can't post must wed be back bear with

The Gallivanting Monkey experienced a wedding meltdown last night, weeping and weeping without ceasing. The Gallivanting Monkey's mother lectured her, "[The Gallivanting Monkey] [doesn't] know how to budget [her] energy. [She's] never known how to budget [her] energy. [She] just [goes and goes]--"

The Gallivanting Monkey cut her off.

Lecture = Not Like a Massage

Massage = More Like It

Be back next week.

what happened in clown class

For those of you who are like, "Tina, we do not care that you are getting married. Blah Blah Blah with you all the time! Go universal or shut it," I am here promising that I will make an effort to bring you the stories you're looking for.

Maybe you're looking to know about Clown Class.

Perhaps you want to know why I took it. You might want to know, "Tina, are you a CLOWN?!" Because you might be like, "Oh, shit. I don't want to read some clown's blog."

I am not a clown. I'm an actor. And, look. I took the class because the description of the class on the website was something like:

The clown goes on stage intending to succeed, and fails.

This seemed so character-building to me. I thought, hey! I'm afraid of failure! I'm afraid as an actor, and as a person. This is my chance to make peace with failure. This will be great!

Who in their right mind thinks the process of making peace with failure will be great?! It isn't great. It is sucky in the extreme.

But I didn't know that then. Also, the teacher was someone I knew to be very fantastic and right-on. HE wasn't the problem. Clown class was the problem.

In a nutshell, what you had to do was find yourself a clown character. No, actually, you were really supposed to let it find you. Let the clothes find you, let your inner clown out organically. Release your inner Clown David like the Michelangelo you are.

I tried some different personas. Uptight maitre d' clown. Neither here nor there sort of upbeat messy clown. And then, goddamn it, my inner clown found me.

And she was a sad clown.

Oh my god! Who wants to be a sad clown?! Nobody wants to be a sad clown! I scrambled in every direction away from Sad Clown but she wouldn't let me go! How I could tell that she wouldn't let me go was that every single time I went to clown class, I ended up weeping in there, right in front of everyone, all the time. Like clockwork, like a clown Ally Sheedy in the clown Breakfast Club (although she was more catatonic than a weeper, I realize - but you feel me, I hope. You can picture the type of clown I was becoming). I wept during exercises, I wept watching other people work. I wept at the beginning of class and I always wept at the end.

And I wasn't a FUNNY sad clown. No, I was just a sad sad clown.

I remember driving once to clown class after my teacher, George, had convinced me not to drop out. I was crying already in the car on the way there. I didn't want to go face down failure anymore. The song "Hang On, Sloopy" was playing on the car radio. I sang along to it, weeping, thinking of myself as Sloopy.

Hang on, Sloopy.
(Sloopy, still go to clown class.)
Sloopy, hang on.
(Look at you, Sloopy, so brave, going to clown class.)

There was a clown in there, Eva, whose clowning was always funny. Her clown was all sleek and realized and kind of acrobatic, and she always made George laugh. I was beyond jealous. My clowning mostly just made George speak gently to me, as one speaks gently to an unhinged, unsuccessful, unfunny, crying clown.

And the failure part came in (apart from in my case, which was nearly all the time) when we had to go up there and do prepared or improvised routines, which would be met with stone cold silence. You had to just flail away and make shit up until you'd lost your mind - until you'd truly failed - after which it was possible that you'd stumble on the "bid" (pronounced bead), which was the sort of essence of the thread that could lead you somewhere truly out-of-left-field funny. Some people made it there sooner than others, and got to enjoy the sincere laughter of their teacher and their peers. Others, like me, would be staggering around for what felt like hours, searching for the goddamned bid, totally cold, colder, freezing in relation to whereabouts of the bid. And we'd end cold. I'd end cold.

Now, a lot of things in the class were great. It was very fun running around in an exercise pretending to be made of fire in my upper half, and water in my lower half. Some of those other clowns, also, were really funny and didn't send me into paroxysms of envy, and they were fun to watch. We learned this great scale of intensity we could use, from 0, being almost entirely inert inside and out, to 6, in which you come as close as you can to dying in a self-created explosion of feeling.

And if you think that you would get something out of taking a class to make peace with failure, by all means. You should do it. You will get something out of it. I don't mean this to be some kind of cruel dog dare. Totally, do it. My honey is going to try it, and I almost would take it again just to be a fly on the wall and see him go through the clown process. I really almost would. Except that I totally will not.

