the first year is the hardest part iv

all those presents are from my mom

Our first Christmas in Los Angeles away from family was bittersweet.  Christmas for Jaime and I had always been a marathon, she would wake me up at 5 am to open presents.  At 9 am we would go to my dad’s house for breakfast.  Around noon we would head off to Jaime’s Grandparents, for Lunch with her family, our visit there would be shorter because Christmas eve was also spent with her family.  By 3 or 4 we would head off to my parents where we would finish our evening with dinner before going back to our own home.  The day was exhausting and often difficult to enjoy without worrying about when and where we were going next.

In LA our day was significantly less eventful.  Jaime still got up around 5 am to open presents but then we went back to sleep.   We woke up later to eat breakfast and watch television and call our families to wish them a merry Christmas followed by snacks and more television.  We started cooking dinner around 4, ate by 6 and finished our evening by falling asleep in front of Survivorman.  

For me work was going fine, I was working at developing a routine and had started taking the bus home.  Jaime on the other hand was barely clinging to her sanity.  Her interview with LAMILL coffee, an LA based roasting company had gone well.  Up till that point LAMILL had exclusively sold their beans to upscale restaurants like Spago and now were opening their own cafe in Silverlake, a nieghborhood bordering Los Feliz and Echo Park.  The interview went well enough that they hired her which was good news except that they weren’t scheduled to open to the public until February, she would start training in mid January.  This was all good news she just needed it to come sooner, before she lost her mind.

On New Years eve our friends Joel and Annika invited us to the Archlight where they would be having an adult only showing of Bad Santa, they allowed you to take drinks into the theater.  I’d never seen the movie before and can’t really stand to watch Billy Bob Thornton do anything, but after two rum and Cokes I found it to be humorous.  Afterwards we bought a frozen pizza from Von’s and took it back to our apartment.

It was hard to believe but due to family issues our general stress concerning jobs we’d not seen the only two people we knew in LA until this evening.  We ate pizza and caught up and drank until Joel heard about a work party that was taking place at a house on Winona Avenue, about a mile and a half from our apartment.

We decided to walk their and avoid the need for a designated driver.  When sober the mile and a half walk seed easy and reasonable.

The party wasn’t terribly lively, the highlight was playing Wii bowling.  Midnight was a non event I don’t remember counting down the seconds or if we watched anything on television.  It might simply have been that one person looked down and noticed that it was after midnight and we all shouted a pathetic “happy new year!”  What I do clearly remember was catching Jaime in the kitchen chugging a bottle of Champagne. 

I had work the next morning which meant that I needed to leave the house no later than 5:20 am.  The party wan’t getting any livelier and Jaime and I headed out back home.  At first everything seemed fine, we were a little tipsy and it was unusually cold outside for an LA evening, but as soon as we turned the street corner onto Franklin Avenue Jaime went berserk.  (I should preface the next portion of the blog by saying that Jaime has told the following story on stage numerous times and so I tell it heree with her consent.)

It was a major shit storm, as if Jaime walked through an invisible wall that brought out all the absolute crazy in her.  She began screaming at me, crying, falling to the ground, flailing all around.  She screamed nonsense at the top of her lungs and I begged to be quiet.  I literally dragged her for a mile and a half, while cars slowed down as they passed us trying for a closer look.  I was lucky no one called the Police, the whole scene looked terribly suspicious and I had no idea how I was going to convince them that I wasn’t taking her home to rape her.

me: Oh hello officers.

officers: Is there a problem here?

me: oh, no... everything’s fine.  She’s just drunk... I’m... it’s not fine... I’m trying to get her home.  I’m her boyfriend... we live together.  I need to get her to bed... just to sleep.

I could just see the scene with a dozen cop cars blocking the street, Jaime and I in hand cuffs and separate cars and me talking a mile a minute telling the Police that really everything was fine and that in the morning it would all be worked out.

I had to carry Jaime the last block before we got home at 2:30 am.  I put her to bed and she wasn’t there but two minutes when she sat up and vomited all over everything.  I took her to the bathroom and propped her up against the toilet and began cleaning up.  By 3:30 I was finished and found Jaime passed out on the bathroom floor.  I should have let her stay there but instead felt that she should come back to bed.  After tucking her in she immediately sat up and vomited again.

I didn’t get to bed until 4:00 am and with an hour of sleep I awoke and headed off to work.

It was one of the lowest points in our three years in Los Angeles and about as low as I could imagine starting 2008.  I didn’t blame Jaime, I don’t know what either of us really expected our of our first two months but I know we both expected things to be different than this.  I felt for her and knew one thing for sure; we’d just set the bar so low that things had to get better.

*               *              *

Things did get better, within a few weeks Jaime started training and by February the restaurant opened.  She would be busy with work and getting to know her coworkers who were a truly a great group of people Molly, Viv, Nick, Matt, Andy, Grace and so on.  We got to know them well and they were able to help Jaime began to get a foothold in the industry.

