It’s a Karmic Matter

I was sharking for a spot at a meter on Cahuenga Blvd today between Hollywood and Sunset (which everyone knows is impossible)…I saw one, whipped a U-turn, and parked.  SUCCESS!

As I was parking, a car pulled up in front of me, put on their 4-way flashers, and the driver – a middle-aged woman with pasty white skin, long greying brown hair, and pink slip on sneakers- got out and walked over to my window in a frantic, twitchy hustle.

“This is my spot”, she said to me as I rolled my window down, foolishly thinking she wanted directions or something.

“But…I’m parked here.” I said back, confused and instantly annoyed.

“I was turning around to park here, I saw it first, and you parked here while I was doing that.  Please, it’s the holiday season and I don’t have much time and I need to go into that store to get christmas gifts.”

Interesting.  I too was short on time and going into that same store to get gifts.  And my car was the one already in the spot.

“Yeah. OK…That’s exactly what I’m doing…why do I have to move MY car? I’m already parked here.  Are you actually asking me to move my car and look for another spot because you want to park here?”

Most other people would have heard the incredulous tone in my voice and how insanely self-centered it was to request that a total stranger do something for their benefit, and backed down.  Hell, most people wouldn’t have even gotten out of their car and knocked on my window to make such a request.  But this nut-job had the balls to reply “Yes. Yes that’s exactly what I’m asking you to do.”

She then used the phrase “It’s a Karmic matter” and gave me those ‘namaste’ I-beg-of-you hands, and I had no choice.   I gave her an angry I’m-from-NJ-and-could-kill-you look, told her she was “incredibly unreasonable”, and lost the battle.

Did I mention that she was driving the same exact car as me but in black?  My friend later pointed out that this was obviously the work of my evil twin cabrio driver who drove around doing dark deeds while I drove my angelic white version, which made me feel better about this encounter.

I moved my car a block away  where there was a whole row of empty expired meters (WHICH SHE COULD HAVE DONE JUST AS EASILY PS) and walked the block into Urban Outfitters.  You will never believe who was in there…Ms. Karma herself!  Not only were we driving the same car and trying to park in the same spot, we were now shopping in the same store.  We were shopping the same RACKS of the same store and looking for the same tops in different shades.   We even went to try on our clothes at the same dressing room at the same time, where she OH SO GRACIOUSLY said hello like we were old friends and then offered to let me go ahead of her (what a fucking Miss Manners she turned out to be!).

She was the ugly frumpy fruit fly buzzing around my potential party outfits, and I the dirty-eyed thorn in her side while she tried to enjoy her christmas shopping.

Truth is, if you use any argument against me including Karma, Law of Attraction, Everything Happens for a Reason or Everyone gets Theirs…I fold. I’m not overly superstitious or religious, but I do believe in powers greater than us and that each of our actions affect the next.  I believe that life is hard enough as it is, and anything I can do to avoid wrath from these powers is the right move.  The argument that “it’s a karmic matter” might not have gotten someone else to move their car from the prime store-front meter that I had for a brief two minutes, but it hit my guilt chord enough to get me to drive on.

Best part of this?  While walking back to my car hours later and re-telling this story to friends, I looked down while waiting at a crosswalk and found a $10 bill at my feet.  No joke! I guess it IS a Karmic matter, biatch!

Quick, Annoyed, Thought.

Networking and meeting new people is becoming increasingly more difficult for me.  I’m finding that, lately, men think I want a date and women feel threatened to reveal their “success secrets”, which pretty much leaves me surrounded by college friends and gay men.

Not that there’s anything wrong with being surrounded by either, really.

But how am I supposed to open that damn circle and get anywhere without being misinterpreted as a flirt or a nosy bitch?

If Sex and the City and Mad Men had a cultural female-perspective love child, that’d be my viewpoint.  Liberated, and therefore, trapped. Or something. Ugh.

Don’t cha think?

Today I saw a brunette girl in the elevator at Target wearing a pink t-shirt with the phrase “Blondes Have More Fun” written across her chest in fuchsia bubble letters.  It seemed like a mean joke on her played by the universe for obvious reasons, and because I’d bet money the poor thing wasn’t wearing it ironically.

