Disappointment Sucks, Dammit

Well, looks like my movie reviewing skills leave something to be desired *grin*. For a different take on the movie “Go Fish” check out what this woman [link broken] had to say about it.

Okay, this is how lonely and sad and eager for something to take my mind off of how lonely and sad I was last night: I watched a John Travolta movie. It’s true! I watched “Staying Alive”, and I must say it wasn’t half as bad as I thought it would be. The dancing in the movie all looked fairly ridiculous to me — but then, I’ve never been able to understand dancing, not any kind of dancing, and the dancing in this movie seemed to primarily involve throwing your head and arms back every time a climactic moment in the music happened. I thought about the dance lessons I took as a kid, not my choice by a long shot (promising myself as I watched these people in the movie parade around on stage throwing their heads back a lot that I’d never force my child to take classes) and how pointless it all felt to me. “Move your arms this way! Move your legs that way! Kick! Don’t kick!” — and this is art, somehow? Creativity? It’s a mystery to me.

Dreamed again about Julie Jakolat last night. I dreamed that she’d brought me to Arizona to look at her just-passed-away grandmother’s house because Todd and I were thinking about buying it. It was a hugely enormous house, you could literally have fit three hundred people in it, and then she had to go and left me there to deal with this horrible real estate man who was showing the house to zillionaires and wanted me out and gone. So when I woke up, I searched the house and finally found her address, wrote a postcard that started out, “Julie, Julie, Julie — Okay, after dreaming about you five times in just a month, I get the point. I figure it’s either write you, or dream about you every night for the rest of my life.” We’d gotten in touch last year and she’d given me a friend’s email address. I’d written but never received a reply, and then she sent a card asking why I’d never written the friend’s email address. I couldn’t find that card, but I did find a different one and hopefully she’s still at that same address.

Todd had some adventures last night, he was trying to find an Ethiopian restaurant but it’d gone out of business. Meanwhile, a homeless man had come up to him and walked with him on his way back to the train station, Todd bought him some french fries (*grin* he said that the man did the Happy Dance O Potato Joy when he handed him the fries) and gave him some money, the man showed him the way to the train station and Todd got back to the hotel that way. We got morose on the phone and both were teary but reassured each other that it’ll only be a little longer — he’ll be back tonight at seven p.m., hurrah! Agreed, too, that we both feel very muted emotionally being away from each other. Like experiencing the world through a fog. Not any fun.

Had a rather enormous disappointment this morning — that’ll teach me to read email at 4 o’clock in the morning — I thought I’d been approached about having Parental Warfare published, but hadn’t read the actual wording closely enough. I’d read “publish” and what it said was “digitally publish” which I figure means they want to charge people to read my short stories on the web. And I can’t participate in something like that — I do understand and support charging money for an actual book that you can hold in your hands, but charging money for looking at the web is a growing trend that I really really hate. So that wasn’t any fun and I’m pretty crushed. Because I have such a difficult time dealing with disappointment I learned a long time ago how not to get my hopes up very high about anything but I was still pretty excited about the possibilities for Parental Warfare. Oh well.

Dress With A Head

Wait, wait, there’s a good reason for no journal entry yesterday, honest! I was updating Justine’s diary and got so involved in it that by the time I was half way through I was too exhausted to do any more with either her diary or do an entry in mine.

(Being mean is tiring *grin*). Todd and I were checking Justin’s diary on Wednesday night and it turns out that, aside from that awful domain name (those of you who read his entries faithfully can probably guess what it is) he’s also completely changed the background and layout, so I wanted to work on my parody yesterday so that it still looked like a parody, if you see my point.

So good old Justine is caught up to November 21. By the time I got to that point I wasn’t only exhausted, I was also starving (pot of coffee, three cups of caffeinated tea, no food at all) so I put on my coat and put the pop-psychologist on my walkman radio and walked down to a different deli to get a cheese sandwich and some french fries. It was freezing and slushy, but I had a wonderful time anyway — there’s something about snow that feels so familiar to me, and comfortable. This is the same deli where they gave me hell for ordering a sandwich from the place across the street and then coming over to their store to buy french fries — I worried that now I’d be crabbed at next time I went to the place across the street, but realized that with my hat and coat I was unrecognizable. I’m easily bullied by store owners, can you tell?

