Ireland

This is my best friend. She draws and paints, and talent she's got.

A cone, a collar, a few inches taller

I moved back with my parents recently. Oh joy, you say. But actually, there are many benefits to living with your parents, especially ones like mine: a stay-at-home mother who cooks like Emril and a dry-humored father who rolls his eyes at everything, especially that damn espresso that is just never good enough.

First of all, I think my mother actually enjoys doing laundry, because every two weeks she offers to clean my clothes and even stops me from leaving the house so she can "press my blouse." (I would have just said iron my shirt, but she's a classy broad.) Second, my father is quite fancy. He loves going out to dinners, nice dinners, which is a perk for me and whichever friend I have over at the time. There is not a restaurant in Orange County that he hasn't visited. And every time he lets them know exactly what he thought of the experience. I keep telling him he needs to create a Yelp account, but he doesn't listen. He's too busy drinking wine and watching 24, Law and Order, Monk, or one of the hundreds of DVDs he owns. But my most favorite are the conversations my mother has, either with me, my dad, or herself. She is such a hoot. You should meet her.

She's good at offering perspective on all matters. My dog has mites. Apparently, according to the vet, all dogs have mites but Padme's are concentrated in a certain area, which has resulted in a chewed off, Australia cut-out on her ass. We got all the pills, medicinal baths, and, yes, Elizabethan, cone collar (pictured above). Our other dog, Phoebe, who is such a Q-tip, really hates the collar. I don't think Padme really notices when she has it on. She's just really confused at why she can't chew more of her fur to resemble a larger continent. But the Phebester notices. Normally the two of them play tug of war and all that and get along great. But with the collar, Phoebe becomes a maniac. Pad is just jumping around like everything's normal, and Phoebe freaks out, gnashing her teeth and the whole bit. We had just broken up a rumble between the dogs and my mother and I were in the kitchen when she, in all seriousness, empathized with the fluffy Phoebe:

"Well, I can understand. I wouldn't want to play with someone who had that on their head either."

I love my mom.

(Padme's patch is not shown. She is embarrassed and wishes not to reveal her lower half to the public until the hair has grown back. She's not Britney.)

Mystics and Graveyards and Beautiful Music

I had such an eventful weekend. Sexual harassment in Long Beach. Worst rendition of A Midsummer Night's Dream at a Tarrot/Palm-reading, spiritual-healing, Wicca and Reiki retail, energy and mystic shop. All-nighter at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery to see Bon Iver at sunrise. Donald Miller talk in Irvine...I like that man.

I could go on about the Shakespeare play, but I won't. Just know that we left at intermission. And that the girls were all a little slutty, and the actress who played Titania seemed kind of drunk.

The Bon Iver concert was the coolest event I've ever been to. We got there at midnight. Hundreds of us spread out blankets with drinks and food and weed smoke wafting over us every ten minutes. Personally, I just ate too many Twizzlers and Carmel Apple Pops. We watched Bottle Rocket, some of Planet Earth, listened to some good random music. Free coffee served all morning. A half hour before the show started Buddhist monks blessed the stage through chanting and offering. Then 6 a.m., Bon Iver played. It was amazing.

You know when you're at an event like this and everyone knows it's the coolest thing but no one wants to say it out loud? While everyone was standing in line, people whispered to their friends "this is so cool." But not too loudly of course, because it's cool to not comment about what's cool. Act like it's the norm.

But the first to say it was Justin Vernon himself:

"Thanks for making this the coolest thing ever."

Bon Iver is one of the only bands that are even better live than on their CD. I knew almost every song but they were all a little bit different than the recorded versions. All a little revamped in some way. It was a great show.

Really Appalling

Rite Aid seemed like a perfectly safe place for Cynthy to pick up her ear ointment. And dressing up in skirts for our lunch didn't seem too ominous of a decision.

I'm standing there in the aisle a bit awkwardly because, as much fun as it is to wear four-inch heels, I am quite visibly uncomfortable when I dress up in something more than jeans and a neutral-colored shirt.

I see a man, white, 30s, sunglasses, shorts and t-shirt, limping towards me. He's not limping because he's hurt, but because he has something on his foot that's about to fall off. It looks like an upside down, orange iPod. He walks really close to me and so, out of instinct, I close my legs and walk away.

Cynthy goes to check out and I whisper to her.

"That guy has something on his foot."

