02-01-2003 12:17 AM
________________________________________
In My Bed Upstairs and We Could Still Feel the Bass

Heidi and I saw My Big Fat Greek Wedding tonight, which made us laugh uproariously. We also hit the Upscale Dollar Store, which is so upscale that it has mylar balloons for $1.50. We walked out having show tremendous restraint. Eight purchases, three of which have a vanilla scent of some sort and two of which were travel shoeshine kits.

We ate at Subway, where we had a delightful conversation about pooping. We talked about 30-minute shitters, these people who disappear into the bathroom for eons on end. She posited that people who take a long time to shit are using the time to think and be alone because that is, for some people, the only time they can really sit down to think. I think they’re whacking off.

We discussed the relative merits of an anthropological study of pooping habits, but since anthropologists have to do all that field research, Heidi would have to go poop with people. My basic assumption is that her presence would pretty much change their behavior… who would act the same way if there were someone else in there with you?

It raised the larger question for me, as to whether any serious cultural study can be undertaken by an outsider, since behavior changes when you are being observed, especially by a stranger. I assume that your deviation decreases over time, but I don’t think that data will ever be free of the skewing effect. Heidi’s thought about that a lot, as she’s spent an inordinate amount of time debating between sociology and anthropology, which are pretty damn close to each other with two exceptions: a) sociologists do more quantitative analysis, and anthropologists do more qualitative analysis, but on the same data, and b) the two fields hate each other.

The irony that I got actively engaged in a very academic conversation about anthropology and sociology only through the lens of pooping habits is not lost on me. We also talked about Dutch toilets. I was unaware that the Dutch were so ingenious about looking at their own poop.

Every time I hear Coldplay, I think the lead singer has been listening to someone else. Sometimes he sounds like Bono and sometimes he sounds like Dave Matthews. I can’t make up my mind if I like it.

02-01-2003 07:44 PM
________________________________________
The Comfort of a Knowledge of a Rise Above the Sky Above

Rebecca and I agreed to do one last exchange of stuff– a year and a half after we broke up. She needed her printer back, so I took her some CDs, an old stereo, and Mr. Printy. I figured that if she wanted the printer, I’d at least ask for a CD that I knew she had. I’m reasonably certain that she had other stuff (she also returned a t-shirt, a pair of boxers, and a stereo that I am not sure was ever mine, but which I accepted), but I didn’t really want to ask for it.

I’m wondering what the statute of limitations on asking for your stuff back after a break-up is. I mean, I’m certainly not peeved that she wanted her printer, and I certainly wasn’t upset to give back the other stuff, which had been occupying shelf space in the basement at LEARN NC. And I was pleased to get my Jump Little Children CD back, because a) I had the case, and empty CD cases drive me nuts, and b) it’s a fine CD.

But I don’t know that I would have ever broached the subject. It seems to me that after a certain point, you just really don’t need the stuff back. But then, she had a CD, and I had a printer. I guess that if it were ignore the breakup statute of limitations or shell out $100 for a new one… well, I would shell out the $100, but I think asking for it back was probably a sensible move.

Rebecca brought her boyfriend Corey to the swap, which we did at LEARN NC (which I thought was an odd place to do it, but that was her recommendation). He seemed like a nice guy. I think she may have known him for a while… he may have been one of the two male friends that I never met in the two years we were together. I felt bad for him though, because I just wouldn’t have wanted to go to one of those stuff swaps. The situation wasn’t awkward. I feel like Rebecca and I have made our peace enough. But when I tried to put myself in his shoes, I just couldn’t envision circumstances where I’d really be all that hot-to-trot to meet my girlfriend’s ex while they exchange the last remnants of their relationship.

I gave Cory a painting of Rebecca that Dan Parrish had done that I’d had in a drawer in my office, figuring that he would probably appreciate it more than I could at this point. I didn’t know if that was cool or not; I can see how it would have made him feel more awkward, but I hope that he puts it up and enjoys it.

02-02-2003 10:45 AM
________________________________________
Guide You Out of Triple Stage Darkness

Just something I was goofing off with.

I’ve spent the morning thinking about granularity.

I may end doing something horrible to a group of people. It’s a business decision. I don’t know when I became like this.

I have an agreement with Ellen Bush that I will send out three batches of poems. And now that I go to look for poems to send, I can’t find them on any hard drive. Damn it.

02-02-2003 08:42 PM
________________________________________
The Leave, The Leaving

Pictures from Ginger and Mesha’s visit last week. Obviously very candid shots.

I went to Blem’s house last Monday, and took some pictures of Abby. I never caller her Abby– since Fuzz named the cat “Baby Titty,” that’s pretty much what I call her. TT for short. Blem came over today and we went and looked for houses for sale in the general vicinity. She seemed to really like some of the townhouses being built just across MLK Parkway.

02-04-2003 06:34 PM
________________________________________
They Say It’s Your Birthday

I’m in a hotel in Greensboro right now, chilling out and getting my IRC fix after the first day of a two-day workshop. I’ll be here until Friday with the workforce development conference. Hotels do seem to toss me into fits of extreme pensiveness, which I will try to drown out with plenty of Internet and TV. I’d like an explanation as to why “Home Improvement” is playing on four channels.

It’s Heidi’s birthday! And I’m not around for it! Boo on me, boo on circumstance, boo on missing her 26th.

02-04-2003 11:33 PM
________________________________________
Teeth in the Back of Your Mind

I recovered 438 poems tonight from a zip disc that I didn’t even remember making. 438. That’s everything I wrote between 1992 and 1999. And I think I can now account for everything I wrote in the last three years, which is admittedly almost nothing.

I am rediscovering my 22-year-old self, the kind that wrote love poems to no one at all, and was really scared of being alone and not being alone.

ANOTHER SAD YEAR

Loss has come on stilts,
looms between power lines
and treetops, stark figure
atop skinny limbs
intersecting the yellow
lines of the street.

It dodges the stoplights.
It clonks toward you.
You wonder—would it
follow if you cut
through the cars
at street’s edge?

Its feebling shins
splint in the chase.
You slip through
bush and swingset,
hurrying glances
over your shoulder.

Words taste like
cherries in your
throat as you wheeze.

02-05-2003 10:28 PM
________________________________________
And Instead of Saying All of Your Goodbyes

UNC is playing Duke tonight.

I’ve been reading a lot of junk in newspapers and on ESPN.com this season about Duke/Maryland being one of the best rivalries in college basketball. Bullshit.

I know that Carolina blew chunks last season and certainly hasn’t been brilliant this season (well, maybe right at the start of the season), but there is nothing in basketball that comes close to Duke/Carolina. It’s an amazing rivalry with a buttload of history between two schools that are eleven miles apart and have two totally different cultures.

Carolina is winning at the half. It’s a wonderful thing that no matter how good or how bad either team is in any given season, these games are always intense, always heartbreaking, always supercharged. UNC can go 1-15 in conference play, but if the one win is against Duke, the season had some redeeming qualities. (Of course, that would indicate that Clemson had finally won at the Dean Dome, which is destined to never happen.) And Duke fans will sometimes try to act all superior, but they feel the same way. Watching Carolina win at Cameron Indoor is even better, because to their credit, Duke fans are the best in basketball, and it’s always a pleasure to shut them up.

Can Carolina win? It is the first game against Duke for the freshmen, who carry the team, and no matter what anyone says, the biggest game so far in their careers at UNC. So, go Carolina! Make the Dookies bleed!

Random notes: My hand is tingling like I may have carpal-tunnel to worry about again. I wrote a poem at lunch, something I hadn’t done in… well, months. The last one before this is in this journal, and I’m pretty sure it was summertime. I’m procrastinating, and it may keep me from going into my presentation prepared for tomorrow.

02-07-2003 09:30 AM
________________________________________
It’s Only You Who Can Tear Me Apart

I fell asleep early last night. It was a pretty uneventful day; I did three sessions at a conference, which ranged from really bad to really good. I ate pizza in my hotel room for dinner because it was snowing and I didn’t feel like navigating the world where no one can drive in the snow. I walked around the mall for a while working on a project. IMing Anthony and talking to Heidi for 20 minutes were the highlights of the day.

Heidi has a job interview today. I hope she gets it, and immediately becomes tethered to the Raleigh/Durham area for a few years. I can’t help it; I have this terrible fear of her leaving the country for a year or two. If I were a bigger person, I would be able to let her go when she needs to. And maybe by the time she needs to, I’ll be better able.

02-07-2003 11:25 PM
________________________________________
You Were The Sunshine

Finally home! Spent time watching this week’s 24 and the Girl Crush video, which has renewed my love of all things Baku.

02-09-2003 11:27 PM
________________________________________
Nice Limbo You Have Here

Yesterday was a trainwreck– On the Spot managed to make me frustrated because they didn’t have their stuff together and we ended up wasting a lot of time due to poor planning and not listening. The little time we did have to actually rehearse went smashingly, it was just just infurating to lose an hour to one of the members unable to follow directions for picking me up and not having the common sense to make things go more smoothly. Plus, I missed Bowling for Columbine with Heidi because they didn’t plan their auditions well.

Then I felt ill most of the evening, because we ate at Rudino’s, which may or may not dip all of their foodstuffs in a thin sheath of grease before serving.

Today was kick-ass from the get-go. We woke up and did our Sunday lunch ritual– if you’d told me that I would ever make a ritual out of Taco Bell, I would have said you were daffy. Amos Brown, Leo, and Dave Sherson came over for some Starcraft. I didn’t play a ton, and Heidi and I drove to Chatham Co. to feed Fat Mama, who is lonely while Ruth is in Australia. We took a small tour of the Efird land, which spans 15 acres. I’ve decided that it would be cool to buy an acre or two from them if a) they’d consider selling it to me when b) they get the property settled from the divorce, which could easily be… well, never.

Heidi and I are rearranging my room, and the current configuration has much better feng shue, for certain. We bought a nifty touch-lamp at Wal-Mart for the cube that has found itself acting as a bedside table, and after Japanese steakhouse dinner with Bryan and Kim, we picked up the new printer, which prints beautifully. At least the test page–we don’t have the parallel cable to connect it.

02-10-2003 11:25 PM
________________________________________
I Was Just Wondering If You’d Come Along

I am ticklish. Very ticklish, unfortunately; the slightest touching, at the right time and in the right place, can send me up the wall. I tend to have the unfortunate habit of falling for girls who like to run their fingers along any of the following places, any of which may make me shreik with tickle-terror: arms, stomach, neck, legs, elbows, head, face, back, shoulders, knees, feet.

Heidi especially likes to just lie there and cover a two-inch radius on my arm with her thumb. It’s a small thing, really. A light touch in a two inch radius on my arm. And it gives me fits.

As Heidi and I began dating, she simply could not be tickled in any way. It just wasn’t possible. But recently I have discovered that by nuzzling loudly on her neck, I can make her as sensitive as I am to tickling.

This is like a goldmine for me. I’m a kid again. And I’m paying her back for months of torture.

