A Rainy Tuesday Sermon

Stay-at-home mothers and fathers, I hear your prayers.  I am one with your deep despair and longing for the day when you sat idle in the sunshine, at a cafe at say 2:35 PM, chewing on a scone, your mind an empty vessel.

May you survive being projectile vomited on like I was this morning. Chewed up apple slices look like festive confetti when spewed across multi-colored shag rugs.

May you survive when your college-student babysitter finally arrives to spell you at 3PM and yet looks not fun and frivolous but wan and lifeless.  She informs you that the meds she is taking for the currently undiagnosed ailment only make her nauseous not dizzy.  She doesn't see any problem giving the small children a bath.  You suggest she go home and sleep after she completely over-boils a hot dog.

May you survive any ailment that then sets upon you in your weakened exhausted depleted state, because frankly, you will have to muscle it out with whatever is available and not expired (for too long) on your medicine shelf.  That is if you have enough remaining strength to unlock the child safety latch.  Parents have been found crumbled up against the bathroom cabinet, feverish in a fetal position, the lock in tact.  In my case, it is the hint of a soon-to-be-raging UTI that will remain untreated for a bad long time because I have no doctor here yet, and absolutely refuse to subject myself and my small children to an Urgent Care facility for sixteen hours.  Then again, at least there would be barf buckets there.

May you survive the rain that pours down on top of all these calamities, and not beat yourself up too much when around lunchtime you throw all your morals about television and movies during the day out the door and set your child down before the god of flat screen and finally get a moment to brush your teeth, or vomit, or cry, or whatever you will do...

God bless you if amid all this, you find time to write.

Reports from the Border of O-Town

Because we live on the corner across from a small playground next to a youth center that mainly caters to African American teens, and we are only four blocks from the border of Oakland, lately, when I leave my house with my two children for the day's events, a car will screech to a halt and a white, confident friendly mother hustles up to me saying with apologetic overtone, "Excuse me, excuse me, could I ask you a question?" "Of course," I say.  But by now I know exactly what the question is as this has happened five times in the three weeks I have lived here.   The question is a hopeful desire for me to affirm that if they buy a home in the area, on the street, because the price is right and wow, isn't the neighborhood so precious, that they will not be terrorized by some upheaval of racism prompted by their contribution to the gentrification of the area.

Now...   I wonder if I should tell them that I think the seemingly innocent basketball games played at the youth center are really a cover for the meetings of the Black Panther Teens for a White-Free neighborhood group that meet below in the basement, plotting their murderous plan to take out all yuppies buying up all the overpriced $700,000 homes that no one in this African American community (or me too frankly) can afford.

Or... I wonder if I should tell them that African-American young people are not smoking pot in their PMP-600s outside my daughter's bedroom window because they are hardly that covert.  They are smoking joints on the street, right on MLK Boulevard, while looking to see if any cops are coming because that's what dumb teens, white, black, Asian or what-have-you-in-your-melting pot city high school, do.  It's fun to almost get caught smoking pot when you are 16.

I also wonder if I should tell them about the white butch schizophrenic that walks past by my house at least three times a day who I don't fear or mind because she has taken to calling me the "pretty lady with the adorable kids".  (I will take a compliment wherever I can get it.)

When I learn they have children my daughter's age, and are available for play dates, I really want them to move in!  So I save my sarcasm for the blog and punch the mom's number into my cell phone.   There is a warm friendly smell in the air, as the youth center preps an afternoon BBQ.  Yeah right, we all know that it's a fundraiser to buy AK-47s...but shhhh, no one is telling.

Buy the food, eat the food, poop the food.  Buy the food, eat the food, poop the food.  Ever have days like that?

Monday In a nutty nutshell

My sister hates me so I don't have to worry about saying that on the blog because she'll never read it.

