“Don’t. You're asian, they'll never believe you anyway.”

So, I’m at Bri’s work getting my green tea. It seems to be a normal day, save for the extreme wind that’s been happening and the cold, which, frankly, I’m enjoying, and the fact that Bri’s [crazy] boss was with his daughter today.
I’m bored and except for a boy who didn’t know that he was gay yet, the place is empty so I decided to talk to the five year old who earlier had told me she liked my hair.
My new best friend.
“How old are you?” she asks me after I finish tying her shoes and making her run around the café.
“Seventeen,” I say. She stretches out on an over stuffed arm chair and twirls her hair.
“I can’t wait to be seventeen,” she sighs.
I pine for my younger days. “Ew, why?” I ask.
“I want to go to high school!” she says. Now she’s upside down in the chair.
“Get your feet down!” her lunatic father orders her from behind the counter.
“Best sit up,” I say, mostly because I’m fuckin’ scared of her dad as it is. He previously thought I was a lesbian and dating Brianna because I was in the shop so often. And that little joke where I made her a CD addressed to “my lover” wasn’t so funny in his book apparently.
She listens and straightens herself up then tries to cross her legs like mine.
“Why do you want to go to high school?” I ask, “It’s a lot of work!”
She shrugs. “Although,” I continue, and read carefully, here’s where I make the biggest fucking mistake ever, “you meet a lot of friends and you’ll meet a lot of boys.”
“EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!” she shrieks, “BOYS!”
“Nah, you’ll like them when you’re older,” I insist. I fucking had to insist.
And with that she lollops away in that odd five year old walk. Not quite a dance or a skip, just a lollop. Like she’s still unsure whether her legs can carry her to where she wants to go.
Apparently, she just wanted to go to her dad (again, Bri’s Crazy Ass boss) to tell him I said something inappropriate anyway. That little brat.
“What’s her name?” I hear him say angrily from the back room. He didn’t bother for an answer. “YOU.” Her boss pointed to me from behind the counter. “WE NEED TO TALK.”
OK, so if you’re me you know these things;
- You rarely ever pay full price for anything. If you pay at all.
- You go behind the counter a lot and you’re not supposed to because you don’t work there. In fact, you’ve never really worked. Damn girl. Get a fucking job!
- He’s foreign and thinks you’re gay and possibly dating his employee.
- He asked you if wanted to room with Andre, that other lone patron, who showed slight interest in you before you realized, oh, he’s just gay.
- That this same man apologized for interrupting “you playing with yourself” today during your Texas Hold ‘Em moment. You were practicing and dealing for yourself and your invisible friend and you were so owning “Jim” (that was your invisible friend’s name and he sucked!).
- You stand up around the counter a lot and he hates that.

