Proposition 8

Much has been said on this topic. Much more will be said. However, I feel the need to express my thoughts on 'paper' about this measure.

First, by recognizing same-sex marriages, the law would be changing the inherent definition of what a marriage is. What one group of people is asking for would be null and void if they received what they were asking for, so even though they think they're getting what they're asking for, it's not exactly what they wanted, because the definition changed.

Second, I'm a bit disgruntled because the whole push of anti-Proposition 8 is about the right of two individuals of any sex to have a marriage legally recognized, but they're actually campaigning for a GROUP right, not an individual right. Campaign away, but on at least one political issue this election, let's call a horse a horse and a carrot a carrot.

I am in favor of Proposition 8. !!!! I truly believe that marriage is meant for one man and one woman. I am not hateful or angry toward people who do not share my beliefs, or who don't adopt my preferred lifestyle. I just have a belief, and I'm going to act on it on election day.

just saying...

that if the highlight of your day is squishing a 2.5" cockroach at work, then you are either under ten years old and your employer is breaking child labor laws, or your day has just been sad, sad, sad.

City of Angels

I think I wrote awhile back about the terrible, rotten, no good, very bad car accident I got into about fifteen months ago. The one that involved me and a garbage truck, which ended with my car angelically parking its battered, soon-t0-be-junkyard-self perfectly, three inches away from the sidewalk, just as if I'd meant for my car to be there, fully stopped, regardless of any impact with trash-collecting vehicles. Anyway, after that accident, I knew there really were angels in the City of Angels, and seriously thought that when I leave this place, the angels will go with me.
So. Angels have not deserted me!
Saturday night I was getting ready to play in front of people for the first time in a long time.
I'd had my friend Kim come over and help me pick out what to wear...silly, I know, but I needed the moral support. I ended up in a regular black shirt and jeans, but I added a cool spidey scarf in honor of it being Rocktoberfest. I had even written a song (see two posts below) especially for the occasion, and been practicing it day and night, sleep and wake, in car and out. Now it was 8 on Saturday night and I'd gotten gussied up (haha, what a funny expression) and was ready to go. I grabbed my gear and drove up to Westwood. I got out of the car and opened the rear door to grab my guitar and go....but it wasn't there. I blinked, turned around, and checked again. Still not there. I started to panic. Here I was, about to play for real, and I go an lose my guitar. Wait, had I really lost it? Had I really brought it down the stairs with me? Was it still in my apartment? I suddenly had this horrible image in my head of this time when I was in eighth grade and Casey Getzelman had gotten a brand new cool guitar while we were waiting for our jazz band carpool parents to come pick us up, he'd put it on the ground where we were waiting, and then some stupid ninth grader without a license...his name was Paul, and he rather reminded me of Kay in Disney's Sword and the Stone...had driven along and promptly run over it. Had that happened to my baby, my sweet little roommate-fingernail-gouged Seagull? I raced back as fast as hitting every red light possible allowed me to...and get this: it wasn't until I was three blocks away that I even contemplated the fact that someone could have stolen it. I rounded the corner, and coasted by the spot where my car had been parked, and there was no guitar. None at all. Not even shreds of gator guitar case. I got out and peered all around, even squatting to look under the cars on the side of the road. I started to panic even more because I realized that I had put my phone in my guitar case, and my camera as well, and so half my life was missing. I went back to my apartment, thinking I might have left it by the table in the front room, but even as I raced up the stairs, in my heart I knew it wasn't there, because I distinctly remember having the grandiose feeling of walking along, guitar in hand, being a guitar girl for all the world to see. I trudged down the stairs, defeated, not knowing what to do. I sent up shreds of prayers from my heart - I couldn't even form cohesive sentences. As I exited the building, I overheard some lady talking on the call-in phone about how she had a guitar, and some girl was supposed to be playing in a concert that night...and I turned and looked at her, and said, you have my guitar!?! That's MY guitar! You have it? And she said, "nevermind, I found her" and promptly hung the phone up and came and hugged me and said, "we have your guitar." I was seriously about ready to cry from relief. Anyway, the angels, Peggy and Dan, and their dogs, who are nameless to me, but who I see every morning on their walk, had my guitar safely ensconced in their condo. Apparently Peggy had been ready to take the dog out and he started barking and barking and they didn't know if the guitar case was a bomb or not, and then there was my syringe inside for making sure my guitar is hydrated, and they thought it might be drugs...let's just say that in the end, the angels were there for me, and I got my guitar back.
So I found another parking spot, and made it to Rocktoberfest, where I managed to completely bungle the chorus of TMBG's New York City twice, but managed to keep playing anyway...seriously, my ego was at an all time low. I thought, can I even manage to play this next song? This song I put a lot of effort into? Help! It went fine, even though it was so noisy that I wasn't sure anybody could hear me. But I got a few compliments later, which was nice, even if the guy who was my crush of the week last week totally made it obvious that he isn't even the slightest bit interested after I, bolstered in my courage by my successful singer/songwriter debut, made a slight overture. Seriously, being rejected is just no fun. Although it's a lot better than being strung along and THEN rejected, so I guess it's all part of the learning.
Just wanted to say that there are angels. I know, because even though I haven't seen one with wings, they stop & direct wayward traffic and help small lost girls in LA find their baby guitars.

