- hot
- very dry to the point where it caused some health problems
- tiring
- stressful
- long, even though it was only 3 days
To top it all off, I had an allergic reaction to the new carpet in my parents' new house, so sleeping on a mattress on the floor didn't help. I woke up every morning with a low-grade fever and other assorted symptoms.
On the upside, I can't remember the last time I saw so many stars in the sky. Their section of Tucson has ordinances against light pollution, so every night, I'd sit out on the brick wall at the back of their property and just look up. I could even see the cloud-like Milky Way in the background as I heard the coyotes howling off in the distance. I was told that you can even see manmade satellites orbiting overhead, but I wasn't so lucky.
In "colonizing" Arizona, it seems they didn't do much to circumvent the fact that they're living in the middle of a desert. Here in Los Angeles, they pipe in water from all over the place to keep everything looking green. In Arizona, they didn't even bother. They seem to like it brown and dusty and full of cactus and scrub. The landscaping committee that governs the gardens of all the houses in my parents' new development does not approve grass lawns. The state doesn't do much to account for the fact that the state is a giant desert; the residents just circumvent it by staying indoors a fair amount and air-conditioning everything.
In looking at the cities from above as I was flying in -- and especially as I was flying out from Phoenix tonight -- it seems that they've made their cities not as oases from the desert, but just places where they've put a lot of buildings in the desert. And they clump them together. It's rather obvious where the cities begin and end if you're looking at them from above.
Either way, I was extremely glad to get home, sink into my own driver's seat, punch up 106.7 on the radio and make my way up the 405 onto some familiar streets. L.A. is seeming more and more like home every day.
I was mildly surprised when I got to Tucson, unpacked my bag and realized that the vaunted federal screeners -- whose installation at LAX was praised and plastered all over the L.A. Times earlier this week -- failed to catch the razor and extra blades I'd unwittingly thrown in my weekend bag that I carried on the plane with me. They let me through security and onto the plane with a razor. Speaks wonders for the security of our airports and planes, doesn't it? Makes you feel really secure, eh?
In other news, my parents' new house is really nice, they have an incredible view of the mountains from all but one of the rooms in the house, and I can see the buildings of the Sierra Tucson celebrity detox clinic from the back porch and the spare bedroom I currently occupy.
Originally posted: January 3, 2002
Growing up with a doctor for a father has its perks. Among them was the ever-popular prescription pad -- but not for the reasons you think, you sicko. I'm neither an addict nor a dealer.
My town's school system implemented this policy when I was in junior high school that if you were to be out sick for a day, a note from your parent didn't count. You had to have a note from a doctor that was written on either doctor's office stationery or a prescription pad, and it never had to be anything really involved -- just something along the lines of "Please excuse [insert child's name] from school on [insert date]. He/she had [insert malady]. Thank you." I guess it was an effort to cut down on kids faking notes from their parents for cutting school. But that was never a problem for me, since I had easy access to a prescription pad. I never really cut school because... well, quite frankly, what would I do for the day? I lived in a small town where you needed a car to get anywhere, plus a lot of people recognized me and knew my parents, so there was a decent chance I would've been spotted had I skipped school. So unless I was willing to hide in the woods for the day, I figured I might as well be in school since hiding in the woods would get kind of boring after an hour or two.
But I did get sick every now and then, and having Dad's prescription pad around saved me trips to the doctor to prove that yes, I really was sick and that's why I was out of school. But I learned early on in life that it's more fun when you play with people's minds, so we had a small game going with the school administrators and to this day, I still don't think they ever caught on. Dad would come home from work, ask me if I needed my excuse note, and when I said I did, we'd come up with something creative and that's what he'd say I had in my excuse note. He'd sometimes pull one of his medical books off his bookshelf and tell me to pick something.
Over the course of a few years, I suffered from 24-48 hour bouts of Ebola, listeria (which, if I recall correctly, is a kind of bacterial food poisoning that sometimes results in explosive diarrhea), hemorrhagic fever (yes, I know Ebola is a kind of hemorrhagic fever, but put "fever" down and it sounds plausible), post-prandial upper abdominal distension (translation: cramps) and many other sicknesses that would usually kill a person or cause hospitalization for at least a week or two. Dad occasionally went outside the bounds of medicine, such as the time I had a case of acute Bucephalus (Bucephalus was a winged horse in Greek mythology), monosodium glutamate (translation: salt), and the famous phenylalanine episode (phenylalanine is a preservative used in soda).
