Finger Foods

I accompanied Kevin to a screening of two shorts being hosted by the company he is about to begin working for. One was an animated Indiana Jones-y thing that was very cute and had no dialogue at all. The other was Most, a lovely and sad little film, mainly in Czech, written by two guys, one of whose names was immediately familiar to me. I told Kevin he's the guy who played Johnny Lawrence in The Karate Kid, the mean blond boy and star pupil of the Cobra Kai dojo. I don't think Kevin believed me. But it turns out I was right.

After the screening and a small reception, we went to the Cat and Fiddle where Jeff met up with us, and we gabbed and drank and avoided befriendment from the guy to our left who obviously wished his companion had as much to say about Star Trek and bathroom etiquette as we did. To be fair to Jeff, Kevin and I were the only ones talking about Star Trek. But we are defined by the company we keep.

I've had difficulty getting past the gloom. Seeing sad movies sometimes makes me think that it is necessary and appropriate. That things aren't as beautiful when they are perfect and pretty. I am more likely to take a picture of something broken or smashed or chipped than of something brand new and untouched. I like the desolation of abandoned buildings. I like to picture how things used to be or how they might have been.

My body is sore from many gymnasium visits. My teeth are tired from gritting. I think working in an office promotes nostalgic episodes in me, because I am more inclined to listen to music and be reminded of things. And yet, there is nearly no sensory input that doesn't have the potential to send me off into a reverie. I am so busy remembering I wonder if I'm ever really here.

Instant Rebus

My friend Adam has only recently begun allowing me IM access to his attention. He uses Trillian. I use Adium. And apparently Trillian has a function that turns certain words in parentheses into icons. This is annoying and weird. And useless when you consider that people not using Trillian will only see the word in parentheses and not the picture. In addition, what if you just want to type a noun in parentheses? Maybe you won't want it to suddenly turn into a picture. I take this same issue with IM clients (including Adium) that interpret certain sequences of punctuation to be emoticons. You can type http://, but if you type ftp://, part of that becomes an emoticon. The middle part. And it's the face that looks sort of nonplussed. The half-frownie. And there's nothing you can do to keep it from doing that. Even though ftp is a commonly known and used protocol and URLs can begin with those characters any old time. But this is a secondary gripe.

A gently edited version of an IM exchange between me and Adam follows. The editing was done to remove extraneous conversation parts and to make me and Adam both look like excellent spellers and typists. To put it in context, I was reassuring Adam that, though I nearly refuse to ever type "LOL," I still find his witty messages amusing and clever. I also nearly refuse to ever use emoticons or to abbreviate. I am an IM and text message snob.

adam: (toast)
adam: God, Trillian is weird.
me: I don't use Trillian.
adam: What do you see in the line directly above the phrase, "God, Trillian is weird?"
me: (toast)
adam: Wait, do you see parentheses with the word "toast" inside it, or do you see a picture of toast?
me: Parentheses and the word "toast." Does Trillian replace the word "toast" with an icon of toast? How lame.
adam: They have millions of these.
me: Well, I am seeing text. And I prefer it that way.
adam: (book)
adam: (sushi)
adam: (candycane)
adam: (dice)
adam: (duck)
adam: why would you need these?
me: (intestine)
me: (taun taun)
me: (spigot)
me: (funicular)
me: (glowworm)
me: (spaghetti phone)
me: (mitochondria)
adam: (xmas)
adam: (audiocd)
adam: All mine are real.
me: Oh, listen to you. Yours are REAL. I don't have that function. I'm testing it for you.
adam: I just wanted you to know that I was still picking the ones Trillian put in the system and not making them up.
me: I figured as much. I was trying at being funny and showing off my vocabulary. And insanity.
adam: (squirrel) not kidding
adam: (ps2)
adam: (water)
adam: (flag)
me: What a useless feature.
adam: i hate it.
adam: (book)(toilet)(eye)(food2)(food)(write)(dice)
me: I'm just trying to imagine the pictogram sentence that would make. If it were a rebus.
me: "Bookcommode I munch munch letter craps." Whatever could it mean?
adam: (cheese)
adam: (error)
adam: (frog)
adam: (ket) (pc) (flag) (info) (file) (write) (work) (home) (globe) (robot) (bug) (octopus) (bunny) (squirrel) (turkey) (cent) (ufo) (apple) (balloon) (icecream) (soda) (fish) (webcam) (search) (key) (lock) (cheese) (wine) (wine) (hotdog) (bttf) (rb) (vc) (hourglass) (beep) (!) (talk) (n/s) (ap) (0)

And then we discussed the proper onomatopoietic representation of an archetypal porn soundtrack.

Fortuity

This past week, my iTunes Party Shuffle fortune has been nigh onto magic.

Caution: Bees!

When I was leaving work yesterday, there was caution tape cordoning off the pedestrian bridge between my office building and the parking garage. Apparently it was there because of a rash of bees that had been seen or reported. And I guess this is a fairly common occurrence at this address. To prove I really don't pay much attention to the world around me, I honestly can't tell you if the pedestrian bridge is lined with flowers or not. I think it is. But I may just be adding a fanciful skin to the monochromatic trek between parking space and cubicle. I can see rainbows in my head if I want to, too. I am very imaginative.

I was tempted to just walk under the caution tape and take the most efficient route to my car. I'm not afraid of bees. And from where I was standing, I couldn't see any bees. And I rationalize that the caution tape doesn't actually confine the bees to that space, so if there are a bunch of bloodthirsty, perhaps Africanized bees out there, they can sting me just as easily if I take the elevator down to the street and walk under the pedestrian bridge. Even moreso if I take the stairs. But I didn't want the lobby attendant to think I was being willful and obstinate, so I followed the extempore rules and secretly chided myself for having that momentary flash of panic when I first saw the caution tape and thought, "If I can't walk across that bridge, how will I get home. Or to the mall, for that matter." I wouldn't say I'm NOT strategically minded, but even I'm ashamed that my survival instincts didn't immediately remap the path across the street. It's not like I'm allergic to asphalt or anything.

Back when I was in high school and my mom didn't want to be asked to pay for my college education, she suggested that I join the Reserve Officers Training Corps. Now, that you have heard this story and can add to it the knowledge that I have never successfully done a pull-up nor scaled a wall with the aid of a rope, you will surely think me justified in having glared at her, turned away, and never revisited the topic again, except in storytelling in which the suggestion was positioned as absurd.

Photo courtesy of The Internet.

A little chin music.

Why don't I write about The Paul F. Tompkins Show as much as I used to? I'm lazy and a jerk. Those are the only acceptable explanations. But tonight, I attended the show, as I nearly always do, and I feel the (tipsy) impetus to remark on how great the show always is and how disappointed in it I never am. Maybe I write less because I've run out of synonyms for extolling Paul F. Tompkins' genius. That's just embarrassing. I own a thesaurus. Surely I can find ways to praise Paul without constantly repeating myself. Or not. If history is any witness, I've taken all manner of notes at show after show, but I've just seldom managed to retype them into a journal entry. Obviously rendering my note-taking worthless.

For the record, I have looked up the chin music issue, and it turns out that Dave "Gruber" Allen has nothing for which to answer to me. I guess "chin music" -- while it does also mean punching someone in the face or pitching a baseball a little too close to the batter's face -- made its debut in The Red Badge of Courage and meant an excess of jibber jabber. When I'm wrong, I say so. And then I move to another state and pretend we never met.

Kristin Herman is my favorite thing in the world. Samm Levine is my hero of aerial acrobatics. And AC/DC is good no matter who sings it.

Mutual Admiration Society

I have friends whose praises I do not sing often enough. I will try to rectify this in installments.

There is Yen. She is gifted and a genius and a soft-spoken angel with great taste in music and a fabulous sense of style. She took me and my mom to dinner in Monterey Park on Thursday night. We ordered beef tendons and goose intestines and other less gross-sounding things. I stole a menu because the pictures of things one could get were so appalling as to not be believed. She comes to my aid in a pinch. She brings sunshine with her, no matter how persistent my murk. She lives too far away from me, but that is her only flaw.

There is Jeff. He is also gifted and a genius. After having dinner and drinks at The Arsenal with Ryan and Kadie, we all went to see Drawing Restraint 9 on Friday night, because Jeff worked on it and his name is in the credits and everything. He even knows the way to the Nu-Art, which I apparently do not. Jeff is smart and subtle and supportive and generally down for the good times. He is too good at everything. It makes me ashamed to try things. That is his only flaw.

There is Jessie. My creative partner and a source of sane ballast in my often angst-ridden turbulence. Sometimes Jessie holds my hand when we walk places. I remember when I stopped letting my mother and father do that. And then when I started letting them again. Jessie has never not been allowed. Thursday night, Jessie and I almost went to a birthday party but ended up at the Coach and Horses instead. I took photographs of her on Saturday and ended up with what I feel is an excellent headshot. Then we went to Luna Park, and Jessie took pictures of me. There are so very few people in the world who I allow to see me as I really am. Whether it is a blessing or a curse to be so privileged, she is one of them. We go to the gym together a lot. And she makes fun of the faces I make when I'm on the stair-climbing machine. That is her only flaw.

