Tag Archives: Haters

Day Fifteen

This one’s gonna be a quickie for two reasons:

1) Not much happened today. I went grocery shopping and ate minestrone. Kristyn went to work and ate veggie sausage. Good day in that it was, on a whole, unremarkable and therefore nondramatic which is how he likes it. “This is how he likes it. This is how he wears it.”

2) We are in bed and about to pass out. Kristyn, I think, has already gone to the land of nod without a bitch. She passed out in the car on the way home. (I picked her up from work.)

Okay that’s it. G’nite!

Here I am posing with a gorgeous photo of Betty White from the calendar Christine gave us. Kristyn said I look like a chola and she isn’t wrong. Hey if there is a place to look like a chola, right here is it as we are like two seconds from Echo Park. Just call me Giggles.

And here is Kristyn already willing herself back to sleep. She has to go to her internship in the morning and has been sleepy for a while now as it is.

Okay, for serious…goodnight!

Day Fourteen

Well, I didn’t get to see Billy Idol OR Tommy Lee. I DID get to take red carpet photos though, mostly of the cast of Cirque Berserk. The biggest celebs that I got to shoot were Danny Masterson and Bijou Phillips. The show itself was really great. I’m going to write the review and link it tomorrow. For now, I’m beat. Here I am taking a picture of myself in front of the red carpet like a nerd. I wasn’t the only press person doing this thankfully haha.

Kristyn, as it turns out, had a much worse day than I did because she had a dog poop on her at work. She actually changed her clothes (she keeps a spare in her locker) and washed them in a washer/dryer. She changed back into them and like an hour later another dog peed all down the front of her. She actually had to change AGAIN and rewash and redry her scrubs again. If you recall we just did laundry on Monday haha.

Anyway, she took a quick shower the minute we got in. Kristyn wins for bad day and I win the pouter of the year award considering I bitched about my day but got to take red carpet pictures of Danny Masterson while Kristyn was repeatedly getting voided on. I’m an idiot (and a jerk).

Moldy Avocado

I have an avocado in my lazy susan that is just sitting there. It was purchased before Christmas. At the time it wasn’t quite ripe enough. I bought it anyway because I LOVE avocados and can eat them for breakfast, lunch and dinner (and DO). It came in a pack of four and I kept opening them hoping that NOW they’d be ripe enough but sadly each one was worse than the last. This last avocado has been sitting there waiting to reach it’s peak but somewhere between Christmas, New Year’s and now, it has gone bad. And still it sits there because I willfully ignore it, sad for a missed opportunity and loathe to make the decision to put it out of it’s misery.

The avocado is an apt metaphor for my life right now. I just got the “thanks but no thanks” letter I’ve been dreading about a job I wanted. I can’t help but feel like the longer I sit on a shelf gathering mold and dust, the less valuable I am. It feels like my expiration date on this particular shelf has long gone by. I really can’t take anymore rejection. Right now, right in this second, I just want to go home.

The funny thing about LA is though that in an hour, I am going to be shooting photos of Billy Idol and Tommy Lee on the red carpet for the opening of Cirque Berserk at the Staples Center. Highs and lows up in this bitch and while excitement is great, I can’t seem to get anybody but the state of California to cross my palm with a dollar bill. It’s. Really. Seriously. Getting. Old.

Maybe I’ll take my 365 Face Project with the red carpet behind me. That might perk me up.

* Also no judging on the Halloween placemats I’ve put down for the cats. I totally forgot to switch them out and never really notice them. I’m usually a lot more picky about these things but can’t seem to muster the strength to be.

Day Thirteen

Here we are! We took a break from Harry Potter Lego to take these pictures. The outtakes are hilarious but they involve my lazy eyes and double chin so we shan’t speaketh of them anymore!

Without any further ado, I give you “The Girls”!*:

* We are always referred to as “the girls” by people and it makes us chuckle and therefore we refer to ourselves as “the girls”. We usually high five whenever anyone calls us that for the first time too.