Goodnight, friends. Soon I will tell you the story of how I went to jail.

Coming Summer 2005.

i am not big enough for my bridal shower, i have to grow.

Last night, Elizabeth threw a bridal shower for me. I am not big enough yet in my being to even be able to take it in, how over-the-top beautiful it was. I am scrambling to enlargen myself, and I hope the essence of the event will follow me into the future until I'm able to absorb it.

Some of what happened:

A tower of cupcakes, with ROSE FLAVORED FROSTING.
Mojitos with fresh mint from Morgan's backyard
A new patio put onto Elizabeth's apartment just for the occasion
Wafting French and Latin music
Candles here, there, everywhere
The little girl with no underpants who lives upstairs who kept whizzing by on her bike, and finally joined us for the party, who presented me with the gift of a homemade envelope stuffed with flowers and soft leaves
A box with gathered notes in it from all present and from my impending husband, which I will read the night before we wed
The fucking most soft soft robe that erases stress instantly as a gift for me
Carolyn taking humorous notes
World of lingerie, all my taste and also flattering - what?! how?!
My mom describing my birth, "Tina POPPED OUT!!!!!"
Polaroids, who make instant gratification/mortification
Me weeping
Me weeping
Me weeping
Me raking in bigger than the Baby Jesus.

Soon, what I talk about won't be weddings. Please bear with. In fact, I'll try to get something non-wedding based up there right now. Hang on while I go compose. Here I go. See you later.

my mistake

It's:

YOUR best friend Harry, etc.
He's hoping YOU can make it there...

I overreacted. Young MC was just hypothesizing. He was being crazy! Like, what if that happened?! That would be so silly, and all that. Nobody would just give a best man five days notice. Young MC was just being hilarious.

harry's brother larry's questionable wedding

My best friend Harry has a brother Larry.
In five days from now he's gonna marry.
He's hoping I can make it there if I can,
'Cause in the ceremony I'll be the best man.

Young MC, "Bust a Move"

First of all, why is Young MC the best man in the wedding of not Harry, but his brother Larry? Harry is Young MC's best friend, not Larry. And why isn't Harry Larry's best man? Do the brothers not get along? And doesn't Larry have other friends of his own?

Second of all, regarding "in five days from now" and "he's hoping I can make it" --did Larry only give Young MC five days notice? The best man position is very important. Never mind that Young MC doesn't seem to return Larry's feelings of friendship for him with the same intensity. What if Young MC hadn't been able to do it on such short notice? Larry would have found himself in deep shit, I think, if he has no other friends and this bad relationship with his brother. Or was this Young MC's fault? Maybe Larry asked Young MC long ago, and Young MC hadn't gotten back to him clearly by the five-days-away point. Young MC doesn't make it explicit whose fault the unclearness was, but somebody was in bad form.

The whole wedding frankly sounds very sketchy to me.

we come to do beautiful hair or we don't come at all

I don't know if I'll be able to express properly how much I love watching Jonathan Antin freak out on "Blow Out". This show is unbelievably exciting. Sometimes the sample hair products come, and they are below par. And sometimes at the same time, stylists need to resolve issues with him, and graphic designers throw attitude at him. And all he's about is hair. Just doing great hair. Wait, he's also 'about' beautiful women. So, all he's about is doing great hair, and also about beautiful women. And everybody is tearing him apart. And even when he's freaking out at top level, his voice sounds all slow and low and bass, like he's talking in slow motion, or like he's a shadowy mystery interview silhouette person whose voice had to be altered to protect his identity. "TheRRR IZZ no JOHHHnuhthun PROHHduct!!"

I just watched this week's episode, and already I long for next week's.

Look. I know I should have linked up there, where it said "Blow Out" - that should have been all blue and linky. I promise that after the wedding, I will do my link homework. But if you would like the half-assed experience of a link, read this post again, then type really fast "bravotv.com" in the thing up there, and read it really quick, and then come back, and then pretend you didn't type anything.

