6.12.01

whee! more fan mail for me:

——FAN-MAIL-START-HERE——-

Jen,

you rule. and so does your website.

your stories are what keep me going for the oh-so-painful last hour and a half of my work day.

——–FAN-MAIL-END-HERE——–

this comes from a young man whose sig file is “You’d think building a satellite is complicated thing. And you’d be right.”

i’m working lots right now, kitlens, which is why i have no time to post. amadeus opens next saturday night and there are a mere twenty-six scene changes (mostly carried out by the 15 year old acting apprentices) that i have to document and coordinate. this includes facilitating the movement of three 4’x9′ tall periaktoi, not to mention the 8′ tall bust of mozart which sails around the stage in a threatening sort of manner. each night, when salieri slits his throat, blood is supposed to actually spurt out of his neck and get all over the bust. i’m telling you – never a dull moment. sleep calls.

6.11.01

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where –” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

“–so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.

“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

REMIXED:

Call you to me, method empty me should go here? You obtained to be, it was the cat which good it is transacted is influenced to the place. It was Alice at the place; as for me many worries. Then, as for that with the method without being of important to you it goes, “it was the cat.” If I obtain somewhere, Alice who is added as explanation. Ohio state, you doing that, certainty said and is the cat which, your only walking sufficiently long.

(remixing tools courtesy of babelfish)

6.9.01

insanely busy at work. more soon.

6.7.01

the repercussions of National Open Mouth Insert Foot Day (see 6.5.01) just keep coming. somehow i have this ability to come off sounding manipulative when i’m think i’m being cute. this isn’t the first time this has happened; hopefully i’ve learned my damn lesson now.

6.6.01

ah, i am sore from much frisbee-throwing with nick. here’s a story:

To: lauren.oster@stanfordalumni.org, paul.kerschen@stanfordalumni.org

From: &ltjgadda@stanfordalumni.org&gt

Subject: Nighmare on Oak Street

So it’s a lazy sunday afternoon, and I’m doing the laundry. I wash my towels, I wash my sheets, I decided that Mr. Bear seems a bit musty and could do with a trip through the wash as well. When I went upstairs to see how Mr. Bear liked the spin cycle, I notice that his fur has some red fuzz on it from the towel I washed him with. I think, well, I’ll just run Mr. Bear thru again by himself, to get the red fuzz off. I turn on the washer. I go downstairs. I wait anxiously to have my bear back. I go upstairs, I open the washer, and, grinning up at me is….

the DECAPITATED HEAD OF MR BEAR!

It was like a horror movie. Only he’s more like Nearly-Headless-Nick (the ghost character in the Harry Potter books), because his head isn’t quite fully severed. And worse yet, the washer was full of his fluffy white guts. I’m afraid the washer’s even going to be clogged with the stuff. I brought poor Mr. Bear downstairs for surgery, but decided the best thing would be to pull all the guts out, let them dry, dry Mr. Bear’s lifeless sack of a body, and then try to put it all back together, perhaps with new stuffing. This is worse than the dog chewing on him (which is how he was promoted from Bear to Mr. Bear – he needed more dignity with Serra gnawing on him). I don’t think there’s a title I can give Mr. Bear to make up for this final disgrace. I think I’ll have to promote him at least to Sir Bear.

Off to do bear surgery.

jen

postscript: after two days, the stuffing hadn’t even begun to dry out, so i put it all into a pillow case, tied a knot in the top, and tossed it into the dryer. as you might have guessed, i returned an hour later to find that the knot had come undone and that the fluff was now all over the inside of the dryer. i spent twenty minutes frantically picking bits of fuzz out the lint trap lest my landlord should figure out what the hell has been clogging up his washer and dryer. mr. bear went back together surprisingly well; his head flops around a bit more than it used to, but otherwise he’s the same old bear. come to think of it…later that fall, my landlord stopped letting us use his washer and dryer. i wonder if i had something to do with that…

