Filed under: Daily Specials | Tags: alcohol, anger, articles, disrespect, fighting, life, men, Napoleon complex, thoughts, women, YouTube
Last night’s drink: more Rex.
Every morning I wake up with a million things I want to write about, and I have to find a way to parse them out before my head starts spinning and I finish the contents of my four-cup coffee maker.
Last night, I came across an article in Slate called “Sucker Punch – The art, the poetry, the idiocy of YouTube street fights.” Aside from some debatable points, such as purporting that street fighting is the contemporary take on Martial Arts, and some excellent tips on how not to accidentally become the star of one of these videos, the article takes on a sort of reflective and even endearing view of the clips he has chosen as examples.
As I was reading through the article, I was reminded of some incidences that I had edited out of my original Thanksgiving post, which included two separate occasions where I came uncomfortably close to getting into physical altercations with men. This is not run-of-the-mill for me, not really. I’ve never been in any sort of fist fight before, but I have had more of these sort of “close calls” in the past two years than I have had in the time preceding. Which leads me to ask two questions: 1) Why am I suddenly so scrappy? and 2) Why do these guys want to fight a girl?
There are four or five instances where I’ve come close to calling out. The first happened at the Lamplighter, where my gay friend Kyle and I were standing outside smoking. A young guy probably five inches shorter than me started bashing him with a bunch of homophobic B.S. I think I probably just told him to shut up at first, but he continued to yell these awful things across the patio, which just pissed me off more. We finally decided to walk down the street and get Mexican food, and as we did, I pushed this guy directly in the chest with one hand, which sent him stumbling, drunk, off the curb and into the gutter. Lucky for me, I suppose, he was too drunk to know who, or what, had hit him. So that was one.
The others have a similar bar theme, though not all of them involve drinking on my part. The next close call happened when I was bartending alone on a busy night and this short guy, who was being a jerk anyway, came in with a lit cigarette and while staring straight at me simply dropped the cigarette on the floor and twisted it out with his foot. The other two guys were also short and disrespecting me to my face, though one was just a small man in terms of moral character. He took my phone from my purse and called his phone after I told him I wouldn’t give him my number. I think he also broke into his ex’s house and stole all her underwear. But that’s another story.
The running themes in these encounters is that I really don’t like being disrespected, the guys that want to fight me are typically shorter than I am, and alcohol is usually within reach. The easy answer here is alcohol, but I don’t think that’s the whole answer. I go out all the time, I see short guys all the time, and I get disrespected on occasion - this is just the magic combination for flipping my fighting switch. And for some reason, my being tall, confident, and liqoured up is theirs. I’ll leave you with your own theories on the Napoleon complex, et al… though I’m sure Napoleon would have kicked my ass.
Looking back to the variety of the sort of fighter memes in the article, I try to imagine what I would look like on YouTube if any of the above actually had progressed. I think it’s safe to say that I’d be pretty uncoordinated, about the whole thing, but that doesn’t mean I would lose. One factor I haven’t mentioned yet is the growing impatience and anger I have inside of me for mean people in general. It’s true that it’s the quiet ones you have to watch out for.
Thumb wrestling anyone?
Filed under: Daily Specials | Tags: , alcohol, behavior, education, family, life, thoughts, wild, women, work
Last night’s drinks: Pietra something Merlot.
Kyle and I had an extended happy hour at Modus last night, which then continued in my apartment with pita chips, Rex Goliath, and Little Miss Sunshine. I think we both passed out around 10 p.m.
Of course, I woke up this morning at 4 a.m., stumbled to the restroom, and looked in the mirror to review the mess I’d made. It wasn’t too bad, but it prompted me to think immediately of work which, in turn, prompted me to give my reflection a look of disapproval and consternation. Normal girls don’t act this way, I thought to myself.
So as I washed up, I started to think about what normal girls do do on Tuesday nights instead. I could come up with some hypotheticals – like, they make dinner, watch television or read, work out, talk on the phone, maybe lay out their clothes for the next day. I do these things, too, on weeknights (except for the clothes thing – that’s just over the top), but hardly ever on a consistent basis. I’m all busines in the morning and throughout the workday, but at night I’m hit or miss.
It prompted me to want to figure out who these normal girls were that I was comparing myself to, and why I wanted to be them.
Are they business women? Well, I do feel really good wearing suits and black leather shoes, and I like being on committees and working on projects. I also really enjoy having business cards and a job title with “manager” in it. I like my desk. I like my office. I like shaking hands with people and coming up with strategies for how to get these done, and done right. But I only like working in the business world when it’s not interfering with my social agenda. And business isn’t my passion, it’s more like a lucrative game. So, I don’t think it’s the business women.
