Jenny B Loves You

We Have Relocated!!!

2009-07-01T12:20:00.000-07:00

Saving the World. Killing Animals.

2009-06-11T19:27:00.000-07:00

I watch the baristas (if they're male is it baristos?) at King's Road scoop their potently dark coffee beans from giant gray trashcans into petite brown paper bags. That's gross, I think. The fact that these receptacles have most certainly never been used as proper waste baskets for old food leaves my irrationality undeterred. I will forever associate a trash can with the smell of curdled chocolate milk and sour ham sandwiches. I'd like to not see my precious coffee being stored in such a container of ill repute.
You see, Senior year of high school I become quite familiar with these bins. A recycling club was formed by students and spearheaded by Dr. Foffanoff - a man whose name appropriately and with almost onomatopoeia-like accuracy described his demeanor, gait, and hand movements. His ambiguous sexual orientation was due less to actual ambiguity but rather the strict Catholic school that he had sadistically chosen to exist within. And of all things he was a religion teacher. You could almost see the self-flagellation wounds bleeding through the back of his button up shirt.
We were attempting to save the planet, to see further than beyond our upper-middle class and sometimes plastic surgeon adjusted noses. At the end of the semester we were to donate all of the proceeds of our recycling dollars to a charity of choice. I think it had something to do with homeless kids or hungry kids or kids without books. Whatever. The effort entailed topping the aforementioned cans with state-of-the-art lids, replete with a four inch circular holes, thus separating them from the "I don't give a shit about the planet" cans. The idea was that if teenagers saw the shape of the hole, they would place things of the appropriate size...something akin to that blocks game everyone played when they were babies. X's went in the X holes, Os went in the O holes, and if you got tired of banging them around to see what went where you could opt to just chew on the pieces.
As rudimentary as this plan sounded, it was almost impossible to illicit cooperation from my lazy and ignorant peers. Every lunch a few of us would stand up on chairs and make a reminding announcement over inane chatter about who hates who and who blew who. But our red-faced requests to "PLEASE REMEMBER TO RECYCLE!" were always drowned out by "Chad did WHAT to WHO?!"
Twice a week after school our group of tree-hugging blessed souls would snap on some thin latex gloves and dig through our treasure bins, separating the wheat from the chaff if you know what I mean. The four inch opening never appeared to indicate it's intention. People preferred to interpret the specialized lids for little trash for little trash collectors to take to little trash dumps. Like Lilliput for garbage. Wads of chewed gum, half-eaten BBQ chicken pizza, open containers of ranch dressing, banana peels, etc. Fifty percent of the bins would be filled with toxic rotting shit and the other half full of germ ridden sticky cans not worth the five cents we were trading them in for. It was a thankless job.
One day, doing more of the same, we heard a panic within the ranks.
"OHMYGOD.OHMYGOD.OHMYGOD."
Being the good rubbernecking, eavesdropping seventeen-year-olds that we were, everyone ran to the direction of the squealing. By the front door of the cafeteria and up the stairs from my World History class, a blue trash can lay on its side, cans and garbage spilling out from it like a cornucopia. A girl stood above with her arm held against her nose. Closing in, we all did the same. Amongst the Tang, Pepsi, and Diet Dr. Pepper was a dead squirrel, stiff, having drowned in a mound of filth and good intentions.
The most ineffective recycling program in the history of West Hills ended soon after the slaughter. We earned about $51 from all of our manual labor and lunch hour PR efforts - a sum I would have gladly donated from a week of blending Mahalo Mangos at my juice bar gig. Anything if it would have saved that poor animal. Recycling kills. Trashcans are dirty. The end.

(What our squirrel might have looked like had he/she been able to pursue a long, happy life)

Review: Metric at the Wiltern

2009-06-09T13:53:00.001-07:00

The curtains come up. I look over at Brett and yell, "It's 30 Seconds to Mars! And that's Jared Leto!" The guitarist's hair is straight and shiny and as the light reveals him more honestly he more so resembles Michael Pitt during beer drinking phase. The opening act, Sebastien Grainger, is a motley crew of queer doppelgangers. The lead singer wears a Nascar/Elvis inspired jumpsuit, looking like Freddy Mercury as played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers with facial hair. The keyboardist is a strange lovechild of Mario and Luigi. He's got the height of his momma and the 'stache of papa. He hangs a tambourine around, gyrates epileptically in his designated area. His curly hair shoots out of a sweatband and his stiff, white over-sized shirt reminds me of the waiters at the Red Dragon Chinese Restaurant in West Hills.
They rock out admirably hard for an opening band. They even go through the dramatic trouble of removing the whole band, save fake Freddy for a sentimental solo. He is bathed in the white spotlight and I feel like I am watching The Phantom of the Opera all over again. When he's done crooning thirty seconds later the band is back on the stage perform the rest of the song. In between songs the singer makes what I think are jokes but he snorts them out pretty quickly. I can't decide if I'm at an Eagles of Death Metal show or watching Dane Cook at the Laugh Factory.
Brett has given me a pair of white earplugs to soften the blow to my delicate hearing and I am appreciative. I do, however, liken it to wearing a condom. While you are safe and protected, you just don't feel it. During Metric's last song later in the evening I entice him to take them out for just a moment while they do a quiet acoustic set, just to hear the hum of the speakers and the rustling of the crowd...all of the details that get censored when you attempt to save your ears. When it sounds as though they're going to crank up the tunes again, we slip the plugs back into their appropriate holes. I look over at Brett and yell, "It's like playing 'Just the Tip'!"
The earplugs have the added bonus feature of making the conversations around me more audible than the music being played on stage. The girls behind us are loud and yell things like "I love your mustache!" and "I want to fuck you!" and when the roadies are on stage moving equipment they yell "I want to have sex with all of you...at the same time!" I turn to investigate the age of these potty mouth horn dogs, guessing 7th grade in maturity but most likely 10th grade in reality. I am assaulted by one pair of ironic hipster glasses and four pairs of rather large boobs. I had assumed that their hollering and panting would cease when Metric comes on (female singer, Emily Haines) but these girls are unstoppable maniacs.
"I would go lesbian for you!"
"Emily!!! Emily Haines!!!"
"You're so sexy!!!!!!"
"She's so sexy!"
"OH MY GOOODDDDDDDDDD!!!!!!!"
They're right to be riled up for her. She's petite and adorable and thoughtfully fashionable. She comes on stage silent and covered in a form-hugging, gold-sequined dress, platinum blond shaggy hair, and a sparkly Chanel-esq black jacket. They start playing. She headbangs dangerously while she toys with the keyboard. She is most definitely a good time. At the end of their first song a cobalt blue light pours over them and on us like a technicolor fog. The effect is used multiple times, interchanging between that blue and a gold that matches her outfit. It doesn't get any less mesmerizing.
It's a good time this show. The group to my right bounces up and down endlessly. The floor thuds under the pressure of moving bodies. I note that they too are about ten years my junior and I wonder if I'm too old to like this music. Brett reassures me that there are other people here our age and I stop worrying. A group of girls look at each other and scream the lyrics, dance holding hands, bound about spryly. I am reminded of a piece of myself. Their mother's are probably picking them up afterward. For most of the show I am trapped behind two taller boys with shaggy hair, whose backlit forms open and close to reveal the stage like prop wooden forests in a ballet production. Occasionally the screaming girls behind me catch strands of my hair with their bracelets and I'll feel the twang of my locks being removed violently. The place liberally layers the smell of vomit, Barbasol shave cream, and human sweat. Oh rock and roll, I love thee.

Rutherford Dr.

2009-06-09T09:51:00.000-07:00

Up a winding Hollywood hill, at the end of an ungenerously narrow cul-de-sac, stands a 1920s Tudor style home painted brown and tan. It is meant to whimsical and in many ways it is. The realtor greets me from the door while I am still getting out of my car. She has short hair a la the Golden Girls and red lipstick that had been applied earlier in the day, all that remains of her efforts is a stain of the color on her lips. When she says hi she is friendly and jovial and well-intentioned. I walk through the door and understand that such a personality is precisely what is going to be needed in order to sell this place.
What has become a common expectation of mine in this house hunt are strange smells. One I am particularly fond of is cat piss and this place provides plenty. Confirmation of the owner's pet of choice is in the form of two bags of Friskies near the entrance. The carpet is a deep and dark ruby red, obviously worn over the course of time to something more accurately resembling drying blood. The ceilings are coved and completely cracked with water damage, the old sooty cream paint often morphing into a muddied brown. Glass Christmas tree ornaments hang from the fifteen foot ceiling.
I ask the woman how long the previous tenant had lived here although the answer is an obvious "forever." She tells me the man had been here since the 1940s and had passed away this year (not in this house she assures some other prospective buyers...a pair of contractors that leave within five minutes, knowing that this place is in need of more than cosmetic resurfacing). An easel sits in the corner, covered in drawings that I assume to be his own. "He was an artist," she tells me, "An eccentric old codger."
The place is categorically frightening, but an odd feeling of dilapidated calm prevails in this crumbling old house. I walk into the room with two chairs and "a million dollar view" as the agent puts it. And that it is. The house faces the entirety of Los Angeles...the beach, the hills, downtown, the flats, all of it. The clouds are big and rumbling today. It is clear. This man literally watched LA develop from dust. Piece by piece by piece the surface of the city changed in front of these lead glass windows. Airfields turned into office buildings. Barren dirt turned into shopping centers. Freeways sliced through stately neighborhoods. I wonder if he was sad about it. Disappointed in some way. This place was his city much more than it is mine.
I agree with the woman about the view and move into the dining room with lumberjack plaid wallpaper peeing away from the walls. From there I go to the kitchen and then out a door to the patio. The breeze blows hard from the beach and my hair whips back behind my shoulders. There is something about this place that reminds me of Disneyland and what would happen if its dreams were abandoned.
More details are provided to me by what has turned into two realtors, a man in addition to the woman with red lipstick. It was supposedly quite the Hollywood party place. "Swank," she calls them. The owner was ninety-eight when he passed. The house is 2500 square feet. There are maid's quarters on a detached lower level, complete with laundry chute. There is an attic upstairs...
On second floor are the bedrooms. The first is quite small and I try to relate to the gentleman realtor by saying that my brother always got stuck in rooms like this growing up. The master room shows the same signs of neglect as the res of the home. There are few things in it aside from an uncomfortable and dusty looking bed and a few old lighting fixtures. The next room is cluttered with pictures and birthday cards and stacks of books. An adjustable hospital bed points at me from the door. I offer that this was maybe the old man's room but he tells me that he thinks this is where the granddaughter who lived with him stayed. Yikes.
The realtors direct me back upstairs and to the attic. When I am told that there is an inoperable bathroom there I sense it is less to tell me about an convenient design feature and more to warn me not to venture into it. There are windows on three of the four sides of the roof. This was his artist's studio and I can see why. It is 4 in the afternoon and the light on the wood floor is generous and still.
Before I head down to the maid's quarters, the man walks me over to the outdoor stairs and makes sure I watch my step. These people feel like grandparents and I want to have holidays with them. Twenty some-odd rough-hewn steps later I am in a floor of the house that hasn't been occupied or used in at least thirty years. Leaves lay carelessly on top of paper thin wood floors. Slats underneath the walls peer out of gaping holes in the plaster. Window panes are missing. There are two industrial wash bins that were probably used before the advent of washing machines. The view is still spectacular and despite it's ill repair, there is something quite lovely about it. At some point in time this housed one of the luckiest maids in the word.
When I walk back to the main floor I talk to the realtors for some length. I feel slightly guilty knowing that I am not going to buy this home. They offer to contact me about another that needs "less work" and I agree. I say that I hope someone else does right by this house and I do, if it's even possible. I get into my car thinking about that house as less of a piece of property and more of a testament of time and of life, of how a house deteriorates as you deteriorate...everything sinking into disrepair until the day you're not there anymore to care about it.

Celebreality Bites: The Poser Edition

2009-06-02T22:12:00.000-07:00

In my experience, the flight between New York and Los Angeles has always been fraught with interesting characters. I once had the opportunity of sitting six bodies away from Catherine Keener, whom I identified first by her booming alcoholic witch cackle of a laugh. Needless to say, I felt very honored to be in the same vessel with such a talented actress. That and having a celebrity on a plane usually makes me feel more at ease with the flight, as I would like to believe that God would not strike down an aircraft carrying that variety of superior human. Celebrities die in private planes, not a Jet Blue Airbus.
More often, though, I am surrounded by people that God would gladly take down during Freak Accident Quota Deadline, weather permitting and myself included. Back in 2002, I got trapped in between a drafty window and an young vaguely Indian man who introduced himself as Anand Jon. I am tirelessly wary of people who introduce themselves to you using both their first and last name. These are people who want to establish "Names" for themselves. These are people who want you to remember them down the road. These are people desperately attempting to prematurely stake out a legacy for themselves or are sociopaths who believe they've already done so. These people are douche bags. Apparently Anand Jon does double duty, also taking some time out of his busy schedule being a lame ass to design clothes.
Quickly into the flight, Anand Jon puts his press kit in my lap. At this point in my life I was a first year Communications student who got drunk on Long Island Iced Teas because it was economical. I bought burnt orange Jones New York sweaters from Century 21. The closest thing I had come to regular perusal of a fashion magazine were the issues of Seventeen I subscribed to back in middle school where I learned to mash avocado and mayonnaise together as a remedy for dull hair. I had no idea what a press kit was or what designers were cool. Nothing. I was delightfully immune to the whole machine; as immune as someone who had grown up in South Jersey.
So when the black binder of magazine clippings and badly written articles gets passed my way I did not know that I should have pretended I didn't speak English and ask him to kindly leave me alone in the universal language of physical violence. Nor do I laugh in his face and tell him he's an attention grubbing egomaniac and I'm just a college student who really doesn't care about his clothing line. Instead, I politely flip through page by page while he breathes over me, superfluously pointing out which pictures were of him with Paris Hilton.
Despite being an age when I was not so fashionable, I recognized that these bedazzled, Bollywood-inspired hankerchief dresses were not fashion. Wet Seal wouldn't even sell this stuff. But I smiled and placated, said "Wow..." a few times. And eventually the flight was over.
Aside from the irritation I developed like a light rash from the five hours I spent being a captive audience for the equivalent of an Amway salesperson, I also honed in on something else. This guy was creepy. The creep seeped out of his pores and over his seat and into my seat. This was before I really developed a radar for this kind of thing. But humans are animals and the "Fight or Flight" instinct is alive and well. I surmise to guess that the only thing stopping Mr. Jon from touching me inappropriately was the plane full of bothersome witnesses.
A few years later I get a casting to shoot for his clothing line. The address is on Maple Street, a residential area. I realize it is his apartment when I park my car. This is something that happens often in this industry and goes against all common sense and rules of safety that your mother teaches you when you're in kindergarten. Hold hands when crossing the street, don't eat candy you find on the bathroom floor, when a strange man asks you to come into his car/house/pants you run away screaming "Fire! Fire! Fire!" A few months into modeling I had to put all of this training behind me for the sake of actually booking work. Although I do admit that in the beginning I would say a little prayer and hope that this wasn't the last casting I would ever go on.
When I got inside, there were a few other girls trying on jeans. He was in the living room taking pictures with a digital camera. There was no music. There were no sounds. Just the eerie quiet that usually signifies ill intentions or judgment (most often it's just judgment). When he didn't recognize me I decided not to offer our shared plane trip as a proverbial olive branch. He pointed to the bathroom and told me to try on a pair of jeans on the counter. There was another girl in the bathroom. She was quiet as she pulled on her pants.
A sneaking suspicion crept over me that it would be reasonable to think that he had cameras hidden in between towels and toilet paper rolls and that this casting was only a ruse to acquire more footage for his personal perv collection. "At least I'm not getting raped outright," I think reassuringly.
I leave the casting and like hundreds of times before, I don't book the job. This time I really didn't care. I do, however, take interest when three months later I hear that Anand Jon has been arrested for the sexual abuse of minors and young women, some models. Apparently instinct isn't as sharp in some people and for this I am terribly sorry.

When I Google Anand Jon, a website comes up asking to support him in the egregious injustice he faces. There is a quote from Ghandi and a picture of him looking like a doe-eyed, innocent angel. Even facing life in prison, this guy is a completely ridiculous tool.

You mean they're LYING to me????!!!!

2009-06-02T19:15:00.000-07:00

As found today on a my daily breakdown adventure.

House Hunt: Experience One

2009-05-28T23:55:00.000-07:00

Veronica's mom, Kathy, is helping me on my quest for a reasonably priced home of reasonable size, reasonably close to Los Angeles. These small requests typically add up to a 1,100 square foot, 1.2 million dollar house down the street from a 7/11 decorated by homeless people asking for spare change.

This is a bank owned house for sale on the edge of Hancock Park, a place I aspire to live when I'm 36 with small children and a book deal. The surrounding neighborhoods are tree lined and darling. It is, however, spitting distance from Wilshire and La Brea. Paranoia permits me to imagine armed robberies and blaring traffic ruining the enjoyment of drinking my iced tea in the backyard. The price is $509 K - a relative steal. Buyer beware, of course.

I pull up to 624 South Orange and survey the outside: wood-slated, white-painted, big-ish mismatched windows. I move closer. I begin to notice strange additions, rotting wood, clues to what might be inside. Kathy isn't there yet so I wait on the front patio that has been overzealously covered almost completely with cement. The previous tenants obviously had an aversion to yard maintenance. I can hear a pair of competing buyers walking around inside, the wood floors audible from where I sit. They leave and I wait until they're out of sight until I go snoop around the backyard. As this is my first stop on my real estate tour de force I have no idea what protocol is involved in house hunting. I'm four steps into the backyard when I notice a french window has been left entirely open. So much for the lock box on the front door. I innocently step through the crumbling threshold and into the dining room. There is a strange odor that persists the entire length of my stay; a combination of cat piss, toxic mold, and old lady.

As the MLS description attested, there is hardwood flooring in the living room and dining room. The rest of the house is suffocating under thick cream carpeting that closely resembles a dirty, murdered polar bear. The stains are suspicious. I suspect foul play. I admire that they attempted to deep clean it, not knowing that whoever is going to buy this pieces of property will most certainly not be holding onto that soiled mess. The thought of walking barefoot on it scares me more than a HoJo in Vegas.

There are a reported 3 bedrooms and 2 baths, 1 of which has been done without permits. When I discover this room, which has the architectural bones of the outhouse I used to use at the ranch while my dad and brother killed ground squirrels, I sense that this is the culprit of at least 33% of the smell I previously mentioned. Tucked sneakily in the corner of the rear bedroom, the undocumented 2nd bathroom had a large hole in the ceiling allowing for a modest view of the sky above. How lovely. The ceiling bared no trace of a legitimate barrier from the elements. All I could see was broken orangey drywall and thin slats of wood supporting it. This is the same "roof" utilized over the "laundry room." When Kathy eventually meets me inside she ponders what they did when it rained. This is a very thought provoking question to which I have no concrete answer. As the mold creeping up the wall of the adjacent bedroom might indicate, these people did nothing to thwart rain from pouring into their house, seeping through their walls, drowning whatever insulation might exist there.

