2.27.02 - midnight

my cat, midnight (the one that lives with my parents) was hit by a car this afternoon. my parents live on a quiet suburban street - the sort with so few cars that people still let their kids play in the street - and someone hit the cat in broad daylight and left him there. the neighbor's little girl found him in the gutter. the neighbors took him to the vet, but his pelvis had been shattered and his back broken. the vet doped him up on pain killers until my mother could arrive; she kissed him goodbye and they had to put him down.

we got midnight when i was seven. when he was a kitten, he was so small that i could put him in my dollhouse, close up the walls and roof, and then peek in the windows and watch him run up and down the stairs and through the doorways, swatting furniture out of his way with a oversized paw: a furry black monster come to torment the dollhouse family's peaceful lives. he grew up to be a huge black cat with long silky fur that smelled like woodsmoke when he'd come in from the cold. this afternoon he lay in the gutter in front of our house with a broken back for who knows how many hours because some asshole was in such a hurry to get where he was going that he couldn't even stop to see what he'd hit. losing the cat isn't as hard for me as thinking about how helpless he must have been, laying in the cold with his back legs paralyzed, waiting for my parents to come home from work.

2.26.02

the actor whose house i'm subletting gets great magazines: before i ship his mail off to him i get to read Harper's, the New Yorker, Pottery Barn catalogue and American Theatre Magazine. this is a great deal. AMT's cover stories this month were timely: one was about the Company of Fools, this new up-and-coming theatre company in Hailey, Idaho that's being championed by Bruce Willis. what's funny is that the writer describes Hailey as a "small, gritty western town, hugged by stark, rolling hills dotted with evergreens, sagebrush..." the sagebrush part maybe true, but Hailey is really just a suburb of Sun Valley, winter playground of the rich and famous. i mean, why else would bruce willis and demi moore have moved there and opened a restaurant, a night club, and later a theatre? the other one was about Homebody/Kabul, the new Tony Kushner play about Afghanistan that i've really really been wanting to see. the critics are so-so on it, seeing as how it's four hours long and that's enough to make the most dedicated theatre-goer squirm, but since i'll go see anything by Tony Kushner any chance that i get, i'm prepared to stick it out. when we were in vienna last fall i dragged nick to see Angels in America, parts I and II in this shoebox of a theatre. we were the only members of the audience who didn't belong to a high school english class (who snickered all the way through it), and it was still absolutely worth it.

i feel like a kid in a candy shop: here i am, working literally on the corner of 42nd street and broadway, surrounded by plays i want to see and i don't have any money. when i lived in england, i managed to trick my university into giving me a research grant that paid for me to go to london and see plays on a regular basis. i need a rich patron. i'm trying really really hard to be financially responsible, but there's a little devil sitting on my shoulder pointing out that who knows when i'll be in nyc again and so i really ought to take advantage of everything i have here. chances are i'll end up putting a few tickets on my credit card bill.

high on my list to see:

Urinetown (friend of friend is the SM for this fringe-turned-broadway number, so i get to watch from the booth for free)
Lion King (ditto)
Proof (matt and i are going to see this next week - he wanted to see a math-and-science sort of play)
Contact
Cabaret (starring Molly Ringwald)
Homebody/Kabul
Arms and the Man (we're doing it at ISF this summer)
De La Guarda

i like all the energy in times square. some days working there really bites my ass, because when the director sends me out for a slice of pizza (british accent: "don't go to that place around the corner, darling, their pizza is simply dreadful. go up 8th street till you get to ray's pizza, it's much better, thanks love") because somehow he's the only one in the room who can't manage to pack a sandwich, there are like 8 zillion tourists that get in the way of me walking down the street quickly. but other times, i come out of the relatively calm, quiet rehearsal studio, step onto the street, and the air is just buzzing with all the energy and life that is swirling around. it helps that the sky is blue and the sun has been shining, too. i picked the right time to come to new york: in buffalo they're expecting lake effect snow again this week. as if seven feet wasn't enough for this winter.

