The Jigtastic Journal of J. Na Na

It’s a sweet, sexy, balmy day outside, yet here I am indoors subbing for a co-worker who chose a much better week for a summer vacation than myself.

I had a dream that, at its tail end, involved the Pussycat Dolls.  Chilling…

I miss the MTV of yore.  You know, when they played a little grunge, a little hip hop, a little pop, a little something random.  Now, I swear, it’s 24/7 trite hip pop non-stop.  It’s like, look, you don’t have to be unique (since anything truly unique in this world would probably scare the shit out of you), but don’t mime the same sound as has been perpetuated by thousands and thousands of artists before you. 

Someone stole Dorothy’s ruby slippers from the Judy Garland museum.  I just imagine some tubby 1950’s musical queen in some black leotard thief outfit crawling along the hallway ledging.  Then he hits a shard of glass, "Ouch!  Dammit, Mary!"

If you live in SF, you’ve seen it, too: some poor clueless straight girl walking along hand-in-hand with her suspiciously tweezed and exfoliated "boyfriend."

At first glance, one mistakes the pair for a highly friendly, Jack-and-Jill type fag with hag. But the moment the purported fag picks up a fellow homo on his radar, he clings to his chick even closer under the guise of affection, instead of making one of the Three Standard Reactions of Initial Gay Male Interaction:
1. The Smile (interested)
2. The Two Ships Passing in the Night Blank Stare (interested, but chickenshit; sizing up the competition; or neutral acknowledgment of kindred queer)

…and my personal favorite:
3. The Contrived Icy Optic Aversion (haughty, jealous, or just in a hurry)

Nope, our man is off the charts with such closet case shenanigans in public. And what kind of girl living in the San Francisco/Bay Area can’t make a connection between the homo beside her and the homos omnipresent herein?

Answer: The young ones raised in the red states who’ve only recently relocated here. FYI, ladies–a "metrosexual" is a "homosexual".

I feel badly for them, especially since closeted guys are twice as likely to engage in unprotected sex on the sly. I don’t understand why people can’t see what’s right in front of them, whether it’s a boyfriend dressed in colors unfathomable to a real straight man, or the path to happiness we must follow to keep from getting lost in the woods.

I don’t know what force, being, or entity landed me in the field of human resources, but I’m awful thankful that it did. I used to think it was basically this superfluous department full of smiling idiots. And in many cases, it is. But where I work, we’re a necessary, instrumental, and *progressive* differentiation from that norm.

And while HR had nothing to do with what I majored in, it did provide me a model for something I was lacking in: congeniality and compromising skills. If you’re nice to people, you’ll get what you want 80-90% of the time. In contentious situations, validating the other party’s perspective then quickly slipping in your side of the story works as a great tactic toward reaching a personally beneficially resolution.

It’s not sneaky. It’s the science of human interaction. Baboons yell at each other. People shouldn’t.

Case in my point, the deposit refund on my former residence. While my former roommate and I got along well enough, he does have a short fuse. So when I finally emailed him today about my portion of the refund, after hearing back from him twice about the suffrage he endured with cleaning on move-out day (I’d already moved out), I gingerly articulated the fact that our legal troubles with the landlord were basically his fault. And had those troubles not happened during the absolute busiest time of the year for me at work, perhaps I could’ve had more energy at the end of the day to do some pre-cleaning before our lease expired (not that he ever did…).

Let’s see if my bullshit theorizing above produces some results, hm? ‘Cause mama needs a new passport, bendejo.

Wow.

I did not realize things could quite go from bad to worse on a whim like this.

So, I’m preppin’ my bidness for work this morning and am looking for my passport since I’ll need to go to the bank today, and it is my sole, I repeat, sole source of official, valid, fo’ real y’all identification. Piz-eriod.

And while my room isn’t in the best shape organization-wise, it’s not the depraved 9/11 site my former bedroom evinced. But it wasn’t on the:
*makeshift hamper/night table
*old school “phone desk”
*ground

…which are its usual haunts, so I began to panic and ripped my room apart on a reconnaissance mission to recover it. And all to no fucking avail.

No passport = no clubbing for yet anOTHER weekend. Not to mention I’ll have to perform oral sex on the bank teller and his/her immediate supervisor for authorized approval just to get them to deposit my pay check without an ID.

In better news, I found a rebel tab of Vivarin at the bottom of my work desk drawer this morning, and popped that puppy like a pilla E. Whoo, wigga!

scene from Disney’s "Sleeping Beauty"…

setting: The cottage in the woods where the three good fairies are secretly raising the cursed Princess Aurora as their "niece", Brier Rose. Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather are busily whisking about the wood cabin in preparation for Briar Rose’s surprise birthday party. Flora (the red fairy) has made a dress, and her playful rival Merryweather (the blue fairy) poses as the dummy so she can take in the measurements.

Merryweather: (gathering up the fabric) "It looks awful."
Flora: "That’s because it’s on you, dear."

I want my money problems to go away. Thankfully, it’s just a matter of time and not a chronic issue, but that’s small consolation. I didn’t put myself in this place through reckless spending, but rather slipped into it through a comedy of errors, good intentions acted out with bad results, and my own half-assed efforts to avoid slipping deeper when I should have kicked myself in the ass on up outta there.

That’s right–I’m using pretty cliches and truck driver conscientiousness to mask over the dirty details of my former apartment rent debacle and attempt to find reason and meaning from it.