6.5.01

please join me in a moment of silence, in honor of National Open Mouth Insert Foot Day, which I celebrated with gusto today. and when i wasn’t accidentally insulting people, i was dropping stuff, knocking things over (and entire bucket of dirty mop water at the theatre, a chair onto this guy at the coffee shop, etc), and generally getting in the way. perhaps it was just Jen Has Two Left Feet Day. according to family legend, as a baby there was nothing i enjoyed more than trying to fit all of my toes into my own mouth. i’m pleased to report that i’m still flexible enough to at least get the big toe to my mouth. i’m sure this will come in handy when i run away and join the circus.

i spent the evening out at the theatre, helping out with the Two Gents tech. while i was sitting in the lawn of the amphitheatre, drinking a corona (okay, normally tech isn’t really like this, it’s just that it wasn’t my show that was teching, so i was only there to help out, and there was beer left over from some donor event) and watching the sun set in the cottonwood trees above the stage, it occurred to be that i might have the best job in the world. the long summer evenings and desert sunsets in idaho go unparalleled as far as i’m concerned – the sky is enormous in a way that is indescribable – you have to stand beneath it and see the sun create shadows and highlights and depth in the clouds that streak across the sky for miles and miles in the clear air. low on the horizon, the sun lights up the foothills and makes them glow pink, and sparkles on the deep green of the trees along the river. the theatre is set along the boise river, about 5 miles out of town, tucked up against the foothills of the rocky mountains. as it darkens, swallows sail low over the stage, and deer (and the occasional skunk) wander out of the river bottom to visit back stage. this picture doesn’t really do it justice, because you can’t see any of the trees that border the theatre on two sides, but it gives the general impression.

6.4.01

nobody likes me, everybody hates me, guess i’ll go eat wor-er-erms. long skinny slimy ones, short fat juice ones, itsy bitsy teeny weeny worms!

all of you who haven’t written me in a long time, and you know who you are, have now been suitably notifed that i miss you and i (perhaps mistakenly) think it’s your turn to write.

6.3.01

i saw memento yesterday. go directly to the theatre and see this film. do not pass go. do not collect two hundred dollars. and for god’s sake, don’t read any reviews before you go. i mean that.

6.1.01

currently in my cd player: waking hour, by vienna teng. it took me a while to break the murmurs phase i was in, then there were some brief stints with the new wallflowers album (uninspiring, but anything with jakob dylan’s voice reminds me of a boy i knew freshman year in college), cake’s fashion nugget, and tom petty’s greatest hits, but none of them really sank in. but i highly recommend waking hour. you can download some clips and a couple of whole songs from http://www.viennateng.com, as well as ordering the album &lt/shameless plug for my artist friends&gt

5.31.01

last night i dreamt that i had enrolled in some sort of GRE study course. only when i arrived it turned out to be a combination GRE study course and entrance exam for the peace corps. it turned out that getting through the peace corps exam is really competitive, and so everyone there had come up with some sort of gimmick to get themselves noticed by the judges/instructors. there was a girl there named kim. at some point her friends whipped out a can of pink hair spray and stripped her hair fluorescent pink and she became Crazy Kimmy, and she wrote that all over her computer monitor in sequined letters. i was there, with zeke, only he wasn’t tigger-stipped, he was a fluffy white cat. and he was stuffed into a big clear glass of water. he didn’t seem terribly unhappy about this, but imagine what a fluffy white cat would look like, all soggy and with his face smooshed up against the glass. that’s what he looked like. i became the Girl with the Cat. lauren was there too. she had decided to wear a long grey cloak and a purple felt tri-point hat (three musketeers style), drawn low over her face so that she looked like a walking cape with a purple hat nestled on it’s shoulders. her gimmick, not surprisingly, was that she was the Girl with the Hat. we didn’t do very much studying for the GRE or testing-taking for the peace corps, we mostly just ran around demonstrating our weirdnesses. embarassingly, i hadn’t known in advance about this whole distinguish-yourself-thing, so i was lucky that i happened to have an albino cat in a jar with me when i got to the test center.