2.25.02 - washington doesn't suck!

there's nothing terribly exciting to report about new york: it's a big city, i work here. it's funny how quickly i went from being intimidated by new york to behaving like a new yorker. i think it's part of being an empath: i take a day or two to soak up a city's vibe and then poof! i stop feeling at odds with the city and start blending in. my work schedule is light enough that i actually have some free time to play, but seeing as how i have about 8 cents to my name right now, i'm not doing too much shopping/dining/museum hopping, and mostly hanging around my sunnyside sublet reading anna karinina. on wednesday i'm going to go to the immigrant museum on ellis island and take pictures for my dad; he always talks about how ellis island (where his grandmother first came to america) is the one place in new york he'd most like to see.


disclaimer at mari’s request: washington doesn’t really suck, it was just Thomas Jefferson and some questionable turkey that made us want to hurl. it’s true, DC was sunny and warm(er than Buffalo) and had good ethiopian food and excellent lebanese food and even better it has mari. :)

2.23.02 - you, me, and russian fatalism

spent the evening with japanese take-out and tolstoy. rehearsal was stressful; i took a long long walk in manhattan to shake off the bad vibes and then came home in search of a chill evening. one of the good things about being a stage manager is that my schedule is such that i work all weekend and have mondays off, which means that i never feel compelled to have Exciting Weekend Plans. not that Exciting Weekend Plans are a bad thing, mind you, but i used to always feel so lame if i didn't have somewhere to go on the weekend. now i either rehearse all day or run a show all evening, so there's less of a reminder that "hey, it's saturday night again and i don't have Exciting Weekend Plans." actually i tend to forget when exactly the weekends are, until i notice that everyone on the street is out partying or i wonder why the bank is closed.

saw part of Saving Forrester tonight. imagine my surprise when, while glancing away from the tv, i heard a familiar voice and turned to find that stephanie berry was playing the mother in the movie. stephanie was one of the actors in flyin' west, the play that i worked on earlier this winter at the Studio. weird! i just spent two months working long days with this very cool woman, and now she's in my tv!

mm. time for bed. anna karenina, it's just you and me, baby.

2.21.02 - coffee mug lovin'

the naked cowboy was back in times square today. he's very congenial, posing for pictures with tourists and everything. i didn't get close enough to hear whether he can really sing or not. i imagine i'll get another chance; he seems to be a feature in times square right now. luckily for him, it was a balmy SIXTY ONE degrees outside today. sunshine! i can feel an end to the winter blues...

i have this coffee mug with cartoon pictures of polar bears rolling around having a polar bear orgy (it's much cuter than it sounds). in college, val nick-named it (appropriately) the fucking-bear mug. she even wrote a poem about it. apparently, bears weren't the only option for the fucking-animal mugs; martin's house has a mug collection including one with rabbits and another with penguins. i'm drinking english tea out of a fucking-bunny mug right now. am i the only one who thinks this is funny? quite possibly.

2.20.02 - it's just TWO much fun

i woke up this morning with the overwhelming desire to stay put in buffalo, despite the fact that i’d been looking forward to working in new york all winter. “buffalo is easy,” i thought to myself. “i know where the grocery store is, how to get laundry done, which bars to avoid on thursday nights, how to park downtown without paying, and where to get good french toast at 4 in the morning.” the thought of having to learn all of that in another new town really wasn’t as appealing as staying in bed with zeke was. i don’t know why, but i arrived today feeling thoroughly intimidated by new york. there’s no reason for that, given that i’ve successfully and fearlessly navigated a dozen other large cities, in many of which i didn’t speak the language. but somehow new york intimidated me in a way that [san francisco, los angeles, boston, washington D.C., toronto, amsterdam, vienna, london, paris, rome, berlin, prague, tokyo or seoul] never did. okay, i take that back, i was scared shitless the first time that i went to paris. but i was only seventeen then and it was my first trip abroad. i suppose i just have more preconceptions about new york built up in my head than i did about other cities. all that stuff about how tough a place it is. or maybe there was just too much build up, because i've been lucky enough to travel quite a bit, and somehow never landed in new york before now. maybe i was intimadated because this place is the mecca of the american theatre community. at any rate, i was somehow completely paranoid that i would stick out like a sore thumb on the street, and that everthing about me would somehow say "country-bumpkin!!" and then people would want to pick my pockets or just generally make fun of me in a junior-high-school-gym-class sort of way.

