Friday Five: Tex

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  1. Whether you’ve ever been there or not, what are your thoughts on Texas? After living here for two and a half years, I’m still torn about whether I like it or not. I miss the California climate, and the more liberal politics, but I like the Southern graciousness and the special brand of spunk that seems to be native to the region.
  2. Who was the last person you sent a text message to? If you’ve never sent someone a text message, is there some reason?The last text message I sent was a Twitter update before Spider-man 3 started last night.
  3. Who’s usually the first person you go to when you have a tech-related problem, especially for computers? If I can’t answer it myself? Fuzzy.
  4. What was the best textbook you were ever assigned? I have fond memories of the writing book we used in my Freshman expository writing seminar at USF, and of an ancient blue SRA reader I had in pre-school.
  5. What are your thoughts on techno music? I have no particular thoughts. It’s not my favorite style, but in a club it’s fun to dance to once in a while.

Thursday Thirteen – 0705.03

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Thirteen Things about MissMeliss

13 Things That Begin with E

  1. Earl Grey: I was drinking this tea long before I ever saw Captain Picard make his trademark replicator order of “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.” I like that you can smell the bergamot in it as the leaves first begin to steep, and I like that it’s strong, and distinctive, and still more refined than say, Lipton’s Orange Pekoe. I take mine with milk and sugar.
  2. Easter Eggs: As a very small girl, one of my favorite things to do was color Easter Eggs with my mother. I have such vivid memories of watching the tablets from the Paas kits fizzing away in their vinegar water, of dye-stained fingertips, and of the magic you can do with a white crayon and a little bit of patience. I didn’t color eggs this year, because it felt silly to do it just for me, and I really wish I had. But I like Easter Eggs of another sort as well – the surprises that you find on a DVD if you play with the menus enough. While these are often just credits, sometimes they’re pretty cool little digital trinkets.
  3. Echoes: Acoustic magic. Enough said.
  4. Ectoplasm: This comes up because I’m dabbling in a story about a romance between a human and a ghost (well, poltergeist) but it’s always been an intriguing word to me. It rolls of the tongue so readily, carrying with it an air of mystery and a spark of something sinister.
  5. Education: Formal or not, education is crucial. I don’t believe that all answers are found sitting in a college classroom. Personally, I felt stifled in school, even among the “gifted” kids. It’s not an environment in which I ever thrived, or could thrive. But I read constantly, I try to stretch myself (improv, writing, exploring places), and I have no patience for stupid people. Ignorance, after all, is curable. Stupidity is not. It’s more than just knowledge though. Education extends to cultural awareness. I think it’s the height of arrogance, for example, to visit another country and not at least attempt to learn and use the local language – I’ve seen so many of my parents’ ex-pat friends who refuse to learn Spanish, and it frustrates me.
  6. Eggplant: I think you have to be Italian to truly appreciate the eggplant. Oval, and delightfully purple outside, cool green and pale ecru inside, the eggplant is a fleshy vegetable that offers a distinctive flavor. Breaded and fried for parmegianni, or chopped up and stewed into ratatouille or caponata, it’s a taste I grew up with, and one of those things that just equals “home” to me. Also, love the color. Eggplant purple always makes me smile.
  7. Elderberry Wine: Robert, this one’s for you: “Well, dear, for a gallon of elderberry wine, I take one teaspoon full of arsenic, then add half a teaspoon full of strychnine, and then just a pinch of cyanide.” — Aunt Martha, in Arsenic and Old Lace.
  8. Electronics:Give me my Zen, my laptop, my cell phone, or knock me unconscious. Electronic toys are my second most favorite playthings. (The absolute favorite is words.)
  9. Elements: In the weather sense of the word. I like weather, for the most part, when it is wild – wind, rain, that sort of thing, but there’s something to be appreciated in a hot sunny day, as well. In the more traditional sense – earth, water, air, fire – it’s all about balance. I could use more of that.
  10. Email: Nothing – NOTHING – is better than an actual snailmail letter, but email is fabulous in its own right. I love the immediacy of it. I love that it costs next to nothing. And I love that it doesn’t waste paper.
  11. English Muffins:Technically, I suppose, there’s nothing English about them, but these wonderful breakfast breads, toasted to crunchy perfection and slathered with butter and maybe a little marmalade, are one of my edible guilty pleasures. I love the sourdough version, but the raisin kind, with sharp cheddar cheese melted on them, are great for an afternoon snack on a rainy day. Also, they go great with Earl Grey tea.
  12. Entertaining: Whether it’s hosting a dinner party or playing on stage, I get a kick out of entertaining. It doesn’t have to be “funny” either – a story can still entertain when it’s dark, after all.
  13. Erasure: Erasure’s music was an integral part of my college experience. Truly. To this day, they’re tunes are scattered among the files on my Zen, and on my hard drive, and I have a couple cd’s of theirs as well. Kicky electro-pop with a ‘tude is always welcome on my playlist.

