5.24.03 – My Date with the Triple Meat Sandwich

there’s something so alien about having a bad cold on a really hot day. the dry air sears my throat and then drinking hot tea just makes me sweat even more than the combination of fever sweats and 95 degree heat already are. ugg. i hab a code. (spoken with a stuffy-nose-voice)

summer landed upon us with a vengeance. not that i’m complaining, mind you, i love hot dry weather, and it’s good for my S.A.D. zeke doesn’t seem to like it tho. he drapes himself over his cat tree and says “mow”, which i take to mean, “it’s too hot to be wearing a fur coat.” we don’t have an air conditioner, so the house is roughly 10 degrees warmer inside than out by the end of the day. this also marks the beginning of afternoon thunderstorm season, a rocky mountain weather phenomenon that pleases me greatly: each day dawns warm and sunny, and around 4 pm big thunder clouds roll up over the mountains, it rains or blows briefly, the sky gets all dark and dramatic, and then by 6pm the whole show’s over in time for golden evening light and a late sunset.

hmm. gotta force my hazy sudafed brain into writing a restaurant review about my lunch at Giacinto’s Trattoria for the Weekly. i think i’m going to title it: “My Date with the Triple Meat Sandwich, or They Put Ham Where?”

5.21.03 – so the topic sentence of this paragraph is: i’m even broker than i was before, but i have cool pants

j.crew warehouse sale. whomp whomp.

last night i dreamt that my right leg was covered in these pale grey spots, like the kind of paint freckles you get from working with watery black paint, only it was some sort of mysterious rash. i remembered the dream this morning when, while getting dressed, i noticed a series of bug bites all the way up my right leg – flat, round red freckles. did i somehow know in my sleep that i was being bitten by something? and where was my trusty, spider-eating cat when i needed him?

5.20.03

i moment of silence, please, for the end of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. goodbye favorite show, now i’ll have no reason to rush home on tuesday nights. i confess that my eyes teared up just a little bit at the very end of the series finale, but then again, i’ve cried along with Buffy and the gang for several years, so what’s one more pulls-at-the-heartstrings episode? hell, i saw the Scooby Doo Movie just so i could see Sarah Michelle Gellar kick some more evil butt while wearing 3″ heels, which is, well, what she does best. in college i turned up my nose at the Buffy fanatics, but then i spent the better part of a year laying on my sofa with an undiagnosable balance disorder, and Buffy Night became a highlight for me. my theory as to why the show was so successful is that it’s a classic comic-book formula: villains that look like big lizards and zombies, a superhero who has to struggle to balance her personal life with her superhero life and the emotional isolation caused by that split, a team of side kicks who have their own quirks and skills, a mentor who is older and wiser but ultimately can’t help the superhero make difficult choices…it’s all there. plus, beautiful actors and an excellent lighting director. it really couldn’t go wrong.

i won’t spoil any surprises for those of you who haven’t had a chance to see the finale yet, but i have to say that i thought Giles, Zander and Andrew passing away a sleepless night by rolling dice and moving characters around an RPG gameboard was a nice touch. Giles: “Great! Now I’m an injured Dwarf with the strength of a doily!”

5.18.03 – disgruntled

it’s may 18th and do you wanna know how cold it is? so cold that i was still wearing those little stretchy black mittens when i was riding my bike around town today. it’s deceptively sunny outside – big puffy white clouds sail around in a blue sky, the trees and grass shimmer green in the bright sunlight – but when you leave the house, this blustery north wind chills bones. my plans for a vegetable garden have largely been on hold because temperatures are still dipping below freezing at night. little seedlings in cut-off milk cartons line the shelves of our bathroom, which has been transformed into a temporary greenhouse these past six weeks. with the row of 60w light bulbs just inches from their milk cartons, the little seedlings have been coaxing into sprouting even tho it’s still wintery outside. two more of the cucumber seedlings committed suicide yesterday tho. they just keel over in their carton, hang their heads limply over the side and turn dark green. i don’t know what they want from me, i give them water, sunlight, nutrient-rich dirt, but still they march on to their deaths. luckily i started about 10 seeds but i really only want 1 cucumber plant.

there’s really no point whatsoever to this post, i just woke up from a nap and i’m disgusted with the weather.

5.17.03 – p-r-o-c-r-a-s-t-i-n-a-t-i-o-n

trying to sit down and write an article for the weekly, but the trouble is that i have NO angle and the subject just isn’t a catchy one (human (dis)interest piece on two guys who are founding a film school in boise). methods of procrastination used thus far:

-slept late

-went to a kickboxing class (whee!)

-made lunch

-read a victoria’s secret catalogue

-played with the cat

-put away my laundry

-took a shower

-got coffee

-checked email

-read the usual blogs

-flossed

-investigated bugs in the javascript on slithy tove

i can keep coming up with stuff to do, no problem, but this damn thing doesn’t seem to be going away by itself. nerg.

