8.8.02 – journeys

i’m still having trouble getting back into the swing of writing every day. i went from having no free time to having free time and no structure, which means that my days are seemingly gobbled up with the mundane: going to the gym, loading the dishwasher, shampooing, eating breakfast, reading in bed. three days in a row with no shows, so andy and i went up to the cabin in McCall. more mundane details made an utterly pleasant weekend: sleeping late, watching movies (Amelie – A+, The Man Who Wasn’t There – C), wandering thru the little town drinking coffee in the light afternoon rain, hiking (we saw a bear!), swimming, cooking macaroni and cheese, sitting on the porch in the evening sun, playing the guitar and watching the aspen trees shiver in the breeze. my uncle described them to me once as digital – the leaves flip between silvery pale green and dark forestry green, like ones and zeros, ons and offs. if you relax your eyes a bit, and focus on some still part of the tree, like the trunk, the whole tree seems to shimmer. i wonder if you could comprehend all those numbers, the millions of ons and offs every second, if you’d get some mathematical pattern that makes up the form of the tree.

andy is reading The Hobbit to me aloud; my head is filled with goblins and giant spiders and dwarves and it’s difficult to resist the temptation to read ahead when he’s not here, even though i’ve already read it and know what adventures await mr. baggins and company. tonight i will content myself with Siddartha and an early bedtime. my lazy summer is nearly over; in three weeks i leave for boston and new adventures, and the following weeks will be filled with packing, planning, and preparing to close yet another chapter of my life, and open a new one.

8.5.02 – feeling sorry for myself

through sheer stupidity, an act of malice, or god’s will, i managed to lose my wallet today somewhere between when i left the moxie java in mccall and when i arrived back in boise. spent the afternoon in line at the DMV (i’m SO photogenic when i’m pissed off) and trying to cancel credit cards. wells fargo picked today to take their entire computer system down, so at the moment some hooligan may be on a shopping spree with my bank card and there’s nothing that i can do to stop him since everytime i call customer servie they apologetically tell me that they can’t cancel my cards until their computers come back up. no money, no insurance card, no blockbuster card, no more phony student ID card. and no wallet.

suffice to say i’m having a BAD day. and i have to go the mall and buy a bridesmaid dress, of all things, tonight.

8.2.02 – shiny happy people

happy news all around. hannah, my super-cool roommate/co-worker from Buffalo and Boise, got a job working at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival! she rules. now i will have a happy, hippy, theatre town to go hang out in when i’m unemployed next winter. go hannah.

and callie is getting married in six weeks! and the theatre i’ll be working for gave me the weekend off to be in the wedding! getting six bridesmaids to agree on dresses, via email, is not an easy task. but at least we’ve moved on from “orange/fall-themed fall sundresses” to something in garnet and satin that i’ll probably never be able to wear again but will be much easier to purchase. kudos to callie, who is dealing with grad school proposals, a new house, a new puppy, younger siblings who have decided to move in, and somehow still manages to send out wedding invites. remind me to elope, when the time comes.

and mari is coming to visit soon! in her wonderfully-wise-mari-way, she writes,

you realize sometimes how love can light someone up, happy little chinese lanterns.

i can’t think of a better way to phrase it.

7.28.02 – young love and old

i love these mornings. we sleep in late and wake to the deep blue sky and sunshine of late summer. outside my bedroom window the lake glimmers in the breeze. zeke is asleep at the foot of the bed, his leopard spots glimmering in the sun. we go to the state court cafe, this little greasy spoon that serves breakfast all day, and sit opposite each other, not talking much, but devouring omelets and the newspaper. the air is cool and constantly stirring from the fan in the corner. we sit in the furthest corner of the diner and do the sunday crossword together over second and third cups of coffee, and neither of us is in a rush to be anywhere else.

i sat down at my computer an hour ago to buy a plane ticket to boston (location of next job), and i find i’ve been procrastinating since then. i’ve already signed the contract – i am going to boston – but somehow when i click “purchase” on ual.com and commit $400 to the enterprise, then leaving, and the end of this summer, will really seem real. maybe it can wait till tuesday.

