Author Archives: admin

my little mouse-catcher

{20 December 2008}

after 8 years of hogging space on the bed, eating, pooping, and incurring large vet bills, zeke finally started to earn his keep this month when he caught his first two mice.

he doesn’t bring them to me like a loyal cat would, he generally just stores them underneath furniture and (luckily) alerts me to their presence.

i suppose i shouldn’t be proud about the death of a creature, even a small one, in my dwelling, but it is the way of nature, and a much more appealing method of handling our mouse problem than traps or poison. plus, zeke has grown rather chunky this winter. maybe chasing mice will get him some much-needed exercise.

i’m an aunt!

{25 November 2008}

Geneva Christine* was born on Monday Nov 24 at 2:30am. Welcome, Geneva!

*okay that’s not actually a link to her blog. she’s only 24 hours old, after all. but it’s her mom’s blog and there are pictures!

on the road again

{24 November 2008}

i’ve been traveling a lot this fall. first it was idaho, and the bay area, then minneapolis, then southern california. so, here are some pictures of pretty things.

minneapolis. mpls, as it turns out, is a great city. i’d never been there and didn’t know much about it, but architecturally i found it to be this incredibly aesthetically appealing combination of new and old, industrial and modern. i was there for a couple of nice, mild fall days: i went for runs along the river and walked around the city quite a bit. however, the architecture of the human habitrails make it clear that winter in MN is no joke.

long beach. what does long beach have going for it? well, as near as i can tell, it’s not orange county. forgive me, my beloved OC’ers, but i had a pretty visceral reaction to the OC last weekend*. anyway, about the last thing i saw on the beach here was this shot, immediately afterward this weird mid-afternoon coastal fog rolled in and obscured everything. and made my hair curly. it was a lovely, 65 degree day, which meant that midwestern tourists like me went to the beach and the locals stayed home and wore polar fleece.

the gypsey den. so as not to totally malign the OC, i did get the opportunity to have a big hippy breakfast and the best chai i’ve ever had and what is probably the lovliest independent coffee house on the planet. i claim no credit for discovering it; it’s a childhood haunt of lau‘s. and it is a goodly place.

*contemplating a move there for work. more details when i’m able to process them/share them/know them myself. tantalizing, i know!

Let the Right One In

{17 November 2008}

so i went to see the Swedish vampire flick Let The Right One In last night. i can’t recommend it as a feel-good date movie of the year, to be sure, but it held up under my test of a good piece of art – which is to say that shreds of it were still haunting me the next morning.

it was a quirky (but not funny quirky) mixture of classic foreign art-house flick – lots of long, softly-focused up close shots of not-beautiful people, a profound emphasis on stillness, beautiful cinematography, a moody coming-of-age story about a lonely 12-year-old boy – layered over the top of a story about vampires, complete with classic vampire-movie-camp: demons bursting into flame, severed limbs, splatters of blood across the camera lens. what was troubling was that the mood and esthetic of the film was so solidly art-house foreign-drama that it never gave the audience permission (or a break) to scream at the bits of horror. really unsettling. i think my first words post film were, “great! now I’m grossed out AND depressed,” tho i didn’t dislike it as much as that makes it sound. it was really interesting. and the young heroine-vampire is styled beautifully, with big disney eyes and these strange little animal sounds that seem to resonate from her chest. shiver. overall, i’d recommend it, but not if you’re looking for a holiday blockbuster feel-good sort of movie.

but then again, i hear the new James Bond flick is kind of a downer, too.

my front door, 2:15am

{05 November 2008}

small but enthusiastic and politically-active children live in the apartment downstairs from me.

i was there.

hometown pride

{}

photo is circa 2006
with the exception of my boss, everyone else in this photo no longer works here. oh, and Obama doesn’t need to practice for his senate-race debates on our stage any more.

election day fever

{04 November 2008}

okay, so i’m intentionally writing this at 3:30pm, before any polling data has begun to roll in. i’m at work all day, and into much of the evening, since it’s our first day of tech for SITI Company’s awesome Radio Macbeth. i work in Hyde Park*, Obama’s home neighborhood (and where he is still a current resident and active community member – that is until, godwillingfingerscrossed, january 20, 2009). actually, my driving route from home to work takes me right past his house every day**.

i took a walk across hyde park a little while ago to get some lunch and the excitement is palpable, but it is a nervous, eerily quiet excitement. no one thinks it’s in the bag yet, or we’re all afraid of jinxing something, so the excitement is still the nervous scared kind. the day feels that much more unreal because of this record-breaking heat wave – it’s 72 degrees out on november 4 in chicago, with a bright, hazy sun glaring down on mostly bare trees and piles of crunchy leaves. very incongruous.

i’m supposed to work until 11:30 tonight, though i suspect we’ll end early. at whatever hour we get done i am planning to head straight for Grant Park. the democratic party is handing out golden tickets via an email lottery; those of us who didn’t get one aren’t allowed into the actual fenced-off rally area (from which the stage is visible), but apparently the police had the good sense to turn the rest of Grant Park into an “overflow” rally area (with jumbotron), since they are expecting something like a million people to flood into downtown tonight.

it’s a cool time to be living in chicago, peeps.

i’m having trouble articulating how important this election is, even though i don’t have to tell most of you, you all know. it’s important to you perhaps for different reasons than to me, but the point is matters for everyone. it’s a weird anxious feeling, because usually when i’m nervous about something coming up, it’s something that i have to participate in – public speaking, or a first date, or whatever. but this is out of my hands, and in the hands of millions of people i don’t know. i took advantage of early voting last week, and leaving the polling place i had that strange sensation/realization that this is totally out of my hands now***. i made my vote, my tiny, almost-insignificant vote, and i wrote some emails and did some phone calling, and i don’t know if any of it made any difference.

it’s 4:18 now. election returns start coming in in 38 minutes. fingers crossed. like my pre-marathon post (i’ll finish the post-marathon post, i swear), i’m writing this in a state of not-knowing, to capture some moment of where i am now, where the world is now, even though it feels rambling and unfinished and naive. there’ll be time for knowing later. so i’m going to go post this now, and go back to work, and we’ll check back later.