The kitchen is large...extremely large. A "cooks kitchen!" I might have exclaimed if I could ever imagine sanitarily handling food that would enter my body in there. The floor is linoleum, the counters are that thick plastic nonsense, the cabinets are that fake birch people buy at Home Depot and use in rooms they don't care about (i.e. the lavatories of an ice factory or the tool shed of a fish farm). There is an inexplicable row of bricks that emerge from the wall and then disappear into the shiny white paint again - gone forever, having shown no integral use or purpose for the space. There is an "island" in the center room that Kathy good naturedly points out that it is movable. I would move this whole kitchen straight into a giant blue dumpster if I could. She then looks around and asks, "Where do you put the refrigerator?" Valid point. Apparently in the tragedy of this kitchen "remodel" the contractor failed to install any electrical plugs...anywhere...literally. I don't think the people who lived here (shudder to think) ate anything but canned beans and tuna fish.

The bathroom looks like it underwent a similarly inspired renovation as the kitchen. Both fireplaces have suspicious holes, one I surmise is where the rat that pooped in the closets got in. I feel as though this house is crying from the trauma it has been through and those tears are evident in the water damage that soaks through the cottage cheese ceilings. It's so depressing to think that this was once a lovely and cared for home. One that was loved nearly 100 years ago. People that treat properties like this are the Michael Vick's of home ownership.

2009-05-27T12:45:00.001-07:00

I exit Woodlake Avenune and turn onto Leonora. This is not my street anymore. It has not been my street since 1999 when we sold it for $380,000 in a bidding war between three people. It had stained glass windows we purchased from an antique dealer in Ventura. Before we moved I walked around with yellow Post-It notes and sketched out the details, the variations in glass textures between each leaden barrier. These summer nights make me miss being a kid, make me miss sleeping on the lawn chairs in the backyard, make me miss opening that narrow window above my bed when I got too hot in my sleep. The crickets chirp the same.
It is dark and the kitchen light is on. Everything looks so much smaller in scale, even from the street. Their garage door is open. They have a BMW. A few years ago I noticed they'd taken down the cabinet doors I had painted when we remodeled there. I was surprised it stayed up as long as it did; who wants to keep a sloppily executed heart, smiley face, and upsidedown peace sign above your washing machine anyway? When I was young and the house was less old there were a pair of child hand prints embedded in the cement of our driveway - remnants of another life, some other life. That, too, was demolished when we tore up the driveway in '95.
I pass the house as slowly as I can within anti-stalker reason and then it's gone. I drive past Van's house and Robby's house. I pass the house of Phil's friend who came by and peed his pants watching Ghostbusters. He ran out the sliding glass door to the backyard and slipped down the side of the house, back to his own. I remember this charcoal pavement. I remember Halloween and hockey sticks, rollerblades and bike rides, my dog running down the street with her ears flopping behind her.
I round the corner and see the house that used to keep turkeys in a cage in the front yard. It's must nicer now and the windows are bigger. I turn onto Mariano and drive past my god father's house. This is where I would stay while my brother was in the hospital. He used to have a guest house with a train set in it and workout equipment in the courtyard. The whole family slept on waterbeds. He still lives there and drives the same cars.
A song comes on the radio. It played at a wedding when I was five. The bride's brother let me dance on his shoes. God damn. This life is just like ash. It's burning up and fading away and I am covered in remnants of who I used to be and it feels so far away.

2009-05-26T19:38:00.000-07:00

I saw The Kills perform just a month ago at Coachella. It appeared that the 102 degree heat managed to suck whatever life they ever had in their performance. Visually, the band looked pretty dismal: boy on guitar, girl on vocals and sometime guitar. The open air venue robbed them of any moody lighting they were hoping to achieve. I left filling unfulfilled and wrote them off as "crap live." So when Brett invited me to a repeat performance at the Henry Fonda I accepted with trepidation. I was mostly going for human company. The following is my review of the show.

The Horrors are the second band to open. And they are, in fact, aptly named. The lead singer looks like that leggy, unintelligible MTV VJ that appeared babbling nationwide sometime in the 90s mixed with one of the Ramone's - "the dead one" Brett says. On guitar we have a Partridge family coiffed boy who looks like the French reincarnation of Karen Carpenter before the anorexia really kicked in. I am surrounded by a bunch of torn-tights, black-wearing, fedora-sporting, skinny jean hipsters. These are the "hip" kids. And I can't help but think that what I am watching on stage right now is the equivalent of an 80s hair band. Like we will all look back on this moment and think, "Oh my god. Weren't we all such assholes!"
I give up on them about two songs in and head for the back of the room, unwilling to sacrifice what little hearing I have left for this tired nonsense. Brett and Co. soon follow suit and we've moved up to the rooftop patio with all of the other people who don't care what's going on downstairs either. Brett comments that the lead singer made him feel awkward because he'd just stand there and not do anything but sing. I counter that he did throw his arms up a few times, anointing the audience like a less than fervent televangelist. But these moments were drowned out by the predominance of a lot of affected moving of the hair into the face and away, into and away.
Kristina comes back from the bathroom with what is apparently her second rude encounter with Drew Barrymore.
Kristina: "Sorry, the toilet doesn't flush."
Drew: [No response]
This leads her friend Hadley into a verbal montage of his favorite celebrity nocturnal run-ins...which from the sound of it are quite common and very much prized moments.
Hadley: [Mid-handshake] Why do you have such sad eyes?
Katy Perry: [Slowly removing her hand from his] I have a 9 o'clock.
Hadley: A what?
Or
Hadley: You look better!
Mischa Barton: Uh, thanks.
As we leave the patio he tells me that I am "cynical and unhappy." This is less of a statement and more of a generic aside, like "You must like brown shorts and tangerines." It seems no one escapes his wrath, celebrity or not. Hadley looks like AJ from Empire Records. He is wearing brown leather pirate boots and a cardigan that I know he's just dying to put a couple thumb holes through.
When I realize I've been standing around for two hours waiting for a band I really don't want to see in the first place I want to head over to the $10 parking space I purchased and go home. But because I've started my personal "Don't Be So Lame" campaign, I don't. The curtains part to reveal the same pair of rock and rollers but this time the lights are working in their favor, I am closer to the stage, and the whole production looks a lot damn sexier.
From the very beginning I can't take my eyes off of the singer. She looks like a badass, shaggy-haired Helena Christensen. They both wear leather and black and are so much cooler than I could ever attempt to be. I don't take myself seriously enough to be that cool. This variety of sass takes true dedication to art of cool. Three songs deep the pair make an on stage costume change change, swapping their leather jackets for cardigans. It's about 86 degrees in this room and I think we'd all be better off wearing bathing suits.
Every song is about sexy, overtly or otherwise. She's breathing hard, he's breathing hard, the verses repeat and repeat, then crescendo like orgasms. By the end I feel as though I've entered into some weird musical red light district. At some point I realize that I've been watching the girl the whole time and if I had to pick which of the two to have sex with it would most definitely be her. She spits on stage, knocks over microphones, sweats like mad...but I forgive her all of this. When she lights up a cigarette during a cover of "Crazy" and the curls of smoke float around her black hair I want to pick up smoking. You could have put anything in her hand and I would have bought it: Clorox Bleach, Crest Whitening Strips, Gap Khakis. Whatever. Somehow I have regressed into a bisexual 13 year old.
They play "Black Balloon" toward the end of their set and I am completely satiated. I have had my cake. I have had my icing. I ate the whole damn thing. Not wanting to ruin a good thing, I tell my friends I am heading out. This is apparently an accidentally wise decision. For an encore they brought The Horrors back on stage again and the crowd was subjected to my new girlfriend making out with the Karen Carpenter guitarist - a sight that would have just broken my swollen heart.

Six Degrees of Separation: Barack Obama

2009-05-18T11:56:00.000-07:00

For the last few years, my friend Marty has let me crash on the couch of his huge loft in TriBeCa. A friendship was struck a few years back when he handed keys to me at a party in Los Angeles and offered his place even though I had only known him a few hours through our friend Carlos. This is the type of guy Marty is. When I stay with him I am aware of what comes with that black futon: chasing girls, dirty boots, cab rides, and Marty asking me his favorite question, "When are you going to be my girlfriend?"
Two summers ago I go to the Rose Bar at the Gramercy with Carlos and Marty. Somehow I get sat next to this exceptionally skinny man named Dean. Despite the fact that he looks like a slightly more attractive and taller version of the character Mango on SNL, he is oddly charming and sort of engaging. One shot of tequila later and I am in a unisex bathroom somewhere doing god knows what with this man. We leave the stall more disheveled than when we enter and I avoid the glance of the bathroom attendant. I'm not that type of girl, I keep thinking to myself...I'm not that type of girl...
Dean and I sit back on the couch that we first struck up conversation on and Marty walks by with Carlos saying "Have a good night." I tell them to wait and turn to Dean to say goodbye and thank you for the lovely evening or something not like that at all. Dean's telling me to just come back to his place and I'm thinking no way in hell and I'm saying goodbye again and we're walking outside and by the time I get there those motherfuckers have already hopped in a cab and deserted me. Once again, Dean tries the "come back to my place" shtick and my thoughts move to the cheap side and I figure I can ride down to his place and then just walk back to Marty's, saving me a taxi ride all the way from Gramercy. My protest immediately turns into "Sure, why not" and all of a sudden I am in an apartment in the Lower East Side and not walking back to TriBeCa.
We hang out for a little bit, Dean pacing around the room like an insane person because he is a coke head. The place is clean and doesn't scare me even though I should be and my mother would kill me if she knew where I was. A friend of his comes over. He is funny and drunk and somehow the three of us end up fully clothed in Dean's bed. It's friendly and we're all making jokes and we're all laughing about stupid shit, nonetheless the friend will occasionally touch my leg in a non-accidental manner and I keep thinking "God, this is fucking weird, but what the hell." Around 5 in the morning Dean's roommate comes home with a blonde model with short cropped hair. His roommate is Jamie Burke. I've been seeing him around the city on billboards with Kate Moss for Calvin Klein. I immediately wonder why I always end up with the Mangos of this world and why I'm never with the Jamie Burkes. Dean's back out of bed and chatting away with the two of them and I stay in the room. I sleep for an hour until the jackhammers go off at the construction site across the street. I decide I'd rather die than wake up later than Dean so I leave. At about 7 in the morning I'm walking down the street wearing my party clothes from last night while business traffic and hot air blows past me.
Last week I'm reading an article in Vanity Fair with a picture of Jamie Burke and a Q and A below it asking about the possible perks of being the nephew of Joe Biden. And in place of the shame I've always felt for that New York night, I feel closer to Mr. Obama, closer than I've ever been, and I feel vindicated for my bad behavior.

Beer Goggles.

2009-05-18T10:57:00.000-07:00

Two weeks after my move to New York for Freshman year, my best friend from back home came to visit. This was a delightful break from the fourteen nights I spent in a constant flux of utter enthrallment to crying myself to sleep at night. With her in tow, there were no tears shed until the wee hours of the morning. She came with her mom and grandmother, whom we would go to civilized dinners with and even caught a performance of Mamma Mia!, which has irreparably diminished my desire to see musicals. As day turned to night, Shannon and I would leave her family for something far more exciting than Broadway...underage nightlife experimentation.
This weekend was the catalyst for an alcoholic bender that lasted roughly three months of my first semester. From that point forward my life seemed to be an endless blur of $8 pitchers at Josie's, spilling homemade Cosmopolitans on the sage green carpet of Talia's dorm room while pre-partying to "Raspberry Barret" by Prince, falling over in public, drinking sangria at Bowery Bar with made models, and waking up at 2 in the afternoon. Although I didn't realize at the time, I was apparently the type that held back in high school and fell off the deep end when I left home. If only my mom had let me be a drunk in 10th grade, I would have never found myself in this situation. C'est la vie.
One glorious evening, Shannon and I got all gussied up for a night on the town. There is a photo hidden somewhere in my closet of the two of us right before we left my place. Shannon is wearing greenish blueish jeans purchased from Planet Blue with a black tank top, black boots I had never seen before, and her hair in a ponytail. I outdid her with acid wash Miss Sixty jeans with buttons up the sides that I had found at Century 21, a hot pink giraffe-print blouse, and white tennis shoes with red strips. What. The. Fuck. It was New York Fashion Week party time, and we ready to party.
The night started with a group led by an exceptionally effeminate pathological liar named Dane. I had yet to discover that this boy was utterly painful, but was currently under the magic spell of my first openly gay friend. We stood outside of Serafina for thirty minutes, waiting to get inside. It was the GQ Fashion Week Party. We knew no one inside. And I'm pretty sure no one would have wanted to know us at that point. Buzzed and badly dressed, we looked frighteningly Bridge and Tunnel even though both of us grew up 3000 miles away. But suddenly, for whatever bizarre reason, the clouds opened up and our angel appeared in the form of a friendly grease-ball in a button-up shirt who spotted Shannon and I in the crowd and pulled us through to the front, past the bouncer, and into the throngs of beauty and excess.
I was in love. The lights were blue over a crowd of people yelling over the music, dancing in corners, drinking at tables. We were immediately offered flutes of champagne. I walked past a supermodel with huge lips and cat eyes. Gorgeous. Shannon attempted to flirt with one of the Wayne's brother's who responded to her with a friendly questioning of "What are you? Seventeen?" Apparently he wasn't ready to go to prison. Admirable. Toward the end of the evening, when we were good and hammered, two twins met us on the dance floor where we danced and spun and giggled. Shannon and I snuck away to the bathroom where we slurred that these boys looked exactly like Lenny Kravitz. We went back and danced some more until it was time to go home.
The boys walked us out front to where the cabs were, where they offered to take us both home "just to cuddle." We managed to wrestle out of their grips and went on to walk back to 5th Ave and 10th Street, hollering "TWINS!!!" the whole way home, much to the dismay of a sleeping audience above us on University Place. And when we got back to the dorm we wrote "TWINS!!!" on all of the blackboards hung up on the doors. And when I stupidly met up with one of those guys again, I was assured that he looked nothing like Lenny Kravitz.

Why even a version of this would be appealing, I don't know. Ahh, youth.

Inspiration for Summer 2009

2009-05-16T22:31:00.000-07:00

Make The Girl Dance "Baby Baby Baby" ( official video )
by placeblancherec

Sorry Phil.

2009-05-14T15:10:00.000-07:00

Brain Salve

2009-05-14T14:33:00.000-07:00

It's my mom's 48th birthday this week. She's excited about this because she thought she was turning 49. Apparently she had wrongly programed the scale in her bathroom which has been telling her she was 48 for the last year. She does feel a bit robbed of 47, however. I rarely see her this optimistic.
Uncharacteristically of both her and I, we go shopping at Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills. I thumb through racks of clothing I normally only wear when I am working selling clothes to rich people who dress up for lunches. My mom is not one of those people. She picks up a merlot-colored dress with tulle exploding out the bottom and black corset ties running up the back. It is gilded like a Bernini villa and suitable for a wedding in Dubai or the Renaissance Pleasure Faire. This, too, can be yours for $53,000. I am happy at that moment to be relatively poor and in possession of sanity and good taste.
When fantasy land becomes tedious, we move over to Nordstrom which is more our speed, I suppose. It is at The Grove and the narrow island of grass is littered with parents and children and blankets and balloons. "Is having kids really boring?" I ask my mom as I open the door of the air conditioned department store. She tells me it's actually fun. I hope she's having fun with me right now. I can think of few things more depressing than taking my child to a faux European outdoor consumption fest, but I'm hoping that it's more fun the other way around.
It's busy inside, busier than Neiman's. I wonder when the recession will be over and when CNN will be talking about something else. Recently, I have found it necessary to follow my diet of NPR with a heap of KIIS FM over-produced vomit pop to mellow my blood pressure. This strangely recalls my first Magnolia Bakery cupcake experience. It was delicious going down but the sugar high left me so nauseous that I was left with an inexplicable craving for grilled chicken and a banana.
The clothes were expectantly uninspiring and overpriced; everything made in China, made in India, rip-offs from real designers or terribly bland originals. This is the world in which I exist. Wholly. Entirely. Depressingly. I watch my mom try a blue skirt on with a bow on the top. It doesn't look as good as I would like it to. She takes it off. We move on.
She needs some foundation from Lancome. She picks up a small white tube and smears the tan goop all over her face. A gay man at the counter offers to help my mom with her skincare quest, which turns out to be an hour and a half overhaul of toner, peptides, firming and lifting lotions. She comments that the foundation she tried feels really heavy. He tells her the tubes are concealer. My mom does her embarrassed/ amused laugh where she sort of bows from her midsection and clasps her hands behind her back, her face turning red. Sometimes her socially awkward nature is rather adorable.
I sit on a low stool while he tells my mom about restorative night creams and gels that diminish brown spots. He talks about what happens as the skin ages. He compliments my mom on the tightness of her skin above her eyes and cheeks. He reprimands her for going out in the sun unprotected and for rubbing her face too harshly with a washcloth at night.
The entire time we're at the counter my mom's eyes relay engagement and sadness. I think maybe she's a little scared. I take peaks at myself in the mirror next to me, wondering when I'm going to have this conversation with a gay man at the makeup counter of a department store while people buy scented candles and high heeled shoes. Because one day, no matter how hard it is for me to picture my face marred by the effects of gravity and time, this will most definitely happen.
It is not this fact that saddens me; it's the fact that my mom is getting older and one day when her wrinkles are deep crevices around her mouth and eyes, one day she will be gone entirely. And when I think these thoughts while he dabs full coverage foundation in Bisque Number 1 to camouflage her redness, I want to break out in sobs and tell her she will always look like my mom. But wouldn't that just be silly...

