Back with a Vengeanz

So, a lot of you have been very upset about my lack of blogging (I'm not trying to brag; honestly, more than one of you has made me feel ashamed), and I wish I could say my absence was due to some awesome life change, like I've been cruising Europe or had a baby (except not that, because-- gross). But really, I've just been suuuuper busy watching a lot of TV. I'm not even embarrassed by that (and if you think I should be, then you are seriously reading the wrong blog).

But on to business. Recently, I had a little scerfuffle and had to call the police. So after work one day, I pulled into my parking spot, and this dude followed my car into the garage. Then he follows me into the lobby as I'm checking my mailbox (Coupon book full of maid advertisements and 10% off tummy lipo, SCORE), and he's like, "Excuse me, can I please ask you a question?" I say yes, thinking that he probably is just looking for one of the many prostitutes who live in my building. But then he introduces himself--I want to say it was Jose?--and starts telling me about how he used to be in a gang and sold drugs for a quick buck and now goes to Cal Poly and who hasn't, you know? So this goes on and on, and I have to be honest, the story was really boring. You'd think a former drug-gang-person would be more interesting, but I started just looking at the paper in his hands, trying to figure out where this story was going. It seemed to go nowhere, and at a certain point, I thought him saying, "So that's why I am mugging you at knife-point" would have been a satisfactory end to the story.

But it didn't and he kept talking and talking and sort of touching my shoulder a few times which made me UNCOMFORTABLE. But what do you say to that? "Please don't touch me?" Well, I guess you say exactly that, but for some reason I didn't want to be rude, even though he didn't give me the same consideration in telling me the MOST BORING STORY OF ALL TIME. So, basically he wants me to buy a subscription to some made up paper called the Daily News which sounds like one of those papers that cartoon characters read. Dog cartoon characters will read some equivalent, like the Pouch Press. Anyway, I really didn't want a newspaper (we already are forced to get the LA Times on Thursday-Sunday. All I wanted is Sunday--because all I read is coupons and Parade--but apparently, it is MORE MONEY to get just Sunday than to get Thursday thru Sunday! It's ludicrous! So I get the other days and unwrap it and pretend to read it to seem informed, but really just put it almost immediately in recycling.)

Anyway, I told him no, but he wouldn't buy it, and so then I used the greatest trick of all time-- "Sorry, my husband makes these subscription-related decisions." It's sort of genius, really, because what do you say to that? "Well, tell your husband that that kind of attitude is oppressive and it's not 1952 anymore." "Well, I would, but then he'd take away my allowance and beat me." So, I'm internally complimenting myself on inventing the greatest line of all time, until gang dude throws me for a loop. He says, "Well, is he home right now and can I talk to him directly?" Crap! Clearly I was working with some kind of former gang genius, because he actually wasn't at home, thus giving him the perfect opportunity to break in, rape me, and steal my XFiles DVDs. I one-upped him and said, "He IS home, but you can't talk to him. I have to go now." Brilliant, right? He stares me down. I started getting nervous, honestly. The whole time, something just didn't feel right, but I tried to push this out of my mind, because I didn't want to be racist. But then I thought, you know what, I don't care if Jose does think I'm racist, I'm really freaked out. This is how women get date-raped, basically. "Oh, I don't want to be rude, so I'll let this creepy guy I met on Facebook up to my dorm, oh wait, he just raped me actually."

So I start walking to my apartment and the dude FOLLOWS ME. So I turn around and am like, "My mistake, I'm not going to my apartment after all." and I basically run away. I take a back way to my apartment, because the awesome thing about my building is that it's essentially set up like a scary maze, and there are multiple paths to any one hallway, all of which end up being through the stairwell where some guy just finished smoking a joint. So I get into my apartment and lock the screen door, the dead bolt, the chain lock, the bottom lock, the knob lock and turn on this alarm thing (everyone who laughed at me about this probably feels PRETTY STUPID RIGHT NOW).

So then, I hear the dude BANGING ON MY SCREEN DOOR. He has somehow followed me to my apartment. He bangs for like, a solid two minutes, and I debate how serious the chances are of him murdering me. He seems to stop, and then he BREAKS THE LOCK ON MY SCREEN DOOR, opens it, and starts banging on my main door. One time these kids who live in my building tried an almost identical method to get me to buy chocolates for their school fundraiser, and I was equally scared. So this time, I called 911.

