1990

Thank you Facebook ladies, for helping me pick a year in my life to write about. I will eventually get to each of the years that were picked but I decided on 1990; not because it had the most interesting journal entries but because it had one journal entry that was pivotal in my desire to write fiction and poetry.

In 1990 I was eleven years old. Most of that particular journal was about the boys I liked and the girls I hated in school. I did slip a short entry into that journal about starting puberty that year, which could explain the darkening nature of my journals from that point forward.

I wasn't the most attractive eleven-year-old. In fact, I remember a little chant the kids had for me back then. It went like this: "Patty Fatty two by four, couldn't fit through the bathroom door." But hey, no permanent damage. I managed to lose all the weight over the next year and entered junior high as thin as the other girls, if not a little thinner.

My sister, my guide, my mentor; God love her and she knows I do. But when I was asking her for advice on how to meet boys, she might have wanted to let me know that writing it all down on a little piece of brown paper, might not be a wise idea. Here's why:

June 16, 1990
My sister made me mad today. I am okay now. I wrote down all the tips my sister gave me on how to meet boys on the brown piece of paper I paper clipped to this page. Well...my mom found it and read it. I am pissed now. It was no big deal. I wish my mom would stay out of my business. For all I know she probably reads my journal too.

First off, for those of you who keep journals, or are thinking of giving your daughters a nice journal for their birthday; yes, parents read journals. Don't feel bad though; it's good parenting. Just don't be surprised to find the most angry, depressing, cynical, and brutally honest words you've ever read. That's what children believe their journals are there for; to write ugly, mean, horrible things about people around them that tick them off on a daily basis.

For you kids who think that your journal is for keeping your deepest and darkest, most intimate moments a secret from the rest of the world; your wrong. It's true that journals are places for you to keep your thoughts and feelings about your daily life, but know that as a general rule of thumb: things in writing are meant to be read. If you do have something truly mean and nasty to say about your family or your bestest friends in the whole wide world, then what you need to learn is poetry. The goal isn't to cut out the angst but to camouflage it and coat it with creative icing. For example, you find yourself in a lunchroom with a bunch of girls who are snickering, giggling and pointing at you; this is what you say to your journal that you now realize might be read by someone other than you some day:

GAGGLED GRAY DISGORGED LUNCH
The rot of my stomach is unbearable within.
Sickening, sobering, stabbing on in.
Gaggling girls sicken me gray.
Annoying the naught of the life that is such as thee.
Grabbing me, shaking me, making me pray
to the many horned god that will take them away.
Wrangle the gaggling, giggling girls all the way.
Untie the knots of the rot of the stomach that bears
the sickening, sobering, stabbing that's there.
Slurping and slopping up food from the mat of the
plate to the table that lay for the fat.
Grumbing, growling and sending it back
would be play for the day that has made it this way.
Sickening, sobering, stabbing me in; for the Gods
of all sakes give them some spoons, or forks, or
knives and some manners, before I'm made to
give it all back.
Already too late for the paper thin platter, that lay
before me with a color uncoded mess that they made;
making me thinner than before I got here this day.

-Excerpt from:
Life's Little Impact! An Incomplete Poetry Journal
by: Patty Timms

From raw feelings, to poetry, to short story, to fiction...get it all out in writing!

The Big Tickle

I've given everyone a look into the many journals of my past to illustrate my hankering for the written word. I don't write in my journals daily anymore but I do keep a regular journal. Sometimes I speak my journal entry to the closest person to me and then I go back and write my thoughts out about it later. Today was one of those days for me. I spoke this journal entry yesterday and then wrote it down this morning:

April 28, 2010
My days all blur together now. There isn't a start to my days unless I go all the way back to the beginning.

I wake up in the morning with ideas in my head that are so big and so detailed that I have to find a piece of paper to write my thoughts out onto, but I know I can't start writing or I won't be able to stop. So I hold back the plethora of words waiting to spill out onto a page and I focus instead on waking the kids and helping them dress for school.

After I get downstairs, I can feel my breathing change as I hold onto my thoughts while the kids eat breakfast. I'm starting to get anxious and I hope that a single idea isn't lost while I pack their lunches and ensure each child has what they need for school. I'm using every ounce of my energy to balance the conversation in the car with the thoughts in my head as I drop my daughter off at school. As soon as the door closes and I know my daughter is safe inside the confines of the school, I start to feel my ideas swelling inside my head almost to the point of distraction, but I drive on to get the boys to preschool. After I get back into the car from dropping the boys off, I have a twenty minute drive home before I can get to my computer, or to a notepad in the event I cannot wait for the computer to start up. I spend this time playing out my ideas like a movie in my head.

