Tag Archives: writing

Season Two, Episode Seven: Birthday Candles For My Dad

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Today is my dad’s 69th birthday. I am probably the definition of a daddy’s girl. I’m crazy about my dad and I love him to pieces. He’s my best friend. As far back as I can remember he’s been my partner in crime.

My parents are twenty years apart, so my dad was 41 when I was born. His age never stopped him from chasing me in the grass in our backyard or lifting a very giggly and squirmy five-year-old Me up so that I could touch the ceiling with my fingertips (my dad is 6’4″). As I grew older, I loved sitting with him (me on the couch, Dad in his recliner) as he leisurely smoked a cigarette from his green pack of Kool 100 Super Longs and we watched old reruns of the black and white classics–to this day, I still love watching The Andy Griffith Show and Bewitched with him.

My dad would also sit and tell me and my little brother stories of his childhood on his grandparents’ farm in Morris Chapel, Tennessee and of his time spent in Cleveland at his uncle’s house. I loved hearing how life used to be in the ’40s and ’50s and looking through the old photo albums at my grandparents (my grandpa died when my dad was very young, my grandma died when I was a baby) and my great-grandparents and my great-great grandparents. My dad is predominantly Cherokee-American, so I loved seeing my great-great grandmother and her long white braid that stretched to the ground (my dad swears she lived to be 105) and my great-grandparents’ high cheekbones and stunning profiles. He graduated from high school in Washington, D.C. in 1962 and told me about the dark days of when JFK, RFK, MLK, and Malcolm X were all assassinated. He remembers Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement and he fought in Vietnam. He’s lived through thirteen US Presidents, from FDR to Barack Obama.

He’s still as funny and as smart as when I was a little girl. It’s hard for me to think of my dad as a senior citizen, because he is anything but. He’s still the head machinist at his job. He still smokes those Kool 100s. His favorite show is The Big Bang Theory. He loves being a grandpa and a great-grandpa (I have a 28 year old niece from one of my older half-brothers. She has a little girl herself.). He still criticizes the Browns every football season (he’s a Redskins fan) and reads The Plain Dealer daily and watches Jerry Springer and Maury every day after work because their insanity makes him feel like his day couldn’t be as bad as those guests’ are. He still encourages me to live my dreams and to keep working hard. He taught me that hard work and a strong education are the two most important things that a person can have next to their family. He taught me how to play Monopoly when I was five (no hotels or houses and I always got Boardwalk and Park Place and somehow won every time) and how to dance by standing on his feet in the kitchen while “My Girl” by The Temptations played on the local oldies station. He taught me to really appreciate music and told me I got my voice from my grandma. I am incredibly lucky to have him as a dad 🙂

Happy Birthday, Daddy ❤

Season Two, Episode Five: Of Quarterlife Crises and New Starts

Posted in Random, Society, Uncategorized, Writing by

I turned 27 this past December.  At the end of the year, I will be 28.

And in 2015, I will be 30.

I know it sounds stupid, but the thought of turning 30 never really was one that I entertained myself with.  I was always busy with the hopes and dreams that I had in my teens and early twenties, always thinking of where I would be by 30.  It seemed like a magical age that I’d reach in what seemed like decades–at 17, 30 seemed like light years away.  I had so many things that I wanted to do and see “when I grew up”…I’ll share a few with you:

*Graduate from college

*Have a fabulous career where I make lots of money and am happy

*Become a singer on the side and become famous

*Fall in love with someone who loves me for me

*Get married and stay married

*Have kids

*Travel the world

*Move to NYC and live a wonderfully trendy and fabulous life that everyone back in Cleveland would be envious of

*Write a novel and get it published and have it sell very successfully…and hopefully write a few more that have the same success

*Buy a beautiful house to live in with my husband and kids

*Be happy and content

High school Me, the end of sophomore year, 2002.

High school Me, the end of sophomore year, 2002.

I guess I’ve attained a few of those things, but for the most part I have not.  I’m not married.  I don’t live in NYC.  I rent a house with my beautiful and funny son.  I’ve traveled to a few places, but certainly not the world–more or less the eastern half of the United States and a bit of Canada.  I have never finished a single story I have written, so I very well haven’t had a novel published.  I haven’t even finished my freshman year of college…or become a famous singer.  I suppose I have a lot of time to achieve these goals and dreams, but all this dreaming of the future all these years reminds me of a quote from one of my favorite novels, Looking for Alaska:

“Jesus, I’m not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they’re gonna do.  I’m just going to do it.  Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia…You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it.  You just use the future to escape the present.”