Celebreality Bites: Holiday Issue

2009-05-13T14:02:00.000-07:00

Halloween 2007. The holiday occurred near the culmination of an epic year dallying with the social scene, one in which I have yet muster the energy to match. I was 23, making money, downing 2 cans of Monster a day, going out 5 nights a week. Halloween was predicted to be exceptional. It landed on a Sunday, which meant it was absolutely necessary to have parties two days leading up to the actual event. I spent the weekend dressed up like Liza Minelli's backup dancer, putting my false eyelashes on each evening and peeling them off closer to dawn the next morning. On the third day a group of us combined forces and turned ourselves into a formidable cabaret troupe. Marco came over and I painted him up like a Pinocchio cum transvestite marionette.
The first party delivered its fair share of fun. We ran around taking pictures, myself high on energy drinks and my friends off of whatever I had watched them snort off of the dryer in the yellow-walled laundry room. When the fun began to wane, it was off to the Chateau for some famed annual party. The floors of the outside patio were covered with Persian rugs; people stood around laughing and drunk. My friend sparked up a flirtation with James Franco that lasted a few months following.
Somehow our group got shuttled into a hotel room, led up a series of stairs by a group of men wearing gorilla masks. Once the door closed I found out that Leonardo DiCaprio was the leader of the primate pack. I'd have liked to tell him how many times as a 12 year old I would watch and rewind the scene where he and Claire Danes fall into the pool, kissing madly in clear bubbles and how that image single-handedly shaped what I feel romance should be...but I don't. I watched him sit on a bed in the back of the room while I tried to ignore the feeling that everyone in the room was on drugs. Oh Romeo...
As we exited the hotel and spilled onto the cobblestone driveway where they park classic cars and Range Rovers, a very drunk and very stumbly [Name Omitted] says to me, "Oh my Gaaawwwddd. Look at that baawwwhhh-deeee. Can I just...Caaan I just touch you?" In the spirit of cooperation I allowed him to grope my leg for a second and then we left for yet another party. Two years later, when my friend started dating this very same groper I didn't mention the incident. And when I had dinner across from the happy couple I said nothing. But when he pushed the plate of molten chocolate cake my way, I knew where that roaming hand had been.

Oldie But Goodie

2009-05-12T18:36:00.000-07:00

Kind of how I feel on a frightfully regular basis.

It's a Hard Job

2009-05-11T12:09:00.000-07:00

Another day in the life of...me.

10:44 AM - Arrive one minute early for my day at Carolina Herrera. Although I am technically sixteen minutes early but our agency always places a fifteen minute idiot buffer so models always arrive in a timely manner. No matter how many times a client looks at me, puzzled at my earliness, in the back of my mind I keep thinking that one time the client is actually the one operating in fifteen minute increments, not the agency. I am like a dog who knows that the spoon full of peanut butter always has arthritis medication tucked inside, but for a brief moment I thinks that maybe, just maybe this time there won't be bitter blue pills that dissolve on my tongue as the peanut butter sticks to the roof of my mouth. But there always is...

11:00 AM - Lee from Carolina walks Chantalle and I over to Sally Hershberger to get our hair did. This is a salon started by the Chrissy Hynde of hair, although I believe that Sally is an actual lesbian and not just a butch lady with kick ass rocker style and a latent cocaine habit. On the walls there are pictures of big breasted models doing extreme yoga backbends in the nude.

11:13 AM - I am introduced to Paul who will be doing my hair for the "event" that has not been explained to me in detail and remains a vague reality in the near future. My comfortability with this fact stems from my "show up and get paid" mentality.

11:25 AM - After a decent hair scrub by a woman who leaves me wanting more, Paul begins to blow dry my hair. Two different people come to expedite the process. These are the times in which I feel like a car in the shop. I say this to Paul over the noise of the hairdryer but he laughs a laugh in which I can tell he has no idea what I mean. I look at at the women in the chairs next to me. They're gabbing away and smiling and not smiling and looking at their own eyes in the mirror as they talk at the person doing their hair. The environment is simultaneously energizing and exhausting.

12:00 PM - I am still in the chair, now with fully dry hair, and Paul is whipping up something on my head that I cannot see. All I know is that he is on his 56th bobby pin. This is a lot.

12:15 PM - Paul finishes the last few touches on my up-do. He shows me his creation in the mirror. It looks like a doughnut that sat in coffee or a few hours, inflated and puffy. Not in a bad way, just in a puffy doughnut way. "On to makeup?" he asks. I tell him we are doing it on our own and he says he thinks that I will do a fine job on my own. What I don't tell him is that I am already wearing the makeup I will have for the rest of the day and apparently I did not do a fine job.

12:17 PM - I take off the white robe that they had me change into when I arrived. These are common at expensive salons. They never had this at The Hair House when I was growing up.

12:19 PM - I ask the amiable receptionist if they have any coffee. Like the robes, this is something that places like this have and provide free for their clients. She returns with my nonfat latte. "A double, extra strong, ' she says with a wink in her voice. I drink it down while browsing through a hardcover book about Hollywood's best plastic surgeons. I think I want a new nose.

12:24 PM - Chantalle and I start to walk back over to Carolina Herrera. I ask her questions about her summer plans as I shovel brown rice topped with sliced avocado and sauteed swiss chard into my mouth. There's no reason why this should actually taste good.

12:32 PM - We've changed into beaded summer dresses and uncomfortable shoes and Lee drives us down the street to a furniture store on La Cienega. The event is called "Legends of La Cienega Design Walk Presented by Elle Decor." As far as I can tell all we are going to be doing is walking from store to store taking pictures of us pretending to model for crowds. This hunch pretty much materializes as a reality throughout the day. A woman offers us to sit down and give our feet a rest. I have only been standing for maybe four minutes but I accept the offer. I am not this accostomed to be so comfortable at a job.

12:58 PM - There is now a group of eight models from different boutiques on Melrose Place that are now being shuttled by two raven haired women wearing orange scarves to the VIP Lounge. When we arrive there are only four other people sitting around drinking cocktails made with St. Germain. Telling the crowd what we are wearing takes a minute and then the rest of the twenty minutes we stand their awkwardly waiting for someone to tell us what to do I listen to Michelle tell me about ex-boyfriends and try the appetizers passed around by waiters. The cucumber under my crab salad is a little flaccid.

1:30 PM - We move to design showroom number two. We sit on chairs, they take some pictures, we stand around while other models sit on chairs and get pictures taken. Michelle and I talk some more.

1:55 PM - The third showroom we are supposed to go into for pictures is not ready for us. We stand on the sidewalk watching Sunday traffic go by on La Cienega. An antiques store opens its doors (and chairs to sit on) to us so we go inside. The woman who owns the place looks a little like Jocelyn Wildenstein but she is very friendly and offers us free reign over her buffet of grapes, salami, crackers and cheese. Her son works with her. She pushes him like a loving Jewish grandmother, although I am pretty sure she is an old school Catholic Italian. I feel bad that I am just standing here eating all of their food so I try to carry on a conversation with the son while I munch on green grapes. He used to play tennis professionally. Despite all of our refusals of her offer, the owner pours us each a glass of prosecco and demands that we drink. "You are young!" she says, "It all passes by so fast."

2:32 PM - The showroom we've been waiting for while we eat this woman out of house and home opens up for us to take pictures and stand around some more. A graying man named Nigel asks me about modeling and what I thought about it. He has a fourteen year old daughter who is 5'10. My reviews of the business come out mixed. I feel like an asshole talking about modeling when I'm standing around a furniture showroom in Carolina Herrera, talking about this job as if this is what modeling actually is. It's being the accountant for your family's screwdriver business and telling someone what it's like to be an investment banker.

2:40 PM - A man walks past Chantalle and exclaims that the light on her when she looks down in such a way is just gorgeous. "What a beautiful picture that would make!" he says. I tell him he should consult the professional photographer we have on set, which he does when she walks by. Another model asks him if he is a photographer himself. "No!" he scoffs, "I am a very rich man!" It is hard for me to tell if he is joking or employing any sense of irony. A few minutes later he corners a group of us sitting on a sofa and proceeds to recite some prose he learned at a party the week before. He is the highlight of my day.

2:48 PM - A shuttle drives us down to another showroom. It is light and bright and I want to buy all of the furniture inside of it but I don't have a five thousand square foot house in the hills yet so I cannot.

3:04 PM - I am in a shuttle back to the boutique. My day is done and I don't feel tired, used, abused or otherwise. This is amazing. I can't believe I just got paid to do that.

2009-05-10T23:17:00.000-07:00

The first time I saw The Shins perform was in a tacky white-walled, marble floored house in the Hollywood Hills. It was one of those typical places that never had real furniture in it and was built for the sole purpose of hosting parties with alcohol sponsorship and formal invitations. The band was set up in the corner of a medium-sized living room and played on to a group of bored, drunk, apathetic party goers, most of whom were outside by the bar. It was a shame, really. I stood watching the headlights of cars drive up the hill wondering how strange my life was and praying I would never forget this moment.
That was about three years ago. Tonight I went to see them at the Palladium in Hollywood for a much larger audience, and a largely more enthusiastic one. Per my "Cheap Ass Code of Ethics" I refuse to park in a parking lot near the venue and instead opt for a free spot a few dark blocks down El Centro. As I cross the street to the theater a man wearing what looked like a backstage pass around his neck asks me if I wanted a ticket. As a matter of fact I did! What good luck, I think. This man is just going to give me a ticket! "Let's go down this way," he says. I am agreeable, of course, believing that this man is going to get me in backstage and for free. "This way" turns out to be the wrong way, leading me down the opposite side of the entrance. When he asks if I can just pay him the full price of what he paid, I slow my pace a wee bit.
"I only have twenty-five dollars."
"These are forty-eight dollar tickets."
"Well, I'm sorry. I don't have the cash."
"There's an ATM nearby."
We are close to a security guard by the backstage gate when I decide that this guy's probably scamming me or going to chop me into little pieces or both. I hand him back the "ticket" he gave me in good faith and tell him I am going to just meet some friends around the front instead. He inexplicably turns on his heel and starts walking back the way we came, not taking back the piece of paper and not looking me in the eye.
"How much money do you have?"
"Twenty-five dollars."
"Whatever, I'll just take that."
"No, it's okay, really."
I notice that this gentleman has crazy eyes that I had not intelligently researched earlier. He storms ahead of me, cell phone now drawn to his ear. I hear him say something like, "What am I doing wrong?" loudly. I freely interpret this as a failure as a kidnapper and not as a scalper. When the aforementioned weirdo gets far enough away I decide to make my move past him. Before I do, I ask two young boys if they'll fake being my friends for a block and a half to avoid this whack job (I point to my potential murderer). I employed this very same tactic back in 2002 when walking home by myself in New York at 3 in the morning after denying a ride from my Turkish friends. En route I was visually raped by a homeless man in a tan trench coat who I discovered was jacking himself off while watching me trot down 10th Street. I noticed this at about the same time he slurred, "Yeah, you're lookin' aren't ya."
We arrive at the entrance unscathed and I thank them for their faux friendship. I buy a ticket at the box office for $38, which I find pretty steep for a show these days, but it's possible I've pirated some music off this band at some point so it's time to give back to the arts if you know what I mean.
As the band gets underway I remember that they were actually pretty boring to watch live. The lead singer lacks lead singer charisma and when the other band members pick up the slack it leaves you a little confused. Most of the mojo comes from the keyboardist. His body language is like that of a flirty, self-aware teenage girl and from this angle he looks like the guitar-wielding comedian Nick Thune who I awkwardly flirted with once having seen him perform at the Laugh Factory. The best line I could come up with was, "Umm, I think you're like funny." Needless to say nothing materialized that night at Hyde.
Seeing The Shins is a lot like reading all of the Harry Potter books and then subjecting yourself to the silver screen adaptation: no matter how much money they spend on CGI, nothing will compare with the power of your imagination. These guys have gray hair and wives, they make a Mother's Day shout out, they are not rock stars, they are just nice boys who grew up and kept making music. Most of the songs come and go without incident, none of their live renditions powerful enough to replace memories previously formed by their albums. There are a few exceptions, including a sexed up version of "Sea Legs" that they've infused with a jazzy, almost bow-chica-wow-wow porno vibe.
I jump around a bit, sway from side to side, get bored, type notes on my cell phone, bounce around some more. There are a few pockets of people I move around: an ogre in a picnic table shirt that doesn't know his own size, the group of three "intellectuals" analyzing the nuances of the song transitions, and two sorority girls who jumped up and down like they were at a Bob Sinclair concert. By the end of the set I am standing behind the sound station watching the bass and treble levels move up and down on the screen of an iBook, the smell of bacon wrapped hot dogs pouring in from Sunset Boulevard.

Making Enemies Daily

2009-05-06T14:46:00.000-07:00

A Lesson in Humility: Episode One

It's nice to hear stories about your friends doing well. People booking movies, starting clothing companies, moving up in the corporate ladder, etc. These little tidbits of personal news are generally accompanied by a sense of humility, a sensitivity to the listener, or, at the very least, a good English-humoured self-deprecating joke. One shares their good fortune with grace and humility. One saves tales of triumph for good friends, as these are the people who are obligated to give a shit or fake it with gusto.
Of course it doesn't always happen according to the laws of good taste and manners. Some people never learned how to break away from "Show and Tell Syndrome" as I like to call it. Surely, I was not immune to this as a child. Every Friday in third grade I got up there on the brown linoleum floor, standing in front of rows of uncomfortable desks filled with fidgety children, and I would proceed to attempt my greatest MC Hammer inspired dance. This was without fail my favorite move. It involved jumping from one leg to the other, with the heel of the non-weight bearing foot pointed toward the ceiling. I would do this back and forth for a few minutes until I became tired. I would stop, students would clap, and I awaited my chance to do it again in a week. I can't vouch for myself and say that I was good at it. In fact, I was probably pretty damn bad. But each student was given a platform to use and I used and abused it.
Years of ungodly adolescent insecurity followed by vaguely normal adult social interaction allowed for me to hone a pretty decent sense of when and what people might care to hear about my own life. Boring: the type of orange juice you drink in the morning, the plants your mom grows in her backyard, other people's dreams (although I disagree with this). Worth sharing: banging Tommy Lee, getting into law school, grandparents kicking the bucket. Occasionally we all mess up, telling practical strangers about the Lanvin shoes you bought the other day or how good your roasted brussels sprouts were last night. But these hiccups are unavoidable and all in the spirit of filling the vast uncomfortable holes in bad conversation with people you don't really know well enough to ignore for five minutes without feeling like an asshole.
In regards to jobs in this industry, girls are generally pretty modest, at least the ones who have been around awhile. And honestly, the Los Angeles market isn't a platform for supermodel stardom so any job is ultimately a money job, not a career bellwether. So the filler jobs that allow us to maintain our occupational status as models (runway shows for Orange County philanthropic housewives, informal modeling in suburban shopping malls, fitting clothes for the "real" models in New York) go thankfully unannounced amongst the ladies. The lack of talent and skills required to perform this job makes it difficult when it comes to patting your comrades on the back. Somehow "Oh, hey, nice job standing there!" or "Congratulations on your face!" seems a bit needless.
So when a girl I was working with today randomly interjects something about her experience as the trophy presenter at the Academy Awards on two different occasions, both of which being uncalled for, I wanted to hit her on the head. The conversation was something similar to the following:
Makeup Artist: "This friend of mine is a pastry chef in La Jolla and..."
Model: "One time I made ice cream with Mario Batali."
Makeup Artist: "Ummm..."
Model: "Uh huh. Mario Batali. And I accidentally stuck my whole fist in the bowl! And I was like, 'Mario...'"
I could have attempted to understand the braggart had the Oscars been the night before and the excitement still fresh and new and barely washed off. I'm sure it was exciting to be around that many Hollywood heavy weights, but the only weight she was carrying that night was that of a three pound duchess ballgown and those ten pound statues. Today is May 6th, the Oscars were February 22nd, and by my math this falls into the "Nobody gives a shit anymore" category. Forgive my curtness, but perhaps I am bitter that I gave up my MC Hammer routine thinking that my peers were doing the same.

Seamless

2009-05-01T16:12:00.001-07:00

Dad Dinners

2009-05-01T15:05:00.000-07:00

The second trailer home my dad ever moved into was markedly smaller than the first. It had only one bedroom, a small bathroom, and an area that contained two over-sized sofas, a TV, and a coffee table. All of this adjacent to a triangle-shaped kitchen that was supposed to give the illusion of space, of which there was none. If I have to think of this place, I think of my dad cooking grilled cheese. American cheddar, white bread, mayonnaise on each side of bread. The sandwich spattered and spit loudly, searing in hot butter. He served it with apple sauce.
There wasn't enough room for a proper dining room table so we ate off of birch-colored TV trays in the living room. Dinner was most often picked up from a mini-mall in the Pacific Palisades which housed both a Panda Express and a Subway. My brother satisfied with his greasy chicken, and I with processed turkey meat. Sometimes we would all agree on KFC, something I wasn't horrified by at the time. The biscuits were undercooked and the gravy always salty.

Terror in the Sky: Part II

2009-04-25T12:01:00.000-07:00

I am on a private plane with Monique Lhuillier, headed to Nashville for a runway show. It is not as big as I would like for it to be; it seats about 6 people comfortably, 8 if anyone cared to sit in the 2 jump seats behind the pilots. Nearly every turbulent bump sends my head into my hands. "God, protect us and keep us safe...God, protect us and keep us safe...God..." This is a mantra I repeat over and over and over until the need to vomit reluctantly fades away. I developed this phrase when I was 13 and began flying regularly to Reno for family snowboarding trips. I am not certain that it makes me feel reassured but I am a creature of habit. I ate tuna for lunch every day for 3 years until I began to feel that the mercury was substantially hindering my cognitive functioning.
At times I feel a bit arrogant in willing the plane to stay in the air on my own account. "But I have so much more to do!" I think. I try to explain to myself that I am being completely irrational, that driving a car 50 to 60 miles a day puts me at a higher risk of premature death than flying does. But even then I argue with my calmer self that the statistic only holds if you are an occasional flier, which I am not. I'm airborne practically as often as my rubber meets the road. Many times I like to recall a few incidences in my life, mostly involving psychics or other knowledged persons, that reassure me that I will live to a ripe old age of...well, not right now. I think about the turban wearing gentleman in the Long's Drugs parking lot who told me I would be famous and that I would die at 89. This prophecy does not entail me falling to my death in a blazing inferno. Another psychic recently predicted that there would be a script in 3 years that would inspire me to continue in that direction and would be quite big for me. And, here, I live again! But no matter how vividly I can recall these words, I break out into a cold sweat whenever the wind currents shudder my plane.
My least favorite ride was a cramped hell hole of a Delta experience from Newark to Fort Lauderdale. I was literally the only passenger under 65, aside from 3 grandchildren and someone's caged parakeet. I couldn't help but think that if God had some sick quota to fill under the "Freak Accident" category of human calamities, this plane would certainly be the easiest target. I survived that trip, as I have survived all others, but developed a strong distaste for the disintegrating body so much so that 89 might just be too long to wait.