Once I'm home and I'm confronted with the computer, I experience a giant release as words spill onto the blank spaces of the inviting software meant solely for this purpose. At 87 words per minute, my fingers don't let off the keyboard for the first hour, and even then I only slow down and have to pull myself away when my lunchtime hunger pains set in.

It wasn't until January of this year that I knew my thoughts were bigger than I could relay in a poem or write out in a short story. When I opened my journal January 9, 2010 it was as I suspected: my journal couldn't possibly accommodate these new thoughts and ideas that my brain was producing. I needed to write a book. Not because I have always wanted to, or because I always said I would one day, I needed to write this story before my thoughts overwhelmed my brain. What I didn't realize until I started outlining these new thoughts, was that my story couldn't possibly fit into one book or even two books; I needed to write a trilogy.

So, I wake every day with this incredible urge to write my story down. I never feel like I have to write, or that I should take a break and walk away for a minute; I just write. I spend four hours during the day while the kids are at school and up to three hours at night after everyone's in bed and then my characters take over my dreams while I sleep.

I've been going about this routine and experiencing this daily urge to write my story for fifteen weeks now. And so, with two completed books under my belt, I've officially written my way into a whole new world. My journey starts here with one story but is propelled by the variety of stories I feel creeping up on me every day.

Bad Things

In 2003 I asked my journal this:

If all good things must come to an end, do all bad things go on forever?

Why do all good things have to come to an end anyway? Is it because we're innately negative? Perhaps, we have to be innately negative in order to recognize anything good in life.

I have a good mind to hunt down the pessimist that forced me to recognize my innate negativity and give him a piece of my mind. But the joy I know I will get from doing that will inevitably come to an end, so what's the point?

Christmas From the Underworld

Tuesday, January 5, 1988

Dear Diary,
I am in a hurry so for Christmas I got a scooter, keyboard, a bird that died today, an animator, clothes, singing clown, a cabbage patch that can get wet, moon dreamer, and in my stocking I will only tell a few things. I will tell you tomorrow.
Bye, from Patty
P.S. I have 151 pages to write in this diary. Just 151 to go.

I eventually got another parakeet. However, the new bird came straight from H.E. double hockey sticks. I would try to hold the bird and it would bite that space between my nostrils and then I would have to beat it until it would finally let go. I was too afraid to hold the darn thing so it sat in it's cage for long periods of time. That might be why the bird started laying little pink eggs everywhere in the cage. I'm just lucky the bird wasn't both male and female, otherwise I would've had dozens of little nostril-biting birds all over my room. I eventually gave the bird to my older sister when we moved to California and never got another one.

As for the singing clown. That clown didn't just sing, it's head rotated in a circle, as if it were looking up at the ceiling and then over to the wall and then down at the ground and back up again, while the music played. I think I really liked that clown until I got older and saw Stephen King's, IT. Now the clown is stuffed into a box in my garage. I'm afraid that if I throw the clown away it's going to reappear one day. It's much safer in the garage where I can keep tabs on it at all times.

Pregnancy

I always wanted to have children. I had this idea that I couldn't possibly ever come to realize why I am the way I am unless I gave birth to children and watched how they evolved.

When I got pregnant with my first child I imagined only beautiful and amazing things happening to my body. I couldn't wait to walk into a Motherhood store and buy up a bunch of cute A-line tops to match the idea in my head about what my growing body was going to look like. Birds were chirping, flowers were blooming, life was great and getting better all because I was bringing a life into this world.

You know that sound a needle makes as it scratches the surface of a record and not in the way a DJ can make it sound? That's how quickly all of my ideals of pregnancy fell apart. I was only eight weeks into my first pregnancy before I was forced to accept that I'm not a good candidate for pregnancy after all.

My husband likes to tell this one story about how pregnancy affected me.
From my husband's point of view the story goes likes this:
"One day I came home from work and when I opened the front door all I see is Patty sprawled out on the floor in front of the TV with popcorn and candy wrappers all over the floor around her. She was rocking back and forth holding her stomach and moaning, 'I feel so sick.' I said, 'Well, yeah, look what you've been eating!'"