Still trust your doctor and all the scientific terms he/she spouts off?
Originally posted: November 20, 2001
Good evening everyone, and welcome to another edition of “Dates From Hell!” I’m Keith, always your host, and while this Date From Hell doesn’t end when I dropped her off at the end of the night, our panel of judges has allowed us to call this a “Date From Hell.” Let’s jump right in to the tale, shall we?
I’ve said somewhere along the way that I do have a membership to JDate, which is an online dating service for Jewish singles. I figured that since my friends weren’t doing such a stellar job setting me up, I might as well let an impartial computer do some work as well. So one night, I got an e-mail from one of the female members who sounded fairly interesting in her essays, we corresponded back and forth for a week or so before we finally agreed it might be a decent idea to see what we’re both like in person.
It was a cold night in January when this Date From Hell took place. We met at a restaurant centrally located to both our residences, though I didn’t learn until we met up that night that she didn’t have a car and conned a friend of hers into driving her over to the restaurant—by saying how hard it was to find a ride and that she should’ve arranged a lift beforehand, oopsies! As if the fact that she hadn’t thought to arrange transport and ended up inconveniencing someone at the last minute rather than take a cab wasn’t bad enough, things started off on a decidedly low point when she asked me right off the bat if my parents were divorced because she was also looking to set up her mother, and wouldn’t it be fun for us to go out on a double-date: me and my dad with her and her mom. (My parents just celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary this past August. They are still very much in love with each other.)
Oh, but that’s just the beginning! Things went downhill from there as, over dinner, she began to tell me about her prior boyfriends, most of whom had been abusive in various ways. Might I remind you that this was a first date and that people don’t usually talk about abuse on the first date? I also heard of her parents’ messy divorce, her father’s alcoholism, her repressed memories that are starting to surface (some of which involved more abuse) and about a thousand other details about her life—mostly because I couldn’t get in a word edgewise, so I just kind of sat there, eating and soaking in all this lunacy and thinking Chuck Woolery was hiding somewhere in the building watching me on closed-circuit TV.
Chuck didn’t show himself, so when dinner was mercifully over, no limo was waiting to take her home and she hadn’t arranged a ride—oopsies! I can’t even remember how, but she somehow conned me into a ride home because it was cold outside, but the ride was worse than dinner. During the 15 minute ride back to her place, she debated out loud about whether or not to tell me her secret, then decided to tell me. She had been raped a few years ago by a family friend, so now she carries “defense” with her at all times. “Defense” turned out to be the hunting knife with the five-inch-long blade that she pulled out of her purse to show me. It’s a testament to my nerves that I didn’t drive off the side of the road when she unsheathed that big mammajamma.
We made it back to her apartment building in one piece. Thank God. Except she didn’t get the hint when I unlocked the doors to the car that it was her time to get out and go back to her apartment. She stayed in the car for another 20 minutes, yammering on and on and on… I tried just about every trick I had in the book—yawning, surreptitiously adjusting the heat down so it would get cold in the car, playing with the radio, but none of it worked. I finally had to flat out say something along the lines of “Well, I’ve got work in the morning, I should be getting home.” When she heard this, she started pouting and invited me up to her apartment—she’d “keep me awake.” I wanted none of her sleep remedies, so I stood firm and said I should probably get home.
Somewhere along the way, I had managed to say something about the fact that I didn’t kiss on the first date (not true, though I used the excuse because I didn’t want to kiss her) so before leaving, she said, “I know you don’t kiss on the first date, but I do and I think you’re looking just so kissable.” She aimed right at my lips, I was quickly able to turn my head in time and she nailed me on the cheek with a rather sloppy smooch. The air reeked with her disappointment as I said, “Well, thanks… good night.” She finally got out of the car, and I took off like a bat out of Hell.
