Echo

There’s been an arrest made in the JonBenet Ramsey case. Here is the suspect’s online teaching resume that I found. It’s kind of creepy to have a picture of the girl up on my homepage, staring out at me whenever I open up a browser. I wonder if the millions who watched Little Miss Sunshine in the last few weeks also secretly thought about JonBenet during the creepy beauty pageant scenes, like I did. Maybe it’s the power of things being on the verge of the collective conscious. Regardless, the whole situation was strange and tragic, and I just hope that this new development will give the family some closure.

I can’t believe that man has looked the same for the last 20 years.

Do you ever have dreams so vivid that years later, you can still look back as if they were memories and say, “Remember that? That was a cool dream.” I have a lot of dreams where I’ve moved into a new house and it’s huge with new secret rooms that I continually discover. Sometimes I’ll be driving and I’ll remember one of those dream houses and think, yeah, that was a great one…I wish I really owned that house. The ones that overlooked the ocean were the ones that still make me happy to remember.

I had a dream the night before last where I was competing in a stupid radio contest. It was like a potato sack race or something, but when I won, the prize turned out to be a one-bedroom condo. It wasn’t a great condo–it was an apartment building conversion and the scaffolding was still up outside for the remodeling; I figured its value was around 300K (inflated LA real estate value so it wasn’t anything grand). I kept gushing to anyone who would listen though, that I had been trying to save money to buy my brother a little condo close to me so he could be close and somewhat independent, and all of a sudden my dream had come true earlier than I thought it would. I was so unbelievably happy. Like I said, it wasn’t that nice of a place, but it was a place that fulfilled a major goal of mine and I was so happy that I could do this and have my brother close by that I seriously wouldn’t stop gushing. But then, there was this huge earthquake. I stood in the front doorway which was really solid, and I watched the scaffolding outside crumble. I realized my mom and my brother were in the back of the building and I didn’t know if the building would fall around them. I was terrified for a second, but then I remembered that I had control of the dream. It was weird because I was conscious of a choice–I could either turn this scenario tragic so I could experience the emotions of loss, or I could play it safe and erase the earthquake. I decided to erase the earthquake, but a part of me was very aware that I had cheated at something.

Do you ever get so devastated in a dream that you start sobbing so hard that you’re sobbing in real life? And when you wake up, it’s still heavy around you like ghosts crowded in that haven’t completely retreated back into their own dimension? I have those sometimes, too. As awful as the feeling is, it’s a high, the relief you feel when you realize all that sadness was part of a dream and that everything in reality is still intact. I guess it’s human…we all want to get close to death and devastation in order to experience it, but then also have the safety and high of a resurrection that allows us to truly feel blessed and alive, as exemplified by our search for heightened but controlled “near death” experiences such as roller coasters, skydiving, etc. I am terrified though, that these dreams will make me soft. That a day will come when it’s not a dream and the reality I wake up to is tragic, and that will be something I can’t change no matter how strong my will or determination.

I am and always will be terrified of when the phone rings in the middle of the night.

Appreciate your families, people, whether they are by blood or by companionship or by mutual positive regard. Because really, after all things trivial that make us anxious, sad, angry, jealous, irritated or resentful are overshadowed by something bigger, what is stronger or more valuable than the people you love and who love you? When you read about someone being murdered at random in the street and the only thing the devastated parents can say is, “I just wish I had given her a big hug before she had walked out that door,” at the end of the day, maybe that is the saddest, most devastating hindsight of all.

It’s That Time! The Time to See Who Got Fat.

Last week I got an email announcing that they’ve set a date for my ten year high school reunion. Now, this has always been the big young-adult milestone, where the successes are separated from the failures, where the millionaires are separated from the gas station attendants, where the future productive citizens of America are separated from the poster children of coulda-woulda-shoulda abortions. No, not really. But it is a opportunity to see who got fat.

I’ve always set my standards low. Yeah, I would have liked to have sold a script to a studio at this point, or be able to say that my next movie will star Johnny Depp or Julia Roberts or at the VERY least, Jessica Alba. I guess I can say I’ve written and directed things that have won awards and I did go to Sundance that one year for a tangential festival so things are slowly and steadily moving along, but the only true goal I set was just that I didn’t want to get fat by the time that 10 year mark rolls around.

