West Hollywood

Is the "gay area" of town.

All the good gay clubs are here, all the good restaurants, and all the good daytime celebrity sightings (as long as we're not at the Arclight or the intersection of Hollywood and Vine). Three cars blasting Cher drive around the corner on which I stand in a span of fifteen minutes. The American Apparel store here only carries clothes for men. Two male construction workers still wearing their hard hats roll by, holding hands.

I turn in the direction of the sun, and take off my jacket.

Motivated

Oh my god, you guys, working from home is not for the weak-willed. It's hard. I keep looking at the blank screen awaiting my relevant comments and then clicking half-heartedly over to Tetris. I don't really WANT to play Tetris, but I want to play Tetris more than I want to do something productive. Example: I woke up at 1pm today (ONE! But I was up till like 5:15AM watching movies with Kyle so that's my excuse) and all I've done is sit in bed and eat chips. DELICIOUS. The only thing that could make my chips more delicious would be more chips. Fuck! I can't even stay on task when I'm blogging.

SECOND TRY:

I had dinner with my friend M2 the other night, she's married to a good friend of Kyle's. The three of them went to college together. Okay, I went to dinner with her, and I had a surprisingly good time, because I've had such terrible luck with making new friends here in LA. Probably that "nobody cares" thing I wrote about earlier. Sigh. I was surprised at how well we got along, because we're into such different things, and, you know, she's married. Anyway, we had the following conversation, and I knew I would be at least able to see her once a week for dinner and be glad that we were friendly.

Me: *seeing multiple billboards up for Beowulf* "GAH! I HATE that they're making this movie! They're doing Love in the Time of Cholera too..." *rant devolves into stuttering angrily. M2 looks on uncomprehendingly*
M2: Why is that such a big deal?

Later, after dinner...

Me: I think I'm going to give this guy a one dollar tip. That's enough, right? Valet is $5. So...one dollar, that's enough?
M2: Yeah, that's 20%!
Me: *looks on uncomprehendingly*

Hello, and Welcome to...Priya's Updated List of People Who Should Just Fucking Die Already!

- Pete Doherty
- Courtney Love
- Abigail Breslin (she knows what she did)
- OJ Simpson
- Tiffany Pollard, aka New York
- Britney Spears
- Michael Jackson

The Sugar Dish, The Jewelry Box, The Makeup Bag, whatever.

I feel very accomplished; i just cleaned out my makeup bag. That's right, I finally sat down with my (4 BAGS of) makeup and cleaned out all the broken powder bits and smooshed lipstick and eyeshadow particles, and even gave myself a very strenuous talk about some mascara that I love dearly but is a year and a half old, and even though that doesn't FEEL gross to me, apparently that is VERY gross by other, professional, standards, so I convinced myself to throw it away.
Apparently my endorphin highs from cleaning are very delicate, because Kyle just walked in and ruined it:

Kyle: You look very pleased with yourself.
Priya: I am! I cleaned out my makeup case!
Kyle: I've never heard it called that before.

I just read my horoscope in the LA Weekly, and it sucks. Here:

Is the cavalry really coming? June Crabs may benefit from a friendly and determined Scorpio sun shining light on a long-standing financial matter. Will it be resolved before Mercury turns direct on the 1st or will you have to wait until mid-November, when the Messenger is back in Scorpio? Crabs born around Independence day have bee dealing with an inventive but unpredictable Uranus in Pices for over a year. Now that take-action Mars is in your sign, are you about to take the next step? Maybe not. Mars goes retrograde on 11/15, a week before Uranus turns direct.

Did any of you catch that? All I got was "blah blah blah, blah blah, Uranus, blah blah."

Confidential to the guy with the licence plate that reads ELVIRA

Is it demeaning at all to be seen about town

in your grandma's car?

Fairly Alarmed ...is a Real Blog

I'm back in front of a PC for the first time in a couple weeks, and I apologize for your having to deal with the format-challenged posts I make from my phone. I dunno what's up with that, but am totally unequipped to deal with it. They should look much better now. I know I just recently trumpeted the finding of an all-night internet cafe near my apartment, but recently...well, it can be summed up in this conversation.

Priya: Basically I get home at like 7:30 and read for a while, and then I crawl under the covers because it's cold in our apartment, and then I wake up the next day.

Matt: That is a really sad story.

What have I been up to since my last real post?

Well, Kyle's 26th birthday was much more subdued than we had planned for, but in a welcome, "well, it was surprisingly nice to not black out and throw up in the gutter!" kind of way. I keep trying to postulate that I'm not on the verge of drinking myself to extinction and I'm really not, but damn. Birthdays somehow unlock the competitive drinker in me, where the other participant is my memories.

