the long weekend

The revolution is starting. Are you ready for it?

I spent this weekend with a cornucopia of emotions - some good, some not so good and some that just moved me to want to change things from the way that they are in my life right now. I enjoyed being home in L.A. and around my people. It was good for the mind, heart and soul.

On Friday I took my younger cousin shopping at the Beverly Center. She’s only been there a few times and watching her react to the people watching was amusing. She spotted several celebrities. Each time she did she would grab my arm and do that excited little squeal that only fifteen year-old girls getting ready to enter their tenth grade year of high school can do. I laughed so much. My entire family calls her “Little Monique” and I call her “Mini-me” because she’s so much like I was at that age, smart as a whip and not afraid to speak her mind to anyone. Too bad she hasn’t picked up my shopping habit. Or I guess in this case that would be a good thing since she didn’t break me. She only wanted one pair of shoes. I also took her to Pink’s, but she wasn’t interested in hot dogs.

From there we went to pick up her mom and the three of us went out to City Walk. We went to Jillians so my aunt and I could have a drink and Nikita could try to play Dance Dance Revolution while we watched. It was hilarious. I had considered getting my old ass on there, but once I saw that even my fifteen year-old, able-bodied cousin couldn’t do it I knew there was no way I was going to get up there and embarrass myself. We wandered around City Walk, bought candy in the candy store and then decided that we’d had enough of the crowds up there. We dropped my aunt off and I took Nikita to visit our other cousin Sharmayne.

Sharmayne and I always have heart to heart conversations with Nikita about everything we know teenagers go through. It was here that we gave her the third degree about boys, sex and all the things that are/were wandering through her mind. I was proud to see that my cousin is able to follow her own mind. She’s watched a few of her friends have babies and is against being a teen pregnancy statistic. She asked my aunt and grandmother to check her out of her school in the neighborhood and have her bussed to one in the valley where she will have a greater opportunity to take the classes that will get her into college. She makes me proud.

On Saturday I drove to Camarillo with D. We went shopping at the outlets and stayed overnight to make the weekend a little longer. I had a nice time. I got away with buying only one pair of shoes the whole weekend! Our room was beautiful, the gazebo outside of it even better and the drive up 101 was pretty. Dinner at Marie Callendars was good and spending the night with someone that I loved with all my heart when I was twenty-one years old was bittersweet. He still has the same quirky habits, still drives me crazy with mood swings and can still make my heart skip beats all at the same time. He kept thanking me for getting him out of the city and silently I was thanking him for helping me make up my mind about a few things.

On Sunday when I got back, my grandmother, my aunt, Nikita and I went to South Bay Galleria to go shopping. I didn’t see anything I wanted but my grandmother bought tons of perfume. It smells good on her, but we all laughed when she bought it. My grandmother still has a huge bottle of Charlie sitting on her dresser that my father gave her when he first started dating my mother. I know that the new perfume she bought is going to do the same dust collecting on that dresser that all the other bottles are doing, but it’s all good.

My grandmother doesn’t do well in malls and the like and after a while she was tired so we brought her back home. L.A. was scorching hot like Vegas this weekend and I couldn’t take sitting cooped up in the house any longer so Nikita and I decided to go see a movie. She wanted to go to the theaters in South Bay Galleria, but I decided she needed an outing outside of her normal haunts and took her to Westwood. She’d never been there before either and once she got there her head was turning every which way as she tried to soak it all in. We ate tacos and burritos at Baja Fresh and I showed her all the places I used to hang out in when I was her age wandering the streets of Westwood. Everything is still pretty much the same now except for all the Starbucks and Coffee Beans on every corner.

When we got back to my grandmother’s house it was a little after ten. There was a barbecue up the street that was still going on and Nikita said she wanted to go. I didn’t feel like it, but since her friend was going to walk with her to the corner I didn’t see any harm in letting her go. She ran out of the house and was gone for about thirty minutes before I heard the gunshots. I jumped up and went into my grandmother’s living room to look out the window. I didn’t see anyone standing on the street and it was hard to tell where the gunshots had come from. A few minutes later, Nikita comes running into the house to tell me that they had all been standing at Lucy’s (across the street from Southwest College) when some guys in a car rode by and starting spraying a parking lot full of teenagers. Luckily everyone managed to get inside safely and no one was hurt. I told Nikita it would probably be best for her to keep her ass in the house after that.

Yesterday morning when we woke up, the neighborhood was buzzing with talk about the gunshots. Big Mike, who lives next door to my grandmother, told us that some dude had been getting chased and was shot at the Burger King on Imperial and Western but didn’t go down. He ran across Western and through the Mobile Gas station, up the embankment and into the parking lot of Lucy’s. It was here that his assailants caught up to him and started shooting again. In a crowded parking lot full of teenagers. A discussion then started about whether or not my cousin is allowed too much freedom to roam my grandmother’s deteriorating neighborhood. I don’t think there is much any of us can do to protect her from the streets except keep her locked in the house and that wouldn’t be very healthy would it?

My uncle came over my grandmother‘s house yesterday and we had a good old fashioned Labor Day barbecue. Hot links, ribs, hamburgers, chicken, hot dogs, sausages - you name it, he grilled it. Even corn. The food was so good and with all my other cousins, aunts and uncles showing up we had a blast in that way that only my family knows how. We are all so ghetto fabulous. We are the loudest people on the block and we sat in front of my grandmother’s house and kept up so much noise. Neighbors kept stopping by because they could tell we were having a good time. I got a lot of nice pictures of the New Years Day ham aka my baby cousin Mark Jr (or MJ as we call him). He turned eight months old this weekend and he is still as adorable as ever. He has three teeth on the bottom now and I actually got him to show them to me for a few pictures.

I hung out at the barbecue until about 7:30 and then I decided it was time to kiss my granny goodbye and get my ass on the road back to Vegas. The drive was long as hell cause I was sleepy as hell but I made it back in one piece.

And now I have to go to work. How was your weekend?