27 December 2009

Driving Through

I'll always think of it with fond memories. The dawn of the internet, with the dialing tones and tied up phone lines; Chuck pissing on the crowd at the American Legion Hall, effectively shutting down youthful live music at the venue; the blossoming of my first love. Aphex Twin, and the experience of trapping a time period--smells, words, clothes, eyes--within a song that's never long enough. Staying up later than my parents ever dreamed of at my age, with nothing but a friend to talk to, before I was interested in things like booze or drugs.


All the stuff of my adolescence was contained in the bubble of Denham Springs: a place whose only purpose seemed to be raising children. Our teenage birthrate let me in on that little secret--my graduating class had lots of young mothers, some with children three years old by the time they were 18. It never seemed odd until I got to college, where I met no mothers under the age of 28. I hate to discredit my intelligence, but I didn't put together the reason until several years later--silly me--high school mothers more often than not, don't go to college. They stay in Denham Springs to raise their children, in the same broken (or breaking) homes their parents raised them in.


I don't often go through the city of Denham Springs when I visit my family. I prefer the back roads, away from traffic and all my old stomping grounds. My current friends seem to be in similar ways about where they grew up, because, well I suppose we're growing up. Suddenly, whether we dropped out or got degrees, we shifted into adults almost imperceptibly. The few times I've realized the change have been when I'm encountered by someone who hasn't made the shift, and even though I thought like they do as few as two years ago, I find myself shaking my head and not going to 80s night.


The back roads are comforting in their recent familiarity, i.e. driving home drunk from LSU every other night three years ago. I didn't really live with my parents, I only slept there sometimes. I lived in my car, if you're counting by total time spent in a single place. That's where my clothes were, and my razors and my perfume. Most of my belongings.


And when I came home, it would be so dark that I couldn't see the floor-to-ceiling collage of pictures I'd put on my wall in high school. I wanted to forget about the people in them, and the things we'd done in our crappy little town. Why? I don't know why. We weren't lame. We were pretty well liked. We actually were rather close. Then we all went our separate ways, and no one really talked anymore. I'm not mad that they didn't keep in touch, because I didn't either.


The reason I wanted to forget, I think, is because at some point, I began to associate Denham Springs with being trapped.


And I just balled it all together--all the people I'd met there, all the things we'd done, all the signs we'd stolen, and every memory I'd ever made there--and threw it out the car window on my way to Baton Rouge. I did that every day, for years.


When I drove through Denham Springs today for Christmas, I took River Road, which runs through the main part of town. I passed the place where I crashed my first car, which was next to the house where I crawled through my first window, the first time I ever snuck out of my house. It was overwhelming, and warm, like apple cider.


After Christmas at my parents' house, I left around dusk. I decided to go through the city again--I wanted that warm, encompassing feeling that River Road had given me earlier, in the bright light of morning, but I found nothing of the sort.


The sunset would have been beautiful anywhere else, but in Denham Springs, the shadows enveloped every crevasse and alley I'd ever had fun in. Everything I saw had memories attached, but they were dying without the sun; lichens grew on the bricks I had climbed on, a slow slime that prevented any other adventurous teenager from retracing my steps. The streetlights seemed to burn out as I passed, and I had the distinct sensation that I was not welcome. I sped up to reach the interstate in the same car that had driven me to high school. The axles groaned; a car that's been driven by a child can only take the weight of so many memories.


Denham Springs spat me out tonight. And from now on, it probably always will. It is a place for children and parents. I guess I finally don't qualify.


I eased up when I got on I-12, my muscles loosened and I stopped death-gripping the steering wheel. I turned the radio up and lit up a cigarette, watching my single working headlight catch pieces of decaying trash littering the shoulder, all the way to Baton Rouge.

23 December 2009

M.I.A. due to soap

You know, I could stand to be happy with doing just a few things. But somehow, I'm incapable--my interests go all over the place, and as soon as I've so much as thought an idea through, I'm leaping to another. I'd say that "this is the product of a healthy active mind," but it actually just resembles the picky child who quits every hobby before she gets good at it. In my case, before I ever get to the point of using the supplies I buy for it.

Examples: Christmas lights. I bought a bunch of LED lights with my neighbor, since we live in attached apartments, we were going to decorate. This was a week and a half ago, and all I've done is put some grandma knicknacks outside.

#2: this blog. I'm trying to warm up to the idea again, I really am.

I could go on and on with examples, but I forgot most of the other endeavors this year.

