Well, the anniversary of the last time I had sex is coming up! (I know, I know: Too much information!) :) But I remember the memorable date, the 4th of July, and the fact that it was with the very first woman that I ever had sex with (after many years apart) and that there certainly weren't any fireworks!
We'd been trying halfheartedly for a few weeks to make a go of it again. But this time around, I kept noticing annoying things like: (1) She ate tortilla chips with her mouth open and crumbs flew out when she talked. (2) I checked out a book for her at the library where I worked and she didn't return it on time; when I called her to ask when she was going to take it back, she accused me of trying to start a fight. (3) We were going to eat take-out and spend the evening together at my place. She wanted me to go pick up the food on HER side of town. When I pointed out that the restaurant was just down the street from her and across town from me, so why didn't she just pick it up and bring it over, she accused me of trying to start a fight. (4) On the July 4th date, we went swimming at her pool, when I noticed that she was getting a belly. Nothing wrong with that, but I hadn't been with her in years and she didn't used to have one, and she didn't look particularly good with one. Then, after sex and while we were downtown watching fireworks, she kept blabbing on and on and on about something; I can't remember what, but I do remember thinking that I would scream if she didn't shut up because she was boring me to death...
Friends, the thrill was gone. But still not completely. About a week after the 4th, I called and left a message asking if she wanted to go do something. She didn't return the call. THAT was when a little light finally, finally, after 10 years, went off: "I want somebody who will return my calls and take me out on a Saturday night! That's not too much to ask." At that moment, I completely fell out of love with her and have not thought about her in a romantic way ever since. (She actually did call me back several weeks later, before my birthday. I just sat there and listened to her leave a message and rolled my eyes.)
So anyway, that's my "4th o' July" last-time-I-had-sex story.
BTW: The fireworks on the Hudson, which lies between Manhattan and Weehawken, are going to be insane. I just had an automated call from the Weehawken mayor today warning about the crowds and the traffic and the roads that will be blocked off. I was strolling by the river this past Saturday, and the traffic and people were slightly hectic. (It's a prime tourist spot because of its gorgeous view of the city.) I can't even imagine what it's going to be like this coming Saturday, the 4th. Mayhem, most likely. (I feel sorry for the people whose houses line the street overlooking the river. Most of the houses have picket fences, but people are still going to be intrusive...) Still, the show is going to be fantastic, and since I live just a 2-minute walk away, I can't not go.
And, hey: Maybe I'll meet some hot woman to whom I can tell my sad 4th o' July story and she'll take pity on me and give me a symbolic anniversary present... Yeah, OK, right. ;p
Monday, June 29, 2009
Thursday, June 25, 2009
RIP Michael Jackson (1958 - 2009)
Being unemployed and all, I was dozing in the afternoon when I started hearing reports on CNN: "Michael Jackson is hospitalized after suffering a cardiac arrest." My first sleepy reaction was pretty much the same as when I first heard on TV that Princess Diana had been in a car accident. In Diana's case in 1997, I remember thinking: "Oh, great, now we'll be seeing her give a press conference, with her arm in a cast and a sad, soulful expression on her face, thanking all of her well-wishers." And today with Michael: "Oh, great, now we'll be seeing him give a press conference, in a hospital bed surrounded by flowers and a sad, soulful expression on his face, thanking all of his well-wishers."
I couldn't imagine that they were actually going to DIE...
With Diana, while I later got very sick of all the media coverage, I had, nonetheless, as a kid been one of the millions who got up at 4 in the morning, or whatever crazy hour it was, to watch her fairy-tale wedding to Prince Charles on TV. And I followed all of the media coverage of her, much as I got overloaded with it, every year after...
With Michael Jackson... Like Diana, he was a touchstone, an emblem, of my youth.
I grew up hearing his songs with his brothers constantly on the radio.
And then as a young adult: I first started going out to dance-clubs as a freshman in college, the year after "Thriller" was released and all million songs from that album (the best-selling of all time) were all over the radio and clubs. I'd grown up in a small Texas town and had no clue how to dance, and so started paying especial attention to his videos then being shown on the newly created MTV... I absolutely hated all of the background group dancing (a trend that continues to this day in hip-hop videos---blame Michael for that!), but loooooved how he himself moved... Very lithe, and the lean backward and hips thrust forward, one knee bent while on his toes, and the brief stop-motion punctuated by a finger snap, only to start grooving again... I'd never seen anyone who moved like that! Just Michael, and then... a bunch of dorky white college kids in clubs trying to copy him! :)
No, I NEVER MOONWALKED! :)
After his 1980s "Thriller" and "Bad" and "Dangerous" albums had come and gone, though, I lost track of whatever new song or video he was putting out, and, as the public news about his personal life and multiple plastic surgeries got worse and worse, just started to feel more and more sorry for him.
He obviously was not of this world, and it's perhaps a blessing for him that he's no longer in torment, no longer forced to try to navigate between his soul and the more mundane expectations of the world.
Despite his own inner turmoil and hurt, though, he was able to give the public so much of his life and talent. With that in mind, I have especially deep admiration for the strength and beauty and joy of his contributions to the world.
This evening, I was walking around Weehawken hours after the news of Michael Jackson's death had been announced. At least three times, I walked by cars at stoplights, windows rolled down, blasting Michael Jackson songs. That is the biggest tribute of all.
I couldn't imagine that they were actually going to DIE...
With Diana, while I later got very sick of all the media coverage, I had, nonetheless, as a kid been one of the millions who got up at 4 in the morning, or whatever crazy hour it was, to watch her fairy-tale wedding to Prince Charles on TV. And I followed all of the media coverage of her, much as I got overloaded with it, every year after...
With Michael Jackson... Like Diana, he was a touchstone, an emblem, of my youth.
I grew up hearing his songs with his brothers constantly on the radio.
And then as a young adult: I first started going out to dance-clubs as a freshman in college, the year after "Thriller" was released and all million songs from that album (the best-selling of all time) were all over the radio and clubs. I'd grown up in a small Texas town and had no clue how to dance, and so started paying especial attention to his videos then being shown on the newly created MTV... I absolutely hated all of the background group dancing (a trend that continues to this day in hip-hop videos---blame Michael for that!), but loooooved how he himself moved... Very lithe, and the lean backward and hips thrust forward, one knee bent while on his toes, and the brief stop-motion punctuated by a finger snap, only to start grooving again... I'd never seen anyone who moved like that! Just Michael, and then... a bunch of dorky white college kids in clubs trying to copy him! :)
No, I NEVER MOONWALKED! :)
After his 1980s "Thriller" and "Bad" and "Dangerous" albums had come and gone, though, I lost track of whatever new song or video he was putting out, and, as the public news about his personal life and multiple plastic surgeries got worse and worse, just started to feel more and more sorry for him.
He obviously was not of this world, and it's perhaps a blessing for him that he's no longer in torment, no longer forced to try to navigate between his soul and the more mundane expectations of the world.
Despite his own inner turmoil and hurt, though, he was able to give the public so much of his life and talent. With that in mind, I have especially deep admiration for the strength and beauty and joy of his contributions to the world.
This evening, I was walking around Weehawken hours after the news of Michael Jackson's death had been announced. At least three times, I walked by cars at stoplights, windows rolled down, blasting Michael Jackson songs. That is the biggest tribute of all.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
If heaven can wait, why then can't I...
The HeartThrobs, "I Wonder Why." (Another favorite line from this song: "Even hate must surrender to the lust...")
For more info and links to YouTube HeartThrob videos.
I tried in vain to find the lyrics online to one of my favorite HeartThrobs songs, the plaintive and painful "So Far," which begins:
Unlock the door
let me in
I've been away
don't know where I've been...
There's a later reference in the song to driving around in a Jaguar (pronounced in this song the British way, jag-yoo-ar)... It's odd and painful being so completely tuned in to the person I love's obsession with another lover... But this is Sandra's song for Jim.
For more info and links to YouTube HeartThrob videos.
I tried in vain to find the lyrics online to one of my favorite HeartThrobs songs, the plaintive and painful "So Far," which begins:
Unlock the door
let me in
I've been away
don't know where I've been...
There's a later reference in the song to driving around in a Jaguar (pronounced in this song the British way, jag-yoo-ar)... It's odd and painful being so completely tuned in to the person I love's obsession with another lover... But this is Sandra's song for Jim.
Friday, June 19, 2009
The time for wearing white is gone...
...we grab our steeds and learn to pray
while spider-sound hovers, blade itching our palm
and we find only steel for reflection.
while spider-sound hovers, blade itching our palm
and we find only steel for reflection.
Austin and Two Hoots
Much of the soundtrack of Austin, and my youth, will always be to me Rick Broussard and Two Hoots and a Holler:
My library-friend Jerry introduced me to the band and, back in the late '80s/early '90s, we'd go see them every Monday at the Black Cat on 6th Street, where Pabst Blue Ribbon was $1 a can, the hot-dogs were grilled over an open bonfire, and when you had to pee, you went to the wooden outhouse out back. (The city later closed the place down for health reasons.)
Rick and Two Hoots played brilliant original songs. And his covers/influences were also some of my favorites: The Clash, George Jones, Patsy Cline, Buddy Holly, Elvis Costello...
I later went out with Rick a couple of times, semi-disastrously, but remain excited by and loyal to the man's soul and spirit and talent.
My library-friend Jerry introduced me to the band and, back in the late '80s/early '90s, we'd go see them every Monday at the Black Cat on 6th Street, where Pabst Blue Ribbon was $1 a can, the hot-dogs were grilled over an open bonfire, and when you had to pee, you went to the wooden outhouse out back. (The city later closed the place down for health reasons.)
Rick and Two Hoots played brilliant original songs. And his covers/influences were also some of my favorites: The Clash, George Jones, Patsy Cline, Buddy Holly, Elvis Costello...
I later went out with Rick a couple of times, semi-disastrously, but remain excited by and loyal to the man's soul and spirit and talent.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
The Perry-Castaneda Library
I was just thinking about the people I worked with back at the Perry-Castaneda Library at UT-Austin. The jobs there were state jobs, and thus extremely undemanding and secure: pension plan, lots of days off, not a whole lot to do, although very low pay. There were LOTS of "lifers" there.
Almost universally, my co-workers were disgruntled slackers. Many had advanced degrees (in things like "art" and "music" and "philosophy" and "English"), but were too lazy to put them to use in a more competitive and rewarding (both intellectually and financially) environment. The slackers liked not having too much asked of them. But, to compensate for the mind-numbing deadness of the jobs, which these overeducated folk were all-too-aware of, they (OK, "WE") had to constantly try to make ourselves feel superior by belittling what we were doing, belittling the "system," taking naps at work, etc.
I was kind of a freak in this environment. While I participated in the constant bitching (and, near the end of my stay there, also took frequent naps in my office), I was also initially very much of a go-getter.
For instance: When books were turned in by patrons, they were sent to one of the 4 floors where they belonged. Once there, they were held in "distribution" until they could be shelved in their exact spots.
When I started as a floor supervisor (my first full-time job, when I was 21), the distribution area on my floor (the busiest) was constantly overflowing and sat for days and days, making it impossible for patrons to find their books on the regular shelves.
My first move was to get rid of the overflow sections, guessing that their very presence made the shelvers not worry about getting the books shelved, since they could always just dump them into overflow. (I was right, psychologically, about that.)
Then I tried to figure out why it was that my floor was always running into overflow, while 2 of the other 3 floors' distribution areas were usually empty. First I checked with my boss about the number of work hours for shelvers allotted to each floor. Almost identical. Despite the fact that my floor and the 4th floor were obviously more heavily used and had more books than the other two floors. When I asked my boss about this, he didn't believe me! He insisted that it was "fair" for all 4 floors to have the same number of hours.
So I figured out a way to PROVE to him that the busier floors should indeed have a bigger team of shelvers: Keep statistics. The shelvers always did "pick-ups" of books left on tables and in the copy room every day, but until then no one had thought to keep a count of each book picked up. Also, no one had thought to count the number of books that were shelved every day. I suggested to my boss that we do a test for one month: All floors would keep records of pick-ups and of books shelved. Shelvers would enter pick-up totals on a chart, which would be tallied at the end of the month. And when they or I put together a cart of books and shelved them, we would count the books and put the total on a card; I would tally all the cards at the end of the month.
My boss surprisingly agreed to the experiment. ("Surprisingly" because he was generally a lazy-ass and he disliked me!) At the end of the month: Voila! The counts showed that my floor had something like double the usage of the next busiest floor. And the two floors whose distribution areas had always been clean had the lowest usage stats of all. My boss had to admit that I was right. After that, keeping stats became mandatory for all floors and, more importantly, work hours were allocated appropriately.
Other changes I instituted (though just for my floor): Previously, there were no expectations on how many books a shelver should be able to shelve in an hour. Since I'd been a student shelver myself for 2 years before becoming the supervisor, I knew that it took about a half-hour to shelve a cart of books (roughly 100 books). I didn't ask this of my employees, but I did ask that they be able to shelve a cart in ONE hour. (On their sign-in sheets for work done, I added boxes where they'd write their totals.)
I liked the psychology of this. It lit a fire under the butts of the slackers, who'd been taking 3 hours to do one cart without anyone having any idea of how long they were taking (or what they were doing with all that extra time). And it also rewarded the swift and the diligent workers: Since a cart could be done in a half-hour, this plan gave those people some extra time to browse, etc., once they got their quota done without feeling guilty. (These were, after all, very low-paying jobs. The kids shelving needed SOME minor reward.) Productivity increased tremendously. The slackers were busted and were forced to pick up the pace. The "normal" kids got their reward. The "high achievers" (very few!) continued to go as fast as they had in the past, just for personal satisfaction.
Another change: My floor had areas of books that were completely jam-packed on the shelves, making it nearly impossible to shelve without shifting books around, laying them on top of other books, etc. While several rows down the aisle, there might be dozens of completely empty shelves.
In the worst areas (over 50% of my floor), I organized a massive shift of books, the goal being to have each individual shelf perhaps 2/3rds full, as opposed to some jam-packed and others empty.
When shelvers had free time, or maybe an odd 20 minutes left over at the end of their shift, I'd have them move books. I created a chart where they would write their starting and stopping points. (Where one stopped, the next could easily see where to take up again.) Slowly but surely, the entire floor got shifted, making it much easier for patrons to find their books and for the students to shelve them.
I must add that I also once made the highly tedious effort of walking around the whole floor and writing down where the light-bulbs needed to be replaced! The floor had been seeming dark and dingy to me. Was it psychological?? No... It really was the lights, and not me, that were (literally) burnt out! :) Over a quarter of all the lights had been out! No one believed me when I presented my exact locations of all the burnt-out bulbs, and it of course took forever for maintenance to get up there and fix things, but once they did... it made a huge difference.
I look back on my first job with mixed feelings. As I mentioned, my boss was a total slacker. He was just there for the security and didn't give a shit about how things were run. I never got rewarded either verbally or financially for all the work that I did or the improvements that I made, both to the floor physically and to the system as a whole. And when a new position was created -- floor coordinator -- I applied for it and clearly deserved it and was the best qualified. But the guy gave the job to someone who, like him, had been hanging around the library system for 20 years. And who was notoriously ineffectual and a slacker herself. That's when I quit in disgust. Such wasted energy! And such anger on my part at being unappreciated and passed over.
But when I look back on the whole experience now: Writing just now about all the positive and sane changes I single-handedly put in place (when I was just a kid of 21!) makes me feel good. Screw the deadbeat boss and his not liking me (and thus fucking up my life for the time being because I was too proud to stay on where I'd been dissed).
I was a darn good floor supervisor. And I did things, not to garner favor with the boss but rather because they were the best, and most intelligent, things to do regarding the running of the floor, DESPITE what the incompetent boss thought or wanted, despite my dead end there after he black-balled me.
Right now, reading over the above, I keep thinking with disbelief: "Such mental battles when I was only 21! Shouldn't a 21-year-old girl have been more concerned with her nails?" Weirdly, this 21-year-old just wanted to see the books shelved efficiently...
-----------------------------------------------------------
Aside from work experiences, the PCL was also an interesting, sometimes bizarre, universe personally.
When I was a freshman, I saw a guy jacking off there, which scared the hell out of me.