Today someone told me that I reminded him of his friend, Alanis Morissette, when I was dressed like Elvis on Halloween.  This seemed like a cruel joke played on me by the universe because I look nothing my brunette wig-wearing Halloween outfit during the rest of the year, and because for a brief time during my ‘tween years I believed I was both Alanis Morissette and Elvis.

Ironically, when I Googled Alanis to double check the spelling of her name, this blonde picture of the normally brunette singer came up.  Maybe Blondes really do have more fun, even when dressed as brunettes.

Yesterday, my inner 12 yr old couldn’t believe her luck

Let’s rewind to ages 11-13. When I was young, I had a wall literally wallpapered with pages I ripped out of Bop and TeenBeat magazines.  Literally a ceiling to floor, shiny with scotch tape, wallpapered wall in my basement with pictures of Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Nick Carter from the Backstreet Boys, Devon Sawa, Hanson, Andrew Keegan, Heath Ledger, JC Chasez from Nsync and -my ultimate fav- Ethan Embry.

I believed that Ethan Embry was on a special level and that, based entirely on the character he played in ONE movie that I watched obsessively, we would get along perfectly and fall in love if we were ever in the same place.  I could recite all of his lines (and still can) in Empire Records.   I loved that his character played bass because I did too, further proving our obvious chemistry.  My new year’s resolution in 7th grade brought me to answer the phone “Empire Records, Open till Midnight, this is Mark!” just like Ethan did for about 6 months straight before I decided it was just too confusing for the person on the other end of the phone.

On a less severe level was my boy band love.  I, along with a group of friends, once chased Nsync’s van down at a 97.5 PST concert and, even though they were gone in their dressing rooms, convinced the driver to let us take a picture inside the empty white conversion van simply because it was where they had once sat.  Each of us has “our” assigned man who we planned to marry, mine being JC.  I made photo albums with pictures, ticket stubs, magazine clippings and choice lyrics that I had typed out to commemorate every major concert event where I swore they looked at me directly when I yelled their names.

Now, fast forward to age 24.  I’ve lived in LA for about two years, which brings my star-struck level practically down to zero.  There are certain celebrities that I would go stupid over, sure, but for the most part I am at the point where I see, sometimes acknowledge or recognize, and move the fuck on.  Yesterday, though brought a new level of stupid to this LA-centric charade: the former heart-throb crush encounter.

I started my shift at Cap City pre-dodgers game, and it was really quiet.  There was one guy in my section sitting alone, and we talked a bit and he ordered a beer and said he was waiting for a friend to come before ordering food.  Another guy in my section was having drinks with his uninterested wife, saying she was going to leave soon and his buddies were going to join him for his birthday.  Overall, normal…until.

I left the lone beer drinker to himself until I noticed his friend had arrived.  His friend, it took me about .000001 seconds to realize, was Ethan Embry.  I’m not sure if I showed it, but at the moment that my eyes met his big hazel peepers, my stomach jumped and my jaw dropped open.    …..wait….really?? THIS is your friend, lonely beer drinker guy??? You failed to mention that your fellow dodger’s fan friend that you were waiting to order wings with was the same guy that my 12 yr old self swore caused the sun to rise and set each day.

(This is probably a good time to insert the fact that I saw Ethan once about a year ago in a movie theater. The Rachel Getting Married screening was 21+, which means they serve drinks, and he has obviously had a few.  More than once he’d turn around to strangers, ask their names, and what they thought of the scene that we just saw.  Needless to say this was crushing to my 12 yr old self’s fantasy of him, so I found it pretty incredible  that I got to ‘redeem’ this impression by now waiting on a very sober and polite version of my once future husband.)

I like to think of myself as a pretty cool person in social settings, but I am totally certain that I went to get his diet coke with bright red ears.  I babbled something to a coworker about how incredibly strange my luck was, and only THEN did I realize that not only was I getting the encounter I once dreamed of, I was about to spend the next 9 innings charming the shit out of him.  Oh man, I thought, here’s my chance to ACTUALLY fulfill my 12 yr old dream scenarios of talking about music and falling in love, regardless of my current interests.

