Author: sychela

Categories
Beauty Memoir

One day I’ll be grateful to get carded. For now, it’s still a nuisance.

Over the weekend I got carded for buying lottery tickets.  Not even real lottery tickets.  Dollar scratchers.

I went into the 7-11, mulled over the selection, and chose the two that weren’t Christmas-themed.  The woman said, “Over 18, right?” to which I smiled and said, “Yes.”  Because I am so clearly over 18.  Then she said, “Do you have ID?” to which I said, “Um…it’s in the car…hang on.”  At this point she’d already given me the tickets and I’d already paid for them in quarters.  I got my license – the first one I grabbed (out of my two California licenses with different last names and one NY state ID) happened to be the old one with the hole punched in it, and I expected her to tell me she needed a valid one, but apparently not.  I took my dollar scratchers and my 26-year-old self and left.

I would understand if I were getting carded for buying alcohol.  Even cigarettes.  But dollar scratchers?

I blame the woman at the place in the mall, where I went to get my bangs trimmed last Thursday.  I’ve been doing them myself since July and they were getting a little raggedy.  She said, “I remember you.  To your eyebrows, right?” and I said yes, and then she spritzed the heck out of them and started trimming.  By the time they were half-dry I knew they were too short and so did she.  I still tipped her, but every day I’m checking to see if they’re getting longer.  They are so not to my eyebrows.  Even Drew said I look like a little kid, and I think the subtext (that he had the decency not to say) was that I look like a little boy.  Oh well. 

The good thing about bangs is that they grow fast.  And from now on I’ll ask my friend Molly to do the trims I don’t just do myself (eyes crossed, in front of the mirror).

So I guess you could say I had an uneventful weekend.

Categories
Beauty Memoir Theatre Work

Cameraphone pictures

My phone had started throwing up this message whenever I tried to go to my message inbox: “Memory is 99% full.  Please delete some files and messages before continuing.”  I kept clearing out my inbox but it didn’t make the message go away.  I turned my phone all the way off and back on, because I’m of that “Did you try restarting it?” generation.  When even that didn’t work I was thinking maybe this was the beginning of the end – maybe I needed a new phone.  Then I mentioned it to my brother, who told me that pictures and messages use the same memory and maybe I had too many pictures.  Well, I did have something like 350 pictures in my phone, so on my Bart ride into work the other day, I set to work deleting the ones I didn’t need.

I deleted a lot of pictures that I’ve already uploaded to Facebook or here.  I also deleted all the blurry shots of, say, a woman wearing a bat-wings headband, or a picture of someone’s cute dog, or a lot of food pictures.  I also decided that if I couldn’t remember what a picture signified, then I would delete it.

After deleting over 100 blurry, duplicate, or pointless pictures, I still have a good representation of the last year or so.  Here are some of the “significant” photos I chose to keep.

Me, tiger mask, Dickens Faire
Disneyland last December
Drew wrapped in the GIANT afghan my mom made us
The set for Sunlight, my first show at MTC.
Equivocation set
My stage left view of Woody Guthrie
I just like these colors.
Me and Liz attempting to take a picture in front of Olsen Hall (the English building) at UC Davis.
In Hayes Valley - "Ecstasy" by Dan Das Mann and Karen Cusalito
My friend Christy's baby, Serenity.
Using the courtesy phone at the SF Opera's "Madama Butterfly."
Megan celebrating officially buying her wedding dress!

The following is a series of the weird toys my coworker keeps at her desk…

So weird. 

And last but  not least, this year’s Christmas tree!  I’ve just realized it’s not a very good picture.  But it conveys a certain holiday spirit.

Categories
Exercise Fiction Work

November 30th

I know this is silly, but I’m inordinately proud of myself for completing NaNoWriMo this year.

The past two year I’ve done it, I haven’t really written a “novel” – I’ve written more like “50,000 words that are mostly stories about someone who bears an uncanny resemblance to me, and occasionally straight-up journal entries.”  So I’ve gotten to 50,000 but it’s sort of been cheating.