Day Twelve

We went to the Laundromat today, an warshed our cat-hair-covered clothes. We also went to a “NY Style” Pizzaria and had vegan slices. Good but mushy and not the best I’ve had but points for trying with the vegan cheese! When we got home, we put the clothes away, cleaned up after the tree and cats and are now chilling. There will be nachos. Here we are, toiling at the laundromat:

AND look at Kristyn’s sweatshirt!!! Who do you spy?!

Hey Loser!

Dear Loser,

If your day consists of trying to mess up someone else’s day based on something that you read here…Get a life. Better yet, why don’t you try to get ahead the old fashioned elbow-grease way rather than the step-on-someone’s-neck way? People are beginning to notice that you’re all jokes and get out of jail free cards. I know this is going to seem like a foreign concept, but there are actually some people that simply work hard if they want things! Sure it’s not as quick as say, manipulating situations to your advantage or sullying other people’s names but at least there’s honor in it. Also, when you’re messing with her, you don’t know who you’re messing with because she is a brick wall. Smart, ACTUALLY funny and a great person. The real deal, the whole package. And you’re just a joke.

Thanks!
Buberella

P.S. For everyone else, just know that everything is fine, sometimes you just have to deal with a gnat.

Only me.

I got a $68 parking ticket while leaving the Welfare office. Because I didn’t have the $5 for their PAID parking lot. Swift little business they’re running, do you see what I mean? LA itself is a business. It gets exhausting. The meter maid had the nerve to pull up and yell at me to move my car AS I was sitting in it reading my ticket that I’d only JUST gotten. I said, “Yeah thanks I got the memo. I only just came back from the welfare office. This is like a quarter of what I’ll make for the month. Have a nice day.” I know the meter reader is just doing his job but damn.

Also, and this is a perfect example of your tax dollars at work. The REASON welfare is putting me through the ringer is because I told THE TRUTH on my forms and said I was receiving help from Kristyn. They actually said, in a letter to me, that I was being cut off of aid BECAUSE MY BILLS ARE LARGER THAN WHAT THEY ARE GIVING ME. Naturally there is a “good reason” that is supposed to make that sentence make sense. *sigh*

I sure hope you guys aren’t judging me because I am putting myself way out there for you. I want you to see what this is really like. LA is a beautiful and tough place to live. I am so inspired here but goddamn these weird rules. You never know you’re crossing a line until it’s crossed. EVERYTHING has a learning curve and I am sure all places are (so don’t get all “correcty” on me). I’m making up words now. Okay gotta go hop in the shower to make it to my SECOND welfare appointment of the day. My back is killing me, blerg.

I’m okay…

Just so you guys know. I apologize for getting so heated earlier, I just can’t stand this constant up and down. I wish we had some security. It’s like as soon as things start to seem up, we’re slapped by something else that comes in the form of a big fat “NO”. This week I’d gotten the foodstamps and GR and then that Desperate Housewives thing came my way (more on that later I swear). Kristyn made decent money in her paycheck and then got paid for writing and then got a little extra for Christmas from work. I got a bunch of job interviews. We got to pay off some bills that we’d been worrying about. We were finally feeling like we were getting back on our feet so we did some laundry (a big deal for us), we grocery shopped, we even went out for potato tacos at this cheap place around the corner (something we never do). And Kristyn FINALLY was able to get a haircut. It’s been almost a year. It seemed like we had some breathing room to enjoy ourselves and maybe a little bit of financial security. And then a big chunk of it is just ripped right out from underneath us. We are going to lose $178 from each month AND the government wants to take the GR money they paid me away too. It’s just too much and maybe not worth the hassle. I feel like saying, “You know what? Just take the money. You win.” Just walk away free and clear. Go home. Shiver in the cold weather. Hug my Grandmas. Start over. IDK. We’ll be okay no matter what happens because we have plans here and we have plans there but we didn’t want to have to go out like this. All is not lost here yet but I might be at the end of my rope with my tolerance of how much more disappointment I can stand out here. But then I think of everything it would take to undo this life and I get angry and forward-moving again. BUT how can we stay here if our families feel responsible for us? We can’t. There’s no way to do this where we feel good about what we are doing. There just are no easy answers. Whatever. I have more writing to do for some other projects. I just wanted to take a second to whine. Maybe I should have a meal. It is 11:34pm and my last meal was at noon. Oh we HAVE meals I am just actually too lazy/busy to make one happen. G’nite fools.

