blogging – Page 5 – Typical Jenn

Drunk Things: Vol. 1

I’m not sure if you can tell by my previous posts, but I like to drink. I tried to not drink, but it didn’t work so instead, I decided to not drink as much. It works great during the week but when it comes to the weekend? It’s. ON.

My drink of choice is Miller Lite. As I type this, I’m drinking one. I’ve already drank a lot more than this one. But I haven’t drank enough to make any purchases.. at least not yet. And that’s what this post is about, kind of.

First, a backstory. Fridays are my favorite. I’m pretty sure they’re everyone’s favorite but they’re particularly mine and me is who we’re talking about. Friday kicks off the weekend and the weekend is when I get a few hours to myself at night. The weekend is when I drink my Miller Lites and watch my favorite shows by myself. And I go on kicks. For a while my favorite thing to do was get drunk and watch To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything. Julie Newmar. A few weeks ago I was on a Bridezillas kick but only season 6 (THE BEST SEASON). Right now my kick is the movie Real Women Have Curves. If you haven’t seen it, you hate movies because this is a fantastic movie. That’s not the Miller Lite talking, that’s just facts.

Anyway, I like to drink Miller Lite and watch my favorite movies or shows. I’m doing that now and I’m pretty buzzed. Before I get too far gone, I thought I would talk about the things I do when I get drunk. Those things include buying stuff from Amazon, and/or iTunes, except I don’t know that I bought them until way after my drunkenness has passed.

A couple of weeks ago I was drunk watching Bridezillas but also scrolling on Twitter. So I’m scrolling and then I see a super cool video featuring the making of the Mortal Combat game.

Cool, right?!

So I’m watching this and thinking “Mortal Kombat is the best!”

A few days later, I’m getting ready to get on my elliptical to get in an extra workout. I don’t feel like listening to music so I’m like, let’s watch the Jennifer Lopez documentary I have on iTunes. Hell yeah! I click on the app.

What the fuck?

Then I remembered: watching how the Mortal Kombat game was made prompted me to buy BOTH Mortal Kombat movies. Yup, I own Mortal Kombat part 1 AND 2. Thank you, drunk Jenn. The first one isn’t so terrible but the second one.. Jesus. Unnecessary.

The point is: drunk Jenn is very influential. The shit that I buy is ridiculous and I discovered I’m not alone. The other day I found out that my friend drunk bought a game of Prosecco pong. I didn’t even know that was a thing.

So I decided that I will now document my drunk purchases and happenings as well as those of my friends. Please enjoy my drunkenness. Now if you’ll excuse me, IT art 2 is on for the 137th time and I need to watch it because you never know.

Reading Jogs My Memory So Here’s My Pants Stain Story

So right now I’m reading Weird But Normal by Mia Mercado and in it, she tells a story about being on vacation at Disney with her family when she was 12 and there’s an Aladdin Ride/Poop story it reminded me of a vacation I took when I was 14 that I still can’t believe my parents let me go on.

In 9th grade, I had a boyfriend named Anthony that I somehow managed to date for an entire year. Our one commonality was that he played baseball and I was super into baseball players, so we were just slightly more compatible than the couples you see on 90 Day Fiancé. Anyway, the summer after our freshman year, his team earned a trip to regionals to play for a spot in the Little League World Series and his family invited me to go with them.

I. Was. Down.

My Parents. Were. Not.

So I did what any pubescent, maturing teen would do: I lost my shit. Well, as much as I could around my strict-as-shit Spanish mom. For the most part, I just lost my shit in my room. I couldn’t understand why my parents would not allow me to travel ALL the way to Mississippi to hang out with some parents (that they barely knew) and a bunch of boys (that they didn’t know) and my boyfriend (that they really knew) and all in a time when we didn’t have cell phones (I mean they were invented but we couldn’t afford one because at that time I believe it cost about $100/minute to talk on one). What the hell?

The morning that my boyfriend’s parents were scheduled to leave, my parents gave me permission to go. I think they thought that if they waited till the last minute to give me the OK that I wouldn’t have enough time to get ready. I packed my shit in about 5 minutes and was gone about 20 after that.

So we get there and spend the first couple of days at the baseball field because, duh, it’s a baseball tournament. The third day was an off-day for the team so we went to the beach. I honestly can’t remember if Anthony was with us but his older brother was and he’s partially the reason I have a story in the first place. The other reason being my shit packing skills.

In my haste to evacuate my parents’ house before they could change their mind, I failed to pack maxi pads for the trip. I’d been cramping but thought that surely my period would know I was going on vacation and would give me a break for a week.

