3.31.02 – silicon jesus

spent the past two days with my brothers, fully dorking out over computer stuff…we bought matt a new cell phone/palm and configured it, i bought a printer, installed it on both of my computers, made my laptop play nicely with the desktop machine and share files, took apart the box and re-secured the motherboard, figured out that the power supply was faulty and switched it out for a new one, which required drilling new holes in the case to mount it, nearly toasted my ethernet card but we eventually repaired it, installed 2000 on my laptop even tho the disk was corrupt and a funny little hack was necessary, tweaked with the BIOS till everything worked again, sync’ed and archived files, tweaked with the house network settings…the list goes on. it’s good that i don’t work with computers for a living anymore, because it means that playing with them is still fun. nick dropped by to give me the w2k disk i needed and shuddered at the thought of spending a beautiful spring sunday taking a computer (much less two) apart, but that’s because he has to face computers all day long. of course, archiving and organizing files led me to reading old email and digging up files i hadn’t seen in years, which is why i’m still awake at 3 am.

sigh. whatever happened to those guys who thought a smart girl who knew computers was sexy? this shtick worked for me in high school…

3.29.02

job-related unrest is making me antsy and very very boring. back soon.

3.26.02 – boise, id

today: wyoming, utah, idaho. 753 miles. time to stop traveling. it’s warm here, in a way that makes me believe that spring will actually come after all – the farmland i drove through today is starting to turn hazy green, and the fields were full of baby animals. there’s a special bitter cold reserved for east coast winters that you don’t find in the dry desert air around boise.

am hanging out with the family this week – everyone is either on spring break, between jobs, or taking vacation time, so the house is filled with the happy chaos that always characterizes family gatherings. the plan is to drive up to sun valley tomorrow and ski, however, i still haven’t decided whether i’m going to chicken out. i haven’t skiied since i was injured two years ago, but so far i’ve been able to put off the decision by being too busy/injured to really consider skiing again. i don’t really feel like looking the whole ugly mess in the face tomorrow. maybe i’ll hide in the lodge and blame the weather.

3.25.05 – cheyenne, wy

today: iowa, nebraska, wyoming. 738 miles. saw: 3 wild turkeys, about 10,000 blue heron, a herd of donkeys, 1 camel (the one-hump variety), and 0 curves in the road. nebraska isn’t a very exciting state. had an 8 am breakfast date with paul (in the two years that we dated i don’t think i ever saw paul awake at 8 in the morning, so i’m honored that he was willing to meet me that early). tonight i am in a motel near the train tracks; every time a train whistles, zeke runs to the window and peeks under the curtain at the train rolling by.

3.23.02 – the last night in buffalo

the last night in buffalo. haven’t been posting because i can’t seem to access the blogger page via my isp and haven’t had time to really wonder why that is. tonight i’m just posting brute-force style, by editing the index page that blogger usually writes for me and ftping it back to my server. not that you should be terribly interested in the mechanics of how i post to slithy tove. haven’t had much to write, anyway. my life has been filled with the mundane details of packing, saying goodbye, returning borrowed items, finding new homes for the stuff that won’t fit into my car. zeke is openly traumatized by all the change and movement; he spent large parts of the day hiding underneath the papisans. inwardly i feel equally traumatized; if i had the option of hiding under the furniture until this is all over i probably would do so as well. i can’t figure out why moving is so psychologically difficult. i mean, i put all my stuff in boxes, mail them off to my next home, clean the apartment, put zeke in the car and we go. this time i’m even headed back to my hometown for the summer, so it’s not like i’m headed out into the great unknown or something. but something about the process just makes me tense and anxious on a very subconscious level. somewhere during college i adopted a rather unhealthy coping strategy in which i’m not longer aware on an intellectual level that i’m experiencing stress, but rather i internalize it, express it through my body, and only realized that i must be stressed out when my stomach starts acting up or my shoulders begin to ache from being held hunched so high. i don’t think this can possibly be good for me, but i’m not sure that there’s a way back.

is this wanderlust a part of some self-defeatist attitude? i know that i crave stability and a sense of belonging, yet i continue to place myself outside of those comfortable boundaries, in the hopes of, what? finding something, i guess, although i’m not quite sure what that something is supposed to be yet. maybe i’ll just learn to settle down eventually. maybe this is a massive the-grass-is-always-greener lesson that i have to learn. but maybe there’s something else waiting out there for me to find it, and that’s why my furniture’s been given away, clothing packed, and tomorrow i’ll hop in my car and set out for idaho.

