Category Archives: Mmhmm That’s Right

Yeah but no

By nopasanada | Published: October 1, 2008

“History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.”  ~Abba Eban

This is one of those things I just have to get off my chest. Those almost inexplicable things that pull and tug and are always at the tip of your tongue and so you feel compelled to stand on your balcony and scream your feelings to the world. Sadly, only 14 people will walk down my street yet 140 people (let us pray) will read these words and most likely feel the same amount of undeinable and excruciating pain that I feel.

Deep breaths

I watch a lot of reality television. Since the dawn of the Bunim/Murray days. That said there are three people on the planet who I would have to kick in the kneecaps in exchange for the agony they put me through each and every week; thus leaving me without the will to live. In no particular order:

Kenley from Project Runway: How shall we extricate that stick from your ass?

Rachel Zoe: It IS bananas. And it DOES make me want to die. But YOU make me want to die every time you open your mouth or where sunglasses inside. Why do you do that, Rachel? To hurt me? It’s working.

Speidi: You both are those kids who ate glue in kindergarten. You probably ate lead paint as well. Your current state is just a manifestation of being poisoned as a child. Stop talking. Just stand there and be blindingly blond with that vacant “WUH?” look and collect your paychecks. No, no. Shhh. Quiet time.

Also posted in Inebriated prose, Mmhmm That's Right, Oh The Stupidity You'll See | Tagged , , , | 23 Comments

Clichéd

By nopasanada | Published: April 29, 2008

“If you’re going through hell, keep going. ~Winston Churchill”

You know things aren’t going well when after buying out Ann Taylor Loft you sit in your car listening to Kimya Dawson while inhaling Coldstone ice cream. Ice cream that you haven’t had in like three years and yet it’s made a strong comeback into your daily intake along with other liquid dairy products and excessive amounts of high fructose corn syrup, meanwhile every second sitting in that car, you can feel yourself about to cry and yet you don’t or can’t or perhaps you’re afraid that someone will see you and then question why you are sitting in your car crying in the middle of the afternoon. Because don’t you have a job or something to go to? So you sit and sit and feel like crying but you don’t cry and this process repeats itself for days until you finally find yourself moping at work and then eating your weight in naan and saag paneer while your mother sits across from you and wonders when you replaced with your mouth with a fantastic Dyson sucking mechanism. In between sips of root beer – which has also decided to make itself known once again – you say, “It’s personal” and look rather forlorn and she gets the menacing look like ‘who just fucked with my baby’ so you smile and say “I AM FINE” so that she doesn’t go around the eastern seaboard slashing tires.

From then on you decide to fake feeling just fine! And great! Even though on the inside you feel like someone has been kicking you with the business end of a golf shoe and my, when did spikes get so sharp and pointy? You quickly tire of hearing that things take time and distance and ice cream but this time and distance shit suck and ice cream only makes you bloated with a fat ass which makes you thankful for empire waists but still! Who will want you with a bloated and fat ass? This, you contemplate for days on end while simultaneously pretending to listen and pay attention and care and have normal conversations with dignitaries while your mind is far off and so you keep drinking wine and then spend two solid days inside until one day the voice of Carrie Bradshaw reverberates through your head via seven hours of Sex and the City and you realize that you’ve become a fucking cliché. More importantly you realize that you are not the first or last person to become desperately heartsick so you can either go back to your normal activities and stop eating your weight in dairy and Jack Daniels or you continue on with your sad and pathetic behavior even though others might not think it all sad and pathetic but rather normal even though one person has allowed you to “keep up with this shit” for a few more days. You mull this for a second and decide on normal. The next day you go to the gym and return to a diet of seaweed salad, sushi, soymilk and flavored seltzer. You have a conversation without crying, you make plans with several of your favorite ladies and to also log more airplane time.

And life moves on, as it should.

