My West Coast Royal Wedding Schedule

The last week and a half into my new job have left me with the sudden realization that this may not be a "job" anymore. Call it jumping the gun, but my work title consists of me blogging, Tweeting, Facebook status updating, and just generally reading and reading news reports and stories all day and afternoon long for the company. Everything I normally do outside of work. This is beginning to feel more like that elusive place I definitely did not anticipate on getting to so soon in my life. The place called a career. A CAREER. I haven't even been out of college for a year and its already happening. I don't know how to feel about this. It's somewhere between pure elation and feeling like I need to throw up. It's wonderful, it really is, and considering the last place I was and the nonstop student loan bills piling up all around me, it's been deliverance in so many ways. But, there's always a "but." Somehow, I managed to get into the very shallow pool of post-graduates from college who love what they do and do what they love. This is the dream! This is MY dream, finally coming true after so many years of working in positions that didn't do me any good-or hey, maybe they did put me on the right path. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth and whatnot.

So why do I keep sitting on the edge of the pool, not fully submerged yet? Why do I keep looking at the other pools around me and idly wondering if they're better than mine? I didn't expect to be this content this soon in the game. In my mind's eye, I saw my twenties as the time I would be a vagabond of sorts, traveling around with no real destination in mind. Careers wouldn't arrive until I was 30-something, I used to estimate. I just wonder how things within the next year will wind up playing out. The only constant in life is change, you know.

April 29th is the big day. Maybe the biggest day in my lifetime of entertainment tracking. It is the Royal Wedding for Prince William and Kate Middleton. AKA the day I and millions of other girls will be utterly entranced on our TV sets and live CNN streams online, showing the next big Cinderella story come to life. I wasn't alive when Princess Diana was married (insert comments on my youth here), though I distinctly recall looking through an old book of my Mom's with her gorgeous wedding gown and various other Diana fashion staples. Sometimes I would sneak it to school with me and look at the photos inside of my desk. So lovely. Le sigh.



London time is 6 hours ahead of California time, so as usual the West Coast is going to get the butt end of the deal in terms of what time to wake up for the nuptials. I keep reading various Q&A's on what time the wedding will begin to air on TV and the answers are anywhere from 3am (dear God no) to 6am (even worse, I have to leave for work at 7:30 in the morning).

3am? 4am? Whyyyyy? Do you Brits not realize I will literally become The Walking Dead at my job the morning after? my brain wailed. Then I gave it a good kick in the frontal lobe. 'Scuse me, but I seem to recall that not even a year ago, you were staying up until 5am, half-writing papers with a bottle of Andre's and your Tumblr and YouTube movie trailer pages wide open, laughing at the same cartoon video you were watching for 30 minutes straight. Don't tell me you can't do this. Remember, who was that who saw the last Harry Potter film at midnight, slept for an hour, and went to work, functioning for 8 hours on one hour of sleep? Yeah, I thought so.

Here is my preliminary Royal Wedding Schedule:

April 28th:

3:30pm Get off of work.

4pm Come home from work.

4pm-11pm (this time slot is open for more consideration) Sleep. Nap. Basically stay in bed. Drink some NyQuil if it means ensuring a semi-deep sleep easily. Just sleep as much as possible because the next time you'll be sleeping like this will be many, many hours later.

Midnight-3am or 4am Keep a steady pile of Red Bulls, Starbucks espresso drinks, and some of my personal favorite, the soda energy drink Vault on hand and consume consistently. While awaiting the wedding to begin, read up online about Kate's dress, the guest list, the flower selection. Watch news coverage on TV. Make a cool British reception themed playlist with your iTunes library (there are reasons why I'm single). Update your Facebook/Twitter feed with "T-minus __ hours till the Royal Wedding!" every hour on the hour.

April 29th:

9am You're now at work. Congrats! You made it through the night, got to watch some of the ceremony, and are now so filled with caffeine that your crash is going to be a near-death experience. Worth it? Of course. Get the live stream of the wedding playing if your job allows for you to go on CNN. Of course, you could just do this and skip staying up throughout the night, but where's the fun in that? Nobody would ever told their brother's future offspring that they slept through the Royal Wedding. EVER.



Cheers!

Love to you all,
Heather

Trudy

Today I'm going to tell you a memory. It's not a story. It's a moment in time that lasted for many years throughout my childhood and truly defined the girl I would later grow up to become. I've only told a few people this story before and they've always thought it to be funny, sweet, touching, and sad in the kind of sad that only great moments give you before they're gone. Before they become the memory in your head.

You always remember the first one. The first day of school, your first love, the first day of work. Yesterday when I was at my new job (which is wonderful, if you were wondering), I was writing a blog post and mulling in my head how exactly I came to love and appreciate being with my pen and paper, my keypad. The origins of this were found directly in my first one: my first best friend. The truest of true blue, the greatest friend a girl could ever have when she was just a girl herself.

Her name was Trudy.

