5.1.02 - the slow minutes after midnight

are cool from the open window, filled with the night sounds of suburbia bordering farmland: crickets and frogs, cicadas and the lone car and the soundless sound of the damp black that cools my forehead and ruffles my hair. my cat presses his nose to the screen, sees things in the dark that i do not. the hours tick by and i wonder why i procrastinate sleep. it's the waiting i suppose. it slows down time. stretches things.

4.30.02

apartment shopping is depressing me. the theatre wants to house me in a backyard-buddhist-temple-turned-guesthouse, which would be cool except it doesn't have a kitchen and is allegedly full of spiders. i turned to the classifieds, and found this cute little guest house that this sweet crazy lady will rent to me and zeke but i can't really afford it. it's time that zeke started pulling his own weight when it comes to the bills, it think. he spends all day sleeping on top of my sneakers, for reasons i can't begin to explain.

while i was searching for the classifieds at the flying M today this cute guy came to my rescue (he'd been hogging the newspaper section i wanted). it's so rare that anyone tries to pick up on me that it always makes me giggle. i'm afraid it probably won't work out between us since he had the I.Q. of a stick of gum, but it was good for my ego. then i met this very sweet drag queen who talked to me about shakespeare and martial arts.

4.27.02 - inventory:

CD player: out of range, ani difranco
recent/current reading list:
1. twelfth night, shakespeare
2. girl with curious hair, david foster wallace
3. hands of light, barbara brennen
4. the sound of waves, yukio mishima
5. much ado, shakespeare
6. anna karinina, leo tolstoy
7. cosmo (may)
new hair: boy-short and messy
i'm wearing: jeans, blue tank top, red plaid shirt i stole from an ex-ex-ex-boyfriend. boys may come and go, but pilfered clothing is forever.
piercings: five six (i can't count)
tattoos: one
employment status: part-time. if all goes well, i'll be stage managing full time from may 7 through the end of the year, so i'm taking a little vacation time in advance.
residence: with my parents, but only until next week, when i get to move into an apartment of the theatre's choosing. as long as it takes cats and it's close to the rehearsal hall, i'm not picky.
i am never without: my new camera (hence the sudden influx of pictures on slithy tove). chances are i will continue to force my amaturish photographs on you, dear readers, at least until i get around to putting together a photo gallery. and seeing as how Project Month is nearly over, it might be a while.
weather today: sunny but deceptively cool. this part of spring is heartbreakingly beautiful, when the leaves are still pale green and tightly curled and the blossoms are falling like snow in the breeze, and the sky is blue blue blue and the sun is hot through the windshield and everywhere you look, the earthy tones of winter are giving way to bold, primary and secondary colors.

4.26.02 - come back from san francisco

it's very easy to be nostalgic for a place that you get to drop in, visit, and escape before dealing with any of the logistical complexities inherent in city life. my trip to the bay area had nearly all the requisite pieces: much eating-of-the-avocado/crepes/sushi/fresh fruit, sunshine sunshine sunshine, i prodded, photographed and generally harassed jellyfish on the shore at stinson beach, talked politics w/ my brother, did the Daily crossword in the shade behind the stanford coffee house, sat up late drinking wine with lauren, had a haircut at glamarama, saw the dr who's working on my neck, played with lauren's kitties, rode the MUNI with its usual dose of freaks, did a little damage to my credit card in union square, climbed to the top of russian hill and gazed at the city and the bridge and the bay glittering in the darkness.

i'm back in the land of the cowboy now. lauren rocks my world twice over today; first, just cause she's lauren and secondly because she got up at four am to drive me to SFO.

i have this weird strain of airplane-specific narcolepsy in which it is nearly impossible for me to stay awake during take-off. i've had it for years, and it only seems to be getting stronger. at this point, i can feel the drowsiness start to settle down on me as i walk down the isle looking for my seat. i stow my luggage, fasten my seatbelt and my eyes begin to get heavy. next thing i know, we're in the air. usually i wake up 5-10 minutes after take-off and i'm perfectly alert for the rest of the flight. this might make more sense to me if i was a nervous flyer and the sleeping was some sort of self-defense against the fear, but the truth is that i've always been thrilled by roar and the force that presses your head back against the seat while the plane tips up at a what seems like an impossible angle. back when i could stay awake, i used to try to pinpoint the moment when the wheels would leave the ground and all those tons of steel and people and luggage would become airborne, and every time i would marvel that such a thing could be possible.

