Chasing the White Rabbit

I guess in my old age, my mind can only celebrate Halloween once, since after going to a Halloween party on Saturday, I’m having trouble understanding why people are still talking about Halloween and why the costume stores are still open. I forgot that we've still got a couple more days to go before the real thing. I think my quota is dressing up once per year, and then I’m done. I'm ready for Thanksgiving and all the fattening that comes with it.

So Saturday marked the beginning of the last mercury retrograde of the year. For people who don’t know what mercury retrograde is, it’s an astrological phenomenon that occurs three times a year, lasting for about 3 weeks (plus/minus a week before and after for its effects). It affects travel, communication and anything electronic or mechanical, so expect flights to be delayed, snark-fights to erupt between friends, family and coworkers, and computers, cars, phones, DVD players and toasters, etc. to malfunction. Even if you don’t believe in astrology, keep an eye out for mercury retrogrades because kooky things will happen. And make sure you back up your computer.

Like right now. For the first time ever, blogger crashed and wiped out my post, and now I’m recreating it in Word like I should have done in the first place.

So on Saturday, Reggie and I decided to dress up as Dr. Burke and Dr. Yang from Grey’s Anatomy for AD’s Halloween party since it was comfortable, required minimal investment, and we fit the racial profile. I managed to get my hair really curly like Sandra Oh’s, but I couldn't mimic her blank, indifferent expression since my blank look naturally looks somewhat pissed off. We get to the party and there are some really great costumes from this girl who dressed up as the Tivo Icon (the black TV screen with Tivo written across it) and Shaun from Shaun of the Dead, to Cruella DeVille, the boss from Office Space and K-Fed. I tried to think what Dr. Yang would drink, and I figured she’s the kind of girl who likes the hard stuff, so I started with a Jim Beam and Coke, and followed with a tequila shot. About 10 minutes after the tequila shot, I remembered that I’m not a hard stuff kind of girl, or an anything-with-alcohol-content kind of girl and I started feeling sick. So I went outside, found myself a dark corner by a tree, and did the whole, I think I’m going to throw up, okay, no I’m not. Okay, maybe I will. Okay no I’m not, bit. So I’m huddled up by the tree in the shadows, when suddenly, I see a rabbit hop into the middle of the street. I’m talking a big fat white bunny rabbit with floppy brown ears, just sitting in the middle of an urban street not far from the gnarliest LA freeway, twitching its nose at me. So I’m whistling at it and making non-threatening sounds, trying to get it to come close enough for me to pet it. It takes a while but it slowly makes its way over, until it’s about 4 feet away, just outside of arm’s reach. In my drunk head, I’m thinking about how funny it would be to go back to the party with a bunny in my arms, and all I want to do is pet that damn thing cuz its fur looks so soft, so for no reason in particular, I jump the bunny.

The bunny takes off down the street and I’m booking after it, until it crosses into someone’s front lawn. There’s a crack in the sidewalk that’s got one portion raised significantly higher than the lawn, and I step right on it, spraining my ankle and landing on the lawn in a heap. Now spraining an ankle is no fun, no matter how much hard liquor you’ve got in your system. Reggie comes running up and at first he thought I was joking because all he could see was me hunkered down by a tree one moment, and booking down the street the next. He asks me what the hell I was doing and I told him I was chasing a rabbit. He looks at me like I’m crazy and says matter-of-factly, “Julia, there’s no rabbit.” I tell him there was a rabbit, and he says, “There’s no rabbit.” Now he’s looking at me like he’s really frightened for me, like there might be something seriously wrong but he doesn’t want to scare me by pointing it out. So he’s picking me up, and my body’s screaming with pain, but I’m yelling that there was a rabbit that was white with brown ears. We go down the street back to the party, and on the lawn next door, finally, is that damn rabbit, sitting there in the grass like nothing was wrong. Reggie stares at it and finally says, "I guess there was a rabbit." Reggie went back to the party to tell everyone we had to go because I sprained my ankle chasing a rabbit, and the best answer had to be Matt's, who said, "Do you mean chasing a rabbit metaphorically?"

So I must have been really out of it by the time I got home, because for the next couple of days, I couldn't find my cellphone until Brian woke me up one night to tell me he just fished my phone out of the washer. It had been in the pocket of my scrubs.

We went to Sprint the next day on my lunch break, and being Sprint (worst in customer service), we waited an hour and a half until we were helped. So I'm trying to find out if there's any way that they can pull my phone numbers from my dead phone, when this big black guy who looked like Bernie Mac starts getting irate. He's asking the girl to get the manager and she tries to tell him that there isn't one on duty. He's mad because there are 15 people waiting in the store, he'd been there for a couple of hours himself, and there wasn't a single salesperson on the floor actually helping anyone (this girl appeared to be "training" the one guy standing at the front of the store taking names of people who came in. Literally, they were just standing there waiting for people to come in, despite the fact that the only other 3 employees I'd seen in my time there had all been in the back for a very long time). So he's getting angry and she's telling him that he doesn't have to be rude. He says it's his perogative if he wants to be rude and there had better be someone out on the floor to help him right away.

