Survey says... inspiration! Or broccoli.

It’s 2011. Fuck.

It’s now time for people to scoff at me and return my checks due to my failure to remember it's 2011. Not that I write checks that often. Other people do. And those people are usually in front of me at the supermarket.

Shit. This post isn’t so positive. One of my 2010 2011 resolutions is to think more positively. Wow, that shirt looks great on you.

There’s a reason for the timely negativity. A reason for my cowering in the corner, very reluctant to welcome in a new year. It’s because 2010 2011 will be one of the biggest years in my professional career. I’ve planned it that way, so that’s how it’s going to be. Shit is going to happen. My vision board agrees.

That also means that I’m going to have to make all that stuff happen. And that’s creating a lot fear and vulnerability all throughout my little body that is miraculously still pretty little compared to the amount of food I’ve eaten this holiday paired with alcohol in the hope that I’ll forget the fear and vulnerability.

You, see, I have this dick of an ego, Lawrence, and he likes to chime in and tell me I’m a failure and that it’s stupid to actually try to be a full-time non-advertising writer because I’m just going to fail. But, rejoice! I read a book about dealing with dickface egos, and it said to write out Lawrence’s words with the non-dominant hand and then respond with the dominant hand. And let me tell you, Lawrence has some bad handwriting.

It did teach me that my biggest fear is failure. And that I’m making failure out to be this horrible demon of a thing that I won’t be able to escape, a red X on my face like that on the faces of the Family Feud contestants who don’t know that the survey said broccoli.

But then I thought more about it and realized that failing is my own invention.

Some people think Obama is a failure. Others still really admire him (I swear. We’re out there.). But what’s really the most important is how he sees himself. He can choose to be mad at himself and listen to his jerky ego, or he can be proud of what he’s been able to accomplish and go to bed smiling.

My point is that fear and failure live only in our own minds. And if we have the power to deem ourselves failures, don’t we also have the power to deem ourselves winners? Let’s choose that option. Let’s all be winners.

I’m still unclear on the very objective failures like fathers who leave their kids and never call them until they’re in their twenties. That’s a parental failure, right? Well, I guess the kid could think the father failed, but if the father was doing the best he could at the time, he could still think of himself as a winner. See how I turned that around? I should really be a helpful guest on Jerry Springer.

Is that show still on? If so, I can believe it. I spent a lot of time avoiding Lawrence by watching my mother’s television this holiday season. There are some really crap shows on. Cake Boss? Seriously? See how I’m starting to go all over the place now down here toward the end? My old self could say that this is a total writing failure. But my new self declares this post a winner.

I’m coming out of hiding and am now prepared for 2010 2011, the best year yet. For real. Because I said so. Let’s enjoy it, fellow winners. Let’s be positive and make things happen. My, that shirt looks really, really good on you.

UPDATE: I don't really have a vision board.

UPDATE #2: Tony Robbins called. He wants his post back.

UPDATE #3: The guy who made up the joke about things calling and wanting their stuff back called. He said that shit is old.

You would see the biggest gift would be from me...

For my entire childhood, I lived on the wrong side of town. In hindsight I can see that the invisible dividing line through our town was a bunch of bologna, but in junior high I was obsessed with being the coolest and therefore mortified by the location of our house and its general design. Now, I see our house as the beautiful hard work of a single mother, but at the time it disgusted me. Our appliances were old. Our carpeting was brown. And our bathtub had stains in it.

My friends had nicer houses, and I idolized them for it. They all seemed so normal-- they passed friendship notebooks around and had really stylish bangs and parents that were still together and not gay. They all lived in close proximity on the OTHER side of town so they could get together more often without me. And Lawrence, my ego who totally lacks self-esteem, just KNEW they were gossiping all about my shitty house and my weird dad who wore leather vests.

Acceptance from these girls meant more to me than my Beanie Baby collection. So, one day I convinced the entire clique to come over for a slumber party. I rejoiced when they all agreed. Even Tammy came; she was the prettiest one who had boobs first. We talked about boys and our vaginas. We gossiped about everyone at school.