This year I stuck to it and wrote an entire story about one person – and yes, you might be able to point out a large number of things that she and I have in common, but so what? – and it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  I suspect there is some good stuff in there, too, which excites me.  I’ll find out when I reread (but Stephen King says to give it at least 6 weeks before then).

In April, the same team of people responsible for Nanowrimo hosts Script Frenzy, which is 100 pages of scripted material.  I am so there.

Dude, look at these stats.  I was so far behind for most of this:

I’m so grateful for those Week Three sprints.

So today I’ve been able to relax a little bit and run a bunch of errands (probably one of my most favorite things in the entire world).  I recently got the chance to wash all my clothes (usually I kind of cycle things through, and the bottom of the basket collects things that I don’t really care about), so my dresser drawers are stuffed with clean things.  That feels nice.  I’m going to go read Deathly Hallows and feel smug.

Categories
Drew

The old grease adds flavor

The other day I caught Drew taking a dirty salad plate out of the dishwasher.

“No no no!” I said.  “That’s dirty.”

He flipped the dishwasher door shut and pointed at the little “dirty v clean” wheel we have, which I am constantly forgetting to set to the right side.  The clean side was facing up.  He said, “I’ve been taking dishes out of here for like two days.  This is why I’m getting sick again!”

That’s when I realized how empty the thing was.  Maybe I shouldn’t have laughed at him quite so much.

Luckily I’m one of those people who basically washes every dish, then puts it in the dishwasher.  Or should that be unluckily?  Maybe if at least one dish looked dirty, he would have questioned the wheel, and questioned me.

Oh well.  It’s good to build up your immune system.

(Sometimes my wife skills are tested and found lacking.)

Categories
Drew Nonfiction

“I’ve got the TV, the laptops, I’ll just grab the dishwasher and then I’m outtie”

So we come home from grocery shopping today, and when we come around the corner to our door, Drew looks back at me, panicked, and then pushes the door open.  And I realize that the door, which we definitely left locked, was open.

Once we’re both inside we see there’s a guy, dressed in the maintenance garb of our apartment complex, crouched on the floor in front of the dishwasher.

I think we say something like, “Um, what are you doing here?”

He says he has a work order, with our apartment number, to fix the dishwasher.  We say we did not place a work order and that the dishwasher works.  He says it was draining, so he was confused.  We send him out.  He leaves.  We both take deep breaths.  Then I get on the phone with the office to try to find out what the deal is.  It’s like 10 minutes to 6:00 on the day before Thanksgiving, and I’m glad they even answered.

The woman who answers the phone is the dumbest one in the office, so Drew and I both roll our eyes and he says things loudly like “Ask if Diana is there, put her on the phone, this girl doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

The dumb girl says things like, “Oh, maybe there was a mistake” and “I’m sorry if there was a mistake” and I say things like “No if there was a mistake” and “We didn’t request this and there was a man [who I’d actually never seen before, although Drew said he’s seen him before] in our apartment.”

About five minutes after we got off the phone, Diana called me back to apologize personally, because she’s the one who wrote down the wrong apartment number.  That was nice of her, she didn’t have to do that, and I appreciate that.

Overall, it was fine.  He was a maintenance guy, he just wanted to fix a broken dishwasher in the evening of the day before Thanksgiving.  Neither of us meant to give him a hard time for doing his job.  But it was frightening to come home and find our front door not only unlocked, but cracked open.

And while I don’t mean to come across as a bitch, shooing him out and then being on the phone with the office, clearly upset, when he walked back in there with his bad work order…what if it had been just me coming home alone?  I would have freaked out.  I only stayed fairly cool about it because I came in behind Drew and so by the time I caught on to what was going on, we already knew it was a maintenance guy.