All I Do

2009-04-24T15:31:00.000-07:00

Casting Call: What To Expect -- powered by ExpertVillage.com

Runway Show: Good Posture -- powered by ExpertVillage.com

Walking Styles for Runway Shows -- powered by ExpertVillage.com

I Bleed American

2009-04-23T10:33:00.000-07:00

I walk into a shop that displays confederacy paraphernalia, cowboy hats, and Marilyn Monroe coffee cups in the store window. The tall, elderly shopkeeper is in the middle of an order: 4 Elvis shot glasses, 6 Elvis driver's licenses, hot sauce...bacon and bar-b-q...maple pineapple, 4 tins of... The list continues, each order ever the more ridiculous and entirely appropriate. I stifle a laugh multiples times. He hangs up the phone and says, "Damn it, I forgot to order the Bacon Band Aids." A few minutes later he follows up with an "Oh, I know what to do!" I am assuming this is in regards to the band aid debacle. He apologizes for talking out loud and I offer to brainstorm for him while I am there.
It doesn't take more than a few steps into the store to realize that this man is a patriot with a capital "P." There is a wall dedicated entirely to military related pins: POWs, fake purple hearts, eagles holding snakes, stars of various sizes and metals, I (Heart) My Vietnam Vet, an entire series of scantily clad pinup girls labeled as "Wartime Airplane Decals." My favorite is a naked girl holding up a towel to cover her naughty bits titled "The Home Stretch."
I do not feel American enough to be in the same room with this man. He is obviously tied in some personal capacity to the armed service and while I am inclined to ask him about it I sense that he would throw me over the cash register and bellow "Who sent you?!" while brandishing a knife with a menacing depiction of a pointy fingered Uncle Sam on the handle. And if such violent means were never resorted to, he could easily just go into a dissertation on his "time in the war" exploring every bullet hole and every dead comrade until my ears bled.
When I place the pack of confederate flag playing cards down on the counter I try to play it cool, like I am an actual racist who still upholds the uber American tradition of cross burning in my spare time. If he suspects I am doing this solely to play an ironic game of Gin Rummy with some bearded leftist hipsters, I imagine he might toss me out of the joint. I throw in a sweet looking pin with the word "Nashville" riding along musical notes for good measure.

Social progress is highly overrated.

Nashville, TN

2009-04-22T23:26:00.000-07:00

Coachella Checklist

2009-04-20T12:31:00.000-07:00

Hindsight's always 20/20, but this list shall serve me well for Coachella 2010. Here are the apparent must-haves of Indio's musical sweat fest.

1. Vibrant colored plastic glasses. Now, I doubt that these have any UVA/UVB protection embedded in their cheap little lenses but if you want your outfit doused in a good measure of irony these are the shades for you. My brother owned a pair of these when he was about three. I remember them well because he was wearing them when he whacked me on the head with a flute. I bled. He giggled.

2. Marijuana and MDMA. It might just be me, but it seems as though mushrooms dipped in popularity this year. Apparently the kids just want to feel good and rub each other, not stare at the sky and see God riding a unicorn.

3. Bare ass cheeks. I caught quite a bit of bum at the shows. It came in many shapes and sizes, with cellulite and occasionally without. It peeked out from under short shorts and sequined daisy dukes, a little crescent shaped piece of booty. There was one jumper-clad girl whom I could see her cheeks from the back as well as the front (time for some squats m'lady!). But my favorite pieces of ass was most definitely that of the girl whom walked past me while I was seated on the ground waiting for The Kills to play. Her acid wash denim shorts were essentially summertime chaps; they were torn and shredded and had two holes connected by two strings, top and bottom, through which her bikini bottoms poked through quite prolifically. I was dazzled.

4. S.U.S.Ds (Sweaty Ugly Sugar Daddys) Paying for your own ticket is highly overrated. If you're a girl and you've got some boobs, all you have to find is a boob of a man to mooch off of. They've got houses with pools on lock down, free drugs, full-time chefs, backstage passes, etc. All you have to do is ignore the nagging suspicion that you might get raped in your sleep by some out of work investment banker. And don't worry when people give you that "nothing is free" speech. You won't have to blow the guy because someone else will inevitably be taking one for the team.

5. War Wounds. A testament that you truly weathered the Coachella storm, these little scrapes and bruises give stories to tell until Neosporin is no longer necessarily. Three friends came away wounded after hopping the fence having convinced an off-duty Marine cum security guard to give them 10 seconds to attempt it. A friend of mine scraped his shoulder and elbow falling off of a golf cart. The beauty of this tragic tale is that it simultaneously illicit sympathy and jealousy, as people that "know" know that golf carts are only found shuttling stars and rock stars around the backstage area. Sadly, all I came away with was the plastic shoe induced double blister on the bottom of my left foot. Target shoes are cheap for a reason.

6. Bootie Sandals. Not a sandal, not a boot. These puppies give you the illusion of sensible ankle support, the slouchiness of a your favorite de-elasticized leather gym sock, and the freedom of a flip flop. Thank goodness for these. I couldn't imagine another year watching those poor girls walk around in cowboy boots in 100 degree heat.

7. Public Boob Grabs. Apparently the security guards didn't catch the P.D.A. hidden in people's nap sacks. The boys reached around, reached under, and reached in. I had to light a cigarette afterward, I felt so personally involved in the act.

A Most Productive Day

2009-04-14T16:53:00.000-07:00

This recession has put everyone at a bit of a loss, myself included. So when I actually have things to do throughout the day which pertains to accumulating wealth, I should (in theory) get excited and you know, do my job. But sometimes you just don't feel like it.

Monday's Accomplishments
1. Wake up.
2. Drive to casting for a Black Eyed Peas music video. We are asked to be funky, edgy, and wearing lip gloss. This is described as "euro". I decide on an uncomfortable multicolored Alexander McQueen jumpsuit that I bought a year ago and have only worn three times. I put on some sassy lip gloss.
3. The waiting area for the BEP casting is loaded with girls that look nothing like me and are all under 5'6. This is a room of trashy looking dancers. Not so coincidentally my agent sent a picture in which I look like I'm dancing over to the casting director. I am number 16. I wait around for about thirty minutes until I decide that I do not look hip enough or urban enough to make this worth my while. I leave.
4. I start my drive to Santa Monica. This is for a fairly big money hair job. This only means that you are being compensating for pain and suffering, not actual time working. The last time I worked for this client they told me I was going to be dyed "a nice caramel and honey" which translated to an orange base and a banana stripe down the side of my head. I make two attempts to turn around and head home after recalling the shade of green my hair turned after dying it back brown but finally decide to man up and just go anyway. When they ask if they can layer my hair and dye it back brown again I grit my teeth and say "yeah" through the side of my mouth. I am a liar.
5. I come home and watch an episode of 30 Rock. I want to be Tina Fey.
6. I stop by my agency for them to take polaroids to send to some agencies in Greece. I take off my shoes and put on a bathing suit and pose and pose and pose. My feet are cold on the concrete floor.
7. I have another two hours to kill in which I sit around and pretend to read. My audition is close enough for me to walk but I drive anyway because it is cold and I am lazy. I have been told to be approachable and fun. I am to be lip syncing "Pretty Fly for a White Guy" which I haven't heard in its entirety since it came out when I was twelve and I thought it was funny. As I sit in the casting office, I can hear the people before me singing through the walls. I am embarrassed for them and when I get up to go inside the people in the hallway say they can't wait to hear what I can do. It is a fishbowl scenario, only more violating. I go inside, slate my name, grab a microphone and have at it. Apparently I am good at acting like an asshole because they called me back for a director's session tomorrow.
8. Come home and try to figure out what I'm really supposed to be doing with my life.

Celebreality Bites: Volume 3

2009-04-13T19:29:00.001-07:00

Before I knew any better, I spent some time as as "model" with a C-rate agency in Los Angeles. This was during a time in which I classified myself as a student taking some time off who happened to go on castings where other girls booked the job. I was simply going through the motions of what these girls did, minus the payoff. In fact, at the end of the year my expenses outweighed my income so heavily that the government payed me money for even attempting to model. I should have jumped ship entirely after my booker got me a job working at a restaurant to subsidize my lack of income, but I continued pretending with them for a few more months.
I was hired as a hostess at The Spanish Kitchen on La Cienega at a $10 per hour salary plus tips from the waiters. Considering my situation, this was a goldmine, a wondrous opportunity for growth. The day shift allowed me time to work on calculus homework while scheduling birthday parties for people who still thought the place was cool. The food was hit or miss, which didn't matter because the employees were never given free meals and working two hours for a plate of mediocre chicken mole never seemed worth it. Occasionally one of the bussers would sneak me a doughy white tortilla filled with homemade guacamole. But after the original guac man was fired, it never tasted the same and I refused many a tortilla roll going forward.
There were perks to the job, if you counted D-list celebrity sightings as interesting fodder for dinner party lore. The celebrities themselves were never awe-inspiring. What did amaze me was the ability of the place to draw in only nobodies on a routine basis. I seated Shannon Elizabeth's bulldog of an ex-husband in the center booth at the back of the room. I asked SuChin Pak what she majored in at college while handing her a sticky, leather bound menu (Berkeley: Political Science). Fred Durst came in with a lady friend wearing a hat that had the dual task of camouflaging a premature receding hairline as well as remaining needlessly incognito. He did an admirable job pretending he hadn't sat next to me at dinner parties on a few occasions months before.
By far my favorite encounter, the one that sticks with me like my distaste for all Mexican restaurant ambiance, was with Ananda Lewis and her even bigger nobody friend. The pair came in during a busy Friday night, with a standard wait of about thirty-five minutes. When I informed them of this inconvenience, indicating that five years on MTV would not be exempting them from the squalor of delay, the friend leaned across the hostess stand and said, "Don't you know who this is?" Of course I did. I grew up on MTV. Fashionably Loud, Road Rules, The Real World when it wasn't as slutty, TRL, the whole shebang. Even in my youth I got excited when Kurt Loder and that blond chick with the short hair came on and tried to tell me what was going on in Bosnia. Yes, I knew who she was.
"Sorry, it will be thirty-five minutes. Can I have your name please?"
The friend sneered, bitter that her vicarious arrogance tactic had failed.
"Ananda."
Apparently Ananda had lost her voice since leaving MTV for a life of relative irrelevance. Thank god this woman doubled as her PR girl or I would have missed her entirely.

Post Americana

2009-04-09T23:35:00.000-07:00

Not Much Changes

2009-04-08T19:24:00.000-07:00

It was fifth grade. I was tall already, much taller than my young male and female collegiate counterparts. In our class photo I was put in the middle, as always, part of the giant pyramid made out of squinting faces and the occasional pair of giant glasses. The girl next to me was named Courtney and as we waited under the 1950s awning she told me how her mom put flour in her hair that morning to take out the grease. Around the same time, we started rehearsing for graduation ceremonies: bad poetry, essays about "the future", etc. It was also planned that were to subject our families to group square dancing, which would be practiced laboriously in the auditorium until the big day.
What came with this wonderful mockery of country bumpkin dancing was an opportunity to bond with a member of the opposite sex, one that would put me closer to a boy than I had ever been in my whole short lifetime. I held my breath as the teacher began to pair us up. "Please Greg. Please Greg. Please Greg..." Greg was my fifth grade crush; before him had been Joey and Brian. He was puny, tiny, bird boned. I think I was in love with how delicate he was. His brown hair was always crisply gelled and combed over from the side, left to right. His blue eyes were bluer than my own. They had more of a piercing brightness in comparison to my own, which have always had an unremarkable deep lake quality to them.
For whatever stroke of luck, I was paired with Greg. I am fairly certain it had something to do with our last names being in the beginning of the alphabet. We looked ridiculous. I towered above him. My head was much bigger than his, my arms much longer. I relished the rehearsals that came. I never said one word to him. There were no coy giggles or lingering glances. I was eleven and my eyes danced from the teacher to the floor, watching its brown and tan laminate surface moving slowly underfoot.

Why Child Models/Actors Terrify Me

2009-04-06T16:39:00.000-07:00

I waited in some casting studio south of Santa Monica Boulevard , where the big rig trucks pull in and out, loading and unloading lighting equipment and such movie nonsense. This is the same area that a friend of mine was hit by one of those aforementioned trucks and nearly killed. I was there for some commercial audition that probably required I pretend to splash around barefoot in a giant fountain a la La Dolce Vita, only with cheesy smiles and in English.
The casting studio was also having a session for a children's spot. I was surrounded by three foot tall people and their similarly sized parents, of whom most looked sunburned and paranoid. The children themselves were cute in a boring, accessible way. I find that "pretty" kids are simply those who possess certain adult qualities or standardized qualifications of beauty, but as they grow up and grow older these attributes are no longer adorable or charming. They grew out of that moment of beauty, as we all do in varying speeds, and thus doomed to exist in visual mediocrity. All of this made more difficult to deal with having been so lavished with compliments and attention as children.
This absurd scene continues in front of me, the crossing of potential with expired potential. I continue to silently attack them in my head. A little girl moves over to a white wall where it is her turn to be polaroided. The assistant counts down...1...2...3...And before he gets to three, the little girl hiccups out a giggle and smiles. The assistant says something about the picture not coming out so he goes to take another one. And on "3" comes the same exact contrived giggle from this five year old. It was more offensive than canned laughter on a terrible sitcom. This was the industry equivalent of an invisible cattle prod searing into veal in the making.
Today I participated in a fashion show in which kids were also involved. It was for Juniors and Super Juniors; at twenty-five I am apparently fresh faced enough to sell clothes intended for seventeen-year-olds wielding their parent's money. A few silent little girls get their hair curled while they stare around the room at the big girls, the real models. I'm sure they think we are all thirty with husbands and children and a house with a dog; the same way I saw baseball players when I was young, unaware that I was watching twenty-three-year-old children knocking balls around.
I can't help but think that these kids should be in class somewhere, reading Bunnicula: A Rabbit-Tale of Mystery and pushing boys' heads into water fountains. They should be planting sunflower seeds and eating cookie dough, leaning about cumulus clouds and scraping their knees on black asphalt. I look around the room. We're in a windowless basement of a makeup room. The bathroom door as a handwritten note taped to it that says "Please Knock. Lock Broken." The silver chairs are stained and dirty. This is categorically a toxic environment for a child's spirit. Nothing about seems stimulating for children unless you count the premature development of body image disorders and egotism.
To be fair, a few of these girls seem to have a particular and unfathomable zeal for the limelight. One wearing low heeled Mary Janes and tight jeans practices her runway walk in front of her mom. She sprints across the blue carpet like Tyra Banks on crack. I express my distaste for all of this pageantry and a model friend comes to its defense, says she did it as a child and couldn't get enough of it. The pictures, the clothes, the whole environment. And as much as I do respect her experience, all I can think of was that bitch in elementary school who would be inexplicably show ponied from room to room belting out "The sun'll come out...to-MAR-OW..." and how much I loathed her.

2009-04-03T21:57:00.000-07:00

It was the summer of 2007. Whitney Brown and I decided after watching The Devil Wears Prada that we should move to New York for a few months. So we did. My intention, of course, was to get with a good agency and finally make it modeling. But meeting after meeting after meeting came the ego bruising barrage of "No thank yous." There was one agency that was actually excited about me although I can't say I was terribly excited about them. The owner had been in the business so long that she was actually someone that would say, "Oh honey, I've been in this business so long..." People that say that have thirteen grandchildren and their voices croak from years of cigarette abuse. Their roster of models weighed heavily on the "Over Thirty" set and was partially balanced by the "I Might be Tall but I'm Fat and Ugly" twenty somethings. They took me on. I was horrified.
A few weeks into castings for clients I have never heard of and clothing companies that would never come near Vogue editorials, I booked my first job. It's 9 am and I am lying in my bed adorned with one singular orange bed sheet and no pillows. Some dude from my shit agency calls me and asks if I want to work. "Sure," I say. I had since given up on the idea of making money this summer and relegated my expectations to riding bikes through Brooklyn and sitting on fire escapes writing. "It's easy cash. One hundred an hour. You won't be there too long." I agree to this vague notions he lies before me. He gives me the address. It's in Queens. What the fuck? "It's going to take you about an hour to get there on the train so you'll need to leave now," he says. I ask him what the name of the client is. I will be working for Ruby's Costume Company.
Great. Glamorous. My life sucks, relatively. I sit on the train and when I am the last Caucasian on it, it's my stop. I walk down the platform and onto a street that looks straight out of "Summer of Sam." A nebbish little man spots me and asks if I'm looking for Ruby's. I say yes and he walks me over to what looks like an burnt out building and opens the door. "Go on in," he says.
The room is dark save the lighting equipment for the shoot illuminating the photographer, a paper seamless, and the backside of a very large man. Although I am unsure whether at that moment he qualified as a man. He wears a plastic helmet, a giant cape, and holds a plastic sword with a plastic sheath and as he "models" his garb he roars. I want to turn around and run out the door but I've already been spotted by the team. Fuck me.
I get directed into the makeup room which looks more like a kindergarten arts and crafts room than anything else. Shelves are lined with mannequin heads sporting terrifying expressions that would scare small children. My makeup artist's name is Deborah. She wears thick glasses and a Tommy Hilfiger shirt and the first thing she says to me is, "Looks like someone needs a facial." I want to tell her she should pay someone to dye her hair instead of using whatever boxed red she's been using but I keep my mouth shut.
There is another female model there. She is pregnant and has wiry gray hairs down the part of her head. She sits in the makeup chair deliberating on names for her unborn child. I come to learn that the large man model is Tom and he used to be a football player and when he leaves, the crew thanks him for bringing bagels. He is a sweet ogre. These two people apparently work for this client often. The thought of which gives me anxiety.
Deborah finishes her magic and I look like a cakey old whore. Mission accomplished. There are two "stylists" in charge of changing me and accessorizing. They are both in their mid forties and barely pushing five feet tall. I put on my first costume, a sexy race car driver. There is an eight inch gap where the fabric bends outward at the chest and where my boobs end. Stylist One takes me into the changing room, hands me a 34 C bra, stuffs cutlets inside and proceeds to harness everything in with faux bondage tape. I look like I'm about to shoot a flying scene in a pornography in front of a green screen. Stylist One leads me back into the makeup room where Deborah paints cleavage on my bony sternum. I catch myself in the mirror. I thank God for never giving me tits because these things make me look like a two hundred pound German masseuse and not like the superstar costume model I actually am.
The obscene breasts are quite fitting for everything that occurs over the course of the next few hours. I am often instructed to bend my torso forward, meaning "More boobs, less everything else." The stylist's instructions become increasingly specific as the day proceeds. In my adult Christmas costume they tell me to pretend to lick the magic wand they would be changing to a candy cane in Photoshop. One of them is kind enough to give me a visual demonstration of her own. Oh, how I am thus inspired. This is the same costume that comes with little white panties with "Santa's Little Ho Ho Ho" written across the bum. And yes, I do have to turn around for a back shot, lifting my skirt, looking naughtily into the camera.
With another adult Christmas costume I get a ribbon wrapped box. "Could you hold the present closer to your face? Like...look what I've got here for you, baby..." I do it, although I can't exactly figure out what she thinks could be in that box that would fit her description. A dick? I don't get it.
The other outfits are a little more demure. We do a couple headshots where I get a chance to relax and sit on a stool in front of the camera. There is the witch's glamor shot where they tell me use my "bedroom eyes." This is followed by the donning of a Santa Hat and posing in a style quite reminiscent of my senior year graduation shot. However this time I have little desire to purchase fifty wallet size prints to send out to friends and family.
At 4:30, the day officially ends. I cover my painted chest with the clothes I came in with and wipe off my makeup with tissue paper. I say goodbye to these people I will never see again, ever in my life. And when I get out of ear's distance, I call my agency and drop them.

