Author: badinia

Virginia Jones is a comedian, writer, and actor- probably in that order.

I’m Vegan, Don’t Hate Me

virginia jones by zachary foster
photo by Zachary Foster

I performed this at Greg Walloch’s great food-based storytelling show, Eat Your Words, at the Standard hotel Sunset.  

The first thing I have to tell you is I’m sorry for the second thing I have to tell you.
Here’s the second thing.
I’m vegan.
Don’t hate me. I don’t hate you.
It started this way.

Long ago, we didn’t have Pandora or Spotify or even Pitchfork or Myspace to find new music. Not even Myspace. In my generation, if you wanted to find cool music, you had to go home with an older guy. Maybe one who had a college radio show. Go through his record collection. That’s what you did. It was a gamble. You might get a free t-shirt. On the other hand, you might find a collection of Styx records.

That means you wasted a night of your youth.

The Record

There was this one time I found a Smiths record.  It was called Meat is Murder and it had a song on it called Meat is Murder.
Meat is Murder, I knew even then, is not a good song. It’s stupid and overblown and it has bad logic. The lyric is: It’s death without reason, and death without reason is murder. That’s not true. If anything, murder has MORE reason than other death. If my aunt gets hit by a bus, is that bus a murderer?

The song has cow noises that sound like those little toys you flip over. But I had not really thought about meat before, and I became a vegetarian that day, for the best reason, which is for Morrissey.  This was moral high ground Morrissey, before he was supporting Brexit and saying awful things about minorities all the time.

The Last Meat

The last meat I ate on purpose was a Fishwich from McDonald’s in August 1987. If that was before you were born, please- release yourself from the responsibility of telling me that. Also, know that every time you say- I wasn’t even born then- you’ll get it back in time. Sometimes in spades.

My sisters made fun of me. My Dad told me I was going to die from malnutrition.

I went to Thanksgiving with my best friend in college and her grandfather turned to me and yelled “You ever try meat? You might like it!”

Another friend’s mother served me spaghetti with meat sauce and said it was walnuts. When I said it was OK, I could eat salad she said “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I just thought it was all in your mind!”

In the 80’s and 90’s, many people continued to ask questions about why I was vegetarian, but I think the most hurtful one was- how do you keep your weight on? Touche, custodian lady.

The Next Step

In the early 2000’s, I stopped drinking milk. It turns out, I was lactose intolerant. It was a revelation. I didn’t know you could just live a life without farting all the time. I cut out eggs, because I didn’t care about eggs.
When people ask you why you don’t eat meat these days, they ask if it’s for health or moral reasons. If it’s health, they’re ok with it. If you had to stop eating animals because your blood is mostly cheese, you’re not judging them. I think it’s like how people who don’t drink get asked if it’s by choice or court order.  I’m not judging you.

I have never asked anyone to be vegetarian. If a boyfriend spontaneously becomes vegetarian, his friends will all think you did it, and after you break up you’ll see him at a party, laughing and eating a rolled up hamburger patty with his hands over the grill with his new girlfriend, who is paleo and teaches crossfit.

Eventually, my sisters went vegetarian, then they cut out milk. My mother said “I’m too old to be vegetarian.” My sister calls me to complain about my mother eating ice cream and farting up her house. She doesn’t think there’s any other way.  My mother says it’s too hard to remember what is and isn’t made of an animal.

How Can You Tell What’s Not An Animal?

Think of it this way.  Everything that grows from the earth, from every plant, every grain, every fruit, every vegetable, I eat. I’m not crazy about pumpkin or sweet potatoes, probably from holiday related trauma. Everything that comes out of the ground in the world, I eat. If it can be plucked or shucked or harvested, I’ll eat it. If it’s something that has to be trapped and killed, I don’t eat that. So that’s easy to remember. And I can eat any food that doesn’t have animal parts put into it. It’s really lots of foods.
It’s carnivores who are complicated. Over here, there’s animals you eat: big fish, big pigs, cows, chickens. Over here, there’s animals you love, cats, small fish, small pigs, and depending on where you grew up, dogs and horses. You can be doing really great but you screw up and eat a cat one time and people never let you forget it.

