5.9.02 – Colonel Mustard did it in the library with the candlestick

we went to see the Boise Actors’ Guild (a local community playhouse) put on Agatha Christie’s Mousetrap tonight. I’d never seen or read the story, and it truly is a marvelous whodunit mystery. i’m terribly pleased with myself for guessing the ending. the show, while put on with limited resources, was loads of fun and well done. the english accents were a bit unpredictable, but several of the actors were quite good. i was confused by the guy who, dressed in a white shirt, slacks and a tie, insisted on wearing his pants slung skater-punk low, despite the fact that it was period piece circa 1950. it was just that he did a lot of leaping about the stage and i kept worrying that they might fall off.

you knew it was coming: the obligatory picture of my cat. every personal website has to have one. zeke had a rough day today; i took him over to meet the cats in the house where i might be house-sitting for all summer. zeke was well-behaved, but one of the cats, phoebe, kept cornering him and growling and spitting, and eventually the poor dear had to climb the curtains. i didn’t even try to introduce george, the insane dog that lives in in the back yard and who, in his enthusiasm, left great angry red scratches down my arms in place of a greeting. maybe zeke and i need to keep looking for our own apartment.

5.8.02 – the anatomy of the Un-Boy

found out yesterday that an ex is getting married. and no matter how much i know that i’m better off without him, it doesn’t change the fact that something made it hard for me to breathe last night. the feeling passed in the face of logic, but even still. i feel like a set of romantic training wheels.

which brings me to another, more serious issue: there appears to be a significant decline in the number of Un-Boys in the world. whatever happened to them? i mean, they were always a rare commodity, but these days they seem downright scarce. recent field research has led me to the disturbing conclusion that perhaps Un-Boys grow up to be regular guys after all. maybe Un-Boy-ness isn’t a personality trait so much as it is a stop along the way from adolescence to adulthood, before the inevitable broken hearts of our twenties crush their heart-on-the-sleeve idealism and leave them jaded and behaving much like their beer-swilling counterparts. maybe Un-Boys don’t survive past age 21 and now there just aren’t many left, or perhaps i’ve just used up all my Un-Boy karma. maybe i’ve contributed to the decline – god knows, hearts were broken on all sides.

5.7.02 – disappearing, inc.

life is funny. sometimes people come back into your life just when you thought you’d never see them again. other times they vanish when you least expect it.

5.5.02 – little white lies

oh man, the Society of Women Engineers is after me again. see, way back when i was a wee high school student, i thought that i wanted to be a computer programmer/engineer/guru, and so i applied for and received several college scholarships on that basis. the local chapter of the Society of Women Engineers gave me $300, which just about covered the cost of my books for my first term at Stanford. as it turns out, computers are a nice toy (and were once an excellent way to meet boys), but i have absolutely no interest in working with them for a living. the problem is, the nice lady who runs the boise chapter of SWE and gave me my scholarship tracks me down every spring and invites me to the scholarship awards ceremony and asks for an update as to what exciting things i’m doing in the engineering world. and i just don’t have the guts to tell her that i took their money and used it on a drama degree. my mother suggested that i tell her about the engineering-related things i’ve done since college and skim over the part where i never actually studied engineering.

Dear Barbara,

Thank you for the invitation to the SWE scholarship awards ceremony. I will not be able to attend, but wanted to take a quick moment to send an update, as you requested. In college (Stanford, ’00) I studied Computer Science and also Drama (directing). [Once I got to college I took a couple of programming classes and then tossed the engineering plan out the window and spent the rest of my four years being in a lot of school plays.] My senior honors thesis was a wonderful combination of my two interests: I developed computer software for stage managers. The beta version was available to my drama department when I graduated, and since then writing further versions of it have been a pet project of mine. [I barely cranked out something that my thesis advisor was willing to sign off on, burned a couple of copies to file away with every other undergraduate thesis that will never be read again, and since then I haven’t touched it.]

Since graduation I have been pursuing a career in theatre, but I have found that my technical background is extremely valuable – writing code is certainly better than waiting tables between jobs. :) [I find that my technical background is very useful – I’m the only stage manager I know that can work both PCs and Macs and when the copier eats the script, I’m not afraid to open up the doors and start taking the machine apart. Also, I can plug the sound equipment in all by my self.] I worked as a web designer for a startup in Silicon Valley during the big tech boom, and since then have done web design and development for several small businesses. [Back in the good ol’ days when startups were so desperate for staff that they’d hire a drama major, I was a web designer for a vaporware company. Eventually, they went belly-up like everyone else and I got laid off the day before Christmas. But that’s okay because I hated them anyway and went to work full time at a theatre.] My theatre work takes me all over the country – this year I’ve been in New York, the previous year I was in San Francisco, and this summer I will be returning to Boise to work with the Shakespeare Festival for a while. [Now that I’m a theatre professional, I’m homeless. After a year in San Francisco and one in Buffalo, New York, I’m back here in Boise, Idaho, living with my parents and feeling really lame because I’m twenty-four years old and I can’t afford my own apartment.]

Best of luck, [Please stop calling me. I’m sorry I spent your scholarship money on books about Brecht]

-jcg

5.4.02 – only we

We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog’s yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum’s scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother’s retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what’s brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd.

– David Foster Wallace, Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way

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.