So you’re shakin’ in your boots (flats actually) mostly because you only have about ten dollars in your bag (ok, forty, but he doesn’t have to know that) and you don’t really feel like paying everything that you owe today.
“GET IN HERE.” He says from the back room.
“…You want me to go into the back?” I ask. I’ve seen The Sopranos. I know what happens in back rooms and they’re never playing Candy Land.
I walk in and see his little girl staring up at him from her spot in the corner. Bri looks pissed. But not at me. I’m thankful for that, but my attention is now turning to the short bald man with steam coming out of his ears. Napoleon Complex… I think to myself.
“MY DAUGHTER SAYS THAT YOU SAID SOMETHING INAPPROPRIATE TO HER?”
That little brat! I think, She lied to her dad!
I shake my head, I’m completely perplexed. “SOMETHING ABOUT BOYS?” He continues.
“Ohhhhh…” I say, feeling better, believing this might be an easy fix, “I just said she’ll like them when she’s older.”
He closes his eyes and pushes the palm of his hands together. I’m assuming so that he wouldn’t smash my head in in front of his five year old daughter.
“UNACCEPTABLE! YOU CAN’T SAY THAT TO A FIVE YEAR OLD!” he says probably too loudly (or perhaps, it was my imagination, but I doubt it) in his Arabiraquiturkishbrazillianwhateverheis accent.
I double back and realize my heart is beating just a tad faster than it should be so I calm myself down by thinking before I speak which, let me tell you, never happens. I take time to make eye contact with Bri who gives me a sad look as if to say “I don’t know what to do. I am so sorry.” It makes me feel better.
“Um, I’m not sure what I did? Why is that bad? I-”
He cuts me off, “YOU DO NOT SAY THAT TO A FIVE YEAR OLD! THAT IS UNACCEPTABLE!”
“All I said was that she’ll like boys when she’s older. She asked me what high school was like. She said she wanted to be seventeen… I don’t see what I did wrong.”
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“Let me apologize to her then,” I offer.
“NO. JUST. LEAVE. I’m asking you not to come back.” he turns to poor Bri sandwiched between me and the daughter, then back at me, “I understand you are Bri’s friend and I respect that.”
I wanted to say “Oh, we’re more than just friends…” but I figure this is very much the wrong time.
“But I am asking you to leave.” With that he turned to his little girl who is now practically curled up into a ball on the floor. “You are not in trouble!” he says to the girl, “If someone tells you something inappropriate you let me know. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
Bri stood helpless. I just stood dumbfounded. Her boss got off of the floor and turned his attention back to me, “Please. Leave.”
Fuuuuuuuuuck this! I wanted to shout out. But I didn’t. I just left.
Then I called my mom.
But I didn’t cry! Yes. I’m growin’ up.


I just can't believe I got kicked out of Bri's coffee shop for telling a five year old she'll like boys when she's older. Now I know how Jacko feels.
Now, I’m also on his side.

I'm gonna start wearing more pajamas around town to show my support.

Not really.

Quote of the day:
StephW.Luk: mashmallow eating perv

“I’m just a better person now.”

I’ve never been great at getting my ass up [on time or at all] and getting to school so I wasn't suprised when I woke up at seven this morning. I was not programmed to get up any earlier. I’m always late or I’m never there. It’s that simple. It’s something I’ve always had trouble with.

I remember in sixth grade running out to my classroom from my mother’s car and throwing the door open during the pledge. I’d do the walk of shame to my desk while Mrs. Liston would shake her head and tell me “this can’t happen in middle school!” She was right, because in middle school you needed notes and shit.

“Dentist appointment, eh?” the attendance dean would look over some faxed note excusing me from my first three classes sent over by my aunt who worked at a dentist’s office. “Let me see those teeth!”
I smiled quickly and then closed my mouth as he sent me off with a pass to my next class. Greenway Middle School must have thought I had the cleanest teeth in the whole damn world I was at the dentist so often.

For high school we just don’t give any excuses for my tardiness.

“Hi, this is Jackie Sparer, my daughter Stephanie Sparer will be late this morning. Thank you,” is the script of choice when I wake up and miss English (capitalized). “If you say thank you immediately after they don’t have time to ask you for a reason,” my mother explained to me.

In the beginning it was easy to come up with an excuse to leave early from school (another chronic problem I have).
“When are you getting those braces off?” Mary at attendance would ask me.
“Soon I hope!” I would say as I skipped off. I didn’t need her asking me why I was going back to the office twice a week.

This semester things are a little more difficult because the braces are off.
“Feel better,” Mary says now as she hands me a note.
I always reply with a weak smile and a cough, “Thanks,” I say softly.
Sometimes Mary then adds, “Yeah, there’s just something going around.”

I have to wonder if they think my mother is a complete idiot or if Mary really is that dumb. She has to know. I can’t be sick all the time.

If you look in my yearbooks, no matter what grade I was in, I usually have one entry from a teacher that says something to the affect of “wish I had seen you in class more often!”

But they love me anyway.

