What About Beppy?

Wow, three months.  Am I really still paying for this domain?  I actually started doing private entries in my lj again (lulz).  Thought just writing something would get my creative juices flowing and I could start writing something else.  Not working.  Thinking about joining a band.  I posted this craigslist ad yesterday:

How many female vocalist available ads are on here every day? Let me tell you why I stand out.

Listen: I’m in a rut. I have a worthless B.A. in English and I’m a fucking administrative assistant. I turn 25 in 2 weeks and I have nothing to show for it. I try to come up with something that will make me satisfied and I keep coming up short. And this morning I just thought to myself, “Beppy, what do you *want* for *you*? When are you the happiest?” And I realized that it’s when I’m up on stage doing karaoke, getting that rush. That’s what I need. But karaoke isn’t enough anymore; I want to be in a band.

I love the classics and I LOVE to sing Queen and David Bowie, but I’ll do whatever you need. I’m at work right now, but I’ll get an audition video on youtube when I get home. I lettered in vocal music in high school and received several awards. I know this isn’t exactly something I can put on a résumé, but my friends and acquaintances are always telling me that I need to go on American Idol or America’s Got Talent, etc. I’m taking guitar lessons and I can do your basic chords if you need that. I’ve also been told I’m pretty, if that counts for anything.

So shoot me an e-mail - take a chance on a girl who needs a change.

-Beppy

I honestly didn’t think I’d get any responses.  I got over a dozen.  One guy actually sent me three emails in a row saying we could work something out if I’d watch my language (because I said “I’m a fucking administrative assistant”).  The second one said, “Why would some one as education use such language if can at like a lady we are interested in talent.”  Wait, what?  Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?  Whatever.  Point is, yea, I dropped an f bomb in the ad.  Did it to weed out the squares, pal.  I’m not gonna censor myself.  Fuck.  You.

Good news is I’m emailing back and forth with a guy who actually sounds like we could start an interesting project.  So maybe I’ll have something to keep me going and not feel totally worthless.  That and this farm Steve wants to start.  Oh yea, we’re starting a farm.

My moleskine is back!  So here, as promised, is the ass post:

2/1/08

So I bought this dress in Colorado last weekend.  I don’t typically wear dresses.  My default uniform is skirts at work, jeans on the weekends.  And those skirts are never higher than my knees.  This dress was a dramatic break in routine for me.  It’s hemmed just below that crease where my ass meets my legs.  I’m 22 and I’ve never owned such a high cut piece of clothing.  As a teenager, when my parents would yell at me to get back in my room and change, I wasn’t leaving the house like that, it was always because of cleavage and midriff issues.  I always hated my butt and never ventured into short skirt territory.

Wait, I take that back.  When I was 17 I went to the mall to put together a red and white outfit for the White Stripes concert and I saw this really cute red pleated skirt with these punk rock metal clasps.  I think I was so drawn to it because I had just finished 4 years of wearing a dowdy gray wool pleated skirt, and this red one was like my uniform’s bad girl cousin.  So I go to try it on and it’s really hot and I love it - except it’s really high.  Really, really high.  But I say, “fuck it, I can pull this off.”  So the day of the concert comes and I’ve got the skirt with my white low cut tank top and my red sneakers and my hair in pigtails and my fire engine red lipstick, and guys, I’m lookin’ skanktastic.  But the skirt - I felt like there was so much ass hanging out of it.  I just couldn’t do it.  But I didn’t have anything else red or white.  So I put on little white shorts underneath the skirt.  And I looked kind of retarded.

This shorts under the skirt thing was something my classmates and I did all through high school.  It was cold, the skirts were itchy by themselves, and we didn’t want to have to worry about sitting like ladies.  I was terrible about this - about the whole manners thing in general, really.  I come from not an obscenely rich, but an at least relatively well off family, but I carry myself like total white trash.  I don’t know how this happened.  My parents were constantly reprimanding me for my posture, my eating habits, and my general unladylikeness.  My mother would say that someday I would be on a date with a man and he would be so disgusted with my table manners that he would never call me again.  But somehow, it never sunk in.  This means, among other things, that I never trained myself to wear a short skirt or dress without constantly showing everyone my goods.  Maybe it’s a generational thing - I’ve seen way more celebrity poon than I ever needed to.