Last night Todd got home at around seven thirty and walked in and said, “Hey, quick — if we hurry we can get to the used bookstore,” because there is nothing in this house to read — well, okay, there’s a sci-fi book by Dan Simmons which I managed to crawl through a chapter of and then was sitting on the bed with Todd before we turned off the light to go to sleep and the following conversation ensued:

Todd: What do you think of that book?
Sage: It’s kind of dry.
Todd: Dry? Tell more.
Sage: It’s about as emotionally satisfying as a lecture on tax laws.
Todd: (laughing) Aha, I see. Let’s go to the used bookstore tomorrow, then.

So we rushed to the used bookstore and it was closed — since they’re not supposed to close ’til eight we figured that they probably didn’t even come in that day at all because of the snow. We went all the way to Barnes and Noble instead, and I bought two more mysteries by Ellen Hart, who I only just recently discovered at the used bookstore. When we got home I ordered a pizza with pineapple as the topping and read to Todd for a little while from the Tanith Lee book, he ended up falling asleep and so I waited up for the pizza. I guess no one felt like cooking last night because there was a forty five minute to an hour wait. I’m realizing how funny this is in retrospect — I was sitting here about to type, “The pizza delivery guy was unbelievably perky” and realized that in this area he was perky, in a different part of the US he probably would have been termed “reticent”. I love living in a place where saying “Hi” and “How are you” is unusual. It suits me.

So I woke Todd up when the pizza came and we ate it together then he fell asleep and I stayed up for about an hour reading. I’m very much looking forward to the weekend — we talked about it this morning and probably won’t go over to Sarah’s tonight, it seems a bit overwhelming to try to spend time with other people and we’ve both been pretty tired lately.

Oh! Dress With A Head!

We just received a christmas card from a high school/college friend of Todd’s — they were best friends for years and years and I liked her very much when I met her. She reminded me tremendously of Julie’s college roommate (also named Julie, which led to some confusing conversations — “So Julie, Julie’s-roommate said…”) and we ended up having a great time going to a movie together one night. And it was really surprising to both of us when she turned around and married this creep of a guy. She called us up one day and said that she didn’t know what she was going to do, that he’d actually said that he was reconsidering getting married because she had a skin problem with her hands when she did dishes and who would do the dishes if she didn’t? Yeah, that kind of creep. So it was very sad when she ended up marrying him anyway, and then doubly sad when, oops, she got pregnant. The baby’s just a few months old now, and she sent a picture along with the –

Gosh, I feel teary. The mail came as I was typing that sentence and Svea’s (Sean’s wonderful girlfriend) parents sent a christmas card saying that we were always welcome to stay with them, that they’d read some of my writing off of the net and found it very touching, that they loved Sean and after hearing so much about both of us felt like they knew us as well. What a lovely thing to do!

Anyway, back to the story about this woman. So she sent a picture of the baby along with the card and it made both Todd and I laugh really hard because I swear to god, it looks like an enormous pink dress with a head on it. You can’t see anything of this baby except the head, and it’s one of those babies who has so much chub that the actual features of the face are hard to make out. And then she called and left voice mail asking Todd what his address was, because she’d sent a birthday card and it’d been returned “addressee not known” or something like that. When Todd got home I said:

Sage: Hey, pinkie, did you hear that phone mail message from —?
Todd: Huh uh, what was she calling for?
Sage: She wanted to know our address ’cause the birthday card she sent got returned.
Todd: Oh. How did she sound?
Sage: Frazzled. And frantic. And panicked. And freaked out.
Todd: (chuckling) Well, you know, Dress With A Head can do that. Just imagine Claire, but more mobile with a louder voice.

Traveling Through the Phone Lines

I’ve been meaning to tell about an interesting/funny thing that happened a couple of weeks ago. It was fascinating to me because of the ways that people act around those they know well as opposed to those they don’t know well.