The rest of you who may have hoped or expected to see a paragraph about you here, don't lose hope. I'll get to you. And you will love it when I do. I promise.

This it is everything perfect to my like.

Adam showed me this little film called The Forest in Winter. It is amazing and wonderful on many levels. He showed it to me on Salon.com, but I will post a link to YouTube, as you may not be a premium Salon accountholder, in which case, how not the best for you.

This film has affected my syntax.

Fits and Starts

Make a decision. Commit to something. Exercise some discipline. Follow through for once. Remember all those times you waited? Remember where that got you? Remember all those times you gave up? Remember?

There's a line that Orson Welles says in The Lady from Shanghai. "When I start out to make a fool of myself, there's very little can stop me."

Remember when you weren't afraid to look a fool?

I'll admit, I make rash decisions.

Not as a rule. And not as they pertain to important matters affecting my loved ones and mankind in general. But I get all het up about things and am inspired easily. And all it takes is a little snippet of sensible-sounding rhetoric, and I get pitched into activism lickety split.

I heard Michael Pollan on NPR's Science Friday tonight, after doing some stand-up, and in the time it took me to drive home, I had already decided to try and never eat corn or its byproducts again. I'll never succeed. I won't even stick with it for very long. It's one of those battles that would require me to move to France. Which I would happily do if there weren't these ugly matters of citizenship and animal quarantine.

I've been doing a great deal of study in recent months about food and biology and epidemiology. My mother lauds my recent healthy eating. Almost enviously. Which makes no sense. She says so herself. She wants what I'm eating, but she would die without rice. It's a fact. But I don't know what's so great about eating healthfully. Just having to stop and read the labels on things is enough of a pain to make grocery shopping less of a joy. In comparison to the carefree manner in which I once restocked my pantry, it's like going off to pick wildflowers but having to stop and look each petal-laden stem up in a book of ancient runes before putting it in your basket. And I should add that once found in the book of ancient runes, the description will be dishearteningly bland. And if it isn't, you will have to put the flower back. If I can feel a mixture of excitement and relief when I read the label on a can of lentil soup and find that it was made without potatoes, I may as well go stick my head in a pig. Being careful of course not to get any of the pig in my mouth.

So, Michael Pollan was talking about his new book, and none of what he talked about is intended to inspire asceticism. It's more anthropological and agropolitical than recipe-oriented. But he is a right smart dude, and everything he says makes you want to hear more. I want to believe that sustainable agribusiness can be attained. And I want to believe I can help with that by buying all the organic food that I've been buying. Just like I wanted to believe that I could make The Corporation an internationally-adopted manifesto by hyperlinking it on my blog and my MySpace profile. It costs a fortune to be conscientious, unfortunately. I'm committed for now. But I have several slow- and non-paying clients, and that will put a strain on my ability to buy organic blueberries. Even when they're in season, berries are not cheap.

Buy one or all of these provocative and socially-conscious items, won't you?

  

Aim High

When I was driving up the 405 today, I found myself alongside a big flatbed truck, toting one of those man-made rock-climbing walls, strapped down on its back or side, depending on how you define things. I love fake mountains at Disneyland. But fake mountains in gyms look dumb to me. Especially when the handholds are sort of designed into the faux rock surface. I don't know why climbers want to try and believe they are actually outside when they're working out on one of these things at some trendy fitness center. And the wall is not believable-looking at all. Not believable enough that you might forget and put sunscreen on before you gear up. Not believable enough that a well-composed photograph could be sent to your family as evidence that you've been to Yosemite. To me, they look like crumply mounds of papier mache with those little lick'em and stick'em rings all over them. The kind used to reinforce ring-binder holes. I just think a serious rock-climber might be just as inclined to scale the surface of a structure that is clearly man-made and not attempting to evoke one's inner granola-eater. Granola is terrible for you anyway.

According to Mel Gibson, it rained on Jesus, too.

I'm wearing a groove into the 5 and 405. I haven't been working on it as much these past few months, but every now and then, I get back to it. I had another quickie trip to San Diego yesterday and drove up this morning, straight to the office. Something I haven't had to do in ages. It brought back memories of doing it for the very first time. A trip that started with a goodbye. A week that ended with a good cry. A move that made little difference. A season in my life that was costly and curdled. A season far too lengthy to be called a season. Unless you divide your life into quarters. In which case, it was not nearly a season at all.

I spare myself a lot of the pondering that used to act as ready pastime. I no longer have a go to game to play when I am bored and must sit still and be quiet. When I must look attentive and engaged. I have no excuse.

I'm doing stand-up tonight and photographing and possibly appearing in a friend's film tomorrow and whatever happens Saturday night and going to San Diego again on Sunday.

I like the rain. It reminds me of every other day it rained. And it unearths greedy hopes of curling up in the safe dry indoors. There is something so very civilized about being able to close a door and lock it.

I miss the naivete in you that made it possible for you to say those things to me. I miss the naivete in me that made it possible for me to clutch them so tightly. They meant everything.

Why is this night the same as every other night?

I didn't leave the door open for Elijah. I have a small dog who can't be trusted

Photo Set

I have been uncharacteristically slow about editing and posting photos to my web site for most of this year. It's a sign of many things. But out of love for the people whose pictures I take, and out of pride for having taken them, I am offering the interim solution of my Flickr sets.

Here are some of the events you may have attended/heard about/missed/wished you hadn't gone to:

Disneyland with Michelle and Martín 04.09.2006

Happy Birthday, Tammy Golden! 04.06.2006

The Night We Almost Fought at M Bar 04.01.2006

St. Patrick's Day 03.17.2006

Garage Comedy 03.06.2006

L.A. Zoo 02.19.2006

Liquid Kitty 02.04.2006

Evan Moore's Housewarming/Cooling Party 02.03.2006

Disneyland with Kevin Kelly 02.01.2006

Chip Pope's M Bar Dance Party 01.27.2006

At the Movies with Kevin Tavolaro 01.18.2006

It's a Moist World

Change "moist" to "damp." I dislike the word "moist." I guess everyone does. Except cake-bakers.

I went to Disneyland yesterday and got splashed more thoroughly on Splash Mountain than ever in recent trips. And when I went to Room 5 in the evening, I went to write something down and found that my notebook was all squishy. That's a disappointment. Not even half full and rooooned. Wanting to copy everything over neatly into a second identical notebook is a hallmark of my desire to have things neatly written down and preserved. I used to play with Spirograph and Fashion Plates, both of which are prone to slips of the pen or the crayon, and it would drive me mad trying to get something to come out without any flubs. It took a lot to get me to rejoice in errors, and even now I do it only selectively. If I'm making an art project and I screw it up, sometimes that's for the best. And if a photo comes out with the exposed flare of the leader visible within the print, I almost like it more. But I will throw away an envelope if I write the address incorrectly, and I won't eat burnt popcorn unless it's to spare someone else's feelings.

A Crinkle in Time

I stayed home from work today. Woke up with a piercingly painful sore throat. So I decided to work from my couch. Out of concern for my co-workers. With the consumption of copious amounts of water and tea, I actually feel fine now. Fine enough to watch my pair of Deep Space Nine episodes, which happened to be the final episode of the series. It still makes something in me flutter. It still makes me tear up a little. It still makes me yearn for the lingering tendrils of nostalgia that once made remembering both wonderful and horrible. That final shot of Jake and the station is so lonely. The theme music, too. I long for a world of wide open spaces.

The future is a place you go by yourself. What you find there; there are no guarantees.

And the further you get from the origins of nostalgia, the more varied strata of other things stack up between you and the thing, and suddenly your memory isn't of the thing anymore but of your last memory of remembering the thing. I've talked about this before. Even this is an observation once removed.

I used to make popcorn and chicken sandwiches late at night. I never liked the scent they left on me. But it mattered less then.

Wilfred Wong tastes 8,000 wines annually.

Wilfred Wong tastes 8,000 wines annually. He is America's most prolific wine judge. When I read this, I thought two things: (1) Is that his real name? Because the alliteration is all too convenient, and if you were an Asian person picking a Western name for yourself, why would you choose one with so many unpronounceable consonants in it? And, (2) Am I a small-minded racist? Because I would be so much more likely to trust his point assignations if his name sounded French.

I don't think of myself as a racist, but maybe that's just because I'm too polite to be dangerous. When Jessie and I took a hip hop class at the gym last week (an experience more embarrassing than can be described), I was humiliated and frustrated to see how much better most of the people were getting the steps than Jessie and I. Except the Asian guy. I totally expected the Asians to get it. And then I corrected by pointing out one Asian woman with a cartoon-like overbite and saying, "Except her."

He was an idiot, but I loved him.

Love and Death is on now. I think Turner Classic Movies is doing an AFI Funniest Movies playlist. And god bless them for it. It's like a dream afternoon for an old person. Or me.