Here's the story from my point of view:
First off, I don't like to be nauseas or to throw up. In the event I find myself feeling ill, I will do anything not to throw up. It just so happened that because I had already been feeling ill for a few weeks already, I knew that with pregnancy I needed to find something to eat and fast. At the time, I could not open the cupboard and find just anything to put in my mouth. I had to find something that I could fathom putting in my mouth. This was a long process of analyzing the food before I pulled it from the shelf. I had to take into account the size, shape and color of the food that I was going to put in my mouth. Once I could find something in that category that I was okay with, I had to consider the texture and smell of it before I moved onto whether or not it had the right amount of saltiness or sweetness to hopefully hold back the impending vomit.

On this particular day, thirty minutes before my husband walked through the front door, I had just decided on various types of candy that had been left over from Halloween. After I ate five or ten pieces (give or take a few) of candy, my morning sickness wasn't getting any better, it was in fact getting worse. I thought to myself, I need to counteract the sweetness with something salty. That's where the popcorn comes in. I pop myself some microwaveable popcorn and sit back down on the floor in front of the TV with the bag of popcorn on my lap. The smell of the popcorn was only making matters worse, so I figured I should just start shoving the popcorn into my mouth, hoping that by doing so, I would start to forget the smell and the yummy, buttery, salt lick would work faster than a Tums on heartburn. I was clearly wrong here. I did not feel any better. Still, not wanting to throw up, I laid down with the bag of popcorn next to me and started rocking back and forth, fending off the violent nature of pregnancy. That's when my husband came home from work.

I won the fight that day. I never did throw up, but I had many more days like it that didn't go over so smoothly.

Title Here

When I was ten years old, I woke from a dream that inspired me to write a book. I sat down at the Tandy computer in our office and hashed out my dream before printing it out on the dot matrix printer. This was the first time I ventured from the journal and into short stories. I pulled the story out of my hope chest to see if I could fit it into my blog but I didn't realize how long that story was, it couldn't be less than 3,000 words. I called the story, "What are Friends For?" It was a story about a junior high school girl who wanted so badly to be a model but after she gets an agent and starts modeling classes, she finds out that all the other girls are doing drugs.

After I wrote my first short story, I went on to write others but I started a bad habit where I couldn't write out my thoughts unless I came up with a title that I liked. More often than not, I had no problem writing from the title, but other times the title stifled my creativity. I've since come to terms with having to change the title to suit the completed work, but I didn't figure that out until just a few years ago. In 2003 I wrote about my struggle with titles:

July 23, 2003
In an attempt to write a book that I, myself, will enjoy reading, I've spent one month trying to come up with the title of my soon-to-be favorite book.
How I'm going to come up with the last thing a writer adds to a work of art, which is the first thing a reader sees, is daunting at best. I should just attempt to write this story and let the title gravitate to the cover.
The problem is, I have to want to buy this book and I only buy books with great titles.

However, I have, on many occasion, purchased a book with a sintilating title only to find a boring twenty page introduction that I more than flipped but more like skipped through and found later, after several chapters, I was lost to the point of no return.

Damn titles, they suck me in from across the book store. They belong to books of a certain size, with a certain binding and page thickness. The artwork on the cover hovers like parents in the front row of their child's first recital.

I know that not all book titles have a great story attached to them, but I have a weakness for book titles similar to that of girls who have a weakness for a hot guy. So, you can imagine my disappointment when I bring home a book only to find out that what's on the inside isn't as great as what's on the outside. But just like girls and hot guys, I'm not going to stop picking the ones with great covers.

Arachnophobia

When I decided that I needed a second job to sustain a life away from home, I went to Bank of America to become a bank teller. I thought maybe I would be able to get a job at the BofA on Melrose Ave. but the choice wasn't mine. I ended up working at a BofA off of Vermont Ave in a crowded and occasionally less desirable section of Hollywood. It was one of those areas that bordered the more upper class residents of the Los Feliz area and the bad areas around Hollywood.

When I walked into the bank on my first day of work I wasn't sure what I was getting myself into. There was a fairly large waiting area with couches and desks and then approximately ten teller spots covered by bullet proof glass. I tried to ignore the fact that I felt like I should be packing a gun just to go in to work every day and took my place with the rest of the tellers behind the window.

It didn't take long for the tellers to share all of their horror stories, like foiled robberies, and hold ups at the ATM. But I stayed strong and just ignored it all. I needed money and I wanted to be able to include BofA on my resume, so I forged on. I didn't even get through the first month on the job before I witnessed fights in the lobby and people stealing from other people, it was chaotic. On more than one occasion, the teller line got so long that the managers would bring out signs that showed one hour wait from this point on. If the tellers weren't helping twenty-five customers an hour then we were getting pulled aside by the manager. After awhile the shock of it all wore off and it became just another job to me.

