Secret Agent Man

Today I likened myself to Clark Kent, and it's funny to me that it's taken me so long to think that. Not that my alter ego is Superman - far from it. Don't worry, I have no delusions of grandeur. But I do sometimes feel like I'm leading a double life. Mild mannered (or loud and sarcastic) engineering student by day, theater grad/rock star by night. Except that my nights are more often spent doing homework and going to bed early. Maybe baking cookies.

And yet, no matter how boring my life may sometimes seem to me, whenever someone else finds out what I've been doing for the last ten years it suddenly sounds like the most exciting life a girl from Jersey could ask for. And I guess some of it *has* been exciting. Like that time I worked for a real rockstar (he had a hit song on the radio!), or the time I acted on a tour for eight months, or the time I played in a bar upstairs from a strip club and some of the guys who meant to go downstairs got confused and came upstairs and decided the band and I were better than the strip show so they stayed. Hard to say which was better, that time or the time we got stuck in traffic, took 9 hours to get from Boston to NYC and missed our set time, but my friend who was working at MTV at the time flashed her work ID and demanded that I play. That one was pretty good, too.

I guess I do have some good stories from it all. And the fun of seeing each new friend find out that *secretly* I've done all this other stuff. And that I'm not 22.

My engineering friends found this out today. They said I should write a blog about them - so here it is, guys! (Except they're not guys, they're girls, because girls can be engineers too, dammit.) But now I need to stop blogging and get back to finishing that paper we have due Monday. Good luck with your studying, ladies.

Metal Head

One of the reasons I'm currently writing a musical is because my friends have always teased me that my songwriting seems well suited for the stage. "Andrew Lloyd Webber has left the building" may or may not have been uttered during the recording of my last album. That's the kind of music I write.

So am I the only one who finds it ironic that, now that I am *actually* writing a stage musical, I am for the first time writing - for that same stage musical - a heavy metal song?

I have to go now - I'm listening to heavymetalradio.com's stream and I can't string words together while this is happening in my ears.

Tabs!

I love Mozilla's tabs. I love the ability to group things, to see my recent history laid out to the left and my immediate future to the right, the ability to drop and drag and create a categorical progression instead of a timeline. I also love being able to open a new window: a clean slate, a new group, a total tangent that doesn't have to destory what it leaves behind because I can always minimize the new window and be back at home.

I feel, somehow, that this must relate to my childhood Christmas wishes for desk sets complete with scissors, stapler, and paperclips with designated places for said items to live in the color-coordinated carousel...

Laundry Day

Everyone's done it - put off laundry until you have literally one pair of clean underwear left. Lucky for me, I only have to go as far as the basement to do said laundry. Unlucky for me, my final remaining pair of underwear was, today, a pair of hip-hugger boy shorts that cover approximately one third of my ass.

Do people really wear these by choice? Underwear that comes halfway up their ass? I keep thinking they're falling down and need to be pulled up, but no - that's just all there is. I really ought to throw them away. But then what will I wear on laundry day?

Yummm...ugh

Funny thing about fake ice cream - eating too much of it will make you feel ill EVEN THOUGH it has absolutely ZERO dairy in it. Of course having a maybe-ulcer will also make you feel ill no matter what you feed it...

All the fun and none of the work.

Go to www.dooce.com and watch videos of her baby. Who is adorable. Because watching those videos is almost like getting to play with a baby (who is adorable) without having to change diapers or panic about the kid finding a way to accidentally kill herself in the three seconds that you've got your back turned. It's fantastic!

This Is NOT a Pyramid Scheme

So lately I've been contemplating the topic of monetary income, specifically what various ways there are to generate it besides the standard show up at work, do what you're told, get paycheck from employer model. A few ideas:

• Write a book. (....Publish the book. Convince people to buy the book. Pay back publishing costs. See what's left.)
• Sell Ivy League eggs for genetically engineered children, at top dollar. (...after taking weeks of hormone shots. Have genetic children wandering the world somewhere.)
• Invent something, patent it, and sell it. (....... any ideas?)
• Become a rock star. (Dude, I'm working on it.)
• Start a box company. (I can't take credit for this one. It also needs capital.)

...and a few old standbys:

• Prostitution.
• Deal drugs.
• Marry rich.

(I've recently heard a few other ideas but I don't want to give them away in case the generator of those ideas decides to follow through on any of them. I'll let you know if any of them come to fruition.)

As you can see, each of these options has a small downside. I guess I'll just have to choose the least onerous....

What's that website? www.sugardaddies.com?

Show on Tremont

Remember that time I decided to wear a dress, because I had to look nice for work and it was hot out? Remember how I had a half day and then went to meet a friend? And then, as I was walking down Tremont Street in the early afternoon heat, I thought nothing of walking over a grate in the sidewalk? Remember how that grate turned out to have a lot of air blowing out of it? Did you notice just how fast - instantaneously, even - my entire dress found its way up to my armpits?

I guess I'm just not as smooth as Marilyn.

Free Stuff

The following is a list of stuff I currently own and have no intention of carrying 1000 miles when I move. If you have any interest in any of it, make yourself known! Otherwise, you can just chuckle (or shake your head) at the odd collection:

- various pairs of shoes, at or around women's size nine, including one pair of platform flip flops
- one men's XL timberland jacket that once belonged to someone on the touring crew of the rockstar-no-one-has-heard-of i used to work for, possibly even him himself
- three cans of playdough, never opened
- a thigh master (I don't want to talk about it)
- two small bookshelves that are totally serviceable as long as you don't really plan on looking at them
- a wheely desk chair with slightly ripped fabric (but it's relatively comfortable)
- a very small, very thin, very aquamarine 'throw rug' from Ikea
- one sheet of poster board and one of foam core (both white)
- a shopping bag full of yarn (this has actually been promised to some friends of the knitting persuasion, but if they change their minds it's up for grabs)

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I'm making non-jokes that aren't funny.... that means it's time to stop.

