2.14.02 – be mine, valentine

Wop-a-din-din

She’s got big green eyes

And a long Egyptian face

She moves across the floor

At her own pace

When I’m here in bed

She’ll jump up on my chest

And when we lock eyes there’s so much love

I wanna cry

She comes in near

When I scratch under her ear

And she lifts her head

When I kiss around her neck

Won’t go to sleep

When she falls along my side

And two green eyes fade

To a porcelain marble white

And somehow when I sleep

She’ll end up at my feet

And if I roll and kick her out

I might knock her to the ground

But she’ll come back anyhow

Ella es muy vital

más triste que salir el sol

pura como el agua

The morning comes

She squints up to shield out the sun

And she’ll go and lay

In the warmest dusty rays

And I hold her face

She lays perfectly in place

And she’ll yawn and stretch

And stare me down expressionless

And lay back down into her nest

And if someone calls

She’ll race me out the hall

When she hears the phone

Then she knows I’m leaving home

She don’t wanna be alone

And I know it’s wrong

That I’m going away so long

And for her it’s rough

I can’t be with her enough

But I’ll never give her enough

Ella es muy vital

más triste que salir el sol

pura como el agua

And somehow when I sleep

She’ll end up at my feet

And if I roll and kick her out

I might knock her to the ground

But she’ll come back anyhow

– the red house painters

2.12.02 – toosday, whoosday

from A.A. Milne’s Winne-the-Pooh:

“…you can’t help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY, even if he doesn’t spell it right; but spelling isn’t everything. There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn’t count.”

2.13.02 – through the looking-glass

went on a tour of the Summer Street Cat Clinic’s boarding facilities, as i have to find someone to take care of zeke when i go out of town for a week later this spring. the place was small, but very clean, and the women who worked there obviously took good, loving care of the cats. i took one look at the shiny steel cages, however, and had to flee. back home, i apologized to zeke for even thinking about putting him into a cage. when i adopted him from the animal shelter, he had been living in a tiny cage for so long that he was afraid of open spaces. i brought him home and he spent the first couple of days slinking along the walls and trying to stay in corners and under furniture. now he is a wild beast who prowls the house in search of mice, taunts my parents’ big dog, and climbs into my lap to purr whenever he feels like it. his new favorite trick is to place a mouse on the floor right in front of the mirror, and then reach around behind the mirror and try to capture the mirror mouse. all he’s succeeded in doing so far is bringing the mirror crashing down a couple of times.

2.11.02 – open season on silly putty

spent my day off working with the local stage hands’ union on the load-out of the auto show. the ford rep i worked for today was pretty cool; after momentarily flinching when he saw that his team of three burly, scruffy men had been augmented by a young woman, he got over it and even gave the obligatory girl-job (scratching 2001 decals off and replacing them with 2002 decals) to one of the guys and had me work on loading out the heavy stuff. last week during the load-in i worked for buick and the rep was pissed that he had two women assigned to his team and assumed (loudly) that us “gals” were the reason that our team couldn’t lift a 48718842-pound stage out of the shipping crate without the assistance of a fork-lift. a lot of the guys i work with are pretty cool, but some of the crusty old timers can be kinda sexist. working these union gigs causes me to become more butch the instant i walk in the door.

one of the displays we were taking down today was a turntable about 20′ in diameter, made of steel and iron and wood. we had about half of the platform pieces unloaded when i started to rotate the turntable and accidentally grabbed the iron rim from the underside. it turned faster than i’d expected and before i could move my right hand it ran right over one of the wheels that the turntable was resting on. it was out the other side before i even had time to yelp. it hurt, but not as much as i expected it to (always a bad sign) and for a minute or two i was afraid to take off my glove and inspect the damage. when i got brave and pulled the glove off, my fingers were red and throbbing but not crushed flat like i’d imagined. this turntable weighed thousands of pounds, even with half the platforms taken off. it was the equivalent of having my fingers run over by a volkswagon bug. tonight my fingers feel a little bruised but are otherwise fine and i’m feeling more than a little lucky to be typing. it’s amazing how resilient the body can be sometimes.

later, hannah & i went to the mall to buy silly putty. the guy at KBToys told us that he didn’t have it because it’s a seasonal item. when exactly is silly putty season, anyway?

2.10.02 – on the nightstand

geeks: how two lost boys rode the internet out of idaho, by jon katz

the tao of pooh, by benjamin hoff

hands of light, by barbara ann brennan

the shipping news, by annie proulx

2.9.02 – what’s right in front of me

i have the following talismans on my desk:

-the wind-up nun who spits blue-green sparks as she glides across the table, ruler and bible in hand.