The "Nun for You" costume...

And the "TinWOMAN" getup.

Trust me, I tried to find my own images but I'm afraid I was two years too late on that one.

memory covered in black and white

2009-03-30T12:56:00.001-07:00

I was young and there were road trips. Me, my brother, my dad, my mom. A perennial favorite was June Lake, a small fishing spot near Mammoth Mountain. We had been going there since I was still in a car seat. One summer we picked up a stray cat. She just jumped right into the truck with us. Dad named her Bugs and she lived outside. When he moved out I took over responsibility for her, feeding her dry cat food shaped like grainy "X"s and scratching her back until she raised her rear haunches in content. I was the only one she let pet her.
I would get worried about Bugs when it rained, wondering if she had a dry place to be. We had a big porch with a sage colored roof and old brick flooring. One time I poured her food and sat against the wall next to the front door, stucco pressing into my back. The rain fell through the pine trees and washed up the smell of dirt and the grass looked slick and wet. I sat and waited and I was patient, more patient than I have ever been in my adult life. And she came. Black and white, sneaking around the corner. I scratched her back. I watched the rain.
By the time our house had sold and were were about to move into Tom's place, Bugs was of unknown age but we had had her for ten some odd years. She was old but never grew past the size of a fat bunny with long legs. My mom said we couldn't take her with us because Tom lived on a busy street and she would probably get run over by a car. I felt irresponsible and sad. She was another thing I had to give up.
For a few months I was worried whether she was alive, if someone was feeding her or if she could hunt mice. I thought of her waiting for me by the front door with the stucco wall. I wondered if it made her as sad as it made me. And then, one day, I just stopped thinking about Bugs altogether.

Stolen from Hotlantis

2009-03-29T14:00:00.000-07:00

My ever more frequent crying during trailers has become a concern of mine for which I am confused as to how to tend to the problem.

A Standard 20 Hour Work Day

2009-03-29T13:18:00.000-07:00

The day begins at sunrise. Farm hours. I wake up with the alarm that immediately sends me into the "fight or flight" thing I learned about in high school. My blood pressure surges, my heart races, I am ready for an imaginary battle. In the email detailing out today's job in San Francisco, my agent essential threatened that if we miss this flight we will be dropped from the board. I look at the clock. I'm safe. I eat some cereal, drink some juice, and have some coffee. I leave the house at five til seven. It's a day trip so I only have a purse. This is liberating.
Ten other girls meet me at the airport. The details of the job have been vague aside from flight information and the name of the client. The flight is fine aside from the first "Twenty Minutes of Terror" which I have come to describe all of my flight ascensions these days. Every bump of turbulence turns my stomach and leads me to reach into my database of frequently used flier thoughts such as: "If we crash in water should I grab my purse?" or "If we explode in midair will I be sucked out like those people in Final Destination?" I chastise myself for dying en route to a job whose rate never seems worth jeopardizing my life. When I was younger I loved flying. Mom would always give me the window seat and I would sit staring at clouds, listening to my CD Walkman and thinking about kissing boys. If only I could have remained so ignorant of danger. I put my head between my knees and pray for me to black out or fall asleep. The woman next to me puts a light hand on my back without saying anything. I raise my head.
"I hate fucking flying."
"It'll be over soon," she says.
This is comforting until I think of how that sounds like a quote from "Famous Last Words." I steal a glance at her computer. Her name is Liz Rider and she works at CBS Interactive.
Three town cards pick us up at the airport. By the time I grab the front seat in a Lincoln Town & Country, I realize that the car in front of us is a Mercedes. I want to hop out and join the other two girls but I feel like I would be offending my driver so I stay put. On the freeway he points out houses and landfills but his accent is incomprehensible so I just laugh and say "uh huh" a lot.
It's 1:15 by the time I start actually working, which first involves a fitting for the runway show. I walk into a room of awkward tension and silence. The designer of Akris is there and he is balding and skinny and Austrian. He sits at a long table at the end of the room adjusting Post It notes in a stack of paper. He asks me to walk. I walk. He stares. I am uncomfortable and I think he doesn't like my jawline. "Number four," he says. I am working for the fashion equivalent of a passive aggressive J. Stalin. The room is completely quiet with the exception of delegating outfits, commanding models to walk, and the click of Polaroids being taken. On two occasions he says, "That looks great." But it sounds forced and lame and halfhearted. When I leave the room I am sweaty and nervous. The man literally sucked every once of personality out of a twenty by twenty foot space.
The show comes and goes and nobody falls and nobody's boobs fly out unexpectedly. It is a wild success. The same three cars fill up and again I miss my opportunity to ride in the Mercedes. It's a surprisingly lovely spring evening in San Francisco and I wind the tinted window of the car to its child-proof limit. The air is tepid and the sky is a desaturated cobalt and this is the part of my life that I love but don't get enough of. The mad dash, the blurry scenery, the ability to convince yourself for a moment that you are important. A Coca Cola sign flickers on, it's bulbs switching illumination responsibility.

When LA Fashion Week Disintegrates, So Does My Integrity.

2009-03-27T11:52:00.000-07:00

Shows in LA have always been notoriously dismal. Most everything is made out of some sort of jersey and can be purchased on Melrose. To clarify, it's all shit. So when IMG and Smashbox studios parted ways this season, it was no skin off anyone's back. And, as it turns out, all was not lost. Palm Springs would be hosting it's very own fashion week! Now, I know, the place doesn't scream fashion. The population is predominately near dead or gay, I'm not sure why the latter flock here en masse but they are all fabulously tan. Nevertheless the jobs were paying, and where the money goes we go.
Tyler and I wake up at 5 am for a 2 hour and 12 minute drive to Palm Desert. At some point I hold my right eye open with a cold finger to stay awake. We make it in one piece and arrive at one singular tent in the middle of a dirt parking lot. Glamorous. Our producer warns us that the show will be very "conceptual" and I realize what she means when the owner of the boutique hosting the show comes over and begins to break down the opening scene. The music chosen is "Bad to the Bone" by George Thorogood and when she tells us that we have to act "bad to the bone" she shimmies and shakes and bends her 65 year old knees in emphasis. On the runway she expects walk offs, pushing, and being "a bigger bitch than that other bitch walking toward you." This is somebody's grandmother. Aaron gets removed from opening the show because the woman "just doesn't think [she] can handle it."
The rest of the scenes continue in similarly ridiculous and anti-fashion fashion. One instruction is to prance with knees Hitler Youth high while Native American tribal music plays on in the background. Next, there is a literal interpretation of the lyrics to a song that this woman deemed fit for a strip tease.
"Baby take off your shoes"
The girls step out of their high heel shoes ON THE RUNWAY.
"You can take off your coat."
The black velvet Harry Potter velvet capes covering their fluorescent wunder garb gets thrown off the runway and into the audience.
"You can leave your hat on."
Guess what happens.
And after that imaginative creation finishes the girls dance down the runway to Phil Collins' rendition of "True Colors" because they are wearing...colors.
The entire event is laughable and we try desperately not to be overtly disrespectful to this woman's vision but bloody hell, this is some twisted 1950s dinner theater shit. I imagine this occupation is preparing me for greatness of some sort or there really is no God.

Coffee. Equal. Hot Chocolate. Addiction.

2009-03-23T10:32:00.000-07:00

In light of my recent parting with caffeine, here are my ruminations on a 7 year strong friend. A eulogy, perhaps...

I was determined, naively resolved. I would never be that parent grumbling for their morning cup of joe. Growing up I watched my dad with his Yuban: black, no sugar, no cream. It came pre-ground and in brown tins. This is what my dad wants his ashes put in when he is cremated. My brother and I were about thirteen and twelve the first time he told us that. Years later my mom developed a habit of her own and a strong attachment to a considerably pricey espresso machine. This, of course, came post-second-divorce and was purchased in close proximity to a '91 190E steel gray Mercedes (my first car) and a ten day family Christmas trip to Maya Tulum; all of which were part of her "I can do it on my own" campaign" which continues strong to this day. As far as my youthful tendencies, I didn't touch the stuff unless it was blended with vanilla powder and simple syrup, eaten alongside a peanut butter cookie the size of my strangely large hands. Any buzz I acquired was largely attributed to the sugar content and less so the half shot of espresso that landed into my tasty treat.
But then I got to college. I gave up my Frappuccinos, I banned white chocolate mochas, and New York didn't have Coffee Beans so Ice Blendeds were out of the question. The only thing my budget allowed purchase for was one carton of orange juice a week and one bag of sliced wheat bread. I was obliged to forage my remaining food necessities from the college cafeteria. The cheapest thing available to me was adjacent to the hamburger grill station and across from the pizza warmers. Two carafes full of coffee...brown, watery, terrifyingly dismal...crack.
Being of untrained tongue and nonjudgmental palate, I lapped it up, but not after adding a packet of Equal and a squirt from the hot chocolate machine. Eaten with a dinner roll found next to the soup station and oddly, bananas, I was in caffeine nirvana. My first cup sent me over the moon. After lunch I stormed into my dorm room, pupils dilated. I would like to think that I put on an entertaining interlude for my New Jersey roommate, briefly removing her from the doldrums of undergraduate life. This, I'm sure, is the wishful thinking of an hopped up egomaniac.

Separation Anxiety

2009-03-22T16:46:00.000-07:00

I'm watching Bogie scatter about showing signs of absolute diress. He wanders in and out of my mom's garden, becoming almost invisible behind giant aloe plants. Wimpering, moaning, looking for his friend. The whimpers turn into howls, deep and low. Phil has taken Hunter with him to the nursery. He hates taking Bogie because he sheds, leaving tufts of white Labrador fur stuck on all bits of his truck. Phil used to be quite meticulous about his Ford F150, cleaning the interior with Q-Tips and Armor All. Then some chick threw up in the backseat and it was never really the same.
Bogie doesn't know where they've taken Hunter. So he sits next to the sliding glass door, his haunches laying sideways because he's so fat, and stares into the house waiting for some sign of his friend. "I hope they die together," I say to Tyler. Because I cannot imagine the gut wrenching dog agony either one would go through if left alone on a more permanent basis. Those little fuckers love each other more than they love us. And rightly so. We abandon them for long stretches of time, leaving some classic rock station blaring at what is probably an obnoxious level for their kanine hearing. They're supposedly brothers but looking nothing alike. Hunter doesn't even look like a purebred - he's the one my mom got at a discounted price because the breeder supposedly misplaced his official papers.
I let Bogie cry away because in a strange way I am fascinated by whatever form of emotion he is experiencing; that this compost eating, banana thief is capable of missing something so much.
My eighty year old landlady lost her husband last year. Remnants of whatever illness he ended with sit in the garage alongside wrenches and a rusty bicycle. She sees her kids often, volunteers at Cedars Sinai, and is arguably more active than myself. But somedays I catch her looking out of her screen door adjacent to our screen door and she looks terribly sad. I wonder if she wishes for death and I wonder if her days feel long.

Really Amazing

2009-03-20T17:54:00.001-07:00

When I Grow Up from Fever Ray on Vimeo.

Life in the Slow Lane, Early Retirement

2009-03-17T14:44:00.000-07:00

It is 12:20 pm on a Tuesday. I sit at the car wash where my mom got me a handful of free hand washes for Christmas. There is bird shit on my windshield and streaks of vomit that an unnamed friend did not fully wipe off after a night of too many tequila shots. It was the first time my car had been violated in such a manner. I am waiting for my car under a brown awning where the shade is spread in boxy, linear chunks. There are ads for "safe" hair extensions and synthetic grass. Each person is on a cell phone and every car is expensive.
For the bulk of my time waiting I am concerned about what to tip the Mexican who is about to vigorously clean the inside of my car with a rag. "Such hard work," I think. And then I remind myself how I usually do the very same thing because I am too cheap to pay for a proper professional cleaning. I sneeze. No one says "bless you" or "Gesundheit." This is perhaps because of the deafening whirl of the car washing line going on behind me. Or maybe these people are just rude.

Four Hours at LAX

2009-03-16T11:23:00.000-07:00

Where the mind is allowed to wander when sitting at the airport for four hours waiting for a flight...

- How does lint and other dusting always finds a home on the lid of my chapstick?

- 800 calories is an awful lot for a salad. Do they grow their lettuce in butter?

- Women with small children cannot take the stairs for years of their life due to their infant commitments...it's elevators and Bugaboos for at least 3 years.

- Hey! That mom left her twins alone in their twin stroller while she went to pee. She must find me very trustworthy but I suppose there only being two people washing their hands in the lavatory and that I am 5'10 would make for an easy hunt for kidnapping suspects...

- If your flight gets delayed (2 hours) and the airline (Delta) wants to charge you a fee ($50) to change it (bullshit), tell them that your ride at the destination city (Salt Lake City) can't make it at the adjusted time (later than I fucking paid for). Special thanks to Manny, my gay Latino Delta Concierge desk man for spilling the pinto beans on that one.

- If everyone used the paper toilet seat guards, no ass cheek would ever touch its plastic rim, no pee would ever spill on top of it, and it would always (theoretically) stay clean. The very people who apparently find it more cleanly to pop a squat and ruin it for the rest of us, do not abide by this logic whatsoever...forcing me to conclude that these are the most selfish of cleanly people, robbing me of a pleasant environment to take a piss. Fuck you, squatter. If I could only catch you in the act...

- My everything bagel does not have equal amounts of "everything." This one, particularly, is leaning towards the heavy salted category of bagel varieties.

- The old man across from me is wearing the same old man glasses I used to wear out of irony before I got LASIK and before every MTV watching hipster thought it would be a grand fashion statement. Maybe old man style is just dope style and we should rid ourselves of the ageist stereotypical term. I am reminded of a similar situation in my high school SATs: If I am dope and I wear these glasses, and the old man wears these same glasses, it would assume that both I and the old man are, in fact, dope.

2007: Paris and a Doughnut

2009-03-15T13:53:00.000-07:00

Some 51 hours ago I was at the Louvre, walking on four levels of pillars and heavy marble. Now, I'm sitting in a Starbucks in the Luxor, Las Vegas. a faux pyramid hotel that reeks of desperation and false hope. The croissants here are $3.50 and could easily feed a few people. It cost me $0.50 to change my drink to soy. I'm trying to avoid dairy after a book and a certain PETA video involving a Ukrainian in a yellow jumper and black wellies tearing at the trachea of a living cow with a meat hook. Blood sprayed over the man as the cow hit the sides of the walls with its large body and its weight shifted painfully from hoof to hoof until it couldn't support itself anymore. So yeah, I'm trying to avoid drinking a lot of milk. I haven't seen video footage of tortured soy beans, but maybe that's next.

I didn't buy a pastry today. I never do. My brother was really into them when we were little. He ordered Bear Claws most often. When he was sick we used to stop at K's Donuts on Fallbrook and Ventura and pick up a pink box filled with Long Johns, sugar coated, chocolate frosted, and primary-color sprinkled ones. Then we would take them to the doctors and nurses and sick kids. Phil was diagnosed with leukemia when he was 21 months old. My mom was 24 and my dad barely over 30. When people talk about the theoretical happiness of young parenthood, I wonder how fun it must have been for my parents.

I don't eat donuts anymore.

Pixie Sticks and Burning Sneakers

2009-03-12T16:16:00.001-07:00

Phil and I grew up camping in family-size tents with two parents and a dog and six packs of beer. When Mrs. Hoffstetler sold her 1970s Pace Arrow to us, we were riding in style. We were the owners of a used RV, complete with bathroom, kitchenette, pull-out beds, and a worn out game of Yahtzee. A brown stripe ran down the length of it's 30 foot long sides. Inside, the shag rug was brown and yellow and by the time we abandoned family trips altogether, sand lay in the worn out areas.
We took the dog. Lady. She was a black and tan English Cocker Spaniel, although when my mom told that to her English Grandmother and English friends they laughed at us. "Preposterous," they said, "You have a mutt, there." Lady followed the streams of white from flashlights and chased shadows of the kites that we flew. She was dumb and beautiful and I called her my puppy until the morning we had to put her to sleep because her heart got too big.
I learned how to ride a bike then. The campground roads went around endless circles, trashcans in the center. My brother learned at the same time and the buddy system allowed us to take off without our parents. There was one store in particular, down half a mile from a campsite we visited often. The bike path road along the bluffs of the beach. Two lanes of concrete and wet air. We procured money from our parents with nice voices and sweet smiles and went for high fructose corn sugar sustenance. I can't remember what the inside of that store looked like, not a bit. But my brother and I would leave with two-foot long pixie sticks, riding back to camp with them hanging from our mouths.

Keep the Queens out of Fashion, Please

2009-03-12T15:26:00.000-07:00

He pulls at the two strings of green velvet dragging behind me. The dress is me, I am the dress, it does not matter for we are attached as long as I am paid hourly. The fact that there is a person inside of this hideous notion of an ensemble is irrelevant. He doesn't know how they are tied so he proceeds to drag me into another room where someone else will hopefully know. Bow? Sailor Knot? Bathrobe tie? Jesus Christ. The four layers of dangling fake pearls knock against each other silently as my personal space is violated. I am like a cart behind a horse. A very big, gay horse who wears white denim and a black and white striped vest. Beetlejuice has taken a shower, pierced his ears, is partying in WeHo and now he is here to say things like "fierce" and "bracelets are so in this season" or "look bitchy and rich." Five minutes pass and someone makes an executive decision. Knot.
Thankfully I have forced my way into the i-pod dock where my decidedly good taste in music can play away on shuffle til infinity. I learned my lesson a few days previous when this Queen commandeered full musical reign and initiated a no-holds-barred Britney Spears marathon. And while I am a victim of getting my boogie on in the privacy of my own home to "Toxic" or "Circus" this is where the buck stops. It goes without saying that her entire body of work is not necessarily solid or worthy of listening. The entire day I exist in fear that he will throw my i-pod against a wall, slam his cliche Pride Day music into the stereo, and rail on about with his obsession with Mariah Carey.
Queen says no pleases, no thank yous. When he literally comes an inch from running me over with a rolling rack full of Made-in-China-Ruin-the-Planet-Overpriced clothing, he laughs and says, "Oh! Look at me, running you over." He has not slowed down, adjusted course, or apologized. I scramble to a safe spot away from the metal wheels and think of all the ways I can accidentally punch this man in the face.

Celebreality Bites: Volume 2

2009-03-10T13:06:00.000-07:00

I was in ninth grade when American Pie came out. My brother and I went to see it at the Santa Monica AMC on one of dad's Divorced Parents Weekends. We laughed. Hysterically. Along with the entire room of adolescent, prepubescent teenagers. What could be funnier than humping a pie?
Eight years later I am taking a hike up Runyan Canyon with my boyfriend and I see a bigger Jason Biggs moving up the hillside alongside us. And when he takes the lead, he picks his hike-induced wedgie. It's the kind of thing that makes you never want to be famous in any capacity.