Ah, dear readers, it doesn’t end there! The next day, I got an e-mail from her saying that she had a very nice time and she really liked me, but she was very put out by the fact that I didn’t take her up on her invitation to come upstairs. Would I like to come over tonight? I politely wrote back (after a few hours’ delay to give me some breathing room) that I had plans to go to dinner and then shoot some pool with a friend, we hadn’t seen each other in a while and I’d had these plans for a while (which was the truth). She wrote back much later that night another disappointment-laced e-mail which I received in the morning, containing another invitation to her place for the following night. Sorry, I wrote back, that was Friday night and I had plans to go out into the city with friends (not entirely true, the plans were tentative but there were definitely options for me rather than sitting at home writing her e-mails saying I wasn’t coming over). She wasn’t getting the hint though—she wrote another e-mail telling me that I was offending her Southern hospitality (she grew up in Florida) and that she’d be very upset if I didn’t come over to her place sometime over the weekend.
At this point, I’d had enough. I’d told one or two of my friends about this girl and forwarded them the e-mails I’d received, they were laughing so hard at my continued misfortune in the dating world that they suggested I let them respond to this final missive from her. After all that, I probably should’ve, but I didn’t. I wrote back a final note, saying that it was very nice to have met her, but I just didn’t think things would work out between us. I wished her luck in her quest for her Man (she had made references to her quest several times during the course of our dinner, and I swore I could hear the “m” in “man” capitalized when she said it) but said that I didn’t think I was the one for her.
You’d think that would be the end of it, wouldn’t you? You’d think that in a sane universe, that would’ve been all. But, of course, this isn’t a sane universe and she was decidedly insane. It was rather late in the evening one night during the following week when I was bored and logged onto JDate. They have a chat room, so I figured I’d pop in and check to see if there was anyone interesting talking online. Guess who was there? Guess who, as soon as she saw that I had logged into the chat room, began telling everyone what a bastard I was because I had “stood her up” and then began publicly bashing me? Yes, it was Knife Girl! At this point, there was nothing else I could do but ignore her.
She finally went away. But months later, I was reading the Improper Bostonian, a bi-weekly magazine that comes out for hip Bostonites, and got to their section in the back where people can place anonymous messages—most of which consist of “after a year, I’m still in love with you” or “you fucking bastard, I can’t believe I slept with you” or “I saw you on the T, you were wearing this and I caught your eye and wished I’d gotten your number.” One of the messages caught my eye. It was pretty vehement, talking to a girl and saying how psycho she was, how she could go live with her single freakish Mom down South, how she needed serious therapy to get over her abuse issues and how this guy wished she’d just get out of his life already. To this day, I’m thoroughly convinced that he had also met my Date From Hell.
I think there should be IOUs for retorts, since there's so many times when we immediately come up with great responses but just not at that particular moment. (I think "Seinfeld" did an episode on retorts, the whole thing with "well, the idiot store called, and they're all out of you." Yeah. Anyways.) I was reading a "Calvin & Hobbes" collection today (man, how I miss them) and in one strip, Calvin is yelling at someone and says, "Oh yeah? Oh yeah?? Well, remember what you said, because in a day or two, I'll have a witty and blistering retort! You'll be devastated then, I promise!"
How many times have you gotten into a situation where someone's said something to you and you have no ready response? And it infuriates you because you know you're good at cutting other people down in situations like that? And then it infuriates you even more anywhere from 5 minutes to 24 hours later when all of a sudden, a great retort just pops into your head? The Retort IOU would be perfect for this kind of situation. Having it would not only remind the person that they said this thing to you that deserves the retort, but it also keeps the line alive in their minds for you to retort to. It expires, of course, since there's a time limit on just how long you're allowed to take to come up with a good response -- like a meal, it can be utterly amazing when it's first served but, if left out too long, gets stale and moldy after a while.
I think you need to qualify to be able to give Retort IOUs though -- because if any moron had them, we'd all seem like people who routinely come up with great responses. So maybe there should also be a Retort IOU Board that takes submissions of writings or performances or other things that show you have the personality of someone who would deserve to be able to give out Retort IOUs. This way, when you give someone a Retort IOU, they know something blistering is on the way and it's not just an idle threat.
