That’s a problem to the wheel whale. Trust I know them 20s real whale.
–Clipse, When The Last Time (modified hip-hop whale quote #1)
Your man Whale in his own damn lane / Can’t control the box, you are no Mills Lane.
–Wale, Chillin’ (modified hip-hop whale quote #2)
This weekend, I visited the pelagic zone. (Pelagic means “open water.”) I, with my friends Lina and Naomi, was seeking cetaceans. (Cetaceans means “whales, dolphins and porpoises.”) While on our boat, Lina and Naomi told me they aren’t quite caught up on this blog. (Not quite caught up on means “We never read it.”)
They may never read this blog, but they did have advice for it. Naomi: “You should put more pictures.” Lina: “Yeah. OF CATS.”
Lina and Naomi are former Yale classmates, and two of my oldest friends in L.A. Lina and I took a narrative video class together during my senior year. Though it was a small workshop with multiple collaborative assignments, we never really connected until one night at about 1 a.m. during Finals Week, when we recognized each other outside the raucous, disgusting and permanently sticky floor-ed dance club Toad’s Place.
All roads lead to … your overdue video project.
We shared a brazen laugh over the fact that our final projects for the video class were due in roughly 7 hours, and that neither of us was finished – nor concerned. A month later I graduated and moved to L.A. (slipshod video project notwithstanding); Lina moved here a year later and began to live with Naomi, and the three of us began a blazing friendship.
I sometimes forget our long-ish history, because after we all briefly reunited in L.A. a few years back, Lina and Naomi then moved away for a spell. Right after their graduation, we hung out multiple nights a week; then about a year later Lina moved to Shanghai and Naomi moved to Portland. Meanwhile, as I kept the City of Angels home fires burning, as it were, I endured increasingly desperate living conditions. This included working at an un-ideal job; living in a decrepit, dank and hot water-less “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Section 8!”™ particle board rattrap; and wearing free clothes that my landlady passed to me, pityingly, with the caveat that she was just on her way to incinerate them due to suspicion of bed bugs.
The Way We Were (2008): Drunk, Apparently.
Little better.
Vampin’.
Vivid regret: Lina, Naomi and I went to a VMA after-party in 2008. Among the sea of Z-listers, in one corner, Tila Tequila was holding court. In another: Kim Kardashian (yes, she was a low-letter celeb at the time!). We wanted to get a novelty picture and chose Tila. I can’t even work my mind back into the place where that seemed like the wiser move.
Now, the band’s back together! Lina and Naomi have both moved back to L.A., where they gaming company and produce wildly addictive products such as Egg Baby and Hot Guy Alarm Clock.
On my end, I now take scalding showers, grind it out at the labor of love you’re currently reading, and am blessed with many a non-bed bug-chewed Loehmann’s outfit. (There is of course a loving boyfriend now too, who didn’t flee the first time I brought him by “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Section 8!”™ whilst furtively camouflaging the flame-licked fringes of my abortively incinerated duds.)
Lina and I this year, at the wedding of our friend Su (the blushing bride second from left!) in Singapore. Our other friend Luci is on the far left. I did not wear a bedbug-suspected outfit to this event.
Whale are the WHALE photos violet??
Also, I don’t remember the Toads incident. Which I realize only makes me sound worse and more likely it was true.
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