There are a hell of a lot of toddlers on this planet.

Toddlers are everywhere. They've come from all over town to Toddler Storytime here at the public library this Friday morning. On my day off today, I learn that life is much more than my shit job, my shit attitude, and the people who share my same shit predicament. On my day off today, I learn that there are a hell of a lot of toddlers on this planet, and their lives are shittier than mine.

I mean, look at them: they can't even wait in line to check out books without bursting into tears. And why? Because they can't read and have to sit helplessly through their parents' awful sing-song reading styles the way we big people have to sit through their sing-songy speeches at work. It's no wonder why I start dreaming about my biscuit-faced friends in Dr. Seuss books when our CEO gives her reports.

Toddlers are weak. They get tired after doing nothing. They can't even get through a passive hour of storytime without falling asleep and/or getting all crabby. I can kind of see where they're coming from, though: their strengths aren't played up and job satisfaction must be really low for them.

Toddler Storytime...HA. I say they need to stop resorting to these morningtime escapist fantasyland story hours and start confronting their troubled inner lives.

Sorry, you're not what I expected.

Somewhere out there beneath the pale moonlight, a man who broke my gaydar beyond repair is thinking of me and loving me tonight.

Changing careers is as easy as changing your outlook on life!

Other jobs I'm considering:

1. BBQ restaurant meat maridader: While I brush sauce onto slabs of meat in the kitchen, I'll overhear customers go, "Golly gee willikers, this is a well marinaded piece of meat!," and I'll gain satisfaction in knowing that I hadn't let an expired meat product go to waste.
2. Human burst of sunshine in subway station: In the dark tunnels of the subway station, it'll be me you approach. I'll talk to you about anything, even if you smell a little like spilled whiskey. I'm not one of those people whose heads turn away and eyes glaze over the instant you've threatened them with crazy talk. You're going to play Boggle with Jesus today? I hope you win for once.
   
3. Cactus nursery attendant: I've always loved the quiet mystery of succulents, but I have another reason for choosing this career (see comments section).
4. Office intern shutter-upper: A new line of consulting, if you will. I'll help any company return to maximum efficiency by quashing the time-consuming, question-asking spirit of the golden intern.
   

Lustful Fantasy of a Non-Profit Employee

Phillip Morris, take me away!

Disneyland is mostly right with me!

Hold my hand, morons, and I will take you on a wondrous tour revealing the hidden treasures of my recent Disneyland essay. Thank you especially, anonymous moron, for encouraging me to “plz” correct all the “errors” that I posted.

I knew that if I mentioned Hong Kong Disneyland in the title of my essay, I would surely awaken the patriotic spirit of my fellow nationals. If you thought for a second that I honestly believed the Hong Kong Disneyland’s Donald Duck waved with more genuine enthusiasm than the one born and bred in Anaheim, you’d best check yourself, you Americentric reader of titles only!

By the way the story about the Mickey ears hat was true up to the point where I said got “Kool Moe Dee” stitched on my hat. I was really "Beyonce" for a day. Dreams really do come true at Disneyland!

Now, considering the entire assessment, I only named three shits that made my personal Disneyland experience shitty:

1. It's a Small World was closed for maintenance. It's like going to a O.A.R. concert and not being able to see the band perform even though you can hear 'em in your head. Actually, O.A.R. is a really bad example for this because O.A.R. is a really bad band. I mentioned them because for years I have wanted to utter my public disdain for them for vexing mine ears at the turn of the century. The wonderful mechanical children of It's a Small World, however, may sing their glorious song to my grave. There shall be boats and moats at my funeral, but that's a blog entry for another day.
2. The PeopleMover is gone. When something dies, you grieve for it, you bastard. How do you figure I'm favoring Hong Kong Disneyland at such a sad time? How inappropriate!
3. The Submarine Voyage is also gone. Adding to insult was a five-foot "Coming Soon!" affont by a fish clown (or was it a "clown fish"?) called Nero (or was it "Nemo"?). The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables!
   

I'm excited to go here next fall: Yesterland.

I have a big heart, apparently.