Except for this bitch of a teacher I had in eighth grade. We called her Ms. Alcoholic. That wasn’t her real name, but she had come to school with a hang over one day and denied it. I don’t blame her for doing it. If I had been divorced with her hair and sense of style I would probably be getting drunk every night too. She wasn’t just a divorcee either, she was completely bitter about it. I remember watching this movie in her class and they showed two pigs together and she shouted, “Look! It’s my ex-husband and his new girlfriend!” No one laughed. We were scared. I think she was actually still drunk at the time.
At one point however, this bitter teacher had noted to the class on one of the many occasions when I was gone that I would probably miss school if I “was having a bad hair day”.
I would. And I have. But that’s beside the point. I was so hurt that she’d say that to the class. I was only about twelve at the time.

My father tells me I should go to bed earlier to avoid this mess, but I have been (sort of) and it’s not working out for me. I sleep right through Britney. I wake up around seven-ish and wonder if I could actually go to school in my pajamas.
But then I remember I’m classy.

I used to feel bad about missing so much school, but you tend to get over that pretty fast. Senior year is pointless anyway (as we’ve discussed previously). I learn more watching my syndicated Oprah.

Quote of the day:
Alison (to Mr. Bach): “Would you have regretted not going to your Senior Prom?”
Stefi: “Nah, he would have gotten laid anyway.”
Mr. Bach: “Ok! Let’s talk about this later!”
- Fun during the one class I actually go to.

“You guys are like children! I can’t take you anywhere!”

The weather is changing, Spring Break is near, and damn, I should have done more work this weekend.

But I didn’t.

I’m too lethargic to work. The warmer weather makes me want to just lie down with a good book or sit outside at a café with my friends speaking of our younger years and what we can expect in the future. Sometimes it’s scary to think I’ve known a few of my friends since we were six.

Bri moved into her own place this weekend, so a majority of my time was spent there not watching I Heart Huckabees and instead falling asleep, hopefully not snoring, and driving back to my house in a hazy daze where I can’t tell if the tintinnabulation I hear is in my head or in the real world. Either way, the lack of cars on the street tell me I’m past my curfew. My mother only confirms it for me when I walk through the door.

I ate out this weekend too. Not in a lesbianic way, but in a I felt like getting dressed up and eating a really expensive salad kind of way at Zinc Bistro.

Sorry, I didn’t feel like splitting anything.

They thought we were poor teenagers, but we left a great tip. We also saw Tiffany Barkley, but not really, and that’s completely unrelated.

I finally made an appointment to get my hair cut. My stylist moved salons, but when I called the old one, all they said was that she had resigned.

For four hours I was without a stylist and very, very alone in the world. She ended up calling me though and we set up an appointment to get my hair looking decent again. Something just in time for my Quentin Tarantino* themed birthday dinner.

Perhaps the highlight of yesterday was when an unexpected Girl on Girl DVD was thrown into the viewing mix. Sitting in the company of Marky Mark, Fiona Apple, Michael Moore, Margot Cho, and Laura Flynn Boyle while watching Girl on Girl action is something to remember. Ladies and gentlemen, pre-ops and post-ops, life doesn’t get much better than that.

Grocery shopping was thrown in somewhere too.

I’d love to spend the next blog and a half telling you everything I’ve been doing, but I fear these things;
-I hate reading those blogs that follow this setup; “Then I went here and omg we had so much fun omgomglolz here’s where I didn’t get laid!”
-Please. No one wants to hear about something that is only funny to me.
-It would be so boring you’d end up just reading Andrew’s blog.

I do have some news though; I’m doing some sort of an entertainment segment for the announcements at North Canyon from now on. Not quite sure how to make that school appropriate, but hell, I will make it work if it kills me.

This also means I have to start showing up for school.
Damn, just when I was getting used to sleeping in, too.

Out of fear of again, spending over 70 dollars in one month on iTunes (and that was when I was restraining myself), my mother is allotting me music allowance because she’s not comfortable with me downloading illegal music. I only get fifteen a month because, as my mother puts it, I “don’t need every song”.

My mother and I have become more like each other in these past couple months. At least once a day we find ourselves speaking the same sentence at the same time- it’s because we’re both amazing.

I’m sure this isn’t the blog you were all expecting, sorry to disappoint those of you who check five times a day for an update, and please, don’t lie, I know you do. But, it’s an update, no? If this isn’t enough for you, there are always the pictures on the side of my blog, which, yes, do matter.

