character, shmaracter...

there are days that i barely recognize the past. then there are days like this, when everything seems to sit on top of my chest.

sometimes i feel like there's not enough air around me to breathe. or that i have forgotten how. and my heart starts palpitating and i think about everything that has gone wrong and everything that could go awry so easily. i get shaky and scared and nervous and laden in regrets i would never normally identify with.

but after a couple minutes of re-teaching myself the process of filling my lungs, i calm down and force myself to remember that today is going to pass, like all the others, and the losses that i have had in my life have happened for reasons that i will come to learn later.

i guess i have to remind myself that it's all about the wait. that patience is considered a virtue for good reason, because it's hard. instant gratification is simply a good lottery ticket that leaves you with money-hungry "friends" and "relatives", and a bushel full of taxes at the end of the year.

good things will come. it's hard to wait it out, but at least i'm keeping busy with dance and work. one day i'll understand why people come and go like the wind. nothing is forever besides death, and i'm not ready for that yet. so until then i guess i'll just keep waiting.

besides, success wouldn't be as delicious if everything was super easy. even still, life's lesson's kinda suck sometimes.

listening to a song in the car

Once upon a time,
I was falling in love,
But now I'm only falling apart.

Turn around bright eyes, turn around.

So pretty.

K.

10 THINGS THAT I WISH I WOULD HAVE INVENTED OR AT LEAST GOTTEN CREDIT FOR INSTEAD OF THESE JERKOFFS

ten. does this dude think he looks better on this bike than i do? please.




nine. icarus ain't got nuthin on these sonsabitches.




eight. post-it notes. it's almost too easy, and this guy makes them look 100% less sexy.




seven. even though it's a mini-trampoline, which were all the rage in the eighties for exercise, this dude doesn't look like he understands the meaning of the word AND hasn't been out of his basement since the eighties due to D&D.




six. what is this? ice fishing for rednecks? at least get a girl in a bikini and a trash can full of pbr's.



five. let me get this straight. this unattractive housewife got millions of dollars for inventing a collapsible wagon?? i thought of that shit in the THIRD GRADE, bitch. i just didn't know what a copyright was. damn it.



four. A FLYING CAR?!?!? why did the russians get these cool points??? i mean, look at how many fly ass stewardess bitches they got!!!



three. its a homemade submarine. this guy is either the most brilliant asian man to date, or the dumbest. i'm not sure if i would trust a vehicle i made not to drown me eighty leagues under the sea.



two. does anybody else think it's strange that humans invent so many bike apparatuses? just sayin.



one. ummm... if i could be famous for anything... these would be it. love, love, love.

afloat

what little i know about life
is all coming unseamed
and disheveled; the
pretty daze of spring
is settling all around me,
how quickly
everything got turned around...
once with a royal flush
the house of cards
is busted, and
collapsing from the inside
out.
just keep busy,
keep your chin up,
keep your head
above the water and
eventually you'll float,
right?
trade one crazy
for another and again
and again until
the insanity sets in
and steady will come
naturally.
the wobbly walls are
okay for now, flexing
and convexing with
the exhale.

k.

look both ways before you cross

i was a debutante, ladies and gentlemen.

that's right. all crazy-haired, blunt mouthed, tattooed inch of me was stuffed into a white ball gown, all wrapped up in a french twist and pearl jewelry. i graciously bowed to the audience, waltzed with my father, and was then "presented" to society as a grown woman ripe for the pickin'. i am currently a walking contradiction to myself at 18 years old.

now, i was more or less bullied into it. secretly, it was fun because it's kind of like a wedding without actually having to spend twenty years with someone only to have them come home one day after work and telling you he's leaving you for his secretary, a 23 year old blonde nyu graduate with a bmw and a considerable dowry from her millionaire WASP family.

but it was still frustrating having to smile as much that night, or sneak away to the 17th hole just to smoke a cigarette where you couldn't be found by one of your parents wealthy (but horribly pretentious) friends. i find the tradition in events like these to be completely drained from the bottom... these people are country-club aristocrats. many of which have never even seen 'gone with the wind'. they wouldn't know culture if it lobbed a tennis ball their way.