It didn’t.

Also, yeah, I wore maxi pads. Tampons scared me. They still do but I’m on birth control so it’s not an issue, in case you were wondering.

Back to my period. That fucker came in with a vengeance, and I had nothing. I was way too embarrassed to tell my boyfriend’s mom so instead, I kept buying those shitty .25 cent pads that you used to be able to get in any public restroom. Luckily, our hotel had them. I say ‘luckily’ because it was just one step above ‘nothing’. It was awful. I was used to my normal thin pads and now, I had no choice but to wear this thing that felt like a pillow in my underwear. Fuck.

I managed to play it off until it was beach time. I told everyone I forgot my bathing suit but was fine just hanging out in the sand. Well, Anthony’s brother found this unacceptable and carried me into the water. Me. My pillow pad. And my khaki shorts.

At first, I thought, “OK, no big deal, the pad probably absorbed the water.” Then we got back to the hotel. I went straight into the bathroom to check myself and there it was: a HUGE red stain on the back of my shorts.

And not one person said a word to me about it.

To this day, I don’t know if they were being kind or didn’t notice it. Probably the former. Either way, I’ve had PTSD about it ever since. Because of this incident, I still check my butt in the mirror from time to time because you never know. Additionally, I can’t tell people when they have a booger in their nose. I don’t know where period stains and boogers intersect but for some reason, I just can’t do it. In my head, I’m being kind by ignoring it but I’m also doing people a disservice by letting them walk around with snot hanging out of their nose. I’ve got to work on that.

Anyway, that’s what I get for being a shit about going on this trip. By the way, this is how I learn all of my lessons.

So there’s my story. Back to my reading.

How to Turn $120 into $10,020

In no particular order, here is a list of things that don’t come naturally to me: fashion, being nice, sports of any kind, teaching things. There are more but those are the main ones. I was horrendous at these things before but quarantine has made me practically allergic to them.

In regards to fashion, I’m currently rotating between four shirts. I use ‘rotating’ loosely because what’s really happening is I change my shirt only when absolutely necessary. And it’s only getting worse. This morning I went to put on shirt number three (my favorite) and discovered it had holes in it. I wore it anyway. In my defense, I had already taken it off the hanger.

My already non-existent fashion sense isn’t the only thing in decline: my patience is now in the negative. I didn’t even know that could happen. I can predict when I’m going to be annoyed. It’s easy because it’s all the time.

So it’s never been a better time for me to have to teach something.

I take back what I said about my things being in no particular order. Teaching things is actually 1 through 4. A few weeks ago I had an appointment to teach someone how to use their Facebook business page. The lesson is still ongoing. The questions haven’t stopped and at this point, the only way I know how to make them stop is to just delete their page and tell them Facebook went out of business.

I’ve known I could never be a teacher since I was in grade school. During a math lesson, my 3rd-grade teacher, Miss Guerra, requested that I work with a fellow peer named April on our assignment. It made zero sense. Nobody else was teaming up and on top of that, April wasn’t even a friend of mine because she didn’t know who the Power Rangers were. I didn’t get it but I, begrudgingly, grabbed my shit and sat next to her.

4 seconds later, I got it.

April couldn’t understand why the number 23 wasn’t written 203 because 20 and 3. Miss Guerra thought she would get it if another 8-year-old explained it to her. I couldn’t even teach myself how to properly brush my hair but I was somehow qualified to teach math. (I’m not kidding on the hair thing. That same year my parents had to cut a knot out of my hair that was the size of a golf ball. I’ve only slightly improved since then.)

The situation made me want to drop out of school. My explanation of “that’s how it is just write it” wasn’t working and it was the only thing I had in my arsenal. Eventually, I gave up and told her to keep writing it the way she thought was correct. In my defense, I wasn’t the teacher. My teacher wasn’t even the teacher. To this day I think about that time and wonder if April ever figured out how numbers work. In case she hasn’t, I would like to formally apologize to every bank teller she’s ever dealt with. She doesn’t want to withdraw $10,020. She wants $120. I know.

Believe it or not, this story has a point. In the time of the corona (we’re on a first-name basis now), we all have an opportunity to figure out what we really want to do. I’ve always thought that one of the dumbest questions kids get asked is “what do you want to be when you grow up?” I know people in their 30s that are still trying to figure that out, how is a 6-year-old supposed to know? The answer is: they don’t. That’s why they come back with stupid shit like mermaid, or Nemo, or robot (which, I guess if you really think about it, isn’t a bad response considering robots will eventually replace us all).