Work has been about the same as usual: same old LA people rotating in and out of my life every day. I just read this post and was struck by how the author put into words what I'm just starting to figure out about living in this city. Basically, the point of the article is that nobody cares about you. You're nothing. While some would think that's an extraordinarily depressing thing to have to live with every day, I love it. It's probably the part of me that cuddled right up to Fight Club when I first saw it: you're not your khakis, or your art, or your celebrity sightings. You're just Nothing; you're free. In some ways, it's a lot like going to the doctor: No matter how unbelievably fucked up your ingrown toenail is, the doctor's probably seen something WAY more disgusting, and pretty recently, too.

Here: think of all the morbidly obese women in the world that don't realize that they're pregnant until they start giving birth in a Denny's restroom, then think about the men who made them pregnant. Multiply your shudders by 4 million (the population of LA) and then think about yourself. You're really not that bad, in comparison.

I did this exercise when I got dressed this morning: I'm wearing a grey, two-sizes-too-large Morrissey shirt, dirty grey skinny jeans, brown riding boots, and a yellow purse. Does it matter? NO! So what if wearing all grey is a sign of mental imbalance? So what if brown boots and a yellow purse don't go together? Fuck you and your bourgeois fashion decrees! Also, nobody is making judgments on what I'm wearing because NOBODY CARES! Full circle. How do you like them apples?

Oh my fucking SHITBALLS

I think I might have just spotted a flea.

What do they look like? Are they even visible to the naked eye? Do they ever just come one at a time and not in bunches? How could this have happened? We have no dogs or cats, I haven't interacted with one in months(constant vigilance), and oh my god if that was a flea let it be a freak occurrence and not one of many fleas that I haven't found yet. Even better, let that have been some other kind of bug altogether. I don't think I could handle that.

The One Time I Write About Sports

Jesus, ask a guy a simple sports question ("Kyle, why do the Yankees lose") and you will get a, like, 3 hour answer, most of which has nothing to do with the Yankees, or even baseball at all. He's STILL talking, and I have no idea what about. Wait, I'm starting to get it...Now we're talking about JD Drew, who apparently has a ton of talent but doesn't apply himself.

Kyle: Remember when your dad used to yell at you for not trying in school?
Priya: And remember how that made me want to kill myself? Yeah.
Kyle: Well, that's JD Drew.
Priya: Also, nobody paid me 50 million dollars to get an A in math.
Kyle: Priya, nobody paid you 70 million dollars, either.
Priya: Whaaaaaat?
Kyle: Yeah.
Priya: Athletes are spoiled. *mutters to self* Sports, sports...70 million dollars...!

I'm trashed, but...

Jena Malone.

Same bar as Nick Carter. Fucking...PATTERNS MUCH?

I'm pretty sure we're an old married couple

I have to write this down.

Just now, Kyle and I were making out on our bed, and when things started to get more serious, we started debating the pros and cons of going further. "Meh, I just ate, and we're going out for the night pretty soon, and - " Finally I got sick of all the discussion and said, "I know, let's go through the IKEA CATALOG!&" and Kyle said, "yeah, that's sexy, too!" So we did.

It truly is terrifyingly sad to be old.

The Blast Diet

Kyle's days off and mine match up miraculously AGAIN, for the second week in a row, without any maneuvering from either of us. So nice. We plan to do boring things like pay a parking ticket and go shopping at Ralph's. We're also throwing Kyle's 26th Birthday Party at the Brass Monkey on Saturday night. We'll see how this turns out; mostly LA people irritate me. If all else fails, there's always the Dead Nazi approach: two of these in short succession and I won't remember a thing.

Oh god, Whole Foods is closing now. Too bad my computer isn't charging because some ASS was using the outlet to charge up his wheelchair for 2 hours. I KNOW YOU CAN WALK, as is evidenced by the many times that you did walk during those 2 hours, to get coffee, use the restroom, disappear for 10 minutes at a time, etc. Come on. I need to charge my laptop. COME ON. Christ. I don't even care if I sound insensitive.

Infauxtainment

God, the production stills for movies suck nowadays. Seriously: the ones for that Ben Stiller flick, The Heartbreak Kid, are everywhere, on the sides of buses, splashed up on ten story buildings, on billboards in every neighborhood. And now that cartoony-pixar-esque movie about bees, which may actually be called Bee Movie (oh, the indignity) is being advertised with just a picture of a bee on a tennis ball. What the hell?! Annoying.

Holy Shit!

Tomorrow is Kyle's 26th birthday.