Alaska was so right.  You spend all of your teenage years dreaming about what you’re going to do after high school, and then you spend your college years thinking about what you are going to do after college…and then when plans don’t go the way you wanted them to, you think up a new future to try to strive toward, but you actually never achieve all the things you’ve planned.  You spend so much time dreaming about what you are going to do/be when you grow up that when you actually grow up, all your expectations don’t get met the way you planned and your dream life is yanked out from under you.  I think that usually you start to realize that life isn’t going to be everything you hoped when you are in your mid-twenties.  You aren’t going to achieve all your dreams and holy shit, you’re an actual fucking adult.  It’s weird to think of myself as an adult.  I’ve never really thought about that until recently.  I mean…I know that I’m an adult.  I became a legal adult at 18.  But in the actual physical/mental sense…it’s weird.

I guess I was forced to become an adult when I had Nicky at 19, but even though I worked full time to support him as a single mom, I wasn’t an actual real adult, in the sense of the word.  I still lived at home, still relied on my parents for a ton of things.  But one could also argue that living on your own doesn’t make you an adult either.  I think it’s just the sum of the parts that you experience over time that become the whole…like the heartache and the growing pains and the separation anxiety and the ripping off of the metaphorical Band-Aid of Life and the new beginnings and the jobs you love and the jobs you hate and the friends you make and the ones you leave behind and falling in love and just every little thing that you go through that shapes you into who you are that makes you an adult.  You are constantly always growing up.  I think that becoming an adult is a life-long, ever-changing process–you are never fully “grown up”.  You never fully stop experiencing life until the day you die.

I’ve also realized that I am growing older.  I’m aging.  I will one day die.  It’s a scary thing to think of…it’s scary to think that this body that has carried me through 27 years of bumps and scrapes and fabulous memories is slowly falling apart.  I looked in the mirror the other day and noticed that I am beginning to get fine lines under my eyes.  I have a sunspot from my many years of disregarding the use of sunscreen as a youth…I always read about sun damage as a teenager and wasn’t worried because that happened to “old people”.  Well, Stupid Teenage Lashawn, I am not old and I’ve had this stupid sunspot since I was 25.  I’ve been trying to lighten it with over the counter stuff, but I think I will eventually get Fraxel to remove it.  I’m starting to pay for the sins that I made out of ignorance as a teenager.  I’m getting a few gray hairs.  I get tired more easily than I did when I was 17.  I’m beginning to realize that I am not invincible, I am not immortal.  I don’t get a “do over”.  There is no reset button.  I can’t rewind back and try to change the things I did, the mistakes I made.  I’m realizing that my parents are getting older.  My dad will be 70 next year, my mom 50.  They won’t be around forever.  It’s terrifying to think of them growing old.  I can’t imagine them dying, and I know that it is a reality that I will face in the next quarter century, possibly sooner.  There’s nothing I can do to stop any of this from happening.  I can’t press pause and slow life down.  Time goes forward, constantly pressing onward, with or without me.

But even through all of the fears and where the hell am I going and what the hell am I doing, there is happiness.  My son is growing up.  We live on our own.  I’ve fallen on my face and gotten back up again.  I’ve had my heart broken by men who didn’t deserve it, and it made me stronger.  I’ve felt incredibly lonely.  I’ve been surrounded by my family.  I have loved with all my heart and made friends with people who I truly care about.  I have a job I enjoy.  I am happy with my small successes.  I am still hopeful that I will make some kind of positive impact on the world, even if it is just a small one.

But I still don’t know what I want or where exactly I’m going or what I intend to do with the rest of my life.  I don’t have any of the answers.  Ask me again when I’m 30.  Maybe I’ll have an idea then.

“I rent a room and I fill the spaces with / Wood in places to make it feel like home / But all I feel’s alone / It might be a quarter life crisis / Or just the stirring in my soul / Either way I wonder sometimes / About the outcome / Of a still verdictless life

Am I living it right? / Am I living it right? / Am I living it right? / Why, why, Georgia, why?”

                                                                                                          –“Why Georgia”, John Mayer

Season Two, Episode Three: More Than You Probably Ever Really Needed To Know

Posted in Random, Uncategorized, Writing by

It’s been a while.  Happy 2013!

