if this gives you any indication of what today's been like

my day began with a strange pinwheeling floater in my line of vision, alleviated slightly by the removal of my left contact lens, replaced in intensity and frustration by my sudden inability to see clearly at all (it seems i've taken out the lens in the weaker eye, and thus having the two inputs--one clear, one fuzzy as an angora sweater--come into the optical processing center is not making for a happy chappy.)

so, yeah. headache.

along with the gnawing knowledge that i have my semi-annual review this week. which is making me nervous. and the knowledge that now that i'm working within a timeframe, everything is about to get really complicated here at work. and the fact that i still don't know if i'm about to get shipped off to jersey, like everything is such a big fucking secret and we're not worthy of knowing. and being tired. very, very tired.

here's what i really wanted to say: i am actually simultaneously furious and defeated, an exhausting combination that was not alleviated by my brief sojourn to go hit things really hard for about half an hour. now, now i have bruised knuckles, gnashing teeth, a seething headache and only half of a field of vision. and i'm so tired.

but of course you can't say these things when you're locked in the pit that's at the root of it all. the walls have ears and all that.

i killed a cockroach SO BIG

the last few days have been absolutely exhausting. from walking home over the east river to a fitful sleep through an adventurous evening to a unique and draining "snow day" to the show today and its attendant oppressive weather to the destruction of the world's largest cockroach on my bedroom wall, the first i've seen in this apartment, has all left me a bit shaken. and terribly pleased that my big plans for saturday night hae consisted of a very long nap, my air conditioner, the new ikea catalogue and a well-loved copy of kavalier and clay.

blackout!

my city never fails to surprise me. locked in the throes of the biggest blackout in united states history, some semblance of peace managed to reign. no major reports of traffic accidents, only fifteen arrests (impressive, when you consider that all eight million of us took to the streets yesterday)...and, as always, some surprising behavior. my favorite? civilian traffic wardens. random people who opted to jump in and keep their fellow new yorkers from running over and killing each other. of these kindly samaritans, my favorite was the new resident interviewed this morning on NPR...he'd just arrived in the city and saw someone else trying to direct traffic in times square (TIMES SQUARE), and thought he could help. his rationale? "i think new york is an amazing city. and i wanted to do something amazing."

yep.

new yorkers, as you get back online, welcome back to the 21st century.

wherefore art thou, mean reds?

i frequently find that my brain is light years ahead of the rest of me in certain matters. the problem is, i can generally tell when it's gotten ahead of me but rarely why, and am thus doomed to confusion, experiencing only the by-products with none of the clarity. today, my brain has gotten a hold of something. it's simmering and percolating, and over what i have no idea. it's something negative, that i know because i'm being really quite irrational today--my thoughts are skittering all over the place and laced with pessimism (more than usual. hush). i can hear it ticking...no, wait. that's my jaw. perhaps it's because i'm going to a hospital this afternoon...and hospitals are not pleasant places for little ninjas. the smell, and the light, and...yes. don't like them, particularly. ah, well. ignorance, as they say, is bliss, and if i'm lucky, whatever it is unsettling me will sort itself out by the time i figure it out. i, strangely, have a little faith.

you asked me what's my pleasure, a movie or a measure

last night i had several dreams collide, strewing common elements throughout them all. the most noticeable characteristic of them all was the room in which they took place, a huge theatre with a projection screen. in the first dream, it was filled with pews, and i ran in late to find biscuit and flex had saved me a seat, and just in time--the moment i sat down, the walls on either side of the stage opened, and we were cast out to sea. you see, the pews were actually on rafts, and we were a text group for a new ride at disneyland. a sort of theologically themed whitewater river cruise. odd. the second dream was correctly identified as a performance anxiety dream by the boy--i was back in that theatre, and this time everyone was wearing black and red vinyl raingear. i was due to perform for them, part of a three-singer showcase. i would be performing at the back of the theatre, as the same projection screen was still taking up the stage. the thing was, i couldn't get in tune. for the life of me. at all. the top string was horribly off and i couldn't figure out what was wrong. i couldn't fix it, i couldn't retune. and then the bridge of the guitar fell off. it turns out that it was made of green flocked adhesive paper, and wasn't really a bridge at all--someone had stolen my bridge and replaced it with that. i tried to continue with my set, but it was awful...i don't know how the dream ended, because that's when i woke up.

so. to recap. it seems i like theme parks, but i have performance anxiety. if you have a different take on either of these, please let me know.

and here we were, thinking we were going to be short on drama this week.