My dog will be the judge of your foley art.

Certain films and certain commercials have the sounds of doorbells ringing and people knocking on doors, and only certain ones fool Audrey into barking. I assume those are the ones that sound the realest. It usually startles me when it happens, and I end up resenting the program that started the ruckus. One of them is the Domino's ding dong audio logo, which plays repeatedly in every one of their commercials. It's easy to be angry with Domino's. Just now it was The Bank Dick on Turner Classic Movies. Duck Soup was on before that, and all that gunfire and shenanigans didn't rouse Audrey a smidge. But W.C. Fields knocking on a door sends her into hysterics. She has little to no opinion about science fiction sound effects or the sounds of someone being murdered. But if someone's at the door and politely notifying you of that fact, look out.

Curiously, both of these movies were playing in a multi-feature over at the New Beverly a year and a half or so ago only a week or two after I first adopted Audrey. Time is marked in mysterious and varied ways.

I've been saying "ish" for years.

If anyone ever accuses me of soaring on David Spade's coattails, let the record reflect that no such flight was ever taken. The chicken. The egg. In this analogy, I think I am both of them.

The Word

I love that Stephen Colbert is steadfastly etching "jizz" into the censor-sanctioned lexicon of late-night cable programming. It's about time.

Even if you have joined a religion that doesn't agree with podcasting

I hope that will not deter you from listening to The Ricky Gervais Show. You can get it at the iTunes Music Store or at Audible.com. Or you can just sit there and wonder how long it would take you to die if you immersed yourself in organic ketchup, nose, mouth, and all.

Ugh.

Perhaps it's just me, but I am experiencing no enthusiasm at all about Robert Wuhl's new project on HBO. And I think the lack of looking forward to it is mostly caused by the teasers they are running in which Robert Wuhl deconstructs the show and talks about why it works. Or maybe I'm just still experiencing too much aftertaste of Arliss. HBO has money and influence and a wealth of quality programming and the resources to create even more of the same. It's a mystery.

Oh, and Dane Cook's Tourgasm promo makes him look fat. I wonder if that bothers him.

As Good As It Was

I drove to San Diego yesterday to perform in some comedy shows. I also stopped over at Sarah's for Paul's birthday party, where some fun was had. We even went to The Lamplighter because Sarah wanted me and Beulah to sing karaoke. And I ended up on the stage alone. I sang "Rosanna." Then I left. And I really think The Lamplighter is a shitty bar. I always have. I always will.

I had to rush over to the comedy theater to play the late show and our monthly midnight show, in which I am allowed to say words more representative of the words that actually come out of my mouth when talking than one might be able to tell from watching the regular PG-13 show. The midnight show is a fun excursion. We don't do the short-form games of which I grow so bored. We do long-formy stuff, and we get to be more creative with edits. And none of this is entertaining to talk about. I had a fun enough time, despite some disappointments. And I drove home in the rain in the wee hours, listening to a very old playlist on my iPod that sent me into a strange reverie. Strange and painless. I was almost trying to force myself to feel nostalgic and wistful. It's like I miss all that heartache. Like I don't know how to want things in the absence of being denied them. This all ended in getting into bed at the hateful hour of five a.m., where I was neither sad nor happy and where I was so tired I couldn't sleep. So I read a Star Trek novel for a while and then forced myself to turn off the light and be quiet and still.

Who cares.

Now, I'm working again. And As Good As It Gets is on the television, and Audrey is my little Verdell, and I can't believe Helen Hunt won an Oscar for this movie. The movie itself is still reasonably enjoyable to watch, but Helen Hunt's performance didn't wow me the first time I saw it, and none of the letters in "wow" are in my feelings about her performance today. I much prefer her in that educational film where she takes PCP and jumps out a window.

John Cleese was not wearing socks.

I don't know why I notice these things. But I do. He was wearing a nice enough pair of tan loafers, but that bare ankle skin kept glinting at me from between the hem of his jeans and the top of the shoe. I remember noticing his upturned polo collars in that show about the human face. I wonder why I feel so compelled to be critical of John Cleese's fashion choices. Why should I criticize him? I adore him.

I took Martín to see John Cleese's one-man show at Cal State Long Beach tonight. I don't wish to write a review. But I will note that I clapped my hands together when learning that he shares my love for Phil Silvers. I wrote down the joke about Norwegians. And I remember going to see Fierce Creatures in the theater the weekend that it came out. I also went to see the re-release of Star Wars. It was possible to do both, for the record.

I haven't been to Long Beach much. Only to visit Martín back when he lived there. To pick him up on the way to Disneyland or to stop off and have a meal with him when I had a lot on my mind and a long drive ahead. He wasn't terribly nostalgic about visiting his alma mater (which it is). I am always interested to see how much less susceptible to fits of grotesque sentiment others are than I. How freeing that must be.

I hate how much work I still have to do.

I was hoping for Kermit.

You Are Scooter

Brainy and knowledgable, you are the perfect sidekick. You're always willing to lend a helping hand. In any big event or party, you're the one who keeps things going. "15 seconds to showtime!"

The Muppet Personality Test

Deprivation Addiction

Do I really like Guster as much as I think I do, or am I just upset that I waited until today to check their web site and learn that they're playing tomorrow night in San Diego and the following two nights here in Los Angeles? I think I really like them that much. But that the romantic loss is heightened by the almost of it. I don't think I could make it to the San Diego show tomorrow night. And the Roxy shows are both sold out. And if I hadn't gone to their web site today, I would just keep listening to them occasionally on my iPod and not give it another thought. Why get yourself all worked up, Mary? Oh, it's just like everything else. They say that silver medalists are more prone to depression than bronze medalists. I guess the bronzies are just happy they got anything. And the silvers will only ever feel they got awfully close but failed. I guess that's why I don't play any competitive sports.

How many times can you rediscover Pearl Jam?

I'm so immersed in comedy these days, I feel occasionally tugged to return to my previous passions. I once had a reputation for having awesome taste in music and for knowing about bands no one else knew about. That is a difficult reputation to carry or to sustain. At least for me. I'm too keen to be expert in all the categories. Ask me about books! Ask me about gastronomy! Ask me about the ancient art of warfare! Don't bother to ask me about celebrities and stuff, though. I just get my information from Defamer and The Superficial just like you do. I used to see a lot of live music. Now, I see a lot of live comedy. I don't necessarily not want to be able to do both. I feel the onslaught of metanoia. At least a temporary brand of it.

So last summer, Brad introduced to me this awesome and ingenious thing that was then called Music Plasma. It's basically just a relational database, but it creates a visual map of your preferences and uses them to suggest other things you are likely to enjoy. It is now called liveplasma, and it now includes movie preferences, too. You can easily waste three days building your preference map, and why shouldn't you? With this and Pandora.com out there, you'll never have to listen to a song you actually directly like again! And I used to let Amazon.com and my Real One Player tell me what I might like. The very idea.

I'm glad Jay won.

I just watched a fat guy stumble off stage like he had the vapors on Project Runway. It's a rerun. But still.

I had never watched Project Runway before yesterday. Now I have watched all of it, it seems.

This is what diaries are like when kept by dying wretches on desert islands.

I drove past that accident in Culver City. Saw a body under a tarp.

I worked a 21 hour day.

I can barely stand up.

The concept of "bonus" is sacred.

Therefore selling a Rascal-like motorized chair and then offering a free "bonus" of a grabber (like the kind the community service servers use to pick up trash on the side of the road), which you can use to reach a box of high-fiber cereal on a shelf well out of reach of your unextended human arm when seated and let's face it disabled, if you order now with this exclusive television offer seems disingenuous and erodes the value of the word.

The Power of One Eye

My dad's vision is getting better. Prednisone is working on his condition, which was confirmed to be ocular myasthenia after months of Kaiser not scheduling him to see the various physicians he needed to see. I know people say socialized medicine doesn't work. But other than having a staff physician living on site at your family's compound, what does? I was furious every time I learned that my dad was being made to wait months at a time to see someone when one of his eyes wouldn't focus and eventually the other eye's lid began spontaneously shutting. Apparently, things are going so well that he doesn't even have to wear the eye patch anymore. Yeh um wo ha me. That's my homage to little P.K. The Power of One was on while I was getting dressed this morning, and that movie makes me think of my dad and the day we watched it in the living room of the house on Freeport Road while I baked homemade bread from a Paul Prudhomme recipe. I don't think he liked the bread I made, but he liked the movie plenty. And later that night we went to a show that I was playing violin in. I don't remember which one. Probably Crazy for You or The Fiddler on the Roof.

I should note that extended use of prednisone can have unpleasant adverse effects. The two conditions I will never forget the names of since hearing them relayed by a co-worker many years ago are Moon Face and Buffalo Hump. They are real medical conditions, and they are exactly what they sound like. Sometimes I think all maladies should be named in this fashion. Except when I have one of them, in which case the conditions should be named in unintelligible Greek and Latin terms or after flowers.

