three cheers for paul, who tracked down the source of that nagging javascript error which has plagued slithy tove for the past year or two. i just haven’t had the patience for such things, well, really, ever. this is why i fled from the life of a coder. when i get home, exhausted, at midnight, and still want to talk about theatre – then i know i’m in the right profession.

okay, so i came late to friendster (as in, yesterday). it’s just no one ever invited me, see. but now i see value of friendster – it’s the true friendship (oops, almost wrote fiendship) test. looking up lauren and clicking to add her to my personal network, i had to click through the following warning messages:

You are about to add lauren as a friend.

ok, got it.

lauren will be notified, and will have to confirm that you are friends. Your full name and email address will be sent to lauren for identification purposes if you proceed.

yeah, okay. are you trying to tell me something, friendster?

Continue only if you really are friends with lauren.

come on, friendster what about that time i drew on her armpit with a magic marker? doesn’t that count for anything?

well, okay. we shall wait anxiously to have our overture of digital friendship confirmed.

from the American Association of Aikido handbook:

Rule 6: All Aikido arts are secret in nature and are not to be revealed publicly, nor taught to rogues who will use them for evil purposes.

that’s right. so back off, all ye rogues.

lately i’ve been struggling with an apoplectic fear of fiction writing. the more i try, the more i wonder how i could presume to have the authority to know what it is to be someone else. how do i know what winter wind feels like on the face of someone else? the taste of ginger on a stranger’s tongue? the things that make them feel irrationally sad, happy, angry? all of my attempts at fictitious characters are really just extensions of myself, and that feels like a lie, too. here on slithy tove i struggle on a daily basis to process my own convoluted existence – imagining what it is to be another person is like trying to picture in my mind a color i’ve never seen before. incomprehensible, the closer you look.

and yet, other people write wonderful fiction without having an existential crisis. what’s my problem?

i checked the experation date on the milk carton this morning. it said FEB 30. does that mean it’ll never go off?

leap day graced chicago with the first 50+ degree temperatures we’ve seen since october. i know it’s just a cruel tease, as winter is rumored to last until may around these parts, but a temporary lightening of the cold is so good for the psyche. walking to work i kept tucking my hands into my sleeves against a vague, nagging sensation until i realized: i’m just unused to the feel of cool fresh air on my hands, they’re so used to being encased in mittens. chicagoans celebrated the weather by breaking out all the fashions of summer: shorts, tank tops, miniskirts that have been taunting spring in the windows of trendy shops got their first outting, exposing goose-bumped but determined winter-white legs.

congratulations to vienna teng on the release of her new album, Warm Strangers. we have limited experience with being friends with someone who is now a famous rock star. what exactly is the etiquette for attending her chicago gigs? should i get in line with the other fans to have my album autographed? can i cut in line? come early, stay late, regale everyone with stories of i-knew-her-way-back-when? throw underwear? vienna, of course, wears fame beautifully; the social awkwardness is all of my own creation. maybe when she becomes super famous and embarks on her full-band european tour she’ll let me be the stage manager.

the aforementioned kitty drinking fountain was purchased and assembled this evening, to zeke’s great consternation – a water dish that also clicks and gurgles and makes strange sounds. he can’t decide whether to drink or dip his paws in. it makes me think of a loud, grade-school-classroom aquarium, with the pump humming and growling away beneath the faint sound of trickling water. i won’t be able to sleep at night without unplugging the thing.

tuesdays have become our new favorite day: after 3 years of neck-injury-hiatus, i’ve started taking aikido classes again. by happy accident, my apartment is 3 blocks down the street from one of the only aikido schools in chicago. tuesdays i actually leave work at a normal hour, go to aikido, pick up some sort of yummy take-out on the way home and the second half of the evening is devoted to watching 24. god, i’m addicted to that show. i didn’t watch the first two seasons, but these days i specially engineer my schedule around having tuesday nights free from 8-9. i do the unthinkable (for me) and ignore phone calls, i shush the cat, make dinner wait until commecial breaks. it’s probably for the best that andy is away at rehearsal on tuesdays.

man, kidchamp comes back from the dead, and meatmeat promptly kicks the bucket. i’d like to blame my long silence on server problems, but it’s really just that my life’s kinda sucked lately and whining about it here didn’t feel like it would be terribly productive. and those 75-hour work weeks are murder on one’s internet hobbies. so to summarize chief gripes:

1) work is hard, sometimes good, sometimes not so good, just opened a hellish show that nearly gave me a nervous breakdown, but happily, is garnering us good reviews and in 3 more weeks, will be a bad memory, a bump in the career path.

