humans are funny

Category: hmmm

  • Just do it. Is that taken already?

    They say that when you want to really see something, you should step away from it and come back later. I’m not sure they really meant ‘cubicle’ when they said such things. But I’m gonna say that’s exactly what they had in mind, those they.

    After seven long, glorious months, I have, my friends, returned to a cubicle. For the last seven months, I have been purposely unemployed. Haven’t stepped a pinky toe in an office building. I don’t like to tell people what I do because it changes every day and then people are asking you about that book you wrote and then you hate it and then you have to backpedal and muh muh muh.

    But here’s the truth: I took those seven months off because I thought I’d really really try to make it in the mean world of freelance writing. And I have. Oh yes. I now have a column on KCET. I write for the Huffington Post and Tiny Buddha. I have another inspirational blog on Stratejoy. I’ve written for Nerve and The Next Family. And I have edited at least 50 stories for Taboo Tales. Plus, I’ve had the pleasure of being rejected or ignored by countless others! AND… I did happen to finish a book in there somewhere.

    After all that, I have made…. wait for it….. drumroll please…

    $230.
    Two-hundred-and-thirty dollars (I thought if I wrote it out like that, it would seem like more. It’s not working, is it?).

    $230. In seven months.
    Yep.

    I’m a struggling writer!
    “It sounds much cooler than it is,” I said as I stole ketchup packets from McDonald’s.

    Just before I began re-using my toilet paper, I got a call to come back to an advertising agency. A cubicle. I have always had a hate/hate relationship with cubicles because they’ve represented claustrophobia, a stifling, a boss. Nobody puts baby in a cubicle. Some people like cubicles though. They do. They like the structure of a solid job. The insurance. The daily meetings that give them validation. The strange smells that cloud the office around lunch time. I applaud those people. I believe happiness is a choice, and I was never able to make that choice in a cubicle before.

    Now that I’m back in a cubicle and I am seeing things anew, it’s become clear to me that the majority of people DON’T like to work in cubicles. They don’t. Yet they do it. Oh, they do it. Every day. And then, they go to the kitchen to complain about it. My new carpeted box happens to sit next to the kitchen.

    “Is it Friday yet?” I hear constantly. “This project sucks.” “Can we go home yet?” “So-and-so is totally inept.”

    It’s the thing to do, I guess. Complain. It bonds corporate colleagues. There’s some secret rule that says, ‘I’m gonna always be miserable and you be miserable too. And that’s what we’ll have in common. If we do it together, neither of us ever has to have the courage to change. And we’ll always talk about our misery in kitchens and bathrooms.”

    My desk is also next to a very loud talker. She talks loudly because she wants everyone to know how much work she is doing.
    “I JUST GOT TEN NEW EMAILS,” she says to No One.
    “I HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING AROUND HERE,” she says to the kitchen.
    And then when No One or Kitchen says nothing, she sighs. Really loudly.

    I brought headphones.

    Then I went to a meeting. I don’t yet know the politics of this particular office, but I gathered that we were all supposed to be scared of the one lady at the head of the table. Someone brought her some lunch in the middle of the meeting. She complained about it and told everyone they were doing a bad job. And then the meeting was over.

    In actuality, I’m having lots of fun at this job. I’m finding it nice to be a microscopic observer. But what I’m observing is that people don’t want to be there. But they’re there anyway. I watch them stride in reluctantly from the parking lot. And I want to scream at them and say, “You don’t have to be doing this if you don’t want to!”

    And I know what they’ll say. They’ll say ‘The economy is so bad. I’m lucky I have a job.’
    And I’ll tell them that’s a shitty excuse. Because I really feel like it is a shitty excuse. Any excuse is shitty. I don’t care if you have five kids or you are here illegally or you have only three toes or you can’t see. People change jobs and persevere and reinvent themselves every day. I realize that I myself am writing this from a cubicle. But it’s temporary. I swear. RIGHT? I mean, right? There’s a guy I talked to who has worked here for twelve years. He has a band. He is not doing anything about his band. It hurts to see this. Soon he’s gonna retire and then die, having not tried.