Also posted in Mmhmm That's Right, Sucks like a vacuum | 17 Comments

Clingy

By nopasanada | Published: April 4, 2008

“Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not.” ~James Joyce

Several years ago I babysat for the world’s most difficult toddler. She was fine during the 10 months prior but once she turned one she was desperate for her mother and her mother was desperate for 40 minutes without a toddler wrapped around her neck and so she would go out and leave me with a child who screamed bloody murder for a solid five minutes. The girl is almost six now and hates when her mother comes home and I have to leave. I remind her of that really great year when she was clingy and wanted nothing more than to duct tape her body to her mother’s forehead and once gave herself a bloody nose because of all the screaming she looked at me and said “Well, I NEVER!” while appalled by such behavior. So I had her yell at me in my right ear and she was all shocked when I claimed I couldn’t hear anything because she had burst that ear drum many years ago with all the fucking screaming.

Though I am not necessarily screaming at the top of my lungs each day I have reverted back to being clingy to my parents, particularly my mother. I can actually appreciate the sentiment of a toddler because sometimes we all need a little loving from our mommies. But at 24, it’s a little awkward to walk up to my mother in the bathroom at work or the kitchen or while she is mid-conversation with my boss and then rest my head in her armpit. Or perhaps nuzzle her chin. Awkward because there are others around and because I find it rather uncomfortable being a good three inches taller. Yesterday I went into her office twice (unheard of) once to shoot the shit because we hadn’t seen each other in a whole 12 hours. The second time she was genuinely happy to see me and gave me a little pat on the cheek. Each time I had to fight the urge to yell out Mommy! Hold me!

I’m thinking the clinginess is a manifestation of the difficulties of the last several months. Nothing that needs detailing right this moment but hard nonetheless and even harder to not analyze and obsess about. I’m also thinking that the clinginess is what led me to spend Wednesday evening with 489 mothers. 489 mothers, people, and there I was praying I didn’t get pregnant by association. What? You didn’t know you could catch that by breathing? It really was lovely and the thing about mothers is that they don’t stop mothering. They can’t help but love everyone and be protective and yell at you for texting while driving. They’re programmed to care. It was wonderful and full of conversation that actually had nothing to do with children but all about love, puppies and how to get sparkles out of rainbows.

I am leaving for Manhattan in a few hours to go spend more time with several more friends. The other day a friend of mine told me that I could use a little “normal” to cling to. Not that I can actually define “normal” but now I understand the reversion of wanting, nay, needing a parent around at all times; I want something I am confident in and something really good to hold onto that makes me feel a little like me again. So I am going to go away and get drunk for three days, stop at Tiffany, walk around Central Park, eat cupcakes, drink mimosas for breakfast, try not to puke and buy something cute from Coach. See? Normal.

Also posted in La Madre, Mmhmm That's Right | 10 Comments

The best I can hope for

By nopasanada | Published: December 20, 2007

“I always find it a little funny how things can seem so cruddy and then all of a sudden, they return to normal, or some variation of normal. It’s like we’re all set to some relative standard of balance, like a bobber in a lake. And we just bob, bob, bob our way back to okay no matter what.” - Jonniker

On Tuesday I was running ridiculously late to get to the airport. I had every intention of being up early and getting out the door on time and cleaning my bedroom floor but the road to hell is paved with good intentions so I did absolutely none of that. But I do have clean sheets so at least I’ve got that going for me.

Because of my absurd lateness and perpetual fear of missing a flight I didn’t clean off my car. I figured it was passable and went on my merry way. While driving, a police car passed me then promptly turned around to stop me because apparently it is illegal to drive around without being able to see anything out of the front of your car. Shocking. I was offered a ticket or the opportunity to clean off my windshield so that it wasn’t like driving in the dark without lights on. I obliged. When he came back to my car after running my license he asked my height and then asked my weight. I know that it is inadvisable to question a police officer even if they’re wrong as hell but I think I’d risk prison to avoid telling someone my weight, especially since I haven’t seen a scale since 1987. So, I asked why he would need such information and he gave me some bullshit excuse about filling out a ‘contact’ form to say he had had contact with me in lieu of giving me a ticket. I didn’t feel like waiting an extra 20 minutes for him to write out a ticket so I told him my weight and he looked at me as if I’d just informed him that since he was already here, he should also check for the heroin and dead body that I keep in my trunk. Kill two birds with one stone, I always say. He looked me up and down and said “Really??” in this high, you have my testicles in a vice, type pitch. Given that I had actually shaved off about 10 lbs I said “Uh, yes. Why?” then held my breath for him to laugh and call me a liar. He didn’t. Instead he looked me up and down again and said, “Wow, you don’t look it”. And then because the hood of my car was spectacularly clean and snow free, I asked him if he was in a rush or if we could do it on the hood of my car because he totally deserved it.