So...911 was busy. I know. I'm not joking. It was like, a full on busy signal. So I just kind of sat around, wondering if I could just watch TV, but then decided to try again. I got through!! It was like voting for American Idol. I was all, "Carly Smithson, because she makes me feel sad inside." (American Idol Season 7 Shout Out!) So I explain my situation, and literally they transfer me, I explain it again, they TRANSFER ME, and I explain it again. By now I'm feeling pretty stupid, because the more times you tell a story, the less real it feels. Also, I started feeling mad crazy white guilt, because the police dispatcher was like, "Okay, so...do you think he was trying to be violent?" And I was like, "Realistically...no. But...he looked scary?" "Okay, what did he look like?" "He was Latino." "And, his hair color?" "I...assume...dark? I can't remember." "Eye color?" Okay, this was embarrassing. I really had no clue. "Uhhh...dark...also...suspicious looking eyes, is that helpful?" "What about his clothing?" "Ummm...gang....like. Probably baggy. Perhaps some bling, I can't be sure." Finally she agreed to send the cops, after it was clear this was going to devolve into "I'm sure he was off to see his baby mamacita after he stole my TV."

So I called my apartment manager, who lives in the building, and she laughed at me for being so nervous, and by this time I want to be done with the whole thing and seriously just make spaghetti and do some laundry. But she finds the dude, and somehow scares him away, like, with a broom or something, so I call back the cops and tell them "Only come if you want" which is stupid and passive aggressive, and only works on your friends you don't really want to show up to a party, and totally not on cops. They were like, uhhh just tell us if you want us there. So I said no, and the my scary brush with VIOLENCE thus ended.

The moral? As silly as I felt, the dude was freaky, and breaking down my door is not OK, so I think girls especially shouldn't worry so much about hurting people's feelings. I should have walked away instantly, instead of letting him tell me about his boring life of crime. Also, I learned that selling newspapers is a fine art, one that a few semesters at Cal Poly probably does not cultivate.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation...Being Awesome

Growing up, I participated in lots of random enrichment programs. For two years I was in year round school, so we'd have vacation in February, and because there's nothing fun to do in February, my mom put us in this field trip group. We'd go to the most awful places, like a tour of our school district's food processing plant. All I remember is vinyl bags filled with chili product. It was gross.

One summer in elementary school, I went to Science Day Camp at the Jewish Community Center. How much will you laugh at me when I say that I disliked camp because I thought the other kids were too nerdy? Yeah, it never occurred to me that any ten-year-old who's all, "Science Camp???? SIGN ME UP!" is a nerd by definition, myself included. We did all sorts of nerdy kid things, like a trip to NASA, where we got to pretend we were the scientists coordinating some sort of lunar landing. I didn't understand the objective for some reason, and I felt way stupid compared to the other nerds who somehow needed no instruction in operating a FAKE ROCKET SHIP LANDING, so I kept pretending I had to go to the bathroom in order to prevent my idiocy from compromising the whole mission. If that wasn't cool enough, the Channel 2 weatherman came to visit us! All I remember about him was that he offered to sign autographs for all of us, but only if we assured him we were regular viewers of his weather report. I lied to get the autograph. I didn't feel bad about that, because he seemed like sort of a needy jerk. Did he really care if ten-year-olds watched his weather report? Was he on the brink of being fired, and the station manager was like, "Hey, you are losing viewers in the under 12 market. Please! Entice them ANY WAY YOU CAN or it's CURTAINS FOR YOU." One kid had the balls to say, "No I watch channel 11." The weatherman refused to sign the kid's science notebook until he promised to start watching channel 2. The kid agreed, but I always hoped that he was just telling him what he wanted to hear. I'd like to think that as summer camp nerds, we weren't as susceptible to coercion as say, the kids in soccer camp. You really have to take a stand of individualism to declare that you want to hunt for fake dinosaur bones all summer as opposed to go out and socialize and play sports in the outdoors.

The next summer, I think I was in regular day camp, probably because I far exceeded all that the Jewish community could teach me in regards to science. In regular camp, they had a list of activities we got to pick from--dance, art, gardening--and had to do that for the remainder of the summer. I picked puppeteering, and it may not surprise you to know that that program was cancelled due to lack of overall interest. I MIGHT have been the only one who signed up, which I'm kind of still bitter about, because to this day I think my life is significantly less enriched due to lack of puppeteering. Instead, I was placed on the camp newspaper, which was more like a collection of stories and only had one issue. I wrote a story about the history of the Jewish Community Center, which involved no accurate reporting whatsoever. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that I falsified the entire story. It ended up not mattering at all, because our camp counselor actually REWROTE ALL OUR STORIES and added her name to all the bylines. I was pretty pissed. It was the first time I realized that maybe being a writer is sort of sucky. That hasn't stopped me for pursuing it as career, though it's probably just a way to get back at her by being successful and showing her--LOOK! I CAN WRITE MY OWN FAKE NEWS STORIES WITHOUT YOU HAVING TO FIX THEM AND MAKE THEM "ACCURATE." Jerk!

