5.4.02 – the beautiful people

“beautiful people may give us something to wish we were, but ugly people give us something to look at.” – bill cope

by the way, i’m not ignoring those of you who are expecting email from me, it’s just that my email server decided to take a long lunch on friday and hasn’t returned yet.

5.3.02 – paying the idiot tax

i konked my head on the pool table. yeah, the flat green part. yes, it hurt. no, i won’t explain how i managed to run my forehead into a tabletop that is normally at waist-height.

5.2.02 – :wq!

at the gym the mat room where i stretch out is a balcony that overlooks the racquetball courts. today there were four little old ladies of the pink-sweats-and-purple hair-variety on the court. they could only connect racquet to ball about half the time, much less aim the shot, but they were laughing so hard they could hardly stand up. a perky young athletics trainer came in, spouting phrases like “awesome!” and “whoo-hoo!” and showed them how to do forehand and backhand shots in a smoothly coordinated fashion. the ladies stood by, smiling sweetly until she left (to the tune of “right on, dude!”) and then resumed their perfectly wretched play, swinging the racquet between their legs to hit grounders and so forth. they were a nice alternative to the court’s regulars: why is it that all racquetball plays feel compelled to 1) be a big sweaty middle-aged man and 2) punctuate every shot with an ear-piecing “AHHHRRRGGG!” as they swat the ball to the moon and back? i dislike unnecessary shows of force. i had these roommates once that just truly got on my nerves, and i finally realized it was because they were door-slammers. they slammed doors when all that was necessary was pulling up slightly on the handle when you shut it. how do you justify distrusting everything about a person just because they slam doors?

5.1.02 – the slow minutes after midnight

are cool from the open window, filled with the night sounds of suburbia bordering farmland: crickets and frogs, cicadas and the lone car and the soundless sound of the damp black that cools my forehead and ruffles my hair. my cat presses his nose to the screen, sees things in the dark that i do not. the hours tick by and i wonder why i procrastinate sleep. it’s the waiting i suppose. it slows down time. stretches things.

4.30.02

apartment shopping is depressing me. the theatre wants to house me in a backyard-buddhist-temple-turned-guesthouse, which would be cool except it doesn’t have a kitchen and is allegedly full of spiders. i turned to the classifieds, and found this cute little guest house that this sweet crazy lady will rent to me and zeke but i can’t really afford it. it’s time that zeke started pulling his own weight when it comes to the bills, it think. he spends all day sleeping on top of my sneakers, for reasons i can’t begin to explain.

while i was searching for the classifieds at the flying M today this cute guy came to my rescue (he’d been hogging the newspaper section i wanted). it’s so rare that anyone tries to pick up on me that it always makes me giggle. i’m afraid it probably won’t work out between us since he had the I.Q. of a stick of gum, but it was good for my ego. then i met this very sweet drag queen who talked to me about shakespeare and martial arts.

4.27.02 – inventory:

CD player: out of range, ani difranco

recent/current reading list:

1. twelfth night, shakespeare

2. girl with curious hair, david foster wallace

3. hands of light, barbara brennen

4. the sound of waves, yukio mishima

5. much ado, shakespeare

6. anna karinina, leo tolstoy

7. cosmo (may)

new hair: boy-short and messy

i’m wearing: jeans, blue tank top, red plaid shirt i stole from an ex-ex-ex-boyfriend. boys may come and go, but pilfered clothing is forever.

piercings: five six (i can’t count)

tattoos: one

employment status: part-time. if all goes well, i’ll be stage managing full time from may 7 through the end of the year, so i’m taking a little vacation time in advance.

residence: with my parents, but only until next week, when i get to move into an apartment of the theatre’s choosing. as long as it takes cats and it’s close to the rehearsal hall, i’m not picky.

i am never without: my new camera (hence the sudden influx of pictures on slithy tove). chances are i will continue to force my amaturish photographs on you, dear readers, at least until i get around to putting together a photo gallery. and seeing as how Project Month is nearly over, it might be a while.

weather today: sunny but deceptively cool. this part of spring is heartbreakingly beautiful, when the leaves are still pale green and tightly curled and the blossoms are falling like snow in the breeze, and the sky is blue blue blue and the sun is hot through the windshield and everywhere you look, the earthy tones of winter are giving way to bold, primary and secondary colors.