-the pipe-cleaner gnome thingy that my dad brought me from sweden. apparently it’s good luck to clip them on your desk lamp, or something like that.

-dedo the benevolent gargoyle figurine that valerie gave me. dedo is my favorite gargoyle.

-yoda figure from the original star wars collection. my brothers and i once had the millennium falcon and all the major characters, but eventually everything except yoda disappeared into the depths of the sandbox.

-a buttercup (the dark-haired powerpuff girl) key chain. when you push the button on her head, she says, “i think they’re asking for a heiny whoopin’!” and then makes some karate chop sounds. she used to live on my key chain but the loop on her head broke off. it’s a memento of lauren, since since she’s buttercup and i’m blossom, the red-haired one (see 3.29.01).

-my golden plastic tiara, because there are days when you just need to feel like the Princess of Everything.

-my deeleeboppers (headband with pipe-cleaner antennae with gold sparkly balls on the ends). they’re actually my coding antennae, so these days i don’t have to don them too often. which is probably a good thing, because they’re so comfortable that i often forget i’m wearing them until i leave the house and wonder why everyone is looking at me funny.

2.8.02 – hollywood sex and emetophobia

our kitchen smells like pumpkin barf. turns out that the funny smell in the fridge was coming from the thai coconut pumpkin soup from a few weeks back. i was all in favor of throwing it away, tupperware and all, but hannah didn’t want to let the container go. once we opened it and the barf smell emanated throughout the apartment, i knew that throwing away the container would have been a better idea. given that i have a significant fear of barf (emetophobia, if you want to get technical about it), even when it’s actually just soup that smells like barf, hannah was kind enough to clean it out. we burned candles and watched sex & the city until the smell went away. hannah and i don’t have a tv, but we can watch dvds on my computer, so we rented the first season of sex & the city to watch at night when we get home from tech. the show is silly but it has a fabulous costume designer. and besides, brainless tv is kind of what we need to chill out after tech, altho this show is proving to be much less stressful than the last one. sex & the city always makes me feel like i ought to be having more sex than i am, however…which isn’t difficult really, given how utterly single i am at the moment. anyway, to watch dvds we just drag chairs up to my desk. i always feel sort of like the real-life version of joey and chandler on friends when they jump into their side-by-side ottomans and synchronize their reclining.

2.7.02 – what about bob, part II

remember what i said about the dead guy in the props closet, back on 1.4.02? well, there’s more to that story. see, tradition dictates that the ashtray containing the remains of bob get to go onstage for the final performance of every show. last sunday was the closing performance of Flyin’ West, and so mike found a nice out-of-the-way spot for bob to sit upstage during the show.

at intermission, one the actors came off stage and said that she’d had trouble opening the front door (the set is part of an 1890’s farmhouse). when i went onstage to look at the door, i discovered that the deadbolt was sticking out. i tried to poke it back into the lock, but it was stuck fast. stephanie had only been able to open the door because she forced it, breaking off the piece of wood on the door jam that the deadbolt was resting against. the doorknob and lock were the old-fashioned kind; the only way to turn the deadbolt would have been to insert a skeleton key into the keyhole. but here’s the thing: there are no keys for this door. there never were any keys purchased or fitted into the lock, because we had no reason to lock any of the doors onstage. since we had no keys, mike had to take the whole lock mechanism apart during intermission and rebuild the door without the deadbolt. now, we know that the door was working normally at the top of the show, because it’s one of the last things that the stage manager checks before the show starts. the door operated normally through most of the first act, because lots of characters go in and out of the door. then, sometime before the last entrance, the deadbolt was turned out. (terrible use of the passive voice, i know.) without a key, there’s no way it could have been turned accidentally. so my theory is it was bob’s doing. after all, isn’t that what mischievous spirits do? they lock and unlock doors. how many unsolved mysteries specials have you seen in which some old house is plagued by a ghost who loves to play with the door locks? everyone swears that in ten years, bob has never made any sort of mischief, but on the other hand, this winter was the first time that bob didn’t get to go on for his final performance. the last six performances of Lake Effect (the show before Flyin’ West) were canceled because of the blizzard. since no one anticipated that the storm would cancel the show, bob didn’t get a chance to go on for Lake Effect. ever since then, we’ve been joking about how bob’s spirit must be restless, but now i’m convinced that there’s something there to it. maybe bob was just trying to let us know that he’s still hanging around the theatre.

2.6.02 – cornbread, anyone?

i made cornbread tonight. the box of cornmeal said “enriched and degerminated.” i like the fact that my cornmeal has been de-germinated. after all, who would want germs in their cornmeal?