Then, things took a bad turn. One girl thought she saw a doggie toy on the floor and, when she picked it up, found that it was actually dog diarrhea. If that wasn’t bad enough, we awoke at daybreak, excited to start the day with pancakes. And there it was... a dead, rotting mouse next to Tammy’s perfectly perky head.

A dead mouse.
It scurried under us in the night and keeled over right next to the most popular girl's head. Great.

I already lived on the trashy side of town, and I had forced my friends to come over, touch dog poo, and sleep on mice.

Horrifying.

Worst slumber party ever.

But it’s not because my house wasn’t perfect that my slumber party failed. It’s mainly because my friends weren’t really friends. They were judgmental and mean and not at all nurturing. I don’t blame the actual people for acting this way. For spreading rumors about my nipples or tricking me into sitting in chocolate pudding at lunch. I blame the age. All girls seem to go through this horrible time period of feeling ugly and treating people uglier. This time period alone is the main reason for my indecision about having kids. Ah! So scary.

I’m proud to say that my friends today would have no problem waking up on a mouse at my slumber party. I mean, they might not be happy about it. But I wouldn’t fear that they’d go talk about me behind my back. I wouldn’t think they’d condemn me from hosting slumber parties. They would simply think it hilarious, and it would be a funny story to be told at any gathering and most assuredly at my wedding. Because true friends don’t really care if you have mice or if you buy all your clothes at TJ Maxx or if you stick your hand in your pants at the movies or if you live on the wrong side of town. Real friends accept you no matter what. NO MATTER WHAT. Even if you don’t have good bangs, which I still don’t.

It took me a long time to find them, but I finally did. In college. At work. In random classes. On this very blog. I finally have those real friends who love me even after knowing me really really well... even after knowing I talk about poo and never clean out my trunk and don’t own underwear. My self-esteem changed and so did my friends. To mirror Ellen and the rest: it does get better.
Phew.
Seriously.

Being a writer can be a lonely road. I am often holed up in my apartment for weeks. My friends get it. Once something gets published, it’s like I have my own PR system, as my Facebook friends distribute it like confetti. What support! They’re proud of me. And I'm proud of them too. And it feels so good. Love feels like swimming in a bowl of whip cream. Even the friends I have never met, who stop by here every week, bring me such inspiration and motivation with their own gifts that I love and accept. I feel so lucky to have all kinds of friends who color my life with so much love. So, thank you. For you, I am so so so grateful. I can’t imagine what life would be like if I still had to watch what I said or keep secrets or worry about what rumors you were cooking up.

Please come have a slumber party any time (sans mice). You’re always invited (but give me some notice. I know you love me anyway, but still I’d like to be wearing clothes when you come).

Thank you for being there. And being here. And being you. And being amazing.

My head is a quilt.

I saw a woman the other day who was so obviously brimming with positivity that the sun was leaking out of her pores. Beautiful skin, shiny hair, a smile that could make even Mel Gibson love Jews, she was pure radiance. I asked her secret.

“I am grateful for everything in my life,” she beamed.

Well, good for her.
Good for freakin’ her.

Since seeing the third world and meeting people who’ve never even heard of pizza (probably the biggest tragedy in poor countries), I’ve also been on a quest for gratitude. I wake up in the morning and listen to the birds and smile at all the things I’m lucky to have and know (friends, family, toast, a good brain, tea, pumpkin pie, a hot shower, etc.).

And then I look in the mirror.

I see stringy hair and boring. I know I’m not hideous. But it’s just how my brain works. When it comes to myself, I see the negative first. My mission for this year of being thirty is to fully and completely accept myself, mind and body. It’s so hard. Because part of being human is to be hard on ourselves. It’s how we get better.

We can deliver a heart-wrenching motivational speech that rivals that of MLK Jr. People will cry out from the audience. Old ladies will faint in their wheelchairs. The country will finally feel united. And we’ll get off stage and say, ‘It totally sucked. I messed up two words in the third paragraph.”