I met my best friend and her sister there. (When smoking was still legal in buildings, we all used to gather in my office and eat McDonald's and smoke and smoke and talk and talk...)
I met my to-this-day good friend Jerry, a fellow floor supervisor, there.
I fell in love as a freshman, from afar, with a David Bowie-lookalike who studied at the same time and in the same area as me each evening.
Some boys in the library fell in love with me: One got carried away and slapped me on my ass on day. One drew me pictures. One patron slipped a note into a book: "I'd like to meet a sexy librarian."
One co-worker, a night-time desk supervisor with whom I talked frequently, once called me down to the desk to do a search for a book; when I found the book, there was a set of expensive silver earrings -- a gift from him -- waiting there also!
I met and got along wonderfully with some "Leo-boy" co-workers there, and we had a few "Leo Nights Out" at strip clubs.
In the pre-Internet days, I would spend hours in the stacks researching my current celebrity favorite from old bound issues of magazines. (Where I first discovered and learned to love Joan Crawford.)
One day, coming in to work late with a hangover, I dropped a slice of pizza face-down on the pavement. And then picked it up and ate it, I was so hungry and oblivious.
And: When I was in the middle of my profound first poetry writing class, I would gather up poetry books and sit by a window for hours and read and think and think and stare at the pigeons mating on the sills. Here's a poem I wrote back in '86 or something, about the pigeons, as seen from the window of the PCL:
AT THE LIBRARY
The pigeons are mating
and he jumps on her with a solid
THUMP or THWAK
or whatever crazy sound
horny pigeons make...
and then they are flying --
to a more private window sill or perhaps
just to spite the voyeur
They have pride
and will not be subjects
born of a moment's boredom
Five minutes later they return
masking annoyance
nodding cool forgiveness through the glass
They are gentle now
beaks and breasts touch
heads form a silent heart-shaped arc
and she crouches, murmuring softly
then crouches lower still
until he jumps again, this time
with a noble ease that flattens her
The two sway with the wind
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
The Chocolate Factory
Hellllllllloooooooooooooooooooo NEW YORK CITY!!!!!!!!! But first just let me say: Ya know what I decidedly DON'T want to see any more on my way to and from work?
This:
Or this:
Ho-hum, but enough about Jersey and what I USED TO see!
I've currently got a new temp job (though only for a few weeks). In Times Square, baby! :) A 15-minute bus-ride from Weehawken into Midtown, then a nice little 8-or-so minute stroll to my glamorous office building past...oh, just magic and life! Theaters and fashionable stores with pretty things and hot-dog vendors and bands playing at noon at the TKTS stand and New Yorkers meeting for drinks after work and tourists with giddily stunned looks on their faces and the show-offy, slap-happy neon! :) (Oh, plus the silly Naked Cowboy! I didn't shoot this picture I have up here, but I did see him yesterday!)
My favorite thing to see today was when I was walking around at lunch and happened to look up:
I actually stopped in my tracks and just stared. (Then quickly had to back up against a store-front to continue to stare, so I wouldn't be trampled by sidewalk passersby.) To me it wasn't commercial. It didn't make me want to go out and buy Twizzlers. It was just magical and pretty: "Like Willie Wonka's Chocolate Factory," I thought.
While I was still standing there gawking (and adultly sucking down a last cigarette before work), a local mom walked by with her little boy. She was walking fast, practically dragging him, but he managed to accidentally catch a quick glimpse up at all the humongous candy... and then he came to a screeching halt: "Mama! Look! It's Willie Wonka's factory!" To my relief, instead of jerking him on down the sidewalk, she actually stopped for a second with him and looked up at what he was seeing... and SAW it. They smiled at each other. And then she reverted to her "New York Mom"-ness and started to explain as they walked off (with him still looking back), "Well, of course it's not REALLY Willie Wonka's factory..." But that was neat to overhear, too. They'd had their second of real connection, and then it was still nice to hear her talk, albeit in a boring adult way, about what had so caught his eye, and mine.
This:
Or this:
Ho-hum, but enough about Jersey and what I USED TO see!
I've currently got a new temp job (though only for a few weeks). In Times Square, baby! :) A 15-minute bus-ride from Weehawken into Midtown, then a nice little 8-or-so minute stroll to my glamorous office building past...oh, just magic and life! Theaters and fashionable stores with pretty things and hot-dog vendors and bands playing at noon at the TKTS stand and New Yorkers meeting for drinks after work and tourists with giddily stunned looks on their faces and the show-offy, slap-happy neon! :) (Oh, plus the silly Naked Cowboy! I didn't shoot this picture I have up here, but I did see him yesterday!)
My favorite thing to see today was when I was walking around at lunch and happened to look up:
I actually stopped in my tracks and just stared. (Then quickly had to back up against a store-front to continue to stare, so I wouldn't be trampled by sidewalk passersby.) To me it wasn't commercial. It didn't make me want to go out and buy Twizzlers. It was just magical and pretty: "Like Willie Wonka's Chocolate Factory," I thought.
While I was still standing there gawking (and adultly sucking down a last cigarette before work), a local mom walked by with her little boy. She was walking fast, practically dragging him, but he managed to accidentally catch a quick glimpse up at all the humongous candy... and then he came to a screeching halt: "Mama! Look! It's Willie Wonka's factory!" To my relief, instead of jerking him on down the sidewalk, she actually stopped for a second with him and looked up at what he was seeing... and SAW it. They smiled at each other. And then she reverted to her "New York Mom"-ness and started to explain as they walked off (with him still looking back), "Well, of course it's not REALLY Willie Wonka's factory..." But that was neat to overhear, too. They'd had their second of real connection, and then it was still nice to hear her talk, albeit in a boring adult way, about what had so caught his eye, and mine.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Irritated with NYC for first time!
My god, can it be: trouble in paradise! :)
In two years, I really don't recall ever getting more than slightly peeved with the city, until this past Tuesday.
My out-in-public day Tuesday only lasted 4 or 5 hours or so, but it involved doing a lot of crap-stuff in the pouring rain in preparation for my upcoming only-temp-job for a paranoid financial company: a lot of walking and waiting and getting tired and wet and pissed off (and, speaking of "pissed"---literally pissing).
First the fingerprinting. I left my apt. an hour ahead of time for my fingerprinting appointment, but once in Manhattan, got lost and so had to call the woman-in-charge-of-temp-fingerprinting on my cell phone to get me re-directed. I ended up being 15 minutes late, which I hate. The other temp employee who was being fingerprinted at the same time had been so kind as to e-mail the night before: "Since we don't know each other, give me a call when you get there and we'll go in together." Since I was rushing around late the next morning, I didn't call him. When I finally got to the building late, it turns out that he hadn't called the woman in charge because he was waiting for me to show up first and call him! I was hot and sweaty from running around being lost, and I felt terrible about being late for the woman in charge, and now I felt terrible about being late for this guy, too.
Once inside the building to be fingerprinted, turns out the company had the guy's records, but had lost mine. So he got to get out of there quickly, while I had to sit around in a waiting room. With the woman-in-charge, who was nice but also, I could tell, irritated that she had to hang around.
While in the waiting room, the "Maury Povich" show was on the TV. The topic for that morning happened to be "sex crimes." I was sitting around with 3 or 4 other people, male and female, and we all couldn't help but watch actual videotape of (1) a pimp graphically "beating down his ho"; and (2) a couple of mutilated dead teenaged girls. SIGH. So I personally felt the need to get up and go to the guys in the fingerprinting room and say: "Um, 'scuse me... Sorry to bother you... I feel really uncomfortable watching the TV in there... I don't really want to see dead women." It annoyed the shit out of me that I had to act all "female" and apologetic during my quest for a job (and that I had to look at that shit during my quest for a job).
The guys in the main room were, thankfully, extremely professional and nice: "WHAT? That TV should be turned to CNN or Fox!" One guy immediately got up and went to change the channel in the waiting room.
Pretty soon after that, got the damn fingerprinting done (though I still felt embarrassed and troublesome for having to ask to change the TV channel).
Then I walked the 10 blocks to my temp agency to deliver the fingerprint paperwork and pick up more paperwork to go and have the drug/pee test done. The drug/pee center wouldn't be open for another hour. So I aimlessly started to stroll in that direction.
I hadn't had a haircut in over 2 months, and on this rainy day, every frigging store window I passed showed me what a bad hair day I was having... Since my regular place "Chelsea Styles" had closed for good at the end of May, I started to stop into random places during this free hour to ask about appointments and costs. After two places that were dead empty and charged $70 and $80 for a haircut, I came across a nice-looking place that had a "special" going on... $30 for a woman's haircut, plus $15 for the blow-dry. (The blow-dry cost here in NYC remains highly bizarre to me. In all my years of getting my hair cut in Texas, I'd never heard of an extra charge for the blow-drying!)
I hadn't had my hair cut in over 8 weeks not just because I was poor and jobless and my old regular shop was closed, because I was intentionally growing my hair longer. I wanted to keep my long bob, but with a sweeping bang in front. I asked the stylist for a book of pictures, so I could point out what I wanted. I found pictures and showed her. She nodded amiably.
And then... The woman completely layered the fuck out of my hair! It didn't quite descend into "shag" territory, but it came mighty close. At one point, I was watching, wide-eyed, at the INCHES being taken off my hair and protested. She protested back: "Don't worry, don't worry."
What I had in mind, and what I showed her in the pictures, was something like Diane Baker's do in "Strait-Jacket." A classic long bob with a sweeping bang. What I got instead was... something that doesn't even look like anything I can describe! Not horrible, but definitely NOT what I'd asked for.
The Tuesday continues... With my semi-embarrassing semi-shag, I wandered back onto the rainy streets of Manhattan in search of my 12:30 drug test location. No real drama there. Just peeing in a cup. (Had I ever once been intellectually opposed to workplace drug tests? Yeah... but... I hadn't even smoked pot since the 1990s; my test was going to be clean; I was desperate for work. I didn't let the one-time intellectual dilemma interfere with my desperation. Geez, hope I'm not driven to become an honest-to-god SCAB in the future!)
After peeing into the cup, I was done with my tasks for the day and exhausted from walking around and being fingerprinted and peeing and having a bad haircut and protesting about Maury Povich.
Just wanted then to make my way back to the Port Authority (at 8th and 42nd) and catch my bus back to Weehawken, and grab a burger or something along the way. It was around 1:30 in the afternoon. It was raining and miserable, and even my new haircut didn't look good in store windows. All I wanted was a quick McDonald's burger or a Popeye's strips meal before I went home. Nah, not to be. Whenever I stepped into a McDonald's or a Popeye's, the lines were insanely long, all the tables were filled. I could have waited in a line, but I would have had no place to sit and eat.
It was at THAT point that I had my first sense, in two years, of utter irritation with NYC. All the walking back and forth during the day for ridiculous purposes. And then to not, at the end of it all, be able to simply sit down and have a fucking generic burger.
In two years, I really don't recall ever getting more than slightly peeved with the city, until this past Tuesday.
My out-in-public day Tuesday only lasted 4 or 5 hours or so, but it involved doing a lot of crap-stuff in the pouring rain in preparation for my upcoming only-temp-job for a paranoid financial company: a lot of walking and waiting and getting tired and wet and pissed off (and, speaking of "pissed"---literally pissing).
First the fingerprinting. I left my apt. an hour ahead of time for my fingerprinting appointment, but once in Manhattan, got lost and so had to call the woman-in-charge-of-temp-fingerprinting on my cell phone to get me re-directed. I ended up being 15 minutes late, which I hate. The other temp employee who was being fingerprinted at the same time had been so kind as to e-mail the night before: "Since we don't know each other, give me a call when you get there and we'll go in together." Since I was rushing around late the next morning, I didn't call him. When I finally got to the building late, it turns out that he hadn't called the woman in charge because he was waiting for me to show up first and call him! I was hot and sweaty from running around being lost, and I felt terrible about being late for the woman in charge, and now I felt terrible about being late for this guy, too.
Once inside the building to be fingerprinted, turns out the company had the guy's records, but had lost mine. So he got to get out of there quickly, while I had to sit around in a waiting room. With the woman-in-charge, who was nice but also, I could tell, irritated that she had to hang around.
While in the waiting room, the "Maury Povich" show was on the TV. The topic for that morning happened to be "sex crimes." I was sitting around with 3 or 4 other people, male and female, and we all couldn't help but watch actual videotape of (1) a pimp graphically "beating down his ho"; and (2) a couple of mutilated dead teenaged girls. SIGH. So I personally felt the need to get up and go to the guys in the fingerprinting room and say: "Um, 'scuse me... Sorry to bother you... I feel really uncomfortable watching the TV in there... I don't really want to see dead women." It annoyed the shit out of me that I had to act all "female" and apologetic during my quest for a job (and that I had to look at that shit during my quest for a job).
The guys in the main room were, thankfully, extremely professional and nice: "WHAT? That TV should be turned to CNN or Fox!" One guy immediately got up and went to change the channel in the waiting room.
Pretty soon after that, got the damn fingerprinting done (though I still felt embarrassed and troublesome for having to ask to change the TV channel).
Then I walked the 10 blocks to my temp agency to deliver the fingerprint paperwork and pick up more paperwork to go and have the drug/pee test done. The drug/pee center wouldn't be open for another hour. So I aimlessly started to stroll in that direction.
I hadn't had a haircut in over 2 months, and on this rainy day, every frigging store window I passed showed me what a bad hair day I was having... Since my regular place "Chelsea Styles" had closed for good at the end of May, I started to stop into random places during this free hour to ask about appointments and costs. After two places that were dead empty and charged $70 and $80 for a haircut, I came across a nice-looking place that had a "special" going on... $30 for a woman's haircut, plus $15 for the blow-dry. (The blow-dry cost here in NYC remains highly bizarre to me. In all my years of getting my hair cut in Texas, I'd never heard of an extra charge for the blow-drying!)
I hadn't had my hair cut in over 8 weeks not just because I was poor and jobless and my old regular shop was closed, because I was intentionally growing my hair longer. I wanted to keep my long bob, but with a sweeping bang in front. I asked the stylist for a book of pictures, so I could point out what I wanted. I found pictures and showed her. She nodded amiably.
And then... The woman completely layered the fuck out of my hair! It didn't quite descend into "shag" territory, but it came mighty close. At one point, I was watching, wide-eyed, at the INCHES being taken off my hair and protested. She protested back: "Don't worry, don't worry."
What I had in mind, and what I showed her in the pictures, was something like Diane Baker's do in "Strait-Jacket." A classic long bob with a sweeping bang. What I got instead was... something that doesn't even look like anything I can describe! Not horrible, but definitely NOT what I'd asked for.
The Tuesday continues... With my semi-embarrassing semi-shag, I wandered back onto the rainy streets of Manhattan in search of my 12:30 drug test location. No real drama there. Just peeing in a cup. (Had I ever once been intellectually opposed to workplace drug tests? Yeah... but... I hadn't even smoked pot since the 1990s; my test was going to be clean; I was desperate for work. I didn't let the one-time intellectual dilemma interfere with my desperation. Geez, hope I'm not driven to become an honest-to-god SCAB in the future!)
After peeing into the cup, I was done with my tasks for the day and exhausted from walking around and being fingerprinted and peeing and having a bad haircut and protesting about Maury Povich.
Just wanted then to make my way back to the Port Authority (at 8th and 42nd) and catch my bus back to Weehawken, and grab a burger or something along the way. It was around 1:30 in the afternoon. It was raining and miserable, and even my new haircut didn't look good in store windows. All I wanted was a quick McDonald's burger or a Popeye's strips meal before I went home. Nah, not to be. Whenever I stepped into a McDonald's or a Popeye's, the lines were insanely long, all the tables were filled. I could have waited in a line, but I would have had no place to sit and eat.
It was at THAT point that I had my first sense, in two years, of utter irritation with NYC. All the walking back and forth during the day for ridiculous purposes. And then to not, at the end of it all, be able to simply sit down and have a fucking generic burger.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Empress Theodora: A screenplay's a-brewin'!