SL,UT

2009-03-09T10:35:00.000-07:00

West of Brooklyn...really?

The alarm clock goes off at 5:30 AM Central Time. It is 4:30 in Los Angeles and I am all sorts of fucked up. A body should not be put through torture such as this and I cannot get out of Utah sooner. Our flight leaves at 8:25 am. Thank god. I go through airport security. A breeze, relatively speaking. On the way to the gate I spot a general store called "West of Brooklyn" which I suppose is an attempt to compare it artistically with indie hipster going-ons. Further than this hypothetical I come up with, there is no rhyme or reason as to why the owner would have the audacity to try to strike up a similarity with anything, let alone New York City. "West of Broadway" is in a class all it's own and probably filled with the most terrifying art in Utah.

1. Fruit and Vegetable Animals
These go in the inedible art category. They are pottery-like and glazed. Imagine taking your favorite treat, say, a banana. And you think, hey, a banana could look like a donkey if I turn it around and draw a head where the top end of the banana is and shape the bottom end into a tail. Then I can just add some banana colored legs and voila, Banana Donkey! There is an eggplant dolphin, tangerine cats, onion geese, red pepper bulls and cabbage fish. I realize as I write this that it all sounds a little strange and pointless. Trust me, it is.

2. Forever Blue Jeans Family Collection
I'm not sure where to place these little miniature dolls. I'm not even sure if they are dolls. I suppose they are closer to figurines. Like GI Joe toys minus anything interesting or cool. In fact, the Forever Blue Jeans Family Collection does not even go through the trouble of painting on the faces of the moms, dads, sons and daughters that stand eerily next to each other in white GAP tee shirts and blue denim pants. The lack of features on these creepy little representations of the white, Christian nuclear family is to perhaps allow the buyer (if any) to more easily relate to these 5 inch tall pieces of plastic. Admittedly, there was a moment there were I stared deep into the space where eyes should be of an anonymous female family member and I thought "Hey! That could me me!" And then I thought about being stuck on a shelf inside of the West of Brooklyn general store in the Salt Lake City Airport...a modern day "Indian in the Cupboard"...I shuddered and put the figurine back where it came from and backed away slowly.

3. Fimocreations
Fimo dough came out when I was in elementary school. Its consistency was something like a combination of Play-Dough and Wacky Taffy. You could buy all sorts of colors, roll them together into a tube and then slice them like julienned basil. The sliced pieces then looked like a Play-Dough kaleidoscope which we would then string on necklaces and let dry. I was 8 years old. This was okay then. Apparently in Utah, Fimo dough is still going strong for every man, woman, and child. The Fimocreations jewelry case takes up an entire enclosed showcase next to the register.

4. SL,UT
Call me immature but when my eyes passed by the rack of Salt Lake City themed coffee cups this one stuck out. Were they trying to be clever? I looked for other innuendos but I don't think Utah is capable of it. Nothing else in here had a sense of humor and I doubt they would start with this one.

Living the High Life

2009-03-02T21:17:00.000-08:00

Utah. I am here for work. I've recently been informed that we will be standing on a box for 4 hours. This is an excruciating amount of time. Yes, I am aware it is not coal mining nor is it rocket science. But this f'ing blows. In all honesty, I am used to getting paid to sit around waiting to walk on a runway for a combined 1.3 minutes, maybe less.
This recession thing is really kicking my spoiled, over-payed ass. We work for a client, a big department store. They fly us around the country and we prance around for rich folk in the name of marketing and charity. I have been to such glamorous places as Detroit, Fort Lauderdale, and, today, Salt Lake City. When people were actually still contributing to this economy buying expensive designer goodies, we were treated to such hotels as The Westin (functional and clean and business friendly) and The Mandarin Oriental (giggle-inducing extravagant).
Currently I am sitting in the Crystal Inn, a twenty-five minute ride from the airport into the middle of absolute nothingness. The driver of my courtesy shuttle informed me that this was the only Crystal Inn that provided both a complimentary hot breakfast and as well as a light dinner because of their extreme distance from anything resembling food. If we lose contact from the rest of the world, I will most certainly die. After, of course, the breakfast and light dinner rations deplete and the convenience store is raided.
I suppose I shouldn't complain though. I am watching a news special on Tanya Harding and what she has been up to since ruining someone's Olympic career. She pulls a giant trout out of a lake yelling "Holy shit! Holy shit! Holy shit!" Oh, Tanya. You are just as high class as ever and I am so happy that I am stuck in Salt Lake City with no where to go and crappy news stations with twelve year old irrelevant news.

This is apparently an image of the whirling jacuzzi tub in the super suite, which was, unfortunately not in the budget this trip.

Lazy Saturday

2009-02-28T17:58:00.000-08:00

Picture post...I blame this on having seen "He's Just Not That Into You" a mere few hours ago. My brain hurts and it is robbed of intelligent thought.

Celebreality Bites: Volume 1

2009-02-26T14:08:00.000-08:00

Despite having grown up in the backyard of Los Angeles County I had absolutely nothing to do with the city until I was about nineteen. This is of course with the exception of one trip to the Palm Restaurant with my boyfriend plus his dad and dad's flight attendant lady friend. Then there was the class trip to the Museum of Tolerance; rather ironic having been scheduled by my Catholic school who's "Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin" anti-gay propaganda is seared into my memory. Oh, and there were a handful of La Brea Tar Pit family days. As a side note, going there as an adult was a far less enjoyable experience having since acquired a keen sense of smell and a heightened level of OCD. The "Imagine Pulling Yourself Out of a Vat of Tar!" segment turned into "Imagine Yourself Catching Malaria from Kiddie Boogers!"
I was a Los Angeles virgin. And like most late bloomers who went away to college determined and pure, I popped my cherry with the boy bang equivalent of the naughty dude who barely showered, probably did drugs, and was rarely seen in class. I can't say that at nineteen I had 100% quality guaranteed, foolproof taste in people. The crowd of people I fell in with will remain nameless but their ilk were the types to own shi-shi restaurants, private planes, and were listed as named contributors to political campaigns (most often Democratic...this is Hollywood). New money, old money, inherited money, money, money, money.
One night one of these money boys had a party. The host was an emaciated little lizard who, ironically, often sported a black snakeskin leather jacket. The driveway up to the house was lined with vintage cars and Aston Martins. Two gigantic doors with round center knobs opened up to a literal homage to the 1960s shag pad. Silver leafed wallpapered bathrooms, white shag carpet rugs, pod-like patio furniture staring out over Los Angeles. Daddy was in the fruit business, and not in the mafia sense but in the "Look at Me Next to the President" picture in a frame sense...which were littered casually around the house.
I spot Stephen Dorff, or rather, he spots me. He's shorter than I expected, not as good looking in person, but when he slurs a suggestion that we go sit on a pod in the backyard I think, "What the hell...I liked Blade." What transpired lasted only a few minutes and included some mild flattery followed by a swift recommendation that we "go make out over there." He points at the dark side of the house. Now while talking on an isolated pod with a troll is perfectly acceptable, looking down to make out with one is an entirely different animal.
"No."
"Why?"
"I don't kiss strangers."
"Well, fuck you then."
Mr. Dorff gets up to leave and proceeds to abandon me in the middle of the backyard with panoramic views of Los Angeles where I am sure that somewhere down there, at some party, some asshole just did the same thing to someone else.

Bite me.

Cameo Writer: Oscar Fashion

2009-02-24T11:13:00.000-08:00

This was just too good, people. Enjoy the linguistic styling of my dear friend, Cesar Trujillo. Here is...THE STILETTO BI-ANNUAL

Hello Dear Reader,

I know you have been neglected by my absence. I can explain. I have been recovering from a full body lift, a Brazilian butt plump (You know I have a big back yard with nothing in it), and some extractions and additions we need not discuss. There may be some misspellings as I cannot see the screen clearly because of my leaking tear ducts. I was just sitting here minding everyone’s business and watching the Oscars whilst barely wearing a tulle jumpsuit with a sprinkling of Swarovski somethings in strategic locations....

Here are just a couple of observations from my chaise.

A lot of bizo's missed the recession memo. There were many a statement necklace around. I am starting a petition encouraging Carolina Herrera to stop making clothes. She just threw Amy Adams in a tomato soup bath and drew a grid on her tits.
Kate Winslet was beautiful. I was loving the bee catcher netting on her gown. Natalie Portman got her Rodarte at Cache in the Glendale Galleria during their annual Persian clearance sale. SJP looked great. She was looking very haggard/equine recently. I didn’t feel the need to give her a feed bag. It was so lovely for Nikki Kidman to take time out of her busy schedule of rolling around with the chickens to come the show. I just wished she would have changed before she left the house.
I love that Miley is recycling. She managed to save all of the tripe from her last barbecue to make her own dress. My heart goes out to Beouwulf. She had to wear that dress from The House of D-rrrhea-n. I know what it is like to have an overbearing transsexual momma running yo shiz. Poor Jesse Biel. It appears that her left breast caught elephantitis. Miuccia did an amazing job of making her look very Michelinesque.

I think it is about time I tape my eyes shut (very necessary after an extreme eye job) and go to bed.

I hope to write to you before my next procedure.

-- Penelope Anne Chinchilla Capodemonte Salome Lavetra Cinay Smith

PS - I saw John Legend buying a dress for some Hoe at Prada on Saturday. Confucius says what? He was with a completely different hoe at the Oscars. Everyone needs an SBSD (Single Black Sugar Daddy), but you hope yours doesn't mess around on you.

Oh, I Wish I were an Oscar Mayer Winner

2009-02-23T19:30:00.000-08:00

To a very small, very select group, the Academy Awards represent years of toil, bullshit, lunch meetings, getting funding, losing funding, hard work and the climax of a very big and heady dream. To the rest of this city, it is an opportunity to party on someone else's dime, not unlike celebrating Christmas even if you're Jewish and you're just "into the vibe."
As I stand in line waiting to check in for the Bolthouse/Whitesell Oscar fete I am saddened that I am not allowed to bring my camera in to document the event. The slew of badly pressed, cheap gowns...the overtly sexy cleavage...the bare legs with small bruises. This is where merit and might meet gold-digging irrelevance. The people that actually deserve to celebrate the Oscars are not in line with us, of course. They take the narrow road up Mount Olympus in their own cars and limos. They shuttle the rest of us like they do the party decorations and catering brought in hours earlier. I see Bill Mayer in the parking lot, which I suspect is a fluke as he disappears moments later into a car.
I am not unlike the other people waiting in queue. I have nothing to do with the entertainment industry as of yet. Not in any grand capacity, really. But these things can be fun, and I'm not one to turn down a people watching extravaganza. I never do feel completely comfortable at these things though. I feel like I should wait for things like this until they mean something more than free drinks and a 2 AM breakfast bar (waffles, fresh fruit, turkey bacon, bacon bacon, chorizo frittata, sun dried tomato and feta cheese frittata, the works). I am a shameful mooch.

Recipe for a AA Cocktail:
4 scantily clad ladies
4 opaque black tights
1 Monster Energy Drink
1 forty-five minute valet disaster
1 Diet Coke with Lemon
1 pair of very high Jimmy Choo eel-skin booties
1 pair of sensible black flats (kept in my purse for emergency situations)
1 enormous and tasteless marble mansion
600 party goers
3 different types of hors d'oeuvres
1 DJ living in the past a la 2006
180 degree view of the Los Angeles skyline
Celebrities

We call it a night around 3 in the morning, after realizing that nothing really crazy is going to happen and struggling to remember if it ever does. My friends are buzzed and silly with alcohol. The night is a success. I take off in my car, back to my little duplex and my sleeping boyfriend, wondering how I just ended up under a giant plastic party tent with Javier Bardem and Amy Adams.

h'wood

2009-02-22T15:46:00.000-08:00

Sharing Crotch Space with Beyonce Knowles

2009-02-20T10:06:00.000-08:00

There was a time in my life when I could be quite starstruck. Backstage at an Eminem show - a Y2K misstep - I managed to get a picture of my friend and I sandwiching Dr. Dre between our heinous tank tops from Forever 21 and two overly friendly smiles. He made some joke about a menage a trois. We were sixteen but neither party cared.
I kept that photo in a cheap faux cherry wood frame next to my bed until I moved away to college. I can't say why - except for the fact that it in some way validated my existence. It also served the additional role of conversation starter at my sleepover parties. Girls are easily excited and equal opportunists, squealing over sixteen year old boys with sparse facial hair as well as thirty-something rap producers with criminal records. It was a simpler time.
Years later I am jaded from this jet setting, glamorous, Los Angeles life. I see Lindsey Lohan and Sam Ronson storm out of a hotel lobby. I am unimpressed. Justin Timberlake walks past my lunch table. I keep my food down. Pete Yorn whispers sweet nothings in my ear about how I am a nerd "in a good way." I do not swoon. I am the pillar of who the fuck cares.
Just the other day I was doing a photo shoot in the very same patchwork elastic lace leggings Beyonce wore in her latest music video. The very same! My vagina and her vagina were existing in the same space for a moment - different moments - in time and space. But did I turn pink with glee, excitement blushing my face? Did my vagina know the importance of this monumental event? Would this be my closest brush with stardom yet? Alas, non. All I could think about was her giant booty stretching out these pants as they went sliding down my backside. My acquisition of acute narcissism and heaping ego has done wonders for me and my vagina's dignity.

Whitney Brown Does Asia Town

2009-02-18T09:22:00.000-08:00

It's Whitney's 25th birthday. The plan is and goes as follows: meet the ladies at Bario Chino, eat copious amounts of guacamole and cheese (independently), get drunk, squeal obnoxiously, be forgiveness by restaurant patrons once a candlelit cake is delivered to our table, eat cake out of hands because we are not given plates, pay the check, delicately stumble onto street.
Twenty minutes later we are in a room drowning in red vinyl and multi-colored Christmas tree lights. Karaoke. It's like the Cha Cha Lounge and the Chinese New Year had a baby and the baby's name was "Fuck Yes." We take residence in the first jumbo booth off the entrance. Whitney distributes her Chinese takeout boxes filled with candy hearts, AstroGlide, chocolate flavored condoms, and stickers. The gesture is simultaneously reminiscent of childhood Easter celebrations and my seventh grade human sexuality class.
The night tallies away. Songs are sung. Whitney gets more beveraged per the celebration requisites. Friends start to leave due to impending next-day responsibilities and alarm clock settings. By midnight, each song equals one more empty booth. By one o'clock, only the die hards and our party remain.
The three people in the booth adjacent to ours are nonplussed by Whitney & Co's rendition of various unremembered tunes. A small blonde gentleman's boos come in with greater frequency and volume and when the time comes for his duet, he rips the mic out of Morgan's hand midway through "Happy Birthday to yo..."
Blondie and his chubby accomplice begin butchering "There is Always Something There to Remind Me." Our crew boos. "Fuck you assholes," yells Blondie. Blondie's accomplice remains awkwardly silent. Our crew boos some more. Blondie proceeds to mimic jerking himself off, replacing the microphone with his...well, I'll let your imaginations run wild.
The owners put the cabash on the brouhaha citing "disorderly conduct" - one of the rules taped to the projection TV circa 1991. Blondie sits back down in his booth with two lady friend and after a few malicious yet factual comments regarding their small stature from our camp, they finish their beers and leave. Whitney bribes the bartender with $5 for three more songs. The violence has ended but I am now subjected to "Sexual Healing" by a man who admits his throat is dry and mutters something about echinacea or emphysema into the microphone.

John O'Hara

2009-02-13T15:26:00.000-08:00

Middle school was pretty traumatizing. I had big cheeks, a Super Cuts haircut a la Tom Sawyer, and wore a buffalo nickle necklace I got on a family camping trip to Yellowstone National Park. None of this necessarily made me popular. And despite (or perhaps with concurrance) the logic and irregular mathematics of adolescence, I was determined to hang out with the cool crowd. They were mean, obnoxious, entitled. I was desperate to be like them. Of course, in hindsight, I should have run for the hills. Had i done so, I would be writing this blog in Mandarin or Portugese or one of the other five languages I had picked up in the excruciating time of my young lonliness. Instead I had my mom buy me a Nash Skateboard for Christmas and a plastic guitar from JC Penneys so I could attempt to woo people like John O'Hara. I would talk to him on the phone for hours in my bathroom about to Voo Doo Glow Skulls, pretending I knew who the fuck they were. My version of good music in 7th grade was Third Eye Blind and Everclear.
We never actually dated, but I thought we were en route to something magical. I thought after 762 phone hours he would ask me to the movies or kiss me in the girl's lockerroom like Chad and Samantha did when they were dating. But I lost the battle. In between classes one day during the social anxiety frenzy that occurs between history and science class, I found out he had started dating Melissa Mandel. Blonde, short, big boobed, loud mouthed Melissa Mandel. I was temporarily crushed, as I remained for the most of that time in my life...a span that lasted from approximately 1997 to 1999. And I never did learn how to skateboard.

Excuses, Excuses

2009-02-11T06:32:00.000-08:00

So, I know I'm supposed to be updating these now daily per my previous agreement...but I'm in New York.

Bryce Romero

2009-02-09T10:44:00.000-08:00

He was there on my first day of kindergarten. Dirty blonde hair and evenly bronzed arms. He wore round glasses. I was in love. We took naps on woven rugs in our classroom full of two foot tall desks. Our cubbie holes were near each other. It was there that I hung my coat and stored my woven rug for nap time. Mornings started with the Pledge of Alegiance and was followed by a prayer to the Lutheran flag flying next to it. We would stand in the square grass courtyard on cold California mornings and stare up at the two flag posts flying two flags. With the exception of the time that the redheaded boy in the desk next to me stole my sticker book, these were peaceful times.
During recess Bryce and I would escape hundreds of meters away from the kickball games and tether ball courts. We sat against the white painted cinderblock gates, closing us off to the outside world which we never had any interest in venturing into anyway. The wall was cool on our backs and the black asphault parking lot left marks on my shorts. He was my first boyfriend.
My 7th birthday party was an at home Sock Hop, complete with spoons for michrophones, side pony tails and pink lipstick. My parents didn't have the money to buy me a bright colored poodle skirt made out of felt so I ended up reusing the skirt I wore to a square dance I went to with my dad. It was faded pink with delicate pink and green flowers. It looked like a voluminous bed sheet. Bryce came; the only boy. He wore jeans cuffed at the ankles and a white shirt rolled at his underdeveloped biceps. On his left arm one of his parents had drawn a heart with "Jenny" written inside and on the other was "Mom" drawn on a 45 degree angle. We danced in my family room until I started crying for some reason that I can't drag out of my memory. It was a successful party.
After second grade Bryce moved to Scottsdale, Arizona so that his sister could pursue an Olympic dream in gymnastics. We would have had to of parted ways anyway. My mom moved me over to public school because Shepherd of the Valley was "too gossipy" and "ammoral." I'm fairly sure most of the mothers were banging or wanted to bang Mr. Hartmire who taught 6th grade.

