1.28.03 - shape shifter

7:45am - stage hand at the morrison center for the performing arts

10:30am - receptionist at the boise weekly

5pm - sound technician at the boise contemporary theatre

11pm - girlfriend

12:19am - dreamer

1.26.03 - how to get to heaven

someone's been papering our cars, mailbox and doorstep with religious tracts like this lately. perhaps one of the neighbors has discovered we're living in sin and is trying to show us the light. in this one, heaven appears to be a shining gold castle, and the children who get to go to heaven are beautiful blonde 1950's-style children. in the panel that says, "Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish", the children are shooting dirty looks at a third boy who is waving a cigarette and a bottle of booze. i suppose that we're the kid with the booze in this analogy. i appreciate the concern for the state of my soul, really, and i respect the fact that the people bringing the word of god to me really think they're doing a good thing for me, but some of the pamphlets aren't quite as friendly: "How can ye escape the damnation of hell? Your iniquities have separated between you and your god, and YOUR SINS have hid his face from you: bad TV movies, music, games, materialism, adultery, killing babies, homosexuality, cussing, drinking, smoking...FLEE FROM THE WRATH TO COME!." does this mean i'm going to rot in hell for watching Blind Date last night? and then there was the one detailing all the advantages of virginity and the crime against god and humanity that birth control is. i respect our religous differences, there's just no need to litter my doorstep with them. i've made peace with my god; i'm kind to animals, and he lets me watch tv now and then.

1.25.03 - over breakfast

it's eleven am, we're standing in the kitchen, pajama-ed and barefoot, making freezer hash browns and scrambled eggs. where would you be right now if we hadn't moved in together? i ask suddenly, as a vision of an alternate-self flashes before my eyes, unbidden. probably living at our respective parents' houses, was the joint conclusion. i look around and we're surrounded by our house: items filched from parents' garages and our own apartments and garage sales that are already losing their possessives: it's not my garlic press or your cat anymore, it's the garlic press, our cat. i think how professionally barren i've felt these past few weeks, then i look out the window at the neighbor's cats and i realize that we've been busy building a life together.

1.22.03 - from the slithy tove inbox

To: brillig@slithy-tove.net
Subject: Something to write about...
Date: Sun, 19 Jan 2003 17:26:23 -0500

I happened upon your page today due to the "tiny tove" search you dislike so much. You shouldn't let it bother you, though. The world is a strange place with many different interests, including your public journal, which I have oddly enjoyed reading...You and the other Tove share something in common - a need to, or simply the basic enjoyment of, sharing yourself with others...

TTL

the comparison is not unreasonable, given that there's something kind of exhibitionist about blogging, although i think that's probably where the similarity between myself and porn stars ends. i could wax poetic on this, i guess, but i think the point was made nicely already. it seems like movie stars (of all types) have more, shall i say, polish? when it comes to their presentation of themselves to the world. this is the raw, ugly, always-changing me, all my musings and my insecurities, the pictures of my cat and the books i've been reading, the freaks i meet on the street and the freaks i call my own. i won't say that bloggers (such as myself) never make pretenses or edit themselves for the public forum, but i love the blog for its confessional-like format. i mean, where else can you read about lauren's magical knickers?

i think this is what qualifies as meta-blogging. perhaps meta-paul can give us more insight on such things. i have a picture around here somewhere of paul posting to my blog, which, at the time i took it, made some sort of mind-bending cosmic sense, that i could post pictures on my blog of paul creating the blog. like photographs of yourself taking photographs or something. whatever, i'd been drinking steadily for hours at that point in time.

