4.16.02 – freudian slips

when i got into bed last night my eyes were drooping and i was ready for sleep. but as soon as i turned out the light and my head hit the pillow, all the little what-ifs came creeping in on little cat feet and settled around me, and all thoughts of sleep vanished in the face of these rare but obnoxious little visitors. i guess i eventually drifted off, and in the morning when i woke they were still lurking around my pillow, but they retreated as soon as i got up. now i guess i’m staying up late again in the hopes that sleep will win out over the what-ifs. that and i’ve realised that i actually procrastinate going to bed. it sounds backwards, i know – that i’m putting off sleep in order to do other, less essential tasks – but hey, this way you get a late-night blog update, right?

nick wants to see frailty for our birthday-movie, but i think i’m too much of a weenie. i have a vivid imagination, okay? the review on ebert‘s website is just glowing, if that make any difference. i always get sad when someone mentions ebert, because now that siskel is gone it’s just ebert, and it’s like bert without ernie or peanut butter without jelly or me without you.

4.15.02 – fashion for dummies

i rarely wear a baseball cap, but i always feel so sporty and tomboyish when i do, even tho it’s usually just to cover up the fact that i haven’t showered.

4.14.02 – decisions

i got the job that i’ve been chewing my nails over for the past three weeks. just about every other detail of my practical life (where i’m going to live this summer, should i go to boston for a job interview next week, can i afford to see a doctor about my neck, yada yada) hinged on this hiring decision. now the other pieces of the jigsaw puzzle can start to fall into place.

4.13.02 – pro-cras-ti-na-tion: melancholy 3 am

i think too much.

4.12.02 – you’ve been warned

good god: Things Other People Accomplished When They Were Your Age. not recommended for type-As or anyone who feels at all insecure about what they’ve done with the first 2x years of their lives. it’s good for a few laughs, tho. my favorite is age 72.

last night i sat down at midnight to eat a late dinner. the heavy, sleeping silence of the house was temporarily broken by a plane or helicopter nearby; it flew so low that the whole house vibrated and buzzed. for a moment, i was able to imagine in a real, not abstract, sort of way what it would be like to live during wartime, wondering if that plane cruising overhead would be followed by an explosion…i let my overactive imagination wander off this subject for a moment, and then came to my usual conclusion, which is that words cannot express how thankful i am that i’ve grown up in a time and place of peace. it’s one thing to see a newspaper filled with gore and destruction that’s happening far away from here, but i’ve never had to wonder on a day-to-day and moment-to-moment basis whether my whole world could just go up in smoke. i’m too young to remember much of the cold war, altho the psychological ramifications of that time period have always fascinated me. i think that before sept 11, this country had finally stopped waiting for the bomb and begun taking our sense of safety for granted again. while new york is a city focused raising positive energy in order to heal itself, the rest of the country is holding its breath and waiting for the other shoe to fall, hiding the fear behind patriotism and warmongering. musing on such topics, i went to bed.

this morning, just before dawn, i dreamt about biological warfare, in which there was this gelatinous, fluorescent orange goo flowing like lava all over the place. it was called Agent Orange, only this stuff wasn’t design to kill vegetation, it was something that would eat right through your skin. i had to climb over this rocky field filled with this stuff, and even tho i was being really really careful not to touch it, a trace of it got on my hands. the stuff just seemed to keep spreading. i went home and washed it off, but it was too late. i brushed away the charcoal that had been my skin to see actual holes that went most of the way through my hand. none of it hurt, so i was just looking at it with the sort detached horror that one gets in dreams.

so goes the curse of a vivid imagination.

4.10.02: 8pm – i feel a redesign coming on

the tech process of fuddy meers has been less tedious than usual because one of the computers that i’m using for sound cues also has internet access, so while we’re holding to work out light or set issues, i can sit up here in my bat cave and write email and blog and such. i’ve been reading webmonkey.com tutorials this evening. webmonkey has been reprimanding me for all the lazy design choices i made with slithy tove and, being the perfectionist wanna-be techie that i am, i feel compelled to start cleanng up the code. also, i’m getting a digital camera for my birthday, and hope to start illustrating my point here with lots of amaturish photos, so….i feel a redesign coming on.

4.10.02 – full of vim and vigor

did an interval workout at the gym that kicked my ass this morning, and then followed it with weights, and the end result is now that i’m back home, ready to start the day, i just want to lay on the couch and not have to raise my arms over my head. so much for that exercise-will-energize-you stuff. isn’t it weird that we invented machines in order to eliminate physical labor and now we have to invent machines in order to get enough physical labor?

4.9.02 – thanks for joining NakedMail!

i have a junk mail box that i use for those web sites that won’t give me the info i want until i register, but that i don’t trust not to sell my name to herbal viagra companies. since most of the mail i get there truly is junk, i often forget to check the box for weeks or months at a time. yesterday i was going through there looking for an invoice and got the following message:

Thanks for joining NakedMail, the finest adult-oriented email subscription service in the world! Here is a summary of the benefits you’ll now enjoy as a member:

…blah blah blah…

So sit back and enjoy! Your first email will start in approximately 6 days.

the title NakedMail gave me this mental image of a letter looking ashamed about the fact that he’s been caught without an envelope on.

4.8.02 – a very merry unbirthday to you!

turns out i have the same birthday as buddha. cool.

my day rolled by without too much excitement, since it was the first day of tech and i had to be in the theatre all day. no complaints, tho. cards and phone calls from far-away friends brightened the day, and the cast sang happy birthday to me in three-part harmony. birthdays stopped being really exciting after number 16. i missed the significance of 21 completely; i had been living in england for months, so the legal drinking age thing wasn’t significant, and besides, david and i had been thoroughly poisoned in spain a couple of days earlier and spent most of the day rolling around clutching our stomachs.

my grandfather called earlier today to wish me a happy birthday. i love my grandfather, but he is nothing if not square. imagine my suprise when the last thing he said to me before getting off the phone was, “if you ever need a place to crash, we’ve got a pad here.” who taught my grandfather to talk like that?

4.7.02 – it’s a really weird feeling

the whole world turned green overnight. yesterday all the grass was still brown, the willow trees had just the slightest spring haze, and the trees weren’t even thinking about budding out. this morning, i woke up and everything was green. the willow trees are big clouds of pale green and all the trees are in that about-to-burst-out-in-leaf moment of anticipation. since i’m never awake in the morning anyway, i love the shift to daylight savings time, when all the light is concentrated at the end of the day.

i took a nap on the sofa this afternoon, and serra (my parents’ golden retriever) came and slept on my feet, and zeke flopped out on my stomach, so that i literally had an animal blanket to sleep under. i think that zeke is left-pawed. he always attacks with the left-paw in the lead. i’ve realized that zeke is a not a good starter-cat. one who has never owned a cat before should probably think about starting with a slower, fatter model than zeke. he’s endless amounts of fun, but requires the sort of respect that non-cat people take for arrogance. today, in an effort to catch the toy mouse i was holding, zeke ran along the outside of the banisters in the upstairs hallway. that went fine until he tried to squeeze between the newel post at the top of the stairs and the first spindle on the stairs – and he got stuck. the space between those two posts is narrower than the others, and his head, front legs and belly fit through, but his pelvis was too wide. i had to lift him up, struggling and clawing at me, to a wider part of the railing in order to get him through, because if he’d backed up he would have fallen to the tile floor 12 feet below. cats should come with a rating when you adopt them. zeke would with an advanced-cat-owners-only certification.

tom petty on behind the music:

“i don’t know if you’ve ever had someone try to kill ya, but it’s a really weird feeling.”