During my first year in Los Angeles straight out of college, I ran into a high school classmate who was living out in LA. She had some cosmetic work done and was sporting contacts, a fashionable haircut and a wardrobe of revealing, sex-kitten clothes, but there was something very demanding about her personality that wasn’t there when we were in high school, like a desperate need to be acknowledged in a very specific way. I hung out with her out of sheer not knowing enough people in LA to do otherwise, and was soon overwhelmed by the chip on her shoulder that had visualized some master plan that all culminated SPECIFICALLY at our 10 year reunion. She claimed that she hated high school and all the people in it, and she had done all this work on herself because planned to go back to our 10 year reunion hot and vindictive. Keep in mind, this was in 1999. Now, I hated high school myself and never felt at home with the whole lot. I did hope to be successful enough or at least happy enough in my own life 10 years from our graduation date to not be bothered with what those people from my little hick town thought, but I sure didn’t have a focused 10 year plan for it. In fact, it sounded a little crazy to me. I looked at her and at her unspoken but open invitation to assure her that she was indeed hot and would blow people from our high school away in 2006, but in my eyes, she just looked like someone who had gotten contacts, cosmetic work, a new wardrobe and a newfound sense of determination and resentment, all of which just accentuated her insecurity and need to “show up” people who probably didn’t care in the first place. Myself, I just hoped I wouldn’t be fat.

I’m excited about the reunion because I’m always curious about the life experiences of people, and I want to see people and see where their life journeys are taking them. The advent of Myspace has done wonders for my curiosity as I can browse my high school, see how people have grown up, what their children look like, and theorize their contentment with their lives by the syntax of their profiles. But ultimately, I wonder if this experience is going to be one big dick measuring contest, where everyone is out to show how much more successful they are or how much more successful they can convince people they are, and we realize that no one was really friends with anyone else outside of wanting to keep their enemies (aka competitors) close. I hope that’s not the case. I hear 20 year reunions are much more civil and enjoyable in the intended atmosphere of reunions. I hope mine will be like Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion where old friends are reunited and it’s a joy to see where life has taken everyone within their evolution. Where I can be awarded for most successful in my class despite losing my top, where I can tell those mean girls from school that I hope their babies look like monkeys, where some nerd who was secretly in love with me will arrive a billionaire, and will whisk me (and Reggie) off in his private helicopter en route to funding our little boutique clothing store on Rodeo. I hope that billionaire ex-high schoolmate doesn’t mind foursomes, because I’m sure Digit Whit will be involved as well. All that would be really cool, especially if there’s also a cameo by Janeane Garafalo. But at the very least, between now and November 25, I just hope I don’t get fat.

In other news, Reggie is shooting a commercial with Leslie Nielson of Naked Gun fame tomorrow. I’m sure he’s going to have a full day of shooting and fart jokes.

There are only 2.5 reasons I watch the show Psych…for the 1.5 times it makes me chuckle slightly during each episode, and because this guy’s hot. He’s a big boy next door in uniform..you have to see him on the show. I wish I had skin like his.

I’m not much of a beach person. In fact, in the 6 years I’ve been living in Los Angeles, I can count the number of times I’ve been to the beach on two hands. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I have low tolerance of heat and sun, but also because I get a little OCD about being sticky or dirty, meaning that wet sand drives me crazy. However, I *love* napping. Last week, someone finally explained to me that people don’t go to beaches because they enjoy being hot and getting sunburnt…they aim for a nice (not overly hot) day with a cool breeze and the sun shining down to nap in peace, sometimes getting wet in the ocean and letting the sun dry them off. I realized that I may have completely missed the point of the beach, particularly the opportunity to nap with the sound of the ocean in the background, so I thought I would give it another try.

I set out for the beach on Sunday morning, but since Reggie wanted me to drop by Houston’s for lunch, I decided to stay close to Santa Monica. I walked to the Pier, aiming for the crowded area just north of it that people seemed to enjoy. Right off the pier in the sand were rows and rows of small wooden crosses. On closer inspection, it was the Arlington West Memorial for the soldiers who have been killed in Iraq. There are thousands of crosses, some with pictures and handwritten notes from friends and family members. As you approach the memorial, there are large boards displaying pictures of the thousands of soldiers killed, like a massive laid-out yearbook. The sheer number of them is staggering, and the fact that some of them looked like they should have still been in high school was devastating. As I was looking out at the symbolic cemetary, a couple of Chinese tourists walked up next to me. One girl asked the other one in Chinese why the U.S. was fighting in this war. The other girl said, “It’s what they’re always doing. They like to fight wars.” The first girl asked, “Why do they keep fighting even when they can’t win. They just send all these people to die.” The other girl answered, “It’s in their nature. It doesn’t make any sense.”

