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Everybody’s Happy

Gad, I got so involved in redoing the imagemap that goes at the bottom of every page that I completely lost track of time. *grin* I hate to say it, for fear of jinxing myself, but I feel quite inspired and am so relieved!

Most of what I did yesterday pertains to the new section, called Hearing Things. I’ve been thinking about putting up some sounds for a long time, and finally really sat down yesterday and started going through my audio tapes. I was astonished at just how much of my life is on audio tape — geez, it’s a shame that radio documentaries aren’t more popular (well and *laughing* I guess a shame too that I don’t have access to a nice foo-foo recording studio) because I could very easily do an audio documentary on my life. The really early stuff, like the very first tape I know of that has summer and I at ages six and seven, respectively, doing an entire program of singing and talk shows, dramatic performances, etc. has been lost.

We called it “The Christmas Carol”, and I was quite adamant about having everything totally original, and if not original, a parody of the original. I’m chuckling as I type this, because I’m realizing that we did the whole thing over the christmas holidays and my memories of the whole thing are almost all outside because it was so warm. Which seems completely unreal now — just five years out of California and already the whole concept of no snow is surreal. Anyway, so I told summer I only wanted original material on the tape, so she convinced me that she’d written the song “Jingle Bell Rock”. If you’ve never heard this song, consider yourself lucky — it’s a really hokey dumb song. I was still listening to only classical music, so I’d never heard the real thing, and spent an entire week feeling down on myself because summer, who was not only younger than me but someone I didn’t even like or respect, had written a song that I could never hope to equal. It wasn’t until an entire year later when I heard it on the radio and asked her if she’d lied and she said yes. So what I meant to say was that unfortunately that tape is lost, because I’d love to hear it again.

Stupidly, yesterday I decided to listen to a tape that had been made when my uncle and his family (this is yet another sibling of my dad’s) came to stay with us for a couple of weeks, while I did the first (and unfortunately not last) coat of primer in the purple room. It hadn’t even occurred to me to think that of course — that uncle and aunt are divorced now, and I can’t tell you how depressing it was to hear all of us sitting around in the living room talking and singing and laughing and knowing what was going to happen just a few years down the road. Also, the primer is this super-duper-primer, because the purple was so dark and at one point I was painting kind of leaning over and breathing and thinking over and over and over, “This stuff smells like cough syrup. This stuff smells like cough syrup. This stuff smells like cough syrup,” and happily realized that my mind was acting like a broken record because I’d forgotten completely to open the window when I’d started painting. I stood in front of the window and breathed in the fresh air and felt much better.

When Todd got home I showed him the new section and he said he liked it a lot — that just about everyone has a picture of themselves on their web page when they were little, but who keeps sounds? I read more from the Tanith Lee book and we decided to make it a routine, me reading before we fall asleep, and I’m thrilled because there are a lot of books I want Todd to read but I want to experience reading them with him and this is a great way to do that. Todd thought about calling Sean and decided not to — we’d just turned out the light and were about to go to sleep and the phone rang. I ran to get it before the voice mail did (I swear this is true, at first I didn’t even recognize what the ring was — I was very amused to listen to the tapes I made when I was a teeeeeeeeeenager and the flurry of phone calls I was fielding and making. Something interesting: I mean, in these tapes that I made I was obviously miserable. Oh, geez, this isn’t all going to fit in a parenthetical thought.) and it turned out to be Sean, hurrah! He called because he’s got net access and can see my web page now, he called to get our email address and web page address. I’m very curious to know what he thinks — he’s the first person who knew Todd before Todd and I met who will see the journal, etc.

So what I was going to say about the tapes which wouldn’t fit in a parenthetical thought was that I’m obviously miserable in most of the tapes — not the really early ones, but the ones after I’ve been to visit Kitey for the first time and I’m beginning to realize what a wonderful place it is and wondering why the hell I’m living with my father and Ruth. A long time ago, Kitey started making tapes called “Windy Thoughts” tapes. Actually, come to think of it, I named them Windy Thoughts — they were originally called Black Warrior Pencil tapes because Kitey loves using those pencils. The tapes are basically completely impossible to explain, it’s truly one of those things that you have to sit down and listen to for a long time before you understand quite what they are, but I’ll try to tell about what I heard last night on one of the Windy Thoughts tapes without being too confusing. Like I think I’ve said before, Kitey and I communicated largely via audio tape. Which is strange, isn’t it? Considering that we’re both writers? But because we both also love to sing, and because at the time I didn’t type 95+ wpm, audio tapes worked better for both of us. And at one point in one of the audio letters I’d sent her, I’d said, “And so, everybody’s happy,” as the conclusion of some story about what had happened to me. The way I say it is this awful panicked anxious way — so Kitey took just that clip and repeated it over and over again, until it sounds like almost a song, and inserted another clip of me laughing. Hm, I didn’t really do a very good job of explaining that, but I think I’d just end up going around in circles if I tried to explain it more clearly.

Military Perspective

Very Very Good Thing