    If you really want to do something, DO IT. Stop waiting for it to happen. Yeah, I’m a struggling writer, but I’m a writer. I’m doing it. And it’s hard. And maybe I’m going through a period where I can’t have as much fun as I would like because I’m writing all the fucking time and pitching myself to strangers and making awkward jokes at lame media mixers. But I will turn it around. I’ll sell my book. I’ll one day have a column that pays me more than it costs to write the column (ahem, KCET).

    Anyone who doesn’t think they can also fulfill what they want in life is letting fear feed them a bunch of excuses. They’re letting their low self-confidence tell them that this is as good as it gets. But it’s not true. It’s never as good as it gets until you decide it is.
    So get the fuck up. March out of your cubicle. Do the best you can with your day. And stop congregating in the kitchen to complain. You’re better than that.

    And, you, yeah you: Stop taking the elevator from the third floor to the second fucking floor.

    And this concludes the meanest inspirational speech ever. Steve Jobs was better at this. Too bad he died.

  • Happy Black Friday!

    I realized yesterday that Thanksgiving is quite an American holiday. We’re already known for overeating, and on this special day we get together so we can overeat in front of people. It’s just like every other day for me, but I normally overeat burritos.

    After the strangely delicious Tofurkey last night, I rushed to Target at midnight to get a flatscreen TV at a discount. No I didn’t. But I guess other people did. Other people camped out in front of Best Buy for days. Nothing like being the first one to buy electronics from a tired man in a blue polo shirt. Are the discounts really that spectacular?

    Violence around the country? A woman pepper spraying people in line? To get fifty bucks off? This is why people in other countries hate us, my people! We’re obsessed with more more more more more more more (and they also hate our loose morals).

    I am sitting in a cafe watching the world go by and steering clear of any type of store. I hate stores, which is why I still have the style of a clubgoer from 1998. I haven’t gone shopping since then. Shopping is a torture for me. Stores are chock full of decisions, and there’s nothing worse than decisions. I’ll just sit here and contemplate…

    
What do Indians do on Thanksgiving?

    Why didn’t they drop the name ‘Indians’ the moment they realized they weren’t in India?

    How do Indians from India feel about Native Americans having their name for so long?

    Do Native Americans enjoy black friday?

    Has any store ever offered to open their doors early ONLY for Native Americans?

    Why is butter so fucking good?

    What am I doing with my life?

    Happy Black Friday!

  • Let’s talk about death, baby.

    Saturday was the 13th Annual International Survivors of Suicide Day.

    “Survivors?” My friend asked. “That’s the wrong word.”

    But it isn’t. Every 40 seconds someone takes his own life. And every 41 seconds, someone is left to make sense of it. That’s what the ads for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention say. That one second is a war. Everything that follows is a tsunami. There can only be survivors. There are questions. There is reasoning and rationalizing. There are thousands of ‘whys’. There are a million ‘what if’s. What if I had called more often? What if I had gone over there? What if I had never said that? Those left after a suicide drown in questions. Sometimes it takes years to figure out how to tread through them. We eventually figure it out. We never go back to normal, but we survive. ———–> The rest of this is on the Huffington Post! Check it out and spread the word. 

    And if you want to hear more about my story, it’s HERE. But please don’t feel bad for me. I’m telling it because I want people to know what suicide is really like. If the knew, they wouldn’t do it.

  • Home is where the LA is.

    I’ve lived in LA for almost 14 years now. I’ve left to go try other places during those 14 years, but I always come back. I never mean to come back, but I do. Here I am.

    Hi!