There is one interest, though, that has stood for about a year. And it's completely weird that it's stuck. I believe I'm addicted, actually.

I like making soap. Real soap. As in, measure out the oils and pour lye into water and get chemical burns Soap.

Last Christmas, I was short on money and went to Hobby Lobby to find something to make as gifts for everyone. I had no idea what I was looking for. I then came across the "melt-and-pour" soap base bars. This is the cheap and easy way to do it, but I had no idea at the time. I made them all within a few days, and bought more base. Thought about the business opportunities. At some point I realized that I didn't know how to make soap base at all, and I would have to learn if I were to start selling soap at a Farmer's Market or something.

A year went by; I didn't make anymore soap. I thought it was gone like all my other hobbies. Then October came around, and I started to research how to make soap base. It took me approximately 2 months of reading to believe I had a good theoretical grip on the process. About 2 weeks ago, I bought all my materials bit by bit.

Two weeks later, I've spent ~$120 on soap materials. The oils aren't cheap. The scents are SO EXPENSIVE. That's another idea: I need to get into the essential oils business, I'd be a millionaire. My fridge is empty, and everything I own is covered with a thin layer of soap and/or lye. I botched my first batch because I measured everything in fluid ounces instead of weight, including the lye, and once cured, my soap would create rashes on everyone I gave them to. This is a dangerous process!

But four batches later (including 2 crumbled to the point where they're unusable), I have real soap, like people in the 17th century used to make, with no preservatives or harsh chemicals. I know exactly what's in them, ingredient by ingredient, and the respective amounts. I know what oils turn which colors, and that honey caramelizes and turns everything orange (and smells like sugar cookies!).

The only thing I don't understand, and what I might never understand, is how the hell lye water mixes with oil to make soap.

Harsh, caustic drain cleaner + the hardest thing to clean = sanitation. Maybe that's why I stuck with this hobby--it has an inherent mystery of nature that I have learned how to manipulate for the benefit of my species. Soap/sanitation is one of the most important inventions of the human race. I say "invention", but it's really the chemistry of nature that put it there for us to find.

And when it all goes to hell, whether it be zombie-related or nuclear fallout, if I survive, I'll know how to make soap. Without soap, disease and pestilence run rampant.

Ok, so maybe it won't all go to hell and this will just be some silly hobby that I could bypass completely by going to Walgreens, but putting it that way makes me feel important. So shut up.

29 October 2009

It's 2am, I'm driving away, and everything evaporates.

all the secrets I've told tonight, all the secrets I'll never tell

melt into one giant blob

makes it hard to walk upstairs

what's upstairs? some place I call home.

I need some food. I have no money,

I do what my mother taught me

in times of need:

"always have a sack of grits and a carton of eggs"

although I don't remember buying them,

I have them

I remember her warmth and her wisdom but

I don't remember her saying it,

maybe it was just me?

1 cup grits

1 2/3 cup water

some salt, whatever

throw it in the microwave, in that

pyrex bowl I bought at a thrift store

add some salt, to taste

To taste: oh, what a feeling. I can't taste anything right now but oh

that egg, slightly uncooked

poured atop those grits and salt and water

tastes like home

I might be able to forget tonight.

oh, to forget: the enemy of the drunk twenty-something

the girl who needs to remember

might always choose to forget

24 September 2009

How do you learn everything? Is it money weighed in tons? Reading books? Eating mushrooms?

I want to learn everything. I don't want to know everything. Am I doing it wrong?

24 August 2009

17 August 2009

The Best

Best Compilation evar:

1: Simon and Garfunkel - America
2: The Replacements: - Hold My Life
3: REM - Daysleeper
4: Snakes Say Hisss! - We Are Hot
5: The Flaming Lips - Do You Realize?? REMIX
6: Devendra Banhart - Bad Girl
7: Less Than Jake - The Brightest Bulb Has Burned Out
8: Animal Collective - Winter's Love
9: Bon Iver - Skinny Love
10: The Bouncing Souls - The Guest
11: Boards Of Canada - Kid For Today
12: Air - Playground Love
13: Matt Pond PA - It Is Safe
14: Neutral Milk Hotel - Two-headed Boy Part 1
15: Regina Spektor - Us

16 August 2009

Alma Mater

On this brutal Sunday afternoon, I'm missing my nurturing mother. My alma mater.

This is partly due to my hangover. It's funny that a hangover reminds me of LSU. Most of my mornings there were spent in that state, with an iced coffee sweating bullets on my desk while a red-faced, militant German professor bellowed his reasons for hating the department. The coffee took the bulk of his anger while I wondered idly what happened the night before.

