Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2011 08:45:12
From: Jill
To: Josh
I dreamt we took an elephant to Coachella…
And that you fought with my dad because, “He thinks Chelsea Handler is hot and he doesn’t like Radiohead!”
From: Josh
Sent: Monday, December 05, 2011 9:05 AM
To: Jill
Subject: RE:
That would be sweet. we could sit on top of him to see over the crowds, or we can sit under him for shade. theres lots of benefits in taking an elephant to coachella.
your dad’s a dick if he likes chelsea handler.
I locked the door behind me at 2B for the last time. Even if you put the packing aside, the process of moving is so, so awful. Changing the address on your bills, submitting a change of address to the post office, returning internet and cable equipment, letting your food supply dwindle down so as to not have to pack an ice chest that you left in your friend’s backyard anyway… Motherfather, I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy. (I’d wish far worse, natch.) But it’s over, officially and totally. Kiddo and I are jam packed TO THE GILLS, SON (sorry, Joe Rogan’s lexicon makes its way into my own sometimes) in my parents’ spare bedroom. The men in our life (Josh, Furby and Mo) have temporarily relocated to Josh’s family’s house about an hour away. Absence is making us quite fond and the like but I would give up some seriously sacred shit to wake up next to him every morning again.
It’s all for the better. To get caught up and to get ahead. We were rocking the hand-me-down chic with pride for a while but it’s high time we bought ourselves some furnishings we love and are proud of. I was mentally and emotionally finished with 2B and wished it a good riddance on the last drive out of the alley. Though on that drive, I did tell Kiddo, “I’m kind of sad.” She offered with a heavy sigh, “I’m sad I don’t have any food.”
Some pretty kickass anecdotes to living at home again are hanging with the fam and enjoying my mom and dad’s cooking. They’re a damn fine bunch of people and I’m pretty thrilled to be related to them. I’ve missed my hometown so much. There’s already been a hefty poker tournament in the backyard, many a lap swam in their pool, a jog around the quarter mile track up the street and a hike at a local park. (I am not above squealing over a cotton-tailed bunny or seven, turns out.) All of my DVDs are packed and my TV requires a variety of boxes and/or cables to work. I don’t have the patience for that so I borrow a lot of their movies and read more than I used to, which is a huge perk in itself. Face down in a good read is when I’m most at peace, mostly because everything and everyone around me seizes to exist. I could get behind this whole no television lifestyle, though I do miss all my Showtime stories.
Last week, I made the final payment on a loan that has been hanging over my head for five or six years. There is so much relief in that statement. It’s gone. Over with. DONE-ZO. This calls for a celebration, yes?
-CJ
Filed under: ~*loooove*~
From: Josh
To: Jill
Date: June 13, 2011
I want to take you to seattle aug 18-22. That ok with you?
!!!!!!!!!!!!!
-CJ
The end of a holiday weekend woes are with me, unlike the Force. I loathe the creep up to the alarm firing off after a few days of blissful late nights and later mornings.
Friday was nice, when my boss allowed us all to duck out early. I was super selfish and came home for my workout before I picked up my kid from school. I know, to hell with me. I actually doubled that workout in anticipation of All The Beer. We had some vague plan shapes that frothed over into nothing when Josh went out to finish the dragon tattoo on his arm. I hung out at home with kid, did some shopping, did some cleaning. A young gentleman got in line behind me at the grocery store with a case of beer. I told him to cut in front and he asked if I was sure. “Come on, you’re obviously going somewhere fun and I’m *sweeping gesture over the cart of lunch foods and dinner ingredients* going home.”
The thing about being home sort of alone on a Friday night is how fucking awesome it’s become. I am thrilled for those wide open weekends with few to no commitments so I be loungey and cleaney and do everything I want according to my watch.
My watch is set like that of most other Pacific time zone dwellers, so I guess I do things according to theirs too but you know.
