My feet hurt...

Who would have known that a pair of Rockport could be uncomfortable! Nevermind that I was on my feet 11 hours, waiting on people who, for whatever reason, decided that this was the weekend they wanted Mexican food and stuff you can only get at Gap and JC Penney.

Why do people want to shop for Christmas, all at once? Wouldn't it make more sense for shopping malls to *assign* a time to people when they could come and do all their shopping? Then there wouldn't be a mad crush of people -- literally mad and figuratively mad.

Of all the things I don't understand about the Human Race, it's a drive to rat-pack it to the mall and be herded around by a security guard on a powertrip with a stungun. Doesn't it make more sense to say, shop at little boutiques and other places where they would actually *care* that you're giving them business?

That's the challenge this Christmas Season: Don't go to the mall. Instead, find what you want at either a local store and pay the extra four percent (that's the price differential these days), or worst-case, only go to free-standing chain stores. Avoid Mega-Super-Conglomo-Mall.

See you at the food court.

The Wonderful World of Deadlines....

I love deadlines -- especially that glorious wooshing sound they make as they go flying by. Unfortunately, I missed the deadline on a paper I'm writing concerning sexuality in Romeo and Juliet, specifically the presentations of Juliet's sexuality presented in the play by various characters. Ironic really, the concept of sexuality and deadlines are so similar.

Things have to start at a certain age to be finished by a certain age. It's the same with projects. If you don't *begin* a project in time, then the deadline will pass long before you have a chance to complete the project. I'm not sure how it's going to work out -- The R&J deadline, not my sexuality. (That's done been and gone. I'm convinced I'm never getting laid again.)

Why deadlines? Don't misunderstand me. I know why we have dates by which projects must be completed. But why do we call it a DEADline, as if the fear of not getting paid, not getting published, getting a bad grade isn't enough to get our creative juices scared into flowing. No, we have to tack to the concept an appeal to the most basic of human emotions: fear of death.

Today, I'm going to protest. No longer will I suffer under the burden of fear. I will stand my ground against the deadline. Instead, I'll call it a LIVEline. Instead of a point-of-no-return, it will be a date that -- if you succeed in reaching your goal by it, you get to celebrate!

I invite you all to stand with me and fight the oppression of -- hello, yes. OH! I ALMOST FORGOT IT'S THE FIRST!

Thanksgiving and being thankful.

I am thankful for many things, this year. I'm thankful for a job, for a warm bed and a roof that doesn't leak. I'm thankful for my friends, even the ones that don't always live up to expectations and promises. I am thankful for living in a free country and a refrigerator that has food and a working control knob. But mostly I'm thankful for a quiet living room, a Mac w/ a wireless router, and a forty-eight hour marathon of West Wing on Bravo.

This show has become such a religion to me, and aparently a phanatical group of other people around the world. (My Canadian friend watches it relentlessly and it was recently plugged on the Brit-Flick "Love Actually"--set in London.) I'm very thankful to call Martin Sheen my president and I am thankful that once a week I can snuggle up on the couch with Toby, Josh, Leo, Abby, CJ, Charlie and Jed and catch a glimpse of life in a bigger and more grand scale than I can ever imagine in my own art.

That's what it is -- art. It is the selective recreation of a reality, as Aristotle defined art. With that said, it's more than even that. It is a glimpse of not what life is like in the White House, but what it *could be* like. These are basically good people who are doing what they think is right. It doesn't always work out well, but they try.

Maybe that's what we're looking for, those of us who watch this show. And that's why it's the thing for which I'm most thankful. I'm thankful that I live in a nation where this, while not likely, is at least possible.

Happy Thanksgiving

Paid to put up...

...but the irony is I'm not. So what's the point? Why take abuse for pennies?

Sorry for the brief post. It's just the day before Thanksgiving. Will post more tomorrow evening.

Paid to put up...

...but the irony is I'm not. So what's the point? Why take abuse for pennies?

Sorry for the brief post. It's just the day before Thanksgiving. Will post more tomorrow evening.

O Christmas Tree...

...oh Christmas tree, how thorny are thy fricken branches that cut me and made me bleed and now itch from the thousand and two microscopic fleshwounds covering my arms and legs.

Yep, you guessed it. I put up my Christmas tree today, breaking one of my own cardinal rules--NO CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS BEFORE THANKSGIVING! Alas, the day *after* Thanksgiving, the day I would normally put up the tree and deck the fricken halls (of which I have two very long, narrow halls just crying out for holly), I will be working. And Saturday...and Sunday. And I have company coming. So I wanted the house to be in holiday form for the weekend.

