I do not consider myself a bandwagon girl.
I am instead an irritating contrarian. My favorite Katherine Hepburn
movies are the ones you haven’t seen. I hate chocolate cake. I take surface
streets from the Valley to
Santa
Monica.
Just to piss you off.
This reality can be traced to two moments in my
life. The first was when I chose to abstain from all organized sports as a
child, instead preserving the sanctity of the after-school snack hour. As a result, even now I have a paralyzing fear of falling down, a fear that I rarely witness in people who
have played competitive sports at some point.
Falling down was never an integral part of my life (soccer, skiing, assorted
physical hijinks), and so to this day it remains worst case scenario. Even if technically
I am only somewhere between 1 and 4 inches off the ground, the panic sends me into a quiet meltdown,
and I tend to flee the scene in search of chocolate-coated comfort.
Temple
Grandin had her Hug
Machine. And I have the Choco Taco, an improbably not disgusting frozen delight now made harder to find by the
complete evaporation of almost every physical Blockbuster store, and the impulse-buy frozen treat cases they housed.
The second moment that forged me into an
oppositionist happened on a blustery fall day in the
late 90’s. I heard the crunch of tires in the driveway, and looked up from my
after-school snack. (See: Second Paragraph) Footsteps landed with eerie determination
on the gravel, then the stairs, then the porch. Faster than usual. My sister crept
to the top of the stairs above me, her eyes wide with (terror? hours of
continuous television programming?)
My eyes never leaving the front door, I took what could have
been my last ever bite of cinnamon toast. The door flew open, or slowly creaked
open, or opened at a normal speed. My eyes struggled to focus in this new
natural light that had shattered the blue light emissions of
the My Two Dads re-run I had been enjoying.
There stood my dad, a scarlet feveresque spark in his eye-the
result of an impeccable and inescapable marketing campaign that had now made
its way into my home. He didn’t have to think about it, and it was the most
certain of anything that I have ever heard him sound. He just said it.
“Everybody get in the car. We’re all going to Old Navy to
get those vests.”
And so I spent much of high school in a square fleece vest
the color of a taxi cab, and while I have certainly made much more egregious
fashion errors (and continue to do so to this day), that was really the moment
I decided not to do the thing everyone else is doing.
I live in Los Angeles, and
once in a while I have a sickeningly California
day. The kind of day that everyone who doesn’t live here thinks you have every day, except that of course you
don’t. Unless it’s one of those days that you accidentally do. Savvy?
Now that you know that
I am contrarian and why I am as
well, I can tell you that sometimes I accidentally have a completely typical Los Angeles day, despite
my best counter-offensive. This one was a Thursday.
For reasons I will not go into, unless you ply me with red
wine and curly fries, at which point I start giving away missile codes anyway,
I had to have a bit of a “proceeeeeedure” done the other day in Beverly Hills.
It’s not what you’re thinking.
It’s not that either.
Not even that.
It’s so boring and un-scandalous, it’s kind of disappointing
actually. Nothing about me is bigger or smaller, or better or worse, less or
greater, or younger and “more radiant.” It was something so lame, but that had
to be done, and it was by pure circumstance that the office was in Beverly Hills, thus
making the whole scenario completely damned typical.
