I suppose it’s not a bad thing to have only two posts this month, one on the first day and another on the last. January is never easy. Things are ostensibly new. You have to remember that new number on all your dates. Though less so these days. Most everything but your hand is rigged up to some world-wide clocking device that does it for you. Hands might get rigged up too some day soon. That’s a scary thought, but it would also be pretty functional. All my checks to the shrink this month have had the wrong year scratched out. The last thing I’m doing is thinking when I’m all shaky at the end of a session. In the little “So You’ve Decided to Seek Therapy” pamphlet I got at my first session it recommended writing the check out beforehand. Just like there are no new ideas, there ain’t no new problems either.
Things in the new year are never that new. My jobs are the same, my unluckiness in love is the same. My apartment has new lighting and a new (tortuously difficult to assemble) bookshelf. But my shit’s all over the place still, and I’m so daunted by all the new storage space I have now that I keep looking at the piles of stuff, the empty bookcase, sighing, and retiring to another room.
What’s new is that I left my internship at the paper this month. Alternately liberating (only for so long can you wake up at 8am and trudge through the weather to work in an office and not get paid – that sort of thing doesn’t much fly after age 22), and frightening (since never before have I been published with any regularity, my fear is that it will never happen again). I was joking, that in two months, I’ll be begging for my old blueberry iMac back. A joke laced with fear.
I wrote a Valentine’s Day piece this week, which was kind of tricky assignment for me. I’m as cynical as I should be about these things. But I’m also secretly longing for a big bunch of flowers and a heart-shaped dinner. Aren’t we all? Damn ad people. The only real Valentine’s day I ever had was quite a few years ago, and it was so unexpected after the typically self-absorbed poops I associate myself with that I could barely take it all in. Most years I kind of forget about it, but since it falls on a Saturday this year (I know this from my article – thanks a lot) it might be harder.
On Wednesday I’m off to LA for a week. It seems like I’m running off to LA for a week quite a bit these days. Besides that I’m dreaming of any temperature above 30 C, it also acts as a big paragraph break in the big plans I keep planning to make. You know what they are.
I might need to throw a party.
Greetings and Happy New Year tidings to us all.
I rang in The ’04 (I am officially calling this year The ’04 (pronounced oh-four) just cuz I think The OC sounds really cool. I’m not being sarcastic – I truly do like the sound of it. Maybe because I lived there during some formative years and I saw none of the glamor or drugs that pervade the show. Granted I was in the second grade, but according to the show I would have to see that somewhere. Anyway I digress), I rang in the New Year with unprecedented debauchery which would have qualified it as one of my best except that somewhere in the minute and a half that I paid for the cab outside my apartment and I walked in my door I lost my wallet and my cell phone. It was around 8am and I was suitably messy so you can see how this was possible.*
The crew that I was with was dressed to the nines – sharp suits, tight black dresses, and some seriously vixen-like lipstick: all of us single (in way or another) and we were out for good times. After a decadent yet shockingly expensive dinner we hit up the Madagascar party which Jim described as an arty frat party and I had to chuckle in agreement. We rang in the midnight moment with mild asphyxiation in a slightly botched human fireworks display. No one was hurt but there was much coughing and eye watering among the crowd.
Later was a party near the Bowery where we chatted up youngsters, and one sweet little 20 year old from Colorado let me cut him in line for the bathroom in exchange for a hickey. Let me clarify, he wanted to get the hickey. A woman of my word, I gave him a nice (but mild) one on the neck which was more bright red vixen lipstick than anything else. He went home happy. But we marched onward. It was 4 and the night was young. Undaunted by bartenders who had already announced last call, we got the skinny on a bar in Greenpoint that was serving until 8 am. There were many an interesting folk there including a really sweet bunch from Virginia who seemed slightly freaked out by the city around them. It was cute. The bartenders were swell and there were some hot strangers to frolic with. The scary part was when we realized it was a hundred percent day outside, not the bluish glow of sunrise, but the total brightness of morning. It was time to go and lose my belongings.
I was in a conversation with one such stranger where we were talking about things, as in personal property, and since I have a habit of being separated from my belongings I feel like I have developed a sort of zen attitude towards it. So I was blabbering on about how when it comes down to it, nothing you have can keep you from being who you are, and is thus not that important. It was in the context of a conversation about owning a gun in the city. Anyway, I got my comeuppance in the form of waking up after barely sleeping by a gnawing hunger with no money and no way of getting the chicken sandwich I was craving. Serves me right.
Anyway, good times. The year should only live up to its promise: looking hot, partying bravely, and realizing that one’s opinions on the nature of things should be tempered with plenty of humility.
* Note to friends.. no cell phone service at the moment
New Angeles Monthly, June 2008
Weekend America, March 30, 2008
Los Angeles Times, March 13, 2008
Los Angeles Times, March 6, 2008
Nil by Mouth is written by Neille Ilel. Neille is a writer, reporter and user interface specialist in Los Angeles. If you think that's a lot, she's also got a host of meandering sidelines including improv comedy, tennis, cooking, drawing and thinking about learning to play the guitar.
Nil is her given name. It's a long story.
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