I'm generally an entertainment snob. Sure, there are the occasional Adam Sandler movies (Billy Madison is freaking brilliant) and funny voices and midget wrestling that appeal to my basest need to giggle, but for the most part, I'm fairly discerning. Smitty refers to it somewhat like this: "Oh, it wasn't nominated for an Oscar? Then Emily won't watch it," which is not really fair, I'm not that snobby, but you get the idea. Brief sidebar: How excited am I about the new "Planet of the Apes" movie? James Franco AND monkeys bent on destroying the world, but only because the world deserves it...it's like Hollywood created a movie based on a focus group of me. Add in Yoda voices, Al Gore as the President and the utter annihilation of anyone named Kardashian, Lohan, and Rush Limbaugh, and it's heaven on earth.
Nonetheless, with all this taste of mine, lately I've been glued to TruTV's reality shows like "Hardcore Pawn," "South Beach Towing," and "Repo Games." I partially blame this on the utter lack of good summer TV and for God's sake, don't tell me to read or enrich my life. I read a lot, and I'm enriched adequately. Trust me. All of these shows are visual showcases of human misery, and I am somewhat ashamed for watching them, but I am unable to stop.
If you're not familiar, basically they all represent rock bottom in some form or another. I saw a guy trying to pawn/sell a penis ring (who would want that, I ask), a woman who sold jewelry to replace the money she was given for bills that she lost gambling, only to go gambling again, a woman who left her poor dog in an illegally parked vehicle inside a duffel bag for TWO hours and then was stunned she couldn't get him back, rival tow truck drivers engage in fisticuffs....do you get the idea? It's horrible; I wish these shows didn't exist, so I wouldn't be drawn to them, but they do...and I am..
I look at it like this:
A. I feel much, much better about my station in life when I see this behavior.
B. In the current economy, as outlandish as some of this behavior is, we can all somewhat relate (except to the dog woman, she should be locked in a car with a bag thrown over her for two hours in the Miami heat).
C. It's just plain entertaining to witness others engage publicly in ways we would never, ever imagine actually doing, but have perhaps envisioned in a Walter Mitty-esque kind of way.
and
D. Some people just act like complete ass clowns when money comes into play. I adore money, but I'm not going to yell expletives at someone because they don't want to buy the earrings I bought at Claire's Accessories for $100. It's just common sense.
My 34th birthday looms like the guy in "The Crow," which I watched part of last night, which is not a movie I would recommend watching before bedtime. I guess when it came out, I was in high school, and it was very cool to be deep and tortured, but that movie is seriously depressing..but has an excellent soundtrack. Thirty-four...my parents had two kids by the time they were 34, not realizing that the best was yet to come..(ME). I don't feel 34, I don't think I look 34, but damn...34..I feel the need to adopt some Malawian puppies or live in India for 6 months or maybe just clean my car out and dye my hair. All of those things currently sound exhausting.
I have arthritis in my finger? Yesterday, I cut off my Barbie's hair and colored it with a Magic Marker.
Nightly I think about losing my remaining parent or my love having a cardiac arrest in his sleep, and I drift away to dream of recess and tennis matches and the time I was the Queen of Hearts in a parade.
I won a spelling bee and now can barely remember you have to be desperate to 'pe(e)' to remember the difference between words, and speaking of 'pe(e), I have to interrupt what used to be a constant slumber to assault my eyes with pre-dawn fluorescent light and curse the existence of soda and tea.
But my skin is clear and elastic; when I pinch my hand, it snaps back like a rubber band, not like my grandfather's used to gather and take its time to return to its position atop the bones. I can't be old. I can still stand on my head for five minutes straight. I'll show you if you want to see.
-- me, 2011
Friday, July 22, 2011
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Where the day takes you
As I was driving through Birmingham today, or as I like to call it, the Seattle of the South, on the 14th day of afternoon torrential downpours, I started giggling. I think I have a rare form of ADD, not one that requires medication or anything, but the kind that causes random songs to come into my head and therefore, out loud, and produce the most random thoughts possible.
I used to work at a newspaper; I worked there in total about 5 years, actually, and sometimes I miss it a lot. If you've never worked in news, either at a paper or a radio/TV station, it's not something I can explain. You work constantly, as the news never stops, you develop a camaraderie with some people and an intense annoyance and dislike for others (they know who they are). You also get silly a lot.
We used to constantly make fun of another local paper that apparently had illiterate 5-year-olds writing stories and editing copy. You could get wasted playing a drinking game if you drank every time a word was misspelled or there was a grammatical error, and the stories were almost all cheesy human interest with a handful of actual news stories.