It can work like that between us for a minute. Baby, I promise I'll change.

we're going to need to raise those roof beams even higher, carpenters

Our wedding is now less than two weeks away. Today, Dave and I met with our beautiful writing teacher, Vicky, who generously offered us some free classes to write material from which to cull our vows. (She's one of the three muses who will officiate at our wedding.) If any of you are getting married in 12 days, and are beginning to feel the stress, beginning to sweat the colors of the napkins and whatnot, I highly recommend dropping all of your tasks for a couple of hours and sitting down and writing paeans to your beloved instead.

Because now I feel like, who gives a tiny flying shit about which flower is going where? Who needs to freak about about the pear tarts? Nobody does. Nobody needs to.

In 12 days, I'm getting married to a man about whom I have no doubts. I practically married him the minute I met him. I met him in a room full of new people, and his was the first face I saw. Before I even saw any of the others, I decided I liked everybody in that room. It was a split-second thing. They were all instantly grandfathered in on the strength of my first impression of Dave. Anybody remotely associated to that face had to be someone I would endorse.

I'm going to marry that man in front of a group of the most loyal, loving, smart people you could ever meet, many of whom are going to be dropping their insane talents all over the evening.

I got me a peacock blue dress that shaves ten pounds off of me, through no help of my own.

Luck been, and continues to be, a lady to me.

le doublemint commenter, c'est moi

I was reading a delightful Shane Nickerson post today (link over to the right onto Nickerblog - still figuring this all out on this computer!) and decided to make a comment. It posted twice.

The same thing happened to me a few days ago on his blog. Left a comment about Iron Maiden, and it posted twice. Apologized. The apology posted twice.

When it happened today, someone commented on my double comment. I COULD NOT RESPOND FOR FEAR OF LEAVING ANOTHER DOUBLE COMMENT.

Damn! Damn!

a bit of advice

When you're driving around and listening to the radio, don't tough it out through a song you don't like. Your mood will drop. And then you will need two good songs worth of, um, song to hoist it back up.

Toughed it out today through something kind of steel drummy. Regretted it.

Word to the wise.

green

Now we must talk about jealousy. I'm going to show you a few pictures from the jealousy photo album of my life. Here we go:

The girls I was jealous of as a child (in no particular order, so don't get all excited, Dana Sugarman):

1. Dana Sugarman. Her last name had SUGAR in it, her teeth were crooked in a way that was, in first grade, a bit hip. Who knows what created the popular aura in children all the way back when every last bastard of us was wearing Garanimals? She had it. I think I was jealous because even then, I knew she had it, but I couldn't quite figure out WHY.

2. Same goes for Gwen Lighter, except for the sugar part and the crooked teeth part (substitute freckles). No, wait. Maybe I can put a finger on it. Maybe she seemed a little ruthless. Yeah, she did. That's it.

3. Abra Potkin. Now this chick, I totally know why I was jealous of her. And also, I liked her. But her name was ABRA POTKIN. Come on! What a spicy name. She had this thick, long, wavy hair, and an absolute celebrity vibe, even at 9 years old. I just saw her name fly by on the credits of some television show, as a producer, maybe? She had another name tacked on there that I can't remember, her married name. Abra told me that if a guy takes his shirt off in front of you, he wants to have sex with you. We were hanging out in this little atrium at the small private school we went to, and moments before, this guy Rob Efird had come in to talk to Abra, and taken his shirt off.

Things that people could do that I was jealous of as a child:

1. Ride a bike. I never learned. I still don't know how. My dad tried to teach me when I was nine, and we'd just moved to Seattle. But there were kids around in the neighborhood that might be WATCHING, and I was too old, too old for that kind of humiliation. Better to just let it lie.

2. Eat meat. We were vegetarians - 4th or 5th generation on my dad's side. I remember going to this girl Dina's birthday party when I was six or so. My parents had just been to Hawaii and I was wearing this long orange muu-muu they brought me. Dina's mom brought out the hot dogs, which looked fucking FUN TO EAT, but I had to remind her that I was a vegetarian. She went into the kitchen and made me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and brought it back. She seemed annoyed.