Instead of asking “what do you want to be?” to a bunch of know-nothing first-graders, let’s start asking “what do you like to do?” when they get to be a bunch of know-it-all pre-teens. I’ve loved and have written since I was a kid but no one ever talked to me about what I loved doing. So when asked the career question, my answer was always something that sounded like a grown-up job (my 8-year-old answer was “Judge” so I could throw everyone in jail, and the reason for that is coming up in another post).

Now’s the time to ask yourself: “what do I like to do?” “What makes me happy?” If you don’t know the answer then go backward and ask yourself what do you hate doing. I have nothing but respect for teachers (although I’m still on the fence about Miss Guerra) and parents who are temporarily filling that role right now. I could never do it, fuck that.

Things suck right now. Things are tough and they’re shitty. But if you felt this way before the pandemic, and you’re in a position to change it, then go for it. You might as well. If April can make $10,020 out of $120, then you can do anything too.

Side note: Sometime during my freshman year of high school, I was at a barbecue with my parents and my dad’s friend showed up with his new girlfriend: Miss Guerra. She looked at me and said, “Hiiii, I remember you”, and I said, “I remember when you made me try to teach April math”. She giggled and then walked away to go say hi to other people that she hadn’t tried to make do her job. I haven’t seen her since. The End.

Did I Dream That or Did I Do That?

Happy day after Easter everyone! I’m hurting. Nothing emotional, just pride-wise. Here’s the thing: I’m sure I’ve mentioned this a time or two but… I’m Mexican. And do you know what my people do on Easter? We drink, A LOT. Too much and now I’m here, playing my favorite hangover game “did I dream that or did I do that?”

Here’s how it works: you get really wasted, pass out on the couch then, wake up and try to piece together the events of the previous evening all while riddled with anxiety and nausea. It’s a barrel of laughs.

Did I really do the Chingo Bling dance to his song “Bolis on My Wrist”? Oh God, did I send a drunk Marco Polo video to all of my workout buddies? What happened to my leftover wings?

This game allows for calling a life line, which I did. My sister (a woman I grew up with who exceeds best friend status) came over last night so this morning I called her to get a recap of the evening. It turns out that yes, I did do the Chingo Bling dance. And not just once. Multiple times, each time looking dumber than the time before. And yet I kept going. Watch me dance! Why was I not in the music video?! I’m AMAZING! I was not. I was Elaine from Seinfeld: arms and legs everywhere.

Miraculously, it’s not on TikTok or YouTube, I think.

I, fortunately, did not send a drunk Marco Polo video to my workout friends. I did, however, watch the “Happy Easter” video I sent earlier in the day repeatedly. I could not get enough of myself but can you blame me after I nailed that dance routine?

And what happened to my wings? What happened was I ate them. I guess. I remember wanting to eat them and that’s about it. But they’re gone and no one else touched them. The important thing is, I didn’t choke on the wings I have no recollection of eating and I didn’t burn anything down.

All-in-all it was a fun night, probably.

Anyway, that’s how you play “Did I dream that or did I do that?” It’s loads of fun, if your idea of fun is wondering if you still have a job, friends, or life the next day. Enjoy!

Review: Open Book | Jessica Simpson

I used to sing. Shut up, I did. I started with Tejano music then moved on to Freestyle music (it made a comeback in the 90s and you had to have zero talent). Then I opted for pop music because it appeared that that’s where the money was at. If Britney Spears could get a record deal, how hard could it be?

14-year-old me got to work. I had no mom-ager and no social media, but I did have the internet. I began signing up for toll-free numbers so I could record myself singing on them and then promote them on forums for people who wanted to be popstars (a very popular career choice at the time). I checked the numbers multiple times a day to see if anyone left messages of praise, which is really no different than the way social media works now. Just like my social media accounts, I had none.

I signed up for talent shows, with my most memorable performance being the one where I sang a Pink song and forgot the words the minute it started. I mailed letters, hand-written letters, to every record label I could find on my wonderful dial-up. Nothing. My last straw came when I began cold-calling record labels and the receptionist at Jive Records told me I needed to “buy a book on how to break into the music business” before hanging up on me.

That was it. At 14-years-old I was washed up and done. No record deals. No millions of fans. No mom-agers trying to act like my bestie. Nothing. Meanwhile, Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears were stealing all of my applause. I swore off pop music then and there. What a stupid genre anyway. “I’m a genie in a bottle”? I didn’t know the writers for the Mickey Mouse Club were bound to the actors for life. That’s some price to pay for a Disney career. Pfft. Anyway, when Jessica Simpson came along she stood no chance with me. Don’t even ask me about her show Newlyweds; I watched The Osbournes.