I'd like to refill my pride

I didn't have a car for the majority of my time in college. It sort of sucked, because if you needed to like, leave campus in order to buy things, you were pretty much screwed. There was this weird Mexican market within walking distance that I didn't trust--they were closed down on more than one occasion for selling beer to underage college students and rat infestations, or perhaps just underage mutant rats were trying to buy beer, I'm not sure because I couldn't read the broken English hand-written sign on the door (but how cool would that be? It's like Splinter from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, only not old and lecture-y!!! He's all, "hey don't worry about Shredder, here's a Newcastle.")--but I was sometimes forced to due to my lack of food and inability to order Thai food for the tenth day in a row.

If I needed some sort of non-food product, the overpriced pharmacy on campus was always the way to go, especially if you didn't want to buy suspicious looking Los Kleenexos. However, something went down one day while I was there which made me sort of unable to ever enter the pharmacy again.

So I had to buy something and get a prescription filled, which always worried me because I assumed that work-study students filled the prescriptions, and I had to ask myself, is this the day they accidentally hand me diabetes medication and I die? But it was a chance I had to take. So I buy whatever I needed and hand them my prescription and wander around campus for a half hour until it's ready. I come back there, and the dude's like, hey what medication are you talking about? I don't have a prescription for you here. I told him what it was, and waited patiently while he flipped through EVERY PAPER IN THE PHARMACY looking for it. Nope. He lost it, apparently. I pointed to the woman I handed it to and said, "SHE must have lost it. I handed it RIGHT TO HER." I was pretty accusatory, because I was annoyed and had to get home in time to play Spider Solitaire, most likely. So then he conferenced with her and was like, "yeah I don't know what to tell you. It's gone." I stood there for a minute, like, uhhhhh? Seriously? The pharmacy was always screwing things up and charging 11 dollars for deodorant and I just couldn't take it anymore. I was pissed. By this time, a crowd had started to form for some reason, I guess because I was holding up the line. Normally, I'd wander away like a loser, but I wasn't going to let it go. I even RAISED MY VOICE a bit, and was like, "hey, what kind of operation are you running here, man? I don't know about anyone else here, but I don't think it's very good business TO LOSE A CUSTOMER'S PRESCRIPTION." Yeah, I created a scene. It was awesome. I felt very proud of myself. Now the pharmacy guy was shaking in his boots. He starts searching around for it again. At this point, I've already browsed every item in the pharmacy (including ear wax remover! COOL!), so I had nothing left to do but stand there and look pissed. I called my mom, and decided to have a conversation with her for the benefit of the entire pharmacy-- "Yeah! Can you BELIEVE IT? They LOST my PRESCRIPTION. I know, I won't stand for it! NOT ONE BIT! Highly unprofessional, I must say." Everyone was cheering me on, and I felt very Norma Rae. I even got a "damn, that ain't right" from some random dude. Well, maybe not, but he was THINKING it, at the very least. Finally, the pharmacy guy calls me over, and is like, "look. I am so sorry. We can't find it. I'll tell you what. I will just fill it without the prescription. Just don't tell anyone, okay? I don't want you to be without your medication." That seemed sort of dangerous, but whatever. I accepted the meds and thanked him and went about my way, shoving my meds in my purse, thankful that this ordeal is over.

And then I found the prescription in my purse.

I mean...I guess I never ACTUALLY handed it to the woman? The woman I called out as the loser of my prescription. I'm pretty sure I did hand it to her. But clearly, I did not. So here was the dilemma. Do I go home and have an extra prescription just lying around, and hope that the woman doesn't get fired and the guy doesn't get arrested for filling medication without a prescription, or do I bury any sort of pride and go back and say, whoooops I found it? If you know me at all, you'd know that I am such a guilty wimp that I went back just so no one would get in trouble. It was SO EMBARRASSING. Especially because the guy then YELLED AT ME for being mistaken. I mean, I guess I yelled at him for essentially the same thing, but STILL! Didn't he know I just saved his job and that it was really awkward for me?! He then LECTURED ME, "you should really call back whoever you were on the phone with and say, HEY IT WAS ALL MY FAULT. THIS PHARMACY DOESN'T LOSE PRESCRIPTIONS." And I'm all like, "WELL I can't because it was my mom and now she is watching American Idol so maybe she'll just go on thinking that, OKAY?!"

