Like I said, the homeless were in short supply in my area. Inevitably, three pointless hours later, I’d be in tears.
#EXES AND OHS SEASON 1 ONLINE FULL#
I would leave the house with a trunk full of goodies, smugly optimistic about my goodwill mission. I’d cook up a Costco-sized box of macaroni and cheese and divide it into old margarine tubs, then write inspirational notes on napkins. I raided the bathroom closet for pilfered hotel soaps and large, unwanted T-shirts from this 5K or that student council event. When I got old enough to drive I would scour our house to make care packages for the homeless. So I began donating to charity in whatever way I could. Thanks to them, we were able to afford a nice house and bountiful Christmases, but I was lucky and I knew it.
My grandmother and great-grandmother served as my babysitters and surrogate parents while my mama worked two jobs. Growing up with a single mom, I was all too familiar with life on an extreme budget. Something with a more Mexican-sounding name than “Irvine.” For most of my town’s residents, it was easy to forget that poor people even existed. If one popped up, police would drive him outside city limits and drop him off in a more “poverty-friendly town,” like Costa Mesa or Santa Ana. In the manicured suburbs of Orange County, we simply didn’t have hobos. I always had a very soft spot for the indigent. We sat at that table and ate until we were nauseous, because we’d rather punish our stomachs and arteries than wash any perfectly good grub down the drain.Įventually, I found a better place for excess food than my strained tummy: the homeless. God help us if we ever made too many pancakes or anything else that didn’t thrive well as a leftover.
Needless to say, tossing out food was just not an option. You don’t even want to know her thoughts on tampons. In her house, ziplock bags were washed out and reused until they looked like a CDC experiment, and toothpaste tubes were cut in half to mine every last drop. My great-grandmother had survived the Depression and never missed an opportunity to remind us. They’d be rock-hard stale in less than a day what in hell was I going to do with them-build a fort?īut I couldn’t just trash them! In my family, being wasteful was a capital crime. I stared at the bagels, starchy little enemies, as they taunted me, begged me to eat them all. Even for the most ardent carbohydrate fan (me), that was a tall order. I shrugged and accepted, figuring that between me and my three other roommates, Sarah (aka “Pfeiffer”), Marcia, and Holly, we could find some drunken use for a few bagels.īut she didn’t give me a few. “Ve just trow dem away, you should take instead,” she said insistently, already stuffing baked goods into a paper bag. The Romanian lady working behind the counter looked as bedraggled as I felt, and pretty soon we were swapping workplace horror stories as I stuffed my face with day-old scones and let her teach me Gypsy curses to mumble under my breath at work.Īs she closed up shop, she offered me leftover bagels to take home, free. Hopefully you’ll enjoy these tales as much as my therapist has.Īfter one particularly heinous day as a gossip reporter, I stopped into my local bakery on the way home. A few names have been changed to protect the truly wicked, though they probably don’t deserve such anonymity. But alas, this really is my life, for better or for worse. I wish that these seventeen tales of love, loss, revenge, hockey, condoms, car thieves, hookers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and many, many men were nothing more than fantasies.
Even Owl, my kitten, meowed something along those lines.īut, friends, let me assure you that everything you are about to read in this book is in fact true. “That did not happen.” My editor said the same thing, as did my mom, grandmother, and friends. Ice Cream, You Scream, We All Scream Because If I Deleted You from Facebook You Probably Wouldn’t Notice If I know what love is, it is because of you. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataĪ downtown girl’s (mostly awkward) tales of love, lust, revenge, and a little Facebook stalking/by Shallon Lester.-1st. Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.,