we arrived at la guardia this morning, and found the house in queens without incident. the house is lovely and in a fairly quiet neighborhood. although i am sharing the place with my stage manager, i have my own bedroom and bath, complete with a tv and lots of shakespeare videos (we’re subletting an actor’s house) and a smooshy bed to sleep on. N had to go to meet with the show’s producer today, so i accompanied her as far as times square. once i’d successfully explored the subway system and spent a few hours wandering around midtown soaking up the city’s vibe i felt a little less lost. i have no words to accurately describe the blinking-flashing-huge-advertizements-everywhere-you-look sensory overload that is times square. once i got over my initial confusion that times square isn’t actually a square (ie, a city block that doesn’t have any cars or buildings, and maybe has a fountain or statue or something that people congregate around) at all, i was simply overwhelmed by the sheer volume of STUFF going on there. it’s a total sensory overload. it felt like something out of the movie brazil. our rehearsal studio is on 42nd street, one block off broadway, right in the center of everything. back in queens N and i located the essentials: groceries, laundry, japanese, chinese, mexican and indian takeout menus. it took both of our giant brains plus an act of god to figure out how to make the tv-vcr-dvd-stereo system in my bedroom work, but once we did, we ate sushi, drank corona, and watched the powerpuff girls.

now that i’m back in a big city, you can look forward to the return of my Freak of the Week feature. this week’s freak would have to be the naked cowboy. this super-buff guy with a tan and long blond hair was standing in the center of times square, playing his guitar and singing with gusto. he was wearing only cowboy boots, a cowboy hat, and a pair of tightie-whities that said “naked cowboys” on the butt. his boots had TIPS scrawled down each side, and he was inviting passersby to place money inside his boots. it was kind of a cold day to be playing guitar in nothing but your undies. let's hope he earned enough tips to buy some jeans for tomorrow.

2.19.02 - things that go 'squish' in the night

the buffalo science museum has an exhibit called “Grossology: blood, boogers and things that live in our bodies.” apparently it’s wildly popular with the under-12 crowd. you get to walk through a giant nose and get covered in boogers. sort of like super sloppy double dare, only more educational.

i am now the proud owner of a Jewish Community Center of Greater Buffalo t-shirt, which i earned by going to the gym 30 times in the past 90 days. whoo hoo! the shirt's about as ugly as i had expected, but at least i have new and improved biceps to wear with it. maybe i'll cut the arms off and make it into a muscle shirt.

gotta go pack, as i am leaving for new york in the morning. assuming that all goes as planned, i'll be able to post while i'm in new york. otherwise, i'll be back in mid-march.

2.18.02 - thomas jefferson makes me queasy

my trip to washington was good, food poisoning not withstanding. Good Pants were sought, found, purchased and later returned in favor of a Good Haircut with Coco. we wandered around georgetown and looked at all the beautiful people walking their beautiful dogs and their beautiful houses, explored a happy independent bookstore where i was torn between buying the sequel to bridget jone's diary and anna karenina, and ate ice cream on a regular basis. sunday mari and i made an omelet out of questionable turkey, and three hours later we were at the Jefferson Memorial, trying not to barf on Thomas J's feet. they always say that men turn into such babies when they get sick; the same goes for me. nothing takes 20 years off my age faster than getting the stomach flu. mari's sister-in-law made us seltzer water with lemon, and we laid around clutching our stomachs until i had to leave for the airport. as we left for the airport she handed us ginger ales. right after i opened mine i remembered that i'd given up soda for lent. "lent? since when do you celebrate lent?" asked mari. "i'm a lapsed catholic," i told her. "the only things we celebrate are christmas, lent, and guilt." i figured since i was feeling guilty about wasting the soda, or else would feel guilty about drinking it, that guilt would have to take the place of my lenten vows for the day. fortunately i had decided on anna karenina at the bookstore, since i had hours to kill at the airport and the usual airport trick of searching out the requisite cinnabon shop and eating a huge gooey cinnamon roll in order to past the time wasn't going to work.