4.24.02 - a whole new you

i have new hair. the best thing about it is that the back is cut really short in that boy-haircut way so that it's all just-shaved and fuzzy and fun to play with. once again i am convinced of the value of the $50 haircut over that of the do-it-myself blunt cut. wendy at glamarama is my haircut goddess.

4.22.02 - decentralizing me


the upside to having a terminally fucked-up neck and a specialist who lives in redwood city is that i get lots more trips to the bay area to visit friends. i’m hanging out with my brother at stanford now, and tomorrow i'll head up to the city to see lauren & co. hovav is my literary hero of the day: he traded me a coffee date for british editions of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy imported directly from blackwells in oxford.

it's disorienting, all this moving around to places that i've once known well. i spent the afternoon wandering around stanford's campus while chris was in class. it's not so embarrassing to return to campus now because the chances of bumping into someone i know and getting that "what are you still doing hanging around here?" look are diminishing with time, allowing me to wander around, drink jamba juice and do the daily crossword behind the coffee house in relative anonymity. later this evening chris and i drove up to san francisco to have dinner at ti couz, which is not far from where i used to live. in order to get back on the freeway we had to drive right past my apartment on oak street. technically i live in boise right now, a place where i spent the first 18 years of my life but now feel like a frequent visitor more than an actual resident. this ability to move freely from once place to another so quickly - it almost makes me feel like i'm moving backwards and forwards in time. it's not a sense of rootlessness so much as a sense of having roots spread so far and wide that i feel pulled in all directions - back to every place that i've known, and yet pulled forward always toward somewhere new. i'm decentralized. it’s not that it doesn’t matter where i am – it’s just that there are so many options, and each one has an infinite number of possibilites attached to it. how am i supposed to choose wisely? i wonder what life was like at a time when there were no options; there was a place where i was destined to be born, to live and to die and be buried, and that place defined me.

airplane travel always makes me feel a little stretched out, as if the spirit can't quite follow as fast as the plane goes, and it takes a day or two to catch up and be whole again.

4.21.02 - sunday breakfast with my parents

[context: we're talking about how each generation tries to find a new fashion statement that will horrify its parents. e.g. bell bottoms and mini skirts, tattoos and facial piecings, and so on]

mom: "the one thing that every generation has in common is that it thinks that it invented sex."
me: "uh huh."
mom: "i mean, no one likes to think about their parents doing that. i mean, eww. one time i opened a cupboard at my parents' house and..."
me: "can we stop talking about this?"

4.20.01 - from the slithy tove inbox:

Delivered-To: celia@slithy-tove.net
Date: Sat, 20 Apr 2002 22:18:17 -0400 (EDT)
From:
Subject: Your web site
To: celia@slithy-tove.net

Hello again Bill,
I just found this quote on your web site, and thought
it would be nice to send you a message:

Quote: "I just can't take the disappointment, Anu.
Every evening Eudora plays that happy little tune and
my heart leaps in anticipation of a message addressed
to me, and then I discover that it's just an
impersonal group message..."

You are a very talented writer.
I could not understand why you said today that I was
only the second person to send you flowers. So I'm
even more glad that I did.

By the way, was your birthday today or on April 8th?

I'm happy to read your journal. I'm not quite ready
yet to share mine, but hey, could be soon!
Take care, and have a lovely weekend.
See you in the forum,
Paulette

______________________________________________________________________
Find, Connect Date! http://personals.yahoo.ca

oh dearie me. either this is a really sophisticated piece of address-confirmation spam, or else it seems that "bill" has been passing off my blog as his own in order to impress the ladies on the Yahoo! Canada personals site. tsk tsk, bill. didn't you know she'd do a little internet-sleuthing?

4.17.02 - tod's driving shoes

the following are the most frequently-used search terms that generated a link to slithy tove this week:

slumber party naked
tod's driving shoes
san francsico traffic (sic)
dr jekyll and ms hyde breasts
supermodels negative impact
china flats

i'm afraid that i probably disappointed all of you. :)

4.17.02 - technical difficulties

the nike/rio portable mp3 player is the biggest load of crap i've ever purchased. i guess that's what i get for compromising my values and buying something from nike.

