born into this mess
Thursday, April 29, 2004
fire the cannons, i think i'm drowning
some days i want to get me a raft and just take off down the mississippi, a la huck finn.
instead i just flash my tits at the guys i work with and throw up red gatorade.
if i could just hate you, it would be so much easier.
i can't get you out of my head, like the way i can't help taking big legflailing steps when i walk down a hill too fast.
i'm still wanting my face on your cheek
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some days i want to get me a raft and just take off down the mississippi, a la huck finn.
instead i just flash my tits at the guys i work with and throw up red gatorade.
if i could just hate you, it would be so much easier.
i can't get you out of my head, like the way i can't help taking big legflailing steps when i walk down a hill too fast.
i'm still wanting my face on your cheek
Wednesday, April 28, 2004
girl, (da da da dum), you'll be a woman soon
So, I don't really even remember my first Sex Talk. I had a book my parents gave me about bodies and how they worked and how they fit together, and sometime in the middle of fifth grade the teacher took all the boys into the other room and showed us a very frightening video about the uterus. But they'd always said to expect puberty to start around 13 or 14.
Right.
I started kindergarten when I was four, something to do with cut-off dates and being bored in nursery school, and so was always a year younger than everyone else in my grade.
So there I am, eleven years old, the night before the first day of seventh grade. I've got my outfit all laid on on the chair by my bed (orange and yellow Hypercolor t-shirt, yellow fingernail polish, white Umbros, black hi-top All Stars Oh Hell Yeah) and I'm downstairs watching my allowed daily hour of TV (Star Trek: TNG). I have to pee, but I feel a little bit slimy, almost like I've wet my pants, and when I sit down on the toilet, there's All This Blood.
It's scary as hell, isn't it. Those first few times. It took me years to get over the initial shock of it. So much blood.
So I wad up some toilet paper in my ruined underwear and go dig through my mom's cabinet in her bathroom for pads. Of course, she catches me and I'm mortified by her Our Little Girl is a Woman Now speech to my dad, who, as far as I am concerned, would be perfectly happy with having a little tomboy forever.
So anyway, the first day of school, which ought to be incredibly exciting, what with the new kids in homeroom and the seating charts and the lockers and the cute boy in Social Studies, is absofucking horrible. I can't figure out how to change my pad in the bathroom without everyone knowing, seeing as I'm not one of those girls who carries a purse, I'm wearing white shorts for fuck's sake, there's this hideous bunchy mass in between my legs and I'm supposed to be playing basketball, and I end up just barely making it through the day without just taking on off out the door.
and that's pretty much how the rest of the year would end up being:
just barely making it through the day without taking on off out the door.
|
So, I don't really even remember my first Sex Talk. I had a book my parents gave me about bodies and how they worked and how they fit together, and sometime in the middle of fifth grade the teacher took all the boys into the other room and showed us a very frightening video about the uterus. But they'd always said to expect puberty to start around 13 or 14.
Right.
I started kindergarten when I was four, something to do with cut-off dates and being bored in nursery school, and so was always a year younger than everyone else in my grade.
So there I am, eleven years old, the night before the first day of seventh grade. I've got my outfit all laid on on the chair by my bed (orange and yellow Hypercolor t-shirt, yellow fingernail polish, white Umbros, black hi-top All Stars Oh Hell Yeah) and I'm downstairs watching my allowed daily hour of TV (Star Trek: TNG). I have to pee, but I feel a little bit slimy, almost like I've wet my pants, and when I sit down on the toilet, there's All This Blood.
It's scary as hell, isn't it. Those first few times. It took me years to get over the initial shock of it. So much blood.
So I wad up some toilet paper in my ruined underwear and go dig through my mom's cabinet in her bathroom for pads. Of course, she catches me and I'm mortified by her Our Little Girl is a Woman Now speech to my dad, who, as far as I am concerned, would be perfectly happy with having a little tomboy forever.
So anyway, the first day of school, which ought to be incredibly exciting, what with the new kids in homeroom and the seating charts and the lockers and the cute boy in Social Studies, is absofucking horrible. I can't figure out how to change my pad in the bathroom without everyone knowing, seeing as I'm not one of those girls who carries a purse, I'm wearing white shorts for fuck's sake, there's this hideous bunchy mass in between my legs and I'm supposed to be playing basketball, and I end up just barely making it through the day without just taking on off out the door.
and that's pretty much how the rest of the year would end up being:
just barely making it through the day without taking on off out the door.
prologue to long rambling memoir-type thing
One of the qualities that defines my adult life (as opposed to grown-up life, which, as far as I can see, I will never EVER experience) is the ability to look back and say, there. Then. This is why, and this is how.