A couple of nights ago, I was watching a program about the Dark Ages on the History Channel. Conventional wisdom is that the Dark Ages began with the sack of Rome in 476 by the Germans, but the show pointed out that it was only the Western Roman Empire that fell at that time, and that things weren't so completely "dark" in the Eastern Empire and in other parts of the world.
One dramatic part of the show that caught my attention was that of the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Emperor Justinian. He was a decent enough fellow, but just 5 years into his reign, there was great unrest in the empire due to his tax policies. One day in 532 when he was watching chariot races between his supporters (the Blues) and their rivals (the Greens) in the Hippodrome that adjoined his palace, the frenzied crowd, instead of yelling at the rival team, began to insult the emperor. Then, horrifyingly, the two chariot teams stopped competing and banded together to storm the palace, accompanied by the frenzied crowd.
In the midst of all the chaos, Justinian (with justification!) freaked out and prepared to make his escape via a sea route open to him. But his wife Theodora put her foot down and insisted on staying, saying: "Those who have worn the crown should never survive its loss. Never will I see the day when I am not saluted as empress." She also expressed her willingness to fight and die by quoting an ancient Roman saying, "Royalty is a fine burial shroud." Her speech rallied both Justinian and his supporters, and he was able to muster the balls and the men to quell the insurrection. (Fighting in the city lasted a week; 30,000 died. Justinian went on to rule for another 33 years, until his natural death.)
While watching the show, I was completely caught up in the story of the riots, feeling both the lynch-mob excitement of the crowd and the fear of the emperor. And was completely amazed by the (to me, since I didn't know my history) unexpected turn of events brought on solely by the Empress Theodora's insanely brave last stand.
Who the heck WAS she??
Her story, as I found out after Internet searches the next day, was/is completely amazing, a true "rags-to-riches" story! Her father was a bear-trainer at the Hippodrome. After his death, her mother, a dancer/actress, basically sold the girl (at age 10) into prostitution, in the guise of having her become a stage performer (pretty much the equivalent of "prostitute" at the time). As a teenager, she continued as an actress and became a courtesan (i.e.,"prostitute," just for richer men!). While she was performing, she met Justinian, 2 years before he became emperor. He (also initially from peasant stock) fell madly in love and had her raised to patrician status so he could marry her.
The ancient historian Procopius has plenty to say about her sexual exploits both onstage and privately in his "Secret History" (written in either 550 or 558). Here's one of the milder (!) excerpts:
"Often, even in the theater, in the sight of all the people, she removed her costume and stood nude in their midst, except for a girdle about the groin: not that she was abashed at revealing that, too, to the audience, but because there was a law against appearing altogether naked on the stage, without at least this much of a fig-leaf. Covered thus with a ribbon, she would sink down to the stage floor and recline on her back. Slaves to whom the duty was entrusted would then scatter grains of barley from above into the calyx of this passion flower, whence geese, trained for the purpose, would next pick the grains one by one with their bills and eat."
See this Wikipedia link for even more graphic sexual details, as well as a complete look at her life overall.
My jaw had already dropped in amazement over her empire-saving speech at the riots. Then there was all of the sex stuff in titillating detail thanks to Procopius. Then, after reading further at the Wikipedia link above, I was also very interested to learn what she did once her power, and her husband's, was solidified.
Aside from some very petty personal acts against women of the aristocracy (she forced a couple of them to marry crude plebes far beneath them, though she later tried to make amends by raising the husbands' official status), Theodora actually had a great influence advancing women's rights in Justinian's successful efforts at codifying Roman law. It was fascinating to see her own personal psychological background in play. Empire-wide laws that came into being because of her direct influence: Rapists and "kidnappers of women" were given capital punishment. It became illegal to force women or girls onto the stage or into prostitution.
Theodora died at around age 48, in 548. (Justinian went on to rule until his death in 565, known primarily for his codifying of Roman law and for the "blossoming of Byzantine culture" that occurred during his reign. Oh, yes, and for the 532 riots!) They are both now saints in the Orthodox church.
I can't stop thinking about her! That incredible speech that saved her husband. His love for her and trust in her. Her personal harsh background and her later successful attempts to, because of that harsh psychological/physical past, very drastically help other women and change their lives for the better.
What a goddamn great story! I feel a screenplay a-brewin'...! :)
One dramatic part of the show that caught my attention was that of the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Emperor Justinian. He was a decent enough fellow, but just 5 years into his reign, there was great unrest in the empire due to his tax policies. One day in 532 when he was watching chariot races between his supporters (the Blues) and their rivals (the Greens) in the Hippodrome that adjoined his palace, the frenzied crowd, instead of yelling at the rival team, began to insult the emperor. Then, horrifyingly, the two chariot teams stopped competing and banded together to storm the palace, accompanied by the frenzied crowd.
In the midst of all the chaos, Justinian (with justification!) freaked out and prepared to make his escape via a sea route open to him. But his wife Theodora put her foot down and insisted on staying, saying: "Those who have worn the crown should never survive its loss. Never will I see the day when I am not saluted as empress." She also expressed her willingness to fight and die by quoting an ancient Roman saying, "Royalty is a fine burial shroud." Her speech rallied both Justinian and his supporters, and he was able to muster the balls and the men to quell the insurrection. (Fighting in the city lasted a week; 30,000 died. Justinian went on to rule for another 33 years, until his natural death.)
While watching the show, I was completely caught up in the story of the riots, feeling both the lynch-mob excitement of the crowd and the fear of the emperor. And was completely amazed by the (to me, since I didn't know my history) unexpected turn of events brought on solely by the Empress Theodora's insanely brave last stand.
Who the heck WAS she??
Her story, as I found out after Internet searches the next day, was/is completely amazing, a true "rags-to-riches" story! Her father was a bear-trainer at the Hippodrome. After his death, her mother, a dancer/actress, basically sold the girl (at age 10) into prostitution, in the guise of having her become a stage performer (pretty much the equivalent of "prostitute" at the time). As a teenager, she continued as an actress and became a courtesan (i.e.,"prostitute," just for richer men!). While she was performing, she met Justinian, 2 years before he became emperor. He (also initially from peasant stock) fell madly in love and had her raised to patrician status so he could marry her.
The ancient historian Procopius has plenty to say about her sexual exploits both onstage and privately in his "Secret History" (written in either 550 or 558). Here's one of the milder (!) excerpts:
"Often, even in the theater, in the sight of all the people, she removed her costume and stood nude in their midst, except for a girdle about the groin: not that she was abashed at revealing that, too, to the audience, but because there was a law against appearing altogether naked on the stage, without at least this much of a fig-leaf. Covered thus with a ribbon, she would sink down to the stage floor and recline on her back. Slaves to whom the duty was entrusted would then scatter grains of barley from above into the calyx of this passion flower, whence geese, trained for the purpose, would next pick the grains one by one with their bills and eat."
See this Wikipedia link for even more graphic sexual details, as well as a complete look at her life overall.
My jaw had already dropped in amazement over her empire-saving speech at the riots. Then there was all of the sex stuff in titillating detail thanks to Procopius. Then, after reading further at the Wikipedia link above, I was also very interested to learn what she did once her power, and her husband's, was solidified.
Aside from some very petty personal acts against women of the aristocracy (she forced a couple of them to marry crude plebes far beneath them, though she later tried to make amends by raising the husbands' official status), Theodora actually had a great influence advancing women's rights in Justinian's successful efforts at codifying Roman law. It was fascinating to see her own personal psychological background in play. Empire-wide laws that came into being because of her direct influence: Rapists and "kidnappers of women" were given capital punishment. It became illegal to force women or girls onto the stage or into prostitution.
Theodora died at around age 48, in 548. (Justinian went on to rule until his death in 565, known primarily for his codifying of Roman law and for the "blossoming of Byzantine culture" that occurred during his reign. Oh, yes, and for the 532 riots!) They are both now saints in the Orthodox church.
I can't stop thinking about her! That incredible speech that saved her husband. His love for her and trust in her. Her personal harsh background and her later successful attempts to, because of that harsh psychological/physical past, very drastically help other women and change their lives for the better.
What a goddamn great story! I feel a screenplay a-brewin'...! :)
Friday, June 05, 2009
9.4% and counting!
Wow! The highest unemployment rate since 1984 (when I was 19)! Nice to be part of the ongoing downward economic spiral! Wheeeeee!
Actually, the past 10 days have been heartening and pleasant. (1) It is soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo relaxing not to have to be on that stupid bus to work for over 3 hours a day. Honestly, the last 6 months of 12-hour days have been rather hellish, both mentally and physically.
Physically: With that travel schedule and the stress of having to get up at 5:50am every day (often after only 4 or 5 hours' sleep---my body clock never could adjust to going to bed at 10 or 11pm), I was starting to look like shit: my hair was literally falling out, I put on at least 10 pounds, my skin looked sallow and droopy. (Gee, what a pretty picture!) :)
Mentally: While I was dead tired after getting home each work-day, I could not come to grips with the fact that "this is all there is to my life." So, to feel more like "myself," I'd get online and start drinking. Which would get me pumped up for those few hours... but often "pumped up" meant getting into drastic, stupid arguments with S. So then I'd wake up the next day, not only with a hangover after 4 hours' sleep, but also blearily wondering, "What in the hell did I just say to S.?" Also, knowing since February that there would be no more funding for the job after May 15 made it a complete no-future limbo that I was living in. And the job didn't pay fantastically, so I wasn't getting ahead. I could pay all bills and have a little left over, but not enough to get things I desperately needed, like a new computer, an air-conditioner, et al.
As for the past 10 days... Immediately after my job ended May 15, I was panicked and depressed. I spent the first week doing absolutely nothing but reading depressing poetry (I love Rilke and Plath and Hughes because they're brilliant, but... Plath/Hughes's world views are a little (!) harsh and sad; and Rilke is too in tune with the afterworld and the Universal...his words are beautiful, but ultimately all about loss... which is NOT loss but part of EVERYTHING... which nonetheless bummed me out. I couldn't even get my ass on the phone to sign up for unemployment.) Also during that initial week or so, I realized that I wasn't going to be able to make all of June rent. Thankfully, my mom sent me a check to tide me over (after my dad read this blog and called her!), which took a great mental burden away.
And then: My old place of employment called and asked if I wanted to do some freelance work! Heck yeah! So for the past 10 days or so, I've been working at home either 9-hour days or 2-hour days or not all, but ultimately getting in about 45 hours... which will give me a paycheck of $1100 in a couple of weeks! That, combined with my upcoming Unemployment checks, means that now July rent and bills are covered. One month at a time!
It's been so nice to wake up WHENEVER, maybe do a little grocery shopping when the store is pleasantly deserted at 10 or 11am, then come home and work a little, watch a little TV, do some laundry on a weekday afternoon, crank out more work, drink a little, never having to check the clock to see if I "should" be in bed yet... Of course, that's the end of that freelance project, but more random projects will be coming up. And this big sum of money gave me some much-needed breathing room. (BTW: With all of this leisure, I've dropped a few pounds, my hair is growing back, and my skin tone is reviving, though I'm still a pale-face!)
And then today, I had a job interview in the city with a major global company. The project is only for about 4 weeks full-time, then I'd be part of the pool whenever new work came in. Again, not a permanent panacea, but very much a panacea for the month of August's rent/bills! Did I mention: One month at a time!
The interview went well, I think. My potential boss is a young guy (30s to me is young!) who used to be an actor and started proofing years ago to pay the bills. He's since given up acting and gone corporate, now managing the company's proofing operations globally (aside from NYC, there are also branches in Houston, London, and Hong Kong, among others). It was supposed to be a half-hour interview, but we ended up chatting for over an hour about the fine points of things like "roll out" being two words when used as a verb, and one word, "rollout" when used as a noun! (And how to explain that to a client who's arguing that it's inconsistent and we need to pick one style!) The guy was really on the ball and knew his stuff (i.e., he's a fan of the "Chicago Manual of Style," like I am) but was also funny and down-to-earth.
After weeks of schlepping around the house and 'hood in shorts and no makeup, it was nice to GET DRESSED (complete with perfume and jewelry) and get into TOWN! (BTW: The temp job would be in Midtown... a mere 15 MINUTES away from where I live!! I can't EVEN imagine the insane relaxation of a 15 MINUTE commute to work!) :)
So today was a good day. After my interview, I came home and napped... (ah, napping in the middle of a weekday!) It's been rainy and 60-ish all day (ah, "rainy and 60-ish" in June! Sorry, my-old-home-Texas, but I absolutely DESPISE your 6 months of solid 85 - 100 degree sunny weather!), and when I woke up, I went strolling around beautiful, spring-leafy Weehawken in my snappy red raincoat, buying little things like a candle, a $2 salad from the neighborhood pizza joint. (I always get the same thing on my salad: onions, cucumbers, tomatoes -- NO OLIVES, NO PEPPERS... After one guy made the salad tonight, the counter-guy looked at it and yelled at him: "You put olives on it! NO OLIVES! You need to learn your regular customers!") :)
Speaking of my-old-home-Texas: Today I got the below e-mail from a reader of both this blog and my Joan site:
"...I also read your blog and can totally relate to your current unemployment. I have been unemployed for a month now, after moving back in with family in CT, and am still looking. It is depressing, but you just have to remember it only takes one phone call and one interview to get another job and get back on track. I used to live in NYC until circumstances forced me to move and I've made the decision that once I've found another job here in CT and made a little money, I'm moving back to NY. There really is no other place in the world like it and I miss it terribly. I wish I had stuck it out and never left, but of course I can always go back. My advice to you is STICK IT OUT AS LONG AS YOU CAN in NY before you decide to move back to TX. Really try every avenue of employment before throwing in the towel because if you don't you will regret it."
AMEN! :) :) I KNOW absolutely that I would miss NYC terribly if I couldn't be here. In spite of my recent woes -- no job, my cat dying, losing S. -- my innate/almost biological love for both NYC and Weehawken and this whole area has honestly never wavered. I'm where I want to be.
Actually, the past 10 days have been heartening and pleasant. (1) It is soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo relaxing not to have to be on that stupid bus to work for over 3 hours a day. Honestly, the last 6 months of 12-hour days have been rather hellish, both mentally and physically.
Physically: With that travel schedule and the stress of having to get up at 5:50am every day (often after only 4 or 5 hours' sleep---my body clock never could adjust to going to bed at 10 or 11pm), I was starting to look like shit: my hair was literally falling out, I put on at least 10 pounds, my skin looked sallow and droopy. (Gee, what a pretty picture!) :)
Mentally: While I was dead tired after getting home each work-day, I could not come to grips with the fact that "this is all there is to my life." So, to feel more like "myself," I'd get online and start drinking. Which would get me pumped up for those few hours... but often "pumped up" meant getting into drastic, stupid arguments with S. So then I'd wake up the next day, not only with a hangover after 4 hours' sleep, but also blearily wondering, "What in the hell did I just say to S.?" Also, knowing since February that there would be no more funding for the job after May 15 made it a complete no-future limbo that I was living in. And the job didn't pay fantastically, so I wasn't getting ahead. I could pay all bills and have a little left over, but not enough to get things I desperately needed, like a new computer, an air-conditioner, et al.
As for the past 10 days... Immediately after my job ended May 15, I was panicked and depressed. I spent the first week doing absolutely nothing but reading depressing poetry (I love Rilke and Plath and Hughes because they're brilliant, but... Plath/Hughes's world views are a little (!) harsh and sad; and Rilke is too in tune with the afterworld and the Universal...his words are beautiful, but ultimately all about loss... which is NOT loss but part of EVERYTHING... which nonetheless bummed me out. I couldn't even get my ass on the phone to sign up for unemployment.) Also during that initial week or so, I realized that I wasn't going to be able to make all of June rent. Thankfully, my mom sent me a check to tide me over (after my dad read this blog and called her!), which took a great mental burden away.
And then: My old place of employment called and asked if I wanted to do some freelance work! Heck yeah! So for the past 10 days or so, I've been working at home either 9-hour days or 2-hour days or not all, but ultimately getting in about 45 hours... which will give me a paycheck of $1100 in a couple of weeks! That, combined with my upcoming Unemployment checks, means that now July rent and bills are covered. One month at a time!