the owl is ailing. this came to my attention somewhere in the 9 o'clock hour last night, with a call from the biscuit asking me if i'd heard from her, as he'd received a garbled message intimating that she was sitting in an emergency room somewhere.

and on the strength of that piece of information did we activate the tribe emergency network. biscuit described the chain of events well, so i'm not going to attempt to embellish upon it. i lament that i was not at the hospital myself, nor had the opportunity to meet her parents...but my job in all this was to work dispatch, which basically meant i needed to stay near a computer and out of tunnels with no reception. i shall remedy my absence this afternoon, methinks.

suffice it to say, shall we all send some good thoughts to the little owl, who is probably right this very second completely doped up on painkillers and feeling hunky dory. but good thoughts, indeed, for a speedy and painless recovery.

taking matters into our own hands.

WANTED: fourth female for festive frivolities

We're seeking a fierce, fabulous female to make fourth for monthly round of mahjongg and mai tais. You: intelligent, funny, capable of discussing international politics and your favorite mascara in the same breath. Us: creative and wacky, a little verbose. if you are just as comfortable in combat boots as in pearls, if you can survive a roomful of liberal arts college grads, if you know what the east wind looks like or just have a great recipe for sangria, drop us a line. we need you!

p.s. you should probably live in new york, too.

sartorially bitchslapped

it seems that the chairman of the board does not like the website that i've spent the last few months bleeding over to get live. or, more specifically, he finds it "incredibly unattractive," and isn't certain that people will be able to get past its unattractiveness to explore the content within.

why, i ask, did he not tell us this in the planning stages? or at any time in the last TWO YEARS we've been working on this?

please excuse me while i go bang my head against the wall repeatedly.

kids!

i was accosted this weekend by a pack of small children. they had been in attendance at our production this weekend at von king park, and afterwards were terribly keen to meet the assembled company. well. as most people will tell you, nothing attracts small kids quite like a large noisemaker hung around your neck. like a guitar.

so, i was sitting there, minding my own business, when this pack of children comes up to me. they ask me to play a song. i oblige, playing them the theme from the show. then they want more. then THEY want to play my guitar. and it escalates, and they won't let me leave, and i'm trapped by small children in a pile and ring about me. i finally managed to flee the scene, but i had to handoff my guitar before i could, it was the only way i could make a break for it.

i fear small children.

actually, it wasn't so bad. these kids were not of the sort you'd expect to see hanging around a shakespearean production, so that they were there at all was amazing. the fact that they were interested in us was unreal. though i still fear them.

someone brought the sauciness home.

the glitter monster is a sleepy beast, and apparently growing ever more adept at the art of pouting. shameless,truly.

another long hazy weekend under my belt, with heat and rain leaving us all endlessly dampened, long treks to far reaches and the satisfaction of a job well done indeed. as well as the pleasure of inducting some neophytes into the lost art of hand fluting. if only i'd had a camera. and perhaps a tape recorder.

i do so love the occasional luxury of following.

and it seems that i have entered into one of my phases where just about everything makes me blush. charming.

i need to wake up. perhaps i'll expound a bit more after i've accomplished that.

tra la!

about it

1. i am a human disco ball.

2. the mta can absolutely kiss my ass.

3. i have a sexy new haircut. you will note that it has ceased to be cardinal atomic in color; i am alternately relieved and disappointed by this fact.

4. last night's show was alternately humdrum and absolutely blow-the-roof-off-rockstar-awesome. it was a really extreme dichotomy. it shall henceforth be known as the "professional redhead power hour"

5. tonight's show was also a good time--though i managed to fuck up my one actual scene. heh. ah well.

6. i called a vacation day today. and spent it instead sleeping late and futzing about and introducing the boy to the grey dog cafe (home of the best grilled cheese ever) and catching up with a delegation from the clan for the purposes of morally supporting my haircut (shush. i lost something like five inches of hair. i needed support) and going to the show. not a lot really happened today, at least, not if you're going by our original plans for my "special day" (as was phrased by my charming companion). but you know? it was about as perfect a day off as i could have hoped for.

qualming.

i'm having a qualm. i'm qualming. for the first time that i can remember, i don't really want to go to this show of mine tonight. it's odd. ordinarily, i love my shows. i'm an inveterate showoff (so to speak). but tonight? tonight i kind of just want to go home. and curl up in something (or around someone) warm and soft. and just go to bed. be quiet and still.

but instead, i have to go be a rockstar. oh, it's a hard life. a hard life indeed.

new new new

so, newsong is, for all intents and purposes, finished. i should probably clean up the last line, but that's easily done. i think. let's hope, as i'm planning to bust it out at the show tonight.