I didn't have very many friends when I was growing up, a recurring issue of mine throughout most of my life until I moved away to attend university in California. I know a lot of people say this, but I never fit in with the kids my age at any of the schools I attended. Nor did I care to. All I wanted out of life was to sit with my book and read until forever. There were so many countless days when I would be sitting in the lunchroom, tightly holding my lunch box and wishing so much that I could just bring a book with me. I didn't like to talk to others. I mean, I could try to pretend we had things in common, but then the moment would be fleeting and end and I would lose interest and move on. Even as a child, I didn't do commitment. I just wanted to sit in the bookstores forever and read myself somewhere where the people were like me. I know I'm painting you the portrait of a child who nobody understood and I know there are definitely some people who would tell you otherwise and say that I was a mean girl and sarcastic. I guess it was a coping mechanism. While I might have been lonely at school, I wasn't in my head. I used to talk to myself, not in the "Hi Heather. How's your day?" way, but in the way in which I would tell stories to myself with fictional characters and act out their dialogue to each other. I used to do this while walking back and forth in the hallways of my parent's house. Gradually over the years, I learned how to tell myself stories while sitting down, then finally without speaking but speaking aloud within my mind. I still do this. I don't imagine there will ever be a time in my life where I'm not telling myself a story in my head.

My parents worried about me and my inability to relate to the world. My Dad decided that if I wouldn't make friends at school, I'd have a pen pal instead. He signed me up for a pen pal service that allowed me to become insta-friends with someone (a young girl, to fit my demographic) from across the world. I was very excited. Who would she be? Did she like sprinkles on her ice cream like me? What did her house look like? Her favorite color? I wanted to know everything about her!



The first letter I received my Dad gave me. It was all the way from England and the girl's name was Trudy. She grew up in a very small township called Moustershire and lived in a small cottage with a vegetable garden. She had honey colored hair and like me, liked to read. Her favorite color was pink. Her town was very small and did not have a movie theater so she would always ask me about movies I was seeing, especially since I lived in the United States where the release dates were different. Her letters, written on yellow paper, always contained lots and lots of beautiful sparkly stickers, with some scratch and sniff. Sometimes she'd include whole sheets of these stickers tucked in her letters and I would use them sparingly, as they were so stunning. I still have an entire container of them at home. I kept everything she ever gave me. I always felt like I could be myself when I wrote to her and would spend longer and longer amounts of time hunched over, telling her my life. She always wanted to know about my brothers, because she was an only child and was curious about my parents, which I told her about too. It never took very long to receive her letters back in response which my Dad would always pull free from the mail and give to me first. I remember sometimes I'd get longer letters which always excited me and shorter ones, which were a bit more hurried in content, but I loved them just the same.

"I have a pen pal." I would smugly announce to the lunchroom table at school, "She's from England and her name is Trudy."

There was always one smartass in the group who instead of "oohing" and "you're so lucky"'ing would narrow her eyes at me and sigh, "Where is she from?"

"Moustershire." I would excitedly reply, "It's a very small town. You probably haven't heard of it."

"Moustershire?" The dubiousness was on full blast, "There's no such town."

"There is too!" I hotly replied, "And it is inhabited by mice!"

Chuckles. Giggles. "You pen pal lives in a town with mice?? Is she a mouse?"

"No, but her parents are." I replied, each word dropping off in tempo. See, that's the thing about Trudy. She told me she lived in a town owned by mice. Moustershire. Get it?

I suppose this is the time when I should have started to wonder about her. I guess this was the moment where I was supposed to ask my Dad why she didn't have a last name, why I never had to write a street address on the envelopes. He told me Moustershire was so small that the town name, her name, and zip address would suffice. They'd find her.

It was the last age of childhood for me, the one in which I would visit neighbor's gardens and pretend I was in The Secret Garden, wore a locket all of the time like Sara Crewe and charm bracelets with ribbons in my hair, when I wrote in an essay for school once that I wanted to wear petticoats and carry parasols in my 30's. All I ever wanted was to grow up but never lose my childhood in the process. I would carry it with me. These were the things I promised myself at night alone in my bedroom. Losing the magic would be the end and I swore to hold to time as much as I could, as much as I could grasp before inevitably letting go.



I wrote to Trudy for years. During these years, I would tell my Mom, "Now, I'm going to do my homework, write a letter to Trudy, and read before going to sleep." She would smile when she saw me writing to Trudy, watching my penmanship get better with each letter. We would buy stationery sets at the store in the widest variety of styles so Trudy always had something to look at. We would find unique stickers and mail those along too.

The moment I never forgot was when my parents took me to a little bookstore that sold jewelry in a glass case. I must have been 10 when this occurred. Underneath the glass were two rings, perfect to fit my fingers. One with a pink cubic zirconia stone and the other a white stone. I told my parents I wanted them both because I wanted to send one to Trudy, like a friendship ring. They bought me them both and asked me which one Trudy would get. This was a tougher decision than it seemed because we both loved the color pink. I thought about it for awhile and decided to send Trudy the pink stone because, "she'll love it more." And she did, when she wrote back to me the following week, praising how pretty it was and how nicely it looked and just thanking me so much for it. That letter was really the first lesson I remember sticking in not being selfish and putting others before me.