Our immediate focus is always on the negative. I can take anyone else's situation and see the positive in it: You got pushed off a cliff by your fiance and broke your spine, but at least now you know he's not right for you. But when it comes to myself, I’m too harsh. I’ll look in the mirror with gratitude, and my ego, Lawrence, will appear and tell me how my hair is too thin and my skin looks like that of a confused teenager. (Lawrence is a dick. You can read about him here). I’ve worked so hard this year to accept these two last parts of me. I’ve used affirmations. I’ve meditated. I’ve accepted my anxiety, my control issues, my man problems. But this whole hair and skin thing is a real pisser.

The tragedy of how unimportant my skin and hair are in the grand scheme of things is not lost on me. This is why it’s all so frustrating. There are people in the world who have never heard of PIZZA! There are Indians who are sleeping in train stations with flies all over their faces, and all they want is a pair of clean underwear and a sip of clear water. And here I am bitching that none of the expensive cleansers in my medicine cabinet has made me beautiful like promised. Gross. I want to punch myself. But that would just be anger towards myself for not accepting myself, and that would mean even less self-acceptance.

My friend Katie came over the other day, and we were talking about ourselves, like prima donna narcissists often do.
“I hate my hair. It’s too thin.” she said.
“I hate my hair. It’s too short.” I said.
“Your hair’s great,” I said.
“You hair’s great,” she said.

Then it donned on us. We’ve known each other for five years, and each time we see each other, the conversation is the same (after the very important social commentary about globalization and other such paramount themes). We’ve always hated our hair. Even after accepting so many other parts of our selves, we can’t get over our hair.

“Let’s finally do something about it,” I said.
“Extensions,” she said.

I am not one to get fake things. I had fake nails throughout high school. I have banished such fakeries. Yet we did research. We made appointments. We sat through pain. We now have hair.

We have hair! We have hair that's long and silky. And we can look in the mirror and love it. But it’s fake! And it’s sewn into our scalps.
That’s right. We can only look in the mirror and love ourselves now that we have another person’s dead hair painfully sewn onto our heads. How odd is that? Humans are so strange.

After looking at all the options, we decided that weaves were the way to go. It took us an entire Saturday in a no-frills hair specialty spot with the worst logo ever. Seriously. Why make a ‘before’ picture your logo? That’s like making an empty plate the logo for a restaurant. Or some really sweaty man the logo for an air conditioning company. Not smart. BUT... We don’t judge a hair place by the logo, so we walked in for a day of fun. It was seriously fun.


You know those stereotypical black barber shops where all the men sit around and talk about life? This was the female version filled with women getting weaves while watching ‘The Best Man’ and commenting about Morris Chestnut’s private life and Hugh Jackman’s abs. I felt very welcomed into the weave community. And what a community it is. Holy mackerel. The women told me how to spot a weave, and man alive, so many women have weaves! I have been comparing my shitty hair to the luscious locks of plenty of women for so long and it was all for naught because so many are fakes.

What exactly is a weave, you ask? Well, besides a shortcut to self-acceptance, it’s a bunch of human hair that’s been dyed to match yours. D’Lisa, the weave specialist who only books appointments through text messages, finds the perfect spot on your head for the weave. She marks it with a Sharpie and then twists your own real hair into a tiny braid. Once that’s finished, she takes a thick, curved needle and sews the hair onto that braid. Like she’s making a quilt. Like your head is a big fucking Afghan blanket. And then it’s done. Then you have long hair that you can love for at least 6 weeks.


It sounds great. There’s just one tiny drawback: you have hair sewn into your scalp! It feels like I’m wearing a bathing cap made for a 3-month-old. Sometimes I want to rip it out of my head, but I saw her sew that shit in there and I know I’d be pulling out scalp skin and possibly exposing brain matter. So I suck it up and leave it in. Just so I can have long hair.

Just so I can have long hair!

One day I will get to the point where I don’t need this hair, the point where I can look at bare me in the mirror and love everything about what I see, including every single one of my real and short split ends. It will be a glorious day and sunlight will shine from my pores. And then Lawrence will come around and say, "Man, you have a lot of pimples."

I'm not only the president, I'm also a client!

L v L

Laurenne: See, Lawrence. Everyone was so supportive after that last post. So many even offered to help me find a job. Not only are the people I know pretty amazing, I am too. So there, bitch.

Lawrence: Yeah, whatever. You’re so lazy. You couldn’t even get a blog post up about this for the whole week. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. Lazy lazy lazy.