What made me laugh this afternoon was this: We were reading over that paper's latest gem, a story about an old house that had been restored, but the lede (for non-news folks, the beginning sentence of the story) was "If this house had a face, it would be smiling from ear to ear." Seriously, that was the lede. What ensued was the following:
"If houses had faces and mouths, they'd say 'why did you paint me this color'?"
"If houses had faces, the house eats you when you enter."
"If you see faces on houses, you've got issues."
"If houses had faces, this one looks like Picasso created it."
You get the idea. There were more, but they either weren't as funny, or I just plain can't remember, but it made me laugh because even parts of that job were cruel and unusual punishment, parts of it were awesome, and I laughed and had more "work friends" than any other job I've ever had.
There was the day I proofread a story about an escaped criminal and the headline read "Convict on the lamb" with no hint of irony until I returned it to the writer with a picture of a lamb taped to the bottom of the mug shot we had. I had to have an ethical conversation with an employee who didn't want her divorce printed as part of legal information about how we didn't get to omit our embarrassing information and print everyone else's, and somebody removed her divorce listing anyway, and I made sure it was included in the next week's paper...can't imagine why she and I were never close...good times.
On a final note, through recent experience, I've discovered that "sexy talk" and the art of seduction should probably not involve two things I may or may not have done recently:
1. Compared one's self to "the kid from 'Mask,'" to refresh your memory, the '80s movie with Eric Stoltz based on the kid who had lionitis, the disease that made his head enormous and the bones in his face all mixed about...
2. Laughing so hard that you either spit....or snort....I'm told this is not sexy.
"The world is full of willing people, some willing to work, the rest willing to let them."
Robert Frost
I used to work at a newspaper; I worked there in total about 5 years, actually, and sometimes I miss it a lot. If you've never worked in news, either at a paper or a radio/TV station, it's not something I can explain. You work constantly, as the news never stops, you develop a camaraderie with some people and an intense annoyance and dislike for others (they know who they are). You also get silly a lot.
We used to constantly make fun of another local paper that apparently had illiterate 5-year-olds writing stories and editing copy. You could get wasted playing a drinking game if you drank every time a word was misspelled or there was a grammatical error, and the stories were almost all cheesy human interest with a handful of actual news stories.
What made me laugh this afternoon was this: We were reading over that paper's latest gem, a story about an old house that had been restored, but the lede (for non-news folks, the beginning sentence of the story) was "If this house had a face, it would be smiling from ear to ear." Seriously, that was the lede. What ensued was the following:
"If houses had faces and mouths, they'd say 'why did you paint me this color'?"
"If houses had faces, the house eats you when you enter."
"If you see faces on houses, you've got issues."
"If houses had faces, this one looks like Picasso created it."
You get the idea. There were more, but they either weren't as funny, or I just plain can't remember, but it made me laugh because even parts of that job were cruel and unusual punishment, parts of it were awesome, and I laughed and had more "work friends" than any other job I've ever had.
There was the day I proofread a story about an escaped criminal and the headline read "Convict on the lamb" with no hint of irony until I returned it to the writer with a picture of a lamb taped to the bottom of the mug shot we had. I had to have an ethical conversation with an employee who didn't want her divorce printed as part of legal information about how we didn't get to omit our embarrassing information and print everyone else's, and somebody removed her divorce listing anyway, and I made sure it was included in the next week's paper...can't imagine why she and I were never close...good times.
On a final note, through recent experience, I've discovered that "sexy talk" and the art of seduction should probably not involve two things I may or may not have done recently:
1. Compared one's self to "the kid from 'Mask,'" to refresh your memory, the '80s movie with Eric Stoltz based on the kid who had lionitis, the disease that made his head enormous and the bones in his face all mixed about...
2. Laughing so hard that you either spit....or snort....I'm told this is not sexy.
"The world is full of willing people, some willing to work, the rest willing to let them."
Robert Frost
Thursday, July 07, 2011
Is that all there is?
As I write this, I'm looking at my feet and the fact that, a. I need to repaint my toenails, and b. I've worn my Croc sandals every day for a week because I'm too lazy to search for other footwear early in the morning. Funnily enough, those two details embody my whole mood lately...what's the freaking point?
I feel I've been gypped somehow (by the way, is 'gypped' a racist slur toward Gypsies?). I should be more exciting and fabulous than I am on a daily basis. Don't get me wrong, I'm still pretty fabulous, but I think when I envisioned my 30-something life, it involved fame, a butler, and a car not made out of recycled bottles. Also, I pictured a better wardrobe, although part of that is my laziness and apathy toward being in shape. I want to be in shape, I just don't want to actually do anything to meet that goal.
