| continued from previous page<<< One such sponsor is a 65 year old guy named Matthew Lesko. He dresses up in an obnoxiously colored suit, specled with black question marks. The product he's pitching is a book on how to get money from the government for self-improving endeavors like going back to school or starting a business. The commercial basically consists of this weirdo running around Washington D.C. yelling at the top of his lungs about how people are getting rich because of his retarded book. Then it cuts to random people of differing genders and ethnicities screaming out different dollar amounts like "NINE THOUSAND DOLLARS" or "THIRTY THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS!!!!." All of these different people, in their own rite, look like trailer trash to varying degrees. They also have the intelligence of a grapefruit. One example is a woman saying "If I can get money to go back to school, any woman can." which automatically places her at the bottom of her gender's heap. It's difficult to believe that watching this commercial, which appears to be more like a wild animal park, that anyone would ever buy this book, yet I've seen the commercial for at least two months on this channel, so this Lesko freak must be cashin' in somehow. Julianne was babysitting during this time of extreme boredom, but had told me that she approximated getting done with this at about 10:30 PM and would come over to my house after that. Watching TechTV is fun, but watching it with Julianne is far more entertaining. There's a lot of stuff that goes strait over her head and I get to explain it to her. Julianne is going to Stanford, so I spend I big portion of my life feeling stupid because I'm not going to nearly as prestigious a college. I'm going to Cal Poly Pomona, which isn't too bad, but still is not anywhere near her school. However, for the short portion of time when I get to sound smart about something, it's like I'm on top of the world. Then I realize that knowing the best type of RAM in existance isn't really gonna help me as much as going to a good college would, so my self-esteem hits the floor again. So, I continue watching television, and 10:30 comes around and there was no phone call or page. I was sure that she would probably make some sort of attempt to contact me by 10:45, but I was wrong. So, I sat aimlessly by the television finding out how the Eurosealer can change my life. 11:00 o'clock came around...no dice. At about 11:20, I had become fed up with Julianne and with life in general. I turned off the TV and just as I stood up, my leg started convulsing. It turned out that it was just my pager vibrating, so I was safe, for the moment. I walked over to the phone and called Julainne's cell phone. She said that the babysitting deal went a little longer than expected and "informed" me that it was ok to go to bed now...which is exactly what I did. I hit the sack (the bed, stoner) like a ton of bricks and slept until the next morning when I got up unusually early, despite my minimal amount of sleep. Today was the day that Julianne and I were going to go to LAX (that's the airport for all you non-Californians) to visit some crazy bitch that Julianne hadn't seen in like five years. I came because she said we would go to the 3rd Street Promenade and I know for a fact there's a lot of crazy stuff happening in that neck of the woods. It was somewhere around 4:30 PM that we left from Julianne's house to go to the airport. On the way over, Julianne handed me her organizer and told me to sift through it and find pictures of her and her friends that she could show whats-her-name at the airport. There was a various assortment of pictures including several with me in them. One that stood out as being out of place was a picture of Christina sitting next to the remenants of a cake with a look of "I can't believe I ate the whole thing" on her face. I didn't understand the appropriacy of showing the girl whose name escapes me this picture because it didn't feature Julianne in it. There was another picture of Julianne, Christina, Jason (Christina's would-be boyfriend), and I sitting by a fire place after Winter Formal and me smiling in a profoundly disgusting manner. I also didn't see the appropriacy of showing this picture because it would undoubtedly make me seem retarded to this girl in question. The drive to the airport was long and I kept trying to find things to occupy myself with in Julianne's car. I don't really have ADD, but if you hang arond with me enough, you know that I can't sit still and am constantly searching for objects to fool around with. I decided my object of choice for today would be Julianne's shift knob. I had often times fiddled with her shift knob, but today I toyed with it more than usual. I continually pushed in the little button on the side that you have to engage in order to shift gears. This made Julianne very uneasy and she kept slapping my hand when I would reach for it. I kept doing it because Julianne slaps like a girl...probably because she is one, but I'm no expert. When we got on to the 405 Freeway, traffic picked up because, as any Southern Californian can tell you, the 405 is the most ill-constructed freeway in the entire country if not the world. Julianne was unsure of when the flight we were supposed to find was supposed to arrive. So, I had to call up several times in order to get information on it. After navigating through ten minutes of recorded voice menus, I finally was able to reach an actual human being. I was awestruck because this person told me that for the first time that I can remember, a flight coming into LAX was actually arriving AHEAD of schedule. I was struck with utter disbelief to say the least. I told Julianne this while she was stuggling to keep her car from slamming into the one in front of us. She essentially threw a fit and called her mom to tell her that we were probably going to be late. I don't know why she did this because her mom couldn't possibly do anything about it. We continued driving and finally made it to the airport only about ten minutes late. The one stroke of luck we received on our journey was that when we parked, there was already about twenty minutes left on the parking meter. Julianne put in an additional 75 cents which gave us a totaly of about 45 minutes. The time had come for us to frantically search for the gate in which this girl we were in search of would be. Julianne, for the first time in her life, had not really planned out this little excursion after wasting about an hour driving to the airport. We ran into the luggage pick-up area and looked around. We started running to the right, but I don't know why because neither of us really knew anything about the direction we should head. We found some of those nifty monitors that tell what gate each flight arrives in and we searched frantically to find the flight number, but to no avail because they take the flight off the monitors after it has landed. So once again, we were screwed. We continued to wander to the right when suddenly, as if out of nowhere, a voice from above shouted out, "Julianne Cuellar, please come to gate 69B." Our confusion ceased and we began running...running like the wind to get to 69B. We ran for what felt like days, in and out of corridors and around gigantic vertical columns, past coffee shops and jet laggers. It wasn't too bad because Julianne runs like a girl...um...yeah. Anyway, we finally reached the promised land that was gate 69B. After climbing up a final flight of stairs in near total exhaustion, I saw in the distance a small group of people that appeared awestruck. I figured they must have recognized Julianne (despite her five year absense) so we rushed over. It was indeed the party we were so desparately searching for. Only one of the three people we encountered actually knew Julianne. She was slightly taller than myself and seemed unnecessarily jolly for the given situation. The other two were another teenage girl that appropriately lacked enthusiasm and a fifty-something woman who seemed constantly distracted. Immediately, Julianne put on a mask of false joy and started reminissing. I sat by idly while Julianne and this girl chatted away. This girl was a motor mouth and an animal enthusiest. I think animals are reasonably cute, and pets are fun, but this girl's whole life was like a giant zoo. From her descriptions it sounded like she had in her posession thousands upon thousands of various creatures that she kept to do her bidding. For most of her and Julianne's conversation I was staring off into the distance, praying that some day they would shut up and I could finally move on with my life. However, I did pick out one detail from the whole endeavor. The girl kept talking about how she had been in a play in which three of her continued on next page>>> |