8.23.01

yesterday’s word of the day was “whatever.”

today i’m eating that word for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

8.21.01

my own little personal nightmare:

i get home last night around 3:30. i’m tired and all i want to do is go straight to bed. i go into the bathroom, turn on the facet, and notice a tiny little yellow spider in the sink. i wash him down the drain. then i notice a second little spider. i wash him down the drain as well. then it occurs to me: there are never just two baby spiders. i look up at the ceiling and lo and behold! the ceiling is crawling with newly-hatched baby spiders! they’re the harmless yellow kind, but even still. so i got a can of insecticide (all i could find was “flying insect killer” but i figured bug killer is bug killer, right?) and sprayed the ceiling, which of course meant that the spiders promptly started dropping off the ceiling and onto my head, along with a fine mist of insecticide. i turned on the fan, slammed the door closed and plugged up the crack under the door with a towel. (given that these spiders are only 1/16th of an inch long, i realize that a towel wasn’t really going to keep them from coming through the two-inch crack under the door, but it did make me feel better.) then i took a shower (in a different bathroom) to get all the spiders and insecticide out of my hair. since i knew my father would be up for work in about an hour and a half, i left a note on the bathroom door:

TO ALL YE WHO DARE TO ENTER, BEWARE:

A MILLION SPIDER BABIES HATCHED IN HERE THIS NIGHT.

ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK.

when i woke up, my father had replaced the note with one of his own:

“great! just what i need! another family to put through college!”

in the morning the counter was littered with little curled up spider bodies and there were no creepy-crawlies to be found, so i guess they all died or escaped to the rest of the house. let me say here that i didn’t used to kill spiders. my mode of operation has always been to either escort them outside via a overturned glass, or to just coexist. but lately i’ve been getting tougher on the spiders inside my house – after all, this is MY HOUSE, damn it, and i’m sick of getting spider bites in my sleep or worrying that my cat will accidently injest a poisonous hobo spider. suddenly there’s something terrible and empowering about killing bugs in my own defence. i still don’t like to mush them if i can help it, but flushing them works marvelously.

8.20.01

when you are a cat, traction = dignity.

8.19.01

i went used cd shopping yesterday with a friend and had the best used cd shopping karma – i walked in with one album in mind that i wanted (elvis costello’s greatest hits), and promptly found it. even better, i found it before my friend did, which meant that i got the real cd and he gets a burned copy of it. i struck out on everything else i wanted, but i think the day was still a success. then i saw original sin, which is quite possibly the worst movie i’ve seen in years. the only saving grace was that it was so bad as to be funny. the audience actually laughed out loud at the climax of the story (which goes something like this: the police find angelina jolie with her two lovers – one just drank coffee laced with rat poison and is foaming at the mouth, the other has just been shot in the stomach. she tells the police to get a doctor for the guy who got poisoned. the police say, “what about him?” and point to the other guy who’s bleeding out of the mouth. angelina kisses him (on the bloody mouth), shoots him with his own gun, and replies, “he’s dead.”) timing’s everything in this world, kitlens, and director michael cristofer just doesn’t have it. neither do i, it would seem. but that’s a whole different story.

8.17.01

i’m still in the LIBRARY! looking for the elusive Ed Sullivan video tapes. i’d forgotten what a research wasteland boise, idaho can be. i got spoiled in college. i took for granted the fact that i was living at one of the largest research institutions in the world, and if i needed any sort of research materials, all i had to do was get off my butt and go get them from the library. inter-library loans meant walking across campus to one of the department libraries to get something, not waiting a week for the library in twin falls, idaho, to send over some audio recordings, when what i really wanted were videos anyway.

now i’m just buying them online. but i’m still stuck in the LIBRARY! because the DSL at the rehearsal hall is down. these LIBRARY! computers are running a version of netscape that was written in about 1962. uh oh, i didn’t sign up at the desk to use this computer, and now the librarian is headed my way with a clipboard and someone who looks like he probably did sign up for my workstation. gotta run.

8.16.01

good morning. today i’m going to the LIBRARY! to look up old Ed Sullivan tapes. (spoken aloud, that last sentence reads at normal volume until you get to LIBRARY! which must be screeched out at top volume, sort of like the sega adverts where the guy screams “SEGA!” at the end). no one knows why, but the Boise Public LIBRARY! insists on spelling the world with an exclamation point. see, here’s a picture. at night that sign lights up and can be read from several blocks way. the LIBRARY! is right around the corner from the rehearsal hall where i work, so there are lots of LIBRARY! jokes, but not too many opportunities to actually go and use the LIBRARY!. but now i seem to be the unofficial dramaturg for Forever Plaid (new show i’m rehearsing), so the director sends me out on little research projects. which is fine by me, since it means i have to spend less time in rehearsal or slaving over the copy machine.

on the bright side, one of the actors has to eat fire on stage, and he promised to teach me how to do it. he says you only burn your mouth the first time. after that it’s like riding a bicycle – you never forget. i figure this will be a great party trick.

