Well. I'm not, anymore.
Vegan, I mean.
Stop judging me.
OKAY FINE, HERE'S WHAT HAPPENED.
I started managing a restaurant who serves only responsibly-sourced, good-for-both-you-and-the-animal cheeses. And then oysters happened. And then sustainable seafood in general happened. And then I did heroin.
Okay fine. I didn't really do heroin, but I feel REALLY BAD that I moved on from my vegan fixation and I'm constantly worried that people are going to call me out on it now two years later.
For what it's worth, I still believe in veganism. I never believed in Santa Claus (there was just something really fishy about a fat dude getting a lot done in one night that I could never get behind), but there is just something pure in the idea of not harming any living beings for selfish purposes that I fully, truly can get behind. I still feel one hundred percent that if I were perfect, I would be vegan.
Instead, I'm a fully-flawed fatty shoving wedges of local cheeses in my mouth between gulps of Paso Robles Zinfandel and German Riesling. And... yeah. That pretty much sums it up and brings us up to date today.
I'm pretty focused on a half-coherent, half-memorable wine education right now. I have now developed a fear of committing to ANYTHING because of my past failed veganism and my recent failed long-term relationship. Quick! Things I know I can commit to:
1.) Wine (anything will do, but let's get snobby about it and drink only stuff that's worth learning about, k?)
2.) TV or movie dramas about grown-up families with lots of siblings who all hang out all the time and have lots of problems. Also, the availability of these must extend to Netflix.
3. ) Singing half-shitty songs I've written and recording them on my shitty iPhone. Usually to inanimate objects that carry some sort of emotional value. MY favorite moment was when my 7-year-old niece came to visit and announced publicly that she knew what my stuffed Beanie Babie crab was for --"You SING to this!" is what she actually said. Not embarrassing. At all. Thanks, Alina!
4.) My mom, siblings, and two best friends. Whether I'm a hardcore sober healthnut lesbian or a Gewurtztraminer-glugging heterosexual power trip, these people accept me. And make fun of me.
And that's important.
Right now?
I am... a me. A Haymitch who downs a bottle of wine like it's oxygen. A highly obsessive 6th-grader whose "teachers" won't let her sleep 'til all of her extra credit assignments are fully completed to perfection. A woman whose mental self-projection is a fat hairy bearded trucker man and who has a problem being looked at in daylight. A banjo-loving obsessee who cries at the sight of The Avett Brothers and who sings in her breath every second of every day while pushing invisible buttons on an air flute.
These things are me.
And I'm not sure anyone else will ever be odd enough to want to be around those things all the time.
And... I think... that's okay.
I'm back (bitches).
Monday, May 12, 2014
Friday, January 27, 2012
It's all about me, like in that one country song that is annoying
You know, I've come to realize that being entirely insecure and self-conscious requires a high degree of vanity. I've spent my life believing that I'm a humble person easily embarrassed by flattery or any sort of attention at ALL actually, but... I've recently decided that the amount of energy I expend worrying about my faults and bumbling awkwardness actually points to a strong self-centered nature.
For example:
If anyone around me appears to be glum and lost in despair, I have the correct natural response of feeling concern. This is good, (singlewhitefemale). I always try to get the person to talk about what is wrong-- to open up so that maybe by divulging his or her woes the emotional burden can be lightened up a little bit. However, if said person doesn't WANT to talk about it, things start to get a little ugly. Each evasive dodge to my caring inquisitions pokes the crazy in me to come out of hibernation. Uh oh. Why can't he TELL me about it? It must be something I've done. Faaaahck. This is all about ME. I knew it. (I decided to stick with a masculine subject here because, let's face it. If you try to get a girl to talk about her problems, she's not gonna put up much of a fight. **sexism! yeah!!**)
After this delusional mental conclusion, I fish out a fresh quiver of questions to fire at my poor already beaten-down victim, this time armed with the pretense that I am not only the sole person who has caused his misery but also the only one who can fix it. So now the poor guy is dealing with whatever Real Problem Shit is bogging him down AND a maniacal frizzball of guilt wringing her hands at him and frowning brokenheartedly at him with a crazed, off-kilter expression. After prying unsuccessfully for one hundred hours, I then resort to apologizing profusely for... well, ultimately nothing. In response, my weary friend lifts an even wearier mama hen wing and tucks me under his shoulder, reassuring ME that everything is fine and that I have nothing to worry about. At this point I am a frazzled mess, and hey yeah I could use some comforting, so I allow myself to be soothed until my worry wrinkles fade and then I'm laughing and telling the story of The Lunchbuddy Who Locked a Troll in the Closet and Was Feeding Him Skittles, and as the stress dissipates in my bloodstream I'm all sunshine and giggles and forget that the eyes smiling back at me are masks protecting me from Real Life. My friend senses that I have been lulled into a false sense of safety, and he takes this opportunity to bolt like lightning across a dry patch of grass and get the hell out of my pseudo-therapy session.
It is usually at this moment that I realize I done fucked up, son, and that maybe I should have taken myself out of the equation. Just maaaaaaybe.
Another example of this particular vein of vanity is that oftentimes when someone is talking to me about important goings-on, I will be utterly convinced that he or she is staring at how fucked-up my hair or lipstick is. I have interrupted urgent messages to shout Tourette's-style, "WHY ARE YOU LOOKING AT MY MOUTH LIKE THAT?!!!" I like to think of this as my "hair-muffs." No matter what you're telling me, I'm not going to hear you because I'm busy trying to see my reflection in the framed photo behind you to see if the shapes of my hair are trying to form sticky-outty alphabets again. A confident person would be a much better listener. If I were full of myself, I would not be worrying that you're standing there ripping apart my appearance with your evil eyes as you tell me about your sick grandmother.
No, the vanity of insecurity is a far more serious affliction than a case of Big Headedness.
I feel that this particular strain of self-consciousness creates an insurmountable distance between myself and other people. We can be sharing the most intimate moment in a passionate bout of love-making as our souls intertwine in the dim bedside lighting... and all I will be thinking about is that from this angle I must have like five hundred chins. I once told an old boyfriend of mine that I would be a much better partner if I had better hair. He laughed it off, but I grinned back at him in a perfect rendition of Jack Nicholson in The Shining because as I said it, I realized how much truth there was behind it. Oh okay, not REALLY. A Brazilian blow-out isn't going to make me a better person. But if I could find a way to shed my tight skin of insecurities I could have more honest, more fulfilling interactions with people because I wouldn't be present in so many capacities and I would be able to just BE in the MOMENT for once. Currently I exist as myself and as my reflection of myself as seen in your eyes by my own imagination at ALL times. I am sure we all walk around with our reflected self-images permanently by our sides, but I've come to realize that some people are just so much BETTER at ignoring... or... accepting? their egos and are able to take the lead in the constant tango step our self-awareness requires. These Lords of Dance are able to fully flesh-out their character and being, unencumbered by the inhibitions of a cruel heckling Jiminy Cricket, and they glitter like bedazzled (vajazzled, anyone?) beacons of hope for the rest of us to rise to our true potentials.
Here in San Luis there is a community FULL of brilliantly kooky and confidently nutty individuals who exude the utmost security and assuredness of self. I believe that is why I am so drawn to the energy here, and even though I miss and love so many people in other locations, I don't yet feel like I've satiated myself from all that this place has to offer.
It has been an interesting month. For whatever reason, everyone I have grown close to here has decided within the last few weeks to verbally share with me what they think of me as a person. I was shocked that no lewd "C" words were thrown in there for good measure and that everyone seemed to have some glorified version of me blocking their view of all the dark and bulky rest of me. For some reason, it filled me with a sense of desperation to know that everyone else's version of (singlewhitefemale) is so different from mine. Like... like maybe no one here knows the true me. Which I suppose doesn't really matter on any List of Important Things, but you know, I'm in the midst of a quarter-life crisis and self-identity is kind of what's led me on my metaphorical journey over a year ago and what I've been writing about the whole time, so let's pretend this is earth-shatteringly monumental.
In a bout of frustrated vulnerability, I appealed to my mother (the one person here who I KNOW knows the "real" me) and threw my conflicting selves into her hands, imploring her to use her talent with artistry to make the edges overlap neatly and soothe my inner unrest. Instead of solving anything, somehow thirty seconds later we were playing Scramble on her iPad (electronic Boggle laced with crack) and clucking like Bantam Sebright girlfriends about dragonfly wings on acorns and such until we couldn't keep our eyes open and it was time to go to bed. Just as I was surrendering myself to another insomniac bout of self-reflection, my mother came in and whispered in the dark directly into my ear my singlemost favorite thing she has ever said to me:
"(singlewhitefemale), you know why everyone thinks you're this great, glorified version of yourself? It's because you are, you stupid bitch."
I think today I'm going to take my ego out into public, set it down on the sidewalk, point at it with a mighty finger, and shout, "GET OVER YOURSELF."
Either that, or I'll just buy a wig.
For example:
If anyone around me appears to be glum and lost in despair, I have the correct natural response of feeling concern. This is good, (singlewhitefemale). I always try to get the person to talk about what is wrong-- to open up so that maybe by divulging his or her woes the emotional burden can be lightened up a little bit. However, if said person doesn't WANT to talk about it, things start to get a little ugly. Each evasive dodge to my caring inquisitions pokes the crazy in me to come out of hibernation. Uh oh. Why can't he TELL me about it? It must be something I've done. Faaaahck. This is all about ME. I knew it. (I decided to stick with a masculine subject here because, let's face it. If you try to get a girl to talk about her problems, she's not gonna put up much of a fight. **sexism! yeah!!**)
After this delusional mental conclusion, I fish out a fresh quiver of questions to fire at my poor already beaten-down victim, this time armed with the pretense that I am not only the sole person who has caused his misery but also the only one who can fix it. So now the poor guy is dealing with whatever Real Problem Shit is bogging him down AND a maniacal frizzball of guilt wringing her hands at him and frowning brokenheartedly at him with a crazed, off-kilter expression. After prying unsuccessfully for one hundred hours, I then resort to apologizing profusely for... well, ultimately nothing. In response, my weary friend lifts an even wearier mama hen wing and tucks me under his shoulder, reassuring ME that everything is fine and that I have nothing to worry about. At this point I am a frazzled mess, and hey yeah I could use some comforting, so I allow myself to be soothed until my worry wrinkles fade and then I'm laughing and telling the story of The Lunchbuddy Who Locked a Troll in the Closet and Was Feeding Him Skittles, and as the stress dissipates in my bloodstream I'm all sunshine and giggles and forget that the eyes smiling back at me are masks protecting me from Real Life. My friend senses that I have been lulled into a false sense of safety, and he takes this opportunity to bolt like lightning across a dry patch of grass and get the hell out of my pseudo-therapy session.
It is usually at this moment that I realize I done fucked up, son, and that maybe I should have taken myself out of the equation. Just maaaaaaybe.
Another example of this particular vein of vanity is that oftentimes when someone is talking to me about important goings-on, I will be utterly convinced that he or she is staring at how fucked-up my hair or lipstick is. I have interrupted urgent messages to shout Tourette's-style, "WHY ARE YOU LOOKING AT MY MOUTH LIKE THAT?!!!" I like to think of this as my "hair-muffs." No matter what you're telling me, I'm not going to hear you because I'm busy trying to see my reflection in the framed photo behind you to see if the shapes of my hair are trying to form sticky-outty alphabets again. A confident person would be a much better listener. If I were full of myself, I would not be worrying that you're standing there ripping apart my appearance with your evil eyes as you tell me about your sick grandmother.
