How I spent my Cinco de Mayo

I woke up this morning having been visited by several literary figures in my dreams last night. In one of them, I was Candace Bergen I and was interviewing Dorothy Parker in some kind of family restaurant, like Applebees or TGI Fridays. Later on, as the dream warped and I became an elderly Betty White-like character, Gore Vidal became my physician. My ex-boyfriend accused me for being elitist for dreaming about writers. This accusation holds no merit, however, because I cannot control my dreams and I mention the dreams here and now, because this seemingly inconsequential detail will prove itself important later in the day.

"Happy Cinco de Mayo!" my co-worker greeted me as I walked in the office today, and dammit, if it wasn't that always surprising little gem of a drinking holiday, the fifth of May, as we Anglos call it--or would call it, if it was our holiday. I am an exciteable person and so I was excited by the promise of Cinco de Mayo, even if I was terribly uneducated about the holiday and under the impression that it was the Mexican Indepdence Day. As it turns out, it was on this day in 1862 that the Mexican Army defeated Napoleon's French Army-a force which hadn't been defeated in 5o years! Go Mexicans!! Read more about the holiday at this delightful and informative website. http://www.vivacincodemayo.org/history.htm

But in past years, Cinco de Mayo meant getting drunk off of several margaritas at Mad Mex and that was probably an intangible, as I was in New Castle and working until 8:00 p.m. I decided to celebrate Cinco de Mayo by going to El Canelo, the local "authentic" Mexican place in town, for lunch. I ducked out around 2:00 after the staff meeting. I was dismayed to find that El Canelo was strictly eat-in. As I was alone and under time constraints, I headed to the Taco Bell/KFC hybrid a few blocks down. This was a terrible choice. Fiesta Potatoes turned out to be barely microwaved potato blocks smothered in sour cream and a knockoff Velveeta cheese-like slop. My spicy chicken burrito was unassembled and as I tried to open it for a sneak preview bite before I drove back to work, it spilled all over my lap and newly-cleaned car. Taco Bell is not very good sober, as it turns out. And maybe if I would have heeded the social expectations of the holdiay and drank copious amounts of tequila before trying to eat my pseudo-Mexican meal, my stomach would have fared better. But then I would have been fired. Sometimes I do miss the European work ethic (i.e. drinking at lunch).

Anyway, I then worked for a few hours: wrote some reports, lost a game of pool, won a game of air hockey, drove a huge 12-passenger van around, tried to stop a child from eating paper, applied band-aids, drank two cups of coffee, (failing in my resolution to-yet again-stop drinking coffee) and read the worst story ever to a child. I'm seriously considering going into children's literature because the stories these kids are forced to read are absolutely abomidable. I realize that the authors cannot use an extensive vocabulary, but readers of all ages appreciate a plot. "Bill led Meg. Meg hit a log. Meg said '"OW'" Leading somebody is as boring as it comes. Especially in this context, it just meant walking in front of somebody else and as this was the bulk of the action, it made for very boring illustrations. And why was Bill so terrible at leading, causing Meg to hit a log?

After work, I did arm exercises at the gym, because I have incredibly weak arms. I then came home and drank a Jose Cuervo pre-made margarita I found in the mini-fridge in the basement. It was very sweet and not very good, but I usually don't like those kind of drinks. I was convinced my Cinco de Mayo had been a failure and I decided to take a bath with my bubble bath birthday gift from the Sephora Insider Club and read the new Esquire. Chuck Klosterman had an interesting article about the ineffectiveness of self-selecting one's career. I guess Great Britain was short on their Olympic athletes in such sports as rowing, vollebyall, and several others, so they put out an advetisement for tall people and they ended up selecting a surprising number of people who responded to these ads for the Olympic teams in these sports. So Klosterman goes on to propose that this could/should become the protocol for all job selection.He argues that people are usually bad at selecting what they are good at and what will make them happy. It was slightly thought-provoking, but ultimately useless, because what kind of world would it be if we couldn't have the freedom to fail miserably? I always felt this way about the world; i believed that failures add value to successes, but my recent state of affairs have left me a little bit down in the mouth and a little bit uncertain of whether I'll ever find "what I'm meant to do." Are some people doomed to never find this and are they aware that they're not living the life they are "supposed to lead?" Is it still incredibly naive of me to hold on to this belief that our lives are following some path towards some concrete thing?

And just as I was ruminating on this and thumbing through the rest of Esquire I stumbled upon the "What I've Learned" feature of the magazine-one of my personal favorites. And who were they interviewing this month? You guessed it. Gore Vidal. Dorothy Parker also would have been a good guess, but she's dead. I won't go into the conclusions I made from this dream/real-life intersection. I'll just leave you with some of the most interesting quotes from the interview.

"You hear all this whining going on, "Where are our great writers?" The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?"

"When she was running for the Senate, Hillary's psephologists discovered that the one group that really hated her was white, middle-aged men of property. She got the whole thing immediately-I heard she said, " I remind them of their first wife.'"

"We're the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. Everybody's afraid to be thought of in any way different from everyone else."