"What is it?" she asks.

"I don't know. I really don't know. But he got all close to me and put his foot by my foot and, I don't know, I think it's a camera."

"What do you mean?"

"Like he was trying to look up my skirt or something."

"No. Really?"

"I don't know. That's what it seemed like. Look. That guy. Look at his foot," I say as he walks past us.

"Yeah. That's a camera phone."

"Oh my god."

Cynthy is next in line and the guy gets behind me. I cross my legs, scoot away from him, and look at his face. He is exhaling a long breath while looking up nervously. I walk out of the store.

Cynthy comes out and meets up with me.

"Is he still in there?" I ask.

"Yeah. He did the same thing to me. He went like this," she says, sliding her foot directly under me.

"Oh my god."

"So I pulled away and gave him this dirty look."

"Did you say anything?"

"No."

"Do you think he's still in there?"

"I don't know."

"Should we go in there and say something to him?"

"Like what?" she says.

"I don't know. Like, hey pervert, or something. And tell him off. I don't know."

"Well, we don't know if he was really doing that."

"I know. What if we were wrong?"

"That'd be pretty bad."

So we walk away.

Obviously looking back, I realized that was in fact what he was doing. I was just so shocked in the moment I didn't think to report him, yell at him, step on his foot and break his phone, or even simply ask what the hell was so precariously attached to his foot. I wish I did something, said something.

I still can't really get over it. There are so many perverts and freaks out there.

I fell asleep around 2 a.m. with the incident still on my mind. Fifteen minutes later, I woke up from a loud ringing. I checked my phone and I didn't have any missed calls or anything, but something woke me up. Something was telling me to pray for that man. It was a difficult thing to do.

So Serious

Girl With a Patch

If you are standing to the left side of me I probably will not notice your pretty face. Keep in mind that I do care, for I do not wish to ignore you, my dear reader. I do not wish to shun you. The fault is not mine; it is not my mother’s; it is not my father’s; it is not my father’s parents’, who died before I was born; it is not my mother’s legalistic parents’ on a farm in South Bend, Indiana. The fault is no one’s, in fact. Just a pure genetic coincidence, if you believe in coincidence and chance and the like. Just a sometimes noticeable, always laughable, never lived-without-it kind of handicap: my legally blind left eye.

My mother did have this physical fault, but I do not blame her. It would be like blaming her for my tiny mouth, which takes about three bites of a sandwich to equal any person’s one chomp. My sweet mother did what she could for my baby self. I went to an optical therapist, something you probably did not know existed. What I remember of the office lobby was like any unimportant and forgotten doctor’s office: impeccably clean yet un-matching furniture, corners cluttered with Highlights magazines, a seemingly ubiquitous toy with winding rods and imprisoned beads. In the examination room, the kind, fat lady asked me to tell her which was better, one or two. I swung my five-year-old legs, whacking her expensive equipment. And in return I was given a patch. A black, pirate-looking patch.

Cool. My mother and I wondered how making me the kid with the patch, the kid you did not make fun of because she is just too pitiful and suffers enough humiliation within the first five minutes of leaving her house, would help reverse my lazy eyeball. Of course, without the patch, if I looked you in the eyes, in your perfectly straight, forward-looking eyes, you would notice my left eye veering towards my nose. That’s humiliating enough. But the patch does not cover it up; it draws much more attention to it. Fortunately, the optical therapist did not insist on any public wearing of the patch. I was only meant to wear the thing over my right eye for a couple hours a day playing Legos in the privacy of my own home. Relief.

This, however, did not suffice. We kept at my patch-wearing Lego-play for about a year to no avail. My blind eye remained. I wore glasses for most of my life; so I was the kid with glasses, not at all a unique characteristic. But if I removed said glasses, my left eye would throw his hands in the air, give up, and become so lazy he just had to check out what my right eye was doing, which was diligently fulfilling his innate duties of seeing whatever my brain told him to see. At times my fellow conversationalist, out of honest sincerity, would look over his or her shoulder and ask to whom I was talking or at what was I looking. And of course there were the snickers. One year a jr. high boy circled my yearbook picture and wrote “Cross Eyed Girl.” How lovely of him. But the handful of rude remarks has not been the downside.