I eventually quit BofA to move up to Ventura for a short time between 1998 and 1999. The first thing I did was apply for a job as a bank teller. I ended up getting hired on at Bank of Ventura. Ventura is relatively small and suburbian compared with Hollywood so I figured I shouldn't have any problems working in a small town bank. I walked into the bank for my first day on the job and looked around. It was so quaint and peaceful. There were only five or six teller stations and absolutely no bullet proof glass anywhere. That's when something strange and twisting happened inside my mind. I panicked. I suddenly became afraid. My experiences in Hollywood had warped my perspective about what normal meant that I started questioning the manager.
I literally asked her, "How can you ensure my saftey without any bullet proof glass?"
You can probably imagine the look on her face. She didn't know what to say. I think she was trying to figure out if I was serious, and I was.
The manager finally said, "We don't have any use for bullet proof glass in this area."
I was so skeptical about whether or not I could be safe in a bank that had no bullet proof glass, an out of shape security guard who looked bored, and no organization for potential lines that might form for the tellers, that I quit my job. My reasoning was based on my concerns for safety. I wasn't right in the head anymore. I ended up getting a better job at a magazine publishing company.

Not only had my view changed of what was right and what was normal, I had also become afraid of spiders. I was getting ready for work one morning and noticed a spider in the window sill. I was too afraid to kill it so I just kept my eye on it. When I got home from work the spider was still there, so I kept my eye on it some more. I did this for a couple of days before I finally asked my boyfriend to kill it, but when he got to it, it was already dead. I snapped out of my fear, and started feeling bad for the spider. I wasn't sure how long it had been sitting there waiting for the the window to open up before it died so I wrote about this spider:

08.10.1998
EIGHT LEGS TOO FAR AWAY
Stuck in a box where the big people roam.
Build me a web for my prey to roam.
I will get me my prey today or tomorrow.
When those little bugs come out to play, to roam, outside alone,
they will snag in my web and provide food for my home.

And I will wait while I dodge the hand of the people
who kill for the fun and the fright of the fear
of the eight legg-ed unknown.

And I will wait while I wonder how may I have got here
from the out of the side
away from all that I have known.

Hunger sets in to distract my lonely
of the sadness, the fear
that I'm far from the prey that is the reason
for this forever long stay.

I have survived the reign of the mighty while big hand;
but my stay has grown long
and I remembered today how I got in this Hell
where my carcass doth lay.

I stopped trying to be normal and eventually accepted who I was and then all the fears dissolved.

...She exclaimed!!!!

As I sifted through my many journals to find some entry to write about today, I found one of my most and yet least favorite journals. It's a small book, only 4.5 x 6, and it came with a title...a little brown notebook. On the cover, there is a picture of Shakespeare sitting at a writing table with two men sparring behind him with Shakespeare's name written in all capital letters along the bottom. All of the unlined pages have the color and texture of a brown paper bag and have either quotes from Shakespeare's or pictures depicting one of his many works.

My mom bought this tiny book for me at a garage sale in 1999. When I got her care package and found this little book in there, I loved it right away. It was fitting because of my theater background and love for Shakespeare and because I love any kind of book that offers blank pages for me to write my thoughts.

When I get a new journal, I like to let it sit for a day or two, out in the open where I can see it inspiring me to write something interesting in it. But this little brown journal sat for more than two days. I looked at it everyday as I got ready for work and again when I came home to my empty apartment at the end of the day. It sat on my bed for a week before I moved it to the floor where it sat in various places around the room for a month. I put it on top of my TV where it collected dust for awhile, and then I finally just put in on my bookshelf. I didn't want to put it between the books on the shelf right away because I knew I would eventually think up something great to write in this little book.

One night in the middle of the night, the light coming from outside the window was shining on this little book reminding me that I had to write something in it or it was going to end up blocking me. I sat up at realized that I was having a hard time coming up with something to write in it because I didn't want to put my words next to the words of Shakespeare. Enough was enough! I wasn't going to let Shakespeare psych me out. What I had to say was just as important as Shakespeare, at least to me. After I briefly explained my communication problems with this journal I went on to write some crazy notion about the exclamation mark.