And he wasn’t in the living room flipping through DVDs…he was crouched on the floor in the kitchen with a wrench.  Worst thief ever.

Adrenaline rush!

Categories
Beauty Books Drew

There’s been a change in me…

So last night found me watching Watch What Happens Live, an interview show where Andy Cohen talks with people from Bravo TV shows, particularly the Real Housewives.  His guest was Kim Zolciak, from The Real Housewives of Atlanta.  I think Atlanta is on the far trashy-and-stupid end of the Real Housewives spectrum, and so I spent the first 20 minutes of WWHL making fun of Kim (who is particularly trashy and stupid).  I called out her lack of interview skills (she spent a lot of time looking down or just not at Andy); when she said “Do I look fat or something?” I said yes; and I was eager to watch her “perform” one of her “songs” at the end of the show.

We came back from a commercial and she was sitting on a stool, sort of bobbing her head with a track, and then she started “singing” along with the pre-recorded song.  It was awful.  I mean, truly awful.  She’s not a good singer, but she also lacks any confidence, so her “dance moves” are all half-hearted and self-conscious.  Like when you watch a middle-school production of a musical where they all have to dance and sing.  It even fell out of the “delightfully bad” range and into “painful and pathetic.”

Afterwards, Andy told her she sounded great, which was sweet of him, I think he’s a nice guy who’s just stuck with a superficial job.  Then he started taking phone calls from viewers, one of whom asked Kim, “Will you ever sing without a track?”

Kim said, “Well, that was me singing, the microphone was a lot louder than the background singing.  So you heard me.”

The caller said, “But will you just sing now, without any music?”

So Kim kind of intoned, “I’m not a material girl…”

And then you heard the caller and her friends laughing hysterically.  And Kim looked down and away some more and didn’t really talk very much for the final couple minutes.

And I found myself suddenly feeling sympathy for the trashy, self-centered Real Housewife, with the giant blonde wigs and the short tight dresses and the married boyfriend (“Big Poppa”) and the “singing” career.

Jeez.  It’s like…you don’t want to feel sorry for them.  That ruins everything.  I think this may have changed, if not the way I view all the Real Housewives, then at least the way I view Kim.  Darn.

Categories
"Other people" Work

The Worst Phone Interviewer In The State

Earlier this week I applied to a bunch of craigslist ads for companies looking for SAT tutors.  I had a phone interview with one of them on Wednesday, and then went in Friday morning to meet them and take math and verbal quizzes.  I was feeling pretty good about it, overall, so when I got a phone call Friday afternoon from an undefined 415 number, I went ahead and answered it.  It was from a different tutoring company, whose name will be changed.  This is that phone call.  (It begins with him mispronouncing my name, me correcting him, then him mispronouncing it again.)

Him: Hi, I’m calling from SAT Prep*, you applied to be a tutor with us, and I was wondering if you’re still interested?
Me: Yes, I am.
Him: Oh…kay…  So we usually do a phone interview before bringing people in.  Would this be an okay time for a phone interview?
Me: Sure.
Him: Okay.  Um, so, what are you doing right now?
Me: Well, I’m working at the SF Opera, in the marketing department, but it’s just temporary and so I’m looking for…(etc.)
Him: Okay.  So…I don’t have this in front of me…um, I turned my computer off because I’m about to go to a meeting…but, whatever**…so, what’s your tutoring experience?
Me: I tutored for four years in high school, and…(etc.)
Him: Okay.  Um, can you hang on a sec?
Me: Sure.
Him: (Fumbling noises and a clank.  He comes back.)  So, we don’t actually do in-person interviews.  So, um…do you have any questions for me?
Me: No, I don’t think so.
Him: Okay, well, someone will be in touch with you.
Me: Okay, thanks.
Him: Bye.

**This is the point in the conversation where I checked out, and just started looking at Facebook, because I had just had a great experience with another company, and this guy was clearly not invested in this “phone interview.”  Maybe he didn’t expect me to pick up the phone.  “But, whatever.”