After my six years there, it's strange to miss the place, because I never thought I'd have to miss it. Those six years felt like eternity--a pleasant eternity, in which I was a college student and would always be a college student. LSU spit me out in May, and all of a sudden, it was over. I got so comfortable in that desk with my iced coffee. Now I've got to figure out what exactly I learned there.

What am I qualified for? Did I learn anything of value, or was I just hungover all the time? These are questions I'd rather not answer right now, because all I want to do is be forced to wake up at 9:00AM and trudge my dehydrated ass to class, where I can drink iced coffee and wonder what I did last night. Sometimes I wonder why they gave me a degree at all.

Oh, LSU, I'd say you had me at hello, but you never properly introduced yourself. You just kind of cracked the door open a little and I ran inside, and didn't come out for six years. You failed to explain exactly how much $22,000 is, or that my years with you would cost so much. And that's not including all those bar tabs. You didn't tell me that most of my friends would move away after graduation and force me to re-evaluate myself and my ambitions, and what I always said I'd do once I was free from you. I said I'd leave too, over and over and over again.

My head hurts.

07 August 2009

A Nostalgic Essay on Time

From the roof, we could see where we met--in a tiny, colorless classroom fifty yards down and across. It was a math theory class, taught by an old woman who resembled a turtle. I'd thought he was cute. When we introduced ourselves, neither of us could have guessed the stream of events that would span six years after that, or how many of our friends and family would be affected by that moment. No one could have told me that at three in the morning, six years after, that he and I would be sitting on the roof of the old fieldhouse trying to make sense of the fact that if we'd never met, my sister wouldn't have a two-year-old son, and we might have found completely different ways to become adults.

A full moon hung in the sky. The Mississippi Bridge glowed hazy, riddled with late-night travelers and early commuters. Years ago, I had moved to this city from the other direction, and so had he. Sometime soon, I thought, we'll both be leaving this city by way of that bridge. He'll go one way, and I'll go the other, and that might be the end. The network we've built over what feels like most of our lives, even though it's been only six years, will fall to pieces without us. Or maybe so much has happened that it will continue to thrive without us. I don't know which hurts more.

My life has a history of extraordinarily long chapters, and sometimes I leave the book open for too long. That's what happens, you know, when you stick around for too long, testing how much dust and cat hair it can hold before you're forced to turn the page. Pretty soon, your beautiful chapter looks more like your parents' attic, or your grandma's knick-knack shelf--it never changes, and you eventually forget it's there, until a rusty nail gives out and you have a pile of broken ceramic dwarves on your floor.

Or maybe it'll be one of those projects that you think is brilliant at first--the ones that wake you up in the middle of a dream--but you can't finish it, because you don't know enough yet. But when that day comes, you pick up the unfinished chapter, blow off the dust and realize you know how it ends. When you start to write, it doesn't even look like your own handwriting anymore. Then you remember that the person who started it couldn't be the one to finish it. And you smile, because you kind of always knew that.

An old drinking buddy once told me that life can only be lived forward, but can only be understood in reverse. I began to drink more because I thought he'd discovered a way to get drunk enough to time-travel, and that sounded way fun. The fucker always had a drink in his hand, but not because drinking made his life reel backwards. He merely understood what he was saying.

And he never bothered to explain what it meant. I suppose one can't describe the fourth dimension unless you're sitting on the roof of a period in your life, looking down and across at every building you've ever drafted, as every person you've ever affected enters and leaves at different times, and continue to do so long after you stop looking.

And to our left was a wide, wide river, with only one bridge across, and the light glowed hazy. The commuters buzzed by, continuing on to the event horizon. It might have been Port Allen on the other side, but we couldn't tell from there. He threw a handful of rocks off the side of the fieldhouse; they hit the steel awning four stories below us, and each made its own pitch upon impact. Shortly after that, we climbed the stairs back to the ground. I suppose it's there that we belong.

03 August 2009

Barrel-chested and solid-souled, I have decided to "do this".

I'm going to be teaching English as a second language by this time next year.

It's more than enough time for me to save up for either the plane ticket, or the certification that pays for the plane ticket. I'm leaving. If I don't, I hold you--mostly my family and friends--responsible for reminding me what I haven't done. Of course I hold myself responsible, but as you learn in 5 years of peer-editing, one person cannot always see what they're doing wrong.