4.16.02 - freudian slips

when i got into bed last night my eyes were drooping and i was ready for sleep. but as soon as i turned out the light and my head hit the pillow, all the little what-ifs came creeping in on little cat feet and settled around me, and all thoughts of sleep vanished in the face of these rare but obnoxious little visitors. i guess i eventually drifted off, and in the morning when i woke they were still lurking around my pillow, but they retreated as soon as i got up. now i guess i'm staying up late again in the hopes that sleep will win out over the what-ifs. that and i've realised that i actually procrastinate going to bed. it sounds backwards, i know - that i'm putting off sleep in order to do other, less essential tasks - but hey, this way you get a late-night blog update, right?

nick wants to see frailty for our birthday-movie, but i think i'm too much of a weenie. i have a vivid imagination, okay? the review on ebert's website is just glowing, if that make any difference. i always get sad when someone mentions ebert, because now that siskel is gone it's just ebert, and it's like bert without ernie or peanut butter without jelly or me without you.

4.15.02 - fashion for dummies

i rarely wear a baseball cap, but i always feel so sporty and tomboyish when i do, even tho it's usually just to cover up the fact that i haven't showered.

4.14.02 - decisions

i got the job that i've been chewing my nails over for the past three weeks. just about every other detail of my practical life (where i'm going to live this summer, should i go to boston for a job interview next week, can i afford to see a doctor about my neck, yada yada) hinged on this hiring decision. now the other pieces of the jigsaw puzzle can start to fall into place.

4.13.02 - pro-cras-ti-na-tion: melancholy 3 am

i think too much.

4.12.02 - you've been warned

good god: Things Other People Accomplished When They Were Your Age. not recommended for type-As or anyone who feels at all insecure about what they've done with the first 2x years of their lives. it's good for a few laughs, tho. my favorite is age 72.

last night i sat down at midnight to eat a late dinner. the heavy, sleeping silence of the house was temporarily broken by a plane or helicopter nearby; it flew so low that the whole house vibrated and buzzed. for a moment, i was able to imagine in a real, not abstract, sort of way what it would be like to live during wartime, wondering if that plane cruising overhead would be followed by an explosion...i let my overactive imagination wander off this subject for a moment, and then came to my usual conclusion, which is that words cannot express how thankful i am that i've grown up in a time and place of peace. it's one thing to see a newspaper filled with gore and destruction that's happening far away from here, but i've never had to wonder on a day-to-day and moment-to-moment basis whether my whole world could just go up in smoke. i'm too young to remember much of the cold war, altho the psychological ramifications of that time period have always fascinated me. i think that before sept 11, this country had finally stopped waiting for the bomb and begun taking our sense of safety for granted again. while new york is a city focused raising positive energy in order to heal itself, the rest of the country is holding its breath and waiting for the other shoe to fall, hiding the fear behind patriotism and warmongering. musing on such topics, i went to bed.

this morning, just before dawn, i dreamt about biological warfare, in which there was this gelatinous, fluorescent orange goo flowing like lava all over the place. it was called Agent Orange, only this stuff wasn't design to kill vegetation, it was something that would eat right through your skin. i had to climb over this rocky field filled with this stuff, and even tho i was being really really careful not to touch it, a trace of it got on my hands. the stuff just seemed to keep spreading. i went home and washed it off, but it was too late. i brushed away the charcoal that had been my skin to see actual holes that went most of the way through my hand. none of it hurt, so i was just looking at it with the sort detached horror that one gets in dreams.

so goes the curse of a vivid imagination.

4.10.02: 8pm - i feel a redesign coming on

the tech process of fuddy meers has been less tedious than usual because one of the computers that i'm using for sound cues also has internet access, so while we're holding to work out light or set issues, i can sit up here in my bat cave and write email and blog and such. i've been reading webmonkey.com tutorials this evening. webmonkey has been reprimanding me for all the lazy design choices i made with slithy tove and, being the perfectionist wanna-be techie that i am, i feel compelled to start cleanng up the code. also, i'm getting a digital camera for my birthday, and hope to start illustrating my point here with lots of amaturish photos, so....i feel a redesign coming on.

