Shorty Got Low

Today, I went into Whole Foods at 7:30 am to pick up a coffee before work, and they were playing "Low" by Flo-Rida and T-Pain. That was a really, really good start to my day. (Additionally, I didn't get that Flo-Rida was a pun on Florida until I had to type it out just then. Good for me.)

My lovely Claire has contracted some kind of minor deadly illness and canceled her Friday evening birthday party, which means that I'm going to be going to the star-studded Dr. Phil Holiday Party before flying away from Los Angeles for ten days. I hear that at the party, Dr. Phil gives all of his staff a gift. I'm retardedly excited for this. I think I'll get drunk and hook up with a runner.

Girl With The Broken Face - Part 7

On Friday, I went to the dentist to get my permanent fake teeth put in. Lord in Heaven. Nothing is easy. Firstly, I'm a fucking baby about novocaine shots, so I had to get the laughing gas just to get the four regular shots. And then one of my teeth would not, for the life of it, numb up. So after the first four regular shots of novocaine, I had to get two extra shots on the left side of my face. I was numb and swollen up to my left eyeball, which was a really special experience. Before I left, they gave me a mega extra strength Motrin.

Then, I went home. My dentist instructed me to eat, and take a viccodin if my teeth hurt. The novoaine wore off and my mouth didn't hurt that bad so I ate and had a beer. Which was probably a mistake, but whatever. Then, later, my teeth started to hurt so before I went to bed I had a viccodin.

So I woke up Saturday morning, sick as a dog, vomiting up my stomach acids. Apparently, the amount of novocaine itself could've had that effect (according to the internet), but I certainly didn't make it better. Sorry, body.

Names

New boss-of-me at The Amazing Race. I do not know this man's name. I will try to avoid ever having to admit that I don't know his name. In my defense, he did not introduce himself.

Milk

Okay, after my jerk-off, now something of substance.

I saw Milk last night with my friend Emily, the new Gus Van Sant one about Harvey Milk, the gayest gay to ever be elected to public office. While mostly about that man, and how gay he was, the movie was also about James Franco being attractive, and Emile Hirsch dancing during celebratory parties.

To jerk-off some more (I guess no substance after all): it was, as you've probably already heard, pretty haunting to watch this movie just a month after Prop 8 got repealed. Though the gay rights movement has made so so so many advancements since 1978, the time does resonate in a few strange ways to 2008. I think overall, gay people are much more accepted now on a personal level, but the movie was about politics and the political arguments that politicians were having in the movies - the debates, the arguing about various gay rights statues and amendments and such - were pretty much the same arguments that people are still having today. Nobody gets on TV and says "gay perverts" anymore, but the same points are still argued in the same way, just with PC-ed-up terminology.

Slow and steady wins the race, I guess.

Fakery

Today, during my lunch break. I went out to the parking lot, and masterbated in the hatchback-trunk of my creamsicle-orange Honda Fit.

Okay, so I didn't do that. I called State Farm to sort out some car insurance stuff. But masterbation would've been much more fun.

Read Books

The other night (when I had the pork belly), I bought a book called Anagrams by Lorrie Moore, which I began last night. I tore through about a hundred pages. Do you ever read a book and have that strange feeling that it was written just for you? Obviously it wasn't, but it just speaks to you about yourself, and is perfect for where you are in your life. Usually, I like that, but last night it was just making me feel itchy and uneasy, like someone was looking over my shoulder all the time. That isn't to say I don't like the book, I do, it just makes me feel strange.

Pork Belly!

Lately, I've been falling down on my self-professed wish to be much healthier than I was during the last semester of college. Better food and less alcohol was the goal, and I was doing pretty well for a while, before falling backwards a little bit since moving to LA.

So, to get back on track, yesterday I got myself a (delicious) kale salad with fake chicken breast for lunch and all morning long resisted the Dr. Pepper that's been haunting me. But sometime, during the afternoon, my will broke, and I drank two cans of Sprite. Then went and got pork belly and a glass of Malbec for dinner. Then went to bed on a cocktail of whiskey-and-apple-cider and a Vicodin (disclaimer: I'm actually prescribed this as a result of fucking up my face recently, so this was not recreational drug use in the strictest sense, and it certainly wasn't illegal.)

I fell asleep singing "Werewolves of London" to myself and felt great, but this morning I felt a little guilty about the whole thing.

Shameful Things

1. Instead of doing my laundry before I go home for Thanksgiving, I'm going to stop at Target and buy more underwear.

2. At about 2pm everyday, I've been feeling really exhausted. Heavy-headed sleepy. I used to get that afternoon slump all the time and I haven't had it lately and for a while I didn't know what was going on. Why was it back? Was I just terribly, terribly board at work? I realized today that I was SUGAR CRASHING. I'd almost completely cut most refined sugars out of my diet for several months now, but when I started my job at the Amazing Race I'd also started succumbing to the Dr. Peppers in the Kraft Service Fridge almost every day at lunch. And at 2pm, I was crashing. The thing is, I don't know if I can stop now that I've started. Bad, bad business.

Epic Journeys

Last night my roommate Claire and I started what probably will be an epic journey to watch the entirety of the BBC Miniseries of Brideshead Revisited. We only watched the first 45 minutes or so, but I'm already enjoying myself and nursing a guilty crush on Jeremy Irons.

Tomorrow morning, I fly home to Chicago for Thanksgiving. I plan to eat very very well.

Misadventures of the Girl With The Broken Face, Part II

Quite recently, I broke my face. What happened was, I engaged in some sort of dangerous bike-riding activity while out of my face, and managed to topple to the concrete head-first and break off my two front teeth. While out of town in San Francisco on an otherwise lovely visit to my friend Nick with another friend, Bari.