Last year, we had Kyle's party on October 9th, 2006, at this dive bar we loved called Golden City, where our friend Kieran's brother tended bar and nobody cared that I was underage. There was always either a smattering of drunken old people who had been 86ed from every other bar in the Ballard neighborhood (which was really saying something, since it was an old Norwegian boating community...those sailors are tough!) or hipsters spinning and dancing to 80's New Wave and old skool hip hop. Even better: Golden City was only three drunken, stumbling blocks from our apartment. We invited all our Seattle friends and got blisteringly trashed. When we couldn't walk, they carried us home.
When we got home, I took off my eye makeup and when I looked at my scrubbed clean face in the mirror, I reflected slowly over my place in life. I was happy. Given: I missed my friends terribly that night, and we were poor, and my parents weighed on my mind. But I wasn't that worried; I knew I would see them again soon, and we'd figure the money thing out eventually, but...until then, I was happy. If you know me at all you know what a momentous occasion that was for me.

In the year that has elapsed since that moment, lots has changed. I changed jobs, flown back and forth to Houston countless times, and gone to India for a month, and I moved to Los Angeles and changed jobs again. One thing that is still the same: I am happy.

For Kyle, who gave me space and support to figure my life out, sacrificed so much time, energy, and sleep for our relationship, and who made it possible for me to be happy with my life in general...
Happy Birthday. I love you.

Oh, maybe I neglected to mention this, but

I saw NICK CARTER, of the Backstreet Boys, singing karaoke in a bar one block away from my apartment. Nick Carter was the first celebrity I ever cared about. I'm serious.

I had a tiny plastic ring with his face on when I was in 2nd grade. And then, when I was in 8th grade, in field hockey, my team named a maneuver after him: the Carter. It was when you hit the ball between the opponent's legs. I don't know why we did that, but my theory is that we were in love with Nick Carter and would have named our grandmas after him if we were given the chance, and none of us suspected that I would one day be in the same small, darkened room with him, watching him tunefully (surprisingly so; I kind of thought his voice would be ruined after all those years of shooting heroin through his eyeball, but apparently that was Aaron Carter I was thinking of) perform a rendition of some Eagles song.

OMG EAT THAT POPULAR GIRL, YOU ARE SO JEALOUS OF ME EVEN THOUGH YOU WERE WAY MORE POPULAR THAN I WAS IT'S OKAY WE'RE EVEN NOW BECAUSE I'M PRETTY SURE YOU'RE HOOKED ON METH AND I SAW NICK CARTER SO THERE.

Yikes. I'm going to go lie down now.

Imagine

That every cell of your body aches, so much so, in fact, that you are on the verge of nausea, and when your boyfriend kisses you, you contemplate telling him to kiss a strand of your hair if he absolutely must, because those cells are dead anyway and mercifully unfeeling.

Okay, got it?

Now imagine that your electrified meat-sack of a body is jouncing down one of the worst streets in LA. In public transit. Which famously lacks shocks.

Now combine those feelings.

WARNING: This rant kind of gets away from me, so skip on to the next one; I won't mind.

Yesterday I was at a bar and saw part of the cast of the Real World which is currently filming. I was sitting right in front of one of their cameras for a while there, but I doubt I'll end up on the show at all. I was wearing a grey hoodie and had my back to them; not enough boob showing. Anyway, I kind of wanted to fuck with them as much as possible - not so that I could get on camera or anything, but because they're fucking tools - but I didn't want to have to, like, interact with them. They seem like such uninteresting, reprehensibly unintelligent sub-humans. You'll see when the show airs. I sat across the bar from these two guys as they had their shots poured and actually, I'm not even shitting you when I write this, raised their glasses and said, "To the Ladies!" in unison. It was like watching two ugly fratboys do that weird I-Swear-I'm-Not-Gay-But-I-Love-You-Man-But-I'm-Not-Gay thing...methinks sirs doth protest too much?

I hated them so much.

And then Andy Dick showed up and they all talked to each other; I heard . I could just see this horrible Weather Channel hurricane graphic forming over their three heads: STORM OF JACKASSERY FORMING OVER LOS ANGELES: CITIZENS UNIMPRESSED, with the corresponding canned dialogue delivered by the guy who wanted to be anchor but wasn't professional enough (kept wearing ties with suns wearing sunglasses on them): "There's a Storm of Jackassery forming over the greater Los Angeles area - what's it mean for your weekend? We'll let-cha know, after these messages!"

