Archive for October, 2007

yeah, this is a post about Robert Goulet, what?

Oct 31st, 07 / 0 Comments

Seeing the headline that he died yesterday made me think about the one time I saw him in a production of Camelot at Artemus Ham hall sometime in the early 90′s with my mom (and I think my grandma).

I mean, it wasn’t really much of a spectacle– I think Goulet was playing Arthur, and it was mainly a local production, if I can remember– but it was something I haven’t thought about for a long time. (And I probably wanted to forget about it, too. I had to be in middle school, and feeling somewhat embarrassed that I was dragged to a musical by my mother.)

The thing was, he was actually a really good singer, and even as a kid I admired his presence. My mom was mesmerized by the end of it. And it was a nice little bonding moment for her and I.

  
Music : Emiliana Torrini - Dead Things
random, stage

monday recovery.

Oct 29th, 07 / 0 Comments

I am so easily distracted it’s ridiculous.

And you know what else is ridiculous right now? Heroes. Like, I’m thinking on skipping out until the end of the season all Lost-like. I need to get some work done, anyway. But it’s like Anne Rice novels: you just keep reading them, thinking it’s going to get better, and it doesn’t.

I’m a little late in the game with my 2c about Radiohead putting out mp3s at shoddy bitrates in order to get people to buy CDs, but really, people: when did hipsters who collect mp3s start caring about audio quality anyway? Seriously. Look, I know people shelled out dumb amounts of money for mp3s. But that’s kind of their fault: they paid that dumb money for files, and that’s it. For me, the record’s good enough that I would’ve been okay with paying $5 for meh mp3s (but I didn’t). I was thinking about this in the car this morning, after watching Jay Smooth’s latest blog on Jay-Z’s album leak this weekend, and the new culture of The Leak being the new Midnight Record Party. Yes, things have changed. I get it. Maybe I’m getting old, but there’s nothing I get excited enough about to stand in line for. Actually the last Midnight-Anything I went to was probably Return Of The King back in like, ’03 or whatever. I grew up at the tail end of record-selling. I was a tape girl, and even then for those shitty pieces of goodness people were shelling out at least $10 a pop for Air Supply’s Greatest Hits. I have all my parents vinyl along with my own little collection, and really, it’s more rare to bust those out than the convenience of instant clicking. Clearly, I’m not an audio purist.

Anyway.

Oddly, I have no plans for Halloween. It’s typically my favorite holiday of the year, and this year I’m mindful of the holiday but I have no plans. I’m kind of okay with staying home and getting stuff done. I have deadlines that are suddenly becoming more, um, clear that I need to get moving.

I do have a post about family and how my family is kickass, but I’m going to wait until I have more than 5 minutes to write about them.

  
Music : A/C in the Pregame office
being here, catching up, music, quasi-theoretical rambling

autumn is starting to set in.

Oct 25th, 07 / 0 Comments

So, I’m going to try and make a concerted effort to blog a little more, because it seems like I had a spurt of posts right out of Clarion, and now it just looks like I don’t have anything to say.

I mean, I do. I’ve been listening to a few records. The new José Gonzáléz is fantastic, but short. The new Beirut is the drunken Europe I should’ve seen.

And yes, In Rainbows, which slowly unfolds on me.

I have an idea for a group arts blog centered around Vegas. I know I’d have a couple of writers for it. I just don’t know if it’ll have any traction or not. All I know is that even talking with Scotty about it at a hookah place got us hooked up with free drinks once, and we didn’t even have anything going on, just throwing ideas around.

That’s all for now.  I’ll try to have a little more later.  I should get a little of a page in before bed.

  
Music : Pink Floyd - Comfortably Numb
catching up

I hate having to choose.

Oct 21st, 07 / 0 Comments

Though, honestly, I’d rather be choosing than worrying about not being able to work on things, or not having things to work on at all.

Mostly I’m choosing the novel first, then the Roman story second, then Owl Mask third, and some other stories in a mixed-up order.   But I think now that I’m staring down the barrel of the end of October, the Roman story is going to have to get moved up in the queue.  (Even though, honestly, the novel re-writing is going smashingly well, and I feel in the zone to get a draft done by the end of the year at this rate.  And looking at the old draft, it’s probably better than I’m re-writing the whole thing anyway.)

Right now I’m cleaning, doing laundry, the dishes, wiping down the house.  I’m  going to be at the bar tonight to train so I can be on-call.  I tried to bartend once a few years ago while my brother supervised, and it was weird.  I didn’t feel like I was good at it.  But then again, serving beer really isn’t all that hard to people who have watched you grow up in a place, I guess.  You don’t have to be good, you just have to be there.

You just have to pull things together slowly, I guess.

  
Music : Quantic - Time Is The Enemy
being here, catching up, novelling, writing

my glorified ipod.

Oct 10th, 07 / 0 Comments

I have this iMac that I got for a birthday present back in 1999, and it was one of my closest buddies my senior year of college: I wrote my senior project novella on it, my second screenplay, countless stories and poems, started blogging, remixing, and discovered the glory of mix CDs on it. I used to lug it back and forth from Vegas and Redlands every weekend. There are a lot of emotions I have with this iMac.

It’s got a whole 5 gigs of hard drive space on it.

I unfortunately have slowly turned to the dark side of PCs since then, but I’ll always have a soft spot for my Macintosh LC III, two PowerBooks, and iMac (all of which I still have).

My bedroom is a pretty silent place right now, which is nice for me because I went through a phase for a long time where I couldn’t fall asleep without either some kind of headphones or a television on. The music was phased out, as was the television. Now I just have a book on the nightstand, which is the way it should be.

But when I’m doing cleaning or laundry on the weekends, or getting ready to go out on Fridays, I like to have some kind of music on in the background. Well, I like having music in the background of just about everything. The iMac was collecting some dust in the garage, so I figured I’d get the blueberry out and fire it up and see what I could do with it.

I’d forgotten it had 5 gigs on it, as opposed to the 2 I kept thinking it had for a long time. So I burned some mp3 CDs for it, created some playlists on it’s snazzy iTunes 2.0, and cranked up the jams.

So now I have this old G3 iMac, with some old writing files on it, but mostly just holds a bunch of mp3s, like an iPod with a really big screen and a mouse/keyboard, and CD-ROM.

I love it.

  
Music : Fatboy Slim - The Rockafeller Skank
being here, computers, imac

Lagging.

Oct 5th, 07 / 1 Comment

Just haven’t had much to say this week. Maybe I just don’t feel like talking?

But, Jaq gave me a challenge: 25 pages of the novel by the 20th. It’s on.

Other things are moving along. Stories are getting drafted, some are cooking, and I submitted a poem to Strange Horizons.

I actually need to be running around, getting a new health card and a new work card for the bar, but I can’t pay for anything until I, you know, get paid. So I wait.

What else is going on? Not a whole lot. Trying to run three times a week. Staying out of trouble. Watching Heroes (it’s slow) and Pushing Daisies (intruiguing). Reading bits here and there.

The thing is, once this time of year comes around, I get really scared that I’ll get hermity and cranky to people. Last year wasn’t so bad, probably because I’m recognizing the signs earlier now: that overall, limp feeling in myself, that I should just stop trying. It’s wasn’t ever a suicidal kind of thing, but it was really let’s wait this out because it’ll pass kind of thing, and that’s not good to do alone.

But I’m determined to go. And keep going.

  
catching up, writing