Anyway, point is, I’m not good with little skirts.  But I tried this one on and I looked so hot and I said to myself, “Beppy, you only have a few more years that this skirt length will even be appropriate.  Why not make the most of them?”  Plus it was 50% off an already good d eal.  So I bought it.  Still too cautious to go completely bare legged, I bought some tights to go with them, but those are a far cry from the boxer shorts I wore under my uniform.  I knew Steve would love it - he was always saying I should wear little dresses more often (as in ever) so I decided I would wear it the next day when I went home.  What I didn’t take into account until it was too late was that most of that day would be spent in the wardrobe malfunction obstacle course known as Denver International Airport.

Moving through those lines, adjusting and readjusting a backpack, a suitcase, and a garment bag was the ultimate field exam of dainty squatting.  Did I mention that 20+ years of toe walking have severely atrophied my Achilles tendons, making it impossible to bend very far beyond a 90 degree angle with my heels on the ground?  Yea.  So that’s what I had to contend with.  Still, I think I did pretty well.  Until the very, very end.  I was back in Austin, getting in my cab to go home.  I tossed my backpack into the backseat, put one foot into the cab at an awkward angle, and felt the hem of my dress go up just a tad too far.  I thought, fuck it, no one’s looking.  And then I turned around cab driver was right fucking there, waiting to shut the door for me.  He had a perfect view.  I thought about counting that as his tip, but then I decided that wasn’t fair because you can’t feed your family with glimpses of my ass.

Fast forward to March 2010: some of my clothes had fallen off of their hangers and onto the floor of my closet.  I was getting dressed the other morning and my nostrils were assailed by the unmistakable smell of animal pee.  Every article of clothing on the closet floor was just fucking soaked in piss.  Ooooh boy, was I ever mad.  It all had to go out into the dumpster - including my short little dress from Colorado.

Poor blog.  Over and over again, I neglect you for weeks at a time.  You are like the goldfish in my recurring dream.  My efforts lately have been put into practicing guitar and working on my short plays.  I thought about posting them here, but there’s just something kind of meh about posting plays to read.  Perhaps I’ll gather a rag tag group of actors and film them on youtube.  Until then, I shall feed you random snippets of things I’ve already done but haven’t posted.

Never got my journal back, by the way.  Guess whoever found it decided it was too damn interesting to send back to me.

Here’s something I wrote the other day and tacked up in the back corner of my desk where only I can see it:

There will always be bitches.

There will always be assholes.

There will always be retards.

There will shit that doesn’t work.

There will always be crises blown way out of proportion.

There will always be impossible tasks that come up at the last minute.

You will always get blamed for shit you didn’t do.

You are not going to wake up one morning to a world where everyone suddenly understands.  As lovely as that would be, egos will always get in the way.  So why let it get to you?

Everything will be fine if you remember these two simple words.

Fuck it.

Just…fuck it.

I posted this on reddit, and some Steven Covey wannabe called it an “elegant piece of pessimism” and went on to answer every line with something positive, ending with “fix it.  Just…fix it.”  Point missed entirely.  Affirmations like “see the glass as half full,” “rise above it,” and “keep your head about you while others are losing theirs” just never resonated with me.  To just say “fuck it” is to free yourself from internalizing shit you can’t control.  Yesterday someone was a total bitch to me, and I felt better just saying to myself, “there will always be bitches.”  Because there will always be bitches.  You can’t “fix it.”  So fuck it.

Coming soon: adventures in MS Paint!

You know what really grinds my gears? Numbers. Why do we as a society obsess over them so much? When I was in therapy for my eating disorder (oh noes I’m getting all personal), my therapist would always tell me not to fall in love with the numbers. My doctor forbade me to weigh any less than 115 pounds, and I listened, but I would freak out every time I got on the scale and it said 116. And she would say, “Beppy, are you serious? You don’t look any different. It’s a number. You have got to let go of the numbers.”

Once, we were talking about sex and what counts as losing your virginity, and she said she thought third base counted and I just lost my shit. I was like, “No way! That would mean I lost it when I was 17! Ugh, that sounds so skanky!”

