pounds and the blocks dig into my hips.

This is your BC. Your buoyancy compensator.

The man hands me what looks like a ski vest with tubes hanging off of it. The man is balding and wears coach's shorts and he seems tired of all of the equipment. I am, too. It's heavy and there's too much to remember.

The vest gets attached to the fifty pound tank and I slip everything on like a backpack. I feel, for a moment, that I might topple backwards. An octopus of black rubber rubes hang in front of my shoulders.

The class is three weeks long. Tuesday nights we're in the class room and Thursday nights we're in the pool.

Two nights ago I learned the depth chart and how to calculate how long it takes to ascend from certain depths for certain minutes. It's all simple algebra. Then there's Nitrogen Narcosis. Narced, the man calls it. And The Bends. Also called Caisson's Disease because of those poor men in the diving bells building the Brooklyn Bridge.

When I am all frogged out, the man sticks a black rubber mouthpiece between my lips and I have my first breath of tank air. I always imagined it would taste stale and I would feel claustrophobic, but it doesn't and I don't.

The trick now is to walk thirty feet, with the fins and the mask and a hundred pounds of gear strapped to me. I toddle along cautiously.

The man laughs. Wait till you have to stand on the back of a boat that's being tossed in six foot waves, he says.

I reach the side of the pool, thinking I'd ease myself in slowly, but the man has other plans. Hold on to your mask and your regulator, he tells me.

What's the reg---?

He pushes me into the pool and I realize the regulator is the mouthpiece. It gets pulled from my mouth as I hit the water and then I'm breathing normal air again as I bob on top of the water. I realize my vest, my BC, is filled with air like a life preserver.

The man gets in the pool with me, with his shorts and t-shirt on, and says that I'm getting ready to go down and I need to let the air out of the vest slowly.

I don't know how to do that and he shows me to raise the little pump and soon, I'm descending into the twelve foot depths of the Lake Brantley High School pool.

I land with a clunk on the bottom of the pool near the drain and I sit there, Indian-style, and take it all in.

It's nice down there. I've been swimming since I was a few months old and I've never leisurely sat underwater before, not caring to come up for air.

I don't feel the weight of the gear anymore. I don't feel the weight of myself anymore. The man is up there, treading water, motioning to me, I think, but I don't look at him.

The only thing I hear is my own breathing, mechanical like Darth Vader, but so effortless.

On the exhales, the bubbles are gorgeous. I see myself reflected in the large ones, a creature from another part of the planet, wondering how exciting it will be to see fish staring back at me.

How to Forgive Yourself

2006-01-16T04:30:28Z

Book Review: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

When was the last time you read a book that brought you to tears? I'm an easy crier, but I don't remember being moved to this degree by something I've read in a long time.

Because of this engaging book, I have human images of places I've only read about in newspapers over the past few years... Kabul, The Khyber Pass, Jalalabad, Islamabad.

I understand the Muslim class structure a little better: the main character, Amir, was a Sunni and the person he was closest to in his childhood, Hassan, was a Shi'a, also called Hazara. Amir was rich and went to school. Hassan was his illiterate servant. And although they were the best of friends, Amir could never call Hassan "friend."

I have a broader understanding of Afghani politics over the past thirty years: The story begins with the last days of the monarchy and the overthrow of the King in 1973 and shows us life in Kabul before the Russians invaded, only to be replaced by the Taliban, driving around in their little red Toyota trucks.

But these events are just a backdrop to a personal tale. What this extraordinary book does best is explore relationships--father to son, and son to himself--to understand what it means to redeem and forgive yourself. I cared about these characters, most of all, Amir, because he was flawed and so very human:

Then I realized something: That last thought had brought no sting with it. I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.

Hosseini's spare prose is simple and haunting. Some plot points seem outlandishly coincidental and some details gratuitous, but I'm willing to overlook them.

I read this book in an afternoon and wished it lasted longer.

And I admit that I had to put it down, briefly, twice, due to my own tears.

Middle School or Middle Age

2006-01-15T01:14:41Z

It's strange to read about your crappy old middle school in a newspaper twenty-two hundred miles away.

This was my school for three miserable years back in the early 80's: Mine and at least a few other people I know who read this page. Someday my niece will go there.

It wasn't such a miserable place to be, just a horrible age to be.

It isn't about a particular school though... it's about that tragic desperation that people feel, at that age and at any other age, that drives them to do things like this.

“He said ‘I hope I die today because I don't really like my life.’”

And they spelled Milwee wrong. It's only one "L".

A Million Little Feces

2006-01-10T02:30:26Z

Book Review: A Million Little Pieces by James Frey

I had to read it. It's a social phenomenon. People at work talking about it. People on airplanes. People in waiting rooms. People on the internets.

On Christmas morning, I unwrapped my copy from my sister Lisa, and my other sister, fl_chrissy unwrapped one copy from me and ANOTHER copy from my brother. As siblings, apparently, it was important that we read this book.

I surrendered. I was powerless against it. I took inventory. I made amends. I spent a whole Sunday reading it cover to cover.

No, you can't put it down. Not because it's so good and so powerful, but because you can't wait to see what tall tale James Frey spins next in his supposed non-fiction memoir.

How could he have duped millions of people with this hyperbolic drivel? Are we all so starved for stories of people with lives worse than our own? Or is it because of the brainwashing of Oprah's Book Club machine?

The story takes place at a rehab center (presumably Hazelden) that has the best recovery record of any rehab center in the world. Seventeen percent of people who go through the program will stay sober. Only seventeen percent. This is staggering to me as one of the few truths in the book.

As readers we are expected to swallow unbelievable circumstances:

Dentistry like root canals done without novacaine but rather by clutching tennis balls? And what dentist would perform such an operation?According to a couple of doctors I've talked to, a shot of a local anesthetic would be perfectly fine. What would happen if he needed major surgery? Would they give him a wallet to bite on?

On a plane, with a hole in his cheek, no front teeth, full of blood and vomit, unconscious and unattended?

Mobsters and judges pulling strings for him?

The crack house rescue?

Ridiculous anecdotes and details aside, I found Frey's writing style to be lazy and repetitive:

"Bayonets of Pain. The Fury. Blood. Vomit. Blood. Vomit." We GET it.

Further, the lack of structure, randomly capitalized letters, and punctuation became tedious.

This book is insulting to recovering addicts and their families. It's insulting to 12-steppers. It's insulting to anyone with cognitive skills. I'd even say it's insulting to mobsters and crack-whores.

Frey's biggest addiction seems to be for drama and narcissism. He's always the hero. Everyone wants to be his friend except the crazy guy. Every girl is beautiful. Everyone, including an old priest, wants to have sex with him. He is above the rules of the rehab center. In every situation, he beats us over the head with his subtextual, overcompensating comments about how tough he is.

I'm not going to include the link to the Smoking Gun's six page expose on all the ways his book his fiction but it's an interesting, yet not surprising read.

To those reviewers who contend that the book, marketed as fiction, would get lost and never sell, I heartily agree. I've read that he first tried to publish it as fiction several times and then "retooled" it so that it became a memoir.

Well he got the "tool" part right.

The One with the Resolutions for Workplace People

2006-01-06T22:19:37Z

"Everyone's alive! Party at the church!"

"No, wait did we say everyone's alive? Sorry, we meant to say that everyone's dead!"

In light of the West Virginian miner tragedy this week, I tried to think of a time when I was waiting for news on something and I finally got really great news and celebrated and then a couple of hours later was hit with the real, bad news.

The only thing I could remember (thankfully) was a time when the opposite happened.

I desperately wanted out of my job about six years ago, and I interviewed with the YMCA. Late on a Friday afternoon, the director called me and left a message on my voicemail that said, "Congratulations, we'd like to hire you at a starting salary of rerty-four thousand a year."

"Rerty-four" was all I heard.

I had everyone I knew listen to that voicemail that weekend. Some people said, "She said thirty-four," and other people said, "She said forty-four." Back then, that amount of money would make a big difference as to whether I would take the job. I was making forty-one at the job I wanted to leave.

And even though I had a mortgage to pay and mouths to feed (mostly me and my dogs), I decided that I could scrape by on 34 if I needed to because happiness at your job is important and I was so tired of working with the good-ole boy back-stabbing lecherous jackasses of (should I say it?) the largest community college sytem in Central Florida.

So I called on Monday and said, "Yes, I'll take the job."

Some people might ask, "Why didn't you just clarify the salary with her before you accepted it?"

Well if I did THAT, then I wouldn't be telling this story right now, would I? Plus I used to feel very meek about such things (not anymore, thankyouverymuch). At my very first job, I didn't even know what I was making until I got my first paycheck, but I was so proud to see my name on that check that I barely noticed the number. Also? I had business cards!

I went in to HR a few days later to fill out my paperwork and saw a big "44,000" printed in the box on the last page and the rest is career history.

Still I'm very sorry for the miners' families. While I do think such a job is fraught with danger and death shouldn't be an enormous surprise (it's a career along the lines of "grenade polisher"), I sympathize with the incompetent way the news was presented to them.

It's 2006, why do we even HAVE miners anymore? Aren't there, like, mining robots?

****

Although I'm not going to directly reveal any of the 2006 resolutions I made for myself, I do feel comfortable in revealing the resolutions I made for other people:

1. The Workplace Parking Garage

We resolve to park inside the lines of the tiny spaces so that no innocent persons will receive fake tickets for shabby parking from the Workplace Rent-a-Cops. We also realize that the indicator "Compact Cars Only" does not include Ford Expeditions.

Three times in 2005, I received such tickets. I pulled in, evenly between two cars, and when I left in the evening, mine was one of the only cars left in the row and the chassis of my car straddled a parking spot dividing line. There was a little pink ticket on my windshield and the next day, my boss called me in for a conversation about proper parking procedures.

(Notice how I worked "chassis" into that passage?)