No, the vanity of insecurity is a far more serious affliction than a case of Big Headedness.
I feel that this particular strain of self-consciousness creates an insurmountable distance between myself and other people. We can be sharing the most intimate moment in a passionate bout of love-making as our souls intertwine in the dim bedside lighting... and all I will be thinking about is that from this angle I must have like five hundred chins. I once told an old boyfriend of mine that I would be a much better partner if I had better hair. He laughed it off, but I grinned back at him in a perfect rendition of Jack Nicholson in The Shining because as I said it, I realized how much truth there was behind it. Oh okay, not REALLY. A Brazilian blow-out isn't going to make me a better person. But if I could find a way to shed my tight skin of insecurities I could have more honest, more fulfilling interactions with people because I wouldn't be present in so many capacities and I would be able to just BE in the MOMENT for once. Currently I exist as myself and as my reflection of myself as seen in your eyes by my own imagination at ALL times. I am sure we all walk around with our reflected self-images permanently by our sides, but I've come to realize that some people are just so much BETTER at ignoring... or... accepting? their egos and are able to take the lead in the constant tango step our self-awareness requires. These Lords of Dance are able to fully flesh-out their character and being, unencumbered by the inhibitions of a cruel heckling Jiminy Cricket, and they glitter like bedazzled (vajazzled, anyone?) beacons of hope for the rest of us to rise to our true potentials.
Here in San Luis there is a community FULL of brilliantly kooky and confidently nutty individuals who exude the utmost security and assuredness of self. I believe that is why I am so drawn to the energy here, and even though I miss and love so many people in other locations, I don't yet feel like I've satiated myself from all that this place has to offer.
It has been an interesting month. For whatever reason, everyone I have grown close to here has decided within the last few weeks to verbally share with me what they think of me as a person. I was shocked that no lewd "C" words were thrown in there for good measure and that everyone seemed to have some glorified version of me blocking their view of all the dark and bulky rest of me. For some reason, it filled me with a sense of desperation to know that everyone else's version of (singlewhitefemale) is so different from mine. Like... like maybe no one here knows the true me. Which I suppose doesn't really matter on any List of Important Things, but you know, I'm in the midst of a quarter-life crisis and self-identity is kind of what's led me on my metaphorical journey over a year ago and what I've been writing about the whole time, so let's pretend this is earth-shatteringly monumental.
In a bout of frustrated vulnerability, I appealed to my mother (the one person here who I KNOW knows the "real" me) and threw my conflicting selves into her hands, imploring her to use her talent with artistry to make the edges overlap neatly and soothe my inner unrest. Instead of solving anything, somehow thirty seconds later we were playing Scramble on her iPad (electronic Boggle laced with crack) and clucking like Bantam Sebright girlfriends about dragonfly wings on acorns and such until we couldn't keep our eyes open and it was time to go to bed. Just as I was surrendering myself to another insomniac bout of self-reflection, my mother came in and whispered in the dark directly into my ear my singlemost favorite thing she has ever said to me:
"(singlewhitefemale), you know why everyone thinks you're this great, glorified version of yourself? It's because you are, you stupid bitch."
I think today I'm going to take my ego out into public, set it down on the sidewalk, point at it with a mighty finger, and shout, "GET OVER YOURSELF."
Either that, or I'll just buy a wig.
Monday, November 28, 2011
Still pretending I'm going to write a book: Chapter 3
I worry that I might be losing my "asshole" sense of humor and turning into a legitimately good person. The blame for this falls entirely on veganism. (What a cunt!)
To get to the beginning of this story, we've gotta back up a year or so ago when I decided to stop eating animal products. I'd read in The Kind Diet and Skinny Bitch and countless issues of Veg News that when a person stops consuming the meat from fear-drenched slaughtered animals, a lightening occurs in his or her body, and the negative adrenaline and chemical dread are replaced with the ability to love and appreciate life. Essentially, compassion is born. As fast as you can Google-search "compassionate vegans" you'll be linked to story after story of how the vegan lifestyle lends itself to generosity, goodwill, peace on Earth and all that good stuff. For me... personally... well, I get it. I've had moments of pure joy and clarity where I've actually wished I could live a thousand lives just to be able to spread the gift of veganism all across the land (ewwwww I sound like a Jesus-enforcer **blech**). I've come to appreciate my family, my friends, and mySELF more than I ever have before, and to genuinely feel capable of more love than at any other time in my life-- even more than when I was pledging my soul to some boyfriend who would rather be playing videogames than pretending to want to watch Goldie Hawn in Housesitter with me for the thirtieth time. So I think they're right, really, when they say that veganism turns you into a sappy lover of all things under the sun. And I think I'd totally be on that train to sainthood with them except for...
well...
booze and cigarettes.
They are the last two things denying me my hippie sunshine bliss... and the last two things connecting me to my former self-indulgent lifestyle. I know what you're thinking. "VEGANS CAN'T SMOKE CIGARETTES!!" Right? Right? Well guess what? Actually I can do whatever the hell I want to do, bitch, it's not like a fucking cult. **sigh** That was rude. I apologize. It's just that... well, you're right. It makes no sense for me to be a big supporter of saving the world when I'm the dumb drunk breezy throwing her used cigarette butt into the bushes outside the local dive bar. NO sense. AT all. It's just that-- I don't know if you knew this but-- cigarettes? Yeah. They're HIGHLY addictive. And as addicted as we are to dairy and meat products, their hold has NOTHING on nicotine, man. I gave up gruyere in a heartbeat. I stopped smoking for a month, and then all of a sudden there I was with a stinky white cancer stick in my mouth again one day in Encinitas. It's definitely a problem. And it doesn't even FEEL good to inhale a lung-ful of carbon monoxide anymore-- when all you eat is quinoa and kale, your body becomes this hypersensitive sponge of sorts, and anything you put in it is so easily absorbed that its effects electrify you like holy water on a witch. So I spend all day pampering my body with orange juice and avocados only to fill it with toxins the second I give in to my fierce nicotine cravings. And because the chemicals have no rotten flesh or curdling lard to cling to in my stomach, they settle straight into MY flesh and lard, and twenty seconds after smoking I feel like I've done five lines of cocaine (I'm pretending to know what that feels like so I sound cool) and taken a baseball bat to the head. "Why?" you wonder. Why do I still poison myself with cancerous chemicals when I appear to get no satisfaction out of it and when it is so incongruous with the rest of my chosen lifestyle? That, my friends, is a very good question. And to be honest, I have no answer, other than "old habits die hard" or some stupid shit like that. So, for now, let's just move on to my other hallelujah-blocking vice: BOOZE!!
Ohhhhhhh booze. I'll save the five hundred thousand pages necessary to cover this topic for a later date, and I'll just touch the tip of the iceberg for now. Basically, I've been a pretty big drinker since I started tending bar in Isla Vista at age twenty-one. I went forty days last summer sans the poison, and I truly felt the full benefits of a vegan diet for the first time: I was constantly overcome by bouts of delirium at how wonderful and full of possibility I felt. (The best "high" I've ever encountered in my life was being completely sober on a plant-based diet and dancing in a bar of drunkards to Florence and the Machine's "Dog Days Are Over." Other-worldly.) Then, one day, I was at Whole Foods and saw the specific bottle of sulfite-free vegan red wine I'd enjoyed at a restaurant months before, and it all went downhill from there. I spent the evening in my writer friend's basement downing mugs of the wine and incidentally sampling a non-vegan pot brownie which resulted in my waking up in the driveway. After that, I kinda slipped back into my habit of drinking nineteen hundred after-work cocktails and such, and that feeling of absolute euphoria hid itself somewhere in my body amongst the empty calories.
I believe that if I ditched my vices, I would slowly become more and more like the Jesus-ly vegans I read about who say "That big hat is silly!" in voices reeking of innocence and who donate the majority of their time, money, and energy (which is a LOT when you're running on clean plant fuel and unencumbered by hangovers) to making the world a better place. My liver and my lungs are just BEGGING me to do so. However, I'm finding that even as I feel less and less comforted by ridiculously strong Ketel-and-sodas-with-lots-of-
That concept is... terrifying. Is it just another part of Growing Up that (singlewhitefemale)'s try to put off as long as possible and pretend doesn't exist, like Driving or Marriage? (Although really, I'm still not sure that those are necessary either.) I just hope that someone will be gracious enough to slap me in the mouth the INSTANT I start laughing at Good Ol' Boy humor. You know what I mean. The guys who swoop their hair into optimistic gelled shapes and then say, "Boy you sure did kick that ball real high!" and laugh like they've just completed a sketch on Comedy Central? Yeah. The second I start doing that I might need an intervention in the form of three Camel Crushes and five hundred shots of Jameson with Sprite backs. Just be ready, guys. If I'm gonna do this good-person thing, shit might get real.
Friday, November 18, 2011
I think I have decided...
to attempt... to possibly try... to write a book. I heard my mouth say today that I should write a book... and then I realized that HEY I have nothing better to do with this time in my life, so I might as well try to do something both time-consuming and ridiculous. Essentially I'll just write stupid shit like I do for my blog... but maybe I'll end up with a copy on paper when I'm done. No big deal, guys. Anyway, here's the first random blurb I scribbled out to get the creative process flowing....
I never thought that at age twenty-five I would be living with my mother in the county I grew up in, working part-time as a daytime bartender. Oh... my... GOD. As I wrote that sentence my eyes started filling up with tears. (Note to self: no deep reflective moments while PMSing.) I mean, what the fuck HAPPENED to me??? The other day a girl from my high school class came in to my bar. During lunch, there are never any customers. I stand there cutting limes and reluctantly making painful conversation with the one-maybe-two homeless guys who have scrounged up enough change to sit on a ragged bar stool all day and make my life miserable. Sometimes standing behind that counter and having to be nice to these people makes me think I know something about how prostitutes feel. Except that they make a shit-ton of money, and all I get is the fifty-cent piece from 1952 that the guy rolled across the counter to me as a tip. Oh, and I got spit on by that one ninety-year-old dude who refused to pay for his beer and then tried to kickbox me across the bar. I'm so used to it at this point that I think I was yawning, unfortunately, when the spitting happened, and a drop of decrepit saliva landed on my unimpressed tongue.
I never thought that at age twenty-five I would be living with my mother in the county I grew up in, working part-time as a daytime bartender. Oh... my... GOD. As I wrote that sentence my eyes started filling up with tears. (Note to self: no deep reflective moments while PMSing.) I mean, what the fuck HAPPENED to me??? The other day a girl from my high school class came in to my bar. During lunch, there are never any customers. I stand there cutting limes and reluctantly making painful conversation with the one-maybe-two homeless guys who have scrounged up enough change to sit on a ragged bar stool all day and make my life miserable. Sometimes standing behind that counter and having to be nice to these people makes me think I know something about how prostitutes feel. Except that they make a shit-ton of money, and all I get is the fifty-cent piece from 1952 that the guy rolled across the counter to me as a tip. Oh, and I got spit on by that one ninety-year-old dude who refused to pay for his beer and then tried to kickbox me across the bar. I'm so used to it at this point that I think I was yawning, unfortunately, when the spitting happened, and a drop of decrepit saliva landed on my unimpressed tongue.