It's been so nice to wake up WHENEVER, maybe do a little grocery shopping when the store is pleasantly deserted at 10 or 11am, then come home and work a little, watch a little TV, do some laundry on a weekday afternoon, crank out more work, drink a little, never having to check the clock to see if I "should" be in bed yet... Of course, that's the end of that freelance project, but more random projects will be coming up. And this big sum of money gave me some much-needed breathing room. (BTW: With all of this leisure, I've dropped a few pounds, my hair is growing back, and my skin tone is reviving, though I'm still a pale-face!)
And then today, I had a job interview in the city with a major global company. The project is only for about 4 weeks full-time, then I'd be part of the pool whenever new work came in. Again, not a permanent panacea, but very much a panacea for the month of August's rent/bills! Did I mention: One month at a time!
The interview went well, I think. My potential boss is a young guy (30s to me is young!) who used to be an actor and started proofing years ago to pay the bills. He's since given up acting and gone corporate, now managing the company's proofing operations globally (aside from NYC, there are also branches in Houston, London, and Hong Kong, among others). It was supposed to be a half-hour interview, but we ended up chatting for over an hour about the fine points of things like "roll out" being two words when used as a verb, and one word, "rollout" when used as a noun! (And how to explain that to a client who's arguing that it's inconsistent and we need to pick one style!) The guy was really on the ball and knew his stuff (i.e., he's a fan of the "Chicago Manual of Style," like I am) but was also funny and down-to-earth.
After weeks of schlepping around the house and 'hood in shorts and no makeup, it was nice to GET DRESSED (complete with perfume and jewelry) and get into TOWN! (BTW: The temp job would be in Midtown... a mere 15 MINUTES away from where I live!! I can't EVEN imagine the insane relaxation of a 15 MINUTE commute to work!) :)
So today was a good day. After my interview, I came home and napped... (ah, napping in the middle of a weekday!) It's been rainy and 60-ish all day (ah, "rainy and 60-ish" in June! Sorry, my-old-home-Texas, but I absolutely DESPISE your 6 months of solid 85 - 100 degree sunny weather!), and when I woke up, I went strolling around beautiful, spring-leafy Weehawken in my snappy red raincoat, buying little things like a candle, a $2 salad from the neighborhood pizza joint. (I always get the same thing on my salad: onions, cucumbers, tomatoes -- NO OLIVES, NO PEPPERS... After one guy made the salad tonight, the counter-guy looked at it and yelled at him: "You put olives on it! NO OLIVES! You need to learn your regular customers!") :)
Speaking of my-old-home-Texas: Today I got the below e-mail from a reader of both this blog and my Joan site:
"...I also read your blog and can totally relate to your current unemployment. I have been unemployed for a month now, after moving back in with family in CT, and am still looking. It is depressing, but you just have to remember it only takes one phone call and one interview to get another job and get back on track. I used to live in NYC until circumstances forced me to move and I've made the decision that once I've found another job here in CT and made a little money, I'm moving back to NY. There really is no other place in the world like it and I miss it terribly. I wish I had stuck it out and never left, but of course I can always go back. My advice to you is STICK IT OUT AS LONG AS YOU CAN in NY before you decide to move back to TX. Really try every avenue of employment before throwing in the towel because if you don't you will regret it."
AMEN! :) :) I KNOW absolutely that I would miss NYC terribly if I couldn't be here. In spite of my recent woes -- no job, my cat dying, losing S. -- my innate/almost biological love for both NYC and Weehawken and this whole area has honestly never wavered. I'm where I want to be.
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
Monday, June 01, 2009
Journey: Wheel in the Sky
A beautiful song from 1978's "Infinity."
Journey never made a good album after 1979's "Evolution."
No really. I'm not just saying that 'cause it bugged me to no end that the girl I was in love with in 1983, when I was 18, left me for...a huge fan of latter-day '80s generic hit-making Journey. The whole thing hurt awfully for about 5 years, but somewhere in the back of my mind I kept a tiny little ember of reality, or was it fantasy, burning: "Journey really sucks now. How in the world can she like someone who loves that crap?! What -- she doesn't want to hear me play my unlistenable John&Yoko "Two Virgins" again?? Shallow girl!" ;p
Geezus, sometimes I remind myself of the grim Max von Sydow character in "Hannah and Her Sisters"! Yeah, fuck, like anyone's going to get THAT reference either! ;p Oh, the lonely life of not liking '80s Journey and really liking '80s Woody Allen...
Journey never made a good album after 1979's "Evolution."
No really. I'm not just saying that 'cause it bugged me to no end that the girl I was in love with in 1983, when I was 18, left me for...a huge fan of latter-day '80s generic hit-making Journey. The whole thing hurt awfully for about 5 years, but somewhere in the back of my mind I kept a tiny little ember of reality, or was it fantasy, burning: "Journey really sucks now. How in the world can she like someone who loves that crap?! What -- she doesn't want to hear me play my unlistenable John&Yoko "Two Virgins" again?? Shallow girl!" ;p
Geezus, sometimes I remind myself of the grim Max von Sydow character in "Hannah and Her Sisters"! Yeah, fuck, like anyone's going to get THAT reference either! ;p Oh, the lonely life of not liking '80s Journey and really liking '80s Woody Allen...
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Spookily on-target horoscope!
From astrocenter.com:
Your horoscope for May 31, 2009
This is a climactic time of year for you, STEPHANIE, and you will find that all of your yearly cycles have reached a critical point. You may feel as if you are at a point of tremendous victory, or terrible failure. Either way, it is important that you look upon this time as a celebration that you have made it this far. Make changes where necessary, and continue to re-evaluate your progress over the next several months.
Your horoscope for May 31, 2009
This is a climactic time of year for you, STEPHANIE, and you will find that all of your yearly cycles have reached a critical point. You may feel as if you are at a point of tremendous victory, or terrible failure. Either way, it is important that you look upon this time as a celebration that you have made it this far. Make changes where necessary, and continue to re-evaluate your progress over the next several months.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Moving
As a kid, I moved all the time 'cause my dad was in the Air Force. I kind of missed Iowa Park when we moved to Azle when I was in 6th grade, but other than that, I didn't particularly care where I was or what school I was in.
Since I graduated high school and had control over my own moves, I've made only 4 big ones:
(1) At 18, leaving Azle to go to the University of Texas in Austin.
(2) At 23, leaving Austin to go back to the Fort Worth area (where Azle is) to be with friends I'd met at UT whose mom was dying in FW. (That lasted about 6 months.)
(3) At 28, leaving Austin to go to grad school in San Francisco. (That lasted about 2 years. I left SF and went back to Austin the SECOND my thesis was turned in.)
(4) At 42, leaving Austin to go to New York City... to SEE THINGS.
(1) I knew I never wanted to live in Azle again.
(2) I loved my friends and wanted to be with them, but I hated that whole area. Couldn't wait to get back to Austin.
(3) I was never particularly in love with Austin, but San Francisco was so awful and phony it made Austin seem like a safe haven to run back to.
(4) With my joblessness right now and living in the extremely expensive NYC area, of course the idea of hightailin' it back to Austin has crossed my mind. I have every excuse to. But... The very idea seems dead to me. There's nothing there for me. As I said in #3, I was never in love with Austin. Though it's green and hilly and pretty and a nice liberal/semi-funky college town, I disliked its overt "laid-back-ness." (God, how I hate "laid back.") I think I only lived there for over 20 years because no other options came up. (Other than the ultra-generically-PC San Francisco. Ugh.)
Now that I've had a taste of New York and this whole area...I'm reminded of some lines from Plath's "Mystic":
Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?...
The pill of the Communion tablet,
the walking beside still water? Memory?
I feel like that about NYC. It really is a special place for me.
Not that I'm doing anything exciting here other than walking around! It's just a stunning, vibrant town that one can enjoy and be inspired by even if poor and jobless! The sluggishness of Austin (and the dumber PC-ness of San Fran) depressed the hell out of me. It's hard to explain, but, while my actual jobless situation here in this area is indeed depressing, I'm very much NOT depressed whenever I walk around. Whereas, back in Austin when I was gainfully employed and had a nice/cheap house, car, et al, I didn't feel good or alive at all.
So my internal question is: If NYC kicks me to the curb, where the hell am I going to go??
(A side-note: Years ago, when I had an "online thang" going on with someone from Norway, I did indeed fantasize about moving there! I've always wanted to live in Europe: either Germany, England, or the Scandinavian countries, which seem particularly sane. And, just recently, when I had yet another "online thang" going, this time with someone from Houston... As much as I was fascinated by the woman, there was actually NO WAY that I would have EVER moved to Houston, even in my fantasies! As I learned after my brief move back to Fort Worth at 23: Not even personal love and/or obsession can conquer a bad town.)
Since I graduated high school and had control over my own moves, I've made only 4 big ones:
(1) At 18, leaving Azle to go to the University of Texas in Austin.
(2) At 23, leaving Austin to go back to the Fort Worth area (where Azle is) to be with friends I'd met at UT whose mom was dying in FW. (That lasted about 6 months.)
(3) At 28, leaving Austin to go to grad school in San Francisco. (That lasted about 2 years. I left SF and went back to Austin the SECOND my thesis was turned in.)
(4) At 42, leaving Austin to go to New York City... to SEE THINGS.
(1) I knew I never wanted to live in Azle again.
(2) I loved my friends and wanted to be with them, but I hated that whole area. Couldn't wait to get back to Austin.
(3) I was never particularly in love with Austin, but San Francisco was so awful and phony it made Austin seem like a safe haven to run back to.
(4) With my joblessness right now and living in the extremely expensive NYC area, of course the idea of hightailin' it back to Austin has crossed my mind. I have every excuse to. But... The very idea seems dead to me. There's nothing there for me. As I said in #3, I was never in love with Austin. Though it's green and hilly and pretty and a nice liberal/semi-funky college town, I disliked its overt "laid-back-ness." (God, how I hate "laid back.") I think I only lived there for over 20 years because no other options came up. (Other than the ultra-generically-PC San Francisco. Ugh.)
Now that I've had a taste of New York and this whole area...I'm reminded of some lines from Plath's "Mystic":
Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?...
The pill of the Communion tablet,
the walking beside still water? Memory?
I feel like that about NYC. It really is a special place for me.
Not that I'm doing anything exciting here other than walking around! It's just a stunning, vibrant town that one can enjoy and be inspired by even if poor and jobless! The sluggishness of Austin (and the dumber PC-ness of San Fran) depressed the hell out of me. It's hard to explain, but, while my actual jobless situation here in this area is indeed depressing, I'm very much NOT depressed whenever I walk around. Whereas, back in Austin when I was gainfully employed and had a nice/cheap house, car, et al, I didn't feel good or alive at all.
So my internal question is: If NYC kicks me to the curb, where the hell am I going to go??
(A side-note: Years ago, when I had an "online thang" going on with someone from Norway, I did indeed fantasize about moving there! I've always wanted to live in Europe: either Germany, England, or the Scandinavian countries, which seem particularly sane. And, just recently, when I had yet another "online thang" going, this time with someone from Houston... As much as I was fascinated by the woman, there was actually NO WAY that I would have EVER moved to Houston, even in my fantasies! As I learned after my brief move back to Fort Worth at 23: Not even personal love and/or obsession can conquer a bad town.)
Thursday, May 28, 2009
TORN
This used to be one of my favorite songs ever. Still is. I heard it again today, for the first time in over a decade, in a drugstore while I was wandering about Union City.
I'd gotten out of bed this afternoon at something like 3pm, after going to sleep at 7am, waking up at 11, forcing myself to go back to sleep just 'cause I didn't want to face having to get up and do chore-ish, stressful things like: (1) finally register for unemployment.
Many unemployed folk can register online, but... I hadn't worked in Jersey for the required past 18 months, only the past 6 (before then I was working in NYC), and so I had to call in and speak with someone. (The whole 18-month-thing freaked me out; what if I turned out not to be eligible for any money?!)
After calling in, there were first a series of touch-tone questions you had to answer, which I did. And then I was supposed to be connected with a person, but instead got a message that the wait-time was too long and so: Goodbye. Click. So I had to call back and start all over again. I ended up sitting on hold for nearly an HOUR. To make matters worse, during the wait, my stupid phone batteries started beeping that they were low. The second I finally got someone on the line, I, fully expecting the worst, quickly gave the man my cell number and made him PROMISE he'd call me back if my land-phone died. It didn't. He and I went through the paces pleasantly. (He was pleasant and all, but still kept getting most of my numbers wrong -- my social, my zip code, my phone, my street address. Whatever he repeated back to me was off by a digit or more and I had to correct him almost every time, which was disconcerting.) Anyway, I got signed up. Whew. (Whatever I end up getting will just barely cover my rent, but it's something.)
After that lengthy ordeal, and at least 6 cigarettes in an hour-and-a-half, I was completely jittery, but made myself shower and get out of the house. Still to do: Buy new phone batteries. Buy and mail a birthday card for my mom. Get the cable bill in the mail so it would arrive before they cut me off for non-payment. Robot-like and grim, I set out to find the batteries and the card...
And then in the drugstore...
"Torn" first came out in the late '90s, and I immediately fell in love with it, putting it on just about every mix tape I made back then, while I was still bemoaning the loss of my first girlfriend, and clubbing-to-a-stupor almost every night of the week. I was miserable, but... energetically miserable, with hope springing eternal every time I heard this song. It's actually desolate lyrically, but the tune, and Imbruglia's face and voice, were just soooooooooooo pretty... They made my own emotional suffering seem pretty, made me want a pretty, suffering girlfriend like that...
Nowadays, I'm learning all about hard-core, real consequences. About suffering that isn't pretty. (And thinking about the woman I'm in love with, and whom I've lost, thinking of her lost man while she's listening to this song.)
Nothing's fine, I'm torn
I'm all out of faith
This is how I feel
I'm cold and I am shamed
lying naked on the floor
Illusion never changed
into something real
I'm wide awake and I can see
the perfect sky is torn
But back then, the first time I heard it, everything was still up in the air and "future," all the hurt still somehow un-real and to be worked out, this beautiful, sad song to be fucked to after getting back together...
I'd gotten out of bed this afternoon at something like 3pm, after going to sleep at 7am, waking up at 11, forcing myself to go back to sleep just 'cause I didn't want to face having to get up and do chore-ish, stressful things like: (1) finally register for unemployment.
Many unemployed folk can register online, but... I hadn't worked in Jersey for the required past 18 months, only the past 6 (before then I was working in NYC), and so I had to call in and speak with someone. (The whole 18-month-thing freaked me out; what if I turned out not to be eligible for any money?!)
After calling in, there were first a series of touch-tone questions you had to answer, which I did. And then I was supposed to be connected with a person, but instead got a message that the wait-time was too long and so: Goodbye. Click. So I had to call back and start all over again. I ended up sitting on hold for nearly an HOUR. To make matters worse, during the wait, my stupid phone batteries started beeping that they were low. The second I finally got someone on the line, I, fully expecting the worst, quickly gave the man my cell number and made him PROMISE he'd call me back if my land-phone died. It didn't. He and I went through the paces pleasantly. (He was pleasant and all, but still kept getting most of my numbers wrong -- my social, my zip code, my phone, my street address. Whatever he repeated back to me was off by a digit or more and I had to correct him almost every time, which was disconcerting.) Anyway, I got signed up. Whew. (Whatever I end up getting will just barely cover my rent, but it's something.)
After that lengthy ordeal, and at least 6 cigarettes in an hour-and-a-half, I was completely jittery, but made myself shower and get out of the house. Still to do: Buy new phone batteries. Buy and mail a birthday card for my mom. Get the cable bill in the mail so it would arrive before they cut me off for non-payment. Robot-like and grim, I set out to find the batteries and the card...
And then in the drugstore...
"Torn" first came out in the late '90s, and I immediately fell in love with it, putting it on just about every mix tape I made back then, while I was still bemoaning the loss of my first girlfriend, and clubbing-to-a-stupor almost every night of the week. I was miserable, but... energetically miserable, with hope springing eternal every time I heard this song. It's actually desolate lyrically, but the tune, and Imbruglia's face and voice, were just soooooooooooo pretty... They made my own emotional suffering seem pretty, made me want a pretty, suffering girlfriend like that...