Looking back, here's how I would have handled it differently. 1) Actually hand them my prescription. 2) If I didn't give it to them, then I would not yell at them, but instead look on my person for the prescription. 3) Instead of admitting my mistake, I would just pretend I found the prescription on the floor, like, "OH HERE IT IS! It must have fallen off your counter. HOW ODD." 4) Get someone to drive me to Rite Aid. But Rite Aid sort of sucks, too. Don't even get me started on Rite Aid. Anyway, isn't life just full of valuable lessons? Especially those pharmaceutical-related.

The Reality TV Dictionary

I watch a lot of TV. I'm almost embarrassingly undiscriminating about what I watch, though I will say I don't watch daytime soaps or dating shows (though, I may or may not have watched A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila once. I seriously need eye bleach after that. And ear bleach. And bleach for my soul.). Anyway, I do watch a lot of reality TV, and I'm starting to notice that no matter what show I watch, I hear the same phrases over and over and over.

My favorites:

Step up: (verb) to raise one's game to a higher level; to give more effort in a competition than previously given; to start taking a competition more seriously than before; to be a better competitor than before.

This is a good one. I've noticed it more and more since I started watching Step It Up and Dance. I think the judges and contestants get like, $5 under their pillows if they say "step up" during an episode. I love how they're like, "man, we're down to seven people. Now I really have to STEP IT UP!" I mean, I assume you were working your hardest before? And last week you said you were going to step it up, too, so am I to believe you only took a half-step upward? I also like people who have some sort of strategy, like, I'll cruise by for a while, and then when it gets down to the wire, I'm really going to STEP IT UP and blow everyone out of the water. But guys, in case you have never watched TV before, it NEVER WORKS. First of all, you'll get kicked off right away. Secondly, if you do manage to stick around, everyone will hate you for sucking all the time? Especially in group challenges. Which brings me to...

threw me under the bus: (verb) to sabotage someone in competition; to back-stab; to call someone out unfairly in order to save oneself; to literally see a large vehicle approaching and to toss them in harms way so they are run over by said vehicle.

Pay attention to that definition, because I'm not sure people fully grasp what it means. Here's a good example. Let's say we're on a reality show and the competition is to say, write a children's book (that was really a challenge on the short-lived but much loved Martha Stewart's The Apprentice. Seriously. You haven't lived until you watched a group of adults WRITE A BOOK QUIETLY IN THEIR ROOM. Riveting.) Anyway, Fred is on my team, and I'm like, "hey, Fred. I am an awesome colorer. You go take a break while I color all the caterpillars in this children's book." He's like, "hey, are you sure?" And I'm like, "Yeah. Besides, you picked the storyline, which is awesome and all about caterpillars." So he goes off to mack on some girl, probably, because Fred is totally like that. So then we're in the bottom of all the book groups, and the judges are like, "hey, this coloring sucks." And so I say, "well, Fred made me do it. He refused to color. He was too busy with some girl. Besides, he made the whole storyline up, which was stupid and we didn't even have the right colors for a caterpillar, which he knew, so it's really his fault." THAT IS THROWING SOMEONE UNDER THE BUS. Was it necessary? No. Did they ask about Fred? No. Did he have anything to do with my coloring? No. (Allegedly. Fred is kind of a douche). What is NOT throwing someone under the bus is when you just like, try to win a competition. I so often hear someone say, "well, I think I'm the best dancer here. I have the experience." And someone else is like, "I cannot BELIEVE he threw me under the bus like that!" Because, yeah, saying you're more talented than someone else is the same thing as being murdered by someone with a Greyhound. Jerks.

A side of consumerism, please

In Houston, there are more restaurants per capita than anywhere else in America. It might shake out to like, five restaurants per person, I'm not sure. Either way, it's not hard to eat fast food for your entire life, which is sort of what I did growing up. I spent a lot of my time at Wendy's, and as a kid I somehow could eat a spicy crispy chicken sandwich AND a chicken ranch pita all in one meal. I wasn't chunky in the slightest, but somehow this was a normal meal for me. No one stopped me from eating this, like, "hey, probably that is just like, Juvenile Diabetes Combo #2, maybe you should lay off the two kinds of chicken meals, 14 year old girl."

The best fast food place ever, though (besides Sonic Drive In! You can EAT in your CAR. But you're parked! It's like eating in a restaurant like a normal human being, but instead, it's in your car!) is Whataburger. As in What a Burger! Only, my entire childhood, I thought it was WATER-BURGER, because that's how people pronounce "what a" in Texas. It never occurred to me that a water burger is not a real thing and doesn't even make sense as a fake-thing. Nor did I question why the "Breakfast Taquitos" were actually breakfast burritos but they just called them the entirely wrong Spanish word. That's just how we roll in Texas.