Working for a not-for-profit organization means that the organization does not profit and you, the employee, profits not, as well (or at all! har har har). The other night at a benefit dinner, I encountered a couple of socially insultated engineers who were still rather unschooled about charitable organizations, one asking if we non-profiting employees received bonuses for securing extra grants. Horrified at his suggestion that we martyrs would instate a policy so virulently unethical, I warned him never to ask such an unforgivably stupid question again. I said that if he again crosses me or one of the many other saints at local chapters across the country, God would be very angry with him, because we, through our sacrifices for humankind, are dearest to Him--we, next to the trees and animals, of course. The foolish engineer became awkward, then silent. His partner, then feeling the proximity of God, remarked that "wow" I must have a big heart. I do, for without it, I am unable to forgive the founders for founding and fleeing.

Magically Delicious

More about filming on location from someone who's often finds herself on location in Downtown Los Angeles:

Usually I just want to quickly get around the production crew and be at work on time. Last Wednesday, however, I cared no longer for my job when I found myself immortal in front of a bluescreen. I had approached the area with a mental map, weaving through the extras, squeezing by the crowd at the catering van. Once free, I found myself vulnerable, but dramatically so, in front of an enormous bluescreen. I was engulfed, engulfed by pure energy. I felt like I could do anything, deliver any line, make people cry and experience all their emotions deeply--something that's quite impossible to do in this society. But because no one noticed me at first, I took off my shoes to do incredible cartwheels in front of the film crew. I kept doing these physically demanding cartwheels until someone took notice, but it was the blisters which formed on the palm of my hands--not my waning will--that finally forced me to stop. I waited patiently for the return of equilibrium, at which moment I knew I had to rediscover my shoes, the very pair I had cast off when all senses were silenced by the unstoppable force, which only the awesome spirit of drama can wield. At the office that day, everything else seemed absurd.

Earth Day!

Your Hummer may be terrorized today!

Two Miles an Hour so Everybody Sees You

Hunger roused my dormant stomach at a cruel, cruel 5:37 in the evening: I was shut inside my own car, rolling across L.A. at a pathetic 10 miles per hour, watching headlights grow bright and everything else lose form. Anyway, I was like mad jonesin' for tacos for weeks by then, so I turned off my radio, remained motionless on the 101, and said to myself, "I bet that one place is open." I wedged myself out off the Lego locked traffic to head to that one place for tacos. That one place, I discovered, was off on a family vacation. Disappointed and now feeling the sharpened pangs of my hunger, I kept driving down the avenue, hoping to find a McDonald's to ease the pain quickly and cheaply. And that was when I saw it. A TACO truck! A big, bad taco truck with little lights across the top like a semi, but smaller and filled with corn tortilla optimism. I made a sharp U-turn, pulled over, and ran up to the truck with a sack of coins in my hand. Carnitas y buche! Carnitas y buche, I demanded. The guy looked at me like he didn't know what was on the menu. What the fuck?, I thought. I looked up and around at the truck to find the name of the business. Los Cinco Puntos? El Taco Loco? Maricela's? Nothing. Suddenly it dawned on me that this wonderful taco truck was actually a useless Hummer: a big useless piece of shit with no true function on these urban streets. You want me to stop hatin' on you, Hummer owners, do you? Well start selling some carne asada!

What is love? Baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me no more...

I shake with excitement when I think of the DMV. I find I cannot get my mind off the DMV, so I take time off from work twice this week to tour the DMVs of central Los Angeles. Two DMVs in one day, in fact, a record that left me feeling proud and fulfilled by dusk when the doors shut behind me at 5:00pm. Today I returned once more, lied about needing a motorcycle endorsement on my class C license, just so that I could stand in line...and have my picture taken! Hell, it was a huge bonus for me--I wasn't even expecting it! I have to say, I was surprised by this particular DMV office, how it appeared that they actually wanted to take my picture. You would not believe the difference in photogenic quality compared to my last photo when I was broken-hearted. I mean, any cop or grocery store clerk could see that I was delighted to be at the DMV! Nowadays, few people can say that and mean it like I do. I admit, I overheard one of the clerks tell someone they were open tomorrow, a SATURDAY, so I, with purpose and vigor, failed my test. The rules state you've got three chances to pass. Look at me, making the most of it...