on a lighter note, i get great pleasure from making fun of ann landers, who i think was an old fuddy-duddy whose advice was largely outdated and stuffy (i’d been dead set against her ever since she came out against the stanford marching band after their little P.R. snafu with notre dame). from one of her posthumously published columns:

Dear Ann Landers: My husband is 80 years old, and I am in my early 70s. We have been married four years. We recently took a short vacation. During our love-making, I commented that my husband’s toenails were rather sharp. I promised to cut them as soon as we returned home. However, without a word to me, my husband made an appointment with a woman who lives in an adjoining mobile home park. She advertises herself as an “Experienced Toe Trimmer,” although she has no special training that I know of. I was not happy that he took his “business” elsewhere, especially since this woman wears shorts on the job.”

hmm. the things we have to look forward to in our old age. what i want to know is, why can’t he trim them himself? is he too old to reach his own toes? i think toenails are kind of yucky – trimming someone else’s doesn’t seem like the most sensual experience.

speaking of sensual, i’m off to buy a norah jones CD.

7.27.02 – don’t touch my bikini

item! doug martsch, of built to spill fame, the band that put boise, idaho on the indie rock map, is the lead singer of the halo benders! i have no idea how i failed to realize that till now – both bands have martsch’s same, distinctive tenor. but the point of this is that the halo benders are (in part) from my hometown. i had no idea we were so cool.

7.25.02 – those who can’t, become critics

i had another night off, so i drove up to the cabin in mccall to hang out with my visiting aunt and uncle. after dinner my mother rallied the troupes into seeing the play how i learned to drive at the tiny alpine community playhouse. i wasn’t convinced that i wanted to spend my night off seeing another play, but i’d had too much wine at dinner to really argue. the play was a confusing meditation on issues of sexuality in a teenage girl and the much-older husband of her aunt. it kind of made the whole audience squirm, but not in a good way. the acting had good moments and bad ones, but the distinct lack of direction meant that these six twenty-year-old actors were left to hanging out to dry when it came to addressing very difficult, socially taboo issues and portraying a huge cast of characters ranging from ages 11 to 65. the director’s note in the program was so off beat that it convinced us that she’d been writing about a different play than the one she directed. and the grammar was abominable, something that i absolutely cannot bear. it’s one thing for me to have lazy grammar here, but another thing when it’s the director’s note. the lack of a stage manager (ahem) was evident in the general technical sloppiness, but i understand that it can be hard to convince anyone to be the stage manager in a community project. it’s not a very glamorous job, trust me. all of this could be forgiven, since it’s clear that the actors and director had thrown their hearts and souls into the production, were it not for the fact that the lead actress pronounced the word denouement “de-NEW-meant”. and the director LET her do it. now if that’s not turning your actors out to the wolves, i don’ t know what is.

7.23.02 – conversations held with my brother this weekend

on my ability to dress/act like a girl

matt: “dude, what’s wrong with your toenail?”

me: “it’s old nail polish.”

matt: “oh. sorry.”

on matt’s ability to drive like a maniac

matt: “check it out, jen, i can shift from third to fourth without stepping on the clutch!”

me: “lord. and i loaned you my car last summer? no wonder why the clutch sounds funny now.”

on getting to the concert on time

matt: “do you know how to get to winter park?” (location of said concert)

me: “no, do you?”

matt: “no”

(i dig thru the car looking for maps, finding three maps of idaho, none of colorado).

me:”you’ve been living here for two years and you don’t have a single map of colorado in the car??”

matt: (shrugs)

me: (picks up phone, dials mom) “hey, will you get out the atlas and tell us if winter park is east or west of idaho springs?”

mom: (looks at map) “it’s north.”

me: “oh. matt, i think we’re lost.”

