Bad Business

So. The bikini bar. I left.

These heels were made for walking, and then some.

Actually, me and the most conventionally attractive girl in the whole place, we both left. The same night. For the same reasons. And while it's kinda sad, it was a good & necessary thing. See, I loved the bikini bar. I loved the convenience & what it could have been, and so did my friend. But, the place has problems.

The stage floor rips my skin & is almost always filthy. There are mirrors missing and ajar & broken bits of tube lighting surrounding said stage. The club is often slower than it should be. When they have live performance events they are 90% very frustrating, humiliating, & not profitable for the dancers. They keep around dancers that while they are very nice girls, harm the club's reputation & often drive away customers (and result in the glut of bad reviews online). The dj's do not work with the dancers very well when it comes to selling dances (songs in between dancers on stage are sometimes only a minute long, then songs on stage can sometimes play as long as five minutes or more, the inconsistency severely messes with one's money if doing multiple lap dances in a row. While I understand that myself & my friend are often the only girls selling more than one or two dances at a time, it's still a problem. Still, it was a fun club with a kind of old school, punk rock vibe, with *so* much potential.

But in the end, what drove us away was inept security & inept management.

It's All In Your Head

After a little more than a week apart, sharing a tiny twin-size bunk in a shared room, on-set, in the mountains, is less than ideal. I didn't mind though. It's so hard to be away from Beau, after the months we spend apart last year. It's almost a little traumatizing, between the reminder of such a hard time & spending so much time alone with my own thoughts.

We set the laptop up in front of us & put on Louis CK's latest standup. Beau curled up tight behind me. I could feel his heartbeat he held me so close. His lips on my shoulder, he wrapped his arm around me to caress my stomach, and I shivered, sighed. When you're a girl, or at least if you're me, letting someone touch your stomach is a rare form of intimacy. It's the seat of so much insecurity. It's not an area you let much of anyone touch, ever, intimate partners or not. And it was bliss. I felt high. I felt like I did the first time he wrapped his arm around me.

We've been together a long time now, and, things haven't been easy. Not everything.

Huge Jaws Gnash

Recently, things have been rough. That's an understatement. But a little optimism never hurt anyone that much.

We thought that we would get a break from the horribleness. That Mom might be able to avoid surgery altogether. He oncologist at Providence Hospital in Everett was so very anti surgery. But, I pushed Mom, so she pushed the oncologist & got a consult with a surgeon from Seattle. That surgeon, upon reviewing Mom's case, flipped out. Truly, flipped out. He raged about how Mom's oncologist should be investigated, how her treatment plan was truly awful & wrong & basically treated Mom like she was already a corpse. He said a surgeon should have been consulted first thing, and that surgery should have been done for her immediately, then a short few rounds of chemo. Instead, her oncologist did far, far too much chemo, wracking her immune system & allowing the tumors in her spleen to continue to grow, now necessitating the full removal of the spleen while she's in such a weakened state. And, she will have to just do chemo all over again after surgery...

So, you know. Mom was now flipped out too. We had just gone ahead & booked a vacation for us to be able to relax & enjoy for just a little bit, one last time. It would have to be canceled. And now I would not be around to help while things got suddenly so much more difficult than ever. After stressing the importance of acting immediately, the doctor refused to operate without a specific specialist and they scheduled Mom's surgery for a full month out, in March, after Mom & Kevin had already completely re-arranged February for them... I pushed Mom again to get back in touch with Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, get another opinion from a doctor we actually liked & trusted.

So she did. And then that doctor freaked out. The instant they were able to get her latest CT scan results & file (which they had to fight with the oncologist for despite Mom's prior authorization) the nurse called Mom back in a near panic, saying she was going to go to personally pull that doctor out of a meeting to get to work on Mom's case right away. She said they either needed to get Mom in to get back on chemo immediately or they needed to schedule emergency surgery, she certainly could not wait until March to get this started. Either way, Mom needed to come in immediately, and she would have the doctor call her asap with further instructions. Thusly Mom freaked out all over again.

To add insult to injury (or perhaps the other way around) Mom's ankle came up broken for no reason. The ER doctor said her bones were so depleted from the months of intense chemo as to be mostly transparent on the x-rays. She needs to be exceptionally careful to not break more bones & is now in a boot, on crutches.

Excessive Blood Splatter

(Note: I wrote this back in the first week of January. I'm a little behind. Bear with me. - j)

The "D" is silent, & the movie is amazing.