Originally posted: October 5, 2001
Hello, and welcome to another episode of “Keith’s Dates From Hell!” I’m Keith, your ever-gracious host. This episode’s guest… Christ on a monorail, I don’t even remember her name. But let’s set the scene, shall we?
Location: Ginza, a popular and very good sushi restaurant about a mile from my apartment. (Ed. note: this was while I was still living in Boston)
Time: A Friday night in the not-too-distant past.
Wearing: Solid black t-shirt, khakis, black shoes. (Yowza!)
Weather: Raining. Fairly hard. And since Ginza doesn’t have a large waiting area inside, I was waiting outside in the rain under my umbrella.
Waiting for: My blind date, who was 20 minutes late. And since I’d gotten there a couple minutes early just in case, I’d been waiting for almost 25 minutes now. I was getting ready to pack it up and go home since I was rather hungry, and I figured I’d been waiting a decent amount of time.
My blind date runs out of the T and across the street, comes up to me and begins to apologize profusely for her tardiness. Now, if the lateness itself hadn’t tipped me off, the apology definitely set off the red alert klaxons in my head. Her apology and explanation went something along these lines: “I’m so so sorry I was late… I know it’s inexcusable… but I have a really good explanation… I stopped taking my anti-depressants a little while ago because I wanted to wean myself off them, but a side effect of the withdrawal is that it makes me really tired, so I slept through my first appointment with my new therapist today, and my new therapist called and said that she didn’t think things were going to work out between us because if I couldn’t even make my first appointment, then I should probably go see someone else… and I was so upset that I just had to go out and go shopping… and that’s why I’m late.”
You ever see on sitcoms when a guy gets hit with a ton of information all at once by a rapid-fire-speaking person, and he just kind of stands there with this look on his face and then says “oh” in that tone of voice? The tone of voice that says, “Oh… well, I’m still kind of processing everything that you just said to me and because it rather bowled me over the first time I heard it so I had to go back and make sure I heard right”? Well, I had no idea what to say except, “Oh,” which I said in that tone of voice and then paused for a second, then said, “Are you hungry?”
Over the course of dinner, she revealed the gory details of exactly why she was in therapy. Her father is president of their congregation, and he’s been having a rather public affair with one of the congregants who is not his wife/my date’s mother. As a result, my date’s mother has become a bit of an alcoholic. And my date’s sister recently attempted suicide, but my date thought she was only calling for help because she only took half the bottle of aspirin instead of the whole bottle. I sat there, trying my hardest to maintain my ability to smile-and-nod-and-eat-sushi.
We left the restaurant after dinner was done. Thankfully, the rain had stopped because I was afraid she’d try to cling to me under my umbrella. She said she was taking the T, I said that I lived close by and I was going to walk. She had that expectant look on her face, but there was absolutely no way I was following up my statement with anything even remotely related to “So, would you like to come see my place?” We said our goodbyes and she kept moving closer as if to let me know that if I wanted to kiss her, she wouldn’t be averse to it, but there was no way I was having any of that.
As soon as I walked in the door, I picked up the phone and called my friend who set us up. After I summarily revoked her setting-Keith-up privileges as soon as she answered, she played innocent and asked why. After giving her the 2 minute summary of my date’s issues (and that’s the brief summary!), she said, “Yeah, but she needs someone to take care of her and I thought you’d be perfect to do that for her!” I stressed that I was looking for a partner, not a patient—my Psych degree be damned, I went in there expecting a date and not a therapy session. I restated the fact that she’s no longer able to set me up, then hung up, after which I went over to go drink with some friends and relate the story. My friends, of course, all laughed their asses off and told me that I should’ve known better to let someone set me up on a blind date.
And that’s our show for today… join us next time on “Keith’s Dates From Hell,” when we’ll be featuring an appearance by “The Girl Who’s So Chronically Shy It Takes The Jaws of Life to Pry Information Out of Her!” Thanks and good night, everyone…
--
Unbeknownst to me, but beknownst to those who were in on the action, a bank robbery was taking place across the street. It was in its initial stages when I entered the Starbucks, as several tall men in suits walked up to the bank, pulled black masks over their heads, removed guns from the smalls of their backs and headed inside.
