Grab The Hooch!

Welcome back guys to another post, I appreciate everyone for taking the time to sit down and read my blog. The past week has been somewhat easy-going, definitely not as many hardships as I anticipated. There was a couple of awkward moments that I’ll share with you guys but let me tell you about the most embarrassing thing that happened to me yesterday, Sunday afternoon. Usually I go in order, Monday to Sunday to recap the week but this was too embarrassing to not share with the class.

Okay so I usually have niche embarrassing moments that happen to me more than the normal amount. If you think of a weird, nonrealistic scenario, it will probably happen to me eventually with my luck. But this specific encounter had me in shambles yesterday because it may seem dramatic, but it was actually just tragic. So I was at work yesterday, waiting for a bathroom to open up to spend maybe 5 minutes in the mirror looking at myself, making sure I still look good. I check my go to bandana that I wear, my cleavage, my stomach to make sure it’s still sucked in, and obviously my butt. I do a little twerk, check twitter, and then get out of the bathroom. That has always been the routine, but not yesterday.

I was waiting for the bathroom and a celebrity walks up to me. Not an actual one, but she’s a celebrity at my job and she’s known for her theatrics and especially her smell. Now I know this seems crude but her smell enters the room before she does. It makes you dizzy because it smells heavily of week old pee that has not been cleaned. Customers grimace when they have to stand next to her and all of us behind the counter have to put on a flat smile to mask our disgust. This regular is beyond rude toward the workers, she slams our doors, and stomps around the store. She also has pretty funny conversations with AI people on her phone from time to time, it’s always on speaker. As I was saying, she’s a terror to everyone involved when she steps foot in the store.

She walks up to me and asks me if I’m in line for the bathroom. I give her a simple response and tell her that I am but she can check in the all gender bathroom. They’re both locked. She walks away and I get slapped with the most disgusting stench to the face. If this was a cartoon, green fog would just fill my nose and start to pool into the crowded cafe. The hefty smell of urine causes me to hold my nose and I’m praying that someone doesn’t walk into the cafe from the back door. The back door is to my left and I’m standing maybe 5 feet in front of it. It’s like the universe hears my prayers and is like, “you know what would be funny, let’s have a customer walk in through the back door!” The universe was laughing at me in that very moment because a guy walks in, he looks like a teenager. He walks past me a blows out this big exhale like when you’re taking a test and you just can’t seem to remember the question you went over a thousand times before that. Yeah, he does that out loud and I’m over here freaking out, literally cursing out the insane regular in my head for framing me as a smelly geezer.

That’s how I feel in that moment, like a smelly geezer.

I’m trying to figure out how I can redeem myself before this guy comes back because how do I defend myself in this situation. I feel like Rachel Berry when she’s beginning Carmen Tibideaux for another redo on her audition. Like please don’t do this to me, I swear I smell so good like please. In my head, I’m pleading for this guy to come back so he can just smell me and know that the smell isn’t coming from me. This isn’t a regular case of bad BO, this was the smell of someone sitting in their own pee for weeks and not showering. It was heady and too strong to ignore. I needed this little boy to come back and say something.

So he comes back and mind you the smell still hasn’t left the hallways because it was just that strong. I put my fingers in front of my nose to give a subtle sign to the guy that I smell it too, it’s just not me. I try to make eye contact with him as he’s walking by but his eyes are stuck to the floor like he’s at gunpoint. Like if he looks at me, I’m gonna turn him to stone. The poor guy looks terrified walking by me. I know he’s gonna report back to his other guy friends outside and talk so much crap about this moment.

Then the bathroom magically just opens up and I walk in like someone just kicked my dog but I find out while I’m at work so I can’t even do anything about it. Like I said, I know it seems dramatic but I love smelling good all of the time and making sure that whenever I do have BO, it’s not that bad. So I just stand in the bathroom to look at myself in the mirror for about 3 minutes. This time I don’t even check myself out, I just disassociate in the mirror because of what just happened. I don’t even twerk at the end of the bathroom session.

But I needed to tell you guys about this before anything else because I’m still so heated thinking about it. On the bright side, I celebrated my 23rd birthday last Tuesday! I didn’t do anything special though, but I just took a walk around my neighborhood and painted an acrylic painting I started working on. I don’t enjoy doing much for my birthday so that was enough for me. I’m just not a birthday person for numerous reasons so I prefer for everyone to just act like it’s a normal day. I do like the sound of 23 though, I suppose it’s a cute age. My girlfriend did bake me the best cheesecake ever for my birthday. It was a lemon cheesecake with a homemade crust, homemade whipped cream and a whole bunch of blueberries on top. It was really heartwarming because no one has ever taken the time to make me a freaking cheesecake for my birthday. The only person to make me a cake was maybe my mom when I was a kid but I don’t remember. The point is that I’ve never been in with someone as genuine as her. I realize the more my partner and I grow closer to each other, the more difficult it is for me to not push her away? I am already a tough cookie to crack. On top of that, I have such a disorganized attachment style that drives me and her up the wall. It’s super hard to navigate at times but has gotten better once I realized that my insanity originates from past experiences so my partner is not the enemy. That judgment can get clouded at times but she helps me remind myself that she’s by my side and that we’re in it together so there’s no need to force isolation in certain situations. Whenever I get overwhelmed, stressed, or frustrated, I isolate so it’s incredible helpful being in a relationship with someone that welcomes the good/bad.