When I returned to LA, I went to Dr. Dorfman, dentist to the stars, and got some root canals, got some temporary veneers. I am not allowed to bite down with these temporary veneers, so I have to bite only with the side of my teeth. This is problematic, on occasion. Dr. Dorfman suggested I get caps on the two teeth next to my front teeth, which were crooked. My parents concurred. I did not, but I'm poor and my parents pay health-related expenses so they blackmailed me into getting prettier teeth.

Last Friday, I went to the dentist to get replacement temporaries for my front teeth. They also destroyed two perfectly good teeth to put prettier ones in. No more slightly imperfect smile for Catie.

Maybe the best part? Scored viccodin.

Access Denied

I really wish I could bitch about my work. But I can't. I'm basically under contract not to bitch about my work. In case anyone's reading this who doesn't already know me - I work for Dr. Phil and The Amazing Race, as a transcriber/logger for both shows. It is a job without glory but with a deluge of information about the goings on of these shows before they air (for example, I'll know the winner of The Amazing Race 14 before the editors have even put together the first episode). But if I tell you what I know, I could be fined a great deal of money. Something like $10 million. I don't even have $10,000. Or $1,000. Glory-less and wealth-less these jobs I work.

But on occasion, something bothers me or tickles my fancy, and I would like nothing more than to tell the world about it. Then someone would do a Google search and I'd be cooked. I might be looked at funny for this post even, if someone was to read this that I have already typed. God knows what else. A good rule of thumb is never to put on the internet what you wouldn't say out loud to anybody, as I am always told, but that really fucking blows. I mean, I don't even want to tell you anything interesting. I just want to brag about the strange words and place-names I've learned to spell as a result of working for The Amazing Race, but that could give away the places that the teams are traveling to.

The point of the internet is to tell people things that are too mundane to even bring up in conversation, and when that right is stripped from me, I get a little testy.

I guess I can let you know one thing I learned from Dr. Phil without getting in trouble: lots of people think "themself" is a word. It is not.

Reading List

My sister called me today to develop a reading list for our holiday vacation. She is eighteen, and thinks she's much much cooler than me when it comes to music (she isn't) and rejects most of my music suggestions, but she still comes to me for books. I'm basically responsible for picking up the slack of my high school's English program when it comes to my younger brother and sister. They read what I tell them to read.

Before talking to me, my sister had already decided to read Pale Fire by Nobakov and The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Murakami, both of which I was pushing on her for a while. I suggested adding Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson and Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem.

And then I threw in Black Hole by Charles Burns, which is honestly the most bleak and depressing graphic novel I've ever ever read. It's about an STD that makes people turn into monsters kind of, grow tails or extra mouths on their neck or extra eyes or weird skin. That kind of thing. Because I think it's good to make sure my sister fears sex before she goes off to college and gets tempted to slut it up.

That's What I Want

Last night, I filled my gas tank for $21.53 (from E to full, people), while listening to the Flying Lizards cover of "I Want Money."

Scary Things: Let The Right One In, Sports Bar

Last night I saw a really awesome movie with Claire, Michael, Vlada, Mark, and Ezra, called Let The Right One In. It was oh my god amazing. It was about a kid who got picked on at school a lot, and then a girl moves in next door to be his friend, and turns out she's a vampire. I loved the trailer and I thought that maybe the movie would be a let down comparatively but it was not, not even a tiny tiny bit. That is a picture from it. I'm gonna post the trailer later at home when I figure out how to do it. It's probably my favorite or one of my favorite movies of this year. And stunning cinematography. And vampire children. And bloody, dismembered arms.

Before that, I had a surreal dinner with Ezra at this strange sports bar/restaurant near Sunset Strip, which turns out is about the worst place in LA to hang out. Our conversation kept getting interrupted every thirty seconds by the cheers of drunken football fans. Neither of us knew what we were doing there, but it was the cheapest place around and neither of us have any money, so we stayed. I got the nastiest whiskey sour that I've ever tasted in my life, but it matched the mood of this restaurant. Ezra ordered the side of mac & cheese but they brought him the dinner size, so I guess good things did happen in that place, but it was mostly horrifying.

Protests Are A Lot Like Parades

It turns out protests are a lot like parades: signs, shouting, honking horns. And my take on parades has always been that, as I am usually too short to really see what's going on, a parade is the spectacle of standing in a crowd and not seeing anything. So I've never been a big fan. And it's not that being with a whole bunch of people who really actively want to make a difference was a bad thing, it was actually pretty inspiring. It's just that I personally didn't get much out of being there. I hope that some of the people driving by the protest got something out of it, and that the people there appreciated having another body to shout with them. I don't know what it says about me that seeing and hearing about the previous protests meant more to me emotionally than actually going to one. Maybe it's not about me getting something out it.

Saw Ezra play last night to a really strange crowd at the Roxy. The show was good. Claire and I went. I paid $10 for a gin and tonic, and they gave me gin and soda water. WTF?

Protest or Have A Nap?

Social schedule for the day:

Protest Prop. 8 outside of a Mormon Church in Westwood
See Ezra Furman and the Harpoons live in concert

I figure that crying alone in my bed about Prop 8 isn't really doing much but getting mascara all over my nice pillowcase from Target. Just kidding, I don't wear mascara. But anyway, I should probably stop complaining about protesters making traffic terrible in my neighborhood and become part of the problem.

In other news:

I'm thinking about telling my parents that I'm half gay. I am thinking about approaching it in the same way I approached loosing my virginity: getting it over with fast and leaving the room two minutes after it's done.