Read It's Not Me, It's You: Subjective Recollections From a Terminally Optomistic, Chronically Sarcastic and Occasionally Inebriated Woman for Free Online Page A

Academy and I was afraid I might have to drop down and give him twenty if I dared to punch in thirty seconds late. As I was running for the door, I tripped over Beth’s current boyfriend, Roo, who waspassed out on the floor while Beth watched cartoons from the nearby couch. Roo was a portly goth with a penchant for wearing eyeliner, who’d been released from the Marines on a Section 8, which meant he was psychologically unfit for service—but apparently great boyfriend material if mental stability isn’t high on your priority list.
    “Damn it, Beth. Do you have to keep your boyfriends lying around on the floor where people can trip on them?” I bitched, while grabbing my car keys off the special hook I had on the wall labeled car keys.
    “You know what? You are getting way too uptight!” Beth said, glaring at me from her perch. Although she was only about five feet tall and ninety pounds soaking wet, she still seemed kind of menacing with her pointy mohawk and the black monkey boots she loved to wear. That comment really stung since I’d always seen myself as the rebel. I mean, it was my idea to move to California, but with Beth being seventeen and me being a full year and a half older, I had tried to be the mother figure.
    “Hey, someone’s got to make the money around here. The toilet paper’s not going to buy itself!” I caught sight of myself in the mirror next to the front door shortly after making that comment, with short, pouffy hair and puffy skin that due to daily fluorescent light exposure made me so pale I almost looked like a film negative. Wow. I’m not headed in a good direction. I also took in my long burnt orange skirt and matching blazer with lapels that had the wingspan of a falcon that I wore almost every day because I didn’t have any otherchoices. I suppose Beth could’ve hooked me up with some stolen goods, but almost everything in her store featured skulls, which somehow didn’t seem suitable for a job where a client might drop by to discuss the accidental death clause in their policy.
    When I came home that evening from work, my apartment was full of people. My high school friend Abbie, who was fairly loose in high school but since had become a born-again Christian and now worked as a flight attendant for Delta, had a layover in LA and was crashing with us for fourteen hours before heading back to Dallas. Next, our neighbor Garth, an out-of-work actor, if you didn’t count the “extra work” on The Love Boat he’d been bragging about (which I didn’t—but he did—in a major way), popped by to see if we had any pot. “Dude, I need to mellow out. I came this close to getting an under five today.” Garth, like most wannabe actors, paused for dramatic effect after using any phrase that had to do with acting, like “under five,” leaving plenty of breathing room for someone to ask for a definition. When no request came, he continued on as if we hadn’t heard about his close calls a million times before. “We were doing this scene where I was just talking on the Lido deck with another couple of extras. We weren’t talking out loud, but we were doing our thing I learned at the Learning Annex class I took on being an extra, mouthing, ‘peas and carrots, peas and carrots, peas and carrots’ when all of a sudden, Laurel, casting director extraordinaire, motions to me and says, ‘We need you, Garth.’”
    “You know the Lido deck isn’t a real place, right?” I didn’t want to burst his bubble, but I honestly felt a little concerned for his safety out in the real world and I knew this was probably scaring Abbie. Instead I wanted to pull her into my room to gossip, but there was another knock at the door and in walks Angela’s boyfriend, who looked a lot like a terrorist, although I’d never seen one up close before.
    At this point, Abbie and I decided to make ourselves scarce, so I took off my blazer, threw on a Hands Across America sweatshirt, and we walked down to the