2. The Workplace Cafeteria

We resolve to learn how to make oatmeal and implement this knowledge daily, rather than trying to pass off our usual wallpaper paste with a couple of oats floating around. We also resolve to investigate the laxative effects of the Cafe Coyote Chili, the Taco Salad, and all forms of baked fish.

In other oatmeal news, the cafeteria has new cash registers that actually take credit/debit cards. Woo-hoo! I can't tell you how many people this will please because who carries cash anymore?

So many times I've ladled out my soup and made my little salad, only to get up to the register and realize that I forgot to go to the ATM upstairs. Then I'm abandoning food, running through hallways, climbing stairs and what have you, to stand in that creepy vestibule and wait for the cash to spit out. And why is it so cold in there?

This morning, under the heading of All Things Awesome, there were post-it notes on all the registers: "No credit cards."

Unfortunately, the new equipment means they were forced to raise the price of oatmeal by TWO CENTS. My daily breakfast of oatmeal and coffee rose from $1.45 to $1.47. I'm going to have to rework my whole budget for the year.

3. The Workplace Custodian

I resolve not to empty people's trashcans (and scrutinize what is removed from said trashcans) more than one time per day. I realize it is annoying. I also realize that no one cares that the Olympics are going to be in China, how much my shoes cost, or how tall my son is, so I will stop interrupting people who are actually working to tell them about it.

Further, I will not take any items home that were once in trashcans. Still further, I will not abscond with old food or faux granite statues of Japanese ladies or The Tokyo Collection.

Let's start with these.

The bassoon. Play the bassoon.

2006-01-05T18:28:48Z

Happy 2006.

Yes, I made some resolutions, but I'm not going to spell them out specifically. They might become evident over time.

And thank you to morganaus for her kind words and reference to my last entry. Someday we'll meet and have a drink and realize how much we learn from each other by sharing this medium together.

****

I'm sitting on my portable radiator because I'm cold and I'm watching the Rose Bowl.

It's a good game: the best teams in the country trade scores back and forth. At half-time, the USC band comes out. Since I can remember, there are few things that stir my soul like a good marching band, live and loud, parading by with their fight songs and drum cadences.

As part of their novelty, the USC band, colloquially The Spirit of Troy, wears sunglasses. During the drum feature, they put their instruments on the ground and do a little dance. They stick their butts out, they rub their crotches. I bet this is their favorite part. Even the drum majors and the head conductor wiggle their Trojan capes.

I feel sad that the director of the televised event lets the sounds of the microphones from the cameras on the field spill into the main audio. Instead of hearing the entire band, we just hear Cheryl puffing her 2nd Clarinet part to tens of millions of households worldwide. There's her chubby cheeks pinched into thin lips squeaking her reed on the off-beats, trying desperately, desperately not to look into the camera that's in her face. It's only harmony though and it makes no sense, unless you've played 2nd Clarinet in a marching band.

Making rounds of the woodwinds, the camera then focuses on a fat piccolo player. Well, not fat. Let's just call her a bigger gal. She is me. I wonder if she has an afro under that push-broom hat. She, also, concentrates on not looking at the camera.

She probably has a crush on a tall trumpet player with dark hair and pale blue eyes. He's kind to her but he doesn't even know her name. If only she could see into the future and know that he will marry someone else and become a paper-pusher and have many kids and be bald by 30. If only she could know that she'll lose weight and stop getting those horrible perms and cancel the whole music major thing and go back to writing, where, years later, she'll learn who she is. If only she knew that this is the beginning and the end; that this means nothing and everything.

This marching band stuff is serious art. Don't look at the camera! Don't look down at your feet! Horns up! Mark time! Roll your feet! Eight paces between yard lines! Stop at the hash mark! And at the end of the grand finale, there's always a push, which was my personal favorite part, except it would mean so much more if I had been a brass player, so I could point the bell of my horn up at the pressbox and blow my own lips off at the end of "Live and Let Die" or "Hot Hot Hot."

It always looks slightly ridiculous when a big person plays a little instrument, or when a little person plays a big instrument. In sixth grade Beginning Band, when people are picking instruments that will stick with them for the rest of their life, I'd like to be a consultant. I'd like to tell them, "Don't pick the flute... every annoying girl you'll ever meet plays the flute, including me."

They'd ask, "Well what else is there?"

And I'd answer, "The bassoon. Play the bassoon. It's long and pretty and wooden with bright silver key tabs and it's so very Peter and the Wolf. It's edgy. Plus there are no bassoons in marching band, so you'd get to play something just as cool, like the cymbals or the xylophone."

My second choice would be the oboe. I'm partial to woodwinds: I'm feminine that way. I always thought it was slightly butch for girls to be in the brass section. Plus, it takes real power to be good at it. Girls who played the trumpet and trombone were never first chair or even first part and, remembering a couple of girls I knew, were mostly slutty tomboys.

I have a sister who was a brass, but she was French Horn/Mellophone, which is an entirely different beast, and she wasn't slutty nor was she a tomboy.

Texas comes on next. They are called The Showband of the West. I think calling Texas "the West" is stretching it. If Texas is the West, then we have no middle to the United States. Americans still measure states as if the Louisiana Purchase and all of the land-grabbing that followed never took place. Texas is halfway.

They play a Beatles medley and the color guard is out of synch more than it is in. They show Lance Armstrong and Matthew McConahey in the stands, nodding their heads. I can't bring myself to say anything nice about that burnt orange color, but I do like their cowboy hats and white tassels and fringe.

At Lyman High School, we were the Marching Greyhounds because the school was built next to a dog track. We wore white uniforms with blue and gold capes, sashes, ascots, and cumberbunds, and a strange blue felt, feathered cowboy hat. The uniform was described as "Swashbuckler" style in the catalog. What swashbucklers had to do with those poor skinny dogs chasing fake rabbits, I'll never know.

At Florida we were The Pride of the Sunshine. We wore these horrible traditional thick wool uniforms to sit in The Swamp and spell out G-A-T-O-R-S on the field. We had practice every day except Sunday and whenever we went anywhere, it took four buses.

On home game Saturdays, we'd march to a drum cadence (usually Spider) from Century Tower all the way to the big orange "F" in the middle of the field at Ben Hill Griffin stadium.

The little kids who came to the game with their parents would stand on the curb and dance and stomp their feet as we paraded by. The little boys would pretend to play the drums. The girls would stare at the flags and the batons and the sparkly instruments and swing their hips.

The years work out so that some of those kids could be in college now. Maybe some are in the band. Maybe a couple of awkward girls hold piccolos and want so badly to feel a part of something and try so desperately to fit in with people who are all trying the same thing.

If only they knew.

A Sweatpants Christmas, Part Two

2005-12-20T05:46:12Z

Part one is here.

Within an hour of arriving at my grandmother’s house, I was in full respiratory distress. The air was so thick and hot and moist and dirty it was like I was wearing a coal miner’s left lung as a ski-mask. Even though it was freezing outside, I kept sneaking breaths out on the “porch,” an uninsulated room that wasn’t exactly outdoors, but the air was crisp and refreshingly void of THC. I ended up losing my voice. Actually, it wasn't completely lost, it just morphed into this sexy, husky voice.

It always amazes me that no matter how old I am, no matter what I've accomplished in my life, whenever I find myself in a childhood situation, like my grandmother's house, or even my parent's house these days, I completely regress to nine years old. I was talking with a friend the other day about how easy it is to forget who we've become and where our journeys have taken us when we're around our family.

And much the way I spent my childhood, I spent the day with my grandmother following orders –

1. Find the valise. Suitcases are called valises in Babci's house.

2. Wrap every single item to be packed in the valise in a plastic bag. Then she decided to pack a couple of extra plastic bags, and I wrapped those in other plastic bags.

3. Unpack everything and repack four times.

4. Eat all food that could possibly spoil during the two weeks she'd be in Florida.

5. Watch copious episodes of Murder She Wrote and Matlock and every senior citizen's favorite show: the local news.

My cousin Scott came up sometime during the afternoon (I had lost all sense of time) as Babci had stacked two blueberry yogurts in front of me as a lunch.

"Don't eat those yogurts, Deanna. She's had em for six months," my cousin whispered in my ear as he greeted me with a hug and kiss.

Ah, I guessed the two that I already ate were of the same vintage.

That evening, my cousin decided to rescue me and take me to his friend's restaurant in the city for a party. He made this decision after he saw me settling in to watch Hobo's Christmas on Lifetime while explaining the plot to my grandmother.

And because it was five degrees, Babci forced me to wear her fur coat. I had no say in the matter. I was nine years old. The coat: it was from her overweight days. So there I was, off to a big party with my fun cousin on a pre-Christmas NYC night, wearing my grandmother's black mink jacket, size 18 short.

I looked like a negro yeti. But it did keep me warm. And the food was delicious and the party was fun and I met famous people.

We got home early for NYC standards (about 1 a.m.) and Babci was waiting up for me. I was in trouble. Although all she could really do was make me feel bad by shaking her head at me and looking very disappointed that I broke a curfew I wasn't even aware of having. I ran into Uncle Sonny in the hallway on his way to the bathroom. Apparently he had filled all of his bottles. That was the only time I saw him during my visit.

The next morning our flight to Florida left from LaGuardia. Babci told everyone she met, starting with the skycap at the curb, that she didn't need to be searched and that she had been making this trip for thirty-four years. I just pushed the wheelchair.

She'd point to me with her cane:

“She’s 34. I’ve been flying down to Florida for Christmas on this airline for thirty-four years.”

Well, no you haven’t. Delta Song was just invented two years ago. Before that, you flew Delta. Before that, in the 70’s and early 80’s, you flew Eastern. But I just pushed the wheelchair because she's my grandmother and I love her.

The security guy just smiled at the both of us and said, “Have a good flight.”

We met a man on the plane who sat with us in our bank of three seats. He was mid-60's and on his way to visit his grandchildren.

"Find out if he's single," Babci whispered loudly to me.

"Isn't he a little young for you?" I asked her.