I recently went to the bar with some friends and it felt really great to connect with them and just have good time. Considering that I’ll be leaving them in a few months, that’s all I want to be doing is making the most of the time that I have with them. A friend and I got left alone while the others got more drinks and we discussed the future and just making friends in your 20s. I’m so glad she pointed out that making close friends in your 20s is just so difficult for no reason. I get that you don’t have big situations tying you together like when people make friends in high school, but it should be easier, right? I mean high school forces you to be beside people, to talk to people until you’re kinda forced to like them. It’s like a messed up example of Stockholm Syndrome. But when you’re an adult, you have to go through the very first “getting to know you” stages of chatting to someone new. It does suck because I know of some friends that I’ve made in high school that still don’t recognize that once you grow up, you have to make more of an effort to remain in the lives of those close friends from high school. Life gets in the way and unfortunately, people don’t just magically remain in the lives of others without some form of an effort. I tested this out with a friend of mine from high school late last year and I’m still not sure on how to go about the situation. All I did was not initiate, I didn’t initiate hang outs anymore nor did I initiate a conversation. After that, we didn’t talk as much and still have yet to hang out. You could be upfront about it and just ask, but if you want to find out if you’re the one carrying a friendship on your back, try this out. I let it drag on for a while because of a few other reasons but try this method out and let me know how it works. I recommend testing it for a week, gather the evidence and have that talk.

It’s so sad though, watching someone you consider as your best friend slowly begin to drift away. Friendship break ups are definitely more heartbreaking than a romantic break up and I will stand my ground on that. I say that because in a romantic relationship, your partner is expected to support you emotionally, to be there for you, to uplift you. In a friendship, I would say that it is more of a choice to do all of those things. You aren’t expected to do those things and a lot of people don’t choose that option in “choosing you” when times get tough. I feel confident in speaking about what it means to be an actual friend because sadly, I have experienced almost, if not every type of friend there is. I’ve been in contact with authentic friends that have your back, they just want to be there for you and their actions prove that. I’ve also had friends who are just not right for you, and are also not right in the head. I even survived the ex best friend archetype who you think secretly hates you, she was insane in the head and just a mean girl all around. Needless to say, I know what I’m talking about. I also know when it’s time to get out of that friendship and run for the hills.

On a lighter note, this week I’ve started a few projects that I am super proud of. The biggest one is that I just started working with paper mache. I’m not familiar with the field so I didn’t realize that it got a bit of backlash, people undermine its strengths and just see it as a kids project. What they don’t know is that there are actual paper mache sculptors out there that take something as simple as paper and they make furniture out of it. How cool is that? Even if you’re worried about it molding or getting wet, there are so many solutions to that. If you’re afraid of it molding, add a bit of salt to that glue mixture, don’t add flour if you want a longer shelf life. There are a few methods to successfully making the project water resistant, I’ve found a bit but I might want to make a homemade mixture in the future that I like so that is to be determined. If you want to go the simpler route, people seal it with things such as epoxy resin, varnish, polyurethane, etc. After some research, I’ve decided to start with creating a tiny side table that I can put by the door of our apartment. It’ll be on the staircase by all of our shoes and we can put tiny trinkets on the mini table. I also want it to be a bit abstract looking so there will be a sphere in the middle of the table with spikes coming out of it.

For the past few days, I’ve created one leg and have started the second leg of the table two days ago. It’s easier than one would think but just really time consuming. People don’t realize that all of the cardboard building up in your home from deliveries can easily be put to good use. My partner and I just had so much cardboard from online shopping and I decided to just create something out of it. My other option was creating a super weird looking moon that I could hang up on our wall. It would have a face and would be this massive installation on the wall. That’s my next project. Even though it takes a lot of time, overall I’m really excited because I’m proud of myself for putting in the energy to start creating something, anything really. I have had artist block for the longest time and whenever I do create something, my interest in it just slowly deteriorates and I never finish it. I don’t have the passion I once had for art and it scares me. It scares me how easily I lose the love I have for my passion. It makes me feel like a fraud, like I’m not supposed to be in the art community and that I’m some outsider that lost any ability to create a decent picture. These types of thoughts just eat at me and it doesn’t help that yesterday, I tried to paint a simple apple and failed. I gave up quickly but I’m gonna force myself to go back to it sometime this week. Stuff like that just gets me going because when I was painting this apple, I kept looking at it like it was gonna slowly morph into this beautiful looking painting. I couldn’t even figure out which colors would mix into the color that I needed. No matter how many times I would mix a color, I would get into my head about it and over mix it to the point of it becoming muddy in color.