Finally this guy comes out and says he's the manager (of course it's gotta be the guy helping me). So the black guy is saying how he's been waiting and the service is awful, and the manager says he's rude and that he should leave. Now the girl is chiming in and telling him, "Just get out." So the guy gets mad, though, he never gets emotional. All of a sudden, he's slammed the computer monitors at the register onto the floor and he's saying, "Do I have your attention NOW?" He grabs display phones and pulls them out of the wall. "Is this what I need to do to get some service around here?" He starts grabbing computer equipment and flinging it off the desks. Sprint employees start coming out of the woodwork--flying out of the backroom, running down the street. One even screeches up in a car. There were only 3 employees there the entire hour and a half I was there (not including the 2 that did nothing but stand by the door and take down names), and suddenly there were about 15 of them. The guy even pointed it out, "Oh now all of a sudden this place is full of Sprint employees." It was pretty ridiculous how all of a sudden there were all these attentive Sprint employees who must have all been on "break."

So the guy's tearing up the store and finally the cops come and arrest him. The guy was smart though, he never threw a punch even though the manager did shove him and try to fight him. A bunch of us customers were milling around because the store had our phones and we couldn't just leave, but the consensus was that, while this guy acted pretty inappropriately, this is the kind of thing that happens when your customer service is ridiculously terrible and your employees are apathetic and rude. This isn't the first time I've seen someone flip out at a Sprint store (I've wanted to shake some of these people myself sometimes), but it's a shame that the guy who flipped was black, so they could write it off as a stereotype. I hope some of the customers write the CEO a letter about this incident the way they said they would. Sprint needs to run a tighter ship.

So needless to say, I'm still without cellphone. When I get a replacement phone, I may not have your numbers so please email me your #'s or if you call and leave a message, please leave a number so I have a way to call you back. At least until my phone stops going straight to voicemail, which will mean I've finally gotten my phone back.

Back from My World Work Tour

So my full-time job (aka, what I do during the day because I find the starving artist bit so trite) has ramped up my responsibilities and required more dedication and time than I've really ever been prepared to offer. Suddenly, it's the high-maintenance mistress who's decided she's madly in love with me and wants to spend the rest of her life with me, at least until I'm 56 and can run away from her with my IRA to the Bahamas. Now I find myself spending 5 days out of the week sleeping in a hotel bed that I suspect would stink of certain unnamed bodily fluids if a housekeeper named Maria didn't drench the linen with the sweet smell of clean. I kid you not. I think the housekeeper has been named Maria for every one of my hotels except one. Anyway, I digress.

The security trade show in San Diego was pretty cool because there were robot guns and bulletproof vehicles and lots of ex-cops named Chuck who wanted to debate the merits of the war. Plus, the new guy we hired used to live in San Diego so every night was a different bar and restaurant to visit.

NACS in Vegas was incredible. This was the trade for the National Association of Convenience Stores. You know those zombie movies where everyone's looting from the supermarkets and AM PM's because it's the end of the world, and you're sitting there like, look at all that shit. I want all that shit. I mean, were you one of those people who used to fantasize obsessively about how you would strategize and maximize your time if you won a shopping spree? Well, I was. And this was a fantasy come true.

Imagine 2 and a half Costcos filled with booths featuring candies, cookies, chips, beef jerky, energy drinks, coffee drinks, slushies, sodas, beer, liquor, condoms, cigarettes, cigars, blunt wrappers, pretzels, pizza, pizza rolls, hot dogs, subs, burritos...everything you can buy at a convenience store. Now imagine some mega-booths set up like mini convenience stores, complete with refrigerated displays, racks of edibles and porn magazines. Now imagine 1:30pm, the very end of the last day of the show, when no exhibitor wants to bring their shit home. Yes, 1:30pm that Wednesday was my dream come true. Suddenly people who were giving away samples by the crumble were throwing bulk boxes of their goods at you screaming, "Take it! Take as much as you want!" Those who flew in to attend the show could just stand and watch as those who drove there (in an SUV like us!) brought out our dolleys and started carting away cases of beer and energy drinks. At 1:30pm, people were running through the aisles, grabbing anything that wasn't bolted down and stuffing them into ultra-large shopping bags provided by Coke with anything and everything, whether they really needed it or not (ie my 24-count display pack of tiny blue fake-Viagra. I have no idea what I'll ever do with that). Thankfully, Reggie had driven in the night before so we could buy a display tub from one of the exhibitors for our lemonade, and he had plenty of room left in his truck for all of our booty. We got about 4 24-count cases of Sol, Tecate, Heineken, Dos Equis and a flat of Monster Energy Drink. We got entire bags of beef jerky, candy, chips, cookies, energy bars and flavored cigars. Overall, it was enough stuff to cover the entire floor of my bedroom. When we got back, threw a football party that looked like we robbed a 7-11.