I have this unrelenting habit of not posting for a very long time, even when I have every intent to do so.  Things that often seem relevant at the time lose their awesomeness by the time I sit down at my laptop to tell the blogging universe.  I come up with a lot of funny stuff when I’m at work, but I am a staunch believer in that you should never mix your personal life with your job life, especially on a company computer.  No sir.  So I often forget about whatever I planned on writing about or I’m just too tired to be witty and wordy by the time I get home at 4:40 am.

But here I am, for your reading pleasure.  What is today’s post about?  No idea.  I figured that maybe I could just do a little “About Me” post, especially since I’m not sure if I ever really did one before, and because it’s kind of fun to read about other people’s quirks.  Even more so when you are famous, which I am not, but I am still very awesome and intriguing.  Read away!

 

Lashawn, in a series of asterisked factoids:

 

*I am the shortest of my siblings, by at least a foot.  I am barely 5’1″.

*I am part Creole and a lot Cherokee, on my dad’s side.  My mom is German, Irish, and a little Italian.

*My dad named me Lashawn, my mom wanted to name me Elizabeth.

*I am scared of heights, deep water, big dogs, needles, and squirrels.

*I have been known to sit on the couch and watch TV while eating cheesecake right from the pan.

*My favorite book is Looking For Alaska by John Green.  John is a fantastic writer, and I recommend you read all his books, especially this one and The Fault in Our Stars.

*My favorite runners-up would be The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, and The Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder.  I haven’t read any of the Little House books in years, but I adored them growing up.  I even read the other series about her mother and her grandmother and her great-grandmother.  I used to imagine what it must have been like to live on the frontier back then.

*When I laugh really hard, no sound tends to come out.

*I am ridiculously clumsy.

*I am a huge worrier.  When I am stressed out or frustrated, I chew my lower lip.  If you see me biting my upper lip, that means I am overwhelmed or upset.  My lower lip tends to be slightly chapped at all times, even though I am an ardent user of lip balm.

*I am extremely nearsighted and am pretty blind when I don’t have my glasses or contacts.

*I love Double Stuf Oreos.  Preferably with a huge glass of milk.

*I think I have some hoarding tendencies.  And I am kind of a messy person.  Life is too short to be perfectly neat.

*I am particularly fond of sweatpants and hoodies.

*I mispronounce “belligerent” all the time.

*My favorite movie is Anchorman.

*I would love to go to Venice some day.

*I have an unhealthy love of pasta.  And cheese.

Season One, Episode Twenty-Eight: Of Hangovers and Poetry

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Blehhh.

Nothing ruins a perfectly sunny day off like a friggin’ hangover.  I slept it off til almost 12:30 this afternoon, and while the headache has finally left my cranial premises, I still am dealing with this annoying twinge of nausea.  And I have wasted said day off in the confines of a itty bitty hotel room.  Yesterday I went on quite the jaunt around Downtown Cleveland, walking around in the chilly April sunshine and taking pictures and composing random poetry on my iPhone.  I don’t have too much to talk about today, so I’ll share my impromptu poem I came up with yesterday.

 

This hotel room

Makes me feel claustrophobic

–it’s far too narrow–

Cramped and brown

It makes me vaguely apprehensive

The angle of the windows chokes out the sunlight

But if you crane your head

–just so–

You can catch a glimpse of the lake,

A tiny sliver of sparkling gray-blue beauty.

I’d rather be outside

In the windy chill

At least the sunshine is warm

When it shines down on you.

 

This park bench is prime real estate

The wood feels cold under my jeans

And the far too big windshirt that I surreptitiously stole from my boyfriend

The wind blows in off the lake

–and honestly, anyone who thinks that Chicago is the windiest city has never been to Cleveland in the spring–

Which shimmers like a murky blue jewel

In the late April sun

I sit on this bench, under the pretense of reading

–I’ve got a Salinger novel in my lap–

But really, I just couldn’t take the claustrophobic brown crampedness

Of that goddamn hotel room.

 

So I sit here, fingers chilled

The wind ruffling the loose hairs that lay against my neck

The air a vague combination of exhaust and manure and springtime

And I think

Because that’s what you do when you’re alone on a bench in a park

You sit and you think

And I watch the people and the cars

Hurrying past, off to live another day in their mediocre adventures

The wind comes up again and I think I’ve decided

That perhaps I should move my contemplation to a less windy location.

