dear readers

i tried to install google analytics so i could see how many people were reading, and where they were. but i'm easily confused in matters of the computer, and i mixed everything up and couldn't make it work.

are you out there? if you're reading sometimes maybe leave a comment. i'm such a ham, if i know people are reading, i'll totally be inspired to write more.

xo andi

bitch bitch bitch

work today was slow, which seems to be the case a lot lately. i barely "broke a bill," as the girls like to say. (meaning, i barely "made over a hundred dollars," but i'm sure you already knew what i meant.)

i worked with a girl i like a lot, she's been working at the club for 18 years! amazingly, she's still totally hot. anyway today she decided we are friends, and that was nice. last time we worked together i was telling her how, as a rule, i never buy a cocktail for myself while i'm working. if i can't get a guy to buy one for me then i just don't get to drink. she thought that was silly. "i buy myself cocktails all the time," she said. "why should my fun depend on whether or not someone wants to buy it for me?"

we all have our own ways of doing things.

so today was super slow and about halfway through the shift, i was sitting at the bar with my co-worker (well, she was sitting at the bar, and i was sitting next to the bar, on the edge of the stage, declining to dance for the one derelict non-tipping customer who was there) and i mentioned that i didn't feel like dancing for free today, that i wanted to go out in the sunshine since it was the first sunny day we've had in a long time, and that i felt heart-sick and full of PMS. my co-worker surprised me by ordering us a round of cocktails. "my treat!" she announced. it was a particularly sweet gesture since neither of us was making money.

after a cocktail, i felt considerably more cheerful. like, "okay. i might not make any money today. and i might be sitting in a dark, frigidly chilly over-air-conditioned strip club in the middle of the day missing out on the first warm sunshine in ages. and i might be feeling totally emo and overly sentimental and crazy as hell. but i'm a smart, pretty girl with a lot to look forward to in life, and things are gonna be okay." abrubt alcoholic paradigm shift? maybe. except i'm really not an alcoholic.

then some guys straggled in here and there. i gave a few dances. one guy was from canada. he smelled bad and he kept saying, "in canada the girls let you touch them more." "a lot more." "i wish we were in canada." "you're so hot, i wish you lived in canada."

i said, "yeah, i wish i lived in canada, too. then i could go to the dentist and get my teeth fixed, and it wouldn't cost me my life's savings."

he goes, "no, i meant i wish you lived in canada, so we could hang out," implying that the main thing standing in the way of our love was the giant boner-killing condom known as the us/canada border, because if i lived in canada i'd obviously make myself totally available to him.

another guy i danced for was wearing sweatpants. sorry, sir, as much as i'd love being able to feel everything in its explicit entirety through that thin membrane of worn heather-gray fleece you've got draped across your lap, i'm gonna have to cite oregon's no-contact rule and decline to grind.

the other guy i danced for was a nice, good smelling guy wearing normal pants. he didn't talk too much, just enjoyed being danced for.

after about ten million hours, it was time to go home. i fell asleep on the bus and woke up two blocks past my stop, disoriented and oddly carsick. i had formulated a long to-do list before i left work, but when i got home i indulged in a giant snack attack which necessitated a good deal of lying on the couch with a book afterward. then i had a hard talk with someone, which necessitated another lengthy horizontal literary escape session. and now it's nighttime and, having done nothing even remotely productive all day, i feel rather insane. i'm gonna just get into bed with my book even though it's only 10:30pm, and have a fresh start on the morrow.

dancin machine

i've been working a bunch since i came back from my trip to austin. it's not been terribly exciting, but i've had 4 good shifts and one bad one.

the bad one was last wednesday afternoon. it was extremely dead in the club, all day. i only gave ONE table dance, and the guy was such a hannibal lector. he didn't want me to dance, he just wanted to examine me, in detail. how much do you weigh, how tall are you, how big are your feet, what's your waist size, all that. i kept waiting for him to start calling me "clarice." he wanted me to continue "dancing" for him, and though i hardly EVER refuse someone a dance if they're not grabby, i was getting the creeped out feeling that he was measuring me for his freezer until he had time to make a tiny suit out of my skin, so i told him i needed to go to the bathroom. when i came out, he was gone. whew.

then i worked on saturday and it was fine. a dorky mormon dad-type took a shine to me and wanted lots of dances. he said something that kept me laughing all night because it was so weird. he goes, "wow andi. your pussy is so beautiful. truly perfect. when i look at it, it makes me want to hug it. with my mouth. may i?" haha. as if.