I've had to work the night through several times this week. So I'm allowing myself a later start than usual. Walking Audrey so close to noon is extra nice. It's gorgeous sunny out. A breeze that smells like the right time of year. Memories of cell phone pictures and unclaimed time stretching out ahead and not minding the sun in my eyes or the smell of the outdoors in my hair. It wasn't so long ago, but it feels so far away that I can't believe it ever happened. Only the pictures prove any of it. And these days, I've been taking so few pictures that there is no promise of future proof. I lack inspiration. And I am brutally aware of it.

Unacceptable! (Mea culpa.)
It's not that I haven't had anything to say.
I did not watch even a second of the Oscars. I regret this in a way, as it is usually a fertile field for my exclamations and complaints. I did watch Jon Stewart the next time he was on his show, and he said words that sounded flip, but he seemed cranky about the fickle reviews he received. I guess he is allowed that. But it mars the image that I think previously made him so appealing: that of a very smart dude who can civilly commune with opposing intellects while keeping his justifiably smug superiority a complete secret. In the past few weeks, it's Stephen Colbert who has most thrilled and charmed me. I think the smugness suits him. The irony is subtle enough to be lost. And his delivery has gotten to be leagues better. Although that remote about the women's prison in Shakopee that Dan Bakkedahl did this week is among my favorites.
I was in San Diego over the weekend. That's part of the problem. I did a couple of shows at the comedy theater. Got to play Five Things both times. And then afterwards, I went and met John Meeks at Nunu's only minutes before last call. Then he and I sat and drank whiskey in my car with the iPod playing and me eventually singing along like the dorkiest nitwit ever until my battery died. I had to call a tow truck and everything. When my mom called at 6 a.m., I felt guilty. And when I got into bed at 7:30, I felt guilty and terrified of having to be up in only a few hours and still pretty drunk. But I was able to get up in time to get my errands done and to celebrate my mom's birthday (which was on Monday) with the rest of the family at Jasmine. For dessert, we were served those peach-shaped buns with the sweet bean inside. Somehow, and at the urging of one or both of my sisters, I ended up doing something to that bun with my tongue that fetched the interest of a host at the restaurant, who knows me and Sarah from the days long ago when we used to go to Jasmine for dim sum at least once weekly. He looked over Beulah's shoulder as she reviewed the pictures she was taking and said, "I want to see those pictures." Randy. I got very red in the face and wanted to leave immediately.
I drove back to L.A., having not watched the Oscars, and was mortified to hear Steve-O hosting Loveline with Dr. Drew. Good god. Not only can I not stand his bong-soaked voice with the audible fluttering tendrils of mucus in his throat, but he NEVER SHUTS UP. A girl called in to talk about her heroin addiction and how she is living in a tent, and he interrupted her at every chance, plugging his web site, inviting her to log on to his message boards and receive encouragement from him. I guess her tent is in an area with good wireless signal. And he interrupted Dr. Drew incessantly, too. And never for any amusing or informative reason. It was the worst. Really. Intolerable. I had to turn it off.
And since I have returned, I have had so much work to do and so little time to do it in that I've barely bothered to make notes about the things I wanted to write about later.
Wednesday night, Jeff came over and broke my PlayStation 2. But we fixed it. Like screwdriver-wielding surgeons. I wonder if surgeons save people's lives by just sticking their fingers in wherever they can and jiggling things around.
And I reconnected with an old friend from college this week and have been pitched into that dizzying pace of email exchange that leaves little time for public speaking. Whenever I am immersed in a scintillating exchange, I channel all the good stuff into that private dialogue and my public performance suffers. One day, I will learn to balance this.
I can't remember a single other thing.

Economy of Language

I've noticed something about President Bush's syntax. Beyond the peppering of malaprops and the frequent use of incorrect grammar. There is this thing. This thing he does. This thing he does where he states something. This thing he does where he states something and then states it again, adding on a phrase at a time, until you've heard the first part of the sentence twelve times over. Perhaps you've heard it. I heard him speaking in a clip on the news and he said something similar to this, which I place in quotations to indicate that he is the one speaking, but I disclaim by offering that I can't guarantee these were his exact words. Truthfully, I don't even know if he was talking about Istanbul. "This trip to Istanbul. This trip to Istanbul is an important trip. It's an important trip because it is the beginning of a critical relationship. The relationship that is beginning is critical."

I only point this out because it reminds me of my grade school days when assignments were given with a word count or a page length, and we would struggle to fill our paragraphs with empty phrases to meet the minimum requirements. Well, most of us would struggle. I freely admit that most of the time, I had to pare down in rewrites. But no one is saying that's better.

I'm just surprised and dismayed to see so much of the rest of the listening world not mind the vacancy of the rhetoric we are offered. I have been surprised all along to see journalists and pundits sort of shrug and compliment Bush's addresses, in their own way saying, "Cut the guy some slack. Atleast he got through it." But what promise does that hold for future occupants of the office oval? I suspect that, for at least the very next guy, the audience will expect so little that a gifted and effective speaker will be maligned in the press as a show-off and a know-it-all, while a clumsy one will be accused of biting Bush's style. I didn't know it then, but it has been proven over and over since the election of 2000 that you just can't win. "You" being me or anyone who wants what I want.

And a partridge in a pear tree.

I'm not the only one who remembers Ayds.

Kittenpants is glorious. And I'm not wishing it on anyone, but I so wish I could say someone has a house in Vermont. Thumbs up, gay community! You find a better way of saying EVERYTHING.

The Bravery sure is apologetic.

To listen to their lyrics, if they aren't sorry or asking your forgiveness, they don't really have a lot on their minds. Maybe it's a form of politeness. Or passive aggression. I can't tell yet.

"A can of Simoniz."

I just found out that Darren McGavin died this weekend, too. I would make some "it comes in threes" speculative remark, but apparently Dennis Weaver also passed away. So, I guess no one else need die for a while. We're covered.

And I don't mean to sound glib. I love Darren McGavin. Given the number of rounds of A Christmas Story I've watched in recent years' TBS A Christmas Story Marathons, I may have a greater impression of Darren McGavin as a father figure than I do of my own father*. And, while I often get Dennis Weaver mixed up with similarly white-haired actor Harold Gould, I respect his IMDb playlist, too.

What a sad weekend for Hollywood. It's a shame that people get old at all. I saw a commercial this morning for Ameriprise, and it basically said, Your generation changed the world and rock and roll and all that stuff, and now you're changing the way people retire. Then you see an old guy in a hang glider or some sort of experimental airplane. It's really depressing. I'm sure those Woodstock mud-dancers would be utterly dismayed if they could have seen into the future and caught a glimpse of themselves keeping their grey hair a little on the long side and also diversifying their investment portfolios. I guess you have to market to people. But I wonder how effective it is to market to people as they truly are as opposed to marketing to them as they see themselves. I'm too young to be as old as I am and too old to not have lived through both of the great wars. How do you get someone like me to buy a flat of Lunchables? Answer: Make a melon-flavored variety and package it like it's from Japan. And then use a Bing Crosby song in the commercial.

*This is distinctly not true.

This will mainly be for my Los Angeles friends.

Last week, I found myself in a meeting with Pilot Peppler of Pilotware. I had no idea that Pilotware was named after a guy. I guess it's as good a name as any. Maybe even good-er. He reminded me a little of William Gibson. Or maybe of a character in a William Gibson novel. And he was using a PowerBook.

'A masterpiece.' The Times

I finished the book I've been reading. The one I bought at Counterpoint back in the spring of 2003 and would read for a bit and then abandon for months. The one I bought because the cover was sort of pretty and lonely, and the book was very thick, which always attracts me for some reason. It's called The Unconsoled, was written by Kazuo Ishiguro, and was without contest the most infuriating book I've ever read. I'm glad I finished it. I didn't hate it. But for some reason, passage after passage would just confound me with a mixture of impatience and frustration. If there is a city in the world where people actually do behave and talk like they did in this book, I hope that it ceases to exist before I ever stumble upon it. Although the description of plates of breakfast in the very last pages made me want to visit there very much.

Stairway to Redundant Heaven

I just saw a promo for the 10 O'Clock News that is apparently about backward masking. Fox 11 News finds secret messages in your music, or somesuch. And they were playing Queen's Another One Bites the Dust and showing a vinyl record being spun backwards with someone's hand.

Um...duh. I heard that "It's fun to smoke marijuana" clip when I was in junior high school. I was going to a Seventh-Day Adventist school, and we listened to an audio seminar (on cassette tape) called "Rock A Bye Bye Baby." It was a live talk given by some pastor about the harms of rock n' roll music, and I remember that it made an impression on me. At least enough so that I used to think Ozzy Osbourne was a Satan-worshiper and was a little scared of any band featured on the cover of Circus magazine. That is to say, until Duran Duran was featured on the cover, and then I realized that rock n' roll was not only perfectly safe but also very, very handsome.

Is this really the only newsworthy thing happening in America today? It's hard for me to believe that this decades-old story made it past the editors as something anyone hasn't yet heard about. Tomorrow night, Africanized bees, Tylenol tampering, and the deception of "light" beer.