Todd and I were on IRC together, talking to Sherlyn and Laurel, and someone entered the channel we were on. I said something about Justin’s online diary and the person started to go on and on about how he detested online diaries, and how he thought they were a result of an enormous ego on the part of the person writing them. And I was laughing really hard, I thought it was great that this guy had no idea that I had an online journal because I’d never had a chance to hear what people don’t like about online diaries. So meanwhile Sherlyn and Laurel and Todd are all telling this guy that I’m one of those people he doesn’t like, and the guy started to apologize all over the place. It was weird because for one thing, I wasn’t offended in the least, and for another, he seemed to be saying, “Well, everyone but YOU has a big ego,” and considering that he didn’t know me at all it was a bizarre thing to say. What, because I happened to be there, I wasn’t part of his general statement about people who write online journals? Interesting. I also was curious about how he’d arrived at the conclusion that people with big egos are the ones who do this sort of thing. I mean, he’s telling this to someone who has to bring a book with her when she goes walking somewhere so that she doesn’t get attacked by her rotted monsters telling her what a worthless creep she is.

Had a pretty quiet night last night. Finished up the trim in the ex-purple room and am really thrilled with the results, I think I’ll start in on the green room in a few days. I listened to Sixty Minutes and felt really sad when the anchorpeople started talking about ritalin and attention deficit syndrome. Thank god that whole trendy “disorder” (no, I don’t believe in it) wasn’t around when Sean was a baby. He couldn’t sit down for five minutes at a time, he had an attention span of about six seconds, he was always zipping here and there, but my god, no one popped him on drugs to make him stop it. Eventually he grew out of it and is a really calm kid now. One of the mothers they interviewed was saying that none of the kids liked her son, he was totally unpopular, and as soon as he was put on this drug everything changed and everyone likes him now.

No one liked me when I was in school either. And yeah, it was hard. No, I didn’t like being the kid everyone hated. But I would have run away from home before allowing someone to put me on a drug that made people like me. That’s horrifying and damn scary.

Todd called and I was so tired from painting that I was falling asleep on the phone, I closed my eyes and was listening to his voice and dreamed that I could make myself small and travel through the phone lines to where he is. Then later on last night when I fell asleep I dreamed that my friend Tina called — I can’t for the life of me remember if she really did leave a phone message or not — we’ve been friends since 1991 and met in college. She’s one of the coolest people I know, she just takes life in stride every day and troops on through incredible hardships never losing her sense of humor and never feeling a moment of self-pity. Anyway, whenever I think of her she calls and I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately. So I’ll have to check phone mail to see if she did indeed call and then I dreamed about her, or if she never called at all and I dreamed that as well. (*grin* One hopes that I didn’t dream this dream and THEN she called, because although we do have a connection that sort of thing would be very strange…)

wouldn’t want you to starve

Boy, do I feel crabby. Out of sorts. I’ve mostly just been watching videos today, working on Claire’s rug and looking forward to this evening when I can listen to 60 Minutes and paint the trim in the ex-purple room. Cramps are no fun and neither is missing Todd.

Had a great surprise yesterday, though. I finished watching The Dark Crystal, after spending the entire movie turning to say something to Todd and realizing that he wasn’t there, feeling lonely and sad. Checked email and found a message from him saying that he’d found a place called “The Internet Store” and was on IRC, hurrah! So we were able to talk on the computer for about an hour yesterday, we were both really glad. When the hour was up we were both teary. Todd said that he read my journal entries and it made him feel sad and wistful — that it was like standing and watching through a window but not being able to participate. I told him all about The Dark Crystal, which wasn’t creepy or scary at all (although interestingly I think it had a lot to say about the way human beings treat animals) — on the contrary, it was hysterically funny because instead of seeing what most people see when they watch that movie, which is the Skekses (evil beings) trying to keep the Mystics (peaceful beings) from saving the the Gelflings (nice if not so bright beings) I saw Claire-beings trying to keep Karma-beings from saving Anita-beings. Made for quite an amusing movie.

