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Whenever people ask me why I don’t write anymore, I tell them it’s because I don’t have anything to say.  I still sit down and start to try to tap out a story now and then, but it usually falls apart when I stop and ask myself “what is my point?,”, or “who the hell cares about this?” or “is this sharing too much about a person in my life who may read it and be less than thrilled I’m posting about it?” and I abandon it.

But finally, friends, something happened.  A something that made me stop and say to myself, “this may actually get me writing again.” Minimal risk of the person it involves discovering it, but even if he does, my fucks given are lost somewhere in the ether.

And so here it is: my adorable plane love story….. that was not.  AT ALL.

A few weeks ago I ended up going on an impromptu work trip to NYC.  Only 2 nights, and I was scheduled to be out early the following day.  I packed light and my physical appearance upon arriving at LAX for my 10AM flight could best be described as greasy chic.  I sailed through security thanks to the blessing that is TSA pre-check, and took my far too sweet vanilla latte and egg & cheese breakfast wrap to sit at my gate.

As I glanced around, my eye stopped on a guy that was so attractive it made me pick up my phone to text my friend, Kim, about it.  (Hay Kim.)  This is a thing that does not happen often in my world.

He was sitting at a charging station and there was a seat open next to him, so I said “fuck it” and plopped (gracefully) down next to him.  He was sorting through receipts and entering them into some sort of expense system.  I picked up my phone again.

After a few minutes of me sitting there quietly with him not so much as even sneaking a peak back at me, I mentally shrugged and figured that if he was interested, he would have at least LOOKED at me.  Right?  Right.

The plane starts boarding and I stand in the crowd of people waiting anxiously to trample down the runway.  As I take my bulky duffel bag and purple plaid carry-on and try desperately to maneuver down the tightrope width aisle without knocking someone in the face with my laptop, I glance to the back of the plane where my middle seat (ugh) is.

Hot guy is seated in the window seat right next to me.

Wait, this shit doesn’t happen in real life, does it?  Eyeing someone at your gate that you actually single out and then, by some crazy form of kismet, they actually end up seated right next to you? Shut the fuck up right now.

After I throw my carry into the bin and sit down, I grab my phone again.

If there’s one thing I’m not good at, it’s talking out loud.  I also sensed approximately 0% interest from this dude at the gate, so I debated with myself.  Do I even bother?  Or do I sit here for the entire 6 hour flight trying to sleep upright without drooling on his shoulder?

He broke the ice first.  By literally talking about breaking ice.  There was a sudden chopping sound that made a look of confusion visibly apparent on my face.

“They’re chopping up ice back there.”
“Oh.”

I told you, I’m not good at talking out loud.  But I did smile, and the conversation continued.  Before we even took off, I’d admitted my fear of flying, hence the ice-breaking induced jumpyness, and we’d established that he was finishing a work trip and I was starting one.  He had concluded a photography gig in LA and was returning home.  As if to demonstrate, he grabbed his Canon out of his backpack and began snapping shots of the runway out the window.  As we got in line for takeoff, he pointed for me to watch the plane taking off before us sail into the sky.

“You ready for this?” he asked as the plane started gearing up to race down the runway.

I was.  Heh.

Back then I was a hideously shy, quiet girl who took everything personally.  I went to a tiny school in a tiny town with a bunch of bored kids.  Bullying was a common pastime, and I was an easy target.  I was too skinny, my ears stuck out, and I never fought back.  I was berated for my looks, for using words that were too big (I carried around a pocket thesaurus for years — the equivalent to putting a kick me sign on my own back), for finishing my tests too fast, and for getting good grades.  This is not a humblebrag – none of that shit gets you liked in school. I had been praised so much for doing well in school by my family that I’d never risk disappointing them by slacking off, but I wanted desperately to be liked and accepted by my peers.

In high school, a handful of “popular” boys in my class would sit around me to cheat off of me during tests.  I use the word popular in quotes because in a class of 20 something people, everyone is popular to a degree – just not necessarily in the way that they’d want to be.  I was entirely aware of what they were doing, and I didn’t care.  Sometimes I’d even whisper the answers to them when I saw them straining over my shoulder.  They could use me for a good grade, because it meant that they were paying some sort of attention to me that didn’t feel negative.  Turned out my teacher was aware of their little game too, and on one occasion he gave me a different test than everyone else.  They cheated off of me and promptly failed.  This teacher was a joker, and he wasn’t mad – he just wanted to make them look like dicks, and he took great joy in pointing out what he’d done.  He made a big production out of handing them back their tests, all with failing grades, and then having them look incredulously at me, like I had fucked up.  Then I got my test back and it had an A on it.  Then everyone died laughing.  For real, all those guys are dead now. RIP.

The fact that the boys were trying to benefit from the book smarts they always were so quick to make fun of me for having was now publicly acknowledged, but it was done in a way that made everyone laugh.  And for once, I was in on the joke!