Are they wives and moms? It’s hard to deny wanting to be a wife someday – and if I’m being realistic, also a mom. Even though I’ve talked about my ability and enjoyment of living alone, and my acceptance of probably dying alone, there’s no denying that I really enjoy the partnership of a good man. No one wants to marry a woman who spends more time leaning over a drink than she does leaning over a stove – or at least, the man I would actually consider marrying doesn’t want that. And I would never be caught with more than one glass of wine in front of little kids. So, obviously, I’m not putting myself out there as a potential for either of those things – because I’m not even close to being ready for that. So, it’s not them, either.
Are they law school students? Yeah, right – I’ve seen them party.
Are they good daughters? My dad’s very proud of me.
Are they good Catholics? You know those are the wildest chicks of them all.
Maybe I’m just trying to be a bad girl after all.
Filed under: Daily Specials | Tags: addiction, alcohol, insanity, life, love, lust, men, personal, sex, thoughts, women
Tonight’s drink: Capsula Viola Galestro.
As I sit here and enjoy a second glass of wine on a Monday night, I start to wonder: How do you know – really know – when you’re addicted to something?
First, I try to identify my current feelings. Yes.. they feel unusual, but when do I ever feel usual? Yes, I get excited thinking about it, but since when did excitement absolutely mean something was the real deal? Yes, it sort of makes everything seem a little bit brighter, but so does glitter. So those are dead ends.
So then, I start to compare these feelings to other feelings I’ve had before. The urgency of wanting it, and the extreme relaxation once it’s been obtained. The way you feel like, if you don’t have it right now you’re going to rip patches of hair from your body and implode. But I feel that way on long car trips when I just want to be home, or when I really -really- have to go to the bathroom. So that can’t be the tell-tale sign, either.
Is it that I think about it during the day, or make sure that I can at least have it within reach when I get home? I could say the same thing about my bed, or my blog, or Milton’s 12 grain bread. I don’t think I’m addicted to those.
Addiction must be more than emotions. Just like love is more than that butterfly feeling in your stomach, or sharing a milkshake. Addiction must be more masochistic… where it hurts if you can’t have it, or you feel like you’d do anything – even kill big crunchy bugs – for it. It must be something that rips you apart inside and then grabs you in an infinite swing and launches you into the blue where no one can touch you. It’s very peaceful. And then, just like that, you’re falling again. And even though it tosses you to oblivion, in Hokusai waves and Oz tornados, you can’t get enough of it. Eventually, it gently sets you down, and you forgive it. Then you forgive yourself. And you vow you’ll never do it again.
Until you do. And it makes you warm. And it makes your eyelashes flutter. It makes you talk nonsense, and smile a lot at work. It makes you suddenly artistic, open, and unafraid. Until the gears start to lurch in their forward motion, all over again.
This must be what addiction is like. And for once, I’m not talking about alcohol.
Filed under: Daily Specials | Tags: alcohol, drinking, family, life, men, personal, Thanksgiving, thoughts, warnings, women
Last night’s drink: chicken wonton soup broth.
This year, I had the most inebriated, belligerent, hungover Thanksgiving I’ve ever had – and I was the most sober of them all. From aunts to grandmas, the bar was rocking with tequila shots and Sonoma County chasers. It was a new experience to see not one, but many of my relatives about one open-toed shoe away from dancing on the wet bar. I suppose it’s a blessing that I was on dish-duty, otherwise I’m sure I would’ve jumped right into the competition for most photo-worthy topple.
The alcohol experience wasn’t the only one that raised my eyebrows over the short time I spent in Northern California. On our drive from the airport, my dad and I had a great conversation in which I discovered that: 1) he actually respects my opinion a lot, and 2) he would prefer that I date (and probably marry) a man that can instinctually whip out 50 ways to kill someone. While in the academy, my dad was told to approach everyone you don’t know as if you will have to kill them, and he’s lived, dare I say survived, by that mantra. Now I understand why my father wore his ankle piece to Disneyland.
Of course, I had my fair share of vodka after we bid our relatives a happy recovery. My sister and I carried on our new post-Turkey tradition of going to a dive bar and playing pool after we tried, unsuccessfully, to get the party started at the Hilton (I swear, one of these days I’m going to write a full blog about my hatred for the Hilton). There was some removal of clothing, stealing of numbers, casual death threats, blackjack, moonwalking, bad music, and passing out. Oh, and we kicked ass at pool. The Color of Money, baby. Or, so I’ve been told.
I can’t escape the feeling that I’m getting too old for these pictures, though. I was wearing a blazer for gosh sakes.
The trip was a whirlwind, no matter how you slice it. I landed drunk on Thursday and came back more wrecked on Friday. I saw sides of my relatives, and people in general, that I didn’t know existed. I got up close and personal with my current extreme frustration with men. I came back to San Diego and felt around for an anchor that wasn’t there. When the spotlight spins around you like that, you have to really focus on what’s being revealed to you. More importantly, you have to decipher whether or not it’s a warning that you’re about to crash into the coastline.
It’s not going to stop me from visiting Edward in L.A., though. At least once.