It Happened This Way

One day, I get the call.
My sister called me to say: OK, while I was living in England, there was this green apple and sage sausage that British people eat, because most things they eat are some kind of sausage. And they had a vegetarian kind at the store, and I was craving them recently, and I found them, and it was at Whole Foods, and it was in a brown paper wrapper, and I took it home, and I cooked it, ate it, and read it, and that was the wrong order, because it was made of pork!
I started laughing and I couldn’t stop.
She said, You don’t understand, I’m a vegetarian!
I said, well, I love you, and people make mistakes, but what do you think I am, vegetarian Pope? I can’t absolve you from pig eating.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter- It’s about intention, not execution.

Vegan Superpowers

Don’t think I don’t have vegan superpowers. I do. You know breakfast places? Like, not brunch places necessarily, but places with several different flavors of pancakes and everything comes with bacon and potatoes. What I know that you don’t is that every single drinking glass smells like cooked-on egg from the dishwasher, and you guys can’t tell. It’s like seeing into another dimension.

Movie Love Lessons!

You get to a point in life where you think, hey, I just keep dating awful people, I wonder why? Then you start thinking about your favorite movies from childhood!  

Beauty and the Beast:

A beautiful village girl enters a monster’s castle to plead with him to release her father.  She submits to her own incarceration.  He throws temper tantrums and tries to force his way into her room, and then breaks up his own furniture.

She falls victim to Stockholm Syndrome and falls in love with her captor.   Once she proves her love is true, he is revealed to be a prince! 

This teaches us that if you have patience and love a bad person for long enough, he will become a good person.

 What are some lessons we can take from this?

  1. Don’t trust people who wear too much velvet.
  2. Don’t date guys who have kidnapped any member of your family. Not even a cousin.
  3. Rich doesn’t always mean nice. Some might argue that it never does.

Grease:

Two attractive people meet over Summer break, fall in love, and then when they get back to school they’re worried that if they date, their friends won’t think they’re cool anymore because she is a “soc” and he is a “greaser”.  They spend the WHOLE SCHOOL YEAR pining for each other.  At the end they put on different outfits in order to meet the expectations of the other person, and then they die, as they get into a convertible and their car drives into the clouds. 

Lessons:

  1. Date who you want.  It doesn’t matter if your friends don’t like their jacket.
  2. You don’t have to change to be loved.
  3. Don’t have unprotected sex with Kenickie, or anyone really.
     

Some Kind Of Wonderful:

In this film, Eric Stoltz plans a dream date for a woman he has barely spoken to and only loves for her appearance.

At the end of the date, she turns down his gift of extremely expensive earrings.  He feels that she is being a real a-hole.

  1. When a guy has a best friend who’s a girl and they hang out all the time, that girl is already probably in love with him,  although she dresses like a demolition derby driver.
  2. If someone plans an elaborate first date to try to win your love, and isn’t happy just to meet and talk over coffee, it’s probably a desperate attempt to paper over their own insecurities!

Pretty Woman:

It’s a cute retelling of Pygmalion/My Fair Lady, in which a street prostitute becomes a trophy wife, which is the same thing but in longer pants. 

She gets an emotionally distant workaholic with no family ties, and becomes a kept woman- that’ll be fun in marriage counseling! 

“Hey, I think our power dynamic is screwed up.” “Why is that, I wonder?”

  1. When a man buys a woman, it’s like buying a car- he’ll trade her in eventually.

Just remember that romantic movies are a fun fantasy, but many of the relationships depicted in them are a real nightmare!

Best Goth Friends!

Written for Jonathan Bradley Welch’s A Very Special Episode show!  Theme: BFF’s!

I met my best friend the first week of college.  She was looking for someone in Bruce Hall, which was the art dorm, because it had art studios on the top floor. Also, it was the cheapest.  It didn’t have air conditioning, and it was supposed to be haunted.

I heard a kid died elevator surfing, where you get into an elevator shaft and ride on an elevator until someone takes it to the top floor and you fucking die. 

Instead of getting a haunted elevator, we got the elevator closed the rest of the year and everybody had to take the stairs.

Don’t pity him.  Pity us.

How It Started

Melissa walked past my door, and I went out and said, hi, it’s nice to meet another goth.  She said, what’s a goth?  And I said, it’s us.  It’s what we are.