The Public School Cafeteria Gourmand

2009-02-08T22:02:00.000-08:00

Eating at school was rare. I mean, I ate, but I ate lunches that my mom packed for me. These lunches were packed for some years in various tin lunch pails (My Little Pony being a personal favorite) and when I got "too cool" for it, paper bags. I'm pretty sure I was still lame enough to be using the MLP one at this point. The lunchtime staples were fairly predictable and never failed to please. I'd have a ham sandwich on Orowheat whole wheat bread cut on the diagonal, a Capri Sun or Welch's Grape Juice (I preferred white for it's unique and underrated complex flavor, however the standard purple variety would suffice) and one sweet treat...usually blue flavored Gushers or a strawberry Foot Long Fruit Roll Up, which, at the time, seemed like an extraordinary length for a snack but now rather tidy and modest.
I had a Hello Kitty wallet. It was pink with pink snaps closing the change pouches - one diligently labeled "cookies" and the other, "phone." I was quite organized as a child and I am pretty sure I adhered to my strict monetary guidelines.
My elementary school cafeteria provided a different menu from the one at my old private school. There we dignified the dining experience with an altogether foreign title. We had "Hot Lunch" at Shepherd of the Valley Lutheran School. God was saving us from something, something wicked. My public school cooked up sloppy joes, strange odors, and the most delicious chocolate chip cookies served wrapped in a greasy square of waxed paper. They were never cooked all the way through. In fact, these cookies were frighteningly undercooked and likely a red flag salmonella hazard. They were so tasty they merited that reserved pouch in my wallet filled with my parent's money.
Their pizza was another story. I generally stayed away from the cafeteria which the exception of my aforementioned dirty little cookie secret. I was always under the impression that cafeteria food was for impoverished youths with negligent parents. It is quite possible this idea was on loan from my mother. The vegetables were never the right shade of green, the milk cartons never gave me the impression they were being stored at the right temperature, the meat never smelled like meat.
But one day, for whatever reason, I was drawn to the pizza covered in dried out government cheese that sat on a sickly white crust like chapped lips. It was foul, terribly foul stuff. Whatever they half-cooked these pizzas on, it had a perforated bottom to it and the underbelly of each slice displayed the pimpled evidence - Braille for your tongue, silently screaming "Don't fucking do it!" But I was young and I didn't hear the call.
Later that day I was sitting across from my mom and brother at my favorite dining establishment, Chili's, when my stomach clenched and twisted in such a violent manner that I couldn't even begin to eat my Kiddie Grilled Cheese. The rest of the evening went as follows: Mom takes me home, I get in parents' bed, I writhe around in pain, I begin to perspire, I writhe around in pain some more, little invisible daggers poke at my innards, my parents insist they take me to the hospital, I refuse, I writhe, parents insist, writhe, daggers, refuse, daggers, daggers, daggers. I give in.
Dad drives me to the West Hills Hospital in our tan Toyota Land Cruiser. He hoists me up, my head bobbing up and down watching our journey from the parking lot to the Emergency Room lobby. The sliding doors open. The sliding doors close. Fluorescent light assaults my eyeballs. And finally, all of a sudden, before we even make it to the receptionist desk...I throw up all over the back of my dad's gray wool coat. I am flooded with shame, relief, and the vow never to eat at school again.

An Unapologetic Apology

2009-02-06T22:16:00.000-08:00

I can't help but notice that many of my posts revolve around modeling. Many of my thoughts, gripes, obsessions, ticks, bullshit concerns, mental breakdowns, soul crushing compromises, so on and so forth...surround this industry and making money in it. And so...I apologize if any of you find this grossly offensive or boring because, fuck, it's probably both. However, if you delight in grossly offensive or boring I am quite pleased. Because until one of you assholes gets me another occupation you're just going to have to deal with these.

My New Guilty Pleasure: The Economic Recession

2009-01-17T14:20:00.001-08:00

Now, millions of Americans losing their jobs is no laughing matter but I'm deciding to look on the sunny side of this egg. I suppose that I am able to maintain this lighter attitude because I am relatively employed and I have nice legs. I do feel that this is a great time to assess the nature of well, our nature, and adjust accordingly.

My Top Eight Reasons this Recession Kicks Ass
1. Decreased production and consumption of Hannah Montana dolls, tee shirts, pencil sharpeners and backpacks. As much as I enjoy a good pop idol, the amount of crap that is produced in the name "entertainers" for little kids is frightening. I long for the bygone days of inherited wooden toys and hair dolls. I wonder what the Amish are playing with these days...

2. Increased awareness and (hopefully) usage of locally grown produce and other foodstuff. Whole Foods did a lot making the organic movement commercially and profitably viable, but my fruit doesn't need to travel 300 miles by air conditioned truck for me to chomp it down in a minute. A banana told me so.

3. Dinners at home. Thank god I moved into a house with a good kitchen before the stock market tanked. My previous culinary abilities were self-limited to spreading hummus on pre-cooked chicken. With my new found 15 by 15 foot linoleum laden kitchen I am a roasting, baking, domesticated and recession proof machine.

4. Decreased use of fuel and increased use of public transportation. Okay, so I'm not using the bus but I hear that some people are. I can't really joke about my negligence so I'll end this one here.

5. Vacancies on Melrose Avenue. There are a proliferation of "For Lease" signs glued in the windows of commercial properties throughout Los Angeles, but the ones I cannot lament about are the ones nearest my home. Most of which were previously occupied by Ed Hardy knock off outfits, stripper dresses, and other items of exceptional bad taste. I imagine a town in China is suffering without having such things to bedazzle.

6. My most creative Christmas. I'm not going to divulge where I got about half of my presents but I will tell you that I spent a total $8 on 6 people in a specific case. All of the items were "green" in terms of reuse.

7. Learning how to pirate entertainment, no patch required.

8. My hopes for fat American children. The next time you're at Disneyland, take a seat and people watch for a moment. It is likely the number of people, children included, that could squeeze into a size ten can be counted on the hand you're not holding your 40 ounce soda in. Kid's aren't exercising. And no, wii bowling does not count. I pray that parents with tightening purse strings kick their chubby little children back into the baseball fields or into a library.

New Year, Same Ridiculous Shit

2009-01-14T17:02:00.000-08:00

For the last two hours, my life has been dedicated to the sole purpose of being a face in some juice commercial. Per the usual, I would like to think that these things extend beyond the superficial; that somehow, someway, someone sees something special in my heart and that is why I book jobs. I try to make myself an endless beam of positive light and magnetic smiles. I stare around the room and wonder if the thirty other girls at this callback are thinking the same thing. Who then wins the positive energy contest? Could the combined efforts of the all of this positive energy then become negative? My mind wanders into an oblivion of useless tangents about religion and everyone and their prayers to different, mutually exclusive gods/ dieties/ relics.
Back to my pink ballroom full of hopefuls. I'm wearing the same black jumper I wore in the original casting in which I awkwardly laughed and hugged and played around with "my new best friend" who was 9 inches shorter than me and with big hair that kept getting in the way of the lower portion of my face. I left feeling violated. Presently, I am trying to squelch the feeling of being outwardly irritated that the director of this commercial is over an hour late. I watch the light change on the carpet covered in gargantuan flowers. The woman in charge frantically runs about making sure there are enough chairs per SAG regulations. "I need to keep the fire lanes clear," she keeps muttering. As a half hour turns into an hour turns into an hour and a quarter, the seats fill up and the adults are suggested to give their seats up for children and stage mommies.
Finally some asshole in a puffy Northface jacket rushes into the room and through the double doors. The director. Soon after, a hotel employee follows the trail with a menu in hand. He apparently has time to eat. They bring in the first ten girls. I am in the second group. The first ten come out; five are kept aside, five are dismissed. My group goes in. We stand holding numbers in front of a panel of people who aren't speaking, moving, or in any way creating an environment in which you feel comfortable. The director takes his head out of his bowl of noodles to bark, "Could you all smile at the camera?" in a way that makes me think that we should have been instructed to do so before lining up before the firing squad.
"Hi, I'm Jessica blah blah. Number 11."
"Brianna blah. Number 12."
"Jenny Bahn. Number 13."
The listing continues until the director's face goes back into his bowl of noodles, apparently indicating that we are not special, interesting, or adequate in any way. We are ushered out and back into the pink ballroom full of people who have not been psychologically manhandled yet. I get a good laugh out of it until I realize that I have misplaced my sunglasses during all of this and that some clepto bitch has stolen them. All in all this day has cost me time, dignity, and $300. But at least I saw Cher walking on my way back home.

Jenny Does the Judicial System

2008-12-04T14:47:00.000-08:00

Passive girl that I am, I often find myself at the whim of others. Take for instance my agency. I become quite docile in their presence, my phone voice rises, and sometimes I bake cookies. If I am nice, I work. If I am mean, I work, too. This is only because I am hired on the basis of my buns and legs, not my attitude generally speaking. But we are told not to bite the hand that feeds, and the hand that feeds me first feeds my agency which makes the agency look like the hand when in reality it is just the little man between the hand and me eating (the feed).
A few months ago, a heated conversation with another model about "taking some bastard client to small claims court" inspired me to do a fiscal follow-up of my own. The job in question was for a small German boutique on Rodeo Dr. I had worked for them before; the first time being Black Friday of 2006. This was one of those real glamorous jobs I dreamed about when I thought I was going to be a super model: I stood in a store window for twelve hours while Japanese tourists took pictures with me "the living mannequin." Two fellows from high school managed to recognize me under a thick layer of drag queen makeup and ratty hair that the client had originally intended to interweave with Christmas lights. I protested, stating that being plugged into an electrical outlet didn't seem like a terribly safe idea. The then emensley popular Pussy Cat Doll's album played the entirety of my stay, watching real-time commerce and tourism displayed in front of me. Whenever I hear "Loosen Up My Buttons Babe" I remember the superficial burn I got on the left side of my pasty, SPF 55 managed skin from the movie-size wattage bulbs lighting me.
While I was paid for this first experience as well as the next day that they decided to bring me back (apparently my mannequin services were as popular as a Disneyland ride), I was not compensated for the third time I worked for them a few months later. Two years of complaining to my agency later, I was told I was "shit out of luck." Thus taking the matter into my own large hands.
I arrive at the Beverly Hills Court for my December 4th, 1:30 PM appointed time. Apparently I am not the only one, because when I exit the elevator there is a mass of chatting and not chatting people surrounding the four different court rooms like flies on shit. I am fly. I see my defendant. Shit. Since I got out of my car and put five quarters in the meter I have been sweating more than I care to. I begin to sweat more. I think that I am going to ruin my teal and white striped silk shirt that looks like it could be expensive but I bought it at The Wasteland for $25. When I see the German man who is screwing me out of my money all I can think about is the night after work when he invited me to dinner with his wife, baby, and Jose Eber. I don't feel empowered. I feel like an asshole. He looks up and sees me coming. Oh, dear God save me. The conversation that begins with an awkward wave of recognition is a combination of his German accent telling me about getting woken up by the sheriff at 6 am to serve him papers and me stumbling over "I'm so sorry for doing this" type nonsense.
To make a long story just nearly as long as it is, my client tells me that he never meant to hurt me but to punish the agency for another job that involved sixty grand and a flaky model who botched the operation. Whoops. While we are having this conversation, a woman in a red hat covered in ink black feathers approaches my German. Apparently they are friends. Phoebe is a D list celebrity who I can't recognize for the life of me but she obviously feels like we've all been friends for years as she unloads what she's been doing the last year. Said everything includes her hair accessory line and her upcoming E! channel show in which she is going to be paid "triple what everyone else is being paid" because she "the biggest celebrity there." She's got crazy eyes and a nose that's surely seen the Knife. She is suing the Ivy for crashing her white C Class Mercedes into a Buick. Her lovely frumpy mother pulls out photographs of the scene: Phoebe in a pink, purple and white dress surrounded by paparazzi running towards her crashed car with an acting class version of despair on her face. Each photograph is watermarked with a bright pink "PHOEBE" over it, obviously from her personal website.
Finally we are called into the courtroom by a bleached blond lady deputy. I sit down next to the German, although my initial instinct is to sit on the other sides. Are we supposed to be so amiable? I am existing in a constant state of confusion. The deputy comes up to me.

Blond Deputy: Miss?
Me: Yes?
Blond Deputy: Are you a witness or do you have a case here?
Me: I'm the plantiff in a suit.
Blond Deputy: There are not shorts allowed in a courtroom and when the judge gets
here she is going to embarrass you.

Oh, dear God. I sweat some more. I run to my car to get black jeans out of my trunk. My inner dialogue continues as such:
"No shorts in the courtroom? But these aren't really shorts. They are tasteful, high waisted and black with a slight sheen to them. I look completely respectable. These people just don't understand fashion."
By the time I return the courtroom the judge is speaking in front of the forty people seated in rows. She is stern. I am terrified. She starts talking about labeling evidence, speeches, etc. I stare at my random email print outs and internet articles. Nothing highlighted, blacked out, starred, labeled, stapled. Next to me is a man with a binder and pages marked with those arrow shaped Post Its. Fuck me. We are all dismissed outside again to exchange evidence, which we have already done. When the German and I get back outside I ask him if we should just settle it without the judge since we have both agreed that I provided a service and should have been compensated. He agrees. I am thankful that he has never been to Small Claims Court before and even more thankful that he is awkward and German. We ask Blond Deputy if we can just settle without seeing the judge, the judge gives me a paper, I sign, it's done.
The German and I share the elevator down to the lobby. He tells me he will call me on Monday. When we get to the sidewalk on Burton, he offers me a cigarette. I decline, shake his hand, and scamper back into the real world where I can be flighty, ridiculous, and wear shorts.

This goes out to Phoebe.

Dr. Pepper, French Rolls, Apple Sauce and Cheerios

2008-12-03T13:42:00.000-08:00

Going over to my dad's meant a single-wide trailer, creamed corn, court-appointed every-other-weekend weekend. The healthy menu we adhered to growing up was apparently of my mother's doing. Dad's kitchen was a no holds barred curiosity buffet. And damn it was tasty.
Concocted one day in which there was no milk in the fridge within my two day post expiration maximum, I threw apple sauce into a bowl and generously topped it with stale Cheerios. Crunchy, mildly sweet, and satisfying until I could go back to Mom's - I had in my hands the original Poor Man's Vegan Parfait.
Less detail oriented but no less delicious was a meal that was more of a process and less of a recipe. This creation entailed dipping torn off chunks of a french bread tri-tip roll into a beer mug filled with Dr. Pepper. Dad always had these mugs ready to go in the freezer for his Budweisers. When the glass warmed enough, the soda-flavored frost would glacially move into the rest of the mug which at that point contained bits of white bread and smaller ice cubes.

Poolside Dining

2008-12-03T13:34:00.000-08:00

Tom had a pool on the side of his house which seems weird to say but because it was more of a "gated estate" it didn't much matter where the pool went. Front, back, whatever. The closest I had ever been to regular private pool access was the jacuzzi off of my parents old bedroom. It broke one day and became a watering hole for mosquitoes until we filled it with cement five years later.
In the summer I would make tuna drowning in lemon juice and sit by the pool working on the best tan I'll ever allow myself to have. In hindsight it feels like I did this often over a long period of time, but in reality it was probably a summer or two at most.
When Tom divorced my mom we moved into a rental with a pool that took over the the entirety of the pool-sized backyard. We never sat next to it or went in it. No matter how warm it was outside, it always seemed cold back there. My mom spent a lot of time in her room with the shades drawn. I spent a lot of time practicing my rave dancing in my bedroom mirror.

Quarters and the Taxco Gas Station

2008-11-24T15:07:00.000-08:00

With my mom's new found freedom from the chains of wedlock with my father, she rejoined the workforce she had abandoned when my brother got Leukemia. Since it was decided that my 6th-grade-old self was capable of keeping my brother and I alive for the three hours between school ending and mom getting home, we were free as well.
There were, of course, rules put in place as clouds into ether.
1. No answering the door for strangers.
2. No fighting with your brother.
3. No fighting with your sister.
4. Under no circumstance are you allowed to cross Woodlake.
We did our best to adhere to household policy, but to be honest we get a pretty abysmal record.
Now Woodlake was a two lane road running down the center of my neighborhood, my world. It was the maternal paranoia equivalent of an eight-lane highway in Germany. To be fair to my mother and her parenting abilities, the street did connect to the onramp and offramp of the 101 Freeway. Reckless drivers speeding a reckless 20 MPH could have certainly slaughtered us and any one of the numerous petafiles in sleepy white suburbia could have snatched us up and driven us to Santa Barbara where we would adjust to life on a hippie commune growing marijuana and acorn squash.
On the other side of this hell gate was the Taxco gas station. In it held everything my mom would never allow in our pantry: ho-hos, cherry soda, jelly beans, and Bubble Chew. My brother and I determined that the best way to thwart evildoers was to run as quickly as possible, as closely as possible down Leonora Drive where we would cross Woodlake with absurd caution. After all, as any smart kid knew, if we were run over or kidnapped Mom would definitely find out...a prospect that terrified us arguably more than any suspect on America's Most Wanted list.
A successful trip included a Dr. Pepper and Peanut M&Ms for me; a Coke or Cactus Cooler for my brother to be eaten with a plastic-wrapped pair of Ding Dongs with the swirly frosting tie. All of this was paid for by the exact person we were betraying. Anything found near the washing machine, under a bed, or in the blue dish my mom kept jewelry and lint in was fair game. We were never caught. I attribute this to economically whittling the journey down to a 5.5 minute trip along with craftily hiding all wrappers and cans in the bottom of the trash can. A trick I kept in my back pocket for parentless high school parties later on in life.