Thus, today I trimmed the tree. A hundred tiny, light-em-up pine cones and fifty velvet bows. Four runs of beads and three runs of garland. Twenty christmas globes, thirty candy canes, and a poor angel with a tree branch run up her--well you get the picture. But that was the easy part.

The moron--excuse me. The Engineer who came up with the concept of a Christmas Tree Stand should be hunted down and executed by the angry mob of Christmas decorators who have had the unfortunate experience of coming to UNDER a Christmas tree. (Oh yeah...scratches on the back as well.) I fought and I fought and I fought. I'd get the stand on and as tight as it would go, stand the tree up and it would pull a leaning tower of Piza. Then I'd straighten it and, you guessed it. TIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIMMMMMMMMMMMMMMBEEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR....

I almost gave up. I threw a tantrum that demolished the base of the tree, the stand, and a very expensive pen of the writing kind. After rebuilding the stand, cleaning the bark from one part of the tree, I finally got it to stand. But it was leaning rather ominously forward. At this point, I didn't care. I simply got a coathanger and wired it to the wall.

If any one asks, tell them it is because I don't trust the cats. :-)

Alas the tree is up, the halls are decked, and I spent an evening listening to the Bing Crosby/David Bowie's rendition of "Little Drummer Boy." It is one of my all-time favorite Christmas tunes. After that CD was done, I listened to what I call "the Really Crappy Carolers" album. If I don't have carolers this year, I'll simply put the CD player at the door, ring the bell, and act like I answered the door to twelve kids singing the same two verses of "Joy to the World" six times each, (verse, not kid) and then throw some candy out the door, shut it, and return to watching West Wing.

Jessica Lang is still hot. (And other equally profound observations.)

Jessica Lang will forever be the beauty that tamed Kong. Lately, though, she seems to have stumbled into the realm of 'crazy beautiful spurned chick who goes psycho', a path that other great beauties have followed as well. Look at Joan Crawford, whose work strangely mirrored her life. Jessica Lang has now played a freakish Tamora in the Tabor production of "Titus Andronicus" and the psycho-electra-complexed mother in that Gwyneth movie I forget the title of.

This tends to be the pattern, though. Beautiful young actress, makes a splash. Goes nuts in movies--and then in real life. A few have avoided this...but they've always implanted some other equally un-desireable era in their career. (Betty Davis had the scary-woman syndrome, Blythe Danner that cool-color-wearing WASP bitchwife thing, still going btw, and Kate Hepburn, God rest her soul, played the debutante long past her debutante years (Desk Set anyone??).) I shudder to think about the future careers of Natalie Portman and Jennifer Aniston. You know what I'm talking about--that period of time where Jennifer Aniston is wishing someone would climb a wall to see her topless?

It's all about aging, I think. Or more expressly, staving off aging for as long as you can. Crazy people don't get old. Neither do bitches. That's why we go in that direction. (Yes, even men! I mean does anyone actually believe that Amanda Peet would sleep with Jack Nicholson? Or Dianne Keaton for that matter.)

C'est la vie, kids. We get old. We die. It's part of life. I guess it's time we all started coping with that simple, stark -- Holy shit, there's a Starbucks.

Detente and DMZ

Dealing with conflict is never easy. I sat there today, watching the Washington Spin Machine as they tried to solidify some image of the President's resent trip into insanity (also known as Great Britain). Amazing resources -- both psychological and physical -- are being expended to create a unified picture of what happened. It's very similar to how everything goes in the real world.

People observe one thing, report another, and then form an opinion based on what other people have said about what they reported about the thing completely different. Our society is so hell-bent on creating images of what we are that we forget to look at *what we are*. We interface on the image-level of our beings.

Sadly enough, we're imitating movies, books, music--trying to be more real by imitating the "real" we see in the movies--which are representations of how people react as seen by the auteur eye--rather than real reality. So we're copying the copy. Ironically, it goes further than that--the new movies are copying the 'real' real we're copying from the older movies. Thus we're starting to copy copies of copies of a copy.

Go figure.

Perhaps what we need is a period of detente followed by the creation of a DMZ -- A DE-Manipulation-Zone in which honesty is valued above national loyalty, 'personal' interest (though the truth should always be in one's best interest), and inuendo. In this DMZ of humanity, families could sort out their differences, husbands and wives could save their marriages, and politicians could salvage what's left of civilization before we end up wiping ourselves off the face of our own planet.

Good luck with that one, though. It sounds too much like something that's intelligent to actually work.