Then I asked her about Moustershire.

Once when I was at my beloved Library Limited with my Dad, I went into the history section with him and found a map of Europe. "Where is Moustershire?" I asked him, holding the map up to him as he sat in an armchair reading, "Can you find it for me?"

He just smiled at me and put down his book a little bit, "Heather, I told you, Moustershire is too small to be found on those maps. Maybe if you ask Trudy about it, she can tell you more."

So I did. Trudy began to send me a series of cards, of different places in her town. The French bistro cafe, the garden house with the best vegetable garden around, the grocery shop, the school, the bakery, and homes in the area. All of these cards were beautifully illustrated with small mice standing outside of each place, smiling and wearing little aprons and clothes. It was like another world, one that I held to my heart and believed existed.

The true stunner was the map of Moustershire Trudy sent me. Written and illustrated on a very thin piece of parchment paper, it showed all of the buildings from the cards and the pathways to getting around. There were no cars, no modern (for the '90s anyway) technology, no streetlights or stop signs. There was an ocean. I had never been to the ocean at the time.

With trembling fingers, I turned the cards around to see where they were made. I needed to go here, there, be with her. Embossed on the back of every card was one phrase "Greetings from Moustershire."

I could only hold time for so long before it let me go. I began to grow up and with it, for every bad outfit I created for my angst, working at 11, and trying so much to fit in at school before giving up, I grew apart from Trudy. The last letter I wrote her when I was 12 and never got a reply back which was my closure. The way I responded to this was how I responded to all of my troubles at the time: leave home and go walking throughout the neighborhood, eventually edging out and wandering to other neighborhoods far off from my own. I wish I knew her last name so I could Google her and see how she was.



When I was 14, my parents sold our old house to buy a new one across the street from my new high school. Cleaning and sorting through the old house was a task that required more hands than just 4 people (my two little brothers were too young to really do much) and for the longest time, it seemed like it would never empty. The house just kept accumulating more and more things in every nook and cranny you could imagine.

One evening, I was in the basement cellar pantry, clearing out old dresses of my Mom's from the '80s when I found a big brown envelope tucked on one of the shelves. I opened it cautiously in case any brown recluse spiders decided to wiggle out. What I found inside shocked me to the bone.

It was every letter I had ever written to Trudy. All of the cards I sent her, all of the stickers, the stationery sets. And taped to one letter, the little pink stone ring I had sent her.

"Dad!" I marched up to my father, sitting in a sea of paperwork himself and threw the envelope at him, "What the HELL is this?"

"Watch your language." He replied and looked inside of the envelope, "Oh boy. Oh boy." He started to laugh, heaving and gasping like a beached whale.

"Why are you laughing?" I shouted, "I wrote those letters to Trudy and you never mailed them? What's going on, I need to know right now!"

My Dad calmed down from laughing and finally gasped out, "Oh Heather. Honey. Trudy isn't real."

"WHAT??" Already a high-strung person, I thought my head was going to skyrocket off of my body. I started to cry a little bit. How does a person sit there and tell their only daughter that their best friend wasn't real? I really needed to be sitting down for this, but I continued to stand, knees close to buckling.

Then he looked at me and sighed, "Your mother and I were worried about you. You know, not making friends in school. So we thought this would be a good idea for you. Plus it improved your reading and writing abilities."

I looked at the floor trying not to break down into full-fledged sobbing. He did have a point though, in 4th grade my cursive was immaculate and close to calligraphy.

"I missed you too." He continued, "I was always at work and didn't get to spend much time with you. So I just wanted to know what you were up to and how you were doing. I got the cards and stickers from a specialty shop. Decided on Moustershire because they said so on the back. And I did always like the name Trudy."

He looked so earnest sitting there. Everything fell into place suddenly. The yellow paper the letters were written on came from his legal pad at work. I remember one of the card shops, Botanicals on the Park, from one of our Saturday afternoon visits. He did it all for me, to keep me from being lonely, to make me happy. I didn't know that for as much as I was trying to not let time go, that someone else, several someones were trying just as hard as I was. The tears really started to flow and I just hugged him for a very long time, crying until I didn't know if it would ever stop.



To this day, I still have that entire envelope of letters along with my Moustershire cards and parchment map. They are some of the best magic I know for my life, for keeping my childhood close by even though it really wasn't so long ago.

I still envision Trudy being out there, somewhere, in the English countryside. Even if she isn't in reality, I keep her in my head, my heart, where the story isn't a story and where I can tell her memories forever.

Love to you all,
Heather

The Sweetest Thing

I know what you're thinking. What is this thing of beauty before my eyes, this tasty delight that so will soothe my mind through slumber and lead me to a night so heavy with soft thoughts to cool my aching mind?

Sometimes when I describe food, I look at it from a Shakespearean standpoint.

This is the vanilla bean scone, my new favorite snack.