"For me? No! For you!"

We arrived in Florida a couple of hours later and I looked around at my first Christmas home after moving to California... there was my newlywed sister, my other sister with my darling niece, my brother with his whole being a doctor thing, and me, wearing my mom's sweatpants because Delta Song had lost my luggage.

"What a great time I had with Deanna! It was the best!" Babci told everyone over the next week. She'd tell and retell the stories of us packing together and watching her programs on televisions and always conveniently leave out the part where I came home late.

I didn't have extravagant gifts to lavish on people. I didn't have children to fill the empty places around the table. All I had were those sweatpants, a worn Atari's t-shirt I found in my brother's old room, and whatever was in my purse, except for my keys.

But I did have my memories with Babci. She's my grandmother and I love her.

*

This is the first year Babci won't be able to make the trip to Florida. Christmas won't be the same without her.

The best thing you will read all week

2005-12-15T18:11:23Z

Writing reviews at Amazon has become a new outlet for me over the past three or four days.

I'm really lousy at writing reviews and instead of always saying exactly that, I decided to start practicing to get better. (I also recently hired a personal trainer to kick my ass and make me cry three times a week. I guess I'm in self-improvement and exploration-out-of-my-comfort-zone mode.)

I'm not really reviewing books and movies (and toys) in any specific order. I just click around and if I've read something (or seen something) and feel like writing about it, I do.

Last night I clicked on The Great Gatsby and wondered how I could begin to write a short review of one of the greatest novels of all-time?

So I googled the phrase: "what makes a good book good"

(You can do it, too, and see for yourself the results.)

The very first result is a link to this book, coincidentally, on Amazon.

If you're too lazy to click, I'll just go ahead and tell you the title of the book:

How to Good-Bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way?
(Paperback)
by Hiroyuki Nishigaki

Naturally, I had to know more.

I read the book description.

It's better than you could ever imagine.

Here's a direct copy, but again I suggest you click above to see for yourself:

Book Description

I think constricting anus 100 times and denting navel 100 times in succession everyday is effective to good-bye depression and take back youth. You can do so at a boring meeting or in a subway. I have known 70-year-old man who has practiced it for 20 years. As a result, he has good complexion and has grown 20 years younger. His eyes sparkle. He is full of vigor, happiness and joy. He has neither complained nor born a grudge under any circumstance. Furthermore, he can make love three times in succession without drawing out.

In addition, he also can have burned a strong beautiful fire within his abdomen. It can burn out the dirty stickiness of his body, release his immaterial fiber or third attention which has been confined to his stickiness. Then, he can shoot out his immaterial fiber or third attention to an object, concentrate on it and attain happy lucky feeling through the success of concentration.

If you don't know concentration which gives you peculiar pleasure, your life looks like a hell.

Uh. Wow.

Hey, I can buy this book along with Golden Fountain: The Complete Guide to Urine Therapy!

Now you know what I'll be doing next time I'm in a boring meeting or in a subway. Also, who DOESN'T need their dirty stickiness burned out?

*

And since you already have that Amazon page open, click this and read my reviews and then please click YES when it asks if you found the review helpful.

(You might have to go to the actual page of the item from my reviews page, but it's not hard to find.)

I need "Helpful" votes if I'm going to raise my Reviewer Rank from 1127637. I'm competitive and would like to at least get up into the six digit range.

Also, if you have an Amazon account, add me as a friend. I need friends. Hi.

A Sweatpants Christmas, Part One

2005-12-15T00:07:38Z

Last year, I made the decision that everything was going to be perfect.

It wasn't, beginning with the airport shuttle that forgot to pick me up.

I figured out how to call a cab and thankfully, over-tipped the driver because a few days later, I would realize that I left my keys in his car. If I had stiffed him, he might have just tossed them out the window on The 110.

I flew all night to Dulles and then LaGuardia. It was five degrees when I landed. Fahrenheit. I was supposed to be met at the airport, but I wasn't. I figured out how to get to my grandmother's house and told a cab driver. I overtipped him, too, after he brought my bags up all of the steps.

Being "the single one" travelling from far away, I showed up in Queens as a family duty to collect my grandmother to spend the holiday with the rest of the family in Florida as she's been doing every year since I was born. It would take a couple of days to help her pack and get ready for her trip. We call my grandmother Babci. (Bob-chee) That's Polish. She's 94.

The house is on 67th Street in Woodside. It's a one-way street coming from around the corner on 66th Street. Locals call it "The U Block". For a while back in the 70's and 80's, Babci was the President of The U Block Association. She was somewhat of a dictator and she tended to make up rules that only benefited her, for example, she wanted to install a stop sign just before her driveway, so she would have the right-of-way when backing up. That sort of thing. She quit the post citing "too many strangers moved into The U-Block" but we believe the real story is that she was impeached after she was caught poisoning a neighbor's tree.

Don't bring this issue up with her, though, unless you want an earful. According to her, she was well within her rights poisoning the tree. In the summer, its berries attracted birds from all over Queens. They'd stay in the tree all day eating berries and shitting all over her driveway and car. The tree deserved to die.

There are three apartments in Babci's house.

My cousin Scott, an actor who is my age, lives in the basement. For years he starred on Broadway as Tony in "Tony and Tina's Wedding". He is exactly a blonde Joey Tribbiani. He was also in a reality show about people and their dogs living in New York City that aired on Animal Planet. He owns an enormous Harley and is a member of a Harley owners club that meets locally and raises money for causes like breast cancer or missing kids.

Scott grew up with dyslexia that wasn't diagnosed until his late teens. I like the way he always combines "make believe" and "pretend" into "make pretend". He also told me that one of the deciding factors for him in the election last year was "the cyclone issue." I looked at him, confused, thinking there might be a specific disaster issue that I hadn't heard about, until he explained: "you know, where they want to make copies of youse." Scott is genuine and funny and loyal as hell.

Another family lives on the first floor, but for years, Auntie Adele lived there until she died. Adele and Babci were married to brothers and once their husbands died, they became bitter enemies. Now Babci has outlived everyone, including her thirteen brothers and sisters. She's barely four-eleven and Scott calls her "Yoda".

Babci lives on the second floor with her son, my uncle, Andrew, who everyone calls "Sonny".

Uncle Sonny is 70 and he's never moved out of his mother's house. He never married either, although he was close a couple of times, most recently with a bipolar lady called Cindy. Cindy accused my mother of telling everyone that she (Cindy) wasn't wearing underwear at a family event. That's the only thing I remember about her. I don't know if she was wearing underwear or not. My hunch is no.

When the family wicker furniture business was successful twenty or thirty years ago, Uncle Sonny spent most of the cash on blow and hookers. Now he sits in his bedroom all day with his satellite tv sorting his sports and porn card collections, smoking weed, and pissing in bottles.

When I walked into Babci's apartment, the pot smoke hung like a curtain at the door, courtesy of Uncle Sonny's first pipe of the morning. Immediately I was high and disoriented, and Babci had me sitting down at the kitchen table to feed me breakfast. She gave me a piece of toasted pound cake. When people get old, they toast everything.

As Babci was force-feeding me the Entenmann's and rummaging around in the refrigerator for other goods to shove down my gullet, she shouted in her gravelly old lady voice, toward Sonny's room:

"Sonny! Shut your goddamn door! Did you eat all my yogurts?" She pronounces it "yo-gutts". I thought to myself, I need to be writing this down.

"Fuck you!" He shouted back.

Yes, I definitely needed to be writing this down.

(To be continued)

Bathroom Bras and Porn

2005-12-12T20:44:14Z

I was in the restroom at Workplace on Friday, stall door closed, fastening the belt on my trousers, when I heard someone enter.

I heard belongings drop on the vanity, I heard the ruffling of clothes and something being unzipped. And then I heard... THIS... in a soft, sexy woman's voice:

"Oooo, you're so pretty. Mmmhmmm. That's right. You look good. Look how pretty you are. Ooooo."

Jigga-whaaa?

I'm sure I don't have to tell you how hard I was stifling my own laughter, in the church-giggles method: whole hand over whole mouth and whatever you do, don't snort.

There have been times where I, too, thought I was alone in the bathroom and may have been, well, less than discreet, and peed loudly or whatever. We've all done it. When we think we're alone, suddenly the bathroom becomes our office.

Never, though, have I talked sexy to myself. In fact, with all honesty, I can say that I have NEVER talked sexy to MYSELF in any location in any manner for any reason.

"Yes, that's right. Show us how pretty you are. Mmmm. Yeah," I heard through the stall door.

Us? What? Maybe she's got a baby with her and I was mistaking gooey baby talk for sex talk.

Either way, I had to find out because I couldn't stay in the stall all day and I had a meeting I to attend. I composed myself and opened the door.

Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.

Let's just say it involved a 50-something lady with her shirt off and a see-through bra. She was startled a little to hear my door open and looked back at me and started playing with the straps of her bra. Her shirt was laying crumpled on the counter.

I performed the quickest hand-rinsing in history at the farthest-away sink without looking up at the mirror, not wanting to catch a glimpse of her, because her nipples? They seemed to FOLLOW me.

Ladies, have you ever ever seen witnessed such an act? Or, anonymously please, have you participated in such behavior?

(By "behavior" I mean public-restroom topless sex talk to your own nipples.)

And p.s. There was no baby.

****

In another awesome Workplace moment last week:

A phone number on a very important patient document (to call in case they have any questions about the gravity of the forms they are filling out) was transposed by mistake.

When you call the phone number, you hear:

"Welcome to Lusty and Busty. You must be eighteen years old to continue this call."

Nice!

****

Hey! Eureka!

This is why I'm destined to be a leader:

I recognize an opportunity to maximize resources, think outside of the box, be proactive and synergize:

We can get bathroom bra lady to run our sex-line!

****

In case there are any more karaoke parties in my future, please remind me of my new specialty:

Def Leppard.