Her response: “Once again, Beppy, it’s a number.” Granted, the real thing that disgusted me was to whom I would have lost my virginity if you count third base. I do not. So that’s just one little anecdote from my personal life, but you see this number thing everywhere, all the time.

It starts out young – standardized test scores, your batting average in little league, how many tokens you got in the token jar at home for being quiet and doing chores or having them removed for talking back or getting bad grades (did anyone else have a token system or were my parents just really weird?). It continues into high school, when you really start worrying about your GPA, and then those damned SAT scores. Somewhere around junior high, the weight obsession sets in, and for a lot of us, that will never go away. Ever. Age of virginity loss (and what counts as virginity loss) begins to come into question. Are you branded a slut forever if you lose it at 15? Why is it okay for guys and not for girls? If you graduate from high school a virgin, is something wrong with you?

You get into college and GPA is still there, and weight obsession gets worse when you put on the freshman 15. If you try to do something about it, now you have to count calories or carbs or Weight Watchers points. How many minutes were you on the treadmill? How much can you bench? And sex numbers continue to be an issue. If you’re in college and still a virgin, is something really, really wrong with you? How many credit hours should you be taking? If you’re only taking 12, are you a slacker? Then, unless you’re a lazy fuck like me, the GRE scores rear their ugly heads and it’s like high school all over again.

Then you graduate and get tossed into the real world with no idea what to do. If you’re lucky, you get a job and a place to live. Now it’s how much do you make? How much of that are you putting in savings? What’s your credit rating? What’s the square footage of your cubicle? What interest rate are you going to get on your car/house/whatever? If you reach an arbitrary age without getting that big promotion, did you fail at life?

Then you meet “the one.” How much should the ring cost? What’s the appropriate age to get married? Is there one, or is it just when you’re ready? No, of course there’s a concrete number for everything, haven’t you been paying attention? Once you’re married, how often do you have sex? If it’s less than twice a month, is something really, really, REALLY wrong with you? Does the woman (in a heterosexual marriage) make more money than the man? Is this a bad thing?

Let’s not forget your social life. How many friends do you have? How many black friends? How many gay friends? How many facebook friends? How much fucking reddit karma? How many people showed up to your birthday party out of the number of people you invited?

Everything is a motherfucking number. And they don’t mean shit. And to prove it to you, I’m going to tell you all my numbers right now.

I weigh 116 pounds (I wouldn’t care if I weighed more, I’ve just been pooping a lot).

My GPA in high school was 3.62.

My SAT score was 1360.

My GPA in college was 3.67.

I never took the real GREs. I took a practice version and I forget the scores but they were really, really bad.

I have had 1 sexual partner, 3 if you count third base.

I lost my virginity at 19, 17 if you count third base.

I make $28,576.25 a year.

My credit score, last I checked, is 720.

I have approx. 100 square feet of work space.

The interest rate on my car is something awful like 11%.

I am 24 and have yet to be promoted.

My engagement ring cost $80 and my wedding band cost $25.

I got married at 22.

My husband and I have sex 2-3 times a month unless my migraines are really bad.

My husband makes more money than me, but there have been times when he didn’t, and it didn’t matter.

I have about a dozen or so people I can really, truly call “friends.”  Five of them are in town.  I have three black friends, two gay friends, 183 facebook friends, 163 link karma, and 376 comment karma.

I invited over 30 people to my last birthday party and 8 showed up.

Those are my numbers and I do not care.

I’ve been very cynical lately.  Reading Vonnegut’s A Man Without a Country will do that to you.  But remember how I said I lost my little red book?  Well, I put my e-mail address in the inside of the front cover in case of such an event, and I got this e-mail:

Subject: red.

I have your red book. send me an address and I’ll mail it to you.

This makes me very happy on a Monday morning.

So one of my fans pointed out to me that I haven’t posted in a while, and holy shit, it’s been 3 weeks, hasn’t it? Well, it’s the first week of a brand new semester and I’m head aspl0de fuckall losing it. But there will be some good shit to come, I promise. I found my little red notebook and there was this great essay in there about my ass, and I wanted to post it on here but then I lost my notebook again. So if I find it, you have that to look forward to. Also, expect a domain name change in the near future. Probably to omginorite.com.  I can’t be dissing people I encounter and extolling the virtues of the cannabis plant and have my “real” name on here.