Anyway, so this girl came in whom I recognized from high school. She looked exactly the same. I however, have gained at least forty pounds in the last seven years, have changed my hair color a hundred times and chopped it off, and was standing in a dive bar in the middle of the day arguing with a drunken pirate when she walked in. I could not have been more different from the last time she'd seen me. I watched her and her most-likely boyfriend take a seat at the bar. She smiled at me and ordered a drink. I tried to smile, forcing one side of my mouth to spasm upwards at least for a second. "Marge?? Wow. It's me, (singlewhitefemale)." She stared at me with an expression as blank as a cow passing gas. "(singlewhitefemale... female)." Her ears perked up at my last name.
"No way. (singlewhitefemale)??!!! You are the LAST person I would EVER have expected to see here." She didn't say it with malice. She said it like an innocent baby would say it: very matter-of-factly, with no filter or concern for my interpretation. My mind started spiraling out of control with possible meanings, foaming at the mouth with insecurity. Clearly she meant that she never thought I would fail so utterly that I would stoop to return to the cow town that I came from once I'd left it years ago... when I was "going places." I remembered Marge in high school. She was the one who started dating at a really young age. I used to tutor her in Spanish during study hall. I helped her conjugate verbs to the imperfect tense while she told me how perfect her boyfriend was. We were sixteen. At that age, I was basically a saint. I'd never smoked, never had a sip of alcohol, and the only time I'd ever been kissed by a boy I had held my tongue away from him in my mouth so that he was essentially licking my stale lunch air until he gave up and decided never to try it again. I was such a goody-two-shoes that Marge's stories about partying and handjobs made me blush and giggle at all the wrong moments because I didn't actually understand anything that she was talking about. One day she informed me that the name "Kevin" was tattooed in Sharpie across her left ass cheek because she'd fallen asleep with him after he made her "so tired," and he'd graffiti'd her. I didn't say anything, but she could see her comment had had the desired effect. I was blushing and erasing pencil marks off my desk with my head down as I put together the puzzle pieces illuminating the situation that hey, they must've had sex and that's why she was a.) TIRED and b.) NAKED. I really hated it. I couldn't beLIEVE people MY age were trying to deal already with GROWN-UP things!! The nerve.
Because I wasn't busy dealing with penises and beer, I was a very focused student in high school. I graduated with a 4.02 GPA and left immediately in the fall for college life at UCSB. I was bright, optimistic, creative, and relatively thin when I left our high school campus for the last time. Now, staring at Marge and her boyfriend (who I finally recognized as a guy two grades older than us and the ONLY person my brother has EVER gotten into a fight with) I felt a surge of all the teenage insecurities well up within me. Well, shit. Did I really have to be THIS overweight right now?? And did I have to wear my shapeless lesbian flannel shirt and forget to even LOOK at my hair before I left the house??? But then... amazingly... as we attempted to chat about lost time and the few things we could think of to say to each other... I realized that ultimately... it didn't matter. Since there were no other customers, I was forced to stand in their vicinity and make small-talk to the best of my socially awkward abilities... but I knew that neither one of us really cared what the other was saying. I knew that I was thinking, "Wow, I don't care about you. At all." and I bet she was thinking, "Wow, you weigh like a million pounds." But other than that... so what? I no longer feared her sexual prowess, and I couldn't care less if she still didn't know how to count to diez. Yes... seeing ANYONE from high school in this town is definitely my biggest nightmare.... But I felt oddly relieved to realize that even if I am in the middle of a quarter-life crisis and have relatively little to show for the last seven years of my life... well... I think deep-down I am still proud of myself for the things I have learned and experienced and who I have become. I know it is so close-minded and straight-up BITCHY of me to think that somehow I'm better than the people who never left here, the people who stayed and married each other and had babies before we could even legally purchase alcohol. It's awful. But hey, it's not like I came from a fairy-tale family with parents who taught us how to have successful lives or anything. I think the fact that I feel full-on SHAME at being back here, empty-handed, is a GOOD sign, because it's probably the only thing keeping me at least remotely interested in still figuring out a way to do well for myself in this life. So, sorry Marge if I looked down on you in high school and if I looked down on you at my bar because actually I remember now that your new boyfriend was the biggest wuss in the whole world and I wanted to KILL him when he tried to fight my brother. Sorry if I still feel like we are worlds apart and that I hope my future is splitting away from yours in drastic perpendiculars. I have no right to feel superior. But I'll be damned if I'll be serving your beers seven years from now.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Meat is Dead
Oh... hey... sorry.... I guess I kind of forgot that I like blogging and that it only works if you actually write stuff in your blog. I remember now!
So it's... November now.... That means that my vegan journey officially began over a year ago. Soooooo much has changed in my thinking in that amount of time. Let's go on a little journey through memory lane, shall we?
So last October my sister called me to tell me about the episode of Oprah she'd seen illuminating the problems with the meat industry and advertising the growing vegan movement. A lightning bolt struck my core of beliefs and I decided before she'd finished her sentence that I was going to join the movement and give up my baked brie cheese fetish once and for all. I started ferociously baking 20-lb cheese-less veggie pizzas daily. (I think I just answered my ever-lingering question of why I gained weight the second I became vegan....) I did this for about a month, bolstering my fierce devotion to the Veg Cause by lapping up the segments of animal cruelty in Alicia Silverstone's book The Kind Diet. At the Italian restaurant I managed in Santa Barbara, I traded in my nightly employee meal of three-cheese-and-jalapeno fusilli for a simple marinara and veggie capellini. I patted myself on the back, feeling the wings of my self-righteousness lift my compassionate feet straight up from the floor and into the wanna-be-Sistine-Chapel-replica that adorned the ceiling of our eatery.
But then... something... happened.
I guess.
I mean, it MUST have.
Because last Thanksgiving, my younger sister and I had one of our "Traditional Sister Thanksgivings" where we only have one day off of work so we stay in Santa Barbara together and get drunk and see a movie. And last year we went to the Holdrens Steakhouse in Goleta. And I got three dirty Ketel martinis with bleu-cheese-stuffed olives. And an appetizer of...
steak.
Okay? I said it, okay?!! Steak. STEAK! STEAK STEAK STEAK STEAK STEAK STEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Huh. Now that doesn't look like a real word. That IS how you spell that, right? Hm.
Anyway, what's weird is I don't remember having any dramatic vegan downfall or anything. All I know is that in October I was eating homemade paprika hummus, on Thanksgiving I was eating stinky cheese and steak, and on Christmas I was the one trying to make chopped salad and roasted vegetables the new holiday meal. I guess I just had a bumpy start, and then in December-ish I started my serious, no-nonsense commitment.
Ish.
For the nine months I lived in Encinitas, I was puuuuuuuumped on veganism. It was so easy! I was managing a veg-friendly cafe with such magic vegan ingredients as Daiya mozzarella cheese, tempeh strips, and Gardein "mock" chicken. While I mostly shoveled down big romaine lettuce salads with rice and veggies and tofu dill dressing, I never had a lack of variety of interesting and comforting foods (*cough*cough* vegan chocolate cupcakes with Tofutti soy cream cheese frosting *cough*cough).
When I decided to come up here to SLO, my same wise sister who inspired me to go veg in the first place said to me, "Be careful, that's like the BBQ capital of California up there."
I laughed. What, am I gonna be walking around downtown and trip and fall open-mouthed onto a rib?? HA. Nonsense.
And really, that's NOT what happened. No.... What happened was that about a month ago I started having gnarly red-meat cravings. And I mean GNARLY. I work at a place that serves hamburgers, tri-tip sandwich rolls, and pastrami sandwiches. Normally these things gross me out. But for about three weeks, they made my stomach grumble with desire. There was an off-putting disjointedness occurring between my watering mouth and the knowledge that the enticing aroma belonged to a dead animal's cooked carcass. Nothing about the REALITY of meat was appetizing to me anymore... but it took all my willpower not to scramble over the bar counter and rip that half-eaten, ketchup-y hamburger from the lunching accountant and smear my quivering lips all over it.
I couldn't contain my sinful thoughts anymore. I exploded one morning in a fit of fiery confession at my poor innocent mother. I told her that I was a siiiiiiiiick fuuuuuuuck and that I'd been thinking about meat every. single. day. and that I didn't know WHAT to DO about it. She recommended that I go online and look up other vegetarian's struggles with meat cravings. I did just that. And all I really learned is that for SOME reason, whenever people in online groups write comments, they try emBARrassingly hard to use big words and look like fucking geniuses. I sorted through all the henceforths, the inasmuches, and the neverthelesses before realizing that these people had nothing to do with me. And also that I hated them.
I called my wise sister and asked her advice. She recommended that I eat a big meaty veggie burger with all the fixin's. I smiled weakly. I was too far gone in my desires to be appeased by a measly Gardenburger. I was seeing red. That Thursday I went to the local farmers' market with my friend Stephen. We moseyed around the crowded street looking for a portable meal. I mumbled something in an off-handed manner about wanting something with steak and then chuckled nervously. Unaware of the internal battles over the matter twisting their way through my guts and my consciousness, he murmured politely in agreement and then bumped into me when I halted suddenly in the middle of the sidewalk, panting feverishly and pointing at a food stand with my tongue hanging crookedly out of the side of my mouth. He took a second to shudder at my demonic expression, then joined me in line for the fattening steak-and-cheese baked pastry pies I'd zoned in on. I struggled to order one as my teeth chattered in guilty anticipation and sheer manic expectation.
We sat on the curb and ate our steak pies. Stephen chatted about school and I heard my mouth say "Uh huh. Yeah. School. Got it." as my hands tried to push away my thick ethics surrounding them and getting in the way of me and my meeeeeat.
One bite. Hm.
Two bites. It tastes... good??
Three bites. But it kind of also tastes like... poop?? I mean actual... poop?
I finished the small-yet-rich dish. I blinked. I looked at my hands. I remembered Stephen. I looked at him. "Ready to go to the movie?" he asked. I nodded. I felt sad.
I sat through the movie 50/50, which was so good I forgot to think about the fact that I had part of a cow in my tummy. Well, I TRIED to forget. Every fifteen minutes, the cow took its angry hoof and jutted me right in the lower intestine. I spent the second half of the film breathing like a breeding woman (deeply in through my nose and out my mouth), willing myself not to insult the cow's memory by upchucking its remains onto the theater floor. I repented.
That was a couple of weeks ago. Since then, I have reverted to my former opinion of meat as food: not for me. I ate a bunch of sauteed mushrooms and roasted kale, and the cravings went away entirely. Just needed some iron, I guess. I really need to pay more attention to meal-planning so that I can get all of my nutrients and not walk around in an anemic haze thinking that I need to go grabbing up innocent animals and putting them in my mouth. **shudder**
It's not that San Luis doesn't offer a vegan-friendly environment. It actually is REALLY veg-friendly. More often than not, restaurants will actually say on their menus to ask servers about "vegan options." The actual word "vegan" is on there, guys! That's huge!!!! I think that what IS different for me is that in Encinitas I was surrounded by fellow vegans, and it was something that I was actively participating in every day of my life. Since I moved here... it's been such a private journey. I quietly eat my char-broiled artichoke at work and order my almond-milk lattes at Linnaea's Cafe. I politely answer coworkers' questions about why I don't eat meat and I not-so-politely roll my eyes when they try to catch me on a million ways I'm "cheating" on veganism. Yes, I'm wearing my mom's leather cowgirl boots. I don't feel bad about it, either. No, I didn't know that beer contains fish brains. I'm still going to finish my pint, thank you. And so on and so forth. I guess it's made me realize that even though veganism IS exciting and IS trendy and super rad and brilliant and all those other amazing things... it's also just a non-glamorous lifestyle that you agree to each and every day, whether there's someone to high-five you about it or not. And you know what? There's something beautiful about that. If veganism is perfection, then I am far from it. But it's nice to at least strive for something, and to so firmly believe in something that could potentially save the world. Also... I really just kinda like the almond-milk lattes at Linnaea's....
