10-02-2002 12:29 AM
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All The. Sweet Talk. Caffiene.

My mother sent several photographs a few weeks ago– the first known photographs of me and Heidi reveling in our togetherness, and a picture of a 7-11 with a note– Recognize this? It looks like a 7-11, Ma.

We talked for a while tonight– seeing if she would be around for a visit this weekend when Heidi and I zip up for hockey with John and Jennifer Betz– and she asked if I knew that 7-11. I was puzzled.

“It’s the 7-11 you and Chris used to go to every Christmas,” she said.

Let me preface: I hate Christmas. Hate it. And have for many years, I think since I was old enough to figure out that my own relationship with Christ is embattled and that Christmas is no longer a religious celebration but an overly commercialized fuckfest for all the retail merchants who make you believe that consumption equals redemption. I find Christmas isolating, hypocritical, and shallow. I fucking hate it.

(That said, I enjoy spending Christmas morning with my younger brother, who is 9 this year… well, enjoy it until the moment when he’s opened the last present. After that point, it’s a totally sour experience, for many of the reasons mentioned above, but until then, he’s happy and my father and stepmother can’t find too many reasons to be bad people.)

In my teens, I would spend Christmas with my mother. She married John in 1993, but moved back to DC to live with him in 1991. Back then, I had no younger brother, and thus, no way to escape her visions of Brady-dom– two disparate families living in perfect harmony.

See, I adore my stepfather. Adore him. But he has three children, who are, in order, a cold bitch, a completely self-centered asshole drug addict who lives from woman to woman, and a very yuppie fraternity-president man’s man. The first two I have never cared for, which was fine at Christmas since they always somehow failed to show up even when they committed to coming. But Chris, my younger stepbrother, was usually there– he’s only two years older than I am, and was still appropriately yoked, I suppose. Though only barely.

Chris and I never identified… I was a long haired, straight arrow skinny kid who didn’t fit cleanly into any group, and he would have been the model of conformity if he could have managed not to get kicked out of every high school he went to for more than twelve weeks.

But every year at Christmas, mid-afternoon, when the stench of holiday tension at the White/Pearson home was strongest, Chris and I would hop in his red Pontiac and head from Chevy Chase, MD, where I grew up, to McLean, VA, where he grew up, and we’d stop at the same 7-11 to get a hot dog and a Slurpee. That was the only thing Chris and I ever really shared, and it was the only thing bearable about Christmas.

Chris didn’t show up in 1994. I spent Christmas alone in 1995 and 1996, until I was finally able to co-exist with my stepmother enough to go to Winston-Salem, officially breaking my mohter’s heart and leading to her proclomation that Thanksgiving is her holiday. I spent the next few years watching Taylor squeal with delight while he opened his presents and wail like a banshee when there were none left. It is always empty.

So there’s my Scrooge story. I’d rather disappear for a few hours in the afternoon and eat junk food than share in the yuletide joy.

Remind me to tell you about the time Chris was shot at an ATM and decided to drive 10 extra minutes to the bar where his friends were because he didn’t trust the gas station attendant nearby to call 911 for him.

biza - nose

10-03-2002 12:16 AM
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Crush Me

Four words sum up my day: Blue Crush sucks ass.

Oh, and I spelled yesterday’s Chinese word wrong… it’s bi zi.

er duo - ear

10-03-2002 10:11 AM
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Oh! Landslide.

I keep looking back through the journal entry and finding all sorts of retarded errors. Like times when I spell a word correctly, but it’s entirely the wrong word. Like when Heidi and I saw a movie at the dollar figure instead of the dollar theater.

Speaking of the dollar theater:

Quote:
From: Dan Kois
To: ross@comedyworx.com

“Four words sum up my day: Blue Crush sucks ass.”

What?!? BLUE CRUSH was the best movie of the year. Probably the best movie ever made.

xoxo
Dan

SPECIAL BONUS SIG
“About 15 percent of the American people are screwballs, lightweights and boobs, and you would not want those people unrepresented in Congress.”
-former Senator Alan Simpson
I hope Dan knows he’s part of that 15%.

But I digress. I find myself becoming more of a grammarian than I want to be. Maybe it’s because I was an English teacher. Maybe it’s because a lot of my day is now spent reading things. Or maybe it’s just because I’m an a-hole. But criminy, I like things to be spelled correctly. I like to see English grammar used once in a while.

I only really mention this because I am reviewing job applications right now, and I am astounded by how many applications aren’t even remotely proofed. Dude, I am not giving you a job if you can’t use spell-check. Misspellings are cool in quick personal e-mails that you dash off. They’re fine in your personal journal (how’s that for hedging) or in instant messages. But fuck, proof your resume.

