I know, I know, other people around me have life threatening illnesses, or have custody battles, or have new life changing chaos invading at every turn (infants being only some of that). Jobs lost, great fortunes emaciated into hollow assurances, yada yada. Roofs falling through, yes I know. But today I want to whine about something no one else thinks important enough to whine about. I’m fully cognizant that this is going to be a self-indulgent passage. I think in this case I deserve to be indulged.
That topic is: that nobody is ever really making an effort to physically see me anymore.
I have become an underage shut-in practically, and that is in part due to two problems as I see it. Ok three. Well maybe four. Ok there are just a bunch.
1) No one I met while living here (that I want to come visit me) lives here anymore. Anyone I met in the last four years who I actually liked has vanished without a trace or made themselves so successful as to be completely unavailable. While San Francisco is a town of transients who never leave, this town is a city of movers and shakers who vanish every three months, it seems. And oh yeah, the successful types are now all scrambling to hold on to what’s LEFT of that, so they’re even more busy this year, for sure.
2) None of the people who come to L.A. ever seem to arrive with the sole agenda of visiting me. It’s always Disneyland, Universal Studios, a job offer, a gig, a gem show, the morgue, who knows, all I know is it’s me that ends up second. Can I give them another call on Sunday and they’ll see if we can at least hit a Starbucks? Ya. Whatever.
3) All of my true friends who are sincerely happy to see me are completely broke, and have always been broke because they are generally artists, screenwriters, musicians, intellectual perpetual students, entrepreneurs, or want to change the world and donate almost all of their time pro bono. They are the diamonds in life, the substance of my life itself, but somehow none of them ever manage to have that guy with the giant cardboard check arriving at their door every week so they can get on a plane and see me. I, with my hands soiled from being a minion of the Evil Kingdom, must appear on their doorsteps to become purified.
4) The rest of the worthy and devoted friends have all decided to simultaneously shower the surface of the earth with a rain of newly popped-out progeny. They are much too incoherent from 3:00 feedings to give me a conversation that makes much sense. They generally start any phone call with OMG!! HOW ARE YOU, (bouncing), and then discuss the joys of their new infant for 10 minutes (which is fine by me, I’m all for being an informed Auntie), and then OPpps!!, gotta go, they’re:
( [checkbox] screaming)
( [checkbox] pooping)
( [checkbox] needing a burp)
( [checkbox] going to fall off the couch and split their head open)
( [checkbox] getting into the drawers), etc.
When you hang up mid-breath, you realize nothing ever got said. At all. And you go back to wondering who else you can wake up from a comatose post-feeding nap.
5) Then there are the Facebook Myspace Friendster Yahoo connections who insist on Twittering you every two minutes with the details of their projects or meals, but have no inclination to every actually hold a conversation with you in the first place. They probably have befriended you for the sake of
a) shamelessly promoting their business endeavors
b) showing you their rugrat pictures
c) showing you how many exotic places they visited instead of your dump of a town
d) giving you glib comments about their great life so as to appear more glamourous
e) figuring if they knew your high school friend, you must be someone they’ve momentarily forgotten; what the hell;
f) sending you lots of cartoon icons instead of actually verbalizing; or
g) actually remembering your name from high school, and after two sentences, putting you on their forward lists for e-mails that promote a, b, or c and somehow will inexplicably invite you to increase your penis size later.
I guess I have a couple of things I could do to regain my connections. I could:
1) Win the lottery;
2) Make a scene on Oprah or Dr. Phil (oh but then I’d have lots of Unwanted friends);
3) Start hiring myself to clean my friends’ houses instead of my current job;
4) Become a acclaimed supernanny; or
5) Write something very long, informative, warm and heartfelt, and hire a helicopter to drop it over the Marianas trench, and see if something intelligent responds.
I think number 5 is my best shot.
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1. If you are getting your hands soiled as an evil minion, you’re doing it wrong. Bloodied, perhaps, but not soiled. I have an electrostatic wand you could borrow… call yourself the “Zap Fairy”, maybe work with The Monarch from “Venture Brothers”. Unless you’d rather borrow my Blinding Ray instead. (Man, we BOTH need to go to Minions Anonymous I think.)
2. The Marianas Trench makes me think of a sketch on Robot Chicken: A girl is at a bar talking to the Creature From The Black Lagoon, saying, “So… where are you FROM?” I can see you missing all the fishy flirtations. For this reason I think it might be better to go with “acclaimed supernanny”. I plan to start referring to you in this way to get the ball rolling.
Just today I learned that there’s an interesting phenomenon when mosquitoes mate. (Even more interesting was how mankind acquired this knowledge… we SUPER GLUED a string to one foot of a male mosquito, and another string to a female mosquito, and then led them to their speed date. They may have smaller brains, but ours are often of more questionable usefulness.) You know that sound when a mosquito flies near your ear, the kind that wakes you from sleep and makes you swat blindly in every direction? Well, it turns out that the male wing pitch is about a G, and the female wing pitch is a D above that. They’re playing a chord, but here’s where it gets fun. When they get within a certain distance of each other, the possibility of mosquito sex begins. (By the way, mosquitoes don’t do oral sex, but that’s another set of experiments entirely. Let’s just say it’s problematic.) But it’s not a sure thing; the male has to CHANGE HIS TUNE. He wings it up faster, till he gets his pitch to match the female, and if he doesn’t do this or does it poorly, she won’t give him… um, the keys to her heart. Let’s say “the keys to her heart”.
I can sympathize with the idea of having to change my tune. I’m guessing maybe I need to be doing it now, especially since the tune I keep doing seems to be “extremely sophisticated bot emulation”. Dictionary soup, poetry that feigns meaning. But I digress.
: )
grand piano…
Hello
Thanks heaps for this indeed!… if anyone else has anything, it would be much appreciated. Great website Super Piano Links http://www.en.Grand-Pianos.org Enjoy!…