Road Block

2008-10-13T22:08:00.000-07:00

What Happens in Vegas...Gets in This Blog

2008-10-13T21:53:00.001-07:00

Amber: Want to go see The Thunder from Down Under Tonight?
Me: How much is it?
Danika:35 to 40 bucks or something.
Me: Hmm…

Spending twenty-five percent of my food stipend seemed a bit silly but hey, when in Rome…
I meet Amber and Danika in their room. Danika is tipsy and takes a swig from a nearly empty wine bottle. I think it is a Merlot. Both of them look pretty, wearing the same hair and makeup from the show before. I am wearing a hooded sweatshirt with “Get Fresh” silk screened on the left side and irremovable coffee stains on the right. I bought it from a boy I worked with at Robek’s Juice back in high school. He was a young entrepreneur. I can’t remember his name. He had brown hair and braces.
Amber, Danika and I make our way through the smoke laden depravity of the Hilton casino to meet four other girls. The other part of our party has decided to get a little more dolled up for the occasion. Mini dresses, legs, and dangling earrings.
One mini-stretch limo ride later, our group is loudly traveling through the Excalibur Hotel and Casino. I’m holding up the back, watching the girls in front make their way. One of the girls makes some retort back at a group of boys carrying hurricane cups. “You girls are fat!” one dude yells. For obvious reasons I find this extraordinarily humorous and laugh the remaining forty feet to the ticket counter.
Forty-seven dollars and forty-five cents apiece buys us stage left seats in two black vinyl booths. The view is shit. The gaggle of girls wearing silver palette dresses, birthday tiaras, and various bachelorette paraphernalia is blocking an already weak view of where the action’s inevitably going to take place. There’s an intro song that plays 39 seconds too long, it’s name I have erased from the Readily Useful Memory Bank. The boys come out together, dancing in what should technically be a synchronized, semi-nude, Britney Spears backup dancer dance. Instead, I have paid for three boys dancing in sync, one who obviously thinks he is above The Thunder From Down Under, another who routinely spins in the opposite of his comrades, and two with long hair who have passionately integrated the “Hair Flip” into their routine.
Our first solo routine is Chris “The Wild One” giving us his naked interpretation of Captain Sparrow. His nipple clips glitter like pirates’ booty under the stage lighting, gels switching from red to blue to red to yellow to blue. A fog machine goes off. Girls squeal. Boredom overtakes the room. An ass swerve revives hollering.
The rest of the show continues with the aforementioned pattern for another hour and fifteen minutes. Each “dancer” gets his own time to turn our childhood heroes into sexual desirables. A racecar driver, a greasy mechanic, a fireman, a vaguely romantic fellow in silk satin pajamas that for some reason doesn’t really resonate with the ladies. I feel exploited. The finale brings the team back together, all wearing denim chaps and white hats. I can’t see Amber, but I hear her screaming all of the lyrics from “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy” at the top of her lungs. This could be heaven, but I doubt it.

Las Vegas Expense Report

2008-10-11T22:57:00.000-07:00

It’s that time again: convention work modeling. Each time I sign up for a job like this, I can’t help but be forced to compare it to It’s a Small World. Except the people aren’t Disneyfied multi-ethnic plastic midgets, they’re dumb skinny bitches. Cuckoo clock modeling, every hour on the hour.

Las Vegas Expense Report

$0.00
My boyfriend drives me to the airport. The trip obviously costs him something (i.e. time and gas money) but this is my expense report. Matter struck irrelevant.

$17.00
I split the cab with three other girls. I’m usually the one to collect funds because I’m “good with numbers.” Seventeen plus three for tip to make it easy equals twenty divided by four…Gee whiz…

$2.50
Aaron and I make the trek past and through the Barry Manilow store, resisting the urge to purchase Manilow Merlot and StrawBarry lip balm. We arrive at the Las Vegas Hilton General Store. I grab a 1.2 liter bottle of Smart Water. I think about getting snacks but resist. The woman rings it up. “Six dollars.” Uh, huh. No, I don’t think so. I offer to take it back to the refrigerated isle. She tells me she’ll do it. I sense that this is less an altruistic, occupational duty and more that she believes I am going to steal it out of spite. On our way back up to the hotel room with Floor 16 views of this neon wasteland, I buy a bottle of Desani from the vending machine. Ounce per ounce, this was a rather dim decision. And it’s tap water. Fuck off, Coca Cola.

$4.04
Whenever I travel I realize that the two latte a day habit I have developed in the privacy of my own home translates to a very pricey business expense while traveling for work.

$11.80
Twelve garbanzo beans. Four slices of processed chicken. Gorgonzola cheese that I asked for on the side after substituting avocado was deemed impossible. Iceberg lettuce with carrot strings. Definitely not homemade Italian dressing.

$4.50
I break down and buy a bigger bottle of water from the Coffee Bean. The cashier tells me it’s one of the better deals in town. Ultimately, I would have been better served buying that first Smart Water. The prospect will haunt me the rest of my stay in Las Vegas.

$36.00
When I find out the hotel gym costs $20 a day, my frugality kicks and screams and buries my credit card in a random pair of shorts. Four hours into some seriously recycled convention air and toxic fluorescent lighting, we decide a pricey run on the treadmill and a moment in the steam room might be just the ticket. And if you buy two days instead of one you save $2 a day! Wow. I do fill up my $4.50 water bottle four times total, an $18 value. I steal five razors with moisture strips, two red apples and three bananas. Hilton has practically paid me to exercise and sweat. Boo ya.

$13.00
Margarita Grill. Aaron and I will split the same dish three nights in a row: two chicken soft tacos with a side of rice and beans (holding the cheese on nights two and three) plus the Jumbo Guacamole split four ways. By the third night we’re feeling adventurous and get two chicken tostadas and one chicken taco that we forget to specify soft or crispy. We end up with crispy.

$47.45
My biggest expense but not necessarily my wisest. The Thunder from Down Under, Australia’s Hottest Export. I had never been to a male revue before. The most I had ever heard about it was back in middle school. It was rumored that Alex Mendoza’s* father was a stripper at Chip ‘N Dales. I will dive into greater depth on this subject later.

$3.22
Our flight gets delayed an hour and fifteen minutes due to some reason never relayed to we passengers. I buy the Cranberry Power Mix from the Las Vegas Fruit and Nut Stand. I do not tell the cashier that there is a fly in the Dried Mango bin.

$10.00
My contribution for gas and parking. I cram this into the cigarette tray of Danika’s Audi despite her refusal. Take me home. Please.

*Names have been changed to protect the most likely uninnocent

Seattle: Sunset: August: Sixth

2008-08-16T18:29:00.000-07:00

The light here is brighter. The colors more pungent and the white as blue as Kristin Poms' were in high school, something I always thought to be the result of a slightly freakish accident in the pioneering of Brite Smile technology. I have escaped the kitchen cum makeup room for a cement seat amongst some plants. Some ways down the street a drum line plays on invisibly. I cannot venture out to further investigate the noise, as I have given myself a thirty-foot leash from the venue doors.
A woman walks past sloppily with a tireless seeingeye dog. I wonder of it's self-awareness in terms of good Samaritanship. I hope she feeds him treats at nighttime; little dog treats shaped like dirty brown cupcakes.
Some man in the drumline yells in Swahili or some African language not offered in my high school ciriculum. The older woman in khakis and a white shirt shimmies about, uncoordinated but well intentioned. "Godeh! Godeh! Godeh! Everybody, move it! Animahl!" I am probably a bit off.
A bug crawls on my right wrist. A streetcar drives by. "18th and Lovejoy." How pleasant a destination, I think. A woman's large bottom walks past, perfectly timed with the bass drum I can only hear.

BOOM
BOOM
BOOM
BOOM

D.C.

2008-07-26T10:07:00.000-07:00

Our taxi driver arrives in front of The Hotel Palomar at fifteen to seven. I sit inside drinking coffee with soy milk and eating the everything bagel I stole from work the day before. Free breakfast. Heather's afraid the cabs are going to be poached by other hotel patrons so we begin to load early, throwing our bags into a 1989 Cadillac station wagon. The cabbie later tells us it is reliable and easy to fix; his third one in his cabbie lifetime. The dense foliage blurring past us, wood sided suburban houses slipping through. In and out, in and out. Jam funk music circa some disco era plays on the stereo. The blue synthetic felt fabric that was once tightly adhered to the ceiling droops overhead. Meg moves it away with her hand a few times. Karen and I share a blue leather bench seat and listen to the cabbie talk about gas prices cutting into revenues. Although he never uses the term "cutting into revenues." He says something closer to "shredding into my money."
Dulles Airport is a mid-century take on "an airport of the future." The main terminal rises out from the surrounding flatness. Inside the ceiling swoops overhead, allowing you to imagine what it would be like to be under the belly of a UFO. We ride from the main terminal to Terminal D in a military-esque transporter as wide as a boat and one story high, riding on wheels the size of a semi-truck or some discarded military vehicle. I'm not usually a sucker for chatzky garbage, but when we pass the general store with 2008 election paraphernalia I can't help but want to buy the GOP Cookies and Democrat Snacks. I buy Danika a visually uninspiring "Barack Obama for President" pin, a Republican and a Democrat "Got President?" mug both decorated with a red, white, and blue version of their party mascot. I now feel vastly more connected to the democratic process of my country.

Models Digest

2008-07-24T20:43:00.000-07:00

Yelling over the inane prattle at Hyde one night, I told my MIT graduate friend that my brain was atrophying like the legs of a paraplegic. My prescription came in the form of a subscription to The Economist, a worldly and well written weekly periodical discussing business, politics, the road to global explosion, etc. Having grown up on a diet of The Wall Street Journal and the Financial TImes, it fit well within the boundaries of my regular reading habits. I attribute my rebound into the intellectually capable crowd to a combination of my friend's generosity and my giving up on a six month Vegan bender in which my brain received little protein.
It would seem that the number of people in my field rarely share my enthusiasm. The reading regimen of my peers consists of US Weekly, Star, In Touch, Cosmopolitan (most often read by the Mormon's), and Elle. Generally Vanity Fair does little to offend my senses and when it is present I consider it a step up from the usual fodder. Call me completely self-involved but I care far more about my own life than that of some MTV reality star. I don't give a shit that Shiloh met the twins. The size of Mischa Barton's thighs should really be no concern of mine and I frankly don't understand why it rivets anyone else. Admittedly there have been a few times that flipping through one of these trash mags provided me with a few little gems: a picture of an Ed Hardy clad male model I work with following behind Britney Spears titled "Is Dante the new K-Fed?", a photograph of another male model with Paula Abdul (easily twenty years his senior), and I struggle to come up with a memorable third.

Seat 7F Virgin America STAC to LAX

2008-07-24T19:56:00.000-07:00

The red paint encasing the engine to my right glides past the blue. Seattle beneath me. I watch as it dips further to the side, now contrasting against water and green. A beautiful city although a bit sad. After pulling out my camera to document the view I feel sick; the trail mix swishing around with the latte I had earlier from the chocolate shop. These trips never fail to sap my energy and ravage my otherwise decent complexion. Even though the hotel was user friendly and aside from the first morning (a 4 am wake up for a 6 am flight), the schedule wasn't necessarily grueling. Not grueling like working in a Chinese computer recycling camp or a diamond mine in Ghana, and probably not as grueling as my high school tenure at Robek's Juice. I suppose I'm tired from the three days of community complaining about this job and all it entails. "This shit doesn't pay enough" followed by "fucking __________ ." The food sucks, the money's shit, the traveling blows, the fittings are long, and the rehearsal is tedious. We are a bunch of insolent children in our mid-twenties.
The woman the seat in front of me is watching CNN. Barack Obama greets hundreds of Berliners: shaking hands and smiling. "Obama is widely popular in Europe" the tag line reads. I try to imagine a foreign political figure being greeted in such a way stateside; that we Americans would put aside our self-centeredness long enough to care about the politicians of another country. The Germans look at him with the kind of hope only generated by those of us who will eventually be able to punch is name in a ballot card.
Her son, this woman's son, has Alvin and the Chipmunks on. I never realized how ridiculous the basis of the cartoon's storyline was until seeing Jason Lee pick up a stack of waffles leaking maple syrup from under a rug and glower at three seven-inch tall squirrels. I would watch my own TV but I am stuck in the window seat with an overweight woman plugging up my exit like cork in a bottle of Merlot. The boy's headphones don't work and the mother tells him to be patient, saying she will get the flight attendant for help (which she never does). She continues to watch CNN. I can't help but think that my mother would have switched seats with me so that I could watch the movie.

United Flight 324

2008-06-20T09:20:00.000-07:00

Every now and again, or rather, again and again and again and again I am subjected to the rather tiresome exercise otherwise known as flying. The chore has become increasingly tedious as the mode of transportation has gone from a fairly selective to utterly pedestrian. I am, in short, aboard the equivalent of a public bus 40 thousand miles above the ground. The democracy of aviary travel is ruining my life.

This flight, in particular, has become particularly noteworthy. Maybe it's due to the fact I have woken up at 4 am, 1:30 am, and 3:30 am the past three days. Maybe I'm being oversensitive. But maybe, just maybe, this really is the flight from hell.

What I Am Currently Disliking (Strongly) About This Flight:

1. There are two hours remaining.

2. Over the course of the last three hours I have been forced to listen to the child sitting next to me ask such questions as:

"Mom, why is she sitting here?"

"Are we even moving?"

"Is my water going to be cold?"

And conversations similar to:

"How much longer do we have?"

"An hour and fifty minutes."

"An hour?"

"An hour and fifty minutes."

"An hour?"

"A little less than two hours.

"Less or more?"

"Less."

The highlight being simultaneously entertaining and depressing:

"Are we going down?"

"Yes."

"Is someone going to shoot us?"

"No."

3. I have had only two three ounce servings of water served to me since I boarded. I am far too cheap to shell out $4 for a bottle of Desani from the airport and I forgot my empty 1.5 liter Trader Joe's water bottle to fill up with tap water. The ravages of dehydration are setting in and I am beginning to feel my lips recede past my gums like a Victorian corpse in a wooden box.

4. The Taiwanese man that I switched seats with when asked by his wife, "You switch with my husband, okay?" has left his seat reclined into my lap the entire trip. The person in front of him (aka the person who I should have in front of me per my United Airlines e-ticket) has kindly left his erect. That's the last time I do you a favor, buddy.

5. I am starving. And no, Airlines, I don't want your shitty hot meals. The last time I got a treat like that, a female flight attendant threw a cheese burger wrapped in plastic, burger sweat fogging up the expanding container. What I would like is a granola bar, a bag of nuts, something that I don't have to pay for whilst in the middle of a five hour hunger pang.

6. Rest assured, I am not naive enough to believe such fare will be provided for me. Before boarding I bought my go-to trail mix which is now making me painfully gaseous. I attribute this to the raisins.

7. Our movie options were Horton Hears a Hoo and Gold Rush. Enough said.

8. I am close enough to the restroom to experience what I believe to be people passing gas en route. I suppose the freedom I feel in having one foot of empty space to the right of me is only beneficial when said air is not full of methane gas.

9. The state of the singular bathroom servicing sixty coach passengers was already in poor form one hour into flight. The crevices in the floor corners collected piss like a rain gutter in Lilliput.

10. While attempting to nap, a child stepped on my sandal-clad foot while running down the isle. I am lucky he was young and light, not one of those super-sized children I read about in Time. Children are quite fat these days. Not to continue the barrage on the mother/son team next to me, but I was a bit befuddled when the mother tried to up sell Coke to her child and questioned his only wanting water. He ended up with cranberry juice which I thought to be a sugary compromise.

Bodies of Water

2008-06-02T21:12:00.000-07:00

Another Day in the Valley

2008-06-02T20:12:00.000-07:00

I hate my apartment. I can't live in it, can't exist in it. I can't walk in there and take off my sandals in the hallway anymore. I can't stand to look across the 17 foot gap of air and concrete separating me from the 30 unit stucco piece of shit adjacent to my 30 unit stucco piece of shit. And if I have one more dinner consisting of 1/4 cup of roasted garlic hummus, half an avocado, and some odd ounces of Trader Joe's precooked rotisserie chicken, I will kill. I. Can't. Take. It. Anymore.

So when I have a day off from subjecting myself to castings and auditions, I drive the 25 miles to my mother's house in Woodland Hills. My Audi takes Premium gasoline. So my premium trip to the outskirts of Los Angeles costs me roughly $4.37 each way. Nonetheless, at this point in my apartment-existing life the benefit of a poolside coffee and web surfing bender is priceless.

12:08 pm

I leave a casting for a cheesy LA t-shirt company. Will I get it? Who the hell knows. I get on the 10 West to the 110 North to the 101 West. Traffic. This city is ridiculous. Traffic breaks up after people figure out how to merge. I estimate that the process generally takes 2 miles. It should take a matter of seconds, but the synapses of the people coming from Interstate 5 flicker on and off like the light bulbs in a trailer home. Traffic backs up again around Laurel Canyon. An accident. I drive...and drive...and drive.

1:01 pm

Arrival to Mom's gated house. I'm starving. Her refrigerator is predictable, as is my diet. I help myself to an iced latte with almond milk. Over the course of my stay this afternoon I will have consumed 3 double shot iced lattes. That is a lot. By the end of the day the Costco-sized bucket of Sabra hummus is almost out. I eat hummus daily. Hummus with crackers, hummus with carrots, hummus with pita, hummus on a spoon, hummus on chicken. I am turning into a chickpea.

1:35 pm

I frantically scour the Internet for reasons to live and things to do with my life. Currently I am looking for apartments with my boyfriend which means I have an unhealthy addiction to Craigslist.

3:57 pm

Tyler sends me his friend's user name and password for Westsiderentals. The layout gives me a headache and the apartments similar to the one I am running away from. I anticipate mild usage of the website.

5:02 pm

I realize part of the reason I travel to this godforsaken part of the San Fernando Valley is the cheap dry cleaner I've been using since high school. I take in the sweater my mom stole from her ex-husband (my ex-step dad) and that I have now stolen from her. I thought I would treat the fuzzy wool thing to a chemical bath. My boyfriend is as cheap as I am so I have demanded that he give me his dry cleaning: 1 black Gucci dress shirt, 1 pair black Helmut Lang dress pants, 1 black Helmut Lang knit sweater. When they tell me that they're sorry they've lost the 2 dresses I left with them last time I don't get mad because I can't remember what the hell I left there. My boyfriend will be mad if they lose his. I hope they don't.

5:19 pm

I drive to the cheapest gas station on Fallbrook to fill up. I pull in as a man in a silver Jeep Grand Cherokee tries to attempt the same from the other side. He gets mad. He yells. I tell him I will just back my car up. I do. He kisses my ass. What an idiot.

5:27 pm

My mom left her reading glasses at the vet. I'm picking them up because she works 15 hour days plus commuting time to downtown. She will come home later and have 3 glasses of wine, 2 chocolate chip cookie "dunkers", and frozen yogurt topped with strawberries and mangoes. This is her dinner. This is her life.

6:30 pm

Dinner. Tuna. I open the can and squeeze out the juice. It sprays all over my jumper and gets on my feet. At one point in my life I considered myself to be a gourmet. This is one of my lower moments that presents itself with greater regularity.

6:45 pm

My car's filthy. I wash it.

6:59 pm

Mom comes home. I go buy the aforementioned frozen yogurt.

7:11 pm

I come home to my mom spying on the neighbors through the guest bedroom window. The lights are off so they can't see her. She mumbles something about them removing the stucco under the eaves of their roof and calls them something along the lines of "fucking weirdos." She crawls off the bed and I hand her the white paper bag with her frozen yogurt inside.

7:48 pm

We sit outside and I show my mom all of the apartments I've been looking at on Craigslist. I have my third and final latte. My head hurts.