Nowadays, I'm learning all about hard-core, real consequences. About suffering that isn't pretty. (And thinking about the woman I'm in love with, and whom I've lost, thinking of her lost man while she's listening to this song.)
Nothing's fine, I'm torn
I'm all out of faith
This is how I feel
I'm cold and I am shamed
lying naked on the floor
Illusion never changed
into something real
I'm wide awake and I can see
the perfect sky is torn
But back then, the first time I heard it, everything was still up in the air and "future," all the hurt still somehow un-real and to be worked out, this beautiful, sad song to be fucked to after getting back together...
Monday, May 25, 2009
Adam Lambert: Ring of Fire
Dang! You listen to this and tell me it doesn't give you goosebumps.
And here's the thing: Lambert did this version of the song on "American Idol" after working beforehand with the traditional-country artist Randy Travis, who expressed his bewilderment at Lambert's choice of song delivery. I like and respect judge Randy Travis and original artist Johnny Cash, but I'm also greatly admiring of the kid Lambert for daring to re-work a classic, one that no one thought could be re-done in any way other than the original.
This version equals Johnny Cash's. No, you know what, it surpasses it. Who the hell should be as deadpan as Cash is when confronted with the burning demons of desire. Really now. Was Cash trying to be funny? Or just doing the song the best manly way he knew how? Frankly, I'm sick of irony and "cool." Lambert's howling, swirling version of the song's desire hits a thousand times more close to home for me.
(Apologies for the ads stuck over Lambert's face in this video. Courtesy of the idiot who posted it on YouTube. This was the best audio version of the song I could find, though. So please listen and not look!)
And here's the thing: Lambert did this version of the song on "American Idol" after working beforehand with the traditional-country artist Randy Travis, who expressed his bewilderment at Lambert's choice of song delivery. I like and respect judge Randy Travis and original artist Johnny Cash, but I'm also greatly admiring of the kid Lambert for daring to re-work a classic, one that no one thought could be re-done in any way other than the original.
This version equals Johnny Cash's. No, you know what, it surpasses it. Who the hell should be as deadpan as Cash is when confronted with the burning demons of desire. Really now. Was Cash trying to be funny? Or just doing the song the best manly way he knew how? Frankly, I'm sick of irony and "cool." Lambert's howling, swirling version of the song's desire hits a thousand times more close to home for me.
(Apologies for the ads stuck over Lambert's face in this video. Courtesy of the idiot who posted it on YouTube. This was the best audio version of the song I could find, though. So please listen and not look!)
Meeting Mary Gaitskill
Dunno why, but I made a note to do a search for the writer Mary Gaitskill a couple of days ago (which I finally did tonight), to check up on what had happened to her in the past 10-odd years since I met her.
In the early/mid-90s, she was my absolute favorite writer, and a life-saver. Coming out of a very bad, emotionally abusive relationship (my first sexual relationship) in 1991, I soon after stumbled upon her then-recent first novel "Two Girls, Fat and Thin"... The main character's relationships were as murky and dark as mine had just been, but her solitary voice was crystal-clear and eloquent and non-flinching in the face of uncertainty and insanity. Reading the book helped me feel sane again. As did Gaitskill's earlier book of stories, "Bad Behavior," in which her various characters also managed to find honest moments of purity and kindness in the midst of emotional turmoil.
(A side-note: The recent movie "Secretary" was based on one of Gaitskill's "Bad Behavior" stories. The movie was lauded by "edgy" critics for its portrayal of S/M. I had to laugh at the reviews. In the story, the secretary-character worked for an aging, sleazy lawyer with local political aspirations. There was spanking going on, and it was on one level exciting for the secretary...yet she also felt deeply conflicted by why she was letting the sleaze-ball denigrate her. She ended up quitting her job, and the lawyer ended up being investigated for fraud. In the movie, the lawyer was played by the blond and pretty James Spader. And the two literally lived happily ever after. There was nothing at all "edgy" or realistic about that.)
Maybe in '92 or '93, I wrote her a letter in care of her publisher, expressing my gratitude for her voice. I was fucking AMAZED to get a personal letter back a few weeks later! We exchanged maybe 3 or 4 hand-written letters, and she kindly signed the books for me via the mail. At the time, she was living in San Francisco (she'd given me her home address) and had recently taught at San Fran State... Completely coincidentally, in '94/'95 I ended up going to SF State's writing program. I didn't contact Gaitskill during that time, for fear of seeming like a stalker (to be honest, I did once make a point of walking past her apartment), though I did send her a Christmas card just as I was leaving SF to go back to Austin.
Once back in Austin in early '96, we resumed our correspondence for a short time, this time even sending mix tapes to each other! (Young folks, pre-iPods and downloading, nothing used to say "I have a crush" like making a cassette of your favorite songs for someone!) I don't have her tape with me here in Weehawken (though I saved it; it's back in the Mom's garage in San Antone), but two things I remember from it (aside from the pure joy at getting a tape from her!): an aria from "La Boheme" and the Monkees' "Stepping Stone." (I can't recall at all what I put on my tape for her.)
Come August 1996... and it turned out that Gaitskill just so happened to be en route via moving van from San Francisco to her new Fall teaching job at the University of Houston, and would be passing through Austin. We made plans to meet at the downtown Austin hotel where she'd be staying for the night...on my birthday! I thought it was all fucking FATE! I loved her work, she looked like my ex-girlfriend/was a Scorpio like my ex-girlfriend, I loved her mix tape selections, we had San Fran State and now Texas in common, it was my birthday... I just KNEW that this was my soul-mate and that we'd be having hot sex at her hotel that night to celebrate both my birthday and "our magical connection"...
OK. It didn't QUITE turn out like that.
First off, she was late getting into town and left a phone-message while she was a few hours away, saying she'd be late: A loooooong message, and her voice -- the first time I'd heard her speak -- was very whiny-sounding and irritating. As much as I was looking forward to seeing her, her voice and message for some reason really got on my nerves. Still, the meeting at the hotel was apparently still on. I sat around and waited, drinking numerous beers, calling various friends with updates: "No, she hasn't called back yet..."
Finally, she arrived in Austin and did call me to meet her at her hotel. I went to the hotel and called her room from the lobby, which was deserted. I remember saying to her on the phone, "I feel like a hooker." She asked, "Why? Are you dressed like a hooker?" (No, I wasn't -- just wearing black slacks and a low-cut black shirt -- but for some reason being all made up and calling up to her hotel room from the desolate lobby made me feel that way!)
She came downstairs to meet me in the lobby. (I think I'd hoped to be invited up to her room, but apparently she was traveling with a female friend who was very nervous from the trip and now conked out in their room upstairs.) Based on her writing and letters and the public photos I'd seen, I was expecting some at least semi-glam semi-femme fatale who would come on to me, but... Basically, she was very little and very plain-looking, like Emily Dickinson must've been. A very small, pinched, white face. She was wearing a shirt buttoned all the way to the top (!) and some flats with flowers (!) on them. And I don't remember her smiling very much or exuding even a bit of charm.
We sat down on some lobby couches and started to, slightly uncomfortably, make small talk... I finally, dorkily burst out with, "It's my birthday! Should we get some champagne?" She looked at me flatly and said: "I don't know you." Now, though I was poor, I hadn't meant that SHE should buy it. I actually didn't have enough money to buy a whole bottle by myself, so I had to dig through my purse and then come up with: "I have enough to pay for two-thirds of a bottle---do you want to go in on the last third?"
She DID pitch in for a third of the bottle of champagne! And after that debacle, we sat back down in the lobby and talked about... I can't remember most of it. Except, that is, for our mutually dissing SF State and Frances Mayes (at the time, the head of the writing program there, who went on shortly afterward to fame and fortune as the author of "Under the Tuscan Sun") and our arguing about the importance of the Beatles! (Gaitskill claimed that, sans the Beatles, somehow their spirit would have made its way into the public consciousness... I disagreed profoundly, claiming their utter uniqueness...)
I think we chatted for maybe two hours. Not a single sex vibe to be found, darnit. We hugged politely when I left, and that was it. I'm sure I went home and cried from disappointment. The flat vibe between us was such that I knew that there would be no more letters, no more tapes, no more personal excitement.
In the year or so after that, I read Gaitskill's later-released collection of short stories, "Because They Wanted To." Of course, the magic was gone. And then I lost track of her altogether.
Tonight, though, after my Internet search, I found that since our dull meeting in '96, she'd released another story collection, and, in 2005, a critically-acclaimed award-winning novel called "Veronica." (Not to mention her numerous articles for national magazines.) And that she'd been married, since 2001, to writer Peter Trachtenberg and was living a rural life in upstate New York and occasionally teaching. And was now a bleached-blonde.
Note: I just visited Professor Trachtenberg's blog: I was struck by how utterly safe and conformist it was. He loves Obama; he hates Sarah Palin; Americans, and people, are Mean at Heart. That kind of thing. I think, because he wears an earring in his photo and that he's married to Mary Gaitskill, that I was hoping for more...something original that I hadn't heard before. Nah. Just a generic, intellectually cowardly and nondescript professor trying to present himself as "edgy and cool."
What I found most depressing, though, was a recent interview with Gaitskill in which she mentions, congratutorily, how she and Trachtenberg have been mocking the idea of "intimacy" classes... Now, "intimacy classes" being ridiculous and clammy is, to me, a given. The fact that one has to publicize the mocking speaks far more about one's own insecurities about being "cool" than about said classes... Gaitskill, in the interview, goes on to say how she and Trachtenberg have come up with "Into Me See" ("Intimacy" -- get it?!), in which the person in therapy bends over and reveals their asshole for everyone else... CLEVER!!
Melancholy how life works, how one can care so deeply about someone else's thoughts... and then just as suddenly NOT care at all about them. Just 'cause their writing was so much more meaningful and profound than their personal vibe could embody...
Gaitskill's Wikipedia page
In the early/mid-90s, she was my absolute favorite writer, and a life-saver. Coming out of a very bad, emotionally abusive relationship (my first sexual relationship) in 1991, I soon after stumbled upon her then-recent first novel "Two Girls, Fat and Thin"... The main character's relationships were as murky and dark as mine had just been, but her solitary voice was crystal-clear and eloquent and non-flinching in the face of uncertainty and insanity. Reading the book helped me feel sane again. As did Gaitskill's earlier book of stories, "Bad Behavior," in which her various characters also managed to find honest moments of purity and kindness in the midst of emotional turmoil.(A side-note: The recent movie "Secretary" was based on one of Gaitskill's "Bad Behavior" stories. The movie was lauded by "edgy" critics for its portrayal of S/M. I had to laugh at the reviews. In the story, the secretary-character worked for an aging, sleazy lawyer with local political aspirations. There was spanking going on, and it was on one level exciting for the secretary...yet she also felt deeply conflicted by why she was letting the sleaze-ball denigrate her. She ended up quitting her job, and the lawyer ended up being investigated for fraud. In the movie, the lawyer was played by the blond and pretty James Spader. And the two literally lived happily ever after. There was nothing at all "edgy" or realistic about that.)
Maybe in '92 or '93, I wrote her a letter in care of her publisher, expressing my gratitude for her voice. I was fucking AMAZED to get a personal letter back a few weeks later! We exchanged maybe 3 or 4 hand-written letters, and she kindly signed the books for me via the mail. At the time, she was living in San Francisco (she'd given me her home address) and had recently taught at San Fran State... Completely coincidentally, in '94/'95 I ended up going to SF State's writing program. I didn't contact Gaitskill during that time, for fear of seeming like a stalker (to be honest, I did once make a point of walking past her apartment), though I did send her a Christmas card just as I was leaving SF to go back to Austin.
Once back in Austin in early '96, we resumed our correspondence for a short time, this time even sending mix tapes to each other! (Young folks, pre-iPods and downloading, nothing used to say "I have a crush" like making a cassette of your favorite songs for someone!) I don't have her tape with me here in Weehawken (though I saved it; it's back in the Mom's garage in San Antone), but two things I remember from it (aside from the pure joy at getting a tape from her!): an aria from "La Boheme" and the Monkees' "Stepping Stone." (I can't recall at all what I put on my tape for her.)
Come August 1996... and it turned out that Gaitskill just so happened to be en route via moving van from San Francisco to her new Fall teaching job at the University of Houston, and would be passing through Austin. We made plans to meet at the downtown Austin hotel where she'd be staying for the night...on my birthday! I thought it was all fucking FATE! I loved her work, she looked like my ex-girlfriend/was a Scorpio like my ex-girlfriend, I loved her mix tape selections, we had San Fran State and now Texas in common, it was my birthday... I just KNEW that this was my soul-mate and that we'd be having hot sex at her hotel that night to celebrate both my birthday and "our magical connection"...
OK. It didn't QUITE turn out like that.
First off, she was late getting into town and left a phone-message while she was a few hours away, saying she'd be late: A loooooong message, and her voice -- the first time I'd heard her speak -- was very whiny-sounding and irritating. As much as I was looking forward to seeing her, her voice and message for some reason really got on my nerves. Still, the meeting at the hotel was apparently still on. I sat around and waited, drinking numerous beers, calling various friends with updates: "No, she hasn't called back yet..."
Finally, she arrived in Austin and did call me to meet her at her hotel. I went to the hotel and called her room from the lobby, which was deserted. I remember saying to her on the phone, "I feel like a hooker." She asked, "Why? Are you dressed like a hooker?" (No, I wasn't -- just wearing black slacks and a low-cut black shirt -- but for some reason being all made up and calling up to her hotel room from the desolate lobby made me feel that way!)
She came downstairs to meet me in the lobby. (I think I'd hoped to be invited up to her room, but apparently she was traveling with a female friend who was very nervous from the trip and now conked out in their room upstairs.) Based on her writing and letters and the public photos I'd seen, I was expecting some at least semi-glam semi-femme fatale who would come on to me, but... Basically, she was very little and very plain-looking, like Emily Dickinson must've been. A very small, pinched, white face. She was wearing a shirt buttoned all the way to the top (!) and some flats with flowers (!) on them. And I don't remember her smiling very much or exuding even a bit of charm.
We sat down on some lobby couches and started to, slightly uncomfortably, make small talk... I finally, dorkily burst out with, "It's my birthday! Should we get some champagne?" She looked at me flatly and said: "I don't know you." Now, though I was poor, I hadn't meant that SHE should buy it. I actually didn't have enough money to buy a whole bottle by myself, so I had to dig through my purse and then come up with: "I have enough to pay for two-thirds of a bottle---do you want to go in on the last third?"
She DID pitch in for a third of the bottle of champagne! And after that debacle, we sat back down in the lobby and talked about... I can't remember most of it. Except, that is, for our mutually dissing SF State and Frances Mayes (at the time, the head of the writing program there, who went on shortly afterward to fame and fortune as the author of "Under the Tuscan Sun") and our arguing about the importance of the Beatles! (Gaitskill claimed that, sans the Beatles, somehow their spirit would have made its way into the public consciousness... I disagreed profoundly, claiming their utter uniqueness...)
I think we chatted for maybe two hours. Not a single sex vibe to be found, darnit. We hugged politely when I left, and that was it. I'm sure I went home and cried from disappointment. The flat vibe between us was such that I knew that there would be no more letters, no more tapes, no more personal excitement.
In the year or so after that, I read Gaitskill's later-released collection of short stories, "Because They Wanted To." Of course, the magic was gone. And then I lost track of her altogether.
Tonight, though, after my Internet search, I found that since our dull meeting in '96, she'd released another story collection, and, in 2005, a critically-acclaimed award-winning novel called "Veronica." (Not to mention her numerous articles for national magazines.) And that she'd been married, since 2001, to writer Peter Trachtenberg and was living a rural life in upstate New York and occasionally teaching. And was now a bleached-blonde. Note: I just visited Professor Trachtenberg's blog: I was struck by how utterly safe and conformist it was. He loves Obama; he hates Sarah Palin; Americans, and people, are Mean at Heart. That kind of thing. I think, because he wears an earring in his photo and that he's married to Mary Gaitskill, that I was hoping for more...something original that I hadn't heard before. Nah. Just a generic, intellectually cowardly and nondescript professor trying to present himself as "edgy and cool."