Wait before I go, here are some pictures of yesterday.  My interview yesterday was with a company on the Sony Lot (old MGM).  I took this picture from the parking garage.  It was supposed to be of that building in the distance because it has a huge red and green light up Christmas tree on it but you can’t see it.  Those are production trailers in the foreground and Culver City in the background. 

This picture is of the Hipster Snowman that was waiting for us outside of the Trader Joe’s in our neighborhood.  They are serious with this haha.

Here is some weird gel called “Snott Gorila Gel”.  When you open it, it looks like an electric-colored jar of Gorilla Snot.  Amaze. And for the low low price of $2.49. (Yes we bought a jar for Kristyn’s hairs.)

On my way home from the interview I was FASCINATED by how much the back of this car looks like a smiley face.  When things are going good I see smiley faces in everything.  Kristyn used to laugh at me when we lived in NJ because there was a section of street lights that formed a smiley face on the horizon from a certain spot in our town.  I always pointed it out because it was so cute to me. 

And this flier was in Rudy’s, the haircutting place Kristyn went to.  This “Bearracuda” NYE party is basically in our neighborhood.  It’s being held at the same place that I went to see He’s My Brother, She’s My Sister.  JD Samson of Le Tigre and Men DJ’d there last night too.  See THIS is why we love LA!  There’s no Bearracuda NYE party in Kearny!!!

Gary: Landlord of the Flies

Okay, I just found a blog that actually makes my sweetheart of a landlady look like a tall drink of water. I was reading Hyperbole and a Half (which you should only read if you like smiling and laughing at clever things) when I found this gem of a blog on her sidebar. It is called Gary: Landlord of the Flies and/or Stranger than Eviction.

In this Tumblr blog, Gabe outlines his MONTH living in a sublet in Chicago and all the things his drunken landlord/housemate puts him through. There are trips to the hospital, a felony case, police officers, harrassing emails and phone calls, emoticons, a series of court cases and even Dr. Phil gets involved. It’s incredible. I think it’s true because I haven’t found anything online to dispute the fact and the author (Gabe) has brought the landlord (Gary) to court so it is apparently publicly recorded but I have somewhere to be and don’t feel like verifying that. (Also I have a case of the sniffles due to a really sweet attempt by Kristyn to gussy my morning coffee up with some Soy Pumpkin Nog. Neither of us ever seem to remember the correlation between my ingestion of Soy Pumpkin Nog and the allergy attack that follows UNTIL I’m in the throes of said attack. And it’s not like she did it without asking.  She offered and I accepted.  Stupid, stupid, stupid.)

My favorite part of these entries are the names that Gary calls Gabe, namely that the word “squirrely” comes into play so often. In reality, I have something of a “Gary” in my own life (not my landlord) which makes this all the more hilarious. If you happen to be the “Gary” in my life that is reading this, THIS is what you sound like. Remember Gary. Keep him in your head as a reference. Pleeeeease.

Here are some kind notes that Gary leaves for Gabe in the (MONTH!) time that he lives there:

Unsanitary Living Conditions

For the past few days we have been up to our eyballs in bullshit (literally and figuratively). As some of you know, the plumbing in our apartment is crap and has been since the minute we got here. Always plumbers in and out of this place probably more than ten times and we’ve only been here for a year and two months. Do the math, that’s a LOT. What’s going on is that sewage (as in human waste) is backing up into our bath tub. I’ll just let you settle on that for a minute. Yes I have pictures. No I won’t post them here because I am not abusive.