And while I am ranting… flush the upstairs toilet, creepy officemate! I am tired of finding your nuggets!

No Chinese word today– tigernt.com is down, so I can’t verify spelling!

10-05-2002 04:42 PM
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Who Cares– You Might Be Dead

I turn into a big lump of inaction when I am here at my mom’s house in DC. I think it’s the only place on earth that my mind and body know I am on vacation, and correspondingly, I get lazy, lazy, lazy. I can imagine that this would be no fun for Heidi, especially since every time I start to get going I ask for a massage. I slept on my neck the wrong way last night. Seriously.

We took the kayak out on the lake for a little while after we woke up, and then Mom and John joined us with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. It felt very much like childhood, though I don’t remember moments like that in my childhood. I guess it’s more of a peaceful day than anything else, but I definitely felt my mother’s love strongly, though we didn’t get much of a chance to really spend time together before she and John were off to some dinner party or other.

I ate some of the best Texas-style barbeque I have ever had last night at Capitol Q, but man, am I paying for that today. Well, it could also be a few beers at the Caps/Canes games or the half-bag of dried apricots I ate this morning. Dried apricots are too tempting… I will, like a dog, make myself sick eating them if a large quantity is placed in front of me. I have not purchased them of my own accord in years for this reason.

We’re meeting John and Jennifer Betz, Claire Lambert (and maybe her husband Brad), and Dave Rockwell for a little dinner before the ComedySportz shows here tonight. I would be hard pressed to give up the friendships I have made while doing shortform… and if a little shortform keeps those friendships healthy, well, right on, shortform.

I am ecstatic about the success that the Office is having in Cagematches. I love knowing that my friends are happy and having fun.

Wo xi huan shui jiao - I like to sleep.

10-10-2002 04:48 PM
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Please Tell Me Who You Think You’re Affecting

I miss journaling when I can’t do it– my day always feels incomplete when I can’t journal. So the last five days have been pretty incomplete in that sense, and that sense only. I hate being offline!

I’m sitting in a hotel room in Greenville, NC, musing on the fact that this afternoon is the first breathing time I’ve had since Monday, and on Monday, I was in Williamston, NC, which doesn’t have any local access numbers for ISPs. At least not any ISP that isn’t being run out of some guy’s basement.

I’ve been on the road relentlessly this week, a trend which will continue for the next two months but hopefully not at the breakneck, five-cities-in-five-days pace that this week has taken. I’m pooped!

Speaking of which, hotel rooms are the one place in the world where I’m completely comfortable pooping with the bathroom door open. Anywhere else, someone could walk in. Not in your hotel room, right? (I’m stretching here to find reasons not to be frustrated about spending another night in a hotel. I want to be in my own bed!)

I talked to one guy this afternoon about setting up an interview for this job. He looks good on paper. He could not remember his phone number at work. I was like, “New phone number, huh?” He said, “No, I’ve been here for years.” This man will not get the job. To be fair, he would not have gotten even if he knew the number.

zo ba! - let’s go

10-13-2002 11:39 AM
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We Did Nothing, Absolutely Bupkus

I woke up this morning and could only barely feel half of my face. I think I slept on it wrong.

I will admit to being completely exhausted. I feel like a truck ran over me, backed up, ran over me again, and then the driver got out and spit on me. And shoved a wad of wet cotton up my nose. I can’t explain where the truck driver got the wad of cotton.

Heidi and I made last night a quiet one… we hung out at the house and I worked on her computer (the one that I have been building since August, but am only now starting to make any headway on) and we watched Traffic and Hardware Wars. I felt like I was no good company but as much as I tried, I couldn’t be really sociable. It was just the first chance I’d had to decompress in a while, and it made me a real moron.

It was the first moment since we have been dating that I felt really, truly disconnected from her. I didn’t like it. I felt like it was my fault.

If you haven’t seen Hardware Wars, you need to.

bu hao - bad

10-14-2002 05:42 PM
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I Just Got a Life

It seems like whenever I am down, Jane Borden comes into town and does a workshop for Destroy All Monsters that gives me a lot of hope and encourgement. (I wasn’t down about DAM, so much as I was down on my improv in general… but Jane’s positivity is just so awesome.) Have I mentioned that Destroy All Monsters :love:s Jane Borden?

About eight weeks ago I bought a DJ Food CD and listened to it once. I found it underneath the seat of my car today, and was all jazzed. It’s super-awesome. Perfect for background listening in the office when I get tired of the Billy Joel classical stuff.

I spent more time than I should have last night playing Sim City 3000. I wonder what it is about me that I always end up wanting to play games where I can build stuff rather than games where I can shoot stuff? I used to blame it on my piss-poor hand-eye coordination… I was never particularly good at games like Doom or Quake… but in retrospect, I wonder if I never became good at them because I wasn’t so interested.