January 27, 2000
Greetings!
I love exclamation marks! They automatically make the reader think that the writer is in a good mood. But if I think back to a time when the exclamation mark might have been invented, I think that maybe the writer wasn't in a good mood at all. I picture this: a guy sitting at a wooden table with only the light of a candle next to him, writing on a piece of parchment with a quill pen. If I think about it even deeper, a long line with a dot at the end of it tells me the writer was probably bored, or out of something interesting to write. His quill pen touches the paper in thought, quivers in a downward motion, but no word comes out so dot, that's the end.
Off this parchment is sent to the king who says, "what the hell is this? Bring the writer to me!"
Like a joker sitting in front of the king who has just asked him what this line and dot on the parchment means, the writer fumbles for words and then spews, "It's a sign of happiness in writing!"
The king looks from the parchment to the writer and back to the parchment.
The writer starts to sweat. He doesn't want the king to know he is lying or think that his work is sloppy. He knows the king loathes liars. If the king even suspected the writer's white lie, it would either be off with his head or his favorite quill pen in exchange for a joker costume. In this moment the writer thought maybe it would be better to face the guillotine than the general public wearing a joker costume. But of course the choice wouldn't be his, he thought.
Finally, the king looks up from the parchment and says, "I like it!"
And thus came the exclamation of liars.

I returned the journal to the bookshelf and never wrote in it again.

For the Sake of Arguing

I'm sure we've all experienced a time when we wanted to make a point or defend an opinion but the words either didn't come out right or didn't come at all, at least not until you got home and vented to someone. I've had more than one of those moments in my life, so I turned to my journal, which couldn't argue back.

There aren't many people who want to sit around and debate but when I find someone who will debate with me then it's a challenge I'm always up for. Not all of the debates I've had are worth the time and energy I've put into them, but sometimes I just want to convince someone that 1+1 doesn't always equal 2 (If you think about it, there are a lot of numbers between 1 and 2).

When my sister brought her soon-to-be husband home, she was actually bringing me a great debater, what a prize! One time, this guy debated with me and won, only because I didn't have enough information to support my opinion so I took to the Internet and then to my journal. Here's out it all panned out:

2002 Defeating the Purpose
I've come across all kinds of individuals such as, thinkers, novice philosophers, occasional psychologists, people who euphemize, those who have no original thoughts of their own so they quote others; the list goes on and on. Everybody has an opinion. But in order to be classified you have to have a manner in which you reach and fight for your opinion. What am I? I've heard that I have a lawyer's approach of cornering my prey, where I attempt to plumb my prey's thoughts using a novice philosopher's approach and intellect.

My sister's boyfriend (now husband) falls under the "euphemizing confuser, over-achiever, thinker" category. You have to watch out for him. He speaks fast to divert your attention from your own opinion therefore thrusting your attention entirely onto trying to understand what he's saying. You become so astounded at the force and quickness in which he's talking that you forget what you're fighting for. You can't possibly think up a response and say it as fast as this individual requires in order for him to continue being engaged in a conversation with you. A pause for reflection makes this individual believe that he has "beat" you at this opinion game.

So, one day, myself, my sister and her boyfriend are discussing the Scrabble game we are about to play.
At some point, I, inadvertently say, "I'm going to win you at this game."
Like a bolt of lightning, this boyfriend responds by saying, "You can't win someone. You can only beat them. What are you going to do, take that person home if you win? You can only beat them."
At this point, I'm feeling as though he's literally beating me with a stick, ramming this conversation into my head. I'm left speechless and he goes on to "beat" me at Scrabble as well as his argument. This started the "beat, win, defeat" argument between my sister's boyfriend and me.

Almost one year later, feeling especially thoughtful, I get my sister on the phone and tell her that I've come up with a response to the "beat, win, defeat" argument.
"Uhm, okay," she says.
Sitting at my computer, pulling up definitions on the Internet, I begin to lay out my argument. I tell her that under Dictionary.com there are 12 enteries, 52 definitions, and 9 synonyms for the word Beat. Of the 52 definitions, the use of the word Beat, meaning to defeat, only appears twice and not until after 10 preceding definitions and not again until after 2 more definitions. Those two instances show: defeat, subdue, become superior, or better than as the reigning definitions and is only listed as an informal use of the word. You jump over to the word Win and you find 9 entries, 21 definitions, and no synonyms. Of the 21 definitions, the use of the word Win meaning to defeat, appears 21 times in all of the 21 definitions provided. The number one use of the word Win means: a victory, especially in a competition, to succeed or prevail.