4.26.02 – come back from san francisco

it’s very easy to be nostalgic for a place that you get to drop in, visit, and escape before dealing with any of the logistical complexities inherent in city life. my trip to the bay area had nearly all the requisite pieces: much eating-of-the-avocado/crepes/sushi/fresh fruit, sunshine sunshine sunshine, i prodded, photographed and generally harassed jellyfish on the shore at stinson beach, talked politics w/ my brother, did the Daily crossword in the shade behind the stanford coffee house, sat up late drinking wine with lauren, had a haircut at glamarama, saw the dr who’s working on my neck, played with lauren’s kitties, rode the MUNI with its usual dose of freaks, did a little damage to my credit card in union square, climbed to the top of russian hill and gazed at the city and the bridge and the bay glittering in the darkness.

4.24.02 – a whole new you

i have new hair. the best thing about it is that the back is cut really short in that boy-haircut way so that it’s all just-shaved and fuzzy and fun to play with. once again i am convinced of the value of the $50 haircut over that of the do-it-myself blunt cut. wendy at glamarama is my haircut goddess.

i’m back in the land of the cowboy now. lauren rocks my world twice over today; first, just cause she’s lauren and secondly because she got up at four am to drive me to SFO.

i have this weird strain of airplane-specific narcolepsy in which it is nearly impossible for me to stay awake during take-off. i’ve had it for years, and it only seems to be getting stronger. at this point, i can feel the drowsiness start to settle down on me as i walk down the isle looking for my seat. i stow my luggage, fasten my seatbelt and my eyes begin to get heavy. next thing i know, we’re in the air. usually i wake up 5-10 minutes after take-off and i’m perfectly alert for the rest of the flight. this might make more sense to me if i was a nervous flyer and the sleeping was some sort of self-defense against the fear, but the truth is that i’ve always been thrilled by roar and the force that presses your head back against the seat while the plane tips up at a what seems like an impossible angle. back when i could stay awake, i used to try to pinpoint the moment when the wheels would leave the ground and all those tons of steel and people and luggage would become airborne, and every time i would marvel that such a thing could be possible.

4.22.02 – decentralizing me

the upside to having a terminally fucked-up neck and a specialist who lives in redwood city is that i get lots more trips to the bay area to visit friends. i’m hanging out with my brother at stanford now, and tomorrow i’ll head up to the city to see lauren & co. hovav is my literary hero of the day: he traded me a coffee date for british editions of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy imported directly from blackwells in oxford.

it’s disorienting, all this moving around to places that i’ve once known well. i spent the afternoon wandering around stanford’s campus while chris was in class. it’s not so embarrassing to return to campus now because the chances of bumping into someone i know and getting that “what are you still doing hanging around here?” look are diminishing with time, allowing me to wander around, drink jamba juice and do the daily crossword behind the coffee house in relative anonymity. later this evening chris and i drove up to san francisco to have dinner at ti couz, which is not far from where i used to live. in order to get back on the freeway we had to drive right past my apartment on oak street. technically i live in boise right now, a place where i spent the first 18 years of my life but now feel like a frequent visitor more than an actual resident. this ability to move freely from once place to another so quickly – it almost makes me feel like i’m moving backwards and forwards in time. it’s not a sense of rootlessness so much as a sense of having roots spread so far and wide that i feel pulled in all directions – back to every place that i’ve known, and yet pulled forward always toward somewhere new. i’m decentralized. it’s not that it doesn’t matter where i am – it’s just that there are so many options, and each one has an infinite number of possibilites attached to it. how am i supposed to choose wisely? i wonder what life was like at a time when there were no options; there was a place where i was destined to be born, to live and to die and be buried, and that place defined me.

airplane travel always makes me feel a little stretched out, as if the spirit can’t quite follow as fast as the plane goes, and it takes a day or two to catch up and be whole again.