That's, Like, Sooooo Meta

I have two excuses for not writing very recently.

1. I can barely find time to sleep, much less post here. (Why am I still up now? Good question.)
2. After writing that last blog about all y'all who are reading it - or not reading it, as the case may be - every time I've thought about posting I've found myself wondering what on earth to write about...and gotten stymied and given up.

I think I was better off not thinking about my audience, but simply blathering on about whatever was in my head at the time. Now I find myself censoring every idea as (mostly) completely uninteresting to whomever might be reading, or else some degree of pompous and obnoxious.

This leaves me at a bit of a loss. I mean, I guess I could write about the weather, and sports teams, and that sort of thing. I could start writing nothing but movie reviews (though that would require seeing a lot more movies than I currently do). I could let this become a completely 'meta', self-reflective blog about blogging, but I think we've seen from Jason Mraz's songwriting that writing about nothing but your own writing gets really boring (and irritating) really fast.

So.... I don't have a solution. I suppose I'll just get over it and go back to blathering like before. In the meantime....I'm going to get some sleep.

Blogging

Blogs are, for the most part, fairly ridiculous. Sometimes they serve very clear purposes, like when you go on a trip and want to keep everyone at home updated on the kooky hijinks that led up to your incarceration in a Burmese prison, or when a company decides that the "hip" way to "be down" with the young people is to paste all their marketing copy into a corporate blog on a biweekly basis. Sometimes blogs are just so damn good that they fully deserve every bit of their bandwidth. (see dooce.com) But for mere mortals like myself, blogging just seems rather self indulgent. It's an uninvited opportunity to go on and on about anything you damn well please (with whatever version of spelling and grammar you like), with some assumption that someone - many someones, even - will want to read it. But fear not. I have no delusions that people want to read my blog. Google Analytics keeps me very much in the realm of reality, so all twelve of you can rest assured that I have no crazy ideas about being e-famous. I can talk a blue streak, is all, and this way I can pretend that someone's listening.

I am, however, curious about who's actually reading this thing. I assume you're all people who know me, and recognize any thinly veiled references I make. But perhaps I am mistaken. Google Analytics gives only certain information, so I'm left to wonder who it is, exactly, that has read my blog from Springfield, IL, or from the Bronx, or from Middleton, MA. I don't even know where Middleton is.

So perhaps some strangers have, in fact, stumbled across this blog. If any of you come back to read it ever again - Hi. I hope you enjoy my eternal rant.

To the rest of you, who know me in real life, I'm sure none of this is news but hopefully it's entertaining. (Otherwise why are you reading it?)

I guess for now I'll continue blabbing into the void, and maybe someday someone (else - thank you, Abby) will leave me a comment and I'll feel heard....

Now and Then

I am watching "Becoming Jane" (quite enjoyable though inarguably a chick flick), and I'm wondering what it would be like if my friends and acquaintances and I were subject to the social rules of Jane Austen's era.

I can sort of imagine it with some of my girlfriends: our email exchanges would all be handwritten letters, of course, but I doubt we'd be any less cheeky in composing their content. Of course, it would be strange and rather terrible if our lives consisted of nothing more than writing those letters.... and reading, and doing needlepoint. No trips around the country by ourselves, no jobs, no crazy adventures.

It would also be a mighty shame if an unmarried girl weren't allowed to spend time alone with a boy to whom she wasn't related... though perhaps it would be less of a tragedy in a world without all-night IHOPs and good beer.

But it would be funny to watch the same relationships play out under a wildly different set of rules. Would they still be the same, I wonder? Or are even those parts of our lives dependent on our times and circumstances? Would my friends not be my friends if we couldn't have the same conversations, or the same experiences? Then again, would we ourselves even be the same people if we'd lived at a different time?

Idle speculation, I suppose. "What if?" with no answer.

I hope that our circumstances let our stories develop happily. We shall see.

Blueberry Beer

I am attempting to take life less seriously. This is very new for me, and I'm not sure how it's gonna work out. However, it's a Tuesday night (with work in the morning) and I'm sitting around the house drinking blueberry beer, so I think I'm off to an okay start.

In honor of this new leaf I'm turning, I'm going to eschew a structured blog format this evening (my posts have structure? um.) and instead simply share some thoughts with you:

The whole concept of having a job - being employed by another person - is pretty shitty. I mean, you beg someone to hire you, show up when and where you're told to, do exactly what you're told to do, and then someone gives you a cookie. By which I mean a paycheck, except odds are good that the cookie would have more monetary value than the check. What are we, four year olds? circus animals?

Painkillers would be awesome if they worked.

Painkillers would be even more awesome if they actually removed or fixed the source of the pain instead of just tricking you into thinking the pain is gone so you'll continue doing things you shouldn't and just make it worse. (This is theoretical, of coure, since they don't actually work in the first place.)

Craigslist is magical. Thanks to it, I now have one less large craptastic item in my house, I have that much more space, and I have $75. Thank you, Craig, for making your list.

I also have a blueberry beer to drink and a couple of very large textbooks with which I should be making friends. And so I bid you all a fond farewell, until next time....