Feeling as though I've won this argument, beat this guy at his game and defeated the purpose, I get off the phone with my sister feeling intellectually satisfied. It's not until the next day while I'm on the phone with my sister, who has her boyfriend in the car next to her, that she says, "I can't wait to come over to your house tonight and win you at poker." As if a steadily moving car has just stopped short, my sister's boyfriend says loud enough for me to hear, "You can't win her. You can only beat her at poker tonight."
My sister begins to inform him of my discoveries from the previous night. Whoa! Up comes the "beat, win, defeat" argument in full force. As a matter of fact, the more points we brought up, the slower his response time got. I can feel myself winning. We begin by reminding him that although to beat one at a game is not an improper use of the term, this is not the main definition of this word. We go on to tell him that to win one at a game is the correct use of this term and the main definition of it as well. This is not acceptable to him. I go on to say that if this is a euphemistic argument then we should just use the term defeat to describe the victory in a game.

That's when I defeated the ultimate purpose in the "beat, win, defeat" argument. I have found middle ground in this argument and everyone gets to win.

The funny thing is, I wasn't necessarily looking for a win. I would've been happy using his term as the sole response to a victory, I just wanted to argue for argument sake that day.

Since both my sister and I have had three kids each, neither my sister's husband nor I have enough energy to put into silly debates anymore. Gone are the days I guess.

Green with Envy

jealousy is reflective of a person's feelings or attitudes toward another person, whereas envy expresses a person's feelings or attitudes toward another person's advantages or accomplishments; jealousy pertains to emotional rivalry while envy is resentment of a more fortunate person - dictionary.com

I was a painfully shy kid, constantly worried about what others thought of me so my mom thought it best to put me in drama classes through parks and rec when I was ten or eleven years old to break me out of my shell. She did the right thing. I'm not a shy kid who cares what the world thinks anymore, but I followed the drama thing a little longer than I should have. Probably because I was slightly masochistic. I needed a purpose and I thought theater arts harbored my purpose but it was just a stepping stone.

I was living and working in Hollywood for two months before I started school at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, AADA. During those two months I worked at the Production Group as a production assistant. That's about the bottom of the barrel as far as jobs in the entertainment industry go. My apartment manager hooked me up with that job and day one the boss told me in so many words that I was in a labor intensive job and that he was hoping for a man to do it but as a favor I could have the job as long as I worked as hard as a man. So, that's what I did. I lifted and carried tables and chairs for craft services (food on set), I ran to the store for specific colored hand towels to appease the talent, I did a lot of cleaning, and running around and a day at the Production Group could last seventeen hours. But it was worth it, I had the opportunity to work on the set of Click (a game show that Ryan Seacrest hosted before he even made it onto a radio show, it was produced by Merv Griffin who I got to meet and talk to once or twice), I also helped in the background of Playboy's Night Calls (picked up a few tips for the bedroom while I was there); I even helped with a show called Dot Com hosted by Mark Hamill who accidentally brushed his teeth with Fixodent instead of toothpaste right before he was supposed to be on set and it was so funny that I asked if I could have the tube of Fixodent and he gave it to me with a note and his signature.

I was having so much fun in Hollywood that when school at AADA started I wasn't exactly enthralled. I was distracted and spent time writing during class instead of listening and I wished I was back in Hollywood instead of in a classroom in Pasadena (the school has since moved to Hollywood, I think). I tried hard, but I didn't fit in there. So, when they didn't accept me back for the second year I was hurt at first, but then realized later it was for the best. However, when I was faced with the fact that I was still struggling and starving in Hollywood and didn't even have a boyfriend or a large group of friends, I panicked and thought I should leave the LA area and find a normal job in a normal city where I could live a more stable life. So, that put me back into a bad relationship with a guy who wanted to live up by Santa Barbara. We ended up settling in Ventura, which was a giant mistake for me.

Sitting around in Ventura knowing that I should be in Hollywood made me feel envious of all the kids who got accepted back to AADA, because at least they knew where they were going to be the next year and what they were going to be doing, unlike me who felt lost. I'm rarely a jealous or envious type of person, but I spent a good six months envying all kinds of people for how comfortable and normal they seemed in their life, compared to me. I wrote a poem about it:

April 08, 1998
WALKING ON FALLING GROUND
Green is the grass - I can see it on your side.
Brown is the dirt that collects on my inside.
Now that I know - black is how I go, from my hair and my eyes and down to my toes.
Black is my flesh as black is your soul.
I crawl to and grasp what little I know about holding on tight
and then being let go.
I walk to, I crawl and run 'till I fall
in a desperate attempt to reach something far,
far out of reach. A hope? A dream?
And just then, when I walked and I crawled and I ran 'till I fell
it is a hole that I have found myself in.
A hole that I dug with the hopes that I might store some water in.
Water for grass that I might grow tall
greener and taller with riches galore,
with no doubt of strength that it will pull me from this hole
that I have put myself in!
Green is the grass - I still see on your side.
Brown is the dirt that's crowding my mind.
I'm down and I'm out and all that I know is -
Green is the grass - but not from this hole!