It wasn't so much about the stuff, since most of that junk, other than the invidual servings of soy milk and energy bars, I won't touch on any given day. But it was just about fulfilling that shopping spree fantasy, of being able to run through a place filled with all this stuff, and being able to take whatever you wanted. It's bizarre, but it was a really fulfilling high to have that experience. And I also won my coworker's son a skateboard by lasso-ing a Snapelope at the Slim Jim booth so that was solid.

Last week found me on this crazy midwest tour that involved going to 5 states in 3 days to showcase our new technology. My boss and I left on the red-eye to Chicago on Sunday night, arrived at 5am and had 4 meetings back to back to back before leaving on the last flight out to Indianapolis. Of course, because we were leaving from O'Hare and it was storming, our flight got delayed by 3 and a half hours and we didn't get into our hotel until 3am. We got up at 7 the next morning to head to our next meeting in Indianapolis, then drove to Dayton, Ohio for an afternoon meeting. We flew out to Iowa via Minneapolis where we got in just before 1am. I ended up going through my work email until 3am. I was given one of those handicap access rooms where the shower isn't partitioned from the bathroom by a tub. Usually those shower floors slope towards the drain or have long curtains to contain the water, but apparently, the Marriott in Davenport didn't consider these things. So at 7am, I turn on the shower, go into my room to grab some clothes, come back in to suddenly find myself wide awake and on the floor, having landed hard on my butt. In the minute that I was gone, the water from the shower had drenched the bathroom floor. This was pretty scary for me as, falling isn't a sensation you expect when you're half asleep, and I had fallen close enough to the toilet to slam my hand against the seat and then the floor below it. I was pretty grossed out by having touched a hotel toilet, but I was pretty scared at the thought of how, if I had landed just a little bit differently, I could have easily hit my head on the toilet and had a serious accident.

We headed out to our first meeting where the guy chose to completely ignore me and small talk with my boss despite the fact that I'm actually an executive in our company and I was making a one-on-one presentation to him. Caveman. We rushed to the airport straight from that meeting to catch a flight back to Minneapolis for 2 more afternoon meetings, before taking a late flight back to LA.

Highlights of the trip were: Pre-negotiating a big salary for next year; seeing the Mall of America; bonding with my boss.
Lowlights: You really can't wash your hands enough after you've touched the underside of a hotel toilet.

I'll tell you...there is nothing better than sleeping in your own bed after having been away for so long.

For anyone who's going to be traveling any time soon, the new liquids that you can carry-on rules are somewhat tricky. Just know that if you're going to carry on liquids or gels, the containers themselves have to be no more than 3 ounces, so even if you have a larger bottle but only filled half of it, it's going to get taken away. You should either check your things in, or make sure you buy empty bottles whose capacity are clearly marked as being 3 oz or under and put your things in there. I had SO many things taken away because my boss insisted on not checking in luggage. What was weird was that no airport was consistent. At almost every airport, they found something else to take away.

Last week we had the screening from Pieces which went really well. Many thanks to everyone who came out and an apology to those who didn't get the evite. Since I was traveling the week before, I didn't realize that so many people hadn't gotten the evite until about the day before and the day of. It turned out that most of the crew didn't know about the screening which is pretty awful.

In other news, TR Knight (George O'Malley) got outed by a fight on the set of Grey's Anatomy. For those who are not familiar with ChokeGate, Isaiah Washington got in a fight with Patrick Dempsey and made reference to a gay castmate. Easy deduction would lead to the conclusion that TR Knight was the cast member in question, which promptly led to his releasing a statement about his sexual orientation and his hoping that his sexual orientation wasn't the most interesting thing about him. It's pretty sad how things came about, how TR was forced to make an announcement that he wasn't necessarily ready to make or wanted to make. But the big thing for me is that Isaiah Washington is quoted as calling TR a faggot, which I think is just as bad as if Patrick Dempsey had called Isaiah the N word. It's incredibly offensive and ignorant, and as I write this, the show's PR department is spinning its little heart out over this. But if a white actor had called a black actor the N word, there would be outrage and that actor would very likely be out of a job. Meanwhile, the F word and a cast member's privacy violated gets buried. Sucks how things can turn out. Then again, I don't claim to be close to the situation and to know the truth of it, but it is intriguing. I hope that TR's role on the show doesn't suffer, and that they let his character continue and evolve naturally the way he has so far, rather than letting the fact that he's a gay actor affect it. George is one of the best, most endearing characters on TV right now, and I'd like to see him continue his development unhindered.

Lastly, Kaiser Permanente sucks. SUCKS. SUCKS SUCKS SUCKS SUCKS SUCKS. I want Blue Cross back.