Usually, I’m not one to write posts titled “What I’m Grateful For.” It reminds me of some boring music award acceptance speech: “thanks to my moms, my fans…and Jesus a.k.a The Big Jeezy.”
Being grateful sure feels crappy, as well. Charities are constantly forcing us, between Nov. 1 – Dec. 31, to feel like shit. The other day, I was at the Staten Island Ferry when the Salvation Army decided to send over a 5-piece brass ensemble (playing grand Christmas songs) to help the chick ringing the bell in front of the donation pail.
But no one donated. Probably partly because the bell ringer had this disgusted expression on her face, like, “we’re entertaining the plebeian masses, who won’t even spare a quarter…H-E-L-L for everyone!”
So when @CTK1 asked if I would do a Tweetsgiving post, I was wary. Am I capable of writing on this topic without sounding too much like an ungrateful asshole?
***
Today, I cleaned up a puddle that my sister’s dog left on the kitchen floor (a 5-lb dog, he excretes half his body mass twice a day. Oh, did I mention he is a walking sulfur lab?). He’s sitting on my lap right now. My legs are falling asleep.
But damn if he’s not the cutest thing ever.
And damn, I have legs to fall asleep.
Plus, a kitchen. In a warm, snuggly apartment.
I have a gazillion deadlines: a follow-up article to “He Wants to Wait“…a screenplay that a production company has been waiting a year for…and I have zero word count for NaNoWriMo.
But damn, I actually have people interested in my work.
And a computer with Internet that helps me get my shit done.
McSpanky has been working a lot of hours this week. And he made me watch “2012,” which is quite possibly one of the worst Armageddon-themed movies of all time.
But he’s getting doughnuts and eggnog right now. And when he comes back, he’s cooking a Thanksgiving feast.
I actually have the faculties to be assaulted by bad movies (sight, hearing, taste + decency, etc.)
And, he gave me some sweet sweet loving this morning. And by sweet, I mean he held me down and fucked me so hard I begged and pleaded for him to “stop.”
***
‘Nuff said. My everyday life = gratitude gratitude gratitude.
Being grounded for a month meant that I couldn’t get my drugs, so I was unusually (and painfully) lucid during this time.
FGXB would call me everyday to chat about how much sex he was having with my so-called-friend Gina. My cheeks would be glistening with tears on the other end, but I never once sniffled. I was too proud to hang up on him or show any distress.
However I did start cutting class, because I just couldn’t bear to see the two lovebirds walking around the school hallways. And ok, I preferred sleeping in to showing up for pre-calculus (by the way, I’m the only Asian person post- 200 B.C. who failed pre-calc twice).
snarky, self-aggrandizing side note: when FGXBF started going out with Gina, the “you’re the coolest couple ever!” fan club disappeared. It was like Motley Crue trying to do a reunion tour WITHOUT Tommy Lee -- girls will take their panties elsewhere.
Let’s Do the Time Warp Again
Towards the end of my month-long sentence, FGXBF came up to me. “Some girl invited me to a ‘Rocky Road Horror’ movie party? She said I have to dress up and bring rice.”
“I’ll help you dress up if you bring me to the party,” I offered.
And wouldn’t you know, the party was on same day my grounding expired. So, I was free to jump into Gina’s car and go over to FGXBF’s host family house.
I’m Just a Sweet Transvestite…
“Hi!” FGXBF answered the door dressed in a red sequin dress, with black fishnets and a face caked with 70’s crack whore makeup (his 12-yr-old host sister had used him like a life-size Barbie).
I guffawed. He looked ridiculous and funny.
But next to me, Gina wasn’t laughing. In fact, she was barely giving him eye contact.
…From Trans Sexual…
The party was held in the basement of some girl’s house, and it seemed that all the druggie -metalhead high schoolers from the area were invited.
I knew no one. And, although I had done my best to look gothic, I was still decidedly more Brit-Pop in aesthetic than the rest of the grungy crowd.
Reminder, this is back in the mid-1990’s, so the crowd we’re talking about are tall skinny boys with long ponyatils and the bottom parts of their heads shaved. And girls built like Wagnerian altos with faded Kool-Aid dyed hair and wiggly black eyeliner.
Everyone brought rice. But no one else had bothered dressing up.
Except, of course…
The girls crowded around FGXBF, as the movie started. “Hey, why doesn’t he play Frankenfurter?”
…TRANSYLVANnnnIA!!!
Rice was thrown.
Newspapers were put on top of heads.
And then…
FGXBF started dancing on cue.
To the best-looking goth boy in the room.
And also on cue, Gina stood up and opened her mouth, as if she were going to join in on the merry-making.
Instead, she stared at FGXBF, who was undulating his ass over this goth boy’s crotch.