I made my way back to Hollywood in 1999 and found a job as an executive assistant in a motion graphics company where I ended up meeting my husband through one of my associates. Not every day in my life has been great but I wouldn't change a single step in my path.

Homeless

I graduated from a high school in Utah in 1996. Most of my friends went straight to a local college after graduation except for me. I knew that I didn't want to live in Utah for the rest of my life so I only applied for colleges in California. I was accepted into The American Academy of Dramatic Arts for the 1997-1998 school year.

I worked and saved up one thousand dollars to move to Hollywood with. Several months before, I visited Melrose Ave in Hollywood where, with the help of a friend from California, I found my first apartment. It was located on the East end of Melrose Ave a block away and across the street from Paramount Pictures. The apartment complex had been a hotel in the early 1900's and had a furniture store underneath it. There were no kitchens but the rent was affordable at three hundred dollars a month and I didn't mind washing my dishes in the bathroom sink. It was a great apartment complex. The tenants all helped each other and were very friendly, I would imagine it could be compared with a dormitory style life. To read about the history of this apartment complex visit www.hollywoodmelrose.com.

I moved into my new apartment July 4, 1997. After everyone left that helped me move in, I was truly and utterly by myself in California at nineteen years old. My apartment had two floor-to-ceiling windows that when opened provided a view of the Hollywood sign, on a not-so-smoggy day. I knew I wasn't on the most desirable end of Melrose or Hollywood for that matter but I could afford it thanks to two jobs, one at the Production Group on Vine Street and one at Bank of America as a teller.

Since there was a heat wave that year, I had to keep my windows open every night. It was nice though, because there was this homeless man who would play the flute on a bus station bench across the street. He only came at night, and was gone before I woke up in the morning but he single handedly provided me with so much inspiration that I'll never forget him.

Before I had a job and then again before I had two jobs, I wondered how long I was going to be able to survive in California before I truly ran out of money. The price of failure was having to call my mom on the phone and let her know I couldn't afford to live on my own. If I did that, she would've forced me to move back to Utah, where I didn't feel I belonged. So, there were times that I ate very little, or skipped a meal. One time I had just worked a seventeen hour day at the Production Group and as I was leaving I saw the McDonald's across the street and I wished that I had enough money to eat there, but I didn't have any money. That's when I started wondering if I was going to end up like the man on the corner who played the flute for me every night. I wrote about the Flute Man in my journal:

October 1997
BECOMING THE MAN ON THE CORNER
The man on the corner playing the flute, is playing for you isn't he? He tells your story without your permission and forces you to listen and hear.
The eerie pleasantness of the music is like a movie being projected onto your face. And so I watch with great interest and hear with all soul, because you are a man with a story for all.
The man on the corner has no face to be remembered by, no voice to acknowledge your presence and no name to be recognized by you.
The man on the corner is singing your song! A song with no words, just like your story - a story with no required words for anybody.
Who hears your story besides you? The man on the corner doesn't hear your story, but he tells it well.
And one day you would like to meet that man on the corner, who sings your story with no words and plays your story with no notes.
And so one day you go to that corner to meet that man, but when you get there he leaves and you're the only man standing on the corner with a story that has no words and a song that has no notes. And suddenly, you understand.

Early in 1998 a man in a car experiencing a heart attack crashed through the bus stop destroying that park bench and I never heard from the Flute Man again.

Why Write?

I have spent quality time thinking about why I write and I've come up with several reasons that mostly stem from what I think might be the ultimate two reasons: I am the youngest and often kept my mouth shut amidst the chaos and just wrote down all of my feelings instead, and because I've moved a lot. During my childhood years I attended two different elementaries one in Utah and one in Nevada, two different junior high schools one in Utah and one in California, and three different high schools one in California and two in Utah. Oddly, I ended up going to the same high school that all of my friends from my first elementary and my first junior high went to. I guess somehow, life will eventually come around full circle.

I was often lonely and tired of being the new kid in school so I turned to my journals to vent or just to express my rapidly forming opinions. I've noticed, while looking back through my journals now that I used my journals mostly to talk about the things in life that bothered me rather than made me happy but occasionally I wrote about current events and how they affected me.