If they had grammies for karaoke solo performance including choreography, there's no doubt I'd be nominated for my rendition of Pour Some Sugar on Me.

If they've no Def Leppard, I'll stick to a nice old-fashioned Total Eclipse of the Heart or Wooly Bully as long as I have my back-up singing gals.

A 90210 Christmas

2005-12-10T00:33:19Z

In Beverly Hills, a Christmas Tea for a couple of hundred society ladies, complete with cucumber sandwiches and salmon canapes and baby crab cakes and scones and gingerbread and sweet cheeses and carolers, costs my year's wages.

In the marble foyer, I find myself staring at the twenty-foot ceiling, realizing that even the crown molding has its own crown molding.

The Ladies show up in a flurry of Chanel suits and minks and make-up and dangling carats, chattering away about replastering their drawing rooms or their last trip abroad. Their hairstyles are elaborate and complicated. Each few strands are a different shade of come-hither blonde tossed up into a basket weave with flirty tendrils painstakingly removed.

Their faces are pulled taut and moist like seal skin; their eyes always look surprised under smoky lids. Their duck-lips are drawn even puffier into air-kissing pouts.

Their carefully french-manicured fingers sprout out of unapologetic rings. Even their simple crocheted ponchos are festooned with fur. They call purses "bags" and they smell like money.

Conversations are peppered with important names and hotspot locales. They call each other "darling" with a definite 'G' on the end and use the word "gorgeous" gratuitously. They take tiny bites of nothing and then announce they're stuffed.

A photographer for a glossy magazine called "Celebrity Socialites" works the room. I am slightly insulted that he asks for my picture in front of the Christmas Tree. I wonder if I'd be insulted if he didn't ask. I sneak out of the room as he's changing his film can. Ladies push each other out of the way to stand in front of mirrors before their portraits are made. They apply layer on layer of Dior gloss and smack their lips in approval of themselves.

The Ladies ritually ignore the brown people except to hand them their car keys or their dirty plates. The caterers are all brown people. The valets are all brown people. I'm a brown person, too, in my off-the-rack and on sale suit, my plain leather heels, and my red back-pack purse.

Their mates can't be men who are bewitched by beauty or brainy conversation. Does money make people so ugly?

Leaving early, I tip the valet with a donation I had intended for the charity the event was benefiting.

These ladies don't need my twenty bucks.

Another day, another dogsled

2005-12-07T20:57:07Z

Strange things have been happening at Workplace lately.

The other day, I rounded the corner in a corridor I've never been and there they were... three little people... dwarves, midgets, what have you... standing there, eating carrots.

And they weren't those fake pre-packaged baby carrots that everyone in Weight Watchers munches on. They were the old-fashioned long carrots with the greenery on the back end.

I'm usually good at handling myself around people with disabilities, however, in this case, I didn't know if I should make eye contact or just do that thing where I look like I'm preoccupied and stare straight ahead. Making eye contact requires looking down to the point of tilting my head down to see them, and it seems condescending. I suppose they're used to people looking down on them. I should have looked and smiled, but I didn't. I glanced long enough to notice that they were little and munching orange roots.

I think it was their sheer numbers that threw me off of my usually friendly game. That, and those damn Bugs Bunny snacks.

On another day, it smelled exactly like someone was tailgating in the hallway outside of our offices. We smelled hibachi hot-dogs and cold beer and potato chips.

We investigated high and low and could find no one grilling anything and no football games anywhere.

****

Today was the Workplace staff holiday lunch. On the menu:

1. Chicken Cordon Bleu (a traditional Christmas favorite (huh?), although I think some well-intentioned in-house catering person chose something French because our company was started, back in the day, by a group of nuns from Montréal. And p.s. so many references to Montréal lately!)

2. Rice Pilaf (smelled (and TASTED) like feet)

3. Mixed vegetables (which were surprisingly not as repulsive and plate-leaving as usual)

4. Pink Fluffy Salad (How can you call anything in which Cool Whip is the main ingredient a SALAD?!?)

5. Hard Christmas Tree Cookie (Hard but tasty)

The best part of the lunch was that we were handed a free 2006 Wall Calendar depicting the history of the order of sisters that founded Workplace and many other hospitals in all of the Western states:

Nothing like a fierce nun driving snow dogs to make you proud of your Workplace legacy. Who else can say their company was started by a sister on a sled? I heart my calendar.

****

My boss came into my office yesterday to use my typewriter. (Yes I have a typewriter. It's from college and it comes in handy sometimes for certain projects I do.)

I offered to type whatever it was for her, but she said no, because it involved typing in personal information like her weight.

So she typed away, and in that 15 minutes she was in my little hovel, I've never gotten so much work done in my life. All of those sociological studies are true: When we know people are watching us, we perform at our best levels.

****

Workplace hands every employee an annual survey in the Fall to rate their satisfaction. Last year I learned that:

1. It does no good to say how you really feel because nothing is going to change; and

2. If our department collectively generates an average score of less than 4 (on a scale of 1 to 5), we are required by the administration to form committees and come up with 'Action Plans' in order to "fix" the fact that not everyone is satisfied.

Now since I detest committees and we already have meetings about meetings, I realized that the best thing to do was to rate every category as a "5". I then encouraged all my co-workers to do the same. Some did.

Others felt that they should be honest and answered questions like:

"I would recommend Workplace to a friend" with a score of 2.

And now, we have to form a committee and an action plan so that in the future whoever rated that as a 2 (losers!) will increase their score.

Before you think I'm advocating dishonesty, I'm not. If someone has a problem, they should take it up personally with their supervisor. The Workplace-wide blind survey is not the place to solve problems. It's not your "chance" to get back at the man and give him low scores. What it is, is a chance to make everyone suffer.

Now everyone, including all of the people who followed instructions and marked all "5's" has to suffer.

Excuse me, I'm late for a meeting.

Hop in

2005-12-06T19:54:27Z

I'd like to read people the way Doris does.

You may know Doris - she drives a Club Car around Newark airport, meeting people at faraway gates to make sure they get to their connecting flights.

There she was, waiting in Park next to the monitors when I emerged, haggard at 5:15 a.m. local time, from the jetway of Gate Sixtysomething. The strawberry blonde rinse covering her gray and the navy-blue windbreaker and badge said, "I may be a grandma, but I'm in charge and I'll get you to where you need to be."

Doris read me like a book:

"Where are you headed?" she asked, before I could even glance at the monitors to figure out the next gate I had to find.

"Montreal," I said.

"107b. Hop in," she replied. I got the feeling she had memorized all of the gates of the connecting flights for that morning.

Maybe it was because her voice sounded so sure and I felt so uncertain. I hopped in, on the seat next to her.

I don't remember navigating inside a building so quickly. My hair was blown all around and my eyes dried out if I kept them open longer than a few seconds. People stared as we whizzed by. It made me feel important until I remembered that I always think of The Cart People as big losers who either get lost easily or have trouble walking a moderate distance or both.

As we raced through the terminal, Doris said things like:

"I don't use the horn. People are not animals. I ask them to move," and "I just know it in my gut when I see people who need a ride. I stop and ask them what gate and tell them to climb aboard. I read their body language."

On the way to 107b, we picked up three more people and dropped off two. Her parting words to the travelers were always the same, "Don't do anything I wouldn't do."

"What's in Montreal?" Doris asked, when we were alone. It was a long trip out to 107b and big loser or not, I was relieved that I followed her suggestion.

"I'm visiting someone," I told her.

"How long are you there?" she asked.

"Until early Monday."

"And you just came from Los Angeles?" she asked, remembering where she had originally picked me up.

"Yes."

"Ah. It's someone you love," she said.

"How can you tell?" I asked her.

"Because I never take someone from the long-haul gates to the commuter gates for a 48-hour visit, unless it's for something very important. You don't look sad, so it's not a funeral. You're not dressed for business and besides that, it's a weekend. But even if I didn't know any of that, I can tell by your face. Not many people walk around Newark airport at 5:30 a.m. with a gleam in their eye. You look like my granddaughter on Christmas morning."

It was the second time in a week someone told me I reminded them of their granddaughter and it made me feel proud. Granddaughters are some of the most loved people on earth.

When Doris dropped me off, she showed me where to get coffee without me having to ask. We parted with her words, "Don't do anything I wouldn't do."

As I waited for my flight to board, watching CNN Airport News in a loop and crocheting a scarf, I decided I want to be like Doris.

I want to notice essential things about people. I want to be matter-of-fact. I want to be a good communicator. I want to help people get to where they need to be. I want to know what people need before they do.

I'd put everyone important in that tiny little Club Car and off we'd zoom.

Come with me?

¿Quién es esa niña?

2005-11-30T23:07:55Z

I do this thing on airplanes where I appoint myself president of the row where I'm sitting.

People around me don't know this, however everyone wants a strong leader. People want someone to say it's fine to ask other people to move out of the way. People want someone to coordinate the trash gathering when the flight attendant is on her way with the cart. People want someone to show them how to use their screens and their remote controls and their tray-tables and to accept handouts (headphones, menus, snack-boxes) on their behalf when they are sleeping.

And so it was in Row 21, A through C, me being the "B", on the Air France flight from Paris to Los Angeles.

"A" was already seated when I found the row and stowed the Kenneth Coles. A's name was Will and he's a 5th year Architecture student at UCLA. Each time I meet an architect, I think of George Costanza, who was never an architect, but always wanted to be. Will is a fairer Jake Gyllenhal.

Besides President of the Row, I do another thing: I pick a prolific musician and proceed to sing their catalog of songs in my head for the entire flight. Even when I'm reading or doing puzzles or watching movies, I'm softly humming the songs. Sometimes people hear me.

This past Sunday was Madonna. A couple of weeks ago, on a flight from Florida, it was Guns and Roses. I must have sung forty-one renditions of November Rain.