The Incredible Mr. Knotts

Don Knotts died on Friday. I'm so sad. I have loved him for years. All those movies, falling in love with his wide-eyed clumsiness, his nervous gulping, his stammering attempts at suave, his raspy declaration that any sip of liquor was "smooth."

One of the old morning shows in San Diego had a guy (Cookie "Chainsaw" Randolph on KGB FM) who did a Barney Fife character on the show. I was listening to KGB at work one morning, and I called in and won the Thousand Dollar Thursday contest on Van Halen's Hot for Teacher. And they put me on the air, and they had Barney talk to me, and I told him I loved him, and they teased me for it. And, really, I was thinking more of how handy that thousand dollars was going to come in when I moved into my own apartment in a number of weeks.

But that wasn't even the real Don Knotts.

I have collected his movies for as long as I've owned media. On VHS. On laserdisc. On DVD. And I have found him delightful even in the movies that weren't delightful themselves. And whether it's a product of getting older myself or just being greedy, I maintain that eighty-one years was far too short.

"This is a very specific kind of bullshit."

Last week was my first week at a new job which came to me suddenly and thus took on a dreamlike quality. Not dreamlike in that it was beautiful and ethereal, but rather dreamlike in the sense that it never felt like I was fully awake or fully there. My sleep habits are ridiculous, and my eyeballs are delicate. It seems.

So, it was not entirely unforgivable that I plain forgot that I had tickets to see the Kids in the Hall at the end of the week. My calendar and a conversation with a friend reminded me, and all of a sudden I had to scramble to find mates to go with me, because I had bought two tickets for Friday and FOUR ticket for Saturday, assuming I would have lots of buddies who missed out on the sale. It wasn't difficult. Save for those who wouldn't be in town, no one DIDN'T want to go. In the end, I took Martín on Friday and then Dustin, Boris, and Martín (again) on Saturday, and both occasions were super. The theater was so crowded on Friday night that Martín and I had to stand in the back, but we were flanked by Vera and Blaine and a handful of other friends, so it was really nothing to complain about. But on Saturday, I made sure to get there good and early so that we could sit up close and not have to wonder about what unplanned offstage banter was happening out of earshot.

The Kids performed all new material they had just written this week, which was a thrill and a treat and a dose of inspiration. And an equally potent dose of indictment.

After last night's show, Boris and Dustin and I skipped out on the after party for the show and went instead to the House of Pies and then to the liquor store and then back to the Steve Allen to watch the Tomorrow Show, after which I still had a great deal of whiskey in my handbag and really should have created a scenario that would have led to my drinking more of it, but instead I hurried home to my dog and my Guitar Hero, which just might be as good as it gets.

My friend Simon and I had an IM chat later that night during which I confessed that I had felt pretty, as a means of balancing out the usually self-critical responses I make to any of his kind compliments, and also because -- amazingly and for once -- it was true.

Autodidactic Chiropractic

Constant bleeding. Mopping up unsightly messes. I almost stopped and wrote out the ideas, but I assumed I would remember them. And of course I didn't. What was it? Mortality? How death has always followed me -- at least in my brain? How I am always so wrong? Was it about my mother? Nothing frustrates me more than having something on the tip of my tongue. I should have stopped in my tracks and started writing. It's a lesson I am constantly learning.

I have a number of different Chess recordings on my computer. I am listening to all of them. When I do that, it's suddenly a dewy late summer in my brain. Days that started out hot and ended in chilly outdoor orchestra performances. Music stands sweating condensation on photocopied manuscript paper. My stand partner was supposed to photocopy the score and share it with me so I could have it in my archives, but he never did. What a shame. His name was Lowell, but his nickname was "Speedy."

The pain in my eyes is greater than the weight on my shoulders. Or is it.

"Apologize to THEM."

Oh, it's sunny and brisk here in Jobville today. Yesterday, the day the city was founded, was surprisingly windy and cold, despite the sunshine and cloudlessness. The wind provoked comment from nearly everyone. Especially in the elevator.

Sharing a parking garage with a middling shopping center offering Starbuck's, Borders, Nordstrom Rack, and a waffle place, Jobville is more convenient than Formerjobtown. And far more pleasant, despite the absence of a fancy pants Miele espresso machine in the kitchen. I'm surprised that no one has noticed or commented on my LCARS screen saver yet. In a way, an aspirational nerd like me is protected by the relative unknownness of the things she likes. If there isn't a picture of Captain Kirk on it, most people don't know Star Trek from Beatrix Potter. Soon enough, I'm sure everyone will learn the many unfortunate facts about me that first impressions obscure. Beginning with my clumsiness, my addiction to Super Text Twist, and my fear of using the phone system.

Career Counseling

How do people get jobs these days? Do people actually talk to their guidance counselors and such? Or do they apprentice with blacksmiths and cobblers and the like? I never did any of that. When I was growing up, I think it was more of an oral history tradition. Or an osmosis of popular culture. Because if they weren't getting their career ambitions from the professional cats and dogs in Richard Scarry books, it seemed like most job ideas came to people by way of a short film on Sesame Street or the Electric Company. And people only grew up to be dairy farmers and chewing gum makers.

Speaking of jobs, it looks as if I will be starting a new one next week. What a twisty-turny life it is here in Los Angeles. One can barely buy advance plane tickets with any great surety.

ex nihilo nihil fit

Continually challenged to determine how many days a girl can go without significant sleep. Sometimes getting only forty minutes. Sometimes getting none at all. I had work to do. And people had birthdays. And I had to fly away for a few days. And I had to fly back. And I had to drive out of town. And I had to visit people. And I had to spend entire days in important meetings. And I had to decide what to wear.

Strange. Wherever I have been was the locus of some string of memory. That place I used to work. Waves of coincidence. Reminders reminding.

I got my hair cut, and I hated it. When I went to Tim's bowling alley birthday party, my friends did not hate my hair, but they were not scrutinizing it as I was. I went back the next day to get the color fixed, and I hated it even more. No one seems to hate it now, either. But you can't trust anyone when your hair is bad. No one will speak the truth, and hearing it will not make it less so. Maybe it's not so bad. But it's not what I wanted. And it was far from free.

I am tired of being away from home.

I offered many wishes of happy valentines today. It felt like a pleasant formality.

I don't usually watch much of the Olympics. I think the last time I sat in front of a television and watched them, it was the year 2000, and it was someone else's television, and swimming events were on, and the evening ended in an ideological impasse. But I have seen a great deal of the Olympics this time around. Also on other people's televisions. My mother always watched the figure skating in the winter and the gymnastics in the summer. I don't remember much else.

This Japanese figure skater has the same first name as a stuffed thumb-sucking monkey I had when I lived in Guam. I will find a picture of it and post it. It wore a sailor's cap, and I loved sleeping with it. Daisuke. This guy was skating to that Tango Di Roxanne number from Moulin Rouge. And from far away, he looked like an iteration of Michael Jackson's fashion sense from a few years back. Men who skate don't seem to mind those outfits they wear.

And what a caricature these snowboarding victors are of the version of Southern California one might think only exists in movies about Southern California.

I wish I had made a better show of it all. I must keep myself from reassessing lest I feel perpetually disappointed in everything I have ever done and every moment I have ever endured.

I'm reading a book I bought a few years ago and never finished. And I finally got to a few passages I felt triumphant to have read. I dog-eared the pages. But I realize that everything I savored in the words was what is sad and forlorn in me. Words that justify my yearning or echo what I say when an ache is present. What a terrible habit I have of indulging that.

It's a shame this Canadian fellow fell in his program. He's a good dancer.

Foiled Again

Strangers with Candy is on, and I should go to bed. Some battles are best left lopsided and unwon.

Are you shopping for me?

How sweet of you.

Here are some of the things I like:

Full Metal Alchemist
Paranoia Agent
Herman Miller Aeron Chair
Star Trek
Star Trek Deep Space Nine
Disneyland
Izawa/Hijikata Puppet Story Books
Marilyn Monroe
Violin
Duran Duran
ABBA
Photo albums
Art supplies
Ernie and Bert
Lenticular images
Art supplies
Film scores
Visine
Mel Torme
Bing Crosby
Moleskine notebooks
Winnie the Pooh
Paris (by Yves Saint Laurent)
Things from Japan

Here are some things I have:

PlayStation 2
GameCube
Intellivision
Laserdisc player
Record player
DVD player
DVD burner
Most commercially available DVDs
Reel to reel
Typewriter
Macintosh(es)
Lomo LC-A
Canon A-1
Canon SD500
A Kodak Disk camera
Sony DSC-V1
Gym membership
Queen bed
Viewmaster
A full set of Cutco knives (even the cheese serving tools)
A tape gun

Here are some things I used to collect (but no longer do):

Snowglobes
Erasers
Elephants
Sewing patterns
Everything

Here are some things I don't like at all:

Cannabis candy
Must Love Dogs
Old lady perfume
Old lady jeans
Old lady underwear
Nutrition bars
Hershey's chocolate
Blue cheese
Raisins
Shoes that have been worn before

Word of caution? I am hard to shop for. When in doubt, opt for consumables. I far prefer things that can be used up, if only because I have no more space to keep the things that can't be. And don't worry. If I really like you and you give me something that I use up, I'll probably keep the package.

