Why the hell not?

El Burrito var. Beanitus Chilinense

Before a dinner party, we all slave over a hot stove, worrying about splattering sauce anglaise on our dinner-party clothes. Will the guests come early? Will the souffle fall? So why not undertake the construction of a dinner-party-worthy meal just for me? No stress; I'll just eat whenever it's finished, and microwave some potstickers if it sucks. Hence was born the Beanito Burrito: homemade refried beans, homemade Spanish rice, homemade guacamole and homemade salsa (both featuring homepicked hot peppers!). On a Trader Joe's tortilla. Sometime soon I'm going to make tortillas too. And the Fat Weasel Ale, also from TJ's, is reasonably tasty (for a beer from TJ's)-- rich but not too heavy, malty with a little bit of a tang.*

Really, if I lived Zen and the art of Cooking, dinner parties would always be like this: Just plan and cook the food as best you can, because whatever happens, happens. If it all comes out beautifully, brag away. But if something goes awry, you make do, and hope your friends like the wine. A lot. And don't notice that the lentils are a little too crunchy.

And then, while browsing Manybooks.net (free books! [Edit: Yeah, e-books. Sometimes I enjoy being nonspecific.]) after dinner, I found this in the Cooking section: The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate, by Eliza Poor Donner Houghton. (Should it be poor Eliza Donner Houghton?)

*So I'm upset about how hard it is to find a good beer at TJ's. I think they have a lot of drinkable wines, but I also want cheap, rich, well-balanced ale. And maybe a good stout too. Everything they have is a lager, or an ale that is way too heavy on something, and without enough of anything else.

Los Feliz, Thursday, 7:42 a.m.

Our official shooting schedule for July 4

Los Feliz is such a white neighborhood. Everyone here seems well dressed and shiny with success, or the sheen of trying to look successful for everyone else. I can see the Observatory, which connects me to the old Hollywood of the larger-than-life stars much more than my neighborhood in south-east Hollywood does.

I live in a barrio of immigrants, strangers from El Salvador and the Ukraine. Doing what? Owning businesses, cooking food, raising children. They don't care about the hulking stages three blocks away or the manufactured billboards proclaiming the Next Big Thing. They cook something that smells like tacos at 8 a.m. and watch futbol. They wait outside the Home Depot. They park a taxi in the garage when their shift ends.

This makes it easier for me. In a business more "make it or die trying" than most, I would assume I would die trying, and end up living fatalistically. The pressure is on for us young folks trying to break into the industry to convince people that I'm It and you should pick me! pick me! Coming home every day to the yell of children and the scent of menudo reminds me that Hollywood, and the world, is bigger than the biggest hit show. There is more to life than making it here. And right now, at the end of my third week off work, I'm looking hard for that "more."

The upshot to not having a gig right now is not working in the heat. The other side of the coin is, of course, that there's no coin to have another side. People tell me they could never handle the 16-hour days of the film industry, and I tell them it's tough, but you get way more than two weeks' vacation per year. What I don't say is that it's not necessarily vacation, it's Looking For Work.

Confucius say...

My fortune cookie: "All admire your physical and social appearance."

J: Social appearance? What's that supposed to mean?

Me: Does this conversation make me look fat?

J: IN BED!

Am I What I Eat?

Is it crazy that my new favorite lunch is an everything bagel with cream cheese and kimchi, accompanied by a nice mug of unfiltered apple juice?

Don't get me started on the peanut butter / chutney / smoked Gouda sanwiches of 2002....

6 Lucky Moments in My Life

The technical term for this is "soft bounce"

So there's this guy named Jonathan Grubb, and he has a blog, and he likes to make entries that are lists of 8 things. I've always liked bullet points and outlines and lists so here I go. I'll do 6 today because it's almost dinner time, and I don't have the skill to manage 8. Yes, I'm too lazy to link. Low blood sugar!

6. Not buying "The Life Aquatic" from the Criterion section at Amoeba, coming back for it later and finding it sold, then discovering a copy for less in the Recent Arrivals section. There are scores of things like this that make up #6 for me; it's the little things that make you feel lucky sometimes.