4.10.02 - full of vim and vigor

did an interval workout at the gym that kicked my ass this morning, and then followed it with weights, and the end result is now that i'm back home, ready to start the day, i just want to lay on the couch and not have to raise my arms over my head. so much for that exercise-will-energize-you stuff. isn't it weird that we invented machines in order to eliminate physical labor and now we have to invent machines in order to get enough physical labor?

4.9.02 - thanks for joining NakedMail!

i have a junk mail box that i use for those web sites that won't give me the info i want until i register, but that i don't trust not to sell my name to herbal viagra companies. since most of the mail i get there truly is junk, i often forget to check the box for weeks or months at a time. yesterday i was going through there looking for an invoice and got the following message:

Thanks for joining NakedMail, the finest adult-oriented email subscription service in the world! Here is a summary of the benefits you'll now enjoy as a member:

...blah blah blah...

So sit back and enjoy! Your first email will start in approximately 6 days.

the title NakedMail gave me this mental image of a letter looking ashamed about the fact that he's been caught without an envelope on.

4.8.02 - a very merry unbirthday to you!

turns out i have the same birthday as buddha. cool.

my day rolled by without too much excitement, since it was the first day of tech and i had to be in the theatre all day. no complaints, tho. cards and phone calls from far-away friends brightened the day, and the cast sang happy birthday to me in three-part harmony. birthdays stopped being really exciting after number 16. i missed the significance of 21 completely; i had been living in england for months, so the legal drinking age thing wasn't significant, and besides, david and i had been thoroughly poisoned in spain a couple of days earlier and spent most of the day rolling around clutching our stomachs.

my grandfather called earlier today to wish me a happy birthday. i love my grandfather, but he is nothing if not square. imagine my suprise when the last thing he said to me before getting off the phone was, "if you ever need a place to crash, we've got a pad here." who taught my grandfather to talk like that?

4.7.02 - it's a really weird feeling

the whole world turned green overnight. yesterday all the grass was still brown, the willow trees had just the slightest spring haze, and the trees weren't even thinking about budding out. this morning, i woke up and everything was green. the willow trees are big clouds of pale green and all the trees are in that about-to-burst-out-in-leaf moment of anticipation. since i'm never awake in the morning anyway, i love the shift to daylight savings time, when all the light is concentrated at the end of the day.

i took a nap on the sofa this afternoon, and serra (my parents' golden retriever) came and slept on my feet, and zeke flopped out on my stomach, so that i literally had an animal blanket to sleep under. i think that zeke is left-pawed. he always attacks with the left-paw in the lead. i've realized that zeke is a not a good starter-cat. one who has never owned a cat before should probably think about starting with a slower, fatter model than zeke. he's endless amounts of fun, but requires the sort of respect that non-cat people take for arrogance. today, in an effort to catch the toy mouse i was holding, zeke ran along the outside of the banisters in the upstairs hallway. that went fine until he tried to squeeze between the newel post at the top of the stairs and the first spindle on the stairs - and he got stuck. the space between those two posts is narrower than the others, and his head, front legs and belly fit through, but his pelvis was too wide. i had to lift him up, struggling and clawing at me, to a wider part of the railing in order to get him through, because if he'd backed up he would have fallen to the tile floor 12 feet below. cats should come with a rating when you adopt them. zeke would with an advanced-cat-owners-only certification.

tom petty on behind the music:
"i don't know if you've ever had someone try to kill ya, but it's a really weird feeling."

4.5.02 - only communists use mechanical pencils

i am settled in at my newest job: running sound for boise contemporary theatre's production of fuddy meers. it's nice to be back at a theatre where everyone still likes what they're doing. this afternoon seth & i wrote cue sheets until my eyes nearly bled. okay, it was only a couple of hours, but i have a short attention span. anyway, the pencils we were using weren't just any pencils. they were Ticonderoga pencils, which, according to the box, encourages potential pencil-users to, "revolutionalize your writing with the pencil rich in history." not only that, but "using only the highest quality materials, the Ticonderoga pencils have been securing freedom for your thoughts for generations." what more could you ask for in a pencil, really? i mean, a self-advancing mechanical pencil that never needs sharpening and comes with spare erasers and a rubberized grip sounds pretty good, but when you compare it with the task of upholding my right to freedom, it pales in comparison.