Shots rang out as they aimed towards the ceiling to let people know they meant business. The usual orders came from their supposed leader. Money in bags. Down on the floor. Cooperate or get shot. The requisite crying and whimpering began taking place, but the men were oblivious -- intent on their score. They were efficient, they knew where all the vantage points were and they used them well, covering the entire floor from only four locations.
One of the children began crying loudly. His mother, desperate and scared, held him close, trying to smother his weeping in her blouse. She failed. One of the men glanced her way and gave her what she assumed to be an annoyed look, but she couldn't really tell from under the mask. But he refrained from exacerbating the situation by threatening either of them. At that instant, they both knew it would be over soon if everything just went according to plan. He'd be off with his money, and she'd be on her way home.
"C'mon," the leader growled at the tellers, "I haven't got all day." He almost went in back of the counter to help them pile the cash into the bags. But patience is a virtue, and he knew that if he dropped his guard due to impatience, someone might try something heroic and the whole scenario would go south. So he stood his ground. He knew the police wouldn't be long in coming.
The tellers were finishing up filling the fourth bag. One by one, the men ran to the counter from their places, grabbing the bags and heading back to where they'd come. When the fourth bag was complete, the last man took it while the leader kept guard over all of them. They slowly backed out of the bank, then ran off down the street and quickly into an alleyway, where a nondescript van waited for them.
--
I stepped out of the Starbucks five minutes later holding my frappuccino. I hate waiting in lines like that, especially for something as nonessential as a Starbucks beverage, but I needed the caffeine. I started back to the office, grateful I could spend at least a few minutes outside.
Off in the distance, I heard some sirens and, for a second, wondered where they were headed to before my thoughts went back to the project I was working on. I entered my office building and got into the elevator.
Confidential to the person who hit my site 15 times in the last hour looking for the MP3 for Maroon 5's "This Love":
It's not here. End of story. Your Google search lied to you, the file's not going to suddenly and magically appear if you keep coming back every 4 minutes. Go buy the full-length CD. It's worth it. Honestly.
"I seeeeee yoooooou..." Bwahahahaaaa... Now go, or I shall taunt you a second time. Then I'll make you find me a shrubbery. One that looks nice. And is not too expensive.
Either way, I'd like to offer the addendum that any man who drives a stickshift shouldn't need to put his arm behind the passenger seat when backing up. It's not that you need to keep a hand on the stick at all times, it's that when you drive stick, you just kind of do. Plus, any guy who takes that much control of his driving shouldn't need to do the behind-the-seat thing -- driving stickshift is just cool enough.
I was born just a few days before Christmas. So usually, my birthday rolls around at a time when people are either going to visit family or friends or they're going on vacation because they get a few extra days off around Christmastime. That means that no one is ever around when I celebrate my birthday. And I've never had a real party.
Oh sure, I've done things for my birthday... small things and get-togethers among the few friends who either hadn't left yet to go on vacation or weren't going anywhere for the holidays. For the past two years, I've gone out bar-hopping with only two friends in downtown Boston. Nothing big. So it's always with a twinge of jealousy when I hear about people who were surprised with these big surprise birthday parties or were taken out by a large group of people to paint the town red. I've never had that.
I want a birthday party. A real one. With a good number of people -- which I doubt will happen just by nature of the fact that I don't know that many people in Los Angeles and also because I already know that at least a couple of my friends will be away visiting relatives who are not L.A.-based. I'd love for it to be a surprise party, but I know that'll never happen because I have a couple different circles of friends who don't really know each other or how to contact each other.
But that doesn't stop me from wishing for one. A night when a whole bunch of people just get together and have a good time, and the excuse is for my birthday. It may sound selfish, but so what? We're all entitled to a little selfishness, and I'd like to -- just once -- have my own birthday extravaganza instead of always attending others'.
In the meantime, please update your links if you've got 'em. The blog will be the primary focus of this site so I'm keeping it in the home directory. Links should be reset to www.realityremixed.com without the /llamalicious/ on the end that we here at Llama Central have been using for the past year or so.
Also, if you sent me any e-mail between the hours of 5PM and midnight last night, I probably didn't get it. My apologies if I don't respond to it, but if you don't resent it, I'll never respond to it.