So it's... November now.... That means that my vegan journey officially began over a year ago. Soooooo much has changed in my thinking in that amount of time. Let's go on a little journey through memory lane, shall we?
So last October my sister called me to tell me about the episode of Oprah she'd seen illuminating the problems with the meat industry and advertising the growing vegan movement. A lightning bolt struck my core of beliefs and I decided before she'd finished her sentence that I was going to join the movement and give up my baked brie cheese fetish once and for all. I started ferociously baking 20-lb cheese-less veggie pizzas daily. (I think I just answered my ever-lingering question of why I gained weight the second I became vegan....) I did this for about a month, bolstering my fierce devotion to the Veg Cause by lapping up the segments of animal cruelty in Alicia Silverstone's book The Kind Diet. At the Italian restaurant I managed in Santa Barbara, I traded in my nightly employee meal of three-cheese-and-jalapeno fusilli for a simple marinara and veggie capellini. I patted myself on the back, feeling the wings of my self-righteousness lift my compassionate feet straight up from the floor and into the wanna-be-Sistine-Chapel-replica that adorned the ceiling of our eatery.
But then... something... happened.
I guess.
I mean, it MUST have.
Because last Thanksgiving, my younger sister and I had one of our "Traditional Sister Thanksgivings" where we only have one day off of work so we stay in Santa Barbara together and get drunk and see a movie. And last year we went to the Holdrens Steakhouse in Goleta. And I got three dirty Ketel martinis with bleu-cheese-stuffed olives. And an appetizer of...
steak.
Okay? I said it, okay?!! Steak. STEAK! STEAK STEAK STEAK STEAK STEAK STEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Huh. Now that doesn't look like a real word. That IS how you spell that, right? Hm.
Anyway, what's weird is I don't remember having any dramatic vegan downfall or anything. All I know is that in October I was eating homemade paprika hummus, on Thanksgiving I was eating stinky cheese and steak, and on Christmas I was the one trying to make chopped salad and roasted vegetables the new holiday meal. I guess I just had a bumpy start, and then in December-ish I started my serious, no-nonsense commitment.
Ish.
For the nine months I lived in Encinitas, I was puuuuuuuumped on veganism. It was so easy! I was managing a veg-friendly cafe with such magic vegan ingredients as Daiya mozzarella cheese, tempeh strips, and Gardein "mock" chicken. While I mostly shoveled down big romaine lettuce salads with rice and veggies and tofu dill dressing, I never had a lack of variety of interesting and comforting foods (*cough*cough* vegan chocolate cupcakes with Tofutti soy cream cheese frosting *cough*cough).
When I decided to come up here to SLO, my same wise sister who inspired me to go veg in the first place said to me, "Be careful, that's like the BBQ capital of California up there."
I laughed. What, am I gonna be walking around downtown and trip and fall open-mouthed onto a rib?? HA. Nonsense.
And really, that's NOT what happened. No.... What happened was that about a month ago I started having gnarly red-meat cravings. And I mean GNARLY. I work at a place that serves hamburgers, tri-tip sandwich rolls, and pastrami sandwiches. Normally these things gross me out. But for about three weeks, they made my stomach grumble with desire. There was an off-putting disjointedness occurring between my watering mouth and the knowledge that the enticing aroma belonged to a dead animal's cooked carcass. Nothing about the REALITY of meat was appetizing to me anymore... but it took all my willpower not to scramble over the bar counter and rip that half-eaten, ketchup-y hamburger from the lunching accountant and smear my quivering lips all over it.
I couldn't contain my sinful thoughts anymore. I exploded one morning in a fit of fiery confession at my poor innocent mother. I told her that I was a siiiiiiiiick fuuuuuuuck and that I'd been thinking about meat every. single. day. and that I didn't know WHAT to DO about it. She recommended that I go online and look up other vegetarian's struggles with meat cravings. I did just that. And all I really learned is that for SOME reason, whenever people in online groups write comments, they try emBARrassingly hard to use big words and look like fucking geniuses. I sorted through all the henceforths, the inasmuches, and the neverthelesses before realizing that these people had nothing to do with me. And also that I hated them.
I called my wise sister and asked her advice. She recommended that I eat a big meaty veggie burger with all the fixin's. I smiled weakly. I was too far gone in my desires to be appeased by a measly Gardenburger. I was seeing red. That Thursday I went to the local farmers' market with my friend Stephen. We moseyed around the crowded street looking for a portable meal. I mumbled something in an off-handed manner about wanting something with steak and then chuckled nervously. Unaware of the internal battles over the matter twisting their way through my guts and my consciousness, he murmured politely in agreement and then bumped into me when I halted suddenly in the middle of the sidewalk, panting feverishly and pointing at a food stand with my tongue hanging crookedly out of the side of my mouth. He took a second to shudder at my demonic expression, then joined me in line for the fattening steak-and-cheese baked pastry pies I'd zoned in on. I struggled to order one as my teeth chattered in guilty anticipation and sheer manic expectation.
We sat on the curb and ate our steak pies. Stephen chatted about school and I heard my mouth say "Uh huh. Yeah. School. Got it." as my hands tried to push away my thick ethics surrounding them and getting in the way of me and my meeeeeat.
One bite. Hm.
Two bites. It tastes... good??
Three bites. But it kind of also tastes like... poop?? I mean actual... poop?
I finished the small-yet-rich dish. I blinked. I looked at my hands. I remembered Stephen. I looked at him. "Ready to go to the movie?" he asked. I nodded. I felt sad.
I sat through the movie 50/50, which was so good I forgot to think about the fact that I had part of a cow in my tummy. Well, I TRIED to forget. Every fifteen minutes, the cow took its angry hoof and jutted me right in the lower intestine. I spent the second half of the film breathing like a breeding woman (deeply in through my nose and out my mouth), willing myself not to insult the cow's memory by upchucking its remains onto the theater floor. I repented.
That was a couple of weeks ago. Since then, I have reverted to my former opinion of meat as food: not for me. I ate a bunch of sauteed mushrooms and roasted kale, and the cravings went away entirely. Just needed some iron, I guess. I really need to pay more attention to meal-planning so that I can get all of my nutrients and not walk around in an anemic haze thinking that I need to go grabbing up innocent animals and putting them in my mouth. **shudder**
It's not that San Luis doesn't offer a vegan-friendly environment. It actually is REALLY veg-friendly. More often than not, restaurants will actually say on their menus to ask servers about "vegan options." The actual word "vegan" is on there, guys! That's huge!!!! I think that what IS different for me is that in Encinitas I was surrounded by fellow vegans, and it was something that I was actively participating in every day of my life. Since I moved here... it's been such a private journey. I quietly eat my char-broiled artichoke at work and order my almond-milk lattes at Linnaea's Cafe. I politely answer coworkers' questions about why I don't eat meat and I not-so-politely roll my eyes when they try to catch me on a million ways I'm "cheating" on veganism. Yes, I'm wearing my mom's leather cowgirl boots. I don't feel bad about it, either. No, I didn't know that beer contains fish brains. I'm still going to finish my pint, thank you. And so on and so forth. I guess it's made me realize that even though veganism IS exciting and IS trendy and super rad and brilliant and all those other amazing things... it's also just a non-glamorous lifestyle that you agree to each and every day, whether there's someone to high-five you about it or not. And you know what? There's something beautiful about that. If veganism is perfection, then I am far from it. But it's nice to at least strive for something, and to so firmly believe in something that could potentially save the world. Also... I really just kinda like the almond-milk lattes at Linnaea's....
Friday, September 30, 2011
Unemployment 101
For the last ten years, I have always had at least one job. I've never been "between jobs," because before I moved cities or chose to relocate myself as an employee, I always waited until I'd found a replacement employer in order to avoid the stress of unemployment. Always, that is, until this summer. Six weeks ago, I left my full-time management position in Encinitas to join hands with my mom's tomato plants and sing happiness into the sunshine (while wearing two layers of SPF 50, of course). I had no plan, no idea, and relatively little stress about any of it. Fast forward to the present, and you'll find me wearing holey pajamas that I bartered off of a homeless bearded man for a fistful of blue jay feathers. Well, almost. Yeah, actually.
After the first week of joblessness, I bit off my hands and laughed maniacally to myself through a mouthful of bloody angst. I am used to working 40-80 hours a week (apparently), so to tell myself that my "job for now" is to paint and write and exercise feels something like telling myself to dance without making jerky neck movements and head swishes. Just not quite right. I promptly got on a train to Santa Barbara and started picking up shifts at my old restaurant. (My favorite part about this is that after eight months of being gone, when I showed up and started giving tickets to the kitchen, the chefs just took the paper slips from me and started cooking my orders without so much as an eyebrow-raise. The words "EPIC FAIL" flashed in front of my eyes when I realized they probably expected I'd crawl back someday to fake smile at tables for five dollars.)
Week number two was a good week. My mom and I had our first gallery show. My brother and his girlfriend came to help us set it all up, and all-in-all I'd say it was a success. Thanks to Sam and Sara, we were the only gallery in the Art After Dark loop known for "that bomb-ass soup!"; at one point we had almost twenty people crammed into our closet-sized space, murmuring pleased remarks about the art works through closed lips harboring the vegan summer squash stew and sweet potato hummus. For the first hour of the show, I went into no-nonsense-manager mode and silently covered the walls with all the artists' information for their individual pieces. When that was done, I looked down at my Homeless Outfit and decided I should go change into something nicer. Looking at pictures from the evening, I'm still not sure why that meant I should put on wool slippers, hippie tie-dye leggings, a baggy black sweater, and a thuggish black beanie. I was a walking upside-down funky mullet-- straight-up gangsta business on top, rainbow daisy party on bottom. Oh well. I don't think any of the people passing through even knew I was one of the two women running the show because I found out straight-away that I am not one for schmoozing. I spent the night fighting off old ladies for the last bit of soup, hiding behind tall people in shadows on the balcony, and finally, escaping for a 40 oz draft of beer from Chino's. Great success!
The third week marked my first job interview. I was VERY excited about it. The interview was for a coffee shop slash book bar slash art venue slash amazing fucking awesome establishment. I fell in love with it more and more every time I walked through the doors and saw at least fifteen pairs of black-rimmed emo glasses and a hundred different colors of flannel. On the morning of my interview, I awoke early to go for a Good Karma Run (oh okay, JOG). I gave myself plenty of time to cool down and shower and make myself presentable. The problem was that I underestimated the fatal combination of being severely out-of-shape AND being 99% albino. Two hours after my run, I was still sweating bullets, and the heat radiating off of my fuchsia face was causing my makeup to curdle. I had no choice but to arrive at the interview with... well, with a sopping wet red face. As I shook the hands of the general manager and the owner, I don't think I even said my name. I just blurted out in a disturbingly loud voice an apology for the sheer amount of sweating that was going on, explaining that I'd gone for a run TWO HOURS BEFORE. They both nervously laughed, and I nervously sweated on their hands.