Sylvie Tales

Write to your local PBS station, and it might be me looking at your letter, making faces, genuine faces of astonishment:

"...all your nature shows use the word evolved continuously.
Why don't you find just one piece of evidence that supports this theory...before
deceiving all the children you pretend to love so much. Don't you think kids
would have more self esteem knowing they were created by a loving God instead of
their ancestors coming from some green slime?"

My reply:

Dear Madam,

Kids have long been deceived by vegetables that evolved just enough for biblical inculcation. Please don't hate me though; I lack self-esteem is all.

Sincerely,
Sylvia

My Favorite Link...EVER!

http://emrl.com/~dz-015/pm/pm_tron1.wav

Your Donald sucks. The one at Hong Kong Disneyland is more charismatic.

Recently, I took a trip down memory lane and ended up in Disneyland.

In line waiting for a Mickey-shaped rice crispy treat, I discovered I was within earshot of a perturbed middle-aged lady who deemed our happiest place on earth "ridiculous" because the manager of the Mad Hatter store wouldn't allow "P. Diddy" to be stitched on a mouse ears hat, as it was the name of a rapper. I went through a list of disallowed names myself before someone unwittingly stitched "Kool Moe Dee" onto my hat so pimp.

No one wanted to go on the Jungle Cruise in Adventureland. Too bad for the suckers who preferred to wait an hour to ride Space Mountain. Nothing rouses a venturesome spirit like the redolence of hot dogs coating the air as you're travelling down the dangerous Nile, shooting anything that's got eyeballs on him. That night, I dreamt of grilling franks in Africa.

Even the happiest place on earth couldn't keep me from frowning when I saw that It's a Small World was closed for maintenance. It wasn't a small world, after all: it was a shitty world, a shitty, shitty world.

Things got shittier when I saw for myself that people were no longer moved along the lines where the PeopleMover once moved. In the twenty-eight years that it provided low to moderate enjoyment to Disneyland goers, only two people died after boarding it. This was not the fault of the PeopleMover, however. This was the fault of the two people who hadn't the capacity to supplement the imaginatively open ride and therefore chose to cast themselves from the 2 mph travelling carts to extinguish their anguished boredom forevermore. I wonder if it worked.

The happiest place on earth? Barely. From the monorail above I witnessed with great horror that my beloved Submarine Voyage was no longer. Once a deep sea wonder filled with giant oysters and mythical mermaids, the space was now a parched tract, awaiting the installation of a stupid fish named Nemo, along with his wide-eyed Pixar cast of imagination destroyers.

Soles heavy, I trudged over to Star Tours, a Star Wars inspired simulated ride, which I, as a child, waited two hours in line to experience. No line this time, but I remembered the meandering path well, and it occurred to me that Tron really was a frightful movie and that Ewoks should never die under a pile of rocks when a child is watching.

On the whole, Disneyland remains pretty aight. I really like that ride where you sit on a boat going 1 mph and sail into a whale's mouth like Pinocchio.

You can hear it in your sleep too!

It's a Small World

It's a world of laughter
A world of tears
It's a world of hopes
And a world of fears
There's so much that we share
That it's time we're aware
It's a small world after all

There is just one moon
And one golden sun
And a smile means
Friendship to every one
Though the mountains divide
And the oceans are wide
It's a small world after all

It's a small world after all
It's a small world after all
It's a small world after all
It's a small, small world

Pumpkin Thoughts

People can't get enough Starbucks out here. Starbucks serves holiday-flavored drinks: eggnog, pumpkin spice, gingerbread, and my current addiction, turkey gizzard. I was a Starbucks barista for Halloween. I was not popular. I wanted to be a hackneyed pimp instead. Halloween is...tricky. Insert your laughter here. That better be genuine or else the Halloween Hag will come get you in your mother's kitchen on Thanksgiving night. You will be exposed for pumpkin hoarding. I will be the victor, somehow. Me, the victor, in my hackneyed pimp costume.

Happy Halloween!

Kids are thirsty.

Drink, my children.

Please help! (No, she's not dead.)

Recently, I purchased an oversized plush bed for my Siberian husky. After a week now, she is still sleeping on the floor. I've tried everything to get her to use this bed: put a few pieces of kibble in the middle of it, refuse food altogether until she goes on it, threaten her with the vet's office on the phone. Nothing has worked. I find her behavior tremendously disturbing. I fear that she has adopted the bed as her own child. I don't want to take the kind of action that would traumatize my dog, i.e. bag the bed and return it to Petco. How should I tell visitors that my dog has difficulty separating fact from fiction?