I've eaten them before. Vanilla bean anything is welcome in mah belly, but for some reason the scones I've had in the past haven't been good. They've been more mealy and thick with a bad bean to glaze ratio. Case in point, the Starbucks version of the vanilla bean scone. What was once a a decent scone is now rendered to yogurt covering everywhere.

How am I to compose a haiku/ode to the scone if I cannot see it? If the yogurt has coated it to be unrecognizable?

On Saturday, I was fiddling around with some Funfetti cookie ingredients at Albertsons. Sometimes I think I can bake. Most of the time I bypass the aisle of cooking oils and mixes because it's like that time in grade school when I decided to get into art and bought over $40 of craft supplies and did absolutely nothing with them but stare at how attractive the supplies were in their packaging. These cooking supplies are the same thing. They'll look nice in the fridge, but will I bake? Maybe. Possibly. Probably? Hardly. My handheld shopping cart held some eggs, Funfetti mix, and a new frosting tube from Pillsbury that sold me, like all Pillsbury items, simply by including a tiny picture of Poppin Fresh on the packaging. Then I passed through the bakery to get to the cash registers (a better alternative to passing through the booze aisle and attempting to explain to my cashier why I was, yet again, buying champagne at 11am) and out of habit checked out the scone selection. It was the usual uninspiring group of coconut (why. why was this here.) and blueberry and hold up. Vanilla bean with yogurt drizzling.

I picked up the container and examined the scones up close. They were lightly drizzled, not coated. Fresh until April 8th. Prominent bean specks within vision.

MINE.

Did I just get eerily territorial with scones? Of course. I'm usually like this with cookies only (get away! just kidding I share...sometimes), but I got home and bit into the first moist and ultra-soft scone and tasted no mealiness, no overwhelming chewing to get to the good part. All I could taste was the sweetness, the wholeness of the scone.

The container, loaded with hmm, 20 scones?

Empty the next day.



Observe, the most important property of the vanilla bean scone. Often the most overlooked part in the quest to coat the sucker with icing. Nay I say, put in the vanilla beans liberally and freely. Don't be afraid of the goodness that they offer. Embrace it.

Right here is when I would insert a recipe for these scones, but c'mon. I'm not a cooking blog. You saw what I did up there. When faced with some delicious pre-made confection from the bakery department at a chain grocery store, I went for it and dropped all of my planned baking ingredients in the process. No true chef does that.

Or do they? I swear, these scones have the power to shift mindsets.



Coated with icing
Cool vanilla bean temptress
You mmmmake me happppy.

-haiku to the vanilla bean scone, with the last line written as a nod to Ben Stiller's Simple Jack in Tropic Thunder.

I am the crazy scone lady.

Love to you all,
Heather

The Final Countdown

I woke up this morning, after having a very peaceful dream to the sounds of the birds outside of my window chirping away. I smiled, sat up and stretched in bed, drew my legs in close to me in their peach colored pajamas, and caught a glimpse of the mirrored closet reflecting me and the view from outside of my window. Blue skies, few clouds, sunlight. I got out of bed and threw open the window and let the sunlight and warmth in to bathe in its beauty.

It was 8:30am. I just quit my job yesterday. I start a new one on Monday.

Throughout a person's lifetime, it is said that we will transition through seven to 10 career position changes, something I'm already well on my way to achieving. When people ask me where I will be in five years, I shrug and smile. I stopped planning out my life after I graduated from college. Prior to that, I knew everything. I knew what I would be doing from the moment I woke up to the last hour before I went to bed. I liked to have a routine and a plan, with goals in the future and steps set to achieving them. School set a nice confine to life and allowed me to live within a time frame of predictability. There weren't many surprises and when they did happen, it threw my schedule into a crux and taught me how to adapt to change, even if I didn't like it.

When I think about my future, I see writing. I see long hours hunched over my computer, typing furiously and gazing out the window with a never ending playlist in the background. I see myself traveling to new cities, exploring the landscape and the world around me with all five of my senses. I see myself laughing mostly, spending time with good friends and family. These are really the only glimpses into my future I get. I'm not the kind of girl who is aspiring to be chained to one place for too long, looking for a husband, children, a home. The only room in the house I see myself really giving great thought to is the closet and just how many closets I can find that hold my clothes! I've always intended to live out of a series of suitcases and be forever on the journey to finding all of the puzzle pieces that make up the girl I am. That, and make out with pretty boys, but who doesn't want to do that in their lifetime?

My roommate referred to me once as "untethered Heather." There's so much truth in that. My future is bright with the written word and shine of a glitzy party dress, but while I see that, I also see how very passionate I am for one day being able to create scholarships in colleges, this dream I have of creating a chain of bookstores modeled after one I used to go to as a child, and to be influential in supporting non-profit causes for children. It has always been my firmest belief to keep both style and substance hand in hand with the work I do. If I'm going to change the world, the change will be to better the lives of others while keeping in tune with creating aesthetically pleasing environments for others as well as myself. One cannot exist without the other. You can't be all work and no play. It leads you to the story of how I quit my job that I'm about to tell you.