This handicap has actually rid me of any depth perception. Team sports were always out of the question. I was stuck with things like gymnastics, cheerleading, piano, and kickboxing. The one year I tried playing on a soccer team, I was so bad the team mom had to run alongside me in games to help me out. For future reference, do not try and toss me something most people can catch, things like keys, pens, or remote controls. I also had to take a separate and more complicated driving test to get my license, although I sometimes think I should not be allowed to drive at all based on previous minor but very annoying car accidents that I do not wish to discuss.

I am the girl with the blind eye. If anything happens to my good eye, I would be the girl with the cane and seeing-eye dog. I had fright a year ago when my right eye was infected and I was quite blind for three days. Although reading books is such a big part of my life, I do not think it would be the end of the world if I became blind; thank the Lord for Louis Braille. I just hope no one would ever try to pull a Wait Until Dark. Never mess with a blind Audrey Hepburn or Hannah Petrak.

One of my Favorite Vets

A man set his basket of groceries on my register and looked at me. He was like 80. "Well, it's you and me," he said.

"What," I said.

"It's you and me against the world." Very serious.

I smiled quickly then matched his somber tone and said, "Do you have your weaponry?"

"No I don't believe in that stuff. I got enough of it in World War Two."

"Oh."

The woman who was gathering her change from the previous transaction overheard. She waited a few moments, as if gathering up the courage to do the right thing, looked him in the eye and said, "Thank you for serving our country." Her somberness was not in the same mockery tone as mine and the man's. She said this brave statement as if it were her good deed for the day, obeying the urges of Dr. Laura and PBS, who encourage us all to thank our troops.

The man looked at her a bit startled and said, "Well, I didn't have much of a choice. We were drafted."

I smiled at this. The woman did not. She hunched over her wallet again and mumbled something I could not understand. The man looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. The woman then said more clearly, "My father was in World War Two and he said you never return the same."

"Well, yeah. I'd think that'd be kind of obvious. It's a war, you know," he said.

Without a glimmer of a reaction, she walked out the automatic doors.

"I don't know how I got into that conversation."

"Does it make you uncomfortable?" I said.

"No."

I want to see that man again.

Sequoia

I'm a Great Tenant

Recently I have been almost driving in the carpool lane when I'm alone because I think it's legal now that I'm 21. I don't actually think that of course, but for some reason I feel there are no restrictions now that July 8, 2009 has come and gone.

New subject. I can hear everything my landlord and his family say when they're in the kitchen. Mostly it's a lot of him hanging out with his freakishly adorable three-year-old son. But sometimes I can hear he and his live-in girlfriend fighting which I find very awkward. I told him the first week I moved in that I could hear everything so he insulated the walls. But it only muffled the still pretty clear words. Oh well. I'm moving out soon. Oh, and something else awkward. One time I heard them talking about me. I wish it was bad stuff. It would have caused quite the controversy. However, it's impossible for anyone to say anything bad about me. I'm great. So they said all this nice stuff about me, like, "She's really nice...a very good tenant...great girl." Then my landlord said, "Yeah, I'm thinking about lowering her rent." Ah! I was pretty stoked. A few weeks later he came to talk to me and, surprise surprise, lowered my rent. But my reaction probably threw him off a bit. I'm really bad at lying. Unless I'm being sarcastic (there's a difference). So my reaction was like, "Oh wow. That's really nice of you." Looking back on this I feel I should have said something like, "Really? Oh gosh..." Or something...I don't know. Sorry about this anticlimactic story. Then I looked down and found five bucks.

No Vacancy For Stumpy

I went to a wedding in Solvang last night.  The drive took about four hours.  We made it to the vineyard just in time for the short and perfect ceremony and the beautiful reception.  Delicious wine.  A little too delicious.  I'm feeling it this morning.

Our plan was to cram a bunch of people into a hotel room for the night then drive back the next day.  We stopped by three different hotels and all had to turn us away.  One with a humble white piece of paper posted in the window with a childish scrawl: "No More Rooms."  I tried to find a stable for us to stay in, but I wasn't pregnant so no one took that kind of sympathy on me.  (ba-dum-bum-psh)  Finally at 1:30 in the AM we decided to drive back home.  I tried to keep the driver awake by telling him a scary story.  But it just turned into a coming of age story for an eight-year-old cripple named Stumpy who slept with the camp director, Stacy, who tried to keep their romance a secret because everyone hated Stumpy, especially those damn kids who always toilet papered his shack in the woods.  Poor Stumpy.