humans are funny

Author: laurenne

  • Unrapable.

    Sometimes I perform this live to illustrate how funny humans are. I thought I’d post it here too:

    When my friend asked me to be her bridesmaid, I said yes. In my near 30 years of life nobody had asked me to be in their wedding, and I was dying for an opportunity to prove to my family I had a friend.

    Then she told me her wedding was in Australia. Shit. In order to be in someone’s inner circle, I had to take an expensive trip. I’m not the type of good friend who will pay a thousand dollars for airfare and spend the week running around preparing for someone else’s big day. If I was going to spend a thousand dollars, I would have to see all of Australia. And if I was flying all the way to Australia, I would have to see Papua New Guinea too.

    I also decided that I couldn’t go all the way to Papua New Guinea without seeing Japan, and I couldn’t go all the way to Japan without seeing Vietnam. So, I quit my job and decided to travel around the world for a year. Sometimes you have to go to some great lengths to be a good friend.

    Since I was so busy putting things in storage before my trip, I had no time to research anything. I knew nothing about Papua New Guinea except that it was next to Australia. I saw that there was a cheap flight to the mountain town of Tari so I booked one. I did read one blog that said I had to write a letter (with a pen and paper– the horror!) to the one hotel owner in Tari. They had no phone or internet. No phone or internet? How did they live? I wrote the letter, excited to see what type of world could exist without email forwards from moms or status updates about True Blood. I feared a culture I could not win over with jokes about MySpace. Top 8!

    After the wedding, at which I was the only single person, I was on my own to travel like the hippie backpacker I always knew I was.

    I popped in a book shop to ask for a travel guide for Papua New Guinea.

    “Why would you ever go there?” the shop owner asked. “I guarantee you’ll be raped.”

    I felt scared. And slightly excited.

    I did a quick internet search and found a news story about Papua New Guinean women killing male babies to stop tribal wars. I’m not a male baby, and I don’t believe rumors ever since Donnie D’Alesandro told the whole junior high I put a cordless phone antenna up my vagina. Of course I was still going to Papua New Guinea.

    I stepped off the plane with an German man.

    “You’re here alone?” he asked. “You better watch out. You’re going to get raped.”

    I started to wonder if raping was just some sort of New Guinean custom. In Spain people greet each other with two kisses. In Papua New Guinea, maybe it’s a quick rape.

    Again, I felt scared and slightly excited.

    I had one night in the capital city of Port Moresby before I headed out to Tari the next day. I found a helpful welcome packet in my hotel room. It said atop a bright picture of a sun, “Welcome to Port Moresby! Please do not go outside. AT ALL. Even in the daylight. It’s not safe for tourists.”

    Hmmm… At this point I began to worry a little. I spent the night paying $25/hr to send goodbye emails to friends. And I wrote my will. My mom got everything in storage, which was a papazan chair and a magic bullet blender.

    The next morning, I hopped in my airport shuttle freshly shaven in case I was raped. I asked my shuttle driver what was the deal with the danger and the raping. He said, “Don’t worry about it. Most people who go to Tari come back.” “Most people?” I asked him. But by then the shuttle was being hijacked, so he didn’t have time to explain.

    From the plane, the country looked fake, a series of rivers criss-crossing perfectly like freeways. The amount of untouched green was shocking. A country can sure be beautiful when Westerners don’t barge in, claim the land for development, and kill off the natives. The passenger next to me was not wearing shoes and had two teeth. He did not seem at all like a rapist, so I settled in for adventure.

    The airport in Tari was a fence. When I got off the plane, thousands of villagers were waiting to see who was cool enough to ride a plane. That’s what you do when you don’t have phones or email. You gather to watch planes land. So many strange black faces stared at me through the fence. I was the one white lady as far as the eye could see, even a really good eye with 20/20 vision. I understood what it must have been like for the one black kid in my high school who everyone just expected to play basketball. These people just expected I buy stuff from them.

    First I had to find my guy, the one who surely had received my letter and was waiting for me to arrive. He wasn’t there.

    “Oh, that guy,” someone said. “He had to pay a tribal compensation so he went to go buy some pigs.”

    Oh. Ok. Of course, sure.

    Patrick, the self-appointed mayor of the mountain, took me under his wing and brought me back to his village to stay with his sister, Janet. It was there I immersed myself in true Papua New Guinean culture.

    I was one of the few white people to ever grace the town. The first one arrived in 1932 wearing pants and looking for gold. The villagers had never seen pants before, so they assumed he had a penis down to his ankle. They didn’t realize the white man was a human being until they spied on him and saw that he also squatted in the bushes to excrete brown snakes. Swear.