1.20.03 - dance motherfucker, dance!

so i've been seeing this special chiropractor three times a week lately, trying to finally get enough consistent therapy to fix the damage i did to my neck a few years ago in a ski accident that left me with chronic headaches and dizzy spells. i like this new doctor, plus i feel really lucky to have him, given how few of these specialists there are in the country. today he sent me for some neurological testing designed to get a better picture of the nerve damage. the first test was pretty straight forward, an ultrasound of my upper spine, but the second one, called something like nerve response testing, consisted of hooking up a couple of electrodes to my arm, a few to my head, and then giving me mild electric shocks with this two-pronged cattle-prod sort of thing. as the technician explained the process to me, he mentioned in a off-hand sort of way that this was going to take about forty minutes. "you're going to shock me for forty minutes??" i asked. he wasn't kidding. he smeared this electrically conductive gel on my skin under the electrodes (which he repeatedly referred to as "barbeque sauce") and gave me these mild shocks, not enough to really hurt, but enough to feel like i'd just smashed my funny bone repeatedly, while my arm and sometimes my legs would jerk uncontrollably. the whole experience was weird. the technician was obviously trained to make small talk to keep the patient calm, so i just pestered him with questions about how it worked. "can i see what's on the computer?" "is that sine wave normal?" "does this test respond to electrostatic interference? what if i turned on my cell phone right now?" "what does the red electrode do? what does the black one do?" the whole experience made me think of that project in high school science class where we ran electrical current through a dissected frog and made the dead frog legs dance. that was weird, too.

1.19.03 - playing grown-up

tomorrow i start my day job - the first (probably of many) day job i've had since i started doing this theatre thing a couple of years ago. while i'm pleased to go to work for a company that hired me based on a cover letter that referred to myself as Princess Jennifer, it doesn't change the fact that the SM offers have dried up so completely that i need a day job. i realize that i've been on a luckier-than-most streak, making one show or season lead right into the next, into the next, but deep down i still feel pretty lame for having to resort to being a receptionist for the next couple of months. the real issue here, actually, is my own ego. while i know that day jobs are a normal part of every theatre artist's financial existence, the type-a in me thinks that i'm supposed to be good at everything. and if i'm good at everything, that includes being good at getting by on theatre work alone. even in a town that has only two professional theatres. andy's been through several rounds of my 3 am temper tantrums over this, and he's right about everything - that i'm being egotistical to think that everyone will want to hire me all the time, that i set unreasonably high standards for myself, that i take everything too personally in a business in which hiring decisions are rarely merit-based. he's also marvelously patient with me, and good at lending me a less neurotic perspective on the world. i'd be lost without him.

it's good that the BW hired me; trips to the employment agencies last week were especially demoralizing. the agents were condescending, the skills tests insulting, and the job prospects poor. i came home from the first appointment depressed. i went to stanford, for god's sake! where did i go wrong? i wailed at the unsuspecting andy. he looked at me and said, you don't like being poor, do you? it was a fair question, given the amount of time i've spent worrying about money lately. i guess it depends on the definition of poor. i don't care if we never have IKEA furniture or matching glassware, i told him. when i have money enough to pay dentist bills and buy modest christmas presents, for groceries, cheap meals out, cat food, a new book now and then, then it's easy to believe that less is more, and i honestly don't mind cooking creatively for lack of pots and pans or furnishing my house with thrift store furniture. it gets harder not to measure my success on a monetary scale when the basics get dicey.

this career requires enormous amounts of faith. faith that something else, the next job, will come along, faith that god or fate or providence will open the next door if you can just hang in there and have patience. and with faith comes dark moments of doubt, when i think that i'll never work again, that i've wasted my stanford education on something that was intellectually stimulating but but financially useless. mostly, the darkness comes from the fact that i still can't imagine doing anything else with my life. its why andy and i are moving to chicago in the fall. theatre is like breathing for us. it's not a way to making a living, it's how we live.

1.18.03 - exciting saturday nights

current/recent reading list:

1. the hours, michael cunningham
2. the four agreements, don miguel ruiz
3. fast food nation, eric scholsser
4. the tatooed map, barbara hodgeson
5. the alchemist, paulo coelho
6. war and peace, leo tolstoy

speaking of reading lists, two excellent young men from my stanford past have opened up (intellectual) shop on the internet: mr. tom, and mr. jake. they're smart, witty, and know lots more about politics than i am willing to.