So I had every intention to finish up my review of the decade on the same day I started it, but then I discovered Rice Boy, and that was the rest of that day.  Then it was Christmas, and then I’ve had the week off, so I’ve been either sleeping or cleaning instead of sitting in front of a computer like I usually do all day.  And here it is New Year’s Eve.  So here’s the rest of the post.

Disclaimer:  These are not necessarily the most important things that happened in the past 5 years.  These are the things that stick out in my memory.  Some of them are newsworthy, and some are totally not.

January 2005 - Numa Numa Guy takes the world by storm, then can’t handle the fame.

Spring 2005 - Remember Stevo, who was such an unruly rebel at the war protests that he got a ticket for solicitation?  He joined the Army and went to Iraq.

May 19, 2005 - Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith comes to theaters.  DO NOT WAAAAAAAAAAAAANT!!!

August 29, 2005 - Hurricane Katrina strikes the Gulf Coast, killing almost 2,000 people and causing over $90 billion in damage.  Four years later, thousands of displaced residents are still living in trailers.

At Some Point During 2005 - My affair with OK Go having lost its spark, I need someone to fill the musical void.  Enter the Decemberists.  I had been aware of them, but I was late in really discovering them.  I’ll never forget the first song I heard - “The Mariner’s Revenge Song.”  9 minutes of pure awesome.

July 11, 2006 - Steve and I add a squeaky spaz weirdo to the family.  We call him Jake.

August 2006 - I click on a link on a friend’s MySpace profile that promises “crazy pics from the party,” and get Rick Rolled for the first time.

September 4, 2006 - Zoologist and TV personality Steve Irwin, a.k.a. “The Crocodile Hunter,” is filming in the Great Barrier Reef and is fatally pierced in the chest by a sting ray barb.  Oddly enough, I was at sea when it happened.  I was a cruise ship in Hawaii, and I couldn’t sleep.  2am Hawaii time was about the time Irwin was pronounced dead.  I did not go snorkeling on that trip.

February 17, 2007 - Britney Spears goes to a salon in Tarzana, California, and shaves her own head.  This was the most important thing that happened in 2007.

April 9, 2008 - I has a mawwiage.

November 4, 2008 - After a grueling campaign against some weird old white guy, Barack Hussein Obama is elected the 44th president of the United States.  And there was much rejoicing.

December 2008 - The first time I hear the name Lady Gaga.

June 24, 2009 -  In direct contrast to his plans on living forever, musical pioneer and noted whack job Michael Jackson dies at 50.

July 25, 2009 - The cats just really, really wanted a dog, so we caved and got them Bucky.

At this point in the post, I have to give a nod to Beatrix.  My other three pets were acquired within this decade and got their pictures in the post, and I felt bad for leaving out my Basement Cat.  Born May 27, 1992, she is but months away from being old enough to vote, smoke, and go to war to fight for her country.  So here’s to you, Bebe.  See, you’re in Mommy’s blog.  Please don’t hurt me.

October 15, 2009 - OMGWTF THERES A KID IN A BALLOON wait nevermind he was hiding.  This was the funniest thing that happened this year.

December 24, 2009 - On Christmas Eve, the health care reform bill, albeit a very watered down version, was passed in the Senate after several months of bickering and bullshit and tea parties.  More news on its actual execution as it develops.

So that’s the auts for you.  I might come back in and add more stuff.  Honestly I just wanted to get this done.  If anyone can think of other things that happened in 2007, let me know, because I’m at a loss.

New Year’s Eve 1999 -  I was at my aunt’s party, shooting pool in the basement with my cousins and my cousin’s cousins.  I had on a formal dress and my dad pulled me aside to tell me my boobs were hanging out when I leaned over to take my shot.  I was 14 - I wasn’t used to my boobs yet.  We counted down with Dick Clark, all wondering in the back of our heads if all the computers were going to crash and everything was going to asplode.  Nothing did.  I remember looking into someone’s video camera and saying, “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.”  And thus ended the gay nineties.  And thus began the 00’s.  We had no fucking idea what we were in for.

