On the Ways In Which My Landlord is a Racist

Ron is a racist and here are a few examples of how.

1. Ron thinks all Latinos are illegal immigrants from Mexico. Point A: He was talking about the gardener his dog attacked and then decided not to work for Ron anymore, and Ron thinks the only reason he didn't sue was because he was illegal. Point B: Ron was having a group of workers re-do his bathroom, and during a conversation with one of them, he said, "You're from Mexico, right?" The man gave him an irritated smile and said, "No, I'm from Arizona. My great-great-grandfather is from Mexico though."
2. Ron frequently talks about how disgusted he is with his daughter's relationship with a black man and their soon-to-be child. Ron insists that there are "cultural differences" and the races should not mix.
3. Upon notifying Ron that my boyfriend happens to be a different race than me, and is, in fact, the result of races mixing and turned out just fine, Ron decides to tell me that Puerto Ricans aren't really Latino, nor illegal immigrants. I'm sure racists in Miami would disagree, but I don't want to go there. In Ron's mind, since Puerto Ricans don't count in the Latino category, he is not racist against them.
4. Ron once read a book called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which he explained to me was the Jewish plan for world domination. He then proceeds to say that perhaps the Holocaust wasn't such a bad idea after all. Ron completely disregards the fact that, a) The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a hoax, and b) other empires, such as the Romans, Ottomans, and British, HAVE had rather successful dominations of many people, yet no one ever seems to think that millions of them deserved to be thrown in gas chambers, buried alive, tortured, starved to death, or maimed.

The worst part of Ron's Racism is that he not only proudly admits to being a racist, but he is under the impression that his racism doesn't hurt anybody!

This is the worst!!! This is why our country keeps people down -- because of racists like Ron who will promote these horrible ideas about other people and think that it's not harming anyone, when it is and does. You cannot just stomp on someone's face and think, "oh, well, I'm not really hurting anyone."

And the part that makes me saddest of all is that his poor grandchild, who will be half black & half white, will have to grow up around this awful, awful man. This is the child who will be hurt the most by Ron's Racism. I just hope he or she turns out okay. :(

How Did We Get Here? Part Two

I have been meaning to put this up, but the last couple days have been full of suck and I've acted in a very non-Swedish Chef sort of way. Not that I'm trying to go all Pollyanna-ish here, but I do think the Swedish Chef is not the kind of guy who would lie down in bed all day hating life and then, when someone rear-ends the car he just bought, write a facebook post about being struck by lightning, because shit, if something else could go wrong... it would probably be lightning. Even though I have not seen a single rain cloud in California. Either way, you won't really be able to understand why everything is full of suck until I go on and explain the rest of how we got here.

When I last left off, there was the overall feeling that something has to be done otherwise I will gradually go insane, become a corporate slave, and make lots of money but be completely and utterly miserable.

Will had, for some time, wanted to move to California to move his stand-up career along*, and I, being completely lost after realizing I probably was not going to become a well-read travel journalist, had no particular dream in mind. It was like going back to junior year of high school, where you're expected to take the ACT (or SAT, depending on where you live) and then apply for all these schools and tell these college application evaluators that you've "always wanted to become a rocket scientist" or a veterinarian, or a post office worker, or whatever it is. But quite frankly, besides the bold "making the world a better place" statement, I had nothing. I liked to write, so I went to school for writing.

Fast forward several years, and I'm in the same place of what the fuck am I supposed to be doing with my life!?, now with a degree and a job in PR. So naturally, I started looking for work out in California, since that's where Will wanted to go and hell, I didn't know what I was doing, so why not?

One day, I was explaining some of this feeling of what should I be doing?! to someone I'd consider a bit of a mentor. Schuy is a former colleague, who is the sort of person who is so free-spirited that she inspires people around her to just be themselves and live life to the fullest no matter what anyone else thinks. I wish everyone could know someone like Schuy, because she's always an absolute joy to be around, and she has never really turned into a grown-up** so that's a big plus.

Anyway, Schuy recommended I check out Americorps. Which I did, and totally and completely fell in love with the idea of doing something meaningful and devoting my life to a year of service. I may not know what I want to do for the rest of my life, but I knew that this was what my heart desired. So... within a month, I had started the very lengthy and exhausting application process.

I highly doubt the Swedish Chef faced such an tedious application to be a chef! Harumph.

To be continued...

*I have always been envious of him for knowing exactly what he wants and singlehandedly ignoring and/or fighting off anyone who seems to think he should do things differently.

**By grown-up, I do not mean someone who has reached the age of 18, but rather someone who has decided that certain things in life are certain, like death and paying taxes and working that-job-you-hate-to-pay-the-bills and generally behaving like a complete ass because adult life wasn't what he/she envisioned when he/she was a child so now he/she is completely disillusioned. This is the sort of pathway I was rapidly careening down and the one Schuy has incredibly and amazingly avoided for a very long time.

