These are the days to remember

If you haven’t figured it out yet my friends, I will now tell you the purpose of this blog. Drumroll please...

At first glance, one might think that this blog is about the banal. Or about excess. Maybe, JEM is just a glutton for fun. A hedonist. Or perhaps she is a sucker for the past. An obsessor of nostalgia. No. You’d be wrong.

If I had to try and express it, I guess I am here to try and figure it out. What is “it” you ask? This. Why we are here, more specifically, why am I here? What is the fucking point (for want of a more elegant phrase)?

As children and young adults, we are taught to work hard and we will be rewarded. Spend your high school years studying. Go to college. Study some more. Then, more goals. Graduate school. Finally, find a job. Get married. Have kids.

But what they don’t tell you, is that it’s a game that you can’t win. If you buy into this path, what you get is a zonk. It’s as if the game is rigged and behind any door is a boobie prize.

Because, what you will find is that the best of times will be when you change the narrative. Spending your best years studying straight through is boring. You’re wasting your best years. Some might say that I wasted time with the years after taking my GED when the goal was merely survival and fun. I disagree. During my best years, I waitressed and rented an apartment with my younger sister. Our days had a pattern. We worked out at the gym, went to breakfast, and then went to work at a coffee shop. Every night, we got dressed and went out after a dinner of salsa and rice. If we had made good tips that day, we might fit in a trip to the local cheap boutique, the one with the ten dollar dress rack.

It was the 90s. The time of some of the best punk and alternative music, but (I will deny this if confronted later) we were into club music. We would go to clubs where they played mostly house, what some call electronic music. Every night was a different club. Red Onion in West Covina, Club Metro in Riverside, Florentine Gardens in Hollywood, and Mister J’s in El Monte.

Every night was a different adventure. There were drunken nights of debauchery. There were also nights where we were tired and grumpy and left after an hour, making all of our feminine prep time a waste. We had a crew of five or six girls that would go out together. My twin sister Jackie, a girl named Gina and some whose names I can’t remember.

Occasionally, my best friend Melinda and I would go to Geckos in Upland that played alternative and where Richard Blade occasionally DJ’d.

This went on for three or so years. Then, I met Adrian. We still had fun. He would take me out to Jolt in Los Angeles. And to Florentine Gardens in El Monte. On my days off from work, Adrian (who was working as a dental assistant back then-a precursor to him becoming a dentist) would bring Chinese food to the apartment and eat with Annie and I at the small table. We would drink some beers and chill out and relax. Adrian and I would go to the room and cuddle and sleep.

I didn’t go back to school until I was 22 or so. After some false starts, I excelled. I became the editor-in-chief of the college newspaper and rediscovered writing. I got straight As aside from Algebra 2 as equation math has always been my Achilles heel, but I loved Statistics (my only A plus). It took me almost five years to transfer to UC Riverside. Those years were some of the best years of my life. There was no carefully mapped out plan. I was just living life and taking classes.

Compared to the grind of general ed classes at junior college, UC Riverside was easy. The majority of my classes in my English literature major just involved reading and writing, two of my favorite things to do. Lucky for me, I wasn’t working after being fired from Applebee’s for not carding a patron when I had 13 tables by myself one afternoon. The firing was hard to take, but it ended up being a blessing because I received 250 dollars a week in unemployment which was enough to live on. I had a junkie car and no bills other than books, food and beer. I made two very good friends who were also English majors and we procrastinated together.

Once I graduated UCR, I went straight to USC Law and you know the rest. I am a reformed big firm lawyer. That corporate litigator girl almost seems like a different person, as if I lost my mind for those 6 years trying to fit my square peg of a self into a round hole. I’ve been a deputy public defender for almost a decade and I love it.

Yet, there is still something missing. I miss the wild chaos of a life on the edge. Some days, I feel like I’m just biding time until retirement and that is surely no way to live. What I have figured out is that I am a creative. Above all, a writer. Perhaps, I need to take another plunge.

And that my friends is the take from all this. Don’t plan, just live. We could all die tomorrow. Tell your kids to enjoy their youth. Use the time to have adventures. Do not make it about the money. You just might have the time of your life and meet the love of your life.

Because in the end, that’s what you will have: Memories.