    Since I’ve been here for so long, I have grown accustomed to my environs. I can easily walk by a pantsless homeless man on Venice Beach or a hooker on Hollywood Blvd and not blink an eye (unless it’s a regularly scheduled eye blink.). Converting to full Angeleno was a big step. I arrived having never seen flip-flops. Now I live steps from the beach. I arrived not knowing what I wanted to do with my life. Now, I totally know (kinda). I arrived when I had just lost my virginity. Now, I’ve fucked {{This sentence has been interrupted by the emergency broadcast system. This is only a test.}}. Since my transition has been so gradual, I haven’t really noticed it. But something happened the other day that pulled the wool off of my unblinking eyes.

    My friend came over with a bag from Whole Foods. She pulled out her carton of sushi and screamed. I thought there was a mouse in the bag.

    “Oh my god.” She exclaimed. “I forgot to get brown rice!”

    She forgot to get brown rice.
    In her sushi.

    The. Horror.

    The starch!

    O. M. G.

    It took 14 years, but now I realize: I AM IN LA. Holy mackerel, am I in LA. (I obviously knew I was geographically located in LA since I see the street signs, but I didn’t realize how unique it really is until lately.) Such an event would not have been a tragedy or even a possibility in the city where I grew up (Addison, IL, a blend of Jersery Shore and My Big Fat Greek Wedding.).

    Since the rice catastrophe, I have been hyper aware of my surroundings. For example:

    I stumbled across these screenplays in a bar bathroom garbage can. What? How? How did those get there? “Oh, Larry. I’m sick of lugging around all your screenplays. You’re never gonna sell ’em. I need to find a bar bathroom to throw them out.”  “Miranda! You go throw out all my screenplays. I don’t even want them anymore. Did you see that they’re not printed on brown recyclable paper? The. Horror.”

    Oh, LA, you are so mysterious.

    And then there’s the food. When I go back to Addison, I say I’m a vegetarian, and the waitress says, “Okay, you want chicken or fish?” Sometimes in LA you have to ask a restaurant if they serve any meat at all. Here people eat seaweed chips. And I walk to get wheat grass shots in the morning.

    It must work because there are no fat people here. It’s a cliche, but so true. I stood on my corner the other day and looked for some for an hour (read: three minutes). Okay, there are two. But one has a thyroid problem and one is Tyra Banks wearing a fat suit.

    You think maybe someone thought they’d get discovered if they threw their screenplays into a bar garbage? Or maybe it was a trick, and I would have won a prize if I had pulled one out? Dammit, I always miss out on prizes.

    My friend got married in Malibu last week. He said it was great except for the stunt man who was practicing diving off the cliffs right behind them. Over and over again, he plunged to the ground, suspended by ropes. He’s right behind the happy couple in their wedding pictures. I should make a joke here about taking a plunge, but instead I’ll make one about lamps: Lamps are so skinny. They belong in LA. (Nah. Plunge would have been better.)

    And isn’t this the thinnest grilled cheese? LA, not EVERYTHING must be thin.

    And the namedropping. I’ve realized it’s unavoidable in LA. Even though it’s sometimes a necessity, it doesn’t lose its douche factor. I mean, there are helicopters because Lindsay Lohan lives next to me. And I locked eyes with Jake Gyllenhaal. I cannot help drop some names once in a while. (ahem, I also saw Arnold while eating that skinny grilled cheese.) (Please note: it was still a good grilled cheese. Gone in aprox 4.3 bites).

    And the laptops. In any LA cafe on any given day, you can find a smattering of writers pecking away at their laptops.They are the people who will spend hours perfecting some blog that won’t even earn them a penny. There’s so much hope and opportunity in those people. You can’t spend your days wilting atop your laptop if you don’t believe in possibility. I bet if we took the amount of ambition and hope in LA and tied it all together, it would go around the world twelve times. Or Maybe thirteen. I don’t know. I’m not a scientist.

    That doesn’t happen in too many other places.

    So, yeah, I’m in LA.

    And it’s a weird place. But I love it anyway. Did you see how skinny that grilled cheese was? Why do they even slice bread that thin? Such a travesty. Bread! I sometimes have to drive two hours outside of LA to get bread. Not really. That would be weird. But I do walk to get wheat grass, which is a bunch of grass they grow inside the restaurant. And then they mow it down right in front of me, squeeze it until green water comes out. And then I drink that water. And then my burps smell like summer all day long. That’s LA, baby.