Despite that anecdote, I never figured out how to fit in back then.  I always felt like an outcast, and that me being liked was just not a thing that would happen.  I wore my desire for acceptance like a ballgown at a party when everyone else was in ripped FUBU jeans.  After years of trying too hard and getting smacked back into my place, somewhere along the line I stopped.

Going into college, I developed a shell. I retreated into myself in situations where I didn’t know people.  Instead of trying to seek approval, I acted like I didn’t give a shit.  I assumed that if I opened my mouth I’d be made fun of, or something stupid would fly out, so appearing “tough” and not letting people think I cared about their opinion was a safer bet.  I dressed in tight clothes and tried to look attractive but then acted completely disinterested when a guy gave me any sort of attention.  Something that to this day, I still do to guys I don’t already know.  (It’s working out great so far!) Of course, this was all a defense mechanism.  I did give a shit.  In fact, I gave a metric fuckton of shits.  I still wanted to be liked and I was indeed flattered when someone showed interest in me.  But showing people that never got me anywhere, so I wore the fuck out of that shell.

Somehow, eventually I had girl friends who weren’t trying to humiliate me, and for once, guys weren’t so much into teasing me as they were into seeing if they could crack my exterior.  The tough guy thing served a purpose, but I no idea who I was underneath the act, or what to do with all the residual feelings of rejection.  Once I let anyone behind the curtain, I was afraid they’d run.

I moved to Los Angeles and all I knew for a long time was depression.  I was alone to the umpteenth degree, I was in love with a guy who made me feel like a nuisance, I had no real friends and my job was completely wrong for me.  Stand up had always been one of my favorite things, but now I had a lot more time to pay attention to it.  I found it interesting to watch these comedians as they talked about their neuroses and insecurities and painful memories and the general fucked up-ness of family and love and sex and dating and childhood trauma and drugs and everything.  They were throwing it all out there, and people were enjoying the stories.

It’s a way of reaching out and exposing the sads and the ughs and the help mes while still hiding behind a lol jk security blanket.  It’s a way of connecting with people and showing them who you really are, feeling acceptance, while still keeping your defenses intact.  (“Jesus Christ, Amanda, we get it.” – you )

This wasn’t a conscious notion to me at the time, but my personality and how I talked about things and the tone of anything I wrote did make a large shift after I moved to Los Angeles, and I can see the correlation now.

If you are a person who’s been in my inner sphere at any point in my adult life, you’ve probably been annoyed at me at one time or another for making everything into a joke.  Laughing everything off.  Turning the compliment you gave me into self deprecation.  Sarcasming myself into the seventh circle of hell.  I know that while it can be funny at times, sometimes it just sounds negative.  It’s hard to step away from the only crutch I’ve made work for me and sometimes I feel myself abusing it and sounding like a pain in the ass.  It’s so much easier to make fun of a thing you said than be vulnerable and show you that your words affected me in some way.

What is this, my fucking diary? My next post will be about sex or something. Promise.

Anyways.  Pie.

Who’s a naughty little pop tart?  You are.  mmmmmhmmm

I’ve had a computer since I was roughly 10.  I used to write all the time, and while a lot of the evidence has been lost over the years, plenty of stuff is still in existence on my current computer.  Examples include AIM conversations from high school, all the way through college (if you’re a boy and we talked a lot, I have so many conversations saved between us still – horrible, horrible conversations), diary entries of sorts, and stunning papers I wrote in college.  I’m going to share one of my crowning achievements with you now.  I wrote the following for Freshman Comp on 9/12/2001 at SUNY New Paltz, one day after 9/11.  Let this be a lesson to everyone that a national disaster can do some weird things to your creative output levels.  Judging by whatever this is, I’m guessing the assignment was to try to induce a boner while describing food packaging.  Here is the completely unedited version of what I came up with:

Deliciously juicy, vibrant red spills suggestively across the white background of the fourteen point seven ounce box. The word “Pop Tarts” is scrawled unevenly in lower-case letters that overlap each other across the front, placed in such a way that it seems to bump up and down, almost bouncing off of its cardboard restriction. At the lower left, enclosed in a bright red, irregularly angled square, sits the number eight, proclaiming the amount of treats waiting inside for consumption. Plump pieces of ripe, creviced strawberries topped with healthy green leaves dance across the lower part, indicative of the flavor. A morsel of the fresh pastry pokes up from the bottom as well, laden generously with bright, angular sprinkles which range in color from red to yellow to green to orange. The colorful conglomeration rests delicately on a white cloud of frosting, which is spread smoothly in a thick layer across the toasted brown foundation. A cross section of the filling is a shocking red streak slicing through the center. A Smuckers insignia placed in the upper right-hand corner promises real fruit. Separated from this only by a floating strawberry placed upside-down, the word Kellogg’s is branded in the same bold, tempting red as the glistening filling on the opposite side, declaring the manufacturer. The overall image portrayed is an enticing representation of the fruit filled pastries.