1.17.03 - household religions

the little brick house on martha street has become our own, now. after 4 days of cleaning came a week of unpacking, which required lots more consultation and discussion than it does when moving into one's own house: can the spoons go in this drawer? can we hang this poster here? moving in together lets you to learn things about someone that just aren't important in a relationship without cohabitation: do you need desk space? do you do the dishes while you're cooking or after? is an unmade bed an offence to the eye? can the cat walk on the dinner table?

we went thrift store shopping for furniture; thanks to the religious charities that run most thrift stores, we now have a catholic couch, a christian end table and a mormon entertainment center. if boise had a better representation of eastern religions we might be able to get a buddhist coffee table, perhaps a muslim coat rack, and the living room could be a regular salon. perhaps the hari kirshna temple down the street will have a yard sale and then we could really let the furniture duke it out over religion. andy and i are both recovering catholics who lack the energy to fight over god; we just try to be gentle, with each other and with the world around us, and go from there.

last year's new years resolution was to stop using beauty products that are tested on animals; this year i'm trying to eat only cage-free poultry and fish. i just finished fast food nation; luckily i don't eat beef anyway, but after reading that i'd never be able to look at a hamburger the same again. with our evenings free (still unemployed until monday), we've been cooking up a vegetarian storm in the new kitchen. still trying to find a way to make tofu palatable, but i'm not entirely optimistic.

1.16.03 - ring of power

i knew something was fishy about that man....

1.15.03 - overheard

just write something

i haven't been silent for lack of things to say, just so much uncertainty and change that it's hard to force a coherent thought. tonight i headed for the flying M, armed with a notebook and pen, thinking that perhaps the narrow lines and the inviting, pale green paper (spiral bound, cardboard cover) would seduce a complete thought out of me. it seems that no one in boise has anything to do on a wednesday night in january except hang out at the flying M in noisy, gossipy groups. things like, "and then i woke up naked" and "i'd put ice in my nipples, wouldn't you?" kept drifting over from the next table, and it was impossible to ignore the fact that i, with my cup of peppermint tea and solo notebook, writing about employment insecurities, was boring. i moved to a table in the corner, but the girl next to me was busy listing all the ways in which she was psychic: "and sometimes, i'll say a word, and my dad will be like, hey, i was just thinking about that word too! and it won't be, like, a normal word, it'll be a really weird word."

phrases that led search engines to slithy tove this week include:

fear of dentist cartoon
married lady to cheet with (sic)
parties and sushi and women
tod's oxford shoes
raspberries & worst movie
rabbits having sex coffee mug

plus the usual references to a certain adult film star whose last name is the same as this blog's. stop looking here, you dirty old men!

1.14.03 - the beautiful people

1: frolicking amongst the cactopuses

please visit. i nearly lost it trying to make the nested tables behave, plus i'm kinda pleased with a couple of the photos. it helps when one has friends who are capable of being beautiful even when they're hung over.

1.12.03 - at the employment agency

typing speed: 70 wpm. whomp whomp. the rest of the experience was demoralizing and i'm just not prepared to talk about it yet.

the photos from new years are coming, and in the meantime, i put up the promised picture of paul's bathroom library.

1.6.03 - Boise, ID (to stay, for a while at least)

three days of down-and-dirty cleaning, scrubbing, paint scraping, painting, papering, sweeping, mopping, hammering, puttying, plastering and dusting later, plus two trips each to home depot, bed bath and beyond, and shopko, the house is ready for us to move into. we're renting this place, but it sort of feels like trial home ownership - the dishwasher leaks, the washing machine shorts out its circuit, the last tenants didn't even think about cleaning out the fridge, let alone scrubbing dirt off the window sills, and the bathroom was too hideous for words until we started ripping stuff down with a hammer. next week (or month)'s task is the backyard, but first there must be furniture, curtains, boxes unpacked, find the damn shower curtain so we can stop taking baths, and then i have to find a job, since it seems that the Boise Weekly wasn't as amused with Princess Jennifer (dec 30) as i was. tonight i'm playing survivor with my closet; this takes some time, as deciding which clothes get voted off the island pretty much necessitates a fashion show. my parents stop by my room and wonder why i'm wearing red nylon surfer shorts, a purple lace bra, and a scarf.