At one point my mom called and asked what we were doing. I told her Kiddo and I were fresh off a “penis and vagina conversation*,” to which she asked what one had to do with the other. “Um… a lot?”
“Really? Penises and pajamas?”
Choke laughs, snorts and tears followed. I told her what I’d actually said, baffled that she hadn’t put it together on her own, and told Kiddo, “Grammy thought we were talking about penises and pajamas. Haha, go wipe your pajama!”
“No, YOU wipe your pajama, Mom!”
Totally had to be there. Mom got it right when she said, “Yours is the only eight-year-old that would laugh at that.”
*It’s high time she had an educated conversation about those, IMO.
Halfway through a cheap bottle of red and several Chelsea Lately episodes down, Josh came home, showered off the Bactine smell and showed me his new, raw goods. He has had the outline of a “paper cut” style dragon in need of shading on his forearm, which I fawned over and accidentally touched a few dozen times.
Then I touched his bathrobe, over his chest, and he flinched. He opened the robe to reveal a freshly shaved patch of chest with my name BLAZED across in large, fancy letters.
“Oh, you’re not fucking around, huh?”
“Nope.”
This is translated roughly to: “Oh, you’re very serious about us, huh?”
“I am.”
There’s some history here: In October of 2002, eight months after we’d met, he came home to his pregnant, sleeping girlfriend to reveal a small, printed “Jill” on his chest, with a small x dotting the ‘i.’ A few months after Kiddo was born, I took on a scripty little “Josh” on my right hip. Over the years, his little chest piece faded and faded. I asked him to get it touched up but it never happened. Queue epic breakup of 2007, after which I spent thirteen hours (in three sessions) under a needle to get a huge, colorful dragon down my ribcage to my hip, covering his name completely. HA, I scoffed. And then last summer, we got back together. He still had my name, despite having dated others in our down time. If I mentioned touching it up, he gave me that look that says, “Bitch, please. You erased me.”
A (super-cropped) glimpse of the top portion of my cover-up:
Needless to say I did not expect this huge, bold proclamation in place of his tiny, faded one. I’m still shocked when I see him shirtless. It makes me giddy.
Saturday was the day for All The Beer. My neighbor rolled his BBQ downstairs to our common courtyard/front lawnish type area and grilled up some burgers, brats and dogs. We had a number of folding chairs out under an awning filled with friendly faces. Perched next to me was my blue ice chest filled with frosty Coronas, which I sipped on for a solid seven or eight hours, in between dipping chips and smoking cigars. On every rare occasion we get this group together, we say, “Why don’t we do this more often?!” There’s no right answer. It was a really good night that even included some new faces, though I’ve forgotten the names attached to them.
At (my) of the night (11ish) (some others didn’t head home until dawn) came a text message from my friend Oscar, inviting me to a one o’clock Dodger game the next day, which I happily agreed to. Once I was jersey’d and ready that next morning, I found out we were on the FIELD. The tickets retail around $120 each and could have sold for over $200, surely. They were incredible seats, which we toasted to over and over. They were a last minute gift from a rep at our work who I will seek out and hug. I drunk-Tweet’d from said incredible seats.
There are so few things better than perfect weather at your favorite team’s stadium, cold beers and good company. When my plastic cup emptied, I spied a new one in the next cup holder. “A fresh one?!” I asked Oscar. And he said, which will stick forever, “The beer fairy came.”
The girl I’d overheard turned out to be this hilarious, super baked young girl that we laughed with as well as at for about seven innings after we’d shook hands and declared ourselves friends. That’s one of my favorite things anymore; those single serving friends you meet when you let your guard down and stop thinking the world believes you to be a freak.
And today: Kiddo went off to swim with a girlfriend and Josh and I were blessed with a sudden three hour window for an afternoon date. We loaded up on gummy type candies and hit the movie theater for Hangover 2. If you find the first one to be epically hilarious, and you should, this one is worth seeing. It’s not up to the same caliber as the first, though not much is. It is very, very funny though.