i was a debutante because my father wanted me to be. actually, when i was growing up, anything i was publicly was what he wanted me to be. blonde highlights? check. a virgin? check. socially reserved due to an 11 o'clock curfew? check. able to distinguish a nine-iron from a seven? check.

check. check. check. anything he wanted... check. i played a role in his life. that of the good daughter, the cordial daughter, the doormat daughter. despite the fact that him and i knew we were just reciting the lines of a well-written play, our little stage was set well and was terribly believable to those around us.

until, that is, i went away to college. out from under his critical mass of comments and watchful eye, i began experimenting. with my clothes. with my hair. with tattoos. with body piercing. with boys, with drugs, with dance, with desire, with darkness, with writing, and with identities. i began slowly introducing these elements on the rare occasion i returned home for the holidays. with each visit, his eyes grew wary and his apprehension to me escalated. at first he tried to cover up his distaste for my desire of what i never learned growing up. but by the time i hit 23 it was full fledged disgust, and he never hesitated to call me out on something he didn't think was socially 'acceptable'.

"what did you do to your hair? it's so black it's almost blue... and it's so short! you look like an androgynous elf of some sort..."

"what are you wearing?? are you going to a wedding, or a carnival?"

"i'm not going to the bar with you when you have that lip ring in. i have already made fun of one of the bartenders here for having her lip pierced and i'll be damned if my own damn daughter shows up to her bar proving me wrong. take it out."

and then i went to san francisco to dance with LINES. it was my shining moment of triumph, to get a job in the wake of all of his negativity, and show him that people would hire me on merit and talent and not just because i looked like everyone else who applied.

then he had to ruin it all by being diagnosed with cancer, which solidified my decisions of where i was to live the next year; i would go back to the east coast, so that if he died, i would have had a proper chance at getting to know who he was. my father and i are so similar that we could never get along... he always knew what i was up to because my thought process mimics that of his own. and because i knew this as well, i tried to stay away from him as much as i could, so i could preserve some sort of anonymity in my life. because of these habits i formed when i was a teenager, i have become a fiercely private person with my thoughts... which is an ironic statement to make considering i am currently writing this public blog.

i guess it's safe to me because apart from the people who read this who are my friends (thank you, all five of you), people who read this (a) are random hits from shuffling through blogspot.com, and (b) most likely don't read all the way through. that kind of makes me feel better, like you know who i am without ever knowing who i am. that's still anonymity, but i guess it could be considered public anonymity, maybe?

oh well. whatever it is, i digress. i went home after his surgery, and two days later, my parents kicked me out. said they thought i had emotional problems and that i was abusing substances to boot, and that if i was to stay there until i had to catch my plane that my dad was going to get a hotel room somewhere.

oh, yeah, guys. that's a fair fight. hang on a second while i decide on leaving their house based on completely false and unfair pretenses by driving to the airport and buying a same-day ticket back to atlanta which i gave up for san francisco before leaving to heal a relationship with my father in the event he might die, or make a man fresh from the cancer cutting board leave the comfort of his own home after surgery to remove golf-ball size tumors get a nasty ho-jo hotel room cause his selfish substance abusing daughter won't just look and act normal so that he can get some nice looking grand-kids. that's a tough one.

on the way to the airport, through tears and my poor little brother listening to years of father-daughter turbulence become a full-fledged terrorist attack on the nation's capital of me, i slowly began to realize why the previous years had been so difficult.

i didn't want to accept the reality of my father never understanding the few but huge differences between our similar thought processes, and he didn't want to accept the reality that his daughter was no longer the debutante he had so wished she would be.

he envisioned me married by 25, kids by 30, and a retirement plan by 50. i had a well educated lawyer husband and 3 children, plus a dog and a boat and matching chinaware from the pottery barn fall collection. i drove a sporty four door suv rigged enough for the kid's soccer games but sleek enough to look good behind us for our christmas family pictures at our house in the mountains.