And then the other big surprise came later on in the evening, I was watching another video and Sarah knocked at the door — I let her in and she held out a tupperware container and said, “Well, I know Todd’s out of town and I wouldn’t want you to starve,” and it turned out that she’d came all the way here just to bring me veggie chili. What a sweetheart. I felt really taken care of. We sat and talked for awhile and then I remembered that Kitey had left the video that I’d made with Sarah’s camera and asked if she wanted to see it. She said sure, and ended up liking it so much that she wants a copy.

Talked to Todd on the phone and he told me this absolutely surreal story, which is that he went to a touristy part of the city he’s in because he was curious about it and was walking along when he heard someone say, “Todd!” and looked around, and the person was talking to him! It turned out to be one of his college roommates, who didn’t even live in that town but was just visiting from Vermont to watch a football game. Todd said it was pretty awkward, the guy is in the ROTC and loves football so you can imagine just how much they had to talk about. I was really surprised that the guy had recognized him — I mean, I can barely recognize Todd from his college-age pictures.

Called Sarah today when I’d finished watching the last movie she’d loaned me and asked if I could walk over to return them and borrow more, she said of course and even said she was making a sandwich and did I want one. What did I do to deserve such wonderful people in my life? It turned out to be about 20 degrees colder outside than I thought it was, but it’s bright and sunny outside and I love walking in the snow. When I got there we sat and talked for awhile, I picked out some more movies and then she offered to drive me home since it was so cold outside.

It’s been a kind of strange, unreal sort of day.

Mint Ice Cream

Wow! Not even eleven a.m. and I’ve finished painting the formerly-known-as-purple room.

Hurrah! All I have left to do is the trim and I’m so thrilled with the results that I’m going to go ahead and paint one of the other bedrooms the same color. Currently it’s a lightish green which was supposed to be indicative of springtime and plants but just looks like someone ate a lot of mint ice cream and threw up all over the walls. That bedroom was the worst room in the whole house (except for the kitchen) when we moved in, very very dark panelling on two of the walls and then the other two had white flowered wall paper. When I got the white flowered wall paper off I found a really lovely dark green wallpaper that had been there since the forties and would have liked to save it, but it was just too old and flaking off. All together I’ve gotten seven different layers of wallpaper off in this house, and spackled and done a lot of other repairs — it’s so much fun! I grew up in a series of apartments. With white walls. That all looked exactly the same. Having the ability to change things so dramatically has been great. Although *grin* as I was telling the paint guy yesterday, I think that dark purple color was sort of an overdramatic reaction to the white walls I grew up with.

Now I feel kind of dumb that I went on and on about the color of the walls but oh well.

Ended up deciding to go over to Sarah’s last night and had an absolutely wonderful time. We watched the X-Files and played with the cats (they loved my huge coat) and it turned out that she had a whole enormous collection of videos that were just gathering dust, so I borrowed a bunch of tapes to watch and am quite thrilled. When I got home last night I wasn’t really very sleepy yet so I sat down on the couch to watch one of the movies (”Moon Over Parador”, I wasn’t very impressed) and then realized that I could just sleep on the other couch (*grin* or should I say “the couch formerly known as the-futon-we-used-to-sleep-on) when the movie was over. So I went ahead and did that, and about five minutes into the movie Todd called. It was lovely to talk to him, we miss each other a lot. A whole lot. He says that he already has three pages of his diary written and can’t wait for me to read the whole thing when he gets back.

I slept on the couch which was helpful, it didn’t feel half as lonely as the bed would have, and the cats came and slept with me on and off through the night — Anita woke me up investigating under the covers which she’d evidently decided would make a great fort. I woke up and hung out on IRC for a little while, got to talk to Damon which I was glad about, then listened to NPR’s morning edition while I painted until it was over and then I listened to the different rock stations on the radio, up really loud because the weekend father next door has his kids and they’re really irritating and they get on my nerves. Or, rather, they’re irritating and they get on my nerves but they also get on the weekend father’s nerves and then he yells and I can’t stand that.