This is the decade according to 9 year olds, and here’s Newsweek’s Decade in 7 minutes.  Definitely worth watching.  I’m about to give you a run down of the decade according to a 24 year old self-loathing burnout.  Please enjoy.

June 1999 - Sitting on the roof of my friend Mary’s house in New Jersey, I lay my eyes on Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for the first time.  Technically it began in 90’s, but no one can argue that HP was an 00’s phenomenon.

November 7, 2000 - Hey, we won!  Wait, what?  This is a joke, right?  Well, that’s it, then.  We’re officially fucked.

September 11, 2001 - They won’t let us watch the news like all my friends at other schools did, so I rely on rumors and think that 50,000 people are dead until I get home.  In the coming weeks, my mother gets progressively more messed up, has to know where I am at all times, and wears gloves to open the college offer letters that are starting to roll in.  If they’re from the New York area, she won’t let me open them at all.  At first, the nation seems to come together in the spirit of goodwill, but it quickly devolves into jingoism.

December 2001-December 2003 - All of the Lord of the Rings movies are awesome.

May 16, 2002 - Opening day of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.  Big screen eye candy overshadowed by acting like the “I slaughtered them like animals” monologue.  Still better than Episode I.

October 29, 2002 - My high school sweetheart breaks up with me.  Yes, I remember the date.  I cry nonstop for days.  Then I see this band on Conan.  These cute boys in suits telling me to get get get get get over it.  I am instantly smitten.

Spring break 2003 - We march through town protesting the impending declaration of war on Iraq.  The police have asked us to keep to the sidewalks.  I am a good girl.  My friend Stevo takes it to the streets.  He is ticketed for “solicitation.”  The war begins the next day.

August 2003 - I am in college, in a new city where I don’t know a soul except for the man I met at summer orientation who broke my heart.  My roommate sucks.  I hate my classes.  I put on the freshman 15 in a matter of 2 months.  If there is pertinent world news during that semester, I am unaware.

December 14, 2003 - Ding dong, the Americans caught Sadaam!

January 2004 - Robin and I canvass the bleak city of Council Bluffs, Iowa, spreading the Good News about our Lord and Savior, Howard Dean.  Doors were slammed in our faces.  It’s 9 degrees outside.  I slip on some ice and have a huge bruise on my bum for weeks.  We remain optimistic about our cause.  Then he screams and ruins everything.

April 4, 2004 - I go on my first date with my eventual husband.

July 28, 2004 - John Kerry is awarded the Democratic nomination.  A cute young black Senator delivers a rousing speech at the convention.  I try to get excited about him because it’s the first year I get to vote for a president.

August 22, 2004 - Steve and I adopt Tater.  Would you believe my precious fatass was the runt of his litter?

Here he is now btw:

October 2004 - I cast my early vote for John Kerry.

October 27, 2004 - The Boston Red Sox break the 86 year curse and win the World Series.  Getting choked up just thinking about that magical moment.  They paid their dues, time after time…

November 2, 2004 - whaddaya know, four more years of wtf.

December 26, 2004 - A massive tsunami kills over 230,000 people in South Asia.  This is about the time I stop believing in God.  The humanitarian efforts to aid the survivors are astounding.  This is about the time I start believing in people.

Stay tuned for the second half.

It wasn’t pure, concentrated spit.  He took some vanilla-scented water out of one of his bottles, swished it around in his mouth, and then let it out in a fine, even mist a couple of times from either side of me.  In between spits, he was moving his hands around the air in front of me like Monk when he finds a clue.  Then he said, “I need to suck some energy out of your forehead.”  I’m glad he warned me in advance, because otherwise my kung fu reflexes might have taken over when he grabbed me by the head and sucked on my forehead with a bizarre whistling sound  (Don’t laugh, don’t laugh, don’t laugh).