It’s on.

02-12-2003 01:49 AM
________________________________________
Go Home and Spend Your Life Alone With the Stereo

Bryan and I are up late. He’s adding a server to the household configuration, I’m responding to e-mail and PMs. The sweet printer will be up, so I can print some labels and mail the mix I made for Dan Telfer. (I dropped mad ducats at Staples today for the printer cable, some CD labels, and some blank business cards.) We’re spewing random lines from a Pablo Francisco album.

It looks like my hopes of going to business school for the summer, which had previously seemed so remote that I don’t even think I had mentioned them in this journal, will not be dashed. My boss has agreed that the program would have lots of value and that LEARN should foot the $2,000 price tag to develop me! Whoo-hoo! I’ll have a bunch of projects in that four weeks, much of which will be LEARN-oriented, but I’d be lying if I said that I was not planning to apply some of that to DSI.

Speaking of DSI, I’d been wondering why Zach had not been picking up his cell all week. He called just after midnight from a gig in Mexico. He said he got it last Friday and flew down last Sunday, and now he’s spending part of February in Cancun. My heart is bleeding, bleeding for Zach.

…And for other improv friends, two of whom have good casting news and deserve all their happiness (because neither of them expected it, despite the fact that all of their friends did).

Someone whose opinion I really respect (because he’s outspoken, pointed, and often very right) PMed me tonight with a kind compliment, very much out of the blue. It made my night. In a silly way, but it made my night. This reminds me that I should return that karmic favor more often than I do.

02-13-2003 10:28 PM
________________________________________
Jimmy Stewart Followed Kim to Where Your Portrait Hangs on the Wall

I’ve worked at home the last few days, which was great because I was more productive here than I usually am at the office, despite the fact that there were so many distractions, like TNN showing the A-Team. Bryan was here, sick with a sinus thingie, which made me really want to slack off. But the workload kept me from doing so.

I sent three batches of poems to magazines today, and Ellen delivered the goods on hers as well. Same three magazines. Right on! I hope that she is accepted and it gets her publishing; that she does not have a book is criminal.

Heidi called after class and was sour. I don’t like not being able to cheer her up.

02-14-2003 05:03 PM
________________________________________
Love, Love… What More is There?

Some people are not having a happy V-day. Assistant Jess is one example:

My hair, too:

But I guess I do all right.

02-15-2003 10:53 PM
________________________________________
Don’t See the Glass as Half-Empty, See the Half Full of Shit

The Hurricanes had the courtesy to thump the Capitals in their first home game in two weeks… given that there has not been much to look forward to, hockey-wise, I’ll take anything I can get. Hooray for the Canes!

Two nitwits got married on the ice with the most annoying local radio personality alive at their sides. Maybe I am an asshole, but I pretty much think you’re a dick if you can let your wedding be reduced to a radio promotion.

Yeah, that is the mascot in a tuxedo. Lame.

Heidi and I went and saw Frida after the game. I was really impressed by Julie Taymor’s direction. The movie had a wonderful feel to it and I was impressed. Did this movie get left out of the Oscars? And if so, how?

Spent 8 horus today with On the Spot– they had their first show this evening. And, all told, it was not bad. They had trouble in the third beats, the opening games never really connected well with the rest of the piece, and they dropped the ball on some of the games, but they hit some things right on the head and the second Harold of the night had some of the best work they’ve done. They had in the neighborhood fo 40 people, which I thought was outstanding, and they looked like they had fun after getting over the initial nervous shock.

I’ve had an enormous flood of PMs of late, which is weird but very cool. Now I need to go reply to them!

Sorry, Katy Jack, looks like your license plate is taken.

02-16-2003 11:43 PM
________________________________________
And Don’t Forget to Give Me Back My Black T-Shirt

Quiet day inside. It’s ice-storming, so I never left the house. Heidi and I have spent the day making tacos, watching season one of the Sopranos, making her a mix CD, playing with kitty, doing laundry. Don’t know if I will end up at work tomorrow.

eBay has me in its thrall again; I ended up with a Chicago Cubs jersey from the 80’s and a UNC hockey jersey. Total damage: $50. This two days after I dropped $60 on half.com for Poet’s Market 2003 and Sim City 4. I should cut that shit out for a few weeks.

02-18-2003 06:02 PM
________________________________________
It’s All Illusion, Anyway

I didn’t feel like I could journal in earnest yesterday, since I managed to not even leave the house. The ice is all melting now, and I was able to leave today. I’ll be back at work tomorrow, which I’m a little bitthankful for but also dreading a little bit. I have enjoyed working from home. I’ve gotten stuff done, too! (Though admittedly, I wrote an article today when I really should have been working on a presentation that’s going to be ultra-lame).

I think the chance to be reflective was neceessary, but I also think I probably squandered it with a lot of thinking about little, inconsequential stuff. If I were prone to invention, I would be rivalling Cosmo Kramer right now with my insignificant, impractical inventions.

I’m packing for Utah and putting together my notebook for that, and installed some forums for Implosion, which I expect to tweak tonight.

02-21-2003 11:40 AM
________________________________________
Yeah, I’m All Those Things

I swear, I never meant for this to turn into an every-other day journal. I do have thoughts every day.

I’m in Utah. I finally got in about 11:30 local, and ryloc and Joe Beatty met me at the airport. We picked up Larry Ganz and had a beer and chatted. We went to bed when my body thought it was around 4 AM.

I have been so focused on the classes that I’m going to be doing that I have spent the majority of my time over the past two days preparing for it.

Wednesday night, Pop and Taylor came to Raleigh and joined us for the hockey game. I miss being around Taylor… the older he gets, I think the less and less I feel like a brother to him. Which is fair, he’s 9 now and I have not been there so much. It makes me sad… I remember growing up, I had a friend named Emily Sherman and she had a half brother who was 38 when she was 14. I always thought that was creepy as hell, because he was like this alien who shared blood with her. I don’t want to be like that.

02-22-2003 11:16 AM
________________________________________
You Told Me I Was the Only One

Salt Lake City is absolutely beautiful. There are mountains all around, and not just lame mountains; they are these huge, snow-capped monoliths cradling the city. It’s just started to snow a little down here, so I’m watching the flakes drift down and get kicked around by the wind.

Ryloc just ran outside in his shorts and a t-shirt.

I’m having an absolute blast with KYSOff. I know I didn’t get nearly as much sleep as I could have on Thursday, so I hope that I will be a little more prepared today. Or at least a little more high energy. I got really tired after four hours of teaching yesterday, so I was mad thankful that the group was so high energy for the last two hours.

I taught a beginner workshop for three hours and then the intensive workshop just for KYSOff for three hours. We’ll be doing the same thing today, with a number of the beginners asking if they can come again. I guess they felt like it was valuable.

One of the best feelings was that one guy, who apparently has struggled with the KYSOff workshops for a while, really stepped up the quality of his work yesterday. After the workshop, several KYSOff people mentioned how surprised they were. I take complete credit for the breakthrough! (Though it seems completely reasonable that I was just teaching on the right day, too.)

We worked up to an Armando with KYSOff yesterday in their three-hour workshop, and they performed one last night. Jesse Parent did a monolog about gallows humor, and talked for a few minutes about losing a friend in the Great White concert fire, and how his father was making jokes at his grandfather’s funeral to deal with the pain. It was absolutely touching, and so risky for this group, because it wasn’t funny, it was emotionally naked. And they followed it with a couple of hysterical scenes. I felt like Jesse’s willingness to explore his pain onstage might have been helped along by the workshop, and I was really proud to have that moment come out of my class somehow.

I know it’s lame to gush. But I was really touched by that monolog.

02-24-2003 10:25 PM
________________________________________
You Were Meant to Live Large

I am home, and pooped. Bryan King has committed to the purchase of the new fishtank which holds roughly 2 billion gallons and will take up like half of the dining room, if he is to be believed.

The last two workshops with KYSOff were excellent. What a wonderful group of people to have stumbled upon. A happy accident if ever there was one.

02-25-2003 09:54 PM
________________________________________
It’s a Disease and They’re All Green

Sheesh, a fella goes away for a few days and the office quits communicating entirely! We had a shitstorm of retardation in the office while I was gone and it continued well into today, buoyed by my own stupidity and inability to adjust to this time zone when I never fully felt I had adjusted to mountain time anyhow. Boo!

More kind words from Utah, by IM, e-mail, and forum. Yay! I’m so glad that they felt like the experience was worth their time and money. And in turn, it made me thankful for all of the classes and training and useful tips from the IRC. So, hooray for Mullaney, Delaney, Armando, Jane Borden, and Billy Merritt, who I quoted like a madman; and Brian Berrebbi, Ari, Will Hines, and Brian Stack, who definitely had some gems on the IRC that helped me along.

I don’t know why teaching longfrom in Utah was so different from teaching it here, but it was. Maybe I learned more this weekend than they did.

02-27-2003 12:13 PM
________________________________________
Caught With My Hand in the Till

I don’t know what is so difficult for Wendy’s about the words, “No mayonnaise.”

I detest mayonnaise. I loathe it. I consider it on par with the act of vomiting: absolutely wretched. (And for those of you that know me, you know that I will go to great lengths to avoid vomiting.) When I was younger, a friend would hold me down and hold a spoonful of mayonnaise under my nose to make me convulse with terror and disgust (my only recourse being letting him know I was much smarter than he, which actually seemed like a fair trade to both of us).

I’m in Gastonia, NC today, training twelve teachers in a windowless basement room. I’m tried, I’m having a hard time waking up, and I don’t think anyone is having a lot of fun. I have not slept well since getting back from Utah, and once I get to sleep, I can’t seem to wake up. I think I need a night or two to just crash completely, which I don’t think I will get until after the Dirty South Improv Festival.

But how cool is it that the DSIF is almost here? I’m all about taking Dan Izzo’s class tomorrow and then I’m coaching Lighted Fools from Haverford/Bryn Mawr on Sunday. And there’s shows! And the real kickoff for Implosion! Yay!

02-27-2003 05:28 PM
________________________________________
It’s an Unqualified Success

Could someone please explain to me the premise of The Truth About Cats and Dogs? Uma Thurman is totally hot and Jeanine Garafalo is totally ugly?

Um, no way.

01-03-2003 09:10 AM
________________________________________
Woke Up, Got Out of Bed

I spent last night having horrible dreams that my father had died. When I woke up, they seemed so real that I wasn’t sure that they had been dreams, and it took me a few minutes to rationally tell myself how I spent yesterday… it wasn’t making arrangements for a funeral.

What’s scary is the realization that when my father passes, those arrangements will fall to me. That’s something that I feel should be hard to accept– that as he gets older, I am becoming his primary support system, and I’m not much of one at all. But it’s not hard to accept; it was like I woke up with the knowledge, but it had been there for a long time.