Before I talk about movies in general, I want to give you my main thoughts on Quentin Tarantino's latest film, "Django Unchained". First, WHO THE FUCK TAKES SMALL CHILDREN TO A TARANTINO MOVIE? Seriously. I could see & hear about 5-10 children well below the age of 13 in the movie theater yesterday, in between the gunshots, blood splatters, & racial slurs. Way to parent, guys... Secondly, during a scene all about the humiliation & dehumanization of a slave, there was a group of people in the front who broke into ruckus laughter; a lack of empathy & understanding of racism in white folks is VERY heartbreakingly alive & well. So much rage in that moment in my guilty, privileged heart. Finally, this movie easily has to be in my top ten films of all time. Right now. I would make room for it. And I suggest you make time to see it (if you are of an age to handle the aforementioned subject matter). An incredible revenge flick with amazing characters & even better acting. Superb.

Watching movies is an altogether different experience, now. When your significant other works in & is so very passionate about the industry, you bring new perspective to what you watch. You wonder how the fuck they got that shot, how many takes before it went right & start suddenly caring as much about who the cinematographer was as who directed the damn thing. It's strange. The more you understand about how something is made, the more it changes the way you look at it.

Greener On The Other Side

It's been a full week now since I've been back to work in Los Angeles. Where for five months I have been working two 15 hour days back to back, paying $150-190 each of those days to work, driving an hour and a half each way to get there, getting insanely sick of the same songs in the juke box, getting fully naked on stage making almost zero tips for it, and fighting constantly with customers expecting excessive & illegal amounts of intimacy for their money, my professional life is suddenly so much different.

Now, I am working at a club where I pay $0 in fees to the house. That's right. Other ladies in the industry, do please pick your jaws up off the floor. I pay NOTHING, to work at this club. No house fee, no stage fee, no drink quota, & they don't take a cut of my dances. I just tip my bouncer & my DJ at my discretion. I roll in a little after 8pm, I roll out a little before 2am. It's impossible for me to work more than six hours at this club, no more working myself to the point of true exhaustion. There's no nudity, it's a bikini bar. This club has a full bar, patrons don't feel bad or ripped off paying $9 to buy me a Jameson. I make the majority of my money on stage, it's entirely possible for me to make $200 without selling a single lap dance, spending most of my time relaxing, talking, having a drink, watching the other girls. Often, I don't even have to ask people to keep their hands on the bench. They already assume. They sit back & enjoy. I have a dj, and I dance to two song sets. The club is exactly one mile from my front door. Almost every night, the manager and/or the owner has bought me a drink, and tipped at least one of my stage shows. I have instantly been recognized by all the staff as an important asset at the club. For a minute, I was scared I couldn't make enough money at this club to stick with it, but, now I am confident that I indeed can.

There are a few downsides.

Experience Points

I used to judge my relationships by how I felt after the guy got a hair cut.

Seriously.

In my youth I collected infatuations like baseball cards. I've always had a gift for seeing the best, seeing incredible potential in people. Especially men. But I realized pretty quick that I was also really, really shallow. In my own weird way. When their hair was suddenly very short, the flame always went out. When I got older, I broke up with at least two boyfriends after they cut their hair & I couldn't rekindle my interest. I tend to hate short, orderly, men's hair cuts.

A few days into his visit, Beau went and had someone cut off about four inches of beautiful, dark,  curls. I was terrified. On the rare occasions he'll go without a hat for me, the way he looks at me through the hair over his face....

Step Back

When you think about chemotherapy, obvious things come to mind. Namely, nausea. Hospitals. Hair loss.

Photo by Nic McPhee

More nausea.

The whole point of chemotherapy drugs, is that they kill cells that are dividing rapidly. Thus, they don't just fuck with tumors. These drugs annihilate anything that rapidly replenishes itself in your body. The lining of your digestive tract. Taste buds. Some nerves. Your hair. Any injuries trying to heal. Your blood cells. When any part of you suffers too much, they have to take a break & wait for your body to have a chance to rebuild.

Mom does aggressive chemo, once a week. Initially, her last day of chemo was supposed to be the Wednesday before Christmas. She was dead set on it & it was important to her. Then came the first time that one of her blood levels was too low & we had to push everything back one week. She was a mess, & we were all in hell for a couple days. When it happened again, it was almost as bad, at least until they said we could just skip this one instead of pushing back. Still, Mom was very upset that she would be spending Christmas knowing that she had chemo the next day. The anxiety leading up to chemo is just awful for Mom, you can see it, almost feel it in the air around her. It's contagious.

So, the day after Christmas we arrive at the cancer center. I had tried to encourage Mom to be happy that we were getting so close to the other side of all this. To have some optimism for once. She is so painfully mired in dark thoughts... And then the nurse came in & said her platelets were just way too low for them to fudge it & we had to wait until next week.