So I figure today I’ll watch The Dark Crystal which I’m very curious about. The last time I saw it was when it was actually in the theaters, with my father and summer and Patricia. The popcorn butter was rancid, but I didn’t know that and was hungry and figured it was just my imagination that it tasted funny. Which resulted in me eating it and feeling totally sick throughout the entire movie and made the movie much scarier and weirder than it would have been otherwise. Or, that’s what I think anyway. I’m curious to see if I’m right (although Todd and I agree that the black crab-spider things are incredibly creepy no matter how old you are or what you’re eating).

Looking forward as well to working on Claire’s rug, which I haven’t made much progress on lately. Hopefully this time no one will abscond with my crochet hook.

I’ve thought of you 174 times…

Well, I feel very much at loose ends today. Even though I have a weekday routine I’m having a lot of trouble getting into it because Todd left this morning for his business trip.

Thankfully his plane is already on the ground, he’s arrived and everything, which is a big relief. I think planes are scary — when I was a kid I didn’t mind them in the least but as I get older I like them less and less. Probably *wry grin* because I’m not in control of the situation.

Someone asked me yesterday via email if Todd minded my talking about his life on my web pages. I guess it seemed like a strange question because it just never even occurred to either of us that someone would have a problem with it. He absolutely loves my journal and one of the very first things he does when he gets home is to read the latest entry. In fact, he’s going to keep a diary himself while he’s away so that I know everything he thinks and sees. He was being silly and narrating a hypothetical diary entry and said, “Hi sweetie, I just wanted to say that today I’ve thought of you 174 times –” and I said, “–and it’s six a.m.” which made us both giggle.

I have to admit, this is a time I’d like to have a television around. I’m still deciding whether or not to go to Sarah’s to watch the X-Files — basically I’m not sure I’d be very fun company, and also hate to impose on her and ask for a ride home when the show’s over. I’m hopeful that we can go to the used bookstore together this weekend, though — I thought three books would be enough to tide me over but I finished them in less than a week (I’m a very fast reader) so all I have left in the house are books I’ve already read, except for a Tanith Lee book, not the one I’ve been reading to Todd. It’s a big disappointment; she’s using this extremely irritating narrative technique that seems to involve telling the reader everything that’s happening without actually allowing the reader to see it, if that makes any sense. Like standing outside of a room while a friend watches a tv show and does a running commentary (not even funny) on what’s going on.

Last night I was saying that I don’t have a routine for the weekend, and that I wished I did because I don’t do well without a routine. And Todd had a great idea, which was that I could finish up painting the purple room. So this morning I walked down to the hardware store and bought a very pretty soft gray color and figure I’ll paint today, listen to the tv-radio and pop-psych show while I do.

Hawking Religion

Okay, Damon, the t-shirt I want next year for my birthday is one that says:

“I’m sorry that I didn’t reply to your email sooner.”

‘Cause I figure by then I’ll probably owe email to just about everyone I walk past *grin*. Seriously, if I owe you a reply please don’t despair or take it personally, I’m trying my best to catch up!

Actually, it looks like my web page graphics are going to end up on a t-shirt after all, weirdly enough. It’s not definite or anything (they keep wanting me to call them on the phone and I’m just so bad at being on the phone) but if anyone’s interested I’ll keep you posted. I’m still really surprised when people like my graphics, or ask if I went to school to learn — I don’t know the first thing about computer graphics, everything up on my pages is a technique that I taught myself.

Todd was feeling sad and tired again last night, he basically just needs some time to sit and breathe and is really overwhelmed by this business trip he’s going on this weekend and then further overwhelmed by knowing how much we’ll miss each other. Originally we thought we could talk on IRC but it turns out that the laptop he’s bringing from work will have to be used for something else the whole time. So neither of us are particularly looking forward to not being together over the weekend and are both feeling pretty morose about it.

