2.24.03 – mr. right

andy (wearing powder blue pj pants printed with skiing penguins): umm, will you record Buffy for me tomorrow night?

[grin] what more could i ask for in a guy?

2.23.03 – j.cruel

from the index page of a j.crew catalogue:

men’s: 22 items in big & tall sizes!

women’s: 63 items in petite sizes!

look what this reinforces about body size: that it’s okay for guys to be “big and tall”, but women still need to be petite. when i was in college i went through a phrase where i desperately wished to be a petite woman. i didn’t just want to be skinny; i wanted to be short, small-framed, fragile-looking. this might have had something to do with the fact that i was dating a man who had always dated petite asian women before me (and after me, incidentally), and because we did a lot of swing dancing. the smaller dancers could be flipped and tossed in the air, while my 130-lb boyfriend could only swing my 5’8″ frame around so far.

sometimes i can split my psyche into two neat halves: the half that wants to be the pop-culture archetypal woman, and the half that is acquainted with (and likes) who i actually am. on one level, i’ve always wanted to be the sort of fragile woman that awakens a desire to protect; in real life, i’m deeply self-sufficient. my desired body type vs. my actual body type reflects this same relationship: i wanted to be small, fragile and feminine; in actuality i’m tall, strong and tom-boyish. it’s like those arms that get smaller just below the shoulder. i know they aren’t normal for my body, but that doesn’t mean that the culturally-conditioned part of my psyche doesn’t still admire/desire them. on the other hand, i know that i’m never going to have arms that do that, so i opt for having biceps instead. which are, ultimately, more useful, and the healthy part of my psyche appreciates them for their own functional beauty.

it’s funny how we idolize things that we wouldn’t actually want for ourselves.

2.21.03 – you know you’re a geek when…

recent online time has been consumed by the discovery of e-scrabble: the key is the chat box, which allows players to talk smack between turns. you know you’re a geek when you leave the bar early because you want to go home and play bravura. now, sleep calls.

2.18.03 – reasoning with a search engine

trying to teach google the difference between “diana son” and “diana’s son” proves impossible, so i’m spending the evening digging through articles about Prince William in order to find interviews with playwright Diana Son. BCT’s production of Valparaiso closes this weekend; the next project will be assistant directing Stop Kiss. the total lack of stage management jobs this spring in boise has helped to push me into challenging myself in other areas in the theatre – sound technician, assistant directing, and also teaching children’s acting classes at the Drama School. i feel fumbling and incompetent, but i’m learning, and that learning curve is what keeps me alive and interested.

one of the hardest things about the tour i was one last fall was that no one, myself included, really believed in the quality of the product. the show didn’t do its job – it didn’t make kids excited about theatre or literature, or even just engage them for two hours with great story telling. the opening of Valparaiso earlier this month was a reminder of just how good it feels to work on a project that i’m proud of. it doesn’t matter that i’m just the sound technician (not that the job is easy, but it’s not what i want to do with my career), because i’m collaborating with twenty amazing, talented people to create something really good. that’s all i need. well, that and a paycheck, if we’re being practical here. :)

andy’s watching something with lots of gunfire on the tv right now, i can’t write a coherent sentence to save my life.

2.15.03 – american civics lesson

well, after my tirade about the uselessness of grassroots campaigns, i suppose i ought to comment on the fact that boise’s mayor resigned yesterday under the pressure of a grassroots campaign. it seems he’s been spending the city’s money on boondoggles to new york city and accepting bribes from insurance companies, among other things. when the story broke about three weeks ago, a group of volunteers in bumble-bee-yellow t-shirts emblazoned with “repeal mayor coles” took to the streets and began collecting signatures. they managed to collect more than 30,000 signatures, which equals about a third of the registered voters in the city, and yesterday under the pressure of the repeal action, as well as impending legal action, the mayor stepped down. i didn’t feel strongly the enough about the issue to sign a petition, and besides, i didn’t really think it’d work. an interesting side effect of ousting (republican) mayor coles, however, is that boise’s new mayor (for the next two weeks anyway) is an african american democrat. so yay for grassroots campaigns.

2.13.03 – begin rant

it feels like the whole world is coming apart at the seams. and yet, my life goes on as normal: i go to work, i sort mail and answer phones, at home andy and i watch the simpsons and play with fetch with the cat, cook veggie burgers and speculate on the forecast for snow; i go to the theatre and we put on another good performance of edgy, in-your-face don delillo dialogue. i haven’t bothered to buy plastic and duct tape and bottled water.

i claim i haven’t been able to put together a really good rant on the current state of world politics because i’m just too angry about it; is that the case or is it just apathy? is it too hard, too much work to really get angry about it? i still feel safe; boise idaho is probably not a big terrorist target. i think it was too hard to get angry for a long time; now this growing sense of impotence is making me angry whether i like it or not. no matter what i, or any other average joe american citizen, says, it’s not going to change the current course of american politics. i get daily forwards from other peace-lovin’ friends: email petitions to sign and mail to the president, a grassroots campaign encouraging people to send envelopes of rice to the white house – these are followed by more emails exposing the petitions as frauds and the rice idea as a good way to start a new anthrax scare. what’s a peace-nik to do these days? my co-worker amy invited me to go to a peace rally at the state house. “what’s the point, tho?” said my cynical half, “100 idahoans marching around in the rain is not going to change george bush’s mind about going to war.” i mean, a hundred thousand, even if every resident in the entire state went on a hunger strike, president bush wouldn’t give a fuck. “i guess it’s just good to feel the solidarity with other people,” said amy. “i don’t want solidarity,” i told amy, “i want change.”