7.21.02 – closer to fine

my not-yet-21-year-old brother picks me up from the denver airport this morning. i open the passenger side door and shove aside a bottle of malibu rum in order to sit down, making a feeble joke about open-container laws. “don’t worry, carrie and i drank the whole thing last night” he assures me. “it’s just a souvenir now.”

it’s disconcerting that my younger brother turned out to be the popular kid in the family. i mean, we were all nerds in high school, but then chris and i went on to nerd colleges, whereas matt ended up at one of the top five party schools in the nation. his friends, were they not friends of my brother, would be much too cool for me to hang out with.

after a lost ticket mishap, we made it to the KBCO rockfest concert, which was the point of this weekend’s trip to colorado. arriving three and a half hours late meant that we missed the B52’s entirely, but we did get to see jack johnson and the indigo girls, whom i have been wanting to see in concert for years. winter park is quite possibly the most picturesque concert venue on the planet. the stage was set up at the base of the ski lifts, and the general admission seating was on the hillside above the stage. the sky was blue and filled with puffy thunderclouds, the kind with white edges and grey underbellies, that sailed by at high speed all afternoon. colorado has that high rocky-mountain atmosphere where the air is cold but the sun shining thru the thin air is so hot it actually stings on the bare skin. unlike an indoor concert, the air smelled like pine trees and sun-warmed dirt, rather than sweat and beer, and my inability to see emily and amy’s faces on the far-away stage was made up for by the ring of jagged peaks that surround winter park. you know those perfect moments? the ones where everything seems gold-coloured and you stop and catch your breath and realize you are thankful just be in this moment? yeah. it was one of those.

and yet, something was missing from the day: andy. andy, with the kissable earlobes, who writes lullabies for his baby nephew, who can rhyme ‘lackadaisical’ and brings me coffee at work, who reads bedtime stories in a british accent and his eyes crinkle when he smiles, which he does often, whose absence i feel sharply, even moments after he leaves. i didn’t think our lives could intertwine so quickly. we haven’t been apart a single day since i met him, and suddenly i feel the distance pull, like cords inside my chest.

7.20.02 – re-opening old wounds

friendship isn’t, or shouldn’t be, something that one can wield like a weapon, a commody to bestow or withhold. after this many years of silence, eventually my heart got tired of breaking, and healed, leaving behind the slight taste of regret. it’s too late to rehash. water under the bridge time.

7.19.02 – Scattered T-Storms from the northwest at 9 mph

i don’t think that i can go back to recap all that’s happened in the past two months – i can only go forward. more free time these days, so i’m going to try to get the writing muscle back in shape. zeke is surly about having to share the computer chair with me; i’ve spent so little time in front of the computer lately that he thinks it’s his chair. he’s grooming himself now, each of us squeezed onto and spilling off the chair in a stubborn, uncomfortable position. he has this endearing habit of accidentally grooming me sometimes – he’ll be licking away at a paw, and then move over to my leg, and back to his paw, and never seem to notice that he’s been licking me clean along with himself.

Twelfth Night is playing tonight – it’s unfortunate that my parents picked this evening to see the show since thunderstorms and rain are predicted for the Boise area from 5 until 11pm tonight. late summer in Idaho – whose weather patterns i’d always been fond of before i started doing outdoor theatre – has arrived and made the past few shows fairly chaotic. it goes like this – the days dawn clear and sunny and hot – 110 last week – and as the day goes on the sun bakes the moisture out of the ground, and it piles up as great thunderclouds on the horizon, which spread and bloom like mushroom clouds over the sky until it blots out the late afternoon sun, cooling what would have been the hottest part of the day. these clouds, for reasons i don’t understand, are full of friction, and the rumble of thunder is a common sound. sometimes the humidity breaks with a rainstorm, other times the clouds break up and leave around sunset, leaving a warm summer sky filled with stars. it’s hard not to like this weather. unless you do outdoor theatre. last week, three of Much Ado‘s four performances were beset by 60 mph “fury of the gods” winds that sent set pieces flying, pouring rain that made the deck slippery like an ice-rink, lightening strikes all around the theatre. oops – gotta go to work early today – there’s a flash flood warning in effect for this afternoon’s storm. more later.