Since I still don’t have my driver’s license (I know, I know, the health insurance is all figured out and I could do it, it’s just…well…I’d have to be on the phone, which is a dumb excuse I realize) Todd drove last night when we went to get the laundry done and I could tell that he was really tired. He didn’t think he was until we got home after putting the clothes in the dryer and we sat down on the bed so that I could read more of the Tanith Lee book. After I’d read a few pages he was too sleepy to hear more and just as I put the book down someone came and knocked at the door. It was around nine p.m. so that startled us both and Todd went to the door — he talked to the guy for a minute or so and then gave him a dollar and the guy went away.

You have to understand how mean we are to people who come to the door. Not everyone *laughing* I mean, when Sarah comes over we’re not mean to her, but people who come hawking religion, etc. should have learned by now to avoid us. When Kitey and a different (very temporary) girlfriend came the first time to visit us, it was a long, incredibly hot summer (when we re-watched the video of that time we all marveled at how we survived, I mean, in the video we all look like zombies) and the three of us were sitting zonked out in front of the tv, Kitey and I were working on the rugs we were both making. So someone came and knocked at the door, and I could see right away before I even opened the door that it was people hawking religion. Have you ever noticed the very creepy way that fanatically religious people’s eyes shine? I recognized it because when I was in college in Missouri there was this extremely evil woman that even the devoutly religious christians who lived on my floor in the dorm were afraid of, they all called her “That Baptist Woman” and she had teeth that were about 8 inches long and would capture you in your room talking you into joining the on campus Baptist group until you wanted to scream.

So here are two women standing at my door and one of them even has the same hair style as That Baptist Woman, and she wants to come inside and talk about this charity work or something she’s involved in, and I just stood there and asked, “Is this about religion?” over and over again every time she paused until she realized that I wasn’t going to stop and finally said, “Yes,” and meanwhile Kitey’s temporary girlfriend is yelling from the living room, “GO AWAY! We’re all lesbians!” which was so hysterically funny, I mean, you should have seen their faces. So I was really surprised when Todd gave this guy who came to the door money and he turned around and started laughing ruefully and said, “I think I’m more tired than I thought I was,” or something equally coherent, and wailed, “He said they were singing christmas carols for the needy, and I thought, gosh, I can’t tell them that I don’t want to give them money because they’ll think that I hate the needy and so I just gave him money ’cause I didn’t know what else to do and I think I should to go sleep soon.” Traigic little thing.

Some Enchanted Evening

I’m listening to Steven Cravis on my walkman and thinking about the night that Todd and I saw him play piano.

We’d been walking around Harvard Square in Boston a couple of weeks before and seen this woman playing a guitar and singing and liked the little bit of the song we heard. She was also handing out hot pink fliers saying where she’d be performing, in a little coffee house/pub and we took one and put it on the fridge so we wouldn’t forget. We went into Boston the night of the performance and I remember it was raining (although most of our memories of Boston involve rain or snow — we both are convinced that if we were to park at Alewife in order to get on the subway it would be snowing no matter what time of year it was) and we ran the last few blocks in order to get to the place, which was called Christopher’s. As we walked in we could hear this beautiful piano music coming out of the room where performers play, and tiptoed in, it was standing room only. We stood there and listened to the music and both got a bit teary.

Something about the way that he played, or the actual notes, or just the feeling in that room that night, was so…I don’t know. Quietly happy, and a little wistful too. As if you could climb into the music if you only knew how. We bought the tape when he was done performing — it was his last performance before he left to go to Hawaii — and took it home with us and have almost worn the tape out with playing it so many times. Ironically, the woman who we’d originally come to see turned out to be kind of boring and awful, so we left after listening to just one of her songs. Ever since, we’ve tried to find out more about his music — this happened in 1992 — but haven’t had any luck at all. Which makes the whole evening seem even more enchanted and almost like it never happened.

Yesterday I got email from Marian, when we were both logged on, hurrah! We ended up talking on IRC and having a wonderful time catching up. *grin* I told her I was famous again and she said she’d have to break out the dark sunglasses and attack dogs. We both realized just how much we’d missed talking to each other, too, and are going to try to get together on IRC again sometime this weekend.

