Halloweiner Snack

This Halloween, I went dressed as A GIANT DICK. Just kidding! I had to work coat check for a party at my job and I had to be on a plane for some hours earlier in the day, so my costume-fashioning time was limited. There was a baby on the plane who was wearing a little skeleton costume and shoes that said BOO. He often squealed but I was surprised to find it quite endearing! Maybe you're like, oh sheesh, she's a girl, blah blah Biological Clock. One thing I hate is when women talk about their "biological clock." Actually, I don't hate it so much as I think it's annoying that the phrase "biological clock" is often accompanied by a knowing nudge or roll of the eyes. "My biological clock sure is ticking. Am I right, ladies?" Chortle chortle emphatic eyebrow NOD! Seriously, Ladies, am I right or am I RIGHT?

So for Halloween I had a bouquet of grapes, which was fun, and a hat. Laura was a giant martini. I also had like white stockings and black lacey boots and a funny smocky dress, so in my mind I was if Wednesday Addams was the girl in The Secret Garden if The Secret Garden took place in Italy rather than the moors of weird England. But that took too long to explain to the girls who went as sexy blah blahs and needed me to check their coats for them.

While I was home, I hung out with my broseph, Boopsie, who has the same hair and general catalogue of stances that I do. We had wings with another set of siblings, the Petruseks, who should have a techno side thing called PetruSexxx, and who resemble each other in hair, gait, and demeanor. The four of us together make up a combination so potent that if we turn on each other it will be like some Hatfield v. McCoy type SHIT, but since we all dig each other's vibes and smell what we are collectively cooking, it's a pretty sweet set up like generally you know?

My friend Amy bought a dog that looks and acts a lot like me, so hopefully the Petruseks have a best friend who has a dog that looks and acts a lot like them, or else Boops and I are one-up on those guys. Game, set, MATCH.

On a harmonious note,
Some things happened on this trip home that really warmed my heart and brought me joy. The past month or so has been BUSY and stressful sometimes! But it also is a dream, just a dream. Everyone be safe and healthy and joyous. Yeah, I just got serious, seriouser than Dicks and PetruSexxx, in any case. But you may forget how lucky we are to live, and laugh, and love others, and tell others you love them, and taste cheese, and read a good sentence, and take a deep breath and let it out again, and giggle aloud at private thoughts, and shamelessly hit on your waiter, and do Cher impersonations, and drink refills of Pink Lemonade FOR FREE, and quote Casablanca with your mom inside Banana Republic while trying on a very trenchy trenchcoat, and feel your best friend's mom's boobs, and eat part of your balanced dorm breakfast, and sing, and read old yearbook quotes aloud only to realize that you've pretty sharply predicted the future. See people you haven't seen in five years. Play with their kids. See where you've all gone, know that you're all going so much farther. Wonder why you have more than two friends moving to Lincoln, Nebraska. Listen to Howard Stern with Dad, listen to Oma's stories about her Oma, fall asleep on the couch in the living room in clothes.

Dad Snack

My dad's in town for his 40-year high school reunion. Well, he's not in my town, at the moment, my town being New York City I suppose. He's currently in Clark, NJ, the place where he grew up after being born in Elizabeth and moving away from Garwood and saving the kid who fell through the ice pond and walking that duck on rollers all the way across town and sometimes I get his life story mixed up with that kid from A Christmas Story, but I know for a fact that when he was little, the world was in Technicolor. And kids on TV shows were named Tommy and Beaver. And my grandmother's German accent was as strong as it is now. Anyway, he will be there tonight and he'll be back in New York City tomorrow night, after "going to the party at Cal's place and sleeping at Randy's parents' house," which leads me to believe he's picking up where he left off at age 18. He met The Boss like four times, always brags about jamming with him, though the truth behind that stretch-ed lie is never boiled down completely. Apparently he and Randy burned a building down accidentally once. Some things are too perfect.

I reflect on my own time in high school, a time when I totally lacked confidence or interest in tanning, two things that, at the time, seemed to run rampant around me and signify my own blaring insignificance. While I now have confidence (what a funny thing to acquire! it's not like i can chart it over time, it's the opposite of nickels in a jar, i can only measure my successes in looking back and knowing how lonely and true it felt!), I still lack interest in tanning, and I still hate doing things to my hair to make it look nice. And I still daydream a lot, and I still listen to some of the same songs, and I still love a lot of the same dear hearts I knew and trusted and confided in back then. I still like a lot of the same movies and I still quote most of them like we used to. I think I still have my old ID? In three pieces and taped. Found my Yellow Boat and Charlie Brown tshirts in my tshirt drawer when I was on a laundry prowl. I have my favorite Beatles poster, the Hard Day's Night one, hanging in my room in New York. Lots and lots of pictures of Amy and I, making faces or pointing at things or wearing wigs. Sunil's cackle. The Bell Jar, and Dickens.