Memories

When I was about five or six...back in the days when it was fun to ride in the 'way back' of the '90 Dodge minivan, we were on the way back from an excursion to the City library. My sister and I were harking back to the gunslinging days, using our index fingers to as gun barrels and making shooting noises as we 'shot 'em dead' ('em' being all the drivers of the cars unlucky enough to travel in our wake). There was a guy in an old Ford Ranger behind us who looked eerilyl like Gordon Lightfoot...the version of Gord on the Gord's Gold LP. He followed us for a long time, all the way down Capitol Hill and Victory Road, and we shot him enough times that by all rights he should have expired several imaginary bullets ago. But he was still alive, and perhaps was getting annoyed, as later, we both swore that he pulled something black and shiny from the dashboard and pointed it at us. We huddled behind our 'cover' (aka, below the window) and did not come out to peek at the competition for a very, very long time.

I used to stare at the Simon & Garfunkel Greatest Hits album cover for hours. I wonder how exactly Garfunkel's hair got that texture, and wondered if Simon was really holding a golden egg in his hand. I'd listen to the songs and really feel the mournfulness of the boxer, and the despair of Mrs. Robinson, even though I had absolutely no idea what the song was about at the time, and wonder what the devil difference it made between being a hammer or a nail, as both came with pound-a-trucks which were to be guarded jealously against the stealings of younger siblings.

I remember the first time I went to the subpar Robintino's grill on Highway 89. I had been elected Student of the Month, and my fellow cohort, Paul, and the principal went along. We had pizza which I had heard rave reviews of, but which I remember thinking looked and tasted exactly like the pizza cafeterias used to serve before Ambassador Pizza got the contract to provide the little people with greasy carbs....that is, it didn't taste appetizing at all. Remember, how it was cut in squares, and had canned mushrooms on it, and dripped grease everywhere? (No wonder I brought my lunch from home so often!) Later, Paul gave me a small beanie-baby (yes, this dates me) lamb for Christmas, which I named, but I cannot remember its name to call my little sheep home. Help! what was its name? He (Paul) delivered it to my neighbor's house on Christmas morning, and it had snowed, so I put on my boots and trudged in my pajamas (no coat, as it was bright and not too cold) to the neighbors...the pristine snow glinting. I was so surprised...it was the first time a boy had ever given me a Christmas present, and I was totally overcome with happiness that someone had been so thoughtful...and it was so unexpected! What a great surprise!