Laurenne: I had 5 interviews this week! And I had to spend one day eating croissants.

Lawrence: I can’t hear you.

Laurenne: I read a quote from Quincy Jones today, Lawrence. It said, “Not one drop of my self-worth depends on your acceptance of me.”

Lawrence: Um. I think he was talking about people in the music industry. Not his own ego.

Laurenne: Well, I'm talking to my ego. And it's not talking back. Not one more word about my cellulite. It only looks like that in the bathroom lighting.

Lawrence: That’s what you say, but--

Laurenne: Shut Up!

Lawrence: You just--

Laurenne: Ahem.

Lawrence: You just bought three shirts from Miley Cyrus’s clothing line at WalMart.

Laurenne: All right! You win again. I’m pathetic. But not for long, Lawrence. Not for long.

Talking to yourself out loud is better than talking to someone else in a cafe about Les Miserables.

I’m sitting in a cafe right now among laptops and half-finished screenplays and an unemployed man who just said,“It’s a Republican system of laws that puts you in jail after 3 strikes. It means you could get life for stealing a piece of pizza. It’s as if the Republicans have never seen Les Miserables.”

It’s awesome. I fit in. I’ve got my laptop and my intense grin that says, “I’m a writer. I’m writing right now.”

It’s day two of amusing unemployment, and so far so good. Last week, the ad agency where I was working told me that I should start looking for other jobs, as they were feeling antsy and might want to try out other people. Then on Friday they told me to never come back. Via email. The job wasn’t permanent in the first place. And it’s not like I leaped out of bed each morning and ran there with glee. So this whole firing thing is really no big deal.

But it hurt. I started thinking I wasn’t good enough.

And I realized: Rejection is the pits. I knew it before. I mean, I’ve been rejected a gazillion times, the most memorable from:

*Duke University.

*Plenty of guys in high school (several of them calling me a lesbian).

*Popular girls in elementary school. Once in 1st grade, these older girls (at least fifth graders!) befriended me on the playground and hung out with me for a whole week! I finally felt the joy of having sisters. And when they found out I wasn’t Nina Schrilla, the chick from a few houses down, they never talked to me again.

*A recent date. We met in a bar and ran into my friend from high school. He went home with her.

So, it’s not like I’m a stranger to rejection. I’ve thought a lot about this little demon and have boiled it down to a few hard facts. Not really. Just one: Our egos want everybody to think we are perfect in every way. And when I say ‘we,’ I’m speaking for ‘most people,’ and when I say ‘most people’ I mean me, Laurenne. Because how do I know what other people’s egos are saying?

My ego, Lawrence, is an evil bastard, and he insists that everyone think I’m the funniest, most intelligent and most beautiful girl in the world. He also wants twenty-year-olds to think I’m their age, Benicio del Toro to think I’m marriage material, and people at make-up counters to step back when they see me and, instead of try to sell me something, say ‘Oh, you don’t need any of the stuff we sell here.’ So even when middle management at a job I don’t really love tells me they’d like to try other people, Lawrence gets pissed and convinces me that I’m no good, ugly, and fat. That’s just what egos do-- cause unnecessary pain.

For example, I just had a hard time spelling ‘unnecessary’ right there and Lawrence told me I must be stupid. Argh, Lawrence! Stop saying that. I’m smart. See... that’s how you kill an ego. You have to not listen to him, and he will eventually lose his voice forever. Start by saying the opposite of what he says. For example, Lawrence will say ‘Why am I a male ego? You’re really a man trapped in a woman’s body that’s not even that womanly because your cup size is A. You should be more feminine so that people don’t start a betting pool to see when you’ll go in for your gender reassignment surgery.’

Then I should respond, “You know what, Lawrence? I am beautiful and feminine when I want to be. And I choose to never file my nails because I would rather spend my time downloading illegal episodes of 30 Rock. It’s a choice, and I’m sticking to it. And dog gone it, people like me.”

Soon these comebacks will come more naturally, and Lawrence will die forever. Until then, I will occasionally doubt my sanity and my self-worth. But that’s okay. It’s what we humans do.