3. Listen to rock and roll at home. No go at the Kunz household. My parents couldn't stand rock music. Also, they'd read The Secret Life of Plants, which talked about how rock and roll stifles plant's growth. (This effort, on my folks' part, to stifle the stifling of our growth...IN VAIN. My brother and I ended up teeny tiny.) My parents talked about how the basic beat of rock and roll, duh duh DUH duh duh DUH, disharmonized with the beat of the human heart, duh duh...something else. So, I'd go to my friend Allison's house and we'd listen to Abba, and I would SHAKE IT with every fiber of my being. My friend Hiroe snuck me a bootleg tape that had Abba on one side and Xanadu on the other, and whenever my parents went out to Sears or whatever, I would smack that baby on.

note on 3. There was an exception one bizarre day, when I was seven years old! My dad brought back a Simon and Garfunkel record from the library. I was like, WHAT'S GOING ON?? My dad brought it home for "Scarborough Faire". But with Scarborough Faire, you get the Mrs. Robinson song! Oh mama. I was freaking out. And I was mildly scandalized, too, because when Simon and Garfunkel sing, "woo, woo, woo" -- well, what you said in school when someone had a crush on someone else, you said, "wOOoo wOOoo!" So I was like, not only am I listening to rock and roll, but this shit has some sexual content. My WORD.

Things I was jealous of between the ages of 12 and 20:

1. Girls in my junior high who had big asses. The tough, awesome, scary, popular girls all had ginormous booties. I was a teeny 12 year old masquerading as a broken-lockered 13 year old, and I really needed my ass to be bigger. I would try to roll the waistand up on my jeans, which created a mild wedgie, but also the temporary illusion of a slightly juicier ass. 24 years later, my dream of a big ass has come true. HurrAH.

2. The 1986 class officers of Nathan Hale High School, from '82-86. What the fuck did it take to get elected?! I wasn't ever aiming for PRESIDENT or anything! I had the modest goal of becoming VICE president. One morning, the morning of election results for our upcoming junior year, I called a radio station and asked them to play Van Halen's "I'll Wait", and dedicate it to me, as I would find out later whether I'd be the new vice president. I don't know why I picked that song, other than the fact that I just liked it, it was the song I liked most at the time. But in retrospect, it's so fitting:

I'll wait til your love comes down.
I'm coming straight for your heart.

That's right. I was gonna wait, class of '86, until your love came down. I was coming straight for your heart. No way you could stop me then, as fine as you were. But you could stop me. You did stop me. I was not the new vice president. Phyllis Scott was. THANKS.

3. Claudia Cumes. A guy I dated in college, in between the two rounds of dating me, dated her. She was from South Africa. She was like RAPUNZEL HERSELF. Tall, beyond-shampoo-commercial thick blonde hair to her waist. Slender, crazy gorgeous. Intelligent as hell. Had an elegant little South African accent. Her first name was not pronounced "CLAW-dia." It was pronounced "CLOUD-ia" ClOUDia Cumes. Cumulous Cloud. Legs to the sky. When the guy and I got briefly back together, I was like, buddy, how does a girl compete with Claudia Cumes? And he was like, "With Claudia, it was like, the hair, the legs...the legs...I mean, physically, [long whistling sound]she's GOT it. But with you, it's not your legs or anything. It's you." That's a nice thing to say. But I was sorry I asked.

batdance and soft sweater

Tonight Dave and I abandoned our tickets to go see the Eels. (I know it's just "Eels" but I'm not saying that. Back in the back when, I wasn't saying "Eurythmics". I put a trusty "the" in there, and I'm doing it again now. If your band's gonna be all plural about everything, put a "the" in there or I'm putting one in myself.) We were too tired to just sit and listen to one band play songs - even if it were a really fine band like THE Eels. Instead, we went to go see Batman Begins.

(How I wanted to italicize that, the movie title. I'm using a friend's computer these days, and I can't see a way to get to italics or different font sizes or colors here at Blogger with this computer. I had a dream last night that the front of my tongue was cut off and sewn back on, and that I lost a front tooth. I feel that this means that I miss italics and colors and font size variations -- that I can communicate, but I don't sound right or look pretty.) (But then in the dream I still got to do a staged reading that Sean Penn directed, even with a missing tooth and fucked-up tongue that made me lisp, and it went well. You suckers who tried to cut off my tongue! You didn't silence me! You made me STRONGER.)

I read on another blog -- Shane Nickerson's blog -- I'd link you but I'm still a baby and I don't know how yet, but hit my link to Dup's blog and he'll escort you right over -- that the new Batman movie was fantastic. Run, don't walk, he said.

