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.

4.21.02 – sunday breakfast with my parents

[context: we’re talking about how each generation tries to find a new fashion statement that will horrify its parents. e.g. bell bottoms and mini skirts, tattoos and facial piecings, and so on]

mom: “the one thing that every generation has in common is that it thinks that it invented sex.”

me: “uh huh.”

mom: “i mean, no one likes to think about their parents doing that. i mean, eww. one time i opened a cupboard at my parents’ house and…”

me: “can we stop talking about this?”

4.20.01 – from the slithy tove inbox:

Delivered-To: celia@slithy-tove.net

Date: Sat, 20 Apr 2002 22:18:17 -0400 (EDT)

From:

Subject: Your web site

To: celia@slithy-tove.net

Hello again Bill,

I just found this quote on your web site, and thought

it would be nice to send you a message:

Quote: “I just can’t take the disappointment, Anu.

Every evening Eudora plays that happy little tune and

my heart leaps in anticipation of a message addressed

to me, and then I discover that it’s just an

impersonal group message…”

You are a very talented writer.

I could not understand why you said today that I was

only the second person to send you flowers. So I’m

even more glad that I did.

By the way, was your birthday today or on April 8th?

I’m happy to read your journal. I’m not quite ready

yet to share mine, but hey, could be soon!

Take care, and have a lovely weekend.

See you in the forum,

Paulette

______________________________________________________________________

Find, Connect Date! http://personals.yahoo.ca

oh dearie me. either this is a really sophisticated piece of address-confirmation spam, or else it seems that “bill” has been passing off my blog as his own in order to impress the ladies on the Yahoo! Canada personals site. tsk tsk, bill. didn’t you know she’d do a little internet-sleuthing?

4.17.02 – tod’s driving shoes

the following are the most frequently-used search terms that generated a link to slithy tove this week:

slumber party naked

tod’s driving shoes

san francsico traffic (sic)

dr jekyll and ms hyde breasts

supermodels negative impact

china flats

i’m afraid that i probably disappointed all of you. :)

4.17.02 – technical difficulties

the nike/rio portable mp3 player is the biggest load of crap i’ve ever purchased. i guess that’s what i get for compromising my values and buying something from nike.