“You always look so nice. Like you just stepped out of the shower.” – what wrinkled old men say to me at hospitals. 23-years-old and I still got it!
Enter the year 2015. It was my third anniversary of beating teen pregnancy and I hungrily craved new beginnings. Not that I had room to complain: my job was relatively stress-free, I had an office buddy to hold me accountable when I wasn’t sticking to a healthy diet (which was every day, who knew?), and I was a recent grad only working 40-50 hour weeks, which is about as common nowadays as diversity at an Oklahoma frat mixer.
My social life was also on fleek, as the kids/people on Vine say these days. Evenings revolved around various dance classes, where my talents ranged from socially acceptable (ballet) to blackmail material (bellydance). Per my personal request, my hip hop class was honoring Queen B with a routine to Partition – in heels, no less – so it’s safe to say I was peaking. Sometime in March, I decided to grace San Diego with my presence, partly for a friend’s birthday and mostly to catch up on the latest USD gossip and scandals.
Sidenote: It’s times like these I deeply regret not moonlighting as USD’s very own Gossip Girl. Think about it: a small, incestual student body with poor self-esteem, coke addictions, and limitless funds – my sassy, scathing commentary on it all – shit would’ve gone viral. But alas, I didn’t want to get bogged down in dozens of lawsuits from “daddy’s lawyer.”*
Anyway, there’s no better feeling than walking the (littered, dirty) streets of Mission Beach again (trying not to pick up any sidewalk diseases). Because I am a creature of questionable habit, Friday night was spent guzzling down a bar specialty christened “The Pale,” which is literally every type of liquor you can imagine blended together into a plastic bucket – the type you find in elementary school sandboxes. So yes, it is as entirely troubling as it sounds.
Morale was high until the ride home when our gang of 6 took turns sharing fun facts about ourselves. (Don’t ask me why we did this. I just had consumed what tasted like a vat of Capri Sun Margarita and wasn’t in the mood for questions.) Mae-Ling said something about how she’s been to approximately a bajillion different countries, I can’t remember Nat’s but I’m assuming it’s the fact that she’s a white chick who only dates black guys – that’s always a solid conversation starter – and I recounted the true but somber tale of how an ostrich bit me.
That’s when our Lyft driver chimed in: “I’m not sure how ‘fun’ this is, but I was on a plane during 9/11.”
“….. Oh.” -the rest of us
And for reasons still unclear, I woke up the following morning with a bleeding mouth.
But that was just Pacific Beach. Our destination for night numero dos was Fluxx in downtown’s Gaslamp District, so everyone went as wild as I do around an Anthropologie clearance rack.
Photos from that night. I guess they were going for the classic ‘half-dressed honeys mounting rocket ships’ theme.
Overall, the night was fairly standard:
Every guy I came in contact with: “Oh, your name is Arianna? Like Ariana Grande, right?”
Me: “No, like Arianna Adams, you ill-informed buffoon.”
I swear to god, if one more dude tries to serenade me with “Problem”…
Moving on. The most colorful individual of the night was a gentleman who clearly confused himself with Katie Couric because he was hellbent on questioning me about my plans for the evening, my opinion of San Diego nightlife, and probably some weird stuff about my childhood.
The interrogation didn’t stop until I finally deadpanned, “Sorry, I can’t talk to you. I’m mute.” Despite the fact that there are some rather obvious loopholes in my statement, he accepted it as truth and decided to harass some of my other friends instead. This included making a random, completely unwarranted comment to the birthday girl, Joi, about her race: “You know why black people look good at night? Because you can’t see them.” Like, can this puta do anything right? He’s not even good at being racist.
While Joi wasn’t particularly offended (she simply chose to point out his overt cystic acne problem, which was rather helpful on her part!), our other friends were enraged, so one of them shoved the Cystic Racist away. And just like it happens in every American TV sitcom, CR bounded into another – rather beefy – fellow who was desperate to prove his masculinity and immediately clocked him. This erupted a fight between the two guys, which then had a domino effect on the surrounding people, so before we knew it, it was a club brawl of Tarantino proportions.
My friends exchanged ‘uh oh’ faces and I just laughed, because that happens to be my natural reaction in every sad/dramatic/awkward situation, regardless of whether or not it’s appropriate. (It’s usually not.) Luckily, our Lyft had arrived at that point, so we made a graceful exit just as swarms of security were scrambling over. Moral of the story: talk (racist) shit, get hit. Thanks, Karma!
*Though I could have potentially dodged any legal troubles by only posting on public computers since they were likely ones in USD’s library, Club Copley, or the computer lab that didn’t require a user login. That way, even if someone were to track the IP Address, it wouldn’t automatically lead back to me…… Not that I thought this through or anything. Cough.
The Art of Being Basic 