And then, I noticed his wedding ring.  Huge bummer.  This bummer lead to an even bigger bummer when his beautiful blonde wife showed up half way through the game, but I got a good 4 innings of shoulder touching and smile exchanging in to placate all my 12 yr old hopes and dreams.

Amazing, you say?  What are the chances that you’d find yourself waiting on your middle school crush, you say?

Well, apparently they were good yesterday, because when I went back to the birthday boy table to see what his friends wanted, I found myself meeting another set of unusually bright eyes, this time belonging to JC Chasez.  Really, unassuming, business causal wearing birthday boy??  This ‘it’s-gonna-be-me-bye-bye-bye-i-drive-myself-crazy’ singing guy is in YOUR posse?

While I went to get his beer and a menu, I assessed the highly improbable situation I was finding myself in.

1. I can check two things off my middle school to-do list.

2.Its funny that a normally cool thing, like conversing with a former boyband singer you used to love, can get trumped by an even bigger cool thing, like conversing with Ethan Embry, your former obsession.  Suddenly, JC seemed kinda blase.

3. If I knew then that I’d move to LA and it would become seriously commonplace to be encountering celebrities at all, I am certain my suburban self wouldn’t have believed my own future.

I went through the remainder of my night hearing my pre-pubecent voice screaming “OH MY GOD ITS ACTUALLY HAPPPEEENNNIIINNGGG!!” in my head.  Regardless of this and all of the backstory I just gave, I managed to complete all transactions without mentioning the levels of hysteria I once reached from reading their likes and dislikes in Bop magazine and getting the newest fold-out poster each month.

Although it may have been flattering and possibly well received, I thought such news would weird out a married (although seemingly kinda unhappily) and sober Ethan enough to never come back (because a little part of me wants him to become my regular customer) and because, by the end of my exchange with JC, I was unimpressed enough with his current self to forget I ever cared about his silly pop songs.

While working, I was relaying all of this in real time to my best friend from grade school via text.  Not surprisingly she flipped her lid, which I totally expected.

I was pleased to see that someone else understood that something so unimportant now could still be important, simply because it once was.  That although one was a chain smoker and one was kinda impressed with himself, it was still exciting only because history dictated it to be so.  Sometimes some things never change.

Maybe it’s the rain

It’s officially day #2 of consecutive rain in LA.  For some east-coasters like me its a welcome or even indifferent change of pace, but for most Angelinos it’s an apocalyptic sign, precipitating a huge increase in car-break slamming, excuse making (I actually heard someone say “I couldn’t go to my audition because it was just so cloudy), and all around hysteria and fear.

It’s silly to have a fear of things that shouldn’t be feared.  But I guess that’s all relative.

I’m pretty certain I have a fear of success.  For someone who is basically self-employed and definitely self-promoted, this weaves a real web of stupid for my career goals and hard work, not to mention does a number on my love life.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who does this wishy washy shit to their egos.  In fact, what I am sure about is that this is learned behavior (thanks mom and dad).   I mean, it’s probably good to feel hesitant towards risks, or we’d all be throwing ourselves into things we’re unqualified for or bankruptcy or something.  I’m also trying to be sure that I can probably learn my way out of this habit…maybe…ahhhhh there I go again. Probably.  Trying.  Maybe. Probably.

Just do already, right?

This came up today, when I got an email confirming a performance date for my newly formed improv group and I had a mini internal panic.  10 months of training, 2 months of shows, rehearsals, feedback and the desire to perform improv which drives the whole thing, and the second it gets ‘real’ I’m – just for a second- considering jumping ship.  Really, Sil?  You pay how many dollars and spend how many hours and exert how much energy on something, to then start to find reasons to back out when its finally Go time?

I mean, I won’t ever actually quit.  I’ll just wonder how people who are “better” or “worse” than me go on without a care in the world.  I’ll do the show and secretly want to cry and then have a silent chuckle with myself when the half-hour slot flies by and I haven’t totally blown it.

I use to do this as a kid.  I used to spend HOURS looking through magazines for costumes and making lists of props and placing pretend phone calls to pretend actors to prepare for the Big Show I was going to put on in my imaginary backyard theater.   But I never, even at age 5, got to the show part.  I really think I was more comfortable prepping than doing.