When Todd got home he was feeling really awful. His ears get bright red when he’s tired. No, really! So his ears were bright red and he was feeling stressed out and tired and sad and overwhelmed. I took him upstairs and kept him company while he changed out of his work clothes and gave him lots of hugs. We decided to make a veggie stir fry for dinner and ended up having an absolutely fabulous time — Todd is the only person I’ve ever met in my whole life who gets cheered up when he cooks, personally, cooking is just about number 874 on my list of things to do when I’m feeling sad — and ate the stir fry, agreeing that our bodies were both saying, “VEGGIES! YAY! I forgot!” and doing the Happy Dance O Veggies Joy.

Very Very Good Thing

I talked this morning to someone about participating in a really exciting and interesting project that has me bouncing off of the walls. Hurrah!

We had a dumb argument on Saturday morning, we were both stressed out about money and extremely hungry and grumping at each other because of it. After a few minutes of feeling awful Todd stomped out (yup, he does know that it was dumb and didn’t accomplish anything) and came back about five minutes later and we talked everything out. We’ve both found out how helpful it is to just talk about how whatever’s happened has made us feel — and what we want to happen as a result of discussing whatever it is — after about ten minutes we’d resolved everything and agreed that food would be a Very Very Good Thing and made lunch together, then went out grocery shopping.

Friday night, we went to Sarah’s and watched the X-Files, it was really fun and it felt like she was much more herself. Saturday morning, we went with her and a real estate agent to look at more houses, had a great time. The first house was absolutely amazing. The family had lived there for ten years, and it looked like they’d collected TWENTY years worth of clutter — really, I swear this isn’t an exaggeration — there was stuff everywhere, with narrow pathways between stuff. The walls looked pretty sturdy and in good shape, but since we could only see the top 3 feet of them, they could have looked terrible and we’d never have known. Todd, Sarah, the real estate agent, and I were all stifling giggles the whole time — when we went up to the finished attic and found STILL MORE STUFF (I swear, you could have furnished a small house with just what was in the attic — we recommended that Sarah buy the house and offer to take anything they didn’t feel like moving with them, then hold a huge yard sale, that she could probably buy a whole new house with the proceeds) we couldn’t stop laughing. The truly amazing part was that they had three kids under six, and really, it looked like if you made just one pile of stuff fall, it would cause a chain reaction through the entire house, ending in an avalanche.

The next house we went to had a woman in her seventies with two small children having their Saturday morning routine. This house was spotless. I mean, this was literally the kind of house where you could have eaten off the floor and the floor would be cleaner than anyone else’s kitchen table. If that woman could see our house on its cleanest day she’d probably fall over at the absolute horror of it. Let’s see…oh, and then there were a couple of houses that weren’t any great shakes, then the strangest one of all. We walked in and the very first thing that caught our eyes were these shelves of Disney kids videos. I’ve seen less complete collections in video stores. It was evidently two daughters and a father living in the house and these kids had everything any kid could ever even dream of wanting — I mean, the poor dad had this teensy little room with hardly anything in it, probably because he’d bankrupted himself buying the PENTIUM COMPUTER for his kids *laughing*.

Oh, and there were really cute signs up on all of the bedroom doors saying, “Don’t come in here! You will be in troble!” and “The computer will explode if you enter!” In fact, there was even one on the dad’s door, come to think of it taped up at dad-height, not kid-height. Very weird…

Then on Saturday night we were coming back from grocery shopping, we were getting bags out of the car and our neato neighbor was hauling a christmas tree into his house and said hi, asked how we were and I asked how he and his family were doing, he asked if we wanted to come and meet the (now one month old!) baby and I said yes, definitely! So we put our groceries away and went over to their house and met the baby. I had no idea a human being could be so teensy. I mean, KARMA weighs more than that baby did. They started to put the baby into my arms and I was panicked because the first and last time I held a baby I was thirteen and it was a babysitting job, they all laughed at me (Todd even changed Sean’s diapers, so he wasn’t intimidated at all) and I sat down on the couch and then held the baby (I was really terrified of dropping him). It was amazing. This little teensy life that didn’t exist and now does. We had a great time talking for awhile and then went back home. Quite an experience, I must say.

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.