April 2010
9 posts
An Ode to My Tempurpedic
My dad travels with pillows. Not a “travel pillow” in the shape of a puffy half-eaten donut, but an actual rectangular, goose-down accoutrement upon which to lay your entire head. He will forgo the carry-on bag in lieu of his pillow because he doesn’t trust that the hotel, even the Hilton, will have one that meets his standards, and at his age, he doesn’t have time to...
Subtlety with a Side of Nuance, Please
This past Sunday I saw shit smeared on a wall, a man going down on himself, babies being sucked back up the birth canal and a giant pink phallus. But I’ll get back to that in a moment.
As a contemptuous private school teen in bright, sunny Hawaii, my general mission was to stand out. I wore black patent leather go-go boots, fishnets and glittery polyester shirts tied at my navel. I drove...
Eh Brah, Whatchu Lookin' At?
Having grown up in Hawaii, I’m often asked if it’s true that Hawaiians* hate all white people. I usually tell them what my mother, a white woman from Louisana who worked with the roughest, most challenging kids on the island, told me: If you treat people with respect, they’ll respect you.
I find this to be true and is often the way I try to live my life. I go into situations...
STFUed
I’m a writer, but I’m probably best known for being a talker. A very loud talker at that.
Sure, I’ve destroyed my computer’s hard drive from too much wear and tare, but this weekend, I actually annihilated my vocal chords from excessive laughing and shrieking with my gay BFF in town.
After fours hours of cocktails, followed by three hours of drunken discussion on...
Moderation My Way
Here’s how I eat cereal: I pour a serving size of cereal into a small bowl and barely submerge it in milk. With the cereal eaten and a little milk leftover, I pour a little more cereal. When I get down to the last two spoonfuls, I notice I don’t have enough milk. I pour more milk. I repeat the last three steps two more times. Then I wait ten minutes, grab the box and stick my hand...
Shaking My Maracas
Music was the easiest way to categorize people in high school: us (the alternative kids) and them (everyone else who caved to Top 40). In college, “us” would be broken down further: ravers, goths, rockabillies, punks, skankers, swingers, dark wavers, straight edgers, metalheads, skinheads, hardcores, rude boys, b-boys, disco nuts, etc.
By the time I was in my 20s, I’d...
Pop Tart Detox
Four years ago I was a celebrity gossip junkie. I had TMZ, Perez Hilton and Go Fug Yourself bookmarked on my dashboard, not The New York Times. It has only been in the last few years that I waste valuable Internet minutes reading the news (i.e. stories with more words than pictures). Odd, yes, considering I’ve been a journalist in some shape or form for the last decade.
While I...
March 2010
13 posts
You Know I'm a Dreamer
One of my favorite scenes from a recent movie: A drunk, middle aged man pulls into his garage. He’s about to turn off his engine and head inside when the opening of Motley Crue’s “Home Sweet Home” comes on the radio. He lets go of the keys and pounds the dashboard. “Fuck yeah,” he says. He closes his eyes, feeling each note and singing each sorrowful lyric in...
A New Kind of Maturity
I live in the dark. Literally. In my room, I have four functioning light bulbs, but their combined total wattage appears to be somewhere near 60 volts, one step away from candlelight.
I don’t mind; it makes aging less painful.
It isn’t until I’m subjected to a mirror under flourescent lights (aka the gym) do I remember that I’m not immune to white hairs. I’ll...
Urban Creatures
I have mixed feelings about dogs and babies. I’m one of the few in my species who doesn’t feel the need to reach out and touch either one of them. But this doesn’t mean, among other things, that I don’t notice their existence.
I used to live in LA, where everyone flaunted their dogs like a diamond ring, or as an accessory to their accessories—peeking out of their...
Making Tacos, Not a Run for the Border
In college, we had “parties.” Sometimes these were called nothing more than Friday Night (or “come upstairs, I’ve got a bottle of Everclear”). Nowadays, getting together and imbibing seems to have taken on a new distinction: the dinner party.
This is not to imply that I’m suddenly sophisticated. I don’t own napkin rings or those hideous wine glass...
Green Leaf Clovers Look Best In My Cereal Bowl
I lost interest in St. Patty’s Day years ago. I immediately picture frat boys or desperate-to-get-drunk office workers, or just some indescript mass of green jerseys and beer guts screaming and sloshing pints on me as I pull away from the bar and I’m turned off. Plus, like I’ve said before, I’m less interested in going out for going out’s sake these days.
So this...
Frikin Aspelund Leksvik
I remember sitting on the carpet of my very first apartment—a barred-windowed two bedroom in the wild stretches of North Hollywood’s Little Tijuana—screwing together pieces of plywood, guided by a booklet of vague sketches of how I was supposed to do such a thing. For three hours I sat there on that carpet, and in the end, I was filled with pride as I stood back and admired my...
Infiltrating the Lit Groupie Inner Circle
One of the main reasons I moved to New York was to push forward with my writing. This could mean many things on many different days, but last Thursday this meant listening to one of favorite writers speak.
Now, in the back of my mind, when I made this date with Mr. David Shields at the Brooklyn Public Library, did I imagine hobnobbing with him as he signed my copy of his book? Or sitting next...
Enough with the Corey Feldman Interviews
Between 1999 and 2002, I probably saw every Behind the Music and E! True Hollywood Story ever produced. I was a nosey kid raised on pop culture and my curiosity of celebredom was heightened even further during this mid-to-post college period when I had a proclivity to party, aspirations without strategy, and the rest of my twenties ahead of me.
The dark side of celebrity interested me most....
Pity: A Party Reconsidered
When I walked into a bodega the other day, I saw the following sign:
You must be born before on this date in the year 1992 to purchase a pack of cigarettes.
In 1992, I was a freshman in high school. I don’t make this point to show how old I am, or to dive into a dissertation about how unbelievable it seems that Nirvana pissed all over hair metal more than 20 years ago, or that people...
Time to Bail
I used to be the type of person who didn’t want to miss any action, i.e. the girl who’d corral the last stragglers left at a party back to her house, wooing them with whatever beer she could find in her fridge. Even if I did leave a bar or any kind of shindig early, I had to say goodbye to every single person in the room. Hugs, arm grabs, kisses on the cheek, promises to grab coffee...
Really, a Very Special Episode
I remember one particular episode of Mr. Belvedere. The oldest son Kevin had come home from college for the weekend, and ended up catching a cold. His mother insisted he stay until he got better, and after a weekend of homemade soup and free laundry services, he agreed. For the next week, he watched TV in bed, drank chocolate milk and didn’t do his homework. He feigned illness until his...
I Suck at French Braiding
When I was a waitress in my 20s, I had to wear a uniform. Because I couldn’t express myself from the neck down, I was inclined to do so with the foot of person I had to work with. Sometimes this meant wearing a chunky necklace, a string of coral and sea green beads peeking out from the collar of my billowy, once-navy-now-pewter rayon blouse. Other times it meant sporting a pair of dangly...
Untag Me
It’s no secret: I like to drink. I go to happy hours at least twice a week, and sometimes those happy hours turn into shifts longer than the ones I actually worked that day. I’m not ashamed of this. All my friends know. Even my family knows. Hell, they were usually there.
But lately, I’ve become a little uncomfortable with displaying things like my Welcome to...