I would like to say that this was the end of our job hunt, that now we had steady pay checks and we were able to spend our free time chasing the dream.  I would eventually quit Borders without notice, sending only an email to the GM that I would be in Saturday  to pick up my paycheck.  Following a series of accusations against her coworkers by the company Jaime and her coworkers began weekly drinking sessions at dive bars called “Fight Club” and eventually Jaime had no choice but to quit.  There would be other jobs and better times, we were never settled but if you dedicate yourself enough you can find those jobs in LA.

There is no doubt that the first year is the hardest, in just two short months that saying had been proven true.  Unfortunately there were still ten months to go before we could call it a year and get the second year underway.

christmas mediocrity

   The thing is... I love Christmas!  I love everything about it, giving and receiving gifts, the lights, the decorations and decorated trees, getting together with family, stockings hung by the chimney with care, visions of sugar plumbs... but there is another very big part of Christmas which may be my absolute favorite.  Christmas movies and music.

  What other holiday has it’s own section at the music or movie store?  They’re so incredibly marketable that they require they’re own section, though this may have less to do with trying to find the most accurate way of classifying them and more to do with the fact that most often a Christmas album or film is just not held to the same standard, instead they lean on something that I call “the Holiday Effect” by which a mediocre song or movie gets played on television and the radio not because it has any good qualities but rather because it is Christmas.

  

Can anyone name the last Christmas album to win a Grammy? As far as I can tell it was Stephen Colbert for best comedy album.  What was the last Christmas movie to win an Academy award?  Apparently when it comes time to hand out awards this genre gets forgotten, but not because they can’t be enjoyed for what they are but rather because they are intended to get you into the Christmas spirit and the Christmas spirit knows very little of good art.

Every year just after Thanksgiving I put “Christmas Vacation” into my DVD player and watch it with the same joy, laughing at the same points as I do every year.  I will continue to watch this movie at least four more times during the holidays including Christmas Eve.  For me Christmas isn’t Christmas without it and this is exactly why Hollywood continues to make these movies.  For most of us we all have these movies that we are compelled to watch during the holidays.  Some are good some are okay and some are just bad but as long at they contain at lease three of these five elements we forgive all their flaws in service to the holiday spirit.

1. Movie must contain at lease one miracle that we normally would gag at in any other movie but cry at in a Christmas movie.
2. Movie must contain snow.
3. Movie must contain some sort of fatal disease preferably Cancer which may or may not be cured by the conclusion and will depend on what kind of movie it is.
4. Movie must contain at lease one appearance by Santa Clause.
5. Movie must contain a man and a woman divorced or not getting back together or together for the first time.

  While some holiday movies may not contain three or any and those often are the stand out’s, snow often is a fail safe to get any Christmas movie in the right mood and I think you would be hard pressed to find just one which doesn’t at the very least have snow.  To sum up these movies the fact is that some are good and some are bad but I will literally watch any Christmas movie during the holidays including “The Christmas Clause”  Starring Leah Thompson in what must be one of the most cliched movies ever contrived and yet somehow amid the thousands of stories and scripts that are passing through the hands of Hollywood executives this is what gets made, and I promise you that the only reason this thing airs every year on the Hallmark channel is because as horribly awful as it might be we can’t get enough of the Holiday themed films.

Who doesn’t have a Christmas album out?  I understand why they make them, 90% of the songs on a Christmas album are classics and require no song writing at all, and all the religious hymns are public domain and require no rights to be secured.  Because we all know these songs the albums hold little surprise and make us say, “Sure I love Jingle Bells, but I haven’t heard Justin Bieber sing it,” and so he makes a Christmas album which could easily have been recorded over the course of an evening they take a picture of him wearing a Santa hat put it on the cover and print up a couple million copies.  While I couldn’t tell you a thing about any Justin Bieber song other than he sounds like a little girl, I can say I would probably listen to it, just in the same way that I can’t stand to listen to Mariah Cary but love, love, love “All I want for Christmas is you.”

There are also the so bad they’re great songs one example being Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” take all the Christmas out of that and you just have a really skull numbing jingle which is almost enough to make you forget the Paul McCartney was a member of the Beatles the most popular band of the 20th century.

All of that said we should not forget that there is great Christmas music and great Christmas movies which don’t lean on the “holiday effect” and sure we eat those up just as much as the terrible ones but there is something really festive about watching “elf” or “Prancer” or “the Santa Clause” and basking in the Christmasness of it all.

Then once in a great while something comes along which leans so perfectly on the “Holiday effect” that it should be celebrated as a true Christmas miracle.  That of course is “The Christmas shoes” originally a song by New Song it has also been made into a horrible movie starring Rob Lowe.  This movie song combination is perfect in it’s Holiday spirit, about a man who meet a dirty little boy in line at a department store who is trying to buy some shoes for his sick mother who could die at any moment.  The little boy goes so far as to ask this gentleman for help purchasing said shoes which he then does.  It may come to no surprise that the nice man and the the ailing mother get together in the movie version.  It hits on all the Christmas movie and song themes that it is almost meta christmas.

  Yes, I love all Christmas movies and music no matter how bad or good they may be.  I don’t love them equally but I will enjoy them all, even though I know that most are all marketing and that Hollywood is fully aware of the “Hollywood Effect.”  I won’t be celebrating any high art but rather will be basking in the glow of Christmas mediocrity.