I was back in Texas last week and went to Wal-Mart four different times. Now, before you blame Wal-Mart for destroying the mom and pop shops and screwing over workers and being giant corporate evilly bastards, let me just say that Wal-Mart sells things for CHEAP. That's why it's awesome. Plus they sell everything you could ever want--they have a NAIL SALON in the Wal-Mart, for goodness sakes. The brilliant thing about Wal-Mart is their pricing. Everything ends in weird numbers that trick you into thinking it's a steal. Like, oh this lantern is $8.87. That seems so cheap! Much cheaper than the other guys who sell it for $8.99. Suckers, I'm buying this lantern here. Granted, I don't actually NEED a lantern. In some sort of power outage, normally I spend the entire time looking for a working flashlight and then batteries, and then by the time I discover my flashlight is dim and sucky, the power comes back on. But I can't pass up an $8.87 lantern.

The other genius thing they do is package things together. Like, oh here's some toothpaste, but included is also a SMALLER tube of toothpaste. That's like more toothpaste! Why wouldn't you buy this tube that comes with some travel toothpaste? Because you're a moron, that's why, and all you do is shop at Target. Which, actually is pretty awesome too, due to the Dollar Spot. I once bought a sake set from the Dollar Spot for $2.50 (don't get me started on their screwed up pricing system, I guess calling it the Dollar Spot allows them to consider anything in American dollars as fitting that definition, and therefore I always cave and buy whatever they sell). I've never purchased sake in my entire life, and it sort of seems like hassle to pull out this little set and pour the sake into a sake jar just to pour that into my tiny cup. That's why I eat food straight out of the pan at home, usually. It's very efficient.

Just call Animal Control--it would have saved a lot of trouble

Confession time. I never saw Goonies. In fact, I don't even know what it's about. I think treasure and a group of mishaps, or something? I recently learned that only one of the Two Coreys was in it. Which, to be the other Corey, that must truly suck. I've never had that strong of a desire to see it, and I think as a child I somehow missed out on a lot of those Iconic Childhood Movies, probably because I was too busy with other important things, like being holed up in my room, writing epic Full House fan fiction (the trick was to involve Stephanie Tanner as much as possible. She was a comedic goldmine and woefully underused).

One movie I did manage to catch was The Sandlot. I'm going to be honest. As a kid, I totally did not understand that movie at all. The entire time, they're scared of some giant junkyard dog monster, and at the end, you find out it's some tiny dog that nowadays would be carried around by some stupid celebrity and dressed in little stupid outfits and whatnot. I didn't realize that that was the point entirely--that they imagined it to be a giant monster in their kid minds, but in fact it was a harmless tiny dog. In MY kid mind, I was like, whoa, the prop guy is an idiot, because we saw a giant dog shadow, and now it's this tiny dog? Stupid movie. Call me when you build a robotic dog monster, then I'll be interested. It wasn't until years later that I was discussing this movie with someone, and they were all, yeah, see, that's the point, idiot. It took me a minute, and then I felt dumb. Or maybe I'm brilliant, because I watched the movie on this whole other level--you know, the level that points out prop issues with films.

Also in that movie, all the kids make fun of the main guy who doesn't know who the Great Bambino is. At the time, neither did I. I was watching The Sandlot during some sort of slumber party, and they all laughed at the guy for not knowing who he was. Somehow, I didn't put together that if movie characters laugh at someone for not knowing something, probably real people will laugh at me if I also don't know that very same thing. Otherwise, the scene wouldn't be interesting at all. "You mean, you DON'T know 100 digits of Pi? LOSER!" So I asked my friends, "well, who IS the Great Bambino?" Everyone turned like I was some giant freak (which admittedly I was, considering I just spent five minutes ranting to them about how it's unlikely a giant dog monster would live in a junkyard, unless it fed on metal scraps, because what else could it eat? Plus someone obviously keeps it there, so we're supposed to believe it doesn't eat it's owner or whatever? Etc etc). My friend was like, "DUH IT'S BABE RUTH!" And I was like, "ohhh just kidding. I knew that. I was being funny like the loser character in The Sandlot." Everyone was like, "HE IS NOT A LOSER! HE'S AWESOME!" And I'm like, "wait, but isn't he SUPPOSED to be a loser? He doesn't even know what s'mores are. That's pretty lame. Even I know what that is. It's like, go to Girl Scout camp, GEEZ."

That was the last time I was invited to a slumber party.