2.5.02 – the vision statement that wasn’t

and so slithy tove returns.

what i found during this week of silence is that i am filled with a narrative that has to get out. i’m not claiming that what i have to say has value for anyone else; nor am i claiming that it doesn’t have value. all i know is that some part of me is so full of things to say. when i was a kid, i used to imagine myself as the heroine of a book and i would spend hours lost in daydream, narrating the story of me. there were times in which i embellished, added elements of the fantastic or at least gave myself better hair, but for the most part i just narrated my life as it was, as if i were trying to draw a picture of my life as i see it, almost so that i could be viewed from the outside as i see myself on the inside. it was probably good defense mechanism for the brainiac kid who always felt misunderstood and left out in school. i stopped doing this when i got older, mainly because getting caught talking to yourself in junior high school is instant social death. and then last year i was suddenly inspired to start slithy tove. i’d been reading metameat, and other blogs, and i found that reading other people’s daily journals was causing me to slip back into my habit of narrating the events of my life in my head (i tried not to be the crazy lady on the MUNI mumbling aloud to herself). and so slithy tove was born.

last week i kind of burned myself out with those last two big posts. the ferocity, variety, and sheer volume of responses that i received kind of overwhelmed me, and it was sort of like getting caught talking to myself again, only this time everyone had strong feelings about what i had to say. ironically, it was only two weeks ago that an english prof emailed me and asked me to talk about what my vision for slithy tove is for an article he was writing. i told him i had no vision statement because the vision for slithy tove changes daily. slithy tove was my creative space to say whatever was on my mind, to be funny, or self-absorbed or whiny, to contradict myself if i felt contradictory, to wax poetic or share a vision of whatever weird thing i’ve encountered that day. above all else, it was a space that was mine.

i used to think it’d want to be a writer when i grow up, but i steered away from it eventually because i have this intense fear of The Blank Page. i suffer intense performance anxieties when it comes to being creative. never mind inventing stories on demand, i used to hide during mic check in the theatre for fear that someone would put the mic in my hand and ask me just to talk while they fiddled with sound levels. my voice would stick in my throat and my mind would become this panicked blank white wall. with artistic endeavors there was always this pressure: what if i can’t create? what if i have nothing to say? it terrorized me. in college i studied directing, and the same fear plagued me. i loved directing, i loved the collaborative nature of the work, loved the discovery and learning process, but i was terrified that i had no artistic inspiration. i still feel that looming fear, and it’s probably why i’m pursuing a career as a stage manager right now rather than as a director. but for some reason, slithy tove was different. i felt responsible to no one but myself. i knew i had readers, but i didn’t feel responsible to give them anything in particular. in that the internet is a pull- rather than a push-model of information dissemination, my thoughts were out there for anyone to read, but i wasn’t forcing them on anyone. i didn’t feel pressured to write things to please anyone, so that i could finally start to write things that pleased me. there was no fear of The Blank Page because i didn’t feel i was being judged for the quality of my creative inspiration. i was writing slithy tove for me. i have often used slithy tove as a sort of personal therapy session, for talking out things about my life that don’t really make sense until i take the time to write them out. and sure, it was fun to get email from people, particularly since it was usually flattering or funny.

i realize now that i’ve been laboring under the misapprehension that i don’t have to be responsible for what i say here. slithy tove is mine to use however i please, but that doesn’t mean that i can say things w/out regard for who might be reading it any more than i could walk into a room and start spewing opinions without regard for who might be around to hear them.

in writing slithy tove, i’m learning how to be true to myself, to examine my nature and my actions with ruthless scrutiny. i’m not advocating the sort of pathological honesty in which people’s feelings are disregarded for the sake of Truth, but i have been using my blog as a tool for being honest with myself. one of the things that constantly amazes me about the friends in my life is how wonderfully different all of them are from one another and from me. and in that none of us are the same, i am realizing that i will never be able to please everyone, no matter how far i stretch myself. i don’t like hurting people and i don’t do it intentionally, but i will never be a good friend to anyone if i don’t understand myself. getting to know me isn’t an easy process, but i think it’s a significant journey. the other day i wrote “i’m in my twenties. figuring out what constitutes The Good Life is supposed to be a hobby.” i came out sounding glib, but i actually mean that. i think i somehow expected that after i finished college, my fairy godmother would wave her wand and poof! i’d turn into a Grownup. it turns out that it’s much harder than i thought. so to those of you who still read slithy tove, you are welcome to come along on the ride. besides, who else will i tell about the bizarre bowling injury i sustained in canada last week, or how i nearly lost my eyelashes in a cornbread-baking incident at work?

incidentally, slithy tove will be a year old on saturday. i went back and looked at the first entry. it said, “the impetus: the human need to express, connect, explain.”