Somewhere in Outer Space

In a general effort to, “get my life together,” I’ve spent the better part of the last 6-8 months searching for new gainful employment, finding new and inventive ways to stretch the same 100 pennies in one American dollar to buy me all the things I need to live in a recession, getting myself and keeping myself a new firefighting man, making Rebecca 2.0 ready and in fighting weight for a 30th birthday fast approaching through frequent and long staying trips to the gym, being the sort of dodger fan the best team in baseball deserves, and of course zestfully checking off bucket list items on my mama gena list. The mama gena list (research her if you must), when not instructing me to get a facial and get new bras, register for a intro stand up class, and convince my landlord to let me get a saint Bernard in my small one bedroom apartment I already share with two cats, is also a place I list my great writing ideas I’m certain would be the toast of the town. As such, I find little time to give blonde memoirs the tender loving care she so earnestly desires and deserves, and for that, I’m a bad blogger and I apologize to her, and to you. But if my exboyfriend’s girlfriends have time to droan on on their blog, and I have time to read it, I certainly have time to update this.

This update has zero to do with a text message I just got from a one, Erin Elizabeth Evans, of Brentwood California, with the body, “you do realize it’s been exactly 8 months today since you’ve written on blonde memoirs.”

Zilch.

I think it’s fair to say I put a little something, shall we say, of excess, in to style. It doesn’t come from nowhere. I’m a child of this city, where looking good means you have a fighting chance. My mom put a lot of stock in appearance. You would never know from that easter Kentucky derby type hat she always put me in, or the mother sister sister matching cinco de mayo outfits which we threatened to wear to her recent retirement party. You would never know from the Mervyn’s threads that followed me through my youth or the enormous head enveloping white bow bought and put on me for my 6th grade graduation.

I think if you went to my mother’s house, on any day of the week, let’s pretend and say tomorrow, and woke her up out of a dead sleep at 4am, she’d have matching pajamas with earings, a necklace, and several bracelets that she’d be more angry with you that you hadn’t complimented her on, than that you broke in to her home, and woke her up from a dead sleep. Bless her heart, but being her daughter is a lot of work, and it requires a lot of love.

It also requires a lot of funds. Funds to purchase Guess’ new hot pink pumps to round out my Barbie style portfolio. Funds to get my hair did. Funds that are absent in a global recession. Still I try and try I do, by bringing things out of retirement and matching them up with skirts and pearls that seemed unlikely pairs in fashion years before.

Today I went to the gym at lunch, like every day before it. I kept my eyes peeled on my locker and changed as quickly as my little limbs could climb out of my threads to give me the maximum hour lunch break to get my sweat on. Very uncouth to look left or right at anything except locker number 109 in front of me, as I’d expect others to give me the same respect, when something shiny, and something blue, probably old and probably borrowed, caught my focused eye. It was a skirt, and a shirt, and shoes, and while I tried not to stare, and I tried to keep focused, I tried to balance on my right foot while lacing the left, I had to cover my mouth to not blurt out, “oh no you are not wearing those things together.” “Oh and the shoes. The horror of those shoes.”

Who really had I become? Judging probably a very nice woman, huming the Monday blues in her, well, blue mismatched outfit. A nice woman trying to do her body good with a tall glass of a lunch time workout. I don’t like I judged her, but that doesn’t make that outfit ok.

I needed answers.

Around the same time my mom got inside my head with all sorts of nonsense I take to the pen and paper to illustrate, she also taught me something of value. At one point in early Rebecca-hood I had this concept that the world needed to hear every thing I thought in my head. In a loving talk, she said to me this. “Rebecca, how about whenever you have the vaguest inclination perhaps you shouldn’t say something, you have a system devised where you have to think about it a bit.” At that time I believe I was in the 3rd grade, and working on a solar system diorama in a payless shoe store shoe box, and so we decided out there in the silver Volvo on a hot valley day, when I thought of something perhaps I shouldn’t say, I’d recite first all the major planets in my head.

It was a helpful method. So helpful, I pretty much forget just about everything that wouldn’t be constructive, and much of what is.

A blonde was in the making.

If you look at me and I have a blank stare, or if I’m thinking real hard, trust I’m somewhere between Saturn and Uranus, and that mismatched outfit standing squarely to my right.