I have to laugh when I read enteries in my journals like the one I wrote on:
April 10, 1992 entery #31
My mom came into my room tonight and I said I wanted to go to the beach 'cause I've never been there and I don't want to sit around here all Spring Break. All she said was no and then she got up and left. She won't argue with me but when my sister is here, she'll spend time yelling at her and then she lets my sister do whatever she wants to do. I DON'T THINK THAT'S FAIR!

I'm not sure if I desperately wanted my mom to yell at me or if I thought it wasn't fair that my sister knew how to get what she wanted.

The best part of this journal entry is that I spent three pages complaining about how angry I was with my family and then on the bottom of the third page and continued onto the fourth page I write about a shirt label I had cut out and paperclipped to the page (yes, it's still there).
I wrote:
Well enough about me. This little tag: S.W.A.K. Inc., notice it says, Made in the U.S.A. That is becoming a very big deal right now. We need to start buying more American. I cut this label off of my clothes to put in here because that's what's going on.

The idea that there was a whole world that existed beyond my day to day life had occurred to me on and off throughout my childhood but the full impact of the world's problems really hit me around age thirteen. In 1991 I was thirteen and I became obsessed with the news. I hint at some of the current events here and there throughout the journals but it wasn't until 1992 that I started dedicating pages of my journal to my opinion of events I saw on the news.
On April 20, 1992 I was almost fourteen years old and in entry #33 I wrote:
Something stupid has been happening on TV. In California they haven't executed a person for 25 years and now they are supposed to execute some guy name (last name) Harrison because he murdered two girls. But they are debating whether or not they should do it. They say it's cruel and unusual treatment. Don't they think that what he did to those girls is cruel and unusual? They are all jerks. That guy should burn in Hell.
They said they would do it tonight but then they changed their minds and said they might do it in seven days from now or never. Harrison says his brother helped in one of the murders (last ditch effort, I guess).
There are a whole bunch of asshole protestors who say they shouldn't do it. But I think they should.

I guess I still tend to favor victims over criminals but I'm not sure what my position would be on that particular case today. A fourteen year old often doesn't have all the facts, but I was so passionate about that particular case that I can still remember the telecast even now when I think back on it. I had just moved from Utah, a state that isn't as crime ridden as California and I think I was afraid for my own personal safety. My high school in California, at that time, had a decent amount of crime. In Utah the kids would brawl but in California it was aim to kill. I was taking the bus home from school one day when a kid who was sitting in the seat in front of me ended up being the latest victim in the war of the races. When the fight broke out I felt trapped between them. I remember trying to shield myself hoping that I wouldn't get involved somehow. The seemingly innocent kid that was getting the crap beat out of him just happened to be white like me. He had been wearing an earring in one of his ears that one of the aggressors tore out. At that point, blood started flying around. There was blood on the window next to me and on my pants and my shirt. It took the bus driver a decent amount of time to pull over and remove the kids from the bus. The cops eventually came and took over, but the blood on my clothes never came out and the blood on the bus window wasn't cleaned off for days.

Past, Present, Future

I didn't realize until recently that the majority of the people in my circle of influence don't realize that I write. I write a little something nearly every day in a journal, or on a notepad, or a scrap of paper I find in my car, and I've been doing this for nearly twenty-six years. I didn't get my first formal journal until April 7, 1985, I was seven years old but I can remember writing things down as early as six years old.

At first I wrote in my journal just to talk about what I did every day (don't mind the typos this is straight from the journal):
Sunday, April 7, 1985
Today is EAster. I Got a candy Record. And some BuBBle Bath. I LiKe School very much. I have Fun in the sumer With my frinds. April is fun. I poot my close in the hamper.

And then for awhile my writing came straight from the depths of my soul and came out sounding more like poetry. On February 16, 1999 I became the Gypsyroz Poet:
February 16, 1999
I'm a gypsy rose poet in a garden of prose.
Pick and poke the petals plush
stop and smell the poets lush.
Don't mind the prose, to see the poetry, follow your nose.
I'm a gypsy rose poet in a garden of prose.
See me, read me, taste me, hear me.
Don't pass me by
take the time to find me where I hide.
My patience is wearing, my petals are wilting.
I need to be picked, I need to be smelled, I need to be taken from this garden of Hell.

Over the years, my writing has twisted and turned to accommodate my life and those who end up in it. Not all of the writing is great or profound but it is the legacy I will one day leave for my children.

Over the course of this blog I will take you on my writing journey. I will post excerpts from the many journals I've kept throughout my life and hope that you can relate or just enjoy the read.