Dirk and I are suckers. I don't know how Dirk got to be a sucker, but I was raised one. When my aunt and her family decided to move to the U.S. from the Philippines, who took them into her home and helped my uncle get a job, his license, a car, and, eventually, a townhouse of their own? Why, that would be my mother. And when my cousin Johanna proved that at age 13 and mildly retarded from having half a cup of her grey matter scooped out after a car accident, she was still too promiscuous for her mother to handle, who took her in? Again, my mother.
And, of course, we are the crazy cat people that picked up all the strays, swearing to ourselves that we were just going to clean them up and give them away. I don't think we gave a single one away, after Sasha's two litter mates. Cats would come from all over to our house. We must have had an invisible sign above our front door.
So, Dirk became friends with this girl through Jason. I think I'm going to call her AnimeGirl from now on, because she looks exactly like a slightly skanky girl from an anime movie. She had acne and braces, but other than that, she'd be perfect, right down to the kooky way she has of putting her hair up in a ponytail so that it sticks out geometrically and has a weird little fringe hanging down. It's not normal for someone to look so much like a character from sailor moon.
Anyway, we were supposed to hang out with AnimeGirl on Friday night, but we couldn't get in touch with her. On Saturday, she called and we went over to her place. First of all, she only lives about five minutes away from us, in a really shitty old townhouse development (on it's way to being ghetto) with her mother. They have no car, her mother got fired from her job, and they're getting kicked out of the townhouse they're living in. Anyway, we picked her up and we were blasting the new Rancid CD. We went to the discount ciggie place, but her credit card was declined, so I bought her a pack of cigarettes. It turns out that she's really hesitant to let anyone do anything for her. More about that later, but let me say it's the least of her problems.
AnimeGirl is hypoglycemic, like me. Unlike me, however, she doesn't really take care of herself and takes dieting to new levels. She's also slightly schizophrenic and suffers from really bad panic attacks (which she is on medication for). She got raped about a month ago, and this makes it hard for her to sleep....which means that she's on some kind of hypnotic medication. I feel bad for AnimeGirl, especially about the rape. She has problems, and the fact that her mother is at least as fucked-up as she is doesn't help.
We went back to our place for a while, before deciding to get some food. AnimeGirl ate, and smoked like a chimney. Then we went to the mall to see if AnimeGirl could pick up her mother's last paycheck for her. She couldn't, so we got some movies and went back to AnimeGirl's house — her mother wasn't home. We watched Deuce Bigalow:Male Gigolo first. I didn't think it was all that funny, but Dirk and AnimeGirl about laughed their asses off. We were about to watch The Ninth Gate when AnimeGirl noticed the note her mother left for her. To her credit, her mother had written on the back of a phone bill envelope, and I had moved it and the small stack off food stamps off the couch when I went to sit down.
Her mother had checked herself into the psych ward while we were out. AnimeGirl didn't noticeably start to freak out until after she managed to track down her mother, who said that she'd checked herself into the psych ward because she ‘was tired of all this shit,' and she would be back ‘in a couple of days.' Then AnimeGirl started getting upset, because she was afraid to sleep in the house without her mother there, because the person who'd raped her had been her next door neighbor.
This is where the sucker part comes in. Dirk and I invited her to stay the night with us. She was really hesitant, repeating over and over again that she didn't want to impose, but we told her that she'd be safer and we'd feel better if she was with us. (I should mention here that AnimeGirl doesn't have any friends that she really trusts). So, with us she came, after leaving a note for her mom in case she miraculously came back.
We finished watching The Ninth Gate, and then AnimeGirl got sick. So we all went to bed pretty early. The next morning, Jason and Dirk were supposed to be driving to North Carolina to pick up Jason's car (I don't even want to get into it) and I was supposed to take AnimeGirl home.
When we got to AnimeGirl's house, there was a message from her mother saying that she'd be gone for at least that night. AnimeGirl freaked out again, but wouldn't hear of spending another night with us (she didn't want to impose). I eventually had to leave her there, because she said she needed to be at home. Far be it for me to argue with someone's comfort zone. So, after renting her a couple more movies, I went off on my merry way and bought some groceries.
When I got back, Dirk was home because Jason wouldn't be leaving to get his car until some unknown later time (it's a long story and it just proves that Jason's a bigger sucker than we are). He also informed me that AnimeGirl called, and she had reconsidered my offer of spending the night with us. One, because she got all freaked when I wasn't there anymore; and two, because her VCR had taken a shit. So, we brought her over. We watched The Astronaut's Wife, which creeped me out as well as pissed me off. The woman in it was such a wishy-washy bimbo. I concluded by telling Dirk that if he ever went into space and came out acting funny, I was just going to kill him. No questions asked.
This started a mock-serious discussion of the fact that if I killed him now, I'd probably love him more, because you forget about all the little irritating things and focus on the good stuff. He wouldn't let me kill him.
AnimeGirl does not eat vegetables of any sort, nor does she eat spices ("They make me literally vomit."), so Dirk was sent off to Taco-Bell to get her a bean burrito with no onions and extra cheese. I went over to my parents' house, to eat dinner with my mother. She was telling me that there was no way she'd ever fall in love with my father because he is a big whiny brat, but that doesn't mean she'll leave him. I agreed that he does whine, and told her to basically leave me out of it. I left with a bad taste in my mouth.
I came back and we watched Romeo Must Die. Jet Li is hot. I really like the way some Asian guys look. It's actually a sort of fetish, as my friend Katie could tell you. We were eating candy corn and chocolate-covered espresso beans, which I haven't indulged in since I was first dating Dirk. I got a whole huge bag and it's almost gone.
Right before I went to bed, Dirk was playing his new Bad Religon CD, The New America. I went to bed a bit later than I should have and woke up wanting to die.
Apparently, AnimeGirl's mother got released from the psych ward on Monday, and AnimeGirl is back home. Her mother, by way of thanks, was offering Dirk some of their multitude of prescription medicine. He politely declined.
It's a good thing she left when she did, because having her around was getting on my nerves. I feel bad for AnimeGirl, but knowing that they're going to be kicked out, she's just passively preparing to be homeless. She was homeless for a year, you see, and that's how she got addicted to crack. I wish I was making this up. We offered to let her stay with us and Jason offered to let her stay with him, but no dice. She prefers to be homeless. I don't know when the last time was that she had a job — she told me that she tried to apply for a job at McDonald's, and they called the police because she was ‘loitering'. AnimeGirl was a model when she was 13 (she's 18 now), and she was anorexic. Apparently, she was about 5'6" and weighed 98 pounds. Yay.
Dirk's trying to get her a job at Lowe's, but I'm not too hopeful. Dirk was making noises about us moving into a three-bedroom apartment so she could live with us, and I was having a huge fit about that. It's bad enough that I have to live with someone who doesn't eat seafood and claims that the smell of it makes him sick. I am not going to be reduced to cooking without vegetables and spices because there's another person with gigantic food issues in the house. (She said the smell of cinnamon made her sick! Freak!)
I am all about her getting her own place or something. I just don't want to live with her. I like her a lot, but I know that living with her would suck.
So I don't know what's going to happen with AnimeGirl. She smokes a lot of cigarettes, though. I think we bought her four packs, and that was money we really didn't have.
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Dirk and I could really use a new T.V. set, so if you aren't already a member of StartSampling.com go here to sign up, and please put skatterkat in the ‘referred by' box. It's free, and you get free samples of really cool stuff! If you e-mail me and tell me you did so, I'll try to work out a way of sending some frog erasers your way.
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