the really BIG show

today went with tracey to the really BIG show at the academy of music. i could go on about the various acts but we'd gone specifically to see the illustrious megan e. labonte hooping alongside the dixieland jazz band primate fiasco. the band was pretty great, esp. when they weren't singing. but megan was amazing. she has a dancer's style and grace, and a good deal of self-taught hooping skill. she and the band are friends, and they were so in tune with one another, i couldn't tell where the music ended and megan began. it was smoooooooth. the music was smooth and her movement was smooth and the lighting was beautiful. it felt like old new orleans, sort of, if i'd ever been there. i kicked myself for not bringing along a video camera because i would love to watch that one act over and over and over. as for the others, most of them were good. really megan blew them all away though. not even the acrobats or the juggler could touch her.

after that adventure i drove tracey home and then came back to my own home and put in a couple hours of work, broken up by small chunks of hooping practice. i'm going to keep at it and keep at it and keep at it so that this spring i will be able to join the circus. more on that when it happens. la la la. i have a really bad headache. i will see my very useless doctor tomorrow and i don't expect that he'll help me so i don't even know why i'm going. but whatever. it's just down the street.

p.s. tracey got me a kazoo!

am big spinning dork

i have been severely depressed all day today. unable to work, i decided to make my first hooping video even though i wasn't warmed up and i'm not good enough yet to be making videos to put on youtube, etc. but i thought that playing around in imovie a bit would get me in a better mood and make me better able to deal with working. and it did do that, sort of. now i'm in a good enough mood to work but instead i'm putzing around on youtube and posting on this here blog and so on. but here is my first attempt at embedding a youtube video into my blog: (IMPORTANT: turn the volume way down on this thing before playing it... i somehow created it with the volume cranked too high.)



we'll see how that works. ignore the girl in the movie, she had just woken up and was on an 8 day migraine marathon to boot. you may say this is edited so we can't see how bad she really is, but honestly most of what i cut out was me pulling my pants up as they were constantly trying to fall off.

i haven't left the house all day. and according to my new timer i have done exactly one half hour's worth of work-work so far today. so i really need to get back to that. it's just that there's so much fun to be had on this here internet... especially with the different services integrating with one another and so on. it's really hard to not be here. i am capable of focusing on work but the moment i get an email i am distracted and i forget to go back to my worky task. i'm going back to it now though. because i am using a wacom intuos graphics tablet courtesy of my generous folks, and it is FUN. it makes photo retouching faster and easier and fun fun funner. the only reason it's not THE most fun thing is that it does not help me get noticed by my friends and peers. which these other things do. but everyone has to pull away and do worky things for at least a few hours a day and i need to join the ranks of those working folk. and so i am off.

got me a job

my stepfather is a professional photographer who makes most of his living producing large-size prints for local artists. so he's doing a bunch of prints for a couple local artists who never took care of their negatives or slides, and now they've been scanned and given to stan with millions of scratches and holes. i have now been hired to do photo retouching on a freelance basis. so i have a job! nothing like my old job. it's pretty cool. the work is fun and meditative - it feels like playing a video game like tetris or space invaders. and i can work at home on my new imac, and make my own hours etc. the only problem is that i am so easily distractible, i have not been putting in many hours at all. and this is now day 5 of my horrible migraine headache, so staring at a computer screen and working with teeny details doesn't help it.

but the important point is that now when people say "so, what do you do?" i can come up with an answer.

in other news, i am going to try to join a new circus that's starting in town this spring! there will be hoopers... i hope to be one of those hoopers. it's odd because i really started hooping because i was inspired by my late aunt's hula hooping contests which she organized for the guatemalen refugee children who lived across from her house in costa rica. and my cousin ruthie went to circus school and then started her own circus in brooklyn. so the whole thing kind of runs in the family but my aunt is dead and my cousin is going to just laugh at me and look down her nose, because as much as i love her the truth is she is quite the snooty little thing. she's a very very talented snooty little thing. i haven't seen her in forever because she wouldn't let me bring a girl date to her wedding (ironic considering that she was at least part gay for a number of years and supposedly that was due to my own inappropriate influence) and then i missed it anyway.

i have been in northampton for 8 months now. and i have made a total of two friends!!! that's because i am still a hermit. one of the friends i made through the freedom center and the other one found me on friendster. i have a couple friends from college still living here but i never see them. one works a couple blocks away at the wine store. another WAS one of my best friends but he's ignored me since july when we had a bad ride home from vermont together. i wasn't on enough medication then. another one i just haven't bumped into but we were never 1:1 friends, just group friends. there's one more, but we haven't been friends in years. maybe we will be again. i hope so. here's the problem with all of this: i want a GROUP of friends so that i can hang out with people in a group... it saves time. i don't like being in groups when i only know one or two of the people, so i tend to stick to 1:1 friendships. but that makes it much more time consuming to make the rounds and stay in touch and be noticed in general.

i am being very very boring talking about my very boring self so i am going to stop. this has basically been my morning waiting-for-vicodin-to-kick-in ramble. i'm really very terribly sorry.

what's in my head?

my doctor is out of town so i have to go to the local emergency room today to try & get help for a really bad sinus headache that's been stuck in my head for the past 3 days. i've been trying to ice away the pain but it shoots all the way through. holding an ice pack to my eye isn't all that pleasant anyway.

but i am waiting here killing time while the fantastic freeware utility isquint converts episodes of the OC to ipod video format so i have something w/which to amuse myself while waiting the long wait. last i saw, johnny was falling off the cliff and ryan had reached out to grab him but it ended before we could see if he saved him or if johnny went ahead and plummetted to his death. i am way back in season 3 because i stopped watching for a while... i dunno, i guess i became self-conscious about my affection for this show, even though i will never be ashamed of my love for the sandy/seth father/son dynamic from the gods. and just seth "cohen" cohen by himself. summer is pretty adorable too. marissa (mischa barton) used to be a total embarrassment but i see now that in the third season she's learned some new facial expressions and i hold out a tiny sliver of hope now that one day she may learn how to act.

but enough about the OC. didn't you know i was obsessed with buffy? it's really all i watch most of the time. i think i've seen buffy and angel each 4 times over. at least. not counting before i owned the DVDs and just saw sporatic episodes. no i am not a total tv-head but i don't have much of a social life either, so i have imaginary friends on TV. they are all a lot younger than me so i feel a little weird and that's why i've been enjoying hanging out with my new pal one town over who is only about 3 years younger and i got her into hooping. so now we can walk dogs together and practice hooping together and maybe someday when one or both of us overcomes our shyness we'll just hang out for the hell of it w/out the pretense of a shared activity.

ramble ramble ramble. i never wrote, as i promised i would, about the hellish experience of moving. now i'm kind of over it. i'm here in northampton and california is just a distant nightmare. i'm almost able to think about it without retching now. the problem now is that i live in a heavenly liberal oasis where it's very easy to forget about the rest of the world being totally doomed. i know the chickens will eventually come home to roost and i would like to remain on my toes but it's hard. things are too nice here. there are beautuful young college kids everywhere, and cafes, and art things, and hooping in the park in the summertime. i have joined the local moveon.org council and i go to events & stuff, but everyone is smiling and eating cookies. where is the doom?

perhaps the doom has wormed its way into my head and is manifesting as a terrible sinus headache which has kept me up at night and makes me want to cry. i have got to get out of here and go wait in that fucking emergency room. yuck.

why bother, you pathetic hackers?

don't hack my site unless you have something worthwhile to say. thank you.