my stage manager made me sharpen 48 pencils by hand today, because the back of the box said "for best results use a hand-crank sharpener." this is what she thinks an assistant is for. i really don't mind sharpening pencils, but for god sake, electric pencil sharpeners were invented for a reason! besides, these are the pencils that we never use, we just give them out to the actors who forget to bring their own pencils. what do they care whether we sharpened them with a hand-crank sharpener? at this point, she doesn't really make me upset any more; my relationship with her is so absurd some days that i just have to laugh at it. mind you, i might not be laughing by this time next week, since i'll be sharing an apartment with her in NYC for the next month or so.

2.15.02 - weekend escapades

mari writes:

>i'm confronted with my total lack
> of good pants.

clearly, the only thing to do was reserve a plane ticket and head to DC for the weekend to help remedy the situation. posts will resume on monday.

2.14.02 (later)

valentine's day, 2002: opening night of sleuth. i wore fishnet stockings, a velvet fringed scarf and chopsticks in my almost-long-enough-for-an-up-do hair. i'm not working backstage for this one, so i had two tickets for the show, but no date. sat alone near the back and shot daggers at all the women dressed in bright red. after the show randy put a glass of red wine in my hand and then saw to it that it never got below half full. figured i wasn't drinking much because it was a skinny champagne glass, forgetting that what it lacks in width, it makes up for in height. moved to the party downstairs where i talked stanford drama talk with one of the actors, who graduated from stanford about 10 years before i did, all the while holding up the bar and feeling paranoid about whether i was talking too loud. made the situation worse by moving on to the next bar with the gang and letting hannah put a white russian into my hand. pretty soon all i wanted was to get out of the bar NOW. made hannah drive me home on her way to meet everyone at the Towne, where i watched one of the two dvds that i own and tried to keep my head upright. i haven't had this too-much to drink since that time and lauren and paul and i drank gin and orange juice concentrate outside of terra, and then we tried to go to bed but we were too drunk, so we spent half the night sitting up - paul crying for humanity and me just trying not to barf.

2.14.02 - be mine, valentine

Wop-a-din-din

She's got big green eyes
And a long Egyptian face
She moves across the floor
At her own pace
When I'm here in bed
She'll jump up on my chest
And when we lock eyes there's so much love
I wanna cry

She comes in near
When I scratch under her ear
And she lifts her head
When I kiss around her neck

Won't go to sleep
When she falls along my side
And two green eyes fade
To a porcelain marble white
And somehow when I sleep
She'll end up at my feet
And if I roll and kick her out
I might knock her to the ground
But she'll come back anyhow

Ella es muy vital
más triste que salir el sol
pura como el agua

The morning comes
She squints up to shield out the sun
And she'll go and lay
In the warmest dusty rays
And I hold her face
She lays perfectly in place
And she'll yawn and stretch
And stare me down expressionless
And lay back down into her nest

And if someone calls
She'll race me out the hall
When she hears the phone
Then she knows I'm leaving home
She don't wanna be alone

And I know it's wrong
That I'm going away so long
And for her it's rough
I can't be with her enough
But I'll never give her enough

Ella es muy vital
más triste que salir el sol
pura como el agua

And somehow when I sleep
She'll end up at my feet
And if I roll and kick her out
I might knock her to the ground
But she'll come back anyhow

- the red house painters

2.13.02 - through the looking-glass

went on a tour of the Summer Street Cat Clinic's boarding facilities, as i have to find someone to take care of zeke when i go out of town for a week later this spring. the place was small, but very clean, and the women who worked there obviously took good, loving care of the cats. i took one look at the shiny steel cages, however, and had to flee. back home, i apologized to zeke for even thinking about putting him into a cage. when i adopted him from the animal shelter, he had been living in a tiny cage for so long that he was afraid of open spaces. i brought him home and he spent the first couple of days slinking along the walls and trying to stay in corners and under furniture. now he is a wild beast who prowls the house in search of mice, taunts my parents' big dog, and climbs into my lap to purr whenever he feels like it. his new favorite trick is to place a mouse on the floor right in front of the mirror, and then reach around behind the mirror and try to capture the mirror mouse. all he's succeeded in doing so far is bringing the mirror crashing down a couple of times.