unfortunately, he never recognized the fact that his daughter was a wall-to-wall, card-carrying artist who had never grown up with the taste for the conventional. he knew it, which is why i grew up incredibly restricted and conservative. the eleven o'clock curfew. the prep school, the golf lessons, and the debutante dance. it all added up. if neither one of us allowed ourselves to open up to the idea that we were never going to agree on my lifestyle, how would we ever get past the scripted father-daughter relationship?

just recently i have had someone tell me i, for the length of our relationship, didn't truly reveal who i am. in essence, that i had somehow lied about my feelings for them; that i had never been honest from the beginning. this was due to the fact that i wrote about it on this blog (that no one really reads, so it doesn't really matter anyway) and he ended up reading it. i told him a long time ago, if you want to be with me, i suggest you not read my writing, whether it be my journal or my blog. i suggest you let your curiosity lie, because i have feelings for a lot of things. from beautiful moments like the random people i am attracted to passing on the street or the fact that i thought you were righteous when you would get angry at me over the stupidest shit i have ever heard anyone get angry over... and that's just the thing. when you meet me, you should understand i am like that. from our very first conversation, if you don't understand i am a thoughtful, observant girl who has a lust for feeling out the world and all it's emotions; well, then, we really should not be together.

complexity is not revealed in words. complexity is revealed silently and often ambiguously. it is in the way someone reads a book, how their eyebrows raise in conversation, and the minutes after they fall asleep. there's no doctrine that we have about ourselves, and no amount of explanation will ever be enough to replace the experience of allowing a person to be who they are and trying to make sense of it yourself. i never needed my father to tell me who he was. i watched how he was. how he reacted to things, how his emotions registered in his face. i paid attention to his details. had he done that to me, he would have realized much sooner that i was never going to be the golden daughter... because i never wanted that life for myself.

next time you find yourself in a situation where you have to step back and re-evaluate a person that you "thought you knew" (and how many time have i said that before, oi vay, like every breakup i've ever had), when you step back, look at how you are looking at the person as well. have you really allowed yourself to understand who this person is, or have you just kind of projected what you really want onto their personality?? think about it.

then imagine me as a debutante and have a good laugh.

k.

the dueling insanities of marauding maude

at work the other night, a small, stout woman came in to eat dinner. she was worse for the wear; her bleached and frazzled locks trying to free themselves of her knockoff burberry plaid cap, a pink windbreaker, and jeans that looked as if her ass might have coughed them out onto her legs all pointed to signs that she might have had a little trouble during the recession. upon further inspection, the fact that she had half of her birth-given teeth, cataracts in her eyes, and the pungent realization that she smelled like a stale handle of mr. boston's vodka confirmed it.

this woman was indeed what my mother fondly calls them in orlando... a homeless.

she sat at a table, so i didn't have to deal with her, to which i sighed relief. it may have been a slow night but even i didn't want that kind of action. oh, but i couldn't get away that easy.

my manager had an alarmed look in his eyes. he motions me to lean forward and i could feel something was coming that i didn't want to hear.

"did you hear about the woman who came in here the other night, ordered several drinks and a full meal, and couldn't pay the tab?"

no. of course i didn't. but i have a feeling this was the woman, and i was already making the screwdriver that the server had fired at service bar.

"don't serve her that drink!!! go ask her if she can pay for it."

i've been in many uncomfortable situations. my best friend and newly ex-boyfriend pulling me into a room and telling me they want to date eachother, for example. or, having to tell one of my student's parent's that not only is she a bulimic/anorexic, but she also cuts herself. both not good nor fun to experience. but telling someone that they look broke, well, this has never happened to me. how was i supposed to approach it? Excuse me, m'am, but you look like tammy faye on heroin and smell like my cat's litter box, can you throw me some money up front so i'm sure you have enough money to pay?