Yesterday was my 28th birthday, which I spent in fantastic manner– doing a fat lot of nothing. Heidi and I made the terrible mistake of actually seeing I-Spy at the dollar theater, and spent the rest of the afternoon wondering what the hell happened to Eddie Murphy. Man, that movie was horrible. Almost Blue Crush bad. Shit, maybe even worse.

Leo gave me a My Little Pony with “Loser” written along the sides and “Ross” written on the ass as a monument to the Tank Wars loser pony that I still have. We immediately decided that we have to have a LAN party to dispense the Tank Wars pony, especially now that I have my own permanent pony. (It’s been a few years since the last Tank Wars, and I can’t remember what the winner takes home. I won once, and only had the pony once… I just happened to have the pony after the last time we played.)

The LAN party works well with my overall ambition to get Bryan to move out of Kim’s and get out of his horrible relationship. Maybe if he moves some of his shit out of her place he’ll be less inclined to stay there every night. It’s amazing that he can be so unhappy and so inert, but I guess I did it while I was with Rebecca. Jesus, never again.

01-04-2003 07:39 PM
________________________________________
Your Own Personal Jesus

Working on Saturdays is lame when you have to do a 9-5 during the week. In retail, it never bothered me at all. But now that I have a desk job, I start thinking that Saturday work is an infringement.

That said, we met with the AP teachers in Winston-Salem today and they were all gushy about the good job we are doing for them. So that felt nice.

Toba’s Revenge debuted last night as a four-piece, Tom having quit the group this week. I think it was the certainty of a show that did him in, which makes me sad, because I think he would have been fine but I don’t think he really believed that.

Toba’s did great work for a first show! The group games really surprised me, despite the fact that they had been set before the show (that made me sad, because I really wanted them to trust in themselves enough to see what the moment presented). They opened with scene painting, did a pattern game for the first group game, and then the “give the walk” exercise– into the audience– for the second. When they started the give the walk, I was so confused, since I’d never presented it as a group game, per se. But when I realized what they were doing, and that they weren’t working towards a scene but just heightening, heightening, heightening, I was astounded. It was phenomenal, and the audience loved it. I was beaming in that moment.

They still have a long way to go, particularly with second beats, but Toba’s Revenge is going to get better and better in their run this month.

Typhoid Mary also debuted, and they were great too! You can see where Jim Woods and Eric Hunicutt gave them some excellent feedback in practices the past few weeks. They look like they will really come together as a group in the coming weeks as well.

The coolest thing was the excitement that two Harolds generated in the club– after the show, the atmosphere was very positive, and it was the first time that I’ve felt the ZYGOTE was really achieving the mission that I’d set forth– being a change agent.

I’m really content in that sense.

01-07-2003 02:38 PM
________________________________________
Bandages on My Legs and My Arms From You

On the 2nd, I got this e-mail from Peter O’Bryan, who just took level 2 at ComedyWorx (he and his wife hosted the kickass bonfires):

Quote:
Happy Birthday.
Do you want bookshelves.
You shall have bookshelves.
Do you have the means to transport them, or do you wish them delivered?
They are pretty.
They are nice.
Happy Birthday.
Happy Birthday.
You see, Pete and Jen’s house is wall-to-wall bookshelves. It’s awesome… library-sized bookshelves everywhere. I had made a comment about how great the shelves were, and they told me that they’d bought an entire lot from state surplus and had tons of extras. So I mentioned I would gladly buy a couple sets from them.

Well, at the LAN party Sunday, they delivered the first set of shelves, nine feet of dark wooden book-holding take-no-prisoners ass-kicking. Well, that’s hyperbole, but they look really damn nice in the living room and I am stoked to death. Getting a huge new fixture like that (and being able to fill it) makes the whole house feel new again.

Now I have to go read all those damn books.

01-07-2003 11:25 PM
________________________________________
Finally Someone Let Me Out of My Cage

Excerpts from the notes I gave Toba’s Revenge after their first show. Much of it is regurgitation from classes at UCB this summer. But it’s nice to look at.

Jokes kill the reality of the scene, keeping you from building something more meaningful that the audience can connect with.

But while we work for the audience, we don’t work for the audience at all! If you are primarily concerned with pleasing the audience, you are not doing the work for the right reasons. Do the best improv you can, and have fun, and I promise you that the audience will enjoy it.

When we scene paint, remember that the details build the mood. You don’t need to comment about things… give us the details and let us draw the conclusions. Like good fiction, a scene painting will show instead of telling.

You did absolutely the right thing to drop the pretense of playing dumb and own up to smoking. When in doubt, confess!

Remember, longform is about relationship, because we’re never gonna see enough of the plot to have a satisfying end.

Edit! Edit! Edit!

If Sarah knows what you think, what else does she know? Get caught!

When you have weird things going on around you, call out the fact that it’s weird… We seek to understand, and the search for understanding fuels what our characters do in longform.

Why turn away from the fun of the scene? Is it because you felt like you might be breaking the rules of improv that you’ve been taught? There are no rules, as long as you can agree.

So if you thought a pattern game wouldn’t be interesting or engaging in a show, consider yourself proven wrong, no? But why? Because you committed to it, and you made it work.

Toba’s Revenge is going to have an absolutely awesome run in the month of January.

01-08-2003 04:41 PM
________________________________________
Wish Upon a Star Together

The Anna Waronker record came by mail today, and I couldn’t wait to give it a listen. I :love: Anna Waronker, and not because she’s nekkid on the cover of her record.

I have a lunch meeting Tuesday with Paul Frellick, who is the president and artistic director of Deep Dish Theater, to discuss getting some longform shows booked in Chapel Hill through Deep Dish and DSI. It would be cool as all get-out to bring longform to the mall, which is where Deep Dish is currently quartered. Not because I love the mall, but putting longform in front of a new audience– and the mall in Chapel Hill would be a new audience indeed– is exciting.

I have noticed my tendency to overuse the words “cool” and “awesome” in this journal because I just don’t feel motivated to write beautiful prose every time I want to dash off a quick entry to catalog that moment’s thoughts. If you have a good synonym for “cool” and “awesome,” please let me know.

Bryan King stayed at home last night for the first time in a year. Kim stayed too, but baby steps, baby steps.

01-09-2003 11:24 PM
________________________________________
The Question is How Fast

Bryan King is staying at the house once again. He tells Anthony that this is because “all the computers are there.” I stayed home sick today becasue I haven’t been able to wake up all week and have been dragging and crabby. Bryan blew off work mid-day and we played Starcraft.

I want to know what a kind of geek is. But then, maybe I do not want to.

Heidi and I watched “Y Tu Mama Tambien” tonight, and we both hated it. I was way disappointed, after having heard so many good things about it.

I bought a digital camera online, after the one I tried to buy through half.com didn’t work out (order was cancelled because the guy was on vacation). I think I ended up with a better deal… I bought a Sony DSC-71. I’m really hopeful. It had all the features I wanted when I looked on Digital Photography Review.

01-11-2003 11:45 AM
________________________________________
Stroll to the Edge of the World

Wo hen gao xing. Despite the fact that the Canes are blowing hard and losing to just about anyone they can lose to. Which is unusual, since I have lived and died by this team.

I am impressed with people who can get 30 stitches to the face and be back for the next game, fully aware that it would be really easy for a stick to get up under that face shield and rip shit up again. I am just not cut from that same fabric– I seek to avoid pain whenever possible. I may have the lowest pain threshold of anyone I know.

Somewhere in the next few days I will hit my one year anniversary of looking at the IRC. I was a lurker for a while before I registered and began posting. It’s amazing how much a message board has been good for me, but this journal is probably the single best thing I have done in the past year. Well, maybe the second-best thing; sending Heidi an e-mail saying I would be at her house for hugs the day I found out that she was back in the Triangle has to rank pretty high on the list.

01-12-2003 11:57 PM
________________________________________
You Must Die; I Alone Am Best

Another LAN party. Good group today: Nathan Garrett, the O’Bryans, Philip Boyne, David Carbonell, Ben Moser, Amos Brown, Ben’s roomie Derek, and Bryan. Bryan King is moved back in, that’s for certain. Talking about decorating his room and wiring the house. Talking about upgrading my computer again so he can’t blame my computer when he beats me at whatever game.

Salsa dancing last night. I didn’t think anyone would ever get me to enjoy dancing, but Heidi and I had a blast. I want to go again. Perspective: broadened. I’m sickeningly in love.

01-13-2003 11:59 PM
________________________________________
Part of This

It just so happens that I seem to be fairly unoccupied during Heidi’s spring break, so we think we would like ot go somewhere. We’ve kinda pokingly looked at Austin, Mexico, Vancouver… still not sure. Somewhere she’s never been would be preferred.

Who knows where we will end up?

She had a horrible day in classes, so I spent the later parts of the evening cheering her up. Think I managed. Sick, sick happiness!

01-14-2003 10:17 AM
________________________________________
Everything’s About to Go Away, For Real This Time, and No One’s Watching

…and the winner is: New York City. Heidi’s only been there once, and for three days at that, so she’s never truly been there. We’ll be up March 12-16; as soon as my supervisor OKs the days, I’m buying the tickets.

Please dear lord let me not have cursed this by saying “as soon as my supervisor OKs the days” instead of “if.”

So we will head up with the agreement that she doesn’t have to watch nearly as improv as I plan to and I’ll be up and about for more sightseeing than I would normally do, which is pretty much none since I hate to sight-see. Heidi warns me that I’ve never travelled with her (as did her pal Julie, who was in China with her); she likes to see and do “everything,” in Julie’s words, “in as short an amount of time as possible.” This will no doubt kill me.

As long as I see The Swarm. Though I’m really hoping to see The Office, Dr. Awesome, and My Kickass Van. And hell, about 100 other things.

01-14-2003 11:56 PM
________________________________________
Like a Good Canary

Toba’s Revenge

The digital camera came today! A new toy! As Bill Cochran puts it, I must be “part Asian,” because I love to have new toys and gadgets. (I have not found this to be true of Asians in general, but most of the Asian improvisers I know–admittedly a small group– are gadget junkies.)

Talked to ryloc a little about the possibility of teaching a workshop series in Salt Lake City over a weekend. That would be cool if it happened, though I won’t get my hopes up there. If not, I hope they seriously look into Jill Bernard, who’s at least sort of in the same area of the country and is wonderful.

Toba’s had the most kick-ass practice today.

And I met with Paul Frellick today to talk about DSI at Deep Dish, a subject I haven’t written much about in the journal but am very excited about.

01-15-2003 12:31 PM
________________________________________
The Results of A Thousand Electric Volts

“Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex, intelligent behaviors. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple, stupid behaviors.” –Dee Hack

True for business… I have taped it to my wall to remind me to keep it simple for the Help Desk. But also true for improv, especially teaching.

Linda sent this picture of some of the NCT gang at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in KC in November. Fun!

01-16-2003 10:27 AM
________________________________________
How They Stick In Your Throat

I wrote a long, long rant today. Now I’m all worked up about education.

The Hurricanes dropped another heartbreaker last night to the Penguins. I’m less worked up for hockey.