Moving to Berkeley and ripping my child out of the only world she knew in San Jose has manifested in her a phobia of elevators ("I swear, this is completely out of left field and new to me," I informed the worried passengers of the elevator at Target as my frantic daughter lurched from side to side in the back of the cart, desperately trying to locate the emergency button around the strangers' and my bodies).

Instead of writing on my novel and my screenplay today during valuable and expensive nanny time, I surfed other blogs and submitted writing and articles that would earn me a whopping .14 in revenue should I ever write 900 more articles under my log in name that are ever read by over 10,000 people.

The baseball field across the street from my lovely home office is really picking up the pace, with not just mishmash night games with blaring stadium lights, but full on professionally outfitted girl league games with lots of pumping up cheering and outfield hooting.  This could be a potentially worse distraction than my last office mate's extensive conference calling through rice paper thin walls.  I simply add this to yet another reason to not write and instead look for  glass options for our now glassless beveled coffee table (somehow lost in the move).

I almost made a movie with Andy Dick

Okay so the reason why I was thinking this as I was breastfeeding my kid while the other one watched Sesame Street in the other room was I am about as far from making a movie with anyone anymore never mind Andy Dick. And in his defense, with all the flack about him, the meeting for that movie was very professional and collaborative and it was a damn shame his musician friend with the financing backed out.

So today I want to write about the antithesis of Andy Dick. Corporate conglomerates. And my focus of the day is the f#@%-up conglomerate AT&T/SBC Global. Believe me, there are perks to be had from their rampant incompetency, like the first time they raked me over the coals when I moved from Los Angeles to San Jose, I had high speed dirt cheap for a year. This time, I have like 3 free months or something like that for fiber optic U-Verse but honestly, it was not worth the weeks of high-speedless pain and frustration.

It started on a sunny San Jose morning where I made a seemingly seamless call to a AT&T/SBC Global customer service rep to transfer my very basic service of a phone line costing $5 a month (to service the DSL) and DSL to my new Berkeley home. We chatted about San Jose, kids, what have you, and then she made the transfer to happen on move day. I even made it a day before so my husband who works for an internet entertainment company could have internet at home without a break in service. Aren't I considerate? I was given a transfer reference number, which I warn you, means nothing despite how official it sounds with its letters and numbers combination as they don't reference between departments and there are many many insidious departments in a conglomerate. "Just walk that little modem from one house to the other, plug it in, and Walla!" the sunny rep said. What is the opposite of "Walla"? Is it giving someone the "rasberry" or farting in a pillow case and throwing it over someone's head? Because the day we moved, we plugged in the modem and Walla, nada. Nothing. No parade of fun red and green rectangle lights. No surfing the net right away for information on our new trash day, placing postings for babysitters or Yelp for take out referrals after unpacking for 22 hours. No internet. Cut off. So now, without preschool, nanny and my life in boxes, I have to call AT&T and start again.

I should be featured at a Customer Service Dos and Don'ts symposium at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas for the next 22 days of hell. I spent time on my cell phone with a long line of customer service reps on the service side, and on the customer service side, in the three departments of phone line, internet and U-Verse. None of them talked to each other, none of the notes from one showed up on the screen of the other, and I had a notepad with Tami's and Brent's and Latesha's names crossed out faster than you can eat a grape. When I tried to get back to the rep that promised they were sorting this out and would get back to me, I would be told that there is no way to directly call them even if I know their name, ID number and location in Arizona. Finally, someone called me from an LA office with an actual direct dial number, and I think she realized after my 22nd hysterical message back to her, she had made a grave error in sympathizing with the customer. I was then informed there is no DSL in my area, there are no U-Verse modems in my area, my phone line is dead, my account was closed, there are two closed accounts in my name,it's Friday and the department I need is closed till Monday, and one rep even told me at the end of my long winded story told for the fourteenth time that I was better off with Comcast. Finally, Christine in LA saved the day, and steady sailing, got to the top of the management heap and had someone figure out what the hell had happened with my account. I got expedited U-Verse 22 days after my original request to transfer service. Word to the wise, I only went through this to not lose my email address since I have no time to change it over right now. Get a Gmail account and start using it. You may not be a famous writer yet with publishers emailing you lucrative deals only to get a failure message to your closed email account, but one day you may be!