P.S. My birthday isn't coming up right away or anything. I was just thinking is all.

Oh, Comedy

I did some more stand-up tonight. And that went all right.

Prior to that, I went over to Wayne Federman's place to take headshots for him. I sure hope they come out the way he wants them to.

After my show, Jeff and I went to my friend Evan's housewarming party, and once a bunch of other friends arrived, it was a swell time. Somehow, when Jeff was looking at my Disneyland petting zoo photos and Jessie was greeting him, my camera got dropped and the LCD cracked. This does not make me happy. But I suppose everything will work itself out. Even if I have to buy another camera. Again.

There was a weird Guatemalan fellow who crashed the party. He simply would not go away. And no amount of none of us understanding what he wanted helped. It was all very awkward and uncomfortable but makes for a nice enough story now that we are all home and not murdered.

I stayed too late. But I'm also glad I stayed as late as I did. There were people there I wanted to talk to and laugh with, so even after Jeff and Tim and Mindy and Jessie and a number of others had called it a night, I stuck around and tried not to spill anything.

Audrey greeted me with licky dog love, and I delighted in it. When I'm not with her, I miss kissing her smooth head. And when I am with her, I do almost nothing but make up for lost time.

The Treaty of Oregon 1846

Manifest Destiny
There was no war.
James K. Polk
54° 40' or Fight!
Mary Forrest does not know everything there is to know about everything. So there.

Happy Birthday, Adam!

You are the cutest boy I ever frightened with my analgesic throat spray. I adore you.

Annals of the Ungood

I did go to Disneyland yesterday. And it was a good Disneyland day. Audrey was a yelpy, crying baby when I went to collect her at the end of the night. But everyone loves a little dog. There is no end to the cooing and the fawning and the small children pointing their chubby fingers. I adore it.

When I got home, tired and a bit dizzy and wanting nothing more than a hot bath and a book and a nightlong coma, I had work to do. I created copy and comp designs for a product my friend Julie is hoping to win business for. And I did that until five of the clock in the morning. And by the time it was okay for me to be sleeping, I was so exhausted that I couldn't relax. That has happened to me before. I am not a fan of it.

I signed up for a new gym membership on Tuesday, but I've yet to have a chance to go. I want to go right now, but I think I will be pressing myself for time. I have an article to rewrite, and I have workshop tonight.

And then twelve or thirteen hours passed, during which I tried to get down with some Dance Dance Revolution but ended up on a series of frustrating conference calls with one of my clients, showered, went to my workshop, went to a couple of shows after class, met Angie and Julie at Lola's, and then came home and wondered whether it is even possible to pick up where one left off. I think the answer is no. Even if you think you know where you were going.

If only all the movies that should never have been made were Lawrence of Arabia. I would go to the cinema with much greater frequency. Speaking of which, I have heard that the new Woody Allen film is good in the way that Crimes and Misdemeanors was good. If this is so, I will be happy in a way that would embarrass some people. I also have plans to go see the new Albert Brooks film, which I hear is not a work of art, but I've also heard that a goose egg laid by Albert Brooks is a far finer egg than one laid by someone else. Namely Michael Bay. I don't have a crazy awesome film release to look forward to at the moment. I miss the days when I yearned to see things on the nights they opened. The passage of time has taught me that I can see it when it's more convenient. And I hate it when I catch myself in a fit of pragmatism. It's so unbecoming.

If Big Momma's House 2 is the number one movie in America right now, I assume that means that there was an "incident," and there are no other movies playing. And the sad part is, my mom would probably really like that movie.

Tiger in the Sack

At night, I wrestle beasts and monsters. A leviathan in the ocean. A fish. A snake. A fish snake. A recurring fish snake. I battled it with a flute. I lost someone. The fish swallowed the flute. There was a ship. I was in the sea. I was going to die.

There was a great tiger on a road with grass on either side.

The deepening of genius

Perhaps I am too successful
Too convincing
Perhaps I disguise my feelings too well
When they fall in the realm of hatred
The durability of love
It is even able to coexist with revulsion
Some say they are one and the same
I dissent

If I foresaw my future and it held devastation, I would go forward as planned. I have never been one to spare myself where suffering is concerned. I have also never had much of a knack for telling the future. I wonder how differently I might behave if I knew how it was all going to end.

I had many chances to seize the day. Many chances to take the gift of freedom and do something with it. It could have been a very different life for me.

10:20 a.m. 10:20 a.m. When will I ever see you again?

Spoon songs make me think of long-ago office days. Zoo visits. Hamburger stands.

I remember everything you did
Everything you were
Everything you said

And also of daylight savings time and the discovery of golden hour and photographs of my reflection in the conference room window. Even then, it was never good enough.

The difference between the guy who takes months and months to be comfortable letting people know he's with you and the guy who can't wait to hold your hand. They are the petals of one flower. I don't know what made me think of it.

When love loses its restlessness
No longer scrambling towards an object
No longer fearful of losing it
Doesn't it also lose its flavor altogether
Maybe feeling can only be translated
In the vibrations that radiate from
Nervous tremblings and fear
And in the calm of their absence
With the water smooth and placid
The man loses all thought
Of what was once roiling and churning
For he lacks imagination

I am reluctant to write the word here. Unless it is in glib unmeaning. I am reluctant to draw attention to the fact that I ever feel things or think things or know that attention is being drawn. It is an absurd public illusion, this. And at the same time, it is an impetus and a great mess of gushing, and I am grateful for it and would never curse it away. If nothing else, it keeps me organized.

I fall in love with Ray Bolger when he dances. I am not afraid to say it.

This is what happens when I finish reading a book.

I'm going to Disneyland.

Again.

And that's the only reason I'm up early enough to be showered and getting dressed when the Today show is on. It's been a while since that was part of my morning routine. And maybe that's good for my blood pressure, because watching Katie Couric interviewing John Kerry in response to the State of the Union address made me scowl and run to my computer to tip tap type my disapproval.

Is there no journalistic standard anymore? Is it the role of these performers to just play devil's advocate? Because if Katie Couric wasn't playing devil's advocate, then she was letting her personal agenda show like a petticoat under too short a skirt.

She brought an opponent of the President on the show and asked for his response and then reacted with theatrical surprise and dismay at his thumbs down. She cited an NBC News/Wall Street Journal(?) poll that said 62% of Americans are dissatisfied (my words) with the Democrats not stepping up and providing a clear agenda in the face of this administration's failures. Now, I don't know what the details of that poll were, but it seems so the opposite of incisive to frame a question with that brand of generalization. Could the Democrats do more? I doubt you'd find a Democrat who would say "no." But that floats above the topic of the Bush Administration's performance and flits down onto the head of the minority party for no other reason than to avoid actually commenting on the administration in question. It was essentially this: Senator Kerry, don't you think that everything that has gone wrong in Washington is really your fault? or better yet: That man who was murdered, isn't it really your fault, Mary Forrest, for not doing more to save him? But I don't live in Baltimore. Isn't that just an example of the partisanship that separates California and Maryland?

I wish I could follow the logic and not want to beat the person at the end of it with a broom handle. Katie Couric asked John Kerry why the Democrats have been so unsuccessful in winning the approval of America and John Kerry rightfully pointed out that being the minority party and not in control of the House, the Senate, or the Executive tends to narrow the platform from which his party can speak. I think he said something about the size of the megaphone the other party gets to use, and he's right. Katie Couric said, Oh, come on. You can't blame the media. Once again turning the interview into her personal battle with the interviewee instead of acting as the liaison she is supposed to be for her viewers. And then to point out the Democrats' unified clap/no clap strategy as an example of how Democrats are to blame for the partisan divide. I personally like to be a good sport. I don't know that choosing not to clap or choosing to clap with mocking enthusiasm are the most effective responses when you think the guy up top is a shithead, but I also know that this is not where the deals get cut. And John Kerry was right to point out Karl Rove's recent flagrant (and continuing) abuse of 9/11 to imply that Democrats who don't support the Bush tactics in Iraq are delusional and naive. That line is constantly being drawn and always with that insidious Rove-ian approach of saying you are either this or this. And one of those things is what everyone wants you to be and the other is a cockroach in a dirty prom dress. And America responds to that. You can say, You are either with us or against us. And Americans will go, "Oh, okay. Well that clarifies things." But I just don't see very many Beltway issues that are as binary as that. You can support the troops and not support the war. Duh. You can support a woman's right to choose and not dance a jig whenever an abortion happens. You can disagree with President Bush and not be a crackpot with a partisan agenda. And you can also agree with him on specific issues and not change your surname to Lemming. I just wish you could be a television journalist and also be concerned about getting to the truth. Granted, getting your news from mornings news programs is already questionable, but if I had gotten these thoughts from an online news source, they probably would have made these arguments for me, and that wouldn't have given me anything to blog about.