So: Drew, Annie, Jen, Ant, Ross, Tommy, Josh, Amanda, Mandi; my most esteemed friends and family, I'm counting on you to hold me to this. Rain or shine, unless one of my parents meets an untimely death, one of you needs to tell me to follow my dreams. If I haven't spoken of it by June of next year, remind me. I may have forgotten to follow my dreams, and that is inexcusable.

The doors will open, if I am the one turning the knob. I need out of Louisiana.

31 July 2009

Invisible Toes

This week finds me dancing with my first response from the literary world. I got my first rejection letter.

I know, of course, my work isn't going to be the next big thing tomorrow. I'm not in the least bit sad about this rejection--it almost makes me satisfied that I've sent anything out at all, and someone actually read it. This was my very first step into Big People Adult Land, and first steps usually result in SuperFail anyway. At least there wasn't an entry fee for this one.

I submitted something to thetangledbank and they'll get back to me in October I think. That one was $15. Crossin' fangers.

I've got the title for my next short story, but not much outside of that. "Invisible Toes". Wish me luck.

22 July 2009

Terminal - short short

We passed Southern University, the historically black college in Baton Rouge, with the amazing marching band. I was hungover, my passenger knew it. He was angry, but too passive-aggressive to tell me.

It was a bright, hot, August afternoon. I had to drop him off at the Baton Rouge Metro Airport for his flight back to Connecticut. We'd had an early lunch at Pinetta's--the concept of food horrified my churning stomach so we took it to go.

My mind was elsewhere. He was supposedly my boyfriend at the time, long-distance, but I didn't broadcast it. He wanted to marry me, and steal me away to Connecticut. If I had admitted to myself that we were dating, I would have also had to admit that I had cheated on him four or five times by that point. And I wasn't a cheater, so that was out of the question.

The party I'd been to the night before was not the one he went to. I'd ditched him after work and said I was tired, before I got rowdy drunk elsewhere--a place with less responsibility. We said nothing as I turned down the long entrance to the terminal parking lot. I didn't think to drop him off at the taxi-lane in front--doing so would have saved him the trouble of carrying his luggage all the way from the parking lot. I parked on the top level; I let him carry his bags.

The terminal was speckled with a few travelers, and the coffee shop I'd hoped for was closed. I looked away from the giant windows looking out onto Southern University, the place was too bright for my throbbing head. I looked at him, and he looked ahead. The illuminated Terminal sign reminded me of a cancer ward in a hospital.

He hugged me, hard, and I tried to give him one of those hugs that tells a person without a doubt that they are loved and will be missed--one of those reserved for family members and people in love.

I didn't have it in me. He left the lobby early.

I stayed there for a while, long after his flight had been scheduled for departure. I bought a newspaper and tried to do the crossword, but my headache prevented me from thinking too hard. I don't know why I felt like lingering when my hangover kept reminding me that I should have slept in.

• When I left the lobby, his plane was probably landing in Chicago for a flight change. I'd always wanted to go to Chicago. I could have gone with him, and he would have paid any last-minute fees if I'd only asked. But I had a headache, and all I wanted to do was go home and sleep, and dream of that hug I wanted to give him--that one that tells a person without a doubt that they are loved and will be missed, reserved for family members and people in love.

19 July 2009

Cigarettes

I didn't quit smoking.

Cigarette breaks--the allure of many a non-smoker--brought me back.

Smokers: Tell me you've had those breaks. The ones that happen outside of parties and gatherings, when a new type of conversation emerges and everyone is so engaged they don't want to go back in. Those when you end up smoking your lucky to the last nasty filtered drag, and still hang around outside hoping someone will give you another.

Of course, you wake up and your mouth tastes like ass-ash, but it was worth that awesome conversation. I've met some of my best friends on smoke breaks.

So what is it about smoke breaks? To me, they're exceptionally good times that just happen to involve cigarettes. Cigarettes aren't exactly necessary; they're just the excuse to get out of the clogged interior.

The Joys of the Workforce

Last night at my place of employment--let's call it "Pino's"--I was reminded that I needed to make a post about the joys of waiting tables.

Pino's is a little European restaurant by the garden district of Baton Rouge. Established in 1963, this place is one of the older dining institutions still in business; others were run off by chains like Chili's and DeAngelo's. The majority of our customers are people who have been eating at Pino's since the sixties.