Her lips started trembling.
And with a choked sob, she ran out of the house.
That’s a MAN, baby!
Our go-to ride forever gone -- FGXBF and I got a ride from some other partygoer.
And wouldn’t you know, my mom agreed to let me use her car that night.
So, we decided to go see a movie. And you know how it goes:
I was videorecording it, but the camera was knocked over (you can hear it within the first 10secs) and then the picture was all weird afterwards.
So, I put the mp3 up with the picture of my iBook desktop wallpaper.
Attempting to pass my kvetch as a semi-intelligent argument…
Asian woman are constantly sexually harassed in America.
White girls, black girls, Latinas…sorry, I love y’all but what Asian women go through is ridiculous.
I mean, even my mom gets harassed. And she’s a slightly frumpy middle-aged woman who walks around in golfing clothes. Although, yes, she has a cute figure and looks really youthful.
What can I say? I’m totaly not feeling Tae, the hero of the story.
There’s nothing technically wrong with him – especially in terms of pure hawtness. When I saw the below pictures, I was like, “homina homina, THIS IS TAE!”
So, the Tae in my story is eminently gorgeous. But, it seems that relying on only looks is insufficient, especially in fiction.
Booooooooring. Bland. Just…bleck
I have this theory: if I’m not madly in love with the hero, then the story is dead.
If I don’t want to throw my panties at him, then why should I put anyone else through the agony of reading about him?
I’m just not in love with Tae. He doesn’t move me. He doesn’t make me daydream about his voice, his smile.
If I’m not regressing back to being a teenage girl, then I gotta throw him away.
*sigh* this writing racket is squeezing my balls. If you know what I mean.
The first month of my relationship with FGXBF is a blur. But I will say this: I had never felt so giddy about a boy before.
By the end of week 1, I gave him a homemade card: I drew a stick figure with crazy long arms, extended. The caption?
“I Love You THIIIIIIIIS Much!”
I had never used that L-word before.
By 3rd period, FGXBF told me, “I love you, too!”
Remember, this is after knowing each other for less than 5 days.
The First Kiss
To be honest, I don’t remember. More due to the copious drugs I was smokin’ rather than FGXBF skills (more on that in later installments).
The First Boom-Shaka-Laka
Maybe 2 weeks into the relationship, FGXBF’s host family’s mini-van dropped him off in front of my house.
When I answered the bell, he was totally blocking off the entire doorway.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked him.
“I knew you’d be wearing close to nothing, and I don’t want my host family knowing we’re going to have sex,” he said.
He knew me so, so well; I had answered the door wearing just a man’s button up shirt. And if THAT outfit on a 16-yr-old girl doesn’t spell out “a-fucking we will go” – then I don’t know what does.
This is all I really remember (again – the drugs)
FGXBF was my 2.5th boyfriend
Just to clarify – I did NOT lose my virginity to FGXBF. That honor went to my 0.5th boyfriend, a Chinese guy who was 1st violin in the school orchestra.
0.5 didn’t want to be official with me – he just wanted to molest me in the music storage room and have sex.
I shudder to think of how this has permanently scarred my fragile little mind.
My 1.5th bf was a Weezer-nerdy drummer who was really into jazz. We met in French class and even the teacher was like, “oh, you guys are gonna get together.”
I couldn’t remember my locker combo, so he even let me share his locker during our 2 months together. But, there was no sex and I soon lost interest.
The breakup was cold as ice.
Lunch-period celebrities…
From day 1, the entire high school was enthralled with the unfolding melodrama of me and the FGXBF. Probably because I was a total freakazoid with hair very similar to Saffron from the now-defunct band Republica:
And FGXBF was a Malboro-smokin’, limp-wrist sashayin’, Nordic anomaly who looked awfully close to a young Leo Di Caprio:
Remember, this is back in 1995 or so, when my suburban high school was mainly populated by non-practicing Jews who listened to Dave Matthews Band. To the student body, me and FGXBF were total drag queens.
Side note: there was also a huge Asian population in my school . They didn’t care about FGXBF. As far as they were concerned, FGXBF was an invisible fragment of white-people’s imagination.
Fortunately, instead of being harassed, we had a fan following.
One girl offer us her Ritalin (for us to snort).
Another constantly wanted to take our picture.
And yet another would just pop out randomly like a Gummi Bear and yell, “You guys are, like, the coolest couple EVER!”
Funny enough, we didn’t really have male fans
Many years later, a guy classmate told me, “Yo, your boyfriend at that time? I just wanted to punch him in the fucking face. He was just so gay.”
Frenemies conspire to steal my man
A cute emo boy is catnip to high school girls.
My boyfriend was hyper-cute and pre-emo.