The only time anyone should be talking about glistening fillings is never. Ooh baby, how do you guys feel about unevenly scrawled fonts bouncing off of boxes?  What about toasted brown foundations slathered in white clouds of frosting?  However you feel, it’s not nearly as good as I felt 14 years ago when I was sitting in what was obviously a candlelit bubble bath typing out actual food porn.  How uncomfortable was the professor who had to grade this cringefest?  I should send that woman a formal letter of apology.  That is the most erotic shit you’ll ever see written about a pastry box in your life.  You are welcome.

Dad, Mom & me – Christmas at some point when I was still a tiny, Asian child

My dad passed away in 1993, when I had just turned 10 years old.  His sister, also obviously my aunt, passed away this past weekend.  Both of them died as a result of their own actions.  In my father’s case, it was intentional.  In my aunt’s, years of substance and alcohol abuse had only one exit option – whether she clearly intended for it to happen at the time it did or not, she knew she was slowly killing herself.

I’ve been reeling since it happened.  The emotions that have been bubbling over have left me feeling like I need to talk about it.  There’s been a theme of mental illness and alcohol/substance abuse interwoven into my life since before I was old enough to know what it was.  It was affecting me before I even knew that it was weird – that something was wrong in this picture.  It’s not easy to talk about such painful things, but smothering them down is not any easier.  Right now, it feels downright detrimental to hold everything in.

I’m always nervous about broaching the subject of my father to a new person, because I’m afraid they’re going to look at me like I’m a piece of glass about to shatter before their eyes.  Or that they’ll think that after growing up the way that I did, I’m probably batshit crazy.  Or, if you happen to be a guy trying to get to know me, that you may pack your shit and run away before listening to another word, because there’s no way you want to deal with the daddy issues I must clearly have.

As a result, whenever that inevitable “where’s your dad?” question is asked, I flinch a little bit internally.  Not because it bothers ME to say it, but because I’m afraid I’m going to freak you out or you’ll look at me differently as a result of my answer.  My response always begins vaguely: “He passed away when I was little.”  Some people cut it off right there, offering an apology and then trailing off blankly, usually leaving me to quickly fill the silence with something like, “It’s okay, I’ve had plenty of years to deal with it.  I’m okay.”

At times, though, some people go ahead and ask the obvious follow-up question: “How did it happen?”  I dread giving the answer, because, again, I don’t wanna scare you or have you judge me for shit that I went through.

But I’m tired of it.  Bad things happen to everyone, and while talking about them can exacerbate them, make a person dwell on them, and make others shift uncomfortably in their seats, leaving them unconfronted can cause feelings to fester and blow up.  I’m not responsible for other people’s actions, and the sicknesses in my family do not automatically mark me for life as damaged. I’m affected, but not ruined.  So here it is.

My father killed himself.  It was a conscious decision.  Not only did he do it on purpose, he planned it for at least 20 years before he did it.

As you could probably deduce, a host of serious problems led him to this choice.  He suffered from severe depression, panic attacks, alcohol and prescription drug addiction, anger issues, and I’m not sure precisely what else.  There was more to it than just that.  As if that wasn’t enough, right?  I don’t want to get too detailed here out of respect for certain people in my family.  I would not want to hurt them by discussing things that are more about their experience with my father than mine, because this isn’t something that affected just me as his daughter.  The consequences of his issues affected others, and not everyone confronts things the way that I do, so I’ll be purposefully vague and only give a piece of the story here.

I will say this: his actions affected those closest to him in various ways.  There was something deeply disturbed inside of him, that crept into his psyche at such an early age that he was acting out before he even hit puberty.  I have my suspicions on what might have started the ball rolling, but that’s all I’ll say.

Another thing I’d like to say before I say anything else, because I’m sure you’re wondering it: I was never abused.  My father had a lot of problems, but he never laid a hand on me, in any way, shape or form.  My scars come from the things that he allowed to go on in front of me.  He loved me, that was always made perfectly clear to me, and in the midst of all the stuff that I saw him do, he frequently sat me down to explain what was going on as best as could be explained to a child.  The things I can remember him saying most were usually along the lines of, “I’m sick.  I have a problem, and I really want to change.  I do not want you to end up like me, I never want to see you become an addict, and I am so sorry for all that I’ve put you through.”  I’d reassure him, telling him that I would remember all that he taught me and never end up like that.  And that I really wanted him to try hard to be a better, happier person.

The reason that I can remember specifics about these exchanges after all these years is because my dad struggled over and over, going back and forth between trying to get better and relapsing on an epic scale.  In other words, we had the conversations enough for them to find firm footholds in my young brain.

When he was resolving to get better, he tried a lot of different things.