The Kind of Hero We Need

Earlier this month, a young Greek woman was having a lovely night at the bar when some British schmuck tourist decided to harass her and other women in the bar by removing his genitals from his pants and waving them around. He approached the woman and forcefully fondled her, then requested she do the same to him.

The young woman dumped her (alcoholic) drink on the man, and then he somehow lit on fire -- either by her lighting him on fire, or him lighting a cigarette and then accidentally lighting himself on fire (there are conflicting stories) -- resulting in burns, some on his rapacious genitals.

Now, while it appears some of the local media seem to be horrified by this situation and this woman's apparent cruelty (how could she hurt his poor penis!?), I think she rightfully deserves to be cheered on and emulated.

In a world where women face sexual assault and rape every day, what a simple gesture it is to dump an alcoholic drink on someone's lap and say, "Leave now, and you won't wake up in a strange place with your body damaged by someone else." and hold up a lighter so he gets the point.

How lovely. How lovely!

On Becoming Famous For Writing a Blog

Today I was thinking, "Wow! If my blog got popular enough, maybe I'll get a book deal and then later on they'll make a movie about my life!"

Then I would be set for life.

But the more I thought about it, the more I think this would be a bad idea.

First -- what would they call the movie? Dana & The Swedish Chef? That sounds more like a romantic comedy or a cautionary tale.

Second -- I don't want to get into a collossal fight with my boyfriend about how I care more about my readers than I care about him, or have a bunch of freakouts because the eggs turned out to be ping pong balls after all.

Third -- I don't want the Swedish Chef to learn about my blog from a reporter and then tell the reporter that he hates me and the same reporter will call and tell me that the Swedish Chef hates me and I will cry and cry and cry until my boyfriend tells me it's no big deal and the Chef just doesn't understand and it's the Chef in my head that counts anyway, not the puppet, so everything is okay after all. And then people on the internet will make all kinds of comments about whether or not I'm exploiting the Swedish Chef and his legacy just to be well off, even though that was never my intention at all, I just wanted to spend a year being totally cool even though everything is completely fucked up!!!

Take that rubber chicken and eat it! I don't want your stinkin' book deal or movie anyway!!!!!!

Thoughts on Donating to my Alma Mater

I paid (and am still paying) a lot of money to go to my school, only to get a degree in an industry that may or may not recover (still up in the air) and work in a completely different industry for very little money because I still have a heart.

Yet, my school still would like me to contribute money to it. I get cards in the mail, and they e-mail me, and offer costly events to attend, but most of the money goes back to my school.

So here are my thoughts:

A. If I were super rich, I would not donate to my school directly, because when I attended they invested a lot of money into stupidly-shaped, nonfunctional lounge chairs which they placed on the first floors of a lot of buildings before they realized no one sat on them (how would you?!) and later the chairs disappeared, probably into a classroom no one has ever used. Instead, I would probably create a scholarship fund for some unfortunate sap that has not yet realized how ungodly expensive college is and how he or she will probably not get a good job in their industry anyway, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

B. I should create nonfunctional light fixtures or some other useless but interesting-looking interior design product and sell them back to my school, because I bet I could make a lot of money right back from them.

The Swedish Chef would probably approve of Option B since it's nonconventional, and he seems to be a nonconventional kind of guy as you can see in the video below.

How Did We Get Here?

You may be wondering, as people are wont to do (or maybe not, if you know nothing about me anyway), how it is, exactly, that such a bright,* ambitious** young woman with a well-paying job in Chicago decided to drop it completely, pack up, leave family and friends behind, and relocate to Orange County, California for a job that pays less than minimum wage.

Well, here's how it began:

Sometime last May, I graduated from college with a highly-optimistic view of the world and my future prospects as a writer in the newspaper and/or magazine industry. By June, I became desperate to find work that paid money and took up an internship at a PR firm in the suburbs of Chicago.

What I did not realize was that:

1. Commuting to the suburbs from the city is just about the worst experience ever. Doing it twice a day, five days a week, is torture. But I did read a lot of books. And I acquired great bladder control, since there's nothing like commuting 2 hours without access to a bathroom.
2. Finding work within a month of graduating is actually quite good. Particularly if you've graduated from a liberal arts college only months before the economy tanks, and the newspaper industry had been going downhill for a long time prior. So there's that. Even though I still think maybe if I'd held out for another month or two, I could've found something better, but then again, it's not I had the money to pay rent if I'd been unemployed for another month. But, I could have probably worked fast food again, just to pay rent, and then found a better job.
3. There are many ways to do PR. Some ways are right, and useful, and excellent at getting the public to understand an issue or solution. The other way was how we did business, which is basically like putting a monkey in front of a computer and telling him to spam 2,000 journalists within an 8-hour day (minus 1 hour for lunch). Some people find this task daunting, but if you know how to use the Mail Merge function on Microsoft Word, it's a cinch. More on this later.