Last night, a lady came in with her boyfriend. I immediately recognized her as the woman who came in by herself two years ago to booze up and have an eggplant parmigiana. On that occasion, she got so drunk that she proceeded to talk to me for an hour about how wonderful the South Beach Diet was. I even tried to sit at the table next to her to fold napkins with my co-worker--she kept talking, leaning over so she could see me around the corner. By the time she left, she had been keeping us there past closing time for two hours, because of the goddamn South Beach Diet.

The serious issue here is that I do not understand how anyone could think--drunk or not--that their server, at most a brief acquaintance, would be interested in the intricacies of the South Beach Diet for over an hour. When that starts happening, I start wishing I were a therapist so I could charge $50 an hour. Pay me $50 and I will listen with the greatest of attention.

But she didn't tip me $50. She tipped $7. SEVEN.

Another hilarity struck me last night as well. I had a four-top of sophisticated-looking adults, who were rather wonderful people. It was probably the best table I had all night. Teh Funny happened when I handed them the check. The two CEO-looking husbands each grabbed a side of the payment book and started pulling.
"No, it's MY treat!"
"I assure you, it's mine."
Their wives looked on in amusement. I ran away so I could giggle. The guy I thought would tip the best ended up winning the battle, and he did tip well.

We servers always have a designated person to whom we give the bill to, because we've already judged each and every one of you and decided who is most likely to tip 20%. I guess you could call it being judgmental or greedy, but the gratuity industry is, indeed, a business. It's how we pay rent. You get up at 6AM to crunch numbers or file papers; I get up at noon and lay around until 4 and make money from your excess income. Sometimes this makes me feel like a big cheat, every shift for a year after I first started waiting.

Four years later, I rarely feel like I'm cheating people. I think we get defensive sometimes when people treat us like shit--we run our asses off with no health insurance or 401K, and if we happen to break our leg, we're fucked out of a job and stuck with an insane hospital bill. So I've come to believe that my time is worth just as much as the CEOs I wait on, and I have absolutely no trouble living with myself when I auto-gratuity a big table and they tip on top. Their mistake, right? Technically that's wrong to try for, and I'm glad to say I never take steps to hide the gratuity (I've seen people do it before), but a server's situation is precarious. We're employed in a risky, Stazi-like business.

We get defensive about our worth because deep, deep down, we know we have a long way to go before we're CEOs. We might never ascend to some of our customers' financial levels. Having to wonder whether you'll make rent every month solely on other peoples' generosity gives one a complex. It makes us more ambitious, and at the same time a little defeated every time we only make 20% of your enormous pleasure expense, because we know we couldn't drop that much money in one night at a restaurant.

So we think, "I can make more, more more here," we get greedy, judgmental. Restaurant Samsara develops in the best of us. Caught in that cycle of cash every night, bar tabs, huge tips and living beyond our means because we want to be able to drop $200 in one place. But we can't. And every time the white-collars and soccer moms come in, no matter how much we despise them and their lifestyles, we're faced with the reality that their lives are so much more comfortable than ours.

And we're busting our asses to make it that way.

17 July 2009

Morning

Back to seriosity. I write stuff. Rarely poetry, but this time I did.

WHAT HAPPENED

if I still had all the pictures on her wall
I could reassemble the order they hung
a collage of
what happened
in the hours she lay on her bed
staring, loving, reminding her self
she still exists
now, up in my closet somewhere
in decorated shoeboxes is
what happened

love notes, dead flowers and candy wrappers
junk that looks like trash
old bottles of perfume she stole from
her mother with one single
drop
left
at
the
Bottom

and I’d prefer not to think about her end or
the point that she left and I began, I
don’t remember when

even if I did
that last drop would never come out

13 July 2009

About an hour ago, I remembered that I had a cache of writing uploaded to my LSU file space--wittily named FilesToGeaux--and I found my ridiculous attempts at poetry under the gentle care of Professor Andrei Codrescu. Check this out.

A Dialogue Concerning Why Prayers Are Never Answered

God,
Where is the mercy
in having faith
in my lover's bed, lying
drunk with my eyes gutted,
bits of me scattered atop
the residue of the other girls
hiding on his sheets?
Your Child,
Christie

Child,
I’m a big fan of irony.
Suck it up, kiddo, I rule the universe.
God

BWAHAHA

Fumigation '09

I just finished reformatting my week-old laptop. Why, you ask?

Because I made the unfortunate mistake of letting my boyfriend download Bruno via BitTorrent. The file included one (1) protected WMV copy of Bruno and bazillion (3424879823749) Malware/spyware/trojans.