What do you think you are? I asked.

A spooky kid, she said.

Sidebar: this story is before Edward Scissorhands and Hot Topic. This was before the Craft, before the 2000’s when everyone was wearing vinyl pants and talking about how they partied like a rockstar.  Mel was from a small town in Texas called Palestine, which had the same population as my high school.  Word of goth had not gotten there yet, and she may have believed she was the only person who read tarot and listened to sad music for hours.

She was not.

Mel had long black hair and little round silver glasses and dark lipstick and many layers of black lace on, and in general looked like someone who maybe someday would get a Sylvia Plath tattoo. 

I had short red hair and a nose ring and looked like someone who might have prepared a monologue from Sylvia Plath’s the Bell Jar for an audition for a film called Teen Witch.  That is something that I did do, and they managed to make the film without me.

I asked her, what do you think you are?  What do your high school friends call you? And she shrugged and said, spooky kid. 

Main Hobbies

We started hanging out right away.  Our main hobbies were: taking acid and seeing the Rocky Horror Picture Show, getting dressed up and taking dramatic portraits of each other in the stairwells at school. Also we drank terrible dorm coffee with ice cream bars melted into them, and Bailey’s irish cream, and then we wondered why we were getting fat.

We were inseparable, and dated briefly until we remembered we were primarily straight. Roadtripping to New Orleans for spring break, we hung out in front of Anne Rice’s house. We went to goth clubs, sat in the back of rooms and complained together, and in general we had fun.

Some Troubles

Our friendship wasn’t perfect. When Tank Girl came out, based on a comic book series I liked a lot, I shaved my head into a Chelsea haircut and wore tutus and combat boots, and felt like I was working an edgy look.

  She took a photograph of the back of my head that demonstrated that my head was a bad one for shaving.  My skull is long and H.R. Geiger-like in the back, and there is a shelf.  I asked her why she hadn’t told me my head was bad and she said she figured it was too late.

Once, she wouldn’t stop puking, and I took her to the emergency room and waited with her for ten hours.

One time, she was my confidant and best friend and and she understood me, and that was all the time.

Another time, we drove to Oklahoma city in the middle of the night because we wanted a box of Boo-Berry cereal, which was not available in Texas, and we ate it as the sun came up and it wasn’t very good.

We were a really good match.  I was a little too tall and she was a little bit short.  I was an emotionally needy extrovert who met everyone and remembered no-one and she was sometimes shy, but she could remember everyone we’d met.

And Later

After college, I moved to Portland, OR to date a boy I’d met in Dallas.  She followed soon after and we took back up together. We were doing exciting things like going to a goth club owned by the Russian mob, dancing to Britpop, and complaining that things weren’t the same as they had been in Dallas, Texas.  What they were was much better.

I became aware that she had found another girl to hang out with named Caroline.  Caroline was also a little too tall and wore high heels all the time and I thought she was loud, even though I am also loud.

We still liked each other.  We still saw each other.  But Caroline was usually there too.  It was stupid to complain that I was jealous.  Why should I be jealous?  I was jealous.

The End, My Friend

Our friendship wasn’t really over until she and my husband had a disagreement about plans that they’d made.  I expected her to pick us up for a DJ gig and she didn’t, but she showed up hours later, drunk and with Caroline, talking in circles about how fun and fucked up their evening had been.  I told her I was tired of her letting me down, and she was furious.

It was her word against his, and I felt like I had to side with my husband.  It was a small thing.  Looking back, it didn’t matter, but everyone was very angry.

Later Still

Two years later, my marriage ended, because my husband was sleeping with another friend of mine, which I didn’t like very much.  That friend in turn was surprised that I didn’t like her anymore.

I went to Melissa’s wedding, to a tall blonde Swede, within a month of my divorce, because I loved her and it was important.  It was a beautiful wedding in an art library, with favors made from antique books and a cake in the shape of a gilded beehive. 

I sat with our friends and cried a little harder, because I wasn’t just happy for her. I was also sorry for myself.  At this point, she had fallen out with Caroline over something.

We are still facebook friends.  We leave each other likes and comments.  I am happy to be to see her happy. She is happily married and doing well.  But I still miss my very best friend.