I’m trying to drink more water and less soda. I realized last night on the way to the game that I had not had a single glass of water all day and I’d had three Cokes. And here I was wondering why I was tired and achy. Duh.

CeCe finds out today if she got into CHiPs (fingers crossed), and David Carbonell is working on a flyer for Toba’s Revenge auditions with the following picture (despite my attempts to dissuade him):

So is it better to be loved and publicly shamed than never to be loved at all?

01-19-2003 11:32 PM
________________________________________
As Deep As the Ocean

So, salsa dancing again Saturday night. Again, it was good fun, though I like the cumbia less than the salsa and merengue. I went in for their membership despite the fact that boys always have to pay the cover because I can get free lessons Sundays at 6, which is actually a pretty good time for me to go over there once or twice and get some lessons. I am having a hard time shaking my ass appropriately, as I have little ass to speak of.

I really never thought that I would worry so much about how my ass looks.

The O’Bryans went with us, which was cool because it’s the only real set of couple friends that we have. I have genrally disliked the concept of couple friends, but this has largely to do with the fact that I wasn’t really in a couple for quite some time and when I was, it was with someone who was hard to be friends with. (It wasn’t until a conversation this weekend that I realized just how anti-social and awkward Rebecca was, despite all her best intentions.) But Pete and Jen are good people, I hang out at Mojoes with them when Heidi’s not around, and I really, really, really hope that we aren’t excluding other people in any way.

Friday night’s Toba’s show: they improved on some of the things that they really needed to improve on. This is a team that needs to stay together because when the light really goes on, they will rock out.

St. Louis City Improv has RSVPed for the AC4, which raised Richard’s eyebrow because they have a poor history with Comedy City in Kansas City. They started as an offshoot of that club and at some point they parted ways and continued doing improv. No one’s ever told me much more than that they had some bad blood a few years ago, I’m friendly with both groups, and they both wanted to come. So we’ll see how that shakes out.

01-20-2003 05:36 PM
________________________________________
The Dark Side’s Light

Started a five-day training in Raleigh for DPI today. I’m kinda impressed that these people wanted to get my training so badly that they would give up a holiday for it. They were really motivated and into it, which made it really pleasant to work with them.

Heidi’s dad is here at her place to eat dinner, which will either be weird or fun, depending. I am currently “checking in at work,” which Heidi knows to be code for “reading a day’s worth of IRC that I missed.” Ric has brought some Canes merchandise that he found in a Winn-Dixie in Siler City for $3, and it’s damn nice.

The O’Bryans’ friend Veronica has asked me if I wouldn’t mind reviewing her book for the Carolina Quarterly, which would be fine by me. The whole freelance writing thing is a shitload of fun; I wonder if I can one day parlay it into a paying hobby. Or hell, maybe better. Reviewing poetry books was hard for me, especially after seeing some of the other reviews that came in for that feature, since I consider myself decidedly un-academic.

01-21-2003 06:28 PM
________________________________________
Don’t Let Me Out of Your Sight

THE ZYGOTE is pretty much booked through June, with a weekend here and there up for grabs, which is a very cool feeling. We just have a lot of people who want to perform there. So nice to have an outpouring of support for something like this all of a sudden, when it was like pulling teeth in November and December.

Talked to Anthony to see how his show went and he was very happy with it and completely grateful for all the support from the UCBT community. I’m not surprise that it went well; knowing Anthony, I am sure it was stellar. He doesn’t do bad work. And he put so much into that show– I remember some of those monologs percolating in different forms in the past few years. I really want to see the show, which he’ll do at the AC4. EX-cellent.

No word from my boss on whether I can go to Utah. I will call him tomorrow. I really wanna go!

Heidi is talking about a six-week field study this summer, maybe in Mexico, maybe in Africa. Who knows where she will end up? Wherever it is, I’ll have to make a decision on whether I want to go see her there or go to Amsterdam with her to see Jim and tour around Europe some. I hate to travel. I hate to travel. I am so retarded. New experiences are good. I hate to travel.

More to say… perhaps when I get home from coaching Toba’s!

01-22-2003 09:34 PM
________________________________________
Into a Timeless, Placeless Place

Salt Lake City, here I come.

Boom!

01-23-2003 05:27 PM
________________________________________
Kilimanjaro Rises

Snow this morning: about two inches on the ground. Of course, the entire state of North Carolina shut down, but luckily the participants in the class I am teaching are staying at a hotel, so that should be fine, right? So I trudge on in with my 18 laptops and mobile server, and half the group that was staying went home last night, anticipating the snow! So I plugged away for the 10 participants who were there– 7 of whom had driven in with no problems whatsoever.

Congratulations to Wade and Holly Minter, who gave birth last night at 6:06 PM to Haley Anne-Marie Minter. So Dr. Wade is now Dr. Daddy. Awesome. I had called his cell last night since I hadn’t heard from him in a while, and when it was turned off, I wondered if he was busy with baby-making.

Plans for this evening: Reading comics in bed, maybe watching a movie. A fat lot of not much.

01-25-2003 07:19 PM
________________________________________
You’re My Man-o-War

Dyna just IMed and said she’d hold me a copy of Girl Crush when she gets the tapes made. Yay! I want to show this to everyone in NC who is piddling around talking about scripted shows with great concepts but not doing anything about them.

My 80 GB hard drive is on its way, so I can store more, more, more music. I remember when I first heard about mp3 and I knew a guy who had a 2 GB drive with all his music on it, and he was such a badass. Now that’s laughable. This was, what, three-and-a-half years ago? It’s amazing to be alive in a time when so much information is out there. We’re so truly lucky.

Mesha McDermott and Ginger Russell from Richmond are here and came to On the Spot rehearsal to sit in and to do some scenes with the OTSers. It was incredibly productive, I kept finding myself just being like, “Hey, just watch Mesha! This is how its done!” (Well, not out loud.) She’s pretty frustrated with doing just shortform, so the chance to practice and play in the ZYGOTE show last night with Toba’s Revenge was really good for her. And it she and Ginger were a really good kick in the pants for Toba.

Two hot girls, with whom I am known to share my bed:

More digital camera hijinks! Yay!

01-26-2003 10:48 PM
________________________________________
Can Love Be Measured by the Hours in the Day?

80 GB hard drive installed. Whoo-hoo.

I lost my voice after the Canes win against Florida Friday night (that place erupted when the Canes finally played well again) and having to yell to be heard at Montas Lounge last night. I don’t feel 100%, but Heidi has been sweet enough to come take care of me.

Cast Away was not as good the second time. The Man With Two Brains was.

I’d just as soon have my voice back.

01-27-2003 09:55 AM
________________________________________
Now All I Wanna Do Is Sleep

I’ve had infrequent dreams about performing over the past few years, but last night I had the first dream about coaching.

[dream] I was in a large mansion, and I kept stumbling from room to room, falling down and sleeping. I was wrapped in a blanket and I think I was sick. But when I would wake, I would find that my hand would be stuck through the floor and in some cases coming out into the ceiling in the room below me. This scared my sister at one point; I think I dropped my childhood safety blanket on her, which also went through the floor when I collapsed.

I woke one time and left the house. I drove back to it a while later and the driveway was oddly reminiscent of Philip Boyne’s driveway, so I figured that the house was not mine but Philip’s, and I was there to coach Toba’s Revenge.

I went inside to coach, and everyone was very excited because somehow I had secured Matt Besser to come teach them. When he showed up, he was bald. He introduced himself and then asked me to start warming the group up. But after every warmup, he would tear me apart– never giving any sort of notes or instruction to the group, just savagely picking apart every word I said. Then he had me coach as normal, and wouldn’t tell the group anything but would pick apart my coaching. When he left, he presented everyone with a certificate that said “You have received 6 hours of IMPROV TRAINING from Matt Besser and Global Corporation.” The group loved it. [/dream]

But the shitty thing is that whatever he was telling me about how to improve my coaching, I don’t know any specifics. I couldn’t remember the criticism when I woke up.

:exp:

01-28-2003 11:08 AM
________________________________________
Hey Look I’m Really Sorry I Couldn’t Make It To Your Party

I wonder sometimes why I have any association whatsoever with an improv troupe that labels people as problems when they try to have fun, take risks and make bold choices, and stir up the norm a little. Publicly labelled “problem people.”

01-29-2003 03:15 PM
________________________________________
She Says, “Stop. I’m a Girl Whose Fingernails Are Made of Mother’s Pearls.”

Some DSI discussions with Zach. I am extremely pleased every time we touch base, because something positive always come out of it.

After a horrible, horrible day at the office yesterday, things are looking up today. At the very least, I’ve been able to be productive and not pissed off all day. Yesterday blew because it was one of those days where everyone wanted to tell me what was wrong with the distance learning program but no one had any solutions, short-term or long-term. They just wanted to be pissed off.

Toba’s auditions: one person showed. That made the group very sad. Lesson: a flyer-only campaign don’t do much. Or at least, those flyers didn’t. I think it may have been the “improv heartthrob” bit. Seriously. That was creepy.

But after an all-around shitty day, someone made me feel much better. It’s so… well, I have that silly feeling, like I’m in a movie, and we’re spinning, and you can see one of us or the other, and the background is spinning behind us, but the lens stays fixed on us.

01-30-2003 03:42 PM
________________________________________
You’re Still Standing in That Dress

It seems like all of my friends have good news. Heidi has a job interview with the place she really wants to work on February 7. She’s been teaching at Wake Tech with the woman who is doing the hiring. Anthony is on the March UCB schedule to do his one-man show. Toba’s Revenge is starting shooting on their first film this weekend, which came out of an amazing scene they did about an Internet date. Every time Jess drives by her house, they’ve built more of it.

It’s a rainy day in Chapel Hill. I’m doing enjoyable but midless work, which means that I’m going hopelessly slow as I check IRC, chat on IM, and get up for another glass of water. I guess the brain needs a day like this.

I’m in the process of fetching a number of mp3s off some CDs… I had them on my computer long ago, and then archived them and hadn’t listened to them in a while. It’s seven CDs, which I would estimate at about 500 songs.

I’d like to be more entertained, or entertaining, than I am at the moment.

12-01-2002 03:19 PM
________________________________________
My Candyland Melted Down to Syrup

This is the first vacation in quite some time that actually feels like a vacation. I’ve done nothing since about Friday. Heidi and I got stuck in traffic in DC, so we were a little late to the Hurricanes/Red Wings game (6-4 Canes after 5 power play goals on five stright power plays… the building was as rocking as it has been since the playoffs last year, and it was a really good night to be a hockey fan). Then we hit THE ZYGOTE, because Jim Woods and Karl Rectanus were in town and wanted to play a show with some pals.

Saturday was one of those lazy days that rules beyond belief. I slept until about 1, got up and frollicked some, started to clean the house a little. Ewald dropped by, visiting NC for the Turkey Day, so we went out and drank beer and shot pool for a little while. When I got home, Heidi and I got dinner and watched a few more episodes of 24. We’re 13 hours through.