    Please, come visit. Or don’t.

  • A year! I could have been pregnant 1.3333 times.

    Last week was the year anniversary of Taboo Tales. Years really sneak up on you. One day you’re seven and teaching your Barbies how to have sex in the back of their Ferrari. And the next day you’re twenty-seven and wondering how come you’ve never had sex in the back of a Ferrari.

    Last October 28th, my friend Corey and I got on a stage and hosted a show in front of 90 people. I don’t even know how we got 90 people to come to a show we didn’t even know would be good. I was, of course, filled to the brim with anxiety. If you trip on a sidewalk in front of some people, it’s not really that big of a deal. You weren’t asking them to look at you. This was to be different. This would be people coming to see us because we asked them to. And if we tripped, they might be pissed and annoyed they drove through LA traffic (which, as we know, can be downright depressing) for something that was a mess. The PRESSURE!

    During that first show, we learned a lot. We learned that even D-list actresses don’t show up on time. We learned that projector remotes only work when they’re right next to the projector. We also learned from our audience that most people don’t mind the LA traffic because they’re masturbating all the while. Yeah. They are. Who knew?

    And then a year passed (I’m still not having sex in the back of a Ferrari). There are as many storytelling shows in LA as there are struggling actors, so we weren’t sure how it would fare. But dare I say that our show is more than a storytelling show? We ask humans (any humans) to tell us a comedic version of their taboo story. All we ask is that it be a personal story that they would not normally feel comfortable telling in public. It must make the storyteller completely vulnerable. On stage. In front of 100 people (now 120. That’s right– more people. Huzzzah.).

    The vulnerability is not just for the enjoyment of the audience though. No way. That’s a side product. Getting vulnerable on stage is rewarding for the storyteller. Letting out their stories to an accepting audience who laughs with them in the right places and cries with them in the right places is pretty freeing.

    My friend was scared to tell his story about how he contracted HIV. That’s the kind of secret that sticks with you just below the surface all the time. You’re reminded of it when you take your pills every day. But it’s so ‘taboo’ that it doesn’t easily roll off the tongue. So when he read his story out loud on stage, that vulnerability was for him. And the best part were the hugs that followed. People heard his story, and they lined up to hug him. They weren’t scared of him.

    That’s usually why we don’t tell our stories. We’re scared of being judged. We’re scared of the labels. But Taboo Tales is not ‘just a storytelling show.’ It’s a place where people can tell their secrets and then get hugs. Lots of hugs. And new friends. My favorite part of the experience is going on Facebook the day after. I can see the threads of all the new friendships made in our theater. It’s proof of acceptance. And proof that humans are capable of loving each other even though the news makes us feel sometimes like that doesn’t happen anymore.

    There have been stories of hemorrhoids, breast cancer, blindness, fat fetishes, eating disorders, OCD, vaginal paranoia (that one was mine), butt licking, low self-confidence, and plenty of rapes. Lots of rapes. One of the biggest lessons I learned was how to spell hemorrhoids. Try it. That’s a painful one. to spell. sorry.

    Now it’s been a year and a few days (still no sex in a Ferrari). I’m so grateful for all the new relationships I have, all the stage confidence I gained, all the lessons about humans and acceptance and love and judgments, and all the people who now see me as a safe sounding board for their secrets. Really, people tell me everything now. EVERYTHING! I love it. I’ll admit that once in a while I find myself judging someone for playing a nine-point word in Scrabble, but that’s the extent of my judging! It’s impossible to judge anyone now that I know that most of my friends shit their pants in Walgreens or think their sons are hot. For this, I’m so lucky. I accept this position.

    Thanks for all the support and for coming to the shows and for encouraging us and for sharing your secrets. Next time I see you in traffic, I won’t be so mad when you’re stopped at a green light for too long.

    Also, if you have a Ferrari: Call me!