It needs to be noted that my tolerance level for bullshit is exceedingly higher than most. I also tend to handle my anger differently than most people do. I've dealt with numerous unfair and outrageous situations and have often been a changed person afterward, more wary and careful to guard myself. All in all, I want to believe in the good, the kindness of people, but I've also known that some people just aren't capable of it. When I'm mad, I won't say it. I tend to look too nicely dressed and just smile at people. After someone yells at me, something begins to snap in my mind and while I won't lash out at that moment, I'm gearing up for a retort in the future. Sometimes you have to pick and choose your battles wisely to leave the right imprint upon that person to never, ever mess with you again.

For the last nine months, the job I had was my battle. My copywriter position. I had the position that advertising majors, PR graduates would easily push me out of the way for. I wrote all day long and received recognition for it. Writing for a yellow pages agency, I was able to use my versatility to translate into descriptions on any topic you could name. Locksmiths, French bistros, novelty stores? Ceiling repair, florists, escort agencies? I did it all and I did it with gusto. My work was often referred to as flawless by the upper management and I was determined to stay one year to get the experience I needed to move on to a bigger company (this one was too small to advance in).

What ended everything for me would ultimately be the upper management. It was the age-old case of CEO's who were all for one and one alone with little to no perks given to the employees. Nobody likes to see this written, no company wants to see their former associate trash them on the internet, but damnit it needs to be said and hey, at least I'm not so spiteful to include their name. Everyone in upper management with that company, from the president to the thorn in my side office manager, was on a power trip 24/7 with no end in sight. They would praise your writing one minute and scream at you to stop talking or else you could see yourself out of the door the next. There was never a "good day", only days where you wondered if the next one was your last. In that way that art imitates life, my life began to disturbingly resemble the film Sucker Punch, in which I was trapped within an awful reality and needed to escape inside of my head to better places, daydream myself somewhere nice to avoid where I was and getting dragged into that damn office where I would have to answer some inane question over a spreadsheet that we already went over four times.

I knew things were ending in December when my supervisor, who is one of my closest friends, quit because she was so unhappy. When she quit, the wife of my boss who also serves as the HR head actually told her that they normally wish people good luck when they leave, but in her case they weren't going to. My hatred for my bosses only grew seismically after this-and not just because at the time they had moved my desk to the corner of the office, alone and cut off from everyone else. All I did was talk. I get it when you talk too much and can't get any work completed, then yes, you need to scale back and focus on your task at hand. But when you get all of your work done on time and are just asking your supervisor how their weekend was and boom! The office manager runs out and bitches at you to be quiet. They moved my desk into the corner "to free up some space" but all of the girls knew it was to separate us. That day was the first, and luckily the last, that I went into the bathroom to cry because I knew it was all downhill from there. I was being punished as though I was in first grade. If wearing hats was allowed, I would surely be slapped with a dunce cap. But I knew better now. Through my tears, I knew they weren't going to get away with this.

I would not go down without a fight.



The endless list of things you couldn't do there was staggering. You couldn't eat at your desk. You couldn't wear sleeveless tops, open toed shoes, hats. You were not allowed to go online to check your email or even upload a picture for your computer desktop. You weren't allowed to talk to your coworkers, about anything. No one in the copywriter department was allowed to take a lunch break together. The bagels ordered on Tuesdays for the department were inexplicably stripped from us by the boss' wife. It was, as I put it in a rather un-PC way, turning into a concentration camp run by a bunch of Jews (the bosses were Jewish).

For the rest of December, I took action into my own hands in the isolated corner of the office, far from my former department. I began to work harder than ever while writing and disappeared into my own mind in a fantastic fantasyland where I was a superhero and flying at breakneck speed in the air, where I was on a plane flying to a new place, where I was laughing and free. I had some fairly regular fantasies swim in my head during that time, some of which were old memories I would rehash. Some of my fantasy sessions included being in and exploring London and various other countries, returning to the winding streets of San Francisco and imagining the life I could have had there that I gave up last May, the thought of seeing my family again (its been two years since we last were all together), and this last one is terribly tragic, but on occasion I would envision my ex-boyfriend from college and I getting back together. Very rarely still, I would even have the Cinderella fantasy that he would magically come bursting through the front door and save me. I used to have this thought about other friends of mine, that somehow they would be able to feel my pain and come find me to save me from this room, with no windows and utter silence for nine hours a day with only the sounds of my white trash office manager, bragging on the phone to clients that she was "seven years sober" and who would casually tell everyone in the lunch room about how she was once arrested for grand theft.

The thing about fantasies and daydreams is that no matter what, they end and your reverie is shattered by the reality all around you. My reality began to change in January when I felt it begin to fall apart all around me. My former roommate quit her job out of the blue in February and declared she would move out, barely giving me and my other roommate time to find a new roommate for our apartment even though she was supposed to find us someone. I began to apply nonstop for new jobs, everywhere and anywhere I could. No time zone could get me out of that hell fast enough and while I looked for a new job, we found a new roommate after countless horrendous interviews with potential girls who were just not right to live with.