8.15.01

i got a new cell phone. i found one of those tools online that finds all the possible words that a given phone number can spell. my new number is 208-HUG-GLOB.

i realize i oughtn’t post this, since all you stalkers will have an easier time calling me now, but whatever.

i heard a great analogy for stage management last night. the stage manager is like the court jester. the jester’s the one hovering just behind the king’s ear. he’s the wisest guy in the room, but his wisdom (and power) lies in knowing how to present information. the jester can tap the king on the shoulder and say, “look:” and show him a whole new way of looking at the issue. he can transform and manipulate the king’s vision of the world just slightly so that he makes his point through subtly, not brute force. he’s certainly the sneakiest character in many a courtly drama.

the savvy stage manager works with the director in much the same way. the director may own the room, but it’s the stage manager who ultimately runs it. he can tap the director on the shoulder and say “look:” and gently lead the rehearsal/production/issue at hand in a whole new direction.

a very dear friend of mine once accused me of being manipulative. i didn’t believe him at the time, and as a result, i lost his friendship. it wasn’t until much later that i realized he was right. at least i’m in the right business now. too bad i don’t get to wear the funny hat with the bells on it.

8.13.01

it’s five am and i’ve had enough caffeine to keep an army of narcoleptics awake for about three years. those bottomless cups of coffee at all-night diners are murder, i tell you. plus the fact that i didn’t feel like drinking tonight so i had to drink coke at the bar for about three hours before going to the diner. i’ll go to bed and read Love in the Time of Cholera until i stop twitching.

8.12.01

sorry, i haven’t been posting much, cause i’ve had a lot on my mind and none of it’s terribly interesting. i’m trying to save you from daily reports of what i had for breakfast (eggo waffle with raspberries and yogurt on top). last night i dreamt that my cat, zeke, had died of pneumonia. the vet gave me a box of the cremated remains, and i buried them in a grassy hillside somewhere in the forest. only, a month later i figured out that zeke had only died in my dream. in real life he was at my friend-from-kindergarten kari johnson’s house, where i’d left him to be baby sat a long time ago. kari was nine months pregnant and kind of irritated with me for leaving zeke with her for so long. i tried to explain that i’d forgotten he was there because i thought he was dead. she was keeping him in a cage, so he was more than happy to get out, but the weird thing was that he was no longer tiger-stripped/leopard-spotted, but he was a grey and white calico, like my friend’s cat named bruce. only it definitely wasn’t bruce, it was just zeke with bruce’s paint job. i made a note to find out whether the real bruce had suddenly woken up with zeke’s stripes, but then i got distracted with the revelries at kari’s house – it was halloween and everyone was dressed up in togas and sheets and having a rollicking good time, despite the fact that kari claimed she was going to have her baby tomorrow. the whole scene weirded me out and i was just trying to get zeke out the door with all his toys when i woke up to the real zeke chomping on my toes.

earlier in the night i dreamed this whole horror novel – in the dream i knew it was a book, but at the same time i was playing the main character in it, so all the terror was real. and the creepy thing was that it was taking place in the house where i’m living now. yuck.

this is what happens when i get too much sleep.

to the gym.

8.9.01

i finished reading Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle last night. what a weird trip. i highly recommend it, although there was something about the end of the book that left me feeling dissatisfied – i can’t quite put my finger on it, and i’m not at all sure that feeling wasn’t cultivated on purpose, since it’s a novel about transformation and loss. at any rate, the book fucking rules. next up: Love in the Time of Cholera. with a brief intermission to read cosmo, i think. cosmo is my guilty pleasure, my literary weakness. i can’t stand women’s magazines as a general rule – they’re insipid and socially/culturally damaging, promoting a creepy sort of 1950’s-style subservience only updated in a far more insidious way – trapping women in the cult of success, making them feel that they have to be perfect mothers and perfect lovers and perfect career women and perfect housekeepers and fashionably dressed and be fit and healthy and mentally positive and organized and frugal yet carefree and a real go-getter. i mean, what a way to protect your magazine sales – make women feel inadequate so that they’ll keep looking to your magazine for tips on how to be come the Super Woman that you say every woman has the secret potential to become. yuck. that said, i put cosmo in a completely different category. cosmo is really just about the sex. no one buys it for the fashion tips, do they? plus, their use of alliteration and image-laden language is so profuse it borders on their absurd. for example:

(open to a random page, select first paragraph)

“…We’ve all heard the song “It’s Raining Men.” That tune may be the ultimate celebration of the wacky-yet-wonderful phenomenon when – wham – there’s suddenly a deluge of dudes showering you with attention. True, these mansoons can sometimes seem as random as the weather, but you can stir up your own dating storm…”

okay, lets review. in three sentences we had 7 references to storms or weather, including one of my personal favorites, “MANsoon.” i mean, isn’t that carrying the analogy a bit far? and that was just the warm-up round. there was one good sample of the gratuitous alliteration – “Wacky-yet-Wonderful phenomenon When – Wham”. the use of internal rhyme is also interesting, and certainly not accidental:

“Want to score a permanent spot on his speed dial? Drop some let’s-go-on-a-date bait but resist the urge to ask him out.”

or,

“So what do you do when your Prospective Paramour is a habitual down-to-the-wire dialer?”

here we’ve got alliteration, internal rhyme with a bit of a stretch, and again, that amazing use of the hyphen. damn, they should hire me to write this stuff.

the albertson’s in my conservative boise suburb actually has one of those special porn magazine racks with the opaque cover that shows only the title of the magazine for the cosmos, so that the racy covers of women bursting out of their bodices don’t offend young eyes. this amuses me. next door to the albertson’s, between the tanning salon and the Mail Boxes Etc., there’s a friendly neighborhood gun store. that’s right. a gun store. with all sorts of hand guns and rifles and camo gear vividly displayed in the window. doesn’t seem kind of weird that it’s okay to display and sell weapons for killing people at the grocery store but not a woman’s magazine? i mean, boobs don’t hurt anyone. really.