i played it for the boy last night, which was an unbelievably mortifying and humbling experience. not because of his reaction--on the contrary, he was a superb audience. but because playing my songs for the people they're about is a totally alien experience. almost as alien as the fact that i wrote a songe that's not about what a fuckwit the boys in my life are. quite the contrary--it's about what a pathological psychopath I can be.

how do you like them apples?

yarr. doctor.

as those of you who have been paying attention can attest, it takes only marginally less than an act of god to make me drag my ass to the doctor. this is largely because there is little that makes me feel so frightened and so lost as sitting on that examining table.

i got lost today.

i think it's a doctoral conspiracy that they leave you sitting on the examining table for ages, half naked and nervous, before they see you. by the time the doctor saw me today, i was a shaky little kitten. all i wanted was to leave that tiny, sterile room with its angry red biological wastebasket and dim fluorescent lighting. though my doctor and her staff are all charming and competent, it's still not my choice of activity. and while i'm not emotionally scarred or anything...there's something about going in to get a course of antibiotics and coming out with a barrage of unexpected and unpleasant tests under your belt.

i have a hole in my arm, and have been indelicately prodded. neither were anticipated. but then, i suppose that's okay. mild hysteria aside, i probably would have taken forever to get them done voluntarily. and at least now, in one week, i'll know my official relationship to the acronym that scares me the most (irrationally) and various and asundry other things, including why the hell i've had three bouts of the bringer of orange. that's just not right.

fab four

a few disjointed thoughts for you:

1. i am wearing pink today. when taken in context with my cherry red hair, i am a vision akin to a japanese spring valentine.

2. it's funny how you become accustomed to your little habits, and then miss them so when you reroute your daily routine. example: for ages, i've been plugging my headphones into proper sound i/o thing, giving me access to the full range of bleeps and whistles (as well as mp3s and wavs) that my computer has to offer. recently grown tired of nearly having my ears ripped off every time i move more than eighteen inches away from my machine, i've taken to old habits: plugging into the headphone jack on the front and simply listening to cds. now that i've plugged back in, DAMN, have i missed it. it's sick. but the relief i had upon re-accessing the majority of my sound files? palpable. i'm such a little sound geek.

3. today, we call in the big guns for a goddamn recurring problem of mine these last few months and...yarr! this ends HERE. TODAY. this fucking issue's getting solved once and for all or somebody is going to get hurt. because, frankly, this is getting absurd. ABSURD.

4. and tonight, tonight i resurrect one of my culinary delicacies, my specialties, which i've not attempted to make in...oh...ten months or so. we'll see how that goes. muahahahahahahaaaa!

5. trapeze school. in nyc. i don't think i need to expound any further.

vernaculicious!

let's take a moment to discuss vernacular sponging. have you noticed that if you stick a group of people together for long enough, particularly a group of reasonably intelligent and articulate people, it doesn't take long for them to start speaking like one another? it's almost like a disease; as we pass around fleshy little colds, so too do we absorb and pass on one another's manners of speech. examples that have come into common use through time:

"rock my face."

"sweet chewbacca!"

"christ in a sidecar!"

"dropping a sprog"

"fucknut"

and a whole roster of others which are currently escaping. but seriously. the memes! look out for the memes, because this, quite clearly, is how they are spread.

thank you very much. this moment of minor hysteria brought to you by the city of bangalore, pfizer pharmaceuticals and the letter octopus.

waterlogged shakespeare

and lo, we have borne witness to torrents the likes of which these lands have not seen in eons!

well, not quite. but we have been having some rather impressive downpours, complete with rather impressive claps of thunder, one of which literally caused me to jump out of my seat last night.

that, and half the new york subway system flooded, causing a severe backup in the flow of traffic. as if it didn't already take long enough to get to the bronx from the financial district.

but i digress.

so last night was my first rehearsal for 'much ado,' and i'm afraid that i have no witty and incisive observations to give you on the subject, other than that i feel utterly alien but it's a really nice group of people. and half the cast doesn't know the names of the other half. which is perplexing, to say the least. but i am enjoying myself thoroughly thus far. even though it took me till nearly midnight to get home.

troglodytes and tanslucent shirts.

it's no secret that i'm frequently exasperated by the actions of the men in my neighborhood and their salivating, fetid leering and obscene and/or otherwise offensive comments. no, wait. exasperated is not the word. enraged, perhaps. infuriated. one of those. mainly because despite my repeated snarlings and slashings and spittings in the face of their attention, my brandishments of mace and large pointy objects, the only thing that calls these curs off is the presence of another male. sad, but true. unless i am with a man who clearly has some sort of claim on me (as in, he knows my name and occasionally looks me in the eye when i speak to him), i get treated like, essentially, a piece of meat.