"why don't you ask her, vince? you're the manager. why does it have to be me?"

he gave me a look that said he was too busy watching america's next dance crew to be bothered by confrontation right then. le sigh. i had no choice.

i walked over to her, and kneeled down. "m'am, it's bar policy after 9pm that we charge up front for drinks. i can't do a running tab with the servers." she looked at me incredulously, which is the same thing i would have done, because that is obviously a blatent lie. i have never been to a restaurant that you can order food and be waited on but the drinks you have to walk your lazy ass to the bar and pay for each one individual. even to a homeless person, it's ridiculous.

but it worked. "well, i don't want to pay for each drink as i go. that's why i sat at a table." if it had been a fair fight and had she not looked and smelled like a four day old diaper, i would have pointed out that the reason she sat at a table was so that she could order food and drinks and then walk on her bill, but she was relatively incoherent and i doubt it would have been entertaining anyway.

she got up from the table and asked where there was another bar she could order food from, and i pointed her towards front street, which subsequently was the street parallel to where my bar is, and to get there you need to take a "left, then a left, then a left." form a box. you could also take a right then a right then a right. they both work. it's a box. you just need to make a box.

she asked me how to get there five times. i was about to draw her a map when the owner walked through the doors and she made a quick exit. "what an odd lady," i thought.

the owner then explained that her name was "homeless maude", which i was relatively disappointed by. couldn't they have come up with something more interesting, like marauder maude the toothless drunk, or hoodwink maude the bamboozling swindlestress? throw me a bone, people.

anywayyyy, she is evidently notorious in queens for coming into restaurants and bars, ordering large amounts of booze and food, then passing out on the bar and pretending not to wake up so that the establishment calls an ambulance and takes her to the hospital, where she gets a free bed and more food from the gross cafeteria. not a bad ploy, maude. i mean, if beauty ain't your thing, may as well use your homelessness to your advantage. by the looks of her ass and fupa, she does pretty well for herself. i mean, success isn't always measured by your bank account, as she has so presented.

i guess the restaurants all began to realize the wool hood she was pulling over their eyes and began refusing service to her, so she moved into the city and has started doing this in the seaport. i probably would have stayed in brooklyn, where there are more options and less restaurants per square foot... but it's her business and i'm not running it.

the other day i was out to dinner and arguing my point of insanity... doing things over and over and over and expecting them to yield different results. my date was contesting that you can do something 999 times with the same result, and it's that 1000th time over which may be the loophole. i agree. nothing in this life is certain except death and taxes. maude is the perfect example of someone who contests both categories; for years she has been going to bars and restaurants and ordering things she can't pay for, and for the majority of this time, she has gotten away with it, which proves that she expects the same results every time she does it. as of late, her acquired notoriety is changing the winds of her habits. now she's doing the same thing over and over, and it is yielding different results, which is ultimately leaving her confused and jonesing for some more mr. bostons.

but who wants to do things 1000 times with the hopes that it may or may not be different??? not me. i'd rather gather my results after doing something, say, four or five times, give up, and have a dirty martini and a cigarette. the thing is, my borrowed theory (i ripped off albert einstein, he himself being someone of the insane sort) is based on the notion that someone won't do something thousands of times to find the tipping point. because that's what makes you insane. it's not necessarily the outcome of the experiment that you are looking for... it's the process of getting there which is being judged.

maude should have given it a week in between coming back, at least. you can't come back the day after you skip out on a 100$ check and expect no one to remember. although, i highly suspect that she didn't remember, judging from the alcohol emanating from her core existence. maybe that was her downfall. she couldn't remember where she was doing things over and over, and therefore shot herself in her own foot.

keep truckin', maude. though it may not be in my bar, someone else will yield you the same results you have seen in the past. it's inevitable.

k.

belle at the ball

replace the pictures
in the frames, the
heads so full of smile;
let the air out
of the balloons and
sweep the confetti off
the floor, the party,
sadly,
is no more; these years
they pass
with flying colors, for
my youth is the sand
sifting through the pinch,
and smile, and smile, and
smile some more so
at least i feel i've
moved and inch... the
banners are withered,
the dj's packed up,
and the host is drunk
from the whiskey-wine punch,
she's tired, her feet hurt, and
her hair's all a mess, and
there's a blood colored stain
cross the hem
of her dress, so
closing time has come,
again,
this cinderella trainwreck
should be going
to bed; wash her face,
wash her skin, wash
the memories away,
how much is
too much
on a day like today?

k.