2.12.02 - toosday, whoosday

from A.A. Milne's Winne-the-Pooh:

"...you can't help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY, even if he doesn't spell it right; but spelling isn't everything. There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn't count."

2.11.02 - open season on silly putty

spent my day off working with the local stage hands' union on the load-out of the auto show. the ford rep i worked for today was pretty cool; after momentarily flinching when he saw that his team of three burly, scruffy men had been augmented by a young woman, he got over it and even gave the obligatory girl-job (scratching 2001 decals off and replacing them with 2002 decals) to one of the guys and had me work on loading out the heavy stuff. last week during the load-in i worked for buick and the rep was pissed that he had two women assigned to his team and assumed (loudly) that us "gals" were the reason that our team couldn't lift a 48718842-pound stage out of the shipping crate without the assistance of a fork-lift. a lot of the guys i work with are pretty cool, but some of the crusty old timers can be kinda sexist. working these union gigs causes me to become more butch the instant i walk in the door.

one of the displays we were taking down today was a turntable about 20' in diameter, made of steel and iron and wood. we had about half of the platform pieces unloaded when i started to rotate the turntable and accidentally grabbed the iron rim from the underside. it turned faster than i'd expected and before i could move my right hand it ran right over one of the wheels that the turntable was resting on. it was out the other side before i even had time to yelp. it hurt, but not as much as i expected it to (always a bad sign) and for a minute or two i was afraid to take off my glove and inspect the damage. when i got brave and pulled the glove off, my fingers were red and throbbing but not crushed flat like i'd imagined. this turntable weighed thousands of pounds, even with half the platforms taken off. it was the equivalent of having my fingers run over by a volkswagon bug. tonight my fingers feel a little bruised but are otherwise fine and i'm feeling more than a little lucky to be typing. it's amazing how resilient the body can be sometimes.

later, hannah & i went to the mall to buy silly putty. the guy at KBToys told us that he didn't have it because it's a seasonal item. when exactly is silly putty season, anyway?

2.10.02 - on the nightstand

geeks: how two lost boys rode the internet out of idaho, by jon katz
the tao of pooh, by benjamin hoff
hands of light, by barbara ann brennan
the shipping news, by annie proulx

2.9.02 - what's right in front of me

i have the following talismans on my desk:

-the wind-up nun who spits blue-green sparks as she glides across the table, ruler and bible in hand.
-the pipe-cleaner gnome thingy that my dad brought me from sweden. apparently it's good luck to clip them on your desk lamp, or something like that.
-dedo the benevolent gargoyle figurine that valerie gave me. dedo is my favorite gargoyle.
-yoda figure from the original star wars collection. my brothers and i once had the millennium falcon and all the major characters, but eventually everything except yoda disappeared into the depths of the sandbox.
-a buttercup (the dark-haired powerpuff girl) key chain. when you push the button on her head, she says, "i think they're asking for a heiny whoopin'!" and then makes some karate chop sounds. she used to live on my key chain but the loop on her head broke off. it's a memento of lauren, since since she's buttercup and i'm blossom, the red-haired one (see 3.29.01).
-my golden plastic tiara, because there are days when you just need to feel like the Princess of Everything.
-my deeleeboppers (headband with pipe-cleaner antennae with gold sparkly balls on the ends). they're actually my coding antennae, so these days i don't have to don them too often. which is probably a good thing, because they're so comfortable that i often forget i'm wearing them until i leave the house and wonder why everyone is looking at me funny.

