I AM (blog post) NUMBER 4: Short and sweet, but vital information.

For those of you visiting California, or for those who haven’t been in California since February 2011, you may find something very unsettling every time you buy anything to eat…or enter a building….or buy clothes….or shoes….or a car….or pretty much anything. In California, there is a certain thing called Proposition 65. It has nothing to do with gay marriage, so if you vote against it, there really isn’t anything to fight with your family about at Thanksgiving.

                Proposition 65, was born in 1986, just like me, and it requires businesses to post a notice if there are any chemicals known to cause cancer present. There are 800 chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer. Kentucky doesn’t know anything about these chemicals. Kentucky hasn’t even found out about tobacco yet (shhhh don’t tell).

800, is a lot of chemicals. Therefore, these signs are everywhere! Like on your shoes, on your car, on your apartment building, and since February 2011, at your local Starbucks. Now, since I work at the green logoed “Central Perk” I have recently been confronted about our cancer causing coffee (what great alliteration!!!).

The warning looks horrible, and basically says that something in this place causes cancer, and they put it right on the condiment bar. So, as soon as you buy your coffee, and start to put sugar and cream in it, and get ready for that first sip, you brace yourself, and read about how you’re going to die or have to pay for chemo, and cause your family tears and gnashing of teeth (And you thought paying $4.05 for a latte was bad).  So people flip out and bring their coffee back to me, with a look of “Take this cancer out of it! I didn’t order that!” and then they ask if our tea has, “All those chemicals in it too?” I have to tell them that those signs are everywhere and we are the only place dumb enough to put it out in a very visible spot. I’ve done some research and found out that the sign is because when you cook certain things past a certain temperature, they naturally create a chemical that some Sweedes back in 2002, discovered caused cancer in lab rats. So, roasted coffee beans could….haven’t…but could cause cancer in a lab rat.

                So, there you have it, people who don’t live in California. There are things, almost as bad as the stupid people in LA, they are these signs about how all the chemicals in the world are going to kill you.

                Another stupid California thing, is that LA needs subways. There is no parking in most of the city, there is way too much traffic and pollution, and the place is way too crowded. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are subways, but there aren’t enough subways stops for people to get to where they need to go. I take the subway, but I have to drive to the station, and park my car there….yeah, that kind of defeats the purpose of taking the subway, but it saves me money on having to park in Hollywood.

                So to summarize: Cancer warning signs and driving to the train stop, are dumb. Get it together LA.

The Third Post

                I am pretty sure that LA would be one of the greatest cities on the planet if we could just remove all of the people. Really 90% of LA’s problems are caused by the people that live there. Traffic, pollution, high gas prices, snobs, crime, no people in LA would result in a lovely, clean, palm tree lined city with mountains, beaches, no bad weather, and every kind of tiny food/clothing boutique you can imagine. New York has snow, Seattle has rain, Chicago has wind, Florida has humidity, nothing is going on in Texas, LA is the only city I can think of that is perfectly located in a really nice spot with nothing natural holding it back. (I don’t consider people to be natural)

 I do however, think it would be OK to keep Ryan Seacrest, he really is the heart of LA.

                Since I have found that LA’s major fault is its population, I am going to dedicate this post to discussing the consistently astonishing People of LA.

                I will start with my regular hang out, the TGIFridays in Valencia. Now, I know what you’re thinking, TGIFRidays?!!? That’s not LA, and it’s in Valencia! That’s not LA either! But trust me people, TGIFridays offers so much to this blog post, and it’s only barely not in LA.

                Last week, I was at Karaoke night and Fridays and I met some very interesting people. I will discuss the top three most interesting people.

                The DJ: She has the most intense mullet/bowl cut I have ever seen. It’s like a bleach blonde business on the top party on the bottom, if you can even imagine that. She also has tourettes. However, instead of yelling curses, she screams “Young Man!” She is the greatest!

                The girl who’s way too into it: She is also a highlight of my night. She only sings 80’s power ballads, she walks the room. She laughs at the DJ and audience (the people eating near here) as if they are in the middle of a conversation, and they are sharing an inside joke. She has this amazing pose that she strikes when holding out a note, it involves her bending her elbows in a way that makes her look really strong. I can’t describe it properly, but it’s epic. She is one of the worst singers I’ve ever heard.  

                The Super Star: He looks like he’s observing the room as an artist, but not as a good artist. He is the guy who after observing everyone in the room, announces to the room that he is an artist and he has been observing them. Then he waits around for people to ask him what he has observed. He thinks he is still in theatre class. So, after observing me sing Suerte by Shakira in Spanish, he approaches and says to me:

 “I’m kind of a heavy weight in the Valley, and I don’t usually come out to karaoke at Friday’s but I decided to give it a chance, and it’s pretty cool tonight. I really like what you did there. I’m going to do that sometime too.  Ya know,  just follow the teleprompter. It’s was really great.”

               

What I wanted to say was:  Um, yeah so I paid around $100,000 to go to college to learn how to do that. You can’t just follow a teleprompter and sing like Shakira, ya schmuck!

               

What I really said was a compilation of these sounds: “Oh? A huh, yeah… ha (that ha a was very agreeable ha).” He liked that response and went away to the very enthusiastic karaoke girl, who that night, was wearing some type of anti-bellum, cowgirl shirt thing.

That’s not the only really stupid thing that I have heard here. I recently was discussing how old I was with a co-worker at “The Black Olive” and mentioned that women can start losing bone mass at age 25.

She responds with, “What’s that?”

She must have not heard me. I repeat, “Bone mass.”

- “Yeah what’s bone mass?”

- “The mass of your bones.”

                -“What’s mass?”

What I wanted to say was: “Are you kidding me? How have you made it to your 20s without ever having come in contact with the word mass? #1 How did you make it through school, and #2 What have you been talking about for the past 20 years where the word mass didn’t ever happen? Can’t you even guess at what that means? When I say you’re losing bone mass, what does it sound like mass means? Does it mean, Puppy? Fruit? Balloons? Maybe it has something to do the size or strength or even density (I know you don’t know that word) of a bone.”

What I really said was: “Oh, it’s just like, how much bone you have” and I walked away.

The amount of stupid I have encountered here is mind blowing. I have worked an entire shift at “Central Perk“ with people who did not understand questions unless they were phrased in a certain way.

For example: Hey, Jim Bob, I’m running out of vanilla syrup, is not appropriate. “Excuse me Jim Bob, could you please go to the back and get me some vanilla syrup?”  Is the right way.

I wanted to follow that up with: I know that if I said it to you any other way, you are so stupid that you would think I was just sharing the syrup situation with you. I like to keep you included in all aspects of syrup here, as do all the other Baristas. I can see how the wording of the question would be very confusing to someone who often retrieves syrup for people on an hourly basis.

I just laughed it off and thought, “Oh, my LA, you are turning into a pretty funny blog!”