He went to AA meetings.  He brought me with him often because he wanted me to see that he was trying to change, and I think he wanted me to understand the power of addiction.  I was happy to go, because it meant a break from the storm — things were calm and he was working on recovery.  I was excited to support him.  I’d sit in the hallway, looking at the coffee pots and donuts on the table and listening to people tell their stories.  I remember feeling proud of him for joining, and hopeful that maybe this time it would help him.

He went to therapy.  He brought my mother and I with him at times.  I loved going.  It felt like another small glimmer of hope.  On top of that, I thought it was great to have someone sit down, ask me how I felt, and let me read my stories to them.  Oh yeah, I was writing even back then, y’all.

He went to rehab.  Multiple times.  I was sad to see him go away, yet relieved at the same time.  My relationship with my dad was always a mixture of love and fear.  I’d wrestle with wanting him to stay, but feeling like maybe he needed to go away, too, because things were downright scary in my house around those times.

He would take things way too far and get put in the hospital.  Also multiple times.  When this happened, I was more scared than anything else.

All of these attempts at recovery.  All of these other people pulled in to try to change his life story and put it on a more peaceful, healthy path.  All of these counseling sessions, mood stabilizing drugs from misguided therapists who probably should have thought twice about giving an addict addictive medications, all of these meetings and interventions and promises and renewed commitments to sobriety.

None of it did a fucking thing to help him.

There were some particularly terrifying episodes that were solid predictors that my dad was reaching the end of his rope.  My mother and I had moved out, and when he finally committed suicide, it was very surreal, but not entirely unexpected.  I remember getting the news.  A friend with very unfortunate timing was sleeping over that night, and she burst into tears while I stared blankly.

I greeted shock with silence a lot as a kid.

I didn’t cry at all until the funeral.  I don’t know what it was about the final burial that made me snap into this new, emptier world and realize my dad was really, truly gone, but that’s when it happened.  Something about seeing the casket about to go into the ground made it all sink in, as much as a 10 year old could process it, anyway.

My dad wasn’t here anymore.  And he made the choice to leave.

I don’t remember the fallout of everything and how the adjustment phase to this new chapter of life went, but you can imagine how the story goes since I’m here and relatively (arguably?) normal.  Eventually I grew up, my mom did everything she could to take care of me, and I made my own life.

There are certain things I couldn’t consciously think or feel or understand about my dad’s life, his actions, and his choices when he died because what the fuck. I was 10.  My dad did help me out with that when I got a little bit older, though.  How?  He kept journals.

He filled several notebooks with pages and pages of his innermost thoughts, his feelings, his struggles.  His demons were poured all over those pages.

They aren’t a fun read.

Despite the unsavory contents, I can’t put into words how thankful I am for these glimpses into his head.  I got an insight into the brains behind the man whose actions scared the hell out of me during my earliest years.  Without them I would undoubtedly be confused about who my father was, and there’s a great chance I would have grown up remembering him as a monster.  My dad wasn’t a monster.  He was sick.  He was tortured.  He needed help that he could never find or commit to.

So where does that leave me on the feelings scale?  The most prevalent feeling I have about him is sadness.  Sadness that he could never find any relief from the demons shrieking behind every formed thought and emotion.  Sadness that he was filled with such poison – towards others, but most of all, towards himself.  Sadness that he hurt the ones who loved him most because he didn’t love himself.  Sadness that he was aware of his brokenness and couldn’t figure out how to stop it.  Sadness that no one was able to help him.  Sadness that he couldn’t see any other way out than death.

And sadness for myself.  Most of the time when I think about my dad, it’s when I hit some sort of milestone or am thinking about changes in my life.  I think about all the things he missed out on, all the things that a girl’s father should be present for, and I wonder how he’d feel about who I turned out to be.  I’ll always feel a twinge of sadness everytime I see a girl hug her father, because that’s something I can never have; something that last happened so long ago that I can’t even remember what it felt like.

But these are all things that are mostly locked away; that only pop out now and then in small pieces, maybe hovering over some part of my day here and there and then floating into the back of my brain.

Except for now.  Now my aunt succumbs to her own demons, and it all comes flooding back to the surface.

I’m reacquainted with that deep sadness all over again.  It’s heartbreaking that she was so haunted in her life that she turned to the same numbing agents that my father did.  I’m sad that she was unable to find the help she so desperately needed.  I’m sad that she couldn’t find peace.  I’m sad that she was struggling so hard for so long.  I’m sad to watch my grandfather, a great man, have to bury his second child.

I’m sad about a lot of stuff.

We don’t choose our families.  For better or for worse, for the good and the bad that they bring into our lives, they are a part of who we become.  That doesn’t mean that we have to let the bad parts define us.

What I have taken away from all that I have personally endured is that we have to take control of our own destinies.  It’s easy to look at the fucked up things that happen and say, “Welp, no way I can deal with this shit.  Time to go fuck up now.”  It feels like the clear route at times, to just not try, because overcoming terrible things takes work and determination; and where the hell are you supposed to summon that from when all you feel is heaviness?  You gotta find it somewhere, because if you lay down and do nothing about those trials and tribulations you are faced with and all the awful things you feel as a result, you might end up going down a dark road leading to a place you can’t pull yourself back from.