last night i worked and the club was empty when i walked in, and normally this would be a bummer, but i was feeling tired and bedraggled so i was almost relieved. i went downstairs and put on my makeup, and when i came back upstairs to start my shift, there were a bunch of people. mostly girls, though. oh brother. ready for a sweeping generalization? ok: girls are so annoying to dance for UNLESS THEY ARE DYKES. groups of straight girls aren't good tippers, they want to make comments to you, they think you care what they think about your body or your dancing skills, they want to hear lady gaga, it's their birthday, blah blah blah.

there was this one girl who was SUCH an annoying loudmouth. a group of good-looking guys came in and were sitting at my rack, tipping well and being fun in general. the girl had some jealousy issues she was working out or something because she felt the need to come over and try and commandeer the attention of these cute guys. she came over and stood behind them and was saying things like, "tip her more! she's so cute!" oh ye of the streaky blonde ponytail and green track jacket: sit the fuck down!

i put up with it, but then when i got back onstage a little later and she was doing it again, i told her i didn't need her help because the guys were tipping fine, and asked if she would please sit down and relax. people HATE IT when you ask them to relax. (i should know: i'm kind of high-strung sometimes and i fucking hate when someone tells me to relax!) so then she did sit down but she wasn't happy about it. she started bitching about me to her friends and then eventually they all left. good riddance.

then i danced some more. did some table dances. sat at the bar with a guy who was on vacation from sacramento. he was talking about how this was his chance to get away from his kids and grandkids and just let loose. he had dentures that seemed a little too big, and they were causing him to spit a lot when he talked. it was grossing me out so i guzzled the cocktail he bought for me and then jumped up, telling him he should celebrate his vacation with a double-lapdance. i grabbed my co-worker real quick while he was excited about the idea. we danced for him and he said he was in heaven, etc etc, and that he didn't want it to end. he joked that it was time to cash in the 401k to spend on strippers. "we're gonna have a good night, girls," he said. ALL TALK. after that ONE dance he went took an extended visit to the bathroom and then skedaddled out the side door. i went downstairs and washed his spit off my arm with some antibacterial soap, which i'm sure was unnecessary but made me feel fresh.

the night went on like that. big talkers, lots of girl customers, some lechy couples, and some cute guys too. it was an okay night anyway, though. not great, but fine. i got bored pretty late and hurt my arm on the pole. i woke up this morning in crazy arm pain. i'm babying it today and hoping it feels better soon because i'm going down south to work for a week and a half and i need this arm to be in good shape. i'm hoping to make a nice chunk of money so i can buy a car because i'm learning to drive! i even drove on the freeway for the first time yesterday.

actually, i did drive on the freeway once a long, long time ago. i had a stepdad who was teaching me to drive on this old beat-up yellow station wagon with no speedometer. he used to get mad at me when i made mistakes and scream at me or smack me. anyway once he took me up to the tippy top of this crazy bluff along the columbia river gorge, near corbett i think. the car's steering column pulled to the right, and off to the right of the road was a giant craggy cliff that seemed always too close. i wanted to pull over and let him drive, i was terrified and having an extended anxiety attack, but he wouldn't let me and also there wasn't any place to pull off. so after a million miles of steep narrow road and switchbacks, we finally got to the top of this cliff. beautiful view of the gorge, but really windy. i begged him to drive us home but he wouldn't. i said i was too scared to drive back down that road, and he directed me to an alternate route home but it ended up being I-84. i couldn't tell how fast everyone was going, i felt like i was driving way too fast and way too slow all at the same time. it was super scary. i was really mad that he was making me do this, we bickered, he smacked me. so then i was driving down the world's most windy freeway with no speedometer and hot angry tears impeding my vision. i swore off driving after that. but now i'm learning.

and so i've got to not do any pole tricks for a while and also lay off the homosexual arm sex because my arm needs to feel better so i can massage some menfolk next week and amass a lump sum of $$$ and get myself a cute little car! i want one of the new VW bugs. not a brand new one, but one from the 2000's. when they first came out i thought they were so ugly, but they've somehow grown on me and now i WANT ONE!!! i think i'd like it to be black or silver. or maybe even white!

okay that's it for now. xo

polka dots

hello from austin. i'm visiting a friend here and doing a little work. it's super hot and fun and rad here. lots of good things to eat and drink, and the people are good.

i worked at the club on thursday before i left, and took this picture. nothing much to report. xo andi

back to work.

i haven't written in quite a while. this is because i was feeling BEYOND BORED at work, and then i went on vacation to the mayan riviera, and now i'm back and working a lot so i shall resume my pen.