Instead of making chili relleno as planned, I sat for four hours trying to track those aggressive little shits down. I've had various spyware/malware before, but this was different. In addition to redirecting my search results to insurance websites, this shit hid out in the temp folder and fucked with my registry. I McAffee'd in vain--nothing was found after an excruciatingly long scan. Letting it sit overnight was the worst idea ever--I woke up and could not boot Vista due to the BSoD.

Bruno isn't worth that mess. Since I only had one week's worth of ripped CDs, free programs and configurations, at the end of four hours it became easier to say "fuck it" and fumigate my lappy.

Then I made tacos, and Tommy and Flobes rejoiced.

The End

11 July 2009

Ticket to Ride

Throughout my life, probably a bazillion times, I've thought I should have been born when my mother was. Not because I wanted to grow up with my mother, but to grow up in the 1970s. A month ago, I decided my dream was to be a flight attendant. I told my mother, and she told me it was her own dream 25 years ago. In the 70s, being a flight attendant was glamorous, and it came with a certain badge of attitude and independence for a woman.

Of course, nowadays, men can also be attendants and there aren't as many weight/appearance restrictions. Yet if I walk into a room full of lawyers tomorrow and they ask me what I do, and I say "I'm a flight attendant", everyone will pounce on me with amorous eyes and interested questions, because the occupation still carries that mysterious allure of the 1970s. It's what every awesome woman wanted to become, and who every man wanted to hook up with. An all-American geisha (not a prostitute, go look it up).

Upon this fabulous realization that I wanted to become a flight attendant, I began vigorously researching the road to my destination. Do you just apply? Where's the best place to put your foot in the door?

I found all sorts of advice, and absolutely no job openings. I think this is why flight attendants are historically mysterious--it's so goddamn hard to even get the job, and if you do, there's a waiting period of at least a year before you get more than one flight a month; you're basically a fill-in for sick or injured employees.

I still want to be a flight attendant. It's the perfect job--get paid for traveling, and it's normal to have another job or profession outside of your 3-4 flights a month. And free flights anywhere in space available, when you're not on board as cabin crew. This is my dream.

They've always told me I had my head in the clouds. I might as well get paid for it.

10 July 2009

Tiddlywinks

As promised, here is tiddlywinks.






I didn't write the Great American Novel yet today, but I have a fragment of a story. Well, one page. I tried really hard to finish it, but Tommy kept making sad faces and my cat (Flowbie) began to nom my face after a bit. Good ole' Flobes. Flobe.





a Flowbee in her natural habitat

09 July 2009

Five

Five cigarettes today. Not so bad compared to yesterday's 30, and it's already 6:35pm.

I had a really great idea after I wrote at 4am last night-- I'm going to buy a large box of straws, trim them all down so that 20 fit in an empty box of cigarettes, and when I want a cigarette, I'll take out one of the mini-straws and chew on it.

Actually that sounds kind of nasty, especially if I do it in public. Spit strings are sick. I suppose 4am only feels really significant and meaningful at 4am. Sobriety is overrated.

To get my mind off of smoking, I decided I'd clean my kitchen. As in, hands-and-knees-with-a-toothbrush clean my kitchen. It was relatively clean before this, dishes done, etc. but I wanted to get the baseboards, the greasy crud on the wall by the stove, the dust that covers my empty wine bottle collection. I'm not domestic or anything.

I make my pine-sol solution and dump out the cups that catch my leaky faucet water, scrub the shit off the countertop... and then I look at my wine bottles, catching the sunset in my window with different colors. My favorite is the blue one. See the picture--it's a Bawls energy drink bottle. Then I decide to make a soap container out of it, to put hand soap in. So I do that, and then I decide I want to change out some of the bottles on the windowsill to different colored ones, to catch the sun better.

All in all, I spent two hours in the kitchen, filling up clear bottles with sanitizer water and food coloring. Some now have glittery things in them. The only thing I managed to clean was the tiny spot behind the sink, and I messed up the kitchen with the dye. The baseboards still have cat hair and crud on them, and the grease by the stove continues to fester.

This is why I can't get anything done.

Might have a lil' story or some lil' tiddlywinks to post later.

I'm not really sending it back.