Hot Sex with a Dolphin!

Just wanted to get the largest body of audience's attention as possible. That said, are the sort of people intrigued by nautical bestiality the kind of readers I want to attract? If they read my stuff and like it, hell yeah! Did Faulkner care who read his novels? Did Robert Louis Stevenson ever worry about the feelings of the pirates? Did Dickens actually give change to pan handling waifs?

Let me explain myself

I can't believe it. I'm a blogger. I'm sort of a mommy blogger because I'm a mom to two small kids but I'm really classified as a pining - writer blogger, and I know there are hundreds of thousands of you out there desperate to write but strapped by prior commitments. When you hit an apex in your life and you know your calling is to write and you can't find more than a half hour a day if you are lucky to do it, it is downright depressing. So I am here to lift your spirits which lifts my spirits, and inform you that even though you cannot even fathom more spare time besides flossing, or finally curing that foot arch fungus you contracted the last time you got a pedicure which was about the last time you pampered yourself (double fuck you), you can do it. Hey, I used to wear belly bracelets, drop obnoxious amounts of Ecstasy and live near downtown LA in Echo Park. I used to spend time actually ambling about aimlessly. What I would do now for a crumb of that wasted slacker time!!! Now I prep cucumber slices and baby carrots in tupperware for snack time and most of my Google and Yelp searches are for new playgrounds with cool water and sand features to keep my kids preoccupied.

I posted the short story Pop Goes the Cherry of mine as my inauguration to blogging because honestly, I sat at my desk, exhausted at 10:30 at night, and everything I wrote came off as cute, trite and telling you all about me in a kind of rambling way that only served to expose my true age (always always references to the 80's and 90's... when will that ever end?) Actually at this moment, I have to stop typing in this entry because my pre-schooler is hollering from the other room about getting up on a chair to get her piggy bank down, and is it okay that her baby sister is holding the chair for her? I love that that pre-schooler (almost 5) can sometimes watch her sister for a brief spell while I frantically write something down in my notebook, but I have learned that the baby has become very covert in disguising in her spitty mitt the one piece of sheet rock that the vacuum missed, and the next sound I will hear is a grinding crunching of cement on her front four teeth.

I managed to convince the 5 year old that she doesn't need to take money out of her bank to buy crappy plastic toys from China, but she should be saving to deposit the cash into her savings account so one day she can graduate from high school and see Europe. She is currently processing this information and will surely have a counter argument in about say, ten minutes... So that gives me enough time for the Thought of the Day. If you don't have a home office, make one, out of a box or section of a part of the house or apartment or room and call it your writing space, or go to a coffee shop for only a half hour, and even if that is how long it takes you to set up (like me with an ancient Mac powerbook that grinds like a floppy disk). It is making the act regular and natural that is the key to success. Sounds like the answer to marital sex too! Let me clue you in, it's a close second! I personally went on a crusade when we moved to Berkeley two weeks ago to put the 5 year old and the baby in a bedroom together so I could have an office in the house. It took some toggling, and reminding my husband we would give it two weeks before giving up and now it's like the den of dreams in there when you check on them and I have my writing space. Now that doesn't solve the fact that I currently have no child care to speak of, but at night, I drag my limp demanded upon food crusted self to my desk if only to write a bunch of crap I don't even bother to save. It's the act number one! I really owe it to my mom for the kids sharing a room working out. The minute she gave me body language like only she can that indicated she didn't approve, I was more adamant than ever! Mom gets a byline in the first novel! There are lots of you desperate to write! We hear you in solidarity! (we being me, but I love writing in that voice). God speed!