Little and big things stay the same inside the person growing, up and down as my heart beats, a lot of confusion that in time yielded to hindsight and clarity and still-so-young. Things are never linear and we look back and them and put them that way. I still feel all sorts of the same way in glimpses and glimmers. People change and they don't change and stories lie in how those dos and don'ts are.

A picture of my parents on their wedding day, 1983. They were together for nine years before they got married. Met in college in California. She in a shortish white dress. He in a tux and checkered Vans. You can take my dad out of Jersey, but you can't take the Jersey out of my dad.

High School Snack

I've been thinking a lot about high school. In part, I think, because a lot of my new play deals with my own perceptions about myself and relationships I have with other people. The characters in it all or mostly went to the same high school. There's the girl that is an all-angles Me: exaggerated stereotypes of myself, things I know and hate about myself, things I would be if the world were more hurdy gurdy. The Platonic Male Friend: a stock character that has always played a part in my life, from Drew and Danny when I was three years old all the way up through to the age of Sunil and Cameron and Al Petrusek into the Age of Neisler. Then, there's the Unattainable Crush: Another stock role in my life, one that plagued me heavily as I walked the halls of Mountain Pointe. He's a mixture of every sort of lovelorn misfortune from 4th grade (Austin) to 12th (Smiles McGee*).

I was so transparent! It pains me to read my old blogs. I spent half of my childhood in love with people who, very graciously, pretended that they had no idea. Saving me from myself? Perhaps. Deflection of Awkwardness? Completely.

I drunkenly went to a psychic last night with four or three of my closest platonic male friends. She said that I need to unleash myself from my negative blocks; that love might be staring me in the face and that I might not be recognizing it. I left the room and stumbled out into the street and took each one of them by the head and stared into their faces, looking for a semblance of truth in her words. An answer to her posed question. Instead, we fell into laughter, gave each other high fives, and danced our way to the train.

*Some names have been obviously changed to protect the innocent victims of my unrequited love.

Salad Snack

In the immortal words of Yung-I Chang,

"Love is not a salad bar."

Magical Real Snack

I owe a lot to this guy:



Without him, the kinds of things that I write would raise multitudes of skeptic-brows. I don't know much about him, though. There's a whole bunch of links to Marquez interviews and stuff that the Flavorpill people put in my inbox. I am very interested in these! I guess there is a new biography about him by Gerald Martin that just came out. I might pick it up and read it alongside Love in the Time of Cholera, which, like my mother, I still haven't finished.

Other things I have inherited from my mother:
parking skills (read: lack thereof)





Shelley told me about a Steinbeck journal that's half-journal and process notes and half Grapes of Wrath so you read the musings and the final product side-by-side. I am very interested in this also! I am normally a huge fan of really fat books, although I frickin hated Grapes of Frickin Wrath and pretty much everything else by Steinbeck in High School. I might give it another try.

You know what I will never try again? The Scarlet Fucking Letter.

Trackback Snack

Cos DCP told me to.

Tim and EricSnack

Online JournalSnack

I just rediscovered my OpenDiary from high school. WHOA. It's pretty rough to revisit! Also hilarious!

I have always been a fiend of the online journaling persuasion. I jumped from the OpenDiary (2001-2005? Okay so apparently I wrote an entry or two in college. Woof.) to a blog entitled "It's a Great Day for Baseball," (2002-2006) which still has a URL but for some reason you cannot see any of the backlogged entries. And then I went from that into livejournal (2003-2009), which still very much exists, although I don't write in it very much at all.

I wish I remembered some of those passwords! I want to like bring all of the private and public entries together and bind them into a book to give my hormonal teenage daughter as proof that she's not, nor ever was, the Only One Who Feels This Way.

And No, I will not provide links to you.

(me and my brother circa 2004, eating at P.F. Chang's)

Sunil Snack

A recent text war between myself and my friend Sunil

Sunil: fred astaire.

Jaclyn: “Cant sing. Cant act. Can dance a little.”

Sunil: triple threat.

Jaclyn: Triple X.

Sunil: triple h.

Jaclyn: Big Ed’s Gas Farm.

Sunil: coldfoot, ak.

Jaclyn: Harry and the Hendersons

Sunil: joan jett.

Jaclyn: Blues traveler

Sunil: the original house of blues.

Jaclyn: House on haunted hill.

Sunil: cbgb omfug.

Jaclyn: U g l y u aint got no alibi u ugly. Yeah yeah u ugly.

Sunil: cousins on maternal side.

Jaclyn: Aka browntown

Sunil: from downtown!

Jaclyn: Clowntown, CA

Sunil: you’re gonna die, clown!

Jaclyn: How now, brown clow?

Sunil: the secret of nimh.

Jaclyn: The great mouse detective

Sunil: the great steak escape.

Jaclyn: Escape to witch mountain

Sunil: it takes two.

Jaclyn: Sydney Carton

Sunil: it’s a far, far better thing that i do than i have ever done. It’s a
far, far better rest that i go to than  I have ever known.

Jaclyn: So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly
into the past

Sunil: non-fat foods.