I've come to the conclusion that laptops with wireless cards do several things to a bored, drunken individual.
  1. Sobriety - I can't seem to stop stumbling the blogosphere long enough to get up and make a drink.
  2. Insomnia - Going to sleep without the aid of a glass of wine is not as easy as I remember it.
  3. Very Clear Thoughts - I've done it again. I'm awake after sleeping for an hour, it's four AM, and immediately upon consciousness I decide I need to quit smoking. Not just an "edging towards quitting" or "I'll finish this pack", but an I'm quitting now. It was as if everything negative I've ever known or been told about smoking finally culminated in the instant I woke up, and it sounded like sick whales and starving children screaming, "THIS WILL KILL YOU." And this all leads up to
  4. Becoming Re-Acquainted with the Beauty of Living. After my body told me I will quit smoking, it proceeded to fill my head with images of how much fun it would be to paint my apartment with a snazzy color scheme, and re-tile my linoleum kitchen with black and white checkered ceramic. Maybe possibly build some furniture out of old crap I find in people's garbage [why do other people always throw away shit you think is really neat?].
So basically laptops with wireless cards make your brain into a really complex StumbleUpon button with some serious potential for crapping all over your daily routine. I'm totally sending it back. Tomorrow's 4AM might have me writing the Great American Novel at age 23 and becoming Nobel Laureate for climate change prevention or something really lame like that. It's gotta go.


But seriously, let's see how well I can quit.

08 July 2009

Clarity?

Have you ever woken from dreamless sleep at four in the morning to have a thought so rational about your own life that it prevents further sleeping?

That happened to me this morning. The thought itself was nothing life-changing, and not very important in the long run, yet it was something I failed to notice for years. I realized why a relatively obscure acquaintance five years in my past never became my friend.

We got along very well, we had enough in common to build a lifelong friendship, I think. There's no real reason why, after meeting her, we never connected again. At least, I didn't think there was a reason.

I got way drunk at her friend's house, and I didn't black out or anything, but I remember it being a wonderful apartment. And then, I remember smoking a clove inside (this was before I became a chain-smoker). And then she and her friend left me and my friend for a little while, I don't remember why.

I smoked in her friend's apartment and got all Louisiana-drunk on their outside-of-Louisiana drinking rules. I swear, drinking is not the same outside of Louisiana. Cultural differences.

...I guess I can go ahead and say that LA is a state of drunks. We might be on par with Russia. Anywhere else, they'd put me and most people I know in a program or something.

And at that point in my past, I was very much a lush.

She and her friend probably left because I was acting an ass and filling the living room with clove smoke, which, as I've noticed lately, can be the most annoying thing on the planet to share a room with. Later, we all went to this IHOP-type place for some food, and I vaguely remember saying to the server in a loud voice, "I'M DRUNK, I'M SORRY YOU HAVE TO BE HERE" (it was 2am on New Year's Day). Jesus Christ. She probably ate my food and crapped it back out on the plate before handing it to me.

It seriously never occurred to me that we're not friends because of that. And usually when I wake up, I'm groggy and my dreams stay with me for a second, and I don't really think about anything clearly. So to wake up and think about a single obscure night five years ago and the consequences of my actions was a bit irregular.

07 July 2009

Generation WTF

Hello!

I'm a resident of Baton Rouge, in the swampy state of Louisiana, which is still operating partly under the Napoleonic Code. In May, I completed my BA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing and a minor in History.

I woke up today and I realized that July is here, and I am still waiting tables. Something feels wrong. I had big dreams! I wanted to travel the world and revolutionize the print industry, write bestsellers with little effort, and give commencement speeches and whatnot. Instead, I'm refilling iced tea with specified amounts of ice and serving dressing on the side.

What's more depressing is that many of my friends from my graduating class are in the same boat: scanning through Craigslist scams and hoping for the best.

Now, it very well could be that my major is composed of lazy, pretentious faux-writers, and the ones who aren't, aren't my friends. It's definitely within the realm of possibilities. Yet, I've known these people for six years now, and the lot of them aren't lazy. In fact, there's a high level of talent in the Creative Writing program at LSU.

I'd like to talk about my generation a little bit, comparatively.

The baby boomers were cautious Spock children who quickly learned the order of things after the 1960s: without much protest, most of them cut their hair, stopped dropping out and started blending in. I suppose the large-scale disruptions of the 60s allowed many of these delinquents to get all the unrest out of their systems in one decade. How lucky they were.

Their children composed Generation X--the question mark of an equation that hadn't yet been composed--were expected to be the laziest of the lazy. Their Spock-raised, ex-hippy parents had decided that Spock was a damaging approach to parenting, and they noticed their kids listening to music that seemed to have no soul or cause. What interests me about Gen-X is that they grew up in a time without a cause. No clear social injustice, no world war. A little touch of recession here and there, but nothing major that would influence an American teenager. Those kids went to college and lots of them caught the dot-com wave, buying up domain names and learning HTML and programming languages. This generation had the perfect storm of technological advancements and solid parenting, and if one had a degree in Computer Science, they were a shoe-in for a high-paying job right out of college, regardless of if they caught the dot-com bubble while it was growing.

