CocoVonLizenhoffer
Age: 48
Height: 5’ 3''
Occupation: cherry popsicle

Last great book I read
Betty Crocker's Microwave Desserts

My idea of a great date
Eat dinner with chopsticks, watch Police Academy II, rub lotion on my feet, sing Christmas carols and time each other running laps around the coffee table (I'm fast!).

Celebrity I most resemble
Carol Channing

Five items I can’t live without
Remote control, ice cream, tennis shoes, glasses and love


Favorite movie sex scene
Sex Party 4

Why you should get to know me
Honey, I will make your toes tingle and your mind soar. I will read you poetry in the bathtub. I will kiss your fingers while you type. I will drink the wine of your kisses. I will mop your floor with my love. I will bake your bacon and fry your baloney. I will sleep in your bed very quietly.

What I’m looking for
My lover will have dark hair and dark eyes, long legs, wide thighs, a butt bigger than mine (that's not easy!), good feet, smart, strong enough to lift the toaster, a refrigerator full of butter, plenty of aerobics videotapes, scotch tape, a bus pass or a bicycle (we have to be able to get around!), and love. Reggae music.

but instead I built this:

 

Tonight I did a big thing. It seems like a little thing. Really I just hit "send" on an email. But it's a big thing. For the first time in my life, I have submitted my writing to an agent.

It was my goal this year to finally send this memoir out. For anyone who read this story in a previous draft, you should know it's now a completely different animal. It's been through three complete rewrites and about 150 drafts of each version, and even at the last minute before sending it out tonight there was yet another major change. But I'm happy. It's approximately 2 million times better than the original version, thanks to the feedback I received. And though it may evolve into something totally different down the line, for now, at least, I have hit a milestone.

The story may never be published. Who knows. At this point, that's not what it's about. I really just needed to get over the hump of putting together the query letter and sample chapter and all the bits and pieces necessary to try to convince someone that they might want to take a minute to read my story.

A baby step. But it's something.

that I apparently grew up in hicksville. All the cute boys and pretty girls from grade school are showing up on Facebook as fat, ugly rednecks who ride dirt bikes and have monster trucks full of sloppy children. And they're all really insanely Christian. And republican. And illiterate. I'm having to rethink my childhood here.

I lived on the edge of a relatively affluent white neighborhood that became increasingly Asian over time. I certainly didn't think of any town that attracted Asians as being white trash. And I was so far on the edge of that town that I went to school in the neighboring poor Latino district. They most certainly were not white trash, if for no other reason than that they weren't white.

Yet, based on the lifestyle of my former classmates from grammar school, I have to deduce that I narrowly escaped some sort of Bermuda Triangle in which the white kids were miraculously transported to some desert dirt pile and force fed a constant diet of Del Taco, Budweiser, Ronald Reagan and God.

These are the adventures of Sandy over the last few weeks, and she is incapable at this time of sculpting them into dazzling paragraphs. Instead, she’s speaking in 3rd person, like a status update, and offering you bullet points. Twelve of these can be traded in for a sandwich at Subway.

Sandy:

• Spent five days in San Jose visiting dad, his wife, her son and their two cats who got crazy punkrock haircuts with shaved bodies and wild explosions of fur around the neck and legs. (The cats, not her family.)
• Went running through the park and played on the swing set.
• Did her taxes and is getting money back!
• Won an Award of Greatness at work.
• Was given a nice Mac laptop.
• Attended a lecture on “obsession” at the modern art museum.
• Attended a speaking engagement in Hollywood by Craig who founded the famous list. Made friends with a cool girl in line, and at the cocktail reception afterward, cowered by her side as she interrogated him about why he doesn’t try to make more money off the site. 
  
• Enjoyed fancy dinner, cocktails and flamenco music with two girlfriends at a quaint restaurant, where conversation was everything Sandy’s missed about having girlfriends. The female drought seems to be over, and Sandy is pleased. Really cool girls are an awesome thing.
• Has been crafting a query letter for her manuscript, which will be passed along to a friend’s agent.
• Has been studying Facebook for work purposes, and is now the company’s social networking guru, even though she’s still highly confused.
• Attended a Q&A with the author of an interesting book about California by a journalist born and raised here. He writes about his Armenian family’s journey to California, the immigrant farm laborer population, and much more. The promise of the West has always fascinated Sandy, who loves the stories of Steinbeck and the idea that her homeland is a place that was and still is filled with the promise of fruitfulness and gold in various forms. She thought about this on her drive up to San Jose, past open fields and rows and rows of planted crops just waiting to bear fruit—from garlic town to wine country—the land that has drawn people here in search of plenty.
• Found out that her brother has been invited to audition to be a cast member on a reality TV show about hairstylists.
• Is typing this while eating raisins.

that I was trying to get published by submitting my novel to agents in a ziplock bag filled with frozen blueberries.

  
EnriqueTamale
Age: 36
Height: 5’’
Occupation: Cook at IHOP

Last great book I read
the menu for the food I make its great you know how I like it to

My idea of a great date
I make tacos, dance. the TV is on for looking at Ugly Betty but your not ugly LOL. right?

Celebrity I most resemble
I look like that guy on the show with that teacher with the kids that are bad. You love him!

Five items I can’t live without
HOT SAUCE! LOVE, WATER. my arms. thats two I guess!

Favorite movie sex scene
all of them!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Why you should get to know me
good lover good job, are babys will have good buts LOL if you dont have a big one and make them fat hahahahaaaa. I have all my hair and more to share! I'ma poet!

What I’m looking for
Kissing my hot sauce packet! No, but you should love god to because i do.
   

I feel another Personal of the Day coming on, but until then, here’s what’s been going on:

• Met up with girlfriends and a whole lot of unknown hipsters at a swanky new Silverlake bar. We sipped free cocktails underneath gorgeous chandeliers and talked of one friend’s newly purchased condo and the other’s sore nipples (damn you PMS!).
• Enjoyed wine, potato chips and board games at an intimate party hosted by a lawyer friend who recently spent a month volunteering in Africa. There was some confusion over whether people were going into the bathroom to “take a wee” or “smoke weed.” (Answer: both.)
• Reread one of my favorite books from high school: A Separate Peace.
• Went to the race track with ST. Chatted with a chunky middle-aged black man who told us his betting strategy. He said he dreams of having enough money to buy his own race horses. He would buy two and name one Hilary and the other Obama. ST said something that disappointed me and I cried into my Bloody Mary.
• Attended a 1,000-person food and wine tasting festival and then spent the next two days responding to customer complaints about it, since my company sold half the tickets.
• Went running and saw a modelesque blonde woman carrying two tiny puppies--one under each arm, like a couple of packages.
• Had beer and hours of great conversation with a close friend, who told me about an attempted threesome adventure gone comically awry.
• Gathered with a group of friends to watch our friends’ band play on the Sunset Strip. Dinner and wine with two girlfriends before the show, bemoaning broken hearts and tragic romances. A car ride down Sunset with two beautiful girls, stirring up memories of the drive through Hollywood to the dance clubs 15 years ago with my college roommates, singing along to the radio and bubbling with hope about the boys we would meet.
• Read a great book about the brain and how we make decisions.
• Watched a fascinating interview with Jeffrey Dahmer.

Today the dental hygienist told me my gums are receding and I started sobbing.

Today I received this email from a man I met at that media cocktail party: "It was wonderful bumping into you in the bathroom last week. We'll have to do it again sometime."