Getting to the right gate at Charles DeGaulle had been a chore. All of the bragging I did with regard to the Kenneth Cole luggage a few entries ago, conveniently wheeled and stackable, was for naught when I was climbing out to the tarmac on that tiny, narrow staircase that folds out of the plane on a cold, rainy night.

another suitcase in another hall

I was inspired by Madonna earlier when I heard someone in the mob of people waiting at the gate to board the flight talking about San Pedro. Have you been, by the way? It's as gorgeous as she says. Hire a skiff to take you to the tiny island barely big enough for a restaurant called Capricorn.

¿cómo puede ser verdad?

"C" showed up shortly after me, put his bag in the overhead bin, sat down, and promptly fell asleep. He would sleep for the entire flight. His name, obviously, became The Sleeper.

Normally I wouldn't mind sitting beside The Sleeper, however, he was seated on the aisle, blocking in Will and me, and I hadn't had a chance to give my inaugural address and briefly review the rules as well as say, "I hope you don't mind if I disturb you when I have to get up to use the bathroom."

I met a girl who sang the blues and I asked her for some happy news

As the steward started up and down the aisle, I collected some snacks and a couple of bottles of water for The Sleeper and put them in the seat pocket for him. I passed things back and forth to Will and when we weren't provided with headphones and menus, pressed the call button to rectify the problem. I was master of my domain.

she's got herself a universe gone quickly

Once the meal cart started rolling, Will and I ordered beer and wine. And lots of water. And then they shut the cabin lights off, which spelled trouble because I had to GO.

It won't be easy, you'll think it strange

That's when I came up with The Plan, involving stealth acrobatics. There's no way I could have brushed past The Sleeper by scooting past his knees. He was tall and his knees were pushed up against the seat in front of him. No, I'd have to go over him.

I briefly discussed it with Will, who suggested I just let The Sleeper know what I was going to be doing, in case he woke up mid-stealth and became alarmed.

something's comin' over, mmm mmm

I tried to whisper to The Sleeper my plan, however he wasn't having any of it. He stirred, scratched his ear, and resumed snoring.

My bladder status was increasingly urgent, so I stood up in my seat (in only my stockinged feet) and aimed my left foot at the armrest on the aisle, on the other side of The Sleeper. I held onto the overhead bin to balance.

I was not ready for the fall

I found myself standing with my right foot in my own seat, my left foot on the aisle armrest and one hand raised, clutching the ceiling.

I looked back at Will who was watching me with shock and awe. I was proud of how nimble and capable I was, until Will whispered loudly:

"It looks like you're MOUNTING him!"

get into the groove

For some reason, I lost all confidence in my manuevering. My legs started shaking and my left foot, in tights began to slip off the armrest. If I didn't move quick, I'd be doing the splits on The Sleeper's lap.

I put all of my weight on my right foot and moved back to my seat, still standing.

certainties disappear

"Should I face the other way?" I asked Will.

"You mean so your ASS is in his face? I don't know. Is that better?" Will was really putting a lot of thought into this because he had to go, too.

"I think it's less personal, that way, isn't it?"

"No, I think ass would be weird. Do it the way you were going, just go quick. Leap!"

So without thinking, I acted on instinct, and leapt. I totally stuck the landing, too, right in the center of the aisle, in front of one of those Air France stewards who was not amused.

you can dance

"Madame, in the future, please don't stand on your seat. We don't want anyone getting hurt," he said haughtily.

All that meant, though, was that Will would have to be The Lookout the next time.

When the "Fasten Seat Belts" sign was illuminated as we were approaching LAX, The Sleeper awoke, startled, and looked at me, and asked, "Oh, did you need me to get up?"

take a bow, the night is over

Hail to the chief.

****

Add yourself to this map, please! It's fun for everyone.

http://www.frappr.com/deannabee

Your Friendly Neighborhood Crapping Dog

2005-11-29T20:00:28Z

Yesterday after work, I picked up the dogs from their boarding stint at the Burbank Animal Hospital. Having arrived home from my Thanksgiving away rather late on Sunday, it was my first opportunity to fetch them from their costly confines.

As soon as I walked in, the receptionist asked, with an air of superiority and snideness:

"Are you Matisse's mom?"

I don't know how she knew who I was, because I've never seen her before. I can only assume that everyone in the vet's office had been talking about me, alerting each other as to when I'd be arriving. There was something about her tone that made me want to answer, "No. I'm an adult human woman! Do I look like a female dog to you? DO I LOOK LIKE A BITCH?"

However, I just answered, "Yes, I'm his...mom."

Then she proceeds to tattle on him in all of her ugly smugness:

"Well! Matisse HATES being boarded. He went potty all over his cage several times!"

Again, I wanted to repeat the part where I say that I'm an adult woman. I cannot stand the phrase "went potty". Tell me he crapped the cage. Tell me he shit his brains out in defiance. I wouldn't even mind being told that he petulantly pooped all over the place.

He's a DOG. This is what dogs do. This is how they express their dissatisfaction with a situation.

Why does she even need to tell me anything?

To make me feel guilty for leaving Mattie and Junie in their care for almost a week at a very high daily rate?

To force me to spend my evening lecturing little Matisse about his inappropriate behavior and instruct him that, in the future, if he's unhappy about something, he should communicate about it, perferably in a personal discussion, but if not, then in a strongly worded, clearly written email?

She handed me the bill for services and scanning it, I saw I was charged an extra $3.99 a day for "Hazardous Waste Clean-Up".

Did they have to don their HAZMAT suits to remove the crap? Matisse is all of fourteen pounds. What could he have possibly DONE that would justify this charge?

So I asked her:

"I don't understand this charge. What exactly did the $3.99 cover?"

"I told you," she said, "Matisse HATES being boarded. How would you like to pay for this?"

She looked up at me with her raised eyebrows and frizzy hair, letting me know that she was done with this discussion.

I was without options. If I refused to pay, they wouldn't release Mattie and Junie.

Reluctantly, I opened my wallet.

Instead of handing her my debit card right away, though, I considered, just for a moment, going potty all over her desk.

****

This email was just sent to all 3,000 employees at Workplace. Note that Workplace is an organization of medical professionals and administrators, i.e. doctors, nurses, and people who work in offices. I'm one of the office people.

-----Original Message-----
From: Joe the Plant Operations Supervisor
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2005 12:14 PM
To: All E-mail Users at Workplace
Subject: refractometer

Does anyone have a refractometer that we can use in the Central Plant? We will only need it for less than 2 hours or we can bring a foam sample to you for testing.

Thanks a lot,
Joe
Plant Operations Supervisor

I have no idea what this piece of equipment is or does, but I'm curious as to what kind of foam they'd bring to me for testing.

Hey! Maybe it would be a giant foam finger!

I'm considering a response.

****

On my drive to work this morning, I noticed a sign for a new business had appeared on Glendale Boulevard, just before the Sunset bridge.

The sign? I quote it exactly:

Goin Postal!
You're friendly neighborhood shipping center!

I'm a stickler. You know this. In the past, I would have boycotted such an establishment.

There are many points I'd like to make involving inappropriately using contractions that sound like the correct word and haphazardly using exclamatory punctuation marks, however I won't.

I like the sign. It's quaint and hokey and I bet it's owned by some breezy older couple with names like Bob and Gloria. They hire local kids to help carry the heavy packages and they'll remember your name. Next time I have something to ship, I'll find out.

****

I hope everyone had a thankful Thanksgiving, full of loved ones and loving.

Happy Birthday

2005-11-20T19:20:19Z

This weekend is my brother Michael's birthday.

I wrote something last year and it still works, with some modifications.

He is kind. He is generous with his time and attention. He's rarely cross or in a bad mood. He cares about people. He's funny as hell. He graduates from medical school on May 4, 2006.

I couldn't be more proud of him.

*

My brother turned 26 yesterday:

My baby brother whom my dad took us three girls - sisters - to see in the hospital.. we were 9, 7, and 3. We stared through the glass window of the nursery and watched when he peed on the nurse when she changed his diaper. It was the funniest and most scandalous thing we'd ever witnessed. We covered our mouths and opened our eyes wide. "One time..our new brother... he PEED on the NURSE!" We were fascinated and in love with this new thing in our lives - this tiny boy - who was so very different from us.

My baby brother whom I held in my arms for the first time when Mom and Dad brought him home. "Hold his head, that's right. There you go. Hold him close. No, that's just a little spit-up. It means he likes you." I was nine and knew then that I wanted more than anything to be a mother.

My baby brother whom I held by the baptismal font. I wore a velour green cowl-neck dress and my mom did my hair in hot rollers to take the vows of being his godmother. I am his godmother. He is my only godchild.

My baby brother whom I sat next to me on the piano bench one morning when he was six months old, because I had to watch him while my mother vacuumed. I played him a song I was learning at the time - Music Box Dancer - but I needed both hands, so I let him go for a moment. He fell backwards and landed on his head. He wouldn't stop crying. It was one of the most frightening moments of my life. My mom didn't hear any of it because she was vacuuming. I've never told anyone that before.

My baby brother whom we sisters would taunt and dress up in girls clothes and wigs and call him "Baby Michelle." See, it IS nature and not nurture.

My baby brother who would cry at Sunday School so Mom and Dad would send me with him to make macaroni pictures of Jesus. I was 12. I felt important, like his second mother.

My baby brother who played Willy Wonka in his Fifth Grade school play.

My baby brother who was always on the city league basketball team - and one of the worst players. Still we'd all go.. more to make fun of the other team than to cheer for him. The teams wore different colored t-shirts and were identified that way. Me and my sister would get the stink eye from the whole gymnasium for shouting things like, "Beat the Blacks!" and "Steal it from the Reds!" In the car on the way home, he'd ask, "Was that you screaming that stuff? Oh. Cool."

My baby brother who would wear a clown mask into Albertson's and take pictures of it on a slow night with his friends.

My baby brother who I call sweet-tits and jerky and loser and he knows it means I love him.