I *work* the victim role.

And all I can come up with is, while in college it was my own youthful stupidity and allowance-less childhood that contributed to my obscene credit card spending, this time I had to hit rock bottom to realize how good I have it and how much better I could be doing. No, I’m not going to start donating half my income to the HRC heretofore, but this is a lesson in responsibility for fuck sure. Fucking sucks, too. Did I mention that?

(after explaining some banging on the walls I heard one night after inadvertently playing my stereo too loudly to my BFF and former occupant of my room, Allen)

Allen: "Was it from the people downstairs?  Yeah, they’re not havin’ that.  You know that song ‘Taka Naka *click* Na’?  Well anyway, it’s all in Zulu.  And you know I like to get my groove on, girl…"

When I was a kid, I used to love it when it rained.  Rain distracts people from their normal routine, including the ‘phobes.  It also moved P.E. from outdoors to in.

But this past week, the rain (or threat thereof) really shat on my parade.  I had a poor man’s vacation, mostly photographing (disposable Kodak) some of my favorite sites in the City: The End Up, the Virgin Megastore, the former site of Universe…

Touching, but it would have been better had it been sunnier out.

My only consolation was my new friend cable television, with the E! True Hollywood Story of "Blossom" last night being the veritable cherry on top. 

Say what you will about them, leather queens have got to be the tidiest people in all of Christendom. I was walking through the Castro (naturally) the other day when an apartment building on the corner bearing a blazing new coat of blue paint and thumbing that tell-tale red, white, black, and blue flag caught my eye. A peak inside brought a tear to my eye, as it appeared IKEA had helicopter-ed in two of its best floor room show model dining room- and living room sets. Pristine. Immaculate. Pissed me off that it wasn’t mine.

And can I just say that it concerns me that AMC–that’s the American Movies Classics station for the uninitiated–regularly shows "Reality Bites"? No. My grandmother watches AMC when she comes to visit it, like, non-stop, and it shows shit like "White Christmas."

So, anyway, yeah, my vacation is going fabulously…

Me: "I’ll be on vacation next week."
Co-worker: "OH, really! Where are you going?"
Me: "To sleep."

No, not permanently. But good and plenty.

Yes, catching up on sleep, sort of smoothing down those eyebags back into baby soft pearls of skin, will take priority during my vacation next week. I also plan to not work. And unpack my boxes and arrange my room, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

I guess it’s for the best that I can’t afford to dash off to some chi chi locale. The last time I actually "went somewhere" was to a wedding reception up north, somewhere in not-San Francisco. All I can remember is there were lots and lots of trees and we stayed in a hotel. And Ms. Sunblock USA here, toting her twin friends Vivarin and walkman, can’t take two steps out the house without absolutely each and every amenity necessary to keep me at ground level and prevent an emotional supernova from occurring.

So you can imagine what happened when, ’round midnight at the hotel, I realized I hadn’t brought the Brita filter, and there wasn’t a 7-11 in sight. Of course I don’t drink tap water, so I had to trek through "The Shining" hotel in search of a vending machine, praying that it dispensed some sort of fruit drink or tea beverage. I don’t recall the specific details, but there was some frantic fumbling for change in a darkened hotel suite (the others were asleep, so I couldn’t turn on the lights), the aforementioned venture through ’70s carpeted hotel hallways, and the cherry on top: a card key that didn’t work when I tried to get back into the room, forcing me to walk blindly back to the front desk (I didn’t have my contacts in. Ambiance, you know.) to ask the clerk for assistance.

I don’t know why the smallest things push me over the edge. I mean, I didn’t have a meltdown in this case, but even something like not having filtered water readily available to me is akin to prison. So you can imagine what would happened if I, say, went on holiday to Ibiza for a week. And forgot my favorite hair clip or something. Whoo, dolly, that wouldn’t be pretty. *chills*

Like many kids, I have a real gripe about the way my parents raised me. They weren’t terrible, but they weren’t great either. In fact, they weren’t even all that good. And while I turned out a pretty good person all in all, there are still some scars leftover from my childhood and no small amount of resentment.

They’re called your formative years because they form the basis of the rest of your life. Everything that happens to you when you’re a child sets the stage, tone, and standard for the proportionately larger part of your life as an adult. And you have very little power over anything that happens to you when you’re a kid. And you can’t change the past.

This pretty much means the parents take the blame for what are perhaps our severest grievances in life. Not entirely fair for them, but then again, you never asked to be born.

If you’re going to have a child, try to fully realize that you’re bringing a new life into this world, not producing an accessory to your own. There isn’t a guidebook for parenting, but you have your own full life to draw upon as a reference when raising a child. Make sure you have lived it as successfully as possible before you decide to bring a new one into this world.

Have you ever watched B-list late night talk show host Tavis Smiley?  Probably not, but tune in sometime.  Dude’s lightning speed elocution makes me wonder if a brotha doesn’t hit the crack pipe one time afore going on-air.

I hope that everyone realizes that a hundred years from now–hopefully less–modern society will look back on the cell phone like it was the old-fashioned bicycle of its day; you know, the ones with the big-ass wheel in front and the two teeny ones in the rear.  Not so much a revolution in communication as a stepping stone in improving it.  For some reason, people of today value the quantity of what’s said over the quality.

My advice?

Button up.  Speak up when you’re moved to, not when you want to.  Or when there’s imminent danger.  Then you can howl away.  *tinkle*