Then I blacked out.
Really. I don't remember what was said in that entire fifteen minutes. The only thing I DO remember is that they asked me questions regarding my working capabilities, and that instead of answering them I started laughing a lot and leaning back in my chair with my arms limply sprawled out to both sides, like a fat king in a royal bathtub. I laughed. I sweated. I wiped my hands obsessively over the slick surface of my face, grimacing at the handfuls of water I encountered with each swipe. Oh another question? Hey maybe instead of answering, I should just apologize for being sweaty again? Sounds like a plan to me!! And then I'll tell them that the last job I had was really easy. That's a good one, that'll help a lot. You GOT this, (singlewhitefemale). In da BAG!
When I regained consciousness I was sitting in my mom's house, staring at my phone, praying for the call that would end my vertigo and return me to anti-slip shoes and caked food on my forearms from carting around dirty plates for several hours a day. It never came. Since I had already chewed off my hands in week one, I hammered my feet into flat planks just to give myself something to do other than anything that could actually be helpful.
That weekend I returned to Santa Barbara to work yet again at my old restaurant. People started asking me why I didn't just move back. I started asking myself the same question.
In week four I got a phone call for an interview at a Greek/Mexican fusion cafe in San Luis, and I felt the blood coursing through me shake off the weight of anxiety and adrenal dread it had been dragging through my system. This interview went much, much better. I actually said some good things about myself, and I was only sweating a very minimal amount. Within two hours, I was employed, and I felt like Edward-Cullen-style sprint-running through a forest with heavenly sunlight reflecting on my diamond-sparkling white vampire chest. You know that feeling. C'mon.
Last week, week five, I started at my new job. The owner had me come in for three days and basically stand around and be a big waste of space. The only skill I perfected was saying "behind you!" whenever I realized I was blocking a hurried worker's route to a table with an armful of plated food. I clocked out each day after only a couple of hours, and I realized that the other skill I had perfected was giving myself a big worried crease between my eyebrows from all the fretting I was doing about not actually making any money. I was appointed two weekly shifts: Tuesday and Thursday lunches. **deepening of said Worry Crease**
I got a call for a job interview at a healthy-ish cafe practically next-door to the one where I'd just been hired. You know, it's funny how trying to find a job in this shitbag economy has changed my perspective so much. I used to always think that since I'm someone who works hard, I'd never have any trouble getting a job. Dude. Being unemployed mind-fucks you. I don't even know WHAT I believe anymore. As I was getting ready for this interview, I found myself staring at my reflection in the mirror. It was one of those moments where if you're a heroin addict in a TV show, you shoot up while your baby's crying in the next room and you look deep into your dark-circled eyes and grasp the bathroom sink to steady yourself in a room slowly slipping into a shaky oblivion. True introspection time. I gazed objectively at the thirty bright-colored beaded necklaces I'd roped around my neck, dangling upon a yellow floral blouse tucked into a super-girly high-waisted black skirt with pockets. My feet sweated in glittery silver flats. Bright pink lipstick. Curly ringlets in varying stages of faded hair-dye bouncing around my head. I looked like the most chipper fucking person on the planet. I felt utterly no connection to the person looking back at me for approval.
The owner of this cafe was a sharply dressed man (the uber-femme scarf lazing about his neckline reeked of sophistication) with cutting eyes and a smile that dared you to call it out on its insincerity. He exuded all cold energy. Which was weird, because he was flashing a handsome grin the entire time and seemed to be saying only nice things.... At least his chilly aura cooled my sweat glands for the duration of my time with him. I guess maybe I should've thought about what questions I might have to answer in these interviews before I was actually sitting there faced with them. Even though everything he asked me was completely standard material for a person seeking employment as a server, the questions were knocking me off my feet with profundity.
What would your coworkers say about you if I were to ask them what you're like?
I think my eyebrows got lost up in my bangs. Hm. Huh. My coworkers, eh? Hey, I miss those guys! I used to have friends!! I wonder what they WOULD say about me! They're so nice. I wish Santa Barbara and Encinitas would just move to San Luis already. I'm tired of not having friends here. Poor, poor me.... Oh. Fuck. The guy is looking at me. I need to give him an answer. Oh shit. Wait, where am I? How long have I been sitting here?!!
I finally heard my mouth say something along the lines of, "I think they would say I'm a hard worker. And that I am usually smiling... so... very, uhh, positive. They were... sad to see me go? I think? And that's... yeah... that's... yeah... the answer." I ended every response with some statement of finality, announcing the temporary end to my rambling because there was no meat to any of my statements and I could tell that that the useless bit of information I'd just shared needed to be wrapped up with a bow for him to recognize it as something tangible. As I left the restaurant after my interview, I instantly felt like the cheery necklaces at my throat were constricting my airway with their heavy optimism. I went home and changed into pajamas in all shades of gray.
The thing I never knew about unemployment was how much it fucks with your head. You're supposed to go out there and present yourself to the world as this desirable marketable object, when inwardly you're experiencing the biggest bout of self-doubt and uncertainty of your life. Hearing myself try to SELL myself to these strangers, I start freaking out behind the words coming out of my mouth. Should I even be hired? Would I hire me??? Who the fuck AM I??? Where do I fit?!! The vultures of insecurity start circling my head and dive-bombing my consciousness with jabs of discontent. And all of a sudden, I don't want to be going through the motions of all these formalities. I just want to look the interviewer in the face of his heart and say with a big sigh, "Look, I am feeling really lost right now because I just moved here and it would really help if you could give me a job so that I can calm down and feel enough stability to allow me to make some art because right now I am FREAKING THE FUCK OUT and it's really hard to be creative when my mind is on red alert with the stress of being jobless and penniless in a new town. Aight?"
But... you can't say that. You have puff up your chest, putting on airs of confidence and self-worth, praying that you possess the most potent pheromones and that your feathers will shine brighter than your competitors' so that you can be the lucky chosen one to serve food to pretentious tourists for minimum wage plus tips.
Week six. I have lost myself in The Sons of Anarchy. I spend entirely too much of my jobless time fantasizing about motorcycle clubs and mad amounts of ink, yo, and sexy muscular men shooting bad guys while simultaneously ashing their cigarettes. Mentally this week I became Jax Teller's "old lady" and was crowned princess of the SamCro clan. In reality I guess I picked up an extra shift at my new job and actually made a little bit of money. And I am leaving tomorrow (AGAIN) for Santa Barbara (AGAIN) to work for the weekend (AGAIN) so that I won't get arrested for not paying any of my bills. Maybe it's good to get away for a couple of days. As much as I love Santa Barbara, being there reminds me that I've already milked it for all that it has to offer me. (Wow, what a gross, un-veganly sentence. A sincere apology goes out to Santa Barbara's non-consenting teats.) It's nice to return to SLO with a fresh set of go-get-'em eyes and a mouth foaming with eagerness for new opportunities, though.
Well. Here's to week lucky number seven. As for now? I've gotta go. I have a date with Jax to watch season 4 episode 3 of his show.
We're kind of in love.
You're jealous.
Bitch.
After the first week of joblessness, I bit off my hands and laughed maniacally to myself through a mouthful of bloody angst. I am used to working 40-80 hours a week (apparently), so to tell myself that my "job for now" is to paint and write and exercise feels something like telling myself to dance without making jerky neck movements and head swishes. Just not quite right. I promptly got on a train to Santa Barbara and started picking up shifts at my old restaurant. (My favorite part about this is that after eight months of being gone, when I showed up and started giving tickets to the kitchen, the chefs just took the paper slips from me and started cooking my orders without so much as an eyebrow-raise. The words "EPIC FAIL" flashed in front of my eyes when I realized they probably expected I'd crawl back someday to fake smile at tables for five dollars.)
Week number two was a good week. My mom and I had our first gallery show. My brother and his girlfriend came to help us set it all up, and all-in-all I'd say it was a success. Thanks to Sam and Sara, we were the only gallery in the Art After Dark loop known for "that bomb-ass soup!"; at one point we had almost twenty people crammed into our closet-sized space, murmuring pleased remarks about the art works through closed lips harboring the vegan summer squash stew and sweet potato hummus. For the first hour of the show, I went into no-nonsense-manager mode and silently covered the walls with all the artists' information for their individual pieces. When that was done, I looked down at my Homeless Outfit and decided I should go change into something nicer. Looking at pictures from the evening, I'm still not sure why that meant I should put on wool slippers, hippie tie-dye leggings, a baggy black sweater, and a thuggish black beanie. I was a walking upside-down funky mullet-- straight-up gangsta business on top, rainbow daisy party on bottom. Oh well. I don't think any of the people passing through even knew I was one of the two women running the show because I found out straight-away that I am not one for schmoozing. I spent the night fighting off old ladies for the last bit of soup, hiding behind tall people in shadows on the balcony, and finally, escaping for a 40 oz draft of beer from Chino's. Great success!
The third week marked my first job interview. I was VERY excited about it. The interview was for a coffee shop slash book bar slash art venue slash amazing fucking awesome establishment. I fell in love with it more and more every time I walked through the doors and saw at least fifteen pairs of black-rimmed emo glasses and a hundred different colors of flannel. On the morning of my interview, I awoke early to go for a Good Karma Run (oh okay, JOG). I gave myself plenty of time to cool down and shower and make myself presentable. The problem was that I underestimated the fatal combination of being severely out-of-shape AND being 99% albino. Two hours after my run, I was still sweating bullets, and the heat radiating off of my fuchsia face was causing my makeup to curdle. I had no choice but to arrive at the interview with... well, with a sopping wet red face. As I shook the hands of the general manager and the owner, I don't think I even said my name. I just blurted out in a disturbingly loud voice an apology for the sheer amount of sweating that was going on, explaining that I'd gone for a run TWO HOURS BEFORE. They both nervously laughed, and I nervously sweated on their hands.
Then I blacked out.
Really. I don't remember what was said in that entire fifteen minutes. The only thing I DO remember is that they asked me questions regarding my working capabilities, and that instead of answering them I started laughing a lot and leaning back in my chair with my arms limply sprawled out to both sides, like a fat king in a royal bathtub. I laughed. I sweated. I wiped my hands obsessively over the slick surface of my face, grimacing at the handfuls of water I encountered with each swipe. Oh another question? Hey maybe instead of answering, I should just apologize for being sweaty again? Sounds like a plan to me!! And then I'll tell them that the last job I had was really easy. That's a good one, that'll help a lot. You GOT this, (singlewhitefemale). In da BAG!
When I regained consciousness I was sitting in my mom's house, staring at my phone, praying for the call that would end my vertigo and return me to anti-slip shoes and caked food on my forearms from carting around dirty plates for several hours a day. It never came. Since I had already chewed off my hands in week one, I hammered my feet into flat planks just to give myself something to do other than anything that could actually be helpful.
That weekend I returned to Santa Barbara to work yet again at my old restaurant. People started asking me why I didn't just move back. I started asking myself the same question.
In week four I got a phone call for an interview at a Greek/Mexican fusion cafe in San Luis, and I felt the blood coursing through me shake off the weight of anxiety and adrenal dread it had been dragging through my system. This interview went much, much better. I actually said some good things about myself, and I was only sweating a very minimal amount. Within two hours, I was employed, and I felt like Edward-Cullen-style sprint-running through a forest with heavenly sunlight reflecting on my diamond-sparkling white vampire chest. You know that feeling. C'mon.