4.4.02 - when you move like a jellyfish rhythm don’t mean nothing you

my current musical love affair is with jack johnson. ex-surfer-turned-filmmaker-turned-song-writer that my younger brother introduced me to. matt, who was once the purveyor of awful punk (both other people's and his own), went off to college and suddenly has fabulous taste in music of all sorts. my brothers inherited all of my mother's musical talent; i got my father's tone-deaf ears. with zero natural musical inclination, the only way i learn to play instruments is through sheer brute force. music theory only makes sense to me if you break it down into mathematical principles, and by then it seems like you've destroyed the soul somewhere along the way. i've been trying to learn to play the guitar, but i get easily discouraged. i don't want to learn why a D flat diminished 7th chord does what it does, i just want to sound like ani difranco.

4.3.02 - it's not you, it's me

X-From_: wsmith@wordsmith.org Wed Apr 3 2002
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2002 01:36:18 -0500
From: wsmith@wordsmith.org
To: slithy@slithy-tove.net
Subject: Your unsubscription request


This is an auto reply to your unsubscription request. You've been removed from the list of AWAD subscribers.

Would you please fill this short feedback form and send it back to anu@wordsmith.org ? Thank you!

Reason(s) for signing-off:
[ ] So much email, so little time
[ ] Know most of the words
[ ] Words too esoteric
[ ] Changing email address; re-subscribing at the new address
[ ] Going offline
[x] Other: I just can't take the disappointment, Anu. Every evening Eudora plays that happy little tune and my heart leaps in anticipation of a message addressed to me, and then I discover that it's just an impersonal group message. I' m sorry, but I just don't feel that Wordsmith and I are connecting anymore. It's not you, it's me.


Regards,

Anu Garg anu@wordsmith.org

4.2.02 - where have all the flowers gone?

in response to my 3.31 question of where did all the good guys (who like hacker chicks) go, i received the following reassurances:

p.s. I assure you, the people who find hackers sexy are still out there. The trick is finding them, because they're all in their basements working on their own computers.

Hey, if it makes you feel any better, I think chick nerds are totally sexy! other than the fact that I am married, we would never be compatible because I like macs and you like pcs...

and, from someone i don't actually know...

guys still like hacker chicks. guys like good looking girls. you are both. so, imho, if you are experiencing tactical and environmental problems in the guy area, it is temporary. girls like you do not remain single for long.

hope I'm not being creepy.

hmm. looks like all the guys are 1) married, 2) in the basement, or 3) stalking me on the web and trying not to be creepy. i should look into that basement thing.

4.1.02 - i am the tax maaaaaan

who would'a thunk that it would take all evening and a full half-inch of paper to print out my tax forms, considering that last year i made about as much money as those guys who pick through your garbage to recycle cans, and i don't own anything, not even my car, let alone a business or something. i didn't even itemize deductions. this issue of having to file in 3 states is pretty sucky.

my favorite sign of the day: For Rent: 555-5555 location: taped in the back window of a yellow vw bug. who exactly rents out their car?

3.31.02 - silicon jesus

spent the past two days with my brothers, fully dorking out over computer stuff...we bought matt a new cell phone/palm and configured it, i bought a printer, installed it on both of my computers, made my laptop play nicely with the desktop machine and share files, took apart the box and re-secured the motherboard, figured out that the power supply was faulty and switched it out for a new one, which required drilling new holes in the case to mount it, nearly toasted my ethernet card but we eventually repaired it, installed 2000 on my laptop even tho the disk was corrupt and a funny little hack was necessary, tweaked with the BIOS till everything worked again, sync'ed and archived files, tweaked with the house network settings...the list goes on. it's good that i don't work with computers for a living anymore, because it means that playing with them is still fun. nick dropped by to give me the w2k disk i needed and shuddered at the thought of spending a beautiful spring sunday taking a computer (much less two) apart, but that's because he has to face computers all day long. of course, archiving and organizing files led me to reading old email and digging up files i hadn't seen in years, which is why i'm still awake at 3 am.

sigh. whatever happened to those guys who thought a smart girl who knew computers was sexy? this shtick worked for me in high school...