In a broader sense: Do my general interests drive my areas of inadequacy (for lack of a better term right now), or do my inadequacies drive my general interests?

For example, I far prefer writing to drawing, though I enjoy both. I’m a far better writer than artist. Which caused which?

zhong guo - China

10-15-2002 05:32 PM
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My Stink is Mine

So, I have been meaning to make a list of things that I want to be better at onstage. Here they are:
• Using my space. I’ve been bad about really living in an environment. I usually do well with the items I am touching, and forget to see the rest of the room, smell the air, live in that world fully. It’s not a skill I have ever been really good at, I’ve always been passable enough to get by in shortform shows. I want to be so much better.
• Initiating from the back line. I edit, then start my scenes. I should be attacking. Attacking. A burst of new scene the minute my foot moves forward off the back line. I’m teaching this one religiously, and I’m not doing it yet. I don’t want to be one of those “those who can’t, teach” people. That’s lame as shit.
• Focusing on the first three lines of every beat. I find myself phasing out sometimes as a beat is beginning, trying to use that time to center myself. But I keep missing what’s fun about their scenes. I need to be a better listener in general.
• Summarizing the game as I walk to the back line. I think I fail to keep my understanding of a game simple enough to play it again and again with my teammates. I can’t remember who said it– I think Mullaney– but “it’s so simple, it’s almost hard” is just about right.
• Playing real. I don’t feel like I am making jokes any more, but I do feel sometimes like I stretch and make bad choices that aren’t grounded in reality because some other options seems wittier to me, if less natural. I’m trying to outsmart myself, and it keeps my characters from gaining strong emotional stakes in the scenes.
These are all the ways that I want to improve. Well, there’s more, but these are the projects for now.

zhong - middle

10-19-2002 05:50 PM
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I’m the Man Who Loves You

I think my trip to Ft. Lauderdale was a fruitful one. I rolled in at 4:30, went by a boat taxi to a $50 dinner (I don’t think the rest of the US Distance Learning Consortium has a problem with dropping that much for dinner…), went home to sleep, met with them from 8:30 to noon, and then got in the rental car, headed back to the airport, and came home.

During the meeting, I was looking out the window at the beach… there it was, the middle of October and cold in Raleigh, and it was 80 degrees and beautiful outside; people were playing volleyball on the beach. Kind of surreal. You sort of forget that Florida exists until you go there in the fall or winter.

I don’t know what it is about airports, but everyone in airports looks like someome you know. I don’t know if it’s just that everyone in the world looks alike, or if it’s that since you don’t know anyone, you begin to watch everyone in an airport looking for familiarity, or if you do start to see people who have passed through your sphere before, and some distanct corner of the subconscious knows them. There was a girl on the flight from Atlanta to RDU that I know I know, but I could not place the name. We did that smile of recognition as we deboarded; I could tell that she knew me but didn’t know how. I’m pretty sure it was someone I crossed paths with at Carolina. But the hair was different.

I read some of Learn Chinese in 10 Minutes a Day on the plane. Ten minutes my ass!

Heidi and I went to see The Bourne Identity last night. I enjoyed the hell out of it, though the love story was pathetic. I guess they had to include Franka Potente’s character so that Matt Damon’s character would have an excuse to talk. And I have to say, if I were amnesiac, and the only memory I ever recovered after like three weeks of being hunted was the moment where I got shot in the back, I’d be pissed. What a shitty memory to recover.

I had like 400 e-mails when I got online today. Two days offline this time. It’s becoming a disturbing trend!

I spent two and a half hours in the yard today, mowing and removing the root system from one of the trees that used to be there. I think it was leeching the soil. But I know absolutely shit about yards. Someone told me that they always liked reading this journal because they always knew when I’d mowed my lawn. Hum.

xin ci - new words

10-22-2002 10:43 PM
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On the Mouth

I keep a Jar Jar Binks toothbrush at Heidi’s apartment.

xian zai - now

10-23-2002 05:55 PM
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Another Chance to Rip Off the Gift

While showering this afternoon (shower was cold this morning… BOO!), I had a bunch of stuff that I knew I wanted to put in my journal. Now I can’t remember any of it. Poop.

So, what I left out of the journal was that Monday was a 14-hour day from crap. I was saying day from hell before, but I’ve chilled on it a little and it was just from crap. Servers mysteriously stopped working, after staying at work to fix them, well past the point at which I was useful, they mysteriously began working again in my Tuesday morning class. Fuck you, chance.