Last week, week five, I started at my new job. The owner had me come in for three days and basically stand around and be a big waste of space. The only skill I perfected was saying "behind you!" whenever I realized I was blocking a hurried worker's route to a table with an armful of plated food. I clocked out each day after only a couple of hours, and I realized that the other skill I had perfected was giving myself a big worried crease between my eyebrows from all the fretting I was doing about not actually making any money. I was appointed two weekly shifts: Tuesday and Thursday lunches. **deepening of said Worry Crease**
I got a call for a job interview at a healthy-ish cafe practically next-door to the one where I'd just been hired. You know, it's funny how trying to find a job in this shitbag economy has changed my perspective so much. I used to always think that since I'm someone who works hard, I'd never have any trouble getting a job. Dude. Being unemployed mind-fucks you. I don't even know WHAT I believe anymore. As I was getting ready for this interview, I found myself staring at my reflection in the mirror. It was one of those moments where if you're a heroin addict in a TV show, you shoot up while your baby's crying in the next room and you look deep into your dark-circled eyes and grasp the bathroom sink to steady yourself in a room slowly slipping into a shaky oblivion. True introspection time. I gazed objectively at the thirty bright-colored beaded necklaces I'd roped around my neck, dangling upon a yellow floral blouse tucked into a super-girly high-waisted black skirt with pockets. My feet sweated in glittery silver flats. Bright pink lipstick. Curly ringlets in varying stages of faded hair-dye bouncing around my head. I looked like the most chipper fucking person on the planet. I felt utterly no connection to the person looking back at me for approval.
The owner of this cafe was a sharply dressed man (the uber-femme scarf lazing about his neckline reeked of sophistication) with cutting eyes and a smile that dared you to call it out on its insincerity. He exuded all cold energy. Which was weird, because he was flashing a handsome grin the entire time and seemed to be saying only nice things.... At least his chilly aura cooled my sweat glands for the duration of my time with him. I guess maybe I should've thought about what questions I might have to answer in these interviews before I was actually sitting there faced with them. Even though everything he asked me was completely standard material for a person seeking employment as a server, the questions were knocking me off my feet with profundity.
What would your coworkers say about you if I were to ask them what you're like?
I think my eyebrows got lost up in my bangs. Hm. Huh. My coworkers, eh? Hey, I miss those guys! I used to have friends!! I wonder what they WOULD say about me! They're so nice. I wish Santa Barbara and Encinitas would just move to San Luis already. I'm tired of not having friends here. Poor, poor me.... Oh. Fuck. The guy is looking at me. I need to give him an answer. Oh shit. Wait, where am I? How long have I been sitting here?!!
I finally heard my mouth say something along the lines of, "I think they would say I'm a hard worker. And that I am usually smiling... so... very, uhh, positive. They were... sad to see me go? I think? And that's... yeah... that's... yeah... the answer." I ended every response with some statement of finality, announcing the temporary end to my rambling because there was no meat to any of my statements and I could tell that that the useless bit of information I'd just shared needed to be wrapped up with a bow for him to recognize it as something tangible. As I left the restaurant after my interview, I instantly felt like the cheery necklaces at my throat were constricting my airway with their heavy optimism. I went home and changed into pajamas in all shades of gray.
The thing I never knew about unemployment was how much it fucks with your head. You're supposed to go out there and present yourself to the world as this desirable marketable object, when inwardly you're experiencing the biggest bout of self-doubt and uncertainty of your life. Hearing myself try to SELL myself to these strangers, I start freaking out behind the words coming out of my mouth. Should I even be hired? Would I hire me??? Who the fuck AM I??? Where do I fit?!! The vultures of insecurity start circling my head and dive-bombing my consciousness with jabs of discontent. And all of a sudden, I don't want to be going through the motions of all these formalities. I just want to look the interviewer in the face of his heart and say with a big sigh, "Look, I am feeling really lost right now because I just moved here and it would really help if you could give me a job so that I can calm down and feel enough stability to allow me to make some art because right now I am FREAKING THE FUCK OUT and it's really hard to be creative when my mind is on red alert with the stress of being jobless and penniless in a new town. Aight?"
But... you can't say that. You have puff up your chest, putting on airs of confidence and self-worth, praying that you possess the most potent pheromones and that your feathers will shine brighter than your competitors' so that you can be the lucky chosen one to serve food to pretentious tourists for minimum wage plus tips.
Week six. I have lost myself in The Sons of Anarchy. I spend entirely too much of my jobless time fantasizing about motorcycle clubs and mad amounts of ink, yo, and sexy muscular men shooting bad guys while simultaneously ashing their cigarettes. Mentally this week I became Jax Teller's "old lady" and was crowned princess of the SamCro clan. In reality I guess I picked up an extra shift at my new job and actually made a little bit of money. And I am leaving tomorrow (AGAIN) for Santa Barbara (AGAIN) to work for the weekend (AGAIN) so that I won't get arrested for not paying any of my bills. Maybe it's good to get away for a couple of days. As much as I love Santa Barbara, being there reminds me that I've already milked it for all that it has to offer me. (Wow, what a gross, un-veganly sentence. A sincere apology goes out to Santa Barbara's non-consenting teats.) It's nice to return to SLO with a fresh set of go-get-'em eyes and a mouth foaming with eagerness for new opportunities, though.
Well. Here's to week lucky number seven. As for now? I've gotta go. I have a date with Jax to watch season 4 episode 3 of his show.
We're kind of in love.
You're jealous.
Bitch.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Senorita Guerita
It's already driving me crazy that I can't make the en-yay symbol above the "n" in the title up there. Faaahck. I'm not sure how long I can look at that before I just delete this whole post out of frustration.
Well. Anyway. I've been speaking a lot more Spanish lately. Yep. I'm preeeeeetty much just a bad-ass now. I'm going to take you on a little journey to the very beginning of my history with the Spanish language. For me, it all started when I was in the eighth grade. Since I quit marching band after seventh grade (which I realized later was a mistake cuz there were actually hot nerdy band guys in high school, damnit), I was able to actually choose my elective class for my second year at the junior high. This was a big deal-- while I had been tripping over my shoelaces and accidentally bashing people in the jaw with my flute case, everyone else had been bonding over the generic set of elective classes, gaining coolness levels by not caring about the quality of their freshly sanded wooden bowls but more about who made-out with whom in the photo lab's Red Room. I was giddy with fourteen-year-old girl adrenaline at the prospect of rubbing elbows with non-nerds in a class other than P.E. (We called Phys Ed "PE." I'm sure that's self-explanatory, but it just occurred to me that maybe it's not. But I mean... it is. Right?) I was so tired of seeing the same faces in the desks around me in every classroom-- all the same honors students taking school a *little* too seriously in our rush to be perfect mini-adults before our balls even had a chance to drop. I yearned for a fresh batch of blood to mix with, to hear the gossip of the more sexually advanced, and to develop crushes on the "bad boys" that I otherwise never had a chance to be around.
As I daydreamed about tossing flour into the air with all the other care-free students in Home Ec, pretending not to be super pumped about learning to make a pie crust in a perfect rendition of Snow White's lacy artistry... my mother was discovering that Spanish was going to be offered as an elective for eighth graders for the first time at our school. My powdered sugar dreams slipped soundlessly through the cracks of my doughy fingers and morphed into "suenos" before they hit the floor. Yet again, I was signed up for an elective that was surely to house every helplessly nerdy try-hard student and myself. Thanks Mom.
I was surprised to find that the variety of students in my Spanish class was actually more diverse than every other class of mine. It seemed all kinds of moms had forced their kids into taking an academic course as an elective. I scanned the mixture of jocks and druggees, until SHE crossed the ugly off-blue carpet in one sturdy quarterbacker's stride and took the the center of the room.
"Hola, ethtudianteth. Mi nombre eth Thenora Borrith de Barthelona. Thoy la profethora de ethta clathe."
We stared. Some of us may have even clapped. There she... towered. At least six feet tall. Probably closer to eleven. White as can be, with a mommish style radiating a faint yet terrifying glow of sheer power and strength. Within half a minute, she had the attention of every hormone-rattled brain in that room. I honestly can't explain the hold her presence has over people. I mean, here I am actually TRYING to explain it, and I realize that it just sounds stupid. But... when she speaks in a room, you feel like you'd better listen to what she's saying, or else you're either going to get a spanking from her seriously intimidating forearm or you're going to miss out on a sentence that will be crucially important to you later in a life-or-death situation. Yeah. I guess that's the best way I can describe it.
I lapped up every word that lisped out of Senora Borris de Barcelona's lips. Though I must say that it was difficult, especially at first, to distinguish between what SHE was physically saying with her mouth and what she wanted US to say with ours. Her Castilian accent caused much confusion. I distinctly remember going through the numbers that first day: "Repeat after me. THERO."
"Thero."
"No no no, I say THERO, you say CERO!! Okay? THERO!"
"Sssss--uhh--ther...o.... Thero?"
"NO! SAY-RO! CERO! SSSSSS-ERO!! I SAY THE 'TH' SOUND, NOT YOU!"
And it was fine until we got to numero "doth" and had to go through it all over again. Eventually the Thenora had to just abandon her usual accent and give it to us straight-up. After every lecture she gave she would lean her shadow over our desks and shout "WRITE IT DOWN!" in case any of us were so caught up in watching her large arm swoops that we forgot to take notes. We started referring to her (secretly) as The Borris. We all loved her. Well, and we feared her. I more loved her than feared her though, and inwardly I aspired to be as Spanish-ly savvy as she. I slurped up that vocabulary as if it were Nantucket Nectar lemonade (I didn't drink booze for another four years, so I had a pretty solid addiction to lemonade, and this particular brand was my bottle of choice). I got a raging boner when I discovered that the same grammatical rules I had devoted my heart to in English existed for the Spanish language as well. I could NOT get enough.
Freshman year of high school I entered Spanish 2 with a different instructor, and she chose me as her Student of the Year the first month because I was the only student to turn in a flawless paper for our initial essay. At the lunch thrown in the awarded students' honor, she found out I was a freshman and then seemed upset that she'd chosen me. I was too busy waving across the room excitedly at The Borris to be bothered by the fact that my own teacher was pouting, though. The glorious Borris sat a good four feet above the student trying to have a presence at her side. I felt a kick of jealousy for the girl she had chosen.
I took Spanish for the next three years in high school. Incidentally, The Borris was my teacher for all of them. I was thrilled. However, this is the reason that after taking five years of Spanish, I could still go into a group of Mexicans and be positive that they were speaking Mandarin. I essentially learned text-book Spain-Spanish with a Castilian accent. I studied Nineteenth Century novels and absorbed the culture of The Borris's experiences from living in Spain for eighteen years. I could write ten-paged essays about the politics of Don Quixote, but when a woman stopped me on the street and asked me directions to "El bano?" I dropped to the ground and played dead. On many occasions, I resorted to idiot-status sign language and squeaks of exasperation when confronted with someone who only spoke Spanish. Finally, maybe after four painstaking minutes scraped by, I would bust out a sentence in semi-perfect-but-perfectly-helpful Spanish, and the person would do a double-take and then I'd run away before the stress of it all gave me a heart attack. I just always worried too much about making a mistake with words. One thing I don't like is ANYTHING I AM NOT GOOD AT. True story. Swimming (although that may have more to do with the whole bathing suit thing). Video games. Marathons. The list goes on and on. And when it comes to language, I am very, VERY self-conscious. I actually feel a great deal of disappointment in myself because of the fact that I constantly end sentences and phrases with prepositions. This drives me crazy. I highly doubt anyone else cares, or that anyone was even listening to what I was saying or writing in the first place. But to imagine messing up entire sentences PUBLICLY makes me want to put on all white and go rock in a corner somewhere. Fuck that, lady you go find the bathroom yourSELF.