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

Rambling

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Sometimes, you just have to ramble.

I was up with the birds today. I’d say “up with the sun” but as we haven’t seen it in days, I’m hesitant to use that phrase. Fuzzy had an early meeting, and I had a project to finish – it’s now essentially finished, and since it was the project from hell, I’m glad to have it behind me. I’ve been whining about it for two weeks.

My lungs and head have been feeling pressured all day, and finally around five when the tornado warning was announced (yes, another one), I realized it was a reaction to the atmosphere. Rain, wind, thunder lightning. I used to love these things – I still love these thing – but my head and lungs don’t agree today.

By 6:30 or so I was convinced we’d get nothing – the warning had expired, we were down to a watch. And then the leading edge hit – winds clocked at almost 100 mph, driving rain in voluminous quantities – another half inch and my pool would have been overflowing – and the screechy sound of things sliding around outside.

As I wrote in my LiveJournal, I’m not generally afraid of weather, and, in fact, once the very worst was over, I was out snapping pix of the lightning through the rain – a ghostly image – water flickering blue and silver – the power had flickered off briefly a couple times, my cell had no signal – and mostly I was enjoying the storm, but there were moments when I was convinced the windows were going to implode. (Why yes, I was standing at the 2nd story window, watching the mayhem. It’s not like the actual tornado SIRENS were going off.)

After everything settled, I went outside. (It’s still raining, even now, still flashing lightning and rumbling thunder, but it’s just a rainstorm now, not a threat. Does that make sense?) The deck chairs were scattered across the yard. One was almost into the pool, its ottoman already submerged. We’ll fish it out in the morning – it’s too dark and cold and slimy to deal with tonight. Not that the pool is slimy – it’s just…well…it’s a Fuzzy-job and he didn’t get home til 10.

When he did get home he brought with him a steak for me, and stories of seeing a semi flipped over on top of a car, and the news that two of our trees were no longer trees, exactly. The peach tree was bent in half, and broken, one of the plums had been sheared off at ground level. And I mean sheared. A chainsaw could not have made a cleaner cut. We drove a circuit of the neighborhood, and then came home and I ate steak while we watched Lost.

Fuzzy had already eaten, with clients.

And now? Now I’m tired, and my head still hurts and I am going to turn off the lights and watch the lightning until I fall asleep.

Blah.

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Funky new hair not withstanding, I feel blah. I faded out halfway through workshop tonight, and I know that was bad, but I’m just tired, and this latest project still isn’t done and I like my job, really, but this has been draining in the extreme, and I feel like it’s taking over my life.

Tomorrow, at least, we should be done.

I hope.

Today, all day, felt funky and cranky and drugged.
Took a nap instead of lunch and it helped a little.

But…I still feel blah, and I think I’m going to call it a night now, and start fresh in the morning.

Cherry Cola

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Anytime I need to see your face
I just close my eyes
And I am taken to a place where your crystal mind and
Magenta feelings take up shelter in the base of my spine
Sweet like a drink of cherry cola
— Savage Garden “I Want You”

Three hours and $278 after I entered the Aveda salon yesterday (I bought some products so not ALL of that was for the salon services), I left again with goth-y looking magenta streaks glowing in my dark brown hair, the effect reminding me of cherry cola.

It was a long process – first we touched up my roots with my base color, a warm chocolate brown, then we did foils on specific strands to bleach them out. I sat and read for 20 minutes, and then we rinsed and washed my hair, DRYED it, and then Natalie and Zoila, her assistant, poured the three colors of Special Effects hair dye I’d brought with me, into three separate bowls, and started weaving color onto the strands we’d bleached today, and the strands that were still sort of reddish-pink from last time. Then, more waiting, another rinse and wash, a massage, and then we dryed my hair again. By this time most of the people in the salon were standing around wanting to see the final look. I felt very spoiled.

The over-all effect is that of natural highlights, except they’re an unnatural glowy magenta color. And yes, there will be pix, eventually – I had to dash from the salon to the arena for a ComedySportz show, and while I had energy, I wasn’t my best last night. I messed up a joke I should have sold, and just…felt overpowered.