I also discovered on TNN the most fascinating piece of Saturday fluff– Slamball. Have you seen this? It’s like basketball, but there are four trampoline zones in front of each rim. Each team has four players on the court at a time, three attackers and a defender (the defenders are largely football players, while the attackers seem to be mostly basketball players). You get three points for a shot from beyond the arc, two for a regular shot, and three points for dunking, as long as your hands are on the rim. It’s absolutely fascinating to watch– this awkwardly graceful mix of streetball and flying. I chuckled when I started watching, but soon I was completely hooked. It’s got to be a killer on the knees, but I want to go play Slamball.

I went to lunch with Heidi’s mom, brother, sister-in-law, and nephew today. It was the first time I had been to any kind of family gathering with her since we had been dating– I’ve met her brother several times over the years, but he was outrageously welcoming and cool. It was one of those moments that really pointed out just how long I have known Heidi, which keep striking me as weird since I feel like I discover her more all the time.

12-03-2002 01:25 AM
________________________________________
Fifteen Men on a Dead Man’s Chariot

Overextending as usual, I agreed to coach two teams tonight. I was supposed to justwork with On the Spot as they prepare for their performance Wednesday (I am both nervous and very hopeful), but Toba’s Revenge wanted me even for an hour and forty minutes. So, I put 80 miles on the car and did both. Glad I did; two of the best rehearsals I’ve had so far with these teams.

Toba’s needed a boost to get them thinking more about character, so we did a Harold with accents and then a super hero Harold. Had we had time, we would also have done celebrity impersonation Harold and pirate Harold. They really, really wanted to do the pirate Harold. Ah, another time.

But now that they didn’t, I’m quite taken with the idea of a Harold where all the actors are pirates. Not scenes about pirates– that would be lame– but pirates trying to play a straight Harold. I’m afraid the grand production in my head outstrips anything Toba’s will create, as my imagined pirate Harold has a “Springtime for Hitler”-like production value.

The pirate Harold’s sound and movement opening proves problematic when one peg-legged pirate splinters his leg during a particularly active segment. He is running away from bears. He uses the sharp piece of wood to attack one of the bears, but is too caught up in the moment and actually wounds another pirate just beneath the eye. It isn’t funny. Thankfully they do not stop, and the injured pirate successfully makes the accident look like a bit.

One of the pirates says to another in a scene about a husband coming to grips with his wife’s breast cancer, “Me beloved jugs have run dry.” It is a bit. It isn’t funny.

The pirates attempt a trash can jam for one of their group games. But instead of a trash can, they mime a galley. It is mildly funny, because the song ends up being a love song for a tube of mascara, but hints at disgust for the woman wearing it. Pirates and their complex understanding of facade is more fascinating than funny.

The pirates do the best Harold they possibly can, despite their faults, but the groupmind is hindered by thoughts of mutiny, and their object work is hindered by the various hooks for hands and the lack of depth perception on the part of those that have eyepatches. They do a lot of bits. It is not performance-worthy.

After their Harold, the pirates choose not to go out drinking together. It’s almost certain that they will break up, and soon eight other practice groups in town will have a pirate on the roster.

I’m pretty sure that’s what it will be like.

12-03-2002 08:33 PM
________________________________________
He Cleaned Up. She Took Him Back. He Fucked Up. She Kicked Him Out.

Looks like my pal Lil G will be joining Toba’s Revenge. That’s cool. I think he will like being with them and they will like him being with them.

Bobby Hobgood and I continute to work on the ever-more-ridiculous cooking show presentation on how to deliver effective presentations with technology.

I wrote a glowing recommendation for Katie Roberts to get a scholarship to college. (Not that Katie Roberts, NYC readers. It’s a pretty good improv name, though, huh?) She offered to make me baked goods in exchange. No baked goods necessary.

I’m off to coach On the Spot one more time before their show.

12-04-2002 08:44 PM
________________________________________
But If I Work All Day on the Blue Sky Mine

North Carolina is lame in the snow, absolutely. It took me three hours to travel four miles. Silly.

On the Spot’s show is postponed, and won’t run until next semester. So, I guess it’s good to get some more time to work with them before they perform, but I know they were getting amped for it, and in some ways, I was too.

I saw a license plate: “MAN UNTD.” I know that it was supposed to be “Man United,” but damned if I could get the phrase “Man Untied” out of my head for like 20 minutes after that.

I fucking hate Christmas commercials. People make me fucking sick at Christmas.

12-09-2002 01:11 AM
________________________________________
The Time on the Stove

The karmic payback for whining about the slow-moving traffic and the piss-poor judgement of 98% of North Carolina drivers in snow has been five days without electricity. There were a couple of surges close to midnight, just as I was finishing a Christmas mix CD for a fellow IRCer who won’t expect it. I tucked myself in just in time to hear the first of the branches falling, snapping so quickly that they sounded like gunshots (which have been known to happen in Durham, so I honestly didn’t realize it was the trees at first). Then, at the edge of sleep, I heard a particularly loud crash, and opened my eyes just enough to see the blinding white flash through the blinds– the transformer was blowing, and the power was gone.

When I woke Thursday morning, it was a little chilly in the house, and I had no hot water. I drove in to work, and found trees down everywhere: barring the streets, splayed across front lawns, denting hoods and breaking windshields, peeking through rooftops. Power lines hung draped over branches or lay in the middle of the street. I had to try four different routes to get to work, only to find that there was no power there either. (Nor is there now; my office remains dark and probably won’t be back up tomorrow.) And all the trees that remained standing were bowed, crystalline, and sparkling. It looked like nature had stopped to consider itself, and was weeping.

By midday Thursday, Heidi had joined me in my cold house because I have a fireplace. The roads were all but clear, and the ice was melting. But over a million people in the area were without power, so instead of enjoying the day, I began to hunker down to the task of keeping warm. The temperature in my house had dropped down past fifty. No one was selling any firewood anywhere– most of the stores were not open– so I began helping myself to whatever I could find at the edge of the roads in my neighborhood. I pilfered a couple of people’s yard waste bins, figuring that if they were tossing the remains of the trees that had damaged their property by falling so rudely, they wouldn’t mind me burning those remains. It would be some small form of retribution, right?

I spent most of the day Friday doing one of two things: maintaining the fire I had going, or leaving Heidi there while I went out for more wood. Most of what I could find on Thursday was smallish in nature. The thick logs that would have made good fires were mostly cut too long for my fireplace, and I don’t have a chainsaw or even a hacksaw. Other woodlooters were at work as well, so the pickins on the pre-cut wood got pretty slim. I resorted to bringing home whatever branches I could break off with my hands. It was silly in its primitiveness: here I was, wholly unprepared for the task of heating myself, comically clawing at thin branches that were still too alive to burn well, trying to keep a fire going by using the heat from these logs to dry the next, poking at the fire with gloves and a small garden shovel because I didn’t have fireplace tools until Heidi found the last set at a hardware store on Friday afternoon.

In my singlemindedness, so focused on the task at hand, I think I went a little crazy, and I began to feel acutely alone despite Heidi’s presence. I spent a lot of candle-lit time contemplating nothing in particular, and everything at once; it was as if, with my normal life stopped, I had the chance to step outside myself and look at my existence without judgement, without placing value anywhere, just examining from another viewpoint. Heidi got electricity back on Friday afternoon, but I stayed in the thirty-degree house with the faucets dripping to avoid freezing the pipes so that I could keep the cat warm on a night that was supposed to get down to eighteen degrees, and huddled in bed with two sweatshirts and a hockey jersey on, listening for something that would wake me back into my own life.

I slept past noon on Saturday, and had icy dreams, and when I got up, I started a wet-wood fire and settled down to finish The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and got to the part where Joe is the only survivor of an Antarctic winter, and it was as if that little bit of melodrama snapped me back into my own life. I was suddenly appreciative of everything I had examined for a day and half, and thankful for the chance to hibernate and do the thinking. I drove to Heidi’s, took a hot shower, and began to thaw.

12-10-2002 12:25 AM
________________________________________
An Austrian Nobleman

Got some Christmas mixes made, packaged some half.com sale stuff, and read a little X-Men. It was a quiet day, for the most part. My house has power, finally, as of somewhere around 10:30 AM, but the office still doesn’t. I plan to go in for a while tomorrow to meet with someone, but won’t stay if it’s super-cold. I can finally start getting some work done at home.

Lex is telling LEARN staff that the School of Ed will be looking closely at timesheets. Like she has a damn thing to do with timesheets; she is just being evil, which is pretty ordinary, trying to stir up trouble however she can. In the comics, Lex Luthor wore a Kryptonite ring and eventually it gave him cancer– he had to have the hand removed. I wonder when some vile fate of her own doing will befall our real, live Lex?

12-10-2002 10:09 PM
________________________________________
Part of This is Parting This

Reinstate Pete Rose.

12-11-2002 05:44 PM
________________________________________
We Don’t Want to Learn But We Hate What We Don’t Understand

Yesterday was one of those days where nothing seemed to work right in tech-land: servers weren’t sending outgoing mail, students couldn’t take tests in their online courses, we still had no power on Wilson St. I couldn’t sleep last night, fretting on it. In bed at 12, turned the light back in at 2, sought solace in comic books until 4, yawned through work today.

The solutions which evaded us yesterday were pretty simple. Mail was fixed this morning, power restored last night, and the testing problem was so simple that we had to call in a consultant to think of the most elementary step– a lame little secrity fix that we’d applied last week.

I like only one thing about the approaching Christmas season, and I think I’ll miss out on it this year: Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas. Best Christmas special ever. I watch it every other year at the Spencers’ Christmas special party; it is, in fact, the only reason I am really motivated to attend any Christmas function. I have vivid memories of watching Emmet Otter as a youngun on the couch on Museum Dr. in Charlotte, curled up with an afghan and a cup of hot chocolate and my mom. I mentioned last Christmas that I had watched it, and mom just teared up, remembering how happy she was in her 30’s, before her marriage to my father became a stagnant pool, when she was convinced that she had built the house, the family, the life of her childhood dreams.

I’ve downloaded some of the mp3s from Emmet Otter: The Nightmare, who scared me so badly as a child, especially the snake who plays bass and the fish who rides in the back of the car and so rudely spits on the townsfolk, are so much fun to listen to. I guess it appeals to the grinch in me: it’s Christmas music that sounds like Muppets singing Kiss and is about how terrible the people are. With no mention of Christmas.

I know that Emmet Otter is nothing more than a Muppetized “Gift of the Magi,” but to me, it seems like the one true thing about Christmas. Emmitt coaxing ma into the ice slide that Pa had left them, Ma leaving Emmet a note right next to Emmet’s note, and Emmet and Ma singing “Hole in the Washtub.” Just chilling together. Enjoying each other. It’s the best thing about Christmas.

And then there’s Chuck, saying, “I’m HUNGRY.” Chuck rules.