5. Getting hit by a ricocheting champagne cork at the wrap of my most recent gig. Shaking up a bottle of bubbly and spraying it everywhere is a gesture for luck, so getting hit with the cork must be lucky too. Especially if it doesn't poke your eye out. This just happened, so I don't know what kind of luck I'll get from it.

4. I believe in making your own luck. I'm going to put this list at #4 in hopes that it will make some for me after my car turned out to be even more wrecked than was previously diagnosed (got t-boned by a Jeep while I was in NYC), I fell into video village on set and twisted my ankle and almost ripped out an earring, and I got annoyingly screwed by my health insurance's asinine prescription policies. HealthNet are a bunch of decaying zombie monkeys who fling poo and couldn't type a sonnet if you broadcast the Complete Workes with the BrainWaveControl-o-Tron turned to eleven.

3. Wandering around lost, alone, and drunk in London at 3 a.m., and having nothing worse happen to me than pissing my pants and finally getting back to the hostel to find that they'd given my bed to someone else. (Yes, I know what it's like to have to go that bad.)

2. Getting called to work in NYC last fall. It coincided with my decision to move to LA to start working full time as a scripty, and I met some amazing people, got another job from those connections (almost two, but I fucked one up), and got to list "S16 feature" at the top of my resume. (Which isn't that great, but it's better than what was there before.)

1. Back when we both lived in Seattle, my friend Chris won two free tickets to a Silent Movie Monday. He invited me, and when I took my seat I found an envelope telling me I'd won a free gift basket from Trader Joe's. So Chris lucked out on tickets, and then I lucked out on a big canvas bag full of cookies, wine, cheese, shampoo and mixed nuts. Luck squared!

This is all really me trying to tell myself it's okay that I'm not going to Guatemala.

Did My Momma Raise a Fool?

Dear Diary,

What would you do if you got a call about a six-week shoot in Guatemala, starting in three weeks, and your passport is expired?

The backstory:

• Oct. 2005: I pack up a small suitcase and put my belongings in storage (in Seattle) to work in New York for a month.
• Nov. 2005: I arrive in LA and couch surf for two weeks until my stuff arrives.
• Dec. 2005: I move into an apartment with my bitter ex-boyfriend, because we can't figure out where else to live. Live in tense squalor for four months because neither of us wants to finish unpacking or even clean up.
  
• Apr. 2006: I pack a small suitcase and go back to New York to work for two months; my stuff is in storage again because I'm going to move into a new apartment when I get back.
• June 2006: I come back to my new apartment, and have three days to sort my stuff out before starting on another feature. A short one with a so-so rate.
  

So then I get a message about a feature being produced out of New York. They need a scripty on a show with a Spanish-speaking crew that will be shooting in Antigua, Guatemala. (I'm not sure if I'm being offered the job straight up, or if I'm a finalist for it.) Sounds like a beautiful city, but I'm sick of living out of a suitcase. It's a slightly higher rate than I usually get offered, but my Spanish is rusty. I don't need the money right now this very instant, but I feel paranoid about turning down any money, especially a few thousand dollars (more than a couple, less than several).

It feels really scary to turn down what may be sure work and be possibly faced with nothing. But to rush around to renew my passport, pack for the tropics (something I've never done), and brush up on my Spanish seems too much to do right now. I want a home to be centered around. But then you're only young once.... I guess the things that are making me hesitate are:

1. The fact that I'm shy and my Spanish is rusty (will Guatemala be a macho place? Will my short hair, feminist beliefs and slow, foreign speech cause embarrassing moments? I'm easily embarrassed), and
2. That I've recently made some friends here, for the first time in years really, and want to maximize hanging out time with new exciting people. And they can get me into ComiCon for free.
   

I guess the biggest thing to remember is that not taking this job doesn't imply no work for the rest of the summer -- something else might come up. And I can hope that this won't be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, because if I stay in this industry I may eventually be offered another job in some exotic country. And possibly for more pay and a better hotel room.

Argh. Whatever I choose, I hope I don't regret it.