Love on a Trail of Breadcrumbs

 I had a great first date with a curly-haired breadcrumber who kept in sporadic touch with me, which made me sad because I wanted to see him again.

Technology has changed the way we interact with each other.   A few years ago, if you’d been dating someone and you didn’t want to anymore, you had to say “hey, thanks for dating me, but I don’t want to anymore.”   It was rude to do this over the phone!   You had to meet someone in person to reject them!

Now we ghost, fade, or breadcrumb our way out of hard situations.

Ghosting Has Been Well Documented

You’ve gone on a number of dates with someone, and then you Keyser Soze them like in Usual Suspects- you’re just in the wind.  No text, no call.  Everyone hates it, but everyone does it. Having been ghosted implicitly gives you permission to ghost, like being bitten by a werewolf makes you one yourself.

The first time I was ghosted, it took me by surprise.  I assumed that the person I had been dating for nine months was in rehab or prison (either one would have been a pretty good idea.)  Then, after two weeks of silence, I saw him tagged in a photo in his favorite bar.

I was amazed.  I didn’t call it ghosting, I called it “being dumped by a sociopath”.

Ghosting happens because it’s the easiest option.  There’s no confrontation, and also, ghosting never really closes the door.  In the ghoster’s mind, they’ve never really broken it off with you, so there’s still a possibility of dating you in case what they’re pursuing peters out, and also the thing after that, or if they someday reach the end of Tinder and it’s just a picture of a cat with a colander on its head.

Breadcrumbing is the same- they might not want to date you now, but they maybe want to later?  Or not?

Fading is a slow ghost.

Responses just get shorter and less committal until they’re gone, but by the time it’s done, you’ve gotten used to not hearing from them, like when you taper down from smoking or eating carbs.

Monday after a date: You say “That was fun!”  Three hours later they say, “Ya!”  You say “Have a great night!”, they say nothing!

Tuesday: Still nothing

Wednesday: You ask about plans, three hours later they say “rly busy, talk later”

Thursday: Nothing

Friday: You ask, “Hey!  Good week? Weekend plans?”

Saturday:  No word back at all!  Spooky, they’re a ghost!

In many ways, breadcrumbing is even more infuriating than ghosting or fading, and this is how it goes:

They don’t make plans with you for months, but sometimes you’ll get a text out of nowhere that says, “TGIF!” or “Happy 4th!” or “Hope ur gr8!”  The two weeks between Christmas and New Year’s are filled with enough breadcrumbs to fill a bakery, as people have free time and think “I guess there’s worse things than going out with that girl again.”

They never have a long conversation, but just drop a three syllable text from time to time.   Dropping tiny bits of attention your way keeps you from forgetting about them.

If you respond, they might say something back and they might not.  You might get a picture with a caption that feels generic/out of context, and this is because they’re sending it to a bunch of people.  (IF YOU THINK THIS IS ABOUT YOU THEN IT IS.)

If you’re Facebook or Insta friends with them, they might wordlessly “like” a particularly nice selfie, just pressing a button to change the color of a heart somewhere in the universe, to remind you that they still exist.

What Happened Was

I had a really great first date with a curly-haired breadcrumber who kept in sporadic touch with me, which made me sad because I wanted to see him again.

I ran into him six months later and he asked me out again, and when I told him no, he was surprised.

Me: “I have a two-three week test period on dates.  Your window of opportunity to ask me out again has long since expired.”  (This is fancier than how I really said it, I think the f-word was in my original response.)

Him: “I wish I’d known that was a requirement.” (That’s what he really said)

Me: “I think it’s pretty normal.  If I see you every six months, that’s less often than my parole officer or my hairdresser.  That’s not dating.  I don’t know what it is.”

If the ghoster is keeping you in cold storage, the breadcrumber is just keeping you on the bench.  They might get back to you.  They might not.  They’re “keeping in touch.”  It’s infuriating.  And it’s a tiny, gradual waste of your life.

What are they after?

They’re either a player and like to have lots of people in rotation or else, and this is the sadder option: they really think this is what dating is. They think if they keep meeting people they’ll find the right one, and until they’re sure you’re not the right one, they’d better keep you on the line.