The people at Pacific Place were an inch away from taking that advice literally. We went and got our tickets, and then had an hour to kill, so we took the elevators down to go to the bookstore. When we got out of the elevator, there was this WALL of people, and they were moving fast, like whooooooooooomp, whooooooooomp, we're late, must waaaaaaalk, get out of the waaaaaay, we gotta get on the ELevaaaator.

It was alarming.

Me, I loved the movie. Super big movie satisfaction.

While we were killing time down at the Barnes and Noble, there was this girl on line to buy a book in front of me. She had on this pink sweater that looked so crazy soft. I miss my italics now, so imagine that whatever I say below that's in quotes is also in italics. I am wanting to convey a baby softness of speech. This is what I was thinking in my mind, talking to her sweater:

"hello, sweater."

"hi, sweater."

"if there weren't a person in you, sweater, i would want to pet you."

"you're leaving."

"damn."

"goodbye, sweater."

Goodbye, sweaters. I have to go to sleep now.

the twilight neighborhood of the blogs

You know when you're driving around in the early evening, and the lights are starting to go on in the houses? The sky is dipping into the deeper blue and the windows are yellow and lit behind the dark yards? I always want to go into all the houses and see what they're eating for dinner, see if they did their homework, see if they're fighting, see what magazines they read, look in their refrigerators. The early evening's when I want to do this. I don't want to be there in the morning when they're freaking out and getting ready for work and school. I don't want to be there when the business minds are getting all revved up. I want to be there when it's all winding down, and people are taking off their fancy people identities and beginning to get lazy and silly. I want to be there when it's all unravelling, nice and easy. I want to be there right at the moment when someone says, "Soup's on."

And now I get to do that. I get to drive around on the internet, and if I see a window that calls my name, I can just let myself in and take a look around your lives.

Dreamy.

it will go away if i don't say it

In college, when I smoked my head off and majored in drama, I was leaving the theater one day. This younger dude, Todd, was leaving the building at the same time. He asked for a smoke and I gave one to him, after which we headed off in our separate directions. A couple of seconds later, he called out, "Thank you!"
What I wanted to respond with was a "No problem, man," or a "No sweat, man." What I ended up yelling instead was, "PROBABLY NOT, SWEAT MAN!"

on the other hand, the ice cream was so good it made me curse

When I was going to sleep last night, after having eaten peach ice cream from the Cold Mountain Creamery, I imagined how I would blog about it. And my headline was going to be:

Do you fuckballs like ice cream??

And my text was going to be:

Holy fuck, fuckballs! Fuck off!!! I just ate the best cocksucking ice cream of all time! Goddamn it, you cowardly bitches, go eat some! Jesus Frankin' Fuck!

That ice cream was so good, I was mad at the world.

Edit: It's not the Cold MOUNTAIN Creamery. It's the Cold STONE Creamery. Jude Law and that Oscar-winning hillbilly Renee Zellweger had nothing to do with it.

My bad.

horrible thing, part two: in retrospect

In retrospect, I think that all of the rest of the crabs who were clearly not dead HAD TO BE THINKING:

I'm not here....I'm not here....I'm not here....I'm not here....I'm not here.....

And also, I feel certain they made damn sure to shake their doomed moneymakers from time to time, so NOBODY COULD GET THE IDEA THAT THEY WERE DEAD.

a horrible, horrible thing

My eyes are still aflame from seeing what I have seen. The crabs, the crabs in the live crab tank at Larry's Market. The crabs...last time I saw the crabs, they were mostly just lying around. But two of them were having crazy, crazy sex. And that, you know, was whatever, sort of amusing - the abandon of them, the, er, sex-positive vibe of the whole thing, if you will.

But yesterday, in that same tank. Horrible, horrible horror. The bulk of the crabs were lying around in a stupor: traumatized, stoned, what have you. But one crab was not moving - or rather, not moving OF ITS OWN VOLITION. Because there was movement involved. And the busy, horrible crab behind it? What was it doing? Was it having sex with the motionless crab? No.

The crab in front had died. And THE CRAB IN BACK WAS EATING IT. The. Crab. In. Back. Was. Tearing. Pieces. Out of the crab. In. Front!! Waving the pieces around, and EATING THEM. With, I have to say, as far as I can make out crab expressions, a totally psychotic look on its face.