That’s what my father, and now my aunt, have taught me:  That it’s literally fucking life or death to stay strong and never give up on yourself.  It’s the most absolute, important lesson that I can take away from these horrible tragedies.

I hope that any of you, my friends out there reading this, who may identify with any piece of this part of my story, know that even in the darkest moments we face, this is a clear, undeniable truth:

The only choice that there is is to keep going.

Aunt Rhonda.. young & happy.

Women: I’m not going to ask you if this sounds familiar, because I already know it does.

You’re going about your merry business, your phone buzzes and, thinking nothing of it, you glance at it and a name pops up that throws your brain on its ass.  The name of a person with whom you shared some sort of history with, but is no longer a regular part of your life.  Maybe things ended fine, maybe they ended a little ???, or maybe they ended downright terribly.

Regardless of where things were left, their name popping up incites a dizzying mixture of surprise/excitement/nausea/despair/elation/fury/spastic eroticism/heartburn and before you even attempt to formulate a response, you start a new text to one of your friends saying, “GUESS WHO JUST FUCKIN TEXTED ME.”

The pop up, my friends.

Guys, you have an incredible knack for jumping up out of nowhere to throw yourself back into the brains of former flames.

You might not mean it.  A random neuron in your brain fired that made you think of us and you thought “I’m going to say hi to her” or “I’m going to ask her how she’s been because I haven’t talked to her in a year and I used to hang out inside of her sometimes so why not.”  Or maybe some song made you think of us and your heart smiled and you felt compelled to let us know that.

Or maybe you know exactly what you’re doing.  (But probably not.)

Do you see how exhausting it is to be a woman?

A girl texts you out of the blue and the only thought in your head is “Oh.  Dis bitch just texted me.  Probably wants that d.”

You text us and the thoughts in our head range from, “Oh my god what does he want?  Does he think I still want that d?” to “What the fuck does he mean by how am I?  I’ll tell him how the fuck I am.  Better without you is how I am, motherfucker” to “Shit I think I do want that d, I hope he wants to bone again” to “Someone find an exorcist and get them to my house immediately” to “Dammit I just stopped stalking your Instagram 2 weeks ago, and now let me pull it up again.  Who’s THAT bitch?” to “I hope you die violently” to flat out hurling our phones into an active volcano.

In conclusion, bitches just be stayin crazy so have a seat and get used to it.

WE’LL SEE ABOUT THAT.

One of my friends from college recently made the big move to Los Angeles, and she’s basically become my hetero life partner.  She lives only a couple miles away, she’s one of my few single friends who’s always available for activities (yes, we ARE building bunk beds so we have more room), and she’s cool and smart and funny and shit.  What up, Cate? I just raved about you on the internet.  Congrats.

Cate, excited about coming to the land of supposedly great Mexican food and eager to shove her face into it, suggested we start hitting up taco places around LA every week to determine where has THE BEST TACOS, and I was like, “Well, yeah.”  Tacos are pretty great on most days, but especially on Tuesdays, for a lot of restaurants do Taco Tuesday specials.  And so it was settled.

Our journey began a few weeks ago and she kept going “you should blog about this” but I was doubtful.  Yelp exists, after all.  But a Facebook post inspired me to try it so here I am, letting you join us via your imagination on our most recent Taco Tuesday journey!

The places we’d tried so far were nothing noteworthy, so for this one we decided to follow I Love You, Man‘s lead.  You remember that scene in the movie where Jason Segel promises Paul Rudd he will have the best fish tacos of his life and then they go to a restaurant, get drunk and rave over the amazingness of them?  Well that place is real, it’s in Venice Beach, and it’s called James Beach.  Because why not name yourself a beach when you’re a restaurant?  Fuck it, that’s what I say.  We wanted to determine if those fish tacos really are the tits, as Sydney Fife promised.

So we get to the place and I instantly bleat out a “OH YEAH, I TOTALLY RECOGNIZE THE OUTSIDE OF THIS PLACE FROM THE MOVIE WHEN SYDNEY FIFE MAKES PETER KLAVEN NOT DRIVE HOME CUZ HE’S TOO DRUNK LOL.”  Why not start off our experience obnoxiously?

We make our entrance and it’s all pretty lights and nice white tablecloths and beachside charm.  I like it!  There’s a pink glow in the room, and who can resist that?  Not me.  This is a classy establishment, and I’m not being sarcastic for once.  Well, there are swimming trunks hanging from the ceilings, but hey.

Ceiling shorts! Pink glow! Lights!

A hostess who clearly models in her spare time seats us at a hightop table.