This is not to say that I am right, that I haven't invented these memories and then reinforced their connection to one another in my brain by ceaselessly recounting them to myself, lying on my side alone at night, stroking these thens and theres, taking them out and arranging them on the pillow next to my head, lining them up by order of magnitude, adding little bits of glitter and fluff to make them fit together better.
But this is how I remember it starting.
I grew up in Lower Northern California, in a string of towns just south of San Francisco: Redwood City, Palo Alto, Menlo Park.
I was a normal weird little kid; you know, read books up in trees, shunning Barbie to play with dirt, a wolf under the bed and a witch in the closet. I did well in school, and someday, I told everyone, I was going to be a writer.
Then, just before fifth grade, we moved to suburban Atlanta.
Very Bad Culture Shock.
Cookie-cutter subdivision. Cliques in school involving the brand name of jeans you wore. Bangs up to here. Boyfriends.
Honestly, I don't remember very much of the first two years in Peachtree Corners. I figure I spent them gamely trying to keep up with everyone else. It took me a while to understand why exactly it wasn't cool to spend recess behind a tree curled up reading Tolkien, but I imagine I figured it out eventually.
So anyway, there's these two years of blur, and then, coinciding with the first day of seventh grade, it all started Changing.
|
One of the qualities that defines my adult life (as opposed to grown-up life, which, as far as I can see, I will never EVER experience) is the ability to look back and say, there. Then. This is why, and this is how.
This is not to say that I am right, that I haven't invented these memories and then reinforced their connection to one another in my brain by ceaselessly recounting them to myself, lying on my side alone at night, stroking these thens and theres, taking them out and arranging them on the pillow next to my head, lining them up by order of magnitude, adding little bits of glitter and fluff to make them fit together better.
But this is how I remember it starting.
I grew up in Lower Northern California, in a string of towns just south of San Francisco: Redwood City, Palo Alto, Menlo Park.
I was a normal weird little kid; you know, read books up in trees, shunning Barbie to play with dirt, a wolf under the bed and a witch in the closet. I did well in school, and someday, I told everyone, I was going to be a writer.
Then, just before fifth grade, we moved to suburban Atlanta.
Very Bad Culture Shock.
Cookie-cutter subdivision. Cliques in school involving the brand name of jeans you wore. Bangs up to here. Boyfriends.
Honestly, I don't remember very much of the first two years in Peachtree Corners. I figure I spent them gamely trying to keep up with everyone else. It took me a while to understand why exactly it wasn't cool to spend recess behind a tree curled up reading Tolkien, but I imagine I figured it out eventually.
So anyway, there's these two years of blur, and then, coinciding with the first day of seventh grade, it all started Changing.
Monday, April 26, 2004
broccoli, portabella alfredo, rigatoni, and smoked salmon (alaskan wild FYI)
well helLO there interweb. it sure has been a while, hasn't it.
see, I go into work at around 2, the kitchen closes at 10 and they deliver me a Budweiser while I clean up and wrap shit in plastic waiting on the last tables to order desserts, then I got sit at our bar til the bartender kickjs us out around 1 ish. today it was early enought for me to go to the store and buy food for the first time in weeks.
tomorrow I intend to make mint rosewater simple syrup if'n it kills me.
I want to go to the strip clubs just cos I have never been.
I may well have to go back to being slutty to get over this last guy, interweb.
yep.
|
well helLO there interweb. it sure has been a while, hasn't it.
see, I go into work at around 2, the kitchen closes at 10 and they deliver me a Budweiser while I clean up and wrap shit in plastic waiting on the last tables to order desserts, then I got sit at our bar til the bartender kickjs us out around 1 ish. today it was early enought for me to go to the store and buy food for the first time in weeks.
tomorrow I intend to make mint rosewater simple syrup if'n it kills me.
I want to go to the strip clubs just cos I have never been.
I may well have to go back to being slutty to get over this last guy, interweb.
yep.
Sunday, April 25, 2004
why I do it
Denise spent the next summer in the Hamptons with four of her dissolute college hallmates and lied to her parents about every aspect of her situation. She slept on a living room floor and made good money as a dishwasher and prep drone at the Inn at Quogue, working elbow to elbow with a pretty girl from Scarsdale named Suzie Sterling and falling in love with the life of a cook. She loved the crazy hours, the intensity of the work, the beauty of the product. She loved the deep stillness that underlay the din. A good crew was like an elective family in which everyone in the little hot world of the kitchen stood on equal footing, and every cook had weirdnesses concealed in her past or in his character, and even in the midst of the most sweaty togetherness each family member enjoyed privacy and autonomy: she loved this.