I wished I had never been born.

put THAT on your google-goggle

It's going to seem like I permanently live with my mom, here, and I don't. We're just getting our bathroom remodeled! It's temporary! But I was sitting and chatting with my mom tonight, and she was going on and on for some reason about how drinking alcohol WASTES YOUR LIFE. And I was talking over her, trying to get her to stop, like, "Mom. MOM. MO-OM." And she just kept talking louder and louder, giving this sermon apropos of nothing. I mean, I barely drink a drop these days. I can make a quarter of a glass of wine last for three hours. And finally, both our volumes reached the same height and somehow that was the magic off switch. But not before she tossed out there, "Put THAT on your google-goggle."

She was looking for "blog".

goodwill industries

That's it. Payback time. Everybody be smart and go to Jason Grote's website. He wrote a play and sent it to a couple of us Printer's Devil folks, and we got to read it here in Seattle when it was published in the journal Knock, and it was called The Island of Never Giving Way on your Desire and all of us who worked on it exclaimed over its charming majesty. The link is below, in my group of links way down in South America down there. I'm still learning how to link in a post. If I did it in another one it was by accident. I don't think I did, though.

n-n-n-nobody messes with the raider machine

It's time to talk about school spirit. We will begin with Freshman Orientation at Nathan Hale High School, September 1982. First of all, I was thrilled, psyched, amazed to be joining the high school experience. It seemed to me that there was no difference, NONE, between high schoolers and adults. We were all as big as a person humanly needed to be. Freshmen were perhaps on the petite side of adulthood, I allowed - if I had known of David Spade back then, it would have been like, we're like David Spade. Small, yes, but old.

A couple of weeks before school began, my friend Tammy's mom drove us to Alderwood Mall in her black sports car to shop for school clothes, and we listened to "Urgent" by Foreigner, and "Don't talk to Strangers" by Rick Springfield, and most tinglingly of all, "Eye of the Tiger" by Survivor. I think that's the moment that the school spirit was born, in that car that day. We would all need the eye of the tiger in high school, and by gum, I felt, we would have it. For freshman orientation, I planned to wear a white oxford, levi's and a blue fair isle sweater draped over my shoulders. I meant business. This would be like The Paper Chase.

Tammy's older sister Tracey was a cheerleader. What an in! What a way to start things. I had an unofficial sponsor. Other good news was that over the summer, I had finally learned how to open a locker. The goodness of this news can't be underestimated. In 8th grade, where I was the new girl at the school, and had skipped a grade (which I kept all the way on the down low), I never used my locker, because I was too embarrassed to admit that I didn't know how to open one. This should have been taken care of already, in my imaginary 7th grade year somewhere. So I always claimed that my locker was broken, and lugged around this brown adidas bag with all my stuff in it. Everyone always offered the use of their lockers, and I was like, no, naah, no thanks. So when summer came, every night I prayed to some Lord I didn't even have a particular relationship with, "Please, you Lord I've heard about, please let me learn how to open a locker." Every night, "Oh Lord, perhaps you'll remember I'm the one who wants to know how to open a locker," "The secret to opening a locker, Oh Lord, please unveil it before me," "But above all, Lord, my locker..."

The Lord eventually appeared in the form of my friend and upcoming locker partner, Donnette, a pleasant unthreatening soul who seemed like she wouldn't hold this locker secret over my head. We went to the high school a few days before orientation, and spent a few minutes working on it, and I cracked it. Closed locker, me working on it, open locker!

So I walked into freshman orientation fairly euphoric to begin with. Signed up for the classes, filed into the gym for the assembly. The pep squad came out, unspeakably glamourous, with Tracey's friendly face on it to boot. And then the motherhumpin' Beach Boys started in over the loudspeakers, "When some loud braggart tries to put you down and says his school is great....you tell him right away, now what's the matter buddy ain't you heard of my school, it's number one in the state....BE TRUE TO YOUR SCHOOL NOW NOW, JUST LIKE YOU ARE TO YOUR GIRL OR GUY, BE TRUE TO YOUR SCHOOL NOW AND LET YOUR COLORS FLY, BE TRUE TO YOUR SCHOOL..." My hair was standing on end!! The pep squad was peppin' around, as sexy as can be, the music was thumping the bleachers,

WAS IT GOING TO BE LIKE THIS, THE HIGH SCHOOL??
(actual school colors represented above, minus the difficult-to-represent-here white)

No, it wasn't. But as Journey had exhorted me the year before in a dictated memo on my sneakers, I didn't stop believing. I ran for class office three years in a row and lost. I tried out for cheerleading, and didn't make it. I was on the committees for the school dances, I toilet-papered the football players' houses to put the eye of the tiger in them, I organized homecoming. At games, when we did the "We've got spirit, yes we do, we've got spirit, how 'bout you?" thing, I reached deep within to summon the Raider spirit, as deep as situps, as deep as Pilates, ab-boomingly deep. And when we were ahead, and we did the TOTALLY INCONTROVERTIBLE cheer, "We've got more, check the score," the satisfaction I felt was so sublime it's a wonder I didn't pee.

synaesthesia now??