What’s hard to explain to a breadcrumber is that romantic attachment doesn’t happen like in the movies, where you both reach for the last box of brown cinnamon Pop-Tarts at Von’s and your eyes lock and you fall hard.

Romantic attachment and feeling is something two compatible people who like each other build, with communication and intention, not with breadcrumbs but out of whole slices of goddamned bread.

What do you do if you’re being breadcrumbed?

The only way to stop it is to be clear about what you want from the other person.

“Hey, I’m interested in you.  Do you want to make plans with me?”  If they respond, great, go out with that person.

If they don’t respond with plans, cross them off your list of prospects.  Now, you can spend all the time you spent waiting to hear back from them talking to people who want to date you, and put that emotional energy into people who’ll give it back!

– See more at: http://www.lovetv.co/looking-for-love-on-a-trail-of-breadcrumbs/2/#sthash.8KKcLPqp.dpuf

Lyft in Love!

Busy weekend on Lyft! Last night’s lessons:
-stop driving at three or you’ll wind up in
Compton at 5:30 AM
– exotic dancers will sometimes rob you in your sleep in Thousand Oaks and scale a gate to get in my Lyft and complain about not being able to smoke in my car

Lyft Adventure Part 1:In Love in Lyft

I picked up a cute, fairly drunk guy at 2AM in downtown Pasadena, and he was texting someone while he gave me an address. We picked up a cute, fairly drunk girl and the magic began.

Guy: Let’s go to (name of bar)
Me: Uh, I think they’re closed, it’s 2am.
Guy: I think it’s open?
Girl: I just think I’m a…real easy going person.
Guy: I know, I know. I try to live in the moment.
Girl: You just..have to.
Me: Guys, this bar is closed.
Guy: (to me) oh! Let’s go to (restaurant.) Have you ever had a conversation this amazing happen in your cab before?
Me: (dryly) A Tinder date? Sure.
Guy: Noooo we met at a club.
Girl: You just came up to me and asked me to dance, and I couldn’t turn you down!
Me: OK, I’m sorry to say this restaurant is also closed.
Girl: I don’t even need to eat. I’m good.
Guy: OK, we’ll just go to In n Out and get a shake.
Girl: It’s like, you just…you took down all my roadblocks.
Guy: I know, I know. You told me.
Girl: All my defenses, just gone.
We get to In n Out. It is also closed.
Girl: OK, I guess…take me back to my place?
Me: OK.
Guy: Naw, we can get out here.
Girl: Oh…OK?
Guy: My house is right over there. We can hang for a little while and get another car later.
Me: OK, here we are then.
Guy: Isn’t she just so cute?
Me: Yup. Here we are!
Girl: I just can’t believe how strong we vibe on each other.
(Moments pass. They’re just sitting in my car talking)
Me: You guys…can you go fall in love in someone else’s Lyft?
(I find this hilarious. Nobody thinks it’s as funny as I do.)

Remember, kids: Love is embarrassing but it’s ok if you’re both doing it, it’s like wearing white pants or doing the hokey pokey- but nobody thinks it’s as great as you do. Please be safe and use rideshare when you’ve been drinking and you want to pick up your after-bars-close date. Also, get the fuck out of my car.

Lyft Adventure Part 2: at 2:30 AM I picked up another call in downtown Pasadena. I waited at the address for a few minutes and saw no one, and a bar was emptying out across the street so I cruised it to see if my fare was there. After another minute, he walked across from the first spot, waving at me and pointing at his phone and making an angry “you’re an IDIOT” face about having to cross the street and I just thought “fuck this”, cancelled his ride and peeled out. He was a big douchey bro with black ink sleeves and a backwards baseball hat. I did not want to drive him to Azusa. Felt so good.

Japan’s Not Sexy Anymore

To the outside world, Japan is known for being sexy.

The women of Japan are considered the world’s most beautiful, and it’s the home of crazy street fashion, host bars, and Hentai pornography.

However, 25% of Japanese men are still virgins at 30, so many that a new word has emerged for them: yaramiso, which means “30 years old and haven’t done it.”

If there’s anything the Japanese believe in, it’s being on-the-nose with slang.

Even men with prior sexual experience aren’t having much sex- 50% of Japanese men who’ve had sex before haven’t had it in a year or more. Women’s numbers aren’t far behind.