You can fight or flight in these situations and while curling up in a ball in your bed is easier, while grief will invade your spirit and suck you free of joy, while you can hope that someone will rescue you, the only thing you can do for yourself is fight. Fight for your dreams, your ambitions and goals, remain optimistic, and never let go. No one will come to you, no one will fight your battle in your place. EVERYONE struggles and hurts and my pain can hardly be compared to the pain of others so I had to keep everything in perspective and live as carefully as possible. Careful to be ready for anything to change in a moment's notice. In my case I could have been gone (literally) from my beautiful apartment and on a plane home to my parent's house before I knew it.

You have to know when your time is up and when it all comes to a head, just what you will do. When the last straw has been broken and when you are no longer skating on thin ice, but drowning in it.

My time came to a head one week ago.



The final two weeks prior to my leaving the company were marked by a series of events. My current supervisor quit, leaving me next to take the seat that four people quit in the span of one year. That evens out to a 3 month longevity, ironically enough the same amount of time before my lease on the apartment would be up. So I could be miserable for 3 months and get rewarded with a resignation or a potential firing. Let it be known, upon hearing that my supervisor was resigning, I mildly considering quitting. I didn't though. My two roommates were the reason I stayed because I loved and cared for them too much to put them, and in the case of me and my other roomie who had just been down that road, through the anxiety and hell of breaking the lease.

The next series of events were my parade of job interviews, oh excuse me, my sick days. In the span of two weeks, I went on four job interviews. That is A LOT in this economy and for each one, I wore my best suit, nicest Calvin Klein heels, and brought in various portfolios and resumes of my work in, determined to wow them over. There is a point in the interview process where you can kind of tell if you're connecting with the people you're speaking with and in my case, I watched three interviews go up in flames despite my best attempts to get the interviewers to smile and laugh and you know, display human emotion. These people literally had no idea just how much they could have saved me from drowning in my reality, but in perspective, who's to say that their "saving me" would have led to a better life? I like to think that by not getting those jobs, it was always for the best.

The last interview last Friday went wonderfully well and I left it feeling very hopeful, with little worries built up that I would not get the position. Because even if I didn't, I accepted early on that everything would be okay. How, I didn't know, but I'd do everything I could to make it better. Thank God for the girls I worked with in my department. They were my sanity, my saving grace. They still are. Something brought us together and I know in my heart it was for the best. There were also five of us altogether, just like in Sucker Punch. Life imitating art once more. Jeez, I need to stop comparing my life to the movies so much.

The catalyst that set everything into motion for my departure occurred before the final interview in the foursome. My former desk in the corner had been restored to a new room, next to a window where I sat with two of my copywriter friends in front of the CEO's office, where the door was always open. The desk was restored in February and sitting with these two girls allowed for me to begin testing a little...something. A trick up my sleeve. My nickname at home used to be "The Instigator" because I enjoyed bringing up topics nobody enjoyed discussing because of bad memories. I also have a terrible habit of laughing when people get into arguments. You can trace this to my early childhood where my parents would find me at their first apartment, pressed up against the wall, chuckling at a fight between the couple next door like it was an episode of The Simpsons.

I began to test out just how much I could get away with talking. Each day, I would be sure to say a few extra sentences, raise my voice a bit louder, with the other girls encouraged to follow suit. I'm a fairly quiet person in general, but this rule, this lack of zero communication allowed, for a former communications major, this put me over the edge. What stemmed from this were the best conversations of your life, the ones you'll remember when your old and gray, because they were from girls fresh from college who didn't mind discussing everything and then some under the sun. We were the left side of the office, the more progressive side that could discuss Russian dynasties, viral Youtube videos on bedroom intruders and leprechauns that "coulda been a crackhead", serial killers, liberal drinking habits, and Katy Perry's tits all in stride. Anything goes and it did, growing all the more louder and louder with every passing day. We all did our work and well so there was no argument for us to not talk if it led to getting everything done in time.

The day my boss broke the final straw, I was wearing my hair in pigtails a la Babydoll in Sucker Punch (consider this the Easter egg of my post) and was excited for the movie to be released that Friday (same day as my final interview). The last words I spoke before the hammer fell were to my coworker, quoting a line from Half-Baked when Dave Chappelle mentions that he's "in custodial management, but a janitor if you want to be an ass about it."

"Heather!" My boss' voice boomed behind me and I turned around in my swivel chair, a half-smile on my face lingering still as he shouted, "You are no longer allowed to talk here! Not before or during work or else you and the rest of you girls," he nodded to the girls sitting around me, "are dismissed and can go walk out the door. No. More. Talking!"

Then my raging bitch of an office manager came right up behind him and announced, "No more talking ladies or you're out." She walked out of the room behind him.

My coworkers and I were unable to speak, we were that much in shock. My friend, A, sitting on my left raised one trembling middle finger to the wall where my bosses had just left.

