Now that I am a full-time college student, I have decided to make this coming holiday weekend all about me and doing what would make me happiest; watching the Emanuelle Movie Collection. That's right, one of the most profound film collections to date. Please don't let the provocative covers fool you; these films are full of award-winning acting, cutting dialog and never-seen-before camera angles. They bring a tear to my eye and are remnant of my youth. My sister and I would spend days watching the films and our adolescent years were quite influenced by the cinema verite....of Emanuelle.
What I really want to know is Who Is Vazquez? I, being one of the biggest Emanuelle fans and having the ability to quote from each film, seem to have a bit of competition; a great film buff by the name Vazquez. Although I greatly respect Vazquez's critiques, most of his comments get progressively angrier over time and with each film. Therefore, I can only assume that he dated the great soft porn actress at one time and is taking out his break-up aggression on Emanuelle via his Amazon comments.
Whoever this Vazquez guy is, he's one lucky guy. Or girl.
ADD SYMPTOM: Making the assumption that your friends know what they are talking about.
I took my friends advice today and tried taking the NJ Transit train to Philadelpohia. Well, after life's most dreaded train ride, I never did make it to Philadelphia. Or to class. Instead, I got the long overdue senic ride around Trenton, NJ. If one Googles "What to do in Trention" your search will come up with nothing.
Forget Napa Valley next year, I'm going hit the court houses of Trenton!
So I am playing musical chairs on the train because everyone is just a loud mouth. I don't know whats worse:
I get to Trention and I realize I have to connect to anotehr train that will take me to Phila no less than one hour and I now have to wait an additional hour. I t teh moment I prayed that God had a GPS on my friends ass and have lightenign strike her at that very moment.
So I am waiting on the platform for the next train and I don't know what was worse: the guy sitting next to me talking in a foreign language that souded like he was repeating "dubaba, bumba, dadubaba, bumbada bumba, dadubaba, bumbada" REALLY fast for thirty consecutive mintues. ( I can hear the soothing female voice over in my head now: "Welcome, to the soothing Chinese Water Torchure of Trention". Enjoy your stay.)
So I start playing musical chairs. Just to get away from all the cellphone babbling fools aound me:
White Business Guy In Suit: "Dude? Dude? Are you serious? Dude. Dude, that sucks!"
An Americanized version of Mr Myagi: "Sam, if I go in a tunnel I'm going to lose you! Sam! Sam! Sam!"
Next thing I know Howdy Dooty sits next to me. Just like the puppet from the old TV show. Great! I'm already in a bad mood. The least thing I need is a memory recall of my childhood during a moment of crisis. I swear this girl was the offspring of the television puppet himself; they shared the same firey red hair, the freckled cheeks, the VERY BIG mouth and I swear if I leaned in and took a really close look, her head was made of wood. I think they were also wearing teh same Farmer Ted overalls. She droned on and on about a boyfriend that I'm sure must have been fictionalized and her voice was at a pitch that would send dogs running and gave you chills like nails on a chalk board!
And then I start blaming my parents. Why not? I had no one else to blame at that very moment. I certainly wasn't responsible for spending my day stuck in Trenton. I certainly wasn't responsible for renting a U Haul thirteen years ago and driving all of my college belongings back to my parent's house. No, its their fault. They should have threatened me with abandonment if I was to leave college. They should have had me on house arrest in student housing. Something! Anything! Just so I could have gotten that degree.
I , being a new parent that I am, will know how to handle the situation in the future if my daughter dare leaves college and tells my she's joining the circus. I'll go with her.
My shrink told me this week that I could not stay on Wellbutrin forever and must "learn to find my own focus and learn how to make choices for myself". Well that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. I told her she's a shrink, not a philosopher. So I went home and took her advice. If I can't answer life's hard questions for myself, the Magic 8 ball can. It's the best anniversary present I have gotten so far.
If only I had thought of this sooner:
1. Will my blogging stats go up?
2. Will I sell my mac mini this week on eBay?
2. Will I sell my mac mini this week on eBay?
3. Will I have a panic attack the first day back at Temple U?
4. Will I always be afraid of mice?
5. Will I always be a compulsive crank caller?
If you have a question that needs to be asked, please post it. I will 8 ball you later.