I'm having Mickey Mouse pancakes.

Have you ever had custard-filled mochi?

Oh [stop] My [stop] God [stop]

When I die, please have the morticians stuff thirty of them in my mouth before burying me. I wish to take them with me into the afterlife. Granted, I will have difficulty sharing them, as they will have been carried in my mouth, but I'm very greedy and have no problem with this.

Jogakusei

Sensory Explosion

Star Trek III and a hot pepper.
"How soon is now."
Pon farr. The seven year itch.
The needs of the many. The needs of the one.
When Kirk's voice catches in his throat as he delivers Spock's eulogy.

I did a bit of stand-up tonight. It was less time than I thought it would be, and it was over before I knew it, but it was not so very painful, and that is something.

I was in workshop in the Andy Dick Theatre at I.O. West the other night and Andy Dick walked in. With Dino Stamatopoulos and some other guy whose name I don't know. We were close to the end, but it was still a weird interruption. Andy offered to "work out" with us. Craig Cackowski maintained a placid silence during the brief but bizarre little episode. It was surreal and awesome.

Yen took me to see Of Montreal at the Ex Plex, and it was wonderful. Afterwards, at Chip Pope's dance party, I was waiting outside, because Yen and her pals were coming to meet me, and I know M Bar is hard to find if you haven't been there before, and Willie Garson -- the guy who played that guy on Sex and the City bummed a cigarette off me. He made a to do about the fancy type of cigarettes I had. They're Dunhill Lights.

Last night, I appeared with the Winchester Preparatory Sketch Academy at the UCB Theatre. I donned a short, dark wig and glasses and a school-girlish outfit to portray one of five Asian girls who were poisoned by lemonade and died in front of the stage in a dogpile. I'm pretty sure my skirt flipped up when I fell over dead. I hope the people in the front row didn't bother to notice my shame.

Bryn and Kerri gave me another box of porn for Christmas. Martín borrowed some of it for his "friend at work." I walked him home with Audrey tonight, and we went inside, because Audrey loves to run on his wall-to-wall carpet. And he put in a disc, which I think was Black on Black 7, and it started with an image of a flag waving in the wind and the words "In memory of 9/11/01" superimposed and then promptly went into the fucking. I laughed myself dizzy.

I like Thai food.

I'm going to play Pac-Man World 2 on my PS2 now. I keep dying in Canyon Country, or whatever it's called. I also like bases ball, Martín. But I think I got it right, and you got it wrong. We can fight it out Dance Dance Revolution-style.

Colin Firth and his underpants.

First off, let me say that I really like Colin Firth. He is handsome and charming and has a lovely accent and a reluctant smile. And you get the sense that a lot of the awkwardness in the characters he plays is genuine. Not debilitating. Just sort of ordinary. Like a person would be. Not always certain what to do or say in a given situation. By contrast, Hugh Grant is generally the opposite of this. But I adore him, too. I would allow either of them to beat me past recognition and take all my money. Or date me, I suppose.

So Colin Firth is a guest on the Ellen De Generes Show at the moment. And I find myself both liking and pitying him. Ellen started off by thanking him for doing her show when she knows he hates doing that sort of show. Which I suppose makes for a rough start. And then she coaxed him into telling a story about an embarrassing incident that happened to him recently, which I'm sure was the product of the pre-interview. But he just sort of stumbled through the story, making very little eye contact, and getting a few laughs and looked, at the break, as if he didn't expect to still be sitting there when they returned from commercial. He was, and he seemed more at ease. And I was glad for him.

He wasn't the winning raconteur that a Hugh Grant or an Alec Baldwin would be in that seat, but I almost liked him more. Especially when he described himself as not being very neighborly. He doesn't strike up a conversation with his seatmate at the beginning of a flight. What if they're awful? You might chat with them twenty minutes before landing when the stakes are lower. Genius. And he doesn't "do neighbors." When he's about to "move house," yes, but not generally when he's just moved to a neighborhood. Bravo for that. I think there is too much of a premium on being nice and being friendly. It's great when you only meet nice people with whom you might share common interests and common standards of social behavior. But when you're just friendly to everyone, you will end up receiving phone calls at all hours from the worst people, and all because you felt bad that no one else was talking to them. That's more of a sign from nature than a call to action. There's no real prize in being the only person in town who likes that guy. The movie Forrest Gump really blew this quality out of proportion.

Anyway, I like Colin Firth. I don't think Ellen is the most skilled interviewer there ever was. And I wish my neighbors would mostly fall down a hole at the bottom of which was a river of pure magma.

So dirty. So handsome.

James Franco was absolutely the right guy to play a pre-dead James Dean. He's so pretty. And can make his eyes look weepy for an entire movie. These two things are capitalized upon in Tristan & Isolde, which I went to see with my friend Kevin Tavolaro on Wednesday night. And aside from my thinking his sweater was ridiculous when Isolde saves him on the Irish shore, I didn't have a huge number of complaints about the film for the first half or so. Some of the boyhood stuff seemed implausible. And I always cringe a little at how bad I'm sure everyone in that time must have smelled. And the whole thing smacked of Braveheart. But I let all that go and just wanted to see the two lovers meet and fall for each other and be star-crossed. Because I like crying at the movies, as long as it's not because someone has hurt my feelings.

I remember learning the story of Tristan and Isolde (actually Tristram and Iseult) in a mythology class I took in college. It was told in the cycle of Arthurian legends, and I vaguely remembered it as a possible archetypal progenitor of the story of Lancelot and Guinevere and their betrayal of Arthur, but in looking back on my notes, I don't know if that was what I was actually taught, as Tristan was apparently once part of the Arthurian legends and was considered one of the two most important knights until later in history when it stopped being him. My notes say that the Celtic story of Dierdre and the Sons of Uisnach (The Third Sorrow of Storytelling) was the inspiration for the Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot triangle. But the Tristan and Isolde story seems to fold in, too. That wouldn't be readily apparent from watching the movie, though, because the other thing that came of reviewing my notes was my learning the movie wasn't really very true to the legend, and that always brings me down. Until I had cross-checked my references, I wasn't really so offended by that. I just got so frustrated and disappointed when we got to the third act and it turned out to be a festival of crappy cliché, happenstance, and bad wigs. Such a let down.

Why can't Hollywood master the third act? This seems to be the true sorrow of storytelling. I can't count the number of movies that fail in the homestretch like this. And I don't really know why it is. It doesn't make sense that the process gets rushed in the end or something, because films aren't shot in order like that. I don't think it's just because of studio executives liking their ideas best. I wish I knew and could squash the reason, because it's what makes me think I should start watching movies until the two-thirds point and then just duck out.

I guess ending a story is the hardest part. I know how that is. But maybe it's the desire to wrap everything up so neatly that ruins it. That was what German cinema cursed Hollywood for. And maybe they were a smidge right. And yet with a story like this one, the story is already written. The events are foretold. We know how it ends. So how hard could it be to make those things happen without it feeling like we're playing a pretend detective game on the playground after school. Come to that, I'm pretty sure my friend Sharon Prieto and I used to come up with much better plot wrap-ups when we were making those stories up in fourth grade. And we nearly never got lice in the process.

While I am beginning to think that Gene Siskel's untimely death is what sealed Hollywood's awful fate -- Ebert and Roeper are jerks whose opinions embarrass me in their toadyingness -- I will honor him with the downturned thumb I have to give Tristan & Isolde. Rufus Sewell looks like one of his eyes is made of glass, but he was good. And James Franco is pretty and weepy-eyed and heroic. But the guy who plays Wictred is awful. Wearing a terrible wig and looking like a cross between Andy Garcia and Stanley Tucci and not managing to seem cunning or sly for a necessary instant. And the guy who plays the King of Ireland is pretty good at being brutish and unfeeling and scary until the very end, when he becomes ridiculous and suddenly his crown reminds you of watching the movie Xanadu.

So thumb down. But much applause for the experience of going to the movie. I was a bit tipsy before I even got there, from having had drinks early with my other friend Kevin. And then Kevin Tavolaro and I had cocktails at the Arclight bar, and I snuck a flask of whiskey into the movie, as well. And whether because of the movie or all the spirits, we laughed and laughed. And that was a good time.

Apéritif

For my mother, there is no real distinction between someone who drinks and someone who has a drinking problem. I have plenty of stories from my own experience. The Christmas Eve dinner in 2004 when I was laughing at something Beulah was saying and had had a half a glass of wine, and my mom snarled, "Look at her. She's drunk." There are plenty more like this. She isn't a teetotaler. She's just judgmental.

