Dude, Where's My Health?
I can't go to class tonight. I feel awful. My head hurts and I'm nauseated and I can't remember if I took my Effexor this morning. I'm pretty sure I did. I can't risk taking it again, though. I don't want to O.D. on anti-depressants and end up like Anna Nicole Smith's son. If I'm going to O.D. on something, please let it be opium or morphine or something fun. By the way, have any of you seen those photos of A.N.S. and her son on his last day? She's in a hospital bed holding her newborn baby and he's sitting next to her in a baseball cap smiling. And they both look so white trash and grimy. Really, they look grimy. I saw one of the photos on the cover of a magazine at Von's the other day. It was sad. Not because he died that same day. The whole trashy scene was just really sad to look at.
So I'm skipping class tonight and resting today as much as I can. My sister is feeling really lousy too. I suggested that maybe we got sick from these brownies she made last night and she yelled at me. She's been yelling at me a lot lately. I told her the other day that I'd rather live with my sister who yells at me than strangers who give me the silent treatment (the previous rooommates). She laughed. I said, "At least I know what to expect with you. At least it's familiar." How dysfunctional is that? She treats me all the time like I'm still her little sister and she's 16 and I'm 8. Part of it's because I'm much goofier than she is and she's serious a lot of the time. I'll sing crazy songs in the morning to the dogs and she'll be all grumpy and squeal at me to shut up. And I point out ugly/freaky guys on TV and say stuff like, "He'd be good for you" and she gets mad at me. Ha. My brother and I are, in many ways, so much more alike than my sister and I. But my sister's much more level-headed and not psycho like my brother. I'm glad I'm living with her and not him, that's for sure.
Earlier today I sat down and worked on my novel. I wrote 141 words (two of them being "Chapter Fourteen"). After I lie down for a while, I'm going to get back up and write some more, even though I'm not going to class. Class has been bringing me down lately; hardly anyone comments on my work, and if they do, it's often pointless. I'm starting to think I wasted $500 on the class. I've gotten a few good pointers, but my friends usually have much better--and more insightful--criticism to offer.
For example, last week in one of my chapters I mentioned that Abby McCarthy, an annoying redheaded chick my main character calls "The Red Scare," tossed a Starbucks coffee cup out of the window of her black Lexus SUV and onto the grassy median of Sunset Boulevard. This really nutty, always defensive woman wrote really weird comments throughout my chapter, starting with "A disposable coffee cup, I assume?" What? Huh? A person who tosses a paper cup out of their car window is a litterbug. Someone who throws a ceramic mug into the street is insane.
Earlier, this same character (Abby, not the freaky chick in class) says something slightly racist about her Korean manicurist. Here's the snippet from my novel:
“Great! All right! I hate to cut this short,” Abby announced, “but I’ve got a manicure appointment, and Chin-Hwa flies off the handle when I’m late. Isn’t that a funny name? Chin-Hwa? She says it’s Korean for ‘the most wealthy.’ Kind of fitting with the prices she charges!” She giggled at her own joke. “Okay if I vamoose?”
This is what the weird woman in class wrote: "FYI: Korean manicurists in L.A. are very rare. More often than not, they are Vietnamese. In NYC, they are usually Korean. I suggest changing this to make it more realistic."
Huh? What? As if there's not one Korean manicurist in all of L.A.? I paid $500 for this kind of criticism? It made me want to lob a ceramic coffee cup right between her sullen eyes. The weird thing is that she has these racist lines throughout her novel and is totally clueless about them. A few weeks ago I commented on a line in her book about a "slow-poke Mexican driver," suggesting she take it out, that it was offensive. She said, "Well, they often are slow because they're carrying all that gardening equipment in their trucks and they need to be careful."
The entire class was silent.
All right, here are the 141 words I wrote earlier today. I'm on page 151. I even went back to the beginning the other day and added a dedication and started my acknowledgments page, just to make the book seem more "real" to me. By the way, Hope Rhodes is the evil country singer in the book.
Chapter Fourteen
“Why, thank you, Mrs. Gunning. I tell you, if someone set my house on fire, it’s the only thing I’d bother to grab on my way out. Billy Jack would have to fend for himself. And so would the help!”
Hope Rhodes, gesturing to a pearl necklace draped around her bony neck, was talking with my mother, of all people. She wasn’t pointing with her hand, mind you; she was waving her stolen chicken leg around like it was a third appendage.
“It must be vintage,” my mother said, her chestnut eyes glassy with “Ebay Glaze”—the possessed look she gets when she’s spent an entire weekend shopping online, filling her condo with more “antiques," her word for anything produced before the year 2000. Precious Moments figurines are not vintage, I tell her. They’re junk. With gigantic scary heads and pillow-sack eyes.