hannah and i took a late-night walk to walgreen’s to get her some trashy magazines to read on the plane tomorrow. the cold air cleared my head, tums calmed my stomach, and besides, it gave us a final chance to shoot dirty looks at the security guard who hassles everyone late at night. i’m really going to miss having hannah as my roommate. i’ve had wonderful roommate karma. in college, while everyone else was seeking the highly-coveted senior single, lmo and val and i were trying to snag the only triple in the french house because we genuinely valued each other’s company over our own need for personal space.

a while back, musing on the topic of moving and new places, i wrote that theatre seemed to be the constant in my life, and that everything else was transitory. i kind of had my head up my ass while i was writing that (but then, what’s new?), getting all intellectual and thinking about the parallels between a transitory art form and a transitory lifestyle devoted to said art form. my life is full of constants that i take for granted – some good, some bad. it’s a constant that zeke will be waiting for me at the door when i come home, which ever door that is. it’s a constant that i get anxiety attacks the week before i move to a new place. i will always stay up late, regardless of what i say about going to bed early. movie theatre popcorn sounds like a good idea before you eat it, not after. white russians taste good, martinis taste bad. exercise always makes me saner. sleeping alone isn’t much fun, but you get better rest that way. but most importantly, there are incredible, special people in my life and they are not transitory. our relationships are always changing, because we ourselves are not constants, but i am incredibly blessed that they are in my life, and they are not expendable.

3.24.02 – iowa city, ia

today: new york, pennsylvania, ohio, indiana, illinois, iowa. 853 miles, 3 tanks of gas, 1 quart of oil. zeke slept in my lap for most of 12 hours, except when he tried to use the litter box, bouncing along at 70 miles an hour, which was hysterically funny. ate a chicken sandwich at Country Kitchen that i was convinced has poisoned me 10 minutes later, but it turned out that i was just paranoid. dido cd got stuck in my cd player for the first four hours of the trip, which was a rough start to the day, but retrieval efforts were successful in the end. i’m in a motel in iowa city tonight. i can hear the roar of the freeway though the double-pane glass, but this place 1) takes pets, 2) has a pool and 3) allows me to dial out on my laptop, all for the bargain price of $39.95 so i really can’t complain.

3.18.02 – it has begun

i have new yoga pants! from target. they are itchy. i couldn’t figure out why my roommate’s tooth-brushing noises were bugging me so much until i realized that my yoga pants! were making me irritable. i wonder if i can return them on that basis: “hello, i would like to return these yoga pants. they make me irritable.”

the packing hurricane has begun. zeke has taken to sleeping in half-full suitcases; it’s as if he knows that i’m going somewhere and is worried that i’ll leave him behind again.

3.17.02 – luck o’ th’ irish

st. patrick’s day in buffalo reminds me something of an over-grown frat party. the drinking began as early as 10 am. by the time that i walked downtown to get dinner between shows, the bars along delaware and chippewa were spilling green-clad drunken revelers out into the streets. there were fights, someone was actually run over by a SUV on chippewa street, men and women were peeing and throwing up in the streets, mardi gras beads were being tossed around to the tune of “show us your tits!”. there were parades and live bands and hot-dog stands appeared on all the corners, roving groups of bagpipers (i know, i was thinking the same thing – but maybe there are irish bagpipers as well?), and yellow school buses scooping up and spilling out drunken revelers. the coffee i ordered came topped with green whipped cream and everyone who worked at Spot Coffee seemed to have taken an oath to speak with an irish accent. while i dodging the drunks on my way up main street, for just a moment buffalo seemed like the saddest place i’d ever lived. everyone was partying but no one really seemed to be having fun, they were loud and drunk and seemed to know that they looked silly with green shamrocks painted on their cheeks. on my way back to the theatre it began to snow.

3.16.02 – brunch at hannah & jen’s place

yesterday hannah and i threw a grown-up party, as evidence by the fact that we spent friday night cleaning our apartment from top to bottom so that people could come over and munch on coffee cake and dutch babies and other we-cooked-it-ourselves-for-real breakfast goodies, and we didn’t even have to get an older friend to purchase the champagne for the mimosas. other than a disastrous attempt to cook bacon for the meat-eaters in the room, the party went well. zeke was the main attraction, so the conversation basically drifted between the show we’re all working on, and all the silly antics that our respective pets do. coree tried very hard to get zeke to show everyone his oversized fangs, but he was having none of that.

last night we watched Magnolia, which i thought was rather like reading a david foster wallace novel: it’s very long, has about twelve distinct plotlines, and just when you think that it’s going to be impossible to wrap up all the separate ends, it rains frogs and the movie is over.

3.15.02 – it’s not you, it’s me.

when someone says he thinks you’re super swell, but he’s afraid of getting too attached right now, that’s code for “i’m just not interested,” isn’t it? i thought so.