This has deep repercussions throughout society.  The population has dropped by 1 million people since 2008.  There are now concerns about Japan’s ability to support their aging population.

Even stranger are polls reporting that many Japanese people don’t want to have more sex. 1 in 5 men cite extreme dislike for sex, and 46% of Japanese women 16-24 want no sexual contact at all.

It’s worth pointing out that Japan also has the third-highest suicide rate in the world.

So- what’s killing the Japanese sex drive?

1. Money.

In the money-flush 80’s and early 90’s, there was plenty of dating and premarital sex, but the economy took a sharp downturn in 1995. How does that affect getting it on?

When young people can’t afford to live on their own, sharing an apartment with your parents puts a damper on your dating life. In Tokyo, most teens don’t even have cars to make out in! Chew on that, America!

This means that courting couples must visit love hotels, hourly hotels of varying levels of cleanliness and quality, just to have somewhere to be alone.

2. Social Shame.

Men whose careers don’t produce enough money to raise a family are shamed and emasculated.  The Japanese also have a cultural fear of failure, and may prefer not to try to pursue relationships for fear that they won’t work out or they’ll be rejected.

3. Work.

  The Japanese are working harder than ever, with 22% of people putting in more than 50 hours a week, and 200 people per year dying of karōshi, or overwork: dying of strokes or heart attacks on the train to work, or on the job.
  Single people have no time to date.  Married people get home too tired to have sex with their partners, and with personal time at a premium, many single people prefer not to, in their perception, “waste” time on relationships with others when they could be pursuing other interests.

4. Replacement.

Some of the quirky inventions of Japan designed as substitutes for human contact could be contributing to the problem: virtual girlfriend games, pillows with women printed on them, sex dolls, and pornography- all options where one’s sexual and emotional needs are met on your own schedule. Some men have married their pillows and dolls, saying goodbye to human relationships forever.

What can we in the West learn from the East, and how can we do better?

Americans are getting married later (27 for women, up from 21 in 1964) but losing our virginity around 17.  Most of us aren’t worried about having sex before marriage.

We’re having lots of sex, even if we’re not always having lots of relationships, with over 50% of New York single year after year.

Japan’s overworked, solitary citizens make our phone-spawned hookups seem warm, old-fashioned and romantic by comparison.

My advice on not turning Japanese, I really think so:

Stay connected. Stay empathetic. Keep up with friendships, with family, with current and ex-lovers.  

Use technology to get and stay connected- but not to replace connections with people.  What is life for, but connecting and communicating and sharing with other human beings? We may be in a divisive election year, we may have social problems, but please- let’s not start marrying pillows.

– See more at: http://www.lovetv.co/tokyo-death-sexy/2/#sthash.T4pKR6Z6.dpuf

James and Julian: A Writing Exercise

5 minute writing exercise based on a tweet from Julian McCullough to James Urbaniak:

@julezmac- @jamesurbaniak hey James your creep radar is terrible I’ve been staring at you for 10 minutes at gate 51A
(view is of James Urbaniak wandering through his kitchen in a bathrobe, as seen through a slit in a wall panel)

Hey James

Hey  James

Can you see me

I can see you  

Can you feel my eyes on you

Are you ignoring me


How dare you ignore me

(muffled noise)

No Radiohead songs are about romance, do you ever notice, James?  They’re about failed romance.

Maybe that’s why Thom can’t keep anything together.  What would a happy Thom Yorke sound like?  I’ll bet he’s never happy.  Just manic.

Sometimes failed romance is the best kind, though- it protects you from disappointment.  Never had a start to begin with, just a doomed thing.  I’m keeping my last unexpressed crush safe in a Mason jar.  It can’t breathe but it’s safe and it’ll never get old.

James.  Psst.  James.  You got earbuds in man?  Earbuds in your own house, nobody’s got a record player so nobody bothers having a stereo. We never listen to each other.  You’re staring right at me but you can’t see me.  You’re listening to a podcast where famous people talk about when they weren’t famous yet, making everyone listening feel like being famous is inevitable.  Famous people used to not be famous, I’m not famous but one day I will be.  That’s the progression.  That’s the way it goes.
James.  You’ve gotta get better than this, man.  You’ve gotta get better than this.