4.6.01
i’m off to the wilds of idaho (no internet access – how primative!) for the next three days, so in the mean time, you’ll have to entertain yourself by reading more about the whole man-is-inherently-bad thing. here>, some very smart friends of mine consider the issue of anonymous behavior on the internet.

4.5.01
paul completes what i was trying to say yesterday, only with more eloquence. that’s why he’s the writer, and i do things like catch severed heads for a living.

have i ever told that story? well, probably, but that’s too bad because this is my blog and i’ll cry if i want to. anyway, one summer during college i worked as an assistant stage manager at the idaho shakespeare festival. there’s a scene in cymbeline where the two brothers cut off cloten’s head and say that they’re going to go throw it in the creek. so the actor chucks the head over the back of the set where, i, the lowly, underpaid asm, am waiting to catch it. by the end of the season we had a regular football game going back there. when i wasn’t catching severed heads, i was either making fake blood or schlepping around an entire moose carcass. at least i’m rarely bored with this line of work.

4.4.01
they’re rioting in tucson. the photographer gets some serious kudos – he must have been right in the middle of the mob. paul says he takes some sort of perverse pride in this; i have to say i think it sucks. take a look at the picture of the burned-out shell of a motor home. that trailer used to house a family with a nine-month old baby who sold hotdogs on the street corner for a living. so some angry basketball fans decided that destroying these people’s home would make them feel better? what? seriously, mob mentality is a freaky thing. it’s horrifying the way that personal responsibility vanishes in the midst of a mob scene, and ordinary people do extraordinarily bad things. it makes you wonder about human nature – do we all have a destructive, violent nature lurking just beneath the surface, waiting for a moment of anonymity to free it? is the threat of social reprimand the only thing that keeps us in line?

4.3.01

i’ve been asked to the prom.

given that like half my friends from high school are either married or are getting married this spring, this really makes me feel much better. while they’re all fussing over where the relatives are going to stay, morgage rates, and whether little timmy can go to advanced pre-school this year, i can skim the pages of seventeen magazine picking out the perfect prom hair. nevermind the fact that the prom is paul’s graduate program’s end-of-year formal, and that most of the writers will be there with their spouses anyway, i’m still enjoying feeling young for once. ah, the burden of being fiscally responsible is such a difficult one.

this is the story of my search for a summer position with the idaho shakespeare festival:

december: the artistic director, charlie fee, comes to a.c.t. to hold auditions. i give up my saturday to be his casting assistant. halfway thru the day i drop a little hint – would love to come back to idaho and stage manage for the fesival again this year. he says, send me a resume.
january: i send a resume.
february: i call. no answer. i leave a polite message.
february: no one ever calls back. i send resumes to 15 other theaters.
march: i call. no answer. i keep calling until there is an answer. charlie says he’s still hiring stage managers, he has my resume in front of him, he confirms that i’m available for all the required dates. he says he’ll be making his mind up and calling early next week.
april: i wait three weeks, and call again. no answer. i call until there is an answer. charlie says he’s still hring stage managers, he has my resume in front of him, he confirms that i’m available for all the required dates. he says he’ll be making his mind up and calling early next week.

needless to say, as of today, i’m still unemployed.

4.2.01

I have three words for yesterday: too much wine.

meisha and her gang of foul-mouthed but thoroughly delightful friends kidnapped me and took me wine tasting. only, no one told me until we’d been on the road for an hour that we weren’t going to napa, we were going to medocino, which, for those of you non-california types, is three hours north of san francsico. so there were six of us crammed into a subaru wagon, plus six hours of driving, plus four wineries, 2 crates of wine purchased, some strange cheeses and bread hastily consumed in the car between wineries, and then sushi upon returning to the city. at the first winery, there were eight wines to sample, which we went through in a leisurely manner (we stopped to feed the baby goats a bottle of milk). at the second, there were just three, plus the family golden lab to play with. at the third stop, we blitzed through about six wines before moving 100 yards down the road to the fourth winery. i knew i was in trouble when we walked in and the tasting list had 16 wines on it. fortunately, i had charged meisha with preventing me from puchasing more than one bottle of wine, since i had a hunch that my perspective on my current economic position might change once i’d sampled a few wines. somehow i found myself arriving home at 10:30 last night with a tummy full of sushi, a bottle of sweet reisling under one arm, and a jar of gourmet mustard under the other. what? i don’t even like mustard. i have no idea.

4.1.01

Lord, what fools these mortals be!

paul freaks out about mad cow disease. i’ve forbidden him to ever visit www.mad-cow.org again, as it is not doing him any good at all. well, except that it made him a vegetarian, which makes it much easier for us to eat together these days.

i just got back from seeing the dentist, where they filled two teeth and so now half my face is numb. my boss so kindly put it, “you don’t look that much like a stroke victim.” it’s hard not to be suspicious of your dentist when he appears to be no older than 22. on my two visits, we’ve had involved conversations about snowboarding and the merits of buying brand-name vs. generic computer components. hey, these things are interesting to me, but i really am 22. the dentist i’ve been seeing since i grew teeth is as ancient as time; he’s not very hip and he listens to an awful radio station while he cleans your teeth, but there’s something about his demeanor that makes me trust him implicitly. i feel terrible about cheating on him with this new dentist, but i can’t very well fly to idaho every time i need a checkup. the dentist in question also emailed me these gigantic digital photographs of my teeth. no, not the x-rays, but hideous, full-color, wider than the computer screen close-up shots of my mouth, with all the imperfections magnified to an extreme. why on earth would i want those? i might post them on here at halloween, unless i’ve grown tired of my self-involved blog experiment by then.