I guess as much as I hate Christmas, there’s a piece of me that still wants to be eight, crying when Emmet and Ma lose the contest.

12-16-2002 11:29 AM
________________________________________
It’s Always Funny Until Someone Gets Hurt, and Then It’s Just Hilarious

Friday night, the LEARN NC Help Desk made its debut as an improv team. Bill Cochran, Jon Karpinos, Corey Brown and I played, and were joined by CeCe Garcia, who started her tenure as a LEARN NC employee that day at 3 PM. It was her first improv show. She was awesome. Larry Larr the Wizard joined us. I think we have plans to continue performing every so often as the Help Desk. It made me realize how tremendously lucky I have been to hire good kids.

Saturday was a trainwreck named Jorge. Jorge is one of the ex-boyfriends in the Hall. He called a while back and was going to meet his parents in Greenville (he is from Venezuela) and could he stay with Heidi. So he was coming on a night when she was going to be having a party for her ESL students, and he was going to stay.

Long story short: Jorge pretty much expected that Heidi would fall back into his arms when he appeared, and treated her like a real jerk when she didn’t. He made every attempt when he knew I was around to try to do shit like hold her hand, or whisper in her ear, or stroke her hair. And Heidi, who isn’t one to be very forceful, didn’t set real good limits. So hell yeah, I was jealous. What made it worse was that CeCe was at the party, she knew it was tearing me up, and she was having fun with it, talking about “el amor de Jorge.” (I love CeCe to death, but I was gonna punch her in the head. In retrospect, I wanted to punch Jorge in the head, but I had no rational reason for that, since he was not directly doing anything to me, and Heidi’s old enough to set her own boundaries for her ex-boyfriends. So I projected. Pretty mature, huh?)

Heidi and I talked it over, and everything is cool now. As we fell asleep Saturday night (and the whole Jorge ordeal did not end until mid-day Sunday), she admitted to a small lie she had told me Saturday night, one that was so inconsequential that she wasn’t even sure why she told it (and neither was I, since the truth was actually way more comfortable for me). But she couldn’t sleep and didn’t feel very good about it, and I respected that she told me the truth. But little things like that eat me up inside, and have so little to do with anyone but me and my terrible dating history.

I am in a wonderful relationship with a wonderful woman, and I hate the jealous, insecure, little person that I become when I begin to doubt myself, and that’s all it is. I really want to just enjoy this relationship. I really want to let myself.

12-18-2002 09:33 AM
________________________________________
Soon You’ll Be Much Easier to Capture

Eat my ass, Christmas music on rock stations.

Heidi and I decorated her mother’s tree last night, which made me feel really domestic. The upcoming slew of Christmases with Heidi’s family pretty much cements the fact that we’re very, very much together.

It’s not like you haven’t noticed if you have been reading this journal since August, but I’m always a little dumbfounded when I step back and think about it.

I’m avoiding working on a Godspeed you black emperor! review for salon. Which is, in turn, avoiding doing the work I know I should do today.

12-20-2002 12:24 AM
________________________________________
Floating Weightless

I decided to take tomorrow off from work, which will give me a perfect record in December– no full work weeks. With the ice storm and the holidays, I’ll manage to feel like a complete slacker, which I pretty much am. Rock on, irresponsibility! Whaaaooooh!

Tara Powell e-mailed me today and asked if I would be interested in reviewing any books. She’s the editor of the Carolina Quarterly, which I had once hoped to publish poetry in. Funny that now I may have a pretty decent shot at publishing reviews of other people’s poetry.

One of the books she gave me is called Monster Zero and all of the poems are about Godzilla. I was pretty sure that it was self-published, but it turns out that it is not, and the guy has published some of the poems individually in some decent, if not awesome, magazines like The Cimmaron Review. Amazing! I’m looking forward to plowing through it; if it’s good, then I’ll be amazed, and if it’s bad, then I’ll be amused. Win/win.

Greg Maddux stays in Atlanta, so if life isn’t perfect, at least it’s not a total let-down. I will hate seeing Tom Glavine in a Mets uniform.

12-23-2002 10:08 AM
________________________________________
Hold Your Hand and You’d Understand

Hmm, well, I guess my celebration concerning the Braves was ill-timed, and now Kevin Millwood is in Philadelphia.

Spent Saturday night in Thomasville doing Efird Christmas, which consisted of some good food, a cute baby, and my first White Elephant. They called it Chinese Christmas, though of course Heidi could not resist telling them that there’s really nothing Chinese about it. Much of Chinese Christmas concerned goofing with Heidi’s dad, who brought an Elvis CD and was determined to take it home, too. After a post-game swap, I had the CD and had been relieved of the wine rack which would have no doubt added an air of class to my kitchen but would also no doubt have been used to store magazines, so I made sure he went home with Elvis. Heidi may not spend much time with him, but there’s no harm in doing a little brown-nosing with Ric Efird, no?

My sincere hope was that I was not an a-hole at any point throughout the evening, though I cannot be sure that I wasn’t.

Went to a bonfire last night at Jen and Peter O’Bryan’s house out in Pittsboro (seems like I spend more and more time in Chatham County all of the sudden) after their Level 2 show. Their group really worked together and had such a great bonding experience, hanging out with each other on a pretty regular basis.

Now I am working a short shift at LEARN. I hope to waste the rest of the day with Anthony and Rick. Rick came down Friday to see the ZYGOTE show, which ended up being Anthony, Jim Woods, Eric Hunicutt, George Serad, Jeff Foxx, Matt Cunningham, Larry Howard, Jorin Garguilo, Brian Williams, and me.

12-29-2002 12:59 PM
________________________________________
I’m Not About to Blow It Now For All the Cows

Hmm. I have been strangely unmotivated to write in this journal of late. Then when I tried, my computer crashed mid-entry.

Christmas was wonderful this year, I think because Heidi is so easygoing and her family was so welcoming and completely unfrustrating. It was a good move to avoid my family this year. I was supposed to go with Heidi to her mom’s side of the family’s Christmas in Dillon over the weekend, but they ended up going down early and I stayed here to tech the Arnie Sykes show at ComedyWorx. I think it’s good that I didn’t go– she needed time with her grandfather, who is not doing so well.

My dad joined me, Heidi, and her mom Ruth at Ruth’s house in Chatham County (a house that despite its Chapel Hill street address is nowhere near Chapel Hill) on Christmas Eve, which had the potential to be mad awkward, but was totally delightful. I had given Ruth Apples to Apples for Christmas, so we sat around and played that for a couple of hours and had a great time. It was one of the few times that I can remember my father actually being social with anyone, and he was a complete gentleman.

Anthony and I played in the ComedySportz matinee yesterday and had a good goof-off time. It was Nathan Garrett’s first show, so we just kinda went out there trying to make sure he had a good time.

Spent a lot of time kicking ideas around with Zach Ward… i’m looking forward to the Dirty South Improv festival.

12-31-2002 11:59 AM
________________________________________
Dropping Like Flies

Dr. Wade thinks my revelation that the picture of Heidi and me was my favorite Xmas gift is, and I quote, “hopeless.”

I got real drunk last night and rearranged and cleaned the living room. I should get into more drunken cleaning fits, as the rest of the house would benefit from such deviant behavior. If I get real drunk, I may be inclined to fix the holes in the wall in my closet that Bryan left when he came over and played with DirectTV.

There is a tree service truck outside my office window that is making me so irate that, if I had a bazooka, I would blow the holy living hell out of it.

Speaking of hell, I started reading the first collected Lucifer.

11-01-2002 01:13 PM
________________________________________
Kick Her Legs, Kick Her Down

Halloween was largely uneventful for me, but I did get the chance to drink a few beers with Michael McFee and gang at Linda’s. I was there long enough to see the first vestiges of the Franklin St. celebration… people beginning to wander in as pirates, clowns, vampires, and unnamed accident victims.

Franklin St. is the main drag in Chapel Hill, and every year at Halloween, the police shut it off and the entire town comes out in costume. It’s really quite amazing– it’s this amazing, drunken spectacle that’s about as close as you get to Mardi Gras in North Carolina. There’s a tremendous amount of goodwill, though occasionally, you’ll see spats between people who had the same costume idea and apparently thought no one else should be allowed to be dressed as the Men in Black. For the most part, however, it’s the one night of the year that everyone really wants to check everyone else out. Lots of videocameras. Loads of great group costumes, some of which took oodles of planning.

My fondest Halloween memory was my sophomore year in college. Patrick O’Shaughnessey came by the dorm uncostumed, and I had not really prepared much of anything, but an 11th hour stroke of inspiration led to the 20-minute creation of my finest costume ever– a paper towel dispenser. That was assloads of fun, because everyone on Franklin St. wanted to play with the costume until I finally ran out of paper towels. At that point, I felt lonely and used, knowing that I had been nothing more than an opportune passerby able to assist in the cleanup of spilled beer.

It was freaking great.

Bryan and I met for dinner, then went by Circuit City, where I managed to find a $70 Ultimate TV system (god bless the open box), so I will have UTV real damn soon. As soon as I get up on the roof to mount the dish. Kickass. I’ll never miss As the World Turns again!

11-03-2002 12:12 AM
________________________________________
It’s Not My Fault That You Lost Your Way

More dollar theater action:

City By the Sea was a complete surprise. I made the point to Heidi that Robert DeNiro doesn’t do sucky movies, as a rule. (She pointed out that I hadn’t seen Showtime, and then I made a point of remembering Meet the Parents, so maybe it’s a general rule with some glaring exceptions.) I never saw any sort of press on City By the Sea, so I just kind of assumed that it had tanked for a reason, but I couldn’t quite figure out what that reason would be. A little sloppily sentimental, but so was Traffic, and that got the Hollywood blowjob.

Men in Black II was 94 minutes of really enjoyable, disposable entertainment that will sell a lot of DVDs.

I am currently enjoying a completely responsibility-free day.

11-03-2002 09:59 PM
________________________________________
If I Need a Superhero, I Think I Know Just Who I’d Turn To

Bryan and I have been adventuring around the house to try to get DirectTV and UltimateTV set up. The savings incurred on the $70 open-box receiver were offset soemwhat by the $120 worth of new tools required to do the job. Among the tools: a nice fishing line, a set of butterfly drill bits, a mat knife, and some screws. In all fairness, I guess the whole $120 also covered some putty, a rake, some grass seed, and a putty knife.

We’ve been on the roof, where we discovered the cause and perhaps fixed the leak and cleaned the nieghbor’s gutters before mounting the dish. We’ve been in the attic, which I had never before visited despite living here over a year. It’s pretty attic-like– lots of insulation everywhere. We’ve cut two holes in the walls– one in each of our closets. We discovered that the first hole was a mistake.

So, we’ve been at it for seven hours and no DirectTV yet, but I suppose we’ll get it and I will have more mechanical know-how than I had before. To be frank, Bryan is doing 9/10 of the work, since he’s good at it and has little patience for my hesitance and slow speed as I learn. So I’m doing a lot of watching as he tears through my house. Which is cool. I buy the tools, he does the labor. Seems fair.