Then, a shift. She got divorced. The woman who was forced to talk about her virginity ad nauseam was now exploring her way through Hollywood, at least according to the tabloids which I believed.

Finally, she’s cleared things up for us, years after I’d forgotten all about her “bad girl” time. I read Jessica Simpson’s memoir Open Book and I loved it. Here’s why.

First, she was pretty honest about her skank days as well as her marriage to Nick Lachey – the cute guy from the B-team boy band 98 Degrees. Honestly, that was all I wanted to know about. She. Spills, y’all. And not just about Nick. Tony Romo. Jerk John Mayer. Her alcohol addiction! It’s all in there! She talks about other stuff but let’s be honest, we want the tabloid stuff.

Here’s why you should read it: for years Jessica Simpson has been a laughing stock for everything from her intelligence to her weight, yet she’s happily married and owns a multi-billion dollar company that SHE BUILT. Hahaha LOL yeah, she’s a real joke ol’ Jessica Simpson is.

She’s been through it and actually has a great story to tell. Through it all, she’s remained committed to being herself, as well as finding herself when she got lost. Question her intelligence all you want, but the woman is always learning. I think you’ll enjoy her memoir.

Also, from this day forth I hereby declare it illegal to criticize her “mom jean” look. That look came back and now everyone looks terrible. Take it from me, you don’t see me in the tabloids.

Funerals Bring Out The Kid In Me

Age is nothing but a number. It’s such a cliché thing to say but it’s true. It has to be or the reality is I’m mentally aging in reverse. In fact, don’t even ask me how old I am. I’m relearning numbers.

Recently I attended a funeral that I was not prepared to attend. Not because of the sadness and what have you. I didn’t have anything to wear. I’ve succeeded in not having to dress like an adult for work but completely disregarded the fact that there might be non-work events that may require attire that is not in the form of a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. I can never get it right.

So, the day before the funeral I bought an outfit that included a pair of slacks that matched a blazer I had. Well, it’s been a couple of years since I’ve worn that blazer and in addition to it having shoulder pads, it had also shrunk to an unreasonable size. On top of that, it was really cold outside and my painted-on blazer wasn’t going to cut it so I wore my peacoat over it. I couldn’t put my arms down. Paired with my 5-inch heels that I also hadn’t worn in a couple of years, I was miserable. It only got better when we got to the church. We arrived 10 minutes before the service and the place was packed. So much so that we had to park across the highway from the church, and thus began this entire ordeal.

It was a good 5-minute hike uphill to the church and by the time we got to the top I was really regretting my outfit choice. I spent the next 1.5 hours hating life, which is admittedly a pretty selfish thing to feel at a funeral. But I couldn’t help it. I felt like I couldn’t move, which is also a selfish thing to be annoyed about at a funeral. To compliment my poor outfit choice, I made a bad hair choice: I wore it down. Every time I had to move it out of my face I had to lower my head because my arm wouldn’t bend past a 45-degree angle. I looked like a mannequin.

The uncomfortableness, by the way, spilled over into conversation. Because we’d gotten there right before the service started (and apparently everyone else had camped out) there was nowhere to sit. So we ended up in a lovely standing spot next to my husband’s friend and his more comfortable looking wife. I like this better-dressed-than-me wife but it’s hard to have a conversation with her because we have nothing in common, obviously. Nevertheless, I tried. Recently I decided to go alcohol-free from Jan. 1st to April 1st so I thought I’d ask her about her break from alcohol. The conversation was going great until I told her I was doing this strictly for vanity purposes. No other reason – not my health, not my family. I want to be able to feel comfortable and move all of my limbs freely in my clothing. Also, sucking in my stomach is starting to hurt. She raised her eyebrows and said “oh”, then turned around and that was the end of that conversation. Whatever.

The bummer about the end of that conversation was that my attention was redirected to my feet. I hadn’t worn heels in a long time and after walking up a mountain and standing for nearly 20 minutes, my dogs were barking. I tried leaning against a wall but that only worked for a few seconds. At one point my husband asked me if I wanted him to get me a chair and like a modest idiot, I told him I was fine. I looked over at a woman across from me – who was comfortably sitting in a chair – to see what page in the service pamphlet we were on. There were still 3 fucking pages to go. I was not fine.

Then, as though I was being tested by Jesus or blessed by Satan, an older woman (adjacent to me) got up from her chair. “She has 10 minutes”, I thought to myself. At approximately 10 minutes and zero seconds, I sat in her chair, confidently. Zero regrets. Look, she had a cane to hold her up and I didn’t, OK?