2.8.02 - hollywood sex and emetophobia

our kitchen smells like pumpkin barf. turns out that the funny smell in the fridge was coming from the thai coconut pumpkin soup from a few weeks back. i was all in favor of throwing it away, tupperware and all, but hannah didn't want to let the container go. once we opened it and the barf smell emanated throughout the apartment, i knew that throwing away the container would have been a better idea. given that i have a significant fear of barf (emetophobia, if you want to get technical about it), even when it's actually just soup that smells like barf, hannah was kind enough to clean it out. we burned candles and watched sex & the city until the smell went away. hannah and i don't have a tv, but we can watch dvds on my computer, so we rented the first season of sex & the city to watch at night when we get home from tech. the show is silly but it has a fabulous costume designer. and besides, brainless tv is kind of what we need to chill out after tech, altho this show is proving to be much less stressful than the last one. sex & the city always makes me feel like i ought to be having more sex than i am, however...which isn't difficult really, given how utterly single i am at the moment. anyway, to watch dvds we just drag chairs up to my desk. i always feel sort of like the real-life version of joey and chandler on friends when they jump into their side-by-side ottomans and synchronize their reclining.

2.7.02 - what about bob, part II

remember what i said about the dead guy in the props closet, back on 1.4.02? well, there's more to that story. see, tradition dictates that the ashtray containing the remains of bob get to go onstage for the final performance of every show. last sunday was the closing performance of Flyin' West, and so mike found a nice out-of-the-way spot for bob to sit upstage during the show.

at intermission, one the actors came off stage and said that she'd had trouble opening the front door (the set is part of an 1890's farmhouse). when i went onstage to look at the door, i discovered that the deadbolt was sticking out. i tried to poke it back into the lock, but it was stuck fast. stephanie had only been able to open the door because she forced it, breaking off the piece of wood on the door jam that the deadbolt was resting against. the doorknob and lock were the old-fashioned kind; the only way to turn the deadbolt would have been to insert a skeleton key into the keyhole. but here's the thing: there are no keys for this door. there never were any keys purchased or fitted into the lock, because we had no reason to lock any of the doors onstage. since we had no keys, mike had to take the whole lock mechanism apart during intermission and rebuild the door without the deadbolt. now, we know that the door was working normally at the top of the show, because it's one of the last things that the stage manager checks before the show starts. the door operated normally through most of the first act, because lots of characters go in and out of the door. then, sometime before the last entrance, the deadbolt was turned out. (terrible use of the passive voice, i know.) without a key, there's no way it could have been turned accidentally. so my theory is it was bob's doing. after all, isn't that what mischievous spirits do? they lock and unlock doors. how many unsolved mysteries specials have you seen in which some old house is plagued by a ghost who loves to play with the door locks? everyone swears that in ten years, bob has never made any sort of mischief, but on the other hand, this winter was the first time that bob didn't get to go on for his final performance. the last six performances of Lake Effect (the show before Flyin' West) were canceled because of the blizzard. since no one anticipated that the storm would cancel the show, bob didn't get a chance to go on for Lake Effect. ever since then, we've been joking about how bob's spirit must be restless, but now i'm convinced that there's something there to it. maybe bob was just trying to let us know that he's still hanging around the theatre.

2.6.02 - cornbread, anyone?

i made cornbread tonight. the box of cornmeal said "enriched and degerminated." i like the fact that my cornmeal has been de-germinated. after all, who would want germs in their cornmeal?

2.5.02 – the vision statement that wasn't

and so slithy tove returns.

what i found during this week of silence is that i am filled with a narrative that has to get out. i'm not claiming that what i have to say has value for anyone else; nor am i claiming that it doesn’t have value. all i know is that some part of me is so full of things to say. when i was a kid, i used to imagine myself as the heroine of a book and i would spend hours lost in daydream, narrating the story of me. there were times in which i embellished, added elements of the fantastic or at least gave myself better hair, but for the most part i just narrated my life as it was, as if i were trying to draw a picture of my life as i see it, almost so that i could be viewed from the outside as i see myself on the inside. it was probably good defense mechanism for the brainiac kid who always felt misunderstood and left out in school. i stopped doing this when i got older, mainly because getting caught talking to yourself in junior high school is instant social death. and then last year i was suddenly inspired to start slithy tove. i'd been reading metameat, and other blogs, and i found that reading other people's daily journals was causing me to slip back into my habit of narrating the events of my life in my head (i tried not to be the crazy lady on the MUNI mumbling aloud to herself). and so slithy tove was born.