It wasn’t a suckful show, it was just…odd. Off-kilter. And it was all of us, I think. Not just some of us.

In any case, today I’m catching up on a work-project and enjoying being home.

Baby Seals and Bribery

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Fridays at ComedySportz are always a bit odd. Saturdays, we almost always have a full, if not packed, house, but Fridays are inconsistent, and we’ve found ourselves playing to as few as eight people before. Last night, we had a group of kids coming out for pre-Prom fun, and a group of pregnant women having a booze-free Girls Night Out. There were others, also – walk-in traffic, and some friends of one of the troupemates. It was an energetic crowd, really. But I wasn’t really focused on audience analysis, I was too busy trying not to be nervous about my first time as team captain.

CSz, as I’ve mentioned, and as anyone who’s been to a show knows, is improvisational comedy played as if it were a sport (hence the name), so we have two teams of playerz: Red and Blue, and after each round the audience votes to see who gets points. The teams have names, usually puns on local city names, but the names change and are there for the audience – we just know which color we are. Last night, I was the red captain.

Captains usually choose their teams games, and also make the decisions (with input) about who goes out to guess in guessing games, and stuff like that. There are also bits throughout the match where we challenge each other, or otherwise interact – the coin toss at the beginning, etc. Most of the time, the captain is the most senior player on the team. When I saw the (c) by name in the liners last week, and knew who else was ON those liners, I thought, “This is a typo.” But it wasn’t, and I told three people I’d get to be captain because I was excited.

And so we played. We opened with “Beastie Rap”, which Blue won. They played “Arms Expert” for their first game, and we played a really manic game of “Changing Emotions and Styles”, and we (red) won the round. Then Blue challenged us to “4-headed Broadway Star,” and we challenged them to “Dinner at Joe’s,” and they won that round. Audiences are generally fickle, and generally vote for whichever game they see last. Blue got to play “Five Things” – and we had some suggestions we’d never seen before – the celebrities chosen were Walter Cronkite and Pete Rose, a wakeboard was replaced with a seal (And BZ had to apologize after the game because he’d mimed clubbing a seal to death, and the audience groaned. He went through a long apology in which he said, “I want all baby seals to die in their sleep” and the audience didn’t like THAT much either, so finally he stalked off saying, “Just take the point already!” In the almost-year I’ve been with this group, it’s the first time I’ve seen an apology not work.

After half time, we played a “catchup” game. I’d been thinking about playing Blind Line, and talked about it with our director, who was running sound, and our ref, but then I changed my mind, because Blind Line takes a long time to prep, as the audience has to give lines, and we were running long, and I wanted to use volunteers, so we played “Slide Show” instead, and I sent ER to narrate, because, as I told him, his narrations are always deliciously mischievous. It was a disturbing game of Slide Show, with bigger responses than we usually get. “Story” was our next game, and I was so into listening to ER do a monologue at one point that I forgot to watch the ref, and was eliminated. We ended with “185” and then we got the final scores, and we’d WON. I know it’s all about entertainment, and we’re not supposed to care if we win or lose, but still, it’s fun to win.

Especially since as captain, I got to do the bit where I pretend to pay off the ref after the game. I’m not the best at slo mo or mine, and combining them is harder than you think, but our director said I’d done a good job, as I was leaving, so I’m happy, and psyched, and I get to go have my hair turned PINK today, and then I get to play again tonight, and WOW, CSz weekends are the BEST.

Sadness in E minor

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Master cellist Msitslav Rostropovich died this morning in Moscow, and a part of me is thinking that the fact that I bought new strings for my own cello yesterday is some kind of precognitive tribute.

I’ve only ever heard him play in recordings – his version of the Bach unaccompanied suites is soul stirring – and I’ve seen recordings of him conducting as well. (Conductors, by the way, are hot. They just are. It’s intrinsic.) I’ve read some of his writings about the instrument, and I’ve seen video footage of his playing, his lithe fingers dancing over the strings, a merry gleam in his eye, as if he knows he’s the one in charge of the music, and we’re all just joining him on a journey.

He may not be quite as known among the masses as Yo-Yo Ma or Jacqueline DuPre (he taught the latter, by the way), but in classical music he’s the standard by which others are measured, the spiritual successor to Pablo Casals.

He was 80, when he died, which isn’t horribly young, but even so, it seems too soon.

I never knew him, only his music, but I’ll miss him.

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