lately it seems like i don’t have or can’t take the time to blog about the big stuff that is rattling around in my head. like about how my grandfather was in the hospital last week, and how the family dog went into the emergency vet on the very same day, and that by unhappy coincidence it turns out that both of them have cancer of the pancreas/kidneys/liver that is probably, eventually, terminal. and on the same day, how two of my friends had babies, joyous occasion on the heels of sad occasion, and the bittersweet reminder that life just keeps moving forward, whether we like it or not, and we can get on the train or watch it go by. and i wonder whether or not i’m on the train or stuck in the station. but i dislike being delineated by feeble, mixed metaphors for emotions and thoughts which are big and yet still unformed, which feel deeply personal and yet suspiciously like universal cliches, and so i shy away from doing the work, to process and understand it in a semi-public forum.

and i haven’t blogged about the marathon, which is just five weeks away, or about aikido, both of which are slowly transforming my body and my person. or about politics, about how sarah palin makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up and how i actually donated money to a political campaign for the first time because i am so honest-to-god fearful of what will happen if the republicans win the election.

because those things, and more, are very important to me, near and dear to my heart. it takes hard work to write about them and make sure that i get it right. it’s easier to procrastinate.

and so, in the mean time, i write about apple pie. and….dragonflies!

this afternoon i took a little break from tech rehearsal and walked across hyde park to go to the bank. it’s a perfect early fall day: the trees and grass are still green, but there is a mellow golden quality to the sunlight. after leaving the bank i was passing a small park on 53rd street when i noticed the late afternoon sun shining across a little tree-ringed clearing. in the clearing, swirling a few feet above the grass, were dozens of big orange dragonflies. dragonflies are hands down my favorite insect. i made a few sorry attempts to photograph the scene – lit up by sunlight but seen against a backdrop of shade-clad trees, the dragonflies glowed like fireflies – but the beauty was all in the motion and the camera couldn’t do it justice.* i meant to return to the street but something drew me in. i walked across the clearing and flopped down in deep, cool grass on a little rise. slipped off my flip flops and dug my toes (tired from running 18 miles this morning) into the grass. i folded my hands behind my head and watched the dragonflies zip around crazily overhead, careening off one another in some frantic mating dance, and above them white puffy clouds streaked across a blue sky in ever-shifting patterns.

i’m not very good at slowing down. i’m obsessed with multi-tasking. but maybe the combination of sleeplessness (i’m in tech) and the very long run this morning finally put me into a zone where i could kick back in the lawn and just be for a few minutes. i was drowsy, and could have happily closed my eyes and taken an afternoon nap, warm in the sun, hair ruffled in the breeze**.

*i held very still and tried to pretend i was part of the landscape, but i wasn’t able to tempt any dragonflies into landing on or near me.

**tho, being the city girl that i am, i do know better: falling asleep in the park at 5pm is a good way to wake up cold and stiff, in the dark, with no wallet.

this is the Best Email Ever. or at least, the most random i have received in a very long time.

Facebook: Chris sent you a message.

——————–
Subject: Did you intern at Boise Weekly?

[your author’s name here] —

Are you the same [your author’s name here] who interned at Boise Weekly?

If so — and this has been bothering me for years — I wanted to apologize for the library fine we racked up on the book you checked out as part of your intern duties.If there’s any chance you remember the cost, I would be happy to reimburse you. Probably not with interest. (Yes, I know. I really am this compulsive. Not, apparently, compulsive enough to get a book in on time, but there you go…)

Also, I wanted to say it looks like you’ve done really well. Clearly the most successful of any BW alum — OK, maybe that’s damning with faint praise. Congratulations on everything. Hope all is well.

And if this is not that same [your author’s name here]… Yeah, that would be embarrassing.

Take care,
Chris F

i did, for the record, intern at Ye Old Boise Weekly – in 1996*! i have no recollection of the libarary fine incident – tho it is possible that the Boise Library is still harboring a huge fine in my name, for all i know.

*for those of you tracking such biographical details, i also worked as the receptionist/food critic for the BW again, a few years later, but it was under a different management team, apparently.

i found this door while following a mouse down the hallway. he disappeared under the door of suite 147. perhaps the pilot is odd because he is a mouse?

happy leap day, kats and kitties.

a friend asked me earlier today if i know much about javascript. a bit of code he’s written is behaving differently in IE than in Firefox. no, i tell him, i don’t code much any more. which is true. i barely write my own HTML for blogs and such these days. but it is impossible for me to leave a coding puzzle like that alone. i ended up spending half the afternoon tracking down the bug. more annoying, in the end the bug was a result of IE allowing a case mistake slide and Firefox getting bitchy about it. but it required that i re-teach myself javascript syntax and totally re-write his script before we located the error. it was a reminder of why it is that i got out of coding in the first place. i find the activity to be all-consuming. i forget to eat, to take breaks, anything else i’m supposed to be working on (like, uh, work? the kind i get paid to do?) gets procrastinated as the hours slip by. i kind of LOVE that level of concentration, that mental zone, especially compared to the frenetic, multi-tasking manner i seem to usually work in these days. well, at least slithy-tove’s formatting might benefit from the code i wrote today. might as well put it to use somewhere, right?