The only time I have ever been in jail was for a locative media art project at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. The only way I’ll ever end up in jail is if other tenants don’t start recycling soon. I willkill for paper and plastic.
No, I’m not a Green Machine or one of the fools running around New York City as if my hair’s on fire screaming, “Global Warming!” Nor am I the person with the clipboard on the sidewalk who deliberately gets in my path asking, “Excuse me, ma’am, do you have a moment for Gay Rights?” My answer, “Yes, but that was one drunk night in college and I can’t even remember her name.”
I can’t save the whales because there’s none in the Hudson but I have boycotted Canadian products (except for the syrup) because those Eskimos are still clubbing baby seals. Oops! Racist. Did I say Eskimo?
I have always recycled but I am beginning to really hyper-focus on my garbage. And everyone’s garbage around me. I have three pails: one for recycled paper/cardboard, one for plastic and glass, and one for food. They don’t ask much from us in New York except that we recycle. We can jaywalk into four-lane traffic and not get a ticket like you would in Seattle. We can blow cigarette smoke into the oncoming faces on the sidewalk and not get pulled into a dark vehicle as you would in San Francisco. Smoking, the Ultimate Crime...
I know of a tenant above me that is not recycling and whenever I help take out the building garbage, I have to sort out his trash. So I left a note on his apartment door that read:
Call Me and Let's Talk Trash.
He never did.
Last night, around 12:30, I am outside, leaning against the wall, shadowed by the building next door. I see the tenant from upstairs bringing out his Un-Recycled garbage. Perfect timing to nail the MoFo.
I crept up behind him and whispered loudly in his ear, “Yo, Kimosabe, is that a Pizza Box?” He jumped. “Oh, hey, I didn’t see you. Yeah. Good stuff”, he said mashing his Kohl’s department bag of trash into a can. “You’re a big man with big feet”, I said. “Why don’t you stomp on it or should I have your Mommy do it for you?” He looked at me as if I had a hunchback. “Huh?” “It gets recycled,” I sneered at him as I took the box from his strong man-hands and performed the Riverdance on it until it was the size of a Post-It pad. “What else you got in the bag there, buddy?” I asked him lovingly as I pulled out three perfectly round Tuscan loaves of bread, most likely baked early this morning. “What the hell’s up with the bread?” I asked. “I catered tonight. They had us take it home", he said witness-stand style. “I realize you’ve been spoon-fed as a child, but this bread can feed a couple of homeless people in the neighborhood. Why not leave it a nice bag with a note, MoFo?” “What, are you homeless?” he asks ans he grabs the bag from my hands. “Mine your own f*ckin business!” he says and opens the front door of the building.
“So, you wanna talk trash? How about I go to the local pet store down the street and release a bag of mice in your apartment?” I only fantasized that line but it made me smile.
Not recycling makes me angry. So, if I do off the deep end, will Wayne Newton bail be out of jail? He bailed out Dana Plato for gunning a video store in Vegas. Of coarse I didn’t do Different Strokes but maybe he’s a Vincent D’Onofrio fan.
If you have a hard time with breaking down those cardboard boxes, here's a How-To video:
No I can’t. I think it would be terribly exhausting.
Lately, I have been getting these lovely anonymous emails from strangers who are obviously concerned about my sex life. Here’s another fun email: The World Famous Jake Rabbit Vibrator. Sex In The City stars all use it! I can’t really picture Sarah Jessica Parker being the spokesperson for such a product but Paris Hilton? There’s a perfect match.
I don’t think I would ever buy anything that sounds like “jack hammer”. The name does not conjure up images of sensual erotic evenings. Instead, it reminds me of a bad 70’s porn film starring a fully equipped construction worker who unexpectedly finds his way into my kitchen. No thank you.