The English Major Writes: An Essay on "Come Sail Away" by Styx

Come Sail Away by this band Styx is a mantra about a guy’s first time sailing a majestic cruise liner across the perilous oceanic expanse. The main idea is that this cruise liner is figurative. In other words, the boat is all in the guy’s head. Another important main idea is that our protagonist undergoes all these adventures before he renounces his everyman religion to join an angelic cult.

As I stated in the introduction, the cruise liner is figurative. The way we know that is by investigating the impossible feasibility of the lines. He, the speaker, goes, “I’m sailing away.” And more importantly he goes:

Set an open course for the virgin sea
For I've got to be free
Free to face the life that's ahead of me
On board I'm the captain
So climb aboard
We'll search for tomorrow
On every shore
And I'll try, oh Lord, I'll try
To carry on
I look to the sea
Reflections in the waves spark my memory
Some happy, some sad
I think of childhood friends
And the dreams we had
We lived happily forever
So the story goes
But somehow we missed out
On the pot of gold
But we'll try best that we can to carry on
A gathering of angels appeared above our heads
They sang to us this song of hope and this is what they said
Come sail away
Come sail away
Come sail away with me
I thought that they were angels
But to my surprise
We climbed aboard their starship
And headed for the skies.

As evident, the whole thing is figurative because none of this can be possible. Also, we don’t know who he’s talking to when he beckons someone (who? me? you? us?) to climb aboard, as he is the captain, the skipper of the boat-a-rockin’. The fact that we don’t know who he’s talking to makes us come to no other conclusion than that the boat would sink if you tried to sail it. In other words, it is figurative. The speaker, or, more precisely, the singer also talks about reflections in the waves that spark his memory. It is a known fact that it is impossible for waves to reflect memories, especially because waves move really fast and no one can dictate Mother Nature’s speed. Again, figurative language infiltrating the piece.

Now that we’ve established that the piece is not literal, we can explicate the epic journey condensed in the lyrical piece. First he announces that he is sailing away and says his course is “open,” implying he is not bound by the constrictions of nautical charts, which in turn implies that his sea is indeed “virgin” because no other nautical explorers have “hit it” yet. He is optimistic about his journey, saying that he will “search for tomorrow on every shore,” which is the most poetic line of the whole work, because you can’t really see “tomorrow” as a thing you can spot on the shore with your telescope. No, you have to dream it.

Mystery unraveled. It isn’t until a few lines later that we realize who he’s asking to climb aboard and search for tomorrow: it is Jesus, for God’s sake. So he talks about how he grew up with Jesus and the other kids and had good and bad times. Suddenly, he realizes he missed the pot of gold, which shifts our attention from Jesus to leprechauns galore. Since a lot is lost through oral storytelling tradition, we will never know of the bloody battle of the sailor and the leprechauns, but we do see some deus ex machina in action: angels come to the rescue. We can surely assume that the speaker lost his faith in holiness and shunned the angels, because in the end, he renounces his everyman religion to ascend to a starship, which, by the way, is an underlying message by Styx to say that traveling by boat is out and that the Here and Now is the modern, industrialized society, where we can all travel by plane and retain our spirituality. The cult of modernity is too strong to deny.

Lyrics, deep and cruel, kinda like the sea.

Come Sail Away by Styx

I'm sailing away
Set an open course for the virgin sea
For I've got to be free
Free to face the life that's ahead of me
On board I'm the captain
So climb aboard
We'll search for tomorrow
On every shore
And I'll try, oh Lord, I'll try
To carry on
I look to the sea
Reflections in the waves spark my memory
Some happy, some sad
I think of childhood friends
And the dreams we had
We lived happily forever
So the story goes
But somehow we missed out
On the pot of gold
But we'll try best that we can to carry on
A gathering of angels appeared above our heads
They sang to us this song of hope and this is what they said
Come sail away
Come sail away
Come sail away with me
I thought that they were angels
But to my surprise
We climbed aboard their starship
And headed for the skies