Now I’m slow-cooking some chicken and looking forward to some serious ice cream eating in bed with my freshly inked and wonderfully sexy lovah.
-CJ
Mother’s Day is about as cool as my birthday. I’m so content to have nice things coming my way all day via phone call or text or Facebook or flowers or champagne. I enjoyed it more this year than almost any before, except for the tiff between my man and I that kept us from having brunch together. Which just made for more time to be spent with my folks, my aunt and uncle, my little sister, my kid, and my cousin that was celebrating his 20th birthday on what was supposed to be a day exclusively for his mama. The audacity of being born! If I could have eggs Benedict and mimosas for every meal of every day, I would. Without hesitation.
After brunch, I dropped my kid sister off with her boyfriend to do mother’s day with the ladies in his family. It was so grown up of her. I don’t think I was in those kind of relationships in high school, where you gave a crap about the other person’s relatives. Relationships at that time were for passionate make-outs and not much else. But as we know, my almost sixteen-year-old sister is light years above me when it comes to maturity.
Over at my parents’ house, champagne was opened and kiwi strawberry juice was added and poker was played. I was the recipient of multiple bright sunflowers from my mom and from my sister-in-law and an orange daisy from my brother’s friend, which kind of melted my heart in a way that almost made me squeeze him with enough fervor to pop his eyes out.
When kid and I got home that night, Josh was scurrying around, room to room, closing doors behind him. I couldn’t figure out what he was up to but I was champagne-tired and ready to whip off my bra and put on my loosest fitting pajamas. Just as my eyes got heavy, I felt his weight on the mattress. Softly, quietly, he gave me and kiss and said all the things that I wanted to hear while presenting me with a silver gift bag and a construction paper card with a pink daisy on the front. Looking at it now on my corkboard at work, I’m thinking he used the cover of Cunt: A Declaration of Independence as a guide. It looks a lot like the book cover/my arm tattoo, and oh my God, I love it so much harder right now.
Okay I asked him and he didn’t use the book. Still. Well done, sir.
As masculine as he is, which, despite his sexy purple shirts, is a lot… Josh can clothes shop for a woman better than anyone else. I would fully trust him to start my wardrobe over from scratch, to dress me for any occasion, to pick anything from undergarments to hair flowers for me. In the gift bag were two tops that I was immediately in love with and a pair of dark denim capris. He bought all the right sizes, nailed my style and kept comfort in mind. Monetary gifts can be few and far between when they’re this good. They can be kept until the end of the night on Mother’s Day when they’re this good.
To all of you raising a little one, helping someone else raise theirs, taking care of kiddos on the side or for work, or step-momming… happy (late) Mother’s day. You are (probably) really wonderful.
-CJ
January fourteenth, incredibly almost a month ago, I was commuting to work on the 405 freeway, head bangin’, iced coffee sippin’; my routine in place. I was glad it was Friday, even if I was running behind on time. I saw a missed call on my cell from Josh’s mom. It wouldn’t be strange for her to call me at will, but prior to eight a.m. raised my brows. I was worried and dialed her back. She asked if I was ‘ready’ and I knew she was going to hit me with a blow.
With a deep breath, she informed that just hours prior, Josh’s aunt Sharon, uncle Steve and cousin Jonny had all died in a freak electrocution accident, stemming from a downed power line at their house.
http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/local/inland_empire&id=7898033
The breath was sucked out of me and I struggled to remember that I was operating a vehicle. I shook my head to loosen the words stalled in my brain, hoping for anything to come out, and blindly settled on what? over and over again. She asked that I be the one to tell Josh in person. She needed me to be strong for him, as she was being for her husband, Steve’s older brother. It would be too time consuming to venture out to Orange County to bring Josh the news while the family around her was reeling, but she couldn’t settle on doing it by phone.
I nominate his mother to deliver any bad news I must bear for the rest of my time here. Woman’s a friggin’ saint.