It's ridiculous, ridiculous I tell you, for me to start this catalogue that I'm about to start for you at this time of night. But I feel like I need to ride these blog impulses, because sometimes I sit in front of this blog, and I really want to write something, but there's nothing in my mind but things like, "And then I was thirsty, but water didn't sound good, so I was like, maybe tea? But we were out of tea. Not totally out, but out of the good kind..." etc.

The colors of the days of the week in the calendar a couple of posts below are very close to the colors I see in the synaesthetic way for the days of the week. And I thought that in that vein I would tell you about my color and gender and personality associations for each letter in the alphabet. I will use the colors I have access to here, but they may not be close enough, so I'll describe the difference.

A is a girl, straightlaced - no surprise, there. "A" Student.
B is a warmhearted, fat, male-to-female transsexual who loves to make pancakes.
C is a popular girl, but 2nd in command, S's toady.
D is a boy, quiet, flies under the radar. Studious.
E is an irritating boy, a non-stop un-funny wisecracker.
F is a girl, just a tad prissy, with a voice that sounds like she has braces.
G is an extremely popular boy, student body president, loved by peers and adults, both. He's got a firm handshake.
H is a boy, very literary and well-read. Okay, he's pretentious.
I is a boy, an offbeat, groovy musican with a dry sense of humor.
J is a boy, similar to D (they're friends), but a touch more athletic and popular.
K Here we have a female-to-male transsexual, who looks feminine and acts quietly macho. Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry is a classic K.
L is a quiet, churchgoing girl who needlepoints.
M is a brassy, masculine woman - but not a transsexual! Bette Midlerish.
N is an effeminate, but not transsexual, but maybe gay boy, who reads poetry and is very literary, but is not overbearing and pretentious like H.
O There's an O there, and he/she is white, which is why it looks like there isn't an O, and totally androgynous. A spacey ballerina/ballerino!
P is a guy and everybody loves him. Loyal, funny, life of the party.
Q is a golden, ladylike man.
R is a preppy boy, wearing a dark green and white striped rugby shirt.
S What a bitch! S is the queen of 8th grade, and she will trip you.
T is a girl, an exchange student from Spain. Very artistic.
U is a boy, very political, an activist, but somewhat quiet.
V is a boy, a complete fop. Vintage! Velvet!
W is a boy, friends with R. They're pretty interchangeable, really.
X is a boy, great friends with H. Who can talk louder? H can. Who's funnier? X is. X has more crossover appeal.
Y is a boy, a hippie skateboarder with blond hair.
Z is another boy, a musician again, like I, but I is funnier. I has short hair and Z has long hair. Z and Y agree, "It's all good." They reaffirm that with each other all the time.

goose stepping

I overheard this at Bartell Drugs:

Small child: Has it been 227 days?
Adult: What?
Small child: Has it been 227 days yet?
Adult: Since what?
Small child: Has it been 227 days.....since the morning? No...wait...has it been 227 days since I was born?

Another delightful, child-related thing has to do with my cousin Irena, our flower girl. She's nine years old, soon to be ten. After we went shopping with her, we came back to my mom's place, where the wedding will be. She and I went outside so she could practice her walk. She assured me that she'd been a flower girl before, so she was hep to the whole deal. And her walk...oh, mama. Awesome. A very deliberate sort of goose-step. I told her that she didn't need to do any kind of special step, she could just ease on down the aisle at a slowish pace. So she did it again. And again, crazy awesome goose step. So, now I feel like everything's as it should be. I told her that she doesn't have to walk in a special way, so that's off my conscience - the pressure of making a little person do this fancy walk on purpose - but, it looks like she's gonna bring this wickety-wackety fabulous walk to the table on her own. Sweet piece of fruit!