Heidi’s mom went to the hospital after waking up yesterday to find that her whole right side was numb. It went along with her migraines, and got worse. Now it’s getting better. They’ve done a CAT scan and an MRI, but it’s pretty inconclusive. It’s pretty fucking scary and Heidi is handling it with a composure that I find amazing. I cannot list all of the reasons that she astounds me.

My mom dutifully calls in to let me know she is OK each time the sniper strikes in Falls Church. Thankfully, I often hear the news of the new shootings from her, so I don’t even have a chance to worry. Watching the whole thing played out in the media, insofar as I have any contact with the media, is a curious game of cat-and-mouse/textbook criminal psychology. I hate that I have a personal stake in it at all. I hate worrying about my friends and family in that area.

I finished a workshop today and will get six uninterrupted days in the office! Hot damn! A true rarity of late.

10-24-2002 06:41 PM
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I Hate the Television

I remember what I thought of in the shower yesterday. It’s been a recurring thought since Ft. Lauderdale, albeit one that does not recur when I’ve been journaling.

I saw Susan Bott’s Wendy’s spot while I was sitting in a hotel room.

Admittedly, I still look at the television with a little bit of awe. (The institution, not the device.) I don’t watch a whole lot of TV, but to the part of me that will forever be a groupie– and that is a large part– seeing my friends and even acquaintances on TV is still hot shit. I don’t know why; it’s the same reason that I get pumped when my friends are in kickass bands or in great improv shows. I love the chance to cheer for the people I know, even if I’m not terribly close to them.

I think it’s the fact that I feel somehow closer to some greater avenue when I see my friends succeed in a performance, or even sometimes in a chosen field, though chiefly in performance… somehow closer to a status that I believe I won’t have because I don’t try for it (or don’t try hard enough for). Closer, then, to possibility.

It’s just a Wendy’s commercial. Yeah. But I know how hard Susan works to succeed and I know that she really enjoys commercial work. So, when I saw that spot, I was really fucking pumped.

Now I’m looking forward to seeing Anthony and Charlie in the background of a soap opera, so I can be thrilled some more.

10-30-2002 01:10 PM
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Who Wants That Honey?

Well, glory days. I spent two of my marvelous six days in the office at home sick. My cable modem situation was not resolved by the third repairman, so I cancelled my cable and ordered DSL. The modem arrived today, about an hour before the e-mail telling me that my phone line was now ready for it. So as soon as I get home, I should be back in the world of the high-speed. Hot damn.

The sick days, as miserable as they were (esp. considering that they were a Friday and a Monday… but I felt worse over the weekend!), were probably good for me… a message from my body that I am overextending at LEARN. I know this. So it’s time to start saying “no” a little bit more and doing only what’s humanly possible.

Ewald sent a care package from Salon, the next Smashing Pumpkins release on CD with the accompanying video from 1994, a Racebannon CD which I got reviewed in two days, new CDs from the Residents and Interpol (they really sound like Talking Heads would have sounded if they had been formed in 1999), and a Shaggy CD single. I can’t figure out the Shaggy single.

Heidi and I continue to chug along at a nice comfortable pace. We don’t see each other every day, we have really separate interests and friends, and we have this wonderful place where we intersect. It’s a normal, healthy relationship. Whoa.

Anthony’s appearances on As the World Turns begin tomorrow. I’ll be taping and watching the background for him. Hehehe… yay!

bing cho - hockey (literally, “ice ball… apparently, you must have a ball to qualify as a sport in China)

10-31-2002 08:49 AM
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Every Time You’re Not Around, Doesn’t Matter ‘Cause You’re Everywhere to Me

I eat raw spaghetti. I don’t know what about it appeals to me so much, because often, the spaghetti breaks in my mouth as I am crunching and a shard will jam itself up into my gums and I’ll start bleeding. Or if I don’t chew it up well enough, it makes my stomach ache for a while, probably slicing up the lining of my esophagus as it tumbles down there.

I began reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which after only seventy-odd pages has already filled me with the giddy delight that is usually reserved for Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Randall Kenan.

Speaking of Randall Kenan, word has it that he is back on the UNC campus, teaching documentary studies and folklore. I wonder if he ever got that third book published. I should seek out his office and drop in on him sometime– the class I took from him still stands out as one of the high points of my college career.

I went a little crazy last night on eMusic, a service that I’ve had for too long because of the They Might Be Giants Unlimited deal. So I downloaded Eyes Adrift, two At the Drive-In records, Beulah, the new Ivy, three Guided by Voices LPs, some Frank Black and the Catholics, all the Le Tigre that I didn’t have, more Mogwai, a bunch of Yo La Tengo, and some Ty Tabor. Now that I look at that list, the Ty Tabor really doesn’t fit.