Ain't I a Jew?

So I’m a terrible Jew and I’ve come to terms with that. Yes, I was bar mitzvahed, yes I went to Hebrew School and yes I was most definitely circumcised (on my dining room table in fact, a detail my mother loves to pepper into polite dinner conversation.) But apart from that, I’m a completely secular Jew. I choose to celebrate my heritage by indulging in my anxiety and neurotic disorders rather than praying on a bima.

But recently a good friend of my asked me to attend Yom Kippur services, and so I put down my bacon cheeseburger, strapped on my teffilin and left for the synagogue for the first time in 5 years (Actually I embellished: I don’t own teffilin, it’s a tad bit too S&M for my tastes.)

So this Looney Bin walks into a bar...

Every once in a while, you get locked (literally, locked) in a room with a crazy person.  Nowhere to go, no one else with you, no window to jump out of.  Just you, crazy-eyes and a stack of papers you'll be filing together for the next 40 years or when you find a better job, which ever comes first. 
 
Crazy-town talked without taking a breath for roughly 45 minutes, a favorite word of hers being "polyamorous", which quickly became my favorite word when recounting this story to anyone that would listen. 
 
I'm not sure what it is about me that makes people feel like they can open up and tell me extremely graphic details about their lives but it's a curse I've had to deal with for years.  However, I've been in enough of these "I'm going to try to shock you with my sexual past" scenarios that I know that no reaction is the best reaction.  They just keep fishing, you keep on swimming.  Usually, I'm unable to contain my judgement.  I'm a judger.  If you're weird, I will tell you how weird you are.  Yesterday, however, I showed an enviable amount of restraint.  I could feel her aching for me to ask, "wait a second, you SHARED a boyfriend with your gay boyfriend? gay? polyamorous? I am close-minded to your exploits!" but instead I nodded and said, "oh, yes that sounds like a good exercise in controlling jealousy!"
 
More examples of my enviable restraint:
 
Crazy: And THEN I got kicked out of the polyamorous arrangement and my gay ex went and lived with our shared boyfriend!
Kate: [why the FUCK is it always the disgusting people that engage in this type of behavior?!] Where do they live in the city?  The South End is nice.
 
Crazy: I still get razor blades in the mail from my gay ex's stalker!  I fear for my life!
Kate: [a gay stalker is not interested in a crazy fag hag who doesn't tweeze.] Like do they come in a package or an envelope?
 
Crazy: I get free karate lessons from a local dojo so I can protect the lives of me and my gay ex.
Kate: [Again, you're not what the gay stalker wants.  Your efforts are futile.] I used to babysit a kid who did karate.
 
Crazy: I used to get really depressed about it but now I write Live Action Role Play online.
Kate: [of course you do.] writing can be therapeudic.
 
Let it also be said that as she told me this polyamorous, suicidal, bi-curious saga, she was clipping her nails.  The clippings piled up on the table and, timed perfectly with the denoument of her perverse yarn, she scooped them up in her hands and threw them in the trash where they made the tiniest of tap-tap noises as they fell against the garbage bag.
 
There is no excuse to be THAT weird at 27.  None.  I'm 27 and my eccentricities go as far as occassionally dipping my pizza crust in Diet Coke and loving the show "Supersize vs Superskinny".  Crazy-town was all around fucking weird.  I don't understand HOW one gets like that and more importantly, why do these people always seem to think that I'm the one who will get it?  Because I still have nerd-rage from high school, I sometimes worry that their confidences mean I'm one of them?  Maybe I only think I'm cooler than they are?  Why else would they think they could talk to me, confide in me?
 
Fuck that, I'm way cool and totally not polyamorous with gay dudes and dojos.

gooooood morning!

Two things that everyone will relate to that are upsetting.

1. I dropped my beautiful white iPhone for the first time since I got it back in April. We're talking wet concrete, a purely cosmetic case and now a scratched top right corner. The worst thing about dropping something like this is the regret felt afterward. The intense, self loathing regret. What was I thinking, carrying that third shopping bag? Do I think I'm some kind of super woman that can carry three shopping bags? Do i think im exempt from the rules of physics and gravity and shit? You didn't even have to bring those bags to the car. You just did because you wanted to kill 57744 birds with one stone because you're LAZY. You're a lazy person. Stop killing birds with stones! It's pointless! It's all pointless!

So there's that.

Which brings us to...

2. Nothing compares to the mental defeat that is running for a train as it pulls away, doors open, train conductor staring at you stone faced as you yell "what the fuck? You're going 2 miles an hour! Let me jump on the fucking train!" Hobos jumped on trains all the time and they did just fine.

After missing the train, I drove in to work, making ms an hour late...be that as it may, as I mentioned yesterday, I am temping. Therefore no one noticed I was missing.

I suppose that can be mental defeat number 3.

So tell me, friends, lovers and readers! How was YOUR morning? Any murderous blackouts to speak of?

Greetings from my concrete tomb

Temping can do interesting things to ones psyche. The pay is crap but the work is less than minimal so it evens out. My ass hurts from sitting on it for so long. I'm sincerely regretting the papusa I had for lunch because my cinderblock office has no windows and now it smells like the neglected boudoir of a Mexican hooker fresh out of soap. It's an improvement over the usual smell of dust and broken dreams.

I was just handed a discharge file to assemble, meaning I have to gather and put together the information necessary to fire some shmuck who missed work too much and wasn't clever enough to cover his tracks with "sick babies" and "occasional bouts of violent diarrhea", as one employee graphically cited. I feel like George Clooney in "Up in the Air" only less silver foxy and way less likely to bang anyone I meet at work.

Auditions are dumb.

Yesterday I walked into a room with a bunch of strangers and found myself being dry humped, strangled, had a chair thrown at, and was then returned to the world as if nothing had happened. And no, this was not an orgy or a group assembled from a sketchy craigslist ad. This was an audition. This was an audition for a highly lauded theater company. This was an audition for a stable paying theater job in New York City.

And this is where I talk about how auditions are fucking dumb.