My baby brother who scared the bejesus out of my mother and my niece by running around the backyard in a gorilla suit three Thanksgivings ago. My niece still calls him "Monkey Mike".

My baby brother who is patient and loving with his three older sisters and his mother, and will someday make a fantastic husband and father.

My baby brother who was in the worst car wreck I've ever seen two years ago. When I saw pictures of what was left of the car, I couldn't breathe. If something ever happens to him, I don't know what I do. He's my baby brother.

My baby brother who now delivers babies himself.

Happy Birthday Michael. I love you!

Heartland

2005-11-17T19:16:58Z

The boys in Oklahoma City look exactly as you'd expect them to look:

Corn-fed and and rosy-cheeked, fair-skinned and maybe a little doughy, big teeth and the kindest blue eyes you've ever seen.

They weren't passengers or crew. I didn't expect to see them on a flight bound for Atlanta.

I live in the West and most of my loved ones are in the East: I'm always taking red-eyes. One U-Shaped pillow and the roar of the engines lulls me directly to dreamland. I don't even need an Ambien.

The first time I saw the man, he was waiting at the gate with his wife. They were reading different sections of the same newspaper, an LA Times with the Governor on the front page caught in a scowl because none of his propositions were approved.

The couple occasionally pointed out items of interest to each other and smiled. They looked like they liked to travel. They looked like young grandparents. They looked like they both shopped Eddie Bauer. Between them on the floor sat a red plaid carry-on with leather handles.

It was a big bird. I sat in the forward cabin, in a middle section, but thankfully on the aisle. The movie, which I skipped, was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

An hour into the flight, soon after the first drink cart, came the first casual announcement:

"Ladies and gentlemen, pardon the interruption, do we have any doctors or nurses on board?"

The PA woke me. I shifted in my seat a little, opened my eyes and looked at the man next to me and he returned my stare, unblinking. I fell asleep again.

A few minutes later, a similar announcement sounded, only this time, a little more urgent.

I shifted again and snuggled under the felt blanket, bringing it up to my chin. I was having a good dream: it was snowing and everything around me, including a tree and a house, was silvery white. I was laughing at something and wearing bright blue mittens, holding the hand of someone special, although I never saw a face. We were walking quickly, heading toward the House of Pies and my teeth were chattering.

"Ladies and gentlemen, if you have any emergency medicine experience, we need your help in the back of the rear cabin immediately!"

The Captain's booming voice jolted me awake.

People around me stirred and switched on their reading lamps. Those seated on the aisles turned in their seats and looked toward the back. I did, too, but I couldn't see anything but flight attendants buzzing back and forth, wringing their hands and talking in low whispers.

A few more minutes passed. I picked up my book and turned on my own light. I only read a few pages before we were addressed again:

"Ladies and gentlemen, we have a passenger in distress and we're going to make an emergency diversion. We're going to land briefly in Oklahoma City."

There was a shush-shush-shush of people talking to their travelling mates. I wished I had someone to talk to about this turn of events. The man next to me was unresponsive, just staring at the back of the seat in front of him.

I'm obsessed with miles, trying to make Gold Medallion before the end of the year. I wondered how this diversion would affect my frequent flyer miles. Would I get more miles? Would I get bonus miles?

How long would this take? Would I miss my connecting flight to Orlando, making my short time there even shorter?

I tried to imagine a map of the United States. This was a flight without the personal screens to monitor our progress. Where is Oklahoma City in relation to Los Angeles and Atlanta? Like the entire mid-west, the Heartland, it's somewhere in the middle.

I couldn't picture it. The only information I have about Oklahoma City is images of the bombing of the federal building ten years ago. I know the name Timothy McVeigh. I know there was a rented Ryder truck full of fertilizer and something about Hitler's birthday. I know there was a daycare center on the first floor, full of toddlers.

We saw the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles waiting for us in the 4 a.m. darkness of the runway. The paramedics who were first to board were young and strong and as they took long strides down the aisle past me toward the back, their enormous right thighs in yellow fire pants brushed my shoulder gruffly, their gear clanking with their gait.

Behind the boys was an older man who looked like he was in charge, a sargeant perhaps. He looked with concern toward the back of the plane and carried a walkie-talkie in his hand. He was there on April 19, 1995. I could read this in the wrinkles around his eyes.

They were back there for a while. A few times I looked back to see them crowded and kneeling around someone laying in the aisle. One of the boys was holding an IV bag in the air.

I couldn't keep quiet anymore:

"There's someone, a man I think, laying in the aisle," I told the guy next to me.

He replied with three words: "Probably heart attack."

I read two chapters of my book before the paramedics started filing back up the aisle. With them was the wife I had seen waiting with her husband at the gate. Her face was puffy, her eyes were vacant as she plodded slowly with the emergency workers. Her Eddie Bauer jacket was rumpled. Behind her, being pushed in that skinny wheelchair they call an 'aisle chair,' was her husband, with tubes in his nose and arms. The chair was tilted back and he was unconscious. Someone held the IV bag high.

The man looked twenty years older than he looked as he read his newspaper back at LAX Gate 72B.

There were two hundred passengers on board that plane. I barely heard a breath, not even a sigh, out of anyone as that slow dirge of people advanced toward the front.

I looked around at the faces of my fellow travelers, and even in the middle of the night, in the middle of an interrupted plane flight that would make everyone very late to wherever they were headed, somewhere in the middle of the United States, people's eyes were wide with concern and sympathy.

The youngest paramedic, a freckled tow-headed boy, followed behind.

He held the red plaid carry-on.

Going Down Hill Rapidly

2005-11-15T23:51:21Z

Bow to the Princess. It is her time.

Due to that fact, I'm not allowed to make any decisions about anything important, because my logic will be faultily based on emotions and irrational rants and horrible insecurities and just generally feeling wronged by the world. I have also established limits on text messages and emails, other than perfunctory greetings. It's just safer that way.

I'm not going to do that thing where I start crying at work and tell someone I want to move to a small town in the desert to open a bowling alley slash laundromat. There would also be karaoke at the bowling alley.

Crying at work is the worst. Once you admit you are a human female by crying at work, you should get very comfortable with your lower salary, lack of promotion and fancy titles, and that LOOK that everyone will give you that says, "She's the one who cried when she forgot to take the staple out of the big packet of papers she was trying to copy and jammed the feeder. She's also the one who cried when so-and-so may or may not have said something pejorative about her hair."

Someone once said to me, "No, crying at work isn't the WORST. Having your family shot in front of you. That's the WORST."

Well, ok. Crying at work is the second worst.

In my new home in Desert City, U.S.A., my name would be changed to something simple and monosyllabic like Sue or Kat or Nan. I'd communicate with people outside of town only through post cards. Some post cards would be funny, for example a fat lady in a bikini or a monkey driving a motorbike, that sort of thing. Some cards would just picture a sunset or a mountain-top or an important piece of art. Some post cards would be educational, like a detailed map with capitals or the periodic chart of the elements.

I love that damn periodic chart. Does anyone remember "Hi Helen Little Bees Buzz Constantly Now Over Florida Never Nancy Ming Always Sings Pretty Songs Clear Around Kitty Cat?" It's the way you remember the first twenty elements, in order. Knowing that little verse has gotten me through more than one Final Jeopardy. O, the noble gases and halogens.

I first learned the periodic chart in Mr. Spalding's 8th grade Physical Science class. Incidentally, I will go to my grave despising Mr. Spalding with every fiber of my being.

I was always the terribly shy, awkward, nerdy, ugly girl. One day, there was a new boy in class and Mr. Spalding sat him next to me, coincidentally because the only empty seat in the class room was next to me. (We sat at desks built for two, presumably because in science classes, you're always doing something with a lab partner.)

Anyhow, the new boy, Clifford, didn't realize that I was the nerdy one yet, so he started talking to me and I talked back. This happened to be the same day that Mr. Spalding was filling out our quarterly progress reports and apparently, just as he was filling in the comments on mine, he looked up and saw me chit-chatting with Clifford and wrote, in the little box next to 'Classroom Behavior,' the words:

Going Down Hill Rapidly.

Try explaining to your parents what "Going down hill rapidly" means when you're me at thirteen. I was grounded for a month. Not that this meant any big change to my Stay-At-Home-Teen lifestyle.

I think this is poetic justice. Nothing says "Going down hill rapidly" like that little page and the nickname 'Spaldo'. Notice all of the active links. He's really staying "on top" of things.

And because of the Circle of Life or whatever you believe in, the day right after the GDHR Progress Report, my Princess was gifted with a period for the First Time Ever:

In the bathroom at The Home Depot. I was there with my parents to help carry the bags of cypress bark mulch they purchased.

Yes, the Home Depot and Spaldo will forever inspire cramps in my loins.

Ladies, where were you when you had your first-ever Princess Time?

Princess Time

2005-11-11T19:44:54Z

Traditionally, I have grandiose plans for Christmas gifts for loved ones.

However, this year, the holidays are nearly upon us and I've done nothing!

One year I decoupaged boxes and picture frames until my fingers were permanently stuck together. This is only AFTER my right hand cramped up into the shape of scissor handles. Miss Jill and I set up shop in my dining room and drank wine and cut and pasted until all hours, talking about how much our loved ones would adore their boxes. (We took the undecorated wood and marble boxes out of the dumpster at the Y. Miss Jill deserves all of the credit for standing in the filth and ants and digging out those jewel boxes (which were intended to be donor gifts but had been engraved wrong)).

Another year, I crocheted hats and scarves and blankets and ponchos until my arms fell off. One of my all-time favorite Christmas morning photos depicts me and my sisters and my brother all wearing woolen hats I made.

BWW (Before Weight Watchers), I'd bake rum cakes and tiny pecan tarts and almond crescents and Neapolitan cookies and give them away on antique plates. The baked goods were popular among the co-worker set, only because it feels strange (and in most cases, it's not appropriate) to give co-workers REAL gifts, because suddenly they feel obligated to give you something in return, and then you end up with a set of four ugly, suck-ass trivets with mallard duck hunting scenes painted on them.