All the girls wanted him. Especially the theater/music/bad girls.
This pleased me, inordinately. Who doesn’t want to be with a coveted item? Fuck Birkin bags – having a living, breathing object of desire on your arms is far more ego-boosting.
So anyways, I had a fair share of non-Asian female friends.
One of them was a blonde whiner named Gina. She loved The Cure, wore cute bobby pins in her hair, and drove a retro station wagon that instantly made her grunge-cool.
Gina would ask me stuff like, “Do you mind if I take your boyfriend to the movies? Considering you don’t have a car, and he really wants to see [insert some inane flick playing at the local theater].”
And, instead of saying, “back off, bitch!” I said, “sure, thanks!”
By week 3 of me and FGXBF’s relationship, Gina became our go-to ride.
…and then I was grounded
Who knows what I did – I was always getting in parental trouble for cutting school and having a smart-ass mouth. And I was grounded - FOR A WHOLE MONTH. That’s a huge chunk of life for a person whose been alive for only 16 years.
When I told FGXBF that I couldn’t hang out with him and Gina for a month – they were both really sympathetic. For about 3 days.
On day 4, FGXBF comes up to me in school and asks, “Hey…so…do you mind if I start going out with Gina?”
Which I knew meant: I-already-had-sex-with-her-but-I-wanna-cover-my-ass.
Ouch.
Ouch.
Ouch.
Right when I really needed him to endure month-long social isolation, FGXBF, the boy I was planning to marry, dumps me.
For a girl with a car.
What else could I say? “Sure. You can go out with Gina.”
And then he followed with, “Can we still be friends?”
I wasn’t going to let him know that my heart had just been plopped into a blender. And pulverized into a bloody smoothie. “Sure, we can still be friends.”
And yet – something in me refused to give up hope. That once my grounding was finished, something would happen.
Something magical.
Something mythical.
Something that would bring back FGXBF to my bitter, tear-soaked arms…
I’ve twittered about my Finnish gay ex-bf (FGXBF) many times. He travels to NYC often for his job, and always calls me when he’s in town.
My Twitter followers could say he’s a minor re-occuring character in my life. After all, we get into amusing mis-adventures together, usually ending the night with me in a cab back home…and him having sex with a random stranger back in his hotel room.
However, during my teenage years, FGXBF was not merely a minor character – he was a major character. The MAIN character.
Yes – a gay Finnish boy was my first love.
Love At First (Back) Sight
I was 16-years-old, sitting on a bench outside my high school with my younger sister. We were waiting for my mom to pick us up.
My sister had just finished cheerleading practice, and she was doing some of her math homework.
Me, I had safety pins in my ears and pink Manic Panic stripes in my pigtails (don’t hate – I was deep in my punk phase). I stayed late because I was too uncoordinated to drive a car and too stuck-up to take the school bus home.
Anyways, I was staring off into space when I saw a willowy boy walking down the street. He had a slouchy gait, skinny (NOT wigger wide) jeans that were half falling off his ass, and a gray newsboy cap worn backwards. I could only see his back, and yet I just knew.
I turned to my sister, “this is the boy I’m going to fall in love with.”
She probably rolled her eyes. After all, I fell in love with a new boy every month or so.
Instant BF/GF
The next morning, I saw that familiar slouchy gait from the corner of my eye. Walking towards me. He was beautiful. Bleached blonde hair, hazel eyes, and cheekbones that threatened to give you papercuts.
(Turns out, he had just moved host families, and registered to attend my high school on that unilaterally fateful day before).
He was new, alone, trembling. A European in a schmancy East Coast suburb populated by Jews and Asians.
I immediately linked my arms through his. “Let’s be best friends,” I said.
“Ok!” he responded. He had a clipped Nordic accent – cross between German and British.
Less than 10-minutes in a new school, FGXBF had a gf. And for a Euro-phile suburban girl who watched re-reuns of “Are You Being Served” rather than “Beverly Hills 90210″ – FGXBF was the cat’s fucking meow.
Little did I know that such exotic property would be coveted by other girls.
I’m currently writing a series of erotic stories, called “Cherry Girls & Flower Boys.” And it’s been a bitch to try to write, let alone finish, anything.
But two days ago – I finished vol. 1 of the story.
Mutha.
Fuckin.
YEA!
I basically stayed late at my day job cubicle, type type typing away even as the main office lights went into energy saver mode.
Trust me, when you’re all alone in an office, it’s scary.
The bathrooms are eerily quiet late at night – I was half-expecting that ghost from the Japanese movie “The Grudge” to show up.
Fortunately, I was left alone by restless spirits and was able to send my editor-friend a finished, 18-pg document.
hed, 18-pg
Again, I have issues ending posts gracefully, so I’ll just finish with this sentiment: suh-WEEEET.