it seems strange to me that the entire world is about to erupt in war based on the decisions of a very small number of men. we talk about “the french, the germans, the americans” as if all of the citizens of that country were representatives of the political sentiments of the country’s leaders. i’m having trouble referring to the US as “we” these days. or rather, i catch myself doing it, because it’s a common speech pattern, and have to correct myself because i did not vote for that man and his decisions do not represent my will. but will the whole world come to this realization? will the iraqi people know that i didn’t mean for this to happen?

andy and i share a penchant for Mystery Science Theatre 3000 movies; last night we rented one that started with a short called Truck Farming. it was this piece of 1950’s style propaganda ala Better Living Through Chemistry. when i look at this kind of propaganda, it seems so blatant, so totally unhip that i can’t believe it could persuade anyone; of course, i’m looking at it through narrowed, cynical eyes that the 50’s didn’t have. i feel like, if that’s propaganda, then i’ll definitely be able to spot it from a mile away. but of course, propaganda has evolved along side the rest of the country, getting hipper and more cynical, more subtle. the government keeps its citizens busy laying in stores of plastic and duct tape (which, by the way, might come in handy for a leaky sink but will do very little to protect anyone in the event of nuclear, biological or chemical weapon strikes) and assuring us that by democratizing iraq, the threat of osama bid laden will have been eliminated. isn’t it funny how the US government went after saddam hussein just about the same time that bin laden slipped through their fingers? nothing like a war to distract folks. i mean, the audio recording from bin laden that aired earlier this week was promoted by colin powell even before it aired on radio stations in the middle east, because it served to further the US government’s case for war. and then there’s crap like this coming from CNN.

how can we trust news coming from an organization that makes war – the potential loss of thousands of lives – sound like a shootout at the OK Corral?

and here’s something that really rankles: a clip i heard on the BBC world service this evening described a university district in a town on the border between afghanistan and pakistan in which books promoting jihad on the soviet infidels can still be found, left over from the soviet invasion of afghanistan. these books were published by the university of nebraska press. why? because during the cold war, the US was all for getting afghans to cut out the eyes of soviets, who happened to be our enemies at the time too. but now Americans are the infidels, and this propaganda has turned back on us. and we don’t have the guts to admit that maybe all our propaganda, foreign policy, our dependence on middle eastern oil, the fact that we supported the taliban not that long ago might have something to do with our current woes? i’m not excusing anything about september 11th, but it also infuriates me that the US can feed most americans the simplistic view that “they hate us for our religious differences.”

do i believe that saddam hussein is actually a nice man whose penchant for cowboy hats and american television indicates his fondness for america? no. but do think that we’re going to make anything better for the people of iraq, and the rest of the world, but invading like we are now? no. we’ve broken NATO in half, for god’s sake. north korea has nuclear missiles capable of striking the west coast, and the US keeps saying, “china and japan, can’t you guys work this out yourselves? we’re kinda busy over here bringing democracy to the people of iraq.” but do i have a better solution? well, no. and that’s part of what makes me angry, too.

end rant. i invite responses. i’m not claiming any of the above rant to have been expertly researched, so correction or discussion is welcome.

2.12.03 – technical difficulties

augg! the power supply in my computer is on the fritz, and so posts are going to be a bit scattered till i can get the computer up and working again. at the moment its guts are spilled out all over the floor in the office, and zeke keeps trying to climb inside.

2.10.03 – i am the tax maaaaaan

doing battle with the tax man tonight. three states filed, whomp whomp. it wasn’t pretty – thank god i don’t own anything of substantial financial value, houses or stocks or children. i mean, who writes this shit?

before i could start, i spent two hours trying to fix my dad’s bad install of turbo tax before giving up on my online help desk guy (who i thought was a bot: “please wait while i research your issue, jennifer” until he started making grammatical errors like “please to open the turbo tax now” or “the serial number is their at the back of the cd”, at which point it became clear that the long delay in response time was because i was talking to a guy in malaysia or somewhere).

Help Desk: please wait while i research your issue…

Help Desk: please wait while i research your issue…

Jennifer: okay, i give up. this product is the biggest piece of crap that i’ve ever purchased. i could have done my taxes with an abacus and a quill faster than this.

jennifer has left the chat room.

Help Desk: please wait while i research your issue…

for reasons i only partially understand, calling technical support lines always triggers a fight-or-flight response in me. as soon as i dial my heart rate goes up and i’m ready to fight, treating the agent like he’s the obstacle between me and my fully-functioning computer, and everything comes out of my mouth sounding more belligerent than i mean for it to. this is rarely helpful.

2.8.03 – the wallflower

ah, here’s the problem. turns out i was loading up an old copy of netscape 4.7. it’s not slithy-tove’s fault, i just needed a different perspective on the issue. like netcape 6. which took about 2 hours to download, thank you very much.

is it possible to be such a wallflower that you’re stuck to the wall in your own home? was invited by a co-worker to an indian-food feast this afternoon, and somehow i’m still in my house, dorking around on the computer and trying to fix the dishwasher, telling myself that this shit needs to get done when in reality, i’m just really bad at parties where i don’t know anybody.

2.5.03 – book worm

no. time. to. blog. can’t. stop. reading. The Corrections.