I made a quick call to my supervisor and then my mom, as a grown woman tends to do in light of what-the-fuck moments of any degree. I still hold some guilt that I was talking to her about it before I was talking to my boyfriend but if I was to show any amount of strength and will myself from falling the fuck apart, I needed her to help me. As always, she did.
Josh told me later that he thought I’d been fired. Showing up at his office on a weekday morning and calling his company line, something I’d never done before, to ask him to come outside was unexpected, to say the least. I would trade the best job in the world for that to be the news I had. Like I’d hoped he wouldn’t, he didn’t ask why I was calling, just got up from his desk and came to the parking lot, headset still around his face. I hid behind my sunglasses and clenched my hands to stop the shaking. His reaction mirrored mine, as his hands went to his head. What?
A short amount of time has passed. The funerals came and went; one for Jonny and one for Sharon and Steve. My love donned white gloves and a rose pinned to his dress shirt as a pall bearer. Hundreds of people showed up to the double service last weekend, including at least a hundred leather vest clad bikers in green bandanas for Steve.
It was an incredibly gut-wrenching experience, watching these hard, tough, scarred and tattooed, grown men cry. One that I never hope to see again. The collective shock and heart break was damn near too much to bear and these are not even my blood relatives, but Josh’s and Kiddo’s. Kiddo and I didn’t have much of a relationship with them, and still she was in tears when she saw the sadness her dad tried his best to hide from us. It was the shock and the tragedy and fucking unfairness of it that shook me to my core.
We played poker with them two weeks before, on New Year’s Day. I told Josh on the drive home that it was like watching a couple of high school sweethearts, they way they so blatantly adored one another. I’m thrilled I got to see them leaning against the back of the couch to peer into a lit up fishtank, arms slung around each others’ waist. I’m glad I got to laugh my ass of Steve’s shit talking during Seven Card Stud. And I’m really glad I got to meet Sharon for the first time that night. When she hugged me goodbye and said, “It was so nice to meet you,” I really believed her. They were such genuinely good people and a crowd of a few hundred were reminded as people took the podium during their service and told stories about what a joy it’d been to know them.
The night of their deaths, I posted to my Facebook: We are all finite. Drop your grudges, kissed your loved ones.
You just never fucking know.
-CJ
Just like everyone else, every December, say it with me now, I can’t believe the year is almost over.
In 2010 Kiddo turned seven, which was when I started to realize she wasn’t quite a baby anymore, but a stubborn individual who needs me a little less every day week month year. I turned twenty-five and for the first time, I worried a little bit about my age. There’s something freeing about being in your ‘early twenties.’ It excuses late nights and hangovers, renting instead of owning, shitty credit woes, hand-me-down chic, and mismatched silverware. No one ever asks me why I’m not married yet but rather whether I am considering marriage in the future. I can be ‘going through a phase.’ Am I supposed to be a more distinguished ‘adult’ by the time I cross the halfway point of my twenties? Am I going to shake my head and laugh with nervous embarassment when I look back at this in my thirties?
So much has changed. Early last year I would have choked on the rum I was so dependent on to think I would be happily committed come eight or nine months. I would have balked to think Kiddo could act any less than stellar. I would never have considered that I could be too brash. I would have hid behind my passive agressive tendencies to avoid ever admitting that sometimes I am wrong and more often than not, I have something to learn from everyone around me. It’s hard to see your own stubbornness and your own selfishness. It’s hard to catch yourself in the act, retract and rethink. And it’s hard to watch yourself fall on old habits you want so desperately to have corrected by now.
Dare I say, I might have learned a thing or two in those twelve weeks of anger management this summer.
Which is worse; stagnancy or regression? I think it’s important that I keep changing, be it for better or worse. I want to evolve into a happier, smarter, more independent, secure and selfless being. I want to be proud of myself. I want to be okay with being proud of myself. I am speaking for every woman in America, maybe.