at last – that weird secret fear you’ve been harboring since childhood finally has a name. find it at http://www.phobialist.com. my own top two irrational fears made it onto the list:

emetophobia-fear of vomit
autophobia-fear of being alone or of oneself

don’t laugh, you have weird little phobias too, i’ll bet. the list is not quite complete; my brother had a childhood phobia of fingernails that didn’t make it on the list. if anyone has a name for that, do let me know.

some of my favorites from the list are:

blennophobia-fear of slime
automatonophobia-fear of ventriloquist’s dummies, animatronic creatures, wax statues – anything that falsly represents a sentient being
zemmiphobia-fear of the great mole rat
paraskavedekatriaphobia-fear of friday the 13th

the owner of the list swears that he didn’t make up any of these.

ah yes, my pretties, i promised you the gory details of my trip to the acupuncturist, and gory they are indeed. the experience, on a whole, was a bit unsettling, altho i have a new-found respect for naturopathic medicine.

before i signed the release forms, the doctor went over the acupuncture process in detail. altho i generally prefer to err on the side of too much information, i did NOT need to know that they sometimes stick the needles in as deep as four inches and then wiggle them around. eww! somehow i had thought this was only going to be a series of pin-pricks. i’ve never been crazy about needles, but i’ve had blood drawn and a few body piercings without disastrous results, so i figured i could handle it. somewhere during the discussion it occurred to me just how bizarre it was that i’m letting this guy, rather, paying this guy to stick needles in me.

anyway, the treatment consists of him sticking a bunch of needles in and then leaving me in a dark room with soothing music to contemplate my navel for about twenty minutes. for the first treatment i had a total of 10 needles – one in each wrist, on either side of my neck, on the insides of my ankles, between my big and 2nd toes, just below my bellybutton, and one on the top of my head. the needles are hair-thin, and they really didn’t hurt much more than a pin prick. that is, until we got to the one between my toes. the needle grazed a nerve and instantly i had these crazy nerve signals running up and down the length of my foot. if my body were a cartoon, the nerve would have been a rope with a bunch of bells tied to it – cowbells and liberty bells and big huge church bells and little high-pitched jingle bells – hundreds of them, and suddenly something was tugging on the rope and every one of the bells was going off all at once, and the rope was on fire and this was all inside my foot.

okay, i know that’s weird, but that’s what was happening inside my head right then. as soon as i tensed up all the other needles started to hurt, and then there was sensation like the middle of me, all my guts, got really really tight and tense, and i started to tremble in that deep core-shaking sort of way. the doctor had to talk me through breathing for about five minutes. if i had been sitting up i would have passed out cold, but since i was lying down it wasn’t possible for me to actually lose consciousness (which really would have been a blessing, i have to say). anyway, i survived the next twenty minutes, but the acupuncture created this really unpleasant floating sensation that made it impossible for me to drift off to sleep the way that supposedly lots of patients do.

the verdict? i think it’s too soon to tell. after the shock of the nerve-thing, i just crawled home and lay around for a while. i felt kinda genki later in the evening, so maybe it made a difference, or maybe it was just psychosomatic, but hey, who cares what the cause is if it works. the real test of my sanity, though, will be to see if i make it back for my appointment next week. what, let someone stick needles in me again? we’ll see.

yes! someone at work just brought me a can of TEXAS ARMADILLO MILK. i kid you not. according to the can, my armadillo milk is DELIVERED FRESH FROM THE WORLD’S ONLY ARMADILLO DAIRY NEAR DUBLIN, TEXAS. can food simultaneously be fresh and canned? anyway, the directions are as follows:

ONLY IN TEXAS!
DIRECTIONS: DRINK ONE CAN DAILY FOR
RELIEF OF HEEBY JEEBIES, SINKIN’ SPELLS,
DRAGGY FEELINS, GETALONG HITCHES,
FITS AND CRAVINS.

WARNING!! CONTENTS MAY INCREASE
INTELLIGENCE, KEEP AWAY FROM
YANKEES, AND OTHER WEIRD INDIVIDUALS.

apparently this milk will also liberate you from the confines of grammar rules, as well. and what exactly are ‘getalong hitches?’

so the cash-strapped russians have decided to bring mir back to earth, and it’s set to land somewhere in the south pacific tomorrow. apparently, residents of that corner of the world don’t have too much faith in the russians’ ability to aim their defunct space station. one queensland farmer has taken the time to mow a giant x into his yard. if mir is headed straight for his house, i’m not sure that the x in the back yard will be of much help, but hey, whatever floats your boat. and speaking of floating, taco bell (according to rumor anyway), has floated at 40×40 ft target somewhere out in the south pacific. if mir hits the target, it’s free tacos for everyone in america. shouldn’t they treat the russians to a few tacos, too? after all it’s their space station.

some guy called into the radio station this morning during the mir discussion. according to his calculations, if they brought one mir down every day, it would take 360 million years to hit the target. now, i don’t know much about stats and probability save what i learned for the SAT, but it seems that there’s something wrong with the mechanics of that prediction. at any rate, even if the chances are simply 1 to 360 million years x 365 days, i think we shouldn’t be holding our breath for the free tacos.

i’m going to see an acupuncturist for the first time today. i have no idea what to expect, but i promise to post all the gory details tomorrow.