my first day back to work was monday, which i had forgotten was memorial day until my mom called me on my way to work to make sure i was going to my family's BBQ. it started at 2pm, but i was working till 4:30 so told her i'd come at the tail-end. i was like, "well, it will either be totally busy, or totally dead." i knew there wasn't going to be an in-between.

it was the very least lucrative shift i've had since moving up here. $52. i didn't care very much, though, i was just thinking of the hamburger and hot dog i was going to wolf down the moment i walked in the door at my aunt's. which is what i did. YUM. i didn't eat the buns, but i DID eat a piece of my grandma's birthday cake and it was amazingly delicious. but since i'm gluten-free it gave me the worst stomach-ache ever and i STILL have that stupid stomach-ache. plus my tummy is sticking out, angrily.

i think i'm going to have to cancel my "birthday cake rule." a very long time ago, i decided that even though i have celiac disease (google it--can't eat gluten), it's just too sad to go to birthday parties and not eat at least a tiny sliver of the cake. it triggers my childhood food scarcity issues. watching other people eat yummy things when i can't have any makes me feel super extremely tragically left-out. it's like i'm instantly transported back to the school cafeteria and i'm watching all the other kids eat lunch while i pretend that i "forgot" mine. it triggers my adulthood "i love cake" issues, too. just looking at a birthday cake will make my stomach start growling. but i'm just going to have to get over it, it's NOT WORTH the shooting pains, bloating, and nausea. not to mention the diminished white blood cell count.

soooooo. anyway. that was fun.

i worked last night, too. i made $400, so much better than monday THANK GOD. it was one of those nights that are fun. i liked the girls i was working with, and almost all the customers were good. this little baby dyke came in to use the bathroom and get out of the rain and she counted out her change for a beer then sat at the rail. i let her sit there for 2 songs without tipping but a big party came in and were obviously going to tip so i asked her to start tipping or sit elsewhere. she didn't have even a dollar so she moved. then i did some dances and whatnot and when i got back up on stage she was sitting at the rack with a fresh beer in her hand, a smile on her face, and an middle aged dude at her side. BABY HUSTLA!!! she got him to give her ones to tip with, and then to buy her a couple of dances! hilarious. she just turned 21 in april, and is clearly wasting no time.

oh, one funny thing about the little dyke was that she tried to get all "pretty woman" on me. she was like, "you know, you don't have to dance for me. you can just sit next to me and talk." i was like, "it's okay, i'll dance. it's more fun." i wasn't interested in having precious moments with her.

there was a group of guys having a work reunion, and they bought each other dances all night long, plus one guy bought the whole bar a shot of patron, so my boss was happy. they were extra rowdy and obnoxious but i liked them. except for one guy who kept saying "show me your pussy!" and i was finally like, "dude. you're in a strip club, OF COURSE i'm going to show you my pussy. now stop saying that, please." he seemed to try to stop, but it slipped out a few more times over the course of the night. i think it may have been some sort of verbal tic.

another guy i liked was a short chubby little businessman. he was nice. he bought 6 or 7 dances from me and kept telling me how "absolutely gorgeous" i am. no complaints here.

a guy i DID NOT like was this sensitive little indie rock boy. i told him i liked his sebadoh t-shirt and then he was obsessed. (for the record: i don't even LIKE sebadoh, i was just making conversation.) he was like, "you know who sebadoh is?" i was like, "no, i totally slept through the 90's. plus i'm a stripper so i only listen to lady gaga and usher." jeeeeez. anyway he wanted to know how much it would be to just sit with me for 20 minutes and talk. i said, "how about you pay for 3 dances and i'll sit with you for 5?" then he kept hemming and hawing and i realized he thought i'd just sit with him for zero dollars because of our indie rock connection. which i probably would if the club was empty. but it wasn't. after that he gave me puppy-dog-eyes all night. it was annoying, but also kind of funny.

well. that's it for now, i suppose. working again this afternoon/evening. i'll let you know if anything interesting happens.

xo andi.

i've been bored

lately at work. nothing exciting to tell you. yesterday, for example, nobody even remotely interesting came in. i worked with a girl who was pleasant, but not at all engaging. i couldn't be bothered to hustle the few sweat-panted customers who straggled in here and there. i worried that i am getting old and pathetic. i don't want to become marisa tomei in "the wrestler," a bit grizzled, but still hot at 40-something, and STILL DANCING. although i did admire that she saved up a bunch of money for a house before she packed it in. but, seriously: i've gotta get my other shit back on track. STAT.

double.