I saw red for the next three hours until I excused myself to go to the bathroom where I sat on the floor, unable to cry, only able to fight and dig myself the fuck out of this job. I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror, where a pale face with blue eyes and red lipstick stared back. She was set. She was determined. She would leave and go somewhere better, where the pay was good, the people could talk, and hats could be freely worn.

I left the bathroom and passed my office manager in the hallway, waiting to use it after me. The look we gave each other was one I will never forget. Worse than looking at a stranger, it was a look empty of every emotion and of being human. The end was fast approaching and we both knew it would be me leaving next, by either getting hired somewhere else, quitting, or getting fired. She would lick the boots of the CEO and his wife if it ensured that she could stay because her employment life was over. 35, locked into a family, and with a criminal record. No matter where I went or the girl I became, I would be free because I would never choose to put myself through illegal activity, even if I could never handle the reality in front of me. That simply isn't how I was raised. I was taught to believe in integrity, honesty, hard work, and never resorting to becoming a second rate version of myself.



After the interview on Friday, I didn't expect to hear back until Wednesday and sat on Monday with the phone in my lap, tucked underneath my skirt so my bosses wouldn't see. (They can't tell me to lift my skirt, a big plus in keeping the phone safe.) I felt the phone begin to vibrate and saw the number for the company appear on the screen. I rushed out of the door and walked down the corridor, closer to the light after the last rainy weekend. Come to the light. So I did and heard on the other end of the phone that yes, I did get the position. Yes, they would pay me what I wanted and yes, I could start on Monday. And most importantly, yes, they were excited to work with me. Just as much as I was with them to manage their social networking process, my new position.

My coworker D was the first to find out because she was just coming out to go to the bathroom when I got off of the phone. "I GOT THE JOB!!" I screamed, delirious with joy and ran to hug her, as she was equally overjoyed to hear the news. I was done. DONE WITH THIS COMPANY FOREVER. The relief and the sudden rush of loads of endorphins overflowed within me until it felt like I might drop from exhaustion right on the spot.

I went back in and told the girls immediately who were all beyond excited for and with me. My office manager, She Who Cannot Keep Her Nose Out of Things Not Her Business, came out and critically viewed me up and down, "What's going on? Why are you smiling so much?"

I grinned extra wide at her, neatly smoothed my skirt, and looked her dead in the eye:

"I'm resigning."

Oh, the look on that woman's face was priceless. Especially since this resignation came one week after my supervisor's. Hehe. HA HA!!! Suck on that, bitchface!

The next day I came in, dropped off my resignation letter to my bosses, ignored their begging me to stay because it was too little, too late (and boy did they beg, those assholes who nearly fired me the week before BEGGED me to reconsider staying in that hellhole), and kept my final day rocking with a sweet playlist of tunes all morning and afternoon.

And I did it all in cherry red high heels.

Cheers to my new job and all those fleeing their awful ones!

Love to you all,
Heather

Closing Your Eyes and Opening Your Mind

It's been quite some time since I last wrote a film review, but for Sucker Punch, the apple of my eye for give or take 6+ months, I'm ready and more than willing to write one.

The last time I was this excited for a movie, conveniently enough, was for director Zack Snyder's Watchmen adaptation, of which I am a huge fan of the comic book. Snyder is gifted with a stylized eye for creating gorgeous backdrops with which one can have a particularly kick-ass fight scene, a sense of staying as faithful to the book's vision as he can, and for giving us beautiful people to look at and in the case of 300, sculpted abs that would make even the biggest exercise buffs pinch themselves and demand more gym time.

Sucker Punch is different in the sense that it isn't based on any comic book adaptation, but rather an idea Snyder had spent the better part of 10 years working on. Originality in Hollywood is becoming a vastly unheard of thing and with bated breath I watched the teaser trailer, the full-length trailer, and followed the media circuit by extensively researching every aspect of the film I could, falling deeper and deeper in love with the storyline: Babydoll, a young girl, is sent to a mental institution by her evil stepfather after the death of her mother. The institution is terrifyingly bleak with no hope for escape and the promise of a lobotomy coming her way. In a manner akin to Inception's "dream within a dream", Babydoll must escape her reality by fantasizing that the institution is a brothel nightclub and further from that, a video game world where she can destroy her demons to receive her freedom.

With every photo of a costume piece donned by Babydoll and her girls, the addition of Jon Hamm in the cast, and the Sucker Punch book loaded with illustrations of set designs I poured over at Barnes and Noble, I felt my excitement building to a boiling point. I was setting myself up to be amazed by this film and trusted that it would be just as strong and tough as it promised me.



*Warning: Spoilers Ahead*

The biggest fault of Sucker Punch is that it is rated PG-13, instead of R as I had been long under the impression it would be. Prior to changing the rating, the film would have been undoubtedly much more gorier and bloodier and would have contained more scenes from the brothel of the girls dancing in their scantily-clad costumes (which having seen the pictures, I can confirm they were amazing). But the biggest downer for me was hearing that they cut the sex scene between Jon Hamm and Emily Browning; Babydoll and her client the High Roller who after exchanging money with the nightclub owner Blue, would take Babydoll's last shred of innocence from her. There was also supposed to be another rape scene, or at least a few implied ones between Babydoll and Blue as well, but sliding into the PG-13 rating cut all of this out and left it for the director's cut DVD.