The wildly successful of Gen-X didn't have to cut their hair, yet so many of them did when it came time to sell their websites to huge corporations. I imagine it was quite a shock to their parents to see their children making bank with a machine filled with zeroes and ones, that was only beginning to advance at the time of their birth. The rift between ex-hippies and Gen-X gets bigger every year. The values held by the Age of Aquarius aren't relevant anymore, it seems. America never has been a country for old men. Spock's cold shoulder still chills my grandmother, to the point where she and I cannot relate, on any level. I suppose I can't expect her to; she braved a World War and the biggest economic downturn the United States had ever seen. It's given her an undiminishing optimism that totally escapes me. It's easy to understand though--she's been through it all, and it was so much worse. At least they had the Cleaver family to look up to.

And that leaves us: Generation WTF.

As I hold my shiny new English degree, I wonder where our generation's Cleaver family is. Can they be found in the Osbournes? On Newlyweds? In a brave new world of mixed signals, we have no shining, solid example. It took me six years to figure out that I wanted an English degree, and it happened as I was walking across the stage at LSU's PMAC. Now the student loan bills are coming in, and I'm still waiting tables (which, by the way, destroys even the most holy of souls). Why did it take me so long to decide? Am I lazy?

These are my skills: I can manage money, I can write a short story, I can chain smoke, I can BS a paper that fooled my Harvard-taught, Medieval specialist Chaucer professor. I can make a deadline, I can sort of speak German, and I can beat anyone at Solitaire. Even though my loan bills amount to $22,131.70, I may as well have spent six years banging my head against some bricks. I have no idea what I'm going to do.

However, I do know what I don't want to do: Sit in cubicle. Watch the clock. Anything involving more than simple math is out of the question. Eight to five. Early nights and/or mornings. Teaching--those kids are getting smarter and more stupid by the hour.

And my parents--thank God they didn't foot my college bills--do all of those things, every day. At first glance I'd point at laziness. I wish it were that simple.

I'm not lazy. I work my ass off, and I still find time to write, clean, grocery shop, mop, and do laundry at the ghetto laundromat on Government Street. I even clean my A.C. filter once a month.

I meet up with my college friends often--some of them wait tables with me--and none of us can find a nice, parent-approved job with our fancy English degrees. We're still writing, but no one is publishing.

What has happened? The dot-com bubble has burst, and I only know qBasic and a little VB, if that ever mattered. There are no more frontiers to front in that area. For some reason, I always thought I'd become an AP journalist, but the print news industry has one foot in the glue factory. The internet is lovely, and I've been addicted to it since seventh grade, but every ad I've answered on Craigslist is a scam--even the ones I didn't want to apply to.

I am one of thousands, millions of a BA-holding generation who was told to go to college; and that's all. In a recession, the jobs are down, pressure is up, and our parents are perpetually disappointed in their crotchfruit because a degree actually meant something in the 60s. A degree means nothing in a jobless job market. There was the Great Depression--before national schism was ever thought of, then the great counter culture of the 60s and 70s, followed by Google and eBay and Yahoo. We're the follow-ups. WTF.

Our first instinct is to blame someone, but there's no one to blame. Even if we could blame the dot-com entrepreneurs, what are we going to do? Sue them? For writing the paths to their own success? Hardly.

All blames and politics set aside, these are our times, fellow Gen-WTFuckers. This is what we've been given. We're used to being given things, but we've graduated college in the middle of an economic nervous breakdown. We can't reinvent Google, and although the urge is great, we can't sign up for welfare. We're educated; let's not forget that. We're not satisfied with the cubicles of our parents, or our cousins' search engines. We have to invent a whole new flavor of Kool-aid and stop waiting around for someone to pay us to keep making that gross yellow kind.

We're not different, we're not special. No one's going to call us that right out of college, no matter how much it cost us. I'm not being idealistic here, but we can be different and special. We just have to get off our asses and start thinking first. Maybe we haven't because no one told us we'd have to figure this out after college. It's a horrible excuse.

That's why I'm here. I'm finished with waiting for someone to hire me to perform a job that I'll hate every day of my life. And I hope you're reading this because you're finished with it too.