11-04-2002 03:34 PM
________________________________________
I’m Feeling Turbulence No One Else Sees

Today is one of those days that you dream about in the dead of winter. The trees are orange and red and brown and seem to be falling asleep peacefully. The sun is flirting behind several clouds. There are squirrels everywhere; it’s as if they were born today and will be gone tomorrow, so they’re out enjoying each other and everything they find in their paths.

Beans sent an e-mail to the group, quitting Destroy All Monsters because her family situation has just been too hectic. I’m guessing it’s partially that Eric is working so hard with the seminary and they are still in the process of moving into a new house, but the e-mail felt like it was leaving something out. I need to talk to her before moving forward on D.A.M. I suspect that the group is done at this point, which is OK. We’ve had a really good time in our short existence and I’m really proud of the direction longform is taking in Raleigh. It definitely feels like another tie being severed, and I am finding myself without mooring.

I’m strangely OK with that, too. Journaling has been difficult the past few days, because I don’t know enough of how I feel to be very contemplative. I suppose I should find out– I keep thinking that I’ll discover it, that I’ll get really upset or really determined or really something, but I don’t.

It’s almost like how I imagine flying should feel. It’s like I’m easing my way through cracks between difficult, upsetting masses, passing through woe like I might through the space where the sun shines between two clouds. Just barely escaping affect. It’s pleasant enough in the moment; I just don’t know if it’s a sign that I am on the right path or the wrong one.

11-05-2002 12:33 PM
________________________________________
Days Go By and Still I Think of You

After Heidi and I had been dating for a very short while, I appeared in the Hall of Ex-Boyfriends, and it was alarming. I don’t know what triggered this thought as I was zipping through a cluttered day, trying to get my ducks in a row to go to Kansas City with Ben Moser.

The Hall of Ex-Boyfriends was something Rebecca would not have countenanced. She believed, when we were dating, that all traces of any previous relationship should be obliterated. She would rifle though my shit and then be very upset when she found old letters from Meg or old pictures of Caroline in my top drawer, where they have been probably since I received them. That I still spoke to ex-girlfriends like Claire or Caroline was unimaginable and cause for the utmost jealousy, despite the fact that several weeks after we began dating, she was staying at John Shadle’s house, pet-sitting.

I actually discovered the Hall of Ex-Boyfriends before I was a current boyfriend, so it’s not like I have ever had any real reason to be threatened by it. I think it’s nice to keep some mementoes of the people who have shaped us and really touched us deeply. And I don’t particularly get jealous of anyone in the Hall. I never have, even when I was time-sharing with Brian. I’ll admit that this is an odd phenomenon for me, because I have always been jealous and suspicious and untrusting. It’s been beaten into me by a couple of shitty cheating experiences since puberty and probably by a horde of other factors in my childhood that I can’t even identify. So it’s been pleasant that I’ve had such a non-adversarial relationship with the Hall of Ex-Boyfriends.

But I was distressed the day I found myself in it.

Let me clarify: Heidi has never referred to the Hall as such, and I am not so sure that I have even used that name with her. Maybe once. But the Hall is just one of those pictureframes where you can cram in a bunch of photos of different sizes, and Heidi has set up little sections for each ex-boyfriend. The ones that she’s still pissed at have smaller sections, the ones that she has really made her peace with have larger corners and larger photos. And she’s usually smiling in those photos.

When we’d been dating a few weeks and it was looking like we were going to be together a while– you know, that point at which you’re certain that you’re crazy about someone so you try to start doing some of the little things that imply togetherness: leaving toothbrushes and deodorant in each others’ houses, programming each other on speed dial in the cell phone, saving the silly notes that you’ve left each other– when we got to that point, I entered the Hall. I got the top-left-hand corner, which had previously belonged to Brian, the guy who was current when I entered the picture. And Brian was gone.

I told Heidi that I wasn’t yet ready to enter that distinguished company, and Brian assumed his rightful place in the top left-hand corner again in a day or two. I told her why, too– I wasn’t yet ready to be one of the Ex-Boyfriends. I was too busy enjoying being one of the current boyfriends.

There aren’t too many pictures of me with Heidi. I guess we don’t scream, “Photograph us!” I have two, taken at the same time, framed in my house… one in the bedroom, one in the foyer. And while I had long since cleaned out all the old photographs of everyone that came before Heidi (and I did the cleaning before Heidi and I rediscovered each other), I find myself displaying them as I stumble across them. Caroline is on my mantelpiece, Meg is in one of the wall-frames.

I may re-enter the Hall when Heidi retires my jersey. I’m not really scared about that; we’ll break up when we move apart, or when it stops being fun, or whenever it’s time to break up. But I am, for now, certain that I deserve my own frame.

11-07-2002 07:32 PM
________________________________________
Hardly Be Aware That You Were Breaking

So, I’m hanging out in Linda Williams’ living room in Kansas City right now. World Series of Comedy = kick ass so far.

We rolled in mid-day yesterday and vegged out here, then headed over to ComedyCity. Linda had thought that she was going to have to cancel her workshops because of a remote show, so Ben and I taught them for her.

We missed the KC alumni show while teaching the class, but we caught the “Best of KC Improv” show, which was two of ComedyCity’s competitors. I think the name of the first one was Improvabilities… they did all shortform games, very formulaic and directly out of the ComedySportz playbook. Full Frontal Improv did Asaf’s Hyperlinks format, which they had just learned seven weeks before at the Memphis Comedy Festival. For a team that’s just started working on longform, they were really tight.

Much drinking at Caddyshack afterwards. Most excellent.

I played a remote with KC this morning for a boatload of seventh graders. Had much fun on a team with JaredBru from the IRC, who is supercool. Nothing noteworthy about the show, though we did a question and answer session with the kids after the show, which was not something I had ever done before. It was like this lame version of Inside the Actor’s Studio.

I think my hangover started to go away at about 3:30. I took a nap at about 4:00.

Now we’re watching Saving Silverman and preparing to head back to the club.

Eeeeeeeeee! Fun!

11-11-2002 02:49 PM
________________________________________
This is a Song Without Words

Well, so much for the grandiose thought that I would be able to journal more at the World Series of Comedy. After I wrote that last entry, Ben and I did six hours of workshops, saw three or four shows, and played in like six shows. I got to play all-star-type shows with Pat Quigley, Mike Eserkaln, and Ken Goltz from Green Bay, Gary Kramer from San Diego, and my great pal Beth Melewski, who has burned the phrase “ridonkulous” into my poor brain. And we got to play with Zachie!

The trip was a real ego boost on a number of levels, mainly because I re-discovered how much I enjoy shortform when I let myself play for nothing but the fun of playing. The shows where I was representing Raleigh weren’t as much fun as the ones where I was just hanging out on a team of players that I don’t play with often and felt like I could just fuck around with. As the weekend went on, I found myself more able to enjoy watching the shortform shows, too.

Arthur Bryant’s is definitely better than Gates. That’s some amazing barbeque.

The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum is an amazing facility and any baseball fan should go there. It’s an unreal story. You can walk around all day and forget that our country was once segregated… it’s so easy to forget the recent history of our country. Your jaw sort of drops when you realize just how fucked-up America was just recently.

It was nice to get home, though, since I slept only sparingly and started to feel sick again. I was coughing up huge pieces of phlegm this morning and I feel hot all the time, but I am guessing that I’m just doing a slight relapse into last week’s sickness rather than cultivating a new one. So much for taking care of myself.

11-12-2002 03:50 PM
________________________________________
My Big Drum On Your Big Face

It’s dark outside right now, and it’s only 3:40. It’s been a drizzly day, the kind of day that makes you wonder if the sun is even out there. Hard not to be a little depressed on days like this– even in the summer, when it’s pouring down, you have this sense that just outside the atmosphere, everything is bright. No such luck in wintertime. You start thinking that the surface world is all there is, and that if there’s a God out there, he or she has taken off for a smoke break.

I am listening to the 2-CD mix that Erik Tanouye made for Dan Kois and then copied for me. It’s making the day bearable. The songs I already knew, I love. The songs I didn’t know are, by and large, wonderful. I hope Erik listens to the Connells. I think he’d be a fan.

I drove to Greenville yesterday afternoon so that I could coach Corey Brown’s team at ECU. It is super to see Corey pouring all of his energy into bringing improv to Greenville, where it has not previously had a foothold. I’m amazed that not every college campus has an improv team floating around. Of course, I’m also amazed that everyone in the world hasn’t ventured out to see an improv show, and then I remember that my dad has never been despite the fact that I’ve spent the better part of 12 years inviting him to improv shows. Of course, I like to think that 99% of the world is less socially retarded than my dad. But the truth is probably somewhere in the 60% range for a variety of sad reasons.

11-13-2002 11:18 PM
________________________________________
Beads of Sweat Dripping Down on the Rent Check

I went to the doctor this morning, hoping to better understand why I have recently coughed up several things that resemble red beans in both color and consistency. I’d not been to family practice in over a year, which I don’t think is a testament to my health but rather a stunning endorsement for my own sloth. My records were out of date, so I was asked to fill out the typical stuff—address, occupation, family history of diabetes, heart disease, and gout.

It’s difficult to know exactly what to put in a small blank for “Occupation.” I no longer know how to succinctly say what it is that I do when people ask. I’m uncomfortable giving my title, which I think is stuffy and overbearing, because I sound like a choad walking around trumpeting the word “director” of anything outside the theater. Much of what I actually do has boiled down to sales in the past few months, but I know that I’m not really in sales, I’m in education. It’s a fiendish mix of media specialist, salesman, programmer, consultant, and systems analysis, so I mostly end up going back to my roots and saying something like “I’m in computers.” For this particular form, I just entered “TECH GEEK” and didn’t think much about it.

When the resident (crap, I don’t know exactly what you call the folks who are stuck doing the crapwork like taking blood pressure and height and weight in a family practice. I’m reasonably certain that they’re in some stage of med school and they’re doing some sort of rounds, and that’s why they’re stuck taking temperatures and pulses when they’d most certainly rather be doing something more interesting.) came in, she got a chuckle out of “TECH GEEK.” Then I told her about the fact that I was coughing up red beans, and the chuckles were done.

After she left, as I stood leafing through the only magazine in the exam room (it was “Parenting,” so I looked at the hot toys that build motor skills for like 20 minutes and thought, “I wonder if my life would be different had I had more motor-skills-building bath toys”), another resident poked her head in the room. At least, I assume she too was a resident; she was too young to be a doctor, I surmised, and was wearing the scrubs. No one wears the scrubs at family practice except the residents. Or whatever they’re called.

“Tech geek,” she said. “I love it.” She was Indian, and had a thick gold nose ring, not something I’d seen on medical staff before.

“Thanks,” I said. “It beats trying to tell people what I really do.”

“It’s funny,” she said.