    White people to these villagers are pretty gross. A baby saw me and burst into tears. Cosmo magazine does not have Tarian issue, but if they did, the models in it would be large, dark skinned women with beat up hands. Men there like a woman who looks like she can work hard under the sun. The more meat on her the better.

    I told them that people had warned me I’d be raped, and they laughed and cackled. “Who would want to rape you?” They said with disgust. You are not fat enough. They gave me advice on how to be prettier though: eat more. I’m working on it.

    I have to admit that I felt a bit hurt for not being rapable. My instinct was to show them an American magazine and say ‘Hey look! This is the ideal you should be reaching for.’

    But then I heard myself telling them about our beauty ideals.

    Well, I said to shocked faces, We pay a lot of money to have a doctor break our noses and then shave the bones down and then put it all back together.

    Then they told me about marriages. Women are bought with 30-60 pigs and if a man is rich, he can buy as many brides as he wants. People hardly ever marry for love and couples never sleep in the same bed.

    I thought that was tragic and wanted to teach them about ‘Romeo and Juliet’ or another famous love story like ‘No Strings Attached.’ But then I heard myself telling them about American marriages.

    Well, I said to more shocked faces, we marry just one person. But most of us decide we don’t like them anymore after a few years. And many women in their forties shove silicone bags under their nipples and wear slutty dresses in bars so they can find a second or third husband.

    Then they told me about the lady friend. If a woman is menstruating, she is not allowed out of her hut and she can’t talk to men.

    I wanted to call Gloria Steinem and get her there to fix these misogynists!

    But then I heard myself telling them about abortion.

    Well, I said to more and more shocked faces, women pay a doctor to take a machine and kill the baby while it’s inside of them and then suck it out through a large straw.

    They had never heard of straws. Or Michael Jackson, electricity, sunscreen, wifi, soy lattes or even cheese.

    I felt the urge to run home, grab some electricity, a pizza, and a Netflix password to catch them up on everything. My instinct was to show these people what’s right and teach them that they should venture off their mountain and see the beach. Find some manchego!

    But who am I to say which lifestyle is better? I watch The Jersey Shore. (I mean, only sometimes. Not religiously or anything.)

    I was able to shower away my self-righteousness in the village’s cool natural stream after eating fresh pesticide-free vegetables from their gardens. Though those villagers convinced me to give them all my cash, I wasted no money at all. What I bought was perspective. And it’s what I needed so that I could truly appreciate all the other cultures I encountered during that whole year of traveling.

    Come to find out, I am unrapable in several other countries.

     

  • It really does take up the majority of his face.

    Why does everyone my age look so old lately?

    Is it a coincidence that bananas are always 69 cents/lb?

    Does my mailman think I’m smart because I get The Atlantic?

    Does my mailman think I’m hot because I get Women’s Health?

    Why do I care so much what my mailman thinks?

    Will I ever stop caring about what other people think?

    Am I the only one who judges porn by the set design?

    Did Steve Jobs have any regrets?

    Is there anyone out there who cares less than me about whether or not Ashton and Demi are breaking up (hint: I don’t care at all)?

    Why doesn’t anyone ever talk about how Ghandi’s nose was so big?

    Was Ghandi ever an insecure teenager who cared about his nose being big?

    Are vending machines agist because they only take crisp, young bills?

    Should I be occupying something?

    When can we go back to the barter system?

    Will I ever get over the fact that it’s already 2011?

    I mean, wasn’t it JUST Y2K?

    What should I do with my life (taking suggestions)?

    Have you seen my new column?

    Why do I feel so bad for MySpace?

    How did Michael Jackson name his son Blanket?

    Why do my jeans always smell weird?

    One time I cracked an egg to make a cake and there was a dead chicken fetus inside.

    Why did I throw that one in there when it’s not a question?

    Am I out of questions?

    Am I out of answers?

    Am I out of steam?

    Yes.

    Yes.

    Yes.

    Why are you reading these? You should go buy some bananas. They are 69 cents/lb.
    Or maybe just read some more questions here and here.

  • I had an audition. Thankfully, I’m still not famous.

    Before today, I’d been on two auditions in my life. One was during senior year of high school when I tried out for the theater program at the University of Illinois. I had to memorize some Greek monologue, and the audition sort of went like this:

    Me: HARK! (hands shoot into the air)
    Professor nods.
    Me: Um, Can I start over?
    Professor nods.
    Me: HARK! (hands shoot into the air)
    Professor nods.
    Me: Um, can I use the chair as a prop?
    Professor nods.
    Me: HARK! (hands shoot into the air)

    And scene.

