8.29.01

you know what my problem is? i’m used to getting whatever i want. no, really. i mean, i work for it; i work really hard in fact. but that doesn’t change the fact that in the end, i’m not really used to dealing with disappointment. it’s the whole middle-american you can do/have/say/be anything if you just work for it trap. it leaves us always wanting more and interpreting disappointment as a sort of failure of our own. i’m spoiled, i guess.

(i’m reading Love in the Time of Cholera right now – it’s all about people not getting what they want)

8.28.01

according to my daily calendar, the 5 things i should be happy about today are:

free-association

symphonies

angel food and devil’s food

escapist reading

decorum

not such a hot list. i’m all for free-association and the occasional dip into escapist reading, but i don’t like angel food or devil’s food cake, and as for symphonies and decorum, well, you can take ’em or leave ’em as far as i’m concerned. here, i’ll free-associate my own list:

5 things to be happy about:

twilight

zeke (the cat)

9 hours of uninterrupted sleep

being busy

new adventures

— off to rehearsal —

8.27.01

checking my stats file, which i rarely do, i discovered that these are the top search phrases that led people to my site this week:

buying sex toys in iowa

tiny tove movies

tove scene

tove tiny

indigo girls galileo download

dream interpretation backpack falling cliffs water

death by guns america canada

nick bantock pictures griffin sabine address book

tiny tove

it’s unfortunate that four of the search phrases involved tiny tove, which i vaguely understand to be some sort of child porn thing, but i’m quite certain that slithy tove came first. i hope that the person who wanted to buy sex toys in iowa had better luck with the next site he/she checked.

8.26.01

my accomplishment for the week: i finally grew enough hair to wear it in a ponytail again. goodbye, high maintenance hair. it’s been nice, but i really don’t think we were meant for each other.

8.24.01

after tonight, there’s just one amadeus performance left.

because 80’s hits it makes me laugh.

8.23.01

yesterday’s word of the day was “whatever.”

today i’m eating that word for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

8.21.01

my own little personal nightmare:

i get home last night around 3:30. i’m tired and all i want to do is go straight to bed. i go into the bathroom, turn on the facet, and notice a tiny little yellow spider in the sink. i wash him down the drain. then i notice a second little spider. i wash him down the drain as well. then it occurs to me: there are never just two baby spiders. i look up at the ceiling and lo and behold! the ceiling is crawling with newly-hatched baby spiders! they’re the harmless yellow kind, but even still. so i got a can of insecticide (all i could find was “flying insect killer” but i figured bug killer is bug killer, right?) and sprayed the ceiling, which of course meant that the spiders promptly started dropping off the ceiling and onto my head, along with a fine mist of insecticide. i turned on the fan, slammed the door closed and plugged up the crack under the door with a towel. (given that these spiders are only 1/16th of an inch long, i realize that a towel wasn’t really going to keep them from coming through the two-inch crack under the door, but it did make me feel better.) then i took a shower (in a different bathroom) to get all the spiders and insecticide out of my hair. since i knew my father would be up for work in about an hour and a half, i left a note on the bathroom door:

TO ALL YE WHO DARE TO ENTER, BEWARE:

A MILLION SPIDER BABIES HATCHED IN HERE THIS NIGHT.

ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK.

when i woke up, my father had replaced the note with one of his own:

“great! just what i need! another family to put through college!”

in the morning the counter was littered with little curled up spider bodies and there were no creepy-crawlies to be found, so i guess they all died or escaped to the rest of the house. let me say here that i didn’t used to kill spiders. my mode of operation has always been to either escort them outside via a overturned glass, or to just coexist. but lately i’ve been getting tougher on the spiders inside my house – after all, this is MY HOUSE, damn it, and i’m sick of getting spider bites in my sleep or worrying that my cat will accidently injest a poisonous hobo spider. suddenly there’s something terrible and empowering about killing bugs in my own defence. i still don’t like to mush them if i can help it, but flushing them works marvelously.

8.20.01

when you are a cat, traction = dignity.

8.19.01

i went used cd shopping yesterday with a friend and had the best used cd shopping karma – i walked in with one album in mind that i wanted (elvis costello’s greatest hits), and promptly found it. even better, i found it before my friend did, which meant that i got the real cd and he gets a burned copy of it. i struck out on everything else i wanted, but i think the day was still a success. then i saw original sin, which is quite possibly the worst movie i’ve seen in years. the only saving grace was that it was so bad as to be funny. the audience actually laughed out loud at the climax of the story (which goes something like this: the police find angelina jolie with her two lovers – one just drank coffee laced with rat poison and is foaming at the mouth, the other has just been shot in the stomach. she tells the police to get a doctor for the guy who got poisoned. the police say, “what about him?” and point to the other guy who’s bleeding out of the mouth. angelina kisses him (on the bloody mouth), shoots him with his own gun, and replies, “he’s dead.”) timing’s everything in this world, kitlens, and director michael cristofer just doesn’t have it. neither do i, it would seem. but that’s a whole different story.

8.17.01

i’m still in the LIBRARY! looking for the elusive Ed Sullivan video tapes. i’d forgotten what a research wasteland boise, idaho can be. i got spoiled in college. i took for granted the fact that i was living at one of the largest research institutions in the world, and if i needed any sort of research materials, all i had to do was get off my butt and go get them from the library. inter-library loans meant walking across campus to one of the department libraries to get something, not waiting a week for the library in twin falls, idaho, to send over some audio recordings, when what i really wanted were videos anyway.

now i’m just buying them online. but i’m still stuck in the LIBRARY! because the DSL at the rehearsal hall is down. these LIBRARY! computers are running a version of netscape that was written in about 1962. uh oh, i didn’t sign up at the desk to use this computer, and now the librarian is headed my way with a clipboard and someone who looks like he probably did sign up for my workstation. gotta run.