If you are a former co-worker of mine and you gave me mallard duck trivets, I'm not talking about THOSE trivets. I LOVE the trivets you gave me. In fact I plan on using them to spare my synthetic wood Ikea table-top tonight when I serve four piping hot vats of food to myself.

Intricate, homemade, and carefully planned presents are my trademark. One of my personal three pillars is thoughtful, generous gift-giving. (My other two pillars are still under consideration.)

Where is the time for such gift grandeur anymore?

The right answer is, "There's not!"

Where does the time go? I've always worked nine hours of day. I've always taken care of my house myself, although I can't believe I used to take care of an entire yard, (including mowing the lawn!) I've always (ahem) tried to make it to the gym. I've always gone out a couple of nights a week.

Why does it feel like I barely have time for the basics anymore, not to mention all of the extracurricular crafting? Why are there less minutes in the day than there used to be?

Therefore, due to lack of time and energy, I'm giving everyone a bottle of Jesus Juice and calling it a Yuletide.

They'll wash it down with Mr. Boston's, a generic rum-infused eggnog that's sold in Albertson's liquor stores and one of those lousy Christmas tree cookies sprinkled with the green sugar.

Bah.

****

Does anyone remember when Banana Republic used to be all safari khaki pants and olive drab logo t-shirts and Out-of-Africa gauze dresses and their stores were like outposts with wooden floors and they had a J.Peterman-type catalog and they sold Israeli paratrooper messenger bags and pith helmets and mosquito nets?

I liked that version better.

****

Coming out of a shop this morning, I passed a happy grandma in a lavender sweater-set pushing a stroller with a beautiful cooing toddler bundled in a hooded pink fleece. I smiled at the two of them and said good morning. Then, without so much as a welling-up warning, I burst into full-on crying.

Was I upset because my own grandmother has been ill? Was I feeling melancholy because I'd really like to have a little girl? Was I sad because I might not ever be a grandma? Was I nostalgic because I'd like someone to push me around in a stroller again? Was I envious of the sweater-set or the hooded fleece? Was I miserable because some people can walk around town all day while other people have to go to work? Who the hell knows!

A couple of minutes later, I was in the car, hysterically laughing about something on Howard Stern. HA! Woo-hoo! Baba-booey! HA! Doodie! Ha ha!

A few minutes later, I found myself thinking about a couple of patients at Workplace, saying aloud, to myself, "I like people. I really like people."

A few minutes after that, I was cattily chatting in the hallway to a co-worker about what someone from another department is wearing today. (Seriously. Elastic-waist pink pants and Goody barrettes in her hair!)

Either I'm about to have my Princess Time, or I'm in The Bell Jar.

Which brings me to this:

How does a crazy lady know when she's about to have her period?

Does she suddenly become lucid and logical and stop hearing the voices?

****

I'm excited about this weekend in Florida. I've never flown across the country to surprise anyone before and tonight, I'm doing just that... for THREE of my most favorite people! Thank you fl_chrissy for helping me make it happen.

All's Well that Loveswell

2005-11-09T06:51:53Z

A tree in my tiny brick garden has turned its leaves into shades of gold and amber and shed them, prompting me to continue my nesting by baking apples, crocheting scarves and iPod nano cases, and watching college football.

Does anyone have the same problem that I've been having with the time change?

I'm talking about the problem that nothing at all gets done during the week when you get home from work because it's dark and chilly and it's all you can do to NOT just get right into bed?

Because I'm going to Florida this coming weekend (hi), I designated this past weekend as "Errands Weekend."

My errands took me to Glendale, The City of Lights, for some light green Angel Hair yarn to finish a gift project. Have any of you used the Angel Hair yarn before? It's divine. I want to wrap myself in it as I triple crochet its cashmere-feel. Then I noticed that the Thick- and-Quick Chenille was on sale and so of course, I had to partake.

Do you get excited about yarn, too? Call me!

*

I also travelled to Studio City for two new pieces of smart red luggage handcrafted by Mr. Kenneth Cole. And hey! They're "Cabin Friendly!"

I don't harbor any fears of flying except worrying for the entire flight that there wasn't room for my big blue suitcase and a luggage handler wearing those old-school language lab headphones is now using it as a comfortable and spacious place to sit and eat his lunch out on the LAX tarmac. There's probably even a thermos of tomato soup involved.

With my new Cabin Friendly items, I'll know that they are safely tucked above my head and I can by-pass the tense twenty minutes of watching that unclaimed, beat-up hunter-green Samsonite travelling solemnly around and around Carousel 4.

Who owns that suitcase, by the way? You know the one. You've seen it while you're waiting for the real luggage, the actual luggage owned by you and the people on your plane, to start dropping from the chute. That damn suitcase is in every airport, just stoically riding the baggage claim walk of shame.

Occasionally, some impatient passenger might reach down as it's passing by for the eighty-seventh time, and read the airport code tag to see where it came from. Then he'll just shrug his shoulders and the sad Samsonite will continue his journey around again.

Yes indeed, I can skip the orphaned suitcase experience and instead, head right out to be met by loved ones.

Plus the Kenneth Coles are so compact and mobile (everything is wheeled) so I don't have to struggle and change arms every few feet and worry that I'm aggravating my "typing shoulder."

*

I met two girlfriends in Tujunga Village to see a one-man play called Loveswell. The basic premise being that marriage is like surfing. Or something. All I know is that I realized I'm not a "theatre" person, and that there's a reason I wasn't in the Drama Club.

"Acting" embarrasses me; especially this one man set-up. When someone is by himself on stage, acting out a very emotional scene, WITH himself, I cringe for him. And then I get the church giggles. Which, p.s., isn't polite in a theater that only seats twenty.

But in any case, how adorable is Tujunga Village? I want to spend an afternoon there in the bookstore sipping coffee sometime very soon. Or maybe a nice dinner out on the patio of Cafe Roma.

*

I watched two movies that I loved, albeit I was a little late in watching them:

1. My House in Umbria Perhaps I wouldn't have liked it as much if I wasn't so fond of Italy. Its plot revolves around an explosion in a train car. The survivors of the accident are invited to stay in another of the survivor's homes... a house in Umbria, surprisingly enough. The owner of the house is a older British woman who's a bodice-ripper writer and she's always writing a story in her head. When someone speaks to her, she thinks of it as dialogue and acts out her life the way someone in one of her novels would act. I especially enjoyed, quite nostalgically, the bit where the group travelled to Siena and sat for a while on the steps in front of the Duomo.

2. In America Film-making at its finest is a simple and beautiful story, told in images and carefully placed words spoken by believable, thoughtful actors. This was film-making at its finest. It's the story of a family of four (parents and two bright, beautiful daughters) from Ireland who illegally emigrate to New York City after losing a son. I like it even more knowing that the screenplay was written by the director (Jim Sheridan) with his two daughters. If the scene near the end with the father on the fire escape with his girls looking at the moon doesn't make you cry, then you'd better ask the Wizard for a heart!

A Modest Explosion

2005-11-08T18:18:27Z

Because I'd find it very easy to be a hermit, I celebrate the fact that I can make it out of the house on the weekends. A weekend consisting of shopping and lunches out (with other people!) and one-man plays and football games and phone calls is a big, social weekend for me. Call Page Six, I'm out and about.

Amid all of the excitement, I did have one frightening moment, worse than a toilet overflowing at a party, even if the party is at your boss's house.

It all started when I found an underground Ralph's. It's an underground Ralph's because it's built below a parking lot, not because it's some kind of secret society of grocery-store goers.

Being hungry and being me, I decided to make a big salad from their $4.99 a pound salad bar. And yes, I saw 20/20 about dirty salad bars and fecal matter in the bacon bits and sneeze juice in the ranch dressing and so forth, but I'm the Evel Kneivel of Self-Service Foods. E-coli? I laugh in its face!

I spent a good ten minutes loading up my extra large container carefully and healthfully with romaine and greens and grape tomatoes and black olives and green olives and artichoke hearts and marinated mushrooms and this amazing cabbage salad (Illegally, I sampled it) and sprinkling just the right amount of vinegar, just so.

In the end, the salad container must have weighed in at two pounds of goodness. (Don't judge! That will feed me for three meals! Four, if I drink a lot of Crystal Lite in between bites.)

I was strolling over to the cashier to pay when I remembered that Ralph's is the only place that sells my favorite soda. It's called Canfield's Diet Chocolate Fudge Soda. It's like drinking a carbonated liquid brownie, and none of the calories! I like to enjoy it as an after-dinner drink. That is, if I'm not sipping Vin Santo or 20-Year Old Port.

In the beverage aisle, I locate the six-pack of soda. It was the last one! I was just in time!

The six-pack was fastened together with one of those plastic ring holders that seem very 70s to me. I thought they stopped selling them because people were throwing them in lakes and ducks were being choked to death or fish were being tethered to each other or some other ecological horror.

With the two-pound container of salad in my right hand, I lifted the six-pack of soda off the shelf by the middle of the plastic rings with my left.

The problem was, one of the cans was loose. And it liberated itself from its plastic ring.

The can crashed to the floor.

And exploded.

(How do they fit all of that soda and all of that fizz into that little can?)

Remember eleventh grade Physics? Every action causes an equal and opposite reaction.

In this case, apparently my OWN equal and opposite reaction to the exploding soda can, was to drop the two-pound container of salad.

Of course, the salad didn't fall neatly. The plastic container split open at impact, creating a bowling alley of grape tomatoes and black and green olives to roll, scattering away from the pile of greens and wet cabbage salad. Oh, and yes, marinated mushrooms roll, too, leaving snail trails all the way to the Dr. Pepper.

The chain reaction was complete when I took a look at the Aisle 17 carnage, and high-tailed it the eff out of there, dripping with soda and salad. I learned that another one of my super powers is escaping embarrassing situations. I was out the door before the announcement came over the PA telling some poor bastard to clean up the mess.