There’s work to be done, surely. And I’ll write too much about it and be afraid of what other people think, no matter how hard I deny caring. Then I’ll rear back, confident, and challenge someone to care. I hope one day that the cycle stops at ‘confident.’
-CJ
…but this foul-mouthed blogging bitch is back.
My creativity has dried up like the sponge in the office kitchen and the only thing paying attention to it are fruit flies because they need somewhere to lay their larvae. And they’re like, “There’s the wrung out leftovers of Jill’s mind!” and they kamakaze dive to it.
Human Biology is one class, one night, for just shy of 3.5 hours but it consumes more than 40% of my brain. I want to succeed in the subject I am not good at. I slipped on the first test and scored a high D, adding to it the extra credit I earned in the first week, I balanced a C-. This is not acceptable. I studied like I was getting paid for it and scored a 96% on my second test. I’m balancing out now with a B average and determined to use my last few weeks, chock-full of tests and quizzes, to bring it up slightly.
I’ve always had a very regular reading habit but I’ve devoted my lunch hours and free time to the textbook and the notes to the point that I forgot the story line and who was who in the big ass hardcover I was pointlessly carrying around. I’ve neglected my blog and my personal journaling site. I don’t put pen to paper unless it’s to add cat food to the grocery list. (Man, those furry fuckers EAT.)
School is not entirely to blame. I work on a team of a few people at work, all of us leaning a little on the others to complete the various stages of the order process. Three of our 8 person team have left – one for disability, one for maternity and one for another opportunity. I’ve taken on more than double my work load resulting in some OT (yay!) and major stress, usually held tight in my left shoulder and lately, my neck (boo).
But there is still so much good. I got to go to a Jimmy Kimmel Live taping and see A Perfect Circle perform as a guest (William Shatner was a guest as well!).
I got to swoop up a last minute ticket with my cousin to see them again at the Avalon, where they performed the entire Mer De Noms album in order. And an even last minuter ticket went to my little sister, who I was thrilled to have with me.
I double-dated off to the Galaxy for a night of Joe Rogan’s comedy.
There’s been more social activity than should be for someone working this much, attending school and hanging out with their seven-year-old smartass.
No one warned me about the Smartass. I knew things would get dodgy, rough, patience-testing, infuriating and overall worthy of the pain but BY GOD THE SMARTASS. This phase of sarcasm and dry wit deserves a daily slap upside the head if she weren’t emulating her father and I EXACTLY.
Her father and I… While it is highly likely that this is all in my head, I feel like we’re being challenged to succeed while the people around us are waiting for the crumble. All we ever did was crumble before and build back up something a little weaker. We had a ROUGH five year stretch but we started that stretch at 17 and 19 years old and had a CHILD together before we’d known each other one year. (Kiddo was born three days prior to the one year mark of the day we met.)
Our story goes something like this: hot chick (heh) rolls up in an El Camino with the windows down and talks to a co-worker outside her grocery store job. His two friends linger in the back. One of the friends remarks that he has the same jacket that I’m wearing. (This one.) Girl remains unimpressed. He is, after all, just a boy. And boys are so lame. Girl’s passenger (a family friend) invites the gentlemen to our house for that night’s big boxing match/excuse to party. (Roy Jones Jr. vs. Glen Kelly, 02/02/02) They come. We chat, we beverage. He says now that I was flirtatious. Numbers are exchanged later that week through the co-worker of mine/friend of his and our story began. It went up, waaaay up, and it crashed down. Over and over for five years. And then we spent the better part of three years trying to be big kids without the other to lean on.
It says something that almost nine years after we met, we are having a lot of fun living together with our house full of pets and I still can’t keep my hands off of him. Through the good and the bad, we never lacked passion. And that is weaving into something more solid, stable and exciting than it ever was.
The naysayers, in my head or otherwise, are wrong. We got this.
-CJ