(this is a common rant, i know. but there's a point to this. promise.)

it's gotten to the point that i can't wear certain things unless i either cover it with a muumuu or have a boy on my arm. thus, imagine my pleasure at having an escort for the bulk of the weekend! i got to wear whatever i damn well pleased with no fear of harassment! proof that we're all still living in the dark ages, but such is reality. but i digress. so, for two evenings, i cavort around in whatever vestments i damn well please, without my trademark 'fuck off and die' defense face, because the men in the neighborhood, however crass they may be, don't piss on other men's trees. at least, not obviously.

despite this lovely respite, bit of freedom, my whiskers were tuned, primed to defend myself or anticipate trouble at every step.

of course, let's not forget the fact that it had grown lazy in its two days off.

saturday night rolled around, and im' trotting about in some slinky little heels and my favorite green strapless dress and blow dried hair. we slip outside briefly to indulge in a cigarette. a man passes between us on his way to the garden. he looks down at me along the way (he being tall enough to see down the top of my dress), assesses me briefly and says:

"i really like your br--" i brace myself, preparing to throw him down the stairs if he says what my hackles are thinking is about to be said "--acelet."

(did i forget to mention i'd also been wearing my wonder woman power cuff?)

as you can see, i've been warped by living in the brooklyn quasi-ghetto. i now expect to be offended by whatever people i don't know choose to say to me.

paranoia, as they say, strikes deep in the heartland, eh?

atomic cardinal action!

just call me princess leigh-cheri, because it looks like a box of red crayons just exploded onto my head.

i hope you're the skee-ball type

i sometimes wonder if i'm going to have to turn in my membership card to the club-of-girl, because i am such an utter failure at shopping. plus, i detest it as an activity almost as much as i dislike tea. something about the fluorescent lighting, the prepubescent shopgirls, the endless lines into the fitting rooms. no, doesn't fit into my vastly impatient view of the world and my drive to maintain my self-respect and -esteem.

see, i went on an expedition today, searching for the perfect little skirt for the show of ultimate infamy. something 'wildly inappropriate' without stumbling over into 'skank ho.' needless to say, i was met with no success. (everything was on the wrong side of that dividing line, or burberry plaid. not so much, as they say in the trade). though i did get caught in a charming little tempest and become entirely too well acquainted with my ass. coupled with the no-makeup look i was rocking and the frizzy hair, it was a shivery incognito day, and not a pretty sight. particularly, particularly after the scowl i developed after a nasty old man told me he'd walk me home tonight, and any other night i wanted. ech.

but. all was not lost. as always, the proper company, with which i was entrusted for the rest of the weekend, makes everything so much nicer.

ROCK NINJA

spotted on the subway this morning: a tiny little woman carefully highlighting relevant passages from one of those "why you're going to hell" pamphlets that certain sects of the christian church seem to prone to handing out.

so, it looks as though i have, in fact, been persuaded to join the ranks of the great play creature that biscuit has been rocking all summer. i get to be the resident rockstar. should be a good time, though it's been an absolute age since i've been in a play, and i'm beyond thrilled to say that i have NO LINES. all i have to do is look fabulous (short plaid skirt, yes we're on the prowl) learn a few songs and play them in the big party scene (two, down from the eight that initially caused me to turn the offer down. considering i would have had less than a week to learn them all, and every guitar tab i found for recognizable songs featured either a b-flat or c-sharp chord, neither of which i can play just yet). should be a good time. i think that part of the costume is going to involve wifebeaters with slogans written on them. the one that immediately comes to mind is "rock ninja." i do, of course, desire outside input and suggestions. please feel free to drop me a note with your saucy, three-words-or-less suggested slogan for a quasi-medimoderne rockstar.

in other news, we resurrected the cheesecake kvetching session last night. lots of wine, lots of cheese, lots of cackling and raunch. we had a new member in the ranks, creating a foursome out of the original unholy trinity, which was a lovely and welcome development. though i do fear that, enigmatic and mellow though he is, he is occasionally surprised by just how crass the ladies of the crowd can be. we can bring it, make no mistake. the biscuit is all too familiar with our gutter mouths and dirty minds.

and we're all suddenly becoming very well acquainted with my newly resurrected propensity for deep and sustained blushing. damn my fair irish skin!

and in conclusion, it is always very nice to receive a phone call simply to confirm that one has made it the extra few subway stops home in one piece. though it does make you wonder if you were more trashed than you'd thought. mmm....paranoia strikes deep in the heartland.