also, i must have this bookshelf/bed. in my future dream house, this will be the very second thing i will build.

answer here

why didn’t someone tell me they’re turning off tv? where was i when this got decided?

it is a curious punishment for me that my physical therapist and running coach have come up with: they have prescribed wearing shoes with high heels whenever i’m not actually out running. (they’re not just doing this to mock me and my fondness for butch shoes — it’s supposed to ease the chronic achilles tendonitis i have been struggling with for the past two months). those of you who know me, and know what a tomboy i am, particularly when it comes to matters of fashion, will realize how funny this is that, in the pursuit of the marathon, i end up with my toes pinched into a pair of high heels. the upshot of this, plus the fact that i misplaced all of my shorts* means that i’ve suddenly been wearing a lot of dresses and skirts since the weather warmed up. it’s interesting. i move very differently when i’m wearing heels. i feel girly and a little precious. i feel a little like something that should be admired from afar (perhaps on a shelf of collectibles) but not very hearty. other women i know tromp along in heels without a second thought, looking both sexy AND functional. this is just a piece of fashion education that escaped me, somehow. all those years when the other girls were reading Seventeen and gossiping about boys, i assume they must have also been developing the poise, balance and calf muscles needed to wear high heels, marching back and forth in someone’s parents’ basement rec room with a book balanced on their heads. during those formative years i was spending much of my time programming an ancient UNIX mainframe with my posse of nerdy boys, or running barefoot and a little wild in the idaho desert on archeological digs, studying to become the next indiana jones. indiana never wore impractical shoes, you see.

* when summer finally rolled around and i did the bi-annual rearranging of clothing in my closet, i pushed the wool sweaters and fleece-lined jeans to the back and went to pull out my box of shorts…and discovered they were all gone. i apparently either 1) mistakenly gave them to goodwill with my last closet purge, or 2) accidentally gave them to my ex-boyfriend when i packed all his shit for him last fall. and since he has rebuffed recent attempts on my part to reopen any sort of friendly dialogue (even about pants), i can’t exactly ask for them back. it’s quite a blow to the wardrobe to lose an entire category of clothing.

anyone who’s ever tried to watch a horror movie (or a medical drama) with me knows that i’m a gore wuss. while i don’t mind getting shots or having blood drawn terribly, i can’t bear to watch a needle pierce the skin – even on television, i have avert my eyes for that moment (so i probably don’t have what it takes to be a heroin addict…) and don’t even get me started on my phobias about vomit.

so it’s odd, then, that i find myself sporting a sort of bravado when it comes to real life blood and gore. not that i have been face-to-face with a truly life-threatening emergency, but working in and around theatre and scene shops, i do see injuries. a forehead split open down to the bone, dry wall screw through the fingernail, a broken wrist, broken collarbone.

yesterday our TD came into the production office and said, “does this need stitches?” and he had sliced deeply into the top of his wrist with a chisel. when he flexed his wrist the wound gaped open. since it wasn’t bleeding a lot, there was no immediate danger, and we decided that stitches wouldn’t probably do anything that butterfly bandages couldn’t also do, plus it would require hours and hours spent in the emergency room. so i had him wash the wound out really well, taped it closed with butterfly bandages, then covered the whole thing with a bandage and ran medical tape over the top around his wrist to hold it all on. of course, since he went back to work in the shop for the rest of the afternoon (talk about bravado), the tape only held in place for a few hours. but i re-bandaged it at the end of the night and by the next day it seemed to have knit together. driving someone to the hospital for stitches and filling out worker’s comp paperwork is part of my job here, but closing up wounds doesn’t exactly does fall into my list job responsibilities. but i often force myself to look at or ask about an injury i guess as a way of testing my own mettle.

none of this makes me think that i’d want a future in medicine (germ-phobic, remember) but for some reason i like the fact that i’m surprisingly cool when i’m actually faced with blood and i don’t get totally grossed out. this is good, since my line of work requires people that are good in crisis situations (typically more of the set-is-on-fire sort of thing, but still). the thought of how i’ll handle the next emergency (be it a heart attack in the audience or an actor knocking himself out on stage) is the source of many an anxiety dream, but then i always seem to surprise myself in the moment.

step 1: address your resume to the Ass Production Manager.

hee.

backlog of blog entries, ahoy! i’ve been writing, but publishing into thin air. finally found time today to tame the unruly ftp beasties.