(Did you know that to get a serving/bartending/hosting job in LA you have to apply with a fucking headshot and an actual resume?  What do you even write on that shit?  “I have plenty of experience carrying trays and delivering food to people.  I have done so much side work you can’t even handle it.  I’m pretty enough to work in your establishment, probably.  Might need some implants, but the rest should be okay.”  I mean Jesus.  Get a life, LA. )

The Taco Tuesday “special” is actually a $15 platter of grilled mahi mahi fish tacos, marked down from $19 for the occasion.  It’s my opinion that a Taco Tuesday deal should consist of a la carte tacos in the $1-$3 range, but who am I to argue with an establishment that a movie told me has the best fish tacos I’ll ever taste?

But screw that for a minute, the first order of business is obviously going to be the margarita situation.  Cate and I both decide on the Jalapeno Margarita.  Fuck off if you don’t like pink, because even our drink is pink!  Our very nice, helpful waiter tells us that’s the result of the prickly pear puree they put in there.  We didn’t even ask.  Maybe he’s fighting an internal battle everyday about why he’s working at a place where he’s bathed in pink at every turn. Or maybe he’s proud of it.

Also, no sour mix in this baby – straight up lime juice, as it should be. I could have drank five more.

In lieu of the standard chips & salsa that a lot of places offer, James Beach gives you a plate of random vegetables.  I have no idea what those white things are.  Parsnips?  What the fuck is a parsnip anyway?  Jicama?  That’s just a damn fun word to say.

“Also, what is WITH the carrots?” – Jerry Seinfeld

The fish tacos come out quickly, and it looks all fancy and pretty.  The tortillas are flour, which I love but Cate doesn’t, and come on the side, with the fish, guacamole, salsa and beans on the plate.  So you have to assemble your tacos yourself like some sort of goddamn plebeian.  The fish is grilled pretty perfectly, but the seasoning is lacking some much needed acidity.  Can I get a few squirts of lemon juice on this shit?  Something?  That’s pretty much my only complaint taste-wise, though.

Just imagine it all assembled. I was too busy stuffing it into my head to take pictures.  Also, taking pictures of food at a restaurant feels super obnoxious.  We should all stop.

They did not knock our socks off and leave us gasping for air in ecstasy, which is what I usually look for in a good meal, but they are a solid contender in our list so far.  It also would have been nice if they offered a fried option, because as wonderful as grilled fish tacos are, frying the hell out of anything is most of the time going to taste even better.  Calling them the Best Fish Tacos in LA was a total oversell, and now I know that Hollywood lies.  BUT STILL.  They were good and I would recommend them for a perfectly swell taco experience.  And don’t forget the Jalapeno Margarita.  Fuck, this sounds like a Yelp review.  Fart.

On the way out, we saw an older man at the bar pretending to blow another old man at the bar, which is now my most recommended way to end a dinner.  I like my tacos with a side of sexy.

Resist the temptation to steal and repurpose this magic.

Awhile back, I had a friend who did a lot of research on how to snag a man.  This girl was on the hunt for a husband, and she was reading books on how to find good men and what sort of trickery to employ to get one to commit and become her “one.”  My initial response was to roll my eyes out of my skull, tell her that all the books in the world aren’t going to make the perfect match materialize and that she only really needs to be herself at all times. While she may never find a man doing that, if she does, at least she knows he loves her for who she is.  But then I looked at all the no boyfriends I had, and thought well hey.  Maybe I should shut my know-it-all mouth and see what these books are saying.

I didn’t read any of the books, but I did ask her what ideas she was going to experiment with based on her findings.  The one that stuck in my brain is that she instituted a “no sleeping with a guy until commitment” rule.  I was incredulous.  You’re going to wait until he commits to you to find out if you’re sexually compatible?  But…what if he commits and then you sleep together and it’s a fucking disaster?  Then you’re the dick who broke it off because he couldn’t break you off!  I know there are people out there who actually wait until marriage to have sex, and that’s another thing I can’t wrap my brain around.  Sexual chemistry is a thing, and it’s an important one.  If you’re doing it for religious reasons or because of some personal belief system, fine, that’s great, but if you’re waiting because you think a guy isn’t going to go anywhere as a result of you making him wait for sex, I’m not sure I’m on board.

But then hey, maybe sleeping with guys too quickly does pose a problem…? Follow me while I ramble out my thought process for a minute.  Personally, I’ve never been one to get down on the first night, and 95% of my dates have not gone past date number 1, but if I’m getting along well enough with someone that we’re seeing each other for a while, what the hell am I waiting for?  We’re consenting adults, we’re feeling each other enough to hang out repeatedly, might as well go for it and see if it’s a good time or not, right?  He’s not going to run just because he got in my pants, is he?  Maybe so, but the kind of guy who would do that probably wouldn’t have stuck around if I played the make him wait game to begin with, because he likely just wants no strings attached fun.  Right?