I know when I say it's a downer for a rape or sex scene to be cut from a film I'm setting the feminist movement back about 40 years, but for Sucker Punch I believe that keeping it would have been necessary to the tone of the film as a whole. Babydoll's future, and the future of her friends, in every reality except for the bad guy video game slaying world, is so bleak and hopeless that even as a viewer you know there will be no happy ending. Even when you do applaud the girls for the few upper hands in the situation they receive, you know deep down that for all of them to survive will be impossible. You keep hoping though, that even in the darkest of days, they will be triumphant and Snyder is usually skilled at darkening the world to the point where you cannot imagine it getting worse. If he had kept the scenes and left the rating at R, I can imagine the film being all the better for it, but since the scenes were cut, it left the movie feeling choppy and with questions unanswered at certain points. Also, early on in the film they make a point to note that Babydoll is 20, which leads me to further push for these scenes to have been included since she is clearly over 18.



Within the first 10 minutes of the film, you meet Babydoll, played by Emily Browning who creates the ultimate in fanboy quivering and pretty China doll fantasies. Babydoll's mother has just died and her death leaves Babydoll and her sister to live with her stepfather who is sure he has received the estate in the will and is shocked to find out that all has been left to the girls. He goes to Babydoll's room to undoubtedly rape and kill her, but she fights him off and he locks her in her room to advance on her little sister instead. Babydoll escapes out the window and reenters the house with a gun to shoot him, but accidentally winds up killing her sister instead and runs away to her mother's grave. The police arrive, with her stepfather spinning tales that she is crazy and with the gentle prick of a needle, a dazed Babydoll winds up at the mental asylum owned and run by Blue Jones (a wonderfully creepy Oscar Issac). The girls at the institution act out their lives to the on-site therapist Dr. Gorski (Carla Gugino, in a series of to-die-for ensembles) but its all certain that nothing will save them in the long run.

Babydoll then falls into the fantasy of imagining the institute as a burlesque house where she meets sisters Rocket (Jena Malone) and Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung) who are "the main attraction." They dance for gentlemen clients, as taught by Gorski, who now plays the resident dance instructor, and ensure that the clients get their happy endings, so Blue gets his money and can keep running the place. When Babydoll dances, she closes her eyes and falls into the last world, a place where she is fighting off her demons with the help of the Wise Man who instructs her that in order to be free, she will need a map, fire, a knife, a key, and one last mystery object.



Using this bit of information, Babydoll tells the girls in the burlesque fantasy world that she will escape and though Sweet Pea is reluctant, they all agree to come along and help her. Babydoll is apparently an extremely titillating dancer (you never actually see her dance but it is described as "raw" with lots of "moaning and gyrating") so while she dances, the men are mesmerized and the girls run around collecting their objects, a plan that at first suspends your disbelief that these girls could find everything they need in such a heavily-armed place, but then everything comes crashing down when the girls work to get the knife from the chef.



Meanwhile, during Babydoll's dance sequences, she and the girls fight zombie SS officers, dragons in medieval times, and robots on trains with bombs as led by the Wise Man. These sequences are never boring and extremely intense, making the film stronger for it. When things begin to take a turn for the worse in this world, it is reflected in the nightclub world. In reality, Babydoll's lobotomy comes in 5 days from the doctor, and in the burlesque peep show world, it comes in the High Roller as her first client in 5 days. Yet despite these worries, there is really no sense of impending danger, no frantic rush to get the items in time, and no real sense of time in general. When Babydoll near the end of the movie finally figures out what the 5th item on the list is, I guarantee you nobody was shocked to find it out. In fact, I myself kept waiting for the swelling of some sort of friendship-themed music to start up...which lo and behold, it did.



While I enjoyed the character of Babydoll very much and also the characters of Gorski and Blue who turn out to be more than they both seem, I didn't really care for the other girls in her entourage. Sweet Pea (Cornish) has the most defined personality because she initially doesn't want to fight to leave and considers the entire plan a wash, but even then she's dull and doesn't do much outside of look after her sister (which even then she doesn't do well, ahem the scene with the cook and the chocolate). Rocket, Blondie, and Amber are all about as one-dimensional as they come. Even the High Roller, thanks to all of the scenes cut out, leaves Jon Hamm with nothing to do beyond look resplendent in a white suit. Frankly speaking, if you work at a brothel and your first client is a guy as attractive and suave as the Hamm is, you better count and thank your lucky stars that he's going to be the first guy to deflower you.



While it's worth the viewing in theatres, I prefer my Zack Snyder films to be gritty and raw and will be much more fulfilled by the director's cut rated R edition he plans to release. Only then do I believe that the film's tagline of "You Will Be Unprepared" will ring true for me.

Love to you all,
Heather