Needless to say this elated me. I’m taking my victories – however minor – as they come as of late. I’m generally easily pleased but the past two weeks have kicked my ass. I’m hesitant to give further details because it will come off as whining and well, I’m a HUGE asshole. It all boils down to this relentless tendency to think, analyze, talk, whinge, then rinse and repeat 17 times a day. It’s a classic case of questioning what I want and what I will do to get it. Basically, do I really deserve to be happy or am I destined to questioning my every decision. These are actually things that should be thought out over an extended period of time and hopefully without feeling like I’m at fault and yet I cannot help but think about every single scenario until I’m up at 3:30 AM because what if things don’t go as well as I need them to?

What an utterly stupid question. What if Susan’s roof caves in while I’m sleeping and crushes my torso and I can’t call for help and I die alone in Oklahoma? Seriously. If I ask all the what-ifs I am going to drive myself insane, which is exactly how things have been going for like four days straight. Now I’m tired. Ridiculously exhausted because I’ve worn myself out from all of the overuse of my brain only to come up with a conclusion that is so very easy. A conclusion that should be said very deliberately with a bit of reassuring petting: Things will be OK. I might be an asshole, I might completely fuck up, things will probably not be perfect (understatement of the decade, I know) but things always, always, always, end up OK. And for now that is the best that I could hope for. So I sleep. 

Also posted in Mmhmm That's Right, Whine(o) | 18 Comments

The same old song

By nopasanada | Published: December 11, 2007

“Today is the kind of day where the sun only comes up to humiliate you” – Chuck Palaniuk via Anastacia Campbell

There are these days when I lean back and give a loud and exasperated sigh and harrumph to my Pollyanna-ish thinking. For how perfectly cynical I can be, it at times, catches me off guard and right when I’m thinking that nothing and no one can possibly be that bad or mean or completely and absurdly jealous. But then people surprise me in ways unimaginable and I am brought back down to earth, not with a bang but with a whimper and lo’ people are assholes. Huge assholes.

I’ve had numerous conversations over the past week where I, in a Pollyanna state pre falling flat on my face back to reality, express incredulity towards the behavior of others. Like why would someone intentionally be cruel to someone out of jealousy? Especially when the subject of the hatred has been nothing but kind? Why would someone’s unhappiness manifest itself into the spreading of ridiculous and unbelievably slanderous bullshit? The answer is very simple; people suck, that’s how it is and I need to just deal and yet each time something in that nature occurs I’m shocked.

It’s not just shock due to behavior but that these are adults. For once upon a time in a land not so far away, I had a grand idea that being an adult (which, for the record, I have finally accepted as I start to think about purchasing a car and a home and four people have asked me when I’m going to think about children P.S. I’m still 24 but apparently that doesn’t keep people from wanting to wrestle my ovaries into submission) would mean that the people around me would be nicer. Keep in mind that this was a full decade plus ago so when I say that I envisioned people being kinder without gossip, I’m not high or in need of a neurologist, it’s just that I was like 14 and generally stupid. But I honestly thought that as people change their behavior would automatically catch up to their age and they would be doused with a magic potion of knowledge, kindness and maturity. While for some people, very, very few people, that occurred, it has slowly come to pass that I am now realizing that some adults, are the same people they were in Junior High School and High School, but taller. And their voices have a deeper vibrato. Other than that, it’s the same old shit, different year.

I wish I could laugh it off and let piss poor behavior roll off my back. Like hardy, har har, people are shitty, get over it. But I can’t and I don’t. At least not yet. It’s like this great disappointment and even worse than the time my mother flatly told me that Santa wasn’t real. It’s this great disappointment to realize that some things rarely change. With people, change for the better is on par with a major seismic event occurring in Poughkeepsie, which is to say completely rare if any at all. But more than disappointment the entire thing just makes me sad. Though for once, I am not sad for me, I am sad for them. So maybe some people do change after all.

Also posted in Mmhmm That's Right, That's Life | 14 Comments