That’s a really bad quality, the prepping vs. doing.  Unless you are in pre-production somewhere or something.  Which, I guess, is worth making a note of for myself in future career-path terms.

But then I think that of course this is all a process, and the more I succeed the less I will fear.  Or, at least, the less I will pay attention to the fear and more to the goal.

Or…maybe it’s the sad, gray, apocalyptic rain.

HALLELUJAH!

It’s fair to say that the uncommon is common in Los Angeles.  Here, you watch a movie about a Biggie Smalls at the Grove and then drive right through the intersection where he was shot 3 blocks south of the theater.  Or see Jack Nicholson at any given Lakers game in person, while the rest of the country can only hope to see either spectacle separately.  Or go to hear your favorite local indie band only to find that your favorite big-time actor is a fan, too.

Or, you can pray for some help and then be saved by Jesus on Cahuenga Blvd, right outside the Urban Outfitters.  Whatevs.

I work as a waitress in a busy part of Hollywood.  This means that anytime I leave work, I leave with at least $100 in cash in my pocket.  While I usually take the time to take my apron off and change my shirt so that I’m not a bull’s eye for muggars, on Wednesday I was fed up with being at work and shot out the door as soon as I could.

I only made it 3 storefronts down when I heard a deep voice say “Hey Beautiful.  How was work?”

A young man in a large hooded jacket who was leaning against the building began to walk next to me.  I had walked out still wearing my apron filled with cash, and this guy noticed.   Awesome.

“Fine.” I said and crossed the street southbound.  I hoped that he was just hitting on me, must have gotten the hint, and moved on.

Wrong. He started walking faster, and changed course to cross the street and catch up with me.  Then I heard, “Why are you in a rush?  Did you make alot of money tonight, girl?”

Oh fucking great.  I’m about to get mugged 400 ft from my job and 100 ft from my car, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.

I’m regretting ever taking my pepper spray out of my purse. I looked up in hopes of seeing someone, anyone, who might help me or deter this guy’s plan.  Then, I see the most likely of unlikely sights: Jesus is walking directly towards me, and he’s coming really fast.

Wait…what?

The man coming towards me was a 6’5″, very gaunt, sandy-blonde haired man with a full beard, wearing a long flowing tan robe and brown leather sandals.  He even had that hands-turned-out-in-holiness thing going on.

“HEY! I KNOW YOU!” I yell incredulously.  And I did.  Jesus was a daily customer of mine when I worked at Starbucks.  He was a groundskeeper for a rental building and would come in several times a day for iced coffee, each time with a very odd statement or story to tell.  His resemblance to the Prince of Peace was really uncanny, and I remembered when he told us he had started walking around Hollywood at night dressed in robes just to see what people did.  Turns out, and just my luck, he still does.

“Why hello!  I know you too!” He called back, and suddenly I found myself no longer alone with a scary stranger in tow, but instead wrapped in a blanket and proverbial glow of safety.  It may have been the uncommon interaction of waitress and holy one, or it might have been the very common Urban Outfitters display lights, but I’m not one to split hairs.

The hooded man, obviously caught off guard by the apparition of the Christ child, turned on his heels, jaywalked across the street, and thus away from me and my hard earned cash.  I can’t blame him, really, as I imagine it would be hard to take advantage of a stranger with Jesus Christo himself standing right there watching.

While Jesus and I chatted for a minute about his “thrilling night in Crenshaw” where he sat at a gas station and “met two actors from a television program”, I took a mini internal time-out to assess what had just gone down.

Had I seriously just been saved from harm by the kooky iced coffee refill guy from my shit job at Starbucks that I quit over a year ago?  And was he seriously wearing a tan robe and rope sandals standing outside a hipster clothing store between Sunset and Hollywood Blvds like it was the most normal thing in the world?

Could this scenario have happened anywhere else, or was this one of the uncommonly common things that other cities just can’t claim as theirs?

We walked the last 50 ft to my car while we talked, and then we parted ways.  I drove home without the radio, listening to my wheels turn and the rosary beads that are wrapped around my rear-view mirror clink.

I guess that’s what happens when the uncommon meets the common meets the…I still don’t even know what.