I just find it kind of silly to set up some specific hurdle to clear, like a “we have to go on x number of dates or for x number of months before he gets the goods!” rule, because what does that mean anyways?  He can still disappear after date 16.  He can still commit to you and then sleep with you and then decide it wasn’t worth it and bounce that dick on out of there.  If you like someone and you’re ready for a commitment, whether you got it on early in the courtship or later down the line, is it really going to make that much of a difference?

And god, it’s fucking annoying that women have to even stop to consider gaming the system using their vagina as a chess piece to begin with.  There is a complete double standard about how a girl is judged versus a guy on fuck time situations, and I’m not even going to begin word vomiting on how to change this (mostly because I have no idea), but it is a fact.  Women can be perceived as easy just for making the choice to sleep with a person “too quickly” depending on what sort of subjective timeline some person has in mind for them.

MY WHOLE POINT IS — if a guy is going to completely write you off because you didn’t make him wait for a specific commitment speech or 3 months or whatever the fuck, is he worth it anyway?  My instinct is to say no, but maybe I’m just telling myself that.

Getting back to the girl who I mentioned earlier, her argument was that sex can cloud things and that if you’re spending a lot of time getting to know each other without the physical aspect distracting things and throwing them off course, you can determine whether or not they’re even WORTH sleeping with.  And you know, I can’t argue that point.  It’s a good one!  It’s surely a hell of a lot more of a meaningful experience if you do make it that far.  But it also feels a bit to me like you’re holding sex over someone’s head as some sort of prize to be won.  Hey, if you keep this up and we’re really getting along, eventually you’ll get this prize:  It’s my ass.

From what I remember, she did try this experiment with at least one guy, and the guy did stick around for awhile, but their relationship was rocky the whole time even without the sex.  Hello anticlimactic story.

I ain’t got the answers, Sway.  I haven’t tried this experiment myself, but my inclination is to think that whether it’s date 3 or date 33, and whether you feel like a person likes you or doesn’t, your appointment time on the screw calendar probably isn’t going to be the determining factor in most situations.  If the person is a good match for you, hopefully they’re not judging you solely on whether or not you had sex with them at the appropriate point on some arbitrary timeline.

Balls are weird.  How do you just have those things slapping at your thighs when you walk?  Come on.

You want to know about obsession?  I’ll tell you about obsession.  I clearly remember being a little kid, maybe 6? 7?, sitting in my room, looking in a mirror (why? that’s probably a question for a therapist), and bawling my eyes out because I wanted to marry Michael Jackson and I didn’t know how I could meet him to make it happen.  My first cassette tape was Thriller.  My first CD was Off The Wall.  I used to choreograph dances to the Dangerous album, teach them to girls on my block, and we’d perform them on the sidewalk in the summer.  The dance to “Why You Wanna Trip On Me” involved all of us tripping over each other, because I did not understand slang yet.  I remember being at Ted’s Fish Fry in Watervliet with my parents when his Dangerous tour concert in Bucharest aired for the first time on TV and I forced them to drop everything and take me home so I could record it.  I remember parking myself in front of my TV for the premieres of Black or White and Remember The Time, which were fucking EVENTS by the way.  They’d interrupt primetime TV to broadcast those videos.  I had a recurring dream throughout my childhood of Michael carrying me on his shoulders in an amusement park, then bringing me in a limo where we drank soda and ate candy.  Michael was happiness for this kid.

Then the allegations of child molestation broke, he started hacking at his face and his skin changed, and soon Michael was a walking freak show who everyone couldn’t wait to watch fall down and crumple into a million pieces.  I used to think about how sad he must be and cry, wishing I could do something to help him.  I got older, things got worse, Michael sort of went into seclusion, and he was a running joke for the general public.  Wacko Jacko’s best friend is a monkey!  Crazy Michael sleeps with kids!  Mike the Looney Bird has white kids and he’s covering their faces with masks all the time!  I always felt the need to defend him when people would talk shit about him, but I couldn’t blame people who weren’t slobbering fans like me for writing him off as a mess.  He was a complicated dude with obvious problems, and I could sit there and lay out all the reasons why I thought he wasn’t molesting kids, and why I thought he was drastically changing his appearance, and why he was so far removed from the rest of the world, but the fact is – I didn’t know.  It’s not like we were buddies and I had a personal window into his world.  I have plenty of theories, but I got tired of arguing with people and so eventually I just kept my mouth shut and hoped that he had some good people around him and that he could find some sort of internal peace somehow.  It was obvious he needed it.

When he planned his “This Is It” concerts in London, people kept asking me if I was going to go.  Nope, I’d say, I don’t think it’s going to happen.  He seemed so sickly and out of it — I figured it would fall through at the last minute for one reason or another.  I did not expect for that reason to be his death.