But the best case of this is with the Food Network's Sandra Lee. Now, I dislike Sandra Lee for my own reasons. She promotes the white trashery of the American epicure. She speaks authoritatively using words she mispronounces. She has a show, for Pete's sake. A show whose entire purpose is to teach people how to cook without actually having to make anything. The whole point of the show is to use storebought, prepackaged foods to cobble together something that pretends to be more refined. Meaning your family dinners are even more thoroughly suffused with chemicals and preservatives and fat-makers than if you had unwrapped a stack of Big Macs and set them on your fine china, hoping no one would notice you don't smell like a fry cook. I assure you, if you thicken your soups with a can of storebought chicken gravy, you're probably not going to die at your goal weight. Plus, the food she makes doesn't even look pretty to me. I grew up watching Jacques Pépin and stuff, so maybe I'm a big jerk, but if I went to a restaurant or even to someone's home and had one of Sandra Lee's "creations" set before me, there's very little chance I would be able to pretend to be impressed. But whenever Sandra Lee's name comes up or her show comes on, my mom tells me -- as if intoning a great secret -- that Sandra Lee is an alcoholic. I thought at first maybe she had read this somewhere, so I would say, "Really?" But it turns out it's just because Sandra Lee includes recipes for cocktails on her show. It's not even because she swigs from a wine bottle while sautéeing or anything. Just the fact that she has bothered to include recipes for mudslides and creamsicle shots makes her a drunk. Whenever someone is accused of a crime, my mom also assumes they're guilty.

Oh, and for the record, my mom was watching Rachael Ray the other day and she scowled and shook her head and said, "Look at her. She's getting fat."

My promises are many.

My arguments are few. (Click the photo for a higher-resolution version or whatever.)

And if you are too lazy to crop your photo strip out of the top photo, click here to get your own personal delivery, because you are very special and I have a huge amount of bandwidth:

Mindy and Mary
Mindy and Mary (again)
Mindy and Mary and Marcia and Ryan
Mindy and Mary and Tim
Mary and Jeff
Mindy and Mary and Cale
Mindy and Mary and Tom

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil.

I've been reading Rilke -- and just so it doesn't sound like I'm trying to come over all bookish, I've just finished a trilogy of Star Trek novels by William Shatner and a trilogy of Deep Space Nine novels by the people who always write the books with William Shatner -- and having that experience of epiphany that makes me admit and lament that I could not exist in a vacuum. I am independent in many ways. But there is this craving in me to commune over ideas. When you're reading all night and it's six a.m., the urge to call someone and wax sophomoric over something you've read is easy enough to suppress. That's what blogs are for, I suppose. That's why I jot down quotations and pilfer authored phrases and song lyrics to label and spur on my writing. Something in me wants to capture that instant when I experienced a flash of meaning. Something in me wonders if such things can be shared. Even with the most ample and exhaustive descriptions, I often feel as if the exploring mind is a doom of sorts. A curse. I don't know if you can share a realization. I imagine many people read what I read but don't think what I think about it or feel what I feel. Even in something as seemingly empirical as language, there is the beast of nuance. And I hear every word through the filter of the whole of my experience. Each song that plays is performed by an orchestra of memory. And I am sad when it occurs to me that no one else has ever heard that orchestra. And that is why I clutch at the connections that exist within some shared experience. That is why I treasure the mingling of histories. If only to be able to look at another person and say, "Remember that time?" and have them say, "Oh, yes."

I have been reading and thinking a lot about time travel. Both in fiction and physics. I have been trying to make sense of the various paradoxes and trying to vet the logic in it. And occasionally I drift off into those flights of fancy wherein I have the power to choose such things. Would I change my past? Choose my future? Split off into a veiny mess of alternate timelines? Would I be clever enough to fix it? Or strong enough to leave it be? Bound by science. Neck-deep in fantasy. I never know which end is up. And there are times I can't tell if I am awake or dreaming.

I have been reading humor and history. Philosophy. Psychology. And I have been underlining things on the pages of books I don't plan to resell. I am in the middle of eight things at once. And I am always careful to carry a pencil.

I like monkeys and phases of the moon.

Here are some photos.

Cale's birthday was fun. A little too cold. And not enough Cale. That was Friday night, the sixth day of January.

Tom's actual birthday was fun -- though not an actual party -- but the pictures I took were mostly of me and Mindy in the bathroom. Sorry, Tom. That was Sunday night, the eighth day of January.

Quality Street performed "Cool - a bathroom ballet" at Garage Comedy on the ninth day of January. (I am in Quality Street.)

I appeared in a short film by Erin Gibson the day after that, which was the tenth day of January.

Sarah and Paul invited me to dinner on Wednesday, the eleventh day of January.

I took Jeff to Disneyland as part of his ongoing three-month birthday. That was the twelfth day of January. And it was lovely. Even though I took a record low number of pictures.

Ryan's birthday was celebrated by many at Tangiers and a day early. That was the thirteenth day of January, and it was a Friday, and the only bad luck that happened happened to Sean, whose bicycle was stolen. He took it winningly, if you ask me.

Tom had the audacity to observe a second birthday. And for some reason, again, the pictures are mostly of me and Mindy and then of Mindy and Tim. Sorry, Tom. And I don't really think it was audacious of you to have a birthday party. And I will post the photo booth photos as soon as I get them scanned. That was the fourteenth day of January.

On Sunday, I drove to San Diego to have dinner with my family and my Auntie Ping Ping. I didn't get any pictures of her for some reason. But we sure did laugh a lot that night. And then Beulah and I challenged each other to make the ugliest faces ever, but those photos are on her camera. I drove home late at night and sang along with my iPod. That was the fifteenth day of January, and boy did I need a break.

Sometimes, the moon makes me think of monkeys. On the sixteenth day of January, I took my dog for a walk, and I noticed the gibbous moon, and I remembered having wanted to write something about the moon the last time I noticed it, but I don't really rememeber what it was. One night recently I was driving home, and the moon was just so big in the sky and so low to the rooftops. And I had memories of that sky and of those rooftops and of warmer weather and smaller moons. But I don't know if that was it. When I see the gibbous moon, I am often reminded of my high school boyfriend in Japan, whose name was Ed and who used to tease me by pretending he thought it was called a gibbon moon. Like the monkey. One night, we were driving by the sea wall, and he stopped his car in the middle of the road and we got out and looked at the moon and did some kissing and stuff. And the moon was gibbous and he must have called it gibbon, because he nearly always did, and despite my abhorrence of incorrectness, I thought he was adorable. I went to see an exhibit of Laura Owens paintings at MOCA a couple of years ago, and gibbon monkeys are heavily featured in her work. That time, the monkeys made me think of the moon.

It is now the seventeenth day of January. And I have no idea what will happen before the eighteenth comes around. But I have a feeling it will be both less and more.

And a partridge in a pear tree.

I require the use of a time-turner.

I wanted to be in countless places at once tonight. I was at Tom Hicks' birthday party in Silverlake, using up the photo booth at the Edendale Grill like tomorrow would be the end of photo booths. And I also had wanted to go to the Tomorrow Show. And I also wanted to be at home in my bed or in my bathtub. And I also wanted to be performing at the comedy theater in San Diego with my pals that I love there. And I also wanted to be appreciating the company of my aunt who is visiting from far away and has the best name in the history of names (Ping Ping Valtriani). Tomorrow, I am supposed to go make up an improv workshop. And I am planning to go to San Diego to see my aunt and my family. And I will try to make it to a meeting for a sketch show while I'm there. And maybe I will also drop dead. Because it has been quite a week. I've had somewhere to be every night. And I've stayed out well past closing in most of those cases. And I've had work to do when I arrived home, often with a bit too much of the sauce in my veins. And I really don't know that I have it in me anymore. I want to sleep and read and run and tidy up and fix things. I want to seize the day. I want to squeeze every last drop out of the day. I want to pulverize the day. I want the day to be left bruised an unrecognizable, even to its closest friends. I want there to be fewer bits of celery in the leftover Chinese food I'm eating right now. I want the Bond marathon on AMC to continue forever. Even though it will mean never getting to see an episode of this new con-artist show they keep promo-ing. I would not make a good con-artist. I am not good at telling fibs. And I feel sorry for people. And I have too many belongings to ever be able to up and skip town. God, enough with all this celery.

P.S. Mindy makes my world seem like a bottomless mint julep.

Bung Bung Bung

I was making my mom laugh by mimicking a Vietnamese lady singing on the television. That's when I said, "Bung bung bung."

I worked all day. Made coffee to keep myself focused. Stuffed Audrey into my sweatshirt like a papoose to keep her still and to keep me warm. My mom brought me won ton soup.

I went to a birthday party at Tangiers (Happy Birthday, Ryan!) and then to the 101 Coffee Shop for food I didn't need. And on the way home, I saw two big fat raccoons trying to stuff themselves into a storm drain on Highland just north of Wilshire. What must that be like.

My head has felt all swimmy for some time now. At bedtime, it's easiest to blame the drinks I've had and the sleep I haven't. But it's been perpetual. I can't tell if it's the tail end of sick or the lingering of it or the beginning of a new sick or just the way it's going to feel to be me from now on. It's hard to know what normal is. Nothing about me is ever so consistent. And, yes, I drink plenty of water.