Porn enters our lives in ways you would least expect it. In the late 90’s, I would still send out my acting reel on something called a VHS tape. It looked something like this:
Being an actor who would find every way to save money, I purchased fifty blank VHS tapes from a company that sold refurbished tapes. I dubbed my five minutes of fame onto these short ten-minute tapes. With the rest of the tapes, I recorded my five-minute demo of a TV pilot that I had shot back then. I mailed out a tape to every crew member and one week later, I received a phone call from the slimiest crew member of all, John X (the name has been changed to protected the perverted).
John X worked as a production assistant on my crew. He was in his late 30’s, a smoker with yellowed teeth, politically incorrect and the type of guy that always wanted a kiss. If you complimented the guy on his work, he couldn’t just say ‘thanks’ he had to say, “Yeah? So why don’t you kiss me. Right here. Kiss me.” But he worked for free so I couldn’t fire him.
John X: “Hey Kali, I know how you can get a deal on those production stills you wanna print.”
Kali: “How, John?
John X: “Well, you gotta kiss me”, he salivated, offering his stale breath and unshaven cheek. “Kiss me. Right here. Right here. Kiss me here. And then maybe I can help you.”
So a week after I sent the tapes out, I get an unexpected call from John X.
John X: “Hey Kali, I got the tape. Nice touch. The rough cut looks hot. And I mean hot baby, hot!”
Kali: I was confused. “What’s so hot about it?” John X: “Yeah, you’re funny. You know what’s hot about it. The chick getting’ it on with the chick! Yeah, I knew you played that way. Kiss me. Kiss me through the phone. Right here. Kiss me.”
Kali: “What the hell are you talking about?”
John X: “The Jap Porn! Man, your f*cked up crazy but funny”.
I had John X send me the tape back and low and behold at the tail end of each tape was a pornographic Japanese animated cartoon. And then another crew member contacted me. Same thing. More cartoon porn. Now I knew why no agents responded to my acting reel.
True story. This sh*t only happens to me. I called the company that sold me the tapes and chewed them out over the phone. The owner said that the company, based in the Bible belt, purchased used tape stock from various sources and was a reputable supplier to various churches in the state. They said they had no idea how Japanese porn ended up on my refurbished tapes. I believed them.
I should have kept one of the tapes as a keepsake for the family. It would have made great viewing at the next family reunion.
A.D.D Symptom: Hyper-focusing to the point that you are wasting your F*cking Time!
So this is the very last thing I would EVER want to write about but I need to get it off my chest before I do something that I will highly regret. For all those Typepad users out there, what the hell is up with the Type Lists? I am trying my damnest to cut and paste HTML into my SIDEBAR!! And yes, I was going to switch to Wordpress as everyone and their mother suggested months ago but because I have already given Typepad my money, I am being stingy and I REALLY want to make this work!
I have literally spent three hours today trying to make it work. How can I possibly write about strippers or housewives if I have this crap taking up my time! All comments are welcome....I am going insane!
Its already been three days now and the toxicity of my family still lingers. So what better way to shake it off that to share it with a bottle of tequila and a romantic meal with my significant other.
Some days I can only say what I feel in song. And other days I feel the tequila says it better. This was one of those days...
Dinner started out like this....
And ended up like this....
I think I assaulted the maitre de on my way out. I can't remember. That was good tequila.
I had the pleasure of having brunch with the brood at a doll boutique and bistro. That's right. A restaurant where dolls eat at the table and are treated as paying guests. The brilliant brainstorm came from my older sister, a very well-put-together, west coast woman who seems to only have an appetite for designer labels and a penchant for people with money.
We were happily greeted at the door by a hostess resembling an American Girl doll, who paid no mind to anyone over the age of ten and asked my sister's five year old, "Where would your doll like to be seated?"
"Near the window please", her daughter answered.
"Well, I only have one table near a window and that's directly below the A.C. so if your doll gets cold, she can get fitted for a sweater. Of coarse she ignored my parents, two seniors, who, if blasted by the frigid A.C., might just contract incurable pneumonia.
"Follow me", the hostess replied as she escorted my mother, my father, my sister, her daughter, my daughter and myself. As always, my brother was home cleaning the rifle.