2) the damn cat’s been sick again, and the vet bills are staggeringly expensive, as is the new perscription cat food he must eat and the special kitty-drinking fountain which will, in theory, encourage him to drink more water.

3) the financial result of my having cobbled together a sorry living wage via 6 differnet part time jobs during 2003 is that none of my employers took out enough taxes, so uncle sam also wants a piece of me. our strategy is to file andy’s taxes now, wait till april 15 to file mine, and use andy’s return to pay my tax bill. robbing peter to pay paul?

i simply need more time. i’m not afraid of hard work. i’m afraid of what happens when hard work isn’t enough.

it’s about my armpits.

pet peeves about chicago:

1) the lack of one giant corporate bank that monopolizes the city’s money and can therefore have an ATM on every corner. instead we’re plagued with like 100 different home-grown banks (one of which i grudgingly patronize), each of which can only afford two ATMs.

2) when the weather sucks and the trains get all funked up, the CTA doesn’t do anything about it – as in, make announcements to the 300 rioting people in a subway station wondering why a train hasn’t show up for 30 minutes during rush hour. or run alternate bus service. duh.

so, when these pet peeves conspired to inconvenience me on the same day, i found myself unable to get a train home from work and without enough cash to catch a cab. so i went into walgreens (if only we had ATMs like we have walgreens…) in search of something to buy with my ATM card in order to get cash back so i could get a cab. makes sense – i pay the same $2.00 convenience fee, only i pay it to walgreens for a magazine or a drink instead of to the ATM.

so it’s 6pm, i’ve been trying to get home for forty five minutes and it’s snowing outside and the streets are covered with two inches of slush thanks to the diligent salting trucks, and i’ve been slipping and sliding all over the place because of my stupid useless frail girly clothes (wool slacks, 2″ heeled boots) that i have to wear to my stupid mindless day job. so i’m trying to invest my ATM fee in my usual brand of unscented deodorant, and pet peeve #3 rears it’s ugly head: why every beauty product on the market has to stink to high heaven like some nasty perfume. seriously, why would i want my armpits to smell like, and i’m not making this up, Icy Rush, Sudden Blast, Cold Fusion? what is that, Cold Fusion, a gatorade flavor? and isn’t Sudden Blast just what we’re trying to prevent our armpits from emitting?

and how does one face the the coldest day chicago has seen in seven years?

start by staying in bed with the cat an extra half hour, listening to NPR’s every five minutes extreme cold weather (-29 windchill) warning. they say the key to avoiding frostbite is layers: we begin with long underwear, tops and bottoms, and over that the fleese-lined pants canvas pants, a long-sleeved shirt and cotton sweater. then the regular socks topped by the polar fleese socks. hiking boots, polar fleese jacket and mittens. scarf wrapped meticulously so that it overlaps the collar and the double-thick polar fleese hat, covering the nose and mouth loosely, so that the only exposed skin is the eyes and bridge of the nose. knee-length down parka goes over the top of everything, and the hood drawn tight to prevent any cold-air gaps between scarf and collar. i look like a thumb with legs walking down the street.

i swear this will be the last entry about the weather. well, no, actually, i can’t promise that.

if it’s going to be cold, i prefer snow. as lauren has pointed out, it only takes 10 minutes for new york snow to get dirty and ugly. chicago snow seems to retain the fluffy white picturesqueness a bit longer thanks to the extreme cold – nothing that falls out of the sky is going to melt until at least april, possibly may, and the snow does great things for chicago architecture – highlighting all of the little decorative railings, ledges, gargoyles – the stuff that no one bothers to put on buildings these days. i’m not such a fan, however, of the part where the sidewalk snow turns into an inch-thick dark brown sludge that is, in my father’s words, “slicker than snot.” it’s like walking on a oil spill. like rollerblading, i fully expect to acquire specially developed glute muscles from the effort required to remain vertical on this stuff.