Quote of the day:
Bri: “Can you plug your thing into my thing?”
Taylor: “Hellllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll yeah!”
-- Brianna asking her brother to hook up the DVD player.


*Subject to change

“[Jesus] was a person of questionable background.”

My cousin, he’ll remain nameless, was the, well, I’ll just be frank here, fuck up of the family. He didn't mean to be, he just was. Consequently, he enlisted into the army, and perhaps, in some sort of irony, was also the first out of many cousins (take however many cousins you have and multiply that by 40 and then will have the same amount I have) to participate in a wedding ceremony. And his wife wasn’t even pregnant first! Needless to say, he’s a sergeant now and everyone’s really proud of him as he fights the “War to End All Wars” or whatever they’re calling this one (Fight Against Terrorism?) over in Iraq. He’s even been on ESPN because of this, we’re in awe. Actually, I think my family is more impressed by the fact that he was on ESPN than the whole protecting our country killing some people aspect of war. In any event, he’s coming back home with his wife (the only non-lesbian left in the army) to surprise his mother. His wife gets in a day before he does though, so guess where she’s staying?

Not that I mind, she’s really nice and she’s only 24, so we get along really well. She’s the older sister I always wanted and never had.

There were absolute murders before hand though.
“She can’t stay in my room,” I said simply at dinner two nights before.
“MINE EITHER!” my sister, Danielle, only twelve, or maybe thirteen?, said between mouthfuls of, most likely chicken. I don’t remember what we were eating to be honest.
“Well, she has to stay in someone’s room!” My mother said from the head of the table then looked to my father across from her, “Do you feel like sleeping with her, Howard?” she was being sarcastic, incase someone didn’t catch that.
My dad sat chewing and not answering.
“Daddy,” I kicked him under the table.
“What are you kicking me for?” he looked annoyed.
“SHE IS NOT STAYING IN MY ROOM!” my sister slammed her fork onto the table and went off in a huff.
“Yes, she is,” I said calmly then turned to my mother, “Danielle can just sleep in my room.”
And with that, it was settled.

Now, mind you, when I said Danielle could sleep in my room, I didn’t mean in my fucking bed. I meant on my floor. In a sleeping bag. So imagine my surprise when I’m rolling into bed twenty minutes ago (early, I know) and awake my sister who’s huddled down, probably sweating, I don’t know the last time she showered, in my sheets.
“OW!” she says, “What are you doing?”
“What am I? What- Why are you in my bed?” I ask her. And, oh, I am ANNOYED.
“You said I could sleep here,” she says lazily before she turns over.
“I said you could SLEEP IN MY ROOM, not MY BED!” The skin cells covering my bed now… are her feet dirty? Oh G0d.
“Same thing!” she says.
Same thing. Same thing? I don’t think so. ANYONE knows that there’s a difference between staying in someone’s room and staying in someone’s bed. Ask any guy. Any guy.

I complained enough to my mother that she made my sister move to the couch. Now I have to go change my sheets. What a bother.

Now that Hell Month is over I feel I’ve earned at least a little bit of a break from school. You know, other than the usual four classes a week that I miss. I decided to let Mr. Bush have it today. More or less.

"I am not doing any more fucking work for this week,” I began, mind you, I wasn’t looking him in the eye. “I was stressed out for a month so if you think I'm going to be running around for you this week, you have another thing comin', Fancy Pants." I know, I know, I was embarrassed that I said Fancy Pants too. I don't know what I was thinking.

But in reply he said, "OK, you earned this time off by being consistently on time and consistently good with your work. So, that's OK." and then I said,
"OK, cool."
Yeah, it happened.
Just. Like. That.
More or less.

What are the odds that I get bored by tomorrow and am writing again by Wednesday?

Quote of the day:
Stefi: “Are we doing a WAC (writing across curriculum) today?”
Jenke: “I’ll whack you if you want!”
Stefi: “I bet you will… OK, well, I’m done now.”
-- My conversation with Mr. Jenke today