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Showing posts from April, 2014
Hello, everyone! I am not dead. I have been: Pneumotically sick and busy trying to cough up the insides of my own feet; At #porncamp ; Neurosing about people again. I don't think I have to go in to respiratory infections -- the entire East Coast appears to have caught this one, so there are plenty of valid reference examples. Illness is not nearly so stressful as it used to be, mainly because there are only two things in my life for which I have to leave the house to fulfill my obligations, and I can bow out of both of them if I'm spending a week deceased for medical reasons. Boss Lady is very understanding, mainly because when she's sick, she emails me from her phone with things like, 'trapped in bed, too weak to dislodge cats; just keep doing whatever it was I told you to do before'. I chronically under-bill her for this, because my job involves reading a lot of well-written smut and then handing out pieces of it to anyone who looks like they might share

Weekend Radio Theater: Burns & Allen

" Grandpa's 92nd Birthday " " Are Husbands Necessary? " " Marriage Manual "
I've been checking into some acrobatics lessons, because having now figured out how to spin the hoop around me in a variety of different ways, I think learning to spin me around the hoop would provide a pleasing symmetry. I took gymnastics briefly when I was younger, but after a certain point they wouldn't let me progress unless I caved and did things on the balance beam and uneven bars. I hated both of those things with the passion of a thousand burning suns, so I quit.  I'm a grown-up now, and if I say I'm not doing anything that involves being more than a foot off the ground, I can make it stick. It's probably a bad idea for me to start out doing random saltos unsupervised on a Marley floor, and I've got it in my head that I'd be all right if I had a professional spotter standing by to make sure I don't break my neck. I've also got the sneaking suspicion that if I don't figure out exactly why I think I need a spot, I'm going to thorou
I am completely incapable of finding something interesting without also wanting to know exactly how it works. Not just physical objects like toys, or mechanical processes like figure skating and hooping, but also abstract things like linguistic structures and social scripts. I'm willing to do the kind of obsessive research you need to make this work, so the fact that this is weird normally doesn't bother me much. The most troublesome part is that I keep unintentionally convincing people that I'm the local expert in something I've only been cramming into my head for a few weeks, which can get awkward. At least by that point, I can direct them to other people who know a lot more than I do. I also do it in personal relationships, which has the unfortunate side effect of confusing and annoying other humans. I gather they feel that anyone who wants to scrutinize interaction in that much detail is determined to find fault with whatever's going on. I think it's just

Dog Tails-- er, Tales.

The house was always a menagerie while I was growing up. My mother couldn't turn away an animal. Several times, we had neighborhood people ring the doorbell to ask if a kitten wandering around stray was ours. If it wasn't before, it was now. The minimum complement was two cats and two dogs, plus any small caged critters we had lying about, but it ranged much higher than that at times -- one of the cats escaped for the night before we could get her into the spay/neuter clinic, and we briefly had ten of them, before the babies were weaned and re-homed. Have you ever been in a house with ten cats? It's an adventure. My father had to check his size 13 work boots every morning before putting them on, in case a kitten had decided to nap inside. The dogs were generally fewer in number, but made up for it in mass. Right around the time I was born, my parents had a dog named Yeti. It was apt. He was half Lab, half husky, with mismatched eyes, and completely indestructible. He wa
I'm currently trying to scare up a vocal duet for performance. I really shouldn't be doing it at 11pm. The best way to test them is, obviously, to sing them aloud, and I don't have much of a volume control. The very very top and the very very bottom of my range only work if I'm belting. Naturally, that's where all the fun notes are. I also get sidetracked a lot when building playlists, and I'm almost certain that the neighbors do not want to hear Beyoncé's "Halo" anywhere near as often as I want to sing it. I can sing. Very well. I know this as a scientific fact. There are a lot of things that I think I do pretty well, but I could be easily convinced otherwise by an audience, and I'm never surprised to run into someone more competent than I am. Not so, with singing. I had a complete stranger hunt me down in the audience after a school concert once, when I'd come out to find my parents, to tell me that she was a professional vocalist, and

Weekend Radio Theater: Burns & Allen

" George Attracts Cats " " Gracie Cons George " " Gracie Wants George To Become A Doctor "
I got to be a guest at a Sirlesque photoshoot the other day. Well, I say 'guest'. What I mean is, I was working my shift at the dance studio when the guys came storming up the stairs carrying giant bins of clothes. Dexter sidled over to the desk and made giant puppy-dog eyes at me -- against the majestic backdrop of most of the rest of the troupe whipping their shirts off right in the middle of my lobby -- and asked if I could possibly let them stay a leeeeetle  past closing? Because Dex is one of the designated adults, and he had done enough math to realize that there was no way they were going to get through a six-man promo shoot in the hour they had booked. I'd shown up to work vaguely discouraged with the world. I was hoping to get through two hours of telling people where the yoga classes were before I took the late bus home and went the fuck to sleep to make the day end. I wound up spending my evening with half a dozen highly-attractive, half-dressed guys, who were

Weekend Radio Theater: Burns & Allen

" The BHUS Society Wants New Hats " " December 24th, Santa's Workshop " " Emily Vanderlip's Boy "

State of the Blog Address

The AC jack on the ASUS is finally (almost) broken. There is now no way to lean, wedge, prop, or otherwise jigger the cord so that the computer will charge/run off wall current while I'm using it. All the graphic design software is on that thing, so I've been doing my ad work in 2 hour chunks. I'm trying to do a pamphlet right now. Take my advice: If you know how to do typesetting and desktop publishing, never ever let anyone know that. Boss Lady's not a picky client, but I have nightmares about doing all this for one of those people who has no idea what they want, except that it's not what I spent six hours laying out in Scribus. Boss Lady was also kind enough to lend me a spare Macbook (actually, what she did was ask politely if I wanted to borrow it about half a dozen times until I was smart enough to agree) while I got someone to patch the ASUS together long enough for me to get my hands on another indestructible Toshiba. So now I'm sitting on the bed, i

Weekend Radio Theater: Burns & Allen

" How Jack Benny Became Cheap " " Beauty Shop " " H&R Blockhead "

Tonight, I rant.

I see the hashtag #notyourgoodfatty is making the rounds on Twitter. Good. Surprisingly, most of the people using it seem to have got the idea -- it's for venting about the idiocy that gets flung at fat people, not about sniping at not-fat people for being not-fat, which is what some of these things turn into. It is an unfortunate truth that assholes come in all shapes and sizes, and ruin everything for everyone else; I'm glad this one's being run by sane people, so I can support it without also wanting to bonk my head against the wall the whole time. I am in fact on y'all's side on this. I'm shaped how I'm shaped because I am, just like you. I'm not a very good thin person, either, for the record. I do not have any of this mythical "willpower" stuff. I'm perfectly capable of putting away most of a pizza by myself, if someone makes it for me and brings it to my door. I don't do it more often because I see cooking as an annoying inte