My old art teacher would probably be disappointed in me, I should call her sometime because she and I know we’re overdue for lunch.

Practice really does make perfect because I was never this bad at art. Maybe it was all of the exposure therapy I was forced into in high school because I used to be able to create something, and find the beauty in it. I used to be able to follow through and finish an artwork. Now, I feel almost nothing for it because that confidence I once had is gone. I have no teachers to push me, and now it’s just myself and this self doubt that haunts my head.

There is this friend that I feel as if I’ve been growing closer to recently and I just wanna mention them really quickly. I will call them, “Elbows” and it’s because I love their elbows and always threaten to bite them off. I wanna mention Elbows because they really mean a lot to me and have just been this really great friend to me. They’ve slowly grown to be someone that I admire and can turn to when I’m having trouble expressing myself creatively. I want nothing but the best for them and they have just influenced me a lot the past couple of weeks so I’m very grateful to have them in my life. I believe they are one of the top 3 coolest people to ever meet in your whole life and having them as a friend is just so fun. Especially because they have awesome cats that I plan on kidnapping very soon. Wish me luck on that one guys. But I don’t want to be gay but I love you Elbows, let’s go on a friend date soon!

There’s another project that I’ve been anticipating for sometime and that is a stippling portrait that I plan on starting within the next few weeks. I worked with stippling twice in high school and found that it is a really helpful medium that can make you seem overly experienced than you actually are. I believe I was in my Sophomore or Junior year of high school and I absolutely loved it. It made me feel like I had much more control in comparison to painting or drawing. I think when you’re stippling, it’s near impossible to mess up because of how slow and calculated the process actually is. If you mess up, you’re simply rushing the process. But you’re making tiny dots across a wide scale, how do you even begin to mess up? I understand if it’s the proportions but your values shouldn’t be difficult to work with because that itself is completed overtime. But, here I am struggling to paint a red apple with oil paints so I have no place in judging anyone. It’s not even a real apple, I had to look one up online like an amateur. I really just have to laugh because I would never let this slide when I was younger. I probably would just start crying about it but I have no interest in showing interest in the fact that I have no interest in any art piece. Hopefully that makes sense because I don’t even care to explain at this point.

Another thing I haven’t been as invested as I should be is German. A few days ago, I saw that there were a few people from Germany looking at my blog? Which is so crazy to me and I absolutely love it. I never even imaged that I could build a German audience this early on when I’m still trying to gain a general audience in my city currently. Hallo Leute! Feel free to reach out to me, I’m in need of a German speaking partner so don’t be shy. I started listening to this silly podcast while I’m out and about that’s posted on Spotify. It’s a German guy with a Podcast named, “Papaplatte”. Usually when I watch the video of him, he’s just sitting down in a room reacting to videos uploaded on a Stream. Surrounding myself with ongoing German like that in situations is super helpful because I don’t understand everything he’s saying but I understand the nature of it. I’m learning the slang and lingo that can help me be more legit. I have had some conversations in German with the regulars at my job and it was absolutely horrific. They were nice and said my pronunciation was actually really great which is encouraging but the horrific part about it is that I was shaking like I was going through withdrawals. Like someone held a vibrator to me and told me to not move.

That was a crude comparison, I do realize that.

But yeah my nerves are always through the roof, I stutter and tumble over all of the words. That’s why speaking the language always makes me hesitate because I forget everything I have ever learned once I am speaking it head on with someone. I am confident that I will eventually become fluent but I not only have to find a German speaking community within the area that I live in now, but I also need to stop being a chicken and just speak the language without borderline crapping my pants.

Now that I have my own blog, I realize how simple my life is. Especially because I just go to the bar, listen to music, sometimes do art or German, and also kiss my girlfriend. There’s not that much range that consists of my life as of right now. I do appreciate the fact that I am working less so I have more time to do hobbies that I actually enjoy, now that just means that I have to actually finish a piece that I have started. Let’s see if I follow through with that one.

As I’m wrapping up this blog post for last week, thank you to anyone who is reading. Spread the blog everywhere because I feel like my rants are important because you’re either smiling at the end of them or they weird you out to the point of you not being able to stop thinking about it. Ether way, I’m still on your mind. That doesn’t make me a narcissist but that just makes me a realist. You know the drill, there’s a picture and three songs below for you guys to check out as well. Thanks again for reading and I will see you all next Monday, bye!

~Alyssa

Some songs:

•Flip A Switch by RAYE

•Wave by Remi Wolf

•Five Star Hotels by RAYE and Mahalia

Bye!