Pop Goes the Cherry

She was the last of her girlfriends to have her cherry popped. They’d entertained guys that looked like Patrick Swayze in their bedrooms for almost a year now when their parents were out of town. She wanted to tell her girlfriends that those guys were kind of using them because they weren’t that attractive, and kind of slutty and should they be giving it away to guys who really wished they were still fucking the pert little Catholic school blonds who dumped them to have sex with nice Catholic school boys that got them pregnant and went with them to their abortions while their parents were away? But they wouldn’t care. So one day she stopped wanting to be the one left in the living room by herself stoned and with a luke warm beer while Erica and Patrick Swayze did it in Erica’s bedroom on her pink and white Holly Hobbie bedspread with the eyelet lace ruffle, and gawky kinky haired Debby did it in Erica’s parents’ bed with her grown up construction worker boyfriend (who was actually committing underage sex with her but it was in the middle of the afternoon in a ranch home in Barrington, RI so who was telling?). She stopped wanting to be a virgin and began the quest for who would pop her cherry.


She met Dan shortly thereafter at a public school dance. Her friends went to public school, she went to private school. Dan was between schools. He’d recently moved to the small non-descript town of Barrington, Rhode Island from Los Angeles because his dad was no longer married to his mom, a famous actress from a big family of very famous actors, and she was too busy with auditions and recurring roles to care for Dan. Father and mother had decided that it was best that Dan live in Barrington where there could be some normalcy in his life, but according to Dan, they had not enrolled him in senior year because she was going to send for him to come back any day now.

Dan’s denial of his mother’s obvious abandonment mixed with his nonchalance about his famous lineage excited her. She knew she wanted him to pop her cherry in the first ten minutes they talked in the fluorescent lights of the school cafeteria during the dance. “Open Arms” by Journey blared in the background and couples made out in their seated positions around us, broken up finally by the proctor. Dan made her laugh, and possessed a youthful innocence underneath his adult-like stance. He was laughter, he was confidence, he was innocence and with these commendable qualities, Dan would lay her down and plunge into her his teenage dagger, and forever memorialize himself in her diary and on her memory.

It was a magical night. Their adrenaline electrifying each other through their tightly clenched hands as they raced across the abandoned hill on the coast to the construction trailer that she had dutiful scoped out as the location for her entry into womanhood. He laid his coat down on the bare floor and pushed his way into her and there was a pain and lots of blood. It lasted one minute. As she sobbed, her scabbed knees pulled up to her chin, he cared for her. He soothed her. He even made her laugh with a sardonic comment. He rubbed her shoulders and they awkwardly hugged, her knees still between them, gangly and unshaven. Then he drove her home, his hand possessive on her thigh, both of them nervously grinning from their accomplished quest; a boy who’d popped a cherry, a girl who was no longer a virgin.

They resolved eagerly to do it again. But no parents were away so they decided to rendezvous in the local town park the next night and do it there, perhaps by a tree in the dark. In retrospect, sex for the second time should have been performed somewhere soft and intimate and teen magazine-ish. She would have applied Very Berry lip-gloss before the act. Not in the park in the dirt, under the full moon with people milling about unexpectedly. She had no experience putting on a condom, and he had even less, and when he finally got it rolled on, it was dry as fuck, and when he tried to push it in, her bare ass literally slid back through the dirt. He got frustrated. ‘Fuck it. This is not gonna work,’ as he brushed the dirt off his pant knees. He didn't look at her, and hold her, and have that face of confidence of the boy who had popped the cherry and was tenderly going back for more. He had the face of a boy who was thinking about all the other cherries he could now pop, and why waste his time here in the dirt with a limp dick and an awkward condom when there are other girls with places to pop their cherry all laid out for him and planned.

"We could try again tomorrow,” she said.

“Mmmmhhhhmmm,” he responded. But he wasn’t listening. His body was turned away from her. She pulled up her underpants and her jeans and again, hugged her knees up into her chest, but this time she was ashamed. She was ashamed she was not able to make herself, the sex, the experience good enough. He was finished with her. They were done.