Someone told me recently that if I worked out a lot, I wouldn't be sick all the time. That may be, I don't know, I don't see how working out would cure my allergies, but that's also like saying if I ate only salad with oil and vinegar every day, I'd lose weight. Yes, that's true, but I would also be working out and only eating salad. When people say things like that to me, I hear my dad's voice, chiming in with my inner one, saying, "Why the hell would I want to do that?"
I don't know, I feel as though growing up, I was promised some sort of exciting life if I did the things one does to get to adulthood....like there's a secret maturity prize no one can tell you about, (I speculated it would be a monkey or a pirate vacation) everyone gets it once they settle down, get married, etc...Let me clarify, this has nothing to do with any level of unhappiness in my marriage, but just in general, real life is pretty boring...dishes, what's-for-dinner, did-you-get-gas, it just goes on and on until one of you dies..or kills the other one..or until you have kids and then it's a different set of monotonous, mundane issues...
Maybe I wasn't inherently promised anything; maybe I misread the signs. Possibly due to an overblown extroversion and sense of entitlement as the youngest child, I expected impossible things. I thought by now, I'd be a well-known author, or a beloved, bad-ass English professor, or in a lesser plausible scenario, the wildly red-haired lead singer of an upstart indie band, sweeping college towns with a wardrobe of gauzy peasant shirts and a following of well-read, intelligent fans.
Alas, I answer phones for a living, the last thing I had published beyond this blog was probably in 2005, I watch episodes of "Monk" every night to lull me to sleep, if there are 30 credits required for a master's in English, I lack 28 of them, and I not only own, but wear a Snuggie when I am cold. Fifteen-year-old me would beat 33-year-old me to a bloody pulp.
-- me, 2011
I feel I've been gypped somehow (by the way, is 'gypped' a racist slur toward Gypsies?). I should be more exciting and fabulous than I am on a daily basis. Don't get me wrong, I'm still pretty fabulous, but I think when I envisioned my 30-something life, it involved fame, a butler, and a car not made out of recycled bottles. Also, I pictured a better wardrobe, although part of that is my laziness and apathy toward being in shape. I want to be in shape, I just don't want to actually do anything to meet that goal.
Someone told me recently that if I worked out a lot, I wouldn't be sick all the time. That may be, I don't know, I don't see how working out would cure my allergies, but that's also like saying if I ate only salad with oil and vinegar every day, I'd lose weight. Yes, that's true, but I would also be working out and only eating salad. When people say things like that to me, I hear my dad's voice, chiming in with my inner one, saying, "Why the hell would I want to do that?"
I don't know, I feel as though growing up, I was promised some sort of exciting life if I did the things one does to get to adulthood....like there's a secret maturity prize no one can tell you about, (I speculated it would be a monkey or a pirate vacation) everyone gets it once they settle down, get married, etc...Let me clarify, this has nothing to do with any level of unhappiness in my marriage, but just in general, real life is pretty boring...dishes, what's-for-dinner, did-you-get-gas, it just goes on and on until one of you dies..or kills the other one..or until you have kids and then it's a different set of monotonous, mundane issues...
Maybe I wasn't inherently promised anything; maybe I misread the signs. Possibly due to an overblown extroversion and sense of entitlement as the youngest child, I expected impossible things. I thought by now, I'd be a well-known author, or a beloved, bad-ass English professor, or in a lesser plausible scenario, the wildly red-haired lead singer of an upstart indie band, sweeping college towns with a wardrobe of gauzy peasant shirts and a following of well-read, intelligent fans.
Alas, I answer phones for a living, the last thing I had published beyond this blog was probably in 2005, I watch episodes of "Monk" every night to lull me to sleep, if there are 30 credits required for a master's in English, I lack 28 of them, and I not only own, but wear a Snuggie when I am cold. Fifteen-year-old me would beat 33-year-old me to a bloody pulp.
Can you miss a life you haven't lived? Is there a version of you, living another existence, wishing for the life you have? When it rains and that feeling to which you cannot put a name emerges, is that a life not lived, is it regret or a dream that disappeared before consciousness? Or is it something else?
I woke up, drenched, in the middle of the night, and I forgot where I was. The smells were familiar, but a fear gripped and paralyzed me until I heard your breathing ebb and flow and coax me back to sleep. I once was lulled back to sleep with mechanics and traffic and the sounds of street yelling bouncing off the tops of cars and settling into the night, along with me.
No one can raise a family in the city, but they do, I swear, I've seen the curt, assured visages of those who grew up in the city, but they're scared, too.
We all are.
You can't change anyone; change is inevitable; fear change, but don't fear fear for fear's sake.
What the hell are people talking about anymore? I don't know. I can't think with all this noise and uncertainty. Let's go to sleep.
-- me, 2011
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