On the left are postings of articles and pictures of soldiers who have been wounded. They say that they ship in the wounded soldiers in the cover of night, housing them in VA hospitals that are off limits to media. There are pictures of young men with missing arms and legs and eyes…one guy had burn marks on his face that so badly disfigured him, you couldn’t tell his age or ethnicity. Many of the pictures were accompanied by text detailing the soldier and his story. One soldier who lost a hand and suffered damage to his legs, describes a smoking object flying into his Humvee as he sat in the passenger seat. The object bounced off the windshield and landed on the driver side. Seeing that it was a live grenade, he picked it up to throw it back out of the window, but it slipped out of his hand and fell onto the floor between his legs. He picked it up again and everything disintegrated into a mist of blood. No one was killed by the grenade explosion so basically this guy saved everyone’s life, but he still has recurring nightmares of that moment, knowing that if he hadn’t dropped the grenade, he would still have his hand. I spent a good hour at the memorial reading the stories and looking at pictures including photos of devastated Iraqi’s, and when you see this kind of pain and devastation on individual, human levels, it’s hard to think that this level of violence makes any sense.

I ventured past the memorial to be reminded of one negative about the beach when the sun’s out–hot sand. I found a spot next to people I deemed superficially least likely to steal my things (an English woman wearing a straw hat and sun dress, an actress type listening to her iPod and a Hispanic family with small, adorable children) and set up camp. Since it was a hot day, wanted to go out into the water first so that the heat wouldn’t be intolerable. The water was about knee high for yards so I slowly waded out, only to find that the waves were deceptively strong with a monster one quickly going over my head and tumbling me under water. I surfaced to find myself halfway back to land in shallow water, with my nipple displayed for man, woman and child to see. (note to self: wear a more vigilant bikini if I have plans to play in the water).

I headed back to my towel and laid out, really enjoying the hot sun against the cool water against my skin. The sound of the ocean is really peaceful and I like falling asleep with people around…it feels cozy. I napped on and off until a group of Hispanic boys about 16 to 18 woke me up as they loudly declared that there was some girl in the water who was down for a gang bang or at least a threesome later, but one of them had to sacrifice and take her fat cousin. I listened into their negotiations (looked like their buddy they called “Midget” was gonna have to take her) and kind of wanted to wait to see who the girls were, but it was hot and I was hungry, so I took off.

It may have taken me six years, but I kind of think I can like the beach. I want to get one of those big umbrellas or tents so I don’t kill myself with a sunburn if I fall asleep, but it’s definitely very relaxing, and interesting for people watching.

If anyone wants to see a creepy but very well-done movie, check out The Night Listener with Robin Williams, who does a great job in a non-comedic role as usual. The style is subtle and the acting is great, and the story is riveting. It’s based on a novel by Armistead Maupin. I highly recommend it. I tried to see Little Miss Sunshine on Friday, but the only seats available by the time we got there were in the front row, so it’s next on my list. If anyone’s seen it already, let me know what you think!

In more news regarding this Mel Gibson drama, Gavin de Becker (intuitive author of The Gift of Fear), is my hero. Make sure to read his letter that was a paid 2-page ad in The Hollywood Reporter responding to Endeavor agent Ari Emanual’s impulsive cry for a boycott of Mel in Hollywood.

What do you say when you call a client, only to be told that he died last year? I’ll tell you, even if you’ve never met the person, your heart just sinks. I don’t know if it’s more because you feel like such an asshole for not knowing, or the fact that this person isn’t living anymore and you’ve gone on assuming he was alive and well when he wasn’t, but the worst part of it, is that you still have to communicate the business reason of why you called despite the news. It feels incredibly insensitive. So now I’m supposed to send this woman who’s obviously a relative some product information, when I didn’t even get her email and I’m really bummed by the news and by calling a year later asking for a dead guy. How do you not feel like an asshole?