–“April 24, 2012 5:33 pm”

Season One, Episode Twenty-Four: Chubby Babies Wielding Arrows and Slutty Streetwalking Mailmen

Posted in Comedy, Humor, Random, Writing by

I hate painting my nails.  I always inevitably wind up smudging a nail somehow.  Usually it’s when I think my nails are dry and then I figure it’s safe to go pee and I smear them trying to carefully take my pants off.

Hi.

Well, anyway, I am sitting here contemplating an idea for a story that keeps tickling my synapses and researching ghost towns and drowned towns and thinking about how deliciously melancholy the idea of an entire town under water is.  I’m also thinking about fairy tales and possible names for my main character and how bright my nail polish is (China Glaze lacquer in Pink Voltage.  It’s very very neon pink.) and how much I liked the pilot episode of Smash that I just watched on Hulu.  The mind of a writer is a fantastic thing.  We multitask.

These are obviously not my nails because they are not smudged. No, these are phantom nails I found via Google.

It’s Valentine’s Day.  Yay.  This will actually be the first V-Day that I will not be at work or watching sitcoms over a bowl of Ben and Jerry’s.  I’m excited.  I’m not exactly sure what proper Valentine’s Day etiquette is, but I guarantee you that I will screw it up somehow.  I’m not exactly a particularly classeh ladeh.  Part of me keeps reminding me that there’s a new episode of New Girl on tonight and that I have chocolate gelato in the freezer.  To that schlumpy sweatpant-clad part of me, I say nay.  I will go get overdressed and put on an acceptable amount of makeup and venture out into bitter cold and snow to have a good time.  I’ll be like a hooker mailman (I just giggled at the mental image), but instead of mail I will be delivering…joy.  Yes.

Hmm. They look as though they were delivered some joy by a fat cheeked baby wielding arrows or a hooker mailman.

In other news, my unemployment was rejected on supposedly justifiable grounds, and I am not really wanting to fight the decision, although I have been advised by everyone and their mom to fight it until I get it.  I don’t really feel like fighting with my old boss.  That is a battle not worth fighting because I’ll just wind up getting pissed and I don’t need the stress.  I had four years of that shit and I actually like not having to deal with her anymore.  I might reapply, but if the state ruled that the firing was allowable, I highly doubt that I will receive any compensation.  Just saying.  I don’t feel like wasting time over $165 a week.  Hell, if I have to I’ll apply at Target or something to tide myself over until I find out what is going to happen with the casino.  I applied for state benefits, so I’m just waiting on a response from them.  I highly doubt that I will get rejected when my gross weekly income is nada.

I just thought I’d drop on in and write a quick post because I have been neglectful of a lot of stuff as of late.  This whole days blending together thing is really becoming an issue.  I’m mixing up my days of the week and sleeping a lot.  I think I need to find a routine hobby so that I don’t turn into a crazy person.  Maybe I’ll join the gym so that I have to actually leave the house on a regular basis.

A Short Interlude of Sorts

Posted in Music, Random, Writing by

I’m trying to catch up on sleep and a few side writing projects I’ve been working on, so this is like a mini post.  A postlette, if you will.  Ever since I was around eleven or twelve I’ve been a fan of Charlotte Church.  Her voice is breathtaking, and her range was something I aspired to when I was younger…since my parents couldn’t afford voice lessons, I’d spend many an afternoon after school sitting on my bed with my CD player on my dresser, singing along to her albums, trying my damnedest to hit those crazy high soprano notes.  I’m sure I drove my mom and dad crazy, but I loved her music.

I was messing around on YouTube tonight and on a whim I looked up Charlotte Church because I’d read that she’d tried her hand at pop music.  Sure enough, I found a video of her baring her midriff and shaking her shaggily cut “rock star” hair, singing a song about being “a crazy chick”.  Her voice surprised me because I was so used to her classical stuff, but I wasn’t impressed by the lyrics or the premise of the video.  I clicked on one of the side links and found the song that I’m posting below.  It’s called “We Were Young”, and it’s about her breakup with her children’s father.  Her voice is beautiful, and you can hear the pain and wistfulness in it as she sings.  I couldn’t find the album, Back to Scratch, on iTunes, but I think it’s probably available on the UK version.  I really love the simpleness of the recording, it’s much more impressive than an over-processed, over produced track–and she touches upon her classical background a little when she sings.  I love it 🙂  Take a listen, and don’t miss me too much, I’ll be back soon ❤