WAJ MAHAL // getting to know us

My first inclination is to just start ramming my opinions about things like my landlord’s gift of creating county laws at the drop of a hat and my inability to do anything besides willingly (more eagerly and borderline enthusiastically) abide by said fake laws, but I feel that would be a misstep. Maybe such a story would give you more insight about the person whose story is being told (Me. I’m talking about me right now. And I’m going to be talking about me the rest of the time.), but I want to be a little more obvious than that.  I’m not going to make this one hard. I know you are here to dissect my writing and pick apart my psyche based on stories I tell you about my favorite hamburger, but I want to lay out some basics about myself so that you can have a pool of information to start with before reading further. I’m the type of person that likes to interrupt a story about every 5 words to ask a question so that I have more background information. I don’t want to wait for that information to subtly reveal itself in another 3 seconds because I’m already assuming that you are such a bad storyteller that you are either going to leave it out or assume I don’t need to know it. Maybe a normal person doesn’t need to know what the middle name of the person you are talking about is, but I do. So I’m going to ask while you are in the middle of talking. For this reason, I want you to have some seemingly unnecessary information about me so that you aren’t wondering in the middle of every rant I publicly share with the world whether or not I played sports as a kid and if I was very good at them. (Yes and No respectively.) I’ll tell you some things now since you are not able to interrupt me later.

• I have two siblings – both older, but my son often asks me why I’m the boss even though I’m the youngest. Then I tell him a story about shirking responsibilities and what a disappointment his aunt and uncle are to the whole family and how his grandparents were blessed to have at least one child (Me – that’s who I’m talking about here) who can lead this family to greatness. Fortunately for me, the bar of “greatness” for someone in their 20’s in this generation is having a blog that is run from somewhere other than your parent’s basement, so I’m golden because I rent my grandma’s condo.

• As you may have gathered from the above paragraph (I’m not going to overestimate your powers of deduction), I also have a son. I’m not going to say much about him here because it seems kind of creepy to give out any specific information, but he will be referenced from time to time because I speak a lot about my life and he’s 99% of it. I will refer to him as E. I feel that I’ve already pigeonholed myself by saying I’m a mom because moms are just ripe with negative connotations. We will be featuring a podcast called “Step Dads” on Frankenstein Friends and the first thing I thought was, “How lame would a podcast called ‘Moms’ be?” The answer – very. I love being a mom, but I think we can all agree that it’s pretty hard to make that sound cool or interesting.

• I’m also relatively tall (less than 6′ – I’m not freak of nature (no offense tall ladies…some of you pull it off)) with large feet that smell terrible. I don’t have BO though, so I guess that kind of balances it out. I wear deodorant on occasion for fun though. (If you are thinking sarcastic comments like, “What else do you do for fun – cut your nails?” I’m telling you right now, No. Also, stop reading this and never come back. You’ve been banned.)

• I like TV a lot. I hate when people tell me that they don’t like watching TV. I feel like it’s always a way to seem better than me and other TV enthusiasts.  Oh, I don’t like TV. Really? Go to hell. I like to laugh, and love, and cry with fictional characters that I fantasize about when they aren’t presently sharing their lives with me. I wonder what they are doing long after their series has ended and during their summer and winter hiatus. What’s wrong with that? This is healthy and normal. Whatever you do with your spare time (usually between 8:30 PM and 10 PM) is probably horrible.

• Incase you don’t understand the relationship between the writers (I know we’ve purposely made it more than difficult for those of you who don’t actually know us to figure out), I’m one of those Half-Asians mentioned by Casual Ken. I’m the kind that looks white to most Caucasians and Asians, but can be easily identified by most African-Americans I’ve come in contact with as being mixed. I don’t want to stereotype here, but they just have a knack for identifying racial mixtures. It’s a gift.

• And lastly, I have a child neighbor that doesn’t know boundaries – as in, she came in my bedroom while I was in bed reading to make me get up and look at the cup of hail she collected in one of my cups and put in my freezer.  I just can’t wait to for more stories to tell on that front. Man, my life is difficult  – just like my friend Tim Riggins.