    I didn’t get into the program.

    I hated acting after that. In high school, I was in every play, but that humiliating audition turned me off from any sort of future acting. Plus, I rationalized, being famous would suck. Sure, you make lots of money sometimes. But you have to give up any shred of privacy you’ve ever had. No more midnight CVS runs for a quick pregnancy test. No more tripping silently. No more brothels or public baths. Fame could really ruin everything.

    It wasn’t until senior year of USC when I realized I could be moving out of Los Angeles for good. I felt the urge to be on TV before I left. It’s just what you do in LA. I thought the easiest show to get on would be Blind Date, and I showed up in a very slutty outfit for the audition. I may have looked whore-y, but I didn’t say anything incriminating because I knew my grandma would watch it. They deemed me too prude and, again, I had bombed an audition (I still got to be on TV before I moved away, and it was NOT all it was cracked up to be– long story. Tell ya later. Also, that ‘cracked up to be’ analogy is pretty dumb).

    I didn’t think another audition would ever be in the cards. This week (almost ten years after the last one) a friend of a friend called me in to audition for a sketch show put on by CBS. It’s for minorities, and agents come to pick up new talent and get us dark-skinned people more exposure. What’s that? It doesn’t seem like I have dark skin? Oh. I guess I don’t. I’ve been confused about my ethnicity from the day I was born. Most people think I’m French or Israeli, so I often find myself saying words in Spanish to prove my roots. But why? I hate myself when I do that. I grew up thinking I was half Spanish, which just makes me Hispanic (not Latina), since Spain is in Europe (in case you don’t have a map). I learned the Spanish culture from my dad, and that was that. Then, when I was 16, I found out he was half Puerto Rican. So, I guess I’m that too, which explains my robust hips and my love for beans. Still, unless I’m filling out a scholarship application or in Mexico hablando espanol, I’m pretty damn white. In the end, I’m American. In the end, it really doesn’t matter unless you’re going on an audition for the CBS Diversity Showcase.

    Since I didn’t much care about the outcome, I was more relaxed than most of the hopefuls in the waiting area. At first we all eyed each other without a word. They were studying their characters. We were all supposed to come prepared with 1-3 minutes of funny characters to perform.  Their nerves were sweating. I was just thinking, ‘This is LA! This is a real LA experience! Cooooooool!” Thankfully, my friend Roy had recently taken my picture for his own photography portfolio, so I printed two headshots at Kinko’s.

    “That looks really amateur,” some Asian guy in a bow tie told me. “Headshots are 8×10, not 8.5×11.”

    He had smaller headshots, and he was clearly “diverse.” Dammit.
    They called me in. The first thing they said was, “Let’s take a look at your resume.”

    Oh that.
    I thought I had been clever to write a little paragraph about myself instead of trying to make those plays in high school seem recent and relevant in resume form.
    “Oh, look,” the director said. “You wrote us a little paragraph. Ok.”
    “Well,” I said. “I’ve never auditioned for anything before.”

    You should probably not say that at an audition.

    I performed my characters for them. One was my mom, another was a condescending life coach, and another was a girl trying out for a diversity showcase who wasn’t at all diverse.

    “If your mom’s Latina, why is she talking about using a coupon at Chili’s?” he asked, which I realize now is kind of racist.
    “My dad’s the Hispanic one,” I said.
    “What does he sound like?”
    “Well, he’s dead. He sounds silent.”
    Everyone laughed. I thought I had them! I was in! I had finally killed at an audition!

    “Come over here. I need to see you up close.” The director had to check me out to see if I was really Hispanic. I didn’t know that you could tell someone’s ethnicity by looking at them up close, but I guess this guy could.

    As he stepped into my personal space, my nerves exploded. This man was examining me, and I had never felt so awkward.

    “Hablas espanol?” he asked.
    “Si. Hablo espanol perfectamente,” le dije, which is kind of a lie. I speak Spanish, but not perfectly.
    “Ah! Y tienes accento Espanol,” he said.
    And then I said something so dumb, I have not stopped thinking about it since.
    “Si. Hablo espanol pero ahora es dificil porque tengo sed.” (‘I can’t really speak Spanish with you right now because I’m thirsty.’ Yeah. I said that. I WAS REALLY THIRSTY).
    “Huh?” he asked.
    “Tengo tanta sed!” I said. (I’m so thirsty!).

    And then he walked away.