What I found most depressing, though, was a recent interview with Gaitskill in which she mentions, congratutorily, how she and Trachtenberg have been mocking the idea of "intimacy" classes... Now, "intimacy classes" being ridiculous and clammy is, to me, a given. The fact that one has to publicize the mocking speaks far more about one's own insecurities about being "cool" than about said classes... Gaitskill, in the interview, goes on to say how she and Trachtenberg have come up with "Into Me See" ("Intimacy" -- get it?!), in which the person in therapy bends over and reveals their asshole for everyone else... CLEVER!!
Melancholy how life works, how one can care so deeply about someone else's thoughts... and then just as suddenly NOT care at all about them. Just 'cause their writing was so much more meaningful and profound than their personal vibe could embody...
Gaitskill's Wikipedia page
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Adam Lambert = Elvis/Bowie
Although gay myself, I really am bored by generic asexual "goody-goody" gay guys like Ryan Seacrest (and Seacrest lookalike Neil), Clay Aiken, et al. Gay guys like that, utterly devoid of any sexuality and/or personality, give "gay" and "man" a boringly cheesy name. Turning to them for inspiration is like being turned on by your local PTA president.
Then there's Adam Lambert... I hadn't watched "American Idol" all season, until 2 weeks ago, after I'd been hearing in the media that there was going to be an Idol showdown between a "flamboyant gay guy" and a "guy from the the heartland." Stereotypically flamboyant gay guys usually get on my nerves, as do stereotypically wholesome-slash-pseudo-edgy straight guys.
When I finally tuned in to "Idol" a couple of weeks ago to see for myself, though... Kris Allen, the heartland-guy, really was a generic spiky-haired non-entity, singing whatever song in a generically husky voice that sounded like the equally generic Keith Urban.
Adam Lambert, on the other hand: Damn! That is a MAN!
However gay or bi he is, he's also completely original, very male, very powerfully sexy and intense in an "Elvis/Bowie/Freddie Mercury" way...and he's also a goose-bump-inspiringly beautiful singer.
The yawningly bland Kris Allen won the actual show competition tonight, but... Adam Lambert is the first American Idol singer whose CD I will probably actually buy. And the first American Idol singer who will probably actually be remembered.
Here's Lambert's Tears for Fears "Mad World" performance on AI earlier this season:
Then there's Adam Lambert... I hadn't watched "American Idol" all season, until 2 weeks ago, after I'd been hearing in the media that there was going to be an Idol showdown between a "flamboyant gay guy" and a "guy from the the heartland." Stereotypically flamboyant gay guys usually get on my nerves, as do stereotypically wholesome-slash-pseudo-edgy straight guys.
When I finally tuned in to "Idol" a couple of weeks ago to see for myself, though... Kris Allen, the heartland-guy, really was a generic spiky-haired non-entity, singing whatever song in a generically husky voice that sounded like the equally generic Keith Urban.
Adam Lambert, on the other hand: Damn! That is a MAN!
However gay or bi he is, he's also completely original, very male, very powerfully sexy and intense in an "Elvis/Bowie/Freddie Mercury" way...and he's also a goose-bump-inspiringly beautiful singer.
The yawningly bland Kris Allen won the actual show competition tonight, but... Adam Lambert is the first American Idol singer whose CD I will probably actually buy. And the first American Idol singer who will probably actually be remembered.
Here's Lambert's Tears for Fears "Mad World" performance on AI earlier this season:
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Rilke/Rebound
(First, see the previous blog entry about Rilke.)
I've spent the past 3 days with him now, for the most part my TV off, doing little but lying in bed, reading Rilke and watching the patterns of light on my walls.
I've been so utterly stressed-filled for the past 6 months, the 12-hour days, coming home only to drink and get on the computer for some relief of the tension, a brief window-of-opportunity to re-claim myself, my own personality, in light of my long daylight-hours spent being polite and turning 75% of my brain off... And simultaneously during this same 6 months, trying to connect with someone from my past, but being unable to because I was now always rather obnoxiously "on"... ("I'm not that same kid from 23 years ago" was what I was basically, constantly trying to prove. I never could relax and just say, for instance, as I should have way back at Christmas: "I'll bet your new dress is pretty...I'd love to see it.") And then my best-friend-cat Gracie getting sick with cancer in January, having to watch her die for 3 months...
Here's what I wrote today, after Sandra and Gracie, and finally having days to lie in my bed and read Rilke and think about the past 6 months, and finally feeling some sense of peace, finally able to attempt to get over the horror at what exactly I've lost:
(RE)BOUND
I'd imagined me trapped
in your game-world forever.
My real-life cat
dragging herself from corner to
corner, while your glass-enclosed "No"
echoed over phone and 'Net,
pinballing off my walls.
I could not flip it back.
Still it wracked up its score, bouncing
off both wacky bells and my girl's
silent writhing.
Now through my screen
the smells of the sun and grass and asphalt
rise to a new season. It's May.
On my wall
the light and leaves shy lashes
butterfly kisses
leaving, alighting again
flirting with my cat's ashes.
In her place I soak up the shimmering sun.
I stroke my hair and arch my back
and let my eyes go green.
In shadows glancing off you, and me, and
everything.
I've spent the past 3 days with him now, for the most part my TV off, doing little but lying in bed, reading Rilke and watching the patterns of light on my walls.
I've been so utterly stressed-filled for the past 6 months, the 12-hour days, coming home only to drink and get on the computer for some relief of the tension, a brief window-of-opportunity to re-claim myself, my own personality, in light of my long daylight-hours spent being polite and turning 75% of my brain off... And simultaneously during this same 6 months, trying to connect with someone from my past, but being unable to because I was now always rather obnoxiously "on"... ("I'm not that same kid from 23 years ago" was what I was basically, constantly trying to prove. I never could relax and just say, for instance, as I should have way back at Christmas: "I'll bet your new dress is pretty...I'd love to see it.") And then my best-friend-cat Gracie getting sick with cancer in January, having to watch her die for 3 months...
Here's what I wrote today, after Sandra and Gracie, and finally having days to lie in my bed and read Rilke and think about the past 6 months, and finally feeling some sense of peace, finally able to attempt to get over the horror at what exactly I've lost:
(RE)BOUND
I'd imagined me trapped
in your game-world forever.
My real-life cat
dragging herself from corner to
corner, while your glass-enclosed "No"
echoed over phone and 'Net,
pinballing off my walls.
I could not flip it back.
Still it wracked up its score, bouncing
off both wacky bells and my girl's
silent writhing.
Now through my screen
the smells of the sun and grass and asphalt
rise to a new season. It's May.
On my wall
the light and leaves shy lashes
butterfly kisses
leaving, alighting again
flirting with my cat's ashes.
In her place I soak up the shimmering sun.
I stroke my hair and arch my back
and let my eyes go green.
In shadows glancing off you, and me, and
everything.
Re-reading Rilke
This, my first week of unemployment, I've spent (1) registering with employment agencies and (2) lying/walking around aimlessly, enjoying this beautiful 75-ish-degree weather and my not having to be on a crappy bus for 3 hours a day.
Monday I spent turning off my TV, going grocery shopping, buying the 7-year-old nephew some cheap birthday gifts from a drugstore, and reading David Sedaris's latest collection of essays, "When You Are Engulfed in Flames." Reading Sedaris always makes me feel sane and happy, and after I finished his book, I was at a loss for how to keep the "good feeling" intact... didn't want to turn the TV back on, so reached for my Rilke books -- the collected poems and "Letters to a Young Poet." And lay in bed and read and watched the patterns of the light/leaves flickering on my closet door and read some more and watched and read...
My Rilke poems I bought back in '86 when I was consumed with poetry and melancholy and carried this book around with me wherever I went. I don't have the energy right now to type out lengthy stretches of his "Duino Elegies" that were/are so beautifully moving and life-giving to me, but from Monday 'til today I kept especially re-reading the First, Fourth, and Ninth elegies. And then poems from his "Sonnets to Orpheus" series and individual poems like "O Lacrimosa" and "What birds plunge through..." and "Lament"... OK, I will take the time to quote from "Lament" because it echoes what I've been constantly aware of and picking up on psychically for much of my life:
Everything is far
and long gone by.
I think that the star
glittering above me
has been dead for a million years.
I think there were tears
in the car I heard pass
and something terrible was said...
And then in Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet" (written in the early 1900s to... a young poet), I had to write down the following snippets, more genuinely soul-healing than anything Joel Osteen could have told me (though he tried, he tried!):
"Do not be bewildered by the surfaces; in the depths all becomes law. And those who live the secret wrong and badly (and they are very many), lose it only for themselves and still hand it on, like a sealed letter, without knowing it."
"...consider whether these great sadnesses have not rather gone right through the center of yourself? Whether much in you has not altered, whether you have not somewhere, at some point of your being, undergone a change while you were sad?...For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown ...Because we are alone with the alien thing that has entered into our self; because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away; because we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing. For this reason the sadness too passes: the new thing is in us, the added thing, has entered into our heart, has gone into its inmost chamber and is not even there any more, -- is already in our blood."
"That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter...And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us."
When I'm scared, Rilke has always helped me to not be scared.
Monday I spent turning off my TV, going grocery shopping, buying the 7-year-old nephew some cheap birthday gifts from a drugstore, and reading David Sedaris's latest collection of essays, "When You Are Engulfed in Flames." Reading Sedaris always makes me feel sane and happy, and after I finished his book, I was at a loss for how to keep the "good feeling" intact... didn't want to turn the TV back on, so reached for my Rilke books -- the collected poems and "Letters to a Young Poet." And lay in bed and read and watched the patterns of the light/leaves flickering on my closet door and read some more and watched and read...
My Rilke poems I bought back in '86 when I was consumed with poetry and melancholy and carried this book around with me wherever I went. I don't have the energy right now to type out lengthy stretches of his "Duino Elegies" that were/are so beautifully moving and life-giving to me, but from Monday 'til today I kept especially re-reading the First, Fourth, and Ninth elegies. And then poems from his "Sonnets to Orpheus" series and individual poems like "O Lacrimosa" and "What birds plunge through..." and "Lament"... OK, I will take the time to quote from "Lament" because it echoes what I've been constantly aware of and picking up on psychically for much of my life:
Everything is far
and long gone by.
I think that the star
glittering above me
has been dead for a million years.
I think there were tears
in the car I heard pass
and something terrible was said...
And then in Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet" (written in the early 1900s to... a young poet), I had to write down the following snippets, more genuinely soul-healing than anything Joel Osteen could have told me (though he tried, he tried!):
"Do not be bewildered by the surfaces; in the depths all becomes law. And those who live the secret wrong and badly (and they are very many), lose it only for themselves and still hand it on, like a sealed letter, without knowing it."
"...consider whether these great sadnesses have not rather gone right through the center of yourself? Whether much in you has not altered, whether you have not somewhere, at some point of your being, undergone a change while you were sad?...For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown ...Because we are alone with the alien thing that has entered into our self; because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away; because we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing. For this reason the sadness too passes: the new thing is in us, the added thing, has entered into our heart, has gone into its inmost chamber and is not even there any more, -- is already in our blood."
"That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter...And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us."
When I'm scared, Rilke has always helped me to not be scared.
Blogs and Family Members
Oh jeezus. Opened a can of worms with that last "Suicide: July 5" blog entry. I knew that my dad and brother visited this blog occasionally, though I thought it was more like every 5 or 6 months or something. Turns out the Dad read the suicide entry, called the Mom, who doesn't have a computer at home so she had to call the Brother, who was at work, and had him read the entry to her, upon which the Mom called me...
Folks, I just re-read what I wrote, and I did say at least twice that I'm NOT going to kill myself, but if I WERE going to, I had plenty of reasons why, and that I would wait 'til after the neat-o fireworks. My citing actual burial arrangements seemed to freak everyone out the most, but I seem to recall even an episode of "The Hills" last season where Lauren Conrad (hardly a dark and gloomy sort) was visiting home and found an old high-school diary where she was instructing her friends and family what she wanted to wear in her coffin and what songs to play at the funeral service. Think of my blog entry kind of like THAT. A little more serious, perhaps, because I do have some pretty serious job/monetary/isolation problems right now that don't seem to have solutions, but also quite in the spirit of high-school fantasizing about a dark subject.
As for those burial arrangements: I got a nice e-mail from my brother, which ended funnily: "oh yeah, here's my threat: you kill yourself and I'm gonna bury you in that piece-of-shit land in Briar Oaks. be warned." ("Briar Oaks" is the place outside of Azle where I lived miserably from age 12 to 18. If that threat isn't enough to keep me alive, I don't know what the hell will!) :) And thanks to Mom for offering to send me a month's rent while I'm looking for a job. (Dad, if you really want to help, you can pay for a psychiatrist for me once a week so I can get some help dealing with my coping issues rather than talking about them on a blog when they become too much to handle internally.)
This all leads to a larger issue: Damn, but my blog is going to be incredibly boring if I have to write entries while censoring myself in light of what my parents might say! (How the hell do 60-somethings like my dad even know about "blogs" anyway??) I don't really WANT to censor myself any more than I already do. But in the future, I will try to keep you guys in mind.
Folks, I just re-read what I wrote, and I did say at least twice that I'm NOT going to kill myself, but if I WERE going to, I had plenty of reasons why, and that I would wait 'til after the neat-o fireworks. My citing actual burial arrangements seemed to freak everyone out the most, but I seem to recall even an episode of "The Hills" last season where Lauren Conrad (hardly a dark and gloomy sort) was visiting home and found an old high-school diary where she was instructing her friends and family what she wanted to wear in her coffin and what songs to play at the funeral service. Think of my blog entry kind of like THAT. A little more serious, perhaps, because I do have some pretty serious job/monetary/isolation problems right now that don't seem to have solutions, but also quite in the spirit of high-school fantasizing about a dark subject.
As for those burial arrangements: I got a nice e-mail from my brother, which ended funnily: "oh yeah, here's my threat: you kill yourself and I'm gonna bury you in that piece-of-shit land in Briar Oaks. be warned." ("Briar Oaks" is the place outside of Azle where I lived miserably from age 12 to 18. If that threat isn't enough to keep me alive, I don't know what the hell will!) :) And thanks to Mom for offering to send me a month's rent while I'm looking for a job. (Dad, if you really want to help, you can pay for a psychiatrist for me once a week so I can get some help dealing with my coping issues rather than talking about them on a blog when they become too much to handle internally.)
This all leads to a larger issue: Damn, but my blog is going to be incredibly boring if I have to write entries while censoring myself in light of what my parents might say! (How the hell do 60-somethings like my dad even know about "blogs" anyway??) I don't really WANT to censor myself any more than I already do. But in the future, I will try to keep you guys in mind.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Suicide: July 5
If you've got even a modicum of spark left in you, then... no suicide.
I've got a little bit of spark, so... no suicide.
But I was just recently thinking: I've got no job, no car, no cat, no friends, no nothing... And July 4 is a stand-out date to me: the last time I had sex. AND that last sex happened to be a re-tread with my very first girlfriend years after we broke up. After the bad sex, she and I went and watched the shitty Austin fireworks and tried to make conversation...Blah. But, thankfully, end of my 10-year obsession.
Now that I have no job, I'll be able to make June 1 rent. July 1 rent: doubtful. But the July 4 NYC fireworks on the Hudson are going to be spectacular from where I live. I'm definitely going to be around to see them.
After July 4: I ain't going back to Texas. I don't want a roommate. I ain't movin' to Cleveland or someplace just to have a job.
I've never actually thought about killing myself, and I won't. But if I were to do so: July 5 would be the date.
How to do it, though? The easiest ways seem to be by pills or by gas/exhaust fumes (Plath/Sexton). I don't have any prescriptions, and I don't have access to a garage... Oh, but wait---I do have a gas stove! (Though, I've heard that gas today isn't the same as gas 40 years ago... Turning on my Weehawken gas stove probably won't kill me.)
Being in New York, jumping off a glamorous building or the Brooklyn Bridge seems like an option, but... NO. Jesus. I've read stories of jumping survivors who told about being half-way down and having regrets. (Even if I hadn't read those stories, I know that I'd be half-way down and having regrets. I fucking THINK too much. I don't want to be frantically regretting while in motion while I'm en route to dying. I want to just lie in my bed and peacefully just fade out, while listening to the Beatles and Julie London and being alone with my thoughts about what and who I've loved.)