My favorite baseball players are Derek Jeter, John Smoltz (what a great last name...I think if I chose a last name, that would be it), Orel Hershiser (I nicknamed him Oreo Hershey), Chipper Jones, Mariano Rivera, Greg Maddox, and Kenny Lofton. I saw Lofton, Jeter, and Rivera in action four summers ago at a game at Camden Yards. (Bet you can't guess who I was rooting for...) When Jeter got up for his second at-bat, I silently willed him to hit a home run with all my little heart...and on the third pitch, that's exactly what he did. I jumped up and down, shouting, shaking my roommate and shouting, "He did it for me! That one's for me!" So all you people, the homer he hit on June 24, 2004 is all mine.

HMPM and I used to eat 'cheezits' from the side yard. Cheezits come from weeds. Yes, I ate the 'fruit' of a weed. The plants usually grow to be about a foot high, but can sometimes be higher, and the leaves are wrapped tightly around a very tiny pumpkin-shaped green fruit. We ate them, and actually thought they were good.

I told Shanelle in my 2nd grade class that her crayons were toxic, because they weren't Crayola and didn't have 'non-toxic' written on them. She had absolutely no idea what I was talking about, and after I explained that she would be poisoned and die from using her crayons, she started to cry. I don't know if I was being malicious or just trying to show off that I knew what 'toxic' meant. I don't think I want to know, either.

Before having the Internet at home was common, my siblings and I all had Juno accounts because you could access email without actually having an Internet connection...you just dialed up, and it made the little fax machine noise, and then a bar would appear and it would jump forward in lime-green increments. If it went straight from 0-100%, chances were really good that you had no mail waiting for you; however, if the bar took even a few seconds to load, you almost certainly had mail. I played the old game Lemmings on this computer, too. The graphics and layout of the Juno page stick in my mind...wish I had a printscreen of them to show you.

We used to get Mario and Luigi points for reading back in elementary school. We had a schoolwide reading contest and my older sis was mad because third graders had to read 20 minutes to get a Mario head on the classroom poster chart, whereas first graders only had to read 10. Therefore, I racked up a lot more points than she did, and due to my overzealous competitive edge and my love of reading, our grade managed to win. Mario and Luigi. My kids (if I ever have any) probably won't even know what dot-matrix printers, record players, modems, typewriters, or land lines are. Sad. Most of me wishes I could go back to not being so 'connected.' Seriously, do I have to be looking at a screen ALL THE TIME??????????? I realize that was shouting. I meant it to be.

Ah, a trip down memory lane always takes too long to type. Gotta go to bed now or I won't be able to get up to take my trooper of a car into the stinky dealership to get my headlamp and oil changed. Timeconsuming and tiresome, but necessary, nevertheless.

Music & Lyrics

Clarification: not the movie. Although I have to say that the film, starring the terribly terrible Hugh Grant, and the somewhat dopey Drew Barrymore (not to be confused with Drew Carey...had a really hard time with that one for awhile, just because their names sound so similar), is HILARIOUS because of the music video in the opening credits, which may be viewed here. Seriously, hilarious.

Anyway, so recently I wrote a song. A rather simple song, but decent. The lyrics go like this:

My heart was shuttered and I walked along the street, head down

I was trying to decide whether to try to fly or stay on the ground

To stay safe on the curbside or to give myself a new start

And then I stumbled off the sidewalk and fell into the path of my heart

Where are you? I've been searching for you

Where are you? I've been looking for you

Where are you? I've been waiting for so long

to find you so I can belong with you

My path to you is set like a story in a fairy-tale book

I want a love to fill my whole heart, not just the breakfast nook

My eyes and heart are open and I'm starting to see color

Life was dull and grey before but now I know I want you and no other

chorus

Sometimes I wonder if I'll know you when I first see your face

Or if I'll bump into you one day showing off my lack of grace

Until the day I find you I will daydream of your smile

Hope you're also searching for me or I'll be in this sad state for awhile

I'm going to perform at Rocktoberfest tomorrow night. There will be video of the performance forthcoming.