From Jonathan Franzen's the Corrections, copyright 2001 Farrar Strauss and Giroux, New York
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Denise spent the next summer in the Hamptons with four of her dissolute college hallmates and lied to her parents about every aspect of her situation. She slept on a living room floor and made good money as a dishwasher and prep drone at the Inn at Quogue, working elbow to elbow with a pretty girl from Scarsdale named Suzie Sterling and falling in love with the life of a cook. She loved the crazy hours, the intensity of the work, the beauty of the product. She loved the deep stillness that underlay the din. A good crew was like an elective family in which everyone in the little hot world of the kitchen stood on equal footing, and every cook had weirdnesses concealed in her past or in his character, and even in the midst of the most sweaty togetherness each family member enjoyed privacy and autonomy: she loved this.
From Jonathan Franzen's the Corrections, copyright 2001 Farrar Strauss and Giroux, New York
Monday, April 19, 2004
do it now
at work, we are all obsessed with Arnold.
yep.
I made myself a patch for my chef jacket of this picture with do it now written on it.
I rule.
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at work, we are all obsessed with Arnold.
yep.
I made myself a patch for my chef jacket of this picture with do it now written on it.
I rule.
searing
me and the Tach are chowing down on some seared tuna. he's working away on a chunk about the size of his head. sort of purring and growling at the same time.
mmm. food. free fish.
WAY better than nothing but half and half and pasteurized egg yolk for dinner in the middle of getting reamed on saturday.
|
me and the Tach are chowing down on some seared tuna. he's working away on a chunk about the size of his head. sort of purring and growling at the same time.
mmm. food. free fish.
WAY better than nothing but half and half and pasteurized egg yolk for dinner in the middle of getting reamed on saturday.
Sunday, April 18, 2004
tornado
I haven't written anything in about a week; I feel like all I write is the same goddamn thing over and over:
slammed at work
drink too much
so lonely you could fill up an olympic-sized swimming pool with it
wish I had someone to spoon with
overdrawn bank account
one headlight
constant rejection from boys I like whom I shouldn't
love/hate job
Still, this has been one of the best days off I've had in a long time, especially since I wasn't hungover for all of it, despite staying out drinking til 4. I woke up and went over to Pony Boy's and we went and fetched Squidge and Lil Blueberry and went to Ellen's Soul Food Kitchen. Their fried chicken is so goddamn good, as are their purple-hulled peas. They bring you these amazing cornmeal pancakes and their sweet tea is so sweet it gets you high.
Later on we went and lay by the river and digested.
It's a good feeling to have all my friends in one place at the same time. It makes it easier to face another week of hellacious over-booked full-house not-enough-time-to-get-my-fucking-prep-done bullshit.
I just get so fucking sick of people giving me the let's be friends spiel and then blowing me off. I fucking hate it.
here's some Damien Jurado lyrics; exactly how I feel about this shit:
He'll come around when he's bored
And she'll pay him no mind
"We must stop meeting like this,"
He said with a grin while walking in
And she just slammed the door in his face
I'll see you around sometime
She hangs her coat on the door
He hangs his head on her hopes
She sleeps alone with her thoughts
She dreams of good times
He'll come around when he's old
She'll pay him no mind
"We must stop meeting like this,
Coming to bed with no words said
Makes it tougher on both of us."
And I'll see you around sometime
It used to be much better than this...
|
I haven't written anything in about a week; I feel like all I write is the same goddamn thing over and over:
slammed at work
drink too much
so lonely you could fill up an olympic-sized swimming pool with it
wish I had someone to spoon with
overdrawn bank account
one headlight
constant rejection from boys I like whom I shouldn't
love/hate job
Still, this has been one of the best days off I've had in a long time, especially since I wasn't hungover for all of it, despite staying out drinking til 4. I woke up and went over to Pony Boy's and we went and fetched Squidge and Lil Blueberry and went to Ellen's Soul Food Kitchen. Their fried chicken is so goddamn good, as are their purple-hulled peas. They bring you these amazing cornmeal pancakes and their sweet tea is so sweet it gets you high.
Later on we went and lay by the river and digested.
It's a good feeling to have all my friends in one place at the same time. It makes it easier to face another week of hellacious over-booked full-house not-enough-time-to-get-my-fucking-prep-done bullshit.
I just get so fucking sick of people giving me the let's be friends spiel and then blowing me off. I fucking hate it.
here's some Damien Jurado lyrics; exactly how I feel about this shit:
He'll come around when he's bored
And she'll pay him no mind
"We must stop meeting like this,"
He said with a grin while walking in
And she just slammed the door in his face
I'll see you around sometime
She hangs her coat on the door
He hangs his head on her hopes
She sleeps alone with her thoughts
She dreams of good times
He'll come around when he's old
She'll pay him no mind
"We must stop meeting like this,
Coming to bed with no words said
Makes it tougher on both of us."