-----------
That's all she wrote. As an aside: When I was nine or ten, my brother and I scraped $17 together and bought my mom a ceramic Precious Moments dealie with two kids (a boy and a girl) dressed as angels and sitting on a puffy cloud. We thought $17 was so much money. My mom still has that awful thing on her dresser.
I hate Precious Moments. They are not precious. And they last far longer than a moment.
So I'm skipping class tonight and resting today as much as I can. My sister is feeling really lousy too. I suggested that maybe we got sick from these brownies she made last night and she yelled at me. She's been yelling at me a lot lately. I told her the other day that I'd rather live with my sister who yells at me than strangers who give me the silent treatment (the previous rooommates). She laughed. I said, "At least I know what to expect with you. At least it's familiar." How dysfunctional is that? She treats me all the time like I'm still her little sister and she's 16 and I'm 8. Part of it's because I'm much goofier than she is and she's serious a lot of the time. I'll sing crazy songs in the morning to the dogs and she'll be all grumpy and squeal at me to shut up. And I point out ugly/freaky guys on TV and say stuff like, "He'd be good for you" and she gets mad at me. Ha. My brother and I are, in many ways, so much more alike than my sister and I. But my sister's much more level-headed and not psycho like my brother. I'm glad I'm living with her and not him, that's for sure.
Earlier today I sat down and worked on my novel. I wrote 141 words (two of them being "Chapter Fourteen"). After I lie down for a while, I'm going to get back up and write some more, even though I'm not going to class. Class has been bringing me down lately; hardly anyone comments on my work, and if they do, it's often pointless. I'm starting to think I wasted $500 on the class. I've gotten a few good pointers, but my friends usually have much better--and more insightful--criticism to offer.
For example, last week in one of my chapters I mentioned that Abby McCarthy, an annoying redheaded chick my main character calls "The Red Scare," tossed a Starbucks coffee cup out of the window of her black Lexus SUV and onto the grassy median of Sunset Boulevard. This really nutty, always defensive woman wrote really weird comments throughout my chapter, starting with "A disposable coffee cup, I assume?" What? Huh? A person who tosses a paper cup out of their car window is a litterbug. Someone who throws a ceramic mug into the street is insane.
Earlier, this same character (Abby, not the freaky chick in class) says something slightly racist about her Korean manicurist. Here's the snippet from my novel:
“Great! All right! I hate to cut this short,” Abby announced, “but I’ve got a manicure appointment, and Chin-Hwa flies off the handle when I’m late. Isn’t that a funny name? Chin-Hwa? She says it’s Korean for ‘the most wealthy.’ Kind of fitting with the prices she charges!” She giggled at her own joke. “Okay if I vamoose?”
This is what the weird woman in class wrote: "FYI: Korean manicurists in L.A. are very rare. More often than not, they are Vietnamese. In NYC, they are usually Korean. I suggest changing this to make it more realistic."
Huh? What? As if there's not one Korean manicurist in all of L.A.? I paid $500 for this kind of criticism? It made me want to lob a ceramic coffee cup right between her sullen eyes. The weird thing is that she has these racist lines throughout her novel and is totally clueless about them. A few weeks ago I commented on a line in her book about a "slow-poke Mexican driver," suggesting she take it out, that it was offensive. She said, "Well, they often are slow because they're carrying all that gardening equipment in their trucks and they need to be careful."
The entire class was silent.
All right, here are the 141 words I wrote earlier today. I'm on page 151. I even went back to the beginning the other day and added a dedication and started my acknowledgments page, just to make the book seem more "real" to me. By the way, Hope Rhodes is the evil country singer in the book.
Chapter Fourteen
“Why, thank you, Mrs. Gunning. I tell you, if someone set my house on fire, it’s the only thing I’d bother to grab on my way out. Billy Jack would have to fend for himself. And so would the help!”
Hope Rhodes, gesturing to a pearl necklace draped around her bony neck, was talking with my mother, of all people. She wasn’t pointing with her hand, mind you; she was waving her stolen chicken leg around like it was a third appendage.
“It must be vintage,” my mother said, her chestnut eyes glassy with “Ebay Glaze”—the possessed look she gets when she’s spent an entire weekend shopping online, filling her condo with more “antiques," her word for anything produced before the year 2000. Precious Moments figurines are not vintage, I tell her. They’re junk. With gigantic scary heads and pillow-sack eyes.
-----------
That's all she wrote. As an aside: When I was nine or ten, my brother and I scraped $17 together and bought my mom a ceramic Precious Moments dealie with two kids (a boy and a girl) dressed as angels and sitting on a puffy cloud. We thought $17 was so much money. My mom still has that awful thing on her dresser.
I hate Precious Moments. They are not precious. And they last far longer than a moment.
posted by Chai on Life! at 2:22 PM
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