“You should try it,” I said.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Don’t you ever want to tell people you’re a medical diva when they ask what you do?” I tried to think of some other funny way to describe being a doctor in just a few words, but every other option sounded like something out of D & D.

She laughed. “No, I hadn’t thought of that. I just say ‘med student.’ But the only people who ever ask that kind of thing are doctors.”

I started to cough and could feel myself working up another mysterious red bean. It was at that point that it dawned on me how little fun it must be to spend the whole day talking to people who don’t feel very good.

I’m now in a hotel room in Concord, NC, watching the Kings play the Warriors. I just watched Adonal Foyle take at least 13 steps and jump up and down twice without dribbling the ball, and he was not called for traveling. I have nothing against Foyle, but I think the NBA sucks hard.

11-20-2002 11:20 PM
________________________________________
I Will Come Back, I Will Come Back

I am finally spending some time at home after another one of those long-ass weeks. I have chosen to spend this delicious time alone watching Gilmore Girls episodes that I have saved on Ultimate TV. I love technology. Magnificent!

Recounting a dream, and you’re getting the short version:

[dream] Ben Moser and I are trapped in a large mansion, bunking out and talking about leaving town. We venture into the jungle to find the train station, only to find that we have missed the last train back home. I tell Ben I’m going to go running. I begin running through the jungle. After a while, I feel the need to take off my orange button-down workshirt and khaki shorts, though apparently I have other clothes on because at no point in the dream am I naked. I continue to run, and get to the beach.

So I start thinking that it’s time to get the clothes and head back to the mansion, but cannot find them in the jungle. At either end of the jungle is beach, but I can’t find the clothes anywhere in the jungle. I get to the beach on the other end, and two kids ask me why I’m so bewildered. They tell me that the clothes are in a tree, and help me get them down.

They invite me into their beachside house, which has a patio that hangs directly over the ocean where a bunch of kids are swimming. Sweet Tom from the office is the kids’ father, and while I’m there, Ben and our pal Marian come in. Marian is yelling that we should know that her father is “the president of the fucking United States.”

Good ole William Jefferson Clinton rolls in with a buzz cut to meet everyone and tell offhanded jokes while drinking coffee. Tom goes to the porch and begins to yell to the young swimmers that they should come meet the president. I quickly run out, usher him back inside, and tell him that Clinton won’t waste his time talking to a bunch of kids.

“Maybe if it was a historically black college, but not a bunch of kids,” Clinton says. [/dream]

11-21-2002 12:06 AM
________________________________________
Kinda Always Knew I’d End Up Your Ex-Girlfriend

I spent Monday night listing CDs on half.com. Already sold four of them, including a $15 pre-order for a disc I got for free and never opened. I made the jump and listed one of my Body Count CDs with “Cop Killer.” (Only $50, cheap!)

Heidi and I talked on the phone, and she was all worked up about this survery that her friend had sent her. It was a quiz, one of those “See how well you know me things.” A friend of hers had missed some questions that she thought would be easy. So I said, “Well, I could take this quiz.”

So, she sent me a link, with the warning that she made it with friends from Europe and college in mind, and that it didn’t really reflect everything she has going on now. I missed two questions… one about countries she had NOT been to, and one about which continents her ex-boyfriends were from.

No biggie, until I look at the only person who scored better than I did. Brian. 9 out of 10. The most recent member of the Hall of Ex-Boyfriends.

And then there it was, for every other one of her friends to see: Current boyfriend doesn’t know girl as well as ex-boyfriend. Well, fuck. Fuckity McFuckfuck.

You know, I don’t begrudge Heidi her ex-boyfriends and I don’t feel intimidated or threatened that she still keeps up with most of them. I don’t want her to forget them, and while I don’t want to share a pictureframe with them just yet, I am glad that she keeps her past close to her present. I think that’s healthy.

But I felt like shit when I saw my name in rankings for “who knows Heidi the best.” And Brian’s the #1 slot. And I don’t. That’s a fucking terrible feeling.

I’m over it now. Like 99% over it, at least.

A few facts from the first episode of Golden Girls:
• Rose, Dorothy, and Coco the Gay Housekeeper originally lived with Blanche in her house.
• Sophia supposedly had a stroke that crippled her ability to censor herself. This was how they explained that she was a crabby old lady.
• Rose reveals that she correctly predicted the death of Indira Ghandi.
• Estelle Getty’s makeup hadn’t quite been finalized. Her appearance changes pretty dramatically between the pilot and the end of the first season.
• Coco’s departure is never explained… the network had him written out.
• Sophia leaves Shady Acres because it burns down. In later episodes, Dorothy threatens to take her back to Shady Pines (where she goes in “Empty Nest”).

11-21-2002 10:08 AM
________________________________________
Tomorrow Is Close But Will It Ever Come?

So, how awesome is it that Charlie Todd is on a Harold team? Proof positive that hard work and being a nice guy will pay off for you. I think it fucking rocks.

I’m really jealous of Charlie and Anthony and everyone in NYC right this moment. I coached On the Spot yesterday, and they’re getting a lot better. We’ve almost ramped up to full Harolds– I expect that we will get there during the next practice. But I do wish I could take them all to a Harold night at UCB. Crap, even if I couldn’t take them, I wish I could be going to Harold nights.

I slept on the couch again last night, this time without provocation. (I did it two nights ago because I was fidgety and Heidi was over; didn’t want to keep her up.) I know a lot of people for whom this is pretty regular behavior. But it wasn’t like I fell asleep in front of the TV, I actually went upstairs around 12:20 and got an alarm clock to bring downstairs so I could sleep on the couch.

We got a call this morning from a facilitator who wants access to her students’ e-mail… she thinks the student has been up to the naughties in there! Juicy!

11-21-2002 05:11 PM
________________________________________
I’m Gonna Figure Out What’s Mine

Yesterday, I received this:

To: ross@unc.edu
From: “Cupid”
Subject: Someone has a crush on you!

Believe it! You have a secret admirer!

Just click to http://www.SomeoneLikesYou.com to find out who!

How flattering. I suspect Bill Cochran.

I’m not going to e-mail your address in so that we can make a match and be sweethearts. Do you hear me, Cochran?

11-22-2002 12:17 PM
________________________________________
Hello, I’ve Waited Here for You Everlong

Another review in Salon.com– Foo Fighters this time. I’m about as happy with the final edit as I am going to get… at least I am not embarassed that my name is on this one.

I’m listening to the mix Erik Tanouye made for Dan, and I get stumped by hearing someone covering “Cactus” by the Pixies. Somehow, I failed to realize on previous listens that it was indeed David Bowie doing the cover. How cool is David Bowie?

11-23-2002 05:38 PM
________________________________________
Ecstasy and Alcohol

Played a real loose show at THE ZYGOTE last night with a group that consisted of Zach Ward, Jin Kim, Bill Cochran, Ben Piner, me, and one guy that I’ve met like nine times and I still can’t remember his name. It was a really loose, fun time, with some moments of absolute perfection and some moments of slovenly inattention to detail.

Of note was that Andrew Dunkle was there and he’s really keen to get going on a Harold team. He, Larry Larr and I discussed putting something together in the not-too-distant future if we can find an area coach that knows the Harold reasonably well. I want to be coached really badly. Greg Hohn’s name came up, so that would be fantastic if it happened.

On the Spot did their first full Harold today, and it went pretty well. Sort of out of the blue, they busted into a blues jam for one of their group games, a game that we had practiced, but not one I ever thought they would pull out at that moment. It’s cool to watch some of the lightbulbs coming on; they’re taking the risks and really looking for ways to surprise and push themselves. It was perhaps the best practice they’ve had yet.

11-25-2002 09:11 PM
________________________________________
Of All of My Mistakes, I Think I Lent You Late

An unfortunate side-effect of my resumed TV-watching is that I wonder why anyone should care that Harley Earle has come back to build me a perfect car. F- Harley Earle in the eye.

I’m in Asheville tonight, finished with day one of a two-day workshop. Once again, I’m the only male in the room, but in a pleasant shocker, I’m not the youngest in the room by ten years! Whoo-hah!

I got a speeding ticket last night near Kernersville– 80 in a 65. So that’s a big stinkerpuff. Maybe I would not have been pulled if I’d let Harley Earle build me a sweet-ass car.

11-27-2002 10:35 AM
________________________________________
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue

Someone has hacked our e-mail server at work. Telltale signs:

1. All of the women in the office got e-mail from Chris Andrews saying he would like to take them to dinner. While odd, this isn’t exactly something I would have considered implausible. But the spelling was so messed up that I can’t suspect Chris.

2. Everyone’s Notes client is popping up messages in German.

3. General sysadmin panic.

I recognize the horror of a compromised password, but I have to say that I find it funny. I’m sure that there are more sinister things waiting to happen to us, that the mysterious German hacker who targeted an innocuous NC website has laid virtual landmines that may include things like adding our names to porn spamlists (guess what… they’re already there!) or German edits to the NC-specific content on our website!

On my Laffy Taffy today, the joke was “Which garden has the most vegetables?” The answer: “Flash Garden.” I don’t even come close to getting it. I’m assuming it’s a Flash Gordon joke instead of a Flesh Garden joke. If anyone would care to PM me and enlighten me, I would be much obliged.

Driving home last night, I began thinking that if I could chew the same piece of Bubble Yum throughout the entire Furslide CD, it would be my greatest accomplishment of the day. I was doing great, despite the fact that the gum had gotten old and my jaw hurt a little, until in a fugue-like state, I rolled down the window and toosed the gum during the bonus track. Totally unconscious. During the bonus track! I was so close! How lame was that, ?

So, I can safely say that I accomplished jack shit.

11-28-2002 10:05 PM
________________________________________
Kick Start My Rock and Roll Heart

I just got a little more than half of my Christmas shopping done using online shopping. God bless not having to go to stores, which I find loathsome and detestable.

Thanksgiving is quiet. I spent most of the day focused on keeping the fire rocking, since it was more fun to do that than to listen to my sister complain about my mother. We deep-fried the turkey this year, which was supposed to produce a much tastier bird, but in fact produced a turkey that tasted like every other turkey. We did the ceremonial posing for pictures, none of which came out well since we were backlit, and played a little Cranium. Heidi and I were around the board twice before Mom and Mary had managed to get near finishing for the first time; we all agreed to a ten-minute break and they never came back. Ho hum.

Having Heidi with my family makes things seem a little more… family-like, I guess. I warned her beforehand that I would just attempt to sleep, watch football, and read my book (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay), all of which I did. I warned her beforehand that I would be very little company, as Thanksgiving is a day that I prefer to spend half-comatose, and I was true to that word as well. And she took it all in stride, though right now she is watching The Divine Secrets of Ya-Ya Sisterhood with the rest of the family, which has me worried about her mental fortitude.

10-02-2002 12:29 AM
________________________________________
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
________________________________________
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
________________________________________
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
________________________________________
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
________________________________________
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
________________________________________
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
________________________________________
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