The long and the short of what happened yesterday is that sewage keeps coming up in our tub and our landlady keeps blaming it on us, saying that we are causing the damage. Recently she said she was going to go after us for all the money she’s “lost because of us”. (Mind you every plumber who’s come through here has told us that the pipes are made of clay, are cracked and old and have roots growing into them. There will keep being backups until she actually fixes the system rather than just doing a patch job and snaking it out).

So when it happened again mid-last week and then all day Monday and yesterday, we finally wisened up and called the city. Kristyn’s parents have been urging us to stand up for ourselves forever but we naively “didn’t want to make trouble for her”. Stupid. We finally called the city and they cited her for a number of things (some that we didn’t even point out and turned out were health violations). So she came here ranting and screaming and telling us karma boomerangs right back at you. Yeah blahblahblah lady, had you fixed this the first time, we wouldn’t have been harrassed by this and you screaming at us for the past year. Seriously every time this happens she screams at us to the point that we are scared to even call her. And she blows off any other repairs but this because in LA (and probably everywhere) a non-working bathroom renders the apartment uninhabitable. So she sends someone out but makes sure to make our life miserable over it going so far as to tell us we can’t use toilet paper in the toilet.

The bottom line is that we are within our rights to call the city and if she had nothing to worry about then why is she yelling at us? We fell on SERIOUS hard times last month for the first time since we’ve been here and went to her for advice. We were honest with her and wanted to sit down and talk it over with her to find out what happens next and what our options are. Instead she served us with an eviction notice and then said, “Coleen this is a business. The people on the corner are moving out this month and I have to get my money from somewhere so I am going to go after you.” So, let me get this straight. We’ve always paid our rent, kept the unit clean, never had a party, don’t make any noise, don’t complain about our neightbors, never enforce that you fix things that are broken and put up with your broken plumbing month after month without reporting you to the city but we come to you with a problem and the FIRST thing you do is try to take us to court? And it gets funny because yesterday she had the balls to say to me, “Coleen we are supposed to work together. You called the city on me and that was unneccessary. I fix it when you call me. Karma will come back to you.” I said, “Well we weren’t talking karma and working together when you went for the throat last month. Then it was a business. You had no problem going after us in court or putting us on the street.” And she said, “Well I am going through financial difficulties…” and I just cut her off right there. I said, “Listen, I’ve done enough crying for your financial difficulties which is why we tried to handle this between me and you. From where I stand you’re not doing so bad if you own these five apartments, your own house, a restaurant and a surf resort while I’m struggling to pay bills and am on welfare.” Guess who didn’t have a “poor me” retort then?

So yeah IDK. I don’t want her money, I don’t even want to look at her. She told us we “just want to stay here so that we can make trouble” for her. She knows we would LOVE to move. We are DYING to move. We just can’t afford it. And so she is just going to have to keep this place clean, keep the plumbing working, accept our rent and we will give her proper notice when we do go. I’m not going through her anymore. She tried to tell me that the tree roots are the city’s problem. I said, “So then how about this? You argue with the city about YOUR property and as the tenant I will keep paying my rent like I always do. I cannot see how that 50 year old tree is a problem that falls on our shoulders at ALL.”

I seriously hate renting. I am not built for urban dwelling. I have never wanted to own a house before in my LIFE. I don’t like the idea of “settling” anywhere and for some reason I have it in my head that once you buy a house you have to live in that house forever. And I’ve never found a place to live where I can say that I never want to live anywhere else, not even here.

I wrote more but I don’t want to add it here so I will put it in another post. I don’t want that information and this information touching. This post was for “ANGER!” while the other one is for “Dreaming…ahh…” Haha.