(this is from monday. i thought i had published it, but i guess i had just saved it as a draft.)

whoa. today was a long-ass day. i worked a double, and since there are only two girls at a time at my club, you're on stage for half the time you're there. so i was dancing for 5 hours, which sounded like a fine idea before i did it but ended up being super exhausting. i used to work really long shifts at a big-hustle club down south but it was different because you'd just be trawling around and sitting with guys and getting up on stage hardly ever since there were so many girls. that was tiring, but in a different way.

i didn't make the kind of money i had anticipated for such a long shift, but i did okay. i guess. i mean, it could definitely have been worse. i ended up leaving with $400, which is definitely more than you'd make at most jobs. so okay whatever.

a birthday party of nerds came in for lunch, that was nice. they seriously looked like they had walked off the set of revenge of the nerds. or maybe "office space." it was fun dancing for the birthday boy because he so thoroughly enjoyed himself and was too shy to get grabby or demanding. he kept saying "wow." i wondered whether he might be a virgin. i couldn't picture what a girlfriend of his would possibly look like. i hope that doesn't sound mean, i mean i think even the nerdiest, most painfully awkward nerd is deserving of love and human companionship, and i HOPE he has dates, but i just CANNOT picture who they would be.

some good-looking plumber brothers came in. they were going through concurrent divorces. what i mean is that each is going through his own divorce, right now. they wanted to talk about that a lot. i gave them each a dance and they were chatty as hell. the older of the two complained that his wife of 29 years hadn't put out in 14 months. he's 49, been married since he was 20, and is really hung up on all the numbers involved. 29, 20, 14, 49. he said after about 10 months of the dry spell, his brother had given him some dvd's to watch to provide him with some "relief." this was a new thing for him, he claims to never have needed to jerk off before that. WELL THAT'S YOUR PROBLEM, dude! your wife is probably tired of putting out every time you have a sexy thought. anyway the wife found the porno in the dvd player and that was the last episode before the season finale entitled "divorce!"

the whole time this guy was talking, i had two thoughts in my head, on repeat: 1. why are you telling me al this, and 2. could you please stop, you're depressing me.

the brothers got good and liquored up and just when they seemed ready to pass out from booze and over-sharing, they announced it was time to drive back to walla walla. great. lovely to picture them wasted behind the wheel of their monster truck. rad.

i had one really great customer who tipped me twenties on stage and didn't want any dances, just liked sitting with me. i liked him even before he started tipping because he reminded me of philip seymour hoffman. a little bit creepy and geeky, but also kind of interesting and hot.

the rest of the day is sort of a haze. i got a little tipsy with the philip seymour hoffman guy and then it was finally time for me to get off work. my friend came to get me for a dinner date. we both felt grody and haggard. she had just finished a shift in the new seasons deli so she was greasy. we wanted to go somewhere where you sit down and someone brings you something to eat and you don't see anyone you know. we went to the doug fir, it was nearby and felt super random. well there was some show going on that a million people we know were at. great. the first person we saw was my friend's #1 crush. i thought that was pretty funny, but my friend was mortified. i said, "at least you got that promotion from the dish-pit. you'd be much more bummed if you saw her after that." she agreed that that was one good thing.

after that i came home and went straight to bed even though it was only 11pm.

i'm working again this afternoon. i hope i make some $$$ even though it's sunny and warm out.

my tits looked big yesterday :D

yesterday i woke up feeling wildly productive. i started my laundry, made coffee, and started to clean my room.

i have this amazing apartment down south and all my furniture and pretty things are there. i plan to return to it at some point, but anyway for now i'm up here in portland and i have a room in a house with some friends. our house is super nice, but my room IS NOT because i don't have anything pretty in it and it's also very messy. i feel self-conscious about it and don't want anyone to come in. it feels like when i was a kid and we always had the shittiest, messiest apartments and would never ever want anyone to come over, for shame. also this was during the nancy reagan just say no era of drug paranoia and vilification, and there was always a lot of pot paraphernalia on our coffee table, bongs and dented bongy TAB cans, and little trays of "diet pills," which was all very embarassing. but i'm not a kid anymore! i need to just take control of the situation and try to make my room look/feel decent. and i need to do it quickly because i've been going on dates with someone and he's finding it weird that i don't ever invite him over.

so, that's what i was attempting to do yesterday, and i had gotten as far as making my bed when i got a phonecall from work saying, "where are you? you were supposed to be on stage five minutes ago."

i had mis-read the schedule. this is something that OTHER people do that I NEVER DO, and i can never understand how people do it. it's not calculus. it's a fucking schedule, locate your name and times and write them down. duh. well, now i'm lumped in with all those idiots who came before me, and i get it: you look at the schedule and think it says one thing, when actually it says something else. easy. that's how you mis-read a schedule. mystery solved.