5.16.03

i was born without the stir-fry gene. the veggies are always over-cooked before the chicken gets done, the sauces lack some basic quality. the problem might be blamed on a lack of proper tools (no wok, no gas range), or my unfortunate optimism w/r/t substitutions, but i suspect even in the best-equipped kitchen i’d still fail. encouraged by our recent successes with Pad Thai, tonight’s adventure in cooking was Thai Curry Chicken with Basil. “Everyone will love this dish!” promised the recipe included in the box of rice noodles. i checked the instructions carefully, but the word stir-fry was completely absent. saut&eacute appeared a number of times, but hey, i can cook italian food, i can saut&eacute. having just eaten the over-cooked veggies bathed in coconut milk that was the fruit of two hours’ labor, i suspect that the words stir-fry just got lost in the thai-to-english translation. unfortunately, i’m also not good with proportions, so there are vast quantities of the stuff left. maybe if we drink enough tonight i can convince andy to eat some of it as a midnight snack.

5.15.03 – recap

after berating paul for his month-long silence at metameat, i proceeded to take a two week hiatus myself. have been busy transitioning from day job at the weekly into full time at the idaho shakespeare festival for the summer. god, it’s good to give up my day job. not that i didn’t love the weekly and all the freaks and weirdos i encountered there, and the opportunities to write, and the chaotic atmosphere that comes with a small indie newspaper, but the rigor of getting up every morning and going to sit at a desk beneath a flickering fluorescent panel and performing rote administrative tasks was really more than i could bear. i’m just not cut out for that sort of work (ie, a normal, stable job). training the new receptionist is a painful process, in part because she’s about as bright as a box of rocks, and in part because i’m a control freak and turning my own projects over to other people (particularly strangers) is always a trying experience. perhaps it was a subconscious form of protest, i don’t know, but at any rate, approximately 3 minutes after meeting the new receptionist yesterday i proceeded to nearly snip the tip of my finger off with a pair of scissors. it didn’t turn out to be a terribly serious wound, but it was a gusher. and while i’m squeamish at the sight of movie gore or other people’s hangnails, watching own blood pulse out of my hand didn’t really phase me as much as it embarrassed me to be bleeding all over the newspapers. in the end i got a tetanus shot and one stitch in my left forefinger for my trouble. oh, and the nurse also gave me a Tasmanian devil band-aid for being brave.

5.4.03 – those who can’t, organize

in this biz, it’s always a good feeling when one job ends and something else is lined up to start right afterwards. it means business is good. i’m getting work. vacation time generally indicates involuntary unemployment. today, business is good. perhaps a little too good (although i’m not complaining), as the final performance of Stop Kiss ended around 3:50pm, and at 4 o’clock rehearsal began for my next project: stage managing Drop Dance Collective’s upcoming show, Kissing John Woo. i truly love to watch dancer’s bodies in motion. the combination of power and grace that go into dance honor the human form in a very fundamental way.

4.30.03 – at odds with my own thumbs

all credibility as a movie reviewer went down the drain with yesterday’s issue of the Boise Weekly, when my extremely positive review of Danish art-house flick Open Hearts was printed across from the thumbs-up/thumbs down movie listings, which gave the same movie a “totally worthless” thumbs down recommendation (as a result of a “on a scale of 1-4 where 1 is good or where 4 is good” miscommunication). i will never again trust those three-thumbs, two stars up, two bags of popcorn-but-one’s-spilling-over movie ratings, now that i understand the arbitrary way that the Weekly assigns them: on tuesday afternoon cynthia calls out the names of the movies, and anyone who is in the office is welcome to chime in with their opinion, regardless of whether they’ve actually seen a preview, the film, or even heard of it. the irony of the situation, however, is the fact that it’s actually my thumb providing the conflicting message (i was in the office the day they needed to make a new thumbs-up picture and somehow my thumbs were deemed most attractive. and thus began my career with the Boise Weekly).

4.26.03

this morning’s interview with Dar Williams went well, minus the fact that Madison, WI, has little-to-no cell service, so the interview was staged in several pieces. as one might have expected, she exudes warmth and approachability on the phone. no transcript of the interview to put up here, as i had no way to record the conversation, but i asked a few good questions, i think.

sle-e-e-epy tonight. i didn’t sleep well last night; in between anxiety dreams about not waking up on time for my interview with Dar Williams i had anxiety dreams about my vegetable garden. i’d wake up in the middle of the night and think, “that garden plot is huge. i’ll never be able to keep up with the weeds and watering and plant-nurturing. i kill house plants right and left! i’ll have to spend all summer in the backyard groveling in the dirt, and i’ll start to resent it, and… and…” god, i can be high strung sometimes. most people take up gardening to relax. i can get stressed out by my hobbies.

after tonight’s performance of stop kiss there was this swanky dessert-and-coffee reception with the theatre’s bigwig donors and board members. i always feel like the poor relation at these things; the actors go, so that the donors can get a chance to meet and congratulate the cast, and i am of course invited along, but as the assistant director i’m not exactly playing an important role in the evening’s schmoozing. so there i am in my jeans and sneakers and ponytail, looking really interested in my cup of coffee. halfway through the evening the room had stratified; the donors and board members in smart clothes chatting at one end of the room, the actors and company members on the other side. it’s not such a bad thing, but this is how these events always go; we’re the hired help, and ultimately, everyone feels more comfortable with their own kind.