This... the detonation in the beverage section of the underground Ralph's... was the most frightening and dangerous part of my weekend.

And it is all put sadly into perspective when I talked to Eric and found out what he was doing on the other side of the world at the very same moment I was a juggernaut of destruction in a grocery store in Glendale.

My life seems very small when I find out that after going to Paris for a party for the weekend, he ended up covering the Paris riots...

So I drove to the Silverlake Gelson's, glancing a couple of times in my rear-view mirror, and made another salad.

Although they are above ground and they don't carry Canfield's soda, I don't mind paying an extra dollar a pound for stronger containers.

Shopgirl and Other Stuff

2005-11-05T03:37:23Z

I'm not sure Shopgirl has started nationwide yet. If you're interested in reading my review that might contain spoilers, click on...

Maybe I read Steve Martin's novella at a time in my life when I wasn't as aware and sensitive of the roles women play in relationships, but I don't remember thinking Shopgirl's Mirabelle was weak.

She was. She gravitated toward any man that showed her attention in this modern, adult love story. She begged Ray Porter (Martin) to love her - the emotionally unavailable man paired with a girl who is nothing but raw emotion.

"Why don't you love me?" she asked, crying in his foyer, clutching her shoes and her tiny suitcase, and wearing the dress he bought her.

At the same time, she was quietly strong. Am I contradicting myself?

Claire Danes is the finest I've seen her since Angela Chase. Her gorgeous timid smile, the way she doesn't know how pretty she is, and even her clothes and her hair, were all perfect. Also, her naked body was gorgeous (what man wouldn't have wanted to walk into his room with her on his bed?). I'm just thankful we didn't see any of Steve Martin's naked bits.

In his screenplay that he adapted from his own story, Martin captured the weight of loneliness and the desire to feel desired. This is what he does best.

To make Mirabelle's attraction to Ray, over 30 years older than her, believable, Martin went out of his way to make the other leg of the love triangle, Jeremy, as short, nerdy, ugly, dirty, and undesirable as possible. Still I love that Jeremy (the hysterically funny Jason Schwartzman) took her to City Walk, because it's City WALK and not City Sit-and-Watch-a-Movie and thought it perfectly fine to use a "jiffy bag" as a condom. The compulsive zipping and unzipping of his hoodie while standing in her bedroom was annoyingly charming, something he pulls off well.

Mirabelle's second date with Ray Porter was at Cha Cha Cha in Silverlake (she lived right near Sunset Junction), which is actually a very common second-date type restaurant for singles in this city. At least it was for me last year when I was into that sort of thing. I also went there just as frequently with my friend Ryan, who is very much a lady. (hi Ryan) They redid the restaurant so that the tables were covered in blue and there were more than usual and the lighting was different, but still, there it was.

I know I wouldn't have liked this film half as much if I didn't live right in the center of the action. It opens with a helicopter shot of downtown at night - I can even see the building that houses my YMCA and the street my house is on a few blocks away. The beauty shots are some of the best I've seen of Los Angeles, but the movie can't decide whether it loves LA or despises it. In the end, I think the film decided it loves the town but takes pity on its residents.

Los Angeles itself was the fourth character, personifying loneliness and perhaps trying to explain why the characters were as desperate as they were.

The vapid, trashy Lisa (Bridgette Wilson Sampras), Mirabelle's co-worker, was supposed to represent the typical LA girl: a gold-digging bimbo. I'm realizing that the 'typical' LA girl is a girl like Mirabelle from Vermont who goes home to an empty apartment and draws pictures of herself and takes baths and talks to her cat and just needs love and companionship and someone who isn't afraid to call her his girlfriend.

One of my favorite lines happened in the last five minutes of the movie: Jeremy pointed to Mirabelle's artwork and proudly told a stranger, "My girlfriend drew that."

I think THAT'S what we're all looking for.

****

laylapie threw a little dinner party last night and it was quite a success, possibly because she's managed to assemble a perfect melange of ladies.

We ate ravioli and drank wine and talked about 3-D Ultrasounds (because J is with child) and moving to Seattle (because K is moving there) and crazy-ass sociopathic women (because we all know them).

****

The Two Thing

Two Names You Go By That Aren't Your Name:
1. DeannaBee
2. Sweetie (by only two people)

Two Parts of Your Heritage:
1. I'm half Italian and half Polish
2. Italian Poles are a smart, loving people

Two Things That Scare You:
1. Ignorance
2. An overflowing toilet at a party

Two of Your Everyday Essentials:
1. Body Butter
2. Emails

Two Things You Are Wearing Right Now:
1. Black
2. A Soviet wristwatch

Two of Your Favourite Bands or Musical Artists (at the moment):
1. Josh Ritter
2. Foo Fighters

Two of Your Favourite Songs - at the moment:
1. All These Things That I've Done - The Killers
2. Little Victories - Matt Nathanson

Two Things You Want in a Relationship (other than Real Love):
1. Understanding
2. Inspiration

Two Truths about you:
1. I don't feel like something is real until I write about it.
2. I measure my day by conversations.

Two things you are attracted to (physically):
1. Tall, dark, and handsome
2. An enormous brain

Two of Your Favourite Hobbies :
1. Crocheting
2. Stamp collecting

Two Things You Want Really Badly:
1. Kilgore Trout
2. Unlimited Resources

Two Places You Want to go on Vacation:
1. Anywhere with someone special.
2. Cuba

Two Ways that you are stereotypically a Chick/Guy:
1. I love to cook and clean and sew.
2. I am easily moved to tears.

Two Things You Are Thinking About Now:
1. An aimless phone conversation
2. A story I'm writing

Two Stores You Shop At:
1. Target
2. Trader Joe's

My Beat

2005-11-02T18:10:16Z

There's a homeless guy I pass every day on the way home from work. The traffic light at the intersection of Alvarado and Glendale Boulevard is his beat.

Wearing his uniform of all black including black cowboy boots, he's very lean, like a young, heroin chic Johnny Cash. He takes long strides up and down through the rows of cars stopped at the red light.

I've always admired his business sense. He holds a sign that says "25 cents". That's it.

If I'm stopped at the light, I reach out and hand him a quarter. It's a simple transaction. There's no guilt of "Should I give more?" or "Is that enough?"

He is very polite when he accepts the coin. I could have just handed him a ten dollar bill and he'd smile his gray-toothed smile just as broadly.

The other homeless guys working the other beats at the other traffic lights with their, "Will Work for Food" signs don't collect nearly the same amount of money per two-minute red light that Johnny Cash does. The people in their cars know that it's not work or food that those guys want, so the transaction begins with a lie.

With Johnny Cash, you know you're giving 25 cents and you know he'll give you a weathered smile in return.

Johnny Cash's stock increased even more yesterday, when I saw him standing there with a dog on a leash - a big friendly German Shepard, holding a sign that now reads, "50 cents".

So I gave him two quarters. And he smiled.

p.s. Has anyone ever noticed that (here in the States anyway) there are at least ten homeless guys asking for money for every one woman? I guess there's a glass ceiling in the Hobo World, too! Or maybe the hobo ladies are just tired of getting coffee and making copies for all of the hobo men.

****

Speaking of dogs, I'm going on a lunch-time field trip to the Burbank Animal Shelter with Debbie, who is thinking of adding a new member to her little family.

I have requested to be hand-cuffed because I cannot be trusted in these situations. Just browsing at their website and seeing the nervous chihuahua named Darrin and the elderly dachshund named Simon made all of my nurturing instincts atwitter.

Is it ever quelled? This urge to take care of puppies(and babies)? (I say babies because I tried to ban myself from this journal, but to no avail. The photo of Dog and Baby? I am powerless!

Must. Not. Look at the eyes.

****

My new favorite store is Nordstrom Rack.

I bought my lovely turquoise ball gown there for the Workplace Gala last Saturday night and people are still talking about it. Just this morning Gary (I think) from another department stopped me in the hall with, "That was the most beautiful dress I've ever seen!" Well it was. I felt like the mermaid princess, even though I could have used a little more material in the clamshell area.

Also they have Kate Spade bags for half price.

And Lucky jeans for 30 bucks.

And ball gowns! I was THIS CLOSE to getting a black, washed-silk strapless Ralph Lauren princess gown. The only thing that stopped me was that it was a size 4 and two of my lady parts would have had to be worn outside the dress.

Hi.

****

I saw a doctor here at Workplace eating an apple this morning.

He must not like himself very much.

Thanks. I'll be here all week.

Trickworthy

2005-10-31T23:34:29Z

Someone has taken the "Trick" part of Trick or Treat to an entirely ridiculous level.

This vehicle now makes its home in front of my house.

I'm not sure you can appreciate its size, but if you can see that diminutive gold car parked behind it, that's my car. My car is a Maxima, which is not a small car at all. (Hey lady, nice trash bag under your car.)

Look at that thing! Is it even roadworthy?

Note the wooden barn doors in the back fastened with rope and the jagged metal edges around the top.

It's blocking out the sun! That's a pick-up truck parked in front of the behemoth.

I'm not sure why Frankenstein parked his truck here. At first I thought they might be filming another movie in my neighborhood.

Then I thought that maybe some Halloween character is going to ride around the neighborhood on top of it, throwing candy down to the proletariat, shouting things like, "Happy Hallows Eve, bitches! How you like me now!"

If he doesn't, I might.

*

Here's the little autumn scene I created in my kitchen by buying a bag of apples and tossing them in a bowl between two pumpkins.

This is Tim Burton's pumpkin. Its blue skin is quite leathery, but apparently it's the best variety for eating.

Here's the inside of Tim Burton's pumpkin. I practically had to use a hacksaw to gain entry to all of that fleshy pumpkin goodness.

Happy Halloween! If you're in the Downtown/Echo Park area, beware of candy falling from high above a graffiti truck, tossed down by someone dressed as Frida Kahlo.

How you like me now, bitches!