I looked around the "bistro" and all I saw was a fishbowl of daughters with their dolls seated in their own miniature booster seats with their own miniature tea cups, all with the same expressionless look on their faces. Not the people. The dolls. I don't blame the dolls. By the time I realized how hallucinatory this place was, it was too late to cover the eyes of my three year old. I feared that she may get hypnotized by the retail fantasy we just entered. Luckily she had no interest in the doll hoopla and asked politely just as we sat down, "Mommy, can we go now?" That's my girl.
My sister ordered the Eggs Benedict, the girls ordered rubber star-shaped pancakes and the rest of us thought we would be safe with the French toast. Boy, were we wrong. I choked on my 20.00 French toast that looked like stale and stepped-on Wonder Bread and told the waitress,
"Wendy, this is completely inedible. Can you please take this back to the kitchen and just get my a plate of scrambled eggs instead, please?"
"Certainly!" she fake-smiled back heading to the kitchen a bit too defiantly. And then I realized what I have done; I put myself in the risk of having my eggs spit on. Minutes later, Wendy emerged with a plate of room-temp eggs. They were blue with an American flag stabbed in the middle of them. A golf ball formed in my throat with the thought of swallowing them. I shoved the plate in front of the doll who was still working on her tea and mousse in a mini flower pot.
Wendy the Waitress came back, eyeballed the plate of eggs in front of dolly and said to me, "You didn't eat your scrambled eggs?"
"What's wrong with you?" I scolded the doll as I jokingly back-handed her in the face. I took the plate of eggs and handed it to Wendy. "She's been a problem ever since we sat down at the table", I shrugged back to Wendy, while tousling the doll's head. That didn't make Wendy, my sister or my niece very happy, considering her doll had just gotten her hair re-braided for a whopping $22.00 at the all exclusive "doll salon". It was a joke-free brunch.
As we waited for the check, all I could think of was how can a parent sit in this make-believe bistro and
overindulge her daughter's doll? If the girls grow up thinking that
their dolls deserve a free lunch, what will they demand by the time
their fourteen? I don't know. Maybe I just didn't get
it. Maybe this place was really just a harmless Disney For Dolls and I
was the uptight tight-ass that didn't deserve to be dining with the
plastic-headed prima donnas. I thanked my sister for the lovely brunch that left both my parents stone-cold and expressionless. I leaned into her and asked, "How can you possibly spend all that money on just a doll?".
"It's not just a doll, Kali", "She's an American Girl. And she's worth it".
My bittersweet brunch is just one more reason why, I too, would float in a tire tube just so I can live in America.
I don't know if bizarre dreams are a side effect of Wellbutrin but last night I had a dream of James Lipton at a Strip Club.
I would now like to share the dream with you:
JAMES LIPTON AT THE STRIP CLUB
INT. SKINZ STRIP CLUB -- NIGHT Veteran stripper, Euthanasia, finishes dancing on stage. She walks down the stairs onto the floor and approaches JAMES LIPTON from The Actor's Studio who seated on the main floor.
EUTHANASIA Hi, would you care for a dance?
JAMES LIPTON That may have been one of the most memorable yet effective performances on stage since Lawrence Olivier played King Lear at the Orpheum Theater in London. Euthanasia takes off her dress.
EUTHANASIA I take that as a yes. She starts her erotic dance.
JAMES LIPTON What turns you on?
EUTHANASIA Are you a pervert?
JAMES LIPTON What sound or noise do you love?
EUTHANASIA The sound of twenty dollar bills scraping against my garter.
JAMES LIPTON What sound or noise do you hate?
EUTHANASIA Spare change.
JAMES LIPTON What is your favorite curse word?
EUTHANASIA You are a pervert, aren't you, Mr. Lipton?
JAMES LIPTON What profession other than yours would you like to attempt?
EUTHANASIA Is that an offer? The dance is over. Euthanasia puts on her dress and James Lipton holds out a hundred dollar bill.
JAMES LIPTON If heaven exists, what would you like God to say?
EUTHANASIA Keep the change. Euthanasia walks off. James ponders to himself.
I wonder if this is going to be a recurring dream?
