Just Beth

I thought this might be helpful, having an idea about the main people I talk about on here.  My husband complains that my pronoun usage makes it difficult to follow my stories sometimes.  I think he’s just jealous that I’m way smarter than he is.

Me:

This is what is referred to as ‘The Toothy Grin”.  It was aptly named thusly by my brother-from-another-mother and BFF, Matt.  It’s a good grin, even if you can see that I have terrible dental hygiene from a mile away.  It’s become my ‘go-to’ smile since I realized that making this face:

really wasn’t very attractive, just as my mother would say.  I looked like this for much of my late twenties, a time I used to make up for all the drinking and partying I didn‘t get to do in my early twenties, what with being married and a mom and all.  Turns out with my son at his dad’s house every other weekend, Just Beth turned into Drunk Beth, who thought that this face was hysterical and made it every time someone pointed a camera at her.

We’ve done our best to say goodbye to Drunk Beth, so no worries about too many of THOSE pics popping up anymore.

ahem.

The current issue I’m having is that I am getting VERY sick of The Toothy Grin, especially since you need a picture for your blog and one for Facebook and one for Twitter and a Gravatar… seriously, people.  If I wanted so many pictures taken of me I’d spend more time OUTSIDE, interacting with the world, not hiding behind my COMPUTER.  So I tried something totally different and went all emo —>

I am so embarrassed that I took this picture, that I took the NUMBER of pictures that I took, just so I might look deep and mysterious.  And then with the tinting and the shading… its ridiculous and yet I’m using it, THAT is how sick of The Toothy Grin I am.

So that’s what I look like, anyway.  I was born in Gardena, California (Los Angeles, and not the good part).  My parents divorced when I was young, and two weeks after my ninth birthday my mother died.  She had been ill most of my life, but it was still a bit of a shocker to the system, if you know what I mean.  And truthfully, unless your momma has died, you don’t know what I mean.  You don’t know what it means even if you hate your mom or if you never see her or have never seen her at all… I’m not trying to say that my pain is worse than yours, please understand.  I think that the pain inflicted on children by their parents is always catastrophic.  My mother dying was catastrophic.

Moved in permanently, then, with my step-mother, my father and my two half-siblings in Eagle Rock, California.  It was a cool and funky small neighborhood in the suburbs of L.A. when we lived there.  I played outside all the time, and my step mother took us to every goddamn historical site and Things Of Interest To Do While In Los Angeles every chance she got.  People from L.A. do not GO to things in L.A., it’s just not cool.  I mean, Hollywood is cool with The Whisky and Melrose (before it was a series, oh my god.)  We just didn’t go to the ‘fun’ places… I was an adult before I went to the Chinese Mann Theatre, for instance.   The fact that I have been to the Southwest Museum more than I have been to Disneyland should give you an idea of the amount of culture that was shoved down my throat I was lucky enough to be exposed to.

Ahem.

My favorite color is blue, I prefer dogs to cats, though I have two of each… I have zero ‘good’ taste in music, I just like to sing along.  I’m pretty much over most Country Music, but you see where I’m coming from.

I am also very, very adept at the run-on sentence, I use commas, apostrophe’s, colon’s and semi colon’s at random… I failed grammar every single time it was ‘that’ part of English class.  You know what I mean?  Sometimes it’s about reading, sometimes it’s about writing and I got A’s there, but the grammar part I failed.  I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone that before.   But that’s why I always only ever got B’s in English… I have no idea how to properly construct a sentence.  To this day I couldn’t tell you what a dangling participle is.  So, um, sorry.

That’s all for now.  If you have something you want to know, just ask.  I pretty much have no filter and I’ll tell you almost anything.

xo

b.