Sitting didn’t matter though. It only made my blazer tighter. As people cried during the eulogies, I focused on not tearing through my blazer like the Incredible Hulk.

Eventually, the service ended and after half-hugging the family (because I was too scared to bend my arms too much) we made the 5-minute trek back to the car. BTW, not one person offered us a ride to our truck even though I looked like I had just learned how to walk. That was probably my karma for stealing that chair so I guess we’re even.

So there you go. My proof that age is nothing but a number. I may never learn how to be a real adult but I have learned what to do when life hands you a tight-ass blazer: you work your way through it until you can take it off and move again.

LOL JK the moral of the story is: wear shit that you feel comfortable in, settings are irrelevant. You do you. The end.

The Typical Jenn Experiment

Did you know there are perks to working a job you hate? There are very few of them, mind, and some people may think of them as “reasons to not set the boss’s car on fire” as opposed to “perks”, but they do exist. One is a paycheck. Another, for me at least, is sometimes a client of mine will host an event that buys them another 3 months before I start flipping desks.

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of doing marketing for their first big comedy show. Their special guest? Jamie Kennedy. Some of you may remember him as the nice guy from Scream or as B-Rad from Malibu’s Most Wanted. Some of you may remember him from his show, The Jamie Kennedy Experiment. Some of you may have no idea who I’m talking about. If that’s you – congratulations – you’re basically 90% of the people who saw my advertising. To be fair, I didn’t even know he did stand-up comedy which I think technically puts me right up there in that 90%.

The turnout was less than ideal, which was a shame because he was actually very, very funny. I can’t speak for everyone but I was surprised, primarily because when I was looking for clips of his stand-up to promote his show, I couldn’t find anything that even slightly made me giggle. Leading up to the show I thought we were screwed. On top of that, I’m in a pretty conservative town so images of people getting pretend offended were constantly swirling around in my head. Well, I was wrong.. kind of.

From beginning to end, his show was hilarious but, more importantly than that, it served as an odd source of inspiration for me and my writing. One of the first jokes he made was about the low turnout; he ended the joke by asking “who did the marketing for this?”

Yeah, that would be me who did the marketing.

I laughed so hard because you know what? When you’re right, you’re right. I probably could’ve done a better job promoting the show but I didn’t because the fact is, I’m not good at marketing. I don’t even like it. I got into marketing because I didn’t know I could make a career out of writing this kind of stuff and I wasn’t sure what else to do. (BTW, I still haven’t figured out how to make a living with my writing so it turns out I’m also bad at making progress.) Marketing is what I do to pay the bills but I know I’m just not very good at it. I can’t even properly market my blog. It’s true. Look at my follower count, I’ll wait….. Yeah, and this blog has been up since 2015.

Anyway, Jamie Kennedy’s comment made me realize that I need to be more aggressive about figuring this out because there are plenty more “who did the marketing for this?” where that came from. That’s a bleak future.

The laughter continued, and just when I thought “hey, there hasn’t been one ‘boo’ yet, this is great!”, Jamie Kennedy made the mistake that every comedian makes: he made a joke that offended someone. “Here it goes”, I thought.

Of course, I’m being sarcastic. Jamie didn’t make a mistake. He was doing what we paid him to do: tell jokes. And watching him explain to this heckler that everything he was saying was a joke and reminding her that she was at a comedy show was a fucking downer. He shouldn’t have had to do that. Luckily, her bullshit didn’t ruin the show; he even got a standing ovation when it was over.

I could debate about situations like this all day but that’s not the point of this post. The point is, I wrestle with posting some of the things I write about all the time, and it’s a bit of a problem. I’ve refrained from sharing some of my stories because I worry about how they’ll be perceived, even though I actually put a lot of thought into what I write. I was even hesitant about writing this.

Then I heard Jamie Kennedy asking “who did the marketing for this?” and I thought, fuck it. If I’m going to figure this out there’s only one way to do it, and that’s to write.

Not every story I share will be great, I know that, but I’d rather put them out there than risk the possibility of losing any opportunity to do what I’ve set out to do: make you laugh. Because in a time where everything seems to be going from worse to horrendous, I think we can all agree that laughter is one of the bright spots. So I hope you’re ready to read about my fucking TERRIFYING trip to Jamaica because that story and more are coming. And who knows, maybe I had nothing to worry about in the first place. It’s not like I’m attracting hundreds of thousands of readers. I do my own marketing after all.