I spent all last week eating 5,000 calories a day. Self-gavage. All to avoid -- *gasp* finishing my Gloria+Tae story.
And then today, I sent a series of self-pitying emails to a friend, filled with such pathetic-ness as:
I’m a sham -- I can’t really write. If I continue, people will catch onto me.
People are doing me a favor, reading my stuff.
My efforts are not good enough
And now, here I am -- almost 10pm. Overcome with an intense desire to anesthetize my anxiety with food…drama…household chores. Just anything that will delay the inevitable showdown with the blinking cursor on a blank Word document.
Time is a-tickin away…
Now the inner toughie in me is coming out. Swinging fists and singing Gwen Stefani’s “What You Waiting For”
Yea, what am I waiting for?
Take a chance you stupid ‘ho!
Writing a barely C- draft
Seriously -- fuck this shit.
Fuck this writer’s block and fuck this inability to just let go and let flow and fuck this paranoia and fuck this anxiety and fuck this ego trip and ego let down and fuck me for letting it chop my figurative balls off.
I just want to finish. It’ll be as disjointed and badly written as an episode of “True Blood” But -- what else do you expect from a girl whose literary education was refined on articles in back issues of Maxim Magazine?
Set it. And FORGET IT.
Write it all tonight. Crank it out like the world will end in some bloody Aztec human sacrifice unless the draft is done by tomorrow morning.
I mean, it’s just 4 fucking pages. It’s not like I’m trying to whip together 20 pgs in one night. And yet, those goddamn 4 pages is as fun as waterboarding myself. It’s like making little papercuts inbetween my finger and toes, and dunking them in a fizzy hydrogen peroxide solution.
There’s a lot riding on my writing. We’re talking (uh huh) money. It’s not just about stroking my ego – it’s about paying my rent and student loans and maybe eating something other than $1 dumplings. And this is just…too real. It’s like meeting the perfect 10 girl and realizing that she has to take a shit like everyone else, too.
And it sucks, because I have to invest all this time and energy and faith in something that I don’t even know will pan out. It’s a risk, a gamble that is dispassionate. Unlike people, who can be manipulated – churning out a certain wordcount is a science. You can’t magically will an extra 1,000 words. You do it or you don’t.
I’m supposed to be done with the “Gloria + Tae” story. But I’m not. I feel like an utter failure.
So tonight I write like a fiend. If I have to stare at my screen yet again, I will. Fuck fuck fuck.
What’s keeping me awake? Putting together a music playlist for charity. A seeeexy music playlist. ‘Cause that’s how I roll.
12 for 12K FTW!
There is an amazing organization called 12 for 12K (visit the site - the “12″ repeat motif shall be fully explained).
The lead organizer is the fabulous Danny Brown – who lives in Canada but is a Brit…blimey! (<– not sure what this means exactly, but I want to use it at least once in a blog post)
June Tweet-a-Thon FTW2!
A few weeks ago, 12 for 12K put on the June Tweet-a-Thon spectacular. And that’s when I joined, thanks to my cyber gf with the delish rump and lady lumps, CTK1.
Imagine: 24 hours of streaming online video, kind of like the Jerry Lewis stuff on TV. Comedians, musicians, smut peddlar (me). Powered by 2.0 social media.
There were prizes for those who donated at least $12. Not to mention the karma point accumulated (my younger sister, who is totally broke, donated $5. ‘Cause she’s awesome)
I went on at 11pm, and helped raise approx. $240 during the 40 minutes I was breathing heavy into the webcam It’s the most money I’ve ever made in an hour – and the fact that it went straight to UNICEF made me feel shiny and new.
Nice post-script to that event: one of my friends donated $12 and she won one of the prizes.
Masquertweet
So, PRCog decided to organize a masquerade for NYC locals to help raise some green.
Enter Masquertweet! It promises to be kinda like the masquerade in “Eyes Wide Shut” sans orgy. Or so I like to think.
And me…my teensy part in helping out is to put together a 1-hr playlist for the event.
Compiling playlists gets me SPRUUUNG
What can I say? I’m a music whore, with 70GB of mp3s and too many sleepless nights under my belt.
My mp3s are simply my digital version of Yu-Gi-Oh cards. It’s the sountrack to my mental masturabtion, as I have internal debates over why a certain bassline or loop changed my goddamn life. It’s pathetic.
So – nothing pleases me more than using those music files for the greater good.
“Come into My World (Fischerspooner remix)” – Kylie Minogue
“Poison” – Bell Biv Devoe. (it’s the longer version, with the “grown-men-barkin’-like-Dobermans” part in the middle. I believe this adds to the atmosphere, don’t you?)
ay life = gratitude gratitude g