I guess I feel kind of disillusioned by famous people right now; so few of them seem to be behaving to any standard of proper decorum, or if they do act with some semblance of proper decorum but slip up every once in a while (Sienna Miller, I'm looking at you), they act surprised that people misconstrue what they meant. It's like producing any art, or indeed any object/service intended for consumption by the greater public. Eventually it ceases to be yours and instead becomes theirs. To use an example close to my heart, Cameron Crowe wrote and directed Say Anything out of things that happened to him, out of the desire to communicate the way he felt when he was a kid in high school, or to explore the relationships between certain sets of people (father/daughter, first boyfriend/girlfriend). When he directed it, that was his chance to make it perfect; to make the statement he wanted to with that movie. Then it was released, and eventually I saw it and was suffering through a long-distance thing at the time and everything in the movie became a symbol to me of my relationship or it reminded me of my boyfriend in some other, equally excruciating, way.
Anyway, I'm beginning to think that your life is your art. For everyone on a smaller scale too, not just celebrities, the way you live your life is a representation of what your motivations are, what your personality is, how you were raised, what you believe in. So it doesn't matter if you're having a shitty day and everything's been going wrong for you, if you react to that by being an asshole to the barista and then not tipping her, what kind of person does that make you? If you were famous (and everyone nowadays wishes they were), someone would see that and they would know that you are petty, and rude, and your mom never taught you that the world doesn't owe you anything you don't earn, and that means your mom is a whore. But that isn't the truth, is it? Most people are - or I'd like to believe this is the case - semi-/hard working, mostly generous of spirit, and at least somewhat polite. And most people weren't born to street-walkers with tar-blackened pits where their souls should be.
BUT YOU ALL ACT LIKE YOU WERE, SO SHAPE UP.

THE POINT, FINALLY: Be a good person. It's worth it, if only for the self-satisfied peevishness you will be able to inflict on others in good faith. That will be complicated to work out because consciously inflicting anything on others is kind of the mark of a dick (or an Andy Dick), but work it out for yourself how good you want to be. Nobody said you had to be Mother Theresa; nobody WANTS you to be Mother Theresa. Don't be perfect, just be good.

Oh. Yes. Point taken.

Yesterday, Kyle got home from work kind of late (12ish) and I, having been home for hours and hours by that point, was ready to play. I started talking as soon as he walked in the door, and kept it up as he took off his shoes, and his pants, and as he picked up a book, went to the bathroom and shut the door. I stood there, and every once in a while said, "are you listening? Can you hear me?"

If I had taken a second I would have realized that I was being Crazy, but I could not take a second because I was busy begging for attention.

Anyway, I stood there talking excitedly outside the bathroom door until Kyle finally interrupted, "PRIYA. I'M BUSY RIGHT NOW. GO AWAY."

Shut the fuck up while I finally sleep.

Dear young men in the hallway,

People are trying to sleep! Some people have been trying to sleep since 7:45 and you are making it impossible. I have been lying here watching the fan oscillate slowly for a full 2 hours and 15 minutes listening to you and your ilk futz around outside my front door. So stop relaying a fight you had with someone via text message over the phone while simultaneously having a different conversation with someone who is physically with you. Does that make any sense? It doesn't matter. Shut the fuck up already.

Shut the fuck up,
- Priya

Country

I'm happy and relieved to see that the two Spears kids have been "rescued" from Britney, but does a judge-mandated transfer from the fire to the frying pan (for those of you playing at home, the frying pan referred to here is a metaphor for K-Fed's house) necessarily constitute an improvement? I hope it does, 'cause you can say what you want regarding their parents, but Sean Preston and Jayden deserve a life where Cheetos maintain their rightful place as a snack option, not a meal replacement.

So he's not clever...

At least he's smart. I mean, right?

Hey guys, I'm back!

Random, unexpected vestige of high school internet usage: I was reading Mimi's Weblog and she has written something funny. Imagine. I started to smile, and then subconsciously fought the urge so hard that I almost give myself a cheek cramp. Why? Because when I went to high school, I got in trouble for smiling at the computer during class; it made it so clear that I wasn't writing my Ethics paper or whatever. Nobody would smile at Plato's Cave. Nobody! and Nobody shall.

I also got in trouble for smiling at the computer when I was at home, because that meant I was probably online or otherwise screwing around when I was supposed to be applying for college or downloading math problems.

Basically, smiling and computers have been kind of a verboten combination for me. From now on I pledge to laugh in front of the computer, even if I am in public and people can see me and stuff. Because it is Okay to do that!

Maybe It's My Line of Work?

I just got asked out AGAIN! I am teh sex, apparently. That time I was kind of asking for it, though. Oops, I mean - that time I SMILED at the guy during conversation and that was evidently the checkered flag he was looking for. GO GO GO! Men are so full of it.

But so am I...

A Triumphant Re-Return

I need your help deciding something.

Morrissey is coming back to LA for an epic 10 day run this month, a scant 3 months after his last show here. My question to you is this: should I buy tickets? Remember, I just dropped 135 spendies on him in June, but I do love me some Moz - and I'm pretty sure I love him enough to go see a show that I guess will be exactly the same as the last one I saw (I can't imagine that he has a lot of new material). But should I? This would at least be an opportunity to stare at some freaks and get another tour shirt. I say yes. You say...?