1.1.03 - Tucson, AZ

it was sometime after the sun set today that we'd all made it back from phoenix and managed to bath and dress for the day that had, er, nearly passed us by. the drive was rough; peyton nearly missed her plane and joe had to yak into a bag of chex mix. dinner at a generic all-things-asian restaurant was subdued, and since then we've been laying around the living room dj-ing for one another. paul has just begun making gin and tonics, however, so we might perk up after all.

this is the new year's of the over-educated and under-employed: slumber-partying at paul's tonight we have two harvard grads, five stanford grads, plus a few graduate degrees, and at the moment only one of us is employed. that's right: seven grads, one million dollars of education, and only one job. we do play a mean game of scrabble, tho. they should put us in those prospective student catalogues. here's what life after a liberal arts degree really looks like, kids.

the living room looks like a youth hostel, with backpacks and sleeping bags and skateboards scattered around the room, a fake log crackling in the fire place, and Willy the cat jumping about from lap to lap. paul sorts his books thus: fiction and reference go in the bookcases in the bedroom, non-fiction goes in the bookcases in the living room, and the bookcase in the bathroom has reading one might enjoy while using the facilities. selections include:

zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance
the hitch-hiker's guide to the galaxy
study guide for the GRE lit. exam
civilization and its discontents
the gashlycrumb tines
acu-yoga
the phobias and anxiety workbook
the saga of erik the viking
the art of t.s. eliot
the cat who could read backwards
the indespensible calvin and hobbes.

something for everyone. there's even a desk lamp, for good reading light. i will photograph this bathroom later.

1.1.03 - Phoenix, AZ

guest blogger, mr. paul:

It has been a Very Car Christmas, or perhaps a Very Car Kwanzaa - I'm not sure exactly what holiday is being spanned here. At any rate, we spent two hours on the I-10 driving up to Senor Steve Marlowe's house west of Phoenix, which for most of our guests was a reverse playback of the last two hours of their drive to Tucson from L.A. We are myself and Princess Jennifer and Lauren and Julia and Stewart and Joe and Jake, and Peyton. We left the cat at home.

Marlowe is an enabler and has been mixing everyone Tom Collinses (Colinsii?) and so things have degenerated as you wuold expect. I wore a tiara for some time and then lost it. Steve is blending something and making an ungodly noise doing it. The local development rent-a-cops (or possibly real cops, as some attest--Julia's got a picture) showed up and asked us to stop playing the Hives and Björk and A-Ha so loud, which is probably for the best, since I was burning far too many calories jumping around the room in the shiny shirt that used to belong to Lauren and trying to sing melodies that are just way above my range, no matter what the extent of my inebriation.

I am pleased that worlds have collided in a satisfactory way—my friends from Iowa and Stanford (and the web) have all melded into a sort of mélange cake that is, as Peyton says, "totally tasty." Lauren and Stewart took a few hits for the team and are now unconscious. Stewart emptied his alimentary canal into the toilet and then took a photo of it with his digital camera. He's a good man. Perhaps we can link to the photo at some point.

Julia just took a photo of me posting this entry. Perhaps we can link to that as well.

This is all getting a little confusing a cinema verité, especially since there are now two people with cameras taking pictures of me at the computer. Perhaps we should move elsewhere now. Outside the sky is sparkly (we found Saturn in the sky, happily squatting in the western part of Taurus) but it is also damned cold, and I think my sleepnig bag is still out in the car.