last week i kind of burned myself out with those last two big posts. the ferocity, variety, and sheer volume of responses that i received kind of overwhelmed me, and it was sort of like getting caught talking to myself again, only this time everyone had strong feelings about what i had to say. ironically, it was only two weeks ago that an english prof emailed me and asked me to talk about what my vision for slithy tove is for an article he was writing. i told him i had no vision statement because the vision for slithy tove changes daily. slithy tove was my creative space to say whatever was on my mind, to be funny, or self-absorbed or whiny, to contradict myself if i felt contradictory, to wax poetic or share a vision of whatever weird thing i've encountered that day. above all else, it was a space that was mine.

i used to think it'd want to be a writer when i grow up, but i steered away from it eventually because i have this intense fear of The Blank Page. i suffer intense performance anxieties when it comes to being creative. never mind inventing stories on demand, i used to hide during mic check in the theatre for fear that someone would put the mic in my hand and ask me just to talk while they fiddled with sound levels. my voice would stick in my throat and my mind would become this panicked blank white wall. with artistic endeavors there was always this pressure: what if i can't create? what if i have nothing to say? it terrorized me. in college i studied directing, and the same fear plagued me. i loved directing, i loved the collaborative nature of the work, loved the discovery and learning process, but i was terrified that i had no artistic inspiration. i still feel that looming fear, and it's probably why i'm pursuing a career as a stage manager right now rather than as a director. but for some reason, slithy tove was different. i felt responsible to no one but myself. i knew i had readers, but i didn't feel responsible to give them anything in particular. in that the internet is a pull- rather than a push-model of information dissemination, my thoughts were out there for anyone to read, but i wasn't forcing them on anyone. i didn't feel pressured to write things to please anyone, so that i could finally start to write things that pleased me. there was no fear of The Blank Page because i didn't feel i was being judged for the quality of my creative inspiration. i was writing slithy tove for me. i have often used slithy tove as a sort of personal therapy session, for talking out things about my life that don't really make sense until i take the time to write them out. and sure, it was fun to get email from people, particularly since it was usually flattering or funny.

i realize now that i've been laboring under the misapprehension that i don't have to be responsible for what i say here. slithy tove is mine to use however i please, but that doesn’t mean that i can say things w/out regard for who might be reading it any more than i could walk into a room and start spewing opinions without regard for who might be around to hear them.

in writing slithy tove, i'm learning how to be true to myself, to examine my nature and my actions with ruthless scrutiny. i'm not advocating the sort of pathological honesty in which people's feelings are disregarded for the sake of Truth, but i have been using my blog as a tool for being honest with myself. one of the things that constantly amazes me about the friends in my life is how wonderfully different all of them are from one another and from me. and in that none of us are the same, i am realizing that i will never be able to please everyone, no matter how far i stretch myself. i don’t like hurting people and i don't do it intentionally, but i will never be a good friend to anyone if i don't understand myself. getting to know me isn't an easy process, but i think it's a significant journey. the other day i wrote "i'm in my twenties. figuring out what constitutes The Good Life is supposed to be a hobby." i came out sounding glib, but i actually mean that. i think i somehow expected that after i finished college, my fairy godmother would wave her wand and poof! i'd turn into a Grownup. it turns out that it's much harder than i thought. so to those of you who still read slithy tove, you are welcome to come along on the ride. besides, who else will i tell about the bizarre bowling injury i sustained in canada last week, or how i nearly lost my eyelashes in a cornbread-baking incident at work?

incidentally, slithy tove will be a year old on saturday. i went back and looked at the first entry. it said, "the impetus: the human need to express, connect, explain."