And I'll see you around sometime
It used to be much better than this...
Sunday, April 11, 2004
we must stop meeting like this
after a lot of stupid livejournal bullshit the general goodnatured horniness of the night has fizzled out and left me all hurt..,
BUT, I have leftover potroast and dont have to work in the AM and tachi is yowlering for some meat.
me too, baby.
PS i think when my roommate cleaned my room she hid my vibrator.
|
after a lot of stupid livejournal bullshit the general goodnatured horniness of the night has fizzled out and left me all hurt..,
BUT, I have leftover potroast and dont have to work in the AM and tachi is yowlering for some meat.
me too, baby.
PS i think when my roommate cleaned my room she hid my vibrator.
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
see, here's the thing:
up until just under two weeks ago, I hadn't eaten meat since thanksgiving of 98. pork for maybe 8 or 9 years. fish in forever, since my mom's a strict pot roast and pot pie kinda lady.
now, I eat bacon about every 4 hours. I crave it. today I had a long wistful conversation about Jackson Open Air Barbeque's Brunswick stew, from down in Jasper County GA, and I am fuckin craving it now.
fuck some tuna tartare; I want me some barbeque.
the thing is, I became a vegetarian back when I was all Buddhist. lately, though, I just feel like the world's so fucked up that i should be worrying more about kids my age voting than some poor chicken. I thought I'd get sick, physically and emotionally, but instead I crave it.
I think tomorrow i may lunch at corky's.
damn it's been awhile.
I think all this
bacon and chicken eating has me indavertently on the atkins diet; i've lost five pounds or so since i started cooking fulltime and stopped cleaning.
i go in at 2 so i'm fixin to get in bed with some larry brown and see y'all later.
just a few more months til cicada season and the evenings turn blue.
|
up until just under two weeks ago, I hadn't eaten meat since thanksgiving of 98. pork for maybe 8 or 9 years. fish in forever, since my mom's a strict pot roast and pot pie kinda lady.
now, I eat bacon about every 4 hours. I crave it. today I had a long wistful conversation about Jackson Open Air Barbeque's Brunswick stew, from down in Jasper County GA, and I am fuckin craving it now.
fuck some tuna tartare; I want me some barbeque.
the thing is, I became a vegetarian back when I was all Buddhist. lately, though, I just feel like the world's so fucked up that i should be worrying more about kids my age voting than some poor chicken. I thought I'd get sick, physically and emotionally, but instead I crave it.
I think tomorrow i may lunch at corky's.
damn it's been awhile.
I think all this
bacon and chicken eating has me indavertently on the atkins diet; i've lost five pounds or so since i started cooking fulltime and stopped cleaning.
i go in at 2 so i'm fixin to get in bed with some larry brown and see y'all later.
just a few more months til cicada season and the evenings turn blue.
Monday, April 05, 2004
AND I smacked my funny bone on the handle of the walk-in door
full moon.
dead at work and got sent home after only 9 hours.
uterus is getting full and starting to fuck with my head again.
go on and shed them unused cells for me, baby. bring it the fuck on.
I forgot to tell you all something:
the other day, maybe about 4 days ago, I was driving down Vance to Downtown, kinda through the housing project
where we had the nipple-window incident.
as I crossed the tracks I passed a very tall elderly gentleman, of approximately 75 years of age and almost 7 feet in height, in an immaculately kept suit and hat, walking stooped over and very slowly.
he had an almost beatifically calm expression on his face, and he was carrying a bouquet of intensely bright red flowers.
tell me something good.
tell me that you love me.
|
full moon.
dead at work and got sent home after only 9 hours.
uterus is getting full and starting to fuck with my head again.
go on and shed them unused cells for me, baby. bring it the fuck on.
I forgot to tell you all something:
the other day, maybe about 4 days ago, I was driving down Vance to Downtown, kinda through the housing project
where we had the nipple-window incident.
as I crossed the tracks I passed a very tall elderly gentleman, of approximately 75 years of age and almost 7 feet in height, in an immaculately kept suit and hat, walking stooped over and very slowly.
he had an almost beatifically calm expression on his face, and he was carrying a bouquet of intensely bright red flowers.
tell me something good.
tell me that you love me.
Thursday, April 01, 2004
sign here if you are the translator...
I am the official liason between the rest of the kitchen staff and our incredibly hard-working identical twin Mexiacan dishwashers.
the funny thing is, since they are hourly AND get tipped out 1% of all the waitstaff's tips, they are making more than me.
HA.
|
I am the official liason between the rest of the kitchen staff and our incredibly hard-working identical twin Mexiacan dishwashers.
the funny thing is, since they are hourly AND get tipped out 1% of all the waitstaff's tips, they are making more than me.
HA.