July 5.
It's funny how long I think it'll take anyone to notice my spirit isn't still here! :) People from the Joan message board will probably start to comment on my absence at the end of July. (And then really freak once no payments are made to my domain and the company cancels the actual Joan website circa September or October.) And even my mom probably won't figure it ("it" being "my absence") out until weeks after my August 11 birthday when she doesn't hear from me.
July 5. It's interesting to think about. Not that my mom will ever be able to figure out how to find these instructions here on this random blog that she doesn't know about, but, just in case (Brother Thomas -- you've been here on this blog; here's exactly what I want):
No burial. Cremation. And toss my ashes, along with Gracie's (sitting in a box in my bedroom), over the Hudson River. I repeat: The Hudson. Don't EVEN cart any part of me back to Texas.
I've got a little bit of spark, so... no suicide.
But I was just recently thinking: I've got no job, no car, no cat, no friends, no nothing... And July 4 is a stand-out date to me: the last time I had sex. AND that last sex happened to be a re-tread with my very first girlfriend years after we broke up. After the bad sex, she and I went and watched the shitty Austin fireworks and tried to make conversation...Blah. But, thankfully, end of my 10-year obsession.
Now that I have no job, I'll be able to make June 1 rent. July 1 rent: doubtful. But the July 4 NYC fireworks on the Hudson are going to be spectacular from where I live. I'm definitely going to be around to see them.
After July 4: I ain't going back to Texas. I don't want a roommate. I ain't movin' to Cleveland or someplace just to have a job.
I've never actually thought about killing myself, and I won't. But if I were to do so: July 5 would be the date.
How to do it, though? The easiest ways seem to be by pills or by gas/exhaust fumes (Plath/Sexton). I don't have any prescriptions, and I don't have access to a garage... Oh, but wait---I do have a gas stove! (Though, I've heard that gas today isn't the same as gas 40 years ago... Turning on my Weehawken gas stove probably won't kill me.)
Being in New York, jumping off a glamorous building or the Brooklyn Bridge seems like an option, but... NO. Jesus. I've read stories of jumping survivors who told about being half-way down and having regrets. (Even if I hadn't read those stories, I know that I'd be half-way down and having regrets. I fucking THINK too much. I don't want to be frantically regretting while in motion while I'm en route to dying. I want to just lie in my bed and peacefully just fade out, while listening to the Beatles and Julie London and being alone with my thoughts about what and who I've loved.)
July 5.
It's funny how long I think it'll take anyone to notice my spirit isn't still here! :) People from the Joan message board will probably start to comment on my absence at the end of July. (And then really freak once no payments are made to my domain and the company cancels the actual Joan website circa September or October.) And even my mom probably won't figure it ("it" being "my absence") out until weeks after my August 11 birthday when she doesn't hear from me.
July 5. It's interesting to think about. Not that my mom will ever be able to figure out how to find these instructions here on this random blog that she doesn't know about, but, just in case (Brother Thomas -- you've been here on this blog; here's exactly what I want):
No burial. Cremation. And toss my ashes, along with Gracie's (sitting in a box in my bedroom), over the Hudson River. I repeat: The Hudson. Don't EVEN cart any part of me back to Texas.
Silly Bird
Just now there was a bird outside my window chirping the intro notes to the Drifters song "If You Cry (True Love)." (Couldn't find the song on YouTube for an example to show here, but the bird was uncannily exact! I wonder if the author of the song had heard the same bird before he wrote the song. Must've, the bird's notes were so exactly like the song intro.)
Tonight, I was also thinking about titles of things:
Months ago, S. and I both liked "Universal Remote."
And, tonight, I also thought of "Holding Pattern" and "Style and Stigma" (the latter, also the sexual apparatus of plants -- but what a great duel meaning!).
I've never had a collaborator, but I very much miss someone to bounce ideas off of.
Tonight, I was also thinking about titles of things:
Months ago, S. and I both liked "Universal Remote."
And, tonight, I also thought of "Holding Pattern" and "Style and Stigma" (the latter, also the sexual apparatus of plants -- but what a great duel meaning!).
I've never had a collaborator, but I very much miss someone to bounce ideas off of.
Proof is in the Bagels
On my last day of work Friday:
Got a big mass o' "goodbye bagels" and "goodbye Munchkins"! An older co-worker whom I've been clashing with for weeks bought the bagels, which was kindly of her. (Funnily, she sent out an e-mail to the department saying that I was leaving and that there were bagels: The majority of people wandering into my room were indeed there to say 'bye first and foremost, but then there was the one cheesy person whom I'd never ever spoken to before who just wanted the bagels! I had to laugh at her wishing me well! "Who ARE you, Woman?")
My one office-mate, whom I've bitched about before, and I were also on a creative tear today, giddy with the idea of me being gone, I'm sure. All of a sudden, we decided that we were going to write and star in a sit-com, the running titles (all references to proofreading): READY, STET, GO!, BURDEN OF PROOF, BULLET-PROOF (proofreaders by day, crimefighters by night). Sadly, PROOF IS IN THE PUDDING got rejected...
Got a big mass o' "goodbye bagels" and "goodbye Munchkins"! An older co-worker whom I've been clashing with for weeks bought the bagels, which was kindly of her. (Funnily, she sent out an e-mail to the department saying that I was leaving and that there were bagels: The majority of people wandering into my room were indeed there to say 'bye first and foremost, but then there was the one cheesy person whom I'd never ever spoken to before who just wanted the bagels! I had to laugh at her wishing me well! "Who ARE you, Woman?")
My one office-mate, whom I've bitched about before, and I were also on a creative tear today, giddy with the idea of me being gone, I'm sure. All of a sudden, we decided that we were going to write and star in a sit-com, the running titles (all references to proofreading): READY, STET, GO!, BURDEN OF PROOF, BULLET-PROOF (proofreaders by day, crimefighters by night). Sadly, PROOF IS IN THE PUDDING got rejected...
Gorgeous
Joan Crawford: 1964. I never thought Joan was that attractive in her early silent years in the '20s, but from '31 to approximately '65, I just loooooooooove how she looks.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Really, Astrocenter is messin' with my head!
Your horoscope for May 14, 2009
Some unexpected phone calls from friends or colleagues could bring you some wonderful news today, STEPHANIE. A serendipitous lucky break could end the logjam that has held up the attainment of all your hopes and dreams. Love, money, success in your career and personal development - all seem to be falling into place at once. You might spend much of the day walking around in a daze, trying to take it all in. Relax and stay focused. You're on your way!
--------------------------------
OK, as of 7pm Eastern on the 14th, still no such call! I'm waitingggggggggggggggg... :) Really, it's just downright MEAN of them to keep saying such wonderful things and then denying me! Love? Money?? Career success??? I can't even imagine that such nice things actually exist! (Well, I still have 5 hours left for "May 14." We shall see.)
Some unexpected phone calls from friends or colleagues could bring you some wonderful news today, STEPHANIE. A serendipitous lucky break could end the logjam that has held up the attainment of all your hopes and dreams. Love, money, success in your career and personal development - all seem to be falling into place at once. You might spend much of the day walking around in a daze, trying to take it all in. Relax and stay focused. You're on your way!
--------------------------------
OK, as of 7pm Eastern on the 14th, still no such call! I'm waitingggggggggggggggg... :) Really, it's just downright MEAN of them to keep saying such wonderful things and then denying me! Love? Money?? Career success??? I can't even imagine that such nice things actually exist! (Well, I still have 5 hours left for "May 14." We shall see.)
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
"Sunshine on Leith" goosebumps
One of my favorite songs by the Proclaimers, sung en masse by the crowd after a Scottish soccer victory by the "Hibs" in 2007.
Kindness
This Sunday, May 10, a fellow Joan Crawford-fan and I went out to visit Joan's Ferncliff crypt in Hartsdale, New York, on the anniversary of her death.
Months ago, my old digital camera had broken, and I'd just recently bought a new digital camera, which I took out to Ferncliff.
I shot dozens of photos of the crypt, and of the flowers delivered by us Joan-fans, with the new camera.
When I got home, though, and tried to download them... My computer is from 2000, with the Windows ME system. The new camera will only operate with Windows XP and newer. I couldn't download any of my Ferncliff pictures to my computer.
I cried, I apologized profusely to the Joan fans who had contributed money to the flower fund and were now unable to see any photos of their efforts.
Embarrassed, I stayed off the Internet for two days to hang my head in shame. And when I returned... Had a money contribution, had an offer to send me a laptop, had a message from the florists offering to help me download the photos...
I was feeling so extremely, extremely low and guilty... And to get back online and see the kindness and generosity of people... I can't get over how utterly NICE people were...
Several years ago, when I lived in Austin and, long-distance, ordered flowers delivered to Ferncliff but was unable to travel to the New York area to take pictures to "prove" the flowers had been delivered, a "rival Joan Crawford web-master" accused me of stealing the money... That creepy accusation has stayed with me. Ever since then, I've always assumed that each year's flower-fund drive would be doubted, unless I immediately showed photographs...
This year, I was indeed unable to immediately show photographs... And those who knew me backed me up 100% and offered to help with the download that I'd had problems with.
I'm extremely grateful for such utter kindness and faith.
Months ago, my old digital camera had broken, and I'd just recently bought a new digital camera, which I took out to Ferncliff.
I shot dozens of photos of the crypt, and of the flowers delivered by us Joan-fans, with the new camera.
When I got home, though, and tried to download them... My computer is from 2000, with the Windows ME system. The new camera will only operate with Windows XP and newer. I couldn't download any of my Ferncliff pictures to my computer.
I cried, I apologized profusely to the Joan fans who had contributed money to the flower fund and were now unable to see any photos of their efforts.
Embarrassed, I stayed off the Internet for two days to hang my head in shame. And when I returned... Had a money contribution, had an offer to send me a laptop, had a message from the florists offering to help me download the photos...
I was feeling so extremely, extremely low and guilty... And to get back online and see the kindness and generosity of people... I can't get over how utterly NICE people were...
Several years ago, when I lived in Austin and, long-distance, ordered flowers delivered to Ferncliff but was unable to travel to the New York area to take pictures to "prove" the flowers had been delivered, a "rival Joan Crawford web-master" accused me of stealing the money... That creepy accusation has stayed with me. Ever since then, I've always assumed that each year's flower-fund drive would be doubted, unless I immediately showed photographs...
This year, I was indeed unable to immediately show photographs... And those who knew me backed me up 100% and offered to help with the download that I'd had problems with.
I'm extremely grateful for such utter kindness and faith.
OK, just stop it, astrocenter horoscopes! :)
Your horoscope for May 13, 2009
Today you could feel a rush of sensual passion and desire, STEPHANIE, and may want to get together with a love partner in the evening. However, you might not be able to do this right now. Other responsibilities could get in the way of what you want to do. Perhaps it's best to schedule a meeting of some kind - even if it's very late in the evening. You'll need the comfort if nothing else.
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What's weird is how normal and happy such a horoscope might seem to someone else, yet how completely far-fetched it seems to me in my current state. (Like the joyous, love-infused horoscope of May 9 that I posted here days ago.)
Why do I feel so far removed from the very possibility of experiencing a "rush of sensual passion and desire"? I do very much "need the comfort."
Today you could feel a rush of sensual passion and desire, STEPHANIE, and may want to get together with a love partner in the evening. However, you might not be able to do this right now. Other responsibilities could get in the way of what you want to do. Perhaps it's best to schedule a meeting of some kind - even if it's very late in the evening. You'll need the comfort if nothing else.
------------------------------------------------------------
What's weird is how normal and happy such a horoscope might seem to someone else, yet how completely far-fetched it seems to me in my current state. (Like the joyous, love-infused horoscope of May 9 that I posted here days ago.)
Why do I feel so far removed from the very possibility of experiencing a "rush of sensual passion and desire"? I do very much "need the comfort."
Monday, May 11, 2009
Gracie
This is insane. After she died, my cat was cremated for $165, ashes shoved into an approximately 6-inch by 3-inch box. With a fake-gold label "Gracie" on the side.
Some idiot at work asked me, after I'd told her that my cat had just been cremated, where I'd had the ashes buried. I said I didn't have the ashes buried. Why not?: "Gee --- I'm not FROM HERE. I'm just RENTING. I didn't/couldn't HAVE HER ASHES BURIED anywhere..."
What does happen with me and Gracie is that she's now in said 6-by-3-inch box on a shelf in my bedroom. When I'm feeling particularly sad, I curl up on my side in bed and place her wooden box in the nook between my belly and legs, the way she used to sleep with me. And then I stroke the box and talk to it. (Yeah, go ahead and make fun.)
And when I wake up in the morning and want to sit on the side of my bed with a cigarette before I go to work, I remember that Gracie didn't like the smoke, and so I make sure I move her fucking 6x3 box back across the room, back onto that shelf, before I smoke.
And when I'm on my way home from work, I STILL inadvertently think of coming home to her and feeding her the second I walk in the door...
Some idiot at work asked me, after I'd told her that my cat had just been cremated, where I'd had the ashes buried. I said I didn't have the ashes buried. Why not?: "Gee --- I'm not FROM HERE. I'm just RENTING. I didn't/couldn't HAVE HER ASHES BURIED anywhere..."
What does happen with me and Gracie is that she's now in said 6-by-3-inch box on a shelf in my bedroom. When I'm feeling particularly sad, I curl up on my side in bed and place her wooden box in the nook between my belly and legs, the way she used to sleep with me. And then I stroke the box and talk to it. (Yeah, go ahead and make fun.)
And when I wake up in the morning and want to sit on the side of my bed with a cigarette before I go to work, I remember that Gracie didn't like the smoke, and so I make sure I move her fucking 6x3 box back across the room, back onto that shelf, before I smoke.
And when I'm on my way home from work, I STILL inadvertently think of coming home to her and feeding her the second I walk in the door...
Saturday, May 09, 2009
My horoscope for Saturday, May 9
Hmmmmm... Now, fat chance that who I want to call me will call, but...interesting horoscope! (BTW: It's from Astrocenter.com, if anyone's interested in getting their own daily horoscopes sent to them. I like mine a lot; they're usually non-generic and a tiny bit more in-depth than some other daily 'scopes. Though my absolute favorite horoscope remains "Free Will Astrology" by Rob Brezsny (sp?) which I read here in the "Village Voice" and back when I lived in Austin in the "Chronicle." The Brezsny weekly horoscopes are always thoughtfully philosophical and put me in a good mood, even when they tell me I have "mental work" to do that week.)
Your horoscope for May 9, 2009
A friend from far away, probably a woman, could contact you over the phone, by email or even pay you a surprise-visit, STEPHANIE. She might bring great news that could suddenly turn your life in a new direction. This might involve a new intellectual study, or possibly a new circle of friends. At any rate, you'll certainly enjoy catching up with her and hearing what she has to say. Enjoy your day.
-----------------------------------------------------------
So far, I have indeed enjoyed my day! Amazing how much you can get accomplished when you don't wake up depressed with a hang-over!
I have been in a funk since March---I knew by then that my job would be ending in May; my cat was dying; I couldn't get along with someone I liked a lot... And then both "the semi-relationship" and my beautiful Gracie ended at almost the same time, on April 15. And the 3 hours of travel to work was finally wearing me down completely after almost 6 months to the point where I couldn't stand it any more (not to mention the fact that my office-mate gets completely on my nerves: She's a brown-noser, she's not a good copy editor, I do 3 times the work that she does, etc. etc.). It's been bad the past 3 weeks.
Then around last Thursday or Friday, I finally was able to come up for air a little mentally. After next Friday, I won't have 12-hour days (which includes the travel time) any more. And this Jersey job I've had for 6 months was EXACTLY like the job I had back in Austin: extreme corporate environment, an out-of-the-way building in a suburb. I didn't move all the way up here for that! And the work bus: I'd have to make the same polite conversation with the same people every day, even if I didn't feel like talking. Same when I stood outside for a smoke. And, since I don't have a car, I was trapped on the work campus every day, eating the same over-priced cafeteria food, unable to run out to shop or do errands at lunch, unable to grab a street-vendor hot-dog or people-watch or smoke in peace without having to smile at people... And then there's the wasted money: It was wasting me @ $300 a month at that job: $5 a day for the company bus ($110 per month); $5 a day for getting TO and FROM that bus; $6 for the crappy cafeteria food...