EEEK. there are only two girls working during the day, so it's actually important to be on time at this club or else the other girl will have to just keep dancing and will totally hate you when you finally get there. i took the quickest shower ever and hopped in a cab. (actually, up here there's no "hopping in a cab," you have to CALL one, then wait for it to arrive. very very different from my usual life, where upon exiting my apartment, i'm on a busy street and can hail a cab within 2 minutes.) annnnnyway, i took a cab and got to work in time for my second set. i hate wasting money on a cab during daylight hours. but i got over it.

it wasn't super busy, but it was okay. i did some dances for a native guy who had been out river fishing. i liked his braids, but he smelled strongly of fish, a smell that i didn't want to have all over me for obvious reasons. i got used to the smell by the third dance, though, and loosened up with my stilted demeanor, and ended up rubbing myself on the guy as if he were an average customer whose smell i wasn't taking great pains not to absorb. well, then when i went down to the dressing room i noticed that i had wound up smelling a bit fishy, but it wasn't anything a little stringent head to toe baby wipe-ing couldn't fix.

mid-day, i found myself feeling inexplicably grumpy. luckily i had taken a super hilarious video of my housemate. it's really just 25 seconds of her totally spazzing out on the floor of our basement tv room, yelling "fuck! that!" over and over again in reference to the never-ending rain, doing a shoulder-stand whilst scissoring her legs. but it elicits quite a giant laugh fit from me for some reason. so i went to the dressing room and watched it about five times in a row until i felt capable of smiling at customers, and then i went back upstairs.

around that time a guy came in who i liked a lot. the singer from a band i'd never heard of called "high on fire." i liked dancing for him, he was kind of hot. he invited me to their show. i wanted to go but then i got off work and forgot and didn't remember till lots later when i was REAL DRUNK, singing karaoke at the twilight room with my housemate, and it turns out she wanted to go to that show, too. but by then it was too late and anyway we had song slips in.

in other news, one or two shifts per week isn't cutting it. i want nice things and therefore need to get an additional job. but where.... there's only about three million strip clubs up here. hmm. suggestions?

p.s. it's my mom's birthday today. her present from me: an eighth of weed. put that in your pipe and smoke it, nancy reagan!

ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?!!

i finally changed the wild pepto bismol pink background. i am extremely terrible (i.e. lazy, fearful) w/technological things like that, even fairly simple ones, so it took some clicking around, and it also took reaching the end of my rope of aesthetic displeasure regarding the previous template, but now it should be less of a total eyesore. LOVE ANDI.

BS

today was the slowest, most pointless day ever. the only good thing that happened was that the toothless geezer who comes in sometimes loved my new haircut. he came up to me with this wild smile on his face and said, "has anyone ever told you they like your new haircut?"

i was surprised and charmed that he noticed. he seems so checked out. "never," i lied. "you're the first person who's ever told me that!"

he seemed insanely pleased at this. "well. it looks good, honey," he said. "real good."

later, i hurt my shoulder a little. i'm not sure how.

also i gave a lapdance to a DISGUSTING couple. the man had come up to me and said, "you have a very beautiful vagina." his EXACT WORDS.

"thank you." i said. i've heard this before. a lot. i know i have a cute vag, but i mean vaginas are cute. it's almost redundant to say so, it's like saying "cute kitten." kittens are cute! duh!

"do you want to have sex with us?" he said, gesturing first to himself and then to his woman, a short-haired bespectacled pixie type in a long weird hippie dress, which she later revealed was purchased on ebay for two hundred dollars. what a sucker.

"no thank you," i said. they settled, instead, for a lapdance, during which the girl grabbed at the guy's crotch a lot and kept accidentally jabbing me in the thighs. it was weird. i could have gotten them to buy many dances, but they were kind of freaking me out. swingers have that effect on me. no judgement, it's just not my jam. plus my friend was sitting at the rack waiting for me to be done working and i knew she didn't have a lot of dollars. additionally, my stomach was growling and it was taco o'clock.

so i cleaned up, paid out, and munched some tacos. then i came home and went out dancing with a couple of my friends. it wasn't fun, there were too many people who dislike me and they were all in one place. mostly it was my ex-girlfriend's mafioso friend clique creating a minefield of stank-eye. what are you gonna do? there's nothing to do except keep breathing in and out and reminding yourself that peoples' trifling bullshit is nothing to you.

well. goodnight. tomorrow's going to be WAY better than today.