He said I have stuff in my head called “hoocha” (sp? I tried to google it but found only lobsters.  If anyone knows what it’s actually called, let me know.  Of course, it could just be total bullshit).  It’s neither good nor bad energy; it’s just dense.  Just hanging around in my head, weighing things down.  This actually made a decent amount of sense to me.  Oftentimes when my migraines are in full swing, I feel as if my head is full of something that needs out, and if I could just release the pressure, it would go away.  I’ve threatened self-trepanation a number of times, but never actually gone through with it.  So this head-sucking is an attempt at getting at the hoocha sans power drill.

After that, he had me lie down on a deer skin rug and put a fancy rock in each of my hands.  He asked me to envision good, healing energy being drawn out of the air by the quartz in my left hand, and then moving into my body, up my left arm and into my head.  At the same time, he asked me to envision anything negative - physical pain or negative mental energy - coming out of my head or anywhere else in my body, through my right arm, and into a dark gray, polished, egg shaped rock in my right hand.  While I did this, he was going to do some Lakota chants.  So I imagined good energy coming in through the “good” rock and bad energy going out into the “bad” rock.  The chanting sounded really cool.  Of course I have no idea what it meant, but it was soothing - except when he stopped for a really long time and I thought he was done, then he started again.  That startled me so bad I almost dropped the rocks.

When he was done chanting for real, he did the Monk thing with his hands again.  Then he said, “I’m going to do some blowing on your abdominal area.”  Wait, what?  He made a good call again with warning me.  Wait, blowing on my abdom - is he gonna give me a raspberry?  If he gives me a raspberry I’m gonna laugh so fucking hard…omg he’s totes giving me a raspberry DON’T LAUGH DON’T LAUGH DON’T FUCKING LAUGH!!!! I made it.  Barely.

Next he did some craniosacral therapy.  It’s like chiropractics meets really good scalp massage.  At this point he changed out the fancy rocks for a couple of rocks that looked like the ones I dug up in my garden while I was putting in bulbs last week.  But there was still a light one and a dark one.  When he put his hands on my head, they smelled like the vanilla water, but also like smoke from the incense and from some wood from a special tree he had burned at some point.  So it had the end result of smelling like burnt sugar cookies.  He said it was normal and good at this point to have visions.  Alright, visions, here we go!  This is where we bust out the peyote, right?  No?  Shrooms?  Salvia?  No?  I just lie here while you rub my head and I’m supposed to have visions?  Whatever man…

You die hard fans know I have a thing for cranes (the bird, not the construction equipment).  I sport a wicked crane tat on each arm, and my character in Mage can turn into a giant crane.  And feel free to call this next part power of suggestion because of the thing he said about visions, and I won’t fight you on it.  But while I was lying there, holding rocks and smelling burnt cookies, I was just sort of letting my mind wander and picturing random images, and one came into my head of a crane at the top of a mountain, waving his wing at me like he wanted me to follow him.  You’re laughing.  Stop laughing.

The Shaman asked me to slowly get up off the floor and come back to the Mesa, where he did a few more chants with the staff, and the ceremony was complete.  Then we sat and chatted for a bit about my experience.  Of course he got super excited when I told him I saw a crane, and said it’s my power animal and it’s a great power animal to have because they have their feet in the water and their heads in the sky.  He said to take the rocks home with me - that explains why he changed out the fancy ones for cheap ones.  I’m supposed to meditate with them a couple of times a day, and keep around me as much as I can, with the light one on my left and the dark one on my right.  And get this - at the winter solstice, I’m supposed to go out and bury the dark one.

And that was my day of Shamanistic healing.  It’s been six days now, and I have indeed had headaches since then.  But the weather has been just awful, and when it gets like this my migraines go into super mega overdrive.  I can’t blame the weather on the Shaman.  (Or can I?)  I have the rocks at my desk right now.  I don’t care how retarded it sounds, I’m going to follow through with the whole thing and bury the dark one at the solstice.  Pharmaceuticals have continued to fail me, so why not give this a shot?  The sun is out today, and my head feels alright, so that’s a good sign.  Is it because my meds are working?  Is it because nobody has exceedingly pissed me off today?  Or is it because last week I got spit on by an Indian?  I suppose it remains to be seen.  At the very least, I decided when I left, this would make for a good blog post.  And it did, right?  Right?