Everyone remembers where they were when Michael Jackson died.  On that day, I saw something on TMZ that said he went into cardiac arrest and my stomach turned.  I sat there reloading the screen over and over waiting for any sort of update.  Eventually I went over to talk to a coworker about it and she pulled up TMZ just as the headline changed from “Michael Jackson In Cardiac Arrest” to “Michael Jackson Has Died.”  I started choking, scaring the bejesus out of her, then my eyes flooded and, sensing an imminent full on psychotic break, I fucking ran to the bathroom as fast as I could.  Then I exploded into a sobbing, hyperventilating mess in the bathroom stall.  I obviously knew that he’d die at some point in my lifetime, but I never really thought about how mindfucked I’d be when it happened.  In those moments, I felt a piece of my childhood being wiped off the map, and the sense of loss was overwhelming.  I reacted more strongly to his death than to some people that I knew personally, and yeah, that’s pretty fucked up, but it also kind of makes sense.  Since I never knew the man, I had this idealized piece of him throughout my whole life, and he could never change my opinions one way or another by letting me develop a truly informed opinion on anything about him.  People I knew could show me their humanity.  Michael’s I could only color with my own imagination.  I felt a suffocating sense that we all failed him.

I worked at a TV network so I had a television at my desk.  I sat there and watched coverage, sobbing quietly at my desk.  People tiptoed by, avoiding looking straight at me.  My boss tried to send me home after a couple hours of this, but I had no TV at home at the time, so I couldn’t leave.  Family and friends called to check in on me to see if I was still breathing or if I had checked myself into a mental hospital.  When I finally left work, I rolled down my car windows and blared his music as loud as it could go, and I just drove with tears streaming down my face.  Seeing other people on the streets doing the exact same thing was both comforting, because it really was affecting everyone and making them realize how wonderful he was, and infuriating, because no one showed him any love whatsoever until he was dead.  He was probably the most lonely, misunderstood motherfucker in the universe.

That dude touched my life in a really profound way.  It’s strange to say, but I truly believe he helped shape the person I am now.  Michael was an escape for myself and millions of other people around the world.  He entertained, he delighted, he mystified, he exceeded expectations, he broke barriers, he shocked, he paved the way, he was a fucking enigma, and there will never be another person to walk this earth who did for the entertainment industry at large what he did.  Michael made himself ours, for better or for worse.

Say what you will about his personal life, his obvious body dysmorphia, and his Peter Pan complex (all likely results of him being completely robbed of a normal human experience practically from the time he was able to walk, mind you) and all the other oddities and straight up mysteries surrounding him, but he gave everything he could throughout his whole entire life for the purpose of entertaining the world.  Michael Jackson was magic.  Michael Jackson was a G.

Man, I miss him.

I made it through the entire 3rd day feeling okay, but I attribute that to the fact that I had eaten the night before.  I also only drank 4 of the 6 juices, and didn’t finish any of them.  I felt so terrible the first day that I didn’t want to risk repeats the following days, so I felt I had to limit my consumption.  Which was cutting crucial calories.  By the end of the day, I admitted to myself that this had been an exercise in insanity, and I ate scraps of food I had leftover from before this thing started.  Screw it.

I definitely didn’t do this the “right” way, considering that I skipped the 3 day prep step before starting it, and that I gave in and ate a bit the last two days.  Would this have gone better if I had?  Maybe!  But I have a tough time thinking that all that sugar would have made me feel good under any circumstances — there was as much as 40g of it in one bottle of those things.  If they’d been less sweet, and had 100% less celery, maybe I could have stuck it out better than I did, but I am pretty convinced these cleanses are a load of shit.

Some people claim that juice detoxes make them feel awesome.  To those people I say good for you.  Keep doing it if you think it works for you.  But for me, this felt the opposite of healthy.

I still have two days of juice coming on Friday and Saturday, unfortunately, but I will not be doing this anymore.  I may drink the two least offensive ones and just throw the rest out.  Maybe donate them to a neighbor.  Maybe blast them into the sun.

In closing, if you’re ever considering doing a juice cleanse, eat some goddamn salad instead.

No headache, heartburn or nausea when I woke up in the morning, but I took one sip of that first celery concoction and poured the rest out.  I also only drank about 3/4 each of all the other juices because they’re too fucking sweet.

And I ate some nuts.  And later some pretzels.  Whoops.

My head has been foggy but otherwise I feel alright.  Shockingly, I’m not hungry.  I gave in and ate some solid food mostly because I needed something to cut all the sugar.

I’m ducking out of social activities with people because I can’t bring myself to explain that I am drinking juice and can’t eat food or drink alcohol with them (what else is there?), even though in LA that’s probably not the most uncommon excuse.

I officially don’t believe that this is “detoxing” or good for you, because no human being should be consuming this much sugar in a day, let alone for days in a row.  This is coming from a girl who could house 4 cupcakes and ask for one more.

I’m shutting this down after Thursday, unless I wake up with either A) superpowers, B) washboard abs, or C) washboard abs with superpowers.