After this three-month internship ended, I was on the verge of moving on to bigger and better things. I felt it. I was looking for jobs. And then, on the same day I was scheduled to have an interview elsewhere, my boss offered me $35K to stay on board and continue to spam editors with e-mails. Looking back, it's hard to tell if this was a good decision or a bad one, as a month later, in October, the stock market took a dive and people started getting laid off all over the place. Since my student loans went into repayment that December, I was fortunate to have a job at all.

But as time went on, the general feeling of corporate slavery wore into my bones and I came home every night feeling like, perhaps, this isn't the way I wanted to live my life. I felt as though I were banging my head against a wall until my personality seeped out of my skull and fell on my office chair in a suicidal and, maybe, self-preserving fit.

Then 2009 came around, and I was still miserable, and I knew that something had to be done. But what? And how, when we're in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, would that be possible?

To be continued in Part Two.

*Since this is a blog, it ought to be rife with flattery. I know this because everything I've read about Gen Y indicates that we are complete navel-gazing narcissists, so I will try to include as much of that nonsense as possible to fulfill that stereotype. Wouldn't want the boomers or Xers to think we are anything like them, except with obviously better technology.

**This is true and not an exaggeration.

Do I look like I'm from around here?

The day after I moved to California I was stopped by a police officer.

This is what happened:

Will & I were checking out of a motel room* in Buena Park when Will realized he forgot his cell phone upstairs. So I went to go to the truck with all our stuff in it when the police car rolls over and the officer rolls down his window. He beckons for me to come over, so I do.

"What are you doing here?" he asks me. Apparently, parking in a motel parking lot seems suspicious. He requests to see my drivers' license, and I hand it to him.

"I just rented a room for the night," I say.

"Is this your truck?" He looks over at the truck after scanning my license as if for typos.

Uhhh, I was just unlocking it, doesn't that seem obvious? "It's a rental, yeah."

"Where are you coming from?"

"Chicago."

"Your plates say Oklahoma."

Is this guy really that dumb? "It's a rental. I picked up the truck in Chicago, where I'm from."

"Where are you moving to?"

"Anaheim."

"That's over there." He points in some random direction, implying that I'm far from where I need to be. I just shrug.
"I just moved here, I don't know where I am." Seriously!? I have spent less than 24 hours in California and you're going to harass me about not knowing where I am?!

"Well..." he says slowly, like he's realizing that he has nothing on me. "I'm gonna let you go because you're name is Dana."

He grins. In a totally creeptastic way. Also, WTF?! Because my name is Dana!?

"My name is Dana." He grins again.

"Uhh, oh, okay." I try to stay polite and friendly, despite wanting to slap this man across the face. Like, seriously, thanks for "letting me go" for doing nothing wrong because I happen to share his name.

Great. Thanks. Welcome to California.

*Ron wouldn't let us stay at the room we were renting because he had decided to get the bathroom redone, except(!!) he hired the cheapest help he could find so naturally it took a week longer than it was supposed to (you get what you pay for!) and there was no shower or toilet to speak of... plus Ron is a gross pig so his bathroom wasn't in use either. So we stayed at a motel room for the night and then it became obvious that the bathroom wasn't going to be done the next day either. Or for the next few days...

Hello, and Welcome!

Hello! This is my new blog, in which I will write about many things, including but not limited to:

• The Current Situation
• Cats
• Americorps
• Things I Have Heard Other People Say or Seen Them Do
• Crazy People
• My Efforts to Navigate Life When Everything is Going Pear-Shaped
• What is Up With Politics, Anyway?
• Networking, Job Skills, and Other Things That Are "Important" To My Career (and what is that anyway?)
• Videos I Like
• Etc. Etc. (this is the category that encompasses everything else)

Of course, since this is a Swedish Chef blog, I will spend this year of my life asking, "What would the Swedish Chef do?" and seeking to emulate what I believe he would have done if he were in my current situation (a la Julie & Julia).

This May or May Not include cooking, as the Swedish Chef has yet to publish his book, "Mastering the Art of Swedish Cooking" or even "My Life in Sweden" which would be very helpful in evaluating what he would have done. Nevertheless, I move forward, using only the few remnants of his life -- YouTube videos!!!!

While I do not yet have his fearlessness, I feel that my attempts to cook turn out largely the same way. This will be a good year, I think.