I took a dozen more Spanish classes at UCSB. They were less intimate than our sessions with The Borris. I didn't really care for any of the professors. They didn't really care for me. I didn't try to distinguish myself from my peers, and my learning curve tuckered itself out. In my linguistics class, I all-but phoned in my presence. I waltzed into class late one day, texting my boyfriend at the time about dinner plans (omg lol ttyl), only to find people reciting poems in Spanish that they'd memorized. I looked at my peers' faces to make sure I was in the right class, then hastily made an exit before I had to try to make up some "Rosas son rojas" shit. When did I lose my zest for the language??
It wasn't until I graduated from college that I actually put my eight years of studying the Spanish language to any use. No, I didn't travel to Europe and go running with the bulls. I was busy sucking the teat of the service industry in hoity-toity downtown Santa Barbara, whose entire back-of-house staff is dominated by talented chefs from Mexico. When you go to a restaurant in Santa Barbara, you are greeted by the young hot hostess with the dangly earrings and the side-swept bangs. She leads you to a table, where your surfer hunk of a server lists the evening's specials to you. He directs your difficult questions to the nicely dressed, slightly older gentleman with the manager's smile and efficient demeanor. When your inquisitions have been satisfied, the dreamy server returns and shakes his sun-streaked locks from his eyes as he jots down your order and you settle into your seat and wait for your food to materialize. As a patron, what you don't know is that because you changed five hundred things about your order, your server is about to have the most complicated language barrier battle of his life. Imagine being a chef, standing in front of a hot flame in an overheated kitchen in a warm town, cooking food to-order for hundreds of customers with different modifications on each ticket. Then imagine stressed-out servers shouting important specifics at you for each ticket in a language that is secondary to you. The amount of tension created by this scenario is quadrupled by the fact that the kitchen staff all have access to many sharp knives. It was this extreme environment of terse, mixed-up communication that forced me to reach into my supply kit and pull out my Spanish vocabulary. Granted, half the time the guys in the kitchen laughed at me and corrected me because many of the words I was accustomed to were either outdated or nonexistent for SoCal Spanish. However... after a certain amount of effort on my part, I was gradually accepted as a pseudo-Spanish-speaker, and a camaraderie formed between my Mexican coworkers and me. They started referring to me as la Senorita Guerita, and I proudly translated anxious new servers' requests to the kitchen, joking with the chefs at the doe-eyed unilingual lass's expense. Jajaja.
Because I prided myself so much on being a part of the Mexican community at my restaurant in Santa Barbara, I was utterly thrilled when, after our company Christmas party last year, a group of the guys from the kitchen asked me to go with them to their bar, La Copa. My female coworkers were NOT so happy about this invitation, and immediately started mom-ing me and warning me that they'd ground me if I even THOUGHT about going there, yadda yadda yadda. We'd all heard the stories from that bar. That was where the guys got so drunk that we wouldn't see them for days and all of a sudden a random cousin of theirs would be working for them until they got their shit together again. That was where married men had mistresses, and single men had hookers. And some single men had MALE hookers. And (singlewhitefemale)'s did not belong. Buuuut... in the good ol' Christmas spirit, heightened by a few yard-long Hefeweizen influences, I grabbed the arm of mi mejor amigo de la cocina and told him that as long as he would keep an eye out for me, I would go. Note to everyone: you should always, ALWAYS listen to your girl friends when they're telling you not to go do stupid drunken shit.
La Copa. Well. First of all, there were only five women in the whole bar. I was one of them. And incidentally, I was the only non-prostitute one. Aaaand the only clueless-looking white girl sitting there with a Corona in her hand and a posse of grinning Mexican dudes around her. It would have been an insecure seventh-grader's dream for the amount of guys coming up and asking me to dance with them. Well, it wasn't exactly like they asked me. They just poked me on the shoulder and nodded at the dance floor, and then stood there waiting. I said "No gracias" like a hundred times before my friend started telling them I was with him and that they needed to stop asking. Five minutes later, the same exact line of guys started asking again. I was more than a little weirded out at that point. I sat glued to my barstool of safety, my arm pressed firmly against my friend's, which I had decided was "home" in this situation. When my own coworkers started asking me to dance, I started nervously giggling and saying no, while a cold sweat was glittering across my hairline. I pressed harder against my friend's arm, willing my "home" to get up off his ass and take me to my real home. He committed an epic friendship fail and told me to dance with one of the guys. Sergio, my favorite dishwasher. Okay. Nothing against Sergio. He's a good guy. Very sweet. We joked around all the time at work, and he always helped me when I was being macho and trying to carry too much stuff or was in danger of dropping anything (which was always). So really, nothing personal, Sergio. It's just that I was watching one of my married coworkers grab the breasts of one of the hooker-ladies and squeeze them like those stress-relief balls that my boss had to keep in his desk after he had an anxiety-induced heart attack. And I was watching men on the dance floor grabbing the asses of the other hookers and putting their fingers under the ladies' skirts and I started panickinganditstartedfeelingtoowarminthebarandIjustneededsomeairandnoSergioIdon'twannadancewithyouand-- all of a sudden I was being led by Sergio to the dance floor. This is it, (singlewhitefemale). Just remember: nosenoseNOSE! groingroinGROIN!! I smiled fakely at Sergio as I discreetly practiced flat palm thrusts behind my back. As I tried to gauge whether or not I could truly smash his nose into his brain if necessary, Sergio placed one hand in my left and the other on my upper back/shoulder area. Keeping a good two feet between our bodies, he began to shuffle side-to-side to the mariachi band. I raised my eyebrows in confusion. I looked back into my junior high references, sticking back the self-defense lessons and selecting instead memories from the school dances. We were replicating the exact junior high dance that everyone jokes about, only this time instead of my preteen hormones being annoyed by the distance between us, I was fist-pumping my joy behind his neck. As I looked around, I became aware that other than the guy feeling up the hooker next to us, everyone else was mimicking our modest sway on the dance floor. Was it the traditional Mexican bar dance? If so, halle-fucking-lujah.
When we got back to the bar everyone was slapping Sergio's back in approval and they had all bought me like five hundred Coronas. I looked at their smiles skeptically, but saw in them such a genuine sense of generosity and welcoming. I realized this was the first time I was hanging out with them on their turf, and I was the only girl from the restaurant to dare to enter the super sketch-town place they frequented. I smiled back at them, picked up one of the beers, and pretended to drink it. (Come on. I might really like beer but I'm not a comPLETE idiot. That one creepy guy was coming back to tap me on the shoulder to ask me to dance again, and I needed aaaaaaall my wits about me.) A half hour later, I was chatting up a storm with all the guys and not caring if I floundered on my Spanish at all. I felt truly accepted. So when I jokingly leaned in to the lady of the night who was letting my married coworker get all kinds of handsy on her and said in my form of Spanish, "What are you doing, you're WAY better than him!" I expected everyone else to laugh along with me. This was not the case. Mister Married shoved away from her and got in my face, yelling obscenities in Spanish and thrusting his finger at my nose. My friend jumped in front of me, trying to calm him down. Tears filled my eyes as I tried to explain that I had been just joking, and my false sense of comfort shattered around my feet. Everyone in the bar was fixated on the stupid white girl causing a bar-brawl about a hooker. I decided that was probably the best time to go. My friend grabbed me and shoved our way to the exit. About twenty hands tugged at me on the way out. Not in an aggressive way, but more in a solicitous way, as if I had just been playing hard to get the whole night by telling them I wasn't interested. I followed one of the grabby hands up to the face it belonged to and saw a pair of eyes that legitimately just had a question mark there. Like, eh eh? Maybe? In the blur around me I shook my head in slow motion, and he dropped his hand, a new shadow of defeat taking over his features. Then, we were outside, pushing past more throngs of curious hombres, and scrambling into a cab. After I heard my seatbelt click in safety, I turned to my friend. "Well, tonight I learned that you should never insult a Mexican in front of his hooker." He laughed at me, shaking his head.
"Estas loca, Senorita Guerita." Then he pulled a Corona out of his pocket and started to sip on it, gazing out the window at the fuzzy Christmas lights.
Well. Anyway. I've been speaking a lot more Spanish lately. Yep. I'm preeeeeetty much just a bad-ass now. I'm going to take you on a little journey to the very beginning of my history with the Spanish language. For me, it all started when I was in the eighth grade. Since I quit marching band after seventh grade (which I realized later was a mistake cuz there were actually hot nerdy band guys in high school, damnit), I was able to actually choose my elective class for my second year at the junior high. This was a big deal-- while I had been tripping over my shoelaces and accidentally bashing people in the jaw with my flute case, everyone else had been bonding over the generic set of elective classes, gaining coolness levels by not caring about the quality of their freshly sanded wooden bowls but more about who made-out with whom in the photo lab's Red Room. I was giddy with fourteen-year-old girl adrenaline at the prospect of rubbing elbows with non-nerds in a class other than P.E. (We called Phys Ed "PE." I'm sure that's self-explanatory, but it just occurred to me that maybe it's not. But I mean... it is. Right?) I was so tired of seeing the same faces in the desks around me in every classroom-- all the same honors students taking school a *little* too seriously in our rush to be perfect mini-adults before our balls even had a chance to drop. I yearned for a fresh batch of blood to mix with, to hear the gossip of the more sexually advanced, and to develop crushes on the "bad boys" that I otherwise never had a chance to be around.
As I daydreamed about tossing flour into the air with all the other care-free students in Home Ec, pretending not to be super pumped about learning to make a pie crust in a perfect rendition of Snow White's lacy artistry... my mother was discovering that Spanish was going to be offered as an elective for eighth graders for the first time at our school. My powdered sugar dreams slipped soundlessly through the cracks of my doughy fingers and morphed into "suenos" before they hit the floor. Yet again, I was signed up for an elective that was surely to house every helplessly nerdy try-hard student and myself. Thanks Mom.
I was surprised to find that the variety of students in my Spanish class was actually more diverse than every other class of mine. It seemed all kinds of moms had forced their kids into taking an academic course as an elective. I scanned the mixture of jocks and druggees, until SHE crossed the ugly off-blue carpet in one sturdy quarterbacker's stride and took the the center of the room.
"Hola, ethtudianteth. Mi nombre eth Thenora Borrith de Barthelona. Thoy la profethora de ethta clathe."
We stared. Some of us may have even clapped. There she... towered. At least six feet tall. Probably closer to eleven. White as can be, with a mommish style radiating a faint yet terrifying glow of sheer power and strength. Within half a minute, she had the attention of every hormone-rattled brain in that room. I honestly can't explain the hold her presence has over people. I mean, here I am actually TRYING to explain it, and I realize that it just sounds stupid. But... when she speaks in a room, you feel like you'd better listen to what she's saying, or else you're either going to get a spanking from her seriously intimidating forearm or you're going to miss out on a sentence that will be crucially important to you later in a life-or-death situation. Yeah. I guess that's the best way I can describe it.