The whole thing took about four minutes.  I wonder if I’ll hear back from them.

Categories
cars

Be aggressive, be-be aggressive

Today in the Bart parking lot, a car parked thisclose to me.  And I came out there and looked at it, and it was one of those small-ish SUVs, way over its line into my space, and I purposely left room when I parked for the car to the right of mine to open their door…so why aren’t other people as considerate?

I have a car that could be accurately described as “small,” and the doors are really long, so even if I can get it open like 8 inches, I have to squeeze myself way into that wedge to get past the seatback.  Ugh.

I actually wrote a note, intending to leave it on the hated car.  I wrote it in red sharpie because it’s all I had on me, but maybe I subconsciously wanted to use red sharpie.

“Hey, parked a LITTLE close on your right side, didn’t you?  I am now climbing in the passenger-side door of my 2-door, stick shift coupe.  But don’t worry, I checked and you have PLENTY of room on YOUR driver’s side.”

Then I stood there with the note in my hand, thinking, This isn’t going to change anything. I still have to climb through my passenger door.  They’re not going to read this and think, “Wow, this chick is right, I should be a more considerate driver.”  They’re probably just going to call me a bitch and turn my note into litter.

So I crumpled it up and threw it and the red sharpie into the backseat.  Then I crawled between the two front seats, navigating the low steering wheel and the stick shift.  Then I backed out carefully (although I thought about just sort of gently scraping against the shiny paint on the haunch of their car).

I’m not sure if you would call my actions mature, or just resigned.

Update: Wow, being Freshly Pressed is totally all it’s cracked up to be!  I spent yesterday reading the comments (and laughing out loud) and feeling like a rockstar knowing that people – complete strangers – were reading, commiserating with, and enjoying this post.  I love WordPress and WordPressers!

Categories
Drew

Nov 13

So it’s been a year since our most wonderful wedding day at Tilden Park in Berkeley.  In celebration today we went to pick up our most wonderful anniversary cake from Julie Durkee at Torino Baking (she is the best!).  We had a very chill day and then we went to Sam’s Chowder House in Half Moon Bay for dinner.  So far we have only eaten one quarter of our cake (and that includes a third party eating a piece too).

Jealous?!

Categories
Beauty Memoir

Saturn: Calypso

There are a lot of things that could be fixed about my car.  It growls majorly when it’s cold, the colder the louder.  The brakes squeal occasionally.  Aesthetically, things are falling apart a little bit: the panel on the inside of the driver’s side door is coming off the frame…I never replaced that piece my brother knocked out one day in 2003…I spilled milk in there last week and didn’t get a chance to clean it up.  It needs a new quart of oil every couple months (where’s it going? I don’t know).  I did just put a new air filter in, so I feel good about that.  The windshield wipers need to be replaced.  It needs a wash, bad.  And a general tune-up.

I’m not the only one who’s impressed that A) my parents kept it for me during my NYC hiatus, and B) I’m driving it around now.  This is the car I drove in high school, man.  I got this car in 2001 and have put something like 100,000 miles on it since then.  I’m so grateful that it’s holding together and still running pretty well, but I’m not fooling myself that I’ll have it for another ten years.  I talk to it the way you’d talk to a stubborn horse that’s getting on in years: “Come on baby, I know you can do it…good job!  I’m so proud of you!”  I’ll be letting go of a big piece of my history when I finally have to break down and get a “new” car (especially since I think I’ll probably be abandoning the manual transmission for the more responsible and practical automatic transmission).

But there are days, like today, when it’s warmed up just enough to cut out the growl, and I drop it into fourth at just the right speed, and the road is just hilly and curvy enough to be fun, but the speed limit is still 50, and I feel like it just wants to GO.  The old horse has one last race left in her and she wants to run it.  And I’m like, “Yeah, okay, I’m 19 again, let’s do it, let’s just go.”