*several of my co-workers who live in the neighborhood voted with Obama this morning. apparently he didn’t have to wait in line.

** there are a lot of concrete barriers and police hanging around, most days, though i hear you can still walk up to the house and photograph it or whatever it is that people do when they visit famous people’s houses.

** now, a week after i voted, i have a very distinct sense-memory of the whole experience – the particular scarf i was wearing, the fall sunshine and cool air that morning, then dusty smell and roar of the heater and the honey-colored hardwood floors of the Union Park Field House, the quiet sense of urgency with which everyone went about voting. on September 11, 2001, the moment that i fully comprehended that something really really big had happened was when lau turned to me and said, “do you think this is like Pearl Harbor? that we’ll remember where we were on this day forever?” while i don’t mean to equate something as potentially amazing as an Obama victory with the tragedy of September 11th, the whiff of history-in-the-making was reminiscent.

doors closed.

{28 October 2008}

it’s all gloom and doom here at slithy tove.

while in Minneapolis this past week i found time to take a little pilgrimage past the shuttered gates of the excellent and now-disbanded Jeune Lune theatre.

now, today milwaukee shakespeare announced they’re closing their doors, effective immediately.

it’s ironic that i spent all of last week in conferences with theatre managers from many of the country’s major regional companies, and still somehow felt insulated from the economic anxiety. then my own serious fears about the future moved in and parked themselves on my chest when i got home. tho, that might have something to do with the fact that i learned on sunday that layoffs are coming down the pipe at my second job (the one with all the blue paint). umm. i need that extra income. that income is more than the amount i put away in savings every month. shit. where am i going to find another part-time job that 1) is flexible around the demands of my full time job, 2) pays me MORE per hour than my full-time gig does, and 3) actually utilizes/challenges/refines my particular skillset as a stage manager?

Paul Morken, 1916-2008

{23 October 2008}

my grandfather died on the most perfectly beautiful fall day. at least, it was beautiful in chicago – one of those heartbreakingly golden fall days, when the sky is blue and white clouds with grey underbellies race across it, the sunlight playing hopscotch with little rain squalls. on campus the grass was still lush and green from early fall rains, trees draped in color, not yet bare, dried leaves making that crunchyhappy underfoot noise, filling the nose with the dusty scent of something slipping out of your grasp. the air was cool and crisp and the sunlight warm, that clever dichotomy of temperatures that locates a sort of wordless, melancholy joy in the chest. an imperceptible breeze shook leaves out of their trees, drifting noiselessly toward the ground one or two at a time, like harbingers of the coming snow.

i imagine that in boise it probably rained that day. i picture a grey day and a cold drizzling rain, trees already bare, lifting their skeletal forms up to the sky in dark silhouette. i picture this because on the day that my grandfather left this world, a light went out somewhere. i imagine this cold fall day into being for my grandmother, because the times in my life when i have been truly overwhelmed with grief, i have wanted, needed even, the world to share my howling sadness, to be grey and damp and close.

to try to summarize his life here would only fall into cliche, and i’m no obit writer anyway. i am his legacy, myself and my brothers and cousins, our parents and our children and children-to-be. in all: two children, five grandchildren, three great grandchildren. a life’s work: more life. more branches. on october twenty-first, a single leaf let go of its branch in a breeze so soft the rest of us couldn’t perceive it. it was just time to let go and so he did, drifting slowly earthward, with grace.

more free association blogging

{21 October 2008}

the marathon blog post will have to wait a little longer, as life was waiting for me as soon as the race was over. but i’m headed to Minneapolis for five days of theatre conferencing later this week, which will actually be like a mini vacation. there will be networking and gladhanding and sitquietlyandlistening to be done during the day, but evenings stretch out ahead of me, empty, obligation-free in a enticing sort of way. free time to read/write/knit/explore a new city. i was actually thinking of looking up the local Obama office there and seeing if i could volunteer for few hours (in spite of the fact that the very thought of cold calling strangers makes my throat close up in an instant anxiety attack sort of way), MN being a swing state and all.

so for tonight’s post, i’ll just throw a few other free-association items out into the ether:

bad day? (i had one)
try the sad trombone.
it was good for a snicker at least, which i needed.

new subject, no transition:
i’ve become a regular listener to NPR’s Planet Money podcast. me, interested in econ? a sign of the apocalypse? or just an indication that i’m officially in my 30s? it gets bigger than that, actually. i think i’m going to enroll in some econ classes this winter/spring at the U where i work, since they let staff enroll at half-price tuition. (unfortunately, 50% of very expensive still equals very expensive).

on the topic of money, the economic crisis has finally come for me: my second job cut my hours back. people hear that times are going to be tough, so they stop buying expensive theatre tickets, so my company makes some dire (but probably accurate) projections and decides to up the minimum number of shows that the full-timers do. which means that there are less shows for us part-timers to pick up. i’m working 50% fewer shows in december this year than i did in december last year. this and having to make tuition payments just before the holidays: the upshot is that you’re all getting knitted socks for christmas. lumpy, itchy, wool socks.