I lapped up every word that lisped out of Senora Borris de Barcelona's lips. Though I must say that it was difficult, especially at first, to distinguish between what SHE was physically saying with her mouth and what she wanted US to say with ours. Her Castilian accent caused much confusion. I distinctly remember going through the numbers that first day: "Repeat after me. THERO."
"Thero."
"No no no, I say THERO, you say CERO!! Okay? THERO!"
"Sssss--uhh--ther...o.... Thero?"
"NO! SAY-RO! CERO! SSSSSS-ERO!! I SAY THE 'TH' SOUND, NOT YOU!"
And it was fine until we got to numero "doth" and had to go through it all over again. Eventually the Thenora had to just abandon her usual accent and give it to us straight-up. After every lecture she gave she would lean her shadow over our desks and shout "WRITE IT DOWN!" in case any of us were so caught up in watching her large arm swoops that we forgot to take notes. We started referring to her (secretly) as The Borris. We all loved her. Well, and we feared her. I more loved her than feared her though, and inwardly I aspired to be as Spanish-ly savvy as she. I slurped up that vocabulary as if it were Nantucket Nectar lemonade (I didn't drink booze for another four years, so I had a pretty solid addiction to lemonade, and this particular brand was my bottle of choice). I got a raging boner when I discovered that the same grammatical rules I had devoted my heart to in English existed for the Spanish language as well. I could NOT get enough.
Freshman year of high school I entered Spanish 2 with a different instructor, and she chose me as her Student of the Year the first month because I was the only student to turn in a flawless paper for our initial essay. At the lunch thrown in the awarded students' honor, she found out I was a freshman and then seemed upset that she'd chosen me. I was too busy waving across the room excitedly at The Borris to be bothered by the fact that my own teacher was pouting, though. The glorious Borris sat a good four feet above the student trying to have a presence at her side. I felt a kick of jealousy for the girl she had chosen.
I took Spanish for the next three years in high school. Incidentally, The Borris was my teacher for all of them. I was thrilled. However, this is the reason that after taking five years of Spanish, I could still go into a group of Mexicans and be positive that they were speaking Mandarin. I essentially learned text-book Spain-Spanish with a Castilian accent. I studied Nineteenth Century novels and absorbed the culture of The Borris's experiences from living in Spain for eighteen years. I could write ten-paged essays about the politics of Don Quixote, but when a woman stopped me on the street and asked me directions to "El bano?" I dropped to the ground and played dead. On many occasions, I resorted to idiot-status sign language and squeaks of exasperation when confronted with someone who only spoke Spanish. Finally, maybe after four painstaking minutes scraped by, I would bust out a sentence in semi-perfect-but-perfectly-helpful Spanish, and the person would do a double-take and then I'd run away before the stress of it all gave me a heart attack. I just always worried too much about making a mistake with words. One thing I don't like is ANYTHING I AM NOT GOOD AT. True story. Swimming (although that may have more to do with the whole bathing suit thing). Video games. Marathons. The list goes on and on. And when it comes to language, I am very, VERY self-conscious. I actually feel a great deal of disappointment in myself because of the fact that I constantly end sentences and phrases with prepositions. This drives me crazy. I highly doubt anyone else cares, or that anyone was even listening to what I was saying or writing in the first place. But to imagine messing up entire sentences PUBLICLY makes me want to put on all white and go rock in a corner somewhere. Fuck that, lady you go find the bathroom yourSELF.
I took a dozen more Spanish classes at UCSB. They were less intimate than our sessions with The Borris. I didn't really care for any of the professors. They didn't really care for me. I didn't try to distinguish myself from my peers, and my learning curve tuckered itself out. In my linguistics class, I all-but phoned in my presence. I waltzed into class late one day, texting my boyfriend at the time about dinner plans (omg lol ttyl), only to find people reciting poems in Spanish that they'd memorized. I looked at my peers' faces to make sure I was in the right class, then hastily made an exit before I had to try to make up some "Rosas son rojas" shit. When did I lose my zest for the language??
It wasn't until I graduated from college that I actually put my eight years of studying the Spanish language to any use. No, I didn't travel to Europe and go running with the bulls. I was busy sucking the teat of the service industry in hoity-toity downtown Santa Barbara, whose entire back-of-house staff is dominated by talented chefs from Mexico. When you go to a restaurant in Santa Barbara, you are greeted by the young hot hostess with the dangly earrings and the side-swept bangs. She leads you to a table, where your surfer hunk of a server lists the evening's specials to you. He directs your difficult questions to the nicely dressed, slightly older gentleman with the manager's smile and efficient demeanor. When your inquisitions have been satisfied, the dreamy server returns and shakes his sun-streaked locks from his eyes as he jots down your order and you settle into your seat and wait for your food to materialize. As a patron, what you don't know is that because you changed five hundred things about your order, your server is about to have the most complicated language barrier battle of his life. Imagine being a chef, standing in front of a hot flame in an overheated kitchen in a warm town, cooking food to-order for hundreds of customers with different modifications on each ticket. Then imagine stressed-out servers shouting important specifics at you for each ticket in a language that is secondary to you. The amount of tension created by this scenario is quadrupled by the fact that the kitchen staff all have access to many sharp knives. It was this extreme environment of terse, mixed-up communication that forced me to reach into my supply kit and pull out my Spanish vocabulary. Granted, half the time the guys in the kitchen laughed at me and corrected me because many of the words I was accustomed to were either outdated or nonexistent for SoCal Spanish. However... after a certain amount of effort on my part, I was gradually accepted as a pseudo-Spanish-speaker, and a camaraderie formed between my Mexican coworkers and me. They started referring to me as la Senorita Guerita, and I proudly translated anxious new servers' requests to the kitchen, joking with the chefs at the doe-eyed unilingual lass's expense. Jajaja.
Because I prided myself so much on being a part of the Mexican community at my restaurant in Santa Barbara, I was utterly thrilled when, after our company Christmas party last year, a group of the guys from the kitchen asked me to go with them to their bar, La Copa. My female coworkers were NOT so happy about this invitation, and immediately started mom-ing me and warning me that they'd ground me if I even THOUGHT about going there, yadda yadda yadda. We'd all heard the stories from that bar. That was where the guys got so drunk that we wouldn't see them for days and all of a sudden a random cousin of theirs would be working for them until they got their shit together again. That was where married men had mistresses, and single men had hookers. And some single men had MALE hookers. And (singlewhitefemale)'s did not belong. Buuuut... in the good ol' Christmas spirit, heightened by a few yard-long Hefeweizen influences, I grabbed the arm of mi mejor amigo de la cocina and told him that as long as he would keep an eye out for me, I would go. Note to everyone: you should always, ALWAYS listen to your girl friends when they're telling you not to go do stupid drunken shit.
La Copa. Well. First of all, there were only five women in the whole bar. I was one of them. And incidentally, I was the only non-prostitute one. Aaaand the only clueless-looking white girl sitting there with a Corona in her hand and a posse of grinning Mexican dudes around her. It would have been an insecure seventh-grader's dream for the amount of guys coming up and asking me to dance with them. Well, it wasn't exactly like they asked me. They just poked me on the shoulder and nodded at the dance floor, and then stood there waiting. I said "No gracias" like a hundred times before my friend started telling them I was with him and that they needed to stop asking. Five minutes later, the same exact line of guys started asking again. I was more than a little weirded out at that point. I sat glued to my barstool of safety, my arm pressed firmly against my friend's, which I had decided was "home" in this situation. When my own coworkers started asking me to dance, I started nervously giggling and saying no, while a cold sweat was glittering across my hairline. I pressed harder against my friend's arm, willing my "home" to get up off his ass and take me to my real home. He committed an epic friendship fail and told me to dance with one of the guys. Sergio, my favorite dishwasher. Okay. Nothing against Sergio. He's a good guy. Very sweet. We joked around all the time at work, and he always helped me when I was being macho and trying to carry too much stuff or was in danger of dropping anything (which was always). So really, nothing personal, Sergio. It's just that I was watching one of my married coworkers grab the breasts of one of the hooker-ladies and squeeze them like those stress-relief balls that my boss had to keep in his desk after he had an anxiety-induced heart attack. And I was watching men on the dance floor grabbing the asses of the other hookers and putting their fingers under the ladies' skirts and I started panickinganditstartedfeelingtoowarminthebarandIjustneededsomeairandnoSergioIdon'twannadancewithyouand-- all of a sudden I was being led by Sergio to the dance floor. This is it, (singlewhitefemale). Just remember: nosenoseNOSE! groingroinGROIN!! I smiled fakely at Sergio as I discreetly practiced flat palm thrusts behind my back. As I tried to gauge whether or not I could truly smash his nose into his brain if necessary, Sergio placed one hand in my left and the other on my upper back/shoulder area. Keeping a good two feet between our bodies, he began to shuffle side-to-side to the mariachi band. I raised my eyebrows in confusion. I looked back into my junior high references, sticking back the self-defense lessons and selecting instead memories from the school dances. We were replicating the exact junior high dance that everyone jokes about, only this time instead of my preteen hormones being annoyed by the distance between us, I was fist-pumping my joy behind his neck. As I looked around, I became aware that other than the guy feeling up the hooker next to us, everyone else was mimicking our modest sway on the dance floor. Was it the traditional Mexican bar dance? If so, halle-fucking-lujah.
When we got back to the bar everyone was slapping Sergio's back in approval and they had all bought me like five hundred Coronas. I looked at their smiles skeptically, but saw in them such a genuine sense of generosity and welcoming. I realized this was the first time I was hanging out with them on their turf, and I was the only girl from the restaurant to dare to enter the super sketch-town place they frequented. I smiled back at them, picked up one of the beers, and pretended to drink it. (Come on. I might really like beer but I'm not a comPLETE idiot. That one creepy guy was coming back to tap me on the shoulder to ask me to dance again, and I needed aaaaaaall my wits about me.) A half hour later, I was chatting up a storm with all the guys and not caring if I floundered on my Spanish at all. I felt truly accepted. So when I jokingly leaned in to the lady of the night who was letting my married coworker get all kinds of handsy on her and said in my form of Spanish, "What are you doing, you're WAY better than him!" I expected everyone else to laugh along with me. This was not the case. Mister Married shoved away from her and got in my face, yelling obscenities in Spanish and thrusting his finger at my nose. My friend jumped in front of me, trying to calm him down. Tears filled my eyes as I tried to explain that I had been just joking, and my false sense of comfort shattered around my feet. Everyone in the bar was fixated on the stupid white girl causing a bar-brawl about a hooker. I decided that was probably the best time to go. My friend grabbed me and shoved our way to the exit. About twenty hands tugged at me on the way out. Not in an aggressive way, but more in a solicitous way, as if I had just been playing hard to get the whole night by telling them I wasn't interested. I followed one of the grabby hands up to the face it belonged to and saw a pair of eyes that legitimately just had a question mark there. Like, eh eh? Maybe? In the blur around me I shook my head in slow motion, and he dropped his hand, a new shadow of defeat taking over his features. Then, we were outside, pushing past more throngs of curious hombres, and scrambling into a cab. After I heard my seatbelt click in safety, I turned to my friend. "Well, tonight I learned that you should never insult a Mexican in front of his hooker." He laughed at me, shaking his head.
"Estas loca, Senorita Guerita." Then he pulled a Corona out of his pocket and started to sip on it, gazing out the window at the fuzzy Christmas lights.
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