    “I’m really thirsty.” is worse than “I carried a watermelon.” But when a room of twenty people is testing you to see if you’re really who you are, it gets pretty intense. I just went with what I was feeling at the moment, which was a thirst! It’s their fault. There was no water fountain in the whole damn place. I’m thirsty just thinking about it again.

    So, I will not be performing at this year’s CBS Diversity Showcase. But, I did get to learn a few things.

    1. Auditions are funny and competitive and should be attended with 8x10s.
    2. I’m ethnically ambiguous, and I don’t need to try to prove anything anymore. I’m just an American who gets thirsty when speaking Spanish.
    3. Dead dad jokes always get a laugh (unless they’re in my standup routine, which sometimes never gets laughs.)
    4. Latina moms don’t ever go to Chili’s.

  • Catchphrases and face poisons

    This morning I awoke to a familiar voice at six am. My brain was hazy, but I could tell this voice was having a party in its pants.

    “The party’s in Pauly D’s pants tonight,” it said. “Fresh outfit. Fresh hair. You gotta be fresh.”

    Oh, yes. It was my Jersey Shore Pauly D bobble head doll. My friend Rahul gave him to me because we love to pretend we don’t watch the horrible show that is an embarrassment to all Americans. This Pauly D doll talks. It’s a catchphrase kinda doll. (incidentally, I am working on my own catchphrase. So far it’s “Let’s Pizza It Up!!” Still undecided though.) This bobble head is supposed to talk when you bobble its head, but mine talks whenever. Today he talked at six am. At first I wanted to get mad and tell Pauly D that his line is not fresh but old.  But then I realized something huge: I am probably the only person in the world today who woke up to a bobble head telling her about a party in his pants.

    THE ONLY ONE.

    There are about 6,775,235,700 people in the world, but I really think I am the only one who awoke to a party in a bobble head’s pants. And if someone else happens to have a Pauly D bobble head doll that talks at six am without being bobbled, she was probably not sleeping on the floor when it woke her up.

    I happened to have been sleeping on the floor because I ventured out to buy a new bed frame yesterday at IKEA. For some reason, I thought the best time to put it together was midnight. If you ever put anything from IKEA together, you know that it is impossible to do it quickly whether it’s a set of drawers or a vase. You probably have fallen to your knees swearing about those FUCKING instructions and that STUPID wrench thing. You probably know that if IKEA would just put in a little sentence on those instructions that said ‘make sure to install this piece with the holes facing up,’ millions of those 6,775,235,700 people would swear 10% less and society’s self-esteem would rise. But they don’t do that. And after two hours, I grew frustrated, took my rage out by guzzling a large bottle of sparkling water, and then went to sleep on the floor. I rationalized that it was still comfortable because it was within the unfinished bed frame.

    I am sure there wasn’t anyone else in the world who slept on the floor inside her bed frame to wake up to a bobble-free bobble head doll. I know I must be the only one.

    I’m so unique!

    This totally unique night happened just after I visited the dermatologist who told me I needed Botox. He said, “Oh honey, do you ever need Botox.” This I don’t think was that unique. I bet several people in LA were told the same thing, even from the same doctor. But I bet most of those people got the Botox. That single line really makes a girl feel pretty ugly, so I have a feeling most girls cracked under the pressure from that dicky doctor (ahemDr. Taheri in Santa Monica don’tgothereahem). Even if there were a few who left the dermatologist with no lethal poisons in their faces, they DID NOT go home, sleep within a bedless bed frame and THEN wake up to a plastic Pauly D.

    If I am the only one having this kind of day, I can’t imagine what sorts of other days people are having. I doubt anyone’s day was half as exciting as this one sounds. But, 6,775,235,700 people having 6,775,235,700 different days boggled my mind. As I laid there on the floor inside my bed frame, I thought about the villagers I met in Papua New Guinea. They don’t have bobble head dolls or bed frames or even dermatologists to suggest any treatments at all. Their days were probably spent selling pig heads and gossiping in Pidgin. And then I thought about all the other people in all the other countries all over the world doing things. Different things. 6,775,235,700 things. Then the world felt huge and I felt small.  And, honestly, pretty lame.

    Out of 6,775,235,700 kinds of days to be had, I went to IKEA and the dermatologist. Ew.  I feel uniquely lame. Not that selling a pig head sounds better, but it really sounds better.

    The good news is that, while sitting here writing this right now, I have decided to confirm that previous catchphrase: Let’s pizza it up!

  • Why oh why?

    In case you were wondering why I come here every week, here is the answer. Right here.