So, anyhow, late this week, I finally started to feel a whole lot free-er, knowing the end of the past 6-month phase of my life is near...
I got about 9 hours of sleep last night, then woke up today and looked around my apartment: What a mess! Since April 15, I've been so down that I let things go completely. ALL of my dishes were piled up. ALL of my wearable clothes were in heaps on the floor. My toilet and tub and kitchen sink were all filthy. My trash was nearly overflowing, and I had 3 bags of recyclables just sitting around, since I hadn't bothered to take them downstairs for 3 weeks. A new camera that I'd bought online was still in its unopened box, where it had been sitting for the past 3 weeks. My fridge and cupboards were (both literally and metaphorically) bare.
Long story short: I got off my ass today, full of energy for the first time in forever, and started in on the mess. Let the first tub of dishes soak while getting the first load of laundry started. Then hand-wash/bleach 2 white shirts that had lost their lustre. While they're soaking, wash the first tub of dishes. When it's time to go to the basement to put in a new load of wash, take 2 sacks of trash out. Back upstairs, rinse the shirts and hang them up, then start soaking the bras, then put the first load of dishes away, then do the second and while waiting for them to dry, for god's sake CLEAN THE GREASE OFF OF THE STOVE-TOP!
OK, it goes on and on and on like that! :) At the end of the time period between 11:30am and 7pm, I'd: washed/dried/folded 4 loads of laundry, washed/dried/put away 4 loads of dishes, done 2 loads of hand-washing, cleaned the stove-top and counter-tops, swept the floors, taken 3 bags of recyclables and the big bag of trash out, scrubbed the toilet and the bathtub, thrown away old stuff from the fridge, gone grocery shopping for the first time in 3 weeks (and, while there, told a couple of check-out clerks who were saying "fuckin' this" and "fuckin' that" that I didn't feel like listening to them curse and talk about their personal lives while I was checking out; the guy apologized, the girl "punished" me by rolling her eyes and not looking at me or speaking the rest of the time; I was a bitch and went and told her manager), taken the damn camera out of its box/put in batteries/figured out how it worked, eaten a relatively healthy meal and taken a vitamin (I read somewhere weeks ago that multi-vitamins didn't do any good, so I stopped taking mine. Then my hair started to look dull and crappy -- maybe from the stress, maybe from no multi-vitamin...), AND done a couple of hours of copy-editing that I'd brought home with me, AND STILL (frivolously) caught up on a couple of episodes of "Daisy of Love" and some old MSNBC Drew Peterson interviews in between cleaning.
Not to mention psyching myself up for the possibility of having to get a roommate as of July 1, if I'm still on unemployment by then. (While the 3 roommates I had upon arriving in this area in 2007 were each nightmares in their own way, this time I'M in charge of choosing! My main criteria: Please be QUIET! And no drugs on the premises! My older landlord/landlady live downstairs and like me a lot --- so they'll back me up on anything if I have to tell an obnoxious, wigged-out person to leave. I was so horrifyingly powerless with those 3 early roomies, completely and depressingly at the mercy of their insanity...)
The only thing I didn't do that I had wanted to get done is go into Manhattan to get my hair cut. But I'll do that next Saturday. A symbolic fresh start after my Friday goodbye at work. Then my nails done on Monday (cheaper Mon-Wed at the little places here in Weehawken than in Manhattan). Then a new employment agency interview every day the coming week. And the week after. And the week after.
Whatever it takes to stay here. The upcoming "deadline" of May 15 for my job ending, with no other job in sight, made me really think hard about what I wanted to do, where I wanted to be. Going back to Texas was always an option. When I lived in San Fran for 2 years in the mid-90s, I hated it so and couldn't WAIT to get back to Austin. Now, though: I really do love NY. I love my Weehawken apartment. I like the Northeast, both weather-wise and attitude-wise, more than I like Texas (where it's too friggin' hot, and where idiots like Gov. Rick Perry and Sen. John Cornyn are indicative of the frat-boy mentality that rules there).
While scary and depressing, it's also been interesting and, now, a bit exhilarating mentally to be confronted with an actual CROSSROADS in my life. I've got literally nothing (except my health, thank you god), and I have no idea what the hell is going to happen to me.
Your horoscope for May 9, 2009
A friend from far away, probably a woman, could contact you over the phone, by email or even pay you a surprise-visit, STEPHANIE. She might bring great news that could suddenly turn your life in a new direction. This might involve a new intellectual study, or possibly a new circle of friends. At any rate, you'll certainly enjoy catching up with her and hearing what she has to say. Enjoy your day.
-----------------------------------------------------------
So far, I have indeed enjoyed my day! Amazing how much you can get accomplished when you don't wake up depressed with a hang-over!
I have been in a funk since March---I knew by then that my job would be ending in May; my cat was dying; I couldn't get along with someone I liked a lot... And then both "the semi-relationship" and my beautiful Gracie ended at almost the same time, on April 15. And the 3 hours of travel to work was finally wearing me down completely after almost 6 months to the point where I couldn't stand it any more (not to mention the fact that my office-mate gets completely on my nerves: She's a brown-noser, she's not a good copy editor, I do 3 times the work that she does, etc. etc.). It's been bad the past 3 weeks.
Then around last Thursday or Friday, I finally was able to come up for air a little mentally. After next Friday, I won't have 12-hour days (which includes the travel time) any more. And this Jersey job I've had for 6 months was EXACTLY like the job I had back in Austin: extreme corporate environment, an out-of-the-way building in a suburb. I didn't move all the way up here for that! And the work bus: I'd have to make the same polite conversation with the same people every day, even if I didn't feel like talking. Same when I stood outside for a smoke. And, since I don't have a car, I was trapped on the work campus every day, eating the same over-priced cafeteria food, unable to run out to shop or do errands at lunch, unable to grab a street-vendor hot-dog or people-watch or smoke in peace without having to smile at people... And then there's the wasted money: It was wasting me @ $300 a month at that job: $5 a day for the company bus ($110 per month); $5 a day for getting TO and FROM that bus; $6 for the crappy cafeteria food...
So, anyhow, late this week, I finally started to feel a whole lot free-er, knowing the end of the past 6-month phase of my life is near...
I got about 9 hours of sleep last night, then woke up today and looked around my apartment: What a mess! Since April 15, I've been so down that I let things go completely. ALL of my dishes were piled up. ALL of my wearable clothes were in heaps on the floor. My toilet and tub and kitchen sink were all filthy. My trash was nearly overflowing, and I had 3 bags of recyclables just sitting around, since I hadn't bothered to take them downstairs for 3 weeks. A new camera that I'd bought online was still in its unopened box, where it had been sitting for the past 3 weeks. My fridge and cupboards were (both literally and metaphorically) bare.
Long story short: I got off my ass today, full of energy for the first time in forever, and started in on the mess. Let the first tub of dishes soak while getting the first load of laundry started. Then hand-wash/bleach 2 white shirts that had lost their lustre. While they're soaking, wash the first tub of dishes. When it's time to go to the basement to put in a new load of wash, take 2 sacks of trash out. Back upstairs, rinse the shirts and hang them up, then start soaking the bras, then put the first load of dishes away, then do the second and while waiting for them to dry, for god's sake CLEAN THE GREASE OFF OF THE STOVE-TOP!
OK, it goes on and on and on like that! :) At the end of the time period between 11:30am and 7pm, I'd: washed/dried/folded 4 loads of laundry, washed/dried/put away 4 loads of dishes, done 2 loads of hand-washing, cleaned the stove-top and counter-tops, swept the floors, taken 3 bags of recyclables and the big bag of trash out, scrubbed the toilet and the bathtub, thrown away old stuff from the fridge, gone grocery shopping for the first time in 3 weeks (and, while there, told a couple of check-out clerks who were saying "fuckin' this" and "fuckin' that" that I didn't feel like listening to them curse and talk about their personal lives while I was checking out; the guy apologized, the girl "punished" me by rolling her eyes and not looking at me or speaking the rest of the time; I was a bitch and went and told her manager), taken the damn camera out of its box/put in batteries/figured out how it worked, eaten a relatively healthy meal and taken a vitamin (I read somewhere weeks ago that multi-vitamins didn't do any good, so I stopped taking mine. Then my hair started to look dull and crappy -- maybe from the stress, maybe from no multi-vitamin...), AND done a couple of hours of copy-editing that I'd brought home with me, AND STILL (frivolously) caught up on a couple of episodes of "Daisy of Love" and some old MSNBC Drew Peterson interviews in between cleaning.
Not to mention psyching myself up for the possibility of having to get a roommate as of July 1, if I'm still on unemployment by then. (While the 3 roommates I had upon arriving in this area in 2007 were each nightmares in their own way, this time I'M in charge of choosing! My main criteria: Please be QUIET! And no drugs on the premises! My older landlord/landlady live downstairs and like me a lot --- so they'll back me up on anything if I have to tell an obnoxious, wigged-out person to leave. I was so horrifyingly powerless with those 3 early roomies, completely and depressingly at the mercy of their insanity...)
The only thing I didn't do that I had wanted to get done is go into Manhattan to get my hair cut. But I'll do that next Saturday. A symbolic fresh start after my Friday goodbye at work. Then my nails done on Monday (cheaper Mon-Wed at the little places here in Weehawken than in Manhattan). Then a new employment agency interview every day the coming week. And the week after. And the week after.
Whatever it takes to stay here. The upcoming "deadline" of May 15 for my job ending, with no other job in sight, made me really think hard about what I wanted to do, where I wanted to be. Going back to Texas was always an option. When I lived in San Fran for 2 years in the mid-90s, I hated it so and couldn't WAIT to get back to Austin. Now, though: I really do love NY. I love my Weehawken apartment. I like the Northeast, both weather-wise and attitude-wise, more than I like Texas (where it's too friggin' hot, and where idiots like Gov. Rick Perry and Sen. John Cornyn are indicative of the frat-boy mentality that rules there).
While scary and depressing, it's also been interesting and, now, a bit exhilarating mentally to be confronted with an actual CROSSROADS in my life. I've got literally nothing (except my health, thank you god), and I have no idea what the hell is going to happen to me.
Thursday, May 07, 2009
Bus talk: To bounce or not to bounce
Sometimes overheard bus conversations are incredibly annoying. One earlier this week: A schlubby-looking 20-something guy with spectacles and sensible shoes and white socks making plans for a "blow-out" party. He kept giving his phone-friend instructions to bring the lights---he wants them not too bright; like white Christmas lights, but not too many---and don't forget the "sound equipment"...
The soiree is to be held in someone's garage (presumably Bernie's). And they're not going to let anyone OUT of the garage, because if they did, every time they'd open the door, that might invite police attention. (Trapped in a garage with a string of Christmas lights and what will probably turn out to be a boom-box...Sounds like a blast!) After telling the friend for the millionth time to bring the lights, Young Bernie Suave then added a final business-like grace note: "All I want to do now is go home and take a big shit. I'll call you back." Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!
Yesterday, though, the bus phone-calls got better. A young woman sat behind me and put in a call to, not her best friend Tara, but another one of her homegirls, Tyesha. Turns out that the young woman (who sounded like a slightly more well-spoken and subdued Rosie Perez) had days before texted Tyesha that, if worse came to worse, could Rosie Jr. and her son come stay with her? Tyesha texted back with, "When are you thinking of moving?" Well, looks like Rosie's live-in boyfriend Chris read Tyesha's text, which provoked a crisis since he apparently hadn't been aware that Rosie wanted to move out!
Now, Rosie doesn't REALLY want to move out, but Chris has been acting badly lately, very jealous, starting fights, going through her texts, etc. But why should he be acting that way? HE's the one whose MySpace page still lists his status as "single," even though he and Rosie have been living together for months. And she told him she didn't like that, but...every time she checks his page, it still says "single"!
A few days earlier, Rosie had sat Chris down and asked him straight up: "Can you handle my truth?" Then she gave it to him. She didn't want to bounce. She is so into him. Doesn't she come home from work every night and first thing fix his dinner? "Everything about me tells him I'm his woman." So why, Tyesha, is he acting "retarded"?
Seems Chris has a history of acting this way. When they first started dating, one of Rosie's homegirls (who's 40, but still looks good, although she "has a little bit of ghetto in her. But then don't we all.") somehow got a hold of Chris's address and some private cell phone numbers. Chris had told Rosie he was separated from his wife, but when LilBitO'Ghetto drove to Chris's house one evening, there he was with the wife, looking husbandly while taking out the garbage. Then when LBOG tried one of the secretly obtained cell numbers, lo and behold, his wife answered, and kids were crying in the background... Busted!
At this point, Tyesha had another call, so had to let Rosie go. Darnit! I had really wanted to know how Rosie initially got past the fact that Chris had lied to her about his wife...And, most importantly: Will she or will she not bounce??
The soiree is to be held in someone's garage (presumably Bernie's). And they're not going to let anyone OUT of the garage, because if they did, every time they'd open the door, that might invite police attention. (Trapped in a garage with a string of Christmas lights and what will probably turn out to be a boom-box...Sounds like a blast!) After telling the friend for the millionth time to bring the lights, Young Bernie Suave then added a final business-like grace note: "All I want to do now is go home and take a big shit. I'll call you back." Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!
Yesterday, though, the bus phone-calls got better. A young woman sat behind me and put in a call to, not her best friend Tara, but another one of her homegirls, Tyesha. Turns out that the young woman (who sounded like a slightly more well-spoken and subdued Rosie Perez) had days before texted Tyesha that, if worse came to worse, could Rosie Jr. and her son come stay with her? Tyesha texted back with, "When are you thinking of moving?" Well, looks like Rosie's live-in boyfriend Chris read Tyesha's text, which provoked a crisis since he apparently hadn't been aware that Rosie wanted to move out!
Now, Rosie doesn't REALLY want to move out, but Chris has been acting badly lately, very jealous, starting fights, going through her texts, etc. But why should he be acting that way? HE's the one whose MySpace page still lists his status as "single," even though he and Rosie have been living together for months. And she told him she didn't like that, but...every time she checks his page, it still says "single"!
A few days earlier, Rosie had sat Chris down and asked him straight up: "Can you handle my truth?" Then she gave it to him. She didn't want to bounce. She is so into him. Doesn't she come home from work every night and first thing fix his dinner? "Everything about me tells him I'm his woman." So why, Tyesha, is he acting "retarded"?
Seems Chris has a history of acting this way. When they first started dating, one of Rosie's homegirls (who's 40, but still looks good, although she "has a little bit of ghetto in her. But then don't we all.") somehow got a hold of Chris's address and some private cell phone numbers. Chris had told Rosie he was separated from his wife, but when LilBitO'Ghetto drove to Chris's house one evening, there he was with the wife, looking husbandly while taking out the garbage. Then when LBOG tried one of the secretly obtained cell numbers, lo and behold, his wife answered, and kids were crying in the background... Busted!
At this point, Tyesha had another call, so had to let Rosie go. Darnit! I had really wanted to know how Rosie initially got past the fact that Chris had lied to her about his wife...And, most importantly: Will she or will she not bounce??
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
"Dream a Little Dream," 1957
One of my favorite Doris Day songs, from my favorite album of hers, the sexy "Day by Night."
Stars fading, but I linger on, dear
Still craving your kiss
I'm longing to linger 'til dawn, dear...
Stars fading, but I linger on, dear
Still craving your kiss
I'm longing to linger 'til dawn, dear...
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
On my Joan Crawford message board, people have been discussing the age-old question of what 5 famous people they'd invite for a dinner party. I couldn't whittle my own list down to 5, but here are 8 that I came up with (in no particular order):
Rasputin
Joan Crawford
Zelda Fitzgerald
Charles Manson
Cleopatra
John Lennon
Anne Sexton
Ted Hughes
Just looking for a little polite, quiet conversation!
Rasputin
Joan